Feb 3, 2012 | 100 Days with Bob Dylan
Link to Song: Queen Jane Approximately
What you should know about this song: The Queen of Folk, Joan Baez, once called the Highway 61 Revisisted album a “bunch of crap,” maybe for its new sound or more likely for this particularly song. Despite the speculation, though, Dylan informed a journalist, “Queen Jane is a man.” (Rolling Stone Issue 1131).
This expressively rich song waited 22 years before it ever made it to Dylan’s live performance set since its original recording for Highway 61 Revisited in 1965. Dylan performed it live for the first known time on the 1987 Independence Day featuring the Grateful Dead. He later recorded another rendition for the Dylan & The Dead album.
“Dylan gave rock ‘n’ roll the thing I’d wished it had when I was a kid – respectability, some authority. He took it out of the realm of ignorant guys banging away on electric instruments and put it somewhere else altogether.” – Jerry Garcia, Grateful Dead*
*Source: “Dylan: 100 Songs and Pictures” by Fine Communications
Photo Source: The Independent
Feb 2, 2012 | 100 Days with Bob Dylan
Link to Song: Ballad of a Thin Man
What you should know about this song: Who is this “Mr. Jones” Dylan speaks of throughout this song? The identity of this character has long been in dispute, but in an interview with Dylan in 1965 he responded,
“He’s a pinboy. He also wears suspenders. He’s a real person. You know him, but not by that name… I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put his eyes in his pocket. I asked this guy who he was and he said, ‘That’s Mr. Jones.’ Then I asked this cat, ‘Doesn’t he do anything but put his eyes in his pocket?’ And he told me, ‘He puts his nose on the ground.” It’s all there, it’s a true story.'” (source)
Some speculate that “Mr. Jones” refers to Jeffrey Owen Jones, a man who interviewed Dylan before his 1965 performance at Newport Folk Festival and wrote a piece for Rolling Stone about the increasing popularity of harmonicas, completely missing the controversy around Dylan going electric (source). I love what Jerry Garcia says about this song:
“It tells that person who’s lame that they’re lame, and why they’re lame, which is very satisfying thing to do. Being able to do that and do it beautifully – to me, that’s wonderful. That’s something that only Dylan has been able to pull off in terms of modern songwriting, I think.” – Jerry Garcia, Grateful Dead*
*Source: “Dylan: 100 Songs and Pictures” by Fine Communications
Photo Source: Don Hunstein
Feb 1, 2012 | 100 Days with Bob Dylan
Link to Son: Highway 61 Revisited
Live with Bruce Springsteen, 2003: Highway 61 Revisited
What you should know about this song: “I always felt like I’d started on it, always had been on it, and could go anywhere from it,” Dylan told Rolling Stone Magazine about Highway 61 Revisited (Issue 1131). As for the police whistle? Yes, another Bob Dylan addition to the song, inspired by a whistle given to him from Al Kooper. “A little variety for your album,” he told Dylan, “Suites the lyrics better.” This title anthem from his electric breakthrough album, Highway 61 Revisited, was named after the highway that runs from his native town in Minnesota down to New Orleans, and remains a staple part of Dylan’s live shows. Rolling Stones Magazine described this song as “Dylan in frizzed-out jeremiad mode” (Issue 1131). Only a few artists have braved to cover this song, including Terry Reid and Johnny Winter among others.
“From the moment I met him I thought he was great, a genius, Shakespearean. Every succeeding album up to Highway 61, I had an increasing lot of secret fear: ‘Oh my God, what can he do next? He can’t possibly top that one.’ And then I put on Highway 61, and I laughed and said it’s so ridiculous. It’s impossibly good, it just can’t be that good. How can a human mind do this?” – Phil Ochs*
*Source: “Dylan: 100 Songs and Pictures” by Fine Communications
Jan 31, 2012 | 100 Days with Bob Dylan
Live version from the George Harrison Concert for Bangladesh: It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry
What you should know about this song: This bluesy song was originally recorded for the Highway 61 Revisited album featuring Al Kooper and Michael Bloomfield, and it’s most famous for the live rendition heard at George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh in August 1971.* Dylan took from old blues songs and added his own lyrics to create this piece, which is one of three blues songs featured on the 1965 album. When he first attempted to cut the song during the recording sessions, however, he was frustrated with the uptempo arrangement and decided to set it aside after a few takes to focus on recording “Tombstone Blues” instead. Over the lunch break, Dylan sat at the piano and worked out a slower version, “the results felt both timeless and brand-new” (Rolling Stone Magazine, Issue 1131).
“Bob is a weird cat, you know: weird music, weird words, weird session. But I liked the songs. He sings them, and the musicians fit themselves around them. He sings these long, complex, meaningful songs. He’s a poet.” – Michael Bloomfield*
Source: “Dylan: 100 Songs and Pictures” by Fine Communications
Photo Source: Taken at the Newport Folk Festival 1965
Jan 30, 2012 | 100 Days with Bob Dylan
Links to Song:
Original recording for Highways 61 Revisited (1965) – http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Tombstone+Blues/4kZbsD?src=5
Later recording with the Chambers Brothers for The Bootleg Series Vol. 7 – http://grooveshark.com/#!/s/Tombstone+Blues+Alternate+Ta/3hcPLk?src=5
What you should know about this song: This song was originally recorded in 1965 as an “urban” blues song, but was later recorded with vocal support from R&B group, the Chambers Brothers. The two versions are quite different, but enjoyable nonetheless.
“Dylan’s Woody Guthrie period was very nice and I liked him then, but he had a second wave of popularity when he became more psychedelic… and at that time John [Lennon] particularly became very enamored width him because of his poetry. All those songs were great lyrically.” – Paul McCartney*
Source: “Dylan: 100 Songs and Pictures” by Fine Communications
Photo Source: Don Hunstein
Jan 29, 2012 | 100 Days with Bob Dylan
Link to Song: Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream
What you should know about this song: Dylan had a number of people accompanying him on this humorous song featured on the Bringing It All Back Home album, including Bill Lee, John Hammond Jr., Bobby Gregg, and guitarist Bruce Langhorne. The song even includes a false start that similarly reflects an Elvis Presley single.* It’s a silly song, really, and many critics have attributed Dylan’s humor as the inspiration to other artists like The Beatles (source).
“We didn’t know where to cut the groove. So he went, “I was ridin’ on the Mayflower…”, and we all should have come in on ‘ridin’, but everyone sat there.” – Bruce Langhorne*
Source: “Dylan: 100 Songs and Pictures” by Fine Communications
Photo Source: BBC
