I just drove through the country listening to “Mr. Tambourine Man” and a few other Dylan songs. No one, no one, has ever written songs like those. At the same time these songs were recorded Coltrane was opening the sky with new jazz. Is there anything that matches what these guys were doing out there today? I would truly like to know.

I like a good long Dylan thread, too.

Jim--I like Bruce, also, although the idea of preferring him to Dylan is ludicrous to me. I think the Boss would find it ludicrous himself. On Greetings from Asbury Park, in particular--a record I like a lot--he is quite clearly Dylan-besotted; he has admitted as much. I like the story that when they first met, a moment captured in a photograph, Dylan intimidated Springsteen by saying, "So. I hear you're the new me..."

I'd put Springsteen, maybe, in my personal second-tier of great song-poets. With those in my first tier--Richard Thompson, PJ Harvey, Tom Waits, Shane MacGowan, plenty of others--I sometimes get to thinking, Yeah, that's as good as a Dylan song. But then I put on a Dylan record and realize otherwise, thinking, Nobody's ever written a song that good... And THEN, sometimes, a better one comes on later on the record...

With regard to the perceived drop-off in Dylan's work after the golden 60s period (yeah, sure, but all of Blood on the Tracks, most of Desire, half of Infidels, a lot of the miraculous 90s-00s trilogy... Not to mention what the Basement Tapes and the Bootleg Series reveal about how much incredible stuff he wasn't even putting out)... That same Bruce Springsteen has talked often about how the difference is only significant because of the titanic strength of the earlier work. Any of Dylan's "lesser albums," he has opined, would have been hailed as the work of the "New Dylan" if it hadn't had the misfortune of being released by the old one...

Can we talk about Robbie's solo work, too? Maybe not a great album yet, but not a terrible one either--and the first two had some great stuff on...

Tambourine Man


His hair a thicket, voice a rasping saw
cutting through cant and conscience’s decay —
my scruffy hero channelled youth’s dismay
and changed the world in 1964.
His music called to me: I heard with awe
wild songs — they wheeled and soared above the day
then swooping drove indifference away.
Glad to be young I stood at heaven’s door.

He calls again, and how can I resist
a ragged clown behind a reverie
still chasing wraiths within the day’s fey mist?
It’s darker now: I cannot sense or see
a way ahead but I can dance. Hey! Mist-
-er Tambourine Man, play a song for me.

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Simon, I've regained my senses (they get swept away often) and believe, too, that Dylan is the inspiration for Springsteen and that Dylan's genius is unmatched. I think that James, too, is right to point out that Allen Ginsberg called him (Dylan) a vessel. A messenger. And because of that, I believe we are all going somewhere from here — Which brings me to one of my all-time favorite Dylan songs:

https://youtu.be/5TLDddUBrXc
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David, I like your poem very much...

Simon, you're right about half of Infidels - if only Bob had decided to substitute 'Blind Willie McTell' and 'Foot of Pride' for a couple of the weaker tracks, then we would have had a great album indeed. It's the same for Shot of Love - why Dylan left 'Caribbean Wind' and the breathtaking 'Angelina' off this album I will never understand. Thank god for the bootleg series.

Oh, Mercy ain't bad either, although it could have used something to clear out a little bit of the Daniel Lanois.

I hear ya. There’s a dark, brooding, atmospheric sound on that album that can wear you down after a while. New Orleans cemetery at night. But I must say, I love the chapter Dylan devotes to the making of this album in Chronicles. Whether it’s truth or fiction, who cares. It’s Dylan.

I always think New Morning is a very underrated album. I much prefer it to Nashville Skyline, in terms of Dylan's brief 'contented country boy' phase. It's chockful of charms and quirkiness. 'Winterlude' and 'Sign on the Window' never fail to raise both a smile and a lump in the throat.

Ha. I LOVE Nashville Skyline, although I know I probably shouldn't. It's just so FUNNY. And it suits my attention span.

Oh yeah, it is a lot of fun. Especially 'Country Pie'!

Heard him do "Country Pie" live in 2000, a rare airing for that song. The crowd responded very enthusiastically, and he said something about how we seemed to be "a lot of hungry people out there." 27 minutes, including a silly song about pie, an instrumental, and a Johnny Cash duet. Nashville Skyline!

