Scorsese's movie about Dylan

"Stupid" or "groupie" are two things I wouldn't call her for sure.

Not knowing her biography very well but that she broke out around 75 I was watching the doc and thinking she was like 20 or 21 maybe and cutting her some slack. But no, as I’m sure most of y’all already knew she was like 28/29 then.

I like her records but reading Just Kids really reinforced a negative impression for me of PS being phony. Many bogus scenes of her portraying herself as a wide-eyed naif, where like shes at a restaurant and she notices a guy wearing a hat that reminds her of a hat she read about in a Rimbaud poem and as if in a dream she finds herself compelled to approach him and begin reciting her poetry and then she's amazed to find out later that he was a famous musician or writer or art scene figure who thinks she'd be perfect for this upcoming project and can you imagine that, all because of Rimbaud's hat?

I can.

Rimbaud's hat?

patti smith really is a total fake in so many ways, someone who seems to have spent her entire life carefully and consciously trying to be the coolest person in the room, to the point where she's doing that even today (when it's hard to imagine she has anything to gain from it). but her best records + performances are so good it kinda doesn't matter to me.

and tbh while i will always love his early poetry, allen ginsberg's reputation + legacy looks a lot worse than patti smith's these days.

I’m watching it now, and Smith’s opening number at the folk club is pretty compelling.

Lol @ this loopy flirt convo btw. Dylan and a woman at a party

And now Ratso does a postmortem interview with her about it? These ppl weir so f’in weird

Holy shot, I didn’t know Jim Gianopulos was involved in this.

sidebar re Patti
i should let it go but i won’t
I will stan Patti Smith to my grave
she is the patron saint of awkward self-conscious, poetry-loving, music-obsessed horny women who wears her fandoms as armor in a way that for me completely changed the possibilities of how to ~be~ in the world.
I get that this can be an annoying affectation to most but she frees my soul & always has

it bugs me that criticisms of her feel so pointed & cruel like she kicked everyone’s dog or something by “behaving in this way” idk

loved her opening performance at the club <3

Why is this Sharon Stone segment necessarily a put-on(?) She was born in ‘58, so she was in fact a teenager at the time (as she claims); why did one of those reviews of this doc say she‘s too young for it to be real?

if you can’t tell it’s made up idk what to tell you

i love the “Isis” performance

I would never have known, lol. It didn’t seem “marked” in any particular way

lol it set my bullshit detector RIGHT off

i fkn hate all the fakery fake interview bob-myth shit, i’d happily watch the concert & intersitial footage for hours tho

also i have all the time in the world for sam shepard & joan baez interviews

Oh, that reviewer I mentioned was Alfred, lol. (Alfred, what’d ya mean about the calculator?)

Wait, so this Dutch filmmaker is also fake? What an odd deal... I wouldn’t have known that, either.

I agree, the concert footage (and some of the other stuff from the time) is fantastic.

I never loved the violin on Desire (or the album too much generally), but Scarlet Rivera is really cool onstage.

the dutch film maker irl is Bette Midler’s husband

scarlet is my fave

I guess the Jim G. thing is also fake? His Wikipedia page doesn’t say nuthin’ about Dylan or music.

I dunno, whatever, man. Guess I don’t “get it”

It’s like that thing where someone tells you a totally believable, reasonable-sounding lie; then says “April Fool! You fell for it!” And you’re like... uh, ok.

forget it jake, it’s Dylantown

I watched the Patti Smith bits the way I always experience (most of) her work: crouching behind my couch waiting for it to end.

The Joni performance (at Gordon Lightfoot's house, with McGuinn and Dylan strumming along!) was breath-taking.

I could have done with more Scarlet Rivera. And Joan Baez! I think her interviews in both Scorsese/Dylan docs are great.

I have to admit I don't really enjoy most of the actual Rolling Thunder music. Dylan's still much too shouty on stage for my taste in that period.

Oh, and was Bob Neuwirth actually well-known as a performer back then? I know he was a famous hanger-on and sometime songwriter, but it was odd seeing the promoters handing out flyers for the shows shouting, "Come see Bob Dylan! Joan Baez! Bob Neuwirth!"

Oh, that reviewer I mentioned was Alfred, lol. (Alfred, what’d ya mean about the calculator?)

