The harmonica playing of Bob Dylan with Ross Garren, Rob Paparozzi and Liam Ward

Ross Garren, Rob Paparozzi and Liam Ward join me on episode 128, to discuss the harmonica playing of Bob Dylan.
The early part of Dylan’s career is chronicled in the current biopic, A Complete Unknown.
Ross and Rob were the ‘harmonica coaches’ for the movie. Ross recorded most of the harmonica used in the movie and the soundtrack, with Rob contributing one song and also providing support on the East Coast. Ross shares the painstaking process of recording for such a major music movie, how he studied Dylan’s playing in great depth and the challenges that Dylan’s style of harmonica presented.
Liam runs the highly successful LearnTheHarmonica.com website. He was inspired to take up the harmonica from hearing Dylan, and released a series of tuition videos on some of Dylan’s harmonica playing.
Love him or hate him, Dylan has popularised the instrument which has been an integral part of his iconic songs since the early 1960s.

Links:

Spreadsheet showing all songs using harmonica on Dylan’s studio albums:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/10HnAQSoN2ubvq5LrNCQhaGQF5hCobQ1myc8qvj-7gzI/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Harp keys used on Dylan’s albums:
https://dylanchords.com/content/dylans-harp-keys

'Untold Dylan’ article on Dylan as ‘master harpist’:
https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/9903

Liam Ward ‘Learn The Harmonica’ website:
https://www.learntheharmonica.com/

Videos:

Liam Ward tutorial on Mr Tambourine Man:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IwFW_oCaxU&t=47s

It’s All Over Now: Newport Folk Festival 1965:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcWaHBOFkUw

Dylan playing harmonica in the hand (not rack):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJbddZjbDTM&t=256s

Dylan playing as a harmonica player only with Harry Belafonte:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YibIueuzTNM

Timothee Chamalet talks about A Complete Unknown on the Graham Norton show (UK):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_g3nNcurQU



Podcast website:
https://www.harmonicahappyhour.com

Donations:
If you want to make a voluntary donation to help support the running costs of the podcast then please use this link (or visit the podcast website link above):
https://paypal.me/harmonicahappyhour?locale.x=en_GB

Spotify Playlist:
Also check out the Spotify Playlist, which contains most of the songs discussed in the podcast:
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5QC6RF2VTfs4iPuasJBqwT?si=M-j3IkiISeefhR7ybm9qIQ

Podcast sponsors:
This podcast is sponsored by SEYDEL harmonicas - visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seydel1847.com  or on Facebook or Instagram at SEYDEL HARMONICAS
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Blue Moon Harmonicas: https://bluemoonharmonicas.com

Chapters

• 1:46 Neil was a big Bob Dylan fan in his late teens
• 2:24 Ross played the vast majority of songs in the movie and on the soundtrack and was involved in the project for a long time for Rob got involved
• 2:45 Rob got involved to help with cast someone to play a mid-forties Sonny Terry, which turned out to be Steve Bell (Carey Bell’s Son)
• 3:26 Ross actually played the Sonny Terry part though, not Steve Bell (who appears in the movie)
• 3:39 The music side of the movie was done by a team who worked on The Color Purple from a few years back, which Ross also worked on
• 4:19 Ross recorded the harmonica parts in LA, then filming moved to New York, where most of the movie was recorded
• 4:35 Ross and Rob both provided harmonica coaching to Timothee Chamalet on how to play the harmonica
• 5:41 Ross started working on the movie around two years before it was released
• 6:36 The movie was originally incepted before Covid, but that and the movie writer’s strike delayed it, giving Timothee Chamalet plenty of time to prep to play the music and to play Dylan
• 7:26 Ross gave about five harmonica coaching sessions to Timothee
• 8:04 Ross and Rob are on the credits on the movie as ‘harmonica coaches’
• 8:17 Rob’s role as harmonica coach was to coach Timothee on how to mime to the harmonica parts Ross had already recorded with Timothee keen on it looking authentic
• 9:50 Rob coached Timothee to play a part on harmonica which Rob thinks Timothee recorded for the movie
• 11:50 Timothee recorded parts of the movie with the harmonica reeds removed so he could mime, with Tom Halchak at Blue Moon providing some harmonicas for the movie
• 12:48 Liam has done some harmonica coaching for a movie in the UK where they used harmonicas without reeds
• 13:24 Liam found that the film makers want exaggerated movements from actors playing the harmonica and did Ross and Rob also coach Timothee on authentic harmonica movements
• 14:51 Ross recorded a lot of material that wasn’t used in the movie and some of songs were more complicated which may have called for more miming from Timothee, rather than playing them
• 15:51 Rob decided it was better to coach Timothee with a rack on, as that is how he would be filming it
• 16:39 Dylan was often quirky and erratic in his movements when playing harmonica, and how to teach Timothee to do that
• 17:22 Timothee put a lot of work in to get the visual parts of playing the harmonica correct
• 17:38 Rob tried to get Timothee to use an authentic rack from the 60s but Timothee found it uncomfortable so didn’t use it
• 18:32 Hohner Marine Bands were used in the movie, and Golden Melodies weren’t out at that time
• 19:04 Rob gave some Big River harmonicas (via Blue Moon) to the movie crew
• 19:15 The different parts of the harmonica community involved in the movie across the US
• 19:29 Kinya Pollard also provide some harmonicas for the movie
• 20:32 Ross did lots of recording for the movie, around 150 hours, much of it at home in his studio. Lots of these recordings weren’t used
• 22:08 Made extra recordings at the end which synced better with the visuals on the movie
• 22:34 Ross is interested in how they mixed the sound for different ambient conditions
• 24:13 Harmonica features heavily in the movie
• 24:31 Rob compliments Ross on how he played the Dylan parts, considering his unorthodox style
• 25:34 Rob recorded some harmonica on a Judy Collins Dylan album
• 26:11 Recording sessions often call for specific parts, like Dylan, or Neil Young, which aren’t the sort of harmonica session harmonica players play like
• 26:43 How Ross went about learning some of Dylan’s harmonica parts
• 27:38 Ross thinks Dylan could well be the most well known harmonica player
• 28:10 Did Dylan start the revolution of singer / songwriters playing harmonica on a rack?
• 28:27 Woody Guthrie played on a rack and no doubt inspired Dylan to do so
• 29:44 Jimmy Reed also played on a rack before Dylan
• 29:57 Ross hasn’t done a recording session where he had to emulate a player so closely before
• 31:04 For the informal / live clips in movie Ross listened to Dylan live clips to learn them
• 31:32 Ross decided not to use a rack when recording the parts for the movie as he isn’t an accomplished rack player
• 32:01 Ross had to be careful not to add hand effects when playing the parts with the harmonica in his hands
• 32:38 Are a couple of scenes in movie where Dylan played harmonica held in hands
• 33:16 Ross watched some videos of Dylan playing harmonica so could learn some of his physical movements when playing harmonica
• 33:50 Dylan has a strong attack when playing harmonica
• 34:17 Balance Ross tried to strike between playing Dylan note for note and capturing the hectic vibe of his playing
• 35:58 Recapturing the early 1960s recording techniques was another challenge
• 36:34 Ross took all day to record the Sonny Terry scene, with Joe Filisko providing remote support
• 37:07 Ross was keen to represent the playing of Dylan and Sonny Terry accurately
• 37:41 There is a soundtrack album available of the movie where you can hear the songs Ross and Rob play on
• 38:45 Liam runs the very successful Learn The Harmonica website and did a ‘Bob Dylan’ week where he tabbed out five songs of Dylan, available on YouTube
• 39:26 One of the first YouTube videos Liam made was on a Dylan song, and the difficulty in tabbing out Dylan’s playing
• 40:38 Dylan was the reason Liam took up the harmonica and he defends Dylan’s playing
• 41:16 In the videos Liam teaches the melody lines of the songs, rather than closely tabbing out Dylan’s playing
• 41:39 Dylan plays a lot of melodic lines
• 42:01 Liam tries to teach by pointing students in the right direction and allowing space for students to work part of it out themselves
• 43:12 Ross discusses how the nuances of harmonica playing often don’t lend themselves well to tab
• 44:04 Ross had to learn live versions as well as studio versions of Dylan’s playing
• 44:39 Ross studied Dylan’s style so much that he picked up the nuances of his playing more than with any other players he’s studied
• 45:56 Rob talks of how Dylan’s playing is put down, but that it’s actually difficult to emulate
• 47:03 Dylan played quite a bit of second position
• 47:11 When Dylan played (and plays) as a solo artist, the harmonica is his only melodic instrument and he captures a lot of different moods with it
• 49:33 Dylan’s playing is very relatable to people and his music has a rawness, with the music supporting that
• 49:54 Similar artists (such as Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty) use the harmonica in a similar, simple manner, which is equally appealing to the audience
• 50:19 Dylan defines what the harmonica means to a lot of people, despite it’s rudimentary level
• 50:46 Playing the rack is a limiting factor, but he always serves the song and is quite possibly the best songwriter ever (having also won the Nobel Prize for Literature)
• 51:26 Liam picked out 30 favourite Dylan harmonica songs
• 52:07 Liam shares rough percentages of the positions used by Dylan: 1st position 60%, 2nd position 35%, 4th position on a few songs, one 5th and one 12th position
• 54:06 First eight albums have most harmonica, that dwindled for a while but then made a comeback
• 54:23 Some of Liam’s favourite Dylan harmonica songs
• 55:06 ‘Music isn’t about ability but suitability’
• 55:34 Dylan has recorded harmonica on over 150 songs and bad solos only really appear on live recordings (not studio recordings)
• 56:34 Liam believes the vilification he receives from some of the harmonica community is uncalled for
• 56:45 Dylan is probably the most commonly known harmonica player to the man on the street and the responsibility that brings to him as a harmonica player is probably unfair
• 58:12 Dylan did some session work as a harmonica player only (not on a rack) early in his career
• 59:06 One of Neil’s favourite harmonica songs of Dylan’s is Pledging My Time
• 59:45 Ross likes some of the less polished harmonica performances from Dylan, and the uniqueness of each performance
• 1:01:16 Dylan and Neil Young are two of the most famous harmonica players and they deserve respect for that
• 1:02:04 Dylan is known for having a bad singing voice, especially later in his career, and possible impact on his harmonica tone
• 1:02:29 Dylan also plays piano
• 1:02:36 Liam saw Dylan around 2010 and couldn’t recognise a lot of the songs
• 1:03:12 Dylan is a creative force and his harmonica playing is part of that
• 1:03:51 Liam appreciates Dylan’s imperfections, making him what he is
• 1:04:39 You hear so many acoustic guitar players trying to sound like Dylan on the rack harmonica, without getting his distinctive sound
• 1:05:02 Dylan has recorded plenty of blues songs on his early albums, but didn’t play harmonica on them, maybe in deference to good blues harmonica playing
• 1:07:39 The harmonica has a certain innocence in pop music by being played in a rudimentary style by certain famous artists, including Dylan
• 1:09:04 Dylan used part of Paul Butterfield’s band when he went electric, and Butterfield may have inspired Dylan’s electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965
• 1:09:43 Dylan never really played or recorded ‘proper’ blues harmonica, or played amplified blues harmonica
• 1:10:13 Dylan used some blues harmonica players in later recordings, including Sugar Blue on the Desire album (although the songs never made the final album)
• 1:10:24 Charlie McCoy played on the Blonde On Blonde album
• 1:10:30 The harmonica was an important part of the complete whole of a Dylan songs
• 1:11:04 More on Dylan playing blues songs, without much, if any, playing of blues harmonica
• 1:11:51 Dylan only used session harmonica players occasionally, as he wanted to play the harmonica parts himself
• 1:12:27 The crowd would goes wild when Dylan plays harmonica at one of his live shows
• 1:13:04 An article ‘Dylan Master Harpist’ by Mike Johnson compares Dylan’s harmonica playing to John Coltrane and Charlie Parker
• 1:13:43 A wealth of online material on Dylan’s harmonica, as well as books and You Tube videos tutorials
• 1:14:01 Dylan’s extensive use of the E diatonic and Liam’s breakdown of keys used by Dylan: G harp 23%, C harp 20%, E harp 15%
• 1:15:35 The remaining keys Dylan uses are in a typical order of common use: D, A, F, Bb, Eb, Ab, F#, Db, B
• 1:16:20 All Along The Watchtower is played in 4th position and Dylan more recently may have used minor tuned harmonicas
• 1:17:09 Rob owns one of Dylan’s chromatic harmonicas
• 1:17:43 Don’t believe Dylan has ever played any chromatic harmonica, although used one in photoshoots
• 1:18:01 Dylan played Hohner Marine Bands, then Special 20s and Blues Harps
• 1:18:12 Hohner released a Bob Dylan signature model diatonic, one of which Rob sent to Timothee Chamalet
• 1:19:14 Ross felt the study he made of Dylan’s playing in preparation for the movie recordings really helped him look closely at it for the first time
• 1:20:27 Some of the things Ross learned from Dylan’s harmonica playing included tone and note density, and being effective with a relatively limited technique
• 1:22:11 Dylan has the ability to summon different moods and flavours with his harmonica across a range of different songs
• 1:22:46 With the early songs recorded in mono, they sound different with modern playback techniques
• 1:24:22 Dylan is what got Rob playing harmonica, with his brother a fan when young and so exposing Rob to his music
• 1:24:56 As a session harmonica player Rob feels it’s his job to be able to emulate players like Dylan, as the session demands
• 1:26:13 Rob congratulates Ross on the amazing job he did recording for the A Complete Unknown movie, and Ross is the new Tommy Morgan
• 1:26:36 The movie will bring more exposure to the harmonica
• 1:26:53 Dylan was the inspiration for Liam to take up the harmonica and to give him his career now in the harmonica and has come full circle in looking at Dylan again
• 1:28:10 Liam thanks Ross and Rob for their work on the movie and the mainstream exposure it brings to the harmonica
• 1:28:41 Liam is hopeful that there is more to come from Dylan’s harmonica
• 1:28:58 Neil’s closing remarks are that he has enjoyed re-listening to Dylan’s songs as part of the podcast preparation and remembering how much he loves the songs and the part the harmonica play in them

Transcript

SPEAKER_03: 0:00

Ross Garron, Rob Paparazzi and Liam Ward join me on episode 128 to discuss the harmonica playing of Bob Dylan. The early part of Dylan's career is chronicled in the current biopic A Complete Unknown. Ross and Rob were the harmonica coaches for the movie. Ross recorded most of the harmonica used in the movie and the soundtrack, with Rob contributing one song and also providing support on the East Coast. Ross shares the painstaking process of recording for such a major music movie, how he studied Dylan's playing in great depth, and the challenges that Dylan's style of harmonica presented. Liam runs the highly successful LearnTheHarmonica.com website. He was inspired to take up the harmonica from hearing Dylan, and released a series of tuition videos on some of Dylan's harmonica playing. Love him or hate him. Dylan has popularised the instrument, which has been an integral part of his iconic songs since the early 1960s. This podcast is sponsored by Seidel Harmonicas. Visit the oldest harmonica factory in the world at www.seidel1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Seidel Harmonicas. Hello, Ross Garan, Rob Paparazzi and Liam Ward. Welcome to the podcast. Hi, Neil. Hey, Neil. Thanks for having me. Lovely to be here. So thanks guys, we are here to talk today about Bob Dylan's harmonica playing So the much maligned harmonica playing of Bob Dylan And I think hopefully we're going to dispel that myth somewhat When I was in my late teens I was a huge Bob Dylan fan myself So I'm very familiar with his recordings Certainly his early period through into the late 60s and then some of the 70s albums He didn't inspire me to take up the harmonica But I certainly heard lots of his harmonica then and I was familiar with it So the reason we're doing this episode now is because of course the movie's out, A Complete Unknown, with Timothy Chamelet, who's playing Bob Dylan. And you guys, Ross and Rob, are actually playing on the soundtrack for that. So you were involved with the movie, right? That's right.

SPEAKER_02: 2:18

I'm just going to, before we move on from the soundtrack, just want to state that Ross played on the whole soundtrack. There was one song that they needed to change when they started shooting. because they wanted to, I think, you know, maybe Timmy wanted to start playing on a couple of things. So Ross is all on the soundtrack. I'm on one song on that soundtrack. And Ross started with this project way before I got involved. and got a call. I got a call really because they needed some help with casting. You know, they needed a Sonny Turi for a scene. And hey, Rob, do we know a black harmonica player that can really play, but was maybe 49 or 50 years old in 1961? And so then I started scratching my head and doing emails to Joe Felisco and guys like that. And I was thinking Brandon Bailey, great player from Memphis, but too young. And then I was thinking, sure, Sugar Blue, which everybody knows Sugar Blue, but now he's too old, you know, to be that age in 1960. So anyway, I was helping with the casting, and that was my involvement. And then after they came, I think we ended up, or they ended up, with Steve Bell, who was Cary Bell's son. And he didn't really play. That's Ross playing the Sonny Terry parts. Everything was... Oh, is it? Yeah, so Ross, why don't you jump in here and explain?

SPEAKER_00: 3:39

My understanding is this film, at least the music side, is done by some guy I've worked with the first project I did with them was The Color Purple a really awesome crew of guys that from what I can tell specialize in doing films that have songs you know proper Color Purple film that came out I think two Christmases ago was an adaptation of the musical so it had album song like production and so I had worked with them before so yeah they threw this project my way to start recording the harmonica parts and here in LA but when they moved to filming I think most of it was filmed in New York I'm not totally sure but at least a lot of it was you know when they moved to the that section of it they were lucky that Rob was around to be able to you know do some additional things and I think the lion's share I did get to coach and give Timmy some harmonica lessons I think as he was sort of preparing for the actual shoots but I think we Rob was there when they were doing the real heavy, you know, lifting on that part and some additional recording. And that's my understanding of the workflow. They did sort of pre-production in LA, which involved pre-recording music for them to have on hand for Timmy to practice to, for them, I'm guessing, to shoot to. I'm not really sure on all the specifics, but basically we pre-recorded quite a lot of music. They moved to New York. And I think even in that time period, I got something where they were revising pieces you know maybe they wanted something to play a little longer once they got to shooting or something like that you know then they imagined in the pre-production stage and I think Rob and I handled some of that stuff and then when they were done filming there was another round of you know kind of looking at what they had and what could be improved about it yeah that's kind of my understanding of how that workflow was and it was really cool

SPEAKER_02: 5:41

when did you start giving him online lessons and stuff and coaching out there a couple years ago, right?

SPEAKER_00: 5:47

man, I'm really bad with time. And this project went on for me for an incredibly, you know, for me, like if I get the sort of best film gigs I get as a, you know, recording harmonica, be lucky to be four days or something like that of work, that would be kind of a pretty extensive project for me. And this was over the course of a couple years. I think I even had revisions happening like a month before the movie released, you know, something like that. They were still, you know, working on the end credit scenes. I definitely started working on it a couple

SPEAKER_03: 6:24

years ago. I'm aware that I watched an interview with Timothy and apparently they started this project before COVID and then COVID delayed it all. So he actually kind of worked on it for five years. So the fact that he does sing and play, he actually sings and plays the guitar in the movie, right? And it's only the harmonica, I think, which is, you know, it isn't him. I think I've I'm not sure about the guitar, but he definitely does the singing. So he sort of had five years to work on it because of this delay to the movie being made.

