cast your dancing spell my way

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>> NEWSBRIEF:
"Connecticut to Ban Gun Sales to Those on Federal Terrorism Lists"
(The New York Times, 12-10-15)


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------------------------------ [excerpt, Remnick article on Dylan, N. Yorker] -------------------- ...What you hear in "The Cutting Edge" is a great artist figuring things out....  You hear "Like a Rolling Stone" ...shift from a piano waltz to a 4/4 six-minute, full-band breakthrough....





Dylan wasn't so much rejecting folk music and moving to rock as he was returning to his roots.  Early rock -- Bobby Vee, Johnnie Ray, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis --








was what he listened to at night on the radio as a kid in Hibbing, Minnesota,





and what he first attempted to play.  At a high-school talent show, in 1956, the principal pulled the curtain closed as Bobby played a Little Richard tune, and in his yearbook Dylan declared that his ambition was "to join Little Richard."





As a proto-folkie in New York -- and on [the record albums] "Bob Dylan," "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan," "The Times They Are a-Changin'," and "Another Side of Bob Dylan" -- he embraced the world of Woody Guthrie, Odetta, and Robert Johnson, largely, as he put it later, because


rock songs didn't yet "reflect life in a realistic way. 


I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type thing.  The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings."


What you hear Dylan doing on "The Cutting Edge" is fulfilling rock's deeper ambitions.  And, as he did so, he certainly had an adequate sense of his own range and accomplishment.  He told Keith Richards, "I could have written 'Satisfaction,'





but you couldn't have written 'Tambourine Man.'"  Richards laughed





and told Dylan he was right.


When he was young and in the midst of that golden-era frenzy, Dylan was apt to dodge earnest questions about what led him to the music he made in the mid-sixties....  [end, today's excerpt from "Bob Dylan and the 'Hot Hand'" - written by David Remnick, The New Yorker.  November 9, 2015] ----------------- {(pictures added here, by Blue Collar Lit)}





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