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.]

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.]

MAGIC MAC

Here's the entry in my book The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia  on the late Ian McLagan (updated this morning):

McLagan, Ian [1945 - 2014]
Ian ‘Mac’ McLagan was born on May 12, 1945 in Hounslow, Middlesex, England (that is, neither in London nor the countryside out beyond it), grew playing piano, acquiring a Hammond organ and, in an early band, the Muleskinners, backing Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter and other scary figures on their quick, cheap tours of Britain in the early 1960s.
       In 1965 he joined the Small Faces, which turned into the Faces in 1969. The Faces broke up when Ron Wood joined the Rolling Stones; McLagan joined them as a sideman later. In 1984 he was the keyboards player on Bob Dylan’s European tour (Dylan’s first since the semi-gospel tour of 1981), playing from May 28 in Verona, Italy through to Slane, Ireland on July 8: a total of 27 concerts. Thirteen years later, though the detail is murky, he says he was on a session for Time Out Of Mind - including on the song ‘Love Sick’ - but that the versions he played on were not used.
       Near the end of the 1990s, McLagan published a well-received memoir, All the Rage,  and though the original hardback edition is out of print, the paperback is advertised online with this nicely judged short blurb: ‘The book covers pre-Small Faces days with the Muleskinners, the great days with the Small Faces and the Faces. After that Mac plays with a number of bands including the Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt and the ever-cheerful Bob Dylan. He talks about both sides of the Moon (Keith, that is), the losses of Ronnie [Lane] and Steve [Marriott], his fight with drugs and drinks and what Rod Stewart is really like. Furthermore, he gets royalties on this so buy it now.’
       The great British music critic Charles Shaar Murray elaborates on this in the review he gave the book in Mojo in January 1999:
       ‘All The Rage  contains an unfeasibly large helping of unforgettable vignettes of the rich and famous at work and play…. Here’s Keith Richards, back in his druggy period [?], shooting himself up in the arse straight through his jeans, and then walking around with syringe still protruding from his butt. Or Bob Dylan replying to a large man introducing himself as “Hello, Bob, I’m Peter Grant. I manage Led Zeppelin”, with a terse “I don’t come to you with my problems.”’
       Long married to Kim, the former Mrs. Keith Moon (a man much loved by McLagan even though Moon once paid someone to break his fingers - Pete Townshend paid the same man the same amount again not to), until her accidental death in 2006, Ian McLagan lived in Austin, Texas from 1994 until his death from a stroke on December 3, 2014.

[Ian McLagan, All the Rage: A Rock’n’Roll Odyssey, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1998; republished as All the Rage: My High Life with the Small Faces, the Faces and the Rolling Stones, London: Pan, 2000. Time Out Of Mind session claim in interview by Kent H. Benjamin, 5 Dec, 1997 for Pop Culture Press no.44. US, 1998.]

HOAGY AND BOB AND LUCY ANN POLK

On this, the 115th anniversary of Hoagy Carmichael's birth, here's his entry in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

Carmichael, Hoagy [1899 - 1981]

Hoagy Carmichael was born Hoagland Howard Carmichael on November 22, 1899 and raised in Bloomington Indiana. He grew up to be a singer and actor but primarily a popular songwriter. His very first composition was called ‘Freewheeling’, and he also wrote a song titled ‘Things Have Changed’. More famously he wrote or co-wrote, among many, many others, ‘Stardust’ and ‘Georgia On My Mind’.

            Carmichael is one of the many improbable people whose work and persona Dylan admires, possibly just to be perverse. Hoagy’s photo is pinned up on the wall of the shack behind him on the photo by DANIEL KRAMER planned for the US hardback of Dylan’s Tarantula but rejected (it’s reproduced in Kramer’s book Bob Dylan) and in the Empire Burlesque song ‘Tight Connection To My Heart’ Dylan names a Hoagy Carmichael composition. Dylan sings: ‘Well, they’re not showing any lights tonight / And there’s no moon. / There’s just a hot-blooded singer / Singing “Memphis in June”’.

             ‘Memphis In June’ was composed by Carmichael with lyrics by Johnny Mercer (who also wrote the lyric to ‘Moon River’, which Dylan sang one night on the Never-Ending Tour in tribute to the late STEVIE RAY VAUGHN). Dylan’s ‘hot-blooded singer’ is a neat small joke about Hoagy, whose many assets include a calculatedly lizard-like presence. It was a joke Dylan had retained from an earlier version of the song, then called ‘Someone’s Got A Hold Of My Heart’, which he’d recorded at the sessions for Infidels, the album before Empire Burlesque. At least two performances of this have floated around, but the one eventually released officially, on The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3 in 1991, offered these alternative lines: ‘I hear the hot-blooded singer / On the bandstand croon / “September Song”, “Memphis in June”’. Clearly Dylan was determined to retain Hoagy, whatever other changes he made. (‘September Song’ was written by Maxwell Anderson and composed by Kurt Weill for the 1938 Broadway play Knickerbocker Holiday.)

            ‘Memphis’ was written for the 1945 George Raft film Johnny Angel, in which Carmichael played a philosophical singing cab driver. (‘After that I was mentioned for every picture in which a world-weary character in bad repair sat around and sang or leaned on a piano’). Subsequent film roles included being the pianist who sings ‘Hong Kong Blues’ in the Bogart-Bacall film To Have And Have Not, one of Dylan’s favourite hunting-grounds for lyrics in the Empire Burlesque period.

            The least hot-blooded cover version of ‘Memphis In June’ may be by Matt Monro, from 1962; the best (and ‘on a bandstand croonin’’) may be by Lucy Ann Polk, cut in July 1957 in Hollywood. Hoagy himself recorded the song in 1947 with Billy May & His Orchestra and again in 1956 with a jazz ensemble that included Art Pepper. Carmichael and Mercer also wrote that great song ‘Lazy Bones’  -  in twenty minutes, in 1933  -  which was revisited magnificently in the 1960s by soul singer James Ray (who made the original US hits of ‘If You Gotta Make A Fool Of Somebody’ and ‘Itty Bitty Pieces’; in the UK he was unlucky enough to find these savaged in unusually distressing ways, even by the standards of British cover versions of the time, by Freddie & The Dreamers and Brian Poole in the first case and by The Rockin’ Berries and Chris Farlowe in the second).

