[00:00:00] Speaker A: This show is a part of the FM Podcast Network, the home of great music podcasts.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Visit
[email protected] you are listening to the Dylan Tons Podcast.
Hi and welcome to what Is It About Bob Dylan? I'm Jim Salvucci of the Dylan Ponce. 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 150 papers and several books, the most recent of which is the World Atlas of Trees and Forests.
Through six decades, Bob Dylan has been a constant despite the many changes of Dylan, Peter himself and the world around all of us. For 30 years he has hosted the annual Bob Dylan party in 2024, the Six Hour no Breaks party featured 17 song leaders and 66 songs. Over the decades, the party has featured 266 Dylan songs at least once. In retirement, Peter has joined the online Dylan scholarship and fandom world. In 2023, he co founded It's All Right Ma, I'm only reading a zoom based Bob Dylan book club. Welcome Peter.
[00:01:25] Speaker A: Thank you. Good to be here.
[00:01:27] Speaker B: Yeah. Great to have you. So what is it about Bob Dylan?
[00:01:31] Speaker A: First of all, I wanted to thank you for this question because it's ever since I joined the on world, on online Dylan world, I became aware of the fact that the Dylan tontes and Jim Salvucci like to open with that question, what is it about Bob Dylan? And so it's been swirling around in my head, how would I answer that question? And it's almost like I feel there's a witch's cauldron, a brew cooking, and I have to put in the ingredients. And there are a number of ingredients to the answer. I think for me, what is it about Bob Dylan? It also took me back to the beginning because I was 14 years old when I bonded with Bob Dylan and that glue never came unstuck. That's the same exact glue that I have today. He's been a constant reference point for me, almost like that mysterious obelisk in the movie 2001 that appears in the middle of nowhere. There's always a Bob Dylan aspect to what I feel is my connection, my guidance in life.
So in thinking back though, I wondered to myself, what did I see when I was 14, ripe old age. And now that I'm 70, as I look at my 70s and look back on Bob Dylan. What do I see that's different or adds to that list? I think it'll turn out that it's just making additions to the list rather than changing anything. I thought I'd start with just telling you what it was like to be 14 years old and how I came across Bob Dylan.
[00:03:01] Speaker B: Please do.
[00:03:02] Speaker A: Okay. I have a twin sister now. My twin sister was in a folk music duo in 1963 with a friend named Molly. Those were back in the days when all girls wanted to look like Joan Baez. And I think one of them, or both of them actually ironed their hair on the ironing board. Another thing you did back then to look like Joan. But in any case, Molly had seen Bob Dylan. She was also 14. And she came over to our house to sing some duets with my sister. And she took me aside at one point and very pointedly told me that there was this new folk singer named Bob Dylan and that I ought to pay attention.
And the look in her face and her tone of voice. She was my sister's friend, not mine. I don't know why she decided, as Bob would say, to pick on me, but she did. And I made a mental note to check out this guy.
This was in the Boston area. So I'm not sure which Bob Dylan performance she had been to. But she. She brought me that message. I was learning guitar at the time. My stepfather played guitar around the campfire in Maine, where we have a family compound. There were 13 cousins in my generation. And about half of us were inspired by that campground music to become musicians in one way or another. And so Molly knew I was learning. I was learning various folk songs. My dad played Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee and Josh White and Odetta. So he. He was right in that. In the 50s, he was right in that zone that also influenced Dylan himself.
So anyway, the first thing that burst upon the scene for me was freewheeling Bob Dylan. I went back to his first album too, and realized that I already knew the Jussie Fuller song you're no Good, that crazy song that's on that album. But freewheeling really burst upon the scene. And Bob Dylan became this constant that you mentioned and I've described about my life. So here are some ingredients from a 14 year old.
