Are You Ready? Can You Take It? THE BOB DYLAN THREAD

Yes, he will recieve his prize, but as there are no plans of him making a speach, he will not get the award money.
He has to make a speach before June 10th.

According to my article, his taped speech will be accepted and he will get the money.

A Swedish paper the 27th of March 2017
According to the rules of the Swedish Academy every Nobel Prize Winner
has to hold a lecture before the 10th of June - six months after the Nobel Prize Festivitas.
Dylan will be in Stockhom the 1st and 2nd of April and in Lund the 9th.
So far the Academy has not heard any plans what so ever regarding a date for a lecture.
He will get his diploma and the gold medal, but not the money.
First the lecture than the money.

The article says : "Please note that no Nobel Lecture will be held," Danius wrote. "The Academy has reason to believe that a taped version will be sent at a later point."
The Academy has so far - the 30th of March - not heard anything about a tape.

Last Friday, the guitarist Bruce Langhorne passed away from complications—kidney failure—related to a sizable stroke he suffered in 2015. He was seventy-eight, and at his home, in Venice, California. For anyone who, in the mid-nineteen-sixties, frequented the smoky, caliginous folk clubs of Greenwich Village, the muscular, smiling Langhorne and his acoustic guitar were a recurring vision: he played with Buffy Sainte-Marie, Richard and Mimi Fariña, Peter La Farge, Joan Baez, Richie Havens, Harry Belafonte, and a bevy of other revivalists. He was present for several seismic cultural shifts—too many to feel incidental. At the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, he accompanied Odetta, who sang the traditional gospel song “I’m On My Way,” shortly before the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., faced the crowd. He backed Bob Dylan on “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan,” from 1963, and “Bringing It All Back Home,” from 1965. Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” is a whimsical, nearly disconsolate tribute to Langhorne; the song’s narrator describes losing his spiritual footing, only to implore a mysterious figure to guide him (“Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me / In the jingle-jangle mornin’ / I’ll come followin’ you”). It is as tender a tribute to the alleviative power of friendship as I can imagine. (Langhorne once referred to his and Dylan’s particular synchronicity as “telepathic.”)

Langhorne was born in 1938, in Tallahassee, Florida. His mother was a librarian, and his father was a professor at Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University, which remains the only historically black public college in Florida. (It was previously known as State Normal and Industrial College for Colored Students.) Langhorne’s parents divorced when he was four, and he moved north with his mother, to Harlem. When he was twelve years old, he lost two fingers and most of a thumb while messing around with homemade fireworks. In an interview with the rock journalist Richie Unterberger, he admitted that this meant “some styles of guitar playing were forever unreachable for me.”

Listening to Langhorne’s music, it’s hard to imagine that he felt limited. He was open and expansive in his playing—sometimes he worked dutifully in the call-and-response style popularized by early gospel songs; other times his parts appear to have occurred to him instantaneously, as if he were tuned in to some celestial frequency, a pure signal. And he had an instinct for the unfussy amalgamation of disparate styles, itself an act of near-dissent in the folk era. In that interview with Unterberger, he speaks of a borderless art: “Someone asked me what I thought, and what I heard for the future. And I said, I hear a synthesis. Everyone’s going to take the aesthetics from all different types of music, and put ’em together.” His vision, of course, was prescient.

If you haven’t yet spent much time with Langhorne’s work—such is the fate of the accompanist—start with his molten guitar parts on Dylan’s “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” or hunt down the soundtrack to the 1971 movie “The Hired Hand,” which stars Peter Fonda, as a recalcitrant cowboy, and Warren Oates, as his companion. Langhorne’s inventive score braids sitar, banjo, and fiddle into something as lonesome and foreboding as the Southwest itself. It’s an eerily fitting match for the cool fatalism of Fonda’s world view.

My favorite Langhorne performance is probably the studio version of “Corrina, Corrina,” from “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.” (The guitarist Howie Collins also plays on the track.) Dylan’s vocal sounds uncharacteristically fragile, and Langhorne’s guitar becomes a generous and soothing counterpoint: sweet and assured in the beauty of all things, even deep pain. The song itself dates to at least 1926, when Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded an iteration of it for Paramount Records, though it was likely around long before that; Dylan’s particular version borrows heavily from another country-blues song, Robert Johnson’s “Stones in My Passway,” from 1937. “I got a bird that whistles, I got a bird that sings,” Dylan sings, as Johnson did. “But I ain’t a-got Corrina, life don’t mean a thing,” he finishes. It is a line that suggests great suffering—to have a life go colorless—but Langhorne somehow tugs the whole thing back from utter hopelessness. I can’t describe how it works, but it’s there: a hand on your shoulder.

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Langhorne would explore beyond the folk sphere—he later collaborated with the South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela and the Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji—and moved to Hawaii, in 1980, to farm macadamia nuts. He needed a break, he said, from the monomania of Hollywood. After he was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes, he founded a hot-sauce company, Brother Bru Bru’s. (Its signature pepper sauce contains no sugar, sodium, or gluten.) Its company history describes Langhorne as “a fun-loving, robust fellow who has spent a large portion of his life in the pursuit of wine, women, song, food, etc.” Here, at least, the “etc.” seems to say everything.


Amanda Petrusich is a contributing writer for newyorker.com, and the author of “Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records.” More

Bob Dylan hoax artwork catches out UK dealer
The Guardian ‎
Forgers have turned their attention to artworks created by Bob Dylan, it has emerged, after a British dealer mistakenly spent £10,000 on a hoax artwork ...

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/may/13/conor-mcpherson-paula-bob-dylan-girl-from-the-north-country--old-vic

Irish playwright hits the mainstream with haunting drama and Dylan’s songbook

Conor McPherson is celebrated as the king of the ghost story, thanks to spine-tingling and critically acclaimed plays such as The Weir and The Seafarer. But it would be fair to say that he has remained a writer for the cognoscenti without ever becoming a mainstream favourite. Until now that is.

The Irish playwright’s particular blend of dark realism and haunting unease is set to be the talk of the summer, thanks to a eagerly awaited new play centred on the music of Bob Dylan and the broadcast of a first original television series.

The latter production, Paula, begins on BBC2 on 25 May and is as unsettling a piece of drama as McPherson has created. It is the story of an outwardly respectable young chemistry teacher (Denise Gough) who finds her life spiralling rapidly out of control after she comes into contact with James, a charismatic drifter (Tom Hughes, who played Prince Albert in the ITV drama Victoria). Paula is a dark and addictive tale of desire, obsession and madness, notable for the excellence of its performances and the expertly sustained sense of menace that seeps through even the most straightforward of encounters.

“There is something very dark about it,” agrees McPherson. “The thing about Paula as a character is that her life has no guiding framework. On the outside it looks as though it does because she is surrounded by all the trappings of her status, but she’s existentially a very free person and that’s incredibly dangerous because once she feels threatened then all bets are off. That was one of the most exciting parts of the story, that sense that she and James are on a collision course.”

51 years ago today

Bob Dylan finally delivers his Nobel Prize lecture: Listen
Legendary singer-songwriter traces his own influences both in music and literature
Though Bob Dylan formally accepted his Nobel Prize for Literature while in Sweden back in April (wearing a black hoodie, no less), he was still required to give a lecture in order to collect the 8 million kroner ($900,000) in prize money. Over the weekend, he finally delivered his lecture in the form of a 30-minute recording wherein he traces how various musicians and pieces of literature inspired his own songwriting. He specifically cites Buddy Holly, who Dylan saw in concert shortly before his death, as well as classic novels Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Odyssey. As he speaks, a subdued piano plays in the background.
“Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They’re meant to be sung, not read,” Dylan says to conclude his lecture. “The words in Shakespeare’s plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, ‘Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.'”
It can be heard at the link
https://consequenceofsound.net/2017/06/bob-dylan-finally-delivers-his-nobel-prize-lecture-listen/

Good, and now he can get his Nobel Prize money.

