Review: Audiophile Vinyl Reissue of Donovan's 'The Hurdy Gurdy Man'

The press loved to cop out and make trite Dylan comparisons, but Donovan was always a much more eclectic creature than that. Even during his early "folkie" days he was playing with jazz on things like "Sunny Goodge Street" that could never be mistaken for Bob. And once he remade himself as a sort of psychedelic-pop mystic, his albums started taking on unique and cohesive flavors quite unlike his initial solo acoustic guitar dominated albums. With his break through, Sunshine Superman, he crafted a fine and florid folk-raga record that made more extensive use of the sitar than The Beatles ever did. With "Mellow Yellow" he committed to coffee-house jazz for much of the record, and with A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, he created a children's record hippie parents surely stomached better than they would The Best of Burl Ives. 

Review: 'Decade of Dissent: How 1960s Bob Dylan Changed the World'

Bob Dylan has been narrow-sightedly lionized for his idealism, misrepresented as a protest singer, and denigrated as a disappointment for embracing beats and electricity. But despite his almost compulsive self-mythologizing, Dylan probably never wanted to be anything more than a successful songwriter, and no one's going to say he didn't achieve that. The number of powerful or timeless songs he wrote in the sixties alone is staggering. That so much of his autobiography was bullshit seems to matter little when you consider that the guy wrote "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Don't Think Twice It's Alright" and "My Back Pages" and "Positively 4th Street" and "Visions of Johanna" and so on and so on. 

Review: Robyn Hitchcock's Memoir, '1967'

Anyone who's fallen under the spell of Robyn Hitchcock's tombstone surrealism should be more than a little intrigued by his foray into the memoir world. The guy can write. Not that you'll necessarily find as much story in 1967 as you will in, say, "Underwater Moonlight". 

As the title trumpets, the narrative stays firmly planted in that year of psychedelic whimsy that would so influence Hitchcock's perspective when he began putting out his own songs a decade later. In '67 he was an unripe 14 year old consigned to boarding school, so do not expect 1967 to be the usual rock and roll bacchanal. Even as far as British schoolboy stories go, there isn't much story here. Young Hitch goes to school, where he encounters a few eccentric instructors, as well as his meathead and groover peers, none of whom we readers ever get to know too well. Clearly much more significantly for the lad, he falls in love with the likes of Syd Barrett, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and The Incredible String Band. Then he learns to play the guitar.

Review: 'Nazz' Vinyl Reissue

In a post-John Wesley Harding/post-Music from Big Pink environment, most rock bands were leaving behind the potent influence of the British Invasion to embrace a more staunchly American, borderline rural sound.  Even British bands were following Dylan and The Band's leads, as The Beatles made the New Orleans-influenced "Lady Madonna" and the Stones channelled Delta country and blues into Beggars Banquet. 

Review: 'High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape'

In the age of streaming, entertainment has become so intangible and ephemeral that it makes sense there would be some pushback. In terms of music, this is most obvious in the vinyl revival, which I consider myself a small part of as both a devoted vinyl consumer and a reviewer of vinyl reissues who excludes other formats. There's no greater antidote to a tinny stream from a tiny phone than a slab of plastic you have to pull from a lovely 12-inch jacket, wipe down, slap onto a turntable, and flip halfway through. It may sound silly, certainly self-contradictory, but vinyl returns the soul to music by making it corporeal again.

One of the weirder offshoots of the current vogue for physical media is that cassettes have made a bit of a comeback too. Clearly, I get vinyl. Cassettes? Not really. They always sounded terrible, with their hiss and muddiness. They all look alike. Their cover artwork is shrunk smaller than a CD insert. They unravel. They melt in the sun. If you were to ask me my thoughts on cassettes, I'd say they suck. 

But while reading Marc Masters's new book High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape, I realized my own relationship with cassettes is more complicated than this. Not as far as pre-recorded music is concerned. I think I owned about a half-dozen pre-recorded tapes when my urge to own Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, LTD., caused me to shift formats because the Record World in which I was shopping only had that Monkees album on LP. I bought the vinyl and never looked back to pre-recorded tapes. 

Blank tapes, however, were a different story. I loaded up on them, using them to make straight copies of albums I'd accumulated on LP and CD so I could listen to them in my Walkman or car, mixtapes I compiled from my collection, and, after I got my first Tascam 4-track, recordings of songs I'd written. The sound of a cassette demo was shoddy and hissy, but haunting and real in a way that recordings made with the high-tech digital recording apps so readily available today are not.

Because my story is not unique, the cassette is. Vinyl is cooler and sounds better. But you can't record on it. You can't personalize it. And the fact that cassettes were great because they personalized music is the main thrust of High Bias. Masters provides one short chapter on the format's development and role as a vessel for pre-recorded music before getting into the format's really interesting qualities: its integral role in the history of hip-hop and lo-fi indie rock, DIY music distribution, bootlegging, and Portastudio demoing. He discusses the live tape trading networks that sprung up around The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Throbbing Gristle, Sun Ra, and The Butthole Surfers. He explains the unique cassette cultures in Syria, India, and Egypt that don't really have American equivalents. He embraces the unraveling and the hiss.

 In the midst of the vinyl revival, there have been all sorts of books about that format's history, art, maintenance, and collectability. There aren't that many books about the cassette, but High Bias is provocative and satisfying enough to fill the void on its own.

Review: Bob Dylan's 'The Philosophy of Modern Song'

How is someone like Bob Dylan going to write a book that purports to explore The Philosophy of Modern Song? Such a title seems to suggest an academic approach to analyzing songwriting. Dylan may be clever, but he's no academic. It implies a study performed with discipline. As anyone who ever read his rambling autobiography Chronicles: Volume One or the liner notes of Highway 61 Revisited knows, Dylan sneers at discipline.

Review: 'Portrait of a Phantom: The Story of Robert Johnson’s Lost Photograph'

In 2005, guitar salesman Zeke Schein found an original photograph depicting a man he was convinced was Robert Johnson on ebay. He won the auction after bidding $3,100 (the actual sale price was $2,176.56), passed the photo around to various bluesmen and a forensics expert, and not only amassed evidence that his picture is most likely the real deal (though it remains officially unverified), but identified the photographer and the second man in the photo: Johnson’s traveling companion and collaborator, Johnny Shines. The discovery of the photo was significant because there had previously only been two known photos of the man who was arguably the key figure in blues—more because he wrote timeless songs and developed a complex guitar technique than because of any cheesy Faustian bargain myth.

Review: 'Melody Makers: Should’ve Been There'

Melody Maker was generally more significant for Barrie Wentzell’s striking B&W photos of sixties and seventies pop and rock stars than the depth of its reportage. So Leslie Ann Coles’s documentary Melody Makers: Should’ve Been There is a fitting tribute to the long-running UK music paper. The storytelling is as flimsy as a puff piece on Yes, but boy, those Wentzell photos that fill the screen throughout this film’s 88 minutes are impressive. Peter Gabriel resplendent in his daisy headpiece. Brian Jones cradling his sitar. Tina Turner commanding the stage as a Screaming Mimi in a mini.

Review: 50th Anniversary Edition of 'The Band'

Bob Dylan and The Band spent the summer of ’67 in Woodstock, isolated from the sitars, Mellotrons, and psychedelics that defined the season. When they emerged, they put out the two albums that redefined Rock & Roll for back-to-the-roots ’68. But whereas John Wesley Harding felt like Dylan’s most personal album since Another Side, The Band’s Music from Big Pink was clearly made under Dylan’s heavy influence. It’s an excellent record, but their own defining personal statement was still a year away.

The Band finds The Band leaving the Dylan-collaborations and covers behind for a completely self-created work. Robbie Robertson emerged as a songwriter with a vision nearly as individual as his mentor’s. Much has been made of the idea that The Band is a sepia snapshot of America’s past seen through the eyes of an (Canadian) outsider. However, many of Robertson’s characters seem to be born Americans, and he dramatizes them with such commitment and authenticity the backwoods funk of “Up on Cripple Creek” or the farming woes of “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)” feel completely homebrewed in American soil. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is so soaked with humanity that it’s easy to forget that its sympathetic narrator fights alongside the Civil War’s villains (apparently that’s what staunch Civil Rights activist Joan Baez did when she turned it into a hit).

Review: 'That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound: Dylan, Nashville, and the Making of Blonde on Blonde'

Nashville will always be the home of country, yet Rock & Rollers such as Paul McCartney, The Beach Boys, Neil Young, Mike Nesmith, The Byrds, and R.E.M. all recorded there. This pop gravitation toward Music City started in earnest when Bob Dylan cut Blonde on Blonde there in 1966. If there’s an artist who tends to lead his peers around like a Pie-Eyed Piper, it’s Bob.

Dylan’s time in Nashville is the focus of Daryl Sanders’s That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound: Dylan, Nashville, and the Making of Blonde on Blonde. At 200 pages, the book is a quick read, kind of like what a 33 1/3 book would be if the series banned its writers from pretentious tangents and navel gazing. Sanders keeps the narrative focused, describing the circumstances behind the writing and recording of each of the album’s fourteen luxurious rough gems. There’s light analysis (Sanders notes that “Just Like a Woman” is “intentionally sexist” without daring to explain why Dylan would want to write such a thing) and pretty extensive biographies of the great Nashville session men who brought Rock’s first double album to life.

Sanders could have pumped a bit more life into Nashville, itself. He plainly states the significance of having a Rock musician record in the Country Capital, but there’s only spare sense of the abrasions of two worlds colliding. The Nashville Cats think it’s a bit weird that Dylan’s songs are longer than three minutes, and some bluegrass-playing studio visitors sneer at bluesy stuff like “Pledging My Time”, but the only thing that really shines a light on the town’s friction is a short but scary anecdote in which Al Kooper discusses being chased around town by a clan of Good Ol’ Boys. Yet for a tidy rundown of session facts spiced with quotations from a lot of the guys involved in them, That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound hits the spot.

Review: 50th Anniversary Remix of The Band's 'Music from Big Pink'

When Dylan emerged from his cocoon with John Wesley Harding in late 1967, he seemingly wiped away the psychedelic excesses he helped set in motion with Blonde on Blonde instantaneously. One of the first major new bands to define the Dylan-provoked “return to roots” movement was The Band. However, the group was never as simple as their Antebellum South image implied.

First of all, they weren’t really a new band—they’d been Dylan’s backing band and collaborators for well over a year—and only one member of the group hailed from the American South. The rest were Ontario boys. The music on their debut album, Music from Big Pink, similarly defies dismissive pigeonholing. While John Wesley Harding and the eponymous debut by Creedence Clearwater Revival— that other misleadingly located face of new Americana— are as stripped to the bones as Sgt. Pepper’s or Days of Future Past are lavishly over-dressed, Music from Big Pink is a complex production full of small details that bring its sepia-hued snapshot of a dead world to vivid life. Eerily echoed backing vocals or organ lines skid out of the deep background. Trippy, leslied guitar lines creak in the foreground. Most intricate of all is The Band’s gorgeous loose-weave harmonies.

These fine details have never popped more than they do on the new, remixed edition of Music from Big Pink. The original mix sounds flat in comparison, though the new mix retains the original’s warmth, crunchiness, and antique atmosphere. Mastering is significantly louder, though at least in its vinyl incarnation, it doesn’t sound excessively loud. That 180-gram vinyl edition is presented as a double-LP set with both discs spinning at 45rpm.

For its fiftieth anniversary, Music from Big Pink is also available as a CD Super Deluxe box set and a pink vinyl edition.

Review: 'Gathered from Coincidence: The British Folk Pop Sound of 1965-1966'

In 1963, The Beatles revolutionized pop with a distinctly English ear for melody and harmony and an uncompromised big beat yanked from the yanks. That same year Dylan rearranged the face of folk with a ragged edge that brought the sanitized harmonies of The Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul, & Mary to Earth and a surreal ways with words that kicked it back into the cosmos. As dissimilar as their styles were at the time, there was already some cross-pollination between folk and pop happening. As early as 1962, Dylan rocked up his hootenanny with the obscure “Mixed-Up Confusion”, and The Beatles’ debut single, “Love Me Do” was more folk than pop with its turgid beat, absence of electric six-strings, and wheezy harmonica. Once Dylan and The Beatles became aware of each other, such heavy petting was over and the marriage was officially consummated as Dylan’s influence loomed all over “I’ll Be Back” and much of Beatles for Sale and The Beatles’ beat inspired Dylan to plug in… though his stripped down, thumping sound was always more Stones than Beatles. It took The Byrds to pointedly fuse Dylan’s far-out poetry and The Beatles’ clean jingle-jangle, officially putting a face on the new folk-rock genre.

Between Mersey Beat-dominated ’64 and psychedelic ’67, folk-rock was the dominant pop style for young, white artists. Even such hardened souls as the Stones, Kinks, and Pretty Things got sucked into it. Appropriately, Grapefruit Records’ new triple-disc collection Gathered from Coincidence: The British Folk Pop Sound of 1965-1966 limits its scope to those two years, and while it’s reasonable to wonder if its location and period limitations result in a limited listening experience, they don’t.

Instead of just spotlighting songs that reflect The Byrds’ 12-string shimmer, Gathered from Coincidence presents a variety of sounds that fall within its narrow premise. There is electric jangle (Peter and Gordon’s “Morning’s Calling”, The Silkie’s “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”, The Hollies’ “Very Last Day”) but also solo acoustic pieces (Donovan’s “Catch the Wind”), full-band acoustic rambles (The Kinks’ “Wait Til the Summer Comes Along”), heavy-beat rock (The Pretty Things’ “London Town”, Manfred Mann’s “If You Gotta Go, Go Now”), shades of distinctly British baroque pop (Marianne Faithfull’s “Come and Stay with Me”), bubblegum folk (Twinkle’s “Golden Lights”, Heinz’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”), elaborate productions that fly in the face of folk’s dogged simplicity (Murray Head’s “The Bells of Rhymney”, Justin Hayward’s “Day Must Come”), and some of the turgid, old-fashioned stuff that Rock & Roll mostly swept away (Ian Campbell Folk Group’s “The Times They Are-A Changin’”, First Gear’s “Gotta Make the Future Bright”).

As you probably sussed from the artist and song names, Gathered from Coincidence contains some big groups and a lot of Dylan covers. It also has some varying perspectives, as parodies such as Alan Klein’s “Age of Corruption” and Micha’s “Protest Singer” protest the protest singers, though neither are particularly listenable (however, John Cassidie’s “Talkin’ Denmark Street” is the uncanniest Dylan send up I’ve ever heard). Fortunately, such bum tracks are pretty rare and Gathered from Coincidence ends up a mostly consistent and varied collection of songs from the beginning of pop’s most fruitful period.

Congratulations to Nobel Prize Winner Bob Dylan!

I always knew that "The sun's not yellow...it's chicken!" was "a new poetic expression within the great American song tradition." Now the rest of the world does too, as Bob Dylan has received a Nobel Prize for Literature for doing that kind of thing on a regular basis for 55 years. No word yet on how much Tarantula had to do with the award. Congrats, Zimmy!

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 222

The Date: May 9

The Movie: Don’t Look Back (1967)

What Is It?: There was one hell of a swelled head under all that frizzy hair, and Dylan lets it take over the screen for better and worse in D.A. Pennebaker’s classic, warts-and-all documentary. As soon as you laugh at one of D’s clever snipes, you feel the sudden pang of guilt for the victim that he surely didn’t feel when this movie was shot in 1965. When that victim is dear Donovan (whom Dylan eviscerates by saying “That’s a really good song, man”!), the guilt stings all the worse. Still, this is who the guy was, and the fantastic music he performs in the film almost justifies the egomania. After all, he does finish off Donovan by playing “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”.

Why Today?: On this day in 1965, Dylan plays the Royal Albert Hall concert featured in the film.

Review: 'Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, & Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock'

As the psychedelic era reached its frenzied pitch in late 1967, as even the earthen-blues Stones were dressing up like wizards and peddling lysergic premonitions, Bob Dylan was looking back and bucking trends by issuing the stripped John Wesley Harding from his tree-lined retreat in Woodstock, New York. That record, as well as another by Dylan’s neighbors and collaborators The Band, completely shifted Rock & Roll from the cosmos to the farm in 1968, and pretty soon hippies across the nation were rambling about “getting it together in the country.”

It’s ironic that Dylan was such a leader in this movement since he both hated being thought of as a leader and he hated hippies. In fact, he’d essentially abandoned the leftist politics that won his original following to become pretty conservative— perhaps not incidentally, the prevailing political stance of pre-hippie-influx Woodstock—following the lead of manager Albert Grossman into an odd-bedfellow balance of rustic living and materialism, and even privately voicing support for segregationist George Wallace. Nevertheless, the hippies flooded Woodstock, tried their best to get to Dylan, and staged the most famous outdoor festival in rock history.

In his new book Small Town Talk: Bob Dylan, The Band, Van Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, & Friends in the Wild Years of Woodstock, Barney Hoskyns fortunately devotes a mere chapter to those three days of peace, love, and music, because the Woodstock Festival has been examined and examined and examined in plenty of other places. Yet, it is also the climactic event in a story that begins with Grossman’s move to that New York community in 1963, builds through Dylan’s retreat and The Band’s emergence as artists in their own rights, and downslides with sad tales of over-commercialization and over-hype. We lose The Band’s Richard Manuel, Rick Danko, and Levon Helm before the tale is over. Long before then, Helm and Robbie Robertson split bitterly. Ditto Dylan and Grossman. Doomed souls such as Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin end up in Woodstock on their way out of this mortal coil. For too many, “getting it together in the country” meant hard drugs and early death. Others, such as Dylan and Van Morrison, managed to extricate themselves from a place they initially deemed enchanting but ultimately regarded as a toxic zone.

Hoskyns keeps his authorial distance for the most part, though he cannot hide his own enchantment with the storied burg, rendering its striking sights, sounds, and smells in three vivid dimensions, and the way he occasionally jumps into the present to detail its thriving music and art scene rescues his story from the tragedy bin. There may have been some serious downsides to the old, old Woodstock scene, but this story is fleet-footed, full of creativity, and peopled with a dazzling array of artists, from those previously mentioned to George Harrison, Patti Smith, The Isley Brothers, and the Rolling Stones. And the focus on Todd Rundgren’s wacky glam/prog exploits throughout the seventies that ends the book rescues the story from being a prolonged hippie-fest. Plus, a story that results in the creation of The Basement Tapes, Music from Big Pink, Pearl, Moondance, Something/Anything? and possibly even All Things Must Pass can’t really be called an unhappy one.

Review: 'Bound for Glory' Blu-ray

Woody Guthrie embodies the spirit of the sixties thirty years too early. Like Dylan, the singer who so worshipped him, did at the beginning of his career, Guthrie used his music to express a staunch social conscience and insight his listeners to action. Like Dylan, Guthrie sometimes had trouble being as humane as his lyrics. He abandoned his wife and children amidst the devastation of the Great Depression to “find himself.” His family’s loss was the world’s gain, as Guthrie’s experiences across America inspired him to quit singing trite tunes about pretty girls and Jesus and start using his music to “kill fascists,” as he famously scrawled across his guitar.

I’m not sure how closely Hal Ashby’s 1976 film Bound for Glory, based on Guthrie’s autobiography of the same name, follows true history, but it has Guthrie (David Carradine in an understated yet powerful performance) leaving behind the Dust Bowl and a wife (Melinda Dillon) who belittles his dreams to follow them to California. Along the way he has experiences that shape the musical/political force he would become. He sees racism, redneck justice, the callousness behind Christian platitudes, abject poverty, and the violent chaos that lack of organization breeds firsthand. Upon visiting a shantytown, Guthrie meets Ozark Bule (Ronny Cox), a magnetic singer who instills in Guthrie the values of organization. Together they become pro-Union troubadours forced to keep steps ahead of brutish bands of union breakers. Politicized completely, Guthrie lives up to left-wing ideals even more staunchly than Bule, becoming the man that would inspire Dylan and so many others who preached the power of the people.

Although Bound for Glory is set in the thirties, it is very much a film of the seventies. However, unlike Popeye Doyle of The French Connection, Randall McMurphy of Cuckoo’s Nest, or others of their manly ilk, Carradine’s Guthrie does not possess an iota of cynicism, making Roy Neary of Close Encounters of the Third Kind his closest cinematic cousin of the decade. Guthrie’s humanity makes the cruel way he leaves his wife and kids almost forgivable. He cannot pass a person in need without handing over his last few coins.

Though music is not this film’s main concern, Carradine does get a change to sing quite a few songs, and he does so with a growly, Rock & Roll attitude alien to any music from so many decades earlier. In this way, it reminded me of another great seventies film: Quadrophenia, which assays the early sixties with an anachronistic attitude that makes it just as relevant to the time in which it was released.

Bound for Glory is also very much a film of seventies aesthetics. Haskell Wexler’s photography is superficially “antique” in its use of sepia tones, but the picture’s graininess, expansiveness, and magical lighting are very seventies (Bound for Glory would make a great double-bill with another Wexler-photographed historical drama from the seventies: Days of Heaven).

