The Dylantantes

The 1974 album Planet Waves marked a series of firsts for Bob Dylan. It was his first official album with The Band. It was his first record not on the Columbia label. And it was, believe it or not, his first No. 1 album.

The music represents, if not a return to form, a reset after the release of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid and the Columbia-compiled revenge album called simply Dylan. Compositionally, it’s a musical way station between 1970’s New Morning and 1975’s Blood on the Tracks.

The songs feel personal and even, at times, intimate. And the influence of The Band on the music is unmistakable—particularly Robbie Robertson’s always superb lead guitar and Garth Hudson’s meandering organ, which constantly threatens to explode the arrangements yet paradoxically is what holds them together. Dylan’s harmonica is pretty special too.

The album’s opener, “On a Night Like This,” is a jaunty, accordion-driven love song. The lyrics are simple, rhyming “night like this” with “touch of bliss” for instance. It stands in contrast to the magisterial cast iron song that follows: “Going, Going, Gone,” with its heavy guitar work and heavier lyrics speaking of “the top of the end.” And that song in turn gives way to the outright jocularity of “Tough Mama” with her “meat shaking on her bones,” which leads into the torch ballad, “Hazel.”

Don’t worry. I’m not going to catalog the album’s 10 songs and 11 tracks here. But it’s worth noting that discrepancy: 10 songs but 11 tracks.

That’s because there are two versions of “Forever Young,” the most famous song on the album and a perennial favorite. One is the anthemic hymn we are most familiar with, which closes side one of the vinyl album. Side two opens with the same song done as a country rock honky-tonk. This song, by the way, was quoted by Howard Cosell when Muhammed Ali defeated Leon Spinks in 1978: “It occurs to us that Bob Dylan struck the proper note in his great song ‘Forever Young’: ‘May your hands always be busy, may your feet always be swift, may you have a strong foundation when the winds of changes shift.’” In 1980 Cosell reprised with, “Even Muhammed Ali cannot be forever young. His hands are no longer busy, his feet no longer swift.”

Planet Waves probably lands on few fans’ lists of Dylan’s top ten, but it still likely occupies a special place in their playlist of albums. It’s highly listenable, offering a variety of song genres—from rock to ditty. There’s a darkness mixed in with the joy—for instance, the grave “Dirge” is sandwiched between the rollicking version of “Forever Young” and the loveliness of “You Angel You.”

I first found the album when I was in college in the early 80s, and I’ve loved it ever since. Again, not because it’s such an objectively great album but because it feels great.

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We are entering a season of maximum hype for the Timothée Chamalet vehicle, James Mangold’s biopic of Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown. The release date is December 25, 2024, and I, for one, can wait.

It’s not that I don’t dearly love movies about Bob Dylan; it’s just that I don’t trust this particular director to create anything but a feel-good yawner complete with loving recreations of settings and a superficial interest in actual biographical events. But that’s me.

Besides, haven’t we already traversed the Dylan bio-pic territory with I’m Not There? Granted, even diehard Dylan fans have found it hard to digest, but isn’t that how it should be? In my case, I think I’m Not There is about as suitable (and excellent) a crack at a Dylan bio-pic that we shall ever see.

The eminent filmmaker Todd Haynes, is known for such masterpieces as Far from Heaven, The Velvet Goldmine, Carol, and last year’s May December. His first movie, the highly acclaimed and now legally banned Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, told its tale using Barbie dolls, so you know that Haynes is not conventional in any way.

Indeed, his 2007 film, I’m Not There, is anything but your grandpa’s bio-pic. For one thing, absolutely no one in the film is named “Bob Dylan”—the feature’s ostensible subject. In fact, no one utters the words “Bob Dylan,” and many of the events depicted have, at most, a tangential relationship to the life and times of said Bob Dylan. On the other hand, Dylan’s music features prominently and wonderfully throughout/ and some settings, dialogue, and events are Dylan lyrics put to film.

If you are not aware or need a reminder, in the film six actors portray six characters who correspond somewhat to aspects of Dylan’s life and personality although some scenes fall clearly into the sub-genre of “what if.” What if Bob Dylan found Jesus in the mid-sixties and became a Pentecostal minister? What if Bob Dylan were an actor portraying a Bob Dylan-like character in a bio-pic.

The characters that stand in for Dylan are an 11-year-old Black hobo, a nearly-hermit-like aging cowboy, a hotshot actor with a passion for cheating on his artist-wife, a folksinger turned small-time devout preacher, a poet who’s being interrogated for some reason, and a hipster rockstar immersed in a world of amphetamine and androgyny.

Meanwhile, several other characters in the movie are Dylan-adjacent: an Albert Grossman-like manager; a Joan Baez-like folksinger brilliantly played by perennial Haynes actor, Julianne Moore; a Bobby Neuwirth-type sidekick; and, also for some reason, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, and Allan Ginsburg. That last one is wonderfully portrayed by David Cross.

And for good measure, this non-bio-pic shows us the actor-character, Robbie Clark, in a scene from his bio-pic of Jack Rollins. For those at home keeping score, that’s a fictional bio-pic of a fictional character within a non-bio-pic of a real person. Still with me?

As biography, I’m Not There falls way short, but it never fully attempts biography. Indeed, like Dylan’s unreliable memoir, Chronicles, Volume 1, and Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, it is a meta-biography that uncovers the constructedness of Bob Dylan in our culture. Furthermore as a non-bio-pic or even a meta-bio-pic, it explores the fraught limitations and possibilities of biography itself, particularly when it is contained entirely within the four corners of a screen.

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Last time we discussed just the covers that Bob Dylan and the members of what would become The Band recorded during the 1967 Basement Tapes sessions. Be sure to check out part 1 if you missed it.

Today we are back with part 2 to explore the Bob Dylan originals recorded during those sessions.

The common explanation is that Dylan was cranking out new compositions during what was otherwise his bucolic hiatus in Woodstock, NY, in order to sell them to others to record. If that is true, then the recordings we have scattered across various bootlegs, Columbia’s 1975 release entitled The Basement Tapes, and 2014’s The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete consist largely of rehearsals and demos. Of course, both Dylan and the Band released some of the numbers themselves on separately recorded albums, including The Band’s debut, Music from Big Pink.

Whatever the rational for composing these songs, performing them, and even recording them, we are fortunate to have this trove of musical delights. The songs range from the pretty but treacly "All You Have to Do is Dream" (takes 1 and 2) to the deceptively traditional-feeling  "Apple Suckling Tree” (takes 1 and 2) to the silly “Get Your Rocks Off” to the playful “See You Later Allen Ginsberg” to the magnificent yet incomprehensible “I’m Not There” to the magical “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” to the surreal “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread” (takes 1 and 2) to the magisterial “I Shall Be Released” and on and on.

As I list these songs, each jingles about my head, and I am sure they are rattling around the noggins of most of our listeners now.

So, you’re welcome.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the evident influence these songs had on Todd Haynes’ 2007 meta-biopic, I’m Not There. Haynes has reportedly claimed his movie was greatly inspired by listening to a Basement Tapes bootleg over and over during a cross-country road trip, and many themes, snippets of dialogue, settings, and imagery directly evoke the Big Pink sessions.

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“It feels like this is probably what it sounds like in his head all the time.” -Graley Herren

The Basement Tapes occupy a unique place of honor in the pantheon of Dylan legends. Coming just after two other legendary events—the “going electric” performance and subsequent tour and Dylan’s motorcycle accident—the 1967 recordings were a collaboration between Bob Dylan and his previous backing group who would soon after become the members of The Band. The tracks they laid down—first in Dylan’s house in Woodstock, NY, and then literally in the basement of the house dubbed Big Pink that three members of the Band rented—were never meant for the public. They consist of covers of pop songs, folk numbers, and blues. In addition They recorded a large number of Dylan originals, some apparently intended as demos for other musicians to record.

Public interest in the sessions was piqued by the release of the Great White Wonder in 1969. Widely regarded as the first rock bootleg, the album features five Dylan originals from the Basement Tapes. Given Dylan’s minimal public presence at the time, this bootleg could not help but excite the fan base.

In 1975 Columbia released an album entitled The Basement Tapes, which consisted of a number of these recordings along with some demos from The Band, who were still active and popular. It was inevitable that many more of these storied recordings would make their way into Dylan aficionados’ collections as bootlegs, some of which purported to be complete. In truth, even 2014’s The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete is likely not all there is. And Dylan also penned many lyrics without any musical accompaniment during this period, some of which were set to music and released on the 2014 album The New Basement Tapes, produced by T. Bone Burnett and featuring luminaries such as Elvis Costello and Rhiannon Giddens.

Greil Marcus documented the circumstances and significance of these recordings in his 1997 book Invisible Republic updated in 2011 as The Old, Weird America. Marcus’ book squarely positions them in the American musical tradition.

Today we will address just the cover songs from The Basement Tapes. Look for the upcoming release of part 2 when we discuss the Dylan-penned numbers.

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Scott Warmuth is a writer and musician from Albuquerque, New Mexico. His research and observations on the writing strategies of Bob Dylan are widely acknowledged and frequently referenced, notably in Bob Dylan’s Lyrics 1983-2000. In 2014, writer Jonah Raskin dubbed Warmuth the dean of Dylanologists.

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Back in September 2022, I posted a piece on The Dylantantes called My Fraught Visit to the Bob Dylan Center. It tells the tale of my friend and I traveling to the Center for the first time and our experience with activists in the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Greenwood was the neighborhood famously known as Black Wall Street at the turn of the twentieth century, and it was also the site of the horrors of the Tulsa Race Massacre in May and June of 1921, almost exactly 103 years ago as of this writing.

My piece was an attempt to summarize the Race Massacre, which many still have never heard of, and to grapple with the placement of the Bob Dylan Center Archive in the neighboring Tulsa Arts District, itself a site of considerable racial tension.

I am revisiting the piece because of recent news that a decades-old attempt by survivors of the Massacre to obtain reparations has finally failed in the Oklahoma Supreme Court. As unlikely as it sounds, two women who were child victims of the riot are still with us: Lessie Benningfield Randle (109) and Viola Fletcher (110). With this state court decision, any hope for even a sliver of justice for these women or the Black residents of Tulsa expires forever, just like the long-ago casualties of the racist rampage.

I wish I were revisiting this piece for the opposite reason — that these survivors have prevailed — but even that stunted degree of justice is simply not the way of Oklahoma apparently. Even if you agree with the ruling—perhaps, to be generous, on strictly legal grounds — it becomes impossible to ignore the persistent injustice still visited upon these innocent people. Indeed, it becomes impossible to deny that the cruelty is the point — a feature, not a bug, to lean on a cliche. Oh, and the racism. The cruelty and the racism.

The Tulsa Race Massacre is the century-old crime that just keeps on giving, it seems.

I hope you read or listen to this piece to the end even if you encountered it before. As Dylan fans we have a special responsibility, I believe, to understand a little better the context of the placement of the Bob Dylan Center and the horrific history of that place.

This revisited version is lightly edited from the original .

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Only one year after the triumphal release of “Oh Mercy,” Dylan came out with 1990’s “Under the Red Sky.” The album is known for its all-star musicians—George Harrison, Slash, David Crosby, Bruce Hornsby, Al Kooper, David Lindley, and others—and was produced by Don Was. It is filled with the language and structure of children’s songs and music—which is befitting an album dedicated to “Gabby Goo-Goo,” likely Dylan’s then-toddler daughter, Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan. There are counting songs, fairytales, and echoes of nursery rhymes. But the songs often sport an ominous feel that is hard to shake, which, if we are being fair, is not too different from traditional children’s folk literature.

For instance, “The Cat’s in the Well” is based on an old nursery rhyme about—you guessed it—a cat in a well.  The weirdest aspect of Dylan’s take, though, is the driving blues melody that backs the lyrics. It’s a rockin’ number that belies the quaintness of its verses.

Some songs, such as “Born in Time,” are stellar, while others are the targets of endless knee-jerk derision. No song falls more into that latter category than the album’s opening track, “Wiggle Wiggle.” Personally I’ve always seen “Wiggle Wiggle” as a harmless bit of fun, like “Country Pie” or “Every Grain of Sand,” but others have pegged it as a sign of the coming apocalypse. Perhaps if it weren’t the very first song on the album people would lighten up a bit, but there you have it.

We also see Dylan return to satiric form in several songs, most notably the romping “TV Talkin’ Song,” which is both hopelessly dated and sweetly naive in this Internet Age. As a satire, the song is clever, though. It’s a narrative about a man holding forth in Hyde Park—ranting about the evils of television. Most of the lyrics are simply a transcript of what he says with the narrator serving as mere reporter. This structure allows Dylan some ironic distance from the message. At the end of the song, a riot breaks out, and Dylan concludes with this amusing irony: “Later on that evening, I watched it on T.V.”

One oddity: This is the rare Dylan album to include the lyrics in the liner notes.

“Under the Red Sky” is a short album, 35 and a half minutes long, but in some ways it is too long. “Handy Dandy” would make a fine finish to the album, but instead we get one more number, the uninspired “The Cat’s in the Well.” Most Dylan albums start and end strong. Under the Red Sky does the opposite, which may be one reason—along with its uncharacteristically slick production and slap-dash performances—the album has never been well received.

But here’s the good news! Today we have a full house on Million $ Bash.

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Phil Hale lives in NYC and first saw Dylan live in '81 in London. Since then he has seen Dylan more than 100 times. While having no regrets he's not completely sold on the idea that it's the best use of his time either. That dichotomy has led to some attempts to write about Dylan to make sense of what seems like a grand obsession. Phil lived in Woodstock for a while and likes to think it was a coincidence. As a graduate in philosophy he is at least attuned to the idea that some things can be pursued at length and the answer never found. He's married, and if his wife entered a "eye roll when Dylan is mentioned" competition she would place highly if not outright win it. Despite this he salutes her patience.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedylantantes.substack.com

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Twenty-one years ago, the whole wide world was stunned by the release of a new Bob Dylan project unlike any before, a feature-length movie of his own creation aimed at a generalish audience.

Led by a future Nobel Laureate co-crafting the satirical script, populated with a brilliantly star-studded cast, and helmed by a maverick director out to compose what he described as “a great Bob Dylan song” in film, Masked and Anonymous was destined to be a masterpiece. It. Could. Not. Fail.

The film had its origins in an inchoate scheme by Larry Charles, of Seinfeld and later Borat fame, and Bob Dylan to create a network sitcom, a slapstick comedy that reportedly drew from the antics of Jerry Lewis and would star that master of physical comedy Bob Dylan. Instead, with only 20 days of production time, they cranked out a film that drew on Hollywood royalty who worked for scale just to be in the presence of the man himself.

Although I have written positively about the film, I have never been fully comfortable with it. It somehow amounts to less than the sum of its parts. The actors are all game—no one holds back in the least, and some may even go a tad bit overboard: I’m looking at you Giovanni Ribisi. There are many moments of comedy that just don’t come off the way they are supposed to. Perhaps the alternate-universe dystopian setting is too off-putting to frame this blend of sardonic wit, philosophical musings, and dad jokes.

M$B Roundtable Panelists:

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You may know Dan Brown as the author of the bestseller The DaVinci Code, but you’ve got the wrong guy. This Dan Brown was born in Tarrytown N.Y, and after a stint in the United States Air Force he moved to New City, NY, entered into a career in the restaurant industry. For the last  15 years, he has been owner of the Wherehouse Restaurant in Newburgh, NY.

His lifelong  passion for music has resulted in The Wherehouse being a hub for young  local musicians to perform as well as network. The decor is also reflective of the passionate musical journey he has taken. And though he is a fan of many bands and performers, Bob Dylan stands above the crowd not only as a songwriter but most important as a storyteller. On more tidbit: the Wherehouse serves a drink called “Blood on the Tracks,” which features Bob Dylan’s Heaven’s Door whiskey.

Thanks for checking out The Dylantantes!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedylantantes.substack.com

FM PODCAST NETWORK 

We're a proud member of The FM Podcast Network along with PodDylan - Dylan.FM - The Bob Dylan Primer - and more.