Bob Dylan

Jimmy Carr says the difference is what the person needs from the crowd. Robbie Williams told him he is an entertainer in the pure sense: if you do not love him, he does not love himself. Comics may be better at not caring what people think, because they are not entertainers in that pure sense.

An artist can be told the new record is loved and still treat the record as the point. Jimmy Carr puts Bob Dylan on that side. He writes the jokes, but he does not write the show. Joe Rogan calls the failure mode audience capture: if the work exists only to collect love and affection, the performer becomes a covers version of themselves, a hall of mirrors that reflects what the crowd is thought to wan

David Senra, reading Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One, says Dylan studied Hank Williams while he was still studying the greats. Dylan writes that he did not have to live Hank's life to know what the songs were about. He later learned that Hank had died in the back seat of a car on New Year's Day. He hoped that was not true, and it was.

In those records Dylan heard the archetype rules of poetic songwriting. The forms were like marble pillars, and they had to be there. He learned how a song is built by listening until the records were internalized. A few years later, the folk and jazz critic for the New York Times said Dylan breaks all the rules of songwriting except having something to say

David Senra says Bob Dylan wrote Chronicles: Volume One himself, every word, with no editor. A blurb Senra reads says the memoir is less a life story than the story of a birth, when Bobby Zimmerman became Bob Dylan. Senra pairs that with a line he heard from an older Dylan: life is not about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

Senra then turns to Steve Jobs, who talked about Dylan from his twenties until he was dying. Senra counts about 15 mentions of Dylan in the Walter Isaacson biography. Jobs and Steve Wozniak tracked down underground Dylan recordings. Jobs collected printed Dylan lyrics and spent hours interpreting them. Jobs said he collected hundreds of hours of Dylan c

David Senra, reading Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One, says an actress led Dylan to Woody Guthrie. Dylan already knew he would sing and write songs. He made $3 to $5 every time he played a coffee house or a pizza parlor, and he slept on a mattress in an empty storage room with a sink, a window on an alley, no closet, and a toilet down the hall. Senra adds that this same musician later sold 125 million records.

The actress had long red hair, dressed in black from head to foot, believed in reincarnation, and believed in the occult powers of trees. She took Dylan to hear Guthrie alone, on records her brother owned. Guthrie singing his own songs stunned him. The songs made his head spin. A vo

David Senra, reading Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One, says Dylan told the producer that in the '80s he had been listening to Ice-T. Senra says the producer was surprised, and that Dylan thought the surprise was misplaced.

Ice-T, Public Enemy, NWA, and Run DMC were not standing around talking. They were beating drums, tearing it up, hurling horses over cliffs. They were poets who knew what was going on. Somebody different was bound to come along who had been born and raised in that world and would be all of it and more. Senra's note is that Dylan already knew the pattern, because at one time that somebody had been him.

That next artist would balance on one leg on a tightrope stretched ac

David Senra, reading Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One, says a tiny jazz bar restarted Dylan after he walked out of a Grateful Dead rehearsal. He told them he forgot something at the hotel. He planned never to return and to end his career, because he could not take any more. Senra takes the lesson to be getting out of his own head instead of running away.

Four or five or six blocks down the street, Dylan heard a jazz combo in a tiny bar, amateurs playing for almost nobody. Twenty-seven years earlier, that kind of room was where he had started. He got within four feet of the stage, ordered a gin and tonic, and faced an older man singing jazz ballads. The singer was relaxed, not very forcefu

David Senra, reading Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One, says Dylan came home to bury his father and found that his father was the best man in the world and probably worth a hundred of him. Dylan was a father three times over, so they had more in common than ever, and there was a lot he wanted to say. The chance was gone.

The cultural and generational differences growing up had been insurmountable. Dylan's father was plain speaking and straight talking. Told that his son had the nature of an artist, he asked whether an artist is a fellow who paints. Leaving home had felt like Columbus going off into the desolate Atlantic. Senra reads the homecoming as Dylan back about 10 years after leaving

David Senra, reading Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One, says Dylan greatly admired the singer Roy Orbison. The book's account, as Senra reads it, is that Orbison had no peer, which is what Dylan wanted in his own career.

Orbison had moved past the genres. His music mixed styles, including some that had not been invented yet. A listener could not tell mariachi from opera. Dylan writes that with Orbison it was all about fat and blood, that he sounded like he was singing from an Olympian mountaintop, and that he sang his own songs in three or four octaves. He sang like a professional criminal. His voice could jar a corpse. His songs had songs inside them. He was deadly serious, and nothing el

David Senra cites Bill Gurley's talk How to Run Down a Dream for how Bob Dylan learned folk music before New York. Over eight or nine months, Dylan studied every folk album he could. He had little money, so he used the listening booth in a record store and stayed for hours. Senra places that work about two years before Dylan signed to Columbia.

Dylan was broke, so he made friends with people who liked folk music and could buy records, then listened through their collections at home. In New York he did the same thing in rooms he would later play. He would play on the street, in a coffee house, for one person, for nobody, or for a hundred people. Musicians from that time said he watched them

David Senra, telling the story from Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One, says that in 1961 the label sent Dylan to an in-house publicist, and the book has Dylan say there were other folk musicians but nobody like him. Senra says that sentence comes back through the book.

About two years passed after Dylan arrived in New York from Minnesota and before he signed to Columbia Records. Senra calls the trip to New York a wildly ambitious act. Dylan had no money, so he hitchhiked. Senra puts the distance from Minneapolis at about 1,200 miles. Dylan left with a guitar, a suitcase, and $10. The in-house publicist Senra names is Billy.

James Beshara introduces Burt Blackarach as a Grammy-winning composer, producer, DJ, and sound engineer, known in part for production work with Public Enemy and about a dozen other acts. Blackarach grew up around music. His father, soul and rock keyboardist William Smitty Smith, played with artists from Bob Dylan to Rick James to Fleetwood Mac, and Beshara says watching that work is what pulled Burt toward making music himself. The conversation is about the private cost of that career. Blackarach describes record deals as an expensive form of validation, which is the thread Beshara asks him to unpack.