Haha. Yes, it certainly breezes by! There’s some lovely classic sounding country on there, and Bob’s voice sounding like the contented cat who got the cream.

Thanks, Damian.
I wrote it for his 60th birthday, so that's going back a while.

For contemporary music, I like EDM, specifically house or progressive house at 180 bpm. It's exhilarating, motivating music. It makes me want to run forever, and it makes me want to study.

Nashville Skyline is a nice little detour after the wild mercury sound of 1965-66. But it was probably coming, if you listen to The Basement Tapes and the last few songs off John Wesley Harding. I like New Morning too Mark, particularly the first 3 or 4 songs and most of all 'The Man in Me'. Btw, it's rumoured that 'Went to See the Gypsy' is about Dylan meeting Elvis.

He does use the male pronoun in "Gypsy."

Went to See the Gypsy

Went to see the gypsy
Stayin' in a big hotel
He smiled when he saw me coming
And he said, "Well, well, well"
His room was dark and crowded
Lights were low and dim
"How are you?" he said to me
I said it back to him

I went down to the lobby
To make a small call out
A pretty dancing girl was there
And she began to shout
"Go on back to see the gypsy
He can move you from the rear
Drive you from your fear
Bring you through the mirror
He did it in Las Vegas
And he can do it here"

Outside the lights were shining
On the river of tears
I watched them from the distance
With music in my ears

I went back to see the gypsy
It was nearly early dawn
The gypsy's door was open wide
But the gypsy was gone
And that pretty dancing girl
She could not be found
So I watched that sun come rising
From that little Minnesota town
From that little Minnesota town

Another famous son of Hibbing: Roger Maris was born there but grew up in Fargo.

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Tim: Another famous son of Hibbing: Roger Maris was born there but grew up in Fargo


Now you've gone too far...

But since you did — BD would be the perfect troubadour to craft The Ballad of Roger and Mickey.
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I believe that should be The Ballad of Roger* and Mickey

According to Wikipedia, there is no asterisk after his name, but he still hasn't been elected to the HOF. And according to "Chronicles," a producer did urge Dylan to write a song about a baseball player, but Dylan said that he had no interest in the players or game. When is Volume 2 coming out?

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Tim: I believe that should be The Ballad of Roger* and Mickey


Ha! He's something of a tragic figure isn't he? Shame of Dylan for not seeing the allegorical possibilities that baseball affords those who know the game.
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Dylan does have a song about Catfish Hunter...

Yes! Nobody can throw the ball like Catfish can. Apparently. I wouldn’t know.

Good get Simon. He certainly does. 'Catfish' was written mid-70s (with Jaques Levy I think) in the Desire sessions. It appears on the Bootleg Series volume 1-3. I think Joe Cocker might have also covered it.

Tim, re Chronicle Volume 2, I'm wondering if it will ever see the light of the day now - it's been over 15 years since Volume 1. It might even be a hoax. Chronicles Volume 1 (and nearly all Dylan's songs from 1997 onwards) are collages of other people's words. He's been very tricky. It's a fascinating study. There's websites and blogs dedicated to all these games Dylan has been playing. A brilliant sleuth named Scott Warmuth is at the forefront.

Does anybody else remember the story told somewhere around here by another son of Hibbing, our late Tim Murphy, where he was babysat as a wee boy by "the Zimmerman kid" who sang a lot? Something like that, anyway...

Damien, in Volume 1 he could get apocalyptic with his prose, as he did in his response to Robert Johnson. I didn't know that parts of it may have been borrowed. I had heard that some of his lyrics had been purloined from Mark Twain and others, but I don't know the percentage. I think it's pretty small. I'll have to look up Scott Warmuth. And Tim Murphy too.


Jim, I'll always remember Thomas Wolfe's description of a baseball park: "The velvet geometry of the playing field." I love Thomas Wolfe. Not "Look Homeward, Angel" as much as the other three--"Of Time and the River," "The Web and the Rock," and "You Can't Go Home Again." He wrote prose poetry of the highest order. And most of it's in iambics.

