Perhaps drifting near sleep from counting Watson letters I found my mind making odd associations and connections that may be of interest to few or perhaps not.huckelberry wrote: ↑Thu Jan 02, 2025 8:54 pmJersey Girl, cd may have limitations though how significant may very with the production of the cd. I have not had a device to play vinyl for a long time, for better or worse.
I just finished watching "Don't Look Back" the documentary fallowing Dylan around during his English tour before electric guitar though he performs Mr Tamborine Man all acoustic. I had seen pieces of this rather long movie before but never the whole thing. The slighting of Donovan was not as mean as I had heard it suggested. Donovan managed to sound like a pale Bob imitation on his own. There are bits of private singing Hank Williams songs in the hotel. There is a fragment of Baez singing Love is just a four letter word with Dylan admitting he hadn't figured out how to end that song yet.
That movie is a mix of some interesting pieces and some boring rambling about. There is an interview with a magazine reporter where in Bob is a bit of a self important jerk. He was trying to avoid being pigeon holed at the time of course. He was straight forward in saying he would not explain any meaning of the songs. I understand he has kept that position for a long time now.
Scenes of his guitar playing are clear that his abilities are strong enough to be effective even if there is no reason to think of him as a guitar virtuoso. I have seen Bob once. It was early 90s in a park with relatively small space making a pleasantly intimate performance. I was fairly close. Bob did a bunch of lead electric guitar work. Quite passible guitar work even if not super. I think Bob’s music talent lies in the match of sound rhythm and words, not fancy music.
Jersey Girl posted about the new Bob Dylan movie, my replies garnered little reply. I am not a fanatic fan but have been influenced by and enjoyed his music since about 1963 (or 4?) I think a few of his songs are inspiring and some visionary. Most are doorways to sharing human experience.
He does not want the title prophet as he does not wish to be leading people. He does not wish to claim exceptional knowledge to proclaim. Yet he has functioned as a prophet by inspiring people and creating experience. Do not take his words as authority or divine but the may generate light at times.
It is an odd role, he relates a moment very young hearing seeing Buddy Holly when it seemed a connection occurred like a calling was being made. In a variety of ways Bob felt he was following a calling. In the 60 minutes interview he states he is still trying to fulfill the bargain he made at first with the chief authority (God without being very specific about that).
I am thinking of comparison to Joseph Smith because Joseph Smith was a sort of prose poet creating and sharing his visions with others. A couple of things seem important in this comparison. I do not think Bob was a great original philosopher or social theorist. He brought material that was all around him and brought that to new and vivid focus. In looking at common experience he found ways to touch what is valuable and important to people and created ways to share that.
A prophet is not in the business of telling the future, crystal balls are for that. Prophet reveal human values and make us share them. Did Joseph Smith do anything like that? Of course he did. He inspired people with his vision enough they followed him creating new lives. The dynamism lives on today though perhaps a bit less exciting.
There is a detail that most inclined my to say think about this. There is a naïvété in Bob's better songs. His protest song can adopt it as a badge of honor. I think the naïvété is something of a song writing device but I cannot help but thinking that some of it might honestly be the way he is. It is not that he is dumb or unread. It may be that his intelligence is focused on music and story and not so much philosophical analysis. I think the real naïvété may actually be a boon, a lubricant, and a catalyst for the poetic creation. This in my musing is the connection with Joseph Smith. I think a combination of curiosity and imagination with relative naïvété is what allowed his creative imagination to take some fire. He never had enough schooling to teach him that he could not do what he tried to do. It is sort of an odd angle on Dunning-Krueger when ignorance of the difficulty allows one's overestimation of self to generate creative things.
