Showing posts with label musicians. Show all posts
Showing posts with label musicians. Show all posts
The first song I wrote was a song to Brigitte Bardot.
DYLAN: People were still dealing with illusion and delusion at that time. The times really change and they don't change. There were different characters back then and there were things that were undeveloped that are fully developed now. But back then, there was space, space-well, there wasn't any pressure. There was all the time in the world to get it done. There wasn't any pressure, because no body knew about it. You know, I mean. music people were like a bunch of cotton pickers. They see you on the side of the road picking cotton, but nobody stops to give a shit. I mean, it wasn't that important. So Washington Square was a place where people you knew or met congregated every Sunday and it was like a world of music. You know the way New York is; I mean, there could be 20 different things happening in the same kitchen or in the same park; there could be 200 bands in one park in New York; there could be 15 jug bands, five bluegrass bands and an old crummy string band, 20 Irish confederate groups, a Southern mountain band, folk singers of all kinds and colors, singing John Henry work songs. There was bodies piled sky-high doing whatever they felt like doing. Bongo drums, conga drums, saxophone players. xylophone players, drummers of all nations and nationalities. Poets who would rant and rave from the statues. You know, those things don't happen anymore. But then that was what was happening. It was all street. Cafes would be open all night. It was a European thing that never really took off. It has never really been a part of this country That is what New York was like when I got there.
DYLAN: Mass communication killed it all. Oversimplification.
Brilliant young Canadian pianist Glenn Gould laughing as engineers let him hear how his singing spoiled his recording of the Bach Goldberg Variations after which he offered to wear a gas mask to muffle his songs, at a Columbia recording studio.
New York, NY, March 1956.
Photographed by Gordon Parks
David Tudor, Black Mountain College 1953 Summer Institute in the Arts. Photos taken at the home of Mrs. Ira Julian by Frank Jones when John Cage, Merce Cunningham, David Tudor, and Peter Voulkos were on their way back to New York from Black Mountain College. From the Black Mountain College Research Project Papers, Visual Materials, Box 88, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, NC.
In a 1957 lecture, Experimental Music, he described music as “a purposeless play” which is “an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living”.
DYLAN: No. Psychedelics never influenced me. I don’t know, I think Timothy Leary had a lot to do with driving the last nails into the coffin of that New York scene. When psychedelics happened, everything became irrelevant. Because that had nothing to do with making music or writing poems or trying to really find yourself in that day and age.
People were deluded into thinking they were something that they weren’t: birds, airplanes, fire hydrants, whatever. People were walking around thinking they were stars.
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