This just over the transom from Karl White:
Hope you're well. May be of interest.
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July 30, 2018 Dearest Robert, I feel about [Henri Nouwen] as I do about Thomas Merton. There is much self-deception and muddle in their lives; and yet there is an unwavering concentration on God.
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The Monterey Pop Festival was 55 years ago, yesterday. Your humble correspondent was in attendance.
How many of these do you remember? If you were too much of the '60s then you probably don't remember anything assuming you still animate the mortal coil; if you were too little of the '60s then you won't remember any of these for a different reason. But among the latter are some very beautiful songs from that amazingly creative time.
Fever Tree, The Sun Also Rises
Fever Tree, San Francisco Girls
Love, Alone Again Or
Jefferson Airplane, Embryonic Journey
Moby Grape, Omaha
Moby Grape, I am not Willing
H.P. Lovecraft, The White Ship
Quicksilver Messenger Service, Pride of Man
Related: The Myth of the Boomer Bogeyman
Are you quite sure that there is a way out? It may be that there is no exit. You can of course destroy your body, and that might do the trick. But then again it might not. Or is it perfectly obvious that you are either identical to your body or necessarily dependent for your existence on its existence? You might want to think about this before making the leap of faith in ultimate nonentity.
It would be fairly easy to give strong arguments why TO BE is not the same as TO BE PHYSICAL. Think of so-called 'abstract objects.' It is much more difficult to argue persuasively that the identity fails in the case of persons. And yet persons are rather remarkable. The ones we are regularly acquainted with are also animals. Sunk in animality as we are, it is easy to think that we are are just highly evolved animals. It is easy to miss the wonder of personhood. But the abyss that separates man from the animal should give one pause.
Bishop James A. Pike's son Jim committed suicide. He supposedly communicated the following message to his father from the Other Side:
I thought there was a way out; I wanted out; I've found there is no way out. I wish I had stayed to work out my problems in more familiar surroundings. (James A. Pike, The Other Side: An Account of My Experiences with Psychic Phenomena, Doubleday, 1968, p. 118.)
If you were around in the '60s and hip to what was happening you will recall Bishop Pike. He was a theological liberal who made quite a splash the ripples of which have long since subsided. The book I have cited is worth reading but best consumed with a mind both open and critical.
Remember Fred Neil? One of the luminaries of the '60s folk scene, he didn't do much musically thereafter. Neil is probably best remembered for having penned 'Everybody's Talkin' which was made famous by Harry Nilsson as the theme of Midnight Cowboy. Here is Neil's version. Nilsson's rendition.
Another of my Fred Neil favorites is "Other Side of This Life." Here is Peter, Paul, and Mary's version.
And it's been a long long time since I last enjoyed That's the Bag I'm In.
I've Got a Secret. YouTuber comment: "Why were the sixties so special and important? Fred Neil, for one." But why were they so special to us and not others? In part because we were raw, open to experience, and full of the painful & passionate intensity of youth.
The reclusive Neil died in 2001 at the age of 64. Biography here.
Here. (An entertaining video clip, not too long, that sums up his main doctrine.)
Alan Watts was a significant contributor to the Zeitgeist of the 1960s. Just as many in those days were 'turned on' to philosophy by Ayn Rand, others such as myself were pushed toward philosophy by, among other things, Alan Watts and his writings. But early on I realized that there was much of the pied piper and sophist about him. He once aptly described himself as a "philosophical entertainer" as opposed to an academic philosopher. Entertaining he was indeed.
I heard him speak on 17 January 1973 in the last year of his life . He appeared to be well into his cups that evening, though in control. Alcohol may have been a major contributor to his early death at age 58 on 16 November 1973. (See Wikipedia) What follows is a journal entry of mine written 18 January 1973.
....................
I attended a lecture by Alan Watts last night at El Camino Junior College. Extremely provocative and entertaining. A good comparing and contrasting of Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu and Chinese views.
At random: One must give up the desire to be secure, the desire to control. Ego as totally illusory entity which is really nothing but a composite of one's image of oneself and certain muscular tensions which arise with attempts to achieve, grasp, and hold on. The self as opposed to the ego is God, God who forgot who he was. The world (cosmos) as God's dream. Thus the self-same Godhead reposes in each individual. There is no spiritual individuality. And therefore, it seems, no possibility of personal relations.
Consider the I-Thou relation. It presupposes two distinct but relatable entities. If there is only one homogeneous substance, how can there be relation? But perhaps I'm misinterpreting the Wattsian-Hindu view by thinking of the Hindu deity as substance rather than as function, process. Watts himself denies the existence of substance. Last night he made the well-known point as to the linguistic origin of the notion of substance. [This is of course not a "well-known point."]
Denial of the ego -- i.e. its relegation to the sphere of illusion -- would seem to go hand in hand with denial of substance. [Good point, young man!] Watts seems very close to a pseudo-scientific metaphysics. He posits a continuum of vibrations with the frequency of the vibrations determining tangible, physical qualities. Yet he also says that "We will always find smaller particles"; that "We're doing it"; that the fundamental reality science supposedly uncovers is a mental, a theoretical, construct.
Thus, simultaneously, a reliance on a scientific pseudo-metaphysics AND the discrediting of the scientific view of reality.
Phil Upchurch Combo, You Can't Sit Down, 1961
Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, The Lonely Bull, 1962
Booker T. and the M. G. s, Green Onions
The Tornados, Telstar, 1962. About the first telecommunications satellite.
Mason Williams, Classical Gas, 1968
Michael Bloomfield, Carmelita's Skiffle, 1969
Dick Dale. Let's Go Trippin,' 1961. Not about drugs; pre-psychedelic.
Dave Brubeck, Take Five
The Shadows, Apache, 1960
Lonnie Mack, Memphis, 1963
Ventures, Penetration, 1963. Cheesy version. Much better 1981 version. Still boring.
Ventures, Walk Don't Run, 1960.
Jorma Kaukonen's Embryonic Journey from The Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow LP, 1967.
Bent Fabric, Alley Cat, 1962.
The Village Stompers, Washington Square, 1963.
Kenny Ball, Midnight in Moscow, 1962.
David Rose, The Stripper, 1962.
Acker Bilk, Stranger on the Shore, 1962.
Dick Dale and the Deltones, Misirlou, 1963. If surf music had a father, Dick Dale was the man.
The Chantays, Pipeline, 1963. A nice college boy effort, but the definitive version is the Dick Dale and Stevie Ray Vaughan cover.
Floyd Cramer, Last Date, 1960. She was the world to you, but your love went unrequited. You've just seen her for the last time. But she'll haunt your dreams for the rest of your life. You stumble back to your apartment, fighting back the tears, pour yourself a stiff one, and cue up Floyd Cramer. But time passes, and soon with Floyd's help, you are
On the Rebound, 1961.
Al Kooper and Michael Bloomfield, Albert's Shuffle, 1968. Two Jews play the blues. A fine example of cultural appropriation. We need more cultural appropriation.
Duane Eddy, Raunchy, 1963
The Champs, Tequila, pre-'60s, 1958, to be exact. And not entirely instrumental. The lyrics consist of one word-type 'Tequila' tokened three times. Tequila is what I am drinking right now and what my 1966 self is playing below at a high school talent show. I'm wearing a Bob Dylan-type cap.
From a long-time reader:
Your 'Sat nite oldies' this evening was a great head-trip for me; you hit a lot of buttons, reminded me of a few girls, and some easy days of summer with Booker T. and Bent Fabric; also at that time,"Midnight in Moscow" just flat ruined me for other music for a year or so - it produced in me a heady mix of scandal, sin, sex, high excitement, I was ready to go to any place that resembled that music. I'd never seen a strip show, but 'The Stripper' - just the music - at that time made me think I'd maybe been missing a good time. I missed too many, as an aside.Yeah, once wept in my beer to good ol' Floyd too: some dame? (I was going to say 'some girl' but 'dame' seems to fit better with beer and weeping. Hmmm....'broad' even better? Must think deeply on this.)I would toast 'Tequila' with you but there's none of the noble drop about. I hope you are enjoying yours, and thinking fondly about that talent show - great pic!To avoid a longish ramble, upon which I am on the verge (intentionally mangled verbiage there :-)) - I'll say goodnight. Goodnight, Mate! Thanks for a good 'Oldies.'
Summer subsides once again into the sweetness of September.
Judy Collins, Cravings: How I Conquered Food, Doubleday 2017, pp. 112-113:
. . . and writing Albert Grossmann that no, I did not want to join a trio of women he was bent on calling the Brown-Eyed Girls. He had put Peter, Paul and Mary together, telling me that I was the fallback choice if Mary hadn't worked out. Albert saw how I was struggling and didn't think I could make it on my own, hence the trio idea. It was to be me, Judy Henske and Jo Mapes. He told me he would get me brown contacts, his idea of a joke -- Henske had brown eyes and Mapes and I would have to get brown contacts. I had agreed hastily -- after all, he had made Peter, Paul and Mary into an international franchise. Now I changed my yes to a no. I would go it on my own, no matter what. I was going to do it my way or die trying.
Way to go, Judy. You pulled it off and beat your addictions as well.
Judy Collins, Both Sides Now. Wonderful. My favorite version, however, is that of Dave van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters.
Judy Collins, Someday Soon
Judy Collins, Amazing Grace
Judy Henske, High Flying Bird
Judy Henske, Any Day Now
Judy Henske, Till the Real Thing Comes Along
Jo Mapes, You Were on My Mind. Beautiful, but takes a little getting used to if you are coming at it from the We Five hit version. Ian and Sylvia have a great version.
Jo Mapes, No One to Talk My Troubles To
Bonus cut: Iris Dement and friends, Will the Circle be Unbroken. Wow.
It transpired 50 summers ago, this June, the grand daddy of rock festivals, two years before Woodstock, in what became known as the Summer of Love. Your humble correspondent was on the scene. Some high school friends and I drove up from Los Angeles along Pacific Coast Highway. I can still call up olfactory memories of patchouli, sandalwood incense, not to mention the aroma of what was variously known as cannabis sativa, marijuana, reefer, tea, Miss Green, Mary Jane, pot, weed, grass, pacalolo (Hawaiian term), loco weed, and just plain dope. But my friends and I, students at an all-boys Catholic high school that enforced a strict dress code, were fairly straight: we partook of no orgies, smoked no dope, and slept in a motel. The wild stuff came later in our lives, when we were better able to handle it.
I have in my hand the program book of the Festival, in mint condition. Do I hear $1,000? On the first page there is a quotation from Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice:
How sweet the moon-light sleeps upon this bank! Here we sit and let the sounds of music creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night, become the touches of sweet harmony.
Ah yes, I remember it well, the "sweet harmony" of the whining feedback of Jimi Hendrix's Fender Stratocaster plugged into his towering Marshall amps and the "soft stillness" of the The Who smashing their instruments to pieces. Not to be outdone, Jimi lit his Strat on fire with lighter fluid. The image is burned into my memory. It shocked my working-class frugality. I used to baby my Fender Mustang and I once got mad at a girl for placing a coke can on my Fender Deluxe Reverb amp.
On the last page of the programme book, a more fitting quotation: the lyrics of Dylan's The Times They Are A'Changin', perhaps the numero uno '60s anthem to youth and social ferment. (Click on the link; great piano version. Live 1964 guitar version.) Were the utopian fantasies of the '60s just a load of rubbish? Mostly, but not entirely. "Lately it occurs to me, what a long strange trip it's been."
The Who, My Generation. I hope I die before I get old."
Mamas and Papas, California Dreamin'
Mamas and Papas, I Call Your Name
Jefferson Airplane, Somebody to Love
Janis Joplin, Down on Me
Otis Redding, Try a Little Tenderness
Scott MacKenzie, San Francisco
Remember Fred Neil? One of the luminaries of the '60s folk scene, he didn't do much musically thereafter. Neil is probably best remembered for having penned 'Everybody's Talkin' which was made famous by Harry Nilsson as the theme of Midnight Cowboy. Here is Neil's version. Nilsson's rendition.
Another of my Fred Neil favorites is "Other Side of This Life." Here is Peter, Paul, and Mary's version.
And it's been a long long time since I last enjoyed That's the Bag I'm In.
The reclusive Neil died in 2001 at the age of 64. Biography here.
The Left owns Dylan as little as it owns dissent. Every Dylanologist will want to read Christopher Caldwell's Weekly Standard piece, AWOL from the Summer of Love. It begins like this:
In the mid-1960s the most celebrated folk musician of his era bought a house for his growing family at the southern edge of the Catskills, in the nineteenth-century painters’ retreat of Woodstock. He was a “protest singer,” to use a term that was then new. His lyrics—profound, tender, garrulous—sounded like they were indicting the country for racism (“where black is the color where none is the number”), or prophesying civil war (“you don’t need a weatherman to know the way the wind blows”), or inviting young people to smoke dope (“everybody must get stoned”). Fans and would-be acolytes were soon roaming the town on weekends, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. Eccentric-looking by the standards of the day, they infuriated local residents. Nothing good was going to come of it. One of the town’s more heavily armed reactionaries would later recall:
[A] friend of mine had given me a couple of Colt single-shot repeater pistols, and I also had a clip-fed Winchester blasting rifle around, but it was awful to think about what could be done with those things. . . . Creeps thumping their boots across our roof could even take me to court if any of them fell off. . . . I wanted to set fire to these people. These gate-crashers, spooks, trespassers, demagogues were all disrupting my home life and the fact that I was not to piss them off or they could press charges really didn’t appeal to me.
