BOB DYLAN ENCYCLOPEDIA: A BLOG 2006-2012

GOODBYE BOB BLOG

2012-01-15T22:20:00.001+01:00

I've decided to call a halt to this blog. It was first created almost six years ago at the prompting of my publisher, who regarded it as a marketing tool. I'm glad it grew, and has continued to grow, into something more - not least an often provocative discussion forum - but I want to stop before it becomes a treadmill.

I shall continue to monitor and publish comments that come in for another ten days or so from today, but after that the blog will become, frozen in cyberspace, a record of what's been contributed and published - be me and by you.

I thank every person - and there have been many thousands - who has read the blog down the years, and I thank most gratefully all those who have participated in it more actively. Except the rude people, of course.

That said, I've created a new blog, OUTTAKES. This can be accessed either here or from the drop-down menu cunningly titled 'Blogs' at www.michaelgray.net. I hope some readers might come with me.

News of what I'm doing will also continue to be posted on my website and I can always be contacted directly by e-mail at michael@michaelgray.net . Meanwhile thank you again.

DYLAN DISCUSSION WEEKENDS - AN UPDATE

2012-01-14T13:17:00.000+01:00

I'm pleased to say that one of the three Bob Dylan Discussion Weekends coming up here at our home in May-June is now fully booked. No more places are available for May 11-13.

Places can still be booked for Friday May 4 to Sunday May 6, and for Friday June 15 to Sunday June 17.

More details here.

BOB PAYS TRIBUTE TO SCORSESE - AND McTELL

2012-01-13T13:51:00.000+01:00

Great to see him so upfront, without the hat, without the keyboards and without any faltering over the words.

ALLEN GINSBERG'S FARM

2012-01-13T11:53:00.000+01:00

It would be hard to take much of an interest in Bob Dylan's work, let alone the poetry of the 20th Century, without taking an interest in Allen Ginsberg - and having devoured his Collected Poems, his terrific exchange of letters with his father, and Barry Miles' fine biography, I'm pleased to learn from author Gordon Ball that his book East Hill Farm: Seasons with Allen Ginsberg has at last been published - in US hardback (Counterpoint, though their stated publication date is still given on amazon.com as 1 May 2012) and in a Kindle edition.

One of the reader reviews says this: "A fascinating and disturbing time in U.S. history is echoed in Gordon Ball's riveting memoir of a period in Allen Ginsberg's life that was pivotal in Ginsberg's move to a truly serious Buddhist practice. The Cherry Valley farm commune of upstate New York is breezed over even in Ginsberg's own poetry. But here, Ball's training as a filmmaker gives us a slowed down gander at the often hilarious interactions of visitors Gregory Corso, Herbert Huncke, Ray Bremser, Charles Plymell and Andy Clausen with Allen and longtime companion Peter Orlovsky. At the same time, Ginsberg's voluminous correspondence and exhaustive traveling, as well as Ball's own adventures with Harry Smith, Bob Dylan and John Giorno in NYC, serve up a truly satisfying feast of well-documented detail. A book I didn't want to end."

I look forward to starting it.

Gordon Ball is the man who proposes Bob Dylan for the Nobel Prize for Literature every year. There is an entry on him in my Bob Dylan Encyclopedia.

NEW SERIES OF DYLAN DISCUSSION WEEKENDS IN FRANCE

2012-01-10T11:29:00.000+01:00

We have just clinched dates for a new series of Dylan Discussion Weekends here in southwest France. There are three weekends on offer - two in early May and and one in mid-June, and details have just been posted here on my website. We hope to see you then!

OCCASIONAL PHOTOGRAPHS: A CAFE IN JAISALMER, INDIA

2012-01-09T16:43:00.000+01:00

photo © Magdalena Gray, 2012

HAPPY NEW YEAR

2012-01-08T11:29:00.000+01:00

Brenda Lee reaches for Elvis; details unknown

Hi there pop-pickers (as Alan Fluff Freeman used to say). Happy New Year to all.

I'm back from an unusually long Christmas break - first one in England since moving to France almost four years ago - and have very little Dylanalia to report. With an extravagant number of people helping decorate the tree this year, at a secret location on the south coast, we were forced to foreshorten the traditional music-while-we-work playing of our trusty Xmas records: those by Phil Spector's acts and Elvis Presley, and those on an extraordinary home-made selection compiled and given to us some years ago by Scarborough's Dr. Rock (Charles White, author of Little Richard's remarkable biography) mainly by people like Otis Redding (he actually sings 'White Christmas', and without a hint of irony or guile) but which quite rightly starts with the pubescent Brenda Lee's 'Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree'.

For the last couple of years, naturally, our playlist has been augmented by Bob's Christmas in the Heart, but this time it fell victim, in its entirety, to the foreshortening process, and so we first found ourselves playing it in the car while driving around England on about the eighth day of Christmas. I must say the car speakers do it no favours, but it was removed prematurely when another family member, who was in the back seat and shall remain nameless, declared of 'Hark The Herald Angels Sing': "This is dreadful! It sounds like an old drunk in a pub."

2011-12-18T13:54:00.001+01:00

happy christmas

& new year TO ALL

JOKERMAN by CAETANO VELOSO (1992)

2011-12-12T14:26:00.000+01:00

This morning I had my attention drawn to this version of the great Dylan song 'Jokerman', thanks to our old friend C.P. Lee and via BBC radio producer Peter Everett. On first hearing of the first few lines, I thought it was just going to be one of those clumsy, slightly embarrassing vocals by someone whose first language is so obviously not English, but then I changed my view and have come to appreciate the rhapsodic shine of the musical performance, including the vocal.

I'm curious to know how others respond.

TO RAMONA 1969

2011-12-09T22:02:00.000+01:00

A beautiful thing...

Thanks to zimmermanlive on YouTube and @bobdylantheband in Twitter

HAPPY TRAUM'S ACCOUNT OF HIS 1971 BOB DYLAN SESSION

2011-12-09T11:47:00.002+01:00

I've just discovered this fascinating and warm account by Happy Traum of the very informal, relaxed recording session he did with Bob Dylan in 1971. I love the way Traum went down from Woodstock on the bus. The account, first online on November 24 this year, is here at Happy Traum's Homespun Blog - including a fine rare photograph. I'm re-publishing his words below, but you have to go to his site to see the photo:

A SESSION WITH BOB DYLAN

by Happy Traum

Just about 40 years ago, in October of 1971, I got a call from Bob Dylan asking me if I'd like record some songs with him for his "Greatest Hits, Volume II" compilation. Could I do it tomorrow, and would I bring my guitar and banjo -- and, oh yeah, how about a bass, too? (Never mind that I didn't own a bass, and had never played one in public before. I borrowed one -- fast.)

Now I realize that for most fair-to-middlin' guitar fingerpickers the odds of getting a call like this are about as likely as John Glenn calling to see if you'd like a seat on the next space shuttle, but I was fairly casual about the whole thing. You see, I had been friends with Bob since the early sixties, and had already recorded a song with him on a Folkways recording called "Broadsides, Vol. I." Of course, that was when he was recording his first lp for Columbia; now he was the best-known singer/songwriter in the world! Nevertheless, as neighbors in Woodstock, NY, we often picked together informally, so it wasn't a great leap to take what we had been doing in the living room into the studio. But was I excited? You bet I was!

So, laden with all sorts of instruments, I took the bus from Woodstock to New York City and made my way to the Columbia studios on West 54th Street. To my surprise, the entire session consisted of just Bob and me (and the engineer) in the big, nearly-empty studio. The first song Bob suggested was "Only a Hobo," one of the tunes he had recorded eight years earlier (as "Blind Boy Grunt") on our "Broadsides" session. The machines were turned on, Bob started playing, and I followed along as best I could. After two takes it was obvious that it wasn't coming together, so Bob dropped the song.

Fortunately, the next one, "I Shall Be Released," immediately caught the right spirit and we relaxed into the music. We started the song with a slightly more bouncy feel than I had heard on the Band's famous recording of the song, and it fit right into the bluesy fingerpicking style that I have always favored. Bob played it in A, so I capoed up to the fifth fret and played out of the E position, accenting the ends of lines with bass note hammer-ons and sliding 6ths and pull-offs in the treble. I joined in singing on the chorus, and before I knew it Bob was grinning and we were on to the next song. Now I was starting to have a good time!

I had heard "Down in the Flood" in bits and pieces during the Basement Tapes sessions, but the version that we did at this recording was totally impromptu -- at least for me. It's a blues in G, so it wasn't hard to find some things to play. Again, Bob was strumming the rhythm with his flatpick, so I just tried to compliment his singing with some sliding licks and bluesy, fingerstyle fills on the high strings. The whole thing went by so fast that I didn't realize it was a take until we played it back.

Finally, we cut what turned out to be my favorite of that day's session, "You Ain't Going Nowhere." Bob set the pace with a strong rhythmic strum, and I tried to give the tune a rollicking, joyous feel with a frailing banjo part. I think it worked. We nailed it in two takes, singing and playing together, again with no previous rehearsal. After listening to it we decided it needed a little extra kick, so I made my debut as a bassist. I must admit it was a pretty visible way to start playing in public, but Bob and the engineer seemed to like what I did so my part stayed in. Not long after that session, Bob invited me to play bass on a date he was producing for Allen Ginsberg, so my career as a bassist stayed high-profile for a little while longer before disappearing into a merciful obscurity.

As I re-listen to the CD today I can still hear the informal, home-style picking that so many listeners have told me they like about those particular performances. There's a relaxed intimacy there that I like to think is partly due to our friendship, and to the many occasions in which we sat around the house playing the old songs. Of course, much of it was due to Bob's studio technique at the time: establish a good "feel," play the song as if you really mean what you're singing about, and get it in one or two takes. If you need more than that, it's not happening, so move on. It's a way of working that has created some unbelievably great recorded performances over the years, and I have always been incredibly proud to have been a part of these three.

HUBERT SUMLIN POSTSCRIPT

2011-12-09T10:03:00.001+01:00

I'm delighted to learn that Mick Jagger and Keith Richards are going to pay for Hubert Sumlin's funeral. The story, announced by Hubert's partner Toni Ann, is in Rolling Stone magazine here.

I'm told that Keith Richards also paid for Sumlin's cancer treatment.

It's good to see rich rock stars put their hands in their pockets to help those whose music has so helped them...

INTERVIEW BY THE BOB DYLAN EXAMINER

2011-12-08T14:23:00.000+01:00

Harold Lepidus, who runs the site Bob Dylan Examiner, has just put up an interview he conducted with me earlier this week. It's here and also here, including his very complimentary intro:

What do you get for the Bob Dylan fan who has everything? Chances are he or she already owns the usual suspects - Christmas In The Heart, The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams, Brandeis 1963, The Witmark Demos, The Original Mono Recordings. It's time to think outside the box set.

My first suggestion for this holiday season is an audio CD by renowned Bob Dylan expert Michael Gray. Earlier this year he released Bob Dylan Encyclopedia Greatest Hits, a compact disc featuring eleven "chapter" readings from his mammoth book, Bob Dylan Encyclopedia.

If you are not familiar with Gray's work, you should know he wrote Song & Dance Man, the first serious, long form study of Dylan's music back in the early 1970s. That seminal work, which has since been updated twice, is the bedrock of all current Dylan criticism. When I read the second edition of Song & Dance Man in 1981, it opened a door into Dylan's musical and literary roots that I could not have imagined existed. Gray's writing was so insightful and powerful that it took me a while to figure out my own separate opinions of Dylan's oeuvre. It reinvigorated my own Dylan fanaticism, landed me in used record stores all over Boston, and made me an outcast among my co-workers who couldn't understand my fascination with this supposed has-been.

Gray still loves to discuss and dissect Dylan's work. He even sounded envious that I saw Dylan and the Band in 1974, though he witnessed the legendary 1966 Liverpool show with the Hawks that produced the much sought after live b-side, "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues."

Here is Gray discussing his new CD, writing liner notes for the recent live Brandeis CD, and talking about Dylan for a living.

How was your recent speaking tour?

I couldn’t call it a tour - it was a short trip to deliver a talk at a Dylan Birthday Celebration Conference at the University of Cardiff in South Wales, and also to take part in a panel discussion about connexions between Bob Dylan and the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (who had been a hero to the Beats). In the end, because of the illness of one of the other scheduled speakers, I gave two talks rather than one. And after Cardiff, those of us on the platform for the panel discussion staged a similar event at the lovely Taliesin Arts Centre in Swansea (also in South Wales).

How did you come up with the idea of putting out your own spoken word CD?

Well, I’ve been noticing the increased popularity of audio-books for a long time now - people get tired of trashy radio stations when they’re driving around, and the new technology - things like the iPod - make it so much easier to listen to things doing other stuff. And while most people feel they’re too busy to have much time for reading, an audio-book means someone else can be reading to you while you’re doing other stuff. But of course the book The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia is 750,000 words - far too big to be an audio-book (or, for that matter, to be translated into other languages) - so the only option was an audio-book of selected entries. So it’s about an hour’s worth, a reasonable single-CD’s length, in a really attractive digipak. Well I think so, anyway. Of course, you don’t have to buy it as a CD, you can download either the whole thing or just individual tracks.

My favorite aspect of the CD is when you place Dylan's activities in the context of its time (Records found in the rear of department stores behind vacuum cleaners, only going to one local concert per tour, etc.). How important was that in your writing?

Placing Dylan’s past in the context of the time has always been important to me. Dylan’s work is music, but it’s also history. And the work you’re referring to in those examples is from the 1960s, and the world was different then in so many, many ways. In my case I’m old enough that I can describe how things were, and how they were perceived, in the 1960s from personal experience - and part of the pleasure of being able to draw on that experience in writing about it almost half a century later is to be able to smile, ruefully and fondly, at my own generation’s innocence, folly, enthusiasm and hope. Naturally if you just drone on about the 60s, people who are young now will turn off - but if they’re interested in Bob Dylan’s work, and as you know, many are, then they’re interested in the context. All kinds of things they might assume are as natural as the air we breathe in fact had to be invented, and so for today’s youthful music fans, the odd shaft of light received from the quaint, vanished world of the recent past can be compelling. Mostly people can relate easily to the music of the 1950s onwards, but they’re hearing it from within a very different reality. And few things have changed as radically as how we access music now.

The CD reminds me of a great lost bootleg, with all periods of Dylan's career covered in a random order, from long, rhapsodic meditations of great works like Blood On The Tracks and "Love & Theft" to imagining Dylan frying an egg on stage. How did you choose what to include, and in what order? Did the thought of a Dylan bootleg even cross your mind when deciding what would make the final cut?

