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Bob Dylan’s best songs: Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues #19 (Audio & Video)

bob Dylan Just Like A Tom thumb's Blues

When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez
And it’s Eastertime too
And your gravity fails
And negativity don’t pull you through
Don’t put on any airs
When you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue
They got some hungry women there
And they really make a mess outta you

This reminds me of Kerouac’s “On The Road” – conjuring up a dusty character lost somewhere in America, or South America, down on his luck, wanting to go home and singing off with the bleak but also funny line: “I’m going back to New York City/I do believe I’ve had enough.”
~Howard Souness (His 40 Greatest songs – Uncut Magazine)

Among the masterpieces of Bob Dylan’s amazing outpouring of songs in the mid-’60s, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is a minor pleasure. For anyone else, its extravagant imagery and literary references would make it a sophisticated, comic tour de force. But it has tended to be overshadowed by Dylan’s other songs of the period.
~William Ruhlmann (allmusic.com)

Mr. Ruhlmann has a point… this masterpiece is no. 19 on my Dylan top 200 list… and still there are 3 songs on “Highway 61 Revisited” that are better + 6 others from 65/66… It is brilliant song that carries most of the same characteristics as two of the other  masterpieces on H61 (Like A Rolling Stone & Ballad of  a Thin Man):

Bob_Dylan_-_Highway_61_Revisited

Now if you see Saint Annie
Please tell her thanks a lot
I cannot move
My fingers are all in a knot
I don’t have the strength
To get up and take another shot
And my best friend, my doctor
Won’t even say what it is I’ve got

Original version:


Spotify:

Continue reading Bob Dylan’s best songs: Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues #19 (Audio & Video)

Unreleased – Freehold by Bruce Springsteen

bruce_tj_tour

I was born right here on Randolph Street in Freehold
Here right behind that big red maple in Freehold
Well I went to school right here
Got laid and had my first beer
In Freehold

Today we have found a great “story-song” from Bruce Springsteen that has never been officially released.

This is a sweet and funny song that appeared for the first time live on 8 Nov 1996 in Freehold, NJ. Freehold/ In Freehold is never officially released and I think it has only been played live (not recorded in studio). It is a song in the same vein as Growing Up, but set at an earlier age and in a less serious tone.

The debut of the song was at The Ghost Of Tom Joad Solo Acoustic Tour (Freehold 8 Nov) and it has been played around 20 times after that. It is speculated that the song was written specifically for this event. It was a sort of homecoming show in the sense that he grew up in Freehold, but hadn’t played there since 1967. Bruce Springsteen left Freehold in 1968.

Freehold (first performance, audio):

 

springsteen tj_tour

In 1999 he added a verse based on true events:

Freehold (1999 version):

Continue reading Unreleased – Freehold by Bruce Springsteen