The Dylantantes

Last time we discussed just the covers that Bob Dylan and the members of what would become The Band recorded during the 1967 Basement Tapes sessions. Be sure to check out part 1 if you missed it.

Today we are back with part 2 to explore the Bob Dylan originals recorded during those sessions.

The common explanation is that Dylan was cranking out new compositions ...

“It feels like this is probably what it sounds like in his head all the time.” -Graley Herren

The Basement Tapes occupy a unique place of honor in the pantheon of Dylan legends. Coming just after two other legendary events—the “going electric” performance and subsequent tour and Dylan’s motorcycle accident—the 1967 recordings were a collaboration between Bob Dylan ...

Scott Warmuth is a writer and musician from Albuquerque, New Mexico. His research and observations on the writing strategies of Bob Dylan are widely acknowledged and frequently referenced, notably in Bob Dylan’s Lyrics 1983-2000. In 2014, writer Jonah Raskin dubbed Warmuth the dean of Dylanologists.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with o...

Back in September 2022, I posted a piece on The Dylantantes called My Fraught Visit to the Bob Dylan Center. It tells the tale of my friend and I traveling to the Center for the first time and our experience with activists in the Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Greenwood was the nei...

Only one year after the triumphal release of “Oh Mercy,” Dylan came out with 1990’s “Under the Red Sky.” The album is known for its all-star musicians—George Harrison, Slash, David Crosby, Bruce Hornsby, Al Kooper, David Lindley, and others—and was produced by Don Was. It is filled with the language and structure of children’s songs and music—which is befitting an alb...

Phil Hale lives in NYC and first saw Dylan live in '81 in London. Since then he has seen Dylan more than 100 times. While having no regrets he's not completely sold on the idea that it's the best use of his time either. That dichotomy has led to some attempts to write about Dylan to make sense of what seems like a grand obsession....

Twenty-one years ago, the whole wide world was stunned by the release of a new Bob Dylan project unlike any before, a feature-length movie of his own creation aimed at a generalish audience.

Led by a future Nobel Laureate co-crafting the satirical script, populated with a brilliantly star-studded cast, and helmed by a maverick director out to compose what he descri...

You may know Dan Brown as the author of the bestseller The DaVinci Code, but you’ve got the wrong guy. This Dan Brown was born in Tarrytown N.Y, and after a stint in the United States Air Force he moved to New City, NY, entered into a career in the restaurant industry. For the last  15 years, he has been o...

Bob Dylan’s 15th, 16th, and 17th studio albums, Planet Waves, Blood on the Tracks, and Desire, had been solid successes when he released Street-Legal in 1978. The album was not universally well received by critics although it was a commercial success.

There is an Extended Version of this episode available on FM+. Details below.

The band was mostly drawn from the...

Bob Dylan’s 31st studio album, “Love and Theft,” was released on September 11, 2001. The album’s lyrics are among the first to be heavily researched for references to and lifts from other works, and there are many—perhaps most notably some lines from Japanese true crime writer Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza. The songs are rich with characters—men and women, re...

Michael Glover Smith wrote and directed the feature films COOL APOCALYPSE (2015), MERCURY IN RETROGRADE (2017), RENDEZVOUS IN CHICAGO (2018), and RELATIVE (2022), all of which won awards at festivals across the U.S. and were the subject of rave reviews. The Chicago Sun-Times' Richard Roeper wrote that "Smith has a deft touch ...

Last year a New York Times article opened with 

"Henry Bernstein has seen Bob Dylan 27 times in concert and owns three items autographed by him: a copy of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan’ album, a photograph of the singer and a “John Wesley Harding” songbook. His favorite song is “Tangled Up in Blue.” 

Henry say...

As much as we love Bob Dylan’s many versions of his own music, we at Million $ Bash would be remiss if we did not discuss some of the gazillions of covers of Dylan’s work. Given the buzz emanating from Cat Power’s reconstruction of Dylan’s set from his 1966 British tour, it makes sense to discuss specifically covers of Dylan b...

Bella Napolitano is a nineteen-year old from Baltimore, and is currently a Psychology major at Bard College in Upstate New York. Bella is an aspiring child psychologist, loves creating visual art, enjoys going on long walks, and is a live-music enthusiast. She has had lifelong exposure to Dylan’s music through her father and has d...