Bob Dylan, Mark Shark, George Harrison, Bobby Tsukamoto, John Fogerty and Taj Mahal. Photo via Mark Shark’s taooftuningscom/.
Twenty-Seven years ago, on February 19, 1987, a remarkable meeting of the superstars took place on stage at the Palamino Club in North Hollywood.
Bob Dylan, George Harrison, and John Fogerty joined Taj Mahal and the Graffiti Band, which included slide guitarist Jessie Ed Davis, guitarist Mark Shark, bassist Bobby Tsukamoto, drummer Gary Ray, and keyboardist Jim Ehinger.
Rear L-R, Jesse Ed Davis, Gary Ray, John Fogerty, Bob Dylan, Bobby Tsukamoto, John Trudell, George Harrison; Front: Jim Ehinger, Mark Shark. Photo via Mark Shark’s taooftuningscom/.
George Harrison took charge of the jam session. He sang “Matchbox,” “Honey Don’t” and “Dizzy Miss Lizzy,” all three of which The Beatles did covers of, and Dylan’s “Watching the River Flow. He also shared vocals with Dylan on a version of Buddy Holly’s “Peggy Sue.”
At one point during “Watching the River Flow” Harrison improvised a verse and worked Bob Dylan’s name into it. Jesse Ed Davis, by the way, played on Dylan’s original recording of the song.
John Fogerty sang Elvis’ hit, “Blue Suede Shoes,” and before launching into his best known song, “Proud Mary,” which Fogerty hadn’t sung in years, he said, “OK we’re gonna do this ’cause Bob Dylan asked me to do this. Holy Mackerel.”
Taj Mahal sang “Johnny D. Goode” and “Willie and the Hand Jive” with Dylan, Harrison and Fogerty leaning into a shared microphone for the background vocals. Amazing!
What is unique about these jams is how relaxed the artists seem. Unlike so many superstar jams, this one doesn’t appear calculated. The artists are having a great time singing songs they want to sing.
And Dylan is seemingly comfortable in his role as rhythm guitarist, playing a Fender Jazzmaster (one of the types of Fender electric guitars which he played in the mid-’60s), occasionally adding very loose harmony vocals.
Dig the video, which is funky. Sound is pretty good.
“Matchbox,” Taj Mahal and George Harrison trade off on the verses, and Harrison sings “Honey Don’t” and “Watching the River Flow”:
Bob Dylan, George Harrison sing “Peggy Sue”, Harrison sings “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”:
John Fogery sings “Blue Suede Shoes” and “Proud Mary”:
Taj Mahal sings “Johnny B. Goode” and Willie and the Hand Jive” and “Hey, Bo Diddley”:
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The mythic travels of Sal Paradise reduced to a Google Maps trip.
Gregor Weichbrodt’s “On the Road for 17527 Miles” removes all the poetry from Kerouac’s journey.
The Guardian says of the book:
Going through On the Road with a fine toothcomb, Weichbrodt took the “exact and approximate” spots to which the author – via his alter ego Sal Paradise – travelled, and entered them into Google’s Direction Service. “The result is a huge direction instruction of 55 pages,” says the German student. “All in all, as Google shows, the journey takes 272.26 hours (for 17,527 miles).”
Weichbrodt’s chapters match those of Kerouac’s original. He has now self-published the book, which is also part of the current exhibition Poetry Will Be Made By All! in Zurich, and has, he says, sold six copies so far.
“To me it’s a concept, an idea. It’s odd in which rational ways we discover, travel the world,” he said. “If Kerouac had a GPS system, he would have probably felt less free. I find it rather discouraging to go on self-discovery with a bunch of route directions.” On the Road, he added, “fitted the idea of the concept I had in mind, but I’m not a beatnik groupie”.
We’ve been waiting six years for a new album from Beck.
Now Morning Phase, Beck’s long-awaited followup to Modern Guilt, is here.
You can stream it now, a week in advance of release, at NPR’s first listen.
In his discussion of the album at the NPR website, Tom Moon writes:
The thumbnail summary already circulating for Beck’s 12th full-length album goes like this: It’s a sequel to Sea Change, the brooding 2002 record frequently mentioned as his masterpiece.
