moon traveller herald

  Dylan on Artistic Creation: "...most everything is a knockoff of something else. You could have some monstrous vision, or a perplexing idea that you can’t quite get down, can’t handle the theme. But then you’ll see a newspaper clipping or a billboard sign, or a paragraph from an old Dickens novel, or you’ll hear some line from another song, or something you might overhear somebody say just might be something in your mind that you didn’t know you remembered. That will give you the point of approach and specific details. It’s like you’re sleepwalking, not searching or seeking; things are transmitted to you. It’s as if you were looking at something far off and now you’re standing in the middle of it. Once you get the idea, everything you see, read, taste or smell becomes an allusion to it. It’s the art of transforming things. You don’t really serve art, art serves you and it’s only an expression of life anyway; it’s not real life. It’s tricky, you have to have the right touch and ...

The Philosophy of Modern Song comes as a nifty package with some great pictures, tho you have to go on the Internet to figure out who is who on some of them. The cover is part of the package, not that you can tell a book by the cover. On the Internet there's some discussions to figure out Who is the young woman rocker on the cover pic with Little Richard and Eddie Cochran? I couldn't guess. The Guardian put some heavy legwork into trying to figure out who and why. It’s Alis Lesley. Why? Why does there have to be a why? You have to think that somebody showed Dylan the picture and he said THAT’S IT! Just as he did when he put Claudia Cardinale in the set of inner sleeve artwork on the original copy of Blonde on Blonde. The photographer had the picture there on the drafting table and Dylan said YEAH, THAT. Later editions switched it out. But we weren’t waiting baited breathily for for the pics! Bob Dylan is a frigging Actual Institute in himself. He is where artists study the me...

Excerpt  Dylan Tells Wall St Journal - I first heard most of the songs in my book: on the radio, portable record players, jukeboxes. The songs were simple, easy to understand. They’d come to you directly, let you see into the future. I recently binged: “Coronation Street,” “Father Brown,” and some early “Twilight Zones.” I know they’re old-fashioned, but they make me feel at home. I’m no fan of packaged programs or news shows. I never watch anything foul-smelling or evil. Nothing disgusting, nothing dog ass. When you hear a great song: you get a gut reaction and an emotional one. It follows the logic of the heart and stays in your head long after you’ve heard it. You don’t have to be a great singer to sing it. It’s bell, book and candle. It touches you in secret places, strikes your innermost being. I do love the sound of old vinyl, especially on a tube record player from back in the day. I bought three in an antique store in Oregon about 30 years ago. The tone quality is so powerf...

When he received a Musicares award in 2015, Dylan contemplated his career as a song writer. Here is a snippet....  If you;d sung all these “come all ye” songs all the time, you’d be writing, “Come gather ‘round people where ever you roam, admit that the waters around you have grown / Accept that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone / If your time to you is worth saving / And you better start swimming or you’ll sink like a stone / The times they are a-changing.” You’d have written them too. There’s nothing secret about it. You just do it subliminally and unconsciously, because that’s all enough, and that’s all I sang. That was all that was dear to me. They were the only kinds of songs that made sense. “When you go down to Deep Ellum keep your money in your socks / Women in Deep Ellum put you on the rocks.” Sing that song for a while and you just might come up with, “When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez and it’s Easter time too / And your gravity fails and negativity don’t pull you ...

This is probably about the greatest show I ever saw.  

 

DYLAN: When I first received this Nobel Prize for Literature, I got to wondering exactly how my songs related to literature. I wanted to reflect on it and see where the connection was. I’m going to try to articulate that to you. And most likely it will go in a roundabout way, but I hope what I say will be worthwhile and purposeful. If I was to go back to the dawning of it all, I guess I’d have to start with Buddy Holly. Buddy died when I was about eighteen and he was twenty-two. From the moment I first heard him, I felt akin. I felt related, like he was an older brother. I even thought I resembled him. Buddy played the music that I loved – the music I grew up on: country western, rock ‘n’ roll, and rhythm and blues. Three separate strands of music that he intertwined and infused into one genre. One brand. And Buddy wrote songs – songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses. And he sang great – sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype. Everything I wasn’t and wan...

I think the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds succeeded in doing homage and finding new in existing music forms ( in this case, ones that Mainstream was ignoring) I often think of the Kinks and the Who too, and I am probably repeating myself here... But the Kinks were trying to channel Big Bill Broonzy, and the Who were trying to channel Martha and the Vandellas. They were white, skinny, and underskilled, but THEY FOUND SOMETHING in the R&B. It was valid. What came out of that was 'heavy metal' which I hate. But on the way to that direction there was great great stuff. I suppose Muddy Waters revisited and found something in Memphis Minnie and Robert Johnson, that he could homage and re-invent with. Let's extend this beyond music per se. Dylan is incredible in terms of visiting sources [musical, literary, other] and coming up with something new. I think Ferlinghetti, at least in his later work with which I am familiar, did this.  A path for creation may be: When you visit...

Radio days-Jeff DeMark tells the tale of the first trip to New York Gino, Dylan and Allen Ginsberg by Jeff DeMark

M urder most foul, as in the best it is; But this most foul, strange and unnatural. As meditation or the thoughts of love, May sweep to my revenge. William Shakespeare – Hamlet Act 1 Scene 5 | One thing I'd note this morning is: Yknow the litany of evocative songs he turns into a story is one thing - and NPR has a pretty cool list of all the associations - streaming from one image to another... but there is subtext on a couple of things that I could feel that I wanted to mention. He mentions: Robert Johnson's "Crossroads" and the old country piece "Deep Ellum Blues". Deep Ellum is mere blocks from the Dallas School Book Depository. And Robert Johnson recorded in Dallas in that general area. I think Dylan absorbed ghosts, and constantly studies literature, history, music and humans, and it continues to come out in his music. I spent a few days in Dallas a couple of times on business, family and pleasure. I got a tremendous sense of dread wh...