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With a new (old) album, a tour with (old) new songs, and a giant new book, Bob Dylan remains a neverending juggernaut
I first began listening to Bob Dylan in earnest in early 1974, with the purchase of the contemporaneous album Planet Waves, a somewhat quiet, unassuming collection of deep, intimate songs – including the color-by-number anthem, “Forever Young” — recorded with The Band before they would go out on tour for the first time since Dylan’s premature retirement from the road in 1966 (the same year, incidentally, that the Beatles quit touring). Dylan’s return to touring after his eight-year layoff would pretty much continue for the rest of his career up to and including today.
I did not get to see Dylan in concert until fall 1978, missing two of his all-time greatest tours – his 1974 “comeback” tour with The Band, captured on the live album Before the Flood, and the following year’s “Rolling Thunder Revue,” the subject of several live concert albums, including 1976’s Hard Rain and the more recent The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings, a sprawling, 14-CD box set, released in 2019. (There was also an official two-CD set in 2002, and many widely available bootleg recordings of the legendary tour, as well as a Dylan concert film, Renaldo and Clara, released in 1978, and Martin Scorsese’s 2019 “pseudo-documentary” about the tour.)
Alas, my introduction to live Dylan was during one of his most bizarre tours, launched in Japan in early 1978 and initially captured on the April 1979 American release of Bob Dylan at Budokan (originally intended as a Japan-only release in August 1978). The 1978 tour was controversial, which Dylan acknowledged right from the stage of the old Boston Garden where I first saw him, when, halfway through the show, he paused and said to the audience, “I hope you don’t think this is Las Vegas music, or disco music, because you know it’s not.”
Bob Dylan, circa 1963 Photo by Ralph Baxter
It was a direct answer to critics’ complaints about the song arrangements and the sound of the band, as well as the overall stage aesthetic, which to some mimicked the tackiness of concerts by Neil Diamond and the recently deceased Elvis Presley. (Some blame manager and concert promoter Jerry Weintraub — who worked with both Presley and Diamond, as well as with Frank Sinatra – for Dylan’s cheesy, lounge-lizard presentation.)
Dylan didn’t help his cause by introducing from the stage such well-known songs as “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding),” or asking the audience, “Hey, what’s the name of this?” over the opening chords of “All Along Watchtower.” Doubters questioned the need for an eight-piece band (large for the time) and a trio of female backup singers. Some crueler critics even took to calling it the “Alimony Tour,” a nasty way of accusing Dylan of selling out in the wake of his divorce from his first wife, Sara.
Even though Dylan catered to the desires of audiences around the world to hear primarily his “greatest hits” — and this was one of the last tours on which he did so — he couched them in such weird arrangements that maybe he was justified in introducing them by name; otherwise, they may have remained unrecognizable to some. From where I sat in the cavernous, echoe-y Garden, it proved to be an inauspicious introduction to Bob Dylan, concert artist.
And now, 45 years later, Dylan’s label, Columbia Records, has seen fit to give the 1978 tour — as captured in those first two weeks in Japan — the full “Bootleg Series” treatment, with The Complete Budokan 1978, including two complete concerts at Tokyo’s Budokan, newly remixed and spread out over four CDs, featuring 36 previously unreleased performances. (The official release date is Friday, Nov. 17.)
Film still from 1966 European tour, by D. A. Pennebaker Courtesy of Bob Dylan Center
It is an album package for which Dylan fans — other than rabid completists (possibly including myself) — were not clamoring. This, rather than a more complete version of Before the Flood? This, rather than a live album from one of his two tours with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers? This, rather than a live album — or many live albums — capturing the many ups (and downs) of Dylan’s so-called Never Ending Tour, which began in June 1988 and, depending on how you define it, could include concerts as recent as the one I saw a few weeks ago in Schenectady, N.Y.? (Dylan’s current tour is officially billed as the “Rough and Rowdy Ways” world tour, which began in 2021 and is expected to continue into 2024, and marks a rare step forward in truth in advertising, as about half the concert is devoted to songs from the album of the same name.)
Yet this time around, the concerts at Budokan (if not the 1978 tour, which evolved over the course of a year and 114 concerts in Asia, the South Pacific, Europe, and North America) are what we’ve got. And the new package is not without its merits. The remixed and remastered sound is brilliant (which may or may not be a positive, depending upon how you feel about that sound). The recording captures an unusually chatty frontman, by Dylan’s standards (he has been known to utter nary a word in concert for decades), one seemingly in a terrific mood and also one who is downright funny.
“This is an unrecorded song – see if you can guess which one it is,” he says to the audience before launching into “Is Your Love in Vain,” which would not be released until Street Legal came out four months later. The humor – some of it mocking and self-deprecating – that Dylan evinces even suggests that he was fully aware that he was presenting himself as something akin to a Las Vegas showman.
From Left: Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson, Bob Dylan, Richard Manuel, Garth Hudson and Levon Helm, 1974 Photo by Barry Feinstein
If so, it would not be the first time nor anywhere near the last time that Dylan was playing a character — no less a fictive version of Dylan than Renaldo in Renaldo and Clara nor Jack Fate in his 2003 film, the aptly-titled Masked and Anonymous. (There is a whole school of thought that “Bob Dylan” himself is a put-on, a fictional character invented by a savvy youngster from Hibbing, Minnesota, named Robert Allen Zimmerman.)
But the context of where he had been and, with the benefit of hindsight, where he was headed musically might be the strongest reason to spend time with these glitzy tracks and their unusual arrangements. The use of backup singers, especially ones whose vocals were stylized in gospel-like call-and-response, offered a hint that Dylan was beginning a journey that would see him explore different aspects of Black music in subsequent albums.
Steve Douglas’ dominant saxophone lends many of the numbers a jazzy, R&B feel. A few songs are recontextualized as reggae numbers. In the years immediately following the 1978 tour, Dylan would dive deep into gospel music on several albums, into Motown and R&B on 1981’s “Shot of Love,” and reggae on 1983’s Infidels, which even saw Dylan hire Robbie Shakespeare and Sly Dunbar, famed Jamaican reggae producers, to play bass and drums.
The new Budokan collection is not the only new Dylan product seeing release this season. Bob Dylan: Mixing Up the Medicine is a fabulous new doorstop of a book whose 610 pages serve as a kind of portable version of the Bob Dylan Center and Archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which opened in May 2022. The volume spans Dylan’s entire life and career, featuring over 1,100 images from the archives — everything from concert ticket stubs to handwritten lyric sheets to rarely seen backstage photographs — all duly captioned by editors Mark Davidson and Parker Fishel, both curators at the Dylan Center.
The book also does a terrific job of contextualizing the many objects, images, and ephemera in 30 new essays by writers including Sean Wilentz, Greil Marcus, Lucy Sante, Tom Piazza, Richard Hell, Greg Tate, and Larry Sloman. Sonic Youth cofounder Lee Ranaldo uncovers the mystery of the very first recording featuring the voice of a teenaged Robert Allen Zimmerman and a couple of his hometown friends, “a casual lark for three Jewish boys on Christmas Eve.”
The 610-page ‘Mixing Up the Medicine’ serves as a kind of portable version of the Bob Dylan Center and Archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Courtesy of Callaway Arts & Entertainment
Marvin Karlins, who gave free folksinging and guitar lessons to students at the University of Minnesota’s Hillel, recounts meeting and tutoring an unassuming first-year student named Zimmerman, pointing him towards the thriving folk club scene in the Dinkytown section of Minneapolis. Griffin Ondaatje does yeoman’s work tracing the influence of Joseph Conrad in Dylan’s songs, and the New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich reevaluates Dylan’s first book, Tarantula, in a short essay that should rightly renew interest in Dylan’s imaginative work of prose-poetry, “as deep a piece of literature as anything else he wrote.”
So much territory is covered in the book, including Dylan and Johnny Cash, Dylan and the Band, Dylan and the Beatles (especially George Harrison), Dylan and the Grateful Dead, Dylan on the silver screen, even Dylan’s ill-fated collaboration with Archibald MacLeish. You would have to arrange a multiple-month residency at the Dylan archive to soak in all that is presented in this volume, as attractive as it is informative. It isn’t pitched toward the general or casual reader, but if you have a Dylan fan in your life, your holiday gift-giving dilemma is solved.
Three weeks ago, the big news in popular music was the first album of new music by the Rolling Stones in 18 years, with plans for a 2024 tour. Last week, the Beatles — who broke up in 1970 — released their much-touted “final” single, “Now and Then,” reconstructed from a demo cassette John Lennon made in the late-1970s, featuring overdubbed parts by the three other Beatles (with a little help from “machine-assisted learning,” which sounds an awful lot like AI to me).
Given the fact that the 82-year-old Nobel Prize-winning rock poet Bob Dylan continues to tour incessantly, swinging through the Northeast most recently (and playing three shows in New York City next week), you can be forgiven if you wake up some mornings wondering what year it is, and perhaps more to the point, what world it is. That one’s easy: it’s Bob Dylan’s world, and we just happen to live in it. Lucky us.
The post With a new (old) album, a tour with (old) new songs, and a giant new book, Bob Dylan remains a neverending juggernaut appeared first on The Forward.
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Palestinian Media Lambast Casting of Israelis in Netflix’s Upcoming Biblical Movie ‘Mary’
Scene from Netflix’s show “Mary.” Photo: Screenshot
Palestinian media outlets have castigated the new biblical epic “Mary” coming to Netflix next month because of the film’s Israeli cast, falsely accusing Israel of perpetrating a “genocide” against Palestinian Christians.
Netflix announced earlier this month the coming release of “Mary,” which according to a synopsis provided by the streaming giant “tells the story of one of history’s most profound figures and the remarkable journey that led to the birth of Jesus.”
Notable in the cast are Noa Cohen in the titular role as Jesus’s mother and Ido Tako as her husband Joseph — two Israeli actors under the spotlight in a large-scale production depicting Jewish life during a period when Jews were the primary ethnic group of the region.
Director DJ Caruso previously defended casting Israeli actors for the roles.
“It was important to us that Mary, along with most of our primary cast, be selected from Israel to ensure authenticity,” he told Entertainment Weekly last month.
Nonetheless, the castings were met with derision among anti-Israel activists on social media and elsewhere upset with the choice of selecting Israeli actors. Critics called for a boycott of the film, claiming that Mary and Joseph were “Palestinian” despite them being Jewish and living in modern-day Israel.
Among those expressing outrage was Quds Media Network, the self-described “largest independent youth Palestinian news network,” which lambasted the production, publishing an article tying “Mary” to what it called the “ongoing genocide of Christians in Palestine.”
The article, quoting Father Abdullah Julio of the Melkite Greek Catholic Monastery in Ramallah, alleged that one of Israel’s goals is “the eradication of Christian presence in the region.”
On Aug. 3, Julio filmed a statement on TRT Arabic mourning Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, calling him “a martyr of our Palestinian people and nation.”
In its recent article, Quds Media Network cited the deaths of Christian residents of Gaza amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas war as evidence of “ongoing violence and Christian persecution,” and included a note to readers that “Israelis are not native to Palestine, the birthplace of Jesus.”
Both Jews and Christians boast an age-old presence in the southern Levant — a land sacred to both faiths and central to their peoples’ histories. The early Jewish people underwent an ethnogenesis in the region as a monotheistic people who formed a united kingdom in the late Bronze Age (around 1000 BCE), and remained the primary civilization there until their dwindling numbers under Roman, Byzantine, and Islamic persecution in the early medieval period.
During the Roman period, Jesus — an Aramaic-speaking Jew from the Galilee in modern Israel, then Roman Judea — led a sect of Judaism that would morph into modern Christianity in the decades following his storied execution. Palestinian Christians (culturally Arab local Christians who identify with Palestinian nationalism) likely represent the oldest continuous Christian community, as descendants of the first converts during the Roman occupation.
Genetic studies have confirmed the relationship of both Jewish diaspora groups and Palestinians of all faiths to Iron Age peoples of the region. Likewise, Jews and Palestinian Arabs each claim competing indigenous status, based on a combination of continued settlement and a culture inextricably connected to the Land of Israel.
Critics of “Mary” on social media maintained “Jesus was Palestinian,” or “a Palestinian Jew,” seemingly conflating residency in ancient Judea with Palestinian nationalism — which emerged much later in the early 20th century as a local expression of pan-Arabism and was hostile to local Arabic-speaking Jews (who consequently allied themselves with Zionism) from its outset.
Anti-Israel activists also cited the fair olive complexion of Cohen and Tako as evidence of their foreignness, ignoring that many Palestinians look similar and that skin tone does not necessarily equate to ancestry or claim to territory.
Palestinian Christians’ numbers in the West Bank and Gaza have dwindled in the past decade, from 11 percent of the Palestinian population in 1922 to 1 percent in 2017.
Meanwhile, in Israel proper, where Christians compose 6.9 percent of the Arab minority, they are among the best educated and most successful of Israel’s citizens.
“Mary,” which was shot in Morocco, is set to air on Dec. 6 to a wide audience.
The post Palestinian Media Lambast Casting of Israelis in Netflix’s Upcoming Biblical Movie ‘Mary’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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John Fetterman Signals ‘Enthusiastic’ Support for Pro-Israel Trump Cabinet Picks
US Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) gives an interview in his office in the Russell Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, Jan. 18, 2024. Photo: Rod Lamkey / CNP/Sipa USA for NY Post via Reuters Connect
US Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) expressed excitement about the incoming Trump administration’s seemingly pro-Israel posture, suggesting that he will seek bipartisan opportunities to advance policies that favor the Jewish state.
During an appearance on “Fox News Sunday” with host Shannon Bream, Fetterman reiterated that he wants Israel to continue its ongoing wars in Gaza and Lebanon until it decimates the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups. The senator also praised the foreign policy selections for US President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet, predicting that the incoming administration will allow Israel to continue its “progress” in thwarting neighboring Iran-backed terrorist groups.
“In terms of the incoming administration, I like what I see in terms of being very, very strong pro-Israel,” Fetterman said.
Fetterman affirmed that he will continue his vocal support for Israel when the Trump administration takes office in January.
“And when the administration will change, my vote and voice won’t change either, and that’s going to follow Israel,” Fetterman said, lauding the “magnificent” efforts of the Jewish state to secure peace in the Middle East by fighting against Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran.
Though Fetterman campaigned as a progressive, he has emerged as a staunch ally of Israel in the year following Hamas’s Oct. 7 terrorist attacks. Fetterman has repeatedly condemned anti-Israel voices within his own party in the US Congress, as well as elite universities for tolerating what he has characterized as antisemitic and anti-Israel hate speech on their campuses.
Senator John Fetterman:
“I am really excited that the new Trump administration is strongly pro-Israel, and I will continue to support Israel.”
— Vivid.
(@VividProwess) November 24, 2024
Fetterman praised Trump’s selection of Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) to serve as the next secretary of state, stating that he will “enthusiastically vote yes” for the Florida Republican. The Pennsylvania Democrat signaled that he’s open to voting for several of Trump’s cabinet picks, claiming that he’s not going to “pre-hate” any of the candidates the president-elect has put forward without engaging in conversation with them.
Fetterman also took a swipe at his Democratic colleagues for expressing an increasingly adversarial stance toward Israel. He asserted that Israels military campaign against Hamas in Gaza was “very just” and touted his repeated refusals to support a “ceasefire” between the Jewish state and the terrorist group, praising Israel for having effectively “eliminated and broken” Hamas, Hezbollah, and their backers in Iran.
“For me it’s about standing on the side of democracy, and I was very supportive about that aid, and I don’t understand [why] the other side would now stop the delivering [of] that kind of aid,” Fetterman said, referencing efforts by some fellow Democrats to cut off US military assistance to Israel.
The senator added that it “was a pleasure” to vote “a big no” on three measures advanced and spearheaded last week by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) to impose an arms embargo on Israel.
“I don;t understand why anybody would bring that to the floor, but hey, if they want to go down you know [81 to 19] that’s up to you,” Fetterman stated.
The post John Fetterman Signals ‘Enthusiastic’ Support for Pro-Israel Trump Cabinet Picks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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DePaul University Enabled Violent Attacks and Brain Injury on Jewish Students
DePaul University Law School. Photo: ajay_suresh/Wikimedia Commons.
My name is Brooke Goldstein. I am the founder and executive director of The Lawfare Project, and the founder of the #EndJewHatred civil rights movement. I have dedicated my career to upholding the legal rights of the Jewish people, a fight that is all the more pressing after the wave of Jew-hatred unleashed in America and around the world following the Hamas terrorist attacks of October 7, 2023.
In 2021, a few years before October 7, a Jewish student identified a major problem at DePaul University. She went public about “a long history of antisemitism on DePaul’s campus … without DePaul doing anything really substantive to address this situation.”
In a clear call for action, she said that, “DePaul, as an administration and as a university, doesn’t fully understand what is required for Jewish students in particular to feel safe in their campus community.”
The unprecedented wave of hatred launched against Jews and Israelis at DePaul University over the past year is a direct result of the administration’s failure — not just to help its Jewish community feel safe, but to actually keep its Jewish students safe.
Jew-hatred has become systematized in higher education, and we are now seeing the consequences playing out on campuses across the country — including at DePaul University.
Radicalized agitators who openly support foreign terrorist organizations target Jewish students with calls for their genocide.
“From the river to the sea” is a call for genocide.
“Globalize the intifada” is a call for worldwide violent attacks on Jews, like we see in the streets of New York City and Amsterdam, and on campus here at DePaul.
Jews are dehumanized, deprived of the right to openly express their identity, and the civil rights of Jewish students are ignored and violated — their minority status disregarded, and the harm and violence they endure is minimized. All of this is unacceptable.
Max Long emigrated to Israel from Boston in 2015. He served in the Israel Defense Forces, and, when he was released from the reserves, enrolled at DePaul University in March of this year. After seeing the pervasive atmosphere of antisemitism and anti-Israel rhetoric on campus, he was inspired to use his voice and personal experience to empower and educate his classmates about antisemitism, and about the war against Palestinian terrorism in Gaza.
Michael Kaminsky is a junior who came to DePaul from Buffalo Grove, IL. He, too, has been inspired to use his voice and experience to empower and educate the community about antisemitism, and about Jewish identity. He is a founding member of DePaul’s chapter of Students Supporting Israel, a StandWithUs Emerson fellow, and a proud member of AEPi.
Max and Michael are proud and empowered advocates for Jewish civil rights. They are loud voices for the indigenous rights of the Jewish people in their indigenous homeland — Israel.
On November 6, Jew-haters decided to silence their voices. Two masked men violently attacked Max and Michael with such force that Max suffered a brain injury and Michael suffered a fracture and lacerations.
Max and Michael were doing what they have done many times before — exercising their right to peacefully express themselves and their views, and engage with passersby.
This attack happened in the plain sight of a DePaul public safety officer, who did nothing to intervene. The officer had an opportunity to stop the attack, but did nothing to help Max and Michael.
But it gets worse.
The university was well aware of multiple threats against Max and Michael, just as it was aware of the campus climate of hate targeting Jews. But it did nothing. It failed to protect its students, even when a violent attack was unfolding in front of one of its public safety officers. This cannot be tolerated.
We cannot be silent in the face of intolerance and injustice. This is why The Lawfare Project represents Max and Michael — to demand justice, to ensure that their rights are protected, and to make sure that what they experienced is not experienced by any other Jewish student at DePaul University.
Even now, their attackers remain at large. We demand that the Chicago Police Department use every tool at its disposal to arrest those responsible, and that they be prosecuted for the hate crime they committed, to the full extent of the law. We need to impose meaningful consequences on antisemitic hate crimes to deter future attacks, and to send the clear message that our society rejects this extremist hate and violence.
As for the university, our attorneys are reviewing all options, including legal options, to make sure that the school is accountable not just to Max and Michael for this attack, but to all Jewish students who are under daily threat of similar attacks.
We are here to make sure that DePaul does the right thing, and will take whatever action is necessary to do so.
Jew-hatred has no place at DePaul, or on any college campus. We are demanding action from the school — as all decent people should.
Max and Michael are not alone. Our Jewish students on campus are not alone. We are all here for them, and we will make sure that their rights are protected and upheld.
Brooke Goldstein is the founder and executive director of The Lawfare Project and the founder of the End Jew Hatred movement. She is also an author, award-winning, filmmaker, and regular news television commentator.
The post DePaul University Enabled Violent Attacks and Brain Injury on Jewish Students first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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