This is useful, to a point, for placing Morning Phase in a general neighborhood. But, like so many descriptors flying around, it doesn’t convey much about the work itself — especially since “sequel” is often shorthand for “copy,” which this most certainly is not. To get a sense of the latest turns in Beck’s journey, go directly to “Wave,” one of several pieces from Morning Phase built on the entrancing string orchestrations of David Richard Campbell, the singer-songwriter’s father. Here, you’ll find no conventional strumming, no weepy pedal-steel guitar, no drums at all — just low strings droning in support of a disconsolate, almost detached vocal. Through the somber haze comes a melody defined by strangely upturned half-steps, culminating in unsettling repetitions of the word “isolation,” over and over.
“Wave” has little in common with what most think of as pop music — and, for that matter, with what most think of as Beck music. Even those who know Sea Change will be surprised by the song’s stark sense of drama. In a recent All Songs Considered interview, Beck describes the long interval between Morning Phase and 2008’s Modern Guilt as a process of rediscovery. He was contending with personal issues, including a serious back injury that prevented him from performing, and when he found it difficult to write for himself, he devoted his energy to covers of classic records and writing for other artists (his 2012 Song Reader, the sheet-music folio, is one byproduct). It took him a long time to develop the new album, he says, because he’d been challenging himself to write in different ways — and didn’t always believe that the results were worth sharing.
Bob Dylan was used to recording at Columbia Records’ Studio A in New York, so it was natural that when he began recording the album that would become Blonde On Blonde, he would return to the studio where he’d worked previously.
This time he went in with his touring band, The Hawks. But the onstage fireworks mostly didn’t translate into studio recordings that satisfied Dylan.
Six sessions were held in New York, but they were frustrating for Dylan. He wasn’t getting the sound he wanted, and only one song from all those sessions, “One Of Us Must Know (Sooner Or Later),” would end up on the album.
Dylan’s producer, Bob Johnston, had suggested a change of scene during the Highway 61 Revisited sessions: Columbia Music Row Studios in Nashville. Now Dylan decided to take Johnston’s advice.
On February 14, 1966, Dylan showed up in Nashville for sessions that would produce the bulk of the recordings that would be used on Blonde On Blonde, which I think is Dylan’s true masterpiece.
Sean Wilentz wrote in a 2007 issue of the Oxford American about the making of Blonde On Blonde:
Nashville had been ascending as a major recording center since the 1940s. By 1963, it boasted 1,100 musicians and fifteen recording studios. After Steve Sholes’s and Chet Atkins’s pioneering work in the 1950s with Elvis Presley, Nashville also proved it could produce superb rock & roll as well as country & western, r&b, and Brenda Lee pop. That held especially true for the session crew Johnston assembled for Dylan’s Nashville dates. Trying to plug songs for Presley’s movies, Johnston had hooked up for demo recordings with younger players, many of whom, like McCoy, had moved to Nashville from other parts of the South. Charlie McCoy and the Escorts, in fact, were reputed to be Nashville’s tightest and busiest weekend rock band in the mid-1960s; the members included the guitarist Wayne Moss and the drummer Kenneth Buttrey who, along with McCoy, would be vital to Blonde on Blonde.
Johnston’s choices (also including Jerry Kennedy, Hargus “Pig” Robbins, Henry Strzelecki, and the great Joseph Souter, Jr.—aka Joe South, who would hit it big nationally in three years with “Games People Play”) were certainly among Nashville’s top session men. Some of them had worked with stars ranging from Patsy Cline, Elvis Presley, and Roy Orbison to Ann-Margret. But apart from the A-list regular McCoy (whose harmonica skills were in special demand), they were still up-and-coming members of the Nashville elite, roughly Dylan’s age. (Robbins, at twenty-eight, was a relative old-timer; McCoy, at twenty-four, was only two months older than Dylan; Buttrey was just turning twenty-one.) Although too professional to be starstruck, McCoy says, they knew Dylan, if at all, as the songwriter from “Blowin’ in the Wind” or simply as a guy from New York, an interloper. But they were much more in touch with what Dylan was up to on Blonde on Blonde than is allowed by the stereotype of long-haired New York hipsters colliding with well-scrubbed Nashville good ol’ boys. One of Dylan’s biographers reports that Robbie Robertson found the Nashville musicians “standoffish.” But the outgoing Al Kooper, who had more recording experience, recalls the scene differently: “Those guys welcomed us in, respected us, and played better than any other studio guys I had ever played with previously.”
