Bob Dylan on Rock 'n' Roll

I'm really not interested in listening to Bob Dylan's new crooning albums, but he had some good things to say about rock 'n' roll in this interview/Q and A with Bill Flanagan on bobdylan.com

Edited excerpts:

Q. As a kid, did rock and roll feel like a new thing to you or an extension of what was already going on?
A. Rock and roll was high energy, explosive and cut down. It was skeleton music, came out of the darkness and rode in on the atom bomb and the artists were star headed like mystical Gods...Rock and roll was a dangerous weapon, chrome plated, it exploded like the speed of light...Jerry Lee Lewis came in like a streaking comet from some far away galaxy. Rock and roll was atomic powered, all zoom and doom. It didn’t seem like an extension of anything but it probably was.

Whole lotta shakin' goin' on

Dylan's answer reminded me of what Bruce Springsteen had to say about the big bang in chapter seven of his autobiography, Born To Run, "The Big Bang (Have You Heard the News...).

Read the whole chapter again!

"THE BARRICADES HAVE BEEN STORMED! A FREEDOM SONG HAS BEEN SUNG!...THE OLD ORDER HAS BEEN OVERTHROWN!...A HUMAN ATOM HAS JUST SPLIT THE WORLD IN TWO!"

Hound Dog

Good Rockin Tonight

Blue Suede Shoes - for many in England, the  release of the HMV 78 was the real "Road to Damascus" moment - buying it an act of defiant teenage rebellion. We never had TV in those days, but the record was dangerous enough in itself.

Dylan did embark on his performance career at Hibbing High School by singing Little Richard covers. Time he released an album of those covers?

Long Tall Sally


See also, The Guardian - Bob Dylan reveals an unsuspected love for Stereophonics


Bob Dylan finally agrees to accept Nobel Prize for Literature, BBC News