Blonde on Blonde
Village Idiot
ever made. Don't know how many others enjoyed it but I did. Could have
listened to Dylan the rest of the night.
marcel...@yahoo.com
> Pulled it oout last night at a party.. Got to be one of the best LP's
> ever made.
What TOOK you so long? How could you possibly be from
"The Village"?
Barbara
"Village Idiot" <"Village Idiot"@ucla.edu> wrote in message
news:iKM8f.391415$cw3.2...@fe01.news.easynews.com...
> Pulled it oout last night at a party.. Got to be one of the best LP's
> ever made. Don't know how many others enjoyed it but I did. Could have
> listened to Dylan the rest of the night.
That's what plenty of people say. They say it's a masterpiece.
Harold
don freeman
> that & "Kind of Blue" by Miles Davis are the two best LPs ever recorded
>
I was in a used record store the other day and witnessed a lovely rite
of passage. There was a young, hip looking guy ( and I mean that in a
postive way) and a pretty young girl looking at records and cds. The guy
pulled out a vinyl Kind of Blue and showed it to her, and she smiled and
said, yes, she knew about it.
I bet this scene gets acted out over and over again, all over the
western world.
Dan Luke
"Harold" wrote:
> that & "Kind of Blue" by Miles Davis are the two best LPs ever
> recorded
Yep. Can't imagine life without either one of those records.
--
Dan
Stuck Inside of Mobile
Village Idiot
> "Harold" wrote:
>
>
>
>>that & "Kind of Blue" by Miles Davis are the two best LPs ever
>>recorded
>
>
> Yep. Can't imagine life without either one of those records.
>
Well I got Blonde ages ago. When I said just pulled it out, meant that I
hadn't listened to it in awhile. I've never heard the Miles record but
I'm taking all your words on it and seeking it out.
ch...@cupolagallery.com
Zuke
> Is it me or is BonB a bit over-rated?
>
>
I would say it's not over-rated. It stands on its own.
Just a great record.
Delia
It's you. Quite definitely.
Bob
ch...@cupolagallery.com wrote:
> Is it me or is BonB a bit over-rated?
It's rated just as it should be.
The greatest rock album of all time.
Nancy
i have to tell you.
things have changed.
i used to BE the rock.
it was boring.
i'm looking back.
EVERYBODY is laughing at me.
THEY'RE ALL MAKING FUN OF MEE!
WAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!
I WANT MY MOMMY!
thank god i didn't know i was the rock.
J Buck
<Is it me or is BonB a bit over-rated?>
NO! It's not just you!
Barbara
"J Buck" <jbu...@webtv.net> wrote in message
news:23-4364...@storefull-3134.bay.webtv.net...
> Chris wrote:
> <Is it me or is BonB a bit over-rated?>
>
> NO! It's not just you!
>
some of his old stuff, it is helpful to hear all sides. I also think it
takes courage to come out and say you don't like something that the majority
of people like or just don't think as highly of something that most people
applaud.
crazytimes
Barb,
If you haven't heard this album, you might want to make it the next
Dylan album you get (after Dylan & The Dead, and Self-Portrait, of
course).
Ah, Blonde on Blonde.
The secret album. All full of secret little blase references, about
secret things, the majority known only to Dylan himself. It's a small
forest of songs, a groovy grove of gust, in the wind of 1966. It's so
secret, it's left out of NDH (because no one they interviewed about it
could shed much light on it; either they didn't remember playing on it,
or they claimed they had been somewhere else that day. The staff
photographer who photographed the sessions was electrocuted in a freak
accident in a light-up phone booth one night near a parking lot, and
his camera bag with the negatives went missing, though he did find a
lens or something the next week at a pawn shop.)
Blonde on Blonde is so American sounding, directly does Jimmy Reed in
spots, yet it carries old world charms and graces, yet is an
r&b/c&w/r&r/flk-rock/rock/blues/pop album that succeeds a thousand
times in its attempt to bluff a masterpiece out of the circumstances,
the Nashville studio and cityscape, the musicians, yet, more
importantly, out of Dylan, himself. (I used to think that Robbie
Robertson played on the majority of songs if not all, but now I don't
know.) Anyway, the true details of the actual music you'll have to
discover for yourself.
It's a great album, to be sure, but in some ways Bob never bothered to
finish it. It's too short, and he didn't release a follow-up in that
surreal modish folk-rocker mode again (Live 1966 has to suffice, after
all these years), so in a way it leaves you wanting too much more of a
good thing, which isn't always good if the supply is severely limited.
It's not for everyone, though, but definitely in the "best listened to"
category of recordings. If Bob's sixties career graph chart follows
the silhouette of a circus tent, Blonde on Blonde is part of the peak.
Barbara
"crazytimes" <crazyt...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1130642620....@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
but I thought most everyone thought not much of that album.
I am currently listening to the NDH cd and loving it, along with
Freewheelin', which I never owned, also loving.
I only had the 1st Greatest Hits, Nashville Skyline and Dylan in vinyl, so
now I must discover what I have missed, which is a real lot. Therefore, it
is favorable for me to hear all views. There are so many albums and I'm not
sure what to purchase next. Hard life, huh? :)
fogdog
Nashville Skyline or Desire would be best for that.
ch...@cupolagallery.com
Definitely? You know for sure exactly how good something is? Wish I
did. Actually, on second thoughts I think there might be drawbacks to
knowing that.
ch...@cupolagallery.com
able to play BonB as an album all the way through. It does not flow
right for me.
A Kind of Blue is a good example of an album that you put on and you
can't take it off. It is all of a piece. BonB is not like that for me.
I'm sick of Rainy Day Women. Absolutely Sweet Marie, though a great
song, sounds cheesy compared to live versions. I think TooM holds its
own better with Kind of Blue in the maintaining a consistent mood all
the way through stakes.
Nicholas Twine
brilliance to dis it. I'd have it at 8 in my Bob albums top ten.
<ch...@cupolagallery.com> wrote in message
news:1130624964....@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
don freeman
60s had been growing and evolving at an astounding rate. Bringing it All
Back Home was as great a leap from Another Side as Freewheelin' was from
the first album. Highway 61 Revisited carried the leap into incredible
music and poetry. And then came Blonde on Blonde, a double album of
looser, wilder, even more amazing songs. What's not to like?
And then came the fall. Amazingly, Dylan pulled himself out of his
slumps a few times and created a few more masterpieces, but nothing,
really nothing, like the three electric sixties albums that culminated
with Blonde on Blonde. Sure, for aficionados, Highway 61 Revisited may
be a purer, finer experience, but that's really just an afterthought.
J Buck
<This is what I want to hear actually. Being new to this list and new to
even some of his old stuff, it is helpful to hear all sides. I also
think it takes courage to come out and say you don't like something that
the majority of people like or just don't think as highly of something
that most people applaud>
I'm not sure about the 'courage' angle, but thanks. I've made similar
remarks about BoB several times here over the years. It's hard for me to
articulate why I'm not wild about it...it doesn't stir me the way BIABH
and HWY 61 (not to mention BOTT or Desire) and it seems like a double
album for the sake of being a double album, i.e.
loaded with filler. I know this goes totally against conventional wisdom
here, but there you have it.
Village Idiot
Late in the party and every one left was drunk. I did'nt play the whole
LP but aboout a third.
Snoop Dog did Let It drop. 50 cent, etc My son managed the mid-way
stuff. Early on it was Johnny Cash for his grandparents, thay left early
when the 16-25 took over. By the time Bob made it on they had moved on
and left me with the 35 -50's that are into Dylan, Beatles.
Delia
notice, I wasn't being entirely serious, but neither were you, at least
in your first post. Personally, H61R is my favorite of the trilogy.
But I don't think you can rate any one of the three above the others.
Some of the songs on BoB are better than others. But it contains some
of the greatest songs of the twentieth century. And Bob's right about
the thin, wild mercury sound. I tested it out one time.
Patricia Jungwirth
about it
>could shed much light on it; either they didn't remember playing on it,
>or they claimed they had been somewhere else that day. The staff
>photographer who photographed the sessions was electrocuted in a freak
>accident in a light-up phone booth one night near a parking lot, and
>his camera bag with the negatives went missing, though he did find a
>lens or something the next week at a pawn shop
ha, love it! we're kind of lucky the session tapes got retrieved from that
dumpster, aren't we?
tj
¤ Alias
wrote:
> It's so
>secret, it's left out of NDH (because no one they interviewed about it
>could shed much light on it; either they didn't remember playing on it,
>or they claimed they had been somewhere else that day. The staff
>photographer who photographed the sessions was electrocuted in a freak
>accident in a light-up phone booth one night near a parking lot, and
>his camera bag with the negatives went missing, though he did find a
>lens or something the next week at a pawn shop.)
This must be tounge-in-cheek, crazytimes. I know youre as much fan of
Spitz as I am. Surely you haven't forgotten the wealth of background
info Spitz gets his interview subjects expound on the BoB sessions:
Ken Buttrey and tthe others talking about the first session for 'Sad
Eyed' is highly enlighting, and myriad other anecdotes abound.
Buttrey and McCoy -THOSE are the guys we need to see interviewed for
the BoB sessions. fascinating storys abound ("Bob would go to the
candy machine and come back with another verse (SELOTLL) ")"We all
stayed around the studio playing cards until 4 am- suddenley Bob says
he's ready - we did "sad eyed in one take - I was almost falling
asleep between the verses,praying for the end of the song, but it just
kept going on and on.I struggled to make it o the end of the
song..."[Buttrey]
they interviewed the right people, but not for BoB. The BoB sessions
would be fascinating documentary in it's own right, But I think
Scorcese was content to leave Blonde aside to focus on the tour, and
he definitely seems to have decided early on that the "Judas" incident
would be the culmination of the film. Everything on disc 2 seems to
resolve around that desicion, build to that point.
I also like Buttreys story about Lay,Lady,Lay .....getting a bunch of
wise ass answers from Bob and the producers, taking their suggestions
'to spite them'and 'prove how ridiculous they were, and gradually
realizing he wound up inventing "one of the tastiest drum parts I've
ever played'
Fuck the mudslinging - Spitz's book rules.
¤ Alias
$.02
¤ Alias
Bob Hughes
wrote:
Self Portrait is a great album after you strip all the really terrible
songs off it. Course by then it's only 37 minutes long.
Bob Hughes
Who's Whose at DC Comics? Creator Credits and art samples from DC's Golden and Silver Age Comics, especially Superman and Batman profiled at:
http://www.supermanartists.comics.org/superart.htm
Frank Zappa
Bob Gill
> I've made similar remarks about BoB several times here over the years.
> It's hard for me to articulate why I'm not wild about it...it doesn't stir
> me the way BIABH and HWY 61 (not to mention BOTT or Desire) and it seems
> like a double album for the sake of being a double album, i.e. loaded with
> filler.
That's not the album I hear. To my ears, the one that's weighted down with
a bit of filler is Bringing It All Back Home _ the last three songs on the
first side, specifically. I mean, there's nothing wrong with any of them and
115th Dream is pretty funny, but they're all 12-bar blues and none of them
is distinguished. Also, that album is recorded rather tentatively, probably
because it's the first with electric guitars and drums and such. I think
Clinton Heylin said the songs sound like demo recordings when compared with
the songs on Highway 61, and for me that describes it exactly.
Of course it's still outstanding, but I prefer at least three albums to it
_ the next two, and Blood on the Tracks.
-- Bob G.
Zuke
>
> "crazytimes" <crazyt...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> news:1130642620....@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
>>
>> Barbara wrote:
>>> "J Buck" <jbu...@webtv.net> wrote in message
>>> news:23-4364...@storefull-3134.bay.webtv.net...
