I’m Not There: thoroughly enjoyable … heartily recommended

Thanks to Bernard McGuinn:

“I'm Not There is a thoroughly enjoyable experience. Heartily recommended to anyone who loves film, loves Bob's music and isn't looking for historical documentary.

“Could well have been how Masked and Anonymous or Renaldo and Clara would have turned out if made by someone who knew how to make a good film!

“I laughed out loud at least six times during the film and the actual film soundtrack is so much better to listen to than the released double CD. There's no getting away from it - no one sings Dylan like Dylan!

“The film runs artistically in parallel with the esoteric masterpiece that it takes its name from - it feels that there's so much there, but you can't quite grasp what there is when you try to look up close.

“The critics, rightly, are raving about the enacting of the 65/66 Dylan incarnation, but there's much to be appreciated from the other roles; I loved the young black Dylan character with his tall tales of experience way beyond his years and the Richard Gere role of the reclusive Billy was awesome.”

New episodes of Dylan podcasts - official and fan-generated

The magnificent series of Dylan podcasts from Legacy Recordings, introduced by Patti Smith, has now reached programme 11, with Live At The Newport Folk Festival, the first of three slots on the epochal RI gigs. Programme 10, Gotta Serve Somebody, covered the Gospel years.

The Dylan podcasts are free. And you can subscribe via iTunes to receive future episodes automatically.

http://blogs.legacyrecordings.com/podcast/category/bob-dylan


And fan Mel Prussack's newest Dyl-Time Theme Radio Hour podcast is now also up and running – his theme this month is the year 1966. Mel’s Podomatic site has been having problems, but he's confident they're now solved.

http://dylanshrine.podOmatic.com


These two series will help Dylan fans with iPods banish the stultifying boredom of commuting.




Gerry Smith

DYLAN 3CD Limited Edition – time to reconsider?

Until I received the DYLAN 3CD Limited Edition as a present on Xmas morning, I’d been, like many readers, unmoved by the release: a missed opportunity … nothing new … repetition of earlier releases … blah, blah, blah …

Sure, I’ve bought all this music before, many times over. Sure, I’d have preferred another Bootleg Series release, especially a proper Basement Tapes. And, sure, I may never play the 3CD collection end to end.

But I can now see why Columbia released DYLAN. Clearly, it’s intended primarily to promote the back catalogue to younger consumers. But, beyond that, it’s a fitting tribute to a lifetime of timeless recordings by the biggest name on the label: the Dylan songbook is showcased here as never before.

And the packaging is appropriately reverential. From the three beautiful CD mini sleeves to the lavish 40 page booklet, and the set of 10 collectable cigarette card-type reproductions of show posters to the cloth-finished box, with its velvet lining and clever magnetized closing flap, this is an artefact assembled with skill and care.

DYLAN Limited Edition celebrates one of the great creative forces of the modern world. If, like me, you rejected it on release, it might be time to reconsider, especially if you can pick it up at discount – it’s doing the rounds at half price (£17).



Gerry Smith

Your best of 2007

Here’s wishing all readers of Dylan Daily a peaceful Christmas and a fruitful, fulfilling 2008.

And thanks for their best-of Dylan in 2007 picks to:

* Brad Saltzberg:

“1. The film I’m Not There

2. The cleaned-up, reissued version of Dylan singing I’m Not There

3. Million Dollar Bash by Sid Griffin.”


* Bill White:

“1. Bob singing Masters of War onstage at Bluesfest in Ottawa - on a field right beside Canada's War Museum.

2. Robyn Hitchcock playing a spellbinding cover of Not Dark Yet here in Ottawa at Zapod Beeblebrox in November.”


* Phil Mayr:

“Watchtower live by the drops band, south germany early ‘90s. the guys are weekend musicians, but did it quite nice... getting this copy is in my personal top 3 for 2007.”

The Bob Dylan Top 10 of 2007

This has been a richly productive Dylan year. In 2007 The Dylan Daily has covered a giddy succession of outstanding performances/products by and about Bobby, in an exploding range of media – live performance, CD, DVD, painting, radio, TV documentary, feature films, podcasts, books and magazine special issues.

Here’s my Bob Dylan Top 10 - 2007, in rank order:


1. The tour (aka NET)

2. The Other Side Of The Mirror

3. The Drawn Blank Series

4. Don’t Look Back De Luxe 2DVD set

5. Theme Time Radio Hour Series 1

6. DYLAN, 3CD De Luxe box

7. The Dream Dylan Concert 1962-2001, BBC Radio 2

8. Legacy Podcasts – Bob Dylan 1-9

9. The Traveling Wilburys Collection

10. Million Dollar Bash, by Sid Griffin


BONUS PICKs:

11. Bob Dylan - Never-Ending Star, by Lee Marshall – see exclusive book review, here, next week

12. Dylanesque - Bryan Ferry’s covers album.


All are must-see/-hear/-own – you can find full details in the Dylan Daily Archive.

No mention, notice, of: the new feature film or Factory Girl or the enhanced single or any bootleg/grey market recording …


What are your Dylan 2007 highlights? Please send your Dylan Top 3 2007 to info@dylandaily.com

Thanks, in anticipation. And, if you’re not dropping by for a few days, best wishes for the Xmas holiday!



Gerry Smith

The Drawn Blank Series: encore, encore

It’s remarkable that the curator of a city art gallery in a little-known regional centre like Chemnitz should have persuaded Dylan to complete such a substantial body of art and then made it accessible to a global audience via the striking new catalogue, Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series.

Dylan fans worldwide are indebted to curator Ingrid Mossinger.

If I can find the time before it closes on 3 February 2008, I hope to visit the exhibition in Chemnitz, and I know several other Anglos hoping to do the same. Watch this space …

Recommending suppliers for the book, Bob Dylan: The Drawn Blank Series, I stopped short of recommending the Chemnitz gallery which is actually holding the exhibition – “ … Dylan Daily emails to two officials, offering to review the catalogue, were ignored, so I can’t recommend that route.”

Happily, I have to report that my whining was premature – although I haven’t received an email response (to my two English-language emails, admittedly), today I received a copy of the magnificent book.

So I’m now happy to list the gallery as the prime supplier – they are selling the book at 28 euros (plus 17 euros packing/delivery) via their website – excellent value. Specify if you want the English-language version (the book includes several essays about the exhibition).

www.chemnitz.de/de/tourismus/tourismus_kultur_17_2.htm



Gerry Smith


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Earlier article:


The Drawn Blank Series – striking new book of Dylan paintings

Bob Dylan - The Drawn Blank Series is the official catalogue of the exhibition of Dylan paintings currently showing in Chemnitz, Germany.

But it’s rather more than that: it’s a sumptuous coffee table hardback collection of 170 striking watercolour/gouache paintings Dylan recently worked up from drawings originally sketched between 1989 and 1992.

The book is an unusual, beautiful, colourful artefact. Dylan’s artwork – interiors, urban landscapes, men, women - grabs your attention and demands careful scrutiny. The paintings, in the Expressionist style, would be arresting even if they didn’t carry Dylan’s signature. As you’d expect from its artist, the work is observant, witty and worldly-wise. The surprise is that it’s also technically accomplished – it never fails to evoke an emotional response.

I bought my cherished copy of Bob Dylan - the Drawn Blank Series from The Book Depository, England, via Amazon Marketplace, for £27.37p, delivered – a very competitive price. They still had stock when I checked, but if/when they run out, abebooks.co.uk lists other suppliers with stock. Be careful to order the correct edition – there is a German-, as well as an English-language version.

The Chemnitz gallery also has it for sale, but Dylan Daily emails to two officials, offering to review the catalogue, were ignored, so I can’t recommend that route.

Aficionados need this strikingly handsome artefact – it’s one of the Dylan highlights of recent years: far more important than that new film that’s getting all the media attention.


Details: Bob Dylan - The Drawn Blank Series, edited by Ingrid Mossinger. Munich, Prestel, large format hardback, 29 Nov 2007, 288pp.



Gerry Smith

The Drawn Blank Series: encore

Thanks to “M” (name withheld because email was probably intended in confidence):

“Unfortunately I ordered the catalogue before reading your warning about the English and German versions and have got the German version. An amazing collection of paintings -- a pity I can't read German!

“I wonder whether the text explains Dylan's modus operandi. What I imagine he has done is envisage the act of painting as a performance art. The original sketch from Drawn Blank is the song and each painting is a performance of that song. Does the text refer to this, or is it just a creation of my fevered imagination as I cast my eyes over the pages of incomprehensible text?”


DYLAN DAILY REPLY:
Your perception is remarkable: your conclusion is EXACTLY that of (essayist) Herr Zollner in his last two paragraphs on page 73!



Thanks also to Peter James:

“Are you sure you’re not dazzled just because the pics are by Dylan? Isn’t this just another case of a celeb dabbler trading on a reputation in another field?”


DYLAN DAILY REPLY:
Agreed: this is always a possibility, but it’s one you’ll probably discount once you’ve seen this remarkable artwork. Dylan Daily readers ignoring this important new book might live to regret it!



Gerry Smith

The Drawn Blank Series – striking new book of Dylan paintings

Bob Dylan - The Drawn Blank Series is the official catalogue of the exhibition of Dylan paintings currently showing in Chemnitz, Germany.

But it’s rather more than that: it’s a sumptuous coffee table hardback collection of 170 striking watercolour/gouache paintings Dylan recently worked up from drawings originally sketched between 1989 and 1992.

The book is a beautiful, colourful artefact. Dylan’s artwork – interiors, urban landscapes, men, women - grabs your attention and demands careful scrutiny. The paintings, in the Expressionist style, would be arresting even if they didn’t carry Dylan’s signature. As you’d expect from its artist, the work is observant, witty and worldly-wise. The surprise is that it’s also technically accomplished – it never fails to evoke an emotional response.

I bought my cherished copy of Bob Dylan - The Drawn Blank Series from The Book Depository, England, via Amazon Marketplace, for £27.37p, delivered – a very competitive price. They still had stock when I checked, but if/when they run out, abebooks.co.uk lists other suppliers with stock. Be careful to order the correct edition – there is a German-, as well as an English-language version.
The Chemnitz gallery also has it for sale, but Dylan Daily emails to two officials, offering to review the catalogue, were ignored, so I can’t recommend that route.

Aficionados need this strikingly handsome artefact – it’s one of the Dylan highlights of recent years: far more important than that new film that’s getting all the media attention.


Details: Bob Dylan - The Drawn Blank Series, edited by Ingrid Mossinger. Munich, Prestel, large format hardback, 29 Nov 2007, 288pp.



Gerry Smith

More on those magnificent podcasts from Legacy Recordings

I recommended the official Dylan podcasts, introduced by Patti Smith, Jersey’s finest, a couple of weeks ago. By last week, the series had grown to nine programmes, and I’ve re-listened, more carefully.

