tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-63944028995007396722024-03-21T18:44:31.636-07:00Evert Listens to DylanEvert Bisschop Boelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13102602767225188146noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6394402899500739672.post-87992934664565232702018-01-20T09:05:00.002-08:002018-01-20T09:05:29.702-08:0015. Before the FloodAnd on we go.<br />
<br />
I write something directly after the first listening of Before the Flood - as if I have been to a live concert by Dylan. Because this is a live CD.<br />
<br />
I knew all the songs sung by Dylan. And many of the songs sung by The Band. It felt as if I was, indeed, witnessing a live concert on the basis of listening to his LPs for years; a concert with The Band, more than just a backing band but relatively unknown to me.<br />
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The recognition of his songs, of which some are played very differently live. The energy - maybe too much energy, sometimes. The consistency in all of it. Especially 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door' was an experience - but all of it was great.<br />
<br />
I guess I will do repeated listening, by which it becomes a CD rather than the once-in-a-lifetime experience of the live concert. But then again: each hearing of a CD is a once-in-a-lifetime experience, inni'?Evert Bisschop Boelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13102602767225188146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6394402899500739672.post-9432898227450216492018-01-20T06:27:00.001-08:002018-01-20T06:27:40.401-08:0014. Planet WavesDifferent. Very different.<br />
<br />
I know it's The Band playing.<br />
I know it's all Dylan songs.<br />
<br />
It's an album I can listen to again and again. 'Forever Young' - the wish we would speak to any child. The out-of-tune guitar at 'Dirge' - and again: who cares?<br />
<br />
The great images and sentences. "Twilight on a frozen lake" - yes, I immediately know what that is about. For me, that is.<br />
<br />
We'll see what happens over time. For me, it seems to be somewhat comparable to 'New Morning' - a pleasure to listen to.Evert Bisschop Boelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13102602767225188146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6394402899500739672.post-88929549131060260942018-01-20T06:08:00.002-08:002018-01-20T06:08:55.139-08:0013. DylanI've been listening occasionally to this one. Hard to write about it. I notice myself occasionally humming 'Saroh Jane' and wondering why he pronounces it not as 'Sarah Jane'. I kind of like the folksy atmosphere of such songs as 'The Ballad of Ira Hayes' (the 'come all ye...'-feeling) and 'Mary Ann'. <br />
<br />
I love the background choirs - they seem to refer, to me, to the upcoming religious period I am looking forward so much to listen to.<br />
<br />
I am glad he has found back his 'normal' abnormal voice - but not on 'A Fool Such As I'; which I do not really get into contact with. And the final song, 'The Spanish Tongue', still feels outright ridiculous to me - which then again leads to admiration for the guy who includes it in his repertoire, regardless.Evert Bisschop Boelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13102602767225188146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6394402899500739672.post-70844981099342071402017-05-25T03:20:00.000-07:002017-05-25T03:20:28.652-07:0012. Pat Garrett & Billy the KidI am going to be very short on this one. I knew "Knocking' on Heaven's Door". For the rest, if ever there will be an opportunity to see the movie, having heard the sound track will surely be another way of making connections to the moving.Evert Bisschop Boelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13102602767225188146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6394402899500739672.post-16008653865420129592017-05-25T03:09:00.002-07:002017-05-25T03:09:58.474-07:0011. New MorningLong, long time ago I wrote an entry here. The thing is, as I wrote earlier: I keep going back to those 3 albums of the mid-1960s. I can't get enough listening to Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. And occasionally I go back to the albums before that. So there I am: supposed to be walking in a forward direction, but after having travelled a mile or so I keep returning on my earlier footsteps, walking back and forth. It seems to become a form of the nowadays so popular mindfulness: abiding in what is already there, rather then adding to it.<br />
<br />
Well, anyway. It is nearly summer holiday by now. And New Morning was the album I listened to last summer holiday, when we were on a camping in Luxemburg. The album has stuck to my memories of that holiday. It wasn't the best one we ever had - a camping slightly too crowdy, and because of a hurt foot I couldn't do the hiking I had hoped to be doing with the family; so we were rather stuck on the camping. It was nice enough, however. And the songs of the album do remind me immediately of the camping, of sun, of making a coffee and then sitting on the veranda of our holiday cottage at 11 o'clock in the morning, of doing the dishes and listening to 'Day of the Locusts' and seeing the face of David Crosby ("his head was exploding", as Dylan sings) and hearing in the recording the chirping of the locusts - and now I am thinking about the story behind that song, about Dylan getting a Princeton honorary degree and being upset because he had to wear a robe and hat for the ceremony, and I am thinking of my own inauguration ceremony in fall where I indeed have to wear a robe and hat - a Harry Potter disguise, in a sense, which my two youngest kids like because they have been reading and watching the Potter oeuvre very intensely lately. But of course last year summer I did not know I would have a inauguration ceremony coming a year later...<br />
<br />
And in that way the 'webs of meaning' keep on forming around the Dylan oeuvre (having <a href="http://evertsworldofmusic.blogspot.nl/2017/05/on-schizophonia.html">visited a concert</a> recently hooks me up especially to the idea that I 'Went to See the Gypsy', another song at the album). I like this album - apart from 'If Dogs Run Free' because the scatting of the jazz singer in that song puts me off; to me it's a form of senseless virtuosity, something I don't like in jazz in general. It sounds too convinced to my ears - the 'listen what I can do, isn't it great'-atmosphere doesn't connect to what I have constructed over the years as what music in essence is for me personally.<br />
<br />
But for the rest, a fine album. One which I do replay occasionally, if I want to listen to a relaxed Dylan and find myself mentally on a veranda at about 11 o'clock in the morning in a summer's holiday.Evert Bisschop Boelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13102602767225188146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6394402899500739672.post-56088568472839291672016-12-25T02:04:00.002-08:002016-12-25T02:04:52.099-08:0010. Self PortraitIt took me a lot of time to start writing this one. There was no urgency: I am relistening to the albums of Dylan I have listened to so far, and apparently that is more than enough to keep me busy. I simply didn't feel the need to write so that I could allow myself to start listening to the next album. And I notice that some of these albums already have assembled lots of connotations - for example, Dylan's first album is connected to a camping in Denmark and the world football championships of 2014 (Holland loosing the semi-final).<br />
<br />
