Carthy Discusses Dylan

Subject: RE: Carthy Discusses Dylan
From: PoppaGator
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 09:07 PM

I just listened to the program[me] in question, just in the nick of time. I think this is the final day that the replay is available.

It was more than interesting, even to someone like me who has heard, seen, and read pretty much everything available about these characters and their various genres and areas of interest, both back at the time when it was actually happening and ever since.

I can only be amused by the spoutings of the Dylan-haters, and amazed that they still haven't gotten over their problems.

I certainly don't expect other people to share my tastes, but if one doesn't enjoy and/or doesn't "get" a given performer's output, why is it so difficult to simply ignore/forget the object of one's supposed indifference? Why be so continually obsessed, why harbor such bitter feelings toward an artist whose taste no longer concides with one's own? A performer, after all, can hardly be expected to present material that does not represent his own tastes and feelings.

Subject: RE: Carthy Discusses Dylan
From: Maryrrf
Date: 11 Jun 07 - 09:51 PM

Just to be clear, I don't 'hate' Bob Dylan, but he isn't my favorite singer or songwriter - not by a long shot. However I don't have an issue with those who do feel a deep afinity with Dylan and his music. Little Hawk said it very well - everybody's buttons are different. Joan Baez pushes the right buttons for me most of the time (but NOT when she sings "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down".)

Subject: RE: Carthy Discusses Dylan
From: PoppaGator
Date: 12 Jun 07 - 01:46 AM

Hah, Maryrrf, we certainly agree on at least ONE thing. As much as I generally like most of Joan's work, and as much as I really love everything by and about The Band, her rendition of that particular Robbie Robertson composition really makes my skin crawl. I'm not sure why; she just seems to misunderstand the song completely.

I believe that there's a very telling misreading of a few words of the lyric in there somewhere (a "mondegreen"), but I don't remember just what it is.

I won't name names, but Maryrrf was not the correspondant uppermost in my mind when I wrote my complaint about the "Dylan haters."

Actually, the prototypical anti-Bob whiner that I always think of first is a young British fellow (well, he was young back in '65 or whenever) who appears in "No Direction Home" and informs an interviewer, quite matter-of-factly and in a smugly authoritative tone, that "Bob Dylan was a bahstard" for daring to appear onstage to perform his own music. The same kid also had some highly ignorant and indignant things to say about The Band.

It's just beyond me why people paid good money to come out an boo at those concerts. If you really don't like someone's music, that's certainly your prerogative ~ but why not stay home, save your pennies, and avoid whatever it is that you find so unpleasant?

I was at Newport in 1965, and "Like a Rolling Stone" was already a widely-played commerical hit record that summer, all over the radio, well before the Folk Festival was underway. How could anyone have been shocked or surprised that Bob would dare "go electric"?

Of course, he could never have duplicated the studio sound of that groundbreaking record at an outdoor concert. It would be difficult enough even today to even approximate that kind of highly-produced sound in a festival setting, and with the crude audio technology of that era ~ fuggetaboutit! Plus which, Bob didn't have a working band at the time, he just put together a "pickup band" of himself, Al Kooper, and members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Little wonder that the sound was a bit crude.

Subject: RE: Carthy Discusses Dylan
From: Dave Sutherland
Date: 12 Jun 07 - 03:16 AM

It would be 1966 Poppa and it follows the sequence filmed at Newcastle Odeon. I was at the same concert and forty one years on I still can't understand the same people who hung on his every word, roared with laughter at his quirky introductions and applauded loudly at the end of each of his solo, acoustic songs in the first half either got up and walked out the moment the second half began as he appeared with The Band or gave him a hard time for the rest of the night.It was almost as if it was the hip thing to do at the time.
I just wish that the same people had been to see him at Sheffield this April.

Subject: RE: Carthy Discusses Dylan
From: KeithofChester
Date: 12 Jun 07 - 03:24 AM

Wasn't it Dylan who said that his voice was as good as Pavarotti's? Just listen, he said, every note's in tune so what's the difference?

The comparison Bob made was actually with Caruso. The comment is in one of the press interviews during the documentary film Don't Look Back

Subject: RE: Carthy Discusses Dylan
From: GUEST,Terry McDonald
Date: 12 Jun 07 - 04:27 AM

Thanks Keith - all operatic tenors sound the same to me!

Subject: RE: Carthy Discusses Dylan
From: JeremyC
Date: 12 Jun 07 - 09:51 AM

I was finally able to listen to the show last night, and it's quite a good overview of what was going on at the time (based on what else I've seen and read, because I don't have the benefit some of you do of first-hand experience). I don't believe all the commentary was fair; for instance, the comment about "beauty in ugliness" seemed unwarranted, and the "sand and glue" comparison at the beginning was just ridiculous.

Martin Carthy was very fair to Dylan, but the editorial tone was not. I think Carthy helped balance the tone of the program.

The most striking thing to me were the clips of Baez. I haven't listened to her in a long time, and the purity of her voice really hits hard. I'd actually forgotten just how beautiful it was. Plus, I'd never heard "Diamonds and Rust," and now I'll have to get that album.

Subject: RE: Carthy Discusses Dylan
From: KeithofChester
Date: 12 Jun 07 - 10:02 AM

The most striking thing to me were the clips of Baez. I haven't listened to her in a long time, and the purity of her voice really hits hard. I'd actually forgotten just how beautiful it was. Plus, I'd never heard "Diamonds and Rust," and now I'll have to get that album.

Diamonds & Rust is on quite a lot of Joan compilations, as well as the original album. She has sung it live on tour about 8 out of the 10 times I've seen her.

There are quite a few versions on You Tube too

Diamonds & Rust

and of course there is also the Judas Priest take on it!

Diamonds & Rust (Judas priest)

As I said in another thread, whether 'tis folk or not is often all in the arrangement...

Subject: RE: Carthy Discusses Dylan
From: JeremyC
Date: 28 Jun 07 - 08:30 AM

Awesome. That's a great song.

On the topic of the Dylan-Baez thing, I recently read Dick Weissman's book "Which Side Are You On?" where he says something along the lines of "Joan Baez was surprised to have run across someone more coldly ambitious and calculating than herself." Provocative! I hadn't run across this contention with re: to Baez before, although I'd been told this about Dylan.

Also, the song I was thinking of earlier, where she tries and fails to sing it convincingly, was "East Virginia," on her self-titled album. Her diction is too correct for her to get away with words like "holler" and "darlin'"--if she'd just said "hollow" and "darling," it would have been fine, and I never would have noticed anything amiss.

Subject: RE: Carthy Discusses Dylan
From: Rusty Dobro
Date: 28 Jun 07 - 09:38 AM

PoppaGator may have been thinking of the way JB sings 'Here comes THE Robert E Lee'in 'The Night They...., etc), which seems to indicate that she thought she was singing about a steamboat, or locomotive, or something. Gets to me every time.

Subject: RE: Carthy Discusses Dylan
From: JeremyC
Date: 28 Jun 07 - 02:21 PM

That one's mentioned in the wikipedia article for the song, although they note that she sings it correctly in a later live recording. Someone probably told her to keep her from continuing to look stupid.