Thanks for that. I'm usually interested in people in the Venice neck of the woods, for however long they were there, a place I lived for 25 years with much of the place changing over time; now it's nearly a whole different place, except that the ocean is still there.
Interesting article, for sure.

Madhouse Magazine reports:

Bob Dylan Releases Opera Album!

May 28, 2017
|
Richard Fredricks




Singer Songwriter Bob Dylan known for pushing the envelope, has ripped the envelope up, as he has released a new album consisting entirely of Opera classics. 
Dylan's voice is surprisingly powerful and he nails the opera vibe. He has a true knack for opera. 
Dylan is fluent in Italian and sings the songs completely in their native tongue. 
Highlight Tracks include: "Polovtsian Dance#2" by Borodin,  "La forza del destino" by Verdi, and something else by Verdi that we can't pronounce. 
Dylan brings the house down when he performs "The Habanera" from Carmen. It is pure genius and brilliance in its most purest form.
Dylan's voice has the remarkable ability to range from Baritone to Countertenor. A 'Countertenor' is able to sing even higher than a tenor. This voice actually falls within a female's voice range. Through the use of a man's falsetto voice, the voice produces a sound that is sometimes described as "otherworldly". 
This album is sure to turn on millions of Dylan's fans onto Opera. Lincoln Center watch out!
 

When Bob Dylan finally delivered his long-awaited Nobel Prize lecture this week, he set out to show how his songs relate to literature.



In the process, something else became clear as well: The man really knows his Bible, and he said biblical themes from some of his favorite novels worked their way into his songs over the years.

Referring to Herman Melville’s 1851 novel “Moby-Dick,” which he said has stuck with him ever since he read it in grammar school, Dylan noted the many biblical names in the book.

“This book tells how different men react in different ways to the same experience,” he said. “A lot of Old Testament, biblical allegory: Gabriel, Rachel, Jeroboam, Bildah, Elijah. Pagan names as well: Tashtego, Flask, Daggoo, Fleece, Starbuck, Stubb, Martha’s Vineyard. The Pagans are idol worshippers. Some worship little wax figures, some wooden figures. Some worship fire.”

In Dylan’s eyes, “Moby-Dick” is rich in religious and mythical references.

“Everything is mixed in,” he wrote. “All the myths: the Judeo-Christian Bible, Hindu myths, British legends, Saint George, Perseus, Hercules – they’re all whalers. Greek mythology, the gory business of cutting up a whale. Lots of facts in this book, geographical knowledge, whale oil – good for coronation of royalty – noble families in the whaling industry. Whale oil is used to anoint the kings. History of the whale, phrenology, classical philosophy, pseudo-scientific theories, justification for discrimination – everything thrown in and none of it hardly rational.”

Dylan said the theme of “Moby-Dick” and all it implies “would work its way into more than a few of my songs.” One such theme was that of death and resurrection. He saw that theme play out in the climactic moment of the novel.

“Finally, Ahab spots Moby, and the harpoons come out,” Dylan recounted. “Boats are lowered. Ahab’s harpoon has been baptized in blood. Moby attacks Ahab’s boat and destroys it. Next day, he sights Moby again. Boats are lowered again. Moby attacks Ahab’s boat again. On the third day, another boat goes in. More religious allegory. He has risen. Moby attacks one more time, ramming the Pequod and sinking it. Ahab gets tangled up in the harpoon lines and is thrown out of his boat into a watery grave.”

Dylan even pointed out there was a missing ingredient in the resurrection tale of one of the harpooners – and that missing ingredient was Jesus.

“Tashtego says that he died and was reborn,” the singer noted. “His extra days are a gift. He wasn’t saved by Christ, though, he says he was saved by a fellow man and a non-Christian at that. He parodies the resurrection.”

