RICHARD (and LINDA) THOMPSON

“Imagine encountering, here in the Eighties, someone who had never heard of Jimi Hendrix, who had never been moved by the great singers and session groups of golden-age Motown, or who, by whatever unimaginable means, had managed to remain incognizant of the collected musical masterworks of Lennon and McCartney.  Every guitar player should own this album, if only to hear Richard's skirling Stratocaster intro to "Calvary Cross," and his compact, utterly unpredictable solos on such songs as "When I Get to the Border." Singers will be wonder-struck by Linda's stunning readings of "Withered and Died" and the sublime "Down Where the Drunkards Roll," not to mention the rollicking title track, a pure-pop pinnacle for the pair. And enemies of sentiment can savor Richard's hard-nosed lyrical stance, most striking on "The End of the Rainbow," a chilling lullaby in which he advises the dozing infant: "There's nothing at the end of the rainbow/There's nothing to grow up for anymore."  

So wrote Kurt Loder in an evocative 1984 Rolling Stone review of indie label Carthage’s re-ish of Richard and Linda Thompson’s 70’s back catalog.  If that isn’t the sort of thing that makes ya’ll want to scurry off to the nearest CD store, cash in hand, then friend, you’re probably reading the wrong blog.

RT isn’t all that ob-scure today.  He’s a critics darling and celebrated cult artist, and not only is his back catalog readily available, so is a host of live recordings, outtakes, videos, boxed-sets et al.  Once “scandalously unavailable” (thanks Sr. Christgau), Thompson is highly visible and eminently approachable, if you’ve the inclination.

You should, because Loder is right.  Any guitar-head who loves, say, Marquee Moon is going to collapse into a state of orgasmic ecstasy upon entering Thompson-land. Think a mega-dose of Bert Jansch/Davey Graham-esque DAGDAD Celtic/mid-eastern drone, pumped up with equal parts Scotty Moore/James Burton pure rock`n’roll drive.   If songwriting’s your bag, Thompson’s writing is always literate, witty, sometimes very funny, and other times deals in blasted truths so harsh and unflinching that even Lou Reed would likely wince.

RT’s story begins with legendary British folk-rockers Fairport Convention – a story in itself, but which I’ll condense mightily here.  Fairport essentially kicked off as an Anglo Jefferson Airplane, right down to configuration (dual lead singers, male and female) and material (mostly folkie stuff, covers of notable songsmiths including Dylan, a few similarly-minded originals) and a weird sensa humor.  And, like the Airplane, the band found definition when they ousted original female singer Judy Dyble for Sandy Denny, equivalent to Grace Slick in rep, vocal prowess , charisma and songwriting ability.  Thompson sat in Jorma’s seat.  But as early as their second outing, 19769’s What We Did On Our Holidays, he was also showing himself as a songwriter of real intelligence and originality.  “Take the sun from my heart/Let me learn to despise” crooned the chorus at the opening of “Tale in Hard Time”.  But it was Thompson’s “Meet On the Ledge”, an aching, heartbreaking meditation on love, friendship, loss, mortality and the afterlife that dropped the bomb.  There’d simply never been anything quite like it.  “Ledge” remains Fairport’s signature song, long after Thompson’s departure from the band a little over two years after waxing it.

By the time of that departure, Thompson had lived up to his promise as a writer and was honing his guitar attack to a razors edge – you can hear him duke it out with violinist Dave Swarbrick on House Full: Live at the Troubdour and various bootlegs.  In `72 he cut the bizarre, ultra-eclectic Henry the Human Fly, a collection of originals that spanned various forms of Celtic folk, art song, and pure if peculiarly British rock`n’roll.  Henry picked up the occasional favorable review and influenced those few weirdos (David Thomas of Pere Ubu was/is a major fan) who managed to get their hands on it while going down as the worst-selling album in the label’s history.  Thompson kept it together by doing sessions and marrying Linda Peters.  As Richard and Linda Thompson, they started build a formidable rep on the folk circuit - "Thompson could stun from 50 paces with a frenzy of unfeasibly nimble fretwork, while Linda - was capable of sending a sliver of ice into your heart."

Being a big deal on the British folk circuit made them big-ish fish in a small-ish pond.  But their three album for Island  I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, Honkey Pokey (both `74) and Pour Down Like Silver (`75) got them attention beyond the green and pleasant shores.  " Most folk-rock succeeds only in accentuating the irretrievability of the past, but the Thompsons' hard-nosed Sufi fatalism delivers them from nostalgia. When they sing about getting "to the border," they're talking about dying, not smuggling weed from Mexico, and they make the crossing sound like an earthly triumph ("drowned in a barrel of wine" indeed). Because they believe in eternity, the Thompsons don't sentimentalize about time gone--they simply encompass it in an endless present – wrote Christgau of Bright Lights.  Hokey Pokey was an enjoyable transition, but it was the last that was their first  masterpiece, a dazzling collection of devotional songs that could pass for love songs even if you looked close.  The combination of shimmering guitar work, fearless songs of longing and desire (for eternity, love, transcendence, all of the above and more) and their one-two punch vocal team-up made for the best rock`n’roll to come out of the UK until Johnny Rotten grabbed a mike (which happened, I might add, at the very same time this gem was recorded and released).

None of this translated into big record sales or fame, though.  And the Thompsons, having converted to Sufism, chose to leave the material world behind for a time, dropping out to live in a Sufi commune, where Richard would only make music for and with the faithful.
Fortunately for us fans, it didn’t last.  After a few years without such real-world illusions as electricity and running water, Linda decided it was time to return to the secular world, dragging her perhaps reluctant hubby with her.  Their re-entry was tentative at first – First Light and Sunnyvista are the two weakest offings in the Thompson oeuvre.  This is not, however, to say they’re actually bad – both contain some fine moments and Sunnyvista’s best tracks rock.  The real bomb was yet to drop, though.

