Mississippi Fred McDowell

by Pete Simonelli

Mississippi Fred McDowell: Live at the Gaslight
Recorded: November 5th, 1971, New York City

Several years, and many miles, after his discovery by the great (and sometimes controversial) Blues musicologist, Alan Lomax, Mississippi Fred McDowell’s two sets this night in New York City proved to be the culmination of a long and rich career.

Born in Rossville, Tennessee, McDowell settled in Como, Mississippi in the early 40s, working as a plowman and cultivating his distinct style of slide guitar in local picnics and dances in the region known as The Hills: an area just north of the Mississippi Delta, noted for its own brand of Blues that hewed closer to the African tradition of repetitive rhythms, or “vamps.” He was taught to play slide guitar by an uncle, gradually using a beef rib bone before turning to a pocket knife and, later, as his style and gift were fully developed, a more common glass side he wore on his ring finger. Lomax arrived in 1959 and found McDowell and his wife on their porch, “looking like a couple of hungry blackbirds.” A questionable allusion today, but Lomax said Fred was, understandably, “eager to record.” In his highly acclaimed book, The Land Where the Blues Began, Lomax continues, “We recorded outdoors after dark, by flashlight. No wind was blowing, and the katydids were out of season, so we could take advantage of the living quiet of open air and the natural resonance of the earth and the trees….The sound we captured made us all deliriously happy.”

That same kind of sensation comes across in the intimate setting of the Gaslight. Greeted by an eager and excitable crowd, McDowell takes that energy and works off it throughout the entire recording. People gleefully heckle and cheer him on, entirely in love with him. It goes on like this throughout the show, McDowell being a consummate showman and kindly host, peppering his tuning breaks with explanations of how the Blues, “and Spirituals, too”, are conveyed to him and thus onto his listeners. He never flaunts his authority over the music, never condescends or rhapsodizes the crowd with hollow banter. Instead, he relies on a convivial and sympathetic approach. And as the songs unfold in alternating bouts of grief and redemption, sorrow and joy, the easy, fluid mastery of his playing--- and by extension, his personality--- is undeniable.

Given the palpable sweat and heat that reaches out of this recording, you’d never think that winter was fast approaching outside the Gaslight that night. But it was in fact an approaching cold that would settle over the world when, just a few short months later, Fred McDowell would die of cancer in 1972. Listening to these songs, accompanied by the late Tom Pomposello on bass (who also provides the liner notes and some fond, insightful memories to the collection), is an intimate and sometimes chilling experience when considering the proximity of McDowell’s death. He never recorded again, and to hear these songs unfold is easily one of the greatest listening pleasures any music lover could have. It’s not essential to be a fan of the Blues; this music resonates with such force and authenticity it would be hard not to feel instantly moved by McDowell’s singular ability to make his music stand out and be heard. As he so often said, the Blues “is a feeling, you understand,” and to hear his playing is to understand and capture not only the root of Blues music but what music in general can do for the soul of the listener.

A lofty sentiment perhaps. But if you go straight to the end (yes, straight to the end) of this double CD set, to “Get Right Church”, I think you’ll see what I mean. Granted, it is a haunting number that could unsettle the fainter heart, but the virtuosity of the playing and how McDowell’s plaintive voice combines with the hair-raising, get-right-to-the-bottom-of-the-well tone of his guitar is something beyond explanation. I’ve listened to this song repeatedly for years and my addiction to it is hopeless. I take to it like a dog to an ass scratch; all physical surroundings are lost; I succumb to the feeling.

When the song ends I turn around and play it again, thinking the only approximation to this kind of performance can be found in the likes of Son House or Skip James (each of whom are welcome inspirations to McDowell). There’s an ethereal, transcendent quality to the performance. Pomposello holds a grinding rhythm as McDowell luxuriates over the top of it, sometimes falling in with the bass line for a beat or two before he winds out of it and lets the guitar punctuate and/or finish the lyric. Many bluesmen---from Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, Sleepy John Estes on down---substitute notes for the voice and finish a lyric; I realize it’s nothing new. But to hear it so closely (due to the great mastering of the recording) and with such acoustic density is truly akin to watching the show along with all the other fortunate folks who were there that night. You just have to close your eyes.

Another notable song, “Red Cross Store”, can also be found on the second of the two CD’s (track no.7). To call this number anything other than an indictment would be wrong. Even more so, this particular take is a variation on the original lyrics. Instead of a man taken to task by a woman, McDowell counters that idiom with a stirring version about a man looking to feed his family. Encountering the sheer rejectionof an otherwise charitable organization--- “Go ‘way, boy, you know times got hard.”--- the song veers between an urgency and a telling narrative built on the era’s social injustice that isn’t found too often in McDowell’s catalogue. Though the driving rhythm is a signature style and serves up much of the tune’s anger, a resentful McDowell tells us from the outset: “Well I ain’t!/ gwine back!/ to that!/ Red Cross!!/ store no more // ain’t gon/ na let my baby go back (to that) Red Cross/ store no more.” This is the verse that gets me, the opener, because you know something’s terribly wrong (the delivery tells us as much) and he’s not having it. When followed by the vow that he won’t let his baby go back either, I hear the conviction of a loving and righteous soul who won’t let anyone else suffer the way he already has.

By the third and fourth verses he’s laid out the story for us: boll weevils in the meat, (corn) meal, and lard, and there’s absolutely nothing to show for anybody’s work. The very people who have tended to the food--- sowed it, reaped it, and slaughtered it--- are suddenly told that it’s not available to them; it’s tainted, and there’s not a damned thing anybody’s going to do about it. The Blues, indeed.

On a lighter note, listen for something really cool at the very opening of the song. After a short tuning, McDowell slowly, almost cautiously, begins the song, letting it find its swing. Just as it starts to ramp up, a woman in the audience cuts loose and screams right into the song. It sounds like she’s launching it to fruition, and it’s the kind of enthusiasm that makes any great set a little more memorable. I sometimes go back to “Red Cross Store” just so I can hear her again.

This is standard-bearing work and shows us an artist, poet and farmer in one of his finest hours. Lomax would go on to lament Fred’s preference for electric Blues, believing that he’d lost one of his golden boys to the bright lights and flashy suits, but there’s really nothing lost at all. The porch is just New York City now.

Download:

“Get Right Church” mp3
"Red Cross Store" mp3
"Someday Baby" mp3
"When The Saints Go Marchin' In" mp3
"You Got To Move" mp3

by Mississippi Fred McDowell, 1971.
available on Live at the Gaslight

this photograph:
by William Eggleston,
Untitled, 1972.

top photograph:
by Lee Friedlander
Fred McDowell, Senatobia, Mississippi, 1960.

Billy Lee Riley Needs Your Help

This notice originally appeared on the Rockabilly Hall of Fame site:

Billy Lee Riley, one of the remaining original Sun Records artists is in VERY bad need of help! Billy has had his share of health problems, and is now battling Stage FOUR bone cancer.

Although MusiCares is helping with house payment, car and such, He and Joyce are totally out of money and can barely afford to eat. This is a CALL FOR HELP to all musicians and fans. Please remember, twenty bucks from all of us would make a HUGE difference in Billy's life! What if this was you? Let's all get together and send something today to Billy and Joyce and show them that he means alot to us. If you have a website, a facebook or myspace, please post this need for help on it! We can't save the world, but it will mean alot in Billy Lee's life!

His Address is:

Billy Lee Riley
723 Crest Drive
Jonesboro, Arkansas 72401

Or Donate via PayPal to bob@rockabillyhall.com

Download:

"Flying Saucers Rock n' Roll" mp3
by Billy Lee Riley, 1957.
available on Red Hot: The Best of Billy Lee Riley

"Red Hot" mp3
by Billy Lee Riley, 1957.
available on Red Hot: The Best of Billy Lee Riley

"Wouldn't You Know" mp3
by Billy Lee Riley, 1958.
available on Red Hot: The Best of Billy Lee Riley

via The Hound Blog

Freedom

Download:

"Freedom" mp3
by Alan Vega, Alex Chilton, Ben Vaughn, 1996.
available on Cubist Blues

"Freedom Part 1" mp3
by Charles Mingus, 1962.
available on The Complete Town Hall Concert

"Freedom Part 2 (Clark in the Dark)" mp3
by Charles Mingus, 1962
available on The Complete Town Hall Concert




"Freedom Blues" mp3
by Little Richard, 1971.
available on Rill Thing

"Freedom Train" mp3
by James Carr, 1969.
available on The Complete Goldwax Singles

"Freedom Street" mp3
by Ken Boothe, 1971.
available on Freedom Street

"Everytime I Think of Freedom" mp3
by Karen Dalton, 1962.
available on Cotton Eyed Joe

"Chimes of Freedom" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1964.
available on Another Side of Bob Dylan

top photo: © Ted Barron
Washington Square, New York City, 1984.

Body and Soul

by Chris O' Leary

It’s the first and only record I ever heard of that all the squares dig as well as the jazz people, and I don’t understand how and why, because I was making notes all the way. I wasn’t making a melody for the squares.

-Coleman Hawkins

“Body and Soul,” jazz standard of standards, turns eighty years old in 2010. It is jazz’s benchmark, warhorse, rite of passage, litmus test: I can’t think of a single major jazz musician, post-1930, who hasn’t taken it on, from Roy Eldridge to John Coltrane to Anthony Braxton, from Billie Holiday to Sarah Vaughan to Betty Carter, from Art Tatum to Thelonious Monk to Sun Ra. The fecundity, the sheer number, of its interpretations is staggering--in 1980 Gary Giddins estimated that some 3,000 versions of “Body and Soul” had been recorded, and likely at least a thousand more have come in the decades since.

Still, “Body and Soul” is a strange breed of eternal. It’s an odd song, with a melodramatic, sometimes clunky lyric (“my life a wreck you’re making”), a steeplechase harmonic structure with a wide range and a knotted string of key changes (the bridge alone is dizzying, starting a half-step above the home key of D-flat major, then dropping to a half-step below before it wends its way back to the chorus), and a ghost of a melody which sounds upon hearing it that you’ve dreamt it somewhere first.

The 22-year-old composer Johnny Green debuted the song in a 1930 Broadway show called “Three’s a Crowd”. The producers at first considered “Body and Soul” a dud, cutting it from a few tryout performances, while Robert Sour and Edward Heyman dashed out a series of lyrics in a bid to resuscitate it. (Frank Eyton, an arranger at the song publisher Chappell & Co., is also credited as a songwriter, though he’s there mainly for business reasons.) The final lyric, including the soon-to-be-altered line “my life a hell you’re making,” even got the song banned from a few radio stations in the early ‘30s.

