The Bob Dylan Mystique

Subject: RE: The Bob Dylan Mystique
From: Steve Latimer
Date: 15 Jan 99 - 12:35 PM

I'll always recall a story a good friend of mine told me a few years ago. He was visiting New York in the late fities or early sixties and being a musician himself he was checking out the local scene. He said he was in a club one night when this guy came out in overalls, playing guitar and singing horribly. He recalls laughing at the tenacity of this guy for getting up in public in the first place. He then went on to say that on the drive back to Toronto, he couldn't get the songs out of his head. He was watching T.V. several months later and saw the same "Hayseed" on one of the big T.V. shows of the day and of course, it was Bob.

Thank God that those times allowed a person to say something if they had something to say. You didn't have to sound like Celine Dion to be popular.

Subject: The Bob Dylan Mystique
From: rick fielding
Date: 15 Jan 99 - 11:59 AM

If my memory serves me right, then good old Bobby released his first album in the very early sixties. (he recorded as a sideman and anonymously as Blind Boy Grunt for a least a year before the Columbia album) Here we are approaching the millenium, and so many of us still have opinions on his work, his persona, his ethics, and his alledged "betrayal" of his folkie supporters. Wow! that's longevity, and certainly makes his inclusion in "most significant folkie" a valid if debatable issue.

Every so often I put that first record on and I'm still amazed. The music was unlike anything that I had ever heard. Extroverted to the max, but with incredible discipline. I've heard bootleg tapes from the same period that were just plain awful..out of tune, sloppy, off key, and hardly worth playing a second time, so I have to think that John Hammond sr. (the producer) got the very best from him. The guitar playing was absolutely superb! The singing, VERY scary...and in a nutshell, memorable. Whatever it was he had, it worked!