THE MINNEAPOLIS PARTY TAPE
When Dylan headed back to Minnesota in May 1961, he was eager to show his old friends how much he’d grown after five months in New York, so he played three loose sets for a small audience, with Tony Glover recording. Compiled into a single bootleg, those tapes sound like a practice run at his debut album, giving a good sense of his early basket-house repertoire. And he made up “Bonnie, Why’d You Cut My Hair?” on the spot, documenting his friend’s ineptitude with shears, and never performed it again. 8/10