Jeff and Darron look back to a time when they were so much younger and discuss how their early connection over Bob Dylan opened them up to the broader world of culture and ideas communicated through the arts. They talk about their evolving relationship with Dylan, how he influenced their thinking and led them down other paths, and what he represents. Jeff introduces the distinction he sees between hyperreality and our collective Beautiful Illusion and they conclude with a discussion of the song “My Back Pages.”
2:30 - Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, released in 1967 and eventually referred to as “Volume 1” by fans upon the subsequent release of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 2 in 1971 and then Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 3 in 1994
3:40 - Circuit City
4:03 - Bob Dylan lyrics by song title
4:37 - No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan by Robert Shelton
4:48 - Jack Kerouac
4:49 - Arthur Rimbaud
5:46 - *NOTE* It’s a Steal! How Columbia House Made Money Giving Away Music
Back before the internet, mp3’s, music piracy, and streaming were a thing, mail-order music clubs like Columbia House and BMG would offer multiple albums for 1 penny to new members, as long as members agree to buy a certain amount of albums in the future at regular price. The catch was that the club would automatically send you a new album each month, and the full-price bill, unless you told them in advance you didn’t want, in a model called negative option billing. The obvious result was a lot of people with a lot of albums they didn’t really want.
6:17 - Actually, the release referred to here is actually The Best of The Doors, but the album cover description is spot on
7:48 - Grunge and Pearl Jam - for a pretty interesting take on the 90’s “Alternative Rock” era, check out this 10-part series from rock writer/critic Steven Hyden: Whatever Happened To Alternative Nation? Parts 1-5 are of particular interest here
7:53 - The Mighty Mighty BossToneS and the Third Wave Ska scene
9:02 - “I Want You” from Dylan and The Grateful Dead’s 7/4/87 show in Foxboro, MA - not the exact version on the album (in terms of Dylan’t enunciation it’s actually better), but you get the idea.
9:12 - “When the Wheels Came Off: The History of Bob Dylan in the 80’s” from Ultimate Classic Rock
9:26 - Dylan & The Dead, recorded on tour in 1987 and released in 1989, considered by some to be the worst album from either act
AllMusic.com calls Dylan & the Dead “Quite possibly the worst album by either Bob Dylan or the Grateful Dead, the live Dylan & the Dead completely squanders its promise. Working from an intriguing selection of songs -- it includes staples like "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" and more obscure gems like "Joey" -- the Dead and Dylan contribute listless, meandering versions that are simply boring. Both artists have done much better -- reportedly they have done better together, according to various bootleg fans -- but Dylan & the Dead is a sad, disheartening document.”
10:24 - “I Want You” from Bob Dylan’s 1966 masterpiece Blonde on Blonde
10:27 - Backstage With Bob Dylan
10:58 - According to Wikipedia, as of February 2020 “Bob Dylan has released 38 studio albums, 91 singles, 26 notable extended plays, 50 music videos, 12 live albums, 15 volumes comprising The Bootleg Series, 19 compilation albums, 14 box sets, seven soundtracks as main contributor”- and since this recording was made, he just released his 39th studio album, Rough and Rowdy Ways in June of 2020.
11:22 - “Hurricane” and “One More Cup Of Coffee” off the 1976 album Desire
11:59 - “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” from the 1975 album Blood On The Tracks
13:13 - In Huckleberry Finn’s famous epigraph Twain writes “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR PER G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE
14:26 - “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” from the 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home
14:35 - “The Man In Me” from the 1970 album New Morning, and famously used in the Coen brother’s extraordinary cult classic movie “The Big Lebowski”
15:34 - Beautiful Illusions
17:40 - The “subjective character of experience” as an essential aspect of “consciousness” was introduced by philosopher Thomas Nagel in his influential essay “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?”
18:02 - Paul Simon
18:33 - “Paul Simon says he ‘doesn’t like being second to Bob Dylan’”
19:28 - Check out Bruce Springsteen, the 1975 Rolling Stone article “New Dylan From Jersey? It Might As Well Be Springsteen”, “The Members of ‘The Next Bob Dylan’ Club” and “Who Is The Next Bob Dylan?: 10 Songwriters Once Voted Most Likely”
19:35 - One of the questions Rock writers have loved asking throughout the years has been “Who is the next Bob Dylan?”, besides Springsteen, other “new Dylans” have included Donovan, Gordon Lightfoot, Loudon Wainwright III, John Prine, and more recent artists such as Jason Isbell, Father John Misty, Conor Oberst, Courtney Barnett - basically just about anyone who has a way with words, picked up an acoustic guitar, and wrote a song”
20:10 - Jakob Dylan and The Wallflowers
20:47 - Bob Dylan at The Palace Theatre on April 14, 1996 reviewed here in the Hartford Courant
21:05 - Jewel yodeling circa 1996
21:50 - “Bob Dylan in concert: Infuriating, genius, or both?”
22:43 - Time Out Of Mind
22:55 - Time Out Of Mind won 3 Grammy’s at the 40th Annual Grammy Awards for Album of the Year, Best Contemporary Folk Album, and Best Male Rock Vocal Performance for the song “Cold Irons Bound” - perhaps most memorably Dylan’s performance of “Love Sick” at the show was crashed by a spastically contorting and shirtless Michael Portnoy who infamously had the words “Soy Bomb” painted across his chest - Dylan and the band kept going like the true pros that they are without missing a beat or seeming to acknowledge the intrusion in any way. Also notably “Time Out of Mind” beat out Radiohead’s masterpiece “OK Computer” for Album of the Year.
23:32 - “Bob Dylan’s Career-Reviving Classic ‘Time Out Of Mind’ Turns 20”
19:58 - Bob Dylan at The Oakdale Theater on August 18, 1997
23:45 - “Dylan Recovers From Heart Ailment” - Dylan was hospitalized in late May, 1997, for severe chest pains which turned out to be histoplasmosis pericarditis - a rare fungal infection of the sac that surrounds the heart caused by inhalation of fungal spores found in bird or bat droppings. He was 56 at the time.
24:05 - Rick Danko (late, of The Band) joins Bob Dylan for “This Wheel’s On Fire” and then again during the encore for “I Shall Be Released”
24:40 - The Fugees album “The Score” released in 1996 was a critical and commercial hit, the “Killing Me Softly” cover was ubiquitous, and introduced most of the world to Lauryn Hill who became a superstar with her 1998 release “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill”
25:07 - 7/26/99, 11/10/99, 11/14/99 - featuring Darron’s favorite performance of his all-time favorite song “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”, 11/17/99, 11/18/99, 11/11/00, 11/12/00
25:15 - “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” original version from the 1963 album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan
25:27 - The Gibson J-45 Sunburst acoustic guitar
25:36 - Dylan played the J-45 as his primary acoustic throughout the late 90’s and early 2000’s - it can be seen and heard prominently on this video of “My Back Pages”
26:57 - See, for example, “Rolling Stone Readers Pick the Top 10 Songwriters of All Time” or “The 100 Greatest Songwriters of All Time” (heavily biased towards rock era, but it’s Rolling Stone, so that’s somewhat expected), or try a list from Dave’s Music Database that aggregates 36 other lists, an article/poll from BBC news, an opinion piece from a philosophy professor, or maybe the fact that Dylan won a Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”
27:30 - see Newport concert review (with setlist) from Berkshire Links website, and “Dylan at Newport, 2002” from the blog singer-songwriter/Dylanologist Peter Stone Brown (originally posted on Bobdylan.com), Dylan notably wore a wig and fake beard for the occasion (pic with wig, beard, and J-45) - Actually it was the 2002 festival, 37 years after his last Newport performance. In true enigmatic Dylan fashion, he played the entire show in the summer sun wearing a long-hair wig and fake beard.
28:05 - Bob Dylan at the Augusta Civic Center on August 4, 2002
29:10 - Dylan sang “Only A Pawn In Their Game” and “When the Ship Comes In” (with Joan Baez) as part of a musical program that included Mahalia Jackson, Marian Anderson, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary, Odetta, and The Freedom Singers, before Martin Luther King gave his famous speech
29:15 - See “Bob Dylan’s Influence On The Beatles” from The Flip Side Beatles Blog, and “How Bob Dylan Influenced The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who“ from Far Out Magazine
29:26 - See “How Bob Dylan Changed the 60’s, and American Culture”
29:44 - See “Bob Dylan, The Beatles, and the Rock of the Sixties”
29:48 - The Sixties - You know, “a whole lotta stuff” like the Viet Nam war, the Civil Rights movement, the Summer of Love, Urban Riots, Woodstock, and the moon landing, for starters...