            Carmichael played ranch-hand Jonesey in the 1959-60 season of the TV series Laramie. In 1972 he was given an Honorary Doctorate by Indiana University back in Bloomington (which is where BETSY BOWDEN got her doctorate for a study of Bob Dylan’s performance art that became her book Performed Literature).

            Hoagy Carmichael died two days after Christmas, 1981. When a retrospective 4-LP box set of his work, The Classic Hoagy Carmichael, was issued in 1988, with copious notes by John Edward Hasse, Curator of American Music at the Smithsonian Institution, it was released and published jointly by the Smithsonian and the Indiana Historical Society. (American hobbyists are so lucky: there’s always plenty of places to go for funding. Imagine trying to get funds to research, compile and write an accompanying book about Billy Fury from the British Museum and the Birkenhead Historical Society.) The Carmichael box-set notes say this, among much else, and might just remind you of someone else (not Billy Fury):

            ‘At first listeners may be distracted by the flatness in much of Carmichael’s singing, and turned off especially by his uncertain intonation. The singer himself said, “my native wood-note and often off-key voice is what I call ‘Flatsy through the nose’”. But... one becomes accustomed to these traits and grows to appreciate and admire other qualities of his vocal performances, specifically his phrasing... intimacy, inventiveness and sometimes even sheer audacity. Also, many... evidence spontaneous and extemporaneous qualities, two important ingredients in jazz.’

_________

So here's 'Memphis In June' by Hoagy:

And by Lucy Ann Polk:

[Hoagy Carmichael: The Classic Hoagy Carmichael, 4-LP set compiled & annotated by John Edward Hasse; issued as 4 LPs or 3 CDs, BBC BBC 4000 and BBC CD3007, UK, 1988; Johnny Angel, , dir. Edwin L. Marin, written Steve Fisher, RKO, US, 1945. Daniel Kramer: Bob Dylan, New York: Citadel Press edn, 1991, p.127. Betsy Bowden: Performed Literature, Bloomington: Indiana University Pres, 1982.]

STEVE GOODMAN: 30 YEARS GONE

September 20, 2014: Today it's 30 years - 30 years! - since the sweet-natured, self-deprecating singer-songwriter Steve Goodman died.

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

Goodman, Steve [1948 - 1984]

Steve Goodman was born on Chicago’s North Side on July 25, 1948, the son of a used car salesman, about whom Steve eventually wrote the song ‘My Old Man’. He started learning guitar and writing songs as a young teenager and while at Lake Forest College and the University of Illinois he began to perform in a local club, soon dropping out of college (in 1969) to make music his career. In this he was never financially successful, though he survived early on by writing and singing advertising jingles. He returned to Chicago after a short stint trying his luck in Greenwich Village and in 1971 was recorded performing live on a local album, Gathering at the Earl of Old Town. A support spot to KRIS KRISTOFFERSON that April led to a record deal with Buddah and a first album, Steve Goodman, in 1971. Typically, as soon as Goodman had Kristofferson’s attention, he insisted he go and hear another performer who deserved to be discovered too  -  his friend JOHN PRINE, whose song ‘Donald and Lydia’ Goodman would cover on his own début album.

            That album also offers Goodman’s signature song, ‘City of New Orleans’, which was a hit not for Goodman but for ARLO GUTHRIE  -  and then again, the year of Goodman’s death, a hit for WILLIE NELSON. Also on Steve Goodman’s first album is the good-naturedly parody of a country song ‘You Never Even Call Me By My Name’ (which Prine had co-written but wouldn’t take credit for); this too would become a hit, a couple of years later and for David Allen Coe.

            All this tells the Goodman story: he wrote songs others had hits with, and he was, as writer and performer too, much admired by big-name fellow performers. He was a fine guitarist (he plays on all Prine’s early albums, just as Prine plays on his) and it’s said that when, in solo performances, he broke a guitar string, which was often, he would keep singing while getting a new string out of his pocket, fitting and tuning it, and would then resume his playing unphased  -  yet he never broke through as a performer himself.      In September 1972, with Arif Mardin as producer, Goodman went into Atlantic’s studios in New York to make his second album, Somebody Else’s Troubles, and a single, ‘Election Year Rag’, and for that single, and for the album’s title track, Bob Dylan was a participant. It’s said that Goodman was frustrated at Dylan’s turning up hours and hours late, and perhaps this is why he doesn’t appear on the rest of the material, but he plays piano and sings harmony vocals on these two tracks (both penned by Goodman), along with DAVID BROMBERG on dobro and mandolin, and Prine, among others. The album also included the song that Goodman would come nearest to having a hit with, ‘The Dutchman’  -  the one song he didn’t write. When the album was issued, in early 1973, Dylan was credited as Robert Milkwood Thomas.

            Though Buddah issued The Essential Steve Goodman in 1974 (which also featured ‘Election Year Rag’), it was 1975 before Goodman made his next album, when a label switch gave him greater encouragement and saw an increase in his output. The 1975 album was Jessie’s Jig & Other Favorites; then came Words We Can Dance To (1976), Say It In Private (1977) and High and Outside (1978), which included a duet with then-newcomer Nicolette Larson, and Hot Spot (1980). ‘Chicago Shorty’, as he was dubbed by friends, had also acted as a producer, notably of John Prine’s 1978 album Bruised Orange, and formed his own label, Red Pajama Records, for which he duly recorded Artistic Hair and Affordable Art (both 1983) and his last album, Santa Ana Winds, which reached record stores the day after his death.

            Goodman had been suffering from leukemia all his adult life, and from Chicago made regular and frequent trips to New York for treatment. He moved to the West Coast (to Seal Beach, just below Long Beach, in Southern California) at the beginning of the 1980s, and received treatment in Seattle. The Artistic Hair album cover depicted him standing in front of a hairdressing salon of that name, his own head bald from the effects of chemotherapy. On August 31, 1984 underwent a bone marrow transpant. Twenty days later he died of the liver and kidney failure brought on by his leukemia in hospital in Seattle. He was 36.

[Steve Goodman: ‘Eight Ball’, ‘Chicago Bust Rag’ & ‘City of New Orleans’, Chicago 1970-71, on Various Artists, Gathering at the Earl of Old Town, Dunwich 670, Chicago, 1971, CD-reissued Mountain Railroad, US, 1989; Steve Goodman, NY, 1971, Buddah BDS-5096, US, 1971-2; Somebody Else’s Troubles, NY, Sep 1972, Buddah BDS-5121, US, 1973; ‘Election Year Rag’, Buddah BDA-326, 1973; Artistic Hair, Red Pajama 001, US, 1983; Affordable Art, Red Pajama 002, 1983; Santa Ana Winds, Red Pajama 003, 1984. Many posthumous recordings have been issued, and CD-reissues of the original LPs, some remastered and with extra tracks. There is also a video, Steve Goodman Live From Austin City Limits…And More!, including Prine, Guthrie & Kristofferson, nia, US, 2003.]

 

SALE! "BOB DYLAN ENCYCLOPEDIA GREATEST HITS" CD HALF PRICE

Sale! From today the beautifully digipackaged CD Bob Dylan Encyclopedia Greatest Hits  is half price for a limited period: £5 + p&p instead of £10 + p&p.

The running-time is 56 minutes 34 seconds. Tracklist is of the author (ie me) reading this varied selection of entries from The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

1.  1965-66: Bob Dylan, Pop & the UK Charts  [6:19]

2.   Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat  [3:33]

3.   Being Unable to Die, and Howbeit  [3:00]

4.   Blood On The Tracks  [10:49]

5.   Telegraphy and the Religious Imagination  [4:40]

6.   Eat The Document  [4:38]

7.   Frying An Egg On Stage  [0:52]

8.   Duluth, Minnesota  [3:52]

9.   Musicians' Enthusiasm for Latest Dylan Album, Perennial  [0:52]

10. Dylan in Books of Quotation  [3:31]

11. “Love and Theft"  [13:35]

Buy it now! from www.michaelgray.net/shop.html

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.]

WILFRID MELLERS: A BARELY PERSONAL MEMOIR

Wilfrid Mellers at 90; Downing College Cambridge  20 October 2004 (no photographer credit given)

The literary & music critic and composer and University of York music professor Wilfrid Mellers was born 100 years ago today (ie on April 26, 1914). I can’t claim to have known Mellers at York – I was an English & History student there in the mid-60s and he its founding Music Department Prof, and I doubt we ever spoke. I rarely attended music department events and really only knew of his interest in any “popular music” back then because I chatted a lot with one of his students, a whisky-drinking, fur-coat-wearing girl on whom I was more than somewhat keen, Carolyn Evans-Tipping (now dead). But I formed the strong impression that, classical composers aside, Mellers was exclusively interested in the Beatles, and especially excited by Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band when it was new (while I was infinitely more engaged by Blonde On Blonde). Mellers gave no public indication of interest in Dylan’s work.

I knew from reading paperback collections of F.R. Leavis’ critical journal Scrutiny that Mellers had written literary criticism for it in the deep past (and I quoted him on Hemingway, I think, in my first book, Song & Dance Man: The Art of Bob Dylan, 1972, a book he later reviewed rather pallidly in the New Statesman), but when Leavis himself was a Visiting Professor on campus I never once saw the two men walking or talking together.

Then in the early 1970s Mellers was a talking head on the BBC Radio 4 arts programme Kaleidoscope (as I was, less frequently) and I remember we were once on the same programme, though I was being interviewed down the phone. He spoke about pop/rock as if melody were the important element (so I’d guess McCartney was his favourite Beatle) whereas I was arguing that in rock music melody was peripheral: that ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ hadn’t been important for melody but for sound, impact, sexiness, mystery, difference and feeling - elements far more central to the virtues of rock’n’roll and the blues.

That said, his 1980s book on Dylan and Dylan’s roots - A Darker Shade of Pale: a Backdrop to Bob Dylan - is a wonderful work, ahead of its time for its level of interest in hillbilly music and the like: an interest not so centred around or reliant upon the white part of the Harry Smith collection as that of American critics (then and now). It was a book that deserved to do far better than it did. It was published when Dylan enthusiasts generally paid scant heed to all these old geezers from Kentucky on whom Mellers was rightly so focussed. Most Dylan enthusiasm at the time was still posited on notions of his unique genius rather than on a receptivity to his work’s unfailing dialogue with older forms, musicians and songs.

Here is the entry I wrote on Mellers for 2006's Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (updated here to include his death), which includes a pulling together of more scattered mentions of him written earlier for Song & Dance Man III (1999):

Mellers, Wilfrid [1914 - 2008]

Wilfrid Howard Mellers was born in Leamington (pronounced Lemming-ton) Spa, in the English Midlands, on April 26, 1914. Educated at Cambridge, he fell under the rigorous influence of the pre-eminent and now deeply unfashionable literary critic F.R. Leavis, becoming a literary critic himself and writing for Leavis’ defiant journal Scrutiny before turning towards music, publishing his book Music and Society: England and the European Tradition in 1946 and becoming, by the mid-1960s, the new University of York’s first Professor of Music and a composer of distinction. He continued to straddle the rôles of critic and creative artist, and the genres of popular and classical music. His book Music in a New Found Land, written in the early 1960s and published in 1964, has held up creditably, and is remarkable for, among other things, its early (as it were) critical appraisal of Robert Johnson.

If it seemed an oblique comment when in 1967, in a news magazine survey titled ‘Sixties’, Mellers wrote that Blonde On Blonde was ‘concerned more with incantation than communication’, this may have been because at that point, like so many other musically sophisticated people, his interest in ‘pop’ was almost entirely taken up with an entrancement by the Beatles. He was among those who found the blandishments of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band more beguiling than Dylan’s work, and his book Twilight of the Gods was an early professorial rush into print with a Beatles study.

