Goodbye Jimmy Reed might be something .....

Interesting how the album is named after
the title of a Jimmy Rodgers track and
Rodgers is pictured on the inside sleeve of album ...

But no Jimmy Rodgers track .....


Black Rider .... hhhhmmmm Tom Waits has ridden into that territory



ROCKMAN

Quote
Rockman
Goodbye Jimmy Reed might be something .....

Interesting how the album is named after
the title of a Jimmy Rodgers track and
Rodgers is pictured on the inside sleeve of album ...

But no Jimmy Rodgers track .....


Black Rider .... hhhhmmmm Tom Waits has ridden into that territory

"The Black Rider" is also a comic book that Dylan probably knows from his childhood: [toonopedia.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2020-06-10 02:53 by MrEcho.

Black Rider is also a Bob wills track
penned by Tommy Duncan lead vocalist of Texas Playboys .... Dallas Texas 1938

Black Rider Black Rider
Don't you hear me calling you
You know you're three times seven
You know just what to do

Ride ride ride Black Rider
Set in the saddle and hold the reigns
If you don't ride Black Rider
I'll just have to change your name

Ride ride ride Black Rider
Keep your stroke don't get confused
If you don't ride Black Rider
I'll keep these Black Rider blues



ROCKMAN

Tom Waits for no one

jb

....and he wont wait for me ...



ROCKMAN

Time is on your side

Even if Tom is not


jb



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2020-06-10 03:10 by jbwelda.

Quote
Rockman
Goodbye Jimmy Reed might be something .....

Interesting how the album is named after
the title of a Jimmy Rodgers track and
Rodgers is pictured on the inside sleeve of album ...

But no Jimmy Rodgers track .....


Black Rider .... hhhhmmmm Tom Waits has ridden into that territory

I would bet good money that Bob & Tom share an interest in horticulture. ><

Time is on your side

Hey yeah that's true ... cats got nine lives but mine go up to 11 .... hhhaaa



ROCKMAN

Anyone watch "No Direction Home" on Netflix? Fantastic.

Quote
Cristiano Radtke
According to this JPC.de link, this is the tracklist for "Rough and Rowdy Ways":

Any time he puts out a song named after a blues legend, it turns out to be a classic. Jimmy Reed has his work cut out to top Blind Willie McTell and Charley Patton

Georgia White - Black Rider 1936

Richard M. Jones - Black Rider 1936



ROCKMAN

I'll be publishing a review of the album for The Arts Desk this Saturday, with a more in-depth look on my Art Music Poetry Wordpress site. An exceedingly strange and powerful piece of work!
[timcumming.wordpress.com]

Quote
MadMetaphoricalMax
I'll be publishing a review of the album for The Arts Desk this Saturday, with a more in-depth look on my Art Music Poetry Wordpress site. An exceedingly strange and powerful piece of work!
[timcumming.wordpress.com]

Look forward to your review, have yet to see one anywhere

NEW Dylan interview in the New York Times
[www.nytimes.com]

From that interview (slewan just linked above):

I: A reference to the Rolling Stones makes it into “I Contain Multitudes.” Just as a lark, which Stones songs do you wish you could’ve written?

BD: Oh, I don’t know, maybe “Angie,” “Ventilator Blues” and what else, let me see. Oh yeah, “Wild Horses.”

Interesting that he mentioned VB between the other two well known ballads



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2020-06-12 13:17 by mike567.

Quote
slewan
NEW Dylan interview in the New York Times
[www.nytimes.com]

"I think about the death of the human race.
The long strange trip of the naked ape."

video: [reuters.com] A little snippet of Bobs interview in NYT today. "I wish I had written Angie"

Quote
slewan
NEW Dylan interview in the New York Times
[www.nytimes.com]

Great reading, thank you!

The reviews of the new album are coming in: The Telegraph gave it 5 stars.

Bob Dylan, Rough and Rowdy Ways, review: one long, magnificent riddle for his most loyal fans

The wise old poet has stirred up a cryptic cauldron of truths and clues, philosophy, myths and magic

By Neil McCormick, 13 June 2020

"My hearts like a river, a river that sings,” Bob Dylan tenderly croons in a thin, high, ancient voice on romantic ballad I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You. It is a beautiful phrase, adorning the most sweetly melodic song on his new album, Rough and Rowdy Ways. It's a cowboy prayer of spiritual peace at the end of a lifetime’s journey, in which he contemplates “a lot of people gone” and expresses his “hope that the Gods go easy with me.”

The mood of tranquility is deceptive though. For a river runs through the album – the river of time where everything washes together – and it is every bit as wild and turbulent as the album title implies. It is a red river, “redder than your ruby lips and the blood that flows from the rose,” as Dylan growls on towering blues rocker Crossing the Rubicon, where he depicts himself as a lyrical Julius Caesar, advancing past the point of no return. “Three miles north of Purgatory, one step from the great beyond / I prayed to the cross, I kissed the girls, and I crossed the Rubicon.”

Rough and Rowdy Ways is Dylan’s 39th studio album, and his first of original songs since 2012’s The Tempest. It was preceded by three epic, wordy singles, Murder Most Foul, I Contain Multitudes and False Prophet, which suggested he had a lot on his mind. And he pours it out here, in dense, cryptic couplets delivered with wonky timing in a croaking voice so ragged and torn it is be a wonder he can make himself heard at all.

That he comes through loud and clear is a testament to his own production skills and his band’s delicate arrangements. Everything lifts Dylan’s ragged vocals, even as drums, bass and electric guitars cascade around him. The ambience is laid back, yet the sentiments are anything but. There are 10 songs, spanning 70 minutes, and not a moment is wasted.

At 79, the old troubadour is not exactly going gently into that good night. “After midnight, if you still want to meet / I’ll be at the Black Horse tavern on Armageddon street,” he promises on the darkly amusing My Own Version of You, a steamy Frankenstein blues about creating life from spare body parts. It starts out as a jokey Screamin’ Jay Hawkins riff (“I’ll take the Scarface Pacino and Godfather Brando / Mix it up in a tank and get a robot commando”) but winds up with a long, philosophical passage evincing one of Dylan’s core themes, that we are but tiny particles in the immensity of history, where the story of the whole human race is “all right in there, it’s carved into your face.”

Dylan’s fans may yearn to know his views on our modern crises (“Should I break it all down, should I fall on my knees / Is there light at the end of that tunnel, please?”) but instead he offers up songs about historic presidential assassinations (William McKinley on Key West and John F Kennedy on Murder Most Foul) or ruminates on Caesar, a figure every bit as divisive as Trump in his time. Flashing back to Homer’s Illiad, he invites listeners to picture themselves “beneath the Cypress tree / Where the Trojan women and children were sold into slavery / Long before the first Crusade / Way back before England or America were made.”

He conjures up a vision of “the burning hell / Where some of the best known enemies of mankind dwell” but rather than depicting despots and tyrants in flames, Dylan witnesses father of psychology Sigmund Freud and Communist philosopher Karl Marx  having “the rawhide lash rip the skin from their backs.” Are they being tortured for the unintended consequences of their life choices, or is it an illustration of cosmic injustice?

There is rarely a simple answer to the riddles and conundrums Dylan’s lyrics pose. By opening the album with the Walt Whitman referencing I Contain Multitudes, Dylan declares his freedom to embrace contradiction. This is the liberating power of songs that can go anywhere, filled with non sequiturs and unspooling almost as free association. On slow, haunting folk lament Black Rider, Dylan addresses, teases, threatens, cajoles and pities a spectral figure, but whether the black rider represents death, depression, temptation, conscience or some shadowy aspect of Dylan’s character remains open to the listener.

“I feel the holy spirit inside, see the light that freedom gives / I believe it is in the reach of every man who lives,” Dylan declares on Crossing The Rubicon, a couplet for those who admire his idealism. But in the same song, he turns on a defiler of women to snarl “Others can be tolerant, others can be good / I’ll cut you up with a crooked knife, Lord, and I’ll miss you when you’re gone / I stood between heaven and earth and I crossed the Rubicon.” Dylan crossed his own mystic river a long time ago and occupies lyrical territory that belongs to him alone.

When Dylan embarked on his musical journey as a young man in the Sixties, he forged an almost completely new type of song, open and multifarious, that became a new kind of standard. As he approaches the end of his journey, he really only writes Bob Dylan songs; songs that defiantly inhabit his own myth, shifting perspective between his idiosyncratic views on the world and the world’s views on him. His language is drawn from a now familiar mix of the Old Testament Bible, Roman poetry, Greek philosophy, Shakespeare, Homer and the Beat poets, with liberal quotes from folk, blues, popular songs and B-movie. This is a mashup of culture high and low, dosed with jokes, ribaldry, epigrammatic phrases and surrealist juxtapositions.

Whereas in his final works, the late, great Leonard Cohen offered the consolations of wisdom, pared down with a kind of purity, old Bob Dylan remains far more wayward and ramshackle. He will follow a beautifully turned phrase (“I got up early to see the great carnage of the dawn”) with something familiar or borrowed (“I painted my wagon, abandoned all hope, and I crossed the Rubicon”). Line lengths vary, bars can be erratic, and you are never quite certain where Dylan’s vocal emphasis is going to fall. Entire verses can be drummed up that seem to bear no relationship to what preceded, such as this suddenly raunchy passage from Goodbye Jimmy Reed: “Transparent woman in a transparent dress / Suits you well I must confess / I break open your grapes, I suck out the juice / I need you like my head needs a noose.”

It all evinces a certain randomness, as if Dylan has thrown every passing thought at the page, in any order. Such blatant repurposing of standard blues phrases and musical tropes is sometimes used as evidence by detractors of Dylan’s waning powers of originality. Yet this kind of unabashed intertextuality has been present since Dylan’s earliest recordings and reflects an abiding theme that (echoing Ecclesiastes and Shakespeare, from which Dylan tends to freely quote) there is no new thing under the sun.

