There’s something funny going on. I can just feel it in the air
By Stephen Pate – Revision – the revised title was suggested by the moderator of Expecting Rain, in respect for the artist, and we agree.
First Dylan records a really bad Christmas album with royalties donated to feed the hungry.
Last week saw the wholesale deletion of thousands of bootleg Dylan videos from YouTube – more than 2,000 a day including indefinite account suspensions.
This is the contradiction of the artist who jealously guards his royalty income while donating to charity.
I heard some people like Christmas In the Heart
About the same number of people hate it. I suppose as a collector I will have to get it but what for? Update: my wife mocks me for finally getting the CD in the everything-Bob-ever-recorded box set Complete Album Collection Vol. 1
Dylan is religious in a unique way which is good. Getting sentimental about God is the thing around Christmas and why not. The profit from the CD is going to charity and it gets a good review from Peter Stone Brownpublished on Dylan’s home page.
Ballpark Tour morphing into Christmas Tour?
Then the never-ending tour switches back across the east again before Christmas. Dylan was already in town in the summer when he started the tour in Milwaukee on July 1 and moved to the east coast by mid-month.
That is the tour I’ve taken as a week’s vacation like clockwork for the past few years. As he has for years, Dylan heads up and down the east coast before moving south and west. After playing California, Arizona and Utah he headed back to Kansas on October 23rd. Out of the blue, he’s coming east – Philly, three nights in Boston and ending in November in New York City for 3 nights.
I don’t know why. It’s unheard of to come back into the market you tapped months before on the concert circuit. Someone on Dylan fan site Expecting Rainsuggested it was a Christmas tour. He did release the CD in Chicago.
No more Dylan on YouTube
Dylan videos are being deleted from YouTube, along with the people who posted them, at the rate of 2,000 per day. Sunday there were 104,000. Last night 99,000. This AM there are only 97,000.
I couldn’t find a decent version of Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts to illustrate this story’s headline “There’s something funny going on. I can just feel it in the air.”
Dylan’s company told YouTube to start deleting bootleg and fan videos. Instead of the cool black and white photo montage of Beyond Here Lies Nothing, we get the nasty and unwatchable video from bluetongue films. Perhaps you are into scenes where men beat women up in cheap hotels. I got past that as entertainment thanks.
Before they deleted the video and my account, 105,000 people had watched it on my channel.The video helped push sales of Dylan’s CD this spring.
There’s a change in the air
Last night a fan showed me a video of my song “I Can’t Get Over You.” The video took the song to a new level. It was shocking and intriguing all at once. She understood the song in a deeper way. We’ll have to get clearances for the video portion and release it. You’ll like it.
Update – how ironic that her video had been taken down.
A big smile of joy crossed my face as soon as I started watching it. Good time to wean myself from posting Bob Dylan videos and get back into the studio. 
Stephen Pate
Over on Expecting Rain I got corrected on the late fall tour in the NE. Dylan has done it before.
“The whole annual tour thing was against the better judgment of his tour managers and it has worked for him. I think he reported that in the biography.
You are right – he came back into Canada last October and had one stop in NYC.
2007 – he stopped in Chicago
2006 – had a swing back through North East
2005 – Europe in the Fall
2004 – had a Nov switchback into NE
stand corrected. thanks.”