Bob Dylan and John­ny Cash had formed a mutu­al admi­ra­tion soci­ety even before they met in the ear­ly 1960s.

“Of course, I knew of him before he ever heard of me,” Dylan wrote short­ly after Cash’s death in 2003. “In ’55 or ’56, ‘I Walk the Line’ played all sum­mer on the radio, and it was dif­fer­ent than any­thing else you had ever heard. The record sound­ed like a voice from the mid­dle of the Earth. It was so pow­er­ful and mov­ing.”

When the young Dylan arrived on the scene in 1962, Cash was impressed.

“I was deeply into folk music in the ear­ly 1960s,” he wrote in Cash: The Auto­bi­og­ra­phy, “both the authen­tic songs from var­i­ous peri­ods and areas of Amer­i­can life and the new ‘folk revival’ songs of the time, so I took note of Bob Dylan as soon as the Bob Dylan album came out in ear­ly ’62 and lis­tened almost con­stant­ly to The Free­wheel­in’ Bob Dylan in ’63. I had a portable record play­er I’d take along on the road, and I’d put on Free­wheel­in’ back­stage, then go out and do my show, then lis­ten again as soon as I came off.”

Cash wrote the young Dylan a fan let­ter, and they began cor­re­spond­ing. When they met at the 1964 New­port Folk Fes­ti­val, Cash gave Dylan his gui­tar as a ges­ture of respect and admi­ra­tion. Five years lat­er, when Dylan was in Nashville record­ing his ninth stu­dio album, Cash was record­ing in the stu­dio next door. He decid­ed to drop in. On Feb­ru­ary 17 and 18, 1969, Cash and Dylan record­ed more than a dozen duets. Only one of them, a ver­sion of Dylan’s “Girl From the North Coun­try,” made it onto the album, Nashville Sky­line. The oth­ers were nev­er offi­cial­ly released, but have long been cir­cu­lat­ing as bootlegs. In the video above, Dylan and Cash work on one of two ver­sions they made of “One Too Many Morn­ings,” a song orig­i­nal­ly record­ed by Dylan in 1964 for The Times They Are a‑Changin’.  The out­takes Dylan and Cash record­ed togeth­er are all scat­tered around Youtube. One Youtu­ber post­ed a com­pi­la­tion back in 2013.

A few weeks after the release of Nashville Sky­line, Dylan and Cash per­formed “Girl From the North Coun­try” on The John­ny Cash Show. It was taped on May 1, 1969 at the Ryman Audi­to­ri­um in down­town Nashville. A rough video clip (around the 30 minute mark) cap­tures the moment. Despite Dylan’s report­ed ner­vous­ness, the per­for­mance was well-received. “I did­n’t feel any­thing about it,” Cash said lat­er. “But every­body said it was the most mag­net­ic, pow­er­ful thing they ever heard in their life. They were just rav­ing about elec­tric­i­ty and mag­net­ism. And all I did was just sit there hit­ting G chords.”

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Rus­sell Fall­stad and Adam DeGraff come from Lewis­burg, West Vir­ginia. The two fiddlers/violinists have been close friends for 20+ years. They trained togeth­er at the same music schools, steep­ing them­selves in clas­si­cal music. Then, they decid­ed to move in a new direc­tion and explore the brave new world of “vio­lin rock,” where “clas­si­cal train­ing com­bines with siz­zling ener­gy and a raw impro­vi­sa­tion­al cre­ativ­i­ty.” Above you can watch the Duel­ing Fid­dlers pre­pare for their debut con­cert, per­form­ing an AC/DC mashup of “Back in Back” and “Thun­der­struck.” Maybe one day you’ll find them on tour with 2Cellos, who per­form G ‘n R’s “Wel­come to the Jun­gle” below.

