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Archives for January 2015

Certain Songs #92: Bob Dylan & The Band – “Goin’ To Acapulco”

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Album: The Basement Tapes.

Year: 1967.

One of the standard tropes in popular music is to take upbeat music and wed it to depressing words. Bands like The Smiths pretty much made a living exploring the contradiction of Morrissey’s depressing words with the bouncy guitar hooks that Johnny Marr specialized in. But hell, even Hank Williams did it.

But “Goin’ to Acapulco” does the exact opposite. It takes words about  having a good time and sets them to a mournful, organ-filled deathmarch.

Goin’ to Acapulco–goin’ on the run
Goin’ down to see fat gut–goin’ to have some fun
Yeah–goin’ to have some fun

It’s so doomy and resigned-sounding that by the time the song is ending you want to yell at Dylan “FOR GOD’S SAKE, MAN, DON’T GO THERE! GO ANYWHERE BUT THERE” even as you realize that it’s too late, that he’s doomed to have some some fun whether he likes it or not.

Official video for “Goin’ To Acapulco”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #91: Bob Dylan & The Band – “I’m Not There”

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Album: The Basement Tapes

Year: 1967.

“I’m Not There” was one of those songs that I only read about for years. It was often cited as the prime example of how the compilers of the original Basement Tapes got the whole enterprise wrong. And when it showed up on one of the gigantic Basement bootleg sets I found in the early 2000s, the fidelity wasn’t quite good enough for me to understand what Greil Marcus and Clinton Heylin were on about.

It felt, well, formless. Just Dylan strumming on his guitar with maybe an organ and almost chanting incomprehensible lyrics that probably didn’t make any sense, to boot. It wasn’t until 2007, when it was released as part of the soundtrack of Todd Haynes excellent film of the same name, that we finally got a cleaned-up recording.

So what’s it all about? Well, the official lyric sheet on Bob Dylan’s web site isn’t any help at all.  Which is as it should be, I think.

Out of all of the Basement tape recordings, this just might be weirdest.  In a lot of ways, it’s still incomprehensible,  but it’s also mesmeric, where the individual pieces don’t really matter. Sure, you eventually hear an organ, a piano and a bass, and sure there’s probably more than one guitar. But none of that seems as much as how the whole song expands and expands, as if to fill the hole left by Dylan not being there, but rather being gone.

Official video for “I’m Not There”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #90: Bob Dylan & The Band – “Tiny Montgomery”

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Album: The Basement Tapes.

Year: 1967.

I should surprise absolutely noone that I spent much of the last couple months of 2014 immersed in the definitive 5-disc version of The Basement Tapes, nor should it surprise anyone that I’d been listening to nearly all of it for at least two decades as bootlegs, so I was pretty familiar with it beforehand.

But what might surprise people that despite all of the heavyweight songs recorded during those – well, you can’t really call them “sessions, can you? – months, titans like "This Wheels on Fire,” “I Shall Be Released” or “Tears of Rage” never really do it for me the way an obvious goof like “Tiny Montgomery” does.

As far as I’m concerned, “Tiny Montgomery” encapsulates the entire informal greatness of the Basement Tapes by the vocal call-and-response between Bob and The Band.

Bob:

Well you can tell ev’rybody
Down in ol’ Frisco
Tell ’em Tiny Montgomery says hello

The Band:

Hellooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

I just picture of all of the guys in The Band, sitting in a room playing their instruments, looking at Bob and grinning while shouting “Hellooooooooooooooo!” into the nearest microphone. They’re probably stoned out of their minds, but it doesn’t matter, because the amount of fun they’re having is palpable.

And I think, “this is why music exists.” This is why people love to play music together. This is why I loved to play music: those moments where you look around a room and everybody is enjoying what they’re doing at that exact moment.

That’s what a bunch of the songs on The Basement Tapes capture, and I think that’s part of the reason for their appeal.

Official Video for “Tiny Montgomery” (from original Basement Tapes)

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #89: Alice Cooper – “School’s Out”

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Album: School’s Out.

Year: 1972.

Alice Cooper didn’t fuck around. He became one of the most unlikely artists to continually dent the Top 40 because he didn’t write pop songs, but rather pop anthems. And those anthems were nearly always aimed at teens, and always covered in hard-rock guitars.

And the greatest of them all is the eternal “School’s Out,” which is so awesome, it’s the only song in popular music history to successfully incorporate the dread kiddie choir. Singing a fucking schoolyard chant, of all things. 

