This interview for the Canadian Broadcasting Company by Martin Bronstein is quite amazing. During the 11+ minute interview Dylan says that his breakthrough song was “Like A Rolling Stone” and explains why.
He also says some very funny things.
Worth a listen.
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[I published True Love Scars in August of 2014.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Forty-Seven years ago, on December 27, 1967, following just three one-day recording sessions, Bob Dylan released his minimalist masterpiece, John Wesley Harding.
“We can all relax now,” wrote the music critic Ralph J. Gleason in Rolling Stonefollowing the release of John Wesley Harding. “Bob Dylan isn’t dead. He is all right. He is well and he’s not a basket case hidden from our view forever, the lovely words and the haunting sounds gone as a result of some ghastly effect of his accident.
“And his head is in the right place, which, is after all, the best news of all.”
While the best-known song off the album is “All Along The Watchtower,” due to Jim Hendrix’s explosive rock version, every song is a gem.
Dylan recorded in Nashville with producer Bob Johnston, and for all but the final two songs, was accompanied by just two other musicians, drummer Kenny Buttrey and bassist Charlie McCoy. Pete Drake played steel guitar on the two country songs, “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” and “Down ALong The Cove.”
Some comments Dylan made, according to the Drifter’s Escape blog:
“I didn’t intentionally come out with some kind of mellow sound. I didn’t sit down and plan that sound.”
“There’s only two songs on the album which came at the same time as the music…’Down Along the Cove’ and ‘I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight’. The rest of the songs were written out on paper, and I found the tunes for them later. I didn’t do it before, and I haven’t done it since. That might account for the specialness of that album.”
“I asked Columbia to release it with no publicity and no hype, because this was the season of hype.”
“What I’m trying to do now is not use too many words. There’s no line that you can stick your finger through, there’s no hole in any of the stanzas. There’s no blank filler. Each line has something.”
In an interview published in Newsweek in February 1968 Dylan told writer Hubert Saal:
“I was always with the traditional song. I just used electricity to wrap it up in. Probably I wasn’t ready yet to make it simple. It’s more complicated playing an electric guitar because you’re five or ten feet away from the sound and you strain for things that you don’t have to when the sound is right next to your body. Anyway it’s the song itself that matters, not the sound of the song.”
“I could have sung each of them better. I’m not exactly dissatisfied but I’m just not about to brag about the performance. In writing songs I have one great trouble. I’m lazy. I wish I could but you’re not going to find me sitting down at the piano every morning. Either it comes or doesn’t. Of course some songs, like ‘Restless Farewell,’ I’ve written just to fill up an album. And there are songs in which I made up a whole verse just to get to another verse.”
“It [John Wesley Harding] holds together better. I’ve always tried to get simple. I haven’t always succeeded. But here I took more care in the writing. In Blonde on Blonde I wrote out all the songs in the studio. The musicians played cards, I wrote out a song, we’d do it they’d go back to their game and I’d write out another song.”
Dylan talked to John Cohen and Happy Traum in June and July, 1968, for Sing Out!
Dylan talks about ballads and then John Cohen asks if “Wicked Messenger” is a ballad.
Dylan: In a sense, but the ballad form isn’t there. Well, the scope is there atually, but in a more compressed sense. The scope opens up, just by a few little tricks. I know why it opens up, but in a bllad in the true sense, it woudl’t open ujp that way. It does not reach the proportions I had intended for it.
Cohen: Have you ever written a ballad?
Dylan: I believe on my second record album, “Boots of Spanish Leather.”
Cohen: Then most of the songs on John Wesley Harding, you don’t consider ballads?
Dylan: Well I do, but not in the traditional sense. I haven’t fulfilled the balladeer’s job. A balladeer can sit down and sing three ballads for an hour and a half. See, on the album, you have to think about it after you hear it, that’s what takes up the time, but with a ballad, you don’t necessarily have to think about it after you hear it, it can all unfold to you. These melodies on the John Wesley Harding album lack this traditional sense of time. As with the third verse of the ‘Wicked Messenger,’ which opens it up, and then the time schedule takes a jump and soon the song becomes wider. One realizes that when one hears it, but one might have to adapt to it. But we are not hearing anything that isn’t there; anything we can imagine is really there. The same thing is true of the song ‘All ALong the Watchtower,’ which opens up in a slightly different way, in a stranger way, for here we have the cycle of events working in a rather reverse order.
About songwritng Dylan says: It’s like this painter who lives around here — he paints the area in a radius of twenty miles, he paints bright strong pictures. He might take a barn from twenty miles away, and hook it up with a brook right next door, then with a car ten miles away, and with the sky on some certain day, and the light on the trees from another certain day. A person passing by will be painted alongside someone ten miles away. And in the end he’ll have this composite picture of something which you can’t say exists in his mind. It’s not that he started off willfully painting this picture from all his experience … That’s more or less what I do.
Bob Dylan is in the midst of a three-night run at the Academy Of Music in Philadelphia. These performances are from the November 21, 2014 show.
“She Belongs To Me”:
“Duquesne Whistle”:
“Simple Twist Of Fate”:
“Blowin’ In The Wind”:
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[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
One way the story goes, Bob Dylan called members of The Hawks who were still on salary with him but living in New York, and he had them come to Woodstock, at first to work on a film and then to back him on some demos of new songs.
Robbie Robertson has a different version. As Robbie tells it, the guys moved up to Woodstock and rented Big Pink and set up the basement for recording. Then Dylan came over, saw it, and wanted to record there. and asked the guys to back him.
The only problem with Robbie’s version is that before anything happened in the basement, there were sessions with members of The Hawks in the Red Room at Dylan’s house, Hi Lo Ha, in Byrdcliffe Colony, not far from Woodstock.
Still, it’s interesting to hear Robbie tell his version of the Basement Tapes story.
Here’s a transcript:
We had moved up to Woodstock, New York because in New York City we couldn’t find a place that we could work on our music without it being too expensive or bothering people or something.
We go up there, and Albert Grossman says, “Up there you can find a place, you know, that’s there no people around and you can do whatever you want.” We’re thinking, “Oh, my God, we desperately need that,” and there was some stuff that I was working on then with Bob Dylan up there, too, some film things that we were messing around with.
Anyway, we went up there, we found this ugly pink house out in West Saugerties, just on the outskirts of Woodstock on a hundred acres and there’s nothing around and we think, “All right, we can do this.” We get this place. Some of the guys live there and, in the basement of this place, I think, “Okay, we’ll set up our equipment here and this is where we’ll work on our music.”
Robbie talks about the Basement Tapes.
I have a friend of mine who knows about acoustics and recording and microphones and all kinds of things, so I say to him, “Take a look at this place and see, because we’re going to use this and we just want to make sure that it’s going to work.”
At this time, you’ve got to remember, nobody was doing this. It didn’t exist, that people would set up and now everybody does it. Back then, this was very rare. It was like Les Paul did that. Everybody else, if you were going to make a record, you went and made a record where they make records, right?
Anyway, I had this friend of mine, this guy that I know, look at the thing in the basement and he said, “Well, this is a disaster.”
He said, “This is the worst situation. You have a cement floor, you have cinder block walls and you have a big metal furnace in here. These are all of the things that you can’t have if you’re trying to record something, even if you’re just recording it for your own information, your own benefit. You can’t do this. This won’t work. You’ll listen to it and you’ll be depressed. Your music will sound so bad that you’ll never want to record again.”
I’m like, “Holy, jeez.” I said, “Well, what if we put down a rug?”
He said, “A rug?” He said, “You don’t need a rug, you need everything here. This is impossible.”
The legendary basement. Note the rug.
I thought, “God, well that’s pretty depressing,” but we’d already rented the place. We didn’t have a choice. I was thinking, should we set up upstairs in the living room? What should we do here?
I thought, well, the hell with it. We have no choice. We don’t have the flexibilities, and we got this old rug and we did put a rug down, and we got a couple of microphones left over from the tour. We had this little tape recorder and we were going to start writing and making this music for our record.
Then Bob Dylan comes out and he sees this and he says, “This is fantastic!” He said, “Why don’t we do some stuff together?” He’s like, “I want to record, I need to make up some songs for the publishing company for other people to record.”
In the meantime, Bob is taking care of all of us all of this time. We owe him to do something just to, because the idea was we were going to go into another tour but he broke his neck in a motorcycle thing and we couldn’t do that. We’re still on the payroll and it’s going on and on and on, so it was a way to do something, a gesture back.
I said, “Yeah, okay, we’ll do these things and then we’ll work on our stuff.”
He starts coming up and he comes out all the time. It’s like the clubhouse, now, this place. We love it and we’re laying down these things on tape and, in their own way, they’re like field recordings.
They sound fantastic in their own way. I think, you know what? There is something about bringing the recording experience to you in your own comfort zone, as opposed to going into somebody’s studio that has a huge clock on the wall and the guys in the union there saying, “Hey, it’s about dinner break.” You make your own atmosphere. There’s something very creative about this.
We do the stuff with Bob, we do all kinds of stuff ourselves, everything, the whole thing. It’s like nobody’s ever going to hear this thing. It becomes the first huge bootleg Rock ‘N Roll music record ever. It was like, that wasn’t the idea. That was only for the publishing company and the artists that might want to record that particular song. It became a whole other phenomenon, and it’s okay.
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[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Coming later this month is a 6-CD deluxe edition of the Velvet Underground’s incredible third album, which is titled The Velvet Underground.