>>>> Chris wrote:
>>>> <Is it me or is BonB a bit over-rated?>
>>>>
>>>> NO! It's not just you!
>>>>
>>> This is what I want to hear actually. Being new to this list and new to
> even
> Thanks for your post. Actually someone left me the vinyl of Self Portrait,
> but I thought most everyone thought not much of that album.
> I am currently listening to the NDH cd and loving it, along with
> Freewheelin', which I never owned, also loving.
> I only had the 1st Greatest Hits, Nashville Skyline and Dylan in vinyl, so
> now I must discover what I have missed, which is a real lot. Therefore, it
> is favorable for me to hear all views. There are so many albums and I'm not
> sure what to purchase next. Hard life, huh? :)
Maybe you should buy them in chronological order. That would give you
a good reference for his career too. You'll probably want to know what
is happening in his life when he wrote the songs on the album.
Also, check out your local library. You might be able to check out the
CD's. It's an inexpensive way of at least getting to hear each album.
If you have a turntable that's a pretty cheap way of hearing Dylan.
You can still get copies of most of his stuff at 2nd hand stores for
under 5 bucks and many times it's only 1 dollar.
Each person can have their opinion but I think BoB would win in
a landslide as a must have Dylan lp. The reference earlier to
BoB being heavy Jerry Reed is right. I say HW61 is Robert Johnson,
BoB Jerry Reed and Basement Tapes JOhn Lee HOoker.
Zuke
Filler? Which ones are you calling filler? Sad Eyed Lady?
Stuck Inside of Mobile?
You might not like "Rainy Day Women", I might not like "Rainy Day
Women" at times but the general publics reaction to it makes it
one of Dylan's most popular songs.
Interestingly there are others who do not like this album. I listened
to a tape that they have at the Indiana Univ Folklore library
and it's two musicians who were at the BoB sessions and they
were ripping on Bob pretty good.
I've listened to it now for over 30 years and it can still astound
me. It's Dylan's voice on it that ultimately kills me.
Village Idiot
Probaly my favorite single (unlike Blonde on Blonde that is double)
Dylan album.
I didn't like Hard Rain at first. Now I do. People who don't get Dylan,
look at me crazy when I play it and am in bliss litening.
Zuke
On Sun, 30 Oct 2005, Bob Hughes wrote:
> On Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:00:43 -0700, "Barbara" <barba...@yahoo.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> "crazytimes" <crazyt...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>> sure what to purchase next. Hard life, huh? :)
>>
> Self Portrait is a great album after you strip all the really terrible
> songs off it. Course by then it's only 37 minutes long.
Is "minutes" a misprint? Did you mean "seconds"? Everytime I put it on
I think something is wrong with my turntable, is the record warped,
is my belt turning at the wrong speed? It had to be intentional,
Bob could at least get his bat at the ball. He wore the
golden sombrero on that one.
Jeff Gower
"Village Idiot" <"Village Idiot"@ucla.edu> wrote:
> I didn't like Hard Rain at first. Now I do. People who don't get Dylan,
> look at me crazy when I play it and am in bliss litening.
Recently someone here started a "Desert Island Dylan Disc" query, and
believe it or not I thought of "Hard Rain" for a bit - it has long been
a favorite of mine also. That whole RTR period was great.
Jeff
Mr Jinx
Dylan's focus has shifted away from studio albums to the stage. To
judge him solely on albums is to miss where he really operates. We
know this to be the case because he has chosen to spend his life on the
road and on the stages of the world rather than in recording studios.
The scale of his touring since 1989 dwarfs the puny tours he did in the
60s. His work can be found on thousands of field recordings.
Mr Jinx
Tim Herrick
In a message dated 10/31/2005 12:01:19 AM Eastern Standard Time,
LIST...@LISTSERV.BUFFALO.EDU writes:
Blonde on Blonde
That's not the album I hear. To my ears, the one that's weighted down with
a bit of filler is Bringing It All Back Home _ the last three songs on the
first side, specifically. I mean, there's nothing wrong with any of them and
115th Dream is pretty funny, but they're all 12-bar blues and none of them
is distinguished. Also, that album is recorded rather tentatively, probably
because it's the first with electric guitars and drums and such. I think
Clinton Heylin said the songs sound like demo recordings when compared with
the songs on Highway 61, and for me that describes it exactly.
I don't think they sound like demo songs, although tentative while not apt
is not far from the mark. Bringing it all back home has a sense of discovery
about it, there's an excitement in hearing dylan gaining confidence using the
muscians, exploring the blues and rock and roll that had been embedded all
along.
HW61 and BOB are better records, and I was never a fan of gates of eden.
Ever notice though, you don't hear any of these records for years or months,
cause maybe the last time you went into that jag they got a little tired
cause of the replays, then you play them again, and bam, wow, you notice new
stuff.
Lastly, there's a chess feel to the electric side of bringing it all back
home. gotta love that, the chess feel.
Wilbur Slice
It Hurts Me Too is the only song on that album worth listening to.
It's a masterpiece performance, but it's not even a Dylan song.
jimmy
The first two songs on BoB i could never like. Then comes the best song
he ever recorded i think. Those 3 songs in a row - VOJ Sorlater and IWY
- they are loaded with that thin wild mercury sound. The best 3 songs
in a row on any album. The rest of the album i find inconsistant. One
strange thing though- Temp like achilles i could never take too until i
turned up the bass one day- its the combination of bassline and piano
that makes the song.
And the album has to be listened to on large speakers.
Wilbur Slice
Usenet is so educational - where else would you be able to learn that
there are people who think Hard Rain, Self Portrait, Saved and so
forth are anything but horrible albums for which we should all
petition Bob to get our money back, while at the same time learning
that there are people - Dylan fans, even - who don't think Blonde on
Blonde is a masterpiece.
It's so illustrative that there are all sorts of people in this world,
and ANY idea, no matter how bizarre and unthinkable it may seem, will
find an adherent somewhere.
Barbara
"Zuke" <m...@privacy.net> wrote in message
news:Pine.OSX.4.63.05...@ucfilespace.uc.edu...
seems like it has much of his older stuff and I'm wondering if the originals
sound that much different.
Barbara
gabriel
Wilbur Slice wrote:
>
> Usenet is so educational - where else would you be able to learn that
> there are people who think Hard Rain, Self Portrait, Saved and so
> forth are anything but horrible albums for which we should all
> petition Bob to get our money back, while at the same time learning
> that there are people - Dylan fans, even - who don't think Blonde on
> Blonde is a masterpiece.
>
> It's so illustrative that there are all sorts of people in this world,
> and ANY idea, no matter how bizarre and unthinkable it may seem, will
> find an adherent somewhere.
speaking of bizarre and unthinkable ideas...
>Hard Rain, Self Portrait, Saved and so
> forth are horrible albums for which we should all
> petition Bob to get our money back
Usenet is so educational - just to think there are Dylan fans who
believe he owes them something, and not the other way around!
ch...@cupolagallery.com
Ok, sorry if I got the wrong end of your tone and snapped back. I agree
that there is a great sound much in evidence on BonB. I play songs from
the album all the time, but I almost never play the album as a whole.
Same goes for H61 and BIABH. Uh, maybe I should quickly add that I
don't listen to Self Portrait all the way through that often, either.
Dylan and the Dead, on the other hand, is easily one of the best albums
of all time. Or is it me?
Will Dockery
Something about "Dylan & The Dead" is always enjoyable to me, esp. with
a few friends and some beers... "Queen Jane" and "Joey", and the funny
line in "Knockin' On Heaven's Door": "Something done crawled into my
eyyyyyyye..."
--
"But, truly, I have wept too much! The Dawns are heartbreaking. Every
moon is atrocious and every sun bitter." -Arthur Rimbaud
Mirror Twins by Will Dockery: <http://tinyurl.com/7on5h>
Black Eagle Lady by Will Dockery & Henry Conley:
<http://tinyurl.com/bev5f
Barbara
<ch...@cupolagallery.com> wrote in message
news:1130781478.5...@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
ch...@cupolagallery.com
> Usenet is so educational - where else would you be able to learn that
> there are people who think Hard Rain, Self Portrait, Saved and so
> forth are anything but horrible albums for which we should all
> petition Bob to get our money back, while at the same time learning
> that there are people - Dylan fans, even - who don't think Blonde on
> Blonde is a masterpiece.
>
> It's so illustrative that there are all sorts of people in this world,
> and ANY idea, no matter how bizarre and unthinkable it may seem, will
> find an adherent somewhere.
You're saying that suggesting Hard Rain is a great album is unthinkable
and bizarre? Are there people, Dylan fans even, who can say this kind
of thing and mean it? Judged as an album (not as a cultural document we
have to "put into perspective"), I'd say Hard Rain is better than BonB.
Saved is the best gospel album I've ever heard. (I haven't heard that
many...) I won't say it's "better than BonB" because I'm not trying to
be outrageous on purpose here. Just stating my opinions.
Self Portrait is very entertaining. I would not like to lose a minute
of it.
As for BonB being a "masterpiece"... Individual songs on the album may
come close to that, whatever "masterpiece" means (I suspect it's the
kind of word people use when they're trying to bolster their own
self-image in talking about something they like a lot).
I'm pleased but also quite surprised that finding people can have
different opinions to you is so "educational".
Village Idiot
>
>>Usenet is so educational - where else would you be able to learn that
>>there are people who think Hard Rain, Self Portrait, Saved and so
>>forth are anything but horrible albums for which we should all
>>petition Bob to get our money back, while at the same time learning
>>that there are people - Dylan fans, even - who don't think Blonde on
>>Blonde is a masterpiece.
>>
>>It's so illustrative that there are all sorts of people in this world,
>>and ANY idea, no matter how bizarre and unthinkable it may seem, will
>>find an adherent somewhere.
>
>
> You're saying that suggesting Hard Rain is a great album is unthinkable
> and bizarre? Are there people, Dylan fans even, who can say this kind
> of thing and mean it? Judged as an album (not as a cultural document we
> have to "put into perspective"), I'd say Hard Rain is better than BonB.
>
>
We're talking the same album here, right? I was meaning, Hard Rain the
Live album.
Wilbur Slice
>
>
>> Usenet is so educational - where else would you be able to learn that
>> there are people who think Hard Rain, Self Portrait, Saved and so
>> forth are anything but horrible albums for which we should all
>> petition Bob to get our money back, while at the same time learning
>> that there are people - Dylan fans, even - who don't think Blonde on
>> Blonde is a masterpiece.
>>
>> It's so illustrative that there are all sorts of people in this world,
>> and ANY idea, no matter how bizarre and unthinkable it may seem, will
>> find an adherent somewhere.
>
>You're saying that suggesting Hard Rain is a great album is unthinkable
>and bizarre? Are there people, Dylan fans even, who can say this kind
>of thing and mean it? Judged as an album (not as a cultural document we
>have to "put into perspective"), I'd say Hard Rain is better than BonB.
See? That's exactly what I mean. But then, you also said that Dylan
and the Dead is "easily one of the best albums of all time." That's
amazing - that is truly one awful album. Even most Dylan freaks and
Deadheads just shake their heads and shrug their shoulders over that
one.
>
>
>Saved is the best gospel album I've ever heard. (I haven't heard that
>many...) I won't say it's "better than BonB" because I'm not trying to
>be outrageous on purpose here. Just stating my opinions.
I've never been able to make it through more than two or three songs
on Saved at a time. Truly bad record.
>
>Self Portrait is very entertaining. I would not like to lose a minute
>of it.
An embarrassment. Only even released to fulfill a contractual
obligation, and was widely regarded as Dylan's worst album ever until
some of his 80's and 90's output surpassed it.
>
>As for BonB being a "masterpiece"... Individual songs on the album may
>come close to that, whatever "masterpiece" means (I suspect it's the
>kind of word people use when they're trying to bolster their own
>self-image in talking about something they like a lot).
BoB is almost always on every rock critic's top-ten list of all time
great albums. It is the zenith of Dylan's work, surpassed perhaps
only bu Highway 61 and Blood on the Tracks. A truly amazing album.
>
>I'm pleased but also quite surprised that finding people can have
>different opinions to you is so "educational".
It's truly jaw-dropping.
Wilbur Slice
wrote:
You think I owe Dylan something? Like what?
If I pay a performer, whether it be a ticket price to a concert or the
price of an album, then yes of course, that performer owes me
something. I paid him for it. Imagine going into the grocery store
and paying for a gallon of milk, and what they give you is a couple
weeks beyond its expiration date and stinking sour. Would you say
that they didn't owe you some fresh milk?
Will Dockery
"Love & Theft", Street Legal, Hard Rain, Desire... I agree with
whichever person commented that "Rainy Day Women" has grown tiresome,
and I've skipped that opening cut for the last couple of decades. The
rest of B.O.B. is endlessly listenable, now all over again with the new
CD version.
Village Idiot
I do the same, skip Rainy Day unless their is someone else present that
is not familiar to Bob. It is a pleaser to them.
Jeff Gower
Wilbur Slice <wil...@wilburslice.com> wrote:
> I've never been able to make it through more than two or three songs
> on Saved at a time. Truly bad record.
Bzzzzzz!! Sorry, Wrong Answer. ;-)
Saved is a great album.
> BoB is almost always on every rock critic's top-ten list of all time
> great albums. It is the zenith of Dylan's work, surpassed perhaps
> only bu Highway 61 and Blood on the Tracks. A truly amazing album.
Bing!! Yes, Correct Answer!
BoB is astoundingly good. As are Hwy61 and BOTT. Definitely deserving
of all the praise they receive.
> It's truly jaw-dropping.
Glad to have provided stimulating educational value, Wilbur! :-)
Jeff
Wilbur Slice
<jeffgowerN...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>In article <k5qcm1tpqcolu3m82...@4ax.com>,
> Wilbur Slice <wil...@wilburslice.com> wrote:
>
>> I've never been able to make it through more than two or three songs
>> on Saved at a time. Truly bad record.
>
>Bzzzzzz!! Sorry, Wrong Answer. ;-)
>Saved is a great album.
Yeah. The sales figures bear that out... ;)
Like I said, there's all kinds of tastes in this world.
Jeff Gower
Wilbur Slice <wil...@wilburslice.com> wrote:
> >Saved is a great album.
>
> Yeah. The sales figures bear that out... ;)
I wonder if the lyrical content of the very same tunes was not
evangelical, would it be deemed a "better" album by most Dylan fans?
On second thought, perhaps that is a stupid question.....never
mind...... ;-)
Jeff
Temporary Like Achilles
Wilbur Slice wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Oct 2005 15:15:30 -0500, Jeff Gower
> <jeffgowerN...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>
> >In article <k5qcm1tpqcolu3m82...@4ax.com>,
> > Wilbur Slice <wil...@wilburslice.com> wrote:
> >
> >> I've never been able to make it through more than two or three songs
> >> on Saved at a time. Truly bad record.
> >
> >Bzzzzzz!! Sorry, Wrong Answer. ;-)
> >Saved is a great album.
>
> Yeah. The sales figures bear that out... ;)
>
> Like I said, there's all kinds of tastes in this world.
What is it that, in your opinion, makes "Saved" a truly bad record? Is
it the lyrical content? The music? The production? I'm really just
curious.
Temporary
Ron
Wilbur Slice
<jeffgowerN...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>In article <t1vcm1dnmkldgkp73...@4ax.com>,
> Wilbur Slice <wil...@wilburslice.com> wrote:
>
>> >Saved is a great album.
>>
>> Yeah. The sales figures bear that out... ;)
>
>I wonder if the lyrical content of the very same tunes was not
>evangelical, would it be deemed a "better" album by most Dylan fans?
You mean: if the songs were better, would it be a better album? Sure.
And I think the converse of your question is interesting: would the
people who like the album like it if it was NOT evangelical? I think
most of the people who like it do so BECAUSE of its evengelical
content.
But the music isn't very good, either.
I think there are a lot of Dylan fans who like Gospel music, but still
don't like the Saved album. And I think there are people who ONLY
Dylan's Christian albums but who don't like any of the other Dylan
albums.
Wilbur Slice
<temporaryl...@hotmail.com> wrote:
All of the above. The technical recording is bad. I don't care for
Slow Train Coming, either, but the technical sound of that album is
great.
The lyrical content of the songs holds nothing for me. Even so, there
are lots of gospel and religious-themed songs that I do like. I even
thing Dylan's Every Grain Of Sand and Forever Youg are great songs.
Dylan has used Christian imagery (and religious imagery from other
religions) throughout his career back as far as Gospel Plow (I love
that song). But Saved is a two-by-four bludgeon. Boring.
The music does nothing for me, either. Many of Dylan's other
religious songs, and gospel songs from a lot of othere, liek the
Staples Singers, Odetta, Aretha Franklin, etc. etc. etc. are great
music. Saved is not.
Will Dockery
> Wilbur Slice wrote:
> >
> > >In article <k5qcm1tpqcolu3m82...@4ax.com>,
> > > Wilbur Slice <wil...@wilburslice.com> wrote:
> > >
> > >> I've never been able to make it through more than two or three songs
> > >> on Saved at a time. Truly bad record.
> > >
> > >Bzzzzzz!! Sorry, Wrong Answer. ;-)
> > >Saved is a great album.
> >
> > Yeah. The sales figures bear that out... ;)
> >
> > Like I said, there's all kinds of tastes in this world.
>
> What is it that, in your opinion, makes "Saved" a truly bad record? Is
> it the lyrical content? The music? The production? I'm really just
> curious.
I felt then and felt now that "Saved" was the wrong record for 1980...
I had a hunch he'd have the Clash backing him at that point, and was
wrong. A dreary set of songs for such an explosive year. And that awful
cover art.
The time that Dylan seriously lost touch with the /moment/.
J Buck
<Blonde On Blonde? Never heard it. Is that Blondie?>
You're not missing anything. Ok, that's not fair. You're missing some
good songs, and a lot of songs that make it...drum roll..OOH! a DOUBLE
album. I guess you have to own it so that you can be certiied as a
'serious' fan by other Dylan fans.
What the hell, it's, what, 15 bucks at Borders? 7 bucks at used shops?
Go for it. Just don't say I didn't warn you.
Village Idiot
Bob Dylan? Was he Dylan Thomas' ghost writer?
Sgt Pepper? Isn't that a soft drink?
Elvis Presley? Oh You mean that guy that drove a truck in Memphis?
Will Dockery
fogdog wrote:
> Village Idiot wrote:
> > Pulled it oout last night at a party.. Got to be one of the best LP's
> > ever made. Don't know how many others enjoyed it but I did. Could have
> > listened to Dylan the rest of the night.
> Probably not the greatest party album choice of Dylan's. I think
> Nashville Skyline or Desire would be best for that.
Depends on the /year/, I think.
One of my favorites, Empire Burlesque, had those Miami Vice keyboard
riffs that were perfect for the Summer of 1985.
I keep hope alive that someday we'll have Naked Empire, the tracks
before the disco king [I forget his name] remixed and overdubbed them.
Zuke
> In article <t1vcm1dnmkldgkp73...@4ax.com>,
> Wilbur Slice <wil...@wilburslice.com> wrote:
>
>>> Saved is a great album.
>>
>> Yeah. The sales figures bear that out... ;)
>
> I wonder if the lyrical content of the very same tunes was not
> evangelical, would it be deemed a "better" album by most Dylan fans?
>
Doesn't make any difference to me. I've listed to Slow Train
extensively. I love listening to the Stanley Brothers gospel.
In fact I've collected a lot of local gospel. We've been blessed
in Cincinnati to be a hotbed of bluegrass gospel on a label
called "Jewel"--not the Louisianne label but a Cincinnati label.
Of course there was also some pretty good bluegrass on the more
well-known King label which was headquartered here.
Jeff Gower
"Will Dockery" <will.d...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I felt then and felt now that "Saved" was the wrong record for 1980...
> I had a hunch he'd have the Clash backing him at that point, and was
> wrong. A dreary set of songs for such an explosive year.
Haha, this is beautiful stuff, Will. Hahaha!!
So, you were disappointed in the direction his musical expression was
taking at the time. It was the "wrong" thing for Dylan to do at the
time. He was misguided, "incorrect", and missed out on opportunities
that would have been "better" had he just been as into the "moment" as
you were. If only he'd carried himself in the way you would have
wanted. Such a damned shame. And such a waste. Hahaha!!
> The time that Dylan seriously lost touch with the /moment/.
Hahaha!! Dylan stopped giving a damn about the "moment" from about 1963
or so. From then on, the "moment" was WAY behind Dylan - he'd left the
freakin' "moment" behind time after time after time after time. And
that has been pissing off the "moment" people ever since.
Jeff
Delia
I still get a kick out of RDW, at least the album version. I always
skip Hurricane in any shape or form. And while I love Infidels, I
almost always skip Neighborhood Bully and Union Sundown.
Temporary Like Achilles
Wouldn't that have been something! I think they would have
re-invigorated him, given him the same kind of energy the Band gave him
-- perhaps even greater intensity. In Chronicles, Dylan mentions Mick
Jones and says, "I wished that I had thought of him to play in my band.
He'd have been perfect." Yes, he would have been perfect! I had heard
that Dylan played with the Clash while he was in England, and I had
also heard a rumour that they did some recording. Do you (or anyone
else, of course) know anything about any collaboration or recordings?
Temporary
¤ Alias
*Rolling Stone Album Guide* entry
Blonde on Blonde
*Blonde on Blonde* is Dylan's absolute masterpiece. The two-record set
featured the stoned celebration of "Rainy Day Women ## 12 & 35" and
the sweetly engaging "I Want You", but it was for it's ballads -
"Visions of Johanna","Just Like A Woman" and the side-long "Sad Eyed
Lady Of The Lowlands" - that he drew forth the most dense, hypnotic
music of his career, and poetry that overflowed not only with
inventive wordplay but a depth of mood that language can rarely
convey. Played by guitarist Robbie Robertson, the future leader of the
Band, as well as by a group of ace Nashville studio musicians, the
songs were hardly country,but the recording milieu certainly was - and
it suggested the next turn Dylan might take.
jackmcinroy
dylan album.
Will Dockery
¤ Alias wrote:
> "Bob Dylan"
> *Rolling Stone Album Guide* entry
> Blonde on Blonde
>
> *Blonde on Blonde* is Dylan's absolute masterpiece.
During an argument over another Dylan interview, I came across the
classic Playboy interview from 1966 that came out right before the
release of Blonde On Blonde:
----
PLAYBOY INTERVIEW: BOB DYLAN
February 1966.
