Happy 80th birthday Robert Allen Zimmerman (a day early)! And just remember, Bob, 'ya gotta serve somebody!



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2021-05-23 17:44 by Sighunt.

Wow. His Bobness gonna be 80 years young. I remember the comic strip Peanuts did a strip where Charlie Brown commented, with a sigh, "Bob Dylan's going to be 30 tomorrow". This was in reference to a saying in those halcyon late 1960s daze, "Don't trust anyone over 30". I would venture there are a number of us on this site that can answer to this statement in terms of age and whether we believe this or not.

Regarding Bob Dylan's 115th Dream, what a great song from a great album, "Bringing It All Back Home". This is the album that turned me onto Dylan. The beautiful poetry of "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" is still something and my all time fave Dylan song. "It's Alright, Ma" from the same album captures the wildness, madness and absurdities of living/life so well. For me, this is an album far better than Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde.

Anyways, happy 80th, Mister Zimmerman. May you stay Forever Young.

video: [www.youtube.com] Happy bday on Monday Bob!!! everybody MUST get stoned!

If you like the triad of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, be sure to get that bootleg series six cd set of outtakes and alternates from these LPs. The best Dylan set ever in my opinion and after those LPs I basically wrote the guy off.

Probably already know all that but just a reminder.

jb

My favorite Dylan memory: Front row for Dylan and Joni Mitchell in Detroit, 1998. Joni went on first, and got into an argument with a woman sitting a few seats to my right who didn't seem to be sufficiently enjoying herself. I swear, I think that's what it was over. She wasn't paying Joni the proper degree of rapt attention, or something like that. During Dylan's set, I engaged in a little good-natured heckling, as is sometimes my wont. Interestingly, this was just a couple of weeks after the release of Bootleg Series Vol. 4, Royal Albert Hall, the one with the infamous "Judas" catcall. That night in Detroit, Bob played "Masters of War," and at the exact moment he got to the line, "like Judas of old," he looked right at me.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2021-05-23 20:39 by tatters.

btw: Dylan performed on his birthday only twice:
Paris 1966 => [www.youtube.com]
Dresden/Germany 2000 => [www.youtube.com] + [www.youtube.com]

And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’

Happy Birthday Bob Dylan!

One of my favorite concert memories:
First time seeing Bob at the Santa Monica Civic in 1979, 5th row center with my older brother.
Lo and behold, Ronnie Wood comes down the aisle along with a blonde beauty, and sits right next to us for the show!

A few other memorable shows out of many throughout the years:
- All three at the newly renovated Wiltern Theater in 2002 which Bob christened.
- Santa Barbara Bowl in 2016 w/Mavis Staples opening.

Favorite Dylan albums:
Time Out of Mind is always the first that comes to mind, followed by Blood on the Tracks.
And then there's the '60's classics, along with those early '90's covers albums - Good as I Been to You, and World Gone Wrong.

Favorite songs:
Too many to mention, but A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall is lyrically quite a doozy, and was released the year I was born in '63:




A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall lyrics

Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?
I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Oh, what did you see, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what did you see, my darling young one?
I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin’
I saw a white ladder all covered with water
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son?
And what did you hear, my darling young one?
I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin’
Heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world
Heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin’
Heard ten thousand whisperin’ and nobody listenin’
Heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin’
Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter
Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?
Who did you meet, my darling young one?
I met a young child beside a dead pony
I met a white man who walked a black dog
I met a young woman whose body was burning
I met a young girl, she gave me a rainbow
I met one man who was wounded in love
I met another man who was wounded with hatred
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Oh, what’ll you do now, my blue-eyed son?
Oh, what’ll you do now, my darling young one?
I’m a-goin’ back out ’fore the rain starts a-fallin’
I’ll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison
Where the executioner’s face is always well hidden
Where hunger is ugly, where souls are forgotten
Where black is the color, where none is the number
And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’
But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

_____________________________________________________________
Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2021-05-23 23:33 by Hairball.

Since we're there, here's two Dylan songs covered by Leon Russell and Jose Feliciano. One cannot dismiss Dylan as one of the pre-eminent songwriters of his (or any) generation. It just boggles my mind that he's gonna turn 80 as it reminds me (and I am sure many others) of how many full moons I've/we've seen in our lives, how much music we've listened to.

Leon - Hard Rain

[www.youtube.com]

Jose - Masters of War

[www.youtube.com]

Thank ya, Bob!

My favourite Dylan song – by Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Tom Jones, Judy Collins and more

Mick Jagger

Desolation Row (1965)

I was playing Bob Dylan records at my parents’ house when he was still an acoustic folk singer, but he was already very important and his lyrics were on point. The delivery isn’t just the words, it’s the accentuation and the moods and twists he puts on them. His greatness lies in the body of work. I was at a session for Blood on the Tracks [1975] and really enjoyed watching him record Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, with this incredible depth of storyline, surrounded by all these boring people from the record company who he had sitting in the control room. I couldn’t record like that.

Desolation Row’s lyrics are just so interesting and diverse. It isn’t a real street so you create your own fantasy. I imagine an unforgiving place, somewhere you don’t want to spend much time, peopled with strange characters. The opening line about the “postcards of the hanging” sets the tone, but then this awful event is juxtaposed with “the beauty parlour filled with sailors” and all these circus people. The lines “The agents and the superhuman crew / Come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do / Then they bring them to the factory where the heart-attack machine is strapped across their shoulders” are scary and apocalyptic, viciously delivered.

My reading is that that’s about governmental, military control, but then there’s the payoff: “When you asked me how I was doing, was that some kind of joke? Don’t send me no more letters unless you mail them from Desolation Row.” That sounds like a really personal thing. Musically, he prettifies it. I love the lovely half-Spanish guitar lines from the session guitarist, Charlie McCoy. It’s actually a really lovely song, which shouldn’t work with the imagery but does. You can listen to it all the time and still get something wonderful and new from it.

[www.theguardian.com]

Let's hope the neverending tour hasn't ended! Happy Birthday, Bob

ROCKMAN

His Bobness, indeed.


plexi

I just heard on the news that there is (or soon will be) a new book of interviews with Mr Zimmerman from 60 years. Unfortunately no title etc. was mentioned.

Does someone know more details?

Happy 80th Birthday with good health wishes to Mr. Bob Dylan

Good health and happiness to you Bobala.

Chris Robinson on Dylan flipping off The Stones...

[www.youtube.com]

Quote
Cristiano Radtke
My favourite Dylan song – by Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Tom Jones, Judy Collins and more

Mick Jagger

Desolation Row (1965)

I was playing Bob Dylan records at my parents’ house when he was still an acoustic folk singer, but he was already very important and his lyrics were on point. The delivery isn’t just the words, it’s the accentuation and the moods and twists he puts on them. His greatness lies in the body of work. I was at a session for Blood on the Tracks [1975] and really enjoyed watching him record Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, with this incredible depth of storyline, surrounded by all these boring people from the record company who he had sitting in the control room. I couldn’t record like that.

Desolation Row’s lyrics are just so interesting and diverse. It isn’t a real street so you create your own fantasy. I imagine an unforgiving place, somewhere you don’t want to spend much time, peopled with strange characters. The opening line about the “postcards of the hanging” sets the tone, but then this awful event is juxtaposed with “the beauty parlour filled with sailors” and all these circus people. The lines “The agents and the superhuman crew / Come out and round up everyone that knows more than they do / Then they bring them to the factory where the heart-attack machine is strapped across their shoulders” are scary and apocalyptic, viciously delivered.

My reading is that that’s about governmental, military control, but then there’s the payoff: “When you asked me how I was doing, was that some kind of joke? Don’t send me no more letters unless you mail them from Desolation Row.” That sounds like a really personal thing. Musically, he prettifies it. I love the lovely half-Spanish guitar lines from the session guitarist, Charlie McCoy. It’s actually a really lovely song, which shouldn’t work with the imagery but does. You can listen to it all the time and still get something wonderful and new from it.

