On this site I now have made available on four separate pages (see links above) via links and/or pdf’s my scholarly and public intellectual activities and writing on five general topics:
1. Writing on War = the human experience of war and violence and their effects on human societies, social groups and individual human beings;
2. Dylanology = the songs of Bob Dylan within the long tradition (from Homer onward) of poems set to music as ways human beings communicate often otherwise ineffable ideas and feelings about what it is to be human.
3. Editorials and Feature Articles = over three hundred pieces spanning more than two decades and published across newspapers and journals like the Austin American-Statesman, Times Higher Education, Athenaeum Review. The subject matter is vast. Often responding to current events, they address issues within the University of Texas and academia in general and on broader happenings in the United States like presidential elections and the War in Iraq.
4. Poetry = meditations on ancient and modern subjects, from the Trojan war to covid-19
5. Scholarly Articles and Book Reviews
The Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory homepage is located here.
For my updated cv and profile, go to: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/classics/faculty/palaimat
See also: https://sites.utexas.edu/scripts/about-pasp/people-of-pasp/
For pdfs of my scholarly articles and book reviews go to:
https://sites.utexas.edu/scripts/publications/#articlesPalaima
https://sites.utexas.edu/scripts/publications/#bookreviewsPalaima
https://sites.utexas.edu/scripts/publications/#articlesGulizioPlutaPalaima
The Latest Updates from Tom Palaima
April 3, 2024
People of UT: Tom Palaima
by Tom Palaima
In this People of UT episode, Audio Producer Jake Gripp talks to Tom Palaima — a UT professor with a passion for Bob Dylan’s music. He teaches the signature course Bob Dylan and the Social-Historical Imagination, or as Palaima likes to put it, Dylanology.
October 25, 2023
Murder Most Foul Performed Live by Tom Palaima and Joe Goodkin
by Tom Palaima AND JOE GOODKIN
MURDER MOST FOUL (MMF) by Bob Dylan
Released on Disc 2 of Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020)
https://www.bobdylan.com/albums/rough-and-rowdy-ways/
Official lyrics: https://www.bobdylan.com/songs/murder-most-foul/
Official video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3NbQkyvbw18
MMF LIVE VERSION
Tom Palaima – vocals
Joe Goodkin – guitar
Recorded by Shane Hendrickson at Studio 3024, Chicago, IL, on October 12, 2023 in one unedited take and performed from memory.
We hope our live version helps listeners to feel and understand the magnitude and emotional depth of this masterpiece by Bob Dylan.
About Joe Goodkin: Joe (b. July 8, 1977) is a Chicago-based singer/songwriter who has written and recorded twelve albums of original music under the name Paper Arrows and his own name. He travels the country and world singing modern folk song cycle retellings of Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad (The Blues of Achilles), a combined 450 performances in almost every US state as well as Greece and Italy. His 13th album is called Consolations and Desolations and will be available everywhere you get digital music on October 27, 2023.
More at: https://www.joegoodkin.com
https://www.thebluesofachilles.com
“I played a 1963 Gibson J-50 acoustic (like this one https://guitar.com/reviews/vintage-review/vintage-bench-test-1963-gibson-j-50/ ). An intriguing coincidence (if you believe in coincidences) that it is from the year Kennedy was killed and the young Bob Dylan experienced such trauma (see Background below). I favor Gibson guitars for their darker tone and I especially favor vintage Gibson guitars for the additional sonic complexity that develops from aged wood and the decades of history that reside in the instrument.”
“I was first made aware of Bob Dylan’s music through cover versions of “All Along the Watchtower” (Jimi Hendrix) and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” (Guns N’ Roses). I got a chance to see Bob live in 1993 in Chicago. As my focus in music shifted from strictly guitar playing to songwriting/singing, I began to absorb his influence directly through his massive catalogue. The album Time Out of Mind was a game changer. Over the last few years I’ve been lucky enough to learn and perform Bob’s songs at least a dozen times (both in person and virtually) for Tom Palaima’s UGS 302 class at the University of Texas at Austin: Bob Dylan History Imagination. These performances have been both intimidating and inspiring, allowing me to get inside some of the seemingly limitless genius of Mr. Dylan’s singular oeuvre.”
About Tom Palaima: Tom Palaima (b. October 6, 1951) is in his last academic year as Robert M. Armstrong Professor of Classics and founding director of the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (est. 1986) at the University of Texas at Austin.
Since the 1990’s he has taught seminars, written book reviews and public intellectual commentaries, and lectured widely on human creative responses to war, violence and social injustice, ancient and modern, and on music and songs as social commentary, including the song poems of Bob Dylan.
He serves on the editorial board of The Dylan Review. He was a prime mover in the decision of TDR to publish Dylan-inspired poetry, including his own, and to emphasize inspiring the upcoming generation to explore and feel Dylan’s music and express themselves about how his songs and performances affect them.
