FOLK ROT: Something is happening, but you don't know what it is

As I chop my way through YET ANOTHER Bob Dylan biography, this time by his longtime cheerleader/groupie/apologist Robert Shelton, the going is thicker and sludgier than last year's oatmeal left crusted in the pot. Still I make my way, relentlessly, because the book helps me go to sleep better than taking a couple of Seroquel, and there's no hangover the next day because I've forgotten what I've read. 

What interests me, aside from the fact that Shelton inserts himself into practically every paragraph (it's written in the first person, so that Shelton is the subject of the book and Dylan merely the object) are the bits and pieces out of the folk archives of those early times, when no one quite knew what to make of the skinny little kid from Minnesota who had a voice like a howling coyote and a fast-slashing wit that slipped unnoticed between the ribs of pundits and critics, creating bafflement, confusion, resentment, and even a degree of fear.

The way these indignant, insulted, obviously threatened stuffed shirts blathered on and on about how Dylan knew nothing and was stomping all over the folk tradition with muddy work boots makes for mighty embarrassing reading today. Which is why this is the most enjoyable part of this lumpy, bumpy, really-not-very-well-written-at-all biography-cum-memoir. Shelton knew Dylan like Dick Cavett knew Groucho and does not let us forget that fact for a moment, which nearly sinks the book in a sea of pretentious tedium. He also commits the most unforgiveable sin for a Dylan purist, or even a casual fan: HE GETS THE TITLE OF HIS MOST ICONIC MOVIE WRONG, spelling it "Don't Look Back" - when the filmmaker purposely left out the apostrophe. It is on every poster, in every review, and in the film itself, which makes you wonder if he even watched it.

But the sycophantic Shelton DOES provide us with, very likely, the last remaining documentation of one of the most stupid-ass periods in folk music history. Nobody else kept any of those shitty old copies of Sing Out! anyway, did they? But like back issues of TV guide piling up in an old boomer's attic, Shelton kept every issue and obsessively quotes from them for the book's entire 573 pages.

So I transcribed some of the juicier bits, which reflect just how CLUELESS these folkie pundits were, how stodgily encrusted their beliefs, and what a freaking strait-jacket they wanted to put Dylan in, probably because he scared the hell out of them:

Since 1950, when the folk audience was small, Sing Out!, under editor Irwin Silber, had laid down the "correct line" on folk song. Trumpeted by these men, the folk aesthetic denounced show business and mass culture, and advocated that Leftist, humanist views always be reflected in folk song. Deviation from belief in "art as a weapon in the social and class struggle" meant a sellout to commercial forces. Small wonder that Dylan's freewheeling exploration was apostasy.

Silber's "Open Letter to Bob Dylan", published in Sing Out! in November 1964, was particularly sharp: "I saw at Newport how you had somehow lost contact with people. . . some of the paraphernalia of fame were getting in your way." Dylan was outraged that Silber was telling him in public how to write and behave. Why didn't he telephone or write a personal letter? Silber was just using him to sell his magazine.

In September 1965, singer Ewan MacColl scourged Dylan again in Sing Out!:
“. . . our traditional songs and ballads are the creations of extraordinarily talented artists, working inside disciplines formulated over time. . . the present crop of contemporary American songs has been made by writers who are either unaware or incapable of working inside the disciplines, or are at pains to destroy them. ‘But what of Bobby Dylan?’ scream the outraged teenagers of all ages. . . a youth of mediocre talent. Only a completely non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music, could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel. ‘But the poetry?’ What poetry? The cultivated illiteracy of his topical songs or the embarrassing fourth-grade schoolboy attempts at free verse? The latter reminds me of elderly female schoolteachers clad in Greek tunics rolling hoops across lawns at weekend theatre school. . .”

Izzy Young’s Sing Out! column for November 1965: “Dylan has settled for a liaison with the music trade’s Top-Forty Hit Parade. . . the charts require him to write rock-and-roll and he does. . . Next year, he’ll be writing rhythm and blues songs. . . the Polish polka will make it, and then he’ll write them, too. . .”

Animosity reached its high-water mark in the Sing Out! of January 1966. Tom Paxton lashed out in a column headed “Folk Rot” “. . . it isn’t folk, and if Dylan hadn’t led, fed and bred it, no one would ever have dreamed of confusing it with folk music.” Josh Dunson complained: “There is more protest and guts in one minute of good ‘race music’ than in two hours of folk-rock. . .”

May I say at this point that Josh, Tom, Izzy, Ewan and Irwin are so full of shit they are overflowing, and can in fact "sit on this and rotate" through all eternity. Most of them are dead now anyway, and weren`t particularly alive even while they were walking the planet. Meantime, 80-year-old Dylan lounges on the porch with his dogs on his property in Key West, sipping a glass of Heaven`s Door whiskey and quietly working on the lyrics for his next album.

CODA. Yes, Dylan DID answer his critics. The song is legendary enough that anyone remotely a fan of Dylan will know it. But I want to say it for him again, this time DIRECTLY to "that other Bob", Robert Shelton, and all the hangers-on as well as the detractors who wound up being SO WRONG about the whole thing, and dissed a man who would later go on to win the Nobel Prize while they sat around turning into alcoholic wanna-be/has-beens-who-never-were in some dingy 4th Street bar.

Positively 4th Street

You've got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend
When I was down you just stood there grinnin'
You've got a lotta nerve to say you got a helping hand to lend
You just want to be on the side that's winnin'

You say I let you down, you know it’s not like that
If you're so hurt, why then don't you show it?
You say you've lost your faith, but that's not where it’s at
You have no faith to lose, and you know it

I know the reason that you talked behind my back
I used to be among the crowd you're in with
Do you take me for such a fool, to think I'd make contact
With the one who tries to hide what he don't know to begin with?

You see me on the street, you always act surprised
You say "how are you?", "good luck", but you don't mean it
When you know as well as me, you'd rather see me paralyzed
Why don't you just come out once and scream it

No, I do not feel that good when I see the heartbreaks you embrace
If I was a master thief perhaps I'd rob them
And now I know you're dissatisfied with your position and your place
Don't you understand, it’s not my problem?

