Hear my humble cry ...9:53 am
Of all of those great hymns from the hills that Bob Dylan sprinkled into his set lists during the late 1990s and the early part of this 21st century, the one I’m most grateful for is Pass Me Not O Gentle Savior (here’s a version from Bismarck, ND in March of 2000). I’ve posted about it on multiple occasions in the past. It’s a song written by Fanny Crosby in 1868 (melody by William H. Doane) and it seems to me to carry with it both its own heart-rending poignancy and a sense of intertwinement with so many of the strands of American sacred music.
One of those strands is the art of shape-note singing. I’m grateful to a reader, Don, who shares, on YouTube, some recordings of shape-note singing in which he himself partakes. Below and at this link is a great rendition of Pass Me Not O Gentle Savior from May 17th last at Etowah United Methodist Church in North Carolina.
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Another closely related strand is bluegrass music, of the kind so beautifully played by the Stanley Brothers. It may well be that Dylan learned this song from their version, which you can also hear at the moment on YouTube. Click here or turn on the radio below.
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Friday, May 23, 2008
A crime? ...3:15 pm
There’s what you might call a bracing antidote to Dylan adulation in Nova Scotia’s Chronicle Herald, written by one Jim Meek, who saw Bob perform up in that part of the world. It’s called “Dylan commits songicide in Halifax.”
It was a wall on inchoate sound, a melange of mumbled lyrics, an attack on melody.
Not that the musicians were bad. There was talent on the stage — you could tell during the solos.
Too bad Bob didn’t introduce the boys to each other before the concert.
[...]
Adolescence has its charms, and Dylan has managed to sustain his for 50 years or so. (He turns 67 Saturday.)
But I did expect Dylan to display a passing attachment to his own music and incomparable lyrics.
Here was the man who had written two dozen of the best songs in pop history.
On Wednesday, he performed a few of them — notably It Ain’t Me Babe and Positively 4th Street — after putting the tunes through some kind of industrial-strength blender.
Musical rearrangements?
Heck, no — we’re talking songicide. They should add this offence to the Criminal Code.
Mind you, mine may be a minority opinion. Around the newsroom, most concert-goers gave a thumbs-up.
“Didn’t expect much, anyway,” one colleague said.
“I already knew he mumbled his lyrics,” another said.
As defences go, these were pretty lame.
Well, I think the telling thing about Mr. Meek’s point of view is his assertion that Dylan has “written two dozen of the best songs in pop history.” That he has, but the fact that many of his songs can stand as great pop songs doesn’t make Dylan himself a pop performer, strictly speaking. A pop performer is expected to go on stage and reproduce his or her hit records virtually note for note, and gets kudos for the ability to do so. Even a notable like Paul McCartney still basically does that with the Beatles’ classics. No one (apparently) wants to hear some odd new spin on Yesterday from the man who wrote it. However, Dylan has never been a pop performer in that sense. He’s always sung his songs in the moment, always adjusted arrangements and always delivered something new to his live audiences — even long before the “Never Ending Tour.” So to go to a Dylan concert and expect him to wear his guitar and harmonica and do All I Really Want To Do just like it is on Another Side of Bob Dylan is really pretty cockeyed at this point. Yet, it has to be acknowledged, a certain number of attendees at each Dylan show come with something like this expectation and leave unsatisfied. The proof that what Dylan does works, however, is his ability to keep returning to the same places year after year and to sell tickets. People are really not that masochistic. They go, and return again, because they’re enjoying what Dylan is doing, and they understand the language and purpose of his performance.
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From Liverpool in 2001, there is a clip on YouTube of Bob and the band doing Boots of Spanish Leather. I think that it would be hard to say he ever wrote a finer song, and it would be hard to find a perfomance of it better than this one.
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Odds and ends ...11:54 am
I’m late getting to this, but thanks to Jay for the link to this page at the NPR website, related to Suze Rotolo’s new book, “A Freewheelin’ Time.” You can read a generous introductory excerpt of the book there, and also listen to a 25 minute interview with Rotolo from the “Fresh Air” show. Maybe this isn’t the thing to say, but if you’re not curious enough about the book’s contents to buy it, but you are a little curious about it, you can probably satisfy that curiosity by visiting that page. Suze Rotolo comes across as sincere and, well, nice.
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Tomorrow is Bob Dylan’s birthday. He’ll be 67, and playing a gig in St. John’s, Newfoundland, on his way to Iceland and beyond. His birthday is being marked in Hibbing, Minnesota with the now regular Dylan Days festival. Here’s an article from the Duluth News Tribune on an exhibit at the Ironworld museum in nearby Chisholm, which explores Bob’s roots in the area.