More at: https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/classics/faculty/palaimat
Why record the song? During Covid (Spring 2020-Spring 2023) Joe Goodkin and Tom Palaima performed “Murder Most Foul” three different times via Zoom for annual iterations of Tom’s award-winning UGS 302 class at the University of Texas at Austin: Bob Dylan History Imagination. Tom then was using the printed text as a crutch.
They took advantage of Tom’s going to Chicago for a MacArthur Fellows Forum in mid-October 2023 to record MMF in the studio. Tom decided the only way to ‘know and feel’ the song fully and understand its complexity was to learn it by heart. This he did over a period of about six weeks.
The version of MMF here was done in one take in Studio 3024. It has certain live-performance ‘flaws’: ‘live’ substitutions and small mistakes and two vocal pauses filled by Joe’s fine guitar.
Tom also chants “Look Out” instead of “Hold On” when JFK realizes the trap he is in. He was so deep inside the song that he was warning the president himself rather than reporting the president’s own realization.
But we also got to update the chronology: “For the last sixty years they’ve been searching for that.” The end result is what it is and it’s our “Murder Most Foul.”
BACKGROUND TO DYLAN’S EPIC by Tom Palaima
Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” is a deeply disconcerting hymn of associative and dissociative memory and memorialization.
It is grounded in Dylan’s own original intense experiences of personal loss and menacing social hatred during 1963, the year when he celebrated in late May his twenty-second birthday. During that year Dylan in his famous Town Hall Concert (April 12, 1963) recited a capella, as it were, his seven-minute poem “Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie.” Guthrie at age fifty was then about a decade into hospitalization with the extremely debilitating neural disorder Huntington’s chorea.
On June 12, 1963, in a suburb of Jackson, Mississippi, Medgar Evers, a black World War II veteran, a lawyer and NAACP field secretary for Mississippi, arguably the deepest of the Deep South states, with all that this phrase implies, was shot dead in his driveway coming home late at night to his wife and three children.
Soon afterwards, Dylan wrote his penetratingly honest assessment of the incident “Only a Pawn in Their Game” and performed it on July 6 at a black voter registration rally in nearby Greenwood, Mississippi in the presence of Pete Seeger and Theodore Bikel. Bikel recollects the event, here.
On August 28, 1963, Dylan sang the same song from the very podium in the March on Washington where Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Returning from Washington, Dylan composed his classic song about racial violence “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” He recorded it in October.
Less than three months later, Dylan and his then true love Suze Rotolo sat riveted to coverage of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and its aftermath (November 22-25, 1963).
Finally, on December 13, 1963, three weeks after Kennedy was killed, at the dinner where he received the Tom Paine Award from the Emergency Civil Liberties Union, Dylan, having spoken in favor of pro-Castro activists, segued to the Kennedy assassination. He bravely and honestly said:
I’ll stand up and to get uncompromisable about it, which I have to be to be honest, I just got to be, as I got to admit that the man who shot President Kennedy, Lee Oswald, I don’t know exactly where —what he thought he was doing, but I got to admit honestly that I too – I saw some of myself in him. I don’t think it would have gone – I don’t think it could go that far. But I got to stand up and say I saw things that he felt, in me – not to go that far and shoot.
THE POWERFUL MESSAGE OF “Murder Most Foul” (MMF) by Tom Palaima
The reference in MMF to searching for Kennedy’s soul for ‘the last fifty years’ gives us an indication that Dylan was thinking, as would only be natural, about the killing of JFK around the time of its fiftieth anniversary in 2013. The song distills the essence and the long-term impact of this shockingly brutal public murder upon American culture and the ‘soul of the nation’.
As I wrote during the covid period in an essay not long after the release of MMF in late March 2020, “Grassy Knoll Covid Morning,” Athenaeum Review 5 Winter 2021 FOLIO:
For close to seventeen minutes Dylan, with piano, cello and light percussion accompaniment, hypnotically meditates upon the assassination of John F. Kennedy. He takes us through the events of those late November days in 1963 when “the soul of a nation has been torn away” and “the age of the anti-Christ has just only begun.” The subdued meditative mood of the song matche[d] the gray mood of COVID times.
Dylan’s song is Nobel Prize-worthy. I would say he makes us relive the miserable killings, the grief of the Kennedy family, the quick changing of the political guard and what it all meant for us and our country, but in truth MMF makes us take these things deep into our minds and souls and really live them for the first time.
I lived through the assassination of JFK. I was twelve years old and sitting on the front steps of my neighbor friend Robbie’s house in the early afternoon on Sunday November 24, 1963, when his divorced mother came out the front door looking shaken and distracted. Because there were no adults around for her to talk to, she said, not really to us, “They just shot President Kennedy’s —.” I forget what she called Lee Harvey Oswald. Neither my friend Robbie nor I felt very much. We did not talk about the president or his presumed killer being shot. We were more interested in the Cleveland Browns football game that afternoon. By weird fate the Browns were playing against the Dallas Cowboys. I saw my Catholic parents grieving during this period, my mother crying during iconic televised and photographed moments like John John’s final salute to his father.
