Month: May 2016

Dylan: Aftermath

Brother Dennis directs us to this provocative 37-album list by Andrew Krell in the The Daily Beast purporting to be “The Definitive Ranking of Bob Dylan Studio Albums, From Worst to Best“.    Krell and I are roughly in sync mostly at the extremes of the best vs. the worst, with some discordance in the middle.  Reassuringly, Krell clearly recognizes the awfulness of the Christmas of the Heart album.  But I think he overrates Time Out of Mind, but just slightly.  And, yes, the original Basement Tapes contained important raw material, but the audio quality makes it almost unlistenable for me. And so on.  Great fun. 

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Dylan: Epilogue

In a break from my usual sleep patterns, I stayed up until midnight yesterday to catch as much as I could of the KCRW “Day of Dylan” program that ran from noon to midnight. I probably caught the lion’s share in my nearly five hours of listening, as much of the content appeared to have been repeated. Most seemed to be covers, with originals here and there. (I snagged a playlist that you can see here.) Among the covers were quite a few I had never heard before. Did you know that Duke Ellington covered “Blowin’ In The Wind“? 

For many people, hearing that song, as performed by Peter, Paul and Mary — quite different from the original — was their first introduction to Dylan’s music.

In 2012, Amnesty International produced a 4-CD album, Chimes of Freedom, as a charitable project in which Bob Dylan songs were covered by a broad range of musicians, with Dylan doing the title track himself.  Recommended, and it’s a good cause. Hear a SoundCloud sampler here.

Speaking of covers, the soundtrack for the 2007 film, I’m Not There is one not to miss. The film itself, rife with artistic liberties, is intriguing on its own, not in least part for the astonishing performance of Cate Blanchett, just one of the actors who play the part or alter ego of Bob Dylan.

In that film, Dylan does the title track himself, originating from the 1967 Basement Tapes stuff with The Band. One of my fav Dylan numbers ever. And memorable covers abound in that sound track, among them a terrific version of the surrealistic “As I Went Out One Morning“, performed by Mira Billotte, of the White Magic band (and sister of famed punk guitarist, Christina Billotte).

Another recent source of interesting covers or derivations would be the group known as The New Basement Tapes. This group’s 2014 Lost On The River album, instigated by T Bone Burnett, presented tracks that were based on newly discovered, previously unpublished 1967 Dylan lyrics. Here’s one of the best, created in the Dylan spirit:

In the 80s and certainly by the 90s, I was hearing, “Who?” from younger people when Bob Dylan was introduced into conversation. For all the covers, for me there is nothing quite like hearing the raw, essential nature of the songs as done by Dylan himself, and would urge new listeners to go right to the source. I have already mentioned the strong impression that the Bringing It All Back Home album made on me. With the possible exception of Dylan’s 2009 Christmas album, every release has had at least something that made me pause and listen. But the albums that really stand out for me, that I played continually for days on end, would include Blood on the Tracks, especially for “Idiot Wind”, “Tangled Up In Blue” and “Simple Twist of Fate”.

Same for John Wesley Harding, with “All Along The Watchtower” and the aforementioned “As I Went Out One Morning”. (By the way, a good reason to watch the Battlestar Galactica TV series, if you can find it, is to discover how “All Along The Watchtower” figures in its soundtrack!) 

And the Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid soundtrack to the lovely, underrated movie of the same name. 

Another album I couldn’t get enough of was Planet Waves, with the incredible backing of The Band, including “Dirge”, “Wedding Song”, “Going, Going, Gone”, “Forever Young” and more.

And the 1976 Desire album; think “One More Cup of Coffee”.

You can track down lots of this stuff on YouTube, of course. And many, many compilations and reviews and lists can be found on the Greater Interwebs. One of the best, Rolling Stone’s “100 Greatest Bob Dylan Songs” would serve as a great sampler, although I would differ with a few specific choices and their ranking (in spite of the diminished credibility and stature I have accorded to R.S. in the past few years).  Another good intro would be to listen to good ol’ Bob Lefsetz’ Spotify compilation, the Bob Dylan Starter Kit. 

(But … where was “Bob Dylan’s Dream” from the 1963 The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album (his second, and the first with mostly his own compositions)? One of my sentimental favorites. Missing from both the KCRW playlist and Rolling Stone’s collection.  Where was “Moonshiner” from one of the Bootleg Series?)

And you can always visit the official Bob Dylan site for discography information, and to read the lyrics of everything.   Or to buy stuff, as it is basically a marketing site.

Enough of this. It could go on forever. I expect to be listening mostly to Dylan for maybe the next month. And then I will need to pick up where I left off the other day, getting back into Radiohead’s (themselves oldsters by now) new A Moon Shaped Pool album. But, in a few months or a year, I will almost surely binge again on Dylan for a few weeks, and Kim and I will likely continue our on-and-off tradition to listening to Bob on Sunday mornings.

Robert Zimmerman, Seventy-Five Today: The Times They Are A-Changin’

dylan_bringing-it-all-back-home_cover-artEarly 1965 found me in the small town of Lompoc, California, where I was beginning an extended operations review assignment at AFWTR (the Air Force Western Test Range headquarters, in the nearby mountains). I had driven up from L.A. in my 1959 Chevy El Camino, packing a suitcase of clothing, another of vinyl LPs and a portable collapsible integrated record player/amplifier/speakers affair. For a week or two I lived out of a local motel while seeking a more permanent apartment. Bob Dylan’s first electric (partially, at least) album had just been released, so I found it at a local Lompoc store soon after unpacking and settling into my new temporary motel quarters. That would be Bringing It All Back Home.

(Dylan and his previous four albums had almost immediately struck a nerve with me over the previous year or two, and I was not unaware that I was born within three weeks and 400-odd midwest miles of him.)

For the next week, I played the album on my small stereo, in the morning before work and late into the night after returning, mostly eating takeout in my motel room so that I could concentrate on the music at hand.

While Bringing It All Back Home was not the first Dylan music I had heard (toward the end of my college stint in 1963, I think, my girl friend had returned from a vacation in her native New Jersey to tell me about this incredible person — Bob Dylan — she had discovered in her Greenwich Village music scene wanderings), but it was the first album that I listened to so thoroughly that at one time I knew all the lyrics. It was the first album Dylan released just before his famous/infamous “coming out” with an electric band at the Newport Jazz Festival. And its cover, photographed by Daniel Kramer, displayed an intriguing range of visual elements that led to careful study by myself and many others; I hung the cover on my wall for a time in my Los Angeles home. The tracks on Bringing It … were especially memorable, perhaps the most enduring for me being “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, “Outlaw Blues”, “Maggie’s Farm” and of course “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, noted a couple of days ago. Take a look and listen.

So mention Bob Dylan to me and one of the first images I see in my mind will be that album cover.

Many years ago, a Los Angeles radio station I frequented had a special weekly program in which a musician or music industry person was invited to act as DJ for an hour and play music that they would select to have with them if they were marooned on an imagined desert island. I sometimes played that game for myself, and almost always would find the music of J.S. Bach, Nina Simone and Tom Waits on the list … and always Bob Dylan. And it would be Dylan if the choice were restricted to one. The choice of which albums and which tracks would be more difficult.  And maybe there will be more to choose from in the future.

Birthday Countdown, or Nobody Wants To Hear Your Fish Stories

Years ago, I knew a fellow photographer in Los Angeles who tediously droned on and on about the perfect photograph he had just missed, the opportunity for greatness, ad nauseam.  

Like fish stories about the one that got away, it counts for nothing. The instructive for me was to carry my camera with me at all times. 

My fish story today has to do with Bob Dylan. The genesis came a few years ago, but I didn’t start seriously thinking about it until after I retired. Of course, by then, it was too late. The idea was that I would create a one-year website in which I would make a daily post around a particular Bob Dylan song, carrying this on for one year, to culminate with the 365th entry on his 75th birthday, now fast approaching in one day. My plan was to present the lyrics of the song, along with a YouTube or whatever video of a performance, or to render a digital online recording from content in my own library, and to add a note or two of commentary.  Every day for one year. A simple thought experiment demonstrated the enormity of such an undertaking: a daily commitment, time to research and gather selections, etc.   I’m not sure that I could have done it to the quality and level I wanted with much less than five years of advance staging, or without a staff of people to research and assist.   Or at least without engaging as a full-time project to the exclusion of all else.

But, yes, there are easily 365 Bob Dylan songs worthy of hearing and discussing. So on the eve of the anniversary, following on with my entry from yesterday, I have to almost randomly select something for consideration today. I would have liked to select some gem that is rarely heard, but what first pops into mind is one of my recurring favorites, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues“, from the 1965 Highway 61 Revisited album, with its “… your gravity fails and negativity don’t pull you through …” line and more, so we’ll go with that:

But we can’t stop there.  One of my personal anthems for years has been “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” from the 1966 Blonde on Blonde album, with its “…  Waiting to find out what price/You have to pay to get out of/
Going through all these things twice …”.

That’s it.  Gotta move on.

A Slice of 1977 Venice History

Living in Venice for several years in the 70s afforded much opportunity to come in contact with many of the artists who gave the place some of its flavor. Among these would be the Mother Art collective (one of whose co-founders, Laura, went on to team up with my brother Dennis). Here are some miscellaneous photos of local artists and other scenes from 1977, previously unseen, that I blundered upon yesterday in my archives of unprocessed negatives. Following that, a trailer from Mother Art’s acclaimed video.

And, here’s the Mother Art video trailer:

In the Run-Up to the Birthday

Presumably just about everybody is gearing up for the party this coming Tuesday Wednesday that would be in celebration of Bob Dylan’s 75th birthday.  Just to warm things up a bit, how about a little “Subterranean Homesick Blues“?

(Yes, you’re right.  That’s poet Allen Ginsberg to the left on your screen.)

I was reminiscing with friend John yesterday, considering all the music and too many favorites to even know where to begin, and realized that my music library includes 30 GB of Dylan in FLAC format on my 1 TB music server (with a full backup on another server), covering some 49 folders representing probably 30 – 40  albums (out of his total of somewhere around 60).   So I’m a rather lightweight fan…

By the way, I hear that my old neighborhood radio station/website, KCRW in Santa Monica, is going to do an all-Dylan playlist Tuesday Wednesday on its Eclectic 24 program.  Just browse to http://www.kcrw.com and click/tap on the Eclectic 24 link on the very top, skinny black menu bar.