Dylan: The Known Unknown

 

Exactly who Bob Dylan is remains a mystery to his millions of followers. It’s been estimated that over two thousand books have been written about Dylan since he emerged in the mid-Sixties, a situation that gives us many versions of the who, what, and why of the former Robert Zimmerman.Coupled with the songwriter’s infamous habit of fictionalizing  his biography, what we’ve had for decades are many personal Dylans.  You could read him in any way that suited you. Dylan crafted a mystique by withholding details about his upbringing. He remains a mystery, an enigma, a man hidden in plain sight. The difficulty of saying who Dylan was hasn’t prevented writers and filmmakers from creating versions of the Nobel Laureate. The variations on the known facts of Dylan’s story settle nothing, of course, and in fact compound the mystery around the man, a situation that only makes the icon more alluring.

It was reported in July of 1966 that Dylan had a motorcycle accident while riding in upstate New York. The tour was cancelled. He was a recluse for eight years after the accident, not returning to the stage until 1974. He remained creative during his radio seclusion, releasing his John Wesley Harding album in 1967, Nashville Skyline in 1969, and Self Portrait in 1970, but this wasn’t enough to stymie the musings on who Dylan was truly and what he was up to. The absence of interviews, concerts, and new paparazzi photos resulted in artistic expressions about pop stars either ascending to unreal heights of influence or who performed vanishing acts of a sort. Great Jones Street, a brilliantly etched 1973 satire by novelist Don DeLillo, tells the tale of an influential rock star named Bucky Wunderlick who has burned out and finds himself approached, despite his seclusion, by promoters, fans, intellectuals, would-be gurus, and hucksters of all sorts, all of whom seek approval and a blessing from the reluctant Oracle, a stream of hucksters who need to be told what to do.  A figure as vast, vague, and finally overwhelming as Dylan, though, makes for rich premises on fantasies about rock musicians who reach a level of influence in society and who become political tools to nefarious ends. 1968’s Wild in the Streets, based on a Robert Thom short story and who also wrote the screenplay, an American political party finds itself desperate to increase its power, with kingmakers seeking and getting the cooperation of an enigmatic and sullen rock star named Max Frost to convince the young fans to get involved in politics. In a sequence of events, the voting age is lowered to fourteen, Max Frost is elected president, and adults over the age of thirty are required to go to reeducation camps where they’re force-fed large doses of LSD.

More recently, we come to I’m Not There, a 2007 movie directed by Todd Haynes that depicts Dylan himself, as we think we understand, in the bringing together of different personas of the singer, each variation tweaked, twisted ever so, and recontextualized in unexpected ways. The nonlinear plot reveals a series of narratives drawn from the legend and lyrics of Dylan, with different actors highlighted as the singer in one of his various personas, i.e., the doomed poet, as Woody Guthrie, rustic folksinger, and a doomed rock and roll star. It’s an interesting project that plays around with the many personas Dylan mythology has spawned through the decades, and the point of the movie’s divergent take on him seems to be that we’re no closer to uncovering the inner being of this quizzical figure. Take your favorite version of Dylan and enjoy it, love it, and may it add to your life in only the best ways.

With all the magical thinking about the meaning of Dylan, it’s a relief that director James Mangold’s biopic, A Complete Unknown, sticks with the best-known biographical arc associated with the singer. We meet him (portrayed by Timothée Chalamet) first being dropped off in New York and wandering into Greenwich Village, jean-clad, toting a battered guitar case. The world of 60s bohemia greets the man from Minnesota: coffee houses, poets, art galleries, street corner musicians, intellectuals, lifestyle avant-gardists—all real geniuses and posers alike—gathered in the few condensed New York blocks of the Village that comprised the free-thinking capital of America. And of course, the folk music, the folk boom, the sweeping interests in traditional music forms, Civil Rights, and opposition to the Vietnam War. This was a world the young Dylan wanted to be a part of, one he’d come to dominate. It was a world he conquered and abruptly left. 

The movie is splendidly crafted, with Mangold’s direction taking us through the known events in Dylan’s early life prior to his 1966 accident, progressing from his arrival in New York through his meeting of his first girlfriend, Suze Rotolo (named ‘Sylvie Russo” in the film), meeting Pete Seeger in folk legend Woody Guthrie’s hospital room, where the young Dylan sings the patient a song written in his honor, his early days at open mics and hootenannies, performing for benefits for civil rights and other lefty causes, meeting Joan Baez, and growing attention from the public and the media. Mangold and screenplay coauthor Jay Cocks (incidentally a former film critic for Time magazine) enliven the oft-told incidents with precisely the right amount of speculative dialogue, no speeches, no political rhetoric, and no exposition dumps.

The interactions between the singer and those who befriend him and come to love him are quirky, set in a natural rhythm of give and take. It’s no small accomplishment that the screenwriter restrains a desire to explain, hypothesize, or convert the Dylan saga into a weighty and unreal melodrama. There’s a natural, unforced progression here, with telling scenes, well known to Dylan completists, given the right emotional temperament. What might have been a segment ripe for overdramatization, such as when Al Kooper showed up for an electric Bob Dylan session for Like a Rolling Stone, preparing to play guitar only to be temporarily sidelined when he hears the red-hot fret master Mike Bloomfield play some snarling blues licks. Kooper knew he couldn’t compete with Bloomfield  but  insinuated himself behind an organ, insisting he had a terrific keyboard idea .Kooper had no  such idea and was barely a keyboardist at the time, but when the tapes rolled, the musician’s poking and jabbing at the keys became an integral ingredient in one of the greatest rock songs. There were any number of grandstanding Hollywood clichés the filmmaker might have relied on to create this scene, with fast edits, loud voices, cartoonish facial expressions, and lots of rapid edits to enhance tension and drama, but Mangold maintains his sure hand. Obviously, an abbreviated rendition, there is no natural arch nor false about the scene, only an intriguing showing of musicians and producers working their way through a problem. 

A Complete Unknown doesn’t portray Dylan as a saint or would-be prophet as (maybe) some fans might have liked, and one of the issues they tackle with the icon is inconsistency with both who he is and how he treats those close to him. Well known for telling tall tales and otherwise fabulating about his upbringing and experiences prior to landing in New York, we witness where those he meets are awestruck at the apparent uniqueness of the young genius in their midst, only to have those closest to him become distressed and (perhaps) a bit disillusioned when Dylan’s accounting of himself is found wanting. He’s seen being duplicitous in his relationships with Sylvie Russo and fellow folk singer Joan Baez, an unfaithful lover and user of other people’s good graces to get ahead. Those who’d welcomed him into their world of folk music and left-wing politics witnessed the man they looked up to. By the time the film lands on the infamous Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan “goes electric,” his relationship with the traditional folk community has become tentative at best. He refuses to sing his old songs with Joan Baez when she attempts to get him to duet on “Blowin’ in the Wind.”. Despite pleas from the crowd and Baez’s chiding, Dylan walks off stage. Later, as the noise from his performance with the Butterfield Blues Band creates a backstage argument, an incensed Pete Seeger attempts to take a fire axe to the speaker cords but is stopped by his wife. Dylan is booed after his three-song set but is coaxed back for an encore with only an acoustic guitar, where he sings, to rapt attention, “It’s All Over Baby Blue.”. It’s a fact that Dylan did perform “Baby Blue” as an encore to the discontented crowd, and it works well as a subtle, cleanly presented symbol of Dylan’s leaving the folkie world that nurtured him behind as his music became more raucous and rock and roll and his lyrics ceased being topical and instead became surreal, Dadaesque, a landscape of existential confusion and wonder. 

The casting is as perfect as one could want, with Edward Norton virtually disappearing inside his portrayal as Pete Seeger, with the entire ensemble, especially Monica Barbero as Joan Baez and Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo (the name given the real-life Suze Rotolo, Dylan’s early love interest), inhabiting their characters with a particular reserve that makes their changing view of the Dylan character through the movie’s near two-hour length believable, credible as felt experiences. Early in the film, Baez watches Dylan in a folk club as his voice, his words, and his wise guy attitude captivate her. She’s aware that she’s witnessing something original, unique. Later, after their affair ends and his continual flaunting of his creativity, she tells him the morning following an unexpected one-night stand, “You know, you’re kind of an asshole.” 

Nothing overplayed here, just a hard stare and some direct words indicating the end of something that was never going to progress to anything fulfilling. The storytelling style, the reined-in performances, and the uncluttered dialogue give the sense of the changing status of Dylan’s relationships with others. The disappointments of others in what the songwriter had become are tangible and powerful, effective without bombast or visual flash. A Complete Unknown is a fine-wrought telling of a well-documented life, laying out the slightly fictionalized iteration of the tale that tells what we already know, that Dylan was an enigma in his early life and has remained an enigma ever since those days.

(Originally published in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with kind permission).

WHEN DID THE STONES JUMP THE SHARK? A HOT TAKE

 Some bands don't know when to quit, with the Rollings Stones at the top of that list. I believe Some Girls is the band's last great album, an obvious response to the punk rockers who rejected the Stones and their generational mates as old and in the way, utterly useless to the current cultural grimness. It seems the band knew they had something to prove, and did so powerfully here, the songs solid, tight but bursting with gang fight aggression, jaded but hardly retiring, momentarily reflective and even sentimental but kicking aside the repast for a crazed, speed freak delirium both exciting and suggesting complete and total collapse. "Beast of Burden", "Miss You","When the Whip Comes Down", "Shattered"--peak songwriting throughout from Jagger and Richards in their last important album. This was the last time they could get away with being purely the Rolling Stones of legend without being accused of being a parody of their former greatness. They had two resolutely mediocre albums following Exiles--Goats Head Soup and It's Only Rock and Roll--and it was my hope that the unexpected vitality and verve of Some Girls would be a long-lasting return to form. But alas, not the case. But it is, in my view, among their best work, and is the last significant record they made. Following were discs that were good to fair to middling at best , none of which generated lasting heat and little of which couldn't escape the feeling that this was band that replaced corporate style professionalism ahead of inspiration. Their occupation was to sound like the Rolling Stones.

BALD HEADED WOMAN by THE WHO

 There were times when the usually spirited and inventive wave of Brit bands covering American soul and blues songs yielded music that was cartoonish and , say, insulting. The basic problem is singer Daltry, an energetic, versatile but sadly colorless vocalist who only manages a naive minstrel parody of , maybe, the Lightnin' Hopkins version that came before. Interestingly, the track was produced by Shel Talmy, who according to some references, claimed credit for writing the song , which was actually a traditional chain gang song , author unknown. Talmy is quoted why he took credit for composing a public domain song in Ray Davis: Not Like Everybody Else :"They were my perks, a way for me to get in on the publishing royalties, they were just folk things I adapted. Old public domain folk songs." It was a common practice. Much as I dislike the song, I do find the uptempo, gospel fervor of the conclusion pretty exhilarating . Keith Moon's drumming in this portion is him at his carpet bombing best.

A BRIEF EXCHANGE WITH BARRY ALFONSO ON BOB DYLAN WORSHIP

 

(Barry Alfonso, a scholar, writer and a cultural critic of uncommon depth and equipoise, is a friend with whom I've been having an ongoing conversation about many interests we have in common, Bob Dylan among them. I have been skeptical of Dylan's work since John Wesely Harding, and Barry has been an impressive defender. But with all things Dylan achieving critical mass , even Barry had to slam on the brakes. The dust mote that tipped the scale was an inanely praising review of Dylan's pricey retrospective, The Cutting Edge: 1965-1966 that appeared on the increasingly tone-deaf news site The Daily Beast. We had a brief exchange over what appears the relentless pouring over of Dylan's great period of work. We both agreed, it seems, that it's gotten thick and mindlessly redundant. -tb)

Barry Alfonso:Ted, one of our first literary set-to's was over the value of Bob Dylan's work. I defended Bob -- as I continue to do for the most part, with reservations -- while you made him into a most delicious chew-toy. However, this constant regurgitation of Dylan's golden years is getting pretty boring, leading even the most dedicated fan to scream ENOUGH and go put on some Ken Nordine albums.

