FROM THE LARKIN SOCIETY JOURNAL: TERRY KELLY TRIBUTE

As already noted, Bob Dylan wasn't Terry Kelly's only interest. Thanks to Val Kelly via Roy Kelly, I've been sent this, written by James Booth and just published by the journal of the Philip Larkin Society:

TERRY KELLY

I'm extremely sorry to be saying that longterm Bobcat Terry Kelly has died, aged 57. I've written more about this here on my Facebook page, but here on this blog post I hand over to guest writer Roy Kelly (no relation), who knew Terry better than I did and who, especially, kept abreast of Terry's wide knowledge of, and writing about, poetry:

Terry knew and read a tremendous amount of poetry, and had much wider interests than me, even though I write poems.  He was particularly interested in Ian Hamilton, and poetry associated with his circle, and was really pleased when a posthumous big collected volume of him came out and he got a chance to review it in London Magazine, where over the last at least four years, and possibly more, he had had become a regular.  He liked too Craig Raine, Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney and Hugo Williams, and was able to review his then latest volume (I Knew The Bride), weaving into it a skilful, knowledgeable round up of Hugo's whole career and technique and development. Recently he had reviewed Clive James The Kid From Kogarah, and poetry by David Harsent and Robin Robertson, and the big T S Eliot collected volume so eagerly awaited by aficionados. In his early reporter life he worked with and later championed a poet called Barry McSweeney, also a huge Bob fan, who had a difficult life but produced a lot of poetry. Terry was involved in a memorial type volume for him, including essays. He really did know an awful lot and liked an awful lot. 

Of late he was really proud of the London Magazine work because at first I think it was for nothing but developed into him being a rated and paid reviewer. He knew the whole modern British and American poetry scene very well. He liked what was the Hamilton template, the short, slightly obtuse lyric, but was also way open to modern American forms. He was endlessly getting books and telling you of his haul, either as review freebies or what he'd bought. Poetry totally engaged him. In some ways the literary life seemed more real to him than actual life, which was probably a help in the trial of his last fourteen months. He had also recently starting reviewing for a newish thing called The Next Review and was very pleased about that.

 

A major poetic interest, too, was the work of Philip Larkin. He wrote articles for About Larkin, the journal concerned with Larkin's work and life, reviewing there and elsewhere new Collected editions, and writing knowledgeably about the choices different editors of the volumes made. One of his most recent reviews was of the new book of photographs taken by Philip Larkin, and the connection that could be made with his poems.

I should say too he was always very kind. I think that was a big aspect of his character. He was a networker and a giver, and, that old-fashioned word, a gentleman. Unasked for and unexpected at different times he gave me various books that he knew I would like. He did love Bob Dylan and his work and thought he was a genius, and probably didn't think plagiarism was relevant to whether he was or not, unlike me, but he knew and was interested in everything poetic really. I mean everything. He was much more than someone who was crucial to a Bob Dylan magazine [The Bridge]. Though of course he was always that.

 

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BOB DYLAN DREAM

I've written before of my admiration for Roy Kelly's writing about Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan fandom and the past and its impingement on the present, so it's no surprise that I should be glad to see, published at long last, Roy's book!:

As you may barely be able to see, I've written one of the endorsements for it - the one in the white ghetto by the barcode at the bottom of the back. But that aside, I like the whole cover - the very Woody Guthriesque Bob figure on the front, the pale blue, Roy's own very skilful blurb on the back, and the splendid quote from Nigel Hinton quite rightly there on the front.

It's available as a paperback and as an e-book, and the link to the paperback is here. Get it and read it. A Christmas present to yourself.

DYLAN'S GREAT 1980 TORONTO CONCERT: MASSIVELY UPGRADED FOOTAGE

Before Bob comes on and starts the main and lengthy part of this exceptional concert with 'Gotta Serve Somebody', things begin with a still unpalatable, hopelessly corny godbothering "story" from Regina McCrary. Then comes some beautifully sung, very ordinary gospel fare - though with gorgeous keyboards, and the pleasure of seeing the wondrous Clydie King and the others so clearly. But Bob arrives to offer a really forceful performance of many gems. He gives out so much energy and yet takes so much vocal care - and of a kind only Dylan can. Now this whole concert has been made available with hugely improved footage and audio quality. My thanks go to Andrea Orlandi for posting it on Facebook today.

I thought it might be useful to add the approximate start times of each Bob song performance. They are:

18:00 - Gotta Serve Somebody
24:36 - I Believe In You
29:30 - When He Returns [Bob on piano]
35:20 - talks about Ronnie Hawkins
36:15 - Ain't Gonna Go To Hell For Anybody
40:43 - Cover Down, Break Through [brief remarks at end]
45:20 - Man Gave Names To All The Animals
50:59 - Precious Angel
56:06 - instrumental twiddling, feeding into...
57:03 - Slow Train
1.03:30 - introduces 2 solo song performances by women singers
1.13:42 - Do Right To Me Baby (Do Unto Others)
1.18:23 - rambling, opaque, preachy speech eventually leading into...
1.25:00 - Solid Rock
1.29:10 - Saving Grace
1.34:17 - Saved [no pause at end]; straight into...
1.39:06 - What Can I Do For You?
1.45:52 - speech
1.46:48 - In The Garden
1.53:00 - introduces band & singers & goes preachy again
1.56:20 - Are You Ready?
2.01:10 - Pressing On.

If these timings don't exactly correspond to what you find when you try them, it'll be because (a) my computer is elderly and (b) everything digital is inherently unstable and unreliable. But anyway, an extraordinary concert.

CELEBRATE BOB'S 75th A MONTH AHEAD

You may be busy at a Dylan Days type event next May - specially around May 24th, a Tuesday, when Dylan turns 75 - but if you'd like to be involved a bit earlier, why not take part in our first Bob Dylan Discussion Weekend since 2014?

It's happening on the first weekend in April - Friday the 1st to Sunday the 3rd - and there are places for just six people.

Come to our home in beautiful rural southwest France - specifically in département 32, the Gers - the département with the cleanest air and the emptiest roads in France.

the house

garden, pool & other side of the road

All the details are here on my website and this is what some of our previous guests have written to say afterwards:


"We really enjoyed it, thanks to both of you. The setting was wonderful (as was the weather), the food sublime, and the discussions were great."
Martin and Michele

"A special thank you for a gem of a weekend. Wonderful food, warm hospitality and an amazing giving of knowledge."
Jill and Louise

"We thoroughly enjoyed our visit in every respect and we offer our thanks to your good self and to Sarah for making our stay so  memorable."
Dave and Irene

"Thank you again for this excellent weekend. Sarah's cooking was brilliant and both Dylan Evenings are engraved in my mind. It was an unforgettable weekend. It's sometimes so easily said or written, but it really, really was. We're wallowing in pleasure. May you stay forever young."
Lukas and Saskia

"Thank you so very much. Everything was just perfect, Sarah's fantastic food and the great new insights into Bob Dylan's life gained through Michael's incredible knowledge which he so enthusiastically shared with his guests. I really loved the chosen tracks too, how different they are from the ones on commercial CDs..."
Marion

"Many thanks from the three of us for a great weekend. Lovely food and wine (our thanks to Sarah of course) and terrific conversation. All highly recommended!"
James

"I look back at a wonderful weekend. Thank you very much for your hospitality and inspiring sessions. Thanks too to Sarah for the delicious meals."
Robert

"Michael, we had a wonderful time and it was a privilege to spend some time with the two of you."
Irwin & Erica

"The house is in a beautiful part of France, and the food cooked and served by Michael's wife Sarah is absolutely outstanding, as is the wine ! It's by no means all about Bob, and we met some very interesting guests, but it was wonderful to have the opportunity to chat with other people who are equally enthralled by Bob's work, and to hear at first hand Michael's extensive knowledge of Dylan's work. A truly marvellous weekend!!"
Martin

"Thank you to both you and Sarah for a lovely weekend: we both enjoyed it immensely."
Catherine

"Can I just thank you once again for the weekend? We both had a fantastic time. Please pass on our thanks to Sarah as well, not least for her truly outstanding cooking."
Daniel & Ruth

"You made me and everyone feel very welcome and I couldn't really think of anything to improve the weekend. The food was divine and it was great to be able to indulge our Bob Dylan interest (I'm avoiding using the word obsession!) in an unfettered way!"
Ian

TRAVELLING IN THE NORTH COUNTRIES, AND A SOUTHBOUND TRAIN

This is a look back over my October-November tour of talks, now that I'm home again in the southwest of France.

I gave talks on BOB DYLAN & THE HISTORY OF ROCK'N'ROLL at Cape Breton University, Nova Scotia, Canada; at the University of Texas at Austin; at Arkansas State University at Jonesboro AR; and at the University of Oslo. And I gave talks on BOB DYLAN & THE POETRY OF THE BLUES at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada; at the University of Chicago; at Southwestern University, Georgetown TX; at Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln NE; at the University of Nebraska at Kearney; and at Goldsmiths College, London.

The quirky, surprisingly classy-roomed Royal Hotel, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia

Aside from the talks themselves, and the people who made up my audiences and hosts, and others met along the way, the most memorable episodes for me were encountering US Customs & Immigration on the way in  to Chicago from Canada, and the 29-hour train ride I took out  of Chicago all the way down south to Austin Texas.

I'd expected to meet US Customs & Immigration when I reached  Chicago, but no, they occupy a whole portion of the main airport in Montreal - and a vast acreage of corridors and checkpoints it is too. And instead of granting me the Visa Waiver Business stamp for my passport straight away, as always in the past, they made me wait, and then pulled me aside - "Is there a problem?" "No, no problem: just go and take a seat over there, sir, please"... and so I had to sit and fret in a special waiting area while a gathering of these officers discussed me. None seemed able to dare be responsible for simply letting me in. Time passed. Then one of them, who looked more like a lapsed Amish in fancy dress than an immigration officer, called me over to his small cubicle ("Michael, just step in here a moment...") and grilled me for the longest time, making me show him all the university letters of invitation I had with me, peering through my 7-page printed itinerary like a man who could hardly read, and then sending me back to the forlorn and deserted waiting area while he went off once more to consult . . . while I sweated away and the time ticked by right up to my the gate-closing time for my flight - and beyond. Then he called me back int one more time (and it was "Mr Gray" now, which sounded worse) - and finally gave me the passport stamp thtree minutes before my flight was leaving from a long way away down the airport. "There are plenty of flights to Chicago," he smirked. Mine, of course, was of the cheap, non-transferable type, valid for that flight only. Luckily, Air Canada were kind and gave me a boarding pass for the flight a couple of hours later. Not my favourite part of the trip.

But ah, Chicago. The parts of the university I saw - the music department lecture theatre and the quadrangle you reach it from -  are elegant Victoriana, with ivy climbing stone walls and mullioned gothic windows: all this in sharp contrast to the soaring drama of the city's skyscrapers, which cluster together gleam with far more panache than New York's. I didn't have enough time here, really, to enjoy the zing of the city, before I set off in a cab to Union Station.

The train was just great. 29 hours with no wifi available (and in my case no American mobile phone): 29 hours throughout which no-one could demand anything from me. So rare a thing today. Just the innate glamour of the epic ride, the dining-car sociability - they put you together with strangers at shared tables - the changing landscape, the sleeping compartment, and the sheer olde worlde physicality of it: all iron and steel and rattling tracks and big old bridges taking you high up over muddy rivers and through woods with little wooden houses and mules and rusting 1940s pick-up trucks. We'd pulled out of Chicago at 1.45pm, and rolled on through the afternoon and evening, and all through the night. When I woke in the early morning we were crossing into Texas, and it took all that second day to clatter down through that enormous state; and after I disembarked at Austin, at 6.35pm, it was going to go head on further south, still in Texas, for a number of hours more.

