Rock & Roll : Dylan's Secret Archives

Archives Inside 50 years of hidden history.

- Andy Greene

THE TRUCKS BEGAN ARRIVING in Tulsa in March 2016, each filled with priceless artifacts from Bob Dylan’s past. Open up one box and see a handwritten draft of “Visions of Johanna” on yellow legal paper with alternate lyrics (including mentions of “nightingales” and “infinity codes”). Look inside another and find the leather jacket he wore at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and the guest list for a 1974 show at Madison Square Garden (Yoko Ono got two tickets; Allen Ginsberg got four). Another has a 1969 letter from George Harrison: “Dear Bobbie, Thanks for Nashville Skyline, it is beautiful. Love to you all.”

The collection is still arriving in stages at Tulsa’s Center for American Research at the Gilcrease Museum, but it will eventually include about 6,000 largely unseen items stretching back more than 50 years, culled from Dylan’s exhaustive personal collection. It’s the result of a reported $15 million to $20 million deal between Dylan and the George Kaiser Family Foundation that will give the material – which also includes digital and video files – a permanent home in Oklahoma. The public will be able to see a curated set of items when a planned Dylan museum opens downtown in two years or so, but accredited Dylan scholars and select journalists are already combing through some of the memorabilia in a secure room at the Gilcrease – and it’s clear that the contents of the archive could revolutionize Dylan scholarship. “It opens up a world to Dylan scholars that we didn’t know existed,” says Clinton Heylin, who has written eight books about Dylan.

Robert Polito, the first scholar allowed access to the archive, is researching a book on Dylan’s work from the past two decades. On a June afternoon, he’s sitting in front of a box filled with papers from Love and