Like a Rolling Stone

by time news

2023-06-02 22:48:44

People remember where they were when Kennedy was killed, but how many people remember where they were when they first heard Bob Dylan? This same question is asked by a friend of Greil Marcus at the beginning of his book on Like a Rolling StoneDylan’s song that came to connect with the spirit of an era.

The book has been published by Libros del Kultrum with a translation by Mario Santana and is the biography of a legendary song that Jimi Hendrix would make immortal at the Monterrey festival in full hippie effervescence, when the doors of perception opened to the smoke of the herb recently smoked and the world wore a diadem of Californian flowers.

The day Kennedy was killed I was not yet born. But I do remember the day John Lennon was killed, because I was dunking some cookies in my coffee for breakfast and my mother had the radio on, the transistor as she called it, on top of the fridge. And they broke the news. I can also remember the first time I heard Bob Dylan; It was in my father’s car, a white Citroën Dyane 6 convertible that had a sticker of the hippie symbol on the rear window with the slogan: Make love not war. My old man always had a certain counterculture trend, that’s why that summer he gave us a trip to the beach listening to the Desire, Bob Dylan’s last album until then.

At first, Bob Dylan seemed a little tired to me with that voice that sang as if he had a constipation. My sister and I wanted to listen to the tape of TV clowns, but my old man like no fucking case. When we got to the beach, I already knew all the songs by heart, I even liked two of them: Hurricane y One More Cup of Coffeethe latter sung as a duet with the whispering voice of Emmylou Harris, who also did background vocals on other songs on the album.

Years later, when I started to study English, I did it with a dictionary, and the song Hurricane Dylan’s was the first one I translated. I realized the literary value of him. Dylan was a storyteller who started Hurricane with the shots in the bar that night and the corpse of the waiter lying in a pool of blood; a triple homicide of which Rubin is accused Hurricane Carter, the boxer who eats brown for being black.

A story based on true events that Dylan interprets with the rage of someone who writes a black Time.news without concessions. That was the first one I translated, as I said, then the others arrived, including Like a Rolling Stone, the story of a girl who lost everything and ended up living the street, and with whom Jimi Hendrix fell in love because he was also another loose cannon. Hey babe…would you like to make a deal? Hendrix sings to him, between laughs, returning the double meaning to his street proposal; a song that begins with the “once upon a time” of the stories, when she dressed very elegant.

“The first time I heard Bob Dylan I felt this drumbeat that sounded like someone kicked open the door of your mind,” Springsteen said during Dylan’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I didn’t get that far, but over time, and thanks to Dylan, I realized that you could sing other songs whose lyrics weren’t the usual ones. Lyrics that influenced the spirit of the time so much that they even transformed it.

Now I read the biography of the song Like a Rolling Stone written by Greil Marcus, the wittiest music journalist of our time. I read it at the same time that I listen to Shadow Kingdom, Dylan’s latest album recently released by Sony, an album of 14 tracks that are the same as the documentary film with the singer-songwriter directed by the Israeli-American filmmaker Alma Har’el. An appetizer of what is to come when Dylan appears in our country, in a few days.

#Rolling #Stone

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