Nobel Prize for Literature: Sometimes a hard rain falls down even harder than expected

[ztnoo 2,299]

I ran across this yesterday, and it's a little on the unusual side, but let me explain why I'm posting this. When I was in about the eighth grade or so, my Dad bought a Scott AM/FM receiver that was pretty outstanding quality for its day in the early 1960s. It was vacuum tube driven equipment and to top it off Dad mounted a high end Winegard AM/FM antenna and electric motor driven rotor on the east end of our two story steeply pitched roof. With a rotor control device in the house, you could move the antenna around and maximize your reception signal strength and really "pull in" a station. He also had two AR3 bookshelf 4 ohm speakers. It was a fabulous and extremely entertaining setup for a late adolescent/early teenager, and in the evenings particular on Sunday nights, I would scan around all over on both AM & FM frequencies. I few years later I "discovered" music by such groups as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones on WABC (New York) and WBZ (Boston) listening on my dad's incredibly sensitive receiver. But earlier in my musical adventure I also was hearing stuff I never knew existed, not in north central Indiana anyway......Dave Brubeck (Take Five), Miles Davis (Kind of Blue, Sketches of Spain, Birth of the Cool). Suddenly I knew there was a much wider world of music out there than I was hearing on local radio which played 2 to 2 1/2 minute, 45rpm, top 40 records, over and over and over. It was almost like being shocked with a high voltage line, but boy was it mind expanding! And you wanted to get "zapped" with more of it!

Dad also installed a good turntable in the system (I forget the brand now), so my sis and I started listening to albums and collecting albums. Peter, Paul and Mary were typical things we were playing, until one day I caught wind of a guy named Bob Dylan from listening on dad's receiver to one of the east coast radio powerhouses. At the time, Dylan was still an acoustic player, but his songs, even in the generally mono tonal vocals he growled out, were something very, very, different and unique. He was quirky and odd to a young Hoosier teenager, but somehow, even through some of those overly long songs and intriguing, tangled lyrics, you knew he was very unique and very intellectual. And he was very much a rebel and a non-conformist. I believe the first Dylan album I bought was "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" which was his the second studio album. Looking back 53 going on 54 years ago, it was a milestone, a marker in musical history.
Here are few well known songs from this album:  "Blowin' in the Wind "; "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall "; "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right "; & "I Shall Be Free ". As it turned out, Dylan was one of the early trailblazers of a huge shift in music, the likes of which the world had never seen. Through it all, Dylan has largely remained the aloof, temperamental, moody, distant, and an extremely private person, even while being considered a major musical star and industry icon.

 

 

So, given Dylan being the person Dylan has always been, it really wasn't too surprising when the Nobel Committee recently announced Bob Dylan would be awarded one of its most highly touted, respected, and distinguished awards.......the Nobel Prize for Literature, that the wandering mistral would thumb his nose and his arse at The Committee by purposely not attending the awards ceremony, i.e. the award would be given "in absentia". In his place and to honor Dylan's catalogue of work, singer-songwriter Patti Smith was asked to perform one of Dylan's best known songs, "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall". The ceremony was in Stockholm Sweden on Saturday, December 10, where all the Nobel awards are presented every year.

This song is one of Dylan's most famous songs filled with complicated lyrics and extreme length, and last long enough you would think you were listening to a three act play. Dylan himself is now 75 years old and Patty Smith will turn 70 at the end of December. They both have traveled a long and rutted road and you can see it in both their faces and eyes now. To begin the song, Smith was accompanied by an excellent acoustic guitarist, who was later joined by an equally good pedal steel guitar player, and eventually, an entire symphonic orchestra. You could see Smith was wound so tightly when she began the song is was almost painful to watch, but its a painful and mournful song she was trying to express.
The spring finally unraveled when Smith faltered when she forgot the words in the second verse. She was very visibly upset with herself and completely embarrassed. Smith composed herself and asked the orchestra to start over.
"I apologize. I'm sorry, Could we start that? I'm so nervous," Smith said quietly, as the audience in Stockholm's Concert Hall clapped in support. Smith drew a brief blank again in the third verse, but continued on.
From there, everything went fine, and she gutted out the same raw emotion that Dylan expressed in the song when the album was released May 27, 1963.
 

The song is in the video below, at the 1 hour, 3 minute mark.
Advance the video to that point, go to full screen, and begin.
It's not everyday bebop music or everyone's cup of tea, but it is very good, and done with a lot of raw emotion with excellent accompaniment, and illustrates the power of Dylan's lyrical genius, and the reason he is now a Nobel Laureate.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvZmrygK3F0&feature=player_embedded

 

Patti Smith

 

Edited December 13, 2016 by ztnoo

[dcrage 629]

Your comments about listening to radio stations and discovering a whole new world of music reminded me of my early/mid teen years (1966-70) in central Missouri tuning in late nights to KAAY out of Little Rock, AR -- For 3 hrs (11:00-1:00 AM) the air waves were DJ'd by Clyde Clifford who played album rock (stuff you never heard on the AM stations then) -- Remember hearing things like King Crimson (Court of the Crimson King); Jamie Broket (sp) (Ballad of the USS Titanic); first time I heard CTA (I think that was their first album with 'I'm a Man') -- I know I was really made an impression on me

Edited December 12, 2016 by dcrage

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4 hours ago, ztnoo said:

WABC (New York)

I too am a Dylan fan, also loved PP&M and Simon and Garfunkel. When I was stationed at the Charleston Naval Station I was able to pick up WABC on a 200 foot long wire antenna and while heading to  and from Upstate NY I could listen to it the majority of the way.

            Thanks for the memory.