There are strange stories and then there are stranger ones, like this one about Bob Dylan wheeling up to a house in Winnipeg where Neil Young lived. Nice to know Bob's that dedicated of a fan.

The tough call in reviewing is almost always how much of curve is one willing to grade on when it comes to a legend.
Recently, Glen Campbell, Solomon Burke and Steely Dan made it easy. Campbell, for example,showed up with a big band of ace rock and country musicians capable of re-creating his current album and his hits from the '60s. The others were impeccable.
Some acts you go in knowing it might be  a struggle. Crosby, Stills and Nash can't find a note to save their lives on some nights, but if they don't embarrass themselves or tarnish their legacy they get the benefit of the doubt. Al Green is chief among the artists whose careers began in the '60s and '50s who always gives a good show yet rarely a great one.
Then there's Bob Dylan, the ultimate iconoclast. How in the world does one judge one of his performances without basing the quality of the show on the critic's experiences? Can a show's greatness be determined by a setlist? Can the abilities of the backing band scale the bar that separates good from great? Can exuberance in Bob's vocals make up for problems in pitch?
It seems like anyone seeing Dylan for the first times, whether they are a critic or an observer making a post on a website, cut considerable slack for Bob and his crusty vocal delivery. For those of us who see nearly every show on every tour, a line has to be drawn between nitpicking and deciding whether he is as good as he could be on any given night. I gave a thumbs down to Wednesday night's show, one of the last concerts on his North America trek, even though he thrilled another critic or two.
In this case it's personal. My odyssey with Dylan recordings began when I was 10 and I acquired Dylan's "Greatest Hits." "Positively Fourth Street" hit like few other songs; "Blowin' in the Wind" felt like it was 100 years old. I kept buying more records until the Dylan section was the largest in my collection. That occurred when I was in high school and remained true for a decade after college. "Blood on the Tracks," released when I was 15,was one of those life-changing records, music that makes you see the world through a different set of eyes.
As far as concerts go, my first  came in 1978, when Dylan was wearing the clear mask and traveling with a good-sized band, many of the musicians carrying over from the Rolling Thunder Revue that never got closer than 1,500 miles to my home.
But over the years I never got that great Dylan show, regardless of whether I was seeing him in New York, Philly, Boston or L.A. A Hollywood Bowl show came close, but it was not until the December 1997 run at the El Rey that I finally saw a great one, a concert worthy of his stature that made the songs all magical. Night one of the El Rey stand was my 14th Dylan concert, bringing about a monumental shift in my desire to see him every time he visits.
That run from 1997 to 2002 really spoiled us, and for a good three or four years after that it was quite easy to cut him a break, especially when he was moving between piano and guitar. Wednesday night it felt like Bob forced my critical and fan sides into a corner, making it hard to defend his 100 minutes onstage. He's still the greatest, he just does not look it.

1989 was a start of creative resurgence for Bob Dylan, coming just after he had spent time re-learning the guitar by studying Mississippi blues styles of the 1920s and '30s. It is also the starting pint for the eighth edition of his "Bootleg Series.."
"Tell Tale Signs" will comprise unreleased studio recordings, demos, alternate takes, live cuts and songs from film soundtracks from 1989 through 2006. It will be released Oct. 7.
In addition, bobdylan.com has been redesigned to facilitate social networking among Bob Heads. For many the best place to congregate is here.
Site is offering a free download of "Dreaming Of You," recorded during Dylan's 1997 sessions that spawned "Time Out Of Mind."
"Tell Tale Signs" will be released in three configurations: two CDs and a booklet; a three-CD package with an additional dozen tracks and  and a hardcover book of Bob Dylan singles artwork spanning his entire career; and a four-LP set with all the elements of the two-CD set. 
The soundtrack tunes are from "Lucky You" ("Huck's Tune"), "Gods & Generals" ("'Cross The Green Mountain") and "North Country" (an alternate take of "Tell Ol' Bill").
Live tracks include "High Water (For Charley Patton)" (Niagara, N.Y., 2003); "Cocaine Blues" (Vienna, Va., 1997);  "Cold Irons Bound" (Bonnaroo, 2004); and "Tryin' To Get To Heaven" (London, 2000).
Now we must wait and hope that some day the series will include great shows from the '97-'02 bands.
Complete track list after the jump.