The incredible spiritual journey of an American icon. You’ll never look at American pop culture – or Christianity – the same way again. Discover the unbelievable true story behind one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. “Bob Dylan: The Spiritual Life” is available now at the WND Superstore.

Another book whose themes showed up in Dylan’s music, according to the man himself, was “All Quiet on the Western Front.” That 1929 German novel is a “horror story” in which the characters are “stuck in a nightmare,” according to Dylan, and he spotted one instance in which the protagonist was tested like Jesus was on the cross, shortly before His death.

“Yesterday, you tried to save a wounded messenger dog, and somebody shouted, ‘Don’t be a fool,'” Dylan recalled about the book. “One Froggy is laying gurgling at your feet. You stuck him with a dagger in his stomach, but the man still lives. You know you should finish the job, but you can’t. You’re on the real iron cross, and a Roman soldier’s putting a sponge of vinegar to your lips.”

All of this insight comes from a man whom many people believe left Christianity behind in the 1980s after a brief period of fascination with the faith. But as the brand new book “Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life” reveals, there is plenty of evidence Dylan has continued to believe in the God of both the Old and New Testament through the years.

Scott Marshall, the book’s author, notes Dylan’s 1990 composition “God Knows” warned there would be “no more water but fire next time,” an apparent reference to the biblical end of the world. It was in 1999 that Dylan began performing “I Am The Man, Thomas” at his concerts. The song tells the story of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus and the risen Christ’s interaction with Doubting Thomas.

image: http://www.wnd.com/files/2017/06/BobDylanSpiritualLife.jpg

BobDylanSpiritualLife

These are only two examples from the singer’s long and winding spiritual journey. Dylan was born a Jew, but he surprised critics by becoming a Christian in the late 1970s. Some thought he left Christianity behind in the early 1980s, but Jewish and Christian references would continue to play a central role in his life and career.

“Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life” explores all the nuances of the legendary singer-songwriter’s spiritual beliefs. Marshall draws on years of research and original interviews to shine a light on a side of Dylan many fans and critics don’t know about. He paints the picture of a man who was preoccupied with God from essentially the start of his music career in the 1960s through the present day.

In fact, that may be one of Dylan’s few consistencies.

“It is ironic that the seemingly inconsistent Bob Dylan – who occupies such hallowed space in the countercultural decade of the 1960s – has been so consistent in assuming that God exists,” Marshall writes. “When asked by Neil Spencer of New Musical Express about the ‘compatibility’ between his interest in Judaism (his visits to Israel in 1969-1971) and his controversial beliefs of 1979-1981, Dylan simply replied, ‘There’s really no difference between any of it in my mind.’

The incredible spiritual journey of an American icon. You’ll never look at American pop culture – or Christianity – the same way again. Discover the unbelievable true story behind one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century. “Bob Dylan: The Spiritual Life” is available now at the WND Superstore.


Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2017/06/bob-dylan-man-of-letters-man-of-faith/#Zx1J8s937DcaK0zQ.99

http://www.factmag.com/2017/06/13/chinese-potato-chips-bags-covered-bob-dylan-lyrics/

There are just no chips inside them.

The Chinese translation of Bob Dylan: The Lyrics (1961–2012) is being sold in eight separate pocket-sized volumes… that are individually packaged in potato chips bags covered in Dylan’s lyrics. Sadly, the volumes do not come with chips. (Although, we can hardly imagine what they would taste like.)

New Dylan film in the works. Superficially, it seems like another Don't Look Back sort of movie, but it happens in 1975 and is made by a different film maker.
https://allenginsberg.org/2019/01/sat-j-12/?fbclid=IwAR3tnByVRzhNL1XA7jIqOTviyypoDznIwQN1p75oq-VULxA5HcmQ-Dg-5xQ

Bob Dylan just released a new 17 minute song on the assassination of John Kennedy. I would love to find the printed lyrics, as I can't understand the words when he sings these days.