It seems hard to believe now both as to the performer as well as to what was being attempted that anyone would take umbrage at a performer using an electric guitar to tell a folk story (or any story for that matter). It is not necessary to go into all the details of what or what did not happen with Pete Seeger at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 to know that one should be glad, glad as hell, that Bob Dylan continued to listen to his own drummer and carry on a career based on electronic music.Others have, endlessly, gone on about Bob Dylan's role as the voice of his generation (and mine), his lyrics and what they do or do not mean and his place in the rock or folk pantheons, or both. I just want to comment on a couple of songs here. Obviously, no one will ever really unravel what the meaning of Subterranean Homesick Blues is about except that it has produced one of the most famous lines of the 1960's- `you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows' (although if the truth be known you do) that I am fond of using anytime I get a change to use it as a political cutting edge. Love Minus Zero No Limit is one of the great modern love songs that will along with a few others define what love, longing and companionship meant for our generation ('my love is like some raven at my window with a broken wing' says more above love than half the sonnets every written). Needless to say Gates of Eden is the modern equivalent of John Milton's Paradise Lost (and I do not mean to use that praise hyperbolically). If Milton was explaining the ways of god to man in the aftermath of the defeat of the English Revolution then Dylan was attempting to give his take on the eternal verities for modern times.
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