Good Tidings: Christmas In The Heart

by Polly Bresnick

I'm half Jewish, half Christmas. Jew-ISH. My family lights the menorah when we remember to, usually uncertain of which night we're on, and we mumble out the prayer that even my father barely remembers, with a crescendoing finale of SHALL HANUKKAH! Or is it with a "Ch-"? Does it have an "h" at the end? (I'm barely "culturally Jewish," which is to say that I'm not really religious at all.)

In grammar school I learned that, for Hanukkah, kids traditionally received eight presents — one on each of the holy, candle-lit nights. Also, there was a dreidel and gelt. That all sounded pretty good. On Christmas, of course, children awoke to find piles of gifts under the tree. Also a very appealing concept to my greedy little kid mind. Since I was both, I was thrilled to realize that maybe I'd get to do both! I did. Sort of. But then the deep holiday laze kicked in, and the Hanukkah gifts were skipped. I didn't complain — there were still plenty of Christmas gifts. One year the laze deepened and I was just on the brink of losing track of my belief in your favorite fat man and mine, the one and only chimney diver, bearer of brightly wrapped and bowed boxes, still cold from the icy pole from whence they came, Mr. Santa Claus. My parents figured they could get more sleep on Christmas Eve if they got some of the wrapping done in the weeks before the special day and put them under the tree as they wrapped. I must have gotten confused about my combo-faith (or just uncontrollably impatient for toys), because I started to sneak one present a day back to my bedroom to unwrap in the solitude of my room, hushed and high on the adrenaline of a child's crime. Didn't take long for my parents to notice. They were pretty mad. As Dylan himself laments on his Theme Time radio show, "Some people just don't have the spirit of Christmas. They think it's all about gift-giving. Though, to be more honest, I think a lot of 'em think it's more about gift-getting. Christmas is not about runnin' around the stores, spendin' money, and tryna' buy people's love and affection." It's about a lot of things. Including comfort, joy, figgy pudding, and music.

I love Christmas music. My mom was/is an old-school, screamin' and faintin' Elvis fan, so we have plenty of Elvis Christmas music. I like that "Silent Night" can sound kind of sexy in Elvis's voice. I can't seem to sing along to his "Blue Christmas" without lowering my eyelids and letting my top lip quiver. And I know the lazy velvet of Bing's Christmas repertoire like I know the smell of fresh baked bread. I impatiently look forward to it all year long like a little kid waiting for the first snowfall sticky enough for snowball wars and snow forts and snowmen. But those guys were church-going, God-fearing Christians, right? They can sing those songs however they want to and it will all sound like golden gospel. Those same songs in Bob Dylan's (née Zimmerman's) voice come out as a different gospel, and one that feels no less true. Dylan's voice singing Christmas songs is sweet and comfy. It conjures the gauzy memory of sitting on the rug next to the teetering, over-ornamented tree, when I was too young to even quite know who Santa was or what Christmas meant or that those big shiny colorful boxes had toys in them, but knowing all the words to all the songs and smiling with easy joy because if Christmas music is playing, it must be Christmas.

I first heard Dylan's polka-romp cover of "Must Be Santa" when it was meming around as a music video. It's the stand-out song on Christmas in the Heart, for me. It has a Santa-gone-wild, runaway sleigh energy that truly warms my halfie heart. And it's a weird roller-coaster dream to hear Dylan clowning the "ho, ho, ho's." The video is a little unsettling: Dylan's at a holiday house party and he keeps popping up unexpectedly. He's out of place, but comfortable, still enjoying himself, even amidst the maniacally smiley (super goy) partiers and the drunken chase-brawl that careens through things, sacrilegious and hip and honest in its interruption of the celebration of — what is it? — Christ's birthday? No one other than the camera notices the throwing of glasses or even the man swinging from a chandelier on his way out the door. Everyone, including Dylan, continues the song, knows all the words. The song itself, in humorous contrast to the adult-beverage setting, is a nursery rhyme list of Santa factoid essentials, an instruction manual for how to believe in Santa, a dictation of what to see in your mind's eye as you imagine him. So Dylan singing this song seems like proof that he may not exactly fit in at this Christmas party, but he still knows all the things there are to know about Santa. And really, what American doesn't?

This may offend some die-hard Dylan fans (and/or Tom Waits fans), but "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" comes out sounding a heck of a lot like a Tom Waits song (Dylan drawls it as "HAYrald Angels"), until his angelic back-up singers slip in, mugging sweetly in close harmonies, like the Boswell Sisters or some other assemblage of voices from another time that would sound just right on an old record player, the dustier the better. "Little Drummer Boy" is a bit over the edge for me. Hearing Dylan do the "ba-rum-ba-bum-bum" made me feel embarrassed for him. Though, again, the female back-up singers find some haunting slant-matched harmonies that give this track its own, new idiosyncratic personality. And, perhaps, maybe I just never liked singing this one. In junior-high chorus, I always imagined the little drummer boy as the baby Jesus — a personage I knew far too little about — which made me feel like I wasn't in the club, and maybe Santa wouldn't put anything but coal in my stocking that hung festively next to the rusting and tarnished menorah. Singing "Little Drummer Boy" in chorus as an awkward preteen atheist was about as comfortable as singing the same token Kwanza song every year, which is to say that it was no fun at all.

