I was surprised, but pleased, to see that the late Lawrence Auster, traditionalist conservative, photo to the left, 1973, had a deep appreciation and a wide-ranging knowledge of Dylan's art. Born in 1949, Auster is generationally situated for that appreciation, and as late as '73 was still flying the '60s colors, if we can go by the photo, but age is at best only a necessary condition for digging Dylan. Auster's Jewishness may play a minor role, but the main thing is Auster's attunement to Dylan's particularism. See the quotation below. Herewith, some Dylan songs with commentary by Auster.
The Band, I Shall Be Released. Auster comments:
This Dylan song can seem amorphous and mystical in the negative sense, especially as it became a kind of countercultural anthem and meaningless through overuse. But the lyrics are coherent and profound, especially the first verse:
The modern world tells us that everything is fungible, nothing is of real value, everything can and should be replaced—our spouse, our culture, our religion, our history, our sexual nature, our race, everything. It is the view of atomistic liberal man, forever creating himself out of his preferences, not dependent on any larger world of which he is a part. The singer is saying, No, this isn’t true. Things have real and particular values and they cannot be cast off and replaced by other things. And, though we seem to be distant, we are connected. I am connected to all the men, the creators and builders and poets and philosophers, and my own relatives and friends, who have come before me or influenced me, who created the world in which I live.
They say everything can be replaced
They say every distance is not near
But I remember every face
Of every man who put me here.
Most LIkely You'll Go Your Way (And I'll Go Mine).
First off, some comments of mine on the video which accompanies the touched-up Blonde on Blonde track. The video is very cleverly constructed, providing a synopsis of milestones in Dylan's career. The first girl the guy with the acoustic guitar case is walking with is a stand-in for Suze Rotolo, the girl 'immortalized' on the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan album cover. But now we see the pair from the back instead of from the front. She is replaced by a second girl representing Joan Baez. (Dylan's affair with Baez helped destroy his relationship with Rotolo.) Then the guy gets into a car and emerges on the other side with an electric guitar case. This signifies Dylan's going electric in '65 at the Newport Folk Festival, a change which enraged the die-hard folkies and doctrinaire leftists who thought they owned Dylan as a mouthpiece for their views. A quick shot of a newpaper in a trash can with the headline "Dylan Goes Electric" appears just in case you missed the subtlety of the auto entry-exit sequence. After that we see a downed motorcycle representing Dylan's motorcycle accident, an event that brings to a close the existentialist-absurdist-surrealist phase of the mid-60s trilogy, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. After the accident Dylan is further from the mind and closer to the earth. Dylan the psychedelically deracinated returns to his roots in the Bible and Americana with John Wesley Harding. The girl in the brass bed is an allusion to "Lay Lady Lay" ("lay across my big brass bed") from the Nashville Skyline album. Dylan then colaesces with the man in black (Johnny Cash), and steps over and through the detritus of what remains the hippy-trippy 60's and into the disco era, his Christian period, marked by the 1979 Slow Train Coming and a couple of subsequent albums, his marriage to a black back-up singer, and on into the later phases of the life of this protean bard on never-ending tour.
Here is what Auster has to say about the song:
By the way, that’s the first time I’ve seen “judge” rhymed with “grudge” since Bob Dylan’s “Most Likely You Go Your Way (And I’ll Go Mine),” from Blonde on Blonde. Here’s the recording.
Dylan’s lyric (not for the first time) is pretty appropriate to our situation:
Well the judgeThere is now on the U.S. Supreme Court an intellectually sub-par Puerto Rican woman whose entire career has been essentially founded on a grudge against whites, a judge who makes her pro-Hispanic, anti-white agenda an explicit element in her judging. “The judge, she holds a grudge.”
He holds a grudge
He’s gonna call on you.
But he’s badly built
And he walks on stilts
Watch out he don’t fall on you.