Contributions by a roster of key music biz associates like Roger McGuinn, Garth Hudson and John Hammond Jnr are complemented by some acute writers and critics, notably Bill Flanagan and a History Prof from Princeton (Sean Wilentz?), who make very perceptive comments. And by some clever comedy from the man himself.

Listening to the series for the third time in the car on a one-hour journey yesterday I was alternately raving at the sublime music clips and marvelling at the insights being tossed away by the insightful commentators.

The Dylan podcasts are magnificent. They’re also free. And you can subscribe via iTunes to receive future episodes automatically (free).

Waddya waiting for?


Gerry Smith



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ORIGINAL ARTICLE:

Sony’s official Dylan podcasts, introduced by Patti Smith


Don’t miss hip priestess Patti Smith introducing a series of official Sony Dylan podcasts.

The six programmes in the series so far, running for about six minutes each, include Dylan recordings and interview snippets, Smith’s links and contributions from musicians (eg John Hiatt) and critics (eg Greil Marcus).

The series is covering Dylan’s career chronologically. Number 6 has only reached the late 1960s, so it looks as if the series could eventually run to a couple of hours of prime Dylan documentary - all legally downloadable, of course, as MP3 files.

Highly recommended.



http://blogs.legacyrecordings.com/podcast/category/bob-dylan



Gerry Smith

Dylan in new Tom Petty rockumentary

Watch the trailer for Runnin’ Down A Dream, the new Tom Petty rockumentary directed by lauded veteran Peter Bogdanovich, and, I’ll bet, your eyes will be drawn to the singer duetting with Petty on two clips – from the Dylan/Petty 1986 tour and the Traveling Wilburys project.

In his ‘80s creative trough, Dylan made some perplexing decisions, and touring with Petty was one: surely their musical styles were too far apart – what was Dylan doing with mainstream stadium rockers?

Surprisingly, the pairing worked well. If nothing else, the shows were audience-friendly. The problem was, Dylan looked diminished in the company of the Heartbreakers: unaccountably, Petty’s rock-lite shtick seemed to dwarf the greatest popular musician of the century.

Or did it? Maybe that perception flowed from the general malaise afflicting many Bobfans in those barren years?

It’ll be instructive to dig out and re-evaluate the VHS tape of the Dylan/Petty Sydney show, broadcast some years ago on BBC TV. I have a sneaking feeling that Dylan’s performance will, almost miraculously, have somehow improved since the film was shot.

Runnin’ Down A Dream is reviewed, with link to the trailer, at:


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/12/13/bmpetty113.xml

The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia – review of first edition

Following yesterday’s call by Michael Gray for suggested additions/alterations for the next edition of his Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, several readers have asked what The Dylan Daily thought of the massive book when it was first published, in mid-2006.

In a nutshell: deeply impressed. My review, from the Archives, is reproduced below.



Gerry Smith




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The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, by Michael Gray


Over 30 years ago, Song & Dance Man, Michael Gray’s pioneering study, outlined Bob Dylan’s credentials as a serious artist whose work guaranteed him a place at the top table of twentieth century creatives, alongside fellow giants like James Joyce, Pablo Picasso and Miles Davis.

Though Gray’s seminal work triggered a Bob Dylan book publishing industry - even semi-serious collectors will now possess well over 100 different Dylan titles - there has always been a big gap awaiting an attentive publisher: for an all-encompassing Dylan encyclopedia, presenting all that’s known about its subject.

Billboard Books purported to fill the gap in 2004, but Oliver Trager’s Keys To The Rain: The Definitive Bob Dylan Encylopedia restricted itself mainly to Dylan’s songs and albums, largely ignoring people and places, and the cultural contexts of the songbook. Trager’s tome is valuable, but it doesn’t match the ambition of its title.

So Michael Gray’s new book was a mouth-watering prospect: big gap, key writer. Few will be disappointed by The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, published today (in the USA, and on 13 July in the UK). It’s likely to become the biggest selling Dylan book of all.

As you’d expect from a writer of Gray’s pedigree, the Encylopedia majors on its author’s unparalleled expertise, his critical judgment and a ready intelligence and authorial finesse rare among writers of Dylan (and so, a fortiori, all rock music) books.

The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia is Gray’s magnum opus: in three quarters of a million words, he paints a massive canvas. Over 730 pages, its daunting breadth of coverage and sheer level of detail is deeply impressive.

As devotees of Gray’s writing might expect, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia’s strengths include authoritative essays positioning Dylan’s work in the context of other artistic traditions – notably The Bible, English literature, the blues, rock ‘n’ roll, nursery rhymes and film.

Highlights? Scores. Gray’s analysis of the influence on Dylan’s work of the Book Of Ecclesiastes is the most evocative piece of writing on the musician you’re likely to encounter. His take on Lay Down Your Weary Tune is almost as good. Articles on Albert Grossman, the Newport Folk Festival (and the surprising links between the two), Sara Dylan, and Jerry Schatzberg provide startling revelations. Innumerable other probing essays illuminate dark corners of the Dylan world of which few are even aware. Gray’s dissections of the impact of Dylan’s literary antecedents are definitive.

The footnoting which bedevilled Gray’s last Dylan book is used here to good effect, documenting detail which would interrupt the flow, without repeating the mistake of supplying a parallel, competing text.

And, for a book of this magnitude, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia has remarkably few solecisms or typos. Others might seek to document factual errors, but they’ll need eyes like the proverbial toilet rat to find them.

The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia: perfect, then?

Well, no, not quite. The content could be better balanced. Some Dylan songs and albums are discussed at length, and with considerable acuity, as you’d expect. But many of the albums receive short shrift. Thus The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan gets less than a quarter of a page, to be followed soon after by two and a half pages on Froggie Went a-Courtin’!

Lots of entries on Dylan’s Dadrock contemporaries could have been cut, some entirely, the remainder reduced to focus on their links with Dylan. The galaxy of Dylan superfans profiled will be flattered to see their fealty recognised, though few civilian readers will be much interested.

Gray’s readiness to flaunt his critical savvy generally serves him well, but some aficionados will stick pins into his effigy after reading, for example, his relentless sniping at recent touring performances, and his dismissal of Before the Flood (“has never been a favourite of anyone keen on Bob Dylan”). Gray’s reservations about the two most recent films, No Direction Home and Masked And Anonymous will probably resonate only among fellow experts.

And, after this book, Michael Gray won’t expect to receive Xmas cards for 2006 from, inter alia: Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Robbie Robertson, Larry Charles, the estate of Ewan McColl, Pete Seeger, Oliver Trager, Dave Stewart, Stephen Sondheim … .

When he leaves the Dylan comfort zone, Gray makes some tendentious calls. His dismissal of Cole Porter – one of the few songwriters who would vie with Dylan as the best of the last century – suggests an unworthy rockism. Ditto his dismissal of Joni Mitchell’s jazz-lite excursions, and the legacy of the Grateful Dead. Gray’s generally laudable article on Van Morrison is short of the nuance which informs his Dylan writing.

The Sydney Morning Herald - a “staid and haughty paper”. Paul Brady - “a national hero on both sides of the border in Ireland.” Really?

And, in a writer with such a richly deserved reputation, Gray’s occasionally strident tone is a surprise. Some of his spiky, splenetic ruminations are compounded by a monochrome critical schema, which seems to judge art, people and events as either wonderful or wretched, with few shades of gray.

Gray’s worst stylistic tic is his over-fondness for hyperbole via superfluous adverbs: his over-use of –ly words - “utterly meaningless”, “infinitely fluid”, “immaculately compatible” - is wearing. Absolutely, utterly wearing.

Such infelicities wouldn’t matter in book about Rockaday Johnny, but books such as Gray’s, dealing with the greatest writer in the English language since Shakespeare, have to meet higher standards.

Another Editor might have been tougher on such matters.

As an artefact, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia has the look and feel of The Bible. The unflattering front cover profile apart, the design confers an appropriate gravitas. The CD-ROM of the text supplied with the book is a valuable bonus, offering a functionality that hard copy simply can’t match. Want to check out all the references to Christopher Ricks? Easy. Want to print out the article on Like A Rolling Stone to read on the train? No problem. Want to sneak read the Encyclopedia on the office PC, while pretending to complete a spreadsheet? Just remember to pop the CD-ROM into your jacket pocket before leaving home.

Continuum needs to pack the CD rather better, though – extricating it from the plastic wallet inside the back cover is difficult, and hazardous. Brief user instructions would be handy, too. Some of the headings used in the Encyclopedia are unhelpful. The Index might well be a work of art, but I’ll never know - I can’t read the microscopic font.

In a nutshell? Easy: from today, Michael Gray’s new Encyclopedia is destined to be the most important Bob Dylan book, bar none.


The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, by Michael Gray, Continuum, June (US)/July (UK) 2006, 736pp, £25.




Gerry Smith

New (paperback) edition of The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia: your additions and alterations invited

Thanks to Michael Gray, author of The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:


“ENCYCLOPEDIA NEWS: THE PAPERBACK!

“I'm happy to say that Continuum has clinched its plans for the paperback of The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, and that this will be published simultaneously in New York and London on April 15th (2008).

“This gives me a brief chance to incorporate updates and a few corrections to the text, and I should like to ask each interested blog reader this: please let me know of anything essential you think needs adding or altering.

“Obviously I am adding entries on Modern Times, The Drawn Blank Series, the Dylan 3-CD set and I'm Not There, and to mention the Cadillac ads, the re-mix of 'Most Likely' and the 2nd series of Theme Time Radio Hour, and to add in the deaths of Tommy Makem, Mark Spoelstra and Ian Wallace. (Paul Nelson's death, and some correction, is already included in the revised reprint of the hardback issued in the UK on Sept 24th 2006.)

“BUT there will inevitably be other things it would be good to include if possible, and I shall be grateful if you can suggest any.

“(In the case of living musicians, they may well have issued new albums since early 2006, but we don't have the capacity to add all these in - though it should be possible to mention any that really are significant in that artist's career. Joni Mitchell's Shine is an example, I think, since it represents her first album of substantially new material in some years.)

“So if anything strikes you, let me know, and before January 1st please!”


http://bobdylanencyclopedia.blogspot.com/

Remasters/Street Legal

Thanks to Martin Cowan:

“Further to the recent posts about remastered Dylan CDs, it's certainly true that if you rake through the racks at stores like HMV, it is possible to find "old" (ie not remastered) versions of albums nestling next to 2003 reissues, often at the same price.

“So … buyer beware!

“On a separate note, while the superior 1999 remastering of Street Legal has been rightly praised in many quarters - although why did they loop in that extra instrumental verse at the end of Changing of the Guards? - the echo on Dylan's vocal on some tracks (particularly Senor) is rather annoying.

“Compare that version with the remastered Biograph version which has no irritating echo and sounds just great and you'll maybe see what I mean.”

Cheap CDs: a word of caution

Thanks to John Carvill:

“Just a word of caution regarding all those super-cheap Dylan CDs. As with many artists, the record companies have seen fit to bestow upon us a wide range of encodings, remasterings, clippings, edits, remixes and whatnots of Dylan albums.

“Often, 'cheap' CDs are older versions of albums which have subsequently been remastered.

“A few examples worth noting are: Blonde on Blonde, which has been issued and reissued in I don't know how many variants, it must be into double figures for sure, certainly at one stage they faded/clipped tracks so it would fit on a standard-length CD.

“The best CD version (that I know of) of 'Blonde on Blonde' is the SACD remaster from a few years back, you don't have to buy the SACD to get it, there's a widely available one-disc version which has the SACD's 'CD layer' on it.

“Same goes for 'Bringing It All Back Home', except I think you do have to buy the SACD to get that one.

“And the original issue of 'Street Legal' was terribly murky, it benefited hugely from the 1999 remaster.

“You should definitely avoid older versions of these CDs. Probably most Dylan Daily readers already know this stuff, but just in case … “

Bob Dylan Transmissions - enhanced CD & 74 page book

Thanks to Nigel Boddy:

“I've now listened to Bob Dylan Transmissions and can report that the sound quality (on a few of the tracks) could have been a lot better - no remastering carried out here! But, it's possibly better having average quality `rare and previously unreleased' material in your collection than not at all (?).

“The tracks, as far are as I can determine, come from the following sources:

1. Blowin' In The Wind,
2. Man Of Constant Sorrow
3. With God On Our Side
(Folk Songs & More Folk Songs TV Show 1963)

4. Hurricane,
5. Simple Twist Of Fate
6. Oh Sister
(The World of John Hammond TV Show 10.9.75)

7. Jokerman (Late Night With David Lettermen TV Show 22/3/84)
8. Maggie's Farm (Farm Aid 1985)
9. All Along The Watchtower (Guitar Legends 17/10/91)
10. My Back Pages
11. Knockin' On Heaven's Door
(30th Anniv. Show 18/10/02)

12. Highway 61 Revisited
13. Rainy Day Women #12&35
(Woodstock 14/8/94)

The two additional CD-ROM enhanced tracks are Girl From The North Country (With J Cash) & Forever Young (With Bruce Springsteen).

Grey market Dylan product proliferating

If you haven’t had a good root in the Dylan racks of the music megastores for a while, you might be surprised at the recent proliferation of what’s best described as “grey market” product - CDs and (especially) DVDs.

These products aren’t official (Sony) releases, but they can’t be bootlegs (aka "black" market), or they wouldn’t be stocked by the mainstream music emporia. Some are also available via online retailers.

The latest such product to catch my attention is Bob Dylan – Transmissions, a CD of 15 (mainly audio) tracks recorded for TV/radio across Dylan’s career, released by UK label Storming Music Company. Presumably such releases are legit because the original broadcasters have licensed performances for which they hold the copyright?

Has any reader come across this or similar CDs? Are they worth pursuing?




Gerry Smith

Dylan’s everywhere! Even in Marks & Spencers

Is there no limit to Dylan’s omnipresence?

In my last two visits to local Marks & Spencer stores, Bobby has been busy lulling shoppers into buying mode.

On my last visit to the town centre store, the middle-aged, middle class female population shopping for underwear (“you pay a bit more, but … “) was being serenaded by Like A Rolling Stone.

A week later, the seekers after the meaning of life (and overpriced fruit and veg) in the M25 megastore were bopping along to It Ain’t Me Babe.

Bob Dylan – “countercultural spokesman”: you kidding?



Gerry Smith

Modern Times track-by-track: Workingman’s Blues #2 – part 2

Chris Gregory, who has just finished writing an engaging, thoughtful track-by-track analysis of Modern Times, has kindly consented to The Dylan Daily publishing a sample of his writing, on two of the album’s ten songs.

The first article, on When The Deal Goes Down, was published here last week. This second article, in two parts, analyses Workingman’s Blues #2.




Workingman’s Blues #2 – part 2


By Chris Gregory




(Part 1 was published on The Dylan Daily yesterday)

The backdrops against which the narrator sings are constantly shifting. As with many of Dylan’s recent songs, it’s hard to figure out whether the action is taking place in the present day or in some past time. Sometimes we seem to be in the present day, sometimes in the 1950s, the 1930s … sometimes as far back as the American Civil War. The narrators of many of the songs on Love and Theft and Modern Times live in a kind of timeless dreamworld.

Dylan has said that his ambition is to write songs which ‘stop time’. We are never sure whether the actions he describes are happening in a chronological sequence or not. The songs’ stories are told through the unreliable filter of memory.

In the next verse we hear that the narrator is closing his eyes and …listening to the steel rails hum … suggesting he is now a vagrant, riding a freight train. But not because, like Haggard’s working man, he seeks the freedom of ‘bumming around’. Like the migrant workers of the Depression, he has no choice.

The whole song can be seen as a kind of dream vision seen through this dispossessed working man’s eyes. The great irony of the song is that he is no longer a working man at all. His work has been taken away. The hunger he is fighting to stop … creeping its way into my gut … may be real hunger, or a hunger for ‘what has been lost’. In any case he sounds tearful, and resigned to his fate, telling us he has hung up his ‘cruel weapons’.

The love object he addresses, whom he implores to … come sit down on my knee … may well be a child who has now grown up. In his tearful vision the narrator remembers the child as they were when he was raising him or her. He wants to enfold the child with love. But his mind is continually restless. For like the narrator of King Harvest he’s a … union man all the way… . In his mind, there are still battles to be fought. In each chorus he fantasises that, together with his child he will again fight the bosses on the ‘frontline’. The final line of the chorus repeats Haggard’s modest refrain as if it is a sacred call to arms.

As the song progresses the narrator descends further and further into his dream-fantasy. He is an old man, raging against the dying of the light, crying ‘tears of rage’. He imagines dragging those who have dispossessed him down to hell, lining them up against a wall to have them shot. But he is weary, confused, his consciousness … tossed by the wind and the seas … . Already he is sinking back into sleep, resigned to his redundancy in this cruel world that has rejected him: … Sometimes no one wants what we got/Sometimes you can’t give it away … . As he descends into sleep, dark visions begin to overwhelm him. He … sleeps in the kitchen with my feet in the hall … . Of course he has no house, only this tiny freight train carriage where the ’kitchen’ and the ‘hall’ are so close together. He imagines himself confronted by countless faceless enemies, crowding in on him. He knows that death itself is not far away. Sleep is comforting to him but it is … like a temporary death… . He knows his death is approaching but he knows not when. In the darkness he feels the … lover’s breath … which in Timrod’s poem will be the force which will awaken the spiritual life within.

But it is too late for that breath to work on him. He feels …the night birds call … He knows that the end is nigh. Yet there is no sense of panic, or despair. The music remains stately and unstressed; the band subdued and disciplined behind the singer’s masterful control of his breath.

Increasingly, the narrator becomes a Lear-like figure, exiled from his land and his children. Like the singer in King Harvest he has lost his barn and his horse and his money. He knows that … the sun is sinking … on his life. Like the narrator of that great song of generational anguish Tears of Rage (another song which echoes King Lear, written by Dylan with a melody by The Band’s Richard Manuel) he fears that his child has rejected him. … Of what kind of love is this/Which goes from bad to worse … he asks himself in Tears of Rage. In Workingman’s Blues #2 the narrator is even further down the line: … Tell me now, am I wrong in thinking/That you have forgotten me … . The narrator tells us that the child has … wounded me with your words … . He says that he will wipe the memories of his enemies from his mind, but that the memory of his child – the new ‘working man’ will always remain with him.

In the final verses he tries to heal the rift between them – though he is possessed by a disturbingly dark apocalyptic vision of what will happen to the child: … All across the peaceful sacred fields they will lay you low/They’ll break your horns and slash you with steel … he implores his loved one to look into his eyes one final time. And then, as life begins to ebb away, he fantasises that the child will … lead me off in a cheerful dance … . Everything will be remade anew … the old man sees himself with … a brand new suit and a brand new wife … .

He declares that he can live well on a meagre diet. In the final moments he restates his pride in being a ‘working man’ by telling us that he is ready to work again, unlike those who … never worked a day in their life/Don’t know what work even means … . Perhaps he is Haggard’s working man, now grown old, his world and his values in ruins. But in the end, as the sun sinks on his life, and although circumstances have overwhelmed him, he has something solid to cling to. His pride, in the end, is his salvation.

Although, with its opaque and mysterious surface, the song may appear to be at odds with much of Modern Times, Workingman’s Blues #2 is in many ways its central opus. It is a kind of ode to ‘Modern Times’ itself. Not only the modern world of the technological, globalised culture of the twenty first century but also the eternal process of evolving into ‘Modern Times’ that happens to every new generation. And Dylan himself, of course, is a ‘working man’ who for the last eighteen years or so of the Never Ending Tour has pursued the goal of finding his own salvation through constant work.

There is a level on which, in Workingman’s Blues #2, he is addressing his audience, taking us through the times in which he himself felt abandoned, having only his own pride to fall back on. But the renewed confidence he now shows in his music and his writing - the result of years of hard work - can be felt in every moment of this transcendent, far-reaching piece, which stands with his very best songs.

Like Visions of Johanna or Desolation Row or Idiot Wind or Jokerman or Blind Willie McTell, it can be subjected to many different interpretations. And like those songs, every time you hear it, it sets off new trains of thought in your mind. All you need to do is close your eyes and listen to those steel rails humming … .



All lyrics quoted are used for the purpose of criticism or review.
Workin’ Man Blues, by Merle Haggard, Copyright © 1969 Merle Haggard. Workingman’s Blues #2, by Bob Dylan, Copyright © 2006 Special Rider Music.



See all Chris’s writing at:

www.chrisgregory.org/blog

Dylan in new UNCUT/Cheap CDs/Levon Helm

Thanks to Martin Cowan:

* Dylan in new UNCUT

A 5 star review for "I'm Not There" in the latest UNCUT magazine, along with a feature on the Blackbushe show from 1978, AND the Long Ryders covering "Masters of War" on the covermount CD. And so it is a Bobby Christmas....

* Cheap CDs

HMV are also offering most of the Dylan back catalogue on a "two for £10" deal. Mind you, there's nothing new here really - remember in the days of vinyl, Sony used to shift a lot of the older Dylan albums under their "nice price" banner.

* Levon Helm

If you haven't already picked up on this, I'd like to commend the new Levon Helm LP "Dirt Farmer". With former Dylan touring band member Larry Campbell at the controls, this is a nice mixture of covers and originals, sparklingly recorded, and Levon in fine voice throughout. One for the Christmas list!

Modern Times track-by-track: Workingman’s Blues #2

Chris Gregory, who has just finished writing an engaging, thoughtful track-by-track analysis of Modern Times, has kindly consented to The Dylan Daily publishing a sample of his writing, on two of the album’s ten songs.

