Tag Archives: Bob Dylan

The 12 MixTapes of Christmas

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The Twelve Mixtapes of Christmas have got nothing to do with Christmas (beyond being a gift to you) and they’re not actually mix tapes, or CDs for that matter – just mixes, each 49-minutes long, one posted to Randophonic’s Mixcloud for each day of Twelvetide (aka the Twelve Days of Christmas).

The mixes are in fact remnants of an unfinished project from a few years back that had something to do with compiling a playlist for an alternative to Alternative Rock (or whatever) radio station. To be honest, we’re not one hundred percent clear about any of it because somebody spilled (what we hope is) red wine on the official transcript, thus rendering key parts illegible.

Bottom line: it’s five hundred eighty-eight minutes of music covering all manner of ground, from David Bowie to Bow Wow Wow to Tuxedomoon to Claudine Longet, Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, Captain Beefheart, Aphrodite’s Child, Tom Jones, Marilyn Manson, Ike + Tina Turner, anything and everything, as long as it’s good.

 

 

888. a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

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Leon Russell, everybody’s favourite underappreciated genius of the past fifty years, takes Bob Dylan’s surrealized hymn to ongoing apocalypse and renders it soulfully, gospelly, funkily (almost) fun. So much so that Dylan would be following that road himself in a few years through the land of rolling thunder.

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898. si tu dois partir

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Wherein English folk outfit Fairport Convention take a Bob Dylan ditty, flip it into French and score a minor hit. And why not? It’s got a got a good groove and there’s no arguing with Sandy Denny‘s voice, whatever language she’s singing. From an album called Unhalfbricking that, for all its good time vibes, marked a tragic moment for the band as drummer Martin Lamble and friend Jeannie Franklyn were killed in a car accident barely two months before its release. They would carry on.

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976. blue moon

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As the story goes, Bob Dylan hated us all by 1970 – his audience that is.  Which led to the four slabs of vinyl called Self Portrait in which he ambles through a weird mix of everything but the kind of music that was going to singlehandedly trigger a peoples revolution. Just ditties, sidetracks, half-assed Paul Simon and Gordon Lightfoot covers, and perhaps strangest of all, a take on Blue Moon that actually works. Because it genuinely does just sound like a lonely Jewish guy who got lost somewhere in the north country, and now he’s sitting in the dark, looking up at the second full moon in less than a month, crooning away.

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1018. I wanna be your lover

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A Bob Dylan discard from the already overloaded Blonde on Blonde sessions that eventually showed up on 1985’s Biograph box set (and any number of bootlegs). A straight up rocker with surrealism in its heart – what more could any culture want? How about a version to link to anywhere on the world wide web?

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