Ramblings of A Ragged Clown

The Best Bob Dylan Songs of the Noughties

2010-01-01T16:48:00.000-08:00

Sorry about the lack of blog entries in recent months. Having been ill throughout the first half of the year, I've had to work hard to catch up with my contract. I do intend to return to the second part of my albums Dylan should perform in their entirety theme, but, being as it's not only a new year, but a new decade, here's my contribution to the list mountain.

The Best Dylan Songs of the 00's

What a great decade this has been for new Dylan songs! Here is my list of the best 10 of them.

1. Cross the Green Mountain

The movie 'Gods and Generals,' a civil war epic, was mostly panned by the critics, but Dylan lavished on it one of his greatest songs. It opens with a dream-vision -- or is it a nightmare?

I cross the green mountain, I sit by the stream
Heaven blazing in my head, I dreamt a monstrous dream
Something came up out of the sea
And swept through the land of the rich and the free

That third line is terrific -- one thinks of the monsters of classical mythology that come out of the sea to devour their prey, such as the Zeus-sent creature who destroyed Hippolytus or the serpents that emerge from the sea to strangle Laocoon and his sons after the priest of Poseidon strikes the Trojan horse.

But also, as the Canadian poet and writer on Dylan Stephen Scobie suggested to me in an email, post-9/11 "something came up out of the sea" is bound to suggest the death that dropped out of the air on that dark day. It would be typical of Dylan to transfer the threat from the sky to the sea.

The song, appropriately for a civil war epic, incorporates memories of Whitman as well as the "poet laureate of the Confederacy," Henry Timrod, to whom Dylan later nods more than once on Modern Times.

On and on the song rolls, stately, magnificent, and epic (that word again), and you don't want it ever to end.

2. Highwater (for Charley Patton)

The most striking track of an album released on 9/11, it seems horrible prophetic of the events of that day, and the science-hating, religious primitivism that dominated in both America and the Muslim world in the first decade of the 21st century. Even the fate of New Orleans seems, in retrospect, to have been foreshadowed in this dark masterpiece (which nevertheless finds time for a flash of humour: "I got a cravin' love for blazing speed/Got a hopped up Mustang Ford/Jump into the wagon, love, throw your panties overboard."

Apart from anything else, it's a great blues-based rocker, one of the highlights of stage performances of this decade, especially with the first Charlie Sexton band.

3. Summer Days

A lot of Dylan fans moaned when this exciting jump blues began the inevitable closer of every Dylan show for the best part of the decade. Well, I for one can't get enough of this joyful song that rages against the dying of the light. "Summer days and summer nights are gone/I know somewhere where something's still going on," Bob sings, determined to still have a ball even though he acknowledges his best days might be behind him.

Everybody get ready - lift up your glasses and sing
Everybody get ready to lift up your glasses and sing
Well, I'm standin' on the table, I'm proposing a toast to the King

Well I'm drivin' in the flats in a Cadillac car
The girls all say, "You're a worn out star"
My pockets are loaded and I'm spending every dime
How can you say you love someone else when you know it's me all the time?

4. Forgetful Heart

This, by contrast, is one of the most haunting and bleak songs Bob has ever written. It's live debut in Milwaukee on the first of July 2009 was Bob's best performance of the year. Like several of the songs on Together Through Life, it seems slight at first, but leaves a deep impression:

All night long
I lay awake and listen to the sound of pain
The door has closed forever more
If, indeed, there ever was a door

A delicate, haunting gem of a song that Bob performed several times over the summer and fall, alone, center stage, with just mouth harp.

5. Floater (Too Much To Ask)

An extraordinary portrait of a stuck-in-his-ways misanthrope, a rum old boy living in isolation somewhere in a beautifully evoked deep south. The element of alienation and disenchantment with the present is offset by memories of a deeply cherished childhood:

My grandfather was a duck trapper
He could do it with just dragnets and ropes
My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth
I don't know if they had any dreams or hopes

I had 'em once though, I suppose, to go along
With all the ring dancin' Christmas carols on all of the Christmas Eves
I left all my dreams and hopes
Buried under tobacco leaves

As well as its element of old-geezerish misanthropy, however, the song has its element of reconcilation between the generations:

The old men 'round here, sometimes they get
On bad terms with the younger men
But old, young, age don't carry weight
It doesn't matter in the end

And there is the marvellous touch of humour in evoking the awkwardness of modern adolescent lovers and contrasting them with Shakespeare's classic doomed lovers:

Romeo, he said to Juliet, "You got a poor complexion.
It doesn't give your appearance a very youthful touch!"
Juliet said back to Romeo, "Why don't you just shove off
If it bothers you so much."

This is one of the most extraordinary and original Dylan songs, an extraordinary mixture of highly evocative lyricism and colloquial language, mixed with a smidgen of schoolboy humour. It offers something new on each listen.

6. Po' Boy

An extraordinary song, like so many of those on 'Love and Theft', evocative of the deep south. Here Dylan seems to be singing in the person of a black man ("Boy" is of course racially derogative rather than an indication of age) in the pre-war south, "dodgin' them Georgia laws" evoking the whole world of Jim Crow and its petty obstructions. This song more than any other makes us think of the book by Eric Lott from which Bob took the title of his album: Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, an examination of the whole of blackface minstrelsy in American cultural life. The blackface minstrel, in Lott's interpretation, represents not just cultural appropriation ("theft"), but also homage to "what is stolen ("love"). Rock 'n' roll is itself a manifestation of both these aspects of blackface minstrelsy.

But Dylan's song is even more suffused with schoolboy humour than Floater, with nonsequiturs (I say, "How much you want for that?" I go into the store/Man says, "Three dollars." "All right," I say, "Will you take four?"), an outrageous pun ("Call down to room service, says "Send up a room"), and a knock-knock joke. (Knockin' on the door, I said, "Who's it, where you from?"/Man said, "Freddie." I said, "Freddie who?"/He said, "Freddie or not, here I come!"). And there is another humorous reference to Shakespearean characters.

This "po' boy" has the police on his back, he's washing dishes and feeding swine, he's branded by the claws of time and love, he's "ridin' first class trains" (not legally, one assumes), "tryin' hard not to fall between the cars." The amount of detail in this song, as it is in "Floater," is extraordinary. The cultural vitality, but also the social inequality and racism of the south is evoked. The song is scored for banjo and acoustic guitar, with lounge-style jazz chords, and sung with a soft-shoe charm.

7. Workingman Blues #2

Another extraordinary hotchpotch, this song more than any other on Modern Times evokes the world of Charlie Chaplin's last silent picture.

8. Nettie Mooore

An extraordinary song, with a beautiful, wistful melody and very unusual, off-kilter drumbeat.

9. This Dream of You

For some years now, Bob has been trying to write a classic Tin Pan Alley-type song, and here he finally succeeds. Like several of the songs on Together Through Life, this has an agreeable Tex-Mex flavour.

10. Things Have Changed

The song Bob contributed to the movie "Wonder Boys" and which won him an Academy Award for best movie song. In retrospect, it is the bridge between Time Out of Mind and Love and Theft. It shares the formers disillusion and cynicism, but looks forward to the latter's lighter tone. "I used to care, but things have changed," the refrain goes. But thankfully Bob has shown many times this decade, not least on "Love and Theft," which ranks with his great masterpieces, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, Blood on the Tracks, and and Desire.

Honorary mentions; any one of the following could have made the list: Mississippi (but I decided it was really a Time Out of Mind, i.e. nineties song), Lonesome Day Blues, Cry A While, Ain't Talkin', Moonlight, Life Is Hard (just pipped by This Dream of You), Tell Ol' Bill.

Freewheelin' Revisited! Which albums should Bob perform live in their entirety?

2009-11-07T00:10:00.000-08:00

In recent years several artists have been giving shows that consist mostly of a single album, played in its entirety. Van Morrison not so long ago played Astral Weeks live to critical acclaim, even releasing the result as a cd Astral Weeks Live At the Hollywood Bowl and a DVD (exclusive to Amazon: see inset).

A few years ago Elvis Costello gave a performance of his first and most widely loved album, My Aim Is True, even reuniting with the original musicians.

And in 2002 David Bowie played the whole of Low in one set and then came back to perform his then latest album Heathen in a second set.

Rufus Wainwright even performed the whole of Judy Garland's Judy at Carnegie Hall.

Anyway, you get the idea.I started off by thinking that Bob would never do something like this, then I suddenly realized, he already has -- exactly 30 years ago this month he started the first of two tours on which he performed the whole of Slow Train Coming and the then-unreleased Saved in their entirety (barring 'Satisfied Mind' off the latter, which can be regarded as a sort of 'bonus track.' Also, 'Are You Ready?' only emerged as very a late addition to the second tour, and was then played throughout the third gospel tour, when Bob dropped some songs and added others, some of which remain unreleased to this day).

So once again, Bob was way ahead of the pack. Except of course, the context was different. One album was Bob's latest release and the other would be his next album, and both were informed by his religious belief, giving him a burning desire to perform them to audiences. I cannot see Bob doing a show in which he rattled off the whole of Highway 61 Revisited and then came out and did all of Blood on the Tracks. And even if he did, of course, the songs would be unrecognizable from the versions on the original albums, and the musicians would be different (even if all the original ones were still alive, I can't see him choosing to play with the same people again). And of course, whereas someone like Van Morrison sounds much the same as he did in 1970, Bob's voice has gone through umpteen changes.

So this blog is purely for fun. Tell me which two albums you would pick to be played in their entirety for your fantasy, one-off Dylan live show. Also, who would you like to play with him for these revisited versions (stick to living musicians, please, just to make it a little more plausible)?

I'll go first. These aren't necessarily my favourite albums, I just think that they would make for a fantastic show.

First off, Bob should do the whole of Freewheelin'. Firstly, that will give us a few live debuts -- I don't believe that he's ever performed "Bob Dylan's Blues", "Down the Highway", or "I Shall Be Free" live at all, while there is just one circulating live performance of "Oxford Town" and "Corrina, Corrina" and two of "Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance" (ignoring home recordings). "Bob Dylan's Dream" hasn't been heard since 1991, and "Talkin' World War III Blues" since 1965.

And this half of the show should at least predominantly solo, because we haven't seen that for a while. Maybe he could be joined by some backing musicians on a couple of songs -- maybe we could even finally get to hear what the rocked up "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" might have sounded like (backing musicians are said to be on this track on the Freewheelin' liner notes! No such version has ever surfaced. There is even a rumored "Dixieland" take!) And while they were out there, they could perhaps play on the live debut of Mixed-Up Confusion... The only other "outtake" from the Freewheelin' album I would include in the show would be the all-time great love song Tomorrow Is A Long Time (strictly speaking, it was not recorded in the Freewheelin' sessions at all, but was demoed in between sessions). But hey, if he wants to debut Rocks and Gravel while he's out there, who am I to argue with Bob?

I even have my running order for this one-off live show (to be performed at a suitable small venue within a 20 mile radius of my house), which departs from the original sequence.

I Shall Be Free (starting where he left off in 1963) -- Bob on guitar. Gets Bob and us relaxed and warmed up. New lyrics with updated references, including to Alicia Keyes and Scarlett Johannson)
Masters of War (Bob on guitar).
Oxford Town (Bob on guitar) -- end of first 'protest' sectoin
Down the Highway (Bob on guitar & harmonica)
Bob Dylan's Blues (Bob on guitar & harmonica
Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance (Bob on guitar) -- concludes blues section.
Talkin' World War III Blues (Bob on guitar) -- Bob brings house down with new final line: "Barack Obama said that! At least I think that's what he said!)
Girl of the North Country (Bob on guitar and harmonica)
Tomorrow Is A Long Time (Bob on guitar, Donnie Heron on violin) [End of the Echo-Suze section]

Bobtalk:
"Ladies and gentlemen! I want to introduce my current band! That was Donnie Herron you just heard on violin. On lead guitar, Charlie Sexton! On bass, Tony Garnier! On the drums, the best drummer we could find tonight, George Recile! And the other guy who you can never actually hear but who follows me around, Stu Kimball!)

Don't Think Twice, It's All Right (Bob on keyboards, the rest as above, except Donnie on pedal steel rather than violin).

Bobtalk: "This next song was my first single. Hands up if you were the guy who bought it."

Mixed-Up Confusion (musicians as above)
Rocks and Gravel (musicians as above) -- OPTIONAL
Corrina, Corrina (musicians as above except Charlie and Bob on acoustic guitars, no drums)

A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall (Bob on guitar).

Bobtalk: "Thank you, ladies and gentlemen! That song was called "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall", and it certainly is. Goodnight!"

Long, sustained applause.

Encore:

Blowin' in the Wind (Bob on guitar and harmonica, Joan Baez on backing vocals -- just kiddin'!)

Curtain falls on first part of show, leaving the audience stunned and amazed, especially a certain raggedclown...

Which album will Bob play when he comes back for the second half of the show? Will it be Christmas From the Heart? Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, do let me have your own suggestions for albums* Bob should play in their entirety live, with as much detail as possible. Let your fantasies run wild!

*I was thinking of his own studio albums, but if you think he should sing the whole of Sinatra in the Sands or Kate Bush's A Kick Inside, who am I to stop you? It's your fantasy.

Merry Christmas in the Heart, Everybody!

2009-10-13T08:36:00.001-07:00

Right, here we go!

Two boxes of deep-filled mince pies -- check!
Frozen turkey dinner -- check!
Bottle of 'champagne' -- i.e. cheap sparkling plonk -- check!
Figgy pudding -- check!
One cracker to pull with oneself (yes, I am sad) -- check!
One copy of Bob Dylan's new hot waxing Christmas in the Heart -- check!

I'm all set for my best Christmas ever -- i.e. one without relatives.

Yes, just when you thought there was no other major cultural impact for His Bobness to have, having turned rock music from teenage pap into an art form, having made country cool, having brought poetry to the juke box, having messed with religion and women's knickers, having sung a knock-knock joke, and having ~~written a song with Michael Bolton~~ done lots of other cool things, the Mighty Bob has decreed that Christmas shall henceforth be celebrated in October!

The younger generation were quick to heed the call -- behold this similarly entitled offering, released the same day (today):

am reliably informed that this wee leprechaun is the most recent winner of American Idol, cunningly disguised as a diminutive fawn. I know whose voice I prefer...

I think this that Christmas in the Heart is the greatest album ever released on October 13th 2009 (sorry, David Achoochoo fans). And just what the world needs in the middle of a depression -- turning the clock back to good times and partying like it's 1955! It's cheesy, it's cheery, it's addictive and probably very bad for you -- just like Christmas itself in fact!

Michael Jackson: Suffer the Children

2009-06-28T11:26:00.001-07:00

Michael Jackson's two outstanding talents were his voice and his dance moves. He wasn't a great songwriter like Smokey Robinson or a great song arranger like Quincey Jones (the latter responsible for much of the success of Jackson's Off the Wall-Thriller-Bad trilogy). But boy, could he sing and dance.

Here's a sentimental favourite of mine:

Here he still looks "normal", but looks are deceptive. If you'd been whipped with a belt from the age of 11 when you didn't learn your dance moves fast enough; if your older brothers had sex with groupies while you, a 12 year old, were in the same room; if those same brothers wondered aloud, when you reached puberty, if you were gay, and your father regularly expressed his contempt and hatred for homosexuals; well, I wonder if you'd be "normal." A psychiatrist who examined both Jackson and his accuser during the Gavin Arvizo trial found that Michael did not fit the pattern of a paedophile, but had himself regressed to the mental age of about 10. No wonder.

Now apparently Katherine Jackson (79), the ghastly matriarch who failed to protect Michael and her other sons from Joe's belt and verbal abuse, wants to adopt MJ's children so she can bring them up as good Jehovah's Witnesses.

Wonderful. Although that is possibly no worse than being brought up in the Nation of Islam (the psychopathic black separatist religion that teaches that whites are, literally, alien demons), to which Jacko was apparently a convert.

Another possibility is that the birth mother of the two oldest children, Debbie Rowe, who gave them away for $5 million, will sue for custody. According to some reports, she is threatening a "tell-all" book about Jackson if she doesn't get custody. The implication must be that she has information that could have incriminated Jackson (during the Arvizo trial, in which she was called as a witness, she broke down and refused to testify, saying that Michael was a better parent than she was).

Other reports suggest that she just wants greater access to the children she gave away for money.

Meanwhile, we're being treated to the nauseating spectacle of Jacko's elder brother Jermaine feigning tears about the little brother he'd spent years trying to shaft in return for money. In 2006 Jermaine (whose own career foundered after the flop of his 1991 record, You Said, which included a song attacking Michael) failed to get his book Legacy: Surviving the Best and the Worst published. In the book proposal, he said that he "feared" (i.e. 'I have no evidence but I'm willing to allege by innuendo') that Michael may have been guilty of child molestation. Naturally, now the hypocritical Jermaine is calling for the family's privacy to be respected...

The idea that this dysfunctional and abusive bunch of chancers and money-grabbers is going to be able to pass their brand of physical, religious, emotional abuse and commercial exploration onto a new generation is the most tragic thing about this whole affair. Michael Jackson is gone, but they can continue their legacy of abuse with his children.

Oh, and by the way, if anyone cares, this is my all-time favourite song:

War, the End of the World, and Women on Bob Dylan's Mind in Strasbourg...

2009-04-21T17:16:00.000-07:00

War and apocalypse (and, er, women!) were very much on Bob's mind in Strasbourg tonight, it seems... Maybe he knows it was Hitler's birthday yesterday. Or perhaps he was inspired by being in a city that has been fought over by France and Germany more than once. One of the Nazis' first acts on taking the city in 1940 was to raze to the ground Strasbourg's synagogue (pictured), one of the largest in Europe, the Jewish community in Alsace being one of the oldest on that continent. The city was heavily bombed by the allies in 1944.

Let's go through the setlist...

1. Cat's In The Well
2. Masters Of War
3. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue
4. Lonesome Day Blues
5. Under The Red Sky
6. Rollin' And Tumblin'
7. Beyond The Horizon
8. John Brown
9. Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum
10. This Wheel's On Fire
11. Highway 61 Revisited

12. Just Like A Woman
13. Thunder On The Mountain
14. Like A Rolling Stone

(encore)

15. All Along The Watchtower
16. Spirit On The Water
17. Blowin' In The Wind

1. Cat's in the Well -- dogs are going to war.
2. Masters of War.
3. [No direct mention of war, but reindeer armies and seasick sailors, an orphan with a gun, and "the dead" feature]
4. Well, my pa he died and left me, my brother got killed in the war
5.[Again, no direct mention of war, but this sinister nursery rhyme is every bit as much about the betrayal of innocence as John Brown; note also that after Baby Blue and a Blues, we now have a red sky!]
6. [No direct mention of war, but "sooner or later you too shall burn "and "early doom" and "long dead souls" hardly lift the mood!]
7. [Some light relief at last, though the song is a tad ambiguous]
8. When John Brown went off to war
9. Are this nasty pair supposed to be Bob's comment on gay marriage?
10. Another sinister song...
11. ...tryin' to create a next world war
12. Just Like A Woman -- No war connection, but as Horace says, cunnus taeterrima belli causa, which I won't translate in deference to any ladies who might be visiting my blog, but you can google it...
13. I need a real good woman to do just what I say...
14. How does it feel? The third "woman" song ends with her downfall. Bob's not only in a belligerent, doom-mongering mood, he's feeling pretty misogynistic too.
15. The end of the world, portents of which were seen in 1 and maybe 10.
16. Quite placid, apart from the "I killed a man" line
17. Too many people have died... This might be the audience's feeling after this setlist!

All in all, one of the most doom-laden concerts Bob's given for a while. Thanks to Bill Pagel for the set list.

Correction: New Dylan Album Is Down in the Groove Revisited!

2009-04-16T05:28:00.000-07:00

A Columbia spokesman has now confirmed that nine out of the ten songs on Together Through Life were co-written with Robert Hunter.

The liner notes will read “All music by Bob Dylan except ‘My Wife’s Home Town’ (music by Bob Dylan and Willie Dixon) - All lyrics by Bob Dylan with Robert Hunter except ‘This Dream Of You’ which is lyrics and music by Bob Dylan.”

If you remember, Bob's main reason for going into the studio was to record a song for a forthcoming movie. He seems to have enjoyed the experience enough to have wanted to make a complete album. Or maybe he just wanted to cash in on his recent commercial success.

Quite clearly, he didn't have much other material in the tank, hence the "collaboration." What would be interesting to know is: whether this is a real collaboration, or whether Bob just raided the Robert Hunter notebooks for unused lyrics (presumably rejected as second-rate or unfinished by Hunter himself), as he did with Silvio and the unspeakable Ugliest Girl in the World on the near-disastrous Down in the Groove(1987)* (*liking a couple of songs does not change my view of that album as a total failure as an album).

The sneaky point is that Hunter can write a reasonable pastiche of second-rate Bob (Silvio is like an inferior Up to Me), so that many people have difficulty in distinguishing between the two.

Robert Hunter is of course an accomplished lyricist in his own right, who should not be judged on rejected offshoots of his pen mined for the use of a lyricist whose own muse has deserted him. A genuine collaboration between Dylan and Hunter (i.e. one in which they actually sat down together to cook up a song or songs) could, in fact, be a very interesting affair. Alas, my head tells me that Together Through Life will consist of rehashed cast-off lyrics, no doubt with equally "borrowed" and derivative music (Otis Rush has already been identified as the source of the music for "Beyond Here Lies Nothing", while the great Willie Dixon, the self-styled "poet of the blues" and the most significant blues writer of the 20th century, is actually honoured with a co-writing credit for the music of one song).

Please note, that the title of this blog entry is somewhat tongue in cheek, and of course, I may turn out to be pleasantly surprised by Together Through Life, collaboration or no.

New Dylan Tracks Are 'Knocked Out Loaded'

2009-04-08T04:44:00.000-07:00

Well, it may be unfair to assume that Bob was tight ("loaded") when he recorded these new tracks, but they certainly sound like he cooked them up and knocked them out in the studio without much thought or deliberation. Beyond Here Lies Nothing might as well be entitled "Here Lies Nothing," and for all its (highly derivative) musical charm, I Feel A Change Coming On isn't even as interesting lyrically as the slightly underrated Under Your Spell from one of Bob's least successful albums. The refrain is quite catchy, but most of the rest of the lyrics are trite. Also, I'm a bit fed up with Bob telling us who he's listening to or reading all the time. This is a lazy way of filling in a couple of lines. Still, if that's what he likes, here's a suggestion for his next album:

I'm listening to Britney Spears
I almost forgot the taste of fears

The second line is a near quotation from Macbeth (V.v) , which gives you the impression that something clever is being said, a bit like "I'm listening to Billy Joe Shaver and reading James Joyce/Some people say I've got the blood of the land in my voice," but you see how easy it is? I could write dozens of couplets like this, and I'm sure you could too, but it's a cheap trick.

Also, the refrain seems a bit exploitative, tapping into the expectations generated by Obama's "change we can believe in" slogan, while refraining from commenting on those expectations. Again the comparison is with a Knocked Out Loaded song, one of Dylan's very worse, the execrable Got My Mind Made Up:

Well I'm going off to Libya
There's guy I gotta see
He's been living there three years now
In an oil refinery

Lines so bad, and at the same time, so deliberately evocative of an interest he has no intention of satisfying, and therefore exploitative, that I have always taken the easy way out and blamed poor Tom Petty for them!

Musically, I Feel A Change Comin' On is somewhat reminiscent of Handy Dandy, a much better song.

For the benefit of anyone who has problems with streaming audio files, I include below mp3s of these two pre-release songs. If you do download them, please delete them if you don't like them or if you do not buy Together Through Life when it's released.

Also, if you have time and inclination, please click on some of the Google links!

Beyond Here Lies Nothing (pre-release from bobdylan.com, 192 kb/s)

I Feel A Change Comin' On (mp3, 192 kb/s captured via soundcard from streaming mp3)

Whan that April with his shoures soote...thanne longeth folk to buy new Dylan albums!

2009-03-30T10:22:00.001-07:00

I was hoping to finish my piece on 'Joey' and post it here (see previous blog), but I am still unwell and can't spend too long on line these days. Thanks for the get well messages, I will respond to every one of them individually when I'm fully recovered.

One of the few things I've been able to do since getting out of hospital is sit up in bed and read. Over the past six weeks I've read lots of Dryden, Pope, Keats, Coleridge, Byron, Arnold, Plath and much more besides. I also ordered a new copy of my Riverside Chaucer, a splendid work of American scholarship that makes it easy to read Chaucer in the original almost as quickly as in a modernized version (and with a good deal more satisfaction). My old paperback version was falling to bits, so I got a lovely hardback one from Amazon at a very reasonable price.

This was before I heard about Dylan supposedly quoting Chaucer in a modern translation on his new album, Together Through Life
(link to the Deluxe Edition). However, it wasn't long before I stumbled across an earlier borrowing from England's greatest comic writer (bar Shakespeare) in The Franklyn's Tale:

Aurelius, with blisful herte anoon,
Answerde thus: "Fy on a thousand pound!
This wyde world, which that men seye is round

Bob quotes the italicised line in Ain't Talkin', of course. (Incidentally, it was well known in the Middle Ages that the earth was round -- the myth that before Christopher Columbus's voyage people believed that the earth was flat entered the popular imagination in the 19th century thanks to Washington Irving's novel about the explorer. Chaucer's tale is set in ancient Britanny and the line adds a touch of realism). That indefatibable sleuth Scott Warmuth has discovered that Bob also lifts another line for the Tell Tale Signs outtake of the same song from The Reeve's Tale.

This (and no doubt the quotations on the new album) are of a piece with Bob's Modern Times quotations: in other words, he is not "intertextualizing" at all, i.e. there appears to be no attempt at an ironic counterpoint or other creative contact with the original. He doesn't expect the listener to make a connection with Chaucer, the Franklyn, or his Tale. He has simply filched the line because it sounds nice. To quote something I wrote about this subject some weeks ago:

When Virgil quotes or adapts lines from the earlier Roman poet Ennius or from Homer, he actually wanted to send his audience to the original text, or rather, he assumes that the original text is familiar to his readers, and part of the pleasure is the mutual act of piety (it is more than just an intellectual tip of the hat) of the contemporary poet and his audience to the older master.

In 18th century literature, there is not only the assumption of a common store of classic learning that the poet shares with his audience, but also, especially in the works of Pope, an identification between the modern and ancient poet, both on a personal and a sociocultural level. Pope's garden retreat in Twickenham becomes Horace's Sabine farm, Johnson's London becomes Juvenal's Rome. It's a two-way exchange: you actually read Horace differently after reading Pope, and Juvenal differently after reading Johnson.

Nor does Dylan's use of cultural reference on Modern Times resemble that of T.S. Eliot, who echoes the lines of so many past texts (not just poets and other writers, but songs and snippets of conversation) to represent them as shards of a decaying culture ("these fragments I have shored against my ruin") in The Wasteland. That is at least somewhat akin to what Dylan is doing, on a much more accessible scale, in Desolation Row. Rather than lifting quotations wholesale like Eliot, he refers by name to well-known fictional characters (Hunchback of Notre Dame, Ophelia) and drops them into a completely new, usual ironic contexts. And he adds adds to this mosaic sly allusions to the work of Kafka and Eliot himself (as well as name-checking him), also bringing in a sinister flavour of the American South into these mostly European references with "postcards of the hanging". It's a skilful performance, an artistic tour de force. And Dylan does this again to some extent on "Love and Theft" with his amusing use of the names of Romeo and Juliet and Don Pasquale (from the world of opera), dropping them into modern, ironic contexts (the aged Don Pasquale -- in Donizetti's opera the archetypal old man opposing the happiness of the young lovers -- paying a "2am booty call" is priceless!)

But his use of quotation in Modern Times is different. He doesn't expect his listeners to make a connection to Ovid (if anyone reads Ovid, it's usually the Ars Amatoria -- "the art of love" is actually name-checked by Bob -- or the Metamorphoses, probably the most influential book on English literature after the Bible; not Ovid's self-pitying diatribes from exile on the Black Sea coast). Nor is he identifying himself with Ovid in exile or making a critique of modern culture by collecting its detritus. He's just using some lines he found in one of Ovid's modern translators to eke out his verses. There is no kind of cultural interchange between Dylan and Ovid or his translator at all. (The same can be said of Bob's use of Timrod on the same album, although his use of the Civil War poet in Cross the Green Mountain does seem more apposite). No one would ever suggest that Virgil borrowed from Homer and Ennius because he wasn't able to think up lines of his own, but that does seem to be the case, sadly, with Dylan's borrowings from Ovid on Modern Times.

(Oh, and the routine practice of Shakespeare and his contemporaries of borrowing plots from older literature doesn't really belong in this argument. The nearest equivalent would be something like Ben Jonson lifting whole passages of Tacitus verbatim for dialogue in Sejanus. But Jonson had a definite purpose for this near-plagiarism, whereas Dylan has no apparent reason or need to lift from Ovid.)

After the Franklyn's Tale I read the Nun's Priest's Tale, and while I didn't find any Dylan link (maybe there will be one on the new album), I have to say that this is one of the most delightful of all the tales, and if Dylan read it in his modernized version (link to David Wright's translation for Oxford World Classics, which appears to be the edition Bob is using), he would no doubt have appreciated this "animal song"! Perhaps his attitude to his sources can be summed up in a line from this tale: "Taketh the fruyt, and lat the chaf be stille."

Dylan Wakes Up and Smells the Coffee in Stockholm

2009-03-24T15:52:00.000-07:00

Another night, another NET show, again in Sweden, but a different (larger) venue than Monday's show. As I anticipated, there was no second night for Billy, but Bob whipped out another forgotten song from his mid-seventies back pages, a period that has rarely been revisited during the NET years. This was One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below), which according to the His Bobness database had till then been played only nine times since 1978, mostly in 1990 -- and the most recent performance (Nashville 2007) only counts as half a time really, as Jack White was squawking away on it (it's a difficult song to sing without sounding strained, and Jack sounds...well, strained). Apart from that, until last night, the only coffee Bob has treated us to was the excellent fifth show of his Theme Time Radio Hour.

According to reviews, Bob played this with acoustic guitar, standing centre stage. That must have been a sight for sore eyes indeed, but you can't really hear any acoustic on the recording below. I must say, though, the band is quite tight on this one: as with Billy, this is no half-hearted stab. Unfortunately there are a few lyrical flubs. Still, after the stagnant setlists of recent years, these surprises are very welcome, and let's hope they continue.

While on the subject of Desire songs, I would like to say something about Bob's claim in the second part of his interview with Bill Flanagan on bobdylan.com (see page 9) that Jacques Levy wrote all the words to Joey. In short, "I don't believe you, Bob, you're a liar!"

I'm going to hold over my thoughts on this subject until the next blog entry, because I ended up writing much more than I'd intended. For now, here is an mp3 of last night's performance of One More Cup of Coffee, from the taper romeo's excellent recording of the show.

One More Cup of Coffee (Valley Below) - Stockholm, Sweden 23-03-09

Once again, if you download, I'd appreciate it if you clicked on one of the Google ads, if you have time.

P.S. Oh the image above? It's the patron saint of the Camargue gypsies in the South of France, whose annual festival is celebrated on May 24th, which happens to also be Bob Dylan's birthday. According to legend, she was the (black) maidservant of one of the three Marys (Lazarus's sister Mary Magdalene; Mary Salome, mother of James; and Mary Jacobe, sister of St. Joseph) who fled Christian persecution in the Holy Land and landed on the South of France near the place now known as Saintes-Maries de la Mer. Dylan claims to have written this song after visiting the King of the Carmargue gypsies during the festival in the saint's honour. Her name? St. Sara.

Bob opens European tour with live debut!

2009-03-23T09:37:00.001-07:00

I apologise for the lack of new posts lately; I fell seriously ill in January and have only recently left hospital.

It's nice to see that in my absence there has been quite a lot of activity on the His-Bobness front. Not content with preparing to release a new album, Bob has kicked off a new tour by including that rarity nowadays, a live debut of an old song... And what a left-field choice it is too -- Billy, from the 1973 soundtrack to Sam Peckinpah's Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (to be precise, Billy 4).

Unlike a lot of Bob's one-off (and who's to say this is a one-off?) choices, which often amount to no more than gestures, Bob really puts some effort into this. When I heard that he'd performed the song, I thought we'd just get a couple of desultory verses with a few half-remembered lines, but no! We get the whole damn song, every single verse, quite engagingly performed, and with a bit of harp too!

Typical of the old man with a new album in the can -- to treat us instead to a blast from the past! If past form is anything to go by, we will have to wait until the next tour to here live performances from the new album.

Here's the mp3, kindly uploaded to The Watchtower by the user named appleberry. I've taken the liberty of re-uploading it to sendspace, which I think is easily the best of these public upload sites.

Billy 4 -- Stockholm, Sweden 22nd March, 2009

If you download, I would appreciate it if you would take a second or two to click on one of the Google ads -- thanks.

Davey Graham, Folk Pioneer, R.I.P.

2008-12-17T08:19:00.000-08:00

Folk, Blues, and Beyond is one of those albums that changed the musical direction of a generation and is still cited today by anyone who really aspires to play the acoustic guitar. Most people find him, as I did, as a result of familiarity with the great Bert Jansch. Now I suppose the connection is at one more remove, but Bernard Butler, who worships Jansch, certainly knows him. And I suppose the proto-emo pissings of Neil Drake are where most younger people would have heard the influence of Davey Graham, even if they were unaware of it.

But everyone knows at least one tune of Graham's, Angi, as a result of its being covered by Paul Simon (who changed the spelling to Anji) and many others.

After the 60s Graham basically lost the next 30 years or more of his life to drugs, but he had returned to playing in recent years. A good job was done of issuing some of his old albums at the beginning of this century. They also issued "After Hours", recorded in a student's room at Hull University in 1967 after Graham's performance there the same evening. This is one of my favourite recordings by Graham. That's the sort of setting where you hear real music that no producer has sprinkled with so-called magic dust. Its release was a shot in the arm for anyone who's ever played a "concert" in someone's bedsit or student digs (I've spent some of the most enjoyable musical hours of my life in those settings).

Nowadays aspiring musicians make digital recordings on computers and upload them to MySpace. Graham belonged to that generation of musicians who paid their dues by busking their way around Europe (Ralph McTell is another guy who learned his trade this way, busking in subways or near cinema queues. McTell learned ragtime from a young American who'd studied with the legendary Gary Davies whom McTell met while busking on a freezing cold day on the Left Bank in Paris; you just don't get that sort of experience from the internet).

Graham's travels also took him to India, where he became one of the first British musicians to come under the spell of Ravi Shankar and Indian music generally (see under Harrison, George). Graham was one of the founders of British "folk baroque", which mixed American blues and English folk, renaissance and early classical music, plus what was not then, but is now called "world music." Thus we have lost not merely a fine musician, but a true pioneer.

At least we still have Bert Jansch, who now can quite properly be said to be the finest living British acoustic guitar player, a controversial claim while Graham was alive.

On Milton's 400th Birtthday

2008-12-09T08:34:00.000-08:00

Milton and the Sonnet

The following piece is heavily indebted to the Introduction to A Century of Sonnets: The Romantic Era Revival by Paula R. Feldman and Daniel Robinson, available in the UK from Amazon.co.uk (hardback, softback) and highly recommended.

On His Blindness

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent

To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,-
Doth God exact day-labor, light denied?
I fondly ask:-But Patience, to prevent

That murmer, soon replies; God doth not need
Either man's work, or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best: His state

Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:-
They also serve who only stand and wait.

Milton wrote only 24 sonnets, but they were the last great contribution to the form before it fell into disrepute and neglect until the second half of the 18th century. Johnson dismissed the sonnet form altogether as being unsuited to the English language, and excepted not even Milton's contributions to the genre. Boswell records "a lively saying of Dr Johnson to Miss Hannah More, who had expressed a wonder that the poet who had written Paradise Lost, should write such poor sonnets: ' Milton, madam, was a genius that could cut a Colossus from a rock, but could not carve heads upon cherry-stones'."

To the 18th century, eager for satire, intellect and clarity, the eroticism of the Petrarchan sonnet as adapted to the English language by Surrey, Wyatt, Spenser, Sidney and Shakespeare (who developed a new form not until much later known as the Shakespearean sonnet) seemed morbid, its courtly tradition seemed quaint and obscure, its habitual tone of resignation unmanly and unsuited to an age of reason and confidence, its "conceited" imagery wilfully obscure and much too clever by half. Johnson's Dictionary defines "sonneteer" as a contemptuous word for a "small poet" and in his Essay on Criticism Pope writes,

What woeful stuff this madrigal would be
In some starv'd hackney sonneteer, or me

And George Steevens was praised by critics for omitting Shakespeare's sonnets from his 1793 edition of the collected works!

And yet Milton had already modernized the sonnet for the new age. He had moved it away from erotic themes, and beyond the purely devotional (such as Donne's immortal Holy Sonnets). His sonnets are either personal (but nonerotic) such as On His Blindness (see above) or Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint) or political such as On the Late Massacre in Piedmont or To the Lord General Cromwell. He created a model for a sonnet free of the burden of the Italian erotic tradition, suitable for public themes and for private themes other than love. While restoring the Petrarchan rhyme scheme in place of the Shakespearean form (indeed, five of his sonnets are in Italian), he abandoned its rhetorical division and made extensive use of enjambement. This can be seen very well in On His Blindness -- Milton uses enjambement not only between individual lines but between quatrains and between the octet and the sestet. The volta or "turn" begins after the second foot of line 8, rather than the beginning of line 9. These metrical innovations gave the sonnet the same taut, stately feel as his blank verse.

Nevertheless, an "18th century sonnet" failed to develop from Milton's innovations. When the sonnet returned to favour in the second half of the 18th century, it did so not as a vehicle for public or personal themes, but as part of the "Cult of Sensibility" and largely in the hands of female poets.

Ironically, it was Wordsworth, the romantic who broke with most of the traditions of post-Restoration poetry, who proclaimed himself the heir of the Miltonian sonnet. He praised Milton for his reforms, noting that they gave the sonnet "the intense unity...of an orbicular body, a sphere, or a dew drop." That master epigrammist Walter Savage Landor summed up Milton's contribution to the sonnet best in The Last Fruit Off An Old Tree (the first lines refer, of course, to Milton's sonnet to Cromwell):

'TWAS not unseemly in the bravest bard Milton
From Paradise and angels to descend,
And crown his country's saviour with a wreath
Above the regal : few his words, but strong,
And sounding through all ages and all climes.
He caught the sonnet from the dainty hand
Of Love, who cried to lose it ; and he gave
The notes to Glory.

English Sportsmen in "Taking Moral Stand" Shock

2008-12-07T11:32:00.000-08:00

In my last blog entry, I hesitated before congratulating the England cricket team for showing solidarity with their Indian counterparts at this terrible moment in India's history. At that stage, as Andrew Miller put it in on cricinfo, the Englishmen (and their admirable South African-born leader) were still one step short of a hero's welcome, having arrived at their training camp in Abu Dhabi, but not having fully committed to taking the plane from Dubai Airport to India for the resumption of their interrupted tour. But now that it has been formally announced that England will tour with their full squad, I can offer my warmest congratulations to every member of the team for standing up to terrorism and with their Indian fellow professionals, the Indian nation, and their touring supporters.

Press reports suggested that chief doubts surrounded two crucial members of the England squad, fast bowler Steve Harmison (who has in the past not required much incentive to quit tours and scurry back to his family in the northeast) and talisman Andrew Flintoff. Surely "Freddie" wouldn't jump ship? Not our Fred, who nobly stepped in on the last tour to India, when Vaughan was injured and stand-in captain Marcus Trescothick suffered the first onset of the stress-related injury that eventually ended his international career. Flintoff had been due to fly back for the birth of his child, but put the needs of the team above his personal concerns, an all too rare gesture in modern sport.

I don't imagine it took too many appeals from Kevin Pietersen to get Flintoff to do the right thing. Steve Harmison may have needed a little more persuasion, and I can imagine both KP and Freddie doing sterling work behind the scenes to get our sometimes reluctant fast bowler, but potential match winner, on board.

To announce that they will be arriving in India with their full squad (apart from the injured Sidebottom and Swann, who may arrive later) clearly raises the prestige of their decision to continue the tour. This makes the first time that a first-choice England team has toured India for many years -- there were players who dropped out in 2002 for "security reasons", when the world was just getting used to the idea that terrorism was no longer something that happened "over there", but a permanent feature of our lives that we must resist, or surrender everything that makes our civilization superior to the Islamo-nihilists bent on destroying it.

I have to say that the BCCI (Board for Control of Cricket in India) doesn't deserve this gesture; its shameless protection of Zimbabwe within the ICC, ignoring the fact that the Zimbabwean Cricket Board is merely an extention of Rubert Mugabe's Zanu-PF, is rife with finanical corruption and political interference, and chooses its team on blatantly racist lines, is a permanent and uneradicable stain on the reputation of cricket; the BCCI has sold its soul in return for Zimbabwe's vote within the ICC that allows India to run that organization as its own private fiefdom. For its role in propping up Mugabe's bloody dictatorship, everlasting shame should descend on the Indian board. Please spare me allegations of hypocrisy: there is no comparison between the MCC's embarrassing procrastination before doing the right thing over the Basil D'Oliveira affair and the BCCI's chronic and ongoing (and very possibly corrupt) opposition to the lancing of the Zimbabwean boil. The British were shamed into taking a stand against apartheid in South African sport; the BCCI have shown themselves to be quite beyond the reach of shame, and to have no interest in anything apart from maximizing their revenue from TV coverage.

But screw the BCCI and its narrow-minded, venal politicos; damn the bastards to hell; this is a gesture of solidarity with the Indian people, made for the good of cricket, the first time in a long time that anyone in the sport has taken a long-term, broad view for the good of the game.

Let's make no mistake too: it's a brave decision, even more than Da vid Gower's decision to continue England's tour of India after Indira Gandhi's assissination in 1984. Then the act of terror and the ensuing unrest were confined to Indian nationals, or at least to non-cricketers: no one believed then that terrorists would lift a hand against the game of cricket, a second religion for Hindus and Muslims alike throughout the subcontinent. The main problem for Gower's team was going into a test match having been unable to practise for nearly two weeks because of a national period of mourning. The major danger to the players then, as Matthew Engel wrote in The Guardian, was incurring sunstroke beside their hotel swimming pool. (Admittedly, the crisis hit nearer home when, on the day before the Test match, Percy Norris, who had recently been appointed British Deputy High Commissioner to India, was murdered half a mile from the team's hotel, days after meeting the team.)

Even then, it took some aggressive persuasian to get some members of the squad to stay. According to Derek Pringle in The Daily Telegraph, team manager Tony Brown threw all their passports on a table and told those who wanted out to take theirs and 'piss off'.

One hopes that, even though there is a much clearer danger to Westernisers after the Bombay attacks, and even cricket may not be immune from the Islamo-nihililsts, such moral blackmail was not required this time. Kevin Pietersen had already shown that he has more subtle powers of persuasion in the summer, when he talked Harmison out of retirement from the one day game and Flintoff into batting at five in that format and six in the test match: excellent decisions that brought England victory in all the remaining fixtures of the summer bar the two that were rained off. It is to be hoped that reluctant members of the squad were persuaded by the force of the arguments rather than implied threats to their careers.

However this was achieved, Pietersen and no doubt others such as the England and Wales Cricket Board's managing director Hugh Morris, deserve enormous credit; and so do the rest of the squad, even those who initially dragged their feet. Because, make no mistake about it, it takes some courage to continue with a mere game after the atrocity that was inflicted on Bombay, where one target was the Taj Mahal hotel, where the team had been staying only days earlier, and where their kit was still awaiting their return, even as gunmen rounded up all the British, American, and Israeli nationals they could find and held them hostage.

However, it is not as though terrorism is something that happens far away to other people any more. In July 2005, terrorists struck in the heart of London right near the beginning of the Ashes tour. If the Australians had gone home then, we would not only have been deprived of one of the great sporting contests of recent history, but the terrorists would also have been emboldened to new atrocities by the success in disrupting the British way of life. What happened instead was a show of defiance by Londoners from all walks of life: on the Sunday after the atrocity, the nation commemorated jointly the anniversaries of VE and VJ day in the capital. As England and Australia began their one-day international at Lord's, the famous ground was buzzed by RAF jets. A million poppies were dropped from the London skies over Buckingham Palace to commemorate those who died in an earlier struggle with a different group of fascists. An anti-monarchist, I was nevertheless proud of our Queen for defying the terrorists and riding through the capital as scheduled in an open coach. As the Daily Record wrote,

Grief for those killed last week merged with painful memories of a city devastated by the blitz 60 years ago. It brought generations together. And the quiet dignity of the day sent a silent - but crystal clear - message to the world. Londoners said: our city will never be beaten.

It is clear that we have a duty to India as a fellow member of the cricketing commonwealth, to stand by it in its hour of need, just as Australia did with us.

In case anyone asks of me: What about you? Why aren't you in India right now? Isn't it easy to demand that other people make these sorts of decisions, which might potentially have tragic consequences for them and their families?

Well, I would be in India right now if I had the money and leisure to follow the England cricket team. ButI do have a little experience in being in a foreign country in the midst of an international crisis: On 30th April, 1986 I was studying in the city of Minsk in what is now the Republic of Belarus, when word got to us via some of the Russian students that there had been some kind of nuclear accident near Kiev.

The following day, we were evacuated from Minsk by order of the British Foreign Office; but none of us wanted to go. We wanted to stay as a gesture of solidarity to our roommates and fellow students. After all, they had nowhere to go. But we were bundled on an overnight train to Moscow, while our Russian friends waved us goodbye from the platform, tears in their eyes. My roommate Sergey was still on board the train, giving me last minute advice about eating more cake (I was terribly thin in those days), and had to jump off the moving train in the nick of time.

I should say that the British Embassy was absolutely useless in this whole affair: they had been unable to find us tickets to Moscow (the following day was May Day and thousands of people were travelling to the capital to take part in the biggest holiday in the Soviet calendar), but eventually our tutor Viktor Viktorovich, who had always managed to get us scarce opera and theatre tickets, came up with the goods. The Embassy got its collective finger out and got us a plane out of Moscow only when it became apparent that otherwise they'd have to allow a bunch of student oinks to stay overnight at the palatial British Embassy itself.

I can still recall our horror and disgust at the sensational headlines that awaited us when we boarded the plane, after hours of delay while we underwent compulsory medical checks by the Soviet authorities on the outskirts of Moscow. "Millions of Red Babies at Risk", "Students Escape Nuclear Hell-Hole..." The Soviet authorities in this pre-glasnost era were secretive, but the British press made up for lack of information with ghoulish and sensational speculation.

I read in The Times the next day that the Soviets had refused to allow our plane to leave Moscow Airport until Soviet sympathizers among the students (our group and another from Kiev) had been able to make propaganda statements. I can safely say that there were no Communist sympathizers in our group. We made a joint statement via the oldest member of our party (a retired subeditor in his sixties) that we didn't want to leave but were being forced to do so, and that we thanked our Russian friends for their hospitality and friendship, and hoped that they were in no present danger. The other group stated something similar. Nor had we been prevented from leaving until such statements were made; a Russian official merely boarded the plane and invited us to do so. A far longer delay was caused by British Airways's requirement that we doff all our clothes and put them into the hold, and wear BA tracksuits to board the train.

There were reporters on the plane from the Daily Mail who had boarded British Airways airbus in Gatwick without a visa in their bid for a scoop. But to our party's credit, we refused to talk to them or feed their desire for sensational headlines.

On arrival in Gatwick, after a rowdy flight in which the British Airways pilot had made the bold decision, which he later regretted, of making all drinks on board, including alcohol, free by way of apology to the passengers who had been waiting for hours on the runway while we underwent our checks and the rest (students + free alchohol + four hour flight is not a pretty mixture), we were met by a scum of journalists (my preferred collective noun for that profession). I pushed angrily past a Daily Express man who wanted me to tell my story.

When I got home, I started smashing up my room in a fit of rage. My parents couldn't understand why I was so angry: why wasn't I happy to have escaped from the potential danger?

Because for more than 48 hours, we had been helpless pawns in an international game, unable to do anything but obey orders. Because we had exposed to the sheer mindlessness of the British tabloid and broadsheet press. But most of all because we had been denied the opportunity to make a moral decision to stay with our friends and continue our studies in the face of unknown peril. At least England's cricketers have been given the opportunity to make this brave decision, and I salute them for it.

Now then. What about announcing a date for the postponed ICC Trophy tournament in Pakistan?

Bombay Burns and We Are All Indians Now

2008-12-05T12:34:00.000-08:00

A few days ago an unspeakable attack was carried out on one of the world's most heavily populated, culturally and racially diverse, and cosmopolitan cites -- a city that I shall call Bombay rather than "Mumbai", the name it was given in 1996, for aesthetic reasons, though according to Christopher Hitchens, there are excellent political and anti-theist reasons for continuing to call it by its former name as well (I'm not entirely convinced he's right on this subject, but anyway).

The target was the city's most famous cultural landmarks in the first place, and anyone of American, British, or Jewish nationality in the second.

No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, but it bears all the hallmarks of Al Qaida's filthy handiwork, and, according to the Indian authorities, there are unmistakable links too to Pakistan's ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence).

Those who doubt that Al Qaida are waging a nihilistic, cultural, religiously-motivated war against the whole world have to answer why their targets are always symbolic buildings, multi-cultural communities, and cosmopolitan cities. These Islamic nihilists loathe such culturally diverse centres with every evil fibre of their rotten beings. They advocate not only religious exclusivity, but racial and cultural exclusivity also. As Hitchens wrote in Slate magazine:

...what's at stake is the whole concept of a cosmopolitan city open to its own citizens and to the world—a city on the model of Sarajevo or London or Beirut or Manhattan. There is, of course, a reason they attract the ire and loathing of the religious fanatics. To the pure and godly, the very existence of such places is a profanity. In a smaller way, the same is true of the Islamabad Marriott hotel, where I also used to stay. It was a meeting point and crossroads for foreigners. It had a bar where the Pakistani prohibition rules did not apply. Its dining rooms and public spaces featured stylish Asian women who showed their faces. And so it had to be immolated, like any other Sodom or Gomorrah [the Marriott Hotel was bombed in September this year].

That of course was also why the World Trade Center had to be destroyed -- those who point out, correctly, that many of those killed in the WTC on 9/11 were Muslims, as well as Christian and people of other religions and none at all don't always make the connection that this is the very reason why the WTC was so offensive to the Islamic nihilists: it's not that they didn't realize that Muslims were also present in the building: they did not class those persons as true Muslims because they were working alongside the Infidel.

And that's why one of the world's most admired buildings, the Taj Mahal also had to burn:

Just because America has elected a liberal president, and mirabile dictu, one with a brain to boot, does not mean that he won't have to deal with the same problems as Bush contended with so ineptly. Moreover, in the light of some of Obama's campaign trail comments about Pakistan, the involvement of the ISI, if proven, could have serious implications for future U.S. foreign and military policy. In what many portrayed as a major blunder and sign of his lack of experience in foreign affairs, Obama implied that he would be willing to extend the hunt for Al Qaida within Pakistan's borders if that country did not fully cooperate with the war on terror.

He also indicated a willingness to contemplate a surge inside Afghanistan -- quite a volte face for someone who staked so much political capital on his ab initio opposition to the Iraq war. And yet, if his strategy is to withdraw from Iraq while shoring up the allied effort in Afghanistan, he cannot ignore Pakistan, which is effectively the Taleban's hinterland. But such a policy is fraught with danger, in that Pakistan is already notoriously volatile and possesses (like India) nuclear weapons.

One of the earliest indications of Obama's politicals skills will be his handling of the Pakistani issue. Can he bring the Indian and Pakistani presidents together? Can he organize a collective miltiary responce with broad international backing if necessary? It's a real tester for the new President's early days.

In the meantime, all the rest of us can do is offer India our solidarity. In this respect, I am delighted by the news that England are to return to India to play their rescheduled test matches against India, though I won't say too much at this point in case they back down. If it goes ahead, as it should, it would be a clear sign that we stand shoulder to shoulder with the Indian people in their hour of need.

Always look on the bright side of life

2008-12-02T15:39:00.000-08:00

Ever since I quoted that Edwin Muir poem the other day, the Google ads on this blog have been about nothing else but grief counselling and will making.

So in a bid to dispel the gloom, I hereby offer, courtesy of youtube, Eric Idle's classic song about looking up even when things are looking down. I dedicate it to all those facing hard times due to the world economic downturn. Indeed, our governments have decreed that pessimism is unpatriotic, and we must all feast in the time of plague and above all, spend, spend, spend our way out of recession! So let the Clown spread a little optimism.

In case that doesn't work, here's a version of the song that Idle may have been parodying. Irving Berlin's Let's Face the Music and Dance was written for the film Follow the Fleet in the middle of growing economic depression and the looming spectre of war in Europe. In place of Fred and Ging, here are Strictly Come Dancing's own Anton du Beke and Flavia Caccace, and for double the fun, Vincent Simone and Erin Boag. This was a gloriously cheeky routine, one of my favourite dances by the professionals on my favourite show.

Did you know Anton du Beke's real name is Tony Beak? That certainly brought a smile to my face!

Bob's Big Freeze Left Me Lukewarm at Best

2008-11-28T04:17:00.000-08:00

BOB DYLAN'S BIG FREEZE - BBC Radio 2, November 25th 2008 Bob's Big Freeze November 25th 2008 BBC Radio 2, 10.30-11.30pm

From The Times :

Radio Choice Bob's Big Freeze Chris Campling Bob Harris tells the fascinating story of a significant but largely unknown chapter in the life of that living god, Bob Dylan. In 1962 the newly famous Bobster came to Britain to appear in a BBC TV play called Madhouse On Castle Street. While he was here he stayed with that eminent British folkie, Martin Carthy, who opened Dylan's ears to a whole new way of making music (Don't Think Twice It's Alright, and Bob Dylan's Dream were heavily influenced by his exposure to traditional English folk music). He also had the unequalled joy of living through the famously bitter winter of 1962-63, when Carthy was reduced to chopping up a piano for firewood.

This BBC radio documentary about Bob Dylan's first visit to the United Kingdom in the freezing winter of 1962/3 was OK, but could have been better, especially as this ground has been trod before and fairly recently, also by the BBC (Dylan in the Madhouse, 2005). It was interesting to hear a few different voices from the early 60s British folk scene, although of course Carthy and Davenport were trotted out again (not that I'm complaining, I love Martin in particular).

I also think it could have been a little less sloppy. For instance, when Bob Harris asks "Who knows what a big influence the U.K. folk scene had on Dylan at this time?" (or words to that effect), the song playing behind him is A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, which was written a couple of months before Bob set foot in England. It was left to Carthy to make the point that Dylan was already familiar with English, Scottish, and Irish folk music before he arrived in England. Hard Rain, for instance, is based partly on the Child Ballad, "Lord Randall." However, it was fascinating to hear in this programme that Bob may have also been influenced by another source (I shall elaborate later in an edit to this post). This was one of the few genuinely new (to me, at any rate) pieces of information in Dylan's Big Freeze.

It was also implied that the protest element in Bob's music came from the UK folk scene (especially Scottish folk song, which Davenport told him was all political). Carthy also claims that the anthemic quality of some of the songs Dylan wrote in the next couple of years came from his exposure to the UK scene.

