Tag: Bob Dylan

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The Tide of Prince

You can watch, here, Prince perform a “brilliant” guitar solo at the end of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame tribute to George Harrison in 2004.

One viewer of the Youtube video said this:

This was Prince’s response to being snubbed by Rolling Stone Magazine’s top 100 guitarists. He certainly proved his point here. And the strutting off stage at the end. Priceless.

Well, if that’s your thing.

After Tom Petty, Steve Winwood, Jeff Lynne and Dhani Harrison have played through most of a reverential rendition of the song, Prince emerges from the wings, in a black suit and a red bowler hat, poker-faced, and plays a solo of such intricacy and mournfulness that the other players shake their heads and grin with admiration. On its face, it’s a supreme expression of Prince’s superiority and bravura. But the film gives it a new context.

This is my clue about what is going on here.  Forget about George:  it’s not about the music.  It’s not about Prince’s artistic achievement.  It’s about Prince.  It’s about the drama.  And Sasha Weiss celebrates it.  She’s a fangirl.

As for the music, come on– this is not hard to sort out.  Prince dances and prances and swings his arms and fingers and, yes, he hits more notes than anyone else. That’s what his musical sensibility in this moment– which is supposed to be a tribute to one of the least showy lead guitarists of all time (George Harrison)– calls for: a fucking spectacle about himself.  If your standard is volume, and speed, and quantity, he’s your thing.  If you’re interested in something that matters, he might not be.

And then Prince struts off the stage.  It was the musical version of a bat flip, and just as petulant and petty and banal.  His fans are drunk with pleasure.

I looked up this clip in response to a New York Times Daily podcast in which Sasha Weiss, discarding any pretense of journalistic objectivity, gurgles that Prince was the “Mozart” of his generation.  She raves on and on about the monumental achievements of Prince, awestruck by his decision to change his name to a symbol, blown over by his accounts of just how much suffering he endured in his life, dazzled by his spectacular stage shows, the weeping, the dancing, the emoting!

This is a feminine appreciation of Prince’s identify.  It’s Taylor Swiftian.  It’s all about “telling my story” (about me) and giving my fans an exhibition about me, about who loves me and who doesn’t, about who I love or don’t, about who I am.

It is interesting that this podcast should emerge in the shadow of “A Complete Unknown”,  the terrific film about the early days in New York City and at the Newport Folk Festival of an authentic genius, Bob Dylan.  The contrast of the two is illuminating.  Name one great song by Prince about anybody other than himself, his hurt, his desire, his horniness, his frustration, his monumental glorious self, in all it’s costumed glory?

Sasha Weiss acknowledges that Prince’s legacy has been diminished over time.  She laments that the documentary by Ezra Edelman, which the Prince estate has blocked from being released (they want something more fawning and adoring) will never be released because it would have restored a sense of Prince’s importance and influence.

Precisely what “A Complete Unknown” has done for Dylan.  Well, no it didn’t: Dylan’s influence and importance has never really diminished at all.  “A Complete Unknown” is timely because it resonates so clearly with Dylan’s reputation and esteem in the music industry, and especially among other talented singer-songwriters, including the new generation who know exactly who first established the idea that rock music could be genuinely artistic and relevant and compelling.

Another tell: Dylan had contact with the makers of “A Complete Unknown”, and, as he did for the making of “I’m Not There” by Todd Haynes, gave the director carte blanche to show whatever he wanted.  The result is magnificent for Dylan.  The Prince estate are too stupid to realize how an artistically compelling but honest documentary can do far more for an artist’s reputation than the usual Hollywood sycophancy.

How great is Prince, really?  A sample of the genius’ lyrics:

The rain sounds so cool when it hits the barn roof
And the horses wonder who you are
Thunder drowns out what the lightning sees
You feel like a movie star
Listen, they say the first time ain’t the greatest
But I tell you, if I had the chance to do it all again, ooh
I wouldn’t change a stroke ’cause, baby, I’m the most
With a girl as fine as she was then

From “Raspberry Beret”.

Really?

And from another of his allegedly “great” songs, “Purple Rain”:

I never meant to cause you any sorrow
I never meant to cause you any pain
I only wanted, one time, to see you laughing
I only want to see you laughing
In the purple rain

Impressed?  No, you’re not.  It’s banal.  I am reminded of The Tragically Hip, who also had songs that seemed inspired musically but lyrically fell flat.  The lines are just sequences of images, some striking and some not, but the overall effect is dull.  There’s no build, no narrative context, no real connection to any compelling insight or revelation.

Musically, Prince was amazing– no argument there.  Not my type of music (because it is mostly centered on virtuosity and showiness) but for what he was trying to do, it’s impressive.   But lyrically, he never moved beyond horniness and bullshit– the bullshit part being how he would love anyone forever.  No he won’t.  No, he didn’t.

So one of the things we consider here is weight.  How much does his musical genius compensate for his lyrical banality?  I would argue that you can’t separate the two.  All the bombast and melodic invention and harmonies and inversions are integral to the monotonous repetition of clichés about romantic love.  Songs like Dylan’s “Love is Just a Four Letter Word” or “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right”, “It Aint Me Babe”, or “Tangled up in Blue” are more interesting musically because they are about authentic insights and experiences.  He explores, reveals, illuminates.  “You just kind of wasted my precious time” is a bombshell, a shot, a blast, that expands your ideas about love and distance and disappointment.  “Someone who would die for you and more” caps an ascending escalator of perception of someone’s confused narcissism.

Springsteen’s “Thunder Road”– musically, far more ambitious than Dylan– has this:

There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away
They haunt this dusty beach road in the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets

It resonates.  The boys who longed for you but you turned away, and continue to exist as ghostly opportunity; the burned-out car, reflecting the decline of American confidence and yearning.

Leonard Cohen– I can’t even begin to list the number of lyrics he wrote that are powerful, evocative, compelling.  Yes, musically– in performance– he was limited, but his songs were not.  No cover of a Prince song is even close.

Or you have Prince’s (“1999”):

I was dreamin’ when I wrote this
So sue me if I go too fast
But life is just a party
And parties weren’t meant to last

This is a sophomoric conversation.  It goes nowhere.  And all the music in the world can’t lift it beyond it’s triviality.

 

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On Dylan’s First Album

One of the most astute comments I ever did see on early Dylan:

“These debut songs are essayed with differing degrees of conviction,” writes music critic Tim Riley in 1999, “[but] even when his reach exceeds his grasp, he never sounds like he knows he’s in over his head, or gushily patronizing … Like Elvis Presley, what Dylan can sing, he quickly masters; what he can’t, he twists to his own devices. And as with the Presley Sun sessions, the voice that leaps from Dylan’s first album is its most striking feature, a determined, iconoclastic baying that chews up influences, and spits out the odd mixed signal without half trying.”

From “Inside the World of Rock” posted to Facebook, 2024-03-20.

My second quote of the day, from the NYTimes, on South Dakota Governor Kristi Noemi, who appears to be grooming herself for a shot at Trump’s VP:

This approach to political image-making has its roots in the pantomimed femininity of Phyllis Schlafly and Sarah Palin, where the promise of a powerful woman was defanged by her participation in the pageantry of traditional gender cosplay.

NY Times

Wonderful.

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Worried About the New Dylan Biopic

“It’s such an amazing time in American culture and the story of a young, 19-year-old Bob Dylan coming to New York with like two dollars in his pocket and becoming a worldwide sensation within three years — first being embraced into the family of folk music in New York and then, of course, kind of outrunning them at a certain point as his star rises so beyond belief,” Mangold said. “It’s such an interesting true story and about such an interesting moment in the American scene.”  Indiewire

And becoming “a worldwide sensation”?  Like, a star?  A celebrity?

That’s a pretty disturbing comment to hear from a director preparing to make a movie about the most provocative, original, and compelling singer-songwriter of his era.

It’s a great story because he became rich and famous?  That’s the American dream!  Soon, he is wearing the clothes that stars wear and eating in restaurants frequented by Barbara Walters and Henry Kissinger!

I am not a fan of Timothy Chalamet.  I just can’t find gay actors romancing young women in a movie convincing.  In the back of my mind a little voice keeps telling me “he’s not interested in a girl.”   Worse, Chalamet is one of those actors who, like Leonardo Di Carpio, calibrates his performance to other actors’ performances, to what they think a real actor would do– what has received critical opprobrium and public esteem– rather than to the psychological reality of the character they are playing.

