Spent a chunk of the afternoon beginning the warp measuring for the annual ‘project’ and listening to (some of) Dylan’s first electric albums get literally deconstructed in The Bootleg Series – The Cutting Edge 1965-1966. Six discs, one entirely dedicated to “Like a Rolling Stone.” I guess I’ve had this since it came out about 10 years ago, but I seldom haul it out to give it the attention it deserves.
I made another goat, but I’m still not satisfied. Beads all the same size now, but some are the wrong shape; it matters! And need a much darker gray.
by Peter Ames Carlin
Kind of dull – like the band. And I say that with R.E.M. firmly in my top 5 of favorite artists. They just never struck me as very interesting as people. The book does not disabuse me of said notion. Or maybe I’m not being fair – it’s not that they wouldn’t be very interesting people to get to know; but just not to get to know by reading about them.
Regarding the work, the book is pretty much all-out fanboy. Almost everything they make is great.
What came next? I pulled out HIGHWAY 61 & BLONDE ON BLONDE again when I was 16 or so. Now I was hooked. Harmonica-forward wacky lyric rock & roll. I didn’t know anyone who was into Dylan. It felt like my own little discovery. Ha!
My dear friend Marianne took a listen to one of the albums I was playing in my bedroom. With mild distaste she said something like, “He’s just saying any random words he thinks of.” I shrugged.
I can’t remember if next came BIOGRAPH or the first two albums, the eponymous BOB DYLAN and TIMES THEY ARE A’CHANGIN. All purchased for me by my sweet boyfriend, who could kind of take Dylan or leave him. Though he was a fan of the song “Positively 4th Street” – he was a cynical sort.
BIOGRAPH is a 10-sided compilation, really a fabulous mix of stuff artfully curated & arranged. But it doesn’t have very good representation of the 70s. Mostly it’s awful Rolling Thunder Revue stuff. I liked a few late acoustic numbers like “Every Grain of Sand” and “You’re a Big Girl Now.” But I decided I was firmly a 1960s Dylan fan. I started collecting all the albums and stopped at PAT GARRET & BILLY THE KID.
Did it end there? Oh no…
by Brette Warshaw
What I learned:
by Benoit Clerc
In the midst of this newly conceived Dylan obsession, I read a compendium of every David Bowie song ever recorded. Well, most of it. I don’t like his later period (post-LET’S DANCE)… I just can’t get into any of the albums of the 90s and later. Too jazzy, or something. I do have his final album, BLACKSTAR, which I listen to respectfully, because it was his last. And I really felt moved to come to the end of this book and read about his final work, because of the way he went out. Bowie kept his illness secret from the public and never stopped working. He died two days after his last album came out. A lot of artists I love are dead, but the loss of Bowie really moved me.
When I was about 12 or not much older, a neighbor came by with a pile of LP’s he had found in the trash, to see if we wanted any. There were some various late 60s artists; I recall there was some Neil Young and Buffalo Springfield but those didn’t interest me at the time. But there were two Bob Dylan albums, HIGHWAY 61 & BLONDE ON BLONDE. I knew the song “Like a Rolling Stone” from the radio and liked it (I really liked the Rolling Stones at the time and anything remotely tangential to them). I took those two albums for myself. I also knew the song “Rainy Day Women”, but I didn’t know that was the title. I thought it was obviously called “Everybody Must Get Stoned”; so, I didn’t realize I knew one of the songs on BLONDE ON BLONDE.
I put HIGHWAY 61 on the turntable and listened to “Like a Rolling Stone.” Then I let the next song play, which is “Tombstone Blues.” The song opens with, “The sweet pretty things are getting off course, the city fathers they are trying to endorse, the reincarnation of Paul Revere’s horse, but the town has no need to be nervous.” This was far too wacky for 12-year-old me. I took the needle off the record. I put a cassette into the player, put the needle back to the beginning, and hit “record.” With “Like a Rolling Stone” now immortalized on my mix tape, I put the albums aside, for the next four years, and… to be continued.
When you asked me how I was doing, was that some kind of joke?
They say, sing while you slave, and I just get bored.
Don’t you understand, it’s not my problem?
New color scheme for my goat in progress. And somehow it seems I do not own this album in CD form. It doesn’t make sense, but I can’t find it. Lucky I’m a weirdo who still has a functioning record player.
Tytania 