"Positively 4th Street" is basically iambic, but Dylan introduces extra syllables here and there. Purely iambic lyrics build up the tension but don't release it.

Dylan wrote the first two rhymes in the Byrds' "Ballad of Easy Rider." McGuinn offered him cowriters credit, but Dylan declined, saying "I don't need the money."

The following two lines from "Ballad Of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest" are iambic.

Saying, "Are you Frankie Lee, the gambler, (pause)
Whose father is deceased?

Dylan when singing pauses in between the two lines to make the cadence even easier to pick out.

Dylan's father Abraham Zimmerman died on June 5, 1968, less than a year after Dylan recorded "Ballad of Frankie Lee And Judas Priest." It is possible that the knowledge of his own father's impending death influenced the lyric.

"[Dylan] is a bard who has found his form."--Paul Williams, 1966. And a year later Dylan returned. After a mere 2.5 electric albums (one side of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde On Blonde) John Wesley Harding featured Dylan in his original acoustic format.

WBZ-AMs Dick Summer Show, which could be heard all up and down the East Coast at night, used to play the hell out of it

Dylan doesn't understand his own success just as most people don't understand their own lives.

Some say Zimmerman took his stage name of Dylan from an uncle's first name. Dylan's parents were immigrant-era Jews. Their siblings didn't have names like Dylan.

Even in 1966, at his creative peak, there were some people who put Dylan down. Paul Williams wrote that year: "the favorite indoor sport...is...disparaging...Dylan."

It wasn't just Dylan who couldn't sustain his creative output into the 70s. Burt Bacharach couldn't either. Indeed, Dylan came closer with Blood On The Tracks.

Renaldo and Clara is Dylan's version of the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour--an ambitious film project which the rest of the world didn't get.

Bob Dylan in the 60s was unique. But he still had models of how to be successful. He had Allen Ginsberg, Pete Seeger, Baudelaire.

"I had written a long letter to [Dylan]...I said also that I had dug the great line in the song 'Idiot Wind,'...I said it was a 'national rhyme'--Allen Ginsberg, New Age Journal Interview, February 1976.

The line which Ginsberg praised was:

Idiot wind,
blowing like a circle round my skull
from Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol

In this line the image of a circle is repeated in "skull," the Capitol Dome in Washington DC, and the arched Grand Coulee Dam.

"[In] late 1965, Dylan gave Ginsberg a gift of money which Ginsberg used to purchase a portable tape recorder"--Clinton Heylin

Ginsberg then, with Dylan's approval, made pseudo-bootleg tapes of Dylan's concerts.

Dylan and Ginsberg were close. However, when Ginsberg wrote Dylan ca. 1975 seeking a $200,000 donation for Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche's Naropa Institute, the two had not seen each other in four years. (Dylan, in responding to Ginsberg's letter, ignored the request for money.)

Rinpoche was an interesting case. He opposed the use of psychedelics on the grounds that they clouded the mind. But he himself was an alcoholic, and died of that disease.

Rinpoche would sometimes preach drunk. His followers are divided on the extent to which, if at all, his alcoholism detracted from his teachings.

The legendary Newport festival where Dylan went electric, and Pete Seeger tried to unplug Dylan's amplifier, was 1965. His 1963 performance went smoothly.

When Dylan played LiveAid Keith Richards and David Crosby backed him up. My brother referred facetiously to "those derelicts who wandered onstage" behind Dylan.

Even if Dylan were to attend a wedding or a funeral at a church it would not be evidence that he was an Xtian. However, attending a church to worship would be

Xtianity Today says Bob Dylan hadn't been seen inside a church in many years. But he is sighted at High Holy Day services regularly. He is no longer an Xtian.

Blood On The Tracks is the exception to the rule that Dylan's post Harding lyrics are not worthy of examination. Jakob said the album was his parents talking.