Christian Bale is a great example of an actor who does dig deep into the character and brings out unexpected nuance and subtlety.  His performance in films like “American Psycho” and “Shame” are brilliant.

I wish he had been chosen for this role.

But, my wife says, he doesn’t look like Bob Dylan.

C’est la vie.

 

 

 

 

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Joan Baez’s Vanity

Joan Baez: I am Noise was showing at the Princess Theatre this week so my wife and I went to see it.  Up until about half way through, it was not too annoying.  It was narcissistic and self-serving, of course, and Baez always sings as if the audience has an obligation to express convincing and polite approbation or else, but I found it tolerable until she began to relate how broken down she was for a period in her life.  It’s hard to describe what she meant because the whole thing was amorphous and, I think, purposely vague, but it emerged that her sister Mimi, who also experienced these disorders, claimed that her father had French-kissed her once in the back yard by the clothesline.  Then Joan Baez– also, of course, in therapy– began to recover her own memories of abuse about which she was decidedly vague.

Aside from the obvious controversies, one must immediately acknowledge that she admitted to being desperately addicted to quaaludes at the time.  One must also sadly note that her career was in decline and she was no longer as important or celebrated as she once had been and that can be, for someone admittedly addicted to public adoration, a tough pill to swallow.

Think about it:  she was massively doped up on quaaludes (so badly so that she approved the stupidest album cover photo of her career–in a space suit– during this period for the stupidest album of her career — a desperate attempt to maintain her relevance by embracing rap), depressed about the loss of her prominence on the activism circuit (the Viet Nam War had ended) and possibly even more depressed about her own failures as a mother (she continued to tour leaving Gabriel in the care of others).  The cover of Time Magazine (an awful, ugly graphic) must have seemed so long ago by then.  And David Harris didn’t turn out to be that great of a husband after all.

There was a reference to hypnosis in there but I’ll say no more about that because I can’t recover a memory of the details of context.  But some of the content of the tapes she played in the film reminded me of the suggestive tactics of the “therapists” involved in recovering memories of abuse by the victims of the Satanic Ritual Abuse hoax.

I remained puzzled by several things.  As is often the case, one allegation begets another and, sure enough, the zombie “recovered memories” reared it’s ugly, festering head and Joan claimed that she also had been abused.  Of course, there is no specific date or time or location, and of course her father is deceased and unable to defend himself.  Of course, she had been heavily into quaaludes for eight years– which, I suppose, offers an explanation of just how many layers of shit covered those hidden memories.  Of course.  What astonished me is that no editor or producer thought fit to either excise the questionable allegations or at least do a little more to acknowledge that recovered memories are “controversial”.  Because they are not “controversial” at all.   They are the product of junk psychology and have been thoroughly discredited and debunked.  They were promulgated by books like “Sybil” and “Satan Remembers” which have been convincingly shown to be hoaxes.

But then again, this is a vanity project, not a documentary.  We saw nothing that was not approved of for us by Joan Baez herself.

Add to that the issue of hypnosis, which was also part of her therapy…  look, it’s 2023.  Wake up.

Things come to a crux when Mimi tells of being French kissed by her father, a recollection that leads Joan to pursue her own path of thrice-weekly therapy, including hypnotism, which has her remembering her own inappropriate experiences with her dad — which the film does not go into great detail on. The doc includes letters and voice messages from her father in which he accuses Joan of having fallen prey to false memory syndrome, but Baez tells the filmmakers today that if even 20% of what she remembers is true, that’s damning enough.

Twenty percent of nothing is still nothing.  This is throwing mud onto the wall and believing that some of it must stick.

I will not be polite about this issue under any circumstance.  A good deal of damage has been done by credulous individuals who don’t care about science or evidence or facts and are willing to believe something because they just “feel” it must be true– as Joan Baez suggests in this vanity piece.  She even suggests that her father might have “felt” that it wasn’t true.  And that both feelings are valid.

Really?

 

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Roy Orbison: “A Black and White Night”

Roy Orbison has one of the three or four truly great voices of rock’n’roll. In 1988, just a year or so before he died of a heart attack at 52 (December 6, 1988), he recorded a tribute concert to himself called “A Black and White Night”.

You may wonder, what on earth do I mean by “to himself”. I mean that the project was financed, managed, and controlled by Orbison’s production company. It was “directed” by Tony Mitchell, a gentleman from my home town, Kitchener, Ontario. But Orbison had final cut and control of the film.

This is not the same kind of film as the one we got when Marty Scorcese directed the greatest rock’n’roll film of all time “The Last Waltz” with The Band (some would argue “Stop Making Sense” with the Talking Heads).

There is no rational artistic reason why it’s in black and white, and this video is a poster child for why some people believe in the principle of artistic economy, which is, if you don’t have any ideas at all about what you are doing with the camera (or mic, or paintbrush, or keyboard), replace artistry with volume or quantity. Go up to 11. Or, In this case, have the camera swoop back and forth and up and down and left and right and in and out, for no reason whatsoever other than to make it appear that you are doing something with the camera to make this production visually interesting.

There are moments when the musicians appear to be out of sync. There are even moments where they appear to be hamming it up. Could be that an editor dumped in a few shots taken out of sequence just for effect. Or there were dubs.

“A Black & White Night” is well recorded. Too well-recorded. I am convinced it was dubbed, though every effort appears to have been made to make it appear to be a live recording. You would think that nowadays it would be easy to find out the truth: it’s not. I’ve been searching the internet and all I can find it indirect references to it and drippy, adoring reviews by slavish worshippers of Roy Orbison.

Let’s keep that straight: I am an admirer of Orbison but here it is: Orbison is a truly great but one-dimensional romanticist whose work has limited importance. He was the master of the paranoid, masochistic, break-up song, in which the pain of the loss is elevated to a near hysterical embrace of spiritual and emotional suffering.

You might be surprised that this mode can only go so far.

Only the lonely
Know the way I feel tonight

Yes, those opening lines, the black suit, the sunglasses– truly magnificent.

But a lot of his early success may well have been due to arranger Fred Foster at Monument Records (where Orbison recorded from 1959 to 1965). After Foster left, Orbison rarely charted, until his return during the nostalgia craze in the 1980’s.

But, like Elvis and Michael Jackson, he was a pop star, and never more than that, and he doesn’t belong in the category of the truly visionary, brilliant minds that made rock music worth paying attention to, and made it more relevant and interesting than any other musical style in the past fifty years.

People who tell you the contrary just want to believe that a facile adoration of the sound of a voice is just as valid as an intelligent grasp of the fundamentals of music and idiom and lyric and melody and arrangement in terms of judging a musical performance.

Obscure note: like Elvis, Roy Orbison died on the toilet.

You really should see the performance of “Crying”, in Spanish, in David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”.

The handful of truly great voices in rock’n’roll:

Roy Orbison
Judith Durham (The Seekers)
Jim Morrison (The Doors)
Jennifer Warnes
Aretha Franklin
Janis Joplin
Van Morrison

Burton Cummings

And a bigger handful of extraordinary voices:

Judy Collins
Elvis Presley
Art Garfunkel
Tom Waits
Susan Jacks
Reverend Al Green
James Brown
Screamin’ Jay Hawkins

Over-rated Voices:

Freddie Mercury
Kate Bush
Roger Daltrey
Linda Ronstadt
K. D. Lang
Bruce Springsteen

Why over-rated?

A great singer puts his or her voice into the service of the music, not into the service of the singer’s ego, K.D. Lang.  Roger Daltrey has a big voice, but he’s not really a particularly good singer. Linda Ronstadt: ditto: she gets louder and softer and louder again. She wails.  Listen to her version of “Different Drum” and then listen to Susan Jacks’ version: that’s the difference between wailing and singing.  Kate Bush is a diva: fabulous voice, and a show-off.  Burton Cummings has a great voice and he can sing, but never covered anything really super interesting. One imagines that if he did, the limitations would reveal themselves. Freddie Mercury can never be forgiven for “Bohemian Rhapsody”.

