Category: announcements

Another Self Portrait

Just a quick note to say that I’m looking forward to the release of the Bootleg Series vol. 10, Another Self Portrait, which will highlight the very interesting period around 1970, seeing the controversial releases of Self Portrait and New Morning.

Since I consider this to be one of the two, perhaps three most interesting periods in Dylan’s career (the others being the gospel years and the early 90s) (not that I don’t like the early and mid 60s), while at the same time having previously sided with those who said: “What’s this shit?” about Self Portrait when it came out, I’m especially looking forward to setting thing straight concerning why I consider SP a bad album.

Which I do.

And for the right reasons.

Stay tuned!

Would you pay for tabs?

Back when I closed down the site in 2006, I was in touch with the Dylan folks to try to get some kind of an official status for the site. It stranded because the licencees for the sheet music sales didn’t like the idea.

My guess is that these “licencees” are just some branch of the Dylan corporation, but be that as it may: Might they be pacified if there were money in this?

So I was thinking: what about some kind of iTunes-like arrangement? A moderate subscription fee — small enough to be negligible in most people’s wallets, but enough to generate some income for the licencees? Perhaps a two-level thing: official album version available for free — everything else (outtakes — such as the NY BOTT tabs — live versions, covers, etc.) available to members?

How many of you would pay for that kind of arrangement?

What’s in it for me?

For me, there would be huge benefits. First and foremost, I could run the site without having to be constantly on the alert for the cease-and-desist letter — I could be more official about it whenever that would be an advantage.

I would also be able to dedicate myself more whole-heartedly to the undertaking. If the pace of the updates has declined drastically, it is partly because I’m basically done with the official albums, partly because I’m not as enthusiastic about his live achievement anymore, but mostly because some of the fun went out of it the more I looked over my shoulder. Much as I admire the courage of the pirates and the wikileaks folks, I’d rather not be one of them — at least not in this particular area.

And I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t add: the possibility of making, if not a living, then at least generating some revenue out of something that I believe to be of some value.

What’s in it for you?

More frequent and consistent updates, obviously. But I might also think of other benefits: a closer and more active circle of members, free access to extra material, either from me or from the licencees, etc. And, perhaps not least, the feeling of having contributed — Everybody must give something back for something they get, ya know.

*

Just to be clear: this post is not a warning that dylanchords is going to turn pay-per-view any time soon. I have no such plans, and I have not discussed this with Dylan or Jeff Rosen. It’s just that I’m way past sixteen, and I’d love to be legal…

So it’s purely a probe: IF dylanchords had an official seal of approval and a subscription would get you access, say, to extra material (every outtake, my newly revised tutorial, backstage tour pictures from the Dylan folks); would you —

a) consider it; and/or

b) consider it a sell-out to commercialism and a nail in the coffin of the free internet?

I’m curious to know. Please write and comment.

Lessons: update

Just a quick note to say that I haven’t abandoned the lessons series, I’ve just been having a Christmas and a headache.

What remains are: Two days of fingerpicking glory, one more chord lesson covering the thousands of chords remaining; a brief look into open tunings (with an obvious focus on Blood on the Tracks); a batch of licks and tricks; and a final lesson summing up some things that might be worth a word or two in addition to what has already been said — tuning, chord family characters, etc.

Things Twice, the book — now in html

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:

  1. 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.
  2. Self-ordained professors. This used to be where new stuff appeared, but that is no longer the case. Static html is not the most versatile format to work with, and when I moved on to greener pastures, the versions that were left here, became more and more obsolete. I therefore opted for the radical approach: the articles on the Self-ordained Professors page are now converted versions of whatever is found in the pdf version. This makes them an inferior option, for several reasons: some of the layout is lost, the images are of a horrible quality, and the way the footnotes appear is a bit cumbersome (and I care a great deal about my footnotes!). All in all, this should only be an option if you don’t fancy a 2 Mb download.
  3. Finally, there’s Things twice — the blog — this place right here. This is the place for experiments, drafts, work-in-progress. In other words, it will never be the final version of anything, but it’s where you have a chance to comment. There has been a time when there was more activity here than now, but let me also take this opportunity to say that some of the articles could not have been written without — and others have become immensely better thanks to — the feedback I have gotten from you at the blog.

The Uneven Heart — Bob Dylan The Musician

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 like a heartbeat, hence the title “The Uneven Heart”.

