Is Bob Dylan overrated?

I forgot, I didn't like "Lily" either until I heard the NY version, which becomes this very intimate bit of storytelling - I love how that last verse comes across on this version. I can't find the original mix, which is a shame because it really needs that ambience that was added, including the right touch of echo, but here's the raw, bone-dry mix from the box set:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=achOGc4iKIo

I've also always found Lily more "impressive" than a song I could actually enjoy/engage with; will check out that mix.

FWIW: https://www.reddit.com/r/bobdylan/comments/cldhti/blood_on_the_tracks_test_pressing_cleanest/

But two warnings:

1) I actually don't like how the RSD release was mastered, it sounds a bit bright and strident - the previous bootleg of a clean, original acetate was much warmer and more balanced EQ wise.

2) The RSD release was also poorly pressed so you still have these weird bits of distortion caused by things like non-fill, which kind of sounds like a zipper

Oh yeah, this is much more "engaging" way of performing the song...

"Isis" can be a lot of fun live---look up bob dylan isis live 1976 and you get quite a few, duh---always liked this '75 one from Renaldo and Clara, with the facepaint, big hat, mom jeans, gestures, v. authoritative, barks: "to wash my clothes DOWN." Reminding me in a way of "Clothes Line Saga."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqR3w2_m0u4

Yeah, the Renaldo & Clara film performance of "Isis" is absolutely legendary, one of the great Dylan performances caught on film or videotape.

That show in particular - December 4, 1975 - is one of the great Dylan concerts. If you want some Dylan shows but not turn it into a giant hobby, that's the one show I'd recommend from the 1970s for non-collecting fans.

This one's for Leonard!

xps the NY version is a sonic improvement, but the story just isn't a lot of fun to follow imo

Brownsville Girl, now there's a fun and fragmented narrative!

"Brownsville Girl" is hilarious. "New Danville Girl" is a better recording of it (see the last Bootleg Series installment, Springtime in New York or just click below) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdNxP7w07NQ

Knocked Out Loaded flat out sucks. He never liked it and he didn't even like making it, he was virtually going through the motions and doing it as contractual filler. Partly for that reason, "Brownsville Girl" stands out on its own, a great anomaly he threw into the heap. (He only had it because he had written it with Sam Shepherd a few years prior.)

What's interesting about "Lily" is that it's slotted into Blood on the Tracks - solid conceptually as well in quality, I think those surroundings create a context for "Lily" that's unavoidable. It's possible Dylan was able to write a lengthy and major composition that creatively had no relation in his mind to the other dozen he finished at the same time, but regardless, he chose to slot it in with them and they were originally recorded in the same manner. Jakob Dylan gave a pretty succinct assessment of that album - "the songs are my parents talking" - and that carries into "Lily" when I hear the NY version in its entirety.

You've got this Western fantasy that feels like the type of thing Dylan likes to indulge within his own imagination, but it can also reflect how much a rock n' roll celebrity's life can play out like a wild fantasy. It also reflects aspects of a passionate relationship that can play like a fantasy as well, at least emotionally or psychologically. In a way, it feels like the kind of wild ride an otherwise anonymous person like Sara has been roped into once she and Dylan became a couple. To be clear, I don't think of the details themselves as direct metaphors to anything in their personal lives, this is just the general impression I have as the song unfurls. With that in mind, it makes the ending a little poignant - he's lingering on this woman and the thoughts swirling inside. He gives you an idea of what she's thinking about, but he doesn't write out the exact thoughts - it seems more important that he's observing her perspective. That kind of defines a lot of close relationships - sometimes you know that they're thinking about something in particular, but even then, you can only speculate what exactly those thoughts may be. It feels like an interesting way to close the song, and it works really well in setting the mood for "If You See Her, Say Hello," which is about someone who is very present in mind but not in person - a narrative like that benefits from the tension of wanting to know what's going on in their thoughts.

Sam SHEPARD

xp Awesome post, bird!

Yeah, great post Bird! My beef with Lily has mostly been that it seems like the outlier on an album that is otherwise so thematically consistent. I’m still not sure that I read a strong connection, but I’ll definitely be thinking of it next time I listen, and I appreciate having a new angle on things.

