REGINA McCRARY: HAPPY 55th

Gospel singer Regina McCrary, an old friend of Bob Dylan's, is 55 today (May 22, 2013). Here's her entry in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (but updated for this blogpost):

McCrary, Regina [1958 - ]

Regina McCrary (sometimes billed under her previous married names Regina Havis and Regina McCrary Brown) was born May 22, 1958 in Nashville, the daughter of the late Rev. Samuel Brown, who as Sam McCrary was lead singer of the Fairfield Four gospel group in the 1940s. The group had been formed in the 1920s; re-formed in the 1980s, the Fairfield Four performs ‘Lonesome Valley’ on the soundtrack of the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?. The younger sister of gospel-singer Ann McCrary, she was encouraged to audition for a place in Dylan’s back-up singers’ group by her friend Carolyn Dennis, whom she had known since they were small children.

            She auditioned when the 1978 World Tour hit Nashville on December 2, almost at the end of its long run  -  and she was brought in for the sessions for Slow Train Coming in spring 1979, beginning with vocal overdubs in the Muscle Shoals studio in Sheffield, Alabama that May 5 and continuing on May 7, 10 and 11. Next, the very beautiful Ms McCrary Brown formed part of the back-up singing outfit on Dylan’s ‘Saturday Night Live’ appearance on October 20, 1979 and then embarked on the first Dylan gospel tour, starting with the long run of sold-out dates at the Fox Warfield in San Francisco that November 1 and finishing on December 9 in Tucson, Arizona. She had no idea how ‘big’ Bob Dylan was when she signed up with him: it was only when confronted with these audiences that she registered how important a figure he was to so many people.

            Her friend Carolyn Dennis was not in the group on this tour: Regina’s vocal colleagues were Mona Lisa Young and Helena Springs. The group sang some opening numbers each night before Dylan himself came on, but he plunged Regina in at the deep end by making her deliver as a monologue a particular ‘Christian homily’ story she’d known all her life and had been heard retailing backstage.

            In 1980 McCrary stayed on the Dylan payroll, remaining all through the year’s touring  -  from snowy Portland, Oregon on January 11 through to Charleston, West Virginia on February 9, and from Toronto on April 17 through to Dayton, Ohio on May 21. She was there too for the recording of the Saved album in between the two tours, beginning in the studio on February 13, along with Mona Lisa Young and Clydie King, and she sang behind Dylan on ‘Gotta Serve Somebody’ at the Grammy awards show on CBS-TV in LA that February 27. (In March, when Dylan played harmonica on Keith Green’s track ‘Pledge My Head To Heaven’, two other McCrary sisters, Charity and Linda, were the back-up singers.)

            On the second 1980 tour, she duetted with Dylan on his little-known song ‘Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not One’ at Hartford, Connecticut on May 7, and two weeks later sang it solo on the tour’s last night. Again, this tour did not include Carolyn Dennis.

            In 1981 Regina McCrary was still with Dylan when he went into the studios in Santa Monica on March 11 to start work on the Shot of Love sessions, and towards the end of that month during one day’s session she not only sang back-up vocals but was recorded singing solo lead vocals on ‘Please Be Patient With Me’ and (as she had done live the year before) ‘‘Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not One’. She and Dylan even co-wrote a song at these sessions, ‘Got To Give Him My All’ (though it has never circulated, by either singer). She remained at the sessions until May, though she seems to have left before the last session, at which were Carolyn Dennis and Madelyn Quebec but no Regina.

            On the June-July 1981 tour, Regina was there again, and sang solo lead vocal on ‘Till I Get It Right’ in an early slot at each concert, and duetted with Dylan on ‘Mary From the Wild Moor’ at the third London performance on June 28.

            In all, she had been with Bob Dylan on three albums and over 150 concerts. By 1999, when interviewed for the US Dylan fanzine On The Tracks, McCrary Brown was working ‘as a drug counselor in a Christian ministry’ and singing on ‘The Bobby Jones Gospel Show’, then the largest gospel TV show in the country, which went out twice each Sunday via cable TV channel BET from Nashville, her home base.

            McCrary’s 21-year-old son Tony was murdered in c2000, but she reportedly found peace by inwardly forgiving his killer. By 2004 she had become the Rev. Regina McCrary and was billed as a guest speaker at the Surviving Heartbreak Hotel Women’s Retreat, again in Nashville.

            In 2003, a circle of sorts was completed with the release of the various-artists compilation album Gotta Serve Somebody: The Gospel Songs of Bob Dylan, which features two relevant items (alongside Dylan’s own duet with Mavis Staples): here we find an a cappella ‘Are You Ready?’ by the newest incarnation of the all-male Fairfield Four  -  and a version of ‘Pressing On’ billed as by the Chicago Mass Choir on which the lead vocalist is . . . Regina McCrary.

            Since then, as part of gospel group the McCrary Sisters, she has continued to perform and record gospel albums. Our Journey, from 2010, includes a re-working of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’.

MAP NO. 15: MY UPCOMING UK GIGS, JUNE & NOVEMBER

View Upcoming 2013 Gigs by Michael Gray, Europe in a larger map

TEXT AND DRUGS AND ROCK'N'ROLL?

I don't have a copy of this, and don't know the author, but it sounds interesting - and has a title that gets itself noticed:

This is the publisher's blurb, not mine:

Text and Drugs and Rock'n'Roll explores the interaction between two of the most powerful socio-cultural movements in the post-war years - the literary forces of the Beat Generation and the musical energies of rock and its attendant culture.

Simon Warner examines the interweaving strands, seeded by the poet/novelists Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and others in the 1940s and 1950s, and cultivated by most of the major rock figures who emerged after 1960 - Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Bowie, the Clash and Kurt Cobain, to name just a few.

This fascinating cultural history delves into a wide range of issues: Was rock culture the natural heir to the activities of the Beats? Were the hippies the Beats of the 1960s? What attitude did the Beat writers have towards musical forms and particularly rock music? How did literary works shape the consciousness of leading rock music-makers and their followers? Why did Beat literature retain its cultural potency with later rock musicians who rejected hippie values? How did rock musicians use the material of Beat literature in their own work? How did Beat figures become embroiled in the process of rock creativity?

These questions are addressed through a number of approaches - the influence of drugs, the relevance of politics, the effect of religious and spiritual pursuits, the rise of the counter-culture, the issue of sub-cultures and their construction, and so on. The result is a highly readable history of the innumerable links between two of the most revolutionary artistic movements of the last 60 years.

SARAH BEATTIE: COME ON IN MY KITCHEN

photograph © Sarah Beattie, 2012

Let me declare an interest. Sarah Beattie is my wife. That said, let me also declare that she deserves far wider recognition as an innovative, pioneering cook. So I'm happy to report that we learnt last week that she's been shortlisted for the Guild of Food Writers' annual Cookery Journalist of the Year Award. There are only three people on that shortlist: Diana Henry (Telegraph), Yotam Ottolenghi... and Sarah.

It's a big deal. These awards have been going since 1996, they're the UK's most important food awards, and the shortlists have always comprised the big names: people with TV series, best-selling books and/or columns in mega magazines or the national broadsheets. So it's quite something that Sarah's work has put her in amongst them.

Something else marks her out as the underdog: her food is entirely vegetarian. She's earned her shortlisting for the large monthy feature she contributes to Vegetarian Living magazine  -  for each of which she devises a set of recipes, cooks them all into existence in our kitchen and then photographs them for publication. No assistant, no sponsor, no production company, no expense account, no food stylist, no studio. She does it all. The result is a celebration of seasonal eating pleasure, time after time.

Eating pleasure. That's the crucial thing. Hers is not the kind of approach that gives vegetarian food a bad name. Sarah is a veggie not to be Worthy or Moralising but through a personal disinclination for the killing of animals. She doesn't preach about it, or try to convert other people. Not even me. It's her own committed position, but what makes her food so good  is a sheer pleasure in food, in its tastes and textures, in the bounty of its vast variety. So she can call on her wide, deep knowledge of how food works, from micro-biology to world-wide cuisines, to create rich and beautiful food that anyone can love. Indeed meat-eaters often don't notice that the meal of hers they just ate, including a second helping, contained no meat at all.

The clue is in the title of her first published book: Neither Fish Nor Fowl: Meat-Free Eating For Pleasure.

Here are just a couple more samples of her work. The food I'm lucky enough to eat at home:

Borscht-poached ravioli; photograph © Sarah Beattie 2013

Sarah has created as many dishes as Bob Dylan has created songs. A special favourite of mine is the savoury Croquembouche shown on the front cover of Neither Fish Nor Fowl : choux pastry balls filled with Brie and cranberry, stacked in a pyramid and covered with caramelised onions. And then there's her pear, blue cheese & walnut pizza:

photograph © Sarah Beattie 2013

And that's not to mention the clear celeriac soup; the summer salad of watermelon, Feta, onion & mint; a brilliant yellow Goan curry; the tomato, Stilton & vodka ice-cream...

She has a big new book, text and photographs, ready for a publisher to take on. It's to be titled Meat-Free Any Day.

The Cookery Journalist of the Year award winner will be announced at the Guild of Food Writers' event at the RIBA building in London on May 29. Sarah will be there, and pleased to be there whether she wins or not. And I'll be right there with her. Still declaring an interest.

THIRSTY BOOTS

Here's its composer, Eric Andersen, performing ‘Thirsty Boots', assisted by Roger McGuinn:



Eric's harmonica playing here makes his version sound more of a Bob song than Dylan's own (albeit charming) version. And a note to Bob Dylan's record company: it's Andersen, not Anderson.

QUAINTNESS OF THE RECENT PAST NO. 31: CAKE

'You Can Have Him' by Cake, 1967; thanks to @JacksonWylde guesting on Neglected Nuggets (@TheLostRecord ) on April 30, 2013; there are many other versions of this strong song - I was first struck by it in my youth when I heard Roy Hamilton's version, a single from 1961 that sounded quite soulful and mysterious at the time. I can still hear that quality in his vocal. It's broodingly dark when it's in low register, and when he goes higher, he sounds very like Jackie Wilson.

TWO FINE SAX PLAYERS DIED 20 YEARS AGO TODAY

By coincidence, two sax players who defined the rock'n'roll sax sound between them, died on April 19, 1993: Clifford Scott and the more famous Steve Douglas. They were 64 and 54 years old respectively.

Clifford Scott played with Jay McShann, Amos Milburn, and Lionel Hampton before joining Bill Doggett's memorable group and co-writing & recording, most famously, their 1956 hit ‘Honky Tonk'. He is the prominent star of the B-side, ‘Honky Tonk Part 2':



There's an interesting piece, taken from John Broven, about how ‘Honky Tonk' came about, and more about Scott Clifford here.

In The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia I did Clifford Scott a disservice in giving all the credit for shaping how rock saxophone sounded to that other great player, Steve Douglas, who was blaring and honking away so splendidly for Duane Eddy while Scott was doing the same for Bill Doggett. Mea culpa.

Of course I knew more about Steve Douglas because two decades later he was playing with Bob Dylan. Here's the entry on him in my book:

Douglas, Steve [1938 - 1993]
Steven Douglas Kreisman was born in Hollywood on September 24, 1938, served in the US Navy Drum and Bugle Corps after leaving school and became one of rock’n’roll’s greatest sax players. He came to prominence playing on Duane Eddy’s instrumental records of the late 1950s. Eddy used three other tenor sax players in this period (JIM HORN, Gil Bernal and Plas Johnson) but on many of them, Eddy’s ‘million dollar twang’ guitar sound, shudderingly reverberative and deep, would concede half a verse or so to Douglas’ gorgeously beefy, crucially unjazzlike solos - and between the two of them, on ‘Cannonball’ (1958), ‘Yep!’ and ‘Forty Miles Of Bad Road’ (1959), ‘Peter Gunn’ (1960) and others, they created one of the defining sounds of 1950s teenage rebellion, epitomes of the strutting toughness of teddy boys and rock’n’roll. And it has to be said that now, hearing these old records anew, it is Duane who sounds overly simple and seemly, mild and polite to a fault; the sax holds up far better.

