Origins and musical beginnings

Robert Allen Zimmerman (Hebrew name Shabtai Zisel ben Avraham)^[10][11] was born in St. Mary's Hospital on May 24, 1941, in Duluth, Minnesota,^[12] and raised there and in Hibbing, Minnesota, on the Mesabi Iron Range west of Lake Superior. Research by Dylan’s biographers has shown that his paternal grandparents, Zigman and Anna Zimmerman, emigrated from Odessa in the Russian Empire (now Ukraine) to the United States following the antisemitic pogroms of 1905.^[13] His mother's grandparents, Benjamin and Lybba Edelstein, were Lithuanian Jews who arrived in America in 1902.^[13] In his autobiography Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan writes that his paternal grandmother's maiden name was Kyrgyz and her family originated from Istanbul.^[14]

Dylan’s parents, Abram Zimmerman and Beatrice "Beatty" Stone, were part of the area's small but close-knit Jewish community. Robert Zimmerman lived in Duluth until age six, when his father was stricken with polio and the family returned to his mother's home town, Hibbing, where Zimmerman spent the rest of his childhood. Robert Zimmerman spent much of his youth listening to the radio—first to blues and country stations broadcasting from Shreveport, Louisiana and, later, to early rock and roll.^[15] He formed several bands in high school: The Shadow Blasters was short lived, but his next, The Golden Chords,^[16] lasted longer and played covers of popular songs. Their performance of Danny and the Juniors' "Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay" at their high school talent show was so loud that the principal cut the microphone off.^[17] In his 1959 school yearbook, Robert Zimmerman listed as his ambition "To join Little Richard."^[18] The same year, using the name Elston Gunnn, he performed two dates with Bobby Vee, playing piano and providing handclaps.^[1][19][20]

Zimmerman moved to Minneapolis in September 1959 and enrolled at the University of Minnesota. His early focus on rock and roll gave way to an interest in American folk music. In 1985 Dylan explained the attraction that folk music had exerted on him: "The thing about rock'n'roll is that for me anyway it wasn't enough ... There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms ... but the songs weren't serious or didn't reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings."^[21] He soon began to perform at the 10 O'clock Scholar, a coffee house a few blocks from campus, and became actively involved in the local Dinkytown folk music circuit.^[22][23]

During his Dinkytown days, Zimmerman began introducing himself as "Bob Dylan".^[16] In a 2004 interview, Dylan explained: "You're born, you know, the wrong names, wrong parents. I mean, that happens. You call yourself what you want to call yourself. This is the land of the free."^[24] In his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One, Dylan acknowledged that he was familiar with the poetry of Dylan Thomas.^[25]

1960s: Busy Being Born

Relocation to New York and record deal

Dylan dropped out of college at the end of his freshman year. In January 1961, he moved to New York City, hoping to perform there and visit his musical idol Woody Guthrie, who was seriously ill with Huntington's Disease in Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital.^[26] Guthrie had been a revelation to Dylan and was the biggest influence on his early performances. Dylan would later say of Guthrie's work, "You could listen to his songs and actually learn how to live."^[23] As well as visiting Guthrie in the hospital, Dylan befriended Guthrie's acolyte Ramblin' Jack Elliott. Much of Guthrie's repertoire was actually channeled through Elliott, and Dylan paid tribute to Elliott inChronicles (2004).^[27]

From February 1961, Dylan played at various clubs around Greenwich Village. In September, he eventually gained public recognition when Robert Shelton wrote a positive review in The New York Times of a show at Gerde's Folk City.^[28] The same month Dylan played harmonica on folk singer Carolyn Hester's eponymous third album, which brought his talents to the attention of the album's producer John Hammond.^[29] Hammond signed Dylan to Columbia Records in October. The performances on his first Columbia album, Bob Dylan (1962), consisted of familiar folk, blues and gospel material combined with two original compositions. The album made little impact, selling only 5,000 copies in its first year, just enough to break even.^[30] Within Columbia Records, some referred to the singer as "Hammond's Folly" and suggested dropping his contract. Hammond defended Dylan vigorously, and Johnny Cash was also a powerful ally of Dylan.^[30] While working for Columbia, Dylan also recorded several songs under the pseudonym Blind Boy Grunt, for Broadside Magazine, a folk music magazine and record label.^[31]