That is not to say I kept relistening to Self Portrait. Rather, I kept returning to the Big Three: Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and especially Blonde on Bonde. Occasionally, the earlier acoustic work (I am currently listening more to that) and John Wesley Harding. The span in years of those albums is approximately the span in years of the complete work of The Beatles - and although there is no way to compare both 'oeuvres', it is amazing in both cases that only in some eight years' time a singer or a band can come up with such a body of work.<br />
<br />
Having said that, the strangeness of this album makes that I am not attracted to listening to it too much. There are songs I like - the laid back 'Alberta #1' (yes, there is a #2), 'Days of 49'. There is very lightweight but nice music - the Hawaiian tinge of 'Early Morning Rain', or 'Belle Isle' with its humming strong orchestra. There is the instrumental 'Woogie Boogie'. There are completely outrageous songs, like 'In Search of Little Sadie', the remake of 'Little Sadie' also on the album, with all its bizarre modulations just out of reach of Dylan's vocal capacities. And there is the polished crooner's voice of songs such as 'Let It Be Me' and Blue Moon'. And then there are the live versions of Highway 61's 'Like a Rolling Stone' and of 'The Mighty Quinn', and there is a cover of Simon and Garfunkel's 'The Boxer'.<br />
<br />
It sounds completely haphazard, and probably that was the idea at the time - to stop being Dylan-the-Saviour and to become Dylan-Just-Another-Musician. The opening song, 'All the Tired Horses', with an absent Dylan (at least I don't recognize his otherwise rather recognizable voice), is telling. He was well on the way of deliberately erasing himself. Which is, having read the biography, admirable in its own right.Evert Bisschop Boelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13102602767225188146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6394402899500739672.post-38274749787285695372016-02-29T03:26:00.004-08:002016-02-29T03:26:34.571-08:009. Nashville Skyline"Coming back I quickly recorded what apeared to be a country-western record and made sure it sounded pretty bridled and house-broken. The music press didn't know what to make of it. I used a different voice, too. People scratched their heads. [...] Journalists began asking in print, "Whatever happened to the old him?" They could go to hell, too."<br />
<br />
That's what Dylan writes about this album. Of course, one notices the changed voice and the flatness of the material on this album immediately. Nevertheless, after some listening I just had set myself a New Project: keep listening to this album until it becomes meaningful to you.<br />
<br />
Then I read the above, from Dylan's "Chronicles Volume I", his autobiography. I realized that this album cries out: "'This is not Bob Dylan." As Dylan explained, he did not want to live up to his audience's expectations anymore, who saw him as the Big Rebel, if not the Saviour of the World ("All code words for <i>Outlaw</i>", writes Dylan). And then I became not interested anymore - why listen to albums which were made with the purpose <i>not</i> to show the singer?<br />
<br />
But I relistened to it, and I guess in time I <i>will, </i>in spite of myself, build up a relationship with this album or some of its material, in spite of the flatness of it all. Because I guess one builds up relationships by listening in spite of oneself, and because listening is so contextual. For example, I listen to the first song, <i>Girl of the North Country</i>. A duet with Johnny Cash. And through the messy rendering (on purpose?) I hear the greatness of the earlier version Dylan sang, and when Cash starts to sing I hear the absolute greatness of his voice and his possible - unrealized - interpretation of the song. In <i>Country Pie</i>, I am remembered of the Beatles' <i>Honey Pie</i>, and of their <i>Savoy Truffle</i>. <i>Peggy Day</i> reminds me of Ringo Starr's <i>Step Lightly</i>. In <i>To Be Alone With You</i> I hear the excellency of the accompanying band, referring to earlier Dylan albums. Et cetera.<br />
<br />
I am now listening to Beatles albums again. Every song is great to me. I know, <i>Across the Universe</i> and <i>The Long and Winding Road</i> could have done without the orchestras and the choirs. But I got attached to them, because I have lived with them most of my life.<br />
<br />
And so it will go with <i>Nashville Skyline</i>.<br />
<br />
And so I am looking forward to hearing Dylan's next album, which is an album of covers, ironically named <i>Self Portrait</i>. <br />
<br />
Is this the album about which Dylan says: "I released one album (a double one) where I just threw everything I could think of at the wall and whatever stuck, released it, and then went back and scooped up everything that didn't stick and released that, too."?Evert Bisschop Boelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13102602767225188146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6394402899500739672.post-84998442967906687262016-02-13T08:12:00.002-08:002016-02-13T08:14:44.620-08:008. John Wesley HardingIt took me lots of time to start writing this entry. Not because listening to and getting acquainted with John Wesley Harding has been a huge task; but because I kept also listening to Blonde on Blonde, and to Highway 61 Revisited, and to Bringing It All Back Home.<br />
<br />
I like John Wesley Harding, though. Dylan's voice starts to change, it is sometimes less gruff, more polished. Musically he leans more towards a country-sound. The funny thing is that when I listen to Blonde on Blonde I am so impressed with the musicians - and those same musicians produce on this album to me an adequate but hardly ever a remarkable sound. If I listen concentrated, I hear great things - but it is not the shere awe of Blonde on Blonde to me.<br />
<br />
Many great songs, though, and many sentences I love. A turn towards country (John Wesley Harding) and folk (As I Went Out One Morning) idiom. The great All Along the Watchtower and Dear Landlord. The Beatles' Rocky Raccoon in the shape of The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest (and a sleeve text that reminds one of Lennon's writings - or maybe vice versa?). And that strangely mellow last song, "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight".<br />
<br />
I am looking forward to the next album. And I wonder how my taste for this album will develop in the times to come.Evert Bisschop Boelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13102602767225188146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6394402899500739672.post-42484563709462634112015-10-28T09:01:00.003-07:002015-10-28T09:01:52.620-07:007. Blonde on BlondeIt is going to take a decennium to finish this blog, if I carry on listening to new Dylan albums in the tempo I do it now. But the thing is: there is no speeding up when utter joy is concerned.<br />
<br />
<i>Blonde on Blonde</i> - I have been listening to it for months now, and will keep listening for years. What a great album! There is not one weak song, I feel (although I am not a huge fan of the first track, which I wrongly called 'Everyone Must Get Stoned' some time ago; of course (?) the right name is 'Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35'). And what I especially love are the musicians in the band - listening to the drummer in for example 'One of Us Must Know' or 'Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine' makes me decide I have to take up drumming soon (and what about the long tone Dylan holds on in the chorus of 'One of Us Must Know', one beat longer than you would expect - it is song-writing genius for me), and the organ in the absolute masterpiece of the album 'Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands' is terrific, and 'Visions of Johanna' comes in on a solid second place for me.<br />
