Music & More
Meeting House
Route 57
New Marlborough, Mass.
413.229.2785

Bob Dylan Celebration

Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday will be celebrated in words, music, and pictures with a talk and performance by Dylan author Seth Rogovoy and an exhibition of rarely seen photographs by Ken Regan, one of very few photographers given behind-the-scenes access to Dylan since 1966, as part of the Music & More Series at the Meeting House in New Marlborough on Saturday, September 24, at 4:30 p.m.

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.

Bob Dylan in Jerusalem for his son's bar mitzvah

Writing in the Jewish Chronicle, Simon Round reports on Blowing in the Wind: Bob Dylan’s Spiritual Journey, a production that aired on BBC Radio on May 24, 2011, on Dylan’s 70th birthday, and one in which I took part. Round calls it:

a brilliantly put together and thought-provoking radio documentary, presented by Emma Freud, assessing his journey from barmitzvah boy to evangelist Christian, to synagogue attender. It was a story which made perfect sense – and you can’t say this about many aspects of Dylan.

“Bob Dylan turns 70 on May 24. So what? Well, for one, let’s see you continue to perform two-hour concerts 100 nights a year, as you’ve been doing practically nonstop for the past quarter-century or so, all over the world, keeping things new and fresh, while the music industry around you falls apart; your body is battered by so many aches and pains that you can barely hold a guitar, and your singing voice — never the greatest to begin with — is nothing but a hollow shell of what it once was. You’re lucky if you can even spit out the lyrics of songs from throughout your 50-year career in a talking voice, much less even remember them.”  READ MORE….

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.

Robyn Hitchcock at MASS MoCA

CHINESE WHITE BICYCLES

with Robyn Hitchcock and Joe Boyd
Hunter Center
MASS MoCA
North Adams, Mass.
March 12, 2011

Review by Seth Rogovoy

(NORTH ADAMS, Mass., March 12, 2011) – Both Joe Boyd and Robyn Hitchcock have had remarkably storied careers in rock music – the former primarily as a producer (as well as a record label executive and A&R man; an engineer; and a tour manager) and the latter as a cult-icon performer and recording artist. As they made clear in their charming duet program, Chinese White Bicycles, at MASS MoCA’s Hunter Center on Saturday night, Hitchcock’s career in many ways picked up on much of Boyd’s early work (both continue today as active, vital forces in rock), and they served as complementary foils in a combination program of music and storytelling focusing largely on the nascent English psychedelic folk-rock scene in the mid- to late-1960s that Boyd helped engender and from which Hitchcock emerged.

Something of a Zelig-like figure in rock, Boyd assumed the role of storyteller, basing his real-life insider tales on his music industry memoir, White Bicycles. For the purposes of this program, Boyd limited himself largely to the few years leading up to the explosion of English psychedelic folk-rock, most prominently heard in the early work of Pink Floyd. But along the way Boyd worked with such seminal, influential figures as the Incredible String Band, the Move, Nick Drake, and Fairport Convention. With his front-row seat in the establishment of these artists’ careers, Boyd had a wealth of anecdotes into behavioral eccentricities as well as artistic processes, but also was able to offer a unique cultural context and perspective for these artists and those they influenced that occasionally resulted in mind-boggling surprises.

Joe Boyd

For example, in discussing the seminal English folk-rock group Fairport Convention, Boyd argued for a surprising revisionist history: that rather than a collective of English-minded revivalists, the founding members of Fairport, including Simon Nicol, Ashley Hutchings, Martin Lamble, and Richard Thompson, looked to American roots music for inspiration in the same manner of their contemporaries in the American rock group the Byrds and the Band. But according to Boyd, the Band’s debut album, Music from Big Pink, had such a huge impact on the British music scene upon its release, that the members of Fairport recognized that there was no way that they could ever come close to achieving the sort of creative fusion of American roots music and rock ‘n’ roll that the Band pioneered, and so therefore they decided to look in their own backyards for music upon which to build a new sound – hence, the very English folk-rock of Fairport’s album, Liege and Lief.

