Category: Music

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A Sweetheart Like You – Guy Davis Covers Dylan

If you have never heard Guy Davis’ version of Bob Dylan’s “Sweetheart Like You” you’re really missing something.

Unfortunately, I can’t make you sit down in a seedy bar with a glass of watery American beer and a plate of stale pretzels and a cloud of smoke and a worn-out sagging beauty eyeing you from the bar and the smell of urine and bacon drifting over the tables like yesterday’s politics so the song can start out at you just right, from the unbalanced jukebox in the corner, accordion and lead guitar poking through the din, and Guy Davis’ gravelly voice:

by the way, that’s a cute hat you’re wearin’
And that smile’s so hard to resist
What’s a sweetheart like you doing in dump like this?

All right– so that part is not so new. How about:

You know, I once knew a woman who looked like you,
She wanted a whole man, not just a half,
She used to call me sweet daddy when I was only a child,
You kind of remind me of her when you laugh.
In order to deal in this game, got to make the queen disappear,
It’s done with a flick of the wrist.
What’s a sweetheart like you doin’ in a dump like this?

That’s better. I like that line about “whole man”, not just “half”. What is the missing half? Sexuality? Manliness? Why is he “only a child”? Because he doesn’t understand that this woman, this “queen”, is ready to immolate herself for something that baffles even his royal Bobness, but which Guy Davis sounds like he understands better than anyone.

A “whole” man?  “I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul”.   (“Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”).

Bob being Bob then announces:

You know, a woman like you should be at home,
That’s where you belong…

It boggles the mine that the same expansive mind that wrote “Only a Pawn in the Game” and “Masters of War” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Visions of Johanna” and “Tangled up in Blue” could drop a dud like this on the listener. A woman belongs at home with her husband!

Well, it’s not really a “dud”. It’s an alive line. It’s a dumb idea, but a live one. So it’s a bad line, but not a dud. It’s poetry.

But she is out to make the Queen disappear, which means, she wants to get rid of all the dignity and prestige and meaningfulness that comes with being “at home” with her husband (who is himself probably out sitting in a bar with an assassin on his lap– wondering why she’s not at home where she belongs) and to that end, she makes herself subject to a man’s trivial whim, the flick of a wrist. That’s all it takes to persuade this woman to immolate herself.

Regrettably, Dylan doesn’t see women as whole persons. They only exist in halves, and always half of whatever the man in the lyric is doing. In “Things Have Changed”, he isn’t even fully evil because, after all, she is sitting in his lap, drinking champagne, so she is merely an accessory to the narrator’s despair. Her only hope for salvation is to rush home, grow some flowers and do some sewing, and wait for her man to arrive for dinner to validate her existence.

That does not mean it’s a bad song. No, it doesn’t.

You know you can make a name for yourself,
You can hear them tires squeal,
You can be known as the most beautiful woman
Who ever crawled across cut glass to make a deal.

Wow. You really owe it to yourself to hear Guy Davis scrunch those lines into that lovely bridge, without missing a half-breath or letting the tension slack, so that the “cut glass” really is a shock and the “make a deal” is inevitable.

 

The liberated Bob Dylan:

Can you cook and sew, make flowers grow
Do you understand my pain?
Are you ready to risk it all,
Or is your love in vain?

“Is Your Love Is Vain”, from Street Legal.

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Independent Women of Song: “Someday Soon” and “One of These Days”.

Surprise– to me. These songs were recorded only seven years apart and both are by strong, independent female artists, and both are unusually polished and crisp recordings with outstanding session musicians. They even have similar intros, one with steel guitar, one with electric. And they are both about women on the cusp of breaking out. But Judy Collins is waiting for her man to make her life happen; Emmy Lou Harris is about to make it happen for herself. Both feel constricted by their families, and can’t wait to leave and stretch out their minds, if not their bodies. First, from “One of These Days”.

I won’t have to chop no wood
I can be bad or I can be good
I can be any way that I feel
One of these days

And from “Someday Soon”.

My father says that he will leave me crying
But I would follow him right down
The toughest road I know
Someday soon, going with him, some day soon….

