I started writing songs after I heard Hank Williams.
~Bob Dylan (The Les Crane Show, Feb 1965)
If it wasn’t for Elvis and Hank Williams, I couldn’t be doing what I do today.
~Bob Dylan (to Robert Shelton, June 1978)
The tune utilized on ‘House Of Gold’ is an obvious variant of Williams’ own ‘Lost
Highway’. Williams’ original recording was made in 1949 as a demo and released, with
overdubs, in April 1951 (Polydor 833-752). It is currently available on the “Complete
Hank Williams” box set (Mercury Records, 2000).
~The songs he didn’t write (Derek Barker)
Once upon a time you dressed so fine
Threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?
People call say ‘beware doll, you’re bound to fall’
You thought they were all kidding you
You used to laugh about
Everybody that was hanging out
Now you don’t talk so loud
Now you don’t seem so proud
About having to be scrounging your next meal
Here are 9 great cover versions of “Like A Rolling Stone”
Ah get born, keep warm
Short pants, romance, learn to dance
Get dressed, get blessed
Try to be a success
Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don’t steal, don’t lift
Twenty years of schoolin’
And they put you on the day shift
Question: Do you think there’s a move afoot to turn you into a pop star? Dylan: They can’t turn me into anything. I just write my songs and that’s that! Nobody can change me and by the same token, they can’t change my songs. Of course I vary things once in a while, like with the different backing I had on Subterranean Homesick Blues. But that was entirely my own doing. Nobody talked me into it. Just so happened we had a lot of swinging cats on that track, real hip musicians.
~Bob Dylan (May 1965, UK)
Subterranean Homesick Blues. I mean… I don’t think I would have wanted to do it all by myself. I thought I’d get more power out of it, you know, with a small group in back of me. It
was electric, but doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s modernized just because it’s electric, you know? It was, you know, like a… Country music was electric, too.
Bob Dylan (Jeff Rosen Interviews, 2005)
If Dylan like Shakespeare is to be someday remembered for having created combinations of language that “age cannot wither,” “Subterranean Homesick Blues” will be a shining example thereof.
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan Performing Artist I: The Early Years 1960-1973)
Subterranean Homesick Blues” was electric all the way down to its obvious R & B roots. No traditional ballad provided this song with its underlying infrastructure. Acoustic or electric, it had been taken at quite a different clip from any folk ballad—or, indeed, the southern boogie Chuck Berry utilized when devising the template on April 16, 1956. And Dylan would be the last to deny Berry’s overt influence. As he told Hilburn recently, this first foray into folk-rock was “from Chuck Berry, a bit of ‘Too Much Monkey Business,’ and some of the scat songs of the forties.
~Clinton Heylin (Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957-1973)
On January 12, as a warm-up for two stadium shows in Brazil and ten further dates in Paris and London, he played his first club gig in over twenty-five years, at Toad’s Place in New Haven. The seven hundred lucky witnesses saw this forty-eightyear-old man play for a total of four and a half hours.
Starting at a quarter to nine, with a cover of Joe South’s ‘Walk a Mile in My Shoes’ (‘before you accuse, criticize, or abuse I walk a mile in my shoes’), Dylan finally left the Toad’s stage at twenty minutes past two in the morning, after four sets, interspersed by three breaks of just twentyfive minutes each, having played fifty songs in total, only eight of which derived from his supposed halcyon days of 1963-66.
~Clinton Heylin (Behind The Shades)
Toad’s Place
New Haven, Connecticut
12 January 1990
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