Paul Street, “From Hiroshima to Gaza,” CounterPunch, September 6-8, 2024, https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/09/06/from-hiroshima-to-genocide-in-gaza/
After a bit of delay out of respect to CPunch I’ll put the full thing up here — it’s NOT a quick read.
The real thing version of the song I mostly remembered:
Tom Petty’s story on how Dylan and Petty wrote “Tweeter and the Monkey Man” (at the start):
Funny story about the Traveling Wilburys’ sessions: the other legends in the band (Petty, George Harrison, and Roy Orbisin) went up to Bob and said, “look, we’re going to conduct ourselves as equals in putting this album together; we’re not going to act like you are some kind of God.”
For what it’s worth, I love Petty’s work and have TP&the Heartbreakers as a top ten all-time rock and roll band. “Last Dance with Mary Jane,” “Refugee,” “Running Down a Dream” and a lot more…just top drawer songwriting and playing.
For a while in the 1980s, at the peak of Petty’s popularity, Dylan was opening for TH&theHeartbreakers. Bob says that that and his ill-fated collaboration with the Grateful Dead was his musical low point. He went down to New Orleans, picked up something by hearing a singer in the French Quarter and was re-born. So he says in his rather idiosyncratic memoir Chronicles. (Imagine that - Dylan writing an idiosyncratic memoir).
I’m not super-excited about my version, especially after hearing these Hall of Famers again, but there’s some interesting things in it with the keyboards especially after the first couple of verses and at the end and I surprised myself on the memory test.
Link to my latest CounterPunch essay (updated and revised from my remarkable 2018 Truthdig essay "The World Will Not Mourn the Decline of US Hegemony")