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Post by beatlies on Feb 19, 2015 12:47:49 GMT -5
Bob Dylan's older voice
Play a cover song for me
Feb 17th 2015, 17:27 BY J.C.T.
Timekeeper
BOB DYLAN has usually been reluctant to talk about himself. This is a man who grants a handful of interviews per decade, the majority of which descend into philosophical posturing. So the forthright, 30-minute acceptance speech he gave when picking up the MusiCares Person of the Year award earlier this month came as a bit of a surprise.
“Some of the music critics say I can't sing,” he said. “I croak. Sound like a frog. Why don't these same critics say similar things about Tom Waits?”
Mr Dylan has always furnished his songs with thinly (and sometimes thickly) veiled retorts and regrets—but rarely has he presented himself as nakedly as this. He revealed anxieties that had only previously been hinted at, even in his 2004 memoir, "Chronicles", about being “three to five years beyond” his listeners, about producers who “didn't think much of [his] songs”, about the extra scrutiny heaped on him personally. “Why me Lord?” went his refrain, like a long-suffering Job, or a bewildered Brian of Nazareth. “Why me?”
Mr Dylan was particularly irked by attacks on his deteriorating voice. It is often claimed that he was never much of a singer—in fact, the orthodox position seems to be that he has always struggled with “a voice like sand and glue” (to borrow David Bowie's dubious tribute). That strikes this correspondent as unfair. The young man who whooped on “Positively Fourth Street”, crooned on “Lay Lady Lay” and murmured on “Don't Think Twice It's All Right” had a voice that could be every bit as supple and subtle as his pen.
The range has diminished, though. Like many of the singers Mr Dylan name-checked in his speech, he has a voice that has suffered from the inevitable strictures of getting old. As any doctor will tell you, an ageing larynx undergoes a number of debilitating changes, thanks to calcium deposits on stiffening cartilage, a thinning of the vocal folds, and atrophy in the laryngeal muscles. All of this is thought to begin between the ages of 68 and 74. The 73-year-old Mr Dylan might therefore have suffered more wear and tear than Mr Waits, eight years his junior, who can still punctuate his familiar growl with a clean falsetto.
But despite decades of strain, Mr Dylan is adamant that he can still sing. His recent speech attempted to shift the goalposts a little, with help from a Sam Cooke maxim—“voices ought not to be measured by how pretty they are […] they matter only if they are telling the truth”—but he still challenged the claim that there was no beauty left in his voice at all. “Critics say I mangle my melodies, render my songs unrecognisable. Oh, really?”
To such reviewers Mr Dylan's decision to record a cover album of ten Frank Sinatra staples (“Shadows in the Night”, released on February 3rd) might look like a retreat. In recent years music-lovers have grown accustomed to such fare from the great singer-songwriters of the 1960s and ‘70s. Johnny Cash's last six albums consisted exclusively of covers, as did two of Neil Young's most recent offerings, and Mr Dylan acknowledged that “Rod [Stewart] and even Paul [McCartney] have done some of this kind of material”. In some respects, recording a cover album as an elder statesman of popular music can be a highly conservative (and self-indulgent) exercise: a chance to rearrange the canon and to wallow in favourites from a distant past. There's more leeway for a wavering voice when everyone already knows the tune, and nostalgia sells well.
When Mr Stewart rasps through the opening line of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?”—“Someone told me long ago,” he croaks—it is easy to forgive him, not least because it is self-evidently true. But recording covers as a septuagenarian singer-songwriter is still a bold choice: there is no new material to hide behind, and all attention is directed towards the singing itself. With too many sub-par performances, nostalgia quickly wilts into pity. By picking Sinatra tunes, Mr Dylan has invited that pressure—and he copes with it admirably. There's a husky honesty to the love songs, with barely a note missed as we hear of romances been and gone, backed by melancholic slide guitars and sensuous hi-hats (all recorded live in gruelling sessions at Capitol Records late last year).
But it's in the defiant “Why Try to Change Me Now?” and “Stay With Me” that this album really distinguishes itself. With a directness rarely permitted by his own obscure lyrics—a directness that seems, quite suddenly, to have found a new appeal for him—Mr Dylan sings of ageing and decaying and a refusal to be bowed. Though “I go away weekends and leave my keys in the door”, though “People talk, people stare”, and though “I grope, and I blunder, and I'm weak, and I'm wrong”, the message is loud and clear: “Stay with me”. Thanks to singing this powerful, that prayer should be answered.
