Bob Dylan's Blog, page 13

Fall 2011 European Tour Announced

Bob Dylan and His Band will tour Europe in October and November.

Dates have been published on the bobdylan.com Tour page.

Ticket information will be posted in the coming days, so please check the Tour page regularly.

Wilburys Streaming Event Honors Father's Day & Charles Truscott Wilbury

On Father's Day, four years ago this week, The Traveling Wilburys boxed set, Collection, stormed the worldwide album charts. The Collection includes an exquisite documentary entitled, "The True History Of The Traveling Wilburys," featuring previously unreleased footage of half-brothers Lucky, Otis, Charlie T. Jnr., Lefty and Nelson Wilbury.

In honor of The Wilburys, their father, Charles Truscott Wilbury, and fathers everywhere, please enjoy a free 24-hour stream of "The True History Of The Traveling Wilburys" this Father's Day -- Sunday, June 19th.

Visit TravelingWilburys.com on Sunday, June 19

Programme begins at 8am GMT*

(*7pm Sydney, 5pm Tokyo, 1:30pm Mumbai, 11am Moscow, 10am Johannesburg, 8am London, 5am Sao Paulo, 3am New York, Midnight Los Angeles)

Bob Dylan Summer 2011 U.S. Tour

Bob Dylan and His Band will play U.S. concerts this summer. Tickets are on sale now for all shows!

Visit the bobdylan.com Tour page for details.

Leon Russell will perform at all shows beginning July 24.

Bob Dylan Summer 2011 U.S. Dates

Bob Dylan and His Band will play U.S. concerts this summer. Tickets go on sale in the next few weeks, so please visit the Live and In Person! page for details.

More shows will be announced, as will pre-sale information for some shows.

One of a kind: Bob Dylan at 70

by Michael Gray

from Japan Times

Bob Dylan, the single most important artist in the history of popular music, will be 70 years old on Tuesday, May 24.

He was born Robert Allen Zimmerman in the flinty, scruffy city of Duluth, Minnesota, which teeters on the hills that plummet down to the shores of Lake Superior -- a lake so large it has tidal movement. But when he was 6 years old, his parents moved further north and west to the iron-ore town of Hibbing up on the Mesabi Range.

Iron ore built the town, and built the remarkably lavish Hibbing High School that Dylan attended: a school whose concert hall has a hand-plastered, hand-painted ceiling whose crystal chandeliers imported from eastern Europe are lowered three times a year for cleaning, and a stage large enough to accommodate the entire Minnesota Symphony Orchestra.

This is the hall in which the schoolboy Zimmerman first performed, on piano, with his rock'n'roll group The Golden Chords. He hammered out Little Richard numbers on a 1922 Steinway Grand. And when he was leaving school in 1959, he wrote in his high school yearbook under "Ambition": "To join Little Richard."

But by the time the young Dylan had spent a semester at the University of Minnesota, and then dropped out, Little Richard wasn't really available to be joined, having renounced secular music for gospel.

Meanwhile, the rock'n'roll of that generation of artists -- including Elvis, Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis -- was being pushed off America's airwaves by nervous advertisers and replaced by a milksop kind of pop that held no interest for the young man from Hibbing. In any case, by this point he had encountered the prewar blues recordings of Leadbelly, the campaigning songs of Woody Guthrie, acoustic folk guitarists in Dinkytown, the bohemian enclave of Minneapolis-St.Paul, the writing of Jack Kerouac and more besides.

All this made sense to him as, with his usual impeccable timing, he arrived, calling himself "Bob Dylan," in New York City's Greenwich Village at the very beginning of 1961 -- a 19-year-old already making up romantic stories about his past -- just in time to take part in the most exciting period of the the folk music revival then in full flow. A fearless performer, a charming urchin and a pushy, slippery youth, he soon got attention; an attention he held with the striking, forceful songs he began writing so prolifically.

"How many years can a mountain exist / Before it's washed to the sea? / Yes, 'n' how many years can some people exist / Before they're allowed to be free? / Yes, 'n' how many times can a man turn his head / Pretending he just doesn't see? / The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind . . ."

It's hard to feel this now, but back in the early '60s, "Blowin' in the Wind" was a wholly new, exciting song -- and in a time of racial struggle and conflict across America, a time too of general repressive restraint, this "protest song" spoke out, articulating what so many young people were feeling.

When black gospel-turned-soul star Sam Cooke heard it, he was rocked back on his feet. "How come it took a little white boy to write this?" he asked -- and in response he was moved to write his own great anthem, "A Change Is Gonna Come."

It's a long time ago. While we're not looking, everyone in popular music moves from symbol of youth to senior citizen -- unless they fulfil the callow wish The Who once hurled at us: "Hope I die before I get old." Ask Pete Townshend or Roger Daltry how they feel about that now. For sure they'll say, "Er, maybe old is better than dead after all."