Having now flopped for three labels, the Thompsons weren’t exactly seen as a hot prospect.  Even hit producer Gerry Rafferty couldn’t find a taker for their latest recording – an album Richard intensely disliked.  When that chance died, the Thompson’s signed with producer Joe Boyd’s tiny new Hannibal label and quickly recorded a new album, mostly made up of songs from the unreleased Rafferty album.

Shoot Out the Lights changed everything.  First, it sold -  better than anything they’d ever done, probably a result of the second factor, which is that it was widely and ecstatically reviewed even in such places as Rolling Stone and The Village Voice.  It made pretty much everyone’s best-of-the-year list for 1982.  And it deserved to.  Lights was a collection of powerfully compelling songs, driven by the usual suspects (hot guitar, superb, mature songwriting and potent singing), but here turned up to eleven.  The teaming of Linda’s chilling vocals and Richard’s shards-of-broken-glass guitar on “Walking On A Wire”, the deceptively calm meditation of “Just the Motion”, the driving rock of “Don’t Renege On Our Love” and the joyous doom-laden “Wall Of Death” and the guitar flip-out of the title track … this was Richard and Linda firing on all cylinders.  They’d always been a treasure – now they were undeniable.  

And they were also over.  The success of the album all but forced them into their first US tour, a now-legendary affair in which the Thompsons icily faced away from each other while harmonizing on the songs of broken love and betrayal that filled Lights – that is when they weren’t actively sniping at each other.  The onstage dissolution of their marriage might have been spectacle – odd for RT, a devoutly religious, introverted, achingly shy, teetotaling, non-leather-wearing vegetarian – hardly the stuff of bad-ass rockin’ and rollin’ – but the music, captured on bootlegs, was often extraordinary as the Thompsons, abetted by old mates Pete Zorn and ex-Fairporteers Simon Nicol and Dave Mattacks, stormed through songs from Lights, highlights from their rich back catalog, the occasional Fairport chestnut, and stompin’ rock`n’roll encores courtesy of the Everly Bros., Jerry Lee Lewis and Conway Twitty (“Danny Boy”!).

The whole thing left Richard, now a cause celebre, as a hot property even if he was hardly Top 40.  Next year’s Hand Of Kindness, sans Linda, was a rollicking collection of Cajun-style r`n’r stomps filtered through the usual Celtic sensibility.  It too made numerous year-end best-ofs, and landed him a new signature tune, the romping “Tear-Stained Letter”.  That and another US tour finally put him on the map and now, 11 years after bailing on Fairport, Thompson was officially a cult artist of no little renown, covered and praised in all the music rags.  By `85 he was signed to a major again.

Kurt Loder would write of RT’s next release, Across A Crowded Room, “by any standard other than his own it's a very fine record, replete with rollicking rhythms, master-class guitar excursions and piercing lyrical apercus. However, longtime Thompson listeners may find that, compared to much of his past work — particularly the six superb studio albums he recorded with his ex-wife, singer Linda Thompson — Across a Crowded Room is faintly disappointing. Such are the burdens of inveterate brilliance.  Those unfamiliar with Thompson's work are invited to dismiss all of the above as purist nit-picking. Across a Crowded Room remains a compendium of expertly constructed songs, played and sung with real heart and recorded with an exciting, live-in-the-studio crackle. Rare is the artist from whom such excellence can come to seem a letdown.”  

Which, in a nutshell, sums up RT ever since.  He tours regularly and reliably puts out an album every 2-4 years, for the majors until 1999 and a series of indies since.  He’s put out 13 studio albums since 1983 and all of them are good to very good, each of them contains at least 2-3 very memorable songs and usually at least one real treasure or near-treasure.  Some are stronger than others.  He’s also released a plethora of live recordings, one three-disk set, tow boxed sets (one a career retrospective, the other entirely made up of outtakes), and several DVD’s.  He regularly turns up on tribute albums and specials (and has been the subject of several himself).  He’s generally regarded as a musician’s musician.  He’s never bad, though at worst he can be a little dull and predictable, falling back on musical and lyrical tropes he now handles effortlessly.   He rarely hits it out of the park, but he can still hit a homer.  Thompson’s assembled a catalog of good-to-great albums, and that’s no small thing.  

Richard Thompson
Allmusic
Wiki

Essential Listening

The cream of the RT crop, album-wise, are Shoot Out the Lights, I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, Pour Down Like Silver and Hand of Kindness.  Lights is the most potent, Bright Lights the most "Celtic", Hand the most rockin' and Silver, though less immediately accessible than its brethren, is the most rewarding over time.  The weird but charming Henry the Human Fly comes on the heels of those.

The rest of the Linda-era albums are spottier.  Hokey Pokey, which arrived `tween Bright Lights and Silver, is half an album as good as its brothers and half throwaways.  The good stuff includes "The Egypt Room", "I'll Regret It All In The Morning" and the title track, a paean to ice cream or oral sex - take your pick.  First Light is the least interesting Thompson album to these ears - sub-standard songs, rather lifelessly performed and too-slickly produced.  Sunnyvista is tougher and rocks pretty hard, but again, is half a good album and half filler.  "Borrowed Time" is one of RT's best rockers and the rollicking cajun hoedown "Saturday Rolling Around" are the standouts.

Post-Linda and post-Hand of Kindness, the highlights are Across A Crowded Room which, despite inspiring Kurt Loder's hesitant praise, is consistent and has held up well.  The eerie "Ghosts in the Wind", "When the Spell is Broken" and the very strange "Love In A Faithless Country" are essential RT listening.  Daring Adventures, the follow-up, is nearly as good; the celt-o-billy "Valerie" is another great rocker, and closer "Al Bowlly's in Heaven" is one of Thompson's finest hours.