Sotomayor is not the first of that kind, however. Another Supreme Court sub-competent, Thurgood Marshall, openly stated to one of his colleagues that the philosophy behind his judging was that “It’s our [blacks’] turn now.”
Spanish Harlem Incident. (From Another Side of Bob Dylan) Auster's take:
Thinking about the murder of motivational speaker and “positive, loving energy” guru Jeff Locker in East Harlem this week, where he had been pursuing an assignation with a young lady not his wife but got himself strangled and stabbed to death in his car by the damsel and her two male accomplices instead, I realized that this is yet another contemporary event that Bob Dylan has, in a manner of speaking, got covered. Here is the recording and below are the lyrics of Dylan’s 1964 song, “Spanish Harlem Incident,” where the singer, with his “pale face,” seeks liberating love from an exotic dark skinned woman, and is “surrounded” and “slayed” by her. The song reflects back ironically on the Jeff Locker case, presenting the more poetical side of the desires that, on a much coarser and stupider level, led Locker to his horrible death. By quoting it, I’m not making light of murder, readers know how seriously I take murder. But when a man gets himself killed through such an accumulation of sin and gross folly, a man, moreover, whose New Agey belief in positive energy and transformative love apparently left him unable to see the obvious dangers he had put himself in, there is, unavoidably, a humorous aspect to it.
SPANISH HARLEM INCIDENTGypsy gal, the hands of Harlem
Cannot hold you to its heat.
Your temperature is too hot for taming,
Your flaming feet are burning up the street.
I am homeless, come and take me
To the reach of your rattling drums.
Let me know, babe, all about my fortune
Down along my restless palms.
Gypsy gal, you’ve got me swallowed.
I have fallen far beneath
Your pearly eyes, so fast and slashing,
And your flashing diamond teeth.
The night is pitch black, come and make my
Pale face fit into place, oh, please!
Let me know, babe, I’m nearly drowning,
If it’s you my lifelines trace.
I’ve been wonderin’ all about me
Ever since I seen you there.
On the cliffs of your wildcat charms I’m riding,
I know I’m ‘round you but I don’t know where.
You have slayed me, you have made me,
I got to laugh halfways off my heels.
I got to know, babe, ah, when you surround me,
So I can know if I am really real.
There's more. Next week, if I feel like it.
This, Dylan's second album, and one of my favorites, was released in May of 1963 by Columbia Records. Here are my favorites from the album.
Blowin' in the Wind, with its understated topicality, enjoys an assured place in the Great American Songbook. London Ed uploaded this Alanis Morissette version which is one of the better covers. Thanks, Ed!
Girl from the North Country Ah! it's even better than I remember it as being.
Understated topicality also characterizes A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall, written during the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, lending it a timeless quality absent in a blatant 'finger-pointing' song such as Masters of War. The Baez version is probably the best of the covers.
Don't Think Twice, It's All Right in the outstanding PP & M version. Another permanent addition to musical Americana. Said to be inspired by Suze Rotolo, the girl on the album cover.
Bob Dylan's Dream in the PP & M rendition.
Oxford Town. About James Meredith's battle for admission to the University of Mississippi.
In her memoir, A Frewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties (Broadway Books, 2008, p. 277-8), Suze Rotolo says this about her mother Mary Rotolo:
I remember her informing me that the career army man an older cousin was married to had lost out on a promotion that involved security clearance because of my appearance on the cover of Bob's album. I was astounded.
True, the times they were troubled. Protest against the escalating war in Vietnam was on the rise, draft cards were being burned, and colleges were erupting with discontent. Blues, bluegrass, and ballads no longer defined folk music, since so many folksingers were now writing songs that spoke to current events. Bob Dylan was labeled a "protest singer." But the absurdity of my mother, Marxist Mary, trying to make me feel responsible for a military man's losing a security clearance because I am on an album cover with Bob Dylan, a rebel with a cause, left me speechless. And that was all she said to me about the cover or the album in general.
