Producer and writer Larry Charles (“Seinfeld,” “Curb Your Enthusiasm” and “Borat”) provides insight into Bob Dylan’s creative process during this amazing interview from the “You Made It Weird.”
Charles co-write the 2003 movie “Masked and Anonymous” with Dylan.
Rolling Stone has a good story based on this clip. Read it here.
—
[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.]
Great clip of Chrissie Hynde talking about why she doesn’t eat animals.
This was shown on Swedish and Norwegian television the 28-29th of October 2014.
She brings up the fact that you can’t be an environmentalist if you’re a meat eater.
If you doubt that, here’s a report from the respected Worldwatch Institute, written by environmental specialists Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang of the World Bank Group, a United Nations agency, in which they estimate that at least 51% of green house gas is caused by animal agriculture.
—
[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.
—
[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.]
The Julie Ruin at The Troubadour, Los Angeles CA last night (Nov. 6, 2014).
“V.G.I.:
“Friendship Station”:
“South Coast Plaza”:
“Kids In New York”:
“Radical Or Pro”:
“Oh Come On”:
“Ha Ha Ha”:
“Run Fast”:
“This Is Not A Test”:
—
[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.]
Dylan and band in Oakland, CA. Photo by Michael Goldberg,
On November 4, 2014, Bob Dylan and his band performed at the Orpheum Theater in Minneapolis.
Check out three songs: “Things Have Changed,” “She Belongs To Me” and “Beyond Here Lies Nothing.”
—
[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.]
Three videos songs from Lost On The River: The New Basement Tapes.
These are tremendous.
The footage is from the Showtime documentary “Lost Songs: The Basement Tapes Continued” that will air on Showtime on November 21.
The documentary was directed by Sam Jones, who is best known for the Wilco Documentary, “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart: A Film About Wilco.”
Jim James, “Down On The Bottom”:
Rhiannon Giddens, “Hidee Hidee Ho #16”:
Elvis Costello, “Six Months In Kansas City”:
—
[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.]
[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”:
—
[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 and band at the Paramount Theater, Oakland, CA.
I’m jazzed that the folks over at bobdylan.com have included a link to my review of Bob Dylan’s recent killer show on October 30, 2014 at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, CA in the “Hype” area of Dylan’s website.
“Hype” is where they link to articles about Dylan that they like.
You can get directly to the review with this link.
And if you haven’t yet read my new column about The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11,here.
—
[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 and his band at the Paramount Theater. Photo by Michael Goldberg.
The clang of an ancient gong announced that Bob Dylan was in the house, and that his first set for the final night of a three-night gig (October 30, 2014) at the beautifully restored Paramount Theater in downtown Oakland, CA, had begun.
Was I excited, yeah baby! Yet I was worried too. How could he compare to the Dylan of old?
“Ah, but I was so much older then/ I’m younger than that now,” he once sang, though not on this night.
And it was good he didn’t. Those lines made sense when he wrote them, when he was in his early 20s.
But Dylan is 73, he’s so much older now.
I last saw him live at the Greek Theater in Berkeley in June of 1986, and it wasn’t the best show. Frankly, it was a shadow of the show I saw in 1974 when Dylan and The Band played the Oakland Coliseum and tore the place up. That was incredible.
Think about it though. 1986. That was nearly 30 years ago. Ancient history. Another lifetime.
Bob Dylan, age 73. What would that be like? I’d seen John Lee Hooker perform at the Sweetwater when he was past 80 and he was fantastic. And I saw Muddy Waters when he was 65, and he was damn good too. There’s a wisdom that sometimes comes with age.
But Dylan? With his ragged frog of a voice. And no guitar, ’cause he doesn’t play guitar anymore. How’s that gonna work?
Whatever my pre-show worries, as soon as the band kicked off with “Things Have Changed” I relaxed.
This was gonna be good.
Dylan came onto the stage, a character out of one of his more surreal songs. The flat-brimmed white hat, something a Spanish Don wore in the ’20s perhaps. And a black frock coat with white trim. Dylan was dressing up for us. He wasn’t showing up in his streetwear — jeans and a hoodie. No way, he was here in a grand old theater and he had dressed the part.
A band leader. A performer. An artist.
Dylan is the master of great looks.
He still has style. And you know what, Dylan dressing up the way he does each night, sends the audience a message before he even sings a note. This isn’t gonna be Chuck Berry doing just another gig. This is special. Bob Dylan got dressed up on this night for this crowd. He cares.
I was there with a long time friend, and later during the show he asked me how this show compared to when I’d seen Dylan in 1974.
Well you can’t compare the Dylan of the past and the Dylan of today, I said. It’s like he’s a different person now. It’s like the folkie protest Dylan was one guy, and the Highway 61 Revisited Dylan was another, and the man who recorded the Basement tapes and John Wesley Harding was someone else again.
The Dylan of 2014 is yet another Dylan.
The show.