Dylan in his sung words and [with his] sea-like musical accompaniment takes us “Deep in a Dream,” into the kind of reverie where “junk” or heroin takes the jazz musicians he calls out. He re-creates what it was like for Kennedy himself to realize that he was being “led into some kind of a trap” and “gunned down like a dog in broad daylight” while “ridin’ in the back seat next to my wife / heading straight on into the afterlife.” Dylan conveys the meaning of this “vile, cruel and mean” act to Americans then and to us now, as it was captured forever on the famous Zapruder film.
Dylan never uses the clinical and emotion-obliterating word ‘assassination’. He makes us feel the horrific moment as a murder most foul (a phrase from Shakespeare’s Hamlet that he uses to conclude all four main stanzas, and to end the song itself), a killing “with hatred, without any respect.” And we do feel what it was like when “they killed him once and they killed him twice / killed him like a human sacrifice.”
Dylan takes us away into our distracted American lives filled with Beatles music, Hollywood movies, Woodstock, Altamont, Patsy Cline, Etta James, Don Henley, Sonny Boy Williamson, Hoagey Carmichael, Shakespeare, the Who, Wolfman Jack and “the great Bud Powell.” He jars us [back] out of our American dreams by alluding to other brutal murders of innocents and not-so-innocents in our country’s history: Sherman’s march to the sea (1864), the Tulsa race massacre (1921), the sordid hanging for murder of Civil War veteran Tom Dula (1868), the violent killings of notorious gangsters Charles Floyd (1934) and Benjamin Siegel (1947). He then leaves us with a “blood-stained banner” and a final “murder most foul.”
February 17, 2023
On February 13 Tom Palaima was a commentator along with Thomas Levenson of MIT for the History Institute, University of Texas Workshop on “Einstein in World War I” a novel in progress by Professor Alberto A. Martinez.
The entire workshop can be viewed below.
Tom’s main commentary is from 25:57-46:35.
April 23, 2022
CLASS DISCUSSION: Murder Most Foul, with Tom Palaima and Joe Goodkin
by Tom Palaima
Palaima and Goodkin version of Murder Most Foul, with intro and song
This live Zoom performance of Bob Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” took place on Thursday April 21 during a meeting of the Undergraduate Studies course UGS 302 60315 Bob Dylan: Socio-Political Imagination taught by Prof. Tom Palaima.
On that day UT undergraduate student Melissa Fae Bell led class discussion about Dylan’s nearly 17-minute epic centered on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963 and its immediate aftermath and its enduring consequences for our culture and our nation.
Murder Most Foul by Bob Dylan
The song is performed by Tom Palaima vocals and Chicago-based musician Joe Goodkin on guitar. Below is the version with only the song being performed, without the introduction.
Palaima and Goodkin version of Murder Most Foul, with only the song
Joe Goodkin is well known for his peripatetic performances of song cycles connected with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (https://www.thebluesofachilles.com/ and https://joesodyssey.com/home ) in 43 and soon-to-be 44 states of our union and also abroad and for ten cds / playlists of his own deeply human songs.
See: http://www.joegoodkin.com/music .
Joe has long been a regular in performing and discussing Dylan’s song poems in Tom Palaima’s courses: on the social meaning of Greek mythology, the human creative response to war and violence through time and across different cultures, and the artistry and influence of Bob Dylan’s songs and song performances over the last 65 years.
Joe and Tom thank the UGS 302 students for their love of Bob Dylan’s music and of the music Bob Dylan loves.
We thank Ramon Rodriguez for producing the video files from the Zoom recording.
We thank the Robert M. Armstrong Centennial professorship for funding not only Joe’s work in TC 357, but appearances by Michael DeCapite, Betty Lavette and Richard Thomas.
We thank one of the world’s newest and most deep-diving Dylanophiles, PASP-INSTAP archivist Garrett Bruner for his dedicated work at making things like this accessible on the Web.
Finally, Tom Palaima thanks Brian Doherty and Dave Junker for inspiring him to keep on keeping on in teaching music that affects all of our lives and points the way to doing better the next day.
April 10, 2022
Bob Dylan and the Next Generations
Tom Palaima Collects and Presents Opinions and Reactions From Older and Younger Students and Aficionados on the Bob Dylan Concert
by Tom Palaima
As the day dawned with clear skies Texas blue and sunny on Wednesday March 16, 2022, there was excitement in the air for a merry band of thirteen (paging the apostles—did Judas Iscariot have God on his side?) members of the University of Texas at Austin community who were soon to be joined by Professor Richard Thomas flying in from Boston around High Noon (note Dylan’s love of western motifs—e.g., the movie starring Gregory Peck in “Brownsville Girl”) in order to attend the concert of Bob Dylan and his band at the Bass Concert Hall with me.
Richard Thomas and Tom Palaima
It would be the sixth time that Richard and I, who both teach courses on Bob Dylan, at UT Austin and Harvard respectively, took in a Dylan concert together. Past concerts, with my reviews where noted, were:
- Austin 2010 https://www.boblinks.com/080410r.html#2
- Akron 2017
- New York Beacon Theatre 2019 December 6 https://www.boblinks.com/120619r.html#3 [see also my review of December 5: https://www.boblinks.com/120519r.html#6 ]
- New York Beacon Theatre two shows November 19 and 20, 2021
Richard, author of Why Bob Dylan Matters and an expert in the poetics of Virgil and Bob Dylan, graciously guest lectures in my UGS 302 course Bob Dylan and Socio-Historical Imagination on his ongoing discoveries in the Tulsa Dylan archives of how Dylan shaped his masterpieces into being.
In our merry band were students from my UGS 302 classes the past three years and from my TC 358 Plan II Junior Honors Seminar on the human creative response, individual and collective, to war and violence. Also part of the group were:
- George Walters, a former award-winning creative senior thesis writer who continues to work with me on interpreting Dylan.
- Antonella Del Fattore-Olson, Distinguished Senior Lecturer in French and Italian, who wrote a Ph.D. dissertation connected to Dylan years ago (1978). Antonella’s sister-in-law Carla Olson was lead singer in Carla Olson & the Textones to whom Bob entrusted covering “Clean Cut Kid” on their album Midnight Mission (1984) before he released it on Empire Burlesque in 1985.
- Garrett Bruner, PASP and INSTAP archivist in the Program in Aegean Scripts and Prehistory (PASP), which I founded at UT in 1986 and have directed for the past 36 years. Garrett is a passionate and learned humanist and a dedicated student of world poetry. Working with him in the PASP archives brings me great joy. His spirit pervades the archives and inspires everyone who has worked in PASP or remotely with its on-line materials.
The students, Melania Dobson; Lucy E. Kulzick; Collin Taylor; Anuj Mocherla; Andrew Vanek; Rachel Williams; Sofia Pratt; and Socratis John Zavitsanos, were drawn to the concert by a wide range of personal, musical and other creative interests. It has been a pleasure to explore with them the wonders of Dylan’s songs in their overall cultural and sociopolitical contexts. We will give their reactions to the concert below.
Most ticket expenses were covered by the Robert M. Armstrong Centennial professorship, for which we are extremely grateful. We thank Bob Dylan’s main office and Debbie Sweeney for facilitating getting the tickets that gave these students a close-up view of Bob Dylan and his band. This was a unique opportunity for students who have seriously studied Dylan’s work from 1957 to the present to see him perform. The two tickets I bought personally went to George Walters and long-time Dylan concert follower and reviewer Laurette Maillet (see her review of the March 16 concert at https://www.boblinks.com/031622r.html). Note that Laurette mistook current UT students for high school students. They were so much older then, but in Laurette’s mind, younger in the here and now.
Tom Palaima and Laurette Maillet in Row 7
Most gratifying for Richard and me as teachers of Dylan’s work and genius were the responses of the attendees afterwards. I thank them for permitting me to quote them here, largely unedited.
We talked ahead of the show with fellow Dylanophile Kathleen Hudson who teaches Dylan and other forms of Texas music to her lucky students at Schreiner University in Kerrville, TX, home of the famous folk song festival. Kathleen’s latest book Corazón Abierto: Mexican American Voices in Texas Music (https://www.tamupress.com/9781623499020/corazon-abierto) was just released by Texas A&M Press.
I also include comments from Brandon Eichelberg, a student at the College of Charleston, whom I have been helping a bit with his senior thesis on Dylan’s love songs. Singer and songwriter Joe Goodkin, well known for his song cycles connected with Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey (https://www.thebluesofachilles.com/ and https://joesodyssey.com/home ) and also a regular in performing and discussing Dylan’s song poems in UGS 302 and TC 357, put Brandon in touch with me.
I append two additional recent responses to Dylan’s music from students in my current class who did not attend the concert.
Antonella, Richard, Laurette and I came of age listening to Dylan. The current undergraduate students and George and Garrett are forty to fifty years younger and were taking in and exploring Dylan and his music two generations later. Here are their responses, given alphabetically.
You will see with Mr. Bruner that, to steal and use from Planet Waves, something there is about Dylan’s music that strikes a match in him. I think these reactions offer eye- and ear-witness testimony that Dylan’s song poems are timeless and enduring and speak profoundly to the human experience. Dylan’s songs lead listeners to moments of thought and feeling that they would not come into contact with otherwise. They also offer looks into the hearts and souls of human beings in different times and places trying to live their lives as social creatures.
In the standard set list for the Rough and Rowdy Ways tour, Dylan gets us to meditate about what we and he are doing during our times on earth and what humankind has done during its long and wasted years. The set starts with the 1971 classic “Watch the River Flow” that tells us that sometimes the best thing that we can do is plunk ourselves down and just plain be:
If I had wings and I could fly
I know where I would go
But right now I’ll just sit here so contentedly
And watch the river flow
Mid-set in “My Own Version of You,” Dylan’s own not entirely tongue-in-cheek take on themes explored in Frankenstein, Island of Dr. Moreau and “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” he confronts us with the unrelentingly and immutably miserable history of “man’s inhumanity to man”:
I can see the history of the whole human race
It’s all right there – its carved into your face
Should I break it all down – should I fall on my knees
Is there light at the end of the tunnel – can you tell me please
Stand over there by the Cypress tree
Where the Trojan women and children were sold into slavery
Long ago before the First Crusade
Way back before England or America were made
Step right into the burning hell
Where some of the best known enemies of mankind dwell
Mister Freud with his dreams and Mister Marx with his axe
See the raw hide lash rip the skin off their backs
You got the right spirit – you can feel it you can hear it
Dylan closes by giving us binary options:
I want to bring someone to life – turn back the years
Do it with laughter – do it with tears
And after “Goodbye Jimmy Reed” thumps the bible and proclaims the creed in this lost land of ours, Dylan ends the whole show with “Every Grain of Sand,” conveying his moving existential reflections on what we confront time and again, inevitably out in the world on our own, during the unpredictable journeys of our lives:
I have gone from rags to riches in the sorrow of the night
In the violence of a summer’s dream, in the chill of a wintry light
In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space
In the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face
I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand
The set simultaneously exhausts and inspires our minds, hearts and souls with its accumulation of the emotions and viewpoints Dylan himself has had during his years as a master song-poet.
The fourteenth song of the seventeen-song set distills the nature of the aloneness we all feel along the paths of our lives. Straight, pithy, no chaser, Dylan croons the B-side of Frank Sinatra’s first single “Melancholy Mood.” His current band fills in superbly for Harry James and his orchestra.
Gone is every joy
And inspiration
Tears are all I have to show
No consolation
All I see is grief and gloom
Till the crack of doom
Oh, melancholy mood
Listen to “Melancholy Mood”, below
It was the highlight of the fall tour for me and it highlighted the soon-to-be-springtime Austin tour date, too. A small, sparkling jewel Dylan put in his own crown three songs before they turned on the lights.
Garrett Bruner
March 17: I don’t go to concerts much. It’s been years since one. And could be years before another.
So I didn’t have much to bring to this. But I thought Dylan and his band were top notch. What Dylan’s doing at his age, I appreciate — it looked like he was enjoying himself. And despite the setting of a concert hall, I thought the band played very warmly, welcoming as if you were visiting a friend’s backyard.
My ear kept keying on each performer’s instrument at times. And Dylan’s voice and lyrics had their effect. The depths he’s able to sing! I’m still thinking about them, reading afterwards the lyrics I heard or had missed. Quieter songs I liked, for example, “Black Rider.”
“My Own Version of You” also had me reflecting. I have nothing conclusive really to say about it. At times I thought it was the song speaking to the songwriter. Maybe if Pygmalion’s wife had her say. The elusiveness still has me going over what it’s saying though.
(I should add I re-read the same books for years, without really knowing what they mean, so it wouldn’t be unusual for these songs to stick with me in the same way).
“I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You” was especially moving. Classic sort of images. Rivers, stars, embodied in the speaker, as traveller, on the move. What was moving about it to me was a vulnerable sense of yielding to someone else. What the traveller misses if there isn’t someone to share experiences with. Similarly, it was good to share this concert with friends here at home in Austin.
March 19: I’m still listening to the songs. This morning listened to all of Rough and Rowdy again. “Mother of Muses” is special, reminiscent of a Pindar ode I love, Olympian 14 (For Asopichus of Orchomenus Boys’ Foot Race ?488 B. C.), one of his compressed invocations, to the Graces. Moving.
March 24: Still listening to Dylan a week later. Never gave him a fair chance before, but he’s won me over since that concert. So, thanks.
I think the best compliment paid to chefs is just if you ask for seconds. I’ve been listening to more and more of Dylan since Wednesday. Thanks Tom, again!
April 2: I’m still somewhat in awe, still absorbing having seen Dylan. What a treasure that evening was! I mean it. I’ve listened to Time out of Mind every day since that concert, and much of Rough and Rowdy Ways, Blonde on Blonde. Anyway. Thanks again!
April 9: Still continuing my odyssey through Bob Dylan’s CDs. Now onto Desire and stunned by the opening track “Hurricane”. Most of all its resonance with the past years of strife following George Floyd’s murder (though the song and Floyd are fifty years apart), the buildup and release of what fury Ronee Blakley’s backing vocals add.
How can the life of such a man
Be in the palm of some fool’s hand
The couplet above (and the conclusion about giving Rubin back the time he’s done) reminded me of the poet Zbigniew Herbert and a line from his poem, From The Top of the Stairs, about those like Rubin Carter who are “hostages of a better future.”
Antonella del-Fattore Olson
Thank you so much Tom! It was an amazing evening.
I will try to find the video in which my sister-in-law, Carla Olson, played with Dylan.
She was in his video 1983 “Sweetheart Like You” pantomime of Mick Taylor guitar https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpRKstHl7Y0 . Then he gave her “Clean Cut Kid” to record in the Textones first album https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvNpmJS63nQ.
Below my reaction to the concert
Seeing Bob Dylan’s concert last night was very emotional to me. I saw him with my late husband Bob at the Erwin Center in Austin, many years ago (1981?). Bob helped me a lot when I wrote my thesis about Dylan, even longer ago (1978). I shared with Bob the magic reality of Dylan’s songs and his magnificent music made particularly special by the wonderful artists who played him. Bob Dylan was as powerful as he has always been.
From Left to Right: Richard Thomas, Lucy Kulzick, Melania Dobson, Andrew Vanek, Tom Palaima, George Walters
Melania Dobson
I really enjoyed the experience of seeing Bob Dylan in concert, and had a much greater appreciation for the performance after taking the course on Bob Dylan. As a whole, you could tell how much respect everyone in the audience had for Dylan and the band; the atmosphere of the audience felt very connected, like a uniting experience that we were all taking part in. This is something felt at other performances, but not to the extent of this show. The performance itself was cohesive, quite seamlessly moving from one song to another, which I really enjoyed, as it allowed for the music to carry the performance along. Which of course makes the set list all the more impressive, as it was able to bring everything together.
Thank you again so much for this opportunity, it gave me so much appreciation for Dylan, his music, and his impact on history, as well as his lasting impact today.
Brandon Eichelberg, commenting on the concert Sunday March 27 in Charleston:
March 28 Just to give you an update on the Dylan concert — It was great! As I said, it was my first time seeing him, which made it all the more enjoyable. He played and sang wonderfully, and I specifically favored “To Be Alone with You” because it was just so interesting hearing an aged Dylan sing one of his younger songs. His whole performance was amazing, but if I had to choose another favorite, it would probably have to be “I Contain Multitudes,” especially since he was smiling throughout most of it. All and all, it was a memorable time!
Anuj Mocherla
It seems that we all got separated on the exit, but just wanted to reach out again and say thank you so much for allowing me to come see Dylan live with you and your students! Dayton has spoken nothing but the highest of praise for your work and the class he took with you and I hope we can meet once more before I graduate this Spring!
Have a great night Professor!
Collin Taylor
I lost you after the show but thank you for the opportunity to see Bob Dylan. I’m still in shock
Andrew Vanek
What was special about the concert was ‘seeing’ Dylan. I greatly admire Shakespeare and Jesus Christ and Homer, but I will never get to see them in my mortal lifetime. That makes seeing Dylan truly exceptional.
I loved the lecture that you organized and helped give at the Union a few years back (University Lecture Series: Bob Dylan: The Next Generation March 21, 2017 with Michael Chaiken, the lamentably late Tom Staley and Caroline Frick https://ugs.utexas.edu/events/uls/spring17-3 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9AClQVnnkVE ) about the Tulsa Dylan Archives.
A major point that resonated with me was how Dylan traveled and kept moving to have inspiration. I remembered that Shakespeare traveled to Italy and all over Europe before he started seriously writing.
Malcolm Gladwell writes about a “crucible” moment that artists and entrepreneurs go through before they produce work of value. I like how these writers’ and musicians’ crucibles were traveling from place to place. Jesus not as much, but you get the picture.
George Walters
Thanks for a night I’ll never forget! I really do appreciate it, Tom! I must say I came away a lot more impressed than I thought I would.
Rachel Williams
Thank you so much for the opportunity to see Bob Dylan! Here are my thoughts after experiencing the concert:
Seeing Dylan in person was truly a special experience, especially as he ages (quite gracefully!) and there are potentially fewer chances to see him perform live in the future.
His voice and presence were spellbinding; it truly did sound like sand and glue as Bowie described. It was one of the best concerts I had ever been to, and I will treasure for the rest of my life that I was able to see one of the greatest musicians of all time in person. I am so grateful to have been able to go, especially after analyzing his works in TC358 (as they related to the Kennedy assassination, people in poverty and landmark injustices in civil rights). It was interesting to hear how his voice captured emotions so precisely.
Socrates Zavitsanos
Thank you so much for the tickets!! Experiencing Dylan live in concert near the front of the venue at Bass was truly unforgettable. I do not know of a single other class at UT that would accommodate students with this kind of rare opportunity. Huge thanks to Bob’s music office as well for reserving the tickets for us in very desirable seating locations. And thank you so much for emailing me and giving me the opportunity to take up on those tickets. Dylan’s performance was truly memorable and the musicians he had alongside him were extremely talented (I was especially amazed by the drummer, Charley Drayton). I’m super glad I could attend and cannot thank you enough. This class was amazing!!
Appendix: Aside comments from two UGS 302 students
Amit Henn
April 5: I want to make sure I produce an awesome presentation this Thursday on “Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.” Again, thank you so much for your constant help and support! I’m looking forward to presenting and expressing my newfound love for Dylan’s musical genius.