[www.theguardian.com]

Marianne Faithfull from the same article:

Marianne Faithfull
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (1966)


I first met Bob at the Savoy in 1965. There’s a clip of me and Joan Baez singing As Tears Go By in the hotel room while Bob is hammering away on a typewriter. Later when I turned him down, he told me that it had been a poem about me, but he’d torn it up. I was so upset, but we got over that and have been friends for 56 years. I really like him.

I think It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue is about those times in life where you just have to say, “OK, we tried, it didn’t work”, but it’s a much sleeker way of saying it. It’s very loving, but obviously it’s all over. I don’t really know why I love it so much, but I’ve been in many situations where I would have liked to have time stop and have a band playing and sing that song to people. I’ve recorded it twice. The second time, I’d had more experiences and really felt it. I love the way his songs change octaves. I’m suffering long Covid and my voice is cracked, but I’m trying to recover it by singing It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.

From the BBC website


Bob Dylan: 80 things you may not know about him on his 80th birthday



"I was so much older then / I'm younger than that now."

Bob Dylan sang those wise words at the tender age of 23, on his track My Back Pages.
As he reaches his 80th birthday on Monday, we've decided to ignore the advice of the famous Dylan documentary Don't Look Back and celebrate the life and career of the US singer-songwriter.
Be warned though before we get started, this list is about as long and exhaustive as some of the verses on his last album...

