Maybe its the holidays that influence this comment: when I read your essay this morning, the image that comes to mind is a large, rich, and diverse holiday dinner! Your essay has a theme and but you take off from there for many interesting side stories. One song that was performed at the Polar Music Prize ceremony was one that had not really registered to me until a friend played it at a local musical get together last year...there it was, a great and overlooked song on Oh Mercy! How did I miss it? Here it is at the ceremony:
Thanks, Peter! I had never seen this performance before. I feel for the singer, performing with the pressure of Dylan sitting right there on the front row. "And I just turn my back while you silently die. / What good am I?" I'd be asking myself the same question!
Thanks very much for this detailed and insightful essay. I attended this show, and remember it as perhaps the most engaging and fully present I have ever seen Dylan.It really was a magnificent concert. The set selections were brilliant, I thought, and I recall "Hard Rain", "Song To Woody", and "Positively 4th Street", as highlights.
A brilliant (and vitally polemical) reading of "Duncan and Brady" in the historical and political contexts of the site of its performance: Cincinnati. We know, terribly, that some of the same contexts shape the meaning of the song as it was played in other cities. You strengthen the basic gambit of this project with every installment--this is how to read Dylan's songs and performances in those contexts.
Maybe its the holidays that influence this comment: when I read your essay this morning, the image that comes to mind is a large, rich, and diverse holiday dinner! Your essay has a theme and but you take off from there for many interesting side stories. One song that was performed at the Polar Music Prize ceremony was one that had not really registered to me until a friend played it at a local musical get together last year...there it was, a great and overlooked song on Oh Mercy! How did I miss it? Here it is at the ceremony:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKyzzSfC2z8
Thanks, Peter! I had never seen this performance before. I feel for the singer, performing with the pressure of Dylan sitting right there on the front row. "And I just turn my back while you silently die. / What good am I?" I'd be asking myself the same question!
This is an amazing essay.
Thanks very much for this detailed and insightful essay. I attended this show, and remember it as perhaps the most engaging and fully present I have ever seen Dylan.It really was a magnificent concert. The set selections were brilliant, I thought, and I recall "Hard Rain", "Song To Woody", and "Positively 4th Street", as highlights.
A brilliant (and vitally polemical) reading of "Duncan and Brady" in the historical and political contexts of the site of its performance: Cincinnati. We know, terribly, that some of the same contexts shape the meaning of the song as it was played in other cities. You strengthen the basic gambit of this project with every installment--this is how to read Dylan's songs and performances in those contexts.