Bob Dylan, have an opinion?

Dylan's music is a major part of my history and how many people viewed the world 30+ years ago. I have not been loaded for years though and therefore stopped claiming that I understood much/most of his early lyrics. He lost me musically for a while (around Nashville Skyline) though I know that he was in a serious motorcycle accident at that time and this may be why. He also lost me on a personal level, both with his interviews of the 60's (I felt like cuffing him and I was far from being "the man") and later on with his religion swapping (I am not religious but it just parodied my experiences with close friends that had also gone through this phase and I was tired of it already). When Rolling Thunder was touring the violin player, Scarlet, stopped by my rehearsal space to play with the band that I was with (I gave her my old Ernie Ball belt operated volume pedal, to keep as they were hard to find at the time, and hooked her up through a Dynaco Pas3x/Fender Princeton Reverb setup that had her drooling - kind of a Hi-fi meets music amplification thing:-). I had briefly met his ex-wife before this event and had also looked after his son one Saturday afternoon (I just recently realized that he is the kid in the Wallflowers). His son was normal and a good kid and I assume that he was/is a good father (quite a trick considering what he does for a living). Me and my buddy ended up buying the kid two six packs of "Billy Beer" (this was in 1978 or so) which he had wanted, not to drink, but for the novelty. I never saw him perform live, even when they were in LA as I was busy at the time, my wife though saw him at Carnegie Hall, front row center, maybe in 1964 and has told me that I missed out on something that I would have really enjoyed (I was 9 in 1964 but could have easily seen him a few years later as I started attending concerts at the age of 12 or 13 with older musicians). Think my first one was the Lovin Spoonful followed by Cream. Anyway, not a lot about Dylan in this little ramble, but hope the "fringe" stories wit an audiophile twist are somewhat entertaining.

MG: Did you find something that your father liked? My parents visited us for a week this past New Years (they are pushing eighty) and other than Ella, Sarah, Nat and the like they really got into the Cowboy Junkies.

I once ran Joni's recorded voice through an osciliscope and boy, talk about pure tones. She hits them all the time.

Hi Albert: I did this in junior high school and the AV crew ran it through an overhead projector for an assembly. I do not know if this is a common occurence for singers but I was shocked at the time by the symetry of the patterns that none of us could dupicate ourselves. I met her once on Malibu Beach when she was doing some kind of jazz album (another long story that I won't tell) but just wanted to note that she chain smoked Winstons for the hours that I was there and my friend told me that she always smoked like that. From the way that she was toking away you think that she would have sounded like Tom Waits, but not at all, what a sweet voice.

Brulee: Not much to tell. I ran into a neighbor of mine (that was hooked up) in the early morning hours when I was taking out the trash cans for my building (I had just come back home from a local club). He had returned home to replenish some party materials and I was invited back up to Malibu. They had been in a studio that evening working on an album (I seem to remember something about an "ALL Star Jazz Band"), there was also a petite bass player present that may have been Italian, but I cannot remember his name. They had taken a break at the studio that evening and had gone to a local jazz club to hear some unknowns. The unknowns it turned out blew away what they had already accomplished in the studio and they were therefore in a strange mood. I assume that they went back and redid the tracks, for the better (music is like that sometimes). I have looked for this CD in the record stores recently, but never see anything like it in stock and assume that it would have been released in 78 of 79, if at all. I was always a nobody, but because of keeping odd hours and living in LA I always seemed to run into a lot of musicians and some comedians in the early morning hours. I was also always broke and excelled at "hanging out" if you know what I mean and used to walk into the Troubadour and other show venues most nights at midnight when the cover was dropped, also frequented hole in the wall restaurants and clubs that were open until 4:00 am, some of which served alcohol illegally during this time. I was as thin as a toothpick which is why I was probably invited to share some late night meals by some of these people. Musicians whether they are famous or not are generally completely worked up after they get off work and like to hang a lot. It's kind of funny in that I did not even realize who some of these people were until later on. One of them was Sly Stone who I used to play pinball with at Barney's Beanery. I asked somebody what had happened to Sly and was told that he was in jail by one of the bartenders, that was when I made the connection. I once got drunk with Richard Prior at the Improv, but did not recogize him because the pock marks on his face had been removed when they did the burn surgery. I thought that it was him, but was used to the marks on his face and figured that it was just somebody that looked and talked like him (boy was I drunk).

I forgot about the John Wesley Harding album, thanks. We just have the double Carnegie Hall CD and some new one (97 or 98) that my wife picked up (haven't listened to it yet). My wife can still recite the lyrics from the "Blonde on Blonde" album which are imbedded in her brain (while the best that I can do is remember the the lyrics from "I'm so Glad", by The Cream:-). PRS123: I have never seen Joni Mitchell perform, which is lame on my part as she used to play out here quite a lot.