joni vs. zimmy

http://30.media.tumblr.com/2v3e0iSWensjrklmDpBS6slQo1_400.jpg
what the hell tuning you in, joni?

i love joni mitchell but bob dylan. sounds like a dylan/gaga vs. MIA/joni cage match is coming up...

http://media.ebaumsworld.com/mediaFiles/picture/713575/80597851.gif

Bob towers over everybody of his generation except maybe James Brown and the Beatles. sorry Joni

dylan/gaga vs. MIA/joni cage

are you saying that gaga is a man

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

don't understand how anyone can not vote mitchell. dylan is basically a talentless hippie tramp, mitchell is a genius.

Dylan basically invented the first-person-narrative for rock n roll - the idea that a musician's work expresses a personal point of view - so, no he is not "basically a talentless hippie tramp"

did bob dylan ever manage to hit a note in his career?

he hit all of them

Mitchell's criticism of Dylan there functions equally well as an explanation of how/why he's succeeded.

In terms of whose best stuff I like more, I'd vote Dylan by a nose; in terms of percentage of work I like, Mitchell; in terms of quantity of work I like, well, Dylan. Not sure what that adds up to.

Haha to be fair to Dylan, he tends to hit each note for at least 30% of the note's total duration; he just happens to spend the bulk of each note's length scooping up to it.

Dylan basically invented the first-person-narrative for rock n roll - the idea that a musician's work expresses a personal point of view

HANG ON idk who came "first" but joni also did this

don't understand how anyone can not vote mitchell. dylan is basically a talentless hippie tramp, mitchell is a genius.

voted dylan just for this bullshit

i mean, i love joni, but this "don't understand" front business needs to die

Unfortunately for Joni she came 5 years after Dylan's career took off.

Anyway -- really tough choice. Both really important, personal artists to me and have staked huge claims on my relationship to music. Think I'm gonna go Dylan in the end tho, by a hair.

Bob towers over everybody of his generation except maybe James Brown

^^in a nutshell, this^^

bobby d. and i'm a fuckin faggot.

Dylan. Nuff. Said.

The poll where every side is the challops side.

I couldn't love Joni Mitchell's music more, but wow is she insufferable in every other way...have you ever seen her talking about her terrible paintings? Oh. my. god.

Talentless. Lol.

I mean, fucking hell. There's challops, then there's mental fucking illness...

hahaha what does she say about her paintings

xp I don't want to sound presumptuous, and I'm sure Lex's distaste seems totally authentic and real, but you have to imagine that some of it comes from not appreciating the paradigm shift in music that Dylan inaugurated. It's like trying to appreciate Ghiberti's innovations in perspective, it's hard to imagine a world where art wasn't actually that way. (Which isn't to say that Dylan was as innovative as starting a tradition of using perspective in your art -- but that the same effect is at play.)

Mitchell's criticism of Dylan there functions equally well as an explanation of how/why he's succeeded.

yeah i was thinking "that's why he's great." and anyway, joni mitchell calling anyone else a poseur is a serious pot-kettle situation. i love her plenty, but this one's not remotely close for me.

Mordy otm

(not that that makes Lex's POV any more defensible, just noting that its rooted in ignorance of history)

man this is a hard poll

probably i just wont vote

have you ever seen her talking about her terrible paintings? Oh. my. god.

I dunno, a bunch of her sleeve paintings are awesome imho (Song to a Seagull, Ladies of the Canyon, Hissing of Summer Lawns especially)

hahaha what does she say about her paintings
― i fake it so real, i am beyonce (surm), Wednesday, May 12, 2010

I saw a documentary on public TV where she strolled around a dramatically lit presentation of her awful paintings...kind of like when Billy Bob Thornton talks about how his shitty music is his true calling--yech

yes, her cover art is good, especially for CSNY Deja Vu, but her "art" art--so awful

the key word here is "awful" (before the wolves get me)

Dylan basically invented the first-person-narrative for rock n roll - the idea that a musician's work expresses a personal point of view

this is way overblown, like saying dylan invented talking

john lee hooker/woody guthrie/hank wms/chuck berry/johnny cash/beatles thousands of others expressed a "personal point of view" in the first person before bob

no they didn't

yes they did

all of those guys came from folk/blues traditions that are explicitly about generalized/collective experience (with the exception of the Beatles - which are a random group to throw in there considering how seriously Dylan abetted the expansion of their songwriting). while all of those performers had strong personalities, their songs were not about THEM per se, except in perhaps an oblique, sidelong way. Dylan was the first major figure in pop/rock to come along and present his songs as being explicitly from HIS point of view, with his own unique vocabulary and personal voice - this was one of the key reasons everyone tagged him as a "poet", because he was transforming conventional songwriting templates into a vehicle for something else, as a way for an artist to communicate his own internal experience and private symbolism to a larger audience. this is not what hooker or guthrie or hank williams or even johnny cash did (well, not till after Dylan anyway)

I was thinking more about what I wrote upthread re Lex, and I wonder where we draw the cultural lines between 'this is totally legitimate to dislike,' and 'your dislike of this indicates ignorance about it.' Like there are some things (say Joanna Newsom) that I feel totally okay dissing and saying are worthless and other things (like Philip Glass) that I take a position of: 'Well, I don't know it well enough to enjoy it. I find it a little boring, but I'm sure that's because I haven't investigated it enough.' Is this just a function of canon? Like if a student came and told you he hated Shakespeare, you'd tell him that he needs to know Shakespeare and his personal preferences don't matter. But maybe he'd have a little more personal leeway with Roberto Bolano (or whoever?), and you wouldn't immediately write off his opinion. Like even if you dislike Dylan, I expect something like, "I understand he's very canonized, but I never really understood his popularity, and it always struck me as boring." Some recognition that canon has formed in a particular way for probably good reasons.

Dylan was the first major figure in pop/rock to come along and present his songs as being explicitly from HIS point of view, with his own unique vocabulary and personal voice -

I don't understand this at all. Every good singer (not all of them songwriters!) presents his songs as being explicitly from his point of view.

I chose Dylan, and it wasn't close. I love Joni though.

It's best to appreciate Dylan without the mythos: he's an excellent songwriter and an exemplary singer.

xposts
Not seeing your split on songs about personal vs. collective experience at all - surely most songs (at least the ones that resonate with people) do both

I totally believe Chuck Berry really did sit around waiting for the school bell to ring and was really happy when he got back to the USA - and that those feelings were also collectively understood...

and that him singing about high school and cars and America had a "unique vocabulary and personal voice" and communicated "internal experience and private symbolism to a larger audience"

he's an excellent songwriter and an exemplary singer.

And really really funny, and had a great sense of rhythm.

Not a hard choice at all.

dunno, maybe it's more like Dylan popularized a more confessional style of songwriting? he did *something* to songwriting, right?

how funny is this

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/music/la-et-jonimitchell-20100422,0,5684541.story?page=1

the event that prompted the interview is this:

The renowned Obie Award-winning actor and performance artist has been belting out Mitchell's songs for more than 20 years. This weekend, the New York-based Kelly concludes the L.A. run of his acclaimed solo tribute to the iconic, iconoclastic singer-songwriter, "Paved Paradise: The Art of Joni Mitchell," at Renberg Theatre.

Blessed with an elastic voice and androgynous features, Kelly is famed for his chameleonic ability to morph into historical figures of either gender, from famous painters to first ladies. His performance as Mitchell, however, is perhaps Kelly's most enduring metamorphosis. It's downright eerie how he channels her so completely.

Even Mitchell is a fan of Kelly's show, which spans her entire career, from classic "Me Decade" albums such as 1971's "Blue" through her most recent release, 2007's "Shine." That much was made clear in a recent telephone conversation with her and Kelly.

I don't understand this at all. Every good singer (not all of them songwriters!) presents his songs as being explicitly from his point of view.

sure but most of them use a commonly shared language. They write songs about stock characters, easily recognizable figures. Dylan expanded way beyond this. No one else up to that point loaded their songs with all this obscure, deliberately impenetrable mythological imagery, no one else loaded down their songs so much that you couldn't tell if they were supposed to be jokes, political allegories, or expressions of deeply held personal feelings.

many xposts

Dylan was the first major figure in pop/rock to come along and present his songs as being explicitly from HIS point of view, with his own unique vocabulary and personal voice -

I don't understand this at all. Every good singer (not all of them songwriters!) presents his songs as being explicitly from his point of view.

― cool and remote like dancing girls (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, 12 May 2010 16:32 (5 minutes ago)

Po-faced equivocation aside, even Joni acknowledges the way Dylan changed pop songwriting. She described her own approach as an attempt to take Dylan's long, almost prose-like lines that allowed for much more detail, and combine them with a more complex approach to melody.

I guess that makes Dylan more "important" but I don't really care. Maybe overall Dylan has a greater body of work. I find myself enjoying Joni Mitchell records much more than Dylan records in the last five years or so. I guess I could say the same about Neil Young, who is a lesser songwriter than either. I ultimately just don't like hearing Dylan's voice that much and I'm kind of weary of his caustic schtick.

dylan's paintings also suck & he's just as pretentious you buncha stans

not voting in this poll, both are great artists, I listen to loads more joni & think musically she's a bunch more interesting but dylan's a titan & a better rock guitarist but OTOH the claims made for him as The Inventor Of The Confessional Style are completely absurd & also not worth arguing abt because the ppl who're convinced of it won't be swayed by anything so there is not point getting into it

and that him singing about high school and cars and America had a "unique vocabulary and personal voice" and communicated "internal experience and private symbolism to a larger audience"

no see because everyone in America was familiar with high schools and cars and whatnot - these were readily available images and symbols that pretty much anyone could grasp and get with with little to no effort. And here comes Bobby Dylan, singing about talking cyclones and mad generals and drug dealing Indians or whatever. There's a huge difference here. The first set is an amalgam of images close at hand to the vast majority of the audience. The latter is something that comes across as having been developed by someone who isn't interested in talking to anybody else, who's just kinda made up their own language (of course Dylan's references go deep, and are not cut from whole cloth by any means - but they came from a different avenue and from different sets of reference points than those that had been previously available to the pop songwriter)

xp

fwiw I don't think the "confessional" aspect of Dylan is as important (altho it WAS really influential) as the way he made it clear that songs could be about pretty much anything, as long as they were written with a strong, unique voice and an attention to detail (there are other pop songwriters from previous generations who did this - Cole Porter springs to mind - but a lot of this approach had been excised from the pop landscape by the time Dylan came along)

xpost
great discussion but I gotta get to work so quickly:
- i think this is a different more specific point than you made initially
- think you're not giving chuck berry and hank williams their due as poets
- agree he piled on the imagery, surrealism, arty poetry stuff like no-one else before (but i think you can see antecendents of mysterious mythology in pre-war blues and gospel which can get pretty inscrutable - but yeah he definitely jumped off from that into a new place)

did bob dylan ever manage to hit a note in his career?

He hits all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order.

xpost to positively shakey mo: but the only reason he makes that clear is that he got really famous. that stuff was, forgive me, on the wind: his natural gifts made him the dude for the job, but he's mainly expanding on territory laid by chuck berry & johnnie johnson & brecht + weill & a whoooooooole lotta folksongs, sung by people since time immemorial, many of which were every bit as bizarre & packed with unimaginable references & zigs & zags as his stuff. so, yes, he makes that clear. he succeeds in popularizing something he learned from his teachers. that's always how it works imo, not hating or really diminishing his achievement but certainly strongly questioning this notion that he's some merlin figure inventing anything.

xp Eh, Berry's wacky stream of consciousness in "Too Much Monkey Business" definitely presaged lots of what Dylan did, in his crazier stuff like, say, "Subterranean Homesick Blues." And there other precedents for that stuff -- Guthrie, Diddley, Harmonica Frank or whoever, white talking hokum blues jokers from the old weird America late '20s. So Dylan was a complete original, sure, but he was also synthesizing what came before him. Weird to equate talking cyclones and mad generals and drug dealing Indians with confessional songwriting, but then again it's also weird to think Chuck Berry, who was almost 30 by the time he had his first hit, was usually singing about himself. He's singing about being a teenager in the affluent post-war era of TV sets and coolerators, but he had turned 13 himself in 1939 (and obviously, he was synthesizing lots of what had come before too -- Louis Jordan, for instance.)

well yeah his main accomplishment is that he popularized it, that he did it in a way that suddenly clicked with a whole lot of people, an entire generation (maybe several) of songwriters - like I said, his stuff wasn't cut from whole cloth. To clumsily extend the metaphor, it was more like he stole it from a fabric store most people no longer bothered to frequent lol

xp

even if i had never heard a note of either that asshat quote attributed to Jonin in the opening post would insure a vote for Dylan from me

Weird to equate talking cyclones and mad generals and drug dealing Indians with confessional songwriting,

it is, but its the force of that kind of imagery that makes it so readily apparent as coming from a unique POV. someone from the Brill Building wouldn't write this, it was the kind of thing that could only come from a personal place.

xp

glad to see you won't be swayed by unimportant things like interviews will

someone from the Brill Building wouldn't write this, it was the kind of thing that could only come from a personal place.

ok this is straight-up trolling of alfred or trying to make him have an aneurysm or somewthing

and then the other funny thing is while that's how it seems, it's also become clear over time that Dylan's stuff DOESN'T really come from much of a personal place - it is, as Jonie says, all an act. which kinda makes it even more amazing

xp

i dunno, you don't have to be or greil marcus to see that dylan was self-consciously going back to a kind of expression that precedes "singing about high school and cars" -- this figure of the confessional poet breaking open the "teenager-industrial-entertainment complex" doesn't make much sense to me . come on, "i wish i was a mole in the ground," Harry Smith, all of that?

many xps

(I'm not knocking Brill Building stuff btw, I love a lot of Gerry-Goffin-King too!)

xp

;) tbf if it had opened with one of Dylan's multitudinous asshat quotes i might've gone the other way

ok no not really.

i do love some joni though

anyway, joni otm as far as it goes. a better take on the fakery, though, is luc sante's piece

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2005/mar/10/i-is-someone-else/

(behind a paywall sadly)

(iirc) he argues that dylan's real innovation was bolting together two early 20th century developments: modernist/surrealist poetry, and the recording and professionalization of american rural music. he may have been kind of half-assed and chancy at both! but nobody had really put them together so explicitly.

i like the way joni mitchells music sounds. dylan is like a songwriter to me.

did bob dylan ever manage to hit a note in his career?

Not to play gotcha-media, but Lex, didn't you write this about Paris Hilton?

And her voice isn't half as bad as people make out - sure, she can't really sing and this is obvious, but it's not actively terrible. I don't think any of the album is at all bad.

come on, "i wish i was a mole in the ground," Harry Smith, all of that?

this is a weird thing to cite considering that the main reason it's known at all is because it was adopted/absorbed by Dylan and co. Harry Smith didn't have a lot of pop hits on the charts in the 50s iirc

xp

he argues that dylan's real innovation was bolting together two early 20th century developments: modernist/surrealist poetry, and the recording and professionalization of american rural music. he may have been kind of half-assed and chancy at both! but nobody had really put them together so explicitly.

I can get with this. I think this is a major achievement, obviously, one with huge ramifications for subsequent generations of songwriters

Not only was he innovative tho, but he is also fabulous. His songs still hold up today and are full of interesting musical choices, lyrics, strange vocal performances, etc. I have no idea if any studies have been done, but I can only imagine he's the most written about artist in undergrad programs. (Someone even did a paper on him in my grad program this year.)

there's a lot of other wild stuff in that interview -- morgellon's?? damn

oh yeah Mordy no q there - I don't know anybody who seriously spends much time thinking about songwriting who doesn't stand in awe of Dylan

ok this is straight-up trolling of alfred or trying to make him have an aneurysm or somewthing

call the paramedics

JM: My first four albums covered the usual youth problems — looking for love in all the wrong places — while the next five are basically about being in your 30s. Things start losing their profundity; in middle-late age, you enter a tragedian period, realizing that the human animal isn't changing for the better. In a way, I think I entered straight into my tragedian period, as my work is set against the stupid, destructive way we live on this planet. Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980. Madonna is like Nero; she marks the turning point.

