EXTRACTS (Full text HERE) Brownsville Girl is an extraordinarily experimental song which is a unique amalgam of lyrical, cinematic and theatrical elements. Its use of fractured internal and external narratives and time frames links it to earlier songs like Tangled Up in Blue and Visions of Johanna. But it uses language in a very different...
Category: Music
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PODCAST: Bob Dylan: A Headful of Ideas Season Three 18) Motorpsycho Nitemare: A Clean Cut Kid
PLEASE CLICK ON ‘WATCH ON YOU TUBE’ PLEASE LIKER AND SUBSCRIBE! COMMENTS WELCOME ON YOU TUBE OR FURTHER DOWN THIS PAGE EXTRACTS (full version here) Motorpsycho Nitemare is a comic ‘shaggy dog’ story that appears on what is generally regarded as Dylan’s first ‘post protest’ album, Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964). Motorpsycho Nitemare represents...
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BOB DYLAN’S LOVE SONGS OF THE MID-1960s (Part Two)
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...
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BOB DYLAN’S LOVE SONGS OF THE MID-1960S: IT USED TO GO LIKE THIS… (Part One)
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...
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PODCAST: Bob Dylan: A Headful of Ideas Season Three 17) New Morning: A Pastoral Dream (Part Two)
PLEASE VIEW ON YOU TUBE. LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE! EXTRACTS FULL TEXT HERE NEW MORNING…. A PASTORAL DREAM With his tongue very firmly in his cheek, and using a vocal delivery similar to the ‘softened’ Nashville Skyline tone, Dylan depicts a ‘winter wonderland’ while confessing his love to a girl called ‘Winterlude’, who he refers to...
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PODCAST: Bob Dylan: A Headful of Ideas season Three 16)New Morning: A Pastoral Dream (Part One)
Chris Gregory examines the dreamy world of 1970's NEW MORNING
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BOB DYLAN’S TOMBSTONE BLUES: THE SUN’S NOT YELLOW
…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...
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VIDEO PODCAST 2: Bob Dylan’s Mr. Tambourine Man
EXTRACTS Mr. Tambourine Man is certainly one of Bob Dylan’s most famous creations; so much so that it has become a kind of ‘signature song’. If any one of the characters in Dylan’s lyrics can be said to represent the singer himself, it is this mysterious and enigmatic figure who inspires the song’s narrator with...
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PODCAST: Bob Dylan: A Headful of Ideas Season 3 15) Sara: Forgive Me My Unworthiness
Hi folks! Please click on ‘Watch on You Tube’. Please LIKE and SUBSCRIBE when you get there! EXTRACTS Sara is clearly an autobiographical song. It is a highly moving and desperate plea, which focuses on the happy earlier days of their relationship when their children were very small. There is no mention of...
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BOB DYLAN’S HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED: NEXT TIME YOU SEE ME COMING…
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...