Music Reviews: Bob Dylan & the Band ‘The 1974 Live Recordings,’ plus Dave Edmunds, Randall Bramblett, and Belsitzman & Herman Remember when a double album—two vinyl LPs, each with about 30 minutes of music—was a big deal? Those days are long gone. Not only have recent years witnessed a plethora of four-, five-, and six-CD […]
Book & Music Reviews: ‘Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan,’ plus the Richard Thompson Band and Fats Domino British writer Michael Gray’s gargantuan Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan, which has just been reissued in America, first appeared in the U.K. in 1972 and in the U.S. and Japan […]
Continue Reading
When it first appeared in 1979, Bob Dylan’s Live at Budokan garnered mixed reviews. It did go gold and receive some praise, particularly in Europe, but many listeners derided its radical rearrangements of classic material as well as its use of backup singers and brassy, big-band instrumentation. Dylan may have been in Japan, but it […]
Continue Reading
God knows, no shortage exists of books devoted to Bob Dylan and his music. There are album-by-album critiques, songbooks, scholarly works, biographies, a memoir, and other writings from the bard himself. There are also Q&A collections, including yours truly’s Dylan on Dylan: Interviews and Encounters. Believe it or not, there’s even a book that describes […]
Continue Reading
Every little while over his six-decade career, Bob Dylan has debuted some sort of amazingly great project, often just when fans were starting to grumble that his best days were behind him. His latest such effort is Shadow Kingdom, which first appeared as a pay-per-view online concert in July 2021 while the pandemic kept his […]
Continue Reading
Dexys’ Do-over Kevin Rowland’s overlooked 1999 album, My Beauty, got a deserved second chance with its 2020 rerelease. Now Too-Rye-Ay, the sophomore LP from Rowland’s band, Dexys Midnight Runners, is getting another shot in the spotlight as well, thanks to a recently issued three-CD 40th-anniversary edition. Unlike My Beauty, Too-Rye-Ay didn’t go unnoticed when it […]
Continue Reading
Dead of Winter “I will measure up my life, my days as they go screaming by With Xs on the calendar, till pennies on my eyes I will count my many blessings with gratefulness my mentor And I will count myself in luck as I count the dead of winter” An unfinished song by […]
Continue Reading
A Box Set Showcases Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind Sessions, plus Jeb Loy Nichols and Josh Sinton By 1997, many fans had probably lost track of the number of times Bob Dylan had fallen short or gone silent, been counted out, and then proved the critics wrong with yet another tremendous album. He did […]
Continue Reading
The Philosophy of Modern Song by Bob Dylan (Simon & Schuster) Review by Mark Pelavin The second least surprising thing about The Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan’s new book, is that it’s weird. The least surprising thing? It’s brilliant. It’s brilliant, to be clear, on its own terms. Just as Dylan does whatever he […]
Continue Reading
“Yummy, Yummy, Yummy I got love in my tummy And I feel like a-lovin’ you” By Arthur Resnick and Joey Levine “Yummy Yummy Yummy” (YYY) is a song by Arthur Resnick and Joey Levine, first recorded by Ohio Express in 1968. Their version reached No. 4 on the U.S. Pop Singles chart in June and […]
Continue Reading