Two new songs from legendary singer-songwriter Bob Dylan will be featured in the second season of Cinemax’s Emmy-nominated action drama series ‘Strike Back’, which begins August 17. Both previously unreleased songs appear on Dylan’s upcoming album “Tempest,” to be released September 11, marking his 50th anniversary as a recording artist and his 35th studio release.

“It’s an honor for Cinemax to showcase Bob Dylan’s exciting new music in his 50th anniversary year,” says Kary Antholis, president, Cinemax Programming and HBO Miniseries.

“Early Roman Kings” will make its world premiere in a music video promo featuring scenes from the new season, and airs on Cinemax and HBO starting today. It will also be available at cinemax.com.

“Scarlet Town” will make its world premiere over the end credits following the back-to-back debuts of the first two episodes on Friday, August 17 (10:00-11:30 p.m. ET/PT). In addition, the song will play after the subsequent separate plays of both episodes, which will also be available from Max On Demand and Max GO.

Bob Dylan recently received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. His other honors include a special Pulitzer Prize, 11 Grammy Awards, a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar.

Starring Philip Winchester (“Crusoe”) and Sullivan Stapleton (‘Animal Kingdom’), ‘Strike Back’ follows a stealth counterterrorism unit as it spans the globe to stop potential threats. Season two features guest stars Rhona Mitra (‘Underworld: Rise of the Lycans’) and Charles Dance (HBO’s “Game of Thrones”); the supporting cast includes Rhashan Stone (“Episodes”) and Michelle Lukes (‘Alexander’).

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New York, U.S.A. – Columbia Records have announced that Bob Dylan’s new studio album, Tempest, will be released on September 11, 2012. Featuring ten new and original Bob Dylan songs, the release of Tempest coincides with the 50th Anniversary of the artist’s eponymous debut album, which was released by Columbia in 1962.

The new album, produced by Jack Frost, is the 35th studio set from Bob Dylan, and follows 2009′s worldwide best-seller, Together Through Life.

Bob Dylan’s four previous studio albums have been universally hailed as among the best of his storied career, achieving new levels of commercial success and critical acclaim for the artist. The Platinum-selling Time Out Of Mind from 1997 earned multiple Grammy Awards, including Album Of The Year, while “Love and Theft” continued Dylan’s Platinum streak and earned several Grammy nominations and a statue for Best Contemporary Folk album.

Modern Times, released in 2006, became one of the artist’s most popular albums, selling more than 2.5 million copies worldwide and earning Dylan two more Grammys. Together Through Life became the artist’s first album to debut at #1 in both the U.S. and the UK, as well as in five other countries, on its way to surpassing sales of one million copies.

Those four releases fell within a 12-year creative span that also included the recording of an Oscar- and Golden Globe-winning composition, “Things Have Changed,” from the film Wonder Boys, in 2001; a worldwide best-selling memoir, Chronicles Vol. 1, which spent 19 weeks on the

New York Times Best Seller List, in 2004, and a Martin Scorsese-directed documentary, No Direction Home, in 2005. Bob Dylan also released his first collection of holiday standards, Christmas In The Heart, in 2009, with all of the artist’s royalties from that album being donated to hunger charities around the world.

This year, Bob Dylan was the recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. He was awarded a special Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for “his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.” He was also the recipient of the French Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres in 1990, Sweden’s Polar Music Award in 2000 and several Doctorates including the University of St. Andrews and Princeton University as well as numerous other honors.

Image Courtesy of  vikhoa

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On April, 12, 2012 The Herb David Guitar Studio will celebrate its 50^th anniversary in business; creating custom instruments and repairing instruments (often for musical legends), teaching lessons, and selling brand name guitars. David distinctly remembers his first day in business.

“April 12, 1962 at nine o’clock in the morning,” David Said. “And why do I remember that– because April 12^th is my birthday.”

