Come you masters of war
You that build all the guns
You that build the death planes
You that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls
You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know
I can see through your masks
Great sound & good video… GREAT version.
Rose Garden Arena Portland, Oregon 12 June 1999
Musicians:
Bob Dylan (vocal & guitar)
Charlie Sexton (guitar)
Larry Campbell (guitar, mandolin, pedal steel guitar & electric slide guitar
May 11: Bob Dylan’s best songs: “Lonesome Day Blues” recorded in 2001
I overwrite. If I know I am going in to record a song, I write more than I need. In the past that’s been a problem because I failed to use discretion at times. I have to guard against that. On this album, “Lonesome Day Blues” was twice as long at one point.
~Bob Dylan (Robert Hilburn – Sept 2001)
@ #152 on my list of Dylan’s 200 best songs.. comes this hard, tough & tight electric blues.
The master version (Love and Theft version) was recorded @ Sony Music Studios – New York City – May 11, 2001 (according to Clinton Heylin – Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan, 1974-2006).
Few session details are available.
…Dylan growls like a bear cat that hasn’t eaten since the Eighties
~Rob Sheffield (Rollingstone.com)
…Sure, I try to stick to the rules. Sometimes I might shift paradigms within the same song, but then that structure also has its own rules. And I combine them both, see what works and what doesn’t. My range is limited. Some formulas are too complex and I don’t want anything to do with them.
~Bob Dylan (to Bill Flanagan, in 2009)
“Dylan, who turns 68 in May, has never sounded as ravaged, pissed off and lusty”
~David Fricke (rollingstone.com)
Together Through Life is an album that gets its hooks in early and refuses to let go. It’s dark yet comforting, with a big tough sound, booming slightly like a band grooving at a soundcheck in an empty theatre. And at its heart there is a haunting refrain. Because above everything this is a record about love, its absence and its remembrance.
~Danny Eccleston (mojo4music.com)
Beyond Here Lies Nothin’
I’m listening to Billy Joe Shaver
And I’m reading James Joyce
Some people they tell me
I got the blood of the land in my voice
~Bob Dylan (I Feel A Change Comin’ On)
Wikipedia:
Released
April 28, 2009
Recorded
December 2008
Genre
Folk rock, blues rock, Americana
Length
45:33
Language
English
Label
Columbia
Producer
Jack Frost (Bob Dylan pseudonym)
Together Through Life is the thirty-third studio album by singer-songwriter Bob Dylan, released in April 2009 by Columbia Records. The album debuted at number one in several countries, including the U.S. and the UK. It is Dylan’s first number one in Britain since New Morning in 1970.
Dylan wrote all but one of the album’s songs with Grateful Dead lyricist Robert Hunter, with whom he had previously co-written two songs on his 1988 album Down in the Groove. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine, Dylan commented on the collaboration:
“Hunter is an old buddy, we could probably write a hundred songs together if we thought it was important or the right reasons were there… He’s got a way with words and I do too. We both write a different type of song than what passes today for songwriting.”
The only other writer Dylan has ever collaborated with to such a degree is Jacques Levy, with whom he wrote most of the songs on Desire (1976).
Rumors of the album, reported in Rolling Stone magazine, came as a surprise, with no official press release until March 16, 2009 — less than two months before the album’s release date. Dylan produced the record under his pseudonym of Jack Frost, which he used for his previous two studio albums, “Love and Theft” and Modern Times. The album was rumored to contain “struggling love songs” and have little similarity to Modern Times.
In a conversation with music journalist Bill Flanagan, published on Bob Dylan’s official website, Flanagan suggested a similarity of the new record to the sound of Chess Records and Sun Records, which Dylan acknowledged as an effect of “the way the instruments were played.” He said that the genesis of the record was when French film director Olivier Dahan asked him to supply a song for his new road movie, My Own Love Song, which became “Life is Hard” – indeed, ‘according to Dylan, Dahan was keen to get a whole soundtrack’s worth of songs from the man’ – and “then the record sort of took its own direction.”
Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ live 2011 Tucson, AZ:
Dylan is backed on the album by his regular touring band, plus David Hidalgo of Los Lobos and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Dylan commented on Campbell’s guitar work in his interview with Flanagan: “He’s good with me. He’s been playing with Tom for so long that he hears everything from a songwriter’s point of view and he can play most any style.”
In the interview with Bill Flanagan, Dylan discusses the only known outtake to “Together Through Life”, “Chicago After Dark”. Apparently, this song was in the running to be on the album but was left off the final version, as Flanagan talks about the song as if it is on the album. The song is not circulating among collectors.
“Bill Flanagan: In that song CHICAGO AFTER DARK, were you thinking about the new President?
Bob: Not really. It’s more about State Street and the wind off Lake Michigan and how sometimes we know people and we are no longer what we used to be to them. I was trying to go with some old time feeling that I had.”
