OCCASIONAL PICTURES NO.86

Bob Dylan's 2010 painting Opium.

More info here

MY DYLAN PAPERS IN MINNESOTA: UPDATE

Here's the link to the University of Minnesota's notice about their acquisition of my Bob Dylan Papers. It doesn't really add anything to what I posted about it before, but it places it in the context of their other recent acquisitions.

EILEEN AROON, JOE HEANEY, DYLAN & HANDEL

One of the snags with the way Blogger works is that if a reader of this blog sends in a Comment on an old posting, it appears only underneath that posting  -  so other readers don't see it, even though it's a fresh Comment, unless they happen to be looking at the same old posting. I often wish it were otherwise. Recently, I've wished it particularly, because lately 'Elmer Gantry' has sent in a series of interesting Comments centred around the song 'Eileen Aroon' (which Dylan performed so beautifully, and with such rigour, back in the early days of the Never-Ending Tour)  -  but he has attached them to a post I published five years ago...

So for anyone who may be interested but who checks only the most recent items on this blog, I direct you here, for Comments that say more about 'Eileen Aroon', Joe Heaney, Handel's touching comment on the song and a conjunction between George Frideric and Bob.

THE MAN WHO FINDS BOB DYLAN'S ALBUM COVER LOCATIONS

c/o Bob Egan

My thanks go to Mick Gold for e-mailing me an URL that offers Bob Egan's extraordinary, detailed account of his obsessive tracking and tracing of the locations of various key Bob Dylan album covers  -  including, for the first time, for Highway 61 Revisited. It's all here, and highly recommended.

MORE BOB DYLAN RARE PICS

Another good site for Bob pix, and bigger, is here. It includes this:

AMY WINEHOUSE, WHO DIED TODAY

STUMBLING INTO THE RAIN

I've stumbled upon this strange site, Standing In The English Rain, which carries many rare but uncredited Dylan photos. (At least, they seem rare to me.) Here's a couple:

DYLAN: BIG EUROPEAN TOUR ANNOUNCED

While Dylan's North American tour dates continue through July and into August (with Leon Russell as support act), a list of thirty European tour dates in big arenas has now been added. The following have gone up on bobdylan.com, stretching through October and November:

OCTOBER:

6 Dublin, Ireland: O2 Arena
8 Glasgow, Scotland: Braehead Arena
9 Glasgow, Scotland: Braehead Arena
10 Manchester, England: M.E.N. Arena
11 Nottingham, England: Capital FM Arena
13 Cardiff, Wales: Motorpoint Arena
14 Bournemouth, England: Bournemouth International Centre
16 Lille, France: Zenith Arena
17 Paris, France: Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy
19 Antwerp, Belgium: Sportpaleis
20 Rotterdam, Netherlands: Sportpaleis Ahoy
21 Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg: Rockhal
23 Oberhausen, Germany: Arena
25 Mannheim, Germany: SAP Arena
26 Munich, Germany: Olympiahalle
27 Leipzig, Germany: Leipzig Arena
29 Berlin, Germany: O2 World
31 Hamburg, Germany: O2 World

NOVEMBER:

2 Herning, Denmark, Boxen Arena
3 Malmö, Sweden: Malmö Arena

4 Stockholm, Sweden: Globe Arena

6 Hanover, Germany: TUI Arena

7 Nuremberg, Germany: Nuremberg Arena

8 Innsbruck, Austria: Olympiahalle

9 Padova, Italy: Palasport

11 Florence, Italy: Nelson Mandela Forum

12 Rome, Italy: PalaLottomatica

14 Milan, Italy: Mediolanum Forum

15 Geneva, Switzerland: Geneva Arena

16 Zurich, Switzerland: Hallenstadion

PS. I'm told that these dates will include Mark Knopfler as support.

BOB DYLAN ENCYCLOPEDIA 5 YEARS OLD TODAY

Lawdy, yes: it's already five years since publication day of the original hardback edition of The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, with the searchable CD-ROM included inside the back cover. (The updated 2008 paperback edition is, of course, still available, as is the audio-book on CD or download: a selection of eleven readings I recorded back in February this year in North Yorkshire. For more details see my website.)

NEWS: UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA ACQUIRES MY DYLAN PAPERS

I'm delighted to be able to announce that the University of Minnesota has acquired my papers and other material created from the late 1960s through to the late 2000s in the researching and writing of every edition of Song & Dance Man : The Art of Bob Dylan and of The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia.

The material, to be known as Michael Gray's Bob Dylan Papers, is to be held in the Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, Upper Midwest Literary Archives, Elmer L. Andersen Library, University of Minnesota Libraries.

The institution's own announcement, to be made this weekend in the online version of the library's journal Continuum (paper copies next week), says this:

Michael Gray, a leading authority on the work of Bob Dylan, has donated his papers related to the development of his two landmark works, Song and Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan (1972) and The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (2006). The collection includes all research materials, drafts of the books, publication materials, posters and flyers, and criticism, as well as other writings through multiple editions and reprintings of each work. Also included is correspondence with close associates of Dylan, including Naomi Saltzman, who was in charge of Dylan’s New York office in the early 1970s; Robert Shelton, the New York Times folk music critic who gave Dylan his first review; musician Al Kooper, who played the organ on ‘Like A Rolling Stone’; and Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s first girlfriend in New York City, who appears with him on the front cover of his second album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

They hope to have it all ready for public access in the autumn.

I am, of course, highly gratified by the fact of this acquisition, and by the knowledge that these papers will be both safe and accessible for a very long time into the future. And I'm especially happy that they're to be kept in as appropriate a place as Bob Dylan's home state of Minnesota. They've found a direction home.

DEATH OF FRED NEIL

Today is the 10th anniversary of Fred Neil's death (in Florida, aged 65). I wrote about him back in March, when it would have been his 75th birthday. That blog post is here.

 

Youknowwho, Karen Dalton & Fred Neil at the Cafe Wha, February 1961

photograph by Fred W. McDarrah

(found on http://www.hvmusic.com/article/alexander/susanwerner/index.shtml)

DAVE VAN RONK FILM COMING FROM THE COEN BROTHERS

Blogger Frank Beacham reports that the Coen Brothers are working on a film about Dave Van Ronk. Details here.

Two things. First, from the Grumpy Old Man In Me: even in the age of throw-any-old-unchecked-stuff-online, you'd think Mr. Beacham might bother to spell Coen just that one way in his own report; but no, he calls them Coen and Cohen in the same paragraph.

Second, when he writes that Van Ronk's story "is in the memoir 'The Mayor of MacDougal Street', which was published with the help of a collaborator after Van Ronk’s death", it seems churlish of him not to have namechecked that collaborator. It was Elijah Wald  -  author, among other things, of  "Escaping The Delta" (a book about Robert Johnson) and a very active member of the Pre-War Blues Discussion Group I belong to.

That said, what an interesting prospect such a film offers. And who should play Bob?