This is totally justified and as someone who cherishes music as an art form I'm delighted.

This is totally justified and as someone who cherishes music as an art form I'm delighted.

Bob Dylan criticised as 'impolite and arrogant' by Nobel academy member

A prominent member of the academy that awards the Nobel literature prize has described this year’s laureate, Bob Dylan, as arrogant, citing his total silence since the award was announced last week.

The US singer-songwriter has not responded to repeated phone calls from the Swedish Academy, nor reacted in any way in public to the news.

“It’s impolite and arrogant,” said the academy member, Swedish writer Per Wastberg, in comments aired on SVT public television.

On the evening of 13 October, the day the literature prize winner was announced, Dylan played a concert in Las Vegas during which he made no comment at all to his fans.

He ended the concert with a version of the Frank Sinatra hit “Why Try To Change Me Now?”, taken to be a nod towards his longstanding aversion to the media.

Every 10 December Nobel prize winners are invited to Stockholm to receive their awards from King Carl XVI Gustaf and give a speech during a banquet.

The academy still does not know if Dylan plans to come.

“This is an unprecedented situation,” Wastberg said.

Anders Barany, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, recalled that Albert Einstein snubbed the academy after being awarded the physics prize in 1921.

In 1964 French writer and philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre refused the literature prize outright.

Other contenders for this year’s prize included Salman Rushdie, Syrian poet Adonis and Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

It would be pretty cool if, when they announce his name at the official ceremony, someone in the audience shouted "JUDAS!"

Bob Dylan - I'll be at the Nobel Prize ceremony... if I can

“Isn’t that something…?” Bob Dylan isn’t exactly making a big deal out of being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. But at least the 1960s trailblazer is finally acknowledging his becoming the first musician to be granted admission to the world’s most elite literary club.

When I ask him about his reaction to hearing the news a fortnight ago that he is to follow in the footsteps of George Bernard Shaw, TS Eliot, Winston Churchill, William Faulkner, Günter Grass, Ernest Hemingway and Harold Pinter, I have no idea what to expect.

Dylan, now 75, is on tour in Oklahoma, and we had been due to discuss his new exhibition of artworks, depicting iconic images of American landscapes and urban scenes, which opens to the public at the Halcyon Gallery on London's New Bond Street next week.

Since it was announced he had been chosen by the Swedish Academy to receive the Nobel, Dylan has made no public reference at all to it, save for a fleeting mention on his own website that was deleted within 24 hours.

More than that, he has also reportedly refused to pick up the phone to speak to representatives of the Nobel committee.

They apparently remain in the dark about whether he will be attending the ceremony on December 10, when he will receive a cheque for £750,000 from King Carl VI Gustaf.

Well, I can put them out of their misery. For when I ask about his Nobel, Dylan is all affability. Yes, he is planning to turn up to the awards ceremony in Stockholm. “Absolutely,” he says. “If it’s at all possible.”

And as he talks, he starts to sound pretty pleased about becoming a Nobel laureate. “It’s hard to believe,” he muses.

His name has been mentioned as on the shortlist for a number of years, but the announcement was certainly not expected. When he was first told, it was, Dylan confides, “amazing, incredible. Whoever dreams about something like that?”

In which case, I can’t help but ask, why the long public silence about what it means? Jean-Paul Sartre famously declined the award in 1964, but Dylan has these past weeks seemed intent on simply refusing to acknowledge its existence, so much so that one of the normally tight-lipped Nobel committee labelled him “impolite and arrogant”.

For his part, Dylan sounds genuinely bemused by the whole ruckus. It is as if he can’t quite fathom where all the headlines have come from, that others have somehow been over-reacting.

Couldn’t he just have taken the calls from the Nobel Committee?

“Well, I’m right here,” he says playfully, as if it was simply a matter of them dialling his number, but he offers no further explanation.

It is over a quarter of a century since I first interviewed Bob Dylan. That was back in 1989, and he started off so reticent that he was monosyllabic.

When I asked him a question about the 1960s, he snapped at me. What I did then was start over and ask all the same questions again. It worked. We ended up doing a two-and-a-half hour interview.

