Dylan

Also, Dylan OTM. I’d be interested to hear Townshend’s reaction/response.

Because Dylan is really known for his riffs

Has Bob really been irritated by this song for nearly 60 years?

Ah now it makes sense, thanks! xxp

Didn't realize this:

https://www.nme.com/features/music-interviews/the-psychedelic-furs-tim-butler-david-bowie-pretty-in-pink-2808731

NME's Q: Which Bob Dylan song did you reject when he sent it to you for inclusion on the Psychedelic Furs 1984 album ‘Mirror Moves’?
Tim Butler's answer: “Clean Cut Kid.”

CORRECT.

“It had about 15 verses – it was a long song! (Laughs) He sent it to us because his son Jakob was a fan back then and said: ‘Hey, Dad, these guys are cool’. Richard still has the cassette of it, and it was a huge deal because our father was a big Bob Dylan fan and would buy his records on the day they came out and we’d all sit round and listen to them. He was a massive influence on Richard and I, so to have a song that was written by him sent to us was a great pat on the back.”

From a new interview with John Mellencamp by the NY Times:

Mellencamp: I’m going to quote Bob Dylan to you. Bob and I were painting together one day, and I asked him how he wrote so many great songs. In all seriousness, he said, “John, I’ve written the same four (expletive) songs a million times.” I’m going to get in line with Bob on that. It’s always the same song, just more mature or with a different angle.

Haha, that's perfect

Surprise set at Farm Aid, backed by Tom Petty's Heartbreakers! And he's switched back to guitar for the first time in many years!

https://vimeo.com/867585062

so awesome. i’d been watching the Farm Aid livestream for a while & the way i YELLED when he appeared

and with the goddamn Heartbreakers!

best surprise

I love that his most stunning move to play a set of songs everyone knows with a band everyone loves. This is great!

I love this. I have tickets to the Chicago show. But i really think this might leg of the Never Ending tour

*might be the last leg of the Never Ending Tour

I hope I'm wrong obviously.

Funny that one of the first things I see on here after having the first disc of Blonde on Blonde on for the first time in ages is a thread started in reference to one of its songs.

I'm not getting the image of the guy who builds a fire on main street and fills it full of holes. Unless it is a call for better gun control or something.

& I thought for a moment I was just about to read that Bob had died.

The book was quite fun and a quick read though I to still need to listen to a lot of it. Though think I was already somewhat familiar with a load of those tracks

“Absolutely Sweet Marie” came on in the car yesterday and I cranked it up, the way it just careens along, it’s like the band are riding flat out alongside each other and grinning.

Not strictly necessary o course, but v. fun:
Jason and the Scorchers, "Absolutely Sweet Marie" (original studio version, haven't checked the live ones yet)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKqQJuJqN6Q

Dylan is playing new songs every night (usually two) and they are covers with some relation to the city he's in. He opened the tour in Kansas City and played Wilbert Harrison's standard "Kansas City." In St. Louis, he bookended his show with two Chuck Berry covers ("Johnny B. Goode" and "Nadine"). And last night in Chicago, it was "Born in Chicago" (probably in tribute to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band as it was the opening track of their debut and Dylan famously recorded and performed at Newport with its members) as well as "Forty Days and Forty Night" by Muddy Waters.

Saw him tonight. No surprise covers unfortunately. But I loved the new version of Key West that he did. He closed with Every Grain of Sand and it was one of the best live versions I’ve ever heard.

i will be seeing Dylan in Springfield, Mass in a couple weeks and I will be satisfied with nothing less than a medley of musical numbers from The Simpsons

He covered Leonard Cohen's "Dance Me To the End of Love" in Cohen's hometown of Montreal the other night.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAVmw94Zds

Picked up the new book from the archive yesterday, Bob Dylan: Mixing up the Medicine, and based on a quick flip through it looks like a great trove of stuff I haven't seen before. Enjoyed the Lucy Sante piece from it that Dow linked in another thread.

Glad you liked it: https://lithub.com/how-bob-dylan-blurred-the-boundaries-between-literature-and-popular-music/ ("Not my title!" LS sez)

Last night's show at the Beacon Theater opened with a verse from Billy Joel's "New York State of Mind." Then towards the end of the show, after introducing his band, Dylan said, “Jann Wenner is here tonight. He was kicked out of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. We don’t like that. We’re trying to get him back in.” Yeeesh.

Next month is 50th anniversary of the 1974 tour. I’m completely unfamiliar with this era—is Before the Flood the best document of the tour, or is there an individual show/bootleg compliation that’s better?

