(TV) Dylan + Civil War -- Verlaine too?

["Joe Thornton" <joe.thornton@gmx.net>]

Interesting article in the Guardian today about Dylan:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1569452,00.html

Extracts:

'Only last week the final issues of the broadsheet Guardian carried a
correspondence remarking on the presence on his most recent album, released
four years ago, of a song titled High Water, inspired by an item from the
repertoire of the great early bluesman Charley Patton, who sang of the great
Mississippi flood of 1927, when the levees broke and thousands died.'

' "Songs about real events were always topical," Dylan wrote in Chronicles Vol
1, published last year to great acclaim. But he explained how, in the earliest
days of his career, he had tried to resist the temptation to concentrate on
literal observations of the world around him. Instead he took himself day
after day to the New York Public Library, where he became immersed in
microfilmed newspaper accounts of the American civil war. "It wasn't like it
was a different world," he wrote. "But the same one with more urgency ...
After a while you become aware of nothing but a culture of feeling, of black
days, of schism, evil for evil, the common destiny of human being getting
thrown off course.

' "Back there, America was put on the cross, died, and was resurrected. There
was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the
all-embracing template behind everything that I would write." '


Wasn't there a story that "Words from the Front" was inspired by an incident
in the Civil War? Anyone suppose that that's another case of Verlaine being
inspired by Dylan?

Anyway, it's a great recording by Tom, one of the definitive pieces of rock
music. And unique in his songbook in being a non-ironic song about war.

--JoeT

P.S.  Who was not reminded of "When The Levee Breaks" by Led Zeppelin?
(Another definitive piece of rock music!)
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