News Analysis India

Tag: Bob Dylan

  • ‘Fastest girl drummer in the world’ on Dylan’s book cover

    By Online Desk

    Viola Smith, or ‘Female Elvis’ to her fans, reportedly appears on the front cover of Bob Dylan’s new book, an essay collection.

    Described as the ‘Fastest Girl Drummer in the World’, she died in California at the age of 107 in 2020.

    Viola Smith was reportedly not only an excellent drummer, but also ‘a high-profile advocate for female musicians and a trailblazer as one of America’s first professional female drummers.’

    Among the many female Elvis Presleys there was only one who took the role literally. She slicked back her hair and styled it to give the effect of sideburns. She wore a low-slung guitar and became known for her uninhibited gyrations. And she assumed the stage name Alis Lesley so that only a couple of consonants separated her from the king.

    “I’m not aware of anyone who stuck to the ‘female Elvis’ bit quite like Alis Lesley,” Leah Branstetter, a musicologist specialising in women in the first wave of rock’n’roll, has been quoted as saying by The Guardian.

    According to the British daily newspaper, Viola Smith’s music career was short-lived. In 1959, at the age of 21, she left rock’n’roll behind. In the decades since, she has reportedly given just one interview. But, this year, Lesley was unexpectedly thrust back into the spotlight when she was revealed as the figure between Little Richard and Eddie Cochran on the cover of Bob Dylan’s new book, his first since 2004’s Chronicles: Volume One. Due in November, The Philosophy of Modern Song comprises 60 essays by Dylan on songs by other artists. The press release states that the book’s images have been “carefully curated”, inviting speculation as to why such an obscure artist as Lesley should have been chosen for the cover. Dylan, naturally, hasn’t commented.

    Viola Smith, or ‘Female Elvis’ to her fans, reportedly appears on the front cover of Bob Dylan’s new book, an essay collection.

    Described as the ‘Fastest Girl Drummer in the World’, she died in California at the age of 107 in 2020.

    Viola Smith was reportedly not only an excellent drummer, but also ‘a high-profile advocate for female musicians and a trailblazer as one of America’s first professional female drummers.’

    Among the many female Elvis Presleys there was only one who took the role literally. She slicked back her hair and styled it to give the effect of sideburns. She wore a low-slung guitar and became known for her uninhibited gyrations. And she assumed the stage name Alis Lesley so that only a couple of consonants separated her from the king.

    “I’m not aware of anyone who stuck to the ‘female Elvis’ bit quite like Alis Lesley,” Leah Branstetter, a musicologist specialising in women in the first wave of rock’n’roll, has been quoted as saying by The Guardian.

    According to the British daily newspaper, Viola Smith’s music career was short-lived. In 1959, at the age of 21, she left rock’n’roll behind. In the decades since, she has reportedly given just one interview. But, this year, Lesley was unexpectedly thrust back into the spotlight when she was revealed as the figure between Little Richard and Eddie Cochran on the cover of Bob Dylan’s new book, his first since 2004’s Chronicles: Volume One. Due in November, The Philosophy of Modern Song comprises 60 essays by Dylan on songs by other artists. The press release states that the book’s images have been “carefully curated”, inviting speculation as to why such an obscure artist as Lesley should have been chosen for the cover. Dylan, naturally, hasn’t commented.

  • Bob Dylan museum opening in USA’s Tulsa, celebrating the Nobel laureate’s work

    By Associated Press

    NEW YORK: Elvis Costello, Patti Smith and Mavis Staples will be among the dignitaries expected in Tulsa, Oklahoma, this weekend for the opening of the Bob Dylan Centre, the museum and archive celebrating the Nobel laureate’s work.

    Dylan himself won’t be among them, unless he surprises everyone.

    The centre’s subject and namesake has an open invitation to come anytime, although his absence seems perfectly in character, said Steven Jenkins, the centre’s director. Oddly, Dylan was just in Tulsa three weeks ago for a date on his concert tour, sandwiched in between Oklahoma City and Little Rock. He didn’t ask for a look around.

