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Bob Dylan Looks Back on 1963 on New Release

The next archival Bob Dylan release captures the Bard’s May 10, 1963 performance at the Brandeis First Annual Folk Festival in Waltham, MA. The show took place early in Dylan’s career—two weeks prior to the release of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan ( which was released on May 27, 1963). According to Dylan’s label, “The Bob Dylan In Concert – Brandeis University 1963 concert tape was discovered recently in the archives of the noted music writer and Rolling Stone co-founder Ralph Gleason, where it sat on a shelf for more than forty years. “It had been forgotten, until it was found last year in the clearing of the house after my mother died,” Toby Gleason, Ralph’s son, said in a statement . “It’s a seven inch reel-to-reel that sounds like it was taped from the mixing desk.”

Bob Dylan In Concert – Brandeis University 1963 includes such tracks as “Honey, Just Allow Me On More Chance,” “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues,” “Ballad Of Hollis Brown,” “Masters of War,” “Talkin’ World War III Blues,” “Bob Dylan’s Dream” and “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues.”

Though a version of the show was available for a limited time, the Columbia/Legacy edition features liner notes penned exclusively for this release by noted Bob Dylan scholar Michael Gray. “It’s a small miracle this recording exists,” Gray writes in his essay. “Clearly a professional recording…. (t)he Bob Dylan performance it captured, from way back when Kennedy was President and the Beatles hadn’t yet reached America, wasn’t even on fans’ radar…. It reveals him not at any Big Moment but giving a performance like his folk club sets of the period: repertoire from an ordinary working day….Dylan has leapt a creative canyon with this material….This is the last live performance we have of Bob Dylan before he becomes a star….”