Lyrics - Bob Dylan Lyrics
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Bob Dylan's influence on popular music is incalculable. As
a songwriter, he pioneered several different schools of pop
songwriting, from confessional singer/songwriter to
winding, hallucinatory, stream-of-conscious narratives. As
a vocalist, he broke down the notions that in order to
perform, a singer had to have a conventionally good voice,
thereby redefining the role of vocalist in popular music.
As a musician, he sparked several genres of pop music,
including electrified folk-rock and country-rock. And that
just touches on the tip of his achievements. Dylan's force
was evident during his height of popularity in the '60s —
the Beatles' shift toward introspective songwriting in the
mid-'60s never would have happened without him — but his
influence echoed througho More...
Bob Dylan Lyrics List:
(Submit New Bob Dylan Lyrics)10,000 Men Lyrics2 x 2 Lyrics4th Time Around LyricsA Fool Such as I LyricsA Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall LyricsA Satisfied Mind LyricsAbandoned Love LyricsAbsolutely Sweet Marie LyricsAin't No Man Righteous (No Not One) LyricsAin't No More Cane LyricsAin't Talkin' LyricsAlberta #1 LyricsAlberta #2 LyricsAll Along the Watchtower LyricsAll I Really Want to Do LyricsAll Over You LyricsAll the Tired Horses LyricsAngelina LyricsApple Suckling Tree LyricsAre You Ready? LyricsArthur McBride LyricsAs I Went Out One Morning LyricsBaby, I'm in the Mood for You LyricsBaby, Let Me Follow You Down LyricsBaby, Stop Crying LyricsBallad in Plain D LyricsBallad of a Thin Man LyricsBallad of Hollis Brown LyricsBand Of The Hand LyricsBelle Isle LyricsBessie Smith LyricsBeyond The Horizon LyricsBig Yellow Taxi LyricsBilly 1 LyricsBilly 4 LyricsBilly 7 LyricsBilly (Main Title Theme) LyricsBlack Crow Blues LyricsBlack Diamond Bay LyricsBlackjack Davey LyricsBlind Willie McTell LyricsBlood in My Eyes LyricsBlowin' in the Wind LyricsBlue Moon LyricsBob Dylan's 115th Dream LyricsBob Dylan's Blues LyricsBob Dylan's Dream LyricsBoots of Spanish Leather LyricsBorn in Time LyricsBorn In Time (Live Version) LyricsBroke Down Engine LyricsBrownsville Girl LyricsBuckets of Rain LyricsBunkhouse Theme LyricsBye And Bye LyricsCall Letter Blues LyricsCan't Help Falling in Love LyricsCan't Wait LyricsCan You Please Crawl Out Your Window? LyricsCanadee-i-o LyricsCantina Theme (Workin' for the Law) Lyrics
Caribbean Wind LyricsCat's in the Well LyricsCatfish LyricsChanging of the Guards LyricsChimes of Freedom LyricsClean-Cut Kid LyricsClothes Line LyricsCocaine Blues LyricsCold Irons Bound LyricsCold Irons Bound (Live Version) LyricsCopper Kettle LyricsCorrina, Corrina LyricsCountry Pie LyricsCovenant Woman LyricsCry Awhile LyricsDark Eyes LyricsDay of the Locusts LyricsDays of 49 LyricsDead Man, Dead Man LyricsDear Landlord LyricsDeath is Not the End LyricsDelia LyricsDesolation Row LyricsDiamond Joe LyricsDignity LyricsDirge LyricsDirt Road Blues LyricsDisease of Conceit LyricsDo Right to Me Baby LyricsDon't Fall Apart on Me Tonight LyricsDon't Think Twice, It's All Right LyricsDon't Ya Tell Henry LyricsDown Along the Cove LyricsDown in the Flood LyricsDown the Highway LyricsDrifter's Escape LyricsDriftin' Too Far from Shore LyricsEarly Mornin' Rain LyricsEmotionally Yours LyricsEndless Highway LyricsEternal Circle LyricsEve of Destruction LyricsEvery Grain of Sand LyricsEverything is Broken LyricsFarewell Angelina LyricsFather of Night LyricsFinal Theme LyricsFixin' to Die LyricsFloater (Too Much To Ask) LyricsFolsom Prison Blues LyricsFoot of Pride LyricsForever Young LyricsFrankie & Albert LyricsFreight Train Blues LyricsFroggie Went a Courtin' LyricsFrom a Buick 6 LyricsGates of Eden LyricsGirl of the North Country LyricsGod Knows LyricsGoin' to Acapulco LyricsGoing, Going, Gone LyricsGolden Loom Lyrics
