The occasison for this performance was Willie Nelson’s 60th Birthday Celebration. This song is a real gem written by Townes Van Zandt. Great story about two cowboys. When you win it doesn’t mean you can’t lose.
Dylan is looking suave and delivers his lines steadily in a really cool tone. as and Willie Nelson wails like the country wailer he is.
Buy World Gone Wrong (1993) on CD from Amazon.com
Categories: The Nineties
Tagged: 1993, 60th, Birthday, Bob Dylan, country, cowboy, Dylan, good as i been to you, pancho and lefty, song, willie nelson, World Gone Wrong
Crossroads Centre Benefit Concert, MSG, New York City, NY - June 30th, 1999
I didn’t even know this existed so I am happy to watch this one. This is a great song that was recorded during the Oh Mercy sessions in 1989 but wasn’t released. It was re-recorded and released on Under the Red Sky in 1990. The original Oh Mercy take of Born in Time is now on Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 CD .
It’s good to see Eric Clapton and Bob play together. They do their best to do a duet of the song. Poor Eric would have sung it a certain way when he recorded it and Bob would have taken his standard ‘let’s see what happens’ approach. But all in all there were more good moments than bad. Bob Dylan is a good guitar player too you know!
In the lonely night
In the blinking stardust of a pale blue light
You’re comin’ thru to me in black and white
When we were made of dreams.
You’re blowing down the shaky street,
You’re hearing my heart beat
In the record breaking heat
Where we were born in time.
Bridge #1:
Not one more night, not one more kiss,
Not this time baby, no more of this,
Takes too much skill, takes too much will,
It’s revealing.
You came, you saw, just like the law
You married young, just like your ma,
You tried and tried, you made me slide
You left me reelin’ with this feelin’.
On the rising curve
Where the ways of nature will test every nerve,
You won’t get anything you don’t deserve
Where we were born in time.
Bridge #2:
You pressed me once, you pressed me twice,
You hang the flame, you’ll pay the price,
Oh babe, that fire
Is still smokin’.
You were snow, you were rain
You were striped, you were plain,
Oh babe, truer words
Have not been spoken or broken.
In the hills of mystery,
In the foggy web of destiny,
You can have what’s left of me,
Where we were born in time.
Copyright ©1990 Special Rider Music
Categories: The Nineties
Tagged: Bob Dylan, Born in Time, Clapton, concert, Cream, Crossroads, Duet, Dylan, Eric Clapton, Fender Stratocaster, me tell, New York, Oh Mercy, Rock and Roll, Tell Tale Signs, tell you, tour
This is a press conference in san francisco in 1965 where Dylan is playful as ever taking the reporters for a ride as per usual.
The way Dylan goes on spinning conversational webs is pure genius.
Part 1
Part 2
Part3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Excerpt from newspaper
Bob Dylan’s Idea For a Symphony
by Lisa Hobbs
Bob Dylan, a mental free-floater in two-inch high boots, has made but one commitment to the future–he would like to write a symphony.
It’s the only firm commitment verbal, philosophic, or social that he offered yesterday to a world that he perceives as being otherwise without hope.
It will be like no other symphony, just like the 24 year old Dylan is like no other writer-singer.
As the high priest of the folk-rock cult described it to reporters at KQED, it will have “different melodies, words and ideas all being the same and rolled on top of each other”.
He made a delicate gesture with delicate hands as if he were kneading pastry dough.
Dylan denied that his songs have any subtle message, although he has written and sung over 150.
“Where did you hear they have a message?” he asked a pert teenage editor from a Bay Area high school newspaper.
“In a movie magazine” she giggled.
This sets dozens of beards in the audience shaking. Some beards even removed their sunglasses to wipe off the tears. (Poet Allen Ginsberg, one of the guests invited for what turn out to be a rather fruitless mental autopsy, would have won the prize for Best Beard easlly.)
Dylan, who looks like an under-nourished kewpie doll, also denied that he played folk-rock.
“I call it vision music, mathematical music,” he said in a barely audible mutter which made this reporter feel positively decrepit.
“The words are just as important as the music. There would be no music without the words. I do the words first. I know what music I want when I hear the words. But sometimes on a gentle instrument like a harpsichord or a harmonica, I hear the melody first and know the words that should fit to it. That never happens with the guitar. It’s too hard an instrument.”
Asked what poets did he dig, Dylan replied:
“W.C. Fields, the trapeze family in the circus, Ginsburg, Charlie Rich.”
He denied that he wanted to change anyone’s lives by being hard on them in his songs.
“I just want to needle ‘em.”
He also digs flicks—-will make one himself next year and thinks Joan Baez interprets his earlier songs “all right.”
Smoking continually, flicking ash and rubbing his little suede boots together, the pale and aesthetic-faced Dylan said he’ll know when to quit because “I’ll just start to itch and something goes through a terrifying turn and it has nothing to do with anything.”
A newsman commented that Dylan’s voice was inaudible until he spoke about the booings he had received but then it became quite clear.
“Are you doing a pennance of silence?” Dylan was asked.
“No,” he replied. “It’s always silent where I am.”
“They shouldn’t have asked any reporters over 30,” one sighed.
Source: http://kripes.proboards105.com/index.cgi?board=general&action=display&thread=1
Want this conference on a DVD? Click the link below.
Dylan Speaks: The Legendary 1965 Press Conference in San Francisco from Amazon.com
Categories: Interviews · The Sixties
Tagged: 1965, Bob Dylan, conference, Dylan, folk, interview, music, press, San Francisco, singer
1966 is possibly the best year Dylan ever had performance wise . The 1966 was just off the charts! Gread band, great songs, great time. This version of Like A Rolling Stone is from Newcastle, England. There is all of passion in this performance from all involved.
Albums released around this time are Blonde on Blonde (1966), Highway 61 Revisited (1965) and Bringing It All Back Home (1965) . Many consider these three albums some sort of trilogy because they are all amazing masterpieces.
Buy Blonde on Blonde from Amazon.com
Buy Highway 61 Revisted from Amazon.com
Buy Bringing It All Back Home from Amazon.com
Buy The Bootleg Series Vol.4 – Live 1966 “The Royal Albert Hall Concert” from Amazon.com
Categories: The Sixties
Tagged: 1966, Blonde on Blonde, Bob Dylan, England, Like A Rolling Stone, Live 1966, Newcastle, song, tell you, The Bootleg Series Vol.4, The Royal Albert Hall, UK
4 Dec 1975
from Renaldo and Clara
filmed 1975 – released 1978
Buy Desire (1976) from Amazon.com
Buy Live 1975 (The Bootleg Series Volume 5) from Amazon.com
If you are a new Dylan fan and you have been following my blog you will be possibly freaked out by this Dylan. But the truth is like 1966, I believe 1975 was another significant peak for Bob Dylan. The feel, the image, the sounds, the songs.
I’ll hit wiki up for this…
| Rolling Thunder Revue | ||
|---|---|---|
 |
||
| Poster for November 27 performance in Bangor, Maine | ||
| Tour by Bob Dylan and many others | ||
| Dates | October 30, 1975 – May 25, 1976 | |
| Legs | 2 | |
| Shows | 30 (first leg) 27 (second leg) |
|
The Rolling Thunder Revue was a famed concert tour comprised of a traveling caravan of musicians, headed by Bob Dylan, that took place in the fall of 1975 and the spring of 1976. The January 1976 release of Dylan’s album Desire fell between the two legs of the tour.
Among those featured in the Revue were Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Kinky Friedman and Bob Neuwirth. Neuwirth assembled the backing musicians, including T-Bone Burnett, Mick Ronson, and David Mansfield, and, from the Desire sessions, violinist Scarlet Rivera, bassist Rob Stoner, and drummer Howie Wyeth.
The tour has been profusely documented on film, tape and paper [1].
Contents[hide] |
In October 1975, soon after completing Desire, Dylan held rehearsals for an upcoming tour at New York’s midtown Studio Instrument Rentals space. Bassist Rob Stoner, drummer Howie Wyeth, and violinst Scarlet Rivera, all of whom were heavily featured on Desire, were retained for the rehearsals. Joining them were T-Bone Burnett, Steven Soles, and David Mansfield. The three had been dismissed during the Desire sessions in attempt to focus the overall production, but Dylan decided to recruit the trio for the upcoming tour.[citation needed]
When rehearsals began, many of the musicians were apparently uninformed about plans for an upcoming tour. At the same time, Dylan was casually inviting others to join in with the band. According to Stoner, the group rehearsed “for like a day or two – it [was] not really so much a rehearsal as like a jam, tryin’ to sort it out. Meanwhile all these people who eventually became the Rolling Thunder Revue started dropping in. Joan Baez was showing up. Roger McGuinn was there. They were all there. We had no idea what the purpose for these jams was, except we were being invited to jam.”[cite this quote]
According to Lou Kemp, a friend of Dylan’s who eventually organized the tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue “would go out at night and run into people, and we’d just invite them to come with us. We started out with a relatively small group of musicians and support people, and we ended up with a caravan.”[cite this quote] At one point, Patti Smith was invited to join, but amicably declined Dylan’s invitation.[citation needed] However, Dylan did add one surprising element to the Rolling Thunder Revue when he invited Mick Ronson to join the tour. Ronson was the lead guitarist and arranger in David Bowie’s former backing band, The Spiders from Mars. Ronson would accompany the Rolling Thunder Revue throughout the upcoming tour.
Another musician invited on the tour was introduced to Dylan on October 22nd, when Dylan went to see David Blue perform at The Other End. It was there that he met Ronee Blakley, the actress/singer who had recently starred in Robert Altman’s celebrated film, Nashville. At the end of Blue’s show, Blakley joined Dylan on-stage for a few duets; afterwards, Dylan extended her an invitation to join the Rolling Thunder Revue. She initially declined due to prior commitments, but eventually changed her mind and appeared at rehearsals two days later.[citation needed]
However, the same day Blakley showed up for rehearsal, Dylan returned to the recording studio to re-record Desire’s “Hurricane” (due to legal concerns involving the song’s original lyrics).[citation needed] Employing Blakley as a substitute for Emmylou Harris (who had prior engagements to attend to), Dylan quickly recut “Hurricane”, the last recorded work done for Desire before its release in January 1976.
Sometime in October, Dylan also contacted an old friend and filmmaker, Howard Alk. Dylan’s ambitions apparently included a film of the tour, and Alk accepted Dylan’s offer to shoot the film. When the tour rehearsals were still in progress, Alk reportedly began filming scenes in Greenwich Village for possible inclusion in the film.
Dylan also contacted actor/playwright Sam Shepard. Shepard was still relatively unknown at the time, and it is unclear how Dylan was introduced to him (though Shepard was a former lover of Patti Smith). Shepard flew in from California and met with Dylan at rehearsals, where Dylan asked him if he had seen Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis or François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player. Dylan said that those were the kinds of films he wanted to produce on the tour. [2]
Poet Allen Ginsberg would accompany the tour for most of its 1975 run, but his planned recitations, as well as some performances by other Revue members, were cut before the opening date to keep the concerts at a manageable length. One concert at the prison where Rubin Carter was serving his sentence did restore Ginsberg’s recitations, however.
On October 30th, Dylan held the first Rolling Thunder Revue show at War Memorial Auditorium in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The first leg of the tour was relatively small, spanning thirty shows and reaching only towns along the northeastern seaboard, including some in Canada. However, the secrecy surrounding the tour’s intended destinations, the new material Dylan was premiering, and the inclusion of Joan Baez on the same bill as Dylan for the first time in a decade ensured the tour a good share of media coverage.[citation needed]
According to Larry Sloman, who documented the tour, “onstage it was like a carnival. Bobby Neuwirth and the back-up band [dubbed 'Guam'] warmed up the audience. Next, Dylan ambled on to do about five songs. After intermission, the curtain rose to an incredible sight, Bob and Joan, together again after all these years.” [3] (Dylan and Baez often opened the second half of the show duetting in the dark on “Blowin’ in the Wind“).
Larry Sloman would later document the tour in a book, On the Road with Bob Dylan, in which he “tries to cop the Tom Wolfe technique of turning the backstage story into a plot with the journalist as beleaguered hero,” [4]according to NPR’s Tim Riley.
Perhaps taking a cue from Ronson’s glam-rock experience, Dylan made the surprising theatrical choice of wearing whiteface make-up at many of the shows. Sometimes, he even walked on stage wearing a plastic mask, only to toss it aside after the first song to play harmonica on “It Ain’t Me, Babe.” [5] According to Rivera, one heckler asked Dylan “Why are you wearing a mask?” to which Dylan replied, “The meaning is in the words.”[cite this quote]
There is a critical consensus that the tour failed in one regard: the film.[citation needed] As the tour progressed, Shepard discovered his role as scriptwriter was somewhat superfluous, as much of the film was entirely improvised (with little guidance or direction in shaping those improvisations). Shepard would later cover the tour in an offhand journal titled The Rolling Thunder Logbook.
A number of critics wrote about the tour with a great deal of praise.
“The Rolling Thunder Revue shows remain some of the finest music Dylan ever made with a live band,” wrote Clinton Heylin. “Gone was the traditionalism of The Band. Instead he found a whole set of textures rarely found in rock. The idea of blending the pedal-steel syncopation of Mansfield, Ronson’s glam-rock lead breaks, and Rivera’s electric violin made for something as musically layered as Dylan’s lyrics…[Dylan] also displayed a vocal precision rare even for him, snapping and stretching words to cajole nuances of meaning from each and every line.” [6]
“These are rugged and inspired reworkings of many Dylan standards—[Dylan] even talks casually to the audience (now a thing of the past),” wrote Tim Riley. “He lights into a biting electric version of ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe,’ and then a thoroughly convincing rock take of ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll’…and an ‘Isis’ that makes the Desire take sound like a greeting card.” [7]
A second Hurricane Carter benefit was held in Houston, Texas on January 25.
Dylan then tried to recreate the Rolling Thunder Revue’s success in the spring of 1976. Rehearsals were held in Clearwater, Florida during April, and the first show was on April 18 at the Civic Center in Lakeland, Florida. The tour continued throughout April and May in the American South and Southwest. It ultimately did not attract the same critical acclaim as the fall leg had. Ticket sales were often poor, with several shows being cancelled as a result.[citation needed]
The penultimate show of the tour took place on May 23 at Hughes Stadium in Fort Collins, Colorado. Comments about it typified the feeling about the spring tour: “Although the band has been playing together longer, the charm has gone out of their exchanges,” wrote NPR’s Tim Riley.[cite this quote] “[T]he Rolling Thunder Revue, so joyful and electrifying in its first performances, had just plain run out of steam,” wrote music critic Janet Maslin for Rolling Stone.[cite this quote]
The final Rolling Thunder show took place on May 25. Held at a half-empty, 17,000 seat Salt Palace in Salt Lake City, Utah, it would be Dylan’s last performance for twenty-one months,(Except For The Last Waltz in November 1976 for The Band) and it would be another two years before Dylan recorded another album of new material.
The May 23 Colorado show was filmed for the September 1976 NBC television special Hard Rain; the Hard Rain live album containing selections from that and another late May date was released simultaneously. The television special garnered poor reviews and disappointing ratings, despite a TV Guide cover of and interview with Dylan. Live album sales were modest.[citation needed]
Dylan and Shepard’s completed film, now the symbolist-romance-cum-concert-film Renaldo and Clara, would not be released until 1978; the critical reception would be harsh and negative.[citation needed] It was, for the most part, the only official release documenting the live shows from the fall 1975 leg. However, a majority of the film consisted of the haphazard, fictional drama filmed during the tour.
Performances from the fall of 1975 were heavily bootlegged. Then The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975, The Rolling Thunder Revue, incorporating performances from a number of the fall shows, saw issue in 2002. As the first official release to capture the Revue at its peak, it was warmly received amongst fans and critics, and sold well.[citation needed]
see also: Michael Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, New York:Continuum books, 2006
Categories: The Seventies
Tagged: (valley below), 1975, Bob Dylan, Bootleg Series Vol.5, desire, Dylan, fender, Live 1975, one more cup of coffee, rob stoner, rolling thunder revue, t bone burnett, Telecaster
This is an excerpt from the movie “Don’t Look Back”. Dylan is being interviewed by Time Magazine. Dylan totally shuts this dude down. Talking non stop and this interviewer has no hope at all. One could say Dylan was a smart arse back in the day. But that’s not saying he wasn’t speaking the truth. It is absolutely hilarious and well worth watching.
Categories: Interviews · The Sixties
Tagged: 1965, Bob Dylan, caruso, don't look back, Dylan, interview, magazine, time
Great footage of Dylan covering Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues in New Haven, CT. The band is playing rock and roll sun studios style. Just cool as ice. The stage and curtains look sharp. As do the suits.
Categories: The Nineties
Tagged: 10/11/1999, 1999, Bob Dylan, concert, Dylan, folsom prison blues, gold, Johnny Cash, Live, New Haven, tour
This is a rare treat here. Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan in a recording studio, Nashville 1969 playing One Too Many Mornings. This song was first released on “The Times They Are A-Changin’” (1963). I think Bob sings like an angel in 1969. Apparently due to him giving up smoking. There was a song from these sessions “Girl from the North Country” released on “Nashville Skyline (1969)
Categories: The Sixties
Tagged: 1969, Bob Dylan, bob dylan song, Dylan, Johnny Cash, me tell, Nashville, Nashville Skyline, Smoking, song, tell you, video
Here is the filmclip to the song “Dreamin’ of you” which was written in 1997 for the “Time out of Mind” sessions. If you listen to the lyrics you will find many lines from songs from Time out of Mind such as “Standing in the Doorway” and “Not Dark Yet”.
Harry Dean Stanton plays a bootlegger following Dylan around to archive his music. Archived Dylan footage is included throughout the filmclip.
This track is released for the first time on The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 – Tell Tale Signs and is available to buy from Amazon.com right now!
Tell Tale Signs:The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 [4 LP Vinyl]
Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 (Deluxe)
Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 MP3 Download
Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8
Buy Time Out Of Mind CD from Amazon.com
Categories: The Nineties · Two Thousand and Beyond
Tagged: 1997, Bob Dylan, daniel lanios, dreamin' of you, Dylan, filmclip, harry dean stanton, not dark yet, standing in the doorway, Tell Tale Signs, The Bootleg Series Vol.8, time out of mind, video
It is 6:36 here in Victoria, Australia and I am just about to goto bed but before I do I have to post this performace of I Shall Be Released from Japan in 1994. Dylan played a few shows there with a Japanese orchestra.
Great arrangement and its good to hear Dylan singing the song by himself without it being a sing along.
This is amazing! Enjoy
Releases around this time are MTV Unplugged (1995) and World Gone Wrong (1993)
Categories: The Nineties
Tagged: 1994, Australia, I Shall Be Released Dylan Bob Japan, MTV Unplugged, Nara, Orchestra, Victoria, World Gone Wrong
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