If there is one thing I have learned about him over the years, and the several interviews he has granted me, it is that he always does the unexpected.

Bob Dylan has never made a secret of the fact that he doesn’t like the media. It is two years since he last spoke to a journalist. He does it his way.

So, for all the speculation over the last two weeks about the reasons behind his blanket silence on the Nobel award, I can only say that he is a radical personality – which is why he has remained of so much interest to us over six decades since he first emerged on the Manhattan music scene in 1962 – and cannot be tied down, even by the Nobel Prize committee.

In interviews over the years, the famously unpredictable Dylan has been by turns combative, amiable, taciturn, philosophical, charismatic, caustic and cryptic.

He has seemed intent, most of all, on being fiercely private and frustratingly unknowable. Hence his apparent toying with the Nobel committee cannot be said to have come entirely out of the blue.

Perhaps it is just that he has grown casual about garlands that would send the rest of us into orbit, as he has received so many in the course of his long career in the spotlight, since songs such as Blowin’ in the Wind and The Times They Are a-Changin’ became anthems for the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s.

Among many others, he has received a Special Citation Pulitzer (2008), the National Medal of Arts (2009), Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012), as well as France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (1990) and the Légion d’Honneur (2013).

So does he agree with the Nobel committee, I ask, that his songs belong alongside great works of literature? Sara Danius, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, for example, has linked Dylan’s contribution to literature with the writers of ancient Greece.

“If you look back, far back, 2,500 years or so,” she has said, “you discover Homer and Sappho, and they wrote poetic texts that were meant to be listened to, they were meant to be performed, often together with instruments, and it’s the same way with Bob Dylan. But we still read Homer and Sappho… and we enjoy it, and same thing with Bob Dylan. He can be read, and should be read.”

Dylan treats her words with a certain hesitation. “I suppose so, in some way. Some [of my own] songs –Blind Willie, The Ballad of Hollis Brown, Joey, A Hard Rain, Hurricane, and some others – definitely are Homeric in value.”

He has never, of course, been one to explain his lyrics. “I’ll let other people decide what they are,” he tells me. “The academics, they ought to know. I’m not really qualified. I don’t have any opinion.”

On the associated question of whether those same lyrics can be considered poetry, Dylan has long delighted in publicly changing his mind.

He is perfectly capable in one interview of saying that they can, and then the next time he grants a journalist an audience saying that they can’t.

At heart, he just likes to remain beyond reach. He is as elusive over the question of religion as he is over his songs. Born Jewish, in the late 1970s he released two Christian-themed albums that appeared to suggest he was born-again, but followed them by holding his eldest son Jesse’s bar mitzvah at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, the holiest of Jewish sites. (In total, Dylan has six children from two marriages.)

This refusal to explain extends to other aspects of his creative work. Dylan has been working as a visual artist, in tandem with his music, he explains, since the 1960s. “I’m not obsessed with painting,” he laughs. “It’s not all I do.”

But news of his Nobel Prize for Literature has coincided with the opening at London’s Halcyon Gallery of The Beaten Path, a new exhibition of his watercolours and acrylics – his fourth at the Mayfair venue since 2008.

Is there a parallel between song-writing and painting?

“There’s a certain intensity in writing a song,” he replies, “and you have to keep in mind why you are writing it and for who and what for,” he says. “Paintings, and to a greater extent movies, can be created for propaganda purposes, whereas songs can’t be.”
"You have to know your place. There might be some things that are beyond your talents"

His artwork has been on walls in museums and in private collections around the world since 2007, but devotees first began noticing his painterly ways when he did album covers for The Band’s Music from Big Pink in 1967, and his own Self-Portrait in 1970.

A book of drawings, 1994’s Drawn Blank, grew into a series of paintings that first went public nine years ago in Germany before travelling to London, Edinburgh, Tokyo and Turin.

He later assembled collections inspired by trips to Asia and Brazil, before Halcyon directors Paul Green and Udi Sheleg suggested he look instead in his own backyard for inspiration. (When he’s not on the road, Dylan lives in Malibu, California.)
Bob Dylan - 1984 interview with Mick Brown Play! 04:16

For his four exhibitions at the gallery, he has crisscrossed America, often combining his painting with touring his music.

“Well, it’s the land I know best, really, and Halcyon Gallery was probably aware of that, too,” he says. “At first, it was just a series of landscapes they suggested – landscapes without people – so I did that. To me, that meant mountains, lakes, rivers, fields and so forth.

"Sometime later they expanded the idea to include city façades, bridges, automobiles, streets and theatres. Anything outdoors. It’s not an idea I would have thought of myself, although I could relate to it.”

While straightforward, many of the images – a shadowy figure in a phone booth in Midnight Caller or deserted tables in Ice Cream Shack – suggest stories and secrets.

Others, such as Staring at the Moon, Rooftop Parking Lot, Night Train and Del Rio, convey isolation and solitude, even loneliness, but that may simply be a by-product of escaping the frenzy and hollowness of urban life.

When it comes to meaning, Dylan is, it becomes clear, no more keen to explain his paintings than he is his lyrics. “Different people read different things into what they see,” he says. “It’s all subjective.”

Having been touring practically non-stop since 1988, Dylan grabs opportunities on the road to sketch and paint. This way, he’s not tied to timetables, methods or locations.

“I just do it,” he says. “All kinds of places. Wherever I am, really. You can carry a sketchbook anywhere. Watercolours are easy to work with. You can set them up anywhere. The easels and paints are transferable. As far as acrylics and oils, I do them in a barn-like studio or a larger space. I can work in other painters’ studios, too.

“As a rule, I usually avoid overcrowded streets. You just have to find some vantage point that feels right. All of these things take time, and you are not going to get it down all at one time.

“Once I put the generic forms down, later I can use pixellated imagery, photographs, advertisements, optical devices and so forth, to reconfigure things to complete the picture.

"There’s a process to it. I usually work on more than one painting at a time. Each one is different, depending how simple or complex they are. They all take different lengths of time.”

A few years ago, Dylan began exhibiting huge iron installations, a number of which appear in the new Halcyon show. Bill Clinton was given one of his gates for his 65th birthday, and a 26x15ft archway entitled Portal will become Dylan’s first public artwork when it goes on permanent display in Maryland later this year.

“I was putting iron together even as far back as in my hometown [Hibbing, Minnesota, an iron-mining town], but it was always only a hobby,” he says. “I can’t remember not doing it. It’s just not something I thought anybody else would be interested in. Most of my iron pieces up until the recent years were just for friends and family or myself.”

As a painter, writer, film-maker, actor and disc jockey, Dylan plainly sees no limitations to artistic expression. But he does recognise his own limitations.

“There’s a lot of things I’d like to do,” he says. “I’d like to drive a race car on the Indianapolis track. I’d like to kick a field goal in an NFL football game. I’d like to be able to hit a hundred-mile-an-hour baseball. But you have to know your place. There might be some things that are beyond your talents.

“Everything worth doing takes time. You have to write a hundred bad songs before you write one good one. And you have to sacrifice a lot of things that you might not be prepared for. Like it or not, you are in this alone and have to follow your own star.”

Good evening, everyone. I extend my warmest greetings to the members of the Swedish Academy and to all of the other distinguished guests in attendance tonight.

I'm sorry I can't be with you in person, but please know that I am most definitely with you in spirit and honored to be receiving such a prestigious prize. Being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature is something I never could have imagined or seen coming. From an early age, I've been familiar with and reading and absorbing the works of those who were deemed worthy of such a distinction: Kipling, Shaw, Thomas Mann, Pearl Buck, Albert Camus, Hemingway. These giants of literature whose works are taught in the schoolroom, housed in libraries around the world and spoken of in reverent tones have always made a deep impression. That I now join the names on such a list is truly beyond words.

I don't know if these men and women ever thought of the Nobel honor for themselves, but I suppose that anyone writing a book, or a poem, or a play anywhere in the world might harbor that secret dream deep down inside. It's probably buried so deep that they don't even know it's there.

If someone had ever told me that I had the slightest chance of winning the Nobel Prize, I would have to think that I'd have about the same odds as standing on the moon. In fact, during the year I was born and for a few years after, there wasn't anyone in the world who was considered good enough to win this Nobel Prize. So, I recognize that I am in very rare company, to say the least.

I was out on the road when I received this surprising news, and it took me more than a few minutes to properly process it. I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn't have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I'm sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: "Who're the right actors for these roles?" "How should this be staged?" "Do I really want to set this in Denmark?" His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. "Is the financing in place?" "Are there enough good seats for my patrons?" "Where am I going to get a human skull?" I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare's mind was the question "Is this literature?"

When I started writing songs as a teenager, and even as I started to achieve some renown for my abilities, my aspirations for these songs only went so far. I thought they could be heard in coffee houses or bars, maybe later in places like Carnegie Hall, the London Palladium. If I was really dreaming big, maybe I could imagine getting to make a record and then hearing my songs on the radio. That was really the big prize in my mind. Making records and hearing your songs on the radio meant that you were reaching a big audience and that you might get to keep doing what you had set out to do.

Well, I've been doing what I set out to do for a long time, now. I've made dozens of records and played thousands of concerts all around the world. But it's my songs that are at the vital center of almost everything I do. They seemed to have found a place in the lives of many people throughout many different cultures and I'm grateful for that.

But there's one thing I must say. As a performer I've played for 50,000 people and I've played for 50 people and I can tell you that it is harder to play for 50 people. 50,000 people have a singular persona, not so with 50. Each person has an individual, separate identity, a world unto themselves. They can perceive things more clearly. Your honesty and how it relates to the depth of your talent is tried. The fact that the Nobel committee is so small is not lost on me.

But, like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life's mundane matters. "Who are the best musicians for these songs?" "Am I recording in the right studio?" "Is this song in the right key?" Some things never change, even in 400 years.

Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, "Are my songs literature?"

So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.

My best wishes to you all,

Bob Dylan

Don Hunstein, 'Freewheelin' Bob Dylan' Photographer, Dead at 88



Don Hunstein, the photographer who captured the iconic image of Bob Dylan and Suze Rotolo that adorns the singer's Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, died March 18th in Manhattan at the age of 88.

Hunstein's wife Dee Anne Hunstein confirmed her husband's death to the New York Times, adding that the photographer died following a battle with Alzheimer's Disease.

As an in-house photographer for Columbia Records in the Fifties and Sixties, Hunstein shot the striking images that feature on the covers of albums like Miles Davis' Nefertiti, Thelonious Monk's Monk's Dream, Blood, Sweat & Tears' Mirror Image and Dylan's 1962 self-titled solo LP.

However, Hunstein will be best remembered for his Freewheelin' image, featuring Dylan and his then-girlfriend Rotolo trudging down a West Village street on a freezing February day in 1963.

Hunstein had initially photographed Dylan and Rotolo inside their apartment, but unsatisfied with the results, opted to move the shoot outdoors despite the cold weather.

"We went down to Dylan's place on Fourth Street, just off Sixth Avenue, right in the heart of the Village. It was winter, dirty snow on the ground," Hunstein once recalled in an interview with Dylan fan publication The Telegraph.

"Well, I can't tell you why I did it, but I said, 'Just walk up and down the street.' There wasn't very much thought to it. It was late afternoon – you can tell that the sun was low behind them. It must have been pretty uncomfortable, out there in the slush."

Decades later, Dylan would use a photo Hunstein took of Times Square in the Sixties as the original front cover of his autobiography Chronicles: Volume One, the New York Times notes.

In addition to his album covers, Hunstein photographed artists ranging from Barbra Streisand and Janis Joplin to Tony Bennett and Aretha Franklin. In 2009, Hunstein's work was shown alongside other rock photography giants in the exhibit Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present.

Bob Dylan wore a hoodie to accept his Nobel Prize



Bob Dylan accepted his Nobel Prize for literature while dressed in a black hoodie, according to local reports.

Dylan picked up the award in person at a private event in Stockholm at the weekend (April 1), with a photo showing the legendary singer-songwriter arriving at the event in a hoodie and leather jacket. See below.

The musician was named the recipient of the award last year, but missed the official prize-giving ceremony in December due to “previous commitments”. Patti Smith performed at the event in his place.