A candid conversation with the iconoclastic idol of the folk-rock set.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As a versatile musicologist and trenchant social commentator, Nat
Hentoff brings uniquely pertinent credentials to his dual tasks in this
month's issue - as the author of "We're Happening All Over, Baby!" (on
page 82) an insightful anatomizing of America's youthful new generation
of anti-establishment social activists, and as interviewer of this
month's controversial subject, about whom he writes:
"Less than five years ago, Bob Dylan was scuffling in New York -
sleeping in friends' apartments on the Lower East Side and getting very
occasional singing work at Gerde's Folk City, an unprepossessing bar
for citybillies in the Village. With his leather cap, blue jeans and
battered desert boots - his unvarying costume in those days - Dylan
looked like an updated, undernourished Huck Finn. And like Huck, he had
come out of the Midwest; he would have said 'escaped.' The son of
Abraham Zimmerman, an appliance dealer, he was raised in Hibbing,
Minnesota, a bleak mining town near the Canadian border. Though he ran
away from home regularly between the ages of 10 and 18, young Zimmerman
did manage to finish high school, and went on to spend about six months
at the University of Minnesota in 1960. By then, he called himself Bob
Dylan - in tribute to Dylan Thomas, according to legend; but actually
after a gambling uncle whose last name was similar to Dylan.
"In the fall of that year, he came East to visit his idol, Woody
Guthrie, in the New Jersey hospital where the Okie folk-singing bard
was wasting away with a progressive disease of the nervous syste1m.
Dylan stayed and tried to scrape together a singing career. According
to those who knew him then, he was shy and stubborn but basically
friendly and, beneath the hipster stance, uncommonly gentle. But they
argued about his voice. Some found its flat Midwestern tones gratingly
mesmeric; others agreed with a Missouri folk singer who had likened the
Dylan sound to that of 'a dog with his leg caught in barbed wire.' All
agreed, however, that his songs were strangely personal and often
disturbing, a pungent mixture of loneliness and defiance laced with
traces of Guthrie, echoes of the Negro blues singers and more than a
suggestion of country-and-western; but essentially Dylan was developing
his own penetratingly distinctive style. Yet the voice was so harsh and
the songs so bitterly scornful of conformity, race prejudice and the
mythology of the Cold War that most of his friends couldn't conceive of
Dylan making it big even though folk music was already on the, rise.
"They were wrong. In September of 1961, a music critic for The New York
Times caught his act at Gerde's and hailed the scruffy l9-year-old
Minnesotan as a significant new voice on the folk horizon. Around the
same time, he was signed by Columbia Records, and his first album was
released early the next year. Though it was far from a smash hit,
concerts and club engagements gradually multiplied; and then Dylan
scored his storied triumph at the Newport Folk Festival in 1962. His
next LP began to move, and in the spring of 1963 came his first big
single: 'Blowin' in the Wind.' That same spring he turned down a
lucrative guest shot on 'The Ed Sullivan Show' because CBS wouldn't
permit him to sing a mordant parody he'd written about the John Birch
Society. For the nation's young, the Dylan image began to form: kind of
a singing James Dean with over tones of Holden Caulfeld; he was making
it, but he wasn't selling out. His concerts began to attract overflow
crowds, and his songs - in performances by him and other folk singers -
were rushing onto the hit charts. One of them, 'The Times They Are
A-Changin',' became an anthem for the rebellious young, who savored its
message that adults don't know where it's at and can't tell their
children what to do.
"By 1965 he had become a major phenomenon on the music scene. More and
more folk performers, from Joan Baez to the Byrds, considered it
mandatory to have an ample supply of Dylan songs in their repertoires;
in one frantically appreciative month - last August - 18 different
recordings of Dylan ballads were pressed by singers other than the
composer himself. More and more aspiring folk singers - and folk-song
writers - have begun to sound like Dylan. The current surge of
'protest' songs by such long-haired, post-beat rock-'n'-rollers as
Barry McGuire and Sonny and Cher is credited to Dylan. And the newest
commercial boom, 'folk-rock,' a fusion of fold-like lyrics with an
r-'n'-r beat and background, is an outgrowth in large part, of Dylan's
recent decision - decried as a 'sellout' by folknik purists - to
perform with a roch-'n'-roll combo rather than continue to accompany
himself alone on the guitar. Backed by the big beat of the new group,
Dylan tours England with as much tumultuous success as he does America,
and the air play for his single records in both countries is rivaled
only by that of the Beatles, Herman's Hermits and the Rolling Stones on
the Top 40 deejay shows. In the next 18 months, his income - from
personal appearances, records and composer's royalties - is expected to
exceed $1,000,000.
"Withal, Dylan seems outwardly much the same as he did during the lean
years in Greenwich Village. His dress is still casual to the point of
exoticism; his hair is still long and frizzy, and he is still no more
likely to be seen wearing a necktie than a cutaway. But there have been
changes. No longer protesting polemically against the bomb, race
prejudice and conformity, his songs have become increasingly personal -
a surrealistic amalgam of kafkaesque menace corrosive satire and opaque
sensuality. His lyrics are more crowded than t!ver with tumbling words
and restless images, and they read more like free-verse poems than
conventional lines. Adults still have difficulty digging his offbeat
language - and its message of alienation - but the young continue to
tune in and turn on.
"But there are other changes. Dylan has become elusive. He is no longer
seen in his old haunts in the Village and on the Lower East Side. With
few exceptions, he avoids interviewers, and in public, he is usually
seen from afar at the epicenter of a protective coterie of
tousle-topped young men dressed like him, and lissome, straight-haired
young ladies who also seem to be dressed like him. His home base, if it
can be called that, is a house his manager owns near Woodstock, a
fashionable artists' colony in New York State, and he also enjoys the
run of his manager's apartment on dignified Gramercy Park in New York
City. There are tales told of Dylan the motorcyclist, the novelist, the
maker of high-camp home movies; but except among his small circle of
intimates, the 24-year-old folk hero is inscrutably aloof.
"It was only after a long period of evasion and hesitation that Dylan
finally agreed to grant this 'Playboy Interview' - the longest he's
ever given. We met him on the 10th floor of the new CBS and Columbia
Records building in mid-Manhattan. The room was antiseptic: white walls
with black trim, contemporary furniture with severe lines, avantgarde
art chosen by committee, everything in order, neat desks, neat
personnel. In this sterile setting, slouched in a chair across from us,
Dylan struck a refreshingly discordant note - with his untamed
brownish-blond mane brushing the collar of his tieless blue plaid
shirt, in his black jacket, gray vaudevillian-striped pipestem pants
and well-worn blue-suede shoes. Sitting nearby - also long-haired,
tieless and blackjacketed, but wearing faded jeans - was a stringy
young man whom the singer identified only as Taco Pronto. As Dylan
spoke - in a soft drawl, smiling only rarely and fleetingly, sipping
tea and chainsmoking cigarettes - his unspeaking friend chuckled and
nodded appreciatively from the side lines. Tense and guarded at first
Dylan gradually began to loosen up, then to open up, as he tried to
tell us - albeit a bit surrealistically - just where he's been and
where he's going. Under the circumstances, we chose to play straight
man in our questions, believing that to have done othervise would have
stemmed the freewheeling flow of Dylan's responses."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PLAYBOY: 'Popular songs," you told a reporter last year, "are the only
art form that describes the temper of the times. The only place where
it's happening is on the radio and records. That's where the people
hang out. It's not in books; it's not on the stage; it's not in the
galleries. All this art thev've been talking about, it just remains on
the shelI. It doesn't make anyone happier." In view of the fact that
more people than ever before are reading books and going to plays and
art galleries, do you think that statement is borne out by the facts?
DYLAN: Statistics measure quantity, not quality. The people in the
statistics are people who are very bored. Art, if there is such a
thing, is in the bathrooms; everybody knows that. To go to an art
gallery thing where you get free milk and doughnuts and where there is
a rock-'n'-roll band playing: That's just a status affair. I'm not
putting it down, mind you; but I spend a lot of time in the bathroom. I
think museums are vulgar. They're all against sex. Anyhow, I didn't say
that people "hang out" on the radio, I said they get "hung up" on the
radio.
PLAYBOY: Why do you think rock 'n' roll has become such an
international phenomenon?
DYLAN: I can't really think that there is any rock 'n' roll. Actually,
when you think about it, anything that has no real existence is bound
to become an international phenomenon. Anyway, what does it mean, rock
'n' roll? Does it mean Beatles, does it mean John Lee Hooker, Bobby
Vinton, Jerry Lewis' kid? What about Lawrence Welk? He must play a few
rock-'n'-roll songs. Are all these people the same? Is Ricky Nelson
like Otis Redding? Is Mick Jagger really Ma Rainey? I can tell by the
way people hold their cigarettes if they like Ricky Nelson. I think
it's fine to like Ricky Nelson: I couldn't care less if somebody likes
Ricky Nelson. But I think we're getting off the track here. There isn't
any Ricky Nelson. There isn't any Beatles; oh, I take that back: there
are a lot of beetles. But there isn't any Bobby Vinton. Anyway, the
word is not "international phenomenon"; the word is "parental
nightmare."
PLAYBOY: In recent years, according to some critics, jazz has lost much
of its appeal to the younger generation. Do you agree?
DYLAN: I don't think jazz has ever appealed to the younger generation.
Anyway, I don't really know who this younger generation is. I don't
think they could get into a jazz club anyway. But jazz is hard to
follow; I mean you actually have to like jazz to follow it: and my
motto is, never follow anything. I don't know what the motto of the
younger generation is, but I would think they'd have to follow their
parents. I mean, what would some parent say to his kid if the kid came
home with a glass eye, a Charlie Mingus record and a pocketful of
feathers? He'd say, "Who are you following?" And the poor kid would
have to stand there with water in his shoes, a bow tie on his ear and
soot pouring out of his belly button and say, "Jazz, Father, I've been
following jazz." And his father would probably say, "Get a broom and
clean up all that soot before you go to sleep." Then the kid's mother
would tell her friends, "Oh yes, our little Donald, he's part of the
younger generation, you know."
PLAYBOY: You used to say that you wanted to perform as little as
possible, that you wanted to keep most of your time to yourself. Yet
you're doing more concerts and cutting more records every year. Why? Is
it the money?
DYLAN: Everything is changed now from before. Last spring. I guess I
was going to quit singing. I was very drained, and the way things were
going, it was a very draggy situation - I mean, when you do "Everybody
Loves You for Your Black Eye," and meanwhile the back of your head is
caving in. Anyway, I was playing a lot of songs I didn't want to play.
I was singing words I didn't really want to sing. I don't mean words
like "God" and "mother" and "President" and "suicide" and "meat
cleaver." I mean simple little words like "if" and "hope" and "you."
But "Like a Rolling Stone" changed it all: I didn't care anymore after
that about writing books or poems or whatever. I mean it was some thing
that I myself could dig. It's very tiring having other people tell you
how much they dig you if you yourself don't dig you. It's also very
deadly entertainment wise. Contrary to what some scary people think, I
don't play with a band now for any kind of propaganda-type or
commercial-type reasons. It's just that my songs are pictures and the
band makes the sound of the pictures.
PLAYBOY: Do you feel that acquiring a combo and switching from folk to
folkrock has improved you as a performer?
DYLAN: I'm not interested in myself as a performer. Performers are
people who perform for other people. Unlike actors, I know what I'm
saying. It's very simple in my mind. It doesn't matter what kind of
audience reaction this whole thing gets. What happens on the stage is
straight. It doesn't expect any rewards or fines from any kind of
outside agitators. It's ultra-simple, and would exist whether anybody
was looking or not.
As far as folk and folk-rock are concerned, it doesn't matter what kind
of nasty names people invent for the music. It could be called arsenic
music, or perhaps Phaedra music. I don't think that such a word as
folk-rock has anything to do with it. And folk music is a word I can't
use. Folk music is a bunch of fat people. I have to think of all this
as traditional music. Traditional music is based on hexagrams. It comes
about from legends, Bibles, plagues, and it revolves around vegetables
and death. There's nobody that's going to kill traditional music. All
these songs about roses growing out of people's brains and lovers who
are really geese and swans that turn into angels - they're not going to
die. It's all those paranoid people who think that someone's going to
come and take away their toilet paper - they're going to die. Songs
like "Which Side Are You On?" and "I Love You, Porgy" - they're not
folk-music songs; they're political songs. They're already dead.
Obviously, death is not very universally accepted. I mean, you'd think
that the traditional-music people could gather from their songs that
mystery - just plain simple mystery - is a fact, a traditional fact. I
listen to the old ballads; but I wouldn't go to a party and listen to
the old ballads. I could give you descriptive detail of what they do to
me, but some people would probably think my imagination had gone mad.
It strikes me funny that people actually have the gall to think that I
have some kind of fantastic imagination. It gets very lonesome. But
anyway, traditional music is too unreal to die. It doesn't need to be
protected. Nobody's going to hurt it. In that music is the only true,
valid death you can feel today off a record player. But like anything
else in great demand, people try to own it. It has to do with a purity
thing. I think its meaninglessness is holy. Everybody knows that I'm
not a folk singer.
PLAYBOY: Some of your old fans would agree with you - and not in a
complimentary vein - since your debut with the rock-'n'-roll combo at
last year's Newport Folk Festival, where many of them booed you loudly
for "selling out" to commercial pop tastes. The early Bob Dylan, they
felt, was the "pure" Bob Dylan. How do you feel about it?
DYLAN: I was kind of stunned. But I can't put anybody down for coming
and booing: after all, they paid to get in. They could have been maybe
a little guieter and not so persistent, though. There were a lot of old
people there, too; lots of whole families had driven down from Vermont,
lots of nurses and their parents, and well, like they just came to hear
some relaxing hoedowns, you know, maybe an Indian polka or two. And
just when everything's going all right, here I come on, and the whole
place turns into a beer factory. There were a lot of people there who
were very pleased that I got booed. I saw them afterward. I do resent
somewhat, though, that everybody that booed said they did it because
they were old fans.
PLAYBOY: What about their charge that you vulgarized your natural
gifts?
DYLAN: What can I say? I'd like to see one of these so-called fans. I'd
like to have him blindfolded and brought to me. It's like going out to
the desert and screaming and then having little kids throw their
sandbox at you. I'm only 24. These people that said this - were they
Americans?
PLAYBOY: Americans or not, there were a lot of people who didn't like
your new sound. In view of tbis widespread negative reaction, do you
think you may have made a mistake in changing your style?
DYLAN: A mistake is to commit a misunderstanding. There could be no
such thing, anyway, as this action. Either people understand or they
pretend to understand - or else they really don't understand. What
you're speaking of here is doing wrong things for selfish reasons. I
don't know the word for that, unless it's suicide. In any case, it has
nothing to do with my music.
PLAYBOY: Mistake or not, what made you decide to go the rock-'n'-roll
route?
DYLAN: Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The
first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake
up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table,
takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it
burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start
working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this
big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I
go down to Dallas. I get a job as a "before" in a Charles Atlas "before
and after" ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic
chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and
burns the house down. The delivery boy - he ain't so mild: He gives her
the knife, and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there,
by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I
stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod
races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who
also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but
who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into
lettuce. Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and
tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit
the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a
star. What could I say?
PLAYBOY: And that's how you became a rock-'n'-roll singer?
DYLAN: No, that's how I got tuberculosis.
PLAYBOY: Let's turn the question around: Why have you stopped composing
and singing protest songs?
DYLAN: I've stopped composing and singing anything that has either a
reason to be written or a motive to be sung. Don't get me wrong, now.
"Protest" is not my word. I've never thought of myself as such. The
word "protest," I think, was made up for people undergoing surgery.
It's an amusement-park word. A normal person in his righteous mind
would have to have the hiccups to pronounce it honestly. The word
"message" strikes me as having a hernia-like sound It's just like the
word "delicious." Also the word "marvelous." You know, the English can
say "marvelous" pretty good. They can't say "raunchy" so good, though.
Well, we each have our thing. Anyway, message songs, as everybody
knows, are a drag. It's only college newspaper editors and single girls
under 14 that could possibly have time for them.
PLAYBOY: You've said you think message songs are vulgar. Why?
DYLAN: Well, first of all, anybody that's got a message is going to
learn from experience that they can't put it into a song. I mean it's
just not going to come out the same message. After one or two of these
unsuccessful attempts, one realizes that his resultant message, which
is not even the same message he thought up and began with, he's now got
to stick by it; because, after all, a song leaves your mouth just as
soon as it leaves your hands. Are you following me?
PLAYBOY: Oh, perfectly.
DYLAN: Well, anyway, second of all, you've got to respect other
people's right to also have a message themselves. Myself, what I'm
going to do is rent Town Hall and put about 30 Western Union boys on
the bill. I mean, then there'll really be some messages. People will be
able to come and hear more messages than they've ever heard before in
their life.
PLAYBOY: But your early ballads have been called "songs of passionate
protest." Wouldn't that make them "message" music?
DYLAN: This is unimportant. Don't you understand? I've been writing
since I was eight years old. I've been playing the guitar since I was
ten. I was raised playing and writing whatever it was I had to play and
write.
PLAYBOY: Would it be unfair to say, then, as some have, that you were
motivated commercially rather than creatively in writing the kind of
songs that made you popular?
DYLAN: All right, now, look. It's not all that deep. It's not a
complicated thing. My motives, or whatever they are, were never
commercial in the money sense of the word. It was more in the don't
die-by-the-hacksaw sense of the word. I never did it for money. It
happened, and I let it happen to me. There was no reason not to let it
happen to me. I couldn't have written before what I write now, anyway.
The songs used to be about what I felt and saw. Nothing of my own
rhythmic vomit ever entered into it. Vomit is not romantic. I used to
think songs are supposed to be romantic. And I didn't want to sing
anything that was unspecific. Unspecific things have no sense of time.
All of us people have no sense of time; it's a dimensional hangup.
Anybody can be specific and obvious. That's always been the easy way.
The leaders of the world take the easy way. It's not that it's so
difficult to be unspecific and less obvious; it's just that there's
nothing, absolutely nothing, to be specific and obvious about. My older
songs, to say the least, were about nothing. The newer ones are about
the same nothing - only as seen inside a bigger thing, perhaps called
the nowhere. But this is all very constipated. I do know what my songs
are about.
PLAYBOY: And what's that?
DYLAN: Oh, some are about four minutes; some are about five, and some,
believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve.
PLAYBOY: Can't you be a bit more informative?
DYLAN: Nope.
PLAYBOY: All right. Let's change the subject. As you know, it's the age
group from about 16 to 25 that listens to your songs. Why, in your
opinion?
DYLAN: I don't see what's so strange about an age group like that
listening to my songs. I'm hip enough to know that it ain't going to be
the 85-to-90-yearolds. If the 85-to-90-year-olds were listening to me,
they'd know that I can't tell them anything. The 16-to-25-year-olds,
they probably know that I can't tell them anything either - and they
know that I know it. It's a funny business. Obviously, I'm not an IBM
computer any more than I'm an ashtray. I mean it's obvious to anyone
who's ever slept in the back seat of a car that I'm just not a
schoolteacher.
PLAYBOY: Even though you're not a schoolteacher, wouldn't you like to
help the young people who dig you from turning into what some of their
parents have become?
DYLAN: Well, I must say that I really don't know their parents. I
really don't know if anybody's parents are so bad. Now, I hate to come
on like a weakling or a coward, and I realize it might seem kind of
irreligious, but I'm really not the right person to tramp around the
country saving souls. I wouldn't run over anybody that was laying in
the street, and I certainly wouldn't become a hangman. I wouldn't think
twice about giving a starving man a cigarette. But I'm not a shepherd.
And I'm not about to save anybody from fate, which I know nothing
about. "Parents" is not the key word here. The key word is "destiny." I
can't save them from that.
PLAYBOY: Still, thousands of young people look up to you as a kind of
folk hero. Do you feel some sense of responsibility toward them?
DYLAN: I don't feel I have any responsibility, no. Whoever it is that
listens to my songs owes me nothing. How could I possibly have any
responsibility to any kind of thousands? What could possibly make me
think that I owe anybody anything who just happens to be there? I've
never written any song that begins with the words "I've gathered you
here tonight . . ." I'm not about to tell anybody to be a good boy or a
good girl and they'll go to heaven. I really don't know what the people
who are on the receiving end of these songs think of me, anyway. It's
horrible. I'll bet Tony Bennett doesn't have to go through this kind of
thing. I wonder what Billy the Kid would have answered to such a
question.
PLAYBOY: In their admiration for you, many young people have begun to
imitate the way you dress - which one adult commentator has called
"selfconsciously oddball and defiantly sloppy." What's your reaction to
that kind of put-down?
DYLAN: Bullshit. Oh, such bullshit. I know the fellow that said that.
He used to come around here and get beat up all the time. He better
watch it; some people are after him. They're going to strip him naked
and stick him in Times Square. They're going to tie him up, and also
put a thermometer in his mouth. Those kind of morbid ideas and remarks
are so petty - I mean there's a war going on. People got rickets;
everybody wants to start a riot; 40-year-old women are eating spinach
by the carload; the doctors haven't got a cure for cancer - and here's
some hillbilly talking about how he doesn't like somebody's clothes.
Worse than hat, it gets printed and innocent people have to read it.
This is a terrible thing. And he's a terrible man. Obviously, he's just
living off the fat of himself, and he's expecting his kids to take care
of him. His kids probably listen to my records. Just because my clothes
are too long, does that mean I'm unqualified for what I do?
PLAYBOY: No, but there are those who think it does - and many of them
seem to feel the same way about your long hair. But compared with the
shoulder-length coiffures worn by some of the male singing groups these
days, your tonsorial tastes are on the conservative side. How do you
feel about these far-out hair styles?
DYLAN: The thing that most people don't realize is that it's warmer to
have long hair. Everybody wants to be warm. People with short hair
freeze easily. Then they try to hide their coldness, and they get
jealous of everybody that's warm. Then they become either barbers or
Congressmen. A lot of prison wardens have short hair. Have you ever
noticed that Abraham Lincoln's hair was much longer than John Wilkes
Booth's?
PLAYBOY: Do you think Lincoln wore his hair long to keep his head warm?
DYLAN: Actually, I think it was for medical reasons, which are none of
my business. But I guess if you figure it out, you realize that all of
one's hair surrounds and lays on the brain inside your head.
Mathematically speaking, the more of it you can get out of your head,
the better. People who want free minds sometimes overlook the fact that
you have to have an uncluttered brain. Obviously, if you get your hair
on the outside of your head, your brain will be a little more freer.
But all this talk about long hair is just a trick. It's been thought up
by men and women who look like cigars - the anti-happiness committee.
They're all freeloaders and cops. You can tell who they are: They're
always carrying calendars, guns or scissors. They're all trying to get
into your quicksand. They think you've got something. I don't know why
Abe Lincoln had long hair.
PLAYBOY: Until your abandonment of "message" songs, you were considered
not only a major voice in the student protest movement but a militant
champion of the civil rights struggle. According to friends, you seemed
to feel a special bond of kinship with the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, which you actively supported both as a
performer and as a worker. Why have you withdrawn from participation in
all these causes? Have you lost interest in protest as well as in
protest songs?
