I’m not currently aware of any major interviews with Bob Dylan from 2013 or 2014, so this cover feature from Rolling Stone will likely be the last interview that I write about for this project. There’s plenty to say, and, indeed, I’m holding some pieces back for other posts (including a couple for tomorrow). This was both the weirdest and the most eventful interview in the Bob Dylan reading this year.

Let’s start with the weird. Dylan and Mikal Gilmore get into deep water right around the point that Bob Dylan stands up at the Santa Monica restaurant that they’re in and fetches the biography of Sonny Barger that he is carrying around with him. He has Gilmore read a passage from the book that details the death, in 1961, of a Hell’s Angel named Bobby Zimmerman – who was in a motorcycle collision with another Hell’s Angel. You can see why Dylan might find this story interesting – same name and they both had motorcycle crashes. But he takes it way, way beyond that. I’m going to quote this at length here:

Yeah, poor Bobby. You know what this is called? It’s called transfiguration. Have you ever heard of it?

Yes.
Well, you’re looking at somebody.

That . . . has been transfigured?
Yeah, absolutely. I’m not like you, am I? I’m not like him, either. I’m not like too many others. I’m only like another person who’s been transfigured. How many people like that or like me do you know?

By transfiguration, you mean it in the sense of being transformed? Or do you mean transmigration, when a soul passes into a different body?
Transmigration is not what we are talking about. This is something else. I had a motorcycle accident in 1966.1 already explained to you about new and old. Right? Now, you can put this together any way you want. You can work on it any way you want. Transfiguration: You can go and learn about it from the Catholic Church, you can learn about it in some old mystical books, but it’s a real concept. It’s happened throughout the ages. Nobody knows who it’s happened to, or why. But you get real proof of it here and there. It’s not like something you can dream up and think. It’s not like conjuring up a reality or like reincarnation – or like when you might think you’re somebody from the past but have no proof. It’s not anything to do with the past or the future.

So when you ask some of your questions, you’re asking them to a person who’s long dead. You’re asking them to a person that doesn’t exist. But people make that mistake about me all the time. I’ve lived through a lot. Have you ever heard of a book called No Man Knows My History? It’s about Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet. The title could refer to me.

Transfiguration is what allows you to crawl out from under the chaos and fly above it. That’s how I can still do what I do and write the songs I sing and just keep on moving.

When you say I’m talking to a person that’s dead, do you mean the motorcyclist Bobby Zimmerman, or do you mean Bob Dylan?
Bob Dylan’s here! You’re talking to him.

Then your transfiguration is . . . 
It is whatever it is. I couldn’t go back and find Bobby in a million years. Neither could you or anybody else on the face of the Earth. He’s gone. If I could, I would go back. I’d like to go back. At this point in time, I would love to go back and find him, put out my hand. And tell him he’s got a friend. But I can’t. He’s gone. He doesn’t exist.

OK, so when you speak of transfiguration . . . 
I only know what I told you. You’ll have to go and do the work yourself to find out what it’s about.

I’m trying to determine whom you’ve been transfigured from, or as.
I just showed you. Go read the book.

Really, this was the moment, after spending fifty-one weeks doing little more with my recreational time than reading about Dylan and listening to Dylan and thinking about Dylan that I finally thought: Why in the world am I doing this? Who is this guy? I mean,  it just the sudden crushing realization that I don’t understand him AT ALL. Not even a little bit. I thought I did. I thought I had a whole thing ready to roll out tomorrow morning about this latest art show and I thought “yeah, I see what he’s doing” and then I read this interview and I realized that no, no I do not get it at all. I feel like Gilmore here – stammering out half questions, and there’s Dylan saying “go figure it out” or, more bizarrely, read this Hell’s Angels book. Seriously. I’m Mr. Jones again.