Never thought about Dylan bootlegs at all, at the time. I just wanted a broad sample of kinds of entry - in terms of period, of length of text (and therefore length of track), of subject and of mood. I found that process of choosing very challenging, but fun. I decided early on, for instance, not to try to include any of the entries on specific literary or musical figures who had been big influences on Dylan - not because they’re less interesting than other kinds of entry: on the contrary - but because unless it was going to become a 5 or 6-CD box set, it would be really out of balance to have, say, 15 minutes on Robert Johnson or 10 minutes on Hank Williams or, you know, 42 minutes on William Blake when so many other equally important influences would have to be missed out. And this made it so clear that one of the main criteria for choosing entries had to be, how long does it take to read this entry aloud? Which led to deliberately looking for a couple of really short ones and balancing that out with a couple of long ones. It wasn’t hard to remember the one about frying an egg on stage, when I was thinking about short ones, and for lengthy ones it seemed only right to choose entries that concentrated on major Dylan works. The entry in the book on Blonde On Blonde is too brief, but we tried Blood On The Tracks and that came in at just over 10 minutes, which seemed appropriate - and then I especially honed in on “Love and Theft” because I’ve always felt, right from the moment I first heard it, that it’s one of his major albums, and it has the extra virtue of being from the 21st Century, and I didn’t want the audio-book to just be harking back to the earliest decades. It was also the album that doesn’t feature in my previous large Dylan book, Song & Dance Man III, because that book was completed before “Love and Theft” existed. And the entry on Duluth, the place, begged to be included in the audio-book because it took us all the way back, way back further than the 1960s, to Bob Dylan’s birth.

After decades of music analysis and criticism, what was it like to record your own CD?

I can’t say it felt strange to be recording an audio-book - after all, it’s entirely spoken word, and I’ve been giving talks at arts festivals and colleges and so on for around ten years now: and that is the tremendous contrast to writing the books. When I’m writing, my working life is spent alone at the word-processor. To get out and have a live audience, and meet some of my readers, and to be standing on a stage speaking in public instead of sitting at home writing in private: that’s the great contrast. And actually one of the tracks on Bob Dylan Encyclopedia Greatest Hits is about the song ‘Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat’ - about how it’s so uniquely Dylan yet also coachbuilt on the chassis of an old Lightnin' Hopkins song - and that’s an entry I’ve often read out to audiences at my talks. So I’ve known how that works when it’s read aloud: and of course for people who buy the CD version of the audiobook at the end of one of my talks, that track works as a souvenir of the event.

I can imagine Dylan fans enjoying your CD on a long drive (preferably to a Dylan concert), or as a surprise track when listening to their iPod on shuffle. Did you have any preconceived notions of how Dylan fans would listen to the CD, and what has been the feedback so far?

My only preconception was that people would probably use a shuffle feature, much like the way that people use the book - by dipping in and out of it, opening it at random, that kind of thing. Feedback has been good - but, you know, it hasn’t soared up the charts or anything!

What was it like to write the liner notes to the second version of Dylan's Brandeis CD? How did it come about?

It was a pleasant surprise to be asked, though it is, I have to say, a very minor album. The notes I wrote necessarily had to big it up - but yes, a good surprise to be approached. I was e-mailed by someone at Special Projects at Sony-Legacy, and they asked me, and I said I’d be happy to do it, and they FedEx’d me the material (though of course I had it anyway!) and then when I’d written the piece, I sent it to them and they ran it past Jeff Rosen and he said it was “great” and there you have it. I have to say I don’t like the design they’ve used for the notes on the CD, but the vinyl version looks really terrific - the whole sleeve, back and front, has been made to look exactly as if it’s an LP from 1963... except that, very kindly, they let me put my website address under my name: which of course is a jarring note in terms of period, but a kindness to me.

How can people order the CD, or any of your books?

They can get Bob Dylan Encyclopedia Greatest Hits as a download from the record company, www.lookatmedance.co.uk or from all the usual suspects, iTunes included, and they can buy the CD directly from my website: and if they do that, they have the option to either receive it still shrinkwrapped or else unshrinkwrapped but signed. My books, well, Song & Dance Man III is finally out of print, after eleven years, but the 2008 Bob Dylan Encyclopedia paperback and my biography of Blind Willie McTell, Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes, can be bought from any good bookshop or from Amazon, and if people want a signed and/or inscribed copy, they can get them from my website . Meanwhile, thanks Harold - pleasure to talk.

THERE IS A BOB REFERENCE IN HERE...

2011-12-07T13:22:00.000+01:00

Awakenings: A Kronos Quartet Residency

Early Music

27 January 2012 / 19:30
Wilton's Music Hall
Graces Alley
London
E1 8JB

For this concert, the group is interpreting "early" in broader ways than the common definition of Early Music. In some cases they are early works in a composer's output; in the case of Lizee's Death to Kosmische, it's a reference to early electronic music - and the group plays some rudimentary electronic instruments like Stylophones in the piece. "Early" can also refer to a different mode of human existence, as in the traditional works programmed.

Nicole Lizée
Death to Kosmische UK premiere
Hildegard von Bingen (arr. Marianne Pfau)
O Virtus Sapientie
Traditional (arr. Kronos, transc. Ljova)
Tusen Tankar (A Thousand Thoughts)
Anton Webern
Six Bagatelles, Op. 9
Philip Glass (arr. Kronos Quartet)
Modern Love Waltz European premiere
Valentin Silvestrov
String Quartet No. 3 World premiere

INTERVAL

Charles Ives
Scherzo
Morton Feldman
Structures
Bob Dylan (arr. Philip Glass, additional orchestration by Kronos)
Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right UK premiere
Dan Visconti
Love Bleeds Radiant UK premiere
Traditional (arr. Jacob Garchik)
“Zari” Ritual Lamentation UK premiere
Traditional (arr. Jacob Garchik)
Boyiwa (Song of Mourning over a Corpse) UK premiere
Witold Lutoslawski
“Funebre” from String Quartet
Rahul Dev Burman (arr. Stephen Prutsman / Kronos)
Nodir Pare Utthchhe Dhnoa (Smoke Rises Across the River)
Alfred Schnittke (arr. Kronos)
Collected Songs Where Every Verse is Filled with Grief

Programme subject to change

The Kronos Quartet :
David Harrington violin
John Sherbaviolin
Hank Dutt viola
Jeffrey Zeigler cello

Tickets: £20 / 25 Unreserved seating

THE LATE, GREAT HUBERT SUMLIN

2011-12-06T11:02:00.000+01:00

Hubert Sumlin, guitarist, died the day before yesterday, at the age of 80. My own tribute was written while he was still alive, inside the entry for Howlin Wolf in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia. I wrote that...

... the main guitarist Wolf used from 1954 onwards was the consummate Hubert Sumlin, whose best work is amongst the finest electric guitar playing in the universe. He plays solos of divine, deranged descending notes, tense as steel cable, grungy as hot-rod cars crashing, and as piercing as God cracking open the sky. Howlin’ Wolf brought Sumlin up to Chicago from the south... Hubert Sumlin’s influence is as plain as lightning on MIKE BLOOMFIELD - you can hear it on ‘Maggie’s Farm’, Dylan’s electric début performance at the Newport Folk Festival of 1965 - and on ROBBIE ROBERTSON, as you can hear equally on the 1966 Dylan concert performances and the later album Planet Waves.

I'd like to add that regardless of whom he influenced, Hubert Sumlin was it. If you want just one sample of his shuddering prowess, listen to Howlin Wolf's completely brilliant 'Goin' Down Slow' (on which the monologue is not by Wolf but by Willie Dixon). Sumlin was young then, while the song asks the singer and speaker to sound old, and the way Sumlin brings together the pent-up passion of youth and the song's dramatic thrust is sheer genius. It's my single all-time favourite slice of guitarwork, and it's here:

WHEREVER THE CHILDREN GO, I'LL FOLLOW THEM...

2011-12-05T18:33:00.000+01:00

And now, Bob Dylan for children: the Blowin' In The Wind children's book: here - a page on which you'll see Bob involuntarily keeping very bad company: Piers Morgan even. I mention it as a public service warning. Just writing his name makes me feel unclean.

PETER NARVAEZ

2011-11-29T09:59:00.000+01:00

I have been very saddened to learn of the death, earlier this month, of folklorist, blues musician and cultural historian of Newfoundland, Peter Narváez. He died of lung cancer, aged 69, on November 11.

He was an important figure on the music scene, as this Globe and Mail obituary describes. He was also proud to be able to say that he had played music with Skip James, Sleepy John Estes, Yank Rachell, Big Joe Williams, Bukka White, Victoria Spivey, Johnny Shines, Fred McDowell and others, and it was his resourceful recording of Skip James’ concert in Bloomington IN in March 1968 that was given official release in 1999.

He was also a good friend to innumerable people - in my case initially and especially in the mid-1980s when I spent three months in Newfoundland and got to know him almost immediately I arrived.

Peter introduced me to the several invaluable 1000-pages-each hardbacks Blues Lyric Poetry: A Concordance and Blues Lyric Poetry: An Anthology by Michael Taft - from which I came to realise how enormously Bob Dylan had drawn upon, and must have known inside-out, that great ocean of pre-war blues work. Without Peter’s lead, the huge chapter on Dylan and the blues in my book Song & Dance Man III could not have happened - nor the many talks on Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues I have given in recent years.

Peter also gave me a great deal of other material about, and intelligent, enthusiastic comment on, the pre-war blues, including photocopying for me the sleevenotes of many rare vinyl albums that featured Blind Willie McTell - an invaluable help when, 20 years later, I was writing Hand Me My Travelin' Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell. I owe Peter a great deal.

He shared his time very generously - at his home, at the Ship Inn in St.Johns (a live-music pub still numinous in my memory) and in showing me rural outposts he loved. He visited us in England a couple of times in later years, endearing himself immediately to our then-small children, and always sent me advance copies of his CDs. (The photo above is of the front cover of the most recent.)

He last wrote to me, as cheerfully as ever, four days after his birthday this year. We have all lost a first-rate guitarist and a distinguished folklorist; some of us have also lost a gregarious, warm-hearted, shrewd-minded friend.

DON DeVITO

2011-11-27T12:29:00.000+01:00

Harold Lepidus, of Dylan Examiner, has published (online) a (possibly unconfirmed) report that Don DeVito, producer of Desire album and several other Dylan albums, has died. The report is here.

JEROME ARNOLD: HAPPY 75th BIRTHDAY

2011-11-27T12:12:00.000+01:00

Jerome Arnold, bass-player for Howlin Wolf and in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band - and thereby the man who played bass at Newport 1965 for Bob Dylan's debute electric performance - turned 75 yesterday. An interesting man, who subsequently changed his name to Julio Finn (which Wikipedia still doesn't seem to know), here's his entry in my Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

Arnold, Jerome [1936 - ]
Jerome Arnold, a year younger than his more famous harmonica-playing brother Billy Boy Arnold, was born in Chicago on November 26, 1936. He was playing bass guitar in the city in the 1950s and from around 1957 played in HOWLIN WOLF’s band (though he didn’t play on Wolf’s records till the 1962 session that yielded ‘Tail Dragger’, to which the lyric of Dylan’s 1990 blues ‘Cat’s In The Well’ slyly alludes.) He and SAM LAY were poached from Wolf in 1963 by PAUL BUTTERFIELD, who was forming the pioneering Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Arnold and Lay were the bi-racial band’s black members, and the authentic Chicago blues rhythm section on which the band’s white soloists built. Arnold kept things solid when MIKE BLOOMFIELD introduced Indian music into the band on their second album, East-West, yet while reportedly uneasy with the ‘progressive’ organ-playing of Mark Naftalin (who joined in 1964), he was more than capable of laying down jazz-rooted bass lines flowing around behind Bloomfield on the 8-minute-long ‘Work Song’, which emerged on the Bloomfield compilation Don’t Say That I Ain’t Your Man: Essential Blues 1964-1969. He continued to play on Howlin’ Wolf records after joining the Butterfield outfit.

Arnold, described by Butterfield Blues Band enthusiast Charles Sawyer as ‘quiet and unassuming; a conservative dresser given to double knits and loafers’, was nevertheless one of those who played behind Dylan - with Bloomfield, AL KOOPER, BARRY GOLDBERG and Sam Lay - at Dylan’s controversial electric début at the 1965 NEWPORT FOLK FESTIVAL. It was the only time he played behind Dylan; he continued with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which Butterfield disbanded in 1972.

By 1978 he had changed his name to Julio Finn and moved to London. Now playing more harmonica than bass, he played with jazz acts, including Archie Shepp (for instance on the album Black Gipsy) and the Art Ensemble of Chicago (Certain Blacks, recorded in Paris in 1970). On the 1970 eponymously-titled album by Archie Shepp & Philly Joe Jones, Finn is credited as composer of the 21-minute-long ‘Howling in the Silence’, on which he contributes vocals as well as harmonica.

In 1981 he was asked to write the sleevenotes for the UK label Charley’s album Crying and Pleading, by his brother Billy Boy Arnold. He agreed, mentioned their relationship in his notes but still signed as Julio Finn. Interested in gay rights and in black history, he wrote the 1986 book The Blues Man: The Musical Heritage of Black Men and Women in the Americas, which was published in London by Quartet Books.

Finn / Arnold still keeps open his playing and academic options, and still ranges widely without abandoning the blues. In 1998 he played harmonica on the Linton Kwesi Johnson album Independent Intavenshan; in 2000 he was the respondent at a panel discussion on ‘The Blues as Individual and Collective History’ at a conference on ‘The Blues Tradition’ at Penn State University.

[Bob Dylan with Jerome Arnold et al: ‘Maggie’s Farm’, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ & ‘It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry’, Newport RI, 25 Jul 1965. Charles Sawyer quote from ‘Blues With A Feeling: A Biography of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’, 1994, online Jul 2 2005 at www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~sawyer/bwf.html.]

TWO NIGHTS AT HAMMERSMITH: GUEST POST BY NIGEL HINTON

2011-11-24T12:10:00.000+01:00

I'm delighted to give over this post to the writer Nigel Hinton. It seems to me to encompass all the pros and cons of current Bob Dylan - and to be full of humanity and verve:

Of course, so much of how one reacts to a live show can depend on circumstances and mood. My c + m on Saturday were not very good. I’m the same age as Bob and it was hard work standing, still and squashed, for 3 and a half hours. I was surrounded by newbies agog at seeing Knopfler and Bob - "You know that Denzel Washington film about a boxer? You know, he's accused of murder. Well, Dylan made a song about him. It's eight minutes long!" "Eight? He's a legend, innit.". I also fell into brief conversation with a Norwegian guy in his fifties who had seen him over a hundred times and admitted that 60% of those shows had been mediocre at best. "But it is when he is great that makes it worth it. I think tonight he will be great."

After about four songs of Dylan's set, a young guy in his early twenties and his fat little girlfriend came back towards us - probably because, being so short, the girl hadn't been able to see where they had been - and peremptorily displaced us. The Norwegian was edged sideways to behind a tall guy where he couldn't see and me back a couple of steps where I could still see. The Norwegian leaned in and said something to the guy - I can't imagine it could have been anything other than a mild rebuke. Whereupon the young guy grabbed hold of the Norwegian by his jacket, pulled him close and said, "What? Don't fucking speak like that to me. You fucking hear? Speak nice or I'll tear your fucking throat out!" Then he pushed the guy who staggered into some other people before righting himself and trying to go on listening to the show. A couple of songs later the young guy turned again to the Norwegian who had said and done nothing and twice repeated his threat to "Fucking tear your fucking throat out". This was the end of the exchanges and the young guy continued to appear to be enraptured by the music when not necking his girlfriend who twice spent some longish time reading her text messages. He particularly responded to those crowd-pleasing, climactic build-ups that Bob understands gets the audience going and feeling that they are seeing something good and powerfully significant rather than the primitive rabble rousing which it is.

So, I was not really in the mood to enter into the spirit of what all those people round me obviously thought was so wonderful that they were obliged to record it for posterity on their annoyingly, distractingly, held-aloft mobile phones. I was feeling misanthropic. So, tough on Bob. I thought the show started reasonably - the voice was not too phlegmy and it seemed strong. Don't Think Twice was OK-ish. Things Have Changed was OK too but a bit of a blur. I was happy to hear Mississippi live and it was respectable. Then it all started to go downhill for me. Honest With Me was forceful but I dislike the song and could hardly hear a word. Then he seriously started to get into that find-a-doodle-on-the-organ-and-then-adapt-the-melody-of-the-song-to-it mode, especially on Hattie Carroll and Hard Rain. I actually was less offended by Hattie Carroll , because I thought the silly melody he found was quite pretty, though obviously inappropriate. The nadir for me was Hard Rain, where the three note baby fairground nursery jingle was completely inane. People round me went apeshit. And even madder when he whipped them into a frenzy with Highway 61. Then came Thin Man and its echo which I found sad and cheap - though he delivers it with some force. I can't even be bothered to remember the rest. Although I did notice the "Oh I am so bored" hand on hip while I play a few silly doodles with two fingers on my organ stance which I suppose other people take as charming or amusing.

So, you can imagine I was not expecting much for Monday, and Bob goes and confounds me again.

Was it me? Mood and circumstances? I was seated, so easier on my hips, but a long, long way back in the balcony and only able to get close through the use of binoculars. And seated or not, I was still depressed by much of humanity, and still prey to murderous thoughts as people bobbed up and down and shuffled along rows to get their drinks - is it because they were demand fed as babies that they can't last 90 minutes without shoving something down their throat? And seemingly more intent on talking to their neighbour, or texting to absent friends - "Hi I'm on the train. Oh no I'm not - I'm at a rock concert. Freaking Bob Dylan for chrissakes", or waving their phones around recording the moment rather than living it.

Or was it him? Certainly there were none of the more grotesque manglings like Hattie Carroll and Hard Rain and much less of that doodle riff becomes doodle sung melody. And he sang Forgetful Heart and Man In the Long Black Coat and It's All Over Now Baby Blue and Desolation Row and Forever Young - and I like all those songs and haven't had them done to death.

Me? Him? I honestly don't know. But whatever, all I can report is the effect of whatever it was, and I wasn't alone: my wife and the two friends who came with us had the same reaction, I felt privileged to be there. It was as if all the failings and inconsistencies which were still indubitably there did not matter. Somehow the overall effect reached out and touched me and evaded my critical mind. And moved me. And filled me with love and gratitude to the guy standing on stage, for all he has given me over the years.

I genuinely don't know if the show was a good show and perhaps recordings of it will sound awful and give the lie to my reaction. All I can say is how it felt for me. My heart opened. And everything – this time his gauche movements seemed to make him look like a toreador: stylish arrogant hand on hip like the imagined young bridegroom in Romance in Durango with his new boots and an earring of gold; his clumsy keyboard playing; his sudden darting leg movements; the stuttering and tentative harmonica playing; even the rabble rousing band thrashes; everything - came together and made sense (and that is definitely not the right phrase but as close as I can get). Fitted, perhaps. It came together and took me into its embrace and made me feel the vulnerablity and transience of song, and me, and Bob, and Life. The first five songs softened me - yes, even Honest With Me, yes, even Spirit on the Water from that album I dislike - then Forgetful Heart undid me and I was there with him, engaged, uncritical, open. So that by the time we got to Forever Young I was trembling with emotion and as Mark Knopfler sang the line "May your song always be sung" and gestured towards Bob, tears sprang and I was overcome with love and gratitude.

Perhaps I was in the grip of some kind of semi-religious delusion. I honestly can't explain it. And maybe someone else would have thought it was a shit show and I wouldn't be able to argue with them. All I can say is that I have reported accurately what, inexplicably, happened to me. He's done it to me before, of course, in whole shows in 78 and 90, in some songs on other tours, and so many times on disc - lifted me to somewhere that is not ordinary, into a kind of ecstatic state. Where involuntary moans or sighs or little bubbles of joy are jolted out of you because he has touched you with his genius, a touch of genius which has, you suspect but can’t be sure, given you a glimpse of something beyond. Truth and Beauty. Something ineffable.

But who would have thought he could do it to me now? Not me.

So, him or me? Perhaps it was both of us. For,compared to those other times in the past, I've not known before such a feeling of fragility and kinship with him.

Like two old men, I guess.

MUCH BETTER VIDEO OF THAT TOUR-END FOREVER YOUNG

2011-11-24T12:02:00.000+01:00

Here's a better video version of the final song of the final night of Dylan's European tour, thanks to YouTube user Knopflermania:

And I'm about to post a superlative piece about Two Nights At Hammersmith by the wonderful Nigel Hinton.

2011-11-22T18:03:00.000+01:00

BOB DYLAN, MICK GOLD, PAOLO BRILLO AT HAMMERSMITH

2011-11-22T12:56:00.001+01:00

Mick Gold has sent me (and others, it must be said) his review of / thoughts on Bob at Hammersmith last night. And I'm pleased to say that Paolo Brillo has sent me more of his truly exceptional photos from the same venue. Here they are:

Bob-cats pushed relentlessly forward against the bar at the front of the former Hammersmith Odeon, hats on their heads. Mark Knopfler was caressing liquid guitar solos from his Stratocaster. On Brothers In Arms, the notes flowed down his fretboard like drops of sonic quicksilver.

A random cross-section of the audience (i.e. two men standing next to me) told me their main motive for coming to see Bob was “He may not be back again”. One of them said, “Once we came to listen to him. Now we come to be in his presence.” There was plenty of presence tonight.

Bob and the band kicked of with Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat, with Mark Knopfler and Charlie crouching and strutting in gun-slinger guitar poses. It’s All Over Now Baby Blue had a staccato vocal rhythm, with fluid guitar breaks from Knopfler holding things together. On Things Have Changed, Bob delivered high, keening harp solos, his notes cutting across Knopfler’s guitar. George Recile played a racket at the end, banging the sides of the drums, churning up the rhythm.

Forgetful Heart was one of the highlights of the evening, a lovely, simple tune bouncing off Donnie’s fiddle. Those haunting last words, “The door has closed forever more, If indeed there ever was a door” were delivered with a dying fall. One of my favourites, Man In The Long Black Coat, was enlivened by a slick, faster rhythm which suited the song. As Bob sang, “When she stopped him to ask if he wanted to dance, He had a face like a mask”, a self-deprecating grin flitted across his face. All evening there were a series of grins and frowns and little laughs, like micro-emotions scurrying over that face.

Another highlight was Desolation Row, delivered in waltz time, with practically every verse present and correct. Ballad of a Thin Man was done with great panache, electronic echoes giving extra bite to words like “lepers and crooks”, Bob’s voice positively caressing the lines “you’re very well read, it’s well known”. There were only a few songs when his voice sounded like a hoarse bark; Honest With Me was one, and Thunder On The Mountain was another. All Along The Watchtower managed to sound both staccato and lyrical. Like A Rolling Stone was slow, stately and sorrowful, with no hint of derision in the vocal delivery.

Then there was a flurry on the stage and suddenly Mark Knopfler was back in the spotlight centre stage, beaming and waving to the audience, as they launched into Forever Young. Knopfler took over the vocal on the second verse, “May you grow up to be righteous…” with Knopfler and Charlie both injecting elegant guitar lines between the words, conjuring up memories of Robbie Robertson at The Last Waltz. On the third verse, Bob began singing "May your hands always be busy..." and then Knopfler’s voice rose up to take over the lead, and as he sang, “May your heart always be joyful, May your song always be sung”, he lifted his arm and gestured towards Bob, and the audience roared with approval and devotion. It was a memorable ending.

main text © Mick Gold, all photos © Paolo Brillo

BOB DYLAN'S PHOTO LOCATIONS: NEW STUFF

2011-11-22T11:55:00.000+01:00

This morning I've seen Bob Egan's latest detective-work in hunting down previously-unidentified locations for well-known Bob Dylan photo-shoots. I blogged before about his establishing of where the cover shot of Highway 61 Revisited was done. Now he's posted some new results here. I think the work he does on this is rather brilliant, and that he's admirable for both the originality of the task he's set himself and the ingenuity he brings to it. I think it's a pity he calls his site PopSpots - RockSpots would sound a little less quaint/gagafied - but more power to him anyway.

MORE BOB DYLAN PHOTOS BY PAOLO BRILLO

2011-11-15T23:13:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Paolo Brillo for permission to blog these. I think he takes the best NET photos of anyone who's tried:

And best of all:

I think I like the pictures better than the sound . . .

NEAR-SUBLIME VERSION OF A FAVOURITE SONG

2011-11-10T20:52:00.001+01:00

I found this on YouTube today, not long after putting up the previous post. I thought it was wondrous (and the song itself is one I loved when Ray Charles released it 50 years ago) - and I couldn't help but experience it as a strong riposte to the argument that it's OK to sing the songs badly as long as you're hamming up a song & dance man routine. But don't hold it against Richard Manuel that this is how I'm feeling:

HOW DYLAN CONCERT EXPECTATIONS HAVE CHANGED

2011-11-10T18:13:00.000+01:00

I was listening, the other day, to 'Sugar Baby' from Hanover - and it was terrible: just terrible. So bad I felt almost bereft. And then I said so, in private, to the estimable Rainer Vesely of Vienna, and he sent me this response, which seemed to me so admirably expressed that I asked (and obtained) his permission to reprint it here. He wrote this:

Back from Innsbruck and all the way on the road I was thinking about how to describe for you why I really liked the concert. Even more: why I was deeply impressed... I think what he is doing now, and maybe since 2010 - since he crawled out from his hiding place behind the keyboard, where he ducked away from 2005-2009 - is staging a 90-100 minute drama, in which he puts much, much more emphasis on his physical presence than ever before. He really acts(!) and recites, gestures, mimicks, uses – very consciously!! – his weird way of walking, knee-bending, staring, half-closing or wide-opening his eyes etc. and not only when being center stage but also behind the keyboards. And this presence is so overwhelming, especially since he looks so trim and fit again, that you (well, me and many others) just don’t mind the bellowing and raspy sounds coming out of his mouth.

I understand very well that just listening to a CD or mp3 of the concert can make one shiver with embarrassment. The thing is: where in years long gone the singing, real singing, has been the main attraction, the recitation now is just part of the whole experience. There’s no use any more in recording it: you have to see it, have to be there. Also, the moments that stick in one's mind after the show, and that are exchanged with friends, have shifted from “Oh, when he stretched those vowels over five bars …” to “ Oh, when he pressed both fists to his chest when singing ‘Don’t get up gentlemen’ and then opened his arms and eyes wide for ‘I’m only passing through’”. I dare say, Michael, that even you would have loved it if you haad been with us in the front.

So I guess we really (once again) have to change our expectations and our views of what a Bob Dylan concert is.

OCCASIONAL PHOTOS NO. 196

2011-11-04T18:43:00.000+01:00

Rav Ben-Tov with Bob

photo by Yosh Cohen

OH NO, NOT THAT . . .

2011-10-30T11:22:00.000+01:00

I've just learnt that the song Bono sang at Steve Jobs’ funeral was 'Every Grain of Sand'. How perfectly gruesome. The only one I'd have let him go near would've been 'To Make You Feel My Lurve'.

LAST NIGHT IN MUNICH

2011-10-27T09:55:00.000+02:00

Another fine,pin-sharp photo by Paolo Brillo

BELATED BOB BIRTHDAY BASH

2011-10-26T16:21:00.000+02:00

SO MUCH OLDER THEN

2011-10-25T11:44:00.000+02:00

Screenshot by Karl-Heinz Meurer snatched from a video on YouTube from Dylan's concert in Nottingham. It captures one of those fleeting moments when the face suddenly revisits a much younger Bob look. This one reminds me of 1968, around the time of the Woody Guthrie Memorial Concert.

JOHN BAULDIE

2011-10-22T11:45:00.000+02:00

photograph by M Walker

Today is the 15th anniversary of the untimely death of John Bauldie. He was only 47. Here is his entry from The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

Bauldie, John [1949 - 1996]
John Stewart Bauldie was born on August 23, 1949. He is best known as the founder and editor of The Telegraph, the finest Dylan fanzine there’s ever been, and one of the earliest and longest running. It was the best because of the vision of what it could be, which Bauldie kept in his head, and constantly extended, and conjured into reality, starting from a stapled booklet of typed print on cheap paper, all black and white, totalling 20 small pages, in November 1981, and becoming a professional-looking, authoritative but quirky, properly-bound quarterly in full colour.

Early on, though, The Telegraph became more than a publication: it became an essential part of the Dylan follower’s world. This happened before the internet and the mobile phone - indeed in a world that had only recently acquired the fax machine. Dylan’s 1978 European tour, his first for twelve years, was a great stimulus to a renewed need for afficionados to build means of contact and cameraderie. And then a first Bob Dylan Convention took place, in Manchester (conveniently close to Bauldie’s home), in 1979.

John Bauldie’s immense contribution began in the wake of these events, though he had been listening to Dylan since 1964 and had started collecting taped rarities from late 1969, stimulated by an article by Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone that opened John’s eyes to the existence of such things. He wrote to Marcus, who sent him a tape of Dylan’s 1966 Liverpool concert to start him off collecting. He was aided by ‘two good friends, Rob Griffith and Michael Krogsgaard’ and encouraged by coming across the first American fanzine, Talkin’ Bob Zimmerman Blues, run by Bryan Styble. That folded in 1979, just when that first Dylan convention was happening. As John put it: ‘Here were 600 people whose interest had brought them from all over the world: here were writers and critics who didn’t have a forum; here were fans who were not kept informed by an increasingly negligent music press.’

Bauldie’s founding idea was thus to create a distribution network to circulate news and exchange information, and to sneak a quality Dylan journal into existence on the back of it.

This outfit became Wanted Man, The Bob Dylan Information Service, involving a number of fans in North-West England, and it was this outfit that published The Telegraph, offered a telephone hotline and distributed Ian Woodward’s incessant logging of Dylan news and rumour, The Wicked Messenger. In the early years, Clinton Heylin was its news editor.

For a while, too, there was a Dylan mail-order bookselling unit, the Wanted Man Bookshelf, but this was eventually replaced by a similar but separate enterprise, My Back Pages, run by Dave Heath & Dave Dingle. For some time the latter also took over editorial control of an annual summer issue of The Telegraph while John Bauldie holidayed in Greece; these issues always emphasised how crucial Bauldie himself was to its character. His achievement as editor was multi-skilled but at its core was an ability to keep the whole thing sharp and sane - sane in spite of the necessary fananticism.

He was not, himself, interested solely in Bob Dylan. He was also keen on Phil Ochs, David Blue, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Roger McGuinn and a number of other singer-songwriters, and was himself an amateur guitarist and songwriter. He was also a football devotee with a lifelong loyalty to the romantically-named Bolton Wanderers. A well-educated man, he had been a lecturer in English Literature at a higher-education college in the north of England.

John Bauldie’s own writing, as well as his editing, was a vital part of his Dylan enterprise and in the magazine’s quest for an ever-improving quality of contribution, he led by example, with work that was witty and generous-minded yet rigorous and brightly acute, whether it was essays about Dylan’s work, investigations into events like the 1966 motorcycle crash or pieces that fused the two, as for instance with a scrutiny of the Desire album collaboration between Dylan and Jacques Levy.

Around the time of the filming of the Hearts of Fire movie, John and the magazine moved to London and he took a job working on the editorial side of Q magazine, becoming its Hi-Fi Editor before leaving, shortly before his death, to move across to another national glossy magazine, House and Garden.

By this point, he was also the author and editor of a number of Dylan books and booklets, the first of which had been booklet no. 2 in his own Wanted Man Study Series, an essay on Bob Dylan and Desire. In 1987 he co-edited with [me] the first best-of selection from the magazine, All Across The Telegraph: A Bob Dylan Handbook, and later came the second volume, edited by Bauldie alone, Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan. In 1991, with veteran British music journalist Patrick Humphries he produced the postmodernly titled Oh No! Not Another Bob Dylan Book, re-titled Absolutely Dylan: An Illustrated Biography for the US market. A worthier work, though disappointing in its design and print quality, was the fascinating and important self-published limited-edition hardback The Ghost of Electricity, 1988, about the Dylan of the 1966 tour (republished in smaller-format paperback in 1993). There was also a collection of John’s on-the-road pieces into the small-print-run 90-page book Diary of a Bobcat, 1995.

Finally, however, Bauldie became the first Dylan writer honored with recognition by Dylan’s own office when he was asked to produce - and under near-impossible conditions - a booklet of liner-notes for the first of the official Bootleg Series of Dylan record releases, The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3: resulting in the work of his that will have been by far the most widely read, and which almost won him a Grammy. It can still be accessed on the Dylan website, www.bobdylan.com.

John Bauldie was killed with four others in a helicopter crash late on the evening of October 22, 1996, while traveling back to London from a football match in which his beloved Bolton Wanderers had just beaten Chelsea, whose Vice-Chairman had chartered the helicopter that killed them. An inquest returned a verdict of accidental death on February 25, 1998 - by which time the UK civil aviation authorities had already put in place extra safety rules for helicopter flights, prompted by this crash. John Bauldie was 47. The ownership of his literary estate is still in doubt.

[John Bauldie: Bob Dylan and Desire, Wanted Man Study Series no.2, Bury UK, 1983; The Ghost of Electricity, Romford UK, self-published 1988; Wanted Man: In Search of Bob Dylan, London, Black Spring Press, 1990; liner-notes, The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3, Columbia Legacy, New York, 1991; Diary of a Bobcat, Romford, Wanted Man, 1995. Co-editor with Michael Gray: All Across The Telegraph: A Bob Dylan Handbook, London, W.H.Allen, 1987; and co-author with Patrick Humphries: Oh No! Not Another Bob Dylan Book (UK: Square One Books, 1991), aka Absolutely Dylan: An Illustrated Biography (New York; Viking Studio Books, 1991). Editor of The Telegraph, first from Bury and then Romford UK, 1981-1996. The quotes from John Bauldie above are taken from his article ‘Introduction: All Across The What?’, intended for inclusion in All Across The Telegraph, ibid, but unused. A contents-list of each issue of The Telegraph is still online at www.expectingrain.com/dok/div/telegraph/pasttishes.html, though its hyperlinks no longer work.]

The only essential update is that administration of John's literary estate has now been sorted out and is in the hands of Margaret Garner (babegarner@aol.com).

IF IT'S TUESDAY IT MUST BE MASTERS OF WAR?!

2011-10-21T10:53:00.000+02:00

Harold Lepidus blogged about Dylan's changing setlists the other day on his Bob Dylan Examiner site - and in the midst of his rumination he wrote this:

Dylan rarely plays the same set twice. In fact, when he does, that is considered news. Last year, people commented that when Dylan played "Masters Of War" at certain locations, interpreting the selection as some sort of political statement. Sean Curnyn (a.k.a. "Right Wing Bob"), however, noted that the song was routinely played every Tuesday.

I think that's very funny. Not least because it may be true.

A GREAT SINGER-SONGWRITER

2011-10-19T16:13:00.001+02:00

photographer unknown: apologies to him or her

I've mentioned Mary Gauthier before on this blog (I think) but until last week I'd never seen her perform live, though I have almost all her albums and one of them - Between Daylight and Dark, 2007 - is a toweringly fine body of work, almost without blemish. It opens with the tour de force of 'Snakebit', the first verse of which includes this vivid imaginative couplet setting a scene of despair and fear suffered in darkness: "Even shadows fear to wander / They gather round me in the candlelight." Then comes 'Can't Find The Way', a brave and effective song in which the detail makes clear that its inspiration is the arrival and immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Mary Gauthier is from Louisiana) but which has a chorus that widens out into a far more general expression of contemporary displacement, ending with "We wanna go home / We can't find the way."

The whole album is alive with empathetic observations, small and large, and you're hearing throughout what's incontestably an authentic and distinctive artist's voice - voice in both senses.

Her lyrics are carefully wrought and affecting and she always sounds as if she means it. Her songs offer Wordsworth's "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" originating from emotion recollected not quite in tranquillity - I don't think she has arrived at tranquillity yet - but in responsive alertness to the need to balance urgency with artistic detachment.

What she achieves, as a result, and delivered with such gritty and compassionate vocals, is a truly rare clarity of observation. It's there, for example, on 'Before You Leave', where she sings that "there's something you should know... The darkness that shadowed you was mine / It was never yours at all /And the light behind your eyes that used to shine / Gets brighter as you walk away." I don't know when I last heard such arresting candour in anybody's lyrics. Candour, that is, not as raw, self-indulgent emotional splurge or disguised braggadocio but as piercing self-criticism expressed out of love of another.

All her best work - and that is most of it - is on that level. It oozes integrity.

Last Thursday Sarah and I went to see her only French concert of the year, at a tiny town in a gorge in the north-east of the Midi-Pyrenees - and she was great. She has played the Royal Festival Hall as support act to Richard Thompson, and she has played many large venues in her own right, across America and beyond, but in Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val there were only 28 people in the audience, including us.

Undaunted, she (and her excellent 5-string-fiddle player and harmony vocalist Tania Elizabeth, who used to be in the Duhks - and who gave brilliant support) played a full two-hour set. She was strong on acoustic guitar, added an occasional bit of harmonica, and never faltered through a sweep of songs which, perhaps surprisingly, included very little from her latest album, The Foundling, but plenty from across the rest of her self-penned repertoire, from the first real song she says she ever wrote, 'Goddamned HIV', through her best-known number 'I Drink' (the one Bob Dylan played on Theme Time Radio Hour) to the title song from her 2005 album Mercy Now. She was generous, modest, purposive and full of presence without resorting to any showbiz tricks. It was well worth that 100 mile journey to get there, and the thrill of her concert transformed the 100 mile journey to get back home.

PS. There's an interesting profile on, and interview with, Mary Gauthier by Steve Boisson, for Acoustic Guitar magazine, here.

OCCASIONAL PICTURES WITH VAGUE BOB LINKS NO.2

2011-10-18T10:08:00.000+02:00

Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of the record-player/phonograph, who died this day in 1931, in West Orange New Jersey aged 84.

OCCASIONAL PICTURES NO. 193

2011-10-13T13:55:00.001+02:00

Bob Dylan, Glasgow, October 9, 2011

photo © Paolo Brillo; used with permission

OCCASIONAL PICTURES WITH VAGUE BOB LINKS NO. 1

2011-10-11T08:51:00.000+02:00

Mark Twain, 1907

SWEDEN SAYS "NEJ", & ONE MORE FORAY INTO ASIA . . .

2011-10-06T15:28:00.000+02:00

So Bob Dylan has not won this year's Nobel Prize in Literature. And doesn't need it.

John Baldwin's Desolation Row Information Service e-newsletter recently asked Paul Wood, an art lecturer and owner of several of the Drawn Blank prints, for his thoughts about Dylan's Asia Series paintings and the "plagiarism" question. These were circulated in the e-newsletter yesterday - and I found them so interesting, and inclusive of so much, that I asked his permission to reprint them. He has agreed - for which I thank him - but he has asked that I make it clear that "it is a relatively informal reflection, not originally intended for 'broadcast' so to speak, more a contribution to an open and on-going debate than a fully resolved 'position-piece'."

Here's what he wrote:

You asked me for my thoughts on the 'plagiarism' issue that has come up again over the Asia Series paintings.

My first thought, when I first stumbled across the issue last week was ‘Here we go again’. And the responses I have seen so far tend to reproduce the existing ‘debate’, such as it is, oscillating between a kind of mixed guilt and anger at having enjoyed the work of a plagiarist, and a naïve shrugging it all off, usually validated by a convenient aside from TS Eliot.

I have tried to think about it a bit more, but it doesn’t really get any clearer. I have to say I am puzzled.

I don't think it is an issue that can be ignored. At the same time I don't think it's a question of outdated outrage about 'originality', 'authenticity' and so forth. It is strange how the question seems so blatant and simple, yet is actually so complicated. Where I’ve got to thus far is this:

I think there are different levels to Bob's 'untruths' for want of a better way of putting it.

Level One, so to speak. There are the early 'fantasies' - working on fairgrounds etc. I don't think these are anything other than evidence of an extremely active imagination. Probably crucial to him being able to break through the boundaries and do what he did. Being unable to distinguish between fact and fancy may have a clinical dimension in the normal course of events, but in the case of an artist, a vigorous imagination can be positively beneficial. Other aspects of the juvenilia are slightly different but, I feel, of equally little consequence. For example the 'Drunkards Son' etc manuscripts. I used to copy out Robert Johnson songs when I was fifteen. It's not unusual, and if someone had a band they might easily sing such things and claim they were theirs. It's only later fame that has put these under the spotlight and made them seem symptomatic. (Stealing LP’s. Let he who casts the first stone…)

Level Two. Then there is the incorporation of quotations from other authors into songs. Again, I don't think this is really an issue. It has become pronounced in the later work, and to that degree, unusual. But the quotations are made over into something new. I never understood why the lawyers that must surround every move of ‘B.D. Inc’ didn't just list the sources on the albums and have done. That would have been perfectly ok, even open to being regarded as cutting edge, in a climate of 'postmodernism'. I think this applies equally to lines from old songs and also to prose, such as the Yakusa biography, which is made over into song.

Level Three. The radio shows have also had their doubters. But once again, I think Bob made these over into something of his own, whoever did the spadework. This is not a problem for me; and anyway, the whole edifice is set up as blurring of the bounds of fantasy and reality in the first place.

Level Four. The unacknowledged use of others’ prose in the autobiography seems to cross a line. I'm not quite sure where the line is, but there's a difference. I have heard it claimed that the book was "pretty well all stolen"? I didn't think it was so extensive. But even so, just taking another author's prose and passing it off as your own, unacknowledged and without transformation, seems to open onto another terrain. It is certainly the stuff of censure in academic contexts. Moreover it has to be deliberate; there’s no room for ‘might not have remembered’, ‘the box wrote that one’ etc. At the very least it is culpably slack. What also begins to obtrude here is the economic question – making money out of other peoples’ work (which also applied, of course, to a point from the previous ‘Level Two’ in the case of copyrighting ‘Jim Jones’. And subsequently settling.)

So up to now, it is only the prose borrowings in Chronicles that have seemed really problematic to me.

Now Level Five: the visual art. This seems to open onto a different, and possibly more complex range of issues. The original Drawn Blank sketches do not represent a problem. They are just amateur sketches of a kind any number of us do. The post-Chemnitz prints however, move the goalposts. They are mechanically blown up from the original book, the actual drawings having been lost, and then coloured in. At one level, this is more ‘postmodernism’. As long ago as Warhol's work of the sixties it was actually interesting, questioning as it did receive notions of authorship, originality, etc etc. But in the case of the Drawn Blank ‘limited edition’ prints the process is overlaid with a rhetoric of originality, autographic creativity etc, which opens up a gap between the myth on the basis of which they are sold, for money, and the technological reality. It's a murky area of the art market (not dissimilar to Salvador Dali prints). In one sense, it is nakedly economic, at least as much to do with the signature and their resale value than any worth they possess in their own right. Or, if you do that moving of the goalposts again, you might see them as curios of the world we live in, indexical traces of Bob’s passage one step removed (Question: what’s the difference between a signed Bob Dylan print and an autographed cricket bat?). Actually, it’s probably a bit of both. (personally, I bought ‘Train Tracks’ because I like it 'innocently', whatever the above circuitous questions; and 'Motel Pool' precisely because of those questions viz a typically corporate Richard Hamilton subject bizzarely rendered into a pastiche of early 20th century expressionism. Peculiar...hence interesting, somehow).

And now, still on Level Five, but up a couple of mezzanine floors… the Asia Series. I have to say I just cannot make any sense of this. There is nothing 'wrong' or even unusual about painting from photographs. It became a kind of postmodernist routine about living in a world of representations and simulacra, losing our grip on the real, etc etc. But in Dylan’s case the surrounding rhetoric is not about that at all, but instead all about realism, authentic vision, etc etc (What on earth John Elderfield, a reputable historian of modernism, makes of it I can't imagine; his whole pitch in the ‘Brazil Series’ catalogue was about a return to realism, an American tradition stretching back to Thomas Hart Benton and others in the 1930s). Whatever these ‘paintings’ are, they are not works of realism, in the sense of being pictures of reality.