Ted Burke:Most of our departures on Dylan's work, I think, was bout Dylan's post-John Wesley Harding album to the present day. I don't dismiss it entirely, but as a collection that accounts for his middle and late career, it is spotty at best. His is the problem of Having the compulsion to produce even when his muse isn't having lunch with him. But, yes, enough of exhuming of the glory days . As is, Dylan's work from that period is over examined and, I think, the tragic recipient of something that has cluttered and clouded appreciation of Shakespeare's plays, namely "Bardolotry", a near deification of the playwright. The writing that comes out of that is a slog. Writing about Dylan for most of the mainstream arts press, on line and print, has become a hagiographic exercise. The difficulty with the worshipful approach is that it obscures the real instances of brilliance in the work.

Barry Alfonso:I think some of that hagiography comes out of a fascination with Dylan as the embodiment of arrogant visionary youth circa 1965-67. His work after this period seems to exert less fascination. It also speaks to the lack of a commanding voice in popular music over the past 50 years. There's some combing and re-combing through the Costello catalog these days, but still there is no stopping the endless parsing of Dylan's prime era. His burst of brilliance speaks to the lack of similar bardic vision today.

Ted Burke:Umberto Eco, the novelist, has written that there are limits to how texts, in this case songs, can be interpreted and made to seem to have yield previously undisclosed meanings and nuance. He insists that there really does come a point where interpretations only repeat themselves if we wish to stay with what is actually in the material; beyond that,it is a matter of academics and pop music critics trying to stay in business. Dylan, not to diminish the greatness of his best work, has been over discussed , inspected, and extrapolated upon where the actual man who wrote the songs no longer exists and the songs becomes mere props to brace up the flimsy theorizing that dims the worth of the music. I am not sure if I would say that there haven't been other songwriters in Dylan's time or in more recent years who haven't had visions, bardic and otherwise, comparable to Dylan's; Van Morrison, Costello, Tom Waits, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, off the top of my head, have written and recorded work over the decades that has moments of major greatness that is , I think , no less than Dyan's .Dylan is the case of being the first one out of the gate, the mood of the times and the songwriter's desire to excel as no else had creating a synergy that changed the way the rent gets paid. I almost think it was merely a happy accident that it was Dylan who became the poet, the spokesman, the prophet, all that rot; if it hadn't been Dylan, another musician would have filled the need.Or maybe not. Phil Ochs, who I think is Dylan's equal as a "rock poet" , certainly had the talent but not, from what I've read about him, the temperament to get to the top and remain there. Dylan understood the complications of persona. In any event, it maybe a case of that if Dylan had not existed, the times would have created him, or someone like him. Contrarily, there is the Great Man Theory of history that puts forth that events of historical consequence are the result of the impact "Great Men" have on the destinies of the countries they rule . In this instance, if Dylan hadn't been born, we might still be wearing side burns and be listening to Como and Clooney through cheap car radio speakers.

Barry Alfonso:Yes and yes. Dylan did a lot of things first. And he changed. He rebelled against the rebels. Phil Ochs was an eloquent advocate and a poignant chronicler of his own disintegration. But he lacked that cruel streak, that arrogance that people seem to gravitate towards. The Great Man theory in history is pernicious and leads to the sort of blood and thunder hero-worship Carlyle and Wagner engaged in. But there is some truth to it and, yes, Dylan may have saved us from unchallenged Comoism.

Todd Rundgren from 1977

 
Todd Rundgren is an annoying whiz kids who can dually amaze you with his music and embarrass you with his lyrics. The words he writes are themes of cosmic consciousness and verbose mysticism and rival Yes' Jon Anderson for elevated pretentiousness. The sincerity of both Rundgren and Anderson may well be real, to be sure, but lets say that the precision of the intricate music making s a bad match with the muddy thinking visible in the respective set of lyrics. .Anyway, Ra, a 1977 effort with an occasional band, the ostensibly progressive rock and sometimes brilliantly kinetic Utopia, continued the Rundgren tragedy of good music with awful lyrics. When matters are at their best when the singing stops and the band is given the room to negotiate odd time signatures and reveal, in doing so, a remarkable, amazing in fact capacity to handle any style that strikes their collective fancy. The band (Roger Powell, Kisim Sulton, John Wilcox) proceeds towards some charging, frenetic, deliciously clever music.

But Rundgren, like, Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson, allows the lyrics to become full-blown libretto. The merits of the extended narrative and the underlying bits of spiritualism is a debate left for those who seek truth in tea leaves and horoscopes, but the experience of having the words come at you, sun or recited in equal measure, makes this a record that does not rock you at all. Rather, it talks you into a fitful sleep, with dreams punctuated by agitated percussion. Most notable on side two's extended workout "Singring and The Glass Guitar", a detailed parable that breaks up the music, with Rundgren droning on with the plot particulars. The fantasy, what there is of it, is belabored at length. Every time the band begins something interesting or when Rundgren is doing an impressive guitar exposition, the recited lyrics intrude again, and so on. Either Rundgren considers himself a wise fabulist, or he just employs this clutter to kill time, fleshing out and lending continuity to passages he could not otherwise connect. The discerning 'Rundgren fan will throw away the lyric sheet and let the music mitigate the intellectual vacuity. Taking his world view seriously is like reading between the lines on a blank page.

Ian Anderson and the Music of Jethro Tull

I'm the first to admit that Jethro Tull had "pretty parts", but I would reserve that classification for those musical moments where a shining bit of ensemble work actually clicked and highlighted a fine band raging happily along with some problematic time signatures. In that vein, I rather like the Martin Barre composed introduction to "Minstrel in the Gallery", a tour de force of quirky transitions and sculpted dissonance that rises to actual art. 

