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.

________________

BUDDY HOLLY BY DAVE LAING, FROM 1971

I’ve been reading - for the first time since it was new - Dave Laing’s fine little book Buddy Holly, published by Rock Books/November Books in the UK in 1971.

Its atmosphere is, savoured today, soaked in the modesty of the pre-Google age: when we knew we had access to limited knowledge and that finding things out meant taking pains to explore around a subject. Laing’s personal style tends to the beguilingly tentative in any case, but this sense of limitation, of there being room for doubt, of learning being something demanding care and time, is also a symptom of the era.

Perhaps too there was a special compatibility between subject and book because back then there were only a very small number of books about rock music, a subject still regarded with disdain by broadsheet newspapers and the vast majority of publishers. The rock writing of the early 1970s was as far from mainstream as rock’n’roll when The Crickets cut ‘That’ll Be The Day’.

So we may know more about Buddy Holly’s life and work now - and of course we have easy access to hearing every aspirated glottal stop he ever put on tape; but the spirit of the book gets us closer to Holly’s own. It was published only 12 years after that plane crash, and when Dave Laing was only 24: hardly older than Buddy had been. Book and subject occupy a more similar world than ours can do, and comparable niches within it.

One of Laing’s observations, which I’ve not encountered elsewhere, is that Holly differed from the other major rock’n’roll stars in having a long, slow route to success whereas the others found stardom more or less from the start. He failed to get anywhere with the ‘Buddy and Bob’ Nesman Studio sessions at Wichita Falls, and again with the 1956 sessions for Decca in Nashville, returning to Lubbock still an unknown both times:

            “In this Holly is unique, for the first records of most of the young white rock’n’roll singers were their first hits.”

            He could have omitted the word “white”, since the same virtually instant success happened for rock’n’roll’s biggest black stars too, Little Richard and Chuck Berry.

It may be an obvious thing to say, too, as Laing does, that “in most rock’n’roll records...sound dominates meaning” - and that typically a Holly record exemplifies this: “the themes of the words on the page need not necessarily relate to the way the words are sung on the record.” But if this seems obvious, it is at least usefully specific. To say “sound dominates meaning” is a brilliantly economical statement of a truth that applies not just to 1950s rock’n’roll but throughout the whole of pop. I’m drawn towards words, and always have been, and find them infinitely easier to write about than music, yet when I listen back now to 1959-1963 records I bought and thought were great, not only do the words make me cringe but they show me that I never absorbed the verbal import of the words at all then.

I heard them as sounds, and as a kind of expressive colouring for the singer. Only by doing so could I not have found them risible. The last thing the teenage me would have said to my girlfriend was “Bless you - bless every breath that you take”, and yet it splashed through me cheerily enough on the hit single by Tony Orlando, himself only sixteen when he made the record.

(It’s a charming quirk of this book, then, that having insisted on the secondary importance of Holly’s lyrics on his records, Laing pays quite close attention to those lyrics.)

The exception was Elvis, whose records before he came out of the army tended to have lyrics that were either so striking as to break through the sound (‘Heartbreak Hotel’ - and what a sound the lyric had to break through!) or they had meaning that impinged because it augmented and played upon his smouldering image of the dangerous, rebellious sexpot.

Which was, of course, the last thing you could say of Buddy Holly. What he and the Crickets did instead, more significantly, was, as Dave Laing summed up long before most, to open up “new possibilities for guitar-based rock’n’roll groups, and directly [foreshadow] the way many groups of the mid-’60s came to function as self-contained composing and performing units.”

That’s one hell of a prototype to have offered the music, in the early years of rock’n’roll and ever since.

________

To declare an interest - I've known Dave Laing off and on since about the same time this book was published. He was editor of Let It Rock  when we were members of the Let It Rock Writers' Co-operative; he took me in, and we ate toast together a lot, to save me being homeless in London at some point in the 1980s, and in the late 1990s he organised the first Robert Shelton Memorial Conference at Liverpool University at which I was a speaker.

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...

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.]

JAMES BURTON AT 75

Ricky Nelson & James Burton; photographer unknown

On the occasion of James Burton's 75th birthday, here's my entry on him in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

Burton, James [1939 - ]

James Burton was born in Minden, Louisiana on August 21, 1939, moved to Shreveport ten years later and became one of the defining stylists of electric rock’n’roll guitar, playing mainly a Fender Telecaster yet owning 200 other guitars. He worked his way through backing Slim Whitman and others on the Louisiana Hayride while still virtually a child, escaping into session work after playing a striking solo while still a young teenager on the 1957 Dale Hawkins hit ‘Suzie Q’. It was on RICKY NELSON’s records that he became widely noticed and admired, playing a series of discreet yet inventive, tantalisingly brief solos on Nelson’s big hits. It’s astonishing how short the instrumental breaks were on pop singles.

            In 1969 he was asked to back ELVIS PRESLEY on his return to live performance, and stayed in service through all the numbing, demeaning tours until Presley’s death, though he was never free to impose either his flair or his restraint on this overblown orchestral unit.

            His credentials were better respected on albums by Hoyt Axton, JUDY COLLINS, RY COODER and others, and on the Gram Parsons albums GP  and Grievous Angel. After Parsons’ death he was a member of EMMYLOU HARRIS’ Hot Band (between Elvis tours), touring and recording with her. He and the steel player Ralph Mooney made the duets album Corn Pickin’ And Slick Slidin’ in 1966 (CD-reissued in 2005), and five years later Burton made his only solo album, which suffered under the title The Guitar Sounds Of James Burton, the sort of name normally associated with albums by middle-of-the-road hacks, and catches Burton trying haplessly to look early-1970s hip, in one of the world’s nastiest shirts. This album was CD-reissued in 2001.

            James Burton’s connection with Dylan  -  aside from the mere rumor that Dylan had wanted Burton in his band when he first ‘went electric’ in 1965  -  is that when the Never-Ending Tour came through Shreveport on October 30, 1996, the veteran guitarist came on stage and played with Dylan and the band on five numbers: ‘Seeing The Real You At Last’, ‘She Belongs To Me’, ‘Maggie’s Farm’, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and the final encore item, ‘Rainy Day Women Nos. 12 & 35’.

[James Burton: The Guitar Sounds Of James Burton, A&M, US, 1971. James Burton & Ralph Mooney, Corn Pickin’ And Slick Slidin’, Capitol T 2872, US, 1966.]

MY UK TOUR OF BOB DYLAN TALKS STARTS IN SIX DAYS' TIME

The dates are listed on the previous post (below), but here are some of the visuals for them:

MY OWN TOUR OF TALKS IN THE UK, NOVEMBER

MONDAY NOVEMBER 4: GRANTHAM, LINCS
audio-visually illustrated talk:

Bob Dylan & the History of Rock'n'Roll
Guildhall Arts Centre
St. Peters Hill, Grantham NG31 6PZ
7.30pm; tickets £10, concessions £8 buy tickets, and more info here

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 6: NEWPORT, S. WALES
audio-visually illustrated talk:

Bob Dylan & the History of Rock'n'Roll
Studio Theatre
The Riverfront Theatre & Arts Centre
Bristol Packet Wharf, Newport NP20 1HG
7.45pm; tickets £11; buy tickets, and more info here

FRIDAY NOVEMBER 8: BLANDFORD FORUM
audio-visually illustrated talk:

Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues
Bryanston School, Blandford Forum, Dorset
7.30pm; private gig; David Jones Lecture Theatre

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 9: DORCHESTER
audio-visually illustrated talk:

Bob Dylan & the History of Rock'n'Roll
Dorchester Arts Centre
School Lane, The Grove
Dorchester DT1 1XR
8pm; tickets £10, concessions £8; buy tickets, and more info here

SUNDAY NOVEMBER 10: EXETER
audio-visually illustrated talk:

Bob Dylan & the History of Rock'n'Roll
Exeter Phoenix Voodoo Lounge
Bradninch Place, Gandy Street
Exeter EX4 3LS
8pm; £10, concessions £8; buy tickets, and more info here

TUESDAY NOVEMBER 12: HALESWORTH, SUFFOLK
audio-visually illustrated talk:

Bob Dylan & the History of Rock'n'Roll
The Cut, New Cut, Halesworth, Suffolk IP19 8BY
Box Office 0845 673 2123
7.30pm; tickets £10; buy tickets, and more info here

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 14: LEAMINGTON SPA
audio-visually illustrated talk:

Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues
LAMP [Leamington Live Art & Music Project]
Riverside, Adelaide Rd, Royal Leamington Spa CV32 5AH
8pm; tickets £10; buy tickets, and more info here

SATURDAY NOVEMBER 16: BELFAST
audio-visually illustrated talk:

Bob Dylan & the History of Rock'n'Roll
Crescent Arts Centre
2-4 University Road, Belfast BT7 1NH
8pm; £10, concessions £8; buy tickets, and more info here

WEDNESDAY NOVEMBER 20: BURY, LANCS
audio-visually illustrated talk:

Bob Dylan & the History of Rock'n'Roll
The Met, Market St., Bury BL9 0BW
8pm; £10; buy tickets, and more info here

THURSDAY NOVEMBER 21: HELMSLEY, ENGLAND
audio-visually illustrated talk:

Bob Dylan & the Poetry of the Blues
Helmsley Arts Centre
The Old Meeting House, Meeting House Court
Helmsley, North Yorkshire YO62 5DW
7.30pm; £9, concessions £8; buy tickets, and more info here

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.