Articles in section: 'Dylanosophy'

Bob Dylan sings “Blind Willie McTell” in tribute to Martin Scorsese (video)

At the 17th Annual Critics’ Choice Movie Awards, this very night. Clip via VH1 embedded below. It is, in my view at least, a masterful performance by the 70 year-old song and dance man, and a nice representation—with good production values—of how he is at his best on the live stage these days.

You can go to a Bob Dylan concert, and he performs just as well as he did right there, but due to the vagaries of arenas and other venues and the general annoyance of the rock concert experience, you basically miss it. (Yeah, I’m speaking from my own jaded experience.) So it’s nice to see it and hear it. Bob Dylan is something else; not what he used to be, for sure, but literally something else.

Anyway, like me you might be wondering how Bob Dylan performing “Blind Willie McTell” (a song that he wrote around 1983 but which wasn’t officially released until the 1991 Bootleg Series collection) constitutes a tribute to Martin Scorsese. I guess the tribute part is just in Bob Dylan showing up. And, when they do the glitzy tribute for me in Hollywood a few decades hence, I’ll be quite happy with Bob merely showing up. He can do “Ninety Miles An Hour Down a Dead-End Street” for all I care (and actually that might be fairly appropriate). [Read more →]

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From section: Dylanosophy by Sean Curnyn

“I Believe in You” – Alison Krauss sings Dylan

Thanks to Bob Wilson for referring me to the nice version of Bob Dylan’s heart-rending song “I Believe in You” by Alison Krauss. She’s performing with the house band of the Transatlantic Session TV series. Clip from YouTube below.

If one had never heard of the song before, I guess that it would come across here as a song of devotion to a lover who is strangely unpopular with everyone else; an individual who most people are warning you against. Something like a more-meditative take on the “Leader of the Pack” by the Shangri-Las maybe: “My folks were always putting him down (down, down) / They said he came from the wrong side of town / They told me he was bad / But I knew he was sad / That’s why I fell for the leader of the pack …” [Read more →]

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From section: Dylanosophy by Sean Curnyn

Sinéad O’Connor sings “Property of Jesus”

It’s on the enormous Amnesty International collection of Bob Dylan songs, titled Chimes of Freedom. Sinéad has never been one to do things halfway. This performance of “Property of Jesus” (which Bob Dylan recorded on his 1981 album Shot of Love) will put hairs your chest, or somewhere. But I have to say I do like it. Audio is available via YouTube below (and the photo is apparently of Sinéad and her new brand new husband. Best wishes and best of luck to both of ’em). (Update 12/27/11: Well, so much for that.) [Read more →]

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From section: Dylanosophy by Sean Curnyn

Ke$ha and Miley Cyrus sing Bob Dylan

The Amnesty International collection of eighty different cover versions of Bob Dylan songs, Chimes of Freedom, won’t be officially released until January 24th, but it has in effect hit the streets already. I haven’t gone out of my way personally to listen to much of it (all in due time) but I have heard two tracks: the artist known as Ke$ha singing “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” and the artist formerly known as Hannah Montana (i.e. Miley Cyrus) singing “You’re Gonna Make Lonesome When You Go.”

I can’t say that I’m very familiar with the body of musical work produced to date by these ladies, so in a way that’s good: I hear these performances strictly on their merits. They’re both interesting in their way. [Read more →]

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From section: Dylanosophy by Sean Curnyn

Chimes of Freedom – Amnesty International benefit album featuring the songs of Bob Dylan

Chimes of Freedom - The Songs of Bob DylanDetails have been released on a huge collection of cover versions of Bob Dylan songs, featuring about 80 different artists, which is coming out next year as both a tribute to Bob Dylan and a benefit for Amnesty International. It’s called Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan (and the album cover features Bob Dylan as Doctor Who). Most of the tracks are brand new recordings; an exception is the single track by Bob Dylan himself, which is his original recording of “Chimes of Freedom” from 1964.

I knew something along these lines was coming out, but when I saw the scope of it and the track list, my first reaction was: Isn’t this kind of excessive? Four CDs worth? Some of it will be good, no doubt, but some of it will be pretty painful too. Well, I guess it’s too late to stop them now. Might as well face it: we live in an age of huge excess. Something like this wouldn’t even have been dreamed of in the ’60s or ’70s, because it would have required something like 8 or 10 LPs. Now it’s just some space on an iPod, for most listeners. Ten tracks; eighty tracks; two hundred tracks: what difference does it make? People will just listen to the ones they care to hear anyway. [Read more →]

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From section: Dylanosophy by Sean Curnyn

Ramona, in straits that are dire

During Bob Dylan’s current tour of Europe (which finishes up on the 21st in London) Mark Knopfler has been the opening act, along with his band. Knopfler has also made a habit of sitting in on guitar during Bob Dylan’s set for the first three or four numbers. It being a Bob Dylan set, those numbers vary significantly from gig to gig. So, for people attending or those collecting the recordings, it’s really quite a neat treat: you get to hear a broad range of Dylan songs with that distinctive Mark Knopfler guitar texture added in. It’s different. Knopfler and Dylan go way back, of-course, to 1979′s Slow Train Coming, which featured Mark on guitar, and 1983′s Infidels, which was also co-produced by him and could well be said to sound like a quasi-Dire-Straits album. Mark Knopfler’s own style of singing has I think rightly been described as Dylanesque, but on Infidels it almost sounds like Dylan is imitating Mark imitating him, if you know what I mean. (And it works, too.)