Compression and brevity are the keys to those instances when JT catches my attention, but as often as not Anderson refuses to move from his signature amalgam of styles he likes and provides than is needed, or even effective, in the then-mistaken belief that length of composition and promiscuously convolutions of theme equals serious art. I was always one who preferred their progressive rock not to drag along the road. Lyrically, principle songwriter Ian Anderson is not so stunning ; he had an effective light touch with imagery in the early work like "Living in the Past" or the particularly riveting tune "Nothing to Say"; 'though perhaps guised in a fictional character's persona, Anderson all the same connects with a convincing humanity as matters of being alive without certainty are sussed through impressionistically and, yes, concisely,closer to true poetry . 

The man had a knack, in the day, of getting to the point and getting you to think about things other than material gain. That word smithing, I think, has been far less in evidence since their career took off, from 'Aqualung" on ward.

PURE POP FOR NOW PEOPLE

 

Peter Townsend coined the popular term "Power-pop", joined with a not-so-raucous rock backbeat. That was over ten years ago, and Townsend's term, intended no doubt as a throwaway term, like those  elements of conceptual sophistication wherein Lowe takes a cue from other artists (Warhol, Stuart Davis) who have taken the artifacts of a throw-away culture and have transformed them into objects of art. Except for some catchy tunes ("Breaking Glass," "Heart of the City"), most of the material was no more convincing than the average Sha-Na-Na sendup. Pure Pop, in general, was contrived and too deliberate in execution, the old case of an artist being more interested in form than substance.On one level, the title was a perfect parody of the dumb products record companies used to release for consumers they perceived as witless and gullible. In a 1967 interview, where he was trying to describe the music of the Beach Boys, Townsend, an ashamed Beach Boy zealot, explained that the Beach Boys were in the vanguard of a new movement of pop music. A pop music that eschews the traditional needs of white rockers to emulate their black mentors and produce a kind of rock and roll that was indigenous to the white, middle-class experience. Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' primary songwriter, merged creamy, smooth-as-glass harmonies of the Four Freshmen, the rhythm and blues guitar work of Chuck Berry, and wrote lyrics about surfing, fast cars, puppy love, staying true to your school, and so on. Townsend's point about power-pop was this: it was sleek, professionally rendered music that never ventured beyond the banal in its subject matter.

Spearheading the new Power-pop movement is Nick Lowe,  Lowe, a founding member and songwriter in the sadly departed Brinsley Schwartz and best known to rock fans as Elvis Costello's producer, released a record last year that laid out Lowe's methodology in the title: Pure Pop for Now People. On one level, the title was a perfect parody of the dumb products record companies used to release for consumers they perceived as being witless, gullible, and bereft of any sense of discrimination. Yet on another level, it reveals an  transformed them into objects of art. Lowe the conceptualist, wanting nothing to do with the priggish high-toned pretensions of "art-rock" (ELP and Kansas, let us say, not Roxy Music or Steely Dan or Robert Fripp), nor with the knee-jerk anarchy of most punk-rock acts, wanted to produce music that had the same clean, self-contained aesthetic values of the Beach Boys and the early Who, and yet retained a smart-assed, snot-nosed, wise-guy cynicism. The result, Pure Pop, was just that: a smorgasbord of borrowed riffs and chord progressions, vocal arrangements lifted from any number of vocal bands from the sixties, a plethora of musical styles that ranged from rockabilly, boogie-blues, to Phil Spector. Pure Pop, though, was far from the knockout it could have been. Lowe's production was cluttered and muddy. Lowe, though, has made a sizable step forward with his new record, Labour of Lust. Like Pure Pop, the record is a mélange of contrasting styles and attitudes where Lowe demonstrates an impressive

 character and nerve. Lowe's new material sounds better as well. The songs are better arranged, sound more complete, sound more like real songs rather than effete parodies. Lowe's humor is set in a sharper context. "Big Kick, Plain Scrap," featuring one of those James-Brown-style bass lines that defines the essence of funk, is overlaid with a mumbling, sleepy voiced vocal that utters a word salad of lyrics sounding like Captain Beefheart (if the Captain were the lyricist for K.C. and the Sunshine Band). "Dose of You," a perfect Buddy Holly emulation, puns relentlessly about VD, mixing up the tired theme of a young man trying to woo a woman with a seldom-spoken element of what can happen with love.Lowe remains a bright minor talent who has yet to show that he can break out of his narrow confines, but the improvement on Lust indicates that his will be a career that will warrant attention.

COVID MEMORIES

Sticker balls (left), Corona virus model (right).

 
I worked at the Birch Aquarium Bookshop for 14 years until I finally retired in 2015. In that time I saw the shop evolve into a gift shop, full of toys, games, artwork, delicate glass items, and hundreds of impulse boy toys for the kiddies. AndS yes, they kept books around. But parents with mewling toddlers were the rule of the day, the Aquarium needed their purchases to support their grand efforts to educate the public about Ocean preservation.

Among the kiddie toys featured in bins at the cashier stations were these items, rubber spheres composed of suction cups, which of course stuck to smooth flat surfaces. We called these things "sticky balls" (insert snicker here) and accepted that when school groups came through the store from the aquarium, toddlers, and teens would grab the balls and throw them at the counter glass.

There was a large painting of fish hanging behind the counter, which was protected by a large pane of glass. Of course, a flurry of sticky balls would be tossed at it and we would look behind us after a rush and realize the painting was covered with these multicolored spheres adhering to the protective glass; it looked as if it had broken out in Technicolor gin blossoms. They were among the many banes of my long-term Aquarium employment, and had gratefully forgotten about them.

That is, forgotten about them until the rise of the Covid pandemic. The nightmares haven't stopped since.

