Author: chrisgregory (Chris Gregory)

The frozen smile upon my face fits me like a glove… And she bore him a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, I have been a stranger in a strange land Exodus 2:22 There in the tomb stand the dead upright, But winds come up from the shore: They shake when...

Sometimes like women or unwedded maids Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows Than have the white breasts of The Queen Of Love… Christopher Marlowe, Dr. Faustus Little by little, bit by bit Every day I’m becoming more of a hypocrite…  The main story which Tell Tale Signs tells is that of Bob Dylan’s reinvention...

 …Soul of a nation is under the knife… Dignity, like Series Of Dreams and God Knows, was originally written and recorded for Oh Mercy. It was eventually released in remixed form as a single some five years later and also appeared on the MTV Unplugged album in 1996. Tell Tale Signs features two radically different...

The ‘Drawn Blank Series’, the exhibition of Bob Dylan’s paintings currently showing at Edinburgh’s City Art Centre, provides a valuable insight into Dylan’s creative and imaginative processes. The paintings are based on a series of drawings Dylan completed in the late 80s and early 90s. In what the exhibition catalogue describes as ‘an intense burst...

        In the first verse Dylan begins with a simple statement of his intention to pursue his faith in his muse, combined with clear intimations of mortality which seem to motivate him. From the beginning the use of the pronoun ‘we’ involves the listener intimately in this process. …Every step of the...

    Despite his difficult relationship with the recording process and his focus on live performance, Bob Dylan has always conceived his albums as expressive units – groups of songs arranged in a particular order for specific effects. This is obvious in the case of albums as diverse as Blood On The Tracks, Nashville Skyline or...

…All must yield To the Avenging God…         In the mud and the blood of the makeshift trench, the soldier boy from Belvedere, South Carolina, is about to breathe his last. The Yankee bullet which had pierced his groin had come from some anonymous source, from the other side of the swirling...