Bob dylan

Truth in Duluth

The Venerable Bede writes of a pagan priest in seventh-century England who, sizing up the meager life of man, compares it to a sparrow flying through a well-warmed dining hall on a stormy winter night. The priest admits to knowing nothing about the cold darkness before or after the brief passage. He can only speak to the time the bird spends in the light. In Girl from the North Country (open run at the Belasco Theatre), the season is the Great Depression in 1933, and the dining hall is a flophouse in Duluth, Minnesota, where down-and-outers blow through like so many birds on the wind. The innkeeper, Nick Laine (Jay O.

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On the road with Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan has just concluded the first leg of his revitalized “Never Ending Tour,” which was paused, along with the world, after March 2020. Scheduled to travel to Japan last April, Dylan canceled his dates in Tokyo and Osaka, and presumably sheltered at home in California. He wasn’t resting, though. Just after midnight on March 27, 2020, his website posted a nearly 17-minute-long song, “Murder Most Foul,” circling around and about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Excited rumors of a record of new Dylan songs proved true when Rough and Rowdy Ways, his 39th studio album, was released on June 19, 2020. A year and a half later, Dylan and a newly constituted band finally took the record on tour.

The lost king of the blues

February 15, 1981, the day after Valentine’s Day. At 11 on a Sunday morning, a man’s body was found slumped in the passenger seat of a beige 1971 Mercury on a residential street in the Forest Hills section of San Francisco. All four doors were locked. A Valium bottle was in the pocket of a coat on the back seat. There was no ID: the body went to the morgue as John Doe #15. The dead man was 37-year-old Michael Bloomfield, a pioneering guitarist who brought blues to the mainstream and set Bob Dylan’s music alight. The cause of death was registered as cocaine and methamphetamine poisoning. Questions remain unanswered about how he died; why methamphetamine, which he avoided, was in his system; and why he was in a part of town where he knew no one.

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Bob Dylan is rum and cokey

Rock music is always so close to parody that the best and best known fictional film about a rock tour is This Is Spinal Tap. Rolling Thunder Revue, new on Netflix, is a rock documentary — a rockumentary, if you will — about Bob Dylan’s ‘Rolling Thunder’ tour of December 1975. Its producer is Martin Scorsese, who made The Last Waltz in 1976, when rockumentaries had yet to become mockumentaries by default. Really, it was the musicians who made The Last Waltz, and Scorsese who turned that material into not just one of the best concert films, but also a sharp-eyed study of musicians and the music business.

Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese