In honor of my #1 song of 2001, it's...my #1 song of 2001. Granted, it's shaky and the sound's not that good, but...no matter...
Showing posts with label Bob Dylan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bob Dylan. Show all posts
Friday, September 21, 2007
Friday Nite Music Club
Wednesday, July 04, 2007
My Month of Entertainment - June 2007
Books
Tip Off: How the 1984 NBA Draft Changed Basketball Forever, Filip Bondy
Baseball Economist: The Real Game Exposed, J.C. Bradbury
Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency, Glenn Greenwald
Movies
The Cooler
Music
Blue Scholars, The Long March EP
Bob Dylan, Slow Train Coming
Bokoor Band, Bokoor Beats
Elk City, New Believers
Flaming Lips, Hear It Is
Flaming Lips, Hit to Death in the Future Head
Funkadelic, America Eats Its Young
Gorillaz, Demon Days
Ike Reilly Assassination, We Belong to the Staggering Evening
Jaylib (J Dilla & Madlib), Champion Sound
John Lennon, Plastic Ono Band
K'naan, The Dusty Foot Philosopher
Mission of Burma, ONoffON
My Morning Jacket, It Still Moves
Paul McCartney, Memory Almost Full
Queens of the Stone Age, Era Vulgaris
The Smiths, Singles
TV On the Radio, Live Session (iTunes Exclusive)
Wiley, Treddin' On Thin Ice
Various Artists, Frochot Music Sampler: MALI
Various Artists, The Now Sound Redesigned
Everywhere I looked, June was My Month of Redemption! Old faces, new names, hip hop, and Oklahoma City redeemed themselves to me, I redeemed myself to the God of Music Nerds, and The Butterfly and I redeemed ourselves in the eyes of Netflix. Let’s take a closer look!My Music Nerd Redemption!
I righted some old wrongs in my own music collection in June, and not a moment too soon. It’s hard to admit that I didn’t already own Plastic Ono Band, Slow Train Coming, Demon Days, It Still Moves, or anything by The Smiths, but here I am, admitting it to you now, throwing myself at the mercy of the court.
I finally got around to reading Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music this month (after purchasing it in February). Really interesting (and nerdy) read. There were interesting chapters on everything from Leadbelly and Jimmie Rodgers to The Monkees to Moby, but the chapter with the most impact on me was the one on John Lennon. Needless to say, any discussion of John Lennon and authenticity is probably going to focus on Plastic Ono Band. It’s funny—sometimes when I know there’s an album I should have bought 10 years ago, it makes it harder to suck it up and go ahead and buy it. I didn’t buy OK Computer until last year. I knew I’d love it (and boy, did I), but I guess buying it would acknowledge that I didn’t own it yet, and you can only pull the “I lost my copy” or “My roommate owned it, so I didn’t need to” excuse so many times (I think I lost my rights to those excuses after using them on Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and the Led Zeppelin catalog a couple years ago).
Anyway, it was time to suck it up and acknowledge that I really needed Plastic Ono Band in my catalog. I expected it to be a decent listen, but not an amazing one—I think I’m scarred by the entire post-Beatles McCartney catalog—but I would put this one right up against All Things Must Pass as the best solo album from a Beatle. I think I like All Things better (I think that makes me pretty weird, actually), but it’s to find too much fault in Plastic Ono. A great album. It’s painfully, emotionally raw in parts—duh—but that’s obviously one of the things that make it great. Another thing that makes it great to me is that...well, it’s not just pain and acoustic guitar. Songs like “Well Well Well” and “I Found Out” are a nice balance to the agony of “Mother” and well-known now-standards like “Power to the People” and “Working Class Hero”.
Alright, next up on the “You call yourself a nerd, and you didn’t own this album???” list is...Slow Train Coming. The first of Dylan's three "Christian conversion" albums. When I felt like filling in my Dylan collection over the last couple years, I always looked past this one. Now, in my defense, I already had copies of “Gotta Serve Somebody” and “I Believe in You” on my iPod, so that’s one of the reason I hadn’t ever gotten around to buying this album—the general uncomfortability of being preached at being the other one. But it really is a strong album. Aside from the two classics listed above, “When He Returns” is unbelievable, and even some of the more preachy songs—“When You Gonna Wake Up” and “Precious Angel”, for example, are quite well-done.
Next up? The Smiths. I guess I’ve just read too many Modest Mouse articles and Johnny Marr interviews in the last few months—it was time to take the plunge. It was just a bit disorienting to me to know that The Smiths were one of the most influential bands of the early- and mid-‘80s (it seems if you were in your late-teens or early-20s in 1985 and didn’t worship U2, you lived and died by The Smiths. And while I knew of the major Smiths tunes—“Hand In Glove” and “This Charming Man”, to name a couple—I couldn’t hum a single line of any of them. So now that I’ve listened to all of their major singles, I must say...I’m not all that impressed.
But their music could just be handicapped by their era. I mean, nothing sounds more aged than music from the early- and mid-‘80s. There’s no bass, no groove, too many artifical sounds...it just sounds awful. Music from the early- and mid-‘70s sounds much newer and fresher. I wish all the major albums from the Smiths era could be remixed and remastered with today’s techniques. Could we snap to that please?
Speaking of today’s techniques, I also righted a couple of more recent wrongs by picking up MMJ’s It Still Moves and The Gorillaz’ Demon Days. MMJ is probably quite a rewarding band to have followed over the years—I wouldn’t know...I didn’t get into them until last year. They made a short leap between 1999’s The Tennessee Fire and 2001’s At Dawn, a giant leap between At Dawn and 2003’s It Still Moves, and a quantum leap between Moves and 2005’s amazing Z. I really can’t wait to see what they come up with next, and in the meantime I’m just glad I’ve finally completed the MMJ puzzle.
As for Demon Days, at long last I convinced myself to get it when The Butterfly decided she must immediately own “Feel Good Inc.” It’s embarassing to me that I haven’t gotten into the Gorillaz more; I bitch and moan that not enough bands are attempting to fuse together hip hop, rock, and other genres, and then I don’t pay enough heed to those that do. This album’s good. It’s not amazing, but it still made me feel stupid for letting it sit out there for 2-3 years before giving it a shot. And when these songs fail, they fail in creative—not formulaic—ways. I respect the songs I don’t really enjoy.
So anyway, I feel much better about myself now that I’ve righted these wrongs. Let’s see who else was able to right themselves in my eyes...Macca Redemption!
I’ll say it: I haven’t enjoyed much of the post-Beatles Paul McCartney era. Solo albums...wings...it just hasn’t done it for me. I was working part-time at Barnes & Noble when his last album came out, and though some songs were really pretty decent, it was an in-store play, and I got seriously sick of hearing them pretty quickly. But now I don’t work at B&N anymore, and I’m able to turn Macca off when I don’t want to listen to him. That’s key. In moderation, Memory Almost Full is actually pretty good. It’s uneven—the weak songs like “Nod Your Head” and “Feet in the Clouds” are bad in the ways that all bad McCartney songs are bad—but Memory Almost Full goes in a lot of creative directions. “Only Mama Knows” and “House of Wax” are great, and “Dance Tonight” has the added benefit of annoying the crap out of The Butterfly every time that iTunes commercial comes on...which makes me enjoy it in a very immature way. This won’t crack my Top 5 Albums of 2007 list, but it’s going to end up ranking a lot higher than I figured it would.Hip Hop Redemption!
