Producer/artist Daniel Lanois, who produced two Bob Dylan albums, 1989’s Oh Mercy, and 1997’s Time Out Of Mind, told the Vancouver Sun in a story published today, February 25, 2015, that Bob Dylan visited him last year and spent an hour and a half talking to Lanois about how mysterious recording artists were to Dylan when he was a kid.

“He came to my house eight or six months ago and spent a few hours,” Lanois said. “We listened to 21 songs — because he’s made two records of this (Sinatra project). And he said, ‘Let me tell you, Dan: If you have the time, can I tell you how I grew up?’ So we sat in the kitchen. I hadn’t heard a note.

“He spoke for an hour and a half on how, as a kid, you couldn’t even get pictures of anybody. You might get a record but you didn’t know what they looked like. So there was a lot of mystery associated with the work at the time. As far as hearing live music, he only heard a couple of shows a year, like the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra might come through.

“But the music he did hear really touched him and he felt that a lot of that music was written not only by great professional songwriters at the time, but a lot of it was written from the heart, from the wartime, and people just pining for a lover. He felt there was a lot of spirit in that music. He felt there was a kind of beauty, a sacred ground for him.

“After having said all that, we then listened to the music and I felt everything that he talked about. For one of America’s great writers to say, ‘I’m not gonna write a song. I’m gonna pay homage to what shook me as young boy,’ I thought was very graceful and dignified.”

– A Days Of The Crazy-Wild blog post –

Arcade Fire’s Will Butler is writing and recording a song a day this week based upon news stories he reads in The Guardian.

“It was partly inspired by Bob Dylan, who used to announce that certain songs were based on headlines,” Butler told the British paper. “It would be a song he wrote in two weeks or something, such as The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, which is one of the greatest songs ever. So I’ve set myself an impossible bar.”

The first song is based on this article.

Butler also said: “I was reading The Guardian’s live coverage of the forthcoming Greek proposals of how they’re going to pay off their debts, when a little blurb popped up explaining that the Greek markets were closed today because it was “Clean Monday” – the Greek Orthodox equivalent of Ash Wednesday. It was an amazing/hilarious (well, maybe mildly amusing) coincidence to me that the Greek ministers were scrambling and figuring out how to avoid strict austerity on the day that Lent starts.”

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
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[I published my novel, True Love Scars, in August of 2014.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book. Read it here. And Doom & Gloom From The Tomb ran this review which I dig. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]tter

I got hip this excellent album from the late Roebuck “Pops” Staples over at the excellent Wax Atlas site the other day.

Given what a Staple Singers fan Bob Dylan is, I bet he’s digging into this one.

Now you can check it out too.

If you don’t know who the Staple Singers are, you might want to get the rundown over at Wikipedia.

Here’s a video on the making of the album, which Jeff Tweedy did some production and played on.

Here’s some info on this new record from the Anti- website:

The record, which was originally recorded and produced by Pops and daughter Mavis Staples in 1999, now boasts new production as well as bass and guitar by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy, and drums by Spencer Tweedy. Jeff previously collaborated with Mavis on her solo releases, One True Vine and the Grammy-winning You Are Not Alone. The album takes its title from the instruction Pops gave to Mavis as the two listened to the unfinished recording before his death: “Don’t lose this.”

The Chicago Tribune writes “Pops Staples was a musical visionary who played “gospel in a blues key,” as Duke Ellington once told him. His treble-soaked guitar is instantly recognizable as it appears to rise out of the Mississippi mist…” The NY Daily News adds, “the album’s triumph comes in highlighting both the plaintive quality in Pop’s voice and the wily, sexy, stalwart flick of his guitar.” The New York Times says of the record, “It’s done right: lean, un-slick and focused on Pops’s vividly recorded guitar and determined voice, still finding the unexpected pause and turn.”

Track listing:

1. Somebody Was Watching
2. Sweet Home
3. No News Is Good News
4. Love On My Side
5. Friendship
6. Nobody’s Fault But Mine
7. The Lady’s Letter
8. Better Home
9. Will The Circle Be Unbroken
10. Gotta Serve Somebody

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
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[I published my novel, True Love Scars, in August of 2014.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book. Read it here. And Doom & Gloom From The Tomb ran this review which I dig. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]tter

Two weeks after release, Bob Dylan’s critically acclaimed new album, Shadows In The Night, has dropped to #22 on the Billboard Top 200 in the U.S., down from its debut at #7.

Sales in the U.S. for the past week total 23,943 copies.

The album sold 49,791 in it’s first week of release, and total sales in the U.S. to date are 83,734.

The album debuted in the Top Ten in 18 countries last week including the U.K., Ireland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Austria, Italy, Poland and Australia.

The album has received near umiversal accliam from music critics. The album scored a rating of 83 out of 100 at Metacritic, based on 30 reviews from such media as Rolling Stone, the New York Times, Mojo, The Guardian and Pitchfork.

