As I posted some months back, Noted Bob Dylan expert Greil Marcus is now writing his monthly column, Real Life Rock Top 10 for the Barnes & Noble Review.
In his December column he reviewed one of Dylan’s concerts at the Beacon Theater.
His review begins:
There were many centers of gravity, where songs took on a new depth, where you could hear them as unfinished stories — of a piece with what Dylan did on November 23, when, before a show in Philadelphia he played a four-song set for a single audience member (Swedish TV stunt, don’t ask), and the highlight was a slow, ruminative version of Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” so full of death it would have sounded just right on Time Out of Mind. …
Read the rest here.
His latest column review the new Rhiannon Giddens’ solo album.
It begins like this:
In the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Giddens’s voice is the one you wait for, and when you watch Giddens as part of the so-called New Basement Tapes band in Sam Jones’s documentary Lost Songs — with Marcus Mumford, Elvis Costello, Jim James, and Taylor Goldsmith, she’s searching for music to give a cache of recently discovered 1967 Bob Dylan lyrics — you realize her talent is bottomless.
Read the rest here.
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[Last August I published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of the book. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Did Marcus review ‘Blueberry Hill’ from that short snippet from the tv program? Or does he have a tape of the full song/show?
The whole program is now available: http://en.experimentensam.com/bob-dylan
Oh, and I only posted the Letterman video because it’s awesome. Amazingly, LAWY holds up just as well as the stuff Bob was doing when he was quite a bit younger. Some would even say Tempest is way better than Infidels. Bob Dylan rules! I can’t wait for his next album.