Mr. Jones is dead

Jeffrey Owen Jones, who as an intern for Time magazine had an encounter with Bob Dylan that evidently helped inspire the song “Ballad of a Thin Man,” died this week of lung cancer. He was 63.

Most Bobcats already know the story by heart:

What was happening was the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, and Jones, a summer intern at Time magazine, convinced his editor to allow him to do a story on the harmonica’s folk-music renaissance. He was introduced to Dylan by Peter, Paul and Mary, and led to a truck, where a five-minute interview was conducted as Dylan groupies pounded on the sides of the vehicle.

As it turned out, the harmonica was irrelevant: The following night, Dylan electrified the folk-music world by plugging in his guitar, creating one of the most talked-about events in popular music.

And that fall, when “Ballad of a Thin Man” was included on the Highway 61 Revisited album, Jones recognized Mister Jones, who Dylan fingered as representing an overly smug academic world, and over-educated to the point of naiveté.

“I was thrilled — in the tainted way I suppose a felon is thrilled to see his name in the newspaper,” Jones wrote in a story for Rolling Stone magazine some years later. “I was awed too that Dylan had so accurately read my mind. I resented the caricature but had to admit that there was something happening there at Newport in the summer of 1965, and I didn’t know what it was.”

“It wasn’t a big thing in his life,” said his brother, Christopher Jones of New York City. “He was amused by it.”

If you read the obit, you’ll see that Jones lived to be a lot more than simply a footnote to the legend of His Bobness. Interestingly enough, David Byrne made himself the footnote to the footnote when he wrote the upbeat “Mr. Jones” (which had the eponymous character redeemed by late-blooming hipness) for Naked, the last and certainly least Talking Heads album.

Closing down Christiania

Everything I know about Christiania, I learned from Bob Dylan. Actually, I learned it from In Christiania, one of the more opulent Crystal Cat bootlegs, which captures His Bobness in a series of July 1996 performances at Den Gra Hal (The Gray Hall) in the odd little pocket of Copenhagen called the Free Town of Christiania. I’d never heard of the place, but the photos in the Crystal Cat booklet made it look like something the characters from Hair would have come up with if there’d been no Vietnam War and no narcs to spoil the party.

Thanks to this writeup by Beth Ann Bovino in 3 Quarks Daily, I now know a bit more about Christiania, and it looks like it may not be around much longer:

Christiania began in 1971 when hippies, squatters and political activists invaded an abandoned military base in the heart of Copenhagen. This site was renamed the “Free Town of Christiania.” The authorities, surprisingly, didn’t storm the place. Instead, they humored them (the situation has changed recently, and police have started raiding the commune). The settlement was legalized and the Christianites were allowed to govern themselves. They even designed their own flag. Christiania is now the third largest tourist attraction in Copenhagen after the Little Mermaid and Tivoli.

Christiana is not a legal haven for the drug culture for which it has been associated with at times over the years from uneducated travelers. The use of hash is illegal in Denmark and possession is punishable. Moreover, the current government has repeatedly trying to shut the area down. The hash booths once considered a major feature in Christiana were removed by the beginning of 2004. Before they were demolished, the National Museum of Denmark was able to get one of the more colorful stands, which forms part of an exhibit.

The people in Christiania have developed their own set of rules, completely independent of the Danish government. The rules forbid stealing, guns, bulletproof vests and hard drugs. Marijuana was sold openly from permanent stands until 2004, though Christiana does have rules forbidding hard drugs, like heroin and cocaine. The region negotiated an arrangement with the Danish defense ministry (which still owns the land) in 1995. However, the future of the area remains an issue, as Danish authorities continue to push for its removal.

Bovino’s article gives the sense that Christiania’s days are numbered, and not very high numbers at that. Denmark is supposed to be the most conservative of the Scandinavian countries, which makes its tolerance for this squatter-state all the more surprising — being a tourist attraction probably helps. The self-governing community has had its share of troubles: a biker gang nearly turned the place upside down in the mid-1980s, and heroin dealers had to be forcibly expelled at one point.

Yes yes, you say, that’s all good and well, but how is the bootleg? Pretty good, actually, if you like Dylan’s mid-1990s voice, which was noticeably contracting though not yet the ragged croak of the early Double-Aughts. I don’t play it all that much, but it is a lovely collectible item.

Blue Monday

Just as “Every Grain of Sand” and “Visions of Johanna” vie for position as my favorite Bob Dylan song, so does Blonde on Blonde compete with Blood on the Tracks  as my favoite Bob Dylan album. This despite the fact that the lead-off song from Blonde on Blonde, “Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35,” is one of my least favorite Bob Dylan songs. (I think it was Lester Bangs who called it “the ‘How Dry I Am’ of the hippie generation.) But thanks to the wonders of CD technology, it’s a simple matter to skip ahead to “Pledging My Time” and start to savor Dylan’s bluesiest album of the 1960s and maybe all the decades thereafter.  Kind of ironic when you realize that on the previous album, Highway 61 Revisited, Dylan hired white-blues guitarist Michael Bloomfield and then ordered him not to play ”any of that B.B. King shit.”  

Sean Wilentz has a great piece in the current Oxford American about the long, agonizing process by which Dylan chipped his way to this particular masterpiece – remarkable persistence for an artist who has made off-the-cuff recording his trademark. Of the three albums comprising the Holy Trinity of the 1960s, I find Blonde on Blonde the most inviting and approachable. Bringing It All Back Home is a fine start, but the brilliance of Highway 61 sheds light without much warmth. On Blonde on Blonde I love the playful lustiness of songs like “Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat” and “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” and the idyllic “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” which speaks of romantic longing far more convincingly than “Sara” or any other Dylan song.   

The day after

In today’s Altercation, Roseanne Cash writes charmingly about how cool it was to go to school the day after Bob Dylan appeared on her dad’s TV show:

On June 8, 1969, I walked in to Holy Cross School in Ventura, California, and into my eighth-grade classroom with a new mandate of confidence and coolness. My dad’s television show, The Johnny Cash Show, had aired the night before and his guest had been Bob Dylan. My dad and Bob had sat at the edge of a small stage, wearing hip black suits, with only their two acoustic guitars, and had sung a duet of “Girl From the North Country.” The entire country, or at least my entire generation, was buzzing. It was a certifiable, seminal musical event. My new mandate was justified thusly: the English teacher who had told my entire class, right in front of me — only to pretend that he had forgotten that I was there — that none of my dad’s work was worth listening to, save perhaps “Folsom Prison Blues”; the boy who had said my dad couldn’t sing and could barely talk; the nuns who had made nasty comments about my dad’s profession and attendant personal catastrophes … they could all kiss my ass. They could at least back off. No one was cooler than my dad, well, no one but Bob Dylan. But even Bob Dylan thought no one was cooler than my dad. Everything was forgiven under the terms of my new mandate (at least until MUCH later): the long absences, the drugs, the overnight jail stay, the infidelity, the bizarre and dangerous behavior and the divorce. The stratospheric level of coolness witnessed the evening before on television healed and dissolved just about every problem I had in my 14-year-old life.

I was a sprout at the time, and the only thing I knew about Johnny Cash was that he was the guy who sang a song about a boy named after a girl — a song that was amusing the first two or three times I heard it, rather less the eighth and ninth time I heard it, and downright annoying the twentieth time I heard it. Commercial AM radio being what it was at the time, that song would continue to be played many more times, until each repetition began to feel like a personal insult. In those days, the playlists were so tight you could set your watch to them, and after a while even the disc jockeys let it be known they would consider a root canal without anesthesia preferable to cranking up “A Boy Named Sue” for one more go-round.

Well, the joke was on me, ’cause when I look at the list of musical guests on this DVD of the old Johnny Cash TV show, I realize that the hippest program television has ever seen was going on somewhere just over my head. Bob Dylan? Neil Young? Louis Armstrong? Stevie Wonder? Pete Seeger? Ray Charles? And meanwhile my folks were watching every lameass Rat Pack wannabe variety show? Jeez, did I have a deprived childhood or what?

Hare of the dog

Back in 1992, playwright David Hare created one of the great false dichotomies of our time when he told the world it had to choose between Keats and Dylan. Keats, Hare informed us, was really a poet.

Those of us whose worlds are large enough to encompass both Dylan and Keats, and in some cases wide enough even for Hare’s cramped and suffocating plays, rolled our eyes and went on with our lives. So whatever will Hare have to say about this little development in the U.K.?

Blue Monday

To salute the imminent publication of Michael Gray’s Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell, here are some clips of Bob Dylan performing “Blind Willie McTell,” the buried 1980s masterpiece that could have helped rescue Dylan’s Infidels album from the also-ran category that applies to just about all of his 1980s releases. The tune finally surfaced with the release of the first installment of The Bootleg Series, and a still-unreleased electric version can be found on Rough Cuts, the bootlegged outtakes from the sessions that produced Infidels.   

I’ve already sung Gray’s praises on a number of occasions, and many Dylan fans found their way into McTell’s towering blues legacy through Gray’s great essay in Song and Dance Man. I’m sorry to say that none of the Dylan performances available on YouTube — this 2000 rendition from Cardiff, this 2003 version from London or this 2006 performance from Roskilde – can hold a candle to Dylan’s original recorded performance in The Bootleg Series. Mick Taylor, one of the two hired guitar guns on Infidels, actually cuts his former boss dead with this 2006 concert version. 

There doesn’t seem to be any film available of McTell himself in performance, so here’s a clip of the Allman Brothers doing their signature cover of McTell’s “Statesboro Blues,” which has probably introduced a couple of generations to the work of the great Georgia bluesman. Here’s a link to an annual festival in McTell’s honor, and a good biography of McTell on BluesNet. 

Listeners’ choice

Columbia Records is doing a Dylan compilation album in which the tunes will be selected by Dylan fans. Cast your vote for a song here.

It was forty years ago and a day

So now it’s been just over forty years since the Beatles put out Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the inevitable anniversary stories are done with. Am I allowed to say that as much as I love the Beatles, and as important as they remain in the annals of popular music, I think Sgt. Pepper is a weak, gimmicky record? Or that I think it led rock music down an ill-advised cul-de-sac? Well, there, I said it anyway.

My answer to the old question “Who’s your favorite Beatle” has always been “John Lennon,” and Sgt. Pepper is very much Paul’s record. Sgt. Pepper really hasn’t stood up to the years as commandingly as the band’s other releases, because the songwriting that was always the band’s calling card (as opposed to instrumental virtuosity or great vocals) took a significant step back from Revolver. It all sounds as wonderful as ever, but except for “With A Little Help From My Friends,” “When I’m 64″ and “For the Benefit of Mister Kite” the songs are at best minor additions to the Beatles catalogue. The exception, of course, is “A Day in the Life,” the menacing masterpiece that is the real reason Sgt. Pepper holds its place in the popular imagination.

Even when my Beatles obsession was at its height, Sgt. Pepper was hardly ever the album I reached for when I wanted some of their music. I would go for Revolver, which showcased all three songwriters in the band (George having finally come into his own), or A Hard Day’s Night (pure up from the first note, the high water mark of the group’s initial phase as John Lennon’s band), or the white album (Lennon’s first real solo album, with guest spots by the other boys). In my perfect musical universe, Sgt. Pepper would be edited down and built back up with the choicer cuts from Magical Mystery Tour: “Penny Lane,” “Your Mother Should Know,” “Strawberry Fields,” “Fool on the Hill,” “Blue Jay Way.” “I Am the Walrus” would replace “Mister Kite” as the closer for side one, and a forecast of what’s to come with “A Day in the Life.”

Sgt. Pepper marked the end of the three-way competition of giants that enlivened 1960s rock and roll. It started with Bob Dylan, whose second album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan served as the model for the Beatles as they became more ambitious songwriters, and included the Rolling Stones, who were late to develop their own songwriting skills but quickly made up for lost time. What followed was a wonderful game of Can You Top This? as they tried to outdo each other, with all of us the winners. It ended with Sgt. Pepper. Dylan, who despised the self-indulgent gimmickry of psychedelic rock, turned around and recorded the defiantly anti-psychedelic John Wesley Harding. The Stones, always a few steps behind the Beatles, released the slavishly imitative Their Satanic Majesties Request before high-tailing it back to their signature sound on Beggar’s Banquet. The chief beneficiaries of Sgt. Pepper were the members of the Moody Blues, who decided to chuck their fading R&B-based sound and run with the trippy concept album template the Beatles had created.

Back in the vinyl days, pausing to admire the play of light along the bands that marked each song was part of the whole Japanese tea ceremony that accompanied the placement of a disc on the turntable. You could always tell a much-played album from its scratches and dulled surface. But on every copy of Sgt. Pepper, no matter how worn and overplayed, the band for George Harrison’s dreary sitar-droning song always gleamed as if it were fresh from the pressing plant.

The toppermost of the Bobbermost

A couple of years ago, one of the Brit papers played off the broadcast debut of No Direction Home: Bob Dylan (the DVD has been out for about a week) by asking various celebrities to name their favorite Dylan songs. Some of the replies were unsurprising (Patti Smith loves “Like A Rolling Stone”); one was a cheat, albeit a fun one (Tom Waits names all of The Basement Tapes); one was unexpected (Respect MP George Galloway is keen on “Tangled Up In Blue”). I guess that’s one of the defining misfortunes of being famous: people think nothing of calling you out of the blue and asking you questions like, “What’s your favorite Bob Dylan song?”

But if some reporter comes knocking on my door one of these days, I’ll have my answer locked and loaded: depending on my mood, either “Visions Of Johanna” (off the incomparable Blonde On Blonde) or “Every Grain Of Sand” (from the underrated Shot Of Love). In the universe of great songs Dylan has created, those are the two stars that shine the brightest for me.

“Visions Of Johanna” is, among other things, a treasury of great lines, starting right from the opening: “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet?”. Intriguing, puzzling and inviting, it makes the listener hold his breath and listen as the song sketches in a finely observed, somewhat rundown apartment in a closely-packed building (”Lights flicker from the opposite loft/ In this room the heat pipes just cough”). If I were writing a novel and hit upon that kind of opening line, I’d be torn between knocking off for rest of the night, or crashing forward for another few hours in the hopes of capturing its mate.

A seemingly tossed-off phrase (”Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial”) generates a stream of lines that creates, in the viewer’s mind, a veritable museum of absurdist imagery (”When the jelly-faced women all sneeze . . . Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule”). But it always comes back to a vision of someone who isn’t there — someone the singer longs to see.

It could be romantic longing, but the writing doesn’t support that. Indeed, the song’s most famous line — “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face” — is hardly warm praise. I think Johanna is a muse, a reminder of what the singer should be working toward, instead of wasting his time at a dull party.

“Every Grain Of Sand,” the startlingly gentle coda to the loud and angry Shot Of Love album, is the song I want played at my funeral. The two hard-nosed gospel albums that preceded it (Slow Train Coming and Saved) were all about the harshness of certainty. “Gotta Serve Somebody” is the evangelical version of “Like A Rolling Stone” — where the earlier song aimed its knowing scorn at an anonymous Miss Lonely, its born-again successor targets the listener and anyone else who doesn’t share the singer’s hard-shelled faith. That the song is expertly played and well produced — qualities not always found in the Dylan canon — hardly makes it more inviting: the singer is eyeballing you through a slot in the church door, and odds are you haven’t got the right password.

What an unexpected pleasure, then, to find this evangelical cycle come to an end with “Every Grain Of Sand”, a song about the beauty of doubt. The comfort of faith is there, but the singer is no longer convinced that salvation is his. Sometimes he even seems to doubt salvation itself:

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea/ Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me.

The song includes two of the longest harmonica solos Dylan has ever played on record. I think Dylan’s harp playing is underrated, but I realize part of the reason for that is he usually goes for the hardest, sharpest sound possible. The playing on “Every Grain Of Sand” is still a little rough, but also gentle and, in the most surprising way, reassuring. It carries the song and the listener into the very center of what the singer is striving for, and doesn’t quite realize he has within his grasp.

Dylan Noir

I’ll have this year’s Bobcat Birthday Challenge posted later today, but right now I want to talk about the Bob Dylan song I’ve been playing most obsessively these past two weeks.

With the war grinding on, you’d think it would be “Masters of War” or “With God On Our Side,” but no — it’s “Black Diamond Bay,” the penultimate cut on Desire and second only to “Brownsville Girl” on the roster of Dylan’s shaggy dog story-songs. (I know that most people would put “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts” at the top of that roster, but personally, I’m tired of the thing.)

“Black Diamond Bay” is one of the Desire songs Dylan co-wrote with Jacques Levy, and like them it has a wide-screen cinematic quality. In this case, the movie is a 1930s noir from Warner Brothers, shot in black-and-white with the usual character actors.

There’s all kinds of huggermugger about a tropical island resort with a mysterious woman, a Greek man trying to kill himself, a soldier and a dwarf conducting business and a perennial loser in the resort’s casino. The song is really about the easy wit with which Dylan and Levy manipulate stock players and situations, then cross it with a different genre by having a volcano erupt and send the whole island to the bottom of the sea. And we end up with Dylan in Los Angeles, “watching old Cronkite on the seven o’clock news,” and catching the tail end of the disaster. Too bad, he shrugs, but he never wanted to go there anyhow.

There’s no standout line like “Nowadays even the swap meets around here are getting corrupt, but “Black Diamond Bay” always cracks me up when I play it.