Dylan of the Week, Mk. 12

“Isis”
Bob Dylan
Live: Rolling Thunder Revue – 1975

INSANITY. BOOZE. WOMEN. BOOZE. WOMEN. Arms crossed like Jesus' death. Plastic masks showing more than hiding. That violin that sounds like a dying horse. The drums that pound his hangover/drunkeness into art. Ronson's guitar oddly meshing. Far too many people on the stage – some kind of orgiastic musical “experience”. Double the vocals on the last verse and send me to heaven – or hell, because it doesn't really matter at this point. The playing field has been leveled and the only thing that really exists are materials. But how easily these are destroyed! Do even they exist? Who gives a shit what exists?!

Find value where you can.

Value exists independent of human assignment.

“I came to a high place of darkness and light
The dividing line ran through the center of town.”

What are you worth?

Cherry Red

“Cherry Red”
The Groundhogs
Split – 1971

West Coast Purple. East Coast Grey. Bow at the limbs, oh useless ones! Scream out of your throats. Yell out at the large intestine. Speak in tongues till you're blue in the face. All in an attempt to articulate the insanity of a riff. Nothing compares. This type of shit should have a temple and mythology.

Dylan of the Week, Mk. 11

“When the Deal Goes Down”
Bob Dylan
Modern Times – 2006

Commitment. Not to a person, but to an ideal. An ideal that isn't permanent. “We all wear the same thorny crown”. Would that it were that ideals were permanent for some - “...permanency, everlastingness, is, in my opinion, the root of evil”. The things that keep us bound are “more frailer than flowers”, the things that die quickly. Rings, Earthly Domains, Broomsticks, Altars – these things fade to dust (from whence they came). What replaces them is new, things that were born “in the world's ancient light”. Reconstruction of Ideology. “Whereof we know not, thereof we shall not speak”. Is that misquoted?

What really matters is what we're talking about. Nothing, or at least something like it, is without value. Except certain things, like utterances. Those people, the people that have arrived somewhere, should be silenced. You crawl, you never get up. Who told you you could?

“Nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing” (Shakespeare)

Dylan of the Week, Mk. 10

“Tombstone Blues”
Bob Dylan
Highway 61 Revisited – 1965

What a way to go! West! The blues redux, via the garage and French symbolism. A rock journalist's wet dream. If anybody thought that Dylan embodied American music in his folk guise, just wait for this. Hit me in the jaw with three centuries of tradition. Hit me in the stomach with visceral emotion. Hit me in the head with blissful nonsense. Only Dylan can write gibberish quite so delectably. And they disown him for it?! Stupid pieces of shit with their heads so far up their asses they think shit smells good. They don't realize revolution when it chops their useless heads off – they sit “worthlessly alone”. It's the “geometry of innocent flesh on the bone” that penetrates the minds of a nation, not the anti-capitalist subversion bullshit those desperately holding onto an opinion would have you believe; the truth that “the sun's not yellow, it's chicken” rather than the "fetishization of commodity" that is so dripping with the disease-laden detritus of pretense. Fuck protest. Law is the expression of freedom.

Distance Equals Rate Times Time

“Distance Equals Rate Times Time”
The Pixies
Trompe Le Monde - 1991

Sick him on me. Sick him on me. Sick him on me. Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhh. Not like that, but like that. Give me your television. I want to bow to you, you made me. I want to be a Luddite. I'm not what I want to be. I'm everywhere. Call me Jewish. Call me Zimmy. I can't stop stealing other people's other words. Why not? Hey all! Where didn't we go? Black Francis told me to come this way, but he cannot be trusted. I've fallen asleep behind the school bus in Nightmare on Elm St. Four. That's so ridiculous. Freed up because inanity made me so. Creation doesn't exist, only it's cousin, violence. Nature made who? Mythology creates nothing except itself. This is not creation, but masturbation.

Dylan of the Week, Mk. 9

“You Ain't Goin' Nowhere”
Bob Dylan
Greatest Hits Vol. II – 1971
(originally recorded 1967 appearing on the Basement Tapes in 1975)

My toes have been sprinkled in the stream. Baptism by passivity. My stomach is full of bacon. My head is full of nothing and smoke. My ears are full of basement noise. The nonsense must overtake me – I can't wait. This new girl seems so full of names. Just like her, all these new friends die daily and are replaced with new ones that look and sound just like them. Spit yourselves back at me, rejuvenated! I'll only take the born again ones...and the ones before them. My appetite is reserved for the drunks, the cobblers, the dust, the racists, the “dogs that talk”, and the cherubim. Don't we all deserve worse than this? Thank you Demeter.

Dylan understands the nonsense (“Ghengis Khan and his brother Don”?). It makes him happy and arbitrary. It makes Happy's banjo sing like a child playing at jax. This version is just too wonderful.

The Byrds also did a great version.