<br />
Basically, the whole album breathes the blues - 'Pledging My Time', 'Memphis Blues Again' (no blues though - and great Otis-Redding-sound-underwater-bubbly-electric-guitar), 'Leopard-Skin Pill-box Hat' (great timing of the lyrics, again), 'Obviously 5 Believers', they all ask for playing them at high volume while driving the car fast, while the lazy 'Temporary Like Achilles' ("I'm helpless like a rich man's child" - such a brilliant phrase) asks for playing while cruising slowly on a warm summer evening along the lake.<br />
<br />
'Absolutely Sweet Marie' reminds me of songs from I-don't-know-who; desperately I try to remember the singer's name for weeks now, he must be quite famous, a 70's pastiche-like song - so it goes, things hook somewhere in the back of your memory, waiting to relate to something in the future or remembered from the past. For me it's all about connections, the brain is filled not with facts but with relationships between facts, which makes me suspect that there is no end to the brain's capacity, because the more there is in it, the more will fit into it, relationship-wise.<br />
<br />
I notice that it is easier for me to become a fan of songs I don't know yet - as if I become a fan of them because of the newness of the album to me, and the songs I know from the only Dylan-CD I knew earlier, the Essential Bob Dylan, ('I Want You', 'Just Like a Woman') resist to share in this fandom-out-of-newness.<br />
<br />
I must state as a besides that I just finished reading Robert Hilburn's biography of Johnny Cash. Dylan plays an enormous role in it, and the book states that the common element in both lives is the search for the independent expression of the own voice, regardless of the audience; something both have struggled with, leading to work that distracts from this own voice and work that has found it. <i>Blonde on Blonde</i> seems to be in the second category, as the early (Sun) and late (American Records) work by Cash, I guess; and I am curious to figure out how Dylan sounds in his weaker moments - I have not heard it yet. (As a besides to this besides: I can relate to this idea that life sometimes seems to consist mainly of pedantic attempts to keep to your road with all the distractions from that road the rest of the world offers to you.)<br />
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And I will leave you with the immediate recognition I had when I first heard '4th Time Around': that this is the Beatles' (Lennon's, rather) 'Norwegian Wood' in Dylan-remake. Then I stumbled on the Rolling Stone list of 500 greatest rock albums ever (the top 10 contains four albums of my beloved Beatles and two by Dylan - <i>Highway 61 Revisited</i> on 4 and <i>Blonde on Blonde</i> on 9; and none by Cash, I must add), and the following quote from the review of the Beatles' <i>Rubber Soul</i> album (nr. 5 on the list) tells it all: "Bob Dylan's influence suffuses the album, accounting for the tart emotional tone of 'Norwegian Wood', 'I'm Looking Through You', 'You Won't See Me' and 'If I Needed Someone'. (Dylan would return the compliment the following year, when he offered his own version of 'Norwegian Wood' – titled '4th Time Around' – on <em>Blonde on Blonde</em>, and reportedly made John Lennon paranoid.)"Evert Bisschop Boelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13102602767225188146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6394402899500739672.post-13385550180575901242015-08-11T00:58:00.002-07:002015-08-11T00:58:56.017-07:006. Highway 61 RevisitedI saw parts of a documentary on Dylan the other day, spanning mainly the first five years of his career. To me it was amazing to notice how much emotional involvement I have built up the past year, listening to his first six CDs. (By the way, in this tempo it will take me some seven or eight year to finish my project...)<br />
<br />
I write this to remind myself that the aim of this blog-project is not to write music criticism. It is to report to myself about my particular experiences getting to know the work of Dylan. As those particular experiences involve - in my case, but maybe in yours too - a lot of comparison (it seems to me that in listening to music I am constantly busy to build a 'fit' between my new experiences and my older ones) the result inevitably looks a bit like music criticism, I must admit. But where the critic is supposed to have a sort of de-personalized, professional frame of reference, mine is purely personal. For a music critic, it would matter if he would know the later work of the Beatles much better than the early work; for me it doesn't, it simply is a fact of life making up my personal music biography.<br />
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Just a couple of observations on my listening to Highway 61 Revisited. This is a fully band-driven CD; Dylan the singer-singwriter is largely replaced by Dylan the band frontman. The music is heavily blues-oriented (I must remind myself that this album appeared roughly in the same time as the Beatles' Help; the Beatles were on their way to musically grow up, Dylan was grown up by his second album and already had taken a sort of U-turn in his career).<br />
<br />
The lyrics are, to my ears, very impressionistic and associative, up to the point of being incomprehensible. As I am a non-native English speaker, this may matter to me in different ways than to native speakers. One of the things happenig to me is that I pick up particular phrases and remember them, rather than orient myself on the complete song or on the exact and deeper meaning of the words.<br />
<br />
"They're selling postcards of the hanging" is one of those I pick up (first sentence of Desolation Row). Retaining such a sentence is more meaningful to me than trying to figure out who exactly 'Mr. Jones' from Ballad of a Thin Man is (however much I like the "Do you, Mr. Jones?"-phrase).<br />
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Musically, I love the band sound; it sounds fresh and improvized, but that may be because I know - because I have read so - that Dylan didn't rehearse much but simply played through the songs once or twice with the band and then recorded it.<br />
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One of the things irritating me is the Siren used in the title song Highway 61 Revisited. It is one of the few things that sound outdated to me in Dylan's work so far - it reminds me of cheap 1960s psychedelics too much (it also reminds me of the one song on the Dylan sampler I won I really don't like, Everybody Must Get Stoned - also because its message is so outdated by now). Indeed the remarks I read in Sounes' biography of Dylan that Dylan avoided references to specific persons and places (singing about "the president" rather than giving him a specific name) in order to make sure his songs would not be too specifically tied to contexts makes sense. As does Dylan's remarks that A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall is actually nót about 'atomic rain', so nót about the actual threat of nuclear fall-out after a nuclear war.<br />
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For the rest, it was a joy to listen and relisten to this one. Onwards to the next one!Evert Bisschop Boelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13102602767225188146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6394402899500739672.post-42021418629558182302015-06-13T12:53:00.003-07:002015-06-13T12:57:09.603-07:005. Bringing It All Back HomeWatershed.<br />
