Tag Archives: birthday

Celebrating Bob Dylan’s, Oops, I mean Robert Zimmerman’s, 73rd Birthday

In two days – May 24, 2014 — Bob Dylan will turn 73.

Well no, actually, I don’t think so.

I think Robert Allen Zimmerman will turn 73, but Bob Dylan? No way.

How can Bob Dylan be 73, when I swear just yesterday I spent several hours listening to the 25-year-old Bob Dylan perform at the Royal Albert Hall in 1966.

And in the days prior to that I listened to the 25-year-old Bob Dylan perform live in Glasgow and Edinburg, and I heard him duet with Joan Baez on “Troubled and I Don’t Know Why” in the fall of 1963.

Just this week you might have watched the 24-year-old Bob Dylan tour the U.K. via the great documentary “Don’t Look Back,” or listened to recordings he made in 1961.

Or those great Rolling Thunder bootlegs from 1976.

You could spend some time with a much younger Bob Dylan, if you were to read Robert Sheldon’s bio, “No Direction Home.”

Or hand with him during time he was hanging out with Joan Baez if you read “Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina.”

What I am suggesting here, and it’s not my original idea, certainly not, but Bob Dylan is a construct. A conceptual art piece created by a genius known as Robert Zimmerman.

And if Bob Dylan is a work of art – and certainly he is – than even as new versions of him show up on the Never Ending Tour, all of the older versions still exist, at least as long as someone made a video or a film or a recording or wrote a book.

Now I’m not saying that Bob Dylan is a role that Robert Zimmerman plays the way an actor plays a roll in a film.

In a way he does, but it’s so much deeper than that.

We know, however, that the middle class kid who grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota wasn’t an Okie. And he wasn’t a country-western singer. And he wasn’t the Beat/rock ‘n’ roll dude with wild hair, shades and leather jacket who showed up sometime in 1965.

Yet when the character known as Bob Dylan arrived up in New York in 1961 he spoke like the Woody Guthrie fan that he was, looked like he’d been hoboing around the country, and he told tall tales of a youth that he certainly never lived.

It has been said before, said more eloquently, that fiction is a means for getting to a deeper truth than non-fiction.

The Bob Dylan character that Robert Zimmerman created has shared many, many deep truths with us. He’s written hundreds of songs, and most of them are damn good. He’s enriched our lives in so many ways.

Somewhere in the world, Robert Allen Zimmerman is going to turn 73 on May 24, 2014. As for Bob Dylan, who knows.

So me, I’m wishing Robert Zimmmerman a very, very happy birthday, and I thank him for creating Bob Dylan.

[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.]

–- A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

Audio: Jonathan Richman DJs Two-Hour Lou Reed Birthday Show

Photo via Jonathan Richman’s Facebook page.

On Lou Reed’s birthday, March 2, 2014, Radio Valencia featured major Velvet Underground fan Jonathan Richman DJing an epic two-hour Lou Reed show.

You can listen right now.

Here’s the playlist:

We’re Gonna Have A Real Good Time Together by The Velvet Underground from Another View (1969/1986)
Velvet Underground by Jonathan Richman from I, Jonathan (1992)
White Light/White Heat by The Velvet Underground from White Light/White Heat (1968)
I’m Waiting for the Man by The Velvet Underground from The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967)

Jonathan discusses Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground I

I Heard Her Call My Name by The Velvet Underground from White Light/White Heat (1968)
Venus in Furs by The Velvet Underground from The Velvet Underground and Nico (1967)
Some Kinda Love by The Velvet Underground from The Velvet Underground (1969)

Jonathan discusses Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground II

What Goes On by The Velvet Underground from 1969: The Velvet Underground Live (1974)
Heroin by The Velvet Underground from 1969: The Velvet Underground Live (1974)

Jonathan discusses Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground III

Foggy Notion by The Velvet Underground from VU (1969/1985)
Sweet Jane by The Velvet Underground from Loaded (1970)

Jonathan discusses Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground IV

Sister Ray by The Velvet Underground from White Light/White Heat (1968)

Thanks Doom and Gloom From the Tomb!

– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post –

Michael Stipe Wishes Patti Smith A Happy Birthday

Michael Stipe, Lenny Kaye, Patti’s kids and others at Webster Hall wish Patti Smith a happy birthday on December 30, 2013.

And another view:

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

A Consideration of Joni Mitchell On Her Birthday

Today, November 7, is Joni Mitchell’s birthday, and to celebrate, Alex Macpherson has written a cool tribute for The Guardian.

Macpherson’s essay begins:

When it comes to confidence in one’s own talents, few can touch Joni Mitchell. When asked about a new generation of folk singers in 1990, she responded: “I don’t hear much there, frankly. When it comes to knowing where to put the chords, how to tell a story and how to build to a chorus, most of them can’t touch me.”

There was an irony to her entirely justified ego, though. It is her insistence on undercutting truisms and mythologies that makes her commentary so biting and her confessionals so piercing. What compels Blue, Mitchell’s 1971 masterpiece, is not so much raw honesty as the scientific precision with which she dissects herself – setting what she wants to believe against what she actually believes. It’s fitting that the album ends in a cynic’s stalemate: on ‘The Last Time I Saw Richard,’ she crafts a conversation in which the narrator and her former friend are both correct about each other and also lying to themselves.

For more head to The Guardian.

Meanwhile, give “The Last Time I Saw Richard” a listen: