Blue Moon

Tonite is an astrologer's wet dream. Did I just say that? I know very little about astrology, but the moon in our skies is a blue one, or more precisely the second full moon of the month, with a partial eclipse, and it's made of (blue) cheese. It's also New Years Eve. The term, "once in a blue moon" has come to mean seldom, rarely, or perhaps never. Apply this as you wish, to whatever may be your current milieux. A full moon is prone to wreak emotional intensity or mahyem. Wolves howl at them, and singers sing about them.

"Blue Moon" is a Rogers and Hart standard. Lorenz Hart wrote four different sets of lyrics to it for four different Hollywood films. The one that stuck, has been recorded by hundreds of artists, and the Elvis Presley version of 1954, is in my mind, one of the most beautiful and haunting records ever recorded. Sam Phillips summoned up some real magic that day in Memphis. Another beautiful and different song of the same name, was recorded by Big Star, in the same city twenty years later with another shaman producer--the late great Jim Dickinson--at the helm.

Bill Monroe's 1947 hit, "Blue Moon of Kentucky" is also a standard, in bluegrass, country, and rock 'n roll. Elvis recorded it in the same sessions that yielded "Blue Moon." In Monroe's version, it's a sad and plaintive waltz to a lost love, ("It was on a moonlight night/ The stars were shining bright/ and they whispered from on high/ Your love has said goodbye"). The stars are whispering to Monroe and he asks the moon to shine on the one that's gone and left him blue. Bill Monroe was a spiritual man, and made some of the spookiest records I know. In some folktales, a blue moon has a face and talks to those in it's light. Elvis, states the same, but asks a favor of the moon in a new set of lyrics for the introduction, "Keep on shining bright and bring me back my baby tonite."

What does all this mean? I haven't a clue. Consult an astrologer.

Happy New Year, and may the moon shine on you and yours, brightly, tonight.




Download:

"Blue Moon" mp3
by Elvis Presley, 1954.
available on Elvis at Sun

"Blue Moon" mp3
by Big Star, 1974
available on Keep An Eye On The Sky



"Blue Moon of Kentucky" mp3
by Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys, 1947.
available on Bill Monroe: Anthology

"Blue Moon of Kentucky" mp3
by Elvis Presley, 1955.
available on Elvis at Sun

The Journey Is The Destination

Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then they dream of love...

-Mercutio, Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare

This week Sony unfurled the latest in the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series. Volume 8 contains unreleased and little-known tracks from 1989 to the present. In Dylan's sprawling archive of songs, this constitutes the later period, even though some of these tracks are nearly twenty years old. The highlights of the release are the alternate and unused tracks from 1997's Time Out Of Mind, a bitter, dark, and ultimately beautiful record that reflects on loss and alienation. Time Out Of Mind is not a light record. It starts with the following lines:

I'm walking through streets that are dead
Walking, walking with you in my head
My feet are so tired, my brain is so wired
And the clouds are weeping

Did I hear someone tell a lie?
Did I hear someone's distant cry?
I spoke like a child; you destroyed me with a smile
While I was sleeping

I'm sick of love but I'm in the thick of it
This kind of love I'm so sick of it...

For the next hour or so the singer walks us down dirt roads, paces around rooms, lays around one-room country shacks, rides midnight trains, drifts in and out of dreamless sleep, walks through the middle of nowhere, rolls through stormy weather, is lost somewhere and has made a few bad turns. This is a picture of a man shot out of a cannon, alone and drifting though time and space, wandering a bleak landscape. In the one slightly "lighter" track, the sixteen-minute talking blues "Highlands," based around a repeating Charlie Patton guitar riff, Dylan has a playful conversation with a waitress, yet still he explains:

Insanity is smashin' up against my soul
You could say I was on anything but a roll

It's grim out there. I listened to this record on a road trip - start to finish - last summer for the first time in a few years. I made a conscious decision to leave my iPod (which usually operates only in shuffle) at home and to bring only CDs in my rented vehicle. For whatever reason, this is the one Dylan record I brought and I played it multiple times as I whizzed through the landscape.

In "Not Dark Yet" he gets a letter written "so kind," which got me thinking about another song, "Tryin' To Get to You," best known from Elvis Presley's Sun Sessions, which contains my favorite Scotty Moore guitar part. Sam Phillips erased Elvis's piano track which leaves Scotty playing an alternating lead and rhythm part, start to finish. In "Tryin To Get To You," featured here below in multiple versions, including the original by vocal group The Eagles - no, not those Eagles - the singer also gets a loving letter, and sets out on a journey to find his baby. We never really find out if he gets there. He travels over mountains, through valleys, night and day, trying to get there.

So, allow me to go out a limb here, and consider that maybe these songs from Time Out Of Mind, offer the view of the aftermath and the unraveling of the mind and the soul of a man following a fruitless search - that maybe the letter was just a cruel hoax - and the singer has readjusted his expectations from trying to get to her, to "trying to get to heaven, before they close the door".

Download:

"Tryin' To Get To You" mp3
by The Eagles, 1954.
available on We're Gonna Rock - We're Gonna Roll

"Tryin' To Get To You" mp3
by Elvis Presley, 1955.
available on The Sun Sessions

"Tryin' To Get To You" (alternate version) mp3
by Roy Orbison, 1956.
available on Rocker

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

"Tryin' To Get To Heaven" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1997.
available on Time Out of Mind

"Million Miles" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1997.
available on Time Out of Mind

"Standing In The Doorway" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1997.
available on Time Out of Mind

"Not Dark Yet" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1997.
available on Time Out of Mind

"Red River Shore" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1997.
available on Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8

"Can't Wait" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1997.
available on Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8

"Marching To The City" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1997.
available on Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8

top photograph © Mark Seliger

Midnight

Most of these posts here at the flu are composed in the middle of the night. I've always been nocturnal, and those who know me know I don't sleep much. I get some of my best work done in the middle of the night. Here's a group of songs that reference the witching hour.

It's late now. I'm going to bed.




















Download: "Ooh Midnight" mp3
by Pete "Guitar" Lewis, 1952.
available on Midnight at the Barrelhouse

more PGL Here and Here



















Download: "Wee Wee Hours" mp3
by Chuck Berry, 1955.
available on Blues



















Download: "Rocking After Midnight" mp3
by Lowell Fulson, 1949.
Available on Lowell Fulson: 1946-1953



















Download: "The Midnite Man" mp3
by Bill Justis, 1957.
available on Raunchy: The Very Best of Bill Justis
























Download: "Midnite Blues" mp3
by Charlie Rich, 1962.
available on Sun Sessions


****************** BONUS *********************

Download:

"Midnight" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 2006
Theme Time Radio Hour 24: Time

"Midnight Train" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1965.
available on Dimestore Medicine

"Old Angel Midnight" mp3
by Jack Kerouac with Steve Allen, 1958.
available on The Jack Kerouac Collection

photograph: Kit, Paris, 1995. © Ted Barron