    “I don’t want to put words in his mouth,” Jenkins said. “I can only guess at his reasoning. Maybe he would find it embarrassing.”

    It’s certainly unusual for a living figure — Dylan is due to turn 81 on May 24 — to have a museum devoted to him, but such is the shadow he has cast over popular music since his emergence in the early 1960s. He’s still working, performing onstage in a show devoted primarily to his most recent material.

    And he’s still pushing the envelope. “Murder Most Foul,” Dylan’s nearly 17-minute rumination on the Kennedy assassination and celebrity, is as quietly stunning as “Like a Rolling Stone” was nearly a half-century ago, even if he’s no longer at the centre of popular culture.

    The centre offers an immersive film experience, a performance space, a studio where visitors can play producer and “mix” different elements of instrumentation in Dylan’s songs and a curated tour where people can take a musical journey through the stages of his career. The archive has more than 100,000 items, many accessed only by scholars through appointment.

    Museum creators said they wanted to build an experience both for casual visitors who might not know much of Dylan’s work and for the truly fanatical — the skimmers, the swimmers and the divers, said designer Alan Maskin of the firm Olson Kundig.

    The museum hopes to celebrate the creative process in general, and at opening will have an exhibit of the work of photographer Jerry Schatzberg, whose 1965 image of Dylan is emblazoned on the building’s three-story facade.

    Since Dylan’s still creating, “we’re going to continue to play catch-up” with him, Jenkins said.

    So for a figure who was born and raised in Minnesota, came of musical age in New York and now lives in California, how does a museum devoted to his life’s work end up in Oklahoma?

    He’s never seemed the nostalgic type, but Dylan recognized early that his work could have historical interest and value, Jenkins said. Together with his team, he put aside boxes full of artifacts, including photos, rare recordings and handwritten lyrics that show how his songs went through revisions and rewrites.

    With use of those lyrics, two of the early displays will focus on how the songs “Jokerman” and “Tangled Up in Blue” took shape — the latter with lyrics so elastic that Dylan was still changing verses after the song had been released.

    Dylan sold his archive in 2016 to the Tulsa-based George Kaiser Family Foundation, which also operates the Woody Guthrie Center — a museum that celebrates one of Dylan’s musical heroes and is only steps away from the new Dylan centre.

    Dylan likes the Guthrie museum, and also appreciates Tulsa’s rich holdings of Native American art, Jenkins said. Much of that is on display at another new facility, the Gilcrease Museum, which is also the world’s largest holding of art of the American West.

    “I think it’s going to be a true tourist draw to Tulsa for all the right reasons,” said Tulsa Mayor G. T. Bynum. “This is one of the great musicians in the history of humankind and everyone who wants to study his career and see the evolution of his talent will be drawn to it.”

    Bynum hopes that it also encourages others who may someday want to put their archives on display, and make Tulsa a centre for the study of modern American music.

    Dylan designed and built a 16-foot high metal sculpture that will be displayed at the entrance to the museum. Otherwise, he had nothing to do with the museum’s design and declined, through a spokesman, to offer a comment about the opening.

    “If Bob were telling us what we could or couldn’t do, it would have felt like a vanity project, in a way,” Maskin said. “It was a tremendous relief not to have to satisfy Bob Dylan.”

    Still, it’s safe to assume the lines of communication are open if necessary: Jenkins, the centre’s director, is the brother of Larry Jenkins, Dylan’s long-time media representative.

    In addition to a dinner to celebrate the opening this weekend, Costello, Smith and Staples will all perform separate concerts at Cain’s Ballroom. Costello was asked to program a jukebox that will be on display at the museum and, within a day, submitted his suggestions for 160 Dylan songs and covers, Steven Jenkins said.

    The Bob Dylan Center is open to the public on May 10.

