We change it up a bit in the spirit of holiday festivities and the New Year. Today, we’re going to have a pretty open roundtable. Our regular Bashers will have the opportunity to let loose in response to some open-ended prompts and will be selected to speak via a randomized spinner.

MDB Roundtable Panelists:

• Rob “Rockin’ Rob” Reginio teaches modern literature at Alfred University.  He's currently at work on a book about Dylan's album John Wesley Harding.
• Nina Goss is Editor of or contributor to the volumes Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century and Dylan at Play. She is a contributor to various anthologies and presented at the first World of Bob Dylan conference (2019), and Dylan and the Beats conference in Tulsa (2022). She teaches at Fordham University.
• Erin Callahan lives in the Houston, Texas, area where she teaches English at San Jacinto College. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge.
• Court Carney is a professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches courses on Black history and cultural history. His book Reckoning with the Devil: Nathan Bedford Forrest in Myth and Memory will be out later this year. 
• Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing.
• Jim Salvucci is the founder and keeper of The Dylantantes.

Let us know what you think!

Thanks for checking out The Dylantantes!

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A novelist and author of many short stories, John Radosta teaches high school English near Boston, Massachusetts. Under both a pseudonym and his real name, his fiction has appeared in many magazines, including Yellow Mama, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, Wildside Black Cat, and Tough Crime. A veteran of more than 50 Bob Dylan concerts, he is the co-author with Keith Nainby of Bob Dylan in Performance: Song, Stage and Screen, as well as other Dylan and Woody Guthrie articles.

You can find John’s crime fiction at this link.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedylantantes.substack.com

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Peter White is a retired professor of ecology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For 28 of his 33 years at the University he doubled as the Director of the North Carolina Botanical Garden, an institution that has championed the concept of the "conservation garden," gardens that do well by environmental issues and biodiversity. He is the author of 150 papers and several books, the most recent of which is The World Atlas of Trees and Forests.

Through six decades, Bob Dylan has been a constant, despite the many changes of Dylan, Peter himself. and the world around all of us. For 30 years he has hosted the Annual Bob Dylan Party. In 2024, the six-hour, no-breaks party featured 17 song leaders and 66 songs. Over the decades, the party has featured 266 Dylan songs at least once. In retirement Peter has joined the online Dylan scholarship and fandom world. In 2023 he co-founded It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Reading), a Zoom-based Bob Dylan Book Club.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedylantantes.substack.com

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Christopher Vanni is the author of two Substacks, one about Bob Dylan and one on Gene Clark, he's an advisor for the Bob Dylan Book Club—It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Reading—and he's the creator of a Bob Dylan Quiz that can be found on YouTube and in his feed on X. He is also passionate about golf, classic films, and history.

Check out Christopher’s work using these links:

Christopher Vanni (@Vanni621) / X (twitter.com) 

"The world don't need any more [blogs]" - Bob Dylan | Christopher Vanni | Substack

The Fabulous Exploration of Gene Clark | Christopher Vanni | Substack

It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Reading): A Bob Dylan Book Club

Bob Dylan Quiz (youtube.com)

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedylantantes.substack.com

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The 1974 album Planet Waves marked a series of firsts for Bob Dylan. It was his first official album with The Band. It was his first record not on the Columbia label. And it was, believe it or not, his first No. 1 album.

The music represents, if not a return to form, a reset after the release of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid and the Columbia-compiled revenge album called simply Dylan. Compositionally, it’s a musical way station between 1970’s New Morning and 1975’s Blood on the Tracks.

The songs feel personal and even, at times, intimate. And the influence of The Band on the music is unmistakable—particularly Robbie Robertson’s always superb lead guitar and Garth Hudson’s meandering organ, which constantly threatens to explode the arrangements yet paradoxically is what holds them together. Dylan’s harmonica is pretty special too.

The album’s opener, “On a Night Like This,” is a jaunty, accordion-driven love song. The lyrics are simple, rhyming “night like this” with “touch of bliss” for instance. It stands in contrast to the magisterial cast iron song that follows: “Going, Going, Gone,” with its heavy guitar work and heavier lyrics speaking of “the top of the end.” And that song in turn gives way to the outright jocularity of “Tough Mama” with her “meat shaking on her bones,” which leads into the torch ballad, “Hazel.”

Don’t worry. I’m not going to catalog the album’s 10 songs and 11 tracks here. But it’s worth noting that discrepancy: 10 songs but 11 tracks.

That’s because there are two versions of “Forever Young,” the most famous song on the album and a perennial favorite. One is the anthemic hymn we are most familiar with, which closes side one of the vinyl album. Side two opens with the same song done as a country rock honky-tonk. This song, by the way, was quoted by Howard Cosell when Muhammed Ali defeated Leon Spinks in 1978: “It occurs to us that Bob Dylan struck the proper note in his great song ‘Forever Young’: ‘May your hands always be busy, may your feet always be swift, may you have a strong foundation when the winds of changes shift.’” In 1980 Cosell reprised with, “Even Muhammed Ali cannot be forever young. His hands are no longer busy, his feet no longer swift.”

Planet Waves probably lands on few fans’ lists of Dylan’s top ten, but it still likely occupies a special place in their playlist of albums. It’s highly listenable, offering a variety of song genres—from rock to ditty. There’s a darkness mixed in with the joy—for instance, the grave “Dirge” is sandwiched between the rollicking version of “Forever Young” and the loveliness of “You Angel You.”

I first found the album when I was in college in the early 80s, and I’ve loved it ever since. Again, not because it’s such an objectively great album but because it feels great.

MDB Roundtable Panelists:

• Rob “Rockin’ Rob” Reginio teaches modern literature at Alfred University.  He's currently at work on a book about Dylan's album John Wesley Harding.
• Erin Callahan lives in the Houston, Texas, area where she teaches English at San Jacinto College. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge.
• Court Carney is a professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches courses on Black history and cultural history. His book Reckoning with the Devil: Nathan Bedford Forrest in Myth and Memory will be out later this year. 
• Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing.
• Jim Salvucci is the founder and keeper of The Dylantantes.

Let us know what you think!

Thanks for checking out The Dylantantes!

FM PODCAST NETWORK 

We're a proud member of The FM Podcast Network along with PodDylan - Dylan.FM - The Bob Dylan Primer - and more.

We are entering a season of maximum hype for the Timothée Chamalet vehicle, James Mangold’s biopic of Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown. The release date is December 25, 2024, and I, for one, can wait.

