DARMSTADTDYLANDAYS 2023

Marco Demel, the organizer of DARMSTADTDYLANDAYS 2023 would like to invite all art lovers and admirers of Bob Dylan’s work and spontaneous people who live here in the Rhine-Main area or within a 50 km radius of Frankfurt/Main to a nice festival weekend in Darmstadt. We expect beautiful summer weather with up to 25 degrees Celsius.

Of course we also have our eyes on the Italian region Emilia Romagna with Bologna where not far away a good friend Andrea Porodi Zabala from the international Dylan network has set up a whole tour with Scarlet Rivera and many concerts right in the flood affected area from the to take place next weekend.
In case help is needed there, I put the link to Andrea’s website for the Dylan community.

https://www.andreaparodizabala.com/en/

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/17/europe/italy-flooding-three-killed-rain-intl/index.html

To recall Bob Dylan and his work and to present the importance of his songs especially for today and to help the musical heritage of Dylan to new spaces also in new minds – across all musical styles and generations is the vision of the DARMSTADTDYLANDAYS.
This Dylan-related festival will enter its fourth year in 2023 and will open on May 18, Ascension Day, with a live DylanHour at Radio Darmstadt.
With interesting guests and interview partners from the German and international Dylan cosmos.

On 19.05. Marco Demel, the initiator of the festival, is pleased about the visit of the Finnish author Sven-Erik Klinkmann, who will present his book „Dylan’s Lögndetektor“ in the Weinspirale in the Hundertwasserhaus.
Since the book has so far only been published in Swedish, the author will give the presentation in English.

On this evening, the jazz quartet around Volker Brill will continue to build Bob Dylan’s bridges to jazz and with classics like „I Went Down to St.James Infirmary“ will make the many references to Dylan’s work and especially his Kennedy song „Murder Most Foul“ visible again.
The show starts at 20.00.

Sven-Erik Klinkmann from Vasa

The Hot Jazz Company are not hyping their social media presence anymore, so if you want to get in touch with the old jazz tunes, you should come to Darmstadt this evening

http://www.hotjazzcompany.de/

Wolf Schubert-K.

Then on Saturday, 20.05, Wolf Schubert-K. plays together with his Buddie Steffen Huther in the Büchnergarten ( on the left side of the Staatstheater Darmstadt).
Wolf Schubert-K. has released his new album „Sad Songs Vol.1“ in 2022 and will show us his very own journey through Folk,Jazz and Country.

RAUHE SITTEN (Rough and Rowdy Ways)
&
The PAST is “ NOT EVEN PAST“ is this year’s motto of the DARMSTADTDYLANDAYS 2023.

Dylan-Related-Books has again put together a small but fine line-up.

DAY I :
Event title: Sven-Erik Klinkmann presents his book Dylans Lögndetektor. Live music by Hot Jazz Company
Event date: 19.05.23
Venue: Weinspirale/Hundertwasserhaus
Time: 20.00-22.00
Admission; € 15 / Reduced : € 10

DAY II:

Event title: Wolf Schubert-K. & Friends
Event date: 20.05.23
Venue: Büchnergarten at the State Theater
Time: 16.30-18.30
Admission free/ Donations welcome

Tag der Literatur @ May 7 – American Darmstadt and Andy Warhol in Darmstadt 1971

The decades after World War II were strongly influenced by U.S. culture. Andy Warhol visited Darmstadt in 1971. Why? In the photo books „Andy Warhol in Darmstadt“ and „American Darmstadt,“ the Americanist Antje Voutta describes the turn of the times and the atmosphere of departure at that time by means of extensive picture compositions, stories and anecdotes. She also sheds light on the cultural programs, some of which were controlled by the CIA, such as jazz concerts, the establishment of public libraries, the summer courses for new music and much more, which are still an integral part of the cultural landscape today. The readings will be punctuated by Marco Demel with appropriate musical examples by Marlene Dietrich, Towns van Zandt, Velvet Underground, Nico, John Cage & John Cale.
An event of Dylan-Related-Books with the Kunstarchiv Darmstadt

Wherever you roam in the Rhine-Main-Area – come for an easy listening and reading to Darmstadt

DYLAN related ALTERNATIVE BOOKFAIR in MAINHATTAN (Frankfurt/ Main) – APRIL 25

THE PAST IS „NOT EVEN PAST“

Check this out – a little appetizer for the event from the Dylan-Related-Books-Network – Winfried Klima feat. Jadwiga Demel-Frej with a timeless One More Cup of Coffee

UNDER THE RADAR – IN THE SHADOWS
CONCERT + READING from the BOB DYLAN cosmos

Marco Demel (Dylan-Related-Books) presents new publications on the work of Bob Dylan, conceived as an alternative book fair and sponsored by the Kulturamt Frankfurt.
For a few blue hours, the Bockenheimer Treff will be transformed into a marketplace for storytellers – with live music.
COMMUNITY FIRST – with the opportunity for exchange across generations, religion and skin color

COME TOGETHER, WHEREVER YOU ROAM

From 13.00 Marco Demel will introduce the event and present 4 books from the Dylan cosmos in four blocks. With fitting pieces and outtakes from the Dylan catalogue.
Then there will be a first break (14.00-14.30) where our audience can stock up on drinks, cruising through the books etc. and then from 14.30 the Die Double Dylans from Frankfurt will take the stage. They would then play two sets until ca.16.30.

