Bob Dylan

(KINGSTON, N.Y.) – Bob Dylan, rock poet and Nobel Laureate, will perform with his band at the Hutton Brickyards, a new 3,500-seat riverfront concert venue, on Saturday, June 24, at 8pm (doors 6pm). The concert – a co-presentation of the Bardavon and the Brickyards – will inaugurate the venue at 200 North St., in Kingston.

Tickets to the performance go on sale to Bardavon members on March 23-24 (11am – 5pm). Sales to the general public begin on March 25 at 11am.

Winner of multiple Grammy Awards (including Lifetime Achievement), an Oscar, Golden Globe, Pulitzer Prize, and last year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, Bob Dylan is a Kennedy Center Honoree and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Tickets: $125 and $75 (seated General Admission), $55 (standing).

Tickets can be purchased in person at the Bardavon Box Office, 35 Market Street, Poughkeepsie, 845.473.2072; or in person at the UPAC Box Office, 601 Broadway Kingston, 845.339.6088.

Online at Ticketmaster : 800.745.3000. Please note that Bardavon Member benefits and special discounts are not available through Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster fees will apply.

by Seth Rogovoy

A three-disc studio album from Nobel Prize-winning rock poet Bob Dylan called “Triplicate” will be released by Columbia Records on March 31, 2017, featuring 30 brand-new recordings of classic American tunes from the pre-rock era and marking the first triple-length set of the artist’s illustrious career. While it’s been almost five years since Dylan has released an album of new songs – “Tempest” in September 2012 – and while some – including this writer – may not exactly be jumping up and down with excitement about another Dylan “covers” album of pre-rock pop (following 2015’s “Shadows in the Night” and last year’s “Fallen Angels”), there are some reasons to look forward to the set.

For one, the first single, “I Could Have Told You,” has been released, and Dylan’s voice sounds better than it has than on previous recordings. While there’s still a growl that can be heard at the bottom of his voice, Dylan exercises more control of the melody and keeps the growl mostly at bay. The song was written by Carl Sigman and Jimmy Van Heusen and is most often associated with Frank Sinatra.

Secondly, last year’s concert tour, in which Dylan alternated the pre-rock covers with his own songs, made clear that he is carefully selecting songs and reinterpreting them to show how much of his own work fits logically in the context of early-to-mid 20th century American pop music – what is often called “standards” – mostly written by immigrant Jewish songwriters, for whom Dylan-as-singer clearly has great sympathy.

According to Columbia Records, each disc in the new set will be individually titled and presented in a thematically arranged 10-song sequence. The three themes are: “’Til the Sun Goes Down,” “Devil Dolls,” and “Comin’ Home Late.”

The song titles themselves are very suggestive and indicate that Dylan may be telling a story through them. The final song of the set, “Why Was I Born?” — written by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II and previously recorded mostly be female singers, including Dorothy Lamour, Margaret Whiting, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday — asks the same question that Dylan has asked in several of his own songs (and in interviews) over the course of time.

The set kicks off with Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz’s “I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plans,” written in 1929 right around the beginning of the Great Depression, and recorded variously by Clifton Webb, Fred Astaire, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, and Julie London.

Other songwriters represented include Charles Strouse and Lee Adams (“Once Upon A Time”), Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler (“Stormy Weather”), Harold Hupfield (“As Time Goes By”) and Cy Coleman and Carolyn Leigh (“The Best Is Yet To Come”).

The album is the 38th studio set from Dylan and is credited to the producer Jack Frost, a pseudonym that Bob Dylan has used as producer since the 1990s.

“Triplicate” will be simultaneously released in several configurations, including a 3-CD 8-Panel Digipak, a 3-LP vinyl set and a 3-LP Deluxe Vinyl Limited Edition packaged in a numbered case. “Triplicate”  is also available for pre-order on iTunes, and one of its recordings, “I Could Have Told You,” can now be streamed via a “Vinyl Video” on YouTube. All physical products are also available for pre-order in the bobdylan.com store.