After that complacency sets in.  All of Thompson's from `89's Amnesia on are worth hearing, all contain some fine tracks, all spotlight his talents and virtues expertly and none really blows me away.  Mock Tudor (1999) tops my list and 2005's Front Parlour Ballads is bottom.  Everything else falls somewhere in between.  If you like Thompson, you'll find things to like on all of them (I do, and I do).  

There are many live Thompson albums now, though once they were a rare beast.  I haven't heard them all but any live Thompson is probably worth hearing (and he's definitely worth seeing perform).  I'm partial to the solo, acoustic Small Town Romance, recorded on Thompson's first solo US tour.  Apparently I'm not the only one.  Though Thompson famously dislikes the album and had it deleted from the catalog, he allowed it to be restored due to popular demand.  A fistful of Linda-era live tracks which originally appeared on the Guitar, Vocal compilation, specifically a  romping cover of Jerry Lee Lewis' "It'll Be Me", a stunning take on Dan Penn's "Dark End Of The Street" and a hypnotic, overpowering "Night Comes In" can now be found as bonus tracks on the Pour Down Like Silver and Hokey Pokey CD's.  

There's also a plethora of compilations.  Most noteworthy is the three-disc Watching the Dark, which mixes a handful of album tracks with some real winners - "Crash the Party", an original rocker used to close out shows in the late 80's, the stunning ballad, "From Galway to Graceland", a driving alt take of "For Shame Of Doing Wrong", and a powerful live take of "When the Spell is Broken", among others, making this a close-to-essential set.  The later, 5-CD RT is all unreleased stuff - live stuff, alt takes and never-before heard.  Its a lot of fun but probably only for the committed Thompson-ite (of couse, I have it...).  Walking On Wire is an attempt at box set career retrospective.  Good stuff, but if you're interested in Thompson, go for the original albums first.  If you become an aficionado, you won't need this set anyway.  On the other hand, the very rare Doom and Gloom From the Tomb Vol. 1, a cassette-only set sent out as a gift to subscribers to Thompson's fan club in the 80's, has some essential finds, including a storming live "Cavalry Cross", a cover of "I'll Keep It With Mine", and demo versions of stuff from First Light that slay the released versions.  Good luck finding but its worth the search.

Thompson's Fairport days are covered on their first five albums, the best of which is 1969's Liege and Lief.  The compilation Chronicles, which replaces the fine two-LP set,  contains most of what's best on the rest, including most of Thompson's best Fairport moments, and the obscure "Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman", which Thompson left off his final Fairport album, Full House (it has now been re-added as a bonus track on the CD).  His most exciting moments with Fairport are captured on the live House Full album, which contains intense performances of much of the best of the later Fairport stuff, and some savage dueling between Thompson's guit and Dave Swarbrick's fiddle.

Essential Reading

Richard Thompson: The Biography by Patrick Humphries covers Thompson life and music up to 1996 quite well.  

Essential Viewing 

There are now several live DVD's.  You can check them out here.  I haven't seen any of them, but live Thompson is almost always worthwhile.  One I have seen, and it's quite worthwhile is Across A Crowded Room - Live in Concert 1985.  I saw that tour and it's a fond memory.  Thompson hasn't fit to issue it on DVD yet, though.

THE RAMONES

Excerpts from two Bob Christgau pieces that sum up The Ramones pretty neatly:

I think it was that Tuesday that my wife and I went to CB's with Voice critic Tom Johnson, laconic explicator of Reich and Glass and the "one-note music" of Rhys Chatham, after Tom had lured us to the Kitchen. The 20 or so patrons included Danny Fields at the bar in back. Soon the Ramones played 13 songs in 24 minutes or whatever it was, and among the converts was Johnson, who had little interest in pop but lots in minimalism. For me, it was a life-changing experience. These four inept-sounding geeks had figured out what the Stooges had done wrong--the expressionistic stuff, the long and the slow and the chaos-for-its-own-sake. Over the next four years I would see the Ramones more than I've ever seen any band (even the Grateful Dead!). But having followed the tragic trajectory of the New York Dolls, who had changed my life in a similar way, I wasn't optimistic about "potential hit singles." The Ramones were obviously aesthetes one way or another, and in rock and roll, aesthetes rarely conquer the world.

Of course, the Ramones never did--as hitmakers. In 1994, two years before they finally broke up, the 1988 Ramones Mania comp went gold, and maybe eventually the remastered and bonused-up Ramones or Rocket to Russia will join it. Because of course, they have now been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Because of course, they did conquer the world, if changing rock and roll utterly counts. And somewhere in between they gained and/or created a following far closer to the idealized rock and roll audience they'd imagined than anyone knew existed.

Starting with their names and costumes--yes, costumes: note that Dee Dee, who was bitching about the prescribed look long before he quit in 1989, did not wear leather to the Hall of Fame induction--the Ramones strove to convince fans they were all alike. Even today it's like they were all alienated and nothing else mattered. But they were far from alike. Johnny was the son of a construction worker, Dee Dee an army brat in Germany until his mom got them out; both probably felt outclassed in a Forest Hills where there were loads of families like Joey's, whose divorced parents owned a trucking company and an art gallery, and who was Jewish, hence higher in the Forest Hills pecking order. And Tommy's background is murky. He escaped Hungary with his otherwise unchronicled family in 1956, started a high school band with Johnny, liked Buñuel, worked in some vague capacity on Jimi Hendrix's Band of Gypsys, ran the performance space where the Ramones took shape, and managed them before stepping in as self-taught drummer. Most bios give his birthdate as 1952, within a year of the others; some say 1949, which makes more sense, and not just because 18 is young for a Hendrix credit. He seemed more mature. He was the businessman, the promoter, the conceptualizer, the guy who declared them "an original Rock and Roll group of 1975."

Tendencies crisscrossed. Joey and Dee Dee were the head cases, and also the songwriters. Dee Dee and Tommy romanticized America from a European perspective; Tommy and Johnny romanticized fuckups and kept their shit together. Around 1981, Johnny stole Joey's girl, a secret bond and disastrous rift. But although all four were formalists, surly prole Johnny and stoned wildman Dee Dee were instinctive if not compulsive about it, while Tommy and Joey maintained some semblance of aesthetic distance from the rock and roll ideal Johnny and Dee Dee represented--a distance they could make something of because they knew the ideal from the inside. Musically, the four groundbreaking neoprimitives split into the same pairs. Dee Dee amplified the Dolls' one-note basslines into a barrage that underpinned Johnny's from-the-wrist downstrum to create the band's sound. But the deepest innovator in this rhythm band with tunes on top was Tommy and his brand new beat: "Tommy basically played eighth-notes across, with the 'one' on the bass and the 'two' on the snare, constant eighth-notes on the high-hat. Playing fast with eighth-notes constantly--a lot of people try it, but they get sloppy and can't keep up." And since, as 10,000 hardcore bands soon proved, the beat would have gone nowhere without the tunes, the weirdo who sang them ended up defining the band's emotional identity as opposed to its sonic signature.

The trained drummer whose analysis I just quoted is Marky Ramone, who joined in 1978 after Tommy had had it with touring and left only for a four-year detox. Tommy geared his acute taste to his limited technique, playing no fills or rolls and hardly any accents--he was a little guy with small sticks and a light touch, and his quick forcebeat propels and permeates Ramones, Ramones Leave Home, and Rocket to Russia. Marky admired and replicated Tommy's groove. But he'd played metal before hooking up with Richard Hell and had a show drummer's chops, and his muscular sound and well-chosen flourishes helped galvanize the community of brainy anti-intellectuals, postpunk losers, and assorted hitters brought together by the Ramones' hard work, word-of-mouth, and faith in what they'd wrought. He was the link between the punk they'd invented and the good old hard rock they believed it to be--as well as a sign that they were the road band God made them rather than the radio band they so much wished they could be.

Which leaves Joey where? Where he was to begin with--as one of the strangest singers ever to mount a stage, only now there are 250,000 fans believing it or not. There's no better way to grasp what a shock the Ramones' sound was than to realize that, in the reams of celebration piled on Ramones, Joey's vocals went almost entirely unremarked. Granted, it didn't help that his singing is indescribable. "Affected" is too mild, "cartoonlike" redundant. Garbled? Gargled? Strangled? Unhinged Jewish beanpole's dream of Mick Jagger? The Small Faces? The Nashville Teens? Had he merely forgotten his Sudafed? Here were fools by the thousand whining about how clichéd the Ramones' chords were when emanating from Joey's tonsils was a sound unlike any ever heard on earth. If the voice came from anywhere, it was from rock and roll itself--that was its only frame of reference. But it was anything but inhuman. In fact, although this wasn't instantly clear, its freak vulnerability was living proof that the Ramones had love for cretins, pinheads, lobotomies, and glue sniffers. And its Daffy Duck mannerisms were why their hippie-baiting patriotism and playful little Nazi references, while sure to be taken the wrong way and not unrepresentative of Johnny's philosophy of life, never actually seemed threatening.

In 1981, I opined that in future centuries 1981's Pleasant Dreams would sound pretty much like Ramones Leave Home. In 2002, however, the first four albums are clearly not just classic but sui generis, which with Marky on board for Road to Ruin I attribute to a remarkably long-lived initial songburst. But there were many good albums and important songs after that, and what holds them together is less Johnny's sound than Joey's sensibility, even though his writing declined after he got his heart broke. Spurred by Marky, the son of a left-leaning longshoreman-turned-lawyer, Joey emerged--the signal was "The KKK Took My Baby Away," which preceded "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg" by four years--as a staunchly unelitist, no-BS version of the bohemian liberal his background would suggest. He joined Artists United Against Apartheid. He supported Rock the Vote. He did a Jerry Brown benefit. He got saner. He stopped drinking. He became a patron of the rock and roll arts.


And then he died, and everyone was so sad that Lucinda Williams, for Pete's sake, sent "2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten" out to him from Roseland, and in no time the Ramones were elected to the Hall of Fame, and only Tommy mentioned him at the induction, and Don't Worry About Me came out. He'd been recording his solo debut forever with Eighth (or Ninth) Ramone Daniel Rey; Marky's on half of it, also a Dictator and a Del-Lord and the keyb honcho from Loser's Lounge. Joey can't outpower the Ramones-qua-Ramones gestaltwise, and Don't Worry About Me probably isn't as good as 1992's Mondo Bizarro, much less 1984's Too Tough to Die. But it sure beats most other late Ramones albums, which it resembles without benefit of Johnny's downstrum for the reason just cited--in their postclassic, touring-icons period, which (I repeat) was far more productive musically than that otherwise accurate characterization suggests, Joey was the identity marker. Despite the persistence of Johnny's scowl-and-chop and Dee Dee's wart hogs and cretin families, and despite the hitters they were finally attracting, a certain softness rose to the surface. It had always been there, but as the songs departed from their strictures and Joey gargled more emotively, it got bigger, undercutting what was already a play toughness--a tuffness, as physically enthralling as any hard rock without the menace--with shows of feeling that at times were almost coy and girly. (Village Voice)

Tommy quit the band in 1978 because he couldn't take life on the road with the three volatile geniuses who all dressed the same and all made trouble in different ways. Johnny was a taskmaster, Joey was OCD, Dee Dee bipolar and then some.

