Entertainment For Lively Minds
Smoke Free Dylan
Posted by Suzy Pepper on 22 April 2008 - 11:07pm.
It's a constant battle for me to decide whether to stop smoking completely or not. I do only enjoy the odd one or two a day, but nonetheless it would be nice to stop altogther.
Folklore has it that Dylan quit the herb during the recording of Nashville Skyline and as a result his voice sounds almost boyish, and I like this album for that reason.
Does anyone know of any other vocalist's albums that have been enhanced by either giving up smoking or the opposite, their sweet tones markedly improved by hammering fags til the cows come home?
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Wasn't it...
... around the time of Nashville Skyline that Dylan is thought to have quit smoking, leading to the sweetened country croon?
Yes
You're absolutely right, blogging after a few glasses again...
The Basement Tapes
I love Dylan's Basement voice in the summer of 1967. Not that I'm advocating nearly dying on a motorbike and wearing a neck brace.
Noopoat!
(Another The Wire joke. Sorry. It's just the withdrawal symptoms.)
Joni
Joni Mitchell, a lifelong weed abuser - insists the loss of the top end of her range is down to problems with her back and neck, nothing to do with a 30 a day habit.
BTW I am in the 2 a day camp and half of me thinks why not give up and half of me thinks WTF, why should I. I can feel it when singing though if I've had one, and not in a good way.
I get through two lighters a day, dude...
and it does wonders for my Bob Dylan impersonation.
Just the two lighters?
Pussy, I'm up to 5.
(I miss Bill Hicks. It's so wrong that he should die, and George W Bush should live.)
Bill Hicks...
made and continues to make me laugh more than anyone else ever.
As a lifelong smoker...
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=94123688...
Funny how, when you turn 40, the word 'lifelong' takes an ironic turn when applied to smoking. Remember, you only want one because you had one 20 minutes ago.
Thanks Philip
You're right about this, there's never such a thing as 1 cigarette either. It's always about a chain of cigs.
Every time I hear Nashville Skyline, I can't believe how much difference the lack of smoke makes to his voice. It's incredible really.
Boring though...
..ain't it?
I still think about it every 20 minutes, but the hangovers are a breeze. I tell myself "Just think how bad you'd feel if you'd smoked 30 fags last night. There, not so bad is it?"
It wasn't just the cigarettes
Sorry to be a killjoy, but the giving up smoking is only one element behind Dylan's 1969 voice. The point is, he elected to use a plain, more technically palatable voice for country music. This may sound like hollow apologism and giving him way too much credit, but listen to his recording of The Two Sisters in 1960, which is how he sounded before he heard Woody Guthrie. Or See That My Grave Is Kept Clean, from the Basement recordings of 1967. Both show the Nashville Skyline voice in clear evidence before said album.
Allegedly, when friends that knew him pre-Woody Guthrie first heard his 1969 recordings, their immediate reaction was "I thought that he'd lost that voice forever".