Bob Dylan: Another Self Portrait, post #5

Is it possible I never wrote the last post in that series?  I had it written in my mind...  Oh well, they say blogging is dead anyway. 

Another Self Portrait is at its strongest in its look at Dylan's 1970 sessions.  One could argue that it would have been stronger had it just focused on them, but it gestures toward a look back at 1969 (and 1968).  And it also gestures toward a look forward, at 1971.  This makes sense.  New Morning didn't signal a new direction in Dylan's songwriting;  in fact, in retrospect it marks the first time his muse and he would take some time off from each other.  No album of new songs in 1971, none in 1972, and only a soundtrack for 1973.  Only at the very end of '73, with the Planet Waves sessions, would he find his way back into a songwriting groove.

But 1971 was not an unproductive year for Bob.  He released two new non-album singles, and his second greatest-hits album, released at the end of the year, contained a few new recordings.  A few more studio or at least non-live things have filtered out over the decades since, and ASP adds three key recordings to this cache.  Total it all up and you have a vinyl lp's worth of material.  I've always heard it like that, scattered though it is, and the newly released tracks round out this imaginary album nicely.

What is there?

1. "East Virginia," a traditional number recorded in a home-jam setting with Earl Scruggs and his sons in December 1970 for broadcast on a public television documentary in January 1971.  This is the scarcest track, never having been released on CD, but it's worth seeking out on youtube.  It's the only trad number from this year (counting it with '71), and a nice coda to Dylan's collaborations with the Band, Johnny Cash, and others from this period.

2. Three tracks recorded in March '71 with a bunch of people Dylan knew through the George Harrison/Shelter connection:  Leon Russell, Jesse Ed Davis, etc.  "Watching The River Flow" was a non-album single side, a full-band version of "When I Paint My Masterpiece" was released on GH2, and ASP adds an alternate version of "Masterpiece," Dylan at the piano with some different lyrics.  "Watching" is fun, but "Masterpiece" is one of Dylan's most important compositions.  The alternate version is one of the really worthwhile things about ASP.

3. Yet another take on "If Not For You," this being the second with George Harrison, taken from the soundcheck for the Bangladesh concert in August.  It's on the DVD.

4. Four tracks recorded with Happy Traum for GH2.  This is a very significant session because three of the tracks were Basement numbers:  "I Shall Be Released," "Down In The Flood," and "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere."  For a few years there (two decades in the case of "Released") these were the only officially available Dylan versions of these songs.  Seems like it wouldn't be a fair trade but in fact he's in fine form here, and this version of "Released" is an amazing rethink of the song.  ASP adds "Only A Hobo," long a tantalizing absence from the bootleg circuit.  It's a welcome release.

5. Four tracks recorded in November.  The main purpose of the session was the "George Jackson" non-album single, Dylan's first foray into protest song in many years.  One side was a solo acoustic version, the other a small band version (labeled "Big Band" but really just a country combo with gospel singers).  The electric version was released on CD back in the '80s on the Australian-only Masterpieces set, and was rereleased on iTunes for a while in the mid '00s.  For many years the acoustic version was available only on vinyl or bootleg, but it's now on Side Tracks.  Both versions are essential.  The other two tracks are two versions of the original "Wallflower," one of which wasn't released until 1991, and the other of which is new to ASP.  It's a minor composition, but very nicely realized - a perfect little genre exercise, one of the strongest pure-country songs he ever wrote. 

As this summary makes clear, ASP adds three key tracks that round out our understanding of Dylan's '71 very nicely.  It was a year when he seems to have had only fitful inspiration as a songwriter, but the few things he came up with were gems, every one of them.  And his singing - well, the songwriting drought is a tragedy, because he was in really fine voice this year.  His vocals on the Traum sessions are agile, sensitive, and masterful;  all through the year he's in a backwoods-country-soul mode that's distinct from what he'd done in '69 and anytime in '70.  It's one of my favorite periods in terms of Dylan's vocals, and I've always wished there was more.  Now there is, a little bit.

Sure, one might wish for a release that presented these sessions together, something resembling what's outlined above.  And that's my general take on ASP.  It's full of revelations, minor masterpieces, interesting dead ends, and welcome details.  And it's comprehensive enough to feel like it's intended to be the last word on this era.  But one hopes it isn't, because a closer look reveals that it's nothing approaching comprehensive.  It's a patchwork, very much like the Self Portrait album itself.  Cute idea, but I'm still not sure it does any of the sessions justice. 

Except the Isle of Wight show, which is complete, and therefore definitive.  There's a lesson there, which luckily the Bootleg Series czars learned in time for the next installment. 

Jimi Hendrix: March 1969 collaborations

So here's what you do.  You take "Let Me Move You" from People, Hell And Angels, "Georgia Blues" and "Blue Window" from Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues, and "Jimi/Jimmy Jam" from Hear My Music and you put them all together in that order.  What you've got is a good forty-five minute look at Jimi Hendrix in non-Experience musical settings in the final weeks of the Experience.  Jimi with horns and another singer, Jimi with another guitarist.  And, right, it's all brilliant.

I love Jimi enough to have collected almost everything that's been released.  But there are issues, man...  One is that the official releases, although they've mostly been pretty conscientious in the last couple of decades in how they treat the individual recordings, have been real chaotic in how they compile them.  You never get anything like an orderly look at any given set of studio sessions or period of his career - it's always just thrown together.  And only part of this is the record companies' fault:  after he broke with Chas Chandler, Jimi's studio work itself was chaotic.  As everybody knows he spent two years trying to come up with a follow-up to Electric Ladyland, and instead came up with a mountain of semi-finished, or maybe over-finished, recordings.  He worked so much on a lot of it that it gets hard to figure out where one song ends and another begins.  It's all good, but it's all real confusing.

Every once in a while I dive back in and try to make sense of it again.  Right now my strategy is to break it down into manageable clusters of recordings, not only dating from the same general period but maybe linked by some secondary factor, like what might have been on an album if he'd been forced to submit one that month, or something like that. 

Anyway, that's how I arrived at putting these four tunes together.  In early '69 he was still working with Mitch Mitchell and Noel Redding as the Experience, but he was getting restless.  He'd dissolve the group in June, but in fact early/mid April saw their last studio sessions together.  In late April and May he'd be recording with Mitchell and Billy Cox, rather than Redding:  a different bag.  But as these four recordings show, Jimi was already taking tentative steps outside the experience in March.

"Let Me Move You" and "Georgia Blues" see Jimi reunited with R&B singer Lonnie Youngblood, with whom he had recorded as a sideman back in 1966.  Youngblood and his band, as evidenced by these recordings, were tight, professional, and very soulful.  The first track is a driving, up-tempo hard soul number, and Youngblood's Otis Redding-ish vocals prove a good match for Jimi's juiced-up R&B guitar.  Lonnie's saxophone and John Winfield's organ keep things much tighter than the average Experience recording from this period, and to good effect.  Jimi reveled in freedom, but a few musical restrictions often seem to have focused his playing in salutary ways.  This is a great record and it's hard to believe it stayed in the vaults for over forty years.  "Georgia Blues" is slightly less revelatory, if only because this kind of slow blues is familiar to Hendrix fans, but it's just as masterful.  Again the crowded musical setting forces Jimi to focus his playing, and he sounds like a comfortable and authoritative member of a strong ensemble here.  In both cases Jimi is credited as the songwriter, which suggests that he had something in mind with these sessions, rather than that he just dropped in on old friend. Wonder what kept him from pursuing this direction.

"Blue Window" was recorded with the Buddy Miles Express, minus their guitarist.  Jimi sings on this one, another original;  Buddy scats a little late in the jam.  Once again it's a big band performance:  this time multiple horn players, plus keyboards and a very assertive drummer.  Miles would of course go on to play a big part in Jimi's music over the next few months (and Jimi had already played producer for him), but always in a trio format.  This revue-style thing was not something Jimi would revisit.  But this record is wonderful.  It's a beautiful groove they lay down, and Jimi sounds comfortable and, again, like part of the band.  Even though it's a totally different lineup, this complements the two Youngblood tracks nicely.

The last one is a slight change of pace:  no horns, no keyboards.  It's a jam between Jimi, Mitch, bassist Dave Holland, and Buddy Miles's guitarist Jim McCarty (not the Yardbird of the same name).  It's much looser, unsurprisingly much more of a jam, but still really interesting.  It cycles through several different moods and grooves, and both Holland and (more surprisingly) McCarty are wonderfully assertive.  McCarty takes a long, satisfying solo late in the recording, and his tone and moods are wonderfully different from Jimi's - nice contrast, and technically able to stand in the same room as Jimi, if not on the same platform.  They even do some dual-guitar lines near the end, conjuring up shades of the Allmans. 

There's more from this session, and no doubt it'll be released in some form someday, but I don't find it nearly as interesting.  Both the McLaughlin/Hendrix jam and the "Jimi/Jimmy" jam meander, but whereas I find the latter consistently interesting, always changing, and always going somewhere (even if it is at a pretty leisurely pace), the McLaughlin one seems pretty repetitive to me.

Thus, these four tracks.  They work well together.  There's your Jimi for the afternoon.

Robert Hunter: Jack O' Roses (1980)

The Grateful Dead were the best, the quintessential, American band.  This is so obvious that I won't discuss it.

What surprises me is that, even so, there's a lot of Dead that's obscure and poorly understood.  Like, I've never understood why the Hunter/Garcia partnership wasted away at the end of the '70s.  Really after Terrapin it just kind of dried up, even though the band kept trying to make records for a couple more years.  And since Hunter was never a performing member of the Dead, what does that mean for him as part of the Dead family in the early '80s?  It's easy to consider him all but a member (and records even listed him as one for a while) in the '70s.  But what's his relationship to the Dead in the '80s?

What raises this question for me is that I just recently listened to his 1980 record Jack O' Roses for the first time.  Previously I'd only heard Rum Runners and Tiger Rose, and to be honest I wasn't too impressed.  They're valiant attempts at records, but it was easy to see that while he's one of the music's great lyricists, he just wasn't that great a singer or player. 

But Jack O' Roses is brilliant. 

Among those who've heard of it it's best known for having the full (or at least a fuller) realization of

the "Terrapin" lyric.  But that's not all.  He surrounds it with a number of other tunes that are tied to it lyrically:  his version of "Stagger Lee," which seems like it should be the wrong movie but makes sense with the expanded "Terrapin";  the traditional "Lady Of Carlisle," which is the matrix out of which "Terrapin" was born; and the original "Book Of Daniel," which retells the older version of the lion's den story.  Those seem to be the key ones (although they're not the only songs on the record).  And heard together like this they're a masterful examination of folk song idiom, a demonstration of the folk process.  You can hear how this singer/writer found his way into the old songs and came out with something new;  you can hear "Terrapin" now as a deeper meditation on the strange courtship and faith-testing rituals of the old songs, on the archetypes of soldier, sailor, prophet, lover, on the meaning of the throwaway motif of the fan, and on everything that connects Old Testament time with Old England time and Old South time. 

So it's smart and eloquent.  But we knew that about Hunter.  What floored me about this record was how beautiful it is.  It's just him and an acoustic guitar and a bit of echo, and he sounds comfortable and authoritative.  His guitar work is very capable in a folk-revival mode, and at times really powerful.  And his voice, as he approaches middle age, no longer sounds like a weird castoff of the psychedelic movement:  it sounds like that guy at the bar who, when he starts to speak, you shut up and listen.  Not 'cause he's mean or loud, but because he's got something to say. 

And so naturally this is among the most obscure and scarce records in the Dead's extended family.  Didn't even get a US release until four years after it was recorded.  But it belongs on any short list of essential Dead records.

Los Lobos 1985-1986: An Essay in Discography

What I think of as the third phase of Los Lobos' career comprised the aftermath of How Will The Wolf Survive? and the run-up to and recording of their second album, By The Light Of The Moon. This took them two full years - the first album came out in late '84 and the second didn't come out until January '87.  And in that, they're once again not quite following the template for rock band careers.  They should have taken no more than twelve months to produce a follow-up.  How Will had been a critical favorite and almost a hit on college radio and the like - I was in high school at the time, not particularly immersed in underground music papers, and I remember reading and hearing a lot about it.  A late-'85 follow-up would have been a smart move, commercially.  But they took their time, and did it right.

In the interim they were touring heavily on that first album.  Nothing from that period has been officially released, but there's a perfect candidate for it on youtube:  a Canadian TV special filmed in Montreal on 4/22/85.  This is prime Lobos, and what's more it's full of rarities:  "Buzz, Buzz" (a Hollywood Flames oldie which they'd later record in the studio), the Howlin' Wolf classic "Three Hundred Pounds Of Joy," "Mighty Old Love" (a cover, but I can't figure who of), "The Town I Live In" (Thee Midnighters), and lo and behold, two years before they reimmortalized it, "La Bamba." This show is nothing short of a revelation.  The authority with which they rock Howlin' Wolf, the depth of the groove they get into on "Mighty Old Love," and the way they snap it straight into "La Bamba."  They're unstoppable.

Their cover of "Three Hundred Pounds Of Joy" actually made it to vinyl, but not this rendition.  They performed it live with Roomful of Blues on the latter's 1987 album Live At Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel.  Worth tracking down, but it's not quite as satisfying a version as the one from Montreal - it's shorter, and all those extra horns don't add anything that Steve Berlin's not already delivering on his own.

What the Roomful of Blues collaboration does is remind us just how much the band's critical acceptance was matched by their peer acceptance.  It's one of a long series of guest appearances that the Wolves made on other people's records, or that other people made on theirs.  In the period in question there are two others that I know about, each significant in its own way.

One is their collaboration with Ry Cooder on the traditional "Quatros Vicios," which he recorded for the Alamo Bay soundtrack in 1985;  it's widely available because it's on the El Cancionero box, but to me it's a little disappointing.  Rosas and Hidalgo get to sing, but Cooder himself handles the
accordion and bajo sexto parts - which is like asking Eric Clapton to sing on your record, but handling the guitar part yourself.  People wouldn't be making that kind of mistake much longer.

The other is the song "All Around The World Or The Myth Of Fingerprints," which closes off Paul Simon's Graceland album, released in 1986.  This would never show up on a Lobos compilation, but the thing is, it should.  Steve Berlin insists that the band wrote it, the music at least (he says nothing about the lyrics), and it's easy to believe him, because it sounds nothing like a Paul Simon song, and a hell of a lot like a song Los Lobos would have been working on to follow up "Will The Wolf Survive."  It has that kind of suspended-over-percussion gentle verse going into that chimey, anthemic chorus.  And of course the boys supply all the instrumental work on the song.  Regardless of how things went down between the artists, it's a great record, tight, crackling with energy, and I've always thought it was a key part of their '80s work. 

I know of one other rarity from this period, which is also easily obtained courtesy of the Cancionero box.  We've already heard their cover of the Fats Domino song "I'm Gonna Be A Wheel Someday" on the 1983 PBS special that celebrated their e.p.  They laid it down in the studio in 1986 for the soundtrack to the film A Fine Mess. 

There's a little live Lobos from '86 around, to complement the Montreal show.  I like this segment from a show in San Rafael on 11/21/86: not only does it include more cool covers ("Your Love Keeps Lifting Me Higher"! "Tequila"!), but it has them jamming with Carlos Santana.  Not quite a passing of the torch - there's not really a whole lot of similarity between what Santana does and what Los Lobos do.  But still it's a cool moment.

And that brings us to the second album, recorded in 1986 and released as the New Year (which would be Los Lobos' miracle year) of 1987 began.  By The Light Of The Moon was a much-labored-over album, by all accounts, and in the end all that work was overshadowed by the fluke success of La Bamba later in '87.  And that's an entirely different phase of the band's career.  So I like to try to hear the second album the way I heard it when I first bought it, when it first came out:  in isolation, with no inkling of what would come after.  Taken on those terms it's a beaut.  It's clearly trying to hit most of the notes the first album hit - you have the chiming-guitar anthem ("One Time One Night"), the rockabilly bruiser ("Shakin' Shakin' Shakes"), a Spanish number ("Prenda Del Alma"), and a bunch of chugging r&b with a Latin flavor.  But it feels no less original for that - rather, it just feels like this is a band that has staked out its territory, and knows how to work it.

Los Lobos 1980-1984: An Essay in Discography

The Wolves' story from this point on is better documented - but, surprisingly, there are some holes.  Some pretty big holes.

The story goes that, after having spent the '70s thoroughly exploring acoustic Mexican-American (and elsewhere) folk, they started to get interested again in the louder, rowdier, more physical music of their youth.  They started to play electric occasionally, and to hang out in the Hollywood clubs to see what was happening in rock in L.A. these days.  (As X reminded everyone, it wasn't getting played on the radio:  you had to go to the clubs to find the scene.)  And eventually they started playing those clubs, making converts out of everybody who heard them, no matter how skeptical they were at first.  And then they get signed to a major-minor, Slash, a Warners-distributed punk label, and that's how they get introduced to the world:  as somehow having emerged from the L.A. punk scene of the turn of the decade.  And that's why they get considered an '80s band...

And of course the last disc installment of this essay showed how silly that notion is.  But then again it's not totally wrong.  When they returned to electric music, Los Lobos made the conscious decision to work their way up through an authentic scene.  Maybe they perceived that as their only option, who knows, but the fact remains that, having already put in seven years of apprenticeship at one trade, they started from scratch in another.  And their first label was a New Wave label, and hell, you can even find photos of the band rocking the skinny-tie look.  It just didn't affect their sound in any noticeable way.  But that, too, is something that the L.A. punk scene allowed them that maybe no other would have:  X and the Blasters and Rank & File were also/already conscious of roots in a way that their New York and London counterparts were not.  And meanwhile some little part of the punk aesthetic does seem to have rubbed off on the boys - their early records especially were always short and punchy, no matter what idiom they were in.

And one more thing.  Before they signed to Slash, they put out two D.I.Y. singles, both in 1981. What could be more punk than that?  These were "Farmer John" backed with "Anselma" and "Volver, Volver" backed with "Under The Boardwalk."  And here's where our first big heartbreak comes, as Los Lobos collectors.  They've never been reissued.  Not on CD, not digitally.  And, except for that single youtube of "Farmer John," they don't even seem to circulate.  One assumes that "Anselma" sounds much like it would when they re-recorded it for the ep, and that "Volver, Volver" sounds much like it did when they played it live (and we have a live recording from 1983, as well as one from 1987 that was officially released on the 1993 comp Just Another Band From East L.A.: A Collection).  But what does "Under The Boardwalk" sound like when Loboized?  I would love to know.

The labels were reproduced in the 2000 box set El Cancionero: Mas Y Mas - we even get photos of the sessions.  But not the music.  It kills me.  Thank God the one side circulates, because it's revelatory.  Not least because the arrangement differs so drastically from the arrangements they'd use in live renditions in 1987 (when they played it at a gallop) and 1997 (when they turned it into the heaviest stomper you've ever heard) (neither of these versions have been released either). 

Let's note a couple more things.  First, on the "Farmer John" single they're still crediting themselves

as "Los Lobos Del Este De Los Angeles (Just Another Band From East L.A.)."  Did they actually consider that whole thing their name?  May be.  But on the second single (by the photographic evidence) they're just "Los Lobos."  So 1981 was when that change happened.  Second, both singles paired an R&B cover with a traditional Spanish-language number:  they were determined at this point to present both sides of their musical heritage as a single package.  A determination that has never wavered, although on their albums the English-language material usually predominates.  The point is, from 1981 on they knew what they wanted to do, and they did it.  Eventually the world would catch up with them.

Before we get to the e.p. there are two other early Lobos tracks that have to be taken into account.  In 1982 they recorded one song for a soundtrack that has never been issued on CD, Eating Raoul.  The first of a truly prodigious body of material recorded for soundtracks, tribute albums, and samplers over the course of their career, their contribution was "Diablo Con Vestido Azul," a Spanish-language version of "Devil With A Blue Dress On" first formulated by Mexican garage band Los Yaki.  Los Lobos' version, in true punk fashion, is taken at breakneck speed.  As a gesture it's almost too perfect - it's notable that they've never done Spanish versions of any other English-language tracks.  (The soundtrack also included a version of "How Much Can I Do," which one assumes is distinct from the e.p. version.  But how distinct?  Who knows?)


The other track is easily found because it was included on El Cancionero.  It's an original, "We're Gonna Rock," that was released (according to the box set's liner notes) in early 1983 (discogs.org says 1982) on a sampler called L.A. Rockabilly.  Maybe the fastest anybody's ever played anything. 

Note:  it's produced by Steve Berlin, saxophone player for the Blasters at that point.  He'd also co-produce (with T-Bone Burnett) their debut e.p. on Slash, released in autumn 1983:  ...And A Time To Dance.  He'd also play on it, but he wasn't an official member until after it came out.  And:  why debut with an e.p.?  Because they were on a New Wave label that was part of the doomed effort all through the '80s to get Americans to cotton to the e.p. format.  Again:  they're being marketed as New Wave.  (But then again, the title is a Bible quote.  Not very punk.)

This has never been released on CD, but it is available on iTunes and Amazon as a legal download.  Seven tracks, of which four are originals and three are covers, two are in Spanish and five are in English, and all are brilliant.  I never get tired, in particular, of "Let's Say Goodnight" (and how cool is it that an accordion is the first sound you hear on this record?), "Walking Song," "Why Do You Do" and "How Much Can I Do."  "Walking Song" in particular should be sought out - it never shows up on anthologies, but it's an addictive little two-step. 

The e.p. gained them a surprising amount of notoriety, not just because it was awesome, but because
in one of those flukes that Los Lobos' hard work would position them to capitalize on, that year the Grammies had a new category, Mexican/American, and "Anselma" won it.  They spent the rest of the year touring on the e.p., and doing TV when the opportunity presented.

It presented at least twice.  Once was an appearance on late-night upstart Alan Thicke's show, where they performed "Let's Say Goodnight" and "Come On Let's Go."  They sound pretty close to the e.p. versions (and they're gone from youtube now, so you'll never know), but Steve Berlin is with them onstage.  I think we can date fall '83 as when he becomes a full-time Lobo (although it's unclear when they made it official).  A momentous decision, in retrospect, to make him a member rather than just a collaborator like they would go on to do with drummers.  At first it was obvious, because saxophone fit in so well with their material, but as they evolved away from two-steps and '50s style r&b, Berlin was forced to find new ways to contribute.  He did, and the band was better for it.  To this day in interviews Los Lobos talk as if all of them have this shared East L.A. heritage, and Steve very deferentially never disagrees, but ever since 1983 he's been a member, and a huge part of their distinctive sound.

The other TV thing is another L.A. local PBS documentary that has washed up on youtube.  It's named after the e.p., but the striking thing is how many songs they play that aren't on the e.p.  The meat of the program is a live performance from 11/3/83 at L.A.'s Club Lingerie (Steve's onstage, although the anchor introducing the program still says the band's a quartet).  My favorite moments are a galvanizing take on "Why Do You Do," and three non-album tracks:  "Volver, Volver," "I'm Gonna Be A Wheel Someday" (a studio version of this would be recorded in 1985), and "Sleepwalk."  Amazing stuff. 

This period - post-e.p., pre-first l.p. - is the first time we can get a handle on what electric Los Lobos are like.  The documentary is priceless in that regard, because no live album has been released from this period.  That statement immediately needs to be modified, as the second heartbreak of the Los Lobos collector.  In 2006 the band made an abortive start on an official bootleg series, to be called Chuy's Tape Box, and Vol. 1 was a show from 1/14/84 at La Casa De La Raza in Santa Barbara.  If this ever actually was released it was immediately withdrawn, because I missed it in 2006 and have never located a copy.  It's not on the youtube, not on the usual bootleg sites, and not on Amazon at all.  Two key tracks had already been released on El Cancionero, and those are essential.  "I'm Sorry," about as greasy a slab of soul as you could ask for, and "Las Ojos De Pancha," a ranchera that really cooks.

Of course it all culminates with their first full-length (as Los Lobos del nothing) album, How Will The Wolf Survive? In commercial terms it kind of started everything for them, but in musical terms it's a good conclusion to an era, because it sounds very close to the e.p., and the next time they entered a studio they'd be heading off in new directions.  I feel like I don't even need to discuss this record.  It's perfect, every bit as good as every bit of praise that has been heaped on it.  I still feel it's their definitive record.  Not that they wouldn't continue to do interesting work for the next three decades (and counting)...

It came out in October 1984 and was followed by essentially two solid years of hard-core touring to promote it.  That's a story for the next installment.

P.S.  Here's your perfect disc for this period, but if the singles every become available, make room.

From a 1981 single:  Farmer John.

From the Eating Raoul soundtrack, 1982:  Diablo Con Vestido Azul.

From the L.A. Rockabilly sampler, 1983:  We're Gonna Rock.

From the ....And A Time To Dance e.p., 1983:  Let's Say Goodnight, Walking Song, Anselma, Why Do You Do, How Much Can I Do, Ay Te Dejo En San Antonio.

From Thicke of the Night, late 1983:  Come On Let's Go.

From And A Time To Dance documentary, late 1983:  Why Do You Do, Volver Volver, I'm Gonna Be A Wheel Someday, Sleepwalk.

From 1/14/84 show:  I'm Sorry, Los Ojos De Pancha.

How Will The Wolf Survive album:  entire.

From BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test, late 1984:  Don't Worry Baby.

Los Lobos 1973-1979: An Essay in Discography

This is an essay about collecting Los Lobos.  There are any number of short bios of the band out there, and lots of appreciations.  And I agree with basically every word of them:  they're on my short list of Best American Bands Ever.  But this essay, and the ones that will hopefully follow, is about collecting them;  it turns out that collecting them illuminates their bio, so I'll have some observations on that as we go along.  And as for the appreciation - the subtext of this whole project is that collecting Los Lobos only deepens one's appreciation of them.  They're a very deep band.

All the bios start with Los Lobos' formation in the summer of 1973 as a bunch of like-minded musician friends in East L.A.  They'd grown up on classic rock, but of course their neighborhood was steeped in Mexican-American music, and when they came together it was as a folklorico outfit.  All-acoustic traditional Spanish-language stuff.  They play in this mode for the rest of the decade:  lawn parties, weddings, college assemblies, restaurants, wherever they could get a gig.  They were a working band for a long time before they hit the charts.

There are a number of significant things about this first part of the bio.  It shows that their roots are thoroughly multicultural - or, if you want to put it differently, thoroughly of their time and place.  Throughout their career it's been possible to see Los Lobos in two opposite ways:  as a Mexican-American trad band who decided to embrace rock, or as a bunch of rockers who decided to embrace Mexican-American trad.  Both of these things are true. 

They came by their rock roots the same way that everybody else of their generation did.  From the radio, where they were steeped in things like Cream and the Beatles, who they seem to have idolized like every other American kid did.  And from whatever local scene there was:  in their case, that was the East L.A. r&b exemplified by Cannibal and the Headhunters and Thee Midnighters (a scene that they've managed to mythologize in much the same way that Bruce Springsteen has mythologized the early Jersey Shore scene).  This, by all accounts, was the music of their teen years, and what they were playing in garages and on patios as they learned their instruments.  Which means that when they picked up the folkloric stuff it was a decision.  They came by it not as a chthonic thing but as a learned thing.

And yet of course it's true that, as all the accounts say, the boleros, the norteños, the corridas were part of the culture of their neighborhoods and their families.  So even though they had to apply themselves to learn the stuff, it was not a matter of learning about a foreign culture, but about their own, right?  Reclaiming their heritage.  They weren't Ry Cooder-like musical tourists.  This was where they lived.  And yet:  they did have to study.  It was a body of knowledge, of tradition, that required mastery.  They couldn't just pick up the instruments and naturally play.  Nor could they assume that what they grew up with in East L.A. was necessarily the final word on these songs.  Recall how carefully the style and region of each track is identified on their two all-trad albums.  That's the folk-music scholar in them, the student and educator.

This awakening to traditional music is happening against the background of the Chicano movement, of course, and that's significant.  They're not learning to play canciónes Mexicanas in a vacuum, but in a context where they have a particular meaning and significance to other people like themselves.  It's really cool that early Los Lobos were not just a gigging band but an activist band.  When, nearly twenty years later, they'd sing about "The Neighborhood," it's with a whole lot of lived experience and unquestioned commitment.

But it's also interesting that this journey parallels in a lot of ways those made by other American musicians of their generation or the previous.  Like Dylan they were into electric pop as kids, then when they grew up they embraced traditional folk, then when they grew up some more integrated the two things.  Like the Band they had an extended journeyman period, many years of living together on the road as a band, learning what it means to be a band, before they finally debut with a major label;  and the music they recorded later is vastly different from, and yet constantly informed by, what they played in their journeyman years. 

I've never considered Los Lobos to be an '80s band.  They fit in much more comfortably with '70s artists like The Band.  The closest parallels are probably Springsteen and Tom Petty, actually:  in both cases artists who came along just a little too late to be part of the '60s rock wave, who instead were experiencing that as impressionable young listeners, but who begin their own careers before punk comes along to erase the past.  Springsteen, Petty, and Los Lobos all share this relationship with the whole spectrum of American (and British) pop/rock/r&b, a delight in pulling out an obscure blues number or garage rock anthem or soul grinder and delivering it with authority and glee.  The idea of rock and roll (and rhythm and blues and folklorico) is important to them.

So it's easy to appreciate the importance of this first phase of Los Lobos' career, 1973 to 1979, when they were a trad acoustic outfit.  Easy to appreciate, and yet hard to really assess, because so little has been released from this period.  But there's a little more in circulation than is generally known, and it's instructive. 

In his liner notes to the 2000 reissue of Los Lobos Del Este De Los Angeles, Luis Torres mentions that as a budding documentarian he got Los Lobos to record the soundtracks to a number of small-budget productions.  Tantalizing tidbit: and how come none of that stuff has ever been released?  (That's going to be a constant refrain in Los Lobos collecting.)  Does any of it survive?

I don't know, but the Saints of Youtube have vouchsafed us one priceless document of early Loboism, and it does come in the form of a low-budget PBS documentary.  It's called Los Lobos Del Este De Los Angeles, same as the album, and it's a half hour from a concert the band gave at East Los Angeles College sometime in 1975.  It begins with a brief interview with one of the members, Francisco Gonzales, voiced over film of the band jamming outside on a hill overlooking the city;  then we join the concert.  It's fantastic stuff, including a tremulous early rendition of "Sabor A Mí," as well as a number of songs that weren't included on that first album, such as "Siete Leguas" and "Las Tres Huastecas."  It's good listening.

Wait - Francisco Gonzales?  I thought there were only four Lobos at first.  Yeah, that's one of the things this documentary reveals.  Los Lobos were originally a five-man unit.  The four we know:  David Hidalgo, Conrad Lozano, Cesar Rosas, and Louis Pérez, plus Frank Gonzales.  He never gets mentioned in the official histories - not in the notes to either of the box sets, at least, nor those to the first album reissue.  And yet not only is he taking most lead vocals, but at the end Louie introduces him as the guy who founded the band.  What happened to him?  It's a mystery.

The second obscure document of early Los Lobos is not quite as obscure, because it was officially released on record, and has in fact been reissued on CD and mp3.  In 1976 they contributed to a United Farm Workers fund-raising/consciousness-raising album entitled Sí Se Puede!  It's not exactly clear who played on what track but it seems that Los Lobos (who still included Gonzales at this point) are the basic unit throughout the album, augmented by a few other musicians and a number of singers.  Basically the whole album, then, can be considered a Los Lobos project, but they don't really step into the spotlight.  They only get one vocal number - "Telingo Lingo," sung by Rosas.  But of course their musicianship is on fine display, behind singers including Carmen Moreno (that's how she's credited here, although on the web she's known as Carmencristina Moreno) and Geree Gonzalez.  Of particular note here is the song "Mañana Is Now," sung by Geree Gonzalez:  it's an original by the album's producer, Art Brambila, and what's interesting about it is that it's a pure '70s pop ballad.  Not too remarkable as a song, but that means that this is Los Lobos' first non-trad recording, and they play it beautifully.  And that's a revelation.  Like, we already knew they could do that (the trad stuff:  "Telingo Lingo" is a trip), but now we know they can do this as well.

The third and last document that I know of from Los Lobos' first period is what I've already mentioned, their real debut album:  Los Lobos Del Este De Los Angeles (Just Another Band From East L.A.).  It came out in 1978, but they had been planning it for a while, it seems;  it's teased in the liner notes for Sí Se Puede, and at the end of the 1975 documentary you can hear Frank signing off with the subtitle - "Just another band from East L.A.!"  That title is, of course, an ironic nod to Frank Zappa, which in itself is forward-looking.  They were playing trad, but rock was still among their cultural referents...  This album is now widely available, because it was reissued in 2000 (with a previously-unreleased bonus track, no less:  "El Bon Bon de Elena").  Good deal.

By 1978 they were a four-piece.  Gonzales was gone, and as I say, there's no reference to him in the

reissue's liner notes.  Cesar is the main lead singer at this point, although the others join in on choruses, and David takes one lead ("Cielito Lindo") and one co-lead ("María Chuchena), and Conrad (!) takes one lead (on "Guantanamera").  Back in the '75 doc, Gonzales makes a crack about David's vocals - "at least that's what he calls them" - and that, combined with his minor role here, suggests that in their early days David wasn't considered much of a singer by the rest of the band.  Maybe it was just that they didn't feel his style fit Spanish-language things - even after he became the band's usual lead singer (and one of the most soulful singers in rock, for my money), he tended to leave the trad songs to Cesar. 

One more telling point to be gleaned from the credits on this album.  They only use percussion on a couple of tracks, and it's played by a guest:  Charlie Tovar.  When they went electric they would prevail on Louie to play drums, but evidently he never really liked it, and when they got big enough to make it possible financially, they started using session drummers.  In fact How Will The Wolf Survive? seems (from a careful study of album credits) to be the only album on which Louis was the sole, or even main, drummer.  And they've been hiring extra drummers for tours at least since the early '90s - first Victor Bisetti, then Cougar Estrada, and now Enrique "Bugs" Gonzalez...  Given the tremendous importance of rhythm and percussion in their music I've always been a little puzzled as to why Bisetti or Estrada were never official members.  Then again, the fact that there have only been two lineup changes (minus F. Gonzales, plus Steve Berlin) in forty years means they must have figured out something on the personnel front, so who am I to question it?  Anyway, that starts here.  So far from being a drummer was Louie that when they needed one for two tracks on this record, they hired one.

As far as I know that's the entirety of what's available from the pre-electric, folklorico-era Los Lobos.  One documentary, one fund-raising album backing up mostly other singers, and one album in their own right.  All of it pretty damn good, but of course all of it very pure folk:  I'll readily admit that as beautiful as I find it, I never would have sought it out if it weren't for what came later. 

P.S. It adds up to a really nice single disc (78 minutes or so) if you do it like this:

From the documentary:  The interview into whatever song that is they're playing first (it begins, "Chicanos somos, señores"); Las Tres Huastecas; Sabor A Mí; Siete Leguas; vamping behind band introductions.

From Sí Se Puede!:  De Colores;  Corrida De Dolores Huerta #39; Telingo Lingo; Mañana Is Now; No Nos Moveran.

The entirety of (Just Another Band From East L.A.), including the bonus track.

Bob Dylan: Another Self Portrait, post #4

Another Self Portrait is of the opinion that Self Portrait and New Morning were essentially one project, one long series of sessions with only an arbitrary division.  In my previous post I noted that I'm not really sold on this.  But I'm glad Columbia is, because that gave them an excuse to look at the June 1970 New Morning sessions in ASP.  And this is where the set is strongest.

That's partly, of course, because the New Morning sessions themselves were so strong.  By June 1970 Dylan finally had enough new originals to begin thinking about an album for real, and he came up with more as the sessions progressed (the album would eventually comprise not just the June sessions visited in ASP but a last-minute, and very productive, session in August).  The New Morning songs were good, solid songs:  not as haunted as some of those on John Wesley Harding, but more substantial than anything on Nashville Skyline.    When the reviews proclaimed Dylan is Back, it was more than just a reaction to Self Portrait;  it was a justified feeling of relief that after a silent 1968 and a year and a half of dabbling in 1969 and 1970, Dylan had made an album of committed songwriting again.  Of course, it would be his last real album until 1974's Planet Waves (and four years was an eternity in 1970s rock music), but there was no way to know that in 1970;  at the time, it must have seemed like the beginning of something, rather than the end.

But it's not just the welcome new originals that make the June sessions so important.  It's the fact that, as previously noted, he continued to experiment with covers of folk songs old and new.  But in June he was singing with more passion, more grit, more soul than he had been able to muster for years.  March 1970 had some very bright spots, but June was dazzling.

I keep talking about June.  But of course the New Morning sessions began in May, with the George Harrison session.  The initial Bootleg Series release included a seductive take of "If Not For You" from this session, with George's unmistakeable guitar;  ASP includes two more tracks, a previously-uncirculating version of "Time Passes Slowly" and the only new original recorded that day, "Working On A Guru."  The former boasts George and Bob harmonizing on a refrain that was dropped from future takes;  "la-la-la" is all they sing, but it's all they need to sing.  The latter was probably too similar in feel to the other uptempo numbers on New Morning to make the final cut, but it's a gem, and it's nice to finally have it official-like.  And of course one hopes that eventually this whole session will be released;  it's not as uniformly strong as Dylan's previous high-profile collaboration, with Johnny Cash, at least in part because George hardly sings at all, but it has its moments.  Another nice update of "One Too Many Mornings" (it's one of Dylan's most malleable songs);  too-weird-not-to-prize runthroughs of "Yesterday" and "Cupid";  the pre-country moonshine of "When's My Swamp Gonna Catch Fire" and "Fishing Blues". 

But June.  What makes the 1973 Dylan album so essential is the inclusion of several scintillating covers from these sessions.  "Mary Ann" and "Sarah Jane" are the equal of pretty much anything Bob's ever done, as far as pure singing is concerned.  They're that soulful, that assured, that complete.  Some of the other cover choices are too left-field to be truly effective - "Mr. Bojangles," "Big Yellow Taxi" - but he's still in fine voice.  They're more interesting as performances than most of what he was doing in March.  To these, ASP adds one more cover, and it's a beaut:  "Bring Me A Little Water," a Leadbelly tune often known as "Sylvie."  According to Olof, there are still a few more covers missing from these sessions;  I'm glad to have this one, and greedy for more.  (The best of his 1970 self-covers, a bluesy "Tomorrow Is A Long Time," circulates, and should have been here.)

Where ASP really does itself proud is in the alternate takes it includes of New Morning originals.  A few of these, such as the string-laden "Sign On The Window" and "If Not For You" and the electric-piano "Went To See The Gypsy," have been circulating for a while, and I'm honestly shocked to see them here, alongside the horn-overdubbed "New Morning."  The elaborate arrangements of these fly in the face of the stripped-down aesthetic Columbia is trying to sell for the March sessions.  But the orchestral "Sign On The Window" is a particular favorite of mine.  I'm overjoyed to have it legal.  The new alternates of "Time Passes Slowly" and "If Dogs Run Free" are similarly revelatory:  the former has an organ vamp copped from Joe Cocker, while the latter is performed like a regular Dylan song, complete with a chorus, as opposed to the jazz pastiche on the album.

All these alternate takes do precisely what they're supposed to:  give us a completely different way of looking at this album.  Now we can hear just how much experimentation Dylan put in before he settled on the album arrangements.  In many ways the discarded versions are livelier, more colorful than what he settled on;  but they're less intimate, less light-hearted. 

To sum:  ASP is puzzlingly weak in the 1969 portion of its self appointed task.  But in its treatment of 1970 it's stronger than I would ever have expected.  I still have my quibbles.  I still would have preferred a conscientiously complete look at these sessions, a release, say, that concentrated just on the March sessions and gave us at least one version of everything recorded then.  But nothing in Columbia's history with Dylan evinces that kind of methodicalness, so I hardly expect it.  If they're going to be scattershot, one can only hope that they hit as often as they do in the 1970 part of ASP.

But they also gesture toward 1971.  So there's a little more to consider.

Bob Dylan: Another Self Portrait, post #3

As we've noted, Self Portrait was comprised of a bunch of songs recorded in April-May 1969, a few numbers from the Isle of Wight, and a bunch of songs recorded in March 1970.  Another Self Portrait ignores the April-May 1969 sessions, although the 1973 Dylan compilation had picked up a couple of outtakes from them.  Conversely the Dylan album ignored the early '70 sessions, while Another Self Portrait lavishes attention on them. 

SP included fourteen tracks from 3/70.  ASP includes 11 more unique recordings, plus "stripped" versions of seven of the SP tracks - that is, the same takes but denuded of the overdubs added for the finished album.  Of the 11 unique recordings:  One is a third take of "Alberta" to complement the two on the original album.  One is another take of "Spanish Is The Loving Tongue," first attempted in 4/69 and then recorded again in 6/70 during the sessions that resulted in New Morning; this last version was released on the flip side of the "Watching The River Flow" single in 6/71, and is the best of the three, I think.  Another is an early take of "Went To See The Gypsy," which of course would be rerecorded for New Morning.  And another is an unexpected revival of "House Carpenter," which he had recorded for his first album.  "Railroad Bill" is another song he used to do back in his folkie days.  But the other six are new:  we've never heard Dylan singing them before. 

Which is, right there, fucking awesome.  This is a major cache of material.  These 11 alone amount to an old vinyl elpee's worth of music.  And they're by and large really good takes.  I still think perhaps the best single recording to surface from these March sessions is "Copper Kettle" from the original album;  "It Hurts Me Too" and "Gotta Travel On" are close.  But of the new ones, "Tattle O'Day" and "Pretty Saro" are brilliant, and the rest are very nice too. 

What about the stripped versions of the previously-released recordings?  I never hated the overdubbed versions, to be honest, and I still think I prefer the gussied-up "Copper Kettle" - I long ago outgrew whatever fetish I may once have had for the lone troubadour with his acoustic guitar, and I actually enjoy hearing Bob experiment with different production styles, different ways to find a rapprochement with pop music.  But I do agree that the unadorned versions of "Days Of '49," "Belle Isle," and "Little Sadie" recover a kind of experimental fragility that's nice to hear.

Because experimenting is what he was doing.  It's never been clear that he was really trying to make an album with these sessions, or with the 4-5/69 sessions.  I'm still not sold on the idea that Self Portrait and New Morning were part of one big project, which is what ASP is suggesting.  But I do think it's likely that from February 1969 all the way through August 1970, he was entering the studio fairly regularly, more or less just because he could, but without necessarily having new songs or a particular project in mind.  Twice, with Johnny Cash and with George Harrison, he was jamming with friends who happened to be accomplished musicians, just as he had done with the Band in 1967;  at other times he was in the studio with session musicians, some of whom (like David Bromberg, Al Kooper, and Charlie Daniels) were fairly strong personalities too.  And always, as in '67, he was rummaging through old songs, trying to find something he connected with, waiting for his swamp to catch fire.  In 1967 this had led to a slew of new originals, culminating in John Wesley Harding.  In February 1969 this unlocked a sudden, small burst of songwriting that became Nashville Skyline, but he has said that this was more or less an accident, and it didn't happen again;  by April 1970 he had only written a couple more new songs, but for whatever reason he decided to put out an album with what he had on hand, maybe to get the record company or the fans off his back, and that was Self Portrait.  But in June he was right back in the studio again, and with the same approach:  lots of covers.  Only this time he had a few more originals, and eventually enough to make an album.  I'll discuss that in a future post.

In other words, if the Basement Tapes of 1967 were Dylan's epic trawl through the murky waters of American vernacular music, quite possibly the sessions that would define his career, seeing him connect his 1964-1966 modernism with his pre-1964 folk roots, then his sessions in 1969 and 1970 can be seen as a continuation of that effort.  Nothing he did in 1969 or 1970 quite equals what he did in 1967, but then I consider the Basement Tapes to be the acme of American music, period. 

And now with ASP we have really a pretty good handle indeed on where he was at, what part of the Basement he was in, in March 1970.  There are still a few missing tracks - Olof lists takes on "Dock Of The Bay" and "Come All Ye Fair And Tender Ladies" that I'd like to hear, among other things.  But to be honest this is more than I ever expected to hear from these sessions.  And the new stuff is good.  It makes me reassess the period, and I liked the original album.  So chalk one up for Columbia.

But the best was still yet to come.

Bob Dylan: Another Self Portrait, post #2

Aside from a few Isle of Wight tracks, the original Self Portrait was comprised of studio recordings made between April 1969 and April 1970 (although the last new recordings for it were made in March '70 - the April sessions were just for overdubs, according to Olof).  Another Self Portrait casts a wider net than that, including quite a few tracks from the New Morning sessions of May and June '70, and even a few '71 tracks.  I'll address that decision in a future post.

*

It also includes a small number of outtakes from Nashville Skyline, and that's what I want to take up now.  The set gives us alternate takes of "I Threw It All Away" and "Country Pie."

The rationale for this is unclear, to say the least.  Nashville Skyline was recorded in February 1969 and released in April;  Self Portrait contains nothing from these sessions.  They were separate projects.  There are a number of revealing outtakes from the NS sessions that could have been included on SP if SP had been meant to include the NS sessions, but they weren't. 

I insist on this distinction because the set, and its liner notes, explicitly argue that the SP sessions were indistinguishable, indivisible, from the New Morning sessions (I'll address that in a future post).  And by including these NS outtakes they're implicitly arguing that the SP sessions were indivisible from the NS sessions.  Which isn't true.

Or maybe (more likely) it's that they mean us to conclude that the SP sessions are best heard in the wider context of what Dylan was doing in 1969-1971.  And that I agree with - by all means, more context.  But then I wonder:  why these outtakes?  I have nothing against alternate takes, and the more released Dylan the better I always say, but these alternate takes of "I Threw It All Away" and "Country Pie" don't really reveal much, to be honest.  Not about NS, and not about SP.  And meanwhile they fail to pick up the alternate "Lay, Lady, Lay" that was released as an iTunes bonus track on preorders of Together Through Life a few years ago.  That's no longer available, and it is revealing:  Dylan's vocals are pretty similar to the album version, but without the steel guitar and bongos, and with a more prominent Hammond, the arrangement is altogether more muscular.  It's a shame that this has disappeared into the netherworld.

It's about choices.  I rejoice to have these tracks, unrevealing though I find them.  But at the expense of what?  There's a whole album's worth of circulating outtakes from Nashville Skyline - the session he did with Johnny Cash and Cash's band - which included Carl Perkins!  A Million-Dollar Trio, more or less (although Carl doesn't sing anything).  This is where the NS remake of "Girl From The North Country" comes from, of course, and about 55 minutes of it circulate.

It's a great session.  Sometimes Dylan lays back out of deference to Cash, and sometimes he leans into it a bit more;  but it all has that casual, sunny, sincere bonhomie of the released track.  And repertoire-wise it's very interesting, including quite a few Cash tunes, but also some other Sun Records rockabilly numbers, and some ancient, ancient country songs such as "Mountain Dew" and "Careless Love" and two of Jimmie Rodgers' Blue Yodels.

Bob yodels.

And nothing has been released aside from "Girl From The North Country."  If you want to make the case that the SP idea - an album of country-ish covers - had its start in the NS period, then this is your argument right here.  Bob Dylan futzing around in the studio with a bona fide country giant and his cowboy band, somehow finding his way all the way back to Bascom Lamar Lunsford and the Singing Brakeman.

Another Self Portrait ignores it completely.

*

If Self Portrait (before it became a fuck-you) had an idea at its heart, that was probably it:  a covers album.  Classic country numbers done straight, together with trad folk and folk-revival originals done in a country style.  Dylan was in a songwriting slump, but he also had roots in the, duh, folk tradition, so the idea of a covers album probably didn't seem as strange to him as it did to his audience, which by this time had wholly embraced the ethic of original songwriting that he himself had done a lot to establish.

The Johnny Cash session was clearly just a lark, or an attempt to reconnect with the Basement-rummaging vibe he'd enjoyed with the Band in '67.  But later in the spring of 1969 he entered the studio and began laying down covers in somewhat more earnest.  Sessions in April and May produced one new original, the pastiche "Living The Blues," plus covers of "Take Me As I Am (Or Let Me Go)," "Take A Message To Mary," "Let It Be Me," "I've Forgotten More Than You'll Ever Know," and "Blue Moon."  All of these made it to Self Portrait.  Two more covers, "Spanish Is The Loving Tongue" and "A Fool Such As I," were released on the 1973 Dylan comp (another fuck-you but this time from Columbia to Dylan, who had just jumped labels).

These sessions have to count as the first Self Portrait sessions, right?  They produced a significant part of the final album, and unlike the Cash session it was clear that they were meant for something - a big, professional band, elaborate arrangements.  The SP elaborate-production aesthetic starts here.  And from a historical point of view they're interesting, in that they show Dylan persevering with his Nashville Skyline voice, that silky croon.  In 1970 he traded this in for, usually, something closer to his old folk voice.

Artistically it must be admitted that these aren't the strongest of the SP sessions.  A lot of it I put down to his decision to stick with the croon:  what sounded fresh and playful in February is by this point starting to sound unnatural.  On a few tracks he finds his old joy in rhythm and phrasing - "A Fool Such As I" is pretty successful.  But for the most part these are the tracks that gave SP a name for blandness, and the '73 album a reputation as more of the same.

So I guess I'm not surprised that Columbia didn't take this opportunity to collect the two Dylan tracks - otherwise available only on the Complete Albums Collection, since Dylan is out of print as a separate album.  Not surprised, but a bit disappointed.

In fact, Another Self Portrait ignores the April-May sessions entirely.  And that is a surprise and a disappointment, because the two circulating unreleased songs from these sessions are, predictably, the strongest:  raucous covers of two Johnny Cash songs, "Ring Of Fire" and "Folsom Prison Blues."  The sound is fuzzy on the circulating recordings, so it's hard to know if the performances are really as wild and garage-like as they sound, but what's not obscured is the rockabilly drive of the arrangements, and the corresponding aggression of Dylan's vocals.  These should have been released.  They would have utterly changed people's perception of 1969 Dylan.

*

In sum, Another Self Portrait is motivated by a fine and generous impulse to include 1969 in its overview of the album, but makes really bad choices.  Leaves the interesting stuff in the can.

Bob Dylan: Another Self Portrait, post #1

I picked this up when it was released, but it's taken me a while to begin to digest it, and to figure out what I wanted to say about it.  I think I know now.

First, some general remarks.  I've always liked the original Self Portrait album, probably more than your average Dylan fan, definitely more than the punters and the critics.  I agree that, as released, as a unit, it's a mess, probably a fuck-you;  but within that mess are moments of great beauty, if not quite genius.  And bootlegs and whatnot have shown me that there was a lot of good stuff left off the album.  So I was surprised, but not at all dismayed, to learn that the Bootleg Series was going to take a good long look at the sessions.  Great choice.

But the result is just as much of a hodgepodge (if not a fuck-you) as the original album.  Moments of great beauty, but presented in such a disorderly, haphazard fashion that the package ends up obscuring as much as it reveals.  Which is a shame, because it reveals quite a lot.

*

I'm going to start with two egregious examples of Columbia burying the lede.

The big one is the Isle of Wight set.  This has long been my vote for Next Bootleg Release.  It had all the requirements:  great historical significance, nice performance, notoriety, and yet rarity value because the circulating tapes were so spotty.

Hearing it here in its entirety in excellent sound only confirms me in my love for this show.  In the acoustic numbers it contains some of Dylan's best ever singing - on "Wild Mountain Thyme" he does things that I've only ever heard Aaron Neville pull off.  And on the electric stuff he modulates skilfully between an abandon that looks forward to Tour '74 and a smooth control that recalls (of course) Nashville Skyline.  But with the Band.  I mean, hearing the Band put their stamp on a few Nashville Skyline and John Wesley Harding numbers is deeply, deeply satisfying.  This show is a missing link, a key part of the Dylan story.  So I'm glad they released it.

But shocked and scandalized that they released it only in the super-deluxe mondo-expensive edition of the set.  Meaning only the most dedicated of fans are going to get it.  This is far too good to be bonus material.  This is headline quality music.  Should have been its own standalone release, as far as I'm concerned.

The other buried lede, and this may be even bigger, is the studio version of "Minstrel Boy."  The sole new original at the Isle of Wight show (not counting "The Mighty Quinn," which was known if not previously released), the song was a key part of the Self Portrait album.  So it's a real nice touch that they included a studio take of it here.  Particularly since this comes from the Basement Tapes sessions of 1967, and yet has never circulated (despite the plethora of unreleased material from those sessions that does circulate - and when are they going to release a complete box of Basement tracks?).

But here's where the lede gets buried.  Because Levon Helm's voice is in unmistakeable evidence on this recording - and nowhere else on the circulating Basement tracks.  He had dropped out of the Band (the Hawks) during their 1965-6 world tour backing Dylan, and didn't rejoin until late '67, just as they were gearing up to become the Band.  For decades there have been rumors of Basement Tapes with Levon, but everything that circulates from 1967 of the Band backing Dylan lacks Levon.  So the release of a Basement song that includes him is huge.  It's evidence that Dylan did keep laying down tracks with them after Levon returned - and it suggests that there's more where this came from.  Again, for decades there have been rumors of another reel or two or more of Basement stuff, perhaps in the possession of Garth Hudson.  Maybe it's true.  Maybe there's more where this came from.

But the liner notes are mum on the subject.

(To be honest, I'm not a hundred percent convinced that it is from 1967.  Dylan's voice sounds like '67, but some of his Isle of Wight singing slips back into that Basement vibe, so this could just as easily come from rehearsals for that concert.  It could, perhaps, be 1969.  But I have no reason to think that other than, I guess, a general feeling that Columbia isn't telling this story as carefully as they should.)

More later.

Inside Llewyn Davis

So here's a thing.  Sometimes people who are very competent in one art form are clueless about

another.  I've seen it a lot in my professional life (and in the mirror):  people who are tremendously sensitive and supple in their thinking about literature who use images, paintings or photos, without the slightest wariness, as if what you see is just what you get.  People whose understanding of the visual arts is as multifaceted and textured as you can get who treat text like fluff.  Filmmakers who treat music as nothing but plot or atmosphere; the Coen Brothers are not among their number, however.

So now we get musicians treating the latest Coen Brothers movie as if it were not art.  As if it could aspire to be nothing but a movie "about" a real person or place or time.  As if any deviations from what these musicians remember or imagine are breaches of faith, rather than artistic choices.

Which is not to say that Inside Llewyn Davis doesn't have things to say about Dave Van Ronk, or Greenwich Village in the early '60s, or the Folk Revival.  Just that these things will be said in the context of the movie's true aims, whatever those are.  And that if you expected this to be a Van Ronk biopic you were ignorant, pure and simple. 

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And while I'm thinking about critics of the Coen Brothers, let me say I've had it up to fucking here with this idea that the Coens hate their characters.  I have no idea what this is supposed to even mean, even though it's been part of the critical rap on them from the very beginning.  Go back to reviews of Blood Simple and you'll see it there.  Sure they laugh at their characters, but you don't think they have a deep and abiding love, empathy, and even respect for Ulysses Everett McGill?  For Barton Fink?  For Larry Gopnik, and sure for Llewyn Davis?  The fact is that human beings are idiots, every one of them, silly and vain and flatulent and oddly shaped;  and that comes through in a Coen Brothers movie.  But saying that doesn't mean you hate them.

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The Coen Brothers think more deeply about music than most filmmakers.  Their scores are employed with as much thought and care as everything else in their films (which is to say:  a hell of a lot).  And when they use pre-existing records, or new recordings of old songs, it's always with a deep knowledge of them that speaks (like all the odd details of character and setting in their films) of a delight in them for their own sake.  A humanism of music.

So it is with the music in this film.  And it helps that they know their Dylan pretty damn well - they've always been properly appreciative of their fellow Minnesotan Jewish artist.

Which is why their choice of Dylan's derivative-original "Fare Thee Well" to close the movie is so dead-on.  Like, the more you know about Dylan the more sense this makes.  If you know your early Dylan then when Davis is told that "the New York Times will be there" at the Gaslight that night, not to see you but this other new act in town, you immediately think of Robert Shelton's career-launching NYT review of Dylan.  And so it's entirely right that as Young Bob is up there on stage doing just what Llewyn Davis has been doing for the whole movie (sing personally twisted versions of old folk songs), but doing it with more charisma and more instinctive songcraft, as presumably a secret Shelton is in the audience about to make him a star, Davis himself is out in the alley getting the shit kicked out of him.  By all accounts Dylan's impact on the folk revival scene was just that violent.  Not all at once, but over a period of years.  Dylan joined the scene, then without necessarily meaning to he destroyed the scene.  Not overnight, but quickly enough, he made what Llewyn Davis was doing irrelevant.

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What about the claim that Inside Llewyn Davis neglects the Civil Rights Movement?  Well, it's true.  If this were, say, Cadillac Records or Walk the Line or any other music biopic, it would have an obligation to reflect the importance of political concerns to the musicians who drove the folk revival scene.  This movie doesn't do that.  Obviously because it doesn't choose to do that, and this should surprise no one who knows the Coens' movies, since they always have only an oblique and suggestive relationship to the politics of the periods in which they're set.

My read of it is this.  The movie is called Inside Llewyn Davis, and that's what it's about.  Not the world outside Llewyn Davis - not the real Greenwich Village, the real early '60s, but the emotional and mental and artistic landscape found inside him.  Inside this fictional character.  Obvs.

But more than that.  I've always thought of O Brother as being about, not the South that produced the songs in it, but the South that the songs in it produce:  the Depression-era South as you'd imagine it based on nothing but old Carter Family and Robert Johnson records, and maybe their covers.  The South inside the music.  In just that way, Inside Llewyn Davis is about the Greenwich Village evoked by the music.  And by the cover of Inside Dave Van Ronk.  (That cat, for example.)

And the thing is, until Dylan came along and started writing the protest songs, you wouldn't know from the music what these people cared about, politically.  For these usually well-off usually-white usually-young usually-Northern usually-urban people, singing the songs of the black rural old poor Other was a gesture in support of the Civil Rights movement.  But the songs weren't about that.  Mostly.  Dylan of course wasn't the first to write protest songs, or explicitly political songs.  But look at what Van Ronk, Joan Baez, and others were recording on their pre-Dylan albums:  songs about other things:  suffering, pain, parting, hope, love, etc.  Eternal verities which demanded, ultimately, Civil Rights as a recognition of the common humanity of the people who had first spoken these eternal verities in this way - but which transcended any particular political goal.

To say this may sound like it's belittling the importance of the Movement.  And that's precisely the controversy Dylan sparked - not when he plugged in, but before that, when at the height of his fame as a prophet of protest he recorded an album of personal songs.  Love songs, hate songs, humor songs, rambling songs about himself, not the Movement.  And called it Another Side Of (although he hated the title).  To indulge in the personal is, by some lights, to resist progress.  Or at least to stop contributing to it.  A counter-revolutionary act, in some circles.

For better or worse, I think that's where this movie lives.  I think it's trying to reflect the world you get from listening to Dave Van Ronk, early pre-protest Dylan, even Tommy Clancy and the Makem Brothers - a world that's largely introspective, weighed down by its own feelings, and by the difficulty of expressing them through songs and styles borrowed from the Other.  The results are often beautiful, but strangely inarticulate, like Davis himself, for all their fluency; and this gives rise to not a little frustration.  Thus the moment when Davis heckles the Jean Ritchie analog, the one singer in the film who comes by her music authentically - and Davis can't handle it, and he calls her fake.  In many ways it's the realest moment in the film. 

Andy Williams: "Love Story" (disco version)

More roborative disco.  Andy Williams, of all people, and yes my parents had a few of his records, right there with Roger Whittaker and Neil Diamond, turns in a Virgilian epic of a performance on this nearly ten-minute 1979 remix (or rerecording? nobody seems to know) of his 1971 hit.  It's so toweringly good that it leaves you wondering why more crooners didn't get into the disco game.  (Probably they did, and the Tanuki just doesn't know it.) 

Williams' old-world dramatic sense seems made for disco, turning bel canto at just the right moments, and the arrangement is pretty genius, too.  Some bits are clearly borrowed from better-known tracks.  But that timpani solo:  that's something I hadn't heard before. 

If this doesn't heal you a little bit, maybe you aren't sick enough.

Tantra: "Hills Of Katmandu" (1979)

Last year the Tanuki went on a disco binge.  It was therapy.  You don't need to know for what.

He blew a lot of money on disco records, some he knew, some he knew of, and some that were utterly new to him.  Many of them proved quite delightful.  And so here's "Hills Of Katmandu" by Tantra.  All sixteen minutes and twenty seconds of it. 

Here's some background on it.  But what you really need to know is that it's got it all.  Everything is in this track.  Like the 12" cover suggests, it's got skyscrapers and weird mechanical lionfish and the Universe in it.  It takes you all the way there and leaves you.

It's a perfect example of how the prog aesthetic infiltrated a lot more in the '70s than anybody is willing to admit.  This record derives a lot of its power from being organized like a prog-rock mini-epic, a suite.  The hard-charging guitar-driven part that serves as overture and reprise is the only reason the middle part, the dreamy section, works.  On its own that dreamy section would have been fairly forgettable.  It would have just been a nice poster of the Universe on your bedroom wall.  Framed like this, with the rampage of the mechanical lionfish, it transcends: it whispers in your ear that someday we really will build a skyscraper to the Universe.  And this will be the elevator music.  It will take sixteen minutes and twenty seconds to reach the top floor, and when the doors open

Lou Reed R.I.P.

Yes, even a Deadhead, prog-sympathizer, soft-spot-for-folk-having, no-New-York putz like me likes him some Brother Reed.

And now there ain't no comin' back.

Gil Evans: The Complete Pacific Jazz Sessions

The Complete Pacific Jazz Sessions is a 2006 CD reissue of two Gil Evans albums on one disc:  New Bottle Old Wine from 1958 and Great Jazz Standards from 1959.  The skinny is that they were his second and third records as a leader, a capacity he'd been able to assume due to the prominence he'd achieved through his collaborations with Miles Davis, beginning in earnest in 1957.

New Bottle Old Wine fairly closely follows the model of Evans's first album with Davis.  This record,

too, is essentially built around one soloist, in this case Cannonball Adderley.  It's Adderley's instrumental voice that dominates the recordings, Adderley's improvisational sensibilities that provide the heart.  It's a fine record, though, don't get me wrong;  Evans's style as an arranger is fully realized at this point, and he's doing fine things with these tunes.  They're carefully chosen to guide the listener through the history of jazz from W.C. Handy and Jelly Roll Morton up to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and as arranged by Evans it all sounds of a piece, utterly modern, and even highbrow.  This is dry-martini music.

Great Jazz Standards opens things up a bit.  Solo duties are spread around among a number of players, notably Steve Lacy, Johnny Coles, and Budd Johnson, on a number of instruments, and Gil's own piano plays a small but key role on a few tracks.  And, it could  

just be me, but the result (and this is strange to say, when Cannonball leaves such a mark on the first record) on the second result is more emotional, more moving.  My favorite track so far is the second record's opener, the Bix Beiderbecke number "Davenport Blues."

Shadows of Treme, sure.  And at this point any trumpeter waking up in Gil Evans's bed is going to be suspected of Miles Davis, but Coles makes his own case pretty quick, achieving a singing, broad, magnanimous tone that Miles just didn't use.  But it's Gil we're here to hear, right?  And he delivers, with a setting that alternates between moaning very reminiscent of '20s hot jazz sonorities and the muted-horn, odd-woodwind murmuring you expect from him.  And it all adds up to a deeply moving, authentically felt blues.  This is the olive in your martini.

Sunshine Daydream

We were out of the country for much of July, coming back the day after the Country Fair ended.   So for the first time in three years, I didn't go, and you, Gentle Readers, were spared a long navel-gazing post about hippies.  Time for a break anyway, though.

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But then I saw Sunshine Daydream a few days ago.  This is a movie made about a Grateful Dead concert in 1972.  The concert has been legendary among Dead fans ever since, in the sense that it has circulated widely and been widely hailed as one of their best shows ever (The Deadhead's Taping Compendium makes a serious case, over several pages, for it as a religious experience).  The film has also been legendary, but in a different sense:  it was never released, and most Heads have only known it as a rumor, or as a grainy multi-generational VHS dub, or youtube of same.  More myth than reality.  But the Dead's organization have finally cleaned it up, remastered it, and are releasing both the audio of the show and a DVD of the movie, and to plug it they did a satellite simulcast of the film to theaters around the country this past week on Jerry's birthday.

It so happens that this show took place in Veneta, at the site of what was then a Renaissance Fair, which later became the Oregon Country Fair.  So seeing this film in Springfield (at the only local theater receiving it) meant that I was seeing it in the company, not just of a lot of Eugene's trademark hippies, but of people who had been there, and seeing it as close as you could get to where it happened.  And of course I've been to the Fairgrounds, stood on that field, thought to myself, this is where it happened.  Hell, when we moved here I was even excited to realize that Nancy's Yogurt is an actual ongoing thing (and it's pretty damn good yogurt, too). 

So, you know, if I couldn't make it to the OCF this year, this was the next best thing, and maybe in some ways better, in terms of getting my annual dose of hippie wannabe nostalgia...

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It turns out to be a pretty great film. 

The actual filming is a little variable - the footage of "Sing Me Back Home," the last song, gets kind of unwatchable because it was getting dark and the filmmakers didn't have the right film or lighting equipment.  The interspersal of 1966 performance footage, and Furthur bus film, is interesting but was utterly baffling to the uninitiated (such as Mrs. Sgt. T), because totally unexplained, just dropped in without warning.  And the animation in the middle of "Dark Star" is interesting, but ultimately not quite as interesting as it would have been to just keep showing us the band.

On the other hand it captures the eventness of the event pretty well (I say, not having been there).  It makes you feel the heat, and at the same time the lushness of the Veneta countryside, and the utter freedom of the scene.  Which is maybe a euphemism for saying it has a lot of naked hippies dancing in a field under the sun near some trees.  A lot.  And when it comes right down to it, if that sounds fun to you, you'll probably like this film.  And if not, not.

But as much as I liked that aspect of the film (and I did indeed, in spite/because of the fact that I wouldn't have had the courage to get naked and dance myself), it's the music, and the way the music is presented, that makes it worth seeing. 

Here too there are limitations - only a couple of shots of Keith Godchaux, for example, which broke my heart because he's clearly audible on the soundtrack, playing brilliantly.  The filmmakers caught the other members, though, and show them playing - long, nicely focused shots of players playing.  Sometimes we get their fingers, and if I was a guitar player I'm sure that would please me;  other times we just get their faces, which in some ways is more interesting, because I can't help but wonder what it would feel like to be able to play like that.  But often we get several members at once, and that's where we get the magic of ensemble playing, right there on screen.  You can see them nodding at each other, grimacing or smiling at what the others are doing, signalling each other.

Or, more tellingly, not signalling each other.  The musical high point is, of course, the "Dark Star," a magnificent piece of ensemble playing.  Utterly musical - if your image of the Dead is of aimless noodling, then, well, let's just say you're way wrong, and this "Dark Star" might show you why.  It's jamming, mostly without vocals, but always with a purpose, always with a direction - they're not just drifting, they're moving through a succession of musical moods and settings with careful attention to what they're doing now, and a good sense of where they might go next.  It's anything but stagnant.

And it's also, in true Dead fashion, anything but lead-and-comping.  They're all soloing at once - Jerry's lines can sound like a lead guitar, but often only in the sense that he's providing the most obvious musical anchor, giving everybody else the freedom to embroider even more creatively.  And when they move, they all move together, without missing a beat or a shade or a grace note.  And that's where the film is so brilliant, because for long minutes of this "Dark Star" (when it's not weird animation), we're watching the band, and we realize that they're not really watching each other.  No one of them is catching the others' eyes, giving directions, signalling.  They're just listening to each other, and that's enough.  It's really phenomenal.  And of course it's something any Deadhead knows the band could do.  But I've never seen it caught visually so well.

I doubt anybody who doesn't already get the Dead could make it through this film.  Which is a shame, because more than any other, I think it shows why those of us who love them for their music (as opposed to What They Represented, or whatever) love them.

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So I saw that Thursday night, and most of the day Friday I was still in this great glow, having seen my annual quota of naked dancing hippies, having remembered (after a few weeks of not really listening to them) why I love the Dead, and having come to a deeper appreciation of how very right it feels to me that I've come to live in this place.

And then I read this.  Some background.  That blog is one I read regularly.  It's maybe my third or fourth morning read.  And what sets it apart, for me, is that author's particular point of view - his subject position, to use a dated piece of academic parlance.  He's a solid leftist with a particular interest in and sympathy for labor unions, an interest that manifests itself in his work as a historian of the labor movement in this country but that has its roots, as he frequently reminds us, in his upbringing in the very working-class town of Springfield, Oregon.  To me that