Judy Collins was a soulful interpreter of great songs by the outstanding singer- songwriters of the 60’s, Dylan, Cohen, Tom Rush, Ian Tyson. She was a romantic, and I personally found her a bit suffocating at times– too many whale songs and saturated memories of dreamy trips to Paris or smudgy interior emotional landscapes. Emmy Lou Harris leaned a bit to country and folk, and added some memorable background vocals to Gram Parsons, Neil Young, and Dylan. Her songs are always tasteful and restrained– she resisted the temptations that made very good singers like Dolly Parton and Loretta Lynn go very bad.

Might be a woman that’s dressed in black
Be a hobo by the railroad track
I’ll be gone like the wayward wind one of these days

Unlike Collins, the narrator of Harris’ “One of These Days” isn’t counting on being rescued by some man. She’s going to break out on her own, and be her own person. Collins’ narrator is waiting for her cowboy to come so she can follow him wherever he goes. Okay– the song was written by a man, Ian Tyson, after all, whose woman, Sylvia Fricker, eventually chose not to follow anymore. In fact, Sylvia Tyson basically decided she could be “any way that I feel” and went to work for the CBC in Toronto while Ian cooled his cowboy heels at his ranch in Alberta, writing soulful ballads about how wonderful it was to ride your horse, look at the mountains, and live alone.

So should I add Sylvia Fricker’s “River Road”, another fine song about escape, into the mix?

Here I go, once again
With my suitcase in my hand
And I’m running away down River Road…

Once again, like Harris, she isn’t waiting around for the cowboy.

There’s an odd verse in “River Road”:

Well I married a pretty good man
And he tries to understand
But he knows I’ve got leaving on my mind these days…

When I heard that line, I immediately thought, “the man is real”. She’s talking about someone real, whom she knows will hear the song– he’s “a pretty good man”, and she pulls her punches: she doesn’t want to hurt him too much. But she has leaving “on her mind” these days… This isn’t The Dixie Chicks’ “Earl” getting a vicarious thrill out of name-calling. This is a mature woman who is tired of having to account for where she is, what she’s doing, where’s she going, where is she going to be, what’s she going to do, when are you here, when are you coming, what’s for dinner:

When I get that urge to run
I’m just like a kid again
A 12-year-old jail-breaker running away…

And we can add one more: Lucinda Williams’ “Side of the Road”. The narrator tells her man to pull over, she needs to get out of the car and stand in the tall wet grass and be alone–.

I wanna know you’re there, but I wanna stand alone
If only for a minute or two
I wanna know what it feels like to be without you
I wanna know the touch of my own skin
Against the sun, against the wind…

Okay — two more: isn’t the marvelous “Anchorage” by Michelle Shocked really about the same thing, contrasting two women who made different choices? Her friend:

Hey, ‘Chell, I think I’m a housewife…

…New York City, imagine that!
What’s it like to be a skateboarding punk-rocker?

…Leroy says hello

Leroy says, send a picture…

[added 2009-12] And always, always, always, the Leroys of the world say “send a picture”. We want to see this; we want to see what it’s like to escape, because we don’t generally have the courage or determination to do it ourselves.

[added 2012-07] Oh, what the heck: let’s not leave out one of the best songs of independence: Joan Armatrading’s  “Me Myself I”:

I set here by myself
And you know I love it
I don’t need someone
To come pay a visit
I wanna be by myself
I came in this world alone
Me myself I.

Best Looking Earnest Female Folk Singer Primarily Known as an  Interpreter of Other People’s Great Songs:

1. Emmy Lou Harris
2. Sylvia Fricker/Tyson
3. Jennifer Warnes

Least Best Looking Folk Singer Song-writer:

Tracey Chapman

Sorry.  But it’s okay– she really wouldn’t care what a man might think of her looks anyway.

The Man’s Perspective:

Runaway, by Del Shannon.

If he doesn’t know why why why she left, he should listen carefully to the songs discussed here.

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Festering Corporate Monopolies: DRM

This may sound a little strange but… the simplest, most telling fact about the piracy issue is this: there is no reason why content providers have to issue their “valuable” content on CDs or DVDs. They have always been absolutely free to issue their content on any proprietary media that would prevent their valuable content from being copied.

A proprietary format would simply require a patented algorithm to implement encryption and a hardware device to unencrypt it and play the media.  Simple solution.  It is remarkably easily technically feasible.

But they didn’t. Why not? Because they knew the consumer would never buy it in large enough numbers to guarantee big, fat profits. And they knew that smaller, independent record labels and unsigned artists would be more than happy to issue their stuff on CDs and DVDs and they wouldn’t be able to skim off their customary share of the profits.

[2011-07: this is a profoundly important fact that cannot be underestimated: the media companies have always been free to issue their products on any format they wish to, including formats that have built in protections against copying and piracy. They are under no obligation to issue their products on DVD’s or CD’s. None at all! If they do not like the physical characteristics of these mediums, they should go elsewhere.]

Instead, what they are trying to do, is hijack the mediums.

If you were a smart person and you worked at the highest levels of a corporation in the music or film industry and you understood something about what was coming down the pipe in terms of the internet and user empowerment, and you cared deeply about preserving your own profitability… and you were somewhat ruthless… you would do what the industry has done.

For you would have realized that there was an enormous, gaping hole in the system, and that it had to be plugged quickly before it became transparent to everyone what was happening.

The hole is not in the system of copyright protections. It is in the system that gives you a cooperative monopoly (with the other big 4 music companies) over musical entertainment in the entire world. You have an incestuous relationship with TV and radio to ensure that the artists you have chosen to promote receive wide exposure, and that their music is played on the radio. (Sony recently paid out over $100 million to settle an action by New York State on this issue.) The system ensures that only artists you control will receive the kind of exposure that creates a “superstar”. Only the artists you control will appear on Letterman and Leno and Oprah and in movies and on radio play-lists.

As long as it cost tens of thousands of dollars, this system worked in favor of the big players, because very few people could afford to make a professional recording and print vinyl records.

But with new technologies, this control has dissipated, and suddenly almost anybody can make a good digital recording and make their music available on CD’s or through down-loading. This means a talented artist might be able to simply ignore the establishment, if he or she doesn’t like the unfair conditions imposed upon artists by industry contracts.

To sustain their control over the market, the music industry has to close this gap.

You must first create the illusion that your concern is about copyright, and about preserving your rights over the valuable original content your company insists it “created”. You must above all else perpetuate the illusion that your artists and your movies and your content are the best there is to offer and the only stuff that people really want. You validate a person’s entertainment choices. You give yourself awards, schedule your performers on Letterman and Leno, get your stars on the cover of magazines. You lobby foreign governments demanding that they empower their populations to see “Ishtar” and “Gigli”.

You must try– in the face of the unremitting ridiculousness of your position– to insist that your really do want to make sure that artists get paid for their work. In spite of the fact that almost none of your current artists under contract will stand up and say he or she believes you.

But you know, deep in your musty little heart, that most of this is an illusion you have created to convince people that your artists are important and talented, and to assure the average consumer that he or she can’t be like your artists.

And you know that if the marketplace was actually free to choose it’s own “successes” from the thousands and thousands of artists our there, that yours might not be among the best or most desired or most original or interesting.  Even worse, geographical areas might develop a base of fans for local artists who can survive on their earnings from this base, instead of having to depend on multi-national media corporations.  Imagine a Duluth radio station playing, primarily, artists from the Duluth region, or Minnesota, instead of artists from New York or Los Angeles?

So you must find a way to ensure that these other artists do not slip through your filters, your stranglehold on media, into a position wherein they could make money performing music without you being able to skim off the largest chunk of their incomes.

You must prevent them from being able to sell their music directly to the public, without you.

And you discovered, to your horror, that, given a choice between your own copy-protected, restricted, controlled, homogenized product, and unprotected, unrestricted, un-homogenized works by new, independent artists, the public is drawn to the free and the original. You realize that if the industry issued it’s product on media that prevented individuals from copying, that everyone would simply migrate to media that did allow copying. Because there are lots of artists who are willing to make that trade-off and you don’t own them all.

And so you realized that you had to prevent such media from existing, by persuading the government to violate the essence of capitalism and free enterprise by imposing a design upon the manufacturers of the hardware used to create and play back video and audio.

If you continue to issue your product on protected disks while other artists are free to issue their own work on non-protected disks– your days of lavish hotels and extravagant junkets are over.

So you must– you absolutely MUST– force the media outlets, now including Windows itself, and all hardware to incorporate a system of DRM — “digital rights management”–, which has the function of allowing you to hijack the media. In essence, you are taking over the media itself, the disk itself, the player itself, the computer itself… controlling them, without even having to pay a penny for it, other than the cost of lobbying.

This is like requiring every car to be able to use ethanol. This is a program that would be of great interest to corn growers. All they need to do is lobby the right politicians. After a few years, no one will wonder if ethanol is actually any good or not. It won’t matter. And if someone builds a better car that will run on hydrogen– it doesn’t matter: it will also have to be able to use ethanol.

You have pulled off one of the biggest cases of fraud in the history of corporate malfeasance. Congratulations. Nobody even seems to know yet, what you have done.

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Copyright: Subsidizing Obsolescence

The world has changed. Get over it. I think people still immersed in the old business models see their infrastructure crumbling but can’t see how the new possibilities might be even better– as Apple clearly did with the iPod.

I hope Viacom has their wish: Youtube will delete all their videos– that’s their policy if they receive a complaint. Then Viacom will pay millions of dollars to show clips in ads on regular TV. Duh!

The “principle” of copyright is indeed in trouble. The trouble is that people don’t really understand the original purpose of copyright. The trouble is also that people have this illusion that Walt Disney’s “The Little Mermaid”, for example, is “original” (Disney stole it or bought it, along with “The Lion King” Pinochio, Aladdin, and most of everything else they produce). Most rock’n’roll is derived from long established models of chord progressions and riffs. Art steals from landscapes or objects (Warhol’s Campbell Soup can is only the most obvious example). Ever see a TV episode in which one major character seems to have forgotten another major character’s birthday? Lucy? Mr. Ed? Gilligan? Edith? Maude? Homer?

The sad truth is that most of the current big corporations fighting for stricter copyright enforcement could not themselves have been profitable without outright theft. (Exactly how many “reality” tv shows are there, by the way? Hey, I got an idea: we get a bunch of people on a show, have them do something, then kick one of them off every episode!…)

We have simply entered an era in which definitions of “original” and “copy” and “collage” and “edited” and “found” are rapidly changing. We’ll survive. We’ve never had as much money to spend on diversions as we do now, and the money is madly flowing in all directions. The groaning and creaking we are hearing is the sound of decrepit old business models struggling to re-orient themselves to the new realities. The nimbler minds at Google, and Apple, and YouTube, and Myspace, etc. have already found their way. The older models are not only inefficient — they’re boring.

It would be very, very bad policy for the government to try to artificially prop up those old monsters, the way some governments and unions used to try to require stokers on diesel trains. The DMCA was a clumsy attempt to do just that and I hope it dies slowly, the death of a thousand YouTubes.

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Reel to Real: The Aiwa TP-40

Somewhere around 1966, my brother Harry gave me a tape recorder exactly like this one.

 

I loved this tape recorder, the Aiwa TP-40.  (Amazingly, someone posted a video of the unit in its original packaging!)  It was my first real electronic device. It had a microphone and an ear plug and a built-in speaker. I actually used it to record music from the radio. If you didn’t have the record back then, that was the only way you could hear a song over again when you wanted to, short of buying the record.

So this was the tool of my first act of musical piracy.

I’ve always liked the looks of the reels turning around. I’ve even toyed with the idea of picking up a used Nagra recorder for the pure visceral thrill of seeing a finely crafted machine actually do something, visibly. The television show “Mission Impossible” used to use a Nagra for the famous “your mission, should you decide to accept it…” sequences at the beginning of each show. It was cool.

The Nagras, however, are such marvels of engineering that even though they are completely obsolete they still command very high prices on eBay. I saw one for over $1000. That makes no sense– you can buy a very, very good digital recorder for $150.

I have a little minidisc recorder which, compared to my little Aiwa, is a Boeing 747 compared to a Spitfire.

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Bob Dylan Live: London, Ontario, 2006-11-03

I saw Bob Dylan and the Band in 1974 at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto. I was 17 and it was my first major concert. Our music enrichment class at Beacon Christian High School went, with Lambert Zuidevaart, our music teacher. I believe we stayed overnight at his friend’s apartment. We visited Kensington Market, ate at a Chinese restaurant, then walked to Maple Leaf Gardens. That’s what I remember. It was 32 years ago.

I remember vividly the opening chords of the first song: “Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way and I go Mine”. The Band may well have been the greatest back-up ensemble Dylan ever played with. Their performance was incredibly rich, textured, and vibrant. (“Before the Flood”, a double-album of performances from that tour, is worth having.)

