Graham Gaskell

Wow!! I may not have a ticket for tomorrow night, but I just bumped into Tony. My hands were shaking so much that he had to take the picture! So kind. #BobDylan

i absolutely hate today being remembered as the “star wars day” instead of the anniversary of the kent state shooting. four innocent students massacred with no accountability, no justice was ever served. the more you learn about it the worse it gets.

@daffodilmachete Will visit tomorrow morning 🤗

For those in Shreveport today…

@daffodilmachete It would be Muses’s third show! They are seeing it it’s a possibility. I really hope this comes together 🫶

@grahamagaskell It is available!

@FreewheelinMY @daffodilmachete @nightly_moth was there 👍

@daffodilmachete Somebody had better have taped that Jackson show because O M G ❤️

being very zen Buddhist about the fact that my shows don’t have tapes (yet)

Willing to drop these great tickets (6th row for Baton Rouge in two nights! 5th row for Shreveport in the week!) down to $100 / £75 each to get them gone to a good Bob Fan. Can transfer immediately through ticketmaster

@Darren__ODell Wish I’d bumped into you before/after the show. Such a great evening.

Had the good fortune to see 50+ Dylan shows going back to ‘92. Tonight is the finest his vocals have ever sounded to me. What a revelation.

A parasite that has been eating people for 3,500 years is about to be wiped off the planet. It infected 3.5 million people in 1986. Last year, it infected 10. And I have not seen it make a single front page. It is called Guinea worm. You drink contaminated water from a pond in a poor village. A year later, a worm up to three feet long starts coming out of your leg through a burning blister. There is no pill that stops it and no surgery that works. You wrap the worm around a stick and pull it out slowly, over days or weeks, inch by inch. If you rush, the worm breaks inside you and causes a fresh infection. Guinea worm is ancient. Preserved worms have been pulled out of Egyptian mummies from around 1000 BCE. The Ebers Papyrus, an Egyptian medical scroll from 1550 BCE, describes pulling the worm out with a stick. For three and a half thousand years, that was the best humans could do. Then in 1986, public health workers decided to kill the parasite off. They had no vaccine and no drug. What they had was cheap cloth water filters and a small army of volunteers willing to walk from village to village for decades. The plan was simple. Give everyone who drinks from a pond a cloth filter to strain out the tiny water fleas that spread the parasite. Then send volunteers walking house to house, year after year, teaching people how to use the filters and keeping anyone with an emerging worm out of the water. It worked. From 3.5 million cases a year to 10. Four were in Chad, four in Ethiopia, two in South Sudan. The other four countries where the worm used to be common, Angola, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Mali, had zero human cases for the second year in a row. The World Health Organization has already certified 200 countries as Guinea worm free. Six are left. The last hurdle is dogs. Cameroon had 445 infected animals last year and Chad had 147, so a lot of the remaining work is on animals, not humans. Strays get leashed, and crews treat ponds to kill any remaining worms. The campaign keeps watching until the number hits zero. When Guinea worm hits zero, it becomes the second human disease ever erased from the planet. The first was smallpox. It will also be the first parasite humans have ever wiped out, and the first disease ever ended without a single dose of medicine. Volunteers walked village to village with cloth filters for 40 years. Now a plague from the age of the pharaohs is about to be gone.

This is one of the hardest but also one of the most important warnings from the history of Auschwitz coming to us today. Perpetrators were people who accepted and followed an ideology that made them believe that they were better than others, an ideology that rationalized and promoted hatred and evil. This ideology became part of their everyday lives and environment. They were not monsters. They were people: fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, sons and daughters. They were farmers, doctors, bakers, bankers, architects, or carpenters. They had their family joys and problems, favorite desserts or songs, hobbies or fears. They were people like us. But they also perpetrated horrible, monstrous acts on behalf of the ideology they believed in. Dehumanizing all the „others” was a tool that helped them achieve their goal. The perpetrators thought of themselves as moral people. And this is the scary part of this history. We should not and cannot dehumanize them, as their story and choices are the human warning. For us all.

@johnsemley3000 Just saw him in Detroit, genuinely hand to god he is operating at the absolute top of his game - 85 years of experience , its beyond debate, the sheer numbers, definitionally he is playing the best show he has ever played every single night

THIS, absolutely. My mother once asked me how many times I was going to see Bob Dylan. My answer: "As many times as I can." ❤️

I was born homeless in 1967 because I was born out of wedlock, and my mother already had one child while unmarried. She got sectioned for not being able to cope, and me and my brother were taken into care for six months. The past these people yearn for only existed for the rich.

1863. The Central Pacific Railroad needed to cross the Sierra Nevada. White workers quit. “Too high, too cold, too dangerous.” The foreman hired 50 Chinese men from California. They worked. By 1868, 12,000 Chinese men were 90% of the workforce. Pay was $28/month. White men got $35 + board. Chinese bought their own food. Slept in tents at 8,000 feet. They called them “Celestials.” Said they were too small. Then they watched. Chinese crews laid 10 miles of track in one day — April 28, 1869. A record never broken. White crews managed 2 miles. They hung in baskets off cliffs to blast Cape Horn. Snow tunnels through Donner Summit — 15 tunnels, 1,659 feet of granite. No machines. Black powder, chisels, and nerve. Hundreds died in avalanches and explosions. Company records say “2 dead.” Graves say 1,200. In 1867 they struck. 5,000 men walked off. Demanded $40/month and 8-hour shifts in tunnels. The boss cut off food and supplies. Starved them back in 8 days. May 10, 1869. Promontory Summit. Golden Spike ceremony. The photo has zero Chinese men. They were told to step aside. They built 1,776 miles of America. Excluded from citizenship until 1943.

Get on the 'bus over at ER.

@ithrewtheglass Good to finally meet you live and in person after the show yesterday. Sorry if I was a bit weird, I often am for the first 30mins after a show!

Bob was UNBELIEVABLE tonight. He really fucking came through and seemed to be loving the energy in the crowd tonight.

Oh, this is marvellous! He somehow makes it a country-tinged rockabilly number, and he delivers the end line of each verse with a meaning-soaked level of cool:

@BobDylansWife I’ll be in Cleveland and I know we have mutual friends like Keith Miles (aka uncle, for some reason I can’t find his twitter handle) so if you see me pre or post show come say hello as I’ll got some postcards I give away with the wonderful @dylanbootlegs design on them.

Bob in two days!!!!! 😬😬😬

@Darren__ODell @rayfp 😂 and good to see Bob changed from his white hoodie to a black one (I assume the white one smells a bit ripe by this point of the tour).

@rayfp I'm looking at a grainy pic with Bob and it's the OTHER GUY with the most unbelievable chest-revealing opening to a shirt I've ever seen!?! Is that some kind of device that rolls up the center?

Photo evidence of the recent Bob Dylan-Question Mark summit! (via scottbakermusicofficial on IG)

@1michaelgray1 @DylanRevisited Thanks for sharing this Michael! I really enjoyed listening to your interview on “Is it Rolling Bob?” a few years back. Hope you’re well.

I've added to my website an interview Andrew Muir did with me. It's old but says a lot about music I grew up with, how I came to Dylan, changing tech & the freelance life, writing without an eye on people's opinions & more. It's a short scroll down here: michaelgray.net/interviews.html

@1michaelgray1 I think the issue is that the federal minimum wage hasn’t gone up since the seventies & unions are so weak in the US. Sadly restaurants just fire employees who kick up too much of a fuss. I usually pay 20% tips here (especially in the red states where low wages are a reality)

Nonsense. 10% is standard. The US notoriously underpays its waiters, encouraging them to push for higher tips. It's not the diner's job to subsidise the restaurant's wage bills.