Ron Rosenbaum. Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed. New York: Melville House, 2025, v + 271 pp.

Review by D. Quentin Miller, Suffolk University

Change. The final word in this book’s title indicates the perfect framework for approaching Dylan midway through the sixth decade of his prominence. We could follow his early lead and say the times have changed. We could obviously say Dylan has changed, repeatedly. Those of us who study him could say we have changed, individually and collectively, or even that Dylan’s work has changed us. “Things have changed” casts a wide net. What things? Wrong focus. Keep your eye on the word change, the only constant.

Ron Rosenbaum’s study concentrates on a couple of significant changes in Dylan’s career, but not the one that most critics point to, the “going electric” moment at Newport. For Rosenbaum, that moment has become an irritating cliché rather than the key to understanding the artist. Indeed, the first page of the preface advances the assumption that “many readers will come to this book only after or because of seeing the film A Complete Unknown” (xi), the popular 2024 biopic that reinforces the myth of the Night of Amplified Metamorphosis. Too easy, Rosenbaum suggests. Come with me on a far more complex journey. The key is Buddy Holly, not Woody Guthrie. The key is Renaldo and Clara, not A Complete Unknown. The key is magnetic fields, and theodicy, and a bayou-dwelling curiosity shop owner named Sun Pie who raised Dylan up after the low point of his born-again Christian phase.

Let me reiterate: “a far more complex journey.”

I’ve twice called the book a “study” already, and before diving into its contents, I think it’s important to attempt to classify it because the dustjacket declares it “A Kind of Biography” and the front matter revises that to “A Sort of Biography.” Those attempts at definition might mislead some readers. I would submit that it’s not any kind or sort of biography as I understand the genre, though incidents from Dylan’s life are occasional touchpoints. I realize that the author wants to distinguish it from other biographies which, he argues, have overplayed the folk-rock transition. But even with the kinda sorta qualifiers, the ideal reader of this book might leave it on the shelves under the false assumption that it’s yet another biography. It covers a lot of ground, but it doesn’t tell the story of a life. If anything, it assumes the reader is already familiar with versions of that story even as Dylan has famously frustrated all attempts to tell it.

It’s important to sit a minute with the question of definition. Once we get beyond the kind of / sort of biography statements that frame the book’s actual content, the author shares my curiosity about what kind of book it is. On the first page of the preface, he describes it as “a book that focuses on [Dylan] as a songwriter and focuses closely on some aspects of his songwriting themes and memes that are likely to be little known yet highly relevant” (xi). He makes it clear throughout the study that he’s not a musicologist and is instead primarily interested in the lyrics as literature, supplemented by interviews, an analysis of Chronicles: Volume One, the Nobel acceptance address, and one particular line from Tarantula (more on that later). At one point he states that one aim of the book is to “offer one of the first (only?) close readings of the neglected gems of later Dylan” (38). More: “this very book is less a formal biography of Dylan than a biography of his impact” and “an exploration of the source of that impact” (51, emphasis original in all quotations). Much later in the book he completes the thought: “his impact on the consciousness of the culture” (96). Acknowledging that the book is about its author as well as the subject, he calls it a “memoir” (51) of sorts and dwells on some of the intersections of his own story with Dylan’s, building on the notion that, as he puts it, “In a sense I feel Dylan’s been writing my life—unknowingly—all his” (xi). And yet, “we already have enough formal comprehensive biographies and memoirs of Dylan” (99). This book, whatever it is, cannot be “formal” in the same way, which I take to mean it has to be unconventional, and perhaps improvisatory, in the spirit of its subject.

And improvisatory it is. But it can’t be what the author states he wants it to be on the first page: “a book for all parties” (3) ranging from Dylan’s superfans to his detractors. No book can. I would argue that this one is specialized, even rarified. The true party for whom the book is intended is probably a regular reader of The Dylan Review.

To get a keener sense of audience, I’d start with some of the author’s critical opinions, and there are some definite ones. Readers who hold everything Dylan ever did in equally high esteem are going to be put off by certain pronouncements or perhaps put on the defensive. Rosenbaum spends some time rejecting the term “Dylanologist” which he describes multiple times as barely concealing a “sneer” (4, 7). He also takes issue with the term “Bobolator”—I hadn’t heard that one before—related to the term “Bardolator” which smacks of Dylan worship and thus clouds critical judgement. (The author describes himself as “a recovering Bobolator” [12]). Dylan’s early folk audience—the fans who would boo his rock performances and shout Judas!—do not get a lot of love in these pages, and even some of the songs that drew in that group are dismissed, such as the “sappy, Kumbaya-like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’” (37). Those enamored with Nashville Skyline might bristle to hear “Lay Lady Lay” dismissed as “Dylan’s worst” (7). If there are any vocal champions of Dylan’s three born-again albums of the late 70s and early 80s—Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?—they would not be among the parties invited to this party. Rosenbaum describes those years as “the uncontestably ludicrous low point of Dylan’s career—his three years as a Jesus-freak scold” (62). Devotees of Allen Ginsberg might also take umbrage as the Beat icon is described as an “aesthetic con man / parasite” and “overrated” (184, 185). Woody Guthrie barely escapes a similar assessment: “Dylan’s raptures over Woody are a bit of a puzzle to me. I just don’t think he was that good” (214).

So, no: not a book for all parties, but a book for someone who has what Rosenbaum calls “the Dylan receptor” (6, initially) and a book for someone who appreciates a far-reaching, ambitious intellectual argument. (The college student who skeptically accuses a classmate or professor of “reading too much into” a text would not get very far into this study). Individual words, fashion choices, the act of staring into the middle distance, and even the way Dylan holds his cigarette are all potentially signficant. Examples: “I’m prepared to argue that no one today smokes cigarettes more expressively than Bob Dylan, waving the lit ember about with studied focus like a conductor’s baton” and “There’s more to Dylan’s cigarette smoking than a stylistic accident. It was a clue to character” (45). Dylanologists, sneering or otherwise, traffic in this kind of scrutiny. Those outside the circle might be inclined to roll their eyes.

The argument, as might be gleaned from the previous quotations, is somewhat of a counterargument. Rosenbaum is an experienced cultural critic who has the distinction of conducting what may be the longest interview Dylan ever granted, in 1977, just before the “uncontestably ludicrous low point” mentioned above. Part of his argument is with the way Dylanologists and “rock critic sycophants” (10) in general deal with the born-again Christian period: “It’s one of the great scandals of American cultural criticism, the way this woeful Dylan has been elided from view or wrenched into a false continuity with the Dylan of before and after” (142). Rosenbaum seeks instead to take Dylan’s songs as individual works and to appreciate the ones that endure, no matter which album they come from (except, of course, the three albums comprising the “low point”). He calls this the “slush-to-gold ratio” (237). He lifts the gold nuggets out of the slush and compels the reader to appreciate their literary genius, placing Dylan in a continuum that stretches from Shakespeare to Salinger to Pynchon, Borges, and DeLillo. Certain songs from the early half of the career get recurrent attention, like “Desolation Row,” “Like a Rolling Stone,” and “If You See Her, Say Hello.” For more recent chunks of gold, he offers a list of eleven songs we should take very seriously, leaning heavily on the one that gives the study its title, which he calls “the pivotal moment of Late Dylan” (243). Like many of the others he chooses, “Things Have Changed” was “orphaned” (237) from one of Dylan’s albums: dropped from Time Out of Mind but later appearing on the soundtrack of the film Wonder Boys. The premise is that you’ve got to pan the whole Dylan ocean to find the gold, and Rosenbaum convinces the reader that he’s done so, and that his assessments are the result of an informed critical viewpoint, not just taste.  While this move recalls old-school criticism from the era of the so-called Canon Wars, Rosenbaum implicitly insists that the role of the critic is to go beyond thumbs-up-or-down emojis or star ratings.

If part of the argument is to “seek out and take note of the jewels within the dross” (237), another part is to examine Dylan in terms of theodicy, defined here as “a subdiscipline” of theology “that focuses on evil” (xii). This is how the book opens, and it’s a little esoteric, but certainly intriguing. The epigraph begins with that memorable line from “Highway 61,” “God said to Abraham, ‘Kill me a son.’” Through much of Rosenbaum’s argument, God is much less direct and less available than He is that line. Rosenbaum raises questions about how thinkers including Dylan have wrestled with the existence of evil in a universe created by a supposedly benevolent God. The question is focused on the line from Tarantula I mentioned above: “Hitler didn’t change history/ Hitler WAS history” (xii, 9, 90, and more). The author makes much out of this line, reading outward from it into other horrors of the twentieth century like racist lynchings and nuclear Armageddon, both of which also became part of what he terms “Dylan’s argument with God” (79).

There are yet more dimensions to the thesis. One prominent one is to explain but definitely not apologize for the years when “Jesus freaks stole his soul” (40, 44, 51, 84, 150 … and many more). When Rosenbaum interviewed Dylan in 1977, he could sense a man in crisis, and at times he seems to feel responsible for intensifying the crisis with his questions. The interview itself takes on a mystical quality: “It left me with an ineradicable impression of an Oz-like wizard glimpsed through a haze of airborne ash” (45). The signature phrase that emerges from the interview as Dylan reaches for a description of what he searches for in music is “that thin, that wild mercury sound” (126 etc.), a line which Rosenbaum argues “is used in almost every single Dylan book I’ve ever read” and which he claims is nearly a product of their mind-meld during the interview that sounds like a joint vision quest: “I have a proprietary feeling about the phrase, almost as if I said it to him rather than him to me” (126).

The interview is not only significant because Dylan was teetering on the precipice of what Rosenbaum considered the abyss of the born-again years, but because he was working on his never-to-be-released film Renaldo and Clara, which Rosenbaum considers a masterpiece that should be screened immediately. At that moment, Dylan was still chasing thin wild mercury and receptive to some pretty far out visions that can be explained only through cosmic magnetism, something physical in the clouds above Minnesota’s iron range and in the earth, “filled with ore,” in Dylan’s words (35). Some might regard that as a throw-away line, but Rosenbaum uses it as the basis for some deep metaphysical analysis.

As might be clear from some of my citations above, for all its virtues, the book contains many repetitions, including entire anecdotes, but especially verbatim repetitions of individual phrases. I stopped counting how many variants there were of the phrase “Jesus freaks stole Dylan’s soul,” or of phrases Dylan used to distance his present self from earlier versions (“that’s not me … I’m not there … it ain’t me,” etc.), or the many times the author borrows the Dylan song title “Up to Me” to define his own task: “It’s up to me to set them straight” (239). Clever the first time, not so much the fifth. I could cite many other repetitions, and I’m not being pedantic so much as wishing an editor had played a stronger role in developing the book into a coherent whole as opposed to a stack of Substacks. Chapters within the book—often with witty titles like “The Gates of Sweden” about the Nobel speech—are engaging and coherent, but the overall organization too often had me writing “brilliant” in the margins the first time, but “redundant” thereafter.

There are, in fact, many bright flashes of brilliance in these pages. I sometimes felt like I was in college again. At moments I felt like I was in the middle of a weed-fueled late-night conversation with a genius friend who was fixated on an idea and prepared to elaborate into the wee hours. At others I felt like I was in a lecture hall trying to follow a professor who hadn’t fully organized his lecture but who was happy to improvise, circling around the room with great enthusiasm and a passion for his subject, if not a conventional sense of structure. I picture myself at that lecture writing down great lines like “Dylan had roots, but his roots don’t entirely explain him, exhaust all interest, negate innovation” (131). Or “Dylan’s work…doesn’t make sense; it makes senses” (236). I’d memorize those bits of wisdom for my final exam and hang onto them well beyond. In both of my analogies, though, there’s a real risk that the student/reader will become disoriented.

From where I sit, Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed is best described not as a biography, kind of / sort of or otherwise, but as an insightful analysis that, in its author’s words, lives at “the intersection of the Dylan phenomenon and some currents of cultural history” (8). Culture, history, Dylan, and approaches to Dylan are all predicated on change. Despite its occasional churlishness, this book gets that right and runs with it, if sometimes in surprising directions.

Robert Reginio. Bob Dylan Outside the Law: The Poetics of John Wesley Harding, Palgrave Macmillan, 2025, 281 pp.

Review by Nicholas Birns, New York University

Robert Reginio offers a reading of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding (1967) that is capacious, provocative, and helps us recognize the significant place of the album, or, as Reginio calls it, the “song-series” (5) in Dylan’s career and oeuvre. Reginio’s book at once complements and contrasts with the reading of the album offered by Louis Renza in the final chapter of his book Dylan’s Autobiographical Vocation (2017). Both share a theoretical awareness, prodigious learning, and a profound grasp of the many possible meanings of Dylan’s lyrics. Renza is such a good literary critic that some of his treatment of the album is more pertinent to the question of literary criticism as such than as commentary on Dylan. Reginio, on the other hand, though an ingenious and resourceful reader, always keeps his focus on Dylan. His book will be of interest to admirers of the album who might have some interest in literary criticism, but who are not themselves literary critics.

