Remember a Day

Tag: music

  • Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited

    Bob Dylan – Highway 61 Revisited

    Studio Album | Released August 30th 1965 | Recorded between June 16 and August 4 1965 at Columbia Studios, New York City | Columbia Records | Produced by Bob Johnston and Tom Wilson

    “Philosophy can’t give me anything I don’t already have.”

    And we return to Bob. For me, it is the Triumph motorcycle shirt and the look on his face. That face is so unapologetically unique. It isn’t a smirk. On the surface it is barely a smile. And still, a smile lives underneath it. It is him knowing how good he has it as a musician, and how confident he is in the record he is making. This is peak rock of the 60s. This is peak Bob of the 60s. This is iconic music, iconic sounds, and an iconic time. Bob’s rocket was on autopilot. He was revolving around success, locked in its orbit. We don’t have to get bogged down analyzing the lyrics. If you do, you’ll find all sorts of nooks and crannies, nuggets of wisdom, nuggets of pure beauty and poetry, and nuggets that are simply meant to drop a little confusion into the old noggin. Live a life that likes music and you’ll hear this album. Or at least one song from it.

    I’ll say this: I’m a simple blogger, trying to get at the feeling this music creates in me. I can’t untangle all of Bob’s words here. Many have tried, and many will keep trying. The true understanding of a lot of Bob’s most complex songs comes through a suspension of disbelief. You won’t understand it all. You might come close. Listen to “Desolation Row,” for example, and let your brain create the images Bob conjures. Enjoy the magic. Let it mean whatever you want it to mean. Take a ride on the mystery. You don’t have to walk around claiming to know who Dr. Filth is. He exists only in a brief glance. It’s just music. It’s art at its finest. But really, it’s just rock and roll. We have to recognize that. Fully organic.

    Don’t Look Back, the amazing documentary by D.A. Pennebaker, follows the UK tour Bob made not long after Bringing It All Back Home. It revealed the astonishing scale of his success, maybe even more so in the UK than in the United States. The film explores his touring life, his interactions with the media, and his backstage character and behavior. It is as pure and simple as a rock documentary can be, essential viewing for anyone wanting to understand Bob at the time and the transition between these two great albums. Pennebaker would say of his film and of Bob, “what you see is what you get.”

    Work on Highway 61 Revisited began once the touring behind the documentary had ended. Back in the studio, Bob started building on the electric sound of his previous album. The Byrds were riding their own success with a purely electric, California-pop version of “Mr. Tambourine Man.” The Beatles were beginning their folk-rock exploration. Everything was starting to culminate. Bob opened the album by cutting “Like a Rolling Stone.” Not long after, he shocked the crowd at the Newport Folk Festival, plugging in an electric guitar and blasting out a live set backed by members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. All of it was a recipe for drastic change. Vietnam was on the horizon. Social change was moving through politics and the civil rights movement. The birth control pill was being introduced. The country was on a tear toward a paradigm shift.

    Bob had opened new pathways with Bringing It All Back Home, and this record takes that concept and expands on it. The band builds the full world for him. On a few tracks, Bob’s words take a back seat to the brilliant sidemen and their performances. Think of Al Kooper’s impromptu organ part on the opening track, the first he ever played.

    The record’s title: a highway. The highway. Number 61. It runs past the country where Bob grew up, the same road he was traveling in 1959 when he went to see Buddy Holly play, just days before the singer died in a plane crash. The whole album carries a traveling theme. Bob crossed this highway at different points in his life, and here he is revisiting those trips. Each track emotes that feeling of traveling, and of traveling alone. Stopping and learning. Stopping for no reason at all, just to take in the scenery. Snapping a picture, writing a verse down, getting back in the vehicle and moving on. I feel it in the strumming of the guitar on “Tombstone Blues,” and in the blues electric twang running through so many of these songs. Be exhilarated. Roll the window down, hop in, and take to the road on this record.

    The sessions for Highway 61 have been described as pretty rough. They happened over a handful of days across July and August 1965. The players were a mix of studio hands and outsiders, so there is an edge to the music, an edge Bob loved, as Al Kooper would tell it.

    The Object

    I’ve had a couple of copies of this record over the years. The first needed replacing because it was pretty scratchy. That’s fine for some collectors, but give me the best music in recorded history without any pops, please. I think a clean pressing gives the music its due diligence. My current copy is a simple reissue, nothing collectible, nothing limited edition. I bought it at a store known for pumping out common reissues in their shrink wrap: Siren Records in Monterey, California. Some diligent Discogs users will know their online selling machine, Recordmule. I’ve been buying from the store and from Recordmule for some time now. They come in handy when the originals are demanding high prices and the reissues sound great for a decent price.

    The cover, though. It echoes the previous album. The photo is bordered in white, with the name of the record and the artist landing right on the top edge of the frame. Bob Neuwirth is cut off, shown here only from the torso down. Still, he has enough style to get the point across: striped shirt, thumb hooked in his pants, holding the strap of a beautiful SLR camera. Bob fills most of the frame with that enigmatic look. The goofy colored jacket, the killer Triumph shirt, the hair all a mess. He is sitting on the steps of a building, sunglasses in hand. I think that if he had been wearing those glasses, this artwork would not have the effect it had then and still has now. It is one of the most iconic record photos of the 60s, and of all time.

    It was always a cover that drew me in, the way the best record covers should. They give you a feeling of what the record holds. This photo, purely as it is, hints at a life being lived. Bob’s pose and his look are enough. It’s just a glance, and you can gather a lot about someone from a single glance. At the very least, it was inspiring to a lot of “fuck the whole world” hipster crews.

    The Music

    Side One

    Like a Rolling Stone

    Bruce Springsteen said the opening snap and crack of the snare drum, Bobby Gregg’s snare drum, was like someone kicking in the door to your mind.

    Generation-defining song. Genre-defining song. For many it’s the song of their life. For some it’s the song of their youth. For me, it’s the song of my mid-20s into my mid-30s. Every time I hear it I hear something new. It’s one of those tracks that takes on a bigger meaning as it grows with you. Some say the best art is the art that changes as you come back to it, like a movie you can watch over and over while the life inside it keeps growing outward. “Like a Rolling Stone” has lived that life for me, and it’s still living it.

    It doesn’t sound like most other songs from the time. Placed in its context, it’s a massive blast of sound, brilliant from that first drum crack, a whole world of wonder living inside it. Then comes a guitar riff that gives the wonder its color. Hearing this track can leave you questioning the greatest works. At the time, it was unlike anything else, a six-minute rock single full of insults, wild imagery, and characters. This was all abandon. Rock was now changed. The song was staggering in its appeal, reaching #4 in the UK and #2 in America, and it made everyone across both lands aware that Bob’s greatness had reached a new height.

    First, Bob’s tone in the vocal. It’s pleading, promising, preaching. Desperation is in there, and so is conviction. He makes a stand with each word, and each line ends on a lean shout. Listen to the track and focus on his eyes on the cover, and you can feel where Bob’s at here. It’s all bravado and all sensitivity. It moves you on the strength of the genuine fun in his voice alone. “You’ve got no secrets to conceal” hits the top of the wavelength. That’s what I’m talking about. If you’re a five-year-old kid barely learning the English language, you’ll feel it too.

    Paired beautifully with Bob’s voice, creating a lovely interchange, is the organ. Without it, this song loses its emotional effect. Al Kooper absolutely nailed his work here, and it was pure improvisation. Kooper had never really played organ before, and yet what you hear sounds fully worked out. He must have been deeply tuned into what was happening in the studio to produce a part this good. You can hear the controlled chaos in how he plays.

    Who does the song address? I’ve always taken it as self-reference, like a lot of Bob’s work at the time. He is the rolling stone, drifting further and further from home. He is also drifting into the business, sinking into the quicksand of show business, with a lot to answer for to himself. He was facing the world alone. No direction home. It’s a song about learning who you are and making your own reality.

    Bob himself has called it one of his best-written and favorite songs. And it sits neatly at the top of Highway 61 Revisited. So you rest the needle down, anticipate it coming, and dive right in. If you had never heard this record before, doing that for the first time must have been mind-blowing and life-changing all at once. The power of music, the power of vinyl, the power of Bob. Rock and roll, man.

    Mark Polizzotti, in his book about the record, notes that this was the first time rock and roll started to sound dangerous. It had been building to a point. This was rock and roll’s assault on the other, on “Miss Lonely,” on the other person. Jerry Lee Lewis had assaulted the other. Bob was building on that verbal style, but with greater aplomb, a greater presence of voice, and a deeper wealth of wordplay.

    Tombstone Blues

    “Tombstone Blues” sits in the same realm and universe as the Depression-era blues that Woody Guthrie inspired, the same territory as “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” This entry into that realm is longer, a slog of words, a dense forest full of characters real and imaginary. Mom and dad are struggling. The narrator is in the kitchen or out in the streets with the tombstone blues. Is he dead? Is he imagining his death? Is he in jail?

    The guitar work by Mike Bloomfield is truly great. Flourishes run all the way through, and his signature is felt more here than on any other track. He must have had a great time with this take. You can feel the enjoyment every time you listen.

    Again the song has real movement, and it carries more energy than you’d expect from something inspired by Dust Bowl-era traditional folk and blues. Much of the imagery and the characters conjure up old America, or the American West. Soothsayers. Medicine men. Drifters. Penny arcades. Dust on the shoes and in the saloons. Each verse ends somewhere with the tombstone blues.

    Holes in the ground, circus performers, people questioning the earth’s movement and shape and the idea of God and the planets. This is another song you can get lost inside, and each time you come back you’ll hear new things and reap the rewards. Who was Gypsy Davey with a blowtorch? Watch the film La Strada. Maybe he’s in there somewhere. Maybe he was out in Vietnam.

    It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry

    Dylan dusted off one of his older tracks and reworked it for this reinvention. Track three slows the pace to a jaunt, and the piano turns a little more ragtime, a little less rock. A little less rock. A little more sweet lady swaying on top of the bar, flashing her ankles. Essentially it’s a feel-good song about what it feels like to have a fling, or to love a woman.

    It’s worth noting the Bob Johnston influence here. Johnston was a new producer on the album, and he had a country touch. After working for Columbia in New York, he would go on to Nashville, working alongside the session players who provided the studio skill behind some great recordings. He injects a knack for good country sound into this track with ease.

    The track shows how Bob took his older influences and molded them into something new. There were earlier versions with the same lyrics and a different mood. This version brings the piano in at full force, and Al Kooper again shines on the instrument. A great song, and a break from the fast-paced whirlwinds of the previous two tracks.

    From a Buick 6

    Another blues assault on the auditory senses. This time the travel metaphor gets its own vehicle, and the vehicle is not exactly a car despite what the title suggests. Here we have a woman, the woman, who will look after Bob in his time of need. When he’s at his lowest, she’ll be there to take care of him. This simple, loose track features a great bass line, a great harmonica solo, and a rolling organ part that keeps the fun pace going throughout. It’s a rock and roll song if there ever was one, and it puts the listener in a good mood, ready for what comes next.

    Ballad of a Thin Man

    The opening piano chords, played by Bob, are a sign of what’s coming. This song is relentless in scope, in sound, and in the vituperation spat through the lyrics. Mr. Jones. Who is Mr. Jones? When Al Kooper first heard it, he called it a “nasty” song. What an apt description.

    As with many of Bob’s lyrically dense songs built around a main character, people make an effort to figure out who he’s pointing at. Mr. Jones could be, in my opinion, the happy wanderer, the bystander to the circus. He’s someone who isn’t hip. He’s been duped, taken advantage of. He knows something is happening, but he doesn’t know what it is. He lacks the key thing: an open mind. Mr. Jones. It’s fitting that his name is male, and as easy and common a surname as Jones.

    The likeliest occupation for this Jones is journalist. He’s me, essentially. He’s the stand-in for the person trying to derive meaning from art and claiming that ability as some kind of gift. Bob was assaulted by reporters in this period, much of it a waste of time, and he developed a knack for handling these people. He may have sat down to write this track right after one of those interviews.

    The piano is the core of the track, and it gives the lyrics their dramatic backing. It’s really a piano-and-words song, and that helps Bob get his points across, even steeped as they are in odd imagery and symbolism. The sensation of condescension runs throughout. Whoever Mr. Jones was, he should be happy, and a little watchful, that Bob made such a great song about him.

    Side Two

    Queen Jane Approximately

    Queen Jane? A relative of Mr. Jones? Possibly. Again Bob is laying out the situation of someone’s life, holding a mirror up to them. This is essentially a simple song, the simplest on the album. What draws my ears to it is the melody, and the piano and organ working in tandem. There’s also some great electric rhythm riding underneath all of it. As the opener of the second side, it’s a register change, sweeter and kinder than “Ballad of a Thin Man” was. The rest of the side won’t let up, though. After the track ends on a beauty of a harmonica solo, wishing you hope on your way, the title track awaits.

    Many followers of Bob liken Queen Jane to Joan Baez. The narrator has a closeness to the title character, much like Bob and Joan shared the spotlight together. Their breakup, both in career terms and in emotional attachment, was happening around the time this record was being put together. In the song you can sense compassion.

    Highway 61 Revisited

    Of “Highway 61 Revisited,” Bob would later say he was writing songs meant to be played with a band. He was thinking about the band performance, and probably about the fun too. Nowhere does that fun shine through more than on this title track. It starts right in the intro, with a novelty police whistle, presumably picked up by one of the band members, or by Bob himself, somewhere along the way and brought into the studio.

    The song’s title comes from one of America’s great highways, the one Bob spent a young adolescence traversing north and south. Through Mississippi, through the South, through the great heartland of the country. You can feel that travel across the whole record, and the heart of it lives in this title track.

    The Bible opens the lines, the story of Abraham and God’s demand that he sacrifice his first son. A test of faith. Getting out on that road, flinging your want or need for a normal life into the universal divide of the highway, that’s what this song is about. Get on a motorcycle, pack your bags, sleep on the side of the road, take your faith and shove it deep down. What runs through the track are quick allusions, character studies drawn in a couple of lines. Accusations. References to figures from Bob’s life and from fiction, Albert Grossman chief among them.

    That little whistle brings the fantasy, keeping any sense of groundedness at bay.

    Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues

    The sweet guitar chords that appear throughout the verses of this great song are something to focus on. Add the great piano, heard mostly on the right channel if your record is a stereo pressing, and this becomes one of the best-sounding songs on the album.

    The traveling theme continues, and this time we’re down in Mexico, in Juárez. Dropped out of the bottom, washed out of America and American life itself.

    The two pianos and the slow drawl of the guitar chords really enhance Bob’s tone here. It’s the hangover song, if the album has one.

    Desolation Row

    You’ve made it this far on this brilliant album, and now you’re thrust into an epic eleven-minute poem, matched by a flamenco-style guitar. This is Bob’s Dante’s Inferno. It spirals downward, or maybe outward. The track lives in its own dimension. It’s not a joke.

    Musically, the song is set apart from the rest of the record. It’s just two guitars, Bob and no rhythm section. As if it were meant to bookend the album, it’s the knockout punch, the ten count. It makes you a jealous wanderer for the rest of your life. The images come like a firehose. We don’t know who they all are. It’s like a box of baseball cards, dusty and left in the attic. That’s what listening to this song is like. Picking a card from the deck. What’s your fortune?

    Bob gives a fantastic vocal here. It’s classic for him, Bob at his most pure. One of his most uniquely Bob tracks. You just have to listen. It leaves you bludgeoned, bruised by the beauty of his wordplay. Or you think it’s all gobbledygook and you never listen again. Try it on, pay the ticket, take a look at the museum.

    Closing

    Highway 61 Revisited earned Bob a place in history. The record was received well at the time and rode a wave of success driven mainly by the anthemic greatness of “Like a Rolling Stone.” It’s a powerful song, emotive even today. Every time I hear it, it just sounds important. It’s of its time. It’s of a person. It has character and wit and happiness living inside it. It means different things to different people, as all the best art does. Many people acquainted with Bob call this record, alongside that song, his best. In some ways I recognize it as his best work, but there are two others that mean more to me: Blood on the Tracks and Bringing It All Back Home.

    With this record, the boundary was pushed for good. Even after pouring all his heart into the music, Bob was still calling his previous work into question, and maybe even reaching toward work he had not yet made. You can hear Desire in here. You can hear Blood on the Tracks. The album took nine days to make, some of it improvised on the spot. The complexity of this record was born of a mind pushed inward, and of an art form in its genesis. Rock had passed its crawl-and-walk phase and was starting to hit the first strides of an all-out run. The rest of the 60s, the rock movement and the hippies, all seem born from that first snare snap. Put it on your turntable, turn the volume all the way up, and you can hear it.

    Thanks for reading.
    RTR

  • The Beatles – Help!

    The Beatles – Help!

    Studio Album and Soundtrack | Released August 6th 1965 | Recorded between February 15 to June 17 1965 at EMI Studios, London | Parlophone Records | Produced by George Martin

    For me, this is the moment the Beatles started getting really good. Before this, the British pop invasion superstars had it freaking made. Their albums and movies had already had a dramatic impact on the music world. A Hard Day’s Night had revolutionized the way a band could be displayed in a film. Their touring schedules had been nuts. They were rocketing through space at a bombastic rate. By 1965, the key relationship between Lennon and McCartney was nearly a decade old. They had gone past any realm of whatever success they’d imagined for themselves. That success was only possible thanks to biblical levels of hard work, uncanny songwriting ability, and cheeky Britishness. But what do I know about that?

    Everyone in this world needs a little help sometimes. Beatlemania had these blokes worn out, I’d have to reckon. They started writing songs about how they actually felt, not about what they were trying to express to the birds in their lives. This album was them branching into full musical maturity. The film Help! had its premiere on July 29. Amidst working on the album that year came huge tours of Europe and the US, including the iconic Shea Stadium concert. The change in their music came out of that huge shift in popularity, and a strain against the light-heartedness of their previous film with Richard Lester, A Hard Day’s Night. Super cheeky, they’d say. As a formula, Help! is about the same as A Hard Day’s Night. But now we have each Beatle singing their own songs, by themselves. How different.

    After A Hard Day’s Night, George Harrison said:

    “We’re still basically the same, but now we can afford things.”

    The most glaring example of the nucleus of the Beatles breaking was the title track. Lennon is screaming for help because the guy needed help. Most people hear this song as just another one of their popular singles, but it’s a serious expression of emotion, unlike anything the Beatles had done up to that point. The turn in the music of the era, meaning Bob Dylan’s work at the time, had a serious effect too. Lennon saw what Bob was doing, writing rock and folk with real emotion, and it led him to write songs about growing up, love, and relationships. Put all of this together, and Help! begins the second era of the Beatles, where the focus was on songwriting, incredible incredible songwriting. That’s what makes Help! fantastic, and a true statement of the mid 60s rock scene.

    The Beatles touring amid all this is just ridiculous to consider. They were playing massive concerts, touring the United States for the first time, and doing it in stadiums, something that just wasn’t done before. The rocket was blasting into the stratosphere, and the culmination of this moment in time was an insane concert at Shea Stadium in New York City. Over 55,000 fans. A dizzying display of the intense power of rock and roll, and just one of the best concerts to ever happen. Watch the footage of it, listen to how good they sound even amid the screams. They couldn’t hear a thing, but they stayed together. It’s mesmerizing, and each time they look at each other it’s a serious “holy shit” moment.

    The touring was taking its toll. It had gotten to be too much. They’d peaked. They had to tone it back, and they would. Every new record after this one would benefit from touring taking a back burner. Rubber Soul came after Help!, and that would be their first serious studio experiment. They’d go from playing music they intended to perform live to playing music that was purely about expression.

    The Film

    Help! was the Beatles’ second full-length film. This time the budget was bigger and the plot was… different? It’s in color, and the locations are all over the world. The plot centers on Ringo, and it’s strangely lavish, so much so that the band members said they felt like guest stars in their own movie. It was a product of their fame, and of their misgivings about the fact that EVERYONE wanted a piece of the Beatles at this point. Everyone was scrambling to capitalize. Bubble gum royalties. They were living like politicians. They needed HELP. They didn’t need the film, they needed the help, you see.

    The final product just isn’t as good as A Hard Day’s Night. It was the second go-around at making a movie, the excitement wasn’t there, and all the outside forces, the money, the executives, the endless touring, made things different. Also, the Beatles were stoned most of the time. It all just made things different and weird.

