x
I came across this interview of Dylan with a Time Magazine reporter. It's not the only time I've heard Dylan belligerent. He's barely coherent in his arguments... I don't know... I wonder sometimes...
x
x

If Frost gave a reading in which he read us stuff that wasn't in his books, but it was still poetry that he in his judgment wanted to present, then I would absolutely love to hear it. If Rubinstein played a sonata with an interpretation that was different in some way from his recorded version of the same sonata, I would also love to hear it. Any artist whose performance is pretty much identical to their recording of the same piece is offering no more than a better sound system than most of us have at home. Dylan does not play his songs backwards but reminds us that a good song is not a static thing and can be approached from many different directions, with varying subtexts and tempos and keys. That's why singers often cover songs that have been recorded before, or directors direct plays that have been performed before. Surely there's not just one way to sing every song, even though the singer has to choose just one for the album. Being a "purist" doesn't mean that you will forever insist upon a performance that mirrors the one chosen for the record.

What Roger said.

And also

Ah, Jim. He was barely 24, probably speeding, and brimming with a righteous conviction of his own talent. I follow what he’s saying. When I first saw this documentary in my teens I fell madly in love with him. Ha.

He's 78 now, Mark, and I'll betcha he's still approximately the same ass he was at 20 something. Except at 78 he probably knows not to talk quite so much. Doesn't take away from what he found and gave us. A vessel, Ginsberg described him in that Scorsese documentary. I'll go with that.

My three favorite Dylan albums are "Bringing It All Back Home," "Highway 61 Revisited," and "John Wesley Harding." Every song on those albums is a killer. All killer, no filler. "Blonde on Blonde" has enough great material for a single album, not a double. So it's half killer, half filler. I'm still undecided about "Blood on the Tracks," which puts me in a minority, I know. After this period, when his creativity burned so bright and hot, he seems, as Jim Moonan says, to have lost contact with his muse, although he never dried up completely. Almost every album he's made has at least one masterpiece, from "Song to Woody" in the beginning to the recent "Tempest." Many have two or three or more. But it's true that he never regained the heights that he reached in the '60s. Dylan himself said as much when, speaking about that period, he admitted he had no idea where all those great songs came from. Which is an aspect of true inspiration.

As a Dylan tragic for near on 30 years, am enjoying this thread very much - Tim, Mark, et all, you can keep going on about Bob as much as you like as far as I’m concerned. Favourite albums Tim: I find it hard to go past the 65-66 trilogy (i.e. Bringing, Highway 61, Blonde) and mid 70s resurgence (i.e. Blood, Desire), but a few others that spring to mind are the Complete Basement Tapes (6 CDS of stuff from those 1967 sessions with the Band - just stunning, a great artist at work), Bootleg Series 8 (which covers a fair portion of the latter day Dylan outtakes/rarities i.e. 1989-2006), Modern Times (from 2006) and Infidels (from 1983) - albeit an uneven album but with that enigmatic masterpiece 'Jokerman' nonetheless. I’ve even got an unworthy piece out there somewhere in cyber space that uses the prism of the Joker/Jester/Clown to examine Dylan’s music.

I read an interview the other day. The young woman being interviewed apparently has a novel out that I will never read and I'm sorry to say her name slips me. She was so unpleasant and yes women have the right to be unpleasant but it doesn't work on women any more than it works on men. Anyway, in the course of the interview, she said that she thought Beyonce should have won the Nobel Prize instead of Bob Dylan. I remember my poor, unsainted mother telling me that I was so open-minded my brain had flopped out of my head. Of course, I blew it off, but now I think I'm beginning to understand what she meant.

I was reading closely until beyonce. I couldn't pay attention after that because apparently I had a stroke.

Beyonce has already received the Nobel Prize in physics.

https://humoroutcasts.com/2015/nobel...y-trouble-man/

x
Just to add yet another twist to this thread, I prefer Bruce Springsteen over Bob Dylan. There. I said it. Not Born to Run Springsteen. Nebraska Springsteen. Greetings From Asbury Park Springsteen. Darkness On The Edge Of Town Springsteen. And the storyteller Springsteen.
If it were a matter of being stranded on a deserted island with either Dylan or Springsteen's music, I think I'd go with the Boss.
x
x