has Bob Dylan made you feel depressed..

[pillory]

or does it need a depression by yourself already?

[Nyarlathotep]

Originally posted by pillory
or does it need a depression by yourself already?

I don't know what your talking bout but I will say that I would like to toss Bob Dylan into a deep depression (more of a pit than a depression I guess) then finish filling up the depression with used kitty litter.

I really, really don't like Bob Dylan

[Brian]

If Bob Dylan makes you sad you should light fires. It will make you feel better.:j2: :j2: :j2: :j2: :j2:

[DrMatt]

When people refer to his craft as "singing", I sorta... well, never mind... I wanna hear him sing Pierrot Lunaire...

[Tricky]

Dylan's songs always make me feel better, because I will always know that there is at least one famous singer who sings worse than me. Two if you count Leonard Cohen.

[MoeFaux]

I love Dylan. His songs don't make me feel depressed. Maybe pensive, but not depressed. He's a genius.

[Mercutio]

Originally posted by MoeFaux
I love Dylan. His songs don't make me feel depressed. Maybe pensive, but not depressed. He's a genius. Agreed, even though I used to hate his voice. I do find the over-analysis of his writing to be a bit annoying--our library has entire books on the "real" meaning of some of them. (A chapter on "why a siamese cat?" bleargh)



For true so-depressing-it-can-lift-you-out-of-depression music, try early Tom Waits.

[Luciana]

This thread has given me a great idea - I'll listen to Bob Dylan in a while. Suffice to say that once I fell in love with his music, I just had to know what he was singing - I had read a few translated lyrics, so I knew it was worthwhile - and that's why I made an extra effort to learn English. :clap:

[AmateurScientist]

He he. A former girlfriend once dragged me to a Dylan concert in open air downtown. I'm sure the poor acoustics contributed somewhat, but all I recall about the event was spending the entire concert turning to each other and trying to guess what song he was singing and the band was playing. We honestly couldn't discern one from the other.

Dylan is a great songwriter. I love some of the covers others do of his work. I won't comment on his singing.

AS

[Mercutio]

"Like a rolling stone"...if he had recorded nothing else, his contribution to music would still be amazing. Fortunately for us, or at least for me, I could probably name 2 dozen other songs for which I would make the same claim.


I still prefer Tom Waits, though.

[Mark]

Only when he sings. I love his songs when other people do them.

[TwoShanks]

Well I've always liked a bit of Dylan, but I can't say listening to him has ever made me feel depressed. Which is odd, since when I was a few years younger I had the ability to become depressed at virtually any stimulus. That's the fun of clinical depression.

I think the only two artists that didn't ever make me feel depressed were Dylan and Reel Big Fish.

[lofgoernost]

Dylan's music has never depressed me. In fact, by listening to Blood on the Tracks I found a kindred spirit soon after a big break-up.

I've since been told that Dylan afficianados consider that experience a cliche.

[Supercharts]

Great Article on Dylan:
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/292/focus/The_Dylanist+.shtml

The web page indicates that this is a free 'easy print' article. However, if you wait until Oct. 21 then there a fee associated to search. So, Im confused about the copyright thing.

In any event here's the article. The mods may edit this as they may per their interpretation.

"The Dylanist
BU's Christopher Ricks parses Bob

By Eric McHenry, 10/19/2003

YEARS AGO, WHEN Christopher Ricks was teaching at Cambridge University, he discovered that some of his students were playing a game called Ricks Bingo during his classes. It involved filling in a grid of 25 squares with literary names that seemed likely to come up during the lecture and then checking them off as they did. The first person to get a row of five was the winner, and the winning card invariably included a handful of dependable names: Tennyson, Samuel Beckett, Philip Larkin, T.S. Eliot, Bob Dylan.

Ricks, a professor of humanities at Boston University and one of the most widely admired living critics of English-language poetry, says he has never taught a course on Bob Dylan, but it is probably just as accurate to say that since the late 1960s he has never taught a course not on Bob Dylan, either.

''He seems to me a natural artist to invoke,'' says Ricks. ''I think he's available all the time for comparison. The plot of the unjust magistrate in 'Measure for Measure' is the plot of 'Seven Curses,' irrespective of where Dylan gets the song from.''