DYLAN: As far as SNCC is concerned, I knew some of the people in it,
but I only knew them as people, not as of any part of something that
was bigger or better than themselves. I didn't even know what civil
rights was before I met some of them. I mean, I knew there were
Negroes, and I knew there were a lot of people who don't like Negroes.
But I got to admit that if I didn't know some of the SNCC people, I
would have gone on thinking that Martin Luther King was really nothing
more than some underprivileged war hero. I haven't lost any interest in
protest since then. I just didn't have any interest in protest to begin
with - any more than I did in war heroes. You can't lose what you've
never had. Anyway, when you don't like your situation, you either leave
it or else you overthrow it. You can't just stand around and whine
about it. People just get aware of your noise; they really don't get
aware of you. Even if they give you what you want, it's only because
you're making too much noise. First thing you know, you want something
else, and then you want something else, and then you want something
else, until finally it isn't a joke anymore, and whoever you're
protesting against finally gets all fed up and stomps on everybody.
Sure, you can go around trying to bring up people who are lesser than
you, but then don't forget, you're messing around with gravity. I don't
fight gravity. I do believe in equality, but I also believe in
distance.
PLAYBOY: Do you mean people keeping their racial distance?
DYLAN: I believe in people keeping everything they've got.
PLAYBOY: Some people might feel that you're trying to cop out of
fighting for the things you believe in.
DYLAN: Those would be people who think I have some sort of
responsibility toward them. They probably want me to help them make
friends. I don't know. They probably either want to set me in their
house and have me come out every hour and tell them what time it is, or
else they just want to stick me in between the mattress. How could they
possibly understand what I believe in?
PLAYBOY: Well, what do you believe in?
DYLAN: I already told you.
PLAYBOY: All right. Many of your folksinging colleagues remain actively
involved in the fight for civil rights, free speech and withdrawal from
Vietnam. Do you think they're wrong?
DYLAN: I don't think they're wrong, if that's what they see themselves
doing. But don't think that what you've got out there is a bunch of
little Buddhas all parading up and down. People that use God as a
weapon should be amputated upon. You see it around here all the time:
"Be good or God won't like you, and you'll go to hell." Things like
that. People that march with slogans and things tend to take themselves
a little too holy. It would be a drag if they, too, started using God
as a weapon.
PLAYBOY: Do you think it's pointless to dedicate yourself to the cause
of peace and racial equality?
DYLAN: Not pointless to dedicate yourself to peace and racial equality,
but rather, it's pointless to dedicate yourself to the cause; that's
really pointless. That's very unknowing. To say "cause of peace" is
just like saying "hunk of butter." I mean, how can you listen to
anybody who wants you to believe he's dedicated to the hunk and not to
the butter? People who can't conceive of how others hurt, they're
trying to change the world. They're all afraid to admit that they don't
really know each other. They'll all probably be here long after we've
gone, and we'll give birth to new ones. But they themselves - I don't
think they'll give birth to anything.
PLAYBOY: You sound a bit fatalistic.
DYLAN: I'm not fatalistic. Bank tellers are fatalistic; clerks are
fatalistic. I'm a farmer. Who ever heard of a fatalistic farmer? I'm
not fatalistic. I smoke a lot of cigarettes, but that doesn't make me
fatalistic.
PLAYBOY: You were quoted recently as saying that "songs can't save the
world. I've gone through all that." We take it you don't share Pete
Seeger's belief that songs can change people, that they can help build
international understanding.
DYLAN: On the international understanding part, that's OK. But you have
a translation problem there. Anybody with this kind of a level of
thinking has to also think about this translation thing. But I don't
believe songs can change people anyway. I'm not Pinocchio. I consider
that an insult. I'm not part of that. I don't blame anybody for
thinking that way. But I just don't donate any money to them. I don't
consider them anything like unhip; they're more in the rubber-band
category.
PLAYBOY: How do you feel about those who have risked imprisonment by
burning their draft cards to signify their opposition to U. S.
involvement in Vietnam, and by refusing - as your friend Joan Baez has
done - to pay their income taxes as a protest against the Covernment's
expenditures on war and weaponry? Do you think they're wasting their
time?
DYLAN: Burning draft cards isn't going to end any war. It's not even
going to save any lives. If someone can &el more honest with himself by
burning his draft card, then that's great; but if he's just going to
feel more important because he does it, then that's a drag. I really
don't know too much about Joan Baez and her income-tax problems. The
only thing I can tell you about Joan Baez is that she's not Belle
Starr.
PLAYBOY: Writing about "beard-wearing draft-card burners and pacifist
income-tax evaders," one columnist called such protesters "no less
outside society than the junkie, the homosexual or the mass murderer."
What's your reaction?
DYLAN: I don't believe in those terms. They're too hysterical. They
don't describe anything. Most people think that homosexual, gay, queer,
queen, faggot are all the same words. Everybody thinks that a junkie is
a dope freak. As far as I'm concerned, I don't consider myself outside
of anything. I just consider myself not around.
PLAYBOY: Joan Baez recently opened a school in northern California for
training civil rights workers in the philosophy and techniques of
nonviolence. Are you in sympathy with that concept?
DYLAN: If you mean do I agree with it or not, I really don't see
anything to be in agreement with. If you mean has it got my approval, I
guess it does, but my approval really isn't going to do it any good. I
don't know about other people's sympathy, but my sympathy runs to the
lame and crippled and beautiful things. I have a feeling of loss of
power - something like a reincarnation feeling; I don't feel that for
mechanical things like cars or schools. I'm sure it's a nice school,
but if you're asking me would I go to it, I would have to say no.
PLAYBOY: As a college dropout in your freshman year, you seem to take a
dim view of schooling in general, whatever the subject.
DYLAN: I really don't think about it.
PLAYBOY: Well, have you ever had any regrets about not completing
college?
DYLAN: That would be ridiculous. Colleges are like old-age homes;
except for the fact that more people die in colleges than in old-age
homes, there's really no difference. People have one great blessing -
obscurity - and not really too many people are thankful for it.
Everybody is always taught to be thankful for their food and clothes
and things like that, but not to be thankful for their obscurity.
Schools don't teach that; they teach people to be rebels and lawyers.
I'm not going to put down the teaching system; that would be too silly.
It's just that it really doesn't have too much to teach. Colleges are
part of the American institution; everybody respects them. They're very
rich and influential, but they have nothing to do with survival.
Everybody knows that.
PLAYBOY: Would you advise young people to skip college, then?
DYLAN: I wouldn't advise anybody to do anything. I certainly wouldn't
advise somebody not to go to college; I just wouldn't pay his way
through college.
PLAYBOY: Don't you think the things one learns in college can help
enrich one's life?
DYLAN: I don't think anything like that is going to enrich my life, no
- not my life, anyway. Things are going to happen whether I know why
they happen or not. It just gets more complicated when you stick
yourself into it. You don't find out why things move. You let them
move; you watch them move; you stop them from moving: you start them
moving. But you don't sit around and try to figure out why there's
movement - unless, of course, you're just an innocent moron, or some
wise old Japanese man. Out of all the people who just lay around and
ask "Why?", how many do you figure really want to know?
PLAYBOY: Can you suggest a better use for the four years that would
otherwise be spent in college?
DYLAN: Well, you could hang around in Italy; you could go to Mexico;
you could become a dishwasher; you could even go to Arkansas. I don't
know; there are thousands of things to do and places to go. Everybody
thinks that you have to bang your head against the wall, but it's silly
when you really think about it. I mean, here you have fantastic
scientists working on ways to prolong human living, and then you have
other people who take it for granted that you have to beat your head
against the wall in order to be happy. You can't take everything you
don't like as a personal insult. I guess you should go where your wants
are bare, where you're invisible and not needed.
PLAYBOY: Would you classify sex among your wants, wherever you go?
DYLAN: Sex is a temporary thing; sex isn't love. You can get sex
anywhere. If you're looking for someone to love you, now that's
different. I guess you have to stay in college for that.
PLAYBOY: Since you didn't stay in college, does that mean you haven't
found someone to love you?
DYLAN: Let's go on to the next question.
PLAYBOY: Do you have any difficulty relating to people - or vice versa?
DYLAN: Well, sometimes I have the feeling that other people want my
soul. If I say to them, "I don't have a soul," they say, "I know that.
You don't have to tell me that. Not me. How dumb do you think I am? I'm
your friend." What can I say except that I'm sorry and I feel bad? I
guess maybe feeling bad and paranoia are the same thing.
PLAYBOY: Paranoia is said to be one of the mental states sometimes
induced by such hallucinogenic drugs as peyote and LSD. Considering the
risks involved, do you think that experimentation with such drugs
should be part of the growing up experience for a young person?
DYLAN: I wouldn't advise anybody to use drugs - certainly not the hard
drugs; drugs are medicine. But opium and hash and pot - now, those
things aren't drugs; they just bend your mind a little. I think
everybody's mind should be bent once in a while. Not by LSD, though.
LSD is medicine - a different kind of medicine. It makes you aware of
the universe, so to speak; you realize how foolish objects are. But LSD
is not for groovy people; it's for mad, hateful people who want
revenge. It's for people who usually have heart attacks. They ought to
use it at the Geneva Convention.
PLAYBOY: Are you concerned, as you approach 30, that you may begin to
"go square," lose some of your openness to experience, become leery of
change and new experiment?
DYLAN: No. But if it happens, then it happens. What can I say? There
doesn't seem to be any tomorrow. Every time I wake up, no matter in
what position, it's always been today. To look ahead and start worrying
about trivial little things I can't really say has any more importance
than looking back and remembering trivial little things. I'm not going
to become any poetry instructor at any girls' school; I know that for
sure. But that's about all I know for sure. I'll just keep doing these
different things, I guess.
PLAYBOY: Such as?
DYLAN: Waking up in different positions.
PLAYBOY: What else?
DYLAN: I'm just like anybody else; I'll try anything once.
PLAYBOY: Including theft and murder?
DYLAN: I can't really say I wouldn't commit theft or murder and expect
anybody to really believe me. I wouldn't believe anybody if they told
me that.
PLAYBOY: By their mid-20s, most people have begun to settle into their
niche, to find a place in society. But you've managed to remain
inner-directed and uncommitted. What was it that spurred you to run
away from home six times between the ages of ten and eighteen and
finally to leave for good?
DYLAN: It was nothing; it was just an accident of geography. Like if I
was born and raised in New York or Kansas City, I'm sure everything
would have turned out different. But Hibbing, Minnesota, was just not
the right place for me to stay and live. There really was nothing
there. The only thing you could do there was be a miner, and even that
kind of thing was getting less and less. The people that lived there -
they're nice people; I've been all over the world since I left there,
and they still stand out as being the least hung-up. The mines were
just dying, that's all; but that's not their fault. Everybody about my
age left there. It was no great romantic thing. It didn't take any
great amount of thinking or individual genius, and there certainly
wasn't any pride in it. I didn't run away from it; I just turned my
back on it. It couldn't give me anything. It was very void-like. So
leaving wasn't hard at all; it would have been much harder to stay. I
didn't want to die there. As I think about it now, though, it wouldn't
be such a bad place to go back to and die in. There's no place I feel
closer to now, or get the feeling that I'm part of, except maybe New
York; but I'm not a New Yorker. I'm North Dakota-Minnesota-Midwestern.
I'm that color. I speak that way. I'm from someplace called Iron Range.
My brains and feeling have come from there. I wouldn't amputate on a
drowning man; nobody from out there would.
PLAYBOY: Today, you're on your way to becoming a millionaire. Do you
feel in any danger of being trapped by all this affluence - by the
things it can buy?
DYLAN: No, my world is very small. Money can't really improve it any;
money can just keep it from being smothered.