It shouldn’t work, but over the big-ass bolero drumbeat and flash guitars that ace producer Bob Ezrin, it seems absolutely natural, and for the rest of time, kids of all ages will sing this:

Well we got no class
And we got no principles
And we got no innocence
We can’t even think of a word that rhymes!

School’s out for summer
School’s out forever
My school’s been blown to pieces

As a guy who hated school until I got to college and met college girls, allow me to philosophize a bit about as to why this song still resonates with me. “School’s Out” isn’t just about the end of the school, but rather about the end of just any responsibility that you really don’t want to do.

It’s really about freedom. Or at least the illusion of freedom. Two times in the past decade, I’ve taken a vacation between leaving one job and starting another. And those were the sweetest vacations, because for those couple of weeks or so, I didn’t have to worry about what was going on at work.

I think that “School’s Out” taps into that feeling: school isn’t just out for summer, but it’s out forever; out completely; blown to pieces.

“School’s Out” performed on Top of the Pops in 1972

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #88: Bob Dylan & The Hawks – “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues (Manchester 1966)”

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Album: The Bootleg Series Vol 4.

Year: 1966.

On Highway 61 Revisited, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” was a bit of respite from the supersonic Old Testament testifying of the title track and the epic name-dropping of “Desolation Row.”  Infused with uncharacteristic melancholy, it kinda gets lost in the shuffle.

But not the live version. As far as I’m concerned, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” was the peak of every concert on the 1966 tour and this version is  definitely in my top 5 Dylan songs. All of that melancholy has been replaced by anger, as it now sounds like a trip through a harrowing hellscape.

When you’re lost in the rain in Juarez
And it’s Easter time too
And your gravity’s down
And negativity don’t pull you through

With Garth Hudson’s organ fading in and out of the maelstrom like far-off Christmas lights in the fog, things only get worse as Dylan meets person after person and checks out one bad place after another. But no matter where he goes, no matter what he does, it all just sucks.

If you’re lookin’ to get silly
You better go back to from where you caaaaaaaaaaaame
Because the cops don’t need you
And man they expect the same

Then, just before the final verse, Robbie Robertson uncorks a guitar solo that doubles down on all of the pain and rage in lyrics. I think it’s his finest moment, presaging later solos by Neil Young and Tom Verlaine. Always threatening to come apart at every note but hanging together because it really has no choice. If the guitar solo falls apart, then the song falls apart. And if the song falls apart, then the world falls apart.

But it doesn’t. The solo hangs on, the song hangs on, the world hangs on. But Bob Dylan is sick of the whole fucking thing.

I started out on Burgundy
But soon hit the harder stuff
Everybody said they’d stand behind me
When the game got rough
But the joke was on me
There was nobody even there to bluff
I’m going back to New York City
I do believe I’ve had enough

And while he hitches a ride on Robbie Robertson’s guitar, it’s actually not even clear that he made it back to the safe confines of mid-1960s New York City.

—————————-

A pretty great live version of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” (recorded in Liverpool) was actually put out as the B-side of the “I Want You” 7-inch single. It’s muddier than this version, but still every inch as epic.

For a few years, the jukebox at The Olympic Tavern in Fresno had that single, which at the time was only available on an Australian import album called Masterpieces. So every time one of my bands did a soundcheck at the Oly, the first thing I would do was play it as we were loading in our equipment, just to see if anybody was paying attention. Noone ever was, of course. I wonder whatever became of that single.

Certain Songs #87: Bob Dylan & The Hawks – “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down (Manchester, 1966)”

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Album: The Bootleg Series Vol 4.

Year: 1966.

This rocked-up revision of a polite (he even gives it attribution before he sings it) pretty acoustic cover from Bob Dylan’s debut exemplifies everything great about the “Royal Albert Hall” concert. Every single song in this set is given a new lease on life.

Even discounting the music, the new lyrics in this version of “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” – and how he sings those lyrics – transform the lovelorn cast of the original into an anticipatory fucksong:

I’ll buy you rope and twine
Honey, just for you to climb
Yes, I’ll do anything in this god almighty world
If you just once drive me out of my mind!

But of course, you can’t discount the music. Not without taking your life into your hands, because with Mickey Jones crashing around his drum kit like he forgot where the brakes were and decided to speed into the spinout, “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” will run you right off the road if you’re not paying attention.

Energized by those drums, or maybe just to protect themselves, Dylan and Hawks take turns trading off solos after each verse. Here goes Robbie Robertson. Here goes Dylan. Here goes Garth Hudson. Here goes Richard Manuel. All of them are just hanging for dear life and no doubt hoping that Rick Danko’s bass will provide the stability they need to make it to the end of the song.

The “Royal Albert Hall” concert came into my life via a cassette that my brother Joe had somehow gotten ahold of in either the late 70s or early 80s, and instantly became a favorite of mine. In case you couldn’t tell. 

At some point in the mid-1980s, I discovered that the Henry Madden Library – the big one, with all of the books and magazines and microfiche and shit – at Fresno State had a vinyl copy of the “Royal Albert Hall.” Why they had it, I don’t know. I do know that there were a couple of other boots there, including The Rolling Stones Live’R Than You’ll Ever Be. 

In any event, I recorded it to cassette a couple of times, and spent the next few years trying to figure out how to, uh, liberate it from its involuntary servitude and give it a new home in my vinyl collection. I never did, mostly because I couldn’t figure out a way to do it without getting caught. Nevertheless I often wondered how those boots ended up in the Library.  I’ve always assumed that some super-hipster hippie librarian was responsible.

One amazing minute of “Baby Let Me Follow You Down” performed live in 1966

Official video for “Baby Let Me Follow You Down (Manchester 1966)”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #86: Bob Dylan & The Hawks – “Tell Me Momma (Manchester, 1966)”

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Album: The Bootleg Series Volume 4.

Year: 1966.

The first thing you need to know about the legendary Royal Albert Hall concert is that it wasn’t recorded at the Royal Albert Hall. Instead, the greatest, wildest, most fucked-up visionary set of rock and roll music ever was recorded in Manchester. It was either misinformation or bootleggers hype that this ridiculously great piece of music became known to crazed Dylan fans as “Royal Albert Hall.”

Where even to start? How bout this insane blast of energy, which itself starts with what feels like random strumming until somebody (probably Dylan) counts off 1 … 2 … 3 … 4, and with a WHACK! of Mickey Jones’ snare drum, Dylan and The Hawks just fucking explode.

With Garth Hudson’s planet-covering organ and Robbie Robertson’s ever-changing guitar leading the way, “Tell Me Momma” barrels its way through its verses nearly crashing prior to every chorus

But I know that you know that I know that you show
Something is tearing up your miiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnnd!

This is so fucking audacious: not only was Dylan “betraying” his audience by playing the hardest, fullest rock music that anyone had ever heard, he led with a song that nobody had even heard before!  Or, for that matter – since Dylan never recorded a studio version – they likely would never heard again.

Imagine being a punter who hated that Dylan was going electric. By the time they got to the breakdown with Robertson’s typical mathematical rearguard solo, you’d be so furious, you wouldn’t know what to do. Meanwhile, Dylan, supremely confident, and one of the hugest, most totally wired assholes to ever walk the planet, was spoiling for a fight.

A fight, of course, he pretty much won with this first-round knockout punch..

Official Video for “Tell Me Momma”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #85: The Alarm – “Marching On”

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Album: Declaration.

Year: 1984.

Here is one of the stupidest things I have ever written:

The Alarm are big. The Alarm are important. And on their new album Declaration (I.R.S.) is not only good, it’s going to be the next major crossover on the order of U-Know-Who. Of course The Alarm do have silly hair, but I think that it’s a manifestation of their philosophical outlook and their music. The Alarm are a combination of punk power and hippie idealism. And so is their hair. ‘Nuff said.

Oy. I wrote those words in mid-1984 (in a piece presciently entitled “Going Out in a Blaze of B.S.”) for my college radio station ‘zine, The Dead Air Diary. Now you might be wondering why the editor of the fanzine didn’t at least challenge me on this – or at least tell me to tone down the damn hype. It’s because I was the editor of The Dead Air Diary, typing up each issue on Kassia’s old acoustic typewriter, thrilled (as I am right this second) that anybody might be reading the crap I was writing. 

So for the first couple of months of 1984, Declaration was the biggest thing in my universe, but by the time I wrote up the year-end wrap-up, I was calling it “powerful, but shallow” and had placed it below such other worthies as Let it Be, The Unforgettable Fire, Reckoning, and The Smiths.

By the time the 1980s were over, I had it way down at #72 for the decade, and just a few years ago, when I did my Top 150 albums of the 1980s list for Medialoper, it wasn’t even the Top 100.

So what happened?  I think what initially made me realize that I’d totally overrated them was seeing them in concert around the same time I first saw U2. When U2 needed an audience singalong song to end their concerts with, they wrote the simple but beautiful “40,” so that everybody could endlessly sing “how long to sing this song?” (while the band leaped into their limos, no doubt) to wind down a thrilling show.

But The Alarm, wanting to follow through on the same urge, didn’t write their own show-ending audience singalong, but rather had everybody sing along to Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.” And while that’s a great song and everything, but to me, it kinda put the difference between the two bands into sharp relief.

That said, I still enjoy Declaration as an example of mid-80s anthem rock, and truly love things like “Blaze of Glory,” “Howling Wind” and of course the proto-anthem “Marching On,” which perfectly encapsulates the “Clash-meets-Bob Dylan” sound that I initially loved. I still don’t what we’re marching on about, but it remains fun to scream with when the song is playing.

“Marching On” performed live in 1983

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #84: Bob Dylan – “She’s Your Lover Now”

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Album: The Bootleg Series Volume 2.

Year: 1966.

To my ears, the closest that Dylan ever got in the studio to the sound he and The Hawks found during their 1966 tour is this incomplete outtake. Recorded with nearly all of The Hawks plus Sandy Konikoff providing the driving drums that Levon Helm would have scoffed at, “She’s Your Lover Now” is also one of Dylan’s great rant songs, more fun musically than “Positively 4th St.” and nearly as scathing lyrically as “Idiot Wind.”

While Richard Manuel provides forward motion on the piano and Garth Hudson & Robbie Robertson adding their color when needed, “She’s Your Lover Now” is the sound of Dylan confronting an ex with her new boyfriend and just losing his shit.

So the first half of each verse is Dylan expressing his frustration to the ex-lover:

You know I was straight with you
You know I’ve never tried to change you in any way
You know if you didn’t want to be with me
That you could … didn’t have to stay
Now you stand here sayin’ you forgive and forget. Honey, what can I say?

And then, hilariously, Dylan turns the rant onto her new boyfriend:

Yes, you, you just sit around and ask for ashtrays, can’t you reach?

I goes on like this for six gloriously ragged minutes until breaking down because somebody – I still don’t know who – made a mistake, and the whole thing just collapses as a surprised Dylan asks “what?” No answer.

When this showed up in 1991 on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3, I had no idea how much stuff was truly in the vault from the 1965-1966 period, and just the tiny taste of outtakes (after the even smaller taste on Biograph) felt like a revelation. After that, whenever I went bootleg shopping, I started looking for Dylan mid-60s outtakes – first during record swaps, and later on the internets.

Even now, there are still amazing takes – the solo piano version of this song, the “nightengale’s code” version of “Visions of Johanna” – of key songs that remain unreleased, and/or barely heard. Obviously, most of this is only of interest to crazies like me, but man, nobody in the history of music was ever on their game like Bob Dylan in the mid-1960s.

Official Video for “She’s Your Lover Now”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #83: Bob Dylan – “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again”

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Album: Blonde on Blonde
Year: 1966

With Al Kooper & Kenny Buttrey rocking it up in one channel and Charlie McCoy and Joe South laying back in the other, all votes for “Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again” as Dylan’s greatest song will be considered by our elite panel of judges. 

First off, it’s got that short, brilliant and endlessly singable chorus, which like “Like a Rolling Stone,” posits a question with an infinite amount of answers:

Oh, mama, can this really be the end?
To be stuck inside of Mobile
With the Memphis blues again?

Not to mention that I’ve used “Stuck Inside of [PLACE] with the [THING] Blues Again” as a joke framework for decades now. 

I think that this song was also one of the key turning points for my appreciation of Bob Dylan turning into full-blown love, because I have a memory of scrawling the words of this verse on my high school textbooks and maybe even a desk or two:

Now the rainman gave me two cures
Then he said, “Jump right in”
The one was Texas medicine
The other was just railroad gin
An’ like a fool I mixed them
An’ it strangled up my mind
An’ now people just get uglier
An’ I have no sense of time

And finally – especially since “Absolutely Sweet Marie” won’t make the cut here – let me give it up for Kenny Buttrey’s utterly amazing drumming. Driving hard through the verses, putting weird rolls everywhere, almost disappearing during “Oh, mama, can this really be end?” before roaring back during “To be stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again?” and finally dueting with the acoustic guitar with his ride cymbal before the next verse starts.

“(Stuck Inside of Mobile With The) Memphis Blues Again”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever