Princeton historian and longtime Rolling Stone contributor Sean Wilentz’s new book ‘Bob Dylan: Through the Open Window (1956-1963)‘ is an essential portrait of a great artist in formation. The book captures Dylan “turning musical sketches into the songs
that first made him famous and endure.” It’s also a powerful evocation of a lost world: the bohemian Greenwich Village of the 1950s and 1960s. It’s a story Dylan has told himself in his own magical fantasia of a memoir, ‘Chronicles: Volume One’ and has been told many times by many different writers. But Wilentz, himself a native son of that Village milieu, brings his skill as a historian to the music, the time, and the place. Wilentz also had exclusive access to the materials for the ‘Bootleg Series’ box set he co-produced — rare tapes, outtakes and performances that capture a long-gone scene. As the book shows, into that incredibly fertile downtown atmosphere strode an artist determined to become himself.
In the exclusive excerpt below, Dylan has taken his act on the road to another city exploding with creative energy: early Swinging London. The artist was looking for some good times and a little inspiration, but events spurred him to write his angriest political song, “Masters of War” and then, after a chance encounter, a classic ballad to a mysterious and beautiful woman.
At the end of 1962, having recorded upward of 20 new songs since March including a breakthrough, “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” Bob Dylan had reason to think that he had at last completed his second album, eventually entitled The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. In mid-December, instead of heading back to Minnesota for the holidays, he set off on an unlikely trip engineered by his manager, Albert Grossman, flying to London to appear in an original BBC television drama, The Madhouse on Castle Street, which would keep him in England into the new year. He had not a whit of acting experience but what did it matter? His girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, gone since June, had still not returned from art studies in Italy, long after he’d expected her to. Apart from seeing Canada, he’d never been abroad. Grossman was encouraging him to expand his horizons (and with it their joint revenue stream) by getting into theater. Anyway, everything was paid for, topped off by a £525 BBC acting fee.
Dylan was out for a good time. He was in for another jolt of inspiration.
The Madhouse on Castle Street was not much of a play; and Dylan, whatever his natural comedic talents, was even less of an actor. Once he arrived at the BBC and met the talent with whom he’d be working, he balked at doing anything but sing. Realizing they had made an expensive mistake, the director and playwright cut him out of his major role as Lenny, a mysterious recluse, but had him appear as Bobby, a minstrel who would perform a few songs and speak a single line. Along with singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” and a couple of traditional folk songs, Dylan composed the melody and added some lines to a lurid folkish lyric by the play’s author, Evan Jones (who would go on to a major career as a screenwriter). Dylan did what he could to improve “The Ballad of the Gliding Swan,” which mainly involved toning down Jones’ most gruesome lyrics. The incomplete recording that survives is a curious novelty souvenir of an important passage in Dylan’s artistic growth.
Although the city, bound by a freakishly heavy snowfall and bitter cold, was hard to traverse, Dylan, now with plenty of time on his hands, got around. He’d planned all along to dive into the London music scene, where he performed in the folk pubs and received an advanced crash course in Anglo-Celt balladry. “He absorbed enormous amounts from a different culture,” recalled Anthea Joseph, who ran the Tuesday night sessions at the Troubadour Club and whom he’d befriended on a tip from Pete Seeger. “It was a totally different thing, much older…. Here you can go back on some songs… over a thousand years. I think it had a tremendous effect on him.”
Folk music circles in London were snobbier than in New York and they did not take kindly to upstarts (especially American upstarts). They were also more political, associating traditionalism with proletarian purity. (Three years hence, word made the rounds that at least some of the notorious booing of Dylan and the Hawks across England was organized by members of left-wing folk music clubs.) At the King and Queen pub, though, Dylan made a fast and lasting friend in Martin Carthy, a guitarist and singer born in Hertfordshire just three days before him, a rising star innovator also steeped in traditional American as well as English folk music. Dylan was captivated by Carthy’s version of “Scarborough Fair,” a variant of Child Ballad 2, and of “Lord Franklin,” its melody drawn from a traditional Irish song, “Cailín Óg a Stór.” Once Dylan had learned them, he held on tight.
Awash in English folk music, Dylan gave as good as he got. Shortly after his arrival, reading in the London papers about official Anglo-American arms talks, he wrote the most scathing political song he had yet and ever would compose, “Masters of War.” Borrowing from Jean Ritchie the melody of another song collected in Eastern Kentucky, “Nottamun Town,” Dylan took aim at the armaments moguls who made fortunes off war while risking nothing themselves, and who had now brought the world to the verge of nuclear annihilation. With a vengeful concluding verse as chilling as any in “Hard Rain,” the song hurled Dylan’s curse at the death merchants. To English leftist folkies, lately stirred by Bertrand Russell and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the lyric, coming from Dylan, would cut through the anti-Americanism not uncommon in their midst. At the Singers club, he performed “Masters of War” as well as “Hollis Brown,” and brought down the house.
All the while, though, Dylan was also getting a taste of what was becoming Swinging London, thanks to the play’s director, Philip Saville, and Saville’s adulterous lover, a gorgeous and brilliant painter named Pauline Boty. Saville was a well-known innovator in television drama. Having started out as an actor, his experimental camera work and daring subject matter while directing for an independent British network, ABC, had shaken some in the business. (One production in 1959, a play about a single mother, was deemed taboo and never broadcast.) His closest associates included the playwright Harold Pinter, with whom he collaborated in 1960 on a startling, televised presentation of Pinter’s play A Night Out, a breakthrough success for both men.
At a New Year’s Eve ball at the Chelsea School of Art in 1961, Saville, in his mid-30s and long married, was thunderstruck at the sight of the 23-year-old Pauline Boty, and the two commenced an affair. Boty was making a name for herself as a painter, working out of her small upstairs flat in West London, the one woman in an emerging circle of British Pop artists that included David Hockney, Derek Boshier, David Bailey, and Peter Blake. As beautiful and sexually assured as she was talented, known to some as the “Wimbledon Bardot,” Boty also dabbled seriously in poetry, dance, stage acting, and film; and she was a highly intelligent reader, conversant in the works of Genet and De Beauvoir as well as Joyce and Proust. But it was in her colorful canvases that Boty’s gifted originality shone, combining female erotic symbolism with images of pop celebrities like Jean-Paul Belmondo and Marilyn Monroe. Thanks to the up-and-coming director Ken Russell, Boty had even become something of a celebrity herself, one of four Pop artists featured in Russell’s stylish 1962 BBC documentary, Pop Goes the Easel, described by one critic as a “filmic fugue” (and easily viewed today online).
Together and apart, Saville and Boty worked and played at the acme of a hip London artistic scene very different from the folk music pubs. Boty accompanied Saville to pick Dylan up on his arrival at London Airport, but the lovers had plans for the evening that did not include the American, so they dumped him off at the Notting Hill studio flat of Boty’s close friend, the painter Jane Percival. “They turned up with some musician in tow,” Percival recalled, “and Pauline said, ‘Look, I’m terribly sorry, Jane, we can’t come in, we’ve got to go to a reception, but will you look after this guy for the evening? He’s over to do a play for Philip.’”
AS IT HAPPENED, Percival was hosting a dinner party with more than a dozen guests, but Dylan settled in and performed several songs (he was still carrying his guitar). He spent the night downstairs in the flat of another painter, Joanna Carrington, then returned the next morning to thank Percival and say goodbye.
Dylan, Saville, and Boty did spend a good deal of time together over the coming days and weeks, quite apart from Dylan’s spotty work on Madhouse. Along with stays in two hotels, the Mayfair and the Cumberland, Dylan crashed in a spare room at Saville’s home while, according to some reports, he also resided in Boty’s one-room flat. Saville’s memoir describes how the three of them sported about the fashionable parts of bohemian London, including soon-to-be iconic Carnaby Street, then a center for off-beat men’s fashion. Here was a Pop milieu less like the folky Greenwich Village he knew than the New York artists’ scene that was assembling loosely at that very moment around Andy Warhol and that would soon evolve into the Factory.
What Dylan made of these parts of his London visits survives at this point only in fragments. On his visit to Minneapolis the following May, as taped by his pal Tony Glover — later of the formidable trio Koerner, Ray, and Glover — he told some extended stories of the strange Londoners whom he had encountered, including a wild comic riff that was almost surely a take-off based on the party at Jane Percival’s.
We go into this room and it’s got a fireplace and there’s about fifteen people in this room, you know. And it’s very weird, because it’s very cold of winter and…all of ‘em are in short sleeve shirts …
Somebody suggested they all dance, and somebody else put on an Everly Brothers record, and the guests began doing the twist, everyone perched, oddly, on one leg. Dylan stayed put, alone, by the fire.
So finally, after about an hour goes by, they ask me to play…I played some songs, I played the song “Hollis Brown”…and I played “Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” I played “With God on Your Side”…but they froze, man, they were solid, utterly cold, you know, they’d never heard anything like that before.
With the spiritual temperature dropping, Dylan returned to the fireplace. After a while, one of the women crept over and whispered, “Would you like to see my paintings?” Instantly, the chill was gone, and of course he said yes, he would very much like to see her paintings. Then things got truly strange:
We walk outta the room, we walk thorough a bathroom … we climb up a ladder, we’re going down a balcony… walk down the floor, climb up through an attic, go through another bathroom, swing down a rope, walk down a corridor, open up a door, go through, go down a basement… and we walk out a rope ladder then climb another ladder, climb up on a little gully kind of way, jump down and we’re on a corridor, then we’re walking down a hall. And through the whole thing I was saying, wow, you know where you live? And she says yeah, yeah this is the shortest way possible.
When they finally reach her place, the unnamed woman flicks on the lights to reveal paintings that Dylan thinks are terrible (though he admits to Glover and his friends he knows nothing about visual art). Freaked out, he bids farewell and splits to find another place to stay. “Those people are so weird. Weird. Just plain weird. They’re out of another dimension, you know?”
There was likely another side, though, to Dylan’s encounter with the London hipsters, or at least one genuinely soulful talent, expressed in a song he sang into Glover’s tape recorder just prior to telling his meandering story. Probably composed just before or just after his return to the States, set to the tune of the folk standard “The Lily of the West” (though possibly based also on “The Girl I Left Behind”), “Liverpool Gal” was only released in 2025 on Dylan’s Bootleg Series Volume 18: Through the Open Window. It was inspired, Dylan said, by a woman he had met in London, one of the “beautifulest” in the world, he told his friends, “like a dream… beautiful all over.”
In the song, she appears out of nowhere down by the Thames, jolts him out of his thoughts of home, and takes him back to her upstairs flat. She tells him she’s from Liverpool (easier to rhyme with than London and perhaps borrowed from a song he would hear in the pubs, “The Leaving of Liverpool,” which he would in time rewrite as “Farewell”). They talk for hours in “sweet conversation” by an inside fire (almost surely a two-bar electric one) “’bout the outside world so cruel.” He is smitten by her ease of mind, accepting him for who he is despite his strange ways. The song then cuts to them awakening the next morning. He must leave and it’s awkward, but then she smiles a smile he’s never seen “that said she understood.” Once downstairs, he gazes up at her window and, hands deep in his pockets, hits the road. He’ll soon forget London and some of the people he’d met but never the Liverpool girl who lives there.
Speculation about the song’s references began more than a decade before its release in 2025. (A set of draft lyrics, different in important ways from the only recorded version, had surfaced amid a cache of material known to Dylan scholars as the Margolis and Moss manuscripts, and inevitably, in time, they reached the internet.) Aficionados wanted to find out, above all, whether “Liverpool Gal” was a cognomen for the irrepressible Pauline Boty. Given everything known about her, including the flat where she lived while Dylan was in London, it is a plausible, even an obvious hunch. (Nobody in the predominantly male folk-club circles he moved in seems nearly as likely a candidate.) It is even more plausible now that we can hear Dylan tell his friends, on Glover’s previously unreleased tape, that there was a real-life person behind the song, although how much of the lyrics is fact and how much is pure invention only Dylan knows.
Discovering the Liverpool gal’s identity, though, is unnecessary to understand the song’s significance to Dylan’s early work, and what it suggests about his London sojourn. Dylan had by now written some astounding love songs and would write two more before he returned to the States. They conveyed, however, not romance in bloom but the singer grappling with a love or a would-be love that had either gone wrong or was suspended by distance. “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” “Girl from the North Country,” and “Boots of Spanish Leather” (along with, before long, “One Too Many Mornings”) — all are songs about breaking up with, or longing for, and expressing abiding affection for a woman he’d known for some time.
“Liverpool Gal,” however, evokes a momentary but genuine intimacy, achieved without either person trying to change the other, in which the woman instructs the man about sexual freedom and independence. (From moment she picks him up Thameside, she calls the tune, though gently.) Four crucial lines — “The night passed on in the drizzlin’ rain/There’s one thing I’se findin’ out/Of walkin’ and ramblin’ I know too hard/But of love I knew nothin’ about” — suggest an erotic education. By the song’s end, though, it’s clear that the singer has learned spiritual lessons as well, in an encounter emancipated from conventional expectations, yet also egalitarian and charged by a meeting of minds in hours of talk “’bout the outside world so cruel.” He’d never felt anything like it, and he will never forget.
“Liverpool Gal” is also a straightforward narrative in a specific place where concrete things happen, where two people really converse through the night, where the rain really drizzles and turns to snow. The other songs play out at a higher level of abstraction and metaphor. Why Dylan departed in style for “Liverpool Gal” is unclear, though it may have to do with his wanting to mark a particularly vivid and memorable passage in his life.
DELVING INTO THESE neglected stories enriches the importance of what has long been understood as a few vital weeks in Dylan’s artistic development. If he felt bemused by the weirdness of nascent Swinging London, Dylan discovered, probably inside that milieu, a sensibility even freer, in its own way, than what he had found in Greenwich Village, a spirit that, by all accounts, emanated from Pauline Boty and her art. Whether Boty or some other woman was the London muse that Dylan enthused about to his friends back home matters less than that he caught that spirit. And, fittingly, once he had caught it, he expressed the spirit in a love song unlike any he had yet written, its melody drawn from the rest of what he’d learned in London, the traditional Anglo-Celt balladry that would infuse his songwriting from this moment on.
Five days into the new year, having finished taping Madhouse, Dylan flew to Italy, possibly in search of Suze (who by now, he would learn, had returned to New York) and to join Odetta and their manager, Grossman, in Rome, where she was performing. Staying for about a week, Dylan enjoyed the relaxed tempo and fine food and inexpensive wine, and worked on two exceptional songs of lost love, different in lyrical form but their melodies based on Carthy’s rendition of “Scarborough Fair.” Suze’s departure and long absence lay behind “Boots of Spanish Leather,” not yet quite finished. “Girl from the North Country” could have been about any of number of women or no one in particular.
Dylan stopped off back in London before returning to New York. His English adventure ended on an awkward if high-spirited note when he joined his friends Richard Fariña and Eric Von Schmidt to do some low-budget recording in the basement of Dobell’s record shop on Charing Cross Road. Fariña’s marriage to the singer Carolyn Hester was dissolving, as was Von Schmdt’s to his wife Helen, and Dylan was still without Suze, and the boys fortified themselves with plenty of pot, cheap whiskey, and beer. After laying down what Von Schmidt called one of the “friendliest messes” he ever recorded — Dylan playing back-up harmonica, to be listed on the album that resulted, for contractual reasons, as Blind Boy Grunt — the trio hit the Soho clubs, winding up at the Troubadour on Earls Court, crowding out the scheduled performers and belting out bawdy songs until closing time. Dylan was reportedly so wasted that the burley Von Schmidt had to carry him back to his lodgings.
During those last London days, though, Dylan also made sure to connect with Martin Carthy. “He came back and he said [cue Bob Dylan impersonation], ‘I wanna sing you this!,’” Carthy later recalled. The tune was familiar, as were the lyrics, though about a girl from the north country fair, not Scarborough Fair. “And he started to sing it, and he was trying to do the guitar figure. He got halfway through the first verse and he said, ‘Oh, man, I can’t do this!'” [Laughs.] “He wasn’t really ready. He was just so excited about it.”
“Scarborough Fair” had been Carthy’s signature tune and he soon decided to drop it from his set list — “too much baggage,” he’s said — but being a sage as well as generous man he really didn’t mind the borrowing. (Carthy had and still has much more music in him, which would make him a legend in his own right, complete with an MBE from the Queen.) But he understood immediately the core of Dylan’s alchemical art, making a wonderful song out of elements he’d barely known before he landed in London. “I love the fact that Bob Dylan got ‘Girl From the North Country’ from it,” he says. “It was very typical of him to do that — very him.”
Excerpt from the new book BOB DYLAN: Through the Open Window, 1956–1963 by Sean Wilentz, published by Abrams © 2026 Sean Wilentz. Used by permission of Abrams Books, an imprint of Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York. All rights reserved.
Click here to read the full article.