Megan H. Adams
April 5: I think you are a really great and compassionate teacher. I always get a lot out of your class and wish that it was in person so that I could listen better. I enjoyed working on that presentation and I now know how powerful the song “Blowin in the Wind” is and I learned a lot of things I never knew. Have a good day. Thank you!
Tom and Richard share Bob Dylan’s Heaven’s Door straight rye whiskey and Tennessee bourbon back home after the show.
Updated on April 10, 2022 by Garrett R. Bruner. garrettbruner@utexas.edu
April 29, 2021
Remembering Denny Freeman
by Tom Palaima
The Old Austin is now officially dead. Denny Freeman did/played it all,
from Bob Wills and Hank Williams on pedal steel behind John Reed at C-Boy’s to Bob Dylan (March 2005-August 2009 for selections from his Dylan period go to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAsLiqUAnlg );
from jazz standards behind jazz trombonist Jon Blondell at the Elephant Room and Hammond B3 organist Mike Flanigin at the Gallery to late 50’s into 60’s r&b and early rock and roll dance music at the Saxon Pub happy hour throughout the 2000-teens;
and behind great bluesmen and women at Antone’s and at the start with Paul Ray and the Cobras and with Stevie Ray Vaughan. He also long toured with Taj Mahal.
He did it with grace, modesty, dedication and a kind of genial seriousness of purpose.
And he did, as one headline proclaimed, make everyone else sound better.
Visitors and even Austinites whom I took to hear Denny in his many manifestations, all say the one time is memorable and they are grateful to have seen and heard him.
Two pieces sent my way from Denny’s friends
This profile is great on Denny. It is written by my friend of twenty years, Brad Buchholz, former feature writer for the Statesman:
This is a marvelous heartfelt interview found and furnished by my friend, Casey Monahan, former head for ca. 25 years of the Governor’s Music Commission, who knows knew everyone, because he set up the state index of musicians and supported/promoted Texas music personally and tirelessly. The interview will clue you in to life for someone coming of age in Texas 1962-70 and some deeply personal experiences we all go through, including how we handle becoming separate from our parents out in the world.
https://www.everyonelovesguitar.com/2021/02/23/d-freeman-interview/ (Links to an external site.)
Recordings of Denny’s music
I have put together in one folder 5 live tracks and one studio version that get across why Denny’s music gave us so much joy and helped us get through our blues and sorrow in whatever rough times we were in.
I hope this works. Let me know if you have any troubles downloading the six files. They’re embedded below, too.
There are some small stutters in these.
They were recorded with an old small voice recorder kind of thing I had back then and then transferred onto computer.
Five Freeman classics live and One Ur-original
-
- Dylan (2005 Manchester) “Million Miles”
- Jazz (2011) 2 versions of “Riders on the Storm” premiere 082611 & 6 wks later 101611 with Mike Flanigin and Frosty Smith at The Gallery
- Version 1:
On the premiere of “Riders on the Storm” you will hear Mike Flanigin at the beginning explaining to Denny some features of the structure of the song they are about to play and at the end Denny asking what song that was that he just played; my boyish voice twice says it’s the world premiere!
- Version 2, 6 weeks later:
The Gallery on Sunday nights second set was pure heaven for the small audience; no one was there ’round midnight who did not want to hear great music. On the 101611 version you can hear Mike explaining there was no cover that night but we were encouraged to fill the tip jar, because “Denny Freeman doesn’t come cheap.”
In fact, no. Denny was and will remain priceless as these bootlegs of mine will attest.
- Version 1:
- Blues/jazz (2012) Denny’s ‘signature’ tune “Soul Street” the original released version from his 1988 album Out of the Blue AND 2 live versions, one with Derek O’Brien at Antone’s and the other with Jon Blondell and Frosty Smith (The Denny Freeman Trio) at The Gallery
- Original version:
- With Derek O’Brien:
- with Jon Blondell:
All my very best wishes. All this above and below helps me not feel so bad. Maybe it will do some good for you, too.
PS Here, too, is an oldie, but goodie from Gavin Garcia’s TODO Austin that recalls a time the late, great Cliff Antone, over my house for a reception, plucked Denny’s music out of the air in mid-conversation. I had thought this was when Michael Gray was visiting, but that was on September 7, 2006 and Cliff passed away on May 23, 2006. And this talks about Denny just having started to play for Bob, which he did from March 7, 2005 through August 2009.
I also thought it was “Million Miles” of which I have given you a magnificent Denny version here. But it actually was “Standing in the Doorway” which Denny played six times with Bob between March and November 2005: 11 March, 25 March, 8 April, 25 April, 21 June, 13 November.
Ain’t it just like your mind to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to make it be still and quiet.
This all captures some of the last gasps of old Austin. I think with Denny’s passing, even memories of old Austin will be gone, or else transform themselves in our imaginations as my mind has gotten two things wrong. But what I got right was Cliff and how he knew Denny’s playing style. And the emotion that student detected in Cliff is the same quiet love of music Denny put across on stage all the time.
