Among the notable people whose passing has been marked over the past couple of months, some may have missed the mention given to Dave Bartholomew, who died in June at the age of 100. He was one of the great behind-the-scenes figures of American popular music. A musician, songwriter, arranger and producer, he helped createRead More
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, newly released theatrically and on Netflix, opens with a film by Georges Méliès. Escamotage d’une dame chez Robert-Houdin (1896), known in English as The Vanishing Lady, features Méliès in his familiar role as a magician, placing a woman (Jehanne d’Alcy) under a cloth and, throughRead More
It is one of the great questions of our time. How many roads must a man walk down? Before you can call him a man, that is. Bob Dylan posed it in his 1962 song ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, and left us to ponder its very unanswerability. Some have tried to answer it, however. DouglasRead More
It was with a degree of apprehension that I went to see Conor McPherson’s new play, Girl from the North Country, at the Old Vic. Sprinkling your theatre production with Bob Dylan songs seems to be quite the thing to do just now, what with the Andrew Scott Hamlet recently playing in the West EndRead More
I’d listen to a lot of jazz and bebop records, too. Records by George Russell or Johnny Cole, Red Garland, Don Byas, Roland Kirk, Gil Evans – Evans had recorded a rendition of “Ella Speed,” the Leadbelly song. I tried to discern melodies and structures. There were a lot of similarities between some kinds ofRead More
If I’m asked what my eight desert island discs would be – and to date I have to admit the question has yet to be asked – then six of the choices are always changing, but two remain fixed. One is Booker T and the MGs’ ‘Time is Tight’ (which I’m going to make theRead More
I’m on working on a new web project which is close to going live, but it’s meant that writing on the web, including this site, has been a bit on the quiet side. But while I’ve been working on said project I’ve been having fun listening to Bob Dylan cover versions. It started when IRead More
‘I’m Not There‘ is the title of one of Bob Dylan’s most remarkable songs, mysterious in word and tune. It was recorded as part of his ‘Basement Tapes‘ sessions with The Band in 1967, but not released when the Basement Tapes album was published in 1975, presumably because of the unfinished state of the recording.Read More
Well, it’s summertime, the Olympic Games are in full flood, and my mind is on holiday. So I can only set aside the usual sort of cod-philosophical post for the time being, and instead revert to lists. Maybe a series of lists. I’ve not produced any lists for ages, and they’re easy (or so itRead More
Last night I saw Bob Dylan. What an ordinary – yet still extraordinary – thing that is to say. When I first saw Dylan in 1978, at Earl’s Court, it was like the second coming, so utterly unlikely did it seem to most of us there that we were ever going to get a chanceRead More