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Certain Songs

Certain Songs #106: Bob Dylan – “Not Dark Yet”

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Album: Time Out of Mind.

Year: 1997.

By 1997, I think that the last thing even the most fanatical of Dylan fanatics expected was to get a whole album of great songs from the man. Not only had he not put out an album of original material since 1990’s ambivalent Under The Red Sky, most of the 90s proper were spent celebrating his past: The Bootleg Series, The 30th Anniversary Concert, Greatest Hits Volume 3, the acoustic covers albums, MTV Unplugged.  All of these things basically signaled that he was done writing new songs, that he was content to touring endlessly on the strength of what was already the greatest song catalog in popular music.

Thus the miracle of Time Out of Mind, the album that kicked off what has now been a nearly 20-year endgame. Working with Daniel Lanois, Time Out of Mind utilizes the same swampy mixed of atmospherics they utilized on the near-miss Oh Mercy, but this time, he’d written a bunch of great songs, all of which fit the dark and doomy sound Lanios imposed.

And the greatest of those songs was the utterly gorgeous centerpiece “Not Dark Yet.”  A companion piece of sorts to “Most of The Time,” easily the best thing from Oh Mercy, but channeling some of the same despair that fueled his last great album, Blood on the Tracks, “Not Dark Yet” sounds like a fucking suicide note.

I’ve been down on the bottom of a world full of lies
I ain’t looking for nothing in anyone’s eyes
Sometimes my burden seems more than I can bear
It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there

 

Gorgeously played and sung, with an utterly beautiful melody, “Not Dark Yet” makes me worry about what’s going to happen when it actually gets dark.

Official video for “Not Dark Yet”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #105: Artists United Against Apartheid – “Sun City”

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Album: Sun City
Year: 1985

I guess that the best way to explain why “Sun City” was the greatest of all of the 80’s all-star jams, one of the greatest protest songs in history, and one of the key texts in terms of bringing rap and rock together is to hit some of the highlights of the powerhouse video.

After a few seconds setting up what “Sun City” even is, the song proper kicks off with Miles Fucking Davis soloing over an Arthur Baker beat so sick that not even Taylor Swift could copyright it.

[Read more…] about Certain Songs #105: Artists United Against Apartheid – “Sun City”

Certain Songs #104: Bob Dylan – “Delia”

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Album: World Gone Wrong.

Year: 1993.

It’s weird, but despite the fact I became a Bob Dylan fan in the late 1970s, it wasn’t until World Gone Wrong that he put out an album of new recordings that I truly loved as much as I loved his classic 60s & 70s recordings. Sure, there was the unreleased stuff on Biograph and The Bootleg Series, but while I liked – and loved – songs from every album from Slow Train Coming through Under the Red Sky, none of those records did it start to finish for me.

All the friends I ever had are gone

So I really didn’t have high hopes for World Gone Wrong.  After all, it was his second all-acoustic covers album in a row, coming relatively soon after the tepid Good As I Been To You. Acoustic Dylan is my least favorite Dylan. Cover songs are not why I revere the man. If anything should have signaled the final and utter artistic decline of Bob Dylan in my eyes, it was this eye-rolling record.

All the friends I ever had are gone

Still, I bought it because it was Bob Dylan, duh – probably walked down the street and got a used copy at Ragin’ Records – but I wasn’t really expecting much. And about halfway through, this song happened:

Delia was a gambling girl, gambled all around,
Delia was a gambling girl, she laid her money down.
All the friends I ever had are gone.

Just like that, the sadness of “Delia” just leapt out, grabbed me, and dragged me into the rest of World Gone Wrong.  It wasn’t even the story of Delia’s death that I responded to, but rather the tag of every single verse:  "all the friends I ever had are gone.“  In 1993, with my career as a drummer at a standstill; the Wild Blue slowly giving up on live music; the Video Zone declining; and the Tower District scene inevitably changing as everybody grew up and became, you know, adults, how Bob Dylan sang that phrase resonated with me.

All the friends I ever had are gone

As always, with hindsight, that seems silly. I mean, by the time I was 30, I’d been through enough that I should have remembered that whatever was happening in my life was temporary, just so long as I remembered that I had agency to change things up. And in fact, things were in motion that would change my life for the better forever: I was also getting on the internet for the first time, and making a whole bunch of new friends – some of them other Dylan fans – from all over the country, and Rox and I had started seeing each other.

All the friends I ever had are gone

And yet, all these years later,  "Delia” still affects me. I guess it’s because the inevitability of losing people you love – even temporarily – comes through so deep and so hard in his playing and singing, it doesn’t even matter what my current circumstances are.  Which I guess is what I also instinctively responded to in 1993: not only was Bob Dylan’s artistic decline not happening, he was going back to his artistic source as fuel for a rebirth.

Official video for “Delia”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #103: Bob Dylan – “Brownsville Girl”

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Album: Knocked Out Loaded

Year: 1986.

Welcome to the 1980s. Welcome to bottomless wells of reverb, walls of backing vocals, fake-sounding drums, faker-sounding horns and a complete and utter sonic disregard for, well, anything. And yet, like good cholesterol kicking ass over bad cholesterol,  the sheer fun and complete over-the-topness (over-the-topitude?) of “Brownsville Girl” transcends its terrible sound. 

Co-written with Sam Shepard (presumably after Shepard wrote his unproduced play “Boy Oh Boy, I Can’t Believe I’m Sleeping With Jessica Lange”), “Brownsville Girl” is half weird travelogue – he’s back in the American Southwest, which didn’t treat him so well back in “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” and half meditation on the awesomeness of Gregory Peck.

So one hand, in his best preaching cadence, we get Dylan intoning the following fable:

Well, you saw my picture in the Corpus Christi Tribune. 
Underneath it, it said, “A man with no alibi”
You went out on a limb to testify for me, you said I was with you
Then when I saw you break down in front of the judge and cry real tears
It was the best acting I saw anybody do

On the other hand, we get this confession:

Well, I’m standin’ in line in the rain to see a movie starring Gregory Peck
Yeah, but you know it’s not the one that I had in mind
He’s got a new one out now, I don’t even know what it’s about
But I’ll see him in anything, so I’ll stand in line

It shouldn’t work at all, especially since it goes back over and over again to the “Brownsville girl, with your Brownsville curl” chorus, which is honestly the weakest part of the song, as its completely overladen with backing vocals and those fucking godforsaken synth-horns or whatever in the fuck they are, and yet, it’s also too damn catchy to completely dismiss.

And let’s not forget this line, which I’ve stolen over and over and will steal again for the rest of my life:

The only thing we knew for sure about Henry Porter is that his name wasn’t Henry Porter

Just as the only thing we know for sure about Bob Dylan is that is name isn’t Bob Dylan.

Official video for “Brownsville Girl”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #102:  Bob Dylan – “Band of The Hand (It’s Hell Time, Man)”

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Album: Band of the Hand Original Soundtrack

Year: 1986.

Heh. While the recording of this was clearly a money gig, and associated with the garish neon nadir of the Miami Vice era – I mean, look the utterly ridiculous John Lydon lookalike on the album cover –  the actual performance is one of my favorite things he did in the 1980s.

Recorded with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – with whom Bob was touring during the early part of 1986 – “Band of the Hand” is an apocalyptic blues chock full of wailing background vocals and Mike Campbell’s utterly stinging guitar riffs. And after the mostly slower songs of Infidels and the overbaking of Empire Burlesque, “Band of the Hand” seemed to point a way towards the next phase of Dylan’s music.

It didn’t, as the mostly dire (with one amazing exception) Knocked Out Loaded and the completely dire (and completely misnamed) Down in the Groove followed. 

My favorite part of “Band of the Hand” is near the end, when the chorus of “It’s hell time, man” changes to “band of the hand” a couple of times. It’s as if somebody reminded Bob that they needed to pretend like it was written for the film, so they punched in a couple of overdubs of the backing vocalists singing the movie’s title a couple of times. Hopefully, those overdubs placated whichever studio boss greenlit this in the first place.

“Band of the Hand” is total footnote in the middle of the worst part of Bob Dylan’s career, and according to IMDB, the film was a failed TV pilot (and clearly woulda been a perfect target for the MST3K folks) prior to being a failed film, so the whole enterprise is obviously the kind of debacle that everybody has completely forgotten about.

But at least it gave us this song.

Official Video for “Band of The Hand”


My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #101: Bob Dylan – “Jokerman”

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Album: Infidels.
Year: 1983.

As the first new album that Bob Dylan released that I could actually play for other people as a DJ on the radio, Infidels holds a special place in my heart, even though it’s not as great as it could have been. When it – and to a lesser extent, Empire Burlesque – came out, I felt like I was part of a great continuum of college students going back for two decades who were totally thrilled to pour over the latest offering from Dylan.

Which I did, and really only one song totally stood out as worthy that scrutiny. But that one song – “Jokerman” – is as as worthy of scrutiny as any song the man has ever written. 

After years of lists and cants, it was great to be reminded that the man could still pour out a surreal torrent of non-linear images in his lyrics. And after so many years of saying what he meant, it was even more fun to figure out if they were personal: 

Shedding off one more layer of skin
Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within

Or religious (but with a joke!):

You’re a man of the mountains, you can walk on the clouds
Manipulator of crowds, you’re a dream twister
You’re going to Sodom and Gomorrah
But what do you care? Ain’t nobody there would want to marry your sister

Or maybe political:

Well, the rifleman’s stalking the sick and the lame
Preacherman seeks the same, who’ll get there first is uncertain
Nightsticks and water cannons, tear gas, padlocks
Molotov cocktails and rocks behind every curtain
False-hearted judges dying in the webs that they spin
Only a matter of time ’til night comes steppin’ in

But, of course, in another way, it didn’t matter, because of the music of “Jokerman.”. With Sly and Robbie playing a reggae-inspired groove that never falls into the trap of being straight reggae, and Mark Knopfler doing that guitar thing that he does, Dylan returns again and again to what might be his most beautiful chorus:

Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune
Bird fly high by the light of the moon
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman

By the time he gets to the last iteration of that chorus, just before the last harmonica solo, there is so much joy in his voice, like singing this song has lifted the weight of the past – well, decade – right from his shoulders.  

Definitely a Top 5 Dylan song for me. And the video only solidified it for me.

Oh man. That video. I first encountered it on Night Flight, the all-night music show on USA that Kirk and/or Rob and I used to watch in the wee hours of the weekend mornings. You know, when the evenings had played out but it didn’t feel quite time to crash either because you were suddenly old enough to stay up late and young enough not to have any reason not to.

So Night Flight was a pretty big deal around our apartment, cos you never knew what kinda crazy shit they were going to show.. Sometimes, it might be a new Miles Davis video, other times they’d show Ladies & Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains in its entirety.  

Probably a year after Infidels came out, maybe longer, there it was, this amazing video. “Bob Dylan’s ‘Jokerman’ explodes with mixed imagery” said the Night Flight lady on the version one of us taped on Kirk’s ever-handy beta machine that sat on the floor under the TV. Clearly, they must have given advance warning, or maybe one of us (that would probably be me) fucking DOVE for the “record” button when it came up.

The insanely great video for “Jokerman”

BONUS “Jokerman” video.

This is an absolutely terrible, tossed-off version of “Jokerman” Dylan performed on Late Night With David Letterman with a band he seemingly recruited from the audience waiting in line to see the show.  Worth it for the the moment at 3:03 when Dylan tosses off his guitar, grabs a harmonica, and starts to play, only to realize it’s in the wrong key. Or something. What happens next won’t particularly surprise you.

Certain Songs #100: American Music Club – “Johnny Mathis’ Feet”

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Album: Mercury.

Year: 1993.

American Music Club was one of those artists where I would go out and get their most recent album, despite the fact that I only liked a handful of songs from the previous album. With artists like this, it usually means that i really really liked the songs I liked, and I was always hoping that the next album would be full of songs I loved.

As it turns out, the only one of their songs I ever truly loved was the beautiful fantasia of “Johnny Mathis’ Feet.”  Over huge, soaring strings, American Music Club frontman Mark Eitzel tells the story of how he made a pilgrimage to Mr. Mathis for advice on, well, everything.

Johnny looked at my old collection
Of punk rock posters
Anonymous scenes of disaffection
Chaos, torture

And he said, “You were on the right track
But you’re a lamb jumping for the knife”
He said, “A real showman knows
How to disappear in the spotlight
In the spotlight, in the spotlight, in the spotlight”

In 1993, the peak era of Indie Rock’s battle with itself over its sudden popularity, the tale of culty ultra-hipster Mark Eitzel going to Vegas icon Johnny Mathis for advice could have shot through with deep irony and/or contempt. But instead, it’s completely sincere, both lyrically and musically, which is really the only reason it works: otherwise it’s like one of those “clever” punk rock covers of cheesy pop songs that got so annoying as the 80s wore on.

So while the slow beat and huge strings of “Johnny Mathis’ Feet” were a bit off-putting at first, they’re actually integral to the overall impact of the song.

Official video for “Johnny Mathis’ Feet”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #99: Bob Dylan – “Shelter From The Storm (Fort Collins, 1976)”

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Album: Hard Rain
Year: 1976.

I’m not really that big fan of either of the live albums that came from The Rolling Thunder Revue, as the arrangements and sound suffered from … well, just too much of everything.  It was interesting for Dylan to go in a completely different direction from the by-then precision of The Band, but he went so far in the other direction that most of Rolling Thunder recordings I’ve heard feel completely unfocused.