    The Object

    My copy is a solid Parlophone reissue. It keeps the original track listing, seven songs from the film on side one and seven original studio recordings on side two. I think this copy was picked up by my wife at Independent Records in Colorado Springs, Colorado. If that’s a store you’re familiar with, good for you, because you know good record stores. For my two stints living in Colorado, both times stationed at Fort Carson, Independent Records was my go-to. I haven’t kept up with the place, but I hope it’s still there.

    The album art is an image from the film, all four Beatles standing in a row, facing the camera against a white background. They’ve got their arms out in what looks like flag semaphore. The story goes they were supposed to be spelling out HELP, but the photographer, Robert Freeman, thought the actual semaphore for those letters looked lousy, so he arranged them for the best-looking shot instead. Which means the poses don’t spell anything. On the UK sleeve, the arms come out to something like NUJV.

    The Music

    The Help! record, in its original Parlophone form, contains 14 tracks: seven featured in the film, and seven other studio tracks from 1965.

    Help!

    An opening blast. A real statement. With that one word, you understand: this is a new Beatles, a new sound. Written by John Lennon about his inner thoughts and struggles with Beatlemania and the skyrocketing fame of being in such a group. Being a prisoner to your fame. Being unable to just walk around and get a coffee somewhere. It’s a legitimate concern. John struggled the most with all the success the Beatles gained.

    Lennon would say he always loved this song, and that he meant every word of it. It came out of a desperate period, the “fat Elvis” period. For what it was at the time, and for Lennon, it’s a stunning admission that needing help from others is a perfectly okay thing to make clear to a LOT of people. If you’ve been there, you know what it’s like. This song seems to connect with people in that way. It does for me.

    The music is effective, and people responded so well that it topped the charts in both the USA and the UK. For all the shortcomings of the film, this song stands on its own. The record surpasses the film in quality, and for myself, I recognized this record’s greatness well before I ever got acquainted with the movie.

    The Night Before

    McCartney’s great follow-up to the Lennon intro song. Paul’s on lead here, and it’s a tight, punchy little rocker with a great back and forth between the vocal and the guitar, plus some electric piano filling it out. Not a headliner, but a strong one, and proof of how deep the bench was on this record.

    You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away

    Lennon’s beautiful ode to Bob Dylan. An acoustic-led track, simple, but it fills the space musically. It also features a really good flute part at the end. This sound was a sign of things to come, foreshadowing Rubber Soul and the experimental, emotional side the Beatles would explore soon after. It’s one of their most stripped-down, acoustic recordings to that point.

    When you’ve listened to a lot of Dylan, like I have, you can just make out Lennon imitating the bard. The phrasing, the “head in hand” resignation, all of it. He’s wearing the influence right on his sleeve, and it works.

    I Need You

    This is a George Harrison song, one of two he landed on the record, which was a real step up in his presence in the group. The guitar is simple as hell, and gives no hint that it’s a small revolution in style. But it is. Those chords are so uncanny, and there really wasn’t anything like this sound happening at the time. It’s jangly, and the Byrds would later build on that, but the real innovation here is the guitar volume pedal, the band’s first use of one, giving each chord that swelling, breathing quality as it fades in. It’s a perfect example of how the Beatles could be incredible and simple at the same time. The lyrics don’t get preachy or weird. They’re basic, and the chords are simple too.

    Another Girl

    A McCartney tune, and he handles the lead guitar himself on this one. It’s bright and a little cocky, a guy more or less bragging that he’s moved on and found somebody new. It doesn’t reach for much, but it’s got a swing to it and moves right along. Filler, sure, but the kind of filler most bands would kill to have.

    You’re Going to Lose That Girl

    Lennon and McCartney really do great work on their vocals here. The song comes off essentially as a filler track, but it’s still extremely solid. It’s pretty simple, but the real joy is hearing Lennon’s hard-edged lead against Paul and George’s answering lines. Ringo does killer work on the drums and bongos on this one too.

    Ticket to Ride

    Another of the Beatles’ instantly recognizable hits. For some it’s the first guitar lick they ever learn, for some it’s a nostalgia trip. For others, the “ticket to ride” double meaning becomes clear the more you learn about what the Beatles were up to in the early 60s. For some it’s just about the tambourine. Lennon called it “heavy,” and he wasn’t wrong. That droning, dragging rhythm was a real step toward something new, and it closes side one on a heavier note than anything around it.

    Act Naturally

    Ringo’s moment on the record. He takes the vocal and the drums on this Buck Owens country and western hit from 1963. It would be the last cover the Beatles cooperated on until 1970 and “Maggie Mae.”

    It’s a perfect song for Ringo. In the films and in his public persona, the song was pretty much him. I suspect he was playing it that way, and that Ringo is just about anything but an act-naturally kind of guy. But that’s my opinion. The song’s whole idea is that he just needs to be himself and he’ll be famous. That seemed to work out for Ringo.

    It’s a solid vocal performance, and it fits right in as the first song of side two.

    It’s Only Love

    A John Lennon creation. A bit cheesy for a Lennon song, but by this point in the record I’m just floored by how strong the songwriting is. The jangly guitar kicks in something simple and fresh, like a relaxing day in the park. The lyrics enter on Lennon’s double-tracked vocal, and they descend and land like pure 60s British pop. It’s a style that knows itself. Lennon and the boys were at the peak of their game on this album, even when they were being twee and cheeky.

    The guitar sound came out of studio experimentation, run through a tremolo effect to get that wobbling, swimming quality. Harrison’s appetite for guitar effects was starting to show here in the mid 60s. He’d get a lot more experimental on later records.

    The best thing about this song is Lennon’s vocal and the chorus. It’s only love, and that is all, but it’s so hard loving you. Even though Lennon would later call the song lousy, with abysmal lyrics, the artist still delivered on the performance. It’s a good Lennon song, overlooked next to a lot of what he’d go on to write. Even the songs the Beatles themselves didn’t like are still great, and I like that about them.

    You Like Me Too Much

    Harrison’s second songwriting credit on the record, which is worth pausing on. Two Harrison originals on one album was a real jump in his standing in the group. It opens with a fun, clunky piano intro before settling into a pleasant, mid-tempo shuffle. It’s minor Harrison, sure, but you can hear him carving out his own room in a band that already had two of the greatest songwriters alive.

    Tell Me What You See

    A McCartney-led track that tends to get lost in the shuffle, and I get why, but there’s a nice gentle groove to it. Electric piano, a guiro scraping along underneath, some tambourine. It’s simple and a little slight, but pleasant, the kind of album cut you stop noticing until one day it’s your favorite thing on the side.

    I’ve Just Seen a Face

    Even though McCartney wrote this in the 60s, it somehow sounds like it could have come out in the 2010s. Or now. It’s a timeless vibe. Another really simple chord structure, descending, but it moves quick and the lyrics leave little room to breathe. The story of the song is basically love at first sight. The execs loved it so much they used it as the opening track of the American version of Rubber Soul a few months later. This song and “Yesterday,” the one that follows it, really elevate this record into the stratosphere. It came out of McCartney’s pressure on himself to create quality material and keep up with Lennon’s output.

    It became one of McCartney’s favorite Beatles songs, and he’d play it live with Wings on their 1975 to 1976 world tour. On the American Rubber Soul it slots right into that album’s folk rock vibe, opening the whole thing. In the UK, Rubber Soul opened with “Drive My Car” instead, and this track stayed home on Help!. The folky, country feel here is something McCartney would chase for the rest of his career, and for some listeners this song is his true breakthrough into that realm.

    Yesterday

    What a song for the time. Social upheaval was on the come-up, and yesterday sure seemed better than tomorrow, that’s for damn sure. The famous story is that the melody came to McCartney fully formed in his sleep one morning, and he was so convinced he’d accidentally stolen it that he spent weeks playing it for people, asking if they recognized it. He hadn’t stolen it. The placeholder lyric was “Scrambled Eggs” until the real words came. That makes it a song he carried around for a while before finally recording it here for Help!, and it makes a lot of sense on this record. It’s a beautiful McCartney song, definitely among his best, and it plays like a response to the desperation behind Lennon’s writing on the title track.

    It’s sad. It’s desperation, longing for another time and another person. Probably McCartney’s greatest two minutes with the Beatles, and it’s just him, an Epiphone Texan steel-string acoustic, and some strings. Those strings were the Beatles’ first use of a classical string quartet, arranged by George Martin under McCartney’s supervision.

    It’s great. It’s a song that shows how good McCartney was at melody. Each line is like its own little song. It’s one of those flawless things that seems to appear out of thin air, and according to McCartney it more or less did. He felt it was so good it had to have come from somewhere else, but it came from him.

    The song was issued as a single and stayed at number one in the USA for a month. It’s got a pretty strong claim to fame: Guinness World Records calls it the most covered and recorded song in the history of popular music. On this album, it’s just another great song in a group of great songs.

    Dizzy Miss Lizzy

    This one is a Larry Williams cover, and it’s hopelessly tacked onto the end of the record. It would make far more sense to close with “Yesterday,” but the label felt the record needed more material and a longer runtime. The group was tired from filming the movie when they recorded it, and it feels rushed and tiredly excited, like they were putting just about enough energy into the cover and no more. It rocks, and it ends the album with a lot of energy regardless. Lennon delivers a great rendition of a song by one of his favorite artists.

    Closing

    Help! was a turning point for the Beatles. They figured out that movies maybe weren’t their bag, baby. They had acting chops, sure, but any acting talent is so easily surpassed by their musical talent. The record produced three number one singles, and the album itself went platinum. After it was released, the band went on another US tour, and that tour opened with the Shea Stadium performance on August 15, 1965, which would become one of the most famous films of a rock band playing live anywhere, ever. As if that wasn’t enough, they kept the studio momentum going straight into recording a truly innovative, game-changing record, Rubber Soul. Possibly my favorite Beatles record. Rubber Soul would never happen without Help!, and that makes Help! one of the most important albums in the Beatles catalogue.

    Listen to it with fresh ears, and hear the moment they became the band that would go on to change everything.

  • The Byrds – Mr. Tambourine Man

    The Byrds – Mr. Tambourine Man

    Studio Album | Released June 21st 1965 | Recorded between January and April 1965 in Hollywood | Columbia Records | Produced by Terry Melcher

    In a year full of genre and scene defining songs, including the ones I’ve already covered, came this debut record from a rock group folding folk music into their sound. They pioneered something new, the LA folk rock sound. It wasn’t quite folk, and it wasn’t quite straight rock and roll. It was purely their own, brought partly into existence by the geography and inspiring scenery of the Laurel Canyon locale. Not quite Hollywood, not quite Beverly Hills. A nice little corner of LA. The famous venues were close by, the Troubadour and the Whisky a Go Go. In a few minutes you could be in one of the clubs, then drive right back home to keep the music and the party going into the night.

    The album’s title track and lead single was a song penned by the one and only Bob Dylan. What the Byrds did with that track influenced an entire generation of rock musicians, and folk rock entered common conversation because of it. They became an international success, and the record made the top ten in both the UK and the US. It contains four covers of Bob Dylan’s contemporary songs alongside original material. This was American rock music, an answer to the British Invasion rather than a part of it. The Beatles had made their mark on rock, British and American both, and their fingerprints are all over this record, from the haircuts to the Rickenbacker. But these were California boys making something purely American.

    The original members of the Byrds came from a folk background: David Crosby, Jim McGuinn (who would later change his name to Roger), and Gene Clark. They added a bassist and drummer, Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke, at the end of 1964. They wanted the full band sound. The instrument that would become the most iconic, taken from the Beatles’ lead in A Hard Day’s Night, was the 12-string Rickenbacker guitar in the hands of Jim McGuinn.

    Much of the evolution of this group and this record grew out of the initial recording session, working out the Bob Dylan song “Mr. Tambourine Man.” Initially the members of the group were reticent about recording a folk song from Dylan. Dylan was growing his base among the rockers at the time. Nevertheless, the group wanted to merge folk with the Beatles, and some of the figures behind the band were certain that this was the song for them. It turned out to be a good move, and the single shot them into popularity with a charting hit. They kept going on that trajectory and recorded three more Dylan songs for the record.

    Alongside the Dylan covers, there’s some really great original material that fills out the rest of the record and showcases strong, burgeoning songwriting from this young group. Most of it came from Gene Clark. Every original on the album was written or co-written by him, with McGuinn as his occasional co-writer.

    The Setting

    Mid 1960s Los Angeles. Laurel Canyon and Hollywood.

    The Troubadour was essential to the formation and growth of this band. The original members had cut their teeth at that club, working out Beatlesque versions of folky and country songs.

    The members of the Byrds would frequent the clubs and venues of Santa Monica Boulevard and the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, and when those closed down for the night, they would retreat north into the hills and hideaways off Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Today it’s still only about a fifteen minute drive, unheard of commuting for LA. My own experience in these areas is that they’re assuredly not the same quaint little hangouts they were in the 60s. The money’s taken over.

    Dozens of artists made up this scene, and the history and setting are pretty well documented. The Byrds were there at the earliest beginnings of it. They were originators, the band that defined that LA folk rock sound. I’d suspect the sound and vibe of this group is a direct relation to the geography and scenery of the time and area. That relaxed California day and the Hollywood evening. It must have been nice. So nice, in fact, that later on, punk and DIY artists would work as hard as they could to take offense to the niceties of that lifestyle and inject a hard edge into the music. LA punk and hardcore stands as a direct anti-evolution of this late 60s and 70s scene.

    Terry Melcher’s Production

    Melcher was the man for the job, based partly on his location. He worked out of the western branch of Columbia and knew the ins and outs of California rock. It was to his benefit to record the Byrds and put the pressure on them to get this record right. He brought out something great from these sessions, something that wasn’t just the Beach Boys, sand in your toes, white t-shirt pop rock. The Byrds’ sound had more body to it, more weight. I’d say that had a lot to do with Melcher’s presence in the studio.

    When a band produces a record that later becomes known as genre-defining, as this one is, it’s often not the band’s intention. Most commonly, it’s a marketing tactic. This is a folk rock album from before that term had been fully explored or defined. The reason it wasn’t being used yet is simple: this record hadn’t been released. The Byrds had taken what Bob Dylan did on Bringing It All Back Home and made it into something pure, crystal clear. After this album there was no question about the legitimacy of blending folk with rock. It was here, and it was here forever.

    The Object

    My copy is an original mono pressing, and it sounds brilliant, close to how it was originally intended to sound. I bought it on Discogs this year to give my 1965 collection some juice and legitimacy.

    The cover is striking: a black border framing a fisheye photo of the band standing in a garden. Put it right next to Dylan’s folk rock debut, Bringing It All Back Home, and you have to wonder whether what the Byrds were doing here was an inverse of that. Dylan’s cover is warm and cluttered, a sharp-focus interior packed with objects and a woman in red, baroque in every corner. The Byrds’ is the opposite: cold, wide-angle, an exterior with five guys in casual clothes and black boots and nothing else, looking out at you through the warp of the lens. One record is maximal, one is stark. If Dylan brought it all back home, the Byrds took it back outside.

    The rear cover includes terrific liner notes, Billy James’s original “Open Letter to a Friend.”

    The Music

    Mr. Tambourine Man

    The first track recorded for the album, and the first single the Byrds released. Recorded January 20, 1965, and released April 12, 1965.

    The Byrds’ treatment of “Mr. Tambourine Man,” that pure LA folk rock sound, made a real impression on Dylan. Chris Hillman tells the story of Dylan hearing their version and marveling that you could actually dance to it. Their success is often pointed to as one of the nudges that pushed Dylan further into electric rock and toward chasing a number one hit of his own, even if he had already cut Bringing It All Back Home electric that January, before the single was even out. A big part of that danceability came from McGuinn, who took Dylan’s countrified arrangement and reworked it into a steady 4/4 you could move to.

    The timeline is worth getting straight. The group had just signed with Columbia and entered the studio to record the Dylan-penned song as a rock arrangement. Dylan hadn’t released his own version yet. That wouldn’t happen until March 22, 1965, when it appeared on Bringing It All Back Home. So the Byrds actually recorded their version before Dylan’s was out in the world. Dylan’s album came first to the public, then the Byrds’ single in April, then the full album in June. The single itself was recorded under Terry Melcher’s direction using session musicians, great ones, legendary ones, members of the famous Wrecking Crew. McGuinn was the only Byrd to play on it. The remainder of the album sessions were done with the full Byrds lineup, once Melcher was satisfied they could handle it.

    To my ears, the Byrds’ version of this track deserves the commercial praise and popularity it received. But I’ll always prefer Dylan’s version, with its complex and surreal lyricism and spooky beauty. The Byrds’ version is amazing as a pop song, and it sounds great as a full band arrangement and on vinyl.

    It’s the sound of the twelve string that opens and closes this song, and that’s fitting, because it’s the signature instrument of the Byrds’ output at this time. That opening figure has a Bach-like quality to it, instantly recognizable but foreign at the same time. It’s one of those instruments that takes some mastering, and McGuinn was indeed that.

    Not only was the sound of this song unprecedented, the type of lyrics hadn’t been used on a rock record yet either. These weren’t posh, romantic, good-times lyrics. Even though the band didn’t use all of Dylan’s verses (they kept just one, plus the choruses), these were words of poetic merit, of beauty and surrealism. For the time, listeners were getting something very new if they paid their money to hear this record in full. It was this kind of song that would influence the songwriting of Gene Clark too, as we see on the next track.

    I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better

    A song that deals mostly with heartbreak and a conceited view of romance. Written by Gene Clark, who also takes the lead vocal here. It came out of the Byrds’ early hangs at Ciro’s nightclub in LA, as Clark explained. It was about a girlfriend he’d had, and the words of the title were something he’d once said to her.

    When I hear this song, I can track a lot of other familiar bands back to this source. You can hear Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers in it, plainly. The rhythm guitar starts it out, the 12-string gets blasted on top, and there’s this whole propulsion effect brought on by both those instruments, a tambourine, and wonderful bass work from Chris Hillman. Along with all that, the vocal harmonies are pure power pop. What a pleasure this song is. At track two on their debut album, you’re along for the ride after this one.

    And don’t forget that country-tinged lead guitar solo at around 1:20. It’s a killer solo, right in the pocket.

    The track was the B-side of the band’s “All I Really Want to Do” single, released June 14, 1965. It was recorded on April 14, 1965, a couple of days after the “Mr. Tambourine Man” single came out. Despite being tucked away as a B-side, it became known as one of the band’s finest, was covered many times, and has become a staple rock release.

    Spanish Harlem Incident

    The second of the Dylan covers. This one came from his record Another Side of Bob Dylan, recorded and released in 1964. It’s named for the Spanish Harlem neighborhood of NYC.

    The Byrds add another round of their own pop seasoning to this track. Dylan’s version is strained and slow, halting at points, but it has the raw blues edge of his earlier records. It’s also a vocal from Bob that doesn’t quite match his other songs of the time.

    The Byrds improve on it with their touch. They made it theirs. The vocal fits the material better, and the rhythm and lead guitars give it the rock propulsion it needed. McGuinn does a solid Bob impression, and where it comes up short, the rest of the band fills in with their beautiful backing harmonies.

    You Won’t Have to Cry

    A track similar in sound to the others so far. This time the songwriting is shared between Clark and McGuinn. Guitar drives it through to the end.

    In its meaning and some of its sound, the Byrds are nearly in Beach Boys territory here. Still, this is an honest original. It’s true to their sound, and to me the tambourine is very effective on this track. It also sounds great on my mono release.

    Here Without You

    One of the earliest songs Gene Clark wrote, back when the group was still going by the name the Jet Set. It’s a real highlight of his songwriting ability, and one of the best tracks on the record among the original material.

    It starts with a killer guitar lick that’s essential 60s. That sound and string of notes could only come from the 60s. You had to be there, I guess. Even with that opening, the track is more harmony and melody driven than guitar driven.

    The lyrics aren’t too complex. Clark is simply relating his sorrow at being away from his girl, and the melancholy that produces. The beauty is in how he relates that melancholy, using minor chords in the melody. It sounds similar to some of the Simon and Garfunkel tunes of the period. They had that knack for expressing a darker, sadder side of things using those kinds of melodies. Here Clark shows both how good he was and his soft side all at once, in an impressive original written as the band was just forming in LA. It’s a goth song, before that was even a thing.

    The Bells of Rhymney

    The final song of the first side is another cover, but not a Dylan one this time. This track was composed by Pete Seeger, with words by the Welsh poet Idris Davies. Seeger released it in 1958. The Byrds went into the tomes, dusted this one off, and made it new again. Their version would become the most famous. Others followed after, but the Byrds’ seemed to have the widest impact.