And then at the end of my trip, the flight back to France from Montreal, and a quick side trip to London for an especially enjoyable talk at Goldsmiths College in New Cross (where I used to live, not especially happily, once upon a time) and on to Oslo on Norwegian Air, which had wi-fi on the flight (!).

flying out of Montreal, November 1st

flying in towards Paris next morning

My first visit to Norway, and an unexpected pleasure from first to last - from the elegant airport with its beautiful wood-floored corridors and the highly congenial, efficient train into the good-looking city centre to the university and my reception there. Texas is well over twice the size of Norway, but a good deal less civilised.

Back again via London, and home to beautiful weather: days of 25+ degrees Celsius (77+ Fahrenheit), and the keen anticipation of receiving Bob Dylan's most essential Bootleg Series issue, The Cutting Edge. Altogether this trip I was away for 26 days.

I calculated my mileage totals this morning:

By road: 891

By rail: 1,780

By air: 15,829

TOTAL = 18,500 miles.

________________

BOB DYLAN & THE HISTORY OF ROCK'N'ROLL: A VIDEO

Here's a neat little video created by The Forum Tunbridge Wells to promote my BOB DYLAN & THE HISTORY OF ROCK'N'ROLL gig there on Sunday Sept 20 at 8pm.



But just a reminder that I'll also be giving this 1-man-show-type talk with loud audio and rare footage at...

An Lanntair, Stornoway, Sept 9
Halifax Square Chapel, Sept 11
Civic Theatre, Barnsley, Sept 12
Artrix Studio, Bromsgrove, Sept 13
Kitchen Garden Cafe, B'ham, Sept 15
Swindon Arts Centre, Sept 16
The Flavel, Dartmouth, Sept 19
Stamford Arts Centre, Sept 22
Colchester Arts Centre, Sept 23
Norwich Arts Centre, Sept 24 and
Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal Sept 25...

UPDATED BOB & ROCK'N'ROLL POSTER!

Due to circumstances beyond my control, one of my September UK dates (the one in Dorset) has been cancelled. I believe it's the first time in 15 years that any of my gigs ever has been. So here's the updated tour poster, kindly revised by its brilliant designer, Jon Wainwright:

MAP NO. 26 - MY GIGS ROUTE in SEPTEMBER

WED SEPT 9 - An Lanntair, STORNOWAY
FRI SEPT 11 - Square Chapel Arts Centre, HALIFAX
SAT SEPT 12 - The Civic, BARNSLEY
SUN SEPT 13 - Artrix, BROMSGROVE
TUE SEPT 15 - Kitchen Garden Cafe, BIRMINGHAM
WED SEPT 16 - Arts Centre, SWINDON
SAT SEPT 19 - The Flavel, DARTMOUTH
SUN SEPT 20 - The Forum, TUNBRIDGE WELLS
TUE SEPT 22 - Arts Centre, STAMFORD
WED SEPT 23 - Arts Centre, COLCHESTER
THU SEPT 24 - Arts Centre, NORWICH
FRI SEPT 25 - The Brewery, KENDAL.

Details of times, tickets etc here on my website

[NB: The WIMBORNE event shown on the map has been cancelled.]

BOB DYLAN & THE HISTORY OF ROCK'N'ROLL: 2 MAY GIGS

Pleased to say I'm making two live appearances next month - one in Dorset and one in Suffolk. Details:

Friday May 15, 7.30pm 
BLANDFORD FORUM
BOB DYLAN & THE HISTORY OF ROCK'N'ROLL
Coade Hall, Bryanston School
Blandford Forum, Dorset DT11 0PX
tel: 01258 484623 or boxoffice@bryanston.co.uk
admission free but please book

Sunday May 17, 7.30pm
BURY ST. EDMUNDS FESTIVAL
BOB DYLAN & THE HISTORY OF ROCK'N'ROLL
The Hunter Club Main Hall
6 St Andrews Street South
Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk IP33 3PH
tel: 01284 758000 or
https://www.buryfestival.co.uk/whats-on/event/1443/bob-dylan--the-history-of-rock-n-roll
£12 but only £5 for under-25s; Festival Friends get discount

MANCE LIPSCOMB - SONGSTER BORN 120 YEARS AGO TODAY

He may be a minor figure in the story of the blues, but he's an interesting one, and one the very young Bob Dylan met, and their repertoires connect in several ways.