Dylan obviously thinks so. He's seen innumerable contemporaries -- musicians and colleagues and friends -- fall by the wayside; but he's a survivor. And not because he's looked after himself. His attempts at doing so have been fitful at best, and somehow always incongruous, from giving up smoking to taking up fitness training, boxing, cycling to work ... even playing golf, a most unDylanesque hobby introduced to him by country star Willie Nelson.

Nor has Dylan ever made much attempt to keep on looking youthful. He's consented to one or two howlingly obvious airbrush jobs on album cover photos, but not many. Certainly not for him the eerie reconstituting of the visage like Cher or Michael Jackson.

Dylan usually looks his age (and the rest); he's often appeared on stage stiffened by corsetry, not to pull in his stomach but to support his back; and it's been 10 years now, since accepting an Oscar for the "Wonder Boys" film-soundtrack song "Things Have Changed," he launched the innovation of a small pencil-moustache, the effect of which has been to make him look oddly like Vincent Price, and at least as sepulchral.

No, the secret of Dylan's ability to keep on keeping on is nothing to do with any urgings to put on an ageless front. He grows old, he grows old, but he stays alive because he's always been ready to die.

This is a philosophical position, a spiritual stance, and one acquired early. It didn't emerge with the sometimes disconcerting 1980s and '90s Dylan who licks his lips over an imminent apocalypse. Nor does it date only from his Born Again period of the late '70s, when the Jewish-born Dylan converted to Christ and started evangelizing at us with alarming venom. "Are you ready are you ready? / Are you ready to meet Jesus?" he demanded to know back then (on the 1980 album, "Saved") -- clearly implying that we weren't and he was.

If this alone were the quality and provenance of Dylan's readiness to face death, it wouldn't perhaps add up to much, or explain his continued unconquerable insistence on plowing his own furrow.

But look back, for a moment, to "Dont Look Back" (sic), the documentary film of his 1965 visit to Britain, when Dylan is young and beautiful. Here he is, just turning 24, with the world of celebrity and glamour kissing his feet and cooing in his ears. He is the most perfectly hip creature on earth. Imagine how you'd cope with that. Even 10 percent of it would turn your head. But Dylan does cope, telling the man from Time magazine:

"You're going to die. You're going to be dead. It could be 20 years, it could be tomorrow, anytime. So am I. I mean, we're just going to be gone. The world's going to go on without us. All right now. You do your job in the face of that, and how seriously you take yourself you decide for yourself."

That is the Dylan stance. Forty-six years on, he's still all alone in the end zone, determinedly unimpressed by the clamor he's engendered and endured throughout.

After the babble of '60s approbation, initially for the power, articulacy and originality of songs like "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" and "Masters of War," Dylan felt trapped by his reputation as "protest singer, spokesman of a generation."

In the mid-'60s he went electric, and after the folk fans' booing stopped, he was lauded far more widely even than before -- now for the brilliance of his fusion of poetry and electricity and a run of peerless albums, from "Bringing It All Back Home" through "Highway 61 Revisited" to "Blonde on Blonde."

Here were records that broke down the walls of song -- liberating all of us and making it possible for every other musician and singer to seize that creative freedom. They could be as unlike Dylan as they wished, but he made their liberation possible by his revolutionary insistence that popular song, rock music, could handle all subjects and the whole range of human emotion and the life of the mind -- and by writing songs and making records that proved it.

But you weren't supposed to be crass enough to ask him what his songs were about. When Playboy magazine did, in 1966, the answer was this: "Oh, some are about four minutes; some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about 11."

But then, in the summer of that year, Dylan crashed his motorcycle. Rural seclusion and recovery followed, in the New York State countryside around Woodstock, and from all that emerged the ascetic challenge of his next album, "John Wesley Harding." In its beautifully pared-down instrumentation, and thanks to the mystery and gravitas of its songs, this effectively rebuked all the excesses of the new rock-star world: a post-"Sergeant Pepper" world of self-indulgent, drug-induced guitar solos and hippy-dippy lyrics sprawled across lavishly packaged double-albums.

It's impossible now to describe the thrill of being there then, hearing these seminal Dylan records when they were new and each so different from the last -- and when his extraordinary voice, or rather, voices, offered such a subtly nuanced and direct a form of communication that he seemed to be expanding your mind when he opened his mouth.

After "John Wesley Harding" came the dramatic switch toward warm simplicity and a pretty voice on 1969's "Nashville Skyline" -- and then the falling off the pedestal that was "Self Portrait" at the start of the new decade. Not only was this a provokingly unhip album, but in the inevitable early '70s backlash against the so-called Swinging Sixties, Dylan became perceived as a passe pariah, the very embodiment of the decade now being spurned.

In the mid '70s, Dylan's fortunes revived, thanks to a vast North American tour with The Band -- 6 million people applied for 600,000 tickets -- and then the more street-cred and intimate "Rolling Thunder Revue" tours of 1975/'76, on which a troupe of entertainers, fronted by Dylan, recaptured some of the spirit, the troubadour ethic, of their folkier youth.

More crucially, though, there came a huge renewal of admiration (and sales) following the release of the mature masterpiece that is 1975's "Blood on the Tracks," and its successor, "Desire." Then came the giddy success of a "World Tour" of concerts in 1978, after a 12-year absence from Europe.