I mean, take this live version of “Shelter From The Storm” from Hard Rain: it’s filled with these terrible mid-70s phased-out guitar sounds, the electric violin fighting for space, and it’s anchored by a completely unnecessary central guitar riff which always followed by a weird tap! tap! on the snare drum.

And yet, outside of “The Royal Albert Hall” performances, this is my favorite live Dylan song. It comes down to his singing. We he sings this on Blood on the Tracks, he definitely needs the shelter, but on Hard Rain, he’s the one who sounds like the storm.

And my favorite singing of his entire career is this verse:

In a little hilltop village, they gambled for my clothes
I bargained for salvation an’ they gave me a lethal dose
I offered up my innocence and got repaid with scorn
“Come in,” she said, “I’ll give you shelter from the storm”

It comes down to “a lethal dose.” A lethal dose of salvation. It doesn’t make any linear sense, but when sings it, it feels like everything he’s done since – including the singing of that song right thing – has been affected by the lethal dose of salvation. He’ll never be the same, and neither will we. 

Check out the video below, which doesn’t have the greatest sonic quality (as it’s from an old VHS tape) and see of you spot a much-younger T-Bone Burnett in between what is otherwise mostly close-ups of Dylan singing.

“Shelter From The Storm (Fort Collins, 1976)”

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Certain Songs Spotify playlist
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Certain Songs #98: Bob Dylan – “Isis”

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Album: Desire.

Year: 1976.

Written and recorded in the middle of the Rolling Thunder Revue, Desire has always struck me as one of Bob Dylan’s most singular albums. Mostly co-written with Jacques Levy, it’s filled mostly with protest songs, travelogues and love songs, and musically, it’s dominated by Scarlet Riveria’s violin. I’m indifferent to about half of it, but “Isis” – half travelogue and half love song – is fucking awesome.

Played in sped-up ¾ time, and sparse musically: mostly just Dylan on a repetitive piano, bass, drums, and that violin.  Which is perfect, because “Isis” is all about the witty parable he’s spinning:

I married Isis on the fifth day of May
But I could not hold on to her very long
So I cut off my hair and I rode straight away
For the wild unknown country where I could not go wrong.

While he’s off seeking his fortune with a dude he runs into in a laundromat, Isis is always on his mind, and in the middle of it is one of my all-time favorite Dylan one-liners:

When he died I was hoping that it wasn’t contagious

Unlike so many of the stories he was telling on Blood on the Tracks, “Isis” is fundamentally an optimistic song about love, marriage and reconciliation. 

Official video for “Isis”

My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever

Certain Songs #97: Bob Dylan – “Up To Me”

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Biograph

Album: Biograph
Year: 1974

In the tumultuous summer of 1986, two different homemade cassettes kept me afloat. The first one was a tape I made of Hüsker Dü’s Candy Apple Grey to which I had appended the epic b-side “All Work And No Play.”  And the second was a tape I made of Blood on the Tracks, which I ended with “Up to Me,” which had shown up on Biograph the year before and almost instantly became a Top 5 Dylan song for me.

Let’s put it this way: if “Up to Me” actually ended Blood on the Tracks, then it would be my favorite Bob Dylan album, hands down.  Instead of just probably my favorite Bob Dylan album, since, as far as I’m concerned, “Up to Me” does end Blood on the Tracks.

In every possible way it is the perfect album-ender, even more so than the utterly awesome “Buckets of Rain.” Because it – both musically and lyrically – pretty much sums up the entire record, and in a weird way, adds a note of hope and optimism to it.

One one hand, it’s a bit of a shaggy dog story, like “Tangled Up in Blue” or “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts:”

Oh, the only decent thing I did when I worked as a postal clerk
Was to haul your picture down off the wall near the cage where I used to work
Was I a fool or not to try to protect your identity?
You looked a little burned out, my friend, I thought it might be up to me

But then, in the very next verse, it’s as simple and direct as “You’re a Big Girl Now” or “If You See Her, Say Hello:”

Well, I met somebody face to face and I had to remove my hat
She’s everything I need and love but I can’t be swayed by that
It frightens me, the awful truth of how sweet life can be
But she ain’t a-gonna make me move, I guess it must be up to me

Oh, and like nearly all of Blood on the Tracks, the melody is sadly beautiful, winding its way through each verse with such ragged precision you don’t even realize that you’ve internalized it until you realize you know exactly when he’s going to sing “up to me.”


My Certain Songs Spotify Playlist:

Every “Certain Song” Ever