In "O' Come All Ye Faithful," "The First Noel," and "O' Little Town of Bethlehem," Dylan really does sound to me like a self-conscious Jew in a church (a feeling I have experienced on the few occasions I've been inside of an actual church during an actual service with singing and praising and whatnot). These are the songs I remember my gentile grandfather singing in a booming, choir-trained baritone beside a piano in a living room in Delaware with a fire roaring and "bubble-lights" (which, I believe, have been recalled due to the serious fire hazard they pose) bubbling merrily on the Christmas tree, though I'm not sure this did, in fact, ever happen in my life.

The rest of the album is perfectly reasonable 'round-the-yule-log fare, with some trickster flourishes here and there. Dylan's poetic sensibility sneaks in as he relishes the swinging alliteration of "Walking in a Winter Wonderland," letting all the w's wash together into a warm and cozy lullaby mumble. There's something deeply satisfying about the cheesy key modulations and boozy swaying rhythms of these songs that I really do know as well as some people know their prayers. I know them so well I don't remember learning the words, as if I were born with the knowledge of them — I know them in a way that really deserves to be described as "by heart" because I know them in my heart and not in my brain. One doesn't get in the Christmas "mindset" one gets into the Christmas spirit. It's reassuring to hear Dylan humoring this cross-section of melodies that I hold so dear. It's as if he's agreeing with me, that Christmas is not in the church or in Macy's or in Daddy Warbuck's Nutcracker-scale living room. It's truly in the heart. And I'm not afraid to say it if my ol' pal Bobby Zimmerman isn't.

Dylan has surprised us so many times, that even a Christmas album wasn't all that shocking to me. The man loves the music of the American everyman. And in this country, where, starting the day after Thanksgiving, it's difficult to find much else on the radio, it doesn't get much more universal than Christmas music. As silly as some of the songs may sound in Dylan's lupine sneer, he sings as if he loves these songs in the same ways I do — and he seems to be proving that these songs are for everyone to sing. As Christmas does in this country, these songs also, for the most part, transcend religion. They're part of the weird warm collective memory of Home and Childhood and Magic.

Download:

"Must Be Santa" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2009.
available on Christmas In the Heart

"Hark the Herald Angels Sing" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2009.
available on Christmas In the Heart

"Winter Wonderland" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2009.
available on Christmas In the Heart

*****************

"Mistletoe" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2006.
from Theme Time Radio Hour: Christmas and New Year

"Figgy Pudding" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2006.
from Theme Time Radio Hour: Christmas and New Year

"The Night Before Christmas" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2006.
from Theme Time Radio Hour: Christmas and New Year


*****************

God Help the Troubadour

by Ben Greenman

Phil Ochs was born five months before Bob Dylan and died sixteen months before Elvis Presley, and that tells you all you need to know about him, and that tells you nothing. Ochs was an earnest activist, and a rebel, and a satirist, and a town crier, and a crack-up. He built and dismantled personae with such rapidity that it’s sometimes difficult to find the real person who, in theory, provided the foundation on which those personae were built and dismantled. Born in Texas, raised in Ohio, gifted musically and culturally omnivorous, Ochs appeared on the Greenwich Village folk scene in 1962 and performed at Newport, the folkies’ Mecca, in 1963. Early on, he defined a certain kind of straightforwardly sardonic protest song, bringing Woody Guthrie’s plainspokenness into the tumult of the sixties. Bob Dylan famously remarked that Ochs was getting better and better, and that Dylan could’t keep up with him. In 1967, he took a sharp left turn in his work, abandoning guitar-and-voice for a lavishly pretentious folk-rock. He brooded, marvelously, and then broke out of the brooding with both gallows humor and lovely, clear poetry. Many of his most beloved songs come from this period, such as “Pleasures of the Harbor”and “Tape from California.”

Then came Ochs’ sixth album, Rehearsals for Retirement, which he released in 1969. The album was recorded after Ochs appeared at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and it’s at once a document of the deepest despair—it grew out of terror and sorrow over the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, and the cover image was of Ochs’s tombstone—and a rollicking good time. “Pretty Smart on My Part,” the leadoff track, skips along on a fleet acoustic riff before descending into a disturbing, if hilarious, series of psychosexual portraits of America. Phil, in chracter, is menaced by a hitchhiker, whips a woman with big breasts, is terrorized by an intruder, experiences humiliation at the hands of the cops, and plots to assassinate the president. Elsewhere, Ochs is the subject of his own pained investigation: “My Life” is almost unbearably naked in both its sound and its subject (“My life,” he sings, “is now a death to me”). “William Butler Yeats Visits Lincoln Park And Escapes Unscathed” is a ghostly piano ballad that, in its last thirty seconds, gives way to a glib bit of vaudeville:

Where were you in Chicago
You know I didn’t see you there
I didn’t see them break your head
Or breathe the tear gas air
Where were you in Chicago
When the fight was being fought
Where were you in Chicago
‘Cause I was in Detroit

The album closes with its spectral title song, which starts with one of the most depressing couplets in pop music (“The days grow longer for smaller prizes / I feel a stranger to surprises”) and gets worse from there. Worse, but not even more beautiful: Ochs’s singing in this period is, I think, his best: his limited range and keening style are a perfect match for both the personal lyrics and the more baroque production. “I wear a different kind of garment,” he sings, “in my rehearsals for retirement.”



As it turned out, the garment wasn’t metaphorical. After Rehearsals for Retirement, Ochs commissioned a gold suit from Nudie Cohn, Elvis Presley’s tailor, and transformed himself in a kind of pre-Andy Kaufman King manqué. That period produced exactly two records: the sarcastically titled Greatest Hits, in 1970, which consisted of all new material, and then Gunfight at Carnegie Hall, a chronicle of an utterly chaotic March 1970 live date that included a bomb threat that cut short the first show, an altercation with unhappy fans who wanted to get into the second show, and Ochs’s idiotic solution to this problem—he smashed the glass window of the box office, severely lacerating his thumb, and performed the second show with his hand bandaged. And that’s just the offstage drama. Onstage, Ochs played some of his beloved protest songs but also the standard “Mona Lisa,” Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee,” and medleys devoted to the work of Elvis and Buddy Holly.

Gunfight at Carnegie Hall was, for most purposes, the last of Ochs as a singer. He began to suffer from crippling writer’s block and equally crippling alcoholism. He traveled extensively (he was mugged in Tanzania, damaging his voice), became interested in Chilean politics, performed at a huge rally in Central Park in April 1975 when the Vietnam War ended. And then, the eternal darkness of madness: Ochs started telling people that he was a man named John Butler Train who had murdered the real Phil Ochs and taken his place. This eventually passed, but what remained behind was insurmountable depression and suicidal thinking. Ochs hanged himself on April 9, 1976.

Many artists have recorded tribute songs: Tom Paxton, Billy Bragg, John Wesley Harding, Todd Snider. Snider’s “Thin Wild Mercury” is built around the famous story of Ochs getting kicked out of Dylan’s taxicab after weighing in unfavorably on “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window.” Well, unfavorable is a relative term. “It’s not as good as ‘Positively 4th Street,’” Ochs said, telling the truth, and Dylan took the mixed review in stride, ordering the driver to stop the car and throwing Ochs out onto the sidewalk. He also delivered a parting shot that stung like an epitaph: “You’re not a folksinger, Ochs, you’re a journalist.”

And then, of course, there’s Dylan’s own “Lenny Bruce,” which isn’t about Ochs, except that it is. Ochs, of course, also wrote a song about Bruce (the heartbreaking “Doesn’t Lenny Live Here Anymore?”), and Dylan’s mournful, clumsy elegy starts by talking about freedom and rebellion and shining the light of truth in the eyes of power. It ends, though, in a cab, which makes me wonder if he’s been talking about Lenny Bruce at all:

Lenny Bruce is dead but he didn’t commit any crime

He just had the insight to rip off the lid before its time

I rode with him in a taxi once

Only for a mile and a half, seemed like it took a couple of months



Download:

“Pretty Smart On My Part” mp3
by Phil Ochs, 1969.
available on Rehearsals For Retirement

“William Butler Yeats Visits Lincoln Park & Escapes Unscathed” mp3
by Phil Ochs, 1969.
available on Rehearsals For Retirement

"Chords of Fame" mp3
by Phil Ochs, 1970.
available on Phil Ochs Greatest Hits

“Tape From California” mp3
by Phil Ochs, 1970.
available on Gunfight at Carnegie Hall

“Thin Wild Mercury” mp3
by Todd Snider, 2006.
available on The Devil You Know

“Lenny Bruce” mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1981.
available on Shot of Love, 1981

"Doesn't Lenny Live Here Anymore?" mp3
by Phil Ochs, 1969.
available on Rehearsals For Retirement

An All American Trilogy... Boy

"Uncle Sam needs you, Boy
I'm a gonna cut your hair off
Take this rifle, Kid
Gimme that gui-tar
Yea-ah..."

Today, on the 4th of July, when we Americans do what we do to celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence (eat meat, drink beer, and blow shit up), let us pause and reflect on the glory that is "The All American Boy."

In 1958, when Bobby Bare was about be inducted into the Army and his pal Bill Parsons was returning from his own call to duty, they teamed up with a forty year old drifter of Irish and Cherokee descent named Orville Lunsford and recorded a one-off demo talking blues called "The All American Boy" at Syd Nathan's King Studios in Cincinnati along with a Parsons original, "Rubber Dolly."

There are many versions of this story, and it's hard to tell what's what. But what we do know is that these two recordings were released as a single on the Fraternity label, and Bare, who had allegedly said that he didn't want his name on the record, got his wish. When the single came out it was credited to Bill Parsons on both sides. The songwriting credit for "The All American Boy went to Parsons and Lunsford, and unbeknownst to Bare who was then overseas, it raced up the charts to #2 a few months later.