First of all, I thought Dylan was in great voice, and having listened to a recording of the show I can say that with even more force. Sure his voice is different. More Tom Waits than Woody Guthrie. But if you give it a chance, it grows on you and pretty soon you find yourself totally digging it. And it’s totally Dylan’s voice. On this night he was a live wire.
Dylan as piano man. He’s always had his own bluesy piano style, and over the years he’s gotten even better. So while I miss Dylan on guitar, his whorehouse piano on numerous songs including the snaky tango, “Beyond Here Lies Nothing,” was just right. And while some have derided his harmonica playing since the early days, I’ve always been a huge fan. On this night his harp breaks were dead-on perfect.
He seemed totally in-the-moment and with us as he sang his songs — all but one being his own compositions.
But what knocked me out the most was the set list. Of the 18 songs Dylan sang, 14 were ‘new’ songs, written in the 21st century. Only one, “She Belongs To Me,” was written in the ’60s, and two, “Simple Twist Of Fate” and “Tangled Up In Blue,” came from the mid-’70s. The final song of the night was Dylan’s version of a song Frank Sinatra made famous, “Stay With Me.”
That’s gutsy. That’s self-confidence. And you know what? These 21st century Bob Dylan songs are killer.
While Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones go out and play oldie-but-goodie greatest hits shows, Bob Dylan plays material from his most recent albums.
Dylan these days comes across onstage as a working musician. He doesn’t talk to the audience. He’s there to play music.
“He’s a real song and dance man,” my friend said.
Dylan was either at the piano, standing fairly still before the microphone as he sang, or swaying in place as one of his band members took a killer solo.
And speaking of the band, another thought I had as I took in the music was that this current band are as good as The Band.
Dylan has assembled his version of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, or Merle Haggard and the Strangers.
What I mean is, this band is like those great country-western bands, musicians who play with soul and really have their chpps down. Now I’ve been cheering the raw, imperfect sound of punk bands since the early days of The Stooges and the MC5, and if I’ve got to choose between soul and spirt, or musician ship, I’ll take soul and spirit every time.
But Dylan’s guys, they are some of the best musicians you’ll ever hear; they’ve got a total feel for Dylan’s music. As used to be said of a great jazz band, they swing.
Bassist Tony Garnier (on upright), drummer George Receli and rhythm guitarist Stu Kimball are a rock solid rhythm section. They ground the songs and let Dylan, lead guitarist Charlie Sexton and mutli-instrumentalist Donnie Herron (pedal steel, lap steel, electric mandolin, banjo, violin) add beautiful texture and solos.
Both Sexton and Herron are simply incredible. I love pedal steel guitar and Herron added hip country riffs to “Things Have Changed,” “Workingman’s Blues #2,” “Duquesne Whistle,” and others.
Meanwhile Sexton added electrifying riffs and solos.
Dylan has become a great band leader. Years on the road, and certainly his perfectionist demands, have turned this band into one of the best.
Highlights? The beautiful ballad “Forgetful Heart” was love on a moonlit night, with rhapsodic violin from Herron, and a mournful harmonica solo from Dylan. “Long And Wasted Years” was a triumph, from that unforgettable opening riff and Dylan’s defiant vocal, to the final lines:
“So much for tears
So much for these long and wasted years.”
There were many other highlights. “Early Roman Kings,” “Simple Twist Of Fait,” “Scarlet Town,” “Pay In Blood,” “High Water (For Charley Patton)” — I could go on.
After nearly two hours of listening to Dylan’s new music, it’s clear that just as Dylan and the Hawks had a very unique sound in the ’60s, so too do Dylan and his current band.
Leaving the Paramount, I said to my friend, the music Bob Dylan now makes is totally its own thing. It has nothing to do with current trends, and it’s not some retro trip either. The only reference point for Dylan’s new music is Dylan. He’s created something unique that works for him in 2014, and his fans love it. Dylan being Dylan, and nothing could be better.
You could call the music Dylan and the band make Americana, an umbrella term that covers blues, rock, rockabilly, jazz, folk, country, western swing and more, but if were going to name Dylan’s sound, I’d want to come up with something more unique. But really, what’s the point.
It’s 2014 Bob Dylan music, a thing all its own.
The musicians:
Bob Dylan — vocal, piano, harmonica
Stu Kimball — rhythm guitar
Donnie Herron — pedal steel, lap steel, electric mandolin, banjo, violin
Charlie Sexton — lead guitar
Tony Garnier — bass guitar
George Receli — drums, percussion
Set List:
Set I
Things Have Changed
She Belongs to Me
Beyond Here Lies Nothin’
Workingman’s Blues #2
Waiting for You
Duquesne Whistle
Pay in Blood
Tangled Up in Blue
Love Sick
Set II
High Water (For Charley Patton)
Simple Twist of Fate
Early Roman Kings
Forgetful Heart
Spirit on the Water
Scarlet Town
Soon after Midnight
Long and Wasted Years
Encore:
Stay With Me
—
[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.]
