Now and then someone at the hospital would put in an order without giving a phone number or specifying which building they were in, which led to some adventures in a grim complex of cheerless, largely abandoned buildings once known as the Georgia Lunatic Asylum.

At the time, I was delivering pizza in Milledgeville, Georgia, and the hospital where he’d breathed his last was part of my route. I also enjoyed knowing what they didn’t: that he’d passed away in the late ‘50s. I found it terribly amusing that they’d put out an album without knowing if the artist was dead or not. In it, that gave a brief biography of McTell, then noted that they weren’t really sure, but it “seemed likely” that he was now dead. Twenty years or so ago, I bought a Blind Willie McTell CD that reproduced the liner notes from a vinyl edition that had come out in the ‘60s or ‘70s. And the same is true for me, even though I wasn’t there in ‘62 or ‘74 at all. Maybe it always did when American Graffiti came out plenty of critics noted that 1962 seemed like far, far longer than twelve years ago. It seems as though ’63 was a whole lot further in the past. It’s strange, but finding a Dylan setlist from a long-lost gig in 1963 seems like it would be infinitely harder than finding one from, say, 1974. Adam’s popped up here a couple times, writing about shows in 1984, 1999, and 2001, but today he goes way further back to explore a forgotten 1963 Gaslight Café show he found buried in the Village Voice archives. Today’s newsletter is a guest entry from Adam Selzer.

Town Hall 1963, shortly after when Dylan might have popped up at the Gaslight

Gaslight club ny