The folk singer was Bob Dylan. The reactionary old coot with all the guns . . . well, that was Bob Dylan, too. At age 25, he was growing uncomfortable with the role conferred on him by the music he’d written at age 20. “I had very little in common with and knew even less about a generation that I was supposed to be the voice of,” he would later write in his memoir Chronicles.
And it ends like this:
If Dylan was the voice of a generation, it was not of the generation we think. He belonged to the generation before the one that idolized him, as did The Band. For them, the pre-baby boom frameworks of meaning were all still in place, undeconstructed and deployable in art. One of history’s secrets is that revolutionaries’ appeal in the eyes of posterity owes much to the traits they share with the world they overthrew. They secure their greatness less by revealing new virtues than by rendering the ones that made them great impracticable henceforth. There is no reason this should be any less true of Dylan. His virtues are not so much of the world he left us with as of the world he helped usher out.
Some selections from The Bootleg Series, #11:
You Ain't Going Nowhere (Take 2)
Say to Valerie, say hello to Marion
Give them all my salary on the waters of oblivion.
An old Hank Williams number
Jerry Lee Lewis version
Joan Baez's unsurpassable and definitive version
Hank Snow's 1952 version
Just a couple of years before the motorcycle accident:
Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
Some, like Jesse Jackson, are still stuck inside of Selma with the Oxford Blues again.
Oxford Town is both topical and timeless. It is about the enrollment of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1962. But neither Meredith nor Ole Miss are mentioned. This allows the song to float free of the events of the day and assume its rightful place in the audio aether of Americana.
These tunes go out to Sally Shoaf. It was great to see you again after 50 years, Sally.
I'm So Glad to join you, My Best Friend, as we follow Mr. Tambourine Man on an Embryonic Journey to hear the Chimes of Freedom as we Break on Through to the Other Side.
Here. (An entertaining video clip, not too long, that sums up his main doctrine.)
Alan Watts was a significant contributor to the Zeitgeist of the 1960s. Just as many in those days were 'turned on' to philosophy by Ayn Rand, others such as myself were pushed toward philosophy by, among other things, Alan Watts and his writings. But early on I realized that there was much of the pied piper and sophist about him. He once aptly described himself as a "philosophical entertainer" as opposed to an academic philosopher. Entertaining he was indeed.
I heard him speak in the last year of his life on 17 January 1973. He appeared to be well into his cups that evening, though in control. Alcohol may have been a major contributor to his early death at age 58 on 16 November 1973. (See Wikipedia) What follows is a journal entry of mine written 18 January 1973.
....................
I attended a lecture by Alan Watts last night at El Camino Junior College. Extremely provocative and entertaining. A good comparing and contrasting of Jewish, Christian, Islamic, Hindu and Chinese views.
At random: One must give up the desire to be secure, the desire to control. Ego as totally illusory entity which is really nothing but a composite of one's image of oneself and certain muscular tensions which arise with attempts to achieve, grasp, and hold on. The self as opposed to the ego is God, God who forgot who he was. The world (cosmos) as God's dream. Thus the self-same Godhead reposes in each individual. There is no spiritual individuality. And therefore, it seems, no possibility of relation.
Consider the I-Thou relation. It presupposes two distinct but relatable entities. If there is only one homogeneous substance, how can there be relation? But perhaps I'm misinterpreting the Wattsian-Hindu view by thinking of the Hindu deity as substance rather than as function, process. Watts himself denies the existence of substance. Last night he made the well-known point as to the linguistic origin of the notion of substance. [This is of course not a "well-known point."]
Denial of the ego -- i.e. its relegation to the sphere of illusion -- would seem to go hand in hand with denial of substance. [Good point, young man!] Watts seems very close to as pseudo-scientific metaphysics. He posits a continuum of vibrations with the frequency of the vibrations determining tangible, physical qualities. Yet he also says that "We will always find smaller particles"; that "We're doing it"; that the fundamental reality science suppsedly uncovwers is a mental, a theoretical construct.
Thus, simultaneously, a reliance on a scientific pseudo-metaphysics AND the discrediting of the scientific view of reality.
It was 30 years ago tomorrow, during a training run. Running pioneer James F. Fixx, author of the wildly successful The Complete Book of Running, keeled over dead of cardiac arrest. He died with his 'boots' on, and not from running but from a bad heart. It's a good bet that his running added years to his life in addition to adding life to his years. I've just pulled my hardbound copy of The Complete Book of Running from the shelf. It's a first edition, 1977, in good condition with dust jacket. I read it when it first came out. Do I hear $1000? Just kidding, it's not for sale. This book and the books of that other pioneer, George Sheehan, certainly made a difference in my life.
The atavism and simplicity and cleansing quality of a good hard run are particularly beneficial for Luftmenschen. Paradoxically, the animality of it releases lofty thoughts.
See here for a comparison of Fixx and Sartre. And here for something on George Sheehan. Now for some 'running' tunes.
Spencer Davis Group, Keep on Running
Jackson Browne, Running on Empty
Eagles, The Long Run
Beatles, Run for Your Life
Del Shannon, Runaway. Charles Weedon Westover was born 30 December 1934 and is best known for his 1961 #1 hit, "Runaway." Suffering from depression, Shannon committed suicide on February 8, 1990, with a .22-caliber rifle at his home in Santa Clarita, California. Following his death, the Traveling Wilburys honored him by recording a version of "Runaway".
Bob Dylan, If Dogs Run Free
Chuck Berry, Run Rudolph Run
Johnny Preston, Running Bear
Dion DiMucci, Runaround Sue
Roy Orbison, Running Scared
Crystals, They Do Run Run
Addendum (7/20)
I should have mentioned it last night. Today, 20 July, is not only the 30th anniversary of Jim Fixx's death, but also the 49th anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone. Wikipedia:
The song had a huge impact on Bruce Springsteen, who was 15 years old when he first heard it. Springsteen described the moment during his speech inducting Dylan into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and also assessed the long-term significance of "Like a Rolling Stone":
The first time I heard Bob Dylan, I was in the car with my mother listening to WMCA, and on came that snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind ... The way that Elvis freed your body, Dylan freed your mind, and showed us that because the music was physical did not mean it was anti-intellect. He had the vision and talent to make a pop song so that it contained the whole world. He invented a new way a pop singer could sound, broke through the limitations of what a recording could achieve, and he changed the face of rock'n'roll for ever and ever "[66][67]
Dylan's contemporaries in 1965 were both startled and challenged by the single. Paul McCartney remembered going around to John Lennon's house in Weybridge to hear the song. According to McCartney, "It seemed to go on and on forever. It was just beautiful ... He showed all of us that it was possible to go a little further."[68] Frank Zappa had a more extreme reaction: "When I heard 'Like a Rolling Stone', I wanted to quit the music business, because I felt: 'If this wins and it does what it's supposed to do, I don't need to do anything else ...' But it didn't do anything. It sold but nobody responded to it in the way that they should have."[68] Nearly forty years later, in 2003, Elvis Costello commented on the innovative quality of the single. "What a shocking thing to live in a world where there was Manfred Mann and the Supremes and Engelbert Humperdinck and here comes 'Like a Rolling Stone'".[69]
Your humble correspondent was lying in the sand at Huntington Beach, California, when the song came on the radio. It was like nothing else on the radio in those days of the Beatles and the Beach Boys. It 'blew my mind.' What is THAT? And WHO is that? I had been very vaguely aware of some B. Dylan as the writer of PPM's Don't Think Twice. I pronounced the name like 'Dial in.' That memorable summer of '65 I became a Dylan fanatic, researching him at the library and buying all his records. The fanaticism faded with the '60s. But while no longer a fanatic, I remain a fan.
This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the so-called British Invasion of 1964 - 1966. Here is one reasonably complete list of 'invaders.' Tonight, selections from A through C.
Animals, We Gotta Get Out of This Place
Animals, Please Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood
Beatles, You Can't Do That
Beatles, It Won't Be Long
Cilla Black, You're My World. Remember her? Few popular songs capture the delightful delusionality of romantic love as this one.
Cilla Black, Anyone Who Had a Heart
Chad and Jeremy, A Summer Song
Chad and Jeremy, Yesterday's Gone
To Scottsdale this drizzly dreary dark December morning to see the Coen Bros. latest on its opening hereabouts, Inside Llewyn Davis. A tale of two kitties is a sub-motif that symbolizes the self-destructive folksinger's troubles, but it would take a couple more viewings for me to figure it out.