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Suddenly, Dylan's music becomes rock 'n' roll. Well, suddenly... Of course I hear the continuous line in the albums thus far, but still, the full band on most of the songs of the album is a shock. I guess the upheaval about his appearance with an electric guitar on the Newport festival, some months later, was not so much because the electric guitar was a big surprise - everybody could have heard that coming - but rather because it was an insult to a folk audience. <br />
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May I suggest, by the way, that 'the folk audience' - which I know extremely well because I have been part of it for such a long time now - may be the perfect illustration of Adorno's 'Ressentimental Listener'?<br />
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I read somewhere this album was recorded in three days only, and that Dylan did not like to rehearse but rather just started playing and hoped the band would play along. Maybe that gives this album its fresh sound. It also makes that there is a false start at 'Bob Dylan's 115th Dream', and that I seem to hear in the opening song, 'Subterranean Homesick Blues', that the bass player (I always focus on the bass player while listening to pop and rock music) really has to grope his way around, waiting for the exact moment when the chords change. Dylan is a master in writing lines of uneven length, but playing such lines in a session is quite a nightmare, especially if you are supposed to lay a firm foundation as a bass player.<br />
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Lots of 12-bar blues forms. Check the timing of the mouth harp substituting the 4th line of every 6-line verse in 'On the Road Again' - clever. Check the piano on 'Bob Dylan's 115th Dream' - great.<br />
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And again hardly choruses - Dylan doesn't seem to like choruses.<br />
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Dylan sings with two voices: one high, the other low. The high-voice songs are driving along with great power. The low-voice songs are more reflective - I love that sound of 'She Belongs To Me' or 'Love Minus Zero/No Limit'.<br />
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Of course, great lines: "You don't need the weathermen to know hich way the wind blows" is surely one of my favourites. ''She knows too much to argue or to judge". "He not busy being born is busy dying". Sometimes I catch myself listening to Dylan as if being a 15-year old schoolboy listening to records of my favorite artists and drinking in their words as if they are the gospel.<br />
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Some Dylan songs for me are less attractive to listen to. On this album 'Mr. Tambourine Man' - an incredible song, but I have heard it too often, I guess, to be able to really concentrate. <br />
<br />
And one song stands out for me: 'It's Allright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)'. The descending melodic lines in the guitar accompaniments of the verses below the sustained singing line; the chord changes in the 'chorus'; the extremely long lines with lots of alliteration. It is chilling.<br />
<br />
By the way. I bought a ticket for Dylan performing in Amsterdam in November. Egoistically, I secretly pray he holds on till then... I might also have chosen to go and listen to Paul McCartney; the Beatles are my favorite band of all times, surely. But I decided for Dylan - I guess the only musician I would have preferred over him would have been John Lennon, really.<br />
<br />
And by the way. This afternoon I was in an asylum seeker's centre, they had open day and my son has friends there. I was sitting, drinking tea with my wife and looking around, and saw a - probably - Syrian young man walking around wearing a Dylan T-shirt. The man is everywhere.Evert Bisschop Boelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13102602767225188146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6394402899500739672.post-70434904286564408802015-04-22T12:25:00.002-07:002015-04-22T12:25:19.374-07:004. Another Side of Bob DylanAnother Side? Really?<br />
<br />
I've been listening to this CD quite some time, and what stays with me most is the steady musicianship. The way Dylan sings songs in such a steady intermediate tempo. The lines of irregular lengths he produces within one song, which give his music an air of plasticity and improvisation. In 'To Ramona': Dylan as a singer; in the final syllable of each sentence a little descending cascade of 3, 4 or 5 notes. It comes back in some of the other songs on this album.<br />
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Of course there are strong messages, for me tied to who Dylan essentially wants to be: himself, rather than his image in the eyes of his audience. In 'All I Really Want To Do' he says: no need to try to be like me. And in 'It Ain't Me Babe' (one of those songs so harsh they are hard to swallow for me in the beginning): if you think I can be your hero, forget it.<br />
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Apart from that, some of those lines Dylan writes stick in my head. In 'My Back Pages': "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now." Or in 'Motorpsycho Nitemare' (which I would like to cite complete here because it has such funny lyrics, but I'll cite just one line): "Just one condition... That you don't touch my daughter and in the morning milk the cows." 'One condition', yeah - selling the daughter with the cow, as it were. And, in 'I Shall Be Free No. 10', the sarcastic:<br />
"I'm a poet/<br />
and I know it/<br />
hope I don't blow it".<br />
<br />
I know the first songs much better than the last songs because I listened to the CD in the car often, starting at the first song but never getting to the end really.<br />
<br />
And in 'Chimes of Freedom', I hear, for some reason, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY8fifc4VRY">Dave Rawlings' 'Bells of Harlem'</a>. I promise I will, at some point, report exactly on how I link the two. If I can, that is: I don't really believe that the outrageously complex grid of musical connections embedded in my body (of which my brain, mind and soul are 'parts') can be explained, generally - far too complex for that.<br />
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It dawns on me that Dylan doesn't sing stories. He only sings about "me" and "you". That is: about himself, about his others, and, maybe, about me. As for the last thing, adding: if you think I can be your hero, forget it.Evert Bisschop Boelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13102602767225188146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6394402899500739672.post-24041499052574780772015-02-15T04:36:00.005-08:002015-02-15T06:16:13.953-08:003. The Times They Are A-Changin'This project is going to take a long time.<br />
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I've listened and relistened to Dylan's third album in all kinds of places. Mostly in two places, though: at home in the living room, and in the car (places that in my research about other people's musical lives here and now turned out to be the two most important places to listen to music today). At home, while ironing kids' clothes, or when I was alone on an evening (kids asleep, wife gone somewhere) - sometimes in the background, sometimes meant for concentrated listening, often something in-between. Never trust listening typologies using the dichotomy concentrated/background, it is the usual kind of simplification researchers use to make the fluid and messy reality of daily life manageable for their own purposes. In the car, while driving long ways (see<a href="http://evertsworldofmusic.blogspot.nl/2014/11/i-like-songs.html"> 'Í like songs'</a> on my other blog) or while driving to the rehearsals of my shanty choir - in the latter case, when I would start at song number 1 when leaving home, I would invariably end in the middle of song nr. 7, 'Boots of Spanish Leather', when I would return home; the song for some time will for me have the connotation not only of being related to 'Girl of the North Country' and 'Scarborough Fair', but also of sitting in my car in front of the house in the dark of Tuesday evenings, engine off but CD-player on, allowing Dylan to finish that particular song.<br />
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That's one of the points of keeping this blog; finding out how I - and maybe you, and others - build up a listening history with all the specific and very personal connotations, such as the memory of listening to Dylan's first album intently over the headphones while sitting on a plastic chair in a tent on a camping site in Zeeland province, summer 2014. Or how the songs on the Dylan compilation I bought earlier will keep being connected to those same Tuesday evening drives in the car, especially when I just became a member of the shanty choir and tried frantically to figure out what singing in this choir not only meant to those guys I just started to know, but especially what it did with me, personally, Dylan becoming the soundtrack to all that intensely personal questioning and thus acquiring deep meanings for me on a level that I consider close to the religious.<br />
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I have now grown accustomed enough to Dylan's third album to write something about it and then embark on listening to his fourth. So just some words about this third album. I am not going to enumerate all the songs and what they do with me. Somehow at this point of time that doesn't seem appropriate - my listening relation to this album somehow seems to be fragmented, picking up snippets of some songs while having a good feeling of the completeness of other songs.<br />
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As I write this sentence, 'When the Ship Comes In' plays - I don't know what it is about, but I love the image of ships coming in, and have the impression that it functions as a semi-religious metaphor, pointing towards later work of Dylan where he sings about his conversion to Christianity. And while writing the last sentence, the Ship-song finished and the next song has started, 'The Lonely Death of Hattie Carrol', which in the chorus addresses the listener directly - "You who philosophize disgrace ... now ain't the time for your tears", turning in the last chorus to "... now is the time for your tears". Such a clever song, so well done, with a verse where Dylan allows himself to end three or four consecutive lines with the word 'table', a kind of rhyme only a master of text-writing can allow himself (what did it mean for him, being a master in his early twenties?).<br />
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Many songs are what would be called 'protest songs' - either direct or, by telling stories from life, indirect - but I think that's not the essence of those songs. The essence for me is a deep poetry, which unites the protest songs with the more personal ones such as the lovely last song 'Restless Farewell'. I love the integration in all those songs of folk song qualities such as starting the famous opening/title song with "Come gather round people wherever you roam" and North Country Blues with "Come gather round friends and I'll tell you a tale".<br />
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The record sleeve contains no information on the songs, or song lyrics, but Dylan poetry - "11 Outlined Epitaphs". I haven't read it yet. Will let you know when I've done so.<br />
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While listening and relistening to the CD, I renewed my contact with an old acquaintance: a school teacher who supervised my first educational placement when I was about 19 years old. He turns out to be a Dylan fan and sent me a document with some personal remarks combined with prose of writer Martin Bril about his Bob Dylan listening experiences. Just a week ago, a colleague who seems to follow some of my blogging sent me an article from an American newspaper about a speech Dylan recently made, a speech in which he also says things about what he considers his songs to be. I guess my personal Dylan experience will incorporate Ed and Hein in this ever-changing amalgam of my listening biography, which may make my musical behavior maybe a little bit understandable by hindsight but completely unpredictable future-wise.Evert Bisschop Boelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13102602767225188146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6394402899500739672.post-53851967074831473392014-10-09T07:24:00.001-07:002014-10-09T07:24:49.839-07:002. The Freewheelin' Bob DylanI must have listened to 'The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan' over a twenty times now. Is that much? I remember playing the white and the black Queen LPs every other day when I was 15 or 16, I must have heard them at least a hundred times, all in all.<br />
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But still. This second Dylan album to me sounds enormously matured since the first one. Starting off with 'Blowin' in the Wind', that anthem, at the age of 21 of course is incredible. But the second song is 'Girl From the North Country' - Scarborough Fair, yes; it shows how Dylan uses existing songs and tunes to make new repertoire, standing in a folk song tradition which makes ideas of copyright and plagiarism simply ridiculous (and, by the way, is a very living phenomenon if only you think of the birthday parties where new texts are sung to existing melodies). But also a simply beautiful song. Followed by 'Masters of War', about which I wrote <a href="http://evertsworldofmusic.blogspot.nl/2014/09/hearing-joan-baez-sing-dont-think-twice.html">earlier</a> about it, in connection to 'Don't Think Twice, It's alright', also appearing on this album.<br />
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You see how tempting it is to write about all the songs on the album. I am not going to do that. But I want to point out a couple of things. For example that the guitar still is very untuned, occasionally - check out 'Down the Highway' or 'Oxford Town'. As I wrote before, I like that untuned guitar. Or that there is a quasi-'unbalance' in many of his songs; it is often unpredictable how many bars a sentence exactly is going to have, and within a song the same line my be fluid in that respect in different verses. I imagine playing with him, and the flexibility you would need to stay 'in form' with him. The same for 'A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall', where you never know how many sentences there will be in each verse. In that song, he daringly writes verses without rhyme; that is to say: there are no rhyming syllables at the end of sentences (or halfway, for that matter), but rhyme is there in alliteration and especially in the (sometimes very biblical) images and metaphors he u<span style="font-family: inherit;">ses<span style="background-color: white;">:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="text-align: center;"><br /></span></span></span>