Dylan made two important career moves in August 1962. He legally changed his name to Robert Dylan, and signed a management contract with Albert Grossman. Grossman remained Dylan's manager until 1970, and was notable both for his sometimes confrontational personality, and for the fiercely protective loyalty he displayed towards his principal client.^[32] Dylan would subsequently describe Grossman thus: "He was kind of like a Colonel Tom Parker figure ... you could smell him coming."^[23]Tensions between Grossman and John Hammond led to Hammond being replaced as the producer of Dylan's second album by the young African American jazz producer Tom Wilson.^[33]

By the time Dylan's second album, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, was released in May 1963, he had begun to make his name as both a singer and a songwriter. Many of the songs on this album were labelled protest songs, inspired partly by Guthrie and influenced byPete Seeger's passion for topical songs.^[34] "Oxford Town", for example, was a sardonic account of James Meredith's ordeal as the first black student to risk enrollment at the University of Mississippi.^[35]

His most famous song of the time, "Blowin' in the Wind", partially derived its melody from the traditional slave song "No More Auction Block", while its lyrics questioned the social and political status quo.^[36] The song was widely recorded and became an international hit for Peter, Paul and Mary, setting a precedent for many other artists who would have hits with Dylan's songs. "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" was based on the tune of the folk ballad "Lord Randall". With its veiled references to nuclear apocalypse, it gained even more resonance when the Cuban missile crisis developed only a few weeks after Dylan began performing it.^[37]Like "Blowin' in the Wind", "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" marked an important new direction in modern song writing, blending a stream-of-consciousness, imagist lyrical attack with a traditional folk form.^[38]

While Dylan's topical songs solidified his early reputation, Freewheelin' also included a mixture of love songs and jokey, surreal talking blues. Humor was a large part of Dylan's persona,

By this time, Dylan and Baez were both prominent in the civil rights movement, singing together at the March on Washington on August 28, 1963.^[47] Dylan's third album, The Times They Are a-Changin', reflected a more politicized and cynical Dylan.^[48] The songs often took as their subject matter contemporary, real life stories, with "Only A Pawn In Their Game" addressing the murder of civil rights worker Medgar Evers; and the Brechtian "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" the death of black hotel barmaid Hattie Carroll, at the hands of young white socialite William Zantzinger.^[49] On a more general theme, "Ballad of Hollis Brown" and "North Country Blues" address the despair engendered by the breakdown of farming and mining communities. This political material was accompanied by two personal love songs, "Boots of Spanish Leather" and "One Too Many Mornings".^[50]

By the end of 1963, Dylan felt both manipulated and constrained by the folk and protest movements.^[51] These tensions were publicly displayed when, accepting the "Tom Paine Award" from the National Emergency Civil Liberties Committeeshortly after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a drunken, rambling Dylan questioned the role of the committee, insulted its members as old and balding, and claimed to see something of himself (and of every man) in Kennedy's alleged assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.^[52]

Another Side of Bob Dylan, recorded on a single June evening in 1964,^[16] had a lighter mood than its predecessor. The surreal, humorous Dylan reemerged on "I Shall Be Free #10" and "Motorpsycho Nightmare". "Spanish Harlem Incident" and "To Ramona" are romantic and passionate love songs, while "Black Crow Blues" and "I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)" suggest the rock and roll soon to dominate Dylan's music. "It Ain't Me Babe", on the surface a song about spurned love, has been described as a rejection of the role his reputation had thrust at him.^[53] His newest direction was signaled by two lengthy songs: theimpressionistic "Chimes of Freedom", which sets elements of social commentary against a denser metaphorical landscape in a style later characterized by Allen Ginsberg as "chains of flashing images,"^[54] and "My Back Pages", which attacks the simplistic and arch seriousness of his own earlier topical songs and seems to predict the backlash he was about to encounter from his former champions as he took a new direction.^[55]

In the latter half of 1964 and 1965, Dylan’s appearance and musical style changed rapidly, as he made his move from leading contemporary songwriter of the folk scene to Folk-Rock pop-music star. His scruffy jeans and work shirts were replaced by aCarnaby Street wardrobe, sunglasses day or night, and pointy "Beatle boots". A London reporter wrote: "Hair that would set the teeth of a comb on edge. A loud shirt that would dim the neon lights of Leicester Square. He looks like an undernourished cockatoo."^[56] Dylan also began to spar in increasingly surreal ways with his interviewers. Appearing on the Les Crane TV show and asked about a movie he was planning to make, he told Crane it would be a cowboy horror movie. Asked if he played the cowboy, Dylan replied, "No, I play my mother."^[57]