But Bob was already writing political songs -- Death of Emmett Till, Let Me Die in My Footsteps, and Talking John Birch Society Paranoid Blues, for example. The important person here, apart from Bob himself, was his girlfriend at the time, Suze Rotolo, who inspired his interest in politics. Plus there is a protest element in some blues (Big Bill Broonzy, for instance, whose "When Will I Get To Be Called A Man?" may have given Bob the idea for one verse of Blowin'). And for anthemic material, Bob could turn to negro spirituals (as he did for Blowin' in the Wind, which was inspired by No More Auction Block, which he probably learned from Odetta). Plus, of course, Bob couldn't help being influenced by the Civil Rights movement in America itself at the time. All of this was surely more influential on Bob's political material than Carthy or Davenport. And that's without even mentioning Woody Guthrie!

It is true, though, that on his return to the States he withdrew the first version of Freewheelin' and replaced four of the songs with what he called "fingerpointing songs", which was probably the result of his British visit. Otherwise the record would probably have been more blues- oriented (its original title was Bob Dylan's Blues). But it already contained Blowin' in the Wind (recorded in July, written months earlier) and A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall (recorded in December at what was supposed at the time to have been the final session for the album).

There is so much that Bob was absorbing at this time (including Brecht, which is a major influence on The Times, They Are A-Changin'). That's why he's so fascinating, and why programmes like this one, which only focus on one element, miss the point. The first part of Martin Scorsese's brilliant No Direction Home is the best documentary of Bob's early period precisely because it shows what a sponge he was, soaking up a wide range of influences incredibly quickly and using them to produce something new.

Incidentally, it is ironic that Bob left Minnesota because (as he tells us in his interview in No Direction Home) it was "too cold to be different", only to arrive in New York in the middle of "the coldest winter in 17 years." Then when he went to England for the first time, it was our coldest winter since the 18th century!

For those who missed the transmission, I have provided an mp3 below. If you download it, by way of thanks you might like to click on some of the Google Ads, which will help me stay on line.

Bob Dylan's Big Freeze

(Big download, 78MB).

Snatched from deceiving death/By the articulate breath

2008-11-25T10:16:00.000-08:00

I've had this volume of the collected poems of Edwin Muir (1887-1959) for several years now, but for some reason, I have hardly ever dipped into it. Which made it a pleasant surprise to discover the following superb poem today (from a series of meditations on time and eternity in his 1956 collection One Foot in Eden):

THE ANIMALS

They do not live in the world,
Are not in time and space.
From birth to death hurled
No word do they have, not one
To plant a foot upon,
Were never in any place.

For with names the world was called
Out of the empty air,
With names was built and walled,
Line and circle and square,
Dust and emerald;
Snatched from deceiving death
By the articulate breath.

But these have never trod
Twice the familiar track
Never never turned back
Into the memoried day.
All is new and near
In the unchanging Here
Of the fifth great day of God,
That shall remain the same
Never shall pass away.

On the sixth day we came.

Bullingdon Conservatives Trash Talk the UK Economy

2008-11-18T22:30:00.000-08:00

An Ipsos Mori opinion poll puts Labour just three points behind the New Tories, which of course makes it a statistical dead heat.

While Gordon Brown, the victim of so much yah-boo derision over the past 12 months, has emerged as virtually the savour of the European economy, the Tories' collection of ex-Etonian hooray-henries has been exposed as weak, opportunistic, and out of their depth. In particular, the reputation of 'Boy' George Osborne will possibly never recover. His attempt to discredit Peter Mandelson over the "Deripaska yacht" affair backfired spectacularly (how silly to try to out-Mandy Mandy in the black arts!), and his latest irresponsible talk about the economy is likely to provoke a run on the pound and will be viewed very dimly in the City (he and his other fellow graduates from Eton's notorious Bullingdon Club have been trash-talking the UK economy in the way they allegedly used to trash restaurants, totally without regard for the consequences for other people, secure in their own unearned wealth).

In short, the dangers of Britain sleepwalking into Bullingdon Conservatism* have somewhat receded. We just need Boris to make a complete chump of himself now; so give it a couple of months tops, then.

*Please feel free to chuck this phrase around liberally. I don't know if it's my own coinage, but I'm trying to give it currency as a counterpart to the long-standing "Bolinger socialist".

10 Reasons Why Rolf Harris Is Better Than Bob Dylan

2008-11-13T23:05:00.000-08:00

1. Two Little Boys. The children's classic that has a strange effect on grown men (and on a certain evil ex-prime minister). The real greatest single ever made!

2. Didgeridoo vs. harmonica -- I mean, which is cooler?

Well, ok, but which is more phallic?

3. Bob can't play the wobble board either.

4. His Rolfness has been backed by all four Beatles on a remake of 'Tie Me Kangaroo Down' sport -- Bob has only ever sung with George and Ringo, separately, and has never sung about kangaroos.

5. The Rolfster has sung on a Kate Bush album.

6. Make that two Kate Bush albums!

7. Rolf can draw. Sorry, Bob, but just because you have an exhibition of your pisspoor paintings nowadays, it doesn't mean they're any good.

8. Jake the Peg -- a more poignant story of an outcast than Hollis Brown?

9. Has Bob Dylan ever performed a cover of the Divynyls 'I Touch Myself' accompanied only by a wobble board? I think not.

10. Bob was the voice of his generation, but Rolf is the voice of every generation.

What's more, that "vocal percussion" thing that Tom Waits does -- Rolf invented that, he did.

The Pet Goat -- the Reviews Deleted by Amazon

2008-11-13T00:01:00.000-08:00

News that President-elect Barack Obama has been reading Derek Walcott's Collected Poems 1948-1984 (it's apparently the book he's holding in the picture) reminds me that outgoing President George W. Bush will soon finally have an opportunity to finish reading The Pet Goat, the story (often erroneously referred to as My Pet Goat) in a children's book he spent so much time immersed in on September 11, 2001.

The book prominently sold out, and inspired lots of satirical reviews on Amazon.com, which has since deleted them.

But of course, on the Internet, nothing really disappears, so here are some of those reviews: http://www.sadlyno.com/uploads/sadlynogoats.htm

It's out of work and back to school for Dumbfuck!

I Finally Remembered Who McCain's Attack Bimbo Reminds Me Of....

2008-11-11T12:46:00.000-08:00

I've been trying to work out who Sarah Palin reminds me of, and now I've got it!

Anyone remember the Gus Van Sant movie from the mid-nineties, To Die For, about a dim but ruthless weather girl (Nicole Kidman) who has her husband bumped off to further her career?

Its tagline was, as I recall: "All she wanted was a little attention"...!

Return of the Brown Bounce?

2008-11-07T22:10:00.000-08:00

Compared to the U.S. presidential election, Labour holding onto a once safe seat in Scotland with a reduced majority is not even on the scale. And yet it may just be the turning point in Gordon Brown's premiership. His stewardship of the economy at this momentous time has won golden praise globally from political leaders across the spectrum. If Labour had lost, as the polls had predicted that they would throughout the campaign and even on polling day, it would have been the end for Brown, and probably Labour too. At last there is the hope of stopping the election of a Tory government that would take us right back to the discredited Thatcherite economics of the 1980s.

Not to mention that Alex Salmond and the SNP are starting to look like a busted flush. Salmond's ridiculous claim that Scotland would have been able to weather the current economic storm alone, comparing it to Norway, is laughable. Norway is one the richest countries in Europe with considerable greater oil reserves than Scotland, and due to sensible economic management it has been largely untouched by the present economic crisis. In fact, Scotland (pop. 5 million, among whom pensioners greatly outnumber schoolchildren) would probably have been more like Iceland. The SNP's claims are pure demagoguery.

Perhaps the election of the most liberal U.S. President since JFK will encourage more progressive policies from Labour, the sort of policies it is rumoured that Gordon Brown would in fact like to pursue.

Tears and Laughter in Romeo and Juliet

2008-09-17T05:54:00.001-07:00

I have been re-reading, with much pleasure, Shakespeare's earliest plays. Two Gentlemen of Verona might not be a play-goer's or a reader's favourite, but its themes and even plot elements run through all the later comedies up to Twelfth Night, and the early play can in fact be seen as a comic version of "The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet", Arthur Brooke's narrative poem based on the Italian legend (Brooke's poem is used as a source in both Two Gentlemen and Romeo and Juliet).

At the same time, Shakespeare was probably writing his sonnets, with their rumination on Time and Love. Romeo and Juliet makes use of the sonnet form, firstly in the famous prologue:

Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whole misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

but also -- and much more daringly -- within the action itself, in the most "public" part of the action: Capulet's feast, which Romeo (rather reluctantly) and his friends have gate-crashed in disguise (masquers were often welcomed as uninvited guests on such occasions). The headstrong Tybalt has recognized Romeo and is champing at the bit to challenge him to a duel there and then; he is restrained by his angry father, for whom even the presence of a hated Montague isn't worth spoiling his party for. Meanwhile, the guests and the disguised Montagues are enjoying a public dance, from which the love-lorn Romeo (still in love with Rosaline Capulet at this point; a character we never see in the play!) feels excluded by his melancholy ("I have a soul of lead/So stakes me to the ground I cannot move") and he takes little interest in proceedings until he catches sight of Juliet ( ("O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!"), and goes over at the change-over between dances to introduce himself, still in disguise, obviously. At this point, in this most public of scenes, the two lovers enter into their own private world; and Shakespeare uses a sonnet to symbolise this removal of the lovers to an internal sphere into which the world, even at its noisiest, may not intrude:

ROMEO

[To JULIET] If I profane with my unworthiest hand
This holy shrine, the gentle fine is this:
My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand
To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.

JULIET

Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much,
Which mannerly devotion shows in this;
For saints have hands that pilgrims' hands do touch,
And palm to palm is holy palmers' kiss.

ROMEO

Have not saints lips, and holy palmers too?

JULIET

Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.

ROMEO

O, then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do;
They pray, grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

JULIET

Saints do not move, though grant for prayers' sake.

ROMEO

Then move not, while my prayer's effect I take.

They begin another sonnet at once, but this one is interrupted by the nurse; all too brief are the private moments allowed to the lovers in this play.

At the same time, some parts of the play are not so successful. I find Juliet's sudden use of extended legal metaphor (a favourite trope with our poet) when she tells Friar Laurence of her woes in Act 4 scene 1 to be highly unsuitable both for the character and for the situation. Also, when the Capulets learn of Juliet's supposed death (she's taken the friar's potion which makes her appear lifeless for 42 hours, remember), their lamentation borders dangerously on the comic.

LADY CAPULET

What noise is here?

Nurse

O lamentable day!

LADY CAPULET

What is the matter?

Nurse

Look, look! O heavy day!

LADY CAPULET

O me, O me! My child, my only life,
Revive, look up, or I will die with thee!
Help, help! Call help.
Enter CAPULET

CAPULET

For shame, bring Juliet forth; her lord is come.

Nurse

She's dead, deceased, she's dead; alack the day!

LADY CAPULET

Alack the day, she's dead, she's dead, she's dead!

CAPULET

Ha! let me see her: out, alas! she's cold:
Her blood is settled, and her joints are stiff;
Life and these lips have long been separated:
Death lies on her like an untimely frost
Upon the sweetest flower of all the field.

Nurse

O lamentable day!

LADY CAPULET

O woful time!

CAPULET

Death, that hath ta'en her hence to make me wail,
Ties up my tongue, and will not let me speak.
Enter FRIAR LAURENCE and PARIS, with Musicians

FRIAR LAURENCE

Come, is the bride ready to go to church?

CAPULET

Ready to go, but never to return.
O son! the night before thy wedding-day
Hath Death lain with thy wife. There she lies,
Flower as she was, deflowered by him.
Death is my son-in-law, Death is my heir;
My daughter he hath wedded: I will die,
And leave him all; life, living, all is Death's.

PARIS Have I thought long to see this morning's face,
And doth it give me such a sight as this?

LADY CAPULET

Accursed, unhappy, wretched, hateful day!
Most miserable hour that e'er time saw
In lasting labour of his pilgrimage!
But one, poor one, one poor and loving child,
But one thing to rejoice and solace in,
And cruel death hath catch'd it from my sight!

Nurse

O woe! O woful, woful, woful day!
Most lamentable day, most woful day,
That ever, ever, I did yet behold!
O day! O day! O day! O hateful day!
Never was seen so black a day as this:
O woful day, O woful day!

PARIS

Beguiled, divorced, wronged, spited, slain!
Most detestable death, by thee beguil'd,
By cruel cruel thee quite overthrown!
O love! O life! not life, but love in death!

CAPULET

Despised, distressed, hated, martyr'd, kill'd!
Uncomfortable time, why camest thou now
To murder, murder our solemnity?
O child! O child! my soul, and not my child!
Dead art thou! Alack! my child is dead;
And with my child my joys are buried.

How did Shakespeare expect his audience to take this highly artificial scene of extravagant lamenting? First, the audience remembers that the Capulet family has repeatedly rebuked Juliet for (as they supposed) over-doing her mourning of her kinsman Tybalt (slain by Romeo in revenge for the death of Mercutio). In Act 3, scene v, though Tybalt, by the play's chronology, cannot have been dead for more than a few hours, Lady Capulet, advancing the case for Juliet to marry Paris, rebukes her daughter thus:

Evermore weeping for your cousin's death?
What, wilt thou wash him from his grave with tears?
An if thou couldst, thou couldst not make him live;
Therefore, have done: some grief shows much of love;
But much of grief shows still some want of wit.

Not just "want of wit" (i.e. derangement); excessive grief was held to border on heresy, by seeming to impugn the justice of providence, as Claudius reminded Hamlet:

Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,
To give these mourning duties to your father:
But, you must know, your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow: but to persever
In obstinate condolement is a course
Of impious stubbornness; 'tis unmanly grief;
It shows a will most incorrect to heaven,
A heart unfortified, a mind impatient,
An understanding simple and unschool'd:
For what we know must be and is as common
As any the most vulgar thing to sense,
Why should we in our peevish opposition
Take it to heart? Fie! 'tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd: whose common theme
Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried,
From the first corse till he that died to-day,
'This must be so.'

Although Claudius is of course disingenuous (since he is the undiscovered murderer of Hamlet's father), his advice is sound from the religious point of view; as is Lady Capulet's more curt advice, albeit showing a want of feeling for her daughter's grief (although she does not know that her grief is for Romeo, her cousin's murderer, rather than for Tybalt himself).

The Capulets extravagant woe over their apparently lifeless daughter lends a retrospective irony to Lady Capulet's earlier advice. This has the effect of distancing the audience from the Capulets' grief; although, since we know that Juliet is not really dead, but only sleeping, we cannot enter into their feelings anyway. Furthermore, well-meant advice that is useless because the giver of it cannot truly enter into the feelings of the person for whom it is intended is a common Shakespearian theme found already in his earliest comedies, Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Comedy of Errors. However, Shakespeare goes still further than this: the Capulets' over-use of rethorical tropes* (*for the record, as listed by the Oxford Shakespeare they are a) apostrophe: "O lamentable day!"; b) exergasia, repeating the same thought in many figures; c) repetition; d) prosopopeia, the personification of death; e) asyndeton, the omission of conjuctions; f) recurring epizeuxis, the repetition of the same word in close succession) makes one suspect that Shakespeare is sending up the whole tradition of Senecan Tragedy. Indeed, a line of Paris's ("O love! O life! not life, but love in death!") directly recalls a much parodied passage ofThomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy:

O eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;
O life, no life, but lively form of death;
O world, no world, but mass of public wrongs...

Evidently, a parody of the older play's bombast could be counted on for a laugh even at the end of the century; Kyd's flowery rhetoric is memorably sent up in the Pyrrhus speech in Hamlet. At this point in Romeo and Juliet, however, with the action moving swiftly towards its tragic denouement, this highly stylized scene of artificial lament has struck many directors, audiences, and readers as inappropriate. For once Friar Laurence's sententious rhetoric, reminding Lady Capulet of her own earlier sentiments, in putting an end to this scene of extravagant lamenting is entirely welcome:

Peace, ho, for shame! confusion's cure lives not
In these confusions. Heaven and yourself
Had part in this fair maid; now heaven hath all,
And all the better is it for the maid:
Your part in her you could not keep from death,
But heaven keeps his part in eternal life.
The most you sought was her promotion;
For 'twas your heaven she should be advanced:
And weep ye now, seeing she is advanced
Above the clouds, as high as heaven itself?
O, in this love, you love your child so ill,
That you run mad, seeing that she is well:
She's not well married that lives married long;
But she's best married that dies married young.
Dry up your tears, and stick your rosemary
On this fair corse; and, as the custom is,
In all her best array bear her to church:
For though fond nature bids us an lament,
Yet nature's tears are reason's merriment.

There is a strong suggestion that Shakespeare may have been trying to add "local colour" by sending up the extravagance of Italian lamentation. Under this interpretation, Friar Laurence becomes an honorary Englishman, reasserting the importance of restraining one's emotions and maintaining a "stiff upper-lip"! After this rebuke, Capulet's sad and dignified speech is more genuinely moving than his family's previous weeping and wailing:

All things that we ordained festival,
Turn from their office to black funeral;
Our instruments to melancholy bells,
Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast,
Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change,
Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse,
And all things change them to the contrary.

This almost rescues the scene from parody. Directors have frequently gone further by cutting the preceding lamentations; indeed the "bad" quarto of Romeo and Juliet omits several lines, suggesting that even in Shakespeare's day the scene may have been cut. One wonders whether the play's earliest directors, or Shakespeare himself, realized that a scene that was written with the intention of provoking some mirth was destabilizing the tragic resonance of the play as a whole by provoking out-right hilarity among the "groundlings", and consequently reduced the scene significantly in later performances (the "bad" quarto also cuts many of Juliet's legal tropes in the scene discussed earlier). The audience's reception of the scene as originally written may have inspired Shakespeare to write a parody of his entire tragedy and play it purely for laughs as the play acted by the "mechanicals" in A Midsummer Night's Dream (which most scholars believe was written shortly after Romeo and Juliet). Theseus and Philostrate may give us an indication, allowing for exaggeration, as to how the lamentation scene in Romeo and Juliet was received by its first audiences:

THESEUS

Reads 'A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus
And his love Thisbe; very tragical mirth.'
Merry and tragical! tedious and brief!
That is, hot ice and wondrous strange snow.
How shall we find the concord of this discord?

PHILOSTRATE

A play there is, my lord, some ten words long,
Which is as brief as I have known a play;
But by ten words, my lord, it is too long,
Which makes it tedious; for in all the play
There is not one word apt, one player fitted:
And tragical, my noble lord, it is;
For Pyramus therein doth kill himself.
Which, when I saw rehearsed, I must confess,
Made mine eyes water; but more merry tears
The passion of loud laughter never she d.

Not that laughter and death need be kept wholly separate. Earlier in Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio (one of Shakespeare's superly drawn minor characters) dies as he has lived: with a merry quip and a pun.

ROMEO

Courage, man; the hurt cannot be much.

MERCUTIO

No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a
church-door; but 'tis enough,'twill serve: ask for
me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man.

Some find the pun as excruciating as Tybalt's mortal thrust itself; but it is entirely in character for the jesting Mercutio, who cannot even be "grave" about his own death. Death has the last laugh, however; only he can make Mercutio "grave", by providing him with one. Symbolically, Mercutio's death marks a change in the mood of the play, which up till then had been mostly a comedy; thereafter the tone of the play becomes, on the whole, more grave.

But not entirely, for Shakespeare was aware of how laughter and tears, life and death, are closer to each other in the real world than in the discreet genres insisted on by the neo-classical playwrights, for whom comedy and tragedy must be rigorously separated. Auden captured something of Shakespeare's understanding of life when he wrote, in Museé des Beaux Arts:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood...

Shakespeare shares the Old Masters' sense of live as a tragicomedy: while Hamlet is immersed in his melancholy, the grave-diggers pun and quip amidst the remains of human existence; while the Capulets are preparing for a feast upstairs, the servants are noisily moving joint-stools and clattering pots and pans below.

The Shakespearean pun has often come in for criticism; but the pun shows in verbal form how easily tragedy and comedy may slide into one another, how closely allied are laughter and tears; as such it is eminently suited to convey Shakespeare's concept of life as tragicomedy. However, this balance between tears and laughter must be handled very acutely by the playwright, and there are signs that Shakespare temporarily lost control of this balance in Act 4, scene iv of Romeo and Juliet.

The wind began to howl... Good luck this time, NOLA

2008-08-31T12:54:00.000-07:00

Crash on the levee, water's gonna overflow

One thing I neglected to mention in my previous blog entry about Modern Times is that its worldwide official release day was also the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina making landfall in Lousiana. Meanwhile, President Bush strummed a guitar [right] in California while New Orleans drowned, a lasting symbol of his presidency.

Perhaps the release date of Modern Times was a coincidence; but on the other hand, it does feature a song entitled The Levee's Gonna Break. This is the album's most transparent "borrowing", the song clearly deriving from When the Levee Breaks by Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie, which was about the Mississippi Flood of 1927, a calamity that inspired several blues songs. (Incidentally, Memphis Minnie's shout-out to Ma Rainey is the model for Dylan's name-dropping of Alicia Keys in Thunder on the Mountain; but Bob was sampling Memphis Minnie as far back as Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again, as the outtake of that song released on Bootleg Series 7: No Direction Home shows.) A youtube user has made a very appropriate video to the Kansas Joe/Memphis Minnie version.

The most famous version of the song is the one by Led Zeppelin on their 1971 album Led Zeppelin IV. Dylan's new version is a curate's egg; it quotes some lines directly from the original, and adds some of his own that might refer to either the 1927 or the 2005 disaster:

Everybody saying this is a day only the Lord could make

Some people on the road carrying everything that they own

But other lines are unrelated and could be sampled from a dozen blues songs or improvised randomly in a way reminiscent of 10,000 Men on Under the Red Sky. One line seems to allude sarcastically to the plight of the proletariat (in the manner of Joe Hill's "Pie in the Sky When You Die"), thus harking back to Workingman's Blues #2:

Few more years of hard work, then there'll be a 1,000 years of happiness

But the previous lines incongruously refer to Carl Perkin's rockabilly classic "Put Your Cat Clothes On", cat clothes of course being what hepcats (guys) and kittens (chicks) wear; the juxtaposition with the more formal-sounding "evening dress" is amusing.

Here's a fine live version of Dylan's version of the song, from Chatillon, Italy 18th June this year:
It's noticeable how much stronger the song has become in live performance this year.

(I found a youtube clip of this performance, but it's only one minute long.)

How typical that Dylan's new title for the song should use his own favourite tense, the immediate future ("gonna"), which he uses so much (particularly in the Basement Tapes era) that it might well be called the Bob Dylan tense.

An early song that uses this tense is A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall. On his visit to the city in 2003, Bob Dylan performed an inspired version of this anthemic song, almost as though he knew what was in store for the city (so it seems with hindsight, which can make a prophecy out of the slightest coincidence). Here is that performance.

They're trying to wash us away

A more recent song about the 1927 flood became suddenly topical in 2005 because of the inevitable parallels between President Coolidge's racist indifference to the plight of Lousiana flood victims and the criminal negligence of the Bush administration. The original version of Randy Newman's Louisiana 1927 is on his 1974 album Good Old Boys, perhaps Newman's masterpiece and an essential album in anybody's record collection. Here is Randy singing it at a benefit for the victims of Hurricane Katrina:

Incidentally, I am relieved, if not surprised, that Randy sticks to his original lyrics and uses the phrase "this poor crackers land." The contemptuous term "crackers" is similar to the more recent "poor white trash", and nails Coolidge's attitude to the flood victims exactly. Other versions of the song, such as Aaron Neville's, for reasons of misguided political correctness substitute a more neutral term ("farmers") that softens the original song's condemnation of Coolidge.

They say prayer has the power to help (Ain't Talkin')

As I write, people are being evacuated from New Orleans in preparation for the landfall of Hurricane Gustav, expected in the early hours of Monday morning. It is sincerely to be hoped that the city rides out this new storm and the levees hold firm this time. Of all the cities in America, New Orleans is the one I'd most like to visit, because of the richness of its musical heritage, the fame of its cuisine, and the celebrated conviviality of its people. Alas, I do not share Dylan's belief in the power of prayer, but my thoughts are with NOLA right now. If I were to frame a prayer, it might be like Lear's in the storm:

Poor naked wretches, wheresoe'er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop'd and window'd raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.

'Modern Times' is two years old today

2008-08-29T07:24:00.000-07:00

Bob Dylan's 32nd studio album was released 29th August, 2006. It was greeted with almost universal critical praise, but how does it hold up two years later? And how have the individual songs fared in live performance?

Modern Times was released at the high point of a tide of critical praise that had been rising ever since Bob's brush with death in 1997 reminded critics, many of whom had been bashing Dylan's work since as far back as the release of Renaldo & Clara, that Dylan would not be always there for them to take for granted, and that we ought to celebrate his achievements while we still have him. With the subsequent release of the Grammy-winning Time Out of Mind there began a period in which Dylan's critical stock rose so high that nowadays he is in receipt of praise that is almost as undiscriminating as the critical brickbats levelled at him in the eighties and early nineties. One of the few dissenting voices in the general chorus of praise for Modern Times, Alex Petridis in The Guardian, wrote waspishly: "It's hard to hear the music of Modern Times over the inevitable standing ovation and the thuds of middle-aged critics swooning in awe."

Two years later it is even more apparent that Petridis has a point. A solid achievement, Modern Times must be counted a relative disappointment compared to its illustrious predecessor "Love and Theft", Dylan's finest album since Blood on the Tracks and Desire in the mid-seventies. The quality that "Love and Theft" had in abundance was Dionysian energy: so welcome after the ennui and existential angst that had marked all Dylan's work since Infidels. Indeed, this ennervating ennui really begins with Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight on the album just mentioned:

I wish I'd been a doctor
Maybe I'd have save some lives that have been lost
Maybe I'd have done some good in the world
'Stead of burning every bridge I've crossed.

Fine lines, undoubtedly, but a Dylan who looks back, and especially one who looks back with such despair and disappointment, is an unrecognizable shell of the energetic, questing, Dionysian figure of his best work. By contrast on Blood on the Tracks the singer plumbs the depths of despair, but drags from it the Lear-like rage of Idiot Wind and with Buckets of Rain, learns Lear's lesson of Stoic patience also.

This existential ennui came in Dylan's late middle age at the end of a period of great creative achievement from 1974 through 1983, and from there on becomes the dominant note of his work; think of songs like When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky and Dark Eyes on Empire Burlesque and What Good Am I? , What Is It You Wanted?, and Shooting Star on Oh Mercy, in which Bob basically repeats the same mantra over and over: he knows no answers, he has no hope, he lives companionless in a world apart where "life and death are memorized." All these negative feelings reach their peak of artistic expression on Time Out of Mind, which contains what may be the most negative, nihilist line in his entire output:

Well my sense of humanity has gone down the drain
Behind every beautiful thing there's been some kind of pain
She wrote me a letter and she wrote it so kind
She put down in writing what was in her mind
I just don't see why I should even care
It's not dark yet, but it's getting there

When I first heard the line I've marked in bold, I found it so upsetting and depressing that it took me a long time to appreciate the real artistic achievement of Time Out of Mind, which is to state in the starkest form yet the existential ennui that had been overpowering Dylan's work since the mid-eighties. In that sense, it performs the same function as did Watching the River Flow, which faced up to the loss of his muse in the midst of his domestic content with its disarming opening line: "What's the matter with me? I don't have much to say." A Dylan who doesn't care, who is indifferent to love and desire, and who relies on negativity to pull him through is not the Dylan who once declared "this music that I’ve always played is a healing kind of music" and who wrote

Desire... never fearful
Finally faithful
It will guide me well
across all bridges
inside all tunnels
never fallin’.

A spiritual sickness hangs over Time Out of Mind from its opening lines, and it is only reinforced by the album's grim focus on physical decay: scars that won't heal, flesh falling off the singer's face, every nerve so vacant and numb. When he sings "But my heart just won't give in", you get the sense that he only wishes it would. Highlands, which does have its moments of humour and relief, nevertheless leaves us with a portrait of the singer as an old man shuffling along the street, talking to himself, and envying the younger people from whose unselfconscious joys and laughter he is forever banished:

I see people in the park forgetting their troubles and woes
They're drinking and dancing, wearing bright colored clothes
All the young men with their young women looking so good
Well, I'd trade places with any of them
In a minute, if I could

So in the 14 years since Don't Fall Apart on Me Tonight, Dylan has gone precisely nowhere: still wishing he were living someone else's life, looking back with regret and despair.