Should Ricks ever officially devote a course to Dylan, he's now got the textbook for it. All of those classroom riffs, it turns out, were also dry runs for the command performance that is ''Dylan's Visions of Sin,'' a 517-page exegesis of the songwriter's lyrics published in Britain last month and expected from Ecco Press in the United States next June. Ricks believes that Dylan has always been a writer of religious songs -- since long before his ''born-again'' phase of the late '70s -- and that the seven deadly sins, along with the four cardinal virtues and the three heavenly graces, provide a useful starting point for an appreciation of his art.

''The danger in a song that rebukes somebody's anger is that it will itself lapse into anger,'' Ricks says. ''I think that the shape of this book is a good shape for getting at something really important about Dylan, because I can talk about how he deals with these sins and does not fall into them, how he praises these virtues and earns such praise himself.''

In ''The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll,'' Dylan earns Ricks's praise for the delicacy with which he handles the combustible subjects of racial and social iniquity. It's the true story of William Zanzinger, a wealthy white man who was sentenced to six months in prison for beating a black woman to death. A songwriter can credibly condemn this injustice, Ricks writes, only by being a reliable witness -- betraying neither anger nor sentimentality. Dylan pulls it off by rendering the social gulf between Zanzinger and his victim with the utmost subtlety. Ricks finds the song's first two lines almost inexhaustible in their implications because of the way Dylan orders his words: ''William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll/With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger.''

''The song opens with a line that takes a risk,'' Ricks writes. ''But `poor' is saved from any soft pity because it is a hard fact. The word is compassionate but it is dispassionate, too, for it does not lose sight of the plain reality that she is poor.'' William Zanzinger, by contrast, has a ''diamond ring finger,'' the ultimate accessory of excess. ''It's not that he had a finger that had a diamond ring on it; he had a diamond-ring-finger. He may well have had, too, an amethyst-ring-finger, an opal-ring-finger, and a ruby-ring-finger. His diamond ring finger has this extraordinary feeling of affluent agglomeration.''That sort of noun-stacking, Ricks adds, is a device Dylan employs throughout the song to depict wealth and power. ''`At a Baltimore hotel society gath'rin'.' Add up the nouns like that and you're really propertied. Nouns are items, and you can possess them. . ..''

Ricks approaches Dylan's work with the meticulousness of a scholar-editor and the energy of a teenage fan. On the wall of his BU office, among black-and-white photographs of 20th-century literary luminaries like T.S. Eliot and Robert Lowell, are a framed poster from an early-'60s Dylan concert and an autographed color glossy of Dylan onstage, circa 1975. On the floor of his Cambridge (Mass.) dining room, and in the cupboards of a nearby front room, are stacks of CD jewel cases containing about 1,700 Dylan bootlegs and studio outtakes -- ''my Dylan,'' Ricks calls them. A friend has indexed much of the collection by song title; even if Dylan never gets around to recording the obscure death-row lament ''Stone Walls and Steel Bars,'' Ricks will always have five different live versions at his fingertips. Tiny red stickers on the spines of some cases denote especially good recordings. Poorer reproductions, the sort of thing Ricks wouldn't want to listen to ''except in the interest of research,'' are kept in the basement.

The marks of this obsessive attention are all over ''Dylan's Visions of Sin.'' Ricks catches Dylan rhyming ''owed'' with ''the nightingale's code'' in two stray performances of ''Visions of Johanna,'' one from 1965, the other from 1966; he introduces this bit of esoterica to buttress his claim that a 1997 Dylan song reflects the influence of John Keats. ''`Not Dark Yet,''' Ricks writes, ''is owed to a nightingale.''

Ricks, of course, is not the first fan to subject Dylan's lyrics to microscopic scrutiny, even at book-length. Along with countless dissertations and web pages, Dylan's songs have inspired such distinctive investigations as Michael Gray's ''Song & Dance Man,'' which has grown across three decades and as many editions into a comprehensive critical companion, and Greil Marcus's ''Invisible Republic,'' a meditation on Dylan's legendary (''bootlegendary,'' Ricks calls them) Basement Tapes and the shadowy ''old, weird America'' from which they emerged.

