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 on Apr 14, 2005 - View this thread

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 on Feb 19, 2005 - View this thread

"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 on Sep 26, 2004 - View this thread

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 on Nov 19, 2003 - View this thread

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 on Aug 2, 2002 - View this thread

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 on Jul 10, 2002 - View this thread