The achievement of Time Out of Mind, as heretofore stated, is to state these negative feelings in unpredecentedly stark terms. But the album marks a dead end: he cannot go forward artistically by simply restating over and over these feelings of existential isolation, of negativity and regret.

That is why "Love and Theft" was such a spectacular achievement. It has an energy and vitality not heard in any Dylan song probably since Jokerman and the brilliant, underrated Tell Me in the Infidels sessions. Gone is the companionless, misanthropic singer of Dark Eyes, Not Dark Yet, and Highlands; the singer on this album shows himself still receptive to feelings of love, friendship, and gratitude:

Well my ship's been split to splinters and it's sinking fast
I'm drownin' in the poison, got no future, got no past
But my heart is not weary, it's light and it's free
I've got nothin' but affection for all those who've sailed with me

(Of course, these lines are from Mississippi, which was written for the Time Out of Mind album; and that album's atmosphere of bleak misanthropy and spiritual ennui would have been considerably relieved by that song's inclusion, as Dylan intended. Unfortunately, he and producer Daniel Lanois could not see eye to eye on the song's production, and so the song was dropped from the album. The original recording of Mississippi is to appear on the forthcoming Bootleg Series collection of outtakes, Tell Tale Signs.)

Best of all, perhaps, is the brilliant jump blues Summer Days, a song that could not have appeared on Time Out of Mind. In contrast to the despairing resignation of Not Dark Yet, which dolefully accepted that "it's not dark yet, but it's getting there", the singer of Summer Days reminds us of Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night":

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

But rather than raging against the dying of the light, the singer of Summer Days dances against it, leaping on the table to propose a toast to the King, and declaring that though summer days and nights are gone, that doesn't mean that there is no more fun to be had. The Dionysian energy of this singer is more like the Dylan we know of old, one busy being born rather than busy dying.

The energy, high spirits, and perhaps most welcome of all, the humour of "Love and Theft" made it Dylan's finest album for over 20 years. It sparkles with wit, and contains more quotable lines than any album since Street-Legal. It was perhaps too much to hope that Modern Times could equal this standard. But refreshingly, there is no relapse into the doldrums of most of Dylan's post-Infidels output. Most welcome is the extension of Dylan's musical palate beyond his usual reliance on blues and ballad forms, although there are some disappointingly generic blues shuffles on this album also (a couple of which border on musical plagiarism). Not since the underrated Shot of Love has Dylan dipped so much into the rich waters of American popular music. A particular source is pre-rock pop of the twenties to the fifties. Bing Crosby is a particularly strong influence; "When the Deal Goes Down" is musically a chord-by-chord recreation of Bing's "Where the Blue of the Night Meets the Gold of the Day" and "Beyond the Horizon" lifts the tune of "Red Sails in the Sunset." Moreover, Bing's version of "Brother, Can you Spare A Dime?" (played by Bob on the Theme Time Radio Hour show "Rich Man, Poor Man") hangs over Workingman Blues #2. How much love and how much theft lies in all these borrowings has been furiously debated.

One of the most pleasing aspects of "Love and Theft" was its cheerful sexuality, as in the artful suggestion of waning potency in Summer Days:

My dogs are barking, there must be someone around
My dogs are barking, there must be someone around
I got my hammer ringin', pretty baby, but the nails ain't goin' down

or this saucy invitation in High Water (for Charley Patton):

Got a cravin' love for blazing speed
Got a hopped up Mustang Ford
Jump into the wagon, love, throw your panties overboard

And best of all, this allusive third-person reference:

Last night 'cross the alley there was a pounding on the walls
It must have been Don Pasquale makin' a two a.m. booty call

Don Pasquale is the eponymous character in Donizetti's opera buffa, based on the commedia dell'arte archetype of the vain and foolish old man who tries to thwart the young heroine's love for the hero by marrying her himself. With a touch of comic genius Dylan has this stock character paying a "2 a.m. booty call"; and the pounding on the walls suggests that this Don Pasquale is no impotent figure of fun, but a virile figure capable of satisfying his younger lover.

By contrast, the sexuality on Modern Times comes over as idle boasting or even slightly creepy, as in the shout out to Alicia Keys in Thunder on the Mountain and in the unpleasantly sexist line "I want some real good woman to do just what I say" in the same song, in which the singer studies Ovid's Art of Love and proclaims "here's hot stuff here and it's everywhere I go." Unlike Don Pasquale who is getting on with it, paying his booty call, the singer of Thunder on the Mountain is just beating on his trumpet, or rather blowing his trombone (a rather obvious sexual metaphor).

Compare also the confident strut of Cry A While on "Love and Theft":

Well, there's preachers in the pulpits and babies in the cribs
I'm longin' for that sweet fat that sticks to your ribs
I'm gonna buy me a barrel of whiskey - I'll die before I turn senile

and the same song's earlier line about feeling like a fighting rooster with the much less convincing boast in Spirit on the Water:

You think I'm over the hill
You think I'm past my prime
Let me see what you got
We can have a whoppin' good time

That corny and dated phrase "whoppin' good time" is the antithesis of Don Pasquale's ultra-hip "booty call" and rather deflates the intended boast. Rather than as the still virile aging stud that the singer intends to present himself as, he comes over more like a paunchy dad trying to dance at his daughter's wedding reception.

Dylan does improve this verse considerably in concert by singing the first two lines as questions, with an implied "Oh yeah?!", invariably getting a reaction from the audience. And this viagra-induced boasting is at least an improvement on the indifference to desire manifest on Time Out of Mind.

Another weakness of Modern Times compared to its predecessor is its rather precious and somewhat stilted lyricism that at times borders on Victorian pastiche, especially in the parlour ballad When the Deal Goes Down and Spirit on the Water. This may be due to Dylan's falling under the spell of the Civil War poet Henry Timrod (reflected in several borrowings from the earlier poet's work). Compare the freshness of these lines from Moonlight:

The clouds are turnin' crimson
The leaves fall from the limbs an'
The branches cast their shadows over stone
Won't you meet me out in the moonlight alone?

The boulevards of cypress trees
The masquerades of birds and bees
The petals, pink and white, the wind has blown
Won't you meet me out in the moonlight alone?

The trailing moss and mystic glow
Purple blossoms soft as snow
My tears keep flowing to the sea
Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief
It takes a thief to catch a thief
For whom does the bell toll for, love? It tolls for you and me

where the self-conscious poeticism is relieved by Dylan's familiar tricksy rhyming ("crimson", "limbs an'") and the admixture of nursery rhyme and familiar quotation; with

I picked up a rose and it poked through my clothes
I followed the winding stream
I heard the deafening noise, I felt transient joys
I know they're not what they seem
In this earthly domain, full of disappointment and pain
You'll never see me frown
I owe my heart to you, and that's sayin' it true
And I'll be with you when the deal goes down

which undoubtedly have a certain charm, but border on pastiche.

Against this, Modern Times has strengths of his own. It is much better sung than its predecessor (though the musicianship is not of a similarly high standard), and its three best songs are outstanding. The first, Workingman Blues #2, is the closest the album gets to evoking the spirit of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times. The
song features some of the strongest, most evocative writing of the album, for instance, in this reminder that all of us, rich or poor, walk in the valley of the shadow of death:

The opening lines seem to have an extra topical relevance as the world's economy goes into recession:

There's an evenin' haze settlin' over the town
Starlight by the edge of the creek
The buyin' power of the proletariat's gone down
Money's gettin' shallow and weak
The place I love best is a sweet memory
It's a new path that we trod
They say low wages are a reality
If we want to compete abroad

However, this is no rewrite of North Country Blues or Hollis Brown. Its narrative element is non-linear and its protagonist's situation more complex; whoever the singer is supposed to be, he is hardly the typical working man. Dylan is unlikely to usurp Springsteen's status as the poet laureate of the blue collar worker. It's a complex song full of strong images, memorable lines, and with a rousing chorus.

Even more impressive is Nettie Moore, one of Dylan's great ballads, and a song that he has invariably interprets powerfully in concert. A notable feature of the song, despite its folk ballad form, is its saturation in the language of the blues. The opening line quotes the old song "Lost John":

Lost John standin' by the railroad track
Waitin' for the freight train to come back

while later lines evoke the famous story of Frankie and Albert. The crossroads where Robert Johnson is said to have sold his soul to the devil is also evoked. As with many of Dylan's recent songs, it is difficult to say what this collage of recollected and original lines means, but the song is undoubtedly highly evocative.

And finally, the album's closer Ain't Talkin', a mysterious and somewhat sinister epic that returns us to some extent to the atmosphere of Time Out of Mind. The claim that Modern Times was the final album of a trilogy stemmed from his record label rather than the artist himself; in fact, Dylan has specifically denied it. Nevertheless, this dark tale of a man walking, walking, walking, until he reaches the edge of the world (which he appears to doubt is round as men say) brings us full circle to the earlier album, which opens with the words "I'm walking..." and thereafter uses the image of the singer walking "a thousand miles from home" (or rather a million miles) repeatedly as a symbol of his isolation from society. The song begins with a reminiscence of the story of Mary Magdalene mistaking the risen Christ for the gardener of the grounds; but this "mystic" garden is a place of violent menace where "wounded" flowers hang from the vine and the singer is struck from behind. The singer himself threatens to slaughter his enemies if he ever catches them sleeping. He is not alone (which separates him from the isolated figure of TOOM, who seems more of an autobiographical than the mysterious narrator of "Ain't Talkin'), but accompanied by a band of brothers who "share my code", a faith that's long been abandoned, as he walks through a world of hostile infidels and "cities of the plague". The song raises more questions than it answers, and when the narrator steps off the end of the world in the song's final lines, we still have no idea who he is supposed to represent. Several lines in the grim discursive narrative are borrowed from Ovid's self-pitying letters from his exile on the Black Sea, the Tristia, but the story seems closer to Homeric epic than classical elegy. Although it raises more questions than it answers, as a performance it is gripping, full of menace, horror, and intensity.

I leave you with videos of these three songs, each of them a classic of the modern Dylan.

Workingman Blues #2 was a song Bob found difficult to make effective in its first year of live performance. It wasn't until the Australian tour of 2007 that the song really came into its own. It is now a regular concert standout. The following video is identified only as "live 2008"; great sound, though poor video.

Here's a fine Nettie Moore from 2006:

And here's my favourite performance of Ain't Talkin' (Melbourne, Australia 19th August, 2007):

Mystery early Dylan performance (contains mp3s)

2008-08-17T23:10:00.001-07:00

Last October BBC radio broadcast "Dream Dylan Live", a show featuring 10 live performances from across the years cobbled together into a "virtual live show."

In truth, this would have been few people's "dream" concert in the sense of the ideal live Bob Dylan show. On the other hand, the show accurately conveyed the impression of "a series of dreams"— random and unconnected performances each making a strong, vivid impression, but offering no coherent raison d'être.

Only two tracks were unknown to collectors. I may have been the first, on a Dylan internet forum at least, to suggest that Blowin' in the Wind and Only A Pawn in Their Game from this programme could have been from Dylan's Carnegie Hall concert of 23th October, 1963.

This suggestion was pure conjecture, no more than educated guess on my part, based purely on the fact that the 1963 Town Hall and Carnegie Hall concerts are known to have been recorded by Columbia; a live album culled from the two shows was prepared for release in 1964, and then aborted, for reasons that remain unclear.

Both 'Blowin' in the Wind' and 'Only A Pawn in Their Game' were performed at the Carnegie Hall concert. In 2005, Sony-Columbia released two songs from the Carnegie show on Bootleg Series 7: No Direction Home, and a further six songs on a bonus disc available to purchasers of the Bootleg Series CDs and the Bob Dylan Scrapbook. So it seemed natural to deduce that the two songs donated to the BBC for 'Dream Dylan Live' were among those considered but rejected for release in 2005. (Why not just release the whole concert already? It's a far better performance than the 1964 Halloween Concert released as Bootleg Series Vol.6.)

To my consternation, my conjecture was immediately circulated as fact. Apparently the rest of the Dylan community were thinking on the same lines as I. Nevertheless, in the world of Dylan collccting, things have rarely been as they have seemed. A few months ago, the bootleg label Hollow Horn finally ended Columbia's 45-year striptease with regard to this show (unveiling a track or two every so many years) and released this historic show in its entirety, and in stunning quality. This followed the final release of the even more historically important Town Hall concert a few months earlier.

I've been much too busy to compare the performances of Blowin' and Pawn on the Hollow Horn release with the Dream Dylan Live performances until now. In fact, I just assumed that my initial guess was right.

Well guess what—I was only 50% on target! The DDL Blowin' in the Wind is indeed the Carnegie Hall one. There are at least two fairly conclusive fingerprints that establish this identification. In the first place, Bob sings "How many times can a man turn his back" rather than the more usual "turn his head." And he adds a word in another line: "How many times must a man look up/Before he can really see the sky..."

However, "Only A Pawn in Their Game" is NOT the same performance! This is pretty obvious, because in the Dream Dylan Live performance, after the lines "The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid/And the marshals and cops get the same" Bob forgets the lyrics and sings a garbled version of the rest of the verse!

So we have a bit of a mystery. This is quite clearly a 1963/4 performance, but does not correspond to any known performance. It's not the Greenwood, Mississippi version (the live debut), the Lincoln Memorial version, or the version that was performed live on WNET 30 July, 1963. Nor is it the version from Philadelphia, 28th Sept, 1964. My best guess is that it could be from one of the Newport Folk Festival concerts/workshops. But it's definitely not the 26th July evening performance, which was released last year on The Other Side of the Mirror. So the question remains: what other show from this period was recorded by Bob's record company? I am thinking Royal Festival Hall, London 17th May, 1964, two tracks from which emerged on the "Fantasy Acetate" a few years ago. But for goodness sake, don't quote me on it this time! (It still sounds more like a '63 performance to me, and I'm sticking with my guess of an unchronicled Newport performance...)

Here are mp3s of the two songs discussed above.

Blowin' in the Wind - from 'Dream Dylan Live'

Blowin' in the Wind - from Carnegie Hall (raw files from which Hollow Horn bootleg was compiled)

If I am right, the above two tracks are the same (except that the second has Dylan's highly amusing anecdote as an introduction).

Only A Pawn in Their Game - from 'Dream Dylan Live'

Only A Pawn in Their Game - (raw files from which Hollow Horn bootleg was compiled)

It should be obvious that the above two versions of the same song are different performances. Goodness knows why Bob's people decided to give the BBC a flawed performance when they had the faultless Carnegie Hall one....

Note: mp3s on this blog have each been downloaded over 200 times; no one has yet said thank-you. In lieu of thanks, I would be grateful if a few of you could click on the Google ads on this page. I earn a few cents per click, which enables me to stay on line! Thank you in advance!

I shall be posting mp3s of the other unofficially released Carnegie Hall tracks in due course.

Joan Baez: Obama Inspires Me

2008-07-30T02:21:00.000-07:00

The following is a translation of an article by Joan Baez published in the French newspaper Le Monde 26th July, 2008 under the rubric "I Have A Dream."

Much as I love and respect Joan, I can't help having two misgivings about this piece:

1) I thought the whole point of racial equality is that it shouldn't matter what colour your skin is. Obama's major appeal to Joan seems to be that he's black.

2) Is she serious about Obama preaching non-violence and pacifism?! This is a guy who has already threatened to invade a U.S. ally—Pakistan—and has made hawkish noises on Iran etc.

Joan Baez: “I dream that Obama as president will reunite and unify a country that has been divided for too long"

Something unheard of is happening in America. Something bright that I never could have imagined happening in the darkness and torpor that has seized the country for the past seven years. Something moving, motivating, and inspiring. Something that, in the ruins of the current political reality, embodies hope. I have always refused until now to engage in so-called party politics. I have never wanted, despite numerous requests, to lend my support to election candidates at any level. But what is happening today is too extraordinary for me not to change my attitude. 1) Barack Obama is a candidate for the White House. 2) Masses of Americans are ready to accept a black President. That is the healthiest thing that has happened in this country for a long time.

I wrote a letter to Obama. And his reply made me very happy. It was in the style of Martin Luther King. With an expression of sincere faith in non-violence. After all, he has a picture of Gandhi in his office. Something is right, therefore, from that point of view… Indeed, Obama brings me closer to feeling a pride for this country that I've never felt before. When his wife Michelle evoked this unprecedented pride on the evening of a primary, she caused a storm.

But not being a candidate, I can assure you that yes, there would be pride in being – finally! — well represented in the world and knowing ourselves to be reliable and generous, capable of solidarity, and pacifistic… A new feeling for me, as someone who hates any idea of allegiance to a country—birth is such an accidental thing! —and who has never been able to salute the American flag, hand on heart, while reciting idiocies! Or any flag, for that matter!

I’ve always felt myself to be a citizen of the world, even if it means being misunderstood. I remember, for example, a protest march alongside Cesar Chavez and thousands of Mexican workers. “So do you feel a Latino,” the general asked me in the enthusiasm. “No more than I feel Scottish,” I replied.

Hard to describe my evolutionary journey. So many elements unite to make a person. My parents evidently played a big part. My father arrived from Mexico at the age of two; he was the son of a Methodist preacher who had chosen to live in the United States with the most disadvantaged in society. The idea of sharing is essential in our family. My father also decided to become a preacher, before becoming disappointed in the Church and turning toward mathematics and science. He became a physicist, a researcher, and opted for a teaching career rather than accept higher paid posts in the defence sector.

He was profoundly honest and grateful to the United States, which had given him his chance, and it was only at this death that I discovered the importance of his work, notably the invention of the X-ray microscope. My mother, who is now 95, was born in Scotland, but grew up in the United States with her father, who was also a preacher. She never had a particular devotion to America, and it’s from her, I believe, that I inherited a rebel temperament.

When I was eight years old, my parents became quakers. My sisters and I hated at the time the austere and silent Sunday morning assemblies. But their way of according so much value to human life and placing good above nations and territories influenced me greatly. It was in these circles that I discovered that alternatives to violence existed, both at the personal and the political level. And it’s basically around this idea that I built my life.

We travelled a lot as a family. When I was 10-11, we even saw Baghdad; it was like being on another planet. Iraq, it was said, was 50 years behind the other countries of the region and people lived in shocking poverty. The streets were full of beggars, cripples, and children rummaging in dustbins. And I felt a spontaneous solidarity, feeling infinitely closer to them than to the Westerners who frequented the trendy British club. That’s where my passion for social justice was born. It was also there that Mom made me read The Journal of Anne Frank, which had a big impact on my life. I even think it was the trigger for my concern for other people.

My dark Mexican skin perhaps heightened my awareness, in adolescence, of racial discrimination. But there were discussion workshops organized for the benefit of young quakers that kindled my interest in the problems of the world. It was during one of these seminars near Carmel that I was literally bowled over by a 27-year-old black preacher from Alabama, who spoke to us about justice and suffering, about battles to be fought with the weapons of love and non-violent revolution. His name was Martin Luther King, and his words had so much effect on me that I trembled with excitement and fear at the same time. He gave form and words to my passionate but imprecise beliefs. And I felt that there was a path there in which I would do something. Sing, of course, since I have this gift. But sing while expressing something.

I saw King several times again. He had an amazing coolness and sense of humour given the weight on his shoulders. I sang "We Shall Overcome" on that famous 28th August, 1963 in Washington on the stage where he gave his “I have a dream” speech before 350,000 people.

I think Bob Dylan was there too.

I marched at his [King's] side in Grenada and in Mississippi at the head of a procession of black children who were being refused access to a white college. And in 1967 he came to visit me when I had been jailed, for the first time, for protesting against the mobilization for the war in Vietnam.

It was an era of struggle, of faith, of engagement. There were debates, boycotts, and demonstrations. For civil rights, against inequality and conscription. And against the war in Vietnam, of course, for which I refused to pay my share of military tax. I set up an institution for the study of non-violence in California. I also went to the war zones. My whole life has been determined by this permanent mobilization—concerts, protests, travelling—for a multitude of causes: the mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina, Andrey Sakharov, Amnesty International, Chilean and Greek political prisoners, the banning of torture, the abolition of the death penalty...

It seems to me, moreover, that not enough credit is given to all these militants for non-violence for the results achieved. There are those who put an end to the war in Vietnam. The president didn’t want it! The marches, chants, petitions, and all the protest action paid off! And they still do! What’s more, it was this spirit, this cohesion, this enthusiasm that was missing in the eighties and nineties, which were marked by people turning in on themselves and by a total rejection of the idea of self-sacrifice. The shock of 11 September, 2001 and the lamentable, criminal response of the American government might have provoked a somersault. But Bush exploited and maintained the fear. Everyone felt obliged to vie with one another in patriotism so as not to arouse distrust and to keep their jobs. Even the media! What a disaster!

And now Obama has appeared. And millions of Americans who have till now been disillusioned and excluded once again want to act. We are seeing crowds of young blacks travel for the first time in their lives to listen to a candidate and to vote. I’ve been told that crime has fallen in some areas and the ghettos are calmer. And Gabriel, my 38-year-old son, who has never been interested in politics, is organizing a concert in his town with his musician friends to collect funds for Obama's campaign. And here am I, who was not so long ago so skeptical about the usefulness of voting, starting to dream.

I dream that Obama as president will reunite and unify a country that has been divided for too long. I dream that he will bring decency and integrity to the troubled waters of Washington. I dream that he will raise the bar on what is morally and legally acceptable in a democracy (neither torture nor the death penalty) and that he will call on the rich to share their wealth. I dream that he will resist the call for war and seek dialog with opposing parties. I am not naïve, I know that the presidency is a dangerous, exposed post, not favourable to the blossoming of a pacifist. But I find this man inspiring.

Bargain of the week

2008-07-28T06:44:00.001-07:00

Well, when recession bites, you can count on your friendly neighbourhood Sainsbury supermarket to ease the pain. If the 1p reduction in the price of medium-sized pork pies wasn't generous enough, the retailer also offers this unbeatable bargain for Cider drinkers (I stole the price tag off the shelf this morning):

Loudon Wainwright III Part 5: I'm Alright

2008-07-26T02:09:00.000-07:00

Now we come to one of the best records of Loudon's career, perhaps his second-best of the eighties. It was recorded two years after Fame and Wealth, once again on the small folk label Rounder Records. I'm Alright was recorded in London, England, and Loudon himself moved there around this time (the song "Cardboard Boxes" is about moving house, as it happens).

Loudon had produced Fame and Wealth himself, but perhaps realizing that the sound of that album wasn't too great, he invited Richard Thompson on board again, this time as producer as well as session man. The result is a much cleaner sound, though equally stripped down. (Ironically, Thompson's own albums at this time suffered from misguided attempts by other producers to give them an eighties sheen; he might have been better off producing his own records.) As was noticeable with Fame and Wealth, Loudon has given up attempts to be a rocker, having parodied his efforts in "Watch Me Rock, I'm Over Thirty" (on Final Exam, as we saw.)

The opening song of I'm Alright is in fact the lonely acoustic troubador song par excellence. It is ironic, then, that many people today probably know it best in a lush band arrangement with harmony vocals. Yes, it's One Man Guy, the song Rufus appropriated from his Dad and now everyone thinks is his own.

I'm not denying that Rufus's version is sweet on the ear, or that there isn't a curious Oedipal thing going on, with Rufus apparently going against the grain of the lyric by suggesting that whatever Loudon may be, he, Rufus, is not a miserable, selfish loner. That, at least is the impression given by his use of Richard's son Teddy and his own sister Martha on vocal harmonies. How can he be a one-man guy with his best mate and loving sis behind him?

Thus Rufus's version, however sweet, doesn't interpret the lyrics so much as reject their message. This is another of Loudon's loner songs, simultaneously celebrating and recoiling from his motel room existence and his alley cat ways (check out "Motel Blues", "Ingenue", and several others). The song confesses the selfishness of this kind of existence, while clinging to it, even revelling in it. It suggests that the only thing we can depend on and trust is ourselves:

these three cubic feet of bone and blood and meat are all I love and know

Perhaps no one since Philip Larkin has been this honest about the selfish pleasures of the single life.

Thus as a son's gift to a father, Rufus's version is ambiguous, to say the least. Nevertheless, royalties on "One Man Guy" must represent one of Loudon's biggest ever pay days (after "Dead Skunk" and Johnny Cash's cover of "The Man Who Could Not Cry").

The song is written to be sung live at one of Loudon's endless solo shows:

People will know when they come to the show
What kind of a guy I am
They'll understand what I stand for
And what I just can't stand

Great word play, that! And a perfect concert-opener.

Here you can see Loudon perform the song:

And here is Rufus's very different interpretation:

The next song, Lost Love, is a breakup song without an apparent personal angle, it being highly stylized in the manner of a Noel Coward song or something from that era. I'm very fond of it, however untypical of Loudon it may be. There is some great wordplay again.

I've noticed that you never call me "darling", darling
I understand the reason wh-hy-hy-hy
There is no reason why you should call me "darling", darling
Leave love alone and let it die.

The middle part is more like the Loudon we know and are distinctly ambivalent about, however (see "Mr. Guilty" and the later "So Damn Happy"):

I'm not completely sure I'm sorry, darling
When I get angry, then I'm glad
I'M HAPPY THAT IT'S FINALLY OVER
[lapsing back into Noel Coward mode) But when I'm not glad, I'm sad.

As with his country pastiches on Final Exam you wish Loudon would write a little more in this jazz-lounge vein.

Then we have the blues parody, I'm Alright, the title track. Loudon introduces it in concert as the "happy blues." Those old black guys certainly make you think the bottom of their world has fallen out now that their baby darn left them, but a middle class white guy like Loudon can't be that unselfconsciously solipsistic, so on the whole you believe him when he says he's "all right without you", though there may be an element of protesting too much. The performance of the song below is prefaced by an interview with Loudon in which he explains that the album was originally going to be called One Man Guy, but his agent persuaded him that the record-buying public would think he was gay, so he changed it... The performance is a good example of the visual and physical element of Loudon as a performer: lots of spastic gestures and weird facial contortions.

In another interview excerpt shown after the performance of the song in the above video, Loudon says that he was originally drawn to the idea of making it clear that the singer is not "all right" after all; but in the end he was drawn to the comedy ending with the dental floss....

After those thematically linked songs comes a Loudon song about someone else (notice how these are becoming more infrequent as we go on? Not John is about the death of John Lennon five years earlier. It's a sincere tribute, though Loudon cannot resist an irreverent pun:

John Lennon and his wife Yoko - Oh No

youttube offers us a video montage together with the album performance of this song:

Incidentally, loser assassin Michael David Chapman may have been stalking a different victim 12 months earlier:

Cardboard Boxes is about moving house, as already stated, a nice semi-acoustic number with some great drumming.

Screaming Issue is a song written to Loudon's daughter by the singer Suzzy Roche (member of the family vocal group The Roches), who was born (judging by the song's lyrics) the previous Christmas. There would be another daughter (Lexie Kelly) by another woman later, so that it is sometimes difficult to be sure who these Wainwrights are singing about (Rufus has said that "Little Sister" is not about Martha, so is it about Lucy or Lexie?) At least there is no mistaking for whom this song is intended as Loudon mentions Lucy by name. The title puns, of course, on two senses of "issue." Delicate and beautiful.

Next we have one of Loudon's edgy funny songs, about the questions journalists always ask anyone who still has the temerity to outstay their welcome in the music business: How Old Are You?

The questions range from the nasty and impertinent:

How come you don't try to write a novel?
How come you don't try to write a play?
Isn't it time you died or retired?
Why the hell won't you just go away?
How old are you, are you crazy?
How old are you, are you really a drunk?
Are you bitter, have you grown lazy?
Were you embarrassed about "Dead Skunk"?

to ones that Loudon probably wonders about himself:

How come you didn't get big like Bob Dylan?
How come you didn't get big like Springsteen?
Were you unable or were you unwilling?
Tell us the truth about it, come on, come clean!