There's no way she could've been old enough to have met Dylan, I thought. I was wrong, though. I got her age from an inaccurate sight.

But, yeah, she was obviously, uh, getting into the spirit of exaggeration regardless lol

I got her age from an inaccurate sight.

This is a hilarious typo.

Worthy of Dylan!

sun's not yellow!

It’s chiXen

jarring to hear P Smith's accent, don't think I've previously heard her speak in footage of those days …subsequenly, she obviously fixed it in the manner that many trying to make it in the whichever big leagues in question do, whether yr from the south or mass, wherever…she doesn't sound like that now or since she came back in '88. or maybe her years in Detroit smoothed it out… is there a distinct Detroit accent? or is it part of the flat midwest affect?

If anything, this thing makes me appreciate this moment in his career better…previously I thought this was a step backward, associating with all these careerist folkies like Neuwirth…like at least his tour with the Band was with THE BAND, which consider to be an unbeatable, super special rock and roll band…and the Rolling Thunder experience sounded unwieldy in comparison, wrt to the 2002 bootleg…but the tour with the Band was too big for him, too redolent of the gigantic big money CSNY tour around the same time? does anyone have anything nice to say about the Street Legal World Tour? I've never listened to Live at Budokan, but my understanding is that its the point of his career unlikely to ever be rehabilitated.

God, what a snivelling toady Ratso is here… he's the Renfield of Dylan, although he has much competition…

Our thread on Street-Legal is very good, with plenty on Budokan and the other contemporaneous (and better) shows: Bob Dylan's "Street Legal" - Classic or Dud?

sidebar re Patti
i should let it go but i won’t
I will stan Patti Smith to my grave...

loved her opening performance at the club <3

― Squeaky Fromage (VegemiteGrrl), Friday, 14 June 2019 05:06 (eight hours ago) Permalink

I'm sort of Patti agnostic, a bit, but so when her performance started initially it I was "oh man...yeesh" but, in this weird way she has, that like no other performer I can think of does, it starts to coalesce and gather up steam and then almost like a magic trick, almost as if her early awkwardness wasn't awkward at all but part of a strategy to totally wrong-foot the audience and then sneak up on them, it was breath-taking.

My dad was running down this doc last night and how much he loved it and I told him about all the fake stuff and it BLEW HIS MIND, which was pretty hilarious.

"Come see Bob Dylan! Joan Baez! Bob Neuwirth!"

I also thought this was funny (and took it as a potential “in-joke,” though maybe it wasn’t). But I also couldn’t identify Neuwirth; I only know his Dylan-clone look in Don’t Look Back.

What that’s weird word Dylan and Neuwirth has for jiving people, gondorfing or something?

Gandalfing

https://media.giphy.com/media/TcdpZwYDPlWXC/giphy.gif

Haha, that was my other guess.

it's hilarious to me that Patti Smith is being called out as a pretentious, manipulative bullshit artist on a thread about....Bob Dylan

Dylan has better songs

I'm somewhat familiar with his work

what difference does that make?

Bob Dylan never wrote lyrics for Blue Oyster Cult -- Patti 1, Bob 0

women who are musicians have to tread carefully and be humble iirc

some real opinions in this thread!
i thought patti was cool in the doc — and she's only in it for about a minute, so it's no biggie, right?
i kind of like the idea of the fictionalized hijinks in theory, but I'm not sure how i feel about them in practice. i wouldn't be mad if come christmas they put out a DVD that just had the full live performances. and jesus christ, i want to watch the raw footage of those rehearsals too!

I also thought Patti was cool; this is the first time I've seen footage of her performing. The hard anti-Patti takes are... something

Janet Maslin's original NYT review of Renaldo and Clara...https://t.co/sYjPZOOhZM

— Jeffrey St. Clair (@JSCCounterPunch) June 14, 2019

xpost "Shooting Shark" is such an ill jawn

I've been surprised by the criticism that Smith got here yesterday. If I were on the make, I'd hang out in scenes too -- what's the problem?

I'm so excited for this movie, saving it for Sunday night

Glissendorf

God, this snippet of "Simple Twist of Fate" at the senior center / retirement home(?) is amazing