Fifty years in 60 minutes: A celebration of Bob Dylan

Last Wednesday night, Bob Dylan fans from all walks of life congregated in The New School’s Johnson/Kaplan Auditorium — conveniently located in Greenwich Village, the birthplace of Dylan’s career — to view a 60-minute compilation of archived Bob Dylan performances. Some of these performances had never been seen before, unearthed and restored by the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The audience was shifting in their seats, whispering to one another with excitement.

The evening was hosted by Anne-Margaret Daniel, adjunct professor of literature and humanities at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts and teacher of Words Rang True: The Arts of Bob Dylan. Daniel was joined by Steven Jenkins, self-proclaimed “Dylan-ologist” and director of the Bob Dylan Center. The hall was crowded, full of friends and fans catching up before the program began. As Jenkins remarked in his opening speech, the audience was united by their “shared mania for Dylan.”

The hour-long program covered Dylan’s career from the 1960s as a young rock and roller performing at small festivals to the 2010s, performing in tribute shows seen by millions. Audience members laughed, cheered, and clapped for Dylan’s performances, reaching a climax of thunderous applause by the end of the film. 

Following the screening, Daniel and Jenkins had a brief conversation about the selection of clips within the film, the center’s archival work, and they called out several notable audience members, including Dylan’s first manager Terri Thal. On curation of the compilation, Jenkins said, “I gravitated towards these first and foremost because these are songs that I love. I think the performances are particularly striking, [and] I like what’s happening filmically with each of them.” 

Jenkins also spoke about the origins of the Dylan Center: “In 2016, Dylan made it known that he’d been saving things … all these items had gathered up in the tens of thousands, and Dylan was putting them in cardboard boxes, in desk drawers…” Finally, at the urging of his manager, Dylan landed on Tulsa, Oklahoma as the forever home for his archives.

On further archival work, and potentially releasing footage from Dylan’s performances with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in Australia, Jenkins said, “it’s a matter of time” — and asked fans to stay tuned for more. 

When the conversation was opened to the audience, many expressed gratitude for seeing rare footage of a legend in the making. One Dylan fan, Richard Oppenheimer — who has been following Dylan since 1977 — gave an especially poetic description of Dylan: “Bob is lightning. He’s a bolt of lightning that can’t be contained, can’t be defined, he is the persona of the wild mercury sound, and that sound is still spreading. He’s a mystical oracle.” 

In a brief conversation with the New School Free Press following the event, Jenkins spoke about how his work at the center involved promoting Dylan’s life and music to younger audiences. “We work with the Tulsa Public School system for example, and we’ve had something like 7,000 students come in.” According to Jenkins, often on these field trips, he can see “something spark for them.” He said, “I get the sense from some of the students, like, maybe I can make music, maybe I can write a song. What’s stopping me?” 

On appealing to a new generation of fans, Jenkins mentioned the upcoming Dylan biopic starring Timothee Chalamet. “I do think because of [Chalamet’s] fanbase, that film will provide an introduction to new audiences.” 

In conversation with both Jenkins and Daniel, they discussed what made Dylan’s work so enduringly compelling — as evidenced by the full rosters of Daniel’s class on Dylan. Daniel put forth the idea of evolution: “ … it’s something that’s still growing … giving new life to things, he’s doing that to his own songs, by constantly changing them in performance in arrangement … which drives some of the older fans wild, but newer fans really like it!” 

Jenkins mentioned Dylan’s “sense of play,” his singular artistic vision, the multiple interpretations one can take from Dylan’s work, and “an ineffable something that you can never pin down … he’s truly an artist unto himself.” Those in attendance at the event Wednesday night would likely agree. To those Dylan fans, he is a one of a kind creative spirit and someone worth spending a lot more time with than 60 minutes.