Find me on a certain day and The Basement Tapes is my favorite Bob Dylan album. It has been written about extensively, most notably by Greil Marcus in The Old Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes and has been the subject of two different releases by Dylan: the first official release inContinue reading “Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)”
Author Archives: Recliner Notes
Copper Kettle
Released in 1969, the Great White Wonder was the first bootleg album of an established recording audience to gain widespread popularity and sales. In 1985, Bob Dylan told Cameron Crowe for the Biograph liner notes about 1970’s Self Portrait: “[It] was a bunch of tracks that we’d done all the time I’d gone to Nashville.Continue reading “Copper Kettle”
Changing of the Guards
Jonathan Cott asked Bob Dylan the following question about songs on his recent release Street-Legal during a November 16, 1978 Rolling Stone interview: “As in a dream, lines from one song seem to connect with lines from another. For example: ‘I couldn’t tell her what my private thoughts were / But she had some wayContinue reading “Changing of the Guards”
Can’t Wait
1997’s Time Out of Mind is an album of push and pull between Bob Dylan and the album’s producer, Daniel Lanois. Lanois is an illustrious producer who has worked with a roster of who’s who in recorded music: Brian Eno, Peter Gabriel, U2, Emmylou Harris, the Neville Brothers, and on and on. Lanois produced Dylan’sContinue reading “Can’t Wait”
Brownsville Girl
When I first started listening to Bob Dylan, the received wisdom was to ignore his mid-80s music and to focus on the major works in the 60s and 70s. The consensus was that by the mid-80s, he had lost his fastball. Albums such as Empire Burlesque, Knocked Out Loaded, Down in the Groove – theContinue reading “Brownsville Girl”
Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
Unlike “Billy 4” which was written before the movie Pat Garret & Billy the Kid went into production, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” was inspired by the movie itself. The song plays during the death scene of the sheriff who dies in a shootout alongside his wife. The sheriff is played by cowboy movie character actorContinue reading “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”
Billy 4
Released in 1973, Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid was a Western directed by Sam Peckinpaugh. Bob Dylan’s involvement in the film apparently started when he ran into novelist and screenwriter Rudy Wurlitzer, who told Dylan that he was writing a screenplay about the relationship between Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett. Hearing about theContinue reading “Billy 4”
Blind Willie McTell
There’s a running joke for those of us who regularly listen to WTF with Marc Maron Podcast. Maron talks for an hour twice a week with comedians, actors, and musicians. The joke is the understanding that when he talks with a musician, eventually, Maron will talk about how music always comes back to the blues,Continue reading “Blind Willie McTell”
Ballad of a Thin Man
“Who is Mr. Jones?” Nora Ephron and Susan Edmiston asked Bob Dylan in an August 1965 interview. Dylan responds: “He’s a real person. You know him, but not by that name….He’s actually a person. Like I saw him come into the room one night and he looked like a camel. He proceeded to put hisContinue reading “Ballad of a Thin Man”
Angelina
ConcertinaHyenaSubpoenaArgentinaArena When I was first getting into Bob Dylan, I laughed about this song with my old friend and Dylan running mate Mike Vago (author of the Wiki Wormhole column and host of the podcast Why Is This Not a Movie?). Namely how this song seemed like a dare: “Hey Bob, write a song withContinue reading “Angelina”
Recliner Notes 