Page 25 - AAA Magazine – AAA Ohio Auto Club – September 2019

Jakob Dylan and Tom Petty
Beck, Regina Spektor, Cat Power and Jade. The renditions by the Dylan gang will stop you in your tracks. Apple’s performance with Dylan of The Beach Boys’
“In My Room” is hauntingly beautiful. The arrival of The
Beatles to America set
the stage for the coming music writing revolution. Many young artists were mesmerized by The Beatles’ sound.
“They were looking to be in bands,” explained Dylan, “because everybody from what I’ve learned all saw
The Beatles and that’s what they wanted to be. They wanted to be The Beatles. They wanted to be in a band like that.”
And so they dared to plug in the folk songs they
were writing into electric instruments like the 12-string Rickenbacker guitar. Next, they joined up with like- minded artists in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon and on the streets of the Sunset Strip and Ventura Boulevard.
Folk rock was born.
To get a sense for what was happening, listen to the original version of “The Bells of Rhymney” by Idris Davies and Pete Seeger, and then give The Byrds’ remake of it a listen.
“A whole different group of people started living there, and they were exchanging ideas and they were learning how to write these songs, and things were becoming more poetic and more interesting. They hadn’t really discovered themselves yet,” said Dylan. “It’s really in
this moment – 1965/1966 – that that happened in Laurel Canyon. This is about an innocent time in the exchanging of ideas.
“Maybe that dream was very short-lived before things got a little psychedelic and crazy. I do think it’s short.
It was a magical moment because I think maybe there wasn’t much knowledge. I don’t think people knew what was coming next. So I think that things were
very genuine.”
Regina Spector, Jakob Dylan
and Beck in the living room
The place itself – L.A. – made perfect sense for such a monumental change in music.
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