Bob Dylan (Official Thread)

[PaulWyman79]

How much is "The Basement Tapes" (US first pressing) record worth?

 

[joker1961]

the king of poets

the first album I`d heard by Bob Dylan was the freewheeling Bob Dylan.
hooked on the first listen too!

 

[Hurdy Gurdy Man]

Of course,John Lennon and more particularly Paul McCartney are more noted for producing so many chart hits,but many place ol' Bobby Zimmerman above both in the area of songwriting in general.McCartney probably has been a better melody writer, but I think what puts Dylan over the top with some is what they see as greater depth of material lyrically as well as the fact that he has penned so many fabulous social message songs.Been meaning to scoop up a copy of either "Blonde on Blonde",Highway 61 revisited" or both for quite some time now.Absolute essentials that perennially finish in the top ten or twelve on all those "greatest records ever" surveys.And well more than deservedly so.Without question,one of those artists who doesn't just sing for his audiences,but actually lures them into his own universe of nothing less than brilliantly surreal folk rock.Vh1 conducted a survey of the greatest acts ever and nauseatingly had Michael Jackson at No.2 above everyone but the Beatles,including Dylan.Are the people who took part in the survey f***ing sh***ing me!!!!

 

[Johnny-Too-Good]

In 1965, Bob Dylan had a surplus of creativity. In addition to electrifying folk and merging existential poetry with rock ‘n’ roll, the singer-songwriter was turning everything he did into something more. Even boozy conversations and silly press conferences — as seen in D.A. Pennebaker’s arresting documentary Don’t Look Back – became thought-provoking (or simply provoking) works of art.

So it’s not surprising that the bard of rock ‘n’ roll would seek to enhance the burgeoning art form of the music video with visual representations of his lyrics. A film clip for the 1965 single “Subterranean Homesick Blues” went beyond the existing tropes of pop music on film (either straight-forward performance or Hard Day’s Night-style hi-jinks) to create an experience that was strange, clever and utterly Dylan.

While on tour in England (and being filmed for the Pennebaker doc), Bob got the idea to take advantage of the film crew following him around. He sought to make a short music film for French machines called Scopitones, which were visual jukeboxes that played three-minute music videos on 16mm film. Dylan selected “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” the single he released in early 1965, to accompany the clip, in which he would flip over lyric cards in time (or sometimes not in time) with the music.

Members of the Dylan entourage — including fellow singer-songwriter Donovan, writer Allen Ginsberg and cohort Bob Neuwirth — helped Bob scrawl portions of his politicized hodgepodge onto flimsy cue cards (which were actually re-appropriated sheets of cardboard from a shirt laundry). Some cards displayed lyrics lifted straight from the song, while others included intentional mistakes, puns and jokes about Dylan’s accent (“pawking metaws”).

On May 8, 1965, Pennebaker set up his camera in front of Dylan, looking as insouciant as ever as he dropped the cards one by one in the alleyway behind London’s Savoy Hotel. (That’s Neuwirth and “rabbi” Ginsberg in the background, pretending to have a conversation.) The two-minute, 20-second clip was filmed in one, continuous take, with Dylan holding up a “What??” card before ducking out of frame.

The documentarian actually filmed Dylan repeating the performance in two other nearby locations (the hotel roof and a nearby garden), one featuring Ginsberg, Neuwirth and an unknown man in the background, and one showing just Neuwirth and Bringing It All Back Home producer Tom Wilson. The other versions went unseen until 2005, when Martin Scorsese integrated all three into one sequence for No Direction Home.

The original version was first seen in 1967, when Pennebaker chose to use the short film as a trailer for his Don’t Look Back doc. (After Dylan exited the screen, big white letters read: “Surfacing Here Soon: Bob Dylan in Don’t Look Back.”) The director also used the clip in the finished documentary. Even though it had been filmed at the end of shooting, Pennebaker placed the “Subterranean Homesick Blues” scene at the beginning of the film in order to set the wry tone for what was to follow.

Almost instantly, the clip became famous, enduring as a classic of the short music film (later to become the music video in the MTV era) and as one of Dylan’s most iconic moments. As such, it’s seen a vast array of homages, imitations and parodies. Just check out videos by INXS (“Mediate”), Steve Earle (“Jerusalem”) and “Weird Al” Yankovic (“Bob”), commercials for Maxell cassette tapes and references in Bob Roberts and Love Actually.

 

[TheGushinRussian]

My top 25

For anyone browsing the internet attempting to learn about Dylan and listen to his music, keep a few things in mind.

1. You likely will not understand the music upon first listen.

2. Dylan's output during the first 10 years or so of his career varies greatly in the style and subject matter

3. Dylan is a true poet. His voice isn't beautiful by any means, but that's integral to the aesthetic. He doesn't try to be Elvis, Marvin Gaye, Freddie Mercury, etc., it's the tone and sincerity in that nasaly, sometimes crackly voice that delivers the lyrics properly.

4. Do not be deceived, Dylan can write some beautiful melodies. Blonde On Blonde is a good album to reference, along with Highway 61 Revisited.

5. Post Blood On The Tracks Dylan sucks cock, honestly, almost everything is boring minus Desire, and he's my favorite artist. Everything up to Nashville Skyline as well as Blood On The Tracks is amazing, though.
Anyways, my top 25

1. Tangled Up In Blue ( New York Version )
2. Sooner Or Later
3. Like A Rolling Stone
4. The Times Are A Changin
5. Mr. Tambourine Man
6. Girl From The North Country
7. Blowin In The Wind
8. You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
9. Queen Jane Approximatly
10. All Along The Watchtower
11. Lay Lady Lay
12. Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands
13. Stuck Inside A Mobile
14. Subterannean Homesick Blues
15. I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine
16. Peggy Day
17. Tombstone Blues
18. It's Alright Ma ( I'm Only Bleeding )
19. Shelter From The Storm
20. Knockin On Heavens Door
21. Absolutely Sweet Marie
22. Simple Twist Of Fate
23. Tell Me That It Isn't True
24. Maggie's Farm
25. I Want You Back

Honorable Mentions: Visions Of Johana, Idiot Wind, Rainy Day Women #12 and 35, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues, I'll Be Your Baby Tonight

 

[JimJam]

^^^
Very useful and informative, GushinRushin! I appreciate your thoughts. Also a great list of favorite songs.

Mention of his voice is a good point. Dylan was always proud of his voice as a natural instrument and it only served to bring forth the integrity of his music. He seems to have been especially intent on sounding natural and unaffected on Blonde on Blonde.

While i agree that most of his best work was up to and including Blood on the Tracks, i also love Time Out of Mind and Love & Theft, as well as enjoying parts of the Oh Mercy and the recent Together Through Life and Modern Times. Time Out of Mind in particular is filled with top notch material and in my opinion ranks near his best work.

 

[joker1961]

f-f-f-f--f-f--f-f-f-f-f-f-f---f-f--f-f-forever Dylan BOB DYLAN...






life to short to stay CON?????????????????????

 

[Johnny-Too-Good]

The story of Dylan's appearance at the 1969 Isle of Wight Festival. His fee has been variously reported as somewhere between £40 - 50,000 ($61 - 76,000 at the current exchange rate). Just to put that in perspective The Who were paid £900 ($1373).


The day the Woodstock festival opened was an epoch-defining moment in pop. Yet an even more extraordinary event was taking place less than 100 miles away on Friday, 15 August, 1969.

In a journey every bit as unlikely as that of the tin can that had taken men to the Moon less than a month earlier, Bob Dylan and his family were boarding the QE2 in New York to sail to a little island off the south coast of England, snubbing the festival that had been set up in Dylan’s backyard in order to tempt him out of three years’ retirement. In one of the greatest coups, naïve but earnest youngsters were unwittingly stealing the planet’s biggest rock star from the most famous festival in rock history.

One of those youngsters was Ray Foulk, now a bubbling but unassuming chap with an air of eternal optimism who doesn’t look anything near the 70 years he has spent on the planet. The full story, which he is revealing only now, complete with never-before-seen photographs, sheds new light on a mysterious period in the life of rock’s greatest songwriter, and has a supporting cast of Beatles and other rock gods.

In 1968 Foulk was a 23-year-old newspaper printer, living on the Isle of Wight with his wife and two children. With his brother Ronnie he had organised gigs on the island, culminating that year in an outdoor festival headlined by San Francisco’s hippest hippies, Jefferson Airplane. It drew 10,000 people, but Ray and Ronnie weren’t satisfied. They wanted an act for next year’s festival that would be big enough to pull people across the Solent. So they started thinking ridiculously big.

“We needed a giant,” Ray tells me, “and the giants at the end of 1968 were Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and Bob Dylan. The Stones didn’t have a hippie following then – it was the Hyde Park thing that changed their image.” The Dylan die was cast when, that Christmas, someone gave Ronnie Foulk Dylan’s John Wesley Harding album, and he began playing it to death.

But there was a problem. The whip-thin, Ray-Banned, voice of a generation hadn’t played a proper gig since a mysterious motorcycle accident in 1966. He was living in Woodstock in domestic seclusion with his wife Sara and four children. His own producer had even said that he would never perform again. And, if he was to play, there was, unbeknownst to the Foulks, an enormous big-money festival planned for Dylan’s backyard with the intention of luring him.

“We knew there were big bids for him, but we didn’t know what they were for. We only found out about Woodstock about three days after it had happened,” says Ray.

Bob Dylan at the 1969 Isle of White festival A trip to London to consult underground magazines revealed Dylan’s management and Ray made contact via a crackly late-night transatlantic telephone call. He was told Dylan might be interested in performing. But they had no chance of competing with big money US promoters. “We started thinking how we could appeal. The Isle of Wight has this great heritage of Tennyson, Keats and Edward Lear that might appeal to a modern-day poet. So we got this idea of selling him a holiday in the Isle of Wight for him and his family.” (They also added a trip from the US to the UK on the QE2, which Dylan liked, though this was nearly to scupper the whole thing).

It worked. When Ray flew to the States to finalise the deal, Dylan came to his hotel room. “He was wearing shades, leather jacket, jeans, boots, generally that kind of hipster character, but he was very quiet and gentlemanly, and most of the conversation with him was about the sound system. He was very interested in that.” They agreed a fee of nearly £40,000 for an hour’s set.

Resurrected: A young Bob Dylan as Bobby in 'Madhouse' And so, Dylan set sail on the QE2. Except that he didn’t. The Foulks brothers’ dream nearly ended when a cabin door slammed into Dylan’s three-year-old son Jesse’s head, sending him to hospital, and the ship sailed without any of the family. “It was just two weeks before the show, and we got a call. All the papers were saying that Dylan might not appear at the Isle of Wight,” recalls Ray. “Pretty scary stuff.”

Dylan eventually arrived via plane, and no sooner had he and his family and entourage made it to the farmhouse on the Isle of Wight that was to be their base than George and Pattie Harrison arrived with Ringo Starr’s marijuana stash. The two superstars knew each other well – Harrison had stayed at Dylan’s house in Woodstock – but Ray says there was still clearly a mutual reverence.

“I remember [Dylan’s manager] Bert Block whispering in my ear as we were all sitting by the swimming pool and George and Bob were talking and he said, ‘look at them, they’re star-struck with each other!’

“George had the Beatles’ Abbey Road album in his hand, they’d just finished it the day before, and he had an acetate of it. He put it on the record player in the barn and there was a lot of envy in the air… but he was moaning about how John and Paul wouldn’t let him have more than two songs and how unfair it was. I was surprised how openly he was saying all this.”

Another time Ray remembers walking into the living room where George and Bob were singing a close harmony duet of the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream” which, he says, “sounded fantastic”.

On the surface Dylan was calm, but occasionally the mask slipped – like when a housekeeper offered him her car to tour the island and he got frustrated trying to peel promotional stickers reading “Help Dylan Sink the Isle of Wight” off the windscreen. “I remember seeing his long nails scratching at these stickers and suddenly he lost his rag, and said, ‘damn these stupid labels!’, and stormed off in a real huff. I realised he was on a very short fuse.”

The gig itself was fraught: 150,000 had massed to hear music’s messiah return, among them, in a chaotic VIP area, George Harrison, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Syd Barrett, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Terence Stamp and Jane Fonda. Dylan was supposed to go on at 9pm, but technical delays meant a two-hour wait as he got more and more agitated backstage.

Nevertheless, when he eventually went on stage, he was excited, proudly brandishing his guitar like a schoolboy and beaming: “Look, I’ve got George’s [Harrison’s] guitar!”

He eventually played exactly an hour, just what he had been contracted for, before leaving the stage – portrayed in one of the newspapers as “Dylan walks out in midnight flop”, a review that still rankles with Ray. It’s fair to say that Dylan’s performance was idiosyncratic, and the recording reveals his nervousness, but many there, notably Eric Clapton, were blown away.

For Dylan, though, it may not have been the experience he’d hoped for. He didn’t play another gig for three years and only returned to touring in 1974. Ray, meanwhile, went on to something even bigger – the Isle of Wight 1970 festival (a tale he’ll be telling soon), which would be the biggest the world had ever seen, and featured a man who made his name with a Dylan song and who would be dead three weeks later – Jimi Hendrix.

 

[joker1961]

Dylan Dylan & More Dylan Again

I cannot stop playing these two albums of Dylan`s,

1. Bob Dylan And The Grateful Dead

2. Slow Train Coming

IMHO two fabulous albums...

 

[Sharp Dressed Man]

1. Bob Dylan And The Grateful Dead

Great album, yet a lot of people seem not to like it much!