Dylan of the Week, Mk. 14

So much good music right now! New Dylan record is a very solid effort. New Wilco album sounding very mature and interesting. And Radiohead is in the studio! But, without further ado...



Bob Dylan
“Farewell, Angelina”
The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 - 1965

So, this is it. The best Dylan song. Which means its in contention for the best song ever written. Okeh, maybe not the best but at least my favorite. And its discarded from Freewheelin'?! Who made that decision? Listen to the way he sings with such deliberation. Like Tambourine Man, but less druggy and with more clarity. His images are ecstatic and apocalyptic, working more for guidance than substance. He conveys the feeling – we construct the story. Why am I writing about this? This is the type of shit that makes you waltz with yourself in a room in Minneapolis. The heat is unbearable, but the body keeps moving. “What cannot be imitated perfect must die” “Machine guns are roaring / Puppets heave rocks” I will break the surface and it will be delicious. This is my reverie. This is my heart and my stomach. So ridiculous. Does anyone else hear severe hope and it's denial? The table is empty, but its next to a stream. His strings fake ecstasy. His voice, old before its time, moves like the cherubim. Who needs drugs when you've got these fingers? “Call me any name you like / I will never deny it” This sky spoken of is too many things, just like her. Just like me. Too wonderful for speech. Too superior. Too good to me. I need a parrot to speak for me.

Dylan of the Week, Mk. 13

“When I Paint my Masterpiece”
Bob Dylan
Greatest Hits Vol. II, Disc 2 – 1976?

Well the streets aren't lined with rubble no more. “I've got carte blanch!” There's nothing except blank psychological states. Drums held under arms walking down the streets of NYC. Staring despondently out the window at a snow covered field. “Dodging lions and wasting time”. But here it comes – the smooth shit! The hot shit! The shit! Summation of experience will one day yield something. The mundane divined! Is there anything else we can do? This isn't realism, this is euphoria. (Unless you confuse the two.) Break me in, Botticelli. Smother me in unwanted history, Brussels. Gladiotors, caesars, and kings of the jungle be damned (included) - “Someday everything will be smooth like a rhapsody”.

This is a song about hope coming from a place of sadness. Good coming out of Evil? Where else is it supposed to come from? If you believe in anything, you better be listening.

Dylan of the Week, Mk. 12

“Isis”
Bob Dylan
Live: Rolling Thunder Revue – 1975

INSANITY. BOOZE. WOMEN. BOOZE. WOMEN. Arms crossed like Jesus' death. Plastic masks showing more than hiding. That violin that sounds like a dying horse. The drums that pound his hangover/drunkeness into art. Ronson's guitar oddly meshing. Far too many people on the stage – some kind of orgiastic musical “experience”. Double the vocals on the last verse and send me to heaven – or hell, because it doesn't really matter at this point. The playing field has been leveled and the only thing that really exists are materials. But how easily these are destroyed! Do even they exist? Who gives a shit what exists?!

Find value where you can.

Value exists independent of human assignment.

“I came to a high place of darkness and light
The dividing line ran through the center of town.”

What are you worth?

Cherry Red

“Cherry Red”
The Groundhogs
Split – 1971

West Coast Purple. East Coast Grey. Bow at the limbs, oh useless ones! Scream out of your throats. Yell out at the large intestine. Speak in tongues till you're blue in the face. All in an attempt to articulate the insanity of a riff. Nothing compares. This type of shit should have a temple and mythology.

Dylan of the Week, Mk. 11

“When the Deal Goes Down”
Bob Dylan
Modern Times – 2006

Commitment. Not to a person, but to an ideal. An ideal that isn't permanent. “We all wear the same thorny crown”. Would that it were that ideals were permanent for some - “...permanency, everlastingness, is, in my opinion, the root of evil”. The things that keep us bound are “more frailer than flowers”, the things that die quickly. Rings, Earthly Domains, Broomsticks, Altars – these things fade to dust (from whence they came). What replaces them is new, things that were born “in the world's ancient light”. Reconstruction of Ideology. “Whereof we know not, thereof we shall not speak”. Is that misquoted?

What really matters is what we're talking about. Nothing, or at least something like it, is without value. Except certain things, like utterances. Those people, the people that have arrived somewhere, should be silenced. You crawl, you never get up. Who told you you could?

“Nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing” (Shakespeare)

Dylan of the Week, Mk. 10

“Tombstone Blues”
Bob Dylan
Highway 61 Revisited – 1965

What a way to go! West! The blues redux, via the garage and French symbolism. A rock journalist's wet dream. If anybody thought that Dylan embodied American music in his folk guise, just wait for this. Hit me in the jaw with three centuries of tradition. Hit me in the stomach with visceral emotion. Hit me in the head with blissful nonsense. Only Dylan can write gibberish quite so delectably. And they disown him for it?! Stupid pieces of shit with their heads so far up their asses they think shit smells good. They don't realize revolution when it chops their useless heads off – they sit “worthlessly alone”. It's the “geometry of innocent flesh on the bone” that penetrates the minds of a nation, not the anti-capitalist subversion bullshit those desperately holding onto an opinion would have you believe; the truth that “the sun's not yellow, it's chicken” rather than the "fetishization of commodity" that is so dripping with the disease-laden detritus of pretense. Fuck protest. Law is the expression of freedom.

Distance Equals Rate Times Time

“Distance Equals Rate Times Time”
The Pixies
Trompe Le Monde - 1991

Sick him on me. Sick him on me. Sick him on me. Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhhh. Not like that, but like that. Give me your television. I want to bow to you, you made me. I want to be a Luddite. I'm not what I want to be. I'm everywhere. Call me Jewish. Call me Zimmy. I can't stop stealing other people's other words. Why not? Hey all! Where didn't we go? Black Francis told me to come this way, but he cannot be trusted. I've fallen asleep behind the school bus in Nightmare on Elm St. Four. That's so ridiculous. Freed up because inanity made me so. Creation doesn't exist, only it's cousin, violence. Nature made who? Mythology creates nothing except itself. This is not creation, but masturbation.

Dylan of the Week, Mk. 9

“You Ain't Goin' Nowhere”
Bob Dylan
Greatest Hits Vol. II – 1971
(originally recorded 1967 appearing on the Basement Tapes in 1975)

My toes have been sprinkled in the stream. Baptism by passivity. My stomach is full of bacon. My head is full of nothing and smoke. My ears are full of basement noise. The nonsense must overtake me – I can't wait. This new girl seems so full of names. Just like her, all these new friends die daily and are replaced with new ones that look and sound just like them. Spit yourselves back at me, rejuvenated! I'll only take the born again ones...and the ones before them. My appetite is reserved for the drunks, the cobblers, the dust, the racists, the “dogs that talk”, and the cherubim. Don't we all deserve worse than this? Thank you Demeter.

Dylan understands the nonsense (“Ghengis Khan and his brother Don”?). It makes him happy and arbitrary. It makes Happy's banjo sing like a child playing at jax. This version is just too wonderful.

The Byrds also did a great version.

Dylan of the Week, Mk. 8

“I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine”
Bob Dylan
John Wesley Harding – 1968

Sometimes repulsion is tempered with sadness, or is it pity? The song is so simple, that it must be hiding something. No one can make a statement about such a titanic figure being hypocritical and decrepit (“With a blanket underneath his arm / And a coat of solid gold”) without trying to say something more than what they're saying (look at Tom Waits!). This guy is someone we should be condemning, yet still preaches the word. It's because he feels the pains of his life that we are drawn to him. His fire and brimstone has become a “sad complaint”; his encouragement to “go on your way accordingly / But know you're not alone” sounds like some retired circus clown forced to perform one last time. So we kill him. Put a stake through his forehead and string him up. But, god! Dylan rarely sounds so sad as he does in those last two lines. Whose head did the stake go through?

Dylan of the Week, Mk. 7

“Wallflower”
Bob Dylan
The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3 – 1971

We beat our heads into the ground. Why was it always so funny? When his face crushed the pavement, beating it into a bloody pile? "She's flowing like the Santiam!" Cups spill blood (wine) that's fortified with iron. His homework reads like Bill Gate's receipts, his temerity only matched by his uselessness. His ability to do nothing busily. But Oh! what fun it is! Everyone should be enslaved by drunkeness for a fortnight, then set about the ears for industry. Working at capacity? Fuck that: working at gluttony. Give anyone the seven deadly sins (minus pride) and you'd be in Utopia. The utopia that Heironymous Bosch paints. Thats the funny part – irony. What cruelty that accompanies ecstasy! Blood, wine, blood, whiskey, then blood again.

Those simple delights. Like a cup of Ramen in the morning. Or a pretty girl. Or non-existence.

“Just like you I'm wondering what I'm doing here.”

A Wedding in Cherokee County

“A Wedding in Cherokee County”
Randy Newman
Good Old Boys - 1974

Self-confrontation. Isn't there a better word for it? Analysis? No. Psycho-something...psycho-affront? Whatever. What we have is that. A man (most definitely male) describing the inadequacies of his bride, which turn out to, most definitely, be his own characteristics. “She don't say nothin' / She don't do nothin' / She don't feel nothin' / She don't know nothin' / Maybe she's crazy, I don't know” but always with that “Maybe that's why I love her so”. (We're in the South, by the way.) So what is this thing that's so useless? Our speaker. Or, more significantly, our speaker's character. He's snagged the one thing he could get out of this shithouse – a woman. A woman that, “If she knew how she'd be unfaithful to me”. He doesn't have anything to offer – AND – the ultimate in abasement – he's physically adolescent! So, Girl – Check. Rescuer (“Her papa was a midget / Her mama was a whore”) - Check. Further, Courage, or at least its face (“I'm not afraid of the Greywolf / Who stalks through our forest at dawn”) - Check. Then the wedding, with all those freaks. And after that – show time. But his soul is torn asunder.

“I will carry her across the threshold
I will make dim the light
I will attempt to spend my love within her
Though I will try with all my might
She will laugh at my mighty sword
She will laugh at my mighty sword
Why must everybody laugh at my mighty sword?
Lord, help me if you will”

And that's it. Now watch that last bit, because its all there. It's all sexual. Failure in virtue, failure in maturity, failure in emotion, failure in normalcy – all from his physical failure! Newman is almost too cruel. Luckily he has that tinge of sardonicism.

Dylan of the Week, Mk. 6

“Can't Wait”
Bob Dylan
Tell Tale Signs: The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 – 2008
(actual song recorded in 1997)

Talk about down in the groove. It's like a snake. A snake that slides through the grass like something that leaves dead little furry things behind it. Isn't it funny that the Lanois guitar licks sound both deadly and soothing at the same time? Deadly because Dylan's death is approaching but also soothing because he has some piece of peace hidden amongst the ambiguity. And his mind is a “lonely graveyard”? Now, the lyrics changed significantly before Time out of Mind, but we've got more cohesion here. The whole first verse gets overhauled and the “back is to the sun...” lyric had to wait another four years before appearing on “Sugar Baby” on Love and Theft. But this early version – whew! It's so desperate.

“Life is short and I think I've had a lot.
I can't say if I want the pain to end or not.
The blindness overtakin' me is beatin' like a drum
I don't know where it starts or where it's comin' from.
That's how it is when you try to concentrate
And I don't know how much longer I can wait.”

While the other one is a bit more polished, this one has got the quality of a drunken night playing in a bar and throwing out one more number, just for the band, after everyone has gone home. Especially with that rumbling “Let's do it in, uh, how 'bout B-flat?” at the beginning. Man, the treasures one finds! But, I guess be careful of what you find and what you find value in. Be careful of the things you store up, the jewel's in your crown. Because even when you've lost these things and feel stripped, “there's always more left to lose”. That's when you really can't wait for the end.



And the album version.

Dylan of the Week, Mk. 5

Skipped a week.





“Jokerman”
Bob Dylan
Infidels – 1983

“Nightsticks and water cannons, tear gas, padlocks,
Molotov cocktails and rocks behind every curtain,
False-hearted judges dying in the webs that they spin,
Only a matter of time 'til night comes steppin' in.”

Okeh, okeh, get over the drums. This is great vocal alacrity. (E.g. the way he snips off his breath on that “both of your fists-”; cramming in all those words quoted above; all those “ohhhs” in each chorus; that midwest “mick-el-angelo”.) So what the hell is the Jokerman? He's evil - “born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowin'”. He's good - “Friend to the martyr, friend to the woman of shame”. He's totally ambiguous - “the Book of Leviticus” and “the Law of the jungle and the sea” are his teachers. Like any good Dylan song, it comes close to defying a reading of itself. But one thing is certain here – Dylan lives in the song and nearly destroys its subject matter. “So swiftly the sun sets in the sky / You rise up and say goodbye to no one.” What is that? It's nothing. It's pernicious, but also something like sublimity. He sees the rich man without any name in a fiery furnace. All joking aside, this is ridiculous. It's like a dream sequence. It's like everyday in the mind of an artist. It's simple imagination. Why don't we all articulate things like this? What poverty of expression that Dylan is possessor here! He's the kindred slave, king, and acrobat of humanity. He is willing to walk the rope that we only glimpse at. He can also be an asshole.

"Freedom just around the corner for you
But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?"

Also this.

Dylan of the Week, Mk. 4

"Never Say Goodbye"
Bob Dylan
Planet Waves - 1974



HA HA HA! Never say goodbye!? Always say goodbye. To what? To people. They come and go. Family is effervescent. Friends are transitory. Lovers are necessary. But Dreams! Ah! Those remain. Those are the things “made of iron and steel”. You can hear the wistfulness, especially that “turned your hair to broooowwn!” that arches up like his vocal chords slipped on a banana peel. (Like the wildness in his voice on the '66 UK tour, especially “Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues”, perhaps one of the greatest vocal performances in the rock cannon.) There's some understanding that he possesses that only experience, mistakes, and a hefty past can legitimate. The poet. The poet in me, the poet in you, working like a conscience, working at justice. We learn to understand it, to become friends with rogues (memories). Allowance of evolution, things that change and pass. Bye-bye.

Ode to a Song

(Our friend, Jake Dockter, has been kind enough to submit, for your widespread reception, a piece about hearing. Enjoy his actuations.)

"To a song whose title I can't remember

Late night radio, fm dial
down on low end, the 80's
tucked amongst npr, talk radio and public hippie dippie radio
was a song.

Its simple refrain and simple lyrics grabbed me as I almost scanned by
staying away from static, from hard rock, from country.
I needed something simple i needed something clean

The song had already started, I mostly caught the end
but the guitar, the trumpet, the drums
all came slowly, slowly, slowly.
with the window rolled down, crossing that bridge across the river
the still, warm, summer air
it fit.

The station may have been one of those weird random waves coming in from Seattle,
or bouncing off a satellite, or some reflective piece of atmosphere.
My grandfather, living in the mountains of southern California
once talked to a trucker in Texas on their CB radios,
some kind of miracle,
the air carrying voices and music to distant places and distant radios and distant people.

In our collection of family letters,
my great-grandmother was written to by a man on an island off the coast of Alaska.
She was a singer, on the radio, in the 40's,
and one night performed and sang and then went home and went to sleep.
But in that night the waves of her song, the broadcast
kept traveling, out across the pacific,
the lonely waves of ocean pushing her
until she reached a man in a small cabin on a small island
who sat in rapt attention,
and after hearing, had to write a letter.

In the car, on that night, that song came from somewhere
and its simplicity held me, and then faded into the static.
I fiddled with the knobs and buttons and dials
but it was gone.
And i am back to the hardrock, and country and talk radio
which i meant to hear, which is supposed to reach me

I'd rather listen to those stolen sounds
and random, wandering noises
that i was never meant to hear."

-Jake Dockter

Dylan of the Week, Mk. 3

“Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again”
Bob Dylan
Hard Rain – 1976



I've been disembarked! I left not that long ago. Here is what brought me to where I am. Doesn't it feel like air? Like the sound of the breath of a girl lying next to you in bed in the morning? Sun cuts through the window and slices up your legs. It feels so good, like an aria that blows life into the Ragman, the French Girl, Mona, Ruthy, the Neon Madmen, and Shakespeare. We can't send any messages because we've got nothing to say. All we do is feel anymore – like the lovers in bed. What the hell would we have to say, even if the lines of communication worked? Tell tales of getting in fights with the railroad men? Being stuck in the cities of Tennessee? Why would we say this when others could say it so much better? His voice shakes the shit out of your soul. His buddy's guitar rives your hammer and anvil. Its almost comical how good of a time they're having. It almost destroys the musicians, but never the music. It destroyed his marriage, but that had been going south for a while already. But here we have the chance - Taste his fingers! Sleep in his voice! Get drunk and never stop listening to this song!

