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interesteddad, there was a recording technician guy in the Dylan bio, saying jovially that of COURSE Dylan couldn’t help it and couldn’t explain it: God had kicked him in the butt and put the holy spirit in him and he just had to let it out.</p>
<p>That particular explanation doesn’t resonate for me, but it surely indicates that even some of the folks who were there at the time recognized Dylan’s prolific creativity as the inexplicable meteor you suggest.</p>
<p>Interesteddad:</p>
<p>I loved the bio, too. It’s hard to believe that all this great songwriting came out of a 21 year old. I got a kick out of listening to Dylan handle inane questions from the press. I’ve heard writers just as inarticulate (or merely unforthcoming?) about their writing.</p>
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<p>Reporter: Do you consider yourself a musician who writes poetry or a poet who writes music?</p>
<p>Dylan: I consider myself a song and dance man.</p>
<p>I also liked the film a lot. I kept humming along with the songs, and at one point I remarked that back in high school I had spent many hours alone in my room listening to Bob Dylan albums. This made my 14 year-old laugh – but I’m not sure whether that was because Dylan’s music didn’t strike her as worthy of that much attention, or because she couldn’t imagine her old middle-aged dad as a teenager obsessing over rock music, or both.</p>
<p>Well, my young guest laughed as we old foggies hummed along and reminisced about the occasions when a particular song had played a major role in our lives (It Ain’t Me Babe got played constantly the year my H’s roommate broke up with his GF).</p>
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<p>The version that Jimi Hendrix played in his first US concert at the Monterrey Pop Festival is spellbinding. Basically just solo guitar and voice. You can tell that Dylan had a big impact on him. In a circular sort of way, I think that that the amped-up Hendrix covers of Dylan songs had an impact on Dylan’s performances. He closed with a very hard rock version “Like a Rolling Stone” as his encore on his first tour with the Band after eight years hiatus in 1974. I can still vividly recall walking out of the Spectrum in Philadelphia and not being able to get that song of my head for days.</p>
<p>I didn’t really “get” Bob Dylan until I saw him live for the first time. As good as his records may be, he never really put much effort into them. His real strength has always been as a live performer.</p>
<p>mootmom: I thought the quote about God kicking Dylan in the butt was the most memorable quote of the whole documentary.</p>
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<p>My daughter came home from college last Christmas and uploaded all the Dylan Greatest Hits CDs to her computer. I guess Dylan is popular again at Swarthmore. What goes around comes around. Swarthmore had big “beat” crowd in the late 50’s, early 60s, so I imagine that Dylan’s early albums were all the rage.</p>
<p><em>stares, stupefied, in awe at what you folks KNOW about music … hesitate to use the word, but consider it in its most exalted sense … trivia</em></p>
<p>I can recall the words to just about any song from my … er… extensive lifetime, but the who, when, what, how many hits? </p>
<p>Wow</p>
<p>Technically, “The Looking Glass” had a second hit with “Jimmy Loves Mary Anne.” It peaked at #28 in the charts.</p>
<p>More on Dylan and the history of artists who misbehave…</p>
<p>In 1922, modern dancer, Isadora Duncan, began a tour with her husband, Russian poet, Sergei Esenin. Amidst widespread anti-Communist hysteria in the United States, she performed in Boston, beseeching a highly conservative audience, “You were once wild here, don’t let them tame you!” When she waved a red scarf and bared her breast, declaring, “Nudity is truth, it is beauty, it is art!” the audience fled the hall. Nothing like a little post-Red Scare, post-Bolshevik Revolution ranting to scare the Holy Crap out of an audience. Okay, that goes on my list of balls-to-the-walls, fearless, crazy things to do in the name of Art. ;)</p>
<p>Another one was Bob Dylan’s Manchester’s Free Trade Hall performance (a.k.a., The Royal Albert Hall Concert) with the Hawks in 1966. Just before the last number of the infamous second set, a furious fan blurted out, “Judas!” Dylan replied, “I don’t believe you!” He then turned to the band and snarled, “Play fu**ing loud!” Electrically fused and infuriated by sneers from the audience, Dylan and the Hawks roared into, “Like A Rolling Stone.” An adrenaline-pumped, testosterone-fueled, 25-year old Bob Dylan aimed his defiant rage at disloyal fans as he shouted out the line, “How does it feee-eel?!”</p>
<p>Absolutely FEARLESS. Martin Scorsese brought it back for one more enjoyable, heart-pounding look. And, this time I noticed that Bob Dylan’s eyes are blue. :)</p>
<p>I wouldn’t underestimate Dylan as a lyricist. He first got me as an angsty adolescent with:</p>
<p>To dance beneath the sky
With one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea
With all Memory and Fate
Driven deep beneath the waves
Let me forget about Today
Until Tomorrow.</p>
<p>But as I got older–and a little less engineerish and a lot more writerish–I started stopping to notice just exactly <em>how</em> he
did some stuff. Mmmph. He can be an amazingly economical
yet complete story teller: there’s a more complete story in
“Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” than there is in many
manuscripts 6,000 words long. And I wish I could come to a
firm opinion about “Changing of the Guard”…wonderful random
phrase juxtapositions and sequences or meaning that I’m not
smart enough to get? Either way, I find it compelling.</p>
<p>Though I still think my mis-hearing of “Tangled Up In Blue,”
“split up on the docks that night” actually works better in
context than “split up on a dark sad night.”</p>
<p>I was on my way home from a date in Dad’s car when “Lily, Rosemarie, and the Jack of Hearts” came on the radio. The song wasn’t over when I got home, so I drove around the block to hear the end of the song. Unfortunately, I scraped a parked car, leaving a four-foot scratch on the side of my father’s car, which he had already contracted to trade in for a new car he had ordered.</p>
<p>But the parked car was a beater whose owner said, “Forget about it,” and the dealer didn’t dock Dad for the scrape.</p>