I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment I could be you
Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes
You'd know what a drag it is to see you

Bob Dylan

 

Arabian horse

"Do You See Colour on Your TV?"

  

"Do you see colour on your TV?" I probably wasn't even watching TV when I heard this, since I was looking down and making mice out of plasticene or cutting up cardboard boxes with a steak knife to make houses for my trolls - but I did finally look up, and on our rinky-dinky standard-issue black and white TV, there was a sort of Hawaiian scene - was it Hawaiian, or something else? Do I really remember palm trees blowing? - and all around it was a sort of frame, and the frame was "strobing" (that word didn't exist back then, so let's say it was flashing weirdly). And the announcer was asking us if we SAW COLOUR on our black and white TV, and I sat and looked at it - I don't even remember if I saw any colour, but if I did it was tiny iridescent bits and pieces - and then I forgot about it, almost. I think I remember saying something to my mother about it, but she was skeptical. 

This would have been on Detroit TV in the mid-to-late 1960s. WJBK, probably, the same channel where I watched Milky the Clown, Captain Jolly, Jingles and Poopdeck Paul.

Then the whole thing got stashed WAY in the back of the cluttered attic of my mind. 

Something twigged the memory, some lone synapse sputtering in the desert of time, and I started thinking about it again. Now, when you're thinking about anything, or trying to net a memory that wisps away from you like dissipating smoke, you can always google it, and nine times out of ten at least SOMETHING comes up. Or it doesn't.

In this case, "do you see colour on your TV"? didn't come up at all, but after a lot more dredging, a couple of things did, or at least obliquely. These are comments left on various science pages in which someone attempts to start a discussion, which doesn't go very far. In some of these comments there is a sort of  dubiousness, a sense of "maybe I dreamed it" or "we all imagine things", which makes the whole thing much more intriguing. 

But the Squirt commercial referenced below is actually a documented thing, which is the closest thing to proof I'm ever going to have that yes, somebody DID once manage to broadcast colour images on black and white TV. I have attempted to recreate the magic of seeing colour where there should be only black and white by using different text colours for each comment. Thrilling, eh?

Anyone remember experimental color images on black & white TV?

Topics: How to make a Black and White television show color

Something happened that reminded me of this tonight, and I think I have finally made sense of something seen as a kid. For some odd reason it just hit me. When I was fairly young and living in the Los Angeles area, there was a test done one night on a local TV channel that was supposed to produce a color picture on the black and white TVs commonly in use. And I can recall seeing some color; I think mostly green.

From time to time I have thought about this and wondered what it was that I saw. In fact at times I have doubted the memory as it didn't make any sense, but I can remember the event very clearly. Tonight it occurred to me what they were probably up to. I bet that they were strobing the white to produce a false color image, as is done with alternating black and white dots on a rotating wheel [I don't recall the name of the effect].

The idea is that each pixel on the screen would be strobed at the frequency required to produce the desired color for that dot. Does this make sense? I'm not sure what the strobe rate is that produces the false color effect, or if this was doable on B&W televisions, but it is the only thing that has even threatened to make any sense here. Is there any other way that one can imagine producing color on a B&W screen?

I believe the imagination can sometimes fill in things like this, causing us to believe we saw something that wasn't exactly there. But I'm not saying that it didn't actually happen either.

I can remember seeing a similar demo in the UK in about 1970 - most likely on the "Tommorow's World" weekly science program. I think they said it was done by modulating the intensity, but I don't remember any more details. It was a test image with a few large areas of different colours (which were very faint), not an attempt to show a "realistic" moving colour image. If you want to experiment, all you need is a PC and some free software that can generate a movie from frame-by-frame images.

I don't know what prompted me to remember this. Crazy.

When I was a kid we lived the Los Angeles area. We had a (POS) Packard Bell black & white TV in the family room (color TVs were new technology and my parents were skeptical).

One day a Sprite commercial came on and the voiceover said something to the effect of "Sprite is so bursting with flavor that you're probably seeing color on your B&W TV!". I remember scrambling over to the TV, and sure enough, there was a static image of a Sprite bottle, and it was kind of in color.

This is apparently an approximation of what some viewers saw, although I only remember seeing a pale green and possibly red.

One of the earliest test broadcasts of this technology was in 1967 or 1968 on KNXT Channel 2 in Los Angeles.

The Squirt Soft Drink Subjective Color Acid Test

On July 25, 1967, television viewers with black-and-white TV sets were startled to see flashes of color on their monochrome screens for about ten seconds during a 60-second soda-pop commercial. A letter to a columnist in the September 14, 1967 Detroit Free Press asked, "Before I see an eye doctor, let me ask Action Line: Is it possible to pick up color TV on a black and white set? I SWEAR I saw a Squirt soft-drink commercial in color. Not pink elephants Green Squirt!" The image was described in the newspaper column as a red, green and blue sign that had flashed on the screen.

A viewer in Chicago told Popular Photography magazine (July 1968), "I saw pink! It knocked me for a loop...the letters S-Q-U-I-R-T looked greenish or light turquoise...and it kept up for maybe 10 seconds." (Meanwhile a viewer in San Francisco claimed he didn't see anything colorful.)

It was the national debut of an experimental television commercial using a special production process that would give the optical illusion of color. The commercial first aired a few months earlier locally on KNXT, the CBS-owned television station in Los Angeles, and viewers there were just as stunned. Squirt and its advertising partner Color-Tel Corporation of Los Angeles, at the time decided to make no prior announcement of this experimental commercial, preferring to see just how viewers would respond. And respond they did. Within hours, thousands of viewers were asking if they really saw what they thought they did, color on their black-and-white TV screens, according to Popular Electronics magazine (October 1968).

ADDENDA! I found more stuff on this weird subject, to my surprise, but it was such a long piece that I only include a few excerpts here. And it does explain why so few people remember this arcane experiment, or if they do, question the veracity of those memories. The color-on-a-black-and-white-TV experiment was extremely brief, due to the fact that it FLOPPED. Had it come along ten years earlier, maybe. Like Segway, which was supposed to revolutionize transportation as we knew it - it didn't. It didn't revolutionize ANYTHING, and just made a few people (such as myself) doubt their own memories or even feel crazy for having them.