My short answer would be that it’s the best available and best sounding representation we have.

Long answer:

The tour was more interesting at the start because the setlist wasn’t set in stone and had a number of surprises. The first show above all had the most (and welcome) surprises, opening with “Hero Blues,” unveiling a few more songs from Planet Waves (nearly everything from that album was eventually dropped from the tour after a few weeks), the great lost outtake “Nobody ‘Cept You” (one of my favorites) and for the only time of the tour, Dylan plays on a Band number, playing harmonica on their great cover of “Share Your Love with Me.” If I could have one show in pristine sound, it would be that tour opening show - I hope a soundboard recording was made but I have my doubts one exists anywhere. That’s the problem with the early shows - they may be more interesting, but they mostly exist as audience recordings and can be rough listening. A soundboard or PA feed was recorded on January 14 but by then the setlist was becoming much more standardized with much fewer surprises. However Dylan’s singing wasn’t quite as mannered as it would be in the final two weeks when he was shouting more and more with less nuance in his phrasing. Unfortunately those later shows are the only ones that were professionally recorded. The upshot is that the Band played better as the tour went on and come off great on the final two shows performed on Valentine’s Day - selections from those shows dominate the official live album. Frustratingly, the final show had the tour’s only performance of “Mr. Tambourine Man” which was dedicated to Sara (her favorite song) but it was not included on the official live album.

“Professionally recorded” meaning multi-track recordings

Thanks! I’ll check out Before the Flood and the opening show—I’ve heard enough Dead AUD tapes that maybe I won’t mind so much.

i'm blanking on where I read this, but i want to say there are more multitracks of the 1974 shows in the dylan archives ... maybe i dreamt it. some of the soundboards are decent (oakland, NYC). will be interesting if they do anything to commemorate the 50th anniversary — with Robertson's recent passing, seems like a good time?

it's really too bad there isn't a concert doc of this tour, though — I feel like the energy would suit itself to that format ...

However Dylan’s singing wasn’t quite as mannered as it would be in the final two weeks when he was shouting more and more with less nuance in his phrasing.

yeah, as loved as Before the Flood is - I can't really stand Dylan in that mode, such a waste

even Levon gets a bit shouty on some of the Band things, but that said I've always loved Dixie here

The shoutiness totally works for me, Dylan's and Levon's. I prefer several versions here to the originals, even: for inst, the original "Don't Think Twice" sounds fussy faux-hillbily compared to the reggae-oid "someone to give his ha!-ha!" heartiness on the electric set, while the solo acoustic has him flashing back (or experiencing a Blood On The Tracks-related?) mixed-up confusion, like, what just happened? What did she do? Should he even be leaving, and anyway where is he going? But he's going alright, and "Don't think twice it's alrieeet---" Also the jittery raspy proto-rap of "It's Alright Ma." which Lester Bangs compared to Paul Newman in Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill Among The Indians, Or, Sitting Bull's History Lesson: the return of the battered Americana hero "in full scraggle." One of the great arena rock albums of the 70s, esp. by older guys, in there with Rock N Roll Animal(although I've played BTF a lot more than that) and Van Morrison's It's Too Late To Stop Now (almost too sensitive at times to qualify for "arena," but the overall effect of the 2-LP is v. powerful.) I know we all hear what we hear, but gotta say that.

Sure, would love to hear a 50th Anniversary expansion, with or without audience tapes, esp. of songs not on Before..: whatever, bring it on.

your enthusiasm makes me want to revisit this, and I'm down for an official release of more tapes

I've had a good bootleg recording of October 17, 1987 for years - Dylan's backed by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers and IIRC the 1987 tour is held in higher regard than their 1986 tour together.

This show is supposed to be the highlight, and amazingly TWO different amateur videos exist of the concert, both from very different angles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXbDllRrT5k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pja9JSWE0Fk

Should mention, Roger McGuinn makes a guest appearance for "Chimes of Freedom" during the encore, then later George Harrison pops in for a guest appearance.

(Should also mention the sound on the camera close to the stage is abysmal.)

Awhile back there was a discussion on Dylan's heavy drinking during the '80s and I think I was trying to remember where it was well documented. I just stumbled on this paragraph from Clinton Heylin's bio:

By 1987, his drinking had again begun to get the better of him and when Kurt Loder arrived in Jerusalem on September 7 to interview him for a special twentieth-anniversary issue of Rolling Stone, he proceeded to sit through the interview drinking Kamikazes like they were Kool-Aid. Two days after he predicted tomorrow might be his dying day, an almost totally incoherent Dylan fell out of his chair after a hotel piano jam had found him hamming it up on ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ and ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco.’ He was consuming up to four Kamikazes or, later on the tour, Kahlúa, cream, and cognac, before each show. That he could even stand some nights qualified as some kind of achievement. Journalists at the shows couldn’t resist commenting on his shuffling demeanor, referring to his new image as the death-mask look.

Hey, Kamikazes! Those used to be my pleasure, er, downfall

Reminds me of a scene in a Tony Tyler book where an intoxicated Dylan, backstage in '66, pours so much cream or sugar into his coffee that it overflows onto the floor.

Random Internet story: https://www.instagram.com/p/C4JiGvzOY6P/

Incredible arrangement! What a fey trickster, he's clearly having a ball with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZB7QJjqmL0

I love Bob.

Just stumbled on a very handy site dedicated to lyric changes Dylan has made whenever he re-interprets a song. There are already a few sites that extensively document those changes, but this one allows you to toggle back and forth easily between lyrics, bolding the sections that are different:

https://dylyricus.com

What do we think of “jokerman?”

I fucking LOVE it. On paper it should fail miserably, in practice it is one of his best songs from the decade. Who's gonna argue with the rhythm section, for one?

Punk version is great, too.

love jokerman

caetano version rules imo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Syaoz-wLy_Y

The Bob Dylan Center's Director Steven Jenkins is presenting Dylan-related films again in NYC, and I went to the free presentation at the New School, but there's another tonight (Thursday) in Pleasantville at the Jacob Burns Center and another in Brooklyn at Nitehawk Cinema near Prospect Park. These screenings aren't free, you need to buy tickets to either event, but the Nitehawk screening will also have Ira Kaplan of Yo La Tengo moderating the post-screening discussion. (Also, regardless of which one you go to, you'll be entered in a free raffle for two complimentary round-trip plane tickets to Tulsa—redeemable within one year on American Airlines or Delta—and a tour of the Bob Dylan Center.)

Anyway, a lot of what was shown at the free screening looked familiar and was likely circulating in some form, but there are some new discoveries and I know for a fact the Jacob Burns Center will screen at least one different clip. A quick rundown:

The first clip is the real find but brief. It's a clip of Dylan’s first film soundtrack contribution, before his first album even came out! The late Tony Glover apparently discussed it when they interviewed him in the '90s for the project that evolved into No Direction Home, and it happens during the train ride interview seen briefly in that film. They took the relevant portion and use it to frame the relevant footage they found from that rediscovered film - a documentary put together by a Catholic group in response to HUAC (which they were very much against). Produced in 1961, it was called Autopsy on Operation Abolition. Unfortunately, Dylan's music is mixed into the background, so much that an interview subject dominates the audio, but it still has historical value. (I'm guessing the 20-minute raw recording Glover mentions is still lost. He says he remembers it well because it was the first time he saw magnetic tape, which in this case was mag-track complete with sprocket holes, the kind of tape you'd use for a motion picture.)

Next clip was a solo rendition of “Ballad of Hollis Brown” from the 1963 TV special Folk Songs and More Folk Songs. Great performance, they even cut to some extraordinary close-ups of Dylan - it's just startling to see him looking this young yet seeming very old at the same time, and despite the fact that it's vintage TV footage, the quality is really good. (Not to oversell it, it's not like you're looking at 35mm footage, but it still looks really good.)

After that, it's a clip shot by D A Pennebaker of the 1966 tour, a performance of "Baby Let Me Follow You Down." I forgot which show it was (they have a title card that indicates when and where) but it's amazing to watch. It's one angle, one complete and unbroken take, shot from stage right. When Dylan sings, it's a close-up on him, but when he backs away during an instrumental break, no matter how brief it is, Pennebaker zooms out so you can see Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson before zooming back in when Dylan sings again. Robbie and Garth looked incredibly young on this tour, especially without facial hair. I don't think I've ever seen Hudson without a thick beard after the 1966 tour.

Next was “I Pity the Poor Immigrant” from the Hard Rain footage from 1976. Joan Baez is there playing maracas and singing in the same mic as Dylan. Rob Stoner is prominently shown too. Not much of the other band members though. You do get a close-up of the pianist - can't tell if it was T-Bone Burnett or Howard Wyeth as I don't know how either looked in 1976 and they appeared too briefly for me to remember the face well. Fun almost jokey stop-start arrangement that seemed real "showbiz" - each of the stops was basically like a fake ending. In some way, this kind of makes the next tour - the bizarre one from 1978 - seem less of a surprise.

However, the next clip skips to 1981 where Dylan and his new band performs "Blowin' in the Wind" at one of the Florida shows, and it's another single, unbroken take, but this time the cameraman walks around the entire stage, almost simulating a tracking shot as best as they can with a handheld camera. Starts off with Clydie King, Regina McCrary and Madelyn Quebec wearing what may be choir gowns, then it circles around Dylan at the piano, then we see Jim Keltner appear, then another drummer, Arthur Rosato, and eventually Al Kooper who sounds magnificent playing a simple solo. The cameraman keeps moving and we see the rest of the band, and then Dylan hops down, grabs his guitar and finishes the song. The place (which looks like a small arena but per Bjorner is supposed to be a theater) is packed and the crowd is very enthusiastic - people in front are raising their hands like it's a revival.

Next clip is from one of the 1986 Australian shows for Hard to Handle, and a card tells us it was, at the time, the biggest multi-camera 35mm shoot in Australia's history. The Center is currently scanning ALL of the 35mm footage still in existence from those shows - I don't know if that implies some footage is lost, but afterwards they kind of suggested that they had a ton of footage they're scanning, so they still have plenty regardless. Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers as well as The Queens Of Rhythm (Debra Byrd, Queen Esther Marrow, Madelyn Quebec, Elisecia Wright) back Dylan, and they kind of make the performance because by now (and this applies to the 1981 clip too) Dylan's singing has kind of gone downhill, turning into the kind of thing comedians would exaggerate when spoofing Dylan.

But the next clip from 1993 is much better. It's the Supper Club performance of "Ring Them Bells" which was officially released, first on a CD-ROM then in audio form on Tell Tale Signs. It's a great clip and maybe the definitive performance of a great song. (The master take from Oh Mercy was already a perfect performance, so that's saying something.) Too bad the whole video hasn't been released, but the audio for all four Supper Club shows are out there in top-notch quality. Tonight's program at the Jacob Burns Center will feature "Tight Connection to My Heart" from these shows.

Next is the performance of "Train of Love" that was taped for a tribute to Johnny Cash. Home recordings of the broadcast special are on YouTube, but what's nice about this clip is that it's the original video so you're not seeing a screening of it in an auditorium or hearing people applause. Dylan's official Facebook page uploaded the same raw video a few years ago so it's not rare. This is also one unbroken take from one camera, and you see Larry Campbell, David Kemper and Tony Garnier, no one else from Dylan's band (if there's anyone else that was playing).

Next is "Cold Irons Bound" as it was filmed for Masked and Anonymous, also one unbroken take from one camera. Dylan's best band outside of the Hawks, though Kemper is now replaced by George Receli, a recent new addition when they filmed this performance. This is a very common clip - the audio was on the soundtrack, but the footage was put on promo DVD's, it's in the film itself, it was one of the first clips uploaded to YouTube and elsewhere whenever Dylan's camp would upload video to some new platform for the first time...IMHO it's still THE definitive performance of this song, and I even replaced the original album version with it whenever I listen to Time Out of Mind. I'm certain Dylan loves this clip, and not just because of the performance - Jenkins said when they filmed this clip, Dylan basically directed it. He set up the camera and the blocking then told Larry Charles THIS was the setup and not to touch anything - just roll camera and Dylan would start things off. Debate the film all you want, but for at least this particular scene, Dylan did a great job directing.

Next was a tribute to Tony Bennett, again one-camera, one unbroken take, with Dylan and the band performing "Once Upon a Time." I'm not a huge fan of this era but Charlie Sexton does a marvelous job here as he would on tour whenever Dylan did these songs. This was also broadcast so it's not rare.

The last thing they show was anticlimactic but worth seeing. Advertised as "a glimpse into the Archive’s film restoration project with never-before-seen footage of 'It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue' from 1966," it really is a glimpse. The restoration demonstration is pretty good - frustratingly they don't go into technical details (how was the original transfer of Pennebaker's 1966 footage "incorrect" per their words?) but you see the results. I don't want to say it's just "brighter" because that would imply they simply pushed everything in the lab, and it's not like they simply boosted the footage, otherwise the highlights would blow out. They manage to pull a lot more detail in the darker areas that originally fell off really fast, so while overall it does look about a stop brighter, it's as if you're seeing a much wider dynamic range and all this stuff that was sinking in the shadows is now clearly visible. (Sort of like the difference between seeing a show with your own eyes and looking at a video of it afterwards - your own vision adjusts all the exposure so everything's visible, but that's not how it shows up in the video.) At the very end of the demo, they show "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and it looks great, but we only get like 20 or 30 seconds before they fade out.