PLAYBOY: Most big stars find it difficult to avoid getting involved,
and sometimes entangled, in managing the business end of their careers.
As a man with three thriving careers - as a concert performer,
recording star and songwriter - do you ever feel boxed in by such
noncreative responsibilities?
DYLAN: No, I've got other people to do that for me. They watch my
money; they guard it. They keep their eyes on it at all times; they're
supposed to be very smart when it comes to money. They know just what
to do with my money. I pay them a lot of it. I don't really speak to
them much, and they don't really speak to me at all, so I guess
everything is all right.
PLAYBOY: If fortune hasn't trapped you, how about fame? Do you find
that your celebrity makes it difficult to keep your private life
intact?
DYLAN: My private life has been dangerous from the beginning. All this
does is add a little atmosphere.
PLAYBOY: You used to enjoy wandering across the country - taking off on
openend trips, roughing it from town to town, with no particular
destination in mind. But you seem to be doing much less of that these
days. Why? Is it because you're too well known?
DYLAN: It's mainly because I have to be in Cincinnati Friday night, and
the next night I got to be in Atlanta, and then the next night after
that, I have to be in Buffalo. Then I have to write some more songs for
a record album.
PLAYBOY: Do you get the chance to ride your motorcycle much anymore?
DYLAN: I'm still very patriotic to the highway, but I don't ride my
motorcycle too much anymore, no.
PLAYBOY: How do you get your kicks these days, then?
DYLAN: I hire people to look into my eyes, and then I have them kick
me.
PLAYBOY: And that's the way you get your kicks?
DYLAN: No. Then I forgive them; that's where my kicks come in.
PLAYBOY: You told an interviewer last year, "I've done everything I
ever wanted to." If that's true, what do you have to look forward to?
DYLAN: Salvation. Just plain salvation.
PLAYBOY: Anything else?
DYLAN: Praying. I'd also like to start a cookbook magazine. And I've
always wanted to be a boxing referee. I want to referee a heavyweight
championship fight. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine any fighter
in his right mind recognizing me?
PLAYBOY: If your popularity were to wane, would you welcome being
anonymous again?
DYLAN: You mean welcome it, like I'd welcome some poor pilgrim coming
in from the rain? No, I wouldn't welcome it; I'd accept it, though.
Someday, obviously, I'm going to have to accept it.
PLAYBOY: Do you ever think about marrying, settling down, having a
home, maybe living abroad? Are there any luxuries you'd like to have,
say, a yacht or a Rolls-Royce?
DYLAN: No, I don't think about those things. If I felt like buying
anything, I'd buy it. What you're asking me about is the future, my
future. I'm the last person in the world to ask about my future.
PLAYBOY: Are you saying you're going to be passive and just let things
happen to you?
DYLAN: Well, that's being very philosophical about it, but I guess it's
true.
PLAYBOY: You once planned to write a novel. Do you still?
DYLAN: I don't think so. All my writing goes into the songs now. Other
forms don't interest me anymore.
PLAYBOY: Do you have any unfulfilled ambitions?
DYLAN: Well, I guess I've always wanted to be Anthony Quinn in "La
Strada". Not always - only for about six years now; it's not one of
those childhood-dream things. Oh, and come to think of it, I guess I've
always wanted to be Brigitte Bardot, too; but I don't really want to
think about that too much.
PLAYBOY: Did you ever have the standard boyhood dream of growing up to
be President?
DYLAN: No. When I was a boy, Harry Truman was President; who'd want to
be Harry Truman?
PLAYBOY: Well, let's suppose that you were the President. What would
you accomplish during your first thousand days?
DYLAN: Well, just for laughs, so long as you insist, the first thing
I'd do is probably move the White House. Instead of being in Texas,
it'd be on the East Side in New York. McGeorge Bundy would definitely
have to change his name, and General McNamara would be forced to wear a
coonskin cap and shades. I would immediately rewrite "The Star-Spangled
Banner," and little school children, instead of memorizing "America the
Beautiful," would have to memorize "Desolation Row" [one of Dylan's
latest songs]. And I would immediately call for a showdown with Mao
Tse-tung; I would fight him personally - and I'd get somebody to film
it.
PLAYBOY: One final question: Even though you've more or less retired
from political and social protest, can you conceive of any circumstance
that might persuade you to reinvolve yourself?
DYLAN: No, not unless all the people in the world disappeared.
----
Primo Dylan!
gabriel
Wilbur Slice wrote:
>
> If I pay a performer, whether it be a ticket price to a concert or the
> price of an album, then yes of course, that performer owes me
> something. I paid him for it. Imagine going into the grocery store
> and paying for a gallon of milk, and what they give you is a couple
> weeks beyond its expiration date and stinking sour. Would you say
> that they didn't owe you some fresh milk?
So you're the guy who thinks Dylan is a cow and screams "Give me some
milk or else go home" ?
Delia
Yeah, I have to say that of his gospel albums it's the one that leaves
me cold. I like some of the songs on Slow Train, and of course the
production values there are great. But the songs on Saved just don't
do it. But when I first heard the boots of this period, including some
of those songs, it was a completely different story. He's singing with
a totally different power there.
¤ Alias
wrote:
>
>¤ Alias wrote:
>> "Bob Dylan"
>> *Rolling Stone Album Guide* entry
>> Blonde on Blonde
>>
>> *Blonde on Blonde* is Dylan's absolute masterpiece.
>
>During an argument over another Dylan interview, I came across the
>classic Playboy interview from 1966 that came out right before the
>release of Blonde On Blonde:
>
>----
>PLAYBOY INTERVIEW: BOB DYLAN
>February 1966.
>A candid conversation with the iconoclastic idol of the folk-rock set.
I shall offer my head upon the chopping block here.
Bob Spitz biography, page 385, states Hentoff....
"even put his byline to a Playboy interview in which he somehow got
away with allowing Bob to ask and anser his own questions"
For the record, I , ¤ Alias, still feel that even should the above be
true, the interview is still useful and fascinating. Even if you need
to take it with a thousand grains of salt while reading it.
Spitz haters may have at it now.
¤ Alias
Will Dockery
Yeah, but the problem with "Saved" was that it was also boring and
preachy. He didn't leave the "moment"... the "moment" left /him/.
Will Dockery
¤ Alias wrote:
I think I read the same in the Scudato bio. Dylan was pissed with the
way it turned out and dictated the entire thing over the telephone.
Pure /Dylan On Dylan/.
Patricia Jungwirth
>>February 1966.
>>A candid conversation with the iconoclastic idol of the folk-rock set.
>
> I shall offer my head upon the chopping block here.
>
> Bob Spitz biography, page 385, states Hentoff....
>
>"even put his byline to a Playboy interview in which he somehow got
>away with allowing Bob to ask and anser his own questions"
>
>For the record, I , ¤ Alias, still feel that even should the above be
>true, the interview is still useful and fascinating. Even if you need
>to take it with a thousand grains of salt while reading it.
The fact that both the questions and answers come from Dylan himself makes
it twice as interesting, useful and fascinating, salt or no salt.
tj
Bob Hughes
<wil...@wilburslice.com> wrote:
>On Mon, 31 Oct 2005 00:02:44 -0500, Zuke <m...@privacy.net> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>>
>>On Sun, 30 Oct 2005, Bob Hughes wrote:
>>
>>> On Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:00:43 -0700, "Barbara" <barba...@yahoo.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> "crazytimes" <crazyt...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>>>> sure what to purchase next. Hard life, huh? :)
>>>>
>>> Self Portrait is a great album after you strip all the really terrible
>>> songs off it. Course by then it's only 37 minutes long.
>>
>>Is "minutes" a misprint? Did you mean "seconds"? Everytime I put it on
>>I think something is wrong with my turntable, is the record warped,
>>is my belt turning at the wrong speed? It had to be intentional,
>>Bob could at least get his bat at the ball. He wore the
>>golden sombrero on that one.
>
>
>It Hurts Me Too is the only song on that album worth listening to.
>It's a masterpiece performance, but it's not even a Dylan song.
Not talking about writing. Performing only. Copper Kettle is
brilliant. The Boxer is hilarious. Living the Blues is fun and could
easily have slipped on to Nashville Skyline. Add on Early Morning
Rain, Take A Message to Mary, Blue Moon and Days of 49 and you've got
your 37 minutes. Great Album. Bookend it with All The Tired Horses
and Wigwam and an Alberta or two and no one would have blinked an eye.
Bob Hughes
Who's Whose at DC Comics? Creator Credits and art samples from DC's Golden and Silver Age Comics, especially Superman and Batman profiled at:
http://www.supermanartists.comics.org/superart.htm
Frank Zappa
Bob Hughes
Solid Rock is a great song. How could anybody not like Solid Rock?
Wilbur Slice
wrote:
>On Mon, 31 Oct 2005 06:37:44 -0600, Wilbur Slice
><wil...@wilburslice.com> wrote:
>
>>On Mon, 31 Oct 2005 00:02:44 -0500, Zuke <m...@privacy.net> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>On Sun, 30 Oct 2005, Bob Hughes wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:00:43 -0700, "Barbara" <barba...@yahoo.com>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> "crazytimes" <crazyt...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
>>>>> sure what to purchase next. Hard life, huh? :)
>>>>>
>>>> Self Portrait is a great album after you strip all the really terrible
>>>> songs off it. Course by then it's only 37 minutes long.
>>>
>>>Is "minutes" a misprint? Did you mean "seconds"? Everytime I put it on
>>>I think something is wrong with my turntable, is the record warped,
>>>is my belt turning at the wrong speed? It had to be intentional,
>>>Bob could at least get his bat at the ball. He wore the
>>>golden sombrero on that one.
>>
>>
>>It Hurts Me Too is the only song on that album worth listening to.
>>It's a masterpiece performance, but it's not even a Dylan song.
>
>Not talking about writing. Performing only. Copper Kettle is
>brilliant. The Boxer is hilarious. Living the Blues is fun and could
>easily have slipped on to Nashville Skyline. Add on Early Morning
>Rain,
Oh, yeah - I forgot about Living the Blues, which is pretty good. And
Early Morning Rain isn't bad. The rest... if I never hear them again
in this lifetime, that will be fine with me.
Mr Jinx
> Not talking about writing. Performing only. Copper Kettle is
> brilliant. The Boxer is hilarious. Living the Blues is fun and could
> easily have slipped on to Nashville Skyline. Add on Early Morning
> Rain, Take A Message to Mary, Blue Moon and Days of 49 and you've got
> your 37 minutes. Great Album. Bookend it with All The Tired Horses
> and Wigwam and an Alberta or two and no one would have blinked an eye.
Absolutely! Nothing wrong with the record just with a few listeners
who want him to wear a polka-dot shirt and shades forever. Move on....
move on .... move on.
Mr Jinx
Mr Jinx
jackmcinroy wrote:
> my favourite
> dylan album.
Lol. Mine, too!
Mr Jinx
Wilbur Slice
wrote:
If you don't think Dylan owes you something when you give him money to
see him in concert, then how would you feel if he just plain old
didn't even show up for the gig? You sat there for three hours in
silence and then went home. Would you be chuckling to yourself saying
"Well, Bob doesn't owe ME anything"?
J Buck
<If you don't think Dylan owes you something when you give him money to
see him in concert, then how would you feel if he just plain old didn't
even show up for the gig? You sat there for three hours in silence and
then went home. Would you be chuckling to yourself saying "Well, Bob
doesn't owe ME anything"?>
Some people would be ecstatic that they had a ticket stub for a Dylan
show, even if he didn't show up.
mcis...@umich.edu
Same here. Slow Train is the only one of the Gospel albums I've been
able to listen to completely, though it still seems preachy in parts,
but some of the live versions from that time period are very powerful.
I listen to a lot of bluegrass and African American Gospel, it's not
the subject matter that bothers me. I do get the sense that many
people who like Dylans Gospel years like it for the evangelical side of
it, though not everyone, of course. The same type of thing occurs in
religious Jewish music. The quality isn't there at times, but people
are listening for it's message. It's not a question of whether or not
it's great songwriting and performing, it's the message that matters.
Nicholas Twine
included. Slow Train I like, but find it a bit mannered. Saved I can't
stand. Way to hectoring on the sentiment there Bobby.
<mcis...@umich.edu> wrote in message
news:1130864353.9...@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...
Harry
gospel LP."Shot of Love & Slow Train Coming are better for most people.
Harry
the "moment,is the "everlasting present",as LOVE's song title says.He
is with Blake & the Eternals.
ch...@cupolagallery.com
> On 31 Oct 2005 16:18:15 -0800, "gabriel" <gabrie...@hotmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> >
> >Wilbur Slice wrote:
> >>
> >> If I pay a performer, whether it be a ticket price to a concert or the
> >> price of an album, then yes of course, that performer owes me
> >> something. I paid him for it. Imagine going into the grocery store
> >> and paying for a gallon of milk, and what they give you is a couple
> >> weeks beyond its expiration date and stinking sour. Would you say
> >> that they didn't owe you some fresh milk?
> >
>But the understanding between you and the grocery person is that the milk is fresh. When you buy a Dylan album, the understanding between you and the record company is less clear. The understanding might be either that the music on the album is
a) like music on previous albums by that artist
or
b) what the artist wanted to put on the album
Which applies to Dylan a or b? Which one are you applying?
ch...@cupolagallery.com
> >
> >But then, you also said that Dylan
> and the Dead is "easily one of the best albums of all time."
Are you capable of reading any irony into that statement?
> I've never been able to make it through more than two or three songs
> on Saved at a time. Truly bad record.
Ok you don't like it. I do. "Truly bad". Does that make my opinion
"false"?
>
> >
> >Self Portrait is an embarrassment. Only even released to fulfill a contractual
> obligation,
Which contractual obligation? (Genuinely curious :))
and was widely regarded as Dylan's worst album ever until
> some of his 80's and 90's output surpassed it.
>
Who cares about "widely regarded". Most music journos (if that's who
you mean) are idiots who follow the noise of trend-castanets.
> >
>
> BoB is almost always on every rock critic's top-ten list of all time
> great albums. It is the zenith of Dylan's work, surpassed perhaps
> only bu Highway 61 and Blood on the Tracks. A truly amazing album.
>
Again, who cares about rock critics? Look at the other shit they put in
their lists. You trust these people's judgements? (Btw, How can a
zenith be surpassed, even perhaps?)
> >
ch...@cupolagallery.com
mcis...@umich.edu
No.
ch...@cupolagallery.com
Oh well.
Will Dockery
Temporary Like Achilles wrote:
> > I had a hunch he'd have the Clash backing him at that point
>
> re-invigorated him, given him the same kind of energy the Band gave him
> -- perhaps even greater intensity. In Chronicles, Dylan mentions Mick
> Jones and says, "I wished that I had thought of him to play in my band.
> He'd have been perfect." Yes, he would have been perfect! I had heard
> that Dylan played with the Clash while he was in England, and I had
> also heard a rumour that they did some recording. Do you (or anyone
> else, of course) know anything about any collaboration or recordings?
Stuff like "Spanish Bombs" on London Calling, including the title cut,
would have given Dylan the /fire/ that was missing in the smouldering
/brimstone/ of Saved.
The songs really are not so bad, in some cases like "What Can I Do For
You", et cetera as good or better than Slow Train... but the sound
lacks luster compared to the players he used on STC.
I read way back in the day that Dylan met Strummer and Jones but didn't
read of any jamming or collaboration, although the recently unearthed
cover of "The Man In Me" on the expanded London Calling sure makes me
wonder at what could have been.
A friend played me a stunning acoustic duet of Johnny Cash and Joe
Strummer on "Redemption Songs", recorded right before both men died...
Mick Jones is alive and well, though apparently "retired" from the
music biz, so there's still a chance... next record?
--
Will Dockery, week 9:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Will_Dockery_week9.jpg
Wilbur Slice
>Can everyone agree to disllike Neighbourhood Bully?
Actually, I kinda like that song.
mcis...@umich.edu
How about Union Sundown? It's the song on that album I always skip. I
can agree to thoroughly dislike it.
Delia
We cannot all agree to dislike even the worst Dylan song or album.
Pick any one and there will be someone who comes forth to say, "But
that's my favorite."
Wilbur Slice
Personally, I would choose c) the music on the album does not suck.
That could include your a or b or a comination of the above or
neither. Sure, it's a matter of taste, and there's no accounting for
taste. That's why we don't actually get our money back when the
albums suck.
And BTW - this doesn't just apply to Dylan, but to ALL performers. And
even though you seem to like Dylan's most gawd-awful albums, I'll
assume there are some albums somewhere by someone that you think suck
and for which you'd like to have your money back.
Wilbur Slice
>Wilbur Slice foamed:
>> >
>> >But then, you also said that Dylan
>> and the Dead is "easily one of the best albums of all time."
>
>Are you capable of reading any irony into that statement?
Irony is difficult on the net. You've already gushed over some of
Dylan's absolute worst albums, and you've dissed Blonde on Blonde - a
certifiable masterpiece, so I have to assume that I can in NO way
discern what your tastes are. So when you make a statement that I
find completely contrary to MY tastes, I cannot just assume that you
are joking - there are all sorts of tastes out there, and there are
even, prsumably, some people who *like* that album.
>
>
>> I've never been able to make it through more than two or three songs
>> on Saved at a time. Truly bad record.
>
>Ok you don't like it. I do. "Truly bad". Does that make my opinion
>"false"?
No, not at all. As I already said, it's just instructive that there
are all sorts of tastes in this world, and just because someone
doesn't like a particular album doesn't mean that someone else can't
love that album.
This is all just music - it's art. it's just about 100% subjective,
and there is no objective "good" and "bad" here - nor is there
"Truth". You seem to like some Dylan albums that I can't stand. Good
for you - someone has to buy those albums. SOMEone has to buy Ashley
Simpson albums. *I'm* not going to, and *I* might think she stinks,
but that doesn't mean that someone else can't like her.
>>
>> >
>> >Self Portrait is an embarrassment. Only even released to fulfill a contractual
>> obligation,
>
>Which contractual obligation? (Genuinely curious :))
Usually when an artist signs a recording contract, it states that
he(she) is to produce X number of albums, and sometimes it includes
the time period. Sometimes the time period is not specified and it's
just that the artist can't move to another label (or re-negotiate the
contact for better rates)until the contracted number of albums is
produced. Sometimes there is no specific number of albums, but there
is only a time period, so that the artist might just choose to sit on
his material until the time period is up in order to change his
contract. That was true of Springsteen, but the contract he didn't
like was with his manager, IIRC.
With regard to Self Portrait, I have read people speculating that it
was produced in an effort to get Columbia to drop him, so he'd be free
to move elsewhere if he'd like. I don't know for sure if that is
true.
Another example, although from a different angle, is the album
"Dylan", which Columbia used to threaten Dylan into re-signing with
Columbia and not going to David Geffen's Asylum Records. Basically,
it was "we have the contactual righyt to release this album of dreck
that might damage your career, and we will do it unless you sign up
with us again." But Bob apparently doesn't blackmail easily, and he
went to Asylum, and Columbia released that horrible album.
Interestingly, though, Bob returned to Columbia. I wonder if they had
somethign even more powerful with which to blackmail him and he
knuckled under? Or did Columbia knuckle under and give him what he
wanted?
>
>and was widely regarded as Dylan's worst album ever until
>> some of his 80's and 90's output surpassed it.
>>
>Who cares about "widely regarded".
The wide people who do the regarding.
> Most music journos (if that's who
>you mean) are idiots who follow the noise of trend-castanets.
But then, you're in a tiny minority of people (music journalists or
otherwise) who think some of these Dylan albums are any good. I
suppose it's possible that you're a genius and ALL those other people
are idiots.
>> >
>>
>> BoB is almost always on every rock critic's top-ten list of all time
>> great albums. It is the zenith of Dylan's work, surpassed perhaps
>> only bu Highway 61 and Blood on the Tracks. A truly amazing album.
>>
>Again, who cares about rock critics?
Most people who listen to rock. That's why rock criticas have the
jobs they do.
> Look at the other shit they put in
>their lists. You trust these people's judgements?
I don't "trust" anybody's judgement, in particular. I make up my own
mind. In this case, I just happen to *agree* with them, and I think
it's pretty obvious that they are correct. Sure, on their lists of
"best" there are ALWAYS lots of albums I can't stand, and they omit my
favorites. The only PERFECT critic is ME. However, the value of a
rock critic (or any other kind of critic - like Roger Ebert) is that
you get to know their tastes, so that when they come out and gush over
somethign, or if they totally pan something, you can make a decision
about whether to spend yoru money to find out for yourself. I don't
know about you, but I can't afford the money or time to buy and listen
to EVERYthing that comes out - sometimes I just read reviews. And
when the reviewers tell me that Paul McCartney's latest album is
saccharine drivel, I don't bother buying it.
>(Btw, How can a
>zenith be surpassed, even perhaps?)
Records can be broken.
Wilbur Slice
Ehhhh... well, I'm not *fond* of it, but it's certainly not the
*worst* Dylan song I've ever heard. Maybe I have a soft spot in my
heart for it because it was the first song of the eagerly awaited new
Dylan album that I heard - while I was driving across England on my
honeymoon in October of 1983. I remember hearing that this new album
wasn't a Christian Gospel album and actually had some good stuff on
it, so I was looking forward to it. I rememebr thinking that song was
still a bit on the self-reighteous preachy side, and I didn't wholly
agree with its sentiments, but it's not *terrible*.
Delia
Neighborhood Bully has a better beat than Union Sundown. I'll give it
that. When you get right down to it, I don't much care for Don't Fall
Apart On Me Tonight, either. It's too unfocused. At least NB and US
are focused.
Wilbur Slice
>
>Wilbur Slice wrote:
>> On Mon, 31 Oct 2005 15:15:30 -0500, Jeff Gower
>> <jeffgowerN...@bellsouth.net> wrote:
>>
>> >In article <k5qcm1tpqcolu3m82...@4ax.com>,
>> > Wilbur Slice <wil...@wilburslice.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> I've never been able to make it through more than two or three songs
>> >> on Saved at a time. Truly bad record.
>> >
>> >Bzzzzzz!! Sorry, Wrong Answer. ;-)
>> >Saved is a great album.
>>
>> Yeah. The sales figures bear that out... ;)
>>
>> Like I said, there's all kinds of tastes in this world.
>
>What is it that, in your opinion, makes "Saved" a truly bad record? Is
>it the lyrical content? The music? The production? I'm really just
>curious.
>
Just an update about what I don't like about Saved (and several other
albums). I went to bobdylan.com and listened to snippets of the
songs, and one of the things I HATE about that stuff is - the
background singers. I am REALLY glad he doesn't use them anymore. I
don't think there's one song with the Three Chicks singing backup that
I like (except maybe If Dogs Run Free, but that was just One Chick).
Village Idiot
All The Tired Horses?
frankielee
that's an interesting and a daring song, by its lyrics and singing if
not by its music.