The first article, on When The Deal Goes Down, was published here last week. This second article, in two parts, analyses Workingman’s Blues #2.




Workingman’s Blues #2 – part 1

By Chris Gregory


Sleep is like a temporary death …


"You will perceive that in the breast
The germs of many virtues rest,
Which, ere they feel a lover's breath,
Lie in a temporary death"

Henry Timrod, Two Portraits


Workingman’s Blues #2 is already the most celebrated, though perhaps the most misunderstood, track on Modern Times. Distinguished by a beautiful, shimmering arrangement and heartfelt vocals and crammed with memorable poetic twists, it has an anthemic, almost ‘scarf-waving’ quality found in only a few other Dylan songs (Just Like A Woman, The Times They Are A-Changin’ and Like A Rolling Stone might be said fit into this category). Without a doubt, it gets you right there. Most of the (overwhelmingly glowing) reviews of the album have already acclaimed it as an ‘instant classic’. It’s the track on the album you might like to play to a non-Dylan fan to try to win them over, to show them that Bob isn’t just this whiny folk singer after all - that he can write a ‘good tune’ and deliver it like a ‘proper singer’ if that’s what he really wants to do.

The music and the singing carry the track’s overwhelming mixture of bitter nostalgia and defiant dignity in a way that almost anyone can relate to. As a song it is heart-stoppingly moving. It lifts the spirits. It can make you want to cry. But it is not, as a number of (perhaps hopeful) commentators have suggested, any kind of ‘protest song’. The feelings it conveys are ambivalent, complex, sometimes confused. Positioned at the beginning of ‘Side Two’ of the record, it radically changes the tone of Modern Times. The first five songs are concerned with awakening the spirit of creativity - they are playful and hopeful. Workingman’s Blues #2 begins Dylan’s examination of the ‘dark side’ of our Modern Times. Despite its attractive tune and lush presentation, it is the most opaque and ‘difficult’ song on the album.

The song is a ‘sequel’ to Merle Haggard’s celebration of blue-collar pride, Workin’ Man Blues. But here Dylan’s rationale is very different to his reworking of blues classics in Rollin’ and Tumblin’, Someday Baby and The Levee’s Gonna Break. His Workingman’s Blues lifts only the chorus line …Sing a little bit of these workin’ man’s blues … . While Haggard’s song is a straight twelve bar shuffle, Dylan’s version is not (in the musical sense) a blues at all. Yet it’s clear that any examination of #2 must start here.

Haggard’s narrator is an upstanding member of the ‘proletariat’ (although you won’t, of course, find that word in his song) who has been … a workin’ man dang near all my life … supporting nine kids and a wife with his ‘working hands’. He’s determined to keep working … as long as my two hands are fit to use … and in a pointed sneer at those no-good hippies who were getting so much of the limelight at the time, declares (twice in the song, so we can’t fail to get the point) that he … ain’t never been on welfare/that’s one place I won’t be … . But as he sits drinking his beer in a tavern, he does confess that sometimes he does fantasise about doing … a little bumming around … and catching … a train to another town … . It is perhaps this part of the song, with its connection to the Woody Guthrie freight-train rambling ethos which originally inspired the teenage Dylan, which provides the clearest link between the two songs. Naturally, Haggard’s narrator’s moment of doubt is quickly excised as he reiterates his intention to ‘keep on workin’.

In the late ‘60s a song like Haggard’s Workin’ Man Blues would have been seen as terminally unhip. Yet from today’s perspective it is a classic of Americana, and in its own way as much a product of the late ‘60s as the Jefferson Airplane. In this and other songs Haggard was reacting against the spirit of his times by reasserting ‘traditional American values’ but not in a gooey, flag-waving way. The narrator of the song may be proud of his stance, but we are left in little doubt that his life is gruelling and unrewarding. He has to keep on working because he has no choice. No doubt he’s in that tavern a lot, downing a great deal of beer. It’s a significant marker of shifts in cultural values that earlier in 2006 we saw Haggard touring in support of Dylan, interspersing his songs with sneering references to Bush’s foreign and domestic policies and comic tales about hanging out and getting very wrecked with his buddy Willie Nelson.

Dylan, of course, keeps resolutely mum about such matters. It’s also significant that we can trace the beginnings of such a shift back to the late ‘60s when Dylan himself, then regarded by the counterculture as nothing less than a living prophet, the ‘voice of their generation’, would have no truck with psychedelia. In seclusion in (of all places) Woodstock, New York, he was creating recordings which, from The Basement Tapes (1967) to the much-misunderstood Self Portrait (1970) (despised by the ‘hippie establishment’ at the time but now standing as an important landmark in the development of ‘Americana’) daringly embraced country music and many of its values.

Meanwhile, Dylan’s soulmate in this adventure, Robbie Robertson of The Band, was also involved in creating an imaginative new perspective which incorporated ‘workingmen’s values’ within a vision of what Greil Marcus was later to call ‘the old, weird America’. In Mystery Train, his wonderfully eccentric paean to Elvis Presley and The Band, Marcus calls The Band’s own epic of the ‘working life’, King Harvest (Will Surely Come) (1969), Robertson’s ‘masterpiece’. King Harvest, with its embrace of unionization and its steadfast working man’s perspective, seems to me to be the other key text we need to look at with reference to Workingman’s Blues #2.

Dylan’s begins memorably with his own piano intro to the song’s distinctive melody, underpinned as he begins to sing by Donnie Herron’s understated viola and George Recile’s clipped, military-march style drumming. The voice is warm and resonant, gentle and welcoming.

The first image is of sunset: … an evenin’ haze settlin’ over town/starlight at the edge of the creek … , the words and the singing style creating an idyllic picture. After this, the next lines are perhaps something of a shock, as we are immediately transported into the ‘political’ territory of a kind of ‘Marxist lament’: … the buyin’ power of the proletariat’s gone down/Money’s gettin’ shallow and weak … . Yet Dylan’s delivery remains calm and melodic. The use of the term ‘proletariat’ sounds oddly archaic here, and the sentiment itself strangely nostalgic. We soon learn that the opening image is part of the narrator’s ‘sweet memory’ of a life that has been lost, and so the use of the term seems to be part of that ‘lost world’.

At the end of the verse the narrator, still calm and reflective, comments that … they say low wages are a reality/if we want to compete abroad … . This is already a widely-quoted couplet, which many commentators have used to suggest that the whole song is a protest against globalization. Despite the fact that it chimes with Dylan’s oft-expressed concern for the American working man, as expressed in his 1983 song Union Sundown (which for all its clumsy rhetoric really was a protest against globalization), his 1994 collaboration with Willie Nelson, Heartland, and most famously mouthed in his highly controversial comments at Live Aid in 1985 which led to the annual Farm Aid concerts, little of the rest of Workingman’s Blues #2 actually supports this claim. In fact, the narrator delivers the lines with a sense of acceptance - there is no real anger here.

… continued on The Dylan Daily tomorrow …


All lyrics quoted are used for the purpose of criticism or review.
Workin’ Man’s Blues, by Merle Haggard, Copyright © 1969 Merle Haggard.
Workingman’s Blues #2, by Bob Dylan, Copyright © 2006 Special Rider Music.



See all Chris’s writing at:

www.chrisgregory.org/blog

The Traveling Wilburys Collection revisited

Prompted by a reader’s enquiry - ‘should I buy it as a Xmas present?’ – I revisited The Traveling Wilburys Collection over the weekend. Does it stand up to scruting after all the hype’s died down?

Well, maybe. The first album is worth having. The dvd, especially the documentary, is enjoyable. But the second album (“Volume 3”)is what happens when the muse has flown. The packaging – especially the booklet – is insignificant.

As I told reader Deirdre, I’d probably buy it if I saw for about £7. But that she’s safer buying him any of the other 2007 releases:

* The Other Side Of The Mirror

* Don’t Look Back Deluxe

* DYLAN Collectors Ed.

(But not the I’m Not There soundtrack – Wilbury’s is a better bet than any covers album.)


Gerry Smith

Dylan CDs at staggeringly low prices

With CD prices on a relentless downward spiral, Dylan fans can now fill gaps in their collection for a tiny outlay.

Leading online retailer Play.com, for example, has DYLAN, the new 3CD Deluxe Digipak at £18 – half price! It also currently has the following staggering offers (prices include delivery):

* The Basement Tapes 2CD, £7
* Bootleg Series v1-3 3CD, £14
* Biograph 3CD, £14
* Tripack – BIABH/H61R/BOB 3CD, £8
* Tripack – Infidels/OM/TOOM 3CD, £8

as well as innumerable single albums at £4.

These prices almost make me wish I hadn’t bought all this great product/art on release. Almost … .




Gerry Smith

Modern Times track-by-track: When The Deal Goes Down, part 2

Chris Gregory, who has just finished writing an engaging, thoughtful track-by-track analysis of Modern Times, has kindly consented to The Dylan Daily publishing a sample of his writing, on two of the album’s ten songs.

The first article, in two parts, analyses When The Deal Goes Down. A second two-part article, on Workingman’s Blues #2, will follow next week.



WHEN THE DEAL GOES DOWN – part 2

(Part 1 was published on The Dylan Daily yesterday)


By Chris Gregory


The third verse depicts the singer in a twilight, moonlit world – as if he is the ‘pale ghost’ from Spirit On The Water. The mood of reconciliation continues. …We learn to live… he tell us …and then we forgive/ o’er the road we’re bound to go… The anachronistic expression give the lines a kind of timeless quality, with the reference to the ‘road’ of life echoing the ‘street’ on which we ‘stray’ from the first verse.

Perhaps Dylan was recalling Robert Frost’s famous poem The Road Not Taken with its final declaration that …I shall be telling this with a sigh/Somewhere ages and ages hence/Two road diverged in a wood and I/Took the one less travelled by/And that one has made all the difference… The tone of resigned acceptance of fate and the idea that the choices we make that determine our lives are not always thought through parallels Dylan’s position here. The next lines, partly ‘sampled’ from Timrod, focus again on the fragility of life: …more frailer than the flowers/these precious hours… Dylan adds the remarkable …that keep us so tightly bound… suggesting that we often keep the ‘flower’ of our lives, and of our creativity, ‘tightly bound’ like pressed flowers in an old book. The implication seems to be that life is infinitely precious and that it should not be wasted in futile struggle. Following this, the final lines are now triumphant, with the singer greeting his muse like a revelation, a …vision from the skies…

The final verse sees the spiritual seeker reaffirming his newfound acceptance of life’s turbulent path. Instead of following a 'road 'he follows a more natural ‘winding stream’. He tells us that picks up a rose, the Blakean symbol of love, life and death and that, rather comically … it poked through my clothes… as if he does not feel it pricking him now. He is immune to its effects. Although he lives in …this earthly domain/full of disappointment and pain… he now fully accepts his place in the scheme of things. Despite the ‘deafening noise’ of life’s mad confusion, he accepts the ‘transient joys’ of life, even though … I know they’re not what they seem… He confesses that he ‘owes his heart’ to his muse. He fully accepts the hand that life has dealt him. And he implies that when death comes - when his ‘deal’ finally ‘goes down’ he will be reunited with the spirit of creativity that he now places his faith in.