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I enjoyed reading this piece by Leland Rucker, reminiscing about how a review he wrote of one of Dylan’s 1980 shows almost ended up printed on the Saved album cover. It’s also interesting to read the review all these years later, and it’s not hard to see why Dylan would have been taken with Rucker’s appreciative words.
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A new Dylan-related blog is Ramblings of a Ragged Clown, and the writer there makes an argument that Bob should use On a Night Like This as a show-opener, which argument then becomes an extended appreciation of that song and Planet Waves generally. Nice in particular because you don’t read much Planet Waves, do you? Maybe it’s obscured by all the dirt thrown up by the impact of the album that followed it, i.e. Blood On The Tracks.
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Housekeeping note: The eagle-eyed amongst RWB readers would have noticed that there are new doodads at the bottom of each post. Inspired by the recent upgrade of my WordPress platform — necessitated by hackers — I’ve been adding some compatible plug-ins (or again, to use the technical term, doodads). One automatically compares the content of each post with past posts in the database, and comes up with links to allegedly related content (some of which I might be better off leaving buried, but them’s the breaks). The other facilitates sharing the post on a “social bookmarking” site, or easily emailing the link to a friend, or indeed, to an enemy. Should your favorite social bookmarking site not be featured, by the way, drop me a line and I can probably rectify that. There being about 250 of those kinds of things these days, I didn’t choose the option of including a drop down menu with all of them in it, as it seemed to slow down the page loading significantly.
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Thursday, May 22, 2008
It belongs to him? ...10:31 am
Carla Bruni is an Italian singer, songwriter and model, who also famously became the wife of French president Nicolas Sarkozy in February of this year. She has a new album coming out in July. Some days ago, I saw a reference to the fact that she covers a Bob Dylan song on it, but it didn’t particularly spark my curiosity. Today, however, I was more interested when I looked at Dylan-related news on Google and saw the title of the song pop out. It’s none other than his big hit from the 1950s, You Belong To Me. From the Telegraph:
The Italian-born model-turned-singer’s third album contains her own rendition of Bob Dylan’s dewy-eyed ballad You Belong To Me, with blatant references to exotic destinations she and the French President visited last year during their lightning romance.
“See the pyramids along the Nile… Just remember darling, all the while, you belong to me,” she croons in the Dylan song.
Egypt was the couple’s first foreign destination last December, where they were photographed smooching and strolling hand in hand by the edge of the desert sands.
[...]
“See the market place in old Algiers… Just remember till your dream appears, You belong to me,” the Dylan lyrics go on.
Commentators suggest this refers to the President’s trip to Algeria, when he left his fiancee alone back in Paris amid controversy over their public displays of affection.
The final line includes the words, “Fly the ocean in a silver plane… Just remember till you’re home again… You belong to me’.
This is said to be a parallel with Mr Sarkozy’s frequent overseas trips on the presidential jet.
French daily France-Soir, one of the first to hear Mrs Bruni-Sarkozy’s version of the track, said: “Bruni is an intelligent woman and will well aware of all the references to her own life and her romance with the president.
“She is far too clever for this to be a coincidence.”
Carla is clever indeed. The journalists involved in this story are somewhat less so. Actually it’s more of a mind-boggling laziness, in the age of the internet and Allmusic.com. A quick check would have told them, for instance, that Bob Dylan was a precocious eleven-year-old when Jo Stafford had her big hit with his song in 1952. It kind of makes you wonder what eventually led him to run away to New York and a hard-scrabble existence, with all those royalties rolling in to the homestead in Hibbing.
Alright. Bob Dylan is generally believed to have recorded his lovely acoustic version of the song You Belong To Me during the Good As I Been To You sessions, which would be 1992. It wasn’t released on that album but appeared on the soundtrack of the film “Natural Born Killers” in 1994. Who actually did write the song? The consensus is that it was basically written by one Chilton Price. For business reasons, she then split the writing credit with Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart. First recorded by a singer named Sue Thompson, it became a multi-million seller when sung by the aforementioned Jo Stafford.
Personally, until I heard Bob’s recording of it, I always thought of it as a Dean Martin song. And honestly — although I absolutely love Dylan’s version, which features a truly wonderful and heartbreaking vocal performance — I still really think of it as a Dino song. (And then Dylan later did a cover of another Dino song, of-course, and that was Return To Me which was released on a “Sopranos” soundtrack album. I, for one, am eagerly awaiting his version of On An Evening In Roma. )
You can find audio of Bob’s version of You Belong To Me on YouTube, but here, then, is that scamp Dean Martin, delivering what is a pretty awesome vocal performance of his own. Although you might not be able to believe that he means every word of this song, you can believe that he wants her to believe that he does, and that’s a sincerity of sorts, isn’t it?
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Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Circular inanity ...12:59 pm
Walter Williams writes today in the Washington Times about how so many of the so-called solutions being imposed by government are the very things generating the problems.
Congress, doing the bidding of environmental extremists, created our energy supply problem. Oil and gas exploration in a tiny portion of the coastal plain of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would, according to a 2002 U.S. Geological Survey’s estimate, increase our proven domestic oil reserves by about 50 percent.
The Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and eastern Gulf of Mexico offshore areas have enormous reserves of oil and natural gas. Congress has also placed these energy sources of oil off-limits. Because of onerous regulations, it has been 30-plus years since a new refinery has been built. Similar regulations also explain why the U.S. nuclear energy production is a fraction of what it might be.
Congress’ solution to our energy supply problems is not to relax supply restrictions but to enact the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 that mandates that oil companies mix more ethanol with their gasoline. Anyone with an ounce of brains would have realized that diverting crops from food to fuel use would raise the prices of a host of corn-related foods, such as corn-fed meat and dairy products.
Wheat and soybeans prices have also risen as a result of fewer acres being planted in favor of corn. A Purdue University study found the ethanol program has cost consumers $15 billion in higher food costs in 2007 and that it will be considerably higher in 2008.
Higher food prices, as a result of the biofuels industry, have not only affected the U.S. consumer but have had international consequences as seen in food riots in Egypt, Haiti, Yemen, Bangladesh and elsewhere.
What’s the congressional response? On May 1, Sen. Charles Schumer, New York Democrat and chairman of the Joint Economic Committee, convened a hearing on rising food prices saying, “The anxiety felt over higher food prices is going to be just as widespread, and will equal or surpass, the anger and frustrations so many Americans have about higher gas prices.” Congress’ proposed “solutions” to the energy and food mess it created include a windfall profits tax on oil companies, a gasoline tax holiday for the summer, increases in the food stamp program and foreign food aid. These measures will not solve the problem but will create new problems.
Watching what’s going on in America and the world today in relation to issues of energy, food and environmentalism is like being forced to helplessly watch a car go up on a sidewalk and steadily drive along, running people over as it goes, with no one being willing or able to stop it. Politicians claim they want to bring down the price of gasoline, even while they fervently oppose drilling for oil or building refineries. They piously talk of alternative sources of energy, while the real-life replacement for fossil fuels — nuclear energy — has been effectively sidelined thanks to a Jane Fonda movie from 1979. They fret and gnash their teeth over the utterly hypothetical effects on human beings of alleged global warming, while the policies they have instituted to combat it are right now contributing to the real misery and starvation of actual people.
It does make one prone to despair. And especially so in a year when the race for the presidency is currently down to three candidates who all appear to buy into the false premises that have gotten us to this point.
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The sound of music ...9:39 am
Another chapter in the debate over the fidelity of modern recordings from Rolling Stone: Artists Fight for New Hi-Fi Formats.
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Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Let’s pause for a few words ...10:58 am
In the Weekly Standard, Joseph Bottum writes about words that sound like what they mean; words that ring true in and of themselves, and not only in an onomatopoeic sense. He gives examples like squeamish, fluffy and lethargic, and comes up with a term for such words, namely “agenbites,” and explains why. At the First Things blog he’s been soliciting other examples of the phenomenon. OK, I’ll bite, on agenbites.
How do you go about looking for them? Well, I think you have to open a book, preferably a book of poetry or even of song lyrics, where words are being used in a concentrated and careful way.
A few minutes got me a short list of words that seem righter than most.
Gallant seems to me to be a word with a certain gallantry to it.
Growl and howl are clearly almost as good as the things themselves.
Mist has a character that could fog up your mirror just by saying it.
Thunder sounds right, yelled in a deep voice from a mountain-top.
Flat seems to me to be just so.
Sip and the rarer sup are enough to make me wish some people could eat and drink more quietly
Linger appropriately hangs around the tongue for quite some time.
Muck arrives like a splash of the very same stuff on your pant leg. (I obviously am thinking of it in the sense of mud and other wet dirty yucky stuff. However, when you think about it, muck has a variety of usages and meanings. There is the phrase “to muck around,” and then there’s the concept of a grand muckety-muck, closely related to the poohbah. Muck is so flexible it can’t help bringing to mind another four letter word ending in uck. )
Not a million miles from muck is mush, which seems aptly soft and spreadable.
Well, I think I’ll leave it right there, before I get carried away and muck everything up.
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Saturday night in Maine ...9:54 am
A review of Bob Dylan’s show Saturday night in Lewiston, Maine, by one Bob Keyes in the Portland Press Herald, suggests that Dylan’s set list was sending a harrowing message.
On Saturday at the Androscoggin Bank Colisee, Dylan and his band performed a searing 17-song set of apocalypse and catastrophe — songs that professed rising water, human misery and unimaginable doom.
Perhaps the master of musical philosophy was summing up the mood of the country as we head into a summer of discontent?
Maybe, maybe not.
[...]
Playing in front of an enthusiastic audience of 3,000 or so, the soon-to-be 67-year-old Dylan trotted out a bundle of songs from his very earliest days to the most recent, and many settled on harrowing themes.
Simmering along with an edgy acoustic backing, “The Levee’s Gonna Break” offered salvation for those willing to take the plunge. A plaintive “Shelter from the Storm” suggested a different kind of human cauldron, and a blistering “Highway 61 Revisited” pointed the way of escape: “Just put some bleachers out in the sun,” Dylan sang, punching the air for emphasis, “and have it out on Highway 61.”
Well, that’s a very interesting and valid take, I think. I guess you’d have to go back and look at old set lists and determine whether there’s a dramatic difference these days versus some years ago; Dylan, after all, has never been one to flinch from the big questions of mortality, chaos and eternity. There’s almost always some apocalypse going on in his songs, whether it’s the kind that involves floods and fires or whether it’s more like an apocalypse of the soul.
One of the songs Bob and the band did Saturday night was Mississippi — which also fits with the themes above. It’s a song from 2001’s “Love and Theft” which has never become a staple of the live shows, although Bob has returned to it sporadically. I have a feeling we’ll be hearing the arrangement they played on Saturday night more often, because I think it works pretty darned well. Click here for a clip.
Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay
You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long
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Monday, May 19, 2008
Speaking of Frank ...10:29 pm
To mark the tenth anniversary of Frank Sinatra’s death, I wrote a little piece on his album In The Wee Small Hours. That irrepressible dynamo of the written word, Mark Steyn, published a massive raft of excellent pieces he has written on Sinatra, from one angle or another. One of them was the piece at this link, which he wrote in the hours after Frank’s death on May 14th, 1998. In the midst of this appreciation of Sinatra, there is a throwaway line from Steyn: “… in recent years, Bruce Springsteen would drop in on Frank to sing ballads round the piano; Bob Dylan kept pestering him to make an album of Hank Williams country songs.”
Now, I wouldn’t say I’m the best read person in the world on matters related to Bob Dylan, but I’ve read a good bit on the subject. Nevertheless, I don’t know Steyn’s source for this story that Dylan was pestering Sinatra to make an album of Hank Williams songs. I’d love to know from whence that comes.
On the face of it, it does not ring untrue. I do know the story (told in J. Randy Taraborrelli’s gossipy book “Sinatra: Behind the Legend”) that somewhere around the time of Sinatra’s 80th birthday, Springsteen and Dylan went over for dinner to Frank and Barbara’s residence. Much to Barbara’s chagrin, allegedly, Bob and Bruce happily got drunk with Frank on Jack Daniels and sung songs into those wee small hours. Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme were also there, but apparently Frank told Barbara he was sick of them and wanted to have the Boss and Zimmy over regularly from that point on. Another story I’ve heard — in this case, I think, from the mouth of deejay Jonathan Schwartz — is that while planning was underway for those Sinatra “Duets” albums in the 1990s, Bob Dylan let it be known that he would like to sing with Frank on the song That’s Life. It never happened, which is a shame, I think — it could have been the most bizarrely appropriate and memorable of all of those canned duets.
It’s also possible to see Dylan encouraging Sinatra to do that album of Hank Williams songs. Bob fancies himself as an ideas man, when it comes to music. From his memoir “Chronicles”:
[Al Kooper] was a talent scout, too, he was the Ike Turner of the white world. All he needed was a dynamo chick singer. Janis Joplin would have been the perfect front singer for Al. I mentioned this once to Albert Grossman, who was managing Janis’s career. Grossman said it was the stupidest thing he ever heard. I didn’t think it was so stupid, though, I thought it was visionary. Sadly, Janis would soon breathe no more and Kooper would be in eternal musical limbo. I should have been a manager.
So you can see Bob maybe thinking that he was the one to turn Sinatra on to an album of Hank Williams tunes. Would it work? It’s a question that will never be answered. It’s not impossible. Tony Bennett did Cold, Cold Heart and it was a big hit for him, and I think it’s a fine record (although I’m not sure the purist Bennett much likes it). Hank Williams’ songs may not have the elaborate chord changes of Gershwin or Cole Porter, but they have something that’s important to a great singer — in particular Frank — and that’s a fundamental integrity and honesty. Yes: I can hear Sinatra singing I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry. Even Lost Highway. Maybe not Hey Good Lookin’. But there could be an album’s worth of Williams material that Sinatra could have tackled, and perhaps those songs would have been forgiving to his old pipes.
Well, it will never be. Perhaps just one of many of Bob Dylan’s ideas for musical combinations that never came off. That’s life.
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Oh, and it’s always a good time to see this again:
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