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Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Neil Young & The Band in ‘The Alternate Last Waltz’


Japanese cinema poster

I was looking for something else entirely when I stumbled across THIS buried treasure: The Band’s complete “Last Waltz” concert, as shot from what must have been the house cameras at Winterland. The audio and video sound quality is amazing and best of all, this is not only how it went down, in the order that it went down, and it’s actually how it sounded before Robbie Robertson went in and overdubbed everything. (It’s also not had that blob of cocaine hanging from Neil Young’s nose edited out through frame by frame rotoscoping….)

Aside from the opening acts, this is the entire main event. As much as you might love The Last Waltz, this is probably even better.

1. Introduction / Up on Cripple Creek 0:00
2. Shape I’m In 5:55
3. It Makes No Difference 10:15
4. Life Is A Carnival 17:28
5. This Wheel’s On Fire 22:51
6. The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show 27:26
7. Georgia On My Mind 31:20
8. Ophelia 35:05
9. King Harvest (Has Surely Come) 39:18
10. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down 43:26
11. Stage Fright 48:16
12. Rag Mama Rag 53:23
13. Introduction / Who Do You Love (with Ronnie Hawkins) 57:26
14. Such A Night (with Dr. John) 1:02:45
15. Down South in New Orleans (with Dr. John) 1:07:58
16. Mystery Train (with Paul Butterfield) 1:13:23
17. Caledonia (with Muddy Waters) 1:18:27
18. Mannish Boy (with Muddy Waters) 1:26:20
 

 
Part two begins with Eric Clapton coming onstage to join The Band, followed by Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Neil Diamond and Van Morrison and then poetry from Digger Emmett Grogan, Lenore Kandel, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McClure and others.

1. All Our Past Times (with Eric Clapton) 0:00
2. Further On Up The Road (with Eric Clapton) 5:39
3. Helpless (with Neil Young) 11:52
4. Four Strong Winds (with Neil Young) 18:01
5. Coyote (with Joni Mitchell) 23:52
6. Shadows And Light (with Joni Mitchell)
7. Furry Sings The Blues (with Joni Mitchell)
8. Dry Your Eyes (with Neil Diamond)
9. Tura Lura Lural (with Van Morrison) 44:10
10. Caravan (with Van Morrison) 48:15
11. Acadian Driftwood (with Joni Mitchell and Neil Young) 54:07
12. Poem (Emmett Grogan) 1:01:18
13. Poem (Hell’s Angel Sweet William) 1:02:41
14. JOY! (Lenore Kandel) 1:06:14
15. Prologue to The Canterbury Tales (Michael McClure) 1:07:36
16. Get Yer Cut Throat Off My Knife / Revolutionary Letter #4
17. Transgressing The Real (Robert Duncan) 1:10:26
18. Poem (Freewheelin Frank Reynolds)
19. The Lord’s Prayer (Lawrence Ferlinghetti)
20. Genetic Method 1:14:15
21. Chest Fever 1:20:25
22. The Last Waltz Suite: Evangeline 1:25:45
 

 
After the jump, part three has all of the Dylan material, Ringo Starr, and the big jam sessions.

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.02.2019
01:02 pm
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Ratso Has A Record (and a duet with Nick Cave)
04.25.2019
11:13 am
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Portrait of Larry “Ratso” Sloman by William Beaucardet.

What most people dream about, Larry “Ratso” Sloman makes happen. Anyone who’s read Ratso’s first book, 1978’s On The Road With Bob Dylan, has witnessed his epic persistence. A young Rolling Stone reporter in ‘75, he took an invitation from a fueled Bob Dylan to join the tour being convened and he held Dylan to his word. Repeatedly treated as Slo-man on the totem pole by Rolling Thunder Revue functionaries and dubbed “Ratso” by Joan Baez for his slovenly, streetwise demeanor, he refused to give up, eventually melting down in a motel lobby in one of the best scenes in Renaldo and Clara, issuing the righteous demand of “Access!  I want access!”

Access he was given and access he has to this day.

I read On The Road With Bob Dylan close to its pub date in one furious sitting, completely unaware of who this guy Sloman was, but blown away by his chutzpah and ability to describe what it was like to hang with Bob better than any scribe before him. Within a couple weeks of reading it, my pal Kinky Friedman brought an entourage to West Village dive bar Bells Of Hell to see my band Slewfoot. I met Larry Sloman in that crew and a friendship of 41 years followed.   

We went on to edit the National Lampoon together with my brother Andy Simmons in the1980s and have had more adventures than there is room here to recount. (Hey Rats—remember The Babysitter at Baratta’s house in the Hamptons?) In addition to writing bestsellers with Howard Stern, Abbie Hoffman and Houdini biographies, acting/writing/producing movies and sundry side activities like managing strongman Dennis Rogers, the snappy-dressing Ratso decided he wanted to be a rock star. 

And so he is.

