He draws the class’s attention to “the great guitarist Al Kooper on organ.
#Lyrics vast winter in my heart how to#
Nobody’s ever taught you how to live out on the street / and now you’re gonna have to get used to it.” Along with “Positively Fourth Street” and “Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine,” “Like a Rolling Stone” is one of what Yudkin calls Dylan’s “un-love songs.” Unlike some of his more topical work, the song is timeless and the singing is “very intense, cutting, and cynical,” says Yudkin, bobbing his head along with lyrics like, “Ahh you’ve gone to the finest schools, alright Miss Lonely / But you know you only used to get juiced in it.
The song has become synonymous with Dylan’s controversial first-ever electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1965. Barents notes that Bruce Springsteen once said the intro sounds like “someone had kicked open the door to your mind” and that Bono has called the song “something to behold,” adding it “turns wine to vinegar.” In the class Yudkin (left) focuses on Dylan’s music, while Barents talks about the lyrics. In the song, Dylan eviscerates a former lover, whose identity is still debated, in his signature nasal drawl. “Let’s listen,” says Yudkin, as he plays the album’s opening, unforgettable musical screed “Like a Rolling Stone,” and the room fills with the opening clash of tympani.
Louis, the Mississippi Delta, and of course, the blues, jazz, and zydeco mecca of New Orleans. It is highway passing through the breeding grounds of some of the nation’s richest musical heritage, including Memphis, St. But they learn that it is more than a highway bisecting America’s heart.
Students pipe up that the road extends from Dylan’s native Minnesota down to Louisiana. “To give you some context, the Beatles’ Rubber Soul was released the same year,” says Yudkin, who has taught a string of appreciation classes, among them an opera course and a class on the music of Beethoven. All electric except for the dystopic ballad Desolation Row, Highway 61 Revisited was Dylan’s sixth studio album and is rated by Rolling Stone as the fourth greatest album of all time. The students had moved from Dylan’s early acoustic records to the trilogy, which begins with Bringing It All Back Home and concludes with the two-disc set Blonde on Blonde. This day, the class is devoted to the second LP in the so-called electric trilogy, Highway 61 Revisited, released in 1965. The course, funded by the Provost’s office and made possible by the Center for Teaching & Learning’s Interdisciplinary Course Development Grant Program, focuses on Dylan’s most pivotal recordings, including the singer-songwriter’s inaugural LP, Bob Dylan, recorded in 1962, New Morning, and Blood on the Tracks. Whether you’d been weaned on the inspirational, irascible, and now Nobel Literature prize-winning bard, or were just jumping into his vast canon, the interdisciplinary course Bob Dylan: Music and Words, cotaught by Yudkin, a College of Fine Arts professor of music, and Kevin Barents, a College of Arts & Sciences Writing Program lecturer, appears to be whetting the appetites of a new generation of Dylanologists. Undergraduates who had done their homework know what Jeremy Yudkin means when he kicks off a recent music appreciation class with the ominous words, “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you?” The class’ many boomer-vintage Evergreen students not only know that these are the opening lyrics of Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man,” they mouth the words along with Yudkin.
#Lyrics vast winter in my heart series#
This is one of a series of articles about visits to one class, on one day, in search of those building blocks at BU. Twitter Facebook Class by class, lecture by lecture, question asked by question answered, an education is built.
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