Bob Dylan, who rarely talks about his music, sits down for a chat about his art and  politics with the Times of London in advance of an exhibition of his art .
The writer uses a little too much ink explaining his state of mind at the interview,  but draws out some meaningful quotes from the generally cryptic Dylan.
On his  art education: “I was in my teens before I started to see books of paintings in the school library - frescoes or the work of Michelangelo, that kind of thing. And I didn't really see the stuff that properly had an impact on me - Matisse, Derain, Monet, Gauguin - till later on, when I was in my twenties.”
On his style:  “I don't have that facility to copy note for note. Influenced by? If I had the ability to paint like any of those guys I might see the similarity, but I don't. If there is anything it's just by accident and instinctive.”
On American politics: “Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval. Poverty is demoralizing. You can't expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor. But we've got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up ... Barack Obama. He's redefining what a politician is, so we'll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I'm hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.”

Thirteen shows into the latest leg on the never-ending tour that has taken Bob Dylan from Massachusetts and Maine to Iceland and Russia and the great one has managed shake up his set lists so much that only three songs have made it into every show: "The Levee's Gonna Break" and "Thunder Mountain," both of which appear on his last album, "Modern Times," and "Summer Days" from Love and Theft."
"Rollin' and Tumblin'" has has been played a dozen times; "Spirit on the Water" and "Highway 61 Revisited" have shown up 11; "Like a Rolling Stone," "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" and "Workingman's Blues No. 2" are up to nine performances; and "Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again" and "High Water (For Charley Patton)" are at six. Seven tunes have been played five times each.
Opening night had a few songs that have not been repeated on this leg, which runs through July 11 in Portugal: "Can't Wait" from "Time Out of Mind," "A Simple Twist of Fate" and "Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)."
He has played 53 different songs in the 13 shows, most of which have 17 tunes each, and to date eight tunes have only been performed once. Most recent examples are "If You See Her, Say Hello," "Ain't Talkin'" from "Modern Times" and "Every Grain of Sand" from "Shot of Love." 
Dylan is back to only playing keyboards. There are 24 more shows on the European tour

The Bob Fest taking place at  the Skirball Cultural Center on April 23 has added Lucinda Williams, Tim Easton and Meiko to a roster that already includes  Zack de la Rocha, John Doe, Michael Franti  and Maria McKee.
Billed under the banner of "Like A Complete Unknown," concert is the first event to bear the name of the Grammy Museum as a presenter. The museum, which will be part of downtown's L.A. Live, is co-presenting with the Skirball.
Each artist will perform acoustically Dylan compositions of his of her choice.
Concert is in conjunction with "Bob Dylan's  American Journey, 1956-1966" currently on exhibit.

Bob Dylan, who has used a considerable amount of water imagery over the course of 45 years, has reworked "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" to focus attention on the theme of Madrid's Expo Zaragoza 2008, Water and Sustainable Development. The Daily Swarm had the story - and this very cool video - first.

Author Nick Hornby gets it correct on his blog: Dylan is god; "I'm Not There" is a fine rock film; and any time Bob's '80s albums are referenced, those of us who have memorized the work from the other decades get sheepish when it come to reciting things like the order of side 2 on "Infidels."

Gotta love the Dyan obsessives, like this guy who created a compendium of every Dylan show this year.
In 98 concerts this year, he sang 1,616 songs. There were 80 unique titles, only two of which he did not write or co-write. "Thunder on the Mountain" was the only song performed at every show.
If you want to feel like you saw something special - and what Dylan concert isn't? - he performed the following songs only once:
Cold Irons Bound, Floater (Too Much To Ask), Friend Of The Devil, House Of The Rising Sun, Man In The Long Black Coat, Meet Me In The Morning, Not Dark Yet, One More Cup Of Coffee, Outlaw Blues, She Belongs To Me, Shooting Star and Sugar Baby.

Bob Dylan's recording of "I'm Not There" that appears on the soundtrack to Todd Haynes' film sounds plenty different from the version that appears on "Basement Tapes" bootlegs. Thank Neil Young's fanaticism and pack rat mentality for that.
The newly unearthed version clearly has the Band backing him as opposed to the popular bootleg version, a mostly acoustic reading by Dylan with a bit of rhythmic thumping in the background.
"It's pretty much just a sketch," Sonic Youth's Lee Ranaldo said in an interview for a piece on the soundtrack. "The lyric is open ended. It's hard to tell if (the words) make any sense."  Sonic Youth recorded a version of the song that runs over the end credits.
Soundtrack producers and Haynes were creating 5.1 mixes of songs and still using a bootleg copy of the tune when the suggestion arose that they find a better copy of the title track.
Joel Bernstein, a rock photographer who has been shooting Dylan and Young since the early '70s, was working with the team as an archivist and he suggested contacting Elliot Mazer. Mazer, who has produced a number of Young's albums, had worked with Dylan's manager in the '60s, Albert Grossman.
After Dylan's period of inactivity following his 1966 motorcycle accident, Grossman began to work on the publishing side for Dylan and started amassing a collection of tapes of songs that were not released over the next several years. Naturally, copies of the tapes were made; the Band's Garth Hudson even brought in a collection for the "I'm Not There" team to sift through.
Mazer, it turns out, had made a copy for his friend Young, who had tucked it away.
Randall Poster says his partner on the soundtrack, Jim Dunbar, "had to be Sam Spade, trying to make all these connections. What helped us get it quick was having the support of the Dylan camp."
What struck recording engineer Greg Calbi, who has worked extensively with Dylan, was the distinctiveness of the version in Young's vault.
"Every engineer who ever got a copy would put their stamp on it," Poster said, relaying Calbi's observation. "It was mutated over the years. We got the raw version."
Coincidentally, Young revisits his unreleased past with "Chrome Dreams II," which was issued last week; the "I'm Not There" soundtrack is released Oct. 30.
 
      

  It doesn't matter if it's a film festival or a music festival, there's always a stuffed goodie bag to greet an atendee's arrival. As usual, one has to wonder: How much of this stuff is useful? What does this tell us about the confab we're about to step into? I already had PJ Olsson's show on my list of acts to check out, but the inclusion of an ad in the bag reaffirms some belief I have that certain acts have a company behind them,  CBS Records in this case, that wants their acts to stand out. Well, without making too many judgments, CMJ attendees now have in their possession:

6 compilation CDs (New Zealand, OurStage, Austin, Severe Records, Filter and CMJ being the providers)
5 postcards/pamphlets for online services
4 handbills for showcases
4 cards enabling free donloads including one for Mark Ronson's remix of Bob Dylan's "Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)"
3 maps
3 production serves postcards
2 coupons (clothes and bowling)
2 postcards for actual musicians performing at CMJ
2 ads for films
2 educational brocures
1 Zune ad
1 insurance brochure
1 menu for a pizza joint
1 bookmark advertising R. Crumb's "Heroes of Blues, Jazz and Country"
1 cable TV show ad
and, what else? - a single condom.

XM starts the second season of Bob Dylan’s “Theme Time Radio Hour” on Sept. 19.Week one is devoted to "Hello" songs; soon they'll do "Young and Old."
Among Bob's more obscure "Hello" choices: "Hello, Mello Baby" by the Mardi Gras Loungers; "Hello, Aloha! How Are You?" by the Radiolites and the Carter Family's "Hello Stranger."
“Young and Old” has some obvious yet killer selections - "Young Man's Blues" by Mose Allison and "Old Man" by Neil Young - as well as some tunes with an intriguing twist, Muddy Waters' "Young Fashioned Ways," "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" by the Ramones and The Flying Burrito Brothers doing "Older Guys."

The Bob Dylan at Newport concert DVD, "The Other Side of the Mirror,"  now has a release date of Oct. 30. For people who pre-order the Dylan box set, the DVD will show up earlier.

Q Magazine has polled 50 recording artists, among them Michael Stipe, John Legend and the leader of Travis, to create a list of "Perfect Songs." (Since Leonard Cohen wrote "Hallelujah," they actually mean perfect records).
The winners, in no particular order:

Bitter Sweet Symphony - The Verve
Blowin' In The Wind - Bob Dylan
Born To Run - Bruce Springsteen
God Only Knows - The Beach Boys
Hallelujah - Jeff Buckley
Life On Mars - David Bowie
Perfect Day - Lou Reed
Strange Fruit - Billie Holiday
Strawberry Fields Forever - Beatles
Sympathy For The Devil - Rolling Stones

A few of the indidviduals provide their picks here while Q provides the videos.
Personally, I'll agree with Blowin' In The Wind, Born To Run, God Only Knows and Hallelujah and throw in Marvin Gaye's What's Going On, John Coltrane's Naima, Paul Simon's Graceland, Thelonious Monk's 1947 version of 'Round Midnight, R.E.M.'s Nightswimming, Otis Redding's I've Been Loving You Too Long, NRBQ's Riding in My Car and Junior Murvin's Police and Thieves. Naturally, the list changes depending on the day.

The Weinstein Co. has released the trailer for the Bob Dylan biopic "I'm Not There."

Elvis Costello will be opening shows for Bob Dylan and his Band, beginning Sept. 22 in Duluth, Ga. Most of the 13 shows featuring Costello, playing by his lonesome,
are in the Northeast in secondary and tertiary markets. Amos Lee is also on the bill.

The Tour:

Sat 9/22 Duluth, Ga.
Sun 9/23 Clemson, S.C.
Tue 9/25 Norfolk, Va.
Thu 9/27 Charlottesville, Va.
Fri 9/28 Columbia, Md.
Sat 9/29 Kingston, R.I.
Sun 9/30 Bridgeport, Conn.
Tue 10/2 Worcester, Mass.
Thu 10/4 Portland, Me.
Fri 10/5 Manchester, N.H.
Sat 10/6 Albany, N.Y.
Mon 10/8 Syracuse, N.Y.
Tue 10/9 Rochester, N.Y.

The first-ever exhibition of Bob Dylan's artwork will open at Kunstsammlungen in Chemnitz, Germany, starting October 28.

Although Dylan has been a committed visual artist for over forty years, "The Drawn Blank Series" marks he first museum showing of his art

For the exhibit, Dylan is producing over 200 color variations on the largely incomplete drawings and sketches found in the out-of-print 1994 art book Drawn Blank (Random House).

An extensive catalogue (in German and English) with numerous color and black-and-white reproductions will be published by Prestel Munich, New York, and London to mark the exhibition.

You can now hear a snippet Mark Ronson's officially sanctioned soul-dance reworking of Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde classic "Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I'll Go Mine)." It's only about 45-seconds, but you get the gist of it pretty quickly: Cleaned-up Dylan vocals layered over a Stax-style rhythm section, some bouncy horns and even a high-pitched trumpet squawk that recalls the early '90s hip-hop of DJ Muggs (Cypress Hill, House of Pain). The sonic preview is to hype the forthcoming 3-disc best-of which promises to be the "definitive" greatest hits package (and, in addition to 50 classic Bob tracks, will include Ronson's redo). Dropping October 1, the deluxe box includes postcards, three cool mini vinyl sleeves and a 40 page booklet.

It was the lead track at every show during the 1974 tour with the Band and now it will be the first Dylan recording to ever be remixed. "Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine)" will be remixed by Mark Ronson and included on the Dylan compilation being released Oct. 1. The track will be released to radio - globally - on Aug. 1. Track originally appeared on 1966's "Blonde on Blonde."
Mark Ronson told Click Music, "I'm a huge Dylan fan, so it's a great honour, and the fact that he heard it and approved it, as you imagine he'd be quite picky."

A trailer for Todd Haynes' Dylan pic "I'm Not There" has been posted on YouTube and features Dylan's recording of "I'm Not There (1956)," which he recorded during the Basement Tapes sessions but has never been released.

Sonic Youth has recorded a version of the song for the film.

"Dylan," a 51-track collection covering his entire recorded output, will be released Oct. 1 by Columbia Records. The track list has yet to be determined, but  the A&R folks behind this swear they will read submissions posted on www.dylan07.com.  (Please, no voting for "Ugliest Girl in the World.") But why would anyone wax on about a song they don't already own? Seeing as how this will duplicate his three volumes of greatest hits, one has to wonder if the packaging and the inclusion of "One Too Many Mornings," "High Water (for Charley Patton)" or "If Dogs Run Free" will be enough to generate significant sales. Site does include a trailer that is pretty impressive.

Rumors are flying that this won't be the only fall release from the Dylan archives.

PS Dylan starts his summer tour Friday in Atlantic City, N.J.

If recorded music becomes all downloads, what in the world will musicians autograph?

Keeping CDs on shelves might be the one way for big box stores to continue attract musicians -- even major stars -- on promo visits. Bryan Ferry will be signing copies  of his newest, "Dylanesque," on June 27 at J&R Music in New York. Ferry did have a great quote about Dylan's art: "As far as the words are concerned it's a bit like an actor tackling Shakespeare.  I like finding the melodies that Dylan's hidden away in there."