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.
