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HOUSE OF THE RISIN' SUN THERE IS A HOUSE DOWN IN NEW ORLEANS THEY CALL THE RISING SUN AND IT'S BEEN THE RUIN OF MANY A POOR GIRL AND ME, OH GOD, I'M ONE MY MOTHER WAS A TAILOR, SHE SEWED THESE NEW BLUE JEANS MY SWEETHEART WAS A GAMBLER, LORD, DOWN IN NEW ORLEANS NOW THE ONLY THING A GAMBLER NEEDS IS A SUITCASE AND A TRUNK AND THE ONLY TIME WHEN HE'S SATISFIED IS WHEN HE'S ON A DRUNK HE FILLS HIS GLASSES UP TO THE BRIM AND HE'LL PASS THE CARDS AROUND AND THE ONLY PLEASURE HE GETS OUT OF LIFE IS RAMBLING FROM TOWN TO TOWN OH TELL MY BABY SISTER NOT TO DO WHAT I HAVE DONE BUT SHUN THAT HOUSE IN NEW ORLEANS THEY CALL THE RISING SUN WELL WITH ONE FOOT ON THE PLATFORM AND THE OTHER FOOT ON THE TRAIN I'M GOING BACK TO NEW ORLEANS TO WEAR THAT BALL AND CHAIN I'M GOING BACK TO NEW ORLEANS, MY RACE IS ALMOST RUN I'M GOING BACK TO END MY LIFE DOWN IN THE RISING SUN THERE IS A HOUSE IN NEW ORLEANS THEY CALL THE RISING SUN AND IT'S BEEN THE RUIN OF MANY A POOR GIRL AND ME, OH GOD, I'M ONE

Joni Mitchell had a bad experience sharing a microphone with Dylan at a concert in Japan in 1994. “On the third night they put Bob at the mic with me … and he never brushes his teeth, so his breath was like … right in my face.” Mitchell has also needled Dylan over the years, saying, among other things, “I like a lot of Bob Dylan’s songs, though musically he’s not very gifted.” In Long Branch, New Jersey, in 2009, Dylan, who was in town for a concert, decided to take a stroll. This did not go well. A couple of police officers, responding to complaints about a “scruffy old man acting suspiciously” picked up the ID-less singer. He was taken back to his hotel, where the reception staff explained to the officers who, exactly, they’d picked up. Michael Parkinson is a distinguished English talk-show host, whose show aired on the BBC for 33 years. So what? Parkinson had approached Dylan at a restaurant to tell him that he loved his music, but before he got to do it, Dylan said: “Eggs over easy and coffee, please.” Speaking to the audience at a 2009 concert in Taiwan in between songs, Axl Rose mentioned meeting Dylan years before: “Bob asked me, ‘When you gonna record ‘Heaven’s Door’? And I said, ‘I don’t know, but we really love that song.’ And he said, ‘I don’t give a fuck. I just want the money.’ True story!” GNR recorded a cover of “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” in 1991. The following year, Dylan was asked what he thought: “Guns N’ Roses is okay, Slash is okay, but there’s something about their version of the song that reminds me of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Dylan was in the midst of his Born Again phase in 1980 when he performed a concert at the University of Arizona. Facing an audience angry about hearing songs in praise of Christ when they wanted to hear the hits, Dylan hissed, “If you want rock’n’roll, you can go see Kiss and rock’n’roll all the way down to the pit!” Dylan’s attitude toward the hottest band in the world softened over time. He co-wrote a song with Kiss’s Gene Simmons, “Waiting for the Morning Light,” on the latter’s 2004 solo album. For a time, Dylan rented a home next door to Katharine Hepburn in Manhattan’s Turtle Bay neighborhood. According to his personal assistant Victor Maymudes, Dylan let his Bullmastiff, Brutus, “shit in her flowerbed all the time.” And these weren’t dainty droppings. “The dog could really lay some logs,” Maymudes wrote. “I think if it was a small dog, Hepburn wouldn’t have cared.” Michael Douglas tells a story about being invited by George Harrison to hang out with him and Dylan. “George Harrison walks in with Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan has the biggest dog you’ve ever seen in your life.” Douglas orders some caviar for the trio, which Dylan’s dog (Brutus again?) promptly devours. “Bob Dylan hadn’t said a word yet,” Douglas recalls, “then finally he looks over and goes ‘far out.’” Sometime in the late ’90s or early 2000s, Dylan decided he wanted to star in a slapstick comedy on HBO. Larry Charles, who at the time had been a main writer on Seinfeld and Mad About You (and who later directed Borat), got a call to meet with him. That led to a bizarre meeting with HBO, which involves someone whispering, in reference to Dylan, “he’s like a retarded child.” Folk singer Todd Snider told an insightful second-hand story: A friend of his played at the same European festival as Dylan, and after the concert, the musicians, Dylan included, had to take a ferry back to their hotels. Dylan was surrounded by onlookers and needed an escape. “My friend [who was sitting at a table with a chessboard] walked right up to [Dylan] and said, ‘Bob, we got the chessboard you wanted’ and Bob saw his chance and took it. My buddy got to play silent chess with him the whole trip, and as long as Bob seemed engaged, people seemed to leave him alone.”

The True Story of the Replacements is one of the best recent rock biographies. It’s also got a little Dylan story. The Replacements were recording in the same studio in Hollywood as Dylan, then working on Under the Red Sky. And one day, Dylan showed up at their session. Engineer Clif Norrell: “He was saying, ‘My kid loves you; my son’s really into your band.’ You could see [the Replacements’] eyes light up, and then Dylan goes, ‘You’re R.E.M., right?’” The late keyboardist Ian McLagan did a tour in Dylan’s backing band in the early ’80s, an experience he shared in his memoir, All the Rage. Before a gig in Rome, Dylan appears in the band’s dressing room wearing “a black drape jacket with a white high-collar shirt.” McLagan tells him, “You’re looking very Byronic tonight” and is then confused when Dylan stews over the comment for several days. Almost a week later, in Barcelona, Dylan asks, ‘Hey, Ian, at the show in Rome, why did you call me moronic?’” During the mid-’70s, McLagan finds himself in a room with Dylan and Led Zeppelin’s infamously brutish manager Peter Grant, where he witnesses the following exchange: “Hello, Bob. I’m Peter Grant, I manage Led Zeppelin.” After a short silence, Dylan replies: “I don’t come to you with my problems.” Dave Stewart of the Eurythmics had invited Dylan to come by his studio in London, and the latter took him up on the offer — or tried to anyway. “He got my address wrong. He went up to this house, rang the doorbell and a woman came to the door. He said, ‘Is Dave here?’ and her husband was called Dave, so she said, ‘No, he’s at work’ and Bob was going, ‘He’s at work? That’s funny, I thought I was supposed to come around here.’… By the time he got round to my place he was really flustered … he’s a funny chap.” Dylan offered the Beatles marijuana, at the Delmonico Hotel, in August 1964. Before they all smoked, the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein told Dylan that the band members hadn’t tried the drug before. Dylan was shocked: He’d been mishearing the line “I can’t hide” in the chorus of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” as “I get high.” Engineer Chris Shaw was working on the Love and Theft album when he heard Dylan sing something funny: “There’s a lyric on the song where Bob sings, ‘The leaves cast their shadows on the stones,’ and, when he was singing it live, he was reading his lyrics off a piece of paper, and, I guess, for a split-second, he got dyslexic, because on the live take, he actually sang, “The leaves cast their ‘stadows’ on the stones.” Dylan is a well-known boxing fan, and used to spar for exercise. Comedian Daniel Russ was at a gym in Austin, Texas, in 2008 when he was asked to get in the ring: “In comes a diminutive, skinny man. Looks to be a little older than me, has short curly hair. He turns to face me. It’s Bob Dylan.” Russ tells the gym owner, “If you paid me by the shot, I wouldn’t hit this guy ever.” The gym owner says, “Good. Don’t.” Val Kilmer played Doc Holiday in Tombstone. Bob Dylan loved Tombstone so much, says Kilmer, that when the two had a chance to meet, “Dylan shows up and sits down and wants to talk about Tombstone.” But Kilmer didn’t want to. “Eventually Dylan says ‘ain’t you going to say anything about the movie?’” Kilmer later regretted being stubborn. “Now I’ll tell any schmo in the airport, I’ll say ‘I’m your huckleberry,’ but I wouldn’t say it to Bob Dylan!” The singer-songwriter Aimee Mann told a story about meeting Dylan while opening for him on a tour. They get into a conversation about the music they each like to listen to, and Dylan says, “The only thing I can’t stand is those story songs.” Which Mann realizes is weird, since he’s written a huge amount of those. She asks him: “You mean like ‘Tangled Up in Blue?’” Dylan says he doesn’t play that one anymore. Mann points out he’d played it the night before. The late concert promoter Bill Graham understood that Dylan could be prickly. So in advance of a tour in the ’70s, he told the road crew to keep their distance. As he explained in his memoir, the staff obeyed — too well: “In the third or fourth city in the middle of the night, someone knocked on the door of my hotel room. I opened the door and it was Bob. He came in. I could see he had a problem. I said, ‘Is everything okay, Bob? Something’s wrong?’ He said, ‘Bill, why isn’t anybody talking to me?’” Aw. Before the release of his 1962 debut album, Dylan asked fellow folksinger Dave Van Ronk if he could record the latter’s arrangement of the folk standard “House of the Rising Sun.” Van Ronk recalls telling the young singer that he’d prefer Dylan not record his arrangement. “Uh-oh,” says Dylan. “What exactly do you mean, ‘Uh-oh’?” Van Ronk asks. “Well,” Dylan replies, “I’ve already recorded it.” In the Neil Young biography Shakey, artist Sandy Mazzeo remembers taking Young’s ’54 Pontiac for a drive. (This is in the mid-’70s.) Mazzeo hears a series of loud bangs. “I’m thinkin’, Oh my God, it’s a ghost.’ I look in the rearview mirror and it’s Bob.” Dylan had, for whatever reason, climbed into the back of the vehicle and gone to sleep. “Dylan was in his turban stage, and he’d slept in his turban and it had come all undone — he looked like the mummy.” Music critic Paul Nelson was an acquaintance of Dylan’s in Minnesota. Nelson and his friends would play folk records for Dylan, who loved what he heard so much that “he stole a bunch of them from my friend,” Nelson said in the biography The Life of Paul Nelson. “He came along, and he took about twenty or thirty of them.” Though he admitted that Dylan “had impeccable taste. He took the best.” Not really funny, just kinda curious: In a 1968 interview given by his mother, Beatty Zimmerman, and reprinted in the Dylan fanzine Isis, she said, “He was a gorgeous child. He had very blond hair. I put ribbons in his hair up to a year old. I used to say to him, ‘Bobby, you should have been a girl.’” Mickey Jones, who drummed for Dylan on the famously controversial 1966 tour, told of running into his old boss years after playing together. Jones had gone to see his son-in-law, a boxer, fight: “As I turned to leave, I hear a voice, Mickey, and I turned around and it’s Bob Dylan. I said, ‘What are you doin’ here?’ And he had the definitive Bob Dylan answer. He said, ‘I don’t know. They bring me and I come.’” Journalist Al Aronowitz was a confidant of Dylan’s during the ’60s. Aronowitz told the following about a shopping trip that Dylan and his then-wife Sara Lownds took to Pottery Barn in Manhattan, during the mid-’60s: “We walked around,” said Lownds, “and looked at some of the pottery and do you know what he said?” Aronowitz answered, “He probably said, “I can make better pottery than that!” “How did you know?” Sara gasped. Dylan arrived to perform at the U.K.’s Isle of Wight festival in 1969. The singer gets flustered when he sees there’s no toilet in his dressing room. “I don’t want to have to go outside to look for some place to pee!” said an aggrieved Dylan to Aronowitz, who’d helped to organized the trip. “How come you didn’t get ‘em to get me a dressing room with a toilet?” Aronowitz offers that maybe Dylan could tinkle out the window. “If my memory serves me,” Aronowitz wrote, “this was one time Bob ended up doing what I suggested.” Former Dylan touring guitarist César Díaz has told a story about going into Dylan’s dressing room and asking to rehearse. Dylan’s usual response: “I don’t need to fuckin’ practice.” Another Díaz story: “I would go … ‘Bob, the guy from the Counting Crows, he wants to be you.’ And that was before they did that ’Mr. Jones’ thing, you know. And he goes, ‘Yeah, look at them. What a piece of shit.’”

ME AND MY UNCLE Me and my uncle went riding down South Colorado, West Texas bound We stopped over in Santa Fe That being the point just about half way And you know it was the hottest part of the day I took the horses up to the stall Went to the bar-room, ordered drinks for all Three days in the saddle, you know my body hurt It being summer, I took off my shirt And I tried to wash off some of that dusty dirt West Texas cowboys, they's all around With liquor and money, they're loaded down So soon after pay day, you know it seemed a shame You know my uncle, he starts a friendly game Hi-lo jacks and the winner take the hand My uncle starts winning, cowboys got sore One of them called him, and then two more Accused him of cheating, well no it couldn't be I know my uncle, he's as honest as me And I'm as honest as a Denver man can be One of them cowboys, he starts to draw Grabbed me a bottle, cracked him in the jaw Shot me another, that man he won't grow old In the confusion my uncle grabbed the gold And we high-tailed it down to Mexico Now all of those cowboys, they’re out of their gold I love my uncle, God rest his soul Taught me good, Lord, taught me all I know Taught me so well, I grabbed that gold And I left his dead ass there by the side of the road

Not knowing much about people from Denver, and never having met even one, when the Three Man Depravity Band (Brisbane, Australia - Bottleneck Bob Irvine and me, mid seventies) played this tune, we changed it to "I'm as honest as a criminal man can be". I'm interested in whether Denver has a particular reputation, or whether John Phillips might have had an unfortunate experience there. Warren Zevon certainly didn't seem all that impressed with the place ("Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead").

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was born on March 24, 1919, in Yonkers, New York. His father died before he was born and he was separated from his mother after his birth. He attended the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where he earned a B.A. in journalism in 1941. He started in journalism by writing sports for The Daily Tar Heel, and he published his first short stories in Carolina Magazine. Following service in the U.S. Navy throughout World War II, Ferlinghetti earned a master's degree in English literature from Columbia University. He went to Paris to continue his studies and earned a doctorate degree in comparative literature with a dissertation on the city as a symbol in modern poetry. Reflecting his broad aesthetic concerns, Ferlinghetti's poetry often engages with several non-literary artistic forms, most notably jazz music and painting. Ferlinghetti is notable for frequently incorporating jazz accompaniments into public readings of his work. Soon after settling in San Francisco in 1950, Ferlinghetti met the poet Kenneth Rexroth, whose concepts of philosophical anarchism influenced his political development. He self-identifies as a philosophical anarchist, regularly associated with other anarchists in North Beach, and he sold Italian anarchist newspapers at the City Lights Bookstore. A critic of U.S. foreign policy, Ferlinghetti has taken a stand against totalitarianism and war. While saying that he is "an anarchist at heart," he concedes that the world would need to be populated by "saints" in order for pure anarchism to be lived practically. Alongside his bookselling and publishing, Ferlinghetti painted for 60 years and much of his work was displayed throughout the United States. In 2012, Ferlinghetti was awarded the Janus Pannonius International Poetry Prize from the Hungarian PEN Club. After learning that the government of Hungary under Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is a partial sponsor of the €50,000 prize, he declined to accept the award. In declining, Ferlinghetti cited his opposition to the "right wing regime" of Prime Minister Orban, and his opinion that the ruling Hungarian government under Mr. Orban is curtailing civil liberties and freedom of speech for the people of Hungary. Ferlinghetti recited the poem Loud Prayer at The Band's final performance. The concert was filmed by Martin Scorsese and released as a documentary entitled The Last Waltz. Bob Dylan used Ferlinghetti's "Baseball Canto" on the Baseball show of Theme Time Radio Hour. Roger McGuinn, the former leader of the Byrds, referred to Ferlinghetti and "A Coney Island of the Mind" in his song "Russian Hill", from his 1977 album Thunderbyrd. Cyndi Lauper was inspired by A Coney Island of the Mind to write the song "Into the Nightlife" for her 2008 album Bring Ya to the Brink. Bristol Sound band Unforscene used Ferlinghetti's poem "Pictures of the Gone World 11" (or "The World is a Beautiful Place ...") in the song "The World Is" on its 2002 album New World Disorder. Ferlinghetti turned 100 in March 2019, leading the city of San Francisco to proclaim his birthday, March 24, "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day".

THE WORLD IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE THE WORLD IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE TO BE BORN INTO IF YOU DON'T MIND HAPPINESS NOT ALWAYS BEING SO VERY MUCH FUN IF YOU DON'T MIND A TOUCH OF HELL NOW AND THEN JUST WHEN EVERYTHING IS FINE BECAUSE EVEN IN HEAVEN THEY DON'T SING ALL THE TIME THE WORLD IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE TO BE BORN INTO IF YOU DON'T MIND SOME PEOPLE DYING ALL THE TIME OR MAYBE ONLY STARVING SOME OF THE TIME WHICH ISN'T HALF BAD IF IT ISN'T YOU OH THE WORLD IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE TO BE BORN INTO IF YOU DON'T MUCH MIND A FEW DEAD MINDS IN THE HIGHER PLACES OR A BOMB OR TWO NOW AND THEN OR SUCH OTHER IMPROPRIETIES WITH ITS MEN OF DISTINCTION AND ITS MEN OF EXTINCTION AND ITS PRIESTS AND OTHER PATROLMEN AND ITS VARIOUS SEGREGATIONS AND CONGRESSIONAL INVESTIGATIONS AND OTHER CONSTIPATIONS THAT OUR FOOL FLESH IS HEIR TO YES THE WORLD IS THE BEST PLACE OF ALL FOR A LOT OF SUCH THINGS AS MAKING THE FUN SCENE AND MAKING THE LOVE SCENE AND MAKING THE SAD SCENE AND SINGING LOW SONGS AND HAVING INSPIRATIONS AND WALKING AROUND LOOKING AT EVERYTHING AND SMELLING FLOWERS AND GOOSING STATUES AND EVEN THINKING AND KISSING PEOPLE AND MAKING BABIES AND WEARING PANTS AND WAVING HATS AND DANCING AND GOING SWIMMING IN RIVERS ON PICNICS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SUMMER AND JUST GENERALLY 'LIVING IT UP' YES BUT THEN RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF IT COMES THE SMILING MORTICIAN