Christmas In the Heart
	Artist: Bob Dylan

It's the season of bad sweaters, lame office Christmas parties, and drunk uncles in Santa caps. This Bob Dylan song will get you in the mood.

Happy Birthday to one of our greatest national treasures! Here's to many more. What's your favorite song by the erstwhile Robert Zimmerman?

A lovely song for tough times or anytime.

Our sister site Newstalgia has Duke Ellington Live at the Hollywood Bowl, 1966.

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Jimi is our chief hometown hero here in Seattle (Kurt Cobain being a very close second). This is from probably his most famous performance after Woodstock, live at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival. (At the end of his gig, he climaxed "Wild Thing" by lighting his guitar on fire.) Anyway, I used to have an LP from Monterey with Jimi on Side One and Otis Redding on Side Two. (What a great album. Somewhere I lent it to someone and it vanished.) However, it didn't have the whole performance, and this was one of the songs left off -- which was dumb, since this is one of the finest versions of it. "Hey Joe" has been a rock standard for years, but Jimi's version is the standard by which all others are judged. Anyway, it's in the film version, and the newly remastered copy of the film is well worth owning.

PS Our sister site Newstalgia proudly features The Jags -- Live at the Paris Theatre, London, 1979 for your Saturday night listening pleasure.

Okay, okay. It's a bit of a stretch to post NWA's "Fuck Tha Police", about the police unfairly targeting NWA for being black teenagers to highlight a story about Bob Dylan get picked up by the police for looking like a crazy old man in the rain with sweatpants tucked in to his shoes, but it's also a stretch to pinch Bob Dylan for, well, that.

Dylan was walking in the pouring rain in Long Branch when locals became suspicious of his behaviour and called the police. 24-year-old police officer Kristie Buble answered the call, and was told that an "eccentric-looking old man" was standing in a residents' yard.

"It was pouring rain outside, and I was right around the corner so I responded," Buble told ABC News.

"I asked him what his name was and he said "Bob Dylan"," she said. "Now, I've seen pictures of Bob Dylan from a long time ago and he didn't look like Bob Dylan to me at all. He was wearing black sweatpants tucked into black rain boots, and two raincoats with the hood pulled down over his head."

Mr. Dylan, Dre, Eazy, Cube and Ren feel your pain.

Everything worked out okay in the end for Dylan, who didn't have identification but was driven by the officer back to his hotel, who upon seeing a phalanx of tour buses, got the point.

"I got out of my car and said, 'Sarg, this guy says he's Bob Dylan'," she explained. "He opened the car door, looked in, and said, 'That's not Bob Dylan.' So we go over to the tour bus and knock on the door and some guy answers and I say, 'Are you missing someone?'"

When Dylan's entourage showed her his passport, the officer said she sheepishly bid him farewell.

Looks like Officer Buble, Bob Dylan and Barack Obama have a round of cold ones on the way...

This is the first post in a series called Friday Night Ripoffs(?). Here's the deal: every Friday, two songs, where one of them might very well be a gigantic ripoff of the other.

When I was 9 years old watching The Escape Club's "Wild Wild West" on MTV, my stepfather explained that the song was nothing more than a total lift of Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues" and then took me out to Tower Records (RIP) to buy the cassette and drive the point home.

What do you think? Ripoff, or just musical cadences that exist in the ether?

What are some other suspicious musical borrowings you've encountered? We'll go through the comments and post a prime suspect next week!

Though most icon-meets-icon collaborations are a tad underwhelming, it doesn't really get any bigger than this.

UK rag The Daily Express reports:

Just weeks after Bob Dylan announced he wanted to collaborate with fellow legend Sir Paul McCartney, moves are afoot to bring the two superstars together.

Industry insiders say Macca is set to team up with Dylan in California over the summer, where the pair are expected to work on new songs as a duo.

The news comes after Dylan declared this month that he found the idea of working with the former Beatle “exciting”.

McCartney’s spokesman then declared their man would be “very interested” in a collaboration.

“Paul has a home in California not too far from Bob’s so the idea is for the two to meet when Paul is in California over the summer,” says a well-placed mole.

Both artists are no strangers to collaboration, even the notoriously reclusive Dylan. McCartney teamed with Michael Jackson for "Say, Say, Say" (remember that one?) and Dylan has a long list ranging from great (Traveling Wilburys) to WTF (Michael Bolton).

Hopefully the two most accomplished living songwriters in Rock and Roll will yield something more like Dylan's version of "Yesterday" and less like Bolton's "Steel Bars", which Dylan co-wrote (really). We'll know soon enough.

Have a favorite Dylan or McCartney collaboration? The club is open!

But even the president of the United States sometimes must have to stand naked.

In its own way, this is a perfect song for Memorial Day. Bob Dylan's "It's All Right Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)" is a seminal anti-war song of the 60s, having spawned so many famous quotes, people have probably forgotten the origin: quotes like "He who is not busy being born is busy dying" and "Money doesn't talk, it swears."

The song appeared on his 1965 album "Bringing It All Back Home."

Three of America's most celebrated singer-songwriters will be touring minor league ballparks this summer. Bob Dylan will be bringing John Mellencamp and Willie Nelson along for this year's ballpark tour, which kicks off on July 2nd in Sauget, IL, a St. Louis suburb.

Dylan will be touring in support of his new album Together Through Life, which comes out tomorrow.

Dates after the flip.

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We had a great discussion here last week about our favorite Beatles covers. What about Dylan covers? Hendrix's version of "All Along the Watchtower" might be Jimi's best known, but "Like a Rolling Stone" live at Monterey is my favorite Dylan cover, hands down.

What's yours?