For all the folk from outside Frankfurt in a 50 mile radius and to give you an idea of the Double Dylans here’s a radio interview the guys did with Radio X last year. Only a stone’s throw (since the 60s introduced Bockenheimer Messeinheit) from the Bockenheimer Treff you will also find the newly opened bookstore „Andere Seiten“, where there will be a large selection of Dylan-related books on this day.

https://www.doubledylans.de/home.html

https://andereseitenfrankfurt.buchhandlung.de/shop/

Motherfucker Zanzinger -Lonesome Deaths & Trains of Love

What are you looking for, there ´s nothing to see, sings Bob Dylan in False Prophet and when he sang it near Washington D.C, he puts a little more anger in his voice.

A couple of days ago one more innocent man was killed by a bunch of cops.

Ain´t no use in telling you that the victim was black. The Zangigers are still on the road.

This rap comes the Frankfurt-based band The Develish Double Dylans.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hisDCyCSW5I&t=13s

Listen again to the Hancock/Guru – join for a spark of hope, endlessly promoting a unity among nations and generations, not one to be discriminated by any kind of reason.

With „Freunde“ we land in a foggy theatre and hear the story of Franz Beda-Löhner, who was famous for many easy-listening melodies and songs of the 20ies and 30ies, but was mercyless catched by the SS and put on the „Prominententransport into a concentration camp and later murdered by a warden with a Zanzinger- like hit on his head..

From Vienna and Hubert von Goisern´s song we travel down to Ljuljana, the capitol of Slovenia to meet Zlatko on the main station, performing together with Gal Gjurin in Toronto.

Gal Gjurin is an incredible multitalented „string duster“.

Trains of love – the title says everything. Canada and the U.K were among the countries, where the IIWW-freedom fighters could flee after the war and were not allowed to return home for decades.

For a deeper insight just google a little bit.

Two weeks before we reach the first annual of the latest europenean war and seeing that the answer is still blowing in the wind take the powerful performance from SADE

„WHY CAN`T WE LIVE TOGETHER“

Bob Dylan gives tribute via his song When The Deal Goes Down with Jerry Lee´s Lyrics

The 70th anniversary edition of Sun Records relesed by the swiss editor Olms Edition comes with a foreword by none other than Jerry Lee Lewis. And those were perhaps his last written words:

A lot of people have asked me what I think of Sam Phillips. It´s shure that we didn´t see eye to eye, but you know, he was like a brother to me. He helped me get my start, and for that I will forever be grateful.There will never be another like him and there will never be another Sun Records. That´s where it all started, with Sam, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, and of course ol´Jerry Lee. Sam Phillips and Su Records changed the whole world. I can´t believethat it´s been seventy years since Sam founded Sun Records, and I´m blessed to be here to celebrate it with my fans, Sam´s fans, Sun Record´s fans. God bless you all.

-Jerry Lee Lewis

Bob Dylan added Jerry Lee’s lyrics to his song When The Deal Goes Down for his tribute to him. The melody transports the message and you automatically hum along with Dylan’s lyrics and so the performance really becomes an intimate farewell.

Play # 6, Play # 9 -Jimmie Rodgers revisited

Blue yodel # 6

Bob Dylan’s most recent album „Rough and Rowdy Ways seems to be, by and large, dedicated to Jimmie Rodgers and Play #6, Play #9 is a line from Murder Most Foul.

The October issue of Neighborhood Bullies & Shooting Stars, which will be aired on Oct 7 ( 9pm CET) on http://www.radiodarmstadt.de takes another trip into the Jazz, Blues and Rock’n’Roll of the 50’s & 60’s and further back into the 20’s & 30’s to Jimmie Rodgers and Hank Williams and aims to show the many ramifications, junctions and „Crossroads“, the common roots of a song that has been morphing through the States for over a century.

https://www.radiodarmstadt.de/news/neighborhood-bullies-shooting-stars-play-6-play-9-jimmie-rodgers-revisited.html

About the famous Blues & Jazz classic „I Went Down To St.James Infirmary“ ,famous in the version of Louis Armstrong, the Canadian author Bob Harwood has presented a book with the same title, in which he traces the genesis of the song in the greater New Orleans area and the banks of the southern Mississippi.

Jimmie Rodgers stands like no other for the overcoming or fusion of white country music and black blues – CROSSING ALL THE BOUNDARIES.

And in the middle of it all, the songhunters of Tin Pan Alley, who lured musicians like Blind Willie McTell or Robert Johnson into the studio for a recording and cheap money and later earned a fortune with the copyright to a song.

Woody Guthrie also had „St.James Infirmary“ in mind when he wrote VD City, which later led to Dylan’s Desolation Row.

With a few outtakes the host of NEIGHBORHOOD BULLIES & SHOOTING STARS dives into the Dylan/Cash sessions of 1969 also starts an excursion into the SunRecords cosmos, the label just celebrates its 70th anniversary this year, the home of Jerry Lee Lewis (That Lucky Old Sun), Carl Perkins (Matchbox), Johnny Cash (Two Feet High Rising) and Elvis (Mistery Train).

THE BIRTH OF ROCK’N’ROLL: 70 YEARS OF SUN RECORDS

Featuring Braggin from Dylan’s album Devil Dolls and Black Old Magic which Dylan has chosen for his European concerts and swapped out for Melancholy Moon, Neighborhood Bullies & Shooting Stars also comes back tio Tin Pan Alley.

Now I would like to draw your attention to a great event that will take place in May next year in St.Antone, the sister city of Darmstadt.
„The Jimmie Rodgers Saga“ –

As told by  Buffalo Benford with Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Toby Keith, Tanya Tucker, Les Paul, Rosanne Cash,

Kristofferson, Aaron Neville, Steve Earle, Buck Owens, Ramblin‘ Jack Elliott, Bobby Bare, David Ball & More

http://www.jimmierodgerssaga.com/

„I´ve made up my mind to give myself to you“

„Keep your right hand high and your ass off the floor“ or just Keep on Keepin‘ on

http://www.jimmierodgerssaga.com/jr-festival.html

A Guide through Rough and Rowdy Ways

Time is like a jet plane and even we´re still in a time, where there aren´t so much new books about Bob Dylan I would like to draw the community´s attention to a book by Swedish author Sven-Erik Klinkmann, who also published his book last year on the occasion of Bob Dylan’s 80th birthday, entitled : Dylans Lögentetektor. En Essä om Tiden(Ellips-Verlag-ISBN 978-952-7081-22-8).
The book of Sven-Erik Klinkmann is so far one of the few international publications that deal very intensively with the songs on Rough and Rowdy Ways and Dylan has signed up for the fall in our latitudes, is added one more reason to realize this vision.

Ten days ahead the reappearing for a first date with his fans in Stockholm, this Bob Dylan book is a cool guide through the „new“ songs as well for an understanding of him being a Philosophers Pirate.

One, Two, Three and his tiny cowboy band will have the first gig in Germany.

Here is an interview in English I had with Sven Erik for my monthly Radio show on http://www.radiodarmstadt.de

This Key West-version is from the DARMSTADTDYLANDAYS 2022 taken place End of May . Björn Nonnweiler featured first the Darmstadt Konzertchor under the lead of Wolfgang Seeliger. Later even Bernhard Schumacher joined the concert, former bandmate of Bernie Conrads who died unexpected last November.

I´m gonna play the piano like Leon Russel, like Liberace, like John, the apostle

My Own Version of You deserves more positive comparisons than a tired Frankenstein adaptation. For me Frankenstein does not appear here at all and Bob Dylan describes in this song only the vision of a human ideal through his eyes, forged by him; because he knows where he wants to go, no misfortune will happen to him, as with this well-known, unpredictable monster. When the night comes to an end, in the dawn, he then has the ideal of a loving and to be loved man before his eyes.
It does not matter whether it is a he, she or it.

He makes the selection of the components on the basis of his experiences and adventures, his relationships and friendships with people he has grown fond of over the years. in his 80 years of life, which is why his „doll“, his being expresses the embodiment of freedom and is equally an instance of conscience. A being that should also carry the characteristics of its „Creator“ in itself and after „robot commando“ is also independent in decisions and behavior, self-determined and with the set up already the control or responsibility of its own further development has.

In world literature, and Bob Dylan’s work has officially been part of it for six years now, we already know a few examples of this primal human desire to create a version based on a certain model, optimized according to one’s own standards, such as the German writer Juli Zeh, who thinks up the ideal lover in „Corpus Delicti“ and creates this ghost-like figure for her reflection and decisions.

Or in E.T.A Hoffmann’s Sandman (written at a time Dylan likes to fall back into) it is a doll armed with answers to all sorts of existential questions, which at best is a person and probably the only one who can understand you.

The process of creation and the vision of creation may be more in the mind and happen quietly, Dylan at least does not need a Mephisto for his own vision. Always a little drunk with dawn, and beyond all limitations.

I´m Not There – I´m where the moonlight swims

Bob Dylan’s life track in the mirror of his songs

On the occasion of the 15th anniversary of I’m Not There, the June issue of dylanHour brings a film review of a special kind to the radio.

In 2007, Todd Haynes and his team of Dylan connoisseurs presented to the public a film about Bob Dylan using the medium of blending time and space and personalities, which largely uses the method of which Dylan himself uses in his songs when he traces eternally valid existential questions of humanity, be it on the basis of a framework plot from the American Civil War or another event from the recent American past. With stories, anecdotes and interpretations of his lyrics by companions and observers in and from Bob Dylan’s biography, such as Ramblin’s Jack Eliott, David Mansfield, Greil Marcus, Roger Mc Guinn, Neil Young and many others, the phenomenon of transformation is pursued in an entertaining way.

Here is the link to the radio show, which is also on air on Friday 8 am & 2 pm on http://www.radiodarmstadt.de

https://uploader.radiodarmstadt.de/share.php?upid=1655210133197

I´m talking German, but I think most of the listeners will get through. Just try it out.

By 2022, all these Dylans are already dead and yet they live on; in another person or transformed in other times, in any case they continue to live in Dylan himself.

In his contribution, Jochen Markhorst talks about the soundtrack to this film, about special cover versions and has picked out the two songs Goin ́to Acapulco (Calixico) and Moonshiner (Bob Forrest).

In honor of director Todd Haynes‘ biopic, I’m Not There, a host of talented musicians, young and old, contributed to the film’s soundtrack of 33 Dylan songs.

And a handful of these artists gathered at New York’s Beacon Theatre on July 11, 2007, to pay homage to the greatest songwriter of the 20th century. You could now list x names that you know or don’t know.

Oldtimer like X frontman John Doe, Blonde on Blonde collaborator Al Kooper, Jimmy LaFave, Dan Hicks & the Hot Licks and Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth.

In front of an audience spanning at least three generations, you could understand the importance of how a man influenced so many types of music, from John Do’s punk rock to the hip-hop of The Roots.

The Roots? Yes, The Roots made people cook. With their version of „Masters of War“. Captain Kirk on guitar sang the first verse to the melody of the U.S. national anthem with a direct channel to Jimi Hendrix. ?uestlove on drums and tuba Gooding Jr. with his sousaphone, a cover for eternity.

Björn Nonnweiler plays a mindblowin´version of Key West

Björn Nonnweiler sends a greeting from the DARMSTADTDYLANDAYS 2022 into the Dylan cosmos with a mindblowin ́ version of Key West and congratulates Bob Dylan on his 81st birthday.

The festival took place last weekend in Darmstadt in the Hundertwasserhaus and on the Stadtkirchplatz. Marco Demel, the host of the DylanHour and organizer of the DARMSTADTDYLANDAYS 2022, has an overview and the cast of the festival with tracks of the individual bands and musicians put together in the latest radio show which is retrievable the whole week under the following link :

https://www.radiodarmstadt.de/hoeren/radarplus7mediathek.html

The May issue gives an overview of the various events before the live concerts within DARMSTADTDYLANDAYS 2022.
The music and literature festival will be heralded with a concert by the Double Dylans from Frankfurt on 21.05.22 in the Weinspirale in the Hundertwasserhaus. The Double Dylans present their album „MEISTERWERKe“, which was released last autumn.

Dylan author Jochen Markhorst, who wrote the liner notes for this album, will also be present on this evening and take him into the very own world of the Double Dylans.
On Sunday, 22.05.22, the festival will continue with an open-air concert on the Stadtkirchplatz.
The organizer Dylan-Related-Books presents „Into The New Dylan World“, a concert with Wolfgang Seeliger and the Konzertchor Darmstadt.

Special guest on this evening is the singer/songwriter Björn Nonnweiler from Hagen. who has also made a name for himself in Germany with his adaptations from Hannes Vader to Bernie’s motorway band. In this sense, the evening will also be a tribute to Bernie Conrads.

https://soundcloud.com/user-644490668/the-last-hill-session-bernie-conrads-plays-dylan
Björn Nonnweiler also has his new album Why? Why? Why? and one/two tracks from Bob Dylan’s album „Rough and Rowdy Ways“ (2020).

A first circle closes on 27.05.22 with the concert of Thomas Langer in the Kulturtanke (Im Niederfeld 8).
Together with Dylan-Related-Books, the bridges between Bob Dylan and jazz will be changed.
The version of „Ill be seeing you“, originally by Frank Sinatra, is just one example of many that Thomas Langer will sing in the „Kulturtanke“.

Easy to reach for folks from the Rhine-Main area near the main station „Im Niederfeld 8“.

So the circle will be unbroken. See you at the DARMSTADTDYLANDAYS 2023 !!!