I thought the movie was very good but Timothy Chalamet was incredible. You can tell he really immersed himself in the role. I also thought he was funny, with a cocky sense of humor throughout.
From the SJ piece: "Still, just like Dylan has been touring for 35 years now playing unrecognizable versions of his 60s hits, while occasionally pausing to tell an old vaudeville joke..."
Norm Macdonald was a big enough Bob Dylan fan to name his only child after him. Unsurprisingly he was pretty good on the subject: https://youtu.be/ArSN_xCtdlg?t=1
In Norm’s anecdote the aged Dylan stops mid-song and to the bafflement of the audience starts shouting “Ring-Oh! Ring-Oh! Riiing-OH!” Sure enough, the lights go up to reveal Ringo Starr sitting in the audience. Dylan asks for a song request and Ringo replies “Maggie’s Farm”. Bob: “We played that one already!”
From the beginning, Dylan was very adept in obfuscating his own personality.
And later, after super stardom had been reached, go totally silent about himself.
The tales from the crucial early years (until the motorcycle accident) are all second hand, filled with awe and a lot of envy by contemporary artists and people in his life.
This movie seems to be about that envious adoration.
Maybe Dylan should be viewed as a writer of clever nonsense verse in the tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear? Carroll was an overt influence on some of the more unusual Beatles songs, but did Dylan ever mention him? (I accidentally posted this on the original SJ post instead and he graciously replied with a negative view, but I wonder if there was still anything to it.)
As I said there Dylan showed he does appreciate Victorian English verse when he said what enticed him to come out of semi-retirement and play the Isle of Wight festival in 1970 was visiting Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s home. One of his recent songs “Tin Angel” also quotes Sir Walter Scott. Dylan’s influences are highly masculine.
True. Lear and Carroll unlikely to qualify by that standard. Psychedelic whimsy seemed to catch on with the British bands even among the unambiguously straight, but it probably would earn a raised eyebrow at least from Dylan.
Teenybopper girls liked non-threatening "practice boyfriends." My late mother-in-law was a bobby-soxer who screamed through a 1945 Frank Sinatra concert during Sinatra's proto-Beatlemania craze.
If you want to have a long career, you have to shift to primarily appealing to your own sex. Later, Frank settled into being the king of middle-aged masculine cool, inheriting the throne from his friend, the founder of the Rat Pack, Humphrey Bogart, after Bogey died of lung cancer in 1957.
Bogart had a teenage wife, Lauren Bacall, but she never struck anybody as a bobbysoxer, ever.
From what I've been able to gather from online research, modern fantasy literature in English began with George MacDonald. Mr. MacDonald's use of fantasy to emphasize often discomfiting themes of realistic Christianity probably hinder his popularity today. Nonetheless, C.S. Lewis always referred to George MacDonald as his master. https://www.worksofmacdonald.com/fiction/fantasy
Macdonald’s patron was Lord Byron’s deserted wife, Anne Isabella Milbanke, the mother of Ada Lovelace. According to “Chronicles” Dylan got into Byron in NYC, who like him shared a masculine preference for poetry about people doing things in real places:
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of black and white
Meets in her aspect and her eyes
She’s got everything she needs, she’s an artist, she don’t look back
She could take the dark out of the nighttime and paint the daytime black
I very much like pre-1970s Dylan. Like many musical acts, I guess he had only so much to give. He had a distinctive voice yet would never be asked to be in a church choir. Dylan got away with a lot. Think about "Maggie's Farm." Kind of nonsense but very funny. It's one of my favorites.
The Rage Against the Machine 'Maggie's Farm' is great. Dylan was good at writing songs for other people to cover. Also, obviously, 'All Along the Watchtower'. I also dig the White Stripes cover of that one more cup of coffee song
I first heard "All Along the Watchtower" by Jimi Hendrix. I only later heard Dylan's version. The Hendrix version is more interesting. Even Olivia Newton-John's version of "If Not for You" is sweeter than Dylan's although it helps that Olivia was much more beautiful than Dylan fifty years ago. Johnny Cash covered "It Ain't me, Babe" and I'm still not sure which version I like the best, Dylan's or Cash's.
