Music – Page 24 – Maverick Philosopher

On This Date 31 Years Ago and 50 Years Ago: Jim Fixx and Bob Dylan

It was 31 years ago today, 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

Bob Dylan

Today, 20 July, is not only the 31th anniversary of Jim Fixx's death, but also the 50th 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, 50 years later.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Two Rarely Heard Cuts from the ’60s

This wonderfully creative but rarely played song by The Lovin' Spoonful dates from 1966. Six O'Clock is one of the songs that captures for me the 'magic' of those fabulous and far-off days. Same goes for Van Morrison and Them's Here Comes the Night (1965). It still sounds as raw and fresh as it did in '65. Tender and yearning, but with the metallic clang of the Dionysian.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Celebrating Freedom and Independence

Not to mention resistance and defiance.

Johnny Cash, I Won't Back Down. Tom Petty wrote it, with Jeff Lynne.

Byrds, Chimes of Freedom. One of Dylan's greatest anthems.

Byrds, I Wasn't Born to Follow

Good YouTuber comment: "I keep searching for that door back into the summer of '69, I lost it somewhere long ago."

Richie Havens, Freedom

Tim Hardin, A Simple Song of Freedom

Crystals, He's a Rebel

Rascals, People Got to be Free

Bob Dylan, I Shall be Free. This is the first time I've heard this particular delightful 1962 outtake. A real period piece in the style of Woody Guthrie with appearances by Marilyn Monroe, Anita Ekberg, Sophia Loren, John F. Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Mr. Clean, Mr. Clean's great granddaughter, fallout shelters . . . .

Cream, I Feel Free

Johnny Horton, The Battle of New Orleans

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Some Suicides

Del Shannon (Charles Weedon Westover), December 30, 1934 – February 8, 1990, known prmarily for his Billboard Hot 100 #1 hit, Runaway, 1961. "Suffering from depression, Shannon committed suicide on February 8, 1990, with a .22-caliber rifle at his home in Santa Clarita, California, while on a prescription dose of the anti-depressant drug Prozac. Following his death, The Traveling Wilburys honored him by recording a version of "Runaway"." (Wikipedia)

Dalida, O Sole Mio. I think I'm in love. "Dalida (17 January 1933 – 3 May 1987), birth name Iolanda Cristina Gigliotti, was a singer and actress who performed and recorded in more than 10 languages including: French, Arabic, Italian, Greek, German, English, Japanese, Hebrew, Dutch and Spanish." [. . .]On Saturday, 2 May 1987, Dalida committed suicide by overdosing on barbiturates.^[7]^[8] She left behind a note which read, "La vie m'est insupportable… Pardonnez-moi." ("Life has become unbearable for me… Forgive me.")" (Wikipedia)

The Singing Nun, Dominique, 1963. "Jeanine Deckers (17 October 1933 – 29 March 1985) was a Belgian singer-songwriter and initially a member of the Dominican Order in Belgium (as Sister Luc Gabrielle). She acquired world fame in 1963 as Sœur Sourire (Sister Smile) when she scored a hit with the her French-language song "Dominique". She is sometimes credited as "The Singing Nun". [. . .]

Citing their financial difficulties in a note, she and her companion of ten years^[8]^[9]^[10], Annie Pécher, both committed suicide by an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol on 29 March 1985.^[11]^[12] In their suicide note, Decker and Pécher stated they had not given up their faith and wished to be buried together after a church funeral.^[7] They were buried together in Cheremont Cemetery in Wavre, Walloon Brabant, the town where they died.^[13] The inscription on their tombstone reads "I saw her soul fly across the clouds", a line from Deckers' song "Sister Smile is dead". (Wikipedia)

Phil Ochs, Small Circle of Friends. There but for Fortune. "Philip David Ochs (/ˈ oʊ k s /; December 19, 1940 – April 9, 1976) was an American protest singer (or, as he preferred, a topical singer) and songwriter who was known for his sharp wit, sardonic humor, earnest humanism, political activism, insightful and alliterative lyrics, and distinctive voice. He wrote hundreds of songs in the 1960s and released eight albums in his lifetime." [. . .] "On April 9, 1976, Ochs hanged himself.^{[110]" (Wikipedia)}

My favorite suicide song is Shiver Me Timbers by Tom Waits. James Taylor offers a beautiful interpretation. Is it really about suicide at sea? The reference to Martin Eden suggests to me that it is. But you might reasonably disagree.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Sleep, Dreams, Insomnia

These tunes go out to Sally S. and Jean H.

Bobby Lewis, Tossin' and Turnin (1961).

Santo and Johnny, Sleepwalk (1959). Joe Satriani's cover blows the original and every other cover clean out of the water. Masterful guitar work. But wait a minute! What about old man Les Paul's version?

Bobby Edwards, You're the Reason I Don't Sleep at Night. A country crossover hit from 1961.

Johnny Tillotson, Send Me the Pillow that You Dream On, 1957.

Leadbelly, Where Did You Sleep Last Night (1944).

