Bob Dylan
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The new Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, doesn’t hit theaters until Christmas Day, but hype for the new movie has propelled a seven-year-old audiobook about the singer back onto the charts.
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Dylan Goes Electric!: Newport, Seeger, Dylan, and the Night That Split the Sixties was originally released in 2017, but the audiobook has returned to the top of Audible’s music charts on the heels of the upcoming film release.
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Written by music historian and journalist Elijah Wald (and narrated by Sean Runnette), Dylan Goes Electric follows the uproar that ensued after Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 backed by an electric band, rather than his usual acoustic setup. Kicking off his set with an amplified version of “Maggie’s Farm,” Dylan then roared into his rock and roll hit, “Like a Rolling Stone,” much to the chagrin of what the book describes as “folk purists and political activists who had hailed him as their acoustic prophet.”
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Dylan Goles Electric traces the genesis of that performance and tracks the resulting fallout from the show, described as “a mix of shock, booing, and scattered cheers.” The singer did not return to the Newport Festival for 37 years after that night. Was Dylan indebted to the folk community for making him their star? Or did the artist have free reign to explore his musical independence and blaze a bold new path?
As Wald writes in the book, “It was the shot heard round the world – Dylan’s declaration of musical independence, the end of the folk revival, and the birth of rock as the voice of a generation – and one of the defining moments in 20th-century music.”
The publisher notes, meantime, write that “Wald explores the cultural, political, and historical context of this seminal event that embodies the transformative decade that was the sixties,” diving “deep into the folk revival, the rise of rock, and the tensions between traditional and groundbreaking music to provide new insights into Dylan’s artistic evolution.”
Dylan Goes Electric is available now on audiobook for $15 through Amazon. But you can listen to the book for just $0.99 as part of a new Audible deal, that gets you three months of access for just $3. Offer ends December 31 so we recommend signing up for the Audible promo while it’s still live. See full details here.
The Dylan Goes Electric audiobook has a run time of 11 hours and 56 minutes. The Timothee Chalamet-led A Complete Unknown, meantime, hits theaters December 25.
Nick Cave has responded to a recent complimentary tweet from Bob Dylan’s newly-active account, labelling the experience “a lovely pulse of joy”.
The initial tweet was shared via Dylan’s account on Tuesday (Nov. 19), and saw him reflecting on the recent performance by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in France just two days earlier, specifcally singling out the song “Joy”, from Cave’s Australian Music Prize-nominated album, Wild God.
“Saw Nick Cave in Paris recently at the Accor Arena and I was really struck by that song Joy where he sings ‘We’ve all had too much sorrow, now it the time for joy’,” Dylan wrote. “I was thinking to myself, yeah that’s about right.”
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The comment apparently made its way to Cave, who is himself a noted Dylan fan (having previously reflected on the musician’s work and having covered numerous tracks from his extensive back catalog). Taking to his sporadically-updated Red Hand Files website, Cave explained that he was unaware of Dylan’s presence, but called the tweet “a lovely pulse of joy that penetrated my exhausted, zombied state”.
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He continued; “I was happy to see Bob on X, just as many on the Left had performed a Twitterectomy and headed for Bluesky. It felt admirably perverse, in a Bob Dylan kind of way. I did indeed feel it was a time for joy rather than sorrow. There had been such an excess of despair and desperation around the election, and one couldn’t help but ask when it was that politics became everything.
“The world had grown thoroughly disenchanted, and its feverish obsession with politics and its leaders had thrown up so many palisades that had prevented us from experiencing the presence of anything remotely like the spirit, the sacred, or the transcendent – that holy place where joy resides. I felt proud to have been touring with The Bad Seeds and offering, in the form of a rock ‘n ’roll show, an antidote to this despair, one that transported people to a place beyond the dreadful drama of the political moment.”
Cave closed by lamenting his ability to express in-person gratitude to Dylan, instead opting to utilize his own site to do so: “I was elated to think Bob Dylan had been in the audience, and since I doubt I’ll get an opportunity to thank him personally, I’ll thank him here. Thank you, Bob!”
Dylan’s Twitter account has become a source of intrigue in recent weeks given its recent resurgence in activity and its apparent shift from promotional messages to actual comments from Dylan himself. Alongside recommendations for New Orleans cuisine and a delayed tribute to late comedian Bob Newheart, Dylan has aso ignited speculation into the identity of a mystery woman named Mary Jo.
Juliette Lewis stopped by The Kelly Clarkson Show on Wednesday (March 29) and regaled Kelly Clarkson with a story about the time she met Bob Dylan.
During a game of Musical Memories: First and Worst, the frontwoman of Juliette Lewis and the Licks named the folk legend as the first musician she was ever starstruck around.
“The story is even better,” Lewis told the host. “I’m in New York City, I’m working. I walk into an elevator that’s the size of a shoebox, only three people can fit in there. And I look up: It’s Bob Dylan.
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“And your heart goes [makes exploding noise], and all these things happen,” the Yellowjackets star continued. “And then he says, ‘You know Bob, huh?’ Bob De Niro. ‘You were in that movie,’ he says to me,” referencing Lewis’ teenage role alongside Robert De Niro in the 1991 Martin Scorsese thriller Cape Fear. “And I’m like, ‘And you’re Bob Dylan.’ And then my little brain was like, ‘Say hi, how are you?’ ’cause I was gonna faint.”
Lewis then revealed she kept one of Dylan’s songs, 1965’s “She Belongs to Me,” on repeat “for months on end” during a particularly challenging time in her life and characterized the icon’s lyrics as “biblical.”
Meanwhile, Clarkson said her own starstruck moment was a tie between meeting Aretha Franklin — whom she called “literally my favorite singer on planet Earth” — and Trisha Yearwood. Turns out she met the Queen of Soul at an event through American Idol judge Randy Jackson, even though she insisted at first that she’d rather “look from afar.”
Watch Lewis’ heartwarming story about meeting Dylan below.
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