| 31st August 2006 05:14 PM |
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| Egbert |
quote:
Saint Sway wrote:
is Dylan the 1st Jewish cowboy?
or has there been others?
Ramblin' Jack Elliot, for one. |
| 31st August 2006 05:14 PM |
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| Lazy Bones |
quote:
Martha wrote:
ROTFLOL! WHERE did you get those pictures!!!! :-)
the one of bob is from, i think, the itunes site.
the other one, is one of a series i bought on ebay  |
| 31st August 2006 05:14 PM |
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| Saint Sway |
I like peaches |
| 31st August 2006 05:17 PM |
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| Egbert |
quote:
Saint Sway wrote:
I like peaches
She's fresh |
| 31st August 2006 05:17 PM |
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| Lazy Bones |
quote:
Saint Sway wrote:
I like peaches
...with vanilla ice cream... |
| 31st August 2006 05:17 PM |
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| Saint Sway |
sometimes just a plain old peach hits the spot |
| 31st August 2006 05:17 PM |
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| Egbert |
I'm Egbert, bitch! |
| 31st August 2006 05:17 PM |
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| pdog |
quote:
Martha wrote:
Let's step it up or....we're not going to make 500 posts. LOL
Easy! |
| 31st August 2006 05:18 PM |
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| Saint Sway |
pears are also good |
| 31st August 2006 05:18 PM |
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| Martha |
quote:
Lazy Bones wrote:
the one of bob is from, i think, the itunes site.
------------------------------------------------------
My new avatar?? Yes?
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the other one, is one of a series i bought on ebay
LIAR! ROTFLOL |
| 31st August 2006 05:18 PM |
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| Saint Sway |
quote:
pdog wrote:
Easy!
this thread has legs |
| 31st August 2006 05:19 PM |
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| pdog |
I'm listening to The Jesus & Mary Chain - Psychocandy! |
| 31st August 2006 05:20 PM |
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| Egbert |
{{{{{{belch}}}}}} |
| 31st August 2006 05:20 PM |
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| Saint Sway |
I just got the new Black Keys ep.
Two guys. One word: RAWK |
| 31st August 2006 05:21 PM |
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| Martha |
quote:
Saint Sway wrote:
pears are also good
I have 2 ripe pears that would taste great right now..thanks for the reminder.
:-)
Have we hit 250 yet? |
| 31st August 2006 05:21 PM |
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| Lazy Bones |
...can i pick which day? |
| 31st August 2006 05:22 PM |
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| pdog |
quote:
Saint Sway wrote:
I just got the new Black Keys ep.
Two guys. One word: RAWK
They are great. The e.p. is spectacular. I loved the black Keys right away, and the more time goes by I keep digging them so much! |
| 31st August 2006 05:22 PM |
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| Egbert |
quote:
Saint Sway wrote:
I just got the new Black Keys ep.
Two guys. One word: RAWK
Is that the one with the gun on the cover? |
| 31st August 2006 05:29 PM |
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| pdog |
quote:
Egbert wrote:
Is that the one with the gun on the cover?
Is that a gun? I have to dig it out. The new Minus 5 has a gun on the cover! |
| 31st August 2006 05:40 PM |
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| PartyDoll MEG |
Thread to long for me to see if this was posted-lol!!!!
From Rolling Stone:
The Genius of Bob Dylan
The legend comes to grips with his iconic status; an intimate conversation prior to the release of the new ''Modern Times''
JONATHAN LETHEM
"I don't really have a herd of astrologers telling me what's going to happen. I just make one move after the other, this leads to that." Is the voice familiar? I'm sitting in a Santa Monica seaside hotel suite, ignoring a tray of sliced pineapple and sugar-dusty cookies, while Bob Dylan sits across from my tape recorder, giving his best to my questions. The man before me is fitful in his chair, not impatient, but keenly alive to the moment, and ready on a dime to make me laugh and to laugh himself. The expressions on Dylan's face, in person, seem to compress and encompass versions of his persona across time, a sixty-five-year-old with a nineteen-year-old cavorting somewhere inside. Above all, though, it is the tones of his speaking voice that seem to kaleidoscope through time: here the yelp of the folk pup or the sarcastic rimshot timing of the hounded hipster-idol, there the beguilement of the Seventies sex symbol, then again -- and always -- the gravel of the elder statesman, that antediluvian bluesman's voice the young aspirant so legendarily invoked at the very outset of his work and then ever so gradually aged into.