The Q&A afterwards was okay, but I don't remember it too well because it seemed to cover things I've already seen stated by the Center many times. A lot of Dylan-related people were apparently there that night, including Terri Thal, Dylan's first manager, and Mitch Blank, the famed Dylan collector. (Plus some other names that Jenkins pointed out, I think people who did some technical work for them or put together things like video for the exhibits at the Center, but I can't remember their names.)

One hilarious revelation - Clinton Heylin was at the Center for ten weeks to do research, and whatever he did outside of the Center really pissed off some of the locals because there are places in Tulsa where he's been permanently banned.

What do we think of “jokerman?”

― calstars, Saturday, August 24, 2024 2:53 PM

top ten Dylan -- one of the songs I play to non-fans to show how well Dylan can stress and throw away key syllables.

xp bitw thank you - fascinating account!

yeah, that is all very interesting! even with the No Direction Home film, it does seem like the 66 Pennebaker footage should be put together in some kind of cohesive package. it's just such great stuff — every time I see clips, I can't believe it exists.

that blowin in the wind 1981 clip went around at some point, it really is sublime.

in ray padgett's newsletter there was a recent/interesting interview with the filmmaker who shot the supper club shows, some discussion about why Dylan wasn't into releasing them ...

here are the unheard dylan tapes I want to be sitting in some box in Tulsa: "I did some sessions once with Don Cherry and Billy Higgins. I really don't know what happened to that stuff."

You're welcome! And I was actually wondering the other day why Dylan never tried working with full-on jazz musicians. If it happened now, I imagine it would be pretty conservative given his recent standards albums, but I don't think it would be too much of a stretch if it was an ace combo like Jason Moran, Dave Holland, Jack DeJohnette and Bill Frisell.

I saw that interview with Michael Borofsky! He even talks about the train interview with Glover since he filmed it - the moderator at the New School program mentioned that some people in the audience chuckled because they recognized some of the sights outside of the window, which apparently gave away which train line they were taking. (It's the one that follows the Hudson River.)

yeah he did a couple songs with wynton marsalis about a decade ago (or longer?) that ... were pretty good?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwE_zj8Y0X0

not exactly don cherry / billy higgins in the early 60s good ... but yeah, something like "Murder Most Foul" feels almost like it could go in a minimal modern jazz direction. almost surprising he hasn't done anything with frisell.

Stylistically Wynton Marsalis makes sense though it's interesting to see the differences in the way they both revisit the past (even the same pre-WWII eras). They've had a great deal of success in doing so - Dylan's modern-day resurgence comes directly out of it, and Marsalis has made himself synonymous with that approach - but Marsalis has been called a reactionary for adhering to a doctrinal philosophy whereas Dylan is very much a restless apostate.

But Marsalis has taken his old school stance into more of a good-humored, songster, Compleat Entertainer vein sometimes, like on his albums with Willie Nelson---I especially like their "tribute" to Ray Charles, which covers RC songs but for instance with some horns that sound more like Cab Calloway Orchestra soundtracking one of those bizarrely imaginative Fleischer Brothers cartoons in the 1930s---though also with relaxed vocals from Willie and Wynton (cool blue breezes of Norah-no-longer-Snorah Jones passing through sometimes).So I think WM and BD might go together well.
I saw Hard Rain in '76, on ABC, I think. Really fun, and the versions of "Oh Sister" and "Shelter From The Storn "uptempo, with slide guitar hook! Just follow that dream, boy), at least the ones on the HR LP, which is not all the same performances as the TV doc, top the originals, I think.
Don't remember a lot of particulars about the doc, but seems like it would be worth an official release, streaming license, something (as we were saying about other possible releases over on the Masked and Anonymous thread).

And speaking of Frisell, he's been on some strong Lucinda albums, and she's with him and the rest of Charles Lloyd & The Marvels on several Vanished Gardens---also their live "Masters of War, " which I hope suggests further possibilities to Mr. D.:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgVFLdwIRPU

Several Vanished Gardens tracks, that is.

Very true re: Marsalis. I don't follow him that closely, but I get the impression he's far less dogmatic than he was before, and collaborating with rock, pop and country stars is probably a reflection of that.

Frisell's pretty amazing - he just did a three week run at the Village Vanguard playing with three different combos. I was only able to catch one, but it's really impressive how he fits himself into any given context.