This 1993 documentary looks at the significance of Highway 61, the road that runs south from Bob Dylan’s home
town of Hibbing, Minnesota and inspired one of his greatest albums. Produced by Arena, the acclaimed British company known for its documentaries.
It’s in four parts on YouTube but some of the audio is missing.
Part One:
Part Two:
Part Three:
Part Four:
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[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Continuing the advance promotion of Spoon’s upcoming album, They Want My Soul, Britt Daniel performed acoustic versions of two of the songs, “Rent I Pay” and “Rainy Taxi,” on BBC Radio 6.
Talking about being a musician Daniels said:
“There was a long time where there was a lot of not-fun stuff we would do and a lot of scrounging, but I knew this was the only thing I wanted to do and I just kept pushing forward. Now there’s a little more success and it really does make things easier when you get to spend a few more bucks to record a record. You can stay in a hotel instead of a friend’s floor.”
Spoon’s Britt Daniel Plays Acoustic ‘Rent I Pay,’ ‘Rainy Taxi’ On BBC Radio.
[In August of this year I’ll be publishing my rock ‘n’ roll/ coming-of-age novel, “True Love Scars,” which features a narrator who is obsessed with Bob Dylan. To read the first chapter, head here.
And if you’re interested the book is now available at Amazon.
–- A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
Fifty years ago in January of 1963, Bob Dylan flew to England and appeared in a TV play, “The Madhouse on Castle Street,” which was produced and broadcast by the BBC on January 13, 1963. Dylan was to play the lead role in the production, but once he was in England he changed his mind. Instead he played a minor character, Bob the Hobo and performed a number of songs including “Hang Me, O Hang Me,” “Cuckoo Bird,” “Blowin’ in the Wind” and the English folk ballad, “The Ballad of the Gliding Swan.”
According to filmthreat.com, the play tells “the tale of a reclusive young man who shuts himself in his boarding house room, with the declaration that he will never come out unless the world changes. In the course of the drama, the young man’s friends and fellow boarding house residents try to discover why he chose to take such a drastic and peculiar course of action. In many ways, the drama was typical of the so-called boarding house plays of British theater during the early 1960s: a motley collection of malcontent souls venting their respective fears and furies in the setting of a cheap, rundown rooms-to-let setting.”
When the production aired, the public heard “Blowin’ in the Wind” for the first time. How the song came to be part of the play was explained by it’s directer, Philip Saville,at whose house Dylan was staying briefly.
“I got up to have a pee and I heard music,” Saville told The Guardian. “I wandered along the landing and there at the bottom, because I had a little baby then, were our two Spanish au pairs. There he was at the top of the stairs, singing, and these two lovely little girls were like two little robins or starlings looking up at him. He didn’t know I was behind him, and I applauded and just said: ‘Oh Bob, would you sing that on the opening and closing of the production?’”
The film of the play was destroyed in 1968. However there is audio of “The Ballad of the Gliding Swan” that is purported to be from the film.