1. Beautiful lyricism, magical turns of phrase. Now, his lyrical energy gets applied to anything, even sort of stories that aren't very deep or multifaceted. For example, on his first album, he has the wide buildings going up to the sky, people going down to the ground. What a great picture or description. I see him looking out a window at this scene. It's a beautiful sort of way of writing that story for him. But it's not a particularly deep or profound moment. Although I guess we could read some things into it about the billionaires who built the building and the poor workers who are going down to the subway system.
But anyway, the lyricism ranges from please see for me that her hair is hanging long, that rolls and flows all down her breast, to a multilayered lyricism that brings in other meanings. And let me take a short excursion to Blonde on Blonde and Stuck inside of Mubial, where Dylan sings Shakespeare. He's in the alley. Shakespeare's no longer in academia. He's out on the streets, as is Bob Shakespeare. He's in the alley with his pointed shoes and his bells, speaking to some French girl who's not first language, isn't even English speaking. To the greatest English poet who says she knows me well and I would send a message to find out if she's talked. But the post office has been stolen and the mailbox is locked. And the difficulty of getting the message across is compounded because of the mix up of words. You'd expect, if anything, that somebody carted off the mailbox, which is small, and we've all been to the post office after hours and found the door locked. So you'd think, of course, that it was the post office that was locked and the mailbox had been stolen. But no, it's the post office that has been cartered away in the mailbox, which is locked. And it's devastating, really, to have him want to send a message to the greatest poet in the English language and find that it was so hard to send that message via a French girl. But also it becomes even more tangled because of the change of the words. Brilliant artistry, in my point of view, anyway. So beautiful lyricism. I think I have five or six of these ingredients when I was 14. A second one is anti conventionalism, a liberation from the conventional expectations.
His songs were an avalanche of words. And compared to the two and a half minute songs on the radio, he was not only being anti conventional in terms of a theme, but his songs were anti conventional in their length. The word games that he played with reporters were also in that anti conventionalism bag there. A third, he spoke with authority. He speaks with a declarative voice. Many songs could be cited there. He had a heroic stance. That's number four. He stood in the spotlight on stage alone with his guitar and harmonica. And what he did seemed really daring. Number five would be his songs probed for meaning.
The meanings in this mysterious life aren't easy to come by. So it's not to say that it's straightforward. But he probes for meaning. He's another thing that was really important to me as a teenager was the difference between surfaces or what things seem to be and what they really are. And only a pawn in their game would fit right in there. It's not just the Guy who Shot Medgar Evers. It's the institutional racism that is present.
So he probed for meaning.
Very much aware of the difference between what seems to be and what is. Let's see. To me, he also took command of the language. That was another thing that I put as number five here. He took command of the language in the sense that he invented his own rules of grammar and his own usages of words. He created this poetic world where things in a logical sense don't necessarily make sense. The fishes, they will laugh as they swim out of the path. The seagulls, they will be as smiling. Okay, but even a line like, by the old wooden stove our hats were hung. You don't really make a stove out of wood. It would burn up. But that kind of language and that kind of bending of rules of grammar to me sort of created the poetic feel of these songs. It wasn't a mistake. But he does come across as sounding unlearned. And he did make an effort to seem like the court jester or the unlearned guy who knows more than the person who's been to college and so on. But anyway, it was a command of the language that makes my number, whatever number we're on.
[00:10:07] Speaker B: I think that was five anyway.
[00:10:10] Speaker A: And I think you could add all those up and just call it brilliance. I just felt he was brilliant as many people did when they first encountered him and. But there were two other moments as a teenager that were important on my list. And one is his zany songs and songs like I Shall Be Free, I Shall be free. Number 10, motorcycle nightmare. Talking World War Three blues to a teenager. That you could be zany. That you could let your mind go and in all kinds of crazy directions wander that mind wandering freely. It's just, to me, a real sort of encouragement and a liberating sort of feeling. And then the other one I'll add to humor and zaniness is the last one of the 14 year old which is the wee hours of the morning. So Bob was always talking, writing about, singing about Staying up past midnight and into the wee hours of the morning. Sometimes even what's the matter with me? I don't have much to say. Sunlight peeking through the window. I'm still in this all night cafe sometimes all the way until the dawn. And to me as a teenager, in my home when I was in high school, the wee hours were when everybody went to bed. The whole house was quiet and the kitchen, which was this scene of frenetic activity of my mother, who was also an English teacher and a writer, and her typewriter was there with blank paper that when everybody was in bed, it was like this moment of freedom. It reminds me, of course, of Mr. Tambourine man as well. And anyway, so that sort of importance of the wee hours in. Was it my. Those are, I guess my sixth and seventh, I guess list things on that list. I don't know if that just strikes you to ask questions about that.