Libby Holman made “Body and Soul” famous in “Three’s a Crowd” and the song’s dark, obsessive sentiments seem keyed to Holman’s brutal pageant of a life. A stage singer with a taste for younger women and men (including Montgomery Clift), Holman may have killed her husband, an heir to the Reynolds tobacco fortune. She first claimed he shot himself, and later that she had been so drunk she didn’t remember anything; she was indicted for murder but skipped sentencing because she was pregnant. After another of her husbands killed himself with barbiturates, she toured the world, sponsored Martin Luther King’s trip to India and befriended and bedded, respectively, Paul and Jane Bowles. One day in June 1971 her servants found her slumped in the front seat of her Rolls Royce, dead of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Holman’s recording of “Body and Soul” was one of many first-wave versions rushed out during the last months of 1930, along with those from flapper singer Annette Hanshaw and Paul Whiteman’s and Ozzie Nelson (Ricky’s father)’s big bands. Louis Armstrong’s take, cut at the same time, was released two years later, where it served as the first of many revivals of the song. The Benny Goodman Trio’s elegant version from 1935 did the same.

Making Notes All the Way

It’s possible that “Body and Soul” would have faded over time, in the way Johnny Green’s other standards like “Out of Nowhere” did, into a cult song occasionally dusted off by an enterprising jazzman. And then on 11 October 1939 Coleman Hawkins reincarnated “Body and Soul” as a masterpiece of pure improvisation.



"Body and Soul" mp3
by Coleman Hawkins, 1939.
available on Body and Soul: The Complete Victor Recordings 1939-1956 Master Tapes

Hawkins’ version is a two-chorus tenor saxophone improvisation that discards the original melody after the first few bars, and some 100,000 copies of it sold in the first six months of its release. Hawkins recorded it in one take, having come into the studio after playing all night at the NYC club Kelly’s Stable. He later said doing ‘Body and Soul’ hadn’t even crossed his mind:

“That tune was the least of my ideas. There were other tunes I preferred…when I got back to America, maybe once in a while in the middle of the night I would play ‘Body and Soul.’ Every time I played it different and people seemed to like it enough.” Told that one of the label execs had heard him do “Body and Soul” live and wanted Hawkins to record it, Hawkins agreed to do one take. He took a swig of Cognac and told the pianist Gene Rogers to play an introduction. No rehearsal, no charts. Off he went. “I didn’t even have an arrangement on it,” Hawkins said. “I didn’t want to play it at all, so I just played it through once and made up the ending when I got to it. The ending, as it turned out, was one of the funniest things I ever played in my life. Like the way the horns came in on the last chord.” (From John Chilton’s The Song of the Hawk.)

The first time Hawkins heard his “Body and Soul,” on a jukebox in Harlem’s Fat Man Charlie Turner’s Rib Place, he was surprised at how good it sounded. His contemporaries were stunned. Chu Berry told Hawkins he was playing “the wrong notes” on the record, while Thelonious Monk couldn’t grasp its appeal to squares and “old folks” (“I could understand if you played melody, because that’s what they like. [But] there’s no melody in there, what are they listening to?” he later told Hawkins). Nat King Cole dragged people into a dive bar on Central Avenue in Los Angeles to hear it on the jukebox. The young John Coltrane played the disc over and over, trying to figure out Hawkins’ arpeggios. Randy Weston tried to work it out on his piano, breaking the solo down note by note.

After Hawkins, “Body and Soul” had two lives. Subsequent generations of jazz players took Hawkins’ cue and used the genetic material of “Body and Soul” for their own ends, as the basis for a series of extravagant self portraits. Some of the finest include Jimmy Blanton’s 1940 take, a phenomenal bass solo that is first bowed and then, after a Duke Ellington piano interlude, plucked as if Blanton had adamantine fingers; Boyd Raeburn’s fusion--part Schoenberg, part Science Fiction movie soundtrack--from 1946; James Moody’s wistful dream, from 1949; Serge Chaloff’s baritone sax reverie, recorded while Chaloff was in a wheelchair due to spinal paralysis in 1955; Sonny Rollins’ a cappella bravado from 1958; Monk’s spiky, burrowing take from 1962, in which he seems to be trying to test the patience of the “old folks” that bewildered him years ago; John Coltrane’s stately version from 1960; Dexter Gordon’s multiple charges up the mountain. Hawkins himself recorded a tune called “Rainbow Mist” in 1944 which uses the same chord sequence of “Body and Soul”; it’s the closest he ever came to doing a sequel.



"Rainbow Mist" mp3
by Coleman Hawkins, 1944.
available on Rainbow Mist

The singers, however, kept up “Body and Soul”’s parallel existence, as a torch ballad that seems to disregard the basic rules of romantic songs. The singer doesn’t seem to really care about his or her lover except as an object of obsession—the singer is reduced to offering only physical release, and doesn’t seem concerned whether the lover responds in kind, saying only that they will keep up the pursuit until they’re satiated or something worse happens.

Its ominous, moonstruck sentiments were captured by singers like Sarah Vaughan, who recorded an elegant trio version in 1954, or Holiday, who took it on twice, a honeyed love song in 1940 (listen to how sweetly she sings a line like “my days have grown so lonely”), and a weary reminiscence in 1957, or Frank Sinatra, whose 1947 take offers the song in its purest form.