I can't speak for my housemates at the time, Ken Bower and Craig Fellin, but these three albums were my favorites among the ones we listened to, and the selections are my favorites from each.
1. Bob Dylan, New Morning (released 19 October 1970). Sign on a Window. If any song puts me in mind of Craig, it is this one. That's him to the left. He is the proprietor of the Big Hole Lodge in Montana.
Build me a cabin in Utah
Marry me a wife
Catch rainbow trout
Have a bunch of kids who call me 'Pa'
That must be what it's all about
Thta must be what it's all about.
After his motorcycle accident in 1966, the protean Dylan moved closer to the earth and farther from the mind. Gone the despair and the absurdist imagery of It's Alright Ma I'm Only Bleeding (from Bringing It All Back Home, 1965) and Desolation Row (unfortunately, this is the 'stoned' version, but it too is oddly beautiful) and the haunting Visions of Johanna (from Blonde on Blonde, 1966).
2. George Harrison, All Things Must Pass (released 27 November 1970). The title song. "All things must pass/All things must pass away."
3. Derek and the Dominoes, Layla (released November 1970). The title song. The best part begins at 3:10. It still rips me up, 42 years later.
I wouldn't want to relive those early years. But what I lacked in happiness, I made up for in intensity of experience. Ken and Craig had no small part in that.
Image borrowed from Political Correctness Watch.
"'Equality,' I spoke the word/As if a wedding vow/Ah, but I was so much older then/I'm younger than that now." Bob Dylan, My Back Pages.
Where would liberals be without their double standards?
The sound of the sitar played a prominent role in the soundtrack of the '60s. To George Harrison, student of Ravi Shankar, goes the credit of having introduced it to Western popular music. Light a stick of sandalwood incense and enjoy these great Beatle songs that feature its use:
Tomorrow Never Knows. "Turn your off your mind, relax, and float downstream. It is not dying, it is not dying. Lay down all thoughts, surrender to the Void. It is shining, it is shining. That you may see the meaning of within. It is Be-ing, it is Be-ing . . . ." The depth and creativity of a song like this surpasses anything in popular music since.
Following the Beatles, everybody and the brother of his monkey's uncle got into the sitar act. The Rolling Stones for example. No, I'm not going to link to "Paint it Black." I'll link to something obscure: Richie Havens, Something Else Again.
By 1970 or so, the sitar's popularity in Western popular music had subsided. Its resonance belongs to those far-off and fabulous days of the '60s.
Screamin' Jay Hawkins, I Put a Spell on You
Howlin' Wolf, I Ain't Superstitious
Bobby 'Boris' Pickett, The Monster Mash
Mannheim Steamroller version
Alexandru Andries, Dracula Blues. This one goes out to Peter Lupu.
Lightnin' Hopkins, Black Cat Blues. The one goes out to Max and Manny, the brothers Black.
Tomorrow is the 57th anniversary of the death of James Dean. When the young Dean crashed his low slung silver Porsche Spyder on a lonely California highway on September 30, 1955, he catapulted a couple of unknowns into the national spotlight. One of them was Ernie Tripke, one of two California Highway Patrol officers who arrived at the scene. He died in 2010 at the age of 88. But what ever happened to Donald Turnupseed, the driver who turned in front of the speeding Dean, having failed to see him coming? His story is here. In exfoliation of the theme that "speed kills" I present the following for your listening pleasure:
Jan and Dean, Deadman's Curve (1964). But it is not just boys who are drawn to speed, little old ladies have been known to put the pedal to the metal. Case in point: The Little Old Lady From Pasadena.
Johnny Bond, Hot Rod Lincoln (1960)
James Dean, Public Service Announcement
James Dean, The 'Chicken' Scene
Beach Boys, Don't Worry Baby
Ike Turner/Jackie Brenston, Rocket 88 (1951). The first R & R song? With footage of Bettie Page.
Billy Joel, Only the Good Die Young
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