It’s not that I don’t dearly love movies about Bob Dylan; it’s just that I don’t trust this particular director to create anything but a feel-good yawner complete with loving recreations of settings and a superficial interest in actual biographical events. But that’s me.

Besides, haven’t we already traversed the Dylan bio-pic territory with I’m Not There? Granted, even diehard Dylan fans have found it hard to digest, but isn’t that how it should be? In my case, I think I’m Not There is about as suitable (and excellent) a crack at a Dylan bio-pic that we shall ever see.

The eminent filmmaker Todd Haynes, is known for such masterpieces as Far from Heaven, The Velvet Goldmine, Carol, and last year’s May December. His first movie, the highly acclaimed and now legally banned Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, told its tale using Barbie dolls, so you know that Haynes is not conventional in any way.

Indeed, his 2007 film, I’m Not There, is anything but your grandpa’s bio-pic. For one thing, absolutely no one in the film is named “Bob Dylan”—the feature’s ostensible subject. In fact, no one utters the words “Bob Dylan,” and many of the events depicted have, at most, a tangential relationship to the life and times of said Bob Dylan. On the other hand, Dylan’s music features prominently and wonderfully throughout/ and some settings, dialogue, and events are Dylan lyrics put to film.

If you are not aware or need a reminder, in the film six actors portray six characters who correspond somewhat to aspects of Dylan’s life and personality although some scenes fall clearly into the sub-genre of “what if.” What if Bob Dylan found Jesus in the mid-sixties and became a Pentecostal minister? What if Bob Dylan were an actor portraying a Bob Dylan-like character in a bio-pic.

The characters that stand in for Dylan are an 11-year-old Black hobo, a nearly-hermit-like aging cowboy, a hotshot actor with a passion for cheating on his artist-wife, a folksinger turned small-time devout preacher, a poet who’s being interrogated for some reason, and a hipster rockstar immersed in a world of amphetamine and androgyny.

Meanwhile, several other characters in the movie are Dylan-adjacent: an Albert Grossman-like manager; a Joan Baez-like folksinger brilliantly played by perennial Haynes actor, Julianne Moore; a Bobby Neuwirth-type sidekick; and, also for some reason, Bobby Seale, Huey P. Newton, and Allan Ginsburg. That last one is wonderfully portrayed by David Cross.

And for good measure, this non-bio-pic shows us the actor-character, Robbie Clark, in a scene from his bio-pic of Jack Rollins. For those at home keeping score, that’s a fictional bio-pic of a fictional character within a non-bio-pic of a real person. Still with me?

As biography, I’m Not There falls way short, but it never fully attempts biography. Indeed, like Dylan’s unreliable memoir, Chronicles, Volume 1, and Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, it is a meta-biography that uncovers the constructedness of Bob Dylan in our culture. Furthermore as a non-bio-pic or even a meta-bio-pic, it explores the fraught limitations and possibilities of biography itself, particularly when it is contained entirely within the four corners of a screen.

MDB Roundtable Panelists:

• Nina Goss is Editor of or contributor to the volumes Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century and Dylan at Play. She is a contributor to various anthologies and presented at the first World of Bob Dylan conference (2019), and Dylan and the Beats conference in Tulsa (2022). She teaches at Fordham University.
• Erin Callahan lives in the Houston, Texas, area where she teaches English at San Jacinto College. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge.
• Court Carney is a professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches courses on Black history and cultural history. His book Reckoning with the Devil: Nathan Bedford Forrest in Myth and Memory will be out later this year. 
• Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing.
• Jim Salvucci is the founder and keeper of The Dylantantes.

Let us know what you think!

Thanks for checking out The Dylantantes!

FM PODCAST NETWORK 

We're a proud member of The FM Podcast Network along with PodDylan - Dylan.FM - The Bob Dylan Primer - and more.

Last time we discussed just the covers that Bob Dylan and the members of what would become The Band recorded during the 1967 Basement Tapes sessions. Be sure to check out part 1 if you missed it.

Today we are back with part 2 to explore the Bob Dylan originals recorded during those sessions.

The common explanation is that Dylan was cranking out new compositions during what was otherwise his bucolic hiatus in Woodstock, NY, in order to sell them to others to record. If that is true, then the recordings we have scattered across various bootlegs, Columbia’s 1975 release entitled The Basement Tapes, and 2014’s The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete consist largely of rehearsals and demos. Of course, both Dylan and the Band released some of the numbers themselves on separately recorded albums, including The Band’s debut, Music from Big Pink.

Whatever the rational for composing these songs, performing them, and even recording them, we are fortunate to have this trove of musical delights. The songs range from the pretty but treacly "All You Have to Do is Dream" (takes 1 and 2) to the deceptively traditional-feeling  "Apple Suckling Tree” (takes 1 and 2) to the silly “Get Your Rocks Off” to the playful “See You Later Allen Ginsberg” to the magnificent yet incomprehensible “I’m Not There” to the magical “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” to the surreal “Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread” (takes 1 and 2) to the magisterial “I Shall Be Released” and on and on.

As I list these songs, each jingles about my head, and I am sure they are rattling around the noggins of most of our listeners now.

So, you’re welcome.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the evident influence these songs had on Todd Haynes’ 2007 meta-biopic, I’m Not There. Haynes has reportedly claimed his movie was greatly inspired by listening to a Basement Tapes bootleg over and over during a cross-country road trip, and many themes, snippets of dialogue, settings, and imagery directly evoke the Big Pink sessions.

MDB Roundtable Panelists:

• Rob “Rockin’ Rob” Reginio teaches modern literature at Alfred University.  He's currently at work on a book about Dylan's album John Wesley Harding.
• Nina Goss is Editor of or contributor to the volumes Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century and Dylan at Play. She is a contributor to various anthologies and presented at the first World of Bob Dylan conference (2019), and Dylan and the Beats conference in Tulsa (2022). She teaches at Fordham University.
• Erin Callahan lives in the Houston, Texas, area where she teaches English at San Jacinto College. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge.
• Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing.
• Jim Salvucci is the founder and keeper of The Dylantantes.

Let us know what you think!

Thanks for checking out The Dylantantes!

FM PODCAST NETWORK 

We're a proud member of The FM Podcast Network along with PodDylan - Dylan.FM - The Bob Dylan Primer - and more.

