"A curiously arresting mumbling"

'Earliest Concert Tapes' #2: Bob Dylan at Riverside Church, July 1961

New York Times, July 31, 1961

As the story goes, New York Times music critic Robert Shelton made Dylan famous—or, at least, got him a record deal—with a rave review on September 29, 1961. In A Complete Unknown, Albert Grossman reads that review to Dylan in an elevator on the way to his Columbia audition. It’s a core piece of the Bob Dylan origin story.

So imagine my surprise to learn that review was not the first time Shelton praised Dylan in the New York Times.

That actually occurred two months prior, in a writeup about a new FM-radio station, WRVR, airing a live 12-hour concert of folk music from, mostly, Riverside Church on the Upper West Side. As part of his report about the concert, Shelton wrote, “Among the newer promising talents deserving mention are a 20-year-old latter-day Guthrie disciple named Bob Dylan, with a curiously arresting mumbling, country-steeped manner.”

Okay, it’s just one sentence. Less, technically, since it ends with a semicolon. A single part-sentence was not enough to fast-track Dylan’s career, but still, that’s two months before the famous rave that starts him down the path to stardom.

That Riverside concert can be seen in A Complete Unknown. Dylan performs “All Over You,” thanks bluesmen Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, who you see perform a little themselves, then wanders off into the pews to meet, for the very first time, Suze Rotolo. She’s called “Sylvie Russo” in the film, and, name change aside, that part’s pretty accurate. Here’s Dylan in Chronicles:

Sometime later in the summer Terri [Thal, manager] managed to get me on a live radio folk extravaganza broadcast from Riverside Church up on Riverside Drive. Things were about to change for me again, to get new and strange.

Backstage the humidity was soaring. Performers came and went, waited to go on and milled around. As usual, the real show was backstage. I was talking to a dark-haired girl, Carla Rotolo, who I knew a little bit. Carla was Alan Lomax’s personal assistant. Carla introduced me to her sister. Her sister’s name was Susie but she spelled it Suze. Right from the start I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

Riverside concert in ‘A Complete Unknown’

Luckily, someone taped Dylan’s five-song performance (four in his own set, then a later appearance in Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s) off the radio station. So, unlike the first installment in this series on Dylan’s first concert tapes, we can actually hear him well. That was the first concert tape; this is the first good concert tape. In light of that, I thought I’d go song by song though his performance.