At age 70, he’s released his debut album, the appropriately titled Stubborn Heart (Lucky Number), and it’s a dark nocturnal emission—an atmospheric, minor-chord tone poem broken up into nine songs, including co-writes with John Cale. It’s beautifully produced by Vincent Cacchione of Brooklyn band Caged Animals, with guest shots by buddies Nick Cave, Warren Ellis of the Bad Seeds, Leonard Cohen’s collaborator Sharon Robinson and Lebanese chirp Yasmine Hamdan, among others. (Interesting footnote: Cave’s song “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!” was inspired by Ratso’s Houdini bio.) And then there’s his intriguing voice – a talk/sing hybrid strongly reminiscent of Cohen and Dylan – two fellow Jewish mavericks also known for ensuring that miraculous artistry magically materializes.

Like Dylan, like Cohen, Ratso has the poet’s touch. In Cale co-write “Dying On The Vine” (first heard on John’s 1985 album Artificial Intelligence), Ratboy intones: “And I was thinking about my mother/I was thinking about what’s mine/I was living like a Hollywood/But I was dying on the vine.” Note the addition of “a” before the noun “Hollywood.” It’s a savvy – and mysterious—lyrical decision that kicks open doors of potential meaning that would’ve been locked shut had it not been present. What is “a Hollywood”?  I don’t know, but it’s a gift to be forced to think about it. And then there’s the Rat-wit. In the Cave duet “Our Lady Of Light,” he sings of the heroine: “She’ll dance round your shyness, poke fun at your gloom/But you can’t help but smile as she gooses the groom.”

June 12 will see the release of Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story By Martin Scorsese, the latter’s documentary of that fabled tour. Naturally, Ratso is said to be a key talking head in the film. (I know because it’s Ratso who says it.) Fittingly, Stubborn Heart ends with an audacious homage to the man who kickstartled Ratso’s career. His cover of “Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands” works because, like everything he does, he puts a twist on it, spicing up the proceedings by having several sad-eyed lady singers tackle each chorus, culminating with Ruby Friedman emitting the lungpower of a ferocious and fiery tigress.

As we aging freaks become more reliant on prostate medication (something my medical advisor Dr. Sloman keeps me up on), we will need our hearts to be even more stubborn than in our demanding youth, to meet the injustices of aging and to continue to foster creativity as our bodies fail. Ratso has lit one path with his decision to make a record at this point in his life. He’s an inspiration to each individual to decide if and how they’ll follow through for themselves.
 

“Our Lady of Light” with Nick Cave.
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Michael Simmons
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04.25.2019
11:13 am
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Be a fly on the wall when Bob Dylan and Bette Midler went into the studio together, 1975
03.26.2019
08:38 am
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Bob Dylan and Bette Midler recorded together in October 1975 duetting on a cover of “Buckets of Rain” for her Songs for the New Depression album. Dylan apparently also wanted Midler to be a part of his Rolling Thunder Revue. Several years ago, a 27-minute long fly-on-the-wall recording from this session started making the rounds on bootleg sites as part of Bob Dylan New York Sessions 1974-1975.

The original bootlegger says:

“It opens with some upgrades of the original Blood On The Tracks sessions from September 1974, and progresses chronologically through some early Desire sessions, winding up to the main event: almost half an hour of never-heard October 1975 session outtakes of the recording of Bette Midler’s cover of “Buckets Of Rain” with Dylan, which would show up on her Songs For The New Depression album the following January.”

At one point Midler demures saying, “I can’t sing ‘I ain’t no monkey,’” but Dylan gently coaxed her into it.  Moogy Klingman backs them on piano and at one point Dylan sings a full-throated version of Smokey Robinson & The Miracles “You Really Got A Hold On Me” with Midler. The Divine Miss M also dishes on Paul Simon, who she says refuses to speak to her.

“This’ll show him!”

Midler cattily refers to Patti Smith as well, saying “At least I can sing in tune!” What exactly she is referring to here is not spelled out, but in an interview with Barry Miles, Smith tells the story of Midler throwing a beer in her face at a Dylan-related private event in New York around this time. Maybe she saw Patti as competition for Dylan’s affections? (Midler later revealed that she got to “first base” with Dylan in his Cadillac, so perhaps that’s what the remark and the beer incident was all about?)
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.26.2019
08:38 am
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David Lynch sings Bob Dylan
12.06.2018
01:30 pm
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David Lynch’s second solo album, The Big Dream, seems to have made less of a splash than its predecessor, Crazy Clown Time. I have no empirical evidence to support this claim, just the practiced eye of a former record store clerk and lifelong cheapskate.

The Big Dream should not be overlooked, because it includes David Lynch’s reading of “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” by Bob Dylan. You may prefer the Stooges’, the Neville Brothers’, Nina Simone’s, or perhaps even Entombed’s version of Dylan’s take on “Pretty Polly,” but I’m partial to the particular feeling of emptiness Lynch summons.

In the movie David Lynch: The Art Life, the director tells a story about walking out of a Bob Dylan show as an art school freshman in 1964, leading to a bust-up with his roommate Peter Wolf, future singer of the J. Geils Band. As Lynch tells it, back in their room after the concert, Wolf scolded him—“Nobody walks out on Dylan!”—and Lynch responded “I walk out on Dylan—get the fuck outta here!”
 

David Lynch and Scotland’s answer to Bob Dylan, Donovan (via Pinterest)
 
Bob doesn’t appear to have played “The Ballad of Hollis Brown” that night in Boston, but the song, released earlier that year on The Times They Are a-Changin’, is a murder ballad about a man who kills his five children and his wife before turning the shotgun on himself—Dylan’s “Frankie Teardrop.” I suspect Lynch was drawn to “Hollis Brown” as much by the violence in the song and the blankness of the singer’s persona as by the cosmic perspective that appears in the last verse. It’s worth considering that this move to a God’s-eye view of the Wheel of Birth and Death isn’t necessarily redemptive. I take it to mean that a murder–suicide is as natural as the weather.
 
Listen after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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12.06.2018
01:30 pm
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Watch Bob Dylan’s seldom-seem ‘Hard Rain’ TV concert, and the better version that was shelved
04.30.2018
09:52 am
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When Hard Rain, Bob Dylan’s much ballyhooed NBC TV special aired on September 14, 1976, I was nine years old. I’d “discovered” Dylan earlier that year and owned his Greatest Hits album and the single of “Tangled Up in Blue,” which I thought was the greatest song ever recorded. I eagerly anticipated the night that a Hard Rain was a-gonna be broadcast.

However, Hard Rain just perplexed me. I was expecting something more… well, professional, I suppose, and this was really loose and informal, the exact opposite of a slick rock show. I couldn’t understand why he didn’t play his songs the “right way.”

I’d also been reading about how the Rolling Thunder Revue tour was supposed to have all of this crackling, joyous onstage energy and musical camaraderie among the musicians (Joan Baez, T-Bone Burnett, David Mansfield, Gary Burke, Roger McGuinn, Bob Neuwirth, Scarlet Rivera, Luther Rix, Kinky Friedman, Mick Ronson, Steven Soles, Rob Stoner, Howie Wyeth), but as you can see, the energy is downright subdued, barely a smile is cracked. By the time this performance was shot—May 23, 1976 at Hughes Stadium in Fort Collins, Colorado—the Revue seems to have run out of steam and the rain wasn’t helping matters. Roger McGuinn looks like he’s about to fall over and Bob just seems angry.
 

 
Only four of the eleven performances actually heard in the broadcast (“Maggie’s Farm”, “One Too Many Mornings,” “Shelter from the Storm” and “Idiot Wind”) were included on the Hard Rain live album released ten days before the special aired. Rob Stoner would later remark that Dylan had been “hitting the bottle all weekend” and speculated that the album’s sloppy “punk” energy was a result of that bender. The fact that Dylan and his soon-to-be ex-wife, Sara, had been arguing for the entire Colorado stay may have also contributed to what went down onstage (Watch him spit out “Idiot Wind. It’s easy to interpret this performance as a “fuck you” to her.)

More after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.30.2018
09:52 am
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Months later, Bob Dylan is STILL trolling the Nobel Committee! (Updated)
03.29.2017
09:31 am
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After last year’s surprising choice of Bob Dylan to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, some observers surely saw it coming that the prototypical trickster Dylan would largely ignore the experience and—implicitly—deny the Nobel Committee’s authority even to make such a distinction.

Initially, Dylan did not deign to mention the fact of the award in public, maintaining a silence so thorough that it tolerably irked the Nobelites: A few days after the announcement, writer and Swedish Academy member Per Wastberg referred to Dylan as “impolite and arrogant” for neglecting to utter a word on the matter. Interestingly, a few days after that Dylan positively gushed over the event, calling it “amazing, incredible” and asking “Whoever dreams about something like that?” But he soon announced that “pre-existing commitments” would force him to miss the ceremony. Patti Smith performed a Dylan classic in his stead.

Dylan never really stops touring, and 2017 is no exception. Dylan has a six-week tour of Europe coming up, and the first two shows take place in Stockholm on April 1 and 2.
 

 
According to literary omnivore Michael Orthofer, who helpfully deciphered some foreign-language reports, even though he will be a matter of blocks away from the Swedish Academy, Dylan has not made contact with the Swedish Academy in any way:
 

But, as the lady in charge, Sara Danius, now admits/reveals… well, they apparently haven’t been able to get him on the phone for months. So they have no idea what his plans are, or aren’t. As she says: “Vad han sedan beslutar sig för att göra är hans ensak”.

 
Interestingly, delivery of a lecture is practically the only demand placed on Nobel laureates, and Dylan’s apparent lack of interest could theoretically endanger his receipt of the hefty check that also comes with the Prize—Danius has indicated that failure to comply would result in nonpayment.

The prevailing theory is that Dylan is wealthy enough not to mind losing the check.

As Orthofer snarked, “This continuing humiliation train-wreck is something to behold. But I bet they all have their concert tickets…..”

Update: Much to the relief of the Swedish Academy, mere hours ago Dylan agreed to accept the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy quoted above, commented:
 

The good news is that the Swedish Academy and Bob Dylan have decided to meet this weekend.

The academy will then hand over Dylan’s Nobel diploma and the Nobel medal, and congratulate him on the Nobel prize in literature.

 
The ceremony will be “small and intimate,” with no media present. Danius added, “Only Bob Dylan and members of the academy will attend, all according to Dylan’s wishes.”

Dylan will submit a taped version of his required lecture, which is not unprecedented. Much as Michael Orthofer predicted, the Swedish Academy does have a group outing planned for one of Dylan’s Stockholm performances.

It’s good that Dylan does actually have the basic politeness not to snub the Swedes as thoroughly as seemed to be the case just a few hours ago. Dangerous Minds still holds to the view that Dylan is doing the absolute minimum he can do to acknowledge the award and still collect his 8 million Swedish Krone, which is after all nearly a million dollars.

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Bob Dylan raps on a Kurtis Blow album, 1986
Bob Dylan, slapstick comedy hero? It almost happened.

Posted by Martin Schneider
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03.29.2017
09:31 am
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Bob Dylan’s little-known songs about Vincent Van Gogh
11.03.2016
09:50 am
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“Side Tracks - 17 October 1964 - Detroit, Michigan” by Bob Dylan (via Halcyon Gallery)
 
Seeing both Bob Dylan and Vincent Van Gogh in the news this week reminded me of the last place I saw these guys together: in the wonderful world of song.

First there’s Robert Friemark’s “Vincent Van Gogh,” a ragged ballad about the painter’s life that Dylan and Bob Neuwirth sang in close harmony at some Rolling Thunder Revue dates. The song has a punchline that calls the seriousness of everything preceding it into question; I believe this is what you call a “shaggy-dog story.” Don McLean’s “Vincent” is scared of meeting Friemark’s number in a dark alley. I’ve cued up the Bobs singing “Vincent Van Gogh” midway through a three-and-a-half-hour recording of the May ‘76 stop in New Orleans here.

But more mysteriously, there’s the spectral Blonde on Blonde-era song known variously as “Spuriously Seventeen Windows,” “The Painting by Van Gogh,” “Definitely Van Gogh” and “Positively Van Gogh.” Under the latter title, it finally came out on last year’s massive 18-CD version of The Cutting Edge 1965-1966. According to Clinton Heylin’s sessionography, Dylan’s biographer Robert Shelton taped the only known rendition of this song in a hotel room in Denver just three days after Dylan finished recording Blonde on Blonde. Heylin sets the scene:

The only evidence we have of a possible direction, post-Blonde on Blonde, pre-accident, derives from two hotel room sessions with Robbie Robertson. That Dylan and Robertson were at this point blowtorching the candle at both ends—staying up late into the night, smoking a little (okay, a lot of) hash, and working on songs with a couple of acoustic guitars—is well-documented. Melbourne’s answer to Allen Ginsberg, Adrian Rawlins, wrote at the time of Dylan playing him “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” at six-thirty in the morning after a night of smoking hash, while actress Rosemary Garrett witnessed an even more extensive all-nighter just five days later:

I was able to listen to a composing session. Countless cups of tea . . . Things happened, and six new songs were born. The poetry seemed already to have been written. Dylan says “Picture one of these cats with a horn, coming over the hill at daybreak. Very Elizabethan, you dig? Wearing garters.” And out of the imagery, he and [Robbie] work on a tune and Dylan’s leg beats time with the rhythm, continuously, even when the rhythm is in his own mind.

Robert Shelton had already taped such a session in a Denver hotel room, three days after Dylan completed Blonde on Blonde (though he lacked the foresight to have enough blank tape, and ended up having to record all but one song of the thirty-five-minute session at 1⅞ ips—hence the poor quality). Though Dylan was anxious to play Shelton a couple of the songs he had just recorded—“Just Like a Woman” and “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” the latter of which he seemed particularly proud of—Shelton also witnessed Dylan and Robertson working on some newer ideas.

The opening song, the lyrics of which revolve around a painting by Van Gogh, is the most listenable track because Shelton has not as yet knocked the speed of his reel-to-reel down to 1⅞ ips (from 3¾).

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Oliver Hall
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11.03.2016
09:50 am
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Bob Dylan raps on a Kurtis Blow album, 1986
08.26.2016
09:34 am
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It’s a cliché by now that Bob Dylan’s singular 1965 track “Subterranean Homesick Blues” qualifies as one of the building blocks of hip-hop. What is possibly not quite as well known is that Dylan himself made a brief appearance on a track by one of the founding fathers of rap, Kurtis Blow.

Between the magisterial high points of, say, Blood on the Tracks and Time Out of Mind lie the yawning 1980s and most of the 1990s, a period marked by Dylan’s Christian period, the Traveling Wilburys, and “We Are the World.” As Dylan himself conceded later, it was a time when he was feeling out step with the world, with Reagan in the White House, MTV on cable television, and his Boomer cohort veering into suspect activities like junk bonds and jazzercise.

In 1986 Kurtis Blow released his 8th album Kingdom Blow—the album’s opening track, “Street Rock,” is a nearly nine-minute composition that features a single quatrain in Dylan’s voice that is used multiple times on the track, first as the intro and later as a full verse on its own on the track’s 7th minute. The album also featured vocals by George Clinton on a track called “Magilla Gorilla.”
 