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Karl Höfn­er began mak­ing stringed instru­ments in 1887, in the lit­tle town of Schön­bach. His com­pa­ny flour­ished into the 20th cen­tu­ry and real­ly took off one for­tu­itous day in 1961, when Paul McCart­ney ambled into a Stein­way shop in Ham­burg, Ger­many and saw a Hofn­er bass, oth­er­wise known as the “vio­lin bass.”  McCart­ney lat­er recalled:

Fend­ers even then seemed to be around £100. All I could afford real­ly was about £30. Always tee­ter­ing on the edge of not hav­ing much — so I did­n’t real­ly want to spend that much. So… I found this Hofn­er vio­lin bass. And to me it seemed like, because I was left-hand­ed, it looked less daft because it was sym­met­ri­cal. So I got into that. That became my main bass.

As The Bea­t­les Online notes, “The Hofn­er 500/1 bass became McCart­ney’s sig­na­ture instru­ment,” and was even­tu­al­ly rechris­tened “the Hofn­er Bea­t­le Bass.” 50 years lat­er, they’re still mak­ing the icon­ic gui­tar, and you can watch the whole process unfold in just 16 min­utes. It’s not a very styled video, a far cry from oth­er gui­tar-mak­ing videos we’ve fea­tured here before, but it’s worth the watch.

The Art of Mak­ing a Fla­men­co Gui­tar: 299 Hours of Blood, Sweat & Tears Expe­ri­enced in 3 Min­utes

Mak­ing Fend­er Gui­tars, Then (1959) and Now (2012)

Even a mild inter­est in the cul­ture of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can rock will lead you to learn about the Wood­stock Music & Art Fair, those oft-com­mem­o­rat­ed “three days of peace and music” in August 1969. But roll the clock back two years, turn from the east coast to the west, and you’ll find the tem­plate for that icon­ic “Aquar­i­an Expo­si­tion”: the Mon­terey Inter­na­tion­al Pop Music Fes­ti­val. Held from June 16 to June 18, 1967 in Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Mon­terey Coun­ty Fair­grounds, Mon­terey Pop fea­tured a who’s-who of the com­ing momen­t’s musi­cal pan­theon: Jef­fer­son Air­plane, Janis Joplin, Simon and Gar­funkel, Ravi Shankar (play­ing for an entire after­noon), and the Grate­ful Dead. In the intense­ly era-dis­till­ing clip above, watch a cer­tain Jimi Hen­drix fire off his inim­itable ver­sion of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” Not bad at all for what Rusty DeS­o­to called “the first real rock fes­ti­val.”

Mon­terey Pop, orig­i­nal­ly con­ceived as a rock-legit­imiz­ing com­pan­ion to the exist­ing Mon­terey Jazz and Folk Fes­ti­vals, brought many of its host­ed artists a kind of pop­u­lar­i­ty they’d nev­er had before. Otis Red­ding, just six months before his untime­ly death, enjoyed his first pre­dom­i­nant­ly non-black live audi­ence in Mon­terey — and they, by all accounts, enjoyed him. Colum­bia Records gave Joplin and her band, Big Broth­er and the Hold­ing Com­pa­ny, a con­tract on the strength of their Mon­terey show (right above). A great deal of high-qual­i­ty film and audio tape of these per­for­mances sur­vives, thanks in large part to doc­u­men­tar­i­an D.A. Pen­nebak­er, whose film Mon­terey Pop remains the defin­i­tive record of the fes­ti­val. Watch any of the footage, such as the clip below of a ram­bunc­tious out­fit by the name of The Who, and you’ll under­stand just how force­ful­ly Mon­terey Pop launched these artists into the zeit­geist.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Jef­fer­son Air­plane Wakes Up New York; Jean-Luc Godard Cap­tures It (1968)

Wood­stock Revis­it­ed in Three Min­utes

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Neil Young’s new album, his first with Crazy Horse in nine years, is a raw, heav­i­ly ampli­fied inter­pre­ta­tion of clas­sic Amer­i­can folk songs of the kind many of us learned in ele­men­tary school, like “She’ll Be Com­ing ‘Round the Moun­tain” and “Oh My Dar­ling, Clemen­tine.”

But while the gui­tar chords may be dis­tort­ed, the lyrics are not. As Young told Ter­ry Gross this week on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” he wants lis­ten­ers to hear the words as they were orig­i­nal­ly writ­ten. So, for exam­ple, he has restored the scathing protest-song ele­ments of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.” And in “Clemen­tine” he sings a verse teach­ers did­n’t want inno­cent lit­tle chil­dren to hear: “How I missed her, how I missed her, how I missed my Clemen­tine. So I kissed her lit­tle sis­ter, and for­got my Clemen­tine.”

One of the best tracks on the new album is a rol­lick­ing ver­sion of “She’ll Be Com­ing ‘Round the Moun­tain.” (See the video above.) In the “Fresh Air” inter­view, Young explains the ori­gin of his arrange­ment:

I heard that song back in 1964, and I was real­ly into the groove and the melody and the fact that it was an old song with a new melody and old lyrics. And then, when I did it in 2012, I start­ed relat­ing more to the lyrics and start­ed doing more research on the lyrics. I actu­al­ly got into what the lyrics were real­ly about more than I was in 1964. I chose a few vers­es that empha­sized a cer­tain dark­ness, but they were all the orig­i­nal vers­es.

Young was first exposed to a few of the songs on Amer­i­cana when he heard Tim Rose and The Thorns play in Cana­da in 1964. He was deeply impressed by Rose’s rock­ing arrange­ment of “Oh, Susan­na” (anoth­er song on the new album). “I saw what he did to ‘Oh, Susan­na,’ and thought, wow, I could do that to a lot of these songs,” Young told Gross. “And that’s a real­ly cool thing to do to them, because it gives them a new life. Plus I have drums in my band, and the Thorns did­n’t have drums, so I knew we could real­ly rock these things.”

You can lis­ten to Young’s inter­view with Ter­ry Gross, which includes more songs from the new album, at the NPR Web site. And you can get your copy of Amer­i­cana right here.

Few bands can boast a per­for­mance so image-defin­ing as the one the Talk­ing Heads pulled off in Jonathan Dem­me’s Stop Mak­ing Sense. Giv­en its phys­i­cal metic­u­lous­ness, its seam­less edit­ing, and its refined aes­thet­ic sense — qual­i­ties rarely pri­or­i­tized in rock con­cert films — its place in the zeit­geist seems well earned. But that pic­ture opened in 1984, when the band had already released its most wide­ly respect­ed albums, and when they had only four years to go before effec­tive­ly dis­solv­ing. Live in Rome, which you can now watch uncut on YouTube, cap­tures the Heads in 1980, a less estab­lished moment in their his­to­ry. David Byrne and com­pa­ny express the same kind of off-kil­ter ener­gy on dis­play in Stop Mak­ing Sense — the enthu­si­asm of punks who also hap­pen to be musi­col­o­gy nerds — but here they express it in a sim­pler, more tra­di­tion­al­ly “rock con­cert-ish” set­ting.

Talk­ing Heads enthu­si­asts, note that Live in Rome fea­tures the group’s full “Afro-Funk Orches­tra” line­up. Addi­tion­al­ly, you’ll see on gui­tar a cer­tain Adri­an Belew, who would begin fronting King Crim­son the fol­low­ing year. (As he might, in anoth­er real­i­ty, have front­ed the Heads them­selves; in our real­i­ty, he turned down an offer to take Byrne’s place.) The songs not heard in Stop Mak­ing Sense include “Stay Hun­gry,” “Cities,” “I Zim­bra,” “Drugs,” “Hous­es in Motion,” “Born Under Punch­es,” and “The Great Curve.” No die-hard fan will feel com­plete­ly sat­is­fied with this con­cert, of course, until some­one remas­ters it on Blu-Ray with a com­plete sur­round sound mix. But if you sim­ply need a hit of a pack of art-school rock­ers unlike any oth­ers Amer­i­ca has pro­duced, this Remain in Light-era hour mer­its a per­ma­nent book­mark. H/T Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed con­tent:

Talk­ing Heads’ “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” Per­formed on Tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese Instru­ments

David Byrne Inter­views Him­self, Plays Sev­en Char­ac­ters, in Fun­ny Pro­mo for Stop Mak­ing Sense

David Byrne: From Talk­ing Heads Front­man to Lead­ing Urban Cyclist

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.