In 1969 banjo virtuoso and bluegrass innovator Earl Scruggs parted ways with his
longtime musical partner
Lester Flatt and the band they led to
great popularity and acclaim,
The Foggy Mountain Boys. Scruggs wanted to push his musical gifts as far as they could go. In 1970 he was the subject of a PBS documentary where he played with artists such as Bob Dylan, Doc Watson, The Morris Brothers, The Byrds, Charlie Daniels, Bill Monroe, Joan Baez, various friends and family members, and even records a track accompanying a Moog. You can watch the whole thing online:
Earl Scruggs, His Family and Friends.
posted by Kattullus
on Jan 28, 2011 -
17 comments
Bob Dylan had a radio show,
the Theme Time Radio Hour, from May 2006 to April 2009. The archive contains shows on themes such as Thanksgiving Leftovers, The Bible, and Women's Names (click on the arrows to download the full radio show).
posted by Copronymus
on Dec 31, 2010 -
20 comments
Dr. John Rudoff is a cardiologist in Oregon, but before he entered medical school, he was the staff photographer at
The Main Point, a coffeehouse in Bryn Mawr, PA associated with the early 1960s folk revival in the Philadelphia area. His photographs of the Philadelphia folk scene include
unidentified local folkies, but also touring folk singers such as
Dave van Ronk and
John Hammond. Eventually, Rudoff got a press pass to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, where he took photos of
Mary Travers sharing a moment with Mimi and Dick Fariña and
Joan Baez with a pre-psychedelicized Chambers Brothers, but the most amazing discovery of all are the photos of
when Bob Dylan "went electric." And now you can see
Rudoff's whole collection, thanks to the magic of Flickr.
posted by jonp72
on May 7, 2009 -
13 comments
Many a music fan out there in
MeFitown and beyond was delighted with and intrigued by that now-vanished website,
Dylan Hears a Who! It featured backing tracks that captured, with an astonishing believability, both the sound and the feel of Highway 61-era Bob, not to mention an uncannily good Dylan vocal imitation. And of course, as is now legend, "Dylan" was singing lyrics straight out of the wonderful works of the good
Dr. Seuss. Well, back in April Salon magazine broke the story of the very, very talented individual who put the whole thing together. Those for whom this is old news please forgive me, but it's news to me, and I can't find any notice of it here at MeFi, so,
here it is.
posted by flapjax at midnite
on Aug 28, 2007 -
13 comments
What If...Bob Dylan wrote almost every song of the last 30 years in his heyday, but never got around to recording them properly? New York City's Post Show Ensemble dredges up lost footage for
No Direction, Period.
posted by beaucoupkevin
on Jan 17, 2007 -
38 comments
Honest With Me: Musical Stories on Bob Dylan "KEXP [Seattle] presents a series of stories on the musical life of Bob Dylan. Told by Dylan’s friends, scholars and fans, 'Honest With Me' features firsthand accounts from Joan Baez, Al Kooper, Izzy Young and the Band’s Robbie Robertson." And they're all pretty great, even if you've heard some of the stories a hundred times.
posted by ericost
on May 6, 2005 -
8 comments
On
"Love and Theft" & On
On "Love and Theft" and the Minstrel Boy &
The Annotated Love And Theft... In melody,
Bye and Bye comes by way of Billie Holiday's
Having Myself A Time and
Floater by way of Bing Crosby's
(& Eddie Duchin's & Kate Smith's & Isham Jones's...) Snuggled On Your Shoulder--and lyrically, by way,
in part, of Junichi Saga's
Confessions Of A Yakuza, which was not a crime novel, as
StupidSexyFlanders once surmised, but an outright
As told to memoir, which makes it four or five degrees from Yakuza to Dr. Saga to translator to Dylan to
Plagiarism in Dylan, or a Cultural Collage? Oh, who's going to throw that minstrel boy a coin ?
posted by y2karl
on Apr 14, 2005 -
18 comments
Be careful what you wish for, the cliché goes. Having aspired from early youth to become stars, people who achieve that status suddenly find themselves imprisoned, unable to walk down the street without being importuned by strangers. The higher their name floats, the greater the levy imposed, the less of ordinary life they can enjoy. In his memoir, Bob Dylan never precisely articulates the ambition that brought him to New York City from northern Minnesota in 1961, maybe because it felt improbable even to him at the time. Nominally, he was angling for Leading Young Folksinger, which was a plausible goal then, when every college town had three or four coffeehouses and each one had its Hootenanny night, and when performers who wowed the crowds on that circuit went on to make records that sometimes sold in the thousands. But from the beginning Dylan had his sights set much higher: the world, glory, eternity—ambitions laughably incommensurate with the modest confines of American folk music. He got his wish, in spades... 'I Is Someone Else'
posted by y2karl
on Feb 19, 2005 -
34 comments
Chapter 1. Excerpt from Bob Dylan's autobiographical book, Chronicles, Volume One.
posted by semmi
on Oct 20, 2004 -
4 comments
"It was surprising how thick the smoke had become. It seems like the world has always needed a scapegoat --someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire. But America wasn't the Roman Empire and someone else would have to step up and volunteer. I really was never any more than what I was -- a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face and was hanging over me." -- from
Bob Dylan's new autobiography,
Chronicles, with a brief
interview, via
Newsweek
posted by digaman
on Sep 26, 2004 -
14 comments
The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on individual bands in the 'Blonde on Blonde' album. It's that thin, that wild mercury sound. It's metallic and bright gold, with whatever that conjures up.
Bob Dylan 1978
Blonde On Blonde--Seven mixes, four or five covers, four or five women,
some missing photographs and one leather coat...
(story within)
posted by y2karl
on Nov 19, 2003 -
26 comments
The Mysterious Norman Raeben, the son of
Shalom Aleichem, the man behind
Bob Dylan's Blood On The Tracks.
Norman Raeben was one of the most influential people in Bob Dylan’s life. It was Norman Raeben, Dylan said, who, in the mid ‘70s, renewed his ability to compose songs. Dylan also suggested that Norman’s teaching and influence so altered his outlook upon life that Sara, his wife, could no longer understand him, and this was a contributory factor in the breakdown of the Dylans’ marriage. (More inside)
posted by y2karl
on Jan 11, 2003 -
16 comments
Bob Dylan Live at Newport, 1965: Maggie’s Farm. 10 MB Quicktime mp3 A
notorious and historic
moment, that began a legendary year of
touring , stolen moments of which are available in
several sometimes bootlegged formats .Sometimes, perhaps
revised ,
stories differ at
what happened, and, now,
post-
ironically enough, He appears at
Newport again
this Saturday.
posted by y2karl
on Aug 2, 2002 -
35 comments
American Magus Without Harry Smith I wouldn’t have existed!
Bob Dylan
… I put Harry Smith with the three most dear to me GRAND INTELLIGENCE!! Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Harry Smith…These were sharp motherfuckers… and heavy… talk about heavy!!
Gregory Corso
Harry Smith, a central figure in the mid-20th-century avant-garde, was a complex artistic figure who made major contributions to the fields of sound recording, independent filmmaking, the visual arts, and ethnographic collecting. Along with Kenneth Anger, Jordan Belson, and Oskar Fischinger, Smith is considered one of America’s leading experimental filmmakers. He would often hand-paint directly on film creating unique, complex compositions that have been interpreted as investigations of conscious and unconscious mental processes. Smith began as a teenager to record Native American songs and rituals. He is best known for his Anthology of American Folk Music, a music collection widely credited with launching the urban folk revival.
The Anthology is the focus here, but Harry Smith, the artist, avant garde film maker, polymath, musicologist and quintessential hipster must be mentioned, too.
Details Within
posted by y2karl
on Jul 10, 2002 -
32 comments
