Sad Truth

My nomination for the best Bob Dylan imitation by a 1960s Chilean band goes to......Los Jockers (really? not Los Jokers?) for their visceral and heartfelt rendition of  Triste Realidad. You dragged it out of me, I don't like Dylan at all, except for "If Dogs Run Free".

I Shall Be Released.

Joni Mitchell, Mama Cass and Mary Travers sing Bob Dylan.

[via blowupdoll.]

Xmas Mini Puke in My Mouth

Until 5 minutes ago I liked Christmas!

Not a comedy routine - real.

WD Zantzinger Gets His At Last

Hattie Carroll

NYT Obit
Bob Dylan's song The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll was based on his arrest for murder and conviction of manslaughter. Interesting sad story of racism. Great song.

Hear here:
The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll

The Making of Blonde on Blonde

"A memory from the summer of 1966: Across the Top 40 airwaves, an insistent drum beat led off a strange, new hit song. Some listeners thought the song too explicit, its subject of wild lunacy too coarse, even cruel; several radio-station directors banned it. Despite the controversy over the lyrics about madness and persecution, or more likely because of it, the record shot to No. 3 on the Billboard pop-singles chart. The singer-songwriter likened the song, which really was a rap, to a sick joke. His name was Jerry Samuels, but he billed himself as Napoleon the XIV, performing “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!”

That spring, an equally controversial single, with an eerily similar opening, had quickly hit No. 2; and by summer, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” had reappeared as the opening track on the mysterious double album, Blonde on Blonde, by Bob Dylan, who said the song was about “a minority of, you know, cripples and orientals and, uh, you know, and the world in which they live.” Over Coppertone-slicked bodies on Santa Monica Beach and out of secluded make-out spots and shopping-center parking lots and everywhere else American teenagers gathered that summer, it seemed that, the ba-de-de-bum-de-bum announcing Dylan’s hit about getting stoned was blaring from car radios and transistor radios, inevitably followed by the ba-de-de- bum-de-bum announcing Jerry Samuels’s hit about insanity. It would be Samuels’s last big recording; and after July, Dylan would be convalescing from a serious motorcycle crash. ..."

Mystic Nights - The Making of Blonde on Blonde in Nashville. Article in Oxford American by Sean Wilentz. (via del.icio.us/runky.funky)

Nat Finkelstein

'Self-portrait' and 'Amber laughing' (both from 'Portraits')


'Dylan screen test' found in THE FACTORY YEARS: 1964 - 1967 / Duchamp to Dylan

Nat Finkelstein, photographer: Photojournalism - Andy Warhol - Factory - Velvet Underground - A Tale of One City (A photographic Trip throughthe Rock & Roll Underground) - Erotica [NSFW] - Americana - Girlfriends 1980s-90s [NSFW] - Portraits (via The Cartoonist)

No Direction Home - stills

Screen caps from Martin Scorsese's 'No Direction Home' at Nostalgia Party No. 2.

"Dylan was too, dare I say, white for my taste"

"Bryan Ferry has just recorded an album of his favourite Bob Dylan songs. Has he ever met him, I wonder?

"Oh no," says Ferry, as if alarmed at the very idea. "What would I say?" ....

... Oh, I didn't like Dylan at all when I first heard him," Ferry admits.
"I was a Northern soul boy, into mohair suits, electric guitars, horn sections, Otis Redding and Stax. Dylan was too, dare I say, white for my taste."
Yet Ferry was eventually seduced by the originality of Dylan's lyrical vision.
"He brought poetry into pop music and really started the whole phenomenon of the artist as composer. A lot of his songs are very beautiful, they seem to get deeper as you get older."

The life of Bryan: Neil McCormick interviews Bryan Ferry for The Telegraph about divorce, M&S, and his new album of Dylan songs. (via del.icio.us/regine)

Bryan Ferry - Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues:

LSO St. Luke's, London February 6th 2007
Added by CatBuckley

Also: Here is Bryan Ferry doing the beautiful "To Make You Feel My Love" (also from Ferry's new album 'Dylanesque')

Updated: Here is "Positively 4th Street"