SPEAKER_00: 6:55

I definitely didn't work with him at that long. So from my perspective, it was maybe a couple of years and it was interrupted by the writer's strikes. So the original filming got delayed, I think, because of strikes. I don't know how that then impacted, you know, some of the important people's already existing schedules. So he did tell me something along those lines that he felt he enjoyed having significantly more prep time for this role than he thought he was going to have. I think I only did five or ten lessons with him and most of what I did I think was well before they started shooting and then I made I think Rob maybe I sent it to you just a folder of a walk through roughly like video of each song. That was kind of the extent and it kind of seemed like it was a sporadic lesson here and there over a period of time and i don't have much insight into the pre-covid production

SPEAKER_03: 7:55

so i watched the movie on friday it came out in the uk on friday which was the 17th of january but in the us it came out on the 25th of december yeah so so on the end on the credits you you guys are both ross and rob you're both on there on the credits as harmonica coaches right so you're saying there that you're coaching timothy but he didn't play the harmonica did he in the but were you just coaching him about where to put his mouth and things

SPEAKER_02: 8:17

Well, actually, the job I was hired for was to coach him through the stuff that Ross had already recorded. They're really going to use this free record, all of it. And so I had to study Ross's... And then what I kind of did is I kind of even tabbed him out a little bit so I could remind myself where the holes were. And maybe he would want to even see that, too, because he really didn't just want to fake it. He wanted to learn it, even if he wasn't going to play it when they started shooting. So he had real, he had about eight harmonicas when I first met with him and he knew the different keys and was ready to blow along with me. The thing was, is once they started shooting, I think, and I had seen some videos too online that I think Ed Norton, the guy who plays Pete Seeger, was listening to, you know, as they're shooting and he kept saying, you know, Timmy, you know, when all of us, when we perform live, when we're in these small like bedroom scenes, not out on the big Newport stages or anything, It actually, Sounds real. Like if we can, if we can do any of this live. So Timmy already, he had been studying with one of my friends, Larry Saltzman for five years studying guitar. And I remember Larry telling me he was teaching some guy for the, for the Dylan film. So I didn't think anything of it when they started shooting and fast forward now to when they're getting close last summer, they're doing a lot of shots. They were doing a shot, which supposed to be Gertie's folks city or, and I, Timmy wanted to play the guitar thing and he was doing it. And he wanted to do the harmonica thing. So I got a call, Ross, from Nick Baxter. And Nick, who's the music producer for the movie, he said, Rob, he goes, Ross already recorded all this stuff. But this one song, the director wants him to really get in there and do something different. And it's not lining up with our prerecord on this particular song. And they didn't tell me that he was trying to play it. So what do you want me to do? He goes, well, can I come to you to record? And I said, I live in a condominium. What do you mean come to me? He goes, I'll come over. And he came over with his laptop and we recorded. We listened to the original thing that Ross had done. And we kind of, he wanted me to simplify it even more than Ross had already broke it down really nice and easy. It's a solo at the end of the tune. And he didn't tell me why, but I figured, okay, well, tell me what you want. And we would do it lick by lick and we got it. kind of got it down to where, and then he rushed out with his laptop and started, I guess, editing it and putting it all together. And it turns out, when I went to see the film, when I saw it on New Year's Eve, I was listening for that scene, and I see, that's not, because Nick Baxter is a good guitar player too, right, Ross? He played, I think he was playing guitar on some of this stuff, and it was like an open G tuning. And I said, that doesn't sound like the part that I learned from Nick on the free record. So Timmy was playing guitar, and then it got to the harmonica solo at the end. And it didn't sound like Ross and it didn't sound like me. He was playing the new part. I'm pretty sure. Right. So you think

SPEAKER_03: 11:23

there is some of Timothy playing in the

SPEAKER_02: 11:24

movie as well? And on that song, that song, it goes by really fast and everybody's talking and John Hammond's looking at him. But that harmonica solo is not me. And I don't think it was what Ross had sent. So he is playing on some of the stuff in the smaller scenes, maybe at the hospital when, you know, he tooted a note out. I don't know where. And it was interesting to see how that was done. And hats off again to Timmy, who really put in so much time with the videos that me and Ross were making them or when we met up with them. He was really doing his homework.

SPEAKER_05: 12:00

Can I ask, what's the plan that he'd be using a harmonica with the reeds removed for the scenes?

SPEAKER_02: 12:07

I found out from Tom Halchak from Blue Moon Harmonicas that they had reached out to him when they got out to the East Coast. Apparently, they needed some some like vintage harmonica. looking harmonicas that would be harmonicas that were available only in the early 60s and and apparently he sent them a bunch of harmonicas and then they requested reedless ones so i guess if he's on set and he's playing along or whatever they're going to do with the pre-records or not do they don't want sound to come out of the harmonica while they're playing pre-records so he could play and they could mute the guitar or mute the harmonica by putting reedless reeds in there. I don't know if they ever used those, but Tom made them up a whole set of them.

SPEAKER_05: 12:48

Yeah, yeah, I was just wondering, because I've had a bit of limited experience on set on a film in the UK, which my friend Will Pound is on the soundtrack, and he asked if I would go in and train the actor. It's a film about a guy who takes up the harmonica and it kind of saves his life. They did a similar thing where they had reedless harmonicas, but as you were saying with Timmy, the guy I was teaching got really into learning and really wanted to learn the thing, but the thing that I found funny on set, and I don't know how this was for you guys in terms of the video lessons and whatever you were giving, but the thing I found funny was, you know you see a film sometimes and there's a harmonica player, and the movements they're making on the instrument are way too big, it's kind of really hammed up, and you think, ah, they really needed a harmonica advisor there to tell them it's not realistic. Well, I found when I was on this film that I was trying to really make it look realistic I was trying to sort of make sure his movements were really accurate to what he was supposed to be playing and then someone from the crew would keep saying no we need it to be bigger we need them to move around more which of course as you know as harmonica players a lot of the time you're not you're not sliding up and down the instrument that much maybe it's a bit different with Dylan because some of his playing is quite busy and up and down but I just wondered if there was any in terms of your instructions Ross or Rob Were you just teaching specific solos or was there anything in terms of coaching him to look realistic when he's playing it on set or anything

SPEAKER_00: 14:21

like that? In the time I spent with him, we basically were just working on actually playing the songs, like maybe slow, maybe not clean, maybe not exactly the way you would hear it, but where he pretty much was playing, you know, in like some version of it. And I worked with him well before Rob, so I'm sure the whole thing really got way more refined once it, you know, got closer to shooting. So that was it. There were some of the more complicated songs. And I will say that I recorded a lot of material that didn't get used in the film, a lot of songs. And I would say some of the fancier songs that we recorded in terms of like sort of crazier harmonica playing that didn't get used. So I think there were maybe some songs that were going to be, I don't really know because he's a really talented guy who was working really hard, but there were certain songs that were a real stretch for me that maybe would have moved more towards miming and less towards like kind of trying to actually play it. but I don't think that that material didn't really get used a whole lot so for me it was actually just teaching them how to kind of play the songs to to some degree and not like fake it you know

SPEAKER_02: 15:50

Yeah, I had found once we started digging in, And we got together a couple of times with Larry, the guitar player at Timmy's place and myself. And I have found it's better to put a rack on because he's going to be shooting this stuff with a rack. And so I put the rack on and even the stuff I did from home on FaceTime or Zoom, I would pick up a guitar because I could play a little bit. So I would play. I said, OK, we're doing it's all over now, baby blue or whatever it is. I said, let's let's play these chords. And then you're going to start on the middle of the harmonica and you're going to work your way to the right. Whatever Ross was playing on this and Dylan was playing doesn't go down to the left on this particular solo. So we were zeroing in on the whole numbers. He knew the whole numbers. He was already putting a lot of time in as to where he's supposed to play this thing. And then sometimes, you know, and I'm sure they had Ross when he was copying some of these Dylan solos. You know, Dylan was very quirky and he'd do those flurries and like up and down and like... How am I going to teach Timmy this? But that's where the harmonica was going. It was going up and down. And I kind of said, well, start on this hole and work your way. Don't go past nine. He's not going any higher than that. And work your way back down. So it was a very visual kind of thing where me holding a guitar, looking at him. He's looking at me. He's got his guitar. I got a rack on. Like I said, he didn't want any shortcuts. He wanted to nail this stuff. Now, as far as how much time he put in on the set when he got there, I don't know, but I was impressed what I saw. I didn't see any wrong movements there. something that looked weird. I did try and get him to use the original harmonica rack that I had from 1964, whatever, when I started using the rack. But, you know, he felt really uncomfortable with it. And it's a piece of garbage, that rack, you know. And he was already using something, maybe, I don't know, something from the 70s or something. So he wasn't bent out of shape. You know, he didn't say, I'm not using it. But I noticed when I went and saw the film, he didn't use the original one. And they sent it, the property people sent it back to me. And I said, you know what? He's putting a lot of time in playing here. He wants to get it right. He wants to feel comfortable. And that original rack is horrible. And who's going to know but us harmonica nerds?

SPEAKER_03: 18:18

It's funny you should say that, Rob, because I knew that story about the rack. I'd read about it before this. And I was actually looking closely at the rack thinking, yeah, that rack doesn't look so old.

SPEAKER_02: 18:26

No, it doesn't. And they had it. They had the original if they wanted to use it. And so they must have known some of the backstory. And even Tom Halchick said, oh, Rob, I sent them these reedless harmonicas and vintage harmonicas. sent them golden melodies i said tom they didn't have golden melodies until the end of the 60s and uh he goes oh okay i'll tell them i'll tell you know so uh you know i said don't use golden melodies it's got to be marine band or maybe old standbys or something but they were not making plastic comb golden melodies in 1962 you

SPEAKER_03: 18:58

know yeah it's great that tom was involved you know he's a sponsor of the podcast so he also sent some big river harmonicas to the crew didn't he

SPEAKER_02: 19:04

Well, I did. Yeah, I had to make me up a couple and because he was making some up for me on my own order. And I had a couple little ones that he put complete unknown or something on it. And, and I sent it out to them. But it was so cool that way this film worked out to have Ross on the West Coast, and me on the East Coast and a guy like Tom, who's like this harmonica builder, and they were interested in trying to get this right. So that's hats off to them, too. You know,

SPEAKER_00: 19:29

I'd like to chime in real quick, too, because Kenya Pollard is not on social media. But he also made harmonica. This was a big production. Wow. So I personally don't have a lot of insight into how all of it went, but they covered their bases and consulted a lot of experts. And I think it's really cool that it sort of activated that number of people in the harmonica community. So also props to Kenya, you know. Definitely, yeah. I had a few things to say about the realistic look of the performances for me. So like I did some of the sessions, this was a tremendous amount of recording work for me for getting the lesson side of it. I probably recorded something like 150 hours, something like that, like a tremendous amount of recording. Like I said, I recorded a lot of songs that aren't heard that they didn't use. They just cut them all together. And some of the sessions I did in person with Nick but not many most were at home and I could go you know especially for a lot of Dylan's music you know he sings a verse he plays a verse he sings the verse he plays a verse there could be five I think I did one where there was like 10 harmonica solos in the song you know something like that eight or ten like a tremendous number of interludes right and for me to do that it was much more convenient to kind of be able to go section by section from home even phrase by phrase and just kind of dial it in, nail something, give them a couple variations to choose from of like a phrase and kind of go phrase by phrase. And I felt like in the end, I did a pretty darn good job with it. But when I watched the movie and had to think about Timmy making it all the way through takes of the whole song in a believable... Whether he's playing it, whether he's miming it, it doesn't really matter. That seems so much more difficult than me kind of being able to go phrase, nail it, record, boom, next phrase. You know, he's got to sort of be believable across a whole performance. I don't know what they used in the final thing that you hear. You know, I just see the credits same as anybody else. But after they were done filming, we did do an extra round of revisions specifically of things that they didn't think what we were hearing looked like what they decided to go with for the film cut. And I think they had me replace some of those things just so that what you saw matched the sound better. I think in some cases they were also maybe happy with what Timmy had played on set but wanted to you know one of the things that I don't have too much insight that's really fascinating is on a project that's so music based the considerations of mixing right you there's like scenes where somebody Joan Baez is outside the club she kind of hears distantly Masters of War going down in a club and then she kind of walks down a tunnel and there's all these sound changes that are happening to some recording so I think partially some of the process was not necessarily about correcting what I played or Timmy played or anything like that but actually making sure they had captured a sound that would give them flexibility so in terms of being able to mix it and I don't really know how the production audio is recorded it's obviously not in a studio with a guy just sitting in front of a microphone you know people are walking around and so there was a round of revisions like that and I don't know all of the reasons but I think a lot of it was strictly mixability you know scenes where Bob gets up you know there's that scene in the studio where Newhart is starting to play and he Bob's in the background and gets up and plays like we went in and redid that stuff kind of painstakingly and I don't know if they would have used it I think they were just doing it mostly to have mixing options so big project a lot of harmonica players and makers involved and really cool and it would be really interesting interesting to at some point in time grill like some of the guys on mixing and production in terms of how it all you know came together because it's it's a big process you know

SPEAKER_03: 24:13

one thing for sure is the harmonica does feature pretty heavily in it there's plenty of harmonica as you said rob there's little scenes where they're just harmonicas just played just for a little you know a few seconds like with woody guffrey and these sorts of things so the harmonica is definitely prominent in there you know as it is was with dylan you know he did use the harmonica a lot so good work all around guys

SPEAKER_02: 24:30

yeah i just wanted to say also, you know, Ross did an amazing job on this because they picked the songs that, okay, we're going to do these songs or we're not sure if we're going to use them all. So Ross had to go back and start with Dylan recordings. First of all, he's a professional harmonica player. We all kind of play harmonica. That's what we do, right? Liam and you too, Neil. And this is what we do. And now we've got to back everything up, forget a lot of the fancier stuff we know and analyze what Dylan is doing. which is very hard to analyze. It's a very unorthodox way of playing harmonica. It's his own way. And then Ross had to take these songs and they're expecting to hear it to sound like Dylan. So, and he, and I think he did a, you did a fantastic job doing that. When I heard, I heard the prerecords, I said, wow, this is, this is not easy to do. Cause I've had, I've, I've been thrown in some of these situations like this too. I remember doing a, a Judy Collins record. Judy plays Dylan, sings Dylan.

UNKNOWN: 25:43

How does it feel to be

SPEAKER_02: 25:50

And this was back in the 90s, and she wanted me to try and sound more like Dylan. And I realized, and as I conferred with Russ about this, we had a couple of phone conversations about teaching Timmy. We said, man, this is a lot of work to break down Bob Dylan's stuff and then copy it enough to make it sound like Dylan. We play harmonica, and we come up with our own stuff, and we've been playing for a long time, and we play it professionally. We want to have our own sound. And what happened? is a lot of times in the real world you get a call hey can you sound like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young hey can you sound like John Popper because that's all they know in their world is that that's hey that he's the guy right you know and now we have to copy that and it becomes like wow I don't know I think uh I got into some trouble here you know

SPEAKER_05: 26:43

that's the thing about this project that fascinates me and I wanted to ask you Ross because I've taught a few Dylan tunes and I find that despite his lack of maybe technical prowess, his solos are fiendishly difficult to interpret and internalize, and I would say more so than more sophisticated players. So I'm wondering what your process was. I wonder if you could say a little bit about how you went about learning to play like him or replicate some of these solos.

SPEAKER_00: 27:14

Yeah, I mean, thank you guys both for that. I put in a lot of time on this project, felt honored to get it. I felt lucky I think if they had done the pre-production in New York Rob would have crushed the whole thing too so I was just kind of lucky to get in there myself and I think like many harmonica players Dylan is somebody I'm obviously aware of I would venture to guess at this point in time he's probably the most iconic most famous harmonica player to me anyway you know I think he's such a huge figure in music you know and that image of the guy with the rack harmonica you know it's like if you see a picture of Dylan it likely has a harmonica in it you know Stevie you know is obviously one of the most iconic musicians as well but you know when you see the picture of Stevie it's him sitting at the keyboard and you know it's not necessarily a harmonica in his face you know. I

SPEAKER_03: 28:10

just wanted to touch on that because I think Dylan probably is the most iconic player on a rack and maybe started the whole revolution of singer-songwriters using a harmonica on a rack and I think that you know it's what you're saying there I think I can't think of anybody else who sort of are all the same.

SPEAKER_00: 28:25

You know, maybe Rob can speak to that. I do know, like, Woody Guthrie, his hero, at least early on, played some really, I didn't actually, until getting into this, realize he was a mighty fine harmonica player who played some really convincing, beautiful, like, he's on my list of guys to do a deeper dive on. I don't know if he played in a rack or not, but it's similar to the acoustic guitar vocal harmonica.

SPEAKER_03: 28:55

Oh, assume he did because he does play the guitar and sing at the same time so i think he must have done

SPEAKER_00: 29:00

he sounds freaking really great though like if he was playing that in iraq that is impressive and i have also read i think jess fuller the san francisco bay blues

SPEAKER_02: 29:10

okay yeah san francisco bay blues and i there's another one called lost train blues

SPEAKER_00: 29:21

so

SPEAKER_02: 29:21

And it's like you said, Neil, he's playing guitar and harmonica. It's got to be a wreck. And that's probably what Dylan first got interested in, because he's digging Woody's music. and Woody's playing guitar and harmonica. So it's some pretty impressive stuff. Of course, there was Jimmy Reed, but he was a straight-ahead blues guy and doing his own thing with it.

SPEAKER_03: 29:50

Yeah, and if we're talking about someone who's obviously massively popular like Dylan was, you mean, obviously, Woody Guthrie, you know, he's a bit more niche, right?

SPEAKER_00: 29:57

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So another quick aside is I think, like Rob, I have gotten a certain number of requests when recording to, you know, sound like so-and-so, that kind of thing. But normally, it's like grab some element of their essence that would work for this track. It's not sound exactly like them. It's more like, you know, capture a little bit of that vibe and we'll be happy. And so with this one, Nick, the producer of the music, was very detailed with me. I would give him quite a bit of credit in terms of how it ends up sounding and the coaching. You demonstrating or showing the recording of an iconic studio version of a song, as opposed to one of the club or more informal performances that we see on screen. Those ones he wanted basically about as spot on as could be. For the more informal ones, there were I think pretty much most of the time a reference live recording of Dylan that we were looking at. Now, in some cases, they extended scenes. They did things where there wasn't a specific reference for it. And with those ones, we were a little looser. He wanted to hear some variations, sometimes wanted to see if we could kind of improve or bring something to the Dylan versions that we were looking at. So for me, really, the process, first of all, I didn't use a rack. I thought about it, but I'm not a, I'm not in the habit of that kind of playing and to be able to do take after take somewhat accurately especially like when we were in the studio with people around my accuracy on the rack would just wouldn't be there to do take after take kind of getting the same something similar you know getting similar trying to be able to improve on takes rather than just kind of hope for the best

SPEAKER_03: 32:01

so a quick question you just on that so you didn't use a rack did you avoid using any hand effects

SPEAKER_00: 32:06

I did and I caught myself messing that up from time to time I kind of tried to hold it sort of more or less like a little bit unstable you know so maybe it helped a little bit with the kind of dirtiness lack of cleanliness of single notes but also yeah there were certain times where I was trying to do stuff that was more challenging for me and I wanted the stability maybe of a traditional grip and I would I would feel that guy coming in there to make little hand effects and yeah and would have to police on that and the one exception to that, and I don't know what they used again, like I said, it's hard for me to say, was the Woody Guthrie playing on a record scene. That was one of the, that and maybe the scene in the studio I mentioned with Newhart doing Railroad Bill, I think is the song, where Dylan is not in a rack. So I think we did give some consideration to maybe using some very light hand effects. Something that was not so drastic that it sounded like a totally different thing than the rack Dylan were used to but something that maybe suggested it was a little different so for me I watched some videos with Dylan just to kind of get a little bit of the physicality you know seeing what his cheeks are doing a little bit obviously with the rack maybe it changes how far into the mouth one can get the harp in terms of how I'm used to doing it and really I just went and tried try to get a sense of his physicality on the instrument to some degree and I have to say that's one of the things I was really impressed with with him he has I think I'm a pretty soft player most of the time that's my kind of default mode and he has like a really strong like rhythmic in out powerful kind of you know he can sort of hammer that in out in out kind of thing without the envelope of a swell as you kind of move from one on breath direction. and so you know I tried to look at things like that as best I could one of the big challenges with Dylan especially on the more energetic pieces was the sort of trade-off for me between accuracy of attempting to do something that was maybe note accurate to what he had done with capturing the hectic kind of vibe like one of the first songs I think the first song Nick wanted to record for me was You're No Good where this is one of the up-tempo like Dylan Say what you want about, I know he is much maligned, as you said, by the harmonica community. There aren't many guys that have that kind of rhythmic chop that he has, you know, chop like a violin chop. It's accurate. He's playing guitar at the same time, so he's locked in with himself, even as the time may fluctuate a little bit. And so I found just physically some of that stuff pretty challenging, and there were trade-offs in terms of being able to nail something accurately versus having the kind of raucous energy. Sometimes I feel like maybe I could have captured the spirit more accurately at the expense of the accuracy of the notes. That was certainly a trade-off. but with him that's pretty much what I did went through it and like attempted to kind of get a sense of the tone there were a lot of times like maybe like I said Nick did maybe want to polish some of the edges around Dylan's playing maybe you know certain tones a little less strident on the recording that's another thing we're up against is the period nature of the recordings you know how I'm recording it at home is not how Dylan was recording it so you know we're separated by I guess 50 or so years, 50 to 60 years. It sounds a little different. I'm trying to get a similar tone to him. So Liam, I basically was just painstakingly kind of phrase by phrase attempting to match like the amount of extra notes besides you know what maybe a central note would be you know kind of the chordal nature of his playing trying my best to match that to match the tone and I will tell you the Sonny Terry scene it's not you know represented in the shape that I recorded it but that was the same thing I spent basically all freaking day on that I had some good text conversations with Joe Felisco going back and forth about like hey any tips any suggestions and that similar like Sonny's tone is very specific I think the nature and the level of this production also unlike you know can you do something inspired by or whatever might happen on a normal studio session I wanted to really do these guys justice Dylan I wanted to do justice I wanted to do Sonny Terry justice and make it you know when you watched it people that know what those guys did could say hey this is a nice tribute and representation I like what they've done here rather than this is very surface level look look at Sonny Terry, you know, or this is a caricature of Bob Dylan's playing. So for me, it was really just very microscopic. I had the advantage of being able to do it largely in my own time and just get microscopic about the whole thing.

SPEAKER_03: 37:41

So you mentioned, obviously, you don't quite know which parts are in the movie, Ross, but what there is, is there is a soundtrack. And on that soundtrack, which is available, there are six songs where you're playing. And then there's the one song that you're playing, Rob, which shows I was young when I

SPEAKER_04: 37:54

left home.

SPEAKER_03: 38:09

So everyone can go and listen closely to your actual recordings. That's you playing on those six songs, Rosh. As far as you understand, yeah?

SPEAKER_00: 38:18

Yeah, I mean, that's the credits. I see how that interfaces with the versions we see in the movie. I don't really know. It's great. I'm proud of it, man. Really proud.

SPEAKER_03: 38:39

So, I mean, we're talking here about how you studied Dylan's playing to make it all sound authentic. So, Liam, bringing you in. So, you run the very successful Learn the Harmonica website. If anyone hasn't seen your smiling face on YouTube teaching harmonica, then I don't know where they've been. So, you've done a great job with that. So, you did, six years ago now, a Bob Dylan week where you look specifically at five Bob Dylan songs and you tab them out. So, first of all, we can point people out. If they want to learn how to play like Bob Dylan, then And you've done that, so you've picked out through five songs. So what did you do for that? From the approach that I've seen, you do it quite melodically, don't you? Sort of picking out the tune. But maybe talk about what you did for those five videos you made.

SPEAKER_05: 39:22

Yeah, so it actually goes back a little bit further than that. One of the very first... YouTube videos I made was a Dylan tune. I can't remember what the first one I did was, but I did a couple where I was trying to pick out his solos as they were. And then to be honest with you, Neil, it was so tricky. And that's why I wanted to ask Ross what I did earlier. It was so tricky that I think I did a couple of the songs where I was just picking out the melody, almost the vocal melody. And it was kind of easier that way, because it is really difficult to follow what he's doing, because he is idiosyncratic and unpredictable, and especially, I think, if you've trained yourself to play an instrument, you might have your own sound, but there will be certain parts of your technique, certain licks, or just ways of moving around the instrument that you will have in common with most harmonica players, whether you like it or not. And Dylan kind of breaks the mold with a lot of those things. So it was a really difficult thing to teach. But that said, it was a very natural choice for me because Dylan really was the reason I took up the harmonica. And I am, to a certain extent, you know, a Dylan defender because I grew up with my dad's record collection contained a lot of the 60s folk stuff, you know. He also had a lot of Neil Young records, so I was hearing them. But the number one stuff in it in his collection was Bob Dylan. So I was hearing all of those early albums and that made me pick up the harmonica. So when I got into doing YouTube videos and lessons, it was inevitable I was gonna teach some Dylan because he was my first harmonica hero.

SPEAKER_03: 41:16

Interesting watching it, because as you say there, his idiosyncratic style is quite difficult to teach. When I was watching it, I was having the feeling that you probably didn't want to go down that route, because it's quite hard to teach it, but also you don't really want the people learning in that way, because it's kind of not right, in one sense, you know what I mean? So you kept it a bit more clean, right?

SPEAKER_02: 41:34

Yeah. I was going to say, Liam, did you find that Dylan paid a lot of attention to the melody in his own weird way, He didn't strictly play it, but the melody was very important to him. You could always hear him referring to it every once in a while, going back to it. Hence, the first position thing was very important to him because he wanted to always quote a little bit of that melody.

SPEAKER_05: 42:01

Yeah, absolutely. And I've always approached my teaching in what I hope is a sensitive way, by which I mean I try to point out my students in the right direction, but also leave enough space for them to work things out on their own to a certain extent. I don't believe in spoon feeding as much as there are times when you need someone to just tell you how to do something if you need it done quickly, on a deadline, whatever. So I find that if I'm teaching the melody, often it's a skeleton for people to then either adapt in their own way to play something that's a bit more their own signature or adapt to try and get closer to what Dylan was playing because as you say a lot of his playing within it somewhere is a real respect for the melody.

SPEAKER_00: 43:13

Yeah, I think too, like with the two guys that I had to sort of track down for this movie, Sonny Terry and Dylan. Yeah, so like there are very superficial elements to somebody's style that we can grab, right? If you play a little rhythm and do a little bit of whooping, you know, most harmonica players realize that that has some relation to Sonny Terry or whatever, right? But the devil is in the details and I think a lot of the stuff that we hear with those two players in particular, but you know, a lot of harmonica players in general, is not stuff that lends itself well to tabs and you know it is the nuance of tone production it is the nuance of dynamics and phrasing and time so I think that is a big challenge and I personally it's interesting so Between doing studio versions of these songs, some of them also are featured in live performances in the movie, so I had to learn and transcribe live versions of Dylan's songs that I also did the studio version. It was something probably to the order of 30 different songs, mostly fully transcribed, sometimes with other variations of my own or that kind of thing. And I think knowing the scrutiny that that project would be under, just in terms of the number of people who would see it and how iconic he was. that I ended up, I think, getting under the hood of those nuances of sound in a way that I really hadn't, I don't think, with even my favorite players. It makes me think I really should because, you know, it's one thing to learn some of the melodies somebody might play, you know, like a superficial, well, I shouldn't say superficial, say you learn somebody's solo on something, you know, it's not something I've done a lot of, but it has been very helpful for me when I have in terms of building vocabulary. But to go the next step and really like have done that times 20 or 30 for that person and attempting to get the nuances of their sound and you know that the tone how much they let another note bleed in try to really capture the essence of it so you could create a solo in that style that's a level of study in detail that I think I could probably get a lot out of just about any player studying that way and I was shocked that with Dylan I learned so much about the harmonica about music about how to use the harmonica in any kind of music, but obviously in this particular case, singer-songwriter, this kind of folk material. And there was just a tremendous amount to be gained from that detail of study, and it was heavy.

SPEAKER_02: 45:55

You know, when they started posting stuff online and social media and interviews with Timmy and he had coaching, harmonica coaching and guitar coaching. And I remember somebody, maybe it was one of the harmonica forums where they said, you needed a coach to play like Dylan? And I'm thinking like, you know, you go ahead and try it. You go ahead and try it for one song and you'll see what people don't realize the time that Ross put in as a studio player to turn the corners and reverse some of his ways of playing to make it sound. Because Dylan had his own sound, very much so. And then later on, guys like Neil Young were copying guys like Dylan and Bruce Springsteen were copying guys like Dylan. We call it folk harmonica, but it was a very unique thing. People laugh about his style. It's, oh, you know, he just blows in and out. You don't need to coach him on that. And when you start nailing down some of the parts to these songs. And like I had said earlier, he pays a lot of attention to the melody and then he doesn't. And Dylan could play second position too, as Ross can tell you, because some of these songs were in second position.

SPEAKER_00: 47:11

Yeah, yeah. That's the thing too that I think people need to realize about Dylan is when you're playing solo like he is, he, you know, the harmonica was his only melodic instrumental foil between all of these verses and he I think does an exceptional job and maybe a job that we don't really hear on evidence by many of the great blues players necessarily of being able to capture a variety of different moods you know he has these up tempo like really chopping out kind of things like you're no good where he he sort of it's super high energy you know and I remember there was a live version of it's all over now baby blue from I think Newport in 65 that I had to copy and he did all these like really fast arpeggio kind of things that almost kind of has like a little bit of a John Popper flavor. know something totally different right and then he has his sort of simpler melodic things where maybe he only just holds a note for a really long time you know he did that uh like man of constant sorrow would be one you know where it is very melodic but also just holding a note for a really long time Then there's the stuff Rob was talking about where he sort of is... playing the melody in between verses, you know, and it's sort of an abstracted version of the melody and it's not the same each time. But he had a lot of different moods that he captured. And as a solo performer, you know, you may say, well, you know, he's limited or this kind of thing. You know, he couldn't blow over the changes on You're No Good with the same fervor of like a great jazz player. And he, you know, plays these uptempo things and it's not with the same accuracy and vocabulary of a top And what you could say that if you wanted, but he's capturing all these moods by himself as a foil to his songwriting and performance. And it is a lot of variety to what he is doing. It's very unpredictable. I think a lot of times, you know, I'm not really sure, but it seems very relatable to people as well. There's something to me about I don't want to call his music amateurish because it's amazing. It's not amateurish. It's something that people look for.

SPEAKER_03: 49:46

Yeah, I think it was out of role almost, didn't it? And that's what's made it very appealing to people.

SPEAKER_00: 49:50

That's a better word, and I think the harmonica really evokes that in a way, and you hear that with all the guys that Rob was mentioning, you know, Springsteen, Tom Petty, you know, Billy Joel, Neil Young, all these guys, a lot of them had the best bands in the land. Tom Petty band is like an insanely good band, but you still hear that brand of harmonica happening, and I think it speaks to how we perceive harmonica, maybe not among harmonica players and listeners, to this podcast but American people who have been growing up listening to the radio like what the harmonica means to them I think is largely defined by Dylan and you sort of have to respect that I have found that a lot you start playing a nice clean single note melody a la Charlie McCoy or something I might attempt on some sessions sometimes that's unrelatable to the people who have hired they're like what is that now is that some clarinet music or something I want some harmonica come on now you know I

SPEAKER_03: 50:46

think we've got to remember obviously we talked about he played on a rack we've got to remember first of all he did definitely play almost exclusively on a rack i think i've got a couple of clips i've seen him when he's holding it in his hands so that's very different but first of all he's serving the song right and you know he's he's one if not the best songwriter that ever lived so far right i mean he won the as it says in the movie at the end he won the nobel prize for literature for for his songwriting so you know he's used that as as part of the expression for those you know amazing songs he's written and he certainly touched me on a new limb as you said earlier on i'm sure many other people as well so you know the harmonica plays a part but let's dig more into his sort of playing and his style and approach obviously we talked about how you studied it Ross so Liam again as part of this week on Bob Dylan you did you also pick out 30 Bob Dylan songs and you sort of go through you know some of his better playing and solos and different styles and approaches that he makes in that so do you remember some of those songs you picked out from there? I can remember some of them and

SPEAKER_05: 51:44

I chose to limit it to kind of 30 of his most popular ones but I've actually since releasing that blog post done a bit more digging on some of the numbers and I've found a couple of websites or pages on websites that have some amazing information that maybe I can send you the links Neil if there's somewhere you can put them up so for example with positions I found a page on a website I think it's just called Dylan Cords I don't know if it's dylancords.com or whatever but there's a page that just goes through kind of every harmonica and the position that Dylan's playing on pretty much everything throughout his whole career up to very recently obviously he's a guy who's just not going to stop till he dies probably but so there'll be more songs and he's released so much that I think it's hard to be entirely accurate but I took this list and I ran the numbers and it came out with it's not an exact science but you know what I got in terms of positions was that he plays first position on about 60% of the songs he's recorded harmonica on and then second position is about 35% so it's quite a lot really And then there's a little bit of fourth, maybe three or so songs. And then I think there's one that's fifth position. And I think there's one that's 12th position. I think maybe on Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, who maybe plays 12th. But basically, you've got 60% first position and then 35% second. So it's kind of more than most people would think, most harmonica players

SPEAKER_03: 53:42

would think where he's playing second. So yeah, most people would assume he's playing first position pretty much all the time. But as you say, there's plenty of second position in there.

SPEAKER_05: 53:50

You know, it's still the majority first position, but it's kind of more than you'd think. I mean, in terms of the song, I feel like the best harmonica songs are the ones where he's playing something gentler, where he isn't forcing the reeds so much. And on, obviously, the early albums are the place where the harmonica's concentrated. So there's quite a lot of harmonica on the first eight albums, which is like 62 to 67. So it's only, what, a six-year period, and he's released eight albums. But there's quite a lot of harmonica on those, and then it gets sporadic after that. But the ones that I think, you know, I listen to and I really enjoy, just like A Woman, I think that wailing outro, yeah, it's a bit harsh, but I think it works. I don't think Twice is alright, I think it's lovely. And it's kind of a bittersweet counterpoint to that guitar part. I think the times there are changing, it works, you know. Shelter from the Storm is a beautiful song in and of itself and has a nice harmonica part. For me, there are a lot of songs where his harmonica playing really works and is suitable, and it makes me think of a phrase that an old friend of mine, Ron Savory, who I used to play with, said. He used to always say, not specifically about harmonica, but about any instrument, that it's not about ability, it's about suitability. And I really think that a lot of Dylan's playing really is suitable to what he's doing. And in prep for for this podcast I've been listening to more of his stuff because he's recorded harmonica on I think a good 150 songs from what I can tell and to be honest I was kind of searching for bad solos because I was trying to find the worst solo he's played and it was difficult you know I couldn't find in terms of the studio stuff anything that was to me unlistenable and people make out that all of his harmonica playing is unlistenable it's terrible it's awful it's all It's awful, it's discordant, it's out of tune. But my opinion is that there are quite a lot of live recordings and bootleg recordings with not great solos that are quite grating. But I feel like with his studio stuff, he generally managed to get a pretty decent solo on most of the tracks. And to find really bad stuff is harder than maybe people think and harmonica players think. And just to go back to this idea of him representing harmonica to the general public, I can understand why harmonica players rail against his playing, I can. But if you ask the man in the street to name a harmonica player, probably say Bob Dylan there's a few others they might say but they might say Bob Dylan now it seems unfair that he has to take on this mantle of representing an instrument that maybe he isn't the most technically gifted at I don't know you know that's not his fault he plays it it suits the music he plays and if the general public have heard of him more than they've heard of Little Walter or Paul DeLay or you know Sonny Terry whoever that's not his fault you know um And it's fine for people to dislike a sound. That's an immediate, visceral reaction. And that's people's right to dislike a sound. But for me, when it goes too far is when people start piling hate on someone for their music, trying to be the arbiters of taste or the gatekeepers of the instrument. If you don't like it, turn it off. You know, I like it.

SPEAKER_01: 57:48

hey everybody you're listening to neil warren's harmonica happy hour podcast proudly sponsored by tom halcheck and blue moon harmonicas this is jason richie here telling you i love blue moon harmonicas i love the combs the covers the custom harps the refurbished pre-war marine bands and nobody's easier to work with than tom halcheck check them out www.bluemoonharmonicas.com

SPEAKER_02: 58:12

also he he did some session work when he first came into manhattan just before john sabato and got into town and was doing stuff. And I have him on an old Harry Belafonte record just doing a session, you know, playing harmonica. And he would play on a Carolyn Hester record. So he was doing stuff as a harp player before he racked up and just did his solo thing. He saw, I guess, that there was nobody in New York that was really doing that. You know, there was chromatic players and guys that were doing like legitimate sessions and stuff like that. But nobody was playing blues harp. And I think he owned some of his chops at that time. But

SPEAKER_03: 59:04

you mentioned some songs earlier, and I've certainly picked a few out of my favourites. One of the greatest is Pledging My Time on the Blonde and Blonde album, which is some really fantastic playings. you know he does play some beautiful stuff and I think like you say you have to look to some of the live stuff maybe the bootleg stuff to hear some really bad grating harmonica but most of the studio stuff is you know definitely works although it's not conventional in what we would think as being great harmonica playing in some cases but it's very melodic and again it serves the song yeah

SPEAKER_00: 59:46

I would even argue some of like stuff people might think of as bad from this era of guys I'm gonna call it not bad I might say let's call it vibe I'm pretty sure I've listened to Neil Young and Dylan and like just these classic moments where like their solo like maybe 80% of the time it sounds like they're fuddling around just like trying to pick up the harp and then like they bash it into the microphone and like you know it's just like the last 30% of their solo is them actually playing the instrument you know I think this kind of stuff happens a lot and actually you know you can be critical of it but I think it's important to realize what this does to a lot of listeners it puts you there with them you know it it brings people into it it creates a vibe these are memorable moments that that I think of and I like it you know and especially when you're thinking about a large body of work you know if it all sounds the same that's you know I guess that's that's uh good for you for being able to be consistent but some of this other stuff it just kind of makes me feel like I have a feeling for what this session is they toot out something kind of weird and crazy you know I mean I've heard this on blues records too you know somebody comes in on bar two they picked up the harmonica one of my favorite james cotton records like bar two he's upside down you know and then you hear him fuddle around move it around and he's back in position and it's great song great album but it kind of like humanizes the whole thing and i think that that's very cool i think it shouldn't be diminished what that means and i think also that as harmonica players we have to realize these are the famous guys this you know neil young bob dylan these are probably two of the most famous by far and And if you are going to be a harmonica player, I found in this project, having, like I said, to some degree ignoring those kind of players, you have to respect the role of our instrument in music. If you want to participate in certain types of music and if you want to be working with certain types of musicians, you have to respect what that tradition is and what it means to people and figure out how to operate to some degree creatively, artistically and with a level of craftsmanship and respect within that. And I definitely got a lot of that out of this project.

SPEAKER_03: 1:02:04

Just let's talk about his voice a minute, because, you know, his harmonica might be much maligned, but his voice is probably more maligned, certainly as he got older. When he was younger, his voice was reasonably good, but it got pretty terrible later on. I think he sort of improved a little bit again after that, but I don't know, maybe that could be related to his harmonica. His harmonica might be said to be slightly grating. His voice was grating, so it went with the package, right? But maybe did his voice impact his harmonica tone? He plays a little piano too, right, Ross? Dylan?

SPEAKER_00: 1:02:31

I think so, yeah. I mean, I think some of his live shows he was known to mostly play piano.

SPEAKER_05: 1:02:36

Yeah, I mean, I saw him maybe 15 years ago, and he... I don't think he played guitar the whole gig. He was just on a little, you know, electric keyboard the whole night. And I honestly didn't recognise half the songs, and then someone, you know, in the row behind me would start singing along, and I'd go, oh, this is like a Rolling Stone. Because it was unidentifiable. But I think the thing you can say for sure about Dylan is he doesn't give a shit, you know, what any of us think. And what you were saying, Ross, I think speaks into the idea that Dylan is... above all else, a creative person and a creator. What I think the film showed, and it was more in the context of moving from being part of what he saw as a restrictive folk scene to doing his own thing, electric, whatever he wanted to do, but that can also apply to his harmonica playing, is he's just following this creative muse, whatever that is, and he has created a huge body of work over a long, long time, released more albums and songs and most you know most people do even the prolific musicians amongst us and the harmonica has just been part of that journey where he is exploring and creating and to be human is to be imperfect and i think that's what we love about the arts and music and it's never gonna keep every single person happy all of the time and yes maybe his singing isn't the greatest and his his harmonic playing maybe isn't perfect, but he is an artist who is putting out heartfelt stuff for such a long time. And the harmonica's part of that. And I don't know what purpose it serves to spend too much time just sort of piling hate on someone. I mean, maybe people like to do it to make themselves feel better about their own playing, but like Rob said earlier, as good as a harmonica player you are, try to learn to play a song like Dylan, it's hard to do.

SPEAKER_03: 1:04:39

Certainly you'll hear acoustic guitar players playing with a rack and they're emulating Dylan's sound, right? That's predominantly what you hear when you hear people playing a song on a guitar and a rack, yeah?

SPEAKER_05: 1:04:50

Yeah, but do they really sound like him? He does have quite a distinctive... Ross was talking about the rhythmic aspect and the attack. It's quite hard to sound like him.

SPEAKER_00: 1:05:03

I think two things worth mentioning pointing out I know, you know, at certain times in his career, he has made bluesier sounding recordings. I think a lot of harmonica players are coming from perhaps more elitist views with a good education on the great blues harmonica players, right? And Dylan has certainly gotten into that territory for sure. But what I wanted to point out is, and I don't really have that much insight into him as a person, and I studied his music very closely, but just those kind of like first couple records, you know, I have heard plenty of his other music, but I wouldn't say I've studied it. And what I noticed for sure, like if you check out Freewheelin' and Bob Dylan, those records, you know, there is a portion of that repertoire that I would say to my somewhat uneducated ear is kind of like deep blues. Some of it kind of sounds like some delta blues, really awesome guitar-based, slide guitar, bluesy, like kind of deep, droney stuff, not totally unlike some of the R.L. Burnside, Johnny Wood kind of stuff I've listened to. There's a portion of that repertoire like that, and I'm thinking of Masters of War, In My Time of Dying, See That My Graves... There's a number of those songs like that, and he doesn't play harp on those songs. Sort of the bluesiest of that repertoire in that era, he stayed away from on harmonica, and I think that's interesting, because I think a lot of people coming at it from my point of view, that is the stuff that perhaps I would have thought would have most inspired harmonica playing. But I think maybe he, you know, had a sense of it. He obviously plays a ton of harmonica on those albums, so he avoided it on those songs. I don't know if it's out of feeling like he couldn't do it justice, if it was out of feeling that he didn't belong at all. But I think it's important to point out that he did a good job, I think, of staying out of, in my mind, trouble and using his instrument really effectively. Like if he played bad blues harp on these really cool blues songs that he sounds awesome playing guitar and singing that would be something objectionable to me but he he just doesn't even go in there you know and it's obviously a conscious choice because he plays tons of harp and i i think that's important to realize and then i think also what the harp is to listeners from dylan on so like woody guthrie to me is playing it very expertly so

UNKNOWN: 1:07:32

¶¶

SPEAKER_00: 1:07:38

But with Dylan, I think there's something about the harmonica that really resonates. Obviously, he's a super popular, famous artist that is loved by millions of people. But when we listen to a lot of records that are made, pop records, they're made by the greatest professional bands you could have. So when we hear Alanis Morissette play harmonica, or we hear this kind of stuff, the harmonica, for some reason, has maintained to a degree, obviously not the case with Stevie Wonder, not the case with the case with John Popper but with this brand of harmonica it has kind of like maintained this to me I don't know I guess everybody gets a harmonica as a child as a toy it's maintained some kind of like relatable innocence or something that it just is an enduring characteristic where we hear these great professional recordings with awesome players and awesome engineers and then this plaintive kind of amateur harmonica I could take in the freakin' solo, but it's like, I'm not sure what it is, there's something psychological to be studied there, but it's great, and it's in our instrument, and it's in our vocabulary, and it's so cool, you know?

SPEAKER_03: 1:09:04

I just want to go back to something you said there, Ross, about the blues. for him to play electric at Newport was after he saw Paul Butterfield play electric blues at the same festival the Newport Festival in 1965 so that's a really important thing but also touching on that he didn't try to ever play blues harmonica like you say he never put down the guitar and picked up a mic harmonica and tried to play blues harmonica like Paul Butterfield but he was clearly very influenced by that because of what I've just said and he used Paul Butterfield's band to play a more bluesy set.

SPEAKER_02: 1:10:01

He was aware of what was out there and the blues harmonica role. Obviously, like what Neil just said about Butterfield, he obviously went out and heard Butterfield's band and heard them in the Village or heard them in Newport. But later on... He wasn't afraid to bring in, like, harmonica players. Like, Sugar Blue played on, I think, his Desire record in 1976 or something like that. And then he had Charlie McCoy play on Blonde on Blonde. I mean, so he was very aware and attuned to what was out there. He was a painter, and I think a lot of the harmonica parts were part of his picture. It was just another little color in the palette, and it made the song perfect, you know? He had the verses, he had his voice, he had his guitar thing, and the harmonica just This was like a beautiful addition.

SPEAKER_05: 1:10:47

Yeah, I mean, often the harmonica will just be this little bit at the end of the song. So like you say, he wants it there, but it's only playing a certain role that he's decided for it, for whatever reason in his head or whatever he wants to add to that painting. It's a definite choice. And in terms of the blues thing, again, you know, you can tell he was heavily inspired by and into the blues. And even later in his career, you know, there are albums that go bluesy again. But as Ross said in Neil said there isn't necessarily that much harmonica I mean there's one that was a tribute he did relatively late in his career tribute to Jimmy Reed but he plays like two notes on the harmonica he's not trying to be Jimmy Reed And then, you know, he's obviously a big fan of Blind Willie McTell. I think there's a lot of bluesy influence in what he was doing, but the harmonica remained just this tool for achieving whatever it was he had in his head.

SPEAKER_03: 1:11:51

What you said there, Rob, about him using different players, because from what I understand, he didn't do that too much. I mean, yeah, Charlie McCoy played on, obviously, Five Believers on the Blonde on Blonde album.

UNKNOWN: 1:12:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 1:12:03

I wasn't aware of Sugar Blue playing on Desire, but I don't think he used other harmonica players that much because he always wanted to play it himself and have his own distinctive sound on it, right?

SPEAKER_02: 1:12:11

He did. Check out a song called Catfish. And it's a great Dylan song that most people don't know, you know?

SPEAKER_05: 1:12:27

But to be fair, it's not just he wanted to play harmonica. His fans want to hear him play harmonica. I mean, when I saw him, the crowd would go wild for the harmonica like nothing else, you know? Whatever he played on it, on whatever song, they went wild. And again, I think it comes back to that thing that it's entered the general public and the consciousness of people in a way that... our favourite harmonica players or the virtuosic players that we maybe love just haven't. You know, the general public absolutely love him. I've got to mention, though, I read quite an interesting article online called Dylan as Master Harpist. It's by a guy called Mike Johnson. I don't know who he is. It's on some Dylan fan website. He's talking about Dylan's peppering technique, I think he calls it. But he even compares Dylan's harmonica playing to Coltrane and Charlie Puth's and i thought right this is a bit too far for me but it's quite interesting i mean i'm assuming that it's not tongue-in-cheek and he genuinely means it because it's a dylan fan website but this this article kind of eulogizes him it's almost suspicious to me but it might be worth

SPEAKER_03: 1:13:40

including a link for people to read because it's quite interesting you mentioned the the great resources and people tabbing out every single song which he's played on monochrome there is so much stuff on dylan you know him being so massively popular that um you know there's been various books written about him you can There's lots of videos, including your own, of course, Liam, about his harmonica technique on YouTube. So yeah, a crazy amount of information available to him.

SPEAKER_02: 1:14:01

I have a quick question. Maybe Ross knows it. I think it was in the movie, or no, Dylan yells out to the audience, anybody have an E harmonica? And like about five E harmonicas get thrown. I'm like, who had an E harmonica, you know?

SPEAKER_03: 1:14:17

Well, it's interesting you say that, Rob, because actually looking through the key, he actually uses an e-harmonica quite often. I think you saw that, didn't you, Liam, in some of the stuff you put out, yeah.

SPEAKER_05: 1:14:28

Yeah, again, a bit like with the positions, I ran the numbers on this just for my own satisfaction and to ruin this holiday I'm having in Hawaii. Again, I wouldn't say this is an exact science and I used the Dylan Chords site as a reference for this, but I basically found about 23% on a G harp, 20% C, and then 15% on an E harp, which is just bizarre.

UNKNOWN: 1:14:58

Thank you.

SPEAKER_05: 1:15:03

It doesn't really matter. You buy the harmonica, you play the key, which I think is his approach. You know, maybe he just plays a lot of songs in E and A.

SPEAKER_03: 1:15:10

But

SPEAKER_02: 1:15:10

who

SPEAKER_03: 1:15:10

in the audience

SPEAKER_02: 1:15:11

would have

SPEAKER_03: 1:15:12

an E chord? Yeah, that's true, Rob. I guess a lot of those are first position though, Liam, which maybe explains why he played E, yeah.

SPEAKER_05: 1:15:20

Yeah, probably, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are a few he plays in the key of B and he's playing second on an E, but it's just quite interesting because I ran through the 12 keys and to have key of E, the third most Most common out of the 12 was bizarre. And then apart from that, they're in a relatively predictable order. You've got G, C, E, and then D, A, F, Bb, Eb, Ab, F sharp, Db, B. But it's that key of E that's so near the top that it's a little bit strange.

SPEAKER_03: 1:15:52

Because it's quite a high-pitched one as well. It adds to that piercing sound they often get. very much

UNKNOWN: 1:16:27

Thank you.

SPEAKER_05: 1:16:35

Yeah, I mean, I tabbed it out in fourth position. I believe he played it in fourth, and that's where I tabbed it out. So yeah, there's a few where he's playing the relative minor. I've read at different places that more recently at live gigs, he's played minor-tuned harmonicas as well. I don't know if that's true. I've just read it. And sometimes it's hard to tell, even if you're seeing someone live, because they could be on the relative major harp to the minor key. And he's not the kind of person who gives too much away in instrumentals. of use but apparently he plays some minor tuned harps I don't know

SPEAKER_02: 1:17:09

I was doing a gig with this guitar player Jimmy Vivino who used to play on the Conan show and at the end of the gig he came up to me with a brand new chromatic Toots Thielman hard bopper and he hands it to me and he goes he doesn't want it And I said, who doesn't want it? And he said, Dylan. He goes, my guitar tech is Dylan's guitar tech. And Dylan did not want this chromatic. The honer must send him like a ton of harps. And so I have Bob Dylan's chromatic that he didn't want.

SPEAKER_03: 1:17:40

oh wow that's great so I was going to say that he doesn't play any chromatic harmonic as far as we understand right so he's purely diatonic isn't it I don't know I guess not did you see any chromatic limb in your research

SPEAKER_05: 1:17:54

not from what I could I mean I think maybe there are some photos of him holding chromatics but I don't think he ever really plays it as far as I understand I mean you guys probably know better than me but you know he started out with marine bands and then has played special 20s and blues harps and sort of more recently

SPEAKER_03: 1:18:12

so Horner did release a Bob Dylan signature edition harmonica so it's probably worth a mention I've never played one myself are they any good anyone try one

SPEAKER_05: 1:18:20

I've never played one I mean you know I love Horner and I endorse Horner but to me it's kind of one of those things for the super fans but maybe they're great harps I don't know

SPEAKER_02: 1:18:28

I got one from Horner I sent it to Timmy I don't know if he ever got it I sent it out they don't make them anymore but it has a nice picture of Dylan on it and you open up the case it's basically just a a C plastic comb harmonica that they use for all, like, you know, Steven Tyler and Billy Joel and all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_03: 1:18:48

Signature harps, yeah

SPEAKER_00: 1:19:18

that I had not really gotten too deep into that you know as a guy that I've probably focused most of my efforts on being an employable studio musician I have found that you know when we think about those guys who play like Dylan Neil Young and Springsteen and all these guys we've already mentioned that you know that's often the front man playing themselves the songwriter front man playing that it tolerates and maybe even benefits from a certain kind you know that that kind of innocence and yeah kind of like that that kind of flavor is actually an essential element of that style that is endearing and speaks to people and so I just found that every once in a while somebody asked me to do something along those lines but for the most part other people the producer of an album the artists themselves it just didn't come up as much as you might think for how prevalent that is in my world so I wouldn't say that I had a negative or a positive opinion of his harmonica playing in particular. I just hadn't really dove that deep into it. And yeah, I think my overall impression was that there was a lot of variation and concepts in terms of tone production. He had a lot of things on his menu, you know, in his palette that were not in my palette. They were not things I had gleaned from the guys that I had studied, or at least not so on display that it seemed like a central element I'm talking about tone. I'm talking about really paying attention to differences in note density, about thinking about these different approaches. So one of the things that's interesting to me about Millen is he had a relatively limited technique, right? He was able to do a tremendous amount of really effective playing from up-tempo, barn burner, energizing things to kind of plaintive melodies. He had a wide scope for somebody who could not play with the highest level of accuracy and dexterity there are a lot of lessons to be learned from that about how to be effective because that's something we all come up against you know the limitations of our technique but can we manage to still make great music and be effective and he sets a very high bar for that with a lot of variety and you know I got a lot like I said about tone production I got a lot about texture density you know like I was talking about this fast arpeggio that's a thing he might do playing the harmonica kind of like a harmonium where he might just sort of play a note or a chord and just kind of hold it even if the chords were changing that might strike other people as a harmonic faux pas not harmonica faux pas but a harmonic chordal faux pas and that was on his menu and I find those things really effective in the way that he was able in the albums I studied and even the live performances of that material differentiate songs obviously there are a lot of similarities between certain songs with with other songs but there's a lot of differentiation not just in his position playing but in his actual approach to the songs that is very musical it's very thoughtful it's very intentional and it's super effective you know just from a musical standpoint and that he was able to do this all as one guy in a live performance is remarkable and and i i learned a lot from it and i a funny kind of anecdote early on in my process of working on this stuff. I think the first couple songs I got, or at least one of them, was off freewheeling. So I'm listening to it, you know, the studio recording, trying to figure out what's going on. And I hear, like, there's a singing here, guitar's kind of here, and then he starts a harmonica solo. I was like, what? The first puff of the harmonica's on the right side, then it moves to the left. Like, it's like, I was like, what? Did he overdub this? Like, how is it, what? You know, like, my mind was racing, trying to figure out what was happening in terms of the process of this stuff. and I like later after doing some research and asking some guys I realized that Freewheelin like that I would listen to on Spotify was you know probably originally released in mono that was what it was originally presented to you know in the format that it was supposed to be presented to the public but it had been remixed in stereo and I guess you know they probably had a mic on guitar on harmonica on vocal something like that and they had panned them even though he's playing it all live solo it was just kind of a funny little experience as I was trying to autopsy this stuff and hearing the instruments moving around the stereo field wondering, you know, how it was happening. So I recommend anybody, I did track down the mono version of Freewheeling and it sounded way more natural to me. It was everything right down the middle.

SPEAKER_03: 1:24:07

That's what you get if you study songs to the nth degree, Ross. You hear all these subtle differences. So what about you, Rob? What's your closing thoughts on Bob Dylan's harmonica playing?

SPEAKER_02: 1:24:18

Well, closing thoughts I don't really have a different opinion of him either I always liked his music in fact he's the reason I play harmonica my older brother was a Bob Dylan fan sort of like Liam's dad you know and he turned me on there was a a harmonica on the shelf and my brother went out to a concert once and they wouldn't let me play their guitars when they went out because they were guitar players and they said don't touch our guitars they're very expensive but there was this little harmonica laying there and he had the first Bob Dylan records and stuff like that and so that was my first exposure to harmonica but as I listened to him over the years I always just loved what he was doing as a songwriter and the harmonica to me was just something he added to it so I never really gave it that much thought as I became a professional harmonica player I said well what Dylan does is in a very unique capsule and then when I started doing session work as Ross does on the west coast I do it on the east coast I started getting calls from producers and different artists that maybe wanted to copy some of the Dylan thing or understand what he was doing and I feel as a session harmonica player it's our job as a harmonica players to educate arrangers and writers and producers of all these different because they know of all these styles whether it's toot steelman or larry adler or sonny terry or bob dylan or tom petty it's our job to let them know what the harmonica can and can't do and how they're doing it and to study it enough that we can give them what they want as writers and composers so for me dylan's harmonica playing was a very important part of 20 and 21st century music. So I'm just happy that I'm able to keep my ears open and tune into what he did. And I just want to say in closing that, Ross, I think you did an amazing job on this. I used to talk to Tommy Morgan a lot, who was a studio player, was the guy out on the West Coast for many years. Now to be able to call up a guy like Ross and say, hey, Ross, this is what we need on this, or this is what they want on that. I think the harmonica is in good hands. With guys like Ross, and now the world is going to get exposed because of this great movie. And my hat's off to Timmy for really wanting to do the homework on this, because it's going to expose the harmonica to millions more players for years to come.

SPEAKER_03: 1:26:49

Definitely.

SPEAKER_02: 1:26:50

Those are my closing

SPEAKER_03: 1:26:51

remarks. Yeah, well done, Ross. Great job. And what about you, Liam? What's your closing remarks?

SPEAKER_05: 1:26:55

I think for me, I have to be... grateful and thankful to Bob Dylan because in a way I've got him to thank for my whole career. He was the reason I started playing harmonica and that was the launching pad for me so I've got to be thankful for that and I've kind of with the recent Dylan's stuff I've been releasing and then seeing the film the other day and then doing this podcast I feel a little bit like I've come home because I started out with Dylan and then I got obsessed with the blues guys and I'm still obsessed with the blues guys and some some other stuff and Dylan got sort of put away in a drawer for quite a while and partly because because I think if you hear the negative opinions around something enough you you can be a little bit infected with that even if it's not come from yourself so it's been really refreshing to return to that stuff and start listening to a lot of these records again and go you know what I love these I love these tunes I love his songwriting I love his performance and he is a one off so it's been wonderful to feel like I've been returning home and I want to say thank you to you guys I'm thankful to Ross and to Rob for the stuff you've done on the film because you've done an amazing job and it and it's I think any mainstream exposure of harmonica related stuff is good for us and our careers and our love of the instrument and also thank you to Neil for having me on this because you know wonderful podcast and you guys have done amazing stuff on the film and I just wrote a blog post so it's lovely to be here and be part of it and thank you all for reminding me What a great artist Dylan is. And I'm sure it's not the end, although he hasn't done that much harmonica recently. There was kind of a fallow period definitely in the middle of his career. There's been a little bit more recently. So I'm sure it's not going to be the end of the discussion about him.

SPEAKER_03: 1:28:56

So, yeah, it's so fantastic. Thanks, Liam. So my own closing remarks. Murrah, yours quite closely, Liam. I say I was a big Bob Dylan fan when I was younger. You know, I've still listened to him from time to time, but I've listened to Bob Dylan a lot over the last couple of weeks in preparation for this. I love those songs but I also love when the harmonica comes on you know it just adds such a different flavour and texture to the song that you know those harmonica breaks are great in part even though they're not you know conventionally what we would say is fantastic harmonica playing but you know generally you know I love those harmonica parts and you know they're in my memory banks from years ago you know a bit like yourself there Liam so that's definitely what it's meant to me so thanks so much today for joining me and Ross Garan and Rob Paparazzi for talking through the movie they're great insights into the movie which is out now it's an excellent movie even love Bob Dylan's Harmonica or not it's a really great movie and it gives a lot of exposure to Harmonica as we've said so great job on that and also thanks to Liam Ward for joining and adding his insights too thanks guys thank you Neil thanks Neil thanks a lot once again thanks to Zydle for sponsoring the podcast be sure to check out their great range of Harmonicas and products at www.zydle1847.com or on Facebook or Instagram at Zydle Harmonicas A big thanks to Ross, Rob and Liam for joining me today. What a tremendous insight Ross gave us into recording harmonica for such a major motion picture. Ross did an amazing job in emulating Dylan's unorthodox style of harmonica. If you haven't seen the movie yet, then what are you waiting for? Also check out the soundtrack with the songs linked in the Spotify playlist available on the podcast page as usual. Rob and Liam also provided some great insights into Dylan's playing and its challenges. I loved revisiting the songs of Dylan and his incredible body of songs would just not be the same without his melodic, percussive, choppy, piercing, angular, moody, sometimes sloppy but always memorable harmonica breaks. I leave you now with a song I used to perform in a band I was in, the laid-back bluesy It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry. Thanks Bob.