He calls himself a sonic archeologist. But instead of a pick and shovel, Steve Berkowitz uses his ears and a lifetime of musical knowledge to dig up gems from the past and safeguard them for the future.
His latest dig is Through the Open Window, 1956-1963, the 18th chapter in the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series, chronicling the period when the young folksinger left his Minnesota home and headed to New York, with the siren call of Woody Guthrie in his head.
Through The Open Window spans the period when he was still singing “Let The Good Times Roll” at parties in St. Paul, Minnesota, with his 1956 group The Jokers, to his revelatory appearance at Carnegie Hall in 1963 when he emerged as the voice of a generation.
“If he had stopped after that performance at Carnegie Hall, he’d still be considered one of the legendary American artists. But fortunately, he didn’t,” said the 73-year-old Berkowitz, adding that “the real nature of this box set, you could say, is ‘becoming Bob Dylan.’”
The Boston-bred Berkowitz has been involved with the series since Dylan opened the vaults to his vast archives in 1991. Reporting directly to the iconic songwriter’s manager, Jeff Rosen, Berkowitz claims that aside from Rosen, he’s probably listened to more Dylan music than anyone else alive.
“I’ve had complete access to both his private archives and what’s in the CBS vault and others,” Berkowitz recently told The Jerusalem Post from his home in New York. CBS was Dylan’s label in the 1960s and '70s.
“And what is utterly remarkable is that when that little red light went on, Bob Dylan was always laser-focused. Every take. There’s no sluffing. The seriousness of his intent was remarkable, or you could translate that into the moment of artistic creation and what he brings to it. It’s astounding.”
Bob Dylan's early village days in new boxed set
The boxed set includes songs from Dylan’s appearances at Greenwich Village folk clubs like Gerdes Folk City and the Gaslight Café, when he was still finding his voice, as chronicled in last year’s hit film with Timothee Chalamet, A Complete Unknown.
“For years, we’ve focused on other periods, but whenever more material from the 1950s and early '60s was uncovered, radio broadcasts, people’s home parties he was at, we’d put them together and store them because it represented the beginning of the whole journey,” Berkowitz said.
TO CAPTURE the influence that the New York folk scene had on Dylan and his music and place the disparate selections of music and periods in a historical perspective, Berkowitz partnered with renowned Dylan scholar Sean Wilentz, author of the 2010 book Bob Dylan in America, who penned the extensive liner notes for the boxed set.
“Sean and I produced the set together, at Jeff Rosen’s suggestion, and it was great fun. We both felt like it was sculpting. We had this great big mass of music and information to break down into a historical musical document.
Sean’s knowledge about the Village and about Bob made him uniquely qualified,” said Berkowitz, adding that Wilentz’s father owned the famed 8th Street Book Store that Dylan and the folk scenesters used to frequent.
“We had a chicken and egg thing going, you write the liner notes, and I’ll illuminate it with the music, or I’ll put the music together, and you write about it. Instead, we did both at the same time.”
For Berkowitz, the boxed set is not only about Dylan and his path, but also about the Village scene that influenced him.
“I often wonder what would have happened if a guy named Robert Zimmerman from the Midwest had gone from Hibbing, Minnesota, to the big city of, say, Dayton, Ohio, instead of New York. What would he have become?” he asked.
“He undoubtedly would have been great anyway, but there was something about Greenwich Village at that time, the gumbo that existed only there, that enabled him to glean all that information for which he was not only wide open for, but completely capable of both understanding and ingesting, and then spitting out on his own terms,” Berkowitz said, answering his own question.
“For Bob to be around those poets, dancers, philosophers amid the changing sexual climate and the changing ideas about government and culture,” it provided a space to up and change things," he said.
“Bob’s ability to write and emote was already unique, but with artists like Dave Von Ronk, Sonny McGhee, and Jon Lee Hooker being around to learn from, as well as all the academia and literature that was flourishing, enabled him to just gobble it all up.”
BERKOWITZ, WHO was the “rabbi” of the junior congregation following his bar mitzvah at Kehillat Israel in Brookline, Massachusetts, changed his religion to rock & roll after discovering Chuck Berry in the early 1960s.
“From early on, my goal in life, which derives from my growing up in Boston in the activist 60s, was for there to be more music so there’s more open communication and a better world. That’s what I was seeking and what I continue to seek,” he said.
Playing in bands throughout the 1960s and 70s, he eventually made his way to the business side, working as an agent in Boston and then as East Coast representative for David Geffen and Elliot Roberts’s prestigious Lookout Management, overseeing the then-young Boston band The Cars.
By the mid-1980s, he joined Columbia Records as one of the heads of artist development and later as an A&R (artists and repertoire) executive, where he signed a young Jeff Buckley.
Based on his track record, he was asked to be part of the label’s new Legacy division in the early 1990s, in charge of reissuing the works of the label’s artists.
“I said I’m too young to do old stuff,” he recalled, but agreed to forge ahead. His first project was Miles Davis – The Columbia Years, an expansive boxed set of the legendary jazz pioneer’s recorded works.
“Miles was no longer on the label, but having been an artist and an artist rep, I protested, saying we can’t just put out his stuff without his participation, it’s his life,” Berkowitz said.
“So I made it my business to meet with him and get his approval. I had five or six questions – about the photographs, the sound, the liner notes... His answer to all of them was, ‘Just give me the m********ing money.’ I went back to my boss and told him that Miles had no complaints, so that we could move forward. That was the beginning of my life’s work for the last 40 years.”
That path has led Berkowitz to supervise or produce reissues by some of the world’s most enduring artists, from Johnny Cash and Paul Simon to Elvis Costello, Robert Johnson, and The Beatles, garnering two Blues Foundation Awards and five Grammy Awards along the way.
He’s convinced that Dylan’s growth from 1956-63 is the most startling of any of them.
“That explosion, from the guy who comes from the Midwest with a lot of energy, knowledge, and desire to what happened at Carnegie Hall in 1963, was the most rapid rise of any artist’s evolution and delivery of any artist that I’m aware of, whether it be music, painting, or anything,” he said.
“Even after he starts playing in clubs in the Village, he’s, in his own words, a Woody Guthrie jukebox. Then you hear people starting to sing along to his own songs, to ‘Blowing in the Wind,’ and by the time he plays New York’s Town Hall in 1962, he’s kind of graduating out of the land of Woody and the traditional music of the past. By the next year, he’s become 100% Bob Dylan: in what he cared about, what he wrote, his delivery, his guitar playing.”
WITH 18 volumes of the Bootleg Series released for posterity and the historical record, Berkowitz said there’s still more Dylan nuggets to be mined.
“There’s always more: He played and sang all the time, still does. But it’s not up to me. We release what they say we can release,” he said, adding that he’s as much a fan of Dylan’s current work as he is of the material in the archives.
“I last saw him perform in New York about a year ago; he was completely astounding. I have no expectations for that artist to be anything other than what he is on that particular day. Once again, if there was a guy named Bob Dylan and all he did was record and release “Murder Most Foul” (a 17-minute epic from his 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways), it would have made for a legendary career.
Berkowitz, who is still immersed in developing new talent and his archival work (he touts Chicago blues rockers The Claudettes), feels that working on any reissue project carries a heavy responsibility.
“I feel challenged in every project, always fearing I’m going to screw it up, so I better work harder and spend more time on it,” he admitted. “I don’t ever want to mess up somebody else’s art or intention, or slant it in a way that the listener doesn’t get his own chance to figure it out.”
“If I were to have a gravestone, it would suffice to say ‘This guy straightened out both the Bob Dylan and Miles Davis archives.’ That would be just fine.”