    The text is inspired by a mining disaster in Wales in the 1920s. Several Welsh place names are mentioned across the stanzas, and it really highlights the diversity in the song choices the Byrds were making. They knew a good folk song when they found one, and this was a terrific inclusion. It adds to the legitimacy of the record and gives it a historical weight. I dig this track a lot, and it’s a great one to end the first side on.

    Side 2

    All I Really Want to Do

    The third of the Dylan covers. This has always been one of my personal favorites of Bob’s tunes. Here McGuinn is again trying to impersonate Dylan, and to my ears he comes up short. I think this track from Bob already matches the vibe of the Byrds the most, and that’s exactly why their version isn’t the best of the covers. The Byrds were at their strongest when they took a more sorrowful, sadder, or deeper Dylan song and gave it that posh shine. That ability is what made this record the brilliant debut it was.

    It’s simple: I just prefer Bob’s vocal on the original. He gives it the emotion it needs. The song itself is pretty simple in meaning, just a guy asking for nothing more than friendship from a past lover, wanting his distance and not making it more complicated than that.

    This was another single for the Byrds off the record, released June 14, 1965, with “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” on the B-side. It went to battle in the charts with Cher’s cover of the same song. Cher won that one in the US, landing at number 15 while the Byrds only reached number 40. It was the reverse in the UK, where the Byrds beat her. Maybe US audiences had gotten their fill with the “Mr. Tambourine Man” cover, or maybe they just preferred Cher’s version.

    Even so, this version of the classic Bob song is a beautiful listen.

    I Knew I’d Want You

    This was the B-side to the original “Mr. Tambourine Man” single. It’s another Gene Clark original, and he takes the lead vocal. Like the other Clark songs on the record, it’s brilliantly written, built on minor chords in the melody, predating some of the moody pop and rock that would come later in the 60s. Bands like the Moody Blues would eventually pick up on this kind of effective, downcast vibe.

    The words are romantic and suave as hell. The harmonies deliver all that romance in one brilliant package.

    It’s No Use

    Probably the rockingest song on the record. Co-written by Clark and McGuinn, it runs a tight circle around a guy who’s essentially handing a girl her walking papers, telling her “it’s no use” sticking around.

    It sounds like a garage rock song, but done well and with tremendous guitar work, especially in the solo, which drifts into psychedelic territory. That’s something they’d expand on in later albums.

    Something else great about this track is the harmonies. It’s amazing the effect all those layered voices have, even on a simple rocker like this.

    Don’t Doubt Yourself, Babe

    An interesting track, and another cover, this time from Jackie DeShannon. She was an American singer-songwriter, and one of the first women to find success in the early rock period on the strength of her own talents.

    This one sounds a little different in feel and meaning from the rest of the songs, which are mostly power pop rockers. It’s aimed at the young women in the room, talking about empowerment and the need for independence. It has a great message. I’d like to believe the intent behind it was sincere, because women of the time sorely needed to hear it. Though in another light, you could read a band trying to plant its flag in the camp of women’s support and liberation with the end goal of simply being around more women. That’d be a trite read, but I struggle with trust all the time.

    The song is guitar-driven with a Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley style riff running throughout. There’s some great tremolo and fading on the guitar that sounds better here than on any other track on the record.

    Chimes of Freedom

    The fourth and final Dylan cover, tying up the album before the semi-humorous coda that follows. Reports have it that the sessions around this stretch of the record got intense and conflict driven, and I’ve seen it suggested that some of that tension involved David Crosby reaching a breaking point. Whether that was an early sign of Crosby’s eventual exit from the band, I can’t say for certain, but the friction was there.

    Dylan’s version appeared on Another Side of Bob Dylan, the semi-transitional album between The Times They Are A-Changin’ and Bringing It All Back Home. The song showcases Bob’s shift toward surrealist and poetic tones. He wrote it around the same time he wrote “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

    It’s the final example on this record of the Byrds taking something somber or melancholy and adding a nice shine to it. They pulled great songwriting from a known friend and compatriot and made it worth money. Bob’s reaction to the Byrds popularizing his material wasn’t anger, it was appreciation, and he’d already sensed the shift toward folk rock and even country rock coming. Bob’s guitar going electric had as much to do with the Byrds as it did with his own need for change.

    Each version of this song has its merits, but Bob’s seems a little dull and strained by comparison. He sings the words with a harshness, and just a shred of hope. The Byrds’ version is all positive, and feels pleasant in its way. It’s a product of the band treatment, the register of their guitars, and the fantastic vocal harmonizing.

    We’ll Meet Again

    A final cover, and this one is basically an ode to an older time. A nostalgic piece, a Vera Lynn number from the World War years, later famous as the closing song of Dr. Strangelove. It’s an interesting footnote on the record, a fun little “hey, thanks for listening, we’ve got more in store for you” message to all the fans.

    Closing

    The impact this record had on the music business, on popular music, and on rock music is massive. It made the band members internationally famous and put them on their way to more success than they’d probably imagined. It gave radio stations and record companies a new way to describe and market pop music. It made folk music danceable. It was a huge album for 1965 and it signaled a shift in rock. And it wouldn’t be the end for the Byrds, only the beginning. They’d go on to release several successful albums after this one, building on the sound they created and eventually pursuing different avenues, into the psychedelic realm and beyond. It was all on the upswing for this young group.

  • Bob Dylan – Bringing it All Back Home

    Bob Dylan – Bringing it All Back Home

    Studio Album | Released Spring 1965 | Recorded in January 1965 at Columbia 7th Ave, New York City | Columbia Records | Produced by Tom Wilson

    If you were around in 1965, which I wasn’t, and you witnessed the release of this album and had a stake in the opinion pool on the life and work of Bob Dylan, you’d have been thrust into one of two viewpoints. You could have thought that Bob Dylan sold out. You could also have thought that he bought in. All I think, as a person born much later than 1965, is that Bringing It All Back Home is one of Bob’s greatest albums, one of the best albums ever released, and contains songs that are extremely dear to my heart, connected to life events that hold high sentimentality. That makes it one of my all time favorite albums of the 60s.

    1965 would turn out to be a peak year for Dylan, with the release of this record and its follow up, Highway 61 Revisited. Both albums changed rock and roll and initiated shifts in how people thought about the power of music, specifically rock music geared toward a new generation. In the leadup to this record, 1964 was happening. As that year was ending, Bob was on a fall tour, starting to come to grips with his fame and internally reckoning with what he was supposed to be doing with his music. It had become old for him to go up on stage with a guitar and harmonica and sing. The new wave of music was rock. The Beatles were starting to emerge and shift things in a more creative direction. Bob’s output in song energy had to change. His path from the monochrome and bleak The Times They Are A-Changin’ to more colorful music, powered by electricity, was building as 1964 closed.

    “My words are pictures, and the rock’s gonna help me flesh out the colors of the pictures.”

    How electricity and its use in rock became the new thing for Dylan came from several routes. He made it into the orbit of Mike Bloomfield of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, a group pushing the then boundaries of blues infused rock. Bob also made the acquaintance of a group known as the Hawks, a Canadian band backing Ronnie Hawkins. As it would have it, the Hawks would eventually become Bob’s backing band and later grow into their own group, known only as The Band. Also, interesting enough, and a classic jam then and still, The Animals covered “The House of the Rising Sun,” an electrified, real moving version of the folk original.

    On Halloween 1964, Dylan played a show at Philharmonic Hall in New York and performed three new songs as a taste of things to come: “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Gates of Eden,” and “It’s Alright, Ma.” This was new material, unlike anything he’d put down before, full of surreal imagery, existentialism, and anti-authoritarianism. Dylan’s songs had taken plenty of jabs at the man before, but with this new record his poetic mind was in deep expansion. The poetic influence was growing and definitely starting to show. The statues of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie were getting spray painted with the symbolism of Rimbaud and Baudelaire. All to a rocking beat.

    “I don’t call myself a poet because I don’t like the word. I’m a trapeze artist.”

    Recording took place on January 14 and 15, 1965. Dylan was definitely in the lead on the arrangements. He had a full backing band behind him and instructed each of the members on what he wanted until everything came together. He was a painter with a paintbrush, to paraphrase Daniel Kramer. Most of the tracks were done in only a few takes, and three of them, “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “It’s Alright, Ma,” and “Gates of Eden,” were done in one long take, without stops.

    The Object

    My copy has been nestled safely on the shelves alongside some of Bob’s other albums since March 2025. It’s not a particularly expensive record. It’s a 1972 Columbia reissue from their Terre Haute plant, bought on Discogs. Sound quality: great. I like the early 70s reissues of late 60s rock records. To me they’re a cheaper alternative to going for something super pricey. It’s an honest copy, and it has suited me well.

    Strange enough, the songs on this record have been with me for many years. I had been deeply aware of this record’s greatness long before I had a chance to get a copy. That’s the beauty of vinyl for me. Once you finally get a record you’ve loved for years on vinyl, you’re truly acquainted with it. It’s like meeting someone for the first time who you’ve only ever spoken to on the phone.

    Bob envisioned a cover photo vastly different from anything he’d wanted prior. The cover appears like a mosaic, or a mirage on a hill, or a collage of psychedelic imagery. And there’s a cat. The beautiful woman is Sally Grossman, wife of Albert Grossman. Bob’s previous album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, appears in the back of the shot, surreptitiously placed near the large fireplace. Other seemingly random pieces of imagery, LPs, and miscellaneous ephemera appear throughout. The kitten Bob is holding was his pet at the time, named Rolling Stone. The other two characters in the photo, Bob and Sally, give off that feline air themselves, that lounging chillness paired with intensity that cats possess. The rear cover contains several photos from Daniel Kramer of the artist in various situations, people surrounding him, Joan Baez and Allen Ginsberg among them. There are also musings from Bob published that year, writing that would make up a piece of his book Tarantula, published later. It’s a nice package of surrealism from Bob. One of the all time great record cover photos.

    A Word on Dont Look Back

    Before getting into the music, the companion piece to this record deserves its own mention. D. A. Pennebaker’s Dont Look Back captures Bob touring England in the spring of 1965, in that strange pocket of time when this record wasn’t out yet. You can hear test pressings playing in the background of hotel rooms. The film was Albert Grossman’s idea, and Pennebaker himself didn’t know much about Dylan going in, which might be why it works. There’s no reverence in the camera, just observation. What came out of it is one of the first great rock documentaries, and the alleyway cue card sequence for “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” with cards lettered the night before by Bob, Bob Neuwirth, Joan Baez, and Donovan, is arguably the first music video. The film also catches the critics of the day dismissing Bob’s new output as bad poetry, which tells you everything about how far ahead of the room he was.

    My favorite moment is the hotel room rendition of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” right after Donovan plays his song. Bob one ups him, but there’s no malice in it. It’s sincere, and you can just see his greatness in that scene. If you own this LP, the Criterion release of Dont Look Back is the companion physical media to it. The record and the film are two halves of the same moment, and having both on the shelf feels like the complete picture of Bob in 1965.

    The Music

    Side 1 is the electric side.

    Subterranean Homesick Blues

    Recorded in one take on January 14, 1965.

    This would turn out to be a huge song for Bob. It was his first exploration into electric rock music, and it was his first single to chart in the U.S. It was also accompanied by a pop art video, seen in the documentary Dont Look Back by D. A. Pennebaker. That doc is seminal in its own right as one of the first rock docs. Dylan’s cue card moves along with the lyrics were cutting edge music and film combined at the time. You could call that little segment one of the first ever music videos.

    It’s a pretty simple song as far as the structure of the lyrics goes. It has a repetitive nature to it, and with that severe twanging guitar, hearing this for the first time in the 60s must have been a blow to the head. The lyrics come at you quick. It’s beat poetry, essentially. Every line is a couplet, and each allusion can be taken as anti government, anti establishment, or simply a slogan for the general beat vibe and culture of the era.

    The opening couplet, by today’s rationale, is museum quality art. A perfect encapsulation of not only Bob’s life at the time, but the entire zeitgeist of the mid 60s. Something’s cooking below, while the people are out in the open, questioning the man and his purposes. And his decision making.

    Johnny’s in the basement

    Mixing up the medicine

    I’m on the pavement

    Thinking about the government.

    Several warnings to the “kid” appear throughout the song. Possibly Bob’s words were intended toward himself, or his own life. What you can read into those warnings is that there’s grace in giving up, but be careful while you do it. There’s a sense of giving in here, to me. In all of this whirlwind of getting by, all we can really do is get by and try to get our kicks while we can. The idea that there’s something that can be done is starting to fade away from Bob’s protest songs. What’s replacing it is an amplified guitar, a general disdain toward the square community, and the idea that art is king. And rock is art.

    Inspiration for how this song sounds, and for its title, was either stated explicitly by Bob or alluded to. Dylan said the song came from Chuck Berry, a little “Too Much Monkey Business,” and other scat songs of the 1940s. The title is speculated to have come from a Jack Kerouac novella, The Subterraneans.

    She Belongs to Me

    Recorded January 14, 1965.

    This song is one of my favorite love songs of Bob’s career, unlike the love songs he’d put out up to this point in both sound and demeanor. The electric guitar and rhythm section add the shades of calmness and depth that the words rely on. With the sound of this song, you can start to see the direction Bob was going with his calmer love tunes. This song and “Love Minus Zero” were a sign of things to come, well before the almighty brilliance of Blood on the Tracks.

    But with this song we still need to consider who it’s written for. At this time, Joan Baez and Bob were still well within each other’s orbit, each jabbing the other with words of steel along their life paths. By this point Bob was obviously headed in one direction and Joan in another. It could also have been written about Suze Rotolo, whose relationship with Bob was beginning to fizzle out. New flames had emerged elsewhere. The figurehead, whoever manifested her in Bob’s physical life, is given reverence as a stunning character in both mind and shape. And with the gracious acceptance of the narrator, she belongs to him.

    The title itself brings into question whether this is even a person. Could it be a place, a town, a country? Ask many and they’d say that one person can’t belong to another. The narrator asks the listener to bow down to her on Sundays. Could this be a religion or a religious figure? It may refer to all of the women in Bob’s life at that time, or it may refer to his muse herself. Unable to sustain, unable to satisfy, but well maintained and kept away.

    I love the swaying gentleness with which the lyrics come over you. The simplistic structure gives it that soft feeling. Definitely not a mean sounding song. Even as Bob is tearing eardrums on the song before and the one after, he’s offered us a walk down a pleasant path as he displays some of the feminine inspirations in his life.

    Maggie’s Farm

    Recorded January 15, 1965.

    Following the delightful love song prior is another absolute rocking banger of a track. Five verses of heavy steel rock and roll, right out of the factory. Fast and loose. Story has it that this was the final song recorded for the record, and it only took one take, again. They more than likely blistered through it, but what appears is an adept band version of a loose blues rock song.

    This one is central to the legend of the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. The energy and attitude of this song were a perfect match for the energy, attitude, and lack of thought in the decision making of Bob and his band as they essentially crashed the festival with a short electric set. Entire books have been written about that event and its context, and the Timothée Chalamet vehicle A Complete Unknown benefits a lot from that moment of cultural change as its source material. The powers that be, the ones involved, may claim that negative reactions to the amplified instruments weren’t the impetus for the semi riot that occurred. Some folks were probably just upset at how loud it was compared to everything else. If you’ve surrounded yourself with soft spoken, nice folk music, sung by nice, put together dandies and delicate women, and then you hear the headliner lash out a guitar riff like the one starting this song, well. It would be like Cat Stevens opening up for Black Sabbath.

    The subject matter across the five verses is representative of anti labor, anti government, and anti establishment mechanisms. The power is in the people who refuse to fall in line. Over and over there are references to the life of the laborer in this track. Some place Bob himself in the narrative, finding issue with and going against his record company executives. Easy to interpret it that way, as he was currently doing just that by recording this music.

    In the first verse, the worker’s mental state is explicit. There are ideas in his own mind that are driving him insane. The work is getting to him. It’s incessant.

    The second verse brings in the hypocritical and unrepentant nature of hard labor. A nickel is given, a dime is given. A fine is given for every minor infraction. You’re stuck.

    The third verse brings the government into the mix. Maggie’s pa is the one putting out a cigar on your face just for fun, and the National Guard has posted up around his door. The White House.

    The real puppet master of the whole operation is behind the fourth verse. The ma fills the servants’ brains with information about man, God, and law. Useless drivel, words and rules and faith to keep them in line. And meanwhile she lies about her age. Hypocrisy.

    The final verse sounds the most sincerely like it comes from Bob’s own mind, a declaration that he’ll keep doing his best to be exactly who he is, no matter how badly everybody else wants him to be just like them. A perfect line for the Newport crowd.

    Love Minus Zero/No Limit

    Another sweet and calm love song, one that sort of builds off the concept of “She Belongs to Me.” Bob is still deep in poetic land, describing a love he has. What happens in this song is that a figure of affection is placed in a context. It’s like he has a person, likely a woman, in mind, and he’s building the beautiful painting around her. If you sit and let the words wash over you, Bob Dylan’s songs can appear like images, or abstract or surrealist art. Good poetry does that, and with each listen you hear or can visualize something new. That’s where I get the most enjoyment out of Bob, coming back to his songs over and over. There’s always a little new swash of color that gets added each time I hear a song like this one. A little more clarity. A new line takes it out of me each time.

    I love the closing image of the raven with a broken wing, tapping at his window. To me this metaphor represents an entity like a weak omen. A dark test, but with a vulnerability. Any romantic can see within this line women of questionable intent, or the tests they can put men through. But remember, they are all vulnerable, and they need your security.

    This song is connected to the Dont Look Back documentary. The subject of the song is most often thought to be Sara Lownds, a model who Bob had become involved with and would marry in late 1965. Sara was a friend of Sally Grossman, who appears on the cover of the record, and Sara was the one who introduced Bob to D. A. Pennebaker.

    There are zen like qualities addressed here. As if there’s goodness and evilness all around the figure, yet nothing bothers her. It’s also been interpreted that the love figure is his muse, a constant source of disillusionment. Success versus failure.

    Outlaw Blues

    Recorded January 14, 1965.

    This is a raw, chugging blues jam. Less imagery and less complexity than the other material here. It refers to the outlaw Jesse James and Robert Ford, his killer. Bob’s the one hanging the picture frame, which was the setting and circumstance of the legendary outlaw’s death. Here Bob is expressing his standoffishness and his vulnerability to the press, and to the fame of his moment.

    For the electric side of this great record, this may be the most energetic blues tune Bob had done up to this point. This song and the next come at you quick, and if you listen intently, you won’t miss the meaning from the good songwriter here.

    On the Road Again

    Recorded January 15, 1965.

    A seemingly simple blues track. It starts with a cliche, waking up in the morning, but devolves into obscure references and images. Blues deconstructed. Musically it’s great and rollicking. Lyrically it’s a tad dense, but typical of Bob’s writing during the time. A transient Bob, reflecting on the in-laws and their odd, over demanding ways.

    Along with other songs on the album, this one addresses Bob’s reluctance to fit in with normal society. He’s putting a mirror up against it, conflicting with it, and describing it, warts and all.

    Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream

    Recorded January 14, 1965. Intro recorded on the 13th.

    The track starts with a false start and a burst of laughter from Bob and those in the studio. A fitting intro to this track, the final one on side 1, and the longest and most sprawling on that side. It covers plenty of ground in its eleven verses. A self contained dreamscape, apparently covering the discovery of America. I think it’s a distillation of the whimsy inside Bob’s mind about his place in the United States. Every artist around this time, and probably since, along with most good Americans, goes through their own self discovery of America.

    Side 2

    Side 2 is mostly solo acoustic, and the first three songs were done in one take. Side 2 of Bringing It All Back Home is incredible. It’s hard to describe just how good it is. To me it’s Bob’s greatest side of close to any record he made, definitely of the 60s. These songs touch on a brilliance that few songwriters have known. It’s top tier stuff and it blows me away every time I spin the record on my turntable.

    All songs from side 2 were recorded on January 15, 1965.

    Mr. Tambourine Man

    The stuff of greatness. You have to give it up to the beauty of this song, and to Bob’s conviction in writing and singing it.

    The Mr. Tambourine Man of this song is most often cited as being inspired by Bruce Langhorne, guitarist and recording session mate of Bob’s. He used to sport an oversized, specialty drum type instrument that sounded like a tambourine when played. As the lead figure of the song, the title alone gives it a playful whimsy, and the song provides a counterpoint to the heavy rock numbers of the first side. It fits perfectly here as the first song of side 2.

    In line with similar interpretations of some of the other songs on this album, I’ll subscribe to this song being a sort of request from the artist to his muse for inspiration. If that rings true, then the entire album can be read as some sort of hangover come down, a snap into reality, a snap into the music world Bob wanted to inhabit. If you look at him in this time period, he’s mostly performing, writing, or out seeking inspiration. Whoever the Mr. Tambourine Man is, he brings artistic or spiritual salvation. He’s coaxing Bob into the habits of the greats, the shelter required of the famous. The sweet ship destined for the promised land. Eden comes after that.

    The melody and tone of the song have such a strong connection for me to some sort of adolescent emotional state. This may be one of the first songs I can reference in my coming online to appreciate music. It’s one of those songs that most of us will hear, or definitely should hear given the direction of today’s music, as early as possible in our lives. It’s a functional song, severely inspiring me to look for more music that either sounded this way or made me feel the emotions it did.

    Some reports say this song was written after a hazy, hungover experience post Mardi Gras in New Orleans. You can feel that psychedelic atmosphere running throughout the lyrics. There are fantastical elements to the words in some instances. Things don’t make sense, and there are strange time references. What is a jingle jangle morning, exactly? This song is a mental state, a fairy tale. It’s undeniably unique in the feelings it evokes. For me it can’t be taken word for word, or at face value. It weaves images together. Like others among Bob’s best songs, they occur like pastiches, conjured up images of broken promises, fluttering wavelike across the ether of Bob’s odd creativity.

    If we’re comparing this version with others, it’s this version for me. The Byrds took a great song and made their own precise reworking of it, and it skyrocketed Bob, The Byrds, and the song itself into the stratosphere of popularity. The Byrds version is amazing too, but I’m a sucker for some of the lines that only Bob’s version includes. For me this song is about the words, and the images those words make in my mind. There’s no imitating that style when it came to Bob. Maybe Joni Mitchell came the closest.

    One of my all time favorite songs. Every time I hear it I feel safe, like it’s playing just for me. There’s one line in the later verses [insert lyric here] that gets me every time. Those words strung together, sung in Bob’s signature voice, mixed with a simple acoustic guitar. Brilliant. A highlight of this year of music.

    Gates of Eden

    “Gates of Eden,” following “Mr. Tambourine Man,” is another song full of dream and surreal imagery. It’s Salvador Dali and William Burroughs together. The Eden of this song is not the paradise most would imagine. Each verse builds images, each line and each couplet building imagery together. Imagery that is meant to warn, to strike fear or woe.

    The song was released as the b side to the “Like a Rolling Stone” single after the release of this record. A lengthy, weighty single that one is. Two epic songs, each in their own way.

    Here Bob spins one of his all time most surreal songs, which some have compared to the poetry of William Blake. If this song fits into some sort of narrative timeline along Bob’s output, it would be a great sequel to “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” That song warns of what is coming. This song explains what’s here, now that we’re in it. There are many images produced in the lines of this song, and grasping at all of them beckons multiple themes to emerge. Overall, there is a reluctant religious faith in the undertones of this description of an Eden. Behind the gates of this so called Eden, this paradise, is not the paradise you’d likely think.

    The activities, or the wordplay implying some sort of action from the characters behind the gates, are all harsh and scary. There is a savage soldier. There is Aladdin. There is a black madonna riding a chrome motorcycle. It’s all some sort of artistic joke to call this Eden. Its title should be Sodom, or Gomorrah.

    The final verse hints at the imagination of this whole experience. At dawn the narrator’s lover comes to describe the dream of what’s occurred before. There are no attempts to dig into what each piece of it means. There’s no way to describe what’s been dreamt. There are no words to identify what was true. If there were any truth, it would be outside these gates, but Bob reassures us, or rather leaves us haunted, with the final line: there are no truths outside the gates of Eden.

    It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)

    By this point in side 2, nearly at the end of the record, your brain should be melting from the roller coaster of words you’ve just experienced, and from the beauty of simply taking these songs in. If you hadn’t had enough, this song comes and nails the top of your coffin closed.

    His most epic acoustic work up to this point, this song is one of Bob’s masterpieces, on a record that was itself one of his masterpieces.

    Just like the songs before it, this one creates more harsh imagery, and it also serves as a spiritual sequel to some of his earlier music. He’s an artist putting the past behind him, commanding American society especially to witness the shitty situation it was in. This was on the eve of all out war in Vietnam, a very heady time, 1965. Not yet full on protests in the streets and blood running into the gutters, but things were heading there. Many thought of Bob as the wizard, the harbinger who predicted all of it with his music. The song offers no hint of a solution. He’s just the messenger, describing the scene.

    Many of the scenes poke at the woes of capitalism and the fakeness and greed it produces:

    Children’s toys provide distraction rather than purpose.

    The song’s most famous line lays out a stark choice between constant renewal and slow decay. Cast off any sense of the old and get with the new, or fade out.

    Another line takes aim at hatred itself. The self proclaimed virtuous forget that real action is more effective at making change than pure hate.

    It continues as such. Each short verse, and each semi verse in between, bludgeons the listener’s mind over and over. Bob’s ability to fit maximum meaning into such short lines is present here, maybe more than in any of his other songs.

    I must mention that this song will always remind me of The Sopranos, and the final episode of that show. I won’t spoil it for anyone, but I’ll say this. The lyrics of this song, and its placement in that episode, do more than reveal what happens at the end. To me there is no question. This song gets rid of all that ambiguity. For others, it might add to it. But there are lines that reference Tony’s fate. It’s also probably the best use of Bob’s music in any TV show, possibly any movie as well.

    It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

    Though this song comes at the end of the record, it’s not to be overlooked. To me it’s a perfect ending song. It sums up not only the record itself, but Bob’s thoughts on the music business, his place in it, and possibly one or more of his current relationships. Suze or Joan, or both.

    Bob seems to be in a different vocal register here when he’s reaching in the first part of a verse. In the second part of the verse he calms you down and makes it reassuring. In the first part it’s tense. Another great part of this song is the bass, providing a very subtle foundation that carries the weight of the lyrics so well.

    There’s been plenty of speculation over the years about who Bob is supposedly singing this song to or for. To me it’s not that important, but I’d again have to assume it was self directed. This time period was about change for Bob, and one of the things that initiates change is letting go. How do we accept the new without getting rid of the old? Things are always in a state of flux. There’s the past referenced, and then there’s the shift.

    Carpets moving out from under you: I picture movers taking old furniture out of a house while the person is still in it.

    There is a passage in this song that makes it one of my all time favorites, and for me it carries enormous emotional weight. I’m a person who has moved around a lot and changed what I’m doing several times. I’ve pursued different things and different career paths. I feel like I’m always thinking about my past self. The final verse:

    Leave your stepping stones behind, there something calls for you
    Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you
    The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
    Is standing in the clothes that you once wore
    Strike another match, go start anew
    And it’s all over now, Baby Blue

    Those words I’ve carried with me for most of my adult life. It’s not okay to focus too hard on our past selves, the people we’ve come across in our lives, or the dead. In order to keep progressing, to keep going, we have to accept that all of those people, things, and places don’t have anything left for us. That past self, the one you’ve left behind, will undoubtedly come and knock on your door. It’s best to leave the door shut.

    The song has been covered by many artists and has lived a life beyond what Bob probably imagined for it. To my ears, the 13th Floor Elevators version is one of the best covers.

    Closing

    Bob’s transitional masterpiece. It’s a statement piece for Bob’s place in history. Even though it feels at times rushed and put together intuitively, the record’s purpose shines through. It’s a jab at old lovers, at society, at intellectualism. It feels smart and wiseass at the same time. It’s incredibly prophetic and dismal, but also sweet and beautiful and just plain raw. Dylan had brought together a great team of musicians to get what he needed done for the tracks on the first side, but he was often not the leader that band needed. You can feel those musicians sometimes trying to keep up on the recordings.

    For me it’s a close tie at #1 favorite Bob album, with Blood on the Tracks taking the other tie spot. Of course, the album that gets all the praise is his next one. I won’t stop short of giving that one all its due. But it’s Bringing It All Back Home where Bob was in flux. I think it’s some of his best work. It’s close to me emotionally in a few different ways. If you’re someone on the fringe, it makes sense. It always sounds new, every time I listen to it. It’s a record everyone should own. It’s one I’ll always own.

  • The Sonics – Here Are The Sonics!!!

    The Sonics – Here Are The Sonics!!!

    Studio Album | Released March 1965 | Recorded in 1964 in Seattle Washington | Etiquette Records | Produced by Buck Ormsby and Kent Morrill

    If you’ve made your rounds around the opinion farm about who the first punk rock band was, you’d find the biggest, showiest plants being the Stooges, the Ramones, or the Sex Pistols. Maybe even the Velvet Underground. But the old growth, the Ents of the music world, will lead you somewhere else entirely: a band from Tacoma, Washington, some very young guys making some very loud music. The Sonics. The original punk band. Their sound was about energy and attitude, about taking those two things and synthesizing them into pure rock that pushed every limit. The record is a blessed blow to the head every time you spin it.

    Some folks call it garage. Whatever it is, it rocks, and I’m excited to present this band here as one of the earliest examples of pure rock music, maximum overdrive, born out of the influences of Little Richard, The Wailers, and all the other acts feeding this fertile scene, the Northwest garage scene. Around 1964 and 1965, the scene took a turn toward harsher music. It was dirtier than the Beatles. It had a rough edge. This music, from this scene in particular, would go on to influence early ’70s punk.

    Very fertile ground indeed. The initial offering from the Sonics, Here Are The Sonics!!!, was a big deal for that scene. The hit single “The Witch” climbed to a pseudo number one for the local radio DJs, but the story behind it tells you everything about how far ahead of its time this band was. At the time, 1964 into 1965, a hit song about a woman with supernatural powers creeping around the neighborhood at night was just unheard of. It’s important to go back and remember that for this band’s sake and for the scene’s sake.

    Much of the band’s sound came from three main elements: the wicked guitar of Larry Parypa, the saxophone of Rob Lind backing him up, and the raucous screeching ability in the vocals of Gerry Roslie. The final lineup we hear on the debut record was a product of the scene. Players came from other bands in the area, guys who were already gigging the local clubs, looking for that chance to do something great. Reading about these groups, you tend to notice how contained the scene was, which in any respect is what makes a scene great. What drove these young guys was simply to have a good time and play good music for the people in their area. This was not music made to change the world, in no sense. It was pure rock. For the early ’60s, you have to respect that.

    By 1963 the band had formed into a solid unit: Andy and Larry Parypa on bass and guitar, Bob Bennett on drums, Rob Lind on sax, and Gerry Roslie on piano and vocals. This group started out playing purely instrumental, but at one show Gerry Roslie worked up the courage to sing, and what came out was pure and violent. From there the band’s whole motivation became aggression, pure rock energy on stage for people craving something high octane. Long before rock was metal or punk or alternative, this was something folks could dance to and also be scared by.

    As their popularity rose, it came time to record a single. “The Witch” was a song a couple of the members had worked out in the vein of the popular dance crazes of the time, like the Mashed Potato, as Larry recalls it. The Sonics sought out some help recording it from a man who was already a legend in the scene, the bassist for the Wailers, Buck Ormsby. Even with his help, the recording was anything but smooth. It was cut at Commercial Productions studio in Seattle in 1964. The original lyrics got changed, the musicians were relentless with their energy, and what was supposed to be a vampy dance number became an unhinged proto-punk anthem. After the session, almost nobody involved was pleased with what went down.

    Buck liked it. That saved the group. He insisted that what they recorded needed to be released. He had the presence of mind to disagree with anyone who said “The Witch” wasn’t a quality recording, and he understood that it didn’t sound like anything else at the time. The 45 was released with a cover of Little Richard’s “Keep A-Knockin’” on the flip side. Buck took the single and, with his Wailers clout and street cred, convinced big-name DJs to play the record.

    The popularity of the song shot off like a rocket. The single climbed the regional charts and eventually landed at number two. According to the legend that still gets told around here, the song had all the clout to hit number one, but the station management at KJR wouldn’t allow it. The policy was that a number one record had to be played at any hour of the day or night, and they figured a song called “The Witch,” too far out for daytime ears, would upset people. So they capped it at two. Petula Clark’s “Downtown” sat up top. Either way, the band had a regional smash on their hands.

    Following up on the blastoff success of “The Witch,” the band cut another original. The reason was practical. Etiquette didn’t want to keep paying Little Richard royalties for “Keep A-Knockin’” on the B-side, so the Sonics needed an original to replace it. They came up with “Psycho.” Can you just not stop to appreciate any group with an A-side called “The Witch” and a B-side titled “Psycho”? People were probably having their minds blown just reading those titles. What’s more punk than that? It worked. The band blew up. Soon they were opening for the big groups of the day, sharing stages and hanging backstage with the Beach Boys. Their wildest dreams had become realities.

    Eventually more original songs came, and their recording sessions, full of extreme distortion and blown eardrums, ended up with enough tracks to give their label, Etiquette Records, a full LP. The first record was affectionately called Here Are The Sonics!!!, the subtitle promising all sorts of scary nonsense:

    “The Witch, Psycho, Strychnine and More!!!”

    The Object

    My copy is not an original, but it is one of the more sought-after recreations of this classic. It’s pressed by Norton Records, which popped up in the late ’80s with a mission to dust off forgotten gems and repress them for an audience craving older punk. This copy is a 1998 Norton issue. It maintains the original track listing but also adds a few bonus tracks: the original “Keep A-Knockin’” B-side, along with some goofy anti-Christmas Christmas songs.

    What’s awesome about this record, in any variant, is its cover, shot by photographer Jini Dellaccio, who handled the imagery for both of the band’s Etiquette albums. In 1965 it was rare to see a band photo where the members weren’t doing some sort of goofy pose, making a weird gesture, or just smiling. Here the Sonics are all intensity, looking like they want you to challenge yourself and brace for some wild music. My favorite is Bob Bennett, posing in front of his snare drum, arms crossed, defiant stare, and a sweet hairy sweater. It’s punk, but it’s the 1965 version. So great. One of the best album images of the era.

    What’s also great about this Norton reissue is the back cover, which in the tiniest font lays out the entire backstory for the group, at least what led to their formation and the recording of this LP, including some archival images. I’m appreciative of any record label that takes the time to publish a story that’s going to help people understand the music coming out of their speakers. This is part of what keeps bringing me back to the vinyl format after years and years. Here on this Norton release, it’s done very well.

    The Music

    The Witch

    The LP starts off with the song that broke the group out, the one that got them signed to Etiquette. The track is so simple in its construction, but there’s a lot going on inside it. The subject matter, mixed with Roslie’s wailing vocals, creates what all the great songs have: atmosphere. Only here that atmosphere is a riot to the eardrums. There’s a guitar riff locked in with the bass and a drum line that rattles the senses, and over the top of it all the sultry sax weaves in with the guitar.

    The recording was overseen by Buck Ormsby, a member of the Wailers and one of the founders of the Etiquette label. Ormsby was also the de facto discoverer of the Sonics. He came to see them play in somebody’s garage, watched them tear through “The Witch,” and was hooked. The raw power of their live energy had to get put on tape. That proved eventful, because the recording equipment wasn’t taking the volume well. Things were breaking. The band was reportedly satisfied only when every VU meter sat pinned in the red, which drove the engineers to despair. You can hear it even in this final version: turn it up and you catch the strain on the gear. It’s a menace.

    It begins with a sharp, quick snap of the snare, pow pow pow, and then bam, the riff hits. It’s very simple, and you can see why Larry the guitarist once claimed his playing wasn’t the best, but when you’re making music with energy like this, you can get away with less. There’s inspiration in that riff. And later in the song there’s a guitar solo worth discounting any self-deprecating thing Larry ever said about himself. It’s a blistering solo.

    The lyrics come at you the same way the riff does, in basic rhyming meter and not about anything too complex. It’s just about a witch. A spooky lady, long black hair, driving a long black car, looking fine, creeping around the neighborhood while the normies sleep.

    Do You Love Me

    The second track is a Berry Gordy Jr. cover, performed in various iterations since the Contours first recorded it in 1962. This version takes that familiar tune and turns the volume up to the literal max. The snare is a machine gun, and Roslie really gets a chance to test the staying power of his larynx. Screaming is the order of the day on this one, and Roslie does a great job with it.

    It’s a danceable tune, and it references the Mashed Potato. Worth noting that the preceding song, “The Witch,” was originally conceived as a faddish Halloween dance theme. The idea was to get people doing the Witch the same way they did the Mashed Potato.

    Roll Over Beethoven

    They just had to do a Chuck Berry song on their debut. This track was originally cut in 1956. Here, almost ten years later, the Sonics give it its due. On this cover you can really feel the energy of the room. The band sounds like they’re having a great time recording it. The songs for this record were tracked like a live show, and you can surely feel that here. It’s a great time. I think this is the track that shows most how much fun the band probably was before their breakout originals took over. It’s got that rocking Chuck Berry guitar along with the signature intro, and Larry takes another wicked solo.

    If you read the lyrics, rock is the alpha here. Rock is the beginning. Anything before it doesn’t matter anymore.

    Boss Hoss

    The second original on the record, and a classic thing to write a song about: a muscle car. It’s pure and simple. The car is fast, it’s good looking, and it pulls attention from the girls in town. What’s more pure rock and roll than that?

    A highlight here is the sax solo in the middle by Rob Lind. It’s a wild solo, perfectly placed in a track about a sweet ride. I don’t think a sax solo would have fit on “The Witch” or “Psycho,” but here it’s exactly right.

    Dirty Robber

    The Sonics here pay their respects to one of the biggest influences on their sound, the Wailers.

    The Wailers’ influence on the Sonics, and on music overall, was huge. They were pivotal to the Northwest scene, and they mattered nationally for the evolution of rock. Andy Parypa once said the Wailers were the one group that could get the Sonics into a riotous mood.

    Another fantastic sax solo turns up here, along with another guitar solo. Each instrument gets a few sweet bars to stretch out, usually punctuated by a Gerry scream. The subject matter is simple too: a woman who takes more than she gives. If you put the Wailers’ version of this Little Richard-style rocker up against the Sonics’ version, you can see exactly what the Sonics were going for with their influences. Basically, take the energy and the vocal to the ultimate max. The lyrics are screamed more than sung. The drum hits are louder. The guitar and sax combo lands like a sledgehammer against a metal door. At this point in the record, any assumption that things will calm down gets killed by this track.

    Have Love Will Travel

    Perhaps the catchiest song on the record.

    It’s a cover, originally cut by Richard Berry. This version by the Sonics is the definitive one, and it’s probably the most recognizable example of their signature sound. It’s been used in plenty of films and TV, and it earned the band a whole new wave of attention when it turned up in a 2004 Land Rover commercial.

    The trifecta of guitar, sax, and bass is sublime here, and that guitar tone is quite distinctive. Another killer sax solo is featured, with Rob Lind ripping off some real rapid-fire improvised notes. Great track, and one of my favorite covers on the album.

    Keep A-Knockin’

    The start of the bonus tracks on this Norton release. As mentioned, this was the original B-side for the “The Witch” single. “Keep A-Knockin’” was made famous as a rock and roll number by Little Richard, and it’s easily one of the all-time most famous rock and roll songs and one of his best-known tracks.

    A reworking by the Sonics, recorded right as they were getting into making their own music, makes sense. And hearing it here on this more comprehensive vinyl release makes sense too. Its value is in the completeness it adds. The tempo is cranked up, and the Sonics’ version sounds FAST. That quickness is propelled by some wicked drumming from Bob Bennett. Roslie flies through the lines like a whirling dervish of sound and syllables. His voice is rough, maybe from some serious overworking. All through the quick track, Rob Lind fills in on sax like an expert.

    It’s a great song and a great first introduction to the Sonics. If this were the first thing you heard from them back in the day, you’d be hooked instantly.

    Even years later, the resurrected version of the Sonics held onto that live sound:

    Don’t Believe in Christmas

    Another bonus track. This is pretty much the guys goofing around, being anti-Christmas. The song has a good R&B swing to it, but it lacks the energy and force of some of the other tracks. I really enjoy the organ on this one.

    Side 2

    Psycho

    Side 2 starts with essentially the second original composition the Sonics cut to lacquer. In late 1964 and early 1965 you could buy a single with “The Witch” on one side and “Psycho” on the other. That’s a heavy-hitting 45 right there. The two songs share a relationship in their subject matter: the woman in “The Witch” could easily be the woman who’s driving the man crazy here, turning him psychotic.

    It starts with something the Sonics were known for, a quick succession of whacks on the snare and then a launch straight into the first verse.

    Baby, you’re driving me crazy. The subject is basically a woman’s behavior pushing a man off the edge, turning him into a psycho. Or just “Psycho” as a statement for the state of mind a man can be driven to by his woman’s behavior, good or bad, I’d assume.

