Joe Nolan's Insomnia » Bob Dylan

An April Season In Hell

Joe Nolan — Tue, 24 Apr 2018 03:31:22 +0000

Celebrating National Poetry Month, here’s a rad radio production of Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell which was published 145 years ago this year. Even though it might not be immediately evident Arthur Rimbaud had a lot in common with William Blake: both saw the benefits of altered states on literary vision and both were natural born rebels who couldn’t seem to help but attack the mores and codes of their contemporaneous cultures. Both poets were also visionaries whose words went on to influence the rock ‘n’ roll music of the 1960s and 70s. Bands like The Doors and artssts like Bob Dylan and Patti Smith quoted and name-checked both of these poets, and quotes like “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” (Blake), and ““A poet makes himself a visionary through a long, boundless, and systematized disorganization of all the senses” (Rimbaud), seem as if they emerged from the American postwar underground.

Started in London in April 1873, and finished in France that August.
It draws on his stifling – often violent – relationship with Verlaine, and
his discovery that poetry was not enough. He was the great poet of
the age, and he didn’t have a pot to p*ss in. He wanted more.

Listen to A Season in Hell here…

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We’ll Always have Paris, Texas

Joe Nolan — Mon, 18 Sep 2017 04:39:45 +0000

Last week we lost Harry Dean Stanton. Stanton was one of those character actors who never played the dashing leading hero or achieved cinema sweetheart status. But Stanton’s body of work over about a half century of acting gathered together the kind of gravitas that swirls around true artists of the screen, and it’s a kind of poetic coincidence that Stanton takes his leave so shortly after Sam Shepard, the screenwriter of Stanton’s masterpiece, also exited this stage. Here’s the actor talking about Paris, Texas in an interview in The Guardian from back in 2013…

There is indeed a peculiar kind of sadness about Harry Dean Stanton, a mix of vulnerability, honesty and seeming guilelessness that has lit up the screen in his greatest performances. It’s there in his singing cameo in 1967′s prison movie Cool Hand Luke, in his leading role in Alex Cox’s underrated cult classic Repo Man in 1984 and, most unforgettably, in his almost silent portrayal of Travis, a man broken by unrequited love in Wim Wenders’s classic, Paris, Texas. “After all these years, I finally got the part I wanted to play,” Stanton once said of that late breakthrough role. “If I never did another film after Paris, Texas I’d be happy.”

Now, with mortality beckoning, Stanton still gives off the air of someone who, as he puts it, “doesn’t really give a damn”. In his room in a hip hotel on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the aircon is on full blast despite his runny nose and troubling cough, and he smokes like a train as if oblivious to the law and the health police. He looks scarecrow thin, but dapper, in his western suit, embroidered shirt and ornately embossed cowboy boots: a southern dandy even in old age. His hearing is not so good, but his voice remains unmistakable, that soft trace of his southern upbringing in rural Kentucky still detectable. “I’ve worked with some of the best of them,” he says. “Not just directors like Sam Peckinpah and David Lynch, but writers like Sam Shepard and singers like Bob Dylan, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson. I could have made it as a singer, but I went with acting, surrendered to it, in a way.”

Here’s Stanton as a youngster in the cult classic 92 in the Shade (1975)….

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Bob Dylan: Looking Back

Joe Nolan — Wed, 28 Jun 2017 03:35:13 +0000

1967 was the Summer of Love, and by that time Bob Dylan, the poet laureate of the counterculture, was already two years into his transformation from folkie legend to rock star which began when he plugged-in a Fender Stratocaster and “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Dylan had even released rock masterpieces Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde by the time the Summer of Love was in full bloom which made the release of D.A. Pennebaker’s pioneering rock doc, Don’t Look Back, seem exactly like looking back in 1967. The film captured the last flickers of Dylan as a wandering acoustic troubadour during his 1965 tour in England. Here’s the word from The Guardian…

“Very few people change the way of the world,” says Baldassare. “To me there is before Elvis and after Elvis, before Cassius Clay and after Muhammad Ali, and before Bob Dylan and after Bob Dylan. In Don’t Look Back we have the rare vantage point of seeing that moment just before.”

Shot handheld on black-and-white 16mm film, Don’t Look Back invented the “rockumentary”. Its fly-on-the-wall style flew in the face of contemporary cinematic convention, and its reputation and influence has steadily grown since its release in 1967. In 2014, the British Film Institute’s authoritative poll of movie industry experts ranked Don’t Look Back as one of the 10 best documentaries of all time.

Since the mid-1950s Pennebaker had been a pioneer of the observational “direct cinema” style, and had even helped develop the small synchronised sound and vision system which enabled it. While making films for Life magazine, he was looking for a more personal project when he met Bob Dylan in a bar in Greenwich Village. “He [Dylan] said: I have an idea for a film where I write out all the words to this song on pieces of paper, and I’ll just throw them down as I read them,” Pennebaker recalls. “I said: that’s a fantastic idea.” This eventually became the famous Subterranean Homesick Blues “video” (actually the opening sequence in Don’t Look Back).

Celebrating the film and looking back on Don’t Look Back, here’s more than an hour of outtakes from the film that I found on YouTube…

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Nobel 2016 Revisited

Joe Nolan — Wed, 07 Jun 2017 04:37:30 +0000

Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. When the award was announced last October, people who care about such things were either elated or outraged: Fans of the man felt that Dylan’s work deserved such lofty accolades, but writerly snobs — the worst snobs — looked down on the troubadour, his popular music, and his “poetic” lyrics.

I’m a Dylan fan since I was a kid listening to my mom and dad’s Peter Paul & Mary – In Concert album: Mary was so beautiful on the record jacket and just hearing her sing on “Blowin’ in the Wind” made feel like I’d been born too late. I didn’t think too much about the award at the time as Dylan’s ambivalent reaction to the thing will no doubt go down as one of the jester’s best pranks. I was too busy laughing to think too hard on it all.

This week the prize committee released a lecture Dylan wrote — a requirement for receiving the award. Hearing about the lecture I began to ponder the arguments for and against Dylan again. As a songwriter and a poet I can assure you that musical lyrics and literary verses are completely different animals that flourish is mostly separate universes. That said, there is also some overlap and I’ve always believed that the best poetry is musical, and the best musical lyrics are poetic. One way to understand the difference between the two is to consider the ideas that Dylan brought poetry into pop music, but his comrade Leonard Cohen brought music to poetry. These two songsters have a lot in common, but their works lineup alongside one another like mirror images full of similarities in opposition.

You might not agree with me, but I think Dylan would. Here’s a bit from The New York Times take the lecture…

What does it all mean? Mr. Dylan dodges answering directly. But he argues that songs both are and are not literature, the work of novels and plays and epic poems. “Songs are unlike literature,” he wrote. “They’re meant to be sung, not read.” And he asks people to encounter his lyrics the way they were intended to be heard, “in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days.”

But, he added, the granddaddy of Western literature was a singer and a lyric writer, too. “I return once again to Homer,” he wrote, “who says, ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.’”

Here’s the full lecture…

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Young Man Blues

Joe Nolan — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 02:53:01 +0000

55 years ago, 20-year-old Bob Dylan was interviewed on the Folksingers Choice radio program. Here’s a baby Bob quote from the Laughing Squid site…

Oh, yeah, but then sometimes I write a lot of stuff. In fact, I wrote five songs last night, but I gave all the papers away. I don’t even consider even writing songs. I don’t want to write it. I don’t even consider that I wrote it when I got done. The song was there before me, before I came along. I just sort of came down and sort of took it down with a pencil, that it was all there before I came around. That’s the way I feel about it.

Here’s a great Blank on Blank cartoon take on the interview…

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Who Stoned Whom

Joe Nolan — Thu, 01 Sep 2016 04:09:04 +0000

Under the moniker Ian & Sylvia, Ian and Sylvia Tyson were a Canadian folk duo that came to occupy a central role in the folk music revival that rattled and twanged out of Bleeker Street, beyond Greenwich Village, and into the popular music charts in the early 1960′s. The pair moved to Greenwich Village where they signed with Albert Grossman, mega-manager for Bob Dylan Peter, Paul and Mary. Grossman got them a deal on Vanguard, the duo played the Newport Folk Festival in 1963 and 1965, and they introduced the music of Gordon Lightfoot to the world when they cut “Early Morning Rain” and “(That’s What You Get) For Lovin’ Me.”

The pair were in the center of that blue denim dust devil when Ian says he may have turned Bob Dylan on to marijuana. Of course, Dylan paid it forward to The Beatles. The ramifications stagger their contemplating. Here’s Ian’s remembering…

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