According to the BBC, a member of the Swedish Academy told Associated Press that the event “went very well indeed” and described Dylan as “a very nice, kind man”.

No media were present as Dylan accepted the award.

Dylan is yet to give the traditional lecture expected of Nobel Prize recipients and a condition of receiving the 8m kroner (£727,000) prize money.

He has until June to deliver a lecture or forfeit the money, but it is expected that he will give a taped version of his planned talk in the next few months.

Dylan is the first songwriter to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. The Swedish Academy explained their reasons for awarding him with the honour, saying he had “created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition”.

Bruce Langhorne, Guitarist Who Inspired ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ Dies at 78

Bruce Langhorne, an intuitive guitarist who played a crucial role in the transition from folk music to folk-rock, notably through his work with Bob Dylan, died on Friday at his home in Venice, Calif. He was 78.

A close friend, Cynthia Riddle, said the cause was kidney failure.

From his pealing lead guitar on “Maggie’s Farm” to his liquid electric guitar lines on “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” and “She Belongs to Me,” Mr. Langhorne was best known for his playing on Mr. Dylan’s landmark 1965 album, “Bringing It All Back Home.” He also contributed hypnotic countermelodies to tracks like “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.”

“Bringing It All Back Home” proved a harbinger of ’60s folk-rock. Mr. Langhorne’s empathetic accompaniment, always stressing feeling over flash, animated all 11 of the album’s tracks.

In his 2004 memoir, “Chronicles,” Mr. Dylan said of Mr. Langhorne, “If you had Bruce playing with you, that’s all you would need to do just about anything.”

Mr. Dylan credited Mr. Langhorne with inspiring “Mr. Tambourine Man,” recalling in 1985 that the song came to him after seeing Mr. Langhorne arrive for a 1964 recording session with an oversize Turkish drum arrayed with bells. (“In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come following you,” Mr. Dylan sang.)

Mr. Langhorne had not set out to become a guitar player. A student of the violin, he had to forgo a career in classical music after losing two fingers and most of the thumb on his right hand in an accident involving homemade fireworks when he was 12. He took up the guitar at 17, developing a unique call-and-response approach to the instrument.

“Since I have fingers missing, some styles of guitar playing were forever unreachable for me,” he told an interviewer. “I really needed someone who had a thread going to really do my job,” he continued, alluding to his musical collaborators. “Because then they could generate a couple of lines of polyphony, or a rhythmic structure, and then I could enhance that.”

Besides his work with Mr. Dylan — which also included the track “Corinna, Corinna” on the 1963 album “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” — Mr. Langhorne played electric guitar on influential folk-rock albums like Richard and Mimi Fariña’s “Celebrations for a Grey Day” and Joan Baez’s “Farewell, Angelina,” both from 1965.

He appeared on many folk albums on the Columbia, Elektra and Vanguard labels. Among these was Tom Rush’s 1968 album, “The Circle Game,” a precursor to the 1970s singer-songwriter movement led by, among others, James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, both of whom contributed compositions to the Rush album.

Mr. Langhorne recorded with a wide variety of musicians, including the South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, the Nigerian percussionist Babatunde Olatunji and the American folk singer Odetta.

He and Odetta performed Aug. 28, 1963, at the March on Washington, just before the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Mr. Langhorne was born on May 11, 1938, in Tallahassee, Fla. His father taught English at Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University, a historically black land-grant university; his mother was a librarian.

Mr. Langhorne’s parents separated when he was 4. His mother moved to East Harlem in Manhattan, where she raised him. He attended the private Horace Mann School in the Bronx, but was expelled after he was accused of being involved with street gangs.

His first professional work came with the folk singer Brother John Sellers, who at the time was the M.C. at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village. Mr. Langhorne was soon backing others at Gerde’s and was invited to play on recordings like Carolyn Hester’s 1961 self-titled album, which featured Mr. Dylan on harmonica.

Mr. Langhorne also became friends with a fellow guitarist, Sandy Bull, with whom he shared an enthusiasm for African and Middle Eastern music, as well as for the reverb-steeped guitar of Roebuck Staples, the patriarch of the family gospel group the Staple Singers. Mr. Bull lent Mr. Langhorne the Fender Twin Reverb amplifier into which he plugged his acoustic 1920 model Martin guitar to create the electrifying sounds that helped give birth to folk-rock.

