Rogovoy, an award-winning music critic, will present a multimedia program based on his book, Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet, followed by a Dylan tribute concert with his band, the Rolling Rogovoy Revue.

Immediately following the concert is a reception in the Meeting House Art Gallery with photographer Ken Regan, who has photographed Dylan over the course of three decades – including the fateful day in 1975 that Dylan and company spent at the Dream Away Lodge in Becket, Mass., with Joan Baez, Arlo Guthrie, and others. That year, Regan also toured with the Rolling Stones, and the next year he was on hand to shoot The Band’s farewell concert, The Last Waltz. Regan also shot George Harrison’s landmark charity benefit, Concert for Bangladesh, for which Bob Dylan came out of seclusion to perform. He worked closely with renowned concert promoter Bill Graham, and he was the main photographer for such historic rock events as Amnesty International, Live Aid, and others.

Regan has over 200 magazine covers to his credit; has worked in film and TV; has been a photojournalist specializing in politics (with a longstanding relationship with the Kennedy family) and war (including Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Bosnia and Iraq), and has documented famine in Africa, poverty in Harlem, and gold mining in Brazil. He also specialized early on in sports photography, particularly boxing.

Rogovoy’s multimedia program will include a combination of spoken word, digital imagery, recorded and live music, and rare video footage, all based around Rogovoy’s critically acclaimed biography, which examines Dylan’s life and work from a unique perspective. Of the numerous books written about the rock poet, Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet is the only full-length treatment that explores the deep and profound Jewish context and roots of Dylan’s life and songs.

Following the exploration of Dylan’s life, Rogovoy — switching roles to that of singer, guitarist and mouth harpist – will be joined onstage by his Rolling Rogovoy Revue bandmates Alicia Jo Rabins (fiddler and vocals), Rob Sanzone (guitar and vocals) and Miles Lally (bass). Their performance will feature a mix of Dylan’s greatest hits and some lesser-known songs, including ones from his 1976 album Desire, which is sometimes called his “Hebraic” album, and others that fit with the theme of the program, such as “I Shall Be Released.”

Rabins is internationally known as the leader of her indie-rock band, Girls in Trouble, and as a member of the Yiddish/klezmer ensemble, Golem, and a founding member of the trad-rad folk group, The Mammals.

Bob Dylan has enjoyed a five-decade-long career that’s produced more than 500 songs, 50-plus albums, and over 50 million albums sold. Dylan, who this year turned 70, has won many awards, including Grammy, Golden Globe and Academy Awards, and in 2008, the Pulitzer Price jury awarded him a special citation for “his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.”

“I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan religiously (pun intended) since I was 14 years old,” Rogovoy said. “I was struck by the raw honesty of his singing, the directness of his lyrics, and the beauty of the music.

“At some point I began noticing that there were a lot of Jewish references in his songs – concepts, images, actual phrases quoted or paraphrased from Jewish liturgy, from the Bible and the Talmud. I began keeping track, taking notes, and eventually I realized I had enough material in terms of the content of his songs and his biography to tell a story about Bob Dylan that no one else had ever captured — that his life and work fits into the Prophetic tradition.”

To complete the celebration, the Meeting House Art Gallery will simultaneously exhibit a series of photographs by Ken Regan, one of the few people to ever hold the title of “official Bob Dylan photographer.” Regan, a well-known photojournalist who captured everyone from Muhammad Ali to the Kennedys, took some of the most iconic photographs of Dylan’s live performances in history. Moreover, Regan had unrivaled behind-the-scenes access, which allows rare glimpses into the personal life of the fascinating and notoriously-private musician. The exhibit runs from September 24 through October 2 (weekends only).

Tickets to the Bob Dylan Celebration cost $25/$20. Students with ID and children with parents are admitted for free.

Visit Music & More or call 413.229.2785 for tickets, discounts and information.

Enjoy a 10% discount for a post-concert dinner at the historic Old Inn on the Green (rated “Best in the Berkshires” by Zagat) just next door. Call 413.229.7924 for reservations, which are required.

About Music & More

Directed by Harold Lewin and in its 20th year, Music and More was founded with the goal of bringing a diverse and distinguished group of authors, musicians and films to the Berkshires. This year, Music and More is comprised of eight events at the historic Meeting House in New Marlborough, Mass. Visit Music & More or call 413.229.2785 for further information. Music & More is sponsored by the New Marlborough Village Association.

Club Helsinki Hudson
405 Columbia St.
Hudson, N.Y.
518.828.4800
The Kabbalah of Bob Dylan
Multimedia performance with live music and booksigning

Through spoken word, digital imagery, recorded music, live music, and rare video footage, Seth Rogovoy — author of “Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet” – will explore the Jewish Prophetic roots of and influences upon Bob Dylan’s life and music.

Immediately following the presentation, Seth Rogovoy and band will perform a 70th birthday tribute concert to Bob Dylan. Following the concert, there will be a booksigning courtesy of Spotty Dog Books & Ale of Hudson, N.Y.

This event is part of Club Helsinki Hudson‘s multi-evening celebration of Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday, which continues on the actual birthdate, Tues, May 24, at 7, with “Forever Young: A 70th Birthday Tribute to Bob Dylan,” in which Seth Rogovoy will also perform.

Stockbridge Library
46 Main St.
Stockbridge, Mass.
413.298.5501

The Kabbalah of Bob Dylan
Multimedia performance with live music and booksigning

Through spoken word, digital imagery, recorded music, live music, and rare video footage, Seth Rogovoy — author of “Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet” –will explore the Jewish Prophetic roots of and influences upon Bob Dylan’s life and music. This event is FREE; there will be a Q&A and a booksigning immediately following the presentation. Stockbridge Library; Sun Feb 13; 5:30 p.m.

POST NEW YEAR’S EVE/POST-LIMMUD CONCERT

A New Years Night concert and gathering to revive and inspire you forwards into 2011, featuring Roi Levi, founder-singer-songwriter of legendary Israeli band Shotei Hanevua!

When Shabbat goes out on New Years Day we’ll get going with an interactive multimedia talk and performance from Seth Rogovoy, revealing the prophetic roots of and influence on the music of Bob Dylan.

Then Roi will take to the stage with Danny Raphael, playing music from their collaborative project Eser, as well as hits from Shotei Hanevua.

Warning: this event will leave you feeling far too good for a New Years Day and is likely to end in a glorious, smile-inducing jam session!

Recommended donation, towards artists’ fees: £5+

Please also bring food and drink to share as we see out Shabbat
Moishe House
Willesden Green
London, UK

BOB DYLAN TRIBUTE CONCERT
Featuring Seth Rogovoy

Review by Seth Rogovoy

(AMHERST, Mass., November 19, 2010) – Bob Dylan is seemingly unstoppable. Merely a half-year away from his 70th birthday, he shows no sign of slowing down, still performing approximately 100 concerts per year as he has for the last two decades-plus. No one at his age or level of achievement has kept up a record such as this – he has truly become the Lou Gehrig of rock ‘n’ roll, as well as the voice of a generation and a prophet, mystic, and poet —  yadda yadda yadda.

Even with hardly any singing voice left, as was the case at the Mullins Center on Friday night, Dylan has found a way to command a stage for two hours and keep an audience enthralled through his enigmatic charisma (or is it some formula of anti-charisma?), his remarkable body of songs from which to draw, and his mercurial, ever-changing musical arrangements, all of which he employs to find new meaning and immediacy in songs five, ten, twenty, thirty-five and in a few cases nearly fifty years old.

After steering his band and music toward some timeless blend of pre-rock, blues, folk, country, and early rock influences over the past 15 years of concerts in some seeming pursuit of a quintessential Americana roots sound, Dylan seems to have dispensed with much of it this time around in favor of a more unified, coherent aesthetic – a dark, noirish, spooky, almost Halloweenish style — that recontextualizes much of his work, putting it solidly in the prophetic mode that lends ballast to oft-sung lines from songs like “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,” so that instead of sinking under the weight of its own legacy, it builds to a stupendous climax that sent a visceral wave of emotion through the crowd when he sang at the end:

And I’ll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it

And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it

Then I’ll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin’

But I’ll know my song well before I start singin’

Indeed, this is exactly what he was doing, aided by his terrific band that, unlike in the past when it was employed to barrel through numbers with bluesy bluster and bravado, favored the subtle, minimalist touches that allowed every small phrase to count for even more. This approach was particularly effective in the hands of lead guitarist Charlie Sexton, who returned recently to Dylan’s band after more than a half-decade hiatus. Here, Sexton lent functional rhythm and harmonics to the songs, only adding about one phrase or riff per number for color or variation. But oh, when he played those phrases, they spoke nearly with as much power and glory as Dylan’s vocals. Which of course is how it’s supposed to be.
Working with a severerly constrained voice, Dylan himself used every tool and technique at his disposal to overcome those limitations and still get his message across. He did this through new, unique, or odd phrasing; through biting off lyrics or only pressing down on the key words of a phrase; through channeling the pure emotion – humor, rage, what have you – of a particular word, line, or song; and of course, through his musicianship.
Whereas for much of the past decade Dylan confined himself to behind his keyboards, this time out Dylan mixed things up throughout the evening, bouncing around from his organ (which, for the first time this reviewer ever noticed, could actually be heard – and what we heard was evocative playing that formed a latticework not unlike that of Al Kooper’s signature riffs on Dylan’s mid-1960s albums but more importantly, added to the haunting, post-blues quality of the arrangements) to his guitar front and center – including several well-played lead figures as well as chunky, loud, rhythmic riffs; and perhaps most surprisingly, singing several numbers crooner-style, into a hand-held mike, replete with gestures of his free hand and occasional recourse to a mouth harp.  (For the full effect, view this wonderful video of the terrific stop-start arrangement, so typical of the overall approach of the evening, of the fan favorite, “Tangled Up in Blue.”
After years of relying heavily on pretty standard 12- and 16-bar blues arrangements for many of his songs (especially on recent recordings), even songs originally written in the country, rock or folk veins, Dylan has finally found his way to a kind of post-blues style all his own – a distant cousin of his mid-1960s metallic rock sound, but much darker and ominous. It still has blues DNA, but it’s all twisted and bent, forged with rockabilly more than the jump blues and swing styles he also favored in the early aughts, for an end result that sounds like something Quentin Tarantino might choose for his next soundtrack.
Even the stage setup seemed shaped to emphasize the darkness verging on claustrophobia; the dark gray drapery forming a room within which the band performed, and the back scrim serving as a screen for subtle projections – mostly vintage photographs of European arcades and such, but also the first introduction of live video of Dylan and his band – again, subtly, not like any Jumbotron, and very much in keeping with the flavor of the show.

Half of the songs from Dylan’s 16-song setlist were from his last four albums; the other half drawn from the early- to mid-1960s, a couple from the 1970s (including the funky, rocking opener, “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking”), and one from the late 1980s. All of the songs were in some way political and prophetic – “Thunder on the Mountain” evoking the sound and light show that greeted the Israelites when Moses ascended Mount Sinai (a metaphor, really, for a Bob Dylan concert); “Ballad of a Thin Man” no longer merely castigating a clueless chronicler or journalist, but rather an assembled crowd of Mr. Joneses (yes, each and every one of us) who have no idea what is happening here (or else, for example, how could we stand by and let our nation be taken over by wingnuts?).

Dylan sang of the disappointment of being a prophet without honor in “Honest With Me” (“Well I came ashore in the dead of the night/ Lot of things can get in the way when you’re tryin’ to do what’s right/ You don’t understand it — my feelings for you/ You’d be honest with me if only you knew”) and of the sense that judgment day has already begun in “Can’t Wait” (“It’s way past midnight and there are people all around/ Some on their way up, some on their way down/ The air burns and I’m trying to think straight/ And I don’t know how much longer I can wait.”) After he sang about his prophetic mission in the aforementioned “Hard Rain,” he retold the Biblical story of Abraham’s devotion to G-d in “Highway 61 Revisited,” which, like “Tangled Up in Blue,” built to a stunning crescendo that was as scary and chilling as it was dramatic and exciting.

That Dylan can still conjure up these sorts of moments and sustain this sort of mood night after night, over the course of two-hour long concerts, playing before multigenerational audiences and affecting new or casual listeners equally as well as hardened, nearly jaded loyalists, is just more to his credit. There is simply nothing else like a Bob Dylan concert, no one else like Bob Dylan. He truly is in a league of his own. The only league in which the beginning of the end of time, in Dylan’s words, is “mighty funny.” And the only league in which the singer, the player, the bandleader, is truly “like a rolling stone,” gathering no moss into his eighth decade.

Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s editor-in-chief and award-winning music critic, and the author of Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet.

In fact last weekend may have been the very first time I even saw it from the outside.  I immediately walked inside and booked a reservation for a few nights beginning tomorrow (Sunday, Nov 13), as I need to be in New York City anyway on Monday night.

Needless to say, I’m very excited about my trip to New York and my stay at the Chelsea. I don’t plan to do much more while I’m there than soak in the atmosphere inside the hotel and outside in the immediate neighborhood, which I’ve never really explored (my travels simply have never led me to that part of Manhattan).

I’m bringing my camera and laptop, of course, and I hope to post regular updates and photos in the form of this Chelsea Hotel diary.

If you are in New York City and are going to be around, please let me know, and maybe we can hang out there together and talk Dylan.

University of Rochester

Multimedia program with live music and booksigning

Evening, place and time TBA