I’ve complained all year about the lack of recent quality hip hop, and June finally saw that ship slowly righted. First came The Dusty Foot Philosopher, last year’s debut album rapper K’naan. K’naan was raised in Somalia until he was 13, when he (according to his Amazon bio) left “on what turned out to be the last commercial flight ever to do so, amidst a crumbling society and the end to this day of any form of central government.” You think of what he probably saw in Somalia, and you realize that half (okay, probably 90%) of the rapper who try to act ‘hard’ because of what they’ve seen and done...well, they really aren’t hard at all. Though he does drop a few good lines regarding that upbringing (“If I have to talk about home and get descriptive/I would make 50 Cent look like Limp Bizkit”), he doesn’t go far into detail. His attitude basically seems to be “Trust me, it was bad, but let’s move on.” K’Naan has an acquired-taste kind of voice, and his rhymes are hit and miss, but I was looking for creativity and experimentation in hip hop, and this mix of hip hop style and African beats fits the bill nicely.
Next up is London’s Wiley, whose Treddin’ on Thin Ice has been one of the toughest albums I’ve ever attempted to actually review/evaluate. The underground London ‘grime’ sound is unique and creative—and Wiley is probably one of the two best at it, along with Dizzee Rascal—but it’s not always immediate and listenable. It takes a few listens, but I think I’m going to get into this one. I’m not sure by any means, but I’m optimistic.
Of course, neither of these albums are 2007 releases, so for the most part my Top Albums of ’07 list is devoid of hip hop. But I think I might have found the group to invade the list: Blue Scholars. I posted a video clip of theirs last weekend. I started in June with their Long March EP that was released in February. Now that I’ve digested that, I’m moving on to their June release, Bayani. It’s been a while since I heard this sort of clarity and story-telling ability, and when that’s mixed with strong (if not all that creative) beats, good things happen. If I’m optimistic about Wiley, I’m giddy about Blue Scholars.Oklahoma City Redemption!
A year ago, when my parents moved back to Oklahoma City, I discovered an old music store on 36th and Western called Rainbow Records (which I mentioned here)...and it was closed by the next time I visitied OKC. Well I drove by 36th and Western when I was in town a couple weeks ago, and a new store had opened up, called Guestroom Records. I walked out with cheap copies of Slow Train Coming, Singles, OnoffON, It Still Moves, and The Now Sound Redesigned, a neat, $2 electronica/hip hop cd from 2005. Good store. I have a reason to go back to OKC now...other than, you know, visiting berlin niebuhr’s dog, of course.Sports Books Redemption!
Okay, sports books didn’t need redeeming in my book, but I guess it bears mentioning that I bought two of them this month. This week’s Tuesday Pirates Rant™ suggests that I really don’t care much about baseball at the moment, but The Baseball Economist is exactly the kind of book I’ll want to read when Dave Littlefield is fired and I’m interested in baseball once again. Meanwhile, I was very much into the NBA draft (as my posts on a non-NBA blog would suggest) this year, and the 1984 draft is the most talked-about of all-time. I’m starting Tip Off tonight, and I’m looking forward to it.Netflix Redemption!
This hasn’t happened yet, but I was just going to mention that, now that we have officially cranked through every episode of the first five seasons of Smallville (The Butterfly’s anniversary present), we’re open to actually watching movies again. The only Netflix rental we watched this month was The Cooler, and...I really really liked it. William H. Macy absolutely makes this movie all by himself, but Maria Bello, Alec Baldwin, and Ron Livingston are fantastic as well. Good stuff.More Good Music!
I will also mention the following things:
Until next month...
Friday, June 29, 2007
Brain vs iPod: Bob Dylan Edition
A month ago, I decided to embrace my nerddom and look into something that only I could possibly care about: how greatly do my perceptions of an album differ from the star ratings I each song of the album on my iPod? In other words, how much does the concept of an ‘album’ actually matter? A lot of albums have distinct feels and moods to them, but does that end up actually mattering when it comes to an evaluation/rating of the album itself? The album can have a really interesting feel to it, but if the songs aren’t good, what difference does that make? My guinea pig for this experiment was Wilco.
Well, now I’m moving on to the Big Dog.
I’ve always had an appreciation for Bob Dylan, but I didn’t become a full-fledged Dylan-phile until around 2001 or so. In one of my BMG “Buy 1 Get 27 Free” binges early in high school, I bought his greatest hits, but I just wasn’t ready to appreciate him yet. Well, during the height of Napster, I decided to give Blonde on Blonde a try. And that very predictably led to one of my patented ‘phases’ (like the Flaming Lips phase I went through last year...and the Funkadelic phase I seem to have entered recently).
In the summer of 2001, I discovered Half.com and purchased about 2/3 of Dylan’s albums (almost all for under $7!), bought a couple biographies, and immersed myself. So after 6+ years of Dylanology, it’s time to rank the albums...I’ll only do a Top 10 here because if I were to rank all of his albums, this would end up around 15,000 words. That, and there are still a few albums I don’t own—Empire Burlesque, Saved, and New Morning.
Anyway, here goes nothing. The following is my “Brain” ranking of the Top 10 Dylan albums.
1. Highway 61 Revisited (1965). As uncreative as this might make me sound, this is my favorite album of all-time. And I know in advance that my iPod will agree with me, as every song on here got 5 stars. Can’t beat that. Dylan was pursuing that “thin, wild mercury sound” that he had in his head, and he said he didn’t capture it until Blonde on Blonde. Well, to me he had already caught and released it. Everything about this album is perfect. Best album opener ever. Best album closer ever. A perfect combination of whimsy and apocalypse.
2. Blood on the Tracks (1975). No matter what mood I’m in, when I listen to this album, I end up sad and a little bit angry. If great art projects its mood onto you, this is as good as art gets. Songs like “Tangled Up in Blue” and “Shelter from the Storm” set the reflective mood, and then Dylan takes you through the different stages of a breakup, from Anger (“Idiot Wind”) to Gut-Wrenching Despair (“If You See Her, Say Hello”) to Acceptance (“Buckets of Rain”). This might be my second-favorite album of all-time.
3. Bringing It All Back Home (1965). I always forget about this one in the overall conversation of Dylan’s discography—Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde are always the first two ‘60s albums mentioned, Blood on the Tracks always gets mentioned as well, and his last three albums start to surface in the conversation—but that always leads to a nice “Holy crap is this a great album” moment. The album title is one of the most apt titles ever. You can see his music and all of his influences coming together to start making the ground-breaking music he had in his head. But more than that, the lyricism is at just about an all-time high. Hell, this might be third-favorite album of all-time.
4. Love and Theft (2001). When I woke up the morning of 9/11, my initial thought was, “Do I buy Dylan’s new album before class or after?” I had intentionally avoided reading any reviews or stories about Love and Theft because I wanted to be surprised by what I heard. Of course, as I was getting ready for class, I hopped on the Internet like I always do, saw what had happened, and that, shall we say, changed my day around a little bit. By mid-afternoon, though, my brain was simply fried, so I headed over to Wal Mart to pick up Love and Theft and allow it to distract me for a while. When I got back I turned off the TV and computer, sat in my room, turned out the lights, and listened. It was a nice one-hour distraction before I headed back into the living room to take in what was happening for the rest of the evening.