There were a few drawbacks. The images were nothing at all like true color TV. It didn't have the intensity or range of colors. As the technology currently stood, the effect could only be used on still images. The "subjective color" could only be seen in about one-fourth of the TV screen area, and, because it relied on flickering light, there was a lot of flickering. It was also found that some people could not perceive the colors at all, yet some people diagnosed as color-blind could see the colors.

Nonetheless, Popular Science, in its August 1968 issue, saw many possibilities for the technology, particularly for special effects. "Color will appear in cartoons, commercials and special presentations. Polka-dots on a clown's suit will be seen as red flashing dots. You'll see the designs and lettering on a cereal box in pulsating green and blue. A girl will plant a kiss on a boy's cheek--and a red lipstick print will appear on your screen."

But there was one giant flaw in that rosy prediction. By 1968, black-and-white TV was well on the way out. The vast majority of programming (outside of old movies and TV shows) were being broadcast in "living" color by then, and while most U.S. households still had black-and-white TV sets (color sets were big, bulky and expensive in those days), more and more homes were purchasing color television sets every year. Had James F. Butterfield perfected the process ten or fifteen years earlier, in the 1950s when 90 percent of television broadcasts were black and white, it might have had more of a serious impact.

.

I'm not addicted: I just drink 4 bottles of cough syrup a day.

No day comes (and goes) without a lesson. Today I found some very interesting comments on a video about the abuse of cough syrup. As usual, the comments section was much more interesting (and hair-raising) than the video itself. It kind of appalled me to realize how many kids (mostly it's kids) are doing this stuff, chugging two or three bottles of Robitussin at a time, because they are actually - intentionally - chasing DISSOCIATION, which (last time I checked) is a mental illness. 

I know from sad (bad) experience that drug and alcohol addiction can make you do crazy things, and it can even make you crazy. As a small child, I'd take the cap off the Benylin bottle and chug straight out of it, feeling the warmth spreading down into my chest and glowing in my tummy. Mmmmmmm! No one knew then that, along with the warm, tingling comfort of dextro-whatever-it-is (DXM for short), I was getting a hefty dose of codeine AND alcohol. I'm lucky I survived it.

This new thing - and it sounds about as new as drinking Sterno or Lysol in the alleyway - is called robotripping, and sometimes involves downing a two-litre bottle of Sprite as a chaser. It seems to me that chugging that much Sprite alone is enough to do long-term damage.

I'm always interested in the kind of commentary which plainly displays all the hallmarks of addiction, including elaborate, strenuous defense of the habit, protesting too much (hey, we never said you shouldn't take it, buddy - it's your body/funeral), and just plain bullshitting as a means to protect the habit and make it seem OK, at least in other people's minds. It doesn't work, I can tell you, but I'm fascinated when I see it. 

THIS guy might be able to sell ice cubes to a refrigerator, or goldfish to a cracker factory. He's that good.

I think DXM improved my life a lot. Drugs in general but specifically DXM motivated me in ways to learn and accomplish things I would have never been interested in. My interest in pharm, chemistry, mycology, organic chemistry, has all stemmed out of drug use. I work in I.T. and I am too busy to trip these days, but I did DXM many many times for many years and I really liked it. I kind of think there is a double standard where people use prescriptions, ssri's, amphetamines, etc all under the guise of treatment because they are on label use, but treating people who become educated about what they put in their bodies, treat themselves, and find relief are dumped on.

Most medical dr i know are on stimulants, anti depressants, and sleeping pills. I came out of health science research even though I changed fields. I worked in hospitals for years, I have plenty of friends that are nurses and dr. They are all so judgmental about what I chose to do to my body even as they take their own cocktails.

Frankly, I think the issue is with addiction and lack of education. Teenagers don't have direction, don't have safety knowledge... they are prone to over indulgence. I will maintain that tripping on high doses of dxm many many times has caused nothing but a positive change in my mind and personality, but I've never taken what I felt was too much (as in black outs, vomiting, bad side effects, symptoms of overdose, etc) 

I've never abused it multiple days in a short period always having a break in between, I've always made sure to exercise, eat right, and sleep a lot and treat my body with respect. I never mixed drugs in any unsafe way. I feel bad for people who get caught up in addictions but it's just like a food addiction. You eat fried chicken , fries, an a large soda every meal you're going to kill yourself. Maybe not today, but some day not that far off. Safety in general and in all things is not stressed enough in our society. Life can be taken or maimed in an instant in so many ways.

(response to a negative comment by @rose j ) you have damage from this drug? or from overdosing, or from mixing it with other drugs, or from buying a formulation that had other ingredients (decongestants) or from abusing it multiple days in a row? I really find it hard to believe. I can take pretty large doses (3rd plateau but never 4th) a hundred times, and experience only positive effects and someone can take it 6 times and have permanent damage and PTSD unless it was really abused, in which case I don't think it's fair to say it was BECAUSE of the drug.

I mean you can abuse fried chicken, the fried chicken isn't responsible for becoming obese and having heart disease, the choice to abuse the fried chicken is. If you take way too much tylenol it'll screw you up too. Doesn't make it the drugs fault. I know a guy who says he smoked marijuana once and was high for 4 years. I mean I guess anything is possible but it is certainly not typical of marijuana from the thousands of people I've met who have smoked it. Not trying to doubt your experience, I'm just saying 3rd plateau is considered a very high dose for this stuff, and I've never experienced seeing something that wasn't there.

Sure you have very vivid thoughts that feel almost like dreams, and things look and sound interesting, but I've never experienced actually seeing something that wasn't there even off of these very high doses. Unless you were doing 4th plateau which is considered the no zone, or you did it like daily or something irresponsible. I'm sorry I'm not trying to negate your experience or your health consequences. I'm just curious why that would happen to you. I hope you recover and feel better soon. Everyone deserves to feel healthy and happy.

APPENDIX. (Not the kind you have taken out.) I couldn't just leave it at that. I took a deeper dive, and was more shocked than ever at what I found. This is just a small excerpt from a website on rogue pharmaceuticals and what they can do to your body.