The other piece of this interview that was striking was Dylan’s discussion of race. The interview took place right before the re-election of Barack Obama. Gilmore pushes him on that topic – noting that Dylan had seemingly made some pro-Obama remarks in 2008 – but Dylan stonewalls him. He disavows his previous remarks, suggests he didn’t actually say them, or if he did he didn’t recall, or he might not have even meant it. Who knows? It’s clear that he doesn’t vote, and that he isn’t engaged at all with contemporary politics. So his comments on American race relations come from his mystical side. Here’s what he says:

This country is just too fucked up about color. It’s a distraction. People at each other’s throats just because they are of a different color. It’s the height of insanity, and it will hold any nation back – or any neighborhood back. Or any anything back. Blacks know that some whites didn’t want to give up slavery – that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can’t pretend they don’t know that. If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.

I read that without it ringing any bells, until a few hours later when I thought “Hold on, didn’t that get him into hot water in France?”. And, yes, it did. The Gilmore interview ran in the French version of Rolling Stone a month later, but almost exactly a year after that – in late 2013 – a French-Croatian group sought to bring charges against Dylan for promoting hatred. I read a few articles about that case today, and you can as well. Here’s The Guardian simply laying out the facts of the issue at the time. Here’s a New York Times op-ed giving the Croatian side, and another piece from The Forward that indicates a belief that Dylan was not speaking about the 1990s, but rather about the role of the Ustasha in the Second World War. It’s hard to say exactly what Dylan was saying, though I do lean towards the point of view put forward by The Forward myself. Finally, here’s The Guardian again noting in April of this year that the case against Dylan has been dropped, but it is proceeding against the publisher. (By the way, the conclusion drawn by Dylan’s lawyer at the end of this article seems entirely wrong given that the case is proceeding against the magazine). That does not strike me as a good resolution, but France is not exactly a country that I would turn towards for its thoughts on liberté, egalité, or fraternité in the current historical moment.

So, not a great interview. I came out of this liking Dylan a lot less and some people came out of it wanting to see him imprisoned in France. Yikes!

(This post is accidentally belated. Dylan appeared on Pawn Stars in 2010, not 2012. My confusion stems from the fact that the YouTube clip was dated 2012. Sorry to break the rules but I figured that this was worth posting anyway)

Last week I noted the poor coverage that Dylan’s trip to China received – he was accused of censoring himself when it appears that no such thing actually took place. My interest in the poor coverage of Dylan continued while reading about his appearance on Pawn Stars in 2010. Let’s set that up first.

Pawn Stars is a “reality” show set in Las Vegas in which people come into a high end pawn shop and the shop owner, Rick, haggles with them about the price of their goods. Generally external experts are brought in to verify authenticity (or not). The show is clearly scripted, particularly all of the parts in which Rick interacts with his employees and with his father.

So. In one episode Rick pays $50 for a copy of Self Portrait, which is a ludicrous sum for that album considering that he’d need to sell it at a profit. Rick dispatches Chumlee, one of his hapless employees who is used for comedic effect, to track down Dylan, who is playing in town that night (he played Caesar’s Palace on August 18, 2010 – the set included an encore performance of “Happy Birthday” for bassist Tony Garnier). So this is when that was filmed. He was in Utah on the 17th and California on the 19th, so the sequence is definitely from the afternoon of August 18. Okay. Not sure why that matters to me, but there you go.

So. Chumlee wanders around Vegas looking for Dylan. Then he miraculously finds him walking by himself towards his tour van. He approaches Dylan, Dylan signs the album, and that is that. The show ends with Chumlee back in the shop, presenting his trophy to his boss, and his boss noting that it is signed to him, which makes it valueless. Cue horns. Whaaa whaaaaa.

Here’s the video:

The scene is entirely typical of Pawn Stars, a show that, for whatever reason, I often found myself watching in hotel rooms around this time. I even saw this episode! It is not really funny, more like “funny”, and it is clearly scripted. The real question would probably be: Does Bob Dylan like Pawn Stars enough that he agreed to be on that show? And, is that a stranger guest spot than Dharma and Greg?