31:16 - Hyperreality
32:59 - Jean Baudrillard
33:37 - See “How to Stop Romantic Comedies from Ruining Your Love Life,” or maybe just listen to “Love Like the Movies” by The Avett Brothers
34:00 - “Is this cave painting humanity’s oldest story?”
34:20 - The Rolling Stones at Gillette Stadium on July 7, 2019
34:32 - Blues music
36:46 - See “Processing Information with Nonconscious Mind,” or “New Research Suggests We Have No Control Over Our Thoughts” or “We may have less control over our thoughts than previously assumed”
38:10 - Realism, moral constructivism, and relativism
39:15 - See “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, or read this excerpt in Scientific American
39:37 - For more on the evolution of the brain and neocortex see “A brief history of the brain”
42:41 - Another Side of Bob Dylan released in 1964
42:50 - Bob Dylan performing “Maggie’s Farm” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and just because it’s cool here is an awestruck Jason Isbell playing the 1964 Fender Strat that Dylan played at the Newport performance, and here is a bunch of others including Courtney Barnett with the same guitar
42:58 - For more on the “Electric Dylan Controversy” see “The Night Bob Dylan Went Electric,” “Dylan goes electric at The Newport Folk Festival,” “July 25, 1965: Dylan Goes Electric at The Newport Folk Festival,” and “Revisit Bob Dylan’s electric performance at Newport Folk Festival 50 years later” - Perhaps no tale in the history of rock and roll is as dearly told and mythologized as Bob Dylan at Newport in 1965. Taking the stage backed by a rock outfit featuring guitarist Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper on organ, eschewing his acoustic guitar for a Fender Stratocaster, Dylan famously “went electric” - he played raucous and ragged versions of Maggie’s Farm, It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train to Cry, and his current single “Like a Rolling Stone” before walking off the stage- many in the crowd booed, whether it was the rock and roll band or the inadequate sound system remains a topic of debate. Dylan returned a few minutes later, alone with an acoustic guitar borrowed from Peter Yarrow, he played Mr. Tambourine Man before ending with his farewell to Newport and the folk movement, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” As he left the stage the legend was born - Dylan had gone electric, married folk to rock, and changed the course of popular music.
44:15 - Here’s a good example of an antagonistic interview from the famous Dylan documentary “Don’t Look Back”
44:40 - See “How Robert Zimmerman Became Bob Dylan” - Arguably, Bob Dylan himself was never a real Bob Dylan. Born in Minnesota as Robert Allen Zimmerman in1941, he arrived in New York in 1961 stylizing himself as a dusty troubadour in the mold of his idol Woody Guthrie and famously told fantastical versions of his personal history all throughout his early career. Before settling officially on the name Bob Dylan in 1961, he had already gone by Elston Gunn, and Robert Allen. In a 2004 interview Dylan said "You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free." and perhaps most tellingly, in the 2019 Martin Scorscese documentary “Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story” he says “Life isn’t about finding yourself—or about finding anything, Life is about creating yourself.”
45:59 - “My Back Pages” album recording and lyrics
46:53 - The album Bringing It All Back Home was released on March 22, 1965 a few months before the Newport Folk Festival in July of that same year
47:01 - “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” album recording
47:05 - “It Ain’t Me Babe” album recording
48:21 - “On Exactitude In Science” is a one paragraph short story by Jorge Luis Borges that plays with the concept of the relationship between map and territory
48:50 - See “Simulacra and Simulations” excerpt from Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings
49:40 - Meta-narrative
51:11 - List of Bob Dylan songs based on earlier tunes
53:36 - 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited and the 1966 masterpiece Blonde on Blonde, along with Bringing It All Back Home are widely considered the peak of Dylan’s 60’s output
53:46 - Check out the classic video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues”
57:54 - The 2005 documentary “No Direction Home” by Martin Scorsese
58:50 - “Shelter from the Storm” album version
