Bob Dylan's Dream
by Greil Marcus

The June 1966 issue of the youth-oriented American fashion magazine Glamour carried an unusual feature: lyrics from the soon to be released Bob Dylan song Visions of Johanna, which Dylan had been performing onstage, alone, with an acoustic guitar, since late in the previous fall. "Seems like a freeze-out," he'd say to introduce the song before stepping into its slow, languid account of a night of bohemian gloom. Soon the song, recorded in Nashville earlier in the year with the best session players in town, would make a black hole on the first side of Dylan's double album Blonde on Blonde.
[continued at The Guardian]

Well, Actually, It Is Brain Surgery
by Rosanne Cash

I haven't written a song in about a year... All of 2007 was a blur of pain, culminating in brain surgery last November. The surgery went fine, the recovery has been brutal, but I think I'm starting to get better, because just recently I've gotten excited about writing songs again. I didn't get there by a happy epiphany, but by pain of another sort. My friend and great songwriting mentor, John Stewart (''Daydream Believer,'' ''Gold,'' ''California Bloodlines''), died unexpectedly in January. When I heard the news, I pulled out a file I had saved with all the letters and drawings and faxes he had sent me over the years; I noticed that the dual themes of Love and Madness kept reappearing in his notes.
[continued at the Measure For Measure: NYTimes songwriting blog]

77 Barton Street
by Dave Haslam

In the 1970s and 1980s, journalists and TV producers looking to capture the full extent of Britain's industrial and manufacturing decline would go to Manchester in search of empty warehouses, derelict workshops and canals clogged with debris. During the same period of post-industrial ruin, several influential bands formed in the city—The Fall and Joy Division in the late 1970s, The Smiths a few years later—and although they differed greatly in their sound and their ways of seeing the world, in each case it seemed as if the bleakness of the failed landscape around them was seeping into their music...
[continued at the London Review of Books]

Out on Highway 61
by Dave Marsh

"In Search of the Blues" [by Marybeth Hamilton] is not about the blues, or the people who made the blues. It's about people who made the dark side of blues music into what popular mythology calls "the Delta blues." Those people aren't singers or players but folk song scholars and record collectors...
[continued at the New York Times Book Review]

Dreading the Scorsese Stones Film
by Bill Wyman

We are going to have to prepare ourselves, over the next few months for a raft of PR crap about Martin Scorsese's alleged documentary on the Rolling Stones, Shine a Light. It is scheduled to open the Berlin Film Festival Feb. 7, with U.S. release set for April...
[continued at Wyman's Facebook blog]

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