It was obvious at first glance that at least some of them were painted from photographs, but the initial assumption was they were Dylan’s photographs – a source a bit like a quicker version of the original Drawn Blank sketches; which isn’t a problem. It is the nature of the photographs that really generates the tension. Again I wonder, who, who, in either 'institution' be it 'Gagosian' mega-artmarket blue-chip gallery institution or 'the Bob Dylan' institution could have imagined the copying would go unnoticed? Moreover, I simply don't get the point of it. Dylan is the greatest songwriter in the world. If he took the telephone directory he could make it powerful. But he is not a great visual artist. These things are not interesting in themselves, they are only interesting because he is Bob Dylan, and they are starting to be interesting only for the wrong reasons. To repeat myself, they could be very interesting. If Dylan was engaging with some post-colonialist debate about stereotypical Orientalist representations of the Other, blah blah, then you could easily construct a sense for the enterprise. But he clearly isn’t. There is no engagement with the materialism of the source images, either anonymous 19th century, or the very different 20th century Cartier-Bresson, or whatever. There is nothing about why the photographs copied were chosen; not least because the implication was allowed to grow that the resulting paintings did have some rootedness in the recent Asian tours, and Dylan’s observation of reality. The unavoidable question is Why? Back to being puzzled. It can't just be money that drives this. Because in the end the whole product risks being devalued. So what is it? To me, it barely makes sense. I cannot see, from Dylan’s point of view, where the productive, pleasurable work lies. Because he talks so well about art in the accompanying interview. But the terms on which he talks about it are contradicted by the nature of the work itself. It is very strange indeed.

So I am back to the starting point. I could go on, but at present, until more information becomes available, that’s my resting point. Beyond banal censure, the question of what sense we make of this work presently seems unresolvable.

Maybe it isn't so important. Maybe it is. Anyway...I am still looking forward to the Glasgow concert in a few days time, and that is what counts. I have lived with, and to some extent through, Dylan's work for nearly fifty years now, so...so what? With this so-called ‘plagiarism’ issue, I don’t think it is a simple matter of either turning a blind eye, or a sort of guilty complicity in 'living a lie'. We all live lies. These ones in question somehow remain interesting, if only in the gap between the words and the pictures, the complexity of that gap, and its present unfathomability.

AND NOW ANOTHER CONTROVERSY REVISITED

2011-10-05T12:29:00.001+02:00

"Please God no - don't give Bob Dylan a Nobel Prize in Literature". This comes from a blog post by Chauncey Mabe here. Needless to say there are a number of agitated comments underneath his piece.

Chauncey Mabe sounds like an anagram to me. Possibly of Abeyance Chum or Acme Hyena Cub.

Thanks to Andrew Muir for pointing me to Mr. Mabe's posting.

My thoughts are with Gordon Ball at this time. Here's his entry in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (the highlighted sentences are those added for the updated paperback edition):

Ball, Gordon [1944 - ]

Gordon Victor Ball Jr., born Paterson, New Jersey, on December 30, 1944, is an underground filmmaker turned Colonel and Professor of Literature at the Virginia Military Institute, and is the man who has nominated Dylan for the Nobel Prize for Literature annually since 1996.

He first took an interest in Dylan’s work in 1965, but his first published article about it was a review of Renaldo & Clara. Some early listenings to Dylan are recounted in his book ’66 Frames: A Memoir, published in 1999.

In 1968 he was hired as ALLEN GINSBERG’s farm manager, later editing the poet’s early writings. His book Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He wrote Ginsberg’s entry in the Encyclopaedia of American Literature and JACK KEROUAC’s entry for the Dictionary of American Biography. At the Caen University Dylan Colloquium of March 2005 he delivered a paper on ‘Dylan and the Nobel’.

GREIL MARCUS probably speaks for many when, asked if he thinks Dylan will ‘ever get the Nobel Prize for Literature’, replies: ‘I hope not. There are thousands of novelists more deserving than he is. It’s a prize for literature; he’s a songwriter, he’s a singer, he’s a performer. Anyway, Bob Dylan’s won lots of awards, he doesn’t need this one. There are plenty of people who need the money, need the readers.’

Gordon Ball remains undeterred. In March 2007 he was a valuable contributor to the Dylan Symposium at the University of Minnesota, and an enthusiastic attendee on the pre-conference bus tour to Hibbing.

[Gordon Ball: ‘Review Notes and a Community Proposal’, North Carolina Anvil vol.12, no.567, Durham NC, 5 May 1978, p.8; ’66 Frames: A Memoir, Minneapolis MN: Coffee House Press, 1999; Allen Verbatim: Lectures on Poetry, Politics, Consciousness, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974. Greil Marcus: interviewed by Thomas Storch, Isis no.122, Bedworth UK, Sep-Oct 2005, pp.47-49. Bob Dylan Symposium, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 25-27 Mar, 2007; Hibbing bus tour 24 Mar.]

ODDS & ENDS No. 41

2011-10-04T11:14:00.000+02:00

Chubby Checker twisted 70 yesterday. (He was born Ernest Evans in Spring Gulley, South Carolina, on October 3rd, 1941.) Bob Dylan's emergence as an artist, back when he and Chubby were both 20 years old, immediately made Chubby's kind of music sound as silly as it was. But I still have a fondness for some of this stuff - and inevitably the footage is so interesting now. (I'd never seen it before.) And anyway the simplicity of his pun on the name Fats Domino makes me laugh.

Yesterday also marked the 35th anniversary of the death (in NYC) of the great pre-war blues figure Victoria Spivey, who recorded Bob performing with Big Joe Williams on her Brooklyn-based record label, Spivey Records, in March 1962, and who is the woman seated at the piano in the photo on the back cover of New Morning. She has an entry in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia - but her recording career began 15 years before Bob was born.

BLOG LINK IN THE NEW YORK TIMES

2011-09-27T10:17:00.000+02:00

It's not often the New York Times arts section quotes from this blog and links to it, but it has now. I wonder if this will yield any increase in comments. The link back to the NYT article is here.

THE LOST NOTEBOOKS OF HANK WILLIAMS

2011-09-25T13:37:00.000+02:00

Bob Dylan's project The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams sees release as an album on October 4th. The most detailed and interesting account I've found about all this comes from the New York Times here.

Did you know there's a Facebook group called Stop the Desecration of Hank Williams Unfinished Songs?!

THAT BOB DYLAN ASIA SERIES AGAIN

2011-09-23T14:51:00.000+02:00

Thanks to Wiebke Dittmer again. Here's a 1950 photograph by Dmitri Kessel:

and here's another Bob Dylan painting from the Asia Series:

The most striking thing is that Dylan has not merely used a photograph to inspire a painting: he has taken the photographer's shot composition and copied it exactly. He hasn't painted the group from any kind of different angle, or changed what he puts along the top edge, or either side edge, or the bottom edge of the picture. He's replicated everything as closely as possible. That may be a (very self-enriching) game he's playing with his followers, but it's not a very imaginative approach to painting. It may not be plagiarism but it's surely copying rather a lot.

REM'S HOME TOWN: ATHENS, GA

2011-09-22T12:10:00.001+02:00

News that REM have split up, after 31 years' existence, makes it seem a good moment to reproduce an article of mine about their hometown, Athens GA, written in 1999 (plus a fraction from 2001) while I was in Georgia researching the life of Blind Willie McTell. Here it is:

When Shelley wrote “Another Athens shall arise”, he didn’t envisage it as the grunge capital of the South, a sort of Sun Belt Seattle.

This venerable town in rural East Georgia has been enjoying a renaissance based on sheer student numbers and white guitar-based rock bands. This began, or stopped being a local secret, because Athens was hometown to two renowned groups, R.E.M. and the B52s.

I headed there from Atlanta by bus, on Highway 78, a small road through deep woodland with brick bungalows, wooden houses, swathes of grassy farmland, glistening horses, the Full Gospel Holiness Church and ramshackle flea-markets.

I was almost the only person to alight at Athens, where the bus-station waiting-room, two blocks from downtown, is miraculously timeless. I told the manager, who had brought in my suitcase, how good it was to see the pre-war curvaceous wooden bench seating still there. He said yes, it’s been there since 1939 and not even a broken arm-rest. “Can you imagine what all that oak would cost today?”

He’d never heard of my expensive B&B, the, er, Athenaeum… but he found it in Yellow Pages and called me a cab. A mile from the centre, it’s in a leafy street of turn-of-the-century houses, some now frat houses for the university of 30,000 students. Wooden steps led up to a back porch. A pony-tailed young man showed me to an enormous ground-floor room. The room was chinoiserie bourgeoiserie.

It was an autumn afternoon, the air warm and foreign. I sat out on the back porch, near a huge grey cat and two huge ashtrays full of fag-ends - just to confirm that B&B is not like hotel life, I suppose.

I read through the Flagpole Guide to Athens, trying to find clues about real quality in the remorselessly positive write-ups of the restaurants and bars. Their quantity was not in doubt. Athens, population 95,000 - less than Telford - has 48 “American” eateries, plus another 30 doing “Downhome & BBQ”; 14 Asian restaurants; 19 Italians (discounting Pizza Hut, as you should); 10 Mexican; three vegetarian; 14 coffee-houses; and a further 25 miscellaneous food places from Latino to Cajun to German to Middle Eastern to a New Orleans oyster bar.

I had Rebeccas Wells’ deep south novel “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” on the table beside me. People started arriving for a meeting of a preservation society. A crumbling, rheumy-eyed woman in her fifties tottered up the steps in a mauve trouser-suit, spotted the book and asked what I thought of it.

“I have mixed feelings,” I answered. “I -”

“ - Well it’s a women’s book.”

Oh, right: so much for my critical skills.

I took a university bus into town. These are free and run every five minutes during the day. You can’t mistake them: they say THE BUS along their sides. I jumped off by the war memorial (the Civil War, of course: the only one that counts down here), where downtown meets the campus entrance. A notice says this was the earliest state university, and that when “the War for Southern Independence” began, most students joined up and the university closed for two years.

The campus was like the green pastures of Harvard with more luxuriant foliage, including black elephant-ear plants. People walked, cycled and roller-bladed past, often smiling hello. People are polite. It’s creditable that you can walk in unhindered off the street. At the vast main library, scented with old hardbacks, no-one searched my bag.

The autumn weather was hot: 84º [29º celsius] at 4.30pm. Students flowed across the zebra crossing between the campus and downtown, snacking on junk food. Occasionally one had purple hair or self-mutilation jewellery; most just looked pudgy and dead-eyed dull: overgrown American children, already weary from a lifetime’s ease and mass culture. (One girl was writing notes on the film “Pretty Woman” by from Cliff Notes.)

As I transcribed the war memorial’s phantasmagoric prose (“True to the Soil that gave them Birth… to their Ancestors of High Renown… These Heroes - Ours in the Unity of Blood… Reached the Consummation of Earthly Glory… Holiest Office of Human Fidelity Possible to Brave Men… They won their Title to an Immortality of Love and Reverence”) the traffic flowed past, and, living out race clichés, most cars driven by black Athenians pounded out medically dangerous levels of bass and numbing rap lyrics - lyrics exactly as opaque and overblown as the memorial inscription.

Downtown is not one main street, as in Georgia’s smaller towns, but a criss-cross of tree-lined streets, jumbling nineteenth-century to 1960s buildings. As darkness fell they looked like leafy provincial English high streets - except that all the shops that weren’t clothes stores seemed to be bar-cafés, open until 2 or 3am. The mix of students, profs, business types and young townies within was almost all white. In a doorway a black busker played weird runs on an electric guitar you could hear way down the street.

You hear guitars everywhere. There are 300 local groups. Every time a listing is published, half have already disbanded and 150 new bands or new permutations of old ones have replaced them. Most are white guitar-rock. There’s the all-black Common People’s Band but it plays early Tamla-Motown to indifferent frat audiences; most black musicians are DJs or in mixed bands, or play blues or hip-hop outside the middle-class white loop that is The Scene. “De facto segregation influences the music scene as much as any other segment of Athens,” says local journalist Aisha Leuwenhoek.

She says The Scene is allegedly split between frats-and-hippies and townies (“post-punk, gay, pierced, tattooed, commie, country and western, subversive…”) but that the facts don’t fit this theory - thus Vic Chesnutt, charismatic townie genius songwriter now getting a little international recognition, has recorded with local hippy heroes Widespread Panic. Meanwhile, though your waiter may be a muzo who was once big in Belgium, locals who say the Athens renaissance is over are probably just being snobbish.

The crucial thing about Athenian guitar bands is that they’re fiercely anti-Atlanta. Everyone in Athens hates or affects to hate Atlanta: its size, its commuting, its swarms of “beggars and weirdos”, its feverish struggle to Make It. Athens musicians are all duck-tape, grunge and avant garde. Atlanta bands are all cordless mikes and mainstream ambition.

The pressing question is felt to be, though: how long before Athens is absorbed into Atlanta’s commuter-belt? Under ten years, most people fear. The two cities are 70 miles apart.

On apparent borrowed time, then, youthful downtown Athens remains unique: a youthful mix of scuzzy dives with pool tables and black-painted floorboards; fast-food caffs with polystyrene plates and waxed paper drink buckets littering their outside tables and the streets; and polished dark-wood watering holes for obnoxious businessmen and politicians in immaculate clothes pressed for them by the maids and southern-belle women they despise.

In Hollister's, which was dark, empty and congenial, I was alone apart from the short young man playing one of the games machines, who turned out to be the barman. He bore an unfortunate facial resemblance to George W. Bush but was very pleasant, gave me my second Bud Lite free and was helpful with general information about the area. He kept playing Lynyrd Skynyrd on the sound system and was keen on the music of the 1960s and 70s, including the Allman Brothers, and on electric blues. Yet he had never heard of Blind Willie McTell and had no sense that any such important figure from the past came from or belonged to this region.

In the oyster bar at lunchtime next day, surrounded by the politicians and businessmen, I listened perforce to these Tennessee Williams bullies and their ringing phones. (“They just weren’t Athenian type people…”; “He was doin’ the American Dream thing: he got a brand new wife…”) The place exuded pampered plenty but the waitress was comically inept. Maybe she’s a great guitarist.

_______

© Michael Gray 2011

OCCASIONAL PHOTOS NO. 178b

2011-09-20T12:40:00.000+02:00

Another game of ping-pong (photographer unknown):

Difficult shoes to play in

MORE ON BOB DYLAN'S OPIUM PAINTING

2011-09-16T11:10:00.001+02:00

Ah well, so he's at it again - copying or referencing, depending how you see it. Wiebke Dittmer has written to report that Dylan's 'Opium' painting from the Asia Series can't but have been based on a photograph taken in 1910. She writes, very interestingly:

"Bob obviously painted this new work from an old photograph. See link below... To me, it's a fascinating find. I've suspected before that Bob might paint from photographs sometimes, though the main idea / image always was that he makes drawings of things that interest him and paints from those. That's certainly true for the Drawn Blank Series and part of the Brazil Series, but some of the Brazil Series looks very much like good photo opportunities (the Favela pictures come to mind), and one as yet unpublished painting from the Asia Series called "LeBelle Cascade" has been described in the press as "a riff on Manet's 'Le Déjeuner sur L'Herbe' but is, in fact, a scenographic tourist photo opportunity in a Tokyo amusement arcade." We'll have to see about the rest of this new series, but it looks like there will be much to discover, and isn't it just like Bob to find such a vintage photo to paint from? He's doing what he does with old songs in a different medium."

Thanks to Amy Crehore, the photo and the painting were linked, and are juxtaposed, here.

25 YEARS ON: BOB GETTING SNIPPY ABOUT BRUCE

2011-09-14T12:24:00.000+02:00

I realise with the usual twitch of hapless surprise that the US and Far East tour with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers was 25 years ago already! Here's one of the shorter entries from The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, about Bob's little rap during the last night's concert in Japan:

Jesus v. Springsteen

On the 1986 tours with TOM PETTY & THE HEARTBREAKERS, beginning in Australia and Japan in February and March, Dylan would nightly regale his audiences with garrulous, slightly mad raps before a number of songs. Disappointingly, these were always roughly the same (i.e. descending to showbiz routine, rather than the spontaneous one-off communications of earlier eras - or at least of those when he spoke at all).

The most effective was the rap that introduced ‘In The Garden’, from the Saved album: a song about Christ. The rap always begins with a short list other people’s heroes, and those on the list varied nightly - except that they always seemed to include BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN. The list was particularly nifty in Tokyo on March 10, at his last concert in the Far East. Dylan says:

‘This song here’s about my hero. Everybody’s got a hero. Where I come from heroes are . . . John Wayne, Boris Karloff, Henry Winkler, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon. Anyway, I don’t care nothing about any of those people. I have my own hero.’

OCCASIONAL PHOTOS NO. 194

2011-09-11T11:06:00.000+02:00

George reading D.A.Pennebaker's book of the film Dont Look Back:

photographer unknown

TOM HIBBERT

2011-09-05T21:04:00.000+02:00

I'm sorry to read of the death of Tom Hibbert, the brilliant music journalist whose "Who the Hell Is...?" series was the best thing about Q magazine back when Q was the music mag.

OCCASIONAL PHOTOS No. 206

2011-09-01T14:34:00.001+02:00

And Louise holds a handful of ants...

OCCASIONAL PICTURES NO. 231

2011-09-01T10:48:00.000+02:00

This Ace Records compilation, released last year, escaped my notice until internet randomness brought it to my attention this morning:

Most of you will know at least some of these, and they include that great version of 'From A Buick 6' by Gary US Bonds (which, as it happens, I included in a Dylan compilation album issued decades ago now); but I'd like to mention a lesser-known track on How Many Roads - and that is 'I Shall Be Released' by Freddie Scott. I've not heard it and it might not be all that good, but Freddie Scott is always worth looking out for. His slow, ineffably soulful 1960s version of the normally fast-paced 'I Got A Woman' by Ray Charles was one of those singles I played to myself compulsively in adolescence. It still sounds tremendous. He also made a cover of Van the Man's 'Brown-Eyed Girl' and after a 15-year silence made one last album in 2001. He died in 2007. There's a good brief biography of him by Jason Ankeny here.

GERRY RAFFERTY: RIGHT DOWN THE LINE

2011-08-24T11:13:00.000+02:00

It seems reasonable to draw this to people's attention, since its subject was a key part of an influential if short period of my life. I haven't seen any advance version but I think it includes some use of a photograph of Gerry and his producer Hugh Murphy that I took in a small studio in Worthing in 1980 - they were there co-producing Richard and Linda Thompson, if memory serves. Right Down the Line will be shown on BBC 4 TV later.

BOB DYLAN'S US TOUR ENDS

2011-08-22T10:10:00.000+02:00

Bob finished the first US leg of this year's touring last night at the House of Blues in Boston, Massachusetts. His set introduced no song previously unplayed on the tour, and it began as follows:

1. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat
2. Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
3. Things Have Changed.

Clearly they haven't lately.

OCCASIONAL PICTURES NO. 78

2011-08-19T10:22:00.000+02:00

photo © Duncan Hume, 1992

OCCASIONAL PICTURES NO. 153

2011-08-14T14:59:00.000+02:00

BOB DYLAN
Piano Player, 2009
Acrylic on canvas
36 x 48 inches (91.4 x 121.9 cm)

You can find this, plus other images, on one of the pages of the Gagosian Gallery website. The gallery is also announcing the forthcoming publication of four different versions of Dylan's new book of paintings The Asia Series - that is, there are four different front covers, so that completists will have to spend four times as much money.

THE ELVIS ATLAS

2011-08-13T11:48:00.000+02:00

Yesterday was the 15th anniversary of the publication of my co-authored book THE ELVIS ATLAS: A Journey Through Elvis Presley's America, published in US hardback by the now-defunct Reference Division of Henry Holt in New York. I was e-mailed, recently, by someone in the Dylan world, to say he had noted that a new edition was to be published by Chartwell Inc., a subsidiary of Music Sales Inc., on September 15th.

This was news to me. Having looked into it, such a thing was indeed being advertised (and pre-orders taken) on Amazon.com - and with my name misspelt on the front cover - yet when I contacted the publisher, who passed me on to the original packager's agent, I was then told the whole project was only a possibility. I have asked, now, whether this possible republication will repeat the many dozens of errors that were included in the original edition (which went to press when I was on holiday, so that I had no opportunity to proof-check it). I hope not. Perhaps having made the new putative publisher aware of all these errors (as well as the new one of my own name being misspelt) they will back off and not publish it after all. That would certainly be cheaper than bothering to correct everything.

Amazon, to their credit, were very quick to correct my name on the link at the top, but not of course in the publisher's blurb below it...

I'd love to see a decent new edition of the book out, naturally; but this seems unlikely to be it.

BOB, BOY & 1937 HARMONICA

2011-08-08T15:52:00.000+02:00

Nice story (and pictures) here on BobLinks, drawn to my attention by John Carvill, about events at Dylan's Nashville concert on August 1st.

That is one big harmonica, too.

OCCASIONAL PICTURES NO.86

2011-07-31T09:48:00.000+02:00

Bob Dylan's 2010 painting Opium.

More info here

MY DYLAN PAPERS IN MINNESOTA: UPDATE

2011-07-30T10:45:00.000+02:00

Here's the link to the University of Minnesota's notice about their acquisition of my Bob Dylan Papers. It doesn't really add anything to what I posted about it before, but it places it in the context of their other recent acquisitions.

EILEEN AROON, JOE HEANEY, DYLAN & HANDEL

2011-07-27T10:52:00.000+02:00

One of the snags with the way Blogger works is that if a reader of this blog sends in a Comment on an old posting, it appears only underneath that posting - so other readers don't see it, even though it's a fresh Comment, unless they happen to be looking at the same old posting. I often wish it were otherwise. Recently, I've wished it particularly, because lately 'Elmer Gantry' has sent in a series of interesting Comments centred around the song 'Eileen Aroon' (which Dylan performed so beautifully, and with such rigour, back in the early days of the Never-Ending Tour) - but he has attached them to a post I published five years ago...

So for anyone who may be interested but who checks only the most recent items on this blog, I direct you here, for Comments that say more about 'Eileen Aroon', Joe Heaney, Handel's touching comment on the song and a conjunction between George Frideric and Bob.

THE MAN WHO FINDS BOB DYLAN'S ALBUM COVER LOCATIONS

2011-07-26T15:12:00.001+02:00

c/o Bob Egan

My thanks go to Mick Gold for e-mailing me an URL that offers Bob Egan's extraordinary, detailed account of his obsessive tracking and tracing of the locations of various key Bob Dylan album covers - including, for the first time, for Highway 61 Revisited. It's all here, and highly recommended.

MORE BOB DYLAN RARE PICS

2011-07-24T16:02:00.000+02:00

Another good site for Bob pix, and bigger, is here. It includes this:

AMY WINEHOUSE, WHO DIED TODAY

2011-07-23T22:03:00.002+02:00

STUMBLING INTO THE RAIN

2011-07-22T18:11:00.001+02:00

I've stumbled upon this strange site, Standing In The English Rain, which carries many rare but uncredited Dylan photos. (At least, they seem rare to me.) Here's a couple:

DYLAN: BIG EUROPEAN TOUR ANNOUNCED

2011-07-14T10:54:00.001+02:00

While Dylan's North American tour dates continue through July and into August (with Leon Russell as support act), a list of thirty European tour dates in big arenas has now been added. The following have gone up on bobdylan.com, stretching through October and November:

OCTOBER:

6 Dublin, Ireland: O2 Arena
8 Glasgow, Scotland: Braehead Arena
9 Glasgow, Scotland: Braehead Arena
10 Manchester, England: M.E.N. Arena
11 Nottingham, England: Capital FM Arena
13 Cardiff, Wales: Motorpoint Arena
14 Bournemouth, England: Bournemouth International Centre
16 Lille, France: Zenith Arena
17 Paris, France: Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy
19 Antwerp, Belgium: Sportpaleis
20 Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sportpaleis Ahoy
21 Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg: Rockhal
23 Oberhausen, Germany: Arena
25 Mannheim, Germany: SAP Arena
26 Munich, Germany: Olympiahalle
27 Leipzig, Germany: Leipzig Arena
29 Berlin, Germany: O2 World
31 Hamburg, Germany: O2 World

NOVEMBER:

2 Herning, Denmark, Boxen Arena
3 Malmö, Sweden: Malmö Arena

4 Stockholm, Sweden: Globe Arena

6 Hanover, Germany: TUI Arena

7 Nuremberg, Germany: Nuremberg Arena

8 Innsbruck, Austria: Olympiahalle

9 Padova, Italy: Palasport

11 Florence, Italy: Nelson Mandela Forum

12 Rome, Italy: PalaLottomatica

14 Milan, Italy: Mediolanum Forum

15 Geneva, Switzerland: Geneva Arena

16 Zurich, Switzerland: Hallenstadion

PS. I'm told that these dates will include Mark Knopfler as support.

BOB DYLAN ENCYCLOPEDIA 5 YEARS OLD TODAY

2011-07-13T09:44:00.000+02:00

Lawdy, yes: it's already five years since publication day of the original hardback edition of The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, with the searchable CD-ROM included inside the back cover. (The updated 2008 paperback edition is, of course, still available, as is the audio-book on CD or download: a selection of eleven readings I recorded back in February this year in North Yorkshire. For more details see my website.)

NEWS: UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA ACQUIRES MY DYLAN PAPERS

2011-07-08T15:48:00.000+02:00

I'm delighted to be able to announce that the University of Minnesota has acquired my papers and other material created from the late 1960s through to the late 2000s in the researching and writing of every edition of Song & Dance Man : The Art of Bob Dylan and of The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia.

The material, to be known as Michael Gray's Bob Dylan Papers, is to be held in the Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, Upper Midwest Literary Archives, Elmer L. Andersen Library, University of Minnesota Libraries.

The institution's own announcement, to be made this weekend in the online version of the library's journal Continuum (paper copies next week), says this:

Michael Gray, a leading authority on the work of Bob Dylan, has donated his papers related to the development of his two landmark works, Song and Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan (1972) and The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (2006). The collection includes all research materials, drafts of the books, publication materials, posters and flyers, and criticism, as well as other writings through multiple editions and reprintings of each work. Also included is correspondence with close associates of Dylan, including Naomi Saltzman, who was in charge of Dylan’s New York office in the early 1970s; Robert Shelton, the New York Times folk music critic who gave Dylan his first review; musician Al Kooper, who played the organ on ‘Like A Rolling Stone’; and Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s first girlfriend in New York City, who appears with him on the front cover of his second album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

They hope to have it all ready for public access in the autumn.

I am, of course, highly gratified by the fact of this acquisition, and by the knowledge that these papers will be both safe and accessible for a very long time into the future. And I'm especially happy that they're to be kept in as appropriate a place as Bob Dylan's home state of Minnesota. They've found a direction home.

DEATH OF FRED NEIL

2011-07-07T16:43:00.000+02:00

Today is the 10th anniversary of Fred Neil's death (in Florida, aged 65). I wrote about him back in March, when it would have been his 75th birthday. That blog post is here.

Youknowwho, Karen Dalton & Fred Neil at the Cafe Wha, February 1961

photograph by Fred W. McDarrah

(found on http://www.hvmusic.com/article/alexander/susanwerner/index.shtml)

DAVE VAN RONK FILM COMING FROM THE COEN BROTHERS

2011-07-01T11:23:00.002+02:00

Blogger Frank Beacham reports that the Coen Brothers are working on a film about Dave Van Ronk. Details here.

Two things. First, from the Grumpy Old Man In Me: even in the age of throw-any-old-unchecked-stuff-online, you'd think Mr. Beacham might bother to spell Coen just that one way in his own report; but no, he calls them Coen and Cohen in the same paragraph.

Second, when he writes that Van Ronk's story "is in the memoir 'The Mayor of MacDougal Street', which was published with the help of a collaborator after Van Ronk’s death", it seems churlish of him not to have namechecked that collaborator. It was Elijah Wald - author, among other things, of "Escaping The Delta" (a book about Robert Johnson) and a very active member of the Pre-War Blues Discussion Group I belong to.

That said, what an interesting prospect such a film offers. And who should play Bob?

ROBERT SHELTON

2011-06-28T09:53:00.000+02:00

The late Robert Shelton, ex New York Times Folk Critic and the author of No Direction Home, would have been 85 today. The puzzlingly fuzzy photograph above, which I took in 1973, is shown uncropped and more clearly at www.michaelgray.net/photos.html - where it's one of several different pictures added last week.

IT WAS 30 YEARS AGO TODAY . . .

2011-06-26T12:15:00.000+02:00

The second edition of my critical study of Bob Dylan's work - the one with the original title and subtitle reversed, making it THE ART OF BOB DYLAN: Song & Dance Man, was published in the UK thirty years ago today. It came out in simultaneous hardback and paperback from Hamlyn. It was a revised and updated version of the first (1972) edition, but was mainly notable for the very generous number of photographs I was allowed to include, the great majority of which were integrated with the text. Many of the pictures were by Jim Marshall.

There was one giddy week, when Dylan was playing Earls Court that year, when the book filled the window of a W.H.Smith's store round a couple of corners from the venue. On the first night, I handed in an inscribed copy of the hardback to be given to Bob. Naturally I never heard back, though as with every other edition, his office had given me permission to quote copiously from his lyrics at a more or less nominal fee.

In North America, this 2nd edition was published by St.Martin's Press in 1982, also in simultaneous hardback and paperback.

DYLAN 22 JUNE 2011

2011-06-24T11:07:00.000+02:00

SIMPLE TWIST: BOB ON GUITAR

2011-06-21T11:20:00.000+02:00

JOHN LEE HOOKER

2011-06-21T10:28:00.000+02:00

John Lee Hooker died ten years ago today. Here's his entry in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

Hooker, John Lee [1917 - 2001]

John Lee Hooker was born a few miles south-east of Clarksdale, in the tiny community of Vance, Mississippi, on August 22, 1917. He became an influential, and very successful, post-war bluesman: a singer, guitarist and songwriter with a distinctive voice people either like or dislike strongly, and a shambling style that seemed as old as voodoo chants yet always managed to sound modern and knowing.

After an adolescence in Memphis, where he worked as a theater usher, Hooker moved north to Detroit in 1943, played in the city’s important black entertainment district around Hastings Street, and kept a home in Detroit until 1969, by which time he had achieved crossover hit singles in European hit parades as well as in the US. He first recorded in 1948, starting as meant to continue with a sizeable hit, ‘Boogie Chillen’, and then between 1959 and 2000 released a staggering 77 albums. The titles of the earliest of these suggest his popularity with the folk-revival market: the first was Folk Blues and the next handful included The Country Blues Of John Lee Hooker and The Folk Lore Of John Lee Hooker.

Ludicrously, granted his unmistakeably individual voice and style, many of these early records were made under pseudonyms for rival labels to Modern, the one that had signed him: pseudonyms like Delta John, Texas Slim, Birmingham Sam & His Magic Guitar and, as Tony Russell notes, ‘flimsiest of all, John Lee Booker on Chess, a label for which he made some particularly compelling sides in 1950-51’. Nevertheless it was with Modern and under his own name that he followed up his first hit with ‘Hobo Blues’ and ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ (1949), and ‘I’m In The Mood’ (1951).

He has had no discernible impact on Dylan’s style, yet he occupies a special place in his history: for it was a tangible step forward for Dylan when he was given support-act billing to Hooker for a two-week stint at Gerde’s Folk City in April 1961 (the weeks of April 11-16 and 18-23), and named as such on the handbills. Dylan proudly sent copies of these back up to Minneapolis, to impress his friends. Dylan’s friend Sybil Weinberger told the makers of BBC-TV’s 1993 Arena Special ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ that in the early Village days, Dylan loved Hooker, and that whenever he was playing, Bob would be there.

In Chronicles Volume One, although Dylan makes no comment on Hooker, he does mention him in noting ruefully that his own harmonica playing was too basic to ever attract any comment, with the exception of one time ‘a few years later in John Lee Hooker’s hotel room on Lower Broadway… SONNY BOY WILLIAMSON was there and he heard me playing, said, “Boy, you play too fast.”’ That ‘a few years later’ probably means ‘not long afterwards’. In 1985, Hooker said of Dylan: ‘Bob is a beautiful person. A good, good man. Very sweet, very kind. I met him when I was playing in the coffee houses. He wasn’t famous then but he came to see me. We played some shows together and he’d come back to my place and we’d stay up all night playin’ and drinkin’ wine.’

Hooker went on to create band-backed 1960s R&B cross-over hits out of ‘Dimples’ (actually cut in 1956) and ‘Boom Boom’ (1962), and crossed too from the solo ‘folk blues’ of Dylan’s Greenwich Village days to the electric blues mainstream of that decade’s end. In the 1970s he was taken up by younger star names like Elvin Bishop and VAN MORRISON; for most of the 1980s he more or less disappeared, but turned up onstage for the encore of Dylan’s concert with TOM PETTY & THE HEARTBREAKERS at Mountain View, California, on August 5, 1986 to perform ‘Good Rockin’ Mama’ backed by all these rock musicians (augmented by AL KOOPER).

Not long after that Hooker made one of those unpromising albums that gathers up clusters of star guest performers, The Healer, in 1989 - on this occasion CARLOS SANTANA, Robert Cray, Los Lobos, George Thorogood, Charlie Musselwhite and Bonnie Raitt (yielding, with her, a much-admired vocal duet revisit to his 1950 hit ‘I’m In The Mood’) - which turned out to become the biggest-selling blues album in history and was followed by the similarly stellar-supported Mr. Lucky (with Albert Collins, Ry Cooder, KEITH RICHARDS and Van Morrison).

John Lee Hooker died of natural causes at his home in Los Altos, near San Francisco, on Thursday, June 21, 2001. He was 83.

[John Lee Hooker: ‘Boogie Chillen’, Detroit, Sep 1948, Modern 20-627, US, 1948; ‘Hobo Blues’, Detroit, Sep 1948 or 18 Feb 1949, Modern 20-663; & ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’, 18 Feb 1949, Modern 20-714, 1949; ‘I’m In The Mood’, Detroit 7 Aug 1951, Modern 835, 1951; ‘Dimples’, Chicago, 17 Mar 1956, Vee-Jay VJ 205, US, 1956; ‘Boom Boom’, Chicago, late 1961, Vee-Jay VJ 438, 1962; The Healer, California, Jan 2 & Oct 1987 & Apr-May 1988, Chameleon LP 74808, US, 1989; Mr. Lucky, nia, Apr 1990-May 1991, Silvertone ORE CD 519. (There is a monumental Hooker discography online at http://web.telia.com/~u19104970/johnnielee.html, by Claus Röhnisch.) Hooker quote on Dylan: Brian Walden, ‘Questionnaire: John Lee Hooker’, Q no.85, London, Oct 1993. Bob Dylan: Chronicles Volume One, p.257. Tony Russell quote, The Blues - From Robert Johnson To Robert Cray, 1997, p.69.]

SHORT CHRONOLOGY OF SNIPPETS

2011-06-17T13:31:00.000+02:00

JUNE 12: CARL GARDNER, lead singer of the Coasters, died in Port St Lucie FL aged 83.

JUNE 15: C.F. MARTIN, guitar maker, died this day in 1986, in Nazareth PA, aged 91.

JUNE 16: BOB DYLAN live in Cork, Ireland, included 'I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine'.

JACKIE DE SHANNON & RY COODER 1963

2011-06-16T13:21:00.000+02:00

I've had my attention drawn to a terrific website/resource called Wolfgang's Vault, which puts online some of the recordings & other items that seem to have belonged to the late Bill Graham, promoter extraordinaire whose heyday was the 1960s and 1970s. One of the most remarkable items - and you can hear it in full - is a club performance from September 1963 by the 19-year-old Jackie de Shannon accompanied by 16-year-old guitar prodigy Ry Cooder.

I've always admired some bits of Jackie de Shannon's work - her version of 'Needles and Pins' was incomparably better than the Searchers', as was her original recordings of her own composition 'When You Walk In The Room', which the Searchers also covered in enfeebled form.

On this 1963 performance from the Ash Grove in Los Angeles, there are a number of songs included which hold an interest for Dylan afficionados, but the one that strikes me most is Ms de Shannon's version of Rabbit Brown's sublime 'James Alley Blues'. I'd have thought this was uncoverable. She does it superbly well.

The whole thing is here but here is 'James Alley Blues':

BOB'S 1966 TOUR DRUMMER MICKEY JONES . . .

2011-06-09T21:15:00.000+02:00

. . . is also turning 70: tomorrow. Here's his entry in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

Jones, Mickey [1941 - ]

Michael Jones was born in Houston, Texas on June 10, 1941, but grew up in Dallas, learning to play drums early in life and dropping out of high school to play on tour with Trini Lopez, whom he followed to Los Angeles, where Lopez had a regular gig at PJ’s nightclub. When Lopez was signed to Reprise, they wanted an album Live at PJ’s, and this, released in 1963, launched Lopez’s career. From it came his big hit single of ‘If I Had A Hammer’, which he had learnt from a PETER, PAUL & MARY records. Hence even Mickey Jones’ first recording success had a tenuous Dylan connection - and yes, that finger-snappy, thin, echoey drum sound on Lopez’s irksomely chirpy ‘If I Had A Hammer’ is Mr. Jones.

From Lopez he went to work for smoothed-out-rock’n’roll hitmaker Johnny Rivers (an act Bob Dylan seems to have been inordinately fond of, and whose 1968 version of ‘Postively 4th Street’ Dylan says he liked better than his own, even calling it his favourite cover version). Mickey Jones stayed with Johnny Rivers for three years, playing on seven of his albums and including in his touring a March 1966 trip to Vietnam with Ann-Margret.

Before that trip, Dylan caught Johnny Rivers at the Whiskey-A-Go-Go in LA, called Jones over to his table, told him he loved his playing and offered him a job. The job began straight after the Vietnam trip: it was playing live on the Hawaii-Australia-Europe tour of 1966 with Dylan and the Hawks, after LEVON HELM had earlier dropped out and been replaced by SANDY KONIKOFF, who had played the February-March 1966 US dates. Mickey Jones made his début with the group on April 9 in Honolulu. He rode it out right through till after the London Royal Albert Hall concert of May 27 - and he was up for the further North American dates he’d been led to expect, including New York’s Shea Stadium, till Dylan had his motorcycle crash and cancelled everything. Except, apparently, Jones’ paychecks. ‘I had a two-year deal, and Bob never tried to renege,’ said Jones. ‘He’s a man of his word.’

Opinions vary as to the quality of Jones’ contribution. Barney Hoskyns writes scathingly about him, as musician and personality, in his biography of THE BAND, Across the Great Divide (1993), calling him ‘the overweight Texan’ with a ‘penchant for collecting Nazi regalia’, whose ‘sensibility was as different from that of the Hawks as his ham-fisted drumming technique was from the rangy, loose-limbed style of Levon Helm.’ And he quotes D.A. PENNEBAKER as saying: ‘The Hawks’ hearts were down in the swamps of Lousiana…. Mickey’s wasn’t, I’ll tell you that. He’d gotten out of Texas as fast as he could, and he wanted the bright lights.’

It’s true that Levon Helm’s playing was more subtle and flexible, but for many, Mickey Jones’ drumming was perfect for the radical, incendiary electric music that Dylan and the Hawks were hurling out at their audiences. The uncompromising defiance of his snare-drum attacks, like volleys of machine-gun fire, cranking up the pitch of excitement unfurled by this most glorious music, propelled the sound and the spirit of the whole fiery ship on through hostile oceans. It was the surely the best rock drumming since its obvious precursor, D.J Fontana’s thrilling, galvanising rat-a-tat-a-tat-a-tat on ELVIS PRESLEY’s ‘Hound Dog’ ten years earlier.

Even the ‘overweight’ jibe seems slightly unfair. Alongside the Bob Dylan of 1966 nearly everyone else in North America looked overweight. None of which lessens the pleasing witticism of the editing on a fleeting moment of the concert footage of ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’ put together by Pennebaker as a promo for Eat the Document (back when he thought Dylan would co-operate with his version of that project). Before the extraordinary riches of extant 1966 concert film were glimpsed more generously in SCORSESE’s No Direction Home in 2005, bootleg copies of this would-be promo film, centred upon a Scandinavian concert’s ‘Ballad of a Thin Man’, offered the only complete song-performance to be seen - and there’s a neat moment within it where Dylan sings that chorus line ‘You know something is happening but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?’ and as he completes the question, the film cuts to Mickey Jones, pudgy and blonde, in the dark behind his drumkit.

It isn’t a fair connection, and isn’t meant to be - plenty of people were in the dark at the time, while Mickey Jones understood the thrust of the music and helped make it - but it was a gem of editing (and it was surely HOWARD ALK who devised it).

After the tour, Jones’ moment of glory, his contribution to history, was over. It was straight downhill into Kenny Rogers & the First Edition after that, and ‘I Just Dropped In To See What Condition My Condition Was In’. When Kenny Rogers went solo in 1976, to become rich as Croesus in the multi-platinum late-1970s country superstar stakes, Mickey Jones concentrated on acting, encouraged by a small part alongside Rogers (and with music supplied by the First Edition) in the TV film The Dream Makers in 1975. As he grew larger, hairier and more piggy-eyed he became increasingly suited to rôles as the menacing biker, the creepy backwoodsman, ‘man at pizza joint’ and ‘burly miner’. He enjoyed a starring rôle as the Ice Man in Misfits of Science (supported by Courteney Cox), played the character Peter Bilker in the TV series ‘Home Improvement’ throughout the 1990s, and according to Edna Gundersen in USA Today, ‘he became a household face as the burly biker in a long-running Breath Savers commercial.’

In 2002 he released the video/DVD Bob Dylan - World Tour 1966: The Home Movies - Through the Camera of Dylan’s Drummer Mickey Jones. Its anecdotes, told by Jones with some verve, are inevitably interesting, though as one punter-review on Amazon noted, the overall package was ‘heavily criticised by fans, who felt that a DVD with the words “World Tour 1966” in the title should contain at least some concert footage. (It does, but without sound.)…. It is a collection of primitive silent home movie clips, some of which actually include Bob Dylan in the frame.’

In 2007 Jones finally succeeded in publishing his memoir That Would Be Me: Rock & Roll Survivor to Hollywood Actor by settling for the print-on-demand process.

[Mickey Jones: That Would Be Me: Rock & Roll Survivor to Hollywood Actor, Bloomington & Milton Keynes: AuthorHouse, 2007. Barney Hoskyns, Across the Great Divide: The Band and America, London: Viking / Penguin, 1993 (New York: Hyperion, 1993); 2nd edn London: Vintage / Ebury, 2003. Edna Gundersen, USA Today, US, 16-18 Oct, 1998; this is also the source of the Jones quote re his salary from Dylan. DVD review by ‘Docendo Discimus’, seen online 4 Feb 2006 at www.amazon.com.]

SLOWLY INTO AUTUMN 2011

2011-06-08T12:42:00.001+02:00

Sarah and I have scheduled a new set of Bob Dylan Discussion Weekends to take place at our house in France this September (2011). The details are here

JIMI & THE DRIFTER (OUTTAKE) 1970

2011-06-07T17:11:00.000+02:00

THE CAPTAIN'S TOWER

2011-06-03T15:27:00.000+02:00

When I was at the Bristol University Bob Dylan Conference on, yes, May 24th, I was handed, by two of its three editors, a copy of a smart smallish paperback called The Captain's Tower: Seventy Poets Celebrate Bob Dylan at Seventy. The title misleads, since a number of poems were written by people who died long before they could celebrate any such thing, but it's an interesting collection. My favourite bit on first glance is something in the short paragraph about one of the contributing poets (and co-editors), presumably written about himself, at the back of the book. It goes like this:

"Damian Furniss first heard Bob Dylan on an Open University radio documentary about the civil rights movement when he was thirteen, tuning in from under the bedclothes when he should have been listening to John Peel."

BOB'S TOUR DATES (MORE NOW ADDED)

2011-05-31T12:34:00.000+02:00

June 16, The Marquee, Cork, Ireland

June 18, The Feis, Finsbury Park, London

June 20, Ramat Gan Stadium, Tel Aviv, Israel

June 22, Alcatraz, Milan, Italy

June 24, Zirkusplatz, Sursee, Switzerland

June 25, Volkspark, Mainz, Germany

June 26, Stadtpark, Hamburg, Germany

June 27, Funen Village, Odense, Denmark

June 29, Bergen Calling, Bergen, Norway

June 30, Spektrum, Oslo, Norway

July 2, Peace and Love Festival, Borlange, Sweden

July 14, Santa Barbara Bowl, Santa Barbara, CA

July 15, Pacific Amphitheatre, 2011 OC Fair, Orange County, CA

July 16, The Pearl Concert Theater At The Palms, Las Vegas, NV

July 18, Comerica Theatre, Phoenix, AZ

July 19, Anselmo Valencia Tori Amphitheatre, Tucson, AZ

July 21, Hard Rock Pavilion, Albuquerque, NM

July 23, WinStar World Casino, Thackerville, OK

DYLAN AUDIO SLIDESHOW ONLINE

2011-05-23T12:09:00.000+02:00

I've just seen the BBC's new online Dylan audio slideshow to celebrate the birthday. The interview with me was done two or three weeks ago in a little studio in Pau, France, and I don't say anything particularly striking: but the photographs they've used include some really great ones. It's here.

MAY 14, 1966

2011-05-16T11:02:00.000+02:00

Two days ago, it was 45 years since I first saw Bob Dylan live. The Odeon cinema, London Road, Liverpool. I didn't boo. And listening to the recordings now, I feel the same way I've felt for many years: that surely the 'Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues' performed that night is the absolute transcendent moment of moments among that side of his work that expressed alienation, desperation, the acceptance of chaos yet equally the passionate insistence of belief that "there must be some way out of here".

COMPETITION RESULTS - CD AUDIO-BOOK WINNER

2011-05-14T15:07:00.001+02:00

The competition to suggest the most beguiling thing Bob Dylan could do on stage, aside from performing music, has now closed. There was a good response, and some resourceful answers - including:

"Recite some of the Brecht that was performed the night Suze, who was working on the production, had him over to drink it all in. And dedicate his performance to her." (from GL, California USA)

"Treat the band by making them margaritas and serving them from a tray." (from GW, Scotland)

"I would absolutely be mesmerized by watching him paint. So, I would have to say that the most entrancing thing Dylan could do on stage is to paint a picture. I would love to be able to see him create in person." (from JR, Virginia USA)

"Bob reading out loud from a juicy selection of texts: The King James Bible; Rimbaud's Une Saison En Enfer; A Treasury of Nursery Rhymes; and some bits of Ricks and Gray. Especially if interspersed with comments - trying to differentiate between the straight and sardonic would be an enthralling challenge in itself, wouldn't it?" (from AE, Lima Peru)

and

"Really Sing." (from AM, England).

Thanks to these and many others - but the winning entry is this:

"Play chess on stage. Not so much for the moves, but for the body language as he concentrates."

So the modest prize, a signed copy of the Bob Dylan Encyclopedia Greatest Hits audio-book CD, will be on its way to Matt Tempest of London SE23, England. Congratulations to him and many thanks to everyone who took part.

BOB ADMITS HE'S A LEADER?!?!?

2011-05-13T21:58:00.002+02:00

Bizarrely, the official Dylan website issued this statement today, purporting to come from Bob himself:

"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."

This was announced on Twitter as "To my followers and fans..."

COMPLETE LIST OF PUBLISHED ARTICLES PUT UP ONLINE

2011-05-11T11:05:00.001+02:00

Last night I completed, and put up online, a list of all the articles, essays and other bits & pieces I've had published down the years, from a Nature Notes paragraph in the Liverpool Daily Post in 1963 (I was a schoolboy at the time, and knew nothing about nature - least of all my own) through to this year's work, which has included an obituary of Gerry Rafferty and the sleevenotes to the Bob Dylan in Concert: Brandeis University 1963 album. What a lot of hackwork I've had to do to keep body and soul together across the decades. More generally, what a lot of work...

The list is titled Articles and is in the drop-down menu under Work on www.michaelgray.net.

ROBERT LEROY JOHNSON . . .

2011-05-08T18:52:00.000+02:00

. . . was born 100 years ago today, in Hazelhurst, Mississippi.

COMPETITION: WHAT NEXT AFTER FRYING AN EGG?

2011-05-07T16:18:00.001+02:00

Announcing a small competition:

Inspired by one of the entries in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, and also featured on the audio-book recording - 'Frying An Egg On Stage' - I'm offering a prize of a free signed copy of the Bob Dylan Encyclopedia Greatest Hits CD to the person who in my judgement answers this question best:

"In Japan in 1986 Dylan reportedly said this: ‘Somebody comes to see you for two hours or one and a half hours, whatever it is . . . I mean, they’ve come to see you. You could be doing anything up on that stage. You could be frying an egg or hammering a nail into a piece of wood.’ "

Apart from playing music, what would be the most entrancing thing Bob Dylan could do on stage?

Answers by the end of Friday May 13th please, to michael@michaelgray.net. Please include your name and address.

TUSCALOOSA

2011-05-06T15:54:00.000+02:00

I gave a talk at New College in the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa a few weeks ago, and sat in on a music class. I was sorry to hear last week about the death and devastation caused there by a tornado on Wednesday, April 27 - and I've just learnt that one of the students in that music class was among those killed. Marcus J. Smith was 21. He'll be buried in his hometown of Richmond Virginia tomorrow.

OCCASIONAL PICTURES NO. 9

2011-05-05T10:22:00.000+02:00

BOB

BEEB BOB MADNESS

2011-05-04T18:24:00.001+02:00

The Desolation Row Newsletter reported the other day that we're going to get a large number of BBC programmes around Bob's 70th birthday - indeed a "Bob Dylan season". These were the details (apparently from Wicked Messenger Man Ian Woodward):

DYLAN AT 70
Nashville Cats – The Making Of Blonde On Blonde

Monday 16 May

10.00-11.00pm BBC RADIO 2

Ahead of Bob Dylan's 70th birthday on 24 May, Bill Nighy presents the first documentary in BBC Radio 2's Dylan season, telling the definitive story of the recording of his classic album Blonde On Blonde...This is regarded as Dylan's most creatively intense period, and he recalled the album as being: "the closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind ... it's that thin wild mercury sound." Nashville Cats features newly sourced interviews with musicians Al Kooper and Charlie McCoy, producer Bob Johnston and photographer Jerry Schatzberg. Presenter/Bill Nighy, Producer/Henry Lopez Real for the BBC

DYLAN AT 70
Afternoon Reading – Ballads Of Thin Men Ep 1/3

Tuesday 17 to Thursday 19 May

3.30-3.45pm BBC RADIO 4

Bob Dylan is 70 on 24 May 2011. The three stories in Ballads Of Thin Men have been commissioned specially to mark the occasion... Dig Yourself, by Nick Walker, The Night Ride, by Simone Felice, and People Carry Roses, by Toby Litt. Producer Jeremy Osborne for Sweet Talk Productions

Thursday 19 May

11.00pm-midnight BBC RADIO 2

As BBC Radio 2 celebrates Bob Dylan's 70th birthday, the cream of the British folk scene re-interpret songs from his iconic album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Mark Radcliffe guides listeners through a collection of specially recorded songs that illustrate Dylan's great writing skills and the inventiveness and creativity of British folk artists. The guest list includes Martin Carthy, Seth Lakeman, Ralph McTell, Cara Dillon, Billy Bragg [of course...], Martin Simpson and winner of the Horizon Award at the 2011 Radio 2 Folk Awards, Ewan McLennan. The songs from this hugely influential album are performed in its original order and feature a series of stunning new versions. Presenter/Mark Radcliffe, Producer/John Leonard for Smooth Operations

On 24 May at 10 pm there will be a programme called "Bob's Ballad Bases". Presented by Julie Fowlis, it will examine the British and Irish folksong roots of much of Dylan’s songwriting and performance, from Pretty Peggy-O on his first album onwards, to show the melodic, thematic and structural roots of much of his work. Producer Rab Noakes.

And Radio 4 has commissioned an Archive Hour programme on Dylan.

But actually there's even more than that. There's a live 45-minute round-table discussion on May 24th, starting at 1.15pm on BBC Radio Scotland. Called 'Slow Train Coming: Dylan's Gospel Years Revisited' it features Sid Griffin, me and Howard Sounes, and is produced by Caitlin Smith. Also currently in preparation is a new Dylan timeline going up on May 24, if not earlier, on BBC News Online. And I've been interviewed for a BBC Radio 3 programme on The Music of the King James Bible, which includes a section on Dylan and goes out on May 28th at 12.15 pm, produced by Peter Everett.

Any more?

OCCASIONAL PHOTOS No. 47

2011-05-03T11:55:00.000+02:00

Photo from Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid days - puzzling, to me at least, because there's quite clearly a pistol in his lap here, whereas I've always thought one of his Alias character's distinguishing features was that all the film's other males carried a gun while he carried only a knife.

MORE BUSY BEING BORN & DYING

2011-05-01T15:15:00.000+02:00

Last Saturday (April 23rd), Roy Orbison would have been 75 - he was born in Vernon TX that day in 1936; the same day 60 years later saw the death in New York City of Len Kunstadt, last husband and manager of pre-war blues star Victoria Spivey, for whose small Brooklyn record label Bob moonlighted in March 1962, the month his own first album was released. Kunstadt took the terrific photograph on the back cover of the New Morning album. He died aged 70.

A week ago, April 24th, would have been the 75th birthday of cult legend Paul Buff, the boyhood friend of Frank Zappa who, with Frank, co-owned the weird and invaluable record-making machine on which early Zappa demo tracks were concocted.

April 25th marked the 50th anniversary of the death in San Bernadino CA of Cisco Houston, aged 42. (Dylan not only namechecks him in 'Song To Woody' but writes about him vividly in Chronicles Volume One.

This last Friday, April 29th, would have been the 80th birthday of Lonnie Donegan, who for most British people, was the first conduit of Leadbelly's 'Rock Island Line', when he had a hit with it in the UK as singer with the Chris Barber Jazz Band in the mid-1950s.

Today Charley Patton would have been 120. He was born at Heron's Place MS on May 1st, 1891.

BOB DYLAN ENCYCLOPEDIA GREATEST HITS CD OUT NOW

2011-04-27T18:35:00.003+02:00

Today is the release date of Bob Dylan Encyclopedia Greatest Hits on CD. This is an audio-book, as you probably know by now, covering what I think is a wide spectrum of topics dealt with in the 850 entries in the book.

If you want to hear short sample excerpts, they're here:

The CD running-time is just short of an hour, and the full tracklist is:

1. 1965-66: Bob Dylan & the UK Charts [6:19]

2. Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat [3:33]

3. Being Unable to Die, and Howbeit [3:00]

4. Blood On The Tracks [10:49]

5. Telegraphy and the Religious Imagination [4:40]

6. Eat The Document [4:38]

7. Frying an Egg On Stage [0:52]

8. Duluth, Minnesota [3:52]

9. Musicians' Enthusiasm for Latest Dylan Album, Perennial [ 0:52]

10. Dylan in Books of Quotation [3:31]

11. "Love And Theft" [13:35]

You can buy the download version - or just individual tracks - from every major outlet, but the CD is only available from the Shop Page of www.michaelgray.net.

THE LAST TYPEWRITER

2011-04-26T19:20:00.000+02:00

Godrej & Boyce - the last company left in the world still making typewriters - has shut its Mumbai production plant. It has some machines left in stock but won't make any more.

My own first typewriter was an Olympia Monica my parents bought me.

It was kind of them, but in retrospect a Fender would have been the better bet.

HOME FROM SUNNY IRELAND

2011-04-23T18:56:00.001+02:00

I arrived home yesterday evening from my 13-day Irish tour - having been phenomenally lucky with the weather on all but one of those days. In other respects some days were better than others.

The highlights were the very generously administered Dock Arts Centre in the small town of Carrick-on-Shannon, which got everything right, and the literature festival in Galway - a buzzy place at any time. Delivering my Searching for Blind Willie McTell talk to a packed audience in the Drury Lane Theatre there was a real delight.

The lowlight was arriving at the Central Library in Cork three days ago to find that the organisers of the so-called Cork World Book Festival had never bothered to notice that the talk they'd booked was titled Love Me Slender: The Genius of Early Elvis - and not, as they had dozily billed it on posters and leaflets, Love Me Tender etc... I've often arrived at venues to find the technician unacquainted with the Tech Spec I'd sent to the programme director months earlier, but I've never before, in a decade of giving talks, been anywhere they didn't even get the title of the talk right. And this from a city library.

URL FOR AUDIO-BOOK DOWNLOAD FROM iTUNES

2011-04-17T12:19:00.000+02:00

My audio-book Bob Dylan Encyclopedia Greatest Hits can be bought as a download either complete or as individual tracks (and you can hear short samples) from iTunes here.

MISSED: MY OWN BLOG ANNIVERSARY

2011-04-14T15:42:00.000+02:00

For better or worse, I was obviously too busy to notice this, but last month - March the 4th, in fact - marked the fifth anniversary of the creation of this blog. Over 600 posts have been notched up since then. Just thought I'd mention it - and say a special hello to those who've been there since its early days. Your readership is appreciated.

MICHAEL IN IRELAND

2011-04-13T13:57:00.000+02:00

Just a handy reminder of the dates still to come on my current tour of talks in Ireland:

TONIGHT: at the Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon, Country Leitrim, 8.30pm
Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues

TOMORROW NIGHT (APRIL 14): at Linenhall Arts Centre, Castlebar, Co. Mayo, 8pm
Searching For Blind Willie McTell

FRIDAY APRIL 15: The Locke Bar, 3 Georges Quay, Limerick, 8pm:
Love Me Slender: The Genius of Early Elvis

SATURDAY APRIL 16: Cuirt International Festival of Galway, 3pm
Druid Lane Theatre, off Quay Street, Galway City
Searching For Blind Willie McTell

TUESDAY APRIL 19: Mermaid Arts Centre, Main St, Bray, Co. Wicklow, 8pm
Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues

WEDNESDAY APRIL 20: Cork World Book Festival, 7.30pm
Central Library, Grand Parade, Cork
Love Me Slender: The Genius of Early Elvis

THURSDAY APRIL 21: Droichead Arts Centre, Drogheda, Co. Louth, 8.30pm
Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues