Dylanists discussion

Favorite Album?
Blood on the tracks. Only one song on there I can't stand. The rest of 'em I love so much it more than makes up for the poo. (Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts)


Song?
... still thinking

Lyrics?
"going out of my mind/with a pain that stops and starts/like a corkscrew to my heart/ever since we've been apart"

ouch.

Hello, and welcome to the group!

I missed this when I was over commenting on Blood On The Tracks in another thread. :-)

It's really hard for me to choose a particular album. As Paul and i were just discussing, they are all so different. The triad of Bringin' It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde is pretty much unparalleled in all of contemporary music, isn't it? It's amazing to think that all of that music was written in just 2 years.

Song? Boots of Spanish Leather, Tangled Up In Blue, Visions Of Johanna ... oh was I supposed to pick just one?

Lyrics? I'm fond of "the sun ain't yellow, it's chicken"

PS, I quite enjoy Lily, Rosemary & The Jack Of Hearts -- it's like a mini-Western movie in about 6 mins.

These lyrics are pretty good:

"Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail /
The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder /
That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze /
Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder."

Name that tune. :-)

Nice to meet you Muse!

I guess the fact that I don't dig Westerns explains my dislike for Lily, Rosemary and Jack of Hearts.

(does this ban me from the group now?)


blank on the lyrics.

All opinions are welcome, no banning!

I don't like Westerns either, but there's something farcical in the way that song/story is presented that I find amusing.

I'll wait to see if anyone comes up with the song title of lyrics posted above ... to me, it's Dylan at his most poetic.

I'm with Sara - Lily Rosemary is really boring for mr. like someone had said hey Bob, write us one like you used to, with all a them crazy characters you used to have in there. So that's the flaw in Blood on the Tracks for me. The above quote is Chimes of Freedom, naturally, so I feel I have to return the compliment - what's this from (& no peeking on google!)

He said "You always help around here with the chores?"
I said "Sometimes, not all the time"

All but one of my favorite Dylan albums were released before Self Portrait (1970). To those, I add Blood on the Tracks. From that group of ten or so albums, there is a common thread linking my favorite songs. They have been covered by other artists.

Joan Baez did so many, that it is hard to pick just one. Most are on the albums Any Day Now and Farewell, Angelina. I like the Indigo Girls cover of Tangled Up in Blue.

My all-time favorite is the Jimi Hendrix cover of All Along the Watchtower.

I just heard some tracks from Dylan’s new Christmas album on NPR. That gets my vote for the worst album. At least the proceeds will go to charity.

That's a whole new thread - favourite Dylan covers. This one takes some beating

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uA0Z-5...

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."

Did Levon Helm share in writing that one (Wheels on Fire)?

It was Rick Danko.

I hope that this group is still alive! Though I've been on GoodReads for a couple of years, I just discovered you today.

I do have a favorite Dylan song, with about twenty more in second place. :-) I lost some of my interest in 'current' Dylan in his Jesus period, but regained it when I started going to see him live in the early 90s.

"Mr. Tambourine Man" has amazed me since I first heard it back in the day, meaning the Byrds cover all over the radio in 1965, though when I found Bob's version on his Greatest Hits Vol. 1 it was clearly so much more of a song.

Others very near the top of my list would include:

"Girl from the Red River Shore," a track from the Time Out of Mind sessions but not released until 2008's Tell Tale Signs

"Blind Willie McTell," from the Infidels sessions but not released until Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3

"Love Minus Zero/No Limit," from Bringing It All Back Home

"Jokerman," from Infidels (also love the Eliza Gilkyson cover)

"All Along the Watchtower," from John Wesley Harding (also like Jimi Hendrix cover)

"Tomorrow Is a Long Time," live recording from 1962 released about a decade later on Greatest Hits Vol. 2

"Simple Twist of Fate," from Blood on the Tracks (also like Jeff Tweedy's cover on I'm Not There soundtrack)

"Shooting Star," from Oh Mercy (also good on Unplugged)

"The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," from The Times They Are a'Changing

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?

