My final musical selection from a 2024 film comes from a movie that has too many to count. I could have dedicated all ten of my posts from the past two weeks to A Complete Unknown, director James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic.
If I had to pick just one, I’d go with a performance of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin” at the Newport Folk Festival. In that scene, the crowd — hearing the song for the first time — instantly recognizes its impact and starts singing along by the second chorus.
I posted “Bob Dylan Weekends” for so long on the blog that I was positive I’d already featured ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ when it popped up as the next random iTunes cut.
But apart from an early version from The Witmark Demos and a cover from my popular “attractive women playing Bob Dylan songs on YouTube” series, this classic has gone up-posted.
I’m lagging behind on my posts this week. The past few days I’ve found myself writing the entries an hour before midnight, just getting them in under the wire.
So to buy myself some time, I’m resorting to an old standby… attractive women covering Bob Dylan songs. This is the gift that YouTube keeps giving.
One of the downsides of a truly random selection — such as that of my Random Weekend Songs of the Day — is that you wind up with clusters.
I haven’t checked the numbers, but it seems like tracks from Dylan’s Bootleg Series have turned up here on a pretty regular basis. Granted, he has released nine volumes of those bootlegs — all double-CD sets — so those songs make up a healthy percentage of my music collection. Around 3 percent, to be exact.
But 3-in-100 odds aren’t exactly the sort you’d bet heavily on in Vegas. Mathematically, these songs are over-performing.
Meet Me In Montauk 