It's that voice, the voice of a rogue ageless in decrepitude, that grounds the paradox of the achievement of Modern Times, his thirty-first studio album. Are these our "modern times," or some ancient, silent-movie dream, a fugue in black-and-white? Modern Times, like Love and Theft and Time Out of Mind before it, seems to survey a broken world through the prism of a heart that's worn and worldly, yet decidedly unbroken itself. "I been sitting down studying the art of love/I think it will fit me like a glove," he states in "Thunder on the Mountain," the opening song, a rollicking blues you've heard a million times before and yet which magically seems to announce yet another "new" Dylan. "I feel like my soul is beginning to expand," the song declares. "Look into my heart and you will sort of understand."
What we do understand, if we're listening, is that we're three albums into a Dylan renaissance that's sounding more and more like a period to put beside any in his work. If, beginning with Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan garbed his amphetamine visions in the gloriously grungy clothes of the electric blues and early rock & roll, the musical glories of these three records are grounded in a knowledge of the blues built from the inside out -- a knowledge that includes the fact that the early blues and its players were stranger than any purist would have you know, hardly restricting themselves to twelve-bar laments but featuring narrative recitations, spirituals, X-rated ditties, popular ballads and more. Dylan offers us nourishment from the root cellar of American cultural life. For an amnesiac society, that's arguably as mind-expanding an offering as anything in his Sixties work. And with each succeeding record, Dylan's convergence with his muses grows more effortlessly natural.
How does he summon such an eternal authority? "I'd make this record no matter what was going on in the world," Dylan tells me. "I wrote these songs in not a meditative state at all, but more like in a trancelike, hypnotic state. This is how I feel? Why do I feel like that? And who's the me that feels this way? I couldn't tell you that, either. But I know that those songs are just in my genes and I couldn't stop them comin' out." This isn't to say Modern Times, or Dylan, seems oblivious to the present moment. The record is littered -- or should I say baited? -- with glinting references to world events like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, though anyone seeking a moral, to paraphrase Mark Twain, should be shot. And, as if to startle the contemporary listener out of any delusion that Dylan's musical drift into pre-rock forms -- blues, ragtime, rockabilly -- is the mark of a nostalgist, "Thunder on the Mountain" also name-checks a certain contemporary singer: "I was thinking 'bout Alicia Keys, I couldn't keep from crying/While she was born in Hell's Kitchen, I was livin' down the line." When I ask Dylan what Keys did "to get into your pantheon," he only chuckles at my precious question. "I remember seeing her on the Grammys. I think I was on the show with her, I didn't meet her or anything. But I said to myself, 'There's nothing about that girl I don't like.' "
Rather than analyzing lyrics, Dylan prefers to linger over the songs as artifacts of music and describes the process of their making. As in other instances, stretching back to 1974's Planet Waves, 1978's Street Legal and 2001's Love and Theft, the singer and performer known for his love-hate affair with the recording studio -- "I don't like to make records," he tells me simply. "I do it reluctantly" -- has cut his new album with his touring band. And Dylan himself is the record's producer, credited under the nom-de-studio Jack Frost. "I didn't feel like I wanted to be overproduced any more," he tells me. "I felt like I've always produced my own records anyway, except I just had someone there in the way. I feel like nobody's gonna know how I should sound except me anyway, nobody knows what they want out of players except me, nobody can tell a player what he's doing wrong, nobody can find a player who can play but he's not playing, like I can. I can do that in my sleep."
