Tag: bob dylan

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2012 Medal of Freedom ceremony at 3:25 p.m. today on C-Span

The Cinch Review

[Update: My brief take on how the ceremony went is here.]

C-Span now has a page up dedicated to the Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony scheduled for today, when Bob Dylan and a dozen other notables will be conferred with the award. (Via Expecting Rain.) There will apparently be a link on that page to live video, scheduled for 3:25 p.m. Eastern Time. C-Span 1 can also be viewed at this link.

Merely a chance to see Dylan cringe for a while and then get a medal draped around his neck, but historic all the same.

(The story of Jan Karski, who is being awarded the medal posthumously, is one that deserves to be highlighted.)

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Birthday Boy Bob Dylan: King of YouTube?

The Cinch Review

Today is Bob Dylan’s 71st birthday. He was born in 1941; that was the year they bombed Pearl Harbor, and—as he said in November of 2008—he’s been living in a world of darkness ever since. On the plus side, he’s been gifted with the talent and opportunity to write a whole lot of great songs which bring solace and joy to countless souls.

I wonder who the most covered songwriter on YouTube might be? I’m not referring just to professional recordings, which are only a fraction of what’s out there, but all of it, including the bedroom amateurs with their guitars, electronic keyboards and webcams. It would be an extremely difficult statistic to calculate, even if you had access to all of YouTube’s data, because songwriters’ names aren’t always invoked. Continue reading “Birthday Boy Bob Dylan: King of YouTube?”

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Bob Dylan to receive Medal of Freedom on May 29th

The Cinch Review

[Update: My brief take on how the ceremony went is here.]

Reuters reports that this year’s Presidential Medal of Freedom ceremony will take place at the White House next Tuesday, May 29th. Bob Dylan will therefore be receiving the award five days following his 71st birthday. (I note that they waited till his spring concert tour wrapped up to have the ceremony.)

Also receiving the award that day will be Toni Morrison, Madeleine Albright, John Glenn, John Paul Stevens, Jan Karski (posthumously), John Doar, William Foege, Gordon Hirabayashi (posthumously), Dolores Huerta, Juliette Gordon Low (posthumously) and Pat Summitt. Israeli President Shimon Peres is also receiving the award this year but reportedly in a separate event. Continue reading “Bob Dylan to receive Medal of Freedom on May 29th”

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Monterrey, Music and Murder

The Cinch Review

Bob Dylan just finished up his latest tour—or the latest leg of what people call his Never Ending Tour—with four concerts in Mexico, including one in Monterrey a few days ago. The area around Monterrey has become a big hot-spot in the Mexican drug war(s). Just yesterday, 49 headless bodies (some just armless and legless torsos) were dumped on a highway that leads from Monterrey to the border with South Texas. The authorities have been quick to offer assurances that this is only drug traffickers killing each other, although at this point they don’t actually know who the dead people are for, well, obvious reasons. Continue reading “Monterrey, Music and Murder”

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Bob Dylan to receive Presidential Medal of Freedom

The Cinch Review

[Update: My brief take on how the ceremony went is here.]

Just announced today. Bob Dylan is one of thirteen people who will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom this year, along with astronaut John Glenn, writer Toni Morrison, Israeli President Shimon Peres, and former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens. It’s considered the nation’s highest civilian honor (matched only by the legislative branch’s “Congressional Gold Medal”). The ceremony is reported to be planned for “late spring.” Continue reading “Bob Dylan to receive Presidential Medal of Freedom”

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“down with you sam” by Bob Dylan

The Cinch Review

Just for the record, and because I’ve been asked about it, here are the full twenty-odd lines of the particular poem from Bob Dylan’s book “Tarantula”(copyrighted by Bob Dylan in 1966) that features a statement regarding Hitler which Ron Rosenbaum commented upon in a lecture called “Bob Dylan’s God Problem—and Ours,” and which he then wrote about in an article called “The Naked Truth” and which led yours truly to write “God’s problem with Bob Dylan (and with us).”