Why has “Body and Soul” captivated so many for so long? Perhaps it’s not as much of a mystery as it may appear. Musicians can’t get enough of that melody, and there’s so much bounty in Johnny Green’s elaborate composition that one can tap it for a long time without going dry. And perhaps it’s finally become a self-generating machine—the more the finest jazz players take it on, the more their ambitious successors try to best them at it. A fractured ray of moonlight, a stalker’s set of artless sentiments, “Body and Soul” has persisted far beyond the ambitions of its distracted makers. Listen to the tracks here, revel in them, and know that you’ve scarcely scratched the surface.

Download:

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Louis Armstrong, 1930.
available on The Big Band Sides 1930/32

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Benny Goodman Trio, 1935.
available on After You've Gone

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Django Reinhardt, 1937.
available on Django Rheinhardt Anthology 1934-1937



"Body and Soul" mp3
by Billie Holiday, 1940.
available on Lady Day: The Master Takes and Singles

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Duke Ellington and Jimmy Blanton, 1940.
available on Complete RCA Victor Recordings

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Charlie Parker, 1942.
guitar: Efferege Ware
available on Bird in Time 1940-1947

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Ben Webster, 1944.
available on Tenor Men: Titans of the Sax



"Body and Soul" mp3
by Roy Eldridge, 1944.
available on After You've Gone

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Lester Young, 1945.
available on The Complete Aladdin Recordings



"Body and Soul" mp3
by Boyd Raeburn, 1946.
vocal: Ginnie Powell
available on Boyd Meets Stravinsky

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Frank Sinatra, 1947.
available on A Voice in Time: 1939-1952

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Sarah Vaughan, 1954.
available on Swingin' Easy

"Body and Soul" mp3
Sonny Rollins, 1958.
available on Sonny Rollins and the Big Brass

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Charles Mingus, 1960.
available on Reincarnation of a Lovebird

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Eric Dolphy, 1960.
available on Candid Dolphy

"Body and Soul" mp3
by John Coltrane, 1960.
available on Coltrane's Sound

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Sun Ra, 1960.
available on Holiday for Soul Dance

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Thelonious Monk Quartet, 1962.
available on Monk's Dream

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Dexter Gordon, 1970.
available on The Panther!

"Body and Soul" mp3
by Anthony Braxton, 1974.
available on In the Tradition, Vol. 2

"Body and Soul" mp3
Charlie Haden, 1986.
available on Quartet West

**************************************
For more versions of the standard, visit the always formidable and awesome Locust Street. [ed.]

Weegee Speaks!

"It's like a modern Aladdin's lamp. You rub it--in this case, the camera-- you push the button and it gives you the things you want"

Today's mp3s come courtesy of my friend Laura Levine, fellow photographer, artist, and proprietor of Homer & Langley's Mystery Spot Antiques. Recently, Laura purchased a collection of 15,000 LPs to sell at the shop, and among them was this very rare and curious gem, Famous Photographers Tell How. Below you can hear Weegee talk about picture-making. It's interesting to hear his voice, which is one of those accents you don't hear so much in New York anymore: part Austro-Hungarian immigrant by way of the Lower East Side and part Elmer Fudd. Peter Sellers based his accent in Dr. Strangelove on Weegee's voice after Weegee visited Kubrick's set. One of my favorite things in Weegee's classic 1945 book, Naked City is the last chapter called "Camera Tips" where he gives away some of his tricks of the trade. Dated or not, I learned a tremendous amount when I first read it, about picture taking, and about Weegee.



Download:

"Weegee" mp3
by Weegee, 1958.
from Famous Photographers Tell How
out of print



"Now the easiest kind of a job was a murder, because the stiff would be laying on the ground. He couldn't get up and walk away and get tempermental and he would be good for at least two hours."

Arthur Fellig adopted the name Weegee or "Weegee the Famous," alluding to the Ouija board and his knack for being first on the scene is in his days as a roving news and street photographer. It wasn't an accident or any supernatural pre-disposition that he was there first at the fires, murders and general mayhem that he recorded in Gotham. Weegee was the first photographer to have a police scanner (originally in his one room tenement flat across the street from NYC police headquarters and later getting another for his Buick). His photographs of New York from the 30s and 40s are iconographic images of the city and it's inhabitants (both high and low) and important photographs, whether he intended them to be or not. It's been suggested that he was naive, and not a sophisticated photographer, but I don't really believe it, and it doesn't really matter. These pictures are as real as it gets, and great works of art. (see Atget) Later in his career, when he got the idea that he was an artiste is when the pictures became less interesting. (see Richard Avedon)



"I will walk many times with friends down the street and they'll say 'Hey, Weegee. Here's a drunk or two drunks laying on the gutter' I take one quick look at that and say 'They lack character.' So, even a drunk must be a masterpiece!"

A few weeks ago, my friend Chris was in town visiting and we spent part of an afternoon walking around downtown and looking at some of my old favorite places in the city. We came up through Chinatown, and on towards the old police headquarters on Centre Market Place. I told him "Weegee used to live right here, you know." We proceeded up the street, and looking for the John Jovino Gun Shop that had been there since at least the time of the Weegee (he lived upstairs) and I realized it was gone. I found out later that it actually moved around the corner, but something felt strange, like so much of this city that has disappeared in its post-Giuliani homogenization. I've been thinking about it a lot recently as I've been digging through my own archive of photographs that I made in my early days here in New York. I wonder what Weegee would think of the new niceness of his city. He didn't love the misery that the tenements that he grew up in bred - and no one should - but the drama and street theater of New York that he thrived on has been altered in ways that probably wouldn't please him.

Weegee was seltzer, sour pickles, and pastrami.





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

BONUS:




Download:

"Henri Cartier-Bresson" mp3
by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1958.
from Famous Photographers Tell How
out of print

Another segment from Famous Photographers Tell How with
Henri Cartier-Bresson. Eloquent, dry, and French like the great philosopher/mathematician image maker that he was.



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

This record and thousands more, as well as interesting curios of old from near and far are available at Homer & Langley's Mystery Spot Antiques, located in downtown Phoenicia, New York. Tell 'em I sent you.

Jay Bennett 1963-2009

Sad news. Jay Bennett, multi-talented producer, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist, who played with Wilco, during their rise from 1995-2001, died in his sleep yesterday. He was 45 years old, and the cause of death at this time is unknown. His departure from the band and rift with bandmate Jeff Tweedy was (guardedly) documented in the 2002 film, I Am Trying To Break Your Heart. Bennett's pop sensibility and taste for the baroque, as well as his knack for Beatles/Beach Boys melodies and arrangements are highlights of his recordings with the band. His tasty guitar solos were frequently acknowledged by Tweedy from onstage. It's a drag writing obituaries here, and a double-drag when they are for your acquaintances and contemporaries. Here's a few highlights from his tenure with Wilco.

Flags in Fluville are flying at half-mast.


Download:

"Magazine Called Sunset" mp3
by Wilco, 2001.
available on More Like The Moon EP

"Cars Can't Escape" (demo) mp3
by Wilco, 2001.
unreleased

"I Am Trying To Break Your Heart" (alternate) mp3
by Wilco, 2001.
also available on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

"Ashes of American Flags" mp3
by Wilco, 2001.
available on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

"A Shot in the Arm" mp3
by Wilco, 1999.
available on Summerteeth

"When You Wake Up Feeling Old" mp3
by Wilco, 1999.
available on Summerteeth

"My Darling" (demo)
by Wilco, 1999.
also available on Summerteeth

"100 Years From Now" mp3
by Wilco, 1999.
available on Return Of The Grievous Angel

"California Stars" mp3
by Billy Bragg & Wilco, 1998.
available on Mermaid Avenue

"Monday" mp3
by Wilco, 1996.
available on Being There

"Forget The Flowers" mp3
by Wilco, 1996.
available on Being There

"Burned" mp3
by Wilco, 1996.
available on I Shot Andy Warhol

photographs: © Ted Barron
Wilco at the Mercury Lounge, New York City 1996.

Bob's Record Collection (again)

In the liner notes to Bob Dylan's 1993 record, World Gone Wrong, he gives a play-by-play look and commentary into it's ten songs. Well, sort of. In a few pages of a CD booklet he divulges his sources and interprets the meaning of the songs - mostly traditional folk and blues tunes, all old, and for the most part pretty dark - all the while riffing a free association into a look at something that Greil Marcus called "the old, weird America."

Here's a sample. Dylan's talking about a Civil War ballad, called "Two Soldiers."

"... physical plunge into Limitationville, war dominated by finance (lending money for interest being a nauseating & revolting thing) love is not collateral. hittin' em where they aint (in the imperfect state that theyre in) America when Mother was the Queen of Her heart, before Charlie Chaplin, before the Wild One, before the Children of the Sun - before the celestial grunge, before the insane world of entertainment exploded in our faces - before all the ancient and honorable artillery had been taken out of the city, learning to go forward by turning back the clock, stopping the mind from thinking in hours, firing a few random shots at the face of time."

The fluidity and elasticity of time is an interesting subject.

On World Gone Wrong and Good As I Been To You from the previous year, Dylan re-grounded himself by going back to songs he had heard and learned in his early days in New York, and recorded them quickly and simply (voice and guitar) in his garage studio at home. He is, in essence, "firing a few random shots at the face of time." I love these records, and while the record company was probably less than thrilled to get a couple of records of covers - from the songwriter - they serve as stark precursors to his next two records, Time Out Of Mind, and Love and Theft. Dylan, who once said, "don't look back," is without nostalgia, doing just that, and looking forward all the same.

World Gone Wrong, is a collection of murder ballads, songs about gamblers, desperate men, working women, ghosts, trains, soldiers, heartbreak, vigilantes, and essentially - America. Here we have the songwriter as curator in the museum of American Song. So, in celebration of Bob Dylan's 68th birthday, we once again take a look at Bob's record collection, and it's a pretty good one.

Here are Dylan's sources, as best as I could find them. I've made a couple of substitutions: "Jack-A-Roe", he learned from Tom Paley of the New Lost City Ramblers, It appeared on two Elektra collections of Appalachian folk songs from the 1950's, but I've been unable to find a copy. Instead we get an acoustic version from the Grateful Dead. Jerry Garcia, learned this probably from the same record, and also taught "Two Soldiers" to Dylan, which I've substituted for a better version by Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard which Dylan also references in the liner notes.


