Whether he’s lifting lines from old films for lyrics, crooning “The Night We Called it a Day” over the Nash Edgerton-directed video, or taking us to the Bon Bon club in Shadow Kingdom, Bob Dylan’s interest in and admiration of film noir has long been apparent. He seems drawn to the hard-scrabble, world-weary protagonists who travel through the seedy underworlds of big cities and end their stories unredeemed. In this episode, author, scholar, and educator, John Radosta and I talk about his scholarly work, his extraordinary short stories and novels, film noir, and, of course, how all of this relates to Bob Dylan and his work.
A novelist and author of many short stories, John Radosta teaches high school English near Boston, Massachusetts. Under both a pseudonym and his real name, his fiction has appeared in many magazines, including Yellow Mama, Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine,Wildside Black Cat, and Tough Crime. A veteran of more than 50 Bob Dylan concerts, he is the co-author with Keith Nainby of Bob Dylan in Performance: Song, Stage and Screen, as well as other Dylan and Woody Guthrie articles.
Links:
Dylan related:
"The Simple Art of Music" in the Dylan Review: https://thedylanreview.org/2020/12/12/the-simple-art-of-music-bob-dylan-and-noir/
"The Loveliest and the Best: Dylan and Omar Khayyam" in the Dylan Review: https://thedylanreview.org/2024/02/21/the-loveliest-and-the-best-the-tapestry-of-influence-of-omar-khayyams-rubaiyat-on-the-works-of-bob-dylan/
Fiction:
"Rideshare" In Tough: http://www.toughcrime.com/2023/07/
"Fanning the Flames" in Yellow Mama: https://blackpetalsks.tripod.com/yellowmama/index.html
"I Don't Mind a Reasonable Amount of Trouble"