Listening Events & True Artifacts of Dylan Fan Fiction

announcing listening parties in NY & LA and exploring the legacy of bob dylan’s overlooked drag city era

good morning!

welcome to the third edition of well-tempered zealot: the dirty projectors newsletter, substack era. the states are the laboratories of democracy, and so too are individual ‘stacks laboratories for what this newsletter can be. with that spirit of lively experimentation, this week’s communique will have a timely bit of information — particularly if you live in new york or los angeles — followed by a less local, less timely (which is to say more universal & more timeless) bit of, err, disinformation: a little essay and some songs documenting bob dylan’s under-appreciated era with the legendary chicago indie label drag city.

tldr; i share some new recordings below :)

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first up…

LISTENING EVENTS!

the new album Song of the Earth comes out april 4th, 2025.

i was chuffed to see pitchfork shout it out in their list of albums to look forward to a few days ago. in the meantime, i want people to hear this thing! i want to sit in a room together and listen.

so that is what we’re gonna do:

the soundsystem will be very good. (in brooklyn, in particular — it’s an OJAS). we’re gonna chill and listen to this crazy thing:

after the album, i’ll play a solo set of songs old and new. if you have requests, throw ‘em in the comments or message to me on this platform. (i brook no requests from instagram or twitter. only substack).

we’re only doing this in new york and los angeles for now, and attendance to each event is limited to 155 (nyc) and 250 (la). ticket is at the close-to-fugazi-adjusted-for-inflation price of $20.

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and next up …

UNIVERSAL & TIMELESS DISINFORMATION

… in three parts :

1. A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

call me basic, but i loved A Complete Unknown.

depressing, perhaps, that 60 years on, america is still regaling itself with the story of the spindly man-child blowing into midcentury ‘new york town’ and glamouring everyone with his largely amoral genius for combining popular sentiment and historical folk & blues structures …

eyebrow-raising, perhaps, given the last decade of thoughtful and sometimes fierce debate about the duty of the audience not to separate art from artist — the duty to hold the artist accountable as a person — that the movie reanimates the “charismatic asshole” trope with deathly sincerity; invites us to see dylan’s duplicity and occasional callousness as inseparable from his greatness (his humor, his originality, his intuition, his moral clarity) …

unforgivable, maybe, to be dropped once more into a version of new york where ordinary people living ordinary lives are charmed and made graceful and extraordinary by the poetic ease and entropic joy of those streets … (or at least semi-charmed kind of, right?? )

& i agree with the jokerman who told the new york times:

but i loved it. i thought chalamet was great. edward norton as pete seeger was incredible. monica barbaro as joan baez, my goodness. i loved the song choices. i loved how much music there was in the film. i loved seeing these familiar places (west village, monterey, newport, upstate) in all their twentieth-century foxiness. what a fantasy!

2. A COMPLETE KNOWN

warning that what follows is some incomplete lassoing around the zeitgeist. speculating vapors out here on the digital frontier. all is striving after (blowing-in-the-) wind, y’know —

do you ever feel like, with the explosion of episodic television, movies have changed? while tv has come to feature ever-more byzantine story architecture — nonlinear storytelling, crazy plot twists, interwoven timelines, perspective shifts, narrative misdirection, recursive curlicues of cyclical space-time, you name it — it seems like movies have become less interested in formal hijinks, or really in suspense or surprise at all. their plots are getting ever simpler and more inevitable, and that is their charm. many of the movies i’ve seen recently — anora, the substance, the brutalist — feel like fairy tales. some (wicked, nosferatu) literally are.

a complete unknown is an american fairy tale. america is telling its stories to itself like a character in a springsteen song — sittin’ on a stool down at the legion hall (megaplex), havin’ a few drinks (64-oz diet coke, half ice), telling boring stories of Glory Days (the artistic products of the postwar economic boom, midcentury expansion, the optimism and promise of those times).

i, for one, am a rapt consumer of all that. woody guthrie sought to disappear into an american myth, and you can hear it in his recordings: he’s a railroad-hopping hobo, a union-card ham-and-egger, dust-bowl row-hoer, itinerant songster. here in our early-middle-21st century, dylan achieves the disney-industrial-complex version of that same transfiguration into american myth, and you can see it in the multiplex.

his is not guthrie’s myth of the working-class hero, but of the hero-artist who, in performing an aestheticized version of working class, quickly transcends it.

3. AN UNKNOWN INCOMPLETE

as an antidote to this hollywood hagiography (well, more of a supplement, tbh), i offer … some internet fan fiction.

imagine, if you will, a world in which dan koretzky, founder of storied chicago indie label Drag City, gets an unsolicited demo tape in the mail in the late fall of 1993. he’s just released westing (by musket and sextant) by pavement, julius caesar by smog, and the palace brothers’ there is no-one what will take care of you. he’s looking for his next potentially aluminum-selling recording artist.

down on desolation row in malibu, bob is on a west L.A. fadeaway, dismayed by the commercial failure of his last decade of albums, including knocked-out loaded, down in the groove, good as i been to you, and world gone wrong. rewatching the VHS footage of himself looking bamboozled at the recording of ‘we are the world’ eight years prior, he has an epiphany: he just doesn’t like digital recording.

i got swept along in the current of all that, he says, but these modern records, they're atrocious. They have sound all over them. There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like—static.

bob starts thinking more about static and fuzz. too much of nothing. that high lonesome sound. noise. tape hiss. that certain untamed sense of the truth. he glances over at the tascam 38 reel-to-reel four track in the corner, which he barely knows how to use.

in a self portrait-esque mood, he begins revisiting his older material through the noisy but painterly idiom of the nascent lo-fi independent american underground … another reinvention in a lifetime of them ...

back in chicago, dan is intrigued. his first thought — oh man, another bill callahan wannabe … there’s gonna be a lot of those, aren’t there? — has given way to a close attention to the language and phrasing of this singer with the peculiar voice. the cassette says only

A UNXNOWN INXOMPLETE

(‘kinda emo’, dan thinks to himself, one side of his mouth tucking into a frown). he turns the cassette cover over to see the tracklist scrawled in a gnomic and obscure hand:

i dreamt i saw st. augustine (gemini version)

i’ll keep it w mine

dark eyes (edition 4 minus love)

dan loves what he hears … he wants more … but who is this artist? looking through the accordion fold of the memorex cassette j-card, dan sees one more crudely handwritten phrase —

rite now, i caint read too good, dont send me no more letters, no

what should dan do???

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i hope you enjoy these true fan fiction artifacts from one of bob’s most overlooked eras. (if you’re a paying subscriber to the well-tempered zealot, there’s a link down at the bottom of this email where you can download ‘em).

recording on the tascam 38 tape machine is bringing it all back home to my own back pages — glad fact, morning better last, slaves’ graves and ballads. i had a lot of fun making these.

best to you all — thanks for reading — please take care of yourself and each other.

dave