However, multiple entertainment news sites seem to want to run with the show’s story that the whole thing wasn’t staged. Rolling Stone has Chumlee swearing that it wasn’t a set up, a story that is impossible to believe based on the fact that Dylan doesn’t ask a basic question: “How the hell do you spell Chumlee?” Similarly, Ultimate Classic Rock just reiterates the press release. Are there people out there who believe that this might have in any way been a spontaneous event?

Anyway, there you have it. An atypical Dylan/fan interaction in 2010. You can imagine yourself as Chumlee if you want, tracking down a solitary Dylan and finding that he is nice to you. Seems pretty implausible though, based on all other accounts of trying to get a Dylan autograph in this day and age.

I don’t have another Christmas themed Dylan tidbit for 2012 (though I’ll remind you that today is an excellent day to listen to his album Christmas in the Heart!). If you’re not up for that, here’s the video for Dylan’s last ever single (to date, he may well have one next year for the new album). Returning for his third shot as director is Nash Edgerton. You’ll recall him from the brutally violent “Beyond Here Lies Nothin’” and the goofy, but still sort of violent, “Must Be Santa”. What has ol’ Nash served up for us this time? Well, check it out!

To my mind, this is, without a doubt, the best Bob Dylan music video of all time (though hold for next week….). This one is astoundingly great – it almost comes across as an apology for the gendered violence of his first Dylan collaboration. Here Edgerton uses the standard trope of the charming white doofus who chases after a woman on the street (a staple of perfume ads during my youth in particular) and turns it delightfully on its ear. Every time through Edgerton ups the levels in very unexpected ways. The narrative through line here is, again, very violent, but this time it is a kind of comic violence that works.

I also enjoy the (almost unrelated) shots of Dylan and his bizarre entourage of hispanic tough guys and a guy oddly dressed in Kiss gear (seriously, WTF?) striding down the streets until they walk right over our erstwhile hero. I love this video. It’s just one of my most favourite things of this whole year.

I’m also quite fond of the song, the first on Tempest, Bob Dylan’s 35th album (about which more on Saturday). Ironically, since I didn’t much care for Together Through Life, partly because of the collaboration with Robert Hunter, this is one of the things I like best about Tempest – the only collaboration with Hunter. You just never know. Musically, this is the liveliest song on the album: it owes a lot to his earlier “Thunder on the Mountain” but also to “K. C. Moan” a Memphis blues song that even includes some of the same lyrics.

Good song, great video. Merry Christmas!

As I noted yesterday with regards to the passing of Joe Cocker, I haven’t spent much time this year thinking about cover versions of Bob Dylan. A couple of blog posts, but that’s about it. I could probably write for another whole year on the subject of Dylan covers, but I’m not going to do that.

I initially thought that I would skip the quadruple Dylan covers album Chimes of Freedom: The Songs of Bob Dylan Honoring Fifty Years of Amnesty International that was released in January 2012 except to note that they use his version of the title track as the last song. But you know how it goes, and I turned the album on while doing Christmas wrapping and wound up listening to the whole thing.

In a nutshell: It’s pretty bad.

Here’s the problem. More than any other singer, Bob Dylan is the best re-inventor of his own music. The process is constant – there is always a newer version of a song coming around in his live performances. Tempos change, keys change, even lyrics change. With certain Dylan songs you can get the sense that he’s performed it dozens of different ways. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for others to come in and “make the song their own”. Sure, there are artists who have done Dylan better than Dylan (Jimi Hendrix, Joan Baez), but that seems to come from a place of deep understanding of the songs. A quadruple CD like this, on the other hand, seems to have attracted a lot of limp versions.

I’m not going to name names of poor performances, but there are a number of people here who seem to just want to mimic Dylan (Mick Hucknell, sorry can’t help naming him). Sometimes mimickry works out just fine (Jackson Browne’s “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”), but usually it is just a waste of time. There are a lot of bands here who want to layer on loud guitars and shout some angry Dylan lyrics (Rise Against, Bad Religion, My Chemical Romance, State Radio), and the idea of listening to an epic version of Dave Matthews Band singing “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” was more than I could bear. So much of the album is just bland and not worth hearing (including a few true disappointments from people I otherwise generally always like, including Lucinda Williams and Kris Kristofferson).

