New Wax Wednesday

Look through any window, and what do you see? Since it’s the official start of autumn, we here in the Northeast are already awash in falling leaves and beautiful colors galore — but when it comes to the analog side of things, I’m also seeing another great archival Bob Dylan vinyl collection on the horizon.

In this case, it’s the next entry in the bard’s acclaimed Bootleg Series that’s on deck. More specifically, Bob Dylan’s The Bootleg Series Vol. 18: Through The Open Window, 1956-1963 is arriving via Columbia/Legacy/Sony Music as a 4LP box set on October 31, 2025.

Our first preview of the box’s contents comes with the quite stark “Rocks and Gravel” (LP2, Side C, Track 4), which is a 1962 outtake from Bob’s sessions for his second studio LP on Columbia, May 1963’s The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. You can check it out for yourself in its official YouTube clip below.

According to the official press materials, this latest volume in the rightly acclaimed Bootleg Series chronicles Dylan’s emergence and maturation as a songwriter and performer, from his Minnesota roots in the 1950s to the Greenwich Village bohemia of the early 1960s. Through The Open Window includes rare Columbia Records outtakes, recordings made at club dates, in tiny informal gatherings, in friends’ apartments, and at jam sessions in long-gone musicians’ hangouts. Our kinda formative Dylan aural ephemera, in other words.

As per tradition with the Bootleg Series, Through The Open Window will be released in multiple configurations. The 4LP set, nicknamed the “Highlights” edition, includes a 24-page book and features 42 tracks, 18 of which are “completely” unreleased, and nine others considered to be “super-rare” cuts. (Some Window tracks made previous appearances on wax on a pair of multi-LP, Europe-only 50th Anniversary Collections covering the years 1962 and 1963, respectively — which, if memory serves, were released that way overseas to ensure Dylan preserved the copyrights to his material.)

A companion 2CD Window set follows the same tracklisting as the 4LP box, while the full-bore 8CD Deluxe Edition set includes a whopping 139 tracks, 48 of them ID’ed as never-before-released performances along with 38 other super-rare cuts, plus a 125-page hardcover book with extensive liner notes by author/historian Sean Wilentz and over 100 rare photographs.

As for the SRPs, the Through The Open Window 4LP set runs $119.99, the 8CD collection goes for $159.99, and the 2CD option is $33.98. You can preorder the 4LP version from Music Direct here, and/or via the MD link graphic that appears before the tracklisting section below.

It’s probably no surprise to hear that I’ve long been a fan of Dylan’s Bootleg Series, ever since it got underway with March 1991’s The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased): 1961-1991 5LP collection on Columbia/Legacy that features later-period gems like the 1983 Infidels outtake “Blind Willie McTell” (LP5, Side 2, Track 2) and the 1991 remix of the Oh Mercy outtake, “Series of Dreams” (LP5, Side 2, Track 4). Besides that opening Silvio, er, salvo, other essential Bootleg Series entries include Classic Records’ 2006 200g repress of 1999’s Vol 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966, The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert 2LP set; November 2014’s Vol. 11: Bob Dylan and The Band, The Basement Tapes Raw 3LP/2CD set (my copy of it has a pair of nasty splits almost the entire way across the back portion of both the top and bottom of the outer box — but since it’s The Basement Tapes, I can live with it); and November 2017’s Vol. 13: Trouble No More, 1979-1981 4LP/2CD set, to name but a few.

Incidentally, if you want to read our extensive reviews of a good number of Bootleg Series entries, go here, and scroll down to find which editions float your Zimmerman boot-boat. You can also see additional reviews I penned for either/both Bootleg Series LP and CD editions over on our sister site Sound & Vision, such as my January 2018 take on the aforementioned Trouble No More here; my July 2019 look at the Vol. 15: The Rolling Thunder Revue, The 1975 Live Recordings collection here; and my April 2023 dive into Vol. 17: Fragments, Time Out of Mind Sessions (1996-1997) here.

More about Vol. 18 now from the aforementioned official press materials, along with the usual MM additions. The Through The Open Window 4LP edition is a “unique account” of Dylan’s early years, when he honed his talent, and transformed traditional folk songs and lyric sketches into some of his greatest and most enduring songs, and it concludes with eight previously unreleased recordings from Dylan’s landmark concert at Carnegie Hall in NYC on October 26, 1963, on LP4. A culmination of the artist’s exceptional early rise, that concert also marked the end of the beginning of Dylan’s long career. For all you Dylanologist completists out there like yours truly, I must point out that every song from that special 1963 Carnegie Hall gig, along with Bob’s quite-Bob-like introductions, are on CD7 and CD8 in the mondo 8CD version; we only get about one-third of them in the vinyl box.