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="text-align: center;">"I met a young child beside a dead pony</span></span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-align: center;">I met a white man who walked a black dog</span><br style="border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center;" /><span style="text-align: center;">I met a young woman whose body was burning</span><br style="border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center;" /><span style="text-align: center;">I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow</span><br style="border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center;" /><span style="text-align: center;">I met one man who was wounded in love</span><br style="border: 0px none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center;" /><span style="text-align: center;">I met another man who was wounded in hatred"</span></span></span><div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-align: center;">Would you dare to write song lyrics like this? I wouldn't.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-align: center;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-align: center;">And that is another thing to point out: the anger and fear in this album, connected to war, to violence, to the threat of nuclear disaster. To me that is still very imaginable, to the point of re-feeling what I felt a long time ago; having nightmare-ish dreams about nuclear explosions in the 1970s and participating in anti-atomic warcraft demonstrations in the 1980s, all part of a very palpable anger and fear of this lovely but also monstrous world we live in. And although later my connection to those kinds of pacifism dwindled so much that I only really became aware of the horror of the post-Yugoslav wars of the 1990s when I started to visit Sarajevo around 2010 (shame on me), in the days we live in now, with wars and violence raging in the middle east, Ukraine, and many many other places, anger and fear are as present, I guess, as they were in the early 1960s when Dylan wished for the death of the 'Masters of War'.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">There are two songs I particularly love, probably </span>because<span style="font-family: inherit;"> I am basically a romantic-emotional old sod. The first one is 'Bob Dylan's Dream', about his friends of past times and the innocence of all that:</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"And our choices there was few</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-align: center;">so the thought never hit </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-align: center;">that the one road we traveled </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-align: center;">would ever shatter or split."</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="text-align: center;">The other one is the lovely 'Corinna, Corinna'. The first song with a band, I believe. A cover. And a real beauty.</span></span></span></div>
Evert Bisschop Boelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13102602767225188146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6394402899500739672.post-41324973702446028192014-08-20T13:01:00.001-07:002014-08-25T12:22:46.596-07:001b. Bob Dylan - part twoI am looking forward to hear the second CD in the collection, <i>The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan</i> with the iconic record sleeve and the even more iconic 'Blowin' in the Wind' as its first song. But I have forbidden myself to listen to a new CD when I have not yet finished writing about the old one, so I have to wait a bit. A waiting that, as always in such cases, reminds me of the verdict (was it Norbert Elias?) that culture basically is the postponement of satisfying one's needs - something I guess children need to be trained in: not only do they, aged nine, want to become a DJ once they have discovered there exists something like a DJ mix set, they also want to buy the set tomorrow.<br />
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But anyway.<br />
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I find myself also becoming a bit tired with listening to the first album. I don't know why - it is nice enough, inspiring enough, with enough variation to keep listening to it every now and again, I guess. But still, I feel I want to listen to the next record. Is it because of that deeply human (or western?) <a href="http://evertsworldofmusic.blogspot.nl/2012/01/why-do-we-want-to-become-ever-better.html">need for progress</a> - the trait of not being satisfied with playing three chords on the guitar if it would also be possible to play four? And then wanting to learn the fifth chord too? One of my dreams is to live in a simple house and sit on a simple chair and be satisfied with that, rather than longing for another kind of chair or fantasizing about another place where the simple house could stand. I am not sure if I will ever reach even a tenth of this Buddhist level of satisfaction. But I promise I'll keep trying (a true Buddhist would tell me that it is exactly the trying that stands in my way, of course).<br />
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But anyway.<br />
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What I wanted to write about <i>Bob Dylan</i>. That I like Dylan's guitar playing here, which is very functional, even when the guitar is slightly out of tune or when there is an occasional mistake (great to hear a mistake on a record - Sounes' biography learned me that Dylan usually did not rehearse with his bands but just wanted them to play along as he went and often was satisfied with the first take of a new song). That I hear some of Dylan's later voice foreshadowed in this album - the way he pronounces "dove" in the sentence "a lady like a dove" in 'Pretty Peggy-O' (a song which is very much an English ballad - I even know one or two Dutch equivalents to the song, content-wise). That I hear the famous 'Beatle-chord' in 'Baby Let Me Follow You Down'. That Dylan's control of voice in his version of 'House of the Rising Sun' (the version that has become the standard - listen to the very different version of Woody Guthrie <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlbLs_bvimU">here</a> - it reminds me slightly of the famous song John Henry, which I know from a very old recording (not available on YouTube, I guess) I used when I was teaching music in a secondary school) is stunning to me, as is his control of voice (falsetto!) in 'Freight Train Blues'. That 'Man of Constant Sorrow' reminds me, of course, of the Coen-movie <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIKz1phnuCc">Oh Brother, Where Art Thou</a></i> (receiving a Grammy for its soundtrack -check out 'Man of Constant Sorrow' live by Alison Krauss and Unions Station <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-C_HVoiJpY">here</a> from 2.40, but also look at the start of the clip and check out Krauss with Emmylou Harris and my favorite female American singer Gillian Welch in the middle - and if you like it, check out the Down from the Mountain-concert with live performances of the music from the movie; which then might lead me to refer you to Dolly Parton's the Grass is Blue album, et cetera). That the title of 'Fixin' To Die' reminds me of the 'Fixin' to Die Rag' - in my mind is the idea that the 'Fixin' to Die Rag' was played on the Woodstock Festival (where Dylan was very absent) but I am too lazy to check this idea or to listen to the song. And so on, and so forth (a saying which reminds me of Wilco's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYGsBVZsJis">Dawned on me</a> again because they use it in a song...).<br />
