I always check your site, but you haven't had anything new for a while. What's going on! Do I have to tell you to get your lazy butt up off your couch and get to writing or what!?

My fan has spoken. I stand (now that my lazy butt is off the couch) chastised. Actually, things have been most busy both on the work and non-work fronts. But first...

Bob Dylan
At age 60, with a career that spans four decades, he remains one of rock's most eloquent, sexy and unpredictable singers.

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Dylan today is the last moving target of the dream that was '60s rock. Mick Jagger shills for Budweiser and Tommy Hilfiger, while respected new stars like Moby sell entire albums' worth of songs to corporations that grimly purvey youth culture to itself. Dylan makes great money (particularly overseas); he takes home $5 million to $10 million a year for his five or six months of work annually. But he could earn that in a few weeks on a quick stadium tour with Neil Young or the Stones; or he could take a page from David Bowie's or Pete Townshend's book and do a farewell or "Greatest Hits Live!" tour every two or three years. He could feed the attendant hype and walk away with five times what he does now, while investing a fraction of the time.

Is the Never Ending Tour a journey away from that, or toward something else? It's easy to be the sort of pop star who grins for the public, and tells it what it wants to hear. You certainly wouldn't have anyone around urging you to do it differently. It's much harder -- and it takes a greater psychic toll -- to be true to a voice inside and spend your life trying to communicate it faithfully, whether people listen or not, whether people like it or not.

That's what Dylan is doing. Those other stars are in effect moving farther and farther away from themselves, while Dylan's headed in the opposite direction. Elvis died at Graceland, true, but no star ever came to an end further from his real home. Bob Dylan, at the close of the Never Ending Tour -- at the end of this unforgettable, undeniable, incredible career, and a journey no star like him has even contemplated -- will be somewhere else: a point quite close to the uncompromising, limitless, clangorous place he started.

Performing Songwriter
A magazine about "The art of songwriting and the business of making music."

This has been taking up time too. Sylvia Lavin, manager for christinelavin.com records (I do the website), was kind enough to turn me onto this wonderful mag. They will be doing an article on Christine Lavin, and christinelavin.com records, and she thought it would be a good idea to advertise my e-commerce sites to musicians in that issue. I need to get my ad in by the end of the week. So the RGB WebGuy has to deal with CYMK prepress. ACK!

Any performing songwriter out there should be subscribing to this magazine. I will be.

More later. I will be taking pictures this afternoon of the new TestingTesting studio which will be moving to Honeymoon Lake at the end of June.