On Sept. 6, 1961, a little-known 20-year-old calling himself Bob Dylan took the stage at the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village and played a six-song set. More than 60 years later, a reel-to-reel tape of those songs has gone up for auction.
Only about 20 people were at the short performance, but it is well known to folk-history fans and Dylanologists partly because it was preserved on tape. Terri Thal, Dylan’s manager at the time, brought a bulky Ampex recorder in a leather case to the show and set it up on a table at stage left.
Dylan knew she was going to record, Thal said: “He programmed his set as an audition.”
That set, performed more than three decades before the birth of Timothée Chalamet — up for an Oscar this Sunday for his portrayal of Dylan — included “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues,” “He Was a Friend of Mine” and “Song to Woody,” a reference to Woody Guthrie.
The recording became a tool that Thal used to try to persuade out-of-town clubs to book Dylan, who had acquired something of a reputation among the cognoscenti in the Village but wasn’t well known elsewhere.
Now, the tape, described by RR Auction in Boston as “Dylan’s earliest demo recording,” is being offered for sale along with other Dylan-related ephemera, including a sequined suit from his 1975 Rolling Thunder tour and a Martin D-41 acoustic guitar he gave to Bob Neuwirth, a musician who was instrumental in assembling the band for that tour.
The recording is significant, said Mark Davidson, the senior director of archives and exhibitions at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Okla., because it documents a performance by someone on the cusp of fame and before he fully developed his own inimitable style.
“He’s still sort of in that Woody Guthrie jukebox phase,” Davidson said.
Richard F. Thomas, a classics professor at Harvard University and the author of “Why Bob Dylan Matters,” said that at the time of the Gaslight show, Dylan was a “young genius committed to his art and his performance” but who was “still trying to make it.”
It was indeed a seminal time for Dylan. Days after that performance, he met John Hammond, a producer and talent scout, often credited with discovering Dylan. And just weeks later in The New York Times, the critic Robert Shelton described Dylan as “a bright new face in folk music,” a “cross between a choir boy and a beatnik” who performed with “originality and inspiration.” Within a month Dylan had signed with Columbia Records.
Thal said that she met Dylan soon after he arrived in New York, through her husband, the folk singer Dave Van Ronk, whom Dylan admired while growing up in Minnesota. For a while, Thal said, Dylan was a regular visitor to their home in Manhattan, where he wrote and practiced early versions of “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues.” That song, Davidson said, was inspired by a newspaper clipping about an ill-fated boat trip that Noel Paul Stookey, a member of Peter, Paul and Mary, gave to Dylan.
Months before the Gaslight show, Dylan asked Thal if she would manage him. (She was already Van Ronk’s manager.) Thal quickly agreed.
“I thought he had a touch of genius,” she said. “He was not a great guitarist, he was not a great singer. But he had developed a presence, and it was incredibly distinctive.”
The Gaslight, a cellar establishment on MacDougal Street, where The Times reported, “the delicate finger-snap is the mark of thundering applause,” was one of Dylan’s early haunts. He described it in his 2004 memoir, “Chronicles: Volume One,” as “a cryptic club” where performers hung out in an upstairs room reached via fire escape and played poker between sets, with bets generally ranging from a nickel to a quarter. (“I usually folded my cards if I didn’t have a pair by the second or third draw,” Dylan wrote, adding that the singer Len Chandler told him: “You gotta learn how to bluff.”)
The cafe was also important in his development as a professional musician: a venue that paid. After being booked there, he wrote, he “would never see the basket houses again,” referring to spots where people passed the hat to collect donations for performers.
According to a chronological account of set lists on Dylan’s website, the 1961 Gaslight show was among his earliest performances, and just the second in New York City. A small number of these shows had been recorded, including Dylan’s first listed performance in New York, as part of the Riverside Church Hootenanny Special, a 12-hour marathon that took place inside the church theater.
But Thal’s recording was the first to be created in a professional capacity, with the aim of obtaining work for Dylan, said Bobby Livingston, an executive vice president at RR Auction. He added that the auction house was selling the tape as an artifact owned by Thal and that she did not purport to own the rights to its songs.
Livingston estimated that the tape would fetch at least $25,000 at auction. Of course, that doesn’t include the cost of a working reel-to-reel machine, which, if eBay is any guide, could add a few hundred or a few thousand dollars.
Unauthorized versions of the Gaslight performance have long circulated. Thal believes that someone made and kept a version without her permission when she went to a studio to have the Ampex reel copied, so she would not have to bring the original with her when she visited clubs.
In addition to the songs performed at the Gaslight, the tape includes an embryonic version of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” with Dylan accompanied by a piano. That was added to the tape later by a friend, Thal said. By that time, she no longer managed Dylan, having been replaced by Albert Grossman.
Thal said she obtained gigs for Dylan including at Gerde’s Folk City, which was cited by Shelton in his Times article. But even though she played the Gaslight tape for bookers in Boston, Philadelphia and Springfield, Mass., they passed on Dylan.
“The guy in Springfield laughed at me,” she said. Another booker, she said, asked: “Why should I hire a Jack Elliott imitator,” a reference to the singer-songwriter Ramblin’ Jack Elliott.
Thomas, the classics professor, pointed out that seeing Dylan live was a big part of what made him so compelling. That could explain why some of those who listened to the Gaslight tape without having seen him play might not have been swayed.
“The magic of Bob,” he said, “is that everything comes together in performance.”
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