Bob Dylan - The Hotel Tape - Bonnie Beecher's Appartment, Minneapolis, MN, 12-22-1961

As I continue to be going through a Bob Dylan phase, I'm going to post more of his stuff. For now, I'm focusing on his early 1960s material before moving to later in his long music career.

And speaking of early, this is really early! I posted his first real concert from October 1961 a few days ago. This took place just one month later. Those two recordings sound way better than you'd expect for anything recorded in 1961 outside of a professional recording studio. This one was good enough for three of the songs to get official release. "Hard Times in New York Town" was released on "The Bootleg Series, Volumes 1-3: Rare and Unreleased." "Dink's Song (Fare Thee Well)" and "I Was Young When I Left Home (900 Miles)" were released on "The Bootleg Series, Volume 7: No Direction Home." But the whole thing is of the same quality, and the whole thing deserves an official release someday.

Here's the quick story behind this recording. By December 1961, Dylan had just won a recording contract, but he hadn't released anything yet. He had connections in the art community back in Minneapolis, Minnesota, near his home town of Hibbing, from people he met while going to college for a year. When he went home for Christmas vacation, he reconnected with people in that community. One was Bonnie Beecher, a minor actress and singer (she'd have roles in episodes of The Twilight Zone and Star Trek). He'd dated her briefly in college, and she would go on to marry the comedian Wavy Gravy. Around this time, her Minnesota apartment was so frequently used as a crash pad for artists coming through town that people joked it was like a hotel. Thus, this recording has been known as "The Hotel Tape," including by Dylan at the time.

Beecher can be heard singing a bit on an earlier tape made that summer (which has poorer sound quality), but it seems she wasn't around when this tape was recorded. Instead, a musician named Tony Glover helped Dylan make the recording, and he can be heard making a comment or two at the very end of it. Glover was a blues musician, and part of the trio Koerner, Ray and Glover. (I have their albums in my collection - very good stuff.)  That's about all I know, except I've heard Dylan and Glover started drinking heavily while the recording went on, to the point that Dylan's performance started to decline just a little bit towards the end, with him asking to stop the recording right at the very end.

That said, if he got drunk you can't tell, since the performance is solid. Plus, the sound quality is outstanding, just as good as a studio recording of the time period, in my opinion. Dylan apparently liked it enough to give copies to friends and family at the time, since it was the best recording he'd done prior to the release of his first album in 1962. 

I cleaned up the recording a bit, but I didn't have to do much. I deleted a few seconds here and there, for instance when there was the sound of the tape recorder getting turned on or off. But I didn't cut out any music or talking. By the way, there's almost no talking, except for the track "Tale of East Orange, New Jersey," which is a spoken joke-story instead of a song. Oh, the one important change I did is that there seems to be no silent pauses between songs in the versions I've heard. I added the typical two seconds of silence after each song. Plus, some songs got cut off a couple of seconds too soon, so I helped them fade out better.

At this time, Dylan had written very few originals, so this consists almost entirely of covers. "Hard Times in New York Town" is an original. "I Was Young When I Left Home" kind of is, but it's so heavily based on the traditional folk song "900 Miles" that that's debatable. Similarly, in one of his rare comments, Dylan claimed "It's Hard to Be Blind" was an original (which he called "It's Hard to Be Poor"), but it's another traditional folk song with some slightly changed lyrics. (That was a common and acceptable thing to do in the folk world at the time.)

I feel like addressing the fact that there are four songs in a row near the end all about V. D. - venereal disease. Surprisingly, these are all written by Woody Guthrie. The reason for that is that in 1949, the government had a national health drive to educate people about venereal disease. As part of that, they had some radio programs with songs on the subject to help break the taboo about discussing it. Major musical figures of the day were recruited to sing on this topic, including Hank Williams, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Merle Travis, Roy Acuff, and Guthrie. Guthrie actually wrote nine songs on the subject, and Dylan was such a Guthrie fan at the time that he learned them all.

And if you think that's weird, consider that in the 1930s, the government commissioned Guthrie to write an entire album of songs praising dams! That was to drum up public support for the public works projects being done at the time, such as the massive Hoover Dam. Dylan actually covered one of those in 1968, "Grand Coulee Dam." I included it on the stray tracks album I made called "I Ain't Got No Home."

Anyway, this recording is about an hour and twenty minutes long. In my opinion, this one plus the October 1961 Carnegie Chapter Hall concert I posted a few days ago are heads and shoulders above all the other Dylan recordings from 1961 or earlier, which generally sound pretty dodgy. The vast majority of songs here have never been officially released by him in any form, and most of them don't even show up on any other decent sounding bootlegs, since his repertoire changed rapidly during this time.

01 Candy Man (Bob Dylan)
02 Baby, Please Don't Go (Bob Dylan)
03 Hard Times in New York Town (Bob Dylan)
04 Stealin' (Bob Dylan)
05 Poor Lazarus (Bob Dylan)
06 I Ain't Got No Home (Bob Dylan)
07 talk (Bob Dylan)
08 It's Hard to Be Blind (Bob Dylan)
09 Dink's Song [Fare Thee Well] (Bob Dylan)
10 talk (Bob Dylan)
11 Man of Constant Sorrow (Bob Dylan)
12 Omie Wise [Naomi Wise] (Bob Dylan)
13 Tale of East Orange, New Jersey (Bob Dylan)
14 Wade in the Water (Bob Dylan)
15 I Was Young When I Left Home [Nine Hundred Miles] (Bob Dylan)
16 In the Evening (Bob Dylan)
17 Baby, Let Me Follow You Down (Bob Dylan)
18 Sally Gal (Bob Dylan)
19 Gospel Plow (Bob Dylan)
20 Roll On, John (Bob Dylan)
21 Cocaine Blues (Bob Dylan)
22 V. D. Blues (Bob Dylan)
23 V. D. Waltz (Bob Dylan)
24 V. D. City (Bob Dylan)
25 V. D. Gunner's Blues [Landlady] (Bob Dylan)
26 Ramblin' Round (Bob Dylan)
27 talk (Bob Dylan)
28 Black Cross [Hezikiah Jones] (Bob Dylan)
29 talk (Bob Dylan)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15108010/BobD_1961b_TheHotlTapeBonnieBeechers_AprtmtMinneapolisMN__12-22-1961_atse.zip.html

Not surprisingly, I couldn't find any color photos of Dylan from 1961. However, I found a nice black and white one of him from November 1961, just a month before this recording took place. This was taken during the recording of his first album, simply called "Bob Dylan." I colorized it.