For some reason my chief image with Lily has always been the cover of the Basement Tapes

Aw, thanks!

great post indeed!

I still don't really enjoy the song, reads like a roman a clef too convoluted to say something relevant - but anyway, I'll stop my harping now

I always took the song (on BOTT) to be sort of purposefully arch and "distancing" – the narrative is almost impossible to follow, the structure feels endlessly repetitive, that damn organ keeps going, lol. The personified playing-card characters bring "Alice in Wonderland" to mind; it's like you've suddenly fallen thru a hole in the album into this other world for nine minutes, which couldn't be more different from the rest of it (at least on the surface) – impersonal, impenetrable, highly resistant to interpretation, "wtf is this doing here?," etc. And then you come back up for air, with "If You See Her...". It's almost like the album was saying, "Don't get TOO comfortable."

(or like Dylan decided to pull a boss move, and slap his most "experimental" song right in the middle of his most "conventional, relatable" album)

I am on record as saying that I hate "Lily..." for its extraneous length and repetitive nature. Similarly I hate Elvis Costello's "Glitter Gulch" for the same reasons.

I am not going to apologize for either of those opinions. My musical universe is large and contains multitudes but I am leery of a nine-minute song with three chords in it, sorry.

OK but have you met The Fall’s “Garden”??

I have finally recovered from covid enough to join in the great ilx Lily debate, hopefully coherently!

I wouldn't call it my favorite song on Blood on the Tracks, but I have always felt like it belongs there - even anchors the album, in a way I'm not sure I can explain.

Blood on the Tracks gets billed as a breakup album, but it's also very much a relationship album, in the sense that it's full of these shifting connections and power structures and lines of influence between people. This is probably most true of "Tangled Up in Blue" where the relationship story threads its way through all these fading friendships and remnants of the sixties-hippie social scene, but the album as a whole is never one-sided in the way that breakup albums can be: even at its angriest you always get a very clear sense of the other person as a person, with her own feelings and interests and motivations and capacity for suffering. And you have that push-pull all through, between the breakup album and the "stories about people" album - the intense personal resentment and anger and grief threatening to swamp the singer's capacity for empathy, and empathy reluctantly coming through in the end.

So there's something sort of stately and allegorical about the album pausing in the middle for this story that is very much not personal, where you have these four archetypal figures, two men, two women: the bully, the trickster, the tragic figure, the survivor, all interlinked with each other. And I think it also balances the album that "Lily" is fundamentally a story about two women. Big Jim and the Jack of Hearts are both, in their different ways, more powerful than Lily and Rosemary, but it's Lily and Rosemary who come across as people.

Also I like the way the story seems fragmented and surreal if you just let it flow by you, but if you look at it closely you can see all the elements of the story happening simultaneously, like a cross-section of a building with a different little set-piece in each room.

you can see all the elements of the story happening simultaneously, like a cross-section of a building with a different little set-piece in each room.

was it on ilx recently that i saw something about dylan saying (or someone saying, of him) that one reason he enjoyed painting was because it was capable of expressing multiple narratives, perspectives, stories, all at once, rather than linearly (as with music)?

Great post, Lily – glad you’re feeling better!

Thank you!

Yes and yes to both parts of that, morrisp, also yes to Karl: I was just thinking, while reading Lily's last sentence, that I'd once seen a comment by Dylan about writing this album while taking art lessons, or at least while thinking of them, of the sense of time that he absorbed from his painting classes.
bird's and these other takes all pertain---can't think of another song written with this approach, but some movies: it's *kind of* like Bonnie and Clyde, with the two couples, but not that close? I think I was always distracted from the lyrics by what I recall is floppy music, also Dylan's vocalizing getting too cuet and yeah 9 minutes of that. But I like the idea of it as oblique stroke counterpiece to rest of alb, will listen again (it's even counter to the other counter, "Idiot Wind," where he risks burning up all the sympathy he's courted on here, by ripping off his mask or clamping another one on top of it, as his attorney crawls under the table, and his shrink nods approvingly).

You get into a situation working with a bunch of working cats and they have a way of doing things, and you don't want to upset the herd. You want to fall in, and that didn't happen. Instead of me coming around to what they were doing, Bob played bass for a little bit with me playing drums. I remember thinking, "Jeez, he doesn't play bass. What's Tony going to do?"