[00:11:54] Speaker B: No, I think that was a. It's interesting that you remember all that from being 14, because I certainly don't remember my. I remember first encounters with Dylan, but I don't remember the impact he had on me on that level. That. No, that's cool. I do want to bring in your other background here as an ecologist and just talk about that a little bit. So we mentioned conservation gardens in your biography and is there any connection between that work and your love of Dylan?
[00:12:21] Speaker A: Yeah, so I could think of some connections, but they're all pretty, pretty weak in a sense. First of all, lay down your Weary Tune is like a Hall of Fame song about nature and its impact on all of us. That said, biodiversity doesn't really figure that much into Dylan's songs. Sometimes I think his natural habitat is a tour bus and a motel room rather than out in nature. Although nature is important, as we can see again in Lay down youn Weary Tune he has purple clover, Queen Anne's Lace, the birdies were flying from tree to tree. And I think Key west is an example of a song that's loaded with references to plants, probably most of them cultivated in that landscape. But still one, an ecologist appreciates that. And I gained some fame by being able to note the error of interpretation on the Dylan website, which is the line about fish tail ponds. P O N D S is what you'll find. There's a palm tree called fishtail palm, and that's obviously what is being described there. So that's my moment of fame there. And there's some other plants that are in that a direct connection. Not a whole lot When I was learning to play the guitar and inspired by being around this campsite in Maine, though, I was also being inspired not only to be a musician and to be interested in songs like Bob Dylan, I was also being inspired to become an ecologist. So Maine was the meeting ground of those two things.
There was other levels of connection to my work that I thought of. One was I think Bob Dylan makes us smarter.
I think that he challenges us to probe, to understand, to have a eureka moment, to be a puzzle solver. And all those things are what I did as an ecologist with my grad students. And I gave a lot of speeches, I wrote a lot of papers. But I was also solving puzzles and cracking a code. And I was trying to be, I think, my declarative voice. If I ever wrote a direct, positive, declarative statement about a particular ecological problem, it came from Bob Dylan's voice as a model, I think. I think that's a good connection, and that's interesting.
[00:14:48] Speaker B: Can you describe that a little more?
[00:14:50] Speaker A: I see Bob Dylan standing up there and saying, you that build the big guns. And so on. Masters of War as an example. Or at times they are changing. And he is declaring to us a series of things that he is believing in now. One of our books for the book club was Raphael Falco's no One to Meet, in which he claims the title Vatic V A T I C Poet for Dylan, which is a kind of a prophet, someone who makes statements. And so that's what I mean by that. In the things I wrote, I always. Or gave a speech. I always like to boil it down to what can we actually say? There's lots of uncertainty, there's lots of measurement error, but what can we say? I hear the influence of. In the solving puzzles, but also in the stating declaratively things that we've discovered about nature and about ecology. Also, I found his songs really useful during the parts of the classes I taught that were devoted to philosophical ethics. So in order to understand how we should live in the world, it's a question of science and a question of understanding how things work. But it's also a question of our values. And if you don't talk about values in a conservation course or an ecology course, you're leaving out a whole dialogue that the students are having with themselves. And I did include values, philosophical values, in that teaching. And as a result, I also use Dylan quotes. The most obvious ones are from my back pages, good and bad. I defined these terms quite clear. No doubt, somehow it's much Older than. I'm younger than that now. And that's what you're asking the kids to do in that class. You're asking them to erase what their values are or probe behind what their values are and find the philosophical roots of those.