Gonna Change My Way of Thinking LyricsGospel Plow LyricsGot My Mind Made Up LyricsGotta Serve Somebody LyricsGotta Travel On LyricsGrand Coulee Dam LyricsHad a Dream About You, Baby LyricsHandsome Molly LyricsHandy Dandy LyricsHard Times LyricsHard Times in New York Town LyricsHazel LyricsHe Was a Friend of Mine LyricsHeart of Mine LyricsHighlands LyricsHighwater (For Charlie Patton) LyricsHighway 51 Blues LyricsHighway 61 Revisited LyricsHonest With Me LyricsHoney, Just Allow Me One More Chance LyricsHouse Carpenter LyricsHouse of the Rising Sun LyricsHurricane LyricsI'll Be Your Baby Tonight LyricsI'll Keep It with Mine LyricsI'll Remember You LyricsI Am a Lonesome Hobo LyricsI and I LyricsI Believe in You LyricsI Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met) LyricsI Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine LyricsI Forgot More Than You'll Ever Know LyricsI Pity the Poor Immigrant LyricsI Shall Be Free LyricsI Shall Be Free No.10 LyricsI Shall Be Released LyricsI Threw It All Away LyricsI Wanna Be Your Lover LyricsI Want You LyricsIdiot Wind LyricsIf Dogs Run Free LyricsIf Not for You LyricsIf You Gotta Go, Go Now LyricsIf You See Her, Say Hello LyricsIn My Time of Dyin' LyricsIn Search of Little Sadie LyricsIn the Garden LyricsIn the Summertime LyricsIs Your Love in Vain? LyricsIsis LyricsIt's All Over Now, Baby Blue LyricsIt's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) LyricsIt Ain't Me, Babe LyricsIt Hurts Me Too LyricsIt Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry LyricsJack-A-Roe LyricsJet Pilot LyricsJim Jones Lyrics
Joey LyricsJohn Brown LyricsJohn Wesley Harding LyricsJokerman LyricsJust Like a Woman LyricsJust Like Tom Thumb's Blues LyricsKatie's Been Gone LyricsKingsport Town LyricsKnockin' on Heaven's Door LyricsLast Thoughts on Woody Guthrie LyricsLay Down Your Weary Tune LyricsLay, Lady, Lay LyricsLenny Bruce LyricsLeopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat LyricsLet's Stick Together LyricsLet It Be Me LyricsLet Me Die in My Footsteps LyricsLicense to Kill LyricsLike a Rolling Stone LyricsLily of the West LyricsLily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts LyricsLittle Maggie LyricsLittle Sadie LyricsLiving the Blues LyricsLo and Behold! LyricsLone Pilgrim LyricsLonesome Day Blues LyricsLong-Distance Operator LyricsLong Time Gone (1962) LyricsLord Protect My Child LyricsLove Henry LyricsLove Minus Zero/No Limit LyricsLove Sick LyricsMaggie's Farm LyricsMake You Feel My Love LyricsMama, You Been on My Mind LyricsMan Gave Names to All the Animals LyricsMan in the Long Black Coat LyricsMan of Constant Sorrow LyricsMan of Peace LyricsMan on the Street LyricsMary Ann LyricsMasters of War LyricsMaybe Someday LyricsMeet Me in the Morning LyricsMillion Dollar Bash LyricsMillion Miles LyricsMinstrel Boy LyricsMississippi LyricsMixed Up Confusion LyricsMoonlight LyricsMoonshiner LyricsMost Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine LyricsMost of the Time LyricsMotorpsycho Nightmare LyricsMozambique LyricsMr. Bojangles LyricsMr. Tambourine Man LyricsMy Back Pages LyricsNashville Skyline Rag Lyrics
Need a Woman LyricsNeighborhood Bully LyricsNettie Moore LyricsNever Gonna Be the Same Again LyricsNever Say Goodbye LyricsNew Morning LyricsNew Pony LyricsNight After Night LyricsNinety Miles an Hour (Down a Dead End Street) LyricsNo More Auction Block LyricsNo Time to Think LyricsNobody 'Cept You LyricsNorth Country Blues LyricsNot Dark Yet LyricsNothing was Delivered LyricsObviously Five Believers LyricsOdds and Ends LyricsOh, Sister LyricsOn a Night Like This LyricsOn the Road Again LyricsOne More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below) LyricsOne More Night LyricsOne More Weekend LyricsOne of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later) LyricsOne Too Many Mornings LyricsOnly a Hobo LyricsOnly a Pawn in Their Game LyricsOpen the Door, Homer LyricsOrange Juice Blues (Blues for Breakfast) LyricsOutlaw Blues LyricsOxford Town LyricsPaths of Victory LyricsPeggy Day LyricsPercy's Song LyricsPlease, Mrs. Henry LyricsPledging My Time LyricsPo' Boy LyricsPolitical World LyricsPositively 4th Street LyricsPrecious Angel LyricsPrecious Memories LyricsPressing On LyricsPretty Peggy-O LyricsProperty of Jesus LyricsQueen Jane Approximately LyricsQuinn the Eskimo (The Mighty Quinn) LyricsQuit Your Low Down Ways LyricsRagged & Dirty LyricsRainy Day Women #12 & 35 LyricsRambling, Gambling Willie LyricsRank Strangers to Me LyricsRestless Farewell LyricsRing of Fire LyricsRing Them Bells LyricsRiver Theme LyricsRollin' And Tumblin' LyricsRomance in Durango LyricsRuben Remus LyricsSad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands Lyrics
Sally Sue Brown LyricsSanta Fe LyricsSara LyricsSarah Jane LyricsSaved LyricsSaving Grace LyricsSee That My Grave is Kept Clean LyricsSeeing the Real You at Last LyricsSenor (Tales of Yankee Power) LyricsSeries of Dreams LyricsSeven Curses LyricsSeven Days LyricsShe's Your Lover Now LyricsShe Belongs to Me LyricsShelter from the Storm LyricsShenandoah LyricsShooting Star LyricsShot of Love LyricsSign on the Window LyricsSilvio LyricsSimple Twist of Fate LyricsSittin' on Top of the World LyricsSitting on a Barbed-Wire Fence LyricsSlow Train LyricsSolid Rock LyricsSomebody Touched Me LyricsSomeday Baby LyricsSomeone's Got a Hold of My Heart LyricsSomething's Burning, Baby LyricsSomething There is About You LyricsSong to Woody LyricsSpanish Harlem Incident LyricsSpanish is the Loving Tongue LyricsSpirit On The Water LyricsStack A Lee LyricsStage Fright LyricsStanding In The Doorway LyricsStep It Up And Go LyricsStuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again LyricsSubterranean Homesick Blues LyricsSugar Baby LyricsSummer Days LyricsSuze (The Cough Song) LyricsSweetheart Like You LyricsTake a Message to Mary LyricsTake Me as I Am LyricsTalkin' John Birch Paranoid Blues LyricsTalkin' World War III Blues LyricsTalkin Hava Negeilah Blues LyricsTalking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues LyricsTalking New York LyricsTangled Up in Blue LyricsTears of Rage LyricsTell Me LyricsTell Me That It Isn't True LyricsTell Me, Momma LyricsTemporary Like Achilles LyricsThe Ballad of Frankie Lee and Judas Priest Lyrics
The Ballad of Ira Hayes LyricsThe Boxer LyricsThe Death of Emmett Till LyricsThe Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar LyricsThe Levee's Gonna Break LyricsThe Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll LyricsThe Man in Me LyricsThe Night They Drove Old Dixie Down LyricsThe Shape I'm In LyricsThe Times They Are A-Changin' LyricsThe Weight LyricsThe Wicked Messenger LyricsThey Killed Him LyricsThings Have Changed LyricsThis Wheel's on Fire LyricsThree Angels LyricsThunder On The Mountain LyricsTight Connection to My Heart (Has Anybody Seen My Love) LyricsTil I Fell In Love With You LyricsTime Passes Slowly LyricsTimes They Are A Changing LyricsTiny Montgomery LyricsTo Be Alone with You LyricsTo Ramona LyricsTombstone Blues LyricsTomorrow is a Long Time LyricsTomorrow Night LyricsTonight I'll Be Staying Here With You LyricsToo Much of Nothing LyricsTough Mama LyricsTrouble LyricsTrue Love Tends to Forget LyricsTrust Yourself LyricsTryin' To Get To Heaven LyricsTurkey Chase LyricsTweedle Dee And Tweedle Dum LyricsTwo Soldiers LyricsT.V. Talkin' Song LyricsUgliest Girl in the World LyricsUnbelievable LyricsUnder the Red Sky LyricsUnder Your Spell LyricsUnion Sundown LyricsUp on Cripple Creek LyricsUp to Me LyricsVisions of Johanna LyricsWade In The Water LyricsWaiting For You LyricsWalkin' Down the Line LyricsWallflower LyricsWalls of Red Wing LyricsWatching the River Flow LyricsWatered Down Love LyricsWe Better Talk This Over LyricsWedding Song LyricsWent to See the Gypsy LyricsWhat Can I Do For You? LyricsWhat Good Am I? Lyrics
What Was It You Wanted? LyricsWhen Did You Leave Heaven? LyricsWhen He Returns LyricsWhen I Paint My Masterpiece LyricsWhen The Deal Goes Down LyricsWhen the Night Comes Falling from the Sky LyricsWhen the Ship Comes In LyricsWhen You Awake LyricsWhen You Gonna Wake Up? LyricsWhere Are You Tonight? LyricsWhere Teardrops Fall LyricsWho Killed Davey Moore? LyricsWiggle Wiggle LyricsWigwam LyricsWinterlude LyricsWith God on Our Side LyricsWoogie Boogie LyricsWorkingman's Blues #2 LyricsWorld Gone Wrong LyricsWorried Blues LyricsYazoo Street Scandal LyricsYe Shall Be Changed LyricsYea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread LyricsYou're a Big Girl Now LyricsYou're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go LyricsYou're Gonna Quit Me LyricsYou're No Good LyricsYou Ain't Goin' Nowhere LyricsYou Angel You LyricsYou Belong To Me LyricsYou Changed My Life LyricsYou Wanna Ramble Lyrics (Submit New Bob Dylan Lyrics)
Review about Bob Dylan
Mr Jones as carnival freak | Reviewer: Steve Borrow
------ About the song Ballad of a Thin Man performed by Bob Dylan
An irritating, pompous, besuited journo who asked too many inane questions during an interview with Bob has been immortalized as the famous Thin Man in this song. His interrogatory style reminded Bob of the William Powell detective in the 1930s Thin Man series of movies.
Bob has turned the interrogation back on Mr Jones: Something is happening, but you don’t know what it is. Do you Mr Jones?
Without being conscious of it, Mr Jones has become so institutionalized by his normative upbringing that he walks a stranger among his own people. He is a carnival freak, so hard wired with corporatist values that he no longer has a firm appreciation of reality. He works within the institutional media and his contacts have a stake in the way reality is shaped, perhaps preprogrammed to some extent. He is not permitted to think freely, but is spoon fed with “facts when someone attacks (his) imagination”.
Professors, the official custodian’s of knowledge, like the cut of his jib and he fits an acceptable model of the corporate man. He has learned a lot about social outcasts from those who were part of the legal conveyor belt, but this formalism has prevented him from tapping into the life experiences of those he pretends to understand (“eyes in your pocket and nose on the ground...you should be made to wear earphones”). He is inculcated with the selective learning derived from formal education, but it hasn’t made him knowledgeable about the world of flesh and blood, the world Bob writes and sings about. If anything, it had made him both arrogant and ignorant.
Bob’s ubiquitous circus performers make another appearance here. In place of jugglers and clowns we have a sword swallower and midget, freaks at a freak show that remind us that Mr Jones is really a performer in a theatrical sideshow and has reduced the entire exercise to absurdity.
Then we have Bob enjoying a little word play with his pun about a cow – a poor creature that exists as a milk producing factory with no critical capacity is likened to Mr Jones. If you can’t produce milk, Mr Jones, he tells him, you may as well go home. Milk is a metaphor for ideas fed to the public through the media.
Dylan's mortality | Reviewer: andy gross
------ About the song Shooting Star performed by Bob Dylan
This song, along with "Things Have Changed" and "Not Dark Yet" ushered in Dylan's mortality period, which has produced some great work. Loss, regret, anger, confusion, romance all infuse the songs of this period culminating with the spectacular "Modern Times."
The language as become more stripped down. There are still the Biblical pronouncements, but they are more intimate now; ironic and shaped by time and the erosion of a life.
"Shooting Star" with its, "Listen to the engine, listen to the bell, as the last fire truck from hell goes rolling by... It's the last temptation, the last account the last time you might hear the sermon on the mount, the last radio is playing" signals an awareness of a personal rather than social epiphany of emotional attenuation, a kind of inner apocalypse.
Wherever he goes from here, I think this Dylan song is as much a harbinger of what was to come as either "Mr. Tambourine Man," or "Highway 61."
Dylan is god | Reviewer: Curfew Gull
------ About the song Moonshiner performed by Bob Dylan
I first heard this song back in 1991 when the first Bootleg series came out. It is easily my favourite early non-Bob written song he performed. The sweet somber harmonica at the end of the song, compliments the lyrics and his voice. Dylan makes this song his own, he makes me feel like he has lived through "17 long years" of drinking. But at the time he recorded this song he was barely 21 years old.
P.F.Sloan | Reviewer: eralperdogan
------ About the song Eve of Destruction performed by Bob Dylan
If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that's his problem. Love and peace are eternal says Lennon, bullshit is global destruction politics of those nations enrolled, if exist would history reveal the truth, and this song is one of beatiful songs that P.F.Sloan had written
Dylan’s tarot reading of contemporary culture circa 1965 | Reviewer: Steve Borrow
------ About the song Desolation Row performed by Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan was embraced as the great new voice of the American folk music scene during the sixties revival, and performed at the Newport Folk festivals in 1963 and 1964 to great acclaim. His album "Bringing It All Back Home", released in March 1965, give a foretaste of the direction he would eventually take. He would move away from a standard acoustic folk repertoire and commit the unforgivable heresy of going electric.
On Sunday, 25 July 1965, Bob asserted his independence from the orthodoxy of the folk scene by switching on his Fender Stratocaster and stirring up a violent audience reaction. Four days later he resumed work on on new album, the monumental "Highway 61 Revisited". On 4 August 1965, he recorded the last track, Desolation Row, the first out-take having been made on 29 July.
Looking at the verses closely, you get the sense that Bob composed them at different times. He told Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone Magazine in a November 1969 interview that he wrote it in the back of a New York Cab. He may not have been kidding when he said that, but the spontaneity of the writing is evident from the jumble of obscure, partially formed images, and the apparent dissociation between the subject matter of each verse as they flicker past the narrator and Lady like shorts at an art film fest. The song may have been reduced to writing quickly, but the ideas were probably incubating for some time. Indeed, this is how the words and music are to be experienced. On first play, the ear picks up a particular reference, cloaked in hypnotic sound, and before it can be comprehended the images following flood through, creating an overall impression of a distorted, chaotic world of transmogrified fables and iconic references transported to this weird landscape where nothing makes sense at all. You get the impression that Bob picked up a pack of Tarot cards, sliced them up with pair of scissors, and reassembled them at random (more about this later). As we move through the verses, our mind is crowded with a whole zoo of mysterious beings. The thread linking the verses is a repetition of the mantra found in the last line of each verse: “on desolation row”.
We should be open to the possibility that Bob didn’t intend this song to have any particular meaning at all. Perhaps he was inviting us to step in and experience the display, as one does after entering an Andy Warhol art shows. He may have been intoxicated by the stream of images flowing through his consciousness at the time he composed it and, like T S Eliot, refrained from later speculation on the subject to ensure that it’s meaning didn’t become fixed. In that way the interpretations are never closed and the work continues as a living, breathing organism capable of adapting to new cultural frames of reference. To give it a particular meaning would effectual drive a stake through it’s heart and hand it over to the taxidermist. Bob has left it to the listener to make of it what he or she will. Isn’t that what happens when we view surreal art in a gallery?
In seeking to extract some meaning from the song, we need to take care not to drift too far from the symbolism employed. Bob Dylan is gifted with an extraordinary capacity to act as a cipher and to synthesize disparate strands of thought into something fresh and interesting. He tells us in “Chronicles I”, ostensibly a memoir of his early years, that he had immersed himself in a lot of great literature at that time (pre 1966). What we can say with confidence is that the songs on "Highway 61 Revisited" were influenced by his exposure to beat literature and a particularly fertile association with the celebrated poet Allen Ginsberg. There seems to be broad agreement that the song title came from an amalgam of Jack Kerouac’s novel Desolation Angels, which was published the same year as Desolation Row, and John Steinbeck’s novella, Cannery Row. Bob adds a passing reference to Cannery Row in his epic veneration of womanhood, Sad Eye Lady of the Lowlands, which came immediately after this album on the great Blonde on Blonde. The title, though, is a thinly disguised adaptation of Eliot’s title for The Waste Land.
Kerouac’s novel was written in his trademark fractured, conversational style during 63 days of isolation when engaged as a fire watcher on Desolation Peak, which is located in Cascade National Park. It is interesting to note that when asked where Desolation Row was during a KQED press conference on 3 December 1965, Bob replied: “Somewhere place in Mexico . It’s across the border. It’s noted for its Coke factory”, which is where an entire chapter of Desolation Angels was set. Of course, it is not set anywhere in particular. It is an idea, an abstract composite of many elements. In another part of his answer Bob replied: “Coca Cola machines, sells a lotta Coca Cola down there”. Beyond the obvious drug reference, I suspect it is also Bob-speak for a pervasive form of corporate American culture: brilliantly packaged and marketed, appealing to the senses, but probably detrimental in the long run. It also a possible aside to Andy Warhol art and his paintings of Green Coca Cola Bottle made in 1962. Bob associated with Warhol for a time and was gifted with a screen print Bob is alleged to have used as a dart board. Bob returned the favour by sending one of manager Grossman’s old armchairs.
Cannery Row is set in a redundant sardine factory in Monterey , which Steinbeck populates with a poor, but dignified community of social outcasts. The key character, Mack, organizes a party for one of the community that gets very raucous, resulting in the trashing of the poor fellows home and laboratory. Mack seeks redemption by organizing a second party, and the story explores the interaction of the support cast of battlers. Steinbeck described Cannery Row as: “a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, nostalgia, a dream”.
This provides an extrinsic aid to interpreting the images evoked in each verse of Bob’s epic. The influence of T S Eliot is evident throughout the whole song, which can be seen as a hybrid fusion of these three main ideas, set in the context of a Tarot reading, effectually utilizing a thematic device applied by Eliot in The Waste Land. It also uses Steinbeck’s setting of the outrageous party to present a parade of clichéd literary allusions, displaying them, as it were, through circus glass - twisted and misshapen. They are observed by the narrator and the mysterious Lady from their vantage point in Desolation Row. You see in that a parallel with Kerouac looking for smoke curling up out of the conifer forest from his vantage point near Desolation Peak .
The central meaning of the song seems to be a concern with modernism and the cold, clinical reduction of artistic endeavor, particularly in the case of poetry and song writing, to “a thing pinned and wriggling on the wall”. Poetic expression seemed in danger of become a purely elitist, academic pursuit, lacking a creative spontaneity expressive of the human condition in all of its manifestations. Wasn’t that a concern of the beats? The beat movement, on the other hand, may have been perceived by Dylan as an over reaction to this elitism, abandoning intellectual rigor altogether. And then there is subservience to market demands and the dumbing down that inevitably follows when the bean counters get to stamp the logo on everything. Warhol, in particular seems to be a concern here.
We also sense Bob’s disenchantment with the folk music scene that rejected him after Newport ’65. We know he came to reject the very notion of the protest song per se as an effective vehicle for expressing complexity. They were, he said, dead before they are performed, which brings us full circle to this idea of the poem or song having the character of a living evolving thing with an open, adaptable meaning.
Bob Dylan’s escape from the museum of folk music forms and his adoption of rock as the vehicle for expressing his more profound poetic ideas is consistent with his implied critique of elitism. How he later reconciled such a view with a song like Hurricane is problematic, but he did express it strongly around the time Highway 61 Revisited was released. If a song is given a finite temporal and spatial context, it cannot transcend that space and time. It may serve an ephemeral political purpose, but that is all. “Which side are you on?”, for example, which is mentioned in Desolation Row, was about Harlan County Miners, and in Bob’s has a specific frame of reference requiring a fixed response.
It is possible that the characters named in the song, like Dylan’s own name, are aliases for real people in the contemporary art and music scene. This was, of course, a favourite trick of Kerouac – to give his associates, Ginsberg among them, pseudonyms and write honestly about them. Perhaps he let’s us in on the secret where, in the last verse, he says:
“All those people that you mention, yes, I know them. They’re quite lame. I had to rearrange their faces and give them all another name”.
Bob fuses them composites to deepen the disguise.
brilliant. | Reviewer: Anonymous
------ About the song Positively 4th Street performed by Bob Dylan
this song is about a friend or friends that he had that he once hung out with then realized that they were superficial and were constantly trying to fit in and hide who they really were. the kind of people that take pleasure in other peoples misery and will act like they love you to your face but you know the second they turn around they would deny they even knew you. i think we can all relate with bob on this one as it seem our society just seems to keep on multiplying these types of people.
Blind Willie Mctell | Reviewer: Surfddogdude
------ About the song Blind Willie McTell performed by Bob Dylan
This song is up there with Visions of Johanna and others as mere poetic genius. The mood he creates in this song is haunting. "I'm Gazing out the window of the Saint James Hotel. And I know no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell".
The sadness is the point | Reviewer: JohnMcLaughlin
------ About the song Bob Dylan's Dream performed by Bob Dylan
I know it's not fashionable to read the artist into the lyrics or the oetic text, but in this case, it's so profoundly first-personal, coming from someone whose various masks and personae have come to cloak the young man from the Midwest, not so long before arrived in the big city, that I find it impossible to let this one go. Sadness over lost friendship cuts to the core for so many of us who have travled that road in our own waysa, of course, that it's also possible to pick it up and put it to our own uses too, so it goes both ways, inwards to the personal, and outwards to the near universal. One of the most perfect of his early songs, and one you could wish he hadn't felt compelled to write. I like PP&M, OK, but they're to tuneful, not lost enough for me. As so often, Dylan is his own best interpreter, and I could listen to this one over and over if it didn't hurt so much.
The Story of The Hurricane | Reviewer: Steve Borrow
------ About the song Hurricane performed by Bob Dylan
This is one of the best protest songs ever composed. In eleven short stanzas, Bob Dylan gets to tell the whole story of the 1966 frame-up of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, whose real crime, Bob asserts, was being a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was released on the Desire Album on 5 January 1976, just after Blood on the Tracks.
We find none of the abstraction here as in, say, Blonde on Blonde. The song unrolls like a cinematic experience with the powerful chorus reinforcing the central theme: “this is the story of the Hurricane, a man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done”. Note the deliberate “done” for “did”. Bob is championing Rubin’s cause and wants us appreciate his perspective, to have empathy for him, so he presents the narrative in a vernacular the Hurricane might use himself. The gravity of the injustice is measured by the denial of Rubin’s manifest destiny to become world middleweight boxing champion. Scarlet Rivera’s violin perfectly compliments the bottom sound, pulsing like a heartbeat to Bob’s oration – he recites the verses, rather than sings them.
Towards the end of the song, Bob make brilliant use of irony. He provides a visual snapshot of the incarcerated Rubin with his bald head, assuming the pose of the Gotama Buddha, the universal embodiment of tranquility and forbearance, and contrasts that with the real perpetrators who are free to enjoy all night cocktail parties in their tuxedos and bow ties, just like old time gangsters:
“Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise, while Rubin sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell, an innocent man in a living hell”.
Bob excels at this narrative story telling. Song to Woody, Ballad of Hollis Brown, Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, John Wesley Harding, Billy, and Joey (on the same album) are examples of this biographical song writing.
Rubin was freed in 1985 and in 1999 Academy Award winner, Denzel Washington, played his character in the movie Hurricane, which engendered a lot of sympathy for him. Rubin, now 70 years of age, is a popular public speaker making up for lost time.
The Story of The Hurricane | Reviewer: Steve Borrow
------ About the song Hurricane performed by Bob Dylan
This is one of the best protest songs ever composed. In eleven short stanzas, Bob Dylan gets to tell the whole story of the 1966 frame-up of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, whose real crime, Bob asserts, was being a black man in the wrong place at the wrong time. It was released on the Desire Album on 5 January 1976, just after Blood on the Tracks.
We find none of the abstraction here as in, say, Blonde on Blonde. The song unrolls like a cinematic experience with the powerful chorus reinforcing the central theme: “this is the story of the Hurricane, a man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done”. Note the deliberate “done” for “did”. Bob is championing Rubin’s cause and wants us appreciate his perspective, to have empathy for him, so he presents the narrative in a vernacular the Hurricane might use himself. The gravity of the injustice is measured by the denial of Rubin’s manifest destiny to become world middleweight boxing champion. Scarlet Rivera’s violin perfectly compliments the bottom sound, pulsing like a heartbeat to Bob’s oration – he recites the verses, rather than sings them.
Towards the end of the song, Bob make brilliant use of irony. He provides a visual snapshot of the incarcerated Rubin with his bald head, assuming the pose of the Gotama Buddha, the universal embodiment of tranquility and forbearance, and contrasts that with the real perpetrators who are free to enjoy all night cocktail parties in their tuxedos and bow ties, just like old time gangsters:
“Now all the criminals in their coats and their ties are free to drink martinis and watch the sun rise, while Rubin sits like Buddha in a ten-foot cell, an innocent man in a living hell”.
Bob excels at this narrative story telling. Song to Woody, Ballad of Hollis Brown, Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, John Wesley Harding, Billy, and Joey (on the same album) are examples of this biographical song writing.
Rubin was freed in 1985 and in 1999 Academy Award winner, Denzel Washington, played his character in the movie Hurricane, which engendered a lot of sympathy for him. Rubin, now 70 years of age, is a popular public speaker making up for lost time.
Moving tribute to a forgotten hero | Reviewer: Steve Borrow
------ About the song The Ballad of Ira Hayes performed by Bob Dylan
This haunting ballad recounts the story of forgotten Native American war hero, Corporal Ira Hayes, who died penniless and forgotten in 1955, a decade after featuring in the famous flag hoisting photograph following the victory at Iwo Jima. The story of that photo and the fate of Ira Hayes is movingly presented in the Clint Eastwood directed film, Flag of Our Fathers.
The song is the one redeeming feature of Bob Dylan otherwise forgettable 1973 LP, Dylan. It is not a Dylan original, but composed by Peter Lafarge, also Native American, who was a talented singer, songwriter and actor, and an important member of the Greenwich Village folk movement in the 1960s. It was recorded by Johnny Cash way back in 1964, a year before Peter’s tragic death at the age of 34.
Question marks hanging on the winds of chance | Reviewer: Steve Borrow
------ About the song Blowin' in the Wind performed by Bob Dylan
A lot of his fans regard this as the Young Dylan’s (i.e. from his folk singer period) signature anthem. It is constructed from nine rhetorical questions, which may be reduced to a single one: how long will injustice be ignored and tolerated? Bob includes within the compass of this inquiry the degradation of human dignity, war, racism, and oppression. The answer provided is probably more illusive than might first appear. He tells his universalized friend that: “the answer is blowing in the wind”. Like leaves carried upon metaphoric winds of chance, perhaps? It takes a genius to write a song like this when barely out of his teens. Peter Paul and Mary made it world famous and its seemed to succinctly express what a lot of people thought about the 1950s.
One of the greatest albums ever! | Reviewer: Boby
------ About the album Blonde on Blonde performed by Bob Dylan
So many amazing song in just one CD. you have to get this album! Best songs hre are :Visions of Johanna, I Want You
Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
Just Like a Woman
Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine ,One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)
Bob the Jokerman - this one's on us | Reviewer: Steve Borrow
------ About the song Jokerman performed by Bob Dylan
Jokerman is the outstanding track on the Infidels album, released in 1983, eight years after the celebrated Blood on the Tracks (1975). That great album was followed by Street Legal (1978), Slow Train Coming (1979), Saved (1980), and Shot of Love (1981), which all disappointed some devoted Dylan fans because of its Christian themes. Bob had evidently found a sympathetic influence in the poetry of French Belgian symbolists, Rimbaud and Verlaine, so named because of their use of complex concepts or “symbols” as poetic devices. This allowed them to convey a wide expanse of complex meaning. Bob Dylan had been developing independently in that direction for many years, as we see from his description of “A Hard Rain’s a Gonna Fall” during a 1962 interview with Studs Terkel. Each line of that song, he tells his interviewer, could be a song in itself. So, even that far back Bob’s transcendent vision could no longer be adequately conveyed by simple narrative, folk images. Blood on The Tracks expresses the maturing of that development.
Consequently, Jokerman cannot become comprehensible from a narrative reading. Each symbol, construed separately, might contribute something to an overall appreciation after all of the constituent ekements have been considered (if not necessarily understood). It’s like reading clouds or clustering stars into constellations. Every observer will see something different in the landscape.
It has been suggested that the song (I hesitate to call it a song) is an introspective response by the narrator to his status as a cultural “idol” in the context of his Christian conversion. Perhaps, but who would know? It is possible to discern some auto-biographical elements. The short video recording of Bob performing the song with his eyes shut most of the time, which is accessible on You-Tube, reinforces this interpretation, particularly the first two verses. Then it gets very abstract. It presents an intriguing parade of universal symbols (too many to list here)that leave one still guessing.
In one interview Bob conducted just fater the release of Infidels, Bob identified Afro-Caribbean paganism as an inspiration (Jumbis). Is the Jokerman an Obeah Man, perhaps? Other commentators have suggested that it is a complex treatise on Reaganism, with Ronald Reagan being Jokerman. He does appear at the end of the short video presentation.
Bob Dylan, when in the process of reducing these complex ideas to paper, may not have been entirely sure of what it all meant himself. He may have been overwhelmed by the stream of consciousness flowing through him at the time. Genius operates that way sometimes.
Whatever one takes from it, Jokerman is unquestionably an extraordinary piece of popular songwriting, a hypnotic tour de force that will reward repeated listening.
Bob goes Canadian | Reviewer: Steve Borrow
------ About the song Belle Isle performed by Bob Dylan
This charming little tune is actually a Canadian (Newfoundland) folk ballad, derived from the Irish love song Loch Erin Sweet Riverside and The Lass of Dunmore. It was included in Bob Dylan’s Self Portrait album, released in 1970.
The thin man | Reviewer: Ann
------ About the song Ballad of a Thin Man performed by Bob Dylan
You are the thin man with charme and jokes.Mr, Jones is the stupid reporter,who has no respect for your lyric!He is propably informed about gossip,the lumberjackets.You can because of your reputation not answer directly back.He also is interested in Your looking.People of that kind don´t understand anything.He doesn`t want to talk to you about your music,he wears earphones.Why at all does he come?Give the reporters back,but continue it you own way.We like as you are.yours censerely Ann:
The Best Dylan Song | Reviewer: Anonymous
------ About the song Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues performed by Bob Dylan
This song says it all about his experiences and his perception of "pop rock" life. It is no surprise that the lyrics combined with the wonderful session players made a sweet (blues tinged) yet biting indictment of so much about America that still stands the test of time. Because "up on housing project hill it is either fortune or fame - you must pick one or the other though neither of them are to be what they claim".
Prophetic street anthem for our times | Reviewer: Steve Borrow
------ About the song The Times They Are A-Changin' performed by Bob Dylan
Reviewer: sbo25100@bigpond.net.au | 3/1/2008
This song was written at a time when the civil rights movement was building a powerful momentum and the youth of the world were questioning the injustices they had inherited. It is, in one sense, a messianic prophesy and, in another, a call to arms. Bob calls on us (“people wherever we roam”) to prepare ourselves for an enveloping tide of social change that he predicts will unsettle the current order of things. He issues a plea to the keepers of conventional wisdom: parents, politicians, and writers, to accept the inevitability of this or be overwhelmed by it. The youth, he warns, can no longer be contained and will demand that your old ideas give way to their new vision. Like many of the Bob Dylan’s songs written at this time, it became something of an anthem for the international protest movement. Bob was right, of course. The times were a'changing, are a'changing, and will continue to change. Just ask Joe Hill when next you see him.
Mr. Jones is both a journalist and the ignorance of people: | Reviewer: Anni Ecco
------ About the song Ballad of a Thin Man performed by Bob Dylan
Dear Bob.Sorry my misunderstanding.Of course Mr. Jones is a reporter.He does not have his pulse at the time as you do.We seldom understand a war, before afterwards-do we?Yes the majority are dumb,we are not informed enough.Thank you for your lovely poems.You have a strange way to express yourself.You are right because as the permanent situation is now, then most of the people close their eyes for reality,because it often hurts too much to bother.The 2001 came behind us all,the leaders say thank you for your sore throat and give it back and so on.We the population are allways kept out of the powerful peoples play.After a war they won`t take any responsibility at either side,but to make it short.We love you more and more.They often undervalue the headmusicions importance.I look forward to hear more of your songs.Good luck!Sorry to be so dumb!95% of us are kept out of the rules,you know what I mean.Love Anni.
A clever man like you,stop it! | Reviewer: Anni Ecco
------ About the song Ballad of a Thin Man performed by Bob Dylan
Dear Bob.We all love you as you are.You don`t have to listen to gossip!Don`t case Mr Jones anymore.In the end He shall hate her and you shall love her!None of you can milk the cow.And don`t be suspisius!I have followed the radio songs,so I know the truth.But I think you have a heart of gold and Mr.jones has a heart of silver, perhaps,but stop arguing.Remember It was not to heart.We love Your advanced lyrics,remember that,dear Mister! Love Anni.N.B "The dumb" Don´t jumb on an illusion!Don´t let anybody heart You:"The walls have ears,once in a while"Everything has gone out of its proportions! Everybody hearts!Who of you are to trust?
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