Top 102 Albums⁺ No 1. Highway 61 Revisited

As a result of my liking for having my cake and eating it, I am continuing this list to 0 and then beyond, into the shadows of the negative numbers. There was not enough space in 102 albums. So I have a No 1 and a No -1 and also 0, the ground zero of my musical world, due next. 

Top 102 Albums⁺ No 1. 
Highway 61 Revisited - Bob Dylan

"Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. "

I have no problem selecting my favourite Dylan album. He has released at least ten albums that could comfortably sit in my top five if I selected them as my favourite Dylan album but I can't remember a time when this wasn't my favourite Dylan album.

Gilead

Gilead - Marilynne Robinson

"Is there no balm in Gilead?"

Three books in and Marilynne Robinson' is clearly creating a  body of work which can be compared with any other. I read this and Home back to front (Home is a sequel to Gilead, written from a different perspective) but found that one still deepened the other to an extraordinary degree.  I could quite happily spend a lifetime  looking at the town of Gilead if each perspective were as beautifully realised as it is in these two extraordinary books. The variations of the story between perspectives have set me to imagining other perspectives and narratives hidden within what we have been given. It seems as blind and fathomless as life itself.

Whistlestop on the Never ending Tour

Original Post - Sunday, June 25, 2006

A dark rumbling like the birth pangs of an earthquake illuminated by flashes of subterranean lightning. Last night I witnessed one of those moments that Bob Dylan is so capable of blessing a gig with. This time it was the performance of Ballad of a Thin Man - one of my favourites but this was lifted beyond the recorded version. Starting like a rockabilly apocalypse and  tipping a black hat (and the rest) to Scotty Moore it teetered but never wavered. The guitar licks peeled off by Denny Freeman were outrageously good and I felt electric. Some other performances on the night seemed like showmanship beside this and when you look at the setlist (below) you'll see little surprising or unfamiliar. This was showbiz Bob giving the crowd what they wanted. But there was more than one visit to the dark well that is Highway 61 Revisited and the albums title song was another of the nights highlights. Touchstone song and first encore Like a Rolling Stone was a little swamped by the singalong but the finale of Watchtower was pretty fine.

Love Sick was also great and this gig has to go down as prime Dylan.

Bob Dylan - in the eye of the hurricane.

Original Post - Friday, April 07, 2006

Bob Dylan - No Direction Home

Scorcese's Dylan doc proved as fascinating as expected. The music (Not just Bobs') was given enough space to breathe and not just quickly chopped in and out and there were many voices and much archive to tell the story in a clear and engaging way. Scorsese didn't actually shoot any material for this. The interviews had  been conducted by Dylan manager Jeff Rosen five years ago. They included a long interview with Dylan and interviews with many of the denizens of Greenwich Village in the early sixties. (Liam Clancy, Joan Baez, Al Kooper, His job was to find a narrative structure and he has succeeded admirably, starting and finishing with the famous concert in The Manchester Free Trade Hall in 1966 where Dylan was called Judas when he plugged in his electric guitar. There is a wealth out material culled from the outtakes of 'D A Pennebaker's magnificent 'Don't Look Back' and the rarely seen sequel 'Eat the document· Murray Lerners'  footage of the Newport Folk Festivals of 1962, '63 & '64 , tv clips and other odds and ends.