things twice

Two things in particular make Tell Tale Signs a god-send for the Dylan analyst. One is that it shows how tightly interconnected Dylan’s last three albums are, not only musically but also lyrically: text fragments and themes float between them as if they were part of the same triple album. The other is that it gives an opportunity to study the process that so many musicians who have worked with him have mentioned: that songs can change radically from one session to the next or even between takes. The three versions of “Can’t Wait” are particularly revealing in this respect.

I admit it: the chords part of dylanchords may be in a decent state (apart from the use of frames, which is sooo last century), but the articles are a mess. There’s the collected pdf volume, the selected links on the Self-ordained Professors page, the blog posts here, and the introductions to some of the albums.

I’ve now decided to do something about it. Here’s the state of affairs:

Things Twice — the book. This will always be the definitive version. If/when I do revisions to articles, this is where they are made. The layout is more pleasant than in any of the other formats. It’s a pdf file, currently c. 2 Mb.
Self-ordained …

Just to say: this is a tremendous piece of work!

And: I don’t mind Dylan leaving gems off the official albums, as long as he puts them out like this instead.

And: in a way, it’s even better like this. Hearing facets of the work of a creative mind over a limited period of time can be even more rewarding than a single shot (like an album) or a carreer-spanning tour de force (like the original Bootleg Series 1-3).

More on this later. Stay tuned.

When is Dylan at his best these days? When he pulls out his guitar once and again? Or perhaps delivers a blistering harp solo? Or when he soars to the top of his vocal register in a beautifully raw rendition of an old warhorse? Or is it on his albums, the three great artistic and commercial achievements Time Out Of Mind, “Love and Theft”, and Modern Times?

Neither. No matter how great his studio albums are, his greatest artistic achievement during the 2000s comes from a different kind of studio. A small one, by the sound of it. I recently became the proud owner of a true gem: the complete recordings of the first season of his wonderful Theme Time Radio Hour.

I’ve always maintained that Tangled Up in Blue or Brownsville Girl is Dylan’s greatest song. Well, I’ve been wrong, and I’ve known it all the time — I’ve just not been able to shake off the social pressure that his best song just had to be either something from Blood on the Tracks, wildly exploiting the Dylanesque shifts of perspective, storylines, and pronouns, or the greatest epic since Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.

But of course: it has to be a seemingly simple song, loaded with one-liners, a song which floats on a light, humorous mood all the way to the end, where everything is suddenly turned upside down — not in any way discarding what …

Most of my posts begin “it’s been a while”, it seems, and so does this one. This time, it’s been a self-imposed silence, because I’ve been busy finishing a book on lauda singing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — perhaps not your cup of tea, but it’s what I do for a living.

Anyway, my real book is coming along as well — my collected writings about Dylan and his music — and I’ve wrapped up another article, this time an extended translation of the article I wrote for the Norwegian philosophical journal Agora last spring. It’s a survey of some traits of Dylan’s musical carreer, seen as a pulse of phases of appropriation, internalization, and moving on, almost …

Some years ago, I got an email which surprised me, to say the least. It bore the title “Dylan with no harp!”, probably in response to something I had written about that, and was from a certain César Díaz. Not something that happens every day, to be sure, that I’m contacted by one of Dylan’s former guitar players.

He wrote:
When I was his tech before I joined the band, I always made sure that there would be plenty of harmonicas for him to use, in minor keys, sharps and flats — you name it I had it.

After I left to have my liver transplant, the new tech never bothered to ask me how I handled Bob. Consequently he began giving Bob …

“Agora: Journal for Metaphysical Speculation” — sounds exciting, right? If one is not thrilled by the prospects of 450 pages of metaphysical speculation, it may make it more interesting to know that well over 300 of them are about Bob Dylan. . .

Agora is a scholarly journal of philosophy, which in my early university days was a major source of inspiration. It was therefore a great honour to be asked to write an article for it for an upcoming special issue about Dylan. Now it’s out, and apparently it is sold out already, at least in the Oslo area.
I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but it looks good, with articles about the lyrical project in the Basement …

It was time to order tickets again, for yet another last Dylan show I’d ever go to. I usually do that, and probably will for as long as he stays on the road. Thinking that it’s the last time, adds a certain nostalgic undertone to the experience.
After the past few years of mediocrity, the expectations were low. I can’t say I was overly prepared either, but at least I knew that the band was the same as the one I’d seen a year and a half ago, and that didn’t bode well.
Then there was the new album… A good one, for sure — must be, since it could bring the old bard to the top of all the charts in the world. Some people had voiced misgivings about the legitimacy of the phrase “All songs written by Bob Dylan”, but hey, he’s a genius, right, so he must be right, right?