Going electric

His March 1965 album Bringing It All Back Home was yet another stylistic leap.^[58] The album featured his first recordings made with electric instruments. The first single, "Subterranean Homesick Blues", owed much to Chuck Berry's "Too Much Monkey Business" and was provided with an early music video courtesy of D. A. Pennebaker's cinéma vérité presentation of Dylan's 1965 tour of England, Dont Look Back.^[59] Its free association lyrics both harked back to the manic energy of Beat poetry and were a forerunner of rap and hip-hop.^[60]

By contrast, the B side of the album was interpreted by some folk fans as a conciliatory gesture: four long songs where Dylan accompanied himself on acoustic guitar and harmonica.^[61] "Mr. Tambourine Man" had already been a hit for The Byrds, and would become one of his best known songs; while "It's All Over Now Baby Blue" and "It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" would be acclaimed as two of Dylan's most important compositions.^[61][62]

In the summer of 1965, as the headliner at the Newport Folk Festival, Dylan performed his first electric set since his high school days with a pickup group drawn mostly from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, featuring Mike Bloomfield (guitar), Sam Lay (drums) and Jerome Arnold (bass), plus Al Kooper (organ) and Barry Goldberg(piano).^[63] Dylan had appeared at Newport in 1963 and 1964, but in 1965 Dylan, met with a mix of cheering and booing, left the stage after only three songs. As one version of the legend has it, the boos were from the outraged folk fans whom Dylan had alienated by appearing, unexpectedly, with an electric guitar. An alternative account claims audience members were merely upset by poor sound quality and a surprisingly short set.^[64]

Dylan's 1965 Newport performance provoked an outraged response from the folk music establishment.^[65] Ewan MacColl wrote in Sing Out!, "Our traditional songs and ballads are the creations of extraordinarily talented artists working inside traditions formulated over time ... But what of Bobby Dylan? ... a youth of mediocre talent. Only a non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel."^[66] On July 29, just four days after his controversial performance at Newport, Dylan was back in the studio in New York, recording "Positively 4th Street". The lyrics teemed with images of vengeance and paranoia,^[67] and it was widely interpreted as Dylan's put-down of former friends from the folk community—friends he had known in the clubs along West 4th Street.^[68]

Just in case you’ve missed it:  some feller named Bob Dylan is going to be playing down at Riverfest Amphitheatre tonight.  Maybe you heard of him?

We all know Bob’s music, but if you decipher the mumble he’s actually pretty dadgum funny.  Here’s a bunch of Bob’s jokes from his XM radio show (thanks to the folks at

DemocraticUnderground.com for the list. )

 ”I got a friend who’s learning to become a ballerina. She’s improving by leaps and bounds.”

“Getting married’s a lot like getting into a tub of hot water. After you get used to it, it ain’t so hot.” “I once had a cross-eyed teacher who couldn’t control his pupils.” “You know, I sleep at the edge of the bed. It doesn’t take long for me to drop off.” “Two dogs talking. One says to the other: `You’re crazy. You ought to go see a psychiatrist.’ The other dog says: `I’d love to, but I’m not allowed on the couch.”‘ “I was having dinner with our announcer, Pierre Mancini. The only difference between Pierre Mancini and a canoe is that sometimes a canoe will tip.” “Take our engineer, Tex Carbone. He’s so laid back it takes him two hours to watch `60 Minutes.’ I’m the complete opposite. I can make Minute Rice in 30 seconds.” “I just came back from a pleasure trip. Took my mother-in-law to the airport.” “What do you do if you miss your mother-in-law? Reload, and try again.” “All musicians get girls, but a guitarist always has his pick.” “What’s the difference between a drummer and a savings bond? Eventually, a savings bond will mature and earn money.” “They got a new `dial-a-prayer’ for atheists. You call it, and nobody answers.” “A lot of people don’t celebrate Christmas. Like my buddy Dexter Quinn. He’s an atheist. You know what his favorite Christmas movie is? `Coincidence on 34th Street.”‘ “If diamonds are a girl’s best friend, why do so many girls get mad when you want to go to the ballpark? You tell me.” “I gave a bald-headed friend of mine a comb. You know what he said to me? `I’ll never part with it.”‘ “My friend’s wife is a really bad cook. I broke a tooth on her coffee.” “I was at a restaurant. I said to the waiter, `There’s a needle in my soup.’ He said, `I’m very sorry. It’s a typographical error. It’s supposed to be a noodle.”‘ “A cat has nine lives, but a bullfrog croaks every day.” “If you think the sun is too hot, just remember, you don’t have to shovel it.” “In Sweden, they have a system of higher taxes, but welfare for everyone. They call it the Swedish model. Well, I could go for a Swedish model right about now.” “Here’s a tip on how you can save your money. Use somebody else’s.” “He opened a restaurant on the moon. It had great food, people say, but no atmosphere.” “My friend was happily married for 10 years. Too bad he was married for 30.” “Every day in the United States, 200 new jail cells are constructed. I hope we can keep up!” “A giraffe can go a long time without water. But he wants to see a menu right away.” “I was having dinner the other day when the waiter came over. I said to him, `There’s a fly in my soup.’ And he said, `That’s very possible. The cook used to be a tailor.”‘ “Married men don’t live longer. It just seems longer.”

