'The Earliest Concert Tapes' Series Launches Today
#1: Bob Dylan at Indian Neck Folk Festival, May 6 1961
If you look at Flagging Down’s index, you’ll notice that I haven’t written too many newsletters about the early '60s. That’s not due to lack of interest; it’s due to lack of tapes. Any random year of the Never Ending Tour probably has more circulating concert recordings than Bob Dylan’s entire 1961-1965 era. So, given that I tend to start with a recording and write from there, I’ve ended up focusing more on years after his folk era.
However, like probably some of you, seeing A Complete Unknown has reignited my interest in those early days. So today I’m kicking off a series called, simply, The Earliest Concert Tapes. Over the next month or so, I plan to go through every circulating show recorded in 1961 and 1962, one at a time.
Spoiler alert: There aren’t that many! Ten tapes, to be exact, some long and some short. I thought this would be an opportunity to survey what exists, with the hope that the long-teased The Villager Bootleg Series (finally out this fall, supposedly?) will add more to the discography.
I will focus exclusively on public performances, not home recordings, studio sessions, radio shows, etc. What you might call real “concerts,” even if, at this point, they’re more likely to be held at small folk festivals or pass-the-hat coffeehouses than any formal concert hall. I want to hear young Dylan really performing, trying to win over a room full of strangers, not just playing for his friends in someone’s living room. So I’m skipping a few of the earlier home recordings and jumping to May 1961.
Note: Half of my Earliest Concert Tapes entries will be for paid subscribers only. So if you want to read the full series, and haven’t already, join up here (you can read about all the other perks here):
The first concert we have a tape of comes from the third Indian Neck Folk Festival in Branford, CT. Despite having some now-prominent names on the bill—Judy Collins, Buffy Sainte-Marie—this festival remains fairly obscure. That was by design. This “festival” was an invitation-only event the Yale college folk club put on at the Montowese House hotel four times from 1957 until 1963, by musicians for musicians, and others involved in the folk scene. It wasn’t like Newport Folk Festival where anyone could just buy a ticket.
Here is some of the letter the organizers sent out to invitees:
Dylan was not on the bill. He seemingly did not get an invitation to the festival himself, but invited guests could bring friends, and Dylan drove up from New York with Tom Paxton. “It was totally unpaid,” Happy Traum who was also there told CT Insider. “It was not a gig. It was more of a gathering.” Boston folk hero Eric Von Schmidt called it “a weekend of beer drinking and a mass guitar salad.”
Also unlike a “traditional” festival—with stages, set times, etc—it was free-for-all. Bob may well have performed multiple times in multiple locations; there are photos of him jamming outside with Bob Neuwirth, who he met for the first time, and Mark Spoelstra, which were clearly different occasions than today’s solo tape. As that organizers’ letter notes, there were often three or four “hoots” going on at the same time.
There was a public concert the night before the festival, on Yale’s campus in New Haven, which served to raise funds for the festival, but neither Dylan nor Paxton were listed on the flyer. The taper reports the Dylan set comes from the informal hotel setting, not the public concert.
In case any newbies thought the connection in A Complete Unknown was overstated, Dylan’s three-song set was entirely Woody Guthrie covers. Judy Collins, for one, was unimpressed. “Dylan bored the hell out of me,” she said. “He was singing old Woody Guthrie songs — I thought, badly.”
But we don’t have to take her word for it. We have the tape! On it, Bob sings three Guthrie tunes:
“Talking Columbia,” a song about a dam which Guthrie wrote in 1941 for a promotional film designed to celebrate electricity coming to rural America.
“Hangknot Slipknot,” which Bob introduces by saying, “He’s got 5 or 6 hanging songs. This is the best one.”
“Talking Fishing Blues,” a funny yarn where Woody goes fishing and catches, among other things, “three old rubber boots and a Ford radiator and a Chevrolet coupe.” “This is a fisherman song he wrote when he was drunk,” Bob says by way of introduction. “You gotta read between the lines.”
At least, that’s what I think he says. Because, alas, the audio quality of this very first concert tape leaves something to be desired. Like due to poor taper positioning, Bob’s guitar playing largely drowns out the vocals. I found it a more enjoyable listen while reading along with the Woody lyrics online; otherwise it’s hard to make out much. His harmonica playing and guitar strumming are plenty spirited though. [Update: Remixed version below with louder vocals!]
The two talking blues songs sound like dead ringers for the ones he himself would write soon after. “Talking Fishing Blues” especially reminds me of “Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues,” basically one joke after another. “Hangknot Slipknot” is the outlier here, requiring some actual singing. To the limited extent you can hear him, he sounds good! It’s also more overtly political than the other two, evoking the hanging scenes in soon-to-be-written originals like “Seven Curses.”
An implicit question with all these super-early shows I’m exploring will be: Can you hear it? Can you hear what made Bob Dylan “Bob Dylan” rather than just another Greenwich Village folkie?
The answer remains inconclusive on this one, given the tape quality. On the flip side, that tape quality enhances just how closely two of the songs sound to his own talking-blues compositions. Given you can’t really make out the words anyway, he might as well be playing “World War III” or “Bear Mountain” or “John Birch” or any of the others. While I doubt any of his talking-blues are in anyone’s top-top tier of Dylan songs, you can hear how naturally this style suits him early on. But there would be a lot more to come.
1961-05-06, Indian Neck Folk Festival, Branford, CT
New: Here’s an A.I.-upgraded version with vocals made more prominent. Thanks Anthony!
Terrific old photos and I spy baby Dylan. Thanks a million.
Never heard of this festival, so it’s very cool to learn about it. I thought the first half of the movie was much better than the second half for many reasons, so I’m interested in delving into his early years as well. This was great, thanks so much.