The article is available as a separate pdf file or as part of the full book, Things Twice. There is also a plain HTML version, without the typographical niceties of the book version.

As always, I welcome comments. As always, too, there may be typos, errors, inconsistencies, the odd word in Norwegian which I’ve overlooked in the translation, etc. If you spot any such things, please let me know.

A Norwegian Bestseller

“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 Tapes; about the borrowings from Ovid on *Modern Times*; Dylan’s relationship with various American poetic genres (blues, Allen Ginsberg); his voice; his meandering path around folk music; and about the reception of “his” tradition in Norway. There is also an article by Christopher Ricks in Norwegian translation, and translations of the Playboy interview from 1966 and of some song lyrics.

All in all a very nice collection of essays. The bias towards lyrical and “sociological”(-ish) analysis is somewhat balanced out by the article about “Dylan the Musician” by yours truly.

Thus, if you can read Norwegian and want something to lighten up the September evenings, this might be it.

If you can get hold of a copy, that is.

A New Home

The blog has been down for a while. How long, I don’t know, and that’s embarrassingly revealing of my recent neglect of the site. In any case, I decided to move the whole thing to my own webspace, and it seems that the transition has worked out nicely.
Not that I was dissatisfied with the former home. From the day that I registered dylanchords.com and left the old, catchy hem.passagen.se/obrecht/backpages/chords, and until I decided to take down the site, around Christmas 2005 because of the threats from the recording/publishing industry, the site has been hosted nicely from a secret location in Gothenburg — may thanks, Oskar! — and the blog remained there until today.
But since I already had this other domain, I figured I might as well use it.
A change of hosting and domain name doesn’t necessarily mean that the contents will have to change, but I do take it as an opportunity to be more general in what I write about. That was the original intention, but somehow I ended up writing mostly about Dylan anyhow. My intention is to go back to the original concept, of a blog about culture, music, opinion, and the political and human aspects of technology.
But not to worry: there will be some things here about Dylan too.

Things Twice – The Book

For various reasons, I’ve put my Dylan-oriented writings together to a book. It is available for download at http://www.dylanchords.com/tt.pdf (2 Mb).
The main reason I have done this has nothing to do with Dylan, but more with Seal: it’s an experiment in LaTeX, inspired by the wonders of this typesetting environment, gradually revealed to me through Seal, which gave me the urge to try it out myself.
Another reason is the long period of inactivity here. I guess I felt that something needed to happen.
The third reason, and the most direct one, is the Lonnie series, which I thought I had brought to a conclusion. As it happened, I still had more to say. I have extended it with a practical demonstration in a concrete analysis of three versions of Mr Tambourine Man, which I consider prime examples of the method. This is included as a new chapter in the book.

Other than that, the book contains most of the articles that are already available in the Professors section of the site, but I have also added some stuff which is not there (teaser…). The new stuff is: the rewritten Lonnie chapter, the follow-up about the Three Tambourine Men, an article I wrote for Judas! a while back, about Dylan’s concept of beauty (yes, he has one…!), and a short piece about In The Garden. I have also rewritten and updated several of the other articles. Eventually, I may re-incorporate the changes into the webpages, but from now on, I consider the book the main source.

The music examples to the analysis of the T-Men can be downloaded separately, both as midi-files and as pdf-files. Get them here.

All the music examples in the book have been produced with Lilypond, a free, open-source music typesetter which is quite similar to LaTeX: plain-text input, steep learning curve, but superb output, once one gets to know the machinery. Highly recommended.

As this is a learning experiment, there are still some things that are not perfect — some figures that are missing, some hyphens which ought to be en dashes, etc. Bear with me — I will clean it up, eventually.

Happy reading!

The Irony of commercialism

I have a spam filter on this blog. That’s one of the mixed blessings of blogging: once in a while I get bombed with comments like “Like your page, interesting comments” and then fifteen links to online casinos, phentermine, cialis and texas holdem. Most of them never see the light of day, thanks to efficient blocking.
The downside is that once in a while a legitimate post gets trapped too. Usually it’s transparent enough so that those comments end up in “purgatory” and I have to approve them manually (which is why some of you may have experienced a considerable delay before your comments appear on the site), but occasionally, they are sent to “spam hell”.

The irony is that one of the words that trigger this, is “free”.
Freedom’s just another word for something you can buy.

Sad, that’s what it is.