So that's another dwelling connection in terms of quotes. I actually got to write a chapter for a book and the editors asked us to supply an inspirational quote for each of our chapters. And I chose Infinity Goes up on Trial because it was about national parks. And national parks are like museum objects. We want them to stay and we even use language in legislation for all future generations. That's essentially infinity. And yet nature continues to change and it's changing even now because of climate change. What do we do about.
What is it we want to stay forever in a national park? Infinity Goes Up In Trial seemed perfect that. So I got to use a Dylan quote in publication.
And the last thing I'll say about my work and Dylan is I realized that there were a whole bunch of Dylan song quotes that relate to graduation or studying or exams. Let me just say a few of those, a few of those about studying. I already said disclosed before what's the matter with me? And I don't have much to say. So I'm like poke peeking through the window and I'm still in that all night cafe. And then about talking to your teacher, what was it you wanted? You can tell me. I'm back. We can start it all over, get it back on the track. You got my attention. Go ahead, speak. And that was followed by the director of Email me with your questions. And then on taking exams now you must provide some answers for what you sell has not been received. And the sooner you come up with them, the sooner you can leave. You've been shooting in the dark too long. When something's not right, it's wrong. You're going to make me lonesome when you go. Too much of nothing can make a man feel ill at ease. One man's temper might rise while another man's temper might freeze.
And about the exam.
Half the people can be part right all of the time. Some of the people can be all right part of the time. But all the people can't be all right all the time. I think Abraham Lincoln said that. Know your song well before you start singing. Going out into the real world. A gypsy and a broken. With a broken flag and a flashing ring Said son, this ain't a dream no more. It's the real thing. I just reached a place where the willow don't bend. I'm going, I'm gone. The ship is in the harbor the sails are spread Listen to me, pretty baby Lay your hand upon my head behind Here lies nothing done and nothing said Clash is over and then for their futures not now. Each of us has his own special gift. And you know this was meant to be true. If you don't underestimate me. I won't underestimate you. Someday everything is going to be smooth like a rhapsody When I paint my masterpiece Shooting star tonight and I thought of you. You were trying to break into another world A world I never knew Always wondered if you ever made it through.
Anyway, so that's the other connection I thought of. Yeah. So he leaks in there, here and there.
[00:19:33] Speaker B: Yeah. No, I love that. I want to talk a little bit about more of your experience with Dylan.
[00:19:38] Speaker A: Right.
[00:19:38] Speaker B: You've seen him live. So tell me, has there been any sort of standout performance or anything that really jumped out at you?
[00:19:46] Speaker A: 1966, I was in Copenhagen as part of his world tour about a week or two before the Judas show in uk And I. I was an exchange student for a year in Denmark. And I packed every Dylan album then extant, which ended with bringing it all back home. But let's see. No. Yeah, Blonde on Blind came out the following summer. And Highway 61 though, came out while I was in Denmark. So I made people promise to send me that for Christmas. Anyway, I had all the Dylan albums with me. I had my guitar with me. When I heard he was playing in Copenhagen, which was about a three hour train ride from where I was staying, I was determined to go and I went. It was an amazing concert, of course. My first concert, I was 18. I even got out of my chair and snuck up to the stage and took four pictures of Dylan during the acoustic. His first set was acoustic, second set electric. And I took most of the pictures from. Those chores have to do with the electric set. But it's. But anyway, I took these wonderful pictures of Dylan alone at the microphone in Copenhagen. Very few people have seen those pictures. I've been meaning to figure out how to make them available. But I have shown them to a few folks from the definitely Dylan group and other friends that I've run into that I thought would be interested. Anyway, so that was off with a bang with that show. And it was not a raucous crowd. It was a very respectful and very quiet crowd. And very different from the booing that he would get when he hit England. So anyway, that was the first experience. Now let me Say that I have. And it was also the day after that he visited Hamlet's castle too. That was fun. But in the Dylan world there are many niches and we are multitudes. And I've never been the Dylan fan who was completest about concerts. Now I religiously listen to concerts that end up on YouTube due to recordings. But I think I've been only to a total of about 25 Dylan concerts over the. Over those 60 years or so. I have huge respect for the folks I see online who follow Dylan show after show, tour after tour. I think that's great. I love that niche. I love their ability to tease apart the changes from one concert to another. But in a way, it's not really been me. I love it. I love their. What they come up with. I love being directed to a particular version of a particular song. But it's never been sort of part of my mission to be the one who does that. I think it's great that there's so many different ways to be a Dylan fan. I think I mostly I went to concerts and every decade and including one of his first Christian Con concerts in Knoxville, Tennessee in 1979. And I think since then I've been to every concert when he's been near North Carolina.
