Scorsese's movie about Dylan

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

I really wanna see/hear that whole performance, why do they cut out?

all of the audio of that one is on the bonus disc of the new boxed set

In the fall of 1975 Sharon Stone was attending a school (Edinboro University of Pennsylvania) that was a 7 1/2 hour drive from the nearest Rolling Thunder tour stop (Springfield, MA).

Man, Dylan REALLY wanted to add layers to his shoehorning of KISS into this story.

This Ronee Blakley interview is long, but (IMO) pretty interesting: https://variety.com/2019/music/news/ronee-blakley-interview-rolling-thunder-revue-1203243802/

I am about halfway through this and think it is incredible. I wasn't sure what I was going to think about the made up stuff, but I love it. Basically this film is Masked and Anonymous 0.5 or 2.0 or whatever, but a lot lighter and funnier.

The Sharon Stone thing is pretty funny with the stuff about Okuni v. KISS as the source of the face paint. A few years later Dylan would be ranting from stage that, "You can go and see KISS and you can rock 'n' roll all the way down to the pit!"

I waited until about a quarter of the way through to tell my wife about the made up parts. She did a double take and looked at me like I was crazy.

The musical performances are amazing on a musical as well as visual level. He is so intense on the opening Mr. Tambourine Man; my favorite version. Other times, it is amazing to see Bob so cavalier on stage, yet there is an intensity to Bob even in these moments, like even his casualness is studied.

There was one shot of the stage where it seemed like there were ten people on stage. Four guitarists! Like tyler, I wish we had another movie of just the full concert and rehearsal performances.

There are so many great lines about this so far: The crap Bob acknowledges spewing at the very beginning, "A Bob Dylan Story", "We didn't have enough masks on for that tour", "Life is not about finding yourself, life is about creating yourself." "Nothing is revealed" indeed.

Also, I get criticisms of Patti Smith on one level as there is a try-hardness about her that can be grating. Like Jim Morrison, she resembles a high schooler with their first poetry. Yet I usually can put those feelings aside for her (or Morrison) because I love and respect someone for not caring and just going there. She has a presence that, for me, ultimately sells bullshit I would normally not take.

Roger McGuinn looks like Ozzy Osbourne in this.

Is he sweaty and wearing a tight paunch-enhancing leotard?

Ha, no. More the hair and the eyes and the expression.

Lol my wife made that comparison too

fortunately no one in the film was on coke.

At one point in one of the songs I swore that Ronson played the main lick from "Song For Bob Dylan," because that would be kind of hilarious. But I watched the film again and now I can't find it and I think I must have imagined it.

How soon after- or before!- did a bunch of these guys get religion/go Xtian, including the Mormon just mentioned?

Also, lol Alfred

Not even going to FP you for not recognizing “Eight Miles High.”

Does Jacques Levy ever appear in this in any noticeable fashion?

I liked Joan’s story abt pretending to be Dylan

And Joni just hanging out playing Coyote <3

https://variety.com/2019/film/columns/why-did-martin-scorsese-prank-his-audience-in-rolling-thunder-revue-1203243856/

I'm so wedded to '65-'66 Dylan, it'd be impossible for me to like this more than No Direction Home (or, for that matter, Eat The Document). Bias noted, I thought it was pretty great--doubt my attention flagged for more than 10 minutes (pretty much the whole of the "Hurricane" detour, which I've never liked and seemed especially bombastic here).

Yes, this needs a spoiler alert, so don't read any further if you haven't seen it. Being a big Tanner fan, I loved Michael Murphy's bit. Didn't hear a sound, no whispering or laughing; I'm fairly sure every single person there (the theatre was almost full) bought it. You can probably guess the punchline: doofus here was completely reeled in by the filmmaker, Ratso, and Sharon Stone. (The possibility occurred to me about 10 minutes after the film ended, as I got in the car to head home, now confirmed.)

Loved the trap-door beginning, Dylan explaining the meaning of Rolling Thunder. I always find Dylan talking about Joan Baez moving, and Baez talking about Dylan hilarious. So much else to single out...Thought "Mr. Tambourine Man" at the beginning and "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" at the end were great.

To me it seemed obvious--medicine show, revue, whatever; Dylan would never even entertain the thought--that Rolling Thunder was basically Dylan's attempt to create his own version of arch-nemesis Warhol's Factory. That project is already underway in Don't Look Back, and it's probably true, to a degree, of anyone that famous, but it really jumped out early on, when somebody described Dylan being courted by everyone in the room in a way that was Warhol through and through.

Levy is very briefly identified.

Mr Veg got me the box set :D

Jealous! Dub me off a copy of the bonus disc???? 😁

I misread and misunderstood going in, thinking that one member of the revue was going to be fellow Bob Johnston client Michael Martin Murphey and there was going to be some kind of onstage "Chestnut Mare" vs. "Wildfire" FITE!

Levy is very briefly identified.

― Evans on Hammond (evol j), Saturday, June 15, 2019 7:39 PM (forty-nine minutes ago)

That Gleiberman Variety piece is interesting, the (disapproving) connection of the fakery with Trump. But saying Scorsese is "playing catch-up to the 'reality' era" seems off--surely he was already anticipating, along with Albert Brooks, the blurring of that line with King of Comedy.

I didn’t read the piece but I think it makes more sense to connect it to Dylan’s entire career than Donald fucking Trump.

He's talking about his reaction to the film, not really the film itself--that for him it didn't sit right in the Trump moment.

Sometimes wonder if Dylan got the idea for the name Rolling Thunder from the lyrics of "How Great Thou Art," maybe whilst listening to Elvis sing it.

surely the Vietnam War

Yes, that's most likely it, but I still wonder if this other use of the phrase influenced his thinking as well.

They also called the band 'Guam'.