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WEARING A FEATHERED WIDE-BRIMMED GRAY HAT, Bob Dylan could’ve been a Mexican balladeer with a new Durango song, bouncing on stage and stamping his whole leg in time to the drum. Ramblin’ Jack Elliot dedicated “Me and Bobby McGee” to Jack Kerouac, who as a kid had played King of…
Read More »Joan Baez and Bob Dylan singing in Costello Gym, Nov. 2, 1975. Web photo courtesy of UMass Lowell. The media is full of reports about a new movie and music release tied to the legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour of Bob Dylan and friends in 1975-76, which made an earthquake…
Read More »Carrying a Torch for ‘Ti Jean’ We were talking about Bob Dylan getting the Nobel Prize for Literature last week and ole Jack Kerouac having received nothing in his life by way of awards and prizes, and so my friend and I went to the famous gravesite in Edson Cemetery…
Read More »The latest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature performed at the Tsongas Center at UMass Lowell in 2013. He’s been to Lowell a few times before. Here’s a replay of my report.—PM Bob Dylan in Lowell, Another Side I’m glad I went down to the river last night. The…
Read More »Today’s Nobel Prize-winner Bob Dylan in Lowell in November, 1975, is seen below with fellow poet Allen Ginsberg at the Edson Cemetery grave of Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), whose writings influenced the young Dylan. Bob Dylan brought his Rolling Thunder Revue to Lowell in tribute to Kerouac and performed with his…
Read More »In the end it was like church. A generational church. A church of humanity. Of joy. Of suffering. Of soulful community. She had brought us together one more time, and there was a poignancy to it because a lot of us who were there are getting “up there” and have…
Read More »I’m glad I went down to the river last night. The preacher was in town, and the congregation was called to assemble. He made his fourth tour through the city of smokestacks and steeples, the small city with the world on its streets. The people arrived with eager, happy looks…
Read More »Here’s a hat tip to the climate-change demonstrators in Washington, D.C., who are speaking on behalf of the planet this holiday weekend. Lowelltown is as white tonight as the monuments in the capital city. I wrote this poem after a family trip to Washington in the summer of 2004. There…
Read More »With Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. being remembered tomorrow in a special way across the nation, I went back to a prose poem written after a family visit to Washington, D.C., in the early summer of 2004, another presidential election year. We were months away from seeing Barack Obama make news with a…
Read More »Thanks to Lowell Celebrates Kerouac! on Facebook and the blog Reader’s Almanac of the Library of America for this film clip and commentary about Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. The footage is from November 1975 in Edson Cemetery in Lowell, when Bob Dylan was in the city with…
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