—
Described at length in a 2009 interview to promote the album Together Through Life, according to Dylan, it’s about “how sometimes we know people and we are no longer what we used to be to them”. In fact, this song never existed.He made it all up. How fitting. ~Clinton Heylin (telegraph.co.uk)
Forgetful Heart, Memphis, 2011:
The album received two Grammy Award nominations in Best Americana Album category and “Best Solo Rock Vocal Performance” category for “Beyond Here Lies Nothin'”.
The album also is significant as the only album by Dylan to top the US and UK charts consecutively.
The album’s cover photo is the same as that on the cover of American author Larry Brown’s short story collection, Big Bad Love.
Track listing:
“Beyond Here Lies Nothin'” 3:51
“Life Is Hard” 3:39
“My Wife’s Home Town” (Willie Dixon, Dylan, Hunter) 4:15
Here we have a good 89-concert from the “Fall US 89 tour”.
#5 – I Want You
Houston Fieldhouse
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Troy, New York
27 October 1989
Gotta Serve Somebody
What Good Am I?
Ballad Of Hollis Brown
Lenny Bruce
I Want You
I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight
Highway 61 Revisited
Mama, You Been On My Mind
A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
To Ramona
It Ain’t Me, Babe
Everything Is Broken
It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry
My Back Pages
I’ll Remember You
I Shall Be Released
Like A Rolling Stone
—
Disease Of Conceit
Maggie’s Farm
8-11 Bob Dylan (vocal & guitar), G.E. Smith (guitar)
1, 18 Bob Dylan piano
2, 5, 8, 10, 11 Bob Dylan harmonica.
Band:
Bob Dylan (vocal & guitar)
G. E. Smith (guitar)
Tony Garnier (bass)
Christopher Parker (drums)
#8 – Mama, You Been On My Mind
The Never Ending Tour 1989 started in Sweden with a performance at Christinehof’s Slottspark on May 22. This was only the fourth time that Dylan had performed in Sweden. He then performed in Finland, his second performance there, before returning to Sweden. He then performed two concerts in Dublin, Ireland, the first time that he had performed there since 1965. Dylan then performed in Glasgow, Scotland his second only performance in the country. The first being in 1966. After performing concerts in Birmingham and London Dylan performed in the Netherlands, Belgium and France, Dylan performed three concerts in Spain, four in Italy, a single concert in Turkey and two concerts in Greece.
After finishing the European tour Dylan returned to the United States performing at many of the same venues that he had performed in the year before, on the first year of the Never Ending Tour. Dylan continued to perform in the United States and Canada until November 15.
– Wikipedia
Go ’way from my window
Leave at your own chosen speed
I’m not the one you want, babe
I’m not the one you need
You say you’re lookin’ for someone
Never weak but always strong
To protect you an’ defend you
Whether you are right or wrong
Someone to open each and every door
But it ain’t me, babe
No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe
It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe
#11 – It Ain’t Me Babe
Troy is a city in the US State of New York and the seat of Rensselaer County. Troy is located on the western edge of Rensselaer County and on the eastern bank of the Hudson River. Troy has close ties to the nearby cities of Albany and Schenectady, forming a region popularly called the Capital District. The city is one of the three major centers for the Albany-Schenectady-Troy Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), which has a population of 850,957. At the 2010 census, the population of Troy was 50,129. Troy’s motto is Ilium fuit, Troja est, which means “Ilium was, Troy is”.
Troy is known as the Collar City due to its history in shirt, collar, and other textile production. At one point Troy was also the second largest producer of iron in the country, surpassed only by the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Rensselaer School, which later became Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was founded in 1824 with funding from Stephen Van Rensselaer, a descendant of the founding patroon, Kiliaen. In 1821, Emma Willard founded the Troy Female Seminary on 2nd Street, which moved to its current location on Pawling Avenue in 1910. It was renamed Emma Willard School in 1895. The former Female Seminary was later reopened (1916) as Russell Sage College, thanks to funding fromOlivia Slocum Sage, the widow of financier and Congressman Russell Sage. All of these institutions still exist today.Houston Field House is a multi-purpose arena on the campus of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) in Troy, New York. It is the nation’s third-oldest hockey rink, behind Northeastern University’s Matthews Arena and Princeton University’s Hobey Baker Memorial Rink. Further, it is the second-oldest arena in the ECAC Hockey League, behind Princeton’s rink. Until the opening of the Times Union Center in Albany in 1990, it was the largest arena in the Capital Region.Wikipedia
Crimson flames tied through my ears
Rollin’ high and mighty traps
Pounced with fire on flaming roads
Using ideas as my maps
“We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I
Proud ’neath heated brow Ah, but I was so much older then I’m younger than that now
#14 – My Back Pages
They say ev’rything can be replaced
Yet ev’ry distance is not near
So I remember ev’ry face
Of ev’ry man who put me here
I see my light come shining
From the west unto the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released