Everything You Need to Know About Robotripping

DXM, short for dextromethorphan, is an over-the-counter (OTC) cough suppressant that’s found in some cough syrups and cold meds. Robotripping, dexing, skittling — whatever you want to call it — refers to using DXM to experience a range of psychological and physical effects.

Robotripping usually involves higher than recommended doses, which can be harmful. Plus, a lot of DXM-containing products have other active ingredients that can also be harmful in higher doses. The effects of robotripping can vary a lot depending on how much you take. DXM causes different stages of intoxication (often referred to as plateaus) that vary with dosage.

1st plateau

A 100- to 200-milligram (mg) dose of DXM produces effects similar to ecstasy, also called molly. It causes mild stimulation and has an uplifting effect. People also describe feeling more energetic, social, and talkative.

2nd plateau

The second stage happens with 200 to 400 mg of DXM. It’s compared with alcohol intoxication, except with a more noticeable decrease in motor and cognitive functioning.
Euphoria and hallucinations are also likely with this dose.

3rd plateau

Things can get pretty hectic at this level, which produces effects similar to those of ketamine. This plateau happens with 400 to 600 mg of DXM. That’s enough to leave you almost incapacitated.

The effects include:
strong dissociation
intense hallucinations
loss of motor coordination

4th plateau

This involves an extremely high dose of DXM that’s anywhere from 500 to 1,500 mg. At this stage, the effects are similar to taking a hallucinogen like PCP. The effects of this dose are hard to shake off and last longer than the effects of other plateaus. Some people have experienced the effects for 2 weeks after stopping DXM.

Taking this much DXM causes a trance-like state and sensations similar to out-of-body experiences. Delirium and hallucinations often lead to aggressive or violent behavior. People also experience reduced pain perception.

DXM produces several physical effects that vary from person to person and by dose. The product you take also matters. DXM products often contain other active ingredients that produce their own effects.

Potential side effects include:
increased body temperature
hot flashes
sweating
nausea
dizziness
slurred speech
lethargy
hyperactivity
high blood pressure
slow breathing
irregular heartbeat
itching

rash
involuntary eye movements
unconsciousness
seizures

(Have you seen  enough now?)

🐥BABY OSTRICH FLOP!🐤

Baby ostriches flop in the dirt, rush mindlessly at the camera, kickbox in someone's living room, and fall asleep simultaneously while appearing to be dead. 

So you're dead...now what?

A timeless and timely message from WAAAAAAAYYY before COVID. (Yes, there WAS a "before COVID" - we now call it "B.C",)

The Troll Doll Channel: 💗DAM GIANT 17" TROLL! WELCOME, DEVON!💗

Yes, he really IS that big! I now have a pair of 17" DAM "Giants". And I just ordered a troll from Ukraine.

⭐💗FOREVER BOB: DYLAN AT EIGHTY💗⭐

💙 A River that Sings 💙

          

💗Bob Dylan is EIGHTY YEARS OLD Today💗

Bob Dylan: 80 things you may not know about him on his 80th birthday

By Paul Glynn

"I was so much older then / I'm younger than that now."

Bob Dylan sang those wise words at the tender age of 23, on his track My Back Pages.

As he reaches his 80th birthday on Monday, we've decided to ignore the advice of the famous Dylan documentary Don't Look Back and celebrate the life and career of the US singer-songwriter.

Be warned though before we get started, this list is about as long and exhaustive as some of the verses on his last album...

1. Bob Dylan is not his given birth name. But you already knew that, right? So here are 79 more facts about the artist formerly known as Robert Allen Zimmerman.

2. He has sold more than 125 million albums around the world.

3. Despite his success and cultural impact, Dylan has never had a number one single in the UK or US. For context, Mr Blobby, Crazy Frog and Las Ketchup have all topped the charts.

4. A poll of musicians, writers and academics, conducted on Dylan's 70th birthday, found his best song to be 1965's Like a Rolling Stone, which the singer once said was his most honest and direct work. "After that I wasn't interested in writing a novel or a play," he said. "I knew I wanted to write songs because it was just a whole new category."

5. Bruce Springsteen said the track, with its opening snare kick, sounded like "somebody kicked open the door to your mind". While another high-profile fan, U2's Bono, called it "a black eye of a pop song".

6. When asked what his songs were about, in a 1966 interview with Playboy magazine, Dylan quipped: "Some are about four minutes, some are about five, and some, believe it or not, are about eleven or twelve."

7. Surprisingly to many, the counterculture icon did not play at the 1969 Woodstock festival. Dylan was a Woodstock resident at the time (the festival was actually about 40 miles away) but he got a better offer - £35,000 to headline the Isle of Wight festival instead, with members of The Rolling Stones and The Beatles watching on.

8. Speaking of The Fab Four... Dylan was the first man to introduce the band to marijuana, Sir Paul McCartney recently revealed to Uncut. 'We all ran into the backroom going, 'Give us a bit!'" said Sir Macca. "So that was the very first evening we ever got stoned!"

9. Many of his songs are more familiar to mainstream audiences as cover versions. For example Adele's version of Make You Feel My Love, The Byrds' Mr Tambourine Man and All Along The Watchtower by Jimi Hendrix. "He played [my songs] the way I would have done them if I was him," he said of the late guitarist. Dylan himself has recorded covers of Frank Sinatra and Paul Simon tunes.

10. Malibu resident Dylan has 17 houses around the world according to biographer Howard Sounes. One of them is reportedly in the Scottish Highlands.

11. The troubadour has won 10 Grammy awards, including three for his 1997 album Time Out of Mind, which many critics considered to be a return to form after a long artistic slump.

12. He was born into a Jewish family in Duluth, Minnesota, before moving upstate to Hibbing.

13. Country singer Hank Williams, and bluesmen Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker were among his musical heroes growing up, along with the king of rock 'n' roll Elvis Presley. The Rebel Without a Cause James Dean was his celluloid hero.

14. Dylan saw Buddy Holly play live locally just a few days before he died in a plane crash.

15. As a youngster he played piano and guitar in several summer camp/high school bands. Their names included The Jokers, The Shadow Blasters, The Golden Chords and (our personal favourite) The Rock Boppers.

