The deal would raise cash for Sesac, a privately-held Nashville company that owns the exclusive rights to the public broadcast or performance of music by Mr. Dylan, Neil Diamond and Rush, among others. According to reports earlier this month, the company was working with Goldman on a $300 million offering backed by the royalties it receives from its rights to the music of those artists.

Goldman had originally intended to sell the bond in a single tranche, according to the FT, meaning bond-buyers would have identical returns on their investment in the offering. The offering would have carried a rating of BBB- from Standard & Poor's, one level above junk; as a so-called 144A private placement, The Wall Street Journal reported, the offering was only available to qualified institutional investors—those with more than $100 million to invest.

According to the FT, initial interest in the offering was tepid, and the investment bank is restructuring the deal to create a senior tranche, which pays a lower return and offers greater protection from potential losses, and a junior tranche, which provides higher returns with greater risk.

The securitization of rock and roll royalties is not a new phenomenon—back in 1997, David Bowie sold $55 million in bonds backed by royalties to Prudential Insurance. It is, on the other hand, a fine opportunity for punning.

From the FT:

"Investors have thought twice and decided it’s not alright to take up an unusual bond offering backed by royalties from songs penned by Bob Dylan and other musicians."

"If it falls apart entirely and bankers are denied the hunks of plastic they use to celebrate deals, they may suffer from the Tombstone Blues.”

And from The Guardian:

"Bankers may blame it on a Simple Twist of Fate but market participants suggest the delay demonstrates the continuing difficulty in selling such esoteric products, even in the current climate."

"The bankers may now be singing Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance, as they market the deal for the second time."

To which we'd add a couple feeble efforts of our own:

Goldman's Dylan offering is Tangled Up in BBB- Blue.

Fate of Dylan bond deal Blowin' in the Wind.

Surely you can do better ...

'Strike Back' preview (Cinemax)

All the early Roman kings
In their shark skin suits
Bow ties and buttons
High top boots
Drivin' the spikes in *
Blazin' the rails
Nailed in their coffins
Top hats and tails
Fly away over
Fly away flap your wings
Fly by night
Like the early Roman kings
They're peddlers and they're meddlers
They buy and they sell
They destroyed your city
They'll destroy you as well
They're lecherous and treacherous
A-Hell bent for leather *
Each of 'em bigger
Than all men put together
Sluggers and muggers
Wearin fancy gold rings
All the women going crazy
For the early Roman kings

On the surface, Strike Back seems like an odd fit for the song's debut, as the show is about two members of an elite counter-terrorism unit that gets their international travel points by running around the globe and fighting the War on Terror. What political statement is Mr. Dylan trying to make by lending a track about early roman kings destroying cities to a show about two Americans racing around the Middle East, tracking a terrorist suspected of harboring WMDs?

This is not the only song Mr. Dylan has contributed to Strike Back: the show's August 17th season premiere will feature Tempest's "Scarlet Town" in its closing credits.

The Band on the Ed Sullivan Show. (CBS Photo Archive)

Earlier in June, two months after the death of Levon Helm, the drummer and strongest singer in The Band, I received an email with the subject line, “The Band Reunion.” This was curious because they were a five-piece—Rick Danko, Helm, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel and Robbie Robertson—and there’s very little left of them now. Mr. Hudson and Mr. Robertson are the only surviving members and, aside from an appearance at the 1994 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, the two have rarely played music together since the Band’s full line-up performed their final show in 1976. This reunion, at the Iridium Jazz Club last Friday night, would be no exception. Mr. Hudson was sitting in on a set with Jim Weider, who replaced Mr. Robertson as lead guitarist when The Band reformed in the ’80s, but that was good enough for me: there’s enough of a legend to The Band that simply being in the same room as the man who played accordion on “When I Paint My Masterpiece” feels downright significant. There’s a lot of history, too, most of which has ended in tragedy.

The Band is the template for the standard of authenticity by which we judge musicians today. They were effortlessly authentic. They once turned down a gig with Glen Campbell because he wanted them to sit on a flatbed truck and lip synch their songs. Everyone but Helm was Canadian, but people didn’t question that they sang songs about sharecroppers and going to the horse races. There’s a remarkable objectivity to their work—they were telling stories about a mythologized America, rather than trying to be a part of it.

They backed up Bob Dylan—who discovered them in a club either in New Jersey or Canada, depending on the account—on his first electric tour, which means they were booed by whole arenas filled with diehard folk fans. Famously, at a 1966 concert at London’s Free Trade Hall, one audience member shouted “Judas” at them. (Helm had, by that point, left the tour because, as he once wrote, “I wasn’t made to be booed.”) Dylan became a kind of mentor, and The Band recorded a huge repertoire of music with him that was later released under the title The Basement Tapes.

