COLLECTION
ROCK&ROLL
18 | Rolling Stone | RollingStoneAus.com May, 2016
FROM LEFT: GETTY IMAGES; COURTESY OF THE BOB DYLAN ARCHIVES, 2T
ulsa, oklahoma, is about
to become the centre of the Bob
Dylan universe. The singer-song-
writer has sold a treasure-trove
of some 6,000 artifacts from his private
collection to the University of Tulsa and
the Tulsa-based George Kaiser Family
Foundation, run by the billionaire Dem-
ocratic fundraiser. Soon, they will be ac-
cessible to Dylan scholars. “There are a lot
of books written about Bob Dylan,” says
Steadman Upham, president of the Uni-
versity of Tulsa. “But there are going to
be a whole lot more based on these ma-
terials.”
The size and scope of the collection is
staggering, especially since it was assumed
that Dylan had saved few artifacts from
his past. It includes the master recordings
of complete sessions for all of his albums,
the vast majority of which have never been
heard by the public, along with dozens of
professionally fi lmed concerts and so many
concert soundboard recordings that Mi-
chael Chaiken, the self-described “inau-
gural curator” of the collection, can’t even
estimate a number. “I would say hundreds
if not thousands,” he says. “By the time the
1970s rolled around, they were recording
every show.”
The details are still being worked out,
but at some point in the near future,
much of the collection will be housed at
the Helmerich Center for American Re-
search, a facility at Tulsa’s Gilcrease Mu-
seum. Select items will be displayed to the
public, with the rest behind lock and key,
though the facility doesn’t plan to raise a
very high bar when it comes to allowing
researchers complete access. “It’s our goal
that the materials be studied, enjoyed and
refl ected upon,” says Ken Levit, executive
director of the Kaiser Foundation.
Nobody involved with the collection can
discuss dollar fi gures, but they don’t dis-
pute a reported sale price of $15 million
to $20 million. “It was an expensive pur-
chase,” says Upham. But if the pieces of the
collection were sold individually, “it would
have been worth a hundred times more”.
Of particular interest to Dylan schol-
ars will be the trove of handwritten lyr-
ics, including two tiny notebooks fromthe Blood on the Tracks period, a working
manuscript of “Chimes of Freedom” on
Waldorf Astoria hotel stationery, a stack
of handwritten lyrics to 1989’s “Dignity”
and a draft of “Subterranean Homesick
Blues” with many lines that didn’t make
the fi nal version. “It’s an endless ocean of
writing,” says Chaiken. “It brought into
relief just how disciplined and serious he
was as a writer.”
Chaiken has only begun to dip into the
hundreds of hours of raw recording ses-
sions, but he’s already come across a com-
pletely dif erent version of 1997’s Time Out
of Mind, produced by pianist Jim Dickin-
son, and the complete John Wesley Hard-
ing sessions. “I heard a couple of alternate
takes of ‘All Along the Watchtower’ that
were just incredible,” Chaiken says.
The fi lm footage is equally compelling.
It includes 30 hours of outtakes from D.A.
Pennebaker’s 1965 tour documentary,
Don’t Look Back; another 30 hours of foot-
age of Dylan’s 1966 electric tour; upward
of roughly 50 hours shot on the 1975 Roll-
ing Thunder Revue, along with a Toronto
stop of his 1980 gospel tour; and footage
of Dylan, the Band and Tiny Tim goof-
ing about in Woodstock around the time
work began on The Basement Tapes. “The
collection is going to grow,” says Chaiken.“As Bob continues to tour, there’s going to
be more stuf that’s added.”
The bulk of the collection chronicles
Dylan’s music career, but it also includes
personal items like a mid-1960s address
book with phone numbers for Nico, Lenny
Bruce and Allen Ginsberg, a private letter
from George Harrison praising the recent-
ly released Nashville Skyline, and a 1978
postcard from Barbra Streisand thanking
Dylan for sending her fl owers.
Dylan’s complete recording sessions re-
side in Iron Mountain, a series of secret,
climate-controlled underground facilities,
but they are being digitised and curators
plan to make them available to visitors via
an ol ine computer at the Gilcrease Mu-
seum. Sony retains the right to release the
material, but the Tulsa facility will retain
ownership of the physical tapes.
The catch is that anyone wishing to see
the collection needs to travel to Tulsa –
which is probably part of the point. The
Kaiser Foundation owns an extensive col-
lection of Woody Guthrie papers, but the
Dylan archive is likely to increase visitors
by a considerable magnitude.
“That’s our greatest hope,” says Levit.
“Maybe this can fi nally get Tulsa direct
fl ights from New York, Los Angeles and
London.” ANDY GREENEAll of Dylan’s Back Pages
It’s a Dylanologist’s dream
come true: A monumental
collection of artifacts and
recordings will soon be
accessible in OklahomaYET ANOTHER SIDE OF BOB DYLAN
Clockwise from above left: In 1964; lyrics to “Subterranean Homesick Blues”;
a telegram from Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper.