Features
Friday, May 20 2011
The Ballad of Bob Dylan: A Portrait
Bob Dylan lurched toward his place onstage wearing a steel harmonica holder around his neck that made him look like a wild creature in harness, blinking at the floodlights, hunching his shoulders to adjust the guitar strap that held the Gibson Special acoustic high on his slender body.
Friday, May 6 2011
The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes
Despite or even because of its jumble of missing pieces, half-finished recordings, garbled chronologies of composition or performance -- the basement tapes can begin to sound like a map; but if they are a map, what country, what lost mine, is it that they center and fix?
Friday, December 24 2010
The Best 20 Re-Issues of 2010
The year's best re-issues are highlighted by a trio of rock gods in the Stones, Lennon and Bowie as well as a bona fide American jazz genius and a bevy seminal '70s and '80s British bands.
Friday, October 8 2010
Bob Dylan in America
Over Coppertone-slicked bodies on Santa Monica Beach and out of secluded make-out spots and shopping-center parking lots and everywhere else American teenagers gathered that summer, it seemed that the ba-de-de-bum-de-bum announcing Dylan’s hit about getting stoned was blaring from car radios and transistor radios.
Thursday, May 13 2010
Afterword: Rhymes of a Rolling Stone
Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks is a superb work of theater, a classic, albeit cryptic, tale of triumph over adversity.
Columns
Thursday, June 23 2011
Dylan As Text, Sub-Text, Ur-Text in 'Bob Dylan: Like a Complete Unknown'
This is Bob Dylan as shifting text, not just layered like pages, back or front, or over-laid like a palimpsest, but cross-wise and motile as a termite.
Friday, December 18 2009
The Big Nowhere: Rudy Wurlitzer's Rediscovered Trilogy and Bob Dylan Revisited
The myths of unspoiled frontiers and the freedom of the open road, lives played out on the margins of society, attachment and detachment, wrestling matches with the ghosts of Samuel Beckett and Louis L’Amour…
Thursday, July 30 2009
Rudy Wurlitzer, Bob Dylan, Bloody Sam, and the Jornado del Muerto
Dylan’s beautifully simple ballad captures the paradoxical fear of and longing for death that is the hallmark of Wurlitzer’s narratives and what lurks at the heart of the human experience.
Reviews
Friday, August 12 2011
Thea Gilmore: John Wesley Harding
The British singer-songwriter adds new colors in her album-length cover of Dylan's 1967 classic.
Tuesday, July 12 2011
A Document Good Enough to Eat: 'Bob Dylan: The Other Side of the Mirror'
The film showcases several songs from each year, both from the festival’s daytime workshops and nighttime concerts, and the music is often as startling as Bob Dylan’s physical and charismatic alterations.
Wednesday, June 8 2011
With Daniel Mark Epstein's 'The Ballad of Bob Dylan', Dylan Gets the Poet He Deserves
Somewhere along the way, Robert Zimmerman disappeared and became Bob Dylan the rock/folk star. Then Dylan disappeared and became a loving and thievin' Fiction.
Wednesday, May 18 2011
'Don't Look Back': Bob Dylan as Punk, Jerk and Genius
Has there ever been a more ideal subject for a cinema-verite film than Bob Dylan in 1965? As the ultimate unknowable character, Dylan invites multiple readings, interpretations, frames.
Thursday, May 12 2011
'Bob Dylan Revealed' & 'Bob Dylan 1990-2006 The Never Ending Narrative'
What's fun about Dylan is the contradictory responses he generates; one person hates what another loves and each can give good reasons for feeling the way they do.
Blogs
Thursday, September 29 2011
Musical Auteurism: Recognizing Genius
An album is not an insulated document, but rather something that breathes and grows within an artist's discography. I challenge music fans to not simply find songs or albums that they like (though certainly that has a completely worthwhile place), but to find entire discographies (from acknowledged classics to forgotten albums) to grow with over time.
Wednesday, July 27 2011
Tracks They'll Be Talking About: 5 Divisive Songs on Great Albums
Bon Iver's "Beth/Rest" is just the latest song that beguiles as many fans as it detracts.
Friday, March 4 2011
Counterbalance No. 23: Bob Dylan’s 'Blood on the Tracks'
The Man from Hibbing makes his third appearance on the Acclaimed Music list with his 1975 album Blood on the Tracks. Counterbalance’s Eric Klinger and Jason Mendelsohn are planting their stories in the press.
Monday, December 13 2010
Bob Dylan - The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964
Bob Dylan - The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964 -Columbia/Legacy [$18.98]
Friday, December 3 2010
Counterbalance No. 11: Bob Dylan's 'Highway 61 Revisited'
Counterbalance needs a dump truck, baby, to unload its head as it revisits Highway 61 Revisited, Bob Dylan's 1965 game-changer.
News
Tuesday, January 24 2012
Bob Dylan tribute album raises funds for Amnesty International
LOS ANGELES — Bob Dylan has been lauded so often as “the poet laureate of rock ‘n’ roll” that even the man himself, who for…
Wednesday, June 1 2011
Bob Dylan never stops experimenting
We may never get a precise explanation about why Dylan still suits up to play absurdly packed clubs and minor-league ballparks. The "how" he goes about it is a different story, and a reason to care about him still.
Friday, December 3 2010
Top box sets 2010: From Bowie to Beatles' Apple reissues
Though digital downloads are now the preferred format for many music listeners, you still can't beat the extras that come with a well-conceived box set.…
Thursday, August 26 2010
Columbia to release Bob Dylan's early demo recordings
Columbia Records is wrapping up a trove of early Bob Dylan recordings that will surface in time for the holidays, among them 47 early demo…
Friday, March 19 2010
Jakob Dylan steps up his game with star producer T Bone Burnett
LOS ANGELES — Jakob Dylan called in some impressive collaborators to help with his new "Women and Country" album that's coming out next month, at…