The film gripped me and held me its entire running length, but then I lived through that era and I know the music and its major and minor players. Figuring out the the cinematic references and allusions is part of the fun. Tom Paxton, Albert Grossmann, Jim and Jean, The Clancy Brothers, Bob Dylan . . . they are all there -- or are they?
A distinction is made between purely fictional objects (native objects) and immigrant objects: historical individuals that have been imported into fiction from reality. Many of the characters in the Coen Bros. film seem to belong to a third category. They are not wholly unreal like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, or lightly fictionalized individuals like many of the characters in Kerouac's novels, but fictional surrogates of real-life individuals. For example, there is a character who suggests Tom Paxton, but could not be said unambiguously to represent him, pace Dave van Ronk's ex-wife who writes, in a critical review, "The character who represents Tom Paxton has a pasted-on smile and is a smug person who doesn't at all resemble the smart, funny, witty Tom Paxton who was our best man when we married."
Ann Hornaday's Washington Post review ends brilliantly:
In many ways, “Inside Llewyn Davis” plays like a waking nightmare of creeping anxiety and dread, as the era’s grandmaster of brazen self-invention arrives unseen in New York while Llewyn’s self-defeating near-misses pile up like so much street-sullied snow. But this soulful, unabashedly lyrical film is best enjoyed by sinking into it like a sweet, sad dream. When you wake up, a mythical place and time will have disappeared forever. But you’ll know that attention — briefly, beautifully — has been paid.
The era's grandmaster of brazen self-invention is of course Bob Dylan, who blew into town that bitter winter of '61 and who in a few short years brought about a sort of Hegelian Aufhebung of the folk era: its simultaneous cancellation, preservation, and transmogrification into the heart of the '60s as represented by the trilogy of Dylan at his most incandescent: Bringing it It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde.
It's all Over Now, Baby Blue from the the first-mentioned album perhaps sounds the theme of cultural shift.
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.
Let's not forget Joan Baez's sister, Mimi (1945-2001). Interestingly, the girls' father is the noted physicist Albert Baez (1912-2007). I remember a physics teacher in high school showing us an instructional film made by one Albert Baez. We were surprised to hear that he was Joan's father. We hadn't heard of him, but we sure had heard of her. This was around 1965.
Joan and Mimi sing a lovely version of Donovan's "Catch the Wind." Speaking of Donovan, here he and Joan collaborate on another unforgettable 'sixties tune, "Colours." Finally, Mimi, her husband Richard, and Pete Seeger in Pack Up Your Sorrows.
It transpired 43 summers ago, this June, the grandaddy of rock festivals, two years before Woodstock, in what is known as the Summer of Love. Your humble correspondent was on the scene. Some high school friends and I drove up from Los Angeles along Pacific Coast Highway. I can still call up olfactory memories of patchouli, sandalwood incense, not to mention the aroma of what was variously known as cannabis sativa, marijuana, reefer, tea, Miss Green, maryjane, pot, weed, grass, pacalolo (Hawaiian term), loco weed, and just plain dope. But my friends and I, students at an all-boys Catholic high school that enforced a strict dress code, were fairly straight: we partook of no orgies, smoked no dope, and slept in a motel. The wild stuff came later in our lives, when we were better able to handle it.
I have in my hand the programme book of the Festival, in mint condition. Do I hear $1,000? On the first page there is a quotation from Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice:
How sweet the moon-light sleeps upon this bank! Here we sit and let the sounds of music creep in our ears; soft stillness and the night, become the touches of sweet harmony.
Ah yes, I remember it well, the "sweet harmony" of the whining feedback of Jimi Hendrix's Fender Stratocaster plugged into his towering Marshall amps and the "soft stillness" of the The Who smashing their instruments to pieces! Not to be outdone, Jimi lit his Strat on fire with lighter fluid. The image is burned into my memory. It shocked my working-class frugality. I used to baby my Fender Mustang and I once got mad at a girl for placing a coke can on my Fender Deluxe Reverb amp. On the last page of the programme book, a more fitting quotation: the lyrics of Dylan's The Times They Are a Changin', perhaps the numero uno '60s anthem to youth and social ferment. Were the utopian fantasies of the '60s just a load of rubbish? Mostly, but not entirely. "Lately it occurs to me, what a long strange trip it's been."
Here is a sample of the proceedings.
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