The Basement Tapes is incredible for being a collection of songs mostly about nothing. Not nothing in the “Desolation Row,” “Einstein disguised as Robin Hood” esoteric but vaguely interpretable sense, but in a literal nothing sense. It was recorded at The Band’s rented home near West Saugerties, N.Y., and it’s really the first—and maybe, with the exception of “TV Party” by Black Flag—only sustained narrative in pop music about being bored at home. There’s a song about planning a vacation (“Going to Acapulco”), a song about doing the laundry (“Clothes Line Saga”), a song about daydreaming about your hypothetical future wife (“You Ain’t Going Nowhere”). Greil Marcus called this music a document of “The Old Weird America,” mining the inexplicably eerie vibe of recorded music’s formative years in the American South, and that’s true, but less because the music sounds like old-timey folk and blues and more because it takes that mood and transposes it onto suburban restlessness. Take “Orange Juice Blues (Blues For Breakfast)”:

I had a hard time waking
this morning

I have a lot of things
on my mind

Like those friends of yours

They keep bringing me down

Just hanging round
all the time

That’s a very American problem—wanting everything to go your way and being devastated when it doesn’t—that is more slight than, say, the Civil War, which The Band writes about in their later masterpiece, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” but it is treated with equal gravity.

They went on to play Woodstock and the Isle of Wight, released two perfect albums, one good album, and then a bunch of scatter-brained, hit-or-miss music until they broke up.

Their final show with Mr. Robertson was lovingly filmed by Martin Scorcese in The Last Waltz. Helm hated it because it made Mr. Robertson look like the group’s centerpiece (he produced the movie) and said it was “the biggest rip-off that ever happened to The Band.” Reportedly, everyone but Mr. Robertson was stiffed on royalties for the film, which—like a lot of their recorded music—is bursting with energy and also terribly tragic. I’ve seen it 20 times and still get a lump in my throat at the part when Martin Scorcese asks Rick Danko what he’s doing now that The Last Waltz is over. Danko can’t come up with an answer and finally says, “Just trying to stay busy.”

They were joined by the likes of Neil Young, Muddy Waters, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell and Dylan at that final show at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom, but by the time of their reunion tour—without Mr. Robertson—in 1986, they were playing the Cheek to Cheek Lounge in Suburban, Fla. The night of that gig, Manuel told his band mates something like, “I’ll be right back,” and hanged himself with his belt in the bathroom at the Quality Inn next door. He was 43; his obituary in The New York Times got his age wrong. Mr. Robertson was supposed to deliver the eulogy at his funeral, but didn’t show up. Mr. Hudson played “I Shall Be Released” on the church organ. None of the attendees could gather up the strength to sing the words: “I see my light come shining/From the west unto the east/Any day now, any day now,/I shall be released.”

In 1998, Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer. In 1999, Rick Danko, then 56, died in his sleep at his home in upstate New York. In 2001, Mr. Hudson filed for bankruptcy. Helm recovered from intensive radiation treatment and surgery and started holding concerts called “Midnight Rambles” at his home near Woodstock, in part to pay his medical bills. When the news was announced that Helm did not have long to live, Mr. Hudson released a statement: “I am too sad for words right now.”

THE IRIDIUM is a basement club in Times Square, tucked in between the Stardust Diner and the theater that shows Mama Mia. Jim Weider’s band is called Project Percolator and they were playing for a room of a few dozen people, who were all curiously nondescript, save for Iridium’s manager, who had dreadlocks, a friendly smile and asked me what I wanted to drink by saying, “Are you thirsty?” and the publicist seated at my table who was wearing short shorts and a shirt that said SENIORS because she would soon depart for a Dazed and Confused-themed birthday party. There was an empty swiveling computer chair in between a Yamaha keyboard and an old church organ that were arranged at a right angle.

After some time, when Garth Hudson finally appeared, there was nothing about him that seemed real. He was more of an idea, something left over from a different time. He was hunched over and had a beard that went down to the middle of his chest and a mane of white frizzy hair that emerged from beneath a black cowboy hat and rested in a clump across one shoulder. It looked like the only things keeping him propped up at the keyboard were his fingers on the keys. But when he started to play, his hands moving swiftly and casually so that it looked more like he was brushing some dust off the kitchen table, the sound came straight out of the past. He started out solo, with a slow New Orleans blues that constantly altered in tone and mood. After a nice line of notes, he fist pumped the air. He would often play a line beautifully then let his hand drop in a kind of “do I really have to do this?” gesture. He was not doing interviews.

His back-up kicked in and they played “Just Like a Woman,” which Jim Weider prefaced by saying they hadn’t played it before. When they were finished, an audience member said, “It looked like you rehearsed that,” to which Mr. Hudson responded gravely, “You were there?” Those were the only words he uttered the entire evening. The set ended with a take on The Band’s song “Rag Mama Rag.” It was all instrumental because there was no one left to sing it.

mmiller@observer.com

Like Richard Serra, Bob Dylan will be showing at Gagosian in September.

The Observer has learned from a source who spoke on condition of anonymity that Gagosian Gallery will present an exhibition of Bob Dylan's paintings in New York in September.

Artnet reported this morning that the gallery has added Mr. Dylan's name to its artist roster, and that rumors have been afloat on a Dylan-related Facebook page that the gallery has been selling, and will exhibit, the musician's visual art.

Gagosian operates 11 branches around the world.

