W. Niederhut

I always fancied myself a "Dylanologist," but it would be more accurate to say that I was a Dylan impersonator. When I was in high school and college back in the 70s, my folkster friends and I idolized Bob Dylan, and we used to play a lot of his songs in our folk/blues repertoire. Anything by Dylan was considered unquestionably cool. I played guitar and used a Bob Dylan-style harmonica holder. Since I'm sheltering-in-place today, and my fellow Dylan fans are crawling out of the word work, I just posted another one of my favorite old Bob Dylan cover songs at Soundclick. This one was written in August of 1963, just three months before JFK was murdered. https://www.soundclick.com/music/songInfo.cfm?songID=14018631

I can't speak for Mr. DiEugenio, but I have studied his work in some detail. It accurately describes a vast array of historical and forensic data about JFK's assassination and the ensuing cover up of the Crime of the 20th Century. It's a "forest," and the autopsy material is one tree in that forest-- a premise with which Bob Dylan, himself, would, doubtless, agree. Dylan's dirge seems to incorporate a broad array of the JFKA research. As for the WC conspiracy, are you suggesting that Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover (with assistance from Gerald Ford) did not conspire to withhold critical evidence from the WC, and actively intervene with the "investigation," to "conclude" that JFK was assassinated by a Lone Nut with a Carcano rifle? As I recall, Dulles opened the WC "investigation" by erroneously telling the Commission that all Presidential assassinations in U.S. history had been committed by Lone Nuts. I think it was Hale Boggs who replied, "Wasn't there a conspiracy in Lincoln's assassination?"

Can't picture Al Pacino as Richard III. "A horse! A horse, dammit! My God d*mned kingdom for a f**king horse!!" 🤥

I've been re-reading Albert Camus' novel, The Plague, this week, and I was struck by this passage, in particular.* The novel was published in 1947, and has obvious allegorical parallels to the Nazi occupation of France, but Camus also managed to accurately describe the pervasive initial denial of the epidemic that has characterized the reaction to the COVID-19 disaster in many parts of the U.S. * "Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world, yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history, yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise." -- Albert Camus/The Plague

What a truly bizarre, malicious thread. I can understand the intellectual enmity between honest JFKA researchers and Warren Commission apologists like Bugliosi and Posner, but I naively assumed that the scholars in search of JFKA truth were all, more or less, in the same camp-- or, at least, fighting on the same side in the "war" against the perpetrators of the Crime of the 20th Century. Perhaps Solomon was right when he wrote, "All is vanity." 🤪

Ray, I've ceased being astonished by Donald Trump's shocking ignorance and daily litany of lies. Nowadays, I'm mostly numb. Unfortunately, for the U.S. and the planet, the one thing that Donald Trump does well is sales-- conning stupid people. And you've probably figured out by now that the U.S. leads the world in stupid people per capita.

Excellent, indeed. This review should be re-published on multiple media websites. I wonder if Salon.com, Huffington Post, Alternet.org, Common Dreams.org, and/or Rolling Stone would re-print it.

Sad story, Joe. You've, obviously, experienced a lot of serious trauma. Or, perhaps in the style of Subterranean Homesick Blues, "The horn won't blow if they vomit on the gromit." But, seriously, Joe, it's a very sad story. Your childhood sounds extremely traumatic. As for Paul's comment, (above) it hadn't occurred to me that even professional musicians in major symphony orchestras can get burned out by the demands of their daily work. I've probably had a romanticized view of the exalted life of artists in major symphonies. They always look so distinguished on stage, and I've imagined them pouring over their daily opuses (opii?) with a glass of cognac, thinking, "Hmmmm.... shall I start with the Berlioz or the Tchaikovsky today?"

Good story, Ron. BTW, I love boogie woogie piano music, but I never had a "left hand like God." It's an indigenous American musical style that, apparently, originated among freed men-- former slaves-- in Texas and Arkansas, I believe. The word may derive from a West African term for running amok-- bukki wukki, or something. The late, great Albert Ammons was a pioneer and master of that genre. Your story about your mother and the musical instruments also reminded me of a funny story about Jerry Garcia. His mother once bought Jerry an accordion for his birthday. He was so disappointed that his stepfather agreed to exchange the accordion for an electric guitar at a local pawn shop in San Francisco.

2020 will be a banner year for Darwin Awards. You posted about the Virginia pastor who died last week after claiming earlier this month that COVID-19 was a hoax. There's also the guy from Phoenix who drank (chloroquine) aquarium cleaning products recently, after Trump promoted chloroquine as a COVID-19 cure.

Paul, My "group" is a one man basement (studio) band-- guitars, keyboards, violin, mandolin, banjo, drums, harmonica, accordion, etc. My toys. I started out by studying violin as a boy, then focused on the guitar in my teens-- against the advice of my elderly violin teacher, Howard Reynolds, who had once been the Concert Master of the Denver Symphony back in the day. Maestro Reynolds was right. I became a musical Jack-of-all-trades and master of none-- a dilettante. Lately, during this COVID-19 shut down, I've been trying to remember how to play some violin pieces from my youth-- Mazas Duets, Acolay Concerto, etc.-- but it's not like remembering how to ride a bicycle. It sounds like I'm strangling a chicken. As you know better than anyone around here, there's nothing quite as beautiful as a well-played violin, and nothing quite as awful as one that is played badly.

Thanks, Andrej. Playing (and recording) Dylan's songs has been a "hobby" of mine for almost 50 years. One of my sisters bought the Columbia 45 rpm record of Like A Rolling Stone the year it came out, and I probably listened to it 500 times. I think the flip side was Rainy Day Woman or (?) Gates of Eden.

Denny, I used the term, "stream-of-historical-consciousness," (above) on this thread to describe Dylan's new opus. It's not something that I read anywhere on line, but a term that I coined to describe a quality that I have observed over the years in Dylan's thought processes, speech, and writings-- e.g., in his remarkable Chronicles memoir and his 1985 Biograph interview by Cameron Crowe (which anticipated Martin Scorcese's No Direction Home documentary by 20 years.) In psychiatry, we would characterize Dylan's thought processes and speech as "circumstantial, with a kind of hypomanic logorrhea and "flight-of-ideas." It's a trait that Bob Dylan shares with artists ranging from James Joyce and Dylan Thomas to Allen Ginsburg. And it's brilliant-- scintillating with profound sensibility and historical consciousness. He has, obviously, studied and absorbed a lot of the quality research literature about JFK's assassination and related historical phenomena. As for his raspy voice, it has been a serious medical issue for at least 20 years. Dylan released his remarkable Love and Theft album in September of 2001-- and the great musical and literary merits of that anthology were obscured by the events of 9/11. When I first heard Love and Theft, I thought the songs were among the best that Dylan had ever written-- which is saying a lot-- but his vocal chords were shot by then. I bought the songbook and recorded the entire Love and Theft opus in my home studio-- because even I can sing better than Bob Dylan, at least in the 21st century! Here's one of my covers of a song from that album, about Dylan's tour of Mississippi with Pete Seeger during the Civil Rights era-- Mississippi. https://www.soundclick.com/music/songInfo.cfm?songID=13466275

David, Have you seen Martin Scorcese's documentary, No Direction Home, about Dylan and Greenwich Village in the early 60s? I thought it was spell-binding all three or four times I watched it. That was before my time, but I've been a folk (and rock) musician since the early 70s, and erstwhile Dylan impersonator, and I played music with some folk musicians from New York and New England in college. (Mary Chapin Carpenter was a student at Brown in those days.) Meanwhile, the Talking Heads had been in school down the Hill at RISD before moving to Manhattan and recording Psycho Killer in '77. The New England "counterculture" folk scene went the way of the dodo.

Rob, Here's your trophy, awarded in recognition of your strenuous deposits on this forum in defense of the 45th President of the United States. You have, definitely, been doing your duty, dude... 🤥 The Donald John Trump Golden Toilet Award

Trump's Mar-a-Lago and Doral resorts are probably in line for a tremendous taxpayer bail out. Burning through the annual Secret Service budget for room & board won't begin to cover the interest on Donald's Deutsche Bank loans.

Joe, Kudos for keeping the Education Forum Mark-Zaid-Thread-About-Everything alive this week. Everyone knows by now that our Stable Genius-in-Chief botched the pandemic response bigly, but the news that is bothering me today is Trump's signing declaration in which he rejected any Congressional oversight of his handling of the newly approved $500 billion corporate bailout slush fund. Donald Trump in charge of a $500 billion slush fund? What could possibly go wrong? 🤪

Rob, You left out the part where Elvis comes back to life, and promptly gets hooked on Oxycontin. 🤥

The final draft of the University of Alaska study debunking the NIST coverup of the WTC7 demolition on 9/11 is out this week. Anyone with a working knowledge of Newtonian physics could have concluded as much years ago. The 47 floor steel skyscraper collapsed in an abrupt-onset, symmetrical free fall, indicating zero resistance-- i.e., a synchronized, simultaneous demolition of the steel columns. It's an irrefutable smoking gun, indicating that the 9/11 demolitions were staged, in advance, by experts. https://files.wtc7report.org/file/public-download/A-Structural-Reevaluation-of-the-Collapse-of-World-Trade-Center-7-March2020.pdf

Details, please. What are the implications for us-- the little people? And, if the Titanic sinks, who will be in the luxury yachts and lifeboats, besides Moochin' Mnuchin and the Trump Crime Family?

I never owned a copy of the original Free Wheelin' Bob Dylan album, but my old college roommate may have. If it's really worth $30K, I may call him up and ask him if I can borrow that vinyl for old time's sake. 🤪 One thing the album cover photo brings to mind is the incredible cinematography of the Coen Brothers 2013 film, Inside Llewyn Davis, about the Greenwich Village folk music scene in the early 1960s. Some of the sets in that film were closely derived from the album cover.

Dylan wrote Masters of War in the winter of 62-63, shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the album was released in February of 1963.

Murder Most Foul, in a sense, is like a book end to Dylan's 57 year old Jeremiad about the military-industrial complex.

The only thing more karmic would be televangelist Jim Baker dying of Silver Solution poisoning. 🤥

Remarkable stream-of-historical-consciousness stuff by the Great One. And, as usual, Dylan gets the essential historical details right-- the murder most foul by the "Masters of War" who had their own man waiting in the wings to take over. He also succeeds in incorporating a vast array of related Americana into this dirge-- in a manner reminiscent of his brilliant Love and Theft songs. Mega gracias, Bob!