Dylan of the Week, Mk. 2

"All You Have To Do Is Dream"
Bob Dylan
1967



This is the music that never dies. The type of music that is resurrected but never dead, never really needing anything. Something that exists without intervention. Something more like a form than an instantiation. Its confusing. Its because of the way its reckless, because of the way the guitar is far too loud at the beginning of the solo. The way that they just can't manage to stop singing the song at the end. Because the song tumbles into itself, like its already going when it starts. Does any of this make sense? What's it about? A DREAM! A nothing. Conceivably a something, but definitely not real. This shit can't die because its never born, or maybe stillborn. And what the hell is a “floorbird” anyway? Whatever it is, its gotta be American. “...because in America the fantasy of the country sells everything else and everything else on sale sells the country:

ALL YOU
HAVE
TO DO
IS DREAM!”


(Of all the communal, secret, everything music that Bob Dylan and the Band made in their houses in Woodstock, this has to be one of the gems. And that's saying something. We've got a selection here ranging from “I'm Not There (1956)”, “Tears of Rage”, and “Lo and Behold!” to “You Ain't Goin' Nowhere” and “Baby, won't You be my Baby”. Anything that was ever said by an American (and I'm even talking about the politicians and shysters) is spoken of here. And what a song to record! An Everly Brothers hit at the time of the end of the revolution of rock n' roll, when pop was consumed by the radio and spit out to the masses (sound familiar?). Little girls listened to this music! Jerry Lee Lewis was daily exorcising demons from his piano, Little Richard was baptizing in the name of Ripin' It Up, and Gene Vincent had some strange complex which resulted in an overactive libido which resulted in crotch guitar. And here were the Everly Brothers crooning “gee whiz”? Although time has rightly justified the song as wonderful, it was scary pop at the time. And here comes Dylan in '67, rebooting the thing as a song of the real, abandoned America that doesn't care about anything but gettin' down. Because “restriction causes damage / And damage causes lust”. Subversion. Che Guevara had some things to learn here.)

Dylan of the Week, Mk. 1

“You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”
Blood on the Tracks – 1974
Bob Dylan



“Situations have ended sad,
Relationships have all been bad.
Mine've been like Verlaine's and Rimbaud.
But there's no way I can compare
All those scenes to this affair,
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go.

I'll look for you in old Honolulu,
San Francisco, Ashtabula,
Yer gonna have to leave me now, I know.
But I'll see you in the sky above,
In the tall grass, in the ones I love,
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go.”

The lady leaves, unexpectedly. I waited for her for a couple hours, then she left. I wanted her to say things like “I love you” or “Have you ever read Seneca?” I spew invectives. I talk to Alex – smell some of her on him, smell some of that. Sometimes the worst thing is maturity – Rash, Rash, Rash! (cholera dances through my eyes like a drunken otter) The worst bit is that we do see them “in the ones I (we) love”. The universe’s conceit is to pull us into relationships with others like the ones we’ve got, but maximized, leading to the sky, leading to transcendence. Does she want to stay? Impatience or impertinence. I looked for a while (maybe not in “old Honolulu”), but couldn’t find the original diamond. But oh! those beginnings, those middles before it went to vituperative shit. Sublimity! Does anything compare? NO! Not since the beginning of time has man conquered or invented its likeness. It is because we cannot “compare / All those scenes to this affair” that we loiter after the lope. Hands in pockets, heads down, hearts in stomachs, thoughts in the dirt. Ultimately I am lonesome, but that lonesomeness has conceptual companions, even if I don’t have actual ones. Its accompanied by serenity and self-pity. Revelations will take their time before they appear again. They can still be heard, though, in Bob’s harp. Listen to the way he blows after the final verse – almost like he’s sighing into the harmonica. He’s got a handful of disintegration and he’s letting everyone know it, with his playful lugubriousness.