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zircona1 wrote:I've seen him twice, in a small arena in 2003, and at the Austin City Limits Fest in 2007. I've heard that his live shows can be hit-or-miss, but both shows I thought were pretty good. It helps if you go in knowing what to expect. I think I prefer the '03 show, he and his band did a great version of 'All Along the Watchtower' in the encore. Not crap. Some of the songs on The Basement Tapes amuse me. "Well I looked at my watchI looked at my wristI punched myself in the face with my fistI took my potatoesDown to be mashedAnd I made it on down to that million dollar bash!"It takes a serious man to be funny. John Donne knew.

phpBB [media]From Don't Look Back. Dylan ripping into a TIME reporter for six minutes during his England tour in 1965.This would've been a couple months before "going electric" at Newport. Dylan: If I want to find out anything, I m not gonna read TIME magazine, I m not gonna read Newsweek, I m not gonna read any of these magazines, I mean cause they just got too much to lose by printing the truth. You know that.TM: What kind of truths are they leaving out? Dylan: Well anything, even on a worldwide basis, they d just go off the stands in a day if they printed really the truth.TM: What is really the truth?Dylan: Really the truth is just a plain picture. A plain picture of let's say a tramp vomiting into the sewer you know? And then and uh, next door to the picture you know, is Mr. Rockerfeller or you know, Mr. C.W. Jones on a subway going to work, uh you know, any kind of picture. Just make some collage of pictures which they don t do, there's no ideas in TIME Magazine...

I've always wondered if that Time magazine encounter is the basis for the song Ballad of a Thin Man.

Dylan tells Nobel committee he will not go to Sweden for ceremonyBob Dylan has told the Nobel prize committee he will not be attending the ceremony in Sweden to pick up his accolade. Dylan was named winner of this year s Nobel prize for literature in October for his vast body of lyrics and poetry but has since been reluctant to publicly acknowledge the honour. The 75-year-old s silence led him to be labelled œarrogant by one member of the Nobel academy, and a brief message on his website that he was the œthe winner of the Nobel prize for literature 2016 was taken down the next day.It took two weeks for the singer and songwriter, who has a notoriously troubled relationship to his own fame, to accept a call from the permanent secretary of the academy, Sara Danius. He told them he had been left œspeechless by the honour and later said in an interview he would œabsolutely attend an award ceremony œif it s at all possible .However, in a personal letter to the academy, Dylan has told them œhe wishes he could receive the prize personally, but other commitments make it unfortunately impossible. He underlined that he feels œincredibly honoured by the Nobel prize, they added.The Swedish Academy said it œrespects Bob Dylan s decision but stressed it is œunusual for a Nobel laureate not to come to Stockholm to accept the award in person. [Sara Danius, of the Academny] compared Dylan s work to that of ancient Greek writers Homer and Sappho. Asked about the comparison, Dylan said: œI suppose so, in some way. Some [of my] songs “- 'Blind Willie,' 'The Ballad of Hollis Brown,' 'Joey,' 'A Hard Rain,' 'Hurricane,' and some others “- definitely are Homeric in value. Not sure what, if anything, to make of this. It seems not altogether out of character, as the article points out. I hope he's doing OK, at 75.

Here's a 2005 CBC radio show/podcast with a celebrated English prof and literary critic who wrote a book on Dylan's lyrics called Dylan's Visions of Sin. Not a bad conversation so far as these things go: http://www.cbc.ca/radio/writersandcompa ... -1.3803292

Angus Jung wrote:Re: Dylan's late-70's born-again-Christian phase: IN 1979, BOB DYLAN regaled a Tempe, Arizona, audience with a show consisting entirely of songs from his two most recent records ”the ill-received Christian albums Slow Train Coming and Saved. A born-again with an ex-Jew's wrath complex, Dylan peppered the set list with snarling sermons that drew the heckles you'd expect. When some lost soul shouted "rock 'n' roll!" he got a memorable response: "If you want rock 'n' roll, you go down and rock 'n' roll. You can go and see KISS and you can rock 'n' roll all the way down to the pit!"I love when this thread is bumped because I always forget about this incredible quote and it never fails to make me laugh. Something about Dylan as a sermonising Christian is so fucking funny. Shame it didn't stick.

That excuse makes him seem almost embarrassed about the honor. I would call that highly out of character. He could go or not go, but that statement just raises more questions. I don't know what to make of it either.

phpBB [media]Kind of obsessed with this at the moment. It's fucking spooky and otherworldly. Poignant even.

Easy NC. Took me a while to get into him, but it was worth the wait. Arguably the single best lyricist in rock, folk and probably even popular music in general. Highway 61 Revisited and The Basement Tapes are my favs.

have bumloads of his lp's without entirely rooting themBlonde on Blonde: finally got this last year and was expecting the moon on a stick but was bored shitless for some reasonNew Morning: probably my favouriteThe Basement Tapes: cannot see what the big fucken deal is hereTime Out of Mind (1997): [b]Love and Theft (2001[b]Modern Times (2006): rooting these 3 HARD. that old timey shit sure is relaxingps would anyone calling themselves a Dylan Scholar please report to their nearest cliff and throw themselves over the edge