Comments on: Don’t Get Up Gentlemen, I’m Only Passing Through

By: don

don — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 18:47:09 +0000

I’ve just discovered your blog and I’m exploring it with great interest and enjoyment. Special thanks to you for your ideas, approaches, and really good writing.

By: diana wolf

diana wolf — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 16:54:48 +0000

Hi-
Looking forward to reading more of your blog.

I’d like to suggest you add a couple more to the readers ages though- like 61 (me) and even 75! LOL

we are the original Dylan listeners and are still following, being moved, and finding AHA moments within his lyrics- and new AHA moments opening up in lyrics we’ve heard a thousand times before.

I’m planning on starting a blog on Dylan soon- well, not really ON dylan.
I do art journals and am planning on using Dylan lyrics for my AHA’s via both writing and art/collage journals.
When i get it going I’ll link to you.
take care,
I’ll be back.

OH- if you click on the current blog there are a couple of examples-
nothing fabulous. but I love doing them.

By: Michael

Michael — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 15:24:47 +0000

Sorry, I misquoted the Cohen lyric. He doesn’t say “The gardener is gone”, he says, “His body is gone but back here on the lawn….”, from One of Us Can Not be Wrong (Songs of LC).

By: eruke

eruke — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:24:57 +0000

Dear Michael–Holy Profiterole, I did not know the Leonard Cohen reference! My gardener is taken from Ain’t Talkin’: my modest aim is to replace Nietzsche’s taunting aphorism, “God is dead,” with Dylan’s more subtle and witty and troubling and visual lyric–”There’s no one here, the gardener is gone.” What Leonard Cohen song is that from?
I’ve had the chance to see Leonard twice here in NY in the last 2 years. I like the idea of rehearsed sagacity: he is a showman, and his showmanship the kind that’s ritualistic and never superficial. David Boucher’s book, Dylan and Cohen, is an excellent comparison of the two artists, and does justice to each. Dylan’s 1988 performance of Hallelujah, which circulates widely and can be heard on YouTube, is one of the greatest performances of religious art, ever. John Donne and George Herbert roll about in their graves whenever anyone plays Dylan’s Hallelujah. “Well—what’s it to ya?”

By: eruke

eruke — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:12:42 +0000

Dear Dana–I see Farmer McGregror running at Peter in his little blue jacket, soon to be lost. I hope you were not denied blackberries and milk for dessert. I can’t be disingenuous about your extremely gracious comments here. John Bauldie and Paul Williams should be anyone’s models for this topic–and I hope anyone would agree that it’s the bottomless treasure chest of this topic that’s responsible for anything good that;s said about it. I love your reference to vaudevillian, there is so much of that in Dylan that ‘s ignored in favor of Mr. Enigma.-I am just waiting for the night when he’s center stage after the encores, enduring the last cheers of the evening with that restless, annoyed manner we’re all familiar with, and he takes his hat off and out flies a couple of bedraggled and furious doves. It will happen! Keep listening to Bob, and thank you again.

By: Michael

Michael — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 02:54:33 +0000

Your page name is a Leonard Cohen lyric, correct?:
The gardener is gone
but back here on the lawn,
his spirit continues to drool

Is there Dylan with that lyric?

And yes, Cohen does make the audience fieel like a community, more now that in the past. He as acheived, and he has cultivated to some extent a Prophet-like demeanor. I saw him in 1973 (Bottom Line), 1994 (MSGarden theater), and last year at the Beacon. His sagacity grows, slthough it is rehearsed. He is the master folk singer, with all due respect to Dylan. Hear ing Dylan sing Cohen’s Hallelujah will help one to agree.

By: Dana Dantine

Dana Dantine — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 20:20:26 +0000

My great good luck to have stumbled upon “gardenerisgone” near the end of the year & (feeling rather like Peter Rabbit in Mr. McGregor‘s garden & to the annoyance of my family) devoted what time could be stolen devouring the “gardener’s” posts.

“Posts” is too slight a word to describe “gardener’s” bountiful harvest.

“gardener“ doesn’t shy away from deft exegesis; which is not to say it is weighted down with “show-off” academic gravitas. On the contrary it can be sincerely solemn & full of whimsy – simultaneously. & why not ? Its subject, after all works in the tradition of the great vaudevillian comics, as well as the profound prophets & moralists.