Too Dark Too See? ‘Time Out Of Mind’ and Bob Dylan’s Late Trilogy

Yet Time Out Of Mind inaugurated a new Dylan, one less certain of his own powers, and indeed of the possibility of transformation in general. This lack of faith in the new is principally evidenced through the extensive use of quotation across the late trilogy, culminating in 2006’s Modern Times, in which whole tracts of old and forgotten songs are resurrected to address the new age (though controversially the CD declares “all songs written by Bob Dylan”). The middle - and pivotal - work in the trilogy, “Love and Theft”‘, puts this process front and centre in its very title (it is the only album in the canon to benefit from quotation marks).

On that album’s Mississippi, Dylan sings, ‘All my powers of expression, and thoughts so sublime, could never do you justice, in reason or rhyme.’ Indeed, at times the new Dylan falls back on cliché to express the inexpressible: Spirit on the Water, fromModern Times, is a seven minute epic of aphorism, piling old saw upon old saw until their cumulative weight adds up to something like the truth cliché once represented (”from East to West, ever since the world began”); Dylan “can’t believe these things would ever fade from your mind.” But this is hardly the figure of the 1960s, or even the 1970s, he of brash overconfidence and iconoclastic verve. This is another Dylan, looking for truth with the help of others; there’s a new humility in him.

The reasons for this - or the crises which led to it - are explored on Time Out Of Mind, and this bleak honesty is what makes it so thoroughly a winter album - it not just evokes coldness, but has let it sink into its bones. During its centrepiece, the 16-minute ramble across the peaks of Dylan’s psyche which is the song Highlands, the singer notices young couples relaxing in a park: “Well, I’d trade places with any of them / In a minute, if I could,” he confides, admitting to the disappointment, the limitations, of old age. And on Not Dark Yet, one of Dylan’s very bleakest songs, we hear that “my sense of humanity has gone down the drain.” Dylan’s alienation is total, and he is left tryin’ to get to heaven before they close the door.

Michael Gray, in his superlative and idiosyncratic ‘Bob Dylan Encyclopedia’, argues that all this darkness, this angsty confessional, isn’t really the stuff of Dylan: that, in its use of the folk idiom and country blues, “Love and Theft”, the album which followed it in 2001, is the more important, the more Dylanesque, record. This is persuasive, and certainly Time Out Of Mind marks something of a break with Dylans past and future. But in its sense of alienation, it develops a new relationship with time. Dylan is no longer at its forward edge. As Eyolf Østrem has beautifully put it,Highlands (and, I’d argue, the album as a whole) “succeeds, not by trying to stop [time] in the tracks or hold it back, but by realizing that time goes on regardless of everything, and by tapping into its flow and disregarding it, instead of fighting it.”Contra Gray, Time Out Mind (and now we see that title as a typically Dylanesque pun) paves the way for the playful orneriness of “Love and Theft”: Dylan is only able to start fully inhabiting this old man persona because, in 1997, he put his hands up and surrendered on the path to decrepitude.

This persistence of vision is evidenced by Make You Feel My Love, a minor song fromTime Out of Mind which nevertheless performs exactly the same trick as a song separated from it by more than a decade, Spirit on the Water. As I’ve suggested, that song uses the power of cliché, of the cumulative power of our stock phrases.  Consider the first two verses of Make You Feel My Love:

When the rain Is blowing in your face And the whole world Is on your case
I could offer you A warm embrace To make you feel my love, When the evening shadows
And the stars appear And there is no one there To dry your tears I could hold you
For a million yearsTo make you feel my love

The rain falls, the whole world’s against you, it’s dark outside and there are tears on your face. But it’s OK, because Bob loves you. This is surely a first stab at raiding the wordhoard: here Dylan reclaims our most basic idioms, in an admission that we can learn from the past rather than constantly overturn it - and in doing so as he explicity admits to his diminishing powers.

It is important to note, though, how Dylan’s delivery serves this purpose. A banality spoken blandly will merely bore - invention is the stuff of profundity. In times past electrifying images poured out of Dylan at a rate he called ‘vomitific’. The guilty undertaker sighed, the lonesome organ grinder cried; the silver saxophones urged refusal. The new Dylan, back in time to a self that existed before Blonde on Blonde(he was so much older then, and so much younger now), is interested more in recontextualising older images, more venerable words. It is the way he sings them which invests them with something beyond their everyday familiarity.

Christopher Ricks has called it Dylan’s “exquisite precision of voice,” and this is a good way of thinking about the ways in which Dylan chooses to sing a line: what he is looking for is the means in melody and rhythm better to communicate what he has written. This duality is the source of his late songs’ substance: his voice is shot, perhaps, but its subtelty is greater than ever. (We might compare Dylan’s vocal performance on Make You Feel My Love with that of teen soulster Adele’s on her debut album ‘19'; creamy and technically accomplished, it fails somhow to find this space in the inherited phrase which lies apart from the platitude.)

“My cruel weapons have been put on the shelf,” Dylan sings on Workingman’s Blues #2, the most important song from Modern Times. But this isn’t the whole story, we know, since Dylan’s late period is actually a veritable treasure trove of wisdom and comment: far from hanging up the burden of his pen, Dylan has merely employed it in new ways. And on “Love and Theft”, we get closer to the truth: “Summer days, summer nights are gone - I know a place where there’s still somethin’ going on.” IfTime Out of Mind was the start of Bob Dylan’s winter, he soon found a new way to keep warm.

Modern Times (2006)

Dylan began 1973 by signing with a new record label, David Geffen's Asylum Records, when his contract with Columbia Recordsexpired. On his next album, Planet Waves, he used The Band as backing group, while rehearsing for a major tour. The album included two versions of "Forever Young", which became one of his most popular songs.^[107] Christopher Ricks has connected the chorus of this song with John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn", which contains the line "For ever panting, and for ever young."^[108] As one critic described it, the song projected "something hymnal and heartfelt that spoke of the father in Dylan",^[109] and Dylan himself commented: "I wrote it thinking about one of my boys and not wanting to be too sentimental."^[110] Biographer Howard Sounes noted that Jakob Dylan believed the song was about him.^[107] Columbia Records simultaneously released Dylan, a haphazard collection of studio outtakes (almost exclusively cover songs), which was widely interpreted as a churlish response to Dylan's signing with a rival record label.^[111] In January 1974 Dylan and The Bandembarked on their high-profile, coast-to-coast North American tour. A live double album of the tour, Before the Flood, was released on Asylum Records. After the tour, Dylan and his wife became publicly estranged. He filled a small red notebook with songs about relationships and ruptures, and quickly recorded a new album entitled Blood on the Tracks in September 1974.^[112]Dylan delayed the album's release, however, and re-recorded half of the songs at Sound 80 Studios in Minneapolis with production assistance from his brother David Zimmerman.^[113] During this time, Dylan returned to Columbia Records which eventually reissued his Asylum albums. Released in early 1975, Blood on the Tracks received mixed reviews. In the NME, Nick Kent described "the accompaniments [as] often so trashy they sound like mere practise takes."^[114] In Rolling Stone, reviewer Jon Landauwrote that "the record has been made with typical shoddiness."^[115] However, over the years critics have come to see it as one of Dylan's greatest achievements, perhaps the only serious rival to his mid-60s trilogy of albums. In Salon.com, Bill Wyman wrote: "Blood on the Tracks is his only flawless album and his best produced; the songs, each of them, are constructed in disciplined fashion. It is his kindest album and most dismayed, and seems in hindsight to have achieved a sublime balance between the logorrhea-plagued excesses of his mid-'60s output and the self-consciously simple compositions of his post-accident years."^[116] NovelistRick Moody called it "the truest, most honest account of a love affair from tip to stern ever put down on magnetic tape."^[117] After the tour, Dylan and his wife became publicly estranged. He filled a small red notebook with songs about relationships and ruptures, and quickly recorded a new album entitled Blood on the Tracks in September 1974.^[112]Dylan delayed the album's release, however, and re-recorded half of the songs at Sound 80 Studios in Minneapolis with production assistance from his brother David Zimmerman.^[113] During this time, Dylan returned to Columbia Records which eventually reissued his Asylum albums. Released in early 1975, Blood on the Tracks received mixed reviews. In the NME, Nick Kent described "the accompaniments [as] often so trashy they sound like mere practise takes."^[114] In Rolling Stone, reviewer Jon Landauwrote that "the record has been made with typical shoddiness."^[115] However, over the years critics have come to see it as one of Dylan's greatest achievements, perhaps the only serious rival to his mid-60s trilogy of albums. In Salon.com, Bill Wyman wrote: "Blood on the Tracks is his only flawless album and his best produced; the songs, each of them, are constructed in disciplined fashion. It is his kindest album and most dismayed, and seems in hindsight to have achieved a sublime balance between the logorrhea-plagued excesses of his mid-'60s output and the self-consciously simple compositions of his post-accident years."^[116] NovelistRick Moody called it "the truest, most honest account of a love affair from tip to stern ever put down on magnetic tape."^[117] That summer Dylan wrote his first successful "protest" song in twelve years, championing the cause of boxer  Rubin "Hurricane" Carter, who had been imprisoned for a triple murder in Paterson, New Jersey. After visiting Carter in jail, Dylan wrote "Hurricane", presenting the case for Carter's innocence. Despite its 8:32 minute length, the song was released as a single, peaking at #33 on the U.S. Billboard Chart, and performed at every 1975 date of Dylan's next tour, the Rolling Thunder Revue.^[118] The tour was a varied evening of entertainment featuring many performers drawn from the resurgent Greenwich Village folk scene, including T-Bone Burnett,Ramblin' Jack Elliott, David Mansfield, Roger McGuinn, Mick Ronson, Joan Baez, and violinist Scarlet Rivera, whom Dylan discovered while she was walking down the street, her violin case hanging on her back.^[119] Allen Ginsberg accompanied the troupe, staging scenes for the film Dylan was simultaneously shooting. Sam Shepard was initially hired to write the film's screenplay, but ended up accompanying the tour as informal chronicler.^[120] Running through late 1975 and again through early 1976, the tour encompassed the release of the album Desire, with many of Dylan's new songs featuring an almost travelogue-like narrative style, showing the influence of his new collaborator, playwrightJacques Levy.^[121][122] The spring 1976 half of the tour was documented by a TV concert special, Hard Rain, and the LP Hard Rain; no concert album from the better-received and better-known opening half of the tour was released until 2002's Live 1975.^[123] The fall 1975 tour with the Revue also provided the backdrop to Dylan's nearly four-hour film Renaldo and Clara, a sprawling and improvised narrative, mixed with concert footage and reminiscences. Released in 1978, the movie received generally poor, sometimes scathing, reviews and had a very brief theatrical run.^[124][125] Later in that year, Dylan allowed a two-hour edit, dominated by the concert performances, to be more widely released.^[126] In November 1976 Dylan appeared at The Band's "farewell" concert, along with other guests including Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison and Neil Young. Martin Scorsese's acclaimed cinematic chronicle of this show, The Last Waltz, was released in 1978 and included about half of Dylan's set.^[127] In 1976, Dylan also wrote and duetted on the song "Sign Language" for Eric Clapton's No Reason To Cry^[128]. Dylan's 1978 album Street-Legal, recorded with a large, pop-rock band, complete with female backing vocalists, was lyrically one of his more complex and cohesive.^[129]It suffered, however, from a poor sound mix (attributed to his studio recording practices),^[130] submerging much of its instrumentation until its remastered CD release nearly a quarter century later.