Hi Philip - good to see a Tell Tale Signs track in there - that release was a revelation - even the unreleased stuff from the last ten years was either good or great, something I had not expected. I'm amazed at this late flowering - not only of Dylan's songwriting but of his newfound chart-topping abilities....

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?)

hey all -- a few years back i went to a dylan conference (seriously) and we listened to a dylanologist (seriously) speak and i asked about lily, rosemary and the guy said it was a frequently asked question. it is - for many people - the one dud on a masterpiece album of masterpiece songs. the guy told us that dylan hadda choose b/t two songs he had just written: lily, rosemary or up to me .
he chose poorly.
a demo of the latter song can be found on the three disc set biograph.
it blows away lily, rosemary.

Definately - but he explains in the Biograph notes that Up to me was too similar to Shelter from the Storm & so got the elbow. Lily Rosemary is indeed an 8 minute dud.

Thanks for the welcome, EM and Paul!

I love your comments and questions, EM, and I'll be thinking about them. Today's a busy one so I'll just talk about Blind Willie McTell for the moment.

The time shifting is key to my appreciation of the song too, but I think it works differently from his technique in Tangled Up in Blue (another great, great song, obviously), where it's mostly churning up the personal narrative, at least on the surface. In Blind Willie it's the story of a people that is being told back and forth, present, past, future. Some things apparently can be assigned to the past (slavery? [Indian:] tribes a moaning? martyrs fallen in East Texas?) but the sense I get is that the condemnation of the land announced in the opening lines is enduring.

So the shifting about in time and place allow the song to be an even broader and more powerful indictment (to me, anyway) than some more focused songs like the lovely Hattie Carroll or to my ears the more strident Hurricane. Also, considering the song was written as Dylan was emerging from his Fundamentalist period, the restraint of the religious or spiritual rebuke is quite strong. "God is in his heaven ..." but the world's still a truly messed up place.

This is one of those songs where for me the lyric, the performance, the mood, the melody all combine to make a powerful combination that's very hard to imagine any other way. The opening with its tentative piano chords (which later gain immense power for all that) grabs me right away and has since the first time I heard it. The 'condemned' sign was found throughout the rural US in the 80's (Farm Aid?) referring of course to financial failure, seizure of land for back taxes or unmet debt. But this land is condemned in another sense, and not just on this earthly plane - all the way from New Orleans to Jerusalem.

I also really like the play with musical styles and history in the song. The places named are all central to the blues. We focus on the unsurpassable Willie McTell but also hear tell of a hoot owl, a feathery female choir, chain gang shouts, even the anti-music of moans and whip cracks. And the final frame of the St. James Hotel (= Infirmary) alluding so powerfully to the history of blues, but also naming the melodic structure of this song too.

Then, on a more personal level, this song grabbed me for good in part because it came from a period of Dylan's songwriting that I had long held at a distance (kind of like your hesitations with his most recent decade?). When I finally got around to playing it I was stabbed to the heart.

This amazing song was left off of Infidels, but in a way that hadn't mattered to me at the time since I didn't buy or listen to that album anyway. As for many other estranged fans, it was the 1985 release of Biographwith its juxtapositions of early, late, and middle Dylan-- to the benefit of all -- that made me repent my errant ways. But it still took a awhile to dip one's toe in that vast unheard lake.

I did buy the 3-CD Bootleg Series vols. 1-3 set when it was released in the early 90s, but actually only listened to Blind Willie after reading the amazing tributes by writers like Michael Gray and Christopher Ricks.

All for now!

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.

Looks like I'm the only one here that likes Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.
The story doesn't move me, but the music does.

Oh! EM, I was going to try to defend your like for Lily!