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Post by emerald on Mar 2, 2016 15:46:31 GMT -5
Vast Dylan archive knocks on US university's door New York (AFP) - A trove of thousands of Bob Dylan notebooks and other artifacts -- mostly unknown except to the rock icon himself -- will head to a US university to be preserved for posterity. The University of Tulsa in Oklahoma announced Wednesday that it had acquired more than 6,000 items from the singer's six-decade career and would create the Bob Dylan Archive. The archive will eventually go on permanent display in Tulsa near a recently built museum to Woody Guthrie, the folk legend and Dylan influence who was born in Oklahoma, a Great Plains state that was once Indian territory. "I'm glad that my archives, which have been collected all these years, have finally found a home and are to be included with the works of Woody Guthrie and especially alongside all the valuable artifacts from the Native American nations," Dylan, who is famously taciturn when not singing, said in a statement. "To me it makes a lot of sense, and it's a great honor," said the 74-year-old, revered as one of the most influential living US musicians. Early handwritten drafts of his songs have long been studied by "Dylanologists," but few of them were aware of the vast extent of the collection. Among the items in the archive that were rumored but had not been seen in the public realm is a notebook in which Dylan penned lyrics for his 1975 album "Blood on the Tracks," as he conversed with the New York painter Norman Raeben. The album, while initially meeting mixed reviews, is considered a musical landmark for having established a confessional style of songwriting as Dylan reflected on his marital difficulties. The archive will also feature the leather jacket worn by Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival where, in one of the defining moments of rock history, he switched to electric guitar. And it will include part of the piano on which he wrote "Like a Rolling Stone," one of his best-known songs. The collection also includes Dylan's first recordings in 1959, previously unseen concert films and a wallet in which he kept soul great Otis Redding's business card and country star Johnny Cash's phone number. Dylan performs regularly and is believed to be in good health, but he has increasingly paid attention to the preservation of his legacy. In 2014, he released an exhaustive boxed set with all the recordings from his celebrated 1967 "basement tape" sessions as he experimented in form from a house in upstate New York while recovering from a motorcycle accident. Dylan, who was born in Minnesota and emerged in the bars of Greenwich Village in New York City, has no obvious connection to Oklahoma other than his admiration for Guthrie. One of Dylan's first songs was "Song to Woody," an ode to the then living singer, and he later mentioned Oklahoma in his cover of Guthrie's "The Ballad of Pretty Boy Floyd." The University of Tulsa made a concerted pitch to buy the archive, vowing to properly care for it. The price of the deal was not revealed, but The New York Times estimated it was worth $15 million to $20 million. The sale was led by the university with support from the George Kaiser Family Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the family who became billionaires after fleeing Nazi Germany and entering the Oklahoma oil industry. The historically conservative city of 400,000 people has increasingly been trying to channel its oil wealth into culture with the development of a central arts district. Ken Levit, executive director of the Kaiser Foundation, voiced confidence that the archive would be "a boon for Tulsa that will soon attract Bob Dylan fans and scholars to our city from around the world." www.yahoo.com/news/vast-dylan-archive-knocks-us-universitys-door-164136204.html |
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Post by emerald on May 17, 2016 3:40:38 GMT -5
50 years ago, Bob Dylan made history, and The Washington Post missed it Fifty years ago, Bob Dylan released “Blonde on Blonde.” Was it the best Dylan album ever? Probably, and certainly it was the most Dylan album ever — 14 songs on two discs, what was said to be the first studio double LP in rock music. Just less than a year after he shocked fans by going electric, “Blonde on Blonde” melded folk, rock and country for what Dylan himself would later call “that thin. . . wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold.” It was Dylan at his most playful (“Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat”), Dylan at his most yearnful (“I Want You”), Dylan at his most cutting (“Just Like a Woman”), Dylan at his most rocking (“Obviously 5 Believers”), Dylan at his most cryptic (“Visions of Johanna”). It features not only the world’s most therapeutic breakup song (“One of Us Must Know”), but the catchy jingle that I like to think of as entry-level Dylan, “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35″ — you know, the one with the chorus of “everybody must get stoned.” It routinely hits the higher heights of the “best albums of all times” compiled by various professional music nerds. So I thought we’d take a look back at The Washington Post’s complete coverage of “Blonde on Blonde” from 1966. Ready? www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/05/16/50-years-ago-bob-dylan-made-history-with-blonde-on-blonde-the-washington-post-missed-it/ |
