We all know the infamous one-word biblical epithet bestowed on Bob Dylan’s 1966 electric tour of the United Kingdom, as captured in The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: LIVE 1966 – The “Royal Albert Hall” Concert. But my personal favorite review…
Just one month after unleashing his rock monster Highway 61 Revisited on the world, Bob Dylan released an absolute belter of a single called Positively 4th Street. This song wasn’t on Dylan’s latest album, which modern record company executives with marketing budgets…
June 16, 1965. Session musician and songwriter Al Kooper is about to blag his way into rock history by playing an instrument he doesn’t even know how to turn on. Such is the unplanned majesty of Bob Dylan’s Like a…
Dont Look Back – D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary about Bob Dylan’s 1965 UK tour – starts with the famous cue card promo for Subterranean Homesick Blues. The director wanted to “set the stage” for Dylan. Yet for the rest of film,…
In late 1964, Bob Dylan heard I Wanna Hold Your Hand by The Beatles and decided he wanted some of that for his next album, Bringing It All Back Home. But that didn’t mean he was coveting a number one…
In my revisits to Bob Dylan’s first four studio records, early live sets and the first Bootleg volume, I’ve covered 55 original compositions, all written between 1961-64. But The Bootleg Series Vol. 9 – The Witmark Demos: 1962-64 unearths 15…
In mid-1964, Columbia Records urged Bob Dylan back into the studio. The label was keen to capitalize on the commercial and critical success of The Times They Are A-Changin’, which was released in January of that year. Dylan obliged but,…