Category Archives: Film

Video: Bob Dylan Plays ‘Blind Willie McTell’ for Martin Scorsese — Jan. 12, 2012

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Bob Dylan – Blind Willie McTell (January 12… by Flixgr

When the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards were held two years ago, on Thursday, January 12, 2012, Martin Scorsese was the Music + Film honoree.

Appearing with his band to perform “Blind Willie McTell,” a song included in Scorsese’s PBS documentary series “The Blues,” was Bob Dylan.

Scorsese, of course, also put together the Dylan documentary, “No Direction Home.”

When Scorsese took the stage to accept his award he said:

“Such a great honor and an amazing performance by the great one, Bob Dylan. This award has a very special significance to me, so I’d like to begin with a special thank-you to Django Reinhardt, Stéphane Grappelli and the Hot Club of France. That was the music I used to hear when I was growing up in my apartment in New York, even before we had a TV, in the middle to late ’40s. Before anything for me, there was music and conversation, and for me they were both the same thing.”

Watch Olivia Harrison present the award and Scorsese accept it:

(If you’ve got Spotify, you might dig this Martin Scorsese jukebox plus clips from scenes in Scorsese films that include music.)

Other versions of “Blind Willie McTell”:

Accoustic version off The Bootleg Series Vol 1-3, from the Infidels sessions:

Electric version off The Bootleg Series Vol 1-3, from the Infidels sessions:

And a live electric version, Vienna, VA, August 24, 1997:

Blind Willie McTell by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

Watch: Robert Plant’s ‘Zirka’ — Episodes 7 & 8

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Photo via Robert Plant’s Facebook page.

Here are the final two episodes of Robert Plant’s documentary on his 2003 trip to Mali, “Zirka.”

Watch previous episodes here.

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Watch & Listen: Bob Dylan Copyrights ‘Billy’ 41 Years Ago

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Forty-one years ago, on December 18, 1972, Bob Dylan’s main theme for the film “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid” was copyrighted, according to “The Bob Dylan Copyright Files 1962-2007” by Tim Dunn.

Four versions of the song appeared on the soundtrack for the film, two of which were instrumentals and two with lyrics.

The lyrics that were copyrighted and which appear in the songbook, “The Songs of Bob Dylan: From 1966 Through 1975” are not exactly the same as the lyrics Bob sings for “Billy 4” and “Billy 7.” It seems he improvised each time he sang the song, changing words, and choosing which verses to include.

Bob was also an actor in the film, which was directed by Sam Peckinpah and released in 1973.

You can check out a version of the lyrics to “Billy” here.

“Billy 4”:

Billy 4 by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

“Billy 7”:

Billy 7 by Bob Dylan on Grooveshark

Dylan performing “Billy 4” live, Stockholm, Sweden, March 22, 2009,

Main Title Theme (Billy) — instrumental:

Here’s a beautiful version of “Billy” Performed by Gillian Welch & D@vid Rawlings:

And here’s Bob acting in the film:

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Listen: Bob Dylan Performing ‘The Ballad of the Gliding Swan’ From First TV Appearance

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Fifty years ago in January of 1963, Bob Dylan flew to England and appeared in a TV play, “The Madhouse on Castle Street,” which was produced and broadcast by the BBC on January 13, 1963. Dylan was to play the lead role in the production, but once he was in England he changed his mind. Instead he played a minor character, Bob the Hobo and performed a number of songs including “Hang Me, O Hang Me,” “Cuckoo Bird,” “Blowin’ in the Wind” and the English folk ballad, “The Ballad of the Gliding Swan.”

According to filmthreat.com, the play tells “the tale of a reclusive young man who shuts himself in his boarding house room, with the declaration that he will never come out unless the world changes. In the course of the drama, the young man’s friends and fellow boarding house residents try to discover why he chose to take such a drastic and peculiar course of action. In many ways, the drama was typical of the so-called boarding house plays of British theater during the early 1960s: a motley collection of malcontent souls venting their respective fears and furies in the setting of a cheap, rundown rooms-to-let setting.”

When the production aired, the public heard “Blowin’ in the Wind” for the first time. How the song came to be part of the play was explained by it’s directer, Philip Saville,at whose house Dylan was staying briefly.

“I got up to have a pee and I heard music,” Saville told The Guardian. “I wandered along the landing and there at the bottom, because I had a little baby then, were our two Spanish au pairs. There he was at the top of the stairs, singing, and these two lovely little girls were like two little robins or starlings looking up at him. He didn’t know I was behind him, and I applauded and just said: ‘Oh Bob, would you sing that on the opening and closing of the production?’”

The film of the play was destroyed in 1968. However there is audio of “The Ballad of the Gliding Swan” that is purported to be from the film.

For more on this story, head to filmthreat.com.

Audio of Dylan performing the English folk ballad, “The Ballad of the Gliding Swan”:

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Watch: Robert Plant Posts Episode 6 of ‘Zirka’ Mali Trip

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Photo via Robert Plant’s website.

Here’s the sixth episode of Robert Plant’s “Zirka,” a documentary he shot with a video camera during his trip to Mali in 2003.

