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The Bob Dylan Scrapbook, 1956-1966 Review

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(More customer reviews)Bob Dylan scrapbook.
This is a wonderful trip down memory lane.
The text of the book
The book basically a narrative of the years from 1956 to 1966. It provides a nice insight to Bob Dylan before the fame up to Blonde on Blonde. Most of it the true Dylan aficionado would already know, but it is very well written. The book is only 64 pages in length and can be read in a couple hours if you don't stop to examine the scraps.
The Scraps.
These are special. The book is heavily laced with reproductions of memorabilia from advertisements for Zimmerman furniture and electric,concert tickets, photos, newspaper clippings taped to the pages to advertisments for shows. My favorite scraps are the reproductions of hand written lyrics for Talking New York, Blowin in the wind, It ain't me babe, Chimes of freedom, Gates of Eden, Like a rolling stone and She's your lover now.
The CD.
This contains about 45 minutes of interviews that are chopped up into short segments. Sometimes you get to hear the interviewers question and sometimes you don't but you can usually figure out what the question might have been based Dylan's answer. On the CD Dylan will ramble on a little but it is all good. During some of the interviews when he speaks it seems like it is the same cadence as Like a rolling stone and other times more in the cadence of MR Tambourine man which is something I never realized until I listened to this CD. Some of the interviews are actual interviews from that time period and some are newer and are of Dylan reflecting on that time period.
Summary:
This is a really interesting to read, look at and listen to. A nice ride on Dylan's magic swirling ship. You will not be disapointed, a five star book all the way.

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Folk Music: The Basics Review

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(More customer reviews)Ronald D. Cohen's The Basics: Folk Music comes from a history professor who uses scholarship and analysis from the most recent scholarly writings to contrast all kind of folk music, from local and traditional to professionals performing during the folk revival period. From record labels and producers to performers, genres and issues, college-level students will appreciate this detailed history-based survey.

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Folk Music: The Basics gives a brief introduction to British and American folk music. Drawing upon the most recent and relevant scholarship, it will focus on comparing and contrasting the historical nature of the three aspects of understanding folk music: traditional, local performers; professional collectors; and the advent of professional performers in the twentieth century during the so-called "folk revival." The two sides of the folk tradition will be examined--both as popular and commercial expressions. Folk Music: The Basics serves as an excellent introduction to the players, the music, and the styles that make folk music an enduring and well-loved musical style. Throughout, sidebars offer studies of key folk performers, record labels, and related issues to place the general discussion in context.

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Forever Young: Photographs of Bob Dylan Review

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Forever Young is a collection of pictures of Dylan taken by Douglas Gilbert in the summer of 1964. These were to have been published in a Look magazine feature article which was killed when the editors determined that the appearance of Dylan was "too scruffy for a family magazine". Released forty one years later, the images provide an intimate portrait of the artist as a young man.
Dylan is seen pecking away at a portable typewriter, hanging out with Allen Ginsburg and John Sebastian, and riding around Woodstock on his Triumph motorcycle. There's a great shot of him sitting in a driveway with a little kid in a Davey Crockett jacket, and another in which he tilts back in a rocking chair, watching Dean Martin on a TV incongruously placed in a window. In another one he peers interestedly over a cup of coffee at his future wife Sara Lowdnes, who is working on a needlepoint at the Café Espresso.
Unfortunately, the accompanying text by Dave Marsh is rambling, pretentious, and often irrelevant. Here is an example:
"The idea that art deserves respect only if it reaches the most sublime status results mainly in hype, as we try to explain why we love things that aren't quite that fine".
There's no need to explain why we don't love this kind of writing which mars the natural and easygoing flow of what is otherwise an enjoyable book.

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Baby, Let Me Follow You Down: The Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years Review

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(More customer reviews)R. Serge Denisoff, editor of Popular Music and Society, called this oral history seriously flawed, noting that the persons quoted are not always properly identified, and their statements (at least one of them wrong) are occasionally presented unquoted, as fact. My own gripe, which applies to so many miserable books on popular music, is: Here's a wonderful, rich account, chock-full of hundreds of names, and no index to let ya locate 'em again. Nevertheless, for any folkie, it's an absolute must-have, which defrosts the legendary goings-on behind the Cambridge, MA folk scene of the '50s and '60s, written by one of the hoariest veterans of the era. The jam-packed, previously unpublished photos are alone worth the price, and their captions are creative ditties. And, if that wispy, natural, 1960's brand of beauty -- facial, bodily, and musical -- affect you viscerally, get ready to be re-affected.

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Long out of print, Baby, Let Me Follow You Down is a classic in the history of American popular culture. The book tells the story of the folk music community in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from its beginnings in living rooms and Harvard Square coffeehouses in the late 1950s to the heyday of the folk music revival in the early 1960s. Hundreds of historical photographs, rescreened for this edition, and dozens of interviews combine to re-create the years when Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, and a lively band of Cambridge folksingers led a generation in the rediscovery of American folk music. Compiled by two musicians who were active participants in the Cambridge folk scene, the volume documents a special time in United States culture when the honesty and vitality of traditional folk music were combined with the raw power of urban blues and the high energy of electric rock and roll to create a new American popular music.

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No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan (The Acclaimed Biography) Review

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(More customer reviews)A master in the day, Bob Dylan's story of his early coffee shop day up untill about the mid-80's. Robert Shelton in 1961 wrote a article for Dylan that help his music take off.Dylan went from the Village folk scene to performing in front of large crowds of people. This book shows the transition from a coffee shop to the big stage. While telling you a blow for blow story of Dylan's life right up untill the mid-80's. The story starts out close to Dylan and over the span of the novel it come more of a distant observer. This book summerizes the whole time period and makes Dylan's personality better known. His songs have more impact now that you understand his motives. I recomend reading it.

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Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited (33 1/3) Review

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(More customer reviews)I have read a handful of the 33 1/3 line of books, each devoted to a landmark album, and Polizzotti's may be the best.
For starters, it's well-researched, adds original research by Polizzotti himself-- including interviews with the Highway 61 session musicians-- and seeks to settle any mysteries or contradictions extant in previous sources (like who played second guitar on Desolation Row). This is unsurprising, as Polizzotti has proven himself a rigorous scholar in such works as Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre Breton, which was clearly assembled from a mountain of primary sources and original research (and done in French, no less!).
But in addition to solid research, Polizzotti has written an intensely personal book on his history with and interpretation of Highway 61. He walks a fine line, never letting his obviously large vocabulary lead him too far into questionable interpretive territory. His interpretations are convincing, or at least always well-reasoned and explained. When it's impossible or difficult to say what Dylan means by a certain lyric or song (which, as Dylan fans know, is often), Polizzotti has no problem admitting it. He does not force or stretch his interpretations over Dylan's many enigmas.
And this, I believe, is what makes this the perfect 33 1/3 book. If Polizzotti were writing a traditional biographical or journalistic account of Highway 61's creation, his personal descriptions and interpretations would intrude on the narrative. But here, they are not only welcome but epitomize the spirit of the 33 1/3 line. An excellent piece of Dylan scholarship and a fine read for anyone seeking to decode Highway 61 (as far as such a task is possible).