<p>I didn’t get to hear the end of the song that night, though.</p>
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<p>I thought the footage of Dylan from the electric shows at Newport and with the Hawks communicated how the response really hurt him.</p>
<p>Levon Helm didn’t do the British tour. The response to the handful of US shows was more than he could handle. He didn’t want to get boo’d every night on stage.</p>
<p>He joined back up with the Band when they were all hangin’ out recording with Dylan in the Big Pink house.</p>
<p>And what about Pete Seeger threatening to cut the cables? Wow. How much it must have hurt.</p>
<p>IDad, I agree. I think he was genuinely stung by the audience response at Newport in 1965. Dylan was a star, by that time, and he was gradually changing his image that year, both in his look and in his music. When “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was released as a single in March of '65 (BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME), Dylan was backed by a full band. Record stores were promoting the album with cardboard figures of Bob Dylan holding a Fender Strat, and various rock bands had already recorded some of his songs. In typical Dylan style, he tried to stay ahead of the curve by reintroducing himself and his music. By the time he got back from his tour in England (before he played Newport in July of that year), he was more than a folk singer. He was right up there with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, in terms of rock star status.</p>
<p>Even by today’s standards, Dylan’s handlers launched a pretty impressive marketing attempt to transition Dylan from solo acoustic folk singer to Rock 'N Roll lead singer. But, it wasn’t enough to convince the hardcore folk audience at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965. A crappy sound system would later prompt Pete Seeger’s comment, which was not surprising given Seeger’s early experimentation with electric guitars. He knew that the sound could be cleaned up to improve a singer’s performance, and the backstage panic that ensued during Dylan’s set understandably freaked him out. A seasoned professional and an established star himself, Pete Seeger empathized with Dylan’s painful onstage predicament. </p>
<p>In the 3 minutes it took for Bob Dylan to sing, “Maggie’s Farm,” the audience decided that they did not like what they were hearing. After performing his then current single, “Like A Rolling Stone,” a wounded Dylan walked off stage, followed by Peter Yarrow’s pitiful pleading for him to return and finish the set, which he did with two more songs that were performed alone. Even now, it is utterly painful to watch. </p>
<p>The backlash against Dylan’s electric conversion continued, and later, at Forest Hills in New York, the audience booed throughout the entire electric set. By the time he performed in England the following Spring (May 1966), the Rock vs. Folk argument had reached bitter proportions, leading to a musical fistfight with the audience at the Manchester Free Trade Hall performance in May 1966. A now fed-up and clearly pi<strong>ed off Dylan, back up by equally pi</strong>ed off band members, fired a rifle blast into the hall with a seething version of, “Like A Rolling Stone,” after an angry fan blurted out the incendiary “Judas” remark. Curlytopped, soft-spoken Bob Dylan had had enough. So many bootleg versions of this concert were produced that an official bootleg album was finally released in 1998. </p>
<p>Two months later, he was in a near-fatal motorcycle accident outside of his home in Woodstock. What we saw at the Newport festival was a graceful antelope being taken down by lions. What we saw at the Manchester Hall show was the antelope eating the hyenas. :)</p>
<p>Sorry to hijack the thread, guys. Back to One Hit Wonders! ;)</p>
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<p>The motorcycle accident is widely viewed today to have been an exaggeration – another manufactured story. The best evidence is that Dylan didn’t even go to the hospital until much later.</p>
<p>I think he was just done with touring and with “being Bob Dylan” at that point and the motorcycle accident was a useful ruse for his management team. It didn’t take eight years to recover. Dylan was very active in the recording studio during that period of time.</p>
<p>they werent one hit wonders- but a song played over the intercom at the grocery store last night reminded me how much I used to love these guyshttp://<a href=“http://www.savoybrown.com/index2.html”>www.savoybrown.com/index2.html</a></p>
<p>(anyone going to the house of blues/chicago for the benfit concert Oct 5th?)</p>
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<p>Widely viewed by whom, IDad? Forget it, I’ll take your word for it. Adios.</p>
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<p>He was active in the studio except for a two year gap that happened right after the motorcycle accident. It’s the gap between Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding. The only album released in that gap was a Greatest Hits compilation. Two years is long enough to recover from most motorcycle accidents, so his studio activity is consistent with the motorcycle story.</p>
<p>Coureur:</p>
<p>He spent the summer of '67 recording the Basement tapes.</p>
<p>There are numerous reasons for the scepticism about his “near-fatal” motorcycle accident:</p>
<p>a) The vast majority of stuff Dylan has ever said about his life has been pure fiction.</p>
<p>b) He had tour obligations lined up following his return the '66 British tour and was in no mood to continue touring. The timing of the “motorcycle accident” was convenient.</p>
<p>c) Of all the people who have written and talked about Dylan, I don’t believe anyone has ever mentioned seeing him in any great state of rehabilitation from a “near-fatal” accident. People who knew him in Woodstock express consistent skepticism about the accident – not that he didn’t take a spill, but that he had serious injuries.</p>
<p>Who knows? He devotes exactly one sentence to the event in Chronicles. My attitude is to be skeptical of everything he says about his life. He has a pretty consistent track record leading the media astray.</p>
<p>I don’t recall seeing anyone post this one:</p>
<p>Video Killed the Radio Star - The Buggles</p>
<p>The first video played on MTV.</p>