Don’t even get me started:

Whitney Houston (whine)
Michael Jackson (grunt, falsetto, grunt)

No Longer Qualified

Almost all recent singers, Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Katie Perry, Britney Spears, Kesha, Lil Wayne, Nicky Minaj, Ariana Grande, and so on and so on, use Autotune.  They are cheating.  And does Autotune really make them sound better?  No, it doesn’t.  It just speeds up the recording process and takes out the obvious flubs.

Some of these artists claim that autotune is an artistic component of “their sound”.  Oh yes, and EPO is an integral part of Lance Armstrong’s “ride”.

Great Songwriters and their voices

Bob Dylan is actually a pretty good vocalist on his earlier albums, up to “Blood on the Tracks” and “Desire”.  Singing isn’t just about pitch: there’s phrasing and intonation and rhythm.  Around “Saved” his voice went into the tank and I don’t think any one around him ever summoned the courage to tell him the truth.  His voice is cosmetically in the class of Tom Waits but he’s not nearly as judicious with it’s use.

As the years go by, I think less and less of Bruce Springsteen as a vocalist the more I hear him.  Even when I go back to “Born to Run”, I find it harder and harder to overlook his limitations. His voice is not really much prettier than early Dylan’s, but Dylan is far more interesting, in phrasing, intonation; sometimes a good sneer can come in handy.

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Five Perfect Songs

There are five perfect songs. Here they are:

  • Sam Stone (John Prine)
  • All Along the Watchtower (Bob Dylan)
  • Anchorage (Michelle Shocked)
  • I Fought the Law (Bobby Fuller Four)
  • You Don’t Own Me (Leslie Gore)

That’s it.

About Sam Stone:
But life had lost its fun
And there was nothing to be done
But trade his house that he bought on the GI bill
For a flag-draped casket on a local heroe’s hill

“Suspicion” (Elvis Presley) comes close, but no cigar.

Other Honorable Mentions:

“Reelin’ in the Years” (Steely Dan) A truly awesome recording but I can’t overlook the pettiness of “the things that pass for knowledge I can’t understand…”

“Homeward Bound” (Simon and Garfunkel) a fine, fine song, but “all my words come back to me in shades of mediocrity” is a little precious.

“Four Strong Winds” (Ian & Sylvia) is a bit slight, so you have to repeat the chorus and that gives it a bit of a sense of aimlessness and repetition and violates the rule of economy.

The Beatles’ best song is “Girl”:

Was she told when she was young that pain would lead to pleasure?
Did she understand it when they said,
That a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure
Will she still believe it when he’s dead?

But “Eleanor Rigby” is also very nearly perfect.

“Go Your Own Way” (Fleetwood Mac) is too slight.

“Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits is very, very good.

“Echo Beach” (Martha & the Muffins) Actually, this song is darn near perfect as well. Darn near.

“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” (The Band) Great, great song, but a bit murky, and the Band’s own recording of it is not as perfect as the song. As is “This Wheel’s on Fire” and “Tears of Rage”. I do actually like the cover version of “Dixie” by Joan Baez, featuring crack Nashville session musicians. It’s from an album that appeared to be an effort by Baez to reach out to the alienated silent majority of Americans who seemed to despise her.

Levon Helm (who wrote “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”) despised her version, but one suspects that that is because Levon Helm despised Joan Baez.

“Satisfaction” (Rolling Stones) Okay. So this one is perfect too. Six perfect songs. But it has to share with “Light My Fire” (Doors).

“Like a Rolling Stone” (Bob Dylan) Violates rule of economy, but also a great, great song. “Tangled up in Blue” might actually be a better song.

“Thunder Road” (Bruce Springsteen) Can’t sustain that great take-off, “you can hide ‘neath your covers and study your pain” though he tries, brilliantly. In the end, it’s just a trifle indulgent, a trifle too self-consciously monumental. A trifle. On some days I prefer “Jungleland”.

“Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” (Bob Dylan) is as good or better than any other song on the list. All right, seven.

“One of These Days” (Emmy Lou Harris) Lovely, enchanting piece, reminds me of “As I Went Out One Morning” (Bob Dylan): both are elegantly economical, tight, balanced.

“Someday Soon” (Judy Collins) Okay– another one. Eight.

