Category: Articles

As chaos takes over we return to our friend Leo, who can now make no sense of what is happening in this bizarre, hallucinatory scenario: …Leo turned to Cleo/ “I think I’m going mad”/ But he’d lost his mind already/ Whatever mind he had… We are never told who ‘Cleo’ is. Meanwhile the description of Leo trying to …block the doorway to save all those from harm/ Blood from an open wound pouring down his arm… seems to be a version of the scenes in the movie where Jack performs heroics in order to save some of the passengers. But this is the last we will hear of Leo and we will never find out whether he shares Jack Dawson’s fate. In the next verse we hear that: …Petals fell from the flowers/ ‘Till all of them were gone/ In the long and dreadful hours/ The wizard’s curse played on… The mention of the ‘wizard’s curse’ suggests that this dream-version of the sinking of the ship is indeed a kind of Hollywood movie in which the passengers have been bewitched by an unseen manipulator. Given that the trouble with the ship appears to have been started by a whirlwind, perhaps this ‘remake’ of the famous movie has somehow incorporated elements of The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy and her friends are however, nowhere to be seen.

…My only pair of trousers had a big hole. Tom Thumb in a daze, I sowed rhymes As I went along. My inn was at the Big Dipper. —My stars in the sky made a soft rustling sound… Arthur Rimbaud, My Bohemian Life   …My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as...

he narrator appears to be asking ‘Senor’ about the destiny of the world, which is presumably under the control of ‘Yankee power’.

  Several very distinctive love songs that Dylan composed around this time never made it onto his official albums, although these songs did tend to get ‘snapped up’ by other musicians. If You Gotta Go, Go Now is a light hearted romp which, like I Don’t Believe You, is based around a sexual encounter. As...

    My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips’ red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head…. William Shakespeare, Sonnet 130     O my Luve is like a red, red rose    That’s newly...

…I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery     of night… Allen Ginsberg, Howl, 1956 …My solution to the problem would...

    No place, not even a wild place, is a place until it has had that human attention that at its highest reach we call poetry. –Wallace Stegner, The Sense of Place (1989)   Highway 61, the main thoroughfare of the country blues, begins about where I began. I always felt like I’d started on it, always had been on...

 ————————- Hi there folks!  Comments box at the bottom of the page. Comments welcome!!! ————————-                     …Fine, clear, dazzling morning, the sun an hour high, the air just tart enough. What a stamp in advance my whole day receives from the song of that meadow lark perch’d on a fence-stake twenty rods distant! Two or...

Chris Gregory looks at the influence of WOODY GUTHRIE on BOB DYLAN, discusses Dylan's Guthrie covers, his SONG FOR WOODY and his poem LAST THOUGHTS ON WOODY GUTHRIE

 What is revealed? The Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest, from 1967’s John Wesley Harding, is perhaps Bob Dylan’s most enigmatic song. It is certainly one of his funniest. Over eleven verses and within a virtually unchanging musical template, it tells a convoluted ‘shaggy dog’ story about the consequences of falling into too much...