Many thought the track to be about Elvis who had also been inducted into the Army, but it was more than likely an autobiographical joke that Bare improvised before he shipped off. Parsons, with a hit on his hands, was touring for Bare's record, including a spot in early 1959 on Buddy Holly's final tour, The Winter Dance Party, where Cricket Waylon Jennings heard Parsons rehearsing one day and asked if that was him on the record. "No, he's in the Army now." When, Bare was discharged, we went on to record a sequel "I'm Hanging Up My Rifle," and later, a third variation, "Brooklyn Bridge," making it a trilogy of sorts.

Mickey Newbury's "An American Trilogy" is an arrangement of two Civil War songs and a folk ballad. Elvis used it as a grand finale to finish his shows in his later years, and it is the staple of every fat Elvis Impersonator's repertoire. What's more American than that?

Happy Independence Day, Folks...


Download:

"All American Boy" mp3
by Bobby Bare, 1958.
available on Singles (1959-1969)

"I'm Hangin' Up My Rifle" mp3
by Bobby Bare, 1960.
available on All American Rock 'n' Roll: The Fraternity Story Vol 2

"Brooklyn Bridge" mp3
by Bobby Bare, 1963.
available on Detroit City


************


"All American Boy" mp3
by Grandpa Jones, 1959.
available on Country Music Hall of Fame

"All American Boy" mp3
by Bob Dylan and The Band, 1967.
available on The Genuine Basement Tapes


************

"An American Trilogy" mp3
by Mickey Newbury, 1971.
available on Frisco Mabel Joy

************

"Dixie" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2003.
available on Masked & Anonymous

"Glory Hallelujah" mp3
by Furry Lewis with Lee Baker Jr, 1969.
available on Take Your Time

"All My Trials" mp3
by Dave Van Ronk, 1957.
available on The Mayor of MacDougal Street: Rarities 1957-69


*************

Seventy

Bob Dylan is seventy today. Here's seventy versions of songs that he's written. I was hard pressed to narrow it down to seventy, so that's saying something and I think it's enough. These are the songs that folks will still be interpreting in another seventy years.

Happy Birthday Bob.

*************

Download:

"Please Mrs. Henry" mp3
by Peter Laughner, 1972.
unreleased radio session

"Million Dollar Bash" mp3
by the Fairport Convention, 1969.
available on Unhalfbricking

"Baby Blue" mp3
by the Chocolate Watchband, 1968.
available on Inner Mystique/One Step Beyond

"Like A Rolling Stone" mp3
by the Soup Greens, 1965.
available on Pebbles, Vol. 1

"She Belongs To Me" mp3
by the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, 1966.
available on Volume 1





"I'll Keep It with Mine"mp3
by Betty Serveert, 1996.
available on I Shot Andy Warhol

"Stepchild"mp3
by Solomon Burke, 2002.
available on Don't Give Up on Me

"Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?" mp3
by Jimi Hendrix, 1967.
available on BBC Sessions

"Positively 4th Street" mp3
by Lucinda Williams, 1991.
available on In Their Own Words Volume 1

"I Threw It All Away" mp3
by Yo La Tengo, 1987.
available on President Yo La Tengo / New Wave Hot Dogs





"Spanish Harlem Incident" mp3
by the Byrds, 1965.
available on Mr Tambourine Man

"Down Along The Cove" mp3
by Johnny Jenkins, 1970.
available on Ton-Ton Macoute

"If Not For You" mp3
by George Harrison, 1970.
acoustic demo

"I Believe In You" mp3
by Cat Power, 2008.
available on Jukebox





"Maggie's Farm" mp3
by Solomon Burke, 1965.
available on Platinum Collection

"It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry" mp3
by Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper & Stephen Stills, 1968.
available on Super Session

"Can't Leave Her Behind" mp3
by Stephen Malkmus & Lee Ranaldo, 2007.
available on I'm Not There

"Gates Of Eden" mp3
by Marc Carroll, 2003.
available on All Wrongs Reversed

"Up To Me" mp3
by Roger McGuinn, 1976
available on Cardiff Rose





"Mama, You Been On My Mind" mp3
by the Beatles, 1969.
unreleased outtake

"Man Gave Names To All The Animals" mp3
by Townes Van Zandt, 1994.
available on Roadsongs

"Love Minus Zero – No Limit" mp3
by Buck Owens & His Buckaroos, 1971.
available on Bridge Over Troubled Water

"You Ain't Going Nowhere" mp3
by the Byrds, 1968.
available on Sweetheart of the Rodeo

"On A Night Like This" mp3
by Los Lobos, 2003.
available on Masked & Anonymous

"Going, Going, Gone" mp3
by Son Volt, 2000.
available on A Retrospective 1995-2000 EP

"I Was Young When I Left Home" mp3
by Antony with Bryce Dessner, 2009.
available on Dark Was the Night

"Billy" mp3
by Gillian Welch, 2006.
available on Music From The Revelator

"Buckets of Rain" mp3
by Vic Chesnutt, 2003.
available on Crossing Jordan

"Dark Eyes" mp3
by Dirty Projectors, 2010.
Like A Version Radio Session





"Knockin' On Heavens Door" mp3
by Television, 1977.
available on The Blow Up

"Every Grain Of Sand" mp3
by Emmylou Harris, 1995.
unreleased demo

"Girl Of The North Country" mp3
by Howard Tate, 1972.
available on Howard Tate

"Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You" mp3
by Esther Phillips, 1969.
available on Best of Esther Phillips (1962-70)

"I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" mp3
by Bobby Darin, 1972.
available on Aces Back to Back

"One Too Many Mornings" mp3
by Jerry Jeff Walker, 1977.
available on A Man Must Carry On

"Tomorrow Is A Long Time" mp3
by Nick Drake, 1968.
available on Family Tree

"Don't Think Twice It's Alright" mp3
by Waylon Jennings, 1964.
available on Phase One: The Early Years 1958-1964

"It Ain't Me Babe" mp3
by Johnny Cash & June Carter, 1967.
available on Carryin' On With Johnny Cash & June Carter





"Love Is Just a Four Letter Word" mp3
by Joan Baez, 1968.
available on Vanguard Sessions: Baez Sings Dylan

"Only a Hobo" mp3
by Hazel Dickens, 1985.
available on It's Hard to Tell the Singer From the Song

"Blowin' In The Wind" mp3
by O.V. Wright, 1970.
available on How Many Roads: Black America Sings Bob Dylan

"Fur Slippers" mp3
by B.B. King, 1999.
available on Shake Rattle & Roll

"Percy's Song" mp3
by the Fairport Convention, 1969.
available on Unhalfbricking

"Ballad Of Hollis Brown" mp3
by Tony Joe White, 1968.
available on Swamp Music: the Complete Monument Recordings





"Changing Of The Guards" mp3
by Patti Smith, 2007.
available on Twelve

"A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" mp3
by Bryan Ferry, 1973.
available on These Foolish Things

"Tell Me Mama" mp3
by Robyn Hitchcock, 2002.
available on Robyn Sings

"She's Your Lover Now" mp3
by Luxuria w/ Howard Devoto, 1988.
b-side of Redneck single.
out of print

"If You Gotta Go, Go Now" mp3
by Mae West, 1966.
available on Way Out West
out of print

"Baby, I'm In The Mood For You" mp3
by Dion, 1965.
available on Bronx Blues: The Columbia Recordings (1962 - 1965)

"Rita May" mp3
by Jerry Lee Lewis, 1979.
available on Jerry Lee Lewis Box Set

"Wallflower" mp3
by Buddy and Julie Miller,
available on Buddy & Julie Miller

"Halls Of Justice/Positively 4th Street/Like A Rolling Stone" mp3
by Terry Melcher, 1974.
available on Terry Melcher

"When I Paint My Masterpiece" mp3
by the Band, 1971.
available on Cahoots

"Goin' To Acapulco" mp3
by Jim James & Calexico, 2007.
available on I'm Not There

"Nothing Was Delivered" mp3
by the Byrds, 1968.
available on Sweetheart of the Rodeo

"Too Much of Nothing" mp3
by Albert Lee, 1969.
available on Thats All Right Mama





"Wanted Man" mp3
by Johnny Cash, 1969.
available on Essential Johnny Cash

"Seven Days" mp3
by Ron Wood, 1979.
available on Gimme Some Neck

"George Jackson" mp3
by JP Robinson, 1972.
available on Sanctified Soul

"Winterlude" mp3
by Joe Ely, 2005.
available on To: Kate a Benefit for Kate's Sake





"This Wheel's On Fire" mp3
by the Band, 1968.
available on Music From Big Pink

"Tears Of Rage" mp3
by Gene Clark, 1971.
available on Gene Clark (aka White Light)

"Most Of The Time" mp3
by Sophie Zelmani, 2003.
available on Masked & Anonymous

"Emotionally Yours" mp3
by the O'Jays, 2006.
available on Beautiful Ballads

"Paths of Victory" mp3
by Cat Power 2000.
available on The Covers Record

"City Of Gold" mp3
by the Dixie Hummingbirds, 2003.
available on Masked & Anonymous

"Just Like A Woman" mp3
by Nina Simone, 1971.
available on To Be Free- The Nina Simone Story

"Farewell Angelina" mp3
by Jeff Buckley, 1992
from WFMU's The Music Faucet
(courtesy: Nicholas Hill)

"I Shall Be Released" mp3
by the Flying Burrito Brothers, 1970.
available on Farther Along: Best Of The Flying Burrito Brothers

A Century of Big Joe

Big Joe Turner lookin’ east and west
From the dark room of his mind
He made it to Kansas City
Twelfth Street and Vine

-Bob Dylan "High Water (for Charley Patton)"


Big Joe Turner was born one-hundred years ago today. I could listen to him all day long. In fact, I may just do that. It's my birthday too. Bob Dylan is gonna be seventy next week. That's pretty old to be dragging your ass and a rock' n roll band all over the world every year. I tip my hat to him, and he tips his hat to Big Joe at least twice on 2001's Love & Theft. First, by name check (cited above) and second, by melody on "Summer Days." Songwriter, Doc Pomus said his life was changed when as a fifteen year old kid he first heard Joe Turner's record, "Piney Brown Blues," a recording that merged Jazz and Blues into an intersection of what would become R & B and eventually Rock 'n Roll. Pomus modeled his early singing style after Turner's deep wide shout, and later wrote songs for him including "Boogie Woogie Country Girl" which you can hear below. The other side of that record, "Corrine, Corrina," was a blues standard and recorded by dozens artists. It was written by Bo Chatmon, fiddler for the Mississippi Sheiks, (whose music Dylan is well acquainted with). However, I'd venture to say that it was most likely this version that Bob Dylan first heard as a teenager.

"Get it Daddy, get it!"

Download:



"Boogie Woogie Country Girl" mp3
by Joe Turner, 1956.
available on Very Best of Big Joe Turner



"Corrine, Corrina" mp3
by Joe Turner, 1956.
available on Very Best of Big Joe Turner

******

"Boogie Woogie Country Girl" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1995.
available on Till the Night Is Gone: Tribute to Doc Pomus
out of print

"Corrina, Corrina" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1962.
available on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan Outakes
out of print

Like A Complete Unknown

"I Was Young When I Left Home" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1961.
available on Love And Theft (Bonus Disc)

"When I arrived, it was dead-on winter. The cold was brutal and every artery of the city was snowpacked, but I'd started out from the frostbitten North Country, a little corner of the earth where the dark frozen woods and icy roads didn't faze me. I could transcend the limitations. It wasn't money or love that I was looking for. I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot. My mind was strong like a trap and I didn't need any guarantee of validity. I didn't know a single soul in this dark freezing metropolis but that was all about to change -- and quick."
-Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One, Simon & Schuster © 2004.

New York City is covered in snow, just as it was fifty years ago this week when Bob Dylan first arrived here. And though the exact date is in dispute, it was on or around January 24, 1961. His ambition had outgrown the appropriately named Dinkytown coffeehouse scene in Minneapolis, and while having reinvented himself a few times already at the age of nineteen, Dylan, a self-described "musical expeditionary" with "no past really to speak of, nothin' to go back to, (and) nothin' to lean on" set his sites on brighter pastures: New York City, and the burgeoning folk scene in Greenwich Village to be exact. He also set out to meet his hero Woody Guthrie, who was spending his final years in a hospital in New Jersey suffering from Huntington's Chorea disease.

Dylan arrived in town via the George Washington Bridge in a 4-door Pontiac driven by his friend Fred Underhill. As legend has it, he disembarked and caught a train downtown where he promptly met Fred Neil and found himself a spot in the revue at Cafe Wha? backing Neil on harmonica and playing his own three song set which was the standard alotted time for each performer. His own repertoire at the time consisted almost entirely of Woody Guthrie songs, of which he'd learned most of the catalog. He had yet to write any of his own material to speak of, and from most accounts back in Minnesota, Dylan was a fairly ordinary folk singer with great ambition who did a good Woody Guthrie imitation. He had a lot of game and a "schtick" as was needed to succeed, but whatever it was that he considered success at that time, he certainly could have never imagined what lay in store for him in the coming year.

Dylan describes this moment as his "crossroads," as in Robert Johnson at the crossroads, and this particular one (give or take a block or two) was at the corner of Bleecker and MacDougal. The transformation that took place in the coming months is nothing short of remarkable. In the right place at the right time, he quickly met, learned from, and collaborated with a cast of characters including Dave Van Ronk, Karen Dalton, Fred Neil, and Ramblin' Jack Elliott, as well as his future muse Suze Rotolo. He also met Guthrie. He'd regularly board a bus to New Jersey with his guitar and sit with him in the hospital. Woody would call out song titles (his own) and the young disciple would oblige his requests. He learned fingerpicking, and slowly started writing his own songs, borrowing melodies and form from the vast American songbook of country, blues and folk that he and his contemporaries were mining and appropriating into another new form.

In April, he got his first paying gig, at Gerdes Folk City, with a two week run opening for John Lee Hooker. Izzy Young, of the Folklore Center, offered guidance and tried to help the fledgling midwestern transplant find a record deal. The folk labels all balked. In September, while playing harmonica on a Caroline Hester session for Columbia, he caught the ear of John Hammond, who signed him to a record deal a month later. This was far beyond his wildest dreams that a label such as Columbia would be interested in what he was doing. In Chronicles, Dylan recalls getting a copy of the yet to be released LP of Robert Johnson's Vocalion sides (still relatively unknown outside of a small group of blues aficionados) from Hammond on the day of his signing.

"Over the next few weeks I listened to it repeatedly, cut after cut, one song after another, sitting and staring at the record player. Whenever I did, it felt like a ghost had come into the room, a fearsome apparition."

In early November, he played his first concert as a headliner at the Carnegie Chapter Hall, a small annexed room upstairs from the main hall. A typewritten program for the event included a self-penned biography of his reinvented self. It begins: "Bob Dylan was born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1941. He was raised in Gallup N.M. and before he came to NY earlier this year, he lived in Iowa, S. Dakota and Kansas. He started playing carnivals at the age of 14, accompanying himself on guitar and piano." It goes on to say that he "learned many blues songs from a Chicago street singer named Arvella Gray" and met "Mance Lipscomb, from the Brazos River country of Texas, through a grandson that sang rock and roll."



A few weeks later Dylan would enter the studio and record his first Columbia LP in three short sessions over three days of mostly other people's arrangements and songs. He'd save his own compositions for his next record, which he began working in by the middle of 1962. A half a century after his arrival in New York City, he continues to perpetrate his peculiar brilliance, appropriation and reinvention.

Download:

"This Land is Your Land" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1961.
live at Carnegie Chapter Hall, Nov. 4, 1961.
available on No Direction Home

"In the Pines" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1961.
live at Carnegie Chapter Hall, Nov. 4, 1961.

"Baby, Let Me Follow You Down" (mono) mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1962.
available on Bob Dylan

"Mama Let Me Lay It On You No. 2" mp3
by Blind Boy Fuller, 1937.
available on Complete Recorded Works 4 (1937-38)

"Song To Woody" (mono) mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1962.
available on Bob Dylan

"Hard Times In New York Town" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1961.
available on The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 : Rare And Unreleased, 1961-1991

"Down On Penny's Farm" mp3
by The Bentley Boys, 1929.
available on Anthology Of American Folk Music

"Talkin' New York" (mono) mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1962.
available on Bob Dylan

"Mean Talkin Blues" mp3
by Woody Guthrie, 1945.
available on The Asch Recordings, Vol. 1-4

"Ramblin' Round" mp3
by Woody Guthrie, 1944.
available on The Asch Recordings, Vol. 1-4

"New York Town" mp3
by Woody Guthrie, 1944.
available on The Asch Recordings, Vol. 1-4

"Hard Travelin'" mp3
by Ramblin' Jack Elliott, 1961.
available on Hard Travelin'

"Little Bit of Rain" mp3
by Fred Neil, 1964.
Live at Cafe Au Go Go

"Bleecker & MacDougal" mp3
by Fred Neil, 1965.
available on Bleecker & MacDougal





"Red Are The Flowers" mp3
by Karen Dalton, 1962.
available on Cotton Eyed Joe

"Pastures Of Plenty" mp3
by Karen Dalton, 1962.
available on Cotton Eyed Joe

"Georgie on the IRT" mp3" mp3
by Dave Van Ronk, 1961.
available on The Folkways Years, 1959-1961

"He Was A Friend Of Mine" mp3
by Dave Van Ronk, 1963.
available on Inside Dave Van Ronk

"He Was A Friend Of Mine" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1961.
available on The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 : Rare And Unreleased, 1961-1991

"Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1963.
available on The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 : Rare And Unreleased, 1961-1991

top photo: Bob Dylan on my Rooftop, Third Avenue, New York City, 1962. by John Cohen, from There Is No Eye, Powerhouse Books
© 2001.

Bob Dylan, Karen Dalton, and Fred Neil, 1961.
photograph by Fred McDarrah

4th Time Around

Today is January 8th, which means two things around here. It's the fourth anniversary of the Boogie Woogie Flu, and, of course, it's Elvis's birthday. So, in celebration of these two miraculous events, I, T-Bone Carruthers, Mayor of Fluville, offer you four groups of four songs, four square and for today. They are: four versions of Bob Dylan's answer song to "Norwegian Wood," four songs covered by Elvis on his Memphis Record, the same four songs performed by the King, and four songs about him. Think of them as little EPs.

Things have been somewhat quiet here this year at the Boogie Woogie Flu and without all of the writers who contributed pieces, I don't think I could have kept it going. So, as we begin our 5th time around I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all of you readers and everyone who has helped keep this insane endeavor alive.

Drive safely and have a nice day.

*******

Download:

"4th Time Around" mp3
by Terry Melcher, 1974.
available on Terry Melcher

"4th Time Around" mp3
by Yo La Tengo, 2007.
available on I'm Not There

"4th Time Around" mp3
by Robyn Hitchcock, 2002.
available on Robyn Sings

"4th Time Around" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1966.
available on The Original Mono Recordings


*******




"Stranger In My Own Hometown" mp3
by Percy Mayfield, 1964.
Tangerine 45
out of print

"The Long Black Limousine" mp3
by Wynn Stewart, 1958.
available on California Country

"Any Day Now (My Wild Beautiful Bird)" mp3
by Chuck Jackson, 1962.
available on I Don't Want to Cry

"True Love Travels on a Gravel Road" mp3
by Percy Sledge, 1969.
available on It Tears Me Up


*******

"Stranger In My Own Hometown" mp3
by Elvis Presley, 1969.
available on From Elvis in Memphis

"The Long Black Limousine" mp3
by Elvis Presley, 1969.
available on From Elvis in Memphis

"Any Day Now" mp3
by Elvis Presley, 1969.
available on From Elvis in Memphis

"True Love Travels on a Gravel Road" mp3
by Elvis Presley, 1969.
available on From Elvis in Memphis


*******

"He Was The King" mp3
by Neil Young, 2005.
available on Prairie Wind

"A Century Of Elvis" mp3
by Belle and Sebastian, 1997.
available on Lazy Line Painter Jane

"There's A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop" mp3
(country version)
by Kirsty MacColl, 1981.
from Desperate Character
out of print

"Johnny Bye-Bye" mp3
by Bruce Springsteen, 1983.
available on Tracks

*******

top photo: © Ted Barron, 2011.

