Bob Dylan

[TrueTomHarley]

18 hours ago, JOHN BUTLER said:

Now that man has a great voice. I have 3 of his vinyl lp's. 

I know nothing about him but I love his sounds. 

Unlike Freddie Mercury of Queen which everyone knew was a homosexual and whos most famous song was about 'put a gun against his head, pulled the trigger now he's dead'  Murder.  OH so wonderful indeed.  The homosexual tag he had wasn't info you had to go and look for it was just generally known. 

The more you read up on Dylan, the more intriguing he becomes. Though THE counter-culture icon of the 60s, he writes that he was never into it. He wrote those type of songs because they sold. He knew he had to break into the business somehow, and here was a sure point of entry:

https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2011/05/bob-dylan-triggers-journalistic-wrath-in-beijing.html

(Wow, was I wordy. The relevant part doesn’t begin until halfway through)

 

[JW Insider]

13 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

Though THE counter-culture icon of the 60s, he writes that he was never into it. He wrote those type of songs because they sold.

You might not believe this, but I just read your post above and your blog article to a Grammy winner who has previously spoken to Bob Dylan.

After name-dropping a two-time national "Teacher of the Year" nominee, earlier today, I honestly hate to do this again. So I won't. But here's the thing. I'm literally sitting in my living room right now with the person I mentioned above: a two-time Grammy winner (and six-time nominee) who's spending the evening here with his wife and child. And, yes, they're close relatives of mine. My wife and I (and my sister and brother-in-law) attended the Grammys with them in 2014 and 2015. And might have to go back in 2019, because he is nominated again. 

Now I've never met Bob Dylan, but was in the audience when he was honored by MusicCares and gave a half-hour speech, which is rare for him. (For Dylan, even to show up at all to an award being given to him is rare.) Just an aside, but you might not know that going to the Grammys is actually a week-long affair attending a bunch of fairly boring and mundane meetings and minor awards shows that never make it to the famous prime-time TV broadcast. And before you judge too harshly, I could name at least 7 other Witnesses who were there in 2014 and 2015. At least I don't attend the weeknight parties, mostly because I'm not invited to any except the post-Awards parties, which have free food and tame entertainment.

We looked for Dylan's 2015 speech, and found it online. It's here: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/posts/la-et-ms-grammys-2015-transcript-of-bob-dylans-musicares-person-of-year-speech-20150207-story.html  That's the whole speech written out which is quicker to read, but you'd have to watch it to understand the sense of humor.

I'm not here to defend Dylan, of course, but you had it much closer when you kept it simply as:

14 hours ago, TrueTomHarley said:

The more you read up on Dylan, the more intriguing he becomes.

If you have never seen or read the 2015 speech, you might be even more intrigued. I will say he derives some mileage out of a possible persecution complex, and knows that he receives this type of sell-out criticism all the time.

The Political Art of Bob Dylan by David Boucher, Gary Browning gives a similar POV, that it was all business, but even that book shows that if we look more closely at all the words Dylan said about his long love of folk music, that it was more than a business choice. He knew the artists Peter, Paul and Mary, each individually, before they were a group by that name. Sure, he might be rewriting his own autobiography, but folk music wasn't a choice for money, he says:

Just saying that people make Dylan the playlist of their entire philosophy because he has said a lot of things that people can take out of his context and put into their own. Same goes for things he's said in interviews about wanting a house with a white picket fence. Just sayin.'

 

[JW Insider]

 @TrueTomHarley ,  Although I won't name the person I'm here with right now, I can give you a quick sense of what we did all day yesterday when he had a day off. Here's a picture some of the books on my piano. It's every "Kingdom Songbook" we've used since 1927. 

 

[James Thomas Rook Jr.]

I'm not going to say who I am with right now, and he has retired .. but he used to be a mild-mannered reporter for a daily metropolitan newspaper, and sang Kingdom Songs way back when they were published in Kryptonese.

[TrueTomHarley]

7 hours ago, JW Insider said:

Just saying that people make Dylan the playlist of their entire philosophy because he has said a lot of things that people can take out of his context and put into their own.

“The game is the same, it’s just up on a different level.”

 

[TrueTomHarley]

7 hours ago, JW Insider said:

The Political Art of Bob Dylan by David Boucher, Gary Browning gives a similar POV, that it was all business, but even that book shows that if we look more closely at all the words Dylan

My sense is that he does indeed care about social injustice, but he is completely apolitical, for some of the same reasons that Jehovah’s Witnesses are completely apolitical: he knows that human efforts are as likely to be the cause of injustice as the solution to it.

I do know my Dylan fairly well, yet I was into my 40s when I began to develop a taste for him. I didn’t like him at all in my school days. Now in my ‘Musicians’ blog category, he pops up more often than anyone.

There is a local connection, assuming one is not too fussy. Mr Jones, from Ballad of a Thin Man, was from my area:

https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2008/01/and-you-know-so.html

 

[JW Insider]

58 minutes ago, TrueTomHarley said:

I do know my Dylan fairly well, yet I was into my 40s when I began to develop a taste for him. I didn’t like him at all in my school days. Now in my ‘Musicians’ blog category, he pops up more often than anyone.