So, apparently, is the list of artworks that have disappeared from its walls over the years. Today the hotel blog Living with Legends reports that the place has been hemorrhaging artworks, whether because the artists who made them get evicted; the pieces are mistakenly thrown away; or relatives of the artists steal things. Sometimes an artwork’s disappearance is, well, just a mystery.

Recently, the hotel had perhaps its most sheepish moment yet: a painting of a nude by Akbar Padamsee that had hung above the door to its lobby sold in March, at Sotheby’s, for $1.4 million.

Now the hotel is worried that two paintings by Australian artist Brett Whiteley may end up on the block. “[A]ccording to an  anonymous tipster,” the website breathlessly reports, “several paintings were observed being carted out of the hotel last Wednesday and taken away in a van.”

What remains unclear is how, exactly, what the website rather bathetically characterizes as “the looting of our proud artistic tradition” happened right under the hotel’s eyes. How, in other words, did the consignor of Mr. Padamsee’s painting get the painting out of the lobby and over to Sotheby’s without anyone noticing? (The website claims, rather confusingly, that part of the proceeds from the Sotheby’s sale “should be used to compensate the widows whose husband’s stolen paintings formed an integral part of that tradition.”)

Is security that loose over there at the Chelsea Hotel? Perhaps the disappearance of its art, like so much that happened behind closed doors at this storied artist residence, will remain a mystery.

sdouglas@observer.com

Stuck inside of Michael's with the Memphis blues again.

Michael's Twitter feed--the only source for our favorite midtown brasserie's granular updates on celebrity guests and, also, yoga tips--alerted us that one Robert Zimmerman is dining there now. We called the restaurant, which obviously isn't shy about giving away its celebrity guests, but the front office said they had no idea whether Mr. Zimmerman was the Robert Zimmerman who'd changed his name to Bob Dylan.

"I didn't write the Tweet, that happens upstairs," said the Michael's employee we reached in the restaurant's office. She didn't know whether it was Mr. Dylan rubbing elbows with a crowd that today includes David Patrick Columbia and Bonnie Fuller, though Mr. Dylan's tour schedule is on a brief hiatus until July 14.

What does Mr. Dylan like at Michael's? A simple side dish, given the fancy premises, would probably be out of the question. So don't think rice--it's all right.

(Update: There is a Robert Zimmerman who manages a PR firm on Long Island. Chalk one up--perhaps, he seems more the Michael's type!--to same-name syndrome.)

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

In honor of the minstrel's 70th birthday, brilliant blog The Infrastructurist has compiled a list of the Top 10 Dylan songs about roads, bridges and levees, wherein "Only those songs with direct titular and lyrical links to infrastructure were considered." So yes to "From a Buick 6" and "High Water," no to "On the Road Again."

Trying to think of similar songs from contemporary favorites, The Observer is coming up short. Dirty Projectors? Radiohead? Devo? No dice--nor concrete. Maybe it's a WPA Era thing, as Led Zeppelin and even Simon and Garfunkel come to mind. Even Miles Davis wrote Spanish Steps.

No wonder this country's infrastructure is crumbling. We're without the appropriate anthems anymore.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @mc_nyo

Of course, there was the recent fallout with the ownership, which had been trying to update the place and was torn between a commitment to artists and profits. The latter seems to have won out as the 15 shareholders who own the property have decided to sell. "Regardless of who owns the hotel, the Chelsea will always be the Chelsea," Paul Brounstein, one of the owners, said in a release. "The hotel will always continue to be a destination for creativity and art, that's what makes it so special. Nothing can ever change that."

Yet Brounstein was more candid with The Wall Street Journal, telling the paper, "The way we want to run the hotel is not necessarily the way the business world works." In the past, ownership was famously forgiving, even accepting art in certain circumstances as compensation. Now? "I think the neighborhood has changed faster than the hotel has, and it has become anachronistic for the hotel not to change as well."

This was bound to happen at some point, as the last of Manhattan's old artistic well runs dry. But with all the competition from its neighbors (see: Standard, Gansevoort, Jane, et al) one wonders if the Chelsea could even keep up. Maybe the secret will be keeping the artists, instead of kicking them out. And people will pay extra for that "authentic" experience.

mchaban [at] observer.com / @mc_nyo

NEXT ON THE PROGRAM > PERFORMANCE

Well, you can write a Talk of the Town for The New Yorker, which is what David Simon, Baltimore Sun reporter–turned–executive producer of The Wire and Generation Kill, did this week.

Mr. Simon's A Lonesome Death takes the recent passing of William Zantzinger, whose conviction for manslaughter and assault in the death of a hotel barmaid named Hattie Carroll inspired Bob Dylan's 1963 song "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," as an opportunity to look back at an interview he attempted to hold with Mr. Zantzinger 25 years after the incident.

Mr. Simon found Mr. Zantzinger to be "a disappointing lump of a man, with small dark eyes and black hair thinning from behind." Furthermore, Mr. Zantzinger didn't prove the easiest interview subject: he mostly told Mr. Simon that "The song was a lie. Just a damned lie" and spoke of his respect for Ms. Carroll's 11 children. But Mr. Simon did bring one interesting detail to the meeting that piqued his interviewee's interest: