Is Bob Dylan overrated?

that is one of the coolest and relatable bob dylan stories i've ever heard

Bob is the best.

when I saw that story somewhere in the middle of the article, it immediately resonated.

haha, never change <3

Partial video of Dylan's stunning "Restless Farewell" at Sinatra's 80th bash. I added the SBD audio to this VHS rip, and upscaled it (but there's a watermark due to using a cheapo demo mode). One of his best performances which no one ever talks about. pic.twitter.com/90eEWpuhbr

— 𝗗𝗘𝗔𝗗𝗦𝗢𝗨𝗡𝗗 💀 (@DeadsoundApp) June 1, 2022

That's a great one - I think immortalized on one of the Genuine Bootleg Series installments too. (Those three 3CD volumes are mostly obsolete now, but at the time they were a perfect supplement to the official Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3.)

I wasn't much of a fan of that song - I thought Dylan should've set it aside and used "Lay Down Your Weary Tune" as the closing track for The Times They Are A-Changin' - but for the Sinatra tribute it was perfect, and IIRC Sinatra personally requested it.

This guy certainly impressed me in Don't Look Back and Buried Alive (striking Joplin bio) and was aboard Rolling Thunder too---also made at least one solo ab and one with John Cale, neither of which I've heard---Rolling colleagues etc. remember:
https://variety.com/2022/music/news/bob-neuwirth-remembered-t-bone-burnett-david-mansfield-steven-soles-rolling-thunder-1235284946/

Neuwirth’s Havana Midnight is one of my favorite albums, and Back to the Front and Look Up have their moments, too.

Mr. Dylan, in his book “Chronicles: Volume One” (2004), had his own description of Mr. Neuwirth:

“Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in ‘On the Road,’ somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth. He was that kind of character. He could talk to anybody until they felt like all their intelligence was gone. With his tongue, he ripped and slashed and could make anybody uneasy, also could talk his way out of anything. Nobody knew what to make of him.”

I actually met Neuwirth through a mutual friend. I didn't let on that I was a Dylan fan because I imagine he got enough of that from strangers. By that point he was already past 70 and he was incredibly nice and polite - I still have a sharp memory of when he introduced himself (just as Bob, not Bobby) and it wasn't until he engaged with someone he already knew that a boisterous, hilarious side of him finally slipped out. Great guy, he had the best line in No Direction Home: "Back then it wasn’t money-driven - it was about if an artist had something to say. Whether it was Bob Dylan or Ornette Coleman, what people would ask was, ‘Does he have anything to say?" Very sad he's gone.

I like this one - didn't know about it until I saw Elvis Costello's recommendation in that Vanity Fair piece he did of of his 500 favorite albums.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJiq8igzd7E

Is there a link to that Costello VF piece?

Yes, courtesy of the Costello wiki pages:

http://www.elviscostello.info/wiki/index.php/Vanity_Fair,_November_2000

I can't warm to that Restless Farewell performance because of the awful piezo-pickup sound of Bob's guitar. A travesty. I grew up in Ireland at a time when every pub had a bloke playing an acoustic with exactly that terrible sound, so I'm allergic. A pity.

FRANK SINATRA PERSONALLY REQUESTED THAT GUITAR TONE

Hahaha

LMAO

This took some turns!

Editor's note: This segment was rebroadcast on June 13, 2022. Find that audio here.

Mare Winningham was nominated for a Tony for her role in the play. And the show won the Tony Award for Best Orchestration. We speak with some of the actors.
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2022/06/13/girl-from-the-north-country

Broadway's "Girl from the North Country” is a powerful touch-down in Depression-era Duluth, Minnesota.
...anders, who plays the patriarch Nick, explains the non-traditional role of music in the show as “sort of an outer sphere to our inner sphere,” he says. “The outer sphere which is hope.”

Hope, of course, is hard to come by during a cold, bleak, cash-starved winter in 1934 Duluth — particularly as the bank prepares to foreclose on the boarding house that physically and metaphorically holds the family together.

As the only cast member who doesn’t sing until the final number, Sanders says that his character doesn’t have the relief or emotional outlet afforded to the other characters.

Bob Dylan - Civic Theatre, San Diego, CA, June 18, 2022 https://t.co/s9CaotqLbf

— Tyler Wilcox (@tywilc) June 20, 2022

No download here---at least not in this free version, maybe notatall--- but watchful description of his latest L.A. show:
https://dylanlive.substack.com/p/last-night-in-la-by-tim-heidecker

This does have downloads:

I had fun a few months ago compiling a Before the Flood companion set, so I decided to do the same for one of my favorite Dylan live albums, 1978’s At Budokan. Today’s the anniversary of the beginning of the second full leg of the 1978 mega-tour — the first of six consecutive shows at London’s Earls Court — so today’s a perfect day to share the compilation with you all.

The concept is the same as Before the Flood II: A version of every song played that year that was not included on the official live album. Because he played many more shows than the ’74 Band tour, there were many more songs. At Budokan, after all, was only pulled from the first few concerts of the 1978; there were over 100 more to come.

So what I’m calling Not At Budokan has two sections, each arranged roughly like a typical ’78 show. They open with an instrumental then go into a blues cover, just like most of the shows. They have an intermission where you’d flip discs in the CD-burning era, and end on one of the year’s big encore staples: “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” and “Changing of the Guards.” Speaking of “Changing,” they also include a whole lot more Street Legal songs, as At Budokan’s recording predated that album and only featured “Is Your Love in Vain.” He also plays original songs never aired elsewhere: “Am I Your Stepchild,” “Stop Now,” “Love You Too Much,” “Coming from the Heart” (the latter two co-writes with singer Helena Springs).

I adore At Budokan, but it only scratches the surface of a wild and wonderful year, full of sax and flute solos, wailing backing singers, surprising blues covers, and splashy big-band remakes of old hits. He even took requests. Some guy in Osaka yells out “One Too Many Mornings!” and Bob mutters, “We’ve never done it before, but we’ll try it.” Some guy in the front row in Philadelphia writes “It Takes a Train to Laugh” on a piece of paper, and they do that one too — another one-off. When he hit Oklahoma, he even busted into a song he’d recorded with the state’s native son Leon Russell, “Watching the River Flow.”
Bob’s chatty, too. Before “Tangled Up in Blue” in Richmond, Ohio: “This is a ballad I wrote a few years back about three people who were in love with each other all the time” (really leans into the all). Yucking it up during the “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” backing singer intros in Tokyo, Japan: “In the middle, my ex-wife Jo Ann Harris. On the left, my current girlfriend Helena Springs.” And this extended intro to “Señor” in Charlotte, North Carolina:

This has the '74 tour w Band adds he mentions above, recordings not on Before The Flood--- More ads than usual popped up when I clicked the download link, but then I saw it was indeed downloading the music file (FLAC, even, like my choice for the xpost Not At Budokan stash):
https://dylanlive.substack.com/p/before-the-flood-ii-electric-boogaloo?s=w

Bob Dylan and his Rolling Thunder Revue entourage – including Joan Baez, Allen Ginsberg, Roger McGuinn, Kinky Friedman, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Mick Ronson – arrived in Salt Lake City, Utah on May 25, 1976 to play the final show of their all-star caravan tour at the Salt Palace arena...
It was a night filled with unique moments for Dylan: the only time in his entire career that he performed the nine-minute Blood on the Tracks epic “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts,” the first rendition of “Gates of Eden” since 1965 and, according to one contemporaneous report, a performance of the Desire deep cut “Black Diamond Bay,” which has never been played before or after.
Dylan is returning to Salt Lake City on June 30 for a show at the Eccles Theater, and a group of hardcore fans are using it an excuse to join forces and reach out to anyone that might possibly have a recording of the show via a new website and social media campaign.

Bob Dylan gets an electric toothbrush pic.twitter.com/EwnFcxuhrv

— Peter Stone Brown Archives (@ArchivesPeter) July 2, 2022

Caption contest?

Rod Stewart's party at the Greenhouse in Los Angeles, CA on March 17, 1975
Sara Dylan (standing), Paul and Linda, Gregg Allman and Cher, and Bob Dylan pic.twitter.com/hWXJDiOvkS

— Pat Thomas (@PatThomas1964) July 6, 2022

Easily the strangest, most compelling Dylan gig I’ve seen.

The pink-dressed woman in the luxury box dancing arrhythmically for the entire show added a bit of extra Black Lodge surreality. pic.twitter.com/l1oaVEFaPe

— the Heat Warps (@theheatwarps) July 6, 2022

xp SARA: Bob, I’m sorry Linda spilled her tequila from the round you bought the table, but you know that’s what happens when a vegetarian ends up with the worm in her glass.

I'm probably not going to spend that kind of money on that kind of show, but there's some good stuff here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hOlNMUoZAo

Some of these bootleggers, they make pretty good stuff.

We ain't paid no whisky tax since 1792

when he finally goes in for trivia night, and the table is taken, and he says the spot is special because he lost someone to brain cancer, and then the random guy immediately indicates that he, too, recently lost a loved one to brain cancer - he mentions it twice - and the trivia obsessed guy just completely ignores it as he takes the table...

that was gold. was "make up story about brain cancer" on the flow chart? he seemed to go to it immediately as his rock solid excuse

"Take---that--thing---outta your mouth. You stink. No more for you tonight." https://t.co/nx3lRvQxWw

— Don Allred (@0wlred) July 28, 2022

and we have to celebrate the 50th anniversary of this classic Dylan look at the same festival pic.twitter.com/WpWzvIaQcF

— Tyler Wilcox (@tywilc) July 16, 2022

xpost just now noticed, with pic bigger on here than Twitter, that she's got something lit too (and blowing smoke in his face), but it's maybe her first cig of the evening since dinner, and not hanging out of her face like his. Either that, or hers is a joint, aromatic, not bad muffler farts, like my Dad's cigs, also ca.'62, like this photo.

Re: Tyler's tweet, I wonder if Dylan got recognized when he was out on his own looking like that?

seems like his disguise didn't quite work

https://preview.redd.it/wihjphwuzec01.jpg?auto=webp&s=ea09910b7328ae1773e40a2ac2a44b935cacc3f1

"I keep telling you people, I'm Dob Bylan! Now leave me alone!"

Writing Gordon Lightfoot by Dave Bidini of the Rheostatics takes the 1972 Mariposa Festival as its focus. Bidini gave a talk about the book at a local library, and he described his interview with Bruce Cockburn, whose Mariposa set was curtailed when Neil Young wanted to play:

COCKBURN: I was pretty pissed off when I had to give half of my set over to Neil Young.
BIDINI: Sure, but in retrospect, forty years later, it's pretty cool, right?
COCKBURN: No, I'm still pissed off.

well yeah

Everyone else was fine with it.

Can we talk for a minute about "The Hurricane"? For one of his best loved songs, it's got some of his worst rhymes. I mean, come on, Bob. "Eye/guy"? "Paradise/nice"? "Jailhouse/mouse"?

Oh yeah.

"That son of a bitch is brave and gettin' braver
We want to put his ass in stir
We want to pin this triple MURRRR-der....
on HIM!
He ain't no Gentleman JIIIIIIIIM!!!"

ugh

Fucking terrible.

xp love how he sings that.

Yeah, always liked the music, but words have always been somewhat problematic, as some noted when it first came out. Here's what I eventually came to, and added to a blogpost about seeing Renaldo and Clara, with some other updates:

2015 update from something written for somewhere else:

I was just thinking today of how few white music stars have written songs criticizing the way police and prosecutors treat black people. "Hurricane" was one star taking up the cause of another, as was pointed out at the time of its release---but that's yet more baggage pulled along with "This is the story of the Hurricane," the continuing through-line: even if he's got the means and acquires big name support, and the case gets thrown out---so, try, try again, if you've decided that you must make an example of him. The song covers the part of the process that had already happened by 1975, and of course he ended up spending decades in prison, despite the Madison Square Garden benefit, despite much long-term grassroots support thereafter. Not to say he was an angel, not to say he was even innocent, necessarily---but when the rest of the prosecution's case(s) fell apart, they went back to the race card: if nothing else, he was *motivated* to avenge the recent death of another black man, by killing whites. This argument was thrown out of court, and---despite any headline-grabbing aspect of Dylan's motives, despite the rich male sneering at "Miss Patty Valentine," other stuff---the song's point seemed sharper than ever. "The trial was a pig circus" that kept coming back to town, and "he never had a chance"---to avoid the re-tries, not for a long, long time.
(And the section of Dylan’s ”Hurricane”-ear travelling documentary-sketch mix Renaldo and Clara, in which black citizens of Newark comment on and argue about the Carter case on the street---I’ve never seen anything else like that in a movie*. (Dylan’s earlier “George Jackson”, with its highly- unusual-for-197i mix of black-associated gospel voices and white-associated steel guitar (long before the Sacred Steel movement was known by most), and “Sometimes I think this whole world/Is one big prison yard/Some of us are prisoners/The rest of us are guards” seems much less problematic than some of “Hurricane”’s lyrics. But still.)

"Hurricane" is my favourite Dylan track (and Desire for fav album) but not because of the lyrics. Which probably alone indicates I'm very distant from Dylan's work.

It's got its strengths, especially as a track. And it's not like a lot of other chart toppers were pushing political songs, esp. re race, at that point in the early-mid-70s.

How much of "Hurricane" came from Levy? I know some believe he really pushed for narrative or dramatic songs given his theatrical background - "Joey" may be the worse example but then again I do like "Isis" and "Black Diamond Bay" a lot.

Another reason Claudia should write a book, though some attorneys might not agree.

The live version of "Isis" from the Biograph box set is smoking.