The Rootless Cosmopolites

by David Gordon

I first discovered Leonard Cohen in the garbage. I was dumpster diving with some friends in San Francisco, and we found (along with a Nakamichi tape deck I still have) a CD player that was jammed shut. We popped it open with a knife, and The Best of Leonard Cohen was inside. Since it was the only CD we had, we played it over and over. Then I went out and bought everything I could find with his name on it. No doubt I registered that Cohen was a Jewish name – is there a name more Jewish? – but at the time other things intrigued me more: the poetry, the pain, the grown up sex and wisdom. It was adult entertainment, in every sense of those words.

I became a Serge Gainsbourg fan later, after hearing “Bonnie and Clyde,” becoming utterly haunted by it, and realizing he was the same guy who sang those smart, sleazy, slick songs “Je t’aime…moi non plus” and “69 année érotique.” His legend fascinated me too: the louche ladies’ man always looking as though he’d been up all night at the orgy while secretly producing great art. Later I had a girlfriend in Paris who was obsessed with Serge, his grave, the graffiti-covered house. Recommending other singers I thought she’d like, I suggested Cohen. Why? The similar, gravelly voices. The talk-singing. The witty, dark, perverse lyrics. And, I suddenly realized, both were Jews, Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern European descent, a concept that barely made sense to a Japanese Parisian girl who barely knew any Jews besides me. My other suggestion, the CD I made her in NY, only confirmed this hunch: Lou Reed, another lone voice in another wilderness, a Jewish boy from Long Island who’d gone off the reservation into a life of crime, drugs, sex and art. Did every culture have one of these underground Jews? And did someone who loved one love them all?

When my current girlfriend told me on our first date that Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground were her favorites, I knew she was not only beautiful but a woman of rare taste for her generation, and I also realized, without a moment’s hesitation, what else to play for her: Cohen and Gainsbourg, of course, (and of course she loved them, and me for playing them) as well as that other Jewish star: Randy Newman, the strangest creature of all…A Jew with a Southern accent!

In the end, as with so many things, it all leads back to Dylan.

I never registered that Bob Dylan was Jewish until he got born again. As a profoundly secular, atheistic Jew living in the Jewish heartland of NY/NJ, I never gave Mr. Zimmerman’s ethnic or religious background a second thought, since, in my mind, it couldn’t have anything to do with his genius: by definition, nothing that reminded me of middle-class Jewish-American life could be of any interest.

Then he became a Christian, which was much worse. It seemed, frankly, ridiculous. (Although the show I saw during this period was terrific.) It made me realize that the best thing about being a smart, urban Jew was that we didn’t take it all so seriously. It also led me to think about how very Jewish his music had actually always been. There are the myriad Biblical references, too numerous to tally here, with the Old Testament far out-weighing the New. There is the voice itself, closer in some ways to a high, wailing cantor than to Elvis. Just like the other (sort-of) singing, wandering Jews, who are his secret brethren.

There are many other characteristics this group shares: They are intellectual, poetic, high-minded yet low-down, wicked and a little sleazy, portrayed sometimes as sexually depraved or ambiguous and morally or politically suspect. Their singing skills are, let’s say, unconventional, yet their voices became famous. They are seen as prophetic commentators, doom callers with obsessive fans, and as leaders and originators of forms, yet they remain always apart, more like each other than their supposed peers in folk, rock, punk, whatever. Eventually adopted as national or cultural heroes by their home-states, they nevertheless remain uneasy figureheads, critical and in a way forever foreign. They even, as they age, seem to look alike: the sharp noses, the slashed lines around the mouth, the deep-set eyes, open foreheads and thick kinky hair. They look…well they look kind of like some of my relatives…and it suddenly becomes possible to imagine that these guys, Midwesterner, Long Islander, Louisianian, Frenchman, Canadian, all have ancestors from the same shtetl in Russia, or a territory once conquered by Russia.

Weirdly, this profile is almost exactly in keeping with one of the classic anti-Semite stereotypes: the rootless cosmopolitan, the wanderer, the hustler, the intellectual, anti-patriotic, amoral seducer of Christian girls and boys, who insinuates himself into the culture, infecting it with his subversive ideas, his degenerate songs and decadent art, but nevertheless remaining eternally alien.

It turns out that they were right to be afraid, for the little sneaky Jews have triumphed. It is, I would argue, a counter-lineage, a line of Jewish development just as noble as, if less frequently acknowledged than, the rabbinical one, and among its great figures I would include Philip Roth, Larry David, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Walter Benjamin, Kafka and Freud. The dirty-minded, dark-hearted, deep-souled and golden-voiced Jewboys, who carried their weird little light all over this dark globe. I’m proud to be their humble descendant. Happy Hanukkah and YWHW bless us all!

Download:

"Tower of Song" mp3
by Leonard Cohen, 1988
available on I'm Your Man

"God's Song (That's Why I Love Mankind)" mp3
by Randy Newman, 1972.
available on Sail Away

"I'm Set Free (Closet Mix)" mp3
by The Velvet Underground, 1969.
available on Peel Slowly and See

"Ring Them Bells" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1988.
available on Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8

"Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus" mp3
by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin
available on Jane Birkin et Serge Gainsbourg

**********

David Gordon's first novel, The Serialist, will be published by Simon & Schuster in March 2010.