Post a controversial music opinion

morton feldman is boring as fuck

so is dylan but at least his songs and albums are over quicker

Which are the slow ones? I think it generally moves along fairly snappish.

I guess Ballad of a Thin Man is slowest.

I count "Ballad of a Thin Man" as 1) typically (of '65/66) brilliant; 2) historically important; 3) my least favourite song on Highway 61. Just don't like the way it sounds, and can't remember a time when I ever did.

(Brilliant conceptually...as an idea, as a comment on the moment, as a set of lyrics; as a piece of music, no.)

Yeah it’s always been a song I felt like I was supposed to like more than I did. Probably my least favorite on the album too. The plodding pace doesn’t help.

I started out on Burgundy, but soon hit the harder stuff
Everybody said they're right behind me when the game got rough
But the joke was on me, there was nobody even to call my bluff
I'm going back to New York City, I do believe I've had enough

Contender for Dylan's best ever verse in one of the slow ones, imo

that whole song is nigh perfect, the vocal is the most seductive he's ever done.

Oh yeah that one is an all-time classic.

Highway 61 Revisited is his most perfect album - not my favorite, but his most perfect.

Prefer Morton Feldman.

i mean i prefer bob, but highway 61 is a few incredible songs and a bunch of rambling crap so fuck this argument.

Someone should do a doom metal cover of Ballad of a Thin Man.

If you like Just Like Thumbs Blues, don’t sleep on If You Ever Go To Houston. It sounds like a belated sequel.

*Tom* Thumb’s Blues

it is totally proto-doom

Rolling Stone, Tombstone, Buick and Highway 62 always work for me, the rest I get impatient with. Maybe I conditioned my young self to be impatient with the rest. Don’t think I’d given the album a full listen through since 1985.

At the time I got it, say 1983, I was knee deep in The Who and Kinks and Cream what frustrated me was the lack of riffs— it felt like it was all lyrics. I actually picked it up because I’d gotten into Johnny Winter’s cover of Highway 61. The original seemed much less rocking. But at least the motoring ones did motor along. The other made me antsy. This doesn’t happen with “lesser” Dylan albums I’ve subsequently heard, chock full of methodical ballads, but I didn’t really try any Dylan again until I was out of my teens.

Morton Feldman’s piano works, especially “For Bunita Marcos,” are sublime.

"Tom Thumb's Blues" = A+++.

another in my line of "yeah if that got memory hole'd i'd be a happier person"-
zappa

i'm sure we've covered this before, but anytime the topic gets revived, how terrible that music is just hits me all over again. i wasted so much time with that music. ugh.

Someone should do a doom metal cover of Ballad of a Thin Man.

If you like Just Like Thumbs Blues, don’t sleep on If You Ever Go To Houston. It sounds like a belated sequel.

― o. nate, Tuesday, November 14, 2023 3:54 PM (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

*Tom* Thumb’s Blues

― o. nate, Tuesday, November 14, 2023 3:54 PM (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

it is totally proto-doom

― out-of-print LaserDisc edition (sleeve), Tuesday, November 14, 2023 4:11 PM (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Nazareth's "Ballad of Hollis Brown" cover is totally proto doom! one of the greatest covers ever, esp halfway when it gets totally unhinged

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dw-MvBnlFg

lol

My buddy Jan just proclaimed: “no good music was released in 1987. Except the second David Behrman album.”

wow.

Tell your friend to listen to PERFECT PRESCRIPTION, DARKLANDS and ECSTASY (& WINE) loudly in the dark until he changes his mind.

um hysteria helloooo

Jan, regarding Darklands and that Spacemen 3 album “ah… yes, is so, is so”

re: Thin Man, it's rarely one I'm excited to hear, but I was listening to this compilation of "Rare Performances From the Copyright Collections" that came out a few years back that had a performance from Edinburgh in 1966 that I thought was fantastic, just totally venomous and gripping. iirc the version on the Live 66 album didn't get recorded very well, it's a lot harder to hear the vocals than on any of the surrounding tracks. (looking this up i guess it's also on the No Direction Home soundtrack which I had forgotten about.)

YOU'RE LIVING ALL OVER ME, SIGN "☮︎" THE TIMES, EXPOSE - LET ME BE THE ONE, LISA LISA & THE CULT JAM ft SOUL SONIC FORCE - LOST IN EMOTION, THE MARKSMAN (Music from the BBC TV Series), NEW WAVE HOT DOGZ...

We get it Jan, you're not much fun at parties!

JoeStork - there's a 36 CD box set of every known recording on the 66 tour. Sets are similar but the sq does vary (most of the shows are mono, some are mono audience recordings). I found it too much work to try and compare each show, inevitably I prefer the Live 1966 I've known all these years- but I'm glad it exists!

Lol Jan is a blast! He just is prone to making sweeping statements while showing off Lovely Music rarities in the late night. (In this case we were listening Eliane Radigue)

I count "Ballad of a Thin Man" as 1) typically (of '65/66) brilliant; 2) historically important; 3) my least favourite song on Highway 61. Just don't like the way it sounds, and can't remember a time when I ever did.