Dylan in 1986
 
According to The Rough Guide to Bob Dylan 2, “In late March [1986], Dylan was back in America [after some gigs in Australia], oddly rapping a verse on Kurtis Blow’s release Street Rock. ‘He raps, he really raps,’ an excited Blow was quoted as saying.”

Blow was right, the tentative verse on “Street Rock” certainly does qualify as rap of some variety. Dylan has always had a distinctive singing style—understatement of the year—but in “Subterranean Homesick Blues” he indulged in a form of Sprechgesang. Here Dylan raps—one must use the verb—that he’s “indulged in high knowledge,” including an “encyclopedia” as well as “reports in news media,” and is in despair because there are “kids starving in Ethiopia and we are getting greedier, the rich are getting richer.” It’s not terrible by any stretch but it is surely slight; the tracks true virtues all flow from Blow.

In Chronicles, Volume 1, Dylan refers to the mid-1980s as a time when he had lost “power and dominion over the spirits,” stating that he “had done it once, and once was enough.” In the very next paragraph Dylan signals that it is the masters of the new form of rap music who have taken on that dominion:
 

Danny [Lanois] asked me who I’d been listening to recently, and I told him Ice-T. He was surprised, but he shouldn’t have been. A few years earlier, Kurtis Blow, a rapper from Brooklyn who had a hit out called “The Breaks,” had asked me to be on one of his records and he familiarized me with that stuff, Ice-T, Public Enemy, N.W.A., Run-D.M.C. These guys definitely weren’t standing around bullshitting. They were beating drums, tearing it up, hurling horses over cliffs. They were all poets and they knew what was going on.

 
Hear Bob Dylan rap, after the jump…

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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08.26.2016
09:34 am
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Blues legend Victoria Spivey’s got the ‘Dope Head Blues’
04.25.2016
02:57 pm
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The great American blues singer and pianist Victoria Spivey’s long and influential career began as part of her family’s string band which was led by her father, who would die when she was just seven. After this, Victoria would perform by herself at parties and various events around Houston, and later accompanying silent movies on the organ at the Lincoln Theater in Dallas.

Although she was mostly a solo act in her early years, on occasion she would perform with accompaniment from Blind Lemon Jefferson on guitar. Spivey took her cue from “dirty” blues belter Ida Cox penning and performing bawdy songs about drugs and sex in various dives, speakeasies, houses of ill repute, gambling parlours and gay bars.
 

 
King Vidor cast Spivey as the good girl Missy in his 1929 classic Hallelujah, one of the first Hollywood films with sound. Queen Vee was a star of Broadway’s famous Hellzapoppin’ Revue in the 1930s and logged many miles of road time with Louis Armstrong as a featured singer in various incarnations of his touring groups. Spivey retired from showbiz in 1951, but when the folk craze of the early 1960s hit, she found herself in demand again.
 

 
She and her boyfriend, jazz scholar Len Kunstadt, formed the Spivey Records label in 1962. Her first release on her own label featured a young Bob Dylan as a backing vocalist and harmonica player and the label would release albums by Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, Big Joe Williams, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Lonnie Johnson, Memphis Slim, and Louis Armstrong. Victoria Spivey died in 1976 and the label was kept going until Kunstadt’s passing in 1996.

She recorded her first song, “Black Snake Blues” for the famed OKeh label in 1926. Here she is performing it in 1963 during the American Folk Blues Festival European Tour with Lonnie Johnson on guitar and Sonny Boy Williamson on harmonica.
 

 
More Victoria Spivey after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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04.25.2016
02:57 pm
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Incredible auction featuring handwritten Bowie lyrics, Dylan paintings, signed Stones posters, more
03.31.2016
11:48 am
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Brixton Pound, A3 print of B£10 “David Bowie” note
Estimate: $1,000-$1,500

 
The Paddle8 auction website has an incredible auction right now featuring a huge amount of remarkable memorabilia from the greatest musical acts of the 20th century, including David Bowie, the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan, and the Notorious B.I.G., just to name a few.

Unfortunately, the auction, going by the title “Legendary,” ends at 1 p.m. today Eastern time, right around when this post is set to appear live on our website. Presumably DM readers are more interested in viewing the auctions than they are in actually buying the (very expensive) stuff.
 

David Bowie, “Fashions” Mobile Display
Estimate: $400-$600

 
Some of the bigger-ticket items include signed items from the Beatles and the Stones, original handwritten lyric sheets from Bob Dylan and David Bowie, original painted canvases by Bob Dylan, rejected cover art for David Bowie’s album Station to Station, and a jacket worn by the Notorious B.I.G. The auction casts a wide net, including items from the Clash, the Cramps, the Grateful Dead, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix,
Motörhead, the Sex Pistols, the Slits, X-Ray Spex, and Led Zeppelin.

As always, the details of the items only increases one’s interest in them. The paintings by Dylan are known as the “Drawn Blank Series,” watercolors and gouaches depicting “hotel room and apartment interiors, land- and cityscapes, views of sidewalk cafes, train tracks, and wandering rivers.” Dylan’s handwritten lyric sheet for “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” actually dates from 2013, with “the 31 lines written out by Bob Dylan in black ink on a page of Holmenkollen Park Hotel Rica, Oslo stationary.” The full-color proof of the Station to Station album art was rejected by Bowie because he “felt that the sky looked artificial.”