I see that now. I actually never liked Dylan's singing, and always wondered what was the draw. In fact, when you answered the question "Who is the best male artist?" with Dylan saying, "It's not me, babe," I was pretty sure you were just letting Dylan self-deprecate. I still think it's true that Dylan mumbles and can't hold a note very long. But I like his lyrics and sentiments, and have learned that people like his singing, too. Of course, I probably misinterpret most of his lyrics, as I thought that Mr. Jones was Dylan.

BTW, in case anyone thought I was trying to imply that I am in the same house as a major famous pop artist, my relative is actually a music producer who works with other musicians. He tried his own songs when he was a teenager, but they didn't chart for very long and certainly didn't make him much money. For 15 years, now, he has had his own label and a studio that pays the bills by taking money from Grammy-winning artists.

BTW, I have no respect for the "journalist" Maureen Dowd that he supposedly riled. Knowing her politics, she was probably just looking for an angle on China and thought she could catch a few more eyeballs by rolling some iconoclastic stones in Dylan's direction. 

[JW Insider]

On 11/24/2018 at 6:50 AM, TrueTomHarley said:

I do know my Dylan fairly well

Turns out you are more right than I thought. Sorry to have doubted you. A further discussion with the same aforementioned relative expert gave me the following reference from one of his books.

Oh whoops! What's that I accidentally left in the background of the picture? A real Grammy Award?

[TrueTomHarley]

15 hours ago, JW Insider said:

Turns out you are more right than I thought. Sorry to have doubted you. 

It is like when my son-in-law tries to peddle me some bit of nonsense, and I say ‘Jim, Jim, do you REALLY want to challenge your father-in-law about the Beatles?” For I know about them, too.

He was trying to tell me that ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ was included on an album instead of standing alone as a single release. Can you believe that anyone could be so stupid?

Those Grammy pictures go right over my head. I have never seen one. Did Paul take refuge in your home after he supposedly died and you pinched one of his Grammys?

[JW Insider]

52 minutes ago, TrueTomHarley said:

He was trying to tell me that ‘Don’t Bring Me Down’ was included on an album instead of standing alone as a single release. Can you believe that anyone could be so stupid?

LOL! I managed to avoid even hearing more than about 3 or 4 Beatles songs growing up in Missouri from the mid-60's and part of the 70's. Even on long pioneering days driving in the countryside, when the music would go on, it was usually Kingdom Songs on harmonica, or an 8-track tape of John Denver, Glen Campbell, etc.

I still have not heard half the Beatles songbook, and it still surprises people. I knew a lot of them only through instrumentals and covers my father would listen to. My wife, on the other hand, attended Woodstock when she was 15 and her step-father took her to see the Beatles at Shea Stadium when she was like 10.

Anyway, that's a real Grammy, and his more recent one looks the same, just shinier, but I didn't get to the studio yesterday to take a picture. I attended two of the main Awards shows at Staples Center, LA, then last year when it was held just 20 blocks away from us, we didn't go. My "relative expert" has had to go to LA at different times during the year to listen to 100's of songs in several genres just to evaluate the "production quality" of each. 

As an expert yourself, what do you think of my theory that "Maxwell's Silver Hammer" was a direct satirical/parody response to the popularity of "Mack the Knife"?

[Evacuated]

1 hour ago, JW Insider said:

Maxwell's Silver Hammer

"Maxwell's Silver Hammer was my analogy for when something goes wrong out of the blue, as it so often does, as I was beginning to find out at that time in my life. I wanted something symbolic of that, so to me it was some fictitious character called Maxwell with a silver hammer. I don't know why it was silver, it just sounded better than Maxwell's hammer. It was needed for scanning. We still use that expression even now when something unexpected happens."

Paul McCartney
Many Years From Now, Barry Miles

[JW Insider]

5 hours ago, Outta Here said:

We still use that expression even now when something unexpected happens

Interesting, but not completely unexpected. Even so, someone could have defended or explained the somewhat more explicit violence of "Mack the Knife" in the same terms. Mack the Knife is also described by its color beginning in the very first, opening lines:

"Oh, the shark, babe, has such teeth, dear
And it shows them pearly white
Just a jackknife has old MacHeath, babe "

And these serrated edges, the "pearly white" teeth of his jack knife, soon produce billows of red. So the "silver" description is not a surprise.

Of course, "Mack the Knife" is really a rendition of the theme of a German opera and song which we might know through the "Threepenny Opera:" (the following is taken from a web link)

• Our first installment of Between the Lines is standard “Mack the Knife”. We’ll do a little history about the song before we go line by line. The song originally entitled, “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer”, is a song composed by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht for their music drama Die Dreigroschenoper. Yes, it was a German opera first. In fact, the translation is literally The Threepenny Opera. It premiered in Berlin in 1928 and quickly “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” became the standout hit of the opera. That translates to “The Ballad of Mack the Knife.”
• The opera is based on John Gay’s 1728 opera The Beggar’s Opera which, in turn, is based on the thief, burglar and escape artist Jack Sheppard (1702-1724). Macheath is a character in The Beggar’s Opera and in turn becomes the focal point of Die Dreigroschenoper.

Perhaps I haven't looked hard enough, but I have never yet seen anyone tie Mack to Maxwell.