Latest news with #BringingItAllBackHome
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Bob Dylan's Iconic Woodstock Recording Home is For Sale—Take a Rare Peek!
It's not every day that you can buy a piece of music history, or at the very least tour it. The iconic home where Bob Dylan recorded much of his music is officially up for sale and you can take a look at it right now. You can find the New York home in Woodstock, N.Y., which is already known for a major piece of musical history thanks to the legendary Woodstock Festival of 1969, which took place in nearby Bethel, N.Y. But aside from the music-making aspect of its history, this 111-year-old house is full of historical charm and set on a beautiful 70-acre estate. Get a glimpse inside the home where memorable music was made and legends created their music. A look at the estate's famous guests and musical rootsThere is a little more history to the Woodstock home that you may be interested in. Built in 1914, the stone house was once owned by cartoonist John Striebel, creator of the Dixie Dugan comic strip. But later on, music manager Albert Grossman purchased the home and brought in numerous legendary voices. Located at 18 Striebel Road, Woodstock, New York, the home has four bedrooms, four baths and tons of notable features, including its stunning woodwork, wood-burning fireplace and a peaceful front porch. The property is currently listed on Zillow for just shy of $5 million. Along with the main home, the property includes Viking Hall next door to the main house, which features 'a bright and open studio area, ideal for artists, musicians, wellness practitioners or remote work. With hand-hewn beams, loft space, French doors, and spa-like amenities—including a sauna, steam shower and soaking tub—the space combines rustic elegance with modern comfort, perfect for creative retreats, workshops or wellness sessions.' Part of the estate is also the Farmhouse at Speare Road, which includes four bedrooms, two bathrooms and would be perfect as a guest house. There is also a 'charming cabin complete with a bedroom, bathroom and cozy kitchen.' Along with its beauty, musicians like Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Johnny Cash, George Harrison and even the Dave Matthews Band have wandered through the home and the walls have heard their voices. The legendary album that was recorded here Whether you know the Woodstock home, it's likely you've seen it before even if not in person. You might recall the cover of Bob Dylan's fifth studio album, Bringing It All Back Home, where Dylan posed with model Sally Grossman in the stunning living room of this home. The album's most memorable songs include 'Mr. Tambourine Man' and 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' and pieces of the renowned album were also recorded in the home. If you're interested in seeing inside the iconic home that witnessed music history, it is available to tour and is currently on the market. Keep reading for more entertainment! Meet All 6 of Bob Dylan's Children and See Where They Are Now—Including Grammy-Winning Jakob Dylan Bob Dylan's Secretive Love Life: From Joan Baez to Hidden Marriages and Musical Muses Mick Jagger Reveals Why Bob Dylan Turned Down the Oscars—And His Joke Had Fans in Stitches!
Washington Post
18-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
The uncanny Bob Dylan song that inaugurated an era of dread
Sometimes you can point to a single, humble work of art — it may be a song, a movie, a book or a work of visual art — and find in it a key to an entire zeitgeist. You would assume, in such cases, that the work in question would be a product of this zeitgeist, the present cultural moment. But it sometimes happens — it's one of art's great mysteries — that the work that most resonates with the present and somehow unlocks it was produced in a much earlier era. Bob Dylan is still alive. But it was in 1965 — essentially a whole other epoch — that Dylan released 'Ballad of a Thin Man,' a simple song that speaks more directly, insinuatingly and powerfully to my sense of what it feels like to be alive in 2025 than any contemporary work I can think of. There is a great precedent for this phenomenon. Charles Baudelaire's poems, especially the 'Flowers of Evil,' and his great essay 'The Painter of Modern Life,' are like the Rosetta Stone of early modernism. Baudelaire's insights into how modernity affected the individual — his feeling for sex robbed of ulterior meaning, for the sloth that results from our failed attempts to lead a spiritual existence, for the links between glamour and suffering, and for the strange forces tying childhood and illness to creativity — inspired generations of 20th-century artists. Those artists didn't care that the works in question were written midway through the previous century. So it is with Dylan — which is why, year by year, the fascination with him only grows. Dylan is the Picasso of popular music. He has had as many creative personae as the Spaniard, and as much longevity (Picasso died, still painting, at 91; Dylan, still touring, is 83). But no Dylan period was greater than the two years, 1965 and '66, that produced 'Bringing It All Back Home,' 'Highway 61 Revisited' and 'Blonde on Blonde.' 