Thus When The Deal Goes Down is a kind of summation of the journey through spiritual confusion symbolised in Every Grain of Sand’s heartaching line …the bitter dance of loneliness, fading into space… It rejects the dark visions of much of what follows, such as the terrifying final line of 1985’s apocalyptic Dark Eyes : …a million faces at my feet/and all I see are dark eyes… and the jaded, resigned millenialist moralism of 1989’s Ring Them Bells : …Ring Them Bells/For the chosen few/Who will judge the many/When the game is through ….

Since the late ‘80s Dylan has pursued, through his Never Ending Tour, a thorough exploration of the sources of his inspiration. Caught in the grip of spiritual despair and artistic desperation he declared himself …determined to stand… whether or not he could still retain his faith. Now, with Modern Times he triumphantly reasserts his ‘conversion’ to a new kind of faith – faith in himself and humanity.

When The Deal Goes Down dramatises the struggle he has been through to reach this point. Now freed from the shackles of dogmatic thinking that have plagued him for so many years, he has produced a fundamentally humanistic collection of songs which confronts mortality and the vicissitudes of life itself with heartfelt compassion and great courage.


All lyrics quoted are used for the purpose of criticism or review. All lyrics quoted are by Bob Dylan.
EVERY GRAIN OF SAND Copyright © 1981 Special Rider Music.
WHEN THE DEAL GOES DOWN Copyright © 2006 Special Rider Music.
DARK EYES Copyright © 1985 Special Rider Music
RING THEM BELLS Copyright © 1989 Special Rider Music


(A second two-part article, on Workingman’s Blues #2, will follow on The Dylan Daily next week.)



See all Chris’s writing at:

www.chrisgregory.org/blog

Modern Times track-by-track: When The Deal Goes Down

Chris Gregory, who has just finished writing an engaging, thoughtful track-by-track analysis of Modern Times, has kindly consented to The Dylan Daily publishing a sample of his writing, on two of the album’s ten songs.

The first article, in two parts, analyses When The Deal Goes Down. A second two-part article, on Workingman’s Blues #2, will follow next week.



WHEN THE DEAL GOES DOWN – part 1

By Chris Gregory


…We all wear the same thorny crown…

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Modern Times is its lyrical and emotional clarity. The lyrics of 2001’s Love And Theft, like so many Dylan albums before it, featured often wildly allusive patterns of reference. But here the songs are carefully constructed to convey specific emotions and themes in a way that we may not generally think of as ‘Dylanesque’. When The Deal Goes Down is perhaps the most precisely written and the least ambiguous piece on the album. It deals with mortality and the fragility of existence ‘in this earthly domain’ with great humility and dignity. As ever with Dylan, we are presented with a number of apparently very different reference points. Its rich fusion of natural imagery and restrained ‘plain speak’ is reminiscent of the poetry of Robert Frost. It is delivered in a breathy, almost whispered Willie Nelson-style croon which befits its bittersweet nature, in a tune based on an old Bing Crosby number. There is a sparing use of archaic language, including some lines lifted from the work of Civil War poet Henry Timrod. The song is also infused with the spirit, and some of the imagery, of the blues. Yet these disparate elements are quite seamlessly combined in a transcendent, sometimes almost heartbreaking, performance. The song is a kind of open confession, in which the singer lays forth his spiritual confusion in what becomes a kind of conversation with his audience, the rest of the world and himself.

When The Deal Goes Down is especially reminiscent of two earlier Dylan songs, both of which wrestle with loss of faith, mortality and the mysteries of the cosmos. Every Grain of Sand (1981) was written at the end of his most overtly religious period, following his dramatic conversion to Born Again Christianity in 1979. But here the moral certainty of the songs of two years before is replaced by profound self-doubt. Although he declares that he can …see the Master’s hand…. in every aspect of creation, he finally confesses that …sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me… as if his whole experience of God has been merely one of his own projections. By the time of Not Dark Yet (1997) the singer faces a complete loss of faith, feeling that his …soul has turned into steel…. and telling us that …sometimes my burden is more than I can bear… When The Deal Goes Down attempts to provide a resolution to this ongoing spiritual crisis. What makes the song so moving is the way it depicts a struggle for, and perhaps a final attainment of, a kind of grace, or spiritual enlightenment, achieved not through any conventionally ‘religious’ path but through making a personal ‘deal’ with the spirit of creativity. Dylan has stated that he now places his faith not in any deity but in the old songs he constantly revisits and refers to in his art, many of them (such as Hank Williams’ manic gospel number I Saw The Light) rather turbulent expressions of faith. As with Spirit On The Water and Rolling And Tumbling, Dylan makes the spirit of creativity his touchstone, his ‘God’, his ‘Tambourine Man’.

The song begins like a slow country waltz, with some mournful steel guitar and tense percussive brush strokes. In the first verse Dylan describes the state of spiritual confusion he has found himself in, confessing that he is ‘bewildered’ and that …we live and we die/We know not why… Any prayers that may be offered up are like invisible clouds, floating away unnoticed. The ‘pathways of life’ are dark and the singer stands in the symbolic landscape of …the world’s ancient light/Where wisdom grows up in strife… The declaration of …But I’ll be with you when the deal goes down… is the first statement of defiant faith, apparently contradicting what has gone before. Although the song sounds nothing like the blues, it has begun in the typical manner of a blues lament – by stating the singer’s troubles. The phrase ‘when the deal goes down’ is used in a number of blues songs, including Honey Babe Let The Deal Go Down by Dylan’s particular favourites The Mississippi Sheiks and Don’t Let Your Deal Go Down, originally recorded by Charlie Poole and The North Carolina Ramblers in 1925 (and covered by Dylan on several occasions). The ‘deal’ in these songs is a gambling metaphor which the singers extend to life in general, the idea being that you have to face life with whatever ‘hand’ you are dealt. Here, despite what the singer identifies as the apparent purposelessness of life, he is determined to hold onto the ‘cards’ he has been given.

As the band sticks to the minimal backdrop, Dylan continues with his understated delivery. The song continues to shift between the personal to the universal. The first lines of the second verse ...We eat and we drink, we feel and we think/far down the street we stray… suggests, in a philosophical tone, that we are all fallible creatures who will inevitably ‘stray’ from the path of virtue. The singer is ‘haunted’ by regret for ….things I never meant or wished to say… The second half of the verse moves from plainspeak into more imagistic expression. …The midnight rain follows the train… is the song’s most ‘Dylanesque’ line, itself derived from blues imagery. ‘Rain’ is a frequent image in Dylan’s work, frequently symbolising chaotic confusion and spiritual desolation. …I’m out in the rain/And you are on dry land… Dylan cries in 1975’s You’re A Big Girl Now, expressing his exclusion and desolation. ..Everybody’s making love… he sings in Desolation Row (1965) …or else expecting rain… In A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall lies and confusion threaten to flood the entire world. Here the ‘midnight rain’ stands as a metaphor for life’s troubles, following the train which symbolises the progress of a human life. The next line …we all wear the same thorny crown… delivered with a kind of light, sighing compassion, is perhaps the song’s most resonant image, suggesting that the burden of sin is carried by us all. Despite the obvious reference to Jesus, this is decidedly not a line he would have used on Slow Train Coming or Saved. Dylan’s work has always been steeped in Biblical imagery and a concern with what he once called ‘the politics of sin’ has always been one of his central themes. The delivery of the line here is so moving because of the sense of dignity he imparts to what amounts to an almost tearfully world-weary acceptance of the inevitability of the burden we must all bear. Whereas in Not Dark Yet the burden seems to be too much for him, here he is able to bear it lightly. The next line, the exquisite ...soul to soul, our shadows roll… further emphasises the idea that ultimately we are all equally mortal, our ‘shadows’ merging together in the spiritual world. Dylan caresses the words, with their neat internal rhyme suggesting his acceptance of a kind of universal harmony. The title line at the end of the verse now begins with ‘and’ rather than ‘but’. The contradictions of the first verse have clearly, to some extent, been resolved.

… continued on The Dylan Daily tomorrow …


All lyrics quoted are used for the purpose of criticism or review. All lyrics quoted are by Bob Dylan.
DESOLATION ROW Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros Inc; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music.
YOU’RE A BIG GIRL NOW Copyright © 1974 Ram’s Horn Music; renewed 2002 by Ram’s Horn Music.
EVERY GRAIN OF SAND Copyright © 1981 Special Rider Music.
NOT DARK YET Copyright © 1997 Special Rider Music.
WHEN THE DEAL GOES DOWN Copyright © 2006 Special Rider Music.



See all Chris’s writing at:

www.chrisgregory.org

I'm Not There – soundtrack/film reviews

Thanks to Mike Ollier, regular contributor on The Dylan Daily’s companion site, www.musicforgrownups.co.uk:

“I just got I'm Not There this weekend and listened to disc one on my way to work this morning. Some of it is great, some not so (as expected).

“Great:

* Sonic Youth (suprisingly),
* Dark Eyes,
* McGuinn,
* Los Lobos (can do no wrong, as ever!) and
* Willie.


“Not so great:

*Cat Power (what's the point of a slavish re-hash? Though I have to admit that I like the horns on here),
* Eddie Vedder (again, too much like the Hendrix or Band version),
* Jeff Tweedy (very disappointing from one of my fave singer/songwriters, again, too close to Dylan's version).”


And thanks to Martin Cowan for his link to a long feature article (aka “plug”) on the film in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph Magazine:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/11/24/sm_toddhaynes.xml



I don’t know about you, dear Dylan Daily reader, but this film is failing to engage my attention. It’s on at the Barbican, in London over Xmas, if you’re keen to see it.



Gerry Smith

The Dylan/Jack White/Hank Williams project

PASTE magazine caters for followers of grown-up rock and Americana, so it’s no surprise that its scoop of last week that Dylan and Jack White have been working together on a collection of unfinished Hank Williams songs is currently its “Most Read” News article.

According to PASTE, Dylan has acquired the lyrics that Williams was working on when he died and has involved White in a project to complete them. The first fruit is apparently a recording of a song entitled You Know That I Know.

What a mouth-watering prospect – Dylan working with the best younger rocker of all, on songs by one of the greatest popular musicians of the first half of the last century … watch The Dylan Daily for progress reports.


www.pastemagazine.com




Gerry Smith

Dylan records new version of Hard Rain

Thanks to Christian Gerritzen in Germany for his link to Dylan’s new recording of Hard Rain for Expo Zaragoza 2008 in Spain:

“Just in case you haven't seen this yet ... . Nice video with sequences from all over Bob's career. The page is in the Loving Tounge, but the song, of course, isn’t :-)

http://www.unetealaexpo.com/



There’s also an English-language article here:

http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003677162



Gerry Smith

Don’t Look Back – now available as a video download

Apple iTunes have just teamed up with distributor New Video to make available Don’t Look Back as a video download, priced at $9.99.

