bob dylan

“THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT THE FIRST TIME, SECOND TIME I DID IT ON MY OWN…”

A line from Bob Dylan’s Together Through Life album has been garnering some comment recently. “I’m listening to Billy Joe Shaver, and I’m reading James Joyce” he sings on I Feel a Change Coming On. “Some people they tell me I’ve got the blood of the land in my voice.”

Now 69, Billy Joe Shaver is one of the last surviving country outlaws. I met him in the summer of 2006, when he was a “spiritual advisor” to Kinky Friedman’s campaign for Governor of Texas. (As the man who wrote If You Don’t Love Jesus Go To Hell, Shaver was an odd pick for pastor to the Jewish Friedman. But the pair went way back.)

The following April, Shaver was back in more familiar territory, arrested for shooting a man outside a bar in Lorena, Texas. Read the rest of this entry »

SONGS OF PRAISE: EVERY GRAIN OF SAND (1981)

“In the fury of the moment I can see the Master’s hand / In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand…”

SONGS OF PRAISE: I SAW THE LIGHT (1948)

“Here’s the thing with me and the religious thing. This is the flat-out truth: I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. Songs like ‘Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain’ or ‘I Saw the Light’ -that’s my religion. I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.”

Bob Dylan. Read the rest of this entry »

A HARD RAIN’S A-GONNA FALL (1962)

“I saw guns and sharp swords in the hands of small children…”

Dylan wrote A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall when he was 21 years old. It was 1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis was at its height. The world was on the brink of nuclear war. He later said that every line in the song was intended to be the first line of a song he wanted to compose one day. “But when I wrote it,” he explained “I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs, so I put all I could into this one.”

For me, the song is inextricably associated with a world event of comparable magnitude that occurred when I was the same age Dylan was in 1962. Read the rest of this entry »