I Remember Lyrics

On Dylan's 70th, Albany man pays tribute

ALBANY — Bob Dylan turns 70 (yes, 70!) on May 24, and Tom Holling is celebrating in the best way possible: with his music.

So if you’re in the mood for “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “She Belongs to Me,” “To Ramona,” “Buckets of Rain,” and a clutch of other classics, played live in an intimate setting, Rhythm & Brews is the place to be.

But it’s more than a tribute to the troubadour’s five-decade repertoire. It’s a celebration of Holling’s own life, a memory of his teenage years in Clackamas with his friends, spinning Dylan records, parsing the great poet’s lyrics, teaching each other his songs on guitar. It’s a link to these relationships, bonds formed over shared interests and musical discoveries.

Holling is 60 now, familiar to music fans as a trumpet player (an instrument he’s played since the third grade) with the Albany Swing Band. But he still plays guitar, and he stays in touch with his childhood friends.

Back in March he visited with one, Craig Martin, at his home in Ashland. They got around to talking about Dylan, and Martin, a guitarist with the Roadmasters, mentioned that the artist’s birthday had become something of a town tradition, acknowledged annually with concerts since 1999, originally at Pioneer Hall, now at the Wild Goose Cafe & Bar (8 p.m. Monday, May 23, if you’re interested).

“The Dylan birthday celebration is pretty much the reason I moved here,” Ashland resident Steve Larson told the Daily Tidings’ Dawn Hatchard in 2009. “(He’s) the most important guy since Shakespeare.”

When Holling returned home to Albany, he got out his Dylan albums and revisited the master’s work. He discovered that the occasion is almost an international holiday, celebrated around the world. The Arches in Glasgow has booked a soiree. Barb Jungr will perform an evening of Dylan songs at the South Bank in London. Caffe Lena in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where the young Dylan cut his teeth, is devoting an entire night to him. So, Holling thought, why not Albany, Oregon?

“I thought it was a great idea,” he said, “because a lot of his older songs have been my favorites through the years. And to play several in my hometown on his birthday is going to be fun for me.”

Last week Holling stopped by the Gazette-Times office, four Dylan sleeves in tow. He laid them out on a conference table: “Another Side of Bob Dylan” (1964), home to “All I Really Want to Do,” “My Back Pages” and “It Ain’t Me, Babe”; “Bringing It All Back Home” (1965), the half-electric/half-acoustic hybrid with “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and “Love Minus Zero/No Limit,” which the young Holling learned from Martin (“The guitar chords are pretty basic on a lot of these songs,” Holling said. “They’re not fancy songs, but I’ve always liked them.”); the magnificent “Nashville Skyline” (1969); and the devastating “Blood on the Tracks” (1975), recorded by Dylan during a period of personal turbulence.

The lyrics for Borknagar's "Colossus" | Artisan - The Official ...

He song “Colossus” on the Borknagar album “Quintessence” has turned out to be a favourite amongst the fans. ICS Vortex wrote the music and I wrote the lyrics. I remember it took me only 10 minutes to make the drums (some songs just “click” right away) and less than an hour to record them. 40 minutes of the recording was actually a huge discussion in the studio about the drum roll 1:30 into the song… I wanted to do something else (which I can’t remember what was now) but ended up doing what the other guys in the band wanted. Another fun (?) fact is that what I play on the riff from 0:36 is a more progressive version of the drum start on the Spiral Architect song “Conjuring Collapse” (check it here ).

“Quintessence” was recorded in Abyss studio in Sweden, January 2000, and I remember sitting alone writing lyrics during daytime in the house we lived in there, while ICS Vortex was recording vocals on the other songs. I had absolutely no clue how the vocal melodies were but kept checking with Vortex if the text were too short or too long, and if I had written enough. The lyrics are about how the universe “starts” with the big bang, expands, then contracts into the big crunch, then starts all over again with the big bang… and it goes on forever (= Colossus).

From about 2:24 in BBC Horizon’s “What Happened Before the Big Bang”-clip they show this theory which they call “bouncing”.

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