What You Need

Is Frankie Valley and the Four Seasons doing Dylan.

The Best Card Trick You'll See All Day

Last One There Pays for the Rest of Us!

See you there.

Go Here Now

Waste your whole day with this thing. I dare you.

Let's Be Safe Out There

Happy Memorial Day Weekend bastards! And a fond bye to The Office.

Also it's Bob Dylan's Birthday, a high holy day around these parts. Everyone speaks in an adenoidal whine today. No exceptions.

Dylanography

Last year, about 100 lucky Bob Dylan fans in Europe came across a pretty amazing find on record store shelves: a four-CD set titled The 50th Anniversary Collection. The set contains 86 Dylan songs recorded in 1962, including numerous takes of "Mixed Up Confusion," "Sally Gal," "That's All Right, Mama" and "Baby, Please Don't Go." Contrary to appearances, this was no bootleg. It's an official release from Sony and copies are already selling on eBay for upwards of $1,000. "This isn't a scheme to make money," a Sony Music source tells Rolling Stone. "The copyright law in Europe was recently extended from 50 to 70 years for everything recorded in 1963 and beyond. With everything before that, there's a new 'Use It or Lose It' provision. It basically said, 'If you haven't used the recordings in the first 50 years, you aren't going to get any more.'"
Roughly 100 copies of the collection were given to random record stores in France, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Fans who logged onto Bob Dylan's official website from France or Germany in the final days of 2012 were also allowed to download the collection for 100 Euros.
Recordings by Miles Davis, Frank Sinatra, Chuck Berry and other stars of the 1950s and early 1960s hit the European public domain in recent years. Pressure mounted on lawmakers to change the law as it began to threaten the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and other superstars of the era.

Joe, are you holding?

Happy 70th Zimmy!

Joe, I hope you're blaring his entire catalog out some car-mounted speakers everywhere you go today. Cause that's how we do it.

A Sign!

I normally don't fall for the Jesus on Toast stuff, but sometimes you just have to believe. I'll be making Milwaukee famous for the rest of the week. Try to keep the place up, willya?

Dylan!

Going to see Bobby tonight in Tallahassee. Needless to say, I'm excited. It occurred to me this weekend that Lennon was actually older than Dylan. I had always just assumed the opposite.

Blood On The Tracks is Old

I've always said that Dylan's "Blood On the Tracks" is the album that changed me from a fan to a disciple and have used it as a gateway drug for others who express indifference to Bob. I think it's safe to say that if you don't like this album, you're probably not going to like any of his other stuff. You should also have the shit kicked out of you, but that's another story.

The folks over at PopMatters evidently agree with me and are giving the album a proper "Reconsideration." It's essentially an intellectual analysis of the album in the form of quasi-academic articles with the usual dense prose. Example:

Dylan’s work has always been characterized by a poetics of place and displacement. The poetics of place establishes itself through recourse to repeated mentions of real and imagined places, which seem to fix many of Dylan’s texts in recognizable locations and which are therefore crucial to the ability of his audience to identify with the texts. These locations—whether actual or metaphorical—are fixed moments that the memory can focus on even as it struggles to recall other features.

Blech. Read at your own risk. Has anyone ever heard the original version that was bootlegged as "Blood On the Tapes?" I would say listening to that is a more fitting tribute.

Frankie's Gun

I adore this song. The band is the Felice Brothers, who strangely enough are actually brothers (three of them are, anyway). The fourth guy is named Christmas. They've clearly listened to the Basement Tapes a time or two. Enjoy.

Really Important Books

Okay, Here's my top music-related books. There are a bunch more I need to read, so if my fellow bastards will add to it, I'll know what I need to add to my Amazon.com order. Sorry, but I don't see myself getting to Melmoth the Wanderer anytime soon.

• Careless Love: the Unmaking of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick


• Last Train To Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley by Peter Guralnick


• Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam cooke by Peter Guralnick (hey!)


• Chronicles by Bob Dylan


• Shakey: Neil Young's Biography by Jimmy McDonough


• Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes by Greil Marcus


• Big Star: The Short Life, Painful Death, and Unexpect Resurrection of the Kings of Power Pop by Rob Jovanovic


• The Frank Zappa Book by Frank Zappa


• Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil

Obviously, I'm a fan of non-fiction.

Mmmmmmm.....

Ever get a record and after listening to it for about 8 seconds, knowing that you're going to just LOVE it? Man, I'm looking forward to months of wearing this one out. The Jim James version of "Goin' To Alcapulco" was stunning in the movie and is great on the soundtrack. Ramblin' Jack's 'Tom Thumb' is pretting fucking incredible as well. And I have to admit not being cool enough to have actually known the song "I'm Not There" before the movie came out. It's fucking great, though.