As I listen to Blood on the Tracks the song does seem a bit out of place by sounding less serious or compelling or something (though "Buckets of Rain" took me a while to take as seriously as I do now too). Long songs by Dylan should be filled with symbolism, or strong emotion, or both, right ? (the fabulous Visions of Johanna). As you say, at least one of Lily's meanings is the connection to Dylan's larger interest in Westerns or cowboy themes, and that's an area that's never touched me deeply for some reason, though it's pretty pervasive in his work. I suspect there's something interesting going on in the song with all the playing card references, but maybe not, maybe it's just cute allusions to love and gambling, I've never tried to figure any of it out, lazy me.

As has happened to me more than once with songs that at first don't strike me so much, or that I don't pay as much attention to for whatever reason, I've come around to appreciate Dylan's Lily, Rosemary more than I did in the past for two reasons. The first was having a friend who's at least as besotted by Dylan as I am praise it repeatedly -- someone who simply loves the man's music and lyrics without getting too analytical about it -- I had to take that seriously. And then I heard some covers by other artists who clearly find a lot of something in the song. In Lily, Rosemary's case, versions by Ramblin Jack Elliott and Tom Russell are the ones I'm thinking of.

On the Blind Willie McTell discussion, I don't see these listed in the group bookshelf, though I'm pretty sure you know them - the Gray ref is to Song and Dance Man III and his Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, and Ricks to Dylan's Visions of Sin. I just looked again at Ricks, and he has some fine comparisons of Willie with Woody Guthrie amongst lots of other truly fine stuff ranging from Keats to the Bible to the William Tell apple shooting story (pp. 68-80 in my edition).

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.

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.

Like most of you, it's hard to come up with a favorite. Maybe Blood on the Tracks, since that was the first Dylan album that I bought, and I've hung with it over the years. I also like the song "Tangled Up in Blue." (And I do like "Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts.") A few songs off the beaten track that I like: "Changing of the Guard." (There's a cool Patty Smith version out there as well.) "Senor" (I like the Conradian / Nostromo feel to it.) "Series of Dreams" (Which I play a lot -- it's so different! Btw, there's cool video floating around.) As far as his most recent stuff, I think Time Out of Mind can stand with his classic albums. Best Bad Album: Knocked Out Loaded due to it's great puply cover art.

I listened to Brownsville Girl just recently, after many years of not doing so, and was amazed at its weird power and how Dylan sings one line, speaks the next, half sings half of the next and so on. And the narrative is just as fractured. Brilliant!. Co written by Sam Sheppard.

It's the best song on that album (I can't remember the others).

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.

Jennifer, it's on Knocked Out Loaded. It's also on at least one Hits album.

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?

With my favorite albums, it's a toss up between Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. Sean Wilentz's chapter on the making of Blonde on Blonde in Bob Dylan in America is very much worth reading. For some reason, Highway 61 often gets more attention.
Empire Burlesque from 1985 is so underrated - the lyrics are great and downright weird at times, "Something's Burnin Baby," is an example At first I was appalled at the dated production of the 1980s, but it is a lot fun!!

H61R gets attention because you can argue it's the first ROCK album, whatever that term is thought to mean. Empire Burlesque is the album on which he steals many lines from old movies.

Well asking what's your favorite Dylan is kinda like askinga bout yer favorite fiction? Kinda broad, dude! However, I bought a new Blonde on Blonde CD and after listening to it a couple times now...enjoyed watching a willow tree blowin with the spring wind this morning as I listened to Visions of Johanna, One Of Us Must Know, Leopard-skin Pill-box Hat(and LMAO), Just Like A Woman, & dancing around to Abolutely Sweet Marie...yes, yes this is 1 of my Top 3 Dylan albums!

Seems he dealt with breakups and grief by writing a great song about it, damn!

Will have to read the chapter Eric mentions in Bob Dylan in America?

One who is dismissive of Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts should not consider oneself a Dylan fan. :)

In my case, Blonde on Blonde (followed by Street-Legal, which is flawed but never fails to compel) and song - Brownsville Girl.