Anyhow, the clip from YouTube embedded below is of Bob Dylan performing his sweet old song “To Ramona,” in Stockholm, with Mark Knopfler noodling along nicely. And indeed, it is a nice thing that they’ve had the chance to work together again like this.

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From section: Dylanosophy by Sean Curnyn

80-voice choir to perform Bob Dylan’s gospel songs in Australia

The 80-voice Melbourne Mass Gospel Choir will perform many of the gospel-era songs of Bob Dylan in concerts scheduled for this weekend, in Carlton (a suburb of Melbourne), Australia. Full story in the Melbourne Leader.

The leader of the choir is quoted as saying, among other things, that “They are powerful social critiques and the lyrics are now 30 years old but are as contemporary as anything you could imagine.” I usually cringe when hearing people talk about Dylan as a writer of “social critiques” and such-like, but when applied to his gospel-era songs, it strangely makes more a lot more sense than usual. I think it could definitely be argued that they are his protestiest songs ever.

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From section: Dylanosophy by Sean Curnyn

Ron Rosenbaum on Bob Dylan, Judaism, Christianity etc

The writer Ron Rosenbaum—who is working on his own biography of Bob Dylan—was interviewed by JWeekly.com. He had recently given a lecture at Stanford University called “Bob Dylan’s God Problem—and Ours.” He’s asked in the article whether he thinks Bob Dylan is an observant Jew or not.

“It’s a difficult question to answer,” Rosenbaum said. “If you read the Internet, there are all sorts of sightings of Dylan at Chabad-Lubavitcher services. Does that mean he’s become one of them? I don’t know. Does that mean any of [the sightings] are verifiable? There are enough of them to make you think there’s something to it. But who knows? He could be exploring, experimenting, whatever. He’s certainly no longer the scolding Christian that he was for a few years.”

[...]

Dylan’s departure from Christianity “was sort of gradual,” he said. “It’s not like he formally abjured it. It just seemed to slip into the past.” In fact, Rosenbaum sees a profoundly Jewish thread woven throughout Dylan’s life, including the ’60s years.

It’s kind of amazing, when you think about it, that it even needs to be said that there is a “profoundly Jewish thread woven throughout Dylan’s life.” Isn’t that pretty hard to miss? But then the Jewish experience in America includes the phenomenon of those who try to run away from their Jewishness, in a variety of senses, and Dylan has given some reason to believe that he might be doing this at different times. This article also includes a quote from an interview Dylan gave to Rosenbaum in 1977, where he said, “I’ve never felt Jewish. I don’t really consider myself Jewish or non-Jewish.” That sounds like a flat-out rejection, but I would suggest that (aside from Dylan’s knee-jerk hatred of labels) it was more an expression of frustration at that particular time with his failure up to that date to find answers in Judaism as he then knew it, based on his upbringing and life experiences. The whole subject of faith in Dylan’s life was to undergo an earthquake not long thereafter, and comments from him that touch on his Jewishness post-1979 are quite different. [Read more →]

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From section: Dylanosophy by Sean Curnyn

The Asia Series by Bob Dylan at the Gagosian Gallery

Bob Dylan: The Asia Series - Gagosian GalleryWhat a difference five or six days make. In a certain sense, at least. I visited the Gagosian Gallery on Madison Avenue in New York City last Saturday afternoon, with two companions, to view the exhibition of Bob Dylan’s “Asia Series,” which was described in a press release as “a visual journal of his travels in Japan, China, Vietnam and Korea.” I’m not an expert on the visual arts, nor someone who invests any significant amount of either passion or money into that area, but as I wrote when the exhibition was announced, I thought (as a long-time dedicated fan of Bob Dylan) that it would be real nice to have this opportunity to see some of his much-talked-about artwork up close and personal, the way it’s meant to be seen. Pictures on the internet or in a book only go so far. A painting is what it is based not only on the pure image but on qualities like texture and size which you can only appreciate when you’re right in front of it (I’m no expert but I’ve been in enough museums to at least know that much).

So we went to see Bob Dylan’s paintings last Saturday afternoon. I’ve been meaning to write a little on it ever since, but I didn’t really have much of significance to say; other than that, yes it really was nice to see some of his artwork up close and personal. So I was putting it off for an idle moment which wasn’t in a hurry to arrive.

In the last couple of days, however, a huge brou-ha-ha has developed over this exhibition, as explained in this Daily Mail story and countless others. The gist of it is that quite a few of these paintings are not of unique scenes that Mr. Dylan encountered during his concert tours in Asia, but are in fact based on old and classic photographs taken by some quite well-known photographers. (And not loosely-based either.) It seems perhaps to have set off the firestorm which previous allegations of plagiarism against Bob were merely kindling. But that remains to be seen. Certainly, it has to be deeply embarrassing for the gallery which characterized the work as something which it simply is not; i.e., a personal travelogue by Bob Dylan. [Read more →]

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From section: Dylanosophy by Sean Curnyn

A task too mighty: Bob Dylan on Hank Williams’ lost notebooks

The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williamsis due for release on October 4th. Alan Light has a piece in the Old Gray Lady on the making of the album, including this: [Read more →]

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From section: Dylanosophy by Sean Curnyn

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