“It feels like this is probably what it sounds like in his head all the time.” -Graley Herren

The Basement Tapes occupy a unique place of honor in the pantheon of Dylan legends. Coming just after two other legendary events—the “going electric” performance and subsequent tour and Dylan’s motorcycle accident—the 1967 recordings were a collaboration between Bob Dylan and his previous backing group who would soon after become the members of The Band. The tracks they laid down—first in Dylan’s house in Woodstock, NY, and then literally in the basement of the house dubbed Big Pink that three members of the Band rented—were never meant for the public. They consist of covers of pop songs, folk numbers, and blues. In addition They recorded a large number of Dylan originals, some apparently intended as demos for other musicians to record.

Public interest in the sessions was piqued by the release of the Great White Wonder in 1969. Widely regarded as the first rock bootleg, the album features five Dylan originals from the Basement Tapes. Given Dylan’s minimal public presence at the time, this bootleg could not help but excite the fan base.

In 1975 Columbia released an album entitled The Basement Tapes, which consisted of a number of these recordings along with some demos from The Band, who were still active and popular. It was inevitable that many more of these storied recordings would make their way into Dylan aficionados’ collections as bootlegs, some of which purported to be complete. In truth, even 2014’s The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The Basement Tapes Complete is likely not all there is. And Dylan also penned many lyrics without any musical accompaniment during this period, some of which were set to music and released on the 2014 album The New Basement Tapes, produced by T. Bone Burnett and featuring luminaries such as Elvis Costello and Rhiannon Giddens.

Greil Marcus documented the circumstances and significance of these recordings in his 1997 book Invisible Republic updated in 2011 as The Old, Weird America. Marcus’ book squarely positions them in the American musical tradition.

Today we will address just the cover songs from The Basement Tapes. Look for the upcoming release of part 2 when we discuss the Dylan-penned numbers.

MDB Roundtable Panelists:

• Rob “Rockin’ Rob” Reginio teaches modern literature at Alfred University.  He's currently at work on a book about Dylan's album John Wesley Harding.
• Nina Goss is Editor of or contributor to the volumes Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century and Dylan at Play. She is a contributor to various anthologies and presented at the first World of Bob Dylan conference (2019), and Dylan and the Beats conference in Tulsa (2022). She teaches at Fordham University.
• Court Carney is a professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches courses on Black history and cultural history. His book Reckoning with the Devil: Nathan Bedford Forrest in Myth and Memory will be out later this year. 
• Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing.
• Jim Salvucci is the founder and keeper of The Dylantantes.

Let us know what you think!

Thanks for checking out The Dylantantes!

FM PODCAST NETWORK 

We're a proud member of The FM Podcast Network along with PodDylan - Dylan.FM - The Bob Dylan Primer - and more.

Scott Warmuth is a writer and musician from Albuquerque, New Mexico. His research and observations on the writing strategies of Bob Dylan are widely acknowledged and frequently referenced, notably in Bob Dylan’s Lyrics 1983-2000. In 2014, writer Jonah Raskin dubbed Warmuth the dean of Dylanologists.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedylantantes.substack.com

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Back in September 2022, I posted a piece on The Dylantantes called My Fraught Visit to the Bob Dylan Center. It tells the tale of my friend and I traveling to the Center for the first time and our experience with activists in the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Greenwood was the neighborhood famously known as Black Wall Street at the turn of the twentieth century, and it was also the site of the horrors of the Tulsa Race Massacre in May and June of 1921, almost exactly 103 years ago as of this writing.

My piece was an attempt to summarize the Race Massacre, which many still have never heard of, and to grapple with the placement of the Bob Dylan Center Archive in the neighboring Tulsa Arts District, itself a site of considerable racial tension.

I am revisiting the piece because of recent news that a decades-old attempt by survivors of the Massacre to obtain reparations has finally failed in the Oklahoma Supreme Court. As unlikely as it sounds, two women who were child victims of the riot are still with us: Lessie Benningfield Randle (109) and Viola Fletcher (110). With this state court decision, any hope for even a sliver of justice for these women or the Black residents of Tulsa expires forever, just like the long-ago casualties of the racist rampage.

I wish I were revisiting this piece for the opposite reason — that these survivors have prevailed — but even that stunted degree of justice is simply not the way of Oklahoma apparently. Even if you agree with the ruling—perhaps, to be generous, on strictly legal grounds — it becomes impossible to ignore the persistent injustice still visited upon these innocent people. Indeed, it becomes impossible to deny that the cruelty is the point — a feature, not a bug, to lean on a cliche. Oh, and the racism. The cruelty and the racism.

The Tulsa Race Massacre is the century-old crime that just keeps on giving, it seems.

I hope you read or listen to this piece to the end even if you encountered it before. As Dylan fans we have a special responsibility, I believe, to understand a little better the context of the placement of the Bob Dylan Center and the horrific history of that place.

This revisited version is lightly edited from the original .

Let us know what you think!

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Only one year after the triumphal release of “Oh Mercy,” Dylan came out with 1990’s “Under the Red Sky.” The album is known for its all-star musicians—George Harrison, Slash, David Crosby, Bruce Hornsby, Al Kooper, David Lindley, and others—and was produced by Don Was. It is filled with the language and structure of children’s songs and music—which is befitting an album dedicated to “Gabby Goo-Goo,” likely Dylan’s then-toddler daughter, Desiree Gabrielle Dennis-Dylan. There are counting songs, fairytales, and echoes of nursery rhymes. But the songs often sport an ominous feel that is hard to shake, which, if we are being fair, is not too different from traditional children’s folk literature.

For instance, “The Cat’s in the Well” is based on an old nursery rhyme about—you guessed it—a cat in a well.  The weirdest aspect of Dylan’s take, though, is the driving blues melody that backs the lyrics. It’s a rockin’ number that belies the quaintness of its verses.

Some songs, such as “Born in Time,” are stellar, while others are the targets of endless knee-jerk derision. No song falls more into that latter category than the album’s opening track, “Wiggle Wiggle.” Personally I’ve always seen “Wiggle Wiggle” as a harmless bit of fun, like “Country Pie” or “Every Grain of Sand,” but others have pegged it as a sign of the coming apocalypse. Perhaps if it weren’t the very first song on the album people would lighten up a bit, but there you have it.

We also see Dylan return to satiric form in several songs, most notably the romping “TV Talkin’ Song,” which is both hopelessly dated and sweetly naive in this Internet Age. As a satire, the song is clever, though. It’s a narrative about a man holding forth in Hyde Park—ranting about the evils of television. Most of the lyrics are simply a transcript of what he says with the narrator serving as mere reporter. This structure allows Dylan some ironic distance from the message. At the end of the song, a riot breaks out, and Dylan concludes with this amusing irony: “Later on that evening, I watched it on T.V.”

One oddity: This is the rare Dylan album to include the lyrics in the liner notes.

“Under the Red Sky” is a short album, 35 and a half minutes long, but in some ways it is too long. “Handy Dandy” would make a fine finish to the album, but instead we get one more number, the uninspired “The Cat’s in the Well.” Most Dylan albums start and end strong. Under the Red Sky does the opposite, which may be one reason—along with its uncharacteristically slick production and slap-dash performances—the album has never been well received.

But here’s the good news! Today we have a full house on Million $ Bash.

MDB Roundtable Panelists:

• Rob “Rockin’ Rob” Reginio teaches modern literature at Alfred University.  He's currently at work on a book about Dylan's album John Wesley Harding.
• Nina Goss is Editor of or contributor to the volumes Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century and Dylan at Play. She is a contributor to various anthologies and presented at the first World of Bob Dylan conference (2019), and Dylan and the Beats conference in Tulsa (2022). She teaches at Fordham University.
• Court Carney is a professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches courses on Black history and cultural history. His book Reckoning with the Devil: Nathan Bedford Forrest in Myth and Memory will be out later this year. 
• Erin Callahan lives in the Houston, Texas, area where she teaches English at San Jacinto College. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge.
• Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing.
• Jim Salvucci is the founder and keeper of The Dylantantes.

Let us know what you think!

Thanks for checking out The Dylantantes!

FM PODCAST NETWORK 

We're a proud member of The FM Podcast Network along with PodDylan - Dylan.FM - The Bob Dylan Primer - and more.

Phil Hale lives in NYC and first saw Dylan live in '81 in London. Since then he has seen Dylan more than 100 times. While having no regrets he's not completely sold on the idea that it's the best use of his time either. That dichotomy has led to some attempts to write about Dylan to make sense of what seems like a grand obsession. Phil lived in Woodstock for a while and likes to think it was a coincidence. As a graduate in philosophy he is at least attuned to the idea that some things can be pursued at length and the answer never found. He's married, and if his wife entered a "eye roll when Dylan is mentioned" competition she would place highly if not outright win it. Despite this he salutes her patience.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedylantantes.substack.com

FM PODCAST NETWORK 

We're a proud member of The FM Podcast Network along with PodDylan - Dylan.FM - The Bob Dylan Primer - and more.

Twenty-one years ago, the whole wide world was stunned by the release of a new Bob Dylan project unlike any before, a feature-length movie of his own creation aimed at a generalish audience.

Led by a future Nobel Laureate co-crafting the satirical script, populated with a brilliantly star-studded cast, and helmed by a maverick director out to compose what he described as “a great Bob Dylan song” in film, Masked and Anonymous was destined to be a masterpiece. It. Could. Not. Fail.

The film had its origins in an inchoate scheme by Larry Charles, of Seinfeld and later Borat fame, and Bob Dylan to create a network sitcom, a slapstick comedy that reportedly drew from the antics of Jerry Lewis and would star that master of physical comedy Bob Dylan. Instead, with only 20 days of production time, they cranked out a film that drew on Hollywood royalty who worked for scale just to be in the presence of the man himself.

Although I have written positively about the film, I have never been fully comfortable with it. It somehow amounts to less than the sum of its parts. The actors are all game—no one holds back in the least, and some may even go a tad bit overboard: I’m looking at you Giovanni Ribisi. There are many moments of comedy that just don’t come off the way they are supposed to. Perhaps the alternate-universe dystopian setting is too off-putting to frame this blend of sardonic wit, philosophical musings, and dad jokes.

M$B Roundtable Panelists:

• Nina Goss is Editor of or contributor to the volumes Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century and Dylan at Play. She is a contributor to various anthologies and presented at the first World of Bob Dylan conference (2019), and Dylan and the Beats conference in Tulsa (2022). She teaches at Fordham University.
• Court Carney is a professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches courses on Black history and cultural history. He is finishing a book manuscript on the public memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
• Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing.
• Jim Salvucci is the founder and keeper of The Dylantantes.

Let us know what you think!

Thanks for checking out The Dylantantes!

EXTENDED EDITIONS

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You may know Dan Brown as the author of the bestseller The DaVinci Code, but you’ve got the wrong guy. This Dan Brown was born in Tarrytown N.Y, and after a stint in the United States Air Force he moved to New City, NY, entered into a career in the restaurant industry. For the last  15 years, he has been owner of the Wherehouse Restaurant in Newburgh, NY.

His lifelong  passion for music has resulted in The Wherehouse being a hub for young  local musicians to perform as well as network. The decor is also reflective of the passionate musical journey he has taken. And though he is a fan of many bands and performers, Bob Dylan stands above the crowd not only as a songwriter but most important as a storyteller. On more tidbit: the Wherehouse serves a drink called “Blood on the Tracks,” which features Bob Dylan’s Heaven’s Door whiskey.

Thanks for checking out The Dylantantes!

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedylantantes.substack.com

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Bob Dylan’s 15th, 16th, and 17th studio albums, Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks, and Desire, had been solid successes when he released Street-Legal in 1978. The album was not universally well received by critics although it was a commercial success.

There is an Extended Version of this episode available on FM+. Details below.

The band was mostly drawn from the large ensemble performing during Dylan’s Japanese and Australian tours and notably included a chorus consisting of Dylan’s future wife Carolyn Dennis, veteran singer Jo Ann Harris, and Helena Sprigs, who was all of 17 at the time. He would continue to record and tour with a chorus through much of the eighties. The recording sessions were reportedly sloppy, being held in Dylan’s rehearsal space called Rundown Studios using mobile equipment on a truck. The resulting sonics from the original mix were less than stellar, which may be why the album had a rough reputation. The saxophone bits sound somewhat dated now, but they still work.

M$B Roundtable Panelists:

• Rob “Rockin’ Rob” Reginio teaches modern literature at Alfred University.  He's currently at work on a book about Dylan's album John Wesley Harding.
• Erin Callahan lives in the Houston, Texas, area where she teaches English at San Jacinto College. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge.
• Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing.
• Jim Salvucci is the founder and keeper of The Dylantantes.

Let us know what you think!

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Bob Dylan’s 31st studio album, “Love and Theft,” was released on September 11, 2001. The album’s lyrics are among the first to be heavily researched for references to and lifts from other works, and there are many—perhaps most notably some lines from Japanese true crime writer Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza. The songs are rich with characters—men and women, real and fanciful—and events— as devastating as a flood and as benign as the sound of fornication in the room next door. And there is humor, including some hardcore dad jokes.