Because of course, of all of our fears about Dylan, that someday it's going to be the last concert that you can go to. So I've been a little more religious, in other words, about going recently. But it's never been the thing that I wanted to be really invested in.
[00:23:06] Speaker B: Time was, yeah, and there's something. Perhaps we have seen his last concert if he decides not to go out on tour again. So good thing to do is stock up now, Right. I want to ask you about the annual Bob Dylan party.
[00:23:20] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:23:20] Speaker B: So you've been doing this for 30 years, a 30 year batch. What inspired you to launch it? What's kept it going?
[00:23:26] Speaker A: I bonded with Dylan back in 1963 and every birthday thereafter. I had the habit of playing a Bob Dylan song. If I went to bed and had forgotten to play a song on my birthday, I would jump out of bed, play a song, go back to bed, for example. And sometimes I had friends who would be part of it. We'd just have an evening of trading Dylan songs. But excuse me. I think a couple things happened in the 1990s.
One was that my musical world had really greatly expanded. I began joining jams that occur around this area of North Carolina. And I still. I go to three jams a week usually. And so I had many musical friends. And I was gradually persuading them to explore Dylan more and more. And they became the attenders and the participants in the Dylan party. It was also the mid-90s where Dylan's output had become those two wonderful acoustic albums. But it felt like a little bit like his Basement Tapes and Self Portrait days. That he was going back to his roots. And letting his love of music reemerge back with those two roots albums. And so there wasn't a lot of new Dylan to talk about. The moment that I expanded the Dylan Party. And so it became this annual party at my house. Maybe 50 people would crowd in. We had a song list. I made sure that, you know, three people didn't all do Girl from the north country and that. And everybody. We did it often chronologically. Because it was like following a Shakespearean play. Where you go from one act to another and one scene to another. The sort of development of Dylan as through time was part of the fun of the party. But it's not strictly chronological. We get out of sequence all the time. And sometimes we do whole albums. We've, I think, done six whole albums just as one part of the party. Anyway, so it expanded and I began making set lists for everybody. I have a little house band. And anybody who's working on a version of Dylan can come by. We have six rehearsals before the party can come by and get our feedback. And try out a song they haven't done before. And then we get to the party and we sit down. And several of us don't get up again until six hours later. And there's. There's one thing that's wonderful about it, is that Dylan songs are like. You can go into a long Dylan song like Desolation Row. And it can be like entering into a different world. And also getting into a sort of trance.
Where all you know is this song and its recurrent chorus. And the Bob Dylan party is like that at a big scale. You. You start, and six hours later you're finished. But in the meantime, you've gone into this Dylan world. You've inhabited this Dylan world. And it just. I don't know if anybody would relate to this. Other than people who like to play or sing Bob Dylan songs. But it create. It does something to your brain. And I find it really wonderful. A lot of my friends get Dylan out of their system during the party. And they. At the other jams, they hardly ever do a Dylan song. But anyway, yeah, that was. That's what the Dylan party became. It outgrew My house. We had it at a friend's house. He sadly passed away. And we found this wonderful rural church that had just decided to turn itself into a music venue because they built some fancier church a couple miles away. And it's this funky old building with stained glass windows and a nice big open hall. We. We set up microphones for the song leaders and have a few folks playing electrical instruments. And anyway, every year it's just something to look forward to. It used to be at the time of my birthday, which is in February. But because of the weather and because of Bob Dylan himself, it gradually migrated to around his birthday in May. And I got to start sending out emails as soon as we crossed into January.
