"Bootleg Series Vol. 18" Members-Only Advance Listening Session w/ Steve Berkowitz and Sean Wilentz

Bob Dylan Center members are invited to an exclusive online advance listening session featuring selections from “Bootleg Series Volume 18: Through the Open Window, 1956–1963,” the latest in Dylan’s remarkable series of box sets that offer a parallel history to his official discography.

“Through the Open Window” tells the story of Dylan’s emergence and maturation as a songwriter and performer, from Minnesota and Madison to the Greenwich Village bohemia where his imagination took flight. This lovingly assembled collection reveals the wide scope of Dylan’s musical education and artistic development in the Village in the early 1960s, a place and time uniquely suited to creative breakthrough. Along with rare Columbia Records outtakes, the collection includes many previously unreleased recordings made at club dates, in tiny informal gatherings, in friends’ apartments, at jam sessions in long-gone hangouts, and at Dylan’s landmark Carnegie Hall concert that took place on Oct. 26, 1963, almost exactly 62 years ago.

For this special Zoom session, Dylan Center members will be among the very first to hear “Bootleg 18” highlights, including early versions of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and other classics and deep cuts.

Project contributors and Dylan scholars Steve Berkowitz and Sean Wilentz will join Bob Dylan Center Director Steven Jenkins for the listening session and a lively discussion about the box set’s origins and revelations.

Details:
Tuesday, Oct. 28
6 p.m. CT
Virtual Event

Tickets:
Free for Bob Dylan Center members, reservation required. Become a member at bobdylancenter.com/support/memberships

About Steve Berkowitz:
Multiple Grammy- and Blues Award-winning producer Steve Berkowitz was an A&R executive and producer with Columbia/Sony Records, working with artists such as Tony Bennett, Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen and Branford Marsalis. With Sony Legacy, he has supervised or produced reissues by artists including Johnny Cash, Miles Davis, Bob Dylan and Robert Johnson.

About Sean Wilentz:
Award-winning historian, author and critic Sean Wilentz reflects on U.S. sociopolitical history in works such as "The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson and Lincoln." His biography "Bob Dylan in America" considers Dylan’s place in American culture. Wilentz explores these themes in chronological vignettes within the Dylan Center’s Columbia Records Gallery, shedding light on key moments across Dylan’s ever-evolving career.

Wilentz has contributed a 125-page essay to the “Bootleg 18” liner notes, in which he writes, “Of that time and those places, this collection is just a fragment—and when dealing with Dylan, who has made an art out of blurring fact and fancy, history and myth, it can be treacherous to assume too much about what seems to be demonstrable. 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.”

You may also like the following events from Bob Dylan Center:

• Next Thursday, 16th October, 06:00 pm, Member Event: Ten Songs (Plus One or Two) in Tulsa
• This month, 24th October, 06:30 pm, Steve Nieve at LowDown in Tulsa
• Next month, 15th November, 08:00 pm, How Lucky Can One Man Get – John Prine concert film screening in Tulsa

Also check out other Arts events in West End, Entertainment events in West End, Concerts in West End.