Bob Dylan’s earliest New York tapes see the light

Don’t think twice, it’s all right. Bob Dylan’s earliest New York recordings are finally getting their due.

“The Bootleg Series Vol. 18: Through the Open Window, 1956‑1963,” a massive collection of previously unheard performances from the “Like a Rolling Stone” singer’s first years in Greenwich Village and beyond, dropped Friday, Oct. 31.

Spanning from his first appearances at the now-closed Gerdes Folk City to a charged performance uptown at Carnegie Hall, the compilation captures the young Dylan at a time when he was still finding his voice in the city that would help shape it.

Born Robert Zimmerman in Duluth, Minnesota, in 1941, Dylan moved to downtown New York City in January 1961 with a stack of songs, a restless drive to make music and a dedication to tracking down his idol, Woody Guthrie.

“We wanted to get a sense of Greenwich Village as much as anything else,” historian Sean Wilentz, who both produced the new release with Steve Berkowitz and wrote its liner notes, exclusively told The Post.

“And the wider Bohemia, but especially Greenwich Village,” the Princeton professor continued. “And you get that because you’re coming out of a community, not an easy community, always, but a community.”

Dylan’s rise in the early 1960s coincided with a creative explosion in the Village, where folk music clubs like Gerdes, the Gaslight, Cafe Wha? and the Bitter End doubled as sonic laboratories for new songs and ideas.

“There was nothing like what was going on in Greenwich Village,” Wilentz, who wrote the 2010 book “Bob Dylan in America,” said. “And he was very much a part of that, and that was very much a part of him. And that’s what we wanted to get across.”

Last year’s Dylan biopic starring Timothée Chalamet, “A Complete Unknown,” gave audiences a dramatic big screen look at that early Greenwich Village scene by showing the cafés, jam sessions and restless energy of the young musician finding his place.

While Chalamet’s portrayal of the folk troubador-turned-rock legend highlighted Dylan’s ambition, charm and electric atmosphere, Wilentz said that the newly released bootleg series takes it all a step further.

“Where they really blend together is that we have a lot of material which is from the clubs themselves,” the Brooklyn Heights-native explained. “Performances and things.”

“One of the nice things about the film was that it took you inside Gerdes and took you inside the Gaslight Cafe to actually see what those places were like,” Wilentz continued. “The film was strong on all of that. The music was well done.”

“But now you’re going to hear the same place, the same thing, the same feeling, except now you’re going to hear how it actually happened.”

Listeners, the Grammy nominee added, will feel like they are “a fly on the wall” at Gerdes Folk City in April 1962 when Dylan sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” in public for the very first time.

The set also features some of the earliest versions of other Dylan classics, including “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.”

They were all recorded at cafés and house gatherings more than 50 years before Dylan would go on to become the first musician to ever win a Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016.

However, the new collection also tells a story that charts Dylan’s growth from a talented Minnesota teenager to the artist who would soon dominate folk music with timeless albums like “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”

“The point of this bootleg was not simply to give you a lot of music that you hadn’t heard before, but it was actually to tell a story, to tell the story that had a beginning, middle, and end,” Wilentz explained.

“I had an idea what that story should look like, and that’s what my liner notes are,” he continued. “The music was going to match that, except that every time I heard the music, I went back and changed the arc of the story itself.”

The story ends with a concert at Carnegie Hall on the night of Oct. 26, 1963, a performance that Wilentz called both a turning point for Dylan and the world just before everything changed.

“We had to figure out where to end it, and it seemed to us that it was that concert,” Wilentz shared. “His trajectory as an artist is going to take a very different arc right after that.”

“First, the Kennedy assassination, then he meets Allen Ginsberg,” Wilentz continued. “By the time he’s cutting his next album in June 1964, he’s in another place.”

Still, the release of “Through the Open Window” builds on the renewed interest in Dylan’s early years recently sparked by the Chalamet film. And for listeners, it’s a chance to hear New York City exactly as it sounded back in the early ’60s.

“He wants you to hear him for his music and for his art. That’s what’s really important,” Wilentz concluded. “And that’s what you’ll be getting on this.”