Dylan is 60 on thursday time to reflect

So erm...he never meant shit to me :)

I prefer technology to people, in almost all situations, but I haven't had a problem with Dylan since I got over my punk-rock- ayatollah problem with *everything*

Classic: specially Slow Train Coming

I blame Paul Simon for the Kings of Convenience, so I'd prefer to reflect on him and whether his crimes will stand up in court.

His double live album form '66 is fantastic and especially the secone half- the one where he plugs the elctrics and pisses off the folkies- is great and he deserves our respect. So forget the influence, just listen to the records.

Still working on 'serious' answer to original qn.

Referring to my New Favorite Album again -- I'll take the way Maynard James Keenan sings "pine away" at the end of "Reflection" over the entirety of Bob Dylan's back catalog. No regrets. ;-)

2. I quite like 1.Outside and Earthling.

3. I love Dylan - but I appreciate that that's not an answer to the question.

70! keep on keeping on Bobby

Have heard conflicting reports on whether he can still play guitar/keys onstage or not due to arthritis. A couple years ago, no. But then someone told me he recently was seen doing both, so maybe he found some meds that work. Either way, the guy's always been way underrated as a player.

yeah he plays both onstage, a bit more keyboard than guitar. i think he's also doing the thing where he just stands center stage with a harmonica on some tunes.
happy birthday, man of mystery!

btw if anyone needs a basement tapes fix, i just posted the whole shebang over here: http://doomandgloomfromthetomb.tumblr.com/post/5800834205/a-tree-with-roots-bob-dylan-is-70-years-old

Happy 70th birthday, enjoy your never-ending touring schedule

"Tarantula" is £3 in Fopp at the moment. It's been re-printed with a much better photo and a style makeover.

It's actually much easier to read now, and it's damn funny (Something like Lennon's "Write"/"Spaniard" but much more of it)

I can't remember where, but Marcus once wrote something to the effect that artists know things the rest of us don't. I've never believed that--I think we know the same things, which is why we respond. They have the ability to express those things, and they draw them out of us--but we know them too.

"I'll Keep It with Mine" is one of the first Bob Dylan songs I'd point to if were to concede the point; I do believe that in 1965 and 1966, Dylan knew things that I don't know. I wish I could post his version--the one with all the "Alcatraz to the ninth power" jibberish as a preamble--but I can't find it on YouTube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hMBDw7X2BU&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1&safe=active

HB Bob

I've only heard the first disc of A Tree with Roots so far, but that is great stuff. The Johnny Cash covers are startlingly good.

tyler - you get my email?

yes! sorry, totally forgot to respond. haven't listened yet, but THANKS!

cool!

Tyler, has anyone ever told you how amazing you are? Thanks!

lol you're welcome

Yeah, thanks, I've only had the first disc for some time now.

Bootleg Series vol. 2 was my first exposure to Dylan and I think "Santa Fe" might still be my favorite two minutes of his.

This just in: Paul Simon also turns 70 this year. Also, Leonard Cohen is still 76.

So is Dylan forever stuck now in that final stage of being an artist? In that he just "is"? Having done everything, known to everyone, all real creativity behind him, treated with respect but also as if he were a generation's grandpa? No real controversy to be expected any more? (people hardly seem to give a fuck that he's playing China leaving his protest songs off the setlist) All the attention and respect and extra issues of mags and radio shows: it's pouring one out for the old cool guy who turned 70 isn't it?

All signs seem to point to complete irrelevancy. And I'm down with that. Anything to shush that yearly whining of fans about "Dyland deserves the Nobel Prize for Poetry!".

Maybe if he keeps doing stuff like the Christmas album and the so-so "Together Through Life," but frankly the three albums before that were his best in 30 years.

Christmas album was best thing he's done since Love and Theft.

Christmas album and the so-so "Together Through Life," but frankly the three albums before that were his best in 30 years.

fixed

Shakey speakin' truth.

WHO LAUGHS THIS WAY HO HO HO?!
SANTA LAUGHS THIS WAY HO HO HO

DASHER DANCER PRANCER VIXEN
EISENHOWER KENNEDY JOHNSON NIXON
DASHER DANCER PRANCER VIXEN
CARTER REAGAN BUSH AND CLINTON

The idea of a Tom Waits Christmas album >>>>Bob Dylan's actual Christmas album

I think his career has been in a late, great flowering mode since "Time Out of Mind" ('97), "Love and Theft" ('01) and "Modern Times" ('06).

Also a couple of later non-album songs like "Tell Ol' Bill" and especially "Things Have Changed" completely kill me.

He makes 70 look very, very good, artistically.

he also just plain looks good for seventy, i have to say. what's 'tell ol'bill'?

i think dylan's ability to do something that looks like 'mature work' in the rock idiom is kind of fantastic

Virginia Plain OTM. I'd date it to World Gone Wrong, the best record he'd made since at least Blood On The Tracks, and maybe since John Wesley Harding.

Yeah I think of his career as, incendiary '60s, unpredictable '70s, unmoored (but periodically fascinating) '80s, retrenching '90s, magisterial '00s. And now possibly into an affable comfort zone.

I'm not the first person to think "Love and Theft" is as good as anything he did in the sixties.

The 'outtakes film' of Don't Look Back that Pennebaker assembled a couple years ago, 65 Revisited, shows what a great snotnose he was.

I'm partial to "Tangled Up in Blue" and "Brownsville Girl."

I think his last 20 years really have been pretty amazing. Not many people can match him in that period.

yep

and I don't care for WGW all that much -- for the same reason, more or less, why I don't care for "Dark Eyes."

I'm a believer in Dylan as something like a channeller of "the old weird America." When World Gone Wrong came out, it was incredible because that essence was suddenly there again. No matter how good he might have been in the '70s and '80s, it didn't seem like it was.

Huh, I've heard a couple of great covers of "Dark Eyes," from Patti Smith and Alejandro Escovedo.

Prime Dylan was so angry and cynical that his humor always got subsumed by the dark cloud of intensity hovering over him. But recent Bob, when he lets loose a zinger, is some funny stuff. The line about repeating the past, and its delivery, in "Summer Days" cracks me up just thinking about it. "She said 'You can't repeat the past.' I said, "You can't? What do you mean you can't? Of course you can." I find that bit so equally hilarious and inspiring.

and stolen from The Great Gatsby. American pop culture is One Long Song.

Didn't know that! (Shoulda known that?) Anyway, that sort of makes it funnier.

yeah i find the humor/sharpness of his recent stuff so inspiring. in the mid-90s, he really did seem kind of lost (even though I did see a couple good shows then). and time out of mind -- that felt like a strong statement, but it also felt like a last will and testament in some ways. just this wasted voice in the wilderness, with things falling apart. (now i see that more as an aesthetic choice - maybe on the part of lanois more than dylan). so when love & theft came out, it sounded so on point and precise and vital -- and yeah, funny -- that i didn't feel like i was just following dylan because he was dylan. i was following him because he was making amazing music.

TOOM was a faze -- a haze -- he had to maneuver past.

yeah i was listening to tell tale signs today and you can see in the TOOM outtakes that they left the sharper arrangements/songs out! mississippi, red river shore, dreaming of you, marching to the city etc. which is a weird strategy, but i guess it worked.

they left the sharper arrangements/songs out!

bob dylan did this?!

("red river shore"'s rad, yeah.)

haha, yeah, i guess he's got a pattern. who knows, there are probably rad love & theft outtakes that'll come out on the bootleg series vol. 27

You never want to compliment a song in Dylan's presence.

in the liners for tell tale signs, it says jim dickinson was freaked out that "red river shore" wasn't included on TOOM. guess he must've told bob it was great.

the Classic 60s Dylan Moment i won't be too cool to compliment tonight: the inter-verse pause between "LET ME THINK FOR A MINUTE SON" and "WELL YES I THINK IT CAN BE EASILY DONE"

in the liners for tell tale signs, it says jim dickinson was freaked out that "red river shore" wasn't included on TOOM. guess he must've told bob it was great.

Or he told Lanois it was great. Supposedly Dylan was getting seriously fed up with Daniel, which is why an early attempt at "Love and Theft" with Lanois producing was scrapped.

The thing about WGW that I love is that it sounds like Dylan trying not just to remember what he does, but why he loved doing it (which he had largely ceased to do in the 80s, by his own admission). The whole record comes across as a casual yet monumental revelation about himself to himself.

And his voice has only gotten better with age. Only an aughties-voiced Dylan could make "A Change Is Gonna Come" as heavy as Bob did when he sang it at the Apollo (and which has fucking disappeared from YouTube).

No-one's mentioned Infidels yet. That was the first Dylan album I ever heard and I still think it's a cracking late-period Dylan album. Other than that I can get behind Oh Mercy and Time out of Mind, as much for their shimmering Lanois production as for the songs themselves. In fact maybe that's one of the reasons why I like Infidels as well, because of the Knopfler production. I like Dylan when he sounds disconnected from himself.

eh what I meant to say is that Dylan's skills as a musician, producer and arranger are rudimentary and that I like those records where he cedes control of the sound to someone better placed to make them sound good.

"Jokerman" is top ten Dylan, "I and I," "Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight," "Sweetheart Like You" -- terrific. The rest is hectoring garbage, and, like all Serious Dylan Fans, I prefer the outtakes.

he also just plain looks good for seventy, i have to say. what's 'tell ol'bill'?

Thank you; I wasn't sure how to say that without sounding lecherous. "Tell Ol' Bill" was apparently written for the soundtrack of a film called "North Country" ('05) but the version I've heard is on the Bootleg Series Vol. 8 (not sure if it is signficantly different).

I'd date it to World Gone Wrong, the best record he'd made since at least Blood On The Tracks

I actually haven't heard this. Homework!

time out of mind has more than one really good song on it but it's generally kinda witless.

Hmm, I think it's a bit cold, dispassionate and slick (thanks to La Noise?) especially considering the records that came after, but I think every song on it is pretty essential. Especially "Highlands," but really every song that leads up to it as well.

The way he lands a line like, "I used to care, but things have changed" -- there's a richness and knowingness he has now that makes him seem more than arch or caustic or ironic or the other modes he was a pro at in his 20s and 30s.

Omigod--I have been mildly obsessed with this song all year. I always wish that the lyrics: "I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range" were actually "I'm locked in tight, I'm out of RAGE" though.

How is Chronicles, by the way?

A lot of fun, Virginia. He'll regale you with unexpected asides, such as when he shares that he spent hours in the New York Public Library reading about the Civil War, or in a backwoods Louisiana road hearing Paula Abdul in the rain. I also admire his insistence on writing about smaller records like Oh Mercy and New Morning.

Chronicles is a masterpiece. Saying Bob had a strong 2000s is like saying Picasso had a good cubist period. With 2 A+ records, Chronicles and the Theme Time Radio Hour, the guy was untouchable.

World Gone Wrong...can't go wrong there either. Here is the video for one of the obvious highlights.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nz542iQchN4

as far as the 00s go, don't forget about masked and anonymous! on second thought, forget about it.

I watched some of that on TV once. Terrible, but kind of entertaining if you don't care that it's terrible.

Thinking about Chronicles, it's interesting how the literary voice in that seems so much of a piece with the musical voice of the recent albums. I don't just mean the singing, tho that obviously too, but the whole musical persona of the albums -- the kind of loose, wizened swing of them, worldly but not weary, it's how the narrator of Chronicles sounds. I think it's the voice he needed to find, which is what I think the two folk albums were about -- stripping himself back so he could build something different. TOOM got him partway there, but the production is sort of like a hangover of the prior period. Love and Theft is where that voice really comes together, imo. (And for my money, Modern Times is its apex, tho I hate to pit those albums against each other.)

he's matched the disintegration of his physical range with the expansion of his comedic.

Totally agree. The way he lands a line like, "I used to care, but things have changed" -- there's a richness and knowingness he has now that makes him seem more than arch or caustic or ironic or the other modes he was a pro at in his 20s and 30s. (And warmth -- on Love and Theft and Modern Times, he's such a warm singer. Not to mention the Christmas album.)

― something of an astrological coup (tipsy mothra), Wednesday, May 25, 2011 12:52 AM (17 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I think some people can get past the raw sound of his marble-mouthed, cigarette-stained voice now better than others. Non fanatics of music like my sister and people in my office all groaned about the sound of Dylan's voice on any recent awards show they saw him on. I've read non music critics express their difficulty with his voice too (as well as people who just knew the 60s songs that got radio play). I love the recent albums too, but I'm not sure I can convince my sister and others to deal with the sound of his voice and appreciate the elements you guys point out. He's more of an acquired taste (again).

Depends on the album. He sounds smoother on Modern Times than he did 15 years earlier on the folk albums. But pretty croaky on Together Through Life and the Christmas album. And live or on TV, yeah, for one thing he just can't project all that well.

I think some people can get past the raw sound of his marble-mouthed, cigarette-stained voice now better than others.

