Part 1 - Shuffle Synchronicities Podscript 🎙📇 with Ray Padgett
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Let’s start it off with
who is perhaps one of the most historically famous Dylanologists. Though our podscripts' guest 's Substack is currently more widely subscribed (LOL though Greil just started his Substack last month).
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Previously…
The Preamble introduced the Podscript🎙📇
Don’t want to wait for all the Podscript posts to be emailed?
The audio of the full Podcast is already available to listen to here:
Otherwise…
Part 1 of The Shuffle Synchronicities Podscript 🎙📇 with Ray Padgett
begins now!
Introducing Ray Padgett
Dave
What I did with Kiana is I just, recorded it, made an edit, sent it to her, to see if she had any feedback. And you're welcome to do the same, anything you want in or out. But yeah. How are you doing?
Ray
I'm good. I can’t, I'm sure I won't, well, if I have any feedback, I'll let you know, I probably won't. Partly because I cannot stand, I'm like one of those interviewers that when I have to transcribe, I mute myself when I'm talking because I hate listening to myself talking so much. So the idea of re-listening to this, to give notes on it? Gives me incredible anxiety. So I’m almost certainly not gonna do it.
Ray/Dave
<laugh>/<laugh> OK.
Dave
So we’ll just jump into it! I guess, I didn't write a formal introduction for you. Before I started <laugh> I'll have to maybe loop that in myself on my own. But I'll try one now. And we’ll see what I can do here … All right. So we're here with the second Shuffle Synchronicities podcast. And Ray was also the second guest poster, of the regular guest posting on Shuffle Synchronicities. And he was the first guest poster who really actually, like, did it the right way <laugh> No offense to the first person who was also brilliant in their own way. But, you know, Ray stuck to the script and he shuffled and he ended up with a song from Bob Dylan’s Christian era, which hit pretty hard for me. Because that was also really important to me then, as we'll get into later in the podcast.
Dave
But, yeah, so Ray runs a Bob Dylan Substack that is a [like] top 10 Substack [in the paid music category], for most of Substack’s existence, it seems like, which is pretty amazing.
Dave
He then moved on to a Tom Waits Substack as well, where, the Bob Dylan one is live concerts, and the Tom Waits one is Every Tom Waits Song, which is a lot of them.
Dave
And he's also really well-known for writing about cover songs. He had a, he has, a long-running blog about [covers[, that’s called: Cover Me.
Dave
And I've also checked out some of his books. He turned Cover Me into a book about cover songs, where you learn a lot about the history of cover songs and how that all came [about].
Dave
And recently he did a book about Leonard Cohen with 33 and ⅓. And 33 and ⅓ [a series of books each about a single music album] are something that I've always wanted to write one of my own of. And I loved growing up.
Dave
So to have someone like that be part of my growth as a writer and music writer is a real treat. So, thank you, Ray. Thank you Ray for joining us.
Ray
What an intro! Thanks for having me!
Dave
<laugh>
Ray and Dave kinda almost did what together?!
Dave
Um, so one of the things that we overlap on, too is, like, this year, Bob Dylan was on tour again, and I hadn't seen him since I was much younger. And I wanted to go. So I got tickets. And it was in June. I emailed you because I didn't know who to go with. I was like, I wanna go with Ray. Like, Ray travels and goes sees these shows. Like, who better to see, you know, a live Dylan concert with, then, like, the expert right now in the <laugh> history of Live Dylan. So I emailed Ray and…
Ray
Sadly on the wrong side of the country. I do travel some. But, uh, can't make all of them. You're in LA. I'm in Vermont. So, couldn't get out west.
Dave
Yeah. And then when I was trying to bring people. A lot of people were just like, I don't wanna see Dylan. Like he's, I've heard he’s so bad. Or, like, the last time I saw him he was, like, so bad … But then, then other people are like, Oh, I have tickets…I'm already going. And some people are, like, I'm gonna go to all three shows! Some people are really, really into it still. So what is it about Dylan's live performances that, you know, produce that kind of polarizing response?
Yeah, why do some people who love him don’t want to see him live???
Ray
So I think a big part of it is just that Dylan’s shows, and this is kind of why I'm so interested in them, they're very different than certainly other acts of his era. But even modern bands, if you go to see a concert, 9 times out of 10, they're gonna do the most popular songs and they're gonna do 'em more or less the way they sound on the record. That's true for nostalgia acts from the sixties. That's true for the latest indie rock buzz band that put out their first album this year. And Dylan pretty much has never done that. He's probably not gonna play the songs you think he's gonna play. If he does play them, they're fairly likely to be unrecognizable, new arrangements, new lyrics, new everything. And so that can turn people off who aren't expecting it. You know, he's, that's why he's sort of, in terms of live especially, he's kind of a cult artist, and, like, some fraction of the audience, like me, sees him once or twice like this and gets and grows obsessed. He's definitely kind of in The Grateful Dead world in that people are obsessed with his live shows.
Dave
Yeah.
Ray
But plenty of other people go and they wanna, you know, see him strap on an acoustic guitar and sing Blowing In the Wind and Mr. Tambourine Man. And he's not gonna do that.
Bob Dylan
Play a song for me.
Ray
And so I think that that can turn people off. And I should say, to those people's credit, the fact that sort of every concert is different and he lives on the edge. Sometimes, they are genuinely bad, right?
Dave
<laugh>
Ray
Like, The Rolling Stones, every night you're gonna get, you know, if you like The Rolling Stones, it'll be a pretty good show.
The Rolling Stones
Satisfaction.
Ray
It's gonna be basically what you expect. They're not gonna all of a sudden one night just blow it horribly.
Dave
<laugh>
Ray
They're gonna do a good show.
Ray
A good sort of oldies nostalgia show….Whereas Bob, he kinda lives out there on the edge. And, you know, sometimes he falls off.
The Rolling Stones
And I try. Oh, I try!
Dave
Yeah. Can you talk about the mechanics of how they're living out on the edge? Because I was reading through a lot of your interviews, and I should say that the book is focusing, maybe I didn't even say this yet, but you actually are turning your Substack into a book.
Dave
And a lot of those posts were interviews with band members of Bob Dylan. Can you talk about kind of the mechanics of how these live shows work and why they're living on the edge? Because it seems, to me, like, it's different than when people bring bands together, they rehearse, or they get it going in a way that, it’s really tight. Like how does he, how does he conduct these bands? Maybe is the question I'm asking.
Good question, Dave, how the heck does Dylan conduct these bands?
Ray
Yeah. So, as you say, it's fairly different. There are rehearsals. I sort of, going into this, before I talked to the band members, I was, like, he just wings it every night, and they all wing it? But they actually do rehearse fairly extensively. The difference is what they rehearse may have little to nothing to do with what they then play.
Dave
<laugh>
Ray
I've talked to any number of band members who are, like, we rehearsed for, you know, three days and we learned these 20 songs. And then the first show we went out and he didn't play any of the 20.
Dave
Wow.
Ray
Or like, a while ago, I interviewed Stan Lynch, who was the drummer for Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, who were Dylan's backing band for a couple years in the Eighties. And he had this funny story at one show, like halfway through the tour, where, you know, there's something written on the set list, but Bob just turns to him and goes, Hey Stan, what do you wanna play? And so Stan just says, Lay Lady Lay, because that's a song he really liked that they had never played, never rehearsed. And Bob is like, all right, we're doing Lay Lady Lay.
Bob Dylan
That’s it.
Ray
And he just starts singing it and the rest of the band has to figure out <laugh> what to do.
Bob Dylan
Lay Lady Lay!
Ray
Right there on stage in front of like a stadium full of people.
Crowd
<Cheers>
Ray
So that's very Dylan.
Dave
<laugh> I think I actually read that one. I think he asked the drummer what key to play it in, right? Or something like that. And the drummer was like, I don't know. And then the other band members were like, No, no! Play it in this one! It’s much better in this one.
Ray
Yeah because drums don't have a key.
Dave
Yeah.
What’s a gig with Dylan really like?
Dave
I think, is it also kind of why, he's almost like a jazz musician in that way, right? Like, I feel like that's a jazz leader who would kinda just go into something and then people would play along with it?
Pixar’s Soul
Get on up here, teach we ain't got all day….What, what do we play?
Dave
It's almost like an improvisational element…would you say that? Almost like a jazz style?
Ray
That's, I think that's a very astute comparison. And, actually, I was just editing, maybe two weeks ago, one of the interviews that's gonna run in the book, that hasn’t been on the Substack, with one of the guys who was on Rolling Thunder Review, a percussionist. And his line is very similar to that. He says the most common question I get asked is, what is it like to play with Dylan? And this guy, I should preface this, this guy played a bunch of actual jazz. And he says, my answer's always, like, It is the best jazz gig I've ever played. And he's like, People always gimme a look like, What the hell are you talking about? Bob Dylan's not a jazz musician?
Dave
Oooh. Yeah.
Ray
And like genre-wise? No, he's not a jazz musician. But in terms of the approach, in terms of the live performance, he is.
Dave
Wow.
Oh! It’s called Subterranean Homesick Blues
Dave
This is, this is not one of the questions we prepped for, but did you happen to see that movie Soul? With Pixar? Pixar’s Soul? Did you happen to see that movie yet?
Ray
No. I haven't yet.
Dave
Oh, okay. Because it's about jazz. But the only, like, non-jazz music that's in it is, like, a Dylan, there's a Dylan song.
Bob Dylan
Johnny’s in the basement mixing up the medicine.
Dave
There's a moment where basically if you are in the state of playing jazz, you go to this underworld, where it's also where you die, and also where you were born, but it's also where you are when you're kind of creating music in the zone.
Pixar’s Soul
jazzing
Dave
And there's this kind of mystic who travels around there. And the music he plays in his boat is this Dylan song.
Bob Dylan
I'm on the pavement. Thinking about the government.
Dave
Somehow Dylan is part of the jazz ethos to me. Not just, as a result of that movie, but before that, too…
Thanks for reading Part 1 of the Podscript🎙📇!
And for supporting Volume 2 of Shuffle Synchronicities.
Part 2 will be emailed tomorrow. The Preamble is available here.
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