Normally, listening to Dylan is (for me) a pretty emotional experience; coming off of Time Out of Mind, I was expecting something similar with Love and Theft. Instead, I turned on the cd player and listened to what is probably the most fun album Dylan’s ever made. You can’t avoid smiling during “Summer Days”; “Honest With Me” is the hardest-rocking song he’s written; even songs with more downbeat subject matter, like “Cry a While” and “High Water (For Charley Patton)”, aren’t all that downbeat. I expected to enjoy Love and Theft, and I did...in a completely different way than I thought I would.
5. Desire (1976). Certain Dylan albums are mood pieces. They're not tours de force of pure songwriting agility and mastery, but the groove and production and instrumentation are perfectly distinct, and it makes for a lovely listen. Desire is my favorite of this type of Dylan album (others I’d throw into this category are albums like Oh Mercy, Planet Waves, Slow Train Coming, Nashville Skyline—my least favorite Dylan album ever—and Time Out of Mind), though let’s face it—anything with Emmylou Harris on it gives it an unfair advantage over anything without Emmylou.
Desire does have a few perfect songs—“Hurricane” is unbelievable even though his protest might or might not have been sincere; “Isis” is intense and enchanting, though better live (check out the unbelievable Bootleg Series, Vol. 5: Rolling Thunder Revue to see how perfect this song can be); and “Oh Sister” is both haunting and Emmylou-tastic. Most of the album, though, is made up of songs like “One More Cup of Coffee” and “Romance in Durango”—great examples of Dylan songs that could have only been captured with that exact lineup at that exact moment.
I should also mention that Dylan’s voice has never sounded as good as it does on Desire, though my ears might be biased because Emmylou’s harmonizing.
Have I mentioned that Emmylou is the greatest backing vocalist of all-time?
6. Blonde on Blonde (1966). While I don’t love it as much as some (I might just be penalizing it because the harmonica on "Pledging My Time" is too shrill), this album is great for four reasons: 1) “Visions of Johanna”, 2) “I Want You”, 3) that “4th Time Around” sounds like Dylan imitating “Norwegian Wood” (John Lennon had a good reason to be paranoid), and 4) that “Absolutely Sweet Marie” sounds like Dylan imitating every Beach Boys surf song. Don’t know if he actually was or not, but I enjoy it more when I think about it.
7. John Wesley Harding (1967). I was late to the party on this one, and I’m not sure why. I just kept skipping over it on my checklist. That was a mistake. When I finally purchased John Wesley Harding last year, I enjoyed it far more than I thought I would. I knew I’d like “Watchtower” obviously, and I’d seen him perform “Drifter’s Escape” a couple times in concert, so I knew what to expect (more or less...his voice and the instrumentation to every ‘60s song have changed exponentially since then) from that. Otherwise I was a blank slate. But despite the famous lack of hooks or choruses on this album, there is strong emotion and melody at every turn. “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” has become one of the most played songs on my iPod.
8. Oh Mercy (1989). This one’s #2 on the “Mood Pieces” list...for today, anyway. Some other day, I might put Time Out of Mind in this slot instead. They’re both Daniel Lanois productions, and they both have the same tired (in a good way) feel to them. The difference is, while Time Out of Mind feels like a brittle, cold New York morning, Oh Mercy sounds like a stifling, hot New Orleans night. My opinion of this album might have been enhanced by his long recollection of its recording process in Chronicles, Vol. 1. Hearing him talk so fondly and vividly of it might have made me biased. It’s a damn good album either way, though.
9. The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964). Really, this album is just as unsteady as his first two (Bob Dylan and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan), but the title track is, to me, the greatest folk song ever written, so for that reason alone I think very fondly of the album as a whole. However, I have the feeling my iPod ratings won’t think quite as highly of it.
10. Modern Times (2006). Actually, no. Make that Time Out of Mind (1997). Modern Times is a lovely listen, but Time Out of Mind is more cohesive and emotional. Cohesion and emotion are usually two of the more important qualities an album can have, so I’m giving Time the nod. See #8 for further details on this one.
So that’s great. Now what does my iPod tell me I like the best?
1. Highway 61 Revisited. Five-star songs: All of them. “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Tombstone Blues”, “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry”, “From a Buick 6”, “Ballad of a Thin Man”, “Queen Jane Approximately”, “Highway 61 Revisited”, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, “Desolation Row”
2. Blood on the Tracks. Five-star songs: “Tangled Up in Blue”, “Simple Twist of Fate”, “Idiot Wind”, “Meet Me in the Morning”, “If You See Her, Say Hello”, “Shelter from the Storm”, “Buckets of Rain”
3. Bringing It All Back Home. Five-star songs: “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, “She Belongs to Me”, “Maggie’s Farm”, “Love Minus Zero/No Limit”, “Mr. Tambourine Man”, “Gates of Eden”, “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”
4. Love and Theft. Five-star songs: “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum”, “Mississippi”, “Summer Days”, “High Water (For Charley Patton)”, “Honest With Me”, “Cry a While”
5. Blonde on Blonde. Five-star songs: “Visions of Johanna”, “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)”, “I Want You”, “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”, “Just Like a Woman”, “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I Go Mine)”, “Absolutely Sweet Marie”
6. Time Out of Mind. Five-star songs: “Love Sick”, “Standing in the Doorway”, “Not Dark Yet”, “Cold Irons Bound”
7. Slow Train Coming. Five-star songs: “Gotta Serve Somebody”, “I Believe in You”, “When He Returns”
8. Another Side of Bob Dylan. Five-star songs: “Chimes of Freedom”, “To Ramona”, “It Ain’t Me Babe”
9. Modern Times. Five-star songs: “Thunder on the Mountain”, “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”, “Someday Baby”
10. Desire. Five-star songs: “Hurricane”, “Isis”, “Oh, Sister”
Not surprisingly, the ‘mood’ albums I mentioned don’t fare quite as well when they’re evaluated simply for their content—Desire drops from #5 in my head to #10 on my iPod, just as Oh Mercy drops from #8 to unrated.
However, I seem to have discounted Slow Train Coming, Another Side, and Modern Times. I think Slow Train has an easy explanation: it’s a bit of an uncomfortable listen. There are plenty of strong songs, and Dylan sings with conviction, but...well, it’s preachy. Everybody knows this. He suddenly went from well-known Jew to proselytizing Christian, and he seemed to be judging anybody who questioned him or his motives...and for that matter, anybody who wasn’t as faithful a Christian as he suddenly was. Knowing this in advance, I wasn’t in a hurry to buy this album or Saved, even though I’ve owned Shot of Love—the third part of the Christian-esque trilogy—for a while and enjoy it. But there’s no discounting the quality and passion of Dylan’s performance and songwriting here. If he really did ‘go Christian’ go give him something to feel strongly about, it served its purpose.
What about Another Side? Well, quite simply I think it gets lost in the shuffle between his hardcore folk albums—Freewheelin’ and Times They Are A-Changin’—and his electric conversion. How an album with “It Ain’t Me Babe”, “Chimes of Freedom”, “To Ramona” (his most underrated song), and others gets forgotten says something about either my memory or the unbelievable quality of Dylan’s discography. As for Modern Times, I get annoyed with magazines and TV shows when they rank new stuff too high on “Top __” lists, and I think I tend to overcompensate. It’s a damn good album, though it wasn’t the best album of 2006 as everybody tried to immediately anoint it.
So we’re through with two of these experiments now, and I seem to have pretty much learned what I could have guessed I would learn. Just as statistics don’t tell the whole story in sports—one’s impact on team chemistry and his ability to make teammates better doesn’t show up in the box score, just as an album with an interesting mood and groove might not rank high if the individual songs aren’t amazing—they tell a good percentage of it.
Not that this predictable conclusion won’t prevent me from writing a bunch more “Brain vs iPod”’s...
Sunday, January 07, 2007
My Month of Entertainment – December 2006
An explosion of indie music, and...well, that’s about it this month. That’s what happens when you upgrade your subscription to eMusic.com and get iTunes gift cards for Christmas.
Books
Racing in the Street: The Bruce Springsteen Reader – Again, very little in the way of new books this month. I spent most of the month finishing off the Bob Dylan: Performing Artist series (Volume 3 is quite long and a bit tedious) and plowing through Nick Hornby’s A Long Way Down (which is way better than I thought it would be).
DVDs
Pat McGee Band: Vintage Stages Live – A pretty solid CD/DVD from a band I’ve discussed here before. They put out a live CD, General Admission, about seven years ago, but this is the first time you can watch them perform. Honestly, it’s a pretty accurate look at the band. It goes a long way in showing how they’ve managed to develop a strong foundation of fans despite a lack of radio play.
This month’s Netflix rentals:
An Inconvenient Truth
We’ve made plenty of comments about this one in the past.
A Prairie Home Companion
Going into this one, I had no idea whether I would love or hate this movie, and...well, it was pretty much directly in between those two. Companion the movie is, I figure, a lot like Companion the live performance—hokey, amusing, comforting, and unchallenging in every way. It was probably worth seeing because of the performances of Kevin Kline and Maya Rudolph (and for the disorienting effect of watching Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin and Lindsey Lohan performing together), but it’s probably not something I’ll ever need to watch again.
Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man’s Chest
I have a rule: when your main motivation for watching a movie is a) action scenes and explosions, and b) attractive people, then that movie should never ever ever last more than 1 hour, 45 minutes. There’s just nothing that vital to the plot to take it over this length. Well, Pirates 2 is a relatively entertaining 1:45 movie...stretched to 2:30. Seriously, just an inexcuseable length on this movie.
Clerks 2
As with Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, if you enjoy the characters Kevin Smith has created in the last 12-14 years, then you’ll enjoy the movie. Unlike with Jay and Silent Bob, though, this movie isn’t just an “Aren’t these characters funny? You know they are!” victory lap. There is a decent streak of creativity and plot (all of which is quite perverted and crude, though not all of which is believable...I mean, come on, Rosario Dawson hooking up with Dante?? Sorry if you haven’t seen it and didn’t want a spoiler, but you need as much mental preparation for that one as possible), in this one. However, just like with Jay and Bob, if you didn’t enjoy the other Kevin Smith movies, you should just let this one pass you by as well.
Music
(Can’t really call this section “CD’s” anymore since I don’t actually buy cd’s anymore)
Vintage Stages Live, Pat McGee Band
While it is nice to have a live DVD, I’m glad there’s an audio-only version of this concert in this set as well so I can listen on the iPod. Again, it’s a good representation of where PMB were musically (before the death of Chris Williams, anyway), though the inclusion of “Who Stole Her from Heaven” and the exclusion of “Hero” was a bit disappointing to me. But then, only PMB obsessives (or former PMB obsessives) would find that strange or disappointing.
The Greatest, Cat Power
Moon Pix, Cat Power
It’s relatively conventional wisdom at this point (among music nerds, anyway) that if you’re a long-time fan of Cat Power, her latest album, The Greatest, will be your least favorite as it recycles old material and incorporates a Nashville band, very much unlike her previous material; however, if you’re a Cat Power newbie, you’ll find The Greatest much more accessible and enjoyable than her more sparse-sounding earlier work. Well, I’m a Cat Power newbie, and I think The Greatest is fantastic. I found 1997’s Moon Pix a lot harder to enjoy overall. For me, the best albums are the ones that vary tempos and instrumentation, and Moon Pix is all sparse and slow. With The Greatest, the aforementioned band is involved, and even though the songs are still mostly mid-tempo or slow, there is a fantastic R&B feel to the album, and I’m liking it a lot.
Best songs (from The Greatest): “Lived in Bars,” “Living Proof,” “Love and Communication.” Best songs (from Moon Pix): “American Flag,” “You May Know Him.”
Under the Red Sky, Bob Dylan
I am slowly but surely filling in the gaps of my Dylan collection, and while reading Vol. 3 of Bob Dylan, Performing Artist, I went ahead and picked this one up. This is known as Dylan’s “songs for children” album, or something like that, but while the lyrics are definitely not his sharpest (nor were they necessarily supposed to be), I liked this album more than I thought I would, mostly because his band for this album was on fire.
There isn’t a lot of creativity in the song structures or instrumentation—most of the grooves are basically generic blues or R&B—but good grooves are good grooves, and just about every song has one. Not saying this would make my Top Ten Dylan Albums list...just that it was worth getting. I pretty much agree with the sentiment of the album’s 1990 Rolling Stone review (“Old masters sometimes pare their statements down stylistically to attain the mythic or universal – their work gets simpler, easier. Under the Red Sky, certainly, is Dylan taking it easy. Sad to say, he's taking it far too easy. It's disheartening to find the writer of "Visions of Johanna," and a hundred other cryptic, haunting songs that have inspired countless poets, coming up with titles like "Wiggle Wiggle" and "Handy Dandy."), but the music is still worth hearing. It probably helps to know that Dylan didn't stick with this lighter style, too...if I were hearing this as Dylan's latest album, I too would probably be a lot more critical. Best songs: “Wiggle Wiggle,” “Cat’s in the Well,” “Unbelivable.”
Hip Hop Is Dead, Nas
Hell Hath No Fury, Clipse
I’ve said this before, but hip hop has most certainly entered its “hair metal” stage, where primping and pimping are more important than actually saying something of value. There has always been this aspect in hip hop, just as there always has been in rock music, but it’s successfully come to the forefront now. And that doesn’t make Nas very happy. I’ve always been a relatively casual Nas fan, meaning I own most of his albums, but I honestly can’t remember too many of his songs. He’s a strong lyricist, especially when he’s taking on tough subject matter, and that makes his music worth listening to, even if he’s never really had beats that were all that great. I still have to listen to this album a few more times to get a grasp on the vocals, but I can say this for sure: these are the best beats a Nas album has ever had (“Where Are They Now,” in particular), and “Still Dreaming” with Kanye West (who I really hate liking as much as I do) and “Black Republican” with Jay-Z (“I feel like a Black Republican/Money I got comin’ in”...it’s creative, at least) are fantastic collaborations. Nothing but good songs and good beats on this one.
And I should mention that the title track samples “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”...you know, just so you’re not as taken aback as I was by that.
As for Clipse, I am so desperate to discover new good hip hop groups that I’ll pretty much take a chance on anybody who gets a lot of good press. It took four years for Clipse to put out their second album, and it’s a good one...though that is almost totally because of the productions of The Neptunes. Clipse get the first crack at these innovators’ beats, and you can tell. The beats on this album are about as good as I’ve ever heard. The lyrics are decent (the rhymes are pretty good), but not creative in the least. In other words, lots of bitches and hos and guns and the like on this one. However, the lyrics are good enough in songs like “Wamp Wamp (What It Do)” and “Chinese New Year” (“I was in and out of homes like the Orkin man”) to make those songs as good as anything else that came out in hip hop in 2006.
Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards, Tom Waits
I’d never really thought about checking out a Tom Waits album before, but this was generating lots of good press, and his appearance on Daily Show was quite entertaining. I had reservations, “His voice is just so damn weird” being the most prevalent, but I decided to go ahead and check it out one disc at a time on eMusic. I will say that some of the covers he chose (pop standards like “Sea of Love” and “Young at Heart”) don’t do anything for me, but every time he pins his ears back and rocks out, it works tremendously. He absolutely nails songs like “Buzz Fledderjohn” and “The Return of Jack and Judy,” and a lot has already been said about “Road to Peace”...
Young Abdel Mahdi (Shahmay) was only 18 years old...that there’s really not much I can add. This one definitely belongs in the Liked It More Than I Thought I Would category.
He was the youngest of nine children, never spent a night away from home
And his mother held his photograph, opening the New York Times
To see the killing has intensified along the road to peace
There was a tall, thin boy with a whispy moustache disguised as an orthodox Jew
On a crowded bus in Jerusalem, some had survived World War Two
And the thunderous explosion blew out windows 200 yards away
With more retribution and seventeen dead along the road to peace
A Blessing and a Curse, Drive-By Truckers
I’ve heard good things about the Truckers for a while...that they were an extremely competent mix of southern rock and jam band...things like that. I compare them to one of my more recent discoveries, My Morning Jacket. They are indeed both one part Black Crowes/Allmans, but they both like to explore new ideas. Neither of them worry about technical perfection and polish in their studio recordings, which can either lead to sloppiness or raw perfection (to me, the chance for raw perfection is worth the risk of sloppiness), and they both utilize a shaky falsetto from their singer part of the time. Overall, I think I’ll stick with MMJ, but this was worth getting for songs like “Easy On Yourself” and “Daylight.”
Live: Austin City Limits Festival, Flaming Lips
I stumbled across this 4-song set of the Lips’ performance at ACLF this year on iTunes, and it was a lovely surprise. A video download would have been better, since so much of the Lips’ performance is visual, but for the money (<$5), this was more than worth it.
I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, Yo La Tengo
All the Music Nerd magazines were raving about this a few months ago, and since I had a few more downloads to use, I decided to give in and give it a shot. Every song from this poppy, sometimes-falsetto, upbeat, nerdy group (who most certainly couldn’t beat your ass) is good, and I gave them pretty much all **** on the iPod, but when the album was over, I couldn’t think of one single, memorable song beyond the adventurous 10-minute jam (“Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind”) that kicks off the album. For the most part, this is pretty much the definition of “light and enjoyable,” but there’s enough risk-taking here to set Yo La Tengo apart from most.
As with most everything else I got this month, this was worth getting (and it falls into the ever-referenced Liked It More Than I Thought I Would category), but it still falls behind The Greatest, Hip Hop Is Dead, Vintage Stages Live, and possibly Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards on this month’s pecking order. If this came in fourth, though, it was a pretty damn good month for music. Best songs: “Beanbag Chair,” “The Room Got Heavy,” “Pass the Hatchet, I Think I’m Goodkind.”
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
They're Spoon-feeding Casanova (Part Two)
Part One
Contrast the crowd during the acoustic set and the electric set of Bob Dylan's 5/17/1966 show (and any from that tour, really), and you’d think you were listening to two different shows. The audience that was so polite and stunningly quiet during the acoustic set can’t stop buzzing, even as the musicians are tuning their instruments before the first song begins.
Dylan and the Hawks waste absolutely no time in Set #2, starting off with “Tell Me Momma”, which is, musically, the best, most straight-forward rock song in the Dylan catalog, containing a fantastic mini-solo by Robbie Robertson.
Quick aside: a few years ago, I was designing a website for an online web development course, and so naturally the theme of the website was, in so many words, “I’m a music nerd.” In it, I set up my perfect backing band. Robbie Robertson was the lead guitarist, almost completely because of his work on this song. And because I’m sure you’re dying to know this, I believe the rest of the band was Pearl Jam’s Stone Gossard on rhythm guitar; Sherman Holmes, Curtis Mayfield’s bassist in the ‘70s, on bass; ?uestlove of The Roots on drums, and Chardy McEwan of Pat McGee Band on percussion.
Anyway, the Dylan that was slurring words and going through the motions before the setbreak is now crisp and excited and practically shouting the chorus (“TELL ME MOMMAAAAAAAAAA/What is it/WHAT’s wrong with yoooouuuu/THIIIS...TIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIME”). Looking at video footage on Eat the Document and No Direction Home, he’s too excited to stay still...he’s fidgety the whole second set.
The buzz picks up again the moment the song is over. Part of this is frustration with the new music, though apparently some of the frustration was for the same reasons as the booing in Newport: the amps and speakers being used just weren’t meant to be turned up this loud.
Dylan toys with his harmonica for a second and introduces the next song: “This is called ‘I Don’t Believe You.’ It used to be like that, and now it goes like this.” The fraction of the crowd that actually wants to hear the new sound laughs, but it’s pretty subdued. The song itself is a great reworking of a previous acoustic classic. The audacity of messing with a classic offends quite a few people because the shouts and slow-clapping start immediately after the song ends. It will only threaten to get worse after a reworked version of “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” (never one of my favorites), from his debut album, follows.
By this time, though, you can begin to hear a battle beginning, as the “We like the new stuff, besides what did you expect? This is where his music's been going, so shut up and listen,” part of the crowd gets much louder and more boisterous in their cheering. That, combined with only about a 15-second break between songs doen’t give the naysayers a chance to get going. It is only a small setback for them.
“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is next. It’s another fantastic performance, though you can tell that Dylan’s joining in on the competition at this point...with each successive song, his own vocals get a bit less melodic and a bit more shouted. When introducing the following song, “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat” (another one I’ve never been particularly fond of), he gets interrupted by shouts and a bit of slow-clapping. But by now, Dylan seemed to be enjoying the antagonism. You hear angry shouts, and Dylan continues to slowly tune his guitar. Eventually, a supporter yells something inaudible, and half the crowd cheers in response. This only prompts another round of slow-clapping. Dylan, meanwhile, sits back and continues to tune his guitar.
Seriously, how many concerts have you attended where the crowd turned on the performer...and then turned on itself?
I’ve seen it at plenty of Mizzou sporting events, but not at any of the hundreds of concerts I’ve attended.
But at this point the fun is just beginning.
Following “Pillbox Hat”, Dylan and his band are once again taking their time tuning and getting ready for the next song (an unbelievable version of “One Too Many Mornings”) when the slow-clapping and yelling start once again. It grows louder and louder until Dylan starts mumbling something really quiet. Slowly you hear people in the crowd shushing the others so they can hear what he is saying. Everybody stops clapping, and you realize Dylan was just spouting quiet gibberish because he knew it would shut them up, finishing with “(mumble mumble mumble) …if you just wouldn’t clap so loud.” Half the crowd gets the joke, and before the other half can react the band launches into “One Too Many Mornings.” For the people who found his old acoustic songs to be sacred, this might be the biggest outrage. For me, however, it’s one of the best performances of the show. He takes the last line of each verse (“One too many morning/and a thousand miles behind”) and turns it into something of a rock chorus. “And a thousand miles..........BEEE-HIIIIND,” complete with backing vocals. Just a lovely reshaping of a previously lovely song.
But the band is just getting warmed up. If the mumble joke was a sign that Dylan really didn’t care what the crowd thought anymore (I’m sure he did that same thing every night of the tour, but still...), the version of “Ballad of a Thin Man” that followed probably pounded that message home pretty good. One of his bigger insult songs, this version is vicious. “Something is happening, but you don’t know what it is/Do you, Mr. Jones?” In this case, half the crowd is Mr. Jones. But that’s not even the most assaulting part of the song. This performance contains pretty much the best rock organ performance I’ve ever heard. Between Dylan lines, Garth Hudson adds the creepiest, most venomous punch to a song I’ve ever heard, and the combo of organ, Dylan’s piano (this was the only song on which he played piano in this performance), and Dylan’s yelled vocals just pierce your heart. It definitely made an impact on one Mr. Keith Butler. After about 30 seconds of tuning and fiddling about on-stage, the cry comes down. He just couldn’t contain himself any longer.
“Judas!”It’s hard to tell exactly when this became the earth-shattering moment it has now grown to be. For one thing, Keith Butler himself didn’t really understand how big a moment it was until relatively recently.
[T]he man who crystallized those feelings by shouting “Judas” remained anonymous until last year, long after the moment had been written into history. He still might have been unknown had he not been struck with a bout with asthma the day before Live 1966 was released in October.What is for sure is that the night’s final song, “Like a Rolling Stone,” was anything but “artful.” It was brutal and loud and assaulting...and great. Like a lot of the electric set, it’s not the most pleasant thing to listen to on its face; but then you’re taken in by the energy and urgency of the music...and then you picture yourself in that hostile (in a polite British way) crowd...and then you start to get a rush. And you listen to it repeatedly.
On that night, Butler, now 52 and living in Toronto, woke from an asthma attack and decided to take a walk to get some fresh air. He ended up in a coffee shop, where he picked up the Toronto Sun from the counter and spotted an article that inspired him to find out more about that night in 1966.
The story, by Associated Press writer Scott Bauer, described the impending release of Live 1966, as well as C.P. Lee's book about the concert, "Like the Night,"** and a rarely seen documentary on Dylan's '66 tour called "Eat the Document."
"So I'm on my own, in the middle of the night, in a coffee shop," Butler recalled. "And at the bottom of the article, it said, 'On "Eat the Document" can be seen some footage of people leaving the theater.
'One of them says, "Any bloody pop group can do this rubbish." ' And I recognized the words -- it was staggering. It was an incredible shock ... from 30 years ago and 3,000 miles away, I was reading what I recognized as my own words."
...
"Can you imagine what it's like as a 20-year-old kid?" Butler asked. "You were just crushed. I was totally embarrassed when he shouted back. I was there with another guy, and that's when we decided to leave."
While Butler tried to forget about the incident, the exchange sent shockwaves through the world of music and came to symbolize the point at which rock entered a new era, opening the doors to a more artful form of musical expression. ***
Well, at least I have.
** C.P. Lee’s book, Like the Night, a first hand account of the show, is phenomenal. It’s also quite hard to find. Not surprisingly, I went to eBay to get it. It was worth the work. Here’s an excerpt to entice you. Talking about “Tell Me Momma” and the beginning of the electric set (page 132 of my copy):
It comes crashing in from out of nowhere, taking the listener by surprise and shunting them along on an expressway into darkness. Cold black glass, brackish water that don’t make no tears, fool’s gold teeth, graveyard lips, nine pound hammers and steam drills, the hiss, crash and thud of slow mechanical death. But whichever Mojo Bob’s got ain’t working on the woman and something, she won’t tell him what it is, is tearing up her mind.Kinda puts everything I just wrote to shame, doesn’t it?
Three times Dylan pleads, ‘Tell me momma – What is it?’ and then adds a long suffering – ‘What’s wrong with you this time?’
...
Musically, Robertson’s guitar work is white hot funk, chunky and spare, reflecting Steve Cropper rather than Mike Bloomfield. This is stripped down adrenaline, demonstrating a complete understanding of the uses of an electric Fender for lead guitar playing. Robbie leads, and the rest of the band, even Dylan, follow. Thirty years later it’s still a frightening opener.
Shock. Confusion. Delight. Awe.
And then – applause. Polite, perhaps a little reserved, but applause never the less.
Thoughts flew around possessed of their own mad craziness. ‘Would he get rid of the band now?’ – ‘Would he play “Like a Rolling Stone”?’ – ‘Would he turn it down?’
After a short moment of tuning Dylan walked over to the microphone and spoke to us for the first time that evening. It would be an understatement to say that people hung on every word.
‘This is called, “I Don’t Believe You;” it used to be like that, and now it goes like this.’
A nervous ripple of laughter spread through the audience and then, before we’d barely had a chance to take in what he meant, a Cuban heeled boot stomped the rhythm onto the floor of the Free Trade Hall and the number got under way.
*** One last quick aside. Another quote from that Sonicnet article comes from Greil Marcus, author of Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes.
"It elicit[ed] from Dylan not just an angry response but a response that, in its own way, is pure music," said Greil Marcus, author of "Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes." (Marcus' "Days Between Stations" column appears monthly in Addicted To Noise.) "The way he says, 'I don't believe you,' is the essence of shock and disgust and disbelief, but all contained within a kind of cool, which he then immediately loses."There’s an expanded snippet from Invisible Republic in this Alex Ross article from The New Yorker:
As if he had been waiting ... a person rises and shouts what he has been silently rehearsing to himself all night. As over and over he has imagined himself doing, he stands up, and stops time. He stops the show: “JUDAS!” Dylan stiffens against the flinch of his own body. "I don't believe you," he says, and the contempt in his voice is absolute. As one listens it turns the echo of the shouter's curse sour, you begin to hear the falseness in it, that loving rehearsal — and yet that same echo has already driven Dylan back — "You're a liar!" he screams hysterically.When I was growing up, berlin niebuhr always used to say of certain journalists and celebrities (Frank Deford being a prime example), “I wish I could buy them for what they’re worth and sell them for what they think they’re worth.” Well, I guess that means the Frank Deford of rock journalism would be Greil Marcus. Come on, Greil. I know you love to listen to yourself talk and all, but... I don’t hear any “shock and disgust and disbelief” in Dylan’s voice, nor was there anything “hysterical” about “You’re a liar.” Come on, he’d been getting yelled at the whole tour. Aside from “Your mother’s a whore,” what was really going to shock him at that point? He took advantage of the energy and tension of the moment, especially if he really did say “Play f---ing loud,” and turned in a historical performance. Isn’t that enough? Did you have to make it sound like somebody shot at him or threatened to kill him? Did you really have to Hollywood-ize the situation by trying to make it even bigger? Who knows, maybe your account is exactly what happened, but...I doubt it. But I digress.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Random 10
Since I'm smack in the middle of two giant Dylan posts, this only seems right...
Random 10 from All Things Dylan Playlist
1. Blind Willie McTell, Live 1998-1999 bootleg
2. I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, John Wesley Harding
3. Born in Time, Live 1961-2000 import
4. Don't Think Twice, It's Alright, Live at the Gaslight 1962
5. Oh Sister, Desire
6. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (outtake), Bootleg Series 7: No Direction Home Soundtrack
7. I'll Keep It with Mine, Bootleg Series 2: Rare and Unreleased
8. Visions of Johanna, Blonde on Blonde
9. Shot of Love, Shot of Love
10. Endless Highway, The Band, Before the Flood
Random 10
1. Mama's Got a Girlfriend Now, Ben Harper
2. Financial Endorsement, Gregory Isaacs
3. #41 (Live), Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds
4. I'm Waiting for the Day, Beach Boys
5. I Threw a Brick through a Window, U2
6. Heat, Common
7. Gonna Move (Live), Derek Trucks Band
8. Paradise, Bruce Springsteen
9. Diamond Dogs, David Bowie
10. Walk On By, Cake
They're Spoon-feeding Casanova (Part One)
With Bob Dylan’s new album, Modern Times, out for a while now, I’ve been tempted to right a review of it, and I’m not really sure why I didn’t (oh yeah, I’m lazy).
Okay, okay...here’s a one-paragraph review.
It’s not as good as his last two (Love and Theft, Time Out of Mind), but it’s always great to see Dylan having so much fun. He’s obviously laid-back and having a good time, especially in songs like “Someday Baby” and “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.” Songs like “When the Deal Goes Down” and “Spirit on the Water” set a pretty languid pace, one that is continued throughout the album. There are no pantheon songs like Love and Theft’s “Summer Days” or “Honest With Me”, but it’s still a pretty rewarding listen, especially the few peppy songs. I give it an A-.
There you go.
However, having recently finished Paul Williams’ lovely Bob Dylan, Performing Artist: 1960-1973 (a highly recommendable read, by the way...the perfect Dylan book for people who have already read a Dylan book or 20...in fact, the moment I finished it, I bought Books #2 and #3 in the series...wonderful story-telling and analysis here), I think I’ll rewind 40 years for this Dylan post. It was 40 years ago this past summer that the most historical moment in rock music took place. Actually, it was a series of moments, but it culminated in one historic exchange:
Keith Butler, random audience member: “Judas!”It is forever recorded on Live 1966, Part 4 of the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series.
Bob Dylan (after continuing to tune his electric guitar for a few more seconds): I don’t belieeeeve you. (part of crowd laughs) You’re a liar! (turns to band) Play f---ing loud!”
You could say that maybe the Beatles on Ed Sullivan was more historic, but hell...the Backstreet Boys and N*SYNC generated almost the same frenzy in the late-‘90s. You can say maybe it was Elvis getting censored (shot from only the waist up) on Ed Sullivan, but The Doors kind of marginalized that moment by refusing to censor their lyrics a decade or so later. The frenzy of teenage girls and the censoring of a pop artist have happened plenty of times since those original TV moments, but the circumstances that led to “Judas!” can really never be duplicated. *
But before we can get to the UK in 1966, we have to step back to Halloween 1964, the night Dylan played solo at New York’s Philharmonic Hall (which happens to have also been officially released, as Live 1964, Part 6 of the Bootleg Series). Dylan is chatty, happy, engaged with the crowd, making them laugh, inviting Joan Baez out for a few songs, and still apparently finding novelty in his role as Bob Dylan, King of Folk Music. He’s released four albums. His second, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, brought him fame with the success of “Blowin’ in the Wind,” “Masters of War,” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright.” His third, The Times They Are A-Changin’, showed his complete mastery of the folk music format with songs like the title song, “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” and “With God on Our Side.”
However, by mid-1964, he seemed to realize that he was being typecast. Actually, he probably realized it before, but he was enjoying the success that came with the persona of Bob Dylan, Professional Protest Singer. With Another Side of Bob Dylan (worst title ever), he attempted to bring that persona back toward Bob Dylan, Musician. With songs like “All I Really Wanna Do” (“I ain't lookin' for you to feel like me/See like me or be like me/All I really want to do/Is, baby, be friends with you”), “My Back Pages” (“‘Equality,’ I spoke the word/As if a wedding vow/Ah, but I was so much older then/I'm younger than that now”) and “It Ain’t Me, Babe” (“Go 'way from my window/Leave at your own chosen speed/I'm not the one you want, babe/I'm not the one you need”), and the total lack of political protest songs, he tried to shake the mold from which his reputation was formed and find a space where he was able to write whatever kind of songs he wanted to write. But a lot his audience really didn’t come around all that quickly.
At the Philharmonic on Halloween ’64, Dylan was still playing mostly songs that the audience wanted to hear. He opened with “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and played protest classics like “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues” (a song he was going to perform on Ed Sullivan until the CBS censors said no; so he refused to play Ed Sullivan) and “Who Killed Davey Moore?” early on. Near the end of his set, he brought out Joan Baez for a few songs (including “With God on Our Side”) and brought the house down. But in the middle of the set, he experimented. Among crowd favorites, he sprinkled in new songs like “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and “Gates of Eden,” which were much deeper and stranger than folk music was supposed to be. But he always quickly won the crowd back by putting, as he called it that night (being Halloween and all), his “Bob Dylan mask” back on and performing how everybody wanted him to perform. A good time was had by all.
Fast forward to roughly six months later. Bob Dylan is on a solo tour of the UK, going through the motions, singing all of his famous protest songs, getting standing ovations everywhere he goes, and basically hating life, being snide with the (usually ignorant) press, and turning into Bob Dylan, Arrogant and Angry, um, Arse (as documented in Don’t Look Back). He wants to move on from folk stereotypes (at this point, he’s even recorded a new album, Bringing It All Back Home, Side One of which—gasp!—is played with a band of backing musicians), but nobody will let him. He reached folk immortality by age 22, but now he can’t stand folk music anymore. He gets home from the UK, decides “to quit” (he said this in many interviews, though he never really specified what he was quitting...folk music? Music as a whole?), and vents out 20 pages of bile and anger on the typewriter. As you’ve probably read a million times before, that bile became “Like a Rolling Stone” and totally redefined both his music and pop music as a whole.
Within a few months, he’d recorded Highway 61 Revisited, torched the Newport Folk Festival with a 3-song rock set and eliciting some boos along the way (the conventional wisdom is that people booed because they hated the music, though eye-witness accounts seem to agree that the rock music coming out of the smallish folk music speakers made for a loud, too-much-treble mess and nobody could hear his vocals…and that’s why they booed and yelled), brought future members of The Band (then called The Hawks) on board, and went on tour of the US, drawing both rage and reverance along the way (there was enough rage involved that Levon Helm, the Hawks’ drummer quit the tour, eventually replaced by Mickey Jones, who is now most well-known for being one of the bearded guys on Home Improvement).
Okay, so fast forward to May 1966. Dylan’s on the way back to England. Highway 61 has been out around six months, and a large portion of his hardcore fans are still hoping that this is just a phase that he’ll grow out of, and eventually he’ll get back to making protest songs. Dylan still placated the audience by breaking the concert into two parts—a solo acoustic first set and a full-band second set. No matter what he did...no matter how uninterested he was in some of the solo songs he played, and no matter how phenomenal the full-band performances were, the same thing happened throughout the UK tour: every solo song was greeted with polite and grateful applause, and most full-band songs were greeted with shouts and the dreaded slow-clap.