There is an Extended Version of this episode available on FM+. Details below.

Sonically the album is as eclectic as any Dylan has released, spanning such genres as rockabilly, old-timey torch ballads, and some of the most hard-driving blues Dylan has ever produced.

M$B Roundtable Panelists:

• Rob “Rockin’ Rob” Reginio teaches modern literature at Alfred University.  He's currently at work on a book about Dylan's album John Wesley Harding.
• Nina Goss is Editor of or contributor to the volumes Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century and Dylan at Play. She is a contributor to various anthologies and presented at the first World of Bob Dylan conference (2019), and Dylan and the Beats conference in Tulsa (2022). She teaches at Fordham University.
• Court Carney is a professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches courses on Black history and cultural history. He is finishing a book manuscript on the public memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
• Erin Callahan lives in the Houston, Texas, area where she teaches English at San Jacinto College. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge.
• Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing.
• Jim Salvucci is the founder and keeper of The Dylantantes.

Let us know what you think!

Thanks for checking out The Dylantantes!

EXTENDED EDITIONS

To hear the Extended and Bonus Episodes of our shows:

• Subscribe to FM+ : Click the subscribe button in Apple Podcasts or sign up here. (One subscription covers all our network podcasts for one low price ! )
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Michael Glover Smith wrote and directed the feature films COOL APOCALYPSE (2015), MERCURY IN RETROGRADE (2017), RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO (2018), and RELATIVE (2022), all of which won awards at festivals across the U.S. and were the subject of rave reviews. The Chicago Sun-Times' Richard Roeper wrote that "Smith has a deft touch for creating characters who look and sound like people we know" and RogerEbert.com’s Matt Fagerholm has called him “one of the Windy City’s finest filmmakers.” His films have screened at the American Cinematheque and Rooftop Cinema Club in Los Angeles, Spectacle Theater and Regal UA Midway in NYC and the Gene Siskel Film Center and Music Box Theater in Chicago. He was a recipient of the Siskel Center's Star Filmmaker award in 2017 and made Newcity Chicago's "Film 50" list in 2018 and 2020 for being one of fifty individuals who "shape Chicago's film scene." He teaches Directing at the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee and is the author of FLICKERING EMPIRE (Columbia University Press, 2015), an acclaimed nonfiction book about film production in Chicago during the silent era.

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Last year a New York Times article opened with 

"Henry Bernstein has seen Bob Dylan 27 times in concert and owns three items autographed by him: a copy of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ album, a photograph of the singer and a “John Wesley Harding” songbook. His favorite song is “Tangled Up in Blue.” 

Henry says this is a double crowning achievement in life. When he's not obsessing over Bob Dylan Henry works in Operations and Logistics for a local Jewish Day School in Chicago. His other great loves besides his family and Bob Dylan are Superman, Star Trek and the Chicago White Sox. In 2018 Henry along with his friend Rabbi Brandon Bernstein (no relation) took their love of Judaism and Comic Books and started a podcast called "Funny They Don't Look Jewish." Henry describes the podcast as a deep dive into explicit Jewish content within super-hero comic books. This can be a character identifying as Jewish, practicing Judaism, speaking Hebrew, learning Torah and everything in-between. Henry also co-hosts a podcast with Dr. Sam Brody called Superman & Lois & Pals, an episode by episode review of the popular CW tv show.  Henry can be heard talking about Bob Dylan often on Pod Dylan. Henry credits his dear friend Rob Kelly with introducing him to the Bob Dylan Twitter community and giving him a platform to be a voice in that group. Henry lives on the Northside of Chicago with his wife—a guitar playing rockstar rabbi—and his two young children, all of whom enjoy Bob Dylan and tolerate his obsession. 

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As much as we love Bob Dylan’s many versions of his own music, we at Million $ Bash would be remiss if we did not discuss some of the gazillions of covers of Dylan’s work. Given the buzz emanating from Cat Power’s reconstruction of Dylan’s set from his 1966 British tour, it makes sense to discuss specifically covers of Dylan by women.

There is an Extended Version of this episode available on FM+. Details below.

M$B Roundtable Panelists:

• Rob “Rockin’ Rob” Reginio teaches modern literature at Alfred University.  He's currently at work on a book about Dylan's album John Wesley Harding.
• Nina Goss is Editor of or contributor to the volumes Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century and Dylan at Play. She is a contributor to various anthologies and presented at the first World of Bob Dylan conference (2019), and Dylan and the Beats conference in Tulsa (2022). She teaches at Fordham University.
• Court Carney is a professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches courses on Black history and cultural history. He is finishing a book manuscript on the public memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
• Erin Callahan lives in the Houston, Texas, area where she teaches English at San Jacinto College. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge.
• Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing.
• Jim Salvucci is the founder and keeper of The Dylantantes.

Lists of Women Covering Dylan by Your Favorite Bashers

• Rob“Every Grain of Sand,” Emmylou Harris“She Belongs to Me,” Ane Brun“Not Dark Yet,” Shelby Lynn & Allison Moorer“I Believe in You,” Sinead O’Connor“Don’t Think Twice,” Dolly Parton“Shelter from the Storm,” Cassandra Wilson“Ring Them Bells,” Sarah Jarosz“Buckets of Rain,” Neko Case“Changing of the Guards,” Patti Smith“Boots of Spanish Leather” Nanci Griffith“Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” Chrissie Hynde“Masters of War,” Odetta“Walking Down the Line,” Eilen Jewell“Thunder on the Mountain,” Wanda Jackson“Man in the Long Black Coat,” Joan Osbourne“It’s All Over Now Baby Blue,” Marianne Faithfull“Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You,” Ann Peebles“Million Miles,” Bonnie Raitt

3 albums too: Lavette's "Things Have Changed," Baez's "Any Day Now," & Cat Power's '66 album!

