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Goldberg On Dylan: 18 CD ‘The Cutting Edge’ Set Reviewed

Down the Rabbit Hole with Bob Dylan in the Mid-Sixties

By Michael Goldberg

The mysteries of the ’65/’66 recordings revealed (maybe)

How deep can you go into a song? As Greil Marcus’ two recent books, “The History of Rock ‘N’ Roll in Ten Songs” and “Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations,” reveal, there’s no limit. Alice falling down the rabbit hole to discover a subterranean landscape dotted with surreal characters such as the “mad” Hatter, the White Rabbit and a hookah smoking caterpillar, has nothing on Marcus, who takes a song as deceptively simple as Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s 1928 recording “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground” and finds lost continents in its strange lyrics.

It’s no coincidence that Marcus is obsessed with Bob Dylan, the master of bottomless songs; Marcus has written entire books delving into what he hears in Dylan’s recordings. He’s been digging Dylan even longer than I have, and I’ve been in the Dylan Zone for 50 years.

I read “Three Songs…” just prior to the arrival of the Collector’s Edition of The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series Vol. 12, a pricey ($599) 18 CD set that contains “every note recorded during the 1965-1966 sessions,” according to a Sony press release, as well as a CD of recordings made in hotel rooms while Dylan was touring during those years that include some wonderful, apparently never completed Dylan originals. Now if only they’d released all the live recordings, but perhaps that’s in the works, hint, hint…

Just so you understand, 18 CDs translates to over 18 hours of music. Close to a full day and night’s worth of Bob Dylan recording the albums that set a new standard for what rock ‘n’ roll records could be, and to this day influence musicians the world over. Many of the songs on those albums are deep. They are songs with trap doors and secret passages, songs that confound, defy, deny, and mystify.

Here was an opportunity to explore not only the depth of the songs recorded during the sessions that produced Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde, but a rare look at the creative process of an artist at the top of his game: Bob Dylan attempting many takes of some songs, radically changing his approach from take to take in some cases while making minor changes in others. Dylan cracking jokes and cracking up.

BD1_Bootleg 12ed_ (c) Don Hunstein copy

“Like a Rolling Stone” Turned My World Upside Down

I’d just turned 12 the first time I heard Bob Dylan. His voice from the car radio singing his Top Ten hit as my mom drove me somewhere in the summer of ’65. I had been listening to rock music – including songs by The Beatles and the Stones and the Beach Boys and the Lovin’ Spoonful and The Byrds – for a year or so. This was different. This was “Like a Rolling Stone.” This was the ecstatic transmuted into a six minute, thirteen second recording.

That song changed me. There was rebellious fury in Dylan’s voice, in how he sang his Beat lyrics about class privilege and the fall from grace, in how he sang a song that managed to say what it took F. Scott Fitzgerald a whole novel, “The Beautiful and the Damned,” to say. But though I related to the lyrics, what slayed me was the music. And more. Dylan’s voice and the sound of that record made me know one didn’t have to go along with the rules society imposed, that there was another way to live. That it was possible to be fully alive, and not sleepwalk through life.

Or as Dylan sang, “It’s life, and life only.”

So for me, perhaps the pièce de résistance here are the complete studio recordings of “Like a Rolling Stone,” all 20 of them. As it turns out you can also get them on the much less expensive 6 CD Deluxe Edition; for many that will be the way to go. And let me be clear here: the 18 CD set is only for the total obsessives, the immoderates, of which I am one.

Listening chronologically to all the takes of “Like a Rolling Stone” provides a kind of fly on the wall view of how Dylan and a crew of extremely talented musicians – on the first day the song is attempted: Michael Bloomfield on guitar, Al Gorgoni on guitar, Paul Griffin on organ, Frank Owens on piano, Joseph Macho Jr. on bass and Bobby Gregg on drums; and on the second day: Bloomfield, Griffin on piano, Macho Jr., Gregg and the addition of Al Kooper on organ and Bruce Langhorne on tambourine – succeed against all odds in recording one of the great rock ‘n’ roll records.

