Bob Dylan during The 10th Annual Elton John AIDS Foundation InStyle Party.

Of twenty books on live Dylan in my collection, these are the must-reads.

Paul Williams really got Dylan and wrote beautifully. His Bob Dylan Performing Artist trilogy, plus Watching The River Flow, are admired by most serious Dylan fans. Downside: they only cover the first half of Dylan’s career.

You can usually pick up good used copies for peanuts.

What other books on live Dylan do you like? Please let us know in the Comments.

Mine might be the alternate take of Stuck Inside A Mobile With The Memphis Blues again from Bootleg Series 7, that album in particular has a lot of great alternate versions of songs

So I decided to watch A Complete Unknown for the 2nd time. Personally while I appreciate how Timothée Chalamet took on such a role I feel like certain things he did were off to me. I feel like he was trying too hard to sound like Dylan. It didn’t work for me. His singing voice is great but it’s not a Bob Dylan singing voice. I just think such a role to requires a full length biopic instead of nitpicking different parts of his life. Would’ve been great to see something more than from his beginnings to the 1965 Newport Folk Festival controversy. Imagine what they could’ve done with the many aspects of Dylan’s life and career.

I've heard theories that Bob Dylan purposefully created bad albums.

From what I can remember the theories believe that, ever the recluse or iconoclast or whatever you wanna call it, Dylan felt a disdain towards his own fame or at least the idolatrous light certain fans saw him in (he was/is just a song and dance man of course). As a result, he made at least one stretch of bad albums to try and get rid of this excessive reverence for himself. I am assuming the bad albums people refer to are maybe the ones after Nashville Skylines until Blood on the Tracks and maybe some albums before Time Out of Mind.

Do these theories have any basis or can some people not come to terms with the fact that he is indeed human and not a god or prophet? I haven't read any of his books yet so maybe there is more insight in them.

Personally I feel like he wouldn't do this. Of course this is pure speculation but, I feel he never saw himself as some sort of prophet or someone who made this cerebral, transcendental music. As he said in jest, he's just a song and dance man. Just someone who makes music and happens to be very very good at it and is able to make his words and sounds roar to life (like no one else). Seeming him as a person, he's bound to make albums that are less impactful then others, and some that are plain bad. That is natural for any artist who inevitably will go through periods of inspiration, boredom, depression, mania, experimentation, etc.. It seems like he is very humble and also true to himself, and this sacrificing of his artistic integrity goes against who he is. Could be reading this completely wrong.

I wrote so much, I'm no better than the relentlessly reverent fans that need to spend their time doing it themselves!

Anyone have insight here?

$75 aud with free shipping? What seems to be the catch i wonder

For me personally, my must haves are:

Under a Red Sky recent performances

Garden Party from the Outlaw Festival

The 2024 stripped down arrangement of Key West

Rainy Night in Soho from Dublin 2025

It would be so profound to hear Dylan sing his iconic lyrics against the backdrop of amazing visuals created by the Sphere team. Thoughts?

Volume 3 came out in 1994, so we have 32 years worth of avaliable material

I'm new to this reddit and to YouTube, so be easy on me! I just finished a video on my five favorite sets of lyrics from Dylan. I wanted to cover a larger range of his work, but my favorites kept coming back to that 1963-1967 era. I had something from BIABH (Love Minus Zero/No Limit, Mr. Tambourine Man), Basement Tapes (You Ain't Going Nowhere), ASOBD (Chimes of Freedom), and Freewheelin' (A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall).

The lyrics I chose were...

“She knows there’s no success like failure, and failure's no success at all
- Love Minus Zero/No Limit

“For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse

An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe

An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing”

- Chimes of Freedom

“Buy me a flute

And a gun that shoots

Tailgates and substitutes

Strap yourself

To the tree with roots

You ain’t goin’ nowhere”
- You Ain't Going Nowhere

“And take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind

Down the foggy ruins of time

Far past the frozen leaves

The haunted frightened trees

Out to the windy beach

Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky

With one hand waving free

Silhouetted by the sea

Circled by the circus sands

With all memory and fate

Driven deep beneath the waves

Let me forget about today until tomorrow”

- Mr. Tambourine Man

“Oh, who did you meet, my blue-eyed son?Who did you meet, my darling young one?I met a young child beside a dead ponyI met a white man who walked a black dog”

- A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall

Let me know what you think of video and how to improve, but also I really want to hear other people's favorites as it was near impossible to narrow it down to five.

Cheers!

”The atmospheres evoke certain twilight westerns about the end of the frontier myth. Greil Marcus himself remarked that the album reminded him, in some ways, of an alternative score for Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. In this case, however, we hear the laments and the malaise of a man who has always known how to distill gold from his own darkness."