16. He wrote in his high school year book that it was his ambition "to join Little Richard".

17. Working as busboy in a Fargo restaurant, after finishing high school, remains the only normal job Dylan has ever done. But in another life he'd like to have been a soldier. In his 2004 memoir Chronicles he wrote he'd always pictured himself "dying in some heroic battle rather than a bed".

18. After moving to Minneapolis to study he turned his attention to folk music, swapping his electric guitar for an acoustic, which he played in cafes around the city's bohemian Dinkytown area.

19. He became totally enchanted by US folk singers like Odetta and Woody Guthrie, who he would later visit in a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey and play his own songs to him.

20. His first original composition of any note was called Song for Woody, and he even began to sing and talk like the Oklahoma singer.

21. Guthrie offered Dylan his stash of unused lyrics but his young son Arlo was unable to find them when Dylan came knocking. Almost 40 years later, the lyrics were put to music by Essex folksinger Billy Bragg and Chicago band Wilco.

22. In his book, Dylan revealed that aside from Guthrie and Irish folk group The Clancy Brothers, the biggest influences on his songwriting were blues legend Robert Johnson and Pirate Jenny - a song from the Brecht/Weill play The Threepenny Opera.

23. Having briefly operated under the name Elston Gunn, including while playing in Bobby Vee's band, Dylan then settled on his now famous moniker - a nod to the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas.

24. Dylan was a university drop-out. He never did finish his Liberal Arts degree at the University of Minnesota.

25. He read works by French symbolist poets like Arthur Rimbaud and American beat writers like Jack Kerouac. The On the Road writer's spontaneous style "blew a hole in my head", Dylan once remarked.

26. He moved to New York in 1961, to chase his dream of becoming a big music star.

27. He would regularly perform at venues in Greenwich Village such as Cafe Wha? and The Gaslight Cafe, where performers would pass around a basket at the end of each set and hope to be paid. Dylan once said he would get a dollar and a cheeseburger to play his harmonica all afternoon alongside another singer in the village.

28. After nine months in The Big Apple he secured a deal with Colombia Records, feeding the company's PR executives "pure hokum", as he later put it.

29. His first trip abroad involved an eight-week stay in a freezing cold London in the winter of 1962/63, where he learned traditional English folk songs like Scarborough Fair, and (for contractual reasons) cut an LP under the pseudonym Billy Boy Grunt.

30. Early on in his career, he would make up tales about his background, telling journalists and radio presenters that he was an orphan, from New Mexico and that he used to travel with a carnival.

31. His self-titled debut album consisted largely of covers of traditional folk and blues numbers, such as The House of the Rising Sun.

32. His breakthrough follow-up, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, carried a picture of him and his girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo, on the cover. A performance of the song Don't Think Twice, It's Alright is believed to have signalled end of the couple's relationship.

33. Blowin' in the Wind, the opening track on the album, was the song that made Dylan famous - initially thanks to the Peter, Paul and Mary version - and it also forever aligned with him the civil rights movement and anti-war protests.

34. The song has a similar melody to that of the African American spiritual song No More Auction Block. It came about as musician Agnes 'Sis' Cunningham urged artists like Dylan to put contemporary activist lyrics to old tunes which she then published in her Broadside magazine.

35. Dylan performed the number near to Dr Martin Luther King Jr at a march on Washington DC in 1963, becoming the voice of a generation in the process - a label he always rejected.

36. He said that Dr King's famous I Have a Dream speech that day affected him "in a profound way".

37. At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan shocked fans and the music world by plugging in and rocking out, backed by a band that had been hastily-arranged the night before.

38. For the next year or so on tour around the world, Dylan and his band The Hawks were regularly booed when they went electric - including at London's Royal Albert Hall. He was famously even called "Judas" by one gig-goer at Manchester Free Trade Hall. "I don't believe you," replied Dylan. "You're lying".

39. The period that followed - with his trilogy of more abstract and surrealist bluesy folk rock albums, Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde - saw Dylan turn pop music into an art form, according to Sean Latham, director of the Institute for Bob Dylan Studies at the University of Tulsa.

Speaking on Radio 4's documentary series, It Ain't Me You're Looking For Babe: Bob Dylan at 80, Mr Latham said: "The closest parallels we can draw in fact are not to other pop stars but to say Picasso or James Joyce."

40. Dylan married Sara Lownds, who had worked as a model, in secret in 1965, and they had four children together. He also adopted her daughter from a prior marriage.

41. For a short while they lived at the famous Chelsea Hotel in New York.

42. One of their sons, Jakob, became known as the frontman of the 1990s band The Wallflowers.

43. Dylan did a screen test at Andy Warhol's studio, aka The Factory, and walked away with a print of an Elvis portrait.

44. He was injured in a mysterious motorbike accident in July 1966.

45. The singer then stopped touring and became a bit of a recluse for most of the rest of the 60s, living in a remote artists' colony in Woodstock, upstate New York. "Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race," he wrote in Chronicles. "Having children changed my life and segregated me from just about everybody and everything that was going on."

46. During this period he learned to paint, read the bible and would jam with his with 1966 touring bandmates - who would become affectionately known as The Band. The collection of historical ballads and traditional songs they recorded were released many years later under the name The Basement Tapes.

47. The Band's star-studded final gig, which featured Dylan, was later the subject of a Martin Scorsese documentary entitled The Last Waltz.

48. Fans broke into Dylan's property (and bed), and he eventually moved back to Greenwich Village, where he was similarly hounded by Dylanologists.

49. The star rarely read the contracts he signed early on, and as a result he and his long-trusted manager Albert Grossman ended up suing each other in the 1980s.

50. Re-inventing himself again as a country singer, he wrote Wanted Man with Johnny Cash, who debuted the track live at San Quentin prison in 1969. Dylan made a rare appearance on his famous friend's new TV show.

51. His 1975 album Blood on the Tracks tackled the topic of his separation from Sara.

52. Its opening track Tangled Up in Blue saw him experiment with timeless painting-style techniques in the muddled narrative of the song. The singer said it took "ten years to live and two years to write".

53. Dylan returned to the live circuit in 1974, playing arenas with The Band - one of the first major tours of its kind.

54. The following year he gathered a collection of entertainers - including beat poet Allen Ginsberg, singers Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, and violinist Scarlet Rivera - for a travelling circus-esque US tour called the The Rolling Thunder Revue. Dylan even drove a motor home for the circuit of small town venues, which was mythologised in a Scorsese Netflix film.

The finale of the first leg of the tour constituted a benefit concert for imprisoned boxer Ruben Carter - the subject of Dylan's recent song The Hurricane - and featured a cameo from fighting champion and activist Muhammad Ali.

55. At times during the unique tour, Dylan painted his face white and wore a mask, while former girlfriend Baez dressed up as him.

56. Baez has stated that the lyrics to her song Diamonds and Rust relate to her relationship with her fellow singer.

57. He started to re-imagine his songs at this time, reworking the tempos and styles so they were almost unrecognisable. A decade later, after sustaining a debilitating hand injury, Dylan said a jazz singer inspired him to play and sing his songs using a totally different technique.

58. In 1978, Dylan released a cubist-inspired film he had written and directed during The Rolling Thunder Revue tour, called Renaldo and Clara. The almost four-hour long feature starred his (by-then ex) wife Sara and Baez, as The Woman in White, and it was an expensive flop at the box office.

59. Dylan had a period of Christian revelation in the late 1970s, following his divorce, after a fan threw a small silver cross on stage. He got baptised and released several albums containing contemporary gospel songs like Gotta Serve Somebody.

Speaking about his faith in 1997, however, the musician told Newsweek: "I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music, I don't find it anywhere else. I don't adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists all of that, I've learned more from the songs than I have from any of this entity."

60. Sporting a dangly earring, Dylan played a rather ragged rendition of Blowin' In the Wind at the global charity event Live Aid in 1985, backed by Rolling Stones guitarists Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood at Philadelphia's JFK Stadium.

61. His song Blind Willie McTell, a tribute to the late bluesman, was released in 1991, oddly eight years after it was recorded.

62. Dylan married his backup singer Carolyn Dennis in 1986 and they had a daughter together, before divorcing in 1992. This second marriage remained a secret until Howard Sounes' book, Down the Highway, was first published in 2001.

63. He formed a supergroup called The Traveling Wilburys in 1988, with his famous friends George Harrison, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne. They each had band nicknames and Dylan was known as Lucky. Lucky Wilbury.

64. He was inducted into the The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame that year too.

65. His album Love and Theft was released on 11 September 2001 - the same day as the plane attacks on New York City.

66. Dylan won an Oscar and a Golden Globe award earlier that year for his hard-grooving track Things Have Changed, which featured in the Michael Douglas movie Wonder Boys.

67. He had his own weekly one-hour satellite radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, from 2006 to 2009.

68. Dylan's name appears on the wall of Blackpool's Opera House, alongside other acts to have performed there, such as comedians Little and Large and Roy Chubby Brown.

69. He's a hip-hop fan. Dylan raved about Ice-T, Public Enemy, NWA and Run-DMC: "They were all poets and knew what was going on," he wrote. Some consider his own 1965 track Subterranean Homesick Blues to be one of the first popular modern rap songs. 70. He's also allegedly a master thief. Chronicles: Volume One (to give it its full title) was a New York times best-seller, however critics claimed its author, Dylan, had cribbed certain passages from Marcel Proust, Mark Twain, Time magazine and even a guide to New Orleans.

71. The 2007 Dylan-inspired film I'm Not There became Heath Ledger's last movie to be released during the actor's lifetime.

72. A 160ft wide Dylan mural by Brazilian street artist Eduardo Kobra (pictured below) was unveiled in downtown Minneapolis in 2015.

73. Dylan was awarded the US Medal of Freedom in 2012 by then-Present Barack Obama; before receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature four years later, for having "created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition". He became the first songwriter to win the prestigious award, but it was collected on his behalf by another - the priestess of punk Patti Smith, who nervously sang A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall.

74. He eventually delivered a Nobel lecture in the form of a spoken word piece with added piano tinkling and references to the plays of William Shakespeare and Homer's hero, Odysseus. "My songs are alive in the land of the living, but songs are unlike literature, they are meant to be sung and not read," he explained.

75. The last British gig of Dylan's so-called Never Ending Tour, which kicked off in 1988, saw him and Neil Young co-headline a UK show for the first time, at London's Hyde Park in 2019. He's played roughly 100 gigs a year for the last 20 years.

76. His first new song in eight years, Murder Most Foul, was released last year and it comprised of a 17-minute rumination on the 1960s and the assassination of JFK. It made Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands, his 11 minute-plus epic from 1966, seem pretty poppy by comparison.

77. In December, he sold the rights to his entire song catalogue to Universal Music Group (UMG) for an undisclosed fee. The New York Times claimed the deal could be worth more than $300m (£225m).

78. Dylan has been a keen painter and visual artist for decades and his work is currently on display and up for sale at the Halcyon Gallery in London and the Castle Fine Art gallery in Manchester.

79. Last week, it emerged Dylan had agreed to become an honorary patron of the The Bob Willis Fund - a new charity in memory of the late England cricketer. "Bob Willis was a great sportsman who left too soon," Dylan noted. "I'm happy to help keep his flame and cause alive."

Willis once told the BBC's John Wilson that he had changed his middle name to Dylan as a young man, in honour of his favourite musician.

80. The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma - a museum dedicated to artefacts from his huge archive - will open to the public in May next year.

So if you made it to the end of this list and are still craving more, now you know where to go for more Dylan facts.

"Stuffed" Girl's Heads! only $2.98

Blondes, redheads and brunettes for every man to boast of his conquests. . . the first realistic likeness of the exciting women who play an important part in every man’s life. . . and one of the nicest qualities is that they don’t talk back! Accurately modelled to three-quarters life size of real gals and molded of skin-textured pliable plastic, these heads are so life-like they almost breathe. Saucy glittering eyes, full sensuous mouth and liquid satin complexion, combined with radiant hair colours give astonishing realism to these rare and unique Trophies. Blonde, redhead or brunette mounted on a genuine mahogany plaque is complete and ready to hang on the wall for excitement and conversation. Only $2.98 plus 27 cents shipping charges. Full Money Back Guarantee. Specify Blonde, Brunette or Redhead. Send Cash, Cheque or Money Order, or order C. O. D. from: Manor House Products Corp., Lynbrook, New York

 

WILLIAM SHATNER: 💗PRE-KIRK COOL💗

It's William F**king Shatner, who is still cool at 90 years old. But here - there ought to be a law!

