"Anyone else get a little bugged when people say Dylan has a bad voice?"

"I love what Leonard Cohen said about his voice: 'Most music criticism is in the nineteenth century. It’s so far behind, say, the criticism of painting. It’s still based on nineteenth century art–cows beside a stream and trees and ‘I know what I like.’ There’s no concession to the fact that Dylan might be a more sophisticated singer than Whitney Houston, that he’s probably the most sophisticated singer we’ve had in a generation. Nobody is identifying out popular singers like a Matisse or Picasso. Dylan’s a Picasso — that exuberance, range, and assimilation of the whole history of music.'..."

A discussion at the subreddit r/bobdylan.

The top-rated comment is so Reddit: "I find it the opposite of annoying. You’re telling me what your depth is as a music listener and what level of convo I should be expecting and how to respond accordingly. It gets rid of the guess work."

Where is Jake Tapper's bullshit detector?

I follow Jake Tapper on Twitter, but I do not appreciate getting spammed by his "liking" phony-baloney statements from celebrities, like this:

It's one thing to have to see junk like this on Facebook, where I encounter various nice people I know who unthinkingly pass along inspirational "quotes" that would cause an educated sensible person to question whether that celebrity could have said that. 

It's quite another thing to get that kind of crap on Twitter, where I'm only following people I think might say something sharp and intelligent!

Anyone who cares what Hemingway said ought to know he's unlikely to have said "We are all broken — that's how the light gets in." And annoyed as I am to have been spammed because Tapper "liked" that, I'd be more alarmed to learn that Hemingway actually did say that. 

Quote Investigator has examined "We are all broken..." — which means the questionable attribution has been around for a while. Indeed, that Quote Investigator article is 5 years old. So this is a hoary annoyance! 

The investigation is interesting enough to thoroughly de-annoy me. I'm glad I got prompted to dig this up:

"In 1968, he bought his first Bob Dylan album, 'John Wesley Harding,' and worked backward from there."

"He and his friends would sit around for hours nodding along to Dylan’s obscure lyrics as though they understood every word. It was like a microcosm of adolescence, he told me, pretending to know while knowing nothing. Ishiguro wasn’t just bluffing, though. From Dylan, as well as Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, he learned about the possibilities of the first-person: how a character could be summoned into being with just a few words.... 'You probably work harder at your job than I do,' Ishiguro said one evening in early December.... 'Speaking of his comparatively small output, Ishiguro said: 'I don’t have any regrets about it. In some ways, I suppose, I’m just not that dedicated to my vocation. I expect it’s because writing wasn’t my first choice of profession. It’s almost something I fell back on because I couldn’t make it as a singer-songwriter. It’s not something I’ve wanted to do every minute of my life. It’s what I was permitted to do. So, you know, I do it when I really want to do it, but otherwise I don’t.':

From "Kazuo Ishiguro Sees What the Future Is Doing to Us," a NYT article about the Nobel laureate by Giles Harvey, published last February. I'm reading it this morning because I'm getting around to listening to things I saved in my Audm app. 

You probably work harder at your job than I do... I’m just not that dedicated to my vocation....

It's so rare to get that from a highly accomplished person. Usually what we hear is that success is mostly about the very hard work you put on top of whatever basic talent you have. Ishiguro has written only 8 novels. He works very intensely at times, but he also takes lots of time off. 

Between the lines in that article, I'm reading that he's as good as he is because of all the refreshment time and because writing novels is not where he set his ambition when he was young. He wanted to be a singer-songwriter. It's the reverse of Leonard Cohen. 

As for Dylan, there are many here among us who spent our early years absorbing his influence. We all started somewhere. Ishiguro's entry point was the album "John Wesley Harding." I went in through "Bringing It All Back Home."

"Alienated Young Man Creates Some Sad Music."

That's the headline from January 1968 in The New York Times for a review of "Songs of Leonard Cohen," Leonard Cohen's first album. The headline is hilariously dismissive. 

The reviewer was Donal Henahan (1921-2012), whose obituary (in the NYT) says he was a WWII fighter pilot, and he began his NYT reviewing in September 14, 1967 with this:

“The American subculture of buttons and beards, poster art and pot, sandals and oddly shaped spectacles met the rather more ancient culture of India last evening at Philharmonic Hall. The occasion was the first of six concerts there this season by Ravi Shankar, the sitar virtuoso, whose instrument traces back about 700 years and whose chosen art form, the raga, is said to be 2,000 years old.”

Oddly shaped spectacles.... Here's the whole Ravi Shankar piece as it appeared on page 53 of the NYT that day. There's not much more to the article, but, my God, what you see on that page!

How the word "how" has become the most deceptive word in the history of headlines.

I'm sure some "how" headlines sit atop articles that really explain how to do something, but I must cry out against the infestation of "how" in headlines. 

I'm seeing headline after headline that would be more accurate if you just crossed out the "how," because the article isn't really going to tell you how X happened. It's only going to tell you that X happened.

I've been meaning to rail about this for quite some time. What pushed me over the edge this morning was this, in Rolling Stone: "How Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ Brilliantly Mingled Sex, Religion." No, you don't know how he did it! You only know that he did it. Or, at best, the manner in which he did — i.e., "brilliantly." 

Just keep an eye out for "how" headlines. That's all I'm saying. Sometimes they are good, and I'm guilty of deploying "how" to lure readers, but as a reader, I am among the potential victims, and I'm trying to heighten my distaste for bait.

"He would say to me, 'I am taking the inner life very seriously.' And I think that's why it resonates so deeply to us. It wasn't an act. This was a devotional investigation into wherever he found himself."

Said Adam Cohen, quoted in "Posthumous Leonard Cohen album offers apt final waltz" (Yahoo).

[Leonard Cohen's son Adam] assembled a number of star musicians including Spanish guitarist Javier Mas, Daniel Lanois and Jennifer Warnes -- one of Cohen's collaborators and many flames -- to compose sparse but warm instrumentals to accompany Cohen's rich baritone timbre. The likes of artists Beck, Feist and Damien Rice also lent their talents to the new album....

"It was nothing, it was business / But it left an ugly mark / So I've come here to revisit / What happens to the heart," Cohen intones on the opening track "Happens to the Heart."...

The album title is "Thanks for the Dance."

Also let me recommend this episode of "Fresh Air" from Friday, with Adam Cohen talking to Terry Gross about the new album. Adam is interesting in himself — modest and withholding. Terry, meanwhile, was effusively in love with Leonard, so it was an unusual encounter. Funny, actually.

ALSO:

David Lee Roth explains jazz using The Beatles.

The Van Halen frontman was asked by Joe Rogan to explain jazz:

“…We will do it in the old Beatles style, here is the best way to go for somebody that’s interested [in Jazz]. The old Lennon note and McCartney note. The McCartney note is always kinda happy... There’s a darkness among those last three notes. That’s where you get a little bit of pepper in the chocolate, ya know. It’s a little wistful, a little melancholy and when you put them together it doesn’t sound like they do but if I could I would sing both parts and it goes together. Bittersweet like my fucking career, like my last three relatio-here we go!”

Rogan: "So you kinda have to listen to jazz like you’d taste wine?" Roth:

“The best for this is Thelonious Monk, the same thing, the right hand is Paul, the left hand is John, it’s working and you can’t tell is it happy or sad? I don’t know how was dinner last night? Same! It’s indicative of what’s around you because it’s not just happy, that’s Disney. It’s not just sad, think of someone just tuning his guitar to sad, think of Leonard Cohen. [Roth imitates Cohen] That sounded more like Bowie but whatever.”

Here's the whole interview.



I have not listened (yet), so I can't pinpoint the place where Roth plays the notes and Joe Rogan tries to sing like Leonard Cohen. If you know the timestamp, let me know.

"Romantic love and the longing for God are closely intertwined in our music and literature, in our theology, and, beneath all that, in our souls."

Writes Kevin D. Williamson in "The Psalmist and the Sex Doll" (National Review). The "psalmist" is Leonard Cohen, and the essay begins with a discussion of the song "Hallelujah." As for the "sex doll," he's writing about the new brothels (in Toronto) where men pay to have sex with realistic looking/seeming dolls.

The sterility of the act in question is not merely biological. Regulation of that act is not entirely beside the point, but it is not really the point itself, either. Imagine, if you can — with charity, if you can — the state of a man in a silicon brothel paying to have sex (a simulacrum of sex) with an inanimate object. The act indicates a profound alienation not only from ordinary healthy sexual expression but from humanity. And from something more than that. If you want an image of a man alone in the universe, bereft, then there it is.

