Dear listeners,
On Aug. 1, 85-year-old Bob Dylan wrapped up the 35 North American dates of his simply but appropriately titled Long Hot Summer Tour. Even before I caught the tour’s enchanted evening show at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens on July 21, though, I had already been having a Bob Dylan Summer.
For starters, I’ve been making my way through two very good new books about some lesser-analyzed parts of Dylan’s career. Robert Polito’s lively “After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace” considers the remarkable creative renaissance of Dylan’s last 30 or so years, and it has inspired me to spend some time revisiting some of Dylan’s 21st-century masterpieces like the carnivalesque “‘Love and Theft,’” from 2001, and the elegiac 2020 LP “Rough and Rowdy Ways.”
The other book I’ve been reading, Michael Glover Smith’s “Bob Dylan as Filmmaker: No Time to Think,” takes up Dylan’s sometimes successful but always fascinating forays into the world of cinema. I got to witness one of them a few weeks ago, when I attended a rare public screening of the provocative and polarizing 2003 flick “Masked and Anonymous,” co-written by Dylan and Larry Charles. I hadn’t seen it before, but I immediately entered the cult of admirers who believe it was unfairly maligned when it was first released. (Roger Ebert called it “a vanity production beyond all reason.” I hope Dylan chose to take that as a compliment.) I have also had the “Masked and Anonymous” soundtrack on repeat — especially its eclectic assortment of Dylan covers by a global panorama of artists like the Sertab Erener, Francesco de Gregori and the Magokoro Brothers. You’ve never truly heard “My Back Pages” until you’ve heard it in Japanese.
Consider today’s playlist the soundtrack to My Bob Dylan Summer — or perhaps my own personal episode of Theme Time Radio Hour. It features some of the aforementioned “Masked and Anonymous” covers, a few of the tracks he played at Forest Hills (along with some thoughts about that show), and other assorted oddities, like a Dylan song that I recently added to my karaoke repertoire. If you make it all the way to the Bonus Tracks, you’ll also learn why there is only one degree of separation between Bob Dylan and Tinashe, the pop star responsible for the slinky 2024 viral hit “Nasty.”
I’m no pig without a wig,
Lindsay
Listen along while you read.
1. The Magokoro Brothers: “My Back Pages”
Let’s begin with that Japanese cover of Dylan’s “My Back Pages,” which plays over the montage that opens “Masked and Anonymous.” The footage that this song soundtracks is, like most of “Masked and Anonymous,” quite dark and apocalyptic, which provides an ironic contrast to the fun, buoyant spin that the Magokoro Brothers put on this early Dylan classic.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
2. Bob Dylan: “Gotta Serve Somebody”
You have my permission to steal this idea: “Gotta Serve Somebody,” from Dylan’s 1979 gospel reinvention “Slow Train Coming,” is an excellent karaoke song. (Especially if, like me, you are lucky enough to have a friend who instinctively knows to grab the other mic so she can do the chorus’s backing vocals.) It never fails to blow my mind that this was the first solo Bob Dylan song to win a Grammy — nearly two decades into his career! Alas, my karaoke performance of “Gotta Serve Somebody” has yet to garner any major awards.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
3. Bob Dylan: “High Water (for Charley Patton)”
As Robert Polito chronicles in “After the Flood,” Dylan was co-writing “Masked and Anonymous” around the same time that he was working on what would become his 2001 masterpiece “‘Love and Theft,’” so there was a certain symbiotic flow between these two projects. Polito illustrates this, amusingly, by quoting the “Masked and Anonymous” director Larry Charles, who remembered that “one day Bob came in with this line, ‘I’m no pig without a wig,’ and I’m like, Bob, I have to tell ya, even in a movie like this, this dense, weird movie, no one’s gonna understand that line.” No matter. Bob just used it instead in this haunted tune from “‘Love and Theft,’” which pays homage to Charley Patton’s classic Delta blues.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
4. Sertab Erener: “One More Cup of Coffee”
On this 2000 cover that Dylan selected to appear in “Masked and Anonymous,” the Turkish singer-songwriter — and former Eurovision champion — Sertab Erener emphasizes the Middle Eastern undercurrent that courses through a hypnotic song from Dylan’s 1976 album “Desire.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
5. Bob Dylan: “Mississippi”
Polito’s book has inspired me to spend some time revisiting Dylan’s 21st-century albums, and I’m currently tangled up in the great “‘Love and Theft.’” Though Dylan had this song ready to go for his triumphant 1997 comeback “Time Out of Mind,” he and that album’s producer, Daniel Lanois, had differing opinions on how it should be arranged. Dylan wisely saved it for the next LP which, like all his subsequent albums, he self-produced under the nom de plume Jack Frost.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
6. Francesco de Gregori: “Non dirle che non è così (If You See Her, Say Hello)”
Here’s one more of my favorite covers from the “Masked and Anonymous” soundtrack: The Italian crooner Francesco de Gregori’s emotive reading of what I believe to be the most tried and true tear-jerker on “Blood on the Tracks.”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
It’s a small miracle that the Dylan show at Forest Hills went on at all. The forecast on July 21 all but promised thunderstorms, but somehow the weather held out — and at least made the already iconic stage outfit Dylan has been sporting on this tour (a poncho-like hoodie pulled all the way up) seem extra appropriate.
There was such a relaxed virtuosity to the whole performance, from Dylan’s always-in-the-moment phrasing to the elegant fretwork of the touring band’s newest additions, the guitarists Jad Tariq and Joel Paterson. (Alas, I did not get to witness one of the shows on this tour where the jazz guitar wizard Julian Lage sat in.) At the best of Dylan’s late-period shows, all of his songs — or really all songs, by anybody from any time — exist in a kind of continuum of perpetual present, never tethered to a particular time period, genre or even individual author. That approach sometimes frustrates the people who buy tickets because they want to sing along to a faithful rendition of “Blowin’ in the Wind” (not that they’ve ever gotten that from him) but Dylan’s famously shape-shifting live arrangements also allow for unexpected connections and even phantom hints of other songs to emerge from the ether as he’s playing.
My favorite instance of this happened during his performance of “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” a bewitching slow dance from “Rough and Rowdy Ways.” I swore I could hear ghostly echoes of “Just Like a Woman,” that barbed song written more than half a century before the one he was actually playing. I listened to them as a pair a few times after the show — two songs I never would have connected to each other before — and found something deep and poignant in the relationship between them. Heard back-to-back, the cocky, chiding young lover gives way to the vulnerability and soft surrender of the older man. “Well my heart’s like a river — a river that sings,” octogenarian Dylan sings in a wizened croak. “Just takes me a while to realize things.”
7. Bob Dylan: “Just Like a Woman”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
8. Bob Dylan: “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
9. Bob Dylan: “I Shall Be Released”
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Even at his most uncompromising, Dylan usually knows he has to go out with a crowd-pleaser. So he ended the Forest Hills set with a familiar favorite that he has recently pulled out of the archive, and one that everybody could sing along to, if that was their thing: “I Shall Be Released.” However fleetingly, we had been.
The Amplifier Playlist
“My Summer of Bob Dylan ” track list Track 1: The Magokoro Brothers, “My Back Pages” Track 2: Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody” Track 3: Bob Dylan, “High Water (For Charley Patton)” Track 4: Sertab Erener, “One More Cup of Coffee” Track 5: Bob Dylan, “Mississippi” Track 6: Francesco de Gregori, “Non dirle che non è così (If You See Her, Say Hello)” Track 7: Bob Dylan, “Just Like a Woman” Track 8: Bob Dylan, “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” Track 9: Bob Dylan, “I Shall Be Released”
Bonus Tracks
There’s a surreal scene in “Masked and Anonymous” where a mother approaches Jack Fate — the alternate-universe Dylan figure played by Bob himself — with her 10-year-old daughter, who has apparently memorized all of Fate’s songs. The girl then launches into a sweetly sung, spirited rendition of “The Times They Are A-Changin’” that briefly softens the film’s hard-boiled atmosphere.
That girl, it turns out, would go onto become the pop star Tinashe (credited in the film as Tinashe Kachingwe), known for hits like the 2014 smash “2 On,” the meme-spawning 2024 “Nasty,” and the recent collaboration with Disco Lines, “No Broke Boys.” Next month, Tinashe will release her eighth studio album “Popstar,” which features her latest single, “Crash Out.” Somebody tell Jack Fate.
Read past editions of the newsletter here.
If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here.
Have feedback? Ideas for a playlist? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at [email protected].