However, he never stopped paying attention to Dylan’s output, and he was extremely well informed as to many of its antecedents  -  and while in 1980 he could produce the detailed, part-Freudian, part-musicological study Bach and the Dance of God, and three years later Beethoven and the Voice of God, a year after that he could offer A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan. Awkardly titled, and more backdrop than Dylan, it has proved more and more interesting and relevant since its publication in 1984. When it was new, it was received without enthusiasm by many of us who still, as the 1980s dawned, preferred to insist upon the blazingly unerring individuality of Dylan’s art rather than concede that he stood in a tradition occupied by wrinkly old people with fiddles and banjos and obdurately conservative faces. In retrospect we can be grateful for, and a little impressed by, the sharp but serious attention Mellers’ book pays to the Carter Family, Nimrod Stoneman, Aunty Mollie Jackson, Roscoe Holcomb, Jimmie Rodgers and others from among the souls who have haunted Dylan’s imagination and suffused his own art.

In 2004 the York Late Music Festival opened with a weekend’s tribute to Mellers, and that October (not April) a tribute concert was held at Downing College, Cambridge to mark Mellers’90th birthday. He died on 17 May 2008.

[Wilfrid Mellers, Music and Society: England and the European Tradition, London:  Dennis Dobson, 1946; Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music, London: Stonehill, 1964 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965); ‘Sixties’, New Statesman, London, 24 Feb 1967; Bach and the Dance of God, London: Faber & Faber, 1980; Beethoven and the Voice of God, London, Faber & Faber, 1983; A Darker Shade of Pale: A Backdrop to Bob Dylan, London: Faber & Faber, 1984.]

 

SO SAD . . .

The death of Phil Everly (at his home in Burbank CA yesterday, a couple of weeks short of his 75th birthday) is a large marker along rock'n'roll's lost highway. The Everly Brothers loomed as large in my generation's consciousness as Elvis or Buddy Holly. I suppose, all these decades later, we should be surprised that several of the other giants - Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis - are still alive; but Phil Everly's death intensifies my sense of mortality's closeness this morning. I first wrote about the Everly Brothers in Melody Maker  over 40 years ago.

Here's my entry on them in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia. Of course its purpose here is to look at how stongly they influenced Dylan's own work, but it desribes their more general importance as well as I can:

Everly Brothers, the
The Everly Brothers defined the rock’n’roll duet and the sound of adolescent angst. Their unmistakeable harmonies drew on 700 years of Scottish Borders’ misery, transplanted via the Appalachians, to sing out late 1950s teenage confusion. Like Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, the Everly Brothers blueprinted how things would be, and in later years were bitter at receiving less credit for this than rock’n’roll’s solo giants. It typified their knack of snatching sourness from the jaws of sweetness.

            Don, born in Brownie, Kentucky in 1937, and Phil, born in Chicago in 1939, were duetting long before rock’n’roll, on parents Ike and Margaret’s radio show on WKMA in Shenandoah, Ohio. They were seasoned professionals by the time they poured out their magic vocals onto a run of hits that married hillbilly harmonies and Nashville nouse, their full-chorded acoustic guitars embracing Bo Diddley’s exotic rhythms to create the rock’n’roll end of country music’s rich, commercial sounds.

They could not complain at their initial success. After one session for RCA, yielding the rare 1956 single ‘Keep A Lovin’ Me’, they signed with New York label Cadence, later switching to the newly-formed Warner Brothers Records. From 1957 to 1965 they had twenty-eight hits in the British Top 30, and comparable American success, first topping the US charts in 1957 (with ‘Wake Up Little Susie’), and from then till some time in the earlyish ’60s they were constantly having hits, it seemed. ‘All I Have To Do Is Dream’ was another US no.1, also topping the UK charts. ‘Bye Bye Love’, ‘Bird Dog’ and ‘Problems’ were US no. 2s, and ‘(’Til) I Kissed You’ a UK no. 2. Other hits included ‘Let It Be Me’, ‘Take A Message To Mary’, ‘Like Strangers’, ‘Crying In The Rain’ and the UK no.1 ‘Walk Right Back’. One of the great pop death-records, ‘Ebony Eyes’, was theirs too.

            Many of their hits were written by another duo, Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, but the Bryants’ claim that they schooled Don and Phil in their vocal parts was nonsense, and the brothers wrote plenty themselves. Both penned the phenomenally successful début single on Warner Brothers, ‘Cathy’s Clown’, which was another US no.1 and achieved an almost unprecedented nine weeks at no.1 in Britain in 1960. Phil wrote ‘When Will I Be Loved’; Don wrote ‘Since You Broke My Heart’, ‘(’Til) I Kissed You’ and ‘So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad)’.

They were very commercial and they were very good. At a time when most people found a sound by accident, they developed one deliberately and intelligently, bridging what gap there was between pop and modern country music. And at a time when pop’s understanding of music was near-retarded, the Everlys were consistently alert and curious. They handled their own arrangements and they had taste.

They had the gravitas to cover other artists’ crucial songs, including black ones, without apology, from Little Richard’s ‘Lucille’, given a keening slow-motion vocal fall, to blues classics like the immortal ‘Trouble In Mind’ and the cheerily inconsequential ‘Step It Up And Go’ (which Dylan recorded for Good As I Been To You, 1992) and Mickey & Sylvia’s ‘Love Is Strange’. Don, taken down Chicago’s Maxwell Street as a young boy by his father, was ever after aware of gospel and blues. And in an era of pretty pop, the Everlys sought a tougher sound on records like ‘The Price Of Love’ and their extraordinary revival of the standard ‘Temptation’, which pre-figured Phil Spector’s ‘wall of sound’. But like Spector’s ‘River Deep, Mountain High’, the Everlys’ ‘Temptation’ was (by their standards) a flop in the USA, and ‘The Price Of Love’ a bigger one. Don never forgave the American public.