As ever, Dylan is circling, defining what he is first by what he isn't, by what he doesn't want, doesn't like, doesn't need, locating meaning by a process of elimination. This rhetorical strategy goes back at least as far as "It Ain't Me, Babe" and "All I Really Want to Do" ("I ain't looking to compete with you," etc.), and it still has plenty of real juice in it. When Dylan arrives at a positive assertion out of the wilderness of so much doubt, it takes on the force of a jubilant boast. "This is the best band I've ever been in, I've ever had, man for man. When you play with guys a hundred times a year, you know what you can and can't do, what they're good at, whether you want 'em there. It takes a long time to find a band of individual players. Most bands are gangs. Whether it's a metal group or pop rock, whatever, you get that gang mentality. But for those of us who went back further, gangs were the mob. The gang was not what anybody aspired to. On this record I didn't have anybody to teach. I got guys now in my band, they can whip up anything, they surprise even me." Dylan's cadences take on the quality of an impromptu recitation, replete with internal rhyme schemes, such that when I later transcribe this tape I'll find myself tempted to set the words on the page in the form of a lyric. "I knew this time it wouldn't be futile writing something I really love and thought dearly of, and then gettin' in the studio and having it be beaten up and whacked around and come out with some kind of incoherent thing which didn't have any resonance. With that, I was awake. I felt freed up to do just about anything I pleased."
But getting the band of his dreams into the studio was only half the battle. "The records I used to listen to and still love, you can't make a record that sounds that way," he explains. It is as if having taken his new material down to the crossroads of the recording studio Dylan isn't wholly sure the deal struck with the devil there was worth it. "Brian Wilson, he made all his records with four tracks, but you couldn't make his records if you had a hundred tracks today. We all like records that are played on record players, but let's face it, those days are gon-n-n-e. You do the best you can, you fight that technology in all kinds of ways, but I don't know anybody who's made a record that sounds decent in the past twenty years, really. You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like -- static. Even these songs probably sounded ten times better in the studio when we recorded 'em. CDs are small. There's no stature to it. I remember when that Napster guy came up across, it was like, 'Everybody's gettin' music for free.' I was like, 'Well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway.' "
> Get the full article in the current Rolling Stone, on newsstands until September 7th, 2006.
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| 31st August 2006 05:41 PM |
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| glencar |
Jonathan Lethem...why is that name familiar? |
| 31st August 2006 05:43 PM |
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| glencar |
quote:
glencar wrote:
Jonathan Lethem...why is that name familiar?
Aha! Here's why...http://www.amazon.com/Gun-Occasional-Music-Harvest-Book/dp/0156028972/sr=1-9/qid=1157060564/ref=sr_1_9/104-3913358-1428763?ie=UTF8&s=books |
| 31st August 2006 05:45 PM |
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| PartyDoll MEG |
The review of "Modern Times" by Rolling Stone ***** 
The new Dylan album starts with the voice of God in the mountains and the sound of pistols in the streets. Bad things are happening, and the ladies in Washington, D.C., are scrambling to get out of town. Dylan has ladies on his mind, too-- Alicia Keys, who's forty years younger than he is yet worth chasing through the Tennessee Hills just the same, but also good women who do just what you say, and the wicked women who drain your heart and mind. War and love are in the air. It's time to get right with the Lord, maybe go back up north and try his hand at farming. But the pitchfork is on the shelf. The hammer is on the table. And from the sound of things, the hammer is coming down.
That's "Thunder on the Mountain," the first song on Modern Times, Dylan's thirty-first studio record and his third straight masterwork. Modern Times was cut in New York over the course of a little more than a month with Dylan's road band, which had a mere 113 shows of the Never Ending Tour under its belt. The songs are almost evenly divided between blues ready-mades, old-timey two-steps and stately marches full of prophecy. The band--seasoned by night after night of responding to the spontaneous reinvention that makes Dylan's shows the longest-running miracle in rock & roll--jumps at the master's call, bringing rockabilly twang, Chicago street muscle, cowboy swing or le jazz hot languor. In sound and feel, Modern Times recalls the kind of music working bands--Muddy Waters' bluesmen or Hank Williams' Drifting Cowboys--would cut on the fly between gigs, a mixture of unique inventions and variations on hand-me-downs touched by the leader's genius. Almost every song retraces the American journey from the country to the city, when folkways were giving way to modern times. The mood is America on the brink--of mechanization, of war, of domestic tranquillity, of fulfilling its promise and of selling its dreams one by one for cash on the barrelhead.