Even more surprising, however, was Boyd’s passing along a tidbit gleaned from David Hidalgo, a cofounder and co-leader of the Mexican-American rock group Los Lobos. This group has always wore its debt to the Band on its sleeve – as sort of a south-of-the-border equivalent of the Band’s north-of-the-border approach (four-fifths of the Band’s personnel were Canadian).

But according to Boyd, Hidalgo asked him to pass along a message of thanks to Fairport, saying that if it hadn’t been for Liege and Lief – and, presumably, the lessons inherent in that album, that one could draw upon the traditional music of one’s heritage to make for a new and vital folk-fusion – Los Lobos, which initially gained renown precisely by mining its Mexican heritage and combining it with rock ‘n’ roll influences — would forever have been stuck in East Los Angeles playing heavy-metal rock.

It’s a whiplash of a concept – that in fact it took an English folk-rock band, one that arguably no one would have ever connected to Los Lobos – to wake up the group to an approach ostensibly suggested to it by an American ensemble, which would eventually see Los Lobos collaborating with the Band’s singer/drummer Levon Helm on occasion and inheriting the mantle of the Band’s soulful American roots-rock approach based upon tradition.

But before Boyd got anywhere close to Fairport, he spent a good half hour recounting his front-row view of key moments in the very birth of folk-rock in the hands of Bob Dylan himself, as Boyd was present at the Newport Folk Festival of 1965 when Dylan infamously “went electric.” Suffice it to say that Boyd’s version of the oft-told events of that weekend differ greatly in nuance from the conventional story – and his bear the stamp of believability as his story, as are all his anecdotes, are imbued with a true storyteller’s gift of imparting personality. And Boyd truly brought to life the personality of many of the key players at Newport, including Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, Albert Grossman, Peter Yarrow, Bob Dylan – and, as it turns out, Joe Boyd, who was charged by Lomax with turning down the volume on Dylan’s electric set, but who deflected the order (with support by Grossman and Yarrow) with impish humor and cunning.

As Boyd’s musical foil for the evening, Hitchcock, who in addition to being known for his own work with the Soft Boys and the Egyptians as well as for his solo work and for his many collaborations with other artists, has a reputation for being a rock ‘n’ roll encyclopedist, provided brilliant musical illustrations to go along with Boyd’s anecdotes, delivering renditions of songs by Bob Dylan, Nick Drake, Syd Barrett, the Incredible String Band, and the Move that were at once dead-on and accurate yet also simultaneously revealed how these groups influenced his own sound and approach. If the evening was weighted timewise toward Boyd’s lengthy but never draggy stories, Hitchcock’s musical interpolations carried half the impact and half the weight.

The nearly two-hour program went by seamlessly and in a breeze, and a listener was left marveling at the charm and skill of both storyteller and performer, and wondering how many other stories and musical periods they might highlight in future such programs, Boyd’s career also including key roles with R.E.M., 10,000 Maniacs, Billy Bragg, Toots and the Maytals, as well as a surprising number of world music artists.

This review only touches on a few of the terrific tales that Boyd imparted about the artists. There were plenty of jokes, quirky anecdotes, fun give-and-take between Boyd and Hitchcock, and a mind-blowing story involving the Incredible String Band, Boyd’s greatest commercial success, which had as a punch line none other than Scientology – and this before the decade changed from 1969 to 1970. It was as apt a metaphor of several of the others Boyd and Hitchock proposed for the generational and cultural change that divided those decades, another being the difference between marijuana and cocaine, and the more poignant one being the lost spirit of the music itself as it became a commodity sold by corporations – and not something that grew organically out of the many London nightclubs that peppered Boyd’s tales and a scene and bands that were nurtured by unique, visionary figures like Brian Epstein (the Beatles), Andrew Loog Oldham (the Rolling Stones), Peter Rudge (the Who), Peter Grant (Led Zeppelin) …. and Joe Boyd.

Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living’s editor-in-chief and award-winning music critic.

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