1. Bob Dylan is not his given birth name. But you already knew that, right? So here are 79 more facts about the artist formerly known as Robert Allen Zimmerman.
2. He has sold more than 125 million albums around the world.
3. Despite his success and cultural impact, Dylan has never had a number one single in the UK or US. For context, Mr Blobby, Crazy Frog and Las Ketchup have all topped the charts.
4. A poll of musicians, writers and academics, conducted on Dylan's 70th birthday, found his best song to be 1965's Like a Rolling Stone, which the singer once said was his most honest and direct work. "After that I wasn't interested in writing a novel or a play," he said. "I knew I wanted to write songs because it was just a whole new category."
5. Bruce Springsteen said the track, with its opening snare kick, sounded like "somebody kicked open the door to your mind". While another high-profile fan, U2's Bono, called it "a black eye of a pop song".
6. When asked what his songs were about, in a 1966 interview with Playboy magazine, Dylan quipped: "Some are about four minutes, some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve."
7. Surprisingly to many, the counterculture icon did not play at the 1969 Woodstock festival. Dylan was a Woodstock resident at the time (the festival was actually about 40 miles away) but he got a better offer - £35,000 to headline the Isle of Wight festival instead, with The Beatles watching on.
8. Speaking of The Fab Four... Dylan was the first man to introduce the band to marijuana, Sir Paul McCartney recently revealed to Uncut. 'We all ran into the backroom going, 'Give us a bit!'" said Sir Macca. "So that was the very first evening we ever got stoned!"
9. Many of his songs are more familiar to mainstream audiences as cover versions. For example Adele's version of Make You Feel My Love, The Byrds' Mr Tambourine Man and All Along The Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix. "He played [my songs] the way I would have done them if I was him," he said of the late guitarist. Dylan himself has recorded covers of Frank Sinatra and Paul Simon tunes.
10. Malibu resident Dylan has 17 houses around the world according to biographer Howard Sounes. One of them is reportedly in the Scottish Highlands.
11. The troubadour has won 10 Grammy awards, including three for his 1997 album Time Out of Mind, which many critics considered to be a return to form after a long artistic slump.
12. He was born into a Jewish family in Duluth, Minnesota, before moving upstate to Hibbing.
13. Country singer Hank Williams, and bluesmen Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker were among his musical heroes growing up, along with the king of rock 'n' roll Elvis Presley. The Rebel Without a Cause James Dean was his celluloid hero.
14. Dylan saw Buddy Holly play live locally just a few days before he died in a plane crash.
15. As a youngster he played piano and guitar in several summer camp/high school bands. Their names included The Jokers, The Shadow Blasters, The Golden Chords and (our personal favourite) The Rock Boppers.
16. He wrote in his high school year book that it was his ambition "to join Little Richard".
17. Working as busboy in a Fargo restaurant, after finishing high school, remains the only normal job Dylan has ever done. But in another life he'd like to have been a soldier. In his 2004 memoir Chronicles he wrote he'd always pictured himself "dying in some heroic battle rather than a bed".
18. After moving to Minneapolis to study he turned his attention to folk music, swapping his electric guitar for an acoustic, which he played in cafes around the city's bohemian Dinkytown area.
19. He became totally enchanted by US folk singers like Odetta and Woody Guthrie, who he would later visit in a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey and play his own songs to him.
20. His first original composition of any note was called Song for Woody, and he even began to sing and talk like the Oklahoma singer.
21. Guthrie offered Dylan his stash of unused lyrics but his young son Arlo was unable to find them when Dylan came knocking. Almost 40 years later, the lyrics were put to music by Essex folksinger Billy Bragg and Chicago band Wilco.
22. In his book, Dylan revealed that aside from Guthrie, blues legend Robert Johnson and Pirate Jenny - a song from Brecht/Weill play with music, The Threepenny Opera - were the biggest influences on his songwriting.
23. Having briefly operated under the name Elston Gunn, including while playing in Bobby Vee's band, Dylan then settled on his now famous moniker - a nod to the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.
24. Dylan was a university drop-out. He never did finish his Liberal Arts degree at the University of Minnesota.
25. He read works by French symbolist poets like Arthur Rimbaud and American beat writers like Jack Kerouac. The On the Road writer's spontaneous style "blew a hole in my head", Dylan once remarked.
26. He moved to New York in 1961, to chase his dream of becoming a big music star.
27. He would regularly perform at venues in Greenwich Village such as Cafe Wha? and The Gaslight Cafe, where performers would pass around a basket at the end of each set and hope to be paid. Dylan once said he would get a dollar and a cheeseburger to play his harmonica all afternoon alongside another singer in the village.
28. After nine months in The Big Apple he secured a deal with Colombia Records, feeding the company's PR executives "pure hokum", as he later put it.
29. His first trip abroad involved an eight-week stay in a freezing cold London in the winter of 1962/63, where he learned traditional English folk songs like Scarborough Fair, and (for contractual reasons) cut an LP under the pseudonym Billy Boy Grunt.