In the epitaph to his 2005 book, “Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads,” Greil Marcus describes in detail what happened during the “Like a Rolling Stone” sessions based on listening carefully to the session tapes. When I read his book in 2011, I wanted so bad to hear what Marcus had described. His writing made me feel as close to being there in the studio as I imagined one could ever get.

I was wrong. Miracle of miracles! Now we can actually listen for ourselves, we can get even closer, we can listen in on a historic moment in rock history, when everything fell apart, then came together for those six minutes, 13 seconds – musicians, producer, singer, words, melody – and fell apart all over again.

As Marcus has written, and as is clear when you listen, nothing was going right. When they start in on the song at Columbia Studio A in New York, near the end of a long session on June 15, 1965 that has already found these musicians cutting ten takes of “Phantom Engineer” (the song that was retitled “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”), and seven takes of “Sitting On a Barbed Wire Fence,” Dylan admits, “My voice is gone.”

Soon they pack it in, only to pick up where they left off the next day, which is to say, during the first few takes the song remains out of reach. It doesn’t have a hook to pull you in from the first notes, Michael Bloomfield hasn’t found the guitar riffs the song needs, Al Kooper is searching for what to play on organ, and Dylan hasn’t found the right tempo or pacing, nor settled on how he should sing his bitter words.

As I listened, first to the January 15 recordings, then the first few takes cut the next day, lost in the moments of those takes, despite knowing that Dylan and the band had eventually pulled it off, I started to have my doubts. It was as if they’d taken a wrong turn and were miles from the song. And then, amazingly, with the fourth take they hit pay dirt. Only they weren’t sure, and recorded ten more takes, once again losing their way.

Read the rest of this essay at Addicted To Noise.

– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post –

Video: Watch/Listen to Previously Unreleased ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’

BD1_Bootleg 12ed_ (c) Don Hunstein copy

More from the upcoming Bob Dylan set, The Cutting Edge 1965–1966: The Bootleg Series Vol. 12. I’ve been listening to an advance and although I haven’t yet gotten through all the music, what I have heard is amazing.

Here is a version of “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” The footage is fascinating; this version of the song is excellent.

Enjoy!

Here’s the same video on YouTube incase the previous from Vevo doesn’t play:

And here’s the version released on “Bringing It All Back Home.”

– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post –

Audio: Listen to Bob Dylan’s Rare ‘Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence’ Right Now!

BD1_Bootleg 12ed_ (c) Don Hunstein copy

Come November 6 the latest in Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series sets, The Cutting Edge 1965-1966: The Bootleg Series Volume 12 , will be released.

Today we get a taste with this previously unreleased version of “Sitting on a Barbed Wire Fence,” a track cut in 1965. The song never made an official Dylan album until 1991, when a different version was included on the first Bootleg Series set.

This is quite awesome. Dig the great Michael Bloomfield on lead guitar.

New version:

Here’s the version released in 1991:

– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post –

Video: Watch DxE Protest Rock San Francisco

DxE protesters block Geary Street outside Macy’s.

DxE did three protests advocating animal liberation on Saturday, May 23, 2015 in San Francisco. This video shows excerpts from all three protests.

A Days Of The Crazy-Wild blog post –

Audio: Bob Dylan Sings ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ – May 5, 2015 – Houston, Texas

Previously three full songs – “Things Have Changed,” “Workingman’s Blues #2” and “Stay With Me” – plus some of “She Belongs To Me,” all from Bob Dylan’s show at the Bayou Music Center in Houston, Texas on May 5, 2015, were posted at YouTube.

A few hours ago another song, “Blowin’ In The Wind,” from that show went online.

Here it is:

“Blowin’ In The Wind”:

If you missed the others, here they are:

“Things Have Changed” and some of “She Belongs To Me”:

“Workingman’s Blues #2”:

“Stay With Me”:

– A Days Of the Crazy-Wild blog post –

Video: Bon Iver Covers Spoon’s ‘Inside Out’ – Watch Now!

Bon Iver’s new video finds him covering Spoon’s “Inside Out.” It’s a very low-key, moody version.

Here’s a live version by Spoon on Austin City Limits:

– A Days Of The Crazy-Wild blog post –

BOAA, DXE PROTEST (DEAD) GOAT FESTIVAL IN SAN FRANCISCO

Security guard stands by during protest at the goat cooking demonstration. Photos by Michael Goldberg

Today I joined a group of animal activists in protesting a grotesque annual event held at the Ferry Building in San Francisco called the Goat Festival.

You can read an excellent report about the event by my wife Leslie Goldberg at her Vicious Vegan blog.

Here’s the beginning of her post:

BOAA, DXE PROTEST GOAT FESTIVAL IN SAN FRANCISCO

By Leslie Goldberg

We were at the annual Goat Festival in San Francisco to cause a disruption Saturday. Yup, this morning I wasn’t pecking at my keyboard spouting off about animal rights or about the environment disaster caused by animal food consumption, but rather I took it to the streets with the animal rights groups DXE (Direct Action Everywhere) and BOAA (Berkeley Organization for Animal Advocacy).

The disruption was successful: By chanting (loudly) and holding up signs we managed to make it almost impossible to give a cooking goat sausage demonstration.

A small group of foodies had gathered under a tent in front of the Ferry Building to watch John Stewart-Streit show how to fry up the flesh of a goat and to also have some samples. Stewart-Streit owns a restaurant in Oakland that serves “house-butchered porcine delights.” The onlookers sat on folding chairs apparently unaware they were about to experience an animal rights protest up close and personal.

Security, on the other hand, was aware there was to be a disruption. There were about eight San Francisco police officers and private security guards standing around. The cops kept talking into their radios. The security officers seemed annoyed.

As the goat cooking demo got started and the chef started talking about the “pleasures” of goat consumption, one activist who had been sitting in the audience stood up, and holding a poster of a dog kissing a goat, faced the audience and explained (loudly) about how goats feel, suffer, experience joy and love their families just like us.

Read the entire post here.

– A Days Of The Crazy-Wild blog post –

Video: Watch New Lykke Li Clip For ‘Never Gonna Love Again’

Photo via Lykke Li’s Facebook page.

Here’s Lykke Li’s latest video. This one is for “Never Gonna Love Again,” off her most recent album. I Never Learn, released in 2014.

Directed by Philippe Tempelman.

And if you missed it, check out David Lynch and Lykke Li’s “I’m Waiting Here.”

– A Days Of The Crazy-Wild blog post –

Video: Ben Gibbard, Mark Kozelek Do ‘Black Sun,’ ‘Such Great Heights’ & More

Recently – February 23, 2015 – Ben Gibbard performed a set at Noise Pop with the help of the brilliant Mark Kozelek and Death Cab touring keyboardist Zac Rae.

Here are three songs they did that night.

“Black Sun”:

“Such Great Heights”:

“No Room In Frame”:

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

[I published my novel, True Love Scars, in August of 2014.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book. Read it here. And Doom & Gloom From The Tomb ran this review which I dig. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]

Video: Bob Dylan Goes Noir For New Video, ‘The Night We Called It A Day’

If you’ve even seen the great Film Noir classics “Double Indemnity,” “Detour” or Orson Welles “Touch Of Evil,” than you know what Bob Dylan is up to in his new video for the song “The Night We Called It A Day” off his latest album, Shadows In The Night.

The black and white video finds characters played by Dylan, Tracy Phillips and Nash Edgerton involved in some kind of double double cross that involves a diamond ring and a double murder.

Check it out:

And if you haven’t already, read my column about Shadows In The Night.

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

[I published my novel, True Love Scars, in August of 2014.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book. Read it here. And Doom & Gloom From The Tomb ran this review which I dig. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]