It is here that I should bring up Eat the Document.
During the 1965 UK tour, D.A. Pennebaker had followed Dylan around with a video camera and captured footage for what would become Don’t Look Back. So they planned the same thing for this trip of the UK. Pennebaker once again followed Dylan and his band around in 1966...only this time, Dylan would be the one who edited it. What would become Eat the Document was intended to be a one-hour show for ABC, though when ABC eventually saw it they quickly determined that there was no way they would be showing it on their network. I think it made the rounds in tiny independent theatres occasionally, but the main way to see this thing is to do what I did—find a second-hand, grainy copy of it on eBay.
The film quality is quite crappy, but it’s not so bad that you can’t tell what’s going on...and in a word, it’s weird. I understand why ABC didn’t want to show it (especially in 1967), but for a Dylan nerd like me, this is a fantastic thing to watch. First of all, the concert clips themselves are worth the price of admission. It’s easy enough to ignore the weird, random footage of Dylan watching a parade or trying to barter with a guy for his girlfriend...the performances are gripping, even with crappy video quality. Maybe it’s just because I’m a Dylan nerd (lord knows I haven’t tried to inflict this video on The Butterfly or anybody else), but I already had so much reverance for this tour that actually seeing clips of it on screen made me all weak in the knees.
Hmm. I think I crossed the TMI line there. Let’s move on.
The other interesting part of ETD is the series of interview clips of fans on their way into and out of the theatre. A few of the fans love the new music and think he’s changing the world. A majority of the fans, going in, are praying that he sticks to the old stuff and ignores the rock music...and are quite pissy about the “rubbish” they heard on the way out. One of the fans interviewed and commenting on the “rubbish” is actually Keith Butler, a.k.a. Mr. “Judas!”, which is pretty cool to a dork like me. Anyway.
So the tour winds through Dublin and Liverpool and Bristol and Sheffield, and it reaches Manchester on May 17. Thanks to Live 1966, you can experience the show moment-by-moment (there’s also some fantastic footage, of this show and of everything from this period in Dylan’s career, on Scorsese’s No Direction Home documentary that came out last year). What’s amazing about this show is, to me technical quality of the performances themselves just wasn’t all that great (lingering harmonica solos in the first set, melodramatic drumming and super-yelled vocals in the second), and yet I’ve listened to it enough to have even the crowd reactions memorized. It keeps your attention, that’s for damn sure. Then again, I’ve played this album on car trips, and my passengers never fail to fall asleep (even my guitar player, who should be just as nerdy as I am!), so maybe it’s only me.
The acoustic set begins with “She Belongs to Me,” one of his better love songs, and to my ears, Dylan couldn’t sound less interested. His harmonica solo is lazy, lingering on one note for way too long, bending it, then returning to it to linger too long again. But the crowd cheers excitedly and respectfully. It’s almost like he’s trying his hardest to antagonize them, but they’re not catching on. Or maybe he’s just stoned.
“Fourth Time Around” follows, and it’s more of the same. Meandering performance, loving response. Dylan perks up for the next couple of songs, “Visions of Johanna” and “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” “Johanna” is simultaneously one of his most touching songs and one of his strangest. “Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule.” “The ghost of 'lectricity howls in the bones of her face.” “Louise holds a handful of rain, tempting you to defy it.” Pretty weird stuff considering that the song is basically about a guy sitting in a room and thinking about a girl...but for whatever reason it worked then and it works now. Dyaln’s vocals are much more restrained on the live version, but that almost turns it into that much more of a love song. As for “Baby Blue,” we may never know for sure where Dylan was coming from on many of his songs—so many of them end up taking on 30 or so different meanings—but this one always struck me pretty obviously as a message to his fans. “It’s all over now...Bob Dylan, Folk Musician and World Saver, is gone. Deal with it...I have.” And because my mind’s already in that place, I always find his performances of this song extra interesting. This one is no different. He’s singing touching lyrics, basically telling the crowd that the guy they loved is gone, and they need to move on with their lives, and they’re responding with nothing but love and affection.
Set #1 ends with “Desolation Row,” “Just Like a Woman,” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” I’ve always found “Desolation Row” an anxiety attack set to music, but this performance of it has never done much for me...I guess no performance will top the version on Highway 61, with the two guitars and anxious tempo. I literally get a tightness in my lungs and butterflies in my stomach every time I hear it.
Again, I’ve revealed too much.
All three finishing songs are performed well, but there’s a reason I started this post with the Halloween 1964 show. Listen to “Mr. Tambourine Man” as performed in ’64, then in ’66, and you’ll hear a stark difference in crispness, clarity, and engagement. The songs are great enough to carry the performance half the time, but again...it just sounds like he couldn’t be less interested in being on stage, alone with an acoustic guitar.
Then again, maybe that’s not correct. Maybe he couldn’t be less interested in performing these songs for an audience. Maybe that’s the difference. Maybe he’s as wrapped up in his songs themselves as he ever has been, only he hates that people can’t accept both sides of his music. He’s not “performing” for the audience anymore, he’s just performing for himself. Here’s what Paul Williams said in Bob Dylan, Performing Artist:
And finally a song about a songmaker, song of songs, acknolwedgment of the music’s source, a benediction (as “She Belongs to Me” was an invocation), “Mr. Tambourine Man.” When the words begin and the audience recognizes the song and bursts into loud applause, I imagine I can hear Dylan consciously not pausing, not allowing himself to notice, because to do so would be to feel resentment at their enthusiasm (which he knows will turn to catcalls and hostility when he comes back for the electric set), and feeling even a tiny resentment or reluctance now would cut him off from his extraordinary flow of music that’s happening. So he sings on, ignoring the audience, or rather singing his song straight to the “higher self” of each person there, that part that is able and willing to be open to every note, to hear it for the first time, just as though we really were outside of time and space for this moment.No matter what, the audience laps up every second of “Tambourine Man,” and you can practically hear the standing ovation at the end. They’re in heaven, and as soon as he acknowledges them, he’s in hell. Maybe it makes him happy to realize that, in a matter of minutes, some of them will be too.
(This post got quite long, so I decided to break it up. So ends Part One.)
* I actually got to witness a mini-version of the “So-and-So Goes Electric” controversy when Dave Matthews went to LA, strapped on an electric guitar, and made Everyday (admittedly his band’s worst album) with pop producer Glen Ballard in 2001. Dave Matthews Band message boards were filled with shock and anger and claims that Dave had “sold out”. I was even at the band’s album release show in Charlottesville that year when, 2-3 songs into the set, he broke out the electric guitar to play a song from the new album. Scott Stadium filled with a weird buzz until Dave broke the tension by faking shock and outrage at the microphone (“Oh my god, what does he think he’s doing?” and the like) and went on with the show. Surprisingly, the world didn’t end. This obviously doesn’t even remotely compare to the Dylan situation, as the crowd only ever responded with applause and appreciation, saving their bile for the Internet, where they could complain anonymously. In other words, no slow-clapping, no shouting, no interrupting the performer with complaints, and no “Judas!”
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