Guardian obituary. Malcolm Pollack's tribute. And here is a rare photo taken by an unknown German photographer at Gerde's Folk City, Greenwich Village, 1961. (HT: Tony Flood)
Category: Music
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Radosh and ‘Spengler’ on Dylan
In October of 2016, I wrote,
This brings me to Bob Dylan who was recently awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. Now I've been a Dylan fan from the early '60s. In the '60s I was more than a fan; I was a fanatic who would brook no criticism of his hero. And I still maintain that in the annals of American popular music no one surpasses him as a songwriter.
But the Nobel Prize for Literature? That's a bit much, and an ominous foreshadowing of the death of the book and of quiet reading in this hyperkinetic age of tweets and soundbites.
I might have added that Dylan is important in the way Kerouac is. But is Kerouac a great novelist? Obviously not. I have enough literary sense to realize that my own love of Kerouac is largely determined by my own quirks and generational affiliation.
Ron Radosh, whom I respect highly, thinks that Dylan deserved the prize. But David P. Goldman, 'Spengler,' whom I also respect, takes a harsh line:
And so it is with Bob Dylan, parodist, satirist, scammer and snake-oil salesman par excellence. He never hid from us what he had in mind: he's been playing with our heads since high school, finding the lever that loosened our tears, and our wallets. He caught a wave in the early 1960s with the folk revival movement, itself a hoax. We Americans are not a "folk," not in the sense that Johann Gottfried Herder used the term. We do not have the deep memory of autochthonous roots that characterizes European cultures, the hand-me-downs of long-lost pagan experience. We are a people self-created by religious and political impulse.
[. . .]
Of course, it was all a put-on. Woody Guthrie was a middle-class lawyer's son. Pete Seeger was the privileged child of classical musicians who decamped to Greenwich Village. The authenticity of the folk movement stank of greasepaint. But a generation of middle-class kids who, like Holden Caulfield, thought their parents "phony" gravitated to the folk movement. In 1957, Seeger was drunk and playing for pittances at Communist Party gatherings; that's where I first met him, red nose and all. By the early 1960s he was a star again.
To Dylan's credit, he knew it was a scam, and spent the first part of his career playing with our heads. He could do a credible imitation of the camp-meeting come-to-Jesus song ("When the Ship Comes In") and meld pseudo-folk imagery with social-protest sensibility ("A Hard Rain's a' Gonna Fall"). But he knew it was all play with pop culture ("Lone Ranger and Tonto/Riding down the line/Fixin' everybody's troubles/Everybody's 'cept mine"). When he went electric at the Newport Festival to the hisses of the folk purists, he knew it was another kind of joke.
Only someone who was not moved by the music of that period could write something so extreme. No doubt there was and is an opportunistic side to Dylan. He started out an unlikely rock-and roller in high school aping Little Richard, but sensed that the folk scene was where he could make his mark. And so for a time he played the son of Ramblin' Jack Elliot and the grandson of Woody Guthrie.
In his recent Nobel Prize lecture, Dylan mentions early influences. Let's dig up some of the tunes that inspired him.
Buddy Holly, True Love Ways
I think it was a day or two after that that his [Holly's] plane went down. And somebody – somebody I’d never seen before – handed me a Leadbelly record with the song “Cottonfields” on it. And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me. I must have played that record a hundred times.
Leadbelly, Cotton Fields
It was on a label I’d never heard of with a booklet inside with advertisements for other artists on the label: Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, the New Lost City Ramblers, Jean Ritchie, string bands. I’d never heard of any of them. But I reckoned if they were on this label with Leadbelly, they had to be good, so I needed to hear them. I wanted to know all about it and play that kind of music. I still had a feeling for the music I’d grown up with, but for right now, I forgot about it. Didn’t even think about it. For the time being, it was long gone.
Sonnie Terry and Brownie McGhee, Key to the Highway. Just to vex London Ed who hates Eric 'Crapton' as he calls him, here is his Derek and the Dominoes version with Duane Allman. Sound good to me, Ed!
New Lost City Ramblers, Tom Dooley
Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson, What Will I Do with the Baby-O?
By listening to all the early folk artists and singing the songs yourself, you pick up the vernacular. You internalize it. You sing it in the ragtime blues, work songs, Georgia sea shanties, Appalachian ballads and cowboy songs. You hear all the finer points, and you learn the details.
You know what it’s all about. Takin’ the pistol out and puttin’ it back in your pocket. Whippin’ your way through traffic, talkin’ in the dark. You know that Stagger Lee was a bad man and that Frankie was a good girl. You know that Washington is a bourgeois town and you’ve heard the deep-pitched voice of John the Revelator and you saw the Titanic sink in a boggy creek. And you’re pals with the wild Irish rover and the wild colonial boy. You heard the muffled drums and the fifes that played lowly. You’ve seen the lusty Lord Donald stick a knife in his wife, and a lot of your comrades have been wrapped in white linen.
I had all the vernacular down. I knew the rhetoric. None of it went over my head – the devices, the techniques, the secrets, the mysteries – and I knew all the deserted roads that it traveled on, too. I could make it all connect and move with the current of the day. When I started writing my own songs, the folk lingo was the only vocabulary that I knew, and I used it.
Mississippi John Hurt, The Ballad of Stagger Lee
Mississippi John Hurt, You Got to Walk that Lonesome Valley
Mississippi John Hurt, You Are My Sunshine
Blind Willie Johnson, John the Revelator
George F. Will, The Prize that Bob Dylan Really Deserves
A Complete Unknown
A lot happened to young Bob in a few short years, from Song to Woody to Like a Rolling Stone.
I saw the movie and it moved me. How about you?
Here is a good article about Dylan's falling out with Seeger.
A Complete Unknown isn’t that interested in clarifying this point. Because the film almost entirely ignores politics. And it should ignore Dylan’s politics, whatever they might be. But it makes an unforgivable error in ignoring the politics of his Greenwich Village confederates who adhered to the Maoist dictum that art must serve the people, avoid manifestations of the individual, and reject commercial concerns.
As one critic complained in the aftermath of Newport, for the new, electrified Dylan “the words [matter] less than the beat.” What he “used to stand for, whether one agreed with it or not, was much clearer than what he stands for now. [Which is] maybe himself.” Irwin Silber, the rigidly Communist editor of Sing Out! magazine, the in-flight magazine of the radical folk scene, excoriated the New Dylan for having abandoned political songs in favor of “inner-directed, innerprobing, self-conscious” music. Decades later, Silber reflected on his criticism by acknowledging that his “biggest concern was not with the electricity. . . but with what Dylan was saying and doing about moving away from his political songs.”
Dylan was so desperate to slip out from folk’s rigid ideological strictures that he would simply deny the politics even of his most transparently political songs. “Blowin’ in the Wind” wasn’t topical but “just a feeling I felt because I felt that way.” Already in 1964, he would shrug at a song he wrote about the lynching of Emmett Till, “which in all honesty was a bullshit song. . . . I realize now that my reasons and motives behind it were phony.”
New Year’s Eve Again
Last year I wrote, in an excess of pessimism,
Happy New Year, everybody. Not that there is much to be happy about. As our great republic approaches its end, whether with a whimper or a bang remaining to be seen, Irving Berlin's "The Song is Ended" seems an appropriate way to convey the thought that happiness in the coming year is more likely to be found by an inner path. "Take your happiness while you may." Here's a hipster version, my favorite.
But November 5th brought a change, and things are looking up.
Bang on the first link supra for last year's tune list.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Billboard Top Ten in October, 1963 at the Height of the Profumo Affair
Some of us are old enough to remember John Profumo and his entanglement with sex kitten Christine Keeler, which eventually lead to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's resignation in October of 1963:
At a party at the country estate of Lord Astor on July 8, 1961, British Secretary of State for War John Profumo, then a rising 46-year-old Conservative Party politician, was introduced to 19-year-old London dancer Christine Keeler by Stephen Ward, an osteopath with contacts in both the aristocracy and the underworld. Also present at this gathering was a Russian military attaché, Eugene (Yevgeny) Ivanov, who was Keeler’s lover. Through Ward’s influence, Profumo began an affair with Keeler, and rumours of their involvement soon began to spread. In March 1963 Profumo lied about the affair to Parliament, stating that there was “no impropriety whatsoever” in his relationship with Keeler. Evidence to the contrary quickly became too great to hide, however, and 10 weeks later Profumo resigned, admitting “with deep remorse” that he had deceived the House of Commons. Prime Minister Macmillan continued in office until October, but the scandal was pivotal in his eventual downfall, and within a year the opposition Labour Party defeated the Conservatives in a national election.
Seven made top ten in October of '63, but I only like six. Here they are:
Ray Charles, Busted. "I'm broke, no bread, I mean like nothin', forget it."
Roy Orbison, Mean Woman Blues. A great live version featuring the great James Burton and his Telecaster.
Dion, Donna the Prima Donna
April Stevens and Nino Tempo, Deep Purple
I liked this number when it first came out, and I've enjoyed it ever since. A while back I happened to hear it via Sirius satellite radio and was drawn into it like never before. But its lyrics, penned by Mitchell Parish, are pure sweet kitsch:
When the deep purple falls over sleepy garden walls
And the stars begin to twinkle in the night
Through the mist of a memory you wander back to me
Breathing my name with a sigh.In the still of the night once again I hold you tight
Though you're gone, your love lives on when moonlight beams
And as long as my heart will beat, sweet lover we'll always meet
Here in my deep purple dreams.
Kitsch is bad art, but what is the essence of kitsch, and why is it bad? Presumably it is sentimentality that makes kitsch kitsch, and it is this sentimentality that makes kitsch aesthetically and perhaps even morally dubious. One self-indulgently 'wallows' in a song like this, giving into its 'cheap' emotions. The emotions are 'false' and 'faked.' The melody and lyrics are formulaic and predictable, 'catchy.' The listener allows himself to be manipulated by the songwriter who is out to 'push the listener's buttons.' The aesthetic experience is not authentic but vicarious. And so on. Theodor Adorno would not approve.
There is great art and there is kitsch. I partake of both, enjoy both, and know the difference. What is wrong with a little kitsch in moderation? No, I don't collect Hummel figurines and my stoa is not carpeted with astroturf. What is sentimentality and what is wrong with it? There is a literature on this, but I've read almost none of it. Who has time?
Peter, Paul, and Mary, Don't Think Twice, It's All Right. There have been countless covers. The original.
This brings me to Bob Dylan who was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature. Now I've been a Dylan fan from the early '60s. In the '60s I was more than a fan; I was a fanatic who would brook no criticism of his hero. And I still maintain that in the annals of American popular music no one surpasses him as a songwriter.
But the Nobel Prize for Literature? That's a bit much, and an ominous foreshadowing of the death of the book and of quiet reading in this hyperkinetic age of tweets and sound bites. A large theme. Get to it conservative bloggers. Why do I have to do all the work?
Dylan's most sentimental song? I don't know, but Forever Young is in serious contention.
A long, long way from It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding and Visions of Johanna (Marianne Faithful) and Desolation Row. Here is the original of Visions of Johanna.
Village Stompers, Washington Square
Back to Profumo and Keeler: Bob Seger, The Fire Down Below. Take 'below' in two senses, and 'fire' too. There is something demonic about sex obsession.
Saturday Night with ChatGPT and Newsworthy Persons
Maverick Philosopher Saturday Night
Based on the provided search results, here’s a comprehensive answer:
The Maverick Philosopher’s Saturday Night series focuses on nostalgic music reviews, often tied to a specific theme or month. The titles within this series include:
- Saturday Night at the Oldies: Guns and Gun Violence (March 2019) – Discusses songs related to guns and violence, including Jr. Walker and the All Stars’ “Shotgun” and Lloyd Price’s “Stagger Lee”.
- Saturday Night at the Oldies: Marital Advice (October 8, 2022) – Shares songs about marriage, relationships, and advice, featuring artists like Hoyt Axton and Al Dexter.
- Saturday Night at the Oldies: Obscure '60s Psychedelia (no specific date) – Highlights lesser-known psychedelic rock songs from the 1960s, including those by artists like The Electric Prunes and The United States of America.
- Saturday Night at the Oldies: The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (March 16, 2013) – Reviews Dylan’s second album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”, and shares favorite tracks like “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”.
- Saturday Night at the Oldies: Kitsch, Sentimentality, and Dylan (November 20, 2021) – Analyzes the concept of kitsch in music, using April Stevens’ and Nino Tempo’s version of “Deep Purple” as an example, and discusses its relationship to sentimentality and Dylan’s songwriting.
- Saturday Night at the Oldies: September Songs (September 4, 2021) – Celebrates the month of September with songs like Dinah Washington’s “September in the Rain” and Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May”.
These articles demonstrate the Maverick Philosopher’s eclectic approach to music criticism, blending personal nostalgia, philosophical insights, and literary flair.
…………………….
BV: How could any reasonable, fair-minded person disagree with that? A couple of inaccuracies: I have never linked to the Electric Prunes, and I have never even heard of the band United States of America.
Group Mind having praised me, I must now offer up some more content for appropriation. There are questions here I don't even know how to formulate properly. Future shock is upon us. Remember Alvin Toffler's book?
MUSICAL COMMENTARY ON NEWSWORTHY PERSONS
Luigi Mangione: I Fought the Law (and the Law Won). No one is above the law! (Nancy Pelosi) Luigi, Luigi.
Donald J. Trump: Do you love me? You put me down 'cause I couldn't dance; you didn't even want me around. But I'm BACK to let you know, I can really shake 'em down. Contours, 1961? Daddy's Home. And he's home TO STAY. That's the way it is with dictators. Shep and the Limelites, 1961.
Joe Biden: A Fool Such as I. PARDON ME, if I'm sentimental . . . He is indeed fool, and a plagiarist, and the third black president. See here.
Kamala Harris: Born to Lose. Joy to the World. Kamala was a bullshitter, was a good friend of mine; never understood a single word she said, but I helped her drink her wine. Joy to the world! Kamala the commie-clown in action!
Alejandro Mayorkas: the most brazen of the brazen liars of the corrupt-to-the core Biden administration Lies!
But The Times They Are a' Changin'. (Byrds)
Saturday 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 Rosie, 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.
Four for my wife. An old Sam Cooke number, a lovely Shirelles tune, an Everly Bros. cover, and my favorite from the Seekers.
Addendum:
1. 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.”
Don't sing love songs, you'll wake my mother
She's sleeping here right by my side
And in her right hand a silver dagger,
She says that I can't be your bride.All men are false, says my mother,
They'll tell you wicked, lovin' lies.
The very next evening, they'll court another,
Leave you alone to pine and sigh.My daddy is a handsome devil
He's got a chain five miles long,
And on every link a heart does dangle
Of another maid he's loved and wronged.Go court another tender maiden,
And hope that she will be your wife,
For I've been warned, and I've decided
To sleep alone all of my life.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Ghosts and Death
Leslie Kean's Surviving Death: A Journalist Investigates Evidence for an Afterlife (Three Rivers Press, 2017) just arrived via Amazon. HT to Vito for recommending it. It looks good. Have book, will blog. Pressed for time this evening. But not so pressed that I can't scrounge up three tunes.
Highwaymen, Ghost Riders in the Sky
Spiderbait rendition
Blood, Sweat, and Tears, And When I Die
Time for Mark Levin.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Women, Devils, and Angels
The tormenting question Devil or Angel? was posed by the Clovers in 1956. But perhaps you are more familiar with the Bobby Vee cover.
Elvis Presley learned the hard way that appearances can deceive.
Marty Robbins succumbs to the temptations of a Devil Woman and begs his Mary for forgiveness. Angel that she is, she forgives him. But his grip on custodia cordis is weak and so he succumbs once again in El Paso where the charms of the wicked Felina prove irresistible. This time the upshot is rather less favorable.
Jay the American risks an encounter with a fickle she-devil but has the good sense to high-tail it in the nick of time.
An aging Mitch Ryder gets it up one more time in this rousing version of Devil with the Blue Dress.
But not all women are devils. The Peguins, 1955, sing about an earth angel. Is this a case of angelic possession?
When I first saw the woman I married, I fell in love with her on the spot, no lie. It was her angel eyes that did it.
Saturday Afternoon Drowse?
You need some Nitro.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Varia
Beatles, I'm a Loser. This one goes out to Comrade Kamala. A loser who is not what she pretended to be. And just to rub it in,
Ted Daffan, Born to Lose, 1943. The original!
Thelonious Monk, I'm Getting Sentimental Over You. But not over you, Kamala baby.
Simon and Garfunkel, The Dangling Conversation. A lovely song, if a bit pretentious. Paul Simon was an English major.
And we spoke of things that matter
With words that must be said
"Can analysis be worthwhile?"
"Is the theater really dead?"
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, You Really Got a Hold on Me
Lonnie Mack and Co. Mighty fine guitar-slinging.
Mack has been around a long time. I first picked up a guitar around the time Memphis climbed the charts. "If I could only play like that!" Never got close. But I played in bands that got paid. If you get paid for doing something, then someone must think it's worth paying for. That's not saying much, but it's saying something.
Jackson Browne, The Pretender. This great song goes out to Darci M who introduced me to Jackson Browne. Darci is Lithuanian. Her mother told her, "Never bring an Italian home." So I never did meet the old lady. I encountered no anti-Italian prejudice on the West coast whence I hail; the East is a different story.
Abba, Fernando. I first heard this in Ben's Gasthaus, Zaehringen, Freiburg im Breisgau, '76-'77. This one goes out to Rudolf, Helmut, Martin, Hans, und Herrmann, working class Germans who loved to drink the Ami under the table.
Electric Flag, Groovin' is Easy
A contender for the greatest, tightest band of the '60s, featuring Mike Bloomfield on guitar, my second guitar hero. I saw him play at the Monterey Pop Festival in '67. The Jewish kid from an affluent Chicago suburb exemplifies cultural appropriation at its finest. His riffs derive from B. B. King but he outplays the King of the Blues. Is that a racist thing to say? It can't be racist if it's true.
Commander Cody, Truck Drivin' Man. This one goes out to Sally and Jean and Mary in memory of our California road trip ten years ago. "Pour me another cup of coffee/For it is the best in the land/I'll put a nickel in the jukebox/And play that 'Truck Drivin' Man.'"
I once asked a guy what he wanted in a woman. He replied, "A whore in bed, Simone de Beauvoir in the parlor, and the Virgin Mary on a pedestal." An impossible trinity. Some just want the girl next door.
Bobby Darin, Dream Lover. With pix of Sandra Dee.
Audrey Hepburn, Moon River
Gogi Grant, The Wayward Wind, 1956. I'll take Lady Gogi over Lady Gaga any day.
Doris Day, Que Sera, Sera, 1956. What did she mean? The tautological, Necessarily, what will be, will be? Or the non-tautologically fatalistic, What will be, necessarily will be? Either way, she died in the month of May.
A New Morning
The morning is new! Why make it old by the rehearsal of yesterday's rants? The morning is alive! Why mortify it by the re-animation of useless memories?
So I admonish myself, to little effect.
Saturday Night at the Oldies: Cats
Loving Spoonful, Nashville Cats, 1966. They's playin' since they's babies.
Harry Chapin, Cat's in the Cradle. For you fathers out there. Bond with your son when he's five. Wait till he's 50 and he won't give you the time of day.
Harry Chapin was a major talent who died young. Here is his great Taxi. We Boomers are damned lucky to have the greatest popular music soundtrack of any American generation.
What Happened to Harry Chapin?
Tokens, The Lion Sleeps Tonight, 1961
Bent Fabric, Alley Cat, 1962. Bent fabric can be said to have a kink in it. Therefore,
Kinks, Phenomenal Cat
Norma Tanega, Walkin' My Cat Named 'Dog.' The queen of the one-hit wonders?
Mongo Santamaria, El Pussycat. If you remember this one, I'll buy you a pussyhat and a watermelon. While we have Mongo Santamaria cued up, here is his rather better-known Watermelon Man.
To be precise, it is not his inasmuch as it was written by Herbie Hancock.
More cat songs next week.
Young Man’s Blues
Saturday Night at the Oldies: October Jazz
October already! October's a bird that flies too fast. Time herself is such a bird. I would freeze her flight, but not that of
Charley 'Bird' Parker, Ornithology
Jack Kerouac and Steve Allen, Charlie Parker
Kerouac and Allen, October in the Railroad Earth
Jack Kerouac, San Francisco
Mose Allison, Parchman Farm.
This one goes out to Tom Gastineau, keyboard man in our bands Dudley Nightshade and Rosedale, who introduced me to Mose Allison and Herbie Hancock in the late '60s. Tom went on to make it in the music business. I caught Allison at The Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach, California, a couple or three times before I headed East in August of '73. I heard him on the East Coast as well at a joint in Marblehead, Massachusetts with a girlfriend I dubbed 'Springtime Mary' which was Kerouac's name for his girlfriend Mary Carney.
Mose Allison, Young Man's Blues
Mose Allison, I Ain't Got Nothing but the Blues
Dave Brubeck, Blue Rondo al a Turk
Herbie Hancock, Watermelon Man