How a Macy’s Stock Boy Taped Four Never Heard 1960s Dylan Shows

Within a year Ray Anderson was a leading figure in the San Francisco counterculture

RAY PADGETT OCT 19

Photo by Edmund Shea, April 3 1965, via eBay

When I was in Tulsa over the summer, I spent a couple days poking around the Dylan Archives. Just before I arrived, archivist Mark Davidson clued me into a recent acquisition: Four never-heard live tapes from the mid-’60s. 

As you can imagine, “never-heard live tapes” piqued my interest immediately. Two of the four shows have different tapes circulating (one taped by Allen Ginsberg, no less), though in worse audio quality than the new versions. But two of the four shows have never been heard before at all!

The four shows are:

1. February 22, 1964 - Berkeley Community Theatre, Berkeley, CA (w/ Joan Baez)

2. November 27, 1964 - Masonic Memorial Auditorium, San Francisco, CA (w/ Joan Baez)

3. April 3, 1965 - Berkeley Community Theatre, Berkeley, CA

4. December 11, 1965 - Masonic Memorial Auditorium, San Francisco, CA

I will go through what exactly is on each tape, and what I thought of them, in the next installments. But first, an introduction. These tapes, it turns out, come with a story. These were not tapes recorded officially by Dylan Inc. and just sitting in the vault for decades. Instead, these tapes were recorded by an unusual Dylan superfan in San Francisco. His name was Ray Anderson.

If you recognize the name, you know your history of the 1960s Bay Area counterculture. Anderson was a leading figure in the San Francisco rock scene, first managing the club The Matrix and then pioneering psychedelic lights shows at the Fillmore. Decades later he opened a record store, Grooves, that itself has a surprising Dylan connection. But in 1964, when he recorded his first live Dylan tapes, he hadn’t done any of that. He was a stock boy at Macy’s—and a huge Dylan fan.

Anderson passed away in 2016, but I spoke to his daughter Sunny Chanel. She manages his estate, which is full of rare music tapes and ephemera (some of which is available to buy here), and is responsible for getting these tapes to the Dylan Archives. She told me about her dad, and how she uncovered these tapes in the family basement.

read on here . . . .