Three songs were recorded on February 14, 1966 that made it onto the album: “Fourth Time Around,” “Visions of Johanna” and “Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat”.
The next day, February 15, 1966. Dylan cut a keeper version of “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”
The February 1966 sessions concluded on the 16th when Dylan recorded a useable take of “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again.”
He would return in March 1966 to finish recording the album.
Below are the takes that were used on the album, some alternate takes and some live versions.
“Fourth Time Around,” Blonde On Blonde version:
“Fourth Time Around,” live at the Manchester Free Trade Hall May 17, 1966:
“Fourth Time Around,” Rolling Thunder Review, Civic Center, Augusta, ME November 26, 1975:
“Fourth Time Around,” Royal Albert Hall, May 27, 1966:
“Fourth Time Around,” live in Australia, 1966:
“Visions of Johanna,” Blonde On Blonde Version:
æVisions of Johanna,æ alternate take November, 30, 1965:
“Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” Blonde On Blonde version:
“Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat” [Alternate Take], January 25, 1966 session:
“Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat,” Sydney Stadium, Sydney, AU, April 13th, 1966:
“Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” Blonde On Blonde version:
“Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again,” Blonde On Blonde version:
“Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again,” alternate take, Feb 17, 1966:
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Mona Simpson at her ‘desk.’ Photo via the New York TImes. Photo by Magnus Unnar
This photo essay with words provides some insight into what makes for the right enviroment for writing — at least for these five writers: Colson Whitehead, Douglas Coupland, Mona Simpson, Joyce Carol Oates and Roddy Doyle.
As Al Gore notes in his New York Times review of Elizabeth Kolbert’s latest dispatch from the first row of’ Man Vs. Planet Earth,’ “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” Kolbert has been documenting our continuing assault on our environment and all who live here for some time now.
Gore writes:
Over the past decade, Elizabeth Kolbert has established herself as one of our very best science writers. She has developed a distinctive and eloquent voice of conscience on issues arising from the extraordinary assault on the ecosphere, and those who have enjoyed her previous works like “Field Notes From a Catastrophe” will not be disappointed by her powerful new book, “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.”
Kolbert, a staff writer at The New Yorker, reports from the front lines of the violent collision between civilization and our planet’s ecosystem: the Andes, the Amazon rain forest, the Great Barrier Reef — and her backyard. In lucid prose, she examines the role of man-made climate change in causing what biologists call the sixth mass extinction — the current spasm of plant and animal loss that threatens to eliminate 20 to 50 percent of all living species on earth within this century.
Extinction is a relatively new idea in the scientific community. Well into the 18th century, people found it impossible to accept the idea that species had once lived on earth but had been subsequently lost. Scientists simply could not envision a planetary force powerful enough to wipe out forms of life that were common in prior ages.
In the same way, and for many of the same reasons, many today find it inconceivable that we could possibly be responsible for destroying the integrity of our planet’s ecology. There are psychological barriers to even imagining that what we love so much could be lost — could be destroyed forever. As a result, many of us refuse to contemplate it. Like an audience entertained by a magician, we allow ourselves to be deceived by those with a stake in persuading us to ignore reality.
On January 17, 1965, Bob Dylan appeared on “The Les Crane Show” at WABC studios in New York.
He was interviewed at length by Les Crane, and he performed two songs: “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” and “It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleedin’)”
Here’s a bit of the interview. The entire interview is reprinted below the audio.
Dylan: Well, I’m gonna try to make a movie this summer. Which Allen Ginsberg is writing. I’m rewriting …
Crane: Allen Ginsberg, the poet?
Dylan: Yeah, yeah.
Crane: He was on this program you know.
Dylan: Yeah.
Crane: Extolling the virtues of marijuana one night.
Dylan: Really? Allen?? (audience laughter). Sounds like a lie to me (audience laughter).
Crane: That’s really … You think I’m lying?
Dylan: No, I didn’t mean that.
Crane: Allen Ginsberg was sitting in that chair where Caterina Valente is sitting right now and he said that he thought that we ought to legalize pot.
Dylan: He said that?
Crane: Right on the television.
Dylan: Pheeeww!
Crane: Can you imagine that?
Dylan: Nah. Allen is a little funny sometimes (audience roars with laughter).
Crane: Allen’s funny sometimes, huh? Yes … what is this movie going to be about?
Dylan: Oh it’s a, sort of a horror cowboy movie (audience laughter). Takes place on the New York Thruway.