Americans have decided to be stupid and shallow since 1980 1680.

fixed

Life is very hard for cranky songwriters.

sixties people are at their stupidest and shallowest comparing their 20's to everyone else's

yes yes, let's play the "who said something dumb" game, that'll settle this

"I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years, really. You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like … static… Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded 'em. CDs are small. There's no stature to it." -- Bob Dylan

madonna, fiddling while paris burns?

Can you cook and sew make flowers grow
Do you understand my pain ?
Are you willing to risk it all
Or is you love in vain ?
-- Bob Dylan

dylan's paintings also suck & he's just as pretentious you buncha stans
not voting in this poll, both are great artists, I listen to loads more joni & think musically she's a bunch more interesting but dylan's a titan & a better rock guitarist but OTOH the claims made for him as The Inventor Of The Confessional Style are completely absurd & also not worth arguing abt because the ppl who're convinced of it won't be swayed by anything so there is not point getting into it
― in which we apologize for sobering up (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved),

Dylan is a MUCH better painter than Joni, and I've never heard him pontificate about them the way she does, but maybe I missed it. And what's a stan?

You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them.

I'm sorry, but this is quality lolz/genius-level quote

what's a stan?

hardcore fan a la Eminem's totally unlistenable crapfest of a hit single "Stan"

eh, it's not so bad

You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them.

I'm sorry, but this is quality lolz/genius-level quote

― the sound of a norwegian guy being wrong (Shakey Mo Collier), Wednesday, May 12, 2010 6:30 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

And what's a stan?

― iago g., Wednesday, May 12, 2010 6:30 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i think i said this in another thread--but anyone who has listened to any of jonis albums, and is surprised that she doesnt like popular people whose motivations arent always clear, is not really listening to the lyrics

I don't really consider myself a Dylan stan fwiw (esp compared to various other ILMers), it's pretty rare that I listen to Dylan, don't own anything post-1982 etc.

"If you want me I'll be in the bar."

i'm a dylan stan, but i fully admit that the dude is full of shit 25% of the time. just the right amount.

I love Joni and all but Dylan really is funny. is there any humor in Joni anywhere at all? I bet she can't tell a joke to save her life.

Blue has a few zingers. I don't go to her for humor though; she was always a crank with unusual insight into her self-absorption. But as her songwriting deteriorated that's all we had left.

she was always a crank with unusual insight into her self-absorption.

this is otm & maybe why I like her so much - I think Dylan's a superior craftsman, but his insight is kind of Yngwie-esque in its "you're good at this, but I sometimes wonder whether that's your whole point" - I mean in the case of Dylan, I think his technical mastery of lyric is so breathtaking as to render any questions about it pretty pointless (vs. Yngwie who's got speed but no taste), whereas I relate to Joni Mitchell, even when what that tells me about myself is "you're full of shit"

also gotta give Joni credit, as boorish as she can be, at least she knows how to tie a song up instead of letting it run on for fourteen verses just so she's gotten every last endrhyme in

yeah, joni at her best is waaaaaay more economic/incisive than Dylan. i imagine their songwriting processes are ridiculously different -- joni probably slaves over her lyrics, re-writing/editing, while Dylan generally just throws what he's got into a song. there's a story Leonard Cohen told where Dylan asked him how long it took him to write "hallelujah" and Cohen says 10 years. Then Leonard asks Dylan how long it took him to write some song (can't remember which) and Bob says "15 minutes."

here's the actual story:
"He said, 'I like this song you wrote called Hallelujah.' In fact, he started doing it in concert. He said, 'How long did that take you to write?' And I said, 'Oh, the best part of two years.' He said, 'Two years?' Kinda shocked. And then we started talking about a song of his called I And I from Infidels. I said, 'How long did you take to write that.' He said, 'Ohh, 15 minutes.' I almost fell off my chair. Bob just laughed."

is there any humor in Joni anywhere at all?