Parable Versus Allegory

Both Renza and Reginio read the words of the album’s songs as not self-sufficient, but pointing to other meanings, as evinced in long-attested literary forms. Whereas Renza emphasizes allegory, Reginio foregrounds parable. Reginio defines the parables as texts “promising legible analogy but torqued into labyrinthine textual paradoxes” (19). But he also suggests that whereas what allegory explains through something else is intrinsically meaningful, a parable’s ability to explain something through something else is a means to an end. This might seem to be only a slight difference. Both allegory and parable, after all, read one thing in terms of something else. Reginio’s focus on parable, though, emerges as superior to Renza’s on allegory in several ways. Allegories often are out to convey a dogma or truth, whereas parables are out to convey a meaning. An allegory calls out for a supplementary reading precisely because its overt terms are unsatisfying. A parable, whether from the New Testament or Kafka, as both Regino and Dylan himself have adduced, can be satisfying even to a reader unaware or uninterested in any further meaning. Simpler and more supple than the more ostentatious and elaborate allegory, parables can do more with less and avoid one overall conceptual frame. Indeed, Reginio says that the album uses allegorical techniques, but that these undo any overall attempt at allegory. The album’s parables are a “response” to outward events that sculpt an explication or traceable framing of them. John Wesley Harding’s canny and maneuverable use of parables to extract meaning from outward circumstances places the album in the context of “wisdom literature” (67). Reginio, however, sees John Wesley Harding as taking an “ironic stance” (122) towards a straightforward parabolic mode. “All Along the Watchtower” and “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine,” for instance, are lyrical and laden with Biblical overtones. But there is no way to easily understand what they mean. This indicates for Reginio that there are many motives and generic styles operating in Dylan’s work. What would be for Woody Guthrie a “song of protest” (17) is for Dylan “weighted with existential significance.” (17)

Reginio’s introductory Chapter 1, “Before the Flood,” percipiently recognizes how this overdetermination of motive and meaning in Dylan’s songs can be fruitfully addressed by the tools of poststructuralist theory. The impossibility of either escaping the political manifestation of social meaning or expressing a determinate truth outside the mesh of language, necessarily unfolds in the complicated unfolding of Dylan’s lyrics.

Reginio demonstrates this particularly in “I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine,” which “wavers between solitary utterance and public pronouncement” (78). Roland Barthes read Balzac’s “Sarrasine” with no more ardor or attention than Reginio reads these songs. The mixture of close reading with public, archival, and social criticism is a heady one, and Reginio’s reader will feel the full arsenal of possible approaches to the album has been deployed. Reginio’s knowledge of modernist literature and 20^th century history and politics is wide-ranging and enriches his commentary on the album. Reginio’s archival explorations are particularly rewarding and subtle. He describes how the Poughkeepsie Journal, which Dylan, living in the Catskills, would conceivably have read, reported on the Newark riots of the 1960s. That Reginio can pivot between reading Dylan in the light of Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Julia Kristeva while doing this sort of hyper-minute reconstructive archival work, imagining Dylan reading a Hudson Valley newspaper covering riots in New Jersey, is testimony to his breadth as a critic. Theory and practice, speculation and hyperlocal attention, are brilliantly juxtaposed. Reginio’s citation of Derrida’s compelling 1992 essay “Force of Law” is especially fruitful in that the figure of the outlaw and the complicated relation of violence and justice are at the forefront of the album’s narrative and ethical weave, and its relation to the tumult of the 1960s as exemplified by the Newark riots.

Theory and Politics

Yet is it gauche of me to wish that Reginio ushered Derrida off the stage a bit earlier? To feel that Derrida is invoked so often as to obtrude on the reader? Nobody believes more than I do in the total relevance of Derrida to Dylan’s songs and to literature in general. And, as compared to Renza (also deeply grounded in poststructuralism), Reginio’s explorations into “generative aporia” (13) end up saying, appropriately, more about Dylan than they do about theory as such. But if half of the references to Derrida had been eliminated, the book would, I think, seem crisper and more alert. In a broader sense, sometimes one wishes that when Reginio adduces 20^th century European thinkers and poets as elucidators of Dylan, he would make a connection between them and Dylan as people. For instance, Reginio links Paul Celan to Dylan in that they both share an attunement to “the unreconciled voices of a traumatic past” (253). But comparing the two artists as Jews, as lyricists, as gnomic truthtellers might have fleshed this argument out a bit more. Analogously, Dylan and Derrida might—despite the very different circumstances of their upbringing—be connected by their shared Jewishness, their very offbeat ways of registering that identity. So more concrete links to personages such as Celan and Derrida would have been welcome. On the other hand, it is good that Reginio is willing to operate in the reaches of abstraction and speculation that can grapple with the ultimate meanings of the songs.

Like Renza, Reginio does read the album in moral and ethical terms, but unlike Renza he does not get into a political reading. In contrasting John Wesley Harding to the contemporaneous Basement Tapes, Reginio sees the Basement Tapes as absorbing all the explicit political references to the Vietnam War and the racial tensions of the era, with John Wesley Harding shucking off any immediate politics in favor of a broader, more essential, more theoretical politics of violence, the outsider, and justice. Reginio is not trying to say the album is not political. He distinguishes his reading of the album’s relation to its 1960s milieu against one of “ahistorical nostalgia” (8). Instead, Reginio appreciates John Wesley Harding as an album that is “tensile, shifting and often revisionary” (9). Reginio also reads Dylan’s 1992 album Good As I Been To You as a counterstatement of nostalgia for the 1960s. This anti-Sixties nostalgia reading intends to  alter our understanding of John Wesley Harding, as at once an extraction from and counterstatement of the Basement Tapes. It turns the album away from any association with a “seemingly directionless” violence against the system and towards a “colloquy” (9) between insider and outsider that would be at ease “navigating” (9) around violence rather than embracing it. Reginio also rebukes the historian and Dylanologist Sean Wilentz for assuming that the injustice decried in the album is the sort that can be squarely remedied by “incremental reform” (199) and not by identifying anything as more systemic. Reginio sees Wilentz’s literal focus on determinate political events as limiting the album’s fundamentally broader critique of injustice and violence.

Politics and Spirituality

Reginio, though, tends to see violence here as mainly revolutionary violence from the Left, even as, both before and after the 1960s, a greater violence, both literal and symbolic, came from the Right. But for Dylan, the left-wing violence seemed to unravel the “peace and love” consensus of the left at the time in a way that was more disturbing to those who saw themselves as movement people. In this light, the nature of Dylan’s migration to this folky, rootsy material bears a second glance. Dylan’s country-roots persona in John Wesley Harding is inevitably epigenous and ersatz. In this, he is in the tradition of folk music as both inherited and transcended. William Hogeland points out that the Almanac Singers, colleagues and collaborators of  Woody Guthrie, employed fake Southern accents and concocted biographies of hard travel” (Hogeland 57). Dylan, though at this in his early career flirting with an exhibition of the genuine, is more focused on evoking the style and the feeling of the genuine without necessarily calling on it as an organic source. Reginio cites the argument of Benjamin Filene that a yearning for musical roots and source in folk ballads itself is a phenomenon of modernity, of a nostalgia excited by urban alienation and deracination. Thus, one can understand the feeling of some in 1967 who might have thought John Wesley Harding was an evasion of what was going on at that time in San Francisco, New York City, Detroit—and Vietnam. But this ersatz element also represents an attempt to politically broaden the implied stance of the real thing. “I Pity the Poor Immigrant,” though with a different political valence today than in 1967, was an example of this. It is a song done in the style of old-time music, but with a broader, more compassionate message.

Reginio sees the album “juxtaposing two utopian visions,” rather than cementing a narrative of American exceptionalism (268). Dylan creates a rural, old-time persona that presents American life as more liberal and diverse than it truly was—an important accomplishment reflected in this album and his music overall. Indeed, the idea of a conjectural space in the heartland of American music, which is more inclusive than that heartland, is fundamental to the history of rock and roll, and John Wesley Harding plays a pivotal role in fashioning this framework. Reginio evokes this specter without falling into the error, described by Timothy Hampton, of seeing Dylan’s work “as a parable about American identity and inclusiveness” (Hampton 11).