Crane: A horror cowboy movie that takes place .. I don’t think that’s exactly what Tommy Sands had in mind.
Dylan: No, well, its, that’s the kind of movie it’s gonna be though. You know.
Crane: It’s gonna be one of those underground pictures, right?
Dylan: No. It’s gonna be all straight. On the up and up.
Crane: Yeah? Are you gonna star in it?
Dylan: Yeah, yeah, I’m a hero.
I’ve included the songs, audio of Les and Bob’s conversation, and a transcript of the interview.
“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”:
Les Crane interviews Bob Dylan, February 17, 1965:
“It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleedin'”:
Here’s the interview in full:
Crane: Mr Bob Dylan, Ladies and Gentlemen! (applause) (shouts) Hello Bobby!
Dylan: I’m alright!
Crane: Are you plugged in? All right.
Dylan: [sings It’s All Over Now Baby Blue]
Crane: Thank you Bob and I’ll be right back.
—-< break >—-
Crane: How’d it feel?
Dylan: Fine.
Crane: Did it feel good?
Dylan: Felt good.
Crane: Yeah, you were groovy. What’cha doin’ with that?
Dylan: Oh, I’m just trying to get it down so it doesn’t fall in the way of my voice you know.
Crane: We had … looking at that harmonica, have you ever met Jesse Fuller?
Dylan: Sure.
Crane: Jessie was on the show a couple of weeks ago. We didn’t get a chance to talk much but next time he comes back, I want to because he looks like an amazing gentleman. Talking about amazing gentlemen, how old are you?
Dylan: 23!
Crane: 23 years old!
Dylan: Yeah, I’ll be 24 in May!
Crane: Yeah. A lot’s happened to you in just 23 years hasn’t it?
Dylan: Yeah, yeah, fantastic!
Crane: Are you happy about it?
Dylan: Oh, yeah, yeah.
Crane: You oughta be. Because you’re successful at doing, I think, what you want to do more than anything else.
Dylan: Yeah, yeah, I don’t have much to think about.
Crane: You don’t have much to think about? I think you must be thinking about an awful lot of things to write the kind of things you do.
Dylan: Yeah, yeah.
Crane: Tell ’em!
Dylan: Yeah.
Crane: Tell ’em, just for those out there in the audience that might not know all of the songs that you’ve written. Just name a few of the big ones!
Dylan: Oh.
Crane: This is the composer of …
Dylan: SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES!
Crane: No! That ain’t one of the big ones! (audience laughter)
Dylan: No?
Crane: No.
Dylan: Let’s see, One Too Many Mornings.
Crane: How about Blowin’ In The Wind?
Dylan: Yeah? (applause)
Crane: Do you folks. maybe you remember the night that Judy Collins…, and I kept saying “You gotta sing this song, you gotta sing this song” and Judy Collins came out and and sang the full original version of Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall? Well, Bob wrote that!
Dylan: Yeah, I wrote that (applause).
Crane: Who are you waving at?
Dylan: Odetta!
Crane: Odetta! (To audience) Do you know who Odetta is? (lots of applause). Put a light on that lady!! How are you darling? … Talk about great artists! That’s one of them! (To Odetta) You are going to be on show in a while aren’t you?
Odetta: Next month.
Crane: Next month. Yeah, Odetta is all booked …
Crane: When did you first start pickin’ and singin’, Bob?
Dylan: Oh… When I was about ten, eleven.
— continued —
Use this link or the one below below to get to the rest of this post.
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Another in Twin Shadow’s UNDER THE CVRS series, this time a cover of The Smiths’ “There Is A Light That Never Goes Out” with help from singer Samantha Urbani.
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Patti Smith sings “Dancing Barefoot” at the Apostel Paulus Kirche in Berlin on February 12, 2014.
By the way, in case you haven’t noticed, Patti Smith has never sounded better. She was always amazing live, but from the video I’ve seen this past year she is in top form.
Check out the awesome noir guitar from Patti’s son Jackson.
Patti reads from William S. Burroughs book “The Wild Boys”:
“Birdland”:
Also, here she performs “Banga” and “People Have the Power”:
The band:
Voice, guitar: Patti Smith
Piano, Bass, Voice: Tony Shanahan
Guitar, Bass, Special Voices: Jackson Smith
Drums: Sebastian Rochford
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
