It’s back to the beginning for the latest Dylan Bootleg

The youthful subject of A Complete Unknown, which closes with him "going electric" at Newport as the culmination of a rainbow arc that began in monochrome, distant Minnesota, is currently lightly treading the boards across Europe’s arenas, concert halls and theatres.

This new iteration of a complete unknown is largely hidden from view from his audiences, sat behind a baby grand and lyric sheets for most of the set, only the top of the head visible to many paying punters. Bootlegs and fan reports suggest an 84-year-old artist in fine form as he enters the fourth year of touring his most recent album, Rough & Rowdy Ways. The voice is strong, sometimes he adds an echo to it, his wayward piano leading a skeletal band of brothers through a clutch of old songs – “Desolation Row”, “It’s All Over Baby Blue”, “Every Grain of Sand” among them – that form a kind of frame around the restless, shape-shifting unearthly powers of the new ones.

For the Dylan faithful, not being able to see the singer sing is not a problem. Just being in the same room is a blessing. “Most are downright reverent, with shining eyes, almost like believers,” reads a report from Friday night at a sports arena in Lingen. For newcomers without that depth of belief, it might be a little galling to come to one of his concerts without being able to see our Complete Unknown at work. Are they coming because they want to see what it’s all about, or are they here because Bob in 2025 is a piece of history to bear witness to before the stage door closes and the curtain falls for the last time? As one Reddit poster put it: “You’re seeing history, something you’ll remember forever and be able to tell your grand kids about.”

In Dylan’s favour, his voice, his phrasing and presence sound strong and resolutely in the present moment, indifferent to expectations and onlookers, and to nostalgia too, and that will always be bracingly electrifying. And Dylan has been electrifying since way before Newport – as a new Bootleg series set is about to demonstrate. The teenager who came to New York to take on the world on his own terms was electrifying audiences in cafes, apartments and concert halls just a few months after first setting his suitcase down.

But he’s been dividing opinion for a long time, too. Local newspaper reviewers were scathing rather than electrified over his appearance at Copenhagen’s Royal Arena. Sixty years earlier, when Dylan first hit Greenwich Village, Bruce Langhorne summed him up thus: “He was a terrible singer and a complete fake, and I thought he didn’t play the harmonica that well.”

Langhorne revised his opinion swiftly, however, once he started recording with Dylan. “One of his skills was – and probably still is – generating a really strong thread without being distracted by other people’s performances,” he told me in 2004. “Knowing what he wanted to do and doing it. Because he had that thread. He had that thing that you can latch onto. It’s a clarity that many musicians don’t have – I don’t have it – the ability to just do a pure performance from beginning to end. To go to the end and deliver your message.”

The new Bootleg Series set, Through the Open Window, is all about that thread. It charts the folk process of Robert Zimmerman transmogrifying into Bob Dylan, a role he has played for 61 years and is still playing, and his peculiar genius for knowing what he wants to do and doing it, from start to finish. The set comprises eight CDs (and a 2CD cut-down), 139 tracks, 48 of them new releases, and a 125-page photobook and essay by Sean Wilentz, the set's producer, which is illuminating.

It begins with schoolboy Bob and his mates singing “Let the Good Times Roll” onto an acetate disc at a music store in St Paul in 1956, and ends with his first headlining show at a sold-out Carnegie Hall in October 1963, aged 22, before 3,000 people who hang on his every word, especially the ones they haven’t heard yet (such as “The Times They Are a Changin” with which he opened that concert).

In between, you get excerpts from The Gaslight, Gerdes, Carnegie Chapter Hall, The Town Hall, and sundry parties, radio broadcasts and informal singing sessions that found their way to glory on reel-to-reel magnetic tape. Standouts? At random: an early account of “Young But Daily Growing” from the Chapter House; a debut album out-take in “House Carpenter”; “Dink’s Song” from a party in Minneapolis in 1961; a nascent “Tomorrow is a Long Time” at another Minneapolis party a year later; the run of “Hard Rain”, “Don’t Think Twice”, “Barbara Allen” and “The Cuckoo” from the Gaslight in 1962; a snatch of “The Ballad of the Gliding Swan” from the BBC play he appeared in in 1962; previously unheard original “Liverpool Gal”, brought back with him from that England trip; and “Bob Dylan’s Dream” from the Town Hall gig he delivered to around 1,000 audience members in April 1962. Freewheelin’ would come out a few weeks later.

All good, yes? Well, yes. Incredible, a lot of it. The Carnegie Hall discs are a blast. The above paragraph merely brushes the surface of what’s been gathered from the formative years of this Complete Unknown. There’s lots of blues, sessions with Big Joe Williams, Victoria Spivey and Harry Belafonte. But some hardcore fans with time on their hands to compare what’s included on those eight discs and, more importantly, what ISN’T, are not so happy. There seems to be quite a bit that’s absent, mostly from private tapers, including the Karen Wallace tape; while completists bewail the Town Hall and Chapter House concerts not coming in full.

There’s another issue, too: is this a set to be listened to, or one to be kept on the shelf, an historical record returned to for reference, like an encyclopedia? A poster on the Expecting Rain fan forum is revealing: “This is a must-have simply for historic reasons … I don't think I will play this set very often, though.”

There’s the rub. There are great recordings of Dylan’s youthful performances here, but there’s a hell of a lot of them, covering barely more than two years. I’ve been a Dylan fan since I was a squeaky teen, but for a while I struggled to get down and get with it when it came to approaching a stream of this monolithic set of eight jam-packed CDs of strummin and hollarin’.

I love the old-world folk ballads he covers on his way to becoming Bob Dylan, often sat playing in someone’s apartment, and there’s a thrill to hearing iconic songs still paint fresh, but it’s a set and an object that carries the weight of a museum, too. An aural museum, but with a museum’s dead weight, even as the living Dylan continues lightly in his progress across Europe this autumn, still alive and still kicking. A part of me thinks he doesn’t deserve this premature museum-ification – a kind of mummification, but without the poetry.

Over in Tulsa, there’s a big building housing his archives. How much more will fill it? Will this be a Hall of Records for the ages, or a future Ozymandias as times change beyond our current imagining? No one knows; not even posterity, whose face is turned away from the living. But he’s out there, the kid who became Bob Dylan, still singing and playing the songs he wants to play, playing that thread and leaving no room for nostalgia.

• Through the Open Window: The Bootleg Series Volume 18 1956-1962 is out on Sony
• More New Music reviews on theartsdesk

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