The early years of Bob Dylan’s musical career, before he moved to New York and legally changed his name from Robert Zimmerman to his adopted moniker, are often shrouded in mystery. Indeed, in the 2024 biopic A Complete Unknown, Dylan seemed to arrive in New York in mid-1961 fully formed and ready to become a star folk singer.
Soon, however, fans will be able to gain new insight into Dylan’s evolution as a singer and songwriter with the release of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series Volume 18: Through the Open Window, 1956-1963, a new boxed set of rare recordings set for a Oct. 31 release.
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The set, announced on Wednesday, Sept. 17, showcases Dylan’s rise as a performer and songwriter as he moved from his home state of Minnesota to Greenwich Village and found fame.
It opens with Dylan’s version of “Let the Good Times Roll,” recorded on Christmas Eve in 1956 at the Terline Music Shop in St. Paul, Minn., as well as “I Got a New Girl,” recorded at the home of a Dylan associate in May 1959 in his hometown of Hibbing, Minn.
The recordings on the boxed set were laid down at coffeehouses, club dates, the apartments of friends, and informal jam sessions and gatherings. Along with the obscurities are early versions of some of Dylan’s greatest and most well-known songs, including “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
The set concludes with the complete recording of Dylan’s historic Oct. 26, 1963, concert at Carnegie Hall that marked the final chapter of the singer-songwriter’s early career.
The eight-CD, 139-song boxed set, which includes 48 previously unreleased performances as well as 38 ultra-rare tracks, includes a hardcover book with 125-pages of liner notes penned by Dylanologist Sean Wilentz and 100 rare photos. The set will also be released in two-CD and four-LP versions with 42 tracks.
“Of that time and those places, this collection is just a fragment,” writes Wilentz in his liner notes. “Even so, as an aural record of an artist becoming himself—or in Dylan’s case, his first of many artistic selves—the collection aims to collapse time and space, not as a nostalgic reverie but as a living connection between the past and the present, the old and the new, which are never as distinct as we might think.”
The song “Rocks and Gravel” — Take 3, an outtake from the April 1962 sessions from Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, was released on Wednesday, Sept. 17 as a preview track.
