Factoids About Bob Dylan, The Artist
Bob Dylan – The Legend Of Music On This Earth
Blood on the Tracks, the Chicago based Bob Dylan Cover Band, is covering many songs from Bob Dylan, and is considered by many to be the finest Bob Dylan Tribute of all times. The name of the band comes from one of Bob Dylan’s most critically acclaimed albums, Blood on the Tracks.
Bob Dylan is an American born on May 24, 1941 in Minnesota, US with the birth name Robert Allen Zimmerman. Dylan legally changed his name to Bob Dylan in August 1962 and made an important move for his career which was signing a management contract with Albert Grossman. Bob Dylan is a multi-talented person. He is a singer, writer, musician, producer, director, poet and painter as well. Bob has been ruling the world of popular music and culture for six decades. A number of his songs became anthems for the US Civil rights and anti-war movements.
Exit from his folk music culture and entrance in popular music was with the six minute single “Like a Rolling Stone” which was a revolutionary track and very popular. The Lyrics of Bob Dylan songs are integrated with a variety of societal, political, philosophical and literary influences. His recording career of fifty years has explored many distinct traditions.
Bob Dylan usually gives performances with guitar, keyboard, piano, vocals and harmonica backed up by a changing arrangement of musicians. His achievements as a recording artist and performer have been central part of his career but his songwriting is considered to be the greatest contribution in music history.
From December 1962 to January 1963, Dylan made his trips to the United Kingdom. He was invited by TV director Philip Seville to appear in a drama “The Madhouse on Castle Street” in this period.
Many of his most famous early songs first reached the public through more immediately delicious versions by other performers such as Joan Baez, the Byrds, and Jimi Hendrix. At the end of 1963, Bob Dylan felt manipulated and constrained by the folk and protest movements.
In August 2007, another achievement for Bob was the award-winning film on his biography “I’m Not There” which was written and directed by Todd Haynes. It was released bearing the tagline “inspired by the music and many lives of Bob Dylan”
Catch Blood on the Tracks, the finest Chicago Bob Dylan Cover Band performance and enjoy listening to the music of Bob Dylan.
Factoids About the Blood on the Tracks Album
Culled from Rolling Stone and Wikipedia
Bob Dylan once introduced this album’s opening song, “Tangled Up in Blue,” onstage as taking him ten years to live and two years to write. It was, for him, a pointed reference to the personal crisis — the collapse of his marriage to Sara Lowndes — that at least partly inspired this album, Dylan’s best of the 1970s. In fact, he wrote all of these lyrically piercing, gingerly majestic folk-pop songs in two months, in mid-1974. He was so proud of them that he privately auditioned almost all of the album, from start to finish, for pals and peers including Mike Bloomfield, David Crosby and Graham Nash before cutting them in September — in just a week with members of the bluegrass band Deliverance. But in December, Dylan played the record for his brother David in Minneapolis, who suggested recutting some songs with local musicians. The final Blood was a mix of New York and Minneapolis tapes; Dylanologists still debate the merits of the two sessions. Yet no one disputes the album’s luxuriant tangle of guitars, the gritty directness in Dylan’s voice and the magnificent confessional force of his writing: in the existentialist jewel “Simple Twist of Fate,” the wrung-dry goodbye of “If You See Her, Say Hello” and the sharp-tongued opprobrium of “Idiot Wind,” his greatest put-down song since “Like a Rolling Stone.”
Facts About the Tribute
A Bob Dylan Tribute Band: Honoring the Icon
When we think, as musicians or music lovers in general, about cover bands, tribute bands or in this case, a Bob Dylan cover band, we would probably have in mind something very different from most musical projects.
If you do an AC/DC cover band, you know you have two main features to have at hand before investing your time and energy. You need a special hard rock-meeting-blues guitar player and one exceptional vocalist. If you want to rehearse a Gun’s and Roses tribute band, you need similar variables; again one great guitar player and some singer with special qualities about his voice with a flexible range. A mixed voiced some people say, blending head and chest voice.
With Bob Dylan, the voice and the guitar skills are not as important as the ability to convey thoughts and feelings to the crowd. You need charisma. Maybe the hardest aspect of a great performer is the special and almost uncanny spell that as soon as he or she sits on stage, keeps everybody engaged, almost as hypnotized. Of course, with Dylan it is not just about the respect people experience in his presence. This respect is preceding Dylan because of his work.
Dylan songs are full of meaning and send a clear message to those willing to open their mind to his material. Any group of people pretending to dedicate a great portion of their life to give birth to a decent Bob Dylan cover band, must first find the right front man with the charisma mentioned above. The rest of the band is also important. However, you need no shredding guitar players or jazz bass players. You need people with a clear vision about rendering a message. They will need to be very good at giving different colors to the sound and support the frontman every second of the gig or recording.
Finally, the aspect and age of the front man is important. You need a mature man with a solid aspect. This will give more credibility to the lyrics. Most young men are not as experienced as to project a true meaning to what Dylan intended with its songs. All in all, it sounds like a great project to get involved with.
Included as one of the most important people of the century in Time 100, Bob Dylan is a celebrated modern artist that is ranked with the likes of great names in history such as Picasso, Mozart and even Shakespeare. A musician of several genres, Dylan is known more for the lyrical magic that he instills in his songs, such as Blowing in the Wind and Highway 61 Revisited. These songs earned him much accolade especially during the peak of the counterculture movement in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Bob Dylan has stood the test of time when it comes to his music and his art. And with that under his belt and more, a Dylan Tribute Band is an honor that he more than deserves to have.
A Dylan Tribute Band would definitely be faced with a lot of pressure to live up to the man behind the name. Besides being able to perform as well as Dylan, the band should also deserve to bear the name of such a great musician. But with Dylan’s songs backing them up, the challenge would have to be in finding a way to add to a near perfect package when it comes to musicality. Although, it’s never enough that a band just knows how to play and perform Dylan’s songs. It has to incorporate as well, the heart and the dedication that Dylan and his music has come to mean and stand for in modern society.
Dylan himself could be forgiving when it comes to having such a band in his honor. But, the utmost test for such a band to survive is the discriminating taste of Dylan’s faithful followers. Nevertheless, a Dylan Tribute Band would definitely be something that his loyal and countless fans would be glad to see and experience.