Dylan wins Nobel Prize in Literature

Allen Ginsburg, upon hearing Dylan in 1962, was reduced to tears. He said he knew the torch had been passed from his generation to the next. Dylan single-handedly changed the world, not least of all by transforming John Lennon, who pre-Dylan was merely a Pop songwriter. Without Dylan showing him what was possible, John would not have become the writer he did (for better or worse ;-). He also introduced John and the other Beatles to Jazz cigarettes!

Dylan has had many "periods" (as they call them in the world of painting), changing styles without warning. The difference between 1966’s Blonde On Blonde and it’s 1968 follow-up John Wesley Harding (one of his most personal, with a lot of religious imagery) is absolutely staggering---it’s hard to believe they came from the same person. Both are amongst his best, but completely---and I mean completely---different from one another. On Blonde on Blonde he is wound tighter than a drum core snare drum head, sparks flying off him (he was pretty amped up on amphetamines in ’65-6), his Strat cranked up and running down the road at about ninety miles a hour, the rate at which the surrealistic lyrics are flying by. He has a pretty big band, with multiple electric guitars, piano, and organ. On JWH he is playing an acoustic Martin, about as relaxed as you can imagine, singing what sounds like theology discussions in a seminary. Really heady stuff, far, far beyond what anyone else had ever done, to this day, in Pop music.

Always over-looked is his "Born Again" period, during which he produced three solid albums, all having a Southern Gospel feel. Really good music, but the Christian lyrics are off-putting to atheists, which his traditional audience---the counter-culture baby boomers---mostly are. It was funny to watch their reaction to him becoming a "Jew For Jesus"!

His 1974 Before The Flood live double album with The Band, his best collaborators, is a good place to get a lot of great Dylan songs, played and sung with a lot of energy---Dylan absolutely spits out the words. It was recorded on his first tour since 1966, on which The Hawks (who became The Band upon the release of their 1968 debut album Music From Big Pink) were his, heh, band. The studio album they did together around the time of the live album, Planet Waves, is an overlooked little gem, a personal favorite of mine. It has recently been released on vinyl and SACD by Mobile Fidelity in great sound.

All his albums from Time Out Of Mind (1998’s Grammy Album of the year) forward are really good imo, having a number of hypnotically-entrancing songs ("Not Dark Yet" is a masterpiece) I can’t get enough of. You get sucked into the world Dylan creates, temporarily leaving your body and losing sense of time. Not many other "Pop" songwriters are capable of that, unlike Classical composers, who routinely do it.

Absolutely and by a wide margin the most significant, influential, "important" artist of the 20th Century---bar none, even for those who don’t particularly like him. It’s inconceivable what Pop music would now sound like had Dylan not been born. He alone changed Rock ’n’ Roll from teenage music to adult art. Some hard-core 1950’s Rockers I know wish he hadn’t!

Apparently inna you don't hear what others (including his peers) do in Dylan. He's not for everyone ;-).

A Facebook friend of a friend of mine yesterday posted an article entitled "How Jimi Hendrix's obsession with Bob Dylan led him to Woodstock". It was from something called "Cuepoint", whatever that is. I was unaware Hendrix was obsessed with Dylan.

A different friend's comment on the posting reads "His (Dylan's) singing on Blood On The Tracks is so incredibly great it defies words". One man's incredibly great is another man's trash.

For anyone desiring help in understanding Dylan, or why others like him more than thee, here are some books that may be of interest:

The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes; by Greil Marcus. Includes great info on the hugely influential Basement Tapes and The Band.

No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan; by Robert Shelton

Bob Dylan: Performing Artist, Vol.1: The Early Years 1960-1973; by Paul Williams. Paul also chronicled the making of the Beach Boys’ Smile album, Brian Wilson's lost masterpiece, as it was transpiring. It was originally published in three installments in Crawdaddy Magazine, and later reprinted in three chapters of his great book Outlaw Blues.

Bob Dylan: A Biography; by Anthony Scaduto

Great posts, both dgarretson and Geoff, even if they come from divergent points of view. Though it’s true his lyrics were indeed considered almost the soundtrack for the counter-culture movement of the 1960’s, Dylan has stated (in the 60 Minutes interview with Ed Bradley I believe, as well as elsewhere. Perhaps in Chronicles Vol.1?) that he feels little connection with that culture. Though he was instrumental in it’s creation and development, he walked away from it in 1966 when he went into isolation in Woodstock, reappearing in ’68 with a Country music flavored album. Country, music of the "redneck" culture, the antithesis of the civil rights and counter-culture movements. Dylan was instrumental in the creation of not only the counter-culture, but also the counter-counter-culture! His partners in crime in that movement were The Band, who put a giant photograph of themselves surrounded by all their family members and relatives on the inside of the gatefold album cover of their 1968 debut album, Music From Big Pink. This at a time when the war between the generations was raging. They were having none of that.

Dylan’s speech at the Grammy Awards ceremony in which he accepted his Album Of The Year award (for Time Out Of Mind) is really, really funny. It is in typical somewhat abstract Dylan style, obtuse to those who don’t understand him. The point of the speech was that rewards (not awards) of this life may, if one allows them, corrupt one’s soul. The part starting with the line "Well, my Daddy, he didn’t leave me much....." is nothing less than spitting in the face of the Academy and it’s awards. It is a quite obvious reference to lines in the Bible, another thing that separates him from the generally atheistic belief base of the counter-culture and it’s members.

There is a 7:55 minute video on YouTube, posted by what sounds like an academic who calls himself Nerdwriter1. It is entitled "Why Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize: All Along the Watchtower explored". Here are the author's opening lines, spoken over the song as it plays: "There are some novels, some trilogies in fact, with less actual content than Bob Dylan's All Along the Watchtower. It's really astonishing what Dylan achieves in 12 lines, 130 words, and 2-1/2 minutes."

In his exploration, the author dissects the song in terms of literature, the Bible, and the song's place in Dylan's evolution as a songwriter. Well worth eight minutes of your time.