Bob Dylan's punk period

yeah, thanks for sharing!

thanks for sharing that, Justin!

This is a better version of the Letterman show (vocals in synch and allround better sound quality):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1bRGhJPQkA

holy shit, new wave dylan!

you kind of get the feeling that throughout this period he had warring instincts and often didn't choose the best of these.

I'm not a big Dylan fan but that live clip of Jokerman is fantastic.

wow, thanks for sharing JJ

I am a big fan of these performances w/ Dylan on the Letterman show

I like Bob's delayed reaction to Letterman's question at the end

The YouTube links upthread are broken, here's a newer one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP85Uc6H79U

"Best new music" right there

he should have stuck with it too, how dreadful was the 10th anniversary thing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YedNVVw8LD0

just sad.

good example of what not to do with dylan in a live situation.

Oof, I remember that. Everyone else onstage is embarrassingly overcompensating for Dylan's (understandable and justified) "Ugh, this shit again" attitude.

Great thread, thanks! Hope to see more writing by JJ, will have to check the Web. Highway 61 Revisitedis punk as fuck; would be even more so if he'd chosen the fast version of "It Takes A Lot To Laugh," but the slower version provides effective contrast. Maybe someday as a bonus track. think there are other goodies from those sessions? Meanwhile, the fast 'un is on Series of Dreams. Lots of attitude on Tempest too: "So much," he sneers, "for the wasted years."

I still don't know Dylan's punk period but I am once again listening to EMPIRE BURLESQUE (1985) every day.

SO, are those youtubes gone, or is it just my work filter?

is it this one? https://youtu.be/nP85Uc6H79U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQDTSu8v8QI

You guys ever hear about this? In the 90s Bob Dylan got super into Jerry Lewis and tried to pitch a slapstick comedy series—starting himself—to HBO.

Love that Jokerman arrangement. Got back into reading about/listening to Bob Dylan this weekend after not thinking about him for a while. Most people my age that I meet seem to not be enthusiastic about him or think he is a charlatan or something, which is really disappointing to me. At the hipstery bookstore where I used to work everyone was upset when he won the Nobel Prize.

a charlatan at what, being the greatest musician of the 20th century

I think he is just seen as some kind of lame baby boomer emblem, which is absurd because he was famously not seduced by the mythology that grew around him and has spent the past fifty-plus years doing whatever felt right to him, artistically.

Might just be I only know losers but since high school my love of all things Dylan has often seemed a solitary enthusiasm

there is this weird thing that persists where some people still see him as the old timey protest singer and not the decades of being an awesome weirdo crank

Yeah, that. Very odd as the weirdo crank phase arguably began like two years after he became famous.

Canucks re-imagine Infidels if it had been recorded by Dylan & The Plugz.

https://outfitdoesinfidels.bandcamp.com/album/daniel-romanos-outfit-do-what-could-have-been-infidels-by-bob-dylan-the-plugz

sounds pretty good! (lol at them replicating Dylan's harmonica fuckup on the Letterman "Jokerman")

This got me to look up the Letterman performance, and here's a YouTube comment posted three weeks ago. It's Dylan-related, so it could just be an imaginative tall tale. (I cleaned up some of Henry's quotation marks and spacing.)

Henry Edwards
3 weeks ago
THE REALSTORY BEHIND “HARMONICA-GATE”. I was the person who handed Bob Dylan the harmonica during this performance on David Letterman. My name is Ed and back in the day I worked for one of the biggest rock and roll production managers in the country Michael Ahern who in turn worked for Bill Graham. At the time Bill Graham was doing production for Bob Dylan. I got a call from Michael saying Dylan was appearing on the David Letterman show the following week ( I think it was a Thursday) and could I take care of his “back line duties.” Backline means setting up the drums, amps, guitars etc. and taking care of whatever technical needs the band might have. Bob was scheduled to perform two songs on the show that night. On the second song he told me to have a harmonica in a certain key sitting on his Marshall amplifier so he could pick it up and play it towards the end of the song. He used it and everything worked out perfectly. At that point I figured my job was pretty much over for the night, you know wait for the show to finish pack up the gear and go home. Then all of a sudden I was told (by Bob’s son) that Letterman asked Bob to do a third song to close the show and I should have a harmonica ready again. He said it should be in the key of D (if I remember correctly). Now Bob’s son was still a teenager at this time and I was a little wary of the messenger so I took it upon myself to backstage to the dressing room to ask Bob personally. When I got there he was really busy speaking with friends and industry types and I said something to the effect of “hey Bob your son said you need a harmonica in the key of D for the last song”. Bob turns to me and says “ah yea that’s right”. So I figure great end of story, but no not end of story because Bob mistakenly (because he was busy with his guests) told me “ah yea sure”. So I set up everything the way I was told and the third song started. Halfway through the song Bob takes off his guitar hands it to me picks up the harmonica starts blowing immediately stops looks left to me and says “what the fuck it’s the wrong key”. I say “what key do you need?”. He says “G”. I think to myself oh shit that harmonica is on the other side of the drums, so I go running (on camera) behind the drummer to fetch the right one. It took about twenty seconds but seemed like a fucking lifetime! After the song was over I turned to Bob and said “what happened what happened”. He said “I got mixed up”. All of a sudden Bob’s manager Mick Brigdon was all over me saying “what the hell just happened?”. I said Bob asked for the wrong harp”. He said “don’t you move, wait right here”. He came back two minutes later and said “never mind”. I started to pack up the gear thinking shit these guys are never going hire me again! A month later I got a call asking me if I would go on the up coming European Tour as his guitar tech.

that's fantastic

Great story, thanks! Came back to say that I think punk period also incl. John Wesley Harding, challenging sentimental and escapist elements of folk, proto-Americana, etc: "Note to self and others: back to roots incl. back to assholes," although he leaves plenty room for inference that it's the whole, not just boondocks, American-to-AmeriKKKan corrupt, good-ul' boy status quo he's got his eye on (and some confessions of complicity in there too). Jon Landau's review: "Dylan has felt the War"---he meant Vietnam, but in Chronicles, D talks about going to the New York Public Library early on, and reading way back in the newspapers, from Revolutionary times maybe, certainly the Civil War and what led up to it and "away" from it, incl, stuff talked/written around in the papers.
Also in Chronicles, he claims he made Self Portrait to get the worshipful crazies off his back (also off his porch at 3 am, he said in the book or elsewhere), and it's extreme enough (always was, but we now know from Another Self-Portrait[ and related sessions on Travelin' Man, that the original SP could have been a lot better), to count it as a big fat hock-a-loogie fuck you.

https://www.flaggingdown.com/p/guitarist-jj-holiday-talks-bob-dylans

Guitarist Jj Holiday and the bassist and drummer of the Plugz rehearsed a bunch with Bob Dylan 40 years ago and backed him on David Letterman. Holiday talks about the experience in this long q and a

Thanks. He also posted about his Dylan experiences a couple of times way upthread, great stuff. Hope he's in one of those Dylan-related interview collections.

That’s a great interview, thanx for posting it.