Bob Dylan will have a museum dedicated to the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, opening Tuesday (May 10). According to “Billboard”, Dylan himself will not be present at the opening according to the current status and is said to have shown no interest in the exhibition during a previous visit to the city – despite an invitation.
Bob Dylan is ‘maybe embarrassed’ by the museum
“I don’t want to put anything in his mouth that he hasn’t said himself. I can only guess what the reason is. Maybe he would find it embarrassing,” puzzles museum director Steven Jenkins. While he would like to see Dylan at the museum one day, he doesn’t expect it. “I think he’s just interested in the work he’s doing, not what he’s already done,” Jenkins says.
In addition to an immersive film experience, the museum will also offer a performance hall and a studio. In this, visitors should be able to become active themselves as producers and mix different elements in Dylan’s songs. There should also be a route showing the different stages of Dylan’s career. In total, the museum’s archive should contain more than 100,000 objects.
Bob Dylan Museum should not be a “vanity project”.
According to Jenkins, the musician should have recognized early on that his work could be of historical interest. Because of this, he would have kept boxes full of artifacts, including photos and handwritten lyrics to songs, among other things. He sold it to the George Kaiser Family Foundation in 2016, which also runs the Woody Guthrie Center in Tulsa.
The design of the museum got by without the direction of the musician. Dylan would have even rejected the comment on the opening of the museum completely via a spokesman – to the relief of the museum organizers. “If Bob had told us what we could and couldn’t do, it would have felt like a kind of vanity project,” said one participant.
New music video for “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and Wayfarer filter
But it’s not just about the museum: Bob Dylan recently became one too microsite dedicated. It features a new music video for his 1965 hit Subterranean Homesick Blues, as well as a photo filter that allows fans to use their smartphone to “put on” the Wayfarer sunglasses the artist is famous for .
The video was made for the musician’s 60th anniversary on the Columbia Records label. To celebrate the longstanding collaboration, the company organized the production of a music video remake. The clip alludes to the opening sequence of the 1965 Dylan Tour documentary, Don’t Look Back.
The music video is a reference to the Dylan documentary “Don’t Look Back”
For the first few minutes of filming of the documentary, Dylan stands in a London backyard holding cardboard signs at the camera. On these he wrote key words of the song’s lyrics and incorporated intentional spelling mistakes, puns and hidden jokes. During the song, he looks stoically into the camera and drops one cardboard sign after another on the floor.
These signs have now been redesigned by contemporary artists, filmmakers, musicians and graphic designers. For the project, among other things, Patti Smith, John Squire, Bruce Springsteen, Bobby Gillespie and Wolfgang Niedecken. All participants and their contributions can be viewed on the website.
You can watch the video here:
It was recently revealed that Bob Dylan was in the studio with T Bone Burnett. The latter would like to establish a new sound carrier format and recorded songs with Dylan for this purpose. Another project the 80-year-old is currently working on is a book that is due to be published this year.