            Then there were the Beatles, whose ‘new’ harmonies made the Everlys old-fashioned overnight. Made redundant before they were thirty, Don and Phil felt (wrongly) that the Beatles had stolen from them without acknowledgment. Sidelined further by Progressive Rock, Don & Phil tried first to sound like Simon & Garfunkel (indeed like anyone but themselves), then responded with more dignity with their influential 1968 album Roots, which, with the Byrds’ Sweetheart Of The Rodeo, catalysed the creation of ‘country rock’ in 1969, the year they’re said to have turned down Dylan’s ‘Lay, Lady, Lay’.

          Everyone had loved Don & Phil except Phil & Don. Under pressure, they couldn’t stand themselves or each other. The Everly Brothers split up in public acrimony, their last performance together on July 14th, 1973.

It emerged eventually that even at the very height of Dylan’s artistic genius and hipness, the tour of 1966, he could still (off-stage) bear in mind work of Everly Brothers from that most sneered-at period of pop, 1960-62: the semi-documentary film of his tour, Eat The Document  -  not screened until 1971 (and then but briefly)  -  catches him in May 1966 performing the Everlys’ 1960 hit ‘When Will I Be Loved?’ in his Glasgow hotel-room. He ‘went public’ on his affection for the Everlys by recording their ‘Let It Be Me’ and ‘Take A Message To Mary’ on his 1970 album Self Portrait (something very badly received by a hip public). The inclusion of Everly Brothers songs was more striking at the time than it is now, since in recent years, through rock 'n’ roll revivals galore, they have been acknowledged as crucial figures in the pre-Dylan era; but when Self Portrait came out, you weren’t supposed to still like or even remember that old stuff: you were supposed to be Progressive and despise the 3-minute single. But Dylan’s ‘Let It Be Me’ is a perfectionist’s re-drafting of the Everlys’ version, in effect; Dylan stays very faithful to their wistful and solid pop world. With ‘Take A Message To Mary’, Dylan does something more, somehow returning the song (in Bill Damon’s phrase) ‘back to the Code of the West’.

By then, Dylan had also written the Everlys a song, ‘The Fugitive’, which the Everlys never recorded. (It turns up in Dylan’s catalogue as ‘Wanted Man’, and has been recorded by Johnny Cash, who brings to it all the animation of a totem pole.) Later, after the Everlys had reluctantly re-formed, they did record the lovely Dylan song ‘Abandoned Love’, a Desire sessions outtake song  -  and they could have done this song justice, expansively and warmly; unfortunately, and uncharacteristically, a rigid rhythm and uncommitted vocals throw it away.

Harking back not to the Everly Brothers’ version but to the well-known later black cover by Jerry Butler and Betty Everett, Dylan re-recorded ‘Let It Be Me’, with Clydie King as vocal duettist, in 1981, and sang it in three 1981 concerts, this time implying that the ‘you’ the song addresses is Christ rather than woman. He has not revisited ‘Take A Message To Mary’. Yet, by coincidence or not, he does re-meet the Everlys on the long instrumental intro to his great ‘Not Dark Yet’ on 1997’s album Time Out Of Mind. Nineteen seconds in, presaged by a sketch of itself a few seconds earlier, a falling guitar-line arrives, laid across the top of the rest, that is straight out of the distinctive musical introduction to the revisit-version of that great early Everlys song ‘I Wonder If I Care As Much’  -  the version we find on their influential Roots album of 1968.

For the Everlys themselves, meanwhile, it had been a further trauma to discover that separately, no-one cared about either of them. On September 23^rd, 1983, with Don grown fat but retaining in spades the charisma he must have been born with, they staged an historic and moving Reunion Concert at the Royal Albert Hall. This they seem doomed to repeat forever. In the 1990s, at the age of 60, spurred to a fat-free diet, Don lost a lot of weight, just as Phil was belatedly gaining it: a coincidence typical of their sibling disharmony.

They still sing exquisitely, and a small segment of their shows offer songs learnt from father Ike, whom they worshipped, and mine-worker Mose Rager: authentic old-time country material. Don plays loving, intense guitar, though sparingly in latterday performances. Singing lead, he lives in the spontaneity of the moment, his phrasing inspired, warm and free. He is an artist. But they hardly dare stray now from their teenage hits, first offered to us [over] half a century ago.

[The Everly Brothers: ‘Keep A Lovin’ Me’, Nashville, Nov 1955, Columbia 1956; ‘Wake Up Little Susie’, Nashville, 1957, Cadence 1337, NYC (London American HLA 8498, London), 1957; ‘All I Have To Do Is Dream’, Nashville, 6 Mar 1958, Cadence 1348, NYC (London American HLA 8618, London), 1958; ‘Bye Bye Love’, Nashville, Apr 1957, Cadence 1315 (London American HLA 8440), 1957; ‘When Will I Be Loved?’, Nashville, 18 Feb 1960, Cadence 1380 (London American HLA 9157), 1960. ‘Let It Be Me’, Nashville, 15 Dec 1959, Cadence 1376 (London American HLA 9039), 1960; ‘Take A Message To Mary’, Nashville, 2 Mar 1959, Cadence 1364 (London American HLA 8863), 1959; both LP-issued The Fabulous Style Of The Everly Brothers, Cadence CLP 3040, NYC, 1960. ‘Cathy’s Clown’, 18 Mar 1960, Warner Brothers 5151, NYC (Warner Brothers WB 1, London), 1960. ‘Temptation’, Nashville 1 Nov 1960, c/w ‘Stick With Me Baby’, Nashville, 27 Jul 1960, Warner Bros. 5220 (WB 42), 1961. ‘Step It Up & Go’, Nashville, Fall 1961, Instant Party, Warner Bros. W (WS) 1430, 1962. ‘Abandoned Love’, London, 1984/5, Born Yesterday, Mercury CD 826 142-2 (LP MERH 80), Holland & London, 1985; ‘I Wonder If I Care As Much’, Summer 1968, Roots, Warner Bros. W1752, 1968. The Everly Brothers: Reunion Concert London, 23 Sep, 1983, Impression IMDP1, 1984.

            Bob Dylan: ‘When Will I Be Loved’, Glasgow, 18-19 May 1966, fragment in Eat The Document, 1971; ‘Let It Be Me’ (with Clydie King), LA, 1 May 1981 (issued in Europe only, as B-side of ‘Heart Of Mine’, CBS A-1406, 1981). Jerry Butler & Betty Everett: ‘Let It Be Me’, Chicago, 1964, Vee-Jay 613, Chicago, 1964. Bill Damon, ‘Herewith, A Second Look At Self Portrait’ in Rolling Stone, Sep 3, 1970.]

BIG JOE WILLIAMS

superb photograph: apologies for not knowing who to credit

Big Joe Williams was born 110 years ago today. Here's his entry in my Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

Williams, Big Joe [1903 - 1982]

Big Joe Williams, not to be confused with Joe Williams, singer with the Count Basie Band in the 1950s, was born in Crawford, Mississippi, on October 16, 1903 but began traveling beyond Mississippi in his youth, playing guitar and singing in lumber camps, and settled to an unsettled life  -  the classic roaming blues musician. He first recorded in 1935, gaining what was, in the Depression, an unusual 10-year contract with Bluebird.

            Linda Dahl, author of Stormy Weather, 1984, a book of profiles of women (mostly jazz) singers, claims that Mary Williams Johnson, not husband Big Joe, wrote his classic ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’, but Dahl’s source is almost certainly careless assumption from the sleevenotes of a series of LPs on the Rosetta label, which were, like Dahl, trying to raise the profile of women’s contributions to music. This admirable aim is not served by dodgy assertions. (At another point the same Mary Williams was the wife of Lonnie Johnson. No claim seems to have been made for her as the composer of his material.)

            In any case, ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ is strongly based on the older common-stock number known as ‘Don’t You Leave Me Here’, which was at least 30 years old by the time Big Joe recorded ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’. It was recorded in its traditional form by Papa Harvey Hull & Long Cleve Rede, as by Sunny Boy And His Pals, in Chicago, on about April 8, 1927 (the same session that yielded the wonderful ‘Hey! Lawdy Mama - The France Blues’, which became one of the treasures of the blues revival era, covered, for instance, by Mark Spoelstra on that compilation album The Blues Project in 1964.)

            Either way, ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ was a big hit for Williams, and he had a lesser success with a 1941 version of ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’. Well-known for his unique 9-string guitar and his erratic delivery, he performed with many of the greats of his day and, unlike so many, continued as a working musician all the way through till the blues revival movement occurred. He didn’t need to be ‘rediscovered’: he was already around.

            When Dylan paid his return visit to Minnesota in December 1961, and was recorded in a Minneapolis apartment, one of his best song-performances was of ‘Baby Please Don’t Go.’ (Dylan has rarely performed this song since those early days; its most recent rendition was when Dylan came onstage and performed it during the encore of a Tom Petty set in Holmdel, New Jersey on August 10, 2003.)

            At some point, Dylan sought Williams out and played with him. According to Blues Revue magazine, the Chicago-based Delmark Records founder Bob Koester (pronounced Chester) got Williams booked into Gerde’s Folk City in Fall 1961, and over a two-week period Dylan sat in with him: and before the end of the run, they were being billed as Big Bill and Little Joe. But according to Robert Shelton’s Dylan biography No Direction Home, 1986, it was in early 1962 that Mike Porco was considering booking Williams, and Dylan pressed him on it, saying ‘He’s the greatest old bluesman. You gotta put him in here.’ Shelton says that he was given a three-week booking that February and that Dylan showed up each night and jammed with him onstage several times. This would seem the more likely version, especially since the album Big Joe Williams at Folk City was recorded there on February 26, according to its own sleevenotes.

            (Extra confusion is added by the Koester camp by his claim that Dylan first showed up at a Big Joe gig in Chicago back in 1957 and befriended him then; Williams makes it worse by claiming that he first met Dylan in the 1940s, when ‘he was very very young, probably no more than six.’ Dylan himself compounds the confusion by writing, as an aside in Chronicles  -  and it is the book’s only mention of Williams  -  that ‘I’d played with Big Joe Williams when I was just a kid.’)

            At any rate, soon after the Gerde’s Folk City booking, in March 1962, Big Joe was in Brooklyn recording for Victoria Spivey’s small label Spivey Records when Dylan asked her if she could use a little white boy on one of her records. She put him back with the almost 60 year old Williams (not an easy man to play with), and the result was a tremendous version of ‘Sittin’ On Top Of The World’ on which Dylan, aged 20, plays very convincing blues harmonica and is also allowed to sing back-up vocals on the title line  -  and indeed more than back-up, since twice in the course of the performance Big Joe is generous enough to keep silent and let Dylan sing the line alone.

            Since Williams was trying to sound still in his prime, and Dylan was trying to sound as ancient as the hills, it’s a comical moot point here as to who sounds the older of the two. Dylan also plays harp behind Williams on a less striking ‘Wichita’, and on a formless jam later titled ‘Big Joe, Dylan and Victoria’ and behind Spivey’s vocals and piano on ‘It’s Dangerous’.

            In 1980 Mike Bloomfield published a short memoir, Me and Big Joe, which not only portrayed the difficulties of their relationship very honestly but also, in Peter Narváez’ phrase, illustrated ‘the cross-cultural triumph of the blues tradition’. Bloomfield wrote: ‘Joe’s world wasn’t my world, but his music was. It was my life; it would be my life. So playing on was all I could do, and I did it the best that I was able. And the music I played, I knew where it came from; and there was not any way I’d forget.’

            As it turned out, Mike Bloomfield died before his mentor, in February 1981. Big Joe Williams died in Macon, Georgia on December 17, 1982.

