Two Musicians

This week’s Sunday NY Times featured articles on two favorite artists of mine, both ground-breakers in the 60’s folk scene who produced a small but brilliant output and then dropped out of view. Both have since died. They were Fred Neil, a singer possessed of a rich, deep baritone voice who also wrote, and wrote well (the article is primarily about “Everybody’s Talkin’”, used as the theme for “Midnight Cowboy”, which is undoubtedly his best known song, particularly the Harry Nilsson rendition). The other, Sandy Bull, was one of the first popular artists to go deep into fusion in long, raga-like sets. He was a string instrument master, particularly on guitar (although his banjo version of Orff’s “Carmina Burana” is brilliant); his albums are purely instrumental. The paper gets some things slightly wrong, as always, but it’s nice to see guys like Fred Neil and Sandy Bull get some press. Best sets to pick up are “The Many Faces of Fred Neil”, a two-disc collection of his Capitol output (which also includes his own ragaesque piece), and “Re-Inventions”, a good “best” set of Sandy Bull’s work.

Both, as you might guess, have tracks in the DJStan's Selections playlist (did I mention that my personal rules limit artists to one track per album at any given time?). Fred Neil is represented by a song that is both soothing and deeply yearning at the same time, a combination of feelings he conveys so well; the song is a variation on the traditional, "Fare Thee Well" and is called "Faretheewell (Fred's Song)". The Sandy Bull cut is also a variation on a traditional melody; Sandy takes a gospel tune (which is probably more familiar as Ray Charles' "I Got A Woman"), sets it to a heavily reverbed electric guitar playing mostly in the lower registers, and rings changes on it for about 10 minutes; sometimes I wish this piece were longer.

You know, on reflection, the Fred Neil cut is also heavy on reverb, as are a lot of Fred's (and Sandy's) arrangements in general; I wonder if they listened to each other. Wouldn't surprise me at all.

Single Again

No, nothing to do with me and the ever-lovely Mrs. DJStan. Actually, the heading should be "Singles Again".

When I was a kid in Junior High School, the age at which I began buying my own music (as opposed to the Little Golden records and the Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra on a set of 78's that my parents had purchased), it was a singles world. There were still 78's, and my very first purchase was Buddy Knox's "Party Doll" on a 78 (10 cents at John's Bargain Store), but the medium of choice among my set was the 45. It had a targeted-to-hit song on one side (the "A" side) and something else on the other (the "B" side). Occasionally, the "B" side outran the "A" side, and sometimes - rarely - there were hits on both sides (Richie Valens' classic 45 release had "Donna" and "La Bamba" on one record). Oh, the LP had come out, but that was primarily for the grown-ups – classical, broadway shows, jazz, etc. For teens, it was all about the stack of singles. There were special little boxes just sized for 45 collections, and of course, the ubiquitous jukebox, with its push-button menu of singles. Bands didn't save up their tracks until they had an album – they went from single to single.

Eventually, as we all know, the album came to dominate the music world. This had both good points (great for long tracks or a series of related tracks) and bad (you have to buy the entire album, even if you don't really care for half the tracks). And now, plugged into our IPods™, it's back to the world o' singles. I've bought a few things on ITunes™ so far, and except for one album (Willie Nelson & Leon Russell – "One For The Road" – which replaces a set I only have on vinyl and which ITunes sold in a 3 pack (with two other Willie sets that I only had on vinyl) for $9.99; that's 55 songs at about 18 cents per, a fair deal. Everything else has been a single – generally something I heard on the radio and liked, or a track from my mental backlist. Buying them was a very 50's experience (except for the lack of a "B" side). Here's the list so far:

Devil's Lullaby - Slaid Cleaves
Four Chambered Heart - Tom Russell
Wheel Inside The Wheel - Mary Gautier
Oh Mary - Neil Diamond (new Neil Diamond!)
Girl In the War - Josh Ritter
Tainted Love - Soft Cell (I actually have this on 45)
God's Gonna Cut You Down - Johnny Cash
Papa Dukie And The Mud People - The Subdudes
Poison Apples(Hallelujah) - Joan Osborne

And that's just part of it. The other part is how I'm now listening to music at work (and at home – I got one of those $6 "Y" connectors at Radio Shack that allows me to easily hook up my IPod to any receiver, etc. that has an "AUX" input): I'm listening to tracks, as a rule, and not albums. This is a radical change; my former habit had been to bring two CD's to work each day, and go through them once or twice – since I spend a good part of my day working at a PC, this was not difficult. But now, with about 8,000 songs loaded so far (500+ albums), I find myself much more interested in assembling playlists with random selections from various genres, comments, artists, etc. I've set up random selections for favorite artists, like Dylan and Tom Waits; created a Playlist for jazz tracks with a duration of under 8 minutes; another of 100 totally random songs – but with song length limited to 10 minutes; a "Cabaret" playlist of nightclub/lounge/vaudeville acts, and more. Sometimes I just put the whole caboodle on Shuffle, and let the hits fall where they may.

Most to the point of this blog, I've set up a "DJStan's Selections" playlist, to which I add tracks that I particularly like for those days when I don't want to hear anything but. When I get tired of one, I just take it off. I keep it limited to 100 tracks, just to enforce discipline and encourage change. Anyway, I've decided that for the next few blog entries (or more, if I like how it's going), I'm going to talk about a single track from that particular list. I'll post about why I picked it, what I like about it (which is not always the same thing), and anything else that comes to mind. I'm hoping that my loyal reader(s) will find the selection interesting and the postings informative. As always, I welcome comments and music recommendations, related or not.

My Front Pages

In case you hadn’t heard, Bob Dylan is not only still alive, but has released yet another set of songs; this one is called “Modern Times”. Long story short, this is a fine collection. Masterpiece? Who knows; these questions are sometimes fun to discuss and sometimes annoying; at this moment, I don’t care. Fact is, IMO he’s had more than a few great albums in his long career (I’ve got 20 Dylan sets on my Ipod) and this might turn out to be one of them. Test of time and all that; I will say that his songs have become so personal as to be uncoverable, but that’s been true on and off for a long time (and doesn’t stop people from trying). It’s hard to imagine a Peter, Paul & Mary reincarnation covering something like “Spirit on the Water” (I do credit Joan Osborne for doing a nice job on “To Make You Feel My Love”).

However you want to categorize this CD, it’s solid work – well-crafted and intriguing songs and a crackerjack band (I love the word “crackerjack”) that can play anything from Chuck Berry’s country blues rock to cowboy waltz to John Lee Hooker/Slim Harpo boogie to early thirties crooner ballads with a Hawaiian tinge – all of which come out of Dylan’s encyclopedic knowledge of American popular music, particularly what Greil Marcus famously called “the old weird America”. I just loaded a Louvin Brothers disc onto the Ipod™ (“Tragic Songs of Life”), so I know just what he meant (BTW, anything by Ira & Charlie Louvin, a key influence on folks like the Everly Brothers and Emmylou Harris, is highly recommended).

OK – it’s a short while later, and I’ve been loading traditional country and folk, including an anthology of the New Lost City Ramblers (“Out Standing In Their Field”), and I thought “I bet they’ve got some weird stuff on there”. So I played “The Little Girl and the Dreadful Snake”. Bingo. You want to know what Marcus was talking about? Listen to a copy of this song (also performed by the Stanley Brothers and probably others as well). But I digress.

There’s an excellent article in this week’s New Yorker (“Yes, the New Yorker!”) in which Lewis Menand reviews a recent book containing the collected interviews of Bob Dylan. The book sounds reasonably interesting (although if you want to read anything about Dylan, read his “Chronicles” – which is genuinely fascinating and fun – and David Hajdu’s tale of Dylan, Richard Farina, and the Fabulous Baez Sisters, “Positively Fourth Street”), but what makes the review worth reading is late in the article when Menand talks about Dylan’s singing. It’s worth reading because he and I are in total agreement (ha): Dylan is a great singer; yep – you heard that right - not just decent or good or very good – great.

His command of timbre is awesome, as you can hear by playing an Ipod™ shuffled random Dylan playlist; some of it is age, but plenty of it is there almost from the get-go. More important, and here Menand and I are as one, is Dylan’s phrasing. He can swing, he can rock, he can do talking blues, country blues, delta blues, torch, crooning (and that didn’t start with “Love and Theft”; just listen to “Nashville Skyline”) and more. Each of these styles has a different way of phrasing and Dylan does them all.

It’s really what makes his songs work, after all. No one, no matter how mellifluous their timbre, can make a Dylan song work better than Bob. When you hear his lines in your head – and there are so many good ones – you hear them in his tonality and especially with his phrasing. I was listening to “Visions of Johanna” from “Blonde on Blonde” today, one of my all-time favorite songs of his, and when he came to the line “Mona Lisa must’a had the highway blues, you can tell by the way she smiles”, I was blown away by how powerfully he phrases that line – where he puts his stresses, which words he chops and which ones he chooses to stretch out, how he plays the words like a jazz soloist over and around the melody while the band comps. It’s not easy listening, but ultimately it’s the reason his rhetoric – even at its most surreal – sticks in your mind. He’s singer as orator, as persuader, as politician of the personal. When it comes to his songs, Dylan is one slick salesman. And I think I’m still digressing.

Bottom line, “Modern Times” is Dylan worth savoring. He sings about spirit and flesh, the creator and the created; sometimes he's Adam, sometimes he's Jesus, sometimes he's Yahweh, and sometimes he's Cain - but he's always our Bobby, just walkin' down the line.

And when you listen to it, and I hope you will, don’t just get carried away by the Bob the barker; give props to the solid band and pay more attention to the singer’s phrasing, less to the specific meaning of a given string of words. Remember - no one ever asked Louis Armstrong what the intro to “West End Blues” really meant. It’s what was in his head, heart, and soul - laid out for all who can to dig it. Dylan’s songs should be dug in the same way.

p.s. For next week’s assignment, I’d like 500 words on the meaning of “dig” in its hipster aspect. Extra credit for any appropriate quotes from Lord Buckley.