In 1971, the actor Peter Fonda, to whom Mr. Langhorne was introduced by Mr. Masekela, invited Mr. Langhorne to compose the music for his movie “The Hired Hand,” an austere soundtrack that featured banjo, fiddle and acoustic guitar. He later worked with the director Jonathan Demme on music for movies like “Fighting Mad” (1976), which starred Mr. Fonda, and played on Mr. Dylan’s soundtrack of Sam Peckinpah’s “Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid” (1973), whose cast included Mr. Dylan.

Not suited to the pace of Hollywood, to which he relocated from New York in the late ’60s, Mr. Langhorne moved to Hawaii in 1980 to farm macadamia nuts. He returned to Los Angeles in 1985 and, in 1992, learned that he had Type 2 diabetes. His diagnosis inspired him to create Brother Bru-Bru’s Hot Sauce, an organic, low-sodium salsa.

Mr. Langhorne gave up the guitar in 2006 after having a stroke. He played percussion and keyboards on his first and only solo album, “Tambourine Man,” featuring Caribbean-style music, which was released in 2011.

He is survived by his wife of 29 years, Janet Bachelor.

Among the many performers with whom he worked over the years, Mr. Langhorne spoke with particular relish about his collaborations with Mr. Dylan.

“The connection I had with Bobby was telepathic, and when I use that word, I mean it,” he said in a 2007 interview. “Between the two of us, the communication was always very strong.”

Hear Bob Dylan Recite His Nobel Prize in Literature Lecture



Six months after Bob Dylan received the Nobel Prize in Literature at a ceremony he did not attend, the songwriter has fulfilled the award's criteria by delivering a lecture on the topic to the Swedish Academy.

Recorded June 4th in Los Angeles, Dylan's lecture finds the rock legend discussing both his musical influences like Leadbelly and Buddy Holly alongside literary works that informed his songwriting, including Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and Homer's The Odyssey.

"The themes from those books worked their way into many of my songs, either knowingly or unintentionally. I wanted to write songs unlike anything anybody ever heard, and these themes were fundamental," Dylan says during the 30-minute lecture.

Dylan then summarizes those classic stories and how folk music often cited their themes and motifs.

"The Odyssey is a great book whose themes have worked its way into the ballads of a lot of songwriters: 'Homeward Bound,' 'Green, Green Grass of Home,' 'Home on the Range,' and my songs as well," Dylan said.

"The Odyssey is a strange, adventurous tale of a grown man trying to get home after fighting in a war. He's on that long journey home, and it's filled with traps and pitfalls. He's cursed to wander … He's a travelin' man, but he's making a lot of stops," a nod to the Ricky Nelson single.

When the Swedish Academy initially announced that Dylan was the Nobel Prize recipient, they faced some backlash for including a songwriter among previous winners like Samuel Beckett, Pablo Neruda and Toni Morrison. However, as Dylan explained in his lecture, the songwriter, the poet, the playwright and the storyteller are all similar.

"Our songs are alive in the land of the living. But songs are unlike literature. They're meant to be sung, not read," Dylan said.

"The words in Shakespeare's plays were meant to be acted on the stage. Just as lyrics in songs are meant to be sung, not read on a page. And I hope some of you get the chance to listen to these lyrics the way they were intended to be heard: in concert or on record or however people are listening to songs these days. I return once again to Homer, who says, 'Sing in me, oh Muse, and through me tell the story.'"

While Dylan did not attend the Nobel ceremony and banquet in Stockholm in December, he did pen an acceptance speech that was read by United States Ambassador to Sweden Azita Raji. In April, when Dylan's European tour reached Sweden, he officially received his Nobel Prize medal and diploma.

By providing a lecture on the subject of literature, Dylan fulfilled all the requisites in order to receive the $900,000 award that accompanies the Nobel Prize.

I'm currently reading a biography on Joni Mitchell. It mentions an early acoustic version of Blood On The Tracks that was said to be bootlegged. Has it come out as part of the "official bootleg" series? I'd like to hear it.