The songs on John Wesley Harding also seem more acts of spiritual seeking than do most folk ballads. Indeed, the collective nature of the ballad precludes the sense of individual quest in the songs of the album, with “I Am a Lonesome Hobo,” “As I Went Out One Morning,” “I Pity the Poor Immigrant,” and “I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine” all explicitly in the first person. There might be spirituality beyond the spiritual genres (proverbs and allegories) that Reginio brings to bear on the album. “I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine” and “All Along the Watchtower” explicitly invoke a Christian saint and a passage from the Hebrew Bible, and the religious aspects of the album foreshadow Dylan’s later work. Also, a Jewish reading of this album would have recognized that the JWH initials of John Wesley Harding come close to the four letters of the Tetragrammaton, the ineffable Hebrew name of God. Previous critics (see Curtis 98) have raised this point, but Reginio seems to deliberately avoid it.

Reginio quotes the African American writer Julius Lester’s comment that his white friends would have to feel a similar sense of vulnerability to understand Black people living in the inner city. It was not enough, in other words, for there to be compassion and solidarity; there had to be real suffering,  Reginio’s pivotal insight about John Wesley Harding is that the album is trying to intervene at precisely this stage, when rational political analysis has failed, and only art attuned to a sense of emergency can inform the listener. Thus John Wesley Harding, precisely by avoiding a tick-the-boxes checklist of 60s radicalism, and by abjuring editorial page truisms and earnest pleas for moderation, goes very deep indeed. Reginio explores in Chapter 2, “Down in The Flood,” two Dylan songs from 1967 not on the John Wesley Harding album: “This Wheel’s On Fire” and “Too Much of Nothing.” By analyzing these songs from the Basement Tapes, songs fraught with the hope, pain, and frustration of the political and temporal moment, Reginio gives a wider sense of the social background and how Dylan was and was not responding to it in his songs. Attending to these “precursor songs” (47) not only allows Reginio to explore the nature and consequences of  Dylan’s collaboration with Robbie Robertson and other members of the Band but also allows us to see his full response to the “violence and violent collapse accruing in American cities” (48) in the summer of 1967.

Reading The Album

In this way, John Wesley Harding, from the perspective of the albums to come, is indeed a fairly typical Dylan album. Reginio limns this typicality by exploring the album’s deployment of various personae, anticipating the veiled protagonists, observers, and villains of Dylan’s albums of the 1970s and 1980s. Chapter 3, “Ballads Before The Law,” underscores these precedents. The pairings of Frankie and Judas Priest, Tom Paine, and the damsel in “As I Went Out One Morning” promise drama but provide little resolution. The songs offer either “no message” or “elliptical proverbs in a sardonic tone” (133). The damsel, speaking from the corners of her mouth, offers “surreptitious, desperate voicing” (162). This is identified by Reginio as a surrogate for the perspective of the album itself. By remaining “not restricted to historical particulars” (182) and speaking from the corners rather than the center, the album finds an asymmetrical but insightful vantage point.

Reginio also discusses the nature of reference and discursive name-dropping in the songs. His descriptions of the figures of Tom Paine and Saint Augustine referenced in the album are best seen as “stylized sketches” rather than as “allusions held fast” (169). This is where literary critics can help listeners of the songs understand the mechanics of reference and meaning in these lyrics. Reginio discusses how Paine, positioned as a menacing figure, is more an oppressor than a liberator. But the point here is not that Dylan is venturing into the historiography of Thomas Paine, but that he is using the name as a “metonym for American self-emancipation” (144), including that self-emancipation’s dark side. Similarly, the use of the name of Saint Augustine commits Dylan neither to Christian belief nor even to his own lyrics as an Augustine-style “Confession,” a reading which would be inapt. Reginio ranges widely, but this book is of real help to students and appreciators of the album as it augments our sense of what it expresses and means.

The manner of Reginio’s book—a close reading of a work with significant and extravagant theoretical armature—is notable as it is one, in general, less prevalent in literary studies today. Indeed, studies of long-canonical authors such as Milton or Chaucer in the 2020s would tend to be more tightly-knit. This is not a criticism a priori, as this book’s ambition is its greatest virtue. It is just to say that it is not the sort of literary exegesis really being produced now. Since John Wesley Harding, as an album, was hardly the sort of rock album produced in 1967, perhaps this is fitting. I admire Reginio’s courage in not thinking small, not just producing analysis geared to a cautiously formalist or narrowly historicist way, not sticking a label on his methodological approach. So many people are either naturally suspicious of this sort of reading or have been trained by media narratives to be so suspicious that Reginio’s pursuit of this endeavor is rather brave. Yet, because the book’s first half is basically devoted to theorizing and putting the album in broad historical and cultural contexts, a close reading of the songs (perhaps also limited by copyright issues with quoting words) is delayed. In Chapter 4, “Abjection,” we find readings of “As I Went Out One Morning” and “I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine.” This is the strongest chapter of the book, reading very moving and complex songs with the rigor and insight they deserve, and its designated theorist, Julia Kristeva, is used decorously in a generative and heuristic manner. Chapter 5, “Entreaties,” contains readings of “Drifter’s Escape,” “I Am a Lonesome Hobo,” and “Dear Landlord,” with Giorgio Agamben filling the Kristeva role. Chapter 6, “Outside the Law,” contains readings of “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” and “All Along the Watchtower.” As cogent as Reginio’s reading of “All Along the Watchtower” is, it seems frustrating that we have had to wait until page 243 to receive a full reading of one of John Wesley Harding’s strongest, best-known, and most moving songs. The effect here is somewhat of a concert where the singer spends so much time on experimental work that challenges and at times perplexes his audience, and only near the end of a three-hour concert reels off the hits in a way that gratifies our pent-up need but also feels slightly rushed. That there is a sense of the book simply running out of time is also signaled by how “Down Along the Cove” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” are stashed in a sprightly but overly deferred Coda.

Reginio clearly, and commendably, is not simply writing a guide to the album, and he does not simply want to analyze John Wesley Harding song by song. He insightfully realizes that the album’s place in Dylan’s oeuvre, in the 1960s, and in the American cultural tradition solicits a far wider, more conjectural, more comprehensive reading. But there are times when Reginio is undertaking just such a reading that he seems to feel the need to swerve back to close commentary on the songs, and this to-and-fro, and the staccato series of close readings coming so late in the book, make the readings seem almost obligatory. One should not have to be obligatory in Dylan studies, and ideally, the book could have worked out a mode of exposition in which the theory was less top-heavy and the song-by-song reading more thoroughly aligned with and integrated into the overall analysis. From the beginning, Reginio has argued for not pursuing “a linear or allegorical reading that would foreground the sequences of songs on the album” (39), in the service of a broader critique which would at once respect the autonomy of every single song(39) yet on the other hand could reach the broadest possible context. That the last two songs analyzed in the Coda, “Down Along the Cove” and “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight,” are also the last two songs on the album suggests that Reginio’s argumentative structure ends up reoccupying precisely that which it eschewed.