(Nice guitar by Richard Thompson, by the way!)

Then there is the utterly charming Animal Song, about the noises that animals make. A children's song. I don't trust the performer who never records at least one of those. Here's Loudon performing the song (followed by 'Five Years Old) live in 1987:

Out of This World is a hopeful song looking forward to the next life. Daddy Take A Nap is a slightly annoying brass band stomp with mildly amusing lyrics written from a child's point of view. Ready or Not (So Ripe) is an optimistic sounding song I've never got my head around.

The album closes quietly with Career Moves, which looks back over Loudon's career in the music business and as an entertainer with a lot of quiet pride:

For 20 odd years I have strummed on guitars
5,000 lost flat picks, four fingertip scars
I must have broken a million g strings
Picking and strumming, and playing these things
Banging and tunin', and playing these things.

And it's been 16 years now that I've written songs
Over a 100 and still growing strong
About drinking and hockey and flying above
Again and again about unhappy love
Over and over, unhappy love.

And it's music for money, but I'll do it for fun
Oh, I know how to do it, it's easily done
To stand on a stage doesn't make me afraid
I'm comfortable up there, it's gotten me laid
It always amazes me when I get paid.

So here am I doing all that I can do
You're paying, I'm playing, I'm grateful to you
Indoors and outdoors, at home and abroad
I sing these songs and you people applaud.
You haven't changed much, you still applaud.

With that obvious cue to the audience in the last line, it will be seen that the album is framed by two songs that seem written to order for Loudon's live shows. Moreover, "Career Moves" is Loudon's answer to some of the questions the hostile journalists ask in How Old Are You?, in particular, why he still sings and why he won't quit the business.

Here's Loudon singing "Career Moves" live on British TV in 1993:

You'll have to supply the applause yourself on cue!

I'm Alright was nominated for a grammy. It goes without saying that it didn't win...

Note: Scandalously, this fine album appears at time of writing to be out of print, with Amazon.com asking nearly $50.00 for a second-hand copy! Ordinarily I would not recommend that anyone download an mp3 copy of the album (that's against the whole ethos of these threads, which aim to present the artistic integrity of the LP/CD medium), but should you wish to support the artist, you can do so here: http://www.amazon.com/Im-Alright/dp/B000UDQ5VK/ref=dmusic_cd_album

Euro 2008: Russia sunk by Villa hat-trick

2008-06-13T04:49:00.000-07:00

Russia's first effort in the European championship was a complete flop. In the match against Spain, Gus Hiddink's charges showed some fairly bold play before the break, but four times were caught in a counter-attack and lost (1:4). Our team's "gravedigger" was centre forward David Villa, who scored the first hat-trick of the championship.

It was as if four years had not passed. The same June heat, the same fire-breathing asphalt on the approach roads to the stadium. And once again Russia v Spain in the first Euro match for our team. Only then it was Faro, Portugal on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, while this time it was the Alpine city of Innsbruck. The white, blue, and red sea of Russian fans this time exceeded the 10,000 of 2004. Though this time UEFA had allocated them only 6,000 tickets per match in the group phase of the tournament.

What were they counting on, the one-half of our compatriots who came to Austria without any guarantee of getting into the stadium? Some of them reserved places in the bars of Innsbruck and Salzburg, resigning themselves from the outset to watching the match on the big screen. But many were prepared to pay any money just to support the team from the stands of the Tivoli-Neu arena. It was they who became the hunted targets of enterprising Austrians who were prepared to cede to them their coveted tickets. Not, of course, for free.

Surely the touts aren't already asking a thousand Euros a ticket?!", a fan wearing a Zenit [St. Petersburg football team] shirt asked Izvestiya's correspondent. I could console him only partly - on the day before touts wandered into the tiny resort of Leogang demanding "only" 400-500 Euros a ticket. However, judging by my interlocutor's wild eyes, it would scarcely have been possible to frighten him with any price. One way or another, when the teams came out onto the field, even a fleeting glance at the stands was sufficient to understand that the Russian fans in Tirol were not outnumbered by the Spanish contingent.

But 90 minuties before the match a thunderstorm broke out over Innsbruck, and almost at the same time the rain gushed down in torrents. Passions in the covered stands did not cool. On the other hand, the simulation of the circumstances with the Portugal sourroundings, where the same rivals had to play in fatiguing heat. Our team has changed out of recognition in the intervening four years. Among the players in yesterday's term only Dmitriy Sychev took part in the match in Faro, spending only 22 minutes on the field.

Our team's starting line-up was by and large put together by Gus Hiddink literally within the past three weeks. It was given its dress rehearsal was in the 2-1 victory over Serbia. Compared with that game, there were just two changes to Russia's team. The injured Pogrebnayk's place in the attack was taken by the "resurrected" Pavlyuchenko, while on the right wing Bystrov was replaced by the aforementioned Sychev.

The Russian grandstands had also prepared thoroughly for the game. During the performance of the national anthem, alongside portraits of the current team members appeared photographs of the national heroes who won the first European cup in 1960. For several minutes before the Austrian ref Konrad Plautz blew his whistle, a veritable landing party disembarked at Tivoli-Neu. A khaki-coloured helicopter landed in the grassplot near the main stand, from which emerged Moscow Mayor Yuriy Luzhkov and his wife Yelena Barturina into the VIP stand.

The game had scarcely begun when our players had the Spanish sections of the crowd whistling in dissatisfaction. Our technical rivals for a long time could not get to the ball, so well did Huudink's charges control it. But the Spaniards did not need to manoeuvre much to open their account. The super-duo of Spanish forwards Torres and Villa scored a goal on the first counter-attack. Torres outmanoeuvred Kolodin, one of the central pillars of our rehashed defence, while Villa turned home his perfect pass.

No, our team didn't even think of giving up. Under the banner in the stands, "We need a goal!!!', it continued to besiege Casillas's goal-line. Before the break there was also Zyryanov's strike that hit the post, a dangerous free-kick earned by Zhirkov and taken by Pavlyuchenko, but... Yet another counter-attack by the Spanish caught the Russian team's defence by surprise. Iniesta wove a delicate pass between Anykov and Kolodin, and with a single touch Villa completed the double—0:2.

Thus the first half left an ambiguous impression. On the one hand, the Russian team gave not even a hint of being resigned to their fate or playing for a draw at most. On the other hand, in the first 45 minutes of yesterday's game the Spaniards scored twice as many goals against us as in the first 90 minutes in the previous European Championship.

After the break the game continued along roughly the same lines, the one difference being that the Russians' mistakes in defence were even cruder. And the Spanish did not fail to take advantage of them twice more; Pavlyuchenko managed only to score a consolation goal.

Translated from Izvestiya, 12th June, 2008 http://www.izvestia.ru/Russians/article3117286/

More on Bob Dylan in Russia (with mp3s)

2008-06-11T04:21:00.000-07:00

Left: Falconet's statue of Peter the Great, who built St. Petersburg as his "window on the West."

For the first time in 30 years I am able to combine my day job (as a translator of the Russian press) with one of my main hobbies (appreciation of the music of Bob Dylan). So to follow up on my blog the other day, in which I translated the review of a highly perceptive Russian beat fan, here is a look at what the Russian press had to say about Bob's recent concert in St. Petersburg.

Right: bootleg art by StewART.

It was Peter's city, or rather the great poem about it by Alexander Pushkin, "The Bronze Horseman", that inspired me to take up the learning of Russian 30 years ago. Peter built his city in spite of nature, at an enormous cost in human life, as his "window on the West" through which he hoped Western culture would pour, enabling him to rouse up Mother Russia from what he perceived as her oriental backwardness, symbolised in Falconet's statue (above left) by the snake beneath the feet of Peter's fiery steed as he rears it up before the abyss on its giant pedestal, the Thunderstone, sometimes said to be the largest stone ever moved by man. To this day "Peter", as the city was known to its habitants even in Soviet times when it was officially named Leninngrad, remains the most Western of Russian cities, and hence, as the Russian website fontaku.ru notes, much more suited to Bob Dylan than the "white stone city" (i..e. Moscow), where Bob performed three songs at an invitation-only poetry festival way back in 1985.

The Russian press is, as regards youth culture, like the British and American press of 40 years ago; it claims to speak for the fans, but rarely makes any attempt to canvass their opinion. Whereas the admirable beatgene stated quite clearly that she hadn't expected Bob to perform her favourite songs, Kommersant (one of the few bastions of independent journalism remaining in Putin's Russia) assumes that the fans had been expecting the most familiar Dylan songs, and that Bob was guilty of showing contempt for the St. Petersburg public by not performing them.

The setlist looked as if the the maestro had no idea of where he was playing, or before whom. Or else he sincerely and entirely didn't give a damn. Fans of Paul McCartney, for instance, have seen him perform twice already on the territory of the former USSR, and only now are able to permit themselves to timidly ask the idol to play at his concert in Kiev on 14th June one or two things apart from a gentlemanly selection of "greatest hits." From the point of view of world culture, Bob Dylan is a figure of equal weight, but he was performing here for the first time since 1985, for the first time since an unsuccessful performance before an ideologically irreproachable and absolutely indifferent audience at an evening of world poetry that was timed to coincide with the Festival of Young People and Students in Moscow. To all intents and purposes, the concert in the Ice Palace was his first proper performance in this country. And he comes onto the stage and sings the following collection of songs:

"Cat`s in the Well" from the 1990 album Under the Red Sky. "Don`t Think Twice, It`s All Right" and "Girl of the North Country" from The Freewheelin` Bob Dylan (1963). "Honest with Me" from "Love And Theft" (2001). And seven of the 10 songs on the 2006 album Modern Times.

No one expected Mr. Dylan to perform a programme consisting only of songs from his "best of" collections; clearly he is still promoting his universally very well received album "Modern Times". But take the 2007 three-CD collection "Dylan", a more thorough compilation than many "best of" CDs, based as it is not just on the sixties golden period. Of the songs enumerated above, only one is on this compilation—"Don't Think Twice, It's All Right." In other words, for his début in Russia, Mr. Dylan chose songs that aren't too well known anywhere in the world.

At least that was the concert blueprint by and large: to play the little-known and completely new. But he nevertheless did offer a few of his calling cards. "Just Like A Woman" and "Highway 61 Revisited" were there, and the final number was the song that comes to mind when you figure out how Bob Dylan should end his concerts—"Like A Rolling Stone. But if "Just Like A Woman" was performed with at least some kind of hint at the possibility of singing along with it, the two other hits were played as if deliberately without even the most minimal hook that an audience wishing to express their respect for a classic could latch on to.

This quality of "podpevayemost'" (literally 'being able to sing along with') appears important to Russian audiences: beatgene herself mentioned being surprised and disconcerted by its absence. Is this what one goes to rock concerts for in Russia? To sing along with the songs just as they are on your records (or illegal downloads, more likely) at home? At any rate, this is not a quality that many songs as performed on the Never Ending Tour, or at any other stage in Bob's career, have had. He is not interested in being "the legend", or in the Russian phrase, "a classic" demanding respect, but in recreating his songs according to his current whim. Nevertheless, as this is likely to be his one and only performance before a Russian paying audience, I can't help wishing that for once the old bastard had been willing to acknowledge where he was and meet the audience half way. Russians do have an almost religious reverence for poets and performers, and they do like to indulge this bardolatry wherever possible. Their troubled history of the Russian people has meant that artists and poets in Russia have always carried the burden that Bob shook off early on in his career; that of expressing the true thoughts and feelings of the people. But they revere the poet for his words, not for his fame or whatever goes on in his private life. Should Bob have forgotten the lyric sheets that of late have become a fixture on his keyboard, there is little doubt that the entire audience would have been able to prompt him, in thick Russian accents, of course, just as readily as they did me when, at some dinner party or other in Moscow 20 years ago, I attempted to recite a poem by Aleskandr Blok while fully loaded on bootleg vodka and forgot some of the words. Everyone in the room joined in reciting the long dead poet's words.

Just who was the audience for this particular show, apart from beatgene and her fellow beat fans, as we have seen? According to fontaku.ru it was

a curious symbiosis of members of the older generation and young people. There were hippies and kids in trendy gear. What didn't happen was any sense of a "crowd." It was perfectly obviously that each of the spectators had his own Dylan, his own history of relations with his songs, it was impossible to speak of any kind of mass concert ecstasy. The audience was predominantly male, and the women were from the intelligentsia category. There were no "dumb blondes." Many spectators, with serious-looking faces, whispered the words of the songs in English; there were quite a few foreigoners. You would thing that such a tedious concert would quickly become boring; after all, nothing was happening outwardly on state; but there was in both a musical and poetic sense. internal drama. The sound was not loud; it was even like chamber music; but the band played with impeccable style. And for a man of 67, Dylan sung very well: the timbre was clear, the voice strong, even, and far more powerful than on the records.

A rather tepid review; and yet, considered as just another show by the modern Bob Dylan, the St. Petersburg concert was actually pretty good, on the evidence of the already circulating recording by the ubiquitous taper who goes by the name of Bach (hence the inevitable "Bach in the USSR" jokes). As on the US and Canada leg of the tour, Bob is in very good voice, and the performances are anything but indifferent. The band is even coming to life a bit, with noticeably more dynamic solos by Denny Freeman. Although it would be stretching things to suggest that the setlist was in any way tailored toward the audience, it's possible to imagine that Girl of the North Country was chosen as a tip of the hat to the "Venice of the North", as the city of Peter the Great is often called, or even to the name of the venue itself. And Workingman Blues #2 would have struck a chord with many in a nation that has gone from a drab, but equitable socialism, to an unbridled form of capitalism in which the rich are very wealthy indeed, and the poor can barely make ends meet. The buying power of the proletariat has certainly declined since Soviet times (when there was nothing to buy, but all necessities were dirt cheap). Modern times in Russia are very hard for a large percentage of the population.

Nevertheless, Tangled Up in Blue was in the setlist as if to remind everyone that Russia was just "another joint" on Dylan's endless road (or it could be because it was one of the songs written under the influence of Dylan's Russian-born art teacher, the mysterious Norman Raeben; or even just because it is the only Dylan song that mentions revolution!). It's a shuffling, bluegrass-tinged version with some new, somewhat half-baked lines:

He drifted down to New Orleans where he was lucky enough to be employed
Three times on a sailing boat, three times it was destroyed

Ouch. Rather better are:

She was working in "the Tropicana"
I stopped there for a beer
I told her I was goin' on later (?)
She said, "I'm gonna stay right here."

Bob whips out the ol' harmonica before and after the last verse. Altogether a more enjoyable version than some of the breakneck versions of the recent past.

Other songs worth mentioning are Just Like A Woman, well sung with a lengthy harmonica intro; a smouldering rendition of It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) (Russians need no reminding that "propanda, all is phony"), with Dylan's keyboards maybe higher in the mix than usual; and a mesmerising Ain't Talkin'.

Here are some mp3s, with thanks to the aforementioned "Bach":

Girl From the North Country

Tangled Up in Blue

Just Like A Woman

It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

Workingman's Blues #2

Ain't Talkin'

One fan melts Bob's 'icy' heart in St Petersburg

2008-06-05T08:00:00.001-07:00

I've just been reading a fan review of Bob's first ever performance in Russia (barring an appearance at a Moscow poetry festival in July 1985 that was not open to the general public) on Tuesday night and did a little translation to keep my hand in.

[I'll skip the first few sentences; the writer of the review (who blogs on Live Journal under the name beatgene) is part of St. Petersburg's beat scene (Beatles and Kinks fans), and the first couple of sentences are about her arriving at Ledovyy (the Ice Palace) well before the start of the show and meeting up with other people she knew from her Beatles forum. She sounds a really sweet girl; a shame Bob couldn't have been be a bit more responsive to his Russian fans.]

They were allowed in at 7pm: "I was in the second row of the orchestra stalls, pretty cool. But this is where the bewilderment started—the crowd didn't particularly increase. That is to say, there were around 150 of us standing in the stalls with the proverbial one-and-a-half cripples. By the start of the concert, we were feeling awkward about the far from full hall. Heck, Bob Dylan himself has come! For the one, and most likely, the only time. The entire Ledovyy department that was involved in promoting the concert should be fired as effing useless. Along with the security, who, seeing me focusing my camera lens on the as yet empty stage, sternly reported that photographs were strictly forbidden, all complaints [should be made] to the organizers. "Carry on taking pictures for now, kids; but when the concert starts, you won't be allowed to continue."

And now about Bob.

I'm a clever cookie, I don't think I expected from him fiery speeches, shouts of "Hiya, kids!", and the songs of his I love. The one thing I didn't count on was that he would change the arrangements of some numbers so much. No, they sounded good. Interesting. Only in places, unrecognisable; it was possible to sing along only with Just Like A Woman and Like A Rolling Stone. Well, for me anyway.

As everyone knows by now, Bob played only keyboards and harmonica.

Setlist:

1. Cat's In The Well (Bob on keyboard)
2. Don't Think Twice, It's All Right (Bob on keyboard)
3. Rollin' And Tumblin' (Bob on keyboard)
4. Tangled Up In Blue (Bob on keyboard)
5. The Levee's Gonna Break (Bob on keyboard)
6. Girl Of The North Country (Bob on keyboard)
7. John Brown (Bob on keyboard)
8. Honest With Me (Bob on keyboard)
9. Just Like A Woman (Bob on keyboard)
10. It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) (Bob on keyboard)
11. Workingman's Blues #2 (Bob on keyboard)
12. Highway 61 Revisited (Bob on keyboard)
13. Spirit On The Water (Bob on keyboard)
14. Summer Days (Bob on keyboard)
15. Ain't Talkin' (Bob on keyboard)
(encore)
16. Thunder On The Mountain (Bob on keyboard)
17. Like A Rolling Stone (Bob on keyboard)

There was a tense atmosphere; either Bob was tired or didn't especially like the St. Petersburg public. I didn't fully understand it, but he smiled little, spoke even less, came out for one encore, bowed, and left. And for the first time I clearly understood right away that they wouldn't return [for a second encore]. Even with Chuck Berry I had some hopes.

But this time... I don't even know what the reason was, whether it was general tiredness from concert performances, the far from full hall, or some other reason.

But all the same he's a big shot. All the same, he's a legend. And people love him. Standing nearby us were a little group of sweet Italians who devotedly follow Dylan round all the towns where he plays—real fanatics. Probably Russia appearing on his itinerary surprised them a bit!

And they still wouldn't let me take pictures. I thought that I 'd got into position successfully—the security man in front of me didn't see, I started snapping without a flash. It should have worked out fine. But it turns out, they [security] rushed down from the stage area. As a result, a security guy managed to get to me from behind and politely invited me to stop.

A few shots remained. I feel ashamed about showing them, of course, but what can you do—there won't be another time, as I understand. No, I didn't take them on a cell phone.

Well, that is that. My impressions are truly mixed. They don't fit into the usual rubric of liking or not liking something. I went to see Bob Dylan. I saw him. And I'm very happy indeed with this. Thanks to him for coming. And thanks to infobeat [name of another Live Journal blogger] for getting Bob to make a peace sign in his direction. It melted his icy heart. [There is a pun here on the name of the venue, of course].

Well, beatgene, that's a nice review, and your photos are nothing to be ashamed about. I hope you don't mind me showing them here. I hope this translation is okay, I'm a bit out of practice with colloquial Russian; I haven't translated anything but financial and legal documents and technical specifications for a long time!

Let's Be Beastly to the Chinese

2008-05-29T11:56:00.000-07:00

The Chinese government has branded actress Sharon Stone "the enemy of all mankind" after she wondered out loud whether the Sichuan province earthquake was "karma" for Chinese crackdowns in Tibet.

What she actually said (although you wouldn't know it from the media reaction) was not "This is karma for China's actions in Tibet", but "And then this earthquake and all this stuff happened, and then I thought, is that karma? When you're not nice that the bad things happen to you?"

These weren't preconceived remarks that Sharon Stone took into a TV studio to make as her considered reaction to the Chinese earthquake, but idle musings in the middle of the Cannes Film Festival, which the media immediately pounced upon and elevated into a major political or even religious statement.

Ok, she sounds a bit dumb, but I expect she'd had a hard day....

The inevitable youtube video of Stone's remarks caused a hullabaloo beyond the bamboo curtain, and Christiana Dior hastily dropped Stone from their Chinese ads for their foul-smelling perfume, which I sincerely hope none of the Clown's readers wear.

The real story is Christian Dior's grovelling statement (having already forced Stone herself to issue a gushing apology):

Quote:

We will never support any opinion that hurts the feelings of the Chinese people.

The Chinese market is so important now that piffling considerations like free speech can evidently be just swept aside.

Well, phooey to that.

The 19th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre is coming up! On June 4th, 1989, 2,000-3,000 students were massacred in cold blood by the so-called People's Liberation Army. China is the world's fastest expanding sweat shop, and without having rid themselves of their brutal Communist elite, the Chinese are happily embracing the most unpleasant features of unrestrained market capitalism. And as Sharon Stone was suggesting, they are committing cultural genocide in Tibet. But oh no, we aren't supposed to hurt their feelings!

Thank goodness for the worldwide protesters who have been disrupting the progress of the Olympic torch. There's another flame that needs to blaze more brightly in China before we start worrying about upsetting Chinese feelings.

Hey, China, you don't have to look as far as the West to see what a free media looks like:

Anti-Beijing protests in Seol, South Korea.

And 19 years on, this is still the most courageous act I've ever seen in my life:

One loan protester halts PLA tanks in their tracks.

Loudon Wainwright III Part 4 - A Live One and Fame and Wealth

2008-05-28T14:08:00.000-07:00

Part three of our survey of Loudon's discography left our hero at a seemingly low ebb in his fortunes. Dropped by Arista Records after T-Shirt and Final Exam failed to sell in large quantities, Loudon's major label days were behind him, although he may have refused to believe it at this stage; and whatever hopes he may have harboured about being the "new Bob Dylan" (though it's difficult to believe that Loudon seriously entertained them) were dead and buried. Moreover, he had passed the rubicon of the big 3-0 (the major theme of his two Arista albums), and was now in what was, in 1978, relatively uncharted territory for the boomer generation, and especially rocky ground for would-be rockers, at least those without the decency to have O.D.'d on excess and burned out in a blaze of glory before reaching the dreaded milestone.

Well, as Dylan sang, "There's no success like failure." Liberated from the major label pressure of having to produce hits, and from the burden of having to be young, Loudon found...not himself, that horrible cliché of rock biopic, but the perfect niche for his own brand of songwriting, reinventing himself as the poet laureate of middle-aged disappointment, boozing, bed-hopping, and bad parenting .

Around the corner lay battles with the booze, divorce (the breakdown of Loudon's marriage chronicled on Unrequited had led to divorce shortly after), and England. First, however, his first album on the folk-oriented Rounder Records label was his first full-length live album, a showcase for his talents as a club performer. The live performances included on the album were recorded on a tour of the British Isles in 1976 and at McCabe's in Los Angeles in 1978. The album was released in the following year.

Writing in Rolling Stone magazine, Robert Christgau was somewhat underwhelmed:

The cheap seats are the only seats at a Wainwright show, and too often he plays to them, but here the screwy faces and strangled diction and spastic phrasing and easy jokes are kept in check. It's not as if his albums are so ornately orchestrated that the man-and-his-guitar format is a breath of fresh air. But he's a singer-songwriter who deserves a best-of, and this will do till he gets it. B+

Indeed, A Live One is a useful live retrospective of Loudon's 70s songs, but as his best work lay ahead of him, it is not so essential as the later Career Moves (I shall probably end up saying this more than once, but if you only want one LWIII album in your collection, Career Moves is the one to go for; though from the point of view of this blog, that would be rather unfortunate, seeing that this is an album-by-album review of Loudon's oeuvre.)

And so we come to Loudon in the Eighties.

I'm not sure when Loundon met Richard Thompson; perhaps at one of Loudon's successful appearances at the Cambridge Folk Festival (he first appeared there in 1972, when he blagged his way onto the bill by playing to one of the organisers in the marquee). The two artists have a lot in common: both enjoy better critical reviews than record sales; both are superb live performers who know how to milk an audience; both were married and divorced to female folk singers who were stars in their own right. But whereas Loudon's constant wisecracking and joking around masks a serious side, the doom-and-gloom of many of Richard's lyrics is offset by a cheery personality and rib-tickling sense of humour.

Their fruitful collaboration begins on 1983's Fame and Wealth, Loudon's second album on Rounder Records. I've been unable to discover what Loudon was up to in the three years since A Live One was released. No doubt it involved extensive touring. I have a very nice bootleg from Bremen in Germany from Sept. 1980, in which Loudon announces tongue in cheek, before playing "The Grammy Song" (see below) that the eighties are going to belong to him. He is quite bemused when the German audience take him as being in earnest and burst into a round of applause.

Loudon's ambiguous attitude to "fame and wealth" is in fact one of the themes of the albumn. The opening song, "Reader and Advisor" (one of two on which Thompson plays) asks a gypsy clairvoyant to tell him what the future holds in store for him. This is a serious song; Loudon sounds as if he is in a crisis or at least at a crossroads. Thompson's understated electric guitar and plaintive mandolin give the song a sense of foreboding, of quiet desperation. There has been nothing as dark as this in Loudon's work since "Prince Hal's Dirge" on T-Shirt.

By contrast, the next song, the aforementioned Grammy Song, is one of Loudon's funniest. The deliberately bad rhymes are part of the humour:

Last night I dreamt that I won a Grammy
It was presented to me by Debbie Harry
I ran on stage in my tux
I gulped and I said "Aw, shucks!"
I'd like to thank my producer—and Jesus Christ!

Of course, Loudon is making fun of showbiz backslapping wingdings like the Grammy Awards and the tedious thank-you speeches of self-important celebs. But there is an ambiguity in his attitude to the recognition and rewards of the music business, as we saw in Liza (on Attempted Moustache) , and as Loudon himself has noted.

(I should remark here that there is something odd about the way the vocals are recorded on this album; there is too much reverb or something. It's particularly noticeable on Grammy Song.)

Dump the Dog is a funny little apparently throwaway number on which Loudon accompanies himself on banjo that makes some serious points about mortality looking back to "Reader and Advisor": "Salt and pepper on my porridge, one day I'll be dead and gone." Another significant couplet is "I'm a son and I'm a father/I am just a middle man"—this sense of being caught in the middle between generations, of somehow being superfluous to requirements, recurs in Loudon's work.

There is also a glimpse of Loudon's darker side; sometimes his frankness about his bad treatment of women sounds less like honesty and uncomfortably like boasting:

Oh, my good girl loves me madly
And my bad girl is just a flirt
I'll take the good with the bad gladly
And I'll treat them both like dirt....

However, it's impossible to dwell on these darker thoughts for too long, as the delivery is jaunty and casual; it's basically a skipping song!

Thick and Thin and Revenge are two contrasting songs; the first a tribute to a loyal friend, the later a vicious song of recrimination.

Next we come to another song written for daughter Martha (remember Pretty Little Martha on Final Exam?) It's one of Loudon's most attractive songs. But while he paints a lovely picture of Martha in her birthday dress, we might note that it's an imagined picture, and he's playing the absentee dad again, singing a song as an alternative to being there. On the messageboard on which this discographical survey of Loudon Wainwright III first appeared, one user acutely observed that there is some irony to the fact that the lyrics in Pretty Little Martha say, "we will be reunited, maybe on your birthday, we will be reunited, on the eighth day in the month of may", but then in Five Years Old he's missed her birthday and written her a song instead! Though he did send some roses... Still, I defy you not to smile and shed a little tear at the end:

You're growing up so quickly now, I feel a little sad
But that's to be expected, after all, I am your dad-dy...

If that were "after all - I am your Dad!" It would have that clunky, "Well, doh!" effect when an obvious rhyme comes thudding along just where we knew it would be. The line could then only be a gag, as in B Side (on Album III):

There is no complex philosophy
It's just because—I'm a bee!