― clemenza

when i was a kid my mom had a copy of a record with "ballad of a thin man" on it. i don't think it was _highway 61_, i think it was a comp, but i don't know what comp it was. anyway, i thought most of the songs were boring, "the times they are a-changin'" or some shit and then there's a harmonica solo. i liked "ballad of a thin man" more. he's singing about a one-eyed midget, it reminded me of jim morrison and the weird circus shit he was singing about on "strange days" (another record my mom had). and his voice just sounded _hilarious_.

this was when i was too young for shit like symbolism and i didn't quite get the savage mockery in his voice, even though my mom had taught me _all_ about what savage mockery sounded like at that point. not too fond of savage mockery, honestly. unlike, say, frank zappa, or hell, even phil ochs in songs like "love me, i'm a liberal", dylan's actually funny, and god, if anybody deserves dylan's contempt it's the kind of liberals dylan sings about. as for all the songs being slow... to me, it makes everything he does sound that much more menacing. which it is, he is.

the thing is in contrast to someone like, again, zappa, i'd say that dylan in this period is genuinely a misanthrope, or something like one. "just like a woman" is... i mean it's cruel because it takes something that's true and it twists it to where it's just devastating, and after he twists it it's not _entirely_ true but it _seems_ true. i've known people who can do shit like that. honestly, sometimes _i_ can do that. i learned it through example, at great length.

idk. what can one do when one's as fucking _angry_ as bob dylan and is old enough to realize that writing "masters of war" doesn't actually hurt the people he's singing about? like the bob mcnamaras of the world don't even _realize_ that he's singing about them. i guess you can write "ballad of a thin man".

i'm probably overthinking things, again. the levee broke a while back. what am i doing? watching the river flow.

Zappa wasn't genuinely a misanthrope?

checks with thread title tbf

huh, i like that post rushomancy, it's sorta the opposite of how i've perceived dylan and zappa. post is causing me to think again about my feelings that dylan is a profoundly angry idealist weaponizing his observations, while zappa is more like "you're all useless, you'll never get it."

"thin man" is classic if only for garth hudson's freakouts on some of those bootlegs

> didn't quite get the savage mockery in his voice

Great observations. I haven't ever been able to recover the mockery everyone reports hearing contemporaneously in Dylan. Maybe because he's just too nuanced in his delivery to only provide one interpretation, or everyone who was influenced by the mockery imitated it in a hamfisted and obvious manner that makes mid-60s Dylan more ambiguous in retrospect.

I have a hard time piecing together how Zappa's misanthropy felt joyous and silly to me as a teen. There was "Gabba gabba, we accept you, we accept you, one of us" buoyancy that subsequent cultural shifts have deflated. See also Jethro Tull.

i'll take tull over zappa any day

Outside of who is which, maybe i need a T/S which is more effective misanthropy versus extreme cynicism

Zappa wasn't genuinely a misanthrope?

― The First Time Ever I Saw Gervais (Tom D.)

not in the sense of "not a misogynist, but a misanthrope". there's something egalitarian about misanthropy. something like "god's song (that's why i love mankind)" by randy newman, now that's what i call misanthropy! god hates us all. that kind of thing. zappa's hatred just isn't egalitarian. he hates women more than he hates men. that he also hates men doesn't excuse that.

dylan, to me, when he does songs attacking women (and yeah, he does it ambiguously... the ambiguity is what makes it really savage. "oh, you thought my saying that you break just like a little girl was a putdown? says more about you than it does about me". well, when he keeps doing that sort of thing over and over again it starts saying something about him, you know? he's angry, he's hurt, he's betrayed, i mean, these things are where misanthropy comes from. show him someone who's not a parasite and he'll say a prayer for them.

I've never thought of Dylan as angry at all tbh. Has always seemed completely in control of himself to me.

Obviously we agree to differ on both points!

Zappa seemed to revel in lowbrow culture a lot, in fact I think he genuinely liked some of those things and the people who made them, I think it was more his dislike of anyone who thought they were doing anything good or deep. maybe one of those "all culture is lowbrow culture" sort of things, except for his music of course

I've never thought of Dylan as angry at all tbh. Has always seemed completely in control of himself to me.

― The First Time Ever I Saw Gervais (Tom D.)

that's a lot of my formative experience with anger... controlled, cold rage. precise. when i'm at my angriest that's how i get. always has been. knowing exactly the things to say, knowing exactly how to hit people at their most vulnerable spots, and saying those things. it's _targeted_, specific to its recipient. zappa's anger is more of a... petulant frenzy.

Zappa’s misanthropy — and tbf his misogyny — was predicated on a kind of “you’re in on the joke, unlike all these rubes” clubbiness, and I think to enjoy a lot of his stuff you need to maintain a sense that you’re better than the rubes (and that it’s not infra dig to stick it to ‘em). In the earliest days, there was also a sense that he could turn the knife on you too, so a bit of unease. I hung out with people like that a lot in my teen years — just a circle of relentless cruelty and whiplash wit, and everyone was always dancing around to be the one calling the target if not swinging the knife. It was exhausting. Zappa, also, is exhausting.

A lot of the same applies to classic-period Dylan, IMO, so why isn’t Dylan exhausting? — the opposite, in fact. Cuz there’s more to Dylan’s world than relentless mockery? Because he’s got soul? I dunno tbh

I don’t think Dylan had many songs with the vibe you described, though(?) Like Kate said, his put-down songs were pretty… “targeted.”

I think we're talking about a specific part of Dylan too, whereas Zappa really didn't have any other mode

it's not like Zappa has the equivalent of "If Not For You" or "Tangled Up in Blue" or "Mr. Tambourine Man" or "Girl From the North Country" etc etc etc....Zappa pretty much only had one mode

Fwiw, I’ll cop to “Thin Man” never having been a particular fave of mine from that Dylan era…

as someone who loathes both Zappa and Dylan, i would rather listen to the latter than the former any day of the week. Zappa is intolerable petulant bullshit. and i say that as a jazz and noise fan.

It’s because half the time a Dylan song has multiple targets and one them is Dylan.