But Ricks brings a unique set of credentials to the subject. He himself is a Dylan-like figure in the world of literary criticism -- someone whose last name alone is sufficient to identify him. His first book, ''Milton's Grand Style'' (1963), permanently changed the way readers approach ''Paradise Lost.'' According to Harvard professor Helen Vendler, Ricks's contribution was ''to look at Milton primarily as a writer rather than as a thinker or an activist in politics -- to take his language less in the service of his ideas than as it made a linguistic fabric of its own, and a gorgeous fabric, too.''

Subsequent studies of Keats and Tennyson were similarly influential, solidifying Ricks's reputation as a peerless close reader. T.S. Eliot's widow asked Ricks to edit a collection of her husband's early poetry; Oxford University Press invited him to choose poems for the latest edition of the ''Oxford Book of English Verse''; and W.H. Auden famously called him ''exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding.'' So when Ricks calls Bob Dylan ''the best contemporary American user of words,'' as he has on at least one occasion, people take notice.

They don't necessarily take his word as gospel, however. Initial reviews of the Dylan book have been mixed at best. In Britain, along with admiring write-ups in the Sunday Herald and the Guardian (the latter by Andrew Motion, England's poet laureate), there were takedowns in the Sunday Times, the Telegraph, and the Observer, where Sean O'Hagan dismissed the book as ''too knowing, too clever, too clumsily conversational.'' These responses were so unsparing, in fact, and so prominently placed, that they spun off a side debate in the British books columns about what effect ''killer previews'' have on sales.

Ricks quotes John Wain good-naturedly -- ''A bad review should spoil your breakfast but not your lunch'' -- but he's clearly disappointed. He says he hasn't read the negative notices because he wants ''to keep good-tempered,'' but they've been on his mind. ''My daughter last night said, `Why do you call them adverse reviews? They're bad reviews,''' Ricks says. ''I was protecting myself slightly with this good word 'adverse.'''

He had expected to hear from people who believe either that Dylan isn't good enough to deserve an academic treatment or that he deserves better -- that explaining his songs has the same joy-deflating effect as parsing a punchline. Most of the criticism, however, has actually concerned the book's emphases and exclusions. Several writers have remarked on Ricks's playful, punning prose style and his love of flourishes. (''I know I do overwrite sometimes,'' Ricks says, withholding the qualifier he once added when making the same observation about Greil Marcus: ''But then only those who truly can write can truly do so.'')

Some of the reviewers have taken this objection a step further, arguing that the self-conscious cleverness may be symptomatic of larger problems: that Ricks is projecting his own particular genius onto Dylan, whose gift is of a very different sort, and that Ricks's hyper-attentiveness to the lyrics is really just a means of calling attention to himself. John Sutherland, writing in the Independent, noted that the salient names in Ricks's index are not the poets commonly known to have influenced Dylan -- Rimbaud, Ginsberg -- but rather those ''who have interested Ricks over the years'': Eliot, Larkin, the old Ricks Bingo crowd.

That shouldn't matter, Ricks says, because his principal subject in ''Dylan's Visions of Sin'' is affinity, not influence.

''I think I'm more interested in coincidences and analogues than some other people are,'' he says, ''and I certainly don't make many claims for allusion. That is, I don't think that 'Lay, Lady, Lay' is an allusion to 'Come, Madam, come.' I think that there are an extraordinary number of affinities between the Donne poem [`To His Mistress Going to Bed'] and the Dylan song, and the affinities I think are very illuminating.''

The same is true, he says, of ''Forever Young.'' ''I want to compare Dylan's blessing with the kind of blessing Yeats and Larkin issue to the young or the newly born. The point isn't that Dylan is alluding to them -- it's just that you might be able to see how difficult the thing is that he's doing and how well he does it if you think about how other people have done it very well, or less well.''

Almost every reviewer, even the otherwise approving Andrew Motion, wished Ricks had said more about Dylan's music and life. But this seems a bit unfair. There's no question that Ricks privileges words over voice and instrumentation -- he is, after all, a literary scholar -- but he writes frequently of the ways in which aspects of performance, especially Dylan's vocal presentation, punctuate or subvert the lyrics' apparent meaning. Responding to Dylan's singing of the lines, ''Lay, lady, lay, lay across my big brass bed,'' Ricks writes: ''He sings the word `bed' king-sizedly. It's not a monosyllable when he sings it, something happens to it by which it becomes extraordinarily wide.''

As to the absence of biography and social context, Ricks pleads no contest. He can only do so much, and his critical calling card has always been close attention to the text. Ricks believes this is a virtue as well as a necessity. ''Artists,'' he says, ''take a great deal of trouble to produce something that is, in an honorable way, truly independent of them.''

This conviction may be one of the reasons Ricks is such an uncommonly discerning listener to Dylan: He blocks out all competing noise. In his treatment of ''Positively 4th Street,'' Dylan's notorious 1965 kiss-off to a former friend, Ricks raises the question of the addressee's likely identity only to dismiss it: ''Who, except an uncouth sleuth-hound, cares?'' Just about everyone, of course, as Anthony Quinn pointed out in the Telegraph.

But Ricks honestly doesn't. His incuriosity about Dylan's life is as absolute as his curiosity about Dylan's songs. He hasn't read the recent biographies, he says, and when biographical material briefly appears in his own book he almost apologizes: ''If I now quote something that Dylan himself said, it is not in order to invoke whatever biographical facts might exist outside the song, or to adduce Dylan's own character -- it is the character of his songs that interests me.''

Indeed, Ricks has always declined to talk publicly about his one meeting with Dylan. But half-accurate accounts have been popping up in the British press recently. One version, inexplicably, has Dylan recognizing Ricks in a New York hotel. Another has Ricks becoming flustered and inarticulate -- which would probably have been a first. To preempt further speculation, Ricks has agreed to furnish the basic facts:

At Dylan's invitation, following a Nov. 10, 2000 concert at the BU Armory, Ricks and his wife went backstage. ''Mr. Ricks,'' Dylan said. ''We meet at last.''

''And I did say, 'Read any good books lately?''' Ricks recalls. ''But it wasn't because I was tongue-tied. I thought it was a perfectly good thing to say, because books matter to me as they do to him, even if sometimes he pretends otherwise. And it went from there, and I won't go further into it. But he did pick up the question of what he'd been reading lately.''

Eric McHenry is a writer living in New Hampshire.


This story ran on page L1 of the Boston Globe on 10/19/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
"

[WildCat]

Originally posted by AmateurScientist
He he. A former girlfriend once dragged me to a Dylan concert in open air downtown. I'm sure the poor acoustics contributed somewhat, but all I recall about the event was spending the entire concert turning to each other and trying to guess what song he was singing and the band was playing. We honestly couldn't discern one from the other.

Just look it up here (http://my.execpc.com/~billp61/boblink.html) AS.

I love Dylan, I've seen him maybe 50 times.

[MoeFaux]

Originally posted by AmateurScientist
He he. A former girlfriend once dragged me to a Dylan concert in open air downtown. I'm sure the poor acoustics contributed somewhat, but all I recall about the event was spending the entire concert turning to each other and trying to guess what song he was singing and the band was playing. We honestly couldn't discern one from the other.


All you need to know is -
when he played the Emmy's, his own BAND didn't know what song he was singing. No kidding.

He's awesome. Difficult to understand, but that just makes him cooler.

[Brian]

I have no problem understanding him. Not my favorite, but he speaks plain english.

[RonPrice]

Poetry, song and autobiography have been interlinked for millennia. In my pioneering-adult life, beginning in 1962, the music and words of The Beatles and Bob Dylan, the culture of the sixties and my own autobiography come together in an interesting cross-fertilization. Bob Mason's unpublished PhD Thesis on 'The Dialogue Between the Beatles and Bob Dylan'(1) illumined, for me, this triangle of relationships. To take but one of many possible examples, the very month I decided to pioneer among the Eskimo, October 1965, The Beatles' hit "Nowhere Man" was released, as Mason informs us. Most of the Beatles' songs were about their coming to terms with autobiographical issues, about changing society, about drugs and after 1965, about a dialogue between these megastars. Paul McArtney said, in a song he wrote in the 1990s, that the members of his group, The Beatles, always came back to the songs they had been singing because these songs told them, and everyone else who was interested, where they were at. This is quintessentially true of my own poetry.-Ron Price with thanks to 1"Arts Today," ABC Radio National, 10:05-11:00 am, 16 January 2002.

I was finally knowing
where I was going to
and feeling as if I could
finally see some light
at the end of the tunnel,
thinking for myself:
none of this bourgeoisie
normality for me,
going where noone
had gone before----1
at least from my corner,
doing what noone expected,
nothing to do with drugs,
helping to change the world
in a way none else could see,2
on my own, breaking the umbilical chord,
no more of the family Christmas and Easter
and endless birthday scenes for me,
no more of the 'daddy,' 'mommy'
and all the old friends for me:
this was my own response to existence.

This was a starting new
and working out my way of being
my take on the world and its load.
I was not a 'Nowhere Man.'
I was 'doing what I wanted to do,'
thinking what I wanted to think,3
or so I thought.

1 Going to live among the Eskimo, away from family and friends, had an absurdity to it in 1965 in the conservative climate I grew up in in southern Ontario.
2 Outside the small circle of Baha'is I knew then. 3See the George Harrison song: Do What You Want To Do. Ron Price....16 Jan. 2002

I write little in this autobiography about the music of my generation and my relation to it, inspite of the masses of written material, of videos, sound tracks of films, LPs, CDs, a cornucopia of sounds and sights generated since the 1950s. I did have an intense interest in the world of rock, folk and classical music from about 1957 to 1977 but, with the arrival of my son, a dwindling bank balance, with three kids to raise, with a burgeoning of groups, of sounds, of styles and tastes, it seemed that by my early thirties many other things in life came to occupy the stage that music once had once played more prominently. I could write a separate essay on this musical experience and its development, but I am disinclined because, in retrospect, music seems to have occupied a more periferal role in my life when viewed in its totality.

When one goes about writing the story of one's life all of history becomes available when one tries to get a handle on one's experience. In writing about yourself, the autobiographer comes to write about so much more. Here is an example.

SOME COMPARISONS

Mozart's description of what happens to him as he composes has some similarities to the process of writing poetry as I experience it. "Once I have my theme another melody comes,"1 Mozart begins. And so it is, for me, with writing poetry. I get the germ of an idea, some starting point, a strong note or theme. Then, another idea comes along linking itself to the first one in a similar way to the linkage of that melody Mozart mentions to his theme. By now there is emerging "the needs of the composition as a whole" both for me and for Mozart. For both of us, too, the whole work is produced by "melodic fragments," by "expanding it," by "conceiving it more and more clearly." Mozart finishes his work in his head. The composition comes to him in its entirety in his head. I finish my work on paper and I have no idea of the ending until the end. The poem below is an example, drawing heavily on the contents of a book.2 -Ron Price with thanks to the 1ABC Radio National, The Science Show, 10.1.98; and 2Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600-1830, Manchester UP, NY, 1999.

Even the most uninteresting,
trivial and repetitive,
when seen at a distance
with a lively fancy
and a determination,
with purpose and system
to make the most of life,
can find a mysterious charm,
an entertaining commentary
in the hands of a good writer.

But this is not the work
of a tourist and its trivial,
pointless diversion,
innocent gratification,
pleasureable indolence,
gratifying excitements,
gastronomic indulgences,1
relief from responsibility,
and identity: escape.

I have never been a tourist.2

Always there was the work,
the object worthy of life,
of commentary:
always the profusion
of the incomparable,
so much intensification,
excess, the delights,
the dangers, the restlessness,
a reaching out beyond
the mundane, the observable.

The danger of hyperboles,
accepting, as I know I must,
jarring encounters,
the destabilizing,
troubling elements
than can't be kept at bay,
when calm benevolence
can't be maintained
and the necessary distraction.

1 Except, perhaps, on my two 'honeymoons' for several days in August 1967 and December 1975; and travelling to and settling in to some new places of residence and employment.
2 Tourism in the modern sense began, according to Chard about 1880, although other historians of tis modern phenomenon take it back to 1845. See: Paolo Prato & Gianluca Trivero, trans Iain Chambers, "The Spectacle of Travel," Australian Journal of Culture and Society, Vol.3 No.2, 1985.

Ron Price
27 June 2002

And so, with these poems an underlying philosophy becomes more evident. This narrative and this poetry has provided what Doris Lessing called a discourse by which I have constructed my "versions of reality." The other major discourse Lessing describes is fiction. That foundation of civilization I spoke of earlier, and which Kenneth Clark said required "intellectual energy, freedom of mind, a sense of beauty and a craving for immortality," became increasingly manifest in the Baha'i community as well as my own life.

I began to experience, for the most part insensibly over the first twenty years(1980-2000) a certain relief, not from dejection as Tennyson and Coleridge found, but from depression and exhaustion, what I have called a tedium vitae. What Bob Dylan had written about with a certain tedium vitae I certainly experienced off and on for the next 40 years. His tones and undercurrent were for me prophetic. Like Tennyson and Coleridge I found my relief in people outside of myself, in the person of dead friends who never truly died but continued on in my memory and spirit. Tennyson would read letters from a dead friend and I would say prayers of intercession to a range of people from Hands of the Cause to, as I say, dozens of souls whose names I would recite, mantra-like. Coleridge was dejected because he had lost his health, youthful joy, and creativity. I did not feel the loss of these things, in fact, my creativity was perhaps greater than ever. But I felt tired of the social domain, tired of much of life. It was not really depression, for I had known depression only too well. It was a fatigue of the spirit, a distaste for life in varying degrees, a peaceful, restful withdrawal into quietness. It was not unlike the experience of Henry Adams and his sense of isolation and a certain disillusionment. Enough!

[Mephisto]

I've always liked Dylan, but can't help but wonder if it isn't just nostalgia. I think he's an excellent lyricist but again, can't help but recall the time period when he gained his popularity.

Jimi Hendrix (one of my favorite guitrists) also appreciated Dylan quite a bit and I think Hendrix did the Dylan song All Along the Watchtower particularly well.

Dylan was a child of the 60s (much like I was) and I feel his music is timeless, but then I'm personally biased. I agree with Tricky regarding his singing style, but would rate Dylan higher than Leonard Cohen's gravel-grating voice.

[Marquis de Carabas]

The title of this thread puts me in mind of a lawyer's ad for a class-action lawsuit. If you have been depressed after listening to the music of Bob Dylan, call for your free consultation today.

[Mephisto]

The title of this thread puts me in mind of a lawyer's ad for a class-action lawsuit. If you have been depressed after listening to the music of Bob Dylan, call for your free consultation today.

:)

Call in the next two hours to receive a free bamboo steamer!

[Jon.]

I love Bob Dylan, and when I'm feeling down I'll put on "Visions of Johanna" or just about anything from Time Out Of Mind, and just wallow in the feeling for a while. Makes it easier to get out of afterwards.

(NB: This does not apply to clinical depression, just ordinary transient sadness!)

[Björn Toulouse]

...there is at least one famous singer who sings worse than me. Two if you count Leonard Cohen.


i heard that.

http://forums.randi.org/imagehosting/1289045f5b33205c9f.jpg (http://forums.randi.org/vbimghost.php?do=displayimg&imgid=4530)

[JoeTheJuggler]

Big Bob fan here.

How does listening to Dylan make me feel? Well that would depend on the song. There's about 4,000 of them, so you'll have to be more specific.

[Sandy M]

He he. A former girlfriend once dragged me to a Dylan concert in open air downtown. I'm sure the poor acoustics contributed somewhat, but all I recall about the event was spending the entire concert turning to each other and trying to guess what song he was singing and the band was playing. We honestly couldn't discern one from the other.

Dylan is a great songwriter. I love some of the covers others do of his work. I won't comment on his singing.

AS

Yup. Like the songs, but I want to hear SOMEONE ELSE sing them, not Dylan. My brother gave me a two CD set that was all Dylan covers. Can't remember the title though.

[This Guy]

He he. A former girlfriend once dragged me to a Dylan concert in open air downtown. I'm sure the poor acoustics contributed somewhat, but all I recall about the event was spending the entire concert turning to each other and trying to guess what song he was singing and the band was playing. We honestly couldn't discern one from the other.

Dylan is a great songwriter. I love some of the covers others do of his work. I won't comment on his singing.

AS

Did he sing at a faster tempo then the songs should have been done at?

Saw him a few (maybe 10 or so) years ago, and I swear he did the songs faster than normal.

Worse concert I ever went to. Didn't introduce his band. Hardly "said" a word. Just came out, did his songs (fast), and left, pretty much.

Best concert IMHO, goes to Harry Chapin. Came out solo (had band instrument issues at the airport) sang a few songs while playing his acoustic guitar, sat on the edge of the stage taking questions from the audience, did a few more songs, till the band got there, then started the show. Course, that was around 1975, when folks knew how to give concerts ;)

Anyway, love Dylan's music, but think he's a prick.

[billydkid]

When people refer to his craft as "singing", I sorta... well, never mind... I wanna hear him sing Pierrot Lunaire...He is not a great singer no doubt. Funny thing is though people, myself included, enjoy listening to him. I guess what I'm saying is that being a good singer is not really all it is about. Actually, if you have ever heard his Nashville Skyline album where he does less affecting of the gravelly voice thing, he has kind of a nice singing voice. I always hated Axel Rose's singing voice, but if you listen to his version that Don McKlean song If I don't have you, he also has a decent singing voice when he is not affecting that rock singer wail which he is not very good at.

[billydkid]

I do find the over-analysis of his writing to be a bit annoying--our library has entire books on the "real" meaning of some of them. (A chapter on "why a siamese cat?" bleargh)



For true so-depressing-it-can-lift-you-out-of-depression music, try early Tom Waits.I have seen where he has complained that himself saying, essentially, they're just songs.

[President Bush]

fhoQSYfMRvU

Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, "This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem."
I traveled through East Texas
Where many martyrs fell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

Well, I heard the hoot owl singing
As they were taking down the tents
The stars above the barren trees
Were his only audience
Them charcoal gypsy maidens
Can strut their feathers well
But nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
(And) see the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
(I can) hear the undertaker's bell
(Yeah), nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

There's a woman by the river
With some fine young handsome man
He's dressed up like a squire
Bootlegged whiskey in his hand
There's a chain gang on the highway
I can hear them rebels yell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

Well, God is in heaven
And we all want what's his
But power and greed and corruptible seed
Seem to be all that there is
I'm gazing out the window
Of the St. James Hotel
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell


1983 Bob Dylan Special Rider Music

[JoeTheJuggler]

"You could be known as the most beautiful woman
Who ever crawled across cut glass to make a deal."

[bigred]

I give up, why isn't this in the Music/etc forum?

Anyway, if you really want to listen to depressing music (ie regardless of whether you like that kind of music or not), Dylan is a rank amateur compared to Neil Young or Pink Floyd.

[tim]

In 1967, aged 17, I sat on a beach in Italy just south of Florence and listened to a beautiful girl playing a guitar and singing "Tambourine Man". It changed my life. The fact I had drunk 2 bottles of wine and consumed certain illicit substances had nothing to do with it. Or the fact the girl was pretty. Honest. :D
I still love Dylan. And Zimmerman.

[bigred]

In 1967, aged 17, I sat on a beach in Italy just south of Florence and listened to a beautiful girl playing a guitar and singing "Tambourine Man". Sadly, it's debatable whether he or William Shatner sang it better.

[l0rca]

"Like a rolling stone"...if he had recorded nothing else, his contribution to music would still be amazing. Fortunately for us, or at least for me, I could probably name 2 dozen other songs for which I would make the same claim.


I still prefer Tom Waits, though.

Quoted for truth.

[strathmeyer]

Has Bob Dylan made you feel happy?