Wednesday, September 28, 2005
I enjoyed the Dylan fest on PBS. the sudden flashes get me: a brief shot of Muddy Waters working his mojo at high giddy up, a wee bit of Mike Bloomfield, that sort of thing. Allen Ginsberg acknowledging a poet more famous than he. I'd never seen/heard the infamous Newport show. not only was Bloomfield playing hard and loud, he was giving good guitar face. total folkie shock. the transformation of Dylan from soso folkie to champion songwriter is not news, but it was interesting to watch. all these pointless labels that people depended on. which is why I get squeaky over the usage of the phrase School of Quietude, with its gravity of laziness. best rock song of all time is a silly claim, albeit right in keeping with a pop slum like Rolling Stone. I would humbly offer the song "Omaha" by Moby Grape as the best, if someone really needs that kind of info. I'll grant "Like A Rolling Stone" is anthemic, tho that AAAA rhyme scheme hinders my ability to anoint it. and mid-tempo rocker doesn't quite seem appropriate for the award. whereas "Omaha" proceeds, in 2 1/2 minutes, to skip along with brisk delivery. but really, except to sell mags, who needs the notion? I almost got the point of Dylan's harmonica playing while watching the film. he uses the instrument not so much musically as gesturally. I've seen the Irish musician Andy Irvine play the melody on guitar and harmonica simultaneously, so it's possible to make much more of the guitar/harmonica arrangement than Dylan does. his harmonica playing is more like an idea, like a performance art piece. really, I got to thinking that. I liked the bit with the intense weirdo who asked Dylan about the t-shirt Dylan wears on the cover of Highway 61 Revisited. what kind of answer did this guy need? figure it out for yourself. that aspect of Dylan's audience is spooky. that the art is taken into realms of arcana, that there's some prophetic expectation from the audience. we worry that he let "Blowin' In The Wind" attach itself to whatever grim exploitation, but I see it as a reasonable recognition that the song is "out there", no longer Dylan's. tho yeah he gets the royalties. I haven't read Al Kooper's books (I think it's plural), reminiscences of his years in the music biz, but I got to put them on my list: he's got good perspective. Dave van Ronk and Maria Muldaur showed good perspective too.
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3 comments:
I like your topsy-turvy roll with this. Spanish class on Monday night, and a lovely reading-new book party by Bill Berkson kept me out of this first Dylan run until the last hour - one that I found a genuine roll of pathos and no-holds barred on the music. Joan Baez the now sanguine naive counter-point to a guy who was fearlessly out there on the edge, not so much as an act of will, but, as that one recording engineer said, moving without choice, as if, indeed, God had given him a major kick in the butt to be the messenger. Anyway it rattled all my 23 year old remembering bones - the then and still mix of gratitude, desire to emulate, jealousy etc. of any aspiring artist of the early sixties.
Which is to say at the moment,I like the photograph of - are they candle holders up top - the array of colors - the quiet, serene juxtapostion they offer to both the contemporary and the turbulent recollections of Dylan and that time that in certain ways seems so much, or potentially so much back with us - unless that's vain dreaming (even if Bush is toast, there must be - and what is it - someway out of this.
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog
Stephen, I enjoyed this kindly riff. and you're right to mention Joan Baez, who was one of the foci in the film. she wasn't whiny but she was one left behind. she belived heralf a fellow traveller, only to discover that Dylan was travelling solo. her brother-in-law, Richard Farina, wrote a scathing song about Dylan, "Morgan the Pirate". Dylan in one context, but he's subsumed by an entirely different context.
yes, she belived heralf.
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