Here's my entry on him in  The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

Lipscomb, Mance [1895 - 1976]

In his 1965 book Conversation With the Blues, Paul Oliver makes the point that ‘if the blues, like any folk art or indeed almost any art form, is illuminating in terms of a whole group it is still sung and played by individuals...  the individual tends to become submerged...  and even when the assessment of the major figures is made, the minor blues singer is forgotten.’

To listen to much of Dylan’s work  -  which at least between his break with ‘protest’ and his conversion to Christianity in every sense put a consistent emphasis on the importance of the individual rather than the mass  -  is to feel that Dylan has not forgotten the minor blues singer at all. He has listened to the minor figures wherever the somewhat random process of recording folk artists has allowed. We know it from listening to his work.

(Where Dylan heard what; the influence of ‘minor figures’ and unknown ones; the communal nature of much blues composition and how this gells with post-structuralist ideas of the unfixed text and the death of the author: all these are big questions, much discussed throughout this book. They are also central preoccupations of Michael Gray’s Song & Dance Man III: The Art of Bob Dylan, Chapter 9, ‘Even Post-Structuralists Oughta Have The Pre-War Blues’.)

Dylan learnt and assimilated experience from the older songs and the older singers  -  singers who, in some cases, were ‘discovered’ or ‘re-discovered’ in the 1960s. Mississippi John Hurt is one example, the stylish and dapper Mance Lipscomb another.

Lipscomb was born 9 April, 1895, in Navasota, Texas  -  and eventually died there (on 30 January, 1976). He was ‘discovered’ in July 1960 by Mack McCormick and Chris Strachwitz and recorded  -  for the first time  -  a few weeks later in his two-room cabin, by which time he was in his sixties, though still with a strikingly youthful way of moving around in performance. He had almost a thousand songs he could perform.

Dylan met Lipscomb, and we can get an idea of the aura of the man, and thus a hint of the insights he could have given Dylan, from the description of him, and a transcribed conversational fragment, in Paul Oliver’s book. He was a ‘Texas sharecropper and songster with a reputation that extends widely in Grimes, Washington and Brazos counties...  A man of great dignity and natural culture...  a veritable storehouse of blues, ballads and songs of more than half a century... ’

This is Lipscomb talking (the spelling is as in Oliver’s transcript):

‘I been playin’ the git-tar now ’bout forty-nine years, and then I started out by myself, just heard it and learned it. Ear music...  My pa was a fiddler; he was an old perfessional fiddler. All my people can play some kind of music. Well, my daddy...  he played way back in olden days. You know, he played at breakdowns, waltzes, shottishes and all like that and music just come from me...  Papa were playing for dances out, for white folks and coloured. He played Missouri Waltz, Casey Jones, just anything you name he played it like I’m playin’ . He was just a self player until I was big enough to play behind him, then we played together...  ‘Sugar Babe’ was the first piece I learned, when I was a li’l boy about thirteen years old. Reason I know this so good, I got a whippin’ about it. Come out of the cotton-patch to get some water and I was up at the house playin’ the git-tar and my mother came in; whopped me n’cause I didn’t come back  -  I was playin’ the git-tar: “Sugar babe I’m tired of you, / Ain’t your honey but the way you do, / Sugar babe, it’s all over now...”’

            In Glen Alyn’s I Say Me For A Parable: The Oral Autobiography Of Mance Lipscomb, 1993, Lipscomb talks of encountering Dylan (and of Rambling Jack Elliott first hearing of Lipscomb when Dylan played him a Lipscomb record) but specifies no dates. Lipscomb says Dylan followed him to ‘Berkeley University’ and then ‘from Berkeley to the UCLA… And when I went off a duty he was settin round me, an hear what I was sayin, an pick up a lot of songs. He could imitate. But he wadna playin no gittah. Then. Takin you know, learnin from his head.’ On 18 May 1963, Dylan appeared on the same bill as Lipscomb at the first Monterey Folk Festival.

Lipscomb must have been an invaluable contact for Dylan  -  the one a black Texan with a personal repertoire stretching back to 1908 and incorporating songs a generation or two older than that, the other a white Minnesotan would-be artist of the whole American people born in 1941. Not only could Dylan have gained a knowledge ready to work for him but also, in a specific and personalised testimony, a feeling for the intimacy of connection of words and music in the expression of a spirit and a theme.

            Lipscomb’s repertoire included ‘Jack O’Diamonds Is A Hard Card To Play’ (he was field-recorded performing it in his home-town area the first time he ever recorded), which is a title-phrase picked up wholesale and retailed by Bob Dylan inside a piece of his own work that is not a blues. It is, in fact, from one of those poems he calls Some Other Kinds Of Songs . . ., published on the back sleeve of the album Another Side Of Bob Dylan. This long and generally inferior poem repeats several times, and then ends with,  ‘jack o’ diamonds / is a hard card t’ play.’

            Other songs Lipscomb recorded include ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’, ‘You Gonna Quit Me’ (the Blind Blake song on Dylan’s Good As I Been To You, re-titled ‘You Ain’t Gonna Quit Me’ by Lipscomb), ‘Corrina Corrina’, ‘Mama, Let Me Lay It On You’, a song called ‘When Death Comes Creeping In Your Room’ - a title that strongly suggests it may prefigure Dylan’s ‘Watcha Gonna Do’  -  and ‘Night Time Is The Right Time’. In the section called ‘Playing For The White Folks’ in the Glen Alyn book, Lipscomb claims that Dylan took ‘Baby Let Me Follow You Down’ from ‘his’ ‘Mama, Let Me Lay It On You’.

 [Mance Lipscomb: ‘Jack O’ Diamonds Is A Hard Card To Play’, Navasota TX, summer 1960; Mance Lipscomb Texas Sharecropper & Songster, Arhoolie LP 1001, El Cerrito, CA, 1960. ‘Night Time Is The Right Time’, nia.; Mance Lipscomb Vol. 4, Arhoolie LP 1033, El Cerrito CA, nia.]

SHADOWS IN THE NIGHT

This is the tracklist for Bob Dylan's album Shadows In The Night  (a title that surely falls kerplunk  straight into parody):

1. I’m a Fool to Want You
2. The Night We Called It a Day
3. Stay With Me
4. Autumn Leaves
5. Why Try to Change Me Now
6. Some Enchanted Evening
7. Full Moon and Empty Arms
8. Where Are You?
9. What’ll I Do
10. That Lucky Old Sun.

February 3, 2015, has been announced as the release date. The statement from Bob on bobdylan.com is as enticing as it could be. Aside from the unfortunate "me and my band" which for two good reasons should be "my band and I", he still has a way with words:

“It was a real privilege to make this album. I've wanted to do something like this for a long time but was never brave enough to approach 30-piece complicated arrangements and refine them down for a 5-piece band. That's the key to all these performances. We knew these songs extremely well. It was all done live. Maybe one or two takes. No overdubbing. No vocal booths. No headphones. No separate tracking, and, for the most part, mixed as it was recorded. I don't see myself as covering these songs in any way. They've been covered enough. Buried, as a matter a fact. What me and my band are basically doing is uncovering them. Lifting them out of the grave and bringing them into the light of day.”

I'm delighted to learn of the inclusion of 'Some Enchanted Evening' and 'That Lucky Old Sun' and hopeful that the rest will be less dull than 'Full Moon and Empty Arms'.

In the case of 'I'm A Fool To Want You' he's treading not merely in Sinatra's footsteps but in Billie Holiday's too. The film 'The Night We Called It A Day' sounds more interesting than the 1941 song: the story is that "Frank Sinatra (Dennis Hopper) and his entourage become virtual prisoners in their hotel after he insults an Australian reporter during a 1974 tour." As Dylan has shown in recent concert encores, 'Stay With Me' is a fine song, and strikingly reminiscent of some of his own Christian material. 'Autumn Leaves' started out in French as 'Les Feuilles Mortes' ("the dead leaves" - this less "poetic" lyric by the poet by Jacques Prévert) and has been covered by everyone from Edith Piaf (bilingually) to Eric Clapton, though never more solemnly than by Yves Montand.

'Why Try to Change Me Now' is yer typical Sinatra-does-sophisticated-weariness-with-a-touch-of-whimsy, but includes a line I look forward to hearing Bob sing: "Why can't I be more conventional?" The Sinatra version of 'Where Are You' shows his voice at its non-swinging peak, though he can't escape the song's essential dreariness; and 'What’ll I Do' (what a lot of questions without question-marks, according to bobdylan.com), an Irving Berlin song from 1924, is a rather more delicate and tender thing, at least on the earlier of Mr. Frank's two recordings (1947). There's a Rosemary Clooney version that has already saved Bob the trouble of stripping away and replacing that 30-piece orchestra - it has just a guitar - and this is replicated on the Julie London version.

Regardless, I've been wanting to hear Bob sing 'Some Enchanted Evening' since about 1970 - and indeed that's the year I wish he'd recorded it. (It was once rumoured that he had.) That's the Bob Dylan voice I'd like to have heard him sing it with. As for 'That Lucky Old Sun', well, it's a gem that many people have polished, including Bob. According to bobdylan.com he has performed it 27 times, though never more recently than the short version done in California in 2000. He first performed it at Farm Aid in 1985. I always love it, but I'm specially keen on the version from Madison Wisconsin from November 5, 1991 (a great concert altogether, and one that included a song I've often gone on about, 'You Don't Know Me'). There are other, striking versions galore: not least those by Big Mama Thornton and several by Jerry Lee Lewis, this included. The most delightfully wacky version - though wacky isn't always what's wanted - is surely that by the venerable lunatic Lee Perry, who has re-named it and claimed composer credit.

There are many Dylan eras I prefer to the present one - many voices, many bands, many styles - but, as he sang on his last great  album, "We'll just have to see how it goes".

SAM COOKE - 50 YEARS GONE

A sobering fifty years after Sam Cooke's untimely death, I mark this anniversary - December 11 - by re-publishing the entry on Sam in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

Cooke, Sam [1931 - 1964]

Sam Cook was born 22 January 1931 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, but grew up in Chicago, one of eight children of a Baptist preacher; they formed the Singing Children when he was nine. Later he moved over to the Highway QCs and then replaced R.K. Harris as lead tenor of the Soul Stirrers. With this innovative and contemporary gospel group he began recording in 1951 (though his singing at this point is often overrated: his version of Thomas Dorsey’s great song ‘Peace In The Valley’, pallid and unmemorable, cannot compare with those by ELVIS PRESLEY and LITTLE RICHARD).

            He ‘went secular’ in 1957, becoming Sam Cooke and starting a long and splendid run of hits, almost all his own compositions, many of which have been covered time and again by artists of the stature of VAN MORRISON. He was a consummate vocalist and a bright, lithe, sexy young man, whose TV appearances helped make black sexuality visible to young white America. He may have learnt his trade in gospel but church-going modesty was not his style.

Sam Cooke was very popular but never popular enough. Most of his work is of undimmed excellence: great records by a terrific songwriter and a masterful soul singer of panache, integrity and expressive generosity. In 1960-63 he was in his prime, not least in live performance (try One Night Stand: Sam Cooke Live At The Harlem Square Club, 1963).

