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What the hell is wrong with Bill Walton:Bill Walton talked Bob Dylan and Grateful Dead for 3 minutes during ...

Feb 12, 2015 - Bill Walton spent three minutes during Wednesday's ... ESPN even had graphics made for Walton's pre-planned rant. ... ..[Click to View YouTube Video]

Bill Walton spent three minutes during Wednesday’s Oregon-USC talking about Bob Dylan, because he’s Bill Walton and would you want him any other way? The discussion included talk of (sic, left out important ref. to "musicares" speech) Dylan’s new album of standards and that time he saw Dylan take over for Bob Weir during a 1989 show at the old Great Western Forum.

This was Walton at his finest, talking about what he knows best while getting minor points wrong that are of little importance because it’s not the specifics, it’s the big picture, man. (For instance, the new album is Shadows IN The night not Shadows OF the night and the beautiful final song is THAT Lucky Old Sun, not THE Lucky Old Sun.) [Click to View YouTube Video]
But the important stuff he gets right. iTunes says I’ve listened to That Lucky Old Sun 17 times since last Tuesday, but I couldn’t quote it as beautifully as Walton did.

Show me the river/take me across/wash all my troubles away.

USC, at 9-15, could use a trip across that river.

ESPN even had graphics made for Walton’s pre-planned rant.

Walton’s partner, Dave Pasch, had the proper amusement for Walton’s Walton-ness and played the perfect straight man.

Pasch: This is how bad it’s gotten. We’re building full-page graphics on musicians.
Walton: You’ve got the equation wrong, that’s how good it’s gotten.



Then Walton started talking about Nelson Mandela, Thomas Edison and, because it always comes back to him, Jerry Garcia, the late Grateful Dead frontman. And though Walton is a huge fan of Dylan, he’s a Deadhead through and through, so he told a story about how, in 1989, Dylan joined the Dead for one song at the old Forum. By Walton’s memory, on Feb. 11, 1989, the Dead’s Bob Weir forgot the words to Memphis Blues (actually titled Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again, which the Dead covered occasionally) and Dylan had to bail him out. Weir forgets the words around the 5:28 mark, during the “Texas medicine/railroad gin” verse and Dylan takes over to great applause:[Click to View YouTube Video]

Walton’s recollection is almost spot on, which is especially impressive given that it was 1989 and he was at a Dead show. But the Dylan-Weir swap actually happened at the third and final show at the Forum, on Feb. 12, 1989. (Remember, it’s just the minor stuff that gets lost in translation.) And you can’t blame Weir for forgetting the words to the wordy, nine-verse track off Blonde on Blonde.

Dylan was likely in L.A. helping to promote the Dylan & The Dead album, which had come out the week before. The LP was a jumbled mess of some of the “highlights” of the disastrous 1987 tour featuring, well, Dylan and the Dead. The tour was dreadful and something both Dylan and Dead fans like to pretend didn’t happen. Musically, the Dead’s style is too mellow for Dylan’s backbeat heavy tunes. (I mean, the Grateful Dead never played anything as loud as that snare and kick drum which opened Like A Rolling Stone.)

But the notoriously prickly Dylan didn’t help. He wouldn’t work on arrangements, choosing instead to play songs Jerry Garcia had introduced to him (like the great Jack-A-Roe). In quotes, Bob Weir dances around the Dylan questions because he’s far too kind to call Dylan out for being lazy, but the insinuations are clear. “Within two songs, it was obvious, from the large video screens mounted on either side of the stage, that Dylan wanted to be any place but where he was,” writes the Dylan biographer Clinton Heylin of one of the opening shows.


But the botched tour served as an epiphany for Dylan, who realized he needed to get back on track, both on the stage and the studio. The concerts were ignited by his famous live 1990 shows at Toad’s Place and the albums started getting better, eventually leading to 1997’s brilliant Time Out of Mind which brought us to last night, when Bill Walton sang Bob Dylan’s version of an old American standard during a college basketball game because Bob is Bob and Bill is Bill and all is right with the world.

Bob Dylan was honored by the MusiCares charity on Friday night, two nights ahead of the Grammy Awards. Upon receiving his award, Dylan went on a fascinating, shocking and incendiary speech at the event that will go down in the already-crowded annals of Dylan history. Bob was at various times kind, mean, thoughtful, petty, complimentary and critical. In other words, he was the enigma that is Bob Dylan. Here are 15 things we think we learned. (All Dylan quotes in italics and borrowed from a transcription via the Los Angeles Times.)

1. HE HATES SINGERS WHO TURN THE NATIONAL ANTHEM INTO THEIR OWN VOCAL SHOWCASE.

“I was at a boxing match a few years ago seeing Floyd Mayweather fight a Puerto Rican guy. And the Puerto Rican national anthem, somebody sang it and it was beautiful. It was heartfelt and it was moving.

After that it was time for our national anthem. And a very popular soul-singing sister was chosen to sing. She sang every note — that exists, and some that don’t exist.


Talk about mangling a melody. You take a one-syllable word and make it last for 15 minutes? She was doing vocal gymnastics like she was on a trapeze act. But to me it was not funny.

Where were the critics? Mangling lyrics? Mangling a melody? Mangling a treasured song? No, I get the blame. But I don’t really think I do that. I just think critics say I do.”


I also have to mention some of the early artists who recorded my songs very, very early, without having to be asked. Just something they felt about them that was right for them. I’ve got to say thank you to Peter, Paul and Mary, who I knew all separately before they ever became a group. I didn’t even think of myself as writing songs for others to sing but it was starting to happen and it couldn’t have happened to, or with, a better group.

They took a song of mine that had been recorded before that was buried on one of my records and turned it into a hit song. Not the way I would have done it — they straightened it out. But since then hundreds of people have recorded it and I don’t think that would have happened if it wasn’t for them. They definitely started something for me.”

Dylan was a not-all-that successful folk singer in the early ’60s (he said he was ahead of his time) but that changed when his songs were covered by more popular acts and turned into pop classics. Peter, Paul and Mary, for instance, covered Blowin’ In The Wind; Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright and The Times They Are-A Changin’. Others followed and soon Dylan was a reluctant pop star of his own.

No surprise, The Zimmy is more sensitive about the criticism of his gravel slurred sound,'singing'? Then he lets on. .

“Critics have been giving me a hard time since Day One. Critics say I can’t sing. I croak. Sound like a frog. Why don’t critics say that same thing about Tom Waits? Critics say my voice is shot. That I have no voice. What don’t they say those things about Leonard Cohen? Why do I get special treatment? Critics say I can’t carry a tune and I talk my way through a song. Really? I’ve never heard that said about Lou Reed. Why does he get to go scot-free?”

To answer the rhetorical questions: It’s because Dylan has always been divisive. He treated the press with outright, Belichick-ian contempt during those drug-addled days in the mid-1960s when he produced some of his greatest work.

[Click to View YouTube Video]

FREEWHEELIN ON DUTY
San Francisco 1967

Hell's Angel, Freewheelin Frank was guarding the sound truck at the Human Be-In. He was sitting on top of the truck looking into the sun, tripping on LSD. Some guy on the ground below started taunting Frank. The guy got really abusive to the point where Frank had to act (like a Hell's Angel) and attack. Frank jumped down on the guy hitting him square in the face with both of his motorcycle boots. The guy got up unfazed and picked Frank up by grabbing him by the nose (like a bowling ball), then flipping him over on to ground in front of me. Stoned, Frank was getting beaten-up. Someone ran to get his brother Angels who came in a rush; the crowd parted like a zipper opening a jacket. Their code, as I remember it, is "all on one, one on all." We got to witness the "all on one" part. They all jumped the guy and beat him until the crowd started to boo and chant then the Angels stopped hitting him. Frank came over to me and asked if I got any shots of the fight. I did not because of my 300mm lens focused from 25' to infinity and the fight was at my feet. When I saw Freewheelin a few weeks later, he told me his eyes had gotten burnt staring into the sun on acid.