Bob Dylan in Performance

Bob Dylan in Performance
Author: Keith Nainby
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 317
Release: 2019-04-19
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1498582648

This study of Bob Dylan’s art employs a performance studies lens, exploring the distinctive ways he brings words and music to life on recordings, onstage, and onscreen. Chapters focus on the relationship of Dylan’s recorded performances to the historical bardic role, to the American popular song tradition, and to rock music culture. His uses of both stage and studio to shape his performances are explored, as are his forays into cinema. Special consideration is given to his vocal performances and to his use of particular personae as a performer. The full scope of Dylan’s body of work to date is situated in terms of the influences that have shaped his performances and the ways these performances have shaped contemporary popular music.

It Ain't Me Babe

It Ain't Me Babe
Author: Andrea Cossu
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2015-12-03
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317257278

Bob Dylan has always been something of a mystery. He has worn a variety of masks that have delighted, puzzled, amused and angered his many audiences. Andrea Cossu offers a strikingly fresh explanation of Dylan and the transformations he has made throughout his career. Cossu's descriptions of key Dylan performances explain how he forged authenticity through performance, and how the various attempts to make 'Bob Dylan' have often involved the interaction between the artist, his public image and his many audiences. It Ain't Me Babe offers a striking vision of how Dylan built his image and learned to live with its burden, painting a unique and coherent new portrait of the artist.

Performed Literature

Performed Literature
Author: Betsy Bowden
Publisher: Rlpg/Galleys
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2001
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN:

Bob Dylan is not a poet. He is a singer-songwriter, a performing artist. The unit of his art, as collected and documented by his intended audience, is the live performance. Right now, no existing technological tool can give researchers ready access to his entire corpus of work. Revised from the author's Ph.D. dissertation (UC Berkeley, 1978) and again from its first edition (Indiana UP, 1982), Performed Literature develops a methodology for close analysis of verbal art that is heard, not seen, using as comparative examples 24 performances of 11 songs by Bob Dylan. The second edition adds a preface, two major appendices and one minor one, and a detailed index.

Dreams and Dialogues in Dylans "Time Out of Mind"

Dreams and Dialogues in Dylans
Author: Graley Herren
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 188
Release: 2021-07-06
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1785278479

Time Out of Mind is one of the most ambitious, complex, and provocative albums of Bob Dylan’s distinguished artistic career. The present book interprets the songs recorded for Time Out of Mind as a series of dreams by a single singer/dreamer. These dreams overlap and intermingle, but three primary levels of meaning emerge. On one level, the singer/dreamer envisions himself as a killer awaiting execution for killing his lover. On another level, the song-cycle functions as religious allegory, dramatizing the protagonist’s relentless struggles with his lover as a battle between spirit and flesh, earth and heaven, salvation and damnation. On still another level, Time Out of Mind is a meditation on American slavery and racism, Dylan’s most personal encounter with the subject, but one tangled up in associations with the minstrelsy tradition and debates surrounding cultural appropriation. Time Out of Mind marks the culmination of several recurring themes that have preoccupied Dylan for decades, and it serves as a pivotal turning point toward his late renaissance in terms of both subject matter and intertextual approach.

Listening to Bob Dylan

Listening to Bob Dylan
Author: Larry Starr
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2021-09-14
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0252052889

Venerated for his lyrics, Bob Dylan in fact is a songwriting musician with a unique mastery of merging his words with music and performance. Larry Starr cuts through pretention and myth to provide a refreshingly holistic appreciation of Dylan's music. Ranging from celebrated classics to less familiar compositions, Starr invites readers to reinvigorate their listening experiences by sharing his own—sometimes approaching a song from a fresh perspective, sometimes reeling in surprise at discoveries found in well-known favorites. Starr breaks down often-overlooked aspects of the works, from Dylan's many vocal styles to his evocative harmonica playing to his choices as a composer. The result is a guide that allows listeners to follow their own passionate love of music into hearing these songs—and personal favorites—in new ways. Reader-friendly and revealing, Listening to Bob Dylan encourages hardcore fans and Dylan-curious seekers alike to rediscover the music legend.

The Double Life of Bob Dylan

The Double Life of Bob Dylan
Author: Clinton Heylin
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 559
Release: 2021-05-18
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0316535230

From the world's leading authority on Bob Dylan comes the definitive biography that promises to transform our understanding of the man and musician—thanks to early access to Dylan's never-before-studied archives. In 2016 Bob Dylan sold his personal archive to the George Kaiser Foundation in Tulsa, Oklahoma, reportedly for $22 million. As the boxes started to arrive, the Foundation asked Clinton Heylin—author of the acclaimed Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades and 'perhaps the world's authority on all things Dylan' (Rolling Stone)—to assess the material they had been given. What he found in Tulsa—as well as what he gleaned from other papers he had recently been given access to by Sony and the Dylan office—so changed his understanding of the artist, especially of his creative process, that he became convinced that a whole new biography was needed. It turns out that much of what previous biographers—Dylan himself included—have said is wrong. With fresh and revealing information on every page A Restless, Hungry Feeling tells the story of Dylan's meteoric rise to fame: his arrival in early 1961 in New York, where he is embraced by the folk scene; his elevation to spokesman of a generation whose protest songs provide the soundtrack for the burgeoning Civil Rights movement; his alleged betrayal when he 'goes electric' at Newport in 1965; his subsequent controversial world tour with a rock 'n' roll band; and the recording of his three undisputed electric masterpieces: Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. At the peak of his fame in July 1966 he reportedly crashes his motorbike in Woodstock, upstate New York, and disappears from public view. When he re-emerges, he looks different, his voice sounds different, his songs are different. Clinton Heylin's meticulously researched, all-encompassing and consistently revelatory account of these fascinating early years is the closest we will ever get to a definitive life of an artist who has been the lodestar of popular culture for six decades.

Bob Dylan in London

Bob Dylan in London
Author: K G Miles
Publisher: McNidder & Grace
Total Pages: 131
Release: 2021-02-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0857162152

'A must have for Dylan enthusiasts, lovers of London, and anyone with even a passing interest in the history of music. I devoured it in two sittings - and I loved it!' Conor McPherson, playwright, Girl from the North Country This is both a guide and history on the impact of London on Dylan, and the lasting legacy of Bob Dylan on the London music scene. Bob Dylan in London celebrates this journey, and allows readers to experience his London and follow in his footsteps to places such as the King and Queen pub (the first venue that Dylan performed at in London), the Savoy hotel and Camden Town. This book explores the key London places and times that helped to create one of the greatest of all popular musicians, Bob Dylan.

The World of Bob Dylan

The World of Bob Dylan
Author: Sean Latham
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2021-05-06
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1108499511

This book features 27 integrated essays that offer access to the art, life, and legacy of one of the world's most influential artists.

One More Night

One More Night
Author: Andrew Muir
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013-07-26
Genre: Folk music
ISBN: 9781482632361

What Dylan fans call 'The Never Ending Tour' celebrated its 25th anniversary on June 7th 2013. Its time span already represents almost half of Dylan's entire career and totals over 2,500 shows. Highly respected Dylan expert Andrew Muir documents the ups and downs of this unprecedented trek. Muir analyses and assesses Dylan's performances over the years, with special focus on many memorable shows. One More Night traces what it all means both in terms of Dylan's artistic career and in the lives of the dedicated Dylan followers who collect recordings of every show and regularly cross the globe to catch up with the latest leg. Muir also includes the funny and affecting story of his own unforgettable meeting with Dylan. One More Night is part rock criticism, part cultural analysis, part scrutiny of fandom and paints a telling portrait of the Never Ending Tour and its importance in Dylan's career.

Bob Dylan's Poetics

Bob Dylan's Poetics
Author: Timothy Hampton
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 289
Release: 2019-09-04
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1942130236

A career-spanning account of the artistry and politics of Bob Dylan’s songwriting Bob Dylan’s reception of the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature has elevated him beyond the world of popular music, establishing him as a major modern artist. However, until now, no study of his career has focused on the details and nuances of the songs, showing how they work as artistic statements designed to create meaning and elicit emotion. Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work is the first comprehensive book on both the poetics and politics of Dylan’s compositions. It studies Dylan, not as a pop hero, but as an artist, as a maker of songs. Focusing on the interplay of music and lyric, it traces Dylan’s innovative use of musical form, his complex manipulation of poetic diction, and his dialogues with other artists, from Woody Guthrie to Arthur Rimbaud. Moving from Dylan’s earliest experiments with the blues, through his mastery of rock and country, up to his densely allusive recent recordings, Timothy Hampton offers a detailed account of Dylan’s achievement. Locating Dylan in the long history of artistic modernism, the book studies the relationship between form, genre, and the political and social themes that crisscross Dylan’s work. Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work offers both a nuanced engagement with the work of a major artist and a meditation on the contribution of song at times of political and social change.