[Big Joe Williams: ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’, Chicago, 31 Oct 1935; Big Joe Williams: ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’, Chicago 27 Mar 1941, 1st vinyl-issued Big Joe Williams: Crawlin’ King Snake, RCA International INT-1087, London, 1970; Big Joe Williams at Folk City, 26 Feb 1962, Bluesville BVLP 1067, US, 1962. Papa Harvey Hull & Long Cleve Rede, c.8 Apr 1927, 1st vinyl-issued Really! The Country Blues, Origin Jazz Library OJL-2, NY, c.1961. Sunny Boy And His Pals: ‘Don’t You Leave Me Here’, Chicago, c.8 Apr 1927. Big Joe Williams & Bob Dylan: NYC, 2 Mar 1962, ‘Sittin’ On Top Of The World’ & ‘Wichita’, Three Kings & A Queen, Spivey LP 1004, NY, 1964; Big Joe Williams, Victoria Spivey & Bob Dylan, NYC, 2 Mar 1962, ‘Big Joe, Dylan & Victoria’ and Victoria Spivey & Bob Dylan, ditto, ‘It’s Dangerous’, Three Kings & A Queen Vol. 2, Spivey LP 1014, NY, 1972. Bob Dylan: ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’, Minneapolis, 22 Dec 1961.

            Bob Dylan Chronicles quote, p. 182. ‘Big Joe Williams: Memory of the Road’, Blues Revue, Mar-Apr 1995, no further details given, précis seen online 5 Oct 2005 at www.expectingrain.com/dok/who/w/williamsbigjoe.html. Shelton ditto. Peter Narváez: ‘Living Blues Journal: The Paradoxical Aesthetics of the Blues Revival’, collected in Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, ed. Neil V. Rosenberg, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993. Mike Bloomfield, with S. Summerfield: Me and Big Joe, San Francisco: Re/Search Productions, 1980.]

THE IMPORTANT TOM WILSON

Extraordinary that it's now 35 years since Bob Dylan's first “electric" record producer died. But Tom Wilson was much more than Dylan's man. Here's the entry on him from The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia :

Wilson, Tom [1931 - 1978]
Thomas Blanchard Wilson Jr. was born on March 25, 1931 in Waco, Texas, where he attended the A.J. Moore High School - ‘the first school in Waco designed to educate the Negro youth’, as its Historical Marker now notes. Founded in 1881, its third Principal was Tom Wilson’s grandfather, Prof. B. T. Wilson; its fourth was Tom’s father, who took over in 1934. The school’s inspiration was Booker T. Washington and his maxim ‘Take what you have and make what you want’; the school’s motto was ‘A better Moore High through better behavior’; and though its list of what it aimed to instil in its pupils included ‘To refrain from excessive theatre going’, in general Tom Wilson became an exemplar of the school’s positive stance, however old-fashioned and ameliorative it seems today.

Wilson, tall, dark and handsome and an affable young man with a throaty Texan drawl, became a Republican and, as 1970s friend Coral Browning said bluntly: ‘Tom felt let down by blacks. He felt that after the civil rights successes of the ’50s and ’60s, blacks should stop complaining and get on with it. He felt they caused many of their own problems by carrying such large chips on their shoulders.’

Wilson thus occupies an interesting position in the history of those decades from the voteless 1930s to the civil rights struggle and beyond: the son and grandson of educated middle-class blacks inside the segregated school system of the South, he gained a place at Harvard, becoming President of the Young Republican Club and graduating cum laude in 1954. On the other hand he also helped run the Harvard New Jazz Society, got involved with radio station WHRB, moved to New York, founded the jazz record label Transition in 1955, produced radio programmes as from 1958, became jazz A&R director for Savoy, then worked for United Artists and Audio Fidelity before being hired as a staff producer for Columbia in 1963 - the first black producer in the history of the company - by which time he was also executive assistant to the New York State Commission for Human Rights.

Not only did he become Bob Dylan’s producer from Freewheelin’  to Highway 61 Revisited - which is to say, the producer of many of Dylan’s ‘protest’ anthems, the work that saw him go electric and of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ - but then when he moved over to MGM he signed FRANK ZAPPA’s Mothers of Invention and put his own career on the line to let them make an extravagant double-LP as their début release, throughout which they were articulating the kind of anarchic bohemian ‘filth’ that was anathema to Wilson himself (though in truth, of course, Zappa himself was an obsessively hard-working disciplinarian, very anti drugs and alcoholic excess). Zappa said years later: ‘Tom Wilson was a great guy. He had vision, you know? And he really stood by us...’ While producing the second Mothers album, Absolutely Free, Wilson was also supervising the Velvet Underground’s début album The Velvet Underground and Nico. Wilson was, too, the hands-on producer of its track ‘Sunday Morning’, and (albeit against the band’s wishes) edited and re-mixed the album’s other most important tracks: ‘Heroin’, ‘Venus in Furs’, ‘All Tomorrow’s Parties’ and the especially brilliant ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’.

Sometimes his interventionism paid off and sometimes it didn’t. It paid off on The Velvet Underground and Nico; it paid off when, after producing the acoustic SIMON & Garfunkel début album Wednesday Morning 3 A.M., he took its track ‘The Sound Of Silence’, added a rhythm section and some electric guitar, issued it as a single without consulting them at all, and gave them a no.1 hit.

It didn’t work with Bob Dylan when Wilson tried the same thing on him first; nor did it work, in the end, when Wilson tried to make decisions over Dylan’s head in Dylan’s presence in the studio. To start with, though, they got on fine. Wilson replaced JOHN HAMMOND for the final Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan session on April 24, 1963 - a year to the day after the first session - because ALBERT GROSSMAN tried playing games about Dylan’s Columbia contract and Hammond rightly felt that Dylan himself was not trying to walk out on him or the label, that a producer switch would be diplomatic and maybe that a young black producer would be harder to reject. Even if that were a factor in the mix, it would not have weighed heavily: one thing Hammond, Dylan and Tom Wilson had in common was an absolutely undeflected view that people were individuals, not race representatives. When Dylan ‘dropped out of’ supporting civil rights and singing ‘protest’ songs, he always explained this in exactly these terms: that he knew, and wanted to keep on knowing, black people as people, not blacks; and Wilson felt the same. ‘He lived his life unapologetically as a human being, not as a black man,’ said his friend, the cookie magnate Wally ‘Famous’ Amos.