By this time it was the height of punk, and punks regarded Dylan as that loathsome thing, an Old Hippy -- yet in London the police had to supervise nationwide, all-night queues for tickets for his concerts at cavernous Earl's Court, which were followed by an extra performance 65 km away at rural Blackbushe Aerodrome in Hampshire, for which British Railways laid on special trains to handle a crowd of some 300,000. A live double album of this tour was recorded from concerts at the Budokan in Tokyo, where it started on Feb. 20, 1978.

That was, as it turned out, the last gasp of Dylan's superstardom, which petered out little by little over the next 20 years. First, unhappy with his personal and artistic life, Dylan became a born-again Christian. Disconcertingly, the man who had warned us "Don't follow leaders / Watch the parking meters" was now admonishing us with, "There's only one authority / That's the authority on high."

After a couple of albums in this vein, as he began to retreat from evangelizing and struggled to re-find his artistic feet. He stumbled through most of the 1980s, selling only modest numbers of records and performing for smaller audiences. His wretched, inebriated appearance at "Live Aid" in 1985, along with a series of poor albums -- "Empire Burlesque," "Knocked out Loaded" and "Down in the Groove" -- was enough to get him roundly dismissed once again as a figure from the past: an aging star of no contemporary cultural significance.

This was the received wisdom for almost two decades. Dylan was regarded with a kind of automatic knowing contempt. He began the ongoing "Never-Ending Tour" in June 1988, but his record company didn't bother to keep tabs on where he was, and the general public went back to thinking of him simply as the man who'd come up with "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are A-Changin'."

That's how it was -- while in truth his more than 40 albums offer a 50-year exploration of, and make a large creative contribution to, every form of American popular music, while offering a range of literary explorations too. There's his use of poetry from Blake and Browning to Eliot and the Beats. There's his imaginative ear for the poetry of traditional folksong, its dark balladry and weird jump-cut narratives; and for the evocative word-power, too, of blues lyric poetry -- especially that of the prewar blues, with which Dylan is uncannily au fait. Not least, and winding through all the rest, is his career-long intimacy with, and adept deployment of, the "King James Bible."

On stage, he still lives in the moment, making his concerts events, not mere shows. The result is that he can surprise even those like me who've seem him dozens of times.

In 1989, I watched in delight as he ended a New York City concert by jumping from the stage into the audience and dodging out by a side staircase. Before that, at his two debut performances in Israel in 1987, years after he had retreated from born-again evangelizing on his albums, he chose to give both his Tel Aviv and Jerusalem audiences several Christian songs, though his repertoire was wholly different the one night from the other. Who else could, or would, do that?

More often the unpredictabilities are to do with his mercurial, fleeting moods and his daring to risk where they take him -- sometimes in mid-concert, even in mid-song, and certainly from one night to the next. In 2000, I could scarcely believe that the man who performed so badly, so unwillingly, in the hell-hole of Sheffield Arena in northwest England could offer such transcendent greatness two days later in Portsmouth on the south coast.

When he's on form, he's still untouchable. There's simply no doubt, as you stand there, that you're in the presence of genius, however wayward it might be.

Yet despite all this, and despite his writing and recording of numinous songs in more recent decades (isn't "Blind Willie McTell" the best song of the 1980s, by anyone?), in the general public's perception he still remained a left-field figure, a charismatic maverick who operated on the sidelines of our culture. But times really do change.

For Dylan, change seemed to begin with a rush of warm reappraisal when, in 1996, he was taken ill with a heart disease. Even the people running the arts sections of the broadsheet newspapers suddenly imagined the prospect of his permanent absence -- and were surprised to find themselves feeling some regret over this.

And then in 1997, with "Time out of Mind," Dylan's first collection of new songs in seven years, he succeeded in reminding people of how striking and unique the artist in him was and is and always will be.

He even picked up a set of Grammies and a Kennedy Center Award, presented to him by President Bill Clinton. But it took the New York Times best-sellerdom of Dylan's carefully crafted memoir, "Chronicles Volume One," in 2004, and then the 2005 Martin Scorcese film "No Direction Home," before Dylan was rightly elevated to the rank of mainstream American icon, alongside Brando, Monroe and Presley. Or Whitman. It followed that in 2006, his new album, "Modern Times," topped the U.S. charts: the first time he had done so in 30 years, and at the time the oldest living singer ever to reach that position.

The media blitz around his imminent 70th birthday confirms this sea change in the way he's now perceived. He was always somehow minority-interest, even though he had revolutionized popular music. Today, he's a grand old man of American letters -- and at the same time far more commercially successful than ever before.

So there's a snowstorm of Grammies and Oscars and lifetime achievement awards and, now every year, an argument about whether Dylan deserves the Nobel Prize for Literature. He may turn up and accept these awards now, but he knows better than to be swayed by the excessive bestowing of honors.

He knows that such things generally come to artists, if they come at all, when they're felt to be safe and over the hill. There's nothing he can do about that. He keeps on going and he hasn't finished yet.

At the center of all this renewed hubbub, Dylan remains a mystery. He is a mystery because what drives the man is the artist, and he is an exceptional artist: a true original of risk-taking range and bravery, who has never been satisfied with finding a popular niche and settling into it. The important thing about Dylan as we look back, prompted by the occasion of his turning 70, is what has always been important: his enormous and variegated body of work.

If you want to know who Bob Dylan is, why perfectly sane people continue to find him compelling, and why he keeps on drawing in intelligent young people in wave upon generational wave, it's easy. Listen to his records.

© Michael Gray, 2011

Michael Gray is a critic, writer and broadcaster recognized as a world authority on the work of Bob Dylan. He is also an expert on rock'n'roll history and the blues, with a special interest in prewar blues. He grew up on Merseyside, England, and now lives in France. His website is www.michaelgray.net.

A New Take on TARANTULA

from Poet's Path

MARK SPITZER

"BOB DYLAN'S TARANTULA: AN ARTIC RESERVE OF UNTAPPED GLIMMERANCE DISMISSED IN A RATLAND OF CLICHES"

"Dylan? He's the best living

American poet there is, man!"

--Andrei Codrescu.

For the most part, critics and reviewers have always stigmatized Bob Dylan as a lousy poet, advising the public to buy his music instead. When his book Tarantula was published by Macmillan in 1971, the reaction was predictable, and has been ever since--keeping in league with what is expected from that failed-artist class bent on bashing the bards they secretly aspire to be, but can't, for lack of imagination.

That common thought restated for the millionth time, I'll take another unpopular stance: I have never felt a connection with Dylan's music, nor have I felt the urge to worship him like so many fanatics from so many different generations all over the world. Still, there is something about him that I feel is worth appreciating.

Growing up in Minnesota, then going to the U of M (and living under "the watchtower"), I studied the same books Dylan did. I know this because, back in those days at the University Library, you had to sign a slip of paper inside the back cover whenever you checked out a book. And in the books by Arthur Rimbaud, the mythic name of Zimmerman was always there, scrawled in the same ink in which passages were underlined in French as well as English.

Meanwhile, Dylan's popular songs were being played daily (as they are today) on KQ92, and were just as overplayed as the Beatles--because America loves repetition and rhyming just as much as it loves a parade of cliches. The measure of mainstream mediocrity has always been reflected in the most commercial music; ie., the bubble-gum aesthetics of Brittany and the Backstreet Boys, the pop poetics of country western, etc.

But back to those whose job it is to maintain the standard standards of a mass market thriving on lyrical lard: their jargonistic journalism seeks not literary genius, but rather simple rhythms to secretly pledge allegiance to, since we all go la la la in our heads when we walk down the street denying the silence of our minds. Reviewers rarely being poets, though, and hardly ever scholars, it's no surprise they're out of touch with the history of cutting-edge verse.

Robert Christgau was the worst. He reamed Dylan in a New York Times interview when Tarantula first came out, stating that the book "is not a literary event because Dylan is not a literary figure."1 But the thing is, Dylan would be more of a literary figure if Christgau hadn't set the stage for the book's critical reception--which a herd of poetically illiterate reviewers repeated the sentiments of for over thirty years, essentially echoing Christgau's final damning words: "it is a throwback. Buy his records."2

Plus, the publisher's dismissive introduction (in which the editor refuses to identify himself) didn't help Tarantula become recognized as an avant-garde work of postmodern poetics. By explaining that the editors "weren't quite sure what to make of the book--except money," then employing the disclaimer "This is Bob Dylan's first book... the way he wrote it,"3 it's no wonder readers had trouble understanding Dylan's innovation.

Blundering reviewers like Steve Collins then came along and confused Dylan's readership even more by poorly explaining the literary tradition the poetry sprang from:

Tarantula came about after poet Allen Ginsberg urged Dylan to read Maldoror by the Comte de Lautreamont (pseudonym of Isodore Lucien Ducasse) and A Season in Hell by Arthur Rimbaud, both of them nineteenth-century French surrealist poets and writers. Surrealism is a modern movement in art and literature in which an attempt is made to portray or interpret the workings of the artist's or writer's subconscious mind as manifested in dreams. It is characterized by an irrational, non-contextual arrangement of material. Some describe it as automatic writing, that is when a writer quickly puts his random thoughts on paper without organizing them, allowing interpretation on the basis of the writer's total creative output, whether for a day or a lifetime of effort. Others call it art that is anti-art.4

Thus, we now have tons of misinformation informing readers about what Dylan was trying to accomplish. For one thing, Rimbaud and Lautreamont were never "nineteenth-century surrealists," because they predated that movement by half a century (Hey Collins, look up Andre Breton, 1928, and see if there's a manifesto; Rimbaud and Lautreamont inspired the Symbolists, who in turn inspired the Surrealists, but they never belonged to anyone's club). Also, Surrealism may have been a Modernist movement, but it hasn't been a "modern movement" for sixty years. One can only conclude that Collins' malarkey about "irrational... arrangement of material" must've come from the same place he got that baloney about a "writer's total creative output" allowing for interpretation.

I am embarrassed for the reviewers of Dylan, who note his poetic influences but don't have the foresight to look into these connections. Sloppy research, though, is better than no research at all when it comes to reporters trying to understand the purpose of Dylan's poetics. After all, to fully perceive the fine web of music and meter strung throughout Tarantula, it takes a "seer"--a term Rimbaud used in defining the voyant: someone who approaches the ideal of the impossible through a systematic derangement of the senses--which Tarantula does in conscious dreamlike windings.5

Such perspectives on seeing are alien to most people who have never studied the poetics of Rimbaud, but such lyrical language techniques were definitely visible to the visionary Dylan. He practiced these techniques with a skill and ambition that rivaled Rimbaud's. In fact, no other poet in the Am Po scene has demonstrated such mastery in this department since Walt Whitman.

The evidence for this, however, isn't in the fact that I say so; it's in the assonance and alliteration which Dylan saw Rimbaud applying to his already super-imagistic verse, making it more musically dimensional than anything that came before--thus, putting an end to centuries of rhyming in France by slaughtering sonnets, killing quatrains, and foreshadowing the future of free verse.

Dylan, though, didn't just imitate Rimbaud's syllabic acrobatics; he observed how Rimbaud placed similar sounds together to create melodic waves, then did it himself in a way that is hauntingly reminiscent of Rimbaud's poetic prose. Note the repetition of "u" and "a" sounds in the Rimbaud excerpt below, followed by the same sounds in the Dylan excerpt following that. Also note the "c" and "g" combinations in Rimbaud, as compared to the "l" and "d" combinations in Dylan:

From Rimbaud's "Bottom"

Je fus, au pied du baldaquin supportant ses bijoux adores et ses chefs-d'oevre physiques, un gros ours aux gencives violettes et au poil chenu de chagrin, les yeux aux cristaux et aux argents des consoles.6

From Dylan's "Black Nite Crash"

aretha in the blues dunes--Pluto with the high crack laugh & rambling aretha--a menace to president as he was jokingly called--go--yea! & the seniority complex disowning you . . . Lear looking in the window dangerous & dragging a mountain.7

Language aside, this Dylan passage hardly represents an "irrational... arrangement of material;" it is part of a high-art symphony of allegoric metaphor, fertile with commentary on Civil Rights and twentieth-century politics through the ghosts of Kerouac and Shakespeare via Greek mythology. And any reviewer who can't see this is either ignorant or lazy, like those who fail to notice the same (but less pretentious) intention in Dylan that is automatically glorified in the canonized antics of James Joyce, a "crooner born with sweet wail of evoker, healing music, ay, and heart in hand of Shamrogueshire... googoos of the suckabolly in the rockabeddy... copiosity of wiseableness of the friarlayman in the pulpitbarrel... wideheaded boy!"8

"Inaccessibility" is expected from Joyce, but not Dylan, who chose his name for a reason that his sophomoric followers--who view rhyming cliches as poetry--refuse to acknowledge. The Tarantula's web is therefore labeled "jibberish," as demonstrated by a recent listing of the "Top Five Unintelligible Sentences From Books Written by Rock Stars" in Spin Magazine. Dylan made the top of the list with "Now's not the time to get silly, so wear your big boots and jump on the garbage clowns."9

It's ironic, of course, that those who claim Dylan is unintelligible assume that his words have no meaning, but it's pathetic that they fail to notice who the "garbage clowns" are. If such bumbling media-mongers juggling rubbish took a moment to consider that the poet might actually be a poet and have some insight into human nature, they might decode the metaphor.

Meanwhile, there's an undiscovered continent of sense to be made from the seemingly nonsensical pages of Tarantula. Because reviewers of music are not authorities on poetry, there's a whole poetic "novel" by Dylan here waiting to be praised for cryptic brilliance. So get past the music, Garbage Clowns, and read the book--but slowly, and out loud, pausing with reflection.

End Notes

1. Christgau, Robert. "Tarantula," Bob Dylan: A Retrospective, Craig McGregor, ed. William Morrow & Co., New York , 1972, p. 390.

2. Ibid., p. 394.

3. The Publisher. "Here Lies Tarantula," Tarantula, Bantam, New York , 1972, pp. v,vi,viii.

4. Collins, Steve. "Tarantula: Poems," Book Reviews, http://poeticvoices.com/0006BDylan.htm (accessed 2/19/2003), 2000.

5. For more on Rimbaud's visionary aesthetics and the impossible, see "Introduction," The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille, Dufour Editions, 1998 (2nd ed), pp. xii,xiii; or Bataille, Georges. "The Malady/Greatness of Rimbaud," translated by Emmanuelle Pourroy, Exquisite Corpse 7, http://www.corpse.org/issue_7/ critical_urgencies/batail.htm (accessed 2/21/2003), 2000.