The Marquis de Sade thought that the old order might be overthrown by a great orgy of dissolution and blasphemy, an organized assault on every accepted value until the achievement of a state of absolute freedom. De Sade and those who follow him hated and hate what marriage was, because they hated and hate the order founded on it. (Even now, what is left of it.) But they genuinely appreciated its power, and believed that if it were to go down, it would go down in flames. He would have been disappointed by the smallness and banality of where we ended up, even if it is more perverse (though generally less violent) than his fantasies, which were almost exclusively limited to the traditional, transgressions and violations sufficiently longstanding to have Old Testament injunctions against them. De Sade dreamt up theatrical acts of depravity, while we have only dreamt up new ways to be alone.

From the psalmist who discerned in the love of husbands and wives an indication of God’s design to the question of which kind of silicone sex dolls might be unallowable in the marketplace — that is the arc of our history, and of our sorrow.

I haven't copied the part of the essay that explains the religious objection to same-sex marriage, but it made me think that the objection applies even more strongly to sex outside of marriage and to masturbation and sex with robots.

I'm not creating a new tag for sex dolls, so I'm giving this post some old tags that say whatever they say about the topic — sex tools, masturbation, prostitution, dolls, robots. The salient one is masturbation. That's what it is — sex with a sex doll. There is no human mind you're connecting to.

But there could be love and longing for real connection.

If there is no God, is prayer the same as thinking to yourself?

Is masturbation elevated if you're visualizing profound connection with another person, even if that person is not with you? Even if that person is imaginary?

Why would anyone say "I’m Christian, I love Jesus, but he thinks Jesus tells him to say things"?

The speaker is Omarosa  (talking to her "Big Brother" housemates), and the "he" is Mike Pence.

The full quote is: "As bad as you think Trump is, you would be worried about Pence... We would be begging for days of Trump back if Pence became President. He’s extreme. I’m Christian, I love Jesus, but he thinks Jesus tells him to say things that are not —— and like, Jesus ain't sayin' that. Scary."

The video, with a truncated transcription, appears at Entertainment Weekly. EW ends at "he thinks Jesus tells him to say things," which made me write the post title — which I will leave in its original form — and I was going to do a poll. But the left-off "things that are not —— and like, Jesus ain't sayin' that" completely changes the meaning from a religious perspective, as I see it. And the poll I had wanted to do is not appropriate.

In the truncated form, Omarosa seems to be mocking all the people who believe that Jesus speaks to them. What kind of person claims to be a Christian but doesn't even tolerate the belief that some Christians have that. in some way, Jesus is communicating with them and guiding them toward saying the right thing? But in the completed quote, you can see that her problem with Pence is that the things he is saying, which he attributes to Jesus, are not what Jesus would say. That is, Pence is wrong in believing that Jesus is speaking to him because Pence conveys messages purportedly from Jesus that are — in Omarosa's opinion — obviously not things Jesus would say.

Her mockery comes in the line EW left off: "Jesus ain't sayin' that." I'd say that EW doesn't understand Omarosa's religious perspective and has hurt Omarosa by portraying her doing something that maybe the people at EW do: mocking the common religious belief that prayer is a 2-way communication. She's not denying that belief. She's just saying what Pence understands as the message from Jesus can't be the real message, because it's not the Christian message.

I don't know what specific words Omarosa feels she knows can't be from Jesus, and really I don't know whether the entire riff is reality-show bullshit. She's playing a game, so she has a motive to con the other contestants, and she has other plans for the future — notably a book to sell. She's thinking about potential audiences. Pence — whatever he may have said on this subject — may also have been lying, exaggerating, taking poetic license, or simplifying — conning the contestants in the game of winning the next election.

But Omarosa's main point — and it's a good point whatever you think of Omarosa — is that a person who believes he didn't think up his own ideas but had them handed to him by God is dangerous. He's impervious to reason and evidence and advice from experts and pleas for mercy and his own urges toward empathy and self-preservation.

"With the chill barely out of his bones, Cohen took in the horseshoe-shaped harbor and the people drinking cold glasses of retsina and eating grilled fish in the cafés by the water..."

"... he looked up at the pines and the cypress trees and the whitewashed houses that crept up the hillsides. There was something mythical and primitive about Hydra. Cars were forbidden. Mules humped water up the long stairways to the houses. There was only intermittent electricity. Cohen rented a place for fourteen dollars a month. Eventually, he bought a whitewashed house of his own, for fifteen hundred dollars, thanks to an inheritance from his grandmother. Hydra promised the life Cohen had craved: spare rooms, the empty page, eros after dark. He collected a few paraffin lamps and some used furniture: a Russian wrought-iron bed, a writing table, chairs like 'the chairs that van Gogh painted.'... He alternated between extreme discipline and the varieties of abandon. There were days of fasting to concentrate the mind. There were drugs to expand it: pot, speed, acid. 'I took trip after trip, sitting on my terrace in Greece, waiting to see God,' he said years later... Here and there, Cohen caught glimpses of a beautiful Norwegian woman. Her name was Marianne Ihlen, and she had grown up in the countryside near Oslo. Her grandmother used to tell her, 'You are going to meet a man who speaks with a tongue of gold.'"

