“He played for two hours. The place was empty when he finished.”

1962-07-02, The Finjan, Montreal, Quebec

Today we hear Dylan’s a tape from first trip outside the United States. Not far outside, admittedly; he just hopped over to Montreal, which is only about 45 minutes from the U.S. border (I live in Burlington, Vermont and Montreal is our nearest “big city,” despite it being in another country). This performance took place at The Finjan, which had opened in 1959 as an “Israeli Restaurant & Folk Song Club.”

As Ian Woodward notes in a thorough investigation of Dylan’s Montreal 1962 trip in the Isis fanzine, Dylan was in town primarily for a four-night residency at another coffeehouse, The Potpourri. He played there all weekend, then tacked on a likely last-minute Monday night appearance at The Finjan to a tiny audience. “You wanna sing one?” he asks an unknown person at one point on this tape. “There’s nobody really here.” But because the Finjan show to practically no one was taped and the four Potpourri gigs he was actually in town for were not, this apparent afterthought gig has become the famous one.