Is Bob Dylan overrated?

Been wondering about this--if image goes away, it's his book Philosophy of Modern Song ("Featuring 60+ Essays and Riffs"), out Nov. 1:

https://image.fans.legacyrecordings.com/lib/fe9212737d67077c70/m/4/dylan-modernsong.jpg

Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal. These essays are written in Dylan’s unique prose. They are mysterious and mercurial, poignant and profound, and often laugh-out-loud funny. And while they are ostensibly about music, they are really meditations and reflections on the human condition. Running throughout the book are nearly 150 carefully curated photos as well as a series of dream-like riffs that, taken together, resemble an epic poem and add to the work’s transcendence.

In 2020, with the release of his outstanding album Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan became the first artist to have an album hit the Billboard Top 40 in each decade since the 1960s. The Philosophy of Modern Song contains much of what he has learned about his craft in all those years, and like everything that Dylan does, it is a momentous artistic achievement.

Oh yeah, here's table of contents:
https://image.fans.legacyrecordings.com/lib/fe9212737d67077c70/m/4/POMS-TofC-full.jpg

Only one British Invasion song, and it’s the Who. I always knew there was something about this Dylan guy that I liked.

But even one Eagles song has me giving the side-eye to the whole fucking thing tbqh.

Not a great pick if you had to pick an Eagles track, but not a surprise he'd include them. He's covered Henley in concert and he gave a shout-out to him and Glenn Frey in one of his recent songs.

Sometimes you can learn from a bad song. Here's hoping BD did.

Meanwhile:

http//twitter.com/DefDylan/status/1567860921904553986

✨NEW podcast episode✨Stories, myths, and narratives – as the @bobdylancenter opened this May, another Bob Dylan exhibition was coming to a close. What stories are these two Dylan museums telling & what do they reveal about how Bob Dylan wants to be seen?https://t.co/TeQHqlPUVH

— Definitely Dylan (@DefDylan) September 7, 2022

Wonder how noted Trekkie Bob Dylan is spending #StarTrekDay2022 ? https://t.co/OBEESlcCo6 pic.twitter.com/BTqqdztGPE

— QueenCityJamz (@QueenCityJamz) September 8, 2022

Sorry, didn't mean for lower part to be in there!

The "Witchy Woman" chapter may be redeemable if he talks about the Seinfeld episode that features it.

of course he picked fucking Witchay Woman

Maybe the chapter is just a picture of that surgeon in Seinfeld that was so entranced by the song?

Rolling Stone interviewed David Kemper which is perfect timing given that Flagging Down the Double E's just published the second and last part of their Winston Watson interview. (Kemper took over for Watson.)

...after Jerry (Garcia) passed away, about eight months later or something, (Dylan’s manger) Jeff Kramer called and said, “Bob would like you to join his band.” I said, “Sure. How do we get going?” He goes, “Well, we got a gig with the Pope in Bologna.” I said, “Say that again?” He goes, “Yeah, the Pope. John Paul II invited us to a Eucharistic Congress.”

witchy woman is not a bad song and don’s vocal performance is amazing!

Well, yeah

There's a lot about the record that irritates me. The opening sounds really fucking awful in a familiar way, like the stock music commonly used to introduce Native Americans as a bunch of evil savages in some shitty Western. I hoped I was imagining things, but a quick Google search shows that Henley himself recognized that when they first recorded the song, describing it as "a Hollywood movie version of Indian music." There's other stuff too like the lyrics and the way it's punctuated by those annoying high notes at the very end, but I always hate the song from the get-go for that reason alone.

LOL @ "Shelter From the Storm" being used to advertise AirBnB. I suppose when you sell your back catalogue off it's to be expected.

I absolutely cannot wait for this book btw

definitely sounds like a fun read

I’ll definitely leaf through it.

I seem to have developed a fixed idea that Dylan was almost completely unaware of mass culture since about 1967, and I can't seem to shake it in spite of evidence like the songs he is writing about in this book, and more-or-less contemporary covers he has done, etc.

uh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfi7ME_Y5Vs

Yeah, he's made quite favorable references over the years to rap, Prince, Beck, Lou Reed, John Doe, provided pretty good variety on Theme Time Radio Hour. Also mentioned that he used to watch MTV videos for hours.

“You like Ozzy? How 'bout Ratt?”

The feeling makes sense, though, in that the over influences on his own songwriting and music seem to end with 1967, other than what outside producers (Knopfler, Lanois) brought to it.

*overt

I know he went to a lot of shows with his sons in the early '80s - IIRC The Clash, Elvis Costello, Squeeze and X were favorites - and he was always interested in hip hop. (I think the Oh Mercy chapter of Chronicles talks a lot about what he was listening to when he made that album around 1988/1989.) But Dylan draws from a broad array of material, far more than most songwriters. Arguably the majority of it comes from folk songs and literature that pre-date rock n' roll. On some level I'm surprised there aren't more songwriters who do this because it seems to supply Dylan with unending inspiration. You almost have to be a musicologist in order to do that though, and usually someone like that will cover the songs rather than recombine them into something new.

"CIA Man". Good choice, Bob.

In Chronicles, I recall he mentions a few rappers (Ice-T and maybe someone else), and says – "Those guys weren't sitting around bullshitting."

Right, all good points, but there's still an aura about him that he's not quite attentive to his surroundings. Like despite actually being in a band with Jeff Lynne - how many ELO records do you think he's heard?

John Prine had a story about a release party for his first album. Dylan showed up. Prine had never met him before. Prine gave a performance and Dylan sang along, knowing all the words of Prine's songs even though his record wasn't out yet. Prine later learned that Dylan had been given an advance copy.

Jeff Lynne may not be the best example - it may have been more like "well, if George, Tom and Roy want him..." (more George than anyone else) Also 1988 was well after ELO's heyday. I think Dylan was probably better off looking into Public Enemy in his spare time than ELO, and IIRC that's exactly what he was doing.

I'll add that Dylan seems to keep people at a distance. Like it comes off as aloofness but I think he just does it more as a protective measure. This comes up when he toured with Jack White. I can't remember the details, but White approached him one time about something movie-related. I can't remember if he saw something on a guitar or what, but he saw something that made opening the discussion appropriate. Dylan didn't say anything though, and White kind of went away, feeling embarrassed. Then later that day or the next, there's a knock on his bus and he finds out Dylan has sent over a stack of movies related to whatever subject he was talking about - so in the end, he was listening, did process all of it, and did appreciate whatever White said, but he just wasn't going to launch into a discussion about it at that time.

xxxpost John Prine's first album! Well, it's post-'67, but John Prine came out in '71. Which is also when Tom Waits started recording, at least---could swear I've heard some on the radio announced as being from 1969, but earliest I'm seeing now are '71 sessions released in 90s as The Early Years, Vols 1 & 2. The point of mentioning Watis is that mention of Prine reminds me of my ancient Pazz & Jop blurb:

Love and Theft is the best Tom Waits album Ever

(And Prine's whole career in based on, "What if sweet early Bobby D. had stayed in the same sad-funny mode his entire career, aging gracefully, of course?" Not so much The New Dylan, as he among others was called at the time, as The New Old Dylan.)

So yeah, both are post-67, at least in terms of releases, but still not exactly Cardi B. They ollld.

But that's okay; Dylan has learned how to keep intimations of Antique Americana, new as olde, fresh again, like he did on the basement tapes, though not really thinking of them as an album, and John Wesley Harding, down to his 21st Century originals, for the most part.

Noel Stookey is best-known by his middle name: Paul. That’s “Paul” as in the iconic musical trio Peter, Paul, & Mary. They first found success in the ‘60s folk music boom — and, along the way, helped a certain young songwriter with an acquired-taste voice reach a broader audience. Their “Blowin’ in the Wind” was the first recording of a Dylan song to top a Billboard chart (Bob wouldn’t top a chart with his own recording until “Murder Most Foul” in 2020).

Six decades on, Stookey’s still going strong pursuing both music and activism. On the music front, he released his latest album Fazz earlier this year, fusing folk and jazz (hence the title). And on the activism front, he co-founded the nonprofit Music to Life with his daughter Elizabeth Stookey Sunde. Over the summer, Music to Life received a $500,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation to train musicians across all geographies, genres and generations in social-justice work. Interested musicians can join Music to Life’s mailing list for more information on the 2023 program.

“These artists are activists, really,” he explains. “This is not just holding a benefit dinner where somebody gets up and sings a song, and we donate $100 to move it along. I fall into the camp of the guy who's called to do the benefit, but these activists that Music to Life supports actually go into the community, from the prisons of Maine to the homeless of Houston. There's an element of hands-on participation that wasn't there in the '60s.”

When I called Stookey up recently, we, naturally, mostly talked Dylan. That means the heady days of Greenwich Village in the ‘60s, of course, but also when he spent time with Bob and The Band up in Woodstock after the motorcycle accident, and also several later run-ins in the ‘80s.

(Always dug PP&M's cover of "Too Much of Nothin'")

My dad was acquainted with Stookey in high school (suburban Detroit), and played alto on this pre-PP&M record:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5OdE8hZFvU

Ah noice, thanks. These connections!

If you’re a guitar player who likes Bob Dylan enough to, say, subscribe to a whole newsletter about him (heh), you’ve probably discovered Dylanchords.

The site is an indispensable resource for guitarists both amateur and advanced. It offers tabs for way more songs than any other site — every Dylan song on every Dylan album, of course, but also covers, live versions, and more. Want to learn how to play that cool guitar riff in the At Budokan version of “Maggie’s Farm”? It’s here. Larry Campbell’s amazing fingerpicking part in “Girl of the North Country” circa 2003-4. Head here.

But even if you’re just a beginner hoping to strum along to “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the Dylanchords page will be a more reliable source for those chords than anywhere else.

The man behind Dylanchords is Eyolf Østrem, who’s been tabbing out Dylan songs for twenty-five years now (and recently launched his own Dylan newsletter, Dylanology, which specializes in deep dives and music theory). I recently asked him about all things Bob-on-guitar, from how he started the site to what tabs he’d recommend to what he actually thinks of Bob as an electric guitarist. Some of what’s below will primarily be of interest to guitar players, but much of it will appeal to anyone interested in how Bob writes and performs his music.

Note: This is the second in an occasional series chatting with Bob superfans creating interesting, for lack of a less annoying catchall word, content. Here’s the first if you missed it:

Flagging Down the Double E's
A Guide to Some of the Best Live-Dylan Compilations Out There
As I’ve mentioned here before, after a decade of fairly obsessive Dylan fandom starting in the mid-2000s, I semi-checked out in the early 2010s. No big reason, and not even a conscious decision. I was just doing other stuff. Living in NYC made it easy; I could still see him once a year when he inevitably came through, but otherwise not pay super close attention…
Read more
2 months ago · 11 likes · 13 comments · Ray Padgett
Here’s me and Eyolf:

jeez, i had never heard this live version (the only one) of "abandoned love". heads will already know it, i'm sure, but it's new to me and it's an incredible performance

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNeZVC2sn4A

(that song/tab was mentioned in the interview dow just posted -- thanks for that link dow! dylanchords is an amazing resource, prime example of old school internet and why it ruled)

You're welcome, and I think tylerw said that "Abandoned Love" was from around the time of Desire, right? If he'd put that one on there, with "Golden Loom" (from the Desire sessions, I think), the album could have been so much better---or at least, had not just left "Abandoned Love" along the way---

(Yet more golden wtf moments in Dylan)

that performance of Abandoned Love kills me every time. and the crowd knows what they're getting. perfect.

now i'm working through the dylanchords guy's how to play guitar in 2 weeks tutorials, and learning how to play and sing A Hard Rain's (in drop-d, i find) i'm once again profoundly moved by

Oh, what'll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what'll you do now, my darling young one?
I'm a-goin' back out 'fore the rain starts a-fallin',
I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest,
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty,
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters,
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison,
Where the executioner's face is always well hidden,
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten,
Where black is the color, where none is the number,
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it,
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it,
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin',
But I'll know my song well before I start singin',
And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard,
It's a hard rain's a-gonna fall.

which is just fucking brilliant and a thing for humanity to be proud about achieving

otm

then Bryan Ferry steals it from him.

i know that musically it wouldn't make sense to go back to the parental figure asking the questions at the beginning of each verse. but i also like how it ends with him saying what he says, and the parental figure doesn't have a response or a further question. it's just like "damn, blue eyed son, you sure did tell me what'll you do now"

Yeah, and that power comes through even/especially as xpost Ferry deflates the occasional overblown bits w sound effects and "Greek Chorus"/concerned citizens for the poet who dies in the gutter etc---the ending and overall goes w the punk messenger warnings, forecasts of "The Times They Are A-Changing."

The part that has blown me a way for 30 years is that he was 22 when he wrote that - it seems so timeless like it's been handed down for a thousand years.

KM otmfm on Hard Rain