A bitter taste ...9:57 am
So, at a fundraiser in San Francisco, after talking about how economic hard times have affected people in small town Pennsylvania, Senator Barack Obama said this:
And it’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Wow. The remarks are of-course getting lots of attention, from both the Clinton and the McCain campaigns. But just take one part out of it, the most telling part, in my opinion: Obama says that when “they get bitter,” they cling to religion.
Now, that might be the attitude towards religious faith that typifies a contributor to some left wing den of vitriol like the DemocraticUnderground.com, but that is awfully far away from what the average American believes, and awfully far away from what you would expect a candidate for president of the United States to portray. Religion equated with bitterness?
Well, I guess we have to cut some slack for Senator Obama. After all, his experience with religion has been attending services at Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s United Church of Christ in Chicago for the past twenty years.
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The Keys to the conspiracy ...9:39 am
Thanks to Jay for the link: Keys Talks About Her Conspiracy Theories. (His subject line is “Where in the world is Alicia Keys’ … head?”)
The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter tells Blender magazine: “‘Gangsta rap’ was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other. ‘Gangsta rap’ didn’t exist.”
Keys, 27, said she’s read several Black Panther autobiographies and wears a gold AK-47 pendant around her neck “to symbolize strength, power and killing ‘em dead,” according to an interview in the magazine’s May issue, on newsstands Tuesday.
Another of her theories: That the bicoastal feud between slain rappers Tupac Shakur and Notorious B.I.G. was fueled “by the government and the media, to stop another great black leader from existing.”
[...]
Though she’s known for her romantic tunes, she told Blender that she wants to write more political songs. If black leaders such as the late Black Panther Huey Newton “had the outlets our musicians have today, it’d be global. I have to figure out a way to do it myself,” she said.
Well, an AK-47 pendant sounds cute, although, being an American girl, it might be nice if she wore an M-16 around her neck. As for the rest of it: If Ms. Keys were 21 or so, this kind of posing would be excusable. At 27, it’s sad.
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Friday, April 11, 2008
Chronicles Volume Two? ...11:51 am
According to British magazine Uncut, Simon and Schuster, Bob Dylan is supposed to be working on the second volume of his memoir right now, during the lay-off between the end of his last tour and beginning of his next one. Good; get to work, Bob, and stop reading all these blogs.
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Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Pulitzer notes ...12:21 pm
It is very gratifying to see Bob Dylan getting this kind of recognition while he is still walking around on the earth. It wasn’t so for such giants of music as George Gershwin, Thelonious Monk and Duke Ellington, all of whom received posthumous Special Citations from the Pulitzer jury.
Now, generally when authors received Pulitzers, they are then described in the press with that term, as in: “Pulitzer prize-winning author Jane Doe has written a new blah blah …”. Will Bob now have that prepended to most mentions of his name? “Pulitzer prize-winning singer Bob Dylan will be appearing at the Iowa State Fair on July 15th …”.
I like the sound of that.
Since he got his Oscar for Things Have Changed, Dylan has often featured what must be a facsimile of the statuette on stage during his shows, perched on an amplifier or something. For the Pulitzer, perhaps it should be added to the spoken-word intro that kicks off his shows. That’s the one that everyone would know is taken from a local music writer’s piece in Buffalo, New York, in 2002 and it goes:
“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the poet laureate of rock’n'roll; the voice of the promise of the ’sixties counterculture; the guy who forced folk into bed with rock; who donned make-up in the ’seventies and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse; who emerged to find Jesus; who was written off as a has-been by the end of the ’eighties and who suddenly shifted gears and released some of the strongest music of his career beginning in the late ’nineties.”
People still wonder what the point of that is. I personally think it’s amusing to Bob because, after spending a career running away from people’s characterizations of him, this gives him a way of embracing almost all of them, but in an absurd manner. I think he revels in the fact that all the old labels are now defanged by the sheer longevity and vitality of his career. They don’t scare him; he can just laugh at them.
Anyhow, he can now consider making it, “Please welcome the Pulitzer prize-winning poet laureate of rock’n'roll …”. Although on second thoughts maybe that’s mixing an honorable label with too many ridiculous ones.
Bob’s receipt of the Pulitzer is also pleasing for selfish reasons. Those of us who have spent and who do spend a lot of time considering his work can, after all, claim some vindication: it’s not like we’ve been spending all this time fixated on just some rock star; that’s a Pulitzer prize-winning rock star to you now, thank you very much.
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Bob the family man ...11:16 am
In the current issue of Jewish Currents is an article on Bob Dylan by Marek Breiger (someone who has shared some wise observations with RWB readers in the past). It’s called “Bob Dylan: Reconciliation and Atonement”, and is in particular a reflection on what Dylan’s memoir “Chronicles” adds to our understanding of Dylan’s continuing connection to family and to his Jewish roots. I might quibble with one or two points, but it’s a very fine read. Snippet:
Dylan’s songs in 1968 rejected violent and revolutionary solutions. They were, instead, about the need for atonement and reconciliation. Dylan was not interested in demonizing the generation of his parents.