Biggie’s jacket “features an embroidered logo reading ‘Flip Squad’ on its front and an applique ‘Funkmaster Flex’ logo on its back,” while the large Decca poster of the Stones was signed by Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, and Charlie Watts on Monday, October 19, 1964 “at the Locomotive nightclub in Paris during a press event in advance of their concert at the Olympia theatre the following day.”

Excuse me, I have to see my bank representative about a loan…..

Here are some images of the items to be auctioned; click on any image for a larger view.
 

The Beatles, Autographed “Meet The Beatles” Album
Estimate: $100,000-$150,000

 
More incredible items to be auctioned after the jump…..
 

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Posted by Martin Schneider
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03.31.2016
11:48 am
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NYC’s Beatnik ‘riot’: How singing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ kicked off the 60s revolution

04folkizzyriot.jpg
 
The protestors were peaceful. They didn’t look like revolutionaries. They were dressed in suits and ties. They were singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

But the cops still attacked them with billy clubs.

In the spring of 1961, Israel (“Izzy”) Young taped a sign to the window of his shop in Greenwich Village, New York. The handwritten sign announced a protest rally at the fountain in Washington Square Park at 2pm on Sunday April 9th .

Izzy was the proprietor of the Folklore Center at 110 MacDougal Street, a shop that sold books, records and everything else relating to folk music. Since it opened in 1957, the Folklore Center had been the focal point for young folk singers, beatniks and assorted musicians to gather together, hang out, talk, play and listen to music.

After the Second World War, Greenwich Village was the gathering point for all the disaffected youth who wanted to escape the conformity and boredom of suburbia. They were brought by the district’s association with the Beats and jazz musicians who had lived and played there during the 1940s and early 1950s. Often their first point of call was Izzy’s shop. Among the many youngsters who visited there was a young Bob Dylan. Izzy arranged Dylan’s first concert at Carnegie Hall. He “broke [his] ass to get people to come.” Tickets were two bucks apiece. Only 52 people turned up—though later hundreds would tell Izzy they were there.
 
03izzyshop3.jpg
Izzy Young in the Folklore Center circa 1960.
 
Since the late 1940s, folk musicians had gathered at the fountain in Washington Square Park. They brought their guitars and autoharps to play and sing songs. It was peaceable enough but some residents thought the Sunday gatherings brought “undesirables” to the neighborhood—by undesirables they meant African-Americans.

In April 1961, the new Commissioner of Parks Newbold Morris decided to take action. He banned singing in Washington Square Park. As Ted White later reported the events of that fateful day in the park in Rogue magazine, August 1961:

For seventeen years folksingers had been congregating on warm Sunday afternoons at the fountain in the center of the small park, unslinging their guitars and banjos and quietly singing songs. There would be a varied number of groups—perhaps ten or more—rimming the fountain, each singing a particular variety of folk music, from Negro work songs and blues to Kentucky hillbilly bluegrass, with perhaps an Elizabethan ballad from the West Virginia hills thrown in occasionally. As the years passed, the city government began showing an increasing hostility to the use of public facilities by the public, and for the last fourteen years, permits have been required before “public performances” could be given in any park. What this means is that a group of kids singing to each other on a weekday evening would be forcibly silenced by the ever-patrolling police for failing to possess a “permit,” or a young man playing a harmonica to himself quietly while sitting on a park bench might be suddenly ordered, “Move on, you!” and find himself run out of the park.

...

And now the new Parks Commissioner has refused a permit to the folksingers for their Sunday afternoon gatherings. Why? The same old story: “The folksingers have been bringing too many undesirable elements into the park.”

“Undesirable elements?” Yes, healthy young kids, racially mixed and unprejudiced enough not to care, concerned only with having the chance to assemble in the open sun and air and to be able to enjoy themselves harmlessly and happily. Sam Schwartz, a Brooklyn father, told me “Sure I let my kid—he’s a teenager—come and sing here. Why not? It’s a good, healthy activity. What’s wrong with folksongs?”

Ron Archer, a young jazz critic who lives in the West Village (an apparently less troubled area), said “Why shouldn’t people sing in the Square? If Morris is so concerned about the safety of the parks, why doesn’t he clean out the muggers and rapists in Central Park, where it isn’t safe to walk at night? Why doesn’t he go after the local punks who prowl the edges of this park at night? Why take after a group which is as harmless as the old men who play chess here, and who are just about as ’undesirable’?”

“You know what ’undesirable’ means, don’t you?” a name jazz musician told me. “It means ’Negro’. A few of the folksingers are Negroes.”

“I came up here from Mississippi,” says Bob Stewart, a Realist cartoonist who lives in the Village, “to get away from the prejudice, and now I get complaints from my landlord whenever I have a Negro friend up in my apartment.”

“The racial bias is definitely behind the whole thing,” Izzy summed it up. “It’s part of the big squeeze on the Italians.”

In response to the ban, Izzy applied for a permit to sing in the park. It was rejected. He therefore organized a protest rally.
 
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Izzy Young talks to a cop at the start of the demonstration.
 
On Sunday April 9th at 2pm, around 500 men and women—smartly dressed, some in suits and ties and carrying placards—peaceably approached the fountain at Washington Square Park. They were stopped by a cop. He wanted to know who was in charge. Izzy Young made his way to the front of the crowd and talked to the officer. He explained they were allowed to protest peaceably. It was within their constitutional rights to do so. The cop told Izzy they couldn’t sing, that singing was banned. They would be arrested if they broke the ban. Izzy countered by saying singing was a form of speech and they had a right to freedom of speech. He added:

It’s not up to Commissioner Morris to tell the people what kind of music is good or bad. He’s telling people folk music brings degenerates, but it’s not so.

The cops were not impressed. They began to move menacingly towards the demonstrators. Izzy thought if they started singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” the police would not hit them “on the head.” He was wrong. As the demonstrators sang the national anthem the cops started laying into them.
 
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Ten demonstrators were arrested. Dozens were injured. The press hyped the story up as a ‘Beatnik riot’ where some 3000 people attacked the cops. This story was quickly dropped as it was widely known not to be true.

Keep reading after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.07.2016
02:13 pm
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‘Pistol shots ring out in a barroom night’: Bob Dylan’s riveting performance of ‘Hurricane,’ 1975
02.02.2016
03:28 pm
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Yesterday, right after I’d finished reading an article on The Daily Beast about it being the 40th anniversary of Bob Dylan’s 1976 album, Desire, I clicked over to YouTube where I dialed up “Hurricane,” Dylan’s powerful narration of the story of middleweight boxing contender Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, which was the lead single from it. Carter was imprisoned for almost 20 years on flimsy evidence (a random bullet and a shotgun shell found in his car) and sketchy testimony (that the perpetrators had been black, pretty much) for a triple homicide “race killing” in a Paterson, NJ bar in 1966. I still had the Wikipedia page on Carter open on my browser when I saw, in another tab that New York attorney Myron Beldock, who worked for over a decade to free Carter, had died at 86.

Throughout his long career Beldock, who described himself as “a creature of my time, liberal, progressive and idealistic” had a reputation for taking on legal lost causes. One such case was representing George Whitmore Jr., a black teenager who was arrested in Brooklyn in 1964 for the rape and knife-killing of several women. Whitmore claimed he was beaten by NYPD officers until he signed a falsified confession. The outcome of this case would become highly influential in the Supreme Court’s 1966 Miranda decision, which required police to advise suspects of their right to remain silent and be represented by an attorney, and in overturning capital punishment in New York State. But Beldock’s most famous client was Rubin “Hurricane” Carter.

Carter’s case had been boosted by copies of his 1974 autobiography The 16th Round, which proclaimed his innocence, being sent around to notable lefty-types who might want to lend their celebrity to his cause. Esquire magazine’s art director George Lois organized a campaign to support Carter and Muhammad Ali was vocal in proclaiming that Carter was innocent. (Joni Mitchell, however, who was also one of the books’ recipients, passed thinking “This is a bad person. He’s fakin’ it.”)

Her friend Bob Dylan felt differently. Dylan read Carter’s book during a 1975 trip to France, and visited the boxer—who was then incarcerated in a New Jersey penitentiary—in May. The two met for several hours and Dylan agreed to help him.

Having difficulty cracking the lyrics, Dylan enlisted Jacques Levy, a New York-based theatrical director who had worked with Sam Shepard (and who’d staged the nude comedy review Oh! Calcutta! off Broadway) to help. Levy said of the song:

“The first step was putting the song in a total storyteller mode, the beginning of the song is like stage directions, like what you would read in a script: ‘Pistol shots ring out in a barroom night… Here comes the story of the Hurricane.’ Boom! Titles. You now, Bob loves movies, and he can write these movies that take place in eight to ten minutes, yet seem as full or fuller than regular movies.”

 

 
“Hurricane” was premiered to an audience of about 100 people in Chicago on September 10th, 1975 during the taping of Bob Dylan’s performance on the PBS TV series Soundstage. This particular episode was titled “The World of John Hammond,” being a tribute to the retiring Columbia Records executive and civil rights activist who’d signed Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Aretha Franklin and Leonard Cohen (among many, many others) during his fabled 45-year-long career in the music industry. The show, broadcast in December would be Dylan’s very first TV appearance since his duet with Johnny Cash in 1969. The 8:33 single was recorded on October 24 and released in November.

Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue was used by the artist as a platform to campaign for Rubin Carter’s release and the first leg of the tour ended at Madison Square Garden on December 8th with a benefit concert dubbed the “Night of The Hurricane.” Roberta Flack and Muhammad Ali, who called Carter in his jail cell from the stage, also participated. A second event, Night of the Hurricane II, took place on January 25th at the Houston Astrodome and featured Stevie Wonder and Stephen Stills.

Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.02.2016
03:28 pm
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Bob Dylan plays ‘Hava Nagila’ with Harry Dean Stanton
07.14.2015
01:58 pm
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Bob Dylan gets in touch with his inner Zimmerman, playing “Hava Nagila” on harmonica with his son-in-law Peter Himmelman and Big Love patriarch, Harry Dean Stanton on the 25th annual Chabad telethon.

