Before the Flood was oddly enough my first Dylan album. My father used it to “turn me on” to Bob and his lyrical brilliance when I was about ten, picking up the stylus to repeat Dylan’s words after each line of “Rolling Stone.” To me it’s how all the songs are supposed to sound. Dylan sounds like…my Dad…and how I perceived him trying to “push through” all his frustration, confusion, and disappointment to “step up” and be a good man. That’s what I hear on the album: a family man in his early thirties carrying a heavy burden because he said he would.
What strikes me about Dylan every time I hear him live, or even listen to an album like "Highway 61 Revisited" is how hard he rocks. Heck, his first album of hillbilly folk songs and Woody Guthrie tributes has the hardest acoustic guitar I've ever heard, still. I guess that's how he became a "rock and roll star." He plays rock & roll at its hardest, finest, not on volume, but on intensity, energy.
I was there and reading this makes me long to be there again, even though there no longer exists, for all the obvious reasons. It also makes me sorry I had not yet discovered you.
Before the Flood was oddly enough my first Dylan album. My father used it to “turn me on” to Bob and his lyrical brilliance when I was about ten, picking up the stylus to repeat Dylan’s words after each line of “Rolling Stone.” To me it’s how all the songs are supposed to sound. Dylan sounds like…my Dad…and how I perceived him trying to “push through” all his frustration, confusion, and disappointment to “step up” and be a good man. That’s what I hear on the album: a family man in his early thirties carrying a heavy burden because he said he would.
What strikes me about Dylan every time I hear him live, or even listen to an album like "Highway 61 Revisited" is how hard he rocks. Heck, his first album of hillbilly folk songs and Woody Guthrie tributes has the hardest acoustic guitar I've ever heard, still. I guess that's how he became a "rock and roll star." He plays rock & roll at its hardest, finest, not on volume, but on intensity, energy.
I was there and reading this makes me long to be there again, even though there no longer exists, for all the obvious reasons. It also makes me sorry I had not yet discovered you.
Love the earthquake sentence—interesting how it reads differently post-1989. Also love the idea of recording an earthquake.