His grandmother... her grandmother....

The quote is from the New Yorker article about Leonard Cohen that I've already linked to at least twice. But that passage came back to me as I was reading the NYT editorial tribute to Cohen which plops this sentence...

Many people place Mr. Cohen in a musical trinity, with Bob Dylan and Paul Simon: writers who sail in deeper waters, beyond the chop and slop of the usual pop, filling their notebooks with words and our heads with songs — cryptic, surreal, original, unforgettable.

... which just disturbed me for about 5 reasons but then the Times eds serendipitously linked to that New Yorker article and made me want to show you that room.

"This is a vocabulary that I grew up with... This Biblical landscape is very familiar to me..."

"... and it’s natural that I use those landmarks as references."

"They are leaning out for love/And they will lean that way forever..."

Goodbye to Leonard Cohen. The beautiful songwriter was 82.

ADDED: "The big change is the proximity to death. I am a tidy kind of guy. I like to tie up the strings if I can. If I can’t, also, that’s O.K. But my natural thrust is to finish things that I’ve begun."

"Bob Dylan Wins Nobel Prize in Literature."

Whoa!

I am stunned. It's taking some moments for the news to sink in.

My first reaction was: I'd heard this idea floated for a long time, but I didn't take it too seriously. And I'm the kind of deep devotee of Dylan that when I write "take it too seriously," I hear a Dylan song and stop to think what it is. Isn't that a Dylan line? No, I'm thinking "You shouldn’t take it so personal...." — which is "One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later)." "Seriously" only appears in one Dylan song — if I can trust the search function on his website — and that's here....

Now, little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously
He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously
And when bringing her name up
He speaks of a farewell kiss to me
He’s sure got a lotta gall to be so useless and all
Muttering small talk at the wall while I’m in the hall
How can I explain?
Oh, it’s so hard to get on
And these visions of Johanna, they kept me up past the dawn

"Visions of Johanna." Sorry if I'm muttering small talk at the... web... while I'm just out of bed...

Oh! I am simply delighted. No one I don't actually know has made such an impression on me in my life, and it was done with words... words and music... but it's the literature prize, so I'm going to stick to the words here, even though the last thing I read before I went to sleep last night was David Remnick's New Yorker article "Leonard Cohen Makes It Darker/At eighty-two, the troubadour has another album coming. Like him, it is obsessed with mortality, God-infused, and funny." And that contains some long quotes from Bob Dylan, who had a lot to say about Cohen. But it wasn't mostly about the words, but the music:

“His gift or genius is in his connection to the music of the spheres,” Dylan went on. “In the song ‘Sisters of Mercy,’ for instance, the verses are four elemental lines which change and move at predictable intervals . . . but the tune is anything but predictable. The song just comes in and states a fact. And after that anything can happen and it does, and Leonard allows it to happen. His tone is far from condescending or mocking. He is a tough-minded lover who doesn’t recognize the brush-off. Leonard’s always above it all. ‘Sisters of Mercy’ is verse after verse of four distinctive lines, in perfect meter, with no chorus, quivering with drama. The first line begins in a minor key. The second line goes from minor to major and steps up, and changes melody and variation. The third line steps up even higher than that to a different degree, and then the fourth line comes back to the beginning. This is a deceptively unusual musical theme, with or without lyrics. But it’s so subtle a listener doesn’t realize he’s been taken on a musical journey and dropped off somewhere, with or without lyrics.”

But let's talk about lyrics, Bob Dylan's lyrics — a singer's lyrics have won the Nobel Prize. I don't think that's happened before. We expect poetry — to be taken so seriously — to stand disengaged from music. But wasn't early poetry sung? Dylan's words, because they were sung, became imprinted on minds. I cannot exaggerate the impression these words made on me when I began listening to the songs half a century ago. Utterly entranced by The Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man," I took a chance and bought an album from the "folk" section of the record store: "Bringing It All Back Home." That was Bob's current album at the time The Byrds' single came out, and "Mr. Tambourine Man" was on that album. It was also just before the release of "Highway 61 Revisited," so a summer of bonding to "Bringing It All Back Home" ended with access to the new album. I played those 2 albums continually in 1965, when I was 14. I went back into the old albums, "Another Side Of Bob Dylan" and "The Freewheelin Bob Dylan."

Unlike many of the recordings of the day, Bob Dylan enunciated his words clearly. He was saying unusual things, but you knew what the words were — nothing garbled Louie-Louiesquely — so you got those words lodged in your head, where they would come to mind often, and swirl into your self-generated thoughts, even when you didn't know exactly what he was talking about, there was meaning, meaning to contemplate for the rest of your life.

You could read and try to memorize poems or hear a poet recite his verses — Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg — but because this was music, those words got very deeply rooted. All my life, ever since I was 14, Bob Dylan lyrics have been interlaced with my own thoughts. I can't imagine who I would be without Bob Dylan. I can't begin to unravel my mind back to the point when it didn't contain threads of Bob Dylan. I can't pull out any particular idea of mine that I got from Bob Dylan. I'm not the get-out-of-the-doorway-if-you-can't-lend-a-hand type of Bob Dylan fan, stuck on the political propaganda era, his younger, older days.

Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth
“Rip down all hate,” I screamed
Lies that life is black and white
Spoke from my skull. I dreamed
Romantic facts of musketeers
Foundationed deep, somehow
Ah, but I was so much older then
I’m younger than that now....

"So Long, Marianne."

"Leonard Cohen penned a poignant final letter to his dying muse Marianne Ihlen, a longtime friend of hers revealed on Canadian radio...."

Her close friend Jan Christian Mollestad got in touch with Cohen to tell him Ihlen was dying [at the age of 81].... Mollestad, a documentary maker, read Cohen’s letter to her before she died.

“It said well Marianne it’s come to this time when we are really so old and our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon. Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine. And you know that I’ve always loved you for your beauty and your wisdom, but I don’t need to say anything more about that because you know all about that. But now, I just want to wish you a very good journey. Goodbye old friend. Endless love, see you down the road.”

From Sylvie Simmons, author of I'm Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen:

"The first time I met Marianne, she was in her seventies and yet she seemed ageless, almost childlike in her openness and curiosity. The last time we met, she cooked my favourite meal and we read the I-Ching into the night. Marianne came from a time when women were raised to be muses and helpmates, which she was; she loved creative men and she was creative herself. Her life was not the easiest, but nothing seemed to dent her generosity and kindness. A truly beautiful soul."

ADDED: Did you ever want to be a muse (or to have one)? Here are "The 30 Most Famous Muses in Art." One of my favorite movies is about the woman who is #11 on that list.

"Vampire Weekend, whose band members met at Columbia University, sings a song about the Oxford comma."

"Leonard Cohen weaves references to the Old Testament into his work. Bob Dylan may be the Baby Boomers’ Walt Whitman. But could the argument be made that Dan Wilson is our brainiest rocker?"

In the course of a single show at Joe’s Pub in New York this week, Mr. Wilson, a graduate of Harvard University, invoked, not in this exact order, Benedictine monks, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard P. Feynman and the Pyramid of Cheops....

So references in the lyrics are the test of braininess?

I'm sure you could think of some better tests!

And, by the way, what did Feynman do with that Pyramid?, I ask, making an Oxford comma joke, brainily. 

Insincere "Jesus."

A topic this morning at Meadhouse is the insincere use of "Jesus" in pop songs circa 1970.

1. "Jesus Is Just Alright."

The song's title makes use of the American slang term "all-right," which during the 1960s was used to describe something that was considered 'cool' or very good. The song has been covered by a number of bands and artists over the years, including The Byrds, Underground Sunshine, The Doobie Brothers, Alexis Korner, The Ventures, DC Talk, Shelagh McDonald, and Robert Randolph (featuring Eric Clapton).

2. "Spirit in the Sky."

[Norman] Greenbaum... was inspired to write the song after watching Porter Wagoner on TV singing a gospel song. Greenbaum later said : "I thought, 'Yeah, I could do that,' knowing nothing about gospel music, so I sat down and wrote my own gospel song. It came easy. I wrote the words in 15 minutes." "Spirit in the Sky" contains lyrics about the afterlife, making several references to Jesus, although Greenbaum himself is Jewish.

3. "One Toke Over the Line." ("One toke over the line, sweet Jesus...")

The catchy single, "One Toke Over the Line," peaked at #10 (#5 in Canada), garnering notice from Spiro Agnew for what he saw as its subversiveness. Ironically, the song was performed (by Gail Farrell and Dick Dale) on The Lawrence Welk Show, which billed it a "modern spiritual."[2] The song is notably mentioned in the opening of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and was notably "sung" by Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro) in the film of the same name. "

Any more examples? Help me out here. The topic is: Insincere (or arguably insincere) references to Jesus in popular songs in the days before Christian rock was a thing.

I know there's also "The Christian Life" on the Byrds album "Sweetheart of the Rodeo," — which came out a year before the album with "Jesus Is Just Alright" — but I'm not putting it on the list, because I don't think it was played on the radio. The Byrds suddenly switched from psychedelic rock to country music, which was a strange thing to do at the time and it didn't feel like a bid for another hit record.

"'Christian Life' was performed tongue-in-cheek," said [Chris] Hillman. "After Roger [McGuinn] sang it, he admitted to going overboard with the accent. Roger was from Chicago and here he is, doing this heavy, syrupy country twang."

My buddies shun me since I turned to Jesus
They say I'm missing a whole world of fun
I live without them and walk in the light
I like the Christian life

MORE: Maybe it all started with the Paul Newman movie "Cool Hand Luke" — "I don't care if it rains or freezes/Long as I have my plastic Jesus/Riding on the dashboard of my car...":



IN THE COMMENTS: Fr. Denis Lemieux cites "Suzanne," by Leonard Cohen:

"Jesus was a sailor when he walked upon the water, and he spent a long time watching from his lonely wooden tower, and when he knew for certain only drowning men could see him, he said all men shall be sailors then, until the sea shall free them...'

Not exactly insincere... more a use of Jesus outside of orthodox Christian theology, I guess. I find this a fascinating topic, though - intersection of faith and culture.

I agree that this is not insincere. It is mysterious/mystical... and that is religious. Suzanne herself explains:

BBC's Kate Saunders: Could you describe one of the typical evenings that you spent with Leonard Cohen at the time the song was written?

Suzanne: Oh yes. I would always light a candle and serve tea and it would be quiet for several minutes, then we would speak. And I would speak about life and poetry and we’d share ideas.

Saunders: So it really was the tea and oranges that are in the song?

Suzanne: Very definitely, very definitely, and the candle, who I named Anastasia, the flame of the candle was Anastasia to me. Don’t ask me why. It just was a spiritual moment that I had with the lightening of the candle. And I may or may not have spoken to Leonard about, you know I did pray to Christ, to Jesus Christ and to St. Joan at the time, and still do.

Saunders: And that was something you shared, both of you?

Suzanne: Yes, and I guess he retained that.

And El Pollo Real prompts me to include Bob Dylan on this list, but I refuse, because I don't think Dylan was insincere about Jesus — not on "Slow Train Coming" and not on earlier references: "Even Jesus would never forgive what you do" ("Masters of War" on "Freewheelin'"), "Jesus Christ was betrayed by a kiss" ("With God On Our Side," on "The Times They Are A-Changin'"), "You know they refused Jesus, too" ("Bob Dylan's 115th Dream," on "Bringing It All Back Home").

"But it grieves my heart, love/To see you tryin' to be a part of/A world that just don't exist ..."

"It’s all just a dream, babe/a vacuum, a scheme, babe/that sucks you into feelin’ like this."

Is "To Ramona" really the 24th best Bob Dylan song ever? I don't know, but it's meant a lot to me over the years.

It remains one of the best songs based on a woman’s first name, up there with Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” and John Lennon’s “Julia.”

"He has investigated a lot of deities and read all the sacred books..."

"... trying to understand in some way who wrote them as much as the subject matter itself. It’s for his own healing that he reaches for those places. If he has one great love, it is his search for God."

"Thank you so much for reminding me that I wrote a couple of good lines."

Said Leonard Cohen to Lou Reed. It was the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony last night.

A bigger deal, of course, was made of Madonna, who gave a long speech that included a lot of thanking, and she's done so well she can thank anyone who did anything in any relationship to her, like the "ones that said I was talentless, that I was chubby, that I couldn’t sing, that I was a one-hit wonder. They pushed me to be better, and I am grateful for their resistance." Thank you for providing the contrast that makes my greatness all the more apparent.

John Mellencamp, The Ventures, Leonard Cohen and The Dave Clark Five....

... and of course, the sure thing: Madonna.