• NinaBarb Jungr, Sara; her all-Bob CDCass Elliot, Joni Mitchell, Mary Travers  I Shall Be ReleasedPatti Smith, Dark EyesJennifer Hudson, The Times They Are A-Changing
• CourtPatti Smith: Hard Rain (Nobel)Sarah Jarosz: Sign on the Window (live)Nina Simone: Just Like a WomanLucinda: It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to CryNeko Case: Buckets of rainNanci Griffith: Boots of Spanish LeatherCat Power: I Believe in YouAnn Peebles: Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with YouGillan Welch: BillyFairport Convention: Percys SongPJ Harvey: Shot of Love (live)
• ErinAlicia Keys – “I’m Pressing On”Nina Simone – “I Shall Be Released”Nina Simone – “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”Emma Swift – “Visions of Johanna”Patti Smith – “Changing of the Guards”Cat Power – “Mr. Tambourine Man”Cat Power – “Visions of Johanna”Norah Jones – “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight”Edie Brickell – “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall”Marianne Faithful – “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”
• GraleyNina Simone, “Just Like a Woman,” São Paulo, Brazil (April 13, 2000)Gillian Welch (with Dave Rawlings), “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Newport Folk Festival (July 26, 2015)Gillian Welch (with Dave Rawlings), “Billy” (not sure of location or date)Susan Tedeschi, “Lord Protect My Child,” Farm Aid (September 18, 2005)Sarah Jarosz, “Ring Them Bells,” Nashville (not sure of date)Chrissie Hynde (with James Walbourne), “In the Summertime,” not sure of location (April 2020)

Let us know what you think!

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Bella Napolitano is a nineteen-year old from Baltimore, and is currently a Psychology major at Bard College in Upstate New York. Bella is an aspiring child psychologist, loves creating visual art, enjoys going on long walks, and is a live-music enthusiast. She has had lifelong exposure to Dylan’s music through her father and has developed a taste for it. She saw Dylan live for the first time in Baltimore on November 24th, 2023.

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Michael Johnson is a Dylan adventurer. He was born in 1956 and grew up at the Jersey Shore. His first concerts were at Convention Hall in Asbury Park, NJ, starting with Black Sabbath in 1971. The next 3 plus years saw a huge shift largely as the result of him not filling out the selection cards from the Columbia Records Album Club and having to accept the album of the month, which transformed his musical horizons. He has had many jobs and started a career in teaching at age 42 in 2000. He has since transitioned from 8th-grade English teacher to school librarian, which was a survival move. Two major events in his life were sobriety in 1995 and marriage in 2015 at age 58.

You can find Michael on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/MLJ9029) or pretty much wherever Dylan is playing.

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In this latest episode of the Million $ Bash roundtable, the gang goes at the surprise 2009 release of Christmas in the Heart, Bob Dylan’s first and perhaps only album of Christmas music, at least until there is a Bootleg Series box set of the session outtakes. The album is, unsurprisingly, contentious, and the M$B roundtable participants, despite their academic restraint, are not immune from the controversy. Enjoy this special holiday edition of the Million $ Bash!

M$B Roundtable Panelists:

• Rob “Rockin’ Rob” Reginio teaches modern literature at Alfred University.  He's currently at work on a book about Dylan's album John Wesley Harding.
• Nina Goss is Editor of or contributor to the volumes Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century and Dylan at Play. She is a contributor to various anthologies and presented at the first World of Bob Dylan conference (2019), and Dylan and the Beats conference in Tulsa (2022). She teaches at Fordham University.
• Court Carney is a professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches courses on Black history and cultural history. He is finishing a book manuscript on the public memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
• Erin Callahan lives in the Houston, Texas, area where she teaches English at San Jacinto College. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge.
• Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing.
• Jim Salvucci is the founder and keeper of The Dylantantes.

Let us know what you think!

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In this latest episode of the Million $ Bash roundtable, the gang talks about their contributions to the new collection, The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances: Play a Song for Me, edited by our very own Erin Callahan and Court Carney and published by Routledge.

M$B Roundtable Panelists:

• Rob “Rockin’” Reginio teaches modern literature at Alfred University.  He's currently at work on a book about Dylan's album John Wesley Harding.
• Nina Goss is Editor of or contributor to the volumes Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century and Dylan at Play. She is a contributor to various anthologies and presented at the first World of Bob Dylan conference (2019), and Dylan and the Beats conference in Tulsa (2022). She teaches at Fordham University.
• Court Carney is a professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches courses on Black history and cultural history. He is finishing a book manuscript on the public memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
• Erin Callahan lives in the Houston, Texas, area where she teaches English at San Jacinto College. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge.
• Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing.
• Jim Salvucci is the founder and keeper of The Dylantantes.

Let us know what you think!

Thanks for checking out The Dylantantes!

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Roberta Rakove is a partner in the firm of Rakove and Strassberger which advises and trains nonprofits and foundations on how to build effective advocacy. Prior to that she served for many years as the Senior Vice President for External Affairs for Sinai Health System in Chicago advocating on Medicaid(as in Shot of Love “Doctor can you hear me? I need some Medicaid”), immigration, and gun violence prevention. Since 1968 she has spent much of her free time obsessing about Bob Dylan and in 2022 coordinated an adult education class on Bob Dylan for the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Northwestern University.

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Elizabeth Cantalamessa is currently a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Miami and an instructor at the University of Houston-Downtown. She grew up in Houston, Texas, and has published on topics including political speech, disagreement, and copyright law. 

This interview was recorded about two months before it was released.

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In this latest episode of the Million $ Bash roundtable, the gang takes on the Dylan songs they think deserve greater attention and recognition. Will sparks fly? Will inspiration flare? Well, there is only one way to find out!

We assembled our regular panelists for this roundtable, but when Nina Goss tried to join us, she ran into technical difficulty and offered only a ghost-like appearance. We missed her voice on the program, but she did get one word in, and that is alright. 

Roundtable Panelists:

MDB Roundtable Panelists:

• Rob “Rockin’” Reginio teaches modern literature at Alfred University.  He's currently at work on a book about Dylan's album John Wesley Harding.
• Nina Goss is Editor of or contributor to the volumes Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century and Dylan at Play. She is a contributor to various anthologies and presented at the first World of Bob Dylan conference (2019), and Dylan and the Beats conference in Tulsa (2022). She teaches at Fordham University.
• Court Carney is a professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches courses on Black history and cultural history. He is finishing a book manuscript on the public memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
• Erin Callahan lives in the Houston, Texas, area where she teaches English at San Jacinto College. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge.
• Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing.
• Jim Salvucci is the founder and keeper of The Dylantantes.

Let us know what you think!

Thanks for checking out The Dylantantes!

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Laura Tenschert is a writer, podcaster, and musician living in London, UK. She is the creator of Definitely Dylan, a podcast about Bob Dylan’s work and creative process. The episodes on Rough and Rowdy Ways, Shadow Kingdom, and Dylan’s visual art have established her as a crucial voice on the artist’s recent work. Laura has presented and organised panels at the World of Bob Dylan conferences in Tulsa several times, and her work features regularly in books, zines, and other podcasts.

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Harold Lepidus is the author of Friends and Other Strangers - Bob Dylan Examined  He also hosts the Boston Harold Podcast.

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Rebecca Slaman is a freelance writer and editor. She has a BA from Fordham University in English and Classics. Her writing specializes in fan communities on social media. She has been cited as a Bob Dylan expert in speaking engagements at University of Tulsa and Florida International University. You can find her on Twitter @ithrewtheglass, on the web at http://rslaman.wixsite.com/website, and on Substack at http://bawker.substack.com.

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Dr. Keith Nainby is Professor of Communication Studies at California State University, Stanislaus. There, his primary academic interests include pedagogy, philosophy, and performance. Keith currently focuses on the cultural contexts of musical performances, such as listener engagements and fan communities. He has published a book and four essays, with a fifth forthcoming, on Bob Dylan (most with co-author John M. Radosta). His book on Taylor Swift and Swiftie identities is also forthcoming.

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Dr. Anne Marie Mai is our guest on The Dylantantes podcast (interview by Erin Callahan). The discussion ranges widely before zeroing in on Dylan and masculinity.

Anne Marie Mai is currently the chair of humanities at the University of Southern Denmark and serves on the board of the Bob Dylan Research Institute.  She earned her Ph.D. in Nordic literature and her research primarily  focuses on the history of Danish Literature, contemporary Nordic Literature, the history of Nordic Women’s literature and the history of the Scandinavian Enlightenment. She has published numerous works Dylan including: a chapter in  21st Century Dylan: Late and Timely entitled “Behind Every Beautiful Thing There’s Been Some Kind of Pain”: Melancholia in Dylan’s Songs and Paintings,”  “Bob Dylan as a Challenge to Modern Literary Studies,”  “Bob Dylan, The Poet,”  and “New Approaches to Bob Dylan."

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In June of 2023, the University of Tulsa Institute for Bob Dylan Studies held The World of Bob Dylan conference in Tulsa in conjunction with a new cultural event called Switchyard. The panelists start their postmortem of the World of Bob Dylan 2023 with a critique of this “mash-up.”

Roundtable Panelists:

• Rob Reginio teaches modern literature at Alfred University.  He's currently at work on a book about Dylan's album John Wesley Harding.
• Nina Goss is Editor of or contributor to the volumes Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century and Dylan at Play. She is a contributor to various anthologies and presented at the first World of Bob Dylan conference (2019), and Dylan and the Beats conference in Tulsa (2022). She teaches at Fordham University.
• Court Carney is a professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches courses on Black history and cultural history. He is finishing a book manuscript on the public memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
• Erin Callahan lives in the Houston, Texas, area where she teaches English at San Jacinto College. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge.
• Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing.
• Jim Salvucci is the founder and keeper of The Dylantantes.

Let us know what you think!

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A panel from the World of Bob Dylan, June 2, 2023, Tulsa, OK

• Court Carney (chair),‘The Laws of Time Didn’t Apply to You’: The Philosophy of Modern Song and the Zeitgeist of the Discontent
• Erin C. Callahan, ‘Lame as Hell and a Big Trick’: Dylan’s Comment on the Commodification of Art in The Philosophy of Modern Song
• Jim Salvucci, ‘The Future for Me is Already a Thing of the Past’: The Seeming Nostalgia of The Philosophy of Modern Song

The publication of Bob Dylan's The Philosophy of Modern Song in 2022 has elicited much commentary related to song selection, the question of breadth, and the notion of a central philosophy tying it all together. What this panel suggests is that this book contains thematic threads beyond the songs themselves that comment on Dylan’s relationship with the past and the contemporary moment. 

Erin Callahan’s paper explores Dylan’s comments on and critique of the fraught relationship and tensions between artistic creation and the commodification of art consumed as entertainment that leads to its dilution or sanitization. 

Court Carney’s paper looks to contextualize Dylan’s book within the contemporary moment of cultural discontent. Connecting the book to recent films (Nope, for example) and an avalanche of newspaper articles commenting on Generation Z’s collective turning away from the accepted forms of social media and digital culture, Carney seeks to situate Dylan’s book within this age of discontent. 

Jim Salvucci’s paper focuses on nostalgia and sees within Dylan’s book a philosophy centered on what we can preserve from the past while always looking for the next thing. The tension, then, between nostalgia and optimism (and Dylan is undoubtedly an optimist) helps define the themes within The Philosophy of Modern Song. Together these papers help craft a dialogue centered on the way Bob Dylan uses the past to comment on the present. 

The Speakers

Erin Callahan lives in the Houston, Texas, area where she teaches English at San Jacinto College. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge.

Court Carney is a Professor of History at Stephen F. Austin State University where he teaches courses on Cultural History and Black History. He is currently writing a book on the cultural significance and memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest. 

Jim Salvucci, an English professor by training, is a recovering academic. He has presented on Bob Dylan at the first World of Bob Dylan conference as well as in such exotic locales as France and India and taught a course on Dylan for many years. He has published on Dylan in 21st-Century Dylan and The Bob Dylan Review and is the founder and keeper of The Dylantantes.

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• Rob Reginio teaches modern literature at Alfred University.  He's currently at work on a book about Dylan's album John Wesley Harding.
• Nina Goss is Editor of or contributor to the volumes Tearing the World Apart: Bob Dylan and the 21st Century and Dylan at Play. She is a contributor to various anthologies and presented at the first World of Bob Dylan conference (2019), and Dylan and the Beats conference in Tulsa (2022). She teaches at Fordham University.
• Court Carney is a professor of history at Stephen F. Austin State University, where he teaches courses on Black history and cultural history. He is finishing a book manuscript on the public memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
• Erin Callahan lives in the Houston, Texas, area where she teaches English at San Jacinto College. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge.
• Graley Herren is an English professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati, where he regularly teaches a first-year seminar on Bob Dylan. He is author of the book Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, and he has a Substack newsletter devoted to Dylan called Shadow Chasing.

Comments are welcome.

Yours in Dylanology, Jim Salvucci The Dylantantes

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Culture critic, artist, prolific podcaster, and host of Pod Dylan, Rob Kelly, is our guest on The Dylantantes podcast.

Rob Kelly is an award-winning writer, illustrator, and pop culture historian. He was the creator/editor of the book HEY KIDS, COMICS!: TRUE-LIFE TALES FROM THE SPINNER RACK, and writes the Reel Retro Cinema column for 13ThDimension.com. He is the host of FADE OUT, M*A*S*HCAST, and TREASURYCAST, and co-hosts WHO'S WHO'S: THE DEFINITIVE PODCAST OF THE DC UNIVERSE  and SUPERMAN MOVIE MINUTE. Most importantly for The Dylantantes, he is the longtime host of Pod Dylan.

Comments are most welcome.

Thanks for visiting The Dylantantes! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedylantantes.substack.com

FM PODCAST NETWORK 

We're a proud member of The FM Podcast Network along with PodDylan - Dylan.FM - The Bob Dylan Primer - and more.

Music and cultural journalist Allison Rapp is our guest on The Dylantantes podcast.

Allison Rapp is a music and culture journalist based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Brooklyn Magazine, Rock Cellar, City Limits, and more. She currently works as an assistant editor at Ultimate Classic Rock where she's interviewed the likes of Peter Frampton, Roger McGuinn, John Oates and others. She tweets at @allisonrapp22. 

Comments are most welcome.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedylantantes.substack.com

FM PODCAST NETWORK 

We're a proud member of The FM Podcast Network along with PodDylan - Dylan.FM - The Bob Dylan Primer - and more.

Roundtable Panelists:

Rob Reginio, Nina Goss, Court Carney, Erin Callahan, Graley Herren

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedylantantes.substack.com

FM PODCAST NETWORK 

We're a proud member of The FM Podcast Network along with PodDylan - Dylan.FM - The Bob Dylan Primer - and more.

Dr Nina Goss is our guest on The Dylantantes podcast (interview by Erin Callahan)

Nina Goss was born and raised in New York.  She earned her BA from University of Rochester and her MFA and PhD from the University of Washington and currently teaches at Fordham University.  She is quite prolific in her work on Dylan. Since she started researching and writing about Dylan, Nina has been widely published in numerous collections, anthologies, and journals on Dylan, has edited the journal Montague Street and the anthologies Dylan at Play in 2011 and Tearing the World Apart in 2017, and has presented her work at conferences in the US and abroad.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedylantantes.substack.com

FM PODCAST NETWORK 

We're a proud member of The FM Podcast Network along with PodDylan - Dylan.FM - The Bob Dylan Primer - and more.

Dr. Robert Reginio is our guest on The Dylantantes podcast.

Rob Reginio is a professor English at Alfred University in Western New York. He is the editor of and contributor to the collection Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art. He has published and presented widely on modernism and memory and has published pieces on Dylan and race and Dylan and Emmanuel Levinas. He is a member of the editorial board of The Dylan Review. He serves as the Hagar Professor of the Humanities at Alfred University and is currently at work on a book about the poetics of the Dylan album John Wesley Harding. He also provided a fantastic piece for The Dylantantes back in June of 2022 entitled “‘Is the Village Green Preservation Society:’ Notes on Dylan, Memory, and Pilgrimages.”

Comments are most welcome.

Yours in Dylanology, Jim Salvucci The Dylantantes

Thanks for reading The Dylantantes! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedylantantes.substack.com

We're a proud member of The FM Podcast Network along with PodDylan - Dylan.FM - The Bob Dylan Primer - and more.

Dr. Graley Herren is our guest on The Dylantantes podcast.

Graley is Professor and Chair of English at Xavier University in Cincinnati. He is the author of Dreams and Dialogues in Dylan’s Time Out of Mind, published by Anthem Press in 2021 and now available in paperback.

He is also the author of books on Samuel Beckett and Don DeLillo, and many articles and book chapters, including several on Dylan. Each year he teaches a first-year seminar on Dylan, and he is currently working on a book studying all of Dylan’s concerts in the Cincinnati area.

Comments are most welcome.

Yours in Dylanology, Jim Salvucci The Dylantantes

Thanks for reading The Dylantantes! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedylantantes.substack.com

FM PODCAST NETWORK 

We're a proud member of The FM Podcast Network along with PodDylan - Dylan.FM - The Bob Dylan Primer - and more.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedylantantes.substack.com

FM PODCAST NETWORK 

We're a proud member of The FM Podcast Network along with PodDylan - Dylan.FM - The Bob Dylan Primer - and more.

Dr. Court Carney is our second guest on The Dylantantes podcast.

Court is a history professor at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. He is  the author of Cutting Up: How Early Jazz Got America’s Ear and is currently finishing a manuscript on the public memory and image of the infamous rat-b*****d Nathan Bedford Forrest.

For fun, he is a member of a teaching/research group centered on Woodie Guthrie and is co-editing — along with our inaugural guest, Erin Callahan — a collection of essays exploring Dylan’s set lists.

Court and I speak about the importance of Dylan in our culture and across the generations. We wrap up with a discussion of Dylan and jazz.

Caveat Auditor

Despite my best efforts, there is a mysterious clicking throughout. I am still learning, but Court’s many insights are worth the aesthetic shortcomings.

Comments are most welcome.

Yours in Dylanology, Jim Salvucci The Dylantantes

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedylantantes.substack.com

FM PODCAST NETWORK 

We're a proud member of The FM Podcast Network along with PodDylan - Dylan.FM - The Bob Dylan Primer - and more.

You want to talk to meGo ahead and talkWhatever you got to say to meWon’t come as any shockI must be guilty of somethingYou just whisper it into my ear

Also, feel free to share the material widely.

Thanks for sailing with us!

What Is It about Bob Dylan?

This interview with Dr. Erin Callahan constitutes the inaugural podcast of The Dylantantes. Erin is a brilliant Bob Dylan thinker who has flown under the radar a bit, as we discuss during our conversation.

Erin teaches English at San Jacinto College in Texas. She has presented and published on Dylan and is currently co-editing a volume with Court Carney on interpretations of Dylan’s setlists for Routledge.

I am proud to have Erin as our inaugural guest, and I anticipate we will be hearing her compelling voice much more frequently both on this site and out there in the Dylan ether.

Caveat Auditor

The sound quality is a little harsh, particularly on my side. I am new to this podcast interview thing, but I know that the content will more than make up for the technical and aesthetic shortcomings.

Comments are most welcome.

Yours in Dylanology, Jim Salvucci The Dylantantes

Thanks for visiting The Dylantantes! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support our work.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thedylantantes.substack.com

We're a proud member of The FM Podcast Network along with PodDylan - Dylan.FM - The Bob Dylan Primer - and more.