The artist’s two previous albums of classic American songs, last year’s “Fallen Angels: and 2015’s “Shadows in the Night,” were both worldwide hits and garnered Grammy Award nominations in the category of Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album. “Fallen Angels” achieved Top Ten debuts in more than a dozen countries, including the United Kingdom, the United States, Italy, The Netherlands and Austria, while “Shadows in the Night” debuted in the Top 10 in seventeen countries, with #1 debuts in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Sweden and Norway.

Bob Dylan’s seven previous studio albums have been universally hailed as among the best of his storied career, achieving new levels of commercial success and critical acclaim for the artist. The platinum-selling “Time Out of Mind” from 1997 earned multiple Grammy Awards, including Album of the Year, while “Love and Theft” continued Dylan’s platinum streak and earned several Grammy nominations and a statue for Best Contemporary Folk album.

“Modern Times,” released in 2006, became one of the artist’s most popular albums, selling more than 2.5 million copies worldwide and earning Dylan two more Grammys. “Together Through Life” became the artist’s first album to debut at #1 in both the U.S. and the UK, as well as in five other countries, on its way to surpassing sales of one million copies. “Tempest” received unanimous worldwide critical acclaim upon release and reached the Top 5 in 14 countries, while “Shadows in the Night” and “Fallen Angels” were hailed by fans and lauded by critics for Dylan’s singular interpretive artistry.

These seven releases fell within a 19-year creative span that also included the recording of an Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning composition, “Things Have Changed,” from the film “Wonder Boys,” in 2001; a worldwide best-selling memoir, “Chronicles Vol. 1,” which spent 19 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List, in 2004, and a Martin Scorsese-directed documentary, “No Direction Home,” in 2005. Bob Dylan also released his first collection of holiday standards, “Christmas in the Heart,” in 2009, with all of the artist’s royalties from that album being donated to hunger charities around the world.

In December 2016, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature by the Swedish Academy “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.” He was a 2012 recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian honor, and was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for “his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” He was also the recipient of the Officier de la Legion d’honneur in 2013, Sweden’s Polar Music Award in 2000, Doctorates from the University of St. Andrews and Princeton University, as well as numerous other honors.

Bob Dylan has sold more than 125 million records around the world.

by Seth Rogovoy

(LENOX, Mass.) – Consider yourselves warned. When you go to see Bob Dylan perform at Tanglewood on Saturday, July 2, (or at Forest Hills Stadium on July 8, or anywhere during his summer tour), you will be hearing almost no songs you associate with Bob Dylan. In fact, unless you’re a hardcore fan, you may only recognize one or two of the 20 songs he will probably play that night. All together, only four songs – 20 percent of the concert – were originally recorded by Dylan in the 20th century.

(SPOILER ALERT: What follows includes specific discussion of the songs Bob Dylan will likely sing at Tanglewood.)

If the set lists Dylan has been performing for the last couple of months are any indication – and while once upon a time, Dylan shook things up from night to night, these days he seems to be adhering closely to a set list that works for him night after night – the only “famous” Bob Dylan songs he will be playing are “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Tangled Up in Blue.” Those are likely the only two songs the average music fan and casual Bob Dylan fan will know, and even then, they may be delivered in renditions bearing little to no resemblance to the originals or previous versions of the songs.

Here’s an overview of what concertgoers are likely to hear:

Over the course of two sets plus a two-song encore, for a total of 20 songs, fully 1/3 of the songs Dylan will sing are his renditions of pre-rock pop standards typically associated with Frank Sinatra and his ilk, recorded on Dylan’s two most recent albums, “Shadows in the Night” and “Fallen Angels.” Some of these seven songs are “Melancholy Mood,” “All or Nothing at All,” “I’m a Fool to Want You,” “Why Try to Change Me,” and “Autumn Leaves,” which will likely close the second set.

Fully one-quarter – five songs – of the set will be pulled from Dylan’s most recent album of original songs, “Tempest,” recorded in 2012 – interestingly enough, at Jackson Browne’s studio in Santa Monica (Browne just played Tanglewood last week). While “Tempest” garnered critical acclaim and commercial success, with time, much of that praise seems overheated, except perhaps for the song “Pay in Blood,” which Dylan will likely perform at Tanglewood, as well as “Duquesne Whistle,” “Long and Wasted Years,” “Scarlet Town” and “Early Roman Kings.” Those not familiar with “Tempest” who are heading to Saturday’s show may do well to give those songs a good listen to before then.

The concert will feature only two songs Dylan recorded in the 1960s – the aforementioned “Blowin’ in the Wind” (as an encore) and the lesser-known “She Belongs to Me,” whose opening line is often mistaken for the title as well as supplying one of Dylan’s best known catchphrases: “She’s got everything she needs, she’s an artist, she don’t look back.”

“Tangled Up in Blue,” from Dylan’s landmark “Blood on the Tracks” album, is the only song Dylan recorded in the 1970s that he will sing. Notably, Dylan sings no songs from his late 1970s/early 1980s “gospel” albums, nor does he sing anything from his 1989 “comeback” album, “Oh Mercy,” or anything else from that decade, for that matter.

The 1990s are represented by “Love Sick,” from his Grammy Award-winning 1997 comeback album, “Time Out of Mind,” and that’s it. He’ll play four songs from the aughties, including the Academy Award-winning number, “Things Have Changed” (from “Wonder Boys”), and one song each from 2001’s “Love and Theft” (“High Water”), 2006’s “Modern Times” (“Spirit on the Water” and 2009’s “Together Through Life” (“Beyond Here Lies Nothin’”).

There’s hope for hearing some other Bob Dylan songs – Mavis Staples, who warms up the crowd for Dylan, typically sings some of his songs in her sets. But don’t expect any interaction between the two longtime friends and musical collaborators. Dylan doesn’t roll that way.

Also of note: Don’t expect Dylan to play guitar. He will mostly sing with microphone in hand, old-skool style. Maybe he’ll play some harmonica.

And finally – Dylan is wholly unpredictable. Lightning could strike and he could totally rewrite the history of Tour 2016 with an entirely new setlist for Tanglewood. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

Seth Rogovoy is the author of “Bob Dylan: Prophet Mystic Poet” (Scribner, 2009).

(LENOX, Mass.) – According to the unofficial but always reliable Bob Dylan concert website BobLinks, legendary rock poet Bob Dylan will return to Tanglewood on Saturday, July 2 at 7pm, headlining a concert in the Koussevitzky Music Shed also featuring gospel/R&B legend Mavis Staples. The concert will mark the third time Dylan has played Tanglewood, where he made his debut in summer 1991 and performed again in 1997.

The date with Mavis Staples presages a U.S. summer tour by the two, who first met and performed together in the early 1960s when they played Civil Rights gatherings alongside each other. As the story goes, Dylan allegedly asked Staples’s father, Roebuck “Pops” Staples, for her hand in marriage, and was turned down.

Bob Dylan’s recording career began with the release of his eponymous debut album on March 19, 1962. Since that time, he has revolutionized folk music and rock ‘n’ roll, influencing everyone from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones to the Byrds, the Band, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, U2, Wilco, and the late David Bowie.

Dylan will be 75 years old when he performs at Tanglewood. His most recent album, last year’s “Shadows in the Night,” consisted entirely of songs associated with Frank Sinatra, was nominated for a Grammy Award. Dylan is said to have recently returned to Capitol Studios, where the album was recorded, to lay down tracks for a similar, follow-up album.

After decades of infrequent concert tours, Dylan fully committed himself to the road in summer 1988. Since that time, he has consistently played over 100 concert dates a year – more than anyone of his generation – on what has been called the “Never Ending Tour.”

After several albums produced by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, Mavis Staples released “Livin’ on a High Note” just last month. The album, produced by rock songwriter M. Ward, features songs written specifically for Staples by Nick Cave, Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), tUnE-yArds, Neko Case, Aloe Blacc, and others.