Mama duck vs heron: GO, MAMA, GO!

This is one of the great nature videos of all time. Herons are notorious for picking off baby ducklings as a sort of mid-day snack, and at first this bird predator seems to have all the advantages as it slowly advances. But the heron underestimated the fierce protectiveness of the mother duck, who risks her own life to chase this marauder off (squawking in terror!). Honestly, I love watching mama ducks with their young; they are so attentive, so protective, allowing them free rein to explore and swim far out into the water - before bringing them all back home again by some secret signal. I find myself longing for a mother who was that caring, that protective, and that devoted to my safety. It's a strange model to use, I admit, but if I could've been raised by a duck, I would have saved myself decades of grief and despair. 

GLORIOUS Golden Buddha in store window

 

FIRST Goslings of the Season (oh, my heart!) 🌺💗🌷

Let's Bring back the MUNSINGWEAR MEN!

 

Ah, the drama, the camaraderie, the warm human interaction, the - oh what the hell. It's strange how something that seems so blatantly gay now wasn't really seen as gay then. Or at least, I don't think so. But I've never seen a bunch of straight men in a locker room joshing each other about their underwear. Some of these guys are, I confess, pretty cute and easy on the eyes. Hey, I like men too, like the smell of them, their voices, their. . . excuse me. It is an appreciation that most definitely does NOT wane with the years. But the union suit idea doesn't make it for me. And the "stretchy seat" thing kind of kills whatever attraction might ensue. Not to mention those "slumberalls" that I don't think you'd even see at a co-ed pajama party.

NOTE: My blog program is vastly improved now, so that I can blow this up immensely and you might even be able to read most of the text (which is really the best part). Which is why this gif is running sooooooooo slowly! The original ads were long and skinny (like some of these guys) and fit down the sides of the text in magazines, which makes for an awkward size - and having to scroll down to get all the text, if you're that dedicated. If not, here is a sort of edited version with only the best parts:

💙💙💙The Troll Doll Channel: HEAVY METAL trolls!🤎🤎🤎

These two just didn't get enough play. I put an incredible amount of work into them, and though I am pleased with the result, it's too bad this video got a couple dozen views, whereas some of my most lame, inane things get over 15,000 (including one of an old 1961 computer singing "Daisy"). I will never understand it, but I keep working on these because it's an enjoyable hobby and keeps me from thinking too much. 

Pelican trying to eat capybara

No explanation needed. 

CAPYBARA CONFIDENTIAL!

When I found out there is an entire YouTube channel devoted to capybaras, my life was complete. Fifteen years ago Caitlin was obsessed with capybaras, and do you think we could find anything about them? Hardly anything. Certainly not videos like these. This means I can vary my viewing pleasure and watch something besides cute kittens and baby goats. 

💚I LOVE TURTLES!💚

One of my all-time-favorite nature videos. Not exactly action-packed,  but very turtle-licious.

PANDEMIC HAIR: stages of grief

IN THE BEGINNING. Unable to see stylist. Taking matters into my own hands, began to trim the ends off with a razor comb. Colored it with something called hair mascara. Did photo shoot with cat for Facebook page.

 

Quite a few months in. (Already lost track of time.) Not happy about my attempts to keep it short. Natural colour showing through (grey or blonde or what??). Keep thinking about making an appointment, and not making an appointment.

 

PANDEMIC PONYTAIL. More than a year in. No more razor combs, no more hair mascara. This is what it looks like. First, I haven’t worn a ponytail since I was eight. I haven’t seen my natural colour (whatever you call this - I will call it blonde, but in natural light it looks grey) in over 30 years. It is a totally different texture, the annoyingly tickly cornsilk of my childhood. I wore the same side part and barrette when I was five years old. I think my stylist would scream if she saw what has become of me, but if the entire world changes, so does your identity.

Acceptance?? I look ten years older than I did a year ago, but then, a lot has happened, and NOT happened, and my hair is the least of it.

I am back to my five-year-old hair. But at least I look happier now.

SMOKESCREEN: a treat instead of a treatment

One of the reasons I spend so much time on YouTube (OK, the COVID apocalypse is right now the main reason) is to scan the comments, particularly regarding a video which has been up for several years. Sometimes I even see one of my own comments from, say, eight years ago, and it gives me a funny time-machine feeling. The following was a comment on a three-hour documentary (the kind A & E used to produce before their content slid into the sewer) recounting the history of Big Tobacco and their successful coverup of the lethal nature of nicotene addiction. 

This had to be one of the strangest comments I've ever seen on ANY topic, and I want to pick it apart here because it rang a lot of bells for me - not as a smoker, which I've never been, but as a sober alcoholic who nearly drowned in her addiction to alcohol. In other words, I know the dynamics of addiction pretty well, I've lived it through my own heart and liver and brain, and I see all the earmarks of an addict in these strangely defensive, yet rhapsodic remarks about the now socially-taboo habit of smoking.

"I've been a smoker for about a year and a half, smoking about three cigarettes a week with additive free rolling tobacco and its probably one of the most enjoyable habits I've ever taken up in my life.  Here are 5 Thoughts on Why I Smoke Cigarettes:

 1. If you are not willing to even give me the time of day because I have a pinch of dried leaves rolled into a tiny cylinder of paper and lit on fire between my fingers, and that's your only reason to not talk to me, then thank you for removing yourself from the equation and not wasting my time.

 2. There is something zen and meditative about sitting down with a bag of tobacco and rolling your own cigarettes. The mechanical muscle memory of making something relieves you of having to focus on other things.

 3. Almost everything seems better with a cigarette. Long drives in the car. Pulling an all-nighter. Coffee. Sex. Taking a poop. The only thing I can think of that it makes worse is a stuffy nose and a sore throat from a cold, and god dammit if I just don't soldier through that.

 4. There's something beautiful about the way that smoke curls through the air, interacts with sunlight, and vanishes like it never existed. It really makes me want to capture it in a photograph or draw it on a pad of paper.