Watch the other episodes here.

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

Watch & Listen: Bob Dylan’s Infamous 1963 Tom Paine Award Speech

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Dylan accepting Tom Paine award.

Fifty years and two days ago an inebreated Bob Dylan shocked an audience of liberals at the Emergency Civil Liberties Union’s (E.C.L.U.) annual Bill of Rights dinner when on receiving their prestigious Tom Paine Award, he launched into a rant (see below) that in part attacked members of the audience as well as those on the stage with him.

In the days following the speech a letter was sent by one of the organizers of the dinner to all the attendees of the dinner defending the E.C.L.U.’s choice of Dylan to get the award that year.

Dylan ended up writing an open letter which was really a long poem (on page two of this post) in which he tried to explain where he was coming from when he made his speech and what he was talking about.

The video below is taken from Martin Scorsese’s “No Direction Home: Bob Dylan” documentary.

Transcript of the full speech:

I haven’t got any guitar, I can talk though. I want to thank you for the Tom Paine award in behalf everybody that went down to Cuba. First of all because they’re all young and it’s took me a long time to get young and now I consider myself young. And I’m proud of it. I’m proud that I’m young. And I only wish that all you people who are sitting out here today or tonight weren’t here and I could see all kinds of faces with hair on their head – and everything like that, everything leading to youngness, celebrating the anniversary when we overthrew the House Un-American Activities just yesterday, – Because you people should be at the beach. You should be out there and you should be swimming and you should be just relaxing in the time you have to relax. (Laughter) It is not an old peoples’ world. It is not an old peoples’ world. It has nothing to do with old people. Old people when their hair grows out, they should go out. (Laughter) And I look down to see the people that are governing me and making my rules – and they haven’t got any hair on their head – I get very uptight about it. (Laughter)

— continued —

Use this link or the one below below to get to the rest of this post.

Pages: 1 2

Listen: U2 Release Acoustic ‘Mandela Version’ of ‘Breathe’

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The flipside of U2’s “Ordinary Love” single is an acoustic interpretation of “Breathe” — “Breathe (Mandela Version)”

Now the group has made it available via YouTube.

“Breathe (Mandela Version)”:

Plus here’s “Ordinary Love” in case you missed it:

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Listen: Beck-Produced Charlotte Gainsbourg Take on ‘Hey Joe’

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New Charlotte Gainsbourg track, the Beck-produced cover of “Hey Joe,” is used in the closing credits for Lars von Trier’s controversial new film, “Nymphomaniac.” She stars in the film as a self-diagnosed nymphomaniac named Joe.

The track will be released as a digital single on December 16.

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

The Parallels of Bob Dylan & The Coen Brothers

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In a terrific review of “Inside Llewyn Davis” that ran in today’s New York Times, A. O. Scott concludes by quoting on of Dylan’s most obtuse lines as he compares the Coen Brothers approach to making films to Dylan’s creative strategy.

Scott writes:

One of the insights of “Inside Llewyn Davis” is that hard work and talent do not always triumph in the end. Like most of the Coens’ movies, this one sidesteps the political turmoil of its period, partly because it is a fable, not a work of history. (The public affairs of the time get a shout-out in the form of a goofy novelty song called “Please Mr. Kennedy,” a barely topical sendup of the space race and the New Frontier.) But there is nonetheless a strong, hidden current of social criticism in the brothers’ work, which casts a consistently skeptical eye on the American mythology of success.

Winners do not interest them. There’s no success like failure, and failure’s no success at all. That observation was made by Bob Dylan, like Joel and Ethan Coen, a Jewish kid from Minnesota and, like them, possessed of a knack for conscripting the American popular art of the past for his own idiosyncratic genius. His art, like theirs, upends easy distinctions between sincerity and cynicism, between the authentic and the artificial, and both invites and resists interpretation.

So I won’t speculate further on what “Inside Llewyn Davis” might mean. But at least one of its lessons seems to me, after several viewings, as clear and bright as a G major chord. We are, as a species, ridiculous: vain, ugly, selfish and self-deluding. But somehow, some of our attempts to take stock of this condition — our songs and stories and moving pictures, old and new — manage to be beautiful, even sublime.

For the entire review, which I hope you’ll read, head over to the Times.

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Robert Christgau On ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’

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Robert Christgau, who knows what the New York folk scene was like way back when has a great story about the new Cohen Brothers film, “Inside Llewyn Davis” that just went online. The piece is mostly about the authenticity of the film, and what that means.

Christgau writes:

“When you read about the scene you see this mania for authenticity,” says Joel Coen, describing what enticed him and his brother Ethan into making Inside Llewyn Davis, a film about folksingers in Greenwich Village just before Bob Dylan touched down and took off. But Coen isn’t really praising the folksingers’ authenticity — it’s their mania that fascinates him. In the very next sentence he goes on: “You have these guys like Elliott Adnopoz, the son of a neurosurgeon from Queens, calling himself Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. In the film we have a character who sings and plays a guitar, wears a cowboy hat and calls himself Al Cody. His real name is Arthur Milgram.”

For the rest of the story, head over to Rolling Stone.

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