[Tim McGrath]

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?

[Jim Moonan]

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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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[Simon Hunt]

Dylan does have a song about Catfish Hunter...

[Mark McDonnell]

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

[Damian Balassone]

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.

[Simon Hunt]

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...

[Tim McGrath]

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.

[Damian Balassone]

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.

[Ann Drysdale]

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

And the actual anecdote appears in this one...

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

[Mark McDonnell]

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...