30. Early on in his career, he would make up tales about his background, telling journalists and radio presenters that he was an orphan, from New Mexico and that he used to travel with a carnival.
31. His self-titled debut album consisted largely of covers of traditional folk and blues numbers, such as The House of the Rising Sun.
32. His breakthrough follow-up, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, carried a picture of him and his girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo, on the cover. A performance of the song Don't Think Twice, It's Alright is believed to have brought about the end of the couple's relationship.
33. Blowin' in the Wind, the opening track on the album, was the song that made Dylan famous - initially thanks to the Peter, Paul and Mary version - and it also forever aligned with him the civil rights movement and anti-war protests.
34. The song has a similar melody to that of the African American spiritual song No More Auction Block. It came about as musician Agnes 'Sis' Cunningham urged artists like Dylan to put contemporary activist lyrics to old tunes which she then published in her Broadside magazine.
35. Dylan performed the number near to Dr Martin Luther King Jr at a march on Washington DC in 1963, becoming the voice of a generation in the process - a label he always rejected.
36. He said that Dr King's famous I Have a Dream speech that day affected him "in a profound way".
37. At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan shocked fans and the music world by plugging in and rocking out, backed by a band that had been hastily-arranged the night before.
38. For the next year or so on tour around the world, Dylan and his band The Hawks were regularly booed when they went electric - including at London's Royal Albert Hall. He was famously even called "Judas" by one gig-goer in Manchester. "I don't believe you," replied Dylan. "You're lying".
39. The period that followed - with his trilogy of more abstract and surrealist bluesy folk rock albums, Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde - saw Dylan turn pop music into an art form, according to Sean Latham, director of the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies at the University of Tulsa.
Speaking on Radio 4's documentary series, It Ain't Me You're Looking For Babe: Bob Dylan at 80, Mr Latham said: "The closest parallels we can draw in fact are not to other pop stars but to say Picasso or James Joyce."
40. Dylan married Sara Lownds, who had worked as a model, in secret in 1965, and they had four children together. He also adopted her daughter from a prior marriage.
41. For a short while they lived at the famous Chelsea Hotel in New York.
42. One of their sons, Jakob, became known as the frontman of the 1990s band The Wallflowers.
43. Dylan did a screen test at Andy Warhol's studio, aka The Factory, and walked away with a print of an Elvis portrait.
44. He was injured in a mysterious motorbike accident in July 1966.
45. The singer then stopped touring and became a bit of a recluse for most of the rest of the 60s, living in a remote artists' colony in Woodstock, upstate New York. "Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race," he wrote in Chronicles. "Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on."
46. During this period he learned to paint, read the bible and would jam with his with 1966 touring bandmates - who would become affectionately known as The Band. The collection of historical ballads and traditional songs they recorded were released many years later under the name The Basement Tapes.
47. The Band's star-studded final gig, which featured Dylan, was later the subject of a Martin Scorsese documentary entitled The Last Waltz.
48. Fans broke into Dylan's property (and bed), and he eventually moved back to Greenwich Village, where he was similarly hounded by Dylanologists.
49. The star rarely read the contracts he signed early on, and as a result he and his long-trusted manager Albert Grossman ended up suing each other in the 1980s.
50. Re-inventing himself again as a country singer, he wrote Wanted Man with Johnny Cash. Cash debuted the track live at San Quentin prison in 1969.
51. His 1975 album Blood on the Tracks tackled the topic of his separation from Sara.
52. Its opening track Tangled Up in Blue saw him experiment with timeless painting-style techniques in the muddled narrative of the song. The singer said it took "ten years to live and two years to write".
53. Dylan returned to the live circuit in 1974, playing arenas with The Band - one of the first major tours of its kind.
54. The following year he gathered a collection of entertainers - including beat poet Allen Ginsberg, singers Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and violinist Scarlet Rivera - for a travelling circus-esque US tour called the The Rolling Thunder Revue. Dylan even drove a motor home for the circuit of small town venues, which was mythologised in a Scorsese Netflix film.
The finale of the first leg of the tour constituted a benefit concert for imprisoned boxer Ruben Carter - the subject of Dylan's recent song The Hurricane - and featured an appearance from fighting champion and activist Muhammad Ali.
55. At times during the unique tour, Dylan painted his face white and wore a mask, while former girlfriend Baez dressed up as him.
56. Baez has stated that the lyrics to her song Diamonds and Rust relate to her relationship with her fellow singer.
57. He started to re-imagine his songs at this time, reworking the tempos and styles so they were almost unrecognisable. A decade later, after sustaining a debilitating hand injury, Dylan said a jazz singer inspired him to play and sing his songs using a totally different technique.
58. In 1978, Dylan released a cubist-inspired film he had written and directed during The Rolling Thunder Revue tour, called Renaldo and Clara. The almost four-hour long feature starred his (by-then ex) wife Sara and Baez, as The Woman in White, and it was an expensive flop at the box office.
59. Dylan had a period of Christian revelation in the late 1970s, following his divorce, after a fan threw a small silver cross on stage. He got baptised and released several albums containing contemporary gospel songs like Gotta Serve Somebody.
Speaking about his faith in 1997, however, the musician told Newsweek: "I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music, I don't find it anywhere else. I don't adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists all of that, I've learned more from the songs than I have from any of this entity."
60. Sporting a dangly earring, Dylan played a rather ragged rendition of Blowin' In the Wind at the global charity event Live Aid in 1985, backed by Rolling Stones guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood at Philadelphia's JFK Stadium.
61. His song Blind Willie McTell, a tribute to the late bluesman, was released in 1991, oddly eight years after it was recorded.
62. Dylan married his backup singer Carolyn Dennis in 1986 and they had a daughter together, before divorcing in 1992. This second marriage remained a secret until Sounes' book, Down the Highway, was first published in 2001.
63. He formed a supergroup called The Traveling Wilburys in 1988, with his famous friends George Harrison, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne. They each had band nicknames and Dylan was known as Lucky. Lucky Wilbury.
64. He was inducted into the The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that year too.
65. His album Love and Theft was released on 11 September 2001 - the same day as the plane attacks on New York City.
66. Dylan won an Oscar and a Golden Globe award earlier that year for his track Things Have Changed, which featured in the Michael Douglas movie Wonder Boys.
67. He had his own weekly one-hour satellite radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, from 2006 to 2009.
68. Dylan's name appears on the wall of Blackpool's Opera House, alongside other acts to have performed there, such as comedians Little and Large and Roy Chubby Brown.
69. He's a hip-hop fan. Dylan raved about Ice-T, Public Enemy, NWA and Run-DMC: "They were all poets and knew what was going on," he wrote. Some consider his own 1965 track Subterranean Homesick Blues to be one of the first modern rap songs.
70. He's also allegedly a master thief. Chronicles: Volume One (to give it its full title) was a New York times best-seller, however critics claimed its author, Dylan, had cribbed certain passages from Marcel Proust, Mark Twain, Time magazine and even a guide to New Orleans.
71. The 2007 Dylan-inspired film I'm Not There became Heath Ledger's last movie to be released during the actor's lifetime.
72. A 160ft wide Dylan mural by Brazilian street artist Eduardo Kobra was unveiled in downtown Minneapolis in 2015.
73. Dylan was awarded the US Medal of Freedom in 2012 by then-Present Barack Obama; before receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature four years later, for having "created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition". He became the first songwriter to win the prestigious award, but it was collected on his behalf by another - the priestess of punk Patti Smith, who nervously sang A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.
74. He eventually delivered a Nobel lecture in the form of a spoken word piece with added piano tinkling and references to the plays of William Shakespeare and Homer's hero, Odysseus. "My songs are alive in the land of the living, but songs are unlike literature, they are meant to be sung and not read," he explained.
75. The last British gig of Dylan's so-called Never Ending Tour, which kicked off in 1988, saw him and Neil Young co-headline a UK show for the first time, at London's Hyde Park in 2019. He's played roughly 100 gigs a year for the last 20 years.
76. His first new song in eight years was released last year and it comprised of a 17-minute rumination on the 1960s and the assassination of JFK. It made Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, his 11 minute-plus epic from 1966, seem pretty poppy by comparison.
77. In December, he sold the rights to his entire song catalogue to Universal Music Group (UMG) for an undisclosed fee. The New York Times claimed the deal could be worth more than $300m (£225m).
78. Dylan has been a keen painter and visual artist for decades and his work is currently on display and up for sale at the Castle Fine Art gallery in Manchester.
79. Last week, it emerged Dylan had agreed to become an honorary patron of the The Bob Willis Fund - a new charity in memory of the late England cricketer. "Bob Willis was a great sportsman who left too soon," Dylan noted. "I'm happy to help keep his flame and cause alive."
Willis once told the BBC's John Wilson that he had changed his middle name to Dylan as a young man, in honour of his favourite musician.
80. The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma - a museum dedicated to artefacts from his huge archive - will open to the public in May next year.
So if you made it to the end of this list and are still craving more, now you know where to go for more Dylan facts.

