Life must be filled up

Bob Dylan is eighty today. Good grief. The BBC has made a list of 80 things you may not know about Bob Dylan. You will know most of them but check out #79. How can you pick out a favourite Dylan song amongst so many? I can’t but I’ve always loved this. Unlike so many of his versions of his own songs, this video sounds the way you first heard it all those years ago.



There will be plenty of media coverage. This evening, Chrissie Hynde sings Dylan on Sky Arts (Freeview 11) and on Wednesday Mark Ratcliffe plays listeners’ Dylan choices on Radio2.

huskyteer alerted me to this. There was a time I couldn’t hear Forever Young without bursting into tears (funeral music) but now I can appreciate it again, if a little weepily. I love it when Joan says she can’t get the high notes so she’ll just do the harmony and we can do the rest. I did!

All the fun of fairisle without the faff. These are knitted in Regia Design Line by Arne & Carlos. The colourway is ‘Summer Night’ but they have a wintry look to me. No sooner had I grafted the toes than I cast on another pair, this time in pale sherbert colours.



In other news, it’s fifty years since Like a Rolling Stone came out. Frightening to think that I was at school then. Wonderful that the record still sounds great. I turned it up as loud as possible, regardless of what the thatchers might think, and shouted out every word.

I meant to listen to Singing Together yesterday evening but forgot, so I caught up with it on the iPlayer this morning. Singing Together is the reason I know so many folk songs. At junior school, we would all sit down in the hall, the wireless would be switched on and with the help of our booklets we’d join in the songs, presented by William Appleby. I kept all the booklets and was absolutely furious when my mother gave them away without telling me. These small bitternesses last a long time and a few years ago I bought just one booklet, shown here, on ebay.* The illustrations are by Robin Jacques. We also listened to Time and Tune, for younger children, and Rhythm and Melody.

In those days, broadcasting for children was about ‘improving their minds’. Singing Together was actually fun, though why the producers chose so many seditious Jacobite songs, I don’t know! Apparently, from over fifty years of programmes, only three episodes survive, because the broadcasting was live. Jarvis Cocker was hoping to find some archive from the seventies, when he was at school. After my time but the programme went on long enough to influence people like Lisa Carthy.

I loved this one:
Pleasure it is
To hear, iwis,
The Birdès sing.
The deer in the dale,
The sheep in the vale,
The corn springing.
God’s purveyance
For sustenance,
It is for man.
Then we always
To give him praise,
And thank him than,
And thank him than.

At the end of term we used to vote for our favourite song and the results would be sent off to the BBC. Finding no other hands go up for this medieval one, I was too embarrassed to admit that it was mine. I could still sing it. A fascinating programme, do catch it if you can.

*Edit: I see these are now going for at least £12.00 each!

In bed yesterday evening I listened to Counterpoint. So nice that Paul Gambaccini is back and so disgraceful that he was taken off. One contestant picked Bob Dylan for his special round and got every answer right. So did I. Not only that, I even guessed in advance what two of the questions would be!

At ten o’clock yesterday evening, had you felt you could not stand one more news programme devoted almost entirely to the Scottish Referendum, you could have tuned instead to Radio 2 and listened to Suzi Quatro’s favourite Bob Dylan covers. Suzi Quatro is a woman after my own heart. She’s ‘a Dylan addict’; she plays Dylan ‘really loud’; ‘He never ceases to surprise’. She does a mean Dylan impression, although Joan Baez is better at it. At one point, apropos nothing at all, she suddenly said, ‘Oh God, I love Bob Dylan.’ Me too, Suze!

She said she had ‘fifty four’ covers to choose from. What? There must be hundreds! Almost certainly there is a site somewhere on the net, compiled by Dylanolgists, listing every cover ever made and probably telling you what Bobby had for breakfast the day he wrote the song. Right from the start of his career, other people had more chart success with some of Dylan’s songs than he did. When he was young and I was even younger, I knew a lot of his songs without realising that he had written them. That’s true of, for instance, It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (Joan Baez) and If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Manfred Mann). Bruce Springsteen has said that his introduction to Dylan was hearing the Byrds’ version of Mr. Tambourine Man, which made No.1 in the charts on both sides of the Atlantic.

I can’t believe (oh, actually I can, because the BBC website is so notoriously useless) that I CAN’T FIND A PLAYLIST for this programme. Suzi Q went for some unusual covers and eschewed the obvious, like Bryan Ferry or Adèle. Some of these choices were eccentric. Much as I like Bob Marley, I didn’t feel that he added anything to Like A Rolling Stone, nor did I much like The Turtles’ It Ain’t Me Babe. For my views on cover versions, see here, back in 2008. My favourite left-out cover is probably Johnny Cash singing Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right and my fave included one, Rod Stewart’s Just Like A Woman. ‘Mr Stewart’, Suzie called him.

Bob Dylan makes Suzie Q very emotional. She cries every time she hears Blowin’ In The Wind. Hearing To Make You Feel My Love in the car, she had to pull over to have a weep. ‘I can’t believe that Bob, in his later years, could write a song like this.’ She chose Garth Brooks singing the song and called it ‘the best romantic song in the world.’ I can’t disagree. Dylan’s back catalogue must be unmatched and the poor man, being a towering genius, has been a legend for most of his lifetime. How he copes, I can’t imagine.

LJ friends, this is what you’re getting for Snaptember 12.

BBC News - Bob Dylan Like a Rolling Stone lyrics to go on sale

Was it Bruce Springsteen who said, 'It is a privilege to live on the same planet as the man who wrote Like A Rolling Stone'?

Would I bid if I had the money? I think so.

When I got back from the market this morning (what a beautiful day it is!), this track was on the radio. It doesn’t get much airplay and isn’t it a lovely song? Bob Dylan's version, 1962.

Bob manages to read this in a way that makes it sound as though he wrote it himself!

In 1997 Bob Dylan brought out his best album for years, Time Out of Mind. I saw the first UK gig of the tour and it was great. On the album is a beautiful song called Make You Feel My Love. No one made that much fuss about it at the time. It was later covered very well by Bryan Ferry on his album Dylanesque and more recently was a massive hit for Adele.

I’m currently listening to GMS. Amongst Aled’s guests this morning are The Soldiers. What did they choose to sing? Make You Feel My Love. Last week I watched the first episode of a new series of The Choir. What did Gareth get the women to sing? ‘This lovely song by Bob Dylan’: Make You Feel My Love.

For years I think you’d have said that Dylan’s most famous song was Blowing In The Wind, usually described as a protest song. Now, the ubiquitous Dylan sound is a love song which seems to speak to everyone. Are we all going soft? Dylan isn’t. At Bournemouth last month he sang it aggressively, as if he were saying, ‘I’m going to make you feel my love whether you like it or not.’ Trust him to be different.

As everyone knows, this year marks the four hundredth anniversary of the publication of The King James Bible. I seem to have undertaken the Bible challenge without knowing there was one.

I decided to have the Bible on my Kindle and to try out some samples first, to make sure I was getting something easy to read. The first one I’ve downloaded has illustrations by Gustave Doré which are pale on the Kindle and not worth having. I’m now annoyed to find that ‘your Amazon library’ doesn’t include samples you’ve requested. I can see from my Kindle that I have ‘The Holy Bible, King James Version, Church of England illustrated Gustave Doré’ but no amount of searching will bring this same version up on Amazon again. *Sigh*. Fine if I decide to buy it but not much use for recommending it to anyone else. Kindle samples are usually two chapters long so with the Bible you get a lot of text to try.

I’m reading the whole thing straight through, hence the Bible Challenge. This is an odd experience that makes me wonder if people my age have the Authorised Version built into their DNA. Pages and pages of tedious begetting and smiting and the inexplicable actions of a capricious Almighty, then suddenly whammo! a passage that you know by heart. Sunday School? Scripture lessons? Hearing the lessons read week after week in church? I just don’t know but the stories are as familiar as nursery rhymes. Here they come: Esau and Jacob; Jacob’s ladder; Jacob serving for Rachel; Joseph and his coat of many colours, his life in Egypt, the seven fat years followed by the seven lean ones and so on.

I can’t help wondering about people who don’t have all this in their heads. Whether or not you are a believer (I am, BTW) you have to accept that our culture is based on the Judaeo-Christian tradition and therefore it’s referenced constantly in art, literature and music. Just one example: James Mortmain’s book Jacob Wrestling in I Capture the Castle. It must be strange not to get all these allusions naturally and to need footnotes and endless explanations; like having to learn a new language. So I think there’s a good case for at least teaching children bible stories, which can be done without indoctrination.

I prefer the Authorised Version both because it’s familiar and because it’s literature. I always have trouble with the attempted sacrifice of Isaac though, because I can never get Bob Dylan’s version out of my head.
( Dylan & a challenge )