Murder My Sweet

 

Watched "Murder My Sweet"  recently on TCM , a masterclass detective yarn starring Dick Powell and directed with artful craft by Edward Dmytryk. This is an inspired and fairly taut adaptation of Raymond Chandler's "Farewell My Lovely", and Powell, who we usually think of as a song-and-dance man, makes for an engaging Philip Marlowe, a cynical private eye, not-so-tough, wisecracking and whiskey drinking, a man who, once hired for a job, goes to the cruel truth at the heart of all the enterprises he finds himself embroiled in. Marlowe is a knight errant, in many ways, bound by a personal code me manages not to compromise in a city that is dark, full of sharp black corners and a population ruled by Bad Faith. Everyone lies to Marlowe, and they lie about everything--in this word, everyone has secrets they want to keep hidden, but coming up against Marlowe the protagonist, with his skewed virtue, hard truths and foul intents are revealed. Beautiful black and white here, a solid, even essential example of the film-noir style. The angles of the camera shots, the hard corners, the mastery of black and white and the various, shaded tones in between the extremes are nothing less than sculptural. As with the best dark shades, tones and textures created by the best camera artists in Hollywood when it comes to turning mere black and white into a menacing canvas of dread, danger and barely concealed mendacity, Murder My Sweet presents a world where the Greater Good and the Bigger Bad seem nearly indistinguishable from each other that only a steadfast pragmatist like Marlowe could navigate and remain sane

The Byrds, "Younger than Yesterday"

 

Released in 1967, the Byrds' fourth album YOUNGER THAN YESTERDAY saw the band saw the band having to commit itself to releasing a record after the recent loss of their principle and prolific songwriter and lead singer Gene Clark. To be sure , Clark's departure is said to have been caused by a money dispute ; he received more royalties than other band members because of his songwriting contributions.

Admirably, Roger (née Jim) McGuinn. Chris Hillman and David Crosby took up the loss and contributed high caliber material to fill in the void left by Clark, the result being YOUNGER THAN YESTERDAY, which I would argue is their best and most important record and certainly, one of the best and most important studio albums by an American rock band in the Sixties. Clark's absence force the other members to draw on their own musical passions and, taking their cue boldly from what the Beatles were doing with their experiments, handily expanded their sound far beyond the jangling-folk rock that initially launched them . The harmonies remain without peer, and we saw the very early integration of jazz, Indian raga, country and western , psychedelia and electronics into their musical weave.

Smart, disciplined production by Gary Usher keeps this record form becoming a swamp of overcooked pretensions--he was the man who had the job to say "that's enough". SO YOU WANNA BE A ROCK AND ROLL STAR, EVERYBODY'S BEEN BURNED, WHY, RENAISSANCE FAIR, TIME BETWEEN-- the songs are first rate and the confidence these fellows confront all the alien influence and make part of their sound and legacy is remarkable. It sounds fresh, alive, 53 years after its release. The only down side on this disc is the last track on the last side (from the original release) , Mind Garden", an unnavigable mind-blown miasma from David Crosby .

It was the day, I suppose, when drugs were exciting, most of us working day jobs after school to have cash to buy records from major corporations believed a Revolution was pending, waiting in the winds , and that many musicians and producers, always marketers, thought they needed a song about altered consciousness to appeal to the gullible teen and the witless rock critic. I assume Crosby was sincere in his attempt to get the experience of having a blown mind in song form, but its a mess. I even thought that in 1967, when I was still in junior high. But beleiver, Younger than Yesterday is a great record.

PHIL LESH AND THE GRATEFUL DEAD

 

The Grateful Dead remain a problematic band for historians who like to place artists in strict genres and loath those who breach the boundaries. The band had equal footing in all things Americana--old time rock, blues, old school rhythm and blues, folk, country, bluegrass-- with the rest of their music easily moving into areas that are modal, jazzy, influenced not a little by Eastern forms of improvisation, and not a little avant gard . Not to say that the majority of this limitless and often exhilarating eclecticism comes from the late Phil Lesh, but the late bass player's already broad musical training and playing experience--theory, composing, playing trumpet in jazz band situations--certainly informs the off-center improvisations his foundation for the Dead. Part of the Dead's musical genius was how they anticipated what the others were going to do in the moment of extemporaneous music making--we generally think of Bob Weir's uncanny skill to be precisely where he needed to be during Garcia's roaming guitar leads. But here we have an isolated and extended example of Lesh's particular genius as a bassist. As has been said in the NY Times obituary, his lines frequently became lead parts in themselves, offering sublime counterpoint and alternative melodic compliments to Garcia's decorative riffing , as well as working in perfect sympathy, simpatico, with the dynamic drum work. Lesh had a jazz player's instincts.

DeLillo's Tale of the Hidden Rock Star

 

Similar in some respects to the film Performance in general idea, Don DeLillo's 1973 novel Great Jones Street is a story of what happens of what happens to the fan base and the larger culture when a revered rock star goes into seclusion. The musician /prophet/poet/stand-in savior is Bucky Wunderlick, a prematurely sainted scribe whose music and lyrics have been scrutinized by fans, critics, philosophers for hints of what the future holds for the world that, evidently, wanted a respite from being the millennial hero. Doubtlessly inspired by the speculative weirdness that ensued after Dylan's famed motorcycle accident and subsequent retreat from public view, DeLillo gets across the idea through satire, parody, monologues, sample song lyrics, odd-ball projections that a media created savior' absence creates another kind of presence, a mystical state of collective speculation which vaguely yet insistently maintains that the personality that gives purpose to millions of lives is not gone but still here, doing their work, to return with something greater, grander, better than what we already have. It's a wildly funny novel, and DeLillo's prose manages the hard job of being dead pan and yet rhythmically lyric.

Bukowski

So was Charles Bukowski one of the great poets of the 20th Century? Some readers think so, I have another view, but it is a question worth asking. The man learned his lessons well from the writers he liked and carved out a style that is his own, spare, funny, memorable, if sometimes redundant.

 Bukowski is one of the best known modern poets, but not as a “great” poet. Charles Bukowski spent several decades writing about three or four things, which were drinking, staying drunk, screwing drunk women, playing the horses, and drinking. His was not a large world, and after reading a raft of short stories,three novels and five of his plenitude of poetry collections, it's safe to say that he'd run out of things to say about the redundant activities of his life. Hence,his redundant themes and the waning energy of his work as his life wore on, with he waiting for it all to be over with. 

Young people love him because Bukowski is as close to an actual nihilist any of them are likely to encounter in American fiction and poetry. His principal failing is his unwillingness to think harder or differently about the world of drink, cigarettes, whores,racetracks and flop houses and bad sex. This poem, as it goes, goes through the typical moves and ends on some winsome sigh about lost opportunity, faded youth, mauling over of some psychic pain that is somehow aimed at making us understand why he is such a luckless asshole. 