[00:27:38] Speaker B: Yeah, that sounds really amazing. It's very different from what I was conceiving. I was thinking of more of a potluck hoot nanny. Three people bring the they're blown in the wind souffle and several other people all bring the same song and whatnot. But it's. This is very organized rehearsals and all that. That's cool. So it's a big concert.
[00:27:56] Speaker A: I'm pretty sure Bob Dylan knows about the party. Of course. We always fantasize that. And that's because I got a call from a reporter when he played the minor league baseball park tour. And he said, are you the professor who holds an annual Bob Dylan party? And so I just. I was interviewed about the party. And this is going to be totally invisible. But says there people. The 2024 Dylan party. Hillsboro, North Carolina.
[00:28:21] Speaker B: Nice.
[00:28:21] Speaker A: And then has all of our 66 songs and the leader for each song. Yeah, yeah, it's been great. We did all of John Wesley Harding last spring.
[00:28:32] Speaker B: So why did that tell you that Dylan knew about it? What this reporter.
[00:28:35] Speaker A: I'm sorry. Because it was on the front page of the local paper when he played that day at the minor league baseball park. Willie Nelson. So I am sure he saw his press because it was an advertisement for the performance.
[00:28:49] Speaker B: Gotcha.
[00:28:50] Speaker A: But it had this little thing about the Bob.
[00:28:52] Speaker B: Oh, that's funny. That's great. That's very cool. That's very cool. So I want to change gears just a little bit. I don't want to take up too much more time. So what other music do you listen to besides Bob Dylan? You're a musician. What else? What else turned you on?
[00:29:04] Speaker A: Yeah, so I feel like a fisherman for songs all the time. And it's basically singer, songwriter. And there are some probably big names of songs that I end up learning and doing one of the Jams. Tom Waits would be on that list. And Iris Dement and Joni Mitchell and Arlo Guthrie. I could. I. It would be a long list. But yeah, I. There's some great songs out there.
[00:29:31] Speaker B: Yeah. It's funny, I asked that question fairly frequently, not every time when I interview people or some version of it. And my follow up traditionally is so what does that have music have to do with Bob Dylan? And some people struggle to make a connection, others know. But in your case, I'm not going to even ask that follow up. This is pretty obvious.
I don't think we need it. Unless you have something to add beyond singer songwriters of Dylan's era and similar genre.
[00:29:57] Speaker A: I think we. One thing that Bob Dylan stresses in Philosophy of Modern Song is the word heartfelt.
He talks about people and he talks about himself also in terms of being able to touch his songs and that sometimes he's grown away from a song, he doesn't know how to touch it anymore, and he talks about not being able to fake it. So I think what I look for in songs, regardless of the author, is something that I can relate to. Heartfelt wise. And so it's got that common dominant denominator, I think with. With Dylan songs too, and with the Dylan universe. So.
[00:30:33] Speaker B: Yeah, that's a. That's a profound insight. I like that. Heart, Heartfelt song. Singer songwriters. Right?
[00:30:38] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:39] Speaker B: Not just tossing it off, not just doing the commercial thing. I love it.
[00:30:42] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:30:43] Speaker B: Tell us where people can find you online and if they want to join the book club, how they could do that. We talked to Christopher Vinny about the. The book club and. Yeah, but give us a reminder.
[00:30:53] Speaker A: Okay. There's a Bob Dylan book club website, which oddly enough is bobdylanbookclub.com a.
[00:31:01] Speaker B: Write that down, folks.