You know the rhyme is coming because of the previous verse, and you groan, and then laugh.

Just expanding "Dad" into "Daddy" makes the couplet not just a gag, but touching as well. (You may have noticed that Loudon is fairly fond of this trick, viz. rhyming one-syllable with two or more.)

Ingenue is Loudon boasting about his alley cat ways again: "Well I'm out on the prowl/Lookingfor an ingenue/Someone young and pretty/That I can be a leading man to...." Look out, you waitresses! I've never liked this song. Motel Blues (Album II) is a more attractive example of the genre.

IDTTYWLM is the first of Loudon's abbreviated titles. It stands for "I Don't Think That Your Wife Likes Me". It's a comic tour de force, accompanied by some cabaret jazz piano played by Mark Hardwick.

Westchester County is about Loudon's privileged upbringing in the wealthy New York suburb of the title. There's a better version on "Career Moves".

Saturday Morning Fever is about watching cartoons on children's TV. Another song with strangely recorded vocals.

April Fool's Day Morn is one of Loudon's best, and certainly most personal songs. Again the version on Career Moves is probably better, but this version has Richard Thompson playing acoustic on it, always an aural delight. It's a redemption song about a mother's love. Loudon's self-confessed behaviour in the song is again pretty reprehensible, but this serves to highlight the selflessness of his mother and their wordless understanding. Johnny Cash should have sung this one rather than the more whimsical "The Man Who Couldn't Cry."

The album ends with the title track, which is sung a capella (except for a steady drum beat). Again, strangely recorded vocals, probably deliberate here. Loudon sounds as though he were singing it to himself in the shower!

Despite a number of funny songs ("The Grammy Song", "IDTTYWLM", "Saturday Morning Fever", the title track), this is quite a downbeat album. It's one that has grown on me over the years, and I do urge you to buy it and listen to it all the way through and live with it for a bit.

Oh, and did the Academy take the hint and award him a Grammy? Of course not, this is Loudon, the eternal nearly man, remember! But his next album, which is even better, would be nominated for one... Coming next: I'm Alright, an antidote to the blues, and Loudon's best album of the 80s, More Love Songs.

More Thoughts on Dylan's 'Forever Young'

2008-05-25T16:39:00.000-07:00

Thanks for the responses to my special birthday blog on Dylan's great song 'Forever Young'. As you can imagine, in view of my invective against the sentimentalization of the song, I was delighted (though not at all surprised) that Bob avoided playing the song in his first live performance on his birthday for eight years.

(Bob has seldom performed on his birthday through the years. It's amazing to think that when he appeared at T he Olympia, Paris, France on his 25th birthday he had already recorded the albums that secured his reputation for all time!)

One of the most interesting comments on the birthday thread was the following, from "lostchords":

I must admit that I think "Forever Young" has more to do with song written by Meredith Wilson in 1940

"May The Good Lord Bless And Keep You" (later recorded by Eddy Arnold et al.), although this one is obviously directed to a departing lover:

May the good Lord bless and keep you
Whether near or far away
May you find that long awaited golden day today
May your troubles all be small ones
And your fortune ten times ten
May the good Lord bless and keep you
Till we meet again.

May you walk with sunlight shining
And a bluebird in every tree
May there be a silver lining
Back of every cloud you see
Fill your dreams with sweet tomorrows
Never mind what might have been
May the good Lord bless and keep you
Till we meet again.

(Fill your dreams with sweet tomorrows)
(Never mind what might have been)
May the good Lord bless and keep you
Till we meet again.

May the good Lord bless and keep you
Till we meet, till we meet again...

About Meredith Wilson:
http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist/willson.html
http://www.doggedresearch.com/wilson/willson.htm

Now, I have enormous respect for lostchord's writings on the Never Ending Pool, and am frankly envious of his encyclopaedic knowledge of American pre-rock popular music.

However, in this particular instance, I do feel that he is guilty of a common error among people who are expert in a particular field; namely, that of seeing that particular field everywhere, even where it might not be relevant or appropriate.

It seems to me that, if Dylan was indeed aware of the Meredith Wilson song, it served him only as a model of what he wished to avoid, and avoided so successfully, in the composition of his own 'Forever Young.' As I wrote in my earlier blog:

In his interview with Cameron Crowe for the Biograph booklet [Dylan] is quite explicit [about what he wished to avoid in 'Forever Young']: "I wrote it thinking about one of my boys and not wanting to be too sentimental [italics mine]. "

In contrast, there is no banal sentiment or popular cliché that Wilson does not positively embrace in his song. A notable feature of 'Forever Young' is that, even where Dylan's sentiments are conventional, he avoids diluting them for modern tastes by using modish or politically correct vocabulary. "Courageous" and "joyful" are allowed to stand, unapologetically old-fashioned, eschewing the "brave" and "happy" of popular song; "true", which in pop terms merely means the girl's fidelity to her beau, is allowed to retain its more traditional connotations, reinforced by its coupling with "righteous." Whereas Wilson happily embraces the sappy "golden day" and "silver lining", Dylan studiously avoids the familiar and expected "young at heart", preferring "May your heart always be joyful", and paraphrases the clichéd "The Devil makes work for idle hands to do" with "May your hands always be busy."

These differences in level of vocabulary and attitude to banal sentiment are what make one song a dated pop song and the other a timeless Christian prayer with modernist overtones.

And finally, a word about the "other" 'Forever Young' on Planet Waves. As detailed in my earlier blog, Bob's misgivings at being misinterpreted as having given way to sentimentality led to his initially rejecting his first take of the song recorded with The Band. He attempted other interpretations of the song, and only producer Rob Fabrioni's pleadings induced him to relent and allow the "slow" version of the song to appear on the album. Even then, Bob insisted on one of his alternative interpretations of the song being included on the album alongside his near-perfect "slow" version. When you flip the original vinyl album, side two begins with a completely contrasting version of the song with which side one ended. Whereas in the slow version, Bob is passionate, elemental, and entirely committed to the lyric, in the "fast" version his delivery is throwaway and flippant. This marked the beginning of a phenomenon seen especially in the songs of Blood on the Tracks and occasionally glimpsed in later songs, and well remarked upon by Clinton Heylin: the process by which Bob would re-record songs in order to attenuate their emotional commitment or reduce the impression of nakedness and vulnerability.
Another example of this is the final album version of Idiot Wind as recorded in Minnestota; the earlier version recorded in New York City had been even more emotionally unguarded.

The two versions of 'Forever Young' on the original vinyl album exploited something that Dylan, the consummate album artist (by the way, those five words summarize the theme of the putative Dylan book that I've been planning for a couple of years now), was particularly aware of: the two sides of a long-playing record. Flip the album and you get the flip side of the slow version of the song; two Janus-heads of the same coin. Somehow this effect is lost, or its impact much reduced, on the album's CD reissue, whereby one version follows the other immediately, without the need to physically turn the album over so that the 'fast' version marks a new beginning. Really, it would have been better to have omitted the fast version of 'Forever Young' on CD, substituting it with the out-take 'Nobody 'Cept You', perhaps resequencing the album. But of course, Bob wasn't interested in looking back in order to redesign his his earlier creation in the light of more modern technology.

Birthday Bob Taught Boomers How To Grow Old Gracefully, Not To Remain Forever Young

2008-05-23T14:26:00.000-07:00

So another Dylan anniversary comes around, and no doubt Dylan fans everywhere will be playing his classic song Forever Young in his honour. Here then, are a few reflections on that timeless song and how its original message is often mangled, and even turned on its head.

Although Dylan successively negotiated the thin line between sincerity and sentimentality, the song was almost immediately turned by those who heard it from a father's pious wishes (or prayer) for his son into a mawkish expression of insincere sentiment on the part of young people for those of advancing years; like one of those horrible Hallmark Cards that say something like: "Happy Birthday, Dad! Seventy Years Young!"

This ghastly perversion of the song's original meaning reached a ne plus ultra level of well-meaning but mawkish sentimentality when the reformed Band (who, of course, with Robbie Robertson and Richard Manuel in their fold took part in the original recording of the song for Planet Waves) recorded the song for their High on the Hog album, dedicating it to…the late Jerry Garcia!

So I'd like to take another look at the song and explain why it is the very opposite of sentimental, and shouldn't be used as an excuse to wallow in flabby, mawkish Peter Pan-ism.

Here first are the lyrics, reproduced here from www.bobdylan.com for the purposes of study:

May God bless and keep you always,
May your wishes all come true,
May you always do for others
And let others do for you.
May you build a ladder to the stars
And climb on every rung,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.

May you grow up to be righteous,
May you grow up to be true,
May you always know the truth
And see the lights surrounding you.
May you always be courageous,
Stand upright and be strong,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.

May your hands always be busy,
May your feet always be swift,
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift.
May your heart always be joyful,
May your song always be sung,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young

Copyright © 1973 Ram's Horn Music

There we have it: just three short verses and a simple refrain. However, this simplicity should not lead us to suspect simplemindedness. Allen Ginsberg considered it one of Dylan's finest songs, recognizing in it the apparently artless but pure expression of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience.

Dylan was quite clear of the dangers of expressing conventionally pious sentiment in popular song. In his interview with Cameron Crowe for the Biograph booklet he is quite explicit: "I wrote it thinking about one of my boys and not wanting to be too sentimental. The lines came to me, they were done in a minute. Sometimes that's what you're given."

The writing of the song may have been done with Dylan's habitual swiftness, but the recording process was very different. From Wikipedia:

After several false starts, Dylan and The Band executed what would ultimately be one of two master takes for "Forever Young." However, Dylan nearly rejected the performance after hearing some disparaging criticism from one particular visitor.

"We only did one [complete] take of the slow version of 'Forever Young','" recalls [Planet Waves producer Rob] Fraboni. "This take was so riveting, it was so powerful, so immediate, I couldn't get over it. When everyone came in nobody really said anything. I rewound the tape and played it back and everybody listened to it from beginning to end and then when it was over everybody sort of just wandered out of the room. There was no outward discussion. Everybody just left. There was just [a friend] and I sitting there. I was so overwhelmed I said, 'Let's go for a walk.' We went for a walk and came back and I said, 'Let's go listen to that again.' We were like one minute or two into it, I was so mesmerized by it again I didn't even notice that Bob had come into the room...So when we were assembling the master reel I was getting ready to put that [take] on the master reel. I didn't even ask. And Bob said, 'What're you doing with that? We're not gonna use that.' And I jumped up and said, 'What do you mean you're not gonna use that? You're crazy! Why?' Well, during the recording...[Dylan's childhood friend] Lou Kemp and this girl came by and she had made a crack to him, 'C'mon, Bob, what! Are you getting mushy in your old age?' It was based on her comment that he wanted to leave [that version] off the record."

Fraboni would defend the recording, and when he refused to relent, Dylan reconsidered and allowed him to include it on the album. On November 9th, Dylan held what he intended to be the final session for the album. From Fraboni's perspective, Dylan already had a perfect take of "Forever Young" from the previous day, but Dylan still attempted a different, acoustic arrangement, which was ultimately rejected. Dylan would tell Fraboni that afternoon, "I've been carrying this song around in my head for five years and I never wrote it down and now I come to record it I just can't decide how to do it."

Bob Dylan became a father for the first time in January 1966, when Jesse was born. Anna Lea followed in July 1967, Samuel July 1968, and Jakob in December 1969, which would postdate Forever Young's composition if Bob's claim to have been carrying the song in his head for "five years" before the Planet Waves sessions (November 1973) was literally true. This does seem a long time to put off recording a song that came to him so swiftly it felt like the gift of a higher power.

Perhaps in reality only the germ of an idea of the song had come to Dylan as early as that, and it was not completed until just before he made a demo of the song for Ram's Horn Music in June 1973. Otherwise it is difficult to believe that Dylan would not have attempted to record the song for so long, and would have included several inferior songs on New Morning instead. The latter album includes several songs that touch on the theme of fatherhood, so it can't be said that Bob was reluctant to think of himself in those terms or that the song would have been out of place on that album. New Morning even includes a prayer, which is what Forever Young ultimately is. Father of Night, however, with its evocation of oppositeis more of a Zen Buddhist prayers. (It could easily be a children's song, except there is a palpable moment when it turns from a song of innocence into a song of experience; namely the line "Father of loneliness and pain", at which point the song stops and there is a pause, not long enough to be agonizing ,but noticeable enough to be troublesome, before the final line of the verse brings the expected reassuring rhyme.)

Forever Young is more explicitly a Jewish or Christian prayer of the type known as a Benediction, pronounced by a priest on special occasions. By far the best known is the Priestly Blessing, which is based on Numbers 6:23-27:

The Lord bless thee, and keep thee
The Lord make His face to shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee
The Lord lift His countenance upon thee, and give thee peace.

In Orthodox Jewish tradition, only the kohanim (priests, direct male descendants of Aaron, brother of Moses) can pronounce the Blessing, stretching his hands forth over the people. However, this blessing is also used by some parents to bless their children on Friday night before the beginning of the Shabbat meal. Some rabbis will say the blessing to a boy at his barmitzvah ceremony. Therefore in adapting the blessing for his sons (and daughter? the sentiments are strongly patriarchal), Bob was merely continuing the partial secularization of the priestly blessing that was already established in many non-Orthodox Jewish communities.

(On the other hand, a music concert is like a synagogue, or rather a cathedral, and the singer or star is the "kohen" or priest, extending his blessing to the audience/congregation. This is why the song is so effective in live performance, since for the duration of the show we all become Bob's children.)

"May your wishes all come true" isn't a bland statement, but a pious wish that every father makes for his children, even though he knows that nobody's wishes all come true (and therefore the father's wish is itself one that will not come true).

"May you always do for others and let others do for you." Ginsberg suggested (interview with Peter Barry Chowka in New Age, 1976) that this is "Dylan's hip, American-ese paraphrase of Christ's 'Do unto others . . .' But although the cadence is similar, the sentiment is quite different: Dylan wishes his sons to be helpful to others, but not too proud to accept help from others too.

The next line reminds us of the ladder Jacob dreamed of in Genesis whose top reaches to heaven. Dylan wishes his sons a ladder that reaches "to the stars"; but they will have to build it themselves, and climb on every rung. In other words, he does not want them to have any shortcuts to the top (riding on the coattails of their father's fame, for instance). But also he wants them to enjoy every stage of their ascent of the ladder, rather than just focusing on reaching the top.

The second verse is about the abstract qualities Dylan hopes his sons will have when they grow up. Note the deft shift from "being true" to "knowing the truth." Being true means being loyal (to one's family, friends, country, ideals etc.), while knowing the truth means not only being able to detect a falsehood, but (in a religious or philosophical sense) following the true path to enlightenment. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to see in this contrast between the ontological (being) and epistemological (knowing) Plato's contrast between right action and knowledge of the truth. The man who knows what is right, according to Plato's Socrates, will always do what is right. He who does what is right, however, without clear knowledge is in danger any moment of going wrong, and Socrates compares him to a blind man going along the right path.

"...see the lights surrounding you" is vaguer, but probably complements "…and let others do for you." Don't think you're all alone in this world, surrounded by darkness. Look around and see the light of others that will help you see your way along the true path. Courage, uprightness, and strength are traditional male virtues, which Dylan unabashedly recommends.

"May your hands always be busy"; because, as we know, "the Devil makes work for idle hands to do." This is example of Dylan deftly recasting a traditional piece of wisdom or an aphorism that has become a cliché in a new mold in order to make us think about it afresh. He does this elsewhere on Planet Waves: in Going, Going, Gone, "all that glisters is not gold" becomes "all that’s gold wasn't made to shine.

Hands lead naturally to feet, busy leads almost as logically to swift, with the same implication: don't be idle, don't waste your life doing nothing. But also there is the implication that if you do linger along the way, looking behind you instead of pressing on, you will find yourself left behind as time wreaks its inevitable changes ("He who gets hurt will be he who has stalled"). This thought is typical of Dylan, for whom the artist never looks back, and leads naturally to the song's most arresting image and a line that deliberately reminds us of at least two of the "young Dylan's" classic songs:

May you have a strong foundation when the winds of changes shift

This reminds us not only of Blowin' in the Wind, but even more strongly of The Times, They Are A-Changin', when Dylan had been on the other side of the generational divide, warning the older generation to get out of the way of the new and to take care lest they sink like a stone as the waters rose around them. Now on the cusp of middle age and having learned that he too must make way for a younger generation, he reminds his sons that they too will need to be very swift and very strong to avoid being swept away in the changes they too will inevitably face. This is extremely important, because at first sight the Dylan who wrote "Forever Young" seems very different from the younger man who wrote "The Times, They Are A-Changin'." The latter song was embraced as a clarion call for radical social change, while the former apparently espouses very traditional sentiments. But the message of the two songs is really the same: accept change, but don't be swept away by it.

This became fully apparent when on his 1978 tour Dylan sung "Forever Young" and "The Times, They Are A-Changin'" back to back at the close of the concert. The two songs illuminated one another. It became clear that "Forever Young" wasn't a collection of patronizing pieties, while "Times" wasn't so much about social change and the sixties generation gap as the inevitable cycle of history, the whirligig of time that brings in its revenges, in Shakespeare's phrase. After all, the song seems to draw on Tennyson's beautiful lines from Idylls of the King on the inevitability of change and decay:

The old order changeth, yielding place to new;
And God fulfils himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

The line it is drawn and the curse it is cast
The slow one now will later be fast
As the present now will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'...

The phrase "winds of changes" is very beautiful in itself. The phrase originated in a speech by British prime minister Harold Macmillan in South Africa in 1960 that heralded a new era of decolonization. Macmillan's actual words were "The wind of change is blowing through this continent", but the phrase entered the popular language as "winds of change." Simply by making the second noun plural as well as the first, Dylan produces a wonderful piece of assonance and alliteration (since ds sounds very similar to the soft g in 'change', unlike the hard d in 'wind'), reinforced by the alliteration of w in "when the winds", so that the line first of all blows and then ripples as the vowels shift from e to i to a and then back to i again. In the Planet Waves recording (the slow version), Dylan further matches sound to sense by dragging out the vowel in "shift", so that it really feels as though the ground is moving under our feet. Has anyone else who has recorded this song been so alive to these nuances? Only Dylan, and perhaps only in that great recording Fabrioni so rightly cherished and championed.

It may be objected that "shift" is an awkward choice of verb, because winds don't shift: foundations do if they are not sufficiently strong, and sands shift in the desert winds. But somehow the line, perhaps because of the way Dylan stretches it out and animates it with his singing, seems to encompass all these meanings without conflict.

Finally we come to the line that fully encapsulates what the real meaning of the wish "may you stay forever young" encompasses. Dylan is not talking about being trapped in a Peter Pan type warp like those ageing baby boomers whose tastes and behaviour have remained perpetually adolescent, but about being "young at heart", a cliché that he, thankfully, deftly avoids, singing instead "May your heart always be joyful." Thus youth and joy are associated; and only with joy in our hearts can we still be youthful despite our ageing bodies.

Thus it is joyfulness, not retarded adolescence that the song celebrates. Dylan knows, like St. Paul, that when one becomes a man, it is time to put away childish things. In his albums from Nashville Skyline through Blood on the Tracks, he was the first of the rock generation to embrace middle age rather than resist it; something Mick Jagger has yet to do. He was arguably the first to sing about old age too, with grace and humour as well as regret and bitterness. Time Out of Mind seemed preoccupied with the latter, along with the physical decay attendant upon old age. Highlands paints a grim picture of an ageing, disconnected Dylan, shuffling his way along the street, talking to himself, and envying the young people drinking and dancing in the park, while for himself "the party's over and there's less and less to say."

Since that dark night of the soul, however, he seems to have rediscovered some of the joyfulness he wished that his sons would carry in their hearts all those years ago. So if you're celebrating Bob's birthday today, play one of these songs instead of "Forever Young", which is his song to us. For instance, play Floater (Too Much To Ask)

Young, old, age don't carry no weight

Or Mississippi:

Well my ship's been split to splinters and it's sinking fast
I'm drownin' in the poison, got no future, got no past
But my heart is not weary, it's light and it's free
I've got nothin' but affection for all those who've sailed with me

Or perhaps inevitably, Spirit on the Water:

You think I'm over the hill?
You think I'm passed my prime?
Let me see what you got!
We could have a whoppin' good time!

Best of all though, play Summer Days, a song which evokes the spirit of the best known poem of the other Dylan (Thomas) urging his father to "Rage, rage against the dying of the light",

Well I'm drivin' in the flats in a Cadillac car
The girls all say, "You're a worn out star"
My pockets are loaded and I'm spending every dime...

Now excuse me while I stand on the table and propose a toast: "To the King!"

Leonard Cohen on Tour 2008 - Videos & Links

2008-05-23T02:33:00.000-07:00

It's good to have the grand old man of bedsit angst (©all media) back on tour for the first time in 15 years, even if he's taken to the road again out of necessity rather than desire, his pension fund having been rifled by a former manager and lover.

Reports and sporadic audio and video clips from the early Canadian shows indicate that the man is on top form, and as always, he is touring with musicians of the highest calibre, some new to his band, others old hands.

A show of two-and-a-half hours (minus intermission) for a guy in his eighth decade is very impressive. I'm a little disappointed that, with the exception of three songs from 2001's Ten New Songs, Leonard's concert repertoire is virtually unchanged from 1993. No songs from have been debuted from 2004's Dear Heather, nor has he attempted to sing any of the excellent songs he co-wrote with jazz chanteuse Anjani Thomas (reportedly his current romantic partner) for her 2006 album Blue Alert. Perhaps the setlists will be shaken up a bit when the tour reaches Europe next month.

There follows some links to some useful Leonard Cohen websites (do you know of any more? Please add them in a comment!). And as I am very unlikely to be able to get tickets even if I could afford them for his U.K. tour, I've embedded a few live videos from youtube.

All the Setlists are here.

The paged linked to about is part of the forum of the truly excellent Leonard Cohen Files. This is the best one-stop place for all information and discussion about Leonard.

A useful source for Leonard Cohen lyrics, especially alternative versions, extra verses, and prologues performed in concerts is Diamonds in the Lines.

And of course there is the official site, which doesn't seem to keep as up-to-date with Leonard's latest doings as the Leonard Cohen Files (see above).

Here's a few videos from the opening night in Fredericton (audio is good quality, picture is poor; there is a crack in everything!). First the opener Dance Me to the End of Love:

Here Leonard explains what he's been doing since he was last on tour (taking a lot of prozac, apparently!)

Hallelujah with French intro:

Everybody Knows:

And these youtube links are audio only:

In My Secret Life

Who By Fire

Do know of any Leonard Cohen sites or recent videos I should link to? Drop me a line!

Bob changes show opener, but still overlooks perfect choice

2008-05-22T08:32:00.000-07:00

The three shows that circulate from Dylan's latest tour in this, the 20th year of the Never-Ending Tour, confirm the reports of those attending them that the man is back in very strong voice for the first time in at least a year. When that happens, even his current mediocre band can't hold him back.

The one disappointment is the continuing static nature of the setlists. Although no one could possibly obejct to a setlist like the first night of the Canadian tour in Saint John, New Brunswick, an excellent selection of vintage classics plus the best of the more recent Dylan songs, Bob still neglects large parts of his repertoire, particularly from the 70s and 80s.

At least he has started shaking up the opening slot. having opened with a different song on every night of the tour so far. But he continues to ignore, in my view, the perfect show opener....

The never-played opening song from his 1974 album Planet Waves, On A Night Like This has, in my view, all the ingredients of a perfect opening number. It even has some of the characteristics of the songs by which Dylan typically chooses to announce himself to the audience, which often make some kind of comment (usually ironic) about his relationship to the audience. Maggie's Farm is Bob's favourite song in this regard: it tells us right up front that, although we may technically be the boss and Dylan the hired worker, it doesn't mean he has to like it: "They say 'sing while you slave'/I get bored". So don't go complaining if his performance is merely workmanlike or if he actually falls asleep on the job. Others in this category are Hero Blues, that most unlikely obscure number with which Bob kicked off his eagerly awaited return to touring in 1974; and Most Likely You Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine, which was his calling card after "Hero Blues" was dropped after the first two shows in 1974 and again in 1989 and at other times.

There is another category of opener in which Bob makes a big statement, announcing mock-heroically that he's ready for the challenge of facing the audience. Examples are I'm Ready - the Muddy Waters number used on the U.S. leg of the 1978 tour, and Hallelujah, I'm Ready To Go, the bluegrass opener earlier this century. And still another category in which Bob makes us a pledge, as in To Be Alone With You or Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You (that one usually comes second rather than first, it is true). On A Night Like This incorporates elements of all three of these categories (though there are still other categories, which I pass over here). First of all, the night is special to us, if not to Dylan: we are seeing him perhaps for the first time; or it may be the 200th time, but even so, in terms of the number of shows he gives, that is a mere drop in the ocean. So for us the night is quite special, and the way the line builds up to a climax - On a night like THIS - emphasises that specialness; but the same emphasis is double-edged, because as the song goes on, a note of recrimination sets in. "If I'm not too far out, I think we did this once before"—in the context of the song, this sounds barbed. This special evening he's spending with his old lover, reminiscing on old times.... not only are some of those memories not so sweet, but they've even done the nostalgia trip itself before. But as an address to the audience, the song would work as a sly nod of the head to the long-time Dylan fans seeing Dylan for the 10th, 20th, or perhaps even 100th time. And a gentle reminder to the first-timer that while this may be special for him/her,. it's not so special for Dylan, whose been through it all thousands of times....

On A Night Like This is such a perfect opener perfect, you can even hear it in your head: Dylan striding to the microphone, singing the first three words unaccompanied into the microphone (or maybe just strumming an acoustic energetically) and then the band crashing in, with perfect timing, on the word 'TH -I-I- I - I- S !!!'

This could even be why he doesn't do this number - the arrangement I've just suggested, which seems to me the obvious one, would require just the sort of showmanship that he only occasionally goes in for. He normally likes to start a show very loose and relaxed, so that the first song is often little more than a warm-up number. Starting with On A Night Like This would require him to hit the ground running every time. What a great concert would follow if he started off with this tight an arrangement.

However, the real reason could be that Dylan just doesn't like the song. In the Biograph booklet he tells Cameron Crowe:

"I wrote this in New York... Sometimes you are affected by people thinking you're too heavy. You know? They see you and pretend they don't, if you do something that's extreme on the one hand, then you've got to hurry and turn it around so people aren't so sure that they saw what they saw...you know, I think this comes off as sort of like a drunk man who's temporarily sober. This is not my type of song, I think I just did it to do it."

A very intriguing comment. Since prior to Planet Waves Bob had done nothing that could be regarded as 'heavy' or 'extreme' since, say, All Along the Watchtower, he can only be referring to songs on Planet Waves itself. He seems to be suggesting he wrote "On A Night Like This" as a counterfoil to 'heavy' numbers such as Dirge, Going Going Gone, and Wedding Song . And certainly without this song and You Angel You (which definitely sounds written just for the sake of having an uptempo, happy-sounding number and to exorcise the demons of Dirge), Planet Waves wouldn't have much variation.

(And though he may have disliked the song in 1985, he included Los Lobos's version of it for his 2002 movie Masked and Anonymous.

However, although it may have been written specifically to fulfil the role of the uptempo opener, the song nevertheless beautifully prefigures and encapsulates Planet Waves both thematically and in terms of mood. The themes of the album are to be reminiscence and nostalgia - but the mood is to be bitter-sweet. Some of the memories are going to be romantic, others painful or downright venomous. The situation in the song seems to be a former lover returning for the evening: and not just for coffee and to share a few old memories. She is going to stay the night - but this has the air of a one-night-stand for old times' sake or for the sake of sex; not a long-term reunion. Therefore "say you'll never go away to stray" is more about the excitement of the moment than a realistic hope. The song is one of Dylan's most sexually charged:

Hold on to me so tight...
Hold on to me, pretty miss...

