The Dylantantes

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Notes by an elite shock force of researchers, scholars, & stans on Bob Dylan &c. Another Side of Dylan Thinkers thedylantantes.substack.com

JAN 20

Talkin' Bob Dylan Spinnerpalooza

A Million $ Bash Roundtable We change it up a bit in the spirit of holiday festivities and the New Year. Today, we’re going to have a pretty open roundtable. Our regular Bashers will have the opportunity to let loose in response to some open-ended prompts and will be selected to speak via a randomized spinner. MDB Roundtable Panelists: Rob “Rockin’ Rob” Reginio teaches modern literature at Alfred University. He's currently at work on a book about Dylan's album John Wesley Harding. Nina Goss is Editor of or contributor to the volumes Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century and Dylan at Play. She is a contributor to various anthologies and presented at the first World of Bob Dylan conference (2019), and Dylan and the Beats conference in Tulsa (2022). She teaches at Fordham University. Erin Callahan lives in the Houston, Texas, area where she teaches English at San Jacinto College. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge. Court Carney is a professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches courses on Black history and cultural history. His book Reckoning with the Devil: Nathan Bedford Forrest in Myth and Memory will be out later this year. Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing. Jim Salvucci is the founder and keeper of The Dylantantes. Let us know what you think! Thanks for checking out The Dylantantes! FM PODCAST NETWORK We're a proud member of The FM Podcast Network along with PodDylan - Dylan.FM - The Bob Dylan Primer - and more.

55 min
JAN 7

Interview with John Rodosta

What Is It about Bob Dylan? A novelist and author of many short stories, John Radosta teaches high school English near Boston, Massachusetts. Under both a pseudonym and his real name, his fiction has appeared in many magazines, including Yellow Mama, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Wildside Black Cat, and Tough Crime. A veteran of more than 50 Bob Dylan concerts, he is the co-author with Keith Nainby of Bob Dylan in Performance: Song, Stage and Screen, as well as other Dylan and Woody Guthrie articles. You can find John’s crime fiction at this link. 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.

35 min
12/16/2024

Interview with Peter White

What Is It about Bob Dylan? Peter White is a retired professor of ecology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For 28 of his 33 years at the University he doubled as the Director of the North Carolina Botanical Garden, an institution that has championed the concept of the "conservation garden," gardens that do well by environmental issues and biodiversity. He is the author of 150 papers and several books, the most recent of which is The World Atlas of Trees and Forests. Through six decades, Bob Dylan has been a constant, despite the many changes of Dylan, Peter himself. and the world around all of us. For 30 years he has hosted the Annual Bob Dylan Party. In 2024, the six-hour, no-breaks party featured 17 song leaders and 66 songs. Over the decades, the party has featured 266 Dylan songs at least once. In retirement Peter has joined the online Dylan scholarship and fandom world. In 2023 he co-founded It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Reading), a Zoom-based Bob Dylan Book Club. 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.

41 min
10/21/2024

Interview with Christopher Vanni

What Is It about Bob Dylan? Christopher Vanni is the author of two Substacks, one about Bob Dylan and one on Gene Clark, he's an advisor for the Bob Dylan Book Club—It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Reading—and he's the creator of a Bob Dylan Quiz that can be found on YouTube and in his feed on X. He is also passionate about golf, classic films, and history. Check out Christopher’s work using these links: Christopher Vanni (@Vanni621) / X (twitter.com) "The world don't need any more [blogs]" - Bob Dylan | Christopher Vanni | Substack The Fabulous Exploration of Gene Clark | Christopher Vanni | Substack It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Reading): A Bob Dylan Book Club Bob Dylan Quiz (youtube.com) 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.

34 min
09/30/2024

Talkin' Planet Waves

A Million $ Bash Roundtable 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. MDB Roundtable Panelists: Rob “Rockin’ Rob” Reginio teaches modern literature at Alfred University. He's currently at work on a book about Dylan's album John Wesley Harding. Erin Callahan lives in the Houston, Texas, area where she teaches English at San Jacinto College. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge. Court Carney is a professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches cour...

22 min
09/09/2024

Talkin' I'm Not There

A Million $ Bash Roundtable 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. MDB Roundtable Panelists: Nina Goss is Editor of or contributor to the volumes Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st...

21 min
08/19/2024

Talkin' The Basement Tapes, Part 2: The Dylan Originals

A Million $ Bash Roundtable 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. MDB Roundtable Panelists: Rob “Rockin’ Rob” Reginio teaches modern literature at Alfred University. He's currently at work on a book about Dylan's album John Wesley Harding. Nina Goss is Editor of or contributor to the volumes Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century and Dylan at Play. She is a contributor to various anthologies and presented at the first World of Bob Dylan conference (2019), and Dylan and the Beats conference in Tulsa (2022). She teaches at Fordham University. Erin Callahan lives in the Houston, Texas, area where she teaches English at San Jacinto College. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge. Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing. Jim Salvucci is the founder and keeper of The Dylantantes. Let us know what you think! Thanks for checking out The Dylantantes! FM PODCAST NETWORK We're a proud member of The FM Podcast Network along with PodDylan - Dylan....

23 min
07/22/2024

Talkin' The Basement Tapes, Part 1: The Covers

A Million $ Bash Roundtable “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. MDB Roundtable Panelists: Rob “Rockin’ Rob” Reginio teaches modern literature at Alfred University. He's currently at work on a book about Dylan's album John Wesley Harding. Nina Goss is Editor of or contributor to the volumes Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century and Dylan at Play. She is a contributor to various anthologies and presented at the first World of Bob Dylan conference (2019), and Dylan and the Beats conference in Tulsa (2022). She teaches at Fordham University. Court Carney is a professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches courses on Black history and cultural history. His book Reckoning with the Devil: Nathan Bedford Forrest in Myth and Memory will be out later this year. Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing. Jim Salvucci is the founder and keeper of The Dylantantes. Let us know what you think! Thanks for checking out The Dylantantes! FM PODCAST NETWORK

21 min

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