Dylan was the first man to introduce the band to marijuana, Sir Paul McCartney recently revealed to Uncut. 'We all ran into the backroom going, 'Give us a bit!'" said Sir Macca. "So that was the very first evening we ever got stoned!"

...another way he incalculably impacted the trajectory of music and culture.

Happy birthday, Bob!

Knowing his "hits", I discovered his album work pretty late,
around 1990 I bought Subterranean and Highway 61
on CD and was overwhelmed by all these words and
stories. In 1997 Time Out Of Mind blew me away.

He´s the artist I´ve seen the most after the Stones.
The best shows were in 2003 at the DOCKS in Hamburg, a small club.

Can't get over the fact that is was a joke to give him the Nobel Prize. He didn't even bother to show up at the ceremony. And in order to receive the money he
copied an essay from the net and collected the money a year after the ceremony...

Quote
Stoneage
Can't get over the fact that is was a joke to give him the Nobel Prize. He didn't even bother to show up at the ceremony. And in order to receive the money he
copied an essay from the net and collected the money a year after the ceremony...

Classic Bob. Awards ceremonies are weird.

Quote
NashvilleBlues

Quote
Stoneage
Can't get over the fact that is was a joke to give him the Nobel Prize. He didn't even bother to show up at the ceremony. And in order to receive the money he
copied an essay from the net and collected the money a year after the ceremony...

Classic Bob. Awards ceremonies are weird.

no, it was just impolit, nothing else!

Does anyone remember his musicares speech from 2015 (see: [www.youtube.com], starts at about 20 min)? btw.: It's by far the longest speech he ever delivered in public)

Right after that I said: this could have been the Nobel prize speech. (but he got the Nobel prize some two years later)

Keith Richards
@officialKeef

"Today is the day, Bob, and many many more! One love, Keith"


[twitter.com]

Happy belated Birthday Bob, and hope you had a great Day.

Brings to mind about a rumour that has been going round in my home town area since 1962/63.

As Bob in comments in this thread have said, on number 29 in 80 things about Bob', It's about his first trip abroad ,'Involved an eight-week stay in a freezing cold London in the winter of 1962/63, where he learned traditional English folk songs like Scarborough Fair, and (for contractual reasons) cut an LP under the pseudonym Billy Boy Grunt.'

The story is that he was snowed in with the deep snow in London area,( which I remember so well as couldn't go to school after Christmas and not back till after Easter because of frozen up outside toilets that we would normally use.)

Strong rumours about Bob managed to get out of his hotel he was staying in and did a gig at Surbiton Assembly Rooms, not far away, but there are no pics or reviews about the gig.
[thebluemoment.com]

Not sure if he done some other gigs in his first stay in London area.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2021-05-27 13:31 by crawdaddy.

Some great Dylan material on BBC4 tonight including a great interview from the mid 80s.

Nate

Wondering when Bob will resume the never ending tour...used to be like clockwork around these parts...he was either coming or going...
never had to wait too long for him to come back...would love to see him again some day...

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Rip this joint, gonna save your soul, round and round and round we go......

None of us knows why Dylan did not attend the Nobel Prize awards ceremony. We should assume that he had a a good reason to not attend. It's not that he expected it and kept the date free "just in case". No further speculation needed, imho.

It wasn't a joke to him, he felt quite honoured and "not worth it", I think.

At all subsequent concerts I have been to, the Nobel Prize medal was displayed on stage.

Quote
Papo
None of us knows why Dylan did not attend the Nobel Prize awards ceremony. We should assume that he had a a good reason to not attend. It's not that he expected it and kept the date free "just in case". No further speculation needed, imho.

It wasn't a joke to him, he felt quite honoured and "not worth it", I think.

At all subsequent concerts I have been to, the Nobel Prize medal was displayed on stage.

I've been to quite a lot of Dylan shows after the Nobel prize, including the show in Stockholm on the day he met the Nobel prize commity – I've never seen the medal displayed on stage.
Could you please post a photo?