6. Rimbaud, Arthur. "Bottom" (from Illuminations), OEuvres de Arthur Rimbaud, Mercure de France, Paris, 1952, p. 261.

7. Dylan, Bob. "Black Nite Crash," Tarantula, Bantam, New York , 1972, p. 76.

8. Joyce, James. Finnegan's Wake, Penguin, New York , 1976, p. 472.

9. Compiled by Dave Itzkoff et al. "Top Five Unintelligible Sentences From [sic] Books Written by Rock Stars," Spin, vol. 19, no. 4, April 2003, p. 86.

[Originally published in JACK Magazine. 2/3. 2003. Reprinted by permission of the author and publisher.]

NYC's Film Forum to Exhibit Two Bob Dylan Classic Documentaries

New York City's great cinema, Film Forum, will be exhibiting two classic Bob Dylan documentaries starting May 18.

Dont Look Back was filmed on Bob Dylan's 1965 UK tour by director D.A. Pennebaker.

The Other Side of the Mirror showcases Bob Dylan's 1963-5 performances at the Newport Folk Festival, directed by Murray Lerner.

Don't miss your chance to see these films shown on the big screen!

D.A. Pennebaker and Murray Lerner will make personal appearances at selected screenings.

See the Film Forum web site for details and to purchase tickets.

Read A.O. Scott's review in the New York Times.

Comments about Bob Dylan from AARP magazine

Larry Sloman has solicited some comments about Bob Dylan for AARP magazine. Here are a few, with more to come:

MAYA ANGELOU

The truth is, Bob Dylan is a great American artist. His art, his talent, is to speak to everybody, and so when I say American, I think he's a great African American artist, he's a great Jewish American artist, he's a great Muslim American artist, he's a great Asian-American artist, Spanish-speaking artist -- he speaks for the American soul as much as Ray Charles did.

There was a time when Bob Dylan was the young kid on the block. We all sang at the Purple Onion and the Hungry I and at folk-music clubs. When Bob came along, everyone loved him because he was what we all had meant to be; he spoke for all of us. And he was known to be honest, which is what a great American artist is. It may not be expedient, but the audience can trust the artist who is honest, and Bob Dylan followed what he said in his lyrics by his actions. He supported the human being, the spirit of being an American -- of knowing that the mountains and the rivulets and the voting booths belong to all of us, all the time.

JIMMY BUFFETT

From the man who never grew up: I would simply like to say that Bob Dylan's music has kept me forever young.

SENATOR BILL BRADLEY

I've been a fan of Bob's since the mid-'60s. His lyrics had an appealing complexity to them that spoke on many levels and allowed one's imagination to flow, in addition to the music and his distinctive voice. I was very pleased when Princeton gave him a Ph.D.; I even wrote the president when they nominated him that it was the greatest thing the university has ever done. I've followed Bob through his various permutations and I think his latest stuff is some of the best stuff he's ever done. It's his personal reflections on age and relationships and it's quite different than earlier, because he's lived a life, had a near-death experience and he's seen it all. I love that line where he says he's going down to see Alicia Keys, let me show you what I got.

His voice is pretty much gone, but that's who he is. I don't think he's ever really tried to be somebody else; that's the key. You see a lot of these musicians, they want to be actors or they want to do this or that, and then ultimately they'll come back to being who they really are. I think Bob's always been who he is. He's still out there doing it and that means that his public, in this case me, will never be deprived of hearing where he's coming from at a particular time in their lives.

HARRY BELAFONTE

Bob Dylan has lifted the spirits of millions of people in the world. He has inspired great numbers of artists, and has made those of us who have met him come to be rewarded by the encounter. I admire him, I respect him, I am honored to have this moment to express my deep appreciation for who and what he is.

BRUCE DERN

About five years ago, the director Larry Charles called me up and asked me if I would be interested in being in this movie Masked and Anonymous that was starring Bob, and he was getting a bunch of people together that Bob admired to do vignettes in the movie. And I said, "Sure, I'd be honored." So I went to work and I met Bob, and immediately was struck by a few things. First, his size. I thought, somehow, he was bigger. The cowboy hat and the cigar added to his height and stature, however, and that I liked. Second, I was extremely taken by the lack of ego in his demeanor. His feeling that there's no "I" in the word team, his knowing that his movie was teamwork, and that he had to rely on those of us who he felt were really good actors, more than he relied on his own talent.

Bob is about having your heart and everything else in the right place and going for it irregardless, and that irregardlessness and throwing caution to the wind is what excited me about the man and his music and his spirit. If you want to talk about what makes stars, stars to me are people that dominate decades. I can't think of any one individual, other than Bob, who has dominated multiple decades. What can I tell you, man, he's unique.

JONATHAN LETHEM

If, as the poet says, "The purpose of art is to stop time," then Dylan has stopped more time, at least for me, than anyone living or gone. Dylan is a man out of time, belongs to the ages, ages well, is no age at all. So what if 70 years have now accrued to the animal body our bard, our Blake, happens to cart around? He was older than that before, and he's younger than that now.