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Post by emerald on May 25, 2016 5:31:23 GMT -5
More (anniversary) ass-kissing - Bob Dylan Is the Greatest American Singer of All Time As the familiar opening notes of the standard "When You're Young At Heart" on Bob Dylan's new album Fallen Angels ring out, the anticipation mounts. You know the song. You've heard it a thousand times before, whether you wanted to or not. But what is Bob Dylan going to do with something so familiar? You have to wonder, what is someone who seems so unknowable doing singing a song so well known? "Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, when you're young at heart." There they are: those familiar words. And yet, something feels completely different. Unlike those of so many of his peers, Bob Dylan's second standards album isn't a schmaltzy, big budget, tweaked-to-perfection affair. Instead it's raw and intimate and immediate, much like last year's Shadows in the Night. Whereas Shadows felt like it was constantly tiptoeing on a razor's edge, here the playing is delicate, with simple arrangements that pack a huge punch. But what stands out most of all are Dylan's vocals. www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a45180/bob-dylan-at-75/ |
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Post by emerald on Sept 8, 2016 3:56:36 GMT -5
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Bob Dylan
Sept 10, 2016 12:24:43 GMT -5
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Post by beatlies on Sept 10, 2016 12:24:43 GMT -5
More (anniversary) ass-kissing - Bob Dylan Is the Greatest American Singer of All Time As the familiar opening notes of the standard "When You're Young At Heart" on Bob Dylan's new album Fallen Angels ring out, the anticipation mounts. You know the song. You've heard it a thousand times before, whether you wanted to or not. But what is Bob Dylan going to do with something so familiar? You have to wonder, what is someone who seems so unknowable doing singing a song so well known? "Fairy tales can come true, it can happen to you, when you're young at heart." There they are: those familiar words. And yet, something feels completely different. Unlike those of so many of his peers, Bob Dylan's second standards album isn't a schmaltzy, big budget, tweaked-to-perfection affair. Instead it's raw and intimate and immediate, much like last year's Shadows in the Night. Whereas Shadows felt like it was constantly tiptoeing on a razor's edge, here the playing is delicate, with simple arrangements that pack a huge punch. But what stands out most of all are Dylan's vocals. www.esquire.com/entertainment/music/a45180/bob-dylan-at-75/"....As the familiar opening notes of the standard "When You're Young At Heart" on Bob Dylan's new album Fallen Angels ring out, the anticipation mounts. You know the song. You've heard it a thousand times before, whether you wanted to or not. But what is Bob Dylan going to do with something so familiar? You have to wonder, what is someone who seems so unknowable doing singing a song so well known?" ---Fylan album title "Fallen Angels" is in sync with the media's Satanism Chic trend of the past several years. ---Reviewer proclaims wonderment at "unknowable" Fylan covering a well known song, apparently forgetting, or pretending to forget that Fylan actually put a Christmas album not too long ago. America's great musical poet and righteous prophet, to be sure..... Album back cover, with track listing, including " That Old Black Magic": images.junostatic.com/full/CS609239-01B-BIG.jpg |
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Post by emerald on Oct 13, 2016 6:36:03 GMT -5
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Bob Dylan
Oct 13, 2016 8:07:45 GMT -5
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Post by beatlies on Oct 13, 2016 8:07:45 GMT -5