Download:

"The World Is Going Wrong" mp3
by The Mississippi Sheiks, 1930.
available on Stop and Listen

"Love Henry" mp3
by Tom Paley, 1964.
from Who's Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Foot?
out of print

"Ragged and Dirty" mp3
by William Brown, 1942.
available on Mississippi Blues & Gospel: 1934-1942 Field Recordings

"I've Got Blood In My Eyes For You" mp3
by The Mississippi Sheiks, 1930.
available on Stop and Listen

"Broke Down Engine Blues" mp3
by Blind Willie McTell, 1931.
available on The Definitive Blind Willie McTell

"Delia" mp3
by Blind Willie McTell, 1940.
available on Complete Library of Congress Recordings

"Stackalee" mp3
by Frank Hutchison, 1927.
available on Anthology Of American Folk Music

"Two Soldiers" mp3
by Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard, 1973.
available on Hazel & Alice

"Jack-A-Roe" mp3
by The Grateful Dead, 1981.
available on Reckoning

"The Lone Pilgrim" mp3
by The Doc Watson Family, 1963.
available on The Watson Family


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

There's a handful of outtakes from the World Gone Wrong sessions. These are two of the songs he recorded that didn't make it on the album. "32-20 Blues" came out earlier this year on Tell Tale Signs.

"Hello Stranger" mp3
by The Carter Family, 1938.
available on Volume 2: 1935-1941

"32-20 Blues" mp3
by Robert Johnson, 1936.
available on The Complete Recordings


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

Also recorded in Bob's garage at these sessions, is a version of The Duprees' "You Belong To Me," which is on the soundtrack to Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers. On the soundtrack album there is an annoying monologue by actor Woody Harrelson over an instrumental break in the song. Fluvillian resident Jesse Jarnow has provided this mp3, to which he has applied a little cut and paste to get rid of the monologue.

"You Belong To Me" mp3
by The Duprees, 1962.
available on The Doo Wop Box, Vol. 2

"You Belong To Me" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1993.
also available on Natural Born Killers

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

Buy: World Gone Wrong
by Bob Dylan, 1993.
Columbia Records

top photo: by Douglas R. Gilbert, 1964.
John Sebastian, Bob Dylan, and Ramblin' Jack Elliot

Wolfmoon

I'm not really sure about the details of who Wolfmoon were, except that it is some type of consortium of Swamp Doggery on the Fungus record label. Rule of thumb: when buying records, if it's on the Fungus record label, it's probably a good one. "God Bless." and "My Kinda People," were both written, produced and arranged by Jerry Williams Jr., AKA Swamp Dogg.

This record is unusual in that they are both answer songs to two of Swamp Dogg's earlier compositions , or more precisely - clarification songs . On Swamp Dogg's classic LPs, Total Destruction to Your Mind and Rat On!, there are two numbers called, "God Bless America for What" and "These Are Not My People." Perhaps, the Dogg, not wanting to come off on a negative tip, decided to clarify things with this record, where he proclaims God's love through a child's bedtime prayer for, among others, Deputy Dog, Huckleberry Hound, Elmer Fudd and Mother Goose. On the flip side, he praises the down-home and kind kind of people that make a better kind of world.

These are the liner notes from the LP from which this single was taken:

Win with Pride and Glory, Lose with Style
and Grace and remember no matter how
good you are you can always be replaced.
WOLFMOON IS A MOTHER!

-SWAMP DOGG

God bless Swamp Dogg.


Download:





"God Bless" mp3
by Wolfmoon, 1973.
available on Blame It on the Dogg

"God Bless America for What" mp3
by Swamp Dogg, 1971.
available on Rat On!




"My Kinda People" mp3
by Wolfmoon, 1973.
out of print

"These Are Not My People" mp3
by Swamp Dogg, 1970.
available on Total Destruction To Your Mind

Happy Mother's Day From All Your Friends At The Boogie Woogie Flu

Download:

"Mother Popcorn" mp3
by James Brown, 1969.
available on Star Time

"Answer to Mother Popcorn" mp3
by Vicki Anderson, 1969.
available on Mother Popcorn: The Vicki Anderson Anthology

Del Reeves

It's time to salute the late great Del Reeves. Sure, he's responsible for signing Billy Ray Cyrus, but I think Del regretted that long before he died. Franklin Delano 'Del' Reeves enjoyed a long and storied career as a member of the Grand Ole Opry, hosted his own TV show The Del Reeves' Country Carnival, where he frequently carried on like a Hillbilly Dean Martin, and he also cut two of the greatest truck driving records ever. Both of them are featured here, as well as some tracks from his long out of print live LP recorded at everbody's favorite North Hollywood Honky-Tonk, The Palomino Club.

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Download:





"Looking At The World Through A Windshield" mp3
by Del Reeves, 1968.
available on His Greatest Hits



"Girl On The Billboard" mp3
by Del Reeves, 1965.
available on His Greatest Hits



"Belles of Southern Bell/A Dime At A Time" mp3
"Lonesome Rubin/Going Down The Road Feeling Bad" mp3
"Trucker's Paradise" mp3
by Del Reeves, 1974.
from Live At The Palomino Club.
out of print




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BONUS:

"Lookin' At The World Through A Windshield" mp3
by Son Volt, 1996.
available on Rig Rock Deluxe

Handful of Dust

by Paul Abruzzo

In the early 90s I rented a ludicrously small room in an apartment on Amsterdam Avenue near Columbia. I was drinking constantly, working as a waiter in a glorified diner in midtown, ensnared in self pity, remorse, and depression. I wrote bad, dark poems, and as I went to sleep I prayed into my pillow for the mercy of death to take me in the night. I was supposed to be writing a master’s thesis on the Antifederalists—people opposed to the ratification of the U.S. Constitution—but I hadn’t even started. Volumes of their political tracts lay on my desk like an accusation.

