Interetsting critique. I think the reason we don't have a "Dylan" now is twofold. First the music scene is so fractured that no one artist can transcend the various genres. Rap fans are notlistening to country; Country fans are not listening to reggae; etc.

Second, Dylan is that rare artist who though he is very much of his time also transcends his time. Think Shakespeare or Dante. That is the company Dylan keeps.

My favorite part of the documentary was when he spoke of two high school sweethearts and how they brought out the poet in him. He smiled as he said it, and for a moment he was not "Bob Dylan." Rather, he was Bob, a middle aged guy reminiscing about long lost love.

Good God. Stop yourselves.

Puccini, Verdi, Schubert, Matisse, Bergman, Dante, Shakespeare, Rushdie, De Niro?

He was an above-average pop poet who actively borrowed from the language of poetry and wrote so-called "protest" songs of social relevance without ever doing the political thought necessary to flesh out any real political commitment. Dylan was mystical and vague and preferred the aura of mystery where others (like Baez in the documentary) got on the frontlines and used their art to change the times.

"Hard Rain" is a great song, but as poetry itself, it's nothing special. Very few tenured English professors actually teach Dylan and the hippies that do are pseudo-academics trying to seem hip and pretend that their Boomer ideals weren't compromised by the fake counterculture of the 60s that Dylan was at the forefront of, a vague, gooey product of rebellion and sentiment to be consumed.

The worst analogy of all that you infer is to Martin Luther King, Jr. Dylan had none of the courage and grace and only half the poetic beauty of King and his words. Dylan was never an intellectual, as the documentary makes clear, and to attribute great ideas to his lyrics does a disservice to the people you analogize him to.

The problem with Dylan is that he never would or did stand up to the Christian Right or those CEOs. In fact, you're as likely to see them at his concerts driving their gas-guzzling SUVs while buying $35 concert T-shirts and wearing $150 Birkenstocks as you are to find ex-hippies who run an organic grocery in their retirement from being stock brokers. That's the problem with Dylan -- he hinted at a lot of things, but never challenged anyone to change or give up their lifestyles of diffident consumption and cruetly.

Adam, I like a lot of this piece and it sounds like it could belong in any mainstream review publication, but Ithink you were trying too hard to sound writer-ly with this:

"drop the words out of their mouths like unwieldy insect pebbles with stings in their twitching tails."

That is all.

What?

[Shark enters "Dylan Review Room" -- notices the attack pup Bob A. Booey already gnawing on leg of gold-plated plaster statue of Robert Zimmerman; Shark decides to keep his mouth shut and admire attack pup's "biting" analysis.]

=====

Oops, a stray thought...

"...I saw a newborn baby with wild wolves all around it
I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it,
I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin',
I saw a room full of men with their hammers a-bleedin',
I saw a white ladder all covered with water,
I saw ten thousand talkers whose tongues were all broken,
I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of young children..."


Funny, typing out the lyrics to "Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" makes it sound more like a pile of steaming, pretentious, amateurish bullshit.

======

PS: "A Martin Scorsese Picture" -- this arrogant asshole should be taken out and hung by his thumbs over a vat of hot popcorn butter. Ooooh, an AUTEUR who uses 90% of other people's film; now that's FUCKING IRONIC.

Adam's Next review:

"Madonna's Truth or Dare: She's Frida Kahlo, Botticelli's Venus, and Colette All Rolled Into One!"

Dear Adam Ash

I think your perspective is valid, and your comments are pretty well considered, and interesting.

You are just simply mistaken when you say he is played out, and wonder why he's still playing.

The fact is that he is living what he said; becoming what he is.

After you and I have become memories, the tapes of the 21st century concerts will be gathered together as jewels, and the regret will be that each one of them was not preserved in visual format.

There is no mystery about why we seek to see him at each opportunity: He is in his performance prime THESE days.

Kent Bourland

No Direction, Period

The much-hyped Martin Scorsese documentary on Bob Dylan's early career to 1966 has arrived on U.S. airways, thanks to PBS American Masters.

I'm not sure what the point of this series is, beyond heaping homage and glorification on hand-picked American Artists, and then communally basking in their glow. After all, we as Americans "created" them. Don't we deserve some of the credit--if only sitting passively through documentaries informing us of the importance of these "Masters"?

So it is with Bob Dylan--via Scorsese. The hype is through the roof on this one. "The Best Film About Anybody" one headline screams. Another says this is Scorsese's best picture.

As Dylan himself wrote on the back of one of his albums, "Whaaat?!"

There is nothing that unique or informative about the Dylan opus--shown in two 2-hour installments. Dylan's own playroom attempts at film hold more stylistic interest. No, despite the hype, this is not on the level of Raging Bull or Taxi Driver (to be honest, Dylan's just not as interesting as Jake LaMotta or Travis Bickle). No, unlike Werner Herzog who has made some truly visionary documentaries that complement his fictive work, Scorsese has yet to turn that corner. His attempt at documentary is garden variety--"newly found" vintage clips interspersed with candid interviews with friends capped with "authorized" words by the man himself. (Is there a reason why some of the musicians interviewed have to be holding their instruments awkwardly, as if they were an extra appendage they never put down--e.g., Pete Seeger?)

We wander through the familiar narrative of Dylan's life--the us-vs.-them agon of hipster and folkie. The hero-artist performing for booing audiences. The genius typewriting late into the night, fed by an number of cross-indicated stimulants.

The upshot of the film seems to be: "golly gee whiz, Dylan wrote all these amazing songs, suffered to such for it, he must be a Genius or something." He's touched by the holy spirit (according to producer Bob Johnston) or a shaman (according to Allen Ginsberg). Or he's the supremely talented dope (according to Joan Baez, who seems closest to the voice of sanity in this thing).

For more check adamzero.blogspot.com

No Direction, Period

The much-hyped Martin Scorsese documentary on Bob Dylan's early career to 1966 has arrived on U.S. airways, thanks to PBS American Masters.

I'm not sure what the point of this series is, beyond heaping homage and glorification on hand-picked American Artists, and then communally basking in their glow. After all, we as Americans "created" them. Don't we deserve some of the credit--if only sitting passively through documentaries informing us of the importance of these "Masters"?

So it is with Bob Dylan--via Scorsese. The hype is through the roof on this one. "The Best Film About Anybody" one headline screams. Another says this is Scorsese's best picture.

As Dylan himself wrote on the back of one of his albums, "Whaaat?!"

There is nothing that unique or informative about the Dylan opus--shown in two 2-hour installments. Dylan's own playroom attempts at film hold more stylistic interest. No, despite the hype, this is not on the level of Raging Bull or Taxi Driver (to be honest, Dylan's just not as interesting as Jake LaMotta or Travis Bickle). No, unlike Werner Herzog who has made some truly visionary documentaries that complement his fictive work, Scorsese has yet to turn that corner. His attempt at documentary is garden variety--"newly found" vintage clips interspersed with candid interviews with friends capped with "authorized" words by the man himself. (Is there a reason why some of the musicians interviewed have to be holding their instruments awkwardly, as if they were an extra appendage they never put down--e.g., Pete Seeger?)

We wander through the familiar narrative of Dylan's life--the us-vs.-them agon of hipster and folkie. The hero-artist performing for booing audiences. The genius typewriting late into the night, fed by an number of cross-indicated stimulants.

The upshot of the film seems to be: "golly gee whiz, Dylan wrote all these amazing songs, suffered to such for it, he must be a Genius or something." He's touched by the holy spirit (according to producer Bob Johnston) or a shaman (according to Allen Ginsberg). Or he's the supremely talented dope (according to Joan Baez, who seems closest to the voice of sanity in this thing).

For more check adamzero.blogspot.com

Listen up, Booey and Shark:

Usually I find comments from you guys more valuable than most on BC, and I'm grateful the two of you exist in what is often a field of endless fools, but when it comes to Dylan, you both have a black hole where an important part of your brain should be.

I'm not the only one who thinks Bob Dylan wrote the best song lyrics of all time. The Oxford Professor of Poetry, Christopher Ricks, a dude whose views on poetry I respect more than yours, regards him as one of the best poets of all time. Here's a discussion from one article:

Christopher Ricks, who has also penned books about T. S. Eliot and John Keats, argues that Dylan's lyrics not only qualify as poetry, but that Dylan is among the finest poets of all time, on the same level as Milton, Keats, and Tennyson. He points to Dylan's mastery of rhymes that are often startling and perfectly judged. For example, this pairing from "Idiot Wind," released in 1975:

Idiot wind, blowing like a circle around my skull,
From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol

The metaphorical relation between the head and the head of state, both of them two big domes, and the "idiot wind" blowing out of Washington, D.C., from the mouths of politicians, made this particular lyric the "great disillusioned national rhyme," according to Allen Ginsberg .

"The case for denying Dylan the title of poet could not summarily, if at all, be made good by any open-minded close attention to the words and his ways with them," Ricks wrote in Dylan's Visions of Sin. "The case would need to begin with his medium."

The problem many critics have with calling song lyrics poetry is that songs are only fully realized in performance. It takes the lyrics, music, and voice working in tandem to unpack the power of a song, whereas a poem ideally stands up by itself, on the page, controlling its own timing and internal music. Dylan's lyrics, and most especially his creative rhyme-making, may only work, as critic Ian Hamilton has written, with "Bob's barbed-wire tonsils in support."

It is indisputable, though, that Dylan has been influenced a great deal by poetry. He counts Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine alongside Woody Guthrie as his most important forebears. He took his stage name, Bob Dylan, from Welsh poet Dylan Thomas (his real name is Robert Allen Zimmerman). He described himself once as a "sixties troubadour," and when he talks about songwriting, he can sometimes sound like a professor of literature: "I can create several orbits that travel and intersect each other and are set up in a metaphysical way."

His work has also veered purposefully into poetry. In 1966, he wrote a book of poems and prose called Tarantula. Many of the liner notes from his 1960s albums were written as epitaphs. And his songwriting is peppered with literary references. Consider, for example, these lyrics from "Desolation Row," released on 1965's Highway 61 Revisited :

Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody's shouting
"Which Side Are You On?"
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers

Professor Ricks is not the only scholar who considers Dylan a great American poet. Dylan has been nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature every year since 1996, and the lyrics to his song "Mr. Tambourine Man" appeared in the Norton Introduction to Literature.

Shark, you're right about one thing, BTW. No Direction Home was not directed by Martin Scorcese. It was merely edited by him. He's a pompous asshole to call himself the director, that's for sure. The closest thing to a director on it was Dylan's manager, who did the 10-hour interview with Dylan that Scorsese edited for the film, and presumably had all the footage besides the stuff Pennebaker and Lerner had shot.

I've never thought musical composers/performers were bookish intellectuals, and I never will. That does not diminish the unique greatness of Bob Dylan. He's imperfect, pretentious, fascinating and extraordinary.

As for knocking Scorsese in such a vile manner. Well, that says more about the writer than Scorsese.

No Direction Home was thought-provoking and about as fine a documentary as I've seen in a long time. I loved it. Those of us who love both music and film found an interesting meshing of the two. Highly, highly recommended.

Exactly what I was thinking while watching it. The footage all came from other sources and had other directors; Scorsese simply played cut-and-paste. And frankly, while I enjoyed the documentary and seeing all the rare video and hearing young Mr. Zimmerman croon, I really didn't learn anything new about Bob Dylan. Essentially, No Direction Home was a pleasant diversion, but not much more. Which is a shame: I consider Dylan to be one of the most important artists and poets of all time. It would have been nice to have seen something more than a stylized slobberfest with pretty pictures.

"That Ken Burns fella didn't do anything but film a few sunsets and do a cut and paste job. He dudn't know anything about makin' dem dar documentaries. Just a beeg heestorecal slobberfest with peety pictures."

Natalie, you're right.

I'd also like to throttle Scorcese for cutting away from some great performances. When Scorcese cut away from Ballad of a Thin Man, just when Dylan was really tearing into the song, I wanted to stick every Dylan song up Scorcese's gray sphincter. An opportunity was missed -- he could've made a really great documentary.

I think, just for a start, it would've benefited from some rock critics weighing in, like Greil Marcus, for example. And Prof. Ricks.

It strikes me that Scorcese was a total Dylan ignoramus (the first he ever heard of Dylan was when he heard Like a Rolling Stone, for chrissake) and that he was asked to get in on the action because he'd made The Last Waltz about The Band, Dylan's backup band.

I think Dylan's manager, who is the big mover behind this, should try again, with someone who's actually familiar with Dylan's work. There's the rest of Dylan's life to be chronicled -- and the greater part, which includes his even more magnificent songwriting of the 70s.

It might be great to get a knowledgable fan like Professor Ricks to do it, with a better editor than Scorcese to help him.

Did you see Scorcese interviewed about it by Charlie Rose? Scorcese struck me as a dabbler in Dylan territory, with no inside-himself idea of Dylan's significance, and no actual abiding love for his work, merely the respect of an amateur outsider. Heck, I could've been a better editor of the material, because Dylan actually MEANT something to me.

that Scorcese was a total Dylan ignoramus

and there's a parallel here to burns' jazz movie. burns didn't know much about jazz and so relied upon people like Wynton and Stanley Crouch.

so what we got was Louis Armstrong in every freaking episode.

Thanks for the nice words and good debate, Adam. Does anyone else think Shark is trying to be the Ginsberg to my Dylan in a weird way? :)

Scorsese is a FAR more brilliant, valuable artist than Dylan. Marty would probably disagree since he is a huge Dylan fan (maybe not as geeky as you all), but he has for more interesting ideas, more genuine passion and command of a far more challenging medium.

Ricks is trying to seem current and hip, but he would have never gotten tenure at Oxford had his major work been interpreting Dylan's vague hippie poetics.

Even the article you quote contains a HUGE caveat -- he says:

""The case would need to begin with his medium. [...] songs are only fully realized in performance. It takes the lyrics, music, and voice working in tandem to unpack the power of a song, whereas a poem ideally stands up by itself, on the page, controlling its own timing and internal music. Dylan's lyrics, and most especially his creative rhyme-making, may only work, as critic Ian Hamilton has written, with "Bob's barbed-wire tonsils in support."

He's saying Dylan's words wouldn't stand up on their own in a poetry anthology, which is obviously quite true, but that he loves the music so much and Dylan's voice that it makes the words work in a way beyond their literary quality.

So he's a super fan-boy, good for him.

Here's someone smarter than all of us and maybe even smarter than Ricks, and certainly more objective on this point, Thomas Frank:

"And from its very beginnings down to the present, business dogged the counterculture with a fake counterculture, a commercial replica that seemed to ape its every move for the titillation of the TV-watching millions and the nation's corporate sponsors. [...] Apart from certain obvious exceptions at either end of the spectrum of commodification (represented, say, by the MC-5 at one end and the Monkees at theother) it was and remains difficult to distinguish precisely between authentic counterculture and fake: by almost every account, the counter-culture, as a mass movement distinct from the bohemias that preceded it, was triggered at least as much by developments in mass culture (particulary the arrival of The Beatles in 1964) as changes at the grass roots. Its heroes were the rock stars and rebel celebrities, millionaire performers and employees of the culture industry; its greatest moments occurred on television, on the radio, at rock concerts, and in movies.From a distance of thirty years, its language and music seem anything but the authentic populist culture they yearned so desperately to be: from contrived cursing to saintly communalism to the embarrassingly faked Woody Guthrie accents of Boby Dylan and to the astoundingly pretentious works of groups like Iron Butterfly and THe Doors, the relics of the counterculture reek of affectation and phoniness, the leisure-dreams of white suburban children like those who made up so much of the Grateful Dead's audience throughout the 1970s and 1980s."

Give me time to catch up to Ricks, Adam :) I mean, if he really likes Dylan so much that he'd sacrifice his professional credibility and taste, it shouldn't be too hard.

That is all.

Adam: "I have a question for both of you posturing Dylan ignoramuses: who do you think is a better songwriter than Bob Dylan?"

Oh, the list goes on and on.

(BTW: I wrote better poetry than Dylan when I was in junior high. But I had much better drugs.)

========

Chris Kent, you talkin' to me?!

re: Ken Burns -

well, yeah, FEH.

I don't have a problem with an artistic assemblage of old photos with a nicely written voice-over; but I think the well-lit talking heads going on for hours is/was a bit of a cop-out/overkill.

"I'm not a writer; I don't have anything original to say; I think I'll stick a few historians in a chair and LET THEM TELL THE STORY FOR ME."

feh.

His brother, Rick Burns makes much better documentaries.

======

re: no knowledge on subject, etc. -- What Saleski said re. Armstrong.

(btw: Jelly Roll, one of the greatest geniuses of jazz -- was given about 30 seconds in that entire epic; ie CRIME.)

One more thing, Kent: all I'm asking is that these directors drop this "A FILM BY..." and/or "A ___ FILM" if they didn't write the screenplay, operate the cameras, edit, cast, act in, do production and costume design, etc, etc.

Auteur Theory is a crock of shit...

..and "A Martin Scorsese Picture" implies that he's an arrogant dick with an inferiority complex. Isn't "Directed by..." ENOUGH?

OK, I'll bite Adam's bait :)

Wait, that didn't sound quite right, but here goes ...

Yes, Kurt Cobain was a better musician than Bob Dylan and more important too when people look back on this era of music centuries later. Cobain basically destroyed corporate rock and brought punk to bear upon the mainstream years after it failed to shake America the first time around. He influenced an entire generation of Gen X kids in fashion, politics and culture. Dylan was a brilliant salesman of images and culture, but he was more interpreting the spirit of the time than leading it. Dylan DID NOT change the society he lived in -- any objective analysis of the politics, consumption and lifestyles of his Baby Boomer fans makes that VERY clear. He merely gave mediocre capitalist pseudo-intellectual types a poetic diversion as the soundtrack for their unchallenged lives.

As lyricists, Dylan and Cobain share some of the same faults, writing vague, abstract metaphors and bizarrely juxtaposed images to avoid having to say anything concrete or political. Cobain was Dylan with more anger, balls, and integrity.

That is all.

Added points for killing himself.

Just a question since I have some Dylan fans here.
I heard a Dylan song about a boxer who fought until he got beat to death, and no one would take responsibility, like the ref blamed the manager, the manager blamed the crowd, the crowd blamed the sport, etc.
What is the name of that song and what album is it on?
I heard it a old friend/music snob's house, and his music snob girlfriend commented on how great it was, like they both knew it and really wanted me to ask and show my ignorance.
I just couldn't do it, which has been my loss for about five yeats now, because it was a great song.
Can anyone help me out on this one?

Who killed Davey Moore? is the song in question. It's from way back and i'm not sure it was on an album.

Dear Booey:
I'll give you this, at least you take up my challenge, unlike Shark, who is running away from the challenge like a wimp of a sardine. But, Booey, man, you're displaying Swiss Cheese holes bigger than actual cheese protein in your brain to an embarrassing extent.

Cobain made two albums, one of which was good. Dylan has made over forty, of which at least eight are masterpieces, from which at least a hundred songs count as absolutely incredible.

Cobain's influence on the culture? Johnny Rotten had more influence. Cobain's contribution comes down to inspiring kids to wear flannel shirts hanging out of their jeans, for chrissake. Are you being serious, dude, or have those bongs from your Grateful Dead days left you permanently scarred?

As for Scorcese -- he's made one masterpiece, Raging Bull, and three other OK movies, Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. Plus reams of embarrassing crap, of which The Last Temptation of Christ is not even the most embarrassing.

Hardly an output that places him in the same firmament as Bob Dylan. You can't even put Scorcese up there with Billy Wilder, or a workmanlike dude like Wise, let alone Orson Welles or Bergman or Fellini or Godard. The only reason Scorcese counts today is that all our current US directors suck, and film school students slobber over him because he started out pretty flashy, but he's still resting on his 80s laurel of Raging Bull. For the last 20 years Scorsese has been about as valuable as Michael Bay.

Thomas Frank!? Please. A hack pol commentator who struck it lucky with one book. Calling Dylan a fake Woody Guthrie shows him for the faker he is.

Booey, I'm disappointed. I expected more of a debate from you. But then I forgive you, because it's crystal clear that you're unfamiliar with Dylan's work, and have entered a debate for which you're completely unqualified. So you get an A for brashness, and a Z for ignorance. Kurt Cobain indeed. For chrissake, Elton John has a better and bigger collection of songs, and had more influence on the culture than Cobain, what with Elton making it safe for gays to be flamboyant queens in our society.

Booey, do yourself a favor: listen to maybe only three Dylan albums, say Blonde on Blonde, Desire, and Blood on the Tracks, none of which you've obviously ever listened to, and then let's talk again.

But at least you didn't duck my question like that guppie who calls himself Shark. He ain't no Ginsberg to your Dylan. He's not even the Mary in Peter Paul and Mary.

"Cobain basically destroyed corporate rock"

No, he didn't. He made the suits take notice and change their business models, resulting in "alternative" and "grunge" becoming the latest new fads that people could easily identify.

While flannel sales went up because of the "grunge" look, what was the political impact that Cobain had?

Shark, if you have an issue with a film's credits, protest against the DGA and stop watching films. It's their rules that allow it.

Unless the song you're thinking of is "Hurricane" about the boxer Hurricane Carter, first track on the Desire album. As a propulsive rock song, it's perhaps even better than "Like A Rolling Stone." It really rocks out with some damn righteous fury.

"Cobain made two albums,"

wrong. Bleach, Nevermind, In Utero. Please don't tell me that you think Nevermind was the good one. It will weaken your arguments.

Scorsese is certianly in the same class as Welles. I love Citizen Kane, but let's not get crazy. Welles only made two good movies.

Adam, your tastes in music, film, books and art are eccentric.

Roger: Cobain gave the biggest, best, subsersive "F.U." to corporate media ever done THROUGH corporate media and shattered all our notions of what it meant to be a rock star. He was the first TRULY conflicted mega-artist in mainstream music who had roots in the underground. It's no coincidence that rock died roughly when Cobain died. Look at the music numbers now: Cobain and alternative rock killed 80s cheese, classic rock, heavy metal, and cock rock as commercially viable and exposed them for the ridiculous artifice they were. And now alternative rock is dead commercially and culturall as well now that the revolution fizzled out and never took hold the way it should have. Rock sales are disappearing, rock radio is disappearing, and the few acts that make money are last-of-a-generation nostalgia touring acts. Rock is dead and Kurt Cobain helped kill it.

I'm not saying they were sophisticated politics, but Cobain and Nirvana made the culture cynical toward the BS hippie idealism of the 60s counterculture and the politicians of the era as well. In some ways, it was anti-political as much as Dylan was apolitical, but I think that's still culturally significant. Nirvana didn't hide behind hippie poetics -- they wanted to tear down the hypocrisy of the culture entirely.

That is all.

"In Utero" was possibly one of the greatest major label rock albums ever made and the biggest, noisiest, angriest, most uncompromising "F.U." to major label music ever recorded.

That is all.

Bob A. Booey: Yes, Kurt Cobain was a better musician than Bob Dylan and more important too when people look back on this era of music centuries later. Cobain basically destroyed corporate rock and brought punk to bear upon the mainstream years after it failed to shake America the first time around. He influenced an entire generation of Gen X kids in fashion, politics and culture.

Um... OK. But what has any of that got to do with music. I could argue that more people have been concieved in the back seat of a '55 Chevy than any other car, but that doesn't make it a better car than a Toyota Corolla.

At this point, I'm not even sure Kurt Cobain was the best musician in Nirvana.

OK, Booey, so you're a big Kurt Cobain fan, but I can point you to plenty of other conflicted rock artists: Lou Reed, Jimi Hendrix, Prince, Jim Morrison, Joni Mitchell, and Dylan himself, all of whom have had a bigger influence on rock culture than Cobain. In the history of rock, Cobain is a footnote, even if he's your personal fave rave. Pearl Jam made a bigger contribution than Cobain. He'll be more famous for offing himself than for his tiny crop of songs.

if Kurt Cobain was a better musician than Bob Dylan then john bambeneck is a better writer than ernest hemingway.

