Bob Dylan

http://video.bobdylan.com

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

How does it feel?

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

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

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

Is this Jakob Dylan's dad?

Have we a thread for chronicles

How does it feel?

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

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

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

Find someone that admits to booing..

The thing in the first post is kinda cool.

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

That is AMAZING.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

what a good record 'like a rolling stone' is

otm

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

cannot stop giggling @ this, so good

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

<3 crimsy for this thread title

Indeed

Was this video Dylan's idea?

Great question

Great video too

Can't stop watching--so cool

This thread title owns

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

me too. wtf was all the fuss about.

Did you click through the channels?

did i what through the whats

Hit the up and down arrows whilst it played,

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

who comes up with this bullshit

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

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

SHADOWS IN THE NIGHT TRACK LISTING:

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

Already has its own thread on ILM:

Bob Dylan 'Shadows in the Night'

The old grouch turns 75 today.

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

Nobel Prize for Literature

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

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

Better him than fucking DeLillo.

Danils said that though the choice might seem suprisin,

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

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

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

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

well, there goes Facebook this morning

Lol, didn't dare to look at that

my sister is stoked

def not cutting my hair till after halloween now

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

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

Though there was this I suppose:

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

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

Just Like A Pronoun

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

― Lavator Shemmelpennick

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

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

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

― Beyond Goo and Evol (President Keyes)

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

Just Like A Pronoun

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

oh god, i forgot about _that_ song

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heh.

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

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

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

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

The live bootleg of the Christian era is terrific.

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

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

The live stuff is better than the studio imo.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

good tip, thanks!

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

― Lavator Shemmelpennick

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

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

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

― corrs unplugged

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The context is:

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

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

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

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

― il lavoro mi rovina la giornata (PBKR)

kris kristofferson to thread

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

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

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

good morning!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Love Everything is Broken

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

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

gotta agree, not half as bad as I recall

though his voice/delivery hardly peaking