TODO Austin 1:5 (October 2009)
“Dr. Antone: The Real Deal”
by Tom Palaima
“You know, if people wanna know why a brother can do down, can get down so much and really do the blues, it’s cause he lived the blues, he lived the blues.”
-James Brown, “Like It Is, Like It Was” 1970
One of the happiest turns in my life was getting to know Clifford Antone personally through our mutual friend Gavin Lance Garcia. We became friends at lunch with Gavin at Hoover’s on Manor Road just after New Year’s Day 2004. I had, of course, seen Clifford at his club at least a hundred times since my first time there in late December 1983, when, in my memory, Cliff had managed to bring in the reclusive jazz-inflected bluesman Fenton Robinson. What made Cliff special, even from a distance, was the respect and courtesy he conveyed in introducing the blues artists who graced his stage and his own child-like happiness in being able to hear them live, close-up and personal, and to give the gift of their music to people like me who were smart enough to realize that a night of music at Antone’s was the best thing Austin had to offer.
I brought to our lunch at Hoover’s a paper I had presented at a Fulbright conference in Austria in November 1992. I had discussed blues and race relations in the United States, which was then a hot topic in circles such as Living Blues magazine. A friend back in the States had gone to the old Antone’s on Guadalupe one afternoon and, with the kind permission of Susan Antone, had taken slide photos of the whole interior and its many memorabilia, so that I could show Austrian students the environment for the music I was playing them: Zuzu Bolin, Herbie Bowser and T.D. Bell, Jimmy Rogers and the Antone’s House Band, master-of-the-telecaster Albert Collins, Junior Wells and James Cotton. Well, talking about all these blues legends was okay twelve years later at Hoover’s, but it was when I mentioned a special set I had heard at Cliff’s club by the great husband and wife team Carol Fran and Clarence Hollimon that Cliff said to Gavin, “The man knows his blues.”
When the bill came, I went to pay. Cliff insisted that he pay. I said I would take $20 from him, but only if he signed it. That bill is now framed on the wall of my office, Andrew Jackson staring over at the big C in Clifford’s signature and the Antone 04. Below in the same frame is Cliff’s business card with Pinetop Perkins’ autograph from the interview I did with Pinetop for anAmerican-Statesman commentary. Cliff had brought Pinetop to Austin and had seen to all of his living arrangements when it became known to him that Pinetop was being taken advantage of by music people up in Indiana.
The Cliff I knew was the real deal. I think that Cliff, like Bob Dylan, heard music all the time. Once we had him to dinner with a small group of aficionados of other kinds of music. I thought it would be nice to put some Antone’s Records cd’s on softly as background.
Impossible. In the middle of a conversation, Cliff would suddenly say, “Listen to what Kaz (Kazanoff) is doing here.” Or his conversation would stop as he was transported away by Kim Wilson playing harp alongside Jimmy Rogers. Most remarkable was this. Denny Freeman had then just started to play with Bob Dylan. I had put on a bootleg which had Bob and his band doing a beautiful, spare, bluesy version of “Standing in the Doorway.” Cliff, again in the middle of talking, said, “Hey, listen to Denny.”
Cliff was the real deal and he respected real music. I remember getting a call from him saying, “The place to be tonight is Jovita’s.” When I got there, Cliff was dreamily taking in the Cornell Hurd Band. And it was Cliff who turned me on to Hard Core Country Tuesday at the Broken Spoke, with James White and Alvin Crow and Johnny X playing genuine country music. Cliff heard the reality in their non-amplified, front-room renditions of Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, and country blues yodeler Jimmy Rodgers.
The place where Cliff’s deep love of blues music, music-makers and people in general really came across was in the course he taught with Kevin Mooney at UT Austin, “The Blues According to Clifford Austin.” I was lucky enough one semester to be able to sit in regularly.
Cliff would walk in with a suitcase full of dvd’s, vhs tapes, cd’s, books and photos and then give as much of it as he could to the students. Enrollment grew from 60 in 2004 to 180 in 2006. As Kevin recalls, “Cliff’s excitement was infectious, as it always was when he showed us an extremely rare film of B.B. King sharing the stage with T-Bone Walker or a video clip of a young Stevie Ray Vaughan taken from his private collection.” Cliff often said: “This film is so great, I can’t even watch it.” I can corroborate what Kevin says, “He liked to answer questions and showed an enormous amount of respect for the students. He would ask them if they had ever heard of a certain musician and often seemed shocked when only a few hands went up, but that reinforced how important it was for him to be there.”
Cliff died just weeks after the spring 2006 semester ended. I remember getting a call from Gavin while at a dinner before a lecture I was giving in New York City. The bad news sucked the life out of me. What one student wrote on his course evaluation sums Cliff up perfectly, “I have never seen someone so passionate about music. He wanted everyone to feel what he felt and he kept everyone interested with the hundreds of stories he had.” He lived the blues.
PPS Denny lived the blues and so much else through music.