In the book the poem is untitled, although it appears in a chapter titled “Prelude to the Flatpick” (which ought to clarify things considerably).

down with you sam. down with your
answers too. hitler did not change
history. hitler WAS history/sure
you can teach people to be beautiful,
but dont you know that there’s a
greater force than you that teaches
them to be gullible—yeah it’s called
the problem force/ they assign every-
body problems/ your problem is that you
wanna better word for world …
you cannot kill what lives an expct no-
body to take notice. history is alive/
it breathes/ now cut out that jive/
go count your fish. gotta go. someone’s
coming to tame my shrew. hope they re-
moved your lung successfully. say hi
to your sister

love,
Wimp, Your
Friendly Pirate

For an even more expanded context, you can buy the book, although I have to say that I think Blonde on Blondeis really his better work from that period. (I suspect he might agree, since he sang “Rainy Day Women” just last night in Brazil, but when was the last time he did a live reading from “Tarantula?” It’s been ages.)

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God’s Problem with Bob Dylan (and with Us)


Late last year, author Ron Rosenbum gave a lecture at Stanford University titled “Bob Dylan’s God Problem—and Ours.”

More recently, he wrote an article in The Chronicle Review titled “The Naked Truth,” reexamining what he said during that lecture. It had to do with the problem of how we can believe in an all-powerful God who is totally good when there is so much evil in the world. (In philosophical circles the consideration of this problem is known as “theodicy.”) Rosenbaum was in particular looking at how the problem seemed to be considered by Dylan in his work, and the lynchpin of this lecture was apparently a few lines that he had recently found in Bob Dylan’s 1960’s book of poetry and stream-of-consciousness writing called “Tarantula.” Specifically:

“hitler did not change
history. hitler WAS history”
(Found at the bottom of page 23 of my own paperback edition from St. Martin’s Griffin.) (UPDATE: See all twenty lines of the poem at this link.)

I don’t want to linger too long on the Bob Dylan element, because there are (believe it or not) questions that seem more important to me here, but I have a few thoughts. Ron Rosenbaum sums up his reaction to encountering the lines this way:

Whoa. Those eight words: “… hitler did not change history. hitler WAS history”! Where did that come from? In the 10 years I spent writing a 500-page book called Explaining Hitler (Random House, 1998), not one of the historians, philosophers, artists, or other sages I spoke to or read ever made as white-hot an indictment of humanity as that. An indictment, implicitly, of God as well.

Well, I think Rosenbaum had an experience that maybe all Dylan fans have, usually when listening to his music, when we hear something that pierces right into an area of great relevance to us. It seems uncanny that he’s thinking just like us. (And it is uncanny, don’t get me wrong.) As someone who spent ten years writing a 500 page book on Hitler, and is currently writing a book on Bob Dylan, Rosenbaum was struck as if by a lightning bolt by the confluence of these two great subjects. Here was Dylan making a piercing observation about Hitler, albeit only eight words in a jumbled collection of sometimes incomprehensible “poetry” (which for the record and arguably to my shame I’ve read more than once in my life and re-consulted on numerous occasions). But Rosenbaum’s take on it as “an indictment of humanity” and “implicitly, of God as well” is his own. I take it as a simple statement of fact rather than an indictment, and one that in theory could be made by an atheist as easily as by a devout believer in God, albeit with different import. Obviously, given that it’s just eight words, and given the context in this book “Tarantula,” one’s first instinct is to avoid attaching too much weight to it at all, but at a minimum it surely is a comment on human nature, and one that is not inconsistent with the view of human nature that permeates Dylan’s body of work: People are capable of anything. Corruption is a constant. Hitler, in that sense, was only an especially gigantic personification of the presence of evil in history and the capacity for evil in human nature. Continue reading “God’s Problem with Bob Dylan (and with Us)”

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Blood on the Tracks: The Movie

The Cinch Review

There’s been a story promulgating itself out there for a few days now about how a production company has been granted license to make a film based in some way around Bob Dylan’s 1974 album Blood on the Tracks. The quote from an executive is: “Our goal is to work with a filmmaker who can create a classic drama with characters and an environment that capture the feelings that this album inspires in all its fans.” Well, that’s ambitious. A better goal might be just to make a good film, rather than trying to duplicate the feelings that the album inspires in fans, considering that each fan no doubt has somewhat different feelings when listening to the songs and performances on the record. My personal instinct would be to avoid seeing such a film anyway, since Blood on the Tracks has its own resonances for me—as I’m sure for most other listeners—and I just wouldn’t be interested in replacing those in any way with images and characterizations in someone else’s movie. But que sera, sera. As with so many things, it may never even come to pass. As Harold Lepidus observes, there’s actually a history of other screen ideas associated one way or another with Blood on the Tracks.

It’s pretty clear that Bob Dylan and his “camp” are very generous indeed when it comes to granting rights to people to pursue their own projects which utilize his songs. I don’t know how often they refuse requests; it almost seems like they never do. It appears to be done in the spirit of: “Let them throw everything they have against the wall and see what sticks.” A lot of it just doesn’t. Dylan famously granted director Todd Haynes license to use everything in his unusual biopic “I’m Not There,” featuring numerous actors of various ages and genders portraying some kind of “Bob Dylan.” Did it stick to the wall? Maybe somebody’s wall, but, I would suggest, Bob Dylan’s own wall is pretty clean of any vestiges of this movie. The film is so out there that it can only be seen as Todd Haynes’ personal riffing on various aspects of the Dylan story/legend and it actually doesn’t lay a glove on Dylan himself. The title, “I’m Not There,” is indeed incredibly apropros.

Yet, every time that someone devotes their creative energies to doing something associated with “Bob Dylan” it only increases the size of his legend in the public consciousness, and inevitably draws more people into checking out his music, which is, in the end, the real point. As it should be. Continue reading “Blood on the Tracks: The Movie”

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“You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”: A new standard?

The Cinch Review

Miley Cyrus You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You GoI’ve just noticed that in the wake of Miley Cyrus’s popular (and genuinely quite fine) cover version of Bob Dylan’s song “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go,” there’s been an explosion of amateur performers on YouTube who have been inspired by Miley and are clearly doing their versions of her version. It seems to be mimicking the trend where thousands of amateurs (not to mention professionals) have taken to singing Adele’s version of Bob Dylan’s “Make You Feel My Love.” That song has become, in effect, a modern standard, thanks to all the cover versions. It’s not as if “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” was unknown before Miley Cyrus did it, but it was not anything like a standard, not like certain other Dylan songs such as “Blowin’ in the Wind” or “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Although it’s a beautiful song, with a wonderful tension of sadness and exuberance, there’s a certain lyrical quirkiness to it that probably kept it out of the repertoires of most singers. And by quirkiness I’m really referring to this verse:

Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad
Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud
But there’s no way I can compare
All those scenes to this affair
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go

The singer is comparing his own history of bad relationships to the two French poets, Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, who had a homosexual affair which ended, more or less, when Verlaine shot Rimbaud (Rimbaud was not badly injured, but Verlaine was sentenced to two years in prison for the act). A lot of singers have probably figured that (1) nobody will know who Verlaine and Rimbaud are and (2) it’s probably better to keep it that way. Continue reading ““You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”: A new standard?”

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Bob Dylan, election night 2008, etc.

bob_dylan_performing_live

bob_dylan_performing_live

Thanks to John W. who forwards me a recent interview with Greil Marcus in a Minnesota paper. He thought this part in particular would interest me:

One of the major events in my parallel life with Bob Dylan, which any fan has if you follow his work and his ups and downs … was election night in 2008 when he played the University of Minnesota for the first time. I just thought that was a fabulous event. I loved the way he timed the show so that it would end five minutes before the election would be called, so that everybody would be out in the lobby when the TV screen went on. I just felt like that was so appropriate, so not accidental. And ending the concert with that weird comment—“I was born in the year of Pearl Harbor, and it’s been an age of darkness ever since. But now I think things are about to change.” And that’s him just saying, “I know this is a special night, and none of us knows what, if any, changes in our own lives this is going to mean, but we all hope it will mean some change.” And I think when someone as in his own world as Bob Dylan can join his audience … I can’t imagine that would have happened in Poughkeepsie, or Birmingham or Seattle.

When Dylan’s remarks on election night of 2008 were first reported in the press, it was presented as Bob basically hailing Barack Obama’s great victory, with a triumphant “Things are gonna change now!” Greil Marcus’s tone is different to that here, but still slanted in a certain way. Back in November of 2008, I wrote on Bob Dylan’s election night remarks at some (perhaps painful) length. I wasn’t relying on any paraphrase in the press or half-heard snippets. I quoted his full remarks, and provided the audio as well. Then I reflected on what Dylan seemed to be getting at, given the full context, versus how it was being reported, and even versus how it was heard by those present, many of whom were (naturally enough) pregnant with expectations related to the election. With hindsight, despite the longwindedness, I stand by the substance of what I wrote. Briefly put, I thought and think that there was a deep (and intentional) irony in Dylan’s words, notwithstanding the fact that he likely knew it would be missed by most in the audience that night. I ended my reflection with a biblical quote from Psalm 118: “It is better to put trust in the LORD than to put confidence in princes.” I thought then and continue to think that that says more about where Dylan is coming from than anything I could say. It surprises me, still, that there are people who listen to Dylan’s music for years and for decades who don’t seem to get this.

As for Greil Marcus’s theory that Bob Dylan went out of his way to end his performance that night at the very moment that the election results were coming out … aww, never mind. You gotta let it go sometimes.

…

On a different note, it certainly did make me smile to read Marcus’s line about his “parallel life with Bob Dylan.” I do know what he means, in terms of how fans can feel, even if I might tend to see Greil Marcus (not to mention some other prominent rock critics) as being more like the Joker to Bob’s Batman, as parallel lives go. Marcus is of Dylan’s generation (as also is Dick Cheney, for instance), so the parallel concept can come into play for him. I am not of that generation, so I’ve never really thought about my life as being parallel to Bob Dylan’s as such, but I think any dedicated fan of Dylan could define some kind of relationship between events in his or her life and particular music of Bob’s. It’s not that the music brought on the events (necessarily!) but that the music was there when the events occurred, and the music was there again after the dust settled on those events.


What I’ve found fascinating about this phenomenon, and continue to find fascinating, is how so much of Dylan’s music seems to change and deepen with the passing of the years, so that in the wake of events that change one’s perceptions and perspective, Bob’s songs don’t end up sounding trite or crass but instead are prone to produce the aaah moment, as in “Aaah, so that’s what that was about all along …” That’s kinda why we keep listening, isn’t it?

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David Hidalgo reports on new Bob Dylan album

The Cinch Review

Just the other day there was news of yet another Bob Dylan boxed set to be released in the near future, this one some kind of totally complete collection that will certainly appeal to people who (1) don’t own any Bob Dylan albums already and (2) have unlimited funds for entertainment purposes. Not really too very exciting for someone like yours truly, but news all the same I guess.

Today, however, there is news of some genuinely brand new material recently recorded by the young Bobby Zimmerman. An interview in the Aspen Times with David Hidalgo of the redoubtable band Los Lobos includes the following: Continue reading “David Hidalgo reports on new Bob Dylan album”

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Bob Dylan and Ayn Rand

The Cinch Review

The latest issue of the Bob Dylan fan magazine ISIS includes an item by Ronnie Keohane detailing a discovery she made regarding Bob Dylan’s 2003 film “Masked and Anonymous.”

If you’ve seen that film (and what Dylan fan or aficionado of the art of movie-making has not?) you’ll recall that there is a radio preacher who is heard repeatedly, as if in the background. At one point he’s heard saying this:

The only power the government has is to crack down on criminals. When there aren’t enough criminals, you make them. You make so many things a crime that it becomes impossible to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What’s there in that for anyone? You pass laws that can’t be observed or enforced or even objectively interpreted. You create a nation of lawbreakers and then you cash in on the guilt. That’s the system, that’s the game. Once you understand that you’ll sleep a lot easier.

Continue reading “Bob Dylan and Ayn Rand”

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

The Cinch Review

At the 17th Annual Critics’ Choice Movie Awards, this very night. Clip 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). Continue reading “Bob Dylan sings “Blind Willie McTell” in tribute to Martin Scorsese (video)”

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“I Believe In You” – Alison Krauss Sings Dylan

The Cinch Review

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 …” Continue reading ““I Believe In You” – Alison Krauss Sings Dylan”

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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.) Continue reading “Sinéad O’Connor sings “Property of Jesus””

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Ke$ha and Miley Cyrus sing Bob Dylan

The Cinch Review

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. Continue reading “Ke$ha and Miley Cyrus sing Bob Dylan”

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

The Cinch Review

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. Continue reading “Chimes of Freedom – Amnesty International benefit album featuring the songs of Bob Dylan”

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Ramona, in straits that are dire

The Cinch Review

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

The Cinch Review

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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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. Continue reading “Ron Rosenbaum on Bob Dylan, Judaism, Christianity etc”