NYT/Reuters piece trumpeting this laughable charade. The CIA's revolving Fob Fylan cast, USA empire "soft power asset".... "By REUTERS Nobel Prize in Literature Awarded Video The singer and songwriter Bob Dylan, 75, won the prize on Thursday. By SEWELL CHAN OCTOBER 13, 2016 LONDON — The singer and songwriter Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on Thursday for “having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition,” in the words of the Swedish Academy. He is the first American to win since the novelist Toni Morrison, in 1993. The announcement, in Stockholm, came as something of a surprise. Although Mr. Dylan, 75, has been mentioned often as having an outside shot at the prize, his work does not fit into the literary canons of novels, poetry and short stories that the prize has traditionally recognized. “Mr. Dylan’s work remains utterly lacking in conventionality, moral sleight of hand, pop pabulum or sops to his audience,” the former Rolling Stones bass player Bill Wyman wrote in a 2013 Op-Ed essay in The New York Times arguing for Mr. Dylan to get the award. “His lyricism is exquisite; his concerns and subjects are demonstrably timeless; and few poets of any era have seen their work bear more influence.” Mr. Dylan was born on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minn., and grew up in Hibbing. He played in bands as a teenager, influenced by the folk musician Woody Guthrie, the authors of the Beat Generation and modernist poets. Mr. Dylan in Paris in 1987. BERTRAND GUAY / AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES He moved to New York in 1961 and began to perform in clubs and cafes in Greenwich Village. The following year, he signed a contract with the record producer John Hammond for his debut album, “Bob Dylan” (1962). His many other albums, which the Swedish Academy described as having “a tremendous impact on popular music,” include “Bringing It All Back Home” and “Highway 61 Revisited” (1965), “Blonde On Blonde” (1966) and “Blood on the Tracks” (1975), “Oh Mercy” (1989), “Time Out Of Mind” (1997) and “Modern Times” (2006). “Dylan has recorded a large number of albums revolving around topics like the social conditions of man, religion, politics and love,” the Swedish Academy said in a biographical note accompanying the announcement. “The lyrics have continuously been published in new editions, under the title ‘Lyrics.’ As an artist, he is strikingly versatile; he has been active as painter, actor and scriptwriter.” The academy added: “Since the late 1980s, Bob Dylan has toured persistently, an undertaking called the ‘Never-Ending Tour.’ Dylan has the status of an icon. His influence on contemporary music is profound, and he is the object of a steady stream of secondary literature....." mobile.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/arts/music/bob-dylan-nobel-prize-literature.html?_r=0&referer=http://www.google.com/search?site=&source=hp&ei=c4X_V4H3F4Ole9TGpcgJ&q=Bob+Dylan+Nobel+prize&oq=Bob+Dylan+Nobel+prize&gs_l=mobile-gws-hp.3..0l4j0i22i30k1.23392.34489.0.34920.28.25.3.5.5.0.1128.9659.0j11j3j2j0j4j3j1.24.0....0...1c.1.64.mobile-gws-hp..3.25.6273.3..41j0i131k1j0i10k1.PqidBXjzg5o |
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Post by emerald on Oct 13, 2016 9:58:09 GMT -5
Which tells us a lot about who pulls the strings behind such events....
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Bob Dylan
Oct 13, 2016 14:55:41 GMT -5
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Post by beatlies on Oct 13, 2016 14:55:41 GMT -5
Which tells us a lot about who pulls the strings behind such events.... It's certainly not unprecedented with the Nobel boys in Stockholm: CIA rigged at least one Nobel Prize | Physics Forums - The Fusion ... www.physicsforums.com › threads Jan 20, 2009 - So, it was Pasternak who became the Nobel Prize that year. But victory turned to personal tragedy for ... How Pasternak's Path To The Nobel Prize Was Paved By The CIA Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty › Was_... Jan 16, 2015 - Did the CIA finance a Russian-language publication of Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" in order to ... Doctor Zhivago | CIA FOIA (foia.cia.gov) Central Intelligence Agency (.gov) › doct... Following the publication of Doctor Zhivago in Russian in 1958, Pasternak won the Nobel Prizefor Literature, the popularity of the book ... Declassified CIA document: "Doctor Zhivago" should be considered for the ... www.fort-russ.com › Russian Movies Feb 13, 2015 - CIA can make a book a bestseller and can influence decisions on the Nobel prize.CIA controls Radio ... How The CIA Made Dr. Zhivago Into A Weapon » Alex Jones' Infowars ... Infowars › how-the-cia-made-dr-zhivago... Apr 9, 2014 - The propaganda coup was complete when Pasternak received the Nobel Prize for literature in October ... |
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Post by emerald on Oct 14, 2016 2:54:05 GMT -5
Anyway, when I read that Fylan was awarded the Nobel Prize, I thought its April Fools Day revisited, to say it in a fylanesque note.
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Post by emerald on Oct 20, 2016 6:14:32 GMT -5
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Post by emerald on Nov 5, 2016 6:42:10 GMT -5
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Post by emerald on Nov 8, 2016 4:42:10 GMT -5
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Post by emerald on Nov 26, 2016 5:55:28 GMT -5
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