Cheech & Chong sang backup on "Twisted"! And "Raised On Robbery" was kind of funny, had lines about the Maple Leafs and stuff. But yeah, beyond Court And Spark, she wasn't exactly a laugh riot.

Honestly, if she has any obscure stray album tracks anywhere along the lines of "Raised On Robbery," I'd love to know what they are.

off-topic but does Neil Young make jokes?
i mean i love him and I know he's funny and i think he knows he's funny but he's pretty deadpan, isn't he?
like piece of crap, wonderin', welfare mothers are all pretty funny - but kinda melancholy too

i never, ever said anything fawning about dylan in my rag on joni, so how does that make me a "stan"? just curious...

am i right in thinking dylan and cohen are way more obviously jokey?

than neil?

in terms of laffs it goes:
cohen>dylan>neil>>>>joni

funniest singer-songwriter

to whoever called Dylan a hippie tramp

Dylan wasn't a hippie, for god's sake

"I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past 20 years, really. You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like … static… Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded 'em. CDs are small. There's no stature to it." -- Bob Dylan

― in which we apologize for sobering up (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved)

dylan's quite clearly talking about the production values/sound and not claiming that modern songwriters are all talentless idiots.

oh Neil tells some jokes for sure

I voted for Raised on Robbery in the Court + Spark poll, yeah it is probably Joni's lone funny moment...

J0hn, why do you think Dylan's a better guitarist? (Or is the emphasis on "rock" in that sentence? Still want to know.)

(Also, Joni.)

Emphasis is just on "rock" - from a strictly muso standpoint, Joni'd walk this otherwise imo; her tunings used to be traded among people (here's one thing about that, but things like this were among the earliest uses of the internet for me & for other curious guitarists). Dylan used open tunings and alt tunings too, and may have learned them from jn early on, but it doesn't seem to have been a lifelong interest of his. But jm's style begins as folk and moves into something more folk-jazz pretty quickly - even by blue, theres' a restlessness, and of course by summer lawns her jazz leanings/affectations (depending on how you look at it) have pretty much taken over. Dylan OTOH, he's a strat man isn't he? i mean- his acoustic is obv where he makes his bones but part of why I think he goes electric is that his touch is pretty intensely chuck berry/early rock informed.

J0hn, I'd no idea it was you (I need to figure out how people can guess who's who around here)!

dylan can be an amazingly bad guitarist too ... there are bootlegs where he plays the same exact solo on every song. it's kinda weird, it's like he plays lead guitar as though he's playing harmonica.

there are bootlegs where he plays the same exact solo on every song

^^^comedy

Heylin's No Direction Home includes lots of snark from members of Dylan's nineties touring bands, inspired by his decision to suddenly play lead. Keith Richards once said that Mick Jagger and Dylan were the worst electric rhythm guitarists on earth -- "they play the thing like they're scrubbin' fuckin' laundry" (he says Mick has improved lots since then though).

huh, i thought Jagger was secretly supposed to be a really good guitarist? maybe I'm wrong. but i think Dylan's scrubby style can be really good if the people he's playing with can kinda go with it.

Keef's revisionism was inspired by how well Jagger plays on A Bigger Bang (on which he and Keith play most of the instruments).

I would never have called out Dylan's rock playing, have no idea what J0hn's talking about tbh

sw00ds told me recently that one of the weirder sights of his childhood was watching Jagger strap on a guitar in the late seventies. Not because Jagger was bad at it -- it just seemed incongruous to him.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

I mean, where in his catalog is Dylan's electric playing even prominent/audible...? if you watch the footage from Eat the Document/Don't Look Back dude barely plays his guitar at all, and he's always seemed to prominently rely on other lead players, no?

I could be wrong and just listening to his sidemen tbqf - he's on electric on the hwy 61 album a lot ain't he, and in his maligned eighties records?