Thirty-four years later, my son and I attended a Dylan concert in London, Ontario, at the John Labatt Centre. Like Maple Leaf Gardens, this is a hockey arena, so the acoustics were not great. His backup band was good, but not as good as The Band.

In 1972, Dylan and the Band played the complete concert, with the odd Dylan solo on acoustic guitar, and a few songs performed by The Band without Dylan.

The John Labatt Centre is a newer arena, well-furnished and gleaming. The staff seemed unduly concerned with stopping people from recording the concert with cameras or cell phones. This was a little baffling: who cares if someone creates a 160×80 grainy mpeg of this performance? Are they out of their minds? But the attendants stood guard near our seat, watching intently. When it looked like someone was using the camera on their cell phone or a real camera, they stepped in and asked the person to stop. I had to be clever to snap the few shots I did, and most of them are blurry.

The men sitting in five seats to the right of us seemed to have a dire need to go for beer or to the bathroom about once every song– that is not much of an exaggeration. The seats are so close together, I had to stand up to let them pass each time. It was annoying. Whey they weren’t drinking or peeing, they were yakking away, or making fun of Dylan’s incomprehensible voice.

The voice– unlike old copper or English gardens or Tom Waits– has not taken on an atom of patina or richness. If anything, I think he has become more shrill and spastic, and less coherent, than even in his “Street Legal” or “Saved” days. If I hadn’t already known most of his lyrics by heart I wouldn’t have been able to make them out.

Dylan played a keyboard exclusively – he didn’t touch a guitar– and every song featured the entire band.

Dylan’s encore was generous: four songs, including two of his most revered: “Like a Rolling Stone” and “All Along the Watchtower”. He sounded better singing these two than almost any other song of the night.

Dylan apparently is not content to simply perform the same songs over and over again as originally recorded. Several songs were radically restructured, musically, especially “Desolation Row”, “It’s All right Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”, and “Girl From the North Country”. He performed a generous mix of classics and more recent works. His voice is problematic, but give him credit for investing in his own work, taking risks, and reinventing himself.

Memories

I am fascinated by memory issues and this recollection of mine brought up a few.

I was able to determine that the concert was in 1972. Let me see if I can find the exact date: no it wasn’t 1972. It was in 1974, January or February. Surprisingly, I’m having a hard time googling the exact date.

Okay — it was exactly January 10th, 1974. I know because though he played two dates in Toronto (both at Maple Leaf Gardens), I vividly remember the first song I heard: “Most Likely You’ll Go Your Way and I’ll go Mine”, and only the January 10th concert began with that song. (The January 9th set began with “Rainy Day Women”

Where I found the info: www.bobdylan.com

What I don’t remember: how we got to Toronto. Who drove. I don’t remember anything about sleeping over other than the fact that we probably slept over somewhere. Or maybe not. I vaguely remember that the idea of sleeping over was vetoed by a parent. I seem to remember that we ate out at a Chinese restaurant in Kensington Market and then walked to Maple Leaf Gardens.

One person who claims to have attended the concert reported that Dylan came out in a Toronto Maple Leaf’s jersey. I think I would have remembered that. I think this person possibly has the wrong night.

Who came with? Janie Lou Kannegieter — I see her in the picture in the beige coat. Pauline Hielema. Our teacher, Lambert Zuidevart. A smart, cultured student from the grade 11 who liked to write — Gertie Witte? I think that was her name. I am not sure about her.

I think the girl with the long brown scarf in the picture is Pauline.

So I was in grade 12. I graduated a few months later and then went to college.

As you can see from the pictures, oddly, I sat in roughly the same location at both concerts: high up on the left side of the arena looking towards the stage. The first is from 1972, the second from 2006. The third picture is Pauline Hielema, and Janie-Lou Kannegieter, and someone else walking ahead of me somewhere near Kensington Market. The picture is blurred, but I am fond of it, because it looks like dusk in winter in Toronto.

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“That’s What You Get for Lovin’ Me”

…is a song by Gordon Lightfoot which falls into a kind of genre of “love ’em and leave ’em” songs. These are songs about (usually) a man who romances a woman, seduces her, hangs around for a short time, but then gets restless and can’t help it but hit the road again. The woman, of course, always wants him to stay. What fun would it be (for the man) if the woman said, “Okay. Well, I guess you feel the urge to go, you should go.  It was nice meeting you. ”

I’ve had a hundred more like you, so don’t be blue
I’ll have a thousand ‘fore I’m through.