Here are the ten best contributions in descending order.

10.  Thea Gilmore “I’ll Remember You”. I will admit that I wasn’t aware of Gilmore before hearing this, but quick research showed me that Joan Baez personally asked her to be the opening act on one of her tours. That makes perfect sense. This is a very traditional British folk version of this song, but it is beautifully sung. I’ll look Gilmore up when this project is finished.

9. Michael Franti “Subterranean Homesick Blues”. Franti is someone who I was once a big fan of but haven’t followed in literally forever. I owned everything by the Beatnigs and by Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, but sort of bailed out around the Spearhead period. This is a lively, fun version of this song that reminded me why I used to like this guy. He just sort of funks this one up, which is all it really needed.

8. Billy Bragg “Lay Down Your Weary Tune”. Dylan wrote this in 1963 but left it off The Times They Are a-Changin’ (it surfaced twenty years later on Biograph). This is a pretty straightforward version of this, and Bragg owes almost everything he is to the influence of Dylan, but it is the best version of someone other than Dylan doing the Dylan version of the song on the whole album.

7. Sinead O’Connor “Property of Jesus”. Weird one. O’Connor’s voice is filtered here so as to make it sound like it is behind the instrumentation – like she’s singing through a megaphone – and she hollers a lot of the lyrics, even though her vision isn’t all that angry (by O’Connor standards, at least). Still, it’s an interesting take and moreover, credit to Sinead for picking an obscure Dylan song that fits her perfectly. She’s been through an awful lot in her life, but this expression of faith is fascinating.

6. Miley Cyrus “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”. Yeah, it surprised me too. I didn’t know what I was listening to when I looked up to find out that it was pre-twerking Cyrus. I can identify exactly no other Miley Cyrus songs, but I wasn’t aware that she had such a good voice. I look forward to listening to the mature Miley Cyrus covering Loretta Lynn songs about thirty years from now.

(This one got an actual official video!)

5. Dierks Bentley “Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)”. I don’t listen to a lot of contemporary country, so I was unaware of Dierks Bentley, but now I’m interested in him. This is a lovely bluegrass version of this with plenty of fiddle and banjo, and Bentley finds a new way to sing this. Another discovery.

4. Kesha “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”. This is not the most unusual version of a Dylan song on this album (indeed, the very next track is Kronos Quartet doing this exact same song) but it is by far the most successfully innovative take. Kesha is someone like Cyrus that I don’t pay any attention to, but I really appreciated this version.

3. Patti Smith “Drifter’s Escape”. Smith just gets it. She made “Dark Eyes” a better song than Dylan did, and here she takes another obscurity and breathes life into it. What can you say about Patti Smith that hasn’t been said? I should spend a year blogging about her – I’d get a nice break in the middle of the year!

2. Carolina Chocolate Drops “Political World”. I adore the Carolina Chocolate Drops – so much great banjo! – and this is a fun version of this song. They have totally remade it, and they get huge bonus marks not only for using an obscure Dylan song, but for redeeming one of his songs that I don’t really care all that much for. On most albums this would be the best thing going, if it just wasn’t for….

(Seriously! I didn’t find a video version of this! What is the world coming to?!)

1. Joan Baez “Seven Curses”. This is astounding. Baez’s beautiful, haunting version of this Dylan rarity makes it sound like it is three hundred years old. Dylan wrote this in 1963 but didn’t use (it shows up on the first Bootleg Series) during a period where he was still very self-consciously borrowing from the templates of older folk traditions. He was trying to write an “old” folk song and I didn’t think he really succeeded until hearing this. The song is about a horse rustler who is condemned to hanging and whose daughter offers herself to the judge to spare his life. It all goes horribly wrong. Baez makes it sound like a regional folk tune that is vastly older than its fifty years. Her guitar playing is exquisite, and her voice has always been so.

(Also no video of the version on the album: Below she does it live from this year, noting its variegated origins)

What this album drove home for me wasn’t just that a lot of people are terrible at covering Dylan (Seal and Jeff Beck duet on “Like a Rolling Stone” and it is horrible) but, once again, the importance of Joan Baez in the life and career of Bob Dylan. I have no idea what their relationship might be these days – do they exchange holiday cards? – but I really hope that they have a relationship. They are two sides of the same coin, and “Seven Curses” proves it once again.

As we near the end of this project, the pace of awards has also picked up. Bob Dylan regularly receives lifetime achievement awards now – from the Pulitzer to the Polaris Music Prize – and he never seems to be all that impressed to be there. 2012 is no exception. Here’s Dylan, receiving his nation’s highest civilian honour directly from the president, and he fidgets through it like he needs to go have a smoke (maybe he did).

The Medal of Freedom is given for “an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors”. The list of musicians who have won it is actually quite long (Loretta Lynn last year, Stevie Wonder this year, for example). I watched the entire half hour long ceremony (below) and it wasn’t very interesting. President Obama came out, made a couple of jokes, and then spoke about each of the recipients in turn. The others include novelist and Nobel winner Toni Morrison, astronaut and senator John Glenn, and activists Gordon Hirabayashi (who protested Japanese internment in WW2) and Dolores Huerta (United Farm Workers). There is a moment that I found a bit odd. When William Foege got his award I was struck by the disaparity: Foege was one of the people most responsible for eradicating smallpox. Bob Dylan wrote some really great songs. Part of me thinks that even Dylan was feeling a bit out of place because of that.

Edited to add this from Dylan’s 2012 Rolling Stone interview:

MG: Receiving the Medal of Freedom had to be a bit of a thrill.

I want to wrap up 2011 with a brief note on Dylan’s trip to China. In April, Dylan played a number of shows in Asia: Taipei, Beijing, Shanghai, Ho Chi Minh City, Hong Kong (twice), and Singapore. This became something of an international scandal. China had just arrested dissident artist Ai Weiwei the week before, and the irony of the American protest singer in China was a lot to take for political commentators. Rumours circulated that Chinese authorities refused Dylan permission to perform “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Desolation Row”. That seems extremely odd to me, particularly the latter, which doesn’t strike me as a very political song.

This article in The Guardian is fairly typical of the coverage that came out at the time, and it seems bizarrely misguided. Dylan is criticized for not playing “Desolation Row” in Beijing, but there is no mention of the fact that he played it in Shanghai, Taipei and Honk Kong. So if it was banned by Chinese authorities, they did a poor job of it. More likely, Dylan rotated the song out because that is exactly what Dylan does and did. His shows have had (until this year) a constant fluctuation. Dylan’s sets in China were extremely akin to the ones he did on the same tour in Australia.

This article by Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran), in The New Republic, hits the nail on the head when the author writes: “Yet I still hang on to the old-fashioned belief of my youth, when we listened to Dylan, Joni Mitchell, and Joan Baez, convinced that artists were effective because they were the consciences of their societies—because their commitment was not to any political ideology, sect, or party, but to truth. Truth that is dangerous no matter what times we live in, because it is always a call to action. Once we know it, we can no longer justify our silence.” Nafisi couches disappointment in a personal reaction that has little to do with Dylan and everything to do with her. She accuses him of “morphing into Barry Manilow” by singing love songs, which tells me that she has not spent much of the past four decades listening to Dylan.

To my fans and followers

This was the moment that my son was waiting for all year.

If you’ll recall, on my very first pos this year I noted that my son – who was eight – objected to this blog because it meant that we’d spend the year listening to Bob Dylan rather than to his favourite band, The Avett Brothers. “Without Bob Dylan there would be no Avett Brothers,” I told him. He was not impressed at all. He knew what he wanted, and what he wanted was not Bob Dylan.

