Fifty years ago on February 1, 1964 Bob Dylan did a 30 minute performance at CBC Studios for Canadian TV. He appeared on a regular program called Quest that ran between 1961 and 1964 and focused on the arts.
Dylan’s show was called “The Times They Are a-Changin’” and produced in Toronto by Daryl Duke. It aired on March 10, 1964.
What you get here is Dylan in his prime folky protest mode. His voice is great, the performances are terrific and the songs are superb.
Dylan performs:
1 The Times They Are A Changin’
2 Talkin’ World War III Blues
3 Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
4 Girl From the North Country
5 A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall
6 Restless Farewell
Entire show:
Here’s a version on YouTube:
Part One:
Part Two:
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Peter Buck has a new album about to reach record stores.
The album is called I Am Back To Blow Your Mind Once Again.
I haven’t heard it yet, but I’m looking forward to it.
Here’s Buck and friends performing “10 Million BC” January 18, 2014 at his Todos Santos Music Festival.
Here’s what Buck posted today (January 30, 2014) at REMHQ:
Bo Diddley 3am
Hey everybody, this is Peter. I am back in Mexico gearing up for the 3rd annual Todos Santos Music Festival. By gearing up I mean that I am drinking tequila at 3am and listening to Bo Diddley. What a mighty, mighty man he was, ever changing always the same. But that has nothing to do with this screed. I am here to talk about my second solo record.
The record is finished and will be available any day now. It is called “I Am Back To Blow Your Mind Once Again”. No false modesty, maybe no modesty at all, I once saw an orangutan try to break into a box of live lobsters on Hollywood Blvd. That blew my mind. I am hoping my album does the same for yours. If you can’t find it at your local small retailer the best way to obtain it is on the web at littleaxerecords.com. They will be taking orders soon and the record should be available to ship by the end of the month. This being indie world all dates are approximate.
The last record I put out I gave the working phone number of the record company as a contact point. I got a panicked phone call at 12:30pm the next day from Eric who owns and manages Mississippi Records. He was completely freaked out, their answering machine was full and the phone was ringing every 15 seconds. In an outraged voice he told me, “We had to unplug the phone!”
A sane person might ask, who wants to be on a record label who unplugs their phone on the day of release because of too many orders? That person would be me. I spent over 30 years in what is laughably called the professional music business, and I came to the conclusion that there were 3 things that I loved: writing songs, recording songs, and playing songs. So that is how I run my business in conjunction with Mississippi Records: no interviews, no photos, no videos, no promo copies for radio play or reviews. The record is out there. It can be found. And I am pleasured beyond belief that 6,000 of you managed to find the last one. We have pressed up more this time so they should be easier to get. I am doing exactly what I love in exactly the way I want to do it.
I will be hitting the road in certain places this Spring, starting in February with Alejandro Escovedo. Keep up with REMHQ. It’s the only way I seem to be able to communicate regularly with the outside world beyond personal conversations.
-Peter Buck
“(You Must Fight To Live) On The Planet Of The Apes”:
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Fifty-five years ago, on January 31, 1959, Bobby Zimmerman attended a Buddy Holly performance at the Duluth National Guard Armory in Duluth, Minnesota. It was a big deal for the future Bob Dylan.
“Buddy Holly was a poet,” Dylan told journalist Robert Shelton. “Way ahead of his time.”
Shelton wrote the Dylan biography “No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan.”
Dylan once told Link Wray, who opened for Holly, “I was sitting in the front row when you and Buddy Holly were at Duluth…”
From what I can ascertain, Link Ray did not play at the Duluth show Dylan attended, but Dylan’s quote attests to how important seeing Holly was to him.
Bobby Zimmerman was a major Buddy Holly fan. According to Shelton, during his Senior year of high school “a new and lasting musical roll model emerged” for Dylan.
Buddy Holly.
“Bob began to imitate Holly’s sweet, naive, almost childlike voice,” Shelton wrote in “No Direction Home.” “The vocal quality of many Dylan recordings shows his debt to Holly.”
Three days after Dylan saw Holly perform, the young star, along with the Big Bopper (J. P. Richardson) and Richie Valens, died in a plane crash.
Buddy Holly has remained important to Bob Dylan. In a March 1999 interview with Guitar World Dylan spoke about Holly in relationship to the making of his 1997 album, Time Out Of Mind:
“While we were recording, every place I turned there was Buddy Holly. You know what I mean? It was one of those things. Every place you turned. You walked down a hallway and you heard Buddy Holly records like ‘That’ll Be the Day.’ Then you’d get in the car to go over to the studio and ‘Rave On’ would be playing. Then you’d walk into this studio and someone’s playing a cassette of ‘It’s So Easy.’ And this would happen day after day after day. Phrases of Buddy Holly songs would just come out of nowhere. It was spooky. (laughs) But after we recorded and left, you know, it stayed in our minds. Well, Buddy Holly’s spirit must have been someplace, hastening this record.”
Accepting a Grammy for Album of the Year for Time Out Of Mind in 1998, Dylan said:
“And I just want to say that when I was sixteen or seventeen years old, I went to see Buddy Holly play at Duluth National Guard Armory and I was three feet away from him…and he looked at me. And I just have some sort of feeling that he was — I don’t know how or why — but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way.”
Here’s that speech:
In 2004 Dylan told journalist Robert Hilburn, “When I got into rock ‘n’ roll, I didn’t even think I had any other option or alternative. It showed me where my future was, just like some people know they’re going to be doctors or lawyers or shortstop for the New York Yankees.”
About Buddy Holly Dylan said, “Buddy Holly’s songs were much more simplified [than Chuck Berry’s songs], but what I got out of Buddy was that you can take influences from anywhere. Like his ‘That’ll Be The Day.’ I read somewhere that it was a line he heard in a movie, and I started realizing you can take things from everyday life that you hear people say. That I still find true. You can go anywhere in daily life and have your ears open and hear something, either something someone says to you or something you hear across the room. If it has resonance you can use it in a song.”
Dylan has covered Buddy Holly songs. Below he performs Holly’s “Gotta Travel On” in 1976.
“Gotta Travel On,” The Warehouse, New Orleans, May 3, 1976 (Bob Dylan, Paul Clayton, Larry Ehrlich, Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, Fred Hellerman, David Lazar, Tom Six):
Here Dylan plays “Not Fade Away” at Tramps, NYC, July 26, 1999.
And here is “Not Fade Away” performed on April 25, 1999 in Zürich, Switzerland with Nils Lofgren and Miami Steve Van Zandt:
Peter Bucks hosts the Todos Santos Music Festival in the southern Baja region of Mexico each year (this was the third fest).
This year there was a major jam session on January 24, 2014 with The Dream Syndicate, Buck and Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones.
The Dream Syndicate’s Steve Wynn writes on Facebook:
Ah, I had a feeling something would show up–and there it is. The Dream Syndicate playing “John Coltrane Stereo Blues” in Todos Santos last Saturday with John Paul Jones and Peter Buck (with Linda Pitmon and Josh Kantor) And check out JPJ’s solo around the 7 minute mark. Amazing–I was flashing back to seeing Led Zep at the Forum back in 1976.
Here’s The Dream Syndicate doing the Velvet’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll” at the festival:
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James Mercer of The Shins and Danger Mouse have this duo thing they call Broken Bells. They were on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” last night and performed two songs off their album, After the Disco, which will be released Tuesday Feb. 4, 2014.
“Holding On For Life”:
“After the Disco”:
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