Since even before he asked for permission to forget about today until tomorrow, Dylan has said that time means nothing to him. During the past ten years, he has been making music that shows just this. There is no precedent in rock & roll for the territory Dylan is now opening with albums that stand alongside the accomplishments of his wild youth. Love and Theft, recorded when he'd turned sixty, was his toughest guitar rock since Blonde on Blonde in 1966, a combination of the mojo Muddy Waters had working at age sixty-two on Hard Again and the sweeping dystopic perspective Philip Roth brought to American Pastoral at sixty-three (with more than a touch of Groucho Marx on You Bet Your Life).
Modern Times is something different. It's less terrifying, less funny on first listen. But it has more command, more clarity. There is none of the digital murk of Time Out of Mind, and the snakebite live sound of Love and Theft has softened. This music is relaxed; it has nothing to prove. It is music of accumulated knowledge, it knows every move, anticipates every step before you take it. Producing himself for the second time running, Dylan has captured the sound of tradition as an ever-present, a sound he's been working on since his first album, in 1962. (One reason Modern Times is so good is that Dylan has been making it so long.) These songs stand alongside their sources and are meant to, which is why their sources are so obvious, so direct: "Rollin' and Tumblin' " gives a cowboy gallop and new lyrics to Muddy Waters' 1950 hit of the same name (with its own history dating back to at least 1929); "Someday Baby" mellow-downs Slim Harpo's "Shake Your Hips"; "The Levee's Gonna Break" jumps off from Memphis Minnie's "When the Levee Breaks"; "Nettie Moore" lifts a line from a nineteenth-century ballad recorded by the Sons of the Pioneers; and Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode" motivates "Thunder on the Mountain."
"Each invisible prayer is like a cloud in the air," Dylan tells his lady on "When the Deal Goes Down." "Tomorrow keeps turning around/We live and we die, we know not why/But I'll be with you when the deal goes down." The forces of divine reckoning and mortal love are everywhere on Modern Times. It all piles up in "Thunder on the Mountain": devotion, lust, the second coming, earthly troubles. The language is plain-spoken, pared down: "Feel like my soul is beginning to expand/Look into my heart and you will sort of understand/You brought me here, now you're trying to run me away/The writing's on the wall, come read it, come see what it say." In the dance-hall ballad "Spirit on the Water," Dylan invokes God's creation of the heavens and Earth to describe his sweetheart's face. There's divine reckoning here, too, though: "I wanna be with you in paradise, and it seems so unfair/I can't go back to paradise no more/I killed a man back there."
And that's one of the idyllic songs--Modern Times has plenty of love laments that turn into apocalyptic meditations. "Some young lazy slut has charmed away my brains," Dylan sings in "Rollin' and Tumblin'." Then darkness falls: "The night's filled with shadows, the years are filled with early doom/I've been conjuring up all these long-dead souls from their crumblin' tombs." Dylan speaks as a preacher, a lover and a general at the same time, as though every song he'd ever recorded were coming together into one. Modern Times is the second straight album on which Dylan has invoked the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. It is inevitable to read "The Levee's Gonna Break"--with its "people on the road . . . carrying everything that they own"-- in light of the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, just as it was impossible to hear Love and Theft's "High Water" on September 12th, 2001, the day after its release, without thinking of the World Trade Center. But neither song is that simple. Both describe the end times Dylan has seen coming since his second album. Both suggest sex or love as an alternative. "The Levee's Gonna Break," though, has an odd promise of redemption Ð the river brings not just death and destruction but baptism and rebirth. The Great Mississippi Flood, along with the Charlie Chaplin movie from which the album takes its name and the Book of Revelations, form a triangle of tragedy, comedy and prophecy in which Modern Times unfolds.
And then at the end, we are somewhere near the gates of Eden. "Ain't Talkin'," the album closer, has the hard-boiled moralism of a Raymond Chandler novel. The setting is the Mystic Garden. One night a man goes out walking. Someone hits him from behind. There are no rules here. The gardener is gone. And in this godless place, where the cities of the plague run with hog-eyed grease, this lone man looks to avenge his father's death and looks to his mother for guidance: "In the human heart, an evil spirit can dwell/I'm trying to love my neighbor and do good unto others/But, oh, mother, things ain't going well." His eyes are filled with tears. His lips are dry. His mind is clogged with thoughts of a girl he left behind. He carries a dead man's shield and waits for his enemies to sleep so he can slaughter them. "Ain't talkin', just walkin'/I'll burn that bridge before you can cross/Heart burnin', still yearnin'/There'll be no mercy for you once you've lost." He walks up the road, around the bend, bound for "the last outback, at the world's end." His music trails behind him. And then he's out of sight.
JOE LEVY
(Posted: Aug 23, 2006)
[Edited by PartyDoll MEG] |
| 31st August 2006 05:59 PM |
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| Martha |
Suberb review from RS.
Thanks Meg!
I don't have my copy yet. |
| 31st August 2006 06:01 PM |
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| lotsajizz |
nectarines are in season and tasty up here!
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| 31st August 2006 06:06 PM |
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| Martha |
How much longer before we get to page 7? |
| 31st August 2006 06:06 PM |
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| Martha |
Oh...TaDA! |
| 31st August 2006 06:07 PM |
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| glencar |
You need another 13 pages or so. I won't be able to help. Joshy is a valued member of the RO community. If it was some idiot poster, I'd be right there with ya! |
| 31st August 2006 06:13 PM |
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| Martha |
quote:
glencar wrote:
You need another 13 pages or so. I won't be able to help. Joshy is a valued member of the RO community. If it was some idiot poster, I'd be right there with ya!
You just placed my lucky number in your post thanks glencar! That number has been popping up for a month now...everyday throughout, it's weird but true.
I think jb has already tired of us so it won't be any fun to try and make him eat his words now (he has to play too)...
Anyways, I'm already in need of a nap.
:-) |
| 31st August 2006 06:18 PM |
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| Martha |
33 minutes ago....
Arts & Entertainment>Music / Performing Arts
from the September 01, 2006 edition
Dylan: changin' with the times
By Jim Sullivan | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
Bob Dylan delights in confounding expectations. He did so as a folkie who "went electric" at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965; the Jewish singer famously converted to Christianity in 1978; two years ago he left millions of TV viewers gaping in astonishment when he appeared in, of all things, a Victoria's Secret ad.
The enigmatic songwriter's career has taken another unexpected turn of late. Coinciding with this week's release of "Modern Times," an album that many critics are scoring as a perfect "10", the often reclusive Dylan is enjoying more public visibility than at anytime since he became a generation's icon in the 1960s.
STILL FREEWHEELIN': Bob Dylan performed at the Pawtucket Arts Festival at McCoy stadium in Pawtucket, R.I., Aug. 24. Though a prolific live performer, it has taken the folk singer five years to release 'Modern Times,' the followup to his 'Love and Theft' album.
In addition to an interview on CBS's "60 Minutes" and cover stories in Newsweek and Rolling Stone, Dylan's recent activities include becoming a DJ on XM Satellite Radio, starrring in a TV commercial for iTunes, and collaborating with director Martin Scorsese on a Dylan documentary. In December, Twyla Tharp gives Dylan the Billy Joel treatment, setting his songs to dance for a Broadway show.
It all points to a career renaissance for the artist long revered as our greatest living folk-rock poet.
"He's always looking ahead,'' says Dylan scholar Sean Wilentz, a history professor at Princeton University in New Jersey, who is a Dylan scholar. "He's addressing universal themes. A 22-year-old could listen to this record as a 55-year-old like me could.''
The songwriter, born Robert Zimmerman, has undergone periods of extreme popularity and visibility, as well as periods of notoriety and obscurity over the course of his storied career. Joan Baez once mused in the song "Time Rag" how Time magazine once profiled her only to, in her opinion, get close to the mystery man called "Bobby."
Suddenly prolific
But he no longer parcels himself out as a rare commodity. For the past 18 years, he's played more than 100 concerts a year, many in college gyms, and others in minor-league baseball stadiums. He's long been known to reinvent or reconfigure his songs in concert - sometimes to the point of nonrecognition - so that they sometimes turn into tepid blues-rock shuffles.
