The celebrated and influential folksinger and activist Peter Seeger died on Monday at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan.
He was 94 years old.
Seeger scored hit records in the early 1950s as a member of the Weavers; their recording of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene” topped the charts for 13 weeks in 1950, according to Wikipedia.
Mr. Seeger’s career carried him from singing at labor rallies to the Top 10 to college auditoriums to folk festivals, and from a conviction for contempt of Congress (after defying the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s) to performing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at an inaugural concert for Barack Obama.
For Mr. Seeger, folk music and a sense of community were inseparable, and where he saw a community, he saw the possibility of political action.
In his hearty tenor, Mr. Seeger, a beanpole of a man who most often played 12-string guitar or five-string banjo, sang topical songs and children’s songs, humorous tunes and earnest anthems, always encouraging listeners to join in. His agenda paralleled the concerns of the American left: He sang for the labor movement in the 1940s and 1950s, for civil rights marches and anti-Vietnam War rallies in the 1960s, and for environmental and antiwar causes in the 1970s and beyond. “We Shall Overcome,” which Mr. Seeger adapted from old spirituals, became a civil rights anthem.
Rolling Stone called Seeger “a seminal figure in American music who kept folk music alive and influenced generations of musicians from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen…”
Pete Seeger and The Weavers sing “Goodnight Irene”:
“Beans in My Ears”:
Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, “Playboys and Playgirls”:
Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen, “This Land Is Your Land,” Obama inauguration:
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Take a look at Bob Dylan’s face in the above photo, which appeared today onAmerican Songwriter.Then think about what it would be like if everyone you came in contact with wanted something from you. A photo. An autograph. A response to a question. An acknowledgement.
Something.
They always want some goddamn thing.
So maybe, even if it’s another artist, even if it’s Jeff Tweedy, you wouldn’t be in the greatest mood when the photographer took the photo.
Here’s Tweedy on playing “The Weight” with Dylan:
“We played that song in a different key every night. It was never in the same key. The tour manager would say, ‘It’s in A flat tonight.’ Or we’d already be out onstage, and we’d talk to Tony Garnier, the bass player, and somehow ask him which key and he’d say, ‘A flat.’ And that’s in front of a lot of people. But Dylan never told us. I think he likes putting himself and his band into a corner, to see if they can play their way out.”
“The Weight,” Virginia Beach, VA, on July 24, 2013:
Hoboken, NJ, on July 26, 2013:
Another clip of the same performance:
Verizon Wireless Amphitheater, Irvine, CA, August 3, 2013:
Another clip of the same performance:
Verizon Wireless Amphitheater, Irvine, CA, August 4, 2013:
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January 27, 2014 marks the 48th anniversary of Bob Dylan recording “I’ll Keep It With Mine.”
This song is endlessly mysterious. It’s a favorite of mine, and like most of my favorite Dylan songs, I’ve thought about it for years and still don’t know all of what it’s about. It’s a song that keeps on giving, year after year.
The session when Dylan recorded this song took place in New York at Columbia’s Studio A. It was the last New York session done for Blonde On Blonde. The album was completed in Nashville.
This version of “I’ll Keep It With Mine” was recorded on January 27, 1966, and, as we all know, wasn’t included on Blonde On Blonde. It was never recorded for a Dylan studio album.
The song ended up on the first “Bootleg Series” release, Bob Dylan The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 [rare & unreleased] 1961-1991.
This version was recorded a year earlier on January 14, 1965:
This version was recorded June 1964 and released on The Whitmark Demos 1962-1964:
Plus an instrumental version recorded in Nashville that was used in Wim Wender’s “Paris, Texas.”
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Last year, my first confrontation with Haim came when I saw their set at the Treasure Island Music Festival in the Bay Area.
Afterward, on my way home, I streamed Haim’s Days Are Gone. At the time, I thought the group’s live set blew away the album. But with time I’ve come to dig the album.