Pearl Jam? You lose all credibility with little asides like that. That's why I didn't bother to respond to your bizarre comparison of Scorsese to other filmmakers either.

All the artists you list were phonies except for Hendrix. And Hendrix HAD to be conflicted because he was an outsider to rock.

Let me put it this way: beyond cultural importance and image, Kurt Cobain wrote BETTER songs than Bob Dylan did. Most of Dylan's catalogue is painful to listen to, pretentious, meandering, nebulous, and completely affected.

Kind of like my writing, right? I'll save someone the cheap shot.

That is all.

I've been thinking about the differences between this and Don't Look Back (which I much prefer, the new film striking me as an interesting complement to it), and had typed up a bunch of them when I inadvertently hit Delete.

Oh well. Here's the difference I thought was most interesting: in the older film Dylan comes off as childishly petulant prick, albeit a charismatic one. Scorcese edits his material, including a lot of outtakes from the older film, to make him seem like a nice guy, who ultimately became exhasperated with the a-holes who surrounded him.

Two different truths, I think.

My dear Booey:
You appear to be as ignorant about Welles as you are about Dylan.
Here are the Welles masterpieces:
1. Citizen Kane
2. The Magnificent Ambersons
3. Macbeth
4. Othello
5. Touch of Evil
6. The Trial
7. Chimes at Midnight. (Probably his best, but then you've neither seen it nor heard of it, have you, Booey?)

So that's seven masterpieces against your Scorcese's single one of "Raging Bull." Excuse me, but Scorcese cannot kiss Welles's ass, nor Billy Wilder's, nor at least twenty other American directors, let alone twenty more world directors. Scorcese simply hasn't made enough good movies. and of the ones he's made, the majority are crap. Like I said, for the last 20 years he's been about as valuable as Michael Bay. I'd trade "Boogie Nights" from one promising new director for Scorcese's entire output.

May I suggest you use google or look stuff up in Wikipedia before you lumber into a debate in your endearingly brash but stumblebum way?

Who Killed Davey Moore? is on the Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3.

Cobain didn't kill corporate rock. The only thing Cobain killed was himself.

Adam said, "Pearl Jam made a bigger contribution than Cobain."

I thought that was pretty funny.

Orson Welles also appeared in an episode of I Love Lucy. That alone grants him entrance into the pantheon of greatness.

I didn't write the Welles comment, buddy. That was Roger M. Dillion.

"Citizen Kane" is one of my all-time favorite films and based on that alone, I'm not sure I can say Scorsese's better. But Scorsese's the best director of his generation and changed the entire picture industry during the 1970s, although that change clearly hasn't stuck either given where it's gone now. PT Anderson wouldn't be possible without Scorsese and I'm sure he'd tell you that. "Taxi Driver," "Mean Streets" and "Goodfellas" are all just about as good as "Raging Bull" -- I'd say "Taxi Driver" is actually better. And comparing Scorsese to the great giants of international cinema past, his influences and loves like Fellini, is like comparing Dylan to Woody Guthrie or Mozart or Beethoven. It's silly. But Scorsese is the best director of his generation and most critics would agree.

That is all.

Hey Booey, I loves ya, BTW. Just trying to get a rise. Very disappointed I couldn't get one out of Shark. The wily bastard is lying low, frustrating the piss out of me. And there I thought I was definitely insulting him enough to lure him out of his dark waters and take a bite outta my profferred ass. But no, he circles out there in the dark, chuckling to himself. Shark, where are you, you monster of the deep?

One of the interviewees in the movie said something like some people get Dylan and others don't. I forget who. Anyway, that's really about the only reasonable response I can think of to Mr. Booey, except that I agree that he clearly hasn't listened to enough Dylan to say anything substantive about him.

Cobain was not a better musician either. Dylan was a better one, played better, wrote better melodies, even sang better on a good day, although nobody'd call him a virtuoso. OK, that's probably not true.

He's flogging his dolphin.

I love ya too, sexy bitch :)

Welles did get ridiculous late in life when he had to scrounge for money. I'll rent "Chimes at Midnight," and no, I hadn't heard of it. Thanks.

That is all.

...not that's it's even worth arguing about, but, hey, I didn't raise the point.

Booey, yer on yer own, babe.

Cobain is a God to a small, culturally-historically challenged 'third generation' of punk wannabees. That is all.

His 'contribution' is that he expressed in public what 10 million semi-domesticated primate adolescent garage-band types were thinking/doing in private.

"Grown ups" could care less. Then. And. Now.

~fffft.

BTW: He married Courtney Love, which immediately brands him as a boy with no brains and no taste.

~NEXT!

=====

Adam, as far as picking up your gauntlet and "debating" the merits of various songwriters vs Zimmerman -- as well as playing "Whose Art-Knowledge Dick is Bigger?"

1) I'm too tired
2) I'm too lazy
3) I don't "debate"
4) Art is subjective
5) My Art Knowledge Dick is bigger than all of *yalls' put together.

* except fer maybe JR

=========

BTW, Adam, "F for Fake" was a Welles "masterpiece". You left it off your all-encompassing list.

...but I still love ya~!


(Carry on, kids)

Booey:
I don't know, I think Raging Bull is the one. It's got an epic quality about it that Taxi Driver doesn't. I think it also explores character deeper.

But you're right, Scorcese was certainly one of the most exciting directors of his generation, although not neccesarily the best. What about Coppola?

It's not as if Scorcese stands alone out there. The 70s produced Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Terry Malick, Nic Roeg, Peter Weir, Ken Russell, John Schlesinger. I wouldn't count out an overlooked fellow like Hal Ashby (Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, and Being There is a nice body of work). Then there's the odd guys like Jim Jarmusch and David Lynch, and Russ Meyer, some kind of ridiculous genius.