All right: 9– “The Hammond Song”, by the Roches. Actually, this song is obviously flawed, but there are moments when it does sound just perfect to me. So 8. Wait — 9. I forgot about one of the most perfect, crystalline, renditions ever: “Wayfarin’ Stranger” by Emmy-Lou Harris with that absolutely wonderful lead by Tony Rice and mandolin by Albert Lee.

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Oh My But You Have a Pretty Face: Jesse Winchester’s “Brand New Tennessee Waltz”

Oh my but you have a pretty face,
You favor a girl that I knew.

Oh my.

Jesse Winchester’s lyrics starts out with that expression of startled awe: oh my!

It’s not “holy cow” or “my goodness” or “wow”. “Oh my” is that quick feint with polite astonishment, an involuntary gasp of amazement, too spontaneous to be refined or vulgarized: oh my.

Jesse Winchester was writing about his experience as a draft-dodger. He moved to Canada in 1967 to avoid service in the Viet Nam War. Obviously, he left someone behind. From “The Brand New Tennessee Waltz” (1970):

Well I left Tennessee in a hurry dear,
The same way that I’m leaving you
For love is mainly just memories
And everyone has him a few
When I’m gone, I’ll be glad to love you.

That line deserves a thought or two: love is mainly just memories? That’s not a shocking idea, really. It’s much the same as saying “you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone”. It’s certainly much easier to be in love with a memory than with the person who wants you to throw out the garbage and stop switching channels. It leaves aside the issue of whether that kind of love can be real. He’s feeling “like one of your photographs\caught while I’m putting on airs”.

I don’t mind the Joan Baez version of the song, though I find her generally harder and harder to enjoy the older I get. She’s really not a very good singer at all– she just has a lovely voice. Well, she has a voice that would be lovely if she weren’t so damn obsessed with trilling it. Her best work is her slightest: the vocals on “Diamonds and Rust” nicely get under the lyrics instead of on top of them, like thick creamy icing.

When I was about 14, I biked down to Queenston Heights one summer day and climbed up Brock’s Monument, a tall, narrow cement column that culminated in a series of viewports embedded in a coarse sculpture of General Isaac Brock, the hero of the Battle of Queenston Heights, who was shot by the Americans when they spotted him on his white horse in his scarlet tunic.

The stairs up the monument were very, very narrow. I was on my way down when I encountered a small group coming up, so I stopped and stood against the wall and waited to let them pass.

The first person in this group was a girl about my age. She stepped level with me and turned to look at my face. We were just inches away from each other. That was 40 years ago, and I still remember thinking, “oh my, but you have a pretty face”. Not exactly in the words of the Jesse Winchester song, but the sentiment was the same: oh my.

I can no longer actually remember what she looked like. What I remember– and this is true of a lot of our memories, I think– is the intensity of the feeling I had about that face. In my catalogue of a lifetime of memories, of all the pretty girls I’ve ever looked at, I still remember it as one of the most startlingly beautiful faces I have ever seen. She had red hair and freckles and green eyes and beautiful full lips. The average blonde may be more beautiful than the average red-head, but a really beautiful red-head with green eyes is peerless. Her skin seemed luminous. I was so taken aback that I couldn’t avert my eyes and she seemed so startled by my stare that she stared back. She stepped away, up the stairs, and looked back once.

I waited at the bottom for a long time for her to come down, just to see that face again. She emerged a time later, supremely indifferent to my existence. She walked by me and left my orbit forever.

“Diamonds and Rust” by Joan Baez deserves a mention somewhere, if only for these lines:

Now I see you standing with brown leaves falling around snow in your hair
Now you’re smiling out the window of that crummy hotel over Washington Square
Our breath comes out white clouds, mingles, and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me we both could have died then and there.

For me, autumn has always been the most “real” season– the cold winds, the warm coats, the sound of dried leaves under foot, the stilled conversations, the sense of diminished opportunity. Memories of summer can drift into haze, ennui, an indeterminate place and time.

And then, Baez sings,:

Now you’re telling me you’re not nostalgic/
then give me another word for it/
you were so good with words/
and at keeping things vague

Vague, I suppose, and non-committal. “You were so good with words” is both an accusation and a lacerating confession: I believed you. I may have been a fool, but I believed you, and even with the advantage of hindsight, yes, I’m nostalgic– I wish I could believe again.

The Baez song also has a great opening: ”

Well I’ll be damned/
Here comes your ghost again…”

In case you didn’t know, the song is presumed to be about Bob Dylan. I believe she has confirmed that.

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Dylan’s Back Pages: Lies that Life is Black and White

There is a video on Youtube, taken from one or another of the many Dylan tributes over the years, in which Roger McGuinn, Tom Petty, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, and George Harrison, all together on stage at the same time, take different verses of Bob Dylan’s 1964 classic “My Back Pages”.

“My Back Pages” is a rarity. There a great songs and there are great summations and there are great insights, but rarely are they combined into a single unified work– if you could call the mad sequence of disjointed images and ideas “unified”.

You have to hear “My Back Pages” in context. When Bob Dylan arrived in New York in 1961, he quickly established himself as the voice of the protest movement– funny name, isn’t it?– and wrote several defining songs of the civil rights era, including “Blowing in the Wind”, “The Times, They Are A’Changin'”, “A Hard Rain”, and so on. The intensity and power of his words moved people. He became a messianic figure, a prophet of change, and figure upon which an entire generation seemed to pin it’s hopes for remaking the world.

Had Dylan been a politician, he might have found this role congenial (see Obama). But as an artist, it alarmed him. First, he didn’t entirely believe in “the cause” of the protest movement– he embraced it’s values, but he was all too aware of how the cause could become corrupted, and how individuals within any movement can become “pawns in the game”. And with the death of John Kennedy, of course, he saw what was really going down.

It’s hard for anybody to admit they were wrong. It is impressive to see anyone embrace the idea that he was completely wrong about anything. But that’s what “My Back Pages” is about: “I was so much older then/I’m younger than that now.” A line of sarcasm. I was “wiser” when I embraced dubious causes. Now, I am younger, less confident that I get it. Less sure that this path leads to anywhere but disillusionment.

In some ways, “My Back Pages” could be construed as a neo-con’s lament: I used to believe in noble causes, that the world could be made better with grand schemes and revolutionary movements. Now I have come to realize that man’s nature itself is corruptible, and that causes become ideologies, and that evil must be addressed.

Dylan sings, “lies that life is black and white/spoke from my skull, I dreamed”. Pure Dylan– “spoke from my skull” and then, “I dreamed”. He doesn’t even offer you the consolation of thinking you should read his lips, or that he actually spoke the lies. Is this Dylan’s real, and most amazing, contribution: that truth is more important than any cause or dream? Of all the movements and causes that have come and gone, the most persistent outrage in the eyes of the world is to hold truth above all else. That communism failed. That humans really only seek after themselves. That victims can be complicit.

I don’t object that much to the term “protest movement”, though it sounds like it means to reduce visionary political action to “protest”, as if were defined only but what it was against, or by the act of being against anything at all. Why should I object? When you look at the state of American society and culture in the 1950’s, anybody with any kind of independence of spirit and sense of curiosity would be, by definition, in opposition to the prevailing values of that generation.

One of the best lines in any Dylan song: “Fearing not I become my enemy/ in the instant that I preach”.

The Who’s contribution (Pete Townshend): “Meet the new boss/same as the old boss”. (Won’t Get Fooled Again)

The Beatles: “When you talk about destruction/don’t you know that you can count me out” (Revolution)

Creedance Clearwater Revival: “Five-year plans and new deals/wrapped in golden chains”.

10 Years After Undead: “Tax the rich/feed the poor/’til there are no/rich no more” (I’d Love to Change the World)

Updated November 2008, in the cusp of an Obama victory.

What if Obama turns out to be a stooge of the establishment, a man who talks big but ultimately plays by the rules, compromises with mediocre corporate and military apparatchiks, and starts a war so he can look tough for the next election?

What if the Bush Administration– desperate– brokers a deal with Obama to relieve those soldiers and CIA agents who participated in the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo– and, of course, all the administration officials who authorized them to do it? What if Obama signs it, fearing divisions in the government, or the possibility of hard-right Republicans blocking the rest of his agenda?

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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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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.