Category Archives: Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan’s Best Songs: Tryin’ To Get To Heaven





[vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”mulled_wine” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-quote-left”]The air is getting hotter
There’s a rumbling in the skies
I’ve been wading through the high muddy water
With the heat rising in my eyes
-Bob Dylan (Tryin’ To Get To Heaven)

Environment affects me a great deal,a lot of the songs were written after the sun went down. And I like storms, I like to stay up during a storm. I get very meditative sometimes, and this one phrase was going through my head: ‘Work while the day lasts, because the night of death cometh when no man can work. ‘ I don’t recall where I heard it. I like preaching, I hear a lot of preaching, and I probably just heard it somewhere. Maybe it’s in Psalms, it beats me. But it wouldn’t let me go. I was, like, what does that phrase mean? But it was at the forefront of my mind, for a long period of time, and I think a lot of that is instilled into this record.
-Bob Dylan – about “Time Out Of Mind” (to John Pareles, Sept 1997[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row]

[vc_row][vc_column][vc_message message_box_color=”mulled_wine” icon_fontawesome=”fa fa-quote-left”]The life here is drained, vampire-like, from a whole slew of blues songs, it’s title probably taken from the American Folk Song “The Old Ark’s A-Moverin”.. This is “Blind Willie McTell” with a hangover, a picture of the old south, “riding in a buggy with Miss Mary-Jane” and shaking the sugar down.
There is an extraordinary harmonica break, like the best of Dylan, where it carries on the sense of the lyrics into a place where language no longer works.
-Brian Hinton (Bob Dylan Complete Discography)[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row]

Studio version:

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Bob Dylan’s Best Songs: I’ll Keep It With Mine

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You will search, babe
At any cost
But how long, babe
Can you search for what’s not lost?
Everybody will help you
Some people are very kind
But if I can save you any time
Come on, give it to me
I’ll keep it with mine

“I’ll Keep It with Mine,”·a heartbreakingly lovely solo performance on piano and harmonica, did turn up on Biograph, after sitting in the vault for twenty years. How can Dylan record something so beautiful and then let it remain unreleased? This is a question that gets asked again and again, which is why so many people collect Dylan tapes or buy boodlegs (illegal, unauthorized) Dylan albums.
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan Performing Artist I: The Early Years 1960-1973)

And what an exquisite song it is. Author Paul Cable once described “I’ll Keep It with Mine” as “possibly the best thing he had written up to that point . . . [while] the lyrics form the least patronizing way I have yet heard of saying, ‘I’m older than you—therefore I know better.’” In just three verses, bound to a three-line refrain, Dylan manages to encapsulate so much of what he had been hoping to say in the trio of songs to Suze. In her case, though, he hadn’t got beyond his tangled feelings long enough to whisper words like, “If I can save you any time / Come on, give it to me / I’ll keep it with mine.”
-Clinton Heylin (Revolution in the Air: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1957-1973)[/vc_message][/vc_column][/vc_row]

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Jan 26: Bob Dylan performing “Forever Young” & “My Blue Eyed Jane” @ Fort Myers, Florida in 1999

bob dylan atlantic city 1999
Bob Dylan – Atlantic city 1999

May God bless and keep you always
May your wishes all come true
May you always do for others
And let others do for you
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung
May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young

Everblades Arena
Fort Myers, Florida
26 January 1999

  • Bob Dylan (vocal & guitar)
  • Bucky Baxter (pedal steel guitar & electric slide guitar)
  • Larry Campbell (guitar)
  • Tony Garnier (bass)
  • David Kemper (drums & percussion)

1999-01-26 Fort Myers poster

Continue reading Jan 26: Bob Dylan performing “Forever Young” & “My Blue Eyed Jane” @ Fort Myers, Florida in 1999

Jan 26: Bob Dylan @ WBAI Studios With Bob Fass in 1966

Dylan: Experience?
Caller 7: …you know, from life. I was just wondering if you were going to say it.
Dylan: What’s experienced about them?
Caller 7: Well, I mean, like It Ain’t Me, Babe and Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.
Dylan: Oh. Oh, you don’t have to go anyplace to have those kind of experiences though, really, do you?
Caller 7: Well, I don’t know. You have to go through something! I mean, did you just make them up? Come on…
Dylan: Well, I guess I did. I just made ‘em up out of my head, yeah.

WBAI Studios
New York City, New York
26 January 1966
Bob Dylan on Radio Unnamable

Broadcast by WBAI-FM, New York City.

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Jan 25: Bob Dylan’s film Renaldo And Clara was released in 1978





Renaldo and Clara

Bob Dylan’s film Renaldo And Clara was released January 25, 1978

This nearly four-hour surrealist odyssey (232 m.)  is written, directed and starring Bob Dylan himself.

Directed by Bob Dylan
Produced by Mel Howard
Written by Bob Dylan, Sam Shepard
Starring Bob Dylan, Sara Dylan, Joan Baez
Music by Various artists
Cinematography Howard Alk, David Meyers, Paul Goldsmith
Editing by Bob Dylan, Howard Alk
Distributed by Circuit Films
Release date(s) January 25, 1978
Running time 232 minutes
Country United States
Language English

There is a myth about this film, it is considered to be incoherent and confusing, well, it isn’t. Every time I see it, it strikes me as a unified vision, one man’s vision, where he puts different kind of film stocks and styles together to create an entertaining and, yes, demanding movie.  The film is a mixture of fantastic concert footage, documentary style film (dealing with the Hurricane Carter case), and fictional, seemingly improvised  footage.

Never let me go:

Drawing structural and thematic influences from the classic  film Les Enfants du Paradis, Dylan infuses Renaldo and Clara with lots of shifting styles, tones, and narrative ideas. Similarities between the two films include the use of whiteface , the recurring flower, the woman in white (Baez), the on-stage and backstage scenes, and the dialogue of both films’ climactic scenes.

lesenfant_dylan

Also evident is the Cubist approach of the two films, allowing us to see the main characters from the different perspectives of various lovers. This also echoes some of the songs from this Dylan period (Simple twist of faith and Tangled up in blue coming to mind). Running time is also relatively similar.

It’s a free associating epic that feels pulled straight from Bob Dylan’s brain, Renaldo and Clara is a work of misunderstood genius.

Continue reading Jan 25: Bob Dylan’s film Renaldo And Clara was released in 1978