Run your fingers down my spine
Bring me a touch of bliss

Put your body next to mine
And keep me company

The last lines have humorous pay-off: "There is plenty of room for all so please don't elbow me". Given Dylan's reputation, we cannot dismiss the idea that more than one person is sharing his bed, but these lines are better seen as humour: "Can you stay the night? Sure, I don't think there's anyone in my bed right now, let me check - oh yeah, room for one more!" This is curiously echoed in Tough Mama - "Won't you move over and give me some room?"

Those lines of explicit sexuality are reinforced by the sensuousness and vividness of other details: the coffee roasting on the fire while they reminisce, the hissing of the log fire; the contrast between the warmth within - "let it burn burn burn" - and the frosty cold, snow, and stormy wind outside; and the hint of vulnerability but cosiness in "cabin door". The snow lies deep on the pathway outside, frost piles up high at the window, and the four winds howl around the door, but the couple go on reminiscing... and kissing. It's a wonderfully vivid picture, painted in a few lines. The album as a whole will be replete with allusions to nature - a frozen lake and footprints in the snow in Never Say Goodbye, "rainy days on the great lakes" in Something There Is About You - and with sensual details in the description of women: "Tough mama, meat shaking on your bones..." "Hazel, dirty blonde hair".. "Is it the way your body moves, or the way your hair blows free?" "Something there is about you that moves with style and grace". "The way you walk and the way you talk/I feel I could almost sing"... "You're beautiful beyond words". "You've turned your hair to brown/Love to see it hangin' down."

A second source of imagery on the album - heat, fire, smoke - is also prefigured in this song, with the hissing log on the fire and the threefold repetition of "let it burn, burn, burn" - which sounds like it was inspired by June Carter's Ring of Fire: "it burns, burns, burns, that ring of fire". The imagery is repeated in:

Can I blow a little smoke on you?

Ashes in the furnace, dust on the rise...

Today on the countryside it was hotter than a crotch...

Something there is about you that strikes a match in me...

I love you more than ever and it burns me to the soul

Every time we meet you know, I feel like I'm on fire (from Nobody 'Cept You, which comes from the PW sessions, if not on the album).

The heat and flame that burns throughout the album - these are torch ballads, remember - is prefigured in On A Night Like This in those wonderful lines:

Build a fire, throw on logs, and listen to it hiss
And let it burn burn burn on a night like this.

You can hear those hissing logs in the rhyme of listen and hiss and then again in this...

"We've got much to talk about and much to reminisce." The theme of reminiscence and nostalgia is to dominate songs like Hazel, Something There Is About You, Never Say Goodbye, and Nobody 'Cept You. A final theme is the desperate longing for love - these memories build up at times into almost painful yearning for physical contact with a former lover (even if it is not always the same woman, all the women are blended into one):

Nothing matters to me
And there's nothing I desire
'Cept you, yeah you

You've got something I want plenty of
Ooh, a little touch of your love.

Never did feel this way before.
Never did get up and walk the floor
If this is love then gimme more
And more and more and more and more

No I don't need any reminder
To know how much I really care

You're beautiful beyond words
You're beautiful to me...

At times, this longing is satisfied:

Suddenly I found you and the spirit in me sings
Don't have to look no further, you're the soul of many things

You've got me under your wing

Sweet Goddess
Your perfect stranger's comin' in at last

At others, the feelings are so intense that they actually give rise to self-hatred:

I hate myself for loving you and the weakness that it showed
You were just a painted face on a trip down suicide road

My thoughts of you don't ever rest, they'd kill me if I lie,
I'd sacrifice the world for you and watch my senses die

or to a desire to take the record of all these memories and burn them on the blazing log-fire:

I'm closin' the book
On the pages and the text
And I don't really care
What happens next.
I'm just going,
I'm going,
I'm gone.

I've paid the price of solitude but at least I'm out of debt.

All of these feelings climax in Wedding Song, in which longing, desperation, self-hatred, and the desire both to hang on to memories and to blot them out all come together:

I love you more than ever, more than time and more than love
I love you more than madness
Love you more than life itself
...your love cuts like a knife
I love you more than blood
I'd sacrifice the world for you and watch my senses die.
I love you more than all of that with a love that doesn't bend
Oh, can't you see that you were born to stand by my side
And I was born to be with you, you were born to be my bride,
You're the other half of what I am, you're the missing piece
And I love you more than ever with that love that doesn't cease.

and finally

I love you more than ever now that the past has gone.

Most of this is anticipated in the album's brilliant opener - the despair and self-hatred are not present in this song, but are prefigured in the manic air of the whole piece (perhaps this is what Dylan means by saying it sounds like the song of a drunk who has temporarily sobered up). All of the following songs can be seen as part of the lovers' fireside chat: the tender memories, the sexuality, the bitter recriminations... Planet Waves is an album that burns, burns, burns. All of its songs are within that ring of fire. (Note also the link between the blazing hearth and memory in Tangled Up in Blue, where the words of an old poem "glowed like burning coal", triggering memories of a former lover).

So then, On A Night Like This is an underrated song from an underrated album that I suggest would make a perfect opener for Dylan's show. It will probably never happen.

Stay tuned for a special blog to mark Bob's 67th birthday on Saturday. It'll be largely about another Planet Waves song. "See if you can guess which one that is."

Loudon Wainwright III - Part 3: T-Shirt & Final Exam

2008-05-21T17:37:00.000-07:00

After Unrequited, like its predecessor, failed to sell, Columbia dropped Loudon, who then moved to his third label, Arista Records. His first album for his new record company, T-Shirt, was released in 1976.

This was Loudon's best produced record to that point in his career, and for the first time he sounds wholly comfortable with a band behind him.

However, at first listen it seems a strangely impersonal (and therefore very un-Loudon-like) album. The Loudon we know and love (since Attempted Moustache anyway) writes songs that are personal almost to the point of solipsism (a point which his son Rufus passed a long time ago).

But what do we have here?

The album opens with Bicentennial, a moderately sarcastic song about the anniversary of American Independence. It's quite funny, but it's more the sort of thing you'd associate with Randy Newman, who would be more pointedly satirical; Loudon is just poking his tongue out at the national occasion.

At Both Ends is about a young guy who parties himself into an early grave, and Loudon rocks out pretty well; but you can't help feeling Warren Zevon does this sort of thing much better. Reciprocity, a song about a couple into bondage, but it's not much more successful (and less amusing) than the song about gay sex on Unrequited.

Prince Hal's Dirge is a song about future King Henry V, whose conflict with his father is dramatized so brilliantly in Shakespeare's Henry IV Parts One and Two. Then we have Summer's Almost Over, a classic end-of-summer-back-to-school song that is given a gorgeous light jazz arrangement, with tinkling piano and shimmering xylophone; a song about a dog, Hey Packy; a quirky talking blues (Talkin' Big Apple '75), and a strange song entitled Just Like President Thieu.

Almost the only sign of the old Loudon, it seems, is the perennial drinking song, Wine With Dinner and a few personal references in Hollywood Hopeful.

So where are those songs about growing older, never quite making the big time, broken relationships, and family feuds that we associate with Loudon Snowden Wainwright III?

Well, all is not as it seems with this record (and I admit it took me about 30 years to realize this).

Although it starts off with a song called Bicentennial, the real anniversary that is the theme of the record is Loudon's 30th birthday (this was the year he met the dreaded 3-0). The existential dilemma posed by the approach of middle age is for Loudon, as for many of us, whether it should mean a change in our behaviour. Summer's Almost Over is the perfect metaphor for this: "Adopt a brand new attitude... For all those lazy, hazy days you must atone" (wonderful line, that). This accounts for the atmosphere of almost unbearable nostalgia in the song, as Loudon is reluctant to say goodbye to those "crazy days."

"Hollywood Hopeful" continues the theme of maturity vs. youthful irresponsibility (and fame/failure, of course):

Never thought I'd see the age of 25
It's 29 years now I've been alive
The panic I feel can hardly be told
In a matter of months I'll be 30 years old.

"I am full-fledged grown up adult/Trying to make a dent, trying to get a result/I'm holed up in a Hollywood hotel suite/Tequilla to drink and avocado to eat." These are classic Loudon rueful lines on the elusiveness of fame and fortune.

Both Ends Burning is a cautionary tale of someone who never knew when to put away excess. That's what's in store for Loudon if he doesn't reform his ways now that he is on the cusp of middle age. But Prince Hal's Dirge is the key song.

As you know, according to Shakespeare (following the history chronicles), the future Henry V was a tearaway as a young man, mixing with low company, getting into tavern brawls, etc., much to the dismay of his father the king. But all the time the young Prince Hal remains confident that, at the right time, he will be able to shake off this unruly life and accept his responsibilities:

If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wish’d for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So, when this loose behavior I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.

Loudon transforms this into a well-constructed, two-paced song, that starts off slow and builds to a dramatic climax:

Give me a capon, and some roguish companions
A wench and a bottle of sack
Take me to the alehouse, take me to the whorehouse
If I vomit, keep me off of my back

And in view of the fact that Loiudon was himself the son of a dysfunctional father, the following lines is interesting:

My father thinks I'm good for nothing
And that I won't amount to much
But he's not aware of my secret weapon
I can count on myself in the clutch

Show me a breach, I'll once more unto it
I'll be ready for action any day
I'll straighten up, and I'll fly most righteous
In a fracas I'll be right in the fray

I can drink you under 25 tables
Fight and be any lady's man
But all this will change when I'm good and ready
To be king of this land!

Self-reliance is to be Loudon's secret weapon ("I can count on myself in the clutch"). The song builds to a tremendous climax, probably the "heaviest" Loudon has ever gotten musically, suggesting real tensions in the lifestyle choices with which the singer is faced. For the time being though, he is not yet ready to shake off his dissolute lifestyle. This is probably why the drinking song Wine With Dinner is reprised again at the end of the record. The party is to go on, even though the dreaded landmark of 30 years old has been reached... "

A few comments on the other songs:

Hey, Packy

This countrified ode to a faithful dog was written by George Gerdes, the actor, who put out a couple of interesting records in the seventies (one of them with the entire group of Nashville musicians who played on Dylan's Blonde on Blonde!) and who co-wrote a song with Loudon on Unrequited (Kings & Queens). It's one of Loudon's best recordings with a band.

Hollywood Hopeful

A song held over from Unrequited (an outtake of the song from the sessions for that album was released on the reissue). This version uses the tune from the traditional song "Little Sadie" and has some nice banjo. This is the most directly personal song on the album.

Wine With Dinner

One of Loudon's droll songs about drinking (See The Drinking Song on Album III and Down Drinking at the Bar on Attempted Moustache).

T-Shirt, then is a very fine album, Loudon's finest to that date, with a unifying concept that makes it greater than the sum of its parts, and, as stated before, better produced than any of its predecessors. It was a crying shame that it was not issued on CD for so long.

Loudon's second album on Arista was a more lightweight affair, although it is just as well produced as its predecessor.

Many of the songs tend to the lightweight and ephemeral, though, such as Golfin' Blues, Pen Pal Blues, the title track, and The Heckler. However, the record ends with some strong songs. Best of all are the two country songs, Heaven and Mud and Two-Song Set.

A guy I used to share a house with in the 90s said, thinking about his approaching 30th birthday (he was a year older than I): "I'll be sitting here in this armchair, and all of a sudden, the desire to listen to country music will come over me."

I don't think he ever did get into country, at least while I knew him, but I myself have got into country music in a big way since turning 30. It does seem the more mature person's music. This is because it is less about strutting one's stuff like rock 'n' roll, and more a vehicle for talking about family problems, alcoholism, and the other joys of maturity. It's a shame, therefore, that Loudon hasn't used the genre more extensively. The two country songs on Final Exam are a real treat.

Heaven and Mud is a song about falling off the wagon after being "high on life" for "14 boring days"! Certainly any hopes Loudon had of cleaning up his act on T-Shirt have been abandoned.

Two-Song Set is a real gem, very well arranged and produced, with a great singalong chorus. Note how much Loudon's singing with a band has improved since his earliest records. Lyrically, the song is full of aching regret over missed opportunity and nostalgia for the old days.

The waitress is polite to me, but it's just not the same thing now
A few years ago, Bobby, I was the cat's meow
You win some and you lose some, that's an attitude I can understand
And I know what they're saying, Bob, they're saying I was a flash in the pan.

Then there is Pretty Little Martha, one of Loudon's neat little banjo songs. Martha was then two years old.

Finally, as if to emphasize that his rocking days are over, is the parody song Watch Me Rock, I'm Over Thirty.

But it wasn't just Loudon's rocking days were over. Final Exam also marked the end of Loudon's days on a major label. The Dead Skunk era was well and truly dead. Creatively, however, Loudon's best work lay ahead of him....

Note: T-Shirt and Final Exam have never been available separately on CD, but in 2007 they were remastered released as a "two-fer" on the Acadia label of Evangeline Records Ltd.

Dinosaurs on A Diet - the late, great Phil Ochs

2008-05-21T12:37:00.000-07:00

Phil Ochs took his own life 30 years ago today [this piece was written and posted on a messageboard 9th April, 2006].

In April 1976, he'd been kicked off the Rolling Thunder Revue, Dylan's traveling hootenanny of 60s folk stars, and that was the final straw; although in truth Phil had been in no fit state to tour. Having suffered for years from what would now be diagnosed as clinical depression or "bipolar disorder", he was further disillusioned by Watergate, by his own lack of commercial success, and by a physical attack (which he believed to have been organized by the FBI) in Africa that damaged his vocal cords. After his death, it was revealed that the FBI had a 410-page file on Ochs.

Although he flirted with Communism, Ochs was too much of an American patriot to embrace it entirely. His brother has described his work as "love songs to America"; his reaction to America's betrayal of her ideals is like that of a jilted lover. This can be illustrated in The Power and the Glory from his first album (All the News That's Fit To Sing), a kind of update of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land". Here is a video of Ochs performing the song live in 1974 (apparently with a broken arm), accompanied by his friend and mentor Jim Glover.

Ochs's first album also contains a direct tribute to Guthrie, taking its title from that of Guthrie's autobiography, Bound for Glory. Guthrie had been hospitalized for the best part of 10 years, but his influence on a younger generation of folk singers remained immense. See how many Guthrie song titles you can spot!

But Ochs was more than about political anthems. His first album also contains a tender ballad for Cecilia Pomeroy, held in a Filipino jail and separated for 10 years from her American husband, and a spirited adaptation of an Edgar Allan Poe poem The Bells.

His second album I Ain't Marching Anymore likewise contains an adaptation of a poem by Alfred Noyes, The Highwayman. It's a reading of great dramatic power, and one of my favourite recordings by anyone. Here is a remarkable video clip of Phil performing the song live:

The title track of Ochs's second album became one of his best known, and most covered, songs. As if realizing that I Ain't Marching Any More would become the anthem of draft dodgers, Ochs included Draft Dodger Rag on the album, which examines the motives and morals of some of the draft dodgers themselves. There is a serious point behind the humour: this particular draft dodger isn't like the young people who were openly burning their draft papers and risking jail to make a political point, but merely interested in saving his own skin.

Another song on the album is That Was the President, written shortly after John F. Kennedy's assassination two years earlier. In the liner notes, Phil wrote:

My Marxist friends can't understand why I wrote this song, and that's probably one of the reasons why I'm not a Marxist.

After JFK's assassination, Fidel Castro aptly pointed out that only fools could rejoice at such a tragedy, for systems, not men, are the enemy. Later Phil would write another, more surreal and poetic song about the Kennedy legacy, Crossroads.

The finest singing on Ochs's second album is definitely on his cover version of Ballad of the Carpenter, a song written by British songwriter and political firebrand Ewan McColl. Like Guthrie's "Jesus Christ", it's an attempt to turn Jesus into a left-wing hero.

And so to Ochs's third album, Phil Ochs in Concert,which was not entirely recorded live, despite the title (some songs were actually recorded in the studio). It was the last of his purely acoustic albums, after which he asked to be released from his Elektra contract, having failed to have the commercial impact that he wanted in order to spread his political message (although In Concert did brush the lower reaches of the Billboard charts). In truth, the world had moved on from simple protest songs: by the time of Ochs's Elektra debut, Dylan had already given up the genre, disillusioned by Kennedy's assassination and even more by the Left's attempt to turn him into their performing monkey. The Beatles-led British invasion and Dylan's own monumental Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde albumns had changed the face of popular music, and Ochs sounded dated.

Nevertheless, In Concert contains some of his best work, and definitely his best singing on record.

There But for Fortune is the best known song, having been a minor hit for Joan Baez (Phil jokes about her having written it for him). Here's a short clip of Phil singing it:

Canons of Christianity is a rather tender song lamenting the subversion of religion, sung (like 'There But for Fortune') with aching tenderness. By contrast, the spoken introduction shows his natural gift for comedy.

The Cops of the World, on the other hand, this is one of the most angry and sarcastic songs Ochs ever wrote. It portrays the U.S. Army as a strutting, macho bunch of thugs, imposing their will on the rest of the world by rape and brutality:

We're hairy and horny and ready to shack
We don't care if you're yellow or black
Just take off your clothes and lie down on your back!
'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World

The song builds to a bitter climax:

When we've butchered your sons, boys
When we've butchered your sons
Have a stick of our gum, boys
Have a stick of our buble-gum
We own half the world, "Oh say, can you see",
The name for our profits is democracy
So, like it or not, you will have to be free
'Cause we're the Cops of the World, boys
We're the Cops of the World

For Vietnam, read Iraq.

With caustic wit, Ochs also excoriates those who describe themselves as liberal - until a black man moves in next door or they are asked to bus their children into segregated areas. Love Me, I'm A Liberal ends pointedly:

Once I was young and impulsive
I wore every conceivable pin
Even went to the socialist meetings
Learned all the old union hymns
But I've grown older and wiser
-- And that's why I'm turning you in!
So love me, love me, love me, I'm a liberal

In Concert also includes a rare, and astonishingly beautiful love song, Changes, which has one of the loveliest melodies ever written.

The final song on the album is a mournful reflection on death, When I'm Gone. When Ochs returned with a new label in 1967, he would be a different kind of creative artist, no longer relying on straightforward protest to get his message across, but rather using irony and Dylanesque surrealism and experimenting with musical form.

After failing to change the world or sell enough records to get his message heard to a wide audience, Ochs, as stated above, asked to be released from his Elektra contract. He went away for a while, and returned in November 1967 with a very different album from its precedessors, on the then new A&M label. Pleasures of the Harbor, while flawed, is Phil's masterpiece, and most of the songs still hold up well today.

More controversial are the arrangements. Rather than follow Dylan's lead into the new hybrid "folk rock" ("folk" music played with an electric guitar-led band), Ochs attempted a different kind of pop crossover, with arrangements drawing on classical, lounge, Dixieland jazz. rock and roll, and experimental synthesized music crossed with folk.

Further symbolizing the break with the past, the album was recorded not in New York City (centre of the U.S. folk scene in the early to mid sixties), but in Los Angeles, where Ochs had moved, and where psychedlia and "acid rock" was taking over from the folk-rock of Dylan, The Byrds, Simon & Garfunkel, and The Mamas & The Papas (Dylan responded by going rural Americana, on his way to outright country).

Ochs' chief collaborators on the record were producer Larry Marks, arranger Ian Freebairn-Smith, and pianist Lincoln Mayorga, whose contribution to the albumn was outstanding. The achievements of the producer and arrangement are more debatable.

All these musical changes add texture and ironical counterpoint to the lyrics, which are the record's biggest departure. Gone are the somewhat simplistic finger-pointing songs of the early albums (perhaps Ochs had been stung by Dylan's unfair accusation that he was a journalist rather than a songwriter). The songs are still political, but Ochs is more of a social commentator than a rabble rouser this time round. The songs are longer, and the anger and bitterness of his early albumns is replaced by irony, satire, and pathos.

Passing over the somewhat overproduced opening song Cross My Heart, with its drums, harpsichord, flutes, strings, orchestral horns, and vocal overdubs, we come to the first really classic song on the album, Flower Lady - a deft piece of ironical social commentary wrapped in an achingly beautiful melody:

Soldiers, disillusioned, come home from the war
Sarcastic students tell them not to fight no more
And they argue through the night
Black is black and white is white
Walk away both knowing they are right.
But nobody's buying flowers from the flower lady.

All the people in the song are too wrapped up in their own little lives to indulge in simple pleasures like buying flowers. In the final verse, even the Flower Lady no longer knows what she is selling flowers for.

The Byrds apparently thought of covering this song, but unfortunately for Phil, they decided against it.

A different kind of self-absorption is depicted in the best-known song of the albumn, Outside of A Small Circle of Friends. The song was inspired by the brutal murder of a New York woman, Kitty Genovese, and the inaction of her neighbours. The story was sensationalized in an inaccurate and misleading New York Times report entitled "Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police", and the case was cited as illustrating the supposed callousness of urban America. Ochs' song uses a Dixieland jazz backing (with Mayorga on tack piano) that remains almost manically jaunty and unconcerned despite the grim events narrated by Ochs in a splendid deadpan voice:

Look outside the window, there's a woman being grabbed
They've dragged her to the bushes and now she's being stabbed
Maybe we should call the cops and try to stop the pain
But Monopoly is so much fun, I'd hate to blow the game
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends.

And a later verse:

Smoking marijuana is more fun than drinking beer,
But a friend of ours was captured and they gave him thirty years
Maybe we should raise our voices, ask somebody why
But demonstrations are a drag, besides we're much too high
And I'm sure it wouldn't interest anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends

Unfortunately, the drugs reference in the above verse got the song banned from most radio stations, just when it was threatening to chart. An edited version later flopped.

Even more successful in marrying form and content is the albumn's masterpiece, and, in my one, one of the greatest songs ever written. The Party is an account of a high society party in which Ochs plays the part of a singing lounge pianist (although the piano is of course played by Mayorga, who is quite brilliant in his improvisations, quoting everything from Mozart, Bach and Schumann to lounge standards such as "As Time Goes By" and "Stardust"), who passes satirical comments on the guests as they arrive:

The fire breathing Rebels arrive at the party early,
Their khaki coats are hung in the closet near the fur.
Asking handouts from the ladies, while they criticize the lords.
Boasting of the murder of the very hands that pour.
And the victims learn to giggle, for at least they are not bored.
And my shoulders had to shrug
As I crawl beneath the rug
And retune my piano.

"Boasting of the murder of the very hands that pour" is a splendid line. My favourite verse is the following:

They travel to the table, the host is served for supper,
And they pass each other for salt and pepper.
And the conversation sparkles as their wits are dipped in wine,
Dinosaurs on a diet, on each other they will dine.
Then they pick their teeth and they squelch a belch saying:
"Darling you tasted divine."
And my shoulders had to shrug, etc.

"Dinosaurs on a diet, on each other they will dine" is a splendid line. What Ochs is actually saying to these aging, backbiting socialites who nibble on lettuce and light snacks and pass scandalous remarks about one another is that they are dying. Or perhaps he is saying, "Die, die, die!" The image might have come from Sheridan's School for Scandal.

In the final verse, the commentator does not spare himself, catching sight in the mirror of a "laughing maniac who was writing songs like this."

The song is the equal of Dylan's 12-minute opus "Desolation Row", to which it is indebted.

The title track, Pleasures of the Harbor, is a bittersweet story of sailors seeking escape on shore leave, possibly a metaphor for other sorts of escape.

In the room dark and dim
Touch of skin
He asks her of her name
She answers with no shame
And not a sense of sin.
Until the fingers draw the blinds
A sip of wine
The cigarette of doubt
The candle is blown out
The darkness is so kind.

Soon your sailing will be over
Come and take the pleasures of the harbor.

The album's final track, Crucifixion, is a surrealistic reflection on the death of John F. Kennedy, which moved Bobby Kennedy to tears when Ochs played it for him. Unfortunately, the song is lost in the eerie morass of loops, electric harpsichord, and washes of electric distortion arranged by Joseph Burd, leader of a late-60s experimental electronic rock group called The United States of America.

Clocking in at more than 50 minutes, Pleasures of the Harbor was an outrageously long album for 1967. This was Phil's most ambitious project ever, but it was not terribly successful commercially, peaking at #168 in the charts. While Ochs would not retreat to acoustic folk for his subsequent A&M LPs, and would continue to write songs as unusual (and often as lengthy) in construction throughout the rest of the 60s, he would never again employ textures as recklessly varied as those heard on Pleasures of the Harbor.

[The second part of this piece, dealing with Ochs's final three albums, was never completed].

Boris and the Elephant Trap

2008-05-21T11:28:00.000-07:00

Well, it's a couple of weeks now since the populace of London in their wisdom ousted the very able sitting mayor and elected Bojo the Clown in his stead. I still can't believe it—London, the city of Samuel Johnson is now the city of Boris Johnson. Time to revive by far my most popular youtube video (230+ comments!) What can I say—I did my bit!

After watching that you may want to listen to this: The Jam Play 'Eton Rifles' Live on 'Something Else'

Why I hate former England cricket captain Mike Gatting

2008-05-21T10:44:00.000-07:00

Almost certainly the most overrated cricketer of all time (especially as a captain) is Mike Gatting. It is impossible to convey what a useless captain Fat Gatt was for those who didn't witness his 23 matches in charge. He won just two (2) games as captain. True he lost "only" six, but that was sufficient to lose every series of which he was in charge, except one (and this is the reason for which he is rated out of all proportion to his talents and achievement): against Australia, when he retained the Ashes won the previous year by David Gower.

Even that success was a poor achievement: Australia had one of their weakest teams ever, and England should have won 3-0 or 4-0. There was even an opportunity for a rare victory in Perth, but Gatting blew it with his overly defensive fields when England had a huge first innings score. But because of his role in retaining the Ashes down under, every time there was another monumental cockup in the 90s, Gatt would be dragged out by some lazy journalist to be asked where Gower/Gooch/Athers/Stewart etc. had gone wrong.

Gatting lost home series to the might of India and New Zealand, two teams that have never travelled well. Add to that his disgraceful behaviour in Pakistan, quite unworthy of an England captain whatever the provocation; his desertion of an England team of which he was a member in the middle of an Ashes series in order to prop up apartheid in return for a bucketload of rands; and his stupid, ignorant, and borderline racist dismissal of anti-apartheid protests as "just a lot of singing and dancing" and you get the picture of a failed captain and a flawed, shallow human being.

As a player, too, he was quite useless for a long period at the start of his career and for a long time at the end of it, when he continued to be picked despite clearly deteriorating eyesight and footwork. The majority of his good innings for England came in an 18-game period in the middle of his career, in which he was briefly England's most reliable batsman and best player of spin. The latter reputation was completely wrecked, of course, when he ran into Shane Warne:

Gatting was a hugely overrated player and captain, but he is not an overrated commentator. That's because no one rates him at all in that capacity. His difficulties with the English language make Derek Pringle's Daily Telegraph columns read like E.W. Swanton. My favourite Gattingism: "He lampooned that one to the boundary!"

Classic Cash: Ride This Train

2008-05-21T09:38:00.000-07:00

Unlike the previous blogs in this series, this one has been almost entirely rewritten since it first appeared on a messageboard three years ago.

Johnny Cash is best known to younger folk today from the hit movie Walk the Line and from the brilliant series of albums he made towards the end of his life with Rick Rubin on the American Recordings label. His creative work between leaving Sun Records and his work with Rubin has been somewhat neglected of late.

The rock crowd may be surprised to know that the concept album was invented by a certain Mr. Frank Sinatra, who first realized the potential of the new long playing record and used it to create albums that were more than simple collections of singles, but had a cohesive identity that made them more than the sum of their parts.

Johnny Cash was swift to follow Sinatra's lead. His 1959 Columbia Records albums Hymns and Songs of Our Soil were loose collections around simple themes, but his 1960 album Ride This Train was altogether more ambitious.

Ride This Train is not an album of train songs. Rather it is a travelogue of a journey on board an imaginary train that travels across state borders and through time. It's also the first Americana album. It's a celebration of American values, but Cash does not forget to pay tribute to the American Indian, who would be the subject of one of his greatest albums in a few years' time (Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian).

