Study in China

"The pieces collected here," writes Greil Marcus in the introduction to his just-published new book, Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings 1968-2010 , "begin with a rumor and end with a presidential election. There are reactions in the moment and long looks back for undiscovered stories. But more than anything there is an attempt to remain part of the conversation that Bob Dylan's work has always created around itself: You have to hear this. Is he kidding? I can't believe this. You won't believe this—" For more than four decades, Marcus has proven himself to be one our most astute critics of music and literature. In seminal works ranging from Mystery Train (1975) to The Shape of Things to Come (2006), he has opened our ears and eyes to the intuitions and implications of the culture taking shape around us. His friend and colleague Sean Wilentz, the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus Professor in the American Revolutionary Era at...

Bob Dylan is so old and weird and vocally ravaged that there’s been muttering on the Internet and in more respectable quarters that the septuagenarian Bard should bring the Never-Ending Tour to an end, and hang up his dancing shoes for good. Balderdash. On Wednesday night, Dylan played the Mann Center for the Performing Arts in Fairmount Park. Sure, he often sounded like a dying bullfrog scat-singing difficult-to-decipher Bob Dylan songs. (Was that “Leopard-Skin Pillbox-Hat,” he opened with in a predictably unfamiliar arrangement? Indeed it was.) And yes, when he stood stage center without an instrument and sang with arms extended while wearing a broad-brimmed white hat and black cowboy outfit, he did look like a macabre cross between Maurice Chevalier and Vincent Price. But when he was singing in a scorched-earth voice – and sometimes, playing a keyboard you ...

Image credit: Bob Dylan: William Claxton 'MODERN' ART Dylan continues his late-career renaissance with the masterful and mysterious Modern Times It will come as no surprise to most Dylan fans that there's nothing obviously modern about Modern Times . Recorded with his touring band, it takes much of its musical inspiration from the golden age that predated even his own earliest recordings. There's plenty of good-time rock & roll; two romantic, jazzy swingers; a dash of roadhouse blues; plus a couple of haunting, electric folk songs.

  Photo Gallery: Bob Dylan Bob Dylan has signed a new six-book publishing deal with Simon & Schuster. The songwriting legend's new deal will see him release two sequels to his 2004 book Chronicles: Volume One as well as two books based on his XM radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, reports Crain's New York Business. Further details about the other two books included in the deal have not been released. Chronicles: Volume One was the first instalment of Dylan's memoirs, but did not feature much material based on his life in the mid-1960s, when his fame was at its height.

 The outline for Greil Marcus’s approach to analyzing Bob Dylan in his latest book, the aptly titled Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus , can be found in two pieces. The first is a review of the famously messy 1970 album Self Portrait , in which a young Marcus, apparently too stunned to form a proper argument, strings together fifty short observations over twenty pages. Some are fragments of conversations; some are takedowns of the album’s attitude and atmosphere (“I once said I’d buy an album of Dylan breathing heavily. I still would. But not an album of Dylan breathing softly.”); some are muted appreciations of individual songs (Marcus is fond of “All the Tired Horses,” “Living the Blues,” “Copper Kettle,” and precious little else); and some are lengthy quotations from other people. The point, obviously, is that Self Portrait is such an exquisite and inscrutable train wreck that every approach the listener makes toward it is always already doomed to failure; another mus...

  Photo Gallery: Bob Dylan Photo: Press The man who shot the covers of Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are-A Changin’ and Janis Joplin’s ‘Pearl’, Barry Feinstein, has died aged 80. The photographer died of natural causes in upstate New York earlier today (October 20). He also took the photo on the cover of George Harrison’s ‘All Things Must Pass’ and photographed a host of other icons, including Frank Sinatra, Hollywood actor Steve McQueen, Judy Garland and politcians such as John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon, reports Rolling Stone. Feinstein was behind the original image of a dirty toilet and a graffiti covered bathroom stall in a Porsche repair shop in Los Angeles that was intended for the cover of The Rolling Stones’ ‘Beggars Banquet’. However the imaged was too explicit and was replaced with a white cover, but later editions of the album featured the original photo. In 1968 Feinstein directed the film You Are What You Eat, which starred David Crosby of The Byrds and ...

"Chimes of Freedom" is a new four-CD collection of mostly newly recorded covers of Bob Dylan songs, with proceeds going to Amnesty International, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. The consistently surprising set is nothing short of attention-arresting, with top-shelf performers ranging in age from Miley Cyrus, 19, to Pete Seeger, 92. The diversity of the musicians a...