Why don't I like Bob Dylan?

Pink Floyd are fucking brilliant, what are you guys talking about?

i knew this was going to happen. after a lifetime -- all 32 years of it -- of loudly proclaiming my loathing for the silly-haired auld fuck, i found myself oddly drawn to a best-of.

which i'm listening to now.

and CHIZ CHIZ CHIZ it's actually making a lot of sense and i CURSES am really quite liking it.

i still don't get the grovelling reverence, but this is rather brilliant in parts.

oh -- and really, bob, the harmonica. that's not always strictly necessary.

Thanks for reviving this so i could read Fritz above.

Oh, and Ain't Talkin' from Modern Times is up there with Blind Willie McTell

yeh, the fritz post is fritzin' wonderful. ah, the ILM i never knew.

That Fritz post was a keeper and a half. Had almost forgotten it!

hang on, ned, i thought you'd be crosser here. this nascent acceptance of BD makes me JUDAS, surely?

Dude, like what you like. My opinion hasn't changed but yours is your own, so hey.

heh, ned, you really are the least rile-able dude i know and i salute you heartily for it.

i dunno ... i 1) wish i hadn't invested quite so much hatred in dylan, and 2) wish i could remember quite what inspired such outpourings of bile. probably something to do with old men telling me what i should like, but ... hmm.

of course, perhaps i'm just becoming an old man. that could be it.

There ya go. EMBRACE THE ELD.

My point way up near the top about 'tedious reverence' holds, and lord knows there are things I like that I've gone on about accordingly. (Quite honestly I really don't want to write about Loveless ever again -- it's all said on my end now.) Dylan came down for you and I and a lot of others with an overwhelming amount of that. But I stick with my approval of him as ur-figure/source material, that I'm fine with.

urRaggett, yo.

Worth a read:

http://www.mr-agreeable.net/story.lasso?section=Blog%20Archive&id=103

good lord that fritz post is like the greatest thing ever on this board.

What is fritz calling himself these days?

How cool would Ned look if he frizzed his hair, wore Ray-Bans, and rapped about leaders and parking meters.

ned + parking meters

source

and CHIZ CHIZ CHIZ it's actually making a lot of sense

i know this is part of the tedious reverence but it's true that dylan is one of the few artists that i really went through a CLICK moment with -- where at some point i just felt like i went from not getting it to getting it. the key for me was in the singing.

Weird. I’m not a Dylan fanatic, though I’ve slowly become a fan but I’ve always loved Blood on the Tracks with the exception of Jack of Spades.

Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts ... rather.

It's perfectly OK to not be a Dylan fan.
But you have to love "Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat."

heh, ned, you really are the least rile-able dude i know and i salute you heartily for it.
No, that would be Geir. I've seen Ned riled plenty:)

O RILEY?

Grr or something.

thx dudes!

encore!

encore!

will it be his 'best post since TMWDLD' though?,,,,,,,,,,,or will it be Empire Burlesque?

I have to confess, I've been having Daniel Lanois write most of my zings for me.

man, i'd be happy to pull of an Empire Burlesque. I'm in my Down In The Groove phase on ILM.

bob dylan - one of the worst vocals in rock, one of the best songwriters. ( i can't listen to him anyway)

people don't like to hear it, but sometimes you have to grow into stuff. or grow up for stuff. not to say that there aren't perfectly sane people with good taste in music who will never like dylan (like, um, ned), but things change. and you have your dylan epiphany. or your beatles/stones epiphany. or your steely dan epiphany. whatever. it's happened to me a lot over the years. i only had my byrds epiphany a couple years ago! at the ripe old age of 35 or whatever! jazz. classical. same thing. sometimes you just need to hear more to get why someone is considered so special.

and sometimes you won't ever get it even of you try.

Scott's point is that sometimes you don't even try -- it happens.

but trying can be good! people often think that something considered by many to be "genius" or "groundbreaking" or whatever is gonna hit them right of the bat. that it should be obviously great. this isn't always true. and this makes it easy for people to dismiss grandad's fave rockers. and i've made the point on ilm before that it's a GOOD thing when you are young to dismiss your elder's pop faves. it's healthy. but if you are smart-ish and curious, after your youthful denial of oldsters, it's also a good thing to explore the previously deplored. to find out why all these people still foam at the mouth about this stuff. cuz usually there is a good reason. usually. but you need to listen a lot. and hear the tangential as well. in dylan's case: 50's pop, blues, folk, country, art songs, spirituals, gospel, rockabilly, and more. cuz that's what he was taking from. and more besides. and that's too daunting for a lot of people. in which case they can at least agree that he wrote a couple of catchy tunes. or maybe not.

