I've just had to pay £240 per ticket for crap seats with face value of £85 a ticket, bit pissed off but Dylans worth it.
Obviously Dylans not ripping anyone off.

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keefriffhards
I've just had to pay £240 per ticket for crap seats with face value of £85 a ticket, bit pissed off but Dylans worth it.
Obviously Dylans not ripping anyone off.

eh, well I paid 254 Euros (face value) for a 4th row seat in Granda.
front row seat at the Royal Albert Hall in November are 180 GBP. For shows in Germany they are 210 Euros.
Dylan is surely worth the money (but maybe not for everyone)

[youtu.be]

[youtu.be]

Great cast!

Let's see if they can pull it off without it being laughable. I'll give them credit, the trailer gives me more hope than when I first read about it. Its a hell of a lot for them to tackle, storywise, Timthoee singingwise, but so far it seems more positive than negative. I kinda can't believe Dylan was even amendable to be approached, let alone give notes for the thing.

Just a Thought, With the tour starting in Prague 1st weekend in October....And your living in the UK or Europe or elsewhere...You may want to consider coming over for the weekend..The Majority of Tourist will be gone so there should be good deals on Flights/Hotels Etc... Tickets are still available for all 3 Nights.If you have never been to Prague it has it's Charm.Hope everyone is having a great summer.Peace.M

I check in to this thread whenever but this I can not recall so forgive me if it's been talked about and obviously I missed it:

My father in law got THE CHRONICLES Vol 1 recently and he's been going on and on about how good it is, that it's amazing.

My copy showed up today.

I don't know why I didn't consider it when it came out. The Willie Nelson book is fantastic (I don't know if there's more than one and bizarrely I don't own that either but somehow I read part of it). Maybe too much going on.

Or just forgot, like I forgot I own SHINE A LIGHT on CD and DVD - yet, unlike that, which is awful and entirely purposely forgetful, similar to THE BIGGEST BANG DVD box, a Bob Dylan book should sit way better.

5 pages in and I had to set it down because of my dogs but I know I'm in for a treat.

Please comment if you have it/read it. I would appreciate some observations.

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GasLightStreet
I check in to this thread whenever but this I can not recall so forgive me if it's been talked about and obviously I missed it:

My father in law got THE CHRONICLES Vol 1 recently and he's been going on and on about how good it is, that it's amazing.

My copy showed up today.

I don't know why I didn't consider it when it came out. The Willie Nelson book is fantastic (I don't know if there's more than one and bizarrely I don't own that either but somehow I read part of it). Maybe too much going on.

Or just forgot, like I forgot I own SHINE A LIGHT on CD and DVD - yet, unlike that, which is awful and entirely purposely forgetful, similar to THE BIGGEST BANG DVD box, a Bob Dylan book should sit way better.

5 pages in and I had to set it down because of my dogs but I know I'm in for a treat.

Please comment if you have it/read it. I would appreciate some observations.

I’m not a big book reader, at all, but I read it and loved it. It’s a mix of fact and fiction (it is Dylan). The part where Dylan is at a wrestling match and the wrestler (Gorgeous George, maybe?) mouths to Dylan, “You’re making it come alive,” was hilarious. Let us know what you think…

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NashvilleBlues
I’m not a big book reader, at all, but I read it and loved it. It’s a mix of fact and fiction (it is Dylan). The part where Dylan is at a wrestling match and the wrestler (Gorgeous George, maybe?) mouths to Dylan, “You’re making it come alive,” was hilarious. Let us know what you think…

Yes, correct.

I find his description of the NYC winter, combined with the various places he was hanging out, easy to picture, having lived in Chicago during the winter and having been to NYC during winter.

What I've found glazing over is his going on and on about all the books he was interested in... that gets to be quite a snore. So far it's ok. His hemhawing about his name... ok. Finding myself starting to skip through pages.

From today’s Toronto Star

How Bob Dylan and other folk luminaries helped create a legendary New York music scene

David Browne’s “Talkin’ Greenwich Village” tells the story of the performers, the clubs and the social forces that shaped a revolution.

By David McPherson Special to the Star

For David Browne — who has written acclaimed biographies of Jeff Buckley, the Grateful Dead, and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, among others — a love affair with the sights, sounds and venues of Greenwich Village that started during his college days climaxes with his latest book, “Talkin’ Greenwich Village.”

Browne’s deep dive into what the subtitle calls “the heady rise and slow fall of America’s bohemian music capital” is more than just a geographic survey of the people and the places that made this music scene famous. Through extensive research, scouring court records and city archives and conducting 150 interviews, Browne leaves few stones unturned to present a panoramic vision of this music mecca.

He reveals how social and political forces contributed to the scene’s rise and fall, including racial tensions, the mob’s influence, police interference and municipal bureaucracy — all of which added to the challenge of running a Village venue.

Browne, a longtime Rolling Stone senior writer, uses Dave Van Ronk (the inspiration for the main character in the 2013 Coen brothers film, “Inside Llewyn Davis”) as the thread to connect these entertaining tales, from the folk singer-songwriter’s arrival on the scene in the 1950s to his death in 2002.

Browne’s book itself arrives just as interest in the Village is peaking, with the upcoming Bob Dylan biopic, “A Complete Unknown,” chronicling the folk icon’s early-’60s experiences in the Village. The Emmy award-winning comedy-drama “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” which recently finished its run, was filmed in the Gaslight Café and other real neighbourhood spots.

The author spoke to the Star recently via Zoom from his Manhattan home.

The idea for this book was brewing for a long time, wasn’t it?

That’s right. The idea started forming in the mid-’80s to the early ’90s when I noticed the first wave of clubs closing. Suddenly, you didn’t have places like Folk City, the Lone Star Cafe and the Village Gate. An era was coming to a close, and I asked myself, “Is this a book?” Then other things popped up. Jeff Buckley passed away and that ended up being my first book, so I put this idea on the back burner.

What brought the idea to the forefront again?

It came back during the early months of the pandemic. I found myself down in the Village again on a couple of occasions. During these visits, I was reminded of a bygone era. The idea for a book returned, especially following an interview (I did) with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (for Rolling Stone). We toured the Village together and he pointed at all of these places that were now gone or where something else was now in their place. So, the book coalesced over a long period, but I’m glad I finally got around to doing it.

Did you know the arc of the story before writing?

Going into it I did kind of know the arc. What helped is that during my senior year at (New York University), I wrote about the Village folk revival in 1981. I also spent some time as a young journalism student hanging out in places like Folk City and the newer clubs like the Speakeasy that had just opened and were presenting people like Suzanne Vega early in their careers. More importantly, I still had, after almost 40 years, all of my folders of notes, interviews, transcripts and club flyers from that time. I pulled out those folders early in the writing process and reviewing my notes was another reminder that all this stuff was still going on. I immediately felt like that story especially — the mid-’70s to the mid-’80s scenes — hadn’t really been told.

The book not only describes the artists and the venues, but it also tells the broader story of the exterior factors that affected the Village scene.

That’s one thing I learned more as I got further into the research. You always got the sense, when talking about the Village music scene, that there were exterior factors bearing down, whether it was real estate prices or a police presence. The Village was a scene that was constantly being monitored and under siege by the city, the police, the landlords and the mob. I knew some of these factors played a role in so many clubs closing and the scenes folding, but the more I got into the weeds, the more I learned and got a fuller picture of their true impact.

Was using Dave Van Ronk as your protagonist intentional?

No. That’s something that came to me once I started researching. I knew he had to be in the book. And I knew how important he was as a mentor to everybody from Dylan to Danny Kalb and the Blues Project, right up through the Roches. He was in the Village the whole time, like the bedrock of that world. He lived there and died there. Despite his never having a hit record, Van Ronk’s influence was vast. You could almost trace all the different eras of the Village through him. Having Van Ronk threading throughout also seemed like a good way to humanize the story. I didn’t want the book to read like a Wikipedia entry.


Was it hard to structure the book using Van Ronk as a thread?

It was a real challenge. But, hopefully it works for readers. At one point I bought a pack of index cards and I wrote on each one whenever I came across some significant event, album release, date of a seminal show, some New York City political event, etc. I spread them out on the floor of my office and moved things around to see how everything flowed. I did all kinds of stuff like that in the writing and creating process to make sure the narrative was as seamless as possible.

What do you see as the future of the Greenwich Village music scene?

That’s a good question. And I have mixed feelings. On one hand, I went down there many times doing research just to look around and to interview some of the survivors who are still living in the same apartments they were living in back in the 1960s or 1970s. You walk by what used to be the Gaslight Café; you walk by what used to be Kenny’s Castaways or the Speakeasy, and so on. Now those buildings are completely different businesses and in some cases they’ve turned over two or three times. On the other hand, the Village Vanguard is still there. So is the Bitter End, the Blue Note and Cafe Wha? So, while the Village scene is probably never going to be what it was in its heyday, on weekends the streets are still packed.

Why do you think that, despite all these ups and downs, Greenwich Village is still such a draw?

There’s something mythic and mythological about it. It’s still so unique and unlike any other neighbourhood in New York City — just how compact it is. It has those little areas of cobblestone streets, and it has that very irregular grid where streets go up at all kinds of angles.

David McPherson is the author of “101 Fascinating Canadian Music Facts,” “Massey Hall,” and “The Legendary Horseshoe Tavern: A Complete History.” Follow him @mcphersoncomm.

[www.thestar.com]