Simon, I would love to hear that Tim Murphy story too. I wasn't aware of that. I've read that Dylan isn't revered much in Hibbing - there's a book called 'The Dylanolgists' by David Kinney, which goes into detail about this.

Tim, I love how Dylan does all this borrowing - he's obviously doing it because he knows people obsess over his every word - it's a cat and mouse game. It's an endless task to track down all the sources, but lyrics from Time Out of Mind, “Love & Theft” and Modern Times borrow heavily from American Civil War poet Henry Timrod, Ovid, Mark Twain, contemporary singer-songwriter Henry Rollins, and perhaps most surprisingly of all, an obscure Japanese novel “Confessions of a Yakuza” by Junichi Saga. The memoir Chronicles has lines lifted from amongst others, Proust, London, Stevenson, Hemingway, Wells, Wolfe and Time Magazine not to mention his Nobel lecture which sources SparkNotes (the online equivalent of CliffNotes). I reckon Bob's having a laugh at our expense with all this.

https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showt...ight=zimmerman

And the actual anecdote appears in this one...

https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/searc...earchid=481107

https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showthread.php?t=27031

Annie, your second link didn't seem to work. I think this is it.

Tim's story is post #29. This was quite a thread...

We're talking too much. One of my favorites, from No Direction Home (and how alive and vivid the video is, though unfortunately it's not the whole performance).

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=flGpGD0ePMM

Speaking of storytellers...Timothy Murphy was known to exaggerate a detail or two here and there, in order to make an anecdote more compelling. Just sayin'.

I hear ya Julie. I reckon Timothy might have been pulling our legs - mind you, I'd be saying the same thing if I grew up in the same town as Dylan. Interesting that Timothy says he considers Dylan the greatest artist of our times - high praise indeed.

That's a great clip James. The energy. He launches into a venomous version of 'Like A Rolling Stone' a bit later on in the film. I think the hecklers were starting to get to him.

Damien, according to Warmuth, he engaged in wholesale theft. But his aim, I think, was to mystify, not to steal. This is a guy who's read everything and remembers what he read. Then he called upon all of his resources when he slapped the book together. As you said, it was a big con, a joke. Dylan is the last guy who would write a legitimate autobiography.

And he just walked along the road
With his guilt so well concealed
And muttered underneath his breath
'Nothing is revealed.'

"Mystify" is a good way to phrase it, Tim. I was surpised that Warmuth came to the conclusion that it was "stealing". I think "intertextuality" is a better way to describe it - in some weird way Dylan's paying homage to a lot of the texts he loves in a rootin' tootin' way. I think with the title of "Love and Theft" he's even letting us in on the secret. A lot of the melodies from this point in time in Dylan's career are also borrowed - including almost the entire album Modern Times.
The funny thing about Chronicles is that all the "stolen" paragraphs hang together in such a freewheelin', Dylanlesque kind of way. I love rereading that book. Maybe Chronicles: Volume 2 is already in there within the layers of Chronicles: Volume 1 and that is part of the con.

No, Warmuth never uses the word "stealing" and never implies that Dylan was involved in plagiarism. Rather, he sees Dylan as a magician who created the illusion of a life story from dozens of other lives. Warmuth, as you say, is a brilliant investigator.

Sometimes, I wonder if all this hullabaloo about Dylan's "sourcing" is the real reason we haven't see Chronicles: Volume 2. Perhaps the book is indeed complete, but the editors, the lawyers and the powers-that-be at Simon and Schuster are going through it with a fine tooth comb, to make sure they are protected from any prospective legal claim for plagiarism.

They weren't aware of Dylan's "work habits" the first time around.

Yes, that's possible, but I don't think we'll see a second volume. I think he took a lot of raw notes for the first volume, expecting to convert them into his own sentences, but then just left them as they were, without attribution. Who knows why? Maybe, to quote William Logan's judgement of Robert Lowell, "He had the arrogance of a writer who carelessly seized whatever he needed." For a cut-and-paste job, it was very well done. Seamless.

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This seems to belong here. Iggy Pop’s recitation of Lou Reed’s We Are The People (Leron Thomas on trumpet)

https://youtu.be/Yd7Pughcb_4
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From New York in the '70s and '80s, I'd take The Ramones and The Jim Carroll Band.