Bob Dylan

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

Finally a good reason for teachers to bore their students with tales of how Bob Dylan was the first rapper

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TlcPRlau2Q&feature=youtu.be

^^Nobel speech

Better him than fucking DeLillo.

― Don Van Gorp, midwest regional VP, marketing (誤訳侮辱)

that vid is not working for me (in Europe?) what's in it?

Bob Dylan

oh, I've seen him plenty

Maybe this link will work. It's his Nobel lecture, with tinkling piano underscoring.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TlcPRlau2Q

his moby dick analysis is A+. love the odyssey shout out too :)

John Donne as well, the poet-priest who lived in the time of Shakespeare, wrote these words, "The Sestos and Abydos of her breasts. Not of two lovers, but two loves, the nests." I don't know what it means, either. But it sounds good. And you want your songs to sound good.

good lecture, weird piano thing reminds me of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LLpNKo09Xk

well,
sfgate.com/music/article/Bob-Dylan-obliges-annoying-fan-in-Berkeley-by-8132776.php

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wc19CAYLlk4

anyone familiar with Dylan anecdotes from session musicians will be familiar with most of the traits described in this video, but since G E Smith tells it so well it's a nice watch all the same
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-CIOhY4ysRE

Bob Dylan looking, to my eyes anyway, nicely toasted. pic.twitter.com/ANgkpBKGTX

— Danny Baker (@prodnose) July 13, 2020

You've maybe all seen that already. I hadn't. It's lovely.

Great GE Smith stories ^

Never trust a hippie.

Howard Sounes's Down the Highway (originally published in 2001) was updated last year. It's been described as a trashy book, but it does have useful, new info, and the new one basically adds a chapter that covers 2001 to the present. He interviews Stu Kimball, who was part of the band from 2004 to 2018, and apparently Dylan can still play the guitar as good as he used to. Maybe not for a whole show, but still:

"During soundchecks, Bob would tell the band to stop and would ask for my acoustic to show me what he was wanting to hear. So I'd take the guitar off my back and he'd strap it on and run through a few songs with the band while I watched. And God, it was amazing. I swear it sounded like it could have been off the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. And I'd say to him, 'Bob, that was incredible. Maybe you should just play it yourself on those songs.' And he answered with a smirk and a twinkle in his eye, 'Well, ya know. Like they say...I've got real bad arthritis. And I'm in no condition to be strumming no acoustic anymore."

lol, he's just the best.

Weird. Thanks, and here's Part One of another good interview: with Larry Campbell, who def. should write his own book---from a real good enewsletter, Flagging Down the Double E’s (which also incl. some downloads of shows, even on the freebie version I get):
https://dylanlive.substack.com/p/larry-campbell-goes-deep-on-his-eight

I thought this tribute from Jewel was very sweet:

To be brief: Bob Dylan took me on the road to open for him when I was struggling and encouraged me. He gave me books to read (Proust), music to listen to (the Blue Yodeler) and his lyric book with a sweet note written inside. He told me to keep going, even though my first album was failing at the time. And, he let me sing with him. I walked on stage and headed to the backup singer’s mic, with a simple mantra running through my 20-year-old head: “Do not pass out or do anything stupid.” Things seemed to be moving in slow motion. He was waving his arm at me, inviting me up to his mic. “Oh dear Lord,” I thought. “We are sharing a mic while singing my favorite song. Don’t. Faint.” We sang “I Shall Be Released,” the tips of our noses touching. When we were done, he put his arm around me and told the crowd “Does she sing as good as Joan Baez or what?!” My knees buckled and my ears rang loudly. I managed to walk off stage, full of a newfound courage Bob infused me with.

I had arrived to the tour a broken down, beat up, exhausted crooner of sensitive, introspective songs at the height of grunge. All of the ’90s press was telling me to quit. One outlet, I recall, disliked my music so much, the writer suggested my mother should have had an abortion. I was beginning to give up. But when Bob By-God Dylan tells you not to quit, you salute your Captain, pick yourself up, and carry on. And carry on I did.

<3

spent all day having a little Dylan festival - watching No Direction Home & Rolling Thunder Revue

Joan Baez is such a gift

hell yeah, that sounds like a great day!

feel like he's terribly overrated -- i mean, the nobel, the entire literature parsing his bathtub farts, him being the worst live concert i've ever seen, etc.

but also he's pretty fuckin great

i listened to a bunch of the blood on the tracks bootleg volume (really love that Take 2 version of You're a Big Girl Now), then Nashville Skyline, then read through https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/bob-dylan-lost-letters-interviews-tony-glover-1074916/ , which RULED

liked reading the interpretations of Murder Most Foul in that Stereogum list

David Byrne:

“Then little by little the song begins to veer off and begins to become something else — a meditation on the times, using the assassination as a jumping off point. The verses become littered with quotes and references to Gone With The Wind, the Beatles, Gerry And The Pacemakers, Altamont, Woodstock — on and on. Not all of it makes sense, but the sheer amount of clever comedy and portentous humor keeps me smiling. Soon it goes from third person — the story of the assassination plot — to first person. “I’ve been led into some kind of trap,” “I hate to tell you mister only dead men are free,” “I’m just a patsy like Patsy Cline” — the songwriter, and by implication all of us, are also the victims of this fiendish plot.

We’re in Dylan’s head now — the songs he heard over the years make the world in there. “Only The Good Die Young,” “I’d Rather Go Blind,” Don Henley and Glenn Frey — they’re all rattling around in there. And the rest of the song, like one of those earlier list songs, is a long list of artists and songs he’s asking Wolfman Jack to play on the radio — songs that paint a picture of what’s in Bob’s head but also of the whole 20th century, evoked through its popular songs. The Old Weird America, in the phrase Greil Marcus coined. It’s a hilarious hodgepodge of a list — jazz, gospel, pop, soul, rock — it could go on forever, and it almost does. The goofiness of the rhymes keeps it from getting pretentious and tedious — it’s deep and dark, but there’s joy and jokiness here too”

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