There's something about Dylan's singing as well. Obviously he is a bad singer in the normal sense, but something about his delivery is... interesting? There are a lot of bad singers who are not interesting to listen to, but Dylan is. Something about the way he emphasizes different syllables to accentuate ambiguities in the meanings of the words? Once I read an explanation of how he does it, but can't recall the source now.
Singing like many art forms has a skill component and an emotional expression component. It's difficult to learn to sing notes accurate, and hit the intended rhythm and produce the tone you want at a decent volume. That part can be learned by most, with practice. What most people never get past is putting that extra part in. It's the acting aspect of singing with which you spew some mix of emotional experience, nostalgia or the experience of being a different character. That part is much more difficult.
Dylan not so great at the technical aspects (perhaps on purpose) but could really nail the second part. He also often wrote good lyrics.
> Obviously he is a bad singer in the normal sense, but something about his delivery is... interesting?
Yet he might hold the record for most songs that have been successfully covered by others. He was so moved by Jimi Hendrix's version of All Along the Watchtower that he pretty much adopted it as his own as a tribute.
Say that to my guitar player and he will tell you that the Hendrix version was similarly inspired by Dave Mason. Yes the Hendrix version became definitive, but Dave Mason did the heavy lifting.
Agreed. My sense is that Dylan's talent as a well-covered songwriter has been more duly appreciated than his talent (if that's the right word) as a singer...
Neil Young has such a voice he wouldn't be asked to be in the church choir. But that nasal voice of his is very distinctive. It makes him Neil Young. That and some fine lyrics.
Dylan is a vocalist that occasionally was an excellent singer. Before the Flood captures a real rock star, as does the Rolling Thunder era official releases, including Hard Rain.
Viewing him as a playful humorist makes a lot of sense, and recalls his comments of derision when told about “academic study” of his lyrics: he just liked the way the words fit.
Dylan pretending to be someone else was very much of that era. The young generation wanted "authenticity" and, to paraphrase Groucho, the artists who could fake that had it made.
This was so important that I still feel the need to list my bona fides before defending (there it is again; why say defend when I mean praise or tout?) the Monkees.
As a believer in HBD I believe that most traits are normally distributed, including "sense of humor". Yet everyone insists that they have one and if you tell people that a particular friend of theirs has no sense of humor, they will take it as a personal insult
Sense of humor rots over time. Middle school boys can barely keep from cracking up. Middle aged men and women look like deer in headlights should one dare introduce an original joke into a conversation.
When I moved to LA I started a band and have had a bunch of people from ages 30-70 rotate through. We had one funny drummer. He could riff with me and build on gags and laugh and do rimshots. The other's just couldn't, like it wasn't in 'em anymore. I was sad to see him go.
Maybe life and white collar workplaces beat it out of you.
Good question. I used to be in a band that was me and three blue collar guys. They weren't especially more funny than my white collar friends but definitely more willing to talk about things, even 'forbidden' things. They had much less of a pose about them.
You might be immature, but I wouldn't assume it just because you laugh easily. IMO adults would feel a lot better if they could switch this back on.
Speaking of complete unknowns, we still don't know the identity of the woman Sebastian Zapeta set on fire in the NY subway. Really fantastic society we have going here.
I just saw some (thankfully pixelated) video. She's standing still, other people are watching, and some idiot is fanning the flames trying? to put them out! Horrifying. I'd assumed he'd knocked her out and she died alone, which is bad enough.
We really are doomed, and technology and immigrants won't save us. She was 57 yo Debrina Kawam, and she looked as mentally ill as her murderer, which may explain the lackadaisical attitude of the transit cops watching someone burn to death in front of them. It will cost at least $500,000 to get this guy convicted and $40K a year to keep him alive and imprisoned after that.
I'd rather just read Richard Brautigan. His poetry and prose were funny, and close enough in time and spirit to...whatever it is we're talking about here.
Similar adamantine masculine self-confidence in Dylan and his protege Neil Young.
Crosby, Stills, and Nash were already huge when they invited Young to join their band, and he immediately took over through force of personality.
Young's secret was he was a jock by nature (his dad was Canada's top writer of boys books about ice hockey), but a lot of childhood illnesses, such as epilepsy, kept him off the rink so he wound up developing his artistic side.
For about two weeks, Neil Young was in a band in Toronto with later famous freaky funk-meister Rick James. Until the US Navy tracked "Rickey Matthews" down for draft/desertion and brought him back to the States....
I didn't really dig Todd Hayne's I'M NOT THERE, but the idea was sound: casting the movie kaleidoscopically. Christian Bale was the only actor who didn't give a shit about doing a Dylan impersonation and just went nuts, enjoyably. Doing a square, traditional biopic in the manner of, say, Hal Ashby's BOUND FOR GLORY doesn't really cut it.
(Boyd Holbrook is quite fine as a cocaine-and-Jack-Daniels Johnny Cash.)
I was an Air Force airmen in my late teens and early twenties when Dylan hit the scene. Others went nuts over him but I didn't care much for him. I might watch the movie when it's available on streaming but I'm not going to a theater to see it.
What exactly Dylan does so much better than anybody else has been discussed by the most articulate critics for 60 years without complete agreement."
It certainly isn't his singing, which is barely passable at best (not on the level of Elvis, Sinatra, Robert Plant, Freddie Mercury, et al among the 20th century's all time greatest vocalists)
Remember mom and her friend going to see Dylan's show live ca.1964. The one thing that the friend remembered about Dylan, "He's so bowlegged you drive an 18 wheel truck through his legs"
Years later while observing him online in concert, have to say, mom's friend was 100% correct.
I thought the movie was very good but Timothy Chalamet was incredible. You can tell he really immersed himself in the role. I also thought he was funny, with a cocky sense of humor throughout.
From the SJ piece: "Still, just like Dylan has been touring for 35 years now playing unrecognizable versions of his 60s hits, while occasionally pausing to tell an old vaudeville joke..."
Norm Macdonald was a big enough Bob Dylan fan to name his only child after him. Unsurprisingly he was pretty good on the subject: https://youtu.be/ArSN_xCtdlg?t=1
In Norm’s anecdote the aged Dylan stops mid-song and to the bafflement of the audience starts shouting “Ring-Oh! Ring-Oh! Riiing-OH!” Sure enough, the lights go up to reveal Ringo Starr sitting in the audience. Dylan asks for a song request and Ringo replies “Maggie’s Farm”. Bob: “We played that one already!”
Funny story.
From the beginning, Dylan was very adept in obfuscating his own personality.
And later, after super stardom had been reached, go totally silent about himself.
The tales from the crucial early years (until the motorcycle accident) are all second hand, filled with awe and a lot of envy by contemporary artists and people in his life.
This movie seems to be about that envious adoration.
Maybe Dylan should be viewed as a writer of clever nonsense verse in the tradition of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear? Carroll was an overt influence on some of the more unusual Beatles songs, but did Dylan ever mention him? (I accidentally posted this on the original SJ post instead and he graciously replied with a negative view, but I wonder if there was still anything to it.)
As I said there Dylan showed he does appreciate Victorian English verse when he said what enticed him to come out of semi-retirement and play the Isle of Wight festival in 1970 was visiting Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s home. One of his recent songs “Tin Angel” also quotes Sir Walter Scott. Dylan’s influences are highly masculine.
True. Lear and Carroll unlikely to qualify by that standard. Psychedelic whimsy seemed to catch on with the British bands even among the unambiguously straight, but it probably would earn a raised eyebrow at least from Dylan.
Part of the reason that Brits dominated pop music after 1964 was that they were more comfortable acting effete than American boys were.
Teenybopper girls liked non-threatening "practice boyfriends." My late mother-in-law was a bobby-soxer who screamed through a 1945 Frank Sinatra concert during Sinatra's proto-Beatlemania craze.
If you want to have a long career, you have to shift to primarily appealing to your own sex. Later, Frank settled into being the king of middle-aged masculine cool, inheriting the throne from his friend, the founder of the Rat Pack, Humphrey Bogart, after Bogey died of lung cancer in 1957.
Bogart had a teenage wife, Lauren Bacall, but she never struck anybody as a bobbysoxer, ever.
I feel slightly vindicated to learn that he did record an early 2000s song called "Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum."
“Mr. Tambourine Man” has a suggestion of Lear’s “The Owl and the Pussycat”:
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-Tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose…
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
From what I've been able to gather from online research, modern fantasy literature in English began with George MacDonald. Mr. MacDonald's use of fantasy to emphasize often discomfiting themes of realistic Christianity probably hinder his popularity today. Nonetheless, C.S. Lewis always referred to George MacDonald as his master. https://www.worksofmacdonald.com/fiction/fantasy
Macdonald’s patron was Lord Byron’s deserted wife, Anne Isabella Milbanke, the mother of Ada Lovelace. According to “Chronicles” Dylan got into Byron in NYC, who like him shared a masculine preference for poetry about people doing things in real places:
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of black and white
Meets in her aspect and her eyes
She’s got everything she needs, she’s an artist, she don’t look back
She could take the dark out of the nighttime and paint the daytime black
The last two lines sound like they could be from a 1967 Rolling Stones song. Jagger probably read some Byron too.
I very much like pre-1970s Dylan. Like many musical acts, I guess he had only so much to give. He had a distinctive voice yet would never be asked to be in a church choir. Dylan got away with a lot. Think about "Maggie's Farm." Kind of nonsense but very funny. It's one of my favorites.
The Rage Against the Machine 'Maggie's Farm' is great. Dylan was good at writing songs for other people to cover. Also, obviously, 'All Along the Watchtower'. I also dig the White Stripes cover of that one more cup of coffee song
I first heard "All Along the Watchtower" by Jimi Hendrix. I only later heard Dylan's version. The Hendrix version is more interesting. Even Olivia Newton-John's version of "If Not for You" is sweeter than Dylan's although it helps that Olivia was much more beautiful than Dylan fifty years ago. Johnny Cash covered "It Ain't me, Babe" and I'm still not sure which version I like the best, Dylan's or Cash's.
In that way, Dylan is similar to Ray Davies. Any cover of a Kinks song is bound to be so much better that the original that you can't lose.
There's something about Dylan's singing as well. Obviously he is a bad singer in the normal sense, but something about his delivery is... interesting? There are a lot of bad singers who are not interesting to listen to, but Dylan is. Something about the way he emphasizes different syllables to accentuate ambiguities in the meanings of the words? Once I read an explanation of how he does it, but can't recall the source now.
Singing like many art forms has a skill component and an emotional expression component. It's difficult to learn to sing notes accurate, and hit the intended rhythm and produce the tone you want at a decent volume. That part can be learned by most, with practice. What most people never get past is putting that extra part in. It's the acting aspect of singing with which you spew some mix of emotional experience, nostalgia or the experience of being a different character. That part is much more difficult.
Dylan not so great at the technical aspects (perhaps on purpose) but could really nail the second part. He also often wrote good lyrics.
Interestingly, one ambition that Dylan, normally a huge winner, failed at was becoming a movie star.
> Obviously he is a bad singer in the normal sense, but something about his delivery is... interesting?
Yet he might hold the record for most songs that have been successfully covered by others. He was so moved by Jimi Hendrix's version of All Along the Watchtower that he pretty much adopted it as his own as a tribute.
Say that to my guitar player and he will tell you that the Hendrix version was similarly inspired by Dave Mason. Yes the Hendrix version became definitive, but Dave Mason did the heavy lifting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5VC23TeUWU
Agreed. My sense is that Dylan's talent as a well-covered songwriter has been more duly appreciated than his talent (if that's the right word) as a singer...
Neil Young has such a voice he wouldn't be asked to be in the church choir. But that nasal voice of his is very distinctive. It makes him Neil Young. That and some fine lyrics.
Dylan is a vocalist that occasionally was an excellent singer. Before the Flood captures a real rock star, as does the Rolling Thunder era official releases, including Hard Rain.
Viewing him as a playful humorist makes a lot of sense, and recalls his comments of derision when told about “academic study” of his lyrics: he just liked the way the words fit.
Dylan pretending to be someone else was very much of that era. The young generation wanted "authenticity" and, to paraphrase Groucho, the artists who could fake that had it made.
This was so important that I still feel the need to list my bona fides before defending (there it is again; why say defend when I mean praise or tout?) the Monkees.
As a believer in HBD I believe that most traits are normally distributed, including "sense of humor". Yet everyone insists that they have one and if you tell people that a particular friend of theirs has no sense of humor, they will take it as a personal insult
Sense of humor rots over time. Middle school boys can barely keep from cracking up. Middle aged men and women look like deer in headlights should one dare introduce an original joke into a conversation.
When I moved to LA I started a band and have had a bunch of people from ages 30-70 rotate through. We had one funny drummer. He could riff with me and build on gags and laugh and do rimshots. The other's just couldn't, like it wasn't in 'em anymore. I was sad to see him go.
Maybe life and white collar workplaces beat it out of you.
I laugh relatively easily, but am somewhat immature.
Maybe life and white collar workplaces do beat it out of you, indeed. Do blue-collar people laugh more easily, in your experience?
Good question. I used to be in a band that was me and three blue collar guys. They weren't especially more funny than my white collar friends but definitely more willing to talk about things, even 'forbidden' things. They had much less of a pose about them.
You might be immature, but I wouldn't assume it just because you laugh easily. IMO adults would feel a lot better if they could switch this back on.
His gospel rock is outstanding. It's literally the only good gospel rock but I'm open to being proved wrong. I like his Israeli nationalist rock too.
https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/neighborhood-bully/
Speaking of complete unknowns, we still don't know the identity of the woman Sebastian Zapeta set on fire in the NY subway. Really fantastic society we have going here.
She’s just been identified. I don’t remember the name.
I just saw some (thankfully pixelated) video. She's standing still, other people are watching, and some idiot is fanning the flames trying? to put them out! Horrifying. I'd assumed he'd knocked her out and she died alone, which is bad enough.
We really are doomed, and technology and immigrants won't save us. She was 57 yo Debrina Kawam, and she looked as mentally ill as her murderer, which may explain the lackadaisical attitude of the transit cops watching someone burn to death in front of them. It will cost at least $500,000 to get this guy convicted and $40K a year to keep him alive and imprisoned after that.
I'd rather just read Richard Brautigan. His poetry and prose were funny, and close enough in time and spirit to...whatever it is we're talking about here.
I will always be grateful to Dylan for convincing Neil Young that absolutely ANY voice can make it as a pop singer
Similar adamantine masculine self-confidence in Dylan and his protege Neil Young.
Crosby, Stills, and Nash were already huge when they invited Young to join their band, and he immediately took over through force of personality.
Young's secret was he was a jock by nature (his dad was Canada's top writer of boys books about ice hockey), but a lot of childhood illnesses, such as epilepsy, kept him off the rink so he wound up developing his artistic side.
Neil Young’s brother is a golf writer: https://bobyounggolf.com
For about two weeks, Neil Young was in a band in Toronto with later famous freaky funk-meister Rick James. Until the US Navy tracked "Rickey Matthews" down for draft/desertion and brought him back to the States....
I didn't really dig Todd Hayne's I'M NOT THERE, but the idea was sound: casting the movie kaleidoscopically. Christian Bale was the only actor who didn't give a shit about doing a Dylan impersonation and just went nuts, enjoyably. Doing a square, traditional biopic in the manner of, say, Hal Ashby's BOUND FOR GLORY doesn't really cut it.
(Boyd Holbrook is quite fine as a cocaine-and-Jack-Daniels Johnny Cash.)
He could sing deeper as Johnny Cash than Joaquin Phoenix could in Mangold's "Walk the Line" Cash biopic.
I was an Air Force airmen in my late teens and early twenties when Dylan hit the scene. Others went nuts over him but I didn't care much for him. I might watch the movie when it's available on streaming but I'm not going to a theater to see it.
"I was an Air Force airmen in my late teens and early twenties when Dylan hit the scene. "
Eh, this 'they them' business goes back earlier than I thought.
Dylan's turn to Christianity publicly for a while there drove away critical acclaim. I wonder why?
Don't really know if he still is, but he definitely doesn't mention it. Lo and behold, critical acclaim returned once he stopped talking about Jesus.
Dylan’s 1979 Mark Knopfler-produced Christian album “Slow Train Coming” was well received and won him his first Grammy. The other two were spottier.
What exactly Dylan does so much better than anybody else has been discussed by the most articulate critics for 60 years without complete agreement."
It certainly isn't his singing, which is barely passable at best (not on the level of Elvis, Sinatra, Robert Plant, Freddie Mercury, et al among the 20th century's all time greatest vocalists)
Remember mom and her friend going to see Dylan's show live ca.1964. The one thing that the friend remembered about Dylan, "He's so bowlegged you drive an 18 wheel truck through his legs"
Years later while observing him online in concert, have to say, mom's friend was 100% correct.