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And what comes to mind also: that Dylan, a Jewish boy, sings a traditional repertoire in which religion, God and Jesus are present in every song, sometimes in every verse, in an often very moving way. It's the same with the Cash repertoire, maybe with American repertoire in general - maybe the very fact of singing this repertoire for decades eventually ripens the soul for a conversion to Christianity?<br />
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And now I can finally start listening to<i> The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan</i>.Evert Bisschop Boelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13102602767225188146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6394402899500739672.post-67222499209547266992014-08-15T01:20:00.001-07:002014-08-15T01:20:58.724-07:001. Bob Dylan - part one<br />
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So I read <a href="http://www.howardsounes.com/pages/books/down_the_highway/intro.htm">Dylan's biography by Howard Sounes</a>, and have been hesitant to start this little piece about Dylan's first LP, simply called <i>Bob Dylan</i>. I am not sure if both are related. From Sounes' biography I learned that Dylan is a not-always-nice and intriguing person. From listening to Dylan's first album I learned he was, at age 20-or-so, already an intriguing singer.<br />
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It is tempting to listen to this first recording in the light of his later biography. It is also tempting for me not wanting to do that; wanting to write a review as if I was living in 1962. Trying to relive the 'authentic experience' of 1962. Nót taking into account (my knowledge of) his later work.<br />
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But I am not going to strive for such an 'authentic' review, ignoring what I have learned from 1962 onwards (I was born in 1964, by the way). In the first place because that is, of course, impossible anyway. When I write, I write now. But also because the point of this blog is not to write 'authentic' reviews - if you want them authentic, search the web for reviews written in 1962 (but be aware that you will not be able to read them in 1962...). The point of this blog is to trace what listening to Dylan, here and now, brings me. The fact that I listen chronologically to Dylan's albums is not very meaningful - I could have chosen listening alphabetically (starting with his 1964 album <i>Another Side of Bob Dylan</i>) or by color (starting with his 1988 <i>Down in the Groove </i>with a nearly all-black sleeve).<br />
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Listening is a 'reflexive' activity - while listening your complete biography (your listening biography, your wider musical biography, your even wider general biography) comes into play continuously. Listening to music is a constant - if often implicit - way of shaping and reshaping your life history. That might be the reason why it is so important to so many people. And that is why I feel free to write in any which way about me listening to Dylan's <i>The Complete Album Collection; Vol. 1</i>.<br />
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So there we go. I listened to <i>Bob Dylan</i> at home, in the car, on a camping; mostly at night, on headphones often. The album very much is a singer-songwriter album - more singer than songwriter, I would say, as most of the material is 'traditional' (aka 'author unknown') or written by other musicians. Dylan wrote only two songs himself: 'Talkin' New York' and 'Song to Woody'. 'Talkin' New York' describes his experience of coming to New York (and leaving again); it is more spoken than sung (hence the 'talkin'...' - it stands in a tradition of 'talkin'...'-songs), and contains the line "You sound like a hillbilly, we want folk singers here", spoken to Dylan by one of the folk revival's bigger shots, reminding me of the endless discussions about what is folk music and what is not in the Dutch (Frisian, to be precise) folk music scene of the late seventies and early eighties I was part of. Defining 'your' area; drawing the demarcation lines; picturing the musical 'others'; trying to find your place in a musical world inhabited by heroes (<a href="http://www.nanne-ankie.nl/Nanne-Ankie/Engels.html">Nanne Kalma</a>, <a href="http://www.doedeveeman.nl/">Doede Veeman </a>at that time) as well as enemies; music is not only the realm of the beautiful, it is full raging war sometimes and often, at least, a form of cold war.<br />
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The other song 'in his own write' (the title of a small amusing book written by John Lennon) is a tribute to Woody Guthrie, Dylan's hero of that time. Guthrie already was very ill by then; Dylan went to see him and claimed that he and Guthrie became kind of friends (the record sleeve talks of "a deep friendship between the two"), but Sounes makes it reasonably clear that this may be a bit of fabrication by Dylan - Guthrie at that time did not recognize even good friends like Pete Seeger anymore, so why would he recognize a young Dylan?<br />
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But 'Song to Woody' is a beautiful song. It borrows the melody of a Guthrie song ('<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz7oguguIZE">1913 Massacre</a>'), borrowing - as I learnt from Sounes - becoming one of the hallmarks of Dylan's work; he uses fragments of melodies, fragments of lyrics from others freely to write his own songs; which of course lead to allegations of plagiarism but I like Sounes' standpoint in that respect, viz. that Dylan's origin as a singer-songwriter in the domain of 'traditional' American songs explains this way of constantly reworking the tradition you stand in (a very 'biographical' form of songwriting, if you want) and that therefore any reproach of plagiarism (check my other weblog <a href="http://www.evertsworldofmusic.blogspot.com/">Everts World of Music</a> for some older thoughts on it <a href="http://www.evertsworldofmusic.blogspot.nl/2011/12/i-have-theory-which-is-my-theory-which.html#more">here </a>and <a href="http://evertsworldofmusic.blogspot.nl/2012/03/plagiarism-revisited.html">here</a>) falls short and ignores the nature of how new music constantly trickles out of older music. (Plagiarism is by the way a concept that only works if you accept that the music world is a world defined by the laws of the market economy and by a strict definition of 'ownership' (intellectual or otherwise) - I guess Dylan is one-foot-in (in very firmly, I admit) and one-foot-out of this definition of reality.)<br />