Mostly playing electric rhythm, but yes.

if you watch the footage from Eat the Document/Don't Look Back dude barely plays his guitar at all, and he's always seemed to prominently rely on other lead players, no?

I should say though, I haven't seen either of these or any Dylan footage hardly at all really & have been making auteur-based assumptions about who's playing what on his records for years; I am probably actually praising Robbie Robertson for all I know

or Mike Bloomfield or Al Kooper...

or Paul Butterfield

I mean I agree the playing on that mid-60s stuff in particular is amazing I just never thought it was Bob. but I'll defer to tyler or Alfred or whoever else is more schooled in Dylan lore.

obviously his acoustic playing is next level

respect to those guys, who have made Dylan seem to one casual Dylan listener like a better electric guitarist than he is for years

dylan is like a songwriter to me.

― plax (ico), Wednesday, 12 May 2010 17:09 (6 hours ago)

No, no -- the lead guitar work from the sixties was all Butterfield, Kooper, among others.

As far as I know, Dylan has never played lead on his recordings. He HAS played plenty of piano though: New Morning mostly, and all over Modern Times and Together Through Life, plus many tracks over the years.

You can always distinguish Dylan's piano playing: like Bryan Ferry, he concentrates on the black keys.

yeah his piano skills are pretty distinctive

Dylan really didn't start playing any lead guitar until the Rolling Thunder years, afaik. And then he *really* started playing lead during the Neverending Tour Years (though he mainly plays keys these days). Sometimes he's kinda inspired, sometimes he's awful. It's kind of exciting that way. Again, I think it sorta depends on the band -- if they can sort of weave themselves around his playing, it sounds pretty sweet. That might be the way it's always been -- he's always been a *forceful* player, it just depends on whether his band can adjust to that style.

obviously his acoustic playing is next level

Expand please? (Sincere qn. This statement is not obvious to me but you might actually be able to make me appreciate this guy. Bear in mind that I do not have a deep knowledge at all of his catalogue and virtually never listen to BD for pleasure.

I like it when other people do his songs though.

Also, boo to the results.)

pre-electric period (and some post- too, definitely) Dylan showcased a pretty remarkable aptitude for a number of different picking and tuning techniques. I'm not as technically well versed as other people here (J0hn or Dan, for instance) but I can tell you I have never been able to figure out how exactly he does "Don't Think Twice It's Allright", for example. the underlying chord progression and melody are pretty simple (it's actually very similar to These Days), but the actual tuning and picked part that he plays bewilders me.

funny, there are some people who say that the guitar on "Don't Think Twice" is actually played by Bruce Langhorne. I guess they just compare it to live versions from the same time ... and Dylan can't really play it like the record either!

lol

what a fraud!

there's other examples, that's just the first one I could think of off the top of my head

Everything about Bob is a deception.

i think it's just speculation though ... Langhorne isn't credited with doing it on the record ... I guess someone should ask him!
this is a bizarre dylanologist clusterfuck on the topic: http://dylanchords.info/professors/tt/ttch13.html

Dylan was the first major figure in pop/rock to come along and present his songs as being explicitly from HIS point of view, with his own unique vocabulary and personal voice

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_9CfjPN2CcUU/SiWrdbOytuI/AAAAAAAAACo/ARUYolPKtyU/s400/HeyBoDiddley.jpg

yeah I love Bo Diddley, but not what I was talking about really

kinda feel like anybody defending dylan's paintings (which i saw an exhib. of in london two summers ago) doesn't really care abt. painting or what painting is.

i like the cover of self portrait but yeah i don't really get painting :/

some nice picking on Nashville Skyline Rag fyi

listening to new morning. "if dogs run free" sounds like a joni diss track

i like that reading

how is it a joni diss track?

the tinkling piano and the female harmonies sound like a joni send up. maybe

I don't hear that - it sounds more like a deadpan whiteboy blues joke.

Oh, although when I think about it, was Joni in her jazz period yet at that point? I could see maybe the scat thing being a dig.