The box includes two CDs recorded live at The Matrix in San Francisco in 1969 plus a previously unreleased album dating back to 1969. Read more about it here at Consequence Of Sound.
Meanwhile check out two tracks from the set:
Until Nov. 7 at 1 am you’ll need to listen to this first one here.
“I Can’t Stand It”:
“I’m Waiting For The Man”:
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[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Although it appears to the naked eye that Bob Dylan’s The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11 contains 138 recordings, it turns out that the sixth disc contains a hidden track with two more songs on it.
Although only 21 tracks are listed for disc six, there are in fact 22.
And track 22 — two minutes and 26 seconds in length — includes part of a raucous rock ‘n’ roll version of “900 Miles From My Home,” the folk song that appears on disc 5, and an alternate take of “Confidential,” the 1956 Sonny Knight hit that Dylan also covers on disc five.
And then you hear Dylan fooling around: “All right ladies and gentleman, thank you thank you. That was Floyd and Lloyd. Right now we have Pete and Sneat. Sneak one in on Pete.”
(Thanks to Pete Read for that last line: “Sneak one in on Pete.”)
Here is Sonny Knights’ version of “Confidential”:
Woody Guthrie’s “900 Miles” with vocal:
Woody Guthrie’s instrumental version of “900 Miles”:
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[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
In early October I was interviewed about my novel, True Love Scars, on this cool punk radio show, Cheap Hooch, that’s broadcast online every Sunday from 4 pm ’til 6 pm.
I talk about some of the themes in the book and more. Plus you’ll get to hear “Hey Bartender,” one of the songs that shows up early in the book, as well as artists referenced in the book including The Stooges and Mott The Hoople. Holly Hooch, the DJ, also plays some great songs by David Bowie, the Flamin’ Groovies and much more.
The show begins with Holly Hooch talking about how she messed up and didn’t get directions to the studio to me in time, but then I end up calling in Holly and her friends in the studio interview me on the phone. It’s a good interview and theres good music too. I’ve become a big fan of Cheap Hooch Radio.
[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in the new issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Bob Dylan’s next album of new studio recordings will be all covers of songs Frank Sinatra recorded, a source told Billboard.
Two days ago I broke the news that the album, titled Shadows In The Night, would be released during 2015.
Front of insert.
The only other detail yet revealed about the album is that it will include Dylan’s cover of Frank Sinatra’s 1945 hit, “Full Moon and Empty Arms.” A source told that to Rolling Stone back in May of this year, when the album was scheduled for a 2014 release. The release date apparently changed when it was decided to release the Basement Tapes this year.
“Full Moon and Empty Arms”:
Now that we know the entire album will consist of songs associated with Sinatra, it’s near certain that “Stay With Me,” another song associated with Sinatra that Dylan is now using for an encore, will be on the album, although that has not been officially confirmed.
“Stay With Me” as performed at the Dolby Theater, October 26, 2014.
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[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Bob Dylan’s next album will be titled Shadows In The Night, and released in 2015, according to an insert included in Dylan’s new boxed set, The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11.
In May of this year, Bob Dylan released a cover of Frank Sinatra’s 1945 hit “Full Moon and Empty Arms” on his website.
“Full Moon and Empty Arms”:
“Full Moon and Empty Arms” was written by Ted Mossmann and Buddy Kaye and based around Sergei Rachmaninoff’s 1901 composition “Piano Concert No. 2 in C Minor.”
The retro nature of “Full Moon And Empty Arms,” sparked speculation that Dylan’s next studio album of new recordings would be a cover album of standards.
”This track [“Full Moon And Empty Arms”] is definitely from a forthcoming album due later on this year,” a spokesperson for the singer who wouldn’t confirm the title told Rolling Stone in May.
A month later a source who has heard the album enthused about it to me. “It really is a great album,” my source said, offering no additional details.
Obviously plans changed, and it was announced earlier this year that most of Dylan and The Band’s Basement Tapes recordings would be released as Dylan’s next album. The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11, a 6-CD set (as well as a 2-CD version of highlights), will be released on Tuesday, November 4.
Now, based on an insert in the box that The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11, comes in, I can tell you that the title of Dylan’s next album is Shadows In The Night,, that it will be released in 2015 and that for now at least, the Shadows In The Night image seen on Dylan’s website is the cover (unless of course something changes).
No track listing has been released.
In addition to “Full Moon and Empty Arms,” which is still expected to be on the album, Jerome Moross and Carolyn Leigh’s “Stay With Me,” which was recorded by Frank Sinatra in December 1963 and released a month later, could be included.
Dylan performed “Stay With Me” for the the first time the other night at the Dolby Theater in Los Angeles. So this is speculation. There is no confirmation that “Stay With Me” will be on the album. “Stay With Me” was the main theme of the Otto Preminger film “The Cardinal.”
“Stay With Me” as performed at the Dolby Theater, October 26, 2014.
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[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
