Positively Bob Dylan

As the Bob Dylan magazine ISIS reports in its latest issue, there will be an exhibition of original paintings and limited edition prints by Bob Dylan from 14 June 2008. The exhibition will include new, previously unseen works. It will take place at London’s Halcyon Gallery in Mayfair, one of Europe’s leading galleries for contemporary art in its 25th anniversary.
Bob Dylan’s interest in painting was probably influenced by artist Suze Rotolo, Bob’s girlfriend in the early 1960s. Examples of his early works can be found on the covers of his albums of “Self Portrait” (1970) and “Planet Waves” (1974), but only recently he agreed to a very first official exhibition at the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz in Germany from October 2007 until February 2008, entitled “The Drawn Blank Series Watercolor and Gouache Paintings Exhibition”. The initial idea for that came from a book of drawings and sketches done by Dylan from 1989 to 1992, which were published under the title “Drawn Blank” by Random House in 1994. You can read the official press release by Columbia Records here, or take a look at some of the paintings on this page of the Guardian website.

Check out this interview with Zainab in addition to the posting below, Exclusive offer: Dylan’s original 1st Chronicles manuscript. When I asked for the permission to put it on YouTube, Zainab added that it was actually at the end of August when she and Hans Marius Stormoen received the second Chronicles manuscript from Simon and Schuster, and not in September as said in the video interview.

When Zainab McCoy, visual and performing artist from Philadelphia who is currently living in Oslo contacted me, I was immediately astonished by the unique item she had to offer: Her late husband Hans Marius Stormoen translated Dylan’s “Chronicles, Volume 1″ into Norwegian. After his work was finished, Zainab asked him what to do with the original manuscript. His simple reply was “Put it in the trash. Or just do whatever you want to do with it”, she tells me. But of course this is not what you would do with a true collector’s item.
To everyone’s surprise, just before Bob Dylan’s book was going to be released worldwide and Stormoen was nearly halfway finished translating it, the phone rang. It was the Chief Editor of the Norwegian publishing house, telling him to immediately stop his translation, “Dylan has sent us a new manuscript”! On the same day the new version of the manuscript arrived from New York, the one that would later end up as the official book release. Zainab’s job was to read both versions and mark the changes that Dylan had made so that her husband could easily find them and not have to completely run through what he had already translated. A complicated task, as she confirms.
Back to the first, completely unedited manuscript: As Zainab told me, in the first manuscript you can hear Dylan’s voice, his casual unedited way of speaking and writing. It even includes Bob’s personal note to the editor “type written on the PC”. None of the manuscripts contain any handwriting by Dylan. Still since there were so many changes made from the first to the second manuscript, the original unpublished version remains an important item for every serious rarities collector and Bob Dylan fan.

Please note that the authenticity of the original Chronicles manuscript copies can be verified by Morten Malmø, Chief Editor at DAMM/EGMONT in Oslo, Norway, who personally hand delivered the first manuscript to Hans Marius Stormoen, who also translated several other works such as Bob Dylan’s “Scrape Book”. He died on June 1, 2006, whilst in the middle of translating Sharon Osbourne’s autobiography “Extreme”.

Supported by positively-bobdylan.com Zainab McCoy now exclusively offers to sell the original first manuscript to the highest bidder - THIS IS A CALL TO SERIOUS COLLECTORS ONLY! McCoy will request a face-to-face meeting with the eventual buyer to see and purchase the complete manuscript. It will NOT be sent via e-mail! In case you are seriously interested, you may contact her at hmstormo@hotmail.com.

65 years old Suze Rotolo is going to release her book “A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties” in May. The official release date is May 13, 2008 but it can already be pre-ordered on Amazon.com.
Rotolo is perhaps best known from the 1963 cover photography of “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”, where she is walking through Greenwich Village with Bob. Both she and her sister Carla were close friends of Bob in the early 1960s. Her political and artist background is often regarded as having influenced Dylan’s early songwriting and his interest in art, especially painting.

A few years after having lost her connection to Dylan she got married to an Italian film editor. Their son now works as a musician in New York. Her latest public interviews on Dylan were for PBS news in 2004 and for Martin Scorsese’s documentary “No Direction Home” in 2005. The release of her new book comes along with the 45th anniversary of the “Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan” album.