And speaking of Harry Dean Stanton, the actor—who got his start during the Eisenhower-era—turns 89 today. The man can still be seen, indefatigably tying one on most nights of the week somewhere out and about in Los Angeles.

There’s a longer clip of this at Facebook.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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07.14.2015
01:58 pm
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50 years ago today Bob Dylan totally blew our minds with ‘Like a Rolling Stone’
06.16.2015
02:23 pm
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It was 50 years ago today that one of the truly momentous events in rock history took place when Bob Dylan recorded “Like A Rolling Stone” in New York City at Columbia Records’ Studio A. Within weeks of its release on July 15, 1965, the song became a massive hit, where it nestled on the Billboard charts for several months.

“Like Rolling Stone” was a game changer. It opened the doors for a new kind of music that fused folk with electric rock and brought a kind of sophisticated lyricism to top 40 radio that hadn’t really been heard up until then. The only comparable rock and roll word-slinger was Chuck Berry. To my ears, Berry was Walt Whitman to Dylan’s William Blake. You’re free to pick your own bards.


Dylan in Studio A.

I remember hearing “Like A Rolling Stone” for the first time in the kitchen of my childhood home when I was 14 years old. The memory is as vivid as most of the life-changing moments of my life, which generally revolve around sex, drugs and rock and roll. When the song came on the cheesy plastic radio in our kitchen, time stopped and I was swept up inside some sort of mystical swoon that was mind-expanding and emotionally transformative. I didn’t realize it at the time but this was one of those moments that sent me down Blake’s road of excess where “you never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.” I have yet to to find, on a spiritual or intellectual level, “what is more than enough.”  And I hope I don’t. It was Dylan, among a handful of other visionaries, that got me searching.

Here’s Dylan performing “Like A Rolling Stone” at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965. He’s roundly booed by a vocal majority of folk music squares. Others in the crowd, were quite aware, however, that they were watching the future of rock and roll.
 


Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan’s song for the gay liberation movement
04.10.2015
09:26 am
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The first three songs on Allen Ginsberg’s First Blues album come from a November 1971 session for a planned release on the Beatles’ Apple Records. Ginsberg asked Bob Dylan to lead the band, which included Ginsberg’s lover Peter Orlovsky, Greenwich Village folkies Happy and Artie Traum, composer David Amram, and guitarist Jon Sholle. Dylan himself played guitar, piano and organ.

Vomit Express,” credited to Ginsberg and Dylan, might be the best-known product of the session, but the pair also co-wrote a song for the gay liberation movement, which was about five minutes old at the time: “Jimmy Berman (Gay Lib Rag).” I believe Ginsberg is improvising the lyrics, which concern his efforts to get an eighteen-year-old newsboy in the sack. I’ve transcribed the lyrics (as I hear them, of course) below, so you can sing along with Allen and discourage any homophobic and heteronormative attitudes within earshot.
 

Dylan and Ginsberg at Kerouac’s grave, 1975
 

Who’s that Jimmy Berman? I heard you drop his name
What has he got to say? What papers is he sellin’?
I don’t know if he’s the guy I met or ain’t the same
Well, that Jimmy Berman was a boy that is worth tellin’

Jimmy Berman on the corner sold the New York Times
Jimmy Berman in New York he had a long, long climb
Started as a shoeshine boy, ended on Times Square
Jimmy Berman, what’s that rose you got settin’ in your hair?

Jimmy Berman what’s your sex, why you hang ‘round here all day?
Jimmy Berman what’s up next, oh what do you play?
Who you wanna sleep with night, Jimmy boy? Would you like come with me?
Jimmy Berman, O my love, O what misery

Jimmy Berman, do you feel the same as what I do?
Jimmy Berman, won’t you come home and make love with me too?
Jimmy Berman, I’ll take my clothes off, lay me down in bed
Jimmy Berman, drop your pants, I’ll give you some good head

Eighteen-year-old Jimmy, the boy is my delight
Eighteen-year-old Jimmy, I love him day and night
Now I know I’m getting kinda old to chase poor Jimmy’s tail
But I won’t tell you other, love, it’d be too long a tale

Jimmy Berman, please love me, I throw myself at your feet
Jimmy Berman, I’ll give you money, oh, won’t that be neat?
Jimmy Berman, just give me your heart and yeah! your soul
Jimmy Berman, please come home with me, I would be whole

Jimmy Berman on the street, waiting for his god
Jimmy Berman as I pass gives me a holy nod
Jimmy Berman he has watched and seen the strangers pass
Jimmy Berman he gave up, he wants no more, alas

Jimmy Berman does yoga, he smokes a little grass
Jimmy Berman’s back is straight, he knows what to bypass
Jimmy Berman don’t take junk, he don’t shoot speed in his eye
Jimmy Berman’s got a healthy mind and Jimmy Berman is ours

Jimmy Berman, Jimmy Berman, I will say goodbye
Jimmy Berman, Jimmy Berman, love you till I die
Jimmy Berman, Jimmy Berman, wave to me as well
Jimmy Berman, Jimmy Berman, please abolish Hell

 

 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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04.10.2015
09:26 am
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