Here's hoping your Dream Lover doesn't leave you with Tears on Your Pillow.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Brian Wilson

The Brian Wilson biopic Love and Mercy opened yesterday and I saw it. I grew up in Southern California in the '60s with all those songs, and so I had to see it. I'm glad I did. Trailer here. But not for the music of which there is little, but for the biography and backstory. The two heroes of the story are Brian Wilson and the woman who saved him, Melinda Ledbetter. The two villains are the abusive father, Murry Wilson, and the crazy shrink, Dr. Landy. It is probably true, though, that were it not for the hard-charging Murry there would have been no Beach Boys. He pushed them and negotiated their contract with Capitol Records.

Then I Kissed Her. The BBs' answer to The Crystals, Then He Kissed Me. Doesn't come close, but in general Brian Wilson and Phil Spector are in the same league.

Don't Worry Baby

Help Me Rhonda

Wouldn't It Be Nice

Surf's Up (Punch Bros. cover.)

Heroes and Villains

Love and Mercy

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Kings of the Blues

Albert King, Born Under a Bad Sign

Albert King, Crosscut Saw

B. B. King, Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out

B. B. King and Eric Clapton, Riding With the King

Playlist
1. "Riding with the King"
2. "Ten Long Years"
3. "Key to the Highway"
4. "Marry You"
5. "Three O'Clock Blues"
6. "Help the Poor"
7. "I Wanna Be"
8. "Worried Life Blues"
9. "Days of Old"
10. "When My Heart Beats Like a Hammer"
11. "Hold On, I'm Comin'"
12. "Come Rain or Come Shine"

Clapton's tribute on King's passing. New York Times obituary.

All of us blues guitar players of a certain age copied those signature licks. So long, B. B. King.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Clowns

Being hung up on the '60s, there is and will be only one clown for me, Bozo the Clown. After Bozo I had no truck with clowns. I'm a serious man. But I can relate to this segment from the Seinfeld episode, "The Fire." It is one of the funniest in the whole series. But I suppose you had to be there. In the '60s I mean. With Bozo. The Clown. Now some songs featuring clowns.

Roy Orbison, In Dreams. Nice surreal video. "A candy-colored clown they call the sandman . . . ."

James Darren, Goodbye Cruel World. "I'm off to join the circus, gonna be a broken-hearted clown."

Frank Sinatra, Send in the Clowns

A couple of clowns in high places:

Obama the Clown

The Pope is a Buffoon When it Comes to Economics

There is too much buffoonery in high places.

It would be nice to be able to expect from popes and presidents a bit of gravitas, a modicum of seriousness, when they are instantiating their institutional roles. What they do after hours is not our business. So Pope Francis' clowning around does not inspire respect, any more than President Clinton's answering the question about his underwear. Remember that one? Boxers or briefs? He answered the question! All he had to do was calmly state, without mounting a high horse, "That is not a question that one asks the president of the United States." And now we have the Orwellian Prevaricator himself in the White House, Barack Hussein Obama, whose latest Orwellian idiocy is that Big Government is the problem, not him, even though he is the the poster boy, the standard bearer, like unto no one before him in U. S. history, of Big Government!

Read the rest.

I forgot the disgusting Biden the Clown:

Joe Biden the Clown. This article will recall for you Biden's clownish antics in his fall 2012 'debate' with Paul Ryan.

Dion DiMucci on Lennon’s Imagine

At Victor's place.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: “Render unto Caesar the Things that are Caesar’s. . .”

Have you settled accounts with the Infernal Revenue 'Service'? If yes, order up one scotch, one bourbon, one beer and enjoy this live version of Taxman featuring Harrison and Clapton. Stevie Ray Vaughan's blistering version.

Holy Saturday Night at the Oldies: Religious Themes

Herewith, five definite decouplings of rock and roll from sex and drugs.

Norman Greenbaum, Spirit in the Sky

Johnny Cash, Personal Jesus. This is one powerful song.

Clapton and Winwood, Presence of the Lord. Why is Clapton such a great guitarist? Not because of his technical virtuosity, his 'chops,' but because he has something to say.

George Harrison, My Sweet Lord

George Harrison, All Things Must Pass. Harrison was the Beatle with depth.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Bob Dylan, Traditionalist

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:

Quinn the Eskimo

Lo and Behold!

One Too Many Mornings

Million Dollar Bash (Take 2)

You Ain't Going Nowhere (Take 2)

The Auld Triangle

Punch Bros. version

Too Much of Nothing (Take 2)

Say to Valerie, say hello to Marion
Give them all my salary on the waters of oblivion.

You Win Again

An old Hank Williams number

Jerry Lee Lewis version

Rock Salt and Nails

Joan Baez's unsurpassable and definitive version

A Fool Such as I

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.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ordinals and Cardinals > 10

I did zero to ten a couple of years back. What songs can you think of that feature ordinals or cardinals greater than tenth or ten? Well, racking wracking my brains there's

Connie Stevens, Sixteen Reasons. With footage from David Lynch, "Mulholland Drive."