            By the end of 1963, Cooke had notched up eighteen Top Thirty hits since 1957; but pop success was not enough. Earlier that year he had heard Bob Dylan’s ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ and is reported to have felt shaken that it had been ‘a white boy’ who had written so potent a song  -  a song that eloquently, if implicitly, addressed the urgent issues of political struggle that so deeply involved his own race. He began performing the Dylan song himself (a version is captured on the album Live At The Copacobana, 1964), but his more profound response was to write the moving, thoughtful and dignified ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ (originally called ‘My Brother’) which he recorded on January 30, 1964.

            Despite the quality of the song and Cooke’s recording of it, it was slipped out as an album track (on Ain’t That Good News) and its release as a single was long delayed. On December 11, 1964, Cooke died after being shot in unclear circumstances in an LA motel. He was 33 years old. Two weeks later, and with one verse edited out, ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ was released… as the B-side of ‘Shake’.

Dylan mentions the song in Chronicles Volume One; the context is complex but this is what he writes: ‘Sometimes you know things have to change, are going to change, but you can only feel it  -  like in that song of Sam Cooke’s, “Change Is Gonna Come”…’ And in an interview in 2001, he reveals an awareness of Cooke’s early gospel group the Highway QCs, recalling that when he was ‘12 years old, listening to the radio… at midnight the gospel stuff would start, and so I got… to be acquainted with the Swan Silvertones and the Dixie Hummingbirds and, you know, Highway QCs…’

Dylan cut a version of Cooke’s ‘Cupid’ with GEORGE HARRISON in a New York City studio in May 1970 (which would have been effective had Dylan remembered more than a handful of the words) and attempted Cooke’s hit ‘Chain Gang’ at March and April 1987 studio sessions for the Down In The Groove album. (These remain uncirculated.)

‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ was revisited by THE BAND on their Moondog Matinee album of oldies in the 1970s, and on Dylan’s 1978 world tour, on which various of his back-up singers were given solo spots (with Dylan and the band playing behind them), CAROLYN DENNIS sang ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ in Hitler’s old Zeppelinfeld stadium at Nuremberg that July 1 and again at Blackbushe Aerodrome in England two weeks later.

Matching song to venue with his usual quiet shrewdness, Dylan finally performed a respectful version of ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ himself live at the home of early-60s R&B and black aspiration, the Apollo Theater in Harlem, NYC, on March 28, 2004, forty years after the creation of the song for which his own work had been a catalyst.

            In 2004, Rolling Stone magazine asked 172 prominent music-industry figures, including artists such as JONI MITCHELL, to vote for the all-time 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. Sam Cooke’s ‘Change Is Gonna Come’ came in at no.12  -  two places higher than ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’.

            Dylan, however, was at no.1 with ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.

[The Soul Stirrers: ‘Peace In The Valley’, nia, CD-reissued on Sam Cooke: My Gospel Roots, Xtra 26471, UK, 2005. Sam Cooke: One Night Stand: Sam Cooke Live At The Harlem Square Club, 1963, NYC, 12-13 Jan 1963, RCA PL85181, Rome, 1985; ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, NYC, 7-8 Jul 1964, Live At The Copacobana, Victor LPM /LSP-2970, NYC, 1964; ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’, 30 Jan 1964, RCA 8486, NYC, 1964. Bob Dylan: ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’, NYC, 28 Mar 2004, broadcast on NBC TV’s program ‘Apollo at 70: A Hot Night In Harlem’, NY, 19 Jun 2004; Chronicles Volume One, 2004, p.61; interview for WTTW-TV, Chicago, 27 Oct 2001. The Band: ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’, Bearsville NY, Mar-Jun 1973, Moondog Matinee, Capitol SW-11214, 1973. Bob Dylan, Rolling Stone poll seen online 7 Aug 2005 at www.rollingstone.com/rs500moretext.]