Bob Dylan
Almost 60 years to the day since it was first recorded, the original lyrics to Bob Dylan‘s “Mr. Tambourine Man” have sold at auction for a total of $508,000.
The lyrics were sold via Julien’s Auctions alongside a number of other Dylan items – including a signed oil painting and numerous pieces of original art – which were originally part of the personal collection of late American journalist Al Aronowitz. Famed for introducing Dylan to The Beatles in 1964 and for being the first manager of The Velvet Underground, Aronowitz spoke about his unique connection to “Mr. Tambourine Man” in a 1973 article – of which an original version was included in the sale.
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Explained Aronowitz: “Bob Dylan wrote ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ one night in my house in Berkeley Heights, N.J., sitting with my portable typewriter at my white formica breakfast bar in a swirl of chain-lit cigaret [sic] smoke, his bony, long-nailed fingers tapping the words out on my stolen, canary-colored Saturday Evening Post copy paper while the whole time, over and over again, Marvin Gaye sang ‘Can I Get a Witness?’ from the 6-foot speakers of my hi-fi in the room next to where he was, with Bob getting up from the typewriter each time the record finished in order to put the needle back at the start.”
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“At the breakfast bar I found a waste basket full of crumpled false starts,” added Aronowitz. “I took it out the side door to empty it into the trash can when a whispering emotion caught me, like a breeze that sometimes gently stops you cold just because of its own ghostly power to make you notice it. I took the crumpled sheets, smoothed them out, read the crazy leaping lines, smiled to myself at the leaps that never landed and then put the sheets into a file folder. I still have them somewhere.”
The lyrics as sold made up two pages of yellow paper which contained three progressive drafts of the lyrics, typewritten and providing an insight into Dylan’s writing process. The lyrics are believed to date back to March of 1964, based upon the information available.
Dylan first began performing “Mr. Tambourine Man” privately in 1964, eventually recording the track as part of a number of takes on Jan. 15, 1965. The song was later included as the first song on the acoustic side to Dylan’s fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home, in April 1965.
Though “Subterranean Homesick Blues” from the same album was Dylan’s first single to chart on the Billboard Hot 100, “Mr. Tambourine Man” would become his first to top the chart, albeit when The Byrds released a cover as their debut single that same month.
The sale of the lyrics is just another Dylan-related happening in recent months, with the venerated artist’s profile and legacy being thrust into the public eye as a result of James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown biopic. The wider response to the biopic has been widespread and immense, with Dylan seeing his catalog earn 11.6 million U.S. on-demand streams in the week ending Dec. 26.
The times they are a-changin’, and with just a few days to go before a potential U.S. ban of TikTok, veteran musician Bob Dylan has finally joined the popular video sharing app.
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83-year-old Dylan made his debut on TikTok on Tuesday (Jan. 14), sharing a single post which urges potential followers to “Explore the world of Bob Dylan, now on TikTok”. The accompanying video features numerous clips, stills, and record covers from Dylan’s lengthy career, soundtracked to clips of “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door”, “Hurricane”.
While Dylan’s appearance on the app in the wake of the release of James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown biopic has been well-received by his fanbase, much of the attention is being focused on his somewhat late arrival given the impending TikTok Ban.
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“You’ve got 30 minutes king,” wrote one user on Dylan’s post, while another added, “bob dylan save tiktok.” Others still made reference to his catalog in their posts, noting that “tiktok is knocking on heavens door”.
As it stands, TikTok is facing an imminent ban because the American government is worried about its Chinese ownership. After the Supreme Court last month agreed to hear TikTok’s challenge to the law that would either force ByteDance to sell the app or bar it from the U.S., the Court’s imminent decision means that if the law is upheld, ByteDance will be forced to sell off the app or face a ban on Sunday (Jan. 19).
Dylan’s immediate future, however, looks a little more certain currently, especially given that the response to A Complete Unknown has seen his catalog earn 11.6 million U.S. on-demand streams in the week ending Dec. 26.
While it’s unknown whether Dylan’s debut on TikTok is part of a biopic-inspired decision to reach a newer fanbase, it does come about shortly after his recent decision to ostensibly begin using social media with greater frequency. In November, Dylan shared a Tweet praising a performance from Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in France, leading Cave to respond with gratitude.
“I was elated to think Bob Dylan had been in the audience,” Cave wrote on his sporadically-updated Red Hand Files website. “And since I doubt I’ll get an opportunity to thank him personally, I’ll thank him here. Thank you, Bob!”
As Charli XCX closes out what has arguably been her most successful 12 months to date, it’s clear that 2024 hasn’t just been the year of Brat, but also the year of films for the British musician, with her Letterboxd account going viral amongst her fanbase.
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Appearing online on Friday (Dec. 27), a Letterboxd account purporting to be Charli XCX’s began making the rounds before tacit confirmation of its existence was given when its bio was updated to read “my account got leaked i guess”.
Fans have since been quick to comb through the singer’s cinematic tastes, with her favorite films including titles such as Charlie’s Angels, The Addiction, Bride of Frankenstein, and Céline and Julie Go Boating. Her stats also confirm that despite her immensely busy schedule in 2024, the year has seen her watch a total of 210 films to date.
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Most notably, however, has been Charli XCX’s reviews of the films she has watched, which range from the simple and observational (“there were a lot of songs in this!” she says of the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown) to the almost mundane and unrelated (“watched this whilst george built lego”, she wrote of fiancé George Daniel’s activities during The Tragedy of Macbeth).
Other key reviews include her take on the Brad Pitt-starring Moneyball, for which she succinctly wrote “This isn’t for British people”, and Luca Guadagino’s Challengers, which amount to, “was so amped after watching this i ended up going out til 5am with Harrison and then was super hungover for the met. worth it though.”
Her viewing of 2013’s Jonathan Glazer-directed Under the Skin simply resulted in a reminder to “make next album w mica levi”, while Christopher Nolan’s Oscar-winning Oppenheimer saw her opinion amount to, “Liked this coz they were all just gossiping about bombs”.
Earlier this month, it was reported that Charli XCX had joined the cast of The Gallerist alongside Natalie Portman and Jenna Ortega.
The culture-defining musician currently has a number of movie roles lined up following a successful run with her latest album, June’s Brat (which debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200 albums chart, making it her highest charting album to date) and its October companion release, Brat and it’s completely different but also still brat. Her name is credited among the cast of the films 100 Nights of Hero, Erupcja, Faces of Death, I Want Your Sex, Mother Mary and Sacrifice, all currently in post-production. She’s also guest starring on the Amazon comedy series Overcompensating.
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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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