Still, Reginio’s book should be applauded for its ambition, its conceptual and moral vision, and its grasp of the values, urgencies, and preoccupations that Dylan brings to and expounds on in the album. John Wesley Harding disrupted expectations of Dylan and his relation to rock and roll, politics, and modernity by its anchoring in (some rendition of) the American folk traditions. Its lyrics, by evading the minutiae of current political reference, enact, as Reginio shows, a far wider interrogation of unjust and violent norms. Reginio’s reading takes the album from an intriguing exception in Dylan’s spiral trajectory to a consummate statement of his vision and values.

Works Cited

Curtis, Jim, Decoding Dylan: Making Sense of the Songs That Changed Modern Culture

(McFarland, 2019).

Hampton, Timothy, Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work (Zone Books, 2019).

Hogeland, William, Inventing American History (MIT Press, 2009).

Filene, Benjamin, Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots  Music,

(University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

Renza, Louis, Dylan’s Autobiography of a Vocation: A Reading of the Lyrics 165-67-

(Bloomsbury, 2017) .

Francesco Donadio, Freewheelin’ in Rome. La vera storia della prima volta di Bob Dylan in Italia. [“Freewheelin’ in Rome”: The true story of Dylan’s first time in Italy”]. Rome: Arcana, 2022, pp. 160.

Review by Alessandro Carrera, University of Houston

A few years ago, Francesco Donadio, a music journalist, radio programmer, and author of four books on David Bowie, embarked on an investigation into the myths surrounding Bob Dylan’s first trip to Italy. As anyone familiar with Dylan’s biography knows, he visited Rome for a few days in January 1963, as part of a detour during his first trip to England. But what exactly was he doing there? Was he searching for Suze Rotolo, who was then studying at the University for Foreigners in Perugia, a town not far from Rome? Or was he simply drawn to the idea of experiencing Rome, a city that would leave an indelible mark on him?

Donadio relies heavily on Dylan’s biographies and Suze Rotolo’s autobiography A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (Crown, 2009), but he also enriches Rotolo’s narrative with details about the cultural milieu she encountered in Perugia. He explores the possibility that Suze may have been aware of Folkstudio, the venue in Rome where Dylan had his first encounter with an Italian audience (not to be confused with his actual Italian tour, which took place much later, in 1984).

In the early chapters of his book, Donadio leaves no rolling stone unturned—pardon the oxymoron—as he weaves a “parallel lives” narrative of Bob and Suze. Many paragraphs include phrases like “one could imagine that … ,” which, though evocative, might seem excessive, given the tight chronology of the events. Suze arrived in Perugia in July 1962, while Dylan flew from New York to London in mid-December 1962, likely accompanied by his manager, Albert Grossman. Donadio challenges the notion that Grossman was waiting for Dylan at Heathrow, alongside Odetta, who in fact was scheduled to perform in New York until the end of the year. However, Odetta was expected to be in Italy in early January 1963, for television appearances and concerts with bassist Bill Lee. So, Albert, Odetta, Bill, and Bob were all in Italy in the first days of January 1963.

But Suze was no longer in Perugia. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, she felt homesick and decided to return to New York, arriving on December 18, just as Dylan was departing for London. Their reunion would come later, and the end of their relationship was still far off. By that time, however, in Perugia, Suze had already met a quieter, more dependable man, Enzo Bartoccioli, whom she would later marry. Enzo, at the time a factory worker at Baci Perugina, would later become a film editor for the United Nations. Dylan, in turn, would vent his frustration with a bitter and—in my opinion—very bad poem about Enzo, which appears in Writings and Drawings (1973).

Turning to the chronology once again, Donadio notes that Dylan flew from London Heathrow to Fiumicino, Rome’s airport, on January 5, 1963. According to rumors, he and Grossman went to Folkstudio that very night, located at Via Garibaldi 58 in the historic, working-class Trastevere neighborhood. Folkstudio had been created by Harold Bradley Jr (1929–2021), an African American expatriate, former football player, and leader of a gospel group, and by producer Giancarlo Cesaroni (1933–1998), with the help of their wives, Hannelore and Noemi. Before its move to a larger space in 1967, the original Folkstudio was tiny—no more than 50 or 60 people could fit inside. It was, however, the only folk music hub in Italy at the time, a meeting place for English and American students, as well as the new generation of Italian cantautori (singer-songwriters).

The mystique surrounding Folkstudio has always been fueled by the persistent rumor that “Bob Dylan played here.” For example, in 2012 Francesco De Gregori, one of Italy’s most talented cantautori, who made his debut at Folkstudio, released Amore e Furto , a collection of Dylan covers in Italian, whose title translates “Love and Theft.” His lifelong obsession with Dylan began on Via Garibaldi 58.

Donadio lists seven people who confirm that Dylan performed at Folkstudio, including Harold Bradley Jr., whom he interviewed. Bradley recalled that Dylan played two songs for a small audience of 15 people, but the performance left little impression. Bradley himself described Dylan as tipsy and a bit obnoxious, seemingly more interested in flirting with Hannelore and Noemi than performing. In the end, Bradley suggested to Grossman and Dylan that they find somewhere else to spend the night. Though it wasn’t one of Dylan’s finer moments, the encounter evolved into an urban legend. Years later, it wasn’t difficult to find dozens of people who would claim to have been present at the performance (as with Dylan’s early concerts in New York City).

Another urban legend, which Donadio investigated in Perugia, tells of Dylan supposedly hiring a cab that night to travel to Perugia, only to find out that Suze was no longer there. A cousin of Enzo Bartoccioli even confirmed that “two American bums” (presumably Bob and Albert) arrived at the boarding house where Suze had been staying and then knocked at Bartoccioli’s house in the middle of the night, to be met by Enzo’s incredulous mother. The Italian word straccioni means that they were poorly dressed, which is strange if one thinks that Albert Grossman used to be more formally dressed than the folk music crowd, but it is likely that Dylan’s usually unkempt appearance left a more lasting impression. It’s unclear how these “bums” had gotten Enzo’s address, as it’s unlikely anyone at the boarding house would have given it to them. Donadio attempted to interview Enzo Bartoccioli in New York, but Mr. Bartoccioli declined, stating that he had nothing to add to what his wife, who died in 2011, had already written in her memoir.

What else was left for Dylan to do in Rome? Perhaps visit the Colosseum, which made a strong impression on him, as he later mentioned in interviews and in the song “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” He might have also attended Odetta’s concerts at the Teatro Parioli on January 8 and 9, and he sent a postcard to “Sue Rotolo c/o Bob Dylan, 161 West 4th Street, New York City, NY, USA,” stating: “If I don’t open my mouth in this town, everybody thinks I’m Italian (unbelievable but true, I swear).” Dylan also announced that he was heading to Turin (possibly to follow Odetta for another television appearance at the Rai studios?). It didn’t happen. By January 10, Bob, Albert, Odetta, and Bill were back in London. Dylan attended Odetta’s concert at the Prince Charles Theatre, solidified his friendship with Martin Carthy, appeared on an album by Dick Fariña and Eric Von Schmidt, and, of course, completed “Girl from the North Country” and “Boots of Spanish Leather.”

But Donadio doesn’t stop there. The last forty pages of his captivating book narrate Bob and Suze’s reunion, the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, tensions with Carla Rotolo, the “parasite sister” in “Ballad in Plain D” (a song Dylan later regretted recording), actually a skilled folk music expert (she was assistant to Alan Lomax) who harshly disapproved of Suze’s involvement with that Jewish Minnesotan drifter (their mother disapproved too). And then the love story came to an end, leaving a rift between the two sisters.

Donadio uncovers lesser-known details. Many readers will be surprised to learn that in later years Suze became almost estranged from her family, who felt she had become aloof and pretentious. Even more surprising is the revelation that when Carla Rotolo, now living in Italy, died unexpectedly in 2014, Enzo Bartoccioli traveled to her home in Sardinia to clear out her belongings. There, he discovered that Carla had obsessively kept all the newspaper clippings she had found about Dylan. The most precious item in her archive was her dedicated copy of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. Donadio reproduces the back cover with an inscription that reads: “To my Carla-law, Ro la sis [presumably ‘To Carla Rotolo, my sister-in-law’], with luck and don [sic] forget to duck. Me, Bob.” And in smaller letters: “—me, Susie, too, also.”

I had the pleasure of meeting Susan Rotolo at the New York University “Casa Italiana” in 1997 or 1998, during an exhibition of her artwork. She struck me as a joyful person who didn’t appear to consider herself a star. One of the small pieces on display—everything she exhibited was small, she was a miniaturist—was a tiny version of the Freewheelin’ cover, shrunk down to the size of a cigarette pack and placed in a minuscule display case. I remember the caption saying, “It was not all sex, drugs, and rock and roll. We were doing serious things back then.”

Bob Dylan. The Bootleg Series Vol. 18: Through the Open Window 1956–1963. 8CD, Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings, 31 Oct. 2025.

Review by Gayle Wald, The George Washington University

Through the open window the voice of the beauty of the world came murmuring, too softly to hear exactly what it said—but what mattered if the meaning were plain?

— Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

The 18^th volume of The Bootleg Series is titled Through the Open Window, a phrase with mythological overtones. In Joseph Campbell’s typology of the Hero’s Journey, the open window is the Call to Adventure. The Hero may initially resist the Call, but its lure is strong. Leaving home, the Hero encounters obstacles as well as helpers. He is tested. But because he is the Hero, these tests will plant the seeds of his transformation. He will emerge from the tests with new knowledge, ready to take on new adventures.

The cover of the boxed set, released on October 31, gives visual form to the myth. It pictures Dylan on a New York City rooftop. The buildings behind him appear puny, reaching no further than Dylan’s knees. He gazes slightly upward, looking beyond the camera’s frame. His fingers are in his jeans pockets. His stance is a wide and grounded “V.”^[1]

The hero’s narrative is borne out over the eight CDs that comprise the Deluxe Edition of this latest boxed set. (The streaming and LP versions are leaner, featuring “highlights.”) It begins in 1956, in a recording booth in St. Paul, Minnesota, as Bobby Zimmerman and friends tromp through a ragged but enthusiastic version of “Let the Good Times Roll,” a Shirley & Lee song then in high rotation on Black radio programs. It travels with Dylan to the college towns of Minneapolis and Madison, Wisconsin, where he first discovered folk music via Odetta and then Woody Guthrie; to the small and agreeably grungy Greenwich Village clubs where he honed his skills before a live audience; and to venues like Riverside Church and Town Hall, where he established his performing bona fides. It takes us into the studio with producers John Hammond and Tom Wilson as he records Bob Dylan and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. And it culminates with a complete recording of Dylan’s career-defining October 1963 concert at Carnegie Hall, the nation’s most prestigious stage.

As this itinerary suggests, Through the Open Window is best approached as a document of the alchemy of painstaking labor, furious determination, and creative inspiration that is the condition of possibility of every artistic breakthrough. At no point in Dylan’s journey is his success guaranteed or inevitable. Indeed, I came away from my listening with a powerful sense of the work behind the creation of “Bob Dylan.” Cumulatively, the dozens of tracks that record his efforts circa 1959-1962—to teach himself dozens of songs, refine his picking and harmonica skills, experiment with vocal stylizations, and sharpen his abilities as an interpreter of songs born in times and places beyond his own lived experience—provide a useful context for the emergence of Dylan as a composer. They bring to mind Patti Smith’s notion of the musician as worker, reminding us that even familiar and beloved songs were made, not plucked from the ether.^[2]

Yet although the tracks on Through the Open Window are the achievements of a particular person, at a particular time and place, in some quarters the boxed set has been received with a Robert-Johnson-at-the-Crossroads zeal. Reviews published less than 36 hours after the boxed set dropped reprise some of the very language that gave Dylan so much indigestion in the mid-1960s. (That said, they are dutifully reproduced on the Bob Dylan website.) MOJO referred to “Dylan’s miraculous New York transformation” and breathlessly declared, “every damn song is a transcendence.” Uncut described the boxed set as a document of “the dawn of a legend.”^[3]

Perhaps it is inevitable that Through the Open Window will only solidify the “genius” narrative that has long trailed Dylan.^[4] Words like “miraculous” and “transcendent” express admiration, of course, but they are also deeply ahistorical, running contrary to the evidence of the boxed set itself. This air of romantic inevitability also hangs over A Complete Unknown, the 2024 biopic that covers much of the same period as Through the Open Window, and might be seen as its companion piece (in terms of content as well as marketing). But while James Mangold’s movie culminates in Dylan’s electric set at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the new boxed set, by culminating at Carnegie Hall in October 1963, shifts the frame. The difference is telling. In A Complete Unknown, the Hero’s journey culminates in his need to symbolically slay his father (Pete Seeger) and rid himself of straightjacketing emotional encumbrances (Joan Baez, Suze Rotolo) so that he may become the Voice of a Generation. The result is an at times compelling but strangely depoliticized depiction of the folk revival. In Through the Open Window, in contrast, the Hero’s journey ends on a heady note of arrival. At the 1963 Carnegie Hall concert, unlike at Newport in 1965, Dylan is thoroughly enjoying himself, basking in the glow of artistic validation, of which fame is one measure. It would still be a while before the glow turned into a conflagration.

After the period of 1964-65, the years chronicled in Through the Open Window are the most studied of Bob Dylan’s career, covered exhaustively in work since Toby Thompson’s 1969 Village Voice series on Dylan’s “Main Street” origins and Anthony Scaduto’s Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography. Most of the tracks it collects have circulated for years: on tapes traded among collectors; via social media (the complete April 1963 Town Hall concert, posted to YouTube before it was embargoed for copyright violation); and in earlier anthologies, including The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3: Rare and Unreleased 1961-1991 (1991); Live at Carnegie Hall 1963 (2005); and The Bootleg Series Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964 (2010). But as Sean Wilentz points out in the boxed set’s novella-length liner notes, it “differs from other renditions because it tells the story entirely through recordings.” The visual abundance of the boxed set—with its dozens of images of Dylan and reproductions of material artifacts including handbills, lyric sheets, posters, and recording-studio ephemera—somewhat belies this notion of sonic storytelling. But Wilentz is of course correct. Through the Open Window constitutes an unparalleled sonic chronicle of Dylan’s early musical formation, up to and including its “completion” at Carnegie Hall.

