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Feelin' like a little Dylan?


larryp58

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Second time I see Bob with a Bird - first was a few years before when he played that Clinton-thing. .

 

 

 

A hip tune it always was since it came out round the millennium. Things Have Changed.

 

 

 

Oooouhh, , , and then there was the Peter Yarrow square SJ he borrowed in '63.

Then again a Southern Jumbo ain't a real Bird, , , though just as cool if not cooler, should someone asks me. . .

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Sweet video. There's a reason Dylan is so cool......He's Dylan.

 

As one of my friends said this summer :

 

In 1965 noone was as cool as Bob. . .

 

And he was right.

Must have been quite something to be around and actually see/hear it happen -

From where did this kid get it, , , Ginsberg !??????! , , , can't believe it.

And of course some of that basic material lingers - especially when he get's his s... together

 

, , , and take the catalogue seriously. . .

 

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Actually Dylan's a cupla years older than I am, but I can speak a bit to the music and art ethos of the late '50s.

 

Gotta remember Kerouac was into James Joyce, Thomas Wolfe and the Diamond Sutra? But was also a Roman Catholic into changes of swing and jazz into the more intellectualized bebop that went into his "prose?"

 

There was a lot of turbulence intellectually at the time for those who might go a bit beyond what the average folks might think. Form was decreasingly relevant.

 

For some of us it was life-enhancing mental stimulation of learning different perspectives and enriching thought without changing core values; for others it was life changing into activity.

 

Who knows what brings perceptions to the fore, to change one's life if only internally, or for some, to bring a desire to be "out there" in every sense?

 

Hmmm. Plenty prose, poetry and song lyrics have covered that question too...

 

m

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Gotta remember Kerouac, , , ,

 

Yes, I read you milod - the whole beat-scene gave Dylan a jump-start most British youngsters had not encountered - so it seems anyway (Donovan might be an exception).

 

But Bob had an extra dimension in his intuition - a knowledge of something beyond.

 

And it was heard in both lyrics and voice - he carried earlier ages into the 60's, , , and made them the contemporary. And when he went electric it got even stronger.

He must have been a monster to follow record by record - it even seemed so when I began to open the albums in the mid-70's. What a trip.

Take a detail like the John Wesley Harding cover-design at that point in time - amazing, , , or should we say amazingly anti-amazing.

Gave a younger friend 18 Dylan releases a few years ago. From Freewheeling to Slow Train. Hope he gets the picture, , , hope the future gets it too. . .

 

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E...

 

I doubt it.

 

Bob Zimmerman was a very bright young man with the difficult upbringing and strange options in music and literature shared by most of us who were born pre baby boom but too young even for the Korean war.

 

I can't speak of the Brits in that age group; it certainly would have been more difficult for many, if not most, in our generation.

 

But here there was a bursting of everything. Economics, jobs, the switch from an incredible wartime manufacturing economy and "war surplus" technology and ideas... babies. Philosophy. Music. Television and new highways. Money if you worked a bit and weren't inflicted with "bad luck."

 

I often note how artistic fame seems to me to be talent + right time + right place.

 

Dylan an artistic genius? I dunno. IMHO he's not in the class of Eliot as a poet or more than a few musicians of the time but... he was "different" and was at the right place and time.

 

He also hit at a time when a huge group of young people had the wherewithall to convince themselves that there was something ethereal and a hidden but Platonic reality that they were chosen by ... something ... to be better than any other.

 

Bob Dylan was part of it, an exemplification in a sense, of that perspective.

 

That's the memory and whence it came.

 

The reality is... now we're old men and old women whose days of breeding either children or new ideas is most likely past, and whose current role is only to pass on perspectives on what once "we" thought to be revolutionary ... but were simply old ideas cloaked in new words and nontraditional grammar.

 

In explanation? Others can do this far better than I, and from among the generation "we" learned from.

 

From Eliot...

"Think now

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

Guides us by vanities. Think now

She gives when our attention is distracted

And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions

That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late

What’s not believed in, or if still believed,

In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon

Into weak hands, what’s thought can be dispensed with

Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think

Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices

Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues

Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.

These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree."

 

Or from Dylan Thomas...

"Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night."

 

m

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Paid my money at the door and went into a bar the other night. Heard the folk singer do his rendition of Desolation Row. A thought provoking sweet duress song experience - what/ how was going on when this was written??. ..pehaps much ado about nothing lol! Anyways walked out into the night with one of the folk singer's lines - "we all just try to best find our place in line because it's everywhere" I thought I spent my money well on that evening.

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Heard the folk singer do his rendition of Desolation Row. A thought provoking sweet duress song experience - what/ how was going on when this was written??. ..pehaps much ado about nothing lol!

 

Think we need 45Nick to cast light over that song - I'm sure he had his circulations there back in time.

 

Is he away on hiatus. . .

 

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Think we need 45Nick to cast light over that song - I'm sure he had his circulations there back in time.

 

Is he away on hiatus. . .

 

 

 

I wouldn't even dare try to come to grips with that one. Clearly a lot of beat poet influence, especially Ginsberg. I never did really "get" Ginsberg, although I did spend an evening smoking pot and drinking wine with him (along with about a dozen other people) after a reading when I was in college.......

 

For some reason, people like him were a lot more accessible to us mere mortals back then.

 

Desolation Row? Read whatever you want into it, as long as it's not "always look on the bright side of life".

 

(And yes, I have been away for some time, both for good and for bad.)

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Read whatever you want into it, as long as it's not "always look on the bright side of life".

 

 

Yep - it's a portrait of the then turbulant circumstances of modern time, isn't it. Such a mountain to cross - and a favorite here, the atmosphere alone is superb

 

Ginsberg - eeeeh, a lesser mountain, but I heard that he broke in tears first time he heard A Hard Rain. Understandable.

 

To have spent an evening with the guy back then is a feather in cap. He was after all one of Roberts masters.

 

Might be time to re-read Howl.

 

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Yep - it's a portrait of the then turbulant circumstances of modern time, isn't it. Such a mountain to cross - and a favorite here, the atmosphere alone is superb

 

Ginsberg - eeeeh, a lesser mountain, but I heard that he broke in tears first time he heard A Hard Rain. Understandable.

 

To have spent an evening with the guy back then is a feather in cap. He was after all one of Roberts masters.

 

Might be time to re-read Howl.

 

 

Read Burroughs's Junky first.

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