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Five-Star Fridays: Dylan Countdown Finale

Friday, July 17th, 2009

I don’t know that I can really pick a favorite Dylan song. Not even sure I can pick a favorite off of this particular album. But this is the song I seem to listen to most often (at least according to my iTunes statistics). Pretty ballsy to put out an 11-minute track back in the three-minute pop song era, too.

So here’s Dylan’s own Wasteland, “Desolation Row,” from Highway 61, Revisited.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 2:19 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Five-Star Fridays/Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

8 Responses to “Five-Star Fridays: Dylan Countdown Finale”

  1. #1 |  pegr |  July 17th, 2009 at 2:48 pm

    The youtube tag isn’t right…

  2. #2 |  Stormy Dragon |  July 17th, 2009 at 4:29 pm

    My favorite Dylan song is one that’s being performed by someone else. He’s a good songwriter and a genius lyricist, but ugh, he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.

  3. #3 |  Ryan |  July 17th, 2009 at 5:15 pm

    >I don’t know that I can really pick a favorite Dylan song.

    Visions of Johanna. Anyone who answers otherwise is an infidel.

  4. #4 |  chris |  July 17th, 2009 at 10:40 pm

    Saw him the other night here in Pa. I gotta say he was just awful. What is he saying?!? John Mellencamp was really good though,his band was tight and really rocked the show.

    CIII

  5. #5 |  Windy |  July 18th, 2009 at 1:27 pm

    My fav Dylan song is the one about Hurricane Carter, the true story put to music, that situation is right up Radley’s alley.

    Back in 82 my hubby and I visited a friend of a friend who was living in Dylan’s old bus/home in the Northern CA woods (Humboldt County), she was a pot trimmer and the bus was full of weed, as was her dog’s fur (smelled good in there). She had found some old lyrics in the bus, assumed they were Dylan’s early attempts, before he became famous, don’t know whatever happened to her or the lyrics. Hell I can’t even recall her name today and couldn’t find the bus again if my life depended on it. Haven’t ever been back to CA, since.

  6. #6 |  Elliot |  July 18th, 2009 at 4:18 pm

    I never got Dylan. I’ve always found him to be a sub-par singer who’s songs are high on poetic lyrics at the cost of good melodies. There are many, many singers with far more musical talent, a few of whom covered some of his songs (like Cat Stevens).

  7. #7 |  Stormy Dragon |  July 18th, 2009 at 8:24 pm

    The Byrds did a lot of Dylan covers too, all of which are far more awesome than the originals.

  8. #8 |  Ronnie Schreiber |  July 21st, 2009 at 1:45 pm

    What could be more cliched than saying that Dylan can’t sing? Edith Piaf didn’t have classical pipes either. Howlin’ Wolf, as well.

    Dylan is an incredibly expressive singer. Do some covers of his songs transcend the original versions? Sure. Dylan acknowledges as much when he performs All Along The Watchtower live, which he openly admits Jimi Hendrix made his own and Dylan performs the song in a style influenced by Hendrix’ take on the song.

    As far as being a great poet with bad melodies, are you fricking nuts? Lay Lady Lay, It Takes A Lot To Laugh, Visions Of Johanna, and others are beautiful, beautiful melodies. It’s not just the lyrics that have brought so many great, great singers to record and perform Dylan’s material. Dylan is a preeminent songwriter period.

    Oh, and his best song is Blind Willie McTell.

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