Here’s a piece from years back by Devotchka from the Little Miss Sunshine film soundtrack. Happened to wake up this morning to this, and found it a nice break from the vitriol and negativity we hear on the news around the presidential election and other earthly woes.
This soundtrack piece was actually an adaptation from the full vocal version on Devotchka’s 2004 album, “How It Ends”. Listen to the album:
One of my favorite reads of the past several years has been punk rock goddess/poetess Patti Smith’s Just Kids, her 2012 National Book Award winner chronicling her 1960s-1970s affair with taboo-shattering photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and her leap from obscurity to celebrity.
Recently retrieving Smith’s 2015 M Train from the local library afforded another chance — following our last success with Joseph Mitchell‘s wonderful Up In The Old Hotel — to entertain ourselves with a book that I could read aloud at bedtime. But I was well into two or three chapters Thursday night before I realized that Kim had fallen asleep. The hour was sufficiently late that I forcibly put the book aside, waiting until the next morning to find out where Kim had taken leave of it, so she could catch up on her own — or I was even willing to reread the missed portion. But as it turned out, Kim signaled me to read on, as her intention is now to read the thing in her own time. After all, she had a couple of books in process on her own anyway, and the book was soon due back to the library. So yesterday, a fairly undemanding, quiet, rainy day — I read on. (Completing the book well before midnight, I was still not sleepy and had to take in a couple of episodes of Peaky Blinders on Netflix before retiring.)
Smith writes about coffee, travel, her cats, her parents, her now-adult kids, her deceased husband, TV crime dramas, dreams, writers and writing, conversations, time, memories and the realities and tragedy and humor and minutiae of her life as she is approaching seventy. The book is liberally sprinkled with her trademark photographs, taken with her ancient and rather idiosyncratic Polaroid instant film cameras, appearing as usual and at first glance as crude documents but always becoming arresting and moving for me, as I have watched this aspect of her work over the years. And for me the entire book became an utterly beautiful instance of prose that made its way to my brain as poetry. Patti Smith has always been beautifully human to me and even more so, now.
If you want to get a taste of the Patti Smith I first got to know back in the day, some forty years ago, try this, from her classic 1975 album, “Horses”:
Never saw this in a library. Dedicated to all of the family English majors …
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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One of the great Dylan pieces is “Blind Willie McTel” …
And here is something surprising that KCRW came up with: a cover by jazz artist Marty Ehrlich …
Early 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.
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.
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.
Here are some unedited video test snippets from the Marina Adventure of Saturday night. These were the source of the previously-posted screen grabs.