Tag Archives: Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

May 14: Bob Dylan & The Hawks: Odeon Theatre, Liverpool, England 1966

May 14, 2016 Egil 10 Comments

If not the best sounding recording, Liverpool is as good a performance of the electric set as you will find on the tour. Perhaps inspired by playing the hometown of the Fab Four, the band is tight and powerful. Dylan’s vocals, Robbie’s lead guitar playing and Garth’s erie B-3 all seem truly inspired.
~bobsboots.com

…… that they could go on stage in Liverpool in May 1966—the city that had so recently been the centre of the musical universe— and hurl at their audience rock music a thousand times more sublime, challenging, multi-layered and exciting than anything Liverpudlians had ever heard before? Impossible to say, but easy to prove. Play that night’s ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’. By this point Dylan’s cawing voice and searing harmonica were both perfectly integrated instruments in amongst those of the Hawks, whose hardwon knowledge of each other’s playing freed them all to ride each moment in a ceaseless interchange of fiery, creative levitation.
~Michael Gray (BD Encyclopedia)

One of the best concerts I’ve heard from the 66-tour..

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Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan Concerts, Great Concert

April 20: Bob Dylan Concert in Melbourne 1966

April 20, 2016 Egil 3 Comments

Dylan’s voice is extremely rough, but the performance, if anything, even more intense than the English shows
~Clinton Heylin (A Life In Stolen Moments)

Great 66 Show where Dylan sounds very stoned, and still brilliant.

For this show he uses a borrowed guitar, as his had been broken. When compared to the Sydney show, this performance is more laid back.
~bobsboots.com

Festival Hall
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
20 April 1966
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Blues, Bob Dylan, Cover versions, folk, Gospel, Jazz, Soul

Nina Simone sings Bob Dylan

February 21, 2016 Hallgeir 9 Comments

Redirecting to a newer version of this post….

Eunice Kathleen Waymon aka. Nina Simone was the sixth of eight children, she grew up in poverty in Tryon, North Carolina. Her family wished for her was that she should be the world’s finest classical pianist. She did not get into the schools she wanted and always blamed racism.

Born the sixth child of a preacher’s family in North Carolina, Simone aspired to be a concert pianist. Her musical path changed direction after she was denied a scholarship to the prestigious Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, despite a well-received audition. Simone was later told by someone working at Curtis that she was rejected because she was black. When she began playing in a small club in Philadelphia to fund her continuing musical education and become a classical pianist she was required to sing as well. She was approached for a recording by Bethlehem Records, and her rendering of “I Loves You, Porgy” was a hit in the United States in 1958. Over the length of her career Simone recorded more than 40 albums, mostly between 1958—when she made her debut with Little Girl Blue—and 1974.
– Wikipedia

Simone has dug deep into the american song tradition and it comes as no surprise that she has done several of Bob Dylan’s songs. She is an incredible interpreter of Dylan.

The first song is a contender for best Bob Dylan cover ever done (yes, I am aware of Hendrix’ Watchtower).

The Ballad of Hollis Brown(live,Mickery Theatre, The Netherlands in 1965, see coments…):

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Bob Dylan, Cover versions

8 fine cover versions of Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”

September 2, 2013 Egil 7 Comments

Neil Young with Booker T and The M.G.’s – October 16, 1992

The Grateful Dead at the Capital Centre, Landover, MD 3/15/1990

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Bob Dylan, Bob Dylans's best songs

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

September 1, 2013 Egil 3 Comments

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):

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:

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Spotify:

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