I agree, but the burden of an artist's canonicity can hinder more than usual. That's been my Van Morrison problem. I've gotten to the point at which I enjoy several albums of my own volition, but at the beginning every time I heard Veedon Fleece or whatever I kept hearing colleagues shouting "William Butler Ray Charles!" while I heard formless bleating and bad scatting.

i'm gonna give you my byrds example: i've been listening to the byrds since i was a kid. i think i bought my first byrds album at a yard sale when i was 11 or 12. it was turn turn turn. and i liked that song, but i never really listened to anything else on the album. and as i got older i still listened to the byrds but i never LOVED them. i just knew a lot about them and knew their history and influence and their songs, etc. in the 90's i bought a bunch of the remastered CDs cuz i still wanted to understand and feel byrds fire, but they just didn't do it for some reason. they just didn't sound right to me. too fussy. too something. i was not in love. when i moved to this island 4 or 5 years ago i was finally in the right place and right time. i dont know how. maybe the bucolic natural wilderness of the place. maybe cuz i had kids. who knows. the record store had the first 4 or 5 albums and they were in really nice shape. mono pressings. they sounded GREAT. i'm big on good sound. they TOTALLY hit me. they sounded wonderful. i couldn't get enough. songs i had heard for decades sounded brand new to me. i fell in love with the notorious byrd brothers album and couldn't believe that i had lived without it for so long. i searched out solo byrds albums and loved them too. i was READY for them to hit me. it led me into that whole world of calicountryrock (see the ilm thread) and i haven't looked back since. it took me, like, 25 YEARS of trying to feel like that. which is why i say that it isn't always easy and people don't often want to put in that kind of effort to enjoy something. and that is perfectly understandable.

Scott, I'm with you, not just on the Byrds (though they've never been work for me to love), but on working to get music. I think it's wrong to demand that of others---for most people, music is mostly an easy pleasure (or pain), and it wouldn't make sense for them to work at it, given what they're looking to get out of it. When I do so, as I did for jazz recently and finally got it in a big way, it wasn't the sort of epiphany I would expect others to aspire to. It's just music, and while we obviously value it a lot, it's not like we have some kind of good moral argument for its value.

Dylan meant the world to me as early as my 14th or 15th year. I was a punk, like many in England @ 1977/78, in a provincial nondescript east midlands town, feeling the aftershocks of what the Pistols and the Clash had just wrought down in London, or the Buzzcocks up in Manchester, wearing stupid safety pins in our ears, dog collars and binliners ("garbage bags" for our North American ILXors) Docs and pleather bomber jackets. And yet I still responded to Dylan -- back then, Desire and Street Legal specifically, contemporanously, but really a lot of his back catalogue as I worked backwards (Blood On The Tracks, Blonde On Blonde, The Freewheeling... were personal favourites then) -- despite a cultural gulf. I loved words, so that helped -- although before and since I haven't required any overt poetic or lyric dimension in order to love the music I love -- I did like some Kerouac and Ginsberg, but nonetheless I can't really explain it or anything.

I don't know. His voice is fucking amazing. I can really understand people not liking it, but if, like me, you think his voice is "fucking amazing", listen with all your attention to his phrasing on "Moonshiner" or "Blind Willie McTell", watch the oddness or the ferocity or the indifference of his many performances on stage -- YouTube has plenty of footage from Rolling Thunder, for instance ("Shelter From the Storm" springs to mind), or in The Last Waltz when his sheer weird charisma -- a minah bird who looks at you and speaks obliquely of strange meetings in dark bazaars while scrawling something impenetrable in some dim notebook -- makes you want to pause the DVD and debate doing something a little more lighthearted after a tough day at work, and generally try to figure why this same music can irritate you to distraction one day only to move you to tears the next and make you laugh out loud following that, after which you give up and just accept that it's not really for rational analysis and WHY THE FUCK DID I POST THIS ON ILM WHERE SANER, SMARTER HEADS WILL SHRED ME???? And.... I DON"T WORSHIP DYLAN OR ANYTHING BUT AMID MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH ALL MUSIC, DYLAN HAS BEEN PRETTY MUCH THE ONE CONSTANT, SOMETHING I STILL CAN'T EXPLAIN ADEQUATELY ALTHOUGH PERHAPS NONE OF THAT MATTERS...

Haha

I just out-Bimbled Bimble.

Oh dear.

I agree with Scott for the most part, but I think that many people simply forget (or maybe just never really understood) that Dylan had pop hits--i.e., real honest-to-goodness top ten Billboard pop hits in the mid '60s. In other words, he wasn't all that hard to like back then--it's not as if we're talking about free jazz or Beefheart, ya know.

Here's how my sordid (and no doubt excruciatingly tedious) history with Bobby D. began:

I was a nerdy 15 year old listening to KLOS radio in L.A. one lonely evening when they just happened to be playing the entirety of Highway 61 Revisited. Never having heard it (or any Dylan really) before, I had no idea what to expect, but assumed that it would be something really old and somewhat difficult sounding. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Even though I had missed the opening “Like a Rolling Stone,” I was immediately taken with the sheer wonderful sound of the thing, which for me seemed neither new nor old but just there; seemingly occupying some ever-present, but apparently well hidden, inter-dimensional rift that I had unwittingly fallen through (or maybe I was just born to be old and fucking pretentious—hahaha…oh wait…). Nonetheless, the record seemed to be giving off this sort of weird timeless quality for someone like myself who knew virtually nothing about older pop forms, or such now clichéd roots music calling cards as the blues, or country, or R&B, or etc. In other words, it was a blast!

Also, as Lostandfound touched on, Dylan was really fucking funny back then. I mean Chaplin/Groucho funny! Hell, I’ve been laughing at that “the sun ain’t yellow, it’s chicken” line from "Tombstone Blues" for more than 25 years now (which probably only goes to show what a lame and childish sense of humor I have. Oh well.).

*takes planet waves,which's one of the two dylan's within one's left hand's reach right now, and puts on*

I respect him and all, but I just can't get beyond that fuckin' voice.
That probably sums it up for 95 percent of all Dylan haters. I could never get into Led Zeppelin because of Robert Plant's fucking' voice, so I can't knock someone else for doing the same. Lots of people also don't like Dylan because they simply don't like ANY blues-, folk- or roots-based music.
I think Dylan's a great singer. I don't think he has a lousy voice, either, although it's obviously an acquired taste). Live, however, he can get lazy — singing in octaves and all.

Music's not that interesting either.

**wasnnae talkin' 'bout any aleister crowley condoms up there oh no xpost**

Though the songs are often great. (xp)

I think many are also turned off by all the Dylanology shit, too, or with the notion that you have to have an English degree with a minor in Child Ballads to appreciate his music. I leave it to others, like Greil Marcus, to ponder the relationship between "Million Dollar Bash" and the biblical story of Abraham, or whatever. To me, it's a silly song about getting drunk, and you can sing along to it. It just fucking sounds good.
His music has never been inaccessible; he's a pop singer, no more, no less (a "song and dance man?").

his voice is great
his lyrics are frequently wonderful
his songs are sometimes very good
his fans are often insufferable
his reactionary outlook is regrettable
his recent music is depressingly hackneyed
his earlier work was infinitely better when the organ provided a counterpoint to his voice/guitar/harmonica
his very best stuff is not nearly as exciting or musically interesting as a heckload of other stuff
his most valuable asset is the mood his songs can set
his storytelling is better than his music
his storytelling is better than his poetry

someone post some of these frequently wonderful lyrics. all ive heard are lame or creepy lyrics from bd.

written down they don't work half so well, listen to 'talking world war III blues', 'motor psycho nitemare' or 'stuck inside of mobile with the memphis blues again'...

i love dylan more musically than lyrically. stuff like highway 61 is so distinctive in the way it's produced and arranged, it's got little to do with the rest of the blues rock scene then, like yardbirds or john mayall or whoever, it's sort of this odd, mannered take on the electric blues but there's a certain artifice or fakeness i guess that i like about it, no one is really hitting into a groove and soloing like most white blues people did then, and then obv. dylan's vocals and phrasing really aren't like, well, anything really that came before or since....

dylan's vocal phrasing and singing style as a musical element is by far the most underrated thing about dylan. too much focus on lyrics too little focus on how all these records SOUND.

Bah. Commenting on my iPhone is producing lots of typoes. <3 zing tho

Icalling Israel palestinina-frei

^^^in bad taste but not necessarily anti-semitic as there are a lot of legitimate parallels between the ways the Nazis treated the Jews and the way the Israeli gov't treats the Palestinians.

suggesting that bob dylan secret Israeli contacts hooked him up with an african diamond mine

^^^this is totally anti-semitic because its a completely unfounded attack that is based on deliberate misinformation to reinforce a common Jewish stereotype

Ok, I don't totally disagree with that distinction.

Anyway. I got about three songs in before the interminable boredom took a hold of me, and I had to take it off and put on Mwng by SFA. Anyway. I got about three songs in before the interminable boredom took a hold of me, and I had to take it off and put on Mwng by SFA. Anyway. I got about three songs in before the interminable boredom took a hold of me, and I had to take it off and put on Mwng by SFA. Anyway. I got about three songs in before the interminable boredom took a hold of me, and I had to take it off and put on Mwng by SFA. Anyway. I got about three songs in before the interminable boredom took a hold of me, and I had to take it off and put on Mwng by SFA. Anyway. I got about three songs in before the interminable boredom took a hold of me, and I had to take it off and put on Mwng by SFA. Anyway. I got about three songs in before the interminable boredom took a hold of me, and I had to take it off and put on Mwng by SFA. Anyway. I got about three songs in before the interminable boredom took a hold of me, and I had to take it off and put on Mwng by SFA. Anyway. I got about three songs in before the interminable boredom took a hold of me, and I had to take it off and put on Mwng by SFA. Anyway. I got about three songs in before the interminable boredom took a hold of me, and I had to take it off and put on Mwng by SFA. Anyway. I got about three songs in before the interminable boredom took a hold of me, and I had to take it off and put on Mwng by SFA. Anyway. I got about three songs in before the interminable boredom took a hold of me, and I had to take it off and put on Mwng by SFA. Anyway. I got about three songs in before the interminable boredom took a hold of me, and I had to take it off and put on Mwng by SFA. Anyway. I got about three songs in before the interminable boredom took a hold of me, and I had to take it off and put on Mwng by SFA. Anyway. I got about three songs in before the interminable boredom took a hold of me, and I had to take it off and put on Mwng by SFA. Anyway. I got about three songs in before the interminable boredom took a hold of me, and I had to take it off and put on Mwng by SFA.

He's somewhere out on the highway right now drifting from town to town with eyes steel-grey and impenetrably deep, hunting like a great white wonder for some poor kid in a coffee shop - so easy to spot with their unkempt curly locks and dark sunglasses - some poor sapsucker who swallowed it hook line and sinker. The Man Who Doesn't Like Dylan is here and things will never be the same for any of us, anywhere.

listening to "bringing it all back home again" now. goddamn what a funny, funny album.

calling Israel palestinina-frei

^^^in bad taste but not necessarily anti-semitic as there are a lot of legitimate parallels between the ways the Nazis treated the Jews and the way the Israeli gov't treats the Palestinians.

not really, it's basically an offshoot of holocaust denial - not only are they not victims, jews are the real perpetrators! - and really shouldn't be touched with a bargepole by anyone with the slightest historical or political sense. newspapers in the middle east routinely run cartoons with hook-nosed, vampiric jews wearing stormtrooper helmets with a swastika and a star of david. why would you want to be associated with this shit? it's poisonous rhetoric and making the kind of distinctions you're talking about is like saying "but ronaldinho really does have big teeth!"

i've read some years ago that he owned shares of diamond mines in south-africa

Do you have a source for this?

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― Duke, Dienstag, 22. Dezember 2009 19:19 (Yesterday) Bookmark

the source is my corroded memory reading a german print magazine (probably DER SPIEGEL) in the pre-internet era (before 1991).
the reason why i still can remember this, is that i was pretty shocked at the time.
i've spent the last 2 hours searching on google for a reference - sorry to say that i can not provide any.
i have to admit that if someone else would came up with such a story without having any googleproof evidence...well, i would think he's a liar.

"googleproof evidence"

missed the "can't" but I'm not strawmanning here. If you can't see the difference between legitimate criticisms of Israel and calling Israel palestinina-frei or suggesting that bob dylan secret Israeli contacts hooked him up with an african diamond mine (which IMO is about an antisemitic statement as one can make -- the Jewish singer-songwriter is in cahoots with Israel to get rich off the backs of Africans? wtf??), then I don't know what to tell you.

xpost: i'm not aware that Bob has identified as a Jew since before he "turned Christian", anyways

not only are they not victims, jews are the real perpetrators! -

the contention that because someone was once a victim they cannot be perpetrators is wrong - its a fallacy, and its an intellectually dishonest way to defend Israel, in that it deflects attention from the matter at hand (Israel vs. Palestinians) and redirects it to a morally unassailable one (Jews vs. Nazis).

yeah, i'm saying the israel=nazis argument didn't come from a bunch of liberals saying how sad it is that the jews are acting terribly when once they were victims (which certainly has been the case with israel); i'm saying the people who kicked off this line of argument believe the holocaust was a hoax designed to win sympathy for israel while it continues a genocidal campaign cunningly modelled on the very myth that jews supposedly endured.

i agree that it doesn't help to turn people away from the facts of the israel-palestine conflict and onto the morally unassailable case of jews under nazism, which is why i'm the one arguing that people shouldn't make those comparisons. you're the other guy, saying there are "legitimate parallels", albeit in reverse. can you see why there's a pretty ugly context to that line of argument?

just an fyi, mordy otm, s-banning this guy

i've read some years ago that dylan owned cans of Blue Diamond Bold Jalapeno Smokehouse almonds

it just bugs, like an itch you can't scratch. I don't find much in the way of personal connection there, in fact really speaking none, maybe a song or two aside

otm

^ mostly

This is such a great thread. I love that long lyric that scott posted, whatever it is.

I have "personal connections" with few artists though.

scott seward otm for most of this thread too