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2020 and Me
by Skip Heller
As I type this, it is December 8, 2020, the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon's murder. I was then a newly-minted barband guitarist, fifteen years old and thinking how the world —via the election of Ronald Reagan —and music had just suffered the worst season that could ever be. 2020 has been an ongoing parade of American horrors. No matter what city you're in, the town is paused. I live in Hollywood, three blocks from the former site ...
Continue ReadingBob Dylan: Rough And Rowdy Ways
by Doug Collette
Bob Dylan's Rough And Rowdy Ways is a uniformly excellent piece of work. On these ten new original songs, the Nobel Laureate blends folk, blues and country music with just the slightest dash of gospel and, accompanied with sensitivity by his touring band (plus a few additional musicians including Blake Mills and Fiona Apple), the seamless sound makes this thirty-ninth Dylan studio album superior to both of the other standouts of recent years, Time Out Of Mind (Columbia, 1997) and ...
Continue ReadingBob Dylan: The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings
by Doug Collette
In contrast to most of the massive archival projects exhumed from Bob Dylan's vault, The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings is not accompanied by a smaller, condensed package of similar content. But that only makes sense: the third installment of The Bootleg Series was issued in 2002 in the form of a two-cd set devoted to a cross-section of such content. Preserving the rarity of that now discontinued release, every one of those very same recordings reappears in ...
Continue ReadingDreaming of Dylan: 115 Dreams About Bob
by Doug Collette
Dreaming of Dylan: 115 Dreams About Bob Mary Lee Kortes 160 Pages ISBN: #978-1947026179 BMG Books 2018 Considering the subject of Mary Lee Kortes' Dreaming of Dylan, it may sound implausible to suggest the cover reminds of nothing so much as books of Shel Silverstein such as The Giving Tree (Harper & Row, 1964). But that implicit connection, intentional or not, is wholly appropriate: all three writers invoke the whimsical side of their ...
Continue ReadingBob Dylan: More Blood, More Tracks: The Bootleg Series Vol. 14
by Eric Gudas
The challenge of finding something original to say about Bob Dylan's Blood on the Tracks (1975), the mother of all comeback albums, baffles even the most steely-eyed critic. But Sony has made the task easier with More Blood, More Tracks, the unfortunately titled, overpriced, but nonetheless revelatory fourteenth entry in the Bootleg Series. The six-disc Deluxe Edition contains all extant tracks for the album, recorded in 1974 over four September days in New York and two late December days in ...
Continue ReadingRolling Stone: Stories From The Edge - 50 Years of Defining Culture
by Doug Collette
Rolling Stone: Stories From The Edge: 50 Years of Defining Culture Shout Factory 2018 In its two DVD's, six-chapters and four hours-plus total running time (which might well have been twice that length to be truly comprehensive_, Stories From the Edge ostensibly (and fitfully) covers history also laid out in the coffee table book 50 Years of Rolling Stone: The Music, Politics And People That Shaped Our Culture (Harry N. Abrams, 2017) and, to a slightly ...
Continue ReadingNever Say No to a Rock Star: In the Studio with Dylan, Sinatra, Jagger and More
by Nicholas F. Mondello
Never Say No to a Rock Star: In the Studio with Dylan, Sinatra, Jagger and More Glenn Berger 4569 (Kindle) Pages ISBN: # 9781943156108 e: Schaffner Press 2016 “Never Say No to a Rock Star" is Glen Berger's lively account of his experiences participating in the production of some of the most successful recordings in recent popular music. A fascinating fly-on-the-studio-wall depiction, it covers his apprenticeship under hit-maker Phil Ramone at A+R ...
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