New Bob Dylan song: Huck's Theme

Friend just pointed out the arrangement sounds like Ghosteen, kinda.

― Julius Caesar Memento Hoodie (bendy), Friday, March 27, 2020 11:53 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah there's a strong cave feeling. i was reminded of higgs boson blues, mostly cause of all the references.

Play Oscar Peterson, play Stan Getz
Play "Blue Sky," play Dickie Betts

I found this pretty lovely. The lyrics idk I heard less than half of them but found them pretty disarming, laughed a few times. Definitely felt like it could be a matter of faith whether I took them as poignant or just daft but I’m not sure what I would have to gain from being a sceptic

I’m not a Dylan person really but desolation row is one of my all time faves so that might explain it

Don’t really care about Kennedy at all don’t @ me

"play Don Henley
play Glenn Frey"

well, yeah

I love this

On the Waterfront reference?

Play Nat King Cole, play "Nature Boy"
Play "Down in the Boondocks" for Terry Malloy

i enjoyed the rhymes & the references he grabbed to complete them were idk, just enjoyable from a writing standpoint either for silliness or outthereness etc

Dylan's entire studio protest output is basically about 13 songs off his first four albums, and that is only if you include stuff like "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall".

― Why, I would make a fantastic Nero! (PBKR)

some of those songs are pretty decent tho

This is an obvious reference but it's making me think of (70s) Waits if anything. I love the arrangement.

Who am I kidding - these are weird times and this is destroying me.

Listening for the first time, haven't read anything above.

Very striking...It's not "Desolation Row," but I know how silly it is to even say that; it's not the same person who made "Desolation Row," so why would it be? The music's beautiful, and I'm more comfortable with the vocal than most of what I've dipped into the past couple of decades. Putting out a Kennedy song right now is perversely vintage.

Dylan has spent so much time just referring to the musicians before him that it is totally disarming to hear him reference those who came after him. Like that 70s interview where he praised Alice Cooper felt odd (and true) enough.

Bob was friends with Kurtis Blow

The Beatles thing is interesting because it sounds like a putdown, yet Dylan is the author of my favourite Beatles-love quote ever, the one about driving through Colorado in 1964.

xxp Or the Alicia Keys verse in "Thunder on the Mountain."

For anyone who's never read it...

Then, when we were driving through Colorado we had the radio on and eight of the ten top songs were Beatles songs. In Colorado! ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand,’ all those early ones.

They were doing things nobody was doing. Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid. You could only do that with other musicians. Even if you’re playing your own chords you had to have other people playing with you. That was obvious. And it started me thinking about other people.

But I just kept it to myself that I really dug them. Everybody else thought they were for the teenyboppers, that they were gonna pass right away. But it was obvious to me that they had staying power. I knew they were pointing the direction of where music had to go. I was not about to put up with other musicians, but in my head the Beatles were it. In Colorado, I started thinking it was so far out that I couldn’t deal with it — eight in the Top Ten. It seemed to me a definite line was being drawn. This was something that never happened before. It was outrageous, and I kept it in my mind. You see, there was a lot of hypocrisy all around, people saying it had to be either folk or rock. But I knew it didn’t have to be like that. I dug what the Beatles were doing, and I always kept it in mind from back then.

Greatest use of the word "outrageous" ever.

that is cool, thx for posting clemenza

"In Colorado!" That kills me every time.

Bob was friends with Kurtis Blow

they used to throw horses off of cliffs together iirc

I also dig the reference to Paula Abdul while in New Orleans recording Oh Mercy.

re:Chronicles and others---fits current discussion, and I've always found it disturbing. Keeps coming back into my head uninvited (as does "Desolation Row," but don't mind that one): https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2005/03/10/i-is-someone-else/

My computer has probs posting YouTubes here, but check for his track w Kurtis Blow.

Dickie Betts?

"oh you like Ozzy? What about Ratt? You like Ratt?"

https://youtu.be/cntGcbU3nM8

Probably super uncool and unhelpfully obvious but this makes me think of "Rave on John Donne"

that 80s street interview is one of my favorite Bob artifacts

That clip is priceless.