[00:31:02] Speaker A: Yeah. And the first, the front page says join. Join us. It's free. So all you get from joining. You get a couple of things from joining one. One is that you get the actual announcements advertising the next book we're going to do, plus follow up from the books we've done, plus conversations with other book club members. And you get the Zoom link once a month when we have our Zoom meeting. BobDylanBookClub.com is the easiest thing to do. And even if you don't join, you can explore. One of the things that I find really fun is a part of the website called Books and Meetings. And if you click on that tab, you'll find that it's a list of all the books we've done. And each one I'VE developed a website for. And again, it just feels like every Bob Dylan topics radiates out into a whole bunch of other connections like a giant spider web. So what's really fun is for me is to post some of those links or describe those links to the broader subject of Bob Dylan from just this one book. And so I hope people enjoy those. Some of them were quite relevant to the movie. A complete unknown. Our very first book we ever did was Suzi Rodolos. We are so incredibly lucky to have this book. To have an eyewitness account of a very significant and deep relationship that also had its growing pains and its troubles. And Susie Rotolo is a strong person. She's deceased now, but she was strong, insightful, thoughtful, careful about herself. Inquisitive of Dylan, but just. And then she drew some of the illustrations for his early concerts. And there you have in the illustrations in the book one of the drawings that maybe somebody told you was by Susie Rotolo. But here she's putting it in her own book. It's just, it's. That's a really great book. And then of course, Elijah Wald's Dylan Goes Electric.
Really well written and weaving together the many threads that were on the Newport stage that night. And there were more than one reason why people booed. And there was more than one reason why other people didn't boo. But it's not as simple a story as probably it'll end up being in the movie.
[00:33:24] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:33:24] Speaker A: But anyway, yeah, I brought a few other of our books just randomly. Yeah, of course. One thing that's really been fun is that authors have been delighted to sign up to be with us for the hour or two, sometimes two hours. And Peter McKenzie is the author of this book, of course, and he joined our meeting. And to be in the presence of someone who actually interacted with Bob Dylan was another just unforgettable moment in the book club. And last book we did was Bob Dylan in Minnesota. And that gets you thinking about a complete unknown. Because that's Bob Dylan just before he ended up in New York City in January 1961. And Matt Steichen and Paul Metza joined us for this book. And Matt has put together the wonderful idea of all of the made up stories Dylan told about his upbringing. And he ran away from home. He was in the circus. He was in Gallup, New Mexico. Those sometimes stories were interpreted to be a rejection of Hibbing and a sort of a dissing of Minnesota. But it was clear from the very beginning, including the liner notes of his very first album that he had great love and respect for Hibbing and for the Minnesota landscape. And Matt has laid out a chronology of that. Every reference Dylan has made to Minnesota and his coming back to Minnesota to rerecord half of Blood on the Tracks is another example of the ongoing connection. And Ralphie of Falco, no One to Meet is an example of an academic book, a professor expounding a theory about how Bob Dylan writes in his creative. And it's very hard to talk or write about Bob Dylan's music, but it's equally important.
And there is this book, one of the few that is devoted to the musical structures in Bob Dylan.
[00:35:14] Speaker B: Listening to Bob Dylan.
[00:35:15] Speaker A: Yeah, called Listening to Bob Dylan by Larry Starr. And I only brought a few of the books in to my desk, but I just feel about every book, I can't live without that book anymore. It's. It's not like you memorize what they say or you learn every argument, but you can go back to them as well. And it's just really been great. And I. This is a different kind of Bob Dylan book, but Dreaming of Dylan by the singer songwriter Mary Lee Cortez, who was one of the opening acts for Dylan and one of his tours. She had dreams about Bob Dylan in which Bob Dylan appeared and she started writing them down. And then she opened up a website asking other people to write theirs down. And she ended up with 115 dreams, obvious reasons. Bob Dylan's 115th dream, 115 dreams about Dylan. I also have had some Dylan dreams. That was another really fun excursion. But these are examples of fandom, of academia, of historical, cultural context.
That's one thing I've really liked about the book club is the wide ranging choices that people make about wouldn't it be fun to do this book? Excuse me.
And I should mention my co conspirators. So four people have volunteered to be advisors to the book club. And we're still looking for others who might be interested. But those four, they're three plus me. But it's Roberta Rakov, Christopher Vanny and Brian Walsh are.
And me conspire behind the scenes to pick a book and to try to find a leader for the discussion. One thing that we did with Philosophy of Modern Song, Jim, because you participated, was we had people adopt chapters. And I think the time we had it one week, one month, and there were like six presenters, I think when you presented. And then the next week we had, I think seven as I recall. But that was a really successful model. And I'm hoping to reinstitute that maybe in February, because it really got people involved and it got different viewpoints presented different kinds of questions asked and people didn't feel overwhelmed like they had to lead a discussion on an entire book or integrate everything that all their thoughts about it. So I thought that was Christopher Vanity's idea and I think that was a really good idea. Our next book is Lou Kemp's Bob Dylan and Me. Kemp is a long term friend of Bob Dylan. He now lives in Israel. One of our book club members who presented the same day you presented was Daniel Singer. And Daniel is from Minnesota and also knows Lou Kemp and fingers crossed. But I think Lou Kebb is going to join us from Israel and that Daniel Singer is going to be our discussion leader in the January meeting.
[00:38:12] Speaker B: What's the date on that?
[00:38:13] Speaker A: January 5th.
[00:38:15] Speaker B: Fifth. Okay.
[00:38:16] Speaker A: We're working with. We try to aim for the first or second Sunday. Oh, we have our first members from Australia, one of whom attended this last meeting. So we span these time zones from 6:00am in the morning till 9:00 at night or whatever. And it's January 5th at 2:00pm Eastern time.
And I expect that we'll be doing Luke Kemp's book. I had this notion that he could even react to a complete unknown, except that being in Israel, I don't think he has access to the movie as early as January 5th, but we'll see. And then we have. We're working on some ideas for February, but adopting a chapter might resurface.
[00:38:56] Speaker B: Yeah, that's great. That was a great model too. Yeah. With that, I'm planning on getting this episode out pretty quickly. So it should predate January 5th. So maybe you'll have a crowd, right? Yeah, a lot more people will be aware of what's going on. And just the opportunity to hear from Louis Kemp directly would be pretty astonishing. That's fantastic.
[00:39:15] Speaker A: And there is a email button on the homepage of the Bob Dylan Book Club if anybody has questions or complaints or other arguments with what I've said in this interview so far.
[00:39:26] Speaker B: So, okay, we got so rebuttals to the interview. Go to the Bob Dylan Book Club website.
Send emails directly to Peter. Yeah, but Peter, this has been wonderful. I really enjoyed this conversation. You really have a long history with Dylan and a lot to say and I think that's really incredible. And I think the party, the annual party sounds just absolutely astonishing.
[00:39:49] Speaker A: Anybody within the reach of this podcast ought to consider coming to the Bob Dylan party in the spring.
[00:39:55] Speaker B: You don't have to be a musician, right?
[00:39:57] Speaker A: You don't have to be a musician. You can sing or not sing or be part of the audience or. Yeah, yeah.
[00:40:03] Speaker B: And I know firsthand at the book club is great. Thank you for doing those things. And I think those are really important pieces of Bob Dylan fandom. Yeah. That kind of bridge between just fandom and study. And that's for everyone. Keegan. Really appreciate that. So thank you.
Thanks for being on the Dylan Taunts.
[00:40:20] Speaker A: Yep. Good. I appreciate the offer to talk. Another thing I've learned since I retired and joined the Bob Dylan online world is that lots of people have lots to say.
He seems to generate that desire, which is great. It's really great.
[00:40:37] Speaker B: All right. Thank you very much, Peter.
[00:40:39] Speaker A: All righty. I'll talk to you again. Bye.
[00:40:42] Speaker B: Thank you for listening to the Dylan Ponds podcast. Be sure to subscribe to have the Dylan ponts sent directly to your inbox and share the Dylan tons on social media.
