{"id":7301,"date":"2015-03-14T18:40:46","date_gmt":"2015-03-14T18:40:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2015\/03\/14\/saturday-night-at-the-oldies-bob-dylan-traditionalist\/"},"modified":"2015-03-14T18:40:46","modified_gmt":"2015-03-14T18:40:46","slug":"saturday-night-at-the-oldies-bob-dylan-traditionalist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2015\/03\/14\/saturday-night-at-the-oldies-bob-dylan-traditionalist\/","title":{"rendered":"Saturday Night at the Oldies: Bob Dylan, Traditionalist"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Left owns Dylan as little as it owns dissent<\/a>.  Every Dylanologist will want to read Christopher Caldwell's Weekly Standard<\/em> piece, AWOL from the Summer of Love<\/a>.  It begins like this:<\/span><\/p>\n

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In the mid-1960s the most celebrated folk musician of his era bought a house for his growing family at the southern edge of the Catskills, in the nineteenth-century painters\u2019 retreat of Woodstock. He was a \u201cprotest singer,\u201d to use a term that was then new. His lyrics\u2014profound, tender, garrulous\u2014sounded like they were indicting the country for racism (\u201cwhere black is the color where none is the number\u201d), or prophesying civil war (\u201cyou don\u2019t need a weatherman to know the way the wind blows\u201d), or inviting young people to smoke dope (\u201ceverybody must get stoned\u201d). Fans and would-be acolytes were soon roaming the town on weekends, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Eccentric-looking by the standards of the day, they infuriated local residents. Nothing good was going to come of it. One of the town\u2019s more heavily armed reactionaries would later recall:<\/span><\/p>\n

[A] friend of mine had given me a couple of Colt single-shot repeater pistols, and I also had a clip-fed Winchester blasting rifle around, but it was awful to think about what could be done with those things. .\u2009\u2009.\u2009\u2009. Creeps thumping their boots across our roof could even take me to court if any of them fell off. .\u2009\u2009.\u2009\u2009. I wanted to set fire to these people. These gate-crashers, spooks, trespassers, demagogues were all disrupting my home life and the fact that I was not to piss them off or they could press charges really didn\u2019t appeal to me.<\/span><\/p>\n

The folk singer was Bob Dylan. The reactionary old coot with all the guns .\u2009\u2009.\u2009\u2009. well, that was Bob Dylan, too. At age 25, he was growing uncomfortable with the role conferred on him by the music he\u2019d written at age 20. \u201cI had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,\u201d he would later write in his memoir Chronicles<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

And it ends like this:<\/span><\/p>\n

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If Dylan was the voice of a generation, it was not of the generation we think. He belonged to the generation before the one that idolized him, as did The Band. For them, the pre-baby boom frameworks of meaning were all still in place, undeconstructed and deployable in art. One of history\u2019s secrets is that revolutionaries\u2019 appeal in the eyes of posterity owes much to the traits they share with the world they overthrew. They secure their greatness less by revealing new virtues than by rendering the ones that made them great impracticable henceforth. There is no reason this should be any less true of Dylan. His virtues are not so much of the world he left us with as of the world he helped usher out.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"Dylan<\/a>Some selections from The Bootleg Series, #11:<\/span><\/p>\n

Quinn the Eskimo<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Lo and Behold!<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

One Too Many Mornings<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Million Dollar Bash (Take 2)<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

You Ain't Going Nowhere (Take 2)<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

The Auld Triangle<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Punch Bros. version<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Too Much of Nothing (Take 2)<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Say to Valerie, say hello to Marion<\/span>
Give them all my salary on the waters of oblivion.<\/span><\/p>\n

You Win Again<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

An old Hank Williams number<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Jerry Lee Lewis version<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Rock Salt and Nails<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Joan Baez's unsurpassable and definitive version<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

A Fool Such as I<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Hank Snow's 1952 version<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Just a couple of years before the motorcycle accident:<\/span><\/p>\n

Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Some, like Jesse Jackson, are still stuck inside of  Selma with the Oxford<\/a> Blues again.  <\/span><\/p>\n

Oxford Town<\/a> is both topical and timeless.  It is about the enrollment of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1962.  But neither Meredith nor Ole Miss are mentioned.  This allows the song to float free of the events of the day and assume its rightful place in the audio aether of Americana.<\/span><\/p>\n

\nRelated articles<\/legend>\n
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\"\"<\/a>Dylan's American music history lecture – illustrated<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Bob Dylan Goes Film Noir in "The Night We Called It a Day" Video<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Left owns Dylan as little as it owns dissent.  Every Dylanologist will want to read Christopher Caldwell's Weekly Standard piece, AWOL from the Summer of Love.  It begins like this: In the mid-1960s the most celebrated folk musician of his era bought a house for his growing family at the southern edge of the … Continue reading “Saturday Night at the Oldies: Bob Dylan, Traditionalist”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[196,167,18,146],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-americana","category-dylan","category-music","category-sixties"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7301\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}