That session yielded ‘Girl of the North Country’, ‘Masters of War’, ‘Talkin’ World War III Blues’ and ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’ - plus the lovely ‘Walls of Red Wing’, given to Witmark as a music publishing demo, circulated widely many years ago and finally released on The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3 in 1991. (Hammond is credited as the producer of this track on the box set liner notes.)

When they worked together on Dylan’s third album, The Times They Are A-Changin’, beginning on August 6, 1963, Wilson rightly allowed Dylan full control. That first day yielded the great, much-neglected ‘North Country Blues’ and attempted several other things, among them the stellar ‘Seven Curses’: another recording that circulated in bootleg form many years ago and saw official release in 1991. The next day’s session yielded four album tracks: ‘Ballad of Hollis Brown’, ‘With God On Our Side’, ‘Only A Pawn in Their Game’ and the glorious ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’. What a day’s work. Further sessions on August 12 and October 23 were separated by momentous events: Dylan’s star-making appearance at the NEWPORT FOLK FESTIVAL that August 17, the appearance at the historic March on Washington D.C. on the 28th, and the less career-important but artistically significant writing of ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’ at JOAN BAEZ’s house in California, followed by a performance that no-one appears to have taped, of the two of them sharing vocals on a début outing for that song when Dylan made a guest appearance at her Hollywood Bowl concert on October 9.

The August 12 session had yielded various further outtakes for retrospective issue nearly 30 years later - the turgid ‘Paths of Victory’, the worse ‘Only A Hobo’ and the magnificent ‘Moonshiner’ (among the greatest vocal performances in Bob Dylan’s entire canon) - but nothing for The Times They Are A-Changin’; but October 24, while adding ‘Eternal Circle’ and ‘Suze (The Cough Song)’ to the list of material held back till 1991, also gave them the album title track plus the lovely ‘One Too Many Mornings’. A further session on Hallowe’en finished off the album with ‘Restless Farewell’. A few days earlier, Wilson had been in charge of the recording of Dylan’s concert at Carnegie Hall (October 26, 1963) from which, as from his New York Town Hall concert of April 12, it had been planned to make a live album, Bob Dylan In Concert, which got as far as a tracks selection and a Columbia job number (77110) but never did see release. No producer credit is given on the tracks issued retrospectively.

The fourth album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, was recorded entirely in one day, June 9, 1964, again with Wilson producing. They also came out with a long-since circulated take of ‘Denise’, the magnificent ‘Mama You Been On My Mind’ and early attempts at ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’. The album was released to a mixed response in August, and on Hallowe’en Wilson supervised another live recording, Dylan’s New York Philharmonic Hall concert, which was released 30 years later as Bob Dylan Live 1964 - The Bootleg Series Vol.6.

Things between them changed after that. In December 1964, Wilson got drummer BOBBY GREGG and others to overdub backings onto the Bob Dylan track ‘House Of The Rising Sun’ (released in 1995 on the Highway 61 Interactive CD-ROM, with packaging that implied that the whole recording had been made back in 1961) and onto three tracks from the Freewheelin’ sessions, ‘Mixed Up Confusion’, ‘Rocks And Gravel’ and ‘Corrina Corrina’, all of which had to have their original backing tracks removed for the benefit of this futile exercise. In an otherwise entertaining and acute article on its subject, ‘The Amazing Tom Wilson’, blogger Eric Olsen makes the absurd claim that it was Wilson’s electric overdubs on ‘House of the Rising Sun’ that planted the seed for Dylan’s electric flowering (‘The folk spell was broken’). Wilson doesn’t need his achievements augmented by that sort of claim; it’s enough that he was the producer of Bringing It All Back Home - achieved in two days of sessions in mid-January 1965 - and of the first sessions for Highway 61 Revisited, that June 15 and 16.

The first of these two days yielded the fast version of ‘It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry’, one take of which - the wrong take, it might be argued - was released in 1991 on The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3, as was the same day’s ‘Sitting On A Barbed Wire Fence’ and a fragment of an early try at ‘Like A Rolling Stone’. (Other outtakes of this were issued in 1995 on the Highway 61 Interactive CD-Rom.) Far more importantly, the second day’s session produced - and Tom Wilson produced - the classic take of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’.

It was Wilson who brought in AL KOOPER, to watch and play a bit of subsidiary guitar. The story of how Kooper switched to organ, Wilson tolerated this, Bob Dylan liked the organ part and got it turned up in the mix and it led to the perfect take of the song - all this is well known: but a key exchange between Wilson and Dylan in the course of all this has usually been played down. When Dylan says ‘Turn the organ up’ and Wilson replies ‘But he’s not an organ player’ Dylan is often quoted as merely saying, ‘I don’t care: turn it up’ - but in fact what Dylan says is ‘Hey, now don’t tell me who’s an organ player and who’s not. Just turn the organ up.’ The difference is small but telling; in that Dylan response is contained all his resentment, perhaps going back a considerable time, at what he perceived as Wilson’s high-handedness: an attitude on Wilson’s part that means he’s always going to under-attend the artist’s instincts and is likely to fail to catch the moment as it flies.

Fair and reasonable or not, that was the end between them. When the sessions for Highway 61 Revisited  resumed on July 29, Wilson had been replaced by BOB JOHNSTON.

Among many other distinctions in a relatively short life, Tom Wilson also produced the Blues Project and ‘discovered’ and signed Hugh Masekela, went into music publishing and was a founding co-owner of the Record Plant studios in New York. At 47, he died of a heart attack, at home in LA, on September 6, 1978.

[Main sources: Eric Olsen, ‘The Amazing Tom Wilson’, posted 23 Oct, 2003 on the Blogcritics.Org web page http://blogcritics.org/archives/2003/10/23/154347.php, incl. for the quotes from Coral Browning, Frank Zappa & Wally Amos; Waco City Directory 1934; Social Security Deaths Index; Moore High School data from its alumni reunion webpages seen online 21 Feb 2006 at www.wacoisd.org/ajmoore/alumni/history.htm; other sources include Al Kooper, Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards, New York: Billboard, 1998 and Robert Shelton, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, New York: Beech Tree Books / William Morrow, 1986.]