 5. As far as addictions go, smoking cigarettes is probably the least harmful one that I have. Friendships will come and go. Relationships will start and end. People are born and then we die. But I can always go to a gas station and buy a new pack of cigarettes."

OK, so let me analyze these baffling comments one at a time.

I've been a smoker for about a year and a half, smoking about three cigarettes a week with additive free rolling tobacco and its probably one of the most enjoyable habits I've ever taken up in my life.  Here are 5 Thoughts on Why I Smoke Cigarettes:

This guy hits the ground running in what I would call the art of minimizing/rationalizing. "About three cigarettes a week" is kind of like saying you pee three times a week. As far as I know from talking to hundreds of smokers in AA, it just doesn't happen. Even if he's correct in telling us how moderate his habit is, his description of "additive free rolling tobacco" somehow makes it all sound a lot more wholesome, organic, and just plain safer than smoking those awful tubes with the filters in them. "Taken up" gives a sense of starting a new hobby, or a new religion perhaps, and certainly embracing the habit of his own free will.

 1. If you are not willing to even give me the time of day because I have a pinch of dried leaves rolled into a tiny cylinder of paper and lit on fire between my fingers, and that's your only reason to not talk to me, then thank you for removing yourself from the equation and not wasting my time.

WHOA!  Settle down, fella! Nobody's out to get you here, so why the sudden cobra-strike before anyone has even said anything? I saw no direct criticisms of anything he had said in the comments. But that wasn't the issue. He was defensive, surly, even hostile before the conversation even started. It was: hello, I love smoking, and go to hell, you're wasting my time. Anyone who disagrees with him is dismissed with contempt before they even get to make their point. If these are five "thoughts", I'd like to see what he calls "insults". The description of an innocuous "pinch of dried leaves" is probably the most extreme example of minimizing I've ever seen. Hell, I used to drink a clear liquid that might have looked like an ordinary glass of water, except that it said Smirnoff on the label. 

 2. There is something zen and meditative about sitting down with a bag of tobacco and rolling your own cigarettes. The mechanical muscle memory of making something relieves you of having to focus on other things.

This is one of the most far-fetched (if poetic) defenses of smoking I've ever seen. I doubt very much that someone HAS to resort to rolling their own cigarettes to attain a meditative state. If it's muscle memory and the comfort of repetitive actions that provides so much comfort, peeling carrots might do the same thing. If you have the desire to "make something", take up carpentry or cooking or painting or sculpture. It's a lot more constructive way to use your hands, and you won't end up with rotting lungs or a stopped heart. I also wonder exactly what those "other things" are - never spelled out as either positive or negative, but definitely things he would rather not focus on.

 3. Almost everything seems better with a cigarette. Long drives in the car. Pulling an all-nighter. Coffee. Sex. Taking a poop. The only thing I can think of that it makes worse is a stuffy nose and a sore throat from a cold, and god dammit if I just don't soldier through that.

Let me get this straight. You smoke "about three cigarettes A WEEK". So you tell me. Then suddenly everything you do seems to require a cigarette: driving, staying up late, drinking coffee, having sex, even taking a shit! This sounds like the classic smoker's pattern: get up in the morning, have a cigarette. Drink some coffee, have a cigarette. Drive to work, have a. . . or walk the dog, or pee, or whatever-the-hell-it-is you happen to be doing. Smoking doesn't "make it better" either. It's just a reflex based on addictive craving. ANY excuse will do. One of the reasons it's so hard to quit is that you associate every single activity of your day with lighting up. If you truly smoke only three cigarettes a week, you must take very few long drives in the car (and a long drive - hey, wouldn't that maybe require MORE THAN ONE cigarette?). The George S. Patton-type stoicism about sore throats and colds is just a way to flaunt his immunity to such mortal weakness.

 4. There's something beautiful about the way that smoke curls through the air, interacts with sunlight, and vanishes like it never existed. It really makes me want to capture it in a photograph or draw it on a pad of paper.

You could light your fireplace, if you have one, or make a bonfire in your back yard. You could even burn incense (that would be even better, and would smell good rather than toxic and foul). There are ways you can watch smoke curling through the air, having a little dance with the sun rays, etc., without lighting one of your roll-your-owns made with tobacco out of your little drawstring bag. It just isn't poetic to lose a lung or die gasping for air in the COPD ward. It's even worse for your family to have to watch, knowing how preventable it was. You don't get much artwork done if you're dead.

 5. As far as addictions go, smoking cigarettes is probably the least harmful one that I have. Friendships will come and go. Relationships will start and end. People are born and then we die. But I can always go to a gas station and buy a new pack of cigarettes.

Here is an admission in plain type that this guy DOES have an addiction to smoking. He calls it "the least harmful one that I have", making me wonder just how many addictions he DOES have. In a sense, all addictions are the same - it's what goes on in the brain that is such a disaster, the dopamine rush and surge of artificial wellbeing - and the substance, such as "that a pinch of dried leaves rolled into a tiny cylinder of paper and lit on fire between my fingers", is just the delivery device. 

But it's what he says after that which truly horrifies me. Friendships will come and go, relationships will start and end. . . This echoes very closely the MANY statements made in the original documentary by long-term smokers (many of them in the terminal stages) who actually cherished their habit, saw cigarettes as their "friend", and even saw mere human relationships as comparatively disposable.  The tone of his "you live, you die" comments is harsh and feels dismissive of life itself, but then comes the topper: "But I can always go to a gas station and buy a new pack of cigarettes."

Go to a gas station? Buy a new pack. . . But wait. Whatever happened to your little drawstring bag, the wholesome loose tobacco with no harmful additives, the three hand-rolled cigarettes a week? There's nothing very meditative about stopping at a Shell station and furtively purchasing a pack of Marlboros along with your Snickers bar and a bag of Cheetos. It's sad, because it's pretty plain to me that he is basically lying, and posting the elaborate comment publicly out of some need to defend something that he knows is clearly harmful to him. This guy is very likely a full-on smoker, someone who takes denial to the level of an art form, with one of the most elaborate smokescreens I have ever encountered. He deserves the Old Gold "Treat Instead of a Treatment" Addiction Denial Award of the Week.