To listen to Through the Open Window track-by-track is not necessarily to have a linear experience, however. The quality and appeal of its tracks vary widely, with some—for example, unused studio takes from sessions for Bob Dylan (1962) and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963)—being of interest primarily because they represent the road not taken. Home tapes—including from the living rooms of friends including Bob and Sid Gleason, Mel and Lillian Bailey, and Mac and Eve McKenzie—lack the energy of live concert recordings, in which we hear Dylan figuring out ways to put over his songs for strangers. On the other hand, such tapes give us insight into Dylan’s artistry at the moment in late 1961 when New York Times journalist Robert Shelton first extolled Dylan as “bright new face” and allow us the pleasure of observing Dylan trying out material in intimate settings.^[5] Although his development as a guitar player and singer is most apparent, Through the Open Window attests to Dylan’s distinction as a harmonica player within the New York folk scene, and reminds us that his earliest recording work was as a harmonica accompanist for Carolyn Hester, Harry Belafonte, and Big Joe Williams and Victoria Spivey.

There is texture and detail in recordings that were never intended for public consumption. Among these, tracks with fly-on-the-wall snippets of conversation are some of the most interesting moments on the boxed set. We hear Belafonte suavely advising the 21-year-old Dylan to “Take your time, baby” as Dylan fumbles with his harmonica during a February 1962 recording session for Belafonte’s Midnight Special. (Did this make Dylan more or less nervous, I wonder.) Elsewhere, we eavesdrop on an impromptu November 1961 conversation in the Columbia Records studio between Dylan and producer John Hammond, after Dylan has played him an assured interpretation of the Kentucky folk ballad “Man of Constant Sorrow.” Written out, it reads almost like the script of a play, in which the dialogue hints at unstated but palpable feeling:

Hammond (nonchalantly): What was the name of that, Bob?

Dylan (echoing the nonchalance): “Man of Constant Sorrow.” Did you get that?

H: I did.

D (more hopefully): Oh, did you like that one?

H (understated): Sure, it’s all right. Who wrote that?

D: (deflecting) Uh, I don’t know. I don’t know who wrote that.

H: Has it been recorded?

D: Uh, not that way.

H: How has it been recorded?

D: Uh, a different way I guess.

H: Who did it?

D (more insistently): Judy Collins did it, but not a version like that. That’s a different one. Judy Collins on Elektra.

H (thinking ahead): Elektra. We’ll find out from Elektra who wrote the damn thing.

Columbia Records did “find out,” of course, slotting “Man of Constant Sorrow” on the A side of Bob Dylan. But what fascinates is the window this dialogue offers into the delicate relationship of producer and artist. The conversation surfaces untold emotional depths, as Hammond, clearly interested in Dylan’s performance, keeps his enthusiasm in check, while Dylan, even as he solicits Hammond’s approval, displays total confidence in his work.

While such outtakes place listeners in the recording studio, the live concert performance tracks on Through the Open Window give us a seat at some of Dylan’s earliest club appearances. We hear Dylan introducing his first public performance of “Blowin’ in the Wind” for a small Gerde’s Folk City audience on April 16, 1962. “It ain’t a protest song, or anything like that, cause I don’t write protest songs,” he protests, in an uncanny anticipation of the song’s reception. “I wrote this song …. I didn’t actually write it.  I just sort of recorded it,” he explains, acknowledging the composition’s indebtedness to the spiritual “No More Auction Block” while echoing contemporary accounts of the feverish pace of his songwriting, including Joan Baez’s recollection of him “turning out songs like ticker-tape.”^[6]

Other tracks afford us insight into Dylan’s earliest audiences. Hearing the patrons of the Gaslight Café join Dylan in singing the title phrase to “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” in October 1962, just a month after he debuted it at a Carnegie Hall hootenanny, we understand how passionately they embraced the song and its challenging lyrics. I was particularly interested in hearing Gerde’s Folk City patrons react to an April 1962 performance of “Talkin’ New York”—not the G-rated version that would appear on the Bob Dylan album, but a more risqué one befitting the Greenwich Village counterculture. When the song’s narrator, a hayseed visitor to the Big Apple, describes an encounter with a crossdressing prostitute—“Well I got on the subway, took a seat / and got off on 42^nd Street / I met this fella named Dolores there / He started rubbing his hands through my hair”—the crowd laughs uproariously, presumably in response to the comical image of the yokel caught off-guard by a trans woman turning tricks at Times Square. Clearly the Gerde’s audience is hip to the 42^nd Street sex trade.

Dylan’s knowing satire of the yokel-and-Dolores in “Talkin’ New York” is only one example of the comedic and occasionally subversive early 1960s Dylan, who is well-documented on Through the Open Window. In this, the boxed set conveys both the ambiance of the downtown folk scene and Dylan’s ingratiation of himself to audiences through humorous crowd-work. As is well known, Dylan himself credited Charlie Chaplin as an influence on his early stage persona. Picking up on his Chaplinesque mannerisms, Shelton in 1961 described him as “both comedian and tragedian,” who embellished his Gerde’s sets with a “variety of droll musical monologues.” Hammond’s pseudonymous liner notes to Dylan’s 1962 debut further secured this association of Dylan with Chaplin, describing him as “nervously tapping his hat, adjusting it, using it as a prop, almost leaning on it,” in the manner of the silent film icon.^[7]

In his own liner notes, Wilentz picks up on these themes by characterizing Dylan as a “droll singing comedian who could turn even a story occasion into a farcical frolic.”^[8] His observation comes in the context of his discussion of a recording of “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues” from a September 1961 Gaslight Café performance. But he could just as easily have referenced Bonnie Beecher’s 1961 Minneapolis home recording of Dylan doing a comic shtick about East Orange, New Jersey (where his friends the Gleasons lived, not far from Woody Guthrie when he was at Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital) or his version of “Talkin’ War III Blues” from a taped show at Cambridge’s Club 47 in April 1963.^[9] Many eyewitnesses have described the comic Dylan of these early years. But experiencing Dylan’s sharp humor and excellent comedic timing on this newest boxed set is still fascinating, particularly for those of us (present writer included) who grew up with Bob Dylan-the-Legend and who discovered the looser, funnier Dylan only in retrospect. Through the Open Window presents listeners a Dylan who is quite different from the detached, often standoffish performer of the present.^[10] The humorous, joking Dylan of the boxed set arrives at a moment when Instagram users, in response to this seemingly gloomier, glummer Dylan of the 21^st century, have seized upon the photographic trope of “Bob Dylan smiling” as a humorous meme.^[11]

This raises a series of questions: What happened to the Chaplinesque Dylan? Was he a casualty of the suffocating adulation of the early 1960s? By virtue of ending in late 1963, Through the Open Window is silent on such issues. On the other hand, it offers much to listeners interested in Dylan’s well-documented attraction to Black music and musicians, beginning with his teenage forays into Black pop. In particular, Through the Open Window highlights Dylan’s immersion in the recordings of Robert Johnson, whose work became newly available to folk revivalists with the 1961 release of the King of the Delta Blues Singers compilation. Dylan drew overtly on Johnson for the melody of his version of “Corrina, Corrina” (included here in a Gerde’s Folk City rendition); but Johnson’s influence can also be heard in Dylan’s explorations of his falsetto register. Although many of the tracks that register Dylan’s relationship to blues have been heard before, it is still interesting to revisit these early years of experimentation. How did Dylan approach songs that emerged from circumstances so utterly distinct from his own? How did he insert himself into songs of the wanderer, the outcast, the impoverished Southern laborer? By what imaginative leaps—or sleights of hand—did he discover himself in the blues, and how did he bend the music of Black America toward his own expressive needs?

But the young Dylan was not only “discovering” Black music on vinyl or shellac. Through the Open Window documents the young performer’s interactions with contemporary blues musicians including the Rev. Gary Davis, Big Joe Williams, and Victoria Spivey. As these tracks helpfully demonstrate, when Dylan arrived in New York in late 1961, blues was very much a living tradition, not an inert, romanticized art form. Spivey was particularly important to Dylan’s formation. The New York-based Blues Queen indulged his blandishments and invited him to play harmonica on March 1962 sessions with Big Joe Williams, later released on two albums from her own imprint. (Dylan would confirm the importance of Spivey’s mentorship by featuring a photograph of the two of them, from the very same 1962 sessions, on 1970’s New Morning LP.) “Wichita” and “It’s Dangerous,” the Spivey Records tracks included on Through the Open Window, thus helpfully recall the centrality of an older generation of Black musicians to Dylan’s—and other young white folk singers’—musical development. In that sense, the boxed set is a welcome rejoinder to A Complete Unknown’s disparaging depiction of the fictional bluesman Jesse Moffette, played by Big Bill Morganfield (Muddy Waters’ son). The blues singers Dylan knew in 1962—and who are pictured in images printed along with the Through the Open Window liner notes—would not have arrived on the set of the TV show Rainbow Quest disheveled, drunk, and clutching a whiskey bottle. They were dapper professionals, struggling to make a living from their art, even as a new generation of white musicians would ultimately come to profit from it.

In light of the boxed set’s reminders of the many Black people who scaffolded and supported Dylan’s early career, I found it hard not to detect a reference to interracial relationships in the lyrics to “Kingsport Town,” an arrangement of “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet” here captured as an outtake from the November 1962 Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan sessions. “High sheriff on my trail boy / high sheriff on my trail,” Dylan sings, “All because I’m falling for / a curly dark-eyed gal.” The lyrics are traditional, recorded decades earlier by Woody Guthrie, but the phrase “a curly dark-eyed gal” evokes the African American women—including Mavis Staples and Delores Dixon—who attracted (or is rumored to have attracted) Dylan’s romantic interest in the early 1960s. Through the Open Window makes such questions possible, even if it cannot answer them.

I cannot end this review without mentioning Through the Open Window’s documentation of the quantum leap in Dylan’s songwriting between the period of “Talkin’  New York” and “Song to Woody,” the two originals on Bob Dylan, and his utterly self-assured Carnegie Hall performance of October 1963. The setlist of either half of that concert would have been enough to cement Dylan’s reputation as a major 20^th-century composer: “The Times They Are A-Changin,’” “Boots of Spanish Leather,” “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “North Country Blues,” “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” before the intermission, followed by “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” “Masters of War,” and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” in part two. It is genuinely thrilling to hear the Carnegie Hall set in its entirety, rather than through snippets stitched together from Live at Carnegie Hall (Columbia, 2005), earlier Bootleg Series releases (Vols. 1-3 and Vol. 7), and the ultra-rare six-LP set The 50^th Anniversary Collection 1963 (Sony Music, 2013). After listening to them for this review, I would not revisit much of the material on the first six CDs of Through the Open Window. But I can imagine listening to the Carnegie Hall set for its immersive pleasure.

It goes without saying that the target audience of the Bootleg Series, currently retailing at $160 (list price) or $138.36 (on Amazon), consists almost entirely of people who do not need to be convinced of its merits. (That includes readers of this review.) It is impossible to find fault with the boxed set’s thesis that in a few remarkable years between 1959 and 1963, with the assistance of New York City and a large cast of musical mentors (both living and on recordings), muses, friends, and frenemies, Bob Dylan developed into a musician of great originality, interpretive intelligence, and lyrical subtlety. The overabundance of the boxed set only cements the narrative of the Hero’s journey. But that does not mean that we cannot peek through the open window to catch sight of less noticed aspects of his early career.

[1] The image is from a 1963 photo shoot by Ralph Baxter, who mostly placed Dylan in more terrestrial settings: standing at a corner at Gramercy Park, posing with a cigarette on a balcony overlooking a crowded urban courtyard.

[2] See Jacob Uitti, “Patti Smith Is Always Going to Be a Worker,” Interview, October 20, 2020. https://www.interviewmagazine.com/music/patti-smith-is-always-going-to-be-a-worker

[3] See https://www.mojo4music.com/articles/new-music/bob-dylan-the-bootleg-series-volume-18-review-dylans-miraculous-new-york-transformation/ and https://www.uncut.co.uk/reviews/bob-dylans-through-the-open-window-the-bootleg-series-vol-18-1956-1963-reviewed-documenting-the-dawn-of-a-legend-151807/. While track-by-track discussions of “Through the Open Window” began popping up online after the stroke of midnight on October 30, 2025, I particularly benefited from Ray Padgett’s detailed listening guide—sent to subscribers of his “Flagging Down the Double E’s” newsletter.

[4] Here I mean to differentiate the romanticized image from the notion of Dylan’s exceptionalism as a musician.

[5] Robert Shelton, “Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Folk-Song Stylist,” New York Times, September 29, 1961.

[6] “In the dead of the night, he would wake up, grunt, grab a cigarette, and stumble over to the typewriter … turning out songs like ticker tape.” Joan Baez, And a Voice to Sing With: A Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), 86.

[7] Billy James, “Bob Dylan: The First Interview, October 1961, available at https://www.rocksbackpages.com/Library/Article/bob-dylan-the-first-interview; Robert Shelton, “Bob Dylan: A Distinctive Folk-Song Stylist,” New York Times, September 29, 1961; Stacey Williams (John Hammond), liner notes, Bob Dylan (Columbia Records, 1962).

[8] Wilentz, p. 28.

[9] Some of this material appeared on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3: Rare & Unreleased 1961-1991 (Columbia Records, 1991) or The Bootleg Series, Vol. 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964 (Columbia Records, 2010).

[10] I am thinking of the Dylan of the fall 2025 Outlaw Music Festival, who seemed to intentionally hide from the audience. See the “‘I’m Not There’: Why is Bob Dylan Hiding?” (September 14, 2025) episode of Laura Tenschert’s Definitely Dylan. https://www.definitelydylan.com/podcasts/2025/9/14/zu3x709n5k6gifhcha53kt3w039e8i

[11] See, for example, the Instagram account of dylan.ologist. https://www.instagram.com/p/DA3AfODRliZ/