Jennifer (formerly Eccentric Muse)’s
Comments
(group member since Oct 24, 2009)
Jennifer (formerly Eccentric Muse)’s
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from the Dylanists group.
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the one I've read most recently is Chimes of Freedom: The Politics of Bob Dylan's Art, which was just fantastic, esp. as I rec'd and was listening to the Witmark Demos at the same time.
Here's a cool vid ... I did not realize Dylan actually invented the harmonica neck strap contraption.The Witmark Demos - Columbia Video
oh, that is an EXCELLENT idea, Philip. I have been very negligent in getting back to the late (and great) Dylan. Consider it done!
Excellent -- let us all know how it is. I need $11.01 more stuff to qualify for free shipping -- what should I order?!?
Thank NPR and the original sound engineer, I guess! Do you think anyone really knew what they were dealing with in those very early years?Bear Mountain is hilarious. You can hear someone in the background cracking up. He sounds like it's pretty much ad libbed....
fabulous - thanks! I only have the early stuff up to about Blood on the Tracks, then my Dylan becomes very spotty (as he did, frankly).I'll give BG a whirl...right now, I'm enjoying the preview tracks on the vol 9 Bootleg - The Witmark Demos. Have you had a listen?
What album is Brownsville Girl on (I'm too lazy to google)?A song I come back to again and again is Boots of Spanish Leather. Love that song.
Whoo hoo, some action on the Dylanists threads!Welcome, Steve ... jump in with anything you'd like to discuss.
Brian, I adore Seven Curses. Damn thing never fails to make me cry. Anyone besides me, when listening to the acoustic version (and changed lyric) of TuiB get a totally different feel for the narrator? He's a different person, with different motivations in the version on the bootleg series. I guess I just 'see him from a different point of view' hehehe
Hi Dean. Thank you for sharing your poem referencing Dylan. I hope you will feel free to engage in conversation here on Dylanists.
PS - Philip, I think members of this group can add books to the bookshelf here. Would you give it a shot, and let me know if you can? If not, I will try to adjust the settings and/or add them -- but ideally, all members should be able to add threads and books and whatever.
Philip and David: I'm coming back in here while listening/reading Blind Willie (and wasting time at work). I'm glad there are defenders of Lily, Rosemary -- and am happy to retreat from my position of apologist. (As Groucho Marx said, "those are my principles and if you don't like them, well, I have others.")In the true spirit of self-perception theory, here's what I know: I had a period where I spent long stretches of commuting time in the car, during which I was listening solely to Blood On The Tracks. At first, like you Philip, I skipped over the song because its Western theme didn't appeal to me and it seemed inferior to the other songs around it. Later, though, I stopped skipping and started really listening to it. I ended up really enjoying its farcical nature, and like David, the music was a great backtrack keeping me engaged enough to watch the action unroll in my head. Is it the best imagery or characterization of Dylan's? Absolutely not. Does it leave me breathless with wonder at the poetry of it? Not even close. But it almost works like a palate cleanser between other richer courses, and ends up allowing me to enjoy the entire meal of BotT even more.
Ok, that's my position and I'm sticking to it. (I'm Canadian--fence-sitting is well-ingrained in me.)
Back to Willie.
brilliant commentary, Philip. You've captured the complexity and power of the songwriting so well. I will look up the Gray and Ricks tributes too. I find that really good critical analysis helps me enjoy these songs even more, esp. those I don't immediately gravitate to such as, yes, Dylan's last decade. I do intend to remedy that, really. :-)Let me mull this over some, and listen/relisten to the song and I'll come back with further thoughts.
and to all: ok, ok ... so Lily, Rosemary is crap. :-p
I guess I'm an apologist for it, as everything surrounding it is so astonishing.
very cool indeed!
I'm amazed at this late flowering - not only of Dylan's songwriting but of his newfound chart-topping abilities....We're all going to pretend that Christmas In The Heart didn't actually happen, though, aren't we? There was a memo.
(Although the vids I've seen are side-splittingly funny. Sometimes I'm too earnest to pick up on the satire...that was satire, wasn't it?)
Hi Philip! This group is small and I haven't got a lot of time to goose the content, so a hearty welcome to you!I love your list of fave songs. Blind Willie McTell is astonishing for any number of reasons, but perhaps the one that fascinates me the most is the way Dylan plays with time, i.e., the temporal setting of the action (not musical time). He does something similar in Tangled Up In Blue, changing time periods and settings from verse to verse. It creates a sense of disoriented timelessness in the themes; like the patterns of behaviour have been and will be repeated over and over. I can't think of any other songwriter who does this as frequently or as well, can you? I'm trying to think of other examples--I'm sure there are some or many.
One more comment on your list: The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll is of course a great song; one of his greatest. I think in terms of Dylan's justice theme, it often gets the nod over a couple of others that are also noteworthy from that period: Seven Curses and The Ballad Of Hollis Brown. On the latter, Dylan does something with alliteration that is (I think?) uncommon for him, and which, as both a rhetorical and poetic device is remarkable. For me it is an early sign of the poet he would later develop into. The sounds of the words are as important as their meaning in conveying the themes -- all those hard p's, b's and c's and the breathless whooshing sound of the w's and s's, like bullets flying.
Ok, it's late and I've droned on ... tell me more about why you've picked the songs you've picked, will you?
Home with flu, so decided to read this article again. It's a great analysis, in which the author makes a good case for Blake allusions throughout VoJ, including "little boy lost" and "Infinity goes up on trial".I know that Dylan is notoriously silent on the issue of his literary references, although Blake and Rimbaud are often cited as sources, and there is the invariable comparison to Keats (which frankly, I don't quite get).... And of course, direct reference to TS Eliot and Ezra Pound in Desolation Row.
If anyone out there knows their Blake and Rimbaud better than I (and all of you are likely to!), I'd be interested in where else these allusions occur in Dylan's work.
Blake I have a passing familiarity with, but Rimbaud is a complete unknown to me. What should I read?
Paul ... that is really obscure! What a great find.On the lyric trivia, I had to google. Dylan wrote a song about laundry?! Seriously, what is up with that? I can definitely hear the parody of Ode To Billy Joe in it, though. Hysterical.
David - welcome! I agree with you on your listing of fave albums, but I've not given any kind of deep listen to the "late" Dylan: Modern Times, Love & Theft and Time Out Of Mind. Too afraid of being disappointed, I think.
As for the Christmas album, oh ... it's wrong, just so delightfully, painfully, hilariously, Dylanously wrong.
I chuckled at a brief review from the Salt Lake City Tribune: "... it is ill-conceived, even if all of the proceeds do go to charity. Dylan's voice is a unique, interesting, compelling instrument used to best effect on his own bluesy, harrowing work. But it is, and never should be, comforting, as it strives to be here."