Douglas, pianist Larry Knetchel and Al Casey went out on the road as the Rebels on Dick Clark Bandstand package shows but Douglas also kept up session playing, and in this capacity worked on lots of PHIL SPECTOR wall-of-sound hit singles (those ‘little symphonies for the kids’, as Spector called them); his is growling baritone blasting into the middle of the Crystals’ ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’. He made a solo album, Twist, in 1962 (of course it was in 1962) but also augmented a whole slew of the surf records of the early 1960s, among them hits by Jan & Dean and the Beach Boys, including 1965’s masterwork Pet Sounds, as well as recording with everyone from the Lettermen to Lesley Gore.

In the 1970s Steve Douglas played with Mink DeVille, Ry Cooder, Mickey Hart and the Ramones, among others, and in 1978 he joined Bob Dylan’s uniquely large line-up for the 1978 World Tour. Dylan made a point of stressing Douglas’ rock’n’roll credentials, and used him not only for the 114 concerts that of that year, in Japan, Australia, Europe and the US, but also on the 1978 album Street Legal. He came back three years later for the Shot Of Love sessions in late April and early May 1981. On the released album he plays the alto sax on ‘Dead Man, Dead Man’ and ‘Every Grain of Sand’.

In the early 1980s Douglas also played with Duane Eddy again, along with the great Hal Blaine on drums and, at one point in 1983, Ry Cooder on second guitar. He reappeared in Dylan’s professional life on some Knocked Out Loaded sessions exactly five years after his Shot of Love contributions, playing on the overdubs of April 28-29, 1986 onto the original recording of ‘Driftin’ Too Far From Shore’ made on July 26, 1984, and on attempts at ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’, ‘Unchain My Heart’ and ‘Without Love’ made between April 29 and May 5 1986, all in Topanga Park, California. More significantly, at the same sessions he plays on the Knocked Out Loaded tracks ‘They Killed Him’, ‘You Wanna Ramble’, ‘Precious Memories’, ‘Maybe Someday’ and ‘Brownsville Girl’. Their association fizzled out in an unused session in Hollywood some time in April 1987, at which Douglas played on still-uncirculated versions of ‘Look On Yonder Walls’, ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin’, ‘Red Cadillac and a Black Mustache’ and two takes of BILLY LEE RILEY’s song ‘Rock With Me Baby’.

Steve Douglas died of heart failure (or possibly boredom) at the beginning of a session for Ry Cooder in LA on April 19, 1993.

LIFE ON PLANET EARTH AS A 1-DAY CLOCK

taken from a post on the excellent Explore.com; no designer was credited

HERE COMES THE SUN

TEN NEGLECTED NUGGETS

This is a list of the ten neglected nuggets I compiled last month for the tweeter @thelostrecord. I had to keep each one within the Twitter-imposed 140-character length (though without the numbering 1 to 10 as here). Hence the brevity of each explanatory note:

1. Tommy Steele ‘Come On Let’s Go’, 1958: a cover but real rock’n’roll, to his credit http://youtu.be/5zJB00VwRQ0

2. James Brown, ‘These Foolish Things’, 1963: an exquisite different side of Mr Soul http://youtu.be/4uFRJrCjThw

3. Conway Twitty, ‘I Hope I Think I Wish’, 1960s: absolutely unique record, clever song w perfect vocal http://youtu.be/kx_MlQ4Sw6c

4. Don Sugarcane Harris, ‘Directly From My Heart To You’, issued ’71: w zinging shudder http://youtu.be/GhkCLXqX7FE

5. Hoyt Axton, ‘Evangelina’, 1976: powerful voice; romantic mexicali magic http://youtu.be/t43JCQbqOVI

6. Jason & the Scorchers, ‘Absolutely Sweet Marie’, 1980s: gives Bob Dylan’s great original a fond joyful drubbing http://youtu.be/p-cF40OWeak

(Re Jason track on YouT: “as if Bob had some deep seeded premonition of the scorchers back in the day & wrote this so they could do it right.)

7. Hem, ‘Half Acre’, 2000s: slow grower by ace act, sung with deep feeling quietly stated http://youtu.be/7Sq5Bvvx5nc

8. Teitur, ‘Louis, Louis’, 2000s: Teitur is one of the two great C21 singer-songwriters IMO & this so catchy http://youtu.be/DoUKr38wi8s

9. Mary Gauthier, ‘Your Sister Cried’, 2000s: she’s the other; didn’t write this but owns it: despairing and funny http://youtu.be/sTMJCIBaZwY

10. Rebecca Ferguson ‘Nothing’s Real But Love’, 2010s: snubbed by 6Music because she's ex-XFactor but she’s terrific http://youtu.be/ViqCO35OfNU

If you like compiling lists and a great spread of tracks, please send one through (and please include audio links to them: not necessarily c/o You Tube).

MAP 14: US RAIL SERVICE REDUCTIONS

The UK has been marking the 50th anniversary of the notorious Beeching cuts to her railway network. Lord Beeching was the Fat Controller lookalike hired by Harold Macmillan's government at the then enormous salary of £24,000pa to turn an obviously important public asset, the national rail network, into a profit-making business. A Thatcherite policy ahead of its time, despite the abyss between the patrician, slow-talking, mild-mannered Macmillan and the lower middle class, venom-spitting Thatcher.

Beeching's plan, duly executed, was to close down a huge portion of the network, to immediate detrimental effect on people all over the UK. Two small, entirely typical examples from one place: in the rural market town of Kirkbymoorside, North Yorkshire, where we used to live, it had been possible, pre-Beeching, for anyone with an allotment, market garden or plant nursery, to put a crate of tomatoes onto an evening train and have them sold in Central London's Covent Garden market next morning. It had been possible, too, for a young woman to catch the train to the city for a Saturday night dance, and come back by train at the end of it. After Beeching, no such ready country-wide distribution except for those who happened to live on main lines, and a far greater social isolation. And, naturally, Beeching failed to make the railways pay. A barmy idea that was massively destructive.

In the US, the picture was different, but the same half century has seen a parallel reduction in services. Here's the map:

JELLY ROLL MORTON'S SMOKEHOUSE BLUES

This isn't at all my usual kind of music, but an enthusiast played me this track as we were sitting in his pleasant French farmhouse the other week, and it sounded terrific  -  full of life and sunshine, despite its title:

I don't know what Robert Crumb would feel about this rare British reissue from the 1950s; maybe he owns a copy.

Jelly Roll Morton died in 1941, 20 years before his lookalike was born.

White House / Smokehouse

ROBERT CRUMB ON COLLECTING OLD RECORDS

There's a terrific 2013 interview with Robert Crumb, about collecting & obsession in general and old 78rpm records in particular, here at Discaholic Corner. It comes with this comic self-criticism from 1977:

and, at the end, this quote: “We humans with all our intelligence and cleverness are helpless creatures driven by forces over which we have very little control and which we barely understand. Who can fathom the collecting compulsion? It’s not something to be proud of, though it’s certainly not the worst human trait."

What never gets discussed in the interview is the observable fact that 99.999% of serious collecting prolonged into adulthood is by men and not by women. Completists, listmakers, those who remember the matrix numbers of prized-possession records: men.

IZZY IZ 85 YEARS YOUNG

photograph © Birgitta Olsson

 Today (March 26, 2013) is the 85th birthday of Israel Goodman Young, widely known as Izzy Young. Here is the substantial entry on him in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

Young, Izzy [1928 - ]

Israel Goodman Young was born in New York City on March 26, 1928. He grew up working in his parents’ Brooklyn bakery and first encountered folk music in 1945 when on impulse he joined Margaret Mayo’s American Square Dance Group. He attended Leadbelly’s last concert in New York City in 1949, and the concert at his funeral a few months later. He dropped out of Brooklyn College in 1950 and in the mid-1950s met the eminent folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein, whose encouragement steered him toward folk revival activity, starting by compiling a 15-page listing of rare publications.

            He was the founder of the Folklore Center, at 110 MacDougal Street, Greenwich Village, which he opened in March 1957 after cashing in a $1000 insurance policy to pay for the lease. ‘I had about $50 in the bank,’ he said later, ‘and I had a batch of books I put up on the shelves and a few records, and I started doing business from the first minute.’ The idea of the place was to supply the would-be folk musician’s needs: records, sheet music, second-hand guitars, strings, capos, Sing Out! magazine and more.  It was also, perhaps inevitably, a place for like-minded Villagers bump into each other and hang out, especially in a back room ‘with a pot-bellied stove, crooked pictures and rickety chairs’, as Dylan describes it in Chronicles. ‘Some people,’ he recalls, ‘picked up their mail there.’

