Bob Dylan - The Gaslight Cafe, New York City, 10-15-1962

In the past few days, I've really gotten into a Bob Dylan mood, so I'm going to post a bunch of his stuff soon (knock on wood). He's been very prolific for many decades, and much of his interesting music hasn't made it to his official albums. So there's a lot from him that's worth posting.

This album is a case in point. In October 1962, Dylan played at the Gaslight Cafe in New York City. A professional sound engineer, Richard Alderson, patched a reel-to-reel tape recorder into the P.A. system to record these shows. If you don't know what that means, basically, that's as good of a soundboard as you could hope to get with 1962 technology and expertise. And sure enough, these songs sound great. An album of the concert called "Live at the Gaslight 1962" was released in 2005. End of story, right?

Wait. Not so fast. For starters, the official album only included 10 of the 17 known recorded songs. That means it's only 46 minutes long, when the full recording is an hour and five minutes long. The other songs eventually did get officially released, but only as part of the "50th Anniversary Collection," which was sold in extremely limited numbers (maybe 100 or so) for an extremely limited time to allow the record company to retain the copyrights on the performances. 

I've compiled the full recording here. But there's another big problem. For whatever reason, on all known versions, there's no banter between songs, and the starts and ends of the songs are often abruptly faded in or faded out. It could be the taper had a limited amount of tape and was trying hard to save it to squeeze more songs in - that happened a lot with bootleg recordings back in those days. But for whatever reason, the editing was so severe that most of the songs were lacking a few seconds either at the beginnings or the ends.

So I got to work. Although my sound editing skills are very basic, this is the kind of thing I can tinker with. Songs have repetitive patterns, so I usually was able to take a section in one part of a song and move that to another part of the song to fill in the missing bits. As you can see, I have "[Edit]" added to 12 of the 17 songs. But in fact I think I made little tweaks to all of the songs, but the others weren't as significant. Now, when you listen, the songs sound complete, with proper beginnings and ends. There's only one or two, with "Barbara Allen" being such a case, where I couldn't come up with a clear ending, so I had the song fade out. But even in those cases the endings are longer by a few seconds and sound more natural instead of abrupt.

Here's another twist to this recording. Due to the way it was recorded as described above, there is virtually no audience response captured whatsoever. No clapping, no coughing, no talking, nothing. Basically, this whole thing sounds exactly like versions professionally recorded in a studio. There were two songs where a bit of clapping could be heard during the fade out. ("John Brown" was one; I forget the other.) But I removed that during my editing. The only instance in this whole album where I hear any audience noise is in a couple of the choruses of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," where you can faintly hear the audience singing along.

As a result of that, plus the total lack of banter, in my mind I treat this like a collection of studio takes instead of a concert. These sound just as good and clear as anything he was putting on his albums at the time. However, many of these never actually got studio versions, so these will suffice. 

Four of the songs are Dylan originals: "John Brown," "The Ballad of Hollis Brown," "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," and "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right." Furthermore, "Rocks and Gravel" is credited as an original, but it's mostly a medley of two traditional songs, "Solid Road" and "Alabama Woman." The originals have all been officially released in other versions, but most of the covers have not. By the way, note that "Ain't No More Cane" would be revived and done in a very different arrangement for the classic "Basement Tapes" Dylan did with the Band in 1967.

Another complication is that some say this comes from one concert, and others say two concerts on different nights. Dylan played at the Gaslight Cafe at least twice in October 1962. I don't know if it's one concert or two, and it probably doesn't ultimately matter. But maybe it's one, because one quirk is that none of the songs feature his harmonica playing, so maybe it was recorded on a night when he forgot to bring one. That helps make these versions unique, because he often did more on guitar where the harmonica breaks normally would be. That said, I've used the song order favored by those who claim it comes from two sources. Songs one through ten are said to have come from the first source and the rest from the second.

By the way, Dylan's songwriting was hitting new heights around this time. It is probable that this is the first performance of "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" in front of an audience, and the second such performance of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." Of course, both are considered classics today.

01 Motherless Children (Bob Dylan)
02 Handsome Molly [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
03 John Brown [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
04 The Ballad of Hollis Brown (Bob Dylan)
05 Kind-Hearted Woman Blues [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
06 See that My Grave Is Kept Clean (Bob Dylan)
07 Ain't No More Cane (Bob Dylan)
08 Cocaine Blues [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
09 The Cuckoo [Is a Pretty Bird] [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
10 West Texas [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
11 A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
12 Don't Think Twice, It's All Right [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
13 Black Cross [Hezikiah Jones] [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
14 No More Auction Block [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
15 Rocks and Gravel [Solid Road - Alabama Woman] (Bob Dylan)
16 Barbara Allen [Edit] (Bob Dylan)
17 Moonshiner [Edit] (Bob Dylan)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15106976/BobD_1962e_The_Gaslight_Cafe__New_York_City__10-15-1962_atse.zip.html

I'm not a fan of the cover of the official "Live at the Gaslight 1962" album, so I've made my own. This uses a photo of Dylan playing at Gerde's Folk City, another New York City club, just one month later. There are no known color photos of him in concert from this time period, so I colorized it.