It also reveals Cash's poetic talent. Each song begins with the sound of a steam locomotive and the words "Ride this train...", followed by a poetic monologue written by Cash in the persona of the character whom the following song is about.

The travelogue begins with a recital of the place-names of America, majestic in their artless poetry, and continues with the thundering names of the Indian tribes who lived there first. Then Johnny Cash boards the train, stopping first at a a small town in the mining country of Kentucky. He presents a brief sketch of a boy whose father is a miner - when he comes home "nothing is clean but the whites of his eyes" - and whose ambition is to follow that calling. This leads to the first song, Loading Coal, which was written by the great Merle Travis, who himself came from a mining family, and who wrote many classic songs as well as inventing the "Travis picking" style of guitar-playing. In the second selection, Cash travels to Mississippi and its levees and constant fight against flood waters. In this sequence Cash sings his own version of the traditional Going to Memphis, a song of the convict work gangs.

Ride This Train was the first of a series of Cash albums celebrating or exploring various aspects of America. Although he rarely makes explicit political comment or "protests" (though see again Bitter Tears), his concerns are the same as the protest crowd; but he documents rather than sloganizing or advocating. It is this aspect of Cash's great series of 1960s concept albums that makes them classics of the folk music genre as well as of country music.

Loudon Wainwright III: A History (Part 2)

2008-05-21T08:23:00.000-07:00

So far in his career as we have examined it to date, Loudon has recorded a handful of good songs (and one brilliant one, School Days), but his albums have been rather patchy. With Attempted Moustache, his fourth album and his second for Columbia, he finally produced an album's worth of quality songs.

The album was produced in Nashville by Bob Johnson, Dylan's producer on Highway 61 Revisited through New Morning, of Simon & Garfunkel, and a host of other folk-rock artists. Unfortunately, the results were not satisfactory, as Loudon notes in the liner notes to the 1998 reissue of the album:

I sure would like to remix some of Attempted Moustache. On several of the more raucous band numbers, producer Bob Johnston had me sounding like I was singing in some other room. The record was cut in 5 days, practically an eternity by Nashville standards at that time. Usually you'd do a song once, maybe twice, and that was it—the cats were out the door and on the way to the next session.

Still, the Nashville session musicians are undoubtedly brilliant, and as Loudon also notes, the album contains some of his best songs.

The Swimming Song

Loudon's best song since "School Days" and also much covered. Loudon noted in 1998: "My then-wife Kate McGarrigle taught me to frail (lovely verb!) a banjo, and it remains one of the nicest things I ever learned from anybody." Kate plays along on second banjo.

A.M. World

This song is a satirical look at the "fame and wealth" resulting from the success of "Dead Skunk." After two decades of listening to this album, I've finally realized that the album title could be a glance at this song! ("Attempted Moustache" = A.M.)

Liza

With this song, Loudon finally masters the art of sketching the funny-charming vignettes we know and love him for. In his 1998 liner notes, Loudon writes:

I went to school with Ms. Minnelli but it was in the second and third grades and we last saw each other in 1954. Someone from Danish National Radio once played her this song and taped her reaction, which went something like: "Oh yes, I remember little Loudie Wainwright, and if he keeps singing that way, he'll ruin his voice."

Very sweet and funny, but note that yet again that Loudon is in a familiar role: looking on while someone else gets the success and fame. He seems more comfortable in this role than in the long black limousine of "A.M. World."

Loudon sings this one a capella.

The Man Who Couldn't Cry

I consider this another my best songs—certainly it's one of the longest. I like the cutting sound of my DiAngelico on the track. Check out Johnny Cash's great cover of this on his fine record American Recordings.

Johnny Cash's version is an anomaly. Whatever his other great virtues, Cash doesn't normally do irony or piss-taking, subjects on which Loudon is a leading authority. Therefore he treats this strange story as a genuine tale of redemption, like the other songs on that masterpiece, American Recordings. Maybe there really is a serious story in there. Cash's version is sung live in a trendy young persons' night club on Sunset Boulevard. Loudon no doubt appreciated this extra irony.

Back to Attempted Moustache . Come A Long Way is the song the least marred by the production. It was written by Kate.

And finally, there are two songs about Rufus. The first was written to the lad while he was still in the womb. Loudon trumps the outrageous pun of the title—Dilated To Meet You—with an even more excruciating alternative one in his 1998 liner notes: "At Your Cervix." Sung with Kate. The second is Lullaby. To quote the reissue liner notes again:

Another song I still do. And it's myself I'm telling to shut up, not Rufus, as I led the lyric-reading listeners to believe.

(The printed lyrics add "you're Rufus" after the words "you're ruthless.")

Loudon's fifth album was released in 1975. Critics and fans had complained that his studio records were not on a par with his live performances, so on Unrequited Loudon tries to have it both ways. For those of you who don't remember the days of vinyl, the records had two sides, and when you reached the end of the first side, you had to flip the record to play the second side. The first side of Unrequited had seven tracks recorded in the studio; side two's tracks were recorded live at the Bottom Line in New York City.

On the 1999 reissue, Loudon writes:

The big picture of me on the front cover of the album with the tear rolling down my cheek (a glycerine drop I can now confess) seems to say 'look at the sad clown.' Yes, I was sad, but I was one pissed off clown, too. In 1974 my marriages to my wife Kate McGarrible, my personal manager Milton Kramer, and Columbia Records were all on the rocks. Kate and I were separated. Milt and I battled constantly about the direction of my career, and Columbia was poised to drop me from their roster. My last effort for the label, Attempted Moustache, had bombed badly in comparison with my first record for them, Album III, which had contained the hit 'Dead Skunk.' In 1974 things were't going great. Just check out some of the titles of the songs...

Indeed, all the best songs on the album are about the breakdown of relationships. The other tracks, especially those with a band, are not very successful, particularly The Lowly Tourist, which is a faux reggae pastiche (reggae parodies were very popular in the mid-70s; the most successful were 10CC's Dreadlock Holiday and the Kinks' Black Messiah). It does have Harvey Brooks playing bass on it though—that man gets everywhere!

Much better is Kick in the Head, which Loudon sings at the piano, about a man whose lover sleeps with his best friend. But the record really takes off with the savage Whatever Happened To Us, which has some very caustic lyrics:

We used to be in love
But now we are in hate
You used to say I came too early
But it was you who came too late...

There's a whole lot of crap about a tender trap
What it is, is a suicide snare
And all I want to do is forget about you
And our lousy love affair.

Another good track is the jazzy Crime of Passion, which has some great sax. But even better is....

Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder

This one has Kate singing along with him. A song of tender regret, it's the obverse of the nasty 'Whatever Happened To Us?"

Things weren't easy when we were together
We had plenty of days of lousy weather
But now...I'm in a hurricane
And I'm gonna grieve
And I'm gonna moan
'Cos you not here
And I'm all alone

The joke's on me, you had the last laugh
I find out the hard way who was my better half
And now...I'm the worse for the wear
When I see you again, expect some Champagne wine
And on Valentine's Day expect a Valentine
'Cos now I know how much I care.

This well-constructed song is the first really successful personal song of Loudon's career, the first in a long line that includes such heartbreaking classics as "Your Mother and I", "April Fool's Day Morn", "That Hospital", "Dreaming", "Surviving Twin" and others.

Now lets flip the record over and listen to the live tracks. They are all good, and it's hard to know which to single out.

On the Rocks

Another song about breakup, but the live audience allows Loudon to really camp up the funny parts. It's a blues send-up. Part of the humour is in the use of modern, middle class terms like "domestic problems" instead of "the blues" to describe falling out with the missus.

Even funnier is...

Mr Guilty

This is the least guilty song you could possibly imagine! Loudon confesses to his faults, but you don't really believe him! Especially when he hits the mock teenybop chorus...

Call me Mr. Guilty
Mr Guilty, that's my name
Without a doubt, it's all my fault
I am the one to blame

You say that you're unhappy
I do believe it's true
'Cos I'm the one, the no good bum
That did it all to you.

Ooo-ooo-ooo. I'm so sorry.
Sorry as a man can be.
I'm so guilty
This is my a-po-lo-gy...

A comedy classic.

A curiosity on Unrequited is Untitled (actually called The Hardy Boys at the Y, but Loudon's manager feared a lawsuit from the author of The Hardy Boys Mysteries), which deals with a gay relationship. It's not exactly homophobic, but in the seventies you could only sing about homosexuality if you were treating it as one big joke. Loudon sings the whole thing in a fake British accent of indeterminate location. The song is quite pornographic, and when Loudon sings the aside, "It's fabulous", he sounds just like Rufus.

Unrequited to the Nth Degree

Another of Loudon's songs that seems to be aware of life's comedy at the same time as its tragedy.

Old Friend is about the breakup with a long time friend. In view of Loudon's comments quoted earlier, he might be referring to his manager Milton Kramer.

The original album ends with Rufus Is A Tit Man, which achieved a retrospective irony when the then infant Rufus grew up to be more of a cock lover than a tit fancier. At the end of it, the crowd can be heard chanting "Dead Skunk, Dead Skunk!", as Loudon notes ruefully in the liner notes to the 1998 reissue. The reissue also includes a studio version (with band) of "Rufus Is A Tit Man" as a bonus. It's actually more successful than some of the other songs with a band.

It's interesting to compare Unrequited with Dylan's masterpiece Blood on the Tracks, which was released earlier in the same year. Both albums are about the breakdown of relationships and divorce. But the similarities end there. In songs like "Idiot Wind", Dylan stands like Lear in the tempest, and the breakdown of his marriage seems like part of a universal malaise that's sweeping all over America itself ("From the Grand Coulee Dam to the Capitol") in the aftermath of Watergate. As in Macbeth, all normal values are reversed ("What's good is bad, what's bad is good/You'll find out when you've reached the top/You're on the bottom"). The pain of love's ending is like a corkscrew to his heart, but eventually he wills himself to pull through in the cathartic "Buckets of Rain."

Life is sad, life is a bust
All you can do is do what you must
You do what you must do
And you do it well.

On top of all that, there are spiritual allegories like "Shelter From the Storm" and the cinematic scope of "Lily Rosemary & the Jack of Hearts", where the star-crossed lovers take on symbolic or allegorical roles.

Unrequited isn't anything like as ambitious or as traumatic or all-encompassing. It's the sound of one guy singing to himself to cheer himself up. But in its own small way, it's a minor triumph also.

Loudon Wainwright III: A History (Part 1)

2008-05-21T07:14:00.000-07:00

This blog entry is based on a thread I started on this subject on a messageboard last year. The purpose was to introduce the music of Loudon Wainwright III to those who really only know him as father to Rufus and Martha, or author of "Dead Skunk." I never got around to finishing it; perhaps I will do so when I've edited and published all the previous instalments here.

I don't really like Loudon's first couple of albumns very much (in fact, I'm of the opinion that his best work was in the 80s and 90s). The first album, which came out in 1970, was just called Loudon Wainwright III, although it is sometimes known as Album I.

The cover suggests some kind of proto-punk à la Iggy Pop. Loudon's angry strumming occasionally does suggest something of that image; but already on the very first song on his very first record he's looking back into the past and showing one of his enduring qualities: the ability to look at himself honestly, critically, and even satirically. He casts himself as the rebel without a cause, but totally changes the meaning of the song by presenting it in the past tense and emphasizing that all this was "when I was younger." It's as though Dylan's very first recorded song had been "My Back Pages". There is indeed a touch of Dylanesque phrasing in "Blaspheming booted blue-jeaned baby boy" (think of Dylan lines like "the motorcycle, black Madonna, two-wheeled gypsy queen"), but it's also unmistakably a Loudon Wainwright III song.

This first song, School Days, is easily the best song on the first album, and it's one that has endured. Loudon still sings it today, and it is probably his most covered song. It's one of the great songs about adolescence, a worthy counterpart to Springsteen's "Growing Up" (Bruce was getting his start about this time too).

The rest of the album is an anticlimax. He shows some signs of the talent for storytelling that he would later hone to perfection, but most of the stories just peter out before they've got anywhere. His sardonic humour and irreverence are also in evidence, but too often descend into facile sarcasm, e.g. in Glad To See You Got Religion.

Anyone producing an acoustic album of self-penned songs was going to be compared with Dylan (and still is), but at the time Album I appeared, there was what can only be defined as an Absence of Bob in the culture, the man himself having disappeared to Nashville to write country ditties about family life and eventually to fall silent altogether. The albumn "Self-Portrait" with its cheesy pop covers, country crooning, and deliberate iconoclasm was seen by some critics as virtually a suicide note. Bob Dylan is dead, bring on the new Bobs. Competition to crown the "new Bob Dylan" began almost immediately with the seventies, and our boy Loudon was one of those thus tagged. He wrote about this phenomenon himself many years later on his masterpiece, History (1992). The CD booklet with that album reproduces a New York Times article from July 1970. The headline, referring to the famous Greenwich Village café where Dylan and other folkies made their debuts, read: Loudon Wainwright at Gaslight Evokes Dylan Comparisons. The album features a song taking off the Woody Guthrie/Bob Dylan talking blues style and looking fondly at this period (the song is dedicated to Bob on his 50th birthday): Talkin' New Bob Dylan. Catch the nice bit at the end about Martha listening to "Like A Rolling Stone" at full volume!

But the comparison was never really apt. Loudon was not cut out to be the new Wunderkind, and wouldn't really find his voice (in my opinion anyway) until he hit middle age.

Going back to the beginning again, 1971 saw the release of Album II, like its predecessor, a solo acoustic album.

There's not much to say about this album; the songs are as half-formed as most of those on its predecessor. Motel Blues is the first of Loudon's songs about his alleycat ways on the road; it was revived a few years ago by Ben Lee. The humorous ditty Be Careful There's A Baby in the House (not written about Rufus, despite what you may read on some websites—Rufus wasn't born till two years later) has some nice guitar. Drinking Song sounds like Leonard Cohen's "Teachers." Loudon was apparently drinking heavily himself at this period, although the song doesn't mention this; later he would learn to deal with these issues more directly.

Perhaps the best song is the traditional Old Paint, sung with Canadian folksinger Kate McGarrigle, to whom he was by then married.

After Album II, like its predecessor, had failed to sell, Loudon was dropped by his record company, Atlantic Records. But his follow-up album on Columbia was to bring both critical and commercial success. Time to tackle that Dead Skunk.....

So on to Loudon's new start on Columbia Records (Home of the Bob since 1961), and at last a decent album cover:

At this point I can do no better than quote from Loudon s own speech at the Ohio University Spring Literary Festival a couple of years back:

On my third record, imaginatively entitled "Album III," there were more ‘songs of inexperience’ and autobiographical angst, but also a novelty tune I made up in 12 minutes about a dead skunk I ran over while driving in northern Westchester County, New York. Good instincts (get it?), great karma, dumb luck, plus plain old payola, all combined, and the result was my only hit heretofore and thus far, #12 on the Billboard Chart and #1 in Little Rock, Arkansas for six weeks. Suddenly I did have a pretty cool life. I was the "Dead Skunk" guy.

25 years old and I pretty much had made it. The critics’ darling was now a success. So what happened? Why is it that many of you here today aren’t quite sure who the hell I actually am, aside from Rufus Wainwright’s father? Why is finding a CD of mine akin to archeology? Where were the follow up hits to "Dead Skunk," funny animal songs like "I Met Her at the Pet Store" and "Stay Away From My Aardvark?" There are answers to these questions, reasons for the "what," the "whys," and the "where." Indeed, I could hold forth for hours this afternoon on the subject of my career. Over the years I’ve done just that for any number of psychotherapists. But we don’t have enough time today and I have trust issues with strangers who congregate in groups on college campuses. Besides, this talk is about writing and not my self-destructive tendencies. (But if you’re interested in charting the molehills and valleys of my career, it’s all been chronicled in song. Hey kids, fire up those mp3s and check out "Fame & Wealth," "A.M. World," "The Grammy Song," "Mr. Ambivalent," and "They Spelled My Name Wrong Again!")

That quotation is Loudon all over: funny, self-deprecating, honest, but with an underlying sense of thwarted ambition: the reference to his 1997 song Mr Ambivalent is no accident.

When fame came, Loudon couldn't handle it. He started wearing a false beard in public. He grew tired of his hit novelty song, and resented the fans demanding to hear it in concert. In his liner notes to the 1998 reissue of his fourth album, Attempted Moustache, he writes: "I was more than just a tad ambivalent (that word again!) about this success. Attempted Moustache bombed with the critics and John Q. Buying Public. That made me much more comfortable"; while in the notes to the reissue of "Unrequited", he writes with tongue in cheek, but also poignantly of the live tracks included on the album: "Please note how at the end of that I graciously thank my audience, only to be rewarded with screams for 'Dead Skunk."

Is it any wonder Loudon wasn't able to handle Rufus's later success? He couldn't handle his own. Already on Album II, in the song Saw Your Name in the Paper, he had written of someone else's success in the music business:

Take the money, take the love
Take all the people give
The people all are dying
And somehow you help them live
Oh, the people will destroy you
That love will turn to hate
But right now you must scratch it
Your itch that's grown so great.

Make yourself a hero
It's heroes people crave
Make yourself a master
But know you are a slave

That's a typical Loudon song, that comes over both as anitpathetic towards fame and its rewards, but also jealous of those who enjoy them while he doesn't (the song starts "Saw your name in the paper/It was quite a blow").

Anyway, on Album III Loudon has a band on about half the tracks. Apart from "Dead Skunk" there are some genuinely good songs, if nothing yet to match "School Days" from the very first album. Red Guitar (solo acoustic) starts off with a classic verse:

Used to have a red guitar
Till I smashed it drunk one night
Smashed it in the classic form
As Peter Townshend might...

But the song goes on to talk about Kate reproving him for his actions, and his buying a replacement guitar, which gets stolen by a hippy. Unfortunately, we never learn why he smashed it (unless "drunk one night" is the explanation).

Then there is a lovely ballad Needless To Say. There is even a better animal novelty song than "Dead Skunk"; called B Side it's about the sex life of bees.

(I would like to hear this song done as an Elvis Presley parody,. Imagine Elvis doing it in his "If you're looking for trouble/You've come to the right place" or "I Got Stung" voice.)

The final song, Say That You Love Me, is also typically Loudon in its blend of comedy and desperation: "I must know you love me/There must be no doubt/Open your heart/Open your mouth!"

Next: Attempted Moustache and the first songs about Rufus (prenatal and at three weeks)!

Classic Cash: Bitter Tears

2008-05-21T06:29:00.000-07:00

This is another excerpt from a thread about Johnny Cash I posted on a messageboard about three years ago.

June 1964. On the 9th, Dylan records Another Side of Bob Dylan in a single, all-night session fuelled by two bottles of Beaujolais. While on the 30th June and 1st July, Cash records the eight songs that make up Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian.

It is an ironic twist of fate that in the same month that Dylan bade farewell to "protest songs" forever in songs like "My Back Pages" ("I was so much older then/I'm younger than that now), Cash should record his first protest album: although as we have seen, sympathy for the downtrodden and exploited and even the criminal was a characteristic of his songs from the start.

As we have seen in our survey of Ride This Train and Blood, Sweat, and Tears, Cash's musical interests lay far beyond the confines of Nashville, and he was basically working in the same field as the hipster folkie crowd in Greenwich Village, New York, with the exception that he had sung traditional songs in the cotton fields rather than learning them from records. Cash is the bridge between country and folk. He was never as conservative as many of the Nashville crowd, and when he first heard Dylan's Freewheelin' , he recognized someone with the same sympathy for the underdog that characterized his own best work. He would play the record before and after his shows and eventually wrote to Dylan expressing his admiration. It was no surprise that in his reply Dylan stated that he had followed Cash's career since first hearing 'I Walk The Line'. In fact, Dylan can be heard talking about Johnny Cash (albeit none too complimentarily) in the very first circulating recording we have of Dylan (when he was just an 18-year-old Minnesota kid called Robert Zimmerman). Despite enjoying a huge pop hit with "Ring of Fire" in 1963, Cash was determined to make his own folk-protest album.

A few weeks after making that album, Cash and Dylan finally met (July 1964) . "When Bob Dylan first met Johnny Cash, at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964," Kris Kristofferson said in Madison Square Garden in 1992, "they say that Dylan just looked up at him, like a big tree, and walked all the way around him and said, YEAH!" This would be the beginning of a friendship that would culminate in their recording together in Nashville in 1969. In the meantime, when the furore over Dylan's going electric erupted in 1965, Cash wrote a letter to Billboard Magazine, ending with the words: "Shut up and let him sing!"

Back to Bitter Tears. This is a very impressive album: a fine selection of songs brilliantly arranged and performed. Five of the eight songs were written by the American Indian folk singer Peter LaFarge.

Peter LaFarge, adopted son of Oliver LaFarge, first winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Literature–the book was "Laughing Boy," a sympathetic treatment of the Navajo Indians. The F.B.I. took an interest in Peter and began hounding him when he organized FAIR (Federation for American Indian Rights). Several months before he died, the F.B.I. raided his New York apartment at midnight. They scattered and tore up his papers; they put handcuffs on him and dragged him to Bellevue in his pajamas [sic]. They put pressure on Bellevue to declare him insane, but Bellevue could find nothing wrong and turned him loose.

LaFarge died of a stroke just a few months after Cash's recording of Bitter Tears, although rumours persist that he committed suicide. His own recordings of his songs are still available on Folkways and Broadside recordings, but his name remains known largely through Johnny Cash, and Bitter Tears stands as an unintended tribute (the liner notes still talk about him in the present tense, so it is to be hoped that he lived long enough to hear the album).

It cannot be stressed too much that Cash was taking a big risk in releasing Bitter Tears. He needed commercial hits like "Ring of Fire" to enable him to persuade Columbia to allow him to continue producing his American musical histories such as the albums I have been focusing on (from Ride This Train onwards). But this political album risked alienating his core, basically conservative, country music audience. Cash actually took out full page ads in the music press, daring radio programmers to play "The Ballad of Ira Hayes", the single off the album, but to no avail. Although the single was a hit, radio stations refused to play it.

Dylan's song "With God on Our Side" is basically about the way history is taught in American schools. "Oh, my name it means nothing/My age it means less/The country I come from/Is called the Mid-West/I's taught and brought up there/The laws to abide/And that the land that I live in/Has God on its side." The rest of the song is a recital of the history lessons learned in school. (It owes a debt to Pete Seeger's "What did you learn in school today?") One of the verses is: "Oh, the history books tell it/They tell it so well/The cavalry's charged/The Indians fell/The cavalry's charged/The Indians died/For the country was young then/With God on its side."

But a new generation was beginning to question these history lessons. They were to find that Johnny Cash had already been there. The basically patriotic Ride This Train already pays tribute to the Indian contribution to American history and mourns the fate of the native Americans (as they were not then called!) evicted from their homes and slaughtered in great numbers as the white man moved westward, ever westward...

A tall, brooding man, Cash could pass for a native American himself; in fact, he did claim at this time to be a quarter Cherokee, although he later admitted this was untrue. A self-mythologising story, perhaps, but it does show the extent of his sympathy with his subject. And he took the songs back to the people who inspired them: there is remarkable footage in the BBC documentary "The Last American Hero" shown over Christmas that shows Johnny performing "The Ballad of Ira Hayes" to a native American tribe.

So here is a rundown of all the tracks on Bitter Tears n its entirety. It's still in print, but has not yet been remastered.

As Long As the Grass Shall Grow (Peter LaFarge)

A brilliant performance by Johnny. Note especially the effectiveness of the spoken interjections at the end: "Are are you thirsty?... My brother, are you warm?" These never fail to bring a tear to my eyes. The lyrics tell the story of how the Seneca Indians were cheated of their land despite a treaty signed by Washington himself. After the American Revolution, the United States found itself very weak. To placate the American Indians (many of whom fought on the side of the British), the US government offered numerous peace treaties promising land "as long as the grass shall grow and the waters flow". US Courts later interpreted such phrases as pure metaphor, and denied claims to land that the treaties promised. LaFarge uses the example of the damming of Allegheny River, and the consequent dislocation of many Native Americans, near Pittsburgh as proof of these broken treaties. The damming of the river flooded the land of the Seneca Indians (of the Iroqois tribe):

The Iroquois Indians used to rule from Canada way south
But no one fears the Indians now and smiles the liar's mouth
The Senecas hired an expert to figure another site
But the great good army engineers said that he had no right
Although he showed them another plan and showed them another way
They laughed in his face and said no deal Kinuza dam is here to stay
Congress turned the Indians down brushed off the Indians plea
So the Senecas have renamed the dam: they call it "Lake Perfidy".

Apache Tears

One of only two self-penned songs on the record, a simple and effective ballad mourning the tragic fate of the Apache tribe. A couple of explanations: the lyrics mention "Mescalero death moans" - Mescalero is one of the divisions of the Apache.

Dead grass dry roots hunger crying in the night
Ghost of broken hearts and laws are here
And who saw the young squaw they judged by their whiskey law
Tortured till she died of pain and fear

In July 1832, Congress passed a law that totally banned alcohol in the Indian country.

Custer (Peter LaFarge)

A truly remarkable performance as Cash gets right into the persona of an Indian positively exulting in the death of General Custer. This must have been startling in 1964 and later to any white American who had learned only traditional American history: here that history is gleefully turned on its head or presented sarcastically.

Now I will tell you, buster, that I ain't a fan of Custer
And the General, he don't ride well any more!
To some he was a hero, but to me his score was zero
And the General, he don't ride well any more.
Now Custer done his fightin' without too much excitin'
And the General, he don't ride well any more
General Custer come in pumpin' when the men were out a huntin'
But the General he don't ride well any more
With victories he was swimmin', he killed children dogs and women
But the General he don't ride well any more
Crazy Horse sent out the call to Sitting Bull and Gall
And the General he don't ride well any more
Now Custer split his men - well he won't do that again!
'Cause the General, he don't ride well any more!
Twelve thousand warriors waited, they were unanticipated
And the General he don't ride well any more
It's not called an Indian victory, but a bloody massacre
And the General, he don't ride well any more
There might have been more enthusin', if us Indians had been losin'
But the General he don't ride well any more
General George A.Custer, oh, his yellow hair had lustre
But the General, he don't ride well any more!
For now the General's silent, he got barbered violent
And the General, he don't ride well any more
Oh, the General he don't ride well any more!

The Talking Leaves

The other self-penned song on the album, which tells its own story.

The Ballad of Ira Hayes (Peter LaFarge)

The single from the album, see above. Dylan later recorded this for his "New Morning" album, though it was eventually omitted, only to be released on Columbia's revenge album when Dylan left the label in 1973. The album was simply entitled Dylan and consists entirely of songs released against his wishes. It is no longer available in the U.S.A., although it was released in the nineties on CD in the United Kingdom under the title A Fool Such As I.

The song tells the story of a "simple Pima Indian", who, although he had fought for the United States in World War II and even taken part in the famous hoisting of the Stars and Stripes over Iwo Jima, was not given a decent pension and returned home to a life of poverty and alcoholism.

Drums (Peter LaFarge)

Another song about education - this one the attempted forcible assimilation of the remaining Indians, partly by teaching them history from the white man's point of view, even giving them "white" names. The chorus warns that Indian culture will not go away.

Well you may teach me this land's hist'ry but we taught it to you first
We broke your hearts and bent your journeys broken treaties left us cursed
Even now you have to cheat us even though you think us tame
In our losing we found proudness in your winning you found shame

And there are drums beyond the mountain Indian drums that you can't hear
There are drums beyond the mountain and they're getting mighty near....

White Girl

A song about the difficulties of interracial marriage, a very hot topic in America at the time.

The Vanishing Race

The final song was written by J. Horton, and is impossibly melancholy, as the singer mourns the death of his people.

And he gazed below with a heart of woe where the prairie schooners sail
A vision formed like a mortal storm in the dust of the wagon train
A vanishing race appeared in space and he sang his sad refrain
Ii Ii ou Ii Ii Ii ou Ii Ii ou....

Three years after I wrote the above piece, Cash's classic protest album has still not been remastered.