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God damn, this thread scared me. I figure he'd died.

Nope. But Terry Hall did.



RIP Terry Hall.

Sorry to hijack this thread, Bob. I'm sure you'll get plenty of well deserved accolades when your time comes.

The Hard Rain TV special from 1976 features sweet duets with Joan Baez and some great rockers with the Rolling Thunder band, including my favorite version of Shelter From The Storm with Bob playing slide on an electric National guitar shaped like the U.S.

The John Hammond tribute show from 1975 is a fine performance with the stripped down band that recorded Desire. It's split up into individual tracks on YouTube, here's the first one.

Probably my favorite stanza in the history of lyrics is from Idiot Wind:

They say I shot
A man named Grey
And took his wife
To Italy

She inherited
A million bucks
And when she died
It came to me
I can't help it
If I'm lucky

There's a lot to say about it. The humor and then tension of close rhymes, the use of meter to create a beat and fills. Minimum syllables to get the job done. "They say" and "It came to me" being simple, funny, chilling tells that our protagonist was not, in fact, merely lucky.

But as always it's better to just read it out loud a few times, or even better yet listen to him sing it.

"Let us not talk falsely now, The hour Is getting late."

"He traveled a with a gun in every hand" Kind of like Roland the Headless Tompson Gunner

*"but of all the Tompson gunners, Roland was the best"

Oops, I thought this was the Shittiest Dylan Videos thread. Well, Merry Christmas!

I can’t imagine a band more locked in

kmc wrote: Tue Dec 27, 2022 4:24 am I can’t imagine a band more locked in

Really? Your imagination is that limited? What about actual bands that existed which don't require imagination? The J.B.s? The Meters? Any version of Zappa's band? NoMeansNo? But these 5 guys, 3 of which are playing basically the same shit on guitar, demolish your ability to perceive anything tighter?

Those same guys have been playing with Bob for ages. Charlie Sexton on guitar. So it's a real band, anyway.

I saw that band and Merle Haggard play many years ago in Chicago.

Merle was good.

Every single song in Bob's set, no matter what it "was" before, was a two-chord blues. Blowin' in the Wind, two-chord blues. Love Minus Zero, two-chord blues. The band had this pseudo-Beefheart feel to them where it felt utterly off the cuff but was clearly mapped out, on a clairvoyant level if not literally.

Every now and then, he'd lift his voice out of the latter-day gravelly mutter (could hear all the words tho) and sing full voice like a bird or play a bit of harmonica, just to let you know he hadn't forgotten what these songs used to be.

It was one of the coolest things I've ever seen--just this real reckoning with who he used to be and who he was at the moment and what that meant to him and his music, which after all is his so he can do whatever the fuck he wants with it. I really enjoyed it at the time, but it took me a few years to realize completely how great it was.

ChudFusk wrote: Tue Dec 27, 2022 4:13 pm

kmc wrote: Tue Dec 27, 2022 4:24 am I can’t imagine a band more locked in

Really? Your imagination is that limited? What about actual bands that existed which don't require imagination? The J.B.s? The Meters? Any version of Zappa's band? NoMeansNo? But these 5 guys, 3 of which are playing basically the same shit on guitar, demolish your ability to perceive anything tighter?

context, though.

you get behind the wheel.

"where are we going, bob?"
just take a right here. no, go straight. ok, faster.
"show me on the map."
for my eyes only.