Besides Coppola, I'd put two other directors in competition with Scorcese as the best of his generation:
1. Sam Peckinpah. He started a few years before Scorcese, but you could make a case for him having made better movies in the early 70s -- The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue, Straw Dogs, and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid stack up easily against Scorcese.
2. John Casavetes. I'd say his movies of the 70s beat Scorcese's: Husbands, Minnie and Moskowitz, A Woman Under the Influence, Opening Night are mind-bending. A Woman Under the Influence may be better than Raging Bull, though I'd have to see them back to back to decide.

Jeez, how did I end up talking about directors on a Dylan thread? Anyway, to quote you, that is all.

Shark:
"F for Fake" was a bit of throw-away for chrissake. I think you're ducking the songwriter discussion because you can't think of one, JUST ONE, songwriter who measures up to Zimmerman.
I defy you to name just ONE from your big art-knowledge dick-infested bottom-feeding ocean depths. You ain't got one, that's why you're swallowing seawater.

Okay, Adam.

Better lyrics/songs than Dylan:

Fred Neil
Ray Wylie Hubbard
Chris Wall
Steve Earle
Springsteen
Tim Finn
Kim Richey
Zoe Lewis
Laura Nyro
Joni Mitchell
Joe Ely
James McMurtry
Carrie Newcomer
John Smith
Bill Miller
Rhett Miller
Robert Wyatt
Deborah Holland

um... and that's just off the top of my head...

Welles never made a movie as bad as either Age of Innocence or the remake of Cape Fear. I can still hear De Niro saying in that fake drawl, "Coooounselor!"

Bob Dylan was one of the most influential musicians in rock history. Period. You may not like him, but the music we hear today would likely be different had it not been for Dylan.

Take a listen to these five CDs: The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde and Blood on the Tracks. If afterwards you still don't get it, I can't make you understand.

BTW, I find it completely ridiculous to assert that Cobain was somehow better or more influential than Dylan. Just my opinion.

Coppola's had more huge bombs and misses than Scorsese has and has never been as consistently good. Yes, the Godfather movies earn him a spot in my pantheon of that generation, but even his best films like Apocalypse Now never had the clarity and order of thought and image that Scorsese's work had. They're both great and this could make for a great debate, but there's no doubt Scorsese's held up better over time and been the far more vital artist in recent years.

I love Terrence Malick, but he's barely worked. Woody Allen, Peter Weir and Robert Altman are decidedly NOT better than Scorsese -- they might tell you that themselves. I love "Being There," but it's not match for "Taxi Driver" or "Raging Bull."

The other directors you list are all great and I too like all their work, though. I love Lynch, but he's a madman experimentalist who'll never be able to communicate as effectively as Scorsese has.

Tha tis all.

Serious words and music:

Conjure: Music for the Texts of Ishmael Reed

Conjure: Cab Calloway Stands in for the Moon

And ditto to crooked spine.

And one more thought: I remember reading somewhere that Schubert preferred to work with bad poetry. Tried googling it but could find a quote.

shark, yea it's all opinions and whatnot. but since a large percentage of those people were highly influenced by Dylan (and i'm sure they'd admit to this), the point of who's hardly matters.

Discovering Bob Dylan

I don't know anything about Bob Dylan. I used to consider his music "old person" music from a bygone era. I watched the Martin Scorsese directed documentary American Masters No Direction Home: Bob Dylan recently and the film offered some insight on Dylan's life and music during his critical peak in the early to mid sixties. The footage captured in the film was extraordinary fully encapsulating the emotions Dylan was going through at the time with his reluctance to take the helm as a generation's unofficial spokesman.

I've always heard about the influence Dylan had on contemporary music. Many credit him as the individual who brought folk music out of the coffee shops and into the mainstream. Others call Dylan a forerunner to the genres folk rock and country rock. I'm not going to analyze the man and go off on some Greil Marcus-like rant since I'm oblivious too much of his music and don't look at him as god like or anything. I've heard the big hits and have no favouritism to any Dylan era having really first encountered the singer in the late eighties when he was a member of The Travelling Willburys. Even then I paid no attention to him thinking Roy Orbison was the stand out performer of the bunch.

I just want to understand why everyone thinks he's so great. Why is his appeal so lasting? Why is someone who plays pop music the subject of countless debate, analysis and reference? I want to cut through the bullshit and discover Dylan on my own terms without any outside influence from any popular music publication, Internet forum or Scorsese movie.

With the exception of a few great artists, I never had the chance to make my own realization based upon my own pure, original thoughts. I wasn't alive when The Beatles played Sullivan, or when Hendrix played Monterey or when The Ramones were a CBGBs fixture. The only modern day act that made waves on an international scale where the media didn't corrupt my outlook was Nirvana. I'm not saying I was in Seattle at some dive watching them before they were famous. But they literally came out of nowhere and the media was clueless at first. For a brief few months they were really unclassifiable. When I first heard Nirvana in late 91' I never said 'that's a grunge band.' There was no such word at the time. But I knew at the time that a revolution, maybe not on a cultural scale like hip-hop, but on a musical level was unfolding before my eyes.

Maybe it's inevitable. Maybe if you love music you're destined to discover Bob Dylan sometime or another. I'm at the age now and frame of mind where I can truly appreciate good music of all varieties regardless of popularity. My previous attempts to comprehend Dylan and his music failed miserably in the past. I passed his music over numerous times for the contemporary music acts of the day. I settled for whatever someone else told me was good.

Nothing really manipulates my tastes now even if coincidently the new Bob Dylan documentary aired on PBS around the same time as my interest perked up in singer. Maybe the film's release inadvertently influenced my subconscious in some way but I've wanted to discover Dylan long before the documentary was even a glimmer in Scorsese's eye.

Now the question is where to begin? Should I start with a hits album or such classics as The Free Wheelin' Bob Dylan or Highway 61 Revisited? Those would be logical introductions to Dylan's discography especially since I'm impartial to any Dylan era. But I don't really want to focus on his most well known material at first. I'm going to start off with something a little less known but not any less deserving of praise such as Dylan's 1969 country album Nashville Skyline, which I discovered buried in my parent's record collection alongside Kenney Rogers' The Gambler and Neil Diamond's Jonathon Livingston Seagull. The follow up to the rustic classic John Wesley Harding and Dylan's first full-blown country record (featuring Johnny Cash on one track), I figure it's as good as any place to start.


Trent McMartin

Seleski: "...it's all opinions and whatnot. but since a large percentage of those people were highly influenced by Dylan... the point of who's hardly matters."

I agree.

And I think most discussions of art are just a subjective pissing contest.

But Adam chummed my water -- and in the interest of fun -- and shutting his ass up, I bit.

(I was also hoping some of these young dylan 'fans' might google some of those singer/songwriters on My List and find some real underground artists with intelligence and integrity. --heh)

BTW: *I think we tend to think Art is much more important than it really is.


(*I can't believe I said that!)

Side comment:

If I had to cite Kurt Cobain as the best my generation had to offer, I believe I would put a shotgun in my mouth.

BTW: Once again, in the interest of fairness -- and AGAINST this perception that these films just fell outta the director's ass:

Paul Schrader was Scorsese's SCREENWRITER.

(And Scorsese couldn't write his ass out of a paper bag.)

I'm sure I'll take a lot of flak for this, but I prefer hearing other people sing Dylan's lyrics.

Trent:
"Nashville Skyline" is as good a place to start as any. "Desire" might be your next album to listen to. I'd say these are the albums that would be the best intro, because they're the closest Dylan comes to easy listening.

Then you might be ready for the classics: Blonde on Blonde, Blood on the Tracks, Before the Flood, Planet Waves, Highway 61 Revisited.

Then you could go off into the byways, like New Morning, the last album (which won a Grammy I think), Basement Tapes, etc.

Shark:
Thank you for your list of songwriters. You definitely win the Bigger Art-Knowledge Dick contest. I bow before your superior knowledge. Trouble is, I haven't listened to much rock since the 70s, except for the unavoidable high points, like Booey's fave Nirvana, and innovators like Prince, who's not a bad Hendrix-follower/clone. I'm gonna google all the songwriters on your list. (BTW, there's that guy who did 69 Love Songs. I don't know if he's on your list or on your radar, but I heard a few cuts, and they sound damn interesting.)

Now Trent:
If you can give me a list of your faves from recent years I've missed out on, I'd be most grateful. I need to catch up with what's been happening. But leave off the Backstreet Boys and stuff -- only interested in people who are really original, idiosyncratic, or do very gorgeous melodies. I'm fucking envious of you, Trent, being able to come to Dylan fresh and discovering the mountain of this man's music for the first time like giant servings of delicious Sundaes -- it's like never having heard of Shakespeare and watching Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth over four nights consecutive nights for the first time. You're going to have a blast.

Joanie:
You have a point. Dylan is such a distinctive and maybe even bizarre stylist singing-wise, that other people often bring out the best of his songs melodically, even though he is the best to sing his lyrics for their meaning.
For example, the Byrds version of Mr Tambourine Man really takes the melody and makes it soar like Bob can't, though you have to listen to Bob singing it to get what it's really all about.
And Jimi Hendrix plays the absolute living shit out of All Along the Watch Tower.
Even so, some (probably most) of Dylan's own versions are unbeatable. Take Lay Lady Lay. It's one of his most "commercial" pop-like songs ("Just Like a Woman" is another example), yet I defy any more "commercial" singer or band on earth to do a sweeter, more affecting version. It's also one of those rare Dylan songs that aren't driven by sarcasm, rage, taunting, pain or despair. What makes Dylan truly original is that he is everything that is anti-pop, down to his strange voice. He does not pander, which is something most other artists do.

Booey:
Look, Cobain was great, but I'm with Shark on this. In the book of rock, he's a footnote, and Dylan is a chapter.

Booey:
Have you rented "Chimes at Midnight" yet? I'm jealous you're getting to it for the first time, too.

Before you belittle Scorcese, there is no doubt that he presented Dylan's music and story in a scholarly and spell binding fashion. Thats all we can ask of a documentary. And by the way, I am not an expert, but I know that editing a movie can be as important to the finished product as filming the movie.
Here is a unique thought perhaps.
Early in the documentary, Dylan mentions how his two earliest girlfriends could bring out the poet in him. Therefore, he advises us on the importance of women as both lover and muse.
We observe that he first makes a name for himself as a musical interpretor of Woody Guthrie. Apparently, soon after he meets Joan Baez, he becomes both the prolific and stunning songwriter that makes him so remarkable. I recall her remarking that he is "writing all the time." There is the image of Dylan at the typewriter, empty booze bottles strewn about.....with Joan Baez nearby.
Perhaps the love of a woman was an important ingredient in Dylans creativity.
Furthermore, as an artist, he didnt care what the audience thought, he just had to follow where his art took him. But that is why it still seems magical today.
Its a whole different world from the Music INC. we have today.
During the later years depicted in the documentary it is pretty obvious he is flying high on drugs. Perhaps the drugs dulled his thoughts and altered his priorities. As so often happens, maybe the drugs started to take first priority. Not surprisingly, Baez splits and his creativity faded.(It is hard to take seriously songs like "Everybody must get stoned" or "Lay Lady Lay") Thanks for letting me share my opinion.

Bob Dylan is an interesting enigma that attemps to hide his true thoughts behind powerful lyrics...His guitar playing is average at best. Piano ability isn't much to brag about..Simon Cowell would have the police throw him out of the audition room. Yet we are still very fascinated by him..I believe much of the allure is the fact that Dylan tries very hard not to be self labeled...He seems just as curious as the press when fielding questions about his popularity...

If you pay close attention to the music world you'll find that the less you say, the more mysterious you become...Mysteria sells albums..It almost seems that huge artists in film and music try to dodge interviews...It is almost as if they understand the more we know about them the less we'll care. When the answer is revealed the game is over...

I prefer Van Morrison over Dylan..Van isn't the so-called poet but makes his points quicker and smoother...I also prefer Morrison's melodies over Dylan's.

Dylan is one of the top 5 performers of the 20th century no doubt. His music will live for another hundred years. But it is important to keep in perspective that his job isn't to move revolutions from here to there. It is merely his job to create thought. Demand the audience to ask questions of itself to which there is no simple answer. Martin Luther King lead by method. Bob Dylan created thought with music..There is a big difference.


The lyrics do need the support of the music...The two should match...Think about the lyrics of Knockin on Heaven's Door paired with the music of Jumpin Jack Flash...It doesn't work.

So to me it seems it is harder to define a great songwriter than it is a great poet...There are just more material and feelings that go into a song than a poem..

Mike

Any of you losers on this post gotten any pussy in the last 6 months.

I HIGHLY DOUBT IT!!!

And crackhead bob reminds us all what is really important in life.

Obviously crackhead bob is single.

I saw Bob Dylan play his first concert at Town Hall. I don't remember the year and I was very young, I think about 15 years old. I didn't know anything about music, and no one stood up in the audience and gyrated and clapped to musci and shouted. But it was riveting. I never forgot that concert, and I have forgotten many since, even the fun ones with grear rock stars. He was and is a powerful persona that connects in a unique way into your heart. I am sure there are better guitar players and singers. He always makes fun of his own voice and ability, but all of him together with his haunting lyrics comes together and expresses something wonderful and beautiful that isn't like anyone else and yet the same as everyone else. As weird as Bob is, we all some how recognize ourselves in him. He also expresses the thoughts and yearnings of an entire generation that was trying to discover the core of our purpose. Things have gotten a lot more complex since then, yet, somehow Bob Dylan's words manage to still manages to raises up the mundane experience of love, and longing, hope, dispair and even hate to a level where we can wonder at the greatness of the ordinary human soul. And that is what I think makes him extraordinary.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Dylan and his influence on our lives is that a lot of it was visceral, and as hard to define as he is to 'analyse'. I'm a little more than a year younger than he is, and we were there for his first album, and for every one after that thru, interestingly, '66, then it got sporadic - Vietnam overturned a lot of our lives; and when MLK and Bobbie were killed, we all died a little, and the music didn't work any more for a long time....

This 'visceral' is not meant to reflect some foggy ancient sentimentality so much as the fact that his work changed our lives in ways we did not, and still do not, understand. He 'fit' into where we were at when we found him. Nor is it connected to any 'movement' - I know a lotta people my age to whom it never even occurred at the time that his songs were 'protest' songs - we'd been entrenched in the civil rights movement since the late-50's out here in California when he came along, all bright young people who were personally insulted by the cruelty and senselessness of segregation and its attendant horrors, and who did our little bit about it and, later on, 'Nam. If anything, his work merely enhanced mind sets that were already there.

Why did he fit so well into so many of our lives then? Because all that stuff he created was so goddamn beautiful, that's all - the words, the music, the creaky voice, the harmonica, the mistakes, the heart and breath behind it, all made a unique frequently troubling breathtaking gorgeous package that we barely sought to understand. We inhaled him like the best grass on the block and didn't bother to try to figure him out. He was just "right" for us.

And maybe that's enough. He's been beaten up by words thrown at and near and about him for over 40 years now, and has aged into a gracious clear-minded fellow with enuf good feeling to TALK, really TALK in that remarkable documentary.

I was blown away all over again. Let the academics and critics have their continuing field day trying to find a comfortable place to put him so THEY feel better and less puzzled by him.

I know where he is, and so do many other normally highly articulate, overeducated, nasty, judgemental people like me - he's in my goddamn heart, and that's where he'll stay.
Certainly, the 60's without him would have resulted in a big hole in that space he ended up occupying.

That is all sufficient for me.

:)

shakespeare was crap, he didn't get much
cobain is an idiot
dylan knows
its about truth

karenkat, bless you.
you've said it for all of us. (well, most of us anyway).
trent, if you're still there, perhaps the best way to listen to dylan is to start from the beginning. hear the changes in direction, in purpose, in vocal technique, in working methods -in the order that they happened. it will give a better understanding not only of his work, but of the man himself.
dylan has lived his life openly before us, and allowed us to see his soul. we are priviledged indeed.

Dude, you have a serious problem if you think that
Bob Dylan is as great as Shakespeare or Mozart. It makes me wonder whether you have ever attended a classical music concert or read a Shakespeare play, for instance. Have you ever just sat down and listened to Mozart or Beethoven for a few minutes? Let's face it, compared to Schubert or Mozart, Bob Dylan's music is nothing more than confusing, disorganized noise. I am really concerned about your inability to distinguish popular music from the most beautiful music and poetry ever written.

I have always found it interesting that Bob Dylan and many other folk-type singers really do not appeal to audiences on an international level. While The Beatles have sold hundreds of millions of albums around the world, Bob Dylan's total record sales are limited largely to English speaking countries. I think that it is interesting to consider the reasons behind this phenomenon.
My feeling is that, on a musical level, Bob Dylan in fact is really not as good as The Beatles. With regard to melody in particular, The Beatles (and many other hugely popular international artists) wrote really great music that even people in China or India, for instance, might enjoy, regardless of whether they even understand the words. After all, music is the universal art form, isn't it? On the other hand, with Bob Dylan, there is really not as much there on a musical level. And once you take away the music, Bob Dylan's music loses most of the poetic qualties that it once seemed to have.
I also find it interesting that the only people on Earth who really seem to enjoy Bob Dylan and so many of your other folk singers are white, upper middle class people from the US and Canada. It is as though people with real problems don't want anything to do with this narcissistic, self-absorbed form of music.

I liked the interview with Dylan..I thought this was Dylan as bare as we have seen him except in his songs. I'm a 60's kid...and the thing we all need to keep in mind and/or realize is the TIME! Dylan was riding the wave. He was: the right guy, in the right place, at the right time. Just like Dylan said about songwriters...you have to be able to get inside people's heads...and that, my friends, is what Dylan does. And to be able to get inside people's heads...well, that takes a special gift/skill/talent-supernatural-bought at the crossroads...whatever you want to call it...but the fact remains...Dylan had/has it. To say Dylan borrows...hey, we are all part of the original...don't think so..check your DNA.

Pam