GENRE; Rock
LABEL; Columbia
REVIEWED; 8 November, 2025
RATING; 8.0
Through the Open Window: The Bootleg Series Vol. 18” reads like an archival bildungsroman — an exhaustive, sometimes intoxicating excavation of Bob Dylan’s formative years from a 15-year-old in Minnesota to the Carnegie Hall troubadour of 1963. The eight-CD / four-LP deluxe set collects 139 tracks (with dozens of previously unreleased performances and rarities), placing home demos, radio broadcasts, club sets and studio outtakes side-by-side so you can hear the slow alchemy of craft and persona.
Listening end-to-end, the pleasures are twofold: the thrill of discovery and the clearer view of process. Early acetate fragments show a raw-voiced kid absorbing country, blues and rockabilly; by the mid-’60s material, Dylan’s phrasing and lyric touch have already hardened into the distinctive, mercurial voice we recognize. Intimate rehearsal takes of “Blowin’ in the Wind” and outtakes of other seminal songs refract familiar melodies with fresh timing and phrasing, turning what we thought we knew about these songs into a series of small revelations.
The Carnegie Hall performance included here presented complete for the first time in the official catalog — is the set’s emotional keystone: it captures a performer who has learned to command a room and to make even familiar numbers feel newly urgent. The set’s liner essays and photographs add scholarly context without policing the listening experience; as a listening project it rewards both the obsessive completist and the curious newcomer willing to explore.
If there’s a complaint, it’s structural: eight CDs of early Dylan can feel episodic, and the archival fidelity sometimes foregrounds hiss and uneven balances that remind you this is history, not studio polish. But that very rawness is the point — the box doesn’t mythologize Dylan so much as trace his becoming. For anyone interested in the anatomy of songwriting and the texture of American folk revivalism, this is essential listening: a rich, sometimes messy, and ultimately illuminating portrait of an artist learning to be a legend.