Ironically, few writers have been as lucky as this guy, lucky in that the game he ran on us held up all these years, and that it still has enough allure to sucker yet another acolyte who just entering their drunken -brutishness- is -authenticity phase. Bukowski was good at one point in his life, but his lack of interest in the word outside is few blocks of Los Angeles made him progressively less interesting as his years and books wore on.What is distressing is that he decided rather early on his career to rewrite "Love is a Dog from Hell" and "Ham on Rye" for the remainder of his life, marking his work as the stuff of a man who whore'd his talent to become salable to an audience wanting to seem literate without actually doing any reading beyond a certain depth or page length.I just can't shake the feeling that Bukowski's version of despair and beatitude is more a symptom of cornball fantasy than something felt from the gut or the heart. 

He exhausted that vein long before he passed away. He makes me think of someone who creates enormous amounts of anxiety because his life essentially static, full of non-events, sad variations on daily behavior, and rather than go mad and destroy something, he tries to pass off the nagging vibe by writing a lot, in a reserved, occasionally effective prose; still the, fantasy did not resolve what, I think, were his real symptoms. The themes did not change, the moral of the stories were the same funny/sad/fuck you bits of flophouse grit. One realizes, after a bit, that the only thing Bukowski did successfully, besides write the same story over and over, was grow old.

Nick Lowe's Power Pop Gem from the 70s

 
Who guitarist and principal songwriter Peter Townsend coined the now-popular term "Power- pop" in a 1967 interview where he was trying to describe the music of the Beach Boys. Townsend, an unashamed Beach Boy zealot, explained that the Beach Boys were in the vanguard of a new movement of pop music, a pop music that eschews the traditional needs of white rockers to emulate their black mentors and produce a kind of rock and roll that was indigenous to white, middle-class experience. Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys' primary songwriter, merged the creamy, smooth-as-glass harmonies of the Four Freshmen, the rhythm and blues guitar work of Chuck Berry, and wrote lyrics about surfing, fast-cars, puppy love, being true to your school, and so on. Townsend's point about Power-pop was this: it was sleek, professionally rendered pop that never ventured matter, joined with a not-so- raucous rock backbeat." That was a decade ago, and those abounding in enthusiastic chats about pop culture, have now settled firmly into the lingo of the 70s rock critic. Spearheading the new Power-pop movement is Nick Lowe. Lowe, a founding member, and songwriter in the sadly departed Brinsley Schwartz and best known to rock fans as Elvis Costello's producer, released a record last year that laid out Lowe's methodology in the title: Pure Pop for Now People. 

On one level, the title was a perfect parody of the dumb products record companies used to release for consumers they perceived as being witless, gullible, and bereft of any sense of discrimination (i.e.., Jackie Gleason Presents Music for Young Lovers, The Ventures Play the Batman Theme and Other TV Hits). Yet on elements of conceptual sophistication wherein Lowe takes a cue from other artists (Warhol, Stuart Davis) who've taken the artifacts of a throw-away culture and have transformed them into objects of art. Lowe the conceptualizer, wanting nothing to do with the priggish high-toned pretensions of "art-rock" (ELP and Kansas, let us say, not Roxy Music or Steely Dan or Robert Fripp), nor with the knee-jerk anarchy of most punk-rock acts, wanted to produce a music that had the same clean, self-contained aesthetic values of the Beach Boys and the early Who, and yet retained a smart-assed, snot-nosed, wise- guy cynicism. The result, Pure Pop …, was just that: a smorgasbord of borrowed riffs and chord progressions, vocal arrangements lifted from any number of vocal bands from the 60s, a plethora of musical styles that ranged from rockabilly, boogie-blues, to Phil Spector. Pure Pop, though, was far from the knockout it could have been. Lowe's production was except for some catchy tunes ("Breaking Glass," "Heart of the City"), most of the material was no more convincing than the average Sha-Na-Na sendup. Pure Pop, in general, contrived and too deliberate in execution, the old case of an artist being more interested in form than content.

Lowe, though, has made a sizable step forward with his new record, Labour of Lust. Like Pure Pop, the record is a mélange of contrasting styles. and attitudes where Lowe demonstrates an impressive knowledge of hackneyed pop- music forms. Lust, though, fares much better. Lowe's production is sparer this time, unencumbered by unlimited overdubs or an excess of instruments. The musicians on the tracks (unnamed on the jacket, though I suspect it's Dave Edmunds and Rockpile, whom Lowe tours with) sound like a unified band, a unit who've worked out the particulars of each song, and gave performances that, unlike character and nerve. Lowe's new material sounds better as well. The songs have better arrangements, sound more complete, sound more like real songs rather than effete parodies. Lowe's humor is set in a sharper context. "Big Kick, Plain Scrap," featuring one of those James-Brown- style basslines that defines the essence of funk, is overlaid with a mumbling, sleepy voiced vocal that utters a word salad of lyrics sounding like Captain Beefheart (if the Captain were the lyricist for K.C. and the Sunshine Band). "Dose of You," a picture-perfect Buddy Holly emulation, puns relentlessly about VD, mixing up the tired theme of a young man trying to woo a woman with a seldom spoke element of what can happen with love. Lowe remains a bright minor talent who has yet to show that he can break out of his narrow confines, but the improvement on Lust indicated that his will be a career that'll warrant

 OF LINES

This line is the

end of an era

or the start of

a whole new

big bang

from which bold

experiments and

odd comedies emerge.

The line is drawn

or it is uttered

or it falls from a

telephone pole

when the wind

gets snark

and forces

our existences

into inane ironies.

Alone in cold,

dark rooms

as it storms outside

and the

shadows of branches

seem like jagged

scolding fingers

in the remaining light,

we hold our dead phones,

we flip

the switches

that ignite

no light ,

we talk to ourselves

in prayers that

resemble sobs

as the house sways

and sharp

blasts of autumn

air finds the window cracks,

the lines are down

in all regards,

the lines

that bring us

voices

and light and a

sense of

making sense

in an existence

that won't explain itself

or apologize

for the inconvenience,

We need

a connection

to something

that keeps us

in a dimension

we've learned to loathe,

better the

devil you know

we might say,

Every line

he utters

is a lie

but we understand

the language he speaks

and the

light he wants to remove.

JOHN MAYALL WAS A BIGGER DEAL THAN I FIRST THOUGHT

 

While scrolling through the headlines one morning, alternating between laughter and grunts at the day's news, I abruptly stopped. A story caught my eye, prominently displaying a flattering photo of the veteran British bluesman, John Mayall. The prominence of Mayall's photo on the news site sent a chill down my spine, prompting me to read on. The article announced the death of John Mayall, the iconic British blues figure, at the age of 90. A giant no longer walks among us.

Born on November 29, 1933, in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England, John Mayall's pioneering work in the early days of the British Blues movement during the sixties marked a historic milestone in England's pop music history. He, along with other pioneers, sparked a revolution, empowering a generation of musicians to experiment with forms and adapt musical styles such as folk, jazz, blues, and classical, integrating them into the Big Beat. Mayall established the influential band John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, which became the launching pad for a host of dynamic guitar legends like Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Mick Taylor, Harvey Mandel, and Coco Montoya.

A steadfast figure in concerts throughout the 60s and 70s, he released around 50 albums with a constantly rotating and evolving group of musicians. These players adapted to Mayall's vision, creating a blues expression that was both traditional and innovative, direct yet introspective, soothing and invigorating. Mayall may not have reached the heights of success as those who came after him, but it's widely believed that British rock would be markedly different without his early influence. Indeed, Mayall is often considered one of the most significant musical figures of that era.

Mayall's influence was profound during my youth. He, along with Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite, inspired me to pick up the blues harmonica. Sixty years and innumerable harps later, my passion remains strong. Meeting him and other white blues revivalists from America and Britain changed the course of my life. John Mayall and his Blues Breakers were instrumental in the British blues scene, igniting the guitar hero phenomenon that continues today. Mayall shone a light on Eric Clapton, Peter Green, and Mick Taylor. Although he was a competent yet unremarkable harmonica, guitar, and keyboard player, his true genius was in his leadership. Occasionally, his bands reached a level of synergy that seemed truly groundbreaking. Mayall's ensembles broke the mold and exuded energy.

This is evident in the early Blues Breakers records, and later albums that showcased Mayall’s evolving interpretations of blues music, such as The Turning Point and USA Union. His vocal style was remarkable, reminiscent of Mose Allison and J.B. Lenoir—relaxed, high-pitched, and not merely imitating his idols. While he wasn't a virtuoso like Butterfield or Musselwhite, his harmonica playing was charmingly airy, warmly rustic, with rich chords and exquisite slurs and bends that mirrored the emotion in his voice. What he lacked in flamboyance, he compensated with texture, rhythm, brief sequences, and a powerful use of silence between phrases that captivated listeners. No modern blues harmonica player exists who hasn't been influenced by this man's technique.

Mayall was an able and earnest musician, a chilling and eerie vocalist, a punchy songwriter given to pungent social commentary, but his most demonstrable superpower was a genius as a band leader. His penchant for selecting tasty and distinct blues guitarists and other instrumentalists and allowing those players the full expression of their musical personalities kept the blues grooves fresh and crackling. As with jazz maestros he admired, such as Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers or the ever-morphing Miles Davis, the musicians in his various groups through the decades provided Mayall with new frameworks to continually retool his unique style of presenting his music. I give Mayall full credit for putting together crackerjack bands that have, at times, made it possible for him to release first-rate albums. The albums I listen to especially are USA Union, featuring the sadly underrated Harvey Mandel on guitar, Larry Taylor on bass, and Sugarcane Harris on violin, and, of course, Turning Point, with the splendid, Paul Desmond like  sax work of Johnny Almond and Jon Mark on acoustic guitar.  

Unlike Paul Butterfield, who expanded the expressive capabilities of blues harmonica with his fluid and rapid explorations, John Mayall's approach was distinct. He favored chords over single-note runs, crafting a signature "chugga-chugga" rhythm, notably in his track "Room to Move." Influenced by a vibrant Latin beat akin to the classic "Tequila," the song vibrates with energy as Mayall locks into the groove. The song's simplicity belies the difficulty of mastering its elements, a challenge I've faced for years in attempting to perfect the harmonica parts, yet the quintessential Mayall sound remains elusive to me.

Among his works, there are several I revisit for a surge of inspiration, especially "Television Eye," which features Harvey Mandel's guitar work on the 1971 album "Back to the Roots." In this shuffling tune, Mayall sets the tone with hauntingly high notes on the harmonica, hinting at a polished texture, while Mandel's guitar provides a pulsating, well-phased accompaniment. Mayall's lyrics reflect a man's realization of his addiction to the television, unable to look away from the images in darkened rooms. Mandel's ensuing solo maximizes the space given by Mayall, showcasing why I consider him among the finest blues rock guitarists of his era.

It wasn’t always his harmonica solos or the blustery verve of his guitarists that made the man’s performances memorable. “Broken Wings”, from Mayall’s 1967 album The Blues Alone . It’s a slow and churning song in a minor key, Mayall filling the spaces with the rounded swells of what sounds like a B3 organ, applying thick, resonating chords over his resigned choked-up vocal. It’s a lament for a lost lover who now must deal with the consequences of the decision they’ve made. The keyboard fills the space with a harrowing sound as the progression descends and the volume lowers, fading into a silence as one would imagine a downcast man would lapse into after the last words have been said. I heard it originally in 1967 and its been one of doleful melodies that come to mind when old heartaches come back for a visit in the lone , late hours.  

It's somewhat tragic that we often only appreciate the full scope of an artist's work—a musician, writer, or artist with a long and evolving career—after they pass away. This is when we truly grasp the depth and breadth of their life's work. I must admit, I hadn't given much thought to Mayall in the last decade and had even been unfairly critical of him at times. However, an unexpected obituary has a way of sharpening one's memory and perspective on history. John Mayall was indeed a necessary figure, an artist who grappled with the stark realities of the blues. He was a straight-talker about the human condition who also strived to keep his music relevant to the era and culture he lived in. He embodied a paradox: a traditionalist but not a formalist, an innovator but not an avant-garde artist. With just a guitar, a harmonica, and a voice of pure sincerity, he sang the blues, delivered the news, and inspired both audiences and fellow musicians to create their own music.

I purchased his albums, acquired a harmonica, and managed to play it quite well, finding a voice that conveys my meaning when words fail me. Thus, I extend my gratitude to John Mayall for this gift, and wish him Godspeed.

(This originally appeared in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with kind permission).

 

 

THE BOYS OF SUMMER

 The Eagles: a band I loathe—a troupe of musicians with obvious talents as songwriters, instrumentalists, and vocalists—who try too hard to secure a significant place in rock and roll history. Despite their apparent charms  and conspicuous skills at being tuneful, you can't shake the burdensome feeling that they're  calculated in nearly everything they attempt. Their rock and roll feels sluggish, their ballads dragged out, more a burden than an expression of pathos. And those strained vocals, reaching for that perfect moment when the voice cracks and then swells dramatically—it’s all a bit much. As for the lyrics, especially the weak variations on the gloom and doom of Nathaniel West's downcast novel Day of the Locust found in “Hotel California,” they appear weepy, whiny, and oddly proud of their own low self-esteem. 

They were a defining band of the 70s , the last hurrah for the country-infused rock that dominated SoCal music, but even a period where narcissistic self-regard left an odious trace in too many lyric sheets, The Eagles capacity to feel sorry for themselves was so pronounced and heavy-handed that it became toxic; it made you feel bad not in an exhilarating way that an artist Elvis Costello could achieve (due, perhaps, to Costello's wisdom in making his rhyming ruing of missed chances more compact, not turning them into speeches), but instead in a way that made one want to take a mallet to the stereo that was broadcasting their songs. Not a good thing, yes?

However, there’s an exception: “Boys of Summer.” This solo effort by Don Henley—a singer I never quite warmed to due to his Rod Stewart/Bob Seger/Willie Nelson affectations—stands out. The song is genuinely good, boasting a well-crafted arrangement of guitar textures and an insistent beat. Henley’s singing here seems to draw from a deeper well of inspiration, beyond the usual manager’s playbook. The lyrics are clipped, terse, and vividly convey the sense of a man haunted by memories of lost love—an Eden he cast himself out of. And then there’s the video: one of the most effective I’ve ever seen in capturing the song’s mood. Black-and-white photography, suitably faded to evoke memories slipping away, blends with home videos superimposed over the stark reality of the present. That scene—the man brooding over his glass-top desk while a Super 8 home film flickers on the wall behind him—is nothing short of brilliant. It encapsulates the stream of regret a man feels when he reflects on the imagined perfection of a past life with the woman of his dreams. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CRAP

"Sewage Has It's Say", a poem by Steven Cramer, stinks to the highest reaches of irony, and it's a fine thing too.A monologue in essence, the essence of which is the voice of what we consume processed and reduced to its fouler essences in turn. This is the food we eat and the drinks we imbibe with all the cosmetics of preparation removed, after all the benefits (nutrition, energy) and debits ( obesity, high blood pressure) have been had. Insulted, railed against, invariably used as a pejorative, equated with the foulest intents and deeds a race is capable of, sewage finds it's voice, it talks back to the world that is other wise obliged to consume and make crap and crud an unavoidable consequence; there is hypocrisy here, the fetid mess proclaims, everything winds up in this repulsive stew:

Give me roots prying into the joints

of your main waste line, Charmin

thickening her web first to a nest,

then to a dam, and I'll sluice in reverse,

top the basement tub and spill

into a poem! Damn! I've sunken

to new heights! Will you take

a hint and stomach your disgust?

What does The Thinker look like

he's doing? How come Luther heard

God's thunderclap of justice via faith

whilst sitting on the privy?

Steven Cramer has an especially acute wit to imagine a dark mass taking on a voice one could imagine being intoned by a hammy Shakespearean actor intent on over-emoting the lines, a misunderstood and maligned end product talking shop with a product , Charmin, that's ostensibly dedicated to wiping it out. But wipe as much you can, the stinking sludge maintains, you will become part of this flushed proletariat, these breakdowns of food stuffs, fecal encrusted tissues, diapers, sanitary napkins, condoms, illegal drugs and syringes.

At the heart of the matter is that is we really are what we eat, echoing an otherwise stale counter culture cliché, and regardless of how we gussy up the chambers with spray-can aroma, disinfectants , no matter how much art and artifice we set around our dinner table preparations, regardless to what extreme we pervert language to raise our collective self-image and have our race be at the top of the food chain, we are in the food chain, nonetheless, inseparable, consuming vast amounts of products to keep the mortal body a going concern, producing waste in all varieties, forms.

You know...where love's pitched his mansion, so

don't shower so much. Squeaky clean's

for mice. No soap's got enough tallow

to wash out the mouth mouthing off.

What made you so ... nice? Polite's

kind of like death, isn't it? Okay, not

quite. But consider this, my sweet kin

in excretion: to flies we taste like candy.

Whether it's The Thinker or Theologians considering the feasibility of a personal God, everything resembles the process of taking a dump, a long and ponderous crap, the moment when every idea one has absorbed in passing finally passes through us, if we're lucky enough , leaving only that bit of nutritional purity that has helped us grow, come up with an idea, an invention, a poem that is truly our own. Steven Cramer's personification of an unspeakable and limitless mass of stinking waste as having a voice to raise in it's irony-citing defense is an excellent bit of wit. The literary references are less self-conscious than such citations usually are since his point is to reduce the space between humanity's greatest conceit as an elevated species and the inevitability of it's least appealing biological requirements. Everything is shit, like it or not, all is waste, the finest poems become sludge. One needs to embrace the fact, if not the cistern that contains the messenger.

All reactions:

1Barry Alfonso