It’s an intriguing development.

Who, exactly, would buy Don’t Look Back as a download when they can buy the beautifully designed 2dvd/2book de luxe package - praised highly on release just a few months ago here on The Dylan Daily?

Maybe it’s a defensive move by Sony/BMG to counter bootlegging of their breathtakingly good DVD release?





Gerry Smith

Sony’s official Dylan podcasts, introduced by Patti Smith

Don’t miss hip priestess Patti Smith introducing a series of official Sony Dylan podcasts.

The six programmes in the series so far, running for about six minutes each, include Dylan recordings and interview snippets, Smith’s links and contributions from musicians (eg John Hiatt) and critics (eg Greil Marcus).

The series is covering Dylan’s career chronologically. Number 6 has only reached the late 1960s, so it looks as if the series could eventually run to a couple of hours of prime Dylan documentary - all legally downloadable, of course, as MP3 files.

Highly recommended.



http://blogs.legacyrecordings.com/podcast/category/bob-dylan



Gerry Smith

Dylan interview – Dublin, 1984

U2 singer Bono interviewed Dylan (alongside Van Morrison) before Dylan’s gig at Slane Castle, Dublin in July 1984, for Irish music paper Hot Press.

The published interview has snippets of insight into Dylan’s thinking, but the highlight for me is Dylan singing Dominic Behan’s Royal Canal.

Van Morrison News, a blog run by John Gilligan, has the text of this rock summit meeting here:

http://vanmorrisonnews.blogspot.com


Gerry Smith

Revolutions and record deals - copious Dylan content in two new books

There’s lots of Dylan content (including a Bob caricature on both covers) in two new books I’ve been browsing:

* There's a Riot Going On: Revolutionaries, Rock Stars and The Rise and Fall of '60s Counter-Culture, by Peter Doggett (Canongate, 2007, 598pp, £25), a hefty door-stopper, documents Dylan’s on-off-very off relationship with the swirl of the 1960/70s weekend revolution.

While the Dylan content is a come-on, I can’t yet face the prospect of this minutely detailed blow-by-blow account of the collision of the rest of this cast, tawdry rockers and dubious politicos. If you’ve read it, The Dylan Daily is keen to publish your reaction.

* The Producer: John Hammond and the Soul of American Music, By Dunstan Prial (Picador paperback, 2007, 368pp, £7.14 from amazon.co.uk) had strong reviews on first publication last year in the USA. Available in the UK since May in paperback, it’s a compelling tale of Hammond’s role as a talent-spotter/enabler at Columbia – it has 20-odd pages of detail discussing Hammond’s interaction with Dylan.

Apart from Dylan, Hammond played a major role in the careers of two generations of great musicians, including Billie Holiday and Count Basie, and Aretha Franklin and Springsteen. His major legacy, though, according to writer Dunstan Prial, was to single-handedly racially integrate the US music biz.

Once again, if you’ve read it, The Dylan Daily is keen to publish your reaction.



Gerry Smith

Biograph – “hear it before you die”, recommends The Guardian

Thanks to Martin Cowan:

“Dylan's Biograph is featured in today's Guardian, under their round-up of 1000 albums to hear before you die”:

http://music.guardian.co.uk/1000albums/story/0,,2212301,00.html

Dylan “bores” ridiculed: encore, encore …

Thanks to Martin Cowan:

“Further to your Dylan bores thread, the fact that Todd Haynes chose to name his Dylan film after a, let's face it, relatively obscure Dylan song says rather a lot about him, don't you think?”

Dylan – credible painter or celebrity dabbler?

Dylan’s artwork, currently on display in Chemnitz, Germany, raises the question: is he a credible painter or merely a celebrity dabbler? With a formidable 140 paintings on show, there’s plenty of evidence to assess Bob the visual artist.

Of course, if you’ve spent half a lifetime admiring Zim’s super-abundant creativity - as a songwriter, musician, performer, cultural agenda-setter and, recently, chronicler and radio DJ - it’s difficult to view his paintings objectively, without letting your enthusiasm for his genius in other forms spill over and affect your judgment.

Thanks to the sample of nine paintings now on The Guardian newspaper web site, you can now judge for yourself.

Me? I’m impressed. Perhaps he could walk on water, after all?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/gallery/2007/nov/14/dylan?picture=331263237




Gerry Smith

Dylan “bores” ridiculed: encore …

Thanks to John Carvill:

“Dylan bores, eh? The ironies came thick and fast in that Observer piece. A few of the more immediately striking ones:

“1. Is that 'Dylan bores' as in 'people who like Dylan's music and therefore know something about Dylan, including the fact that the androgynous/bitchy/camp side of Don't Look Back era Bob have been duly noted long ago', as opposed to people who just get paid to write desultory articles in crappy Sunday supplements?

“2. Is that 'Dylan bores' as opposed to someone who is currently to be found all across the media publicising his new film about, er, Dylan?

“3. Is that 'Dylan bores' who like olde worlde minstrels such as Bob Dylan, as opposed to Girls Aloud who the Observer Music Monthly proclaim on the cover as superior to 'boring old rock bands'?

“I'm reserving judgement until I see the film, and keeping a reasonably open mind - although if absolutely forced to bet money on my eventual verdict then I would have to opt for 'shite' - but Haynes's attitude, if accurately depicted in this article, is not encouraging.”

Top 10: Dylan on DVD/VHS - encore

Thanks to Larry Banks:

“Thanks for the welcome prod to revisit the many excellent Dylan videos. I share most of your picks, except those towards the bottom of your Top 10.

“I think your numbers 9 (Unplugged) and 10 (Sydney, with Tom Petty) are both less engaging than two of the four you rejected. Bob Dylan American Troubador (Biography Channel, 60th) and Renaldo & Clara (short version) always get a more positive reaction in my house."


XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

ORIGINAL ARTICLE:

The sheer quality of The Other Side Of The Mirror: Dylan at Newport 1963-65, the new DVD release, has forced it straight to the top of my official/semi-official Dylan DVD/VHS recordings list.

Here’s my new Top 10:

1. The Other Side Of The Mirror (2007)
2. Hard Rain
3. No Direction Home (2005)
4. Don’t Look Back De Luxe reissue (2007)
5. Masked And Anonymous (2003)
6. Eat the Document (1966)
7. Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid
8. The Last Waltz
9. Unplugged (1995)
10.Sydney, with Tom Petty (1986)

A Concert for Bangladesh and Bob Dylan - American Troubador (Biography Channel, 60th) almost made the list. I’ve seen, but haven’t bothered to collect, Renaldo & Clara and Hearts Of Fire – which speaks for itself, really.

How does your Top 10 Dylan on DVD/VHS compare? Has The Other Side Of The Mirror gone straight to the top of your list, too?





Gerry Smith

Top 10: Dylan on DVD/VHS

The sheer quality of The Other Side Of The Mirror: Dylan at Newport 1963-65, the new DVD release, has forced it straight to the top of my official/semi-official Dylan DVD/VHS recordings list.

Here’s my new Top 10:

1. The Other Side Of The Mirror (2007)
2. Hard Rain
3. No Direction Home (2005)
4. Don’t Look Back De Luxe reissue (2007)
5. Masked And Anonymous (2003)
6. Eat the Document (1966)
7. Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid
8. The Last Waltz
9. Unplugged (1995)
10.Sydney, with Tom Petty (1986)

A Concert for Bangladesh and Bob Dylan - American Troubador (Biography Channel, 60th) almost made the list. I’ve seen, but haven’t bothered to collect, Renaldo & Clara and Hearts Of Fire – which speaks for itself, really.

How does your Top 10 Dylan on DVD/VHS compare? Has The Other Side Of The Mirror gone straight to the top of your list, too?


Gerry Smith

Dylan “bores” ridiculed

Thanks to Pete Short:

“A friend who knows of my Dylan interest sent me an article from Sunday’s Observer Music Magazine and challenged me to respond to the sneer, below.



OBSERVER MUSIC MONTHLY, Sunday 11 November:

‘Who does Bob think he is?


‘There are six - or is it seven? - 'Dylans' in Todd Haynes's I'm Not There. The director talks exclusively to Sean O'Hagan about the weirdest rock biopic ever

… blah … blah … blah …


‘Haynes's wilful blurring of fact, fiction and myth will probably annoy the crap out of the Bob bores, the very people who possess the deep knowledge of Dylan lore to be able to pick up on, and decode, all the in-jokes and references.

'Oh, they'll be panicking, I suspect,' grins Haynes, 'but it'll do them good. To me, it's like the ultimate misunderstanding of Dylan to try and pin him down by collecting and endlessly analysing everything he does. The one thing you have to acknowledge about Dylan right off is that he's never there when you reach out to claim him. He's already gone, three steps down the road.'


“My response to my friend:

1. I’m not interested in Todd Haynes. His film is of no interest, either – I’d far rather watch some proper Dylan DVDs instead.

2. I don’t buy The Observer; it’s a waste of trees.

3. I don’t read feature articles in glossy magazines plugging new product: who needs them?”

Major artists, according to WH Auden

Thanks to Martin Cowan:

“I came across this in last Sunday's Observer compilation from its archives. WH Auden was writing in 1971 about Stravinsky after his death, but his words seem rather apt for someone else we know:

“ ‘The minor artist, that is to say, once he has reached maturity and found himself, ceases to have a history. A major artist, on the other hand, is always re-finding himself, so that the history of his works recapitulates or mirrors the history of art.

“ ‘Once he has done something to his satisfaction, he forgets it and seems to do something new which he has never done before. It is only when he is dead that we are able to see that his various creations, taken together, form one consistent oeuvre. Moreover, it is only in the light of his later works that we are able to properly understand his earlier.’ "

BOBMANIA #11: Dylan wannabe contest in Vermont

Thanks to Patrick Mullikin:

MONTPELIER – Hang up your Pilgrim hats, unearth your Ray-Bans, wipe the turkey grease off your fingers and grab your guitar! Round out your Thanksgiving festivities with a central Vermont tradition: The Fourth Annual Great Green Mountain Bob Dylan Wanna-Be Contest on Saturday, Nov. 24, beginning at 7 p.m. To accommodate its increasing fan base, we're told this year's show will be held at Lost Nation Theater in Montpelier City Hall.

Tickets will be sold for $10 each with proceeds to benefit the effort to start a YMCA in central Vermont.

That's only fitting, according to event organizer Michele Leno.

"The Dylan Wannabe contest is some of the best fun you'll find in central Vermont, and like the YMCA, it offers something for everyone," says Leno, who has adopted the event from its originator, Patrick Mullikin. However, Mullikin remains a guiding force behind the event and has agreed to serve as Master of Ceremonies this year.