Here’s a list of some of them:

  • For Lovin’ Me (Gordon Lightfoot)
  • I’m Not Saying (Gordon Lightfoot)
  • Green Green (New Christy Minstrels)
  • Greenback Dollar (New Christy Minstrels)
  • We’ll Sing in the Sunshine (Gale Garnett – odd reversal: here the
    girl announces she will hang around for one year, and then leave)
  • Ramblin’ Man (Allman Brothers Band)
  • Freebird (Lynyrd Skynyrd, with pale imitation “Travelin’ Man”)*
  • Rose of Aberdeen (Ian Tyson)
  • Heard it in a Love Song (Jimmy Buffet)
  • Baby, the Rain Must Fall (Glen Yarborough)

That last one– after explaining why he must desert his girl, with a booming, incontrovertible voice:

Baby, the rain must fall
Baby, the wind must blow,
Where-ever my heart leads me,
Baby I must go,
Baby I must go.

This was a very popular song in it’s day, around 1965, and also gave it’s title (and theme) to a movie starring Steve McQueen as an aspiring singer. Wow. Weirdness prevails. Anyway, this guy, in the song, is telling his girlfriend– or maybe, in these enlightened times, his boyfriend– that he can’t stay. He has to go. He just has to. It’s not that he’s a no-account bum who exploited her, took advantage of her feelings, and is now setting out to cheat on her. Oh, no no no. He just, well, has to go. It’s a force of nature, the incontrovertible will of God, fate, destiny– all of that. Like the wind must blow. Like blowin’ in the wind, which is where the answer to the question, “did you know this before you seduced me” is.

It’s not that I’m unsympathetic. If some guy feels an utterly compelling urge to travel and see the world, hey, more power to him. And if he is able to convince some woman that he would be a fine, temporary lover– hey, go for it. It’s just that I suspect that most of these rambler-gamblers are probably a little less than forth-right about those facts at the start of a relationship.

Or maybe they’re just gay. Maybe I’m missing some code here. Maybe the whole thing fits better into the “Brokeback Mountain” sort of scenario. Can’t you just picture Jake Gyllenhaal singing, “Baby, the Rain Must Fall” as he gets back into his little pickup truck to head back to Texas? And Heath Ledger weeping in his trailer?

In that respect, the first song on the list, “For Lovin’ Me”, by Gordon Lightfoot, is refreshingly frank:

That’s what you get for lovin’ me,
Everything you had is gone, as you can see
That’s what you get for lovin’ me.

…I’ve had a hundred more like you,
So don’t be blue.
I’ll have a thousand ‘fore I’m through.

That’ a refreshing tone. It’s like 2:35 seconds of so long, sucker.

Dylan wrote a few, but they’re different. Try “It Aint Me Babe”. He doesn’t have that bitchy God told me to see the world tone that the other songs have, which may make you suspect that that God-told-me-to-see-the-world tone is largely bullshit.

You say you’re looking for someone
Who will promise never to part
Someone to close his eyes for you
Someone to close his heart
Someone who will die for you and more

How good of a lyricist is Bob Dylan exactly? “Someone who will die for you and more” is brilliant. So is “close his eyes” and then “close his heart”. He is unparalleled as a lyricist.

Not one of these other so-long-baby songs can hold a light to the greatest “I’m a-leavin’ yah” song of all time, also with one of the greatest put-downs in the history of popular music, also by, of course, Bob Dylan:

Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right (Bob Dylan)

Now I aint saying you treated me unkind
You could have done better,
I don’t mind.
You just kind of wasted my precious time,
Don’t think twice, it’s all right.

Whoa! Wasted his precious time! A line that makes Meryl Streep in “The Devil Wears Prada” sound like Florence Nightingale, with her: “I’m disappointed in you…”

Love sucks.

* added 2014-04-20

SCTV’s brilliant “Gordon Lightfoot Sings Every Song Ever Written“

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James Ward

I was never really a big fan of James Ward. You don’t know who James Ward is? Not surprised. It is a very bad sign when the home page of a performing artist hasn’t been updated in a year.

James Ward is a gospel singer who began his career in 1972. I saw him at Trinity Christian College. He sings a kind of hybrid gospel/blues, with unusual fidelity to the blues side, stylistically. His lyrics are generally devotions or meditations on the bible. He sounds a bit like Stevie Wonder at times, often in falsetto. Not a style I was ever fond of.

I did a search on the internet for music by James Ward, which I hoped to illegally download. No– I’m being coy. I own several of his records, so I have the right to download copies of those songs, if I could find them. But I couldn’t.

Would James Ward be happy to know that nobody out there is stealing his music on the internet? Obviously, right? He would be making more money, wouldn’t he?

Ha ha! Obviously not. The fact that nobody in the entire world has gone through the trouble of ripping a James Ward CD and dropping the MP3 files into the “share” folder on Kazaa or eMule or whatever… no. He can’t be happy about that.

His early albums are not generally available on CD. Sounds like it’s a problem. It costs money to do it right, but Ward likely doesn’t have a lot of resources. He is trying to raise donations to cover the costs of recording a new album.

According to his website, he is available for concerts, but is also very active working with choirs and church musicians and participating in worship. He is employed as music director at New City Fellowship Church. I think he is genuinely humble man who believes that an artist should never be above that sort of task. It is very, very unfortunate that so many “Christian” musical artists are just as full of themselves and wrapped up in their own achievements as any non-Christian artist.

I used to write reviews for a few Christian journals, and I reviewed Ward a few times. I think I was lukewarm. Having listened to his albums again recently, I think if I were writing the review today, I would stress his artistic honesty and the relative sophistication of some of his lyrics: his religious belief is not banal. I would say he has put together a few “fine” albums. Not great, but “fine”, which means, worth a listen. He’s written four or five good songs, which is an achievement. (The older I get, the more I think writing a few good songs is more than a little achievement: it’s really some thing.)

The James Ward Website.  See?

I have noted that the website is not up to date, and seems a little frumpy and bland.  But then, Ward makes a virtue of his honesty and down-to-earth earnestness, so I don’t mind.

How many artists have had to change their names to get something pleasingly sonorous to use for the stage and album covers?  James Ward was born James Ward.

Other James Wards:

The Painter
The Software Developer
The Actor

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Excommunication

I am listening to an mp3 of a sermon by the pastor of the New City Fellowship Church in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The pastor is saying that New City Fellowship Church never excommunicates anyone for sinning.

No no no– they only excommunicate people who refuse to stop sinning.

Not very aphoristic is it? Not a neat little parallel statement: my intuition is, what’s the difference? And I don’t think my intuition is altogether mistaken on the issue.

Pastor Randy Nabors talks as if sins were discrete, isolated acts that violate clear and simple rules issued by God in the bible, in English, and which are readily available in printed form, comprehensible and unchanging.

That was the mistake of the Pharisees, of course. And the first thing we deny is that we are, in fact, behaving exactly like the Pharisees. We just can’t help it.

The truth is, we love rules, because we love strutting around pointing out that other people have broken them. We deny that we are being legalistic or proscriptive or simplistic or pietistic or moralistic and we do all those things by saying that you can only be forgiven if you stop sinning, as if there was the remotest chance in hell that we could ever stop sinning or that you who demand that we stop sinning are not, at this very moment, sinning yourself.

I don’t believe it. I don’t believe that you have repented and are therefore forgiven at the moment when you have stopped sinning. I believe that you “repent” when you acknowledge that all of us are corrupt human beings who are utterly unworthy of God’s grace and unlikely to receive it on our own through our own virtuous actions.

You see– that’s the part I don’t believe Pastor Nabors and most Christian preachers really believe– that they haven’t “earned” it. Theologically, of course, they might say they haven’t, but they don’t really believe it. How can you possibly identify other people as sinners– so bad, they must be expunged from a congregation– unless you truly believe yourself to be so worthy that you can sit in righteous judgment?

They will object:

When they begin their judgments, they say, “of course we are all sinners, but” and then they should stop.

They’ve already said the important thing: they too are sinners. That’s enough.

There is no “but”, no qualification that suddenly, miraculously entitles them to sit in judgment.

“When they said, repent, repent, repent, I wondered what they meant.” Leonard Cohen, the Future.

