"I met Bob Dylan once, a long time ago. He was an electrified wolf pressed up against the back of a booth at the Marigold Ballroom in Minneapolis. I saw him from the stage and told my Albert Grossman joke : "Here's a man whose last name should have been hyphenated."
After the set I went over to the booth and said "Bob you influenced me a lot."
Bob saiad "Oh, yeah ?"
Speaks were coming off of him. I passed Bob Dylan on a stairway once, fifteen years ago. He was coming down and I was going up. His security guy was walking in front of him, like he was clearing the road of lepers, and he said to me, "Get Back!".
Bob was looking down at his feet. He never looked up.
Under his hood, he looked just like a ghost. I dreamed about Bob Dylan once. It was just last year. I was standing in this long line. And everybody in the line had a stack of cards with writing on 'em and we were all just waiting to go into this big room and justify our lives by putting the cards in order.
And I had a plan.
I was gonna turn all my cards over so they looked like they were blank and I was gonna hand them in that way. And there was a long line of people coming out of that big room too and one of them was Bob Dylan. And he said, "Ben, what are you gonna do ?" And I showed him my cards and he handed me a pencil and said, " Man, you better get busy !"
I wrote a song for Bob Dylan, just hte other day. The chorus goes like this :
"We are the tears of a man in Thailand that wash up on a distant shore
We are the wings of a butterfly in China that started the oceans' roar
We are the straw that broke the camel's back, the bull in the china store
We are here but for a minute and gone for a whole lot more"
I never played it and maybe I never will.
But I know one thing.
If I ever meet Bob Dylan again, I'm not gonna bring it up. "
Ben Sidran
Ben Sidran has been a major force in the modern day history of jazz and rock & roll having played keyboards with or produced such artists as Steve Miller, Mose Allison, Diana Ross, Boz Scaggs, Phil Upchurch, Tony Williams, Jon Hendricks, Richie Cole and Van Morrison.
It's been a long and varied journey for Ben Sidran—from playing boogie woogie piano as a six year old in Racine, Wisconsin, leaning into his jazz records, listening to a Blue Mitchell solo "literally like an Eskimo huddled around a fire", to growing up to play boogie woogie piano around the world and, eventually, recording with Blue Mitchell on his first solo album. Despite the reality that Sidran is better known in Europe and Japan than in America—a fact of life for most jazz musicians—Ben Sidran is an American success story.
Track List
Everything Is Broken
Highway 61 Revisited
Tangled Up In Blue
Gotta Serve Somebody
Rainy Day Woman
Ballad of a Thin Man
Maggie's Farm
Knockin' On Heaven's Door
Subterranean Homesick Blues
On The Road Again
All I Really Want To Do
Blowin' in the Wind
Ben Sidran — Vocals, Piano, Wulitizer, Hammond B3, Fender Rhodes
Alberto Malo — Drums and Percussion
Marcello Giuliani — Acoustic and Electric Bass
Rodolph Burger — Guitar, Vocal on "Blowin' in the Wind"
Bob Malach — Tenor Saxophone, Flute, Bass Clarinet
Michael Leonhart — Trumpet, Flugelhorn
Amy Helm — Background Vocals
Georgie Fame — Vocal and Organ on "Rainy Day Woman #12 & 35"
Jorge Drexler — Vocal on "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"
Leonor Watling & Luca — Backgroiund Vocals on "Knockin' on Heaven's Door"
Ben Sidran - Dylan Different