    Just the title alone must have been an inspiration to ’60s garage acts and to the punk groups that came later.

    Money

    A cover of “Money (That’s What I Want),” written by Janie Bradford and Berry Gordy and first cut by Barrett Strong in 1959. By the time the Sonics got to it, plenty of bands had taken a swing, but the Sonics do what the Sonics do: strip it down, crank it up, and ride that one greedy idea straight to the floor. Roslie sells the hunger in the lyric like he means every word, and the rhythm section keeps it locked and pounding. A simple, primal want, and the perfect kind of song for this band to maul.

    Walkin’ the Dog

    Rufus Thomas put this one down in 1963, a slinky little R&B number built around a nursery-rhyme hook. The Sonics take that slink and rough it up, turning a playful dance tune into something with more grit under its fingernails. The sax gives it some swing, but the energy stays high. It’s a fun one, and another example of how this band could grab any song off the radio and make it sound like theirs.

    Night Time Is the Right Time

    The famous version of this belongs to Ray Charles, all gospel call-and-response and slow-burn soul. The Sonics keep the bones of it but trade the smolder for sweat and volume. Roslie leans hard into the vocal, and the band turns the late-night ache of the original into something more desperate and raw. It’s a cover that shows they could handle a song with some emotional weight and still wreck it on purpose.

    Strychnine

    One of Roslie’s originals, and maybe the most gleefully unhinged concept on the whole record. Literally a song about poison, about how good poison is. The narrator would rather drink straight strychnine than water or wine. How punk is that? The riff is mean, the vocal is a snarl, and the whole thing leans into the band’s love of dark, dangerous subject matter played for kicks. Along with “The Witch” and “Psycho,” this is one of the originals that future punk bands would point back to.

    Good Golly Miss Molly

    The Sonics giving it up to another of their biggest influences, Little Richard. Originally a 1958 smash, it’s a rock and roll staple, and the Sonics treat it with the appropriate amount of disrespect, which is to say they play it loud, fast, and full tilt. Roslie was the right singer to take on a Little Richard scream, and he goes for it. A fitting way to close out the original LP, looping the record back around to the wild rock and roll roots that started the whole thing.

    Santa Claus

    Bonus track, and another one of the Sonics’ anti-Christmas originals. Same energy as their other holiday goofs: a kid complaining that Santa never brings what he wants, set to a churning garage rhythm. It’s silly, but the band commits, and the organ and sax keep it lively. Christmas music with a chip on its shoulder.

    The Village Idiot

    The last of the bonus material, and another bit of seasonal mischief from the band. It’s loose and goofy, more of a curio than a centerpiece, but on a release this comprehensive it earns its place. By the time you reach it, you’ve got the full picture of who these guys were, including their sense of humor.

    Closing

    This record is pure energy. It’s also fun. Lots of fun. It’s original rock and roll, and you can feel the power of rock all over it. Whether or not you factor in its influence, the record stands alone as a great piece of rock music. That’s something all the great records do. They stand alone, but they also make other people pick up their instruments and try to do something similar.

    None of the tracks run longer than three minutes. There’s a pureness and a heavy weight to a record this full of blistering, no-fat tracks. The Sonics followed it up with another Etiquette LP, Boom. The second record didn’t do as well as the first, and the band slowly faded out of existence and popularity. The guys tried to keep things going, but it turned out they did the one thing most of them probably swore would never happen: they grew up and went all square. They led separate, basically normal lives after their short run with the Sonics.

    The music lived on in the shadows of record store conversations across the country, mostly in the Northwest. Their songs landed on garage rock compilations, and those comps became famous overseas and elsewhere. Their legend grew, and the influence they had got passed down through the scene. In the late ’80s and ’90s, bands started imitating that raw Sonics energy. The guys themselves had no idea this was happening while their relatively normal lives kept rolling on. Then, years and years later, a reunion happened, and the band put out another great record. Rock never dies.

    The Sonics’ influence can be heard in the heavy riffage, the bass and kick drum poundings, and the screeching vocals of Gerry Roslie. This was something different from R&B simply turned into a “whiter” sound. This was manic energy. It only could have come out of the Northwest scene. I myself have never spent time up in the Northwest, so I haven’t felt the energy of the setting that produced these neighborhood come-ups, but I have to pay my respects to one of punk’s originators. Bow to the greatness of the raw power of the SONICS!!!

  • John Coltrane – A Love Supreme

    John Coltrane – A Love Supreme

    Studio Album | Released January 1965 | Recorded December 9th 1964 at Van Gelder Studio | Impulse! Records | Producer Bob Thiele

    The John Coltrane sound: heavenly, spiritual, otherworldly. A Love Supreme is for many the peak Coltrane album. For others it is at least the most famous one, the record that hit the jazz world the hardest and left the deepest mark.

    Music as expression of soul and spirit. That is what John Coltrane eventually dedicated his life to. By the time he began working on A Love Supreme, prior to 1965, he was already deeply accomplished as a musician and a horn player, having appeared in probably the best jazz band ever put together alongside Miles Davis.

    1964

    The album was conceived and recorded in 1964. In many ways the cultural movements of the decade were still at the cuff. The wave had not yet formed. Music was definitely pushing toward societal reflection and change, with records like Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are A-Changin’ and Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.” The civil rights movement is key context as well. By 1964 the movement had developed into a massive outpouring of protest. Lyndon Johnson had taken over as president after the assassination of John Kennedy. The war in Vietnam was not yet on most folks’ minds, but it was looming.

    In jazz, John Coltrane loomed over others as an emerging figure of the free jazz movement. He had broken out as a solo artist after his stints working under Miles Davis. 1964 was a year of hard work, but it also gave him room to rest, enjoy his newborn son, his first, and spend time with Alice in their new house on Long Island, New York. It was at this house that John secluded himself and began to develop the concept of A Love Supreme.

    Coltrane’s path to A Love Supreme ran through his years with Miles Davis, and a lot of the inspiration for free improvisation most likely took root while working on Kind of Blue. It was a time of listening, learning, and growing. And between the two recording sessions of Kind of Blue, Coltrane made Giant Steps. A seriously innovative record on its own, but what it also was for Coltrane was an exhibition in composition and music writing. It was proof that he was on the path to getting things going for himself and growing as a creative.

    Then there was the soprano saxophone, a new instrument picked up mid-career. An interesting move. There’s a lightness to the soprano, he would say. You can play lighter things on it. It’s a relief to shift to it. The soprano gave him “My Favorite Things” and a hit, and it widened the range of what his voice on a horn could be. That widening matters on A Love Supreme, even on a record where the soprano never appears.

    Something else Coltrane had to traverse to get to the point of making A Love Supreme was severe heroin addiction. In the 50s, using was not universal among jazz artists, but it was readily done and many artists had easy access to it. John was caught up in the attraction of drugs as a path to higher planes and higher abilities on his instrument. It did everything but that. Coltrane quit heroin cold turkey, and through sheer willpower and faith made it through a darkness few people have any idea of the difficulty of. That moment, the spiritual awakening of 1957, is the very experience he references in the liner notes of this album. A Love Supreme is, in a real sense, the thank you note for surviving it.

    December

    Coltrane’s record label had set aside about half of the second week of December. Tyner and Jones remember Coltrane calling them up and arranging a session for December 9th.

    Recording an album usually takes time. Days, weeks, sometimes months. Depends on the artist, I would say. But something is vastly different about A Love Supreme: it was recorded in one night, in one session.

    The Quartet

    The quartet on this record is a product of experimentation, but the end result is a band that allowed Coltrane full inventiveness and full confidence in working together. The record could not have been made without their collective skill, ability, and knowledge of music.

    Pianist: McCoy Tyner

    Tyner joined up with Coltrane around 1960, a confident young pianist who had what Coltrane wanted: a clean and astute harmonicist. Even though Tyner was 12 years younger than Coltrane, the two seemed to share the same musical focus and a spiritual leaning. They worked well together.

    Tyner relates the relationship to a brotherly one in Chasing Trane, the John Coltrane documentary. They were like brothers, and they were together for one reason: to create beautiful music. Full commitment. Full humility. No ego.

    Drums, Gong, and Timpani: Elvin Jones

    A master of the polyrhythmic style. Not the most in-demand drummer at the time, apparently. He would take liberties on the drum kit, drawing unwanted attention from bandleaders who wanted something tamer. But Jones was an amazing drummer, a master of his instrument, one who looked at the drums as intently as Coltrane looked at his horn. A naturally gifted player and a perfect addition to this quartet.

    Bassist: Jimmy Garrison

    Garrison had come up under another sax impresario and innovator, Ornette Coleman. Coltrane had been seeking a bassist who could match the strength required to work alongside a drummer as challenging and effective as Elvin Jones. Garrison joined the quartet in 1962 as the final piece of the band.

    The group gave Coltrane the feeling and the force he wanted. He wanted extremely capable musicians who could perform and sound like a unit without needing to force it. He wanted the feeling to be there rather than the hard edges of each musician playing on his own. Gathering this group was vital. From the point in 1962 when it solidified, the quartet became known for its work ethic, and its popularity shot up. It was Coltrane’s hot group, destined for something great.

    With this group, John Coltrane became the immense jazz figure that would seal his legacy. It tracked right into the making of A Love Supreme.

    The quartet formed, and the records came through. They recorded Crescent earlier in 1964, and man, what an album. Moodier, more contemplative, the band settling into longer forms and deeper waters. You can listen to it as a subtext, a prologue to A Love Supreme. Crescent is the record if you want to hear the quartet gathering itself for the leap.

    Producer: Bob Thiele

    On Bob, John said his duties were basically to keep the lights on and keep the tape running. A real backseat appearance for a producer. With all that expertise in the room, production gets pushed to the side. These were experts. Especially John.

    Significance

    The record landed in people’s homes like a gift from God. It was early 1965, right in the middle of the 60s. People were pursuing new religions and seeking truth through other means, music being one of them. People were seeking different lifestyles and accepting a universal consciousness. A Love Supreme was a perfect representation of that effort.

    A Love Supreme is dug deep into our cultural awareness, and that is something I’ve taken for granted myself. Even the phrase, the album title itself, inspired similar phrases down the line. A “blank” supreme. Anytime you hear that construction, it’s owed to Coltrane. It was one of the first records to be unapologetically devoted to a higher power.

    Many place the record, and sometimes Coltrane himself, into a religious context. For many listeners the music represents a voice from a supreme being, whether that voice is Coltrane himself or Coltrane channeling something through music. What you hear is someone playing an instrument beyond any extension of himself. It is himself. Full artistry, full mastery of craft, full immersion, and full transcendence.

    The Object

    My copy is not an original, not significant by any means. However, it is the music on vinyl, and for me that is significant enough. I’ll say that for a lot of records. It’s a 2023 US Impulse! reissue bought from my go-to record store right now, Recycled Records in Monterey, CA.

    A beautiful album cover. Instantly recognizable. Pure Coltrane. His gaze is not toward the camera but forward, toward a path to making better music. The photo was likely taken by producer Bob Thiele around the time of the recording. I really like the title font and how the title of the record comes first, then its maker. The tilt of the typeface seems to follow the same tilt as John’s eyes in the image. There’s not much simpler artwork than this, and it’s incredibly effective.

    The Music

    The album plays like improvisation mixed with composition. It blends genres together, and you can hear gospel, free jazz, bebop, and blues throughout. It eventually became known as spiritual jazz, a term that had never been used before. But many just see it as music, period.

    The John Coltrane sound: no vibrato, the shrieks, the rapid-fire runs. Vocal-like. It’s a tone. It’s purely him. It’s from deep within. It’s a howling soul and a wailing preacher together. On A Love Supreme he used the tenor saxophone for the entire recording, noting that it had the depth the music required. The tenor is close in tone to the human voice, and if these sessions were meant to come across as sermons, you can see why leaving the soprano behind made sense. The tenor is a voice here.

    Before even stepping into the studio, John had visualized the music as a connected suite: two pieces on side one and two pieces on side two. This is how the final product appears, and this is how the record was recorded.

    Acknowledgement

    The first gong hit and the opening lines from the sax are immediately transporting. You know you’re in for something different and special.

    Coltrane’s opening is transporting but familiar at the same time. To me it’s reveille, the wake-up call. It’s curtains opening. It’s a door opening. The signal to begin something. The signal for prayer to begin. The imam calling. Elvin Jones dances on the cymbals as that welcome ends. Then Garrison enters with that four-note motif. It is the album’s title in a four-note sequence.

    A love su-preme.

    Then Tyner takes a few chords as the rhythm develops. Coltrane’s horn returns. In full force. With a melody that just kills. Intensity is reached, and Tyner and Jones match it. Jones and Coltrane are really reaching heights here on “Acknowledgement,” interplaying so well. There’s a consistency from Jones that allows Coltrane’s flourishes and movements across the musical atmosphere. The cymbal is an interesting instrument to focus on here.

    Coltrane reaches peak intensity and then backs down, like a hiker on the downslope. Longer pauses open up between lines, and then the recurring theme enters the room. He plays the four-note motif 37 times in a row, in different keys.

    It’s an exercise in roaming key modulation. A masterful display. Some interpret it to mean that God exists everywhere, in every key. Some take it as a display of pure talent and ability.

    Then the tenor is put down and Coltrane takes the mic, one of the rarest moments on any of his records. He chants the mantra 15 times, drops to a lower key, and says it four more times. The song ends as the quartet slowly drops out, but Garrison remains. The bassist is the final musician you hear on this piece and the first you hear on the next.

    Resolution

    The seventh take. Garrison gives an introduction to the track on bass. A simple rhythm and theme, and it does little to warn you about the onslaught of Coltrane’s sax when it comes. It comes in blasting with the most out-there melody you’ve ever heard. Even today this melody makes me feel something I can’t pin down. It’s that dramatic and affecting. What ensues after the initial shock is a relatively traditional 4/4 jazz workout with Coltrane soloing.

    Then Tyner takes a solo. This solo is a highlight of the record. It’s insanely good and really hard to describe. Tyner’s left hand is fluid while his right hand stays fixed, playing mostly chords to follow and give structure to what the left hand is doing. I can’t begin to understand how difficult that is to do. But here, you can hear it done. It’s mind-boggling.

    Coltrane flows back in with his own solo, carrying a subtle respect for what Tyner just accomplished. His second foray as soloist on this track lasts through the remainder of the recording. He flourishes along, some of his lines blues-tinged. Then he strains on some wicked high notes, pushing the limits, and returns finally to the original melody. Garrison and Coltrane finish up while allowing the melody and the track to settle out and resolve, if you will.

    Pursuance

    This track begins with Jones taking a solo of about 90 seconds. His adaptable talent is on full display. Jones reported that Coltrane gave him no direction for this solo, so what you hear is supposedly unplanned. It is a showcase of his polyrhythmic ability. What it really sounds like is Jones using all of the drum kit at once. He playfully executes this extremely fun solo and slowly reaches a conclusion, still going at a brisk pace as Coltrane and the other two bandmates filter in.

    Coltrane’s intro rushes in with an initial blast of this new tune’s melody. Before that even gets a chance to sink in, Tyner takes another solo, his second on the album. Tyner really takes a walk around the room here, dancing around the melody of “Pursuance” at a sometimes breakneck speed. The left hand is just flying. Amazing stuff. Then Coltrane returns.

    Coltrane’s entrance into this track is the peak of the energy on the recording. It is a powerful exposition of melodic runs and strings of new ideas. It’s way out there. Underneath Coltrane is Jones, flying around the kit as well. The two together are reaching new heights simultaneously. A real partnership.

    Coltrane flourishes through the melody for a couple more measures, leaving Jones to find the track’s ending. In reality it’s a false ending. Jones gives some whaps to the snare and cymbals while Garrison begins an improvisation that runs for the next three minutes. His solo here is a truly unique point on the album. He does some great call-and-response work all by himself, moving from chord sequences to several-note combinations and answering them with chords. He travels up and down the strings with ease, and this closes out probably the most intense track on the record.

    Psalm

    The finale of the record. It is different from the three tunes before it, since it’s more of a mood piece. It’s pure emotion. It’s not regimented improv like before. It’s closer to a lyrical poem. The words of the passage appear in the album’s liner notes. It is essentially a conversation between Coltrane and God, giving thanks for his life and his gift. His praise for salvation, laid bare in his most effective form of expression.

    Accompanying Coltrane on the tune, mallets in hand on the timpani, is Jones. The timpani gives this piece the emotional weight it requires and makes the whole thing feel more orchestral and cinematic. Beneath that, Garrison and Tyner provide fills and layers where they can. But really this track belongs solely to Coltrane and his speech through the saxophone. You can listen along and read the words as Coltrane recites them through the horn, and it’s really not that difficult to follow. He does a fantastic job with that. As Coltrane works through the psalm he starts to sound strained, likely because this was the last tune recorded that night. It’s a voice at the end of its night.

    Coltrane finishes with a short reference back to “Acknowledgement,” there’s a roll on the timpani and cymbal, and A Love Supreme finishes.

    Closing

    Carlos Santana plays A Love Supreme every time he enters a hotel room. He does this to cleanse the room of harmful spirits. I do believe this record has that power. I feel something every time I play it. The feeling is a calm acceptance of the beauty and hugeness of my existence in this universe. I’m not a particularly religious person, but I do accept the existence of a higher power. A Love Supreme is a record some people will use to find their connection to, or their acceptance of, that higher power.

  • Dave Van Ronk – Folksinger

    Dave Van Ronk – Folksinger

    Studio Album | Released November 1962 | Recorded April 1962 at Van Gelder Studio | Prestige Records | Producer Shel Kagan

    This album is pure and simple. An urban performer taking his trade and applying it to reshape and reform the golden nuggets of folklore. The folk song unearthed, repurposed, re-bluesified and re-jazzified by a singer with a powerful, emotive voice and a knack for the guitar bent upon years and years of rambling, and practice practice practice.

    Dave Van Ronk didn’t agree with the title this release bestowed upon him. Van Ronk had traveled to Manhattan in the early 50s in an attempt to work and succeed and be famous as a jazz singer. His inspirations were jazz artists and big band leaders and musicians. Those jazz leanings were fused with blues leanings, and his inspirations remained as such throughout his life. The early members of his audience made note of his appearance and his voice. He was a very big guy. Above six feet and above 200 pounds. With a voice that could raise Lazarus from the grave.

    In The Mayor of MacDougal Street, Van Ronk relates hearing an early version of “Stackolee” on an Alan Lomax reissue series record, one of the earliest records he ever purchased. The version by Furry Lewis had a distinct fingerpicking guitar style, and it perplexed Van Ronk. He felt it was two different guitars playing, when it really was one person playing both melody and bass line simultaneously. He ran into someone later in Washington Square Park picking their guitar in a similar way. He sat down and listened, and asked the person for a quick on-the-spot lesson. After that day, Van Ronk took a head-first nose-dive into the fingerpicking style. He would go to Washington Square Park to play, and to learn from those who already knew. He gave everything he had to mastering that style of playing, and that was his change from jazz to folk. It was a career decision, as Van Ronk states in his memoir. It was a move from complex to simple. It came out of necessity, and it was also a change in mood and mind, arriving right at the time the Village scene was about to make history.

    It was the Washington Square Park scene that Van Ronk developed inside of. This scene was sporadic pockets of musicians occupying various parts of the park, striking up tunes together or by themselves. A fertile music-breeding ground if there ever was one. Also passed around in copious amounts were drugs and left-leaning ideology. This was libertarian, progressive, communistic support for music that these folk thought was going to affect change at upper levels of government. Lots of hate for other groups, as he would say. Van Ronk’s MO at the time was to sit down somewhere and sing. The hope was that folks would gather around, and maybe pitch in money. He had an advantage for these impromptu live sessions: his voice volume. If you’ve heard Van Ronk you immediately notice his voice. It would carry well in a park setting, and even the least curious passerby would notice it.

    Somewhere around this time a reissue record comes out. The Anthology of American Folk Music, a compendium of traditional American music. Some had never heard these recordings before. Most hadn’t, actually. This became Van Ronk and friends’ guidebook for how to sing and make their music. It was the tome of the elders. It had all-time greats on it. Mississippi John Hurt, Blind Lemon Jefferson. Triple OGs. On contemporary phonograph equipment at the time, this record set must have blown minds. What it actually was was a set of old 78s collected onto LPs.

    The music would come from places other than America as well. Van Ronk’s song on this record, “Chicken Is Nice,” was a Liberian original. One of the only recordings at the time of an American folk singer repurposing a song from Liberia as his own. That alone makes this record a must-own and a must-listen.

    MacDougal Street, the Folklore Center, and the Scene

    By the time Folksinger came out, Van Ronk was pretty well established in the scene. He had become somewhat of a mentor and ringleader of sorts. The hangouts were the Caricature Coffee House, the lofts down on the Bowery, and the Café Bizarre. It was at a gig at the Café Bizarre, with Odetta as the lead attraction, that Odetta saw Van Ronk’s performance and was so impressed she asked him to send her a tape so she could pass it along to Albert Grossman.

    Van Ronk’s vocal influences were jazz and blues artists he began to mimic through a jazz lens. Josh White was one of those touchstones. White was a Black blues and folk singer who had lived in the Village for years and represented exactly the kind of vocal authority, dramatic phrasing and stagecraft that Van Ronk admired and absorbed. You can hear White’s influence in the way Van Ronk shapes a phrase, how he leans into a line for emotion and then pulls back.

    Izzy Young’s Folklore Center on MacDougal Street was the other anchor of this world. It was part shop, part hangout, part bulletin board, part informal concert hall. Van Ronk spent enormous time there in the late 50s and early 60s, and the cover photo of Folksinger shows him standing right under its sign. There were also the hootenannies at the Gaslight Café and up and down MacDougal Street, which Van Ronk was central to.

    The Object

    My record is a faithful reissue of only the best kind, by the great company Vinyl Me Please. Every one of their reissues that I own I cherish for the quality of sound and the great presentation of some of the all-time greatest records, or at least the ones that hold the most importance. The sound quality on this release is fantastic. The jacket and wax are sturdy and guaranteed to last my lifetime. The liner notes are recreated. The true highlight of this package comes in the listening notes by Elijah Wald, in a little Moleskine-style notebook tucked away in the record sleeve. Give me something like that with every single record and I’ll be happy. With this record, and with the ones that come with lore, it’s a cool thing to see, a writer putting heart and devotion into detailing the music you’ll hear and giving you the stories you need to understand the notes and heart and emotion in Van Ronk’s voice.

    The album cover has a great photo of Van Ronk on it, in full belt, standing under the sign of the Folklore Center, the place where he spent a lot of his time in the late 50s and early 60s, and like the church of his inspiration, where he became linked to so many of the songs you hear on the record.

    The Music

    He Was a Friend of Mine

    This is a traditional folk song, originally unearthed by Alan Lomax. It’s simplistic in nature and exhibition in most versions that you hear. A song of lament, about a person recounting the death of an old friend. There are numerous versions. One of the most incidental was the Byrds’ version, given more weight as a somewhat pointed tribute to the dead president John F. Kennedy. The two early folk versions of the 60s belong to both Bob Dylan and Dave Van Ronk. Dylan’s version precedes Van Ronk’s and is similar in execution, and it did not end up being placed on Bob’s first record.

    Van Ronk’s version really makes you think this song belonged to him. When I first heard it, I suspected the song was new. As the first song on the record, it opens up the listener to the Van Ronk universe. The song is sung with quiet beauty here. Sustained notes start getting scratchy toward their end, like a road going from pavement to loose asphalt to grit. The road is the setting. The man who died, we don’t know who he was. What we do know is that Van Ronk is intensely broken up over this person’s death. And since Van Ronk himself has passed on, leaving his legacy in tattered records and folk legends and lore, perhaps this is a song that can serve as an obituary to the man himself.

    Maybe this is the one song on the record most connected with Dylan and the strange way that people connected Van Ronk to Bob Dylan. Each of them sang their own version of the track, maybe in reference to each other. As far as friends, enemies, rivals, mentors, I don’t know where the two fell. It’s difficult to understand truly how each of them felt for the other. What we do know is that they were both somewhat influences on each other, maybe moreso Van Ronk on Bob. Still friends though.

    The man who most could have been this friend, though, was Phil Ochs.

    A great live version of the song, maybe the most meaningful, was put forth by Van Ronk at the Phil Ochs Memorial Concert in 1976. Van Ronk sounds tore up singing it, his voice cracking with the emotion at the lament of the death of a fellow folk giant.

    Motherless Children

    Originally recorded by Blind Willie Johnson in 1927. The song moves through the gospel and blues tradition and was a natural fit for Van Ronk’s range, sitting somewhere between spiritual and field holler. He gives it that wide, deep voice and lets the guitar do the mourning underneath.

    Stackerlee

    This song’s legend holds a mirror to itself. It’s one of those legends made into song, and with each iteration a new artist and performer etches their name in the logbook of history. Originally the song was performed in the 19th century, about a famous African American criminal. Lee Shelton lived in St. Louis, Missouri, was a member of underground clubs, and gambled, drank, and bedded women. He would go “stag,” and eventually Stag Lee became his name.

    As folk tradition has it, the passing down of songs with different variations was the tradition. The names get changed, the ideas of the song change. The legend grows larger. “Stackolee” is a great example of this passing-down through generations, but with things different each time, like a generational game of telephone.

    Van Ronk relates his first time hearing “Stackolee” and it not making sense to him, that it must have been two guitar players in unison. Furry Lewis is completely inspiring on his rendition of this legendary song. Van Ronk makes note that he never changed much about the original Furry version. Bottom line up front though: if Van Ronk never hears this song on the Listen to Our Story anthology, put together by Alan Lomax and released in 1947 on 78 and 1950 as a 10-inch LP, Van Ronk probably never takes up fingerpicking.

    If you listen to a version by Furry Lewis, you can really make out the great imitator that Van Ronk was, in both his vocal stylings and his guitar work.

    Mississippi John Hurt’s version of this track is one of the most famous and earliest put down. That came in 1928.

    Mr. Noah

    An exhibition of Van Ronk’s great sense of humor, and a touch of goofiness. This one was sourced from blackface minstrel shows by way of Greenwich Village banjo great Billy Faier.

    As simple as this song appears to be, it exposes something inherent about Van Ronk, which is that he was a skeptic of institutions, religion being one of those. According to Elijah Wald, the song was popular as a barroom number, sung by drunk men in circles. It was a mock at religion, with a chorus of “hallelu, hallelu, hallelu.”

    Van Ronk deftly replaces “hallelu” with “doodly-dee-doo.” I think Ned Flanders would not enjoy this song.

    Come Back Baby

    Dave had recorded a version of this song on his preceding record. That version sounds primitive, worked out as a blues recording. On Folksinger, the version has more personal qualities to it. It’s recorded better, for one. You hear the inside of the guitar sound so well. And the vocal has resonance, and you are personally affected. Dave is singing in a slightly tender register. But it’s gruff. It’s like a bear with a soft voice in one line, and then a growl in the next line. That artistic style, that variance in pitch and demeanor, was something Van Ronk was a master of.

    Poor Lazarus

    This song’s source was Alan Lomax’s anthology American Ballads and Folk Songs. A work song with chain-gang roots, sung with a heaviness that Van Ronk’s voice was built for.

    Samson and Delilah

    Original arrangement by Reverend Gary Davis. Of biblical nature, and a narrative song. Reverend Gary Davis was another legend, and probably loomed pretty large for Van Ronk. The banjo of Davis is replaced here by Van Ronk in his own way. Van Ronk is in full throat on some of these lines, giving his best effort to imitate the master.

    Cocaine Blues

    Another song Van Ronk sang as an inspiration from Reverend Gary Davis. Davis’s version is a borrowing of a vintage country song, popularized in modernity by Johnny Cash, but here taken in the folk-singer revival tradition. Van Ronk gives this track its due, and it seems like a personal lament to the drug and its adverse effects. It’s really got that one-man-in-a-song-in-a-small-room setting, maybe more so than any other track on the record. Toward the end it becomes a confessional of sorts. On that last line of the chorus, Van Ronk raises his voice to full effect.

    This track was one of the early folk songs that mentioned drugs, and that inspired dozens of artists to create their own versions. Dave’s version maintains that original status still, and the song about cocaine gained definite appeal long after the 60s and into the 70s, as that drug lived its own life and so did this song about it.

    Many people connect this song to Dave Van Ronk as the closest thing he ever made to a hit. It was always requested, loudly, from the crowds at his live concerts. Van Ronk probably got sick of it. He stopped singing the song in 1972.

    A large section of Dave’s memoir is given over to the inspiration and the authority that Reverend Gary Davis had in his life as an influence. He notes the song’s importance as it came from the Reverend, who was the biggest inspiration on Van Ronk’s life.

    You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon

    This may be the track where you can most make out Dave’s jazz big-band and ragtime influence. You can hear just how important Dave’s vocals are in the arrangement and how the guitar part is giving the vocal its power. On a larger scale, there would be a full band backing up a vocal like this, but here it’s done subtly with just guitar and voice.

    An original song by Bessie Smith in the vaudeville blues tradition. A song that in Dave’s rendition is meant to be funny, though later Van Ronk would express some regret, since the original version holds a more funereal aspect to it.

    Fixin’ to Die

    A Bukka White song, from the album The Country Blues, put together by Dave’s roommate at the time, Samuel Charters. Dylan had also recorded his version of this track a year earlier.

    Hang Me, Oh Hang Me

    Sourced from an album by Sam Hinton, who was a West Coast folksinger. If you watch Inside Llewyn Davis, you’ll get a good dose of this song, sung by Oscar Isaac. The Coen brothers borrowed a lot of inspiration from the life of Van Ronk to make that movie, and it’s fitting that they chose this song as one of the figurepieces. The main character, down on his luck, in a constant cycle of trying to break out of a lack of success through music and talent. It’s downtrodden. If “He Was a Friend of Mine” is a lament about a friend gone away, then this song is a lament about one’s own miserable lot in life. Destined for poverty and hard times.

    Long John

    This song came from a version by Woody Guthrie on a 1950 record called Chain Gang. Another work song, another voice in the long American line of singing under the lash and the sun.

    Chicken Is Nice

    A fantastic ending song, and a unique one. Originally put down by a Liberian pianist named Howard Hayes. Van Ronk found it on a set called Tribal, Folk and Café Music of West Africa. Dave’s early years were occupied with searching out the deepest and best material out there on records. Likely on 78s, and not usually on LP compilations.

    Closing

    I must admit, purchasing, owning and listening to this Van Ronk record are recent events in my life. As an offering of songs, Folksinger is a truly brilliant gift of an album, from a singer who should definitely not be forgotten but too often is. And it’s more than being forgotten. I think he’s a bit misunderstood. Many connect Van Ronk to the Greenwich scene, but to me his life was much bigger than that. That scene was fertile ground for dozens of songwriters, artists, poets and all sorts of creativity. Van Ronk stood solo based on his presence as a person, and on his influences. Folksinger, from 1962, is a good entryway into the efforts and works of art of how he took his song influences and made them his own. Don’t compare him to anyone else. Don’t associate his name with any particular setting other than late-50s and early-60s American music revivals. It’s essential that Van Ronk is remembered as such. Folksinger is in fact a statement of that, and a great record.

  • Bob Dylan — The Times They Are A-Changin’

    Bob Dylan — The Times They Are A-Changin’

    Studio Album | Released February 10th, 1964 | Recorded August 6 – October 31, 1963 | Columbia Records| Produced by Tom Wilson

    In my opinion this record is Bob’s second brush with greatness after his second record, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. The third record from the master bard and songwriter represents a stark contrast to that second one. On Freewheelin’ there’s some hidden optimism somewhere within it. It’s hopeful, it’s youth, and the world is open. There’s a hope that we can get things fixed if we all get on the right track. With The Times They Are A-Changin’, we along with Bob must accept the onslaught of an apocalypse. It’s a stark and haunting landscape. Windswept. Dusty. Dark. Black and white. The title represents a regard for a movement in a different direction. You listen to the record intently, you can feel that movement. In some songs you feel the damage already being done. In some ways things have already changed for the worst.

    Being noticed can be a burden.

    Bob’s fame was shooting to the top in the period between his second record and his third. Between spring 1963 and early 1964, Bob was being crowned the king of the protest song. This was a persona he was beginning to reject and come to terms with at the same time. You can feel that rejection, and some quiet acceptance, in this record. What also occurred during this period was the assassination of John Kennedy. That event really informed the album and had an indelible effect on the songwriter. Many people still associate that event with the title track, and rightfully so, it being such a turning point in his country’s and the world’s history.

    Bob’s relationship with Suze, which helped inspire several of the songs on his sophomore record, continued to struggle. What was coming into his life was a semi-rivalry, semi-courtship with female folk powerhouse Joan Baez. This partnership and career advancement opportunistic relationship took center stage on multiple occasions, most famously during the Newport Folk Festival held in July 1963. That festival was Bob’s joining of the folk zeitgeist, the world giving him the title of folk and protest song master. Bob was applauded in dirges. The want for his words and the want for him to represent the teeming masses was massive. They were on edge waiting for him to come and lead the way, even though he was just trying to make his way as a songwriter and as a young human man being.

    A guest tour with Joan Baez, and a performance at the March on Washington alongside Joan later, pretty much sealed the deal for Bob and Suze. Bob spent time with manager Albert Grossman, as well as spending time in Carmel, California, at the home of Baez. I currently live near this place, and have spent a lot of time in the area. I can sense the pastoral quality of this time period being injected into these lyrics. It may be why I’ve always felt a closeness to this record. It’s got that feel of sitting inside a cozy bedroom or living room, reading and writing, but with a black cloud of woe and worry passing overhead. The Carmel and Monterey fog living within the lines, maybe.

    Bob’s rejection of his personification as the spokesman of his generation informs much of the record as well. His popularity came with an expectation that he began to work against. He just wanted to do his own thing. What emerges are songs that evoke his inspirations and his life as a songwriter up to this point. What emerges in Bob and his persona is a spikiness, and an unwillingness to accept bullshit from the media, the critics, and the endless line of microphones and magazine article writers. It was this spiky Bob Dylan that went on to create his third record.

    The Object

    This record’s album cover has always been striking to me. The monochrome quality, the edges of age and maturity progressing across Bob’s face. It’s a very captivating image. Bob’s face shows a recognition of something harsh and intense going on. It’s post-apocalyptic in a way. You see age but also inexperience on his face. You sense a great emotion, and along with the big typeface of the lead track and the album’s title, a strong statement is made. It’s still very affecting, even by modern standards.

    This cover is also striking as a stark contrast to the preceding record. The brace against the cold on the New York street, along with the kind embrace with Suze and a general optimism, has been replaced with something like a mugshot or an image of poverty, isolation, and longing.

    The Music

    Recording began on the record in August 1963, and Columbia brought back the company producer Tom Wilson to oversee production. Tom Wilson had produced Bob’s preceding record, and went on to produce the next two. Wilson served the artistry here as more of a facilitator than an overseer. The approach with The Times They Are A-Changin’ is less is more, and you feel it throughout the record. If you focus intently on the songs and how they sound, you’ll notice more prominence to Bob’s vocal, and the refinements in the gentle rhythmic strumming guitars are assisting that voice, not playing alongside it.

    Three sessions were conducted in early August 1963 and produced the master takes for several songs: “North Country Blues,” “Ballad of Hollis Brown,” “With God on Our Side,” “Only A Pawn in Their Game,” and “Boots of Spanish Leather.” Touring interrupted further recording, and the rest of the master tracks were completed in October 1963. In this interim period, Bob may have actually been writing the tracks for the album as well, or at least finalizing ideas for songs he wanted for the record.

    The Times They Are A-Changin’

    Finger-pointing songs.

    Bob said this track was influenced by Irish and Scottish ballads like “Come All Ye Bold Highwaymen” and “Come All Ye Tender Hearted Maidens.” Each verse addresses a different group, and each verse provides a command to that group or groups. It’s a song and an anthem, wanting something from society, civilization, the institution, and the individual. Bob admitted that he made this song with the intent to make some social change. Maybe it’s his most literal call to change from his time as a protest singer in the 60s. It became one of his most well known songs.

    The opening verse calls everyone to gather and admit that the waters around them have grown. Water can destroy all things over time, water erodes. What exact waters is Bob referring to? Just the concept that we’re going in a direction where, if the tide or the flood hits a certain point, we’ll all be affected in some way. And we must admit that. Sink or swim, folks. Adapt, learn, evolve, or die essentially. On this first verse you can sense Bob settling in to the song in the studio, his voice and demeanor and maybe his body getting comfortable with the feeling and progression.

    The second verse turns to writers and critics. Is Bob calling to mind his own quality, or is he asking his writer peers to join with him, don’t miss the opportunity to make a grand statement about what’s going on? I can read these words in a political light. The constant flux of leadership. Don’t criticize the leaders now or the losers, the inevitability that they will be replaced is a constant. The loser now will later win, as if it’s all a game, a constant change, the tables always turning, all up to chance, the spinning wheel.

    Next come the senators and congressmen. Bob’s urge here is to get with the friggin’ program. Don’t cause hindrance. Don’t be an obstacle to change, be a facilitator of it. The times need you to change as well, and call upon yourselves to be the ones that help out. If you stand still, you’ll feel the pain of the oncoming change. The battle outside, the conflict you fail to participate in, will affect your home.

    Then mothers and fathers. Every new generation feels this. Bob would like the old ways to go away. It takes old folks to learn and adapt to new ways of thinking. Always. The youth movement was on its way. The times were showing a protesting population full of college-aged youths. They had ideas and were discussing them. Bob joins the thrall, and requests that if the older generation can’t get along or get with the change, then to simply get out of the way.

    Turning points are no longer even acknowledged. It’s a boundary, and the change has been made. Many have drawn biblical parallels to the final lines of this song, however I find similarity in Yeats’s “The Second Coming.” The order is rapidly fading. The blood-dimmed tide is loose.

    Ballad Of Hollis Brown

    This is a grim, morose song, full of hard-edged dusty imagery, of the poor farmer variety. Very Grapes of Wrath. Very Woody Guthrie, and old American. The story is of a South Dakota farmer overcome by poverty, reaching such desperation that he kills his entire family and then himself.

    An earlier version of the track was recorded during the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan sessions in November 1962. The early version had a guitar strum pattern, the final version has a more primitive, fingerpicking style.

    This song is amazing and it’s my favorite on the album. It’s a staggering work and could be one of Bob’s more underrated masterpieces. Definitely belongs in the list of great murder ballads.

    If the title track was meant to attract, this song with its dark imagery, themes of ending, murder, and poverty, is meant to repel. The quick one-two punch of the title track’s finger-pointing call to action, paired with this track’s brought-down gloomy mood, establishes both the black-and-white theme of the record and the bleakness of Bob’s optimism. He asks folks to look at what’s happening, but in reality things all turn out bad in the end, and we all die and towns die with us. Whoever this Hollis Brown character is, none of us should want to be him or experience his woes.

    Sonically, the song is definitely gloomy. Bob takes that lower, Woody Guthrie or more dark folk register, delivering each line with a strong punctuation. A matter-of-fact, line-by-line storytelling style. The fingerpicking guitar strum, albeit gloomy as well with its simple chord sequence, is deliciously infectious when paired with the gloom of the song. If you’re someone who likes dark moods in songs, which I am, you’ll get enjoyment from this dark folk tale.

    The scenery and imagery are stark here. Hollis Brown lives on the outside of town with his wife and five children in a broken-down cabin. Such harsh poverty reduced to a hard one-line image: a child not able to smile due to hunger. I enjoy the way Bob is addressing the subject as “you,” placing his audience inside the character’s scene. It makes the listener feel the emotion as if it’s happening to them. Pacing the floor, asking why, never to get a response.

    The horror continues, and the want for some assistance, whether in human form or spiritual, continues. These added questioning lines give the song an anti-religious bent. Money is lord here in this universe, and when there is no money there is no lord. The psychosis is starting to set in. This is a maddening portrayal of someone pushed to his limits.

    Bleakness reaches its breaking point. He’s finished, and the shells will execute the plan. The cold coyote call. Just amazing alliteration. Very deep western. This song is spooky.

    What’s driving this character to commit this harsh act? Does the brain-bleeding imagery imply some madness taking over? Does the man have the same bad blood that the horses have in an earlier verse? There’s a slight disruption in the fingerpicking here, slight new note intonations. Indicative of the madness occurring.

    The seven breezes, to me, indicate an effort to escape, perhaps a run out of the house and the disturbed wind because of it. Nonetheless, seven shots ring out, seven shells spent. The ending lands hard. Seven people dead on a South Dakota farm, and somewhere in the distance, seven new people are born. That’s an inevitability. There are folks being born every day, and folks dying every day. The seven tragic endings may be replaced by even more tragic endings. Who knows.

