Hmmmm...yeah, I do think the Oscars are a tasteless and largely empty commercial exercise...but...I'm still glad that Bob won some recognition there. I didn't see it, cos I never watch awards shows...or TV generally, for that matter.

But...sorry I missed the Bob part.

Matt - I've seen the movie Gladiator. I'd say several things about it. It was a very well made movie in terms of being great entertainment, visually spectacular, exciting, and all that. Russel Crowe played his part quite well, as did some of the other people too. The first scene with the Roman legions battling the Germans in the forests of Germania was worth the price of the whole movie.

Now the cons: it was a story so utterly unlikely as to border on the incredible, if you know Roman history. It's entirely possible that the corrupt son of a Roman emperor might kill his own father...such things happened. But what is inconceivable is that his father's most loyal general would then be allowed to survive after being unveiled in the arena in Rome itself as a gladiator, and a self-declared bitter enemy of "nasty boy"!!! Scheming Roman politicians did not allow their enemies to survive any longer than it took them to draw breath. In this case it would have taken anywhere from a few seconds to a few hours after Russel took off the mask and revealed himself in the arena. He would have been eliminated that night, in some hideously nasty fashion, by the preatorian guards. He would NEVER have gotten to personally fight "nasty boy emperor" IN PUBLIC for the entertainment of the crowd. The very idea is unthinkable. It's ludicrous. Why risk it all when you don't HAVE to? And "nasty boy" was no arena fighter, that's for sure. He was the kind who has people poisoned or garroted by underlings.

But what the hell...does Hollywood care? No. They just want a good movie with an all-good hero, an all-evil villain, and lots of action, and they certainly delivered that.

So...if you can go into major historical denial and just enjoy the film for what it is (a couple of hours of lively entertainment)...then hey, it's a great movie, I guess.

Back to Bob: Alex, Bob's voice isn't mediocre...it's utterly extraordinary...depending on the occasion. If you listen to his whole catalog, you'll find he sings in not just one voice (as do most singers), but quite a variety of them. He has a greater range (from low to high) than most male singers, and a degree of raw power and intensity that is quite unusual. Sometimes he sounds ragged or nasal. Sometimes he doesn't. He's done some amazing singing in certain phases of his career.

Point is, his voice and his meaningFULL lyrics are his 2 greatest assets, not his liabilities. His 3rd major asset is that he's a hell of a good musician...ask Rick Fielding about that. His major liability has always been that his audience could not keep up with him, and he showed them (and the press) very little mercy in that regard. None at all, in fact.

That's what makes him so interesting.

Spaw - I think Bob's rebellion was entirely real, but he tended to move on very quickly. When he wrote those songs like "The Times They Are A-Changin", and "Hard Rain", he meant them all right. A couple of years later he didn't want to sing them at all anymore, because he had moved on, and he wanted to express something else entirely, something more personal. His audience was not pleased, of course, and accused him of selling out.

He had not sold out, he had changed. In fact, he had deepened.

"He not busy being born is busy dying".

He could've made a whole lot more money by just being agreeable and recycling the old folksinger Bob thing endlessly...Like most of his contemporaries did...until he changed the scene so much that they had to budge themselves off dead center and try something new for a change.

Matt- you just had to be there. It was more than entertainment in those days. We believed that we could change the world...and to some extent, we did.

- LH