Watch it ...9:11 pm
While I’m gone, I’m leaving my loyal pooch (more…)
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Out of the office ...9:08 pm
Contingencies are likely to prevent me from blogging in this space for about the next seven days. Terrible enough at any time, it’s particularly disheartening with The Times opening on Broadway tomorrow and the reviews coming out over the weekend. (By the way, XM Channel 28 is broadcasting a “conversation with the cast” and music from the show tomorrow at 12 noon EST.) It also remains to be decided whether Dylan’s 2006 baseball pick, the Detroit Tigers, will win the World Series and confirm Bob as the sports pundit to watch from here on out. At the time of writing, they are down by 2 games to 1 in the best of seven contest. It will all be over for sure by Sunday, one way or another, and with or without commentary from yours truly. I guess the world will just have to struggle on somehow.
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Meeting with the President ...9:08 pm
President Bush sat down this afternoon for a full hour with eight journalists, including Michael Barone, Charles Krauthammer and Tony Blankley. A brief description of the conversation and links to full audio files are at Barone’s blog here. Well worth a listen (thanks to RS for the tip).
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Viewed “The View” ...12:16 pm
More than half of “The View” on ABC TV in my neighborhood was preempted by President Bush’s news conference this morning. (Thank God for small mercies.) Towards the end of the show, Michael Arden and various dancers came out and performed Like A Rolling Stone. I thought it was quite good, a pretty punchy portrayal of the song that looks like it would work very well on a theater stage. The line about “the jugglers and the clowns” really stood out in the circus-y context. So, it doesn’t demonstrate whether the show will succeed or fail, but it was, at least in my “view,” a definite positive. Success or failure will be determined by Broadway theater-goers and critics.
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“All the people can’t be all right all the time” ...9:44 am
A week or two ago I mentioned a review of Dylan’s show in Vancouver that said the fans wanted to hear more “classics” — that Dylan’s more recent material, from the past decade, just didn’t measure up.
Today, a review of last night’s show in Denver, in the Rocky Mountain News, confidently asserts precisely the opposite.
Despite the acclaim for Modern Times - and the crowd going nuts for those songs Tuesday night - he limited his erratic set-list to just three tunes of the 10 on that disc.
The fact that those three were highlights for the rabid crowd and, seemingly, for the musicians onstage, made you shake your head. Most musicians would kill for that kind of reception of their new work.
Maybe, after over forty-five years as a public performer (and a successful one, so I hear), reviewers might give Dylan a little credit for knowing what he’s doing. Many of the hardcore fans are most interested in hearing the new songs, to be sure — and certainly Dylan and the band probably enjoy tackling the fresh material. Yet, a set consisting of mostly brand new material would leave those who came wanting to hear “the classics” feeling cheated. As an entertainer, with the goal of entertaining, a balance has to be struck. It seems like Dylan is probably getting it right.
The Colorado reviewer also says:
The show included many left turns, some of them welcome (a gorgeous reading of Shooting Star), some not so much. (I can guarantee you no one walked in the show thinking “Man, I hope he sings the song Joey tonight.” Yet there it was anyway.)
Who wouldn’t want to hear Joey?
I guess there really is just no accounting for taste.
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Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Oh no ...7:07 pm
The Times They Are A-Changin’ folks will perform Like A Rolling Stone tomorrow … on ABC’s “The View.” Check local listings for details.
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Odds and Ends ...11:26 am
The New York Sun has a good piece today on (more…)
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Sunday, October 22, 2006
Thunder ...3:38 pm
In recent gigs on his new tour, Dylan has been ending the main set with (more…)
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Times and Times Again ...9:39 am
The New York Times Magazine has what you’d call an “in-depth” piece on Twyla Tharp today. She clearly gave the writer a great deal of time and access; pity it was wasted on this rambling five page piece of amateur psycho-twaddle. The writer seems to think that what we need to know is the truth about Tharp’s personal relationships (and seems to consider himself herself quite the intrepid reporter for trying to drag this stuff out of Tharp against her will). We learn little about The Times They Are A-Changin’ and even less about Tharp’s work in general. It is, in my opinion, the worst kind of writing that you can find on the arts these days — barely a step removed from Kitty-Kelley-type-gossip-garbage, but actually worse for its disingenuousness and pretension.
…
Much more worthwhile is a piece by Jason Zinoman: When Bobby met Bertolt, times changed.
Bob Dylan’s collaboration with Twlya Tharp on the new musical The Times They Are A-Changin’ came as a surprise to some of his longtime followers. “It’s bizarre,” said Michael Gray, who wrote The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, this year’s oversize compendium of all things Dylan. “If you like Bob Dylan, why would you like a Broadway musical? There are theater types and there are music types, and they are rarely the same person.”
Sometimes they are. Among the stew of influences that Dylan identifies in his 2004 memoir Chronicles: Volume One, is the invigorating off-Broadway theater scene that sprang up in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, during some of his most formative years. At one point Dylan raves about a 1963 production he saw of The Balcony, a play by French existentialist Jean Genet.
“It portrayed the world as a mammoth cathouse where chaos rules the universe, where man is alone and abandoned in a meaningless cosmos,” he writes, adding that it would have been as relevant 100 years ago as it is today. “The songs I’d write would be like that, too. They wouldn’t conform to modern ideas.”
It goes on, an interesting and fine sketch of the influences of Brecht on Dylan’s work.
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