    Maskin has no expectation that Dylan will ever see the designer’s work. Still, he indulges himself in a fantasy of a slow summer day, a security guard dozing in the corner, and someone slipping in wearing black jeans, sunglasses and a familiar mop of hair to wander among the displays.

    “To be honest, I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he said. “I think he’s interested in the work he’s doing, and not the work he’s done.”

    The Bob Dylan Center is open to the public on May 10.

    Maskin has no expectation that Dylan will ever see the designer’s work. Still, he indulges himself in a fantasy of a slow summer day, a security guard dozing in the corner, and someone slipping in wearing black jeans, sunglasses and a familiar mop of hair to wander among the displays.

    “To be honest, I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he said. “I think he’s interested in the work he’s doing, and not the work he’s done.”

  • Bob Dylan accused of sexually abusing a 12-year-old in 1965, Nobel laureate dismisses it as ‘untrue’

    By PTI

    LOS ANGELES: Legendary singer-songwriter Bob Dylan has been sued by a woman who claims he sexually abused her in 1965 when she was 12, an allegation the Nobel Prize winner has called “untrue.”

    The lawsuit filed last week on behalf of JC, now a 68-year-old woman living in Greenwich, Connecticut, alleges that Dylan, then 23 or 24-year-old, exploited his status as a musician to provide (the plaintiff) “with alcohol and drugs and sexually abuse her multiple times.”

    A spokesperson for Dylan, now 80, said the “the 56-year-old claim is untrue and will be vigorously defended.”

    According to Deadline, in the papers filed at the New York Supreme Court under the state’s Child Victims Act, JC said the abuse took place at Dylan’s apartment in New York’s Chelsea Hotel for over a six-week period from April-May 1965.

    As per the complaint, JC claims that Dylan established a “connection” with her to “lower her inhibitions with the object of sexually abusing her, which he did, coupled with the provision of drugs, alcohol and threats of physical violence, leaving her emotionally scarred and psychologically damaged to this day”.

    The lawsuit cites causes including assault, battery false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress, and seeks compensatory, punitive and exemplary damages.

    Dylan, whose real name is Robert Allen Zimmerman, was already a popular name in the New York music scene during 1960s, performing and writing songs that gave voice to the anti-war and Civil Rights movements.

    Since then he has been honoured with multiple Grammys, the US Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  • Bob Dylan sued for allegedly sexually abusing 12-year-old girl in 1965

    By ANI

    WASHINGTON: American singer Bob Dylan has been sued by a woman who claims that the singer allegedly sexually abused her in 1965 when she was 12-years-old.

    As per the legal documents obtained by Variety, the woman who is identified only as J.C. in the complaint stated that the singer allegedly groomed her for sex and sexually abused her in his New York City pad back in 1965 when she was underage.

    The suit further alleges that Dylan gave her drugs and alcohol, and established an emotional connection that allowed him to sexually abuse her for a period of several weeks.

    The woman had also claimed that she was abused multiple times over a six-week period from April to May 1965. Dylan allegedly used threats of physical violence, “leaving her emotionally scarred and psychologically damaged to this day.” The abuse is alleged to have occurred at the Hotel Chelsea in New York.

    As per Variety, the suit filed by attorneys Daniel Isaacs and Peter Gleason allege claims of “assault, battery, false imprisonment and intentional infliction of emotional distress.”

    Variety reported that the woman had filed suit under the New York’s Child Victims Act, “the 2019 law that opened a two-year period during which the ordinary statute of limitations was suspended for claims of child sexual abuse. The deadline to file such a suit fell on Saturday, and the suit against Dylan was filed on Friday night.”

    The ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ singer’s spokesman in a statement said that, “The 56-year-old claim is untrue and will be vigorously defended.”

    On a related note, several other high-profile complaints relating to the same cause were filed recently, including one against comedian Horatio Sanz and another against Nicki Minaj and her husband.