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
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[I published my novel, True Love Scars, in August of 2014.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book. Read it here. And Doom & Gloom From The Tomb ran this review which I dig. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]

At some point in the ’70s I believe, the writer/editor Robert Christgau gave himself the title, “Dean Of American Rock Critics.”

Whether he was serious or joking at the time, that title turned out to be an accurate one, for not only has Christgau been one of the smartest and street-saavy critics in the relatively brief history of rock criticism, but he mentored many of the best critics that came after him.

Now he’s written his memoir, “Going Into The City: Portrait of a Critic as a Young Man.”

Rolling Stone has run an excerpt, it’s real good, and I can’t wait to read the rest of the book.

Here’s some of the Rolling Stone excerpt, in which Christgau talks about Television. You can read all of it here.

It was also a vinyl album, forty-five minutes split right down the middle, and this sealed its status, because side one, which shifts materially song to unforgettable song without diluting a band sound that ignores every parallel no matter how complimentary (Byrds-Dead-Stones are all miles away), is as good as album sides get, rushing forward as one thing yet revealing new details every time you play it again. With addictive guitar riffs securing each track, there’s not a misplaced second, and much of it was recorded in one take. Side two can’t possibly keep up, and doesn’t — I find the devotional “Guiding Light” soupy myself, and only “Prove It” with its droll “Just the facts” stays with me like “See No Evil” or “Venus” or “Friction” or “Marquee Moon” itself. So make side two a high A minus. But side one is an A plus plus plus, and side one is why so many treasure Marquee Moon as a classic.

Going outside Manhattan and against type, I assigned the Riff to Virginia-born Boston Episcopalian Ken Emerson, who loved it, only not in the terms I did. For Emerson, Marquee Moon had it all over reductive Ramones and apocalyptic Patti because Television were “grown up.” Everywhere he listened, music or lyrics, he found a “doubleness,” “a golden mean,” an “insistence on seeing things whole.” But while the doubleness is certainly thematic, remembering how young I was when I latched onto “Vacillation” makes me wonder how grown up it is. What I love most about the lyrics of Marquee Moon is their evocation of that youthful moment when you’re this close to figuring everything out, voicing in very few words a multivalence worthy of that adventure’s complexity and confusion — beautifully, profoundly, naively, contradictorily, romantically, kinetically, jokily, cockily, fearfully, drunkenly, goofily, impudently — so nervous and excited you could fly, or is it faint? And with the single line “Broadway looked so medieval” added to what we know about its East Village provenance, it situates this philosophical action in the downtown night.

Like many great albums and more pretentious ones, Marquee Moon has gathered armies of exegetes set on getting to the bottom of every word, and bless ’em, really. But they’re misguided. Not only don’t I know what all the lyrics mean, Verlaine doesn’t know what all the lyrics mean, and it’s a dead end to speculate. When we ran into this problem with Coleridge (who Verlaine would have ditched for being a junkie like Hell and Lloyd), it was because he let the poem get away from him. Here it’s more like Verlaine wanted the poem to get away from him, because he knew the paradoxes it posed were unresolvable and because he knew the guitars would blast through and lift over. So say “See No Evil” is about the onrushing illimitability of desire and “Venus” is about the enveloping impossibility of love and “Friction” is about the bracing inevitability of conflict and I don’t know what the fuck “Marquee Moon” is about except that it’s ten minutes long and you feel it’ll be perfectly OK with you if it goes on forever, like, er — some amalgam of show business and heaven? C’mon. “Elevation” and “Guiding Light”? Getting high and losing either God or love. “Prove It”? So funny it don’t matter. “Torn Curtain”? Ten minutes again, only not much longer please because this case is closed you just said. Ba-da-boom.

In the long wake of punk’s speedy demise and multiple afterlives, UK extremists and their offspring got permanently exercised about a doubleness that pitted “rockism” against — what, exactly? Sometimes the prog tendencies of “post-punk,” sometimes just pop. This polarity is so stupid I generally refuse to discuss it, but in this case I’ll suspend my disbelief in the interest of provisional clarification. Forced at gunpoint to choose, I’d call myself some kind of poppist — Pop Art was formative for me, I have a history of respecting the charts, and what are perception-altering short-fast-hard anythings if not pop? Note too that the two least punk of the indelible albums named above are pop — Parallel Lines proudly, More Songs About Buildings and Food ironically. And then recall that Marquee Moon is a rock album. Why do I believe the rockism-versus-poppism polarity is stupid? Because while most popular musicians who take themselves too seriously are mooncalves, now and again one will home in on something deeper than the pop-identified would dare — in a form livelier and more liberating than the highbrow-identified would know was there if it bit them in the cranium. So I’ll say it and you scoff if you want. The fact that Marquee Moon is a rock album is basic to why it’s a masterpiece — a great work of art. Ba-da-boom.

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
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[I published my novel, True Love Scars, in August of 2014.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book. Read it here. And Doom & Gloom From The Tomb ran this review which I dig. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]