I can't get past it myself. It works on the Xmas album cuz it's just one long drunken-singalong but on his normal material it's just ugh. he sounds like John Lee Hooker with emphysema and a mouth full of mashed potatoes

"Jokerman" is top ten Dylan, "I and I," "Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight," "Sweetheart Like You" -- terrific. The rest is hectoring garbage, and, like all Serious Dylan Fans, I prefer the outtakes.

― The Edge of Gloryhole (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Wednesday, May 25, 2011 6:04 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

otm. love those songs....sweetheart like you sounds like a blood on the tracks era song

Standing on the water, casting your bread
While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing
Distant ships sailing into the mist
You were born with a snake in both of your fists
while a hurricane was blowing

^^i mean dude bobby bringing the raw uncut ish right there, fuck me, so much amazing imagery in a couple stanzas

What gets me is his phrasing. "Jokerman" is the tune I play for skeptics of Dylan's singing.

yeah his singing on that is incredible. there's a funny alternate lyric for that song too
So swiftly the sun sets in the sky,
You rise up and say goodbye to no one.
No store bought shirt for you on your back,
One of the women must sit in the shack and sew one.

but yeah, you can only imagine that people like, say, leonard cohen would hear jokerman and fall on the floor.

Oh, man, I think (and I think I'm 100% alone in this) that the movie "Masked and Anonymous" is a perfect Dylan artifact, the cinematic equivalent of a song like "Desolation Row": it's serious, it's tongue-in-cheek, it's self-aggrandizing, it's a pastiche, it's pretentious, it's self-mocking, it wears its heart on its sleeve, but the sleeve's covered by another sleeve. It shows you all its flaws and forces you to forgive them because they're integral to the "success" of the project. It's too long. It's not long enough.

Hell, and I've never even watched it high...

And the band! The band in that movie! Jesus, the version of "Cold Irons Bound" from the soundtrack is top-five Dylan for me. Maybe #2 or 3 on a good day.

Story is they cut twenty-something songs for the movie and only 4 came out on the soundtrack. Weirdly for Bob, I've never seen the rest bootlegged anywhere. If anyone has a link or a clue or a hint....

Happy birthday, you sly motherfucker. Long may your old candle burn.

don't think any of the masked and anonymous sessions have made it to bootleg, but yeah, those songs on the soundtrack are great. and i do kinda admire the movie for being a pretty faithful cinematic version of dylan's songs -- it's just that dylan's songs work so much better as songs.

but yeah, you can only imagine that people like, say, leonard cohen would hear jokerman and fall on the floor.

dylan is supposed to have asked cohen how long "hallelujah" took to write, and cohen says somberly that it took three years, and asks how long "i and i" took to write, and dylan says "about five minutes", which is way better than anything in don't look back

There was that thing about how Dylan told Lennon "I could write "She loves you" but you could never have written "Desolation Row""

The opposite is true, however.

Is that right? I thought it was Dylan telling Jagger that he could've written "Satisfaction," but Jagger couldn't have written "Like a Rolling Stone." I wouldn't be surprised if both are true. (Dylan to Sam the Sham: "I could've written 'Wooly Bully'...")

(Dylan to Chuck Barris "I could have written Pallisades Park,....")

Man, I can't believe Dylan is 60, such an old geezer!

Dylan to Sam the Sham: "I could've written 'Wooly Bully'..."

Steady on there

Dylan to Ying Yang Twins: "I coulda written 'Wait (The Whisper Song)'."

Actually, when I think about the Soup Greens (from the Nuggets LP), Dylan did write "Wooly Bully," except he called it "Like a Rolling Stone."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIevcLfERW4&safety_mode=true&persist_safety_mode=1&safe=active

I just checked out Chronicles, so thanks for all of the feedback. It looks like a fun read. It's a lot shorter than I imagined though, and I'm disappointed there's no index.

Dylan to Sam the Sham: "I could've written 'Wooly Bully'..."

Reminded of the famous Lou Reed/Lester Bangs' interview/confrontation.

Reed (on David Bowie): "He writes good songs."
Bangs: "Songs! Anyone can write good songs, has he ever written anything as good as 'Woolly Bully'?"

I think an index to Chronicles would take six months to produce but only be half a page long.

also it would be full of people and events that dylan made up.

all an index for chronicles would do is provide more opportunities for people to say WAIT WHY ISN'T--

Oh, the "Phil Ochs" question...

We could make our own index, sort of like what Spy Magazine did for the Andy Warhol Diaries? Except much less labor intensive.