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'Song to Woody' reminds me, of course, of Guthrie himself. It also reminds me of the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnbP34rQwQA">Billy Bragg/Wilco-project</a> in which they put, helped by Woody's daughter Nora Guthrie, existing lyrics from Guthrie's inheritance to new music. I got into it because I knew Billy Bragg and started listening to the great CD <i>Mermaid Avenue</i> (<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohP8wJ_AhXo">also featuring Natalie Merchant</a>, former singer of 10.000 Maniacs and having made the great CD <i>Tigerlily </i>as well as a later intriguing project of children's songs and lullabies), which then led me to appreciate the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cpe_AYaIDSc">Wilco </a>part of the CD better than the Bragg-part and getting me hooked on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnbP34rQwQA">the voice of Wilco's singer Jeff Tweedy</a> (the Wilco concert I attended much later in Groningen is still one of the best concerts I ever heard; the best one being a concert by the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBEi5mDHwqI">Dave Rawlings Machine</a>). And 'Song to Woody' also reminds me, because of the line ending with "...and peasants and princes and kings", of the work of singer-songwriter <a href="http://www.dannyschmidt.com/">Danny Schmidt</a>, whom I also heard in Groningen at the Take Root-festival and, a week later, again together with about 30 other listeners in a very small cafe in the very small village of Spijkerboor, where I again was very impressed with the lyrics of Danny's great song '<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7lTPyoHA5w">Stained Glass</a>'.<br />
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It is telling that I start talking about Dylan's first album focusing on the songs he wrote himself rather than on his 're-songs' (a term I prefer over 'covers' - a cover points to much to the original, a 're-song', I hope, to the act of singing an (existing) song).<br />
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It is also telling that this first blog entry on Dylan's albums tends to get longer and longer as I write. So time to quit for now, and come back on the rest of <i>Bob Dylan</i> in a next blog entry.Evert Bisschop Boelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13102602767225188146noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6394402899500739672.post-79360822326509068932014-07-30T13:39:00.000-07:002014-08-04T02:43:20.491-07:00Dylan 0: RationaleI can't remember the first time I heard Bob Dylan. He must have been on the radio since I was a baby - he started recording in 1961 at the age of 20. I was born in 1964.<br />
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I must have learned to play simple Dylan songs (which don't exist, really) when I was learning the guitar at age 12 or 13. I remember my guitar teacher not only taught me classical guitar (Emilio Pujol, Matteo Carcassi) but also liked to teach me playing chords. I remember one of the first songs I learned was the Stones' "My Sweet Lady Jane", but I guess "Blowing in the Wind" was part of the package too. I should look it up in the old guitar lessons notebooks I may still have in a box somewhere. I remember the teacher often used a red pencil to write with.<br />
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I am quite sure some of Dylan's songs were part and parcel of the alternative youth 'gang' I was part of at secondary school, from age 15 to 18. At the same time I was playing in the folk music scene, and Dylan's songs were played (as covers, sometimes in translation) often. I have heard many of his songs at that time without realizing they were written by him, actually.<br />
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Then there is a lengthy period of which I don't remember hearing too much of or about Dylan. At some point - but maybe that was earlier - he was converted to Christianity. I remember looking at it with wonder and a slight feeling of disgust. At those times, Christianity for me and many in my my circles was the equivalent of bourgeois, something you were because the neighbors were it too - because you ought to be a Christian, not because you really wanted it; unless what you really wanted was being just like the neighbors, of course. It didn't cross my mind, at that time (although I read everything Dutch author Gerard Reve, a converted Catholic, wrote, so I might have known better), that it might be possible to become a Christian in spite of all the bourgeois humbug and organized slickness around it, because a specific deep inner question can only - and therefore must - be answered in a religious way.<br />
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About two years ago I bought, for a reason I can't remember anymore, a double CD called "The Essential Bob Dylan". I became totally hooked, without knowing why.<br />
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Recently I turned 50 and some people gave me money. Enough to buy "Bob Dylan, The Complete Album Collection; Volume 1". And I decided to listen to it chronologically, and write a blog entry after listening to each of the 45 albums. I am not doing that because I am a huge fan of Dylan - fan in the sense that I want to know everything about him, that I want to visit all his concerts (but if the chance is there I will visit one), that I want to talk about him for hours, that I want to understand precisely all his lyrics, that I want to know everything about his biography... No fan.<br />
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I want to write this blog because I am fascinated by music, and researching it professionally. My research is basically about the question why people do with music what they do with music - whatever it is they do. To find that out I interview lots of people about their musical lives, and am continuously observing. I try to understand what makes them tick, musically.<br />
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But that feels sort of out-of-balance, and unfair in a way. I want to understand others, but I do that on the basis of my personal fascination for music. So I feel I owe it to the people I talk with, look at and write about in public to do something in return: not only to write about them, but also about myself. Not only about what makes other people's lives musical, but also about what makes my life musical.<br />
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So that is what this blog is about: about what I encounter when I listen to Bob Dylan's records. How do I listen to it? How do I react? How do I connect it, in my mind - often sub- or half-consciously - to my own musical past, my musical present, my musical future - to my own musical biography? And will that, in the end, shed some light on the question why I like "The Essential Bob Dylan" so much? And why I like the Beatles, Beethoven, Indian music, fado, the kora and the 'ud; and how and why I have been drawn into American music those past five years?<br />
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This blog will be an exercise in writing about my own musical life, with listening to Dylan's records as a catalyst (an excuse, if you want). It will also be an exercise in writing about myself - in "auto-ethnography" or "auto-ethnomusicology" if you like, something I do not like too much in others but something I feel compelled to do myself now, given the direction my life as a researching ethnomusicologist is taking at present.<br />
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To finish: this blog is not a review of the 45 records in the Dylan-collection. I am not going to be posing as a specialist. I will read a biography of Dylan, and I will read some of his own literary work, but just because I would do that anyway (I come to like biographies more and more, the past few years, I notice). The blog will (after this entry) contain at least 45 entries, maybe more because I guess I will at times feel the need to write a short 'intermission'.<br />
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I hope some of you will like some of this blog. I do, already now; I am looking forward to find out about my musical self in a quasi-organized way, this next two years or so.Evert Bisschop Boelehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13102602767225188146noreply@blogger.com0