In one of the greatest songs from that era, “Tears of Rage,” he writes from the point of view of a father who is losing his daughter to a set of circumstances he cannot reverse but can only plead against. A daughter is not only leaving home; she is rejecting her parents’ love. “We carried you in our arms/ On Independence Day” the father sings and then continues: “And now you’d throw us all aside/ And put us on our way.”
In a departure from songs like “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and even “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” Dylan in 1968 wrote as a father wanting to protect his children — and as a son who has lost his father. He understands now the pain of a broken family. In “Tears of Rage,” the father begs the daughter to return home: “We’re so alone/And life is brief.” These words spoke to and about millions of young people and their parents in the late 1960s and early 70s. Dylan’s song does not point fingers at the parents or daughter but recognizes what so few of his fellow artists realized at the time: the tragedy of families being torn apart, and the humanity of both parents and children beyond any political definitions. Politics was less important to Dylan than the emotions of human beings.
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Monday, April 7, 2008
A Pulitzer for Bob Dylan ...10:02 pm
From Pulitzer.org:
A Special Citation to Bob Dylan for his profound impact on popular music and American culture, marked by lyrical compositions of extraordinary poetic power.
Congratulations to Bob.
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Pete Maravich ...9:53 pm
As referenced in our Q & A with Paul Westphal, Bob Dylan wrote about the basketball player Pete Maravich in his memoir, “Chronicles, Volume One”. Here is that passage:
My aunt was in the kitchen and I sat down with her to talk and drink coffee. The radio was playing and morning news was on. I was startled to hear that Pete Maravich, the basketball player, had collapsed on a basketball court in Pasadena, just fell over and never got up. I’d seen Maravich play in New Orleans once, when the Utah Jazz were the New Orleans Jazz. He was something to see — mop of brown hair, floppy socks — the holy terror of the basketball world — high flyin’ — magician of the court. The night I saw him he dribbled the ball with his head, scored a behind the back, no look basket — dribbled the length of the court, threw the ball up off the glass and caught his own pass. He was fantastic. Scored something like thirty-eight points. He could have played blind. Pistol Pete hadn’t played professionally for a while, and he was thought of as forgotten. I hadn’t forgotten about him, though. Some people seem to fade away but then when they are truly gone, it’s like they didn’t fade away at all.
I started and completed the song “Dignity” the same day I’d heard the sad news about Pistol Pete. I started writing it in the early afternoon, about the time the morning news began to wear away and it took me the rest of the day and into the night to finish it.
There’s a lot out there on Pistol Pete, including on YouTube. For instance, click here to see footage of his 68 point game, when he played with the New Orleans Jazz versus the New York Knicks in 1977.
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Q & A with Paul Westphal ...10:06 am
Paul Westphal has enjoyed a storied career in American basketball. As a player, he was drafted by the Boston Celtics in 1972, and earned a championship ring with that team in 1974. He went on to play six seasons with the Phoenix Suns (leading them to the NBA finals in ’76), and continues to rank (… continue reading …)
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- Pete Maravich
- Not enough guns (1993 MTV interview with Bob Dylan and Carlos Santana)
- YouTube interview — Bob Dylan in 1984
Don’t knock Knocked ...9:53 am
Thanks to Ben for the e-mail, in response to my post on Under Your Spell:
I thought for a long time that I was one of the only
ones that saw a lot of merit in “Knocked Out Loaded”
until I recently found this site:
http://knockedoutloaded.weebly.com/
A very interesting perspective of a very interesting
album. Obviously, “Knocked Out Loaded” isn’t “Blood
on the Tracks”, but I appreciate the fact that you
(and the author of this KOL website, whoever it is)
are giving the album’s music some much-need analysis.
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Sunday, April 6, 2008
Just a shot ...1:43 pm
A Shot of Love, that is. This performance is from Nuremberg in 1987.
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Charlton Heston, 1923 - 2008 ...9:54 am
Rest in peace to a great actor and a man who was, by all accounts that count, a deeply admirable human being. 
A few months ago on his “Theme Time Radio Hour” show, Bob Dylan paused to pay tribute to Heston, as noted then in this space:
Bob talks about Charlton Heston receiving the Ten Commandments as Moses in Cecil B. DeMille’s film, plays a clip, and then goes on: “Charlton gets a bad rap for his strong conservative beliefs and involvement with the NRA, but truth to tell, he was a strong advocate for civil rights, many years before it became fashionable. He was also the recipient of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, and the Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award. Never mind the fact that he’s in a couple of our favorite movies, including ‘Touch of Evil,’ ‘The Big Country,’ ‘Planet of the Apes’ and of-course ‘Soylent Green.’”
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Friday, April 4, 2008
Under Your Spell ...1:01 pm
Looking for a new lyric to post at the top of the page, the RWB creative team settled on a couple of verses from Under Your Spell. It’s a slightly odd and I think poignant little song from Bob Dylan’s slightly odd 1986 album, Knocked Out Loaded. The song is actually a collaboration with Carole Bayer Sager — the only song they wrote together. She is better known for such songs as That’s What Friends Are For, and Arthur’s Theme, and collaborations with such as Burt Bacharach and Marvin Hamlisch. I thought I’d go see if she had a website and if this collaboration with Bob were mentioned at all there. Well, she does have a website, and there’s a page devoted to her collaborators, and, indeed, right at the very top of the page is the name of Bob Dylan. Here’s some of what she says about working with him on this song:
… so he called me and we arranged for a time to write at his barn in Malibu. And it was really weird. I’d say something and he’d say he liked it, but he was all the way over on the other side of the room and he was covering his paper as if I was going to look and cheat. It was the most private collaboration…. I mean it’s hard to call it a collaboration because we were never exactly doing anything together at the same time. And at the end of the day he really didn’t use a whole lot of my lyric, maybe a third, but he gave me a credit. I thought, ‘Why is he giving me a credit?’ He basically lost most of my words, but he said he wouldn’t have written it without me in the room. He was a very generous, brilliant guy, as you all know …
So there you go. I wonder if that line about letting the dead bury the dead was one of Carole’s or one of Bob’s?
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Tweedle Dee ...9:58 am
On last week’s “Theme Time Radio Hour”, Bob Dylan played LaVern Baker singing Soul On Fire. Check out the YouTube clip (it’s just audio and a still picture) of her singing Tweedle Dee.
Now, I think that ought to brighten anyone’s day.
…
Note on upcoming content: On Monday, I hope to post a new entry in the ongoing Q & A Series in this space, this time with a star of the basketball world, both as a player and coach: Paul Westphal. You definitely do not want to miss it.
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Thursday, April 3, 2008
Onward Christian commandos ...5:04 pm
At First Things today, Jody Bottum (one time Dylan Q&A subject) questions whether Christians ought to respond to slights with armed resistance in order to get respect in the media.
Well, probably not. But why, in fact, shouldn’t we? Violence works, after all. The mere threat of violence works.
Here’s a recent example: I’m on the board of a literary magazine at a small state university, and, at the board’s meeting this spring, the editor mentioned that he had wanted to reprint the blogger Iowahawk’s hilarious swipe at the archbishop of Canterbury. (If you haven’t read it, it’s worth a look: A description of the archbishop’s mention of a British application for Shari’a law, told as a lost Canterbury Tale, in pseudo-Chaucerian English.)
Unfortunately, the editor said, the magazine couldn’t reprint it. The legal adviser from the university’s administration had said no—not on the grounds that it was offensive to Anglicans and their archbishop, but on the grounds that it mentioned Islam, and the school could receive bomb threats as a result of publishing it.
He goes on to reflect on the evolving reasons for the double standard that is applied when it comes to portraying Christianity, versus Islam, in a negative light.
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T.V. Talkin’ ...2:40 pm
Linked on Expecting Rain today is a video clip from the Charlie Rose television show, from October of 1997, where Rose talks to Daniel Lanois, Jon Pareles and Suzanne Vega about Bob Dylan and his new album, Time Out Of Mind. Click here to go to the page. I don’t remember seeing this show at the time. The segment is about twenty minutes long, and is well worth watching for the input from Dylan’s then-producer, Lanois. Note how he says that when Dylan and he first met to discuss the recording project, Bob sat down and read him the lyrics to the songs, from start to finish. That’s an interesting thing to consider, when people have these arguments sometimes over whether the lyrics should ever be contemplated outside of the context of the music. Dylan understands quite well, I think — and he did state as much in some interview the details of which escape my damaged brain at the moment — that the lyrics are the essence of his songs, which is why he can do whatever he wants with the tunes and the tempos and the arrangments in concert. The words in fact are the songs, and yet this does not take away anything from the fact that the music behind those words, as well as the manner of the performance in any given instance, determines how the song expresses itself to the listener.
The talk in the Charlie Rose show about Dylan’s mortality also reminded me of something he said in a Rolling Stone interview in 2001:
I think that’s why people say Time Out of Mind is sort of dark and foreboding: because we locked into that one dimension in the sound. People say the record deals with mortality — my mortality for some reason! [Laughs] Well, it doesn’t deal with my mortality. It maybe just deals with mortality in general. It’s one thing that we all have in common, isn’t it? But I didn’t see any one critic say: “It deals with my mortality” — you know, his own. As if he’s immune in some kind of way - like whoever’s writing about the record has got eternal life and the singer doesn’t. I found this condescending attitude toward that record revealed in the press quite frequently, but, you know, nothing you can do about that.
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- And more Uncut interviews
- Neil Young talks to Charlie Rose: “I’m not happy about it now”
- The Uncut interviews: pure gold
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