His studio is at the top of two narrow creaky staircases that lead to the hidden inner bellows of his guitar studio. On his third-floor hideaway, two string-less custom ukuleles lay on his cluttered work bench. A custom headstock, intricately carved into a frog’s head, is lying unattached nearby. These are the most recent projects on which Herb David, owner of The Herb David Guitar Studio is currently working.

The Herb David Guitar Studio began as a place for David to teach guitar to his many students, a task that previously took place in the basement of his home. David said it was his wife that pushed him out of the house and into his own shop due to the overwhelming amount of students coming and going from the house. It was only when students began to have their guitars break that David tried his hand at wood working and repairing.

It was April 12, 1962 at 9 am when The Herb David Guitar Studio opened for business at 209 S. State Street in the basement of a small bookstore. Twenty years late he moved his store to 302 E Liberty St, where it still resides today.

“I was a psychologist–that was for my family, to get an education so I could bring honor to my family—but my real [passion] was music. That’s what I really wanted to be involved in,” David said.

Involved he did become.

MUSIC’S MIGHTY GIANTS VISIT

It was the early 60s and Ann Arbor was a hot bed for the political change movement that would define the decade. With the birth of the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), many teach-ins, sit-ins, and concerts promoting change in the midst of political unrest, The Herb David Guitar Studio was in the thick of it all with a front row seat.

TWO OF US

During the Free John Sinclair concert in 1971, John Lennon came to town with Yoko to perform an original song called “Free John Sinclair”, among others. He wasn’t slated to perform until around 3 am, so he hit the town and Herb David’s shop.

Herb David recalls:

“He (Lennon) just came in to just say ‘hello’ because he was bored. He was hanging out in town…and [he wasn’t] playing until three o’clock in the morning…So he hung around [the shop] for most of the afternoon. He walked in and I said: ‘oh, you’re John’ and he said ‘no, I’m not John.’ I said than ‘who are you?’ and he said ‘I’m his cousin.’ I said ‘Well, okay, cousin.”

Lennon sat in a little wooden chair in The Herb David Guitar Studio and played guitar that afternoon. Patrons of the shop can still see and sit in the chair today. The sign on the chair reads: “John Lennon sat here in 1971.”

FOLK GIRL

 David recalls an evening with folk singer Joni Mitchell:

“Joni Mitchell came into the shop to get a set of strings and we tore down Washtenaw Ave (a main drag in Ann Arbor) going the wrong way on our way to my house to welcome my wife home from a visit to Greece and Turkey, to join up there with Jack Elliot and a hot local blues group called the Prime Movers. She had jet lag so the party broke up early.

CORNFLAKES FROM A BYRD

While he was still playing bluegrass music with The Colonels, Clarence White (who later played guitar for The Byrds) ran over his guitar before a gig and brought it to David.

Herb David recalls:

“It (guitar) looked like a box of Cornflakes. He (Clarence White) came in on Monday said ‘I have to record out in California on Friday. Can you out it together for me and don’t use any new wood.’ You couldn’t even tell it was fixed [when I was finished] and it’s still going.”

KNOCKIN’ ON HERB’S DOOR

“Bob Dylan came into the shop,” David said. “You could see him in town for 60 cents at the beginning. He was a Woody-Guthrie [type]. He was hitch hiking and riding trains. He (Dylan) wanted to be seen in that kind of image. He and I played at the same hootenannie. Everybody said ‘boy, he’s a terrible guitar player and he can’t sing, but he sure can write a song.’

THE DEAD CONCERT THAT ALMOST HAPPENED

“The Gratefull Dead came to town to play at Hill Auditorium. Jerry Garcia came to the Herb David Guitar Studio we talked about a guitar problem he had and my apprentice Dan Erlewine (now a well-known and highly respected writer and repairman) talked with him about a guitar he made for Albert King and discussed making a guitar for Jerry.

I asked Jerry what the band was doing that afternoon and if maybe they would like to play a short set at the Canterburry House, a coffee house in the alley across from The Arcade. They agreed to do it I passed the word around the show could go on at 1:30 pm. By 1 o’clock the line of around 200 people wound around the area.  At 1:15 the Dead’s manager called off the event saying if the show went on ticket sales would suffer. There were lots of disappointed people including The Dead and me.”

THE CREAM-OF-THE-CROP REPAIR

According to David, it was a student who was involved in organizing local hootenannies that brought guitar legend Eric Clapton into the Herb David’s shop. It was sometime in the 70s after a fan knocked his Gibson SG off the stage and broke the peg head and the neck off the body of the guitar.

Herb David recalls:

“He (Clapton) brought it to me. He broke in such a way that I had no hope that I’d be able to fix it overnight, but it’s still going. I think it was in the 70s, but the guitar is still going. It worked; I don’t why it worked, there must have been some magic in what I was doing back then.”

And the magic continues decades later.

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Bob Dylan, the 1960s musical legend and icon of the anti-war movement in the era of the Vietnam War came under heavy fire by critics and human rights groups following his performance at the Worker’s Gymnasium in Beijing at the beginning of April. Maureen Dowd of the New York Times lashed out at the 69-year-old folk-rock legend for having “broken creative new ground in selling out.” The fiery commentator expressed her deepest regret that legendary troubadour of the 60s freedom anthems had sunken below the level of other known sellouts “ – even worse than Beyoncé, Mariah and Usher collecting millions to croon to Qaddafi’s family, or Elton John raking in a fortune to serenade gay-bashers at Rush Limbaugh’s fourth wedding.”

Dylan built his extensive career on a foundation of so-called ‘protest songs’ such as The Times They Are a-Changin’ and Like a Rolling Stone with lyrics that voiced the counterculture of the 1960s and labelled him the poster boy for a disenchanted generation, the BBC explains. However, the musician was never comfortable with the label and has been quoted for saying “Whatever the counterculture was, I’d seen enough of it.”

Still, Dowd complained that the old-school touring pro had failed to live up to his own words as he let the Chinese government “pre-approve his set.” She also criticized Dylan for keeping his lips sealed on the artist Ai Weiwei’s disappearance, whose detention happened in the days running up to his first performance in the Chinese capital. Faced with the harshest crackdown on artists, lawyers, writers and dissidents in a decade, the lack of reaction from the aging musician was a thorn in the columnist’s rosy image of Dylan’s 60s persona as he “didn’t offer a reprise of ‘Hurricane,’ his song about ‘the man the authorities came to blame for something that he never done.’ He sang his censored set, took his pile of Communist cash and left.”

A few days ago, the icon himself responded to the criticism in an open letter to fans and followers on his webpage. He insisted that he knew nothing of any censorship imposed on him from the Chinese government and that the list of the songs which was sent to the authorities did not make a difference. “If there were any songs, verses or lines censored, nobody ever told me about it and we played all the songs that we intended to play.”

Bob Dylan dismissed the alleged ‘China controversy’, that he was refused permission to enter China last year, and also refuted the words of Mojo magazine that claimed the “concerts were attended mostly by expats and there were a lot of empty seats.” According to Dylan, the local press had heralded him as a sixties icon and the seats had in fact been nearly full with young, enthusiastic Chinese. He denies any suggestion of bad vibes. “Ask anyone who was there. They were young and my feeling was that they wouldn’t have known my early songs anyway.”

The New York Times explained how he has continuously tried to distance himself from the spirit of the anti-war movement and how his memoirs stress that he “had no interest in being an anti-establishment Pied Piper and that all the ‘cultural mumbo jumbo’ imprisoned his soul and made him nauseated.”

According to the BBC, the notoriously stubborn singer-songwriter regularly surprises fans by changing his set lists. He is known for his lengthy concert tours, known as the Never-Ending Tour, which sometimes has him playing 100 times each year.

In 1963, the 22-year-old Dylan walked out on his first nationwide television appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” when CBS censors told him he couldn’t sing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.”

Image Credit: Heinrich Klaff

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