Ira Glass | Dylan Down Under | Bob Dylan | Sid Griffin

Dylan Down Under

by American Way Staff
Page:
1
2
3
4
Share|

 

Image about Ira Glass


Image about Ira Glass

 

Dylan Down Under
A new book takes us behind the scenes and into the basement with Bob and the Band. By Bob Mehr

By early 1967, Bob Dylan's controversial turn from acoustic folk to electric rock, along with the epochal world tours of 1965 and 1966, had left him damaged, dazed, and ravaged by drugs. So Dylan retreated to his new family home near Woodstock, New York, and under the guise of his mysterious and now infamous motorcycle accident, he disappeared from public view. In Woodstock, with an ensemble of backing musicians known as the Band, Dylan began a series of informal recording sessions. The songs would eventually leak out to the public and come to be known collectively as the Basement Tapes, the most famous bootleg in history.

Four decades (and an official, if somewhat incomplete, release in 1975) later, author Sid Griffin shows us why the myths about and the magic of those recordings endure. In Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, the Band, and the Basement Tapes, Griffin notes that Dylan's work was - as always - revolutionary. It portended a return from the outrageous excesses of the psychedelic era, presaged the country-rock and Americana movements, and influenced everyone in the pop world, from the Beatles on down. Combining historical material and interviews with longtime Dylan confidants, Griffin, himself a noted songwriter as well as the leader of both the Long Ryders and Coal Porters, has created a true fan's delight and a remarkable road map to these historic recordings.

 

Worth Your Money
New CDs, DVDs, and movies you should check out
HEAR IT: LeAnn Rimes, Family
BRINGING THE TWANG BACK: LeAnn Rimes has called her new album "countrier" than anything else she's done lately. Countrier? Um, okay. While Family is definitely not as country as Rimes's old-school, ballad-filled debut, Blue, it is a lot, yeah, countrier than This Woman and her other recent crossover attempts.		 HEAR IT: R.E.M., R.E.M. Live
LUCK FROM THE IRISH: Inexplicably, R.E.M. has never released a live-concert CD or DVD until now. Filmed in 2005 in Dublin, Ireland, where the group has also been recording its next studio effort, R.E.M. Live offers 22 songs and more than 100 minutes of old and new music - plus Michael Stipe's head-shaving secrets. Not really.
HEAR IT: Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings,
100 Days, 100 Nights
A BAND GROWS IN BUSHWICK:The Dap-Kings own a studio (an all-analog facility in Brooklyn) anddistribute their music on a self-owned label, Daptone Records. That maybe why their soul and funk ring so true - well, that and Sharon Jones'scaptivating voice, which can sink to Captain Nemo depths and is inconstant demand from various artists, from Rufus Wainwright to TheyMight Be Giants		 SEE IT (BIG SCREEN):The Nightmare Before Christmas 3-D
THAT PUMPKIN IS COMING RIGHT AT US:Are you ready to see, perhaps, Huckleberry Hound in three dimensions?You'd better be. Because if the digital reworking of Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas 3-Dis successful at the box office - and judging by its stunning looks, itmay well be - then it won't be long before other two-dimensional worksof animation get a third side. As Huckleberry might say, "Golly!"		  
SEE IT (BIG SCREEN):Before the Devil Knows You're Dead
AND THE ENVELOPE, PLEASE … The five main actors - Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei, Albert Finney, and Rosemary Harris - and director Sidney Lumet have a combined 16 Oscar nominations, including two wins. So bring a pen and make your Oscar predictions as you follow this movie's twisting plot involving family betrayal, robbery, and adultery. Sorry, Seymour, but our money is on Finney in a supporting role.		 SEE IT (BIG SCREEN):My Kid Could Paint That
YOU CALL THAT ART? If a four-year-old kid can paint like modern-art master Wassily Kandinsky, does that mean the kid is a genius, or does it just make Kandinsky and other modern-art artists laughable? That's roughly the highbrow query that director Amir Bar-Lev started with when making this documentary. And when he began to question whether little Marla Olmstead had, in fact, painted her works at all - well, that's when things really got interesting.
SEE IT (DVD): 28 Weeks Later
BE AFRAID: London is swell and all, but if you were to take away the traffic and the sky-high real estate prices, you'd really have something. That's just what it's like for the London inhabitants in 28 Weeks Later. Unfortunately for them, this quieter, gentler London is the result of a zombie outbreak. (See 28 Days Later for details.) But the zombies are now contained. Or … are … they?		 SEE IT (DVD):Warner Home Video Directors Series: Stanley Kubrick
BE VERY AFRAID: The mere idea of having A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, and The Shining in one place - in one box - creeps us out. Of course, the presence of Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, a documentary about the legendary director of the aforementioned films, in that box, is somewhat calming. But we suggest that you keep the movies separate, lest Jack Torrance, Private Pyle, Alex de Large, HAL 9000, and a naked Tom Cruise conspire against you.		  

 

 

Truth and Fiction
Radio's Ira Glass brings together some of his favorite writers in a new compendium.

 

The king is dead. More specifically, the old king of literary nonfiction - a form that incorporates fictional-writing techniques such as dramatic arc, scene setting, and extended dialogue to flavor books about true occurrences - is dead. That king would be Truman Capote, whose In Cold Blood, an account of a murder in rural Kansas, is often called the first nonfiction novel. Now, 42 years after In Cold Blood was first published and 23 years after Capote's death, Ira Glass of Chicago Public Radio's This American Life is declaring, "Long live the new kings!"

In a new compendium, Glass brings together 14 top current writers of literary nonfiction. The collection does not include works from the most visible living progenitor of literary nonfiction, the dapper Tom Wolfe, but it does include works from several familiar writers. The most recognizable are probably Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Orlean, and Mark Bowden. Others whom followers of literary nonfiction - or, at least, voracious readers of magazines - may recognize are: Jack Hitt, Lawrence Weschler, Bill Buford, Chuck Klosterman, David Foster Wallace, Lee Sandlin, Coco Henson Scales, Dan Savage, Michael Pollan, and James McManus.

Though their subjects vary widely, all these writers, says Glass, have something in common, qualities he feels This American Life also shares. Glass styles himself as a radio journalist who tells stories by “filtering his interviews and impressions through a distinctive literary imagination, an eccentric intelligence, and a sympathetic heart.” He believes that those practicing literary nonfiction well are those who think about the bigger implications of the facts they gather. “When I’m researching a story and the real-life situation starts to turn into allegory, I feel incredibly lucky and do everything in my power to expand that part of the story,” Glass says in his introduction to the compendium. “Everything suddenly stands for something so much bigger.”

That’s the prism through which Glass evaluated the writers in this book. They are all, he says, writers who share their feelings and thoughts within the text rather than mindlessly excising themselves from the story as some journalistic conventions would have them do.

By the way, Glass dislikes the term literary nonfiction. He thinks it is pretentious. He says he’s unsure what to call the true stories in his collection, but he is certain that they serve as a beacon in what he sees as a golden age of lousy journalism. He is certainly right about that. — Steve Weinberg

 


Page:
1
2
3
4


Share Your Comments

ISSUE: Oct 15, 2007
American Way Cover - 10/15/2007