'Ballad of a Thin Man' appeared on 'Highway 61.' When the musicians had finished recording it, the drummer Bobby Gregg said, 'That is a nasty song, Bob.' Indeed it is. 'Ballad of a Thin Man' functions as a sort of dark pendant to Dylan's more celebrated 'Like a Rolling Stone.' Both songs, addressing the listener as 'you,' conjure an image of a victim of some great turning of life's tables, and seem to mock this 'you' as he struggles in this new, unwonted predicament. ('You're invisible now … How does it feel?') Everyone who has heard 'Ballad of a Thin Man' remembers the distinctive lilt of its verses, where each phrase is a small, sinister step down from the last. The song's rollicking, carnival-like instrumentation is laced with Dylan himself on piano and band member Al Kooper galumphing along on his horror movie organ. But people particularly remember the refrain, and the descending, deeply ominous minor-key melody from which the lyrics themselves feel inseparable: 'You know something is happening but you don't know what it is/ Do you, Mr. Jones?' The rush of syllables in the refrain's first half feels almost like speech. But the sentence — part statement of fact, part incantation, part sarcastic, menacing taunt — slows drastically as the melody drops into the song's dark and terrifying substrate: 'Do you, Mis-ter Jones?' It's an indelible line. You can feel its dark, heavy import spreading like the silent, ineluctable collapse of an immune system. It's there as we think about artificial intelligence in this burgeoning moment. (We know it will transform everything, but we have no idea how to think about that.) It's there when we think about the climate. (It's changing, direly. But what exactly will it all mean for our kids — and their kids?) And it's there throughout the art, music and film of the past 30 years. Knowing something is happening but having no idea what that might be — only that you yourself are somehow implicated — is, for instance, the premise from which the entire career of David Lynch sprang. Bill Pullman in 'Lost Highway,' Justin Theroux in 'Mulholland Drive,' and Laura Dern in 'Inland Empire' are all versions of Mr. Jones. But it's not just the song's universal applicability that feels important right now. It's also Dylan's sneering, taunting tone. You could hear that same tone — a kind of sarcastic contempt, directed at an unnamed 'you' — 15 years ago in Lady Gaga's anthems of alienated love and today in Kendrick Lamar's diss tracks. ('Your lil' memes is losin' steam, they figured you out.') I sense the same spirit, too, behind television shows like 'The White Lotus,' where almost everyone is morally repulsive but no one knows it, or (if they suspect it) has any idea what to do about it. And it's there in the paintings and sculptures of our best contemporary artists, among them Nicole Eisenman, Dana Schutz and Amy Sillman. These artists' most powerful works all speak in acid tones to brokenness, cynicism, and despair, both political and personal. People have interpreted 'Ballad of a Thin Man' as Dylan's critique of the journalists who hounded him with petty questions, forever demanding that he explain himself. Dylan himself fed the idea that there was one particular journalist who served as an inspiration for Mr. Jones. But fixing the song's interpretation in this way is itself a form of explaining it away. It snuffs out the possibility that the song speaks to something much deeper. Like many of Dylan's songs from the same period, 'Ballad of a Thin Man' is a carnival song. Its characters include sword swallowers, geeks, freaks, camels, cows and lumberjacks. They give the song its universal, timeless stamp. But Dylan's lyrics also have an uncanny specificity. 'Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you and then he kneels/ He crosses himself and then he clicks his high heels/ And without further notice, he asks you how it feels/ And he says, 'Here is your throat back, thanks for the loan.'' Somehow, despite the apparently free-floating surrealism, lines like these have undeniable grip. They seem tailor-made for our out-of-joint world, when almost every old verity, every 'safe assumption,' is in the process of collapsing. A world of algorithms, dopamine-driven addictions, conspiracy theories, meme-coins, natural disasters, geopolitical upheaval, resurgent fascism and brazen, ubiquitous gaslighting. The first and final verses of 'Ballad of a Thin Man' both begin: 'You walk into the room.' To enter a room where you are utterly at a loss — and, moreover, where you are also the object of mirth, derision or outright intimidation — is a universal anxiety. It's a scenario as fraught and frightening for captains of industry, political kingmakers, Ivy League academics and Wall Street bankers as for socially struggling teenagers. To tell someone that they don't know what's happening is to imply that you, or at least someone, does. But Dylan casts so much doubt on anyone having the upper hand (epistemologically speaking) that, by the end of the song, all sense of a higher authority has evaporated. 'You raise up your head and you ask, 'Is this where it is?'/ And somebody points to you and says, 'It's his'/ And you say, 'What's mine?' and somebody else says, 'Well, what is?'/ And you say, 'Oh my God, am I here all alone?'' Questions about who owns what, who can claim which rights, and indeed on what basis rights exist at all, are obviously acutely germane today. But 'Ballad of a Thin Man' goes far, far beyond this dark political moment. We used to live, for example, with the idea that, for all its flaws, the news media played a part in connecting individual citizens to wider social and political realities. All that is rapidly disappearing. The 'self-publishing revolution' and the attention economy have stimulated an unslakable thirst for unfounded assertion and rampant conspiracy thinking: Alex Jones, Pizzagate, QAnon, and all their proliferating progeny. At the same time, our culture has developed an unchecked obsession with 'data,' a commodity or resource it equates with knowing. We have arranged things, in fact, so that the world produces data almost on demand, like cows produce milk. ('You see this one-eyed midget shouting the word 'Now'/ And you say, 'For what reason?' and he says, 'How'/ And you say, 'What does this mean?' and he screams back, 'You're a cow!/ Give me some milk or else go home.'') No problem, it seems, can be acknowledged, let alone meaningfully addressed, before the geeks have converted it into data. But of course, data, like conspiracy thinking, creates only the illusion of control. What it represses is precisely what former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld called 'unknown unknowns,' since these (by definition) can't be quantified. Yet, as Dylan knew, we are besieged by 'unknown unknowns.' Amidst all this, certain people — as the song's fourth verse reminds us — continue to hope that an advanced education, or a prestigious profession, or good looks or a passing acquaintance with 'The Great Gatsby' will secure their status, their right to succeed in life. But such forlorn hopes were discredited long ago. Where we're all going, F. Scott Fitzgerald won't help a bit. I could go on. But why am I even writing this? I know no better than anyone. I have been around half a century, but I've never felt it more powerfully: I, too, am Mr. Jones. And I've just walked into that room.
Yahoo
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Stories Behind Timothée Chalamet's Surprising ‘SNL' Bob Dylan Covers
When word came out that Timothée Chalamet was pulling double duty as both the host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live, the obvious assumption was he'd perform a couple of familiar Bob Dylan songs that appear in A Complete Unknown and its soundtrack album. After all, this appearance was meant to both plug the movie and appeal to Academy Award voters deciding whether or not to give him a Best Actor trophy. But during the monologue at the top of the show, Chalamet offered a tantalizing tease of his plans. 'You might not know the Bob Dylan songs I'm performing,' he said. 