Winston Williams, now touring as one of the MC5, talks about being dropped cold into the Endless Tour: great stories incl. some links, and yes a show download at the end:

https://dylanlive.substack.com/p/winston-watson-talks-drumming-for?utm_source=email

Thanks for the link! I think he wrote a book about touring with Dylan that was published around 2009. I mentioned it in passing to a colleague at the time who crazily turned out to be a former musician who knew him. IIRC he said he remembers when he was dropped by Dylan because he was really upset and kind of needed the gig for financial reasons. At least it looks like he turned out okay.

My mistake, it was a DVD not a book: https://www.popmatters.com/72556-bob-dylan-never-ending-tour-diaries-drummer-winston-watsons-incredibl-2496033101.html

dow, thanks for the absolutely great link. A lot of fun stories about a period I didn't know much about.

yeah, the one about Winston's daughter and the mean classmate was great. I'm glad Winston also got to really enjoy his time with Dylan as a fan, at least when he didn't have to be too serious about work.

xpost Me neither!

Seemed like he got to enjoy the work too---don't know how it ended; what does he say on the DVD, or what did your mutual friend say?

I haven't seen the DVD yet, but from what I can recall from people who have, you get the impression that it's mostly Van Morrison's fault. IIRC Van said something like "you got to get rid of that drummer" right in front of Winston, which is sort of Van being his usual self. I used to picture it like that Seinfeld episode where George says "you could've done better than him!" - Dylan may not have said anything, but you could probably see Van's criticisms really sinking in.

Reading that interview was also kind of heartbreaking. I didn't want to say this before, but my colleague/friend mentioned that he remembered Winston was going through a divorce when he was let go - he mentioned that the alimony was really stressing him out. So when I read that interview, and he's talking about his wife and kid, I thought, "maybe I misremembered all that." But then he mentioned that his marriage was heading for divorce, and my stomach sank, like "oh man, now I know what's coming."

wonderful interview, thanks for sharing

I'll tell you this one funny story about them in the Warfield Theatre in 1995. We were getting ready to do the show. I'm getting my clothes on. I see my wife in the green room, and I don't see my daughter. I said, "Deb where's Marcella?" She looks at me, the color drains from her face. She's like, "Isn't she with you?" I go into a panic. At one point, one of our guys sees me and I said, "I'm looking for my kid. Have you seen her?" They're like, "No, man, we'll help you look."

Everybody helped. At one point, I'd looked everywhere except Bob’s dressing room. I go up and knock on the door real quick. His assistant opens it or whatever and there she is.

We were already five minutes late going onstage, and the two of them were holding the show up. I said, "Babe, come on. Bob's got to go to work now." She says, 'Oh, okay." He says, "I want to talk a little more about that later, okay?" She's like, "Okay, Bob." And she grabs her drink and comes out and meets my wife.

At that point, I go to stand with the band and wait for him. They bring the house lights down. Bob stops me with his arm. He says, "We got to do something about that girl."

I said, "Oh man, I'm sorry, she just loves you. I didn't want her to disturb your show." He goes. "No, that girl in art class. She's real mean. We got to do something about her."

there is a bit of a Prince vibe to those secret auditions, the uncertainty of whether you're in or out, what's going to happen

Bob came up to me and said he liked the way I played and that he'd see me tomorrow. I was like, "What does that mean? Like, am I playing with him forever, or is he dropping me off at the airport tomorrow?"

I finally got a chance to call my wife, and she says, "Okay, so when are you coming home?" I said, "I don't know." I kept saying that for two weeks or however long the tour was.

Interview w the guy behind the Thousand Highways shows & etc. site, no longer posting new downloads, but keeping all those links alive, which must be no small task:

What inspired you to start Thousand Highways?

I started trading bootleg CDs when I was off at college in the mid-‘00s, pretty much the last time that practice was common I suspect. One kind soul sent me a bunch of stranger odds and ends as a bonus — shows from the early ‘90s, ‘60s hotel tapes, that sort of thing — which fired my interest in finding out more about the unique styles that Dylan had performed. One of my favorite things about him as a musician is his willingness to totally upend what he’s been doing and try something new.