But Tommy hung in there to school Marc Bell and co-produce Road to Ruin anyway. And somehow the band outlasted its four-album flash-in-the-pan, generating more first-rate records than their maddest fans had dreamed possible and becoming tireless road dogs who regularly thrilled the proletarian fan-base that some, Johnny especially, had always thought they deserved.

For nearly two decades, Johnny and Joey practically never spoke. Marky took five years off for alcoholism. Dee Dee quit to become a rapper in 1989 (it didn't work). [Tommy] came back to produce their finest post-'70s album, 1985's Too Tough to Die.  He also produced the Replacements' Tim and Redd Kross' Neurotica, and formed a bluegrass duo called Uncle Monk with his longtime partner Claudia Teinen. But though he tried never to miss a New York Ramones show, neither Johnny nor Joey was an easy guy to remain close to.

When the Ramones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, Tommy was grizzled and bearded – the other three sported the same dark bowl cuts the Ramones had made a uniform in 1974. Neither Johnny nor Dee Dee mentioned Joey, who had died a year before. Tommy and Marky both did. (Billboard)

Ramones Official
Ramones Wiki
Ramones Allmusic

Essential Listening

The first four, Ramones, Leave Home, Rocket To Russia (my favorite) and Road to Ruin are collected on All The Stuff and More Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 - along with some demos, outtakes, etc.  A surefire investment.  It's Alive is a perfect live set.

After that it gets trickier.  Christgau likes their later albums better than I do.  I agree Too Tough To Die is their best.  I'm also rather fond of the all-covers Acid Eaters.  Weird Tales of the Ramones is a good sampler of the last 18 years, but still misses a few, and overlaps some with the All The Stuff sets.  Downloads are probably your best bet.

Essential Reading

There's a whole cottage industry of Ramones books by now.  I've only read Mickey Leigh's I Slept With Joey Ramone, a memoir by Joey's actual (not musical) younger brother.   Clinton Heylin's From the Velvets to the Voidoids gives a good account of their early days in context. All the members save Tommy (and the various fill-ins) seem to have a bio or autobiography.  Good luck sorting through `em.

Essential Viewing

There are several DVD's, of which The Ramones: Raw looks the most comprehensive.  End Of The Century is a solid documentary.  Trufan's should check out Rock `N' Roll High School, which is not the classic it should've been but still a lot of fun.

BOB DYLAN

First off, if you think he can't sing, you're full of shit.

It's that simple.  It really is.  You may be a very nice person, smart person, tasteful person. You may not like his singing - that is, you may not find it to your personal taste.  Which is just fine - everyone's entitled.  But don't mistake your preferences for facts of life.  Here's what Bono (who's singing I often don't find to my personal taste) had to say about him:


When Sam Cooke played Dylan for the young Bobby Womack, Womack said he didn't understand it. Cooke explained that from now on, it's not going to be about how pretty the voice is. It's going to be about believing that the voice is telling the truth ... To understand Bob Dylan's impact as a singer, you have to imagine a world without Tom Waits, Bruce Springsteen, Eddie Vedder, Kurt Cobain, Lucinda Williams or any other vocalist with a cracked voice, dirt-bowl yelp or bluesy street howl. It is a vast list, but so were the influences on Dylan, from the Talmudic chanting of Allen Ginsberg in "Howl" to the deadpan Woody Guthrie and Lefty Frizzell's murmur. There is certainly iron ore in there, and the bitter cold of Hibbing, Minnesota, blowing through that voice. It's like a knotted fist, and it allows Dylan to sing the most melancholy tunes and not succumb to sentimentality. Here are some of the adjectives I have found myself using to describe that voice: howling, seducing, raging, indignant, jeering, imploring, begging, hectoring, confessing, keening, wailing, soothing, conversational, crooning. It is a voice like smoke, from cigar to incense, where it's full of wonder and worship. Dylan did with singing what Brando did with acting. He busted through the artifice to get to the art. Both of them tore down the prissy rules laid down by the schoolmarms of their craft, broke through the fourth wall, got in the audience's face and said, "I dare you to think I'm kidding." (Rolling Stone, 500 Greatest Singers)

One of the things I like about Bono (and there's a lot of things I don't like about Bono ... he's getting smarter as he gets older.

I. Talkin' New York (1961-63)

Little Bobby Zimmerman grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota, a place I know nothing about except it's a small town and it's cold.  He loved music and books, apparently; blues and country that broadcast out of Shreveport, Louisiana, and then rock and roll.  He learned guitar and piano and harp, and he formed bands: The Shadow Blasters, the Golden Chords.  He scared his high school principal stomping out an extra loud

"Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay" at the high school talent show.  The principal, anticipating Pete Seeger a decade or so later, cut the mike.  His idol was Little Richard. After high school he read Bound For Glory and discovered Woody Guthrie.  He decided rock and roll groups weren't making it, so he embraced Woody and became a folk singer.  In later years, when his rock`n'roll past was still a secret, folkies would claim he sold out when he got an electric guitar.  Surprise!  It was when he went folk that he sold out.

In `61 he went to NYC to seek fame and fortune as a folkie.  He found it because he was unique, and original, and irreverent.

Resembling a cross between a choir boy and a beatnik, Mr. Dylan has a cherubic look and a mop of tousled hair he partly covers up with a Huck Finn black corduroy cap. His clothes may need a bit of tailoring, but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent. Mr. Dylan's voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously trying to recapture the rude beauty of a Southern field hand musing in melody on his back porch. All the "husk and bark" are left on his notes, and a searing intensity pervades his songs. Mr. Dylan is both comedian and tragedian. Like a vaudeville actor on the rural circuit, he offers a variety of droll musical monologues. "Talking Bear Mountain" lampoons the overcrowding of an excursion boat. "Talking New York" satirizes his troubles in gaining recognition and "Talkin' Hava Negilah" burlesques the folk-music craze and the singer himself. Mr. Dylan's highly personalized approach toward folk song is still evolving. He has been sopping up influences like a sponge. At times, the drama he aims at is off-target melodrama and his stylization threatens to topple over as a mannered excess. But if not for every taste, his music-making has the mark of originality and inspiration, all the more noteworthy for his youth. Mr. Dylan is vague about his antecedents and birthplace, but it matters less where he has been than where he is going, and that would seem to be straight up. (Robert Shelton, 1961)

Dylan became the darling of the folkies, their great white hope, their new Woody.  And he broke their hearts when he left them.  He left them because he had to.  Because he was too big a fish for their little folkie pond. Even today there are those who mutter that he was a fraud, a fake, a phony; he was never any good, he sold out for the big bucks, he was only in it for the money and the fame.  Sounding like jilted teenage romantics, turning on their once-pedestaled-paramours because they left them for something bigger and better.  It doesn't matter worth a god-damn if Richard Farina or Eric Andersen or Tom Paxton or Dave Van Ronk or Eric Von Schmidt or Koerner Ray and Glover or Joan Baez were "better" (as musicians, as writers, as whatever).  Dylan could, and did, do things artistically, that they could never have done.  They all made some nice records.  Dylan made epochal ones.

It was true even with album number one.  Other white folksingers of the era, including his older contemporaries Eric Von Schmidt and Dave Van Ronk, had incorporated blues in their work, says Allmusic,  but Dylan's presentation was more in your face...There's a punk-like aggressiveness to the singing and playing here. His raspy-voiced delivery and guitar style were modeled largely on Guthrie's classic '40s and early-'50s recordings, but the assertiveness of the bluesmen he admires also comes out, making this one of the most powerful records to come out of the folk revival of which it was a part. Within a year of its release, Dylan, initially in tandem with young folk/protest singers like Peter, Paul & Mary and Phil Ochs, would alter the boundaries of that revival beyond recognition

The difference is, Dylan never really was a folkie.  He was a rock`n'roll singer who assimilated folk music, and coughed it back up, his way.  His ambition went way beyond the Folk Revival.  And his talent allowed him to reach for it.  He reached and he got it on Freewheelin', his early `63 second album.  "Blowin' in the Wind" gave the Folkie Revival its greatest anthem.  "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" made him a poet.  Even the cover was epochal.

Essential Listening:

Bob Dylan
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
The Times They Are A-Changin'
Live At The Gaslight 1962
No Direction Home
The Minnesota Tapes
Live 1964 - Concert At Philharmonic Hall
The Witmark Demos

Reading:

A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties by Suze Rotolo
Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña, and Richard Fariña by David Hajdu 
Young Bob: John Cohen's Early Photographs of Bob Dylan

II. Another Side (1964)

And, like many ambitious artists, when he saw he had the reach, he knew he had to reach farther.  So he threw the folkies one more bone with The Times They Are A-Changing, a holding effort, and shut himself in the studio one summer night and turned out Another Side Of Bob Dylan.  And he blew off the protest songs and threw off the suit the folkies had tried to sew him into.  They were very pissed off.  The songs were personal, and surreal, full of strange characters and stranger events, and imagery.  His appearance had altered, too, and his attitude.

In the latter half of 1964 and 1965, Dylan's appearance and musical style changed rapidly, as he made his move from leading contemporary songwriter of the folk scene to folk-rock pop-music star. His scruffy jeans and work shirts were replaced by a Carnaby Street wardrobe, sunglasses day or night, and pointy "Beatle boots". A London reporter wrote: "Hair that would set the teeth of a comb on edge. A loud shirt that would dim the neon lights of Leicester Square. He looks like an undernourished cockatoo." Dylan also began to spar in increasingly surreal ways with his interviewers. Appearing on the Les Crane TV show and asked about a movie he was planning to make, he told Crane it would be a cowboy horror movie. Asked if he played the cowboy, Dylan replied, "No, I play my mother." (Wikipedia)

Another Side Of Bob Dylan
Biograph
The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3


III. Bring It On Home (1965-1966)

So he bought himself an electric guitar.  He showed up at the Newport Folk Festival with The Paul Butterfield Blues Band behind him.  He got booed ... for playing electric, for poor sound, for too short a set ... reports vary.  He was defiant.  His new music owed as much to Chuck Berry, and the hard Chicago blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf as to Woody Guthrie.  His songs were surreal beat poetry set to clanging, cacophonous blues-rock.  He did not back down.  Joan Baez trotted after him like a puppy until he finally kicked her off, ending his status as folk-darling forever (how dare you abuse the princess?!?).  The folkies slagged him in print.  He responded with "Positively 4th Street," a musical "go-fuck-yourself." "Something is happening and you don't know what it is," he sneered, at a hidebound audience that couldn't keep up with him.  He didn't need them.  He kept on getting bigger and better, and he blew minds.  "that snare shot sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind" said Bruce Springsteen of "Like A Rolling Stone" He went to Nashville with members of Ronnie Hawkins backing band and laid down Blonde On Blonde,  "that thin wild mercury sound". Al Kooper described the album as "taking two cultures and smashing them together with a huge explosion": the musical world of Nashville and the world of the "quintessential New York hipster" Bob Dylan.  He toured Europe.  Folk purists booed.  He told the band to
"play fucking loud."  Then he went back to upstate NY with his new wife, and threw himself over the handles of his motorcycle.  And he vanished.  And the world went psychedelic.

Bringing It All Back Home
Highway 61 Revisited
Blonde On Blonde

Biograph
The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3
Live 1966: The Royal Albert Hall Concert
No Direction Home

IV. It Came From Woodstock (1967-1969)

He holed up in Woodstock with his friends from Ronnie's band, and they sat around and recorded a bunch of lo-fi demos which built quite a rep, first as bootlegs, then in some official releases, as The Basement Tapes.  Despite their glorious rep, they sound to my ears like a bunch of low-key, lo-fi demos of good songs that might have been great if they'd really cut loose on them.  They didn't.  Instead he went back to Nashville and cut John Wesley Harding, "a quiet, contemplative record of shorter songs, set in a landscape that drew on both the American West and the Bible. The sparse structure and instrumentation, coupled with lyrics that took the Judeo-Christian tradition seriously, marked a departure not only from Dylan's own work but from the escalating psychedelic fervor of the 1960s musical culture."  It was his most mature album of the 60's.  I think it's one of his very best.

He stayed off the road.  He followed JWH with Nashville Skyline, one of his worst.  But it was a huge hit.

John Wesley Harding
The Basement Tapes
A Tree With Roots

V. What is This Shit? (1970-1974)

He stayed home and cut a record just about every year.  Most were modest.  There were some good, but minor, songs.  Some were outright bad.  Rolling Stone savaged him.  He had peaked.  In `74 he did a tour with The Band, who needed their own shot in the arm.  It proved he still knew how to rock.

VI. Lost But Now I'm Found (1975-1976)

He and Sara went their separate ways.  He went to New York with a notebook full of new songs and winged it.  "(he would) go from one song to another like a medley. Sometimes he will have several bars, and in the next version, he will change his mind about how many bars there should be in between a verse. Or eliminate a verse. Or add a chorus when you don't expect" said Phil Ramone, engineer on the session.  The album was a classic, a collection of acoustic soul and blues, JWH with a harder edge, it told stories of men and women, the things we do (for)(to) love, love disguised as sex and sex disguised as love.  It was heartache and heartbreak, anger and grief, despair.  But it ended with a new morning, and a new love.  It was classic.

He was on a good roll again.  He did the Rolling Thunder tour.  He cut Desire, a good follow-up.  He got divorced.  He did a half-hearted TV Special.  He cut a much lesser album called Street Legal (like all Dylan albums, some people call it their favorite).  He made a much-reviled live album in Japan (like all Dylan albums, some people call it their favorite).  He was lost again.

Blood On The Tracks
Desire
Live 1975

VII. People Let Me Tell Ya `Bout The Kingdom Come (1979-1981)

One night he found a cross laying on the stage and picked it up.  He got converted.  He cut Slow Train Coming, a musically sold but often tiresome bit of evangelizing.  Charles Shaar Murray wrote, "Bob Dylan has never seemed more perfect and more impressive than on this album. He has also never seemed more unpleasant and hate-filled." Greil Marcus wrote, "Dylan's received truths never threaten the unbeliever, they only chill the soul" and accused Dylan of "sell[ing] a prepackaged doctrine he's received from someone else." (Wikipedia).  He followed it with the even more (self)righteous Saved.  He toured, refusing to play any older songs.  Fans booed and screamed they wanted Dylan.  As Greil Marcus pointed out, they had him.  As always, he was going his way and his way only as an artist.  And you were welcome to come along.  Or not.

Biograph

VIII. I Was Found But Now I'm Lost (1982-1990)

Shot Of Love toned down his righteousness for a more listenable experience.  Curiously, it contained his best  song of faith, "Every Grain Of Sand".  Infidels was supposedly his return to "secular" music.  It was minor, but it was stronger (big blunder, he left "Blind Willie McTell," the best song he'd recorded since Blood On The Tracks, in the can for close to ten years).  Late one night he turned up on David Letterman, and proved he still had it.

He began to open the vaults.  The box set Biograph included a few crumbs from the cake of his wealth of unreleased material, from album outtakes and bedrooms pisstakes c. 1961-1964 to outtakes and live takes from the `65-`66 albums and tours.  Much of this had been leaked on bootlegs, especially the grand Ten Of Swords, but here it was in good sound and on good vinyl, and you could buy it at the local record store, too!

He wandered.  He made album after album.  Most included an inspired moment or two, but most were weak.  He often left his best songs on the cutting room floor.  He toured with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, then G.E. Smith.  He played Live Aid and Farm Aid.  He joined the Traveling Wilburys. He starred in a bad, all-but forgotten movie (Hearts On Fire).  His voice became pinched and sharp and nasal, as if he'd been sucking helium.

But the fire could never be completely quenched.  Most often he was desultory, but occasionally, he could be brilliant.  When he managed a bit of consistency on the album Oh Mercy in 1989, it was hailed as a return to form (as had every bright spot in this lean decade ... as had every bright spot in every lean decade).  But Under The Red Sky (1990) was dismissed as a joke, his worst ever (and there was plenty of competition).  When his next album was a collection of folk covers, even diehards like me figured it was over.  I did fork over for The Bootleg Series Vol. 1, though.

Biograph
The Bootleg Series Vol. 1-3
Oh Mercy

(hey, he did "License To Kill" that night, and its awesome.  Why that's not on Youtube I'll never know!)

IX. The Old, Weird America (1992-1998)

Sometime around 1994 I saw a video for "Blood In My Eyes," from his 1993 World Gone Wrong, his second album of folk covers (in a row).  Originally performed by the Mississippi Sheiks.  Son of a bitch it was beautiful.  Okay ... maybe he would never write another great song. But damn ... the old fucker still had it.  He had more of it than he a right to have.  I heard something.  I wasn't alone...

(Greil) Marcus became a real fan again in the early 1990s when Dylan released “Good as I Been to You” and “World Gone Wrong,” two unassuming, acoustic albums of folk standards. “I can’t put too much emphasis” on those albums, Marcus told me animatedly. “Something different was going on. It’s the great turning point.” Marcus was dazzled by Dylan’s total performance on the two records – “he never played guitar like that before. He was going back to these very old songs that had been his repertoire in ‘59, ‘60, ‘61. He was saying, ‘These songs still have so much to tell me. I still have so much to tell about these songs. His own music remains an undiscovered country.” (Jon Friedman quoting Greil Marcus in Speakeasy).

...most of these old tunes he gooses or caresses to some kind of arousal--he clearly knows the sensitive spots of Stephen Foster's "Hard Times" and the antiredcoat jig "Arthur McBride." Not that he thinks such intimacy yields a self-portrait. Older than that now, he merely explores a world of song whose commonness and strangeness he knows he'll never comprehend. Dylan's second attempt to revive the folk music revival while laying down a new record without writing any new songs is eerie and enticing. He cherishes the non sequiturs, sudden changes of heart, and received or obscure blank spots in these buried songs--all usages he's long since absorbed into his own writing because he believes they evoke a world that defies rationalization. Me, I'm not so sure it doesn't just seem that way because there's no way we can be intimate with their worlds anymore. And while only a crank could resist his liner notes, that doesn't mean it isn't cranky in the extreme to hold, for instance, that the two-timing aristo who gets his in "Love Henry" is "modern corporate man off some foreign boat, unable to handle his `psychosis' responsible for organizing the Intelligentsia," und so weiter. We do not live in "the New Dark Ages." And if we did, Dylan would call out for rationalization right quick (Robert Christgau)

Something was happening.  And I didn't know what it was.

In the summer of 1998 he was hospitalized with a heart infection.  I thought we might lose him.  I started to listen for pleasure again.  In September, Time Out Of Mind was released.  By now, with every other album a “return to form,” all but the most loyal Dylan-ists had long since given up the ghost.  So, naturally, this time it turned out to be true.  A mournful tramp through meditations on mortality and American folk culture, Robert Johnson meeting Robbie Robertson and leading a New Orleans funeral parade, all culminating in “Highlands,” an endless (16-minute) wander that left Dylan and the listener still lost, still searching, perhaps for all time.

Good As I Been To You
World Gone Wrong
Time Out Of Mind

XI. Storm Warning (2001-?)

He provided a song for the wonderful soundtrack of the even-more wonderful Wonder Boys. The wild rambler of “Highlands” returned, just as lost and mighty pissed off about what he’d found.  But he stopped to collect his Oscar.

On September 11, 2001, he released Love and Theft.  It was supposed to be a big deal ... there had even been commercials aired for its release (now that's a rarity). It’s much-anticipated release having the misfortune to fall on That Fateful Day, it ran the risk of commercial failure.  It survived by virtue of being the funniest, sharpest, and most butt-rocking album he’d dished out since Blonde On Blonde.  Hard, brutal blues, occasionally leavened by gentle, tongue-in-cheek 20’s pop parodies and some of the silliest wordplay ever (from a guy with a rep for silly wordplay).  In typical Dylan fashion, it was also prophetic; “High Water Everywhere” was dedicated to Charlie Patton, but it’s ominous cadences recalled “All Along the Watchtower,” and were just as sure a warning of the stormy weather ahead.

Since then, he has released an album every few years.  While none have quite risen to the heights of these last two, all have been good. Even the 2008 Tell Tale Signs, a collection of outtakes from this same period, is consistently damn good.   His voice has gone to a hard, Tom Waits-ian rasp.  His songs remain storm warnings.

He sounds like himself. He sounds sly, as he’s always sounded. He sounds as if there’s a twinkle in his eye; as if there’s a joke he’s letting you in on, maybe halfway, and you’ll have to find your way to the end of the joke yourself. That’s pretty much been his mode all along. And he sounds utterly eager to keep exploring the unanswered questions of the music that has captivated him for a long time. Mostly that has been the old, old American folk music that first transformed him when he left behind Robert Zimmerman and became Bob Dylan in Minneapolis in the late fifties and very early sixties.(Greil Marcus)

He remains who he is.  He has become a great American artist.  Whether you loathe or love him, his voice, his politics, or anything else, this is a fact.


Bono again: The really unusual thing about Bob Dylan was that, for a moment in the Sixties, he felt like the future. He was the Voice of a Generation, raised against the generation that came before. Then he became the voice of all the generations, the voices in the ground — these ghosts from the Thirties and the Dust Bowl, the romance of Gershwin and the music hall. For me, the pictures of him in his polka-dot shirt, the Afro and pointy shoes — that was a brief flash of lightning. His voice is usually put to the service of more ancient characters.

Wonder Boys (soundtrack)
Love and Theft
Modern Times
Tell Tale Signs
Together Through Life
Tempest

Links


Bob Dylan Allmusic
Bob Dylan Wiki
Bobdylan.com

Expecting Rain
Bringing It All Back Homepage
I Happen To Be A Swede Myself
Searching For A Gem
Annotated Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan mailing list
Mybackpages
Bringingitallbackhomeclub
Positively4thStreet
Expectingrain mailing list
Skipping Reels of Rhyme


Reading:

Chronicles, Vol. One
Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus
Bob Dylan: Behind The Shades

Viewing:

No Direction Home
Don't Look Back