Simon and Garfunkel, 59th Street Bridge Song. What a great song! Slow down you hyperkinetic hustlers, you're moving too fast!

Cannibal and the Head Hunters, Land of 1000 Dances. This one goes out to Tom Coleman who probably danced to this at the El Monte Legion Stadium circa '65. "Be there or be square!"

Question Mark and the Mysterians, 96 Tears. Is that a Farfisa organ making that cheesy sound? This one goes out to Colin McGinn.

Bobby Darin, 18 Yellow Roses

Cannonball Adderley, 74 Miles Away

Chicago, 25 or 6 to 4

Frank Zappa, Twenty Small Cigars

Tom Waits, Ol '55

Paul Simon, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover

Billy Ward and the Dominoes, Sixty Minute Man

Ike Turner, Rocket 88

Beatles, When I'm 64

Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited. Alternate bootleg take. Arguably better than the album version.

And hundreds more . . .

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Weights and Measures

The Band, The Weight

The Byrds, Eight Miles High

The Rolling Stones, Moonlight Mile

The Who, I Can See for Miles

Cannonball Adderley, 74 Miles Away. So titled because it is In 7/4 time.

Dave Brubeck, Take Five. So titled because it is in 5/4 time.

Cream, Spoonful. Heavy, man.

The Lovin' Spoonful, Six O'Clock

Gene Pitney, 24 Hours from Tulsa

Beach Boys, 409. With a four-speed manual tranny, dual quad carburetors (before fuel injection), positraction (limited slip differential), and 409 cubic inches of engine displacement. Gas was cheap in those days.

ZZ Top and Jeff Beck, 16 Tons. Tennessee Ernie Ford's 1955 #1 version.

Justin Timberlake, et al., 500 Miles. (From Inside Llewyn Davis)

Bobby Bare, 500 Miles Away from Home

UPDATE 2/23:

Lovin' Spoonful, Full Measure. Undeservedly obscure.

St. Valentine’s Day’s Night at the Oldies: Love and Murder

We'll start with murder. David Dalton (Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob Dylan, Hyperion 2012, pp. 28-29, hyperlinks added!):

Most folk songs had grim, murderous content (and subtext). In Pretty Polly a man lures a young girl from her home with the promise of marriage,and then leads the pregnant girl to an already-dug grave and murders her. In Love Henry, a woman poisons her unfaithful lover, observed by an alarmed parrot that she also tries to kill. So it was a bit bizarre that these songs should become part of the sweetened, homogenized new pop music.

[. . .]

The original folk songs were potent, possessed stuff, but the folk trios had figured out how to make this grisly stuff palatable, which only proved that practically anything could be homogenized. Clean-cut guys and girls in crinolines, dressed as if for prom night, sang ancient curse-and-doom tales. Their songs had sweet little melodies, but as in nursery rhymes, there was a dark gothic undercurrent to them — like Ring Around the Rosies, which happens to be a charming little plague song.

The most famous of these folk songs was the 1958 hit Tom Dooley, a track off a Kingston Trio album which set off the second folk revival [the first was in the early '40s with groups like the Weavers] and was Dylan's initial inspiration for getting involved in folk music. [I prefer Doc Watson's version.] And it was the very success of the syrupy folk trios that inspired Dylan's future manager to assemble one himself: Peter, Paul and Mary. They would make Dylan, the prophet of the folk protest movement, a star and lead to consequences that even he did not foresee. Their version of Blowin' in the Wind would become so successful that it would sound the death knell for the folk protest movement. Ultimately there would be more than sixty versions of it, "all performing the same function," as Michael Gray says, of "anesthetizing Dylan's message."

Be that as it may, it is a great song, one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement. Its power in no small measure is due to the allusiveness of its lyrics which deliver the protest message without tying it to particular events. It's topical without being topical and marks a difference between Dylan, and say, Phil Ochs.

And now for some love songs.

Gloria Lynne, I Wish You Love. A great version from 1964. Lynne died at 83 in 2013. Here's what Marlene Dietrich does with it.

Ketty Lester, Love Letters. Another great old tune in a 1962 version. The best to my taste.

Three for my wife. An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, and my favorite from the Seekers.

Addenda (2/15):

1. Keith Burgess-Jackson quotes Jamie Glazov on the hatred of Islamists and leftists for St. Valentine's Day. Another very interesting similarity between these two totalitarian movements. Recalling past inamorata of a Saturday night while listening to sentimental songs — is this not the height of bourgeois self-indulgence when you should be plotting ways to blow up the infidel or bring down capitalism? But we who defend the private life against totalitarian scum must be careful not to retreat too far into the private life. A certain amount of activism and engagement is necessary to keep the totalitarians in check.

2. On Thomas Merton: “All the love and all the death in me are at the moment wound up in Joan Baez’s ‘Silver Dagger,’” the man wrote to his lady love in 1966. “I can’t get it out of my head, day or night. I am obsessed with it. My whole being is saturated with it. The song is myself — and yourself for me, in a way.”