When Bob Dylan first arrived in New York City in January of 1961, he was 19 years old, baby-faced and Woody Guthrie-worshipping.But it did not take very long for people to discern he was not exactly like the other folksingers on the scene. Terri Thal was one of them. Thal, a native New Yorker, had gotten involved in socialist organizations in college, and soon became immersed in the political and social world that was Greenwich Village in the late ’50s. In her words: “The world was very small then, and the head of all the left wing organizations were in the Village.”This is how she came to meet and eventually marry folksinger Dave Van Ronk, and started doing some rudimentary management work for him. When Dylan arrived, and Ronk became convinced of his talent, Thal began working with him, too. “Van Ronk’s wife, Terri, definitely not a minor character, took care of Dave’s bookings, especially out of town, and she began trying to help me out,” Dylan wrote in his memoir Chronicles: Volume One. “Both were anti-imperialistic, anti-materialist. ‘What a ridiculous thing, an electric can opener,’ Terri once said as we walked past the shop window of a hardware store on 8th Street. ‘Who’d be stupid enough to buy that?'”On Sept. 6, 1961, Thal taped a performance Dylan gave at the Gaslight Cafe, needing something to show out of town club owners who might be willing to book Dylan. That tape was later bootlegged (available for listening below), but the original master recording is now up for auction. It is the earliest known recording of Dylan.Dylan would eventually bring Albert Grossman on as his manager — “I know he can do much more for you than I can,” Thal recalls saying to Dylan then — and released his debut album in 1962. UCR spoke with Thal about the famous 1961 tape and her experiences with Dylan before he became a household name. Do you remember your first impression of Dylan when you met him?Well, by the time I met Bob — I’m a year older than him. So, ’61 when he hit New York…I was like, 20, maybe 21. My first impression of Bob? I thought he was some kind of remarkable….He was not a great guitarist, he was not a great singer. He kind of stumbled all over the stage. It took a while to realize that I was watching Charlie Chaplin, and there was something charming and memorable about the guy, and that was my first impression. I thought he was some kind — I won’t use the word genius. I can’t do that, but that’s sort of like where it was, and I have no idea why.Why don’t you use the word genius?Well, I don’t know if that’s what I would have said at that point, you know. I mean…the guy I was then living with, who became my husband, who I was managing, was a folksinger [Dave Van Ronk]. And David came home one night and he said, ‘I just heard this kid, and he’s a bloody genius. You gotta go hear him.’ The next night, I trotted down to the Cafe Wha?. Saw this kid, and I mean, did I say he was a genius? I don’t know. You know, something like that, because that was the reaction of people in the folk music world.I mean, the folk music world was a supportive one at that time, and people looked out for one another, they taught one another, and they recommended one another, and they boasted about [one another]. And Bob had the immediate support of more people in the folk music world, more folksingers, than anyone I can think of.It does still sound like you thought he was special or different in some way.Yep, absolutely. I thought he was special. I thought he was distinctive. And you know, we very quickly became friends. Dave, Bob and I hung around together immediately, a lot.Suze Rotolo [Dylan’s girlfriend] was in the picture then, too, right?No, not yet. No, he met Suze months later.Gotcha. I’ve read that you don’t feel like Suze’s character in A Complete Unknown [Sylvie Russo, played by Elle Fanning] was portrayed appropriately.I think they turned Suze — they turned an extraordinarily smart, creative woman into a wimp.You knew Suze up until she died in 2011. Can you talk a little about her as a friend and a presence around the Village? She obviously had a very positive impact on a lot of people, Dylan included.Well, Suze was involved in a lot of things. Was involved in theater. She was an artist, and most of the people in folk music really limited themselves to music. One of the things that struck me over the years is that folksingers and the folk music world — I mean, by and large, any world of artistic young people at that time was somewhat limited, somewhat limited. And the folksingers, pretty much, were not into art, were not really that interested in literature, as far as I knew. I mean, these were things I talked about, that Suze talked about. And she was one of the people who brought a broader perspective to the people she met than most others in the folk music world.And also to the extent that she was with Bob, that she was seen as somebody who — I don’t like the word “educating” Bob, but who was introducing Bob to culture that he didn’t know. He was not an uneducated guy, but there was a whole realm of culture Suze was aware of, and it ranged from the French Symbolists to visual artists to Bertolt Brecht, and Suze was known for introducing Bob to a lot of that.READ MORE: The Best Song From Every Bob Dylan AlbumSo, this tape you made of Dylan in 1961…tell me about the reaction you would get when you would play the tape for people.I took the tape to a recording studio, and I had a little cassette made or something like that, that I could physically carry to an out of town club. And that’s why the thing got bootlegged, incidentally, at some point. I assume the recording studio let somebody make copies, or a copy or whatever, of that tape, which ultimately was issued as a bootleg with dreadful sound.But the reaction that I got was pretty universally: “Why should I hire this guy when I can hire Jack Elliot?” And Jack Elliott was a folksinger, also Jewish, incidentally, from Brooklyn, who also changed his name, incidentally, who sounded like Woody Guthrie, at that time a lot like Woody Guthrie, and people…you know, the reaction I got from the club owner in Springfield, Massachusetts, and the club owner at the Club 47 in Cambridge, and the club owner in Philadelphia was exactly the same. “Why should I hire this kid when I can hire Jack Elliott?”What was your response to that? “I don’t know, because he’s good?”No, that was my response! That was my response. And that he’s more than a, you know, than a Woody Guthrie imitator. This is only a little bit of the range of the songs that he plays. But really what else can you say? And this young man could be very successful, and you’re going to want to be one of the people who introduced him.You had a lot of faith in his potential then, but thinking back on it now — Dylan is 83 years old, still touring the world — was that something you could have predicted in 1961? Did you think he was going to go the distance?Not like that. We could not have predicted that anybody we knew would ever, ever reach that level of fame. It wasn’t — nobody did! Nobody.What is something you don’t think people know or understand about Dylan that you wish they did? That he’s a very funny guy, with a very wise sense of humor…that a lot of putting people down publicly, interviewers and stuff like that, is his way of being funny. That he has one of the most extraordinary memories of anyone I’ve ever seen, I’ve ever met. Bob can hear something or read something, and he can do something that I think is very unusual. He can take a piece of it, that information, immediately. He can take another piece of it and put it in the back of his head so that he can use it 20 years later. … And then he can take some of it and totally pitch it, so it doesn’t bother him. And that is one of the things that marks — whatever kind of genius Dylan is, the things that mark him – he can pull that out. He can separate it. He can use it. I think it’s a very rare quality.Is there anything else you’d like people, Dylan fans or not, to know about the Gaslight tape?The tape represents a deliberate public statement by somebody who was just beginning to find himself or to think of himself professionally. He chose the songs that are on it, he chose to do that set. And I think that the mix of what he did is kind of interesting.And if you listen to it, you listen to his “Song to Woody,” and that’s a world Bob walked out of. He left it for his own reasons, but I find it very moving, because it was his truth, it was his truth at that time. And I think that remained, maybe not as hero worship of Woody, but what that song represented. I think it’s still part of Bob’s reality.Listen to Bob Dylan at the Gaslight Cafe, Sept. 6, 1961The Stories Behind 20 Bob Dylan Album CoversLooking back at the artwork chosen by the famously enigmatic songwriter.Gallery Credit: Allison Rapp