The Dylantantes

A Million $ Bash Roundtable We change it up a bit in the spirit of holiday festivities and the New Year. Today, we’re going to have a pretty open roundtable. Our regular Bashers will have the opportunity to let loose in response to some open-ended prompts and will be selected to speak via a randomized spinner. MDB Roundtable Panelists: Rob “Rockin’ Rob” Reginio teaches modern literature at Alfred...

What Is It about Bob Dylan? A novelist and author of many short stories,  John Radosta  teaches high school English near Boston, Massachusetts. Under both a pseudonym and his real name, his fiction has appeared in many magazines, including  Yellow Mama ,  Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine,   Wildside Black Cat , and  Tough Crime . A veteran of more than 50 Bob Dy...

What Is It about Bob Dylan? Peter White  is a retired professor of ecology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For 28 of his 33 years at the University he doubled as the Director of the North Carolina Botanical Garden, an institution that has championed the concept of the "conservation garden," gardens that do well by environmental issues and biodiversity. He is the author of...

What Is It about Bob Dylan? Christopher Vanni  is the author of two Substacks, one about Bob Dylan and one on Gene Clark, he's an advisor for the Bob Dylan Book Club—It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Reading—and he's the creator of a Bob Dylan Quiz that can be found on YouTube and in his feed on X. He is also passionate about golf, classic films, and history. Check out Christopher’s work using these...

A Million $ Bash Roundtable The 1974 album Planet Waves marked a series of firsts for Bob Dylan. It was his first official album with The Band. It was his first record not on the Columbia label. And it was, believe it or not, his first No. 1 album. The music represents, if not a return to form, a reset after the release of Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid and the Columbia-compiled revenge album cal...

A Million $ Bash Roundtable We are entering a season of maximum hype for the Timothée Chamalet vehicle, James Mangold’s biopic of Bob Dylan, A Complete Unknown. The release date is December 25, 2024, and I, for one, can wait. It’s not that I don’t dearly love movies about Bob Dylan; it’s just that I don’t trust this particular director to create anything but a feel-good yawner complete with loving...

A Million $ Bash Roundtable 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 duri...

A Million $ Bash Roundtable “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 and h...

What Is It about 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 oth...

An Experience of Erasure, Dissonance, and the Consequences of Collection to Collective Memory 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 n...

A Million $ Bash Roundtable 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 album...

What Is It about Bob Dylan? 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. Phil lived in Woodstock for a while and...

A Million $ Bash Roundtable 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 described a...

What Is It about Bob Dylan? 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 owner of the Wherehouse Restaurant in...

A Million $ Bash Roundtable 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 large e...

A Million $ Bash Roundtable 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,...

What Is It about Bob Dylan? 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 for creating characters who look and so...

What Is It about Bob Dylan? 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 says this is a double crowning achievement in lif...

A Million $ Bash Roundtable 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 by women. There is an Extended Version of thi...

What Is It about Bob Dylan? 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 developed a taste for it. She saw Dyla...

What Is It about Bob Dylan? Michael Johnson  is a Dylan adventurer. He was born in 1956 and grew up at the Jersey Shore. His first concerts were at Convention Hall in Asbury Park, NJ, starting with Black Sabbath in 1971. The next 3 plus years saw a huge shift largely as the result of him not filling out the selection cards from the Columbia Records Album Club and having to accept the album of the...

A Million $ Bash Roundtable In this latest episode of the  Million $ Bash  roundtable, the gang goes at the surprise 2009 release of  Christmas in the Heart , Bob Dylan’s first and perhaps only album of Christmas music, at least until there is a Bootleg Series box set of the session outtakes. The album is, unsurprisingly, contentious, and the M$B roundtable participants, despite the...

A Million $ Bash Roundtable In this latest episode of the  Million $ Bash  roundtable, the gang talks about their contributions to the new collection,  The Politics and Power of Bob Dylan’s Live Performances: Play a Song for Me , edited by our very own Erin Callahan and Court Carney and published by Routledge. M$B Roundtable Panelists: Rob “Rockin’” Reginio  teaches modern lite...

What Is It about Bob Dylan? Roberta Rakove  is a partner in the firm of Rakove and Strassberger which advises and trains nonprofits and foundations on how to build effective advocacy. Prior to that she served for many years as the Senior Vice President for External Affairs for Sinai Health System in Chicago advocating on Medicaid(as in Shot of Love “Doctor can you hear me? I need some Medicai...

What Is It about Bob Dylan? Elizabeth Cantalamessa  is currently a Ph. D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Miami and an instructor at the University of Houston-Downtown. She grew up in Houston, Texas, and has published on topics including political speech, disagreement, and copyright law.  This interview was recorded about two months before it was released. Thanks f...