I experienced that once in an autograph lineup for Bobby Hull: famous old males are very receptive to getting their picture taken with younger females.

Dylan's entire studio protest output is basically about 13 songs off his first four albums

this is unfair to "George Jackson" and "Hurricane" imo, but point taken

I love in one of those AJ Weberman calls when Bob turns his nose up at just abt every living songwriter except Gordon Lightfoot. "Yeah...he's alright" (or something to that effect)

^see: Scorsese's movie about Dylan

Beatles bit didn't strike me as a putdown. (And their chords WERE outrageous.)

They hadn't even gotten to "A Hard Day's Night" yet.

But in some sense some of those early Beatlemania smashes like "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "She Loves You" were the most outrageous.

"oh you like Ozzy? What about Ratt? You like Ratt?"

https://youtu.be/cntGcbU3nM8

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, March 27, 2020 4:42 PM (thirty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

OMG, I have seen just about every clip of Dylan known to man, but never seen this. Thanks for posting it. That might be the most generous I've ever seen Bob with anyone.

the whole doc is fantastic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pS8rM_MsIY

new song rules

whoah there's MORE?!?

Anyway, Murder Most Foul is something else. The overall feel is excellent; it's funny and sad at the same time. The music really sets the mood. There are a bunch of great individual lines and a few magical moments where he leans into a phrase.

This section is great:

I hate to tell you, mister, but only dead men are free
Send me some lovin', then tell me no lie
Throw the gun in the gutter and walk on by
Wake up, little Susie, let's go for a drive
Cross the Trinity River, let's keep hope alive
Turn the radio on, don't touch the dials
Parkland hospital, only six more miles
You got me dizzy, Miss Lizzy, you filled me with lead
That magic bullet of yours has gone to my head
I'm just a patsy like Patsy Cline
Never shot anyone from in front or behind
I've blood in my eye, got blood in my ear
I'm never gonna make it to the new frontier

This song belongs in the long tradition of Dylan songs, like Tangled Up in Blue, with a radically shifting narrative viewpoint. In the case of Murder Most Foul, it shifts among a third person almost historical viewpoint, a 1963 viewpoint, the perpetrators' viewpoint, and Kennedy's own viewpoint. I love this shit.

It strikes me as something in his younger days he might have been able to wrestle into a more formidable, devastating form. Like there is an A+ 10 minute song lurking in this monstrosity.

It could've been "Brownsville Girl."

Beatles bit didn't strike me as a putdown.
― timellison

I'm listening again and you might be right. I may have been influenced by a review I skimmed.

Hope someone makes an epic video for it. Something other than Kennedy footage...I don't know what. I thought the "Like a Rolling Stone" video with all the TV stations was incredible--something out of left field like that.

xpost yeah PKBT I love it, he's so chill and accommodating....also just Bob Dylan talking about Ratt makes my day every time

he's the opposite of chill in the rest of that doc, haha

oh yeah? that's all I've seen but I can imagine

posted upthread — Getting To Dylan. It's mostly an extremely irritated interview with Bob during the filming of Hearts Of Fire.

Dylan is like Pynchon in that he likes people and hates systems.

New song is great and his voice hasn’t sounded this good in, what, 40 years ? I really wonder from which session this was culled

people seem pretty convinced it's a Tempest outtake, I'm not so sure, could be from the Sinatra era ... For a couple tours now, he's been doing spare, piano-led versions of "Girl From North Country" and "Boots of Spanish Leather" that this kind of recalls.

The "for the last 50 years" line would place it in 2013 if you're being strict, but uhhh I think that's a mistake when we're talking about Bob Dylan.

Altho I'm not a fan of Great American Songbook moves (World Gone Wrong and Good As I Been To You notwithstanding) his voice on the recent records has been markedly better. Post quitting smoking, I'm told.

I get a sense of Olympian timelessness from this new song - spectral Bob sifting through the wreckage of the past five decades, picking up a thread here, a fragment there, ruminating.