Last year nearly 300 diehard Dylan fans overflowed the basement of Montpelier's Unitarian Universalist Church as 24 Dylan lookalikes/soundalikes performed material from the musician's five-decades-long career.

Who won?

A young Dylan look-alike named Ethan Gilbert claimed the 2006 crown with his version of "Girl from the North Country."

For more information/to register, e-mail: willin2Bdylan@hotmail.com, or write: The Fourth Annual Great Green Mountain Bob Dylan Wanna-Be Contest, 960 Sanders Circle, Montpelier, VT 05602, USA.

I'm Not There gig, Don’t Look Back, and top 100 1970s albums

Thanks to Martin Cowan:

* I'm Not There gig

Great review of the "I'm Not There" live show from Pitchfork's website here:
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/page/news/46983-report-iim-not-therei-in-concert-new-york-ny-110707


* Don’t Look Back

“Just in case we were wondering why there was no Dylan-related stuff going on in the media, Tuesday 13 November sees BBC Radio 4 broadcasting Rockumentary Rollercoaster at 11.30am.

“‘Andrew Collins combines his love for music with his passion for films as he surveys the best documentaries made about rock bands. Fans of Dylan, Bowie, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin and of course Spinal Tap are in for a treat’.


* Top 100 1970s albums

Something of interest for Dylan fans here:

http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/feature/36725-staff-list-top-100-albums-of-the-1970s

Basement Tapes 2008, and Live Dylan

Thanks to Wade Greiner:

“While I wholeheartedly agree that Columbia needs to do a re-release of the Basement Tapes as the next volume of the Bootleg Series, I fear that it is unlikely that it would include any covers other than traditional ones.

“Have you noticed that in the Bootleg Series and Legacy recordings as a whole they have avoided including songs that are written by anyone else who might claim copyright?

“For example, on the Gaslight Tapes there is no Hezekiah Jones. On Live 1975 there is The Water Is Wide (trad.) but no Dark as a Dungeon. The exception I can think to this is on Volume 7 - This Land is Your Land. Maybe Scorsese felt that one was just too important to leave off in documentary terms.

“But if there is a new Basement Tapes release, I am predicting only Dylan-written, Dylan co-written, and traditional tunes. (And for what it is worth, I also am of the opinion: NO OVERDUBS!)



Thanks to Sue Roney

“I was just reading the posts from October asking for recommendations for a live/studio set. I noticed one of my absolutely favourite live performances isn't listed, so my suggestion is: The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest - Cardiff, 2000.

“I'm still building my collection of live cds and as that is the only live version I've heard so far, I can't recommend a second one ... but this one is pretty hard to beat.”

Bob Dylan Hoot Night in Austin, TX, this Thursday

Thanks to Chris Anderson, SONY BMG Music sales rep in Austin, TX:

"I'm throwing a big Bob Dylan event on Thursday night - please spread the word:

“I'm Not There - celebrating the releases of "Dylan", the "I'm Not There" soundtrack, and "The Other Side Of The Mirror: Bob Dylan Live At The Newport Folk Festival" DVD.

"Thursday, November 8th @ 9pm, Emo's Lounge, at the corner of 6th & Red River in Austin, TX

"A bunch o' bands will be playing a few Bob Dylan tunes each, w/ DJ Jester The Filipino Fist mixing up some Dylan in between sets, and we're showing BD's new Newport Folk Festival DVD throughout the night. SONY BMG be giving away a Bob Dylan CD catalog (40+ CDs!), and Waterloo Records will have T-shirts, 7" vinyl singles, and lithographs to give away too.

"Cheap $3 cover, and there will be specials on Tito's drinks while they last. Doors @ 8, DJ Jester starts at 9, and bands start up at 10pm."

Basement Tapes 2008 – no to overdubs

Thanks to Martin Cowan:

“While not a huge fan of the official Basement Tapes LP and as someone who hasn't really heard all that many of the unofficially available tracks, I'd certainly welcome an official release along the lines you've suggested.

“BUT I would have to say "no" to overdubs. I would suggest that part of the magic of the Basement recordings is their "lo-fi" nature and that in fact this unique sonic atmosphere makes up for the shortcomings in the performances and songcraft.

“If some of the stuff is so lo-fi as to be not worth releasing in its raw form, I guess that’s an argument for not releasing it. I'm not a big fan of dubbing historical recordings.”

Basement Tapes 2008, Live Dylan, and Norfolk gig

Thanks to Gerald Bamford:

“Basement Tapes 2008: and then there's all those incredible versions of country favourites (well some of Bob's favourites anyway) - Rock, Salt and Nails, I Don't Hurt Anymore, One Single River, Baby Ain't That Fine, I Can't Make It Alone, All You Have To Do is Dream, Still in Town etc etc.

“It may be that using these would bring back the criticism afforded to the great country and folky covers recorded in Nashville for the Self Portrait album a few years later. It's time for a SP revisit anyway!

“And then the version of Under Control which could easily have come from the tour the year before and the version of On A Rainy Afternoon a song which probably did. And then the soul-influenced I'm Guilty of Loving You, I Can't Come in with a Broken Heart and People Get Ready.

“No doubt we must await the second volume of Chronicles and then who knows what might be released now that Bob is in a Look Back frame of mind

Live Bob: try the Columbia Promo (almost an official release) from the RTR tour of 1975. Songs are - It Ain't Me Babe, Isis, and a great duet with Joan Baez of the Johnny Ace song Never Let Me Go and a version of the Curtis Mayfield song People Get Ready. Actually all you need is the two live albums from the Bootleg series - 1966 and 1975 to appreciate what a great performer Bob has been - well maybe that’s a good place to start!

Oh, and Back Pages will be pickin' 'n' choosin' from the Bob Dylan songbook in mid-Norfolk on Friday 23 November at Tracks, The Railway Freehouse, North Elmham Nr East Dereham - last gig of the year I should think.”

Million Dollar Bash: a must-buy new study of The Basement Tapes

The story of The Basement Tapes is well known: in 1967, in upstate New York, away from mounting pressures, Dylan and his allies, the Hawks/Band, recorded well over 100 songs, without access to a proper studio.

The best of the songs leaked out of the music biz and onto the first rock bootleg, Great White Wonder. By 1975, Columbia decided they needed a piece of the action and released The Basement Tapes as a 24-track double LP, interspersing 16 Dylan performances with eight by The Band.

The feelgood album was well received, by fans and critics alike. And it has stood the test of time. But, as subsequent bootlegs like The Genuine Basement Tapes demonstrate, the album could have been twice the length – the official release ignored many notable Dylan performances.

Sid Griffin’s new book, Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, The Band, and The Basement Tapes, retells the story of this key period with the insights of professional musician and the style of an accomplished writer.

Million Dollar Bash is a lovingly researched, richly detailed, accessible piece of work. It mixes exhaustive lists (what was recorded, where; who later covered the songs … ) with informed musical judgement (why they do/don’t work … ). Interviews with some key players, notably Robbie Robertson (whose work on the 1975 album is often criticised), a graphic evocation of the ambience of a place and time, and some telling photos make Million Dollar Bash a fine book.

Whether you agree with the author’s soaring judgment of the importance in the Dylan story of these 1967 recordings is a matter of opinion, but it’s a pleasure to engage in the debate.

Griffin’s dissection of the contribution of each of the Hawks/Band members (especially Garth Hudson) shows how this was rather more than Dylan plus backing musicians – the three lots of sessions in Woodstock in 1967 were genuine collaborations. And Griffin’s location of the sessions in their historical context establishes that these strange recordings didn’t just spring from nowhere.

You can read Million Dollar Bash as an extended, closely argued memo to Sony to persuade them to re-release a proper, more complete, version of The Basement Tapes. It’s very persuasive; Columbia Legacy would be bonkers to ignore it.

Million Dollar Bash is an engaging, handsome volume which will grace your Dylan bookshelf. A must-buy, then? You bet.


Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, The Band, and The Basement Tapes, by Sid Griffin, Jawbone Press, Sept 2007, 400pp, isbn 978-1-906002-05-3, £14.95/$19.95

www.jawbonepress.com



Gerry Smith

The Basement Tapes 2008

Sony are sitting on the raw material for an outstanding Dylan release - The Basement Tapes 2008. The best of the 100+ tracks of this intermittently outstanding material, recorded in 1967, deserves a proper airing.

If I were in charge of the project, I’d:

* ditch the Band tracks;

* add three groups of Dylan performances – recordings which were subsequently released; the best of the unreleased Dylan compositions; and the best of the unreleased covers;

* tidy up the sound quality.

It would make a very fine Bootleg Series vol 8. Here’s a suggested track listing:

CD1
* Dylan vocals from the 1975 release (16)
Odds and Ends
Million Dollar Bash
Goin' to Acapulco
Lo and Behold!
Clothesline Saga
Apple Suckling Tree
Please, Mrs. Henry
Tears of Rage
Too Much of Nothing
Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread
Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)
Tiny Montgomery
You Ain't Going Nowhere
Nothing Was Delivered
Open the Door, Homer
This Wheel's on Fire

* Dylan vocals subsequently released (4)
I Shall Be Released
The Mighty Quinn (Quinn The Eskimo)
Santa Fe
I’m Not There

CD2
* Unreleased Dylan compositions (4)
Get Your Rocks Off
Next Time On The Highway
Sign On The Cross
Silent Weekend

* Unreleased covers, Dylan vocals (14)
All American Boy
The Banks Of The Royal Canal
Bonnie Ship The Diamond
Cool Water
Four Strong Winds
The French Girl
I’m In the Mood
Joshua Gone Barbados
See That My Grave Is Kept Clean
Waltzing With Sin
Wild Wood Flower
Will The Circle Be Unbroken
You Win Again
Young But Daily Growing



Gerry Smith

The Basement Tapes – a new expanded compilation?

The new release of Dylan’s 1967 recording of the title track on the I’m Not There soundtrack album raises the prospect of an improved and expanded new Basement Tapes compilation.

You’ll remember that the rough and ready recordings were laid down by Dylan and The Band in Woodstock in 1967, with 24 of the 100+ recordings compiled on a double LP released in 1975. A total of 20 Dylan tracks have now been officially released; and there are many times that number on bootleg compilations, notably The Genuine Basement Tapes.

Warmy received on release, The Basement Tapes still splits aficionados: some number it among Dylan’s best work; others, somewhat less charitably, feel the tapes should have been left in the basement.

What do you think of The Basement Tapes? And what tracks would you include on an expanded Bootleg Series vol 8 – The Basement Tapes Revisited?

I’ll be proposing a 30+ track 2CD shortly, but will welcome your suggestions for inclusions, from all the recording sessions which took place in upstate New York in 1967.


Gerry Smith

The Never Ending Dylan bookshelf

The flood of new Dylan books shows absolutely no sign of abating. Amazon lists the following recent/forthcoming books:

* Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, the Band, and the Basement Tapes by Sid Griffin (Paperback - 30 Sep 2007). A fine new title – my review to follow very soon here on The Dylan Daily.

* Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star (Celebrities) by Lee Marshall (Hardcover/paperback - 1 Oct 2007). I ain’t seen it yet.

* Bob Dylan: Intimate Insights from Friends and Fellow Musicians by Kathleen MacKay (Hardcover - 30 May 2007). Looks like a collection of previously published interviews with music biz celebs. Handy if you want to know what Bobby Vee, for example, said about Dylan in a mag interview.

* Dylan on Dylan by Bob Dylan and Jonathan Cott (Paperback - 6 Sep 2007). English version of Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews by Jonathan Cott (Paperback - 15 May 2007). An essential purchase.

* Bob Dylan "Highway 61" Revisited (Legendary Sessions) by Colin Irwin and Paul Du Noyer (Paperback - 1 April 2007). Ain’t seen it yet, looks interesting.


Forthcoming Dylan books include:

* Bob Dylan (Icons of Pop Music) by Keith Negus (Paperback - 15 Dec 2007).

* Alias Bob Dylan (Rex Collections Series) by Jeff Bench and Ty Silkman (Hardcover - 31 Dec 2007).

* Bob Dylan: The Photographs of Barry Feinstein 1966 -1974 by Barry Feinstein (Paperback - 7 April 2008). Must-have.

* A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties by Suze Rotolo (Hardcover - 13 May 2008). The most attractive new Dylan book of all.



If you’ve bought/read/seen any of these new books, please get in touch - The Dylan Daily is keen to publish your impressions.



Gerry Smith

I'm Not There soundtrack

From the Sony Bob Dylan web site:

“The 34-track, Double-CD (as well as an available 4-Piece Vinyl) soundtrack to I'm Not There premieres new interpretations of Bob Dylan songs performed by an eclectic cavalcade of acclaimed and celebrated artists including:

Eddie Vedder
Karen O
Mark Lanegan
Sonic Youth
Iron & Wine
Mason Jennings
Jim James
Ramblin' Jack Elliot
Stephen Malkmus
Jeff Tweedy
Cat Power
Willie Nelson
Jack Johnson
Antony
Sufjan Steven
Los Lobos
John Doe
Yo La Tengo
Glen Hansard & Marketa Irglova
..And More!

“What makes the soundtrack even more special is the inclusion of two versions of the title track - a new interpretation performed by Sonic Youth and the original recording done by Dylan himself, a rare oft-bootlegged outtake from "The Basement Tapes" sessions in which fans have been asking for an official, pure recording.

“Many of the album's performances even include backing from the Million Dollar Bashers, an ensemble created just for the I'm Not There Original Soundtrack by Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo, which features Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley, Television guitarist Tom Verlaine, Wilco bassist Nels Cline, guitarist Smokey Hormel, keyboardist John Medeski and long-time Bob Dylan band bassist Tony Garnier. Other tracks on the album feature the amazing alternative-country band Calexico backing up artists Jim James, Iron & Wine, Roger McGuinn, and Willie Nelson.”

I'm Not There gig in NYC

After the film and the soundtrack CD, there’s an I'm Not There charity gig in the Beacon Theater, New York, next Wednesday, 7 November. Cast reportedly includes Al Kooper, Michelle Shocked, Cat Power, Yo La Tengo, My Morning Jacket and The Roots. Tickets from $50 to $1,000

Further info: sorry I can’t give an official link; Google it.



Gerry Smith

Dylan exhibition opens in Germany

Thanks to Cornelia Grosch in Berlin:

“Did you hear about the exhibition of pictures by Dylan in Chemnitz, Germany (formerly known as Karl-Marx-Stadt)?

“The exhibition is called "The Drawn Blank Series". They were published in a book in 1992 but never shown in an exhibition. The exhibition takes place from 28 October until 3 February 2008.

http://www.chemnitz.de/de/noflash.htm


“I found the first review here:

http://www.welt.de/wams_print/article1305332/Bob_Dylan_zeichnet_nur_was_er_sieht.html

“I don't know if it's worth travelling from overseas to Chemnitz to see the pictures; I have two and a half hours to travel by train, so maybe I will go there!”

Dylan’s everywhere! Final episode of The Sopranos

A long passage from It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding), plus a brief discussion of Dylan’s continuing relevance between AJ and his nubile friend about to get her kit off in his SUV parked in the woods, was a highlight of the compelling, if slightly curious, final episode of The Sopranos, which aired for the first time on Brit TV last night (E4, repeated Tuesday).



Gerry Smith

Mystery Dylan tracks: mystery unravelled

Thanks to Martin Cowan:

“To respond to Clem Harris' recent query:

* "Cross the Green Mountain" - Dylan's contribution to the movie "Gods and Generals", there's a rather fine video to this if you can track it down with Bob and the touring band dressed up in American Civil war garb - superb!

* "Huck's Tune" - Dylan's contribution to the movie "Lucky You".

* "Tell Ol' Bill" - Dylan's contribution to the soundtrack of the movie "North Country"

* "Return to Me" - Dylan's wonderous cover of that old Dean Martin warhorse, as featured in "The Sopranos"

* "Waiting For You" - Dylan's contribution to the soundtrack of the film "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood"

* "Dream About You, Baby", "The Usual", and "Night after Night". These tracks were all on the "Hearts of Fire" soundtrack LP which I would imagine is no longer available. "The Usual" was written by John Hiatt. "Dream About You, Baby" is available on "Down in the Groove" although I think it may be a different version

* Bromberg Sessions - this was a session recorded by Dylan in 1992 with David Bromberg, these four tracks are yet to be officially released but do seem to be circulating unofficially.”

The top 15 vocal performances: encore

Thanks to Liam Mogan:

“Nice concept

1. When He Returns (Slow Train Coming)
2. Like a Rolling Stone (Bootleg Series 4)
3. Isis (Biograph)
4. Blind Willie McTell (Bootleg Series 3)
5. Tangled up in Blue (Blood on the Tracks)
6. Lay Lady Lay (Nashville Skyline)
7. Idiot Wind (Hard Rain)
8. Not Dark Yet (Time Out of Mind)
9. Most of the Time (Oh Mercy)
10. Tomorrow Is A Long Time (More Greatest Hits)
11. The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll (Freewheelin')
12. Never Say Goodbye (Planet Waves)
13. It's Alright ma (I'm Only Bleeding) (Bringing it all Back Home)
14. The Groom's Still Waiting At The Altar (Shot of Love)
15. Changing of the Guards (Street Legal)

“Think I might just go and make a cd-r ... .”

The top 15 vocal performances?

Thanks to Brad Saltzberg:

“Here’s a good one - Bob’s all-time best vocal performances - official releases only:

1. Moonshiner (Bootleg Series v1-3)
2. Idiot Wind (BOTT)
3. One too many Mornings (Hard Rain)
4. Rank Strangers to me (Down in the Groove)
5. The Water is Wide (Bootleg Series v5 Live 1975)
6. Honey, just allow me one more chance (The Freewheelin’)
7. Dirge (Planet Waves)
8. Fixin’ to Die (Bob Dylan)
9. Don’t Think Twice it’s Alright (The Freewheelin’)
10. Hazel (Planet Waves)
11. One more cup of Coffee (Desire)
12. Hurricane (Bootleg Series v5 Live 1975)
13. Youre a Big Girl Now (BOTT)
14. Just like a Woman (Before the Flood)
15. Only a Pawn in their Game (Times)

Dylan & the Blues – in Glasgow

Michael Gray is in Scotland on 16 November for what's likely to be his last 2007 gig - Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues: An Evening with Michael Gray.

Highly recommended - this is an excellent presentation.

Details: Friday Nov 16, 8pm Glasgow CCA, Centre for Contemporary Arts, 350 Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow G2 3JD

Box Office 0141 352 4900, www.cca-glasgow.com, tickets £11, concessions £6

http://handmemytravelinshoes.blogspot.com/

http://bobdylanencyclopedia.blogspot.com/



Gerry Smith

Good car to advertise during a war?

Dylan’s new ad for the Cadillac Escalade “gas guzzler” is here (with predictable breast-beating):

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/10/bob_dylan_is_the_sellouttiest.html

Mystery Dylan tracks: what are they?

Thanks to Clem Harris:

“I recently came across some odd Dylan recommendations which mystify me. I’d be grateful if any reader could shed light on what exactly they are:

* Cross the Green Mountain, Huck's Tune, Tell 'Ol Bill, Return to Me,
Waiting For You

* Dream About You Baby, The Usual, Night After Night (Hearts of Fire)

* Bromberg - Katskill Serenade, Miss the Mississippi & You, Polly Vaughan, Sloppy Drunk.”

Compilation - the studio recording plus a pair of very different live versions for each song: encore, encore

Thanks to Brad Saltzberg:

“While this doesn’t exactly fulfil Andy Miller’s request, I firmly believe if you compiled and played the following live tracks for your friend he could not deny the power of Bob live:

“Most likely you’ll go your way (Before the Flood)
Romance in Durango (Biograph)
The Water is Wide (bootleg series 75)
Dignity (Unplugged)
One too many mornings (Hard Rain)
Just Like a Woman (Before the Flood)
Shelter from the Storm (Hard Rain)
It’s alright ma (Before the Flood)
Who Killed Davey Moore? (Bootleg 64)
Tomorrow is a Long time (Greatest Vol 2)
It’s all over now, Baby Blue (Bootleg series 66)
One More Cup of Coffee (Bootleg 75)
Don’t think Twice (Before Flood)
Shooting Star (Unplugged)
Like a Rolling Stone (Before the Flood)
Knockin on heaven’s Door (Unplugged)
I shall be released (bootleg 75)”

An ALTERNATIVE DYLAN compilation

Thanks to Brad Saltzberg:

“This is it - the ultimate atypical, alternative Bob compilation. No Rolling Stone. No Heaven’s Door. Only criterion is that all tracks are taken from official releases. Sequenced with loving care:

“Let me die in my Footsteps (Bootleg vol 1)
Moonshiner (Bootleg vol 1)
Sign on the Window (New Morning)
Precious Memories (Knocked Out Loaded)
The Water is Wide (Bootleg 75)
The Usual (Hearts Of Fire)
World Gone Wrong (World Gone Wrong)
Going Going Gone (Planet Waves)
Wallflower (Bootleg vol 2)
The Man in Me (New Morning)
Band of the Hand (Soundtrack)
Shot of Love (Shot of love)
When did you leave Heaven? (Down in the Groove)
Too Much of Nothing (Basement Tapes)
George Jackson (acoustic)
Lord Protect my Child (Bootleg vol 1)
Is your love in Vain? (Street Legal)
Watered Down Love (Shot of Love)
Rank Strangers to me (Down in the groove)”