“Of that time and those places, this collection is just a fragment,” writes the aforementioned author/historian Sean Wilentz in the liners. “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.”

Not sure I could have put it any better myself, tbh. Needless to say, I look forward to getting and spinning all eight sides of Vol. 18 when the time comes at the end of October — and, of course, I’ll naturally acquiesce to cueing up all 97 of the track differences between the two sets that are only (currently, upon release) on the CD collection. Takes rocks and gravel, baby, make a solid road. . .

BOB DYLAN
THE BOOTLEG SERIES VOL. 18:
THROUGH THE OPEN WINDOW, 1956-1963
4LP (Columbia/Legacy/Sony Music)

LP1, Side A
1. Let The Good Times Roll (Terlinde Music Shop, St. Paul, MN, 1956)
2. I Got A New Girl (Informal Recording, Hibbing, MN, 1959)
3. Jesus Christ (Informal Recording, Minneapolis, MN, 1960)
4. K.C. Moan (Informal Recording, Madison, WI, 1960) Bob Dylan With Danny Kalb
5. Remember Me (Informal Recording, East Orange, NJ, 1961)
6. Railroading On The Great Divide (Gerdes Folk City, NYC, 1961) Bob Dylan With Jim Kweskin
7. Man Of Constant Sorrow (Bob Dylan Rehearsal, NYC, 1961)
8. He Was A Friend Of Mine (Bob Dylan Outtake, NYC, 1961)
9. Ramblin’ Round (Bob Dylan Outtake, NYC, 1961)

LP1, Side B
1. Story: East Orange, New Jersey (Party, Minneapolis, MN, 1961)
2. Po’ Lazarus (Party, Minneapolis, MN, 1961)
3. Dink’s Song (Party, Minneapolis, MN, 1961)
4. I Was Young When I Left Home (Party, Minneapolis, MN, 1961)
5. Cocaine (Party, Minneapolis, MN, 1961)

LP2, Side C
1. Talkin’ New York (Gerdes Folk City, NYC, 1962)
2. Corrina, Corrina (Gerdes Folk City, NYC, 1962)
3. (I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle (Freewheelin’ Outtake, NYC, 1962) **
4. Rocks And Gravel (Freewheelin’ Outtake, NYC, 1962) **
5. Let Me Die In My Footsteps (The Finjan, Montreal, 1962)
6. Tomorrow Is A Long Time (Party, Minneapolis, MN, 1962)

LP2, Side D
1. Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right (The Gaslight Cafe, NYC, 1962)
2.The Cuckoo (The Gaslight Cafe, NYC, 1962)
3. The Ballad Of The Gliding Swan (BBC-TV, London, 1963)
4. John Brown (Broadside Ballads Album Version, NYC, 1963)
5. Dusty Old Fairgrounds (Town Hall, NYC, 1963)

LP3, Side E
1. House Of The Rising Sun (Informal Recording, NYC, 1963)
2. Seven Curses (The Times They Are A-Changin’ Outtake, NYC, 1963)
3. Masters Of War (Freewheelin’ Alternate Take, NYC, 1963)
4. Girl From The North Country (Freewheelin’ Alternate Take, NYC, 1963)
5. Liverpool Gal (Party, Minneapolis, MN, 1963)

LP3, Side F
1. Boots Of Spanish Leather (The Times They Are A-Changin’ Alternate Take, NYC, 1963)
2. Moonshiner (The Times They Are A-Changin’ Outtake, NYC, 1963)
3. The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll (Party, Los Angeles, 1963)
4. The Times They Are A-Changin’ (Informal Recording, Los Angeles, 1963)

LP4, Side G
1. Who Killed Davey Moore? (Carnegie Hall, NYC, 1963)
2. Lay Down Your Weary Tune (Carnegie Hall, NYC, 1963)
3. Blowin’ In The Wind (Carnegie Hall, NYC, 1963) **
4. North Country Blues (Carnegie Hall, NYC, 1963)

LP5, Side H
1. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (Carnegie Hall, NYC, 1963)
2. Talkin’ World War III Blues (Carnegie Hall, NYC, 1963) **
3. Only A Pawn in Their Game (Carnegie Hall, NYC, 1963) **
4. When The Ship Comes In (Carnegie Hall, NYC, 1963)

** Previously released on either a) the 50th Anniversary Collection 1962, or b) 50th Anniversary Collection 1963, respectively (both editions are Sony Music imports)