Mostly, I went to a bar a few blocks down from the apartment called Starry Night. A print of the Van Gogh painting hung over the register, a forever-crooked brass light illuminating it from above. A jukebox sat directly across from the bar, its base lit up with the bright colors of Italian ices. The music on it ranged from “This Is Where I Belong” by The Kinks to “Rock Box” by Run D.M.C. I loved that jukebox.

A fat man who called himself San Juan sat at the end of the bar, resting his pudgy arms on the banister-like lip, insinuating himself into every overheard conversation. He sweat prodigiously, particularly late in the night, when he hustled out into the streets on cocaine runs for regulars in exchange for skimming a few bumps. About once a night he’d play Prince's “Sexy M.F.” on the juke, standing to holler a self-referential version of the chorus, “You sexy FAT motha-fucker!” while hula hooping his rotund midsection, the flabby underside of his chin bringing to mind bags of goldfish I got as a kid from the street fair.

I played the jukebox every night, starting with Neil Young’s “Mr. Soul,” from Unplugged. The first line always put me at ease, “Well hello Mr. Soul I dropped by to pick up a reason.” There’s something particularly charismatic in Neil’s voice in this rendition, like the way he annunciates the word “better.” No one in recorded history ever sang a better better. The riff is a graceful rephrasing of “Satisfaction” by the Stones, proving that in music, as in all art, there's infinite space between simple parameters.

One night I fell for an adorable blond. She had green eyes and a white t-shirt and I bought her a beer in a green bottle. She asked me what I was up to. “I’m working on my thesis,” I lied, “and waiting tables.”

“What do you make a shift?” she asked, touching my forearm, sending a warm feeling up to my head, and then down into my heart.

“I don’t know. About 60 for lunch, maybe 120 for dinner.”

“Shit!” she implored. She shook her little pale fist, “that’s what I was making when I did it years ago. It’s so unfair. Why does it never change—ever?”

“Oh, please,” I said, “everywhere you turn there’s a new injustice to make your head explode.”

She laughed.

We discovered we lived across the street from each other, she over the bodega where I went for my cigarettes. I dug my fingernail into the soggy label on my bottle. The air-conditioner over the door droned and rattled. She had the smallest hands and tough, black boots, which intensified my crush. I felt the rush of hope. I felt like my whole life was about to change.

It was quiet. “I’m gonna play music,” she said, and went to the juke. I ordered and drank a shot of scotch. She came back. A song started. I didn’t know it.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“Lucinda Williams,” she said, raising her eyebrows and smiling.

“Never heard it,” I said.

“What?” she slapped her palm to the forehead. “She’s a genius.”

The song playing was “Six Blocks Away.” She said, “I broke up with a guy and he lived exactly six blocks away and I listened to this song over and over.”

“I like it,” I said. Then Lucinda’s “Pineola” came on, a dark tale of a suicide. It gripped me right away. I learned later that the character “Sonny” in the song is based on Frank Sanford, a poet Lucinda knew who took his own life by shooting himself three times in the heart.

The fiddle remains quiet while the narrator sings, but then cries a lament at the end of each verse. There’s something very brave about this song in its attempt to put into words emotional states which can’t be put into words.

When Daddy told me what happened
I couldn't believe what he just said
Sonny shot himself with a .44
And they found him lyin’ on his bed

I could not speak a single word
no tears streamed down my face
I just sat there on the living room couch
staring off into space

The drums are silent until after the line, “Sonny shot himself with a .44,” when the snare cracks as if a bullet shot. The chorus is only sung once, which adds to the drama of the narrative. The last two lines are a repetition of “I think I must have picked up a handful of dust and I let it fall over his grave.” The “I think” in that line is a clever comment on how shock and fear hamper memory. The “handful of dust” is ultimately from the Bible, but more specifically from a famous line in the first section of T.S. Eliot’s “Wasteland” called “The Burial of The Dead.”

I will show you fear in a handful of dust

The song ends with a rather long musical interlude, led by a fiddle dirge, emphasizing the reduction of the narrator to speechlessness, and the sadness of walking away from someone you have just put into the earth.

“What an amazing song,” I said.

“Yes,” she said, slapping the bar, “amazing.”

Then, after a tad, I got real drunk. Too drunk. I’d been drinking fast, and the scotch pushed me over. Also, my blood rushed from nerves, and my head was whirling from the dark beauty of “Pineola.” I began slurring. She abruptly said she had to go, to meet her boyfriend. “Boyfriend!” I thought, “how did that happen?” I was destroyed. I nearly puked on her. She said goodbye, turned and was gone. Her empty green bottle sat there on the bar, patches of foam slowly creeping downward.

In the week or so that followed, I would stand at the living room window in my apartment and try to catch sight of her in one of the windows over the bodega, but never did. I couldn’t get her out of my head for a while, how I’d fucked up an opportunity. I went nuts for Lucinda Williams after that. I ran out and got her records, and whenever I played “Pineola,” or “Six Blocks Away,” that whole night came back to me, that little pale hand and those green eyes.