    Bob chose to sing this song as part of his performance during Live Aid on July 13th, 1985. He expressed he hoped some of the money raised for the event would go to pay mortgages on farms in Africa.

    With God on Our Side

    The anti-war and anti-religious songs continue with this great track to make up more of the powerful songs of side one on this record. The irony of the song is simple. The events mentioned all fit the same pattern. It’s war justified by righteousness, throughout history.

    Bob was accused of plagiarism for this song, and how similar it is to “The Patriot Game” by Dominic Behan. He declined any conflict with Behan.

    With this song, Bob takes a stab at patriotism, at history’s alignment with religion, and at political will bending to support both for the pursuit of land, real estate, and monetary gain through war and killing.

    The song sounds like a funeral march. It’s simple, along with all the other tracks on the record, relegated to just Bob, a guitar, and harmonica. At this point in his life and career he’s still up against the man, and probably up against his own indifference to religion and institutions overall. His later days get a little preachy, and lots of folks drew issue with that when you look back on the statements he was making in songs like this.

    Bob does place himself inside the irony and the argument, though, stating that the country he comes from is called the Midwest. He was taught and grew up there, and the land he lives in has God on its side. He belongs to the country, so there are no exemptions.

    The next verse begins the walk through history, mentioning that the cavalries that charged and killed the Native Americans had God on their side. After that, the Spanish-American War and the Civil War take place. Bob notes that all the names in the history books, that he had to memorize, were the winners, and thus had God on their side.

    The First World War comes next. Bob didn’t get what the conflict was for. But he accepted it, because the dead don’t matter when God’s on your side.

    After that, the Second World War, naturally. And the most biting verse of all. The Germans lost, we forgave them, even though they oversaw massive genocides, and now they are on our side, with God.

    Cold War fascinations come next, where Bob notes that he’s been taught to distrust the Russians. If a war with them comes, it will be fought bravely with God on our side.

    Nuclear weaponry makes up the next verse, the weapons of chemical dust. Bob argues the decision would not be questioned. Because God’s on our side.

    Even the Bible’s key event is brought into question. Did Judas Iscariot have God on his side when he betrayed Jesus?

    The last verse brings it all together, and is basically the punchline to the song, if the song is a joke. If God really was on our side, there won’t be any war, and that God, if caring, would stop it. That turned out to be not exactly the way things went for the subsequent decades. Perhaps Bob found God through all those years of hurt.

    One Too Many Mornings

    This track has a calm beauty to it. It’s emotional, and shows a side of Dylan that has been affected by a difficult time and a difficult relationship. Probably the fallout of his Suze relationship coming to an end is the driver of the emotion in the track. The two impressionable young adults seemed to be on different tracks altogether, and eventually broke up in March 1964, after estrangement due to distance and people in the background interfering.

    This song at the time was cast aside as not protesty enough. A re-look at it, and a placement against some of Bob’s later material like Blood on the Tracks, gives it an immense weight. It’s an amazing track and gave a glimmer of the direction Bob would be taking in a few albums and into the 70s.

    To my ears, it has the best vocal performance as well as the best harmonica insertions on any song on the record. Following up the previous grim track with this sweet ballad is like stepping inside after being caught in an acid rainstorm.

    There’s still some melancholy here, and much of the themes deal with sadness and endings, and a mind not equipped for letting go.

    North Country Blues

    We’re back to the protest songs, and we’re back to the circle, gathered around Bob while he tells us a tale. This tale will turn out to be a personal one, about the iron mining towns of Minnesota and how they break people, and the effect on working people of capitalism’s ever-creeping cycle.

    Most people attribute the setting of this song’s story to Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota. Iron to Minnesota was like gold for Californians. It was a mad rush to mine the land in the 1890s, and Hibbing was a town built on those strips. The iron ranges, where Bob grew up near, gave birth to generations of miners. John D. Rockefeller broke the land, buying up huge pieces of land, amassing huge profits by selling iron to U.S. Steel in the early 20th century. By the 50s the area was mined up, and Bob saw the effects of the industry decline causing a depression in his town. Bob himself did not come from one of these poor mining families, but he was exposed to all of it enough to see it and empathize with their experiences on this great song. Perhaps young Bob’s exposure to downtrodden miners was his first brush with the disenfranchised.

    Bob is putting on a vocal performance on this track evocative of the bards of old, and really is emulating Woody Guthrie. His storytelling skills on this track are downright intense, and the vocal performance helps give the narrative the weight it deserves. He’s singing this story like a good country artist, but a folk country.

    The narrative of the track is told from the POV of a woman. The scene opens with an acknowledgement that this town doesn’t have the luster it used to. The red iron ore pits used to run a-plenty, but now folks have cardboard in their windows. Damage done. The woman narrator’s children are grown, but her own mother was sick and died, and she was raised by a brother. The ore trade flowed, but the woman’s brother died, just like her father. So this woman has children, a dead brother, and a dead mother and father.

    Winter comes, her schooling is cut, an indication that schools may have been closed or shut down. She notes she quit in the spring and marries John Thomas, who as luck would have it, is a miner. Three babies later, but work starts going away. The line about work being cut down to a half-day shift with no reason is a greatly written piece of poetry.

    More mines were closed. Prices for ore rise as supply goes down. Inevitably, and along with what would later resemble free-trade dynamics, the labor goes outside the country. The miners in the South American towns work almost for nothing.

    The next verse has an amazing line about the room smelling heavy from drinking. The work gone, no one to support the family, the inevitable demise. The man dies, the narrator is left alone, the stores all start to close. The children grow up and need to leave. There’s nothing left there to hold them.

    Only A Pawn In Their Game

    This track refers to the murder of Medgar Evers, one of the key leaders of the NAACP in Mississippi, in June of 1963. It was first performed by Bob at a voter registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi. This was a peak song for Bob at the time, a very important event in the civil rights movement given its due treatment by a young folk singer on his way to making some of the greatest lyrics ever put down, in any genre.

    The song does a lot to recognize and analyze the origins of institutional racism in the South. It doesn’t just say this was a bad thing and we should all learn from it. Evers’s death was one in a string of heinous events towards black people in the South in the 60s. Heinous things purely just for asking for equal rights and freedoms.

    To my ears, there are similarities between the sound of this song and “With God on Our Side.” Of course, the verses end with the same line, each building on an examination of what the hell did this have to happen for. And Evers is just a small piece in the machine.

    In the second verse, the pawn in their game is the poor white man. The Southern politician tells the poor white man that he’s better than the black man, but as we all know, and Bob effortlessly explains to us, this is the game. They play us against each other for their own gain. It continues with the next verse, where the G-men are the ones getting paid, while the poor white man is their tool. He’s taught early that he’s privileged, the laws on his side. And that his skin will save him, so there’s no need to look outside himself, no need for empathy or creative thought.

    The next verse is where the worm turns in the mind of the poor white man. His enemy grows wider in his vision, while his poverty continues, wearing at his self-esteem and respect. The hate for the other leads him to gather with others who think the same, and to kill and lynch along with them.

    The final verse nails the concept true, with great skill. Medgar Evers’s death occurs, his funeral a moment of sadness, but the martyrdom is only surface level, because on the epitaph will read that he was only a pawn in their game.

    Boots of Spanish Leather

    Another beauty of a song inspired by the Bob and Suze relationship. This one feels achingly sad in its details, and Bob’s emotion in his voice. Bob describes it simply as a boy-leaves-girl story. It was written during Suze’s time in Italy, and when Bob had traveled there with folk singer Odetta. He had hoped to meet up with Suze on this trip, but that’s not what happened. This kind of wondering long-distance love vibe weaves through the track and Bob’s pain in his voice shows that.

    Each verse is like a letter to a loved one on a distant journey, so much delicate beauty packed into each neat package. There’s a subtle naivete about love and life here, Bob being young and in love. Generally there isn’t too much story, but each image brings to mind that lover seeing the end of their relationship in sight, and the journey through life becoming solitary, the distance between the two ever widening. The boots of Spanish leather, as the key metaphor, are the footwear for a long journey. The ever-rambling man must ever ramble on. If that’s the gift he wants given, the implication is he wants to be getting on down the road.

    When The Ship Comes In

    Written after an event shared between him and Joan Baez. They were supposedly checking into a hotel together, the clerk snubbed Bob but acknowledged Joan with much respect. The ensuing anger resulted in a quick flash of songwriting, and “When the Ship Comes In” was written that night. Bob’s biographer mentions the snub was due to Bob’s unkempt appearance at the time of check-in. Joan had to vouch for Bob.

    Maybe in this fit of anger, Bob’s selfishness set in. I read in the lyrics that the ship on the sail is Bob himself, or Bob’s ambition. The hour of this metaphorical ship’s coming is Bob’s rise to fame. It’s kinda like “I’ll show ’em.” That’s the feeling I get from the words, as well as the jaunty melody and uptempo strumming of the guitar chords, and the harmonica filled with a hope for better times.

    The track also features a lot of biblical imagery, with interpretations of conquering enemies and revolutionary time periods. Upheavals, new beginnings, the tide of change bringing in ships of hope for better.

    The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll

    The penultimate track is another semi-lengthy story song, this one about a hotel barmaid who was killed after being struck by a wealthy white man. The incident happened in early February 1963, in a Baltimore hotel. The barmaid was serving the man a drink, too slow for this rich person named William Zantzinger. He was the first white man accused of killing a black woman in Baltimore, and ended up only receiving six months in prison.

    Bob’s response to this severely sad event was a song that again spoke about the broader issue, not the event itself. He pens a terrific series of verses of poetry about the environment of serious racism in the country. He does this through poetry strong and evolving, the creativity of Bob getting stronger and on firmer ground. There are some intensely good and memorable lines, including an accusatory address to those who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears, telling them to take the rag away from their face, that now isn’t the time for their tears. Bob is taking an accusatory tone with the people who politicize events such as this. William Zantzinger’s six-month sentence is the final line of the track, really nailing down the injustice of the system here.

    Restless Farewell

    Opinions seem to divide on this final track on the album. For my ears and my experiences with Dylan, hearing this track at the end of this record, knowing the change in direction he will take after this record, it may be the most fitting final track on any of his records.

    As with a lot of the tracks on this record, the melody is borrowed from some old folk songs popularized long ago. This track seems to borrow the melody from the Irish folk song “The Parting Glass.” That song is usually a parting song, sung after a gathering of sorts.

    Why did Bob want to have the punctuation on his third record be a farewell song? Who was he singing farewell to? To me, Bob wrote a lot about himself, his own life, his own songs, his own mind. The restless farewell could allude to his new direction and a relinquishing of his folk traditions, since after this record he’s on the pathway to rejecting the scene that made him famous, rejecting the old style for the new style, and plugging in an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival. And the reason why his next record would be called Another Side of Bob Dylan.

    There are plenty of lines that refer to this attitude towards the scene and life in general. The final words really were an attack, a true goodbye and a promise to never care about anything anybody said about him. Pretty ballsy of Bob at the time, he was getting criticism from multiple sides at this point, not to mention a rocky personal life. The image of the straight arrow, the slick point, piercing through dust no matter how thick. Making his stand and remaining as he is, and bidding farewell without giving a damn.

    Closing

    The assassination of John Kennedy looms over this record. The event turned out as pivotal to the mind of Bob, the reaction his album got, and his own reaction to feeling helpless against the G-men, his institutions, and the media. That event changed how the title track meant to a lot of folks. It was a turning point, a cultural hinge point. A revolution, towards one direction or another.

    The overall feeling of the record, even if we just focus on that last final line, is black and white. The world as black and white, whether in skin tone, or us and them. The vibe of the record is also darkness and whiteness. There are happy glimpses of bright, very subtle, but overall the darkness is what gives images their contour and context. It may be his most politically charged album, but there’s a frustration about the situation that exists on the fringe of hopelessness and giving up. If you match “bid farewell and not give a damn” to the songs he’s written, arguing to everyone to get their head out of their ass, then we see such a frightening display, a serious pessimism. It’s the darkness to his previous album’s lightness. It’s no easy listen for a vinyl spin. It’s quite bleak. But that’s what makes it a worthy album.

  • James Brown — Live at the Apollo

    James Brown — Live at the Apollo

    Live at the Apollo Live Album | Released May 1963 | Recorded October 24, 1962 at the Apollo Theater, Harlem, NY | King Records | Produced by James Brown

    One of, if not the most significant live recordings ever made. James Brown’s energy as a musician in a live setting is still damn near unmatched. His energy and work ethic off stage, in the studio, as an advocate for his band and his own self-image as a musician and producer, are equally unmatched. There will never be another James Brown, as cliché as that sounds. There will never be an artist more worthy of the title “Hardest Working Man in Showbusiness.”

    James Brown’s road to recording this live album was a rough one. It’s up in the air where he was born exactly, either small-town Tennessee or Macon, Georgia. What is accurate is that he spent his childhood in Augusta, Georgia. Definitely a Horatio Alger story. Young James worked through poverty, family abandonment, prejudice, and delinquency. As a child he shined shoes and danced on the street corners of old Augusta, sometimes falling in with rough crowds and drawing the attention of local police.

    I spent some time in Augusta myself and saw the streets as they are today. Definitely not the town of James Brown’s childhood. What I did see was the display of affection and pride that Augusta holds for being the hometown of one of the most influential musicians who ever lived. The Augusta History Museum has a brilliant display of Brown’s memorabilia and clothes, and James Brown even has a small display of honor at the Augusta Regional Airport.

    Brown started singing with gospel groups in the late 1940s and began touring. Then in the ’50s he started getting noticed as an R&B singer, distinguished by a powerful voice and stage presence despite his stature. His two early hits, “Please, Please, Please” and “Try Me,” became million sellers, and Brown quickly started to rise to dominance in the R&B game and circuit. His work ethic grew with his career, and he became secure enough to play large clubs and demand nothing less than an agreed-upon sum of around $1,200 a night. The Apollo Theater became the quintessential venue for what would become a landmark live album, even though recording a live album of all-original material was essentially unheard of at the time. It just wasn’t done.

    Place this album in its context. Think 1962, the Kennedy administration. Fever pitch. Bottom of the ninth for some Americans. Some people genuinely thought the country and the world were on the brink of full nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis. This show was recorded right in the middle of that 13-day standoff, and folks must have been dancing and singing along to this show thinking it could have been their last night on earth.

    The Object

    My copy is a curious little reissue from 1980 on Solid Smoke Records. It carries the alternate title Live and Lowdown at the Apollo, which to me is pretty dope and really adds to the lore. The original cover is a slightly impressionistic piece depicting the front façade of the Apollo Theater in Harlem, names and lights and information filling the marquee. That cover is more about the impression and the vibe of the setting, which is important. The Solid Smoke reissue I own focuses more on James Brown himself, giving his name center stage alongside a stylized portrait of the artist in action, beautiful hair, mid-expression toward the audience, microphone in hand, delivering a vocal performance. The cover also makes the claim that 1962 saw the “greatest live show ever recorded.”

    I snagged this copy on Discogs at a pretty reasonable price. Originals on the King Records label probably go for much higher. The Solid Smoke release sounds really good. It has that energy captured in the recording and presents it well. The vocal is right where it needs to be, and most folks seem to agree the sound holds up against other releases. Douglas Wolk, in his book on the album, notes that this Solid Smoke release is something of an oddity, and also observes that the vocal appears on the left channel while the instrumentation sits on the right.

    The Music

    The Apollo Theater and the Chitlin’ Circuit

    What this record is, for some people, is a portal to another time. A key time in R&B and soul music, the early ’60s, and the cutthroat venues known as the Chitlin’ Circuit. For many, the Apollo Theater was the most demanding venue on that circuit. James Brown eventually established himself enough in the industry to become one of the original artists with a residency there. Think of the importance by recognizing a key predecessor: Little Richard and his band, the Upsetters. Brown and the Famous Flames eventually worked their way up to co-headline the Apollo right alongside Little Richard. Those must have been some great concerts. We can only imagine the energy in that room watching those two performers work their magic.

    At the Apollo, acts would typically play for a week or weeks straight, performing multiple shows a night. What this record contains in its grooves is only a short snippet of one of those nights. This is Star Time. The headline attraction after a full evening of music, with many other artists preceding. Also important to note: this likely wasn’t the first time the audience had seen James Brown on stage that same evening. An earlier portion of the program was given to the Famous Flames for an all-instrumental set, with Brown playing organ. The anticipation can be felt in Fats Gonder’s introduction and the crowd’s response. This audience was ready for a show.

    The Famous Flames, 1962 lineup:

    After multiple personnel upheavals, the lineup that performed at the Apollo had stabilized: Johnny Terry (original member, who would later leave to join the Drifters), Bobby Byrd (whose second return became permanent), Lloyd Bennett, and Bobby Stallworth.

    At the time this record came out, a live album featuring no new songs or previously unreleased material was an untouched concept in the industry. The recording was produced and overseen by Brown himself.

    Part of what strikes me about this recording is how absolutely in shape the band is. That is not an accident. James Brown was a known perfectionist who demanded a great deal from every musician who backed him. Minor imperfections in clothing, such as an unshined shoe, resulted in fines. A couple of notes off pace or out of tune during a performance resulted in a fine. Brown would signal these infractions by flashing his hands in rhythm with the beat. Four flashes meant twenty dollars docked from their pay. Behavior from a man who wanted the best out of his band, or who was simply unfair and unsympathetic to anything short of perfection in his eyes. Bobby Byrd described the system plainly: Brown didn’t want anyone to know what they were doing ahead of time, so he devised numbers and certain screams and spins as cues. The band as a live compositional tool, entirely subordinate to Brown’s will, requiring him to know every player’s strengths and weaknesses intimately. This endless pursuit of excellence was the product of an upbringing no one would be envious of.

    Introduction by Fats Gonder and Opening Fanfare

    It really doesn’t get better than this in terms of an intro. “Are you ready for Star Time?” immediately establishes what is about to follow. I’m sure that question and that term have long since entered the musical history zeitgeist. What makes this intro even better is the band’s full involvement, and the string of sobriquets Gonder unleashes.

    Fats Gonder really didn’t have to be this effective when he introduced James Brown, but one wonders how much pressure he must have felt. He was not only the emcee for the evening but also an organist in the band. Unclear why the role landed in his lap, but man, it’s a great introduction, and one that Danny Ray, the second hardest working man in showbusiness, aka the Cape Man, aka the number-two to James Brown’s number-one, would go on to emulate in all future shows.

    Gonder’s intro begins:

    “Nationally and internationally known as the hardest working man in showbusiness…”

    That title was originally attributed to Little Richard. Sometimes Little Richard would ghost shows, and James Brown would fill in. The title gradually started to precede James Brown’s name instead.

    Then Fats goes into a greatest hits list, and with each track mentioned, the crowd response grows progressively louder, until the final bang with “Night Train.” Between each song title there is a note, and with each note the progression and tension rise. The pot is boiling over.

    I’ll Go Crazy. Try Me. You’ve Got the Power. Think. If You Want Me. I Don’t Mind. Bewildered. Love Someone. Night Train.

    Mr. Dynamite! Mr. Please Please! The Star of the Show! Mr. James Brown and the Famous Flames.

    Important to note here that Gonder does a great job as master of ceremonies by not leaving out the full title of the band. Not neglecting the Famous Flames. They are stalwart musicians backing James Brown, and they deserve the credit, even if they didn’t always get it from the man himself.

    By the time Gonder gets to that ending, the crowd is like a primed engine ready to blow their frigging top. And then the band flies straight into the first song, bass line and drums and guitar and horns just exploding with energy. One of the more memorable introductions to any live show I can recall.

    What I imagine happening with the opening fanfare, and it’s easy to imagine if you’ve seen any footage of Brown’s work on stage, is his stage entrance. Ever the showman, his intros were some of the finest pieces of expert showmanship in the game. Fast dancing his way to the mic, or strutting and then dancing, sliding up to the microphone like he was born to do it. Many argue he most assuredly was born to play shows, and this recording proves it.

    I’ll Go Crazy

    Written by James Brown, this track was one of his first singles, from 1960, originally recorded in November 1959.

    Brown’s entrance gets the crowd to fever pitch all over again. The background vocals from the Flames are great here, and the band is right in touch with Brown, which was sometimes easier said than done. As the band worked with Brown, they had to learn how to follow his movements and commands, punctuating his shouts and hollers with horn bursts and drum hits.

    Here you can feel how good the band is and what a counterpoint that creates to James Brown. James delivers this vocal with confidence and swagger, claiming he will definitely go crazy if this person leaves him. The Flames act as the mediator between James and the object of his affection, imploring him to calm down and her not to leave him.

    Try Me

    Once Brown announces the first words, the crowd screams in recognition and excitement, and Brown settles into this ballad. One of his earliest singles, preceded only by “Please, Please, Please,” it was a number one hit in 1958. You can feel that popularity in the crowd’s response when Brown kicks it off. Short and sweet here on the live record, but very effective due to Brown’s heartstrung vocal.

    Think

    This track was originally written and recorded in 1957 by a group called the 5 Royales, on James Brown’s same record label, King Records. The James Brown version, especially the one here on the live album, is incredibly sped up, to the point of near ridiculousness. Taking a song and accelerating it into something urgent became part of the MO for Brown and the band.

    The live version is an uptempo clapper, with a strumming guitar, an instrumental jump-and-jive energy that really moves at pace. Those claps, and the way James Brown is so frenetic in his delivery, you can almost picture him cutting some seriously professional dance moves while he sings it. The track comes and goes quickly. For a moment you’re in it and then you’re out of it.

    I Don’t Mind

    Originally recorded in September 1960. The studio version feels a tad different from the Live at the Apollo version.

    The live version is amazing, even if it feels slightly off-kilter in some ways. It sounds like the band is negotiating a strange pace with Brown. Listen closely with headphones and the reward is you start to hear the crowd really becoming involved. A woman in the audience screams after Brown’s “I’m gonna miss you.” She says, I sure do, baby.

    The vowel vocalizing from the background singers is my favorite part of this song on the live record. There’s something about the register they’re in that’s transporting in a way that’s so emotionally affecting. This is an off-kilter track, but to me it’s a high point of the recording.

    Lost Someone

    After the final instrumental interlude, we’re now into something completely different from what came before. After the opening run of hits, what’s coming is a stretch of improvisational, pure musical emotion. A live performance hitting its extreme peak and not relenting until the final note.

    Brown starts with another introduction, something like what Fats Gonder did, but this one is James. He’s pleading with the audience to feel what he feels. And when he finally gets into the first line, “I lost someone,” we are fully engaged in this long, drawn-out song full of vocal power.

    The responding muted horns after each line are a welcome, easy punctuation to the vocal prowess Brown displays. He’s really going for it, and each crash and horn response is the cue for the crowd to respond. And respond they do. By now they are screaming in ecstasy.

    The repeated “I’m so weak.” He gives each one the same justice. Douglas Wolk posits that even here, since Brown knew he was being recorded and wanted to avoid distortion from overloading the microphone, he was holding back. It’s really difficult to comprehend that. With “I’m so weak,” he sounds distant from the mic, perhaps offering more to the live audience in the room than to future audiences listening in the living room. But his method here is an amazing piece of solo artistry. It demands to be heard.

    On the 1980 Solid Smoke reissue, this track is split in half between the last song on side one and the first song on side two. An interesting quirk for folks back then. To my ears it’s a tad jarring. Full recordings of the track are out there and worth seeking out to really hear the power and feel the whole arc of the performance. It’s remarkable through and through. A two-minute pop song stretched to eleven minutes. That was just insane for 1962.

    Medley: Please, Please, Please / You’ve Got the Power / I Found Someone / Why Do You Do Me / I Want You So Bad / I Love You Yes I Do / Why Does Everything Happen to Me / Bewildered / Please, Please, Please

    Within this medley we hear a touch of “Please, Please, Please,” the song that put Brown on the map and was his first hit. The crowd’s response when that kicks in is just staggering. They have been waiting for this moment for hours, or for some, probably their entire lives.

    What a curious song “Please, Please, Please” is. For Brown it’s a signature, one of his likenesses. And it’s a one-word chorus. That’s James Brown for you. The man only needed one word to make his effect.

    That effect is felt for about the first thirty seconds of the medley. A brief notice of the full track, but enough to set the proverbial souls of some audience members on fire. They are literally going insane.

    “You’ve Got the Power” is given only a brief snippet, barely the first line, before it moves on. “I Found Someone” gets thirty-nine seconds and functions as a natural answer song to “Lost Someone.” “Why Do You Do Me” is blink-and-you’ll-miss-it, only four lines, Brown in a lower register. “I Want You So Bad” gets another four lines of ballad. “I Love You Yes I Do”: Brown sings the first line in crooner mode and the band responds by going into the track. Astonishingly, it’s been noted that this medley was not prearranged. The band had to follow Brown’s cues, whether vocal or gestural, to know when to be ready. I’ll go ahead and say it: that’s insane, and I don’t know how they did it. They deserve recognition as some of the hardest working musicians in showbusiness. There’s also some great organ work in this stretch.

    “Why Does Everything Happen to Me” gets another short snippet, the crowd rolling along with what’s happening. “Bewildered” gets only twenty-five seconds, four lines, but that first Bewildered shoots the crowd off like a rocket. And then the finale of the medley turns back into “Please, Please, Please.” We’re back where we started, and the crowd and the band are back with us. We’ve just traveled through Brown’s late ’50s and early ’60s career in under five minutes.

    Was this where the cape routine happened? The cape routine, where Brown falls to his knees, pleading for mercy or forgiveness or submission, whatever you wish, and one of the band members, later it would be Danny Ray, comes over and drapes a cape over the singer as an offering of respite from the pain and sorrow of the performance. By the time of this recording, the cape routine would have been well known enough that Brown didn’t need to draw it out. The two pieces of “Please, Please, Please” would have been enough to trigger the image in everyone’s minds. On the recording the same effect is there. We must imagine some form of the cape routine likely occurred.

    Night Train

    A jazz standard from 1951, originally recorded by Jimmy Forrest. James Brown first recorded his version in 1961, replacing the original lyrics with a list of cities on his East Coast touring circuit. On this live record, that tradition maintains, and it makes for a deeply moving finale to everything that came before. It gets the folks moving, that’s for sure. And it’s got that train motif, which by tradition is a passed-down metaphor for the life of the musician. The constant movement, the place-to-place lifestyle that so many artists come to love and live with. The long lonely nights. The city-to-city movement. The loneliness. The Night Train coming along.

    James revisits the narrative: I’ve lost someone, but I know where to find them. All aboard?

    The crowd answers, and someone in the audience knows what’s coming, responding with the song title before Brown even announces it. It’s the Night Train.

    He starts southern and moves north: Miami, Atlanta, Raleigh, Washington D.C. Wait, we forgot Richmond, Virginia. Back north: Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, Boston. And finally, New Orleans gets the most honorable mention. The home of the blues.

    If you think to today, the modern hip-hop or rap artist mentioning all the towns where they have people, you start to wonder if this litany from James Brown was the first example of that method.

    The music is pretty simple. A recurring guitar riff and a blast of horns driving alongside it. Motivating and relentless to the end. The Night Train carrying him home. New York City, the end. He goes a couple of rounds, like an ouroboros. The tour circle keeps going round and round. The conductor is James Brown. He wants us all to come along with him, and whether we like it or not, we’re going to come along. Captivating.

    Night. The way James Brown closes this show. A fitting ending to an amazing piece of recorded music.

    Closing

    Live at the Apollo marks a specific moment in the life and career of James Brown. It also marks a specific moment in history. Harlem, New York. The Apollo Theater. The Chitlin’ Circuit. The United States, in the midst of an unprecedented paranoia: the Cold War, Soviet aggression, civil rights, nuclear war. Amidst all of it, James Brown and his band are putting out Black energy to a Black audience that probably needed it most. If that’s not a formula for a legendary show and a legendary recording, I don’t know what else you need.

    The legacy this album holds is impeccable. I really enjoy hearing about how DJs would play the entire first side uninterrupted, giving it the honor and space to breathe and letting the effect land. It’s one of the most memorable live records ever made. It was James Brown’s idea, and it became a massive commercial success. After this record’s release, it went to number two on the Billboard 200 pop album chart. The R&B albums chart didn’t yet exist. The success of this record led Billboard to create the R&B Albums chart in 1965.

    The record made James Brown a megastar. We must all bear witness to this creation. Hear it and visualize it for yourself. Hop on the Night Train. Go visit the Augusta History Museum and read up on the star. Be educated. James implores us all, children.

  • Ennio Morricone — A Fistful Of Dollars

    Ennio Morricone — A Fistful Of Dollars

    Film Score | Film Released 12 September 1964 (Italy) | Soundtrack Originally Released in 1966 in Italy

    Sergio Leone. Ennio Morricone. Two masters of their form who converged to create great films and great soundtracks. I remember watching The Good, the Bad and the Ugly when I was young, probably middle school or high school, and feeling more moved by the soundtrack than the film itself. I immediately had to see and hear more. Soon after, I realized that film occurs at the end of a trilogy, with the beginning being A Fistful of Dollars. Released in 1964 in Italy, this movie revolutionized the film industry, the western genre in America, and most importantly, the film soundtrack and score.

    “I tried to vary as much as I could to break the rules of the craft and avoid boredom.” — Morricone

    Hollywood dominated the western scene in the 60s. Italian westerns had been made before, but until Sergio Leone made A Fistful of Dollars, there had not been a western like it. It was rugged, expertly shot with cutting-edge techniques, and had a main character unrivaled up to that point in Clint Eastwood. The film is generally a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, but with a gunslinger instead of a samurai. The plot is simple: a lone gunman enters a town, gets on the bad side of two rival gangs, plays the gangs against each other, saves a family, and leaves town with the loot.

    What was different about this western was mainly the main character’s rugged coolness, and the fact that he is pretty much as bad as the villains. The classic, quintessential antihero. Clint Eastwood’s portrayal of the “Man with No Name” in these three films shot him to the top of international celebrity and stardom. There’s reason to believe, then, that on this soundtrack release, it’s his name that’s on top. Not Ennio Morricone’s. Also different about the film is the violence. Leone made the film in Italy, allowing him to play by his own rules and do whatever he wanted. The Hollywood rules were out the window, and now we have a protagonist as equally reckless and greedy as the villains.

    What we see with this movie is a soundtrack that dramatizes the action and the hero to the fullest extent. I fully believe that if these films were not scored by Morricone, we don’t see the popularity of the trilogy, and we don’t see the celebrity of Eastwood rise. Every cool moment from the main character in the film is punctuated by, or comes along with, a piece of the soundtrack.

    Morricone had, up until that point, made movie scores, even westerns, that followed the rulebook. They weren’t experimental, but they were still seen as good, well-written music. At the time, Morricone had started experimenting with different sounds as a composer, including different approaches to the human voice, and musique concrète, like using a typewriter as a rhythm instrument. What appears on this soundtrack didn’t sound like anything before it. There was a Fender guitar, unheard of in westerns that had been pleasant, orchestral pieces. The guitar was synonymous with rock and blues, and must have sounded absurd compared to what folks were used to. It must have sounded violent. To modern ears, the guitar Morricone uses is fantastic, played with an expert ear. It’s western through and through. Violent and folk.

    There is also the motif of the whistle, which, how can you beat that as a western motif? It’s always struck me as making sense in these films, and it’s hard to realize how radical it must have sounded to an American audience in the early 60s, used to the Hollywood pomp and graciousness. Along with the whistling, the voices you hear are sometimes a shout, or a chant. Set to mimic the film’s environment, this soundtrack was Morricone making the music that would fit the film best. And the film is violent, so the music has a violent edge too.

    Sergio Leone said that Morricone was his best screenwriter. The meaning here is the relationship between the two around what’s going to appear on the screen. The order of events usually goes: screenwriting, filming, soundtrack composition. With Leone and Morricone it was different, and revolutionary. The writing of the screenplay usually happened alongside the writing of the soundtrack and score. Morricone helped Leone realize what images he had in his head. There were even times when Leone would play the music during the shoot. A true melding of image and sound.

    Fistful of Dollars was Ennio and Sergio’s first time working together, but oddly enough, in a great piece of kismet or serendipity, when they first met they slowly realized they were schoolmates long ago. Ennio had proof: a picture of the two together during elementary school. The two had similar backgrounds, as became known between them. Morricone’s father was a trumpeter, and Leone’s father was also involved in show business. They both converged at a point in their lives where things were growing stale; they needed more out of their creative fields. Morricone’s path to their meeting was pretty straightforward. Leone had a different path but ended up finding his way as a director.

    Morricone had a background in composition, but by way of being a trumpeter first. He grew up learning the trumpet from his father, but entered the Santa Cecilia Conservatory in Rome in order to learn the trumpet as well as harmony and composition. This was his training course in music composition. He did well and was starting to get noticed. Life went on. He married and had a son. He kept composing, but started working for radio, television, and theater, and eventually started working on films. This was generally the path that brought Morricone to work with Leone.

    The Object

    My copy is an original release of the soundtrack from 1967. It is an RCA Victor release, in stereo. It’s in great shape and came from Discogs at a generally solid price, no less. You can’t go wrong picking up cheap used movie soundtracks on vinyl. They are, still to me, some of the most enjoyable music on the format. Depending on movie and composer, of course.

    My copy is true 60s movie soundtrack vinyl. Marketed using the name of the film and the name of the lead, what we don’t see prominent on the cover is Ennio Morricone’s name. We also don’t see Sergio Leone’s name up there either. We see Clint Eastwood, in name and image, prominent as all get out. He’s there, centered in the stylized frame, his name in bold letters atop the bold stylized letters of the film’s title. I really like this artwork, even if it doesn’t give the composer center stage. For the 60s releases of Ennio Morricone soundtracks, this one may have the best artwork. The front has a mash-up of characters and scenes from the film in a dashing burnt orange. Eastwood’s visage and character pop on top of all of it, showing the potential buyer the true character of the music within. The music was meant to offer style and substance to the main character’s actions, so if that was the main goal of the artwork, they accomplished it.

    The rear of the cover does more to describe the film itself than the music on the vinyl disc. There are small black-and-white vignettes showing all the characters of the film, with brief captions of their intentions and goals in the plot.

    The Music

    Essentially, what both wanted from the score was a turn away from the over-orchestrated folk melodies that were occurring in the Hollywood westerns of the 60s. They wanted the audience to experience a western as if they were in the environment, dealing with the dust, the wind, the clash of gunmetal, and the walk of boots in the gravel. The score imitates naturalist feelings on occasion, and gives you the experience of being on the frontier. Every sound has a purpose, and the motivation was for music and sound to interact essentially with the picture.

    Budget constraints had an effect on the score. There is no full woodwind or brass section, only flutes, cor anglais, and trumpet. Trombones only appear here and there. Morricone had to recycle from earlier work, and it can be questioned just how much effort he put into this project, not expecting it to have the impact that it did. There was also no way to pre-record music for the set, something they would later try to make happen. That did not become fully realized until The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

    The music for this film defied any convention up to that point. It must have felt at the time so distinctive and unlike the norm that it was completely immersive. The music feels contemporary to the era and the landscape of the film, with the exception of the sweet Fender guitar. The music intensifies the drama of the film.

    For the film’s music, Morricone won the Nastro d’Argento for Best Score, and there was a popular single featuring the film’s music. Morricone was a success from then on, and a celebrity figure in Italy. Even with the success, the director and composer were not happy with their work. Morricone later said the score was his worst. The two would go on to work together after this film, and they truly achieved the greatness they had ambitions for with The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

    Titoli

    Another piece that was arranged before Leone’s involvement and their working together: this was an arrangement of Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty,” which Morricone had produced in 1962 for the RCA Victor label and for the television show Piccolo Concerto. The Morricone-Tevis version departed substantially from Guthrie’s original. It featured a thin texture moving through minor-key triadic harmonies, modal melodies, and an unlikely ensemble of nylon-string guitar, men’s chorus, recorder, strings, and percussion comprising drums, whip, bell, and anvil. American expatriate Peter Tevis sang the vocal line. Morricone later described this arrangement as his attempt to evoke the solitude and aural environment of the American West. Scholars have argued this was effectively the musical progenitor of Morricone’s entire western vernacular.

    Ennio Morricone & Peter Tevis – Pastures of Plenty

    Leone heard this arrangement and was interested in the music, but did not enjoy the vocal from Tevis. It was western-ballad style, not what Leone wanted. Morricone had kept a master recording without the vocal, and Leone requested this version. Alessandro Alessandroni added a whistled melody to the track, and an electric guitar was added on top. The texture and instrumentation were pretty much the same. Title music born.

    “My thought was to put listeners in touch with the faraway pastures described by Guthrie; this is why I inserted the timbres of the whip and the [clay] whistle. The bells were intended to suggest the countryman who longs for the life in the city, away from his daily routine.”

    The whistle is a definite highlight of this entire score, along with the churning voices and strings. Above it all, we have a guitar sharing the melody. The picking style is utility, only notes, but it captures the essence so well. Throughout the soundtrack, and most explicitly shown here, is the use of the human voice and vocal method as an instrument, hence the use of the whistle. Morricone wanted music that evoked an escape to the prairie or desert, and solitude. The whistle is one person making one sound with their mouth. It can be done anywhere, and is deeply connected with western or remote locations. A lone cowboy working his land, whistling a tune to make the day go by faster. It’s an expression of being alone in a desolate place. Perfectly matching the main character’s vibe.

    The use of sound effects is also used to extreme pleasure for the viewing audience. The piccolo or flute flourish, which sounds like a bird call to me, is used throughout the film as a sort of punctuation when Clint Eastwood does something really cool and badass, or is about to. The whip is also used here. You see, Morricone had been exposed to the works of John Cage, who introduced into composition the idea that all sound is music. This concept and its execution seeped into Morricone’s inspiration for this score.

    Almost Dead

    A piano chugging a dirgeful melody. A harmonica. Then a surge. This track really notes the tension at the introduction, and then opens up into a reuse of the motif of the original title, with strings and a slower tempo. It takes the original title and makes it more emotional, effectively bringing the hurried tension into something more sympathetic and moody.

    Square Dance

    A full composition that evokes the time period well. Sounds like a Civil War jaunt through a town. The title pretty much tells you the feeling of this song.

    The Chase

    The most chugging, intense song from the score. High tempo and boisterous, with horns used to their biggest emotional effect here. Trumpets and violins screeching. A fanfare, basically. Then the track opens with the choir singing a progressive melody, and you’re out in the open, moving along with the action. Then the single horn and a slow motif that will appear in full force later on the album: the deguello motif. Very emotionally affecting.

    The Result

    Another very rousing track. Uses violins, a snare drum, and a piano as a band, pretty much. Then the flute motif returns, but more to confuse and disorient the viewer with sound along with the action. Not a flowery melody here. A disorienting mood to make the viewer follow the action and await what comes next.

    Without Pity

    A two-minute piece. The introduction is right out of Bernard Herrmann’s style. Just strings, a horror scene. What follows is a rousing, action-packed trumpet fanfare similar to what happens in “The Chase,” but cut shorter for the next track to begin.

    A Fistful of Dollars

    For “A Fistful of Dollars,” there was a mixture of inspirations between the two. Leone wanted something similar to what was being heard in the American westerns of the time, such as Rio Bravo. A piece by Dimitri Tiomkin, “Deguello,” appears in Rio Bravo, and Leone wanted Morricone to write something similar. Deguello is the slit throat or cut throat song. It’s a dance of death song. The Mexicans played it for the boys that were holed up in the Alamo before the big fight. Nothing more dramatic than that, I would say, and a great piece of historical inspiration for what would become one of the key pieces for the first film of the Dollars Trilogy.

    Rio Bravo –   Deguello

    Morricone instructed the trumpeter Michele Lacerenza to play the theme with a little Mexican flavor. The flourishes are extremely evocative. It’s a truly effective theme that became a lasting touchstone for Italian-western composition. When the trumpet hits its high point in the solo, man, that is some transforming music. It’s as good as anything you’ll hear in a film.

    Side Two

    A Fistful of Dollars Suite

    The entire second side of this release is essentially the entire soundtrack from the first side. It covers all the notes of the first compositions, but allows them all to meld together into a mélange of composition.

    Closing

    The Dollars Trilogy contains some of my favorite western films. The cause of these films’ fame is owed to Morricone’s work on the soundtrack. What we see with A Fistful of Dollars is a composer trying something new, and turning away from convention. What follows in the second film is more of the same, a development on the first film. The third film in the trilogy features a soundtrack that most argue to be the best of all time. What Morricone went on to do with Leone, their works together, are stationary pieces, artistic masterworks in the medium of film and film score. Morricone understood his assignment. These films are good because they have good scores. The score stands alone. Always a mark of a good score, in my opinion. Morricone’s scores also pretty much invented the popular film soundtrack, and drew folks to record stores to buy soundtracks pressed onto the vinyl medium. That just about makes anything Ennio Morricone did essential vinyl listening in my book.

    Thanks for reading. RTR.