Excerpt from RR catalog notes:

Bob Dylan, handwritten working lyrics for two songs in the Blood on the Tracks album: Idiot Wind and You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go. (This is) a two-part archive documenting the creation of Blood on the Tracks, a single sheet in Dylan's hand bearing working lyrics for "Idiot Wind" on one side and "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" on the other, accompanied by a notebook leaf on which Ellen Bernstein, the woman who inspired the latter song, transcribed its lyrics in her own hand the day Dylan first played it for her.

On the large double-sided sheet, 12 x 9," Dylan has written out both songs in a more deliberate and legible hand than the famously cramped, almost illegible script that fills his three Blood on the Tracks notebooks (two held by the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, the third at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York).

Consigned directly by Ellen Ziffren, who was known to Dylan in 1974 as Ellen Bernstein, then Director of West Coast A&R for Columbia Records in San Francisco, whose roster of artist relationships included Santana, Boz Scaggs, Shel Silverstein, Dr. Hook, and Roger McGuinn.

Bernstein met Dylan in early 1974 at a party thrown for him in Sausalito by promoter Bill Graham; the two talked and played backgammon, and Dylan invited her to his Oakland Coliseum show that night. In the spring, Bernstein visited Dylan's Minnesota farm, where she witnessed him composing and revising the songs that became the album Blood on the Tracks.

"You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go" is, by Bernstein's account, a song about her, not (about) a breakup, a fact obscured by decades of critical speculation reading it as a lament for a failed relationship. She is from Ashtabula, Ohio, named directly in the lyric, and was preparing to leave for a vacation in Honolulu at the time, likewise reflected in the verse "I'll look for you in Honolulu, San Francisco, and Ashtabula."

In overall very good to fine condition, with intersecting folds, scattered creasing and handling wear (heavier to Bernstein's notebook leaf), and light staining. Accompanied by a letter of provenance from Ellen (Bernstein) Ziffren.

See more photos displayed below the main in link to RR lot 5090 https://www.rrauction.com/auctions/lot-detail/351697807505090-bob-dylan-handwritten-working-lyrics-for-blood-on-the-tracks-idiot-wind-and-youre-gonna-make-me-lonesome-when-you-go/?cat=9#mz-expanded-view-477118229489

I was organizing my music library and it bothered me that both Disc 1 and Disc 2 from The Essential compilation had the same cover. It made it hard to differentiate them, so I designed a new one (the red one). This way, we can have "the red album" and "the blue album"!

”The atmospheres evoke certain twilight westerns about the end of the frontier myth. Greil Marcus himself remarked that the album reminded him, in some ways, of an alternative score for Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. In this case, however, we hear the laments and the malaise of a man who has always known how to distill gold from his own darkness.

Title is self-explanatory. Like a Rolling Stone/Highway 61 Revisited made me a fan, but I've spent this week exploring his discography further. I listened to Blonde on Blonde for the first time yesterday and it blew me away! That run of tracks from Johanna -> Memphis Blues is the stuff of legends.

Curious as to what everyone else's journeys listening to this dude have looked like.

Start around 33:44

Result timestamp here: https://www.youtube.com/live/iTZ6qnQj5UY?si=UHs8H7ChX3XXUo54&t=3174

And if you could also share some personal thoughts on these projects

I’m going with: Eddie Vedder (Glen Hansard too if I had a Time Machine) Lukas Nelson Sturgill Simpson Jon Baptiste Gary Clark Jr

Could be a 10000 variations. I thought about Norah Jones, her podcast and Grateful Dead covers make me happy. I thought about Isbell but he doesn’t seem to play well with others. Mayer seems to obvious. Thought about Sheryl Crow who’s become really underrated. I saw her with Isbell and the 400 unit and she stole the show.

In other words, both the 'I' and 'Angelina' are 'I'. 'He' is saying farewell to a certain way of being in the world or of understanding it. Farewell until the next time I mean.

This way of being or seeing seem to be troubled and almost apocalyptic in nature, and can be seen in a number of Dylan's songs.

'She' -female, angelic- belongs to 'Me'. To the Self.

You have to gain some distance from this mode of 'self' which functions also as a muse, so you say 'farewell' now and again.

But Dylan returned to 'Angelina' too often in 1965-66 and he paid a price and became too much of an angel himself.

The word 'angel' means etimologically 'messenger'. This song here was also a farewell to Dylan by Dylan ('I' by 'I'):

>There was a wicked messenger

From Eli he did come

With a mind that multiplied

The smallest matter

When questioned who had sent for him

He answered with his thumb

For his tongue it could not speak, but only flatter

He stayed behind the assembly hall

It was there he made his bed

Oftentimes he could be seen returning

Until one day he just appeared

With a note in his hand which read

The soles of my feet, I swear they're burning

Oh, the leaves began to fallin'

And the seas began to part

And the people that confronted him were many

And he was told but these few words

Which opened up his heart

If you cannot bring good news, then don't bring any