Here’s the video:

We start with Mumford and Sons. I started listening to them in that short period between the time the band released their album in the UK at the end of 2009 and the release of the album in the US in early 2010. I was put onto the band by my niece, who is much cooler than I am. She knew that I play the banjo, and so she wanted to alert me to this cool new band with a banjo player. For a couple of months I was the cool middle-aged man listening to the next big thing, and then they exploded and were everywhere, so I guess they’ve achieved total mainstream status now and are no longer cool for a middle-aged man. Oh well.

Mumford and Sons were at the Grammys because they were nominated twice: Best New Artist and Best Rock Song (“Little Lion Man”) for their debut album, Sigh No More. The Grammy performance was one of the things that gave them a big career boost. Of course, two years later they won Album of the Year for their sequel Babel.

The band has become a bit of a joke, at least in the circles that I move in, because they are hipsters (trucker cap and bowtie on your banjo player is going to lead to such charges). Their own self-parodying video for “Hopeless Wanderer” (starring Jason Sudeikis, Ed Helms, Will Forte, and Jason Bateman) showed that they were at least cognizant of the way that people think about them. They are criticized for the fact that their songs, including “The Cave”, which they play here, all sound the same (slow -> fast -> banjo). I don’t care, really, I still enjoy them, and I really came to like Marcus Mumford in the documentary about the music for Inside Llewyn Davis – which he closes by singing Dylan. That said, we missed seeing them when they played here last year – the show sold out before we were even aware that they were coming.

Anyway, good opening by Mumford. I like the horns.

When the curtain pulls back, we get the Avett Brothers singing “Head Full of Doubt, Road Full of Promise” from their album I and Love and You. The Avetts were one of the rare performing acts at the Grammys who were not Grammy nominees. They were booked on the assumption that they would be nominated, but then they weren’t stupid Grammys.

I’m with my son: the Avetts are great. I’ve been a fan for many, many years. Their neo-bluegrass with post-punk influences is literally tailor made to make them my favourite band at this point in my life. I love their cryptic (Dylan-esque!) lyrics and their frenzied, funny performing style. I saw them headline the first night of the Calgary Folk Festival in 2010. I went with a friend who had never heard of them and by the end of that night they were close to being his favourite band as well – he’s even traveled to see them live without me, because that is the kind of lousy friend he turned out to be (still reading, Marc?).

The Avetts are hipsters too (well, not bassist Bob Crawford – he always seems like he’s an accountant that has been kidnapped by two crazy brothers from North Carolina), but that doesn’t diminish my admiration for them in any way, and while they’ve made a couple of musical missteps in the past few years, I still wear my Avett Brothers t-shirt almost every weekend. Plus “Kick Drum Heart” is still my son’s favourite song.

There version is “Head Full of Doubt” here is akin to the Mumfords: slow and soft -> fast and loud. It’s good, but I’ve seen them do it live better.

Then, finally, out comes ten time Grammy winner Bob Dylan and his touring band. Dylan stands in front of a line made up of the three bands, who play a lot of guitar, a lot of bass, and even two banjos as they belt out “Maggie’s Farm”. What can you say? Dylan is great here. My wife just trashed his singing and now we’re going to have get divorced. Look how happy Dylan is here! He prances! He plays harmonica! It’s great (though JLo seems unimpressed). Anyway, it’s a hootnanny.

What is really great is how happy the other bands look – particularly the Avetts – to be backing up Bob Dylan at the Grammys. It must be quite a moment for any band working that style in 2011, since Dylan is the gigantic gravitational force in the solar system of Americana, post-folk, and even neb-bluegrass.

My one knock on the whole thing is that I wish that they hadn’t had David Letterman introduce the whole thing. For me it would have worked better as a series of surprises, with the curtains dropping to reveal the next act, and then the next one. That’s not how The Grammys work though, and, besides, they pre-announced the fact that this performance would be on the show. Still, a little stage craft would have made this even better.