I met girls in the Starry Night all the time—mostly unkempt lunatics. One was a stripper in a place near Port Authority, a stunning girl with beautiful black skin, enormous round eyes, and hands that never stopped moving. I spotted her standing near San Juan, parrying his sweaty coked-up advances with half-hearted politeness. She wore a ridiculous hat. I walked right over. “I love your hat,” I lied. She called herself Kellie, but that wasn't her name. She asked after my ethnicity. I told her my father's from the Sicilians, and my mother from the Jews, and she lit up.

“I only go out with Jewish guys,” she said, adding bluntly, “my father hates them.” I took her home.

She also loved the jukebox. Her favorite tune on it was The Beastie Boys’s “So What’cha Want.” I introduced her to Tom Waits. I played “Frank’s Wild Years,” from Swordfishtrombones.

“Listen to this,” I said, “listen to the lyrics.” She laughed to the ceiling, gave me a soggy, crumpled dollar.

“Play it again!” she hollered.

After a few nights with her I realized she was basically homeless, carrying all her possessions in a red duffle bag out of which she pulled all kinds of sex toys, contraceptives, and tawdry underwear. One morning I got up and found her at the kitchen table eating a Butterfinger for breakfast, peeling back the paper bite-by-bite with her nervous fingers while mouthing lyrics to a song in her head. My two Latin American roommates—both studious squares—stood in their neatly-tied flower aprons making brunch, quieted and terrified by Kellie, looking to me for help as soon as I came in.

I broke up with Kellie later that night in the bar, when she came in after her shift. She cried briefly, scrounged around in her bag for lip gloss, went to make a phone call, ordered a sweet red drink, shot a game of pool, and had a new boyfriend way before last call. They left together and I was relieved and jealous at the same time. Next time I saw her I nodded over toward him as he chose songs on the juke, “I see you're with that guy now.”

“Yeah,” she said, “it's good. Jordan. He's Jewish.”

I was thinking, "Look at that face: how could I have let her go?” Then Jordan played Lightnin' Hopkins's “Come Back Baby,” one of my favorites. I’d brought a girl along, Beth. I’d met her in a bagel shop on Broadway a couple of hours before. She was a cute, plumpish Jewish girl studying journalism at Columbia.

“You’re with her?” Kellie asked, gesturing with her head over at Beth, who was chatting with the bartender, flopping her hands around.

“Yeah,” I said. She looked Beth up and down.

“I don’t like her,” she said, and walked away. I never saw Kellie again.

I moved. I sobered up. I finished my thesis. I got a real job. I got a lovely, relatively sane girlfriend. I quit the job, then the girlfriend. I drank again. I sobered up.

Then, a remarkable thing happened one night years later. I met a guy and he wanted to fix me up with an old friend of his, Jennifer. I agreed. It was cold, winter. We were all bundled. She looked vaguely familiar as we met on the street and shook hands. We three got in a cab, me in the middle. We went uptown and came to a stoplight on Amsterdam. I realized where we were and pointed over at the white iron grillwork cage laid over the door of my old building.

“I used to live there,” I said.

“Where?” Jennifer asked, shocked.

“Right there,” I said, pointing.

“I live right there,” she said, turning and pointing to the other side of the street, over the bodega. I froze. I looked at her face again to make sure.

I waited until we got out of the cab and walked a few steps. “Jennifer,” I said, “I know you. We've met.”

She looked at me quickly, her eyes narrowing. “When?”

“Oh,” I said, “about…six years ago, in the Starry Night.”

“Really?” she said.

“Yeah, you played Lucinda Williams’s ‘Six Blocks Away,’ and said you broke up with a guy who lived—”

“—Oh my God,” she said, putting her pale little hand up to her open mouth.

A few weeks later, one night, Jennifer and I went over to the Starry Night. The jukebox was gone, and it broke my heart. Some young guy I didn't recognize was working the bar. He had an iPod hooked up to the sound system. The music playing was stuff you’d expect to hear in a mall in Michigan. The place was empty but for two girls in their 20s who shot pool. No San Juan. No Kellie. These were clearly different times, and I felt sad, nostalgic. I had the unreal demand that the Starry Night be exactly as I'd left it.

“Hey listen,” I said to the bartender, “you have any Lucinda Williams on that iPod?”

“No, sorry,” he said, “What is that—country music?”

Jennifer put her hand on my forearm. She smiled.

“Let's go,” she said. I nodded. We walked out into the night, this time together.


***********

Download:

"This is Where I Belong" mp3
by The Kinks, 1967.
available on The Kink Kronikles

"Rock Box" mp3
by Run D.M.C., 1984.
available on Run-D.M.C.

"Sexy M.F." mp3
by Prince, 1992.
available on The Hits 2

"Mr. Soul" mp3
by Neil Young, 1993.
available on Unplugged

"Six Blocks Away" mp3
by Lucinda Williams, 1992.
available on Sweet Old World

"Pineola" mp3
by Lucinda Williams, 1992.
available on Sweet Old World

"So What'Cha Want" mp3
by The Beastie Boys, 1992.
available on Check Your Head

"Frank's Wild Years" mp3
by Tom Waits, 1983.
available on Swordfishtrombones

"Come Back Baby" mp3
by Lightnin' Hopkins, 1946.
available on The Complete Aladdin Recordings

***********

Photograph: © Christian Patterson
Memphis, February 2005 (Lamplighter Jukebox)

Sound Affects by Christian Patterson available at Photo-Eye