The Times Are A-Changin’ at the Morgan

Who ever would have thought that the staid Morgan Library and Museum would become Experience Music Project East? That’s what happened with the opening of Bob Dylan’s American Journey, 1956-1966, an exhibition that premiered at Seattle’s EMP, which organized it and is touring it to two other venues after the Morgan (to Jan. 6).
This show (where CultureGrrl tripped in hazy nostalgia through the land of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and that chimerical chameleon, Robert Zimmerman) is not as much of a stretch for the Morgan as it seems: The library’s own manuscript holdings include the George Hecksher Collection of Dylan manuscripts and typescripts—a trove that includes his working drafts or early fair copies for more than ninety songs. And the Morgan’s curator of literary & historical manuscripts, Robert Parks, makes the case that Dylan is a poet who belongs in the pantheon that includes “Thoreau, Steinbeck and Mark Twain—writers who had a real social impact.”
I must confess that I checked my critical faculties at the coatroom while I gawked at iconic guitars and manuscripts, and listened on headphones to that rare piece of Dylaniana, the hilarious “Talkin’ Bear Mountain Massacre Blues,” one of several songs from a never broadcast nor commercially released 25-minute recording from his first concert—Carnegie Chapter Hall, Nov. 4, 1961. This was an occasion where “52 people showed up, and probably 1,000 people said they’d been there,” quipped the EMP’s Jasen Emmons, who organized the show. (The Morgan really must at least supply more than one set of headphones for this…preferably, a large listening booth!)
Also occasionally hilarious was the tour that Emmons gave, right after the press preview, to Morgan staff and docents, some of whom were clearly more familiar with burin than Dylan. Inquiring Morganites wanted to know:
What’s the difference when you’re saying ‘acoustic’ or ‘electric’?
What if people ask us what happened since [after 1966]?
Positively WHAT Street?
I should add that CultureGrrl was more accurate than she knew when, in a previous post, she called NY Times writer Robert Shelton “Dylan’s unsung hero”: After the press preview, I found myself in a Borders bookstore, where I discovered Dylan’s autobiographical “Chronicles: Volume One” on sale for an irresistible $5.99. On Page 278, he mentions the “rave review in the folk and jazz section of the New York Times” that essentially launched his career. But do you think he credits that prescient writer by name?
Like a complete unknown…