            Dylan’s descriptions of Young and his Folklore Center are, in a book of great vivacity and detail, especially vivid. He begins by hinting at their importance to him, saying that he started avoiding the Café Wha in the afternoons and hanging out at the Center instead. ‘The small store was up a flight of stairs and the place had an antique grace. It was like an ancient chapel, like a shoebox sized institution.’ The back room with the stove, he says, had ‘old patriots and heroes on the wall, pottery with crossed-stitch design, lacquered black candles’ and ‘was filled with American records and a phonograph. Izzy would let me stay back there and listen to them’ and even thumb ‘through a lot of his antediluvian folk scrolls… Extinct song folios of every type  -  sea shanties, Civil War songs, cowboy songs, song of lament, church house songs, anti-Jim Crow songs, union songs  -  archaic books of folk tales, Wobbly journals, propaganda pamphlets…’ (Young gave him pamphlets on Joe Hill to read, after Dylan asked who Hill was.) The center was ‘the citadel of Americana folk music… a crossroads junction for all the folk activity you could name and you might at any time see real hard-line folksingers in there… I saw CLARENCE ASHLEY, Gus Cannon, MANCE LIPSCOMB, TOM PALEY, Erik Darling hanging around in the place.’ It was here that Dylan first encountered DAVE VAN RONK, stepping in off the snowy street to look at a Gibson guitar.

            Young himself was ‘an old-line folk enthusiast, very sardonic and wore heavy horn-rimmed glasses, spoke in a thick Brooklyn dialect, wore wool slacks, skinny belt and work boots, tie at a careless slant. His voice… always seemed too loud for the little room. Izzy was always a little rattled over something or other. He was sloppily good natured. In reality, a romantic. To him, folk music glittered like a mound of gold.’ Not everyone found him so good-natured: he often showed a short temper, occasionally a physically violent one, and could be intractable in nursing small imagined slights.

            At some point Young started writing a news-snippets and gossip column for Sing Out!, called ‘Frets and Frails’, and kept a journal in which, invaluably in retrospect, he logged the comings and goings of his musician-customers  -  including Bob Dylan.

            (Examples: ‘September 23, 1961: Met Bob Dylan 3am this morning on the way to a JACK ELLIOTT party at 1 Sheridan Square…Terry Thal now a manager. Tom Paxton, Bob Dylan and someone else.’ ‘January 26, 1962: Passed Dylan on the street, he said to me that he “didn’t know why so many things are happening to me.” I said that he did.’)

            JOHN BAULDIE described him as ‘a loud, disorganised, big-hearted folk enthusiast’ at whose center Dylan spent a lot of time, ‘looking at records, music, trying out instruments, meeting people and, later, writing songs in the back room on Izzy’s old typewriter. One of them, the unreleased “Talkin’ Folklore Center”, was specially composed on March 19, 1962 as a fund-raiser.’ The previous October, when Young was interviewing Dylan for his journal, Dylan mentioned another composition, ‘California Brown Eyed Baby’, which he said he was performing at the time.

            Dylan credits Young with fighting city hall to allow music in Washington Square Park, and in general fighting against ‘injustice, hunger and homelessness’. More personally, though, he credits Young with having played him particular records as suggested pieces of repertoire for him, and even being so trustworthy that Dylan told him truths about his own family (a rare thing indeed).

            It was also Young who, at ALBERT GROSSMAN’s prompting, promoted Dylan’s first real concert, at the Carnegie Chapter Hall on November 4, 1961  -  at which Bob performed 21 songs, finishing with the two of his own he would record later that month for his début album, ‘Song To Woody’ and ‘Talkin’ New York’ . . .  to an audience of 52. Young was not a great businessman, as Dylan comments: ‘Young as beseiged with bill collectors and dictates from the landlord. People were always chasing him down for money, but it didn’t seem to faze him.’

            He’s likely to have been one of those Dylan hit out against later, in ‘Positively 4th Street’. By 1965 Young was highly critical of Dylan’s move away from overt political songs, and he wrote a piece in the first issue of the radically underground East Village Other, published that October, after being angered by the absence, at an anti-war rally, of all Albert Grossman’s artists. Looking back over Dylan’s earlier years he saw them anew: ‘…everyone conveniently forgot that he allowed Columbia Records to delete “John Birch Society Talking Blues” from his second album. This was soon after he swore that Columbia would have its way over his dead body. (I was hoodwinked… into arranging an abortive protest march… Dylan and management pulled a no-show on our six brave marchers.)’ He added that Dylan copyrighted work that ‘reflected accurately’ that of ‘poets from Patchen to Ginsberg’ and ‘no-one complained’; that he went to England, ‘picked up marvelous morsels’ and then ‘left the poets and England behind.’ He added: ‘There seemed no heights to which Dylan could not attain. He had only to meet the right person. If he could only meet Malraux he could write treatises on civilization’. And so on. Young said in 1992 that he sent this article to Dylan before it was published, and that Dylan ‘always said it was the best single article ever written on him’.

            In the fullness of time, Young was back on board the Dylan bus, giving a warm and generous interview to JEFF ROSEN for the MARTIN SCORSESE film No Direction Home, in which he appears. One story he tells in the film, however, is untrue. It was not Young but BOB YELLIN of THE GREENBRIAR BOYS who tried to get Maynard Solomon to sign Dylan to Vanguard  -  he took him a tape  -  and the remark Young has Solomon making about not signing ‘freaks’ does not ring true as the speech of the gently-spoken, good-humoured Solomon.

            When Chronicles appeared, Young was thrilled and gratified by Dylan’s detailed, affectionate recall. ‘No matter what else Dylan has done his starting point has always been folk music. He never leaves folk music and he never will.’ And: ‘The book he promised to write, with a chapter on me, in July 1962 has finally come true!’

            Young handed over the Folklore Center to Rick Altman in 1973, moved to Sweden and there opened the Folklore Centrum in Stockholm. He and it are still going.

           

[Bob Dylan: Chronicles, 2004, pp.18-22; Joe Hill pamphlets p.52. Izzy Young background detail in part from Ronnie D. Lankford Jr., All Music Guide, seen online 5 Oct 2005 at www.icebergradio.com/artist/499028/izzy_young.html. Izzy Young journal extracts Judas! no.12, Huntingdon UK, Jan 2005 p.53; article ‘Bob Dylantaunt’, East Village Other vol.1, no.1, NYC, Oct 1965, republished Judas! no.10, Jul 2004, pp. 87-88; response to Chronicles, written 20 Jun 2005, Judas! no.14, Jul 2005, p.34. John Bauldie, ‘Village Walking Tour’, online 5 Oct 2005 www.interferenze.com/bcs/villagesights.htm.]

QUAINTNESS OF THE RECENT PAST NO. 30

The legendary Ford Edsel, still believed to be the greatest failure in the history of car sales, but now looking completely brilliant. I'd love one:

MAP 13: ACCENTS, UK & IRELAND

TEITUR: GREAT SONG & FINE PERFORMANCE

Teitur performing one of the strongest, sweetest songs from his 2nd album, here live in Bonn, 2011:

QUAINTNESS OF THE RECENT PAST NO. 29

USA, 1951 (c/o Retronaut)

THE BOB DYLAN ENCYCLOPEDIA

Seamus Heaney and the book, 2006

I still have a few original 1st edition hardbacks of The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, 2006, on offer at £25 each (P&P included), each signed and including a fully searchable CD-Rom of the whole 750,000-word text. These will soon be unavailable from any bookshop, including Amazon. They are  now available from the Shop page of my website while this limited stock lasts.

ALLMAN BROTHERS DEBUT 'TEARS OF RAGE'

I wish I'd been back at the Beacon Theatre in New York the other night (for the first time since Bob Dylan's concerts there in 1989) for the Allman Brothers concert at which they played the Dylan/Manuel song 'Tears Of Rage', and beautifully: