The Minneapolis Party Tape

By May 1961 Bob Dylan had been living in New York and working the Greenwich Village cafés and folk clubs for nearly five months. With the harsh winter now gone, Dylan decided it was time to return north to Hibbing, Minnesota to spend some time with his parents. While en route, Bob stopped off in Minneapolis to visit some of the friends he had made during his time at college there. This would be the first of several visits to Minneapolis and a pattern would soon emerge. Whenever he returned, Bob would crash in the apartment of Bonnie Jean Beecher, a girl he had dated while in college, and Dylan would thereafter jokingly refer to her apartment as either the Beecher Hotel or Minneapolis Hotel . These forays to Minneapolis enabled Dylan to use a friend s tape recorder to capture what progress he had made musically during his time in New York. Eager to demonstrate how much he had learned while living in the Big Apple, he performed on several occasions for his old friends, and the so-called Minnesota Party Tape is the combined result of either two or, more probably, three of these May sessions. Whilst this tape illustrate how much Dylan had progressed in the four months since he left Minneapolis for New York, his performances still consisted of blues, folk and Guthrie numbers with only the final song, Bonnie, Why d You Cut My Hair? , being an eccentric Dylan original. As one of the earliest documents of Dylan s musicianship however it captures the birth of an icon, and thus provides essential listening for everyone with even a hint of interest in the genesis of Bob Dylan and of popular music more generally.