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Highway 61 Revisitedresonates because of its enduring emotional appeal. Few songwriters before Dylan or since have combined so effectively the intensely personal with the spectacularly universal. In "Like a Rolling Stone," his gleeful excoriation of Miss Lonely (Edie Sedgwick? Joan Baez? a composite "type"?) fuses with the evocation of a hip new zeitgeist to produce a veritable anthem. In "Ballad of a Thin Man," the younger generation's confusion is thrown back in the Establishment's face, even as Dylan vents his disgust with the critics who labored to catalogue him. And in "Desolation Row," he reaches the zenith of his own brand of surrealist paranoia, that here attains the atmospheric intensity of a full-fledged nightmare. Between its many flourishes of gallows humor, this is one of the most immaculately frightful songs ever recorded, with its relentless imagery of communal executions, its parade of fallen giants and triumphant local losers, its epic length and even the mournful sweetness of Bloomfield's flamenco-inspired fills. In this book,MarkPolizzottiexamines just what makes the songs on Highway 61 Revisitedso affecting, how they work together as a suite, and how lyrics, melody, and arrangements combine to create an unusually potent mix. He blends musical and literary analysis of the songs themselves, biography (where appropriate) and recording information (where helpful). And he focuses onDylan's mythic presence in the mid-60s, when he emerged from his proletarian incarnation to become the American Rimbaud. The comparison has been made by others, including Dylan, and it illuminates much about his mid-sixties career, for in many respects Highway 61 is rock 'n' roll's answer to A Season in Hell.>

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Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña Review

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(More customer reviews)From 1961-66, the Baez sisters, Bob Dylan and Richard Farina came of age, befriended one another, fell in and out of love, raised hell, traipsed the globe on a shoestring budget like college students, drank, got high...and produced some of the most durable music (and, in Farina's case, one of the most underappreciated novels) of their generation. Hajdu captures that half-decade in 300 pages of remarkably seamless prose, painting a vivid picture of four young artists whose intertwining paths left an indelible mark on the work they produced.
Although he appears most interested in Joan Baez and her family, Hajdu produces an impressive amount of information on all four of his subjects. Dylan fans especially are likely to be surprised at some of the details of their hero's early career, such as his first appearance on a studio recording (it wasn't Harry Belafonte's "Midnight Special," as has often been reported) and the somewhat disputed origin of his stage name. Baez, meanwhile, is portrayed for once as a human being with strengths and weaknesses of her own, rather than strictly as a victim of Dylan's misogyny (though this too is acknowledged, as well it should be). Best of all, Richard and Mimi Farina are both researched and profiled just as carefully as Baez and Dylan despite being far less famous outside the realm of hardcore folk music fans.
The book, like its subjects, is not without its shortcomings. For one thing, Hajdu's vision of the four and their importance is a bit sweeping. Baez may have been the first protegee of the folk revival to achieve commercial success, but she was hardly the first folk artist to have a hit record (or even the first of the rock era). Dylan was the movement's biggest name in songwriting, but hardly the only one; Hajdu sprinkles the names of others throughout the book (Phil Ochs, Tom Paxton, Ian and Sylvia Tyson, Paul Simon, Judy Collins, Eric Andersen and a list too long to complete here) without really acknowledging their place relative to those of his four subjects. His sly allusions to their works (i.e. "Dylan acted as if he and the social activists in the folk community never had met") are by turns amusing and tiresome. Also, his practice of phrasing all quotations in the past tense makes it impossible to differentiate between contemporary interview material and decades-old remarks without consulting the endnotes, unless the speaker is a person the reader knows to be dead. Speaking of which, Hajdu tells his nonfictional story novel-style, not revealing the post-1966 fate of his subjects until the end of the book. For those of us who already know why any story of this quartet would have to stop that year, the efforts at suspense can be slightly offputting.
These, of course, are minor criticisms. For any fan of the folk music of the 1960s - especially those who weren't lucky enough to have been in Cambridge or Greenwich Village at the time - this book is a fascinating and welcome look inside a place and time that left a great mark on music history.

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Shadow of Innocence Review

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(More customer reviews)I attended the NFF for several years back in the early seventies and I can tell you that Wasley has the feel of it down just right. I even knew people who lived in Newport and the whole relationship of the town to the festival people was just the way it is in the book.
But now, I'm more of a fan of mysteries than folk music, so none of that would matter if this weren't a rockin' good murder mystery with an unsympathetic victim and two really hot detectives. I ordered this book because of my fond memories of the festival, but I enjoyed it-and passed it on-for the sake of Mike and Bridgit.

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