When I was abroad in England for six months during late 2008, I ended up downloading a few fan-made bootleg collections that were circulating at that time called Self-Portrait Revisited. They were structured like Self-Portrait, a mixture of instrumentals, studio, and live material, and were a big gateway for me. I listened to them endlessly and figured maybe I could do something similar to shine a light on the best, often-unheard parts of this singer’s catalog.

(much later)

Do you have any personal favorite compilations you've done?

Absolutely! Heck, most of the Bob Dylan I listen to at this point consists of Thousand Highways albums, if you can believe it. I guess that makes sense, since I’ve already singled out these songs as my favorites in Dylan’s back catalog. In no order, my favorites are:

In The Summertime (Live 1981) - This is my favorite year of touring. Dylan’s voice is great, and evolves over time, and the band is loose without being bland. Love the backup singers and what they bring to some of his classic songs. It feels a bit like what 1978 should’ve been. Shot of Love produced so many lovely songs too, and those get their best renditions here.

Piano Blues and Barroom Ballads (Live 2003) - This is maybe my second-favorite year of touring! Freddy Koella is Bob Dylan’s best guitar player, in my opinion, and Dylan is doing some genuinely wild vocal performances during this time period. It’s rougher and you never know which way a verse is going to go, but the results (at the best of times) tend to be better than similarly experimental eras like 1987 or 1989. So many songs — “Most Likely You Go Your Way” and “Highway 61” — get their definitive renditions here...

re: dylan and painting circa blood on the tracks again, it think i tracked down where i first read about that. it references an old rolling stone article, so it's probably common knowledge. but hey i'm new here!

While he was writing the songs for “Blood on the Tracks,” Dylan had taken up painting classes with the New York artist Norman Raeben. By all accounts, Raeben was a taskmaster, but he imparted in his students a sense both that life itself was the art, with their creations being merely the by-product of that experience, and, significantly for Dylan, that past, present, and future could all coexist in their work. “He put my mind and my hand and my eye together, in a way that allowed me to do consciously what I unconsciously felt,” Dylan told Rolling Stone in 1978, of Raeben’s influence on his songwriting approach.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/bob-dylans-first-day-with-tangled-up-in-blue

also, more importantly, i've discovered a typo in a new yorker article that was never caught before. i feel good. here it is:

By the time the musicians who’d been hired to back Dylan arrived that afternoon, he had already cut eleven songs. Dylan would record another fifteen that day—including five takes of “Idiot Wind,” alone again, save for the bassist Tony Brown—for a total of thirty-six, an epic amount by any standard.

by my count, that should be twenty-six, not thirty-six! in other words, THE NEW YORKER IS WRONG!

i have to say, butting 26 tracks in a single day is "pretty good", and i think is more than even the beatles used to record back in the days when it took like 2 days to record an album

butting = cutting, that's three posts in a row, i am banned

Thanks for finding that about his art class; it's what I was myopically reminded of by Lily's xpost take.
New Yorker says "songs," then incl. five "takes": looks like they shoulda said "tracks" in front. Just about all of what's surfaced from those sessions are discarded takes of the songs that ended up on the LP (and I think there's a differently-titled, earlier version of one of those, included as a bonus on More Blood, More Tracks, but I'm good with the original album).

Firing Winston because Van said he should sounds plausible. Chronicles could have been titled Meetings With Remarkable Men, after Gurdjieff's chronicle: Dylan too seeks the seekers, or is approached by them, giving advice, which he takes. I forget what The Croz laid on him, but Bono pointed him toward Lanois in New Orleans---somewhat problematically, but he explains the difficulties, and seems to sympathize with Lanois: he knows he can be hard to work with, and finds himself hard to work with to. Even inspiration can be problematic: he knows he's not giving the Dead what they want, and then he remembers something Lonnie Johnson told him, and takes it to the stage---also, I guess, Dylan and the Dead, which I've never heard, but it's a notorious low point for all concerned. Then again, I've heard some pretty decent show tapes of D and the D (on the Grateful Dead Hour), and the insight he says he got from Johnson also becomes the impetus for the Endless Tour, even if, as described in Chronicle, the modus operandi don't make no sense to some musical commentators, incl. musicians. But it does to others, and it does to him, and here we are.
So, sorry, Winston, but at least you got to go on to the MC5.
(oh yeah: he also says in there, that he went, with a typically shadowy-in-there woman, to see Mike Seeger perform in a loft, showing him what not to do: Seeger was overwhelmingly good with the folk-type folk, in a way that makes Dylan feel left behind and over---better stick to catchy tunes, clever lyrics, signed BD(and of course David Hajdu's Postively 4th Street has Richard Farina encouraging him to write more and turning him on to better weed than he'd had)
(also in Chronicles, he alludes to Len Chandler, an intriguing mention, involving motorcycle rides x conversation, I think---he's also mentioned here: http://www.bobdylanroots.com/chandler.html And this incl. some albums I'd like to check: http://www.bobdylanroots.com/chandler.html)

Paul James has sat in with Bob Dylan so many times he can’t remember them all. He’d just show up to a Dylan show and, often as not, get called onstage. He never knew it would happen in advance, and never had time to prepare. (Well, except for those two nights he was actually auditioning to join Bob’s band full-time…but we’ll get to that.)

Their relationship started, though, not with him sitting in with Bob, but with Bob sitting in with him. In 1986, Dylan was filming the movie Hearts of Fire around Paul’s home base of Toronto. Paul gigged constantly then, shlepping all around Canada. And at one night’s show at a bar in Toronto, he gained a very unexpected new guitar player.

Also, Dylan showing up for Paul James's shows sometimes, like at a cops' club.

One for the funny Dylan story thread:

But, as fate would have it, I go to the bar after this set and he's there. He's wearing a big beret and he's got a poncho on. We go backstage. I have my acoustic guitar. I played some Robert Johnson stuff. He went, "Oh, do that again." He was a big Robert Johnson fan. Now everybody knows who Robert Johnson is; in 1986, not as many people did.

Then he said, "I'd like to sit in with your band." I said, "Wow, that's fantastic. We know a lot of your songs." "I don't want to do any of my songs." "Oh?" "I'll just play backup guitar for you." I went, "Okay…” Like, what?

I said, “Well, we're going to go on now. Do you want to come up with us?" He says, "Why don't you do one or two songs, and then introduce me as a hitchhiker from Vancouver."

i have to say, butting 26 tracks in a single day is "pretty good", and i think is more than even the beatles used to record back in the days when it took like 2 days to record an album

― Bruce Stingbean (Karl Malone), Monday, 8 August 2022 02:43 (two weeks ago)

I was just listening to the Is It Rolling Bob? podcast. It was claimed that the recording of all of Dylan's albums up to Desire took less time than the Beatles took to record Sgt Pepper.

I first read that in the preface to Heylin's Recording Sessions book.

Yeah, it's in that book. It brings up something I've thought about when I do my somewhat annual ritual of listening to the Beatles' entire discography in one single day. Granted you have bootlegs and the movies, etc., but the main legacy of their work amounts to something like ten hours of listening, all boiled down from eight hectic years. It feels amazingly compact.

yes. beatlemania is excellent because you can pretty much devote one amazing day to it and get an idea of the entire thing

More from xpost Winston:

Today marks the 30th anniversary of Winston Watson’s first show drumming for Bob Dylan. As Winston told me in the first half of our interview, he played that mid-tour Kansas City concert with zero preparation — he hadn’t even met Dylan when he took the stage — but it started him down a path he’d follow for the next four years.

So today, I’ve got the second part of our conversation. Part one gave an overview of his time with Bob, so for part two we talk about ten particularly notable shows and tours. Winston tells me about the big moments he sat behind the drum kit for — Woodstock ‘94, MTV Unplugged, the Supper Club shows — plus a few lesser-known shows with good stories.

"The place was a speakeasy, like a private place for mob guys or something. It was a dinner show; the stage was tiny. They made clothes for us, these oatmeal double breasted suites that I thought were pretty spiffy."

I just realized that my cat's name is technically Winston Watson. Was not intentional but I still might pretend from hereon that I named him after one of Dylan's drummers.

I'll have to listen to that Prague show again. It is indeed a great show, but Jesus, I can't imagine playing through that kind of illness. In stark contrast, I've actually missed going to a Dylan show because I was still recovering from a digestive bug.

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