Twilight Time’s new blu-ray captures the visual magic of Bound for Glory quite well. Although the print isn’t in spectacular shape—white specks abound—the image is well defined and the original grain remains natural without becoming overbearing. The lack of extras aside from an isolated score track may be disappointing, but the feature is rich enough that you won’t really miss what isn’t here. Get it on Twilight Time Movies.com here.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 103

The Date: January 11

The Movie: The Concert for Bangladesh (1972)

What Is It?: In 1971, George Harrison and Ravi Shankar staged Rock’s first big all-star benefit concert. The proceeds may not have all gone to the Bangladesh refugees who deserved them (perhaps it should have been called The Concert for Allen Klein), but the show did produce a major album and motion picture featuring luminaries such as Harrison, Shankar, Bob Dylan, and Ringo Starr.

Why Today?: On this day in 1972, East Pakistan officially becomes Bangladesh.

Review: 'Unprepared to Die: America’s Greatest Murder Ballads and the True Crime Stories That Inspired Them'

Murder ballads are a little like the true-crime reports of the folk music world, though the way their stories tend to transform and take on new shades and shadows depending on the storyteller may place them closer to campfire ghost tales. They are elastic, though they often begin with an actual tragic incident. Paul Slade pulls murder ballads further from the campfire and closer to the periodical rack with his new book Unprepared to Die: America’s Greatest Murder Ballads and the True Crime Stories That Inspired Them. The author goes back to the original newspaper stories and crime reports to detail the true stories behind such often-crooned legends as “Pretty Polly”, “Tom Dooley”, “Frankie and Johnny”, “Stack-o-Lee”, and “Poor Ellen Smith” as accurately as possible.

As each story becomes a musical source, Slade begins folding the ballads into the tale, analyzing their faithfulness as journalism and what they say about the culture of their times. This is particularly fascinating when race is an issue, as it is in “Frankie and Johnny”, “Stack-o-Lee”, and Dylan’s deeply chilling “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”, which becomes far more horrifying the more we learn about the loathsome “man-slaughterer” William Zantzinger. Slade also tracks how the songs develop from rendition to rendition, sometimes becoming completely distinct from the originals over time, as when “Knoxville Girl” morphed into “Banks of the Ohio” or “Stack-o-Lee” became the pop hit “Stagger Lee”. Sometimes these songs inspired answer or referential songs, such as Billy Bragg’s “The Lonesome Death of Rachel Corrie” or Fred Burns’s “Pretty Polly’s Revenge”.

Slade ends each chapter with his picks for the ten best renditions/reinventions of its featured song, and seasons his narratives with testimony’s and interpretations from artists such as Bragg, Mick Harvey of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, who recorded one of the more celebrated later-day collections of murder ballads, and Kristin Hersh, whose Murder, Misery, and Then Goodnight is one of the finest and most underappreciated ones. As for our author, he editorializes sparingly, mainly maintaining a journalist’s critical distance in his telling, so his book rarely reads luridly or morbidly. Nevertheless, the horrifying nature of these crimes—so often perpetrated against women, and at the height of repugnance, an entire family—and the beauty of the songs they inspired delivers an emotional wallop that will only hit harder if you listen to some of these timeless, troubling ballads as you read.

Review: 'Bob Dylan: Don't Look Back" Blu-ray

OK, so just for a moment, put yourself in his Cuban-heeled boots. Imagine you’re exceptionally intelligent, exceptionally witty, exceptionally talented, and exceptionally self-conscious. Imagine the media has yoked you with the responsibility of being the voice of your generation and incessantly bombards you with inane questions like “What is your real message?” Imagine the media is also trying to find the next you, and when it does so, it’s a meek young man singing a fairly inane love song. Imagine you’re also a 23-year old kid. Well, then you might have come off a bit the way Bob Dylan comes off in Don’t Look Back.

Review: '1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music'

The title of Andrew Grant Jackson’s new book, 1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music, made my eyebrows rise. Really? 1965? Sure, it was the year Dylan went electric and the Stones lamented their lack of satisfaction, but wouldn’t 1968—the year of “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud”, “Street Fighting Man”, Electric Ladyland, the formation of Led Zeppelin, the release of the first LP-length rock opera (S.F. Sorrow), and well, “Revolution” — be more apt? Or how about 1967, the year of Sgt. Pepper’s, The Velvet Underground & Nico, the Summer of Love, Monterey Pop, Motown going psychedelic, and Paul McCartney going on TV to say he’s done acid? Or maybe even 1966 with its Revolver and Pet Sounds and Blonde on Blonde and Aftermath.