Bob Dylan

http://video.bobdylan.com

Other videos have used a similar concept but I like that it was done for this track, because it creates this meta-commentary.

How does it feel?

Did you really just start a new thread called "Bob Dylan"?

Probably a good call. Probably no threads about Bob Dylan.

Have you guys heard this guy? INCREDIBLE voice but the stupidest lyrics I've ever heard...

Is this Jakob Dylan's dad?

Have we a thread for chronicles

How does it feel?

I think you're on your own on this one.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-qxqxFsjURxY/TdNlSlmwsCI/AAAAAAAAAGA/E3II86kGJU8/s1600/bob-dylan-v-alpaca.jpg

Only 1,000 people were at that MCR "Royal Albert hall" gig...

Find someone that admits to booing..

The thing in the first post is kinda cool.

The thread needs a better title, but that video is just tremendous. Think I'll subject my class to the entire six minutes, flipping around at will (and making sure I end up on those pawn-store lunatics for "You better take your diamond ring...").

That is AMAZING.

the video is awesome & I was just about to post it but hexagon, dude, you so did not need to create a new thread

Did you really just start a new thread called "Bob Dylan"?

― Immediate Follower (NA), Tuesday, November 19, 2013 3:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Did you really just start a new thread called "Bob Dylan"?

― Immediate Follower (NA), Tuesday, November 19, 2013 3:56 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

― marcos, Wednesday, November 20, 2013 10:42 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

love the way the history channel ppl really try to match bob's diction

what a good record 'like a rolling stone' is

otm

I left it on the kids channel. Lolz for days.

cannot stop giggling @ this, so good

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZXFdikh-70

<3 crimsy for this thread title

Indeed

Was this video Dylan's idea?

Great question

Great video too

Can't stop watching--so cool

This thread title owns

Finally clicked through the OP to see what the fuss was about.

me too. wtf was all the fuss about.

Did you click through the channels?

did i what through the whats

Hit the up and down arrows whilst it played,

http://www2b.abc.net.au/tmb/BoardFiles/164/Emoticons/sunglasses.gif

who comes up with this bullshit

http://www.bobdylan.com/us/news/new-album-shadows-night-out-feb-3

"I've wanted to do something like this for a long time but was never brave enough to approach 30-piece complicated arrangements and refine them down for a 5-piece band."

SHADOWS IN THE NIGHT TRACK LISTING:

1. I'm A Fool To Want You
2. The Night We Called It A Day
3. Stay With Me
4. Autumn Leaves
5. Why Try to Change Me Now
6. Some Enchanted Evening
7. Full Moon And Empty Arms
8. Where Are You?
9. What'll I Do
10. That Lucky Old Sun

Already has its own thread on ILM:

Bob Dylan 'Shadows in the Night'

The old grouch turns 75 today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab8W06T_yIw

Nobel Prize for Literature

https://www.theguardian.com/books/live/2016/oct/13/nobel-prize-in-literature-2016-liveblog

oh god – here we go. "Song lyrics are literature, maaaaan...."

Better him than fucking DeLillo.

Danils said that though the choice might seem suprisin,

Of course, if song lyrics are literature now, where's Lemmy's posthumous Nobel?

Only the fourth or fifth winner to appear on a Kurtis Blow track

Eh Dylan's probably not too worked up about this I'm not gonna be.

he's been w the professors and they've all liked his looks

well, there goes Facebook this morning

Lol, didn't dare to look at that

my sister is stoked

def not cutting my hair till after halloween now

Finally a good reason for teachers to bore their students with tales of how Bob Dylan was the first rapper

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TlcPRlau2Q&feature=youtu.be

^^Nobel speech

Better him than fucking DeLillo.

― Don Van Gorp, midwest regional VP, marketing (誤訳侮辱)

that vid is not working for me (in Europe?) what's in it?

Bob Dylan

oh, I've seen him plenty

Maybe this link will work. It's his Nobel lecture, with tinkling piano underscoring.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TlcPRlau2Q

his moby dick analysis is A+. love the odyssey shout out too :)

John Donne as well, the poet-priest who lived in the time of Shakespeare, wrote these words, "The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts. Not of two lovers, but two loves, the nests." I don't know what it means, either. But it sounds good. And you want your songs to sound good.

good lecture, weird piano thing reminds me of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LLpNKo09Xk

well,
sfgate.com/music/article/Bob-Dylan-obliges-annoying-fan-in-Berkeley-by-8132776.php

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc19CAYLlk4

anyone familiar with Dylan anecdotes from session musicians will be familiar with most of the traits described in this video, but since G E Smith tells it so well it's a nice watch all the same
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CIOhY4ysRE

Bob Dylan looking, to my eyes anyway, nicely toasted. pic.twitter.com/ANgkpBKGTX

— Danny Baker (@prodnose) July 13, 2020

You've maybe all seen that already. I hadn't. It's lovely.

Great GE Smith stories ^

Never trust a hippie.

Howard Sounes's Down the Highway (originally published in 2001) was updated last year. It's been described as a trashy book, but it does have useful, new info, and the new one basically adds a chapter that covers 2001 to the present. He interviews Stu Kimball, who was part of the band from 2004 to 2018, and apparently Dylan can still play the guitar as good as he used to. Maybe not for a whole show, but still:

"During soundchecks, Bob would tell the band to stop and would ask for my acoustic to show me what he was wanting to hear. So I'd take the guitar off my back and he'd strap it on and run through a few songs with the band while I watched. And God, it was amazing. I swear it sounded like it could have been off the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. And I'd say to him, 'Bob, that was incredible. Maybe you should just play it yourself on those songs.' And he answered with a smirk and a twinkle in his eye, 'Well, ya know. Like they say...I've got real bad arthritis. And I'm in no condition to be strumming no acoustic anymore."

lol, he's just the best.

Weird. Thanks, and here's Part One of another good interview: with Larry Campbell, who def. should write his own book---from a real good enewsletter, Flagging Down the Double E’s (which also incl. some downloads of shows, even on the freebie version I get):
https://dylanlive.substack.com/p/larry-campbell-goes-deep-on-his-eight

I thought this tribute from Jewel was very sweet:

To be brief: Bob Dylan took me on the road to open for him when I was struggling and encouraged me. He gave me books to read (Proust), music to listen to (the Blue Yodeler) and his lyric book with a sweet note written inside. He told me to keep going, even though my first album was failing at the time. And, he let me sing with him. I walked on stage and headed to the backup singer’s mic, with a simple mantra running through my 20-year-old head: “Do not pass out or do anything stupid.” Things seemed to be moving in slow motion. He was waving his arm at me, inviting me up to his mic. “Oh dear Lord,” I thought. “We are sharing a mic while singing my favorite song. Don’t. Faint.” We sang “I Shall Be Released,” the tips of our noses touching. When we were done, he put his arm around me and told the crowd “Does she sing as good as Joan Baez or what?!” My knees buckled and my ears rang loudly. I managed to walk off stage, full of a newfound courage Bob infused me with.

I had arrived to the tour a broken down, beat up, exhausted crooner of sensitive, introspective songs at the height of grunge. All of the ’90s press was telling me to quit. One outlet, I recall, disliked my music so much, the writer suggested my mother should have had an abortion. I was beginning to give up. But when Bob By-God Dylan tells you not to quit, you salute your Captain, pick yourself up, and carry on. And carry on I did.

<3

spent all day having a little Dylan festival - watching No Direction Home & Rolling Thunder Revue

Joan Baez is such a gift

hell yeah, that sounds like a great day!

feel like he's terribly overrated -- i mean, the nobel, the entire literature parsing his bathtub farts, him being the worst live concert i've ever seen, etc.

but also he's pretty fuckin great

i listened to a bunch of the blood on the tracks bootleg volume (really love that Take 2 version of You're a Big Girl Now), then Nashville Skyline, then read through https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/bob-dylan-lost-letters-interviews-tony-glover-1074916/ , which RULED

liked reading the interpretations of Murder Most Foul in that Stereogum list

David Byrne:

“Then little by little the song begins to veer off and begins to become something else — a meditation on the times, using the assassination as a jumping off point. The verses become littered with quotes and references to Gone With The Wind, the Beatles, Gerry And The Pacemakers, Altamont, Woodstock — on and on. Not all of it makes sense, but the sheer amount of clever comedy and portentous humor keeps me smiling. Soon it goes from third person — the story of the assassination plot — to first person. “I’ve been led into some kind of trap,” “I hate to tell you mister only dead men are free,” “I’m just a patsy like Patsy Cline” — the songwriter, and by implication all of us, are also the victims of this fiendish plot.

We’re in Dylan’s head now — the songs he heard over the years make the world in there. “Only The Good Die Young,” “I’d Rather Go Blind,” Don Henley and Glenn Frey — they’re all rattling around in there. And the rest of the song, like one of those earlier list songs, is a long list of artists and songs he’s asking Wolfman Jack to play on the radio — songs that paint a picture of what’s in Bob’s head but also of the whole 20th century, evoked through its popular songs. The Old Weird America, in the phrase Greil Marcus coined. It’s a hilarious hodgepodge of a list — jazz, gospel, pop, soul, rock — it could go on forever, and it almost does. The goofiness of the rhymes keeps it from getting pretentious and tedious — it’s deep and dark, but there’s joy and jokiness here too”

this time around I really admire how much he believed (or says he believed) in his own material from the get-go, and how much he did not feel responsible for any baggage ppl brought to it

like the fortitude that takes as a young artist not to be carried by what others want FOR you is kind of amazing, especially when you find fame pretty quickly

also i love how his singing voice got so much stronger in the 70’s, those rolling thunder duets he does with Joan sound so great compared to the duets they did in the 60’s where he sounds so thin by comparison

xp Love that David Byrne piece, I think of all the pieces in that article his is the one that comes closest to how I personally feel about Dylan.

I just hope he lives to 180

this time around I really admire how much he believed (or says he believed) in his own material from the get-go, and how much he did not feel responsible for any baggage ppl brought to it

like the fortitude that takes as a young artist not to be carried by what others want FOR you is kind of amazing, especially when you find fame pretty quickly

also i love how his singing voice got so much stronger in the 70’s, those rolling thunder duets he does with Joan sound so great compared to the duets they did in the 60’s where he sounds so thin by comparison

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Monday, May 24, 2021 7:43 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Love this.

One of the things I like so much about Dylan is the through-lines from his earliest to his most recent material. My initial reaction to Murder Most Fowl was that it was doing the same basic things as Desolation Row. He's consistent. Even his weirdo sidesteps into Christianity or whatever are still very Dylan-y at least at this late remove.

Also, as someone who enjoys artists who are funny as well as making fun of my favorite artists, Dylan is the best for both. HB, Bob!

Murder Most Foul was such a great moment

I remember lying on my back on the sofa just riding the wave of wordplay and being so happy that he could still pull off something so enjoyable & perfect for that moment

I'll never forget Murder Most Foul came out and the city and state had just gone into super lockdown for Covid. I took the dog for a walk as long as the song lasted. The whole time I never saw another person or even a car drive by, was like the city was a ghost town and Bob was giving a eulogy for America.

That's how I felt too. Like it was a eulogy and a funeral procession in one. And for me it was also what brought the world back into focus after those first surreal weeks, like I didn't have any way to grasp what was happening to the country and the world and start to grieve for it until Murder Most Foul gave me the vocabulary.

but also I just remember staying up at night and trying to figure out what the hell was going on with it, and it was the first time I'd focused on something outside the pandemic since things shut down. it felt wonderful, the gears in my brain having something to grind after weeks of scraping away at nothing.

I'm glad he doesn't want them all to die, but as a vegan, I feel I have to abstain from listening to "Murder Most Fowl".

One of the things I like so much about Dylan is the through-lines from his earliest to his most recent material.

I spent the day listening to a playlist of Dylan covers I made and I had this same thought. The songs in the playlist ranged from Freewheelin' to Rough and Rowdy Ways, but as covers they were stripped of the Dylan vocal and production signifiers that tell you where you are in his career. So the recurring themes and the ongoing liveliness and unreliability of the narrative voice are easier to hear in songs that are decades apart. On one hand he's never stopped changing, but on the other he's always been him.

Also, I feel like he's always been a little dismissive of his own melodic gifts, he likes to say he steals all his tunes and he's obviously right to some degree. But he's also dissembling, because he has written a shit-ton of great melodies.

otm

and he surrounds himself w good musicians

There's a piece about Dylan's humor in the nytimes today that I think is pretty crappy, but I do love his humor so much and the way he spends so much time goofing around, riffing on his own image, straight-up telling jokes, and the more people canonize him the goofier he gets.

I spent the day listening to a playlist of Dylan covers I made and I had this same thought. The songs in the playlist ranged from Freewheelin' to Rough and Rowdy Ways, but as covers they were stripped of the Dylan vocal and production signifiers that tell you where you are in his career. So the recurring themes and the ongoing liveliness and unreliability of the narrative voice are easier to hear in songs that are decades apart. On one hand he's never stopped changing, but on the other he's always been him.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Monday, May 24, 2021 11:23 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Also, I feel like he's always been a little dismissive of his own melodic gifts, he likes to say he steals all his tunes and he's obviously right to some degree. But he's also dissembling, because he has written a shit-ton of great melodies.

― a man often referred to in the news media as the Duke of Saxony (tipsy mothra), Monday, May 24, 2021 11:24 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

otm

and he surrounds himself w good musicians

― terminators of endearment (VegemiteGrrl), Monday, May 24, 2021 11:41 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

The most apt Bob comparison in music, to me, is Miles Davis. Both had/have long legendary careers with many phases, side trips, and indulgences. Both were written off at some point only to comeback multiple times. Plenty of fans dismiss them after certain points in their careers. Both are instantly recognizable, hugely influential, and ornery/curmudgeonly. Both went electric(!) to some controversy. People bring up that Dylan can't sing in the same way and for the same purposes as those who say Miles wasn't a virtuoso. Both had major gifts as synthesists, taking disparate ideas, musicians, influences and combining them into something often new and wholly them. I love them both so much.

Yeah totally agree with that. I had that thought about Miles and Dylan when we were doing the Miles poll a few years ago.

I had no idea Davis was dismissed for his chops.

Good points above - like on Dylan's insouciant belief in himself and decreasing interest in others' view of what he did.

Yesterday I started with TEMPEST, and appreciated the title track a bit more than usual.

At lunchtime the 3rd disc of the TRAVELIN' THRU box with Cash and Scruggs - those mandolin / acoustic numbers at the end of that are lovely.

In the evening the whole of HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED, actually feeling a bit less favourable to it and thinking its production could have been better.

Then the last 3 episodes of an excellent new BBC Radio 4 documentary, which is all here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/series/m000w331

Episode 3 brings out, unusually, genuinely new material from the late 1960s notebooks. Episode 4 does a good job of connecting the Christian period to the earlier, and 5 is accurate on his sense of (especially musical) history.

On BBC 6music Gideon Coe started his programme with Loudon Wainwright III's Talkin' New Bob Dylan and finished it at midnight with the closing theme from PAT GARRETT & BILLY THE KID.

I've also appreciated the title track of Tempest more on recent listens.

One of the amazing things about Dylan is that even though he's had all these career lulls and comebacks, I'm never tempted to measure his mid-to-late stuff against his early stuff and say "this is just as good," or "this isn't as good." Because he never imitates himself; he never seems to be trying to do what he did before. So many distinct phases of his career, all connected, as tipsy mothra says, but each one an essential part of the whole. And each one meeting a different need in the listener (if Dylan is one of those artists you think of in terms of need, which he is for me). Highway 61 Dylan may be greater than Christian Dylan, but there are times when I want to listen to Dylan in Christian mode and that's all I want to listen to.

otm

Yes, Lily Dale, I think I'd agree with that - in that when I hear 'political world', 'high water' or 'goodbye Jimmy Reed', they're not really reminding me especially of 'masters of war', 'highway 61 revisited' or 'to be alone with you', and certainly not falling short of those. They stand in their own right, but, yes, as part of a long story.

So fundamentally, I think you're correct.

I think I only realised yesterday that Leonardo di Caprio in TITANIC features in 'Tempest'.

hmm you defend "Political World"?

I love it. Always have done.

the Bootleg series has 1) been amazing and 2) (along with the Never Ending Tour) really changed my whole perception of Dylan. all the alternate takes and different versions, live versions. I used to see him as a songwriter now I see him as someone who is always chasing a performance, and the songs themselves aren't fixed objects on records, they are living things he's constantly revising and evolving

they are all drafts

i love Highway 61 Revisited so much, especially Mike Bloomfield’s guitar

also i cannot get enough of the title track
the first 3 lines of the opening verse, and Dylan’s delivery, always slay me (no pun intended)
it’s like a super dark SNL sketch lol

Oh God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son"
Abe says, "Man, you must be puttin' me on"
God say, "No."
Abe say, "What?"

listening to the chrissie hynde "sweetheart like you" is making me realize it's one of my all-time dylan lyrics

they say patriotism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel clings

She soothed me when she sang the sexist line, I'll say.

lol yes

God say, "No."
Abe say, "What?"

You're right, it's totally sketch comedy, the way he pauses for a reaction shot and gets a laugh from the audience before he goes on. And how effortlessly he juggles these lines that are wildly different lengths. Idk why people were surprised when Dylan crammed a whole knock-knock joke into two lines on Love and Theft, he's been doing that kind of thing forever.

It has always endeared me to him, like once you realize how funny he is & he’s often just writing stuff to make ~himself~ laugh, it sets his material back down at an accessible level

not the same thing at all but i remember when i first started university hearing people talk about Bukowski. from the way they talked about his work i assumed it was Important poetry that was Not For Me. but then i read him & was like, ok this is so relaxed & like listening to a drunk neighbor talk about his day — why is everyone making this seem so much more than what it is. Because what it IS was already great & more accessible than it was made out to be.

Dylan’s writing taken at face value is really enjoyable and I think maybe only longtime fans really end up with that takeaway. like i think about that motorcycle guy at the press conference in Dont Look Back, demanding of Dylan the hidden meanings behind his Triumph tshirt on the Hwy 61 album cover. Decades of that!! It must be exhausting to be constantly received as High Art with high-frequency meanings when you’re actually just functioning at a normal frequency & it passes everyone by

I'm inclined to think that Dylan has benefited from, from a very early stage (say since 1965), deciding not to explain himself, and to let the work speak for itself and let people take him or leave him. That seems, on the whole, to have been hugely beneficial in allowing the work to stand in its own right to this day.

But then, I also think my own perception might be somewhat inaccurate here, as he has actually given dozens of interviews since that time, quite often saying he doesn't want to explain things, but also at times doing the opposite and going into explanations or discussions.

And eg: I suppose that in the gospel period he did a great deal of talking, lecturing, exegesis of what his own songs were saying?

So my own sense of him having cut loose from that may not be so correct.

I thank the stars for being too late for the mythos. When I came of age musically, Dylan was the guy in the Wilburys who sang, "She loves your sexy body/DIZ-POH-ZI-TION too!"

lol

i think he was always presented to me even as a kid as being Very Important

also a lot of teachers in my high school were old hippies who had come to education to expand young minds about What Was Really Happening so they passed on a lot of Dylan worship that i had to get out from under

One of the things that consistently strikes me about Dylan is how he's seen as such an unknowable weirdo alien outsider but so much of his work actually describes a very common sort of straight middle-class American experience, albeit with tremendous depth and shades of feeling: he's our great poet of falling in love, getting married, getting divorced and trying again (and again and again.)

God say, "No."
Abe say, "What?"

also one of my favs:

"How are you?" he said to me/
so I said it back to him

As a teenager in the '70s, I was well aware he was Very Important at the same time that I found him Incredibly Funny. I don't see those two as incompatible (which is maybe not a point anybody's making).

And his delivery is such a huge part of his songwriting that sometimes lines that aren't that funny on the page land like jokes, and lines that look like jokes on the page sound like laments. Poor boy, in the hotel called the Palace of Gloom, call down to room service, say "send up a room."

so much of his work actually describes a very common sort of straight middle-class American experience

Well ... yes ... if you agree that most songs do that.

But look at most of DESIRE, STREET LEGAL, SLOW TRAIN COMING, BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME, THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN', TOGETHER THROUGH LIFE, TEMPEST, ROUGH & ROWDY WAYS, ANOTHER SIDE OF BOB DYLAN ...

I'm not really sure that I see "straight middle-class American experience" as the core here.

also one of my favs:

"How are you?" he said to me/
so I said it back to him

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, May 25, 2021 2:39 PM (twenty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Your post somewhere about how you would get all crunk and Minnesota-proud about this song is one my favorite ilx posts of all time. Now, I too, get all nuts about this song.

He's clearly been divorced at least two or three times, but how many of his songs mention divorce? 'Tangled Up in Blue' comes to mind.

Isn't Paul Simon more evidently the bard of that particular kind of experience? He really dedicated himself to representing it!

Talking of funny, I'd never seen this, from a 1966 Playboy interview, before Sunday:

Interviewer: Mistake or not, what made you decide to go the rock-‘n’-roll route?

Dylan: Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I’m in a card game. Then I’m in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a “before” in a Charles Atlas “before and after” ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy – he ain’t so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I’m in Omaha. It’s so cold there, by this time I’m robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain’t much to look at, but who’s built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything’s going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?

I think it's fair to say he was pissing gold in 1966.

That's maybe my favourite Dylan interview bit ever, even knowing it was probably scripted. I bought a used copy of that issue about 20 years ago for $10.

You cut off the punchline!

PLAYBOY: And that's how you became a rock-'n'-roll singer?

DYLAN: No, that's how I got tuberculosis.

One of the things that consistently strikes me about Dylan is how he's seen as such an unknowable weirdo alien outsider but so much of his work actually describes a very common sort of straight middle-class American experience, albeit with tremendous depth and shades of feeling: he's our great poet of falling in love, getting married, getting divorced and trying again (and again and again.)

― Lily Dale, T

I can't imagine how the freaks and hippies who loved Dylan responded to New Morning.

From the same interview:

PLAYBOY: Did you ever have the standard boyhood dream of growing up to be President?

DYLAN: No. When I was a boy, Harry Truman was President; who'd want to be Harry Truman?

https://www.interferenza.net/bcs/interw/66-jan.htm

The Band and Nashville Skyline had paved the way for the pastoral, family-oriented side of New Morning. Self-styled freaks and hippies in 1970 were probably listening to Atom Heart Mother.

My parents both graduated from high school in 1969 and they were hippies who dropped out of college by the end of 1970. They became born again christians in a church of former hippies by the end of 1971. It happens!

The Church of the Fallen Hippies

I saw the era of hippies becoming jesus freaks in real time. the first wave was all about drug-addled mysticism and vaguely embracing an ethos of love. jesus freaks didn't attend church. they got high and read the bible and it blew them away, man. it was much later that they got captured by the megachurches.

New Morning was right in line with the counterculture arc, which by the early '70s had taken a strong turn toward the whole "back to nature" family thing. Lots of people who were dropping acid in '67 might have still been dropping acid in '70, but a lot of them also had kids, were splitting the scene, looking for a place they could grow wheatgrass and a little weed.

I lived that in real time — my parents sold our city house in like 1974 and bought a 100-year-old farmhouse on a dirt road where I lived during elementary school. My experience was obviously colored by my folks' social circle, but there were a bunch of rural weirdos doing the same thing. There was a hippie dude who lived in a school bus in a field down the road, a bunch of pot-smoking artisans (jewelers, leatherworkers, musicians), a Zen Buddhist doctor who accepted barter and trade for his services. It was a thing! Dylan of that era was as zeitgeisty as he'd ever been.

then they sold the farm, put on white greasepaint, and hired Mick Ronson for your birthday parties.

wow that's wild tipsy

Some were mathematicians, some were carpenter's wives.

lol more or less. It was quite a scene. The doctor and his wife were family friends (my parents belonged to the same Zen Center). My dad was a potter and once a year or so he would take a load of various pottery over to the doctor's house as payment for family check-ups and whatever other services we'd needed that year.

Then we moved to the suburbs. 7th grade was an adjustment.

like being released back to gen pop

I'm not really sure that I see "straight middle-class American experience" as the core here.

Yeah, I don't think I worded that right, and I can't seem to find the right words for what I was trying to say, so scratch that. (Though I don't regret writing it as it led the thread to the tipsy mothra origin story.) Forget the straight middle-class American part of my comment; keep the part about so much of his work being about serious relationships and breakups and starting again.

Obviously Blood on the Tracks is his divorce album, and there are some songs like "Long and Wasted Years" that take up that theme explicitly, but that's not really what I meant. It's just that he's so focused on relationships with other people and the cost of them and what it feels like to lose them. I get a real sense, in his later work, of the weight of all those past relationships piling up behind you as you age, so that all his love songs come with an undertone of determination, of someone willing himself to stay human and hopeful and vulnerable.

'Long & Wasted Years' is a tremendous performance, OTT, camp ... yes, it's 'about divorce' or something, but it's also so ludicrous that I think it goes way beyond that!

"I lost TRACK of 'em when I lost my LAAAAAND!!"

Ridiculous!

he's so focused on relationships with other people and the cost of them and what it feels like to lose them. I get a real sense, in his later work, of the weight of all those past relationships piling up behind you as you age

I like this reading, but ... I also think tons of the later work is just playing around. The relationships in, say, 'trying to get to heaven', 'can't wait', 'soon after midnight', 'Nettie Moore' ... and others - I can't really take any of that at face value.

I'd more likely think that there is a small minority of songs that seem more serious about such emotions. 'I've made up my mind to give myself to you' could be one. 'make you feel my love' might have been another.

Actually I find this Lily Dale reading more convincing as a description of our other favourite ... Bruce Springsteen.

'Long & Wasted Years' is a tremendous performance, OTT, camp ... yes, it's 'about divorce' or something, but it's also so ludicrous that I think it goes way beyond that!

"I lost TRACK of 'em when I lost my LAAAAAND!!"

Ridiculous!

I mean, yeah, but that brings us back to the conversation about Dylan's humor. he's funny in it but that's not all he is, imo; I take it as one of those songs where the humor and the weirdo delivery keep us at a remove from what's happening until the end, when the reality of it comes down on us: "so much for tears/so much for these long and wasted years" isn't exactly a big haha ending.

Actually I find this Lily Dale reading more convincing as a description of our other favourite ... Bruce Springsteen.

I guess that's true of something like Western Stars - "Moonlight Motel" is kind of Bruce doing "Red River Shore." There is a difference, though, I think.

I think it's partly that when Bruce is writing about himself, as he does very explicitly in the latest album, there isn't quite that feeling of pushing on through life, having failed and lost things but starting again. It's more like every friend Bruce ever made is still with him, even if they're dead; he hasn't lost them through carelessness or through changing as a person or w/ever; they've been taken from him and he mourns in a very straightforward way.

With Dylan it's mostly a feeling I get, a kind of emotional backdrop to the songs. It's less straightforward than what's going on with Bruce; it has less connection to a defined narrative; it's just a vibe, really. A sense of him as an almost-exhausted traveler who never quite loses interest in what's coming next.

The relationship in "Nettie Moore" seems pretty straightforward and believable to me. Not sure which part can't be taken at face value. Singer seems to be someone who travels the world in a "cowboy band". He misses his beloved, who is either temporarily away from him, or deceased, the song is not clear on that point. In either case, the singer's grief seems serious, though of course this being Dylan there are flashes of humor even amidst the pervading darkness (e.g. "Well, the world of research has gone berserk/Too much paperwork").

O. Nate: I'll have to listen again - you evidently know it much better than me - but any song in 2006 that says "I miss you Nettie Moore / and my happiness is o'er" ... I don't really take at face value.

Lily Dale: I like your eloquence and seriousness re: both Bob the Boss, but I think I just don't take Bob as literally as you do. I think that rather few songs since, say, 'not dark yet' have seemed genuinely to be about a real feeling and experience, as against using a musical form, quoting a literary or musical tradition, and enjoying generic play (bringing, yes, lots of daft humour).

"every friend Bruce ever made is still with him, even if they're dead"

This is certainly a big Bruce theme, yes, that has increased steadily in recent years.

any song in 2006 that says "I miss you Nettie Moore / and my happiness is o'er" ... I don't really take at face value

It's true of all his post-2000 albums that he occasionally lapses into archaic language that would not be out of place on a Harry Smith folk anthology, more of a stylistic tic than an indication of irony or distancing, I think.

Aren't a lot of those phrases lifted straight from other sources? I thought that was especially supposed to be the case with MODERN TIMES.

FWIW if the claim is "Dylan is singing movingly about the regret of his own recent personal life", I'd be more likely to reach that conclusion if I actually knew about said personal life -- which generally I don't, and am happy not to.

I hear these occasional things like: he's exhibiting paintings; he now makes wrought iron gates; he has a brand of whisky. But his marriages are opaque to me and I'm content with that ... which means, as I say, that I rarely have any information to tie to the songs.

You could say that's true of any songwriter but I suppose there are those where you either know more from real life, or the songs themselves seem more clearly to point to something, even if you don't know its details. Joni Mitchell's BLUE might be an example. Paul Simon's GRACELAND. Bruce's TUNNEL OF LOVE? Or even, yes, BLOOD ON THE TRACKS. But not, for me, MODERN TIMES.

Still, having beaten that point into the ground, Lily Dale's actual description --

A sense of him as an almost-exhausted traveler who never quite loses interest in what's coming next

-- also does seem accurate.

Aren't a lot of those phrases lifted straight from other sources?

Yes, I guess that line is lifted directly from an old song called "Gentle Nettie Moore". Though Dylan's delivery I think makes it feel very personal.

I mean I guess we could get into a deeper discussion of what it means for Dylan to lift so much material directly from old songs. To me, it seems to be a way of showing the timelessness of basic human predicaments, and the delivery of the songs makes them feel like they are speaking directly to an emotional reality that is happening now. It reminds me of one of my favorite bits from his memoir, when he was living in Greenwich Village and just starting out as a folksinger, he didn't read the newspaper, but instead he went to the library and read old newspapers from the Civil War era, and he felt like that had more relevant news to him.

He and T.S. Eliot would've gotten on splendidly.

Also, I guess as one gets older, one's window for what counts as current events gets wider. Did that event I'm remembering happen last year or 10 years ago? I think the title "Modern Times" is a joke on that, perhaps. From a long enough perspective, the 1800s are still modern times.

the delivery of the songs makes them feel like they are speaking directly to an emotional reality that is happening now.

Maybe, sometimes. More often, I'm inclined to say they sound like quotations, like collage, like pieces of history and archive, and sometimes broad comedy.

In general I think I've learned here that others hear emotional sincerity in late Dylan where, 95% of the time, I don't!

Just because he's singing someone else's lines doesn't mean he can't mean it. For my money, one of his most heartrending vocals is "Delia" from one of his albums of traditional songs.

Is that similar to the one Johnny Cash does, “Delia’s Gone”?

I think based on the same incident, which inspired many folk and blues songs. Lyrics look quite different though.

oh, wow, that's beautiful. I never heard it before.

By 'traditional songs' do you mean the folk ones from the 1990s, not the 'American Songbook' ones from the 2010s?

In theory, someone can cover a song and put themselves and their feelings into it - yes. I wouldn't say I've often heard Dylan do that, but maybe this 'Delia' is the exception.

Again, covering a whole single song that conveys an emotion coherently is different from singing your own 'collage song' which is, let's suppose, made up of different borrowed bits of songs that expressed a range of things.

But it seems like O.Nate and Lily Dale, with their different critical approach, do have a body of Dylan songs in mind that 'speak from the heart' or however one should put it -- so I'd be interested to see a list.

I thought today of 'workingman's blues'. A very odd song - the buying power of the proletariat!?! - but it might seem kind of emotional. But is it?

To me, it seems to be a way of showing the timelessness of basic human predicaments, and the delivery of the songs makes them feel like they are speaking directly to an emotional reality that is happening now.

This is what I hear in them as well. (I would write more but I'm stuck with a stupid migraine today; really enjoying these comments though.)

FWIW I think for me the ultimate case of 'Dylan sings out his raw feelings', that I can think of, is 'You're a Big Girl Now'.

Clearly even there there's loads of mediation through tone and imagery, but I can believe in an emotional reality behind it.

Others seem to hear more Dylan songs working that way than I do.

(... and going back further: I think a lot of ANOTHER SIDE OF BOB DYLAN feels quite rooted in real experience, and maybe certain things like 'just like a woman' do also; and for that matter 'positively 4th street'. But this is going way back to a different Dylan aesthetic altogether. My point was more that I don't hear this in late Dylan.)

There is a Jonathan Lethem essay that, as I recall, distinguishes between 'sexist Dylan' in the 1980s and what I think he calls 'postmodern ironic sexism' or similar (sorry for that horrible phrase) as heard in much later songs -- thus eg: 'I want a real good woman to do just what I say', on 'thunder on the mountain' (2006). It would be daft to complain about the sexism of that line because it's just daft role-playing -- that's Lethem's implication and I pretty much agree.

I think that sense of late Dylan playing around with effects and not meaning it is quite close to my sense.

xp Some def seem more direct and heart-on-sleeve than others - "Red River Shore" and "Every Grain of Sand" come to mind as well - but regardless of the lyrics or the narrative, it's always seemed to me that his singing taps into a range of human emotion so nuanced and so accurate that I often can't find words for the shade of meaning his voice is expressing but I know that I've felt it.

"To me, it seems to be a way of showing the timelessness of basic human predicaments"

I partly agree (cf his love of Homer), but what I get more from it is the tang of history, a love of the flavour of a specific past -- usually an American one.

Fairly of a piece with his immense attraction to and use of American place names.

'Every Grain of Sand', I'd think, would be in a particular category -- ie: all the religious songs of that period (say 30-40 of them) are very clearly signalled as sincere / saying something coherent.

'Red River Shore', I think is a very interesting case. Certainly one of the best examples I can think of of later Dylan being poignant. An astounding song.

I'd say "Workingman's Blue #2" as well

he's written some of his most straightforward love songs on the later albums

though overall, I think there's a false binary being drawn here - the idea that poignancy or sadness can't live besides playfulness and jokes and irony

I agree that people can hear different levels of sincerity and personal emotional involvement in different songs, and there's probably some listener identification effect coloring this perspective as well - "if I relate emotionally to this song, then the singer must relate it to the same way". Did Sinatra really mean it every time he sang "One For my Baby" on stage in Vegas? Who knows? He was a pro, and a pro can put emotion into a song, that's part of the job description. I don't feel the need to investigate further. But to me that's a different question than whether a songwriter is writing lines to be taken with ironic detachment, or to be read more or less straight. Now of course this isn't black and white, and there are shades of grey here, especially with a songwriter as elusive as Dylan. But I think the view of Dylan as the ironic, shape-shifting trickster is a bit oversold. I think he operates in a more straightforward mode most of the time. But I may be in the minority in this view.

I partly agree (cf his love of Homer), but what I get more from it is the tang of history, a love of the flavour of a specific past -- usually an American one.

Fair point, it's partly a matter I think of situating himself in a certain lineage of traditional and popular song, which is specifically American, though of course with roots in British and other traditions.

I tend to agree with the pinefox that the meaning in the later songs stitched together from literal scraps is limited. Dylan's gift is that his performances often imbue these scraps with a sense of meaning.

I guess what I am saying is his songwriting is sometimes overrated and his performance is nearly always underrated.

Like Murder Most Foul is utterly ridiculous and cliche-ridden and yet, he wills the mess into the pantheon.

though overall, I think there's a false binary being drawn here - the idea that poignancy or sadness can't live besides playfulness and jokes and irony

I'm afraid I don't agree, because I agree: they can, absolutely. A pretty good example of the coexistence, actually, would be The Magnetic Fields, 69 LOVE SONGS: vastly ironic, referential, playful, full of downright jokes, and also genuinely poignant, for the listener and often, one suspects, for the author also -- the poignancy even heightened by his strategy of denying it and hiding behind formalism.

But I don't very much hear that coexistence in the late Dylan we're talking about. In that, I hear playfulness and jokes, but not much real sadness that I can recall.

"Sugar Babe"? "Nettie Moore"? "Ain't Talkin'"?

But you're right: that irony is one of queer culture's great gifts to the world

Has anyone ever heard 'Workingman's Blues #1'?

Now I ask that, I realise that it's probably a song from the 1930s that I've never heard of and that Dylan was positing as the precursor to his song.

I'd have to listen to those 3 songs again. Maybe I've missed or forgotten something in them. 'Sugar Baby' I do think has something mysterious.

xp it’s a tribute to the Merle Haggard song

PBKR: oddly, I was thinking that 'Murder Must Foul' might even be one of Dylan's more heartfelt later songs. The pop history rundown is corny, but the investment in JFK seems real, to make something that massive out of it.

Which would be the odder given that in 1964 he told an audience that he could identify with Lee Harvey Oswald.

MASKED & ANONYMOUS (2003) was on BBC TV tonight.

Having only watched fragments before, I found it better than I expected - simply because Dylan was in it more than I thought. The first 10 minutes or so, without Dylan, are dull - then he appears and it's inherently exciting. Any time he's on screen, it's worth watching to say the least. And when he actually plays with a band, it's ... electric. His guitar playing better than I would have thought, his voice reaching and soaring in its unpopular way. Bizarrely he sings 'I wish I was in Dixie', as well as 'Cold Irons Bound' just as a coup takes place.

Everyone except Dylan - professional, often famous, actors - seems bad. Which I suppose is his fault if he wrote the script.

xp I was with you until you said there was not much real sadness ;). I think there is plenty; it just comes from his performance, gravitas, etc. as much from his lyrics or melodies or whatever.

Masked & Anonymous is his most autobiographical work (and the band smokes).

Has anyone ever heard 'Workingman's Blues #1'?

Yes. That is an odd one. Actually the title has "#2" not "#1", which I guess is more mysterious, since it makes you wonder what was "#1". The first stanza seems to set up a straightforward protest song about the travails of blue-collar workers, globalization, decline of unions, decline of manufacturing, etc. But then nothing really turns out as you would expect from that opening. Lots of the lyrics do evoke imagery of poverty, hunger, unemployment, struggle, temptations to criminal activity. But then sudden threats of violence and odd dream-like moments, such as spotting his father on the street but not being sure if it was really him. And what does the chorus mean? "Meet me at the bottom" - bottom of what? And why is he asking for his "boots and shoes"? It's a pungent line, suggesting imagery of a blue-collar father speaking to his son. Maybe that's the main function of it.

since it makes you wonder what was "#1".

Merle Haggard's "Workin' Man Blues" was. iirc, Dylan had just come off a tour with Merle at the time.

"Boots and shoes" sounds ridiculous but I thought that this was supposed to be another of those borrowed phrases?

That first verse as O.Nate recalls it seems same territory as "Union Sundown" (1983).

Yeah, I guess it is. There is an Otis Spann song that starts out "Meet me at the bottom, woman/Bring me my boots and shoes".

"Meet me at the bottom" - bottom of what?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bottomland

Howlin' Wolf's "Down in the Bottom" ("Meet me in the bottom/bring me my runnin' shoes") uses the term more the way people around here use it -- "in the bottom," not "at the bottom." There are Bottoms all over the south -- Becker Bottom and Black Cat Bottom in my town, and some low-lying land in north Tupelo called Ruff Bottom, which -- I can't believe they didn't call it Ruff Bottom Mall when they developed there in the 1980s.

Once you start picking at one of these blues song lines, its like picking a yarn from a sweater and the whole thing starts to unravel- you can always find another earlier song it seems with the same phrase. I guess the blues is kind of a magpie form, with phrases promiscuously borrowed and traded from other songs. There's a 1936 song by Bumble Bee Slim called "Meet Me In the Bottom" with the line "Meet me in the bottom/ Bring me my boots and shoes". There the meaning seems pretty clear. The bottom being bottomland, a conveniently concealed location for a rendezvous, and the boots and shoes being needed because the singer needs to make a quick escape from town, presumably because he's gotten into trouble with another man's woman. Seems Howlin Wolf's song has a similar meaning. But once you get to Otis Spann's song, the phrase seems to be operating more as a free-floating signifier. And it 's not clear how it relates to the theme of "Working Man's Blues #2".

"the boots and shoes being needed because the singer needs to make a quick escape from town"

But surely the first oddity that anyone notices about this line is that you can't wear both boots and shoes at the same time? One of them seems redundant.

"Bring me my socks and shoes" would be more cogent, if very bathetic.

I think he wants them both because he's leaving town and they are personal valuables.

To me there's something a little mannered/hidden/emotionally reserved about a lot of Modern Times, compared to Dylan's other late stuff. Workingman's Blues #2 feels to me like Dylan "doing" something or other - some kind of conscious act, I mean, but I'm not totally sure what.

On some level it seems to genuinely be a working man's blues song, a semi-straightforward narrative about someone who's out of work and angry about it, but the language is all over the place. "The buying power of the proletariat's gone down" is an absurdly formal way to describe the reality of someone's life, like he lifted it out of a socialist pamphlet or something. There are lines you can tell are harvested from other songs, the narrative never quite hangs together, he shifts into this arch/archaic diction every so often, and then there's the weird combo of the martial lyric in the chorus - "You can hang back or fight your best on the front line" - and the quiet, melancholy delivery that suggests he himself might be going for Option A. I don't know what to make of it.

Also, this is a very random association that I don't expect anyone else to have, but I happened to be taking a really good college class on Faulkner when Modern Times came out, so I listened to it a lot as I was reading Faulkner and now they're all mixed up with each other. I can't hear "I've got a brand new suit and a brand new wife" without flashing to the last page of As I Lay Dying, Pa showing up with his new wife and new teeth.

sidebar: I just started reading Chronicles and I love it so much. Mad at myself for not reading it sooner!

I rate both “Chronicles” and “Masked & Anonymous” as better than any album he’s made since

all together now

ALL (wearily): “Blood On The Traaacks!”

Excellent comments from Lily Dale. Though particular Faulkner echoes may be accidents, I think Faulkner would be as good as almost any C20 author as an accompaniment to the late Dylan imagination.

the martial lyric in the chorus - "You can hang back or fight your best on the front line"

I vaguely take that as a reference to industrial action and picketing, given the content of the song.

I had forgotten this in 'Nettie Moore':

'Well, the world of research has gone berserk / Too much paperwork'.

xp I took it that way too; I just meant that his delivery doesn't sound like he's trying to stir you up to fight. To me he sounds regretful and resigned more than anything else.

"Workingman Blues #2" is a song that doesn't quite hang together for me either on Modern Times. However it has 5 or 6 songs that I really like.

I like it, actually, I just can't quite make sense of it. It's interesting that a lot of us hear at least some late Dylan songs as having a lot of direct and heartfelt emotion but we can't agree on which ones those are.

"The Levee's Gonna Break" is another one that's inextricably linked with Faulkner for me; I can't hear it without thinking of "Old Man," the novella about the prisoner working on the levee in flood time.

'The Levee's Gonna Break' feels so connected with other Bob - 'High Water', 'Crash on the Levee' - and of course with whatever traditional songs Bob was drawing on, like Charley Patton's - and with Hurricane Katrina, a year before the LP came out. A tremendous example of Dylan finding it very easy to tap into a sense of tradition.

The period sounds Faulknerian but I don't know that novella.

It's cicada season here and all i do is walk around singing "the weather was HOT, nearly 90 degrees!"

We don't even have cicadas where I am, and I still get that song stuck in my head every time I read about the cicadas in the paper.

Is that 'day of the locusts'?

yes

I had a dream I was in a music improv class in college and the assignment was to create a fictional album and one of my ideas was Dylan Does Elvis Does Dylan which was Dylan doing Dylan “covers” as Elvis and now I am sad this doesn’t exist.

lol thats awesome

honestly Bob might go for that

Dylan: Yeah, Elvis Presley. I liked Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley recording a song of mine. That’s the one recording I treasure the most… it was called “Tomorrow Is A Long Time.” I wrote it but never recorded it.

i kind of like having a thread just called "bob dylan"

Greil Marcus talks of Elvis in a studio session singing a verse of 'I shall be released' (a capella?) and then saying, as explanation: 'Dylan'.

Yep:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJFNQI_ZiC0

It's on the Elvis '70s box.

Yeah, the Elvis "Tomorrow Is A Long Time" is the best I've heard, and not just because it's Elvis. Usually, it seems like a wimpy song, thin, generic, folkie (worshipful of one's own) self-pity (D. did demo it; his is no better). Think the version on Hynde's Standing In The Doorway is okay, but I've only heard it once, and may seem better in context of that good covers collection, which has some unusual picks ( and works as a rainy day country folk musical conversation, nursing a drink and not really bogarting that joint because online and passing tracks back and forth, though by same toke[n], could use a tad more variety)

Elvis also did a long studio run-through of "Don't Tnk Twice It's Alright": the band is vamping, ready to take off, but he just keeps singing the same lines off-handedly, sometimes adding a little Elvis-Jerry "wella ifa youdonknowbynowa," yes, going toward Mark E. Smith a little bit, but never committing (Jerry Lee's got some masterful finished tracks of "Rita May" and "Stepchild" on YouTube; studio and live of the latter)

I think the line that sounds like something from a socialist pamphlet is a deliberate effect, like "Tempest" incl. flotsam and jetsam from the historical event and down through the ages, like Di Caprio, and the sort of stuff that newspapers were publishing even before it actually sank, plus pamphlets and broadsides and too bad there were no (?) t-shirts and bumper stickers yet. "Meet me at the bottom" might be handwritten in the margin of some pamphlets...

Newspapers used to publish commerative poems, along side or in Letters To The Editor, also comparable artwork and fiction and alleged nonfiction ("I beheld my aunt again last night, this time standing on the quarterdeck, signaling a sign from the Heavens, which I in turn must pass along, as should you, Reader.")

(Also legit lit, among the serials and short stories, maybe poetry too.)

(And of course "postcards of the hanging," with postcards of many other things, have come down through the ages.)

I did not know until last night that Dylan wrote a song about Oakland A’s pitcher Catfish Hunter during the desire sessions (appears on the first official bootleg set I think). That’s cool!

There is overwhelming evidence by now that Bob Dylan just likes to write songs all the time about all kinds of things.

XP Yeah, a Desire outtake that surfaced on the first bootleg box. He gave it to Kinky Friedman who released it first on his Lasso From El Paso album.

I was going to put this on a covers thread, now that the Dylan thread has popped up, it'll find a home here

joy crooked- 'one more cup of coffee'

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlbiNF97EdY

joy crookes

Joe Cocker also did "Catfish," but I'll let his fans post the vid---it was okay though! Kind of a spooky tune and tempo for "Catfish/The Million Dollar Man/Nobody can pitch the ball/Like the Catfish can."

No, it was "throw the ball," primal, universal

Physical

Might as well put this here too:

Veeps will present Bob Dylan in an exclusive broadcast performance, Shadow Kingdom, which will showcase the artist in an intimate setting as he presents renditions of songs from his extensive body of work created especially for this event.
Tickets are on sale now for his show on Sunday, July 18 at BobDylan.veeps.com.

Shadow Kingdom actually Bob Dylan-penned Rolemaster supplement from 1985.

Bob Dylan sued for allegedly grooming, sexually abusing 12-year-old girl in 1965

As mentioned in another thread, the lawsuit was permanently withdrawn after the plaintiff asked the federal judge overseeing the case to dismiss it “with prejudice,” meaning it was permanently closed and cannot be refiled. The move came after the plaintiff was accused of deleting key messages and threatened with monetary sanctions.

And now Dylan's lawsuit against the fraudulent lawyers in question has ended with a hefty fine in both of their cases. They actually got off easy - Dylan's team was seeking only $50,000 as a nominal penalty, and it looks like they only have to pay $8,000 in total.

"it is not he or she or them or it that you belong to" - bob dylan endorsing neopronouns in 1965

^ love this, though I definitely do not want to hear 80-year-old Bob Dylan's thoughts on gender and trans issues

Luckily he has been smart enough to keep quiet on the matter

Though there was this I suppose:

Bob Dylan, Kesha and Valerie June are among the musicians and singers reimagining classic love songs as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender anthems in a new album released on Thursday.

The six-song "Universal Love" album is meant to give the community songs that reflect their own gender identity by flipping pronouns or having male and female singers reverse traditional roles.

Just Like A Pronoun

^ love this, though I definitely do not want to hear 80-year-old Bob Dylan's thoughts on gender and trans issues

― Lavator Shemmelpennick

ahhhh, he'd probably do some eight minute ballad about Amelio Robles Ávila or some shit. who the hell knows with bob, though. i haven't heard any of his born-again shit - how much of that was spent yelling about The Gays? was he, like, hanging out with anita bryant or something?

Bob Dylan, Kesha and Valerie June are among the musicians and singers reimagining classic love songs as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender anthems in a new album released on Thursday.

The six-song "Universal Love" album is meant to give the community songs that reflect their own gender identity by flipping pronouns or having male and female singers reverse traditional roles.

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes)

c or d: putting a "crooner dylan sings the standards" song on your gay wedding playlist

Just Like A Pronoun

― an icon of a worried-looking, long-haired, bespectacled man (C. Grisso/McCain)

oh god, i forgot about _that_ song

there's actually a bra shop around here for mastectomy patients called "just like a woman"... they do all kinds of custom sizes i hear, not too many places you can go out and get a 42A bra. bra sizing is bullshit anyway, the whole thing assumes that the breasts are spaced out on the chest like they are on a cis woman. totally different from someone with a larger frame. my boobs aren't tiny by any means! they just don't have the overall volume relative to my frame that you'd see on a cis woman.

wait, we were talking about bob dylan, not about cisnormative standards in bra sizing, weren't we?

the larger point is that bob dylan singing "she breaks just like a little girl" is gross. i mean, what would a genderswap version of that _sound_ like? what would it sound like to hear him singing "he breaks just like a little boy?"

was he, like, hanging out with anita bryant or something?

As I recall, Bob hung out some with Billy Graham. Strange to say, but Graham at least had personal integrity and repped for charity as a Christian virtue. He never descended to the same depths as Anita Bryant, Jerry Falwell or similar shitbirds.

yeah idk i'm delving into some of the off the cuff sermons during the gospel years and they're, like, pretty non-specific in terms of the stuff that's the bread and butter of all the christianity i've ever known

“We’ve had a lot of previews of what the Anti-Christ could be like,” he said. “We had that Jim Jones, he’s like a preview. We had Adolf Hitler, a preview. Anyway, the Anti-Christ is gonna be a little bit different than that. He’s gonna bring peace to the world for a certain length of time. But he will eventually be defeated too. Supernaturally defeated. And God will intervene.”

and he's, like, telling people they'll go to hell for listening to kiss or something, which, i mean, ok, sure. rock and roll is the devil's music. just sounds like he got into the old shit. i mean he grew up with gospel music, he hung out with johnny cash and shit, eventually that's gonna rub off. sure, he got born again just like larry flynt did, you know?

being "born again" is just the funniest fucking thing to me, you go up there and you say "the lord touched me, the lord is real", and like you're totally different now, and really the only thing that ever seems different is that the person who's "born again" is now a bigger asshole than they were before. someone comes up to me and says "oh i got born again" and i'm just like, really, you look exactly the fucking same to me. i grew tits.

anyway, bob dylan, bob dylan is the kind of guy who gives the impression of always having been kind of an asshole, but not, like, in a donald trump way or anything. just somebody who could get _real mean_ on a bad day, who knew how to use words to hurt people. he gets up there on all that fire and brimstone and it's not half as incendiary as, i don't know, "positively 4th street".

and the thing is there are a lot of "bob dylan is christian" truthers out there and the reality is that i can't see any way on earth that matters. he tried to save the world in 1963 and he tried to save the world in a kinda different way in 1980 and both times he seems to have decided, probably correctly, that saving the world wasn't a good way to spend one's life and moved the fuck on. whatever he believes is about him, and not about whether someone else is going to hell for listening to kiss.

he's got this reputation for being "political" and yeah, he was, he was really invested in the big political issues of the day, in 1963. and not really since. the next time he got "political" he was saying, what? this mobster got kind of a bad deal? bob dylan doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would find it a good use of his time to voice his opinion on people like me transing our genders, but if he did, i'd give it every bit as much consideration as i do his political advocacy on behalf of joey gallo - whether that's in favor of trans rights or against trans rights.

a guy like roger waters says "trans rights" and then he sucks up to putin. i guess it's nice that he doesn't hate me as a trans woman, but if he's at the same time out there defending some evil shit, i don't give a shit if he supports my rights. that's how i'm different from a whole lot of the christians i've known - as long as someone says the right words about, i don't know, abortion or some shit, they'll "forgive" people who are violating every value they claim to possess in every other way. that kind of faith, to me that's empty and worthless.

god, now i'm sounding like bob dylan. you can go and listen to kiss! you can go and listen to kiss all the way down to THE PIT!

do kiss shows have mosh pits? god i hope not.

Is it just me or is he barely intelligible when talking about anything except, like, old timey musicians? Not giving him a pass or anything, I read a big book of Dylan interviews last year and was impressed by the… virtuosic obfuscation over the decades

Heh.

He seemed to figure out pretty much from the jump that when it comes to journalists looking for deep insights from rock stars, the only way to win is not to play. At least in so far as winning = maintaining your own sanity and sense of self beyond the public’s perception of you.

It’s funny to hear that there are “Dylan is a Christian” truthers out there. As a Jew who has always travelled in pretty Bob-revering circles, people tend to dismiss the Christian period as just one of his many embarrassing phases that they prefer not to acknowledge unless necessary.

The Born Again Dylan is a very weird moment in his career. Apparently, the shows around that time were pretty bad? I thought he would be full of religious ire! (or maybe that was the problem?)

Dylan is trolling 95% of the time, it's just opinions differ on what the remaining 5% are.

The live bootleg of the Christian era is terrific.

Dylan Christian era is great, especially if you have any affinity/tolerance for gospel/tent revival or just a sense of humor. At least I find it hysterical he applies the same intensity to Jack Chick tracts as he did to Rimbaud/surrealism. It's still Dylan doing Dylan stuff. The band is smoking, too.

I quite like "Slow Train Coming". I havent heard "Saved".

The live stuff is better than the studio imo.

Just finished Heylin's Double Life of Bob Dylan vol. 1. Can't really recommend it, not as fun a ride as (I recall) Behind the Shades. His idiosyncratic prose and his pervasive put-downs of other Dylan writers get annoying quick, and while his attention to minutiae and recording date details make him and his work authoritative, it's just not a lot of fun to read. The book is based on a lot of the "new" archival material which... well, I feel you need to be pretty deep down in the lore to really appreciate what certain napkin notes and hotel stationary fragments add to the canonical story.

Anyway, the highlight/climax of the book is arguably the recording of Like a Rolling Stone, which you can follow along by listening to the Cutting Edge bootleg:

It confirms what Bloomfield later admitted, “It happened almost by mistake”; day two, remake take four. Enter Al Kooper, who has pointed out, “You can hear Tom Wilson [say], ‘OK, this is take seven [sic]. Hey! What are you doing in there?’ … That was the moment he could have just thrown me out and rightfully so. And you know what? He didn’t.” At the time that Kooper commandeered the organ stool, they still haven’t managed a full take of “Rolling Stone.”

In fact, day two starts with Dylan in reflective mood, muttering into the mike (and maybe to himself ), “I’m just me, you know. I can’t, really, man. I’m just playing the song. I don’t want to scream it, that’s all I know.”* Frank Owen has gone, as has Al Gorgoni—evidently both Dylan’s decision. In their place, he has brought in “Tambourine Man” himself, Langhorne, on stand-by. But when Dylan switches to guitar—possibly at the suggestion of Grossman, who asks to hear just his guitar in the mix—and Griffin to piano, there is suddenly a great gaping hole where the organ once was. Kooper, who had snuck into the session hoping to supplant Gorgoni, seizes the moment and ends up replacing Owen.

Immediately, the organ makes its presence felt. It also frees Griffin to play all around the song, masking the moments where bass and/or drums lose their way. One more rehearsal, in which Gregg finally finds a use for that snare drum—the one which “sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind,” to quote Bruce Springsteen—then, ker-pow.

Even hearing “Remake Take Four” now, surrounded by false starts, breakdowns and car crashes, it comes out of nowhere. And goes straight back there. Another eleven takes will be logged, only one of them complete. But having exhausted everything in his locker, Dylan pushes the envelope to see how far it can go. This far. Time to hear the playback, and get some feedback.

Chapter available here: https://dujour.com/culture/bob-dylan-biography-like-a-rolling-stone/

An entertaining side plot is how Dylan - basically from the get go - is opposed to any overdubbing/inserts when recording and the fun/absurd situations this leads to. Many are well-known and surely posted upthread but this one from the Blonde on Blonde sessions in Nashville was new to me:

Al Kooper: Dylan refused to overdub things. He just wanted to play it live right there. I said to Bob, 'Horns would be really nice on this.' And he said, 'Well, there's no horns here.' At which point Charlie McCoy says, 'I play trumpet.' So Bob said, 'I don't want to overdub anything,' and Charlie said, 'I can play the bass and the trumpet at the same time.' And Bob and I looked at each other, and Bob started laughing, to which Charlie said, 'No really, I can,' and promptly played the bass and the trumpet parts at the same time. Our jaws hit the floor

Heylin's Bob Dylan: The Recording Sessions, 1960-1994 is an awesome book if you want nothing but those kind of stories. At the time it came out, only Vol. 1-3 of the Bootleg Series had been released, so it's a little dated now that so many of the then unreleased tracks he is referencing have now been released, but still a great, opinionated read.

good tip, thanks!

He seemed to figure out pretty much from the jump that when it comes to journalists looking for deep insights from rock stars, the only way to win is not to play. At least in so far as winning = maintaining your own sanity and sense of self beyond the public’s perception of you.

― Lavator Shemmelpennick

i mean, if he didn't from the beginning, the shit he went through with fucking weberman... christ, i can't imagine what a nightmare _that_ must have been.

i mean, i've had more experience than i ever wanted these last few years with guys who just won't get off my dick

Chapter available here: https://dujour.com/culture/bob-dylan-biography-like-a-rolling-stone/

― corrs unplugged

oh, and i know bob meant it as a rhetorical question and he meant the whole thing as a sneering putdown, but for the record: it feels fucking great, bob. i didn't understand that until i'd been there myself, but that's how it feels.

Like a Rolling Stone isn't a sneering putdown. It's self help. I think Bob would agree with you.

Kooper told this story in a great interview on Sound Opinions, but some of the details are different - first, he says McCoy denies this now, but he thinks the memory is too absurd to make up or get wrong. He also says McCoy approached him and said "I'd like to play what you're playing on the organ on the trumpet" to which Kooper says great but Bob doesn't overdub so we'd need to get a horn player. That's when McCoy says he can do both, and then Dylan gets involved in the conversation, prompting a demonstration from McCoy when they run down the song. The sight of McCoy doing this isn't just impressive, it cracks up both Kooper and Dylan, and Dylan tells McCoy he can play both on the song, but "be somewhere where I can't see you" because he doesn't want to laugh during the take. (Takes place at 28:45 in the podcast.)

The live (evangelical) stuff is better than the studio imo.

I'm not a huge fan of this era, but pretty much agree with this. I will say Slow Train Coming is worth it if you're a Mark Knopfler fan - his guitar playing is wonderful, especially when he's playing an electric guitar - and the production is immaculate, one of the very best sounding albums Dylan's ever made. Saved you can skip - everything worthwhile comes off much better live. Some of the Shot of Love material is done really well on the original studio recording, especially "Every Grain of Sand" which is never surpassed elsewhere IMHO - I just think the track/song selection is very uneven. (Dylan had the material for a very good album, but only about half of it gets picked for the original LP.)

(FWIW, at minimum, I would've dropped three or four songs from the original Shot of Love LP and included "Angelina" - eventually released on The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3, "The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar" - originally a B-side and not on the original pressings of the LP but added after it was reissued, the unfaded version of "In the Summertime," and the live recording of "Caribbean Wind" from The Bootleg Series Vol. 13.)

Like a Rolling Stone isn't a sneering putdown. It's self help. I think Bob would agree with you.

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR)

like, what's his advice here? "if you need to do sex work it's no big deal?" one the one hand he's not wrong, but on the other hand when the hell has bob dylan ever done sex work?

on the other hand there is the weberman thing, so it's not like he doesn't know about chasers

To the extent the song is subject to interpretation, I subscribe to this one:

Mike Marqusee has written at length on the conflicts in Dylan's life during this time, with its deepening alienation from his old folk-revival audience and clear-cut leftist causes. He suggests that the song is probably self-referential: "The song only attains full poignancy when one realises it is sung, at least in part, to the singer himself: he's the one 'with no direction home.'"[46] Dylan himself has noted that, after his motorcycle accident in 1966, he realized that "when I used words like 'he' and 'it' and 'they,' and talking about other people, I was really talking about nobody but me."[43]

The song is Dylan psyching himself up to make his "big break" with his prior career (it wasn't a big break, but I understand why he might have thought so at the time). He's telling himself it's ok to leave the folk scene, follow his instincts, write the new songs, do something new. It's going to be ok, Bob, you've got nothing to lose by doing this. He's telling the voices in his head that are holding him back, making him doubt himself, to go away, let me do what I have to do.

I'm just going to be a corny fuck and say: the song sounds like freedom to me. It's joyous. Just take that first step. You're free now, don't you see?

"Go to him. Now he calls you, you can't refuse" sounds like freedom?

Yes. He's telling himself to follow his own muse, don't be bound to what others see for you.

The context is:

“I was going to quit singing,” he told Playboy in an interview published in February 1966. “I was very drained, and the way things were going, it was a very draggy situation… I was playing a lot of songs I didn't want to play. I was singing words I didn't really want to sing. It's very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don't dig you.”

The urge to quit hit in the spring of 1965, when Dylan was finishing up a tour of England, which was later featured in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don't Look Back. During a stop in London, Dylan even told his manager that he was going to quit. It didn’t help that his newest album, Bringing It All Back Home, released that February, earned middling reviews and backlash for its introduction of electric guitar and a backing band, a major departure from his folk style.

So he's angry at himself for the situation, really lacerating himself, because he doesn't see a way out, he's ready to quit. And the song is his answer to himself. Yes, you can do this. There is nothing really holding you back but you.

I'm just going to be a corny fuck and say: the song sounds like freedom to me. It's joyous. Just take that first step. You're free now, don't you see?

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR)

kris kristofferson to thread

nothing don't mean nothing. everything you have has been stolen from you by the "high-class" people you trusted, you thought you _belonged_ with. they were all laughing at you. all of them. might as well laugh along with them. you're nobody anymore. just some blown-out street meat rotting in the gutter. might as well go to that pimp down the street. he's the only one who even sees you for who you really are. nobody else sees you at all. you're invisible to them.

yeah, i'm free, free from the burden of illiquid assets like a house and a car, free from stable long-term relationships, free from worrying about the future, free from being able to do anything for all the people around me who are suffering like i am, free from hope. freedom's just a fucking blast. this is what i wanted, right? this is what i chose, right? this is what i signed up for, right?

yeah, i did choose it. i chose to live. and this is what it looks like to live. this is the cost i have to pay to _exist_. boy howdy, i feel great about that. couldn't be happier.

good morning!

"but you just said you _were_ happy, kate. really and truly happy. and now you say this. are you, kate? are you happy really?"

yeah. yeah, i am. both those things are true. it's the best of times, it's the worst of times. when my egg cracked in 2019, i was overjoyed, and i was terrified, terrified of what that meant, terrified of what i'd have to _do_. and i'm still overjoyed. and i'm still terrified. i don't know what's next. i can't think about what's next.

i've lost everything and i have more than i've ever had, more than i ever dreamed of having. and here comes some fucking jokerman sneering at me - and he is. he's sneering at _me_. i don't believe that story that he's singing about himself, that everything is about _him_, really.

if he is singing about himself? he's wrong. he's fucking wrong. he has no clue what it's like. even with the press calling him a sell-out. even with weberman tapping his phone line. there's _no_ comparison. none at all. this cishet white guy doesn't have any fucking clue what it's like to be me. he just thinks he does.

voice of a generation. yeah. bob dylan definitely is the voice of a generation.

I don't mean to suggest my view is somehow universal or that you have to agree. I am just trying to provide some context that I personally find neglected that enriches the song and makes it a sort of wellspring for me even after hearing it a million times.

I don't think Dylan is saying he knows how you feel. The song is *rejecting* all that voice of a generation stuff. He's telling himself a hard truth that he doesn't want to hear but knows he needs to. And, maybe, he is telling the listener to listen to themselves as well.

This is a pretty good summary of what the song feels like to me:

i was overjoyed, and i was terrified, terrified of what that meant, terrified of what i'd have to _do_. and i'm still overjoyed. and i'm still terrified. i don't know what's next. i can't think about what's next.

i've lost everything and i have more than i've ever had, more than i ever dreamed of having.

Not to suggest that your life is reducible to a song or anything.

And now I've said everything I probably needed to say about this song for one lifetime.

otm---didn't think about all that 'til I heard his Before The Flood sweatbox ritual, heaving it: "How does it feeeeeeeeel", howling through the rest of the chorus, rattling the verses---and remembered a quote from another interview: "Everytime I say 'You' I mean 'I.' " Also as in "Advertising signs they con/You into thinking that you're the one/Who can do what's never been done/Who can win what's never been won/Meanwhile life outside goes on all around you." (Raspy loose puppet jittering over the balcony rail on BTF. Yeah, blame the Capitalists, man, with some degree of truth, but---if he hadn't gone that way ("I wanted to be bigger than Elvis..I used to sit in the dark and dream about it"), we'd have missed out on a lot---"I got nuthin Ma, to live UP to." Ha.

otm---didn't think about all that 'til I heard his Before The Flood sweatbox ritual, heaving it: "How does it feeeeeeeeel", howling through the rest of the chorus, rattling the verses---and remembered a quote from another interview: "Everytime I say 'You' I mean 'I.' "

i mean i get it, i make everything about myself too :)

anyway. having a shitty day today. whatever the song is about, i think it's mean-spirited. "punching down", as they used to say, not that i have any use for that kind of thing or ever did, really

Yeah the vibe I always get is schadenfreude, the addressee some upper middle class girl who didn’t probably idolize Bob Dylan enough. you think you’re so smart well look at you now, you pathetic superficial toad, exposed for all the world to see

Very much like Toby Keith’s “How Do You Like Me Now”

Maybe the original, but not on Before The Flood, where I prefer the versions of everything to originals.

Some parts of the song can be about himself, someone else, a third person, someone imaginary, Jackie O, etc. It’s long enough for it.

Been spending some time with Under the Red Sky lately, it's honestly not THAT terrible. The lyrics are indeed clunky on many of the songs and the version of "Born in Time" is far inferior to the Oh Mercy version from Tell Tale Signs, but its not like an album full of "Wiggle Wiggle".

Oops, had no idea this one was on ILE when I bumped it.

I Love Everything is Broken

I get scared when a prominent name pops up on both ILE and ILM.

wiggle wiggle is great-- the weird dread in it-- but title track, cat's in the well, handy dandy all fantastic too, full of shadows. unbelievable is a lot of fun to sing along to. born in time v stiff on it tho yeah. kind of a stiff song tho tbh or maybe i'm wrong.

gotta agree, not half as bad as I recall

though his voice/delivery hardly peaking

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=316JC5kUSjQ

made me laugh

made me smile

even if they scripted it, it was still funny

I read Pledging My Time, which is all interviews with musicians who have played with Dylan over the years. I think it was one of my favorite Dylan books! I felt like I learned more about Dylan as a person and artist than I have from any of the other books I have read (No Direction Home, various Marcus books, Clinton Heylin's discography book, Paul Williams' Performing Artist).

It was especially interesting seeing the through lines from beginning to end. The recurring stories from different interviewees across the decades showing a consistency of character and approach. Some things that I learned:

1. Dylan is shy! It never occurred to me that he could be shy, given his bravado in 65-66, but really how self-assured he has seemed from the get go. I knew his reputation for fiercely protecting his privacy. Maybe it's the Bob Dylan mask he needs to keep the shyness in check to perform. It made me think how much of his act is just armor.

2. The consistency of his live approach since pretty much Rolling Thunder on. Hating to rehearse his songs, not explaining his methods, starting songs live by just strumming chords and expecting the band to follow him, not wanting his band to be locked in to performing songs the same way. Most interviewees talked about it in reverent tones, like they learned a lot from Bob's approach and took that with them long after they stopped playing with him.

Highly recommend the book as there are some great stories.

oh that sounds great, i will check it out

Yeah sounds interesting. What do they say about his musicianship? I feel like I've read several accounts from musicians being surprised/impressed by his chops and musicality.

I think people are surprised by his unique approaches to his instruments and his musicality rather than his chops. Benmont Tench is impressed by his piano playing. Several remark on his innate sense of timing and how they would watch his hands and especially his body to follow him on stage.

The interview with Spooner Oldham is so good. His wife kind of butts in to the interview to great effect. Her Bob stories are some of the weirdest ones from the book.

One of my favorites of his albums, New Morning, works because of his piano playing. I couldn't imagine a better player subbing for him.

I started following Bob on Instagram a bit ago. For the last couple of months, the account has been posting videos of obscure classic country, bluegrass, and rockabilly performances alongside old recordings of recitals of stuff like Andrew Jackson's last speech and Edgar Allen Poe's autobiography. In other words, a weirdo mixture of stuff you might expect from a Bob Dylan social media presence.

He just posted the song Kurt Kobain, from the 1996 album Searching for Jerry Garcia by Proof, a Detroit rapper from the group D12. I wasn't familiar with it and it's not a bad song. Yes, I know Bob was down with rap.

It made me wonder though; is soon-to-be 84 year-old Bob Dylan cruising the Internet, grabbing obscure 90s rap songs, and posting them to social media?

My head tells me he has a team that cultivates his social media presence. At best, maybe he tells a guy what to post.

My heart tells me, no, Bob Dylan puts on his reading glasses, fires up a spliff, and hunts and pecks on his phone keyboard one finger at a time, bobbing his head all the while.

I Want To Believe.

he is absolutely doing the posting

What makes you sure?

the feed doesn't read "this is coming from a team" it reads "an old man playing with his ipad"

He's definitely doing the tweets himself so it's not too much of a stretch from there to instagram.

seems like it has to be him. dylan has nothing to gain from expanding his social media presence. he doesn't need to curate his brand or hype his concerts & releases. he has plenty of money already. he basically lives on the road touring, so fiddling on IG fits perfectly with self-entertainment and and a way to share his restless curiosity.

It's possible he's choosing the content but having someone else do it for him, like a personal assistant or someone close to him (like a significant other or relative). That's not uncommon with some public figures on social media.

(i.e. "I want to post this video I found on YouTube - can you do that for me?")

I thought no way, but I'm being convinced.

Bob Dylan is that new ILM poster..