'But they're my personal favorites.' At that point, it seemed more likely we'd hear deeper cuts from the movie, like 'I Was Young When I Left Home' and 'Song to Woody,' as opposed to more obvious picks like 'Blowin' in the Wind' and 'Like a Rolling Stone.' It turns out Chalamet was planning something significantly more daring: three super deep cuts that only truly hardcore Dylan fans would recognize. Two of them are so obscure that Dylan has never sung them live. (There's a slight asterisk next to one of those, but we'll explain that in a bit.) Here's a breakdown of the three songs he played on SNL. More from Rolling Stone 'SNL': Barista Timothée Chalamet Has Something Much Funnier Than Those Chalkboard Coffee Puns 'SNL': Watch Timothée Chalamet Perform Trio of Bob Dylan Songs 'SNL' Weekend Update Trashes Trump's Inauguration, Musk's 'Nazi' Salute A Complete Unknown is largely the story of Dylan's decision to abandon his folk roots and play electric music at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The public first saw him perform with a rock band that July at Newport, which is the climax of the movie. But his first electric studio session took place Jan. 14, 1965, during the Bringing It All Back Home sessions. He cut 'Subterranean Homesick Blues,' 'Love Minus Zero/No Limit,' 'Outlaw Blues,' 'She Belongs to Me,' 'Bob Dylan's 115th Dream,' and 'On The Road Again' that day with a group of studio pros. Chalamet kicked off his SNL set by playing 'Outlaw Blues' while dressed up like Zoo TV-era Bono. The lyrics are quintessential mid-Sixties Dylan ('Well, I might look like Robert Ford/But I feel just like Jesse James'), but this is one of the most obscure tracks on Bringing It All Back Home. It's also one of the two songs from that album that Dylan never sang live, along with 'On the Road Again.' 'Outlaw Blues' was occasionally played by the White Stripes, and when Jack White came out as a surprise guest at Dylan's show in Nashville on Sept. 20, 2007, they did 'Outlaw Blues' together. But White handled all the singing. The same thing happened the day before with 'Meet Me in the Morning,' another song Dylan had never done before and hasn't done since. These technically count as Dylan performances since he was onstage when they took place, but he didn't sing a note of either of them. Oddly enough, Chalamet now has more experience singing 'Outlaw Blues' to a live audience than Dylan does. 'Outlaw Blues' was a pretty big surprise, but it made sense since it was one of Dylan's first electric songs, and it was recorded in the time period covered by the movie. But a little more than two minutes into the song, Chalamet ripped off the sunglasses and kicked into 'Three Angels' with James Blake on the organ. This list he moment where hardcore Dylan fans all across the country went 'What the fuck?' all at once. If given 100 guesses as to what song Chalamet was going to play on SNL, few would have picked this one. That's because 'Three Angels' is so obscure that it makes 'Outlaw Blues' feel like 'Knockin' on Heaven's Door.' The gospel-tinged, largely spoken-word song appeared on 1970's New Morning, and describes a trio of angels observing a typical day in New York City. 'One U-Haul trailer, a truck with no wheels,' Dylan observes. 'The Tenth Avenue bus going west/The dogs and pigeons fly up and they flutter around/A man with a badge skips by.' Dylan didn't tour behind New Morning, but he did play a few of the songs in the years that followed, including 'The Man in Me' and 'If Not for You.' 'Three Angels' isn't one of them. There isn't even some random one-off where Jack White did all the singing. This is, far and away, the most attention it's ever received. As A Complete Unknown shows, Dylan's tumultuous relationship with girlfriend Suze Rotolo (renamed Sylvie Russo in the movie) inspired many of his early love songs. One of the most beautiful and tender is 'Tomorrow Is a Long Time,' which he wrote in 1962. He played it live at several of his early shows, most notably at New York's Town Hall on April 12, 1963. It never appeared on a proper album, but the Town Hall recording was included on Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. II in 1971. Five years before that, Elvis Presley cut a rendition of the song on the Spinout soundtrack. It's also been covered by Rod Stewart, Judy Collins, Odetta, Sandy Denny, Nick Drake, and Chrissie Hynde. Dylan himself occasionally played 'Tomorrow Is a Long Time' on the Never Ending Tour, but he hasn't touched it since his Nov. 21, 2008, concert at New York's United Palace Theater. The sparse Chalamet rendition on SNL is faithful to the original. Chalamet will appear at the Oscars on March 2, but the Academy has already announced that there won't be any musical performances this year. That's a bummer, since it could have been a platform for Chalamet to break out 'See You Later Allen Ginsberg,' 'Julius and Ethel,' '7 Deadly Sins,' or 'Ain't No Man Righteous, No Not One.' Those may sound like ludicrous proposals, but how many of you saw 'Three Angels' coming? Best of Rolling Stone The 50 Greatest Eminem Songs All 274 of Taylor Swift's Songs, Ranked The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time