Flash forward to the day I listened to Sky Ferreira for the first time. It was a track off her previous album and I didn’t get it. But when her latest album, Night Time, My Time came out I gave it a listen and I liked it a lot. I heard a modern day version of Phil Spector’s Wall-of-Sound.
Both albums made my best-of-2013 list.
The link between those albums, as well as Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City turns out to be 34-year-old producer Ariel Rechtshaid, who has also worked with Usher, Justin Bieber, Snoop Dogg and Cass McCombs.
Many eminent producers say they don’t have a signature sound, and they may be telling the truth, but they do have signature associations, or ideals. They want to make records for the radio, or records that are expansive, organic or precise, or they favor certain mixes and combinations of sounds, or they tend to work with artists in one particular stratum of the pop industry. Most producers — including this year’s other nominees — have a trackable version of what is often called “production values.” Mr. Rechtshaid (pronounced RECK-shide) avers that he doesn’t have a signature sound, and it’s hard to say what his production values are. In general, it has been unclear exactly what he’s up to. I suggested a listening session with him on his own turf, so I could try to crack the code.
And later in the article:
In his studio, I suggested that we listen to some pop music that he found particularly meaningful. For a while, he talked about context: the desensitizing experience of hearing a song too many times, even a great one by Michael Jackson or Chaka Khan or Fleetwood Mac; the stigmas that attach to certain songs or sounds or styles when certain opinion makers deem them uncool; the importance of helping musicians make music that sounds like no other well-known reference point.
As an example, Mr. Rechtshaid came up with the Clash’s 1982 song “Rock the Casbah,” then started looking up other songs on YouTube, pushing toward an interesting idea. He loved the first Clash album and the first Sex Pistols album, both released in 1977, and other punk records from the movement’s beginnings. They were “honest,” he said, “in that they reflect what’s going on around them.”
But by the time of its fifth album, “Combat Rock” — which included “Rock the Casbah” — the Clash had moved toward disco, reggae and rockabilly. And in the shift away from naïve impulses toward a bigger sound and more expensive production values — in a possible move away from some of their original impulses — something important happened. “The best bands kept making records and had this evolution, where by the end, by their commercial phase or sellout phase, the records are from outer space. No one else could have made that record. You don’t know what era it’s from.”
One of the people who read that post, Will Dockery, commented on that post and included a short quote from a Rolling Stone interview that Jonathan Cott did with Dylan that was published January 26, 1978 (the day after “Renaldo & Clara” was first shown in movie theaters in New York and Los Angeles).
I found the interview and have included some of it below.
While Dylan is specifically talking about what influenced his filmmaking, clearly film has influenced him as an artist in many ways.
I’ve excerpted a section where he talks about other directors and mentions a few films. You can find the interview in a book edited by Jonathan Cott called “Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews” published by Wenner Books. It’s also online here (but it’s possible you have to be a Rolling Stone subscriber to get access — I’m not sure).
The movie that creates the context for this conversation is, of course, “Renaldo & Clara.”
Bob Dylan: I know this film is too long. It may be four hours too long — I don’t care. To me, it’s not long enough. I’m not concerned how long something is. I want to see a set shot. I feel a set shot. I don’t feel all this motion and boom-boom. We can fast cut when we want, but the power comes in the ability to have faith that it is a meaningful shot.
You know who understood this? Andy Warhol. Warhol did a lot for American cinema. He was before his time. But Warhol and Hitchcock and Peckinpah and Tod Browning . . . they were important to me. I figured Godard had the accessibility to make what he made, he broke new ground. I never saw any film like Breathless, but once you saw it, you said: “Yeah, man, why didn’t I do that, I could have done that.” Okay, he did it, but he couldn’t have done it in America.
Trailer for “Breathless”:
“Breathless” (Dutch subtitles):
Excerpt from Tod Browning’s “Freaks”:
Andy Warhol’s “Beauty Number 2”:
Jonathan Cott: But what about a film like Sam Fuller’s Forty Guns or Joseph Lewis’ Guns Crazy?
Yeah, I just heard Fuller’s name the other day. I think American filmmakers are the best. But I also like Kurosawa, and my favorite director is [Luis] Buñuel; it doesn’t surprise me that he’d say those amazing things you quoted to me before from the New Yorker.
Buñuel’s “El Angel Exterminador”:
[Earlier in the interview Cott read a Buñuel quote to Dylan from a New Yorker interview: “Mystery is an essential element in any work of art. It’s usually lacking in film, which should be the most mysterious of all. Most filmmakers are careful not to perturb us by opening the windows of the screen onto their world of poetry. Cinema is a marvelous weapon when it is handled by a free spirit. Of all the means of expression, it is the one that is most like the human imagination. What’s the good of it if it apes everything conformist and sentimental in us? It’s a curious thing that film can create such moments of compressed ritual. The raising of the everyday to the dramatic.”]
I don’t know what to tell you. In one way I don’t consider myself a filmmaker at all. In another way I do. To me, Renaldo and Clara is my first real film. I don’t know who will like it. I made it for a specific bunch of people and myself, and that’s all. That’s how I wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin'” — they were written for a certain crowd of people and for certain artists, too. Who knew they were going to be big song
The film, in a way, is a culmination of a lot of your ideas and obsessions.
That may be true, but I hope it also has meaning for other people who aren’t that familiar with my songs, and that other people can see themselves in it, because I don’t feel so isolated from what’s going on. There are a lot of people who’ll look at the film without knowing who anybody is in it. And they’ll see it more purely.
Eisenstein talked of montage in terms of attraction — shots attracting other shots — then in terms of shock, and finally in terms of fusion and synthesis, and of overtones. You seem to be really aware of the overtones in your film, do you know what I mean?
I sure do.
Eisenstein once wrote: “The Moscow Art is my deadly enemy. It is the exact antithesis of all I am trying to do. They string their emotions together to give a continuous illusion of reality. I take photographs of reality and then cut them up so as to produce emotions.”
Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin”:
What we did [in Renaldo & Clara”] was to cut up reality and make it more real . . . Everyone from the cameramen to the water boy, from the wardrobe people to the sound people was just as important as anyone else in the making of the film. There weren’t any roles that well defined. The money was coming in the front door and going out the back door: The Rolling Thunder tour sponsored the movie. And I had faith and trust in the people who helped me do the film, and they had faith and trust in me.
In the movie, there’s a man behind a luncheonette counter who talks a lot about truth — he’s almost like the Greek chorus of the film.
Yeah, we often sat around and talked about that guy. He is the chorus.
That guy at one point talks about the Movement going astray and about how everyone got bought off. How come you didn’t sell out and just make a commercial film?
I don’t have any cinematic vision to sell out. It’s all for me so I can’t sell out. I’m not working for anybody. What was there to sell out?
Well, movies like “Welcome to L.A.” and “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” are moralistic exploitation films — and many people nowadays think that they’re significant statements. You could have sold out to the vision of the times.
Right. I have my point of view and my vision, and nothing tampers with it because it’s all that I’ve got. I don’t have anything to sell out.
Renaldo and Clara has certain similarities to the recent films of Jacques Rivette. Do you know his work?
I don’t. But I wish they’d do it in this country. I’d feel a lot safer. I mean I wouldn’t get so much resistance and hostility. I can’t believe that people think that four hours is too long for a film. As if people had so much to do. You can see an hour movie that seems like 10 hours. I think the vision is strong enough to cut through all of that. But we may be kicked right out of Hollywood after this film is released and have to go to Bolivia. In India, they show 12-hour movies. Americans are spoiled, they expect art to be like wallpaper with no effort, just to be there.
Jacques Rivette’s “Paris Nous Appartient”:
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