Category: Bob Dylan

Did the Needle Just Skip :: 30 Years of Oh Mercy

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As Bob Dylan’s swampy and haunted classic Oh Mercy turns 30 years old, producer and musician Daniel Lanois reflects on the strange magic he helped create in New Orleans, driven by a willingness to explore seemingly contradictory spaces: “I wanted to make sure that that the music was trying to destroy the singer at the same time as support him.”

Bob Dylan :: The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings

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Just about eight months after More Blood, More Tracks comes another massive Dylan archival haul. The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings weighs in at a hefty 14 discs, giving listeners a front row seat (and a backstage pass) at the traveling road show Bob threw together in the months following Blood On The Tracks’ release. Three discs of rehearsals! Five complete Dylan sets! A bonus disc of curios and oddities! (Oh and hey, there’s that Martin Scorsese doc to absorb as well). The good news? This box is very reasonably priced at just about $80 — a whole lot of bang for your buck. The bad news? Come on, dude, there is no bad news.

Why Rolling Thunder Revue is a Terrible Documentary But A Great Bob Dylan Film

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There’s a lot to love in Scorsese’s film, which repurposes an enormous trove of backstage and concert footage into a representation of the fall 1975 iteration of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. Considered as a traditional documentary, Rolling Thunder Revue is fairly embarrassing. Considered as a Bob Dylan movie in the tradition of the films the songwriter has had his hands in over the years, it’s a grand achievement. The project swerves from fact in similar ways that Dylan’s Chronicles swerves from traditional memoir, with fictional constructs serving the biographical needs of the moment, just as they have since the largely bullshitted notes to Dylan’s 1962 debut LP […]