In short, “gardener” offers simply the best, most intriguing commentary since The Telegraph/Wanted Man & John Bauldie

Thank you & Congratulations !

P.S. I hope the check mark below “Notify me of new posts via email“ is an invitation & notice to come again as McGregor‘s garden offers new crops

By: eruke

eruke — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 16:00:14 +0000

Thank you very much for writing, and inquiring after my opinion. If you are a Leonard Cohen fan, I hope you’ve had the chance to see him on his current tour. I did see him at Radio City here in NY a few months ago. It was my first Leonard show, and I did not even start listening to him until I saw the documentary of the Hal Wilner tribute, I’m Your Man, and finally heard *up close* these magnificent lyrics. I think Bob Dylan is in a category of his own, no category at all, and I think Leonard Cohen is a brilliant brilliant poet. Anyone not teaching The Traitor in a course exploring metaphor and figurative language isn’t doing justice to the topic. And if you’re teaching a course on religious poetry, you can draw a line from George Herbert to Hallelujah, or even just the 2nd verse of Suzanne.
Leonard In Show And Concert was a vigorous, witty showman who aimed to charm and provoke everyone in the audience. He was entirely successful–I felt flattered by the connection he sought with the audience, and grateful for his generosity. Each song came across so clear and true to the original that I could see the lyrics as he sang them. He made a theater of strangers feel like a human community. I can’t speak to subtle manipulations of phrasing or intonation or anything like that, I’m not fluent enough in Leonard Cohen, but I’d love to know what Cohenists would say about that. I can say that every song sounded as I knew it. His hat seemed more charcoal gray? He certainly is dapper, and although Bob seems to be in a comparatively elegant phase in terms of his costuming, we know it’s a costume.
When I see Bob D In Show And Concert, I am seeing a man carrying out his vocation. Each night He Is What He Does. He communicates. addresses, connects, entirely through the songs. Nothing he could say to me before singing Jolene or Honest With Me or Senor is going to *tell* me anything at all that the song won’t tell me. I don’t ever feel that I am seeing a show delivered to me as a unified experience. I feel I’m watching and hearing a man being what he does, doing what he is, night after night. I’m not the same today as I was yesterday, and neither is he. And it comes out on stage. There are shifts of feeling and texture in every concert that never fail to teach me how to be alert to how fleeting sensations can be, and how captivating they can be while they’re present. I’ll be seeing Leonard Cohen again in October at Madison Square Garden (an interesting venue for a 74 year old Jewish man in a suit who sings about betrayal, doubt, and despair), and I feel eager and honored to see him again, even if it’s the same exact production I saw at Radio City. I feel hungry to know what Bob Dylan’s gonna do to me next.
One thing that seems important to me is the way both Bob and Leonard are charismatic, vigorous, expressive, interesting, and not at all youthful. I don’t mean they’re not young, I mean they’re not youthful, which is the only kind of energy and appeal we’re willing to grant the not-young. Go see either one of these men perform, and you’re seeing an in-the-moment summoning of kinds of energy that we don’t have much vocabulary for in our culture.
I’m sorry I don’t have too much to say about Paul Simon. I think he’s had an honest, serious, committed career, I think he is ambitious without being portentous, I’ve never seen an interview with him that wasn’t intelligent and self-aware. His songwriting just doesn’t move or provoke me the way it does many many other people. I’ve never seen him perform. I cry every time I see him and George do Here Comes The Sun on Sat. Nite Live, but then again, so does everyone.
Thanks again for writing, and reading. Keep listening to what you love, and I do hope you’ve had/will have a chance to see Leonard.

By: snapt pensuls

snapt pensuls — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 01:43:27 +0000

We readers are waiting for you to comment on the resurgence of Leonard Cohen, his black hats and black clad band and what you might have to say about the two, Bob and Leonard. And then, if you really got going, you might say something about Paul Simon and the two.

By: Luke

Luke — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 00:59:30 +0000

The first and third (reggae) version of Mississippi are great. The second one is not that great. Reference the Rolling Stone interview Dylan did in 2001 when L&T came out. He spoke about Lanois trying to make a sexy version of Mississippi that Dylan disliked. I suspect it is version 2. Dylan said something like, “Lanois didn’t understand that the song had more to do with the Declaration on Independence than sexy.”