The album title itself is borrowed from a song by country pioneer Jimmie Rodgers and seems indicative of Dylan’s engagement with the bloody stuff of life at a time when he might be expected to be slipping towards quiet retirement. Another of his musical heroes is name checked on Goodbye Jimmy Reed, a cheerful blues romp satirising conservative religious middle American values, “football and bible, a proclaimer creed.” It seems to be a song about Dylan escaping his small town Minnesota roots (“You won’t amount to much the people all said / Cause I didn’t play guitar behind my head”) but what Jimmy Reed and a transparent woman are doing in there is anyone’s guess.

There is a lot of mischievous humour throughout the album, jokes sometimes slipping by almost unnoticed perhaps because of the gravitas of Dylan’s aged voice and his immense reputation, so when he croaks “the size of your cockerel will get you nowhere” on Black Rider, listeners may be more inclined to consider the avian symbolism rather than the obvious double entendre.

On the surface, penultimate track Key West might just seem like a long, amiable ramble through the delights of the Florida Keys, full of deft observations of nature and the weather. The music is so warm and relaxed you can almost feel the tropical breeze as Dylan proclaims his happiness (“Feel the sunlight on your skin / The healing virtues of the wind”). The bracketed subtitle, though, is Philosopher Pilot, almost certainly a reference to James Stockdale, whose book Thoughts of a Philosophical Fighter Pilot described how he survived seven years imprisonment in Vietnam by adhering to the stoic philosophy of Epictetus.

Between an opening verse about the death of President McKinley in 1901 and a surprising diversion into the tale of a young boy married off to a prostitute (“That’s my story but not where it ends / She’s still cute and we’re still friends”), Dylan espouses a Zen sense of acceptance of being in the moment. It is here that Dylan’s own philosophy comes through loud and clear: “I do what I think is right, I do what I think is best.” When he sings “Key West is the place to be/ If you’re looking for immortality” he is not addressing a place, but a key to a state of mind.

At its heart, this is a serious work, with an underlying somberness. “I’ve already outlived my life by far,” Dylan murmurs on Mother of Muses, an evocative prayer for inspiration in which he declares his love for Calliope, Greek muse of poetry and music.

Yet Dylan’s artistic muse also honours “the heroes who stood alone / Whose names are engraved on tablets of stone”, naming American Civil War Generals Sherman and Scott and World War II Allied Generals Montgomery, Zhukov and Patton, whose triumphs “cleared the path for Presley to sing” and “carved a path for Martin Luther King.” Coming just before the stinging power of Crossing the Rubicon, this, once again, is a reminder of Dylan’s fluid sense of history, in which the past is permanently present, a constant awareness that everything affects everything else.

The album context lends even greater resonance to 17-minute epic finale Murder Most Foul, in which Dylan turns an elegy for Kennedy into a lament for the death of American idealism and rise of political gangsterism. The song may be set in 1963, when Dylan was first being hailed as the voice of a generation, but its contemporary resonance is what shakes the modern listener to the core. Almost 60 years since we first heard from him, the old protest singer is still composing extraordinary anthems for our changing times.

[www.telegraph.co.uk]

I don't get excited for too many records but am for this one. For dessert the same day, "Homegrown" by Neil Young finally. I'm busy a week from today!

LA Times review:

Bob Dylan’s ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’ is a savage pulp-noir masterpiece: Review

[www.latimes.com]

My in-depth review of Rough and Rowdy Days, Dylan's stone-cold masterpiece, this is the longer version on my Wordpress site, and I'll post the Arts Desk review soon. It's just an amazing record, deep and wide ...

[timcumming.wordpress.com]

And here's the review from The arts Desk. Been listening to it closely all week and it's a strange and great and arresting as anything he has done. Astonishing

[www.theartsdesk.com]

[www.885fm.org]

I don't know if this is a regular Sunday morning show--like Breakfast with the Beatles playing right now on KLOS--but I just stumbled on this all-Dylan broadcast.

(The playlist on the website is frozen and isn't showing any of the Dylan songs now playing)

Bob Dylan-Rough & Rowdy Ways. The Undercard.

Gideon Coe

Ahead of a playout of Rough & Rowdy Ways the new, and much anticipated, Bob Dylan LP at midnight. A Dylan themed three hours featuring rarities, live material, cover versions from the BBC archive & a newly commissioned session from guitarist Ben Phillipson. The show will also include records featured by Dylan in his own Theme Time Radio Hour series & guest appearances by the enigmatic singer-songwriter on other artists records.

Release date:18 June 2020

Thursday 21:00

BBC RADIO 6 MUSIC

[www.bbc.co.uk]

Bob Dylan Has Given Us One of His Most Timely Albums Ever With ‘Rough and Rowdy Ways’

[www.yahoo.com]

Good for you Bob!

This IS what the Stones should deliver : a very strong farewell album that'll make a true sensation, not a "mediatic sensation" (= media overload for 3 weeks then nothing).
C'mon Mick and Keef you can't mess up that one. It's the last bullet you have in the gun.

Is this Dylan's final album? Comparing Dylan to the Stones is not quite apples to apples

I wouldn't put my money on the assumption that this is going to be Bob Dylan's last album…

Quote
slewan
I wouldn't put my money on the assumption that this is going to be Bob Dylan's last album…

If he's in good health, I think the floodgates could be reopening.