Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, “This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem”
I traveled through East Texas
Where many martyrs fell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell
Bob Dylan’s Best Songs: ‘Cross The Green Mountain
I cross the Green Mountain
I sit by the stream
Heaven blazing in my head
I dreamed a monstrous dream
Something came up
Out of the sea
Swept through the land of
The rich and the free
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Bob Dylan’s Best Songs: Tangled Up In Blue
This is a song that took ten years to live and ten years to write.
~Bob Dylan (Special Events Arena, El Paso, Texas – November 21, 1978)
I was trying to do something that I don’t know if I was prepared to do. I wanted to defy time, so that the story took place in the present and past at the same time. When you look at a painting, you can see any part of it or see all of it together. I wanted that song to be like a painting.
~Bob Dylan (to Bill Flanagan, March 1985)
Joni Mitchell had an album out called Blue. And it affected me, I couldn’t get it out of my head. And it just stayed in my head and when I wrote that song I wondered, what’s that mean? And then I figured that it was just there, and I guess that’s what happened, y’know.
~Bob Dylan (to Craig McGregor, March 1978)
September 27: Bob Dylan – Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door, Hard Rain & Forever Young, Bologna, Italy 1997 (Video)
Redirecting to a newer version of this post….
Setlist:
- Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
- A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
- Forever Young
Musicians:
- Bob Dylan (vocal & guitar)
- Bucky Baxter (pedal steel guitar & backup vocal)
- Larry Campbell (guitar & backup vocal)
- Tony Garnier (bass)
- David Kemper (drums & percussion)
Bob Dylan’s Best Songs: Like A Rolling Stone
….would be Like A Rolling Stone because I wrote that after I’d quit. I’d literally quit singing and playing, and I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of vomit about twenty pages long, and out of it I took Like A Rolling Stone and made it as a single. And I’d never written anything like that before and it suddenly came to me that that was what I should do, you know. I mean, nobody had ever done that before.
~Bob Dylan (to Martin Bronstein – Feb 1966)
.. The sound is so rich the song never plays the same way twice
~Greil Marcus
The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody had kicked open the door to your mind
~Bruce Springsteen (Jan 1988)
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