Dylan's real comeback, however, has been in his studio work. The Minnesotan has been thought to have burned out many times, after the fabled 1966 motorcycle accident, when he wrote and directed the 1978 movie "Renaldo and Clara" movie, and during a long stretch in the 1980s. It was 1998's "Time Out of Mind" that made Dylan seem relevant again, ushering in his new halcyon era.
In addition to releasing an acclaimed followup, 2001's "Love and Theft," the troubadour has authorized the ongoing "bootleg'' series (No. 8 is supposed to come next year), and released "Chronicles," the first volume of his autobiography. He also wrote and starred in the 2003 movie "Masked and Anonymous." Dylan himself will be the subject of a biographical film that might strike some as unusual. Titled "I'm Not There" and starring Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger, the movie will reportedly employ seven characters, male and female, to portray the bard.
Is Dylan making a bid to secure or cement his legacy?
"I don't think he's trying to control his legacy as much as this is a convergence of a couple of projects that have been in the works for a long time,'' suggests Bill Flanagan, executive vice president at MTV Networks.
He observes that Dylan had been working on the first installment of his autobiography for a long time, and publication was delayed. Moreover, he notes that Martin Scorsese's documentary, "No Direction Home," had been in the works for 10 years.
"What's interesting is he's probably doing the same number of projects he's always done, but they're not all records," continues Mr. Flanagan. "He seems as if he's stretching his literary talent into other forms and not feeling confined. He's Bob Dylan every day; the rest of us are fascinated by him.''
That would explain why the themed playlists of his weekly radio show on XM Satellite Radio have been picked over by Dylan enthusiasts. (Who'd have guessed that Dylan listens to a hip-hop artist such as LL Cool J?)
"He's pretty secretive about what his next move is, but when we talked to management about [starting] a radio show, the timing was perfect, with the book and movie," says Lee Abrams, chief creative officer at XM. "It seems like it might be a time in his career he wants to step out a little bit.... Maybe he wants to explain himself in a 'Bob Dylan' mysterious way - come out of the Bob Dylan closet in a little way, which he's done in the movie and book, and a little bit in the radio show by showing his true musical taste.''
For Dylan, an era of glasnost
Dylan, who declined to comment for this article, remains, as ever, an enigma. (Three years ago, he called himself "a 62-year-old Jewish atheist.'') But he's more open than he's ever been about his past, even opening himself to interviews for Scorsese.
"You have Bob talking in the documentary, and his powers of reportage and observation are enormous," enthuses Nigel Sinclair, a producer on the film. "He's a great storyteller. You see someone who's aware in a great way, conscious of the journey he's had, the journey home."
A '60s icon embraces 'Modern Times'
Dylan's new album, "Modern Times," has once again stirred a flurry of interest.
"He's aiming very high, to be Shakespeare, the highest he can be," says Mr. Wilentz, who penned the liner notes for the Dylan 1964 installment of the bootleg series. (He's also the official historian at bobdylan.com.) "Now, his peers are wondering, 'How do you grow old in rock 'n' roll?' and Dylan had the clarity and courage to say, 'Getting old is a subject, too.' ''
Mr. Sinclair calls Dylan's three most recent albums focused, powerful, fresh, and different.
" 'Modern Times' is a new record that's equally innovative," says Sinclair. "[It's] not a record by a person revisiting his legacy in making that record now. He's very musically alive."
Bob Dylan - Modern Times (Columbia):
At 65 - and on his 32nd studio album - Bob Dylan is mostly somber and serious, working in the shuffling blues-rock mode he's employed for some time. The 10 songs on "Modern Times" chug along at modest mid-tempos, many lyrics dealing with love's vagaries. There isn't the drama, heft, or hookiness of prime-time Dylan - no rousing anthems or major statements. These are like back-porch meditations, as played by Dylan and his touring band. He can be sly - "I keep recycling the same old thoughts" in "When the Deal Goes Down" - and funny, as in a weird shout-out to Alicia Keys in "Thunder on the Mountain." The soft, elegiac "Workingman's Blues #2'' is the centerpiece, with Dylan musing "sleep is my contemporary death'' as the music meanders past gently and, later, "I say it, so it must be so.'' "Modern Times'' is calm and likable, but it doesn't match Dylan's last two CDs. Grade: B
www.csmonitor.com
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