Pastor Randy Nabors’ sermon was supposed to be about Jezebel, but it turns out it isn’t about very much at all. It is 34 minutes long, and it consists of a long sequence of utterly unremarkable observations and rules. Surprise, surprise, those rules you have heard repeated to you 30,000 times by now are true the 30,001st time and the 30,002nd time too. Maybe. Now do you know what the rules are?

I was really disappointed. New City Fellowship is a very diverse congregation and seems to be involved in some genuinely interesting urban ministries. But there was nothing in this sermon that sounded the slightest bit interesting: don’t sin, Jesus loves you, Jezebel was evil, don’t marry people who don’t respect me (non-Christians).

Why is this same message repeated every Sunday? You can’t remember it? Or could it be that the message is not meant to be teaching or preaching.  It’s a public expression of the sinlessness of the faithful listeners, isn’t it? You affirm your own purity and worthiness by receiving this sermon and looking at your neighbors and receiving their approving looks (unless you have a nose ring) smiling and nodding and saying, “amen, brother”, for I am not a sinner like those people…. Me too– I’m against Jezebel.

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Bob Dylan: “As I Went Out One Morning”

 

We have been thinking of possible band names for the last few days. How about:

  • The Taliband
  • Fractal Mode or Fractal Chords
  • Mortuary Beserck
  • Phantom of the Oprah

Enough. I was also thinking about a Bob Dylan song from “John Wesley Harding” (1967), and album which may well be his finest. The song is “As I Went Out One Morning”.

Like all of the songs on that album, the arrangement is clear, sparse, simple, economical, and crisp: drums, bass, and acoustic guitar, and harmonica. Dylan’s nasal voice is confident and nuanced.

As I went out one morning
To breathe the air around Tom Paine’s
I spied the fairest damsel
That ever did walk in chains

Tom Paine was a celebrated pamphleteer at the time of the U.S. war for independence, best known for his tract “Common Sense”, written in 1776, which advocated an end to the British Monarchy. Paine provided Franklin and Jefferson with some of the inspiration for their own theories about the state and authority and the individual, and these worked their way into the U.S. constitution and Bill of Rights. Paine himself later returned to England where, among other things, he advocated the creation of pension plans, and progressive taxation. The man was ahead of his time.

I offered her my hand
She took me by the arm
I knew that very instant
She meant to do me harm.

The girl seems to represent religion. She is enticing, with promises of spiritual reward, and he offers her his hand. But then she demands more: she takes his arm. In the economy of this song, we waste no time: he immediately suspects she is up to no good.

“Depart from me this moment,”
I told her with my voice
Said she, “But I don’t wish to.”
Said I, “But you have no choice.”
“I beg you sir,” she pleaded
From the corners of her mouth
“I will secretly accept you
And together we’ll fly south.”

Religion? Or utopianism? Does she represent Dylan’s brief faith in the idea of human progress? Unfortunately, we’re not likely to get a straight answer from Dylan anytime soon, so our only clue is her suggestion they “fly” south. To paradise?

I love the amazingly stripped down lines, especially the first four of the verse above, with that inverted “said I”.

Tom Paine comes to his rescue. The spirit of liberty himself? Or the spirit of “common sense”, of a kind of rational agnosticism?

Just then Tom Paine himself
Came running from across the fields
Shouting at this lovely girl
And commanding her to yield

Why did I think the girl represented religion? I believe it was a review by Greil Marcus that came out shortly after the album that first made that suggestion. That makes less sense to me now, and given subsequent developments in Dylan’s religious views, it does seem more likely, now, that the girl embodies utopianism or socialism. Alluring, but basically a means of enslaving the individual in favor of the collective.

On the other hand, “ever did walk in chains”, suggests that her true spirit was constrained in some way, shackled by something. That is more suggestive of religion, strait-jacketed by the spirit of conformity and collective ennui, though it could also evoke the idea that a socialist utopia is always accompanied by the chains of authoritarianism.  Tom Paine represents just plain old common sense: the illusion of utopia is contrary to what we see and know about human nature.

And as she was letting go her grip,
Up Tom Paine did run
“I’m sorry sir,” he said to me.
“I’m sorry for what she’s done.”

It’s a strange, very beautiful song. If you’ve never heard it… you haven’t, have you?

Modestly revised Februrary, 2007.

The entire lyric of “As I Went Out One Morning”.