And, most fortunately, his relationship to "retirement" seems to be weird too. Take a day off, Mr. Dylan, and blow out as many candles as you like. But just a day, okay?

LUCINDA WILLIAMS

The first Bob Dylan album I heard was Highway 61 Revisited. It was 1965. I was almost 13 and had just started guitar lessons. We were living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and my dad was teaching at LSU. One of his writing students came over to the house one day with this album. He was raving about it. My dad wasn't particularly interested but I was. His student left it at the house and I listened to it. Even though I was barely 13, I got it.

From the time I was a small child, I had been influenced by southern poets and folk, blues, jazz and country music. Here was a guy who was putting it all together, for the first time. At the time, I didn't get all of the in-depth meaning of the songs but that didn't matter. I decided, right then and there, that I would learn how to do what he was doing. I wanted to be as good as he was and I have been learning how to do it, ever since.

MILTON GLASER

I met Dylan originally because I was a good friend of Albert Grossman, who was his manager and his mentor. Columbia, Dylan's record company, put out a greatest hits album. I did the poster for it. They had gotten control over the editing and they put that album together using material that perhaps Dylan might not have used. Dylan hated everything about that album. But the poster proliferated.

You do things and you have no idea of why they enter the public consciousness and this is one of those things because it represents an entire generation's interests and it's Dylan, who is a compelling figure.

I never did hear his reaction to it. I always assumed he just wanted to forget about it.

KINKY FRIEDMAN

Bob's a rock star, a world icon, a songwriter and performer who has influenced and inspired millions and affected our music and our world in a profound way. But at heart, I believe, if someone asked him how he thinks of himself, he would say he's only a minstrel boy. I say, long may he wander in the raw poetry of time! Happy Birthday, Bob.

Bob Dylan's China Tour

from SpotifyClassical.com

*****

In 2008 when I was interviewed by local independent music magazine So Rock! – I worked as label manager for an indie folk label by then - I said that musically I had two regrets: "I have never seen Bob Dylan, and never met anyone that love him more than I do."

Three years later, Dylan toured China for the first time, April 6th in Beijing at the Workers' Gymnasium and 8th in Shanghai at the Grand Stage. I went to both gigs, saw the Bob and met lots of good people who were radiating Bobby lovingness like burning coal. Now my heart is full of joy and thankfulness, to Bob and who were there for him.

I have a theory that, after 200 years, most pop music from the past century will be forgotten, just like 99% of the composers on this list, casual baroque fans have probably never heard of them. In my opinion only The Beatles, and Dylan will go down in history as the Handel and Bach of our age. Why? Just like Bach, Dylan perfected a style that had been deemed "outdated" in his time, and single-handed took the style to an artistic level never reached before. That's the sheer power of genius.

If there's not Elvis, someone would almost certainly "invent" rock, but such things cannot be said to Bach or Dylan. Geniuses don't have to influence the time they happen to inhabit. Handel and The Beatles enjoyed the grandest success during their career, and rightfully so. On the other hand, Bach published little of his works during his lifetime, and Dylan, though being honored by Time as one of the100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century, remains the most misunderstood figure in pop history. Numerous people cited him as major influence, but he has no real peers or inheritors. Mojo once published a list of 100 Greatest Dylan Songs, and the 100th is Oh, Sister. Andrew Bird covered this song a lot during his tour. I regard Bird as one of the finest singer-songwriters of today, but honestly I don't think he ever wrote a song in the same league of the 100th greatest Dylan song.

I listened to him relatively little in the past two years prior to the news that he's coming, stopped following the bootlegs after the 2009 European tour and had not revisited the albums often. Not because I lost any interest in him, on the contrary, my eager to know him better was ever growing. I was just waiting for me, and working my way out, to be better prepared for his music. When I first heard "Love & Theft" I thought it's odd fish's drool, five or six years later it became my all time favorite album. It's not because the songs had grown on me, it's me that had grown and matured, become old enough to appreciate the wisdom of old. In 2009 I felt that I had more work to do before I can dig him more, so I stopped.

For the last couple of weeks I listened to him intensely again, and I kept on thinking that, I would surely cry when I saw him doing these songs live. The air was getting more intense as the Beijing gig was drawing near. In the afternoon of the performance day, I was as anxious as if I was going to see Mozart improvising his c minor fantasy before he wrote it down. On the long bus ride to the venue, I looked out of the window and still couldn't believe that he's in this city. The time finally came. As the lights went out, and the voice intro started, we stormed to the rail with a friend in her wheelchair, another friend waved back to other people in the stalls, and they responded enthusiastically. Securities tried to push us back but they didn't dare to touch the wheelchair. After some go-arounds, Bob's men came and asked the securities to let us be. We stayed at the rail for the whole gig.

The lights went on again and he was there. He opened with Gonna Change My Way of Thinking, the second ever performance of this gem outside the US. With the totally re-written lyrics, this song could easily be on "Love & Theft". He must get a kick out of singing"we live by the Golden Rule/whoever got the gold, rules"in China of all places, and I couldn't take my eyes off him. All my anxieties were gone the second I saw him immersed in his music, and smiled on stage. From that moment on I knew that I didn't need anything for myself. He was happy, and I? What good am I to ask for more? I was more than happy. It felt so good to realize that besides my wife and relatives, I am also able to love another person with all my heart. It felt so good to be in the rare moment that love and music was one.

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue followed next, a decidedly upbeat version that sounded like a cheerful invite to a last dance. Love is pleasing, love is teasing - he is always the master of flipping the two sides – and I know what he always meant: love is not an evil thing.

Beyond Here Lies Nothin' came as a surprise, and it relieved me that he's not going to do Jolene tonight. He delivered a decent Tangled Up In Blue, though I still couldn't understand why he continued to cut off a lot verses (he didn't miss a line in Rollin' And Tumblin' and The Levee's Gonna Break!). Charlie finally started to actually play the guitar in Honest With Me and the new arrangement rocked hard. Simple Twist Of Fate is the same as last year, with the third person narrator switched to "her". Watching him performing the Blood On The Tracks songs at this stage of his life transcended affection and anger, it reminded me of his comment on Hank Williams:

"[T]hey're not love songs. You're degrading them calling them love songs. Those are songs from the Tree of Life. There's no love on the Tree of Life. Love is on the Tree of Knowledge, the Tree of Good and Evil."

The first highlight is A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, and the crowd went wild after the first verse. His delivery was clear and powerful, and charged with playful accent variations. Those apocalyptic images were pouring like a flood, and when he sang "I'll know my song well before I start singin'", he sounded as determined as a prophet should be. Only this time, he is determined that even the Book won't be fulfilled, the power of songs lives on.

The second day I took the overnight train to Shanghai, and got to the Grand Stage at the middle of the performance day. I hung around at the staff entry, talked to a roadie when he came out for a cigarette, asked him had he enjoyed his stay in China, he said it's all good except for the air. "How does Bob feel?" "Well, you know, he doesn't actually talk to us." Around 4:30pm the van came and I saw him in his hoodie and I shouted "You are younger than that now!" He disappeared into the venue in a split second. A French fan later asked me if he's wearing jogging shoes "so he walked that fast."

I haven't get my mind wrapped around the fact that the Shanghai gig is over, compare to the big bang of the Beijing gig, it slipped through my senses like the presto finale of Chopin's b-flat minor sonata, after the grand funeral march. Even the ominous opening chords of Blind Willie McTell sounded like thunderclaps in a daydream as I'm trying to recall now. I almost cried in Don't Think Twice(It's All Right), but soon I felt glad that he didn't seal this song forever after Suze passed away. In Thunder On The Mountain he sang the stanza that contains "I'll say this I don't give a damn about your dreams" twice in a roll. That's what I'd love to hear from "voice of a generation". All those boring journalists that suspected he didn't speak out for Ai Weiwei because of the pressure from the Chinese government, you mistook him for Bono. He has an answer for you, and it's not Ai Shall Be Released

"If you got something to say, speak now or hold your peace
If it's information you want, you can get it from the police."

He closed with a less sincere Forever Young, deliberately sang it with pitch-changes that butchered the song. But it's still a thrill to hear the man himself addressing the Chinese audience in this turbulent era:

"May you have a strong foundation, when the winds of change shift."

I didn't take any photos during the shows, somehow it felt too sacred to persevere the images of him with anything other than memory.

May his songs always be sung.

To my fans and followers

Allow me to clarify a couple of things about this so-called China controversy which has been going on for over a year. First of all, we were never denied permission to play in China. This was all drummed up by a Chinese promoter who was trying to get me to come there after playing Japan and Korea. My guess is that the guy printed up tickets and made promises to certain groups without any agreements being made. We had no intention of playing China at that time, and when it didn't happen most likely the promoter had to save face by issuing statements that the Chinese Ministry had refused permission for me to play there to get himself off the hook. If anybody had bothered to check with the Chinese authorities, it would have been clear that the Chinese authorities were unaware of the whole thing.

We did go there this year under a different promoter. According to Mojo magazine the concerts were attended mostly by ex-pats and there were a lot of empty seats. Not true. If anybody wants to check with any of the concert-goers they will see that it was mostly Chinese young people that came. Very few ex-pats if any. The ex-pats were mostly in Hong Kong not Beijing. Out of 13,000 seats we sold about 12,000 of them, and the rest of the tickets were given away to orphanages. The Chinese press did tout me as a sixties icon, however, and posted my picture all over the place with Joan Baez, Che Guevara, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. The concert attendees probably wouldn't have known about any of those people. Regardless, they responded enthusiastically to the songs on my last 4 or 5 records. Ask anyone who was there. They were young and my feeling was that they wouldn't have known my early songs anyway.

As far as censorship goes, the Chinese government had asked for the names of the songs that I would be playing. There's no logical answer to that, so we sent them the set lists from the previous 3 months. If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.

Everybody knows by now that there's a gazillion books on me either out or coming out in the near future. So I'm encouraging anybody who's ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them.