Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Dylan's Shout Outs Now and Then
The best couple of lines from I Feel A Change Comin' On, the best song on Bob Dylan's latest take on Americana, Together Through Life are
I'm listening to Billy Joe Shaver
And i'm reading James Joyce
Some people they tell me
I got the blood of the land in my voice
Shaver is a real deal Texas songwriter. A tough son of a bitch who served as Kinky Friedman's spiritual advisor when he ran for governor of Texas and was involved in a shooting incident a couple years back. As for Joyce, you want to ask Bob (all fans have lots of stuff they'd like to ask Bob) if its Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake. My listening to Bob Dylan of Late leads me to believe it might well be the first round of Daedelus in Dublin.
The shoutouts in the recent song lead me back to these lines from Blood on the Tracks'
Situations have ended sad,
Relationships have all been bad.
Mine've been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud.
I was working with a Dylan obsessive in a bookstore in 1976 when we both decided we didn't know anything about the two poets he called out except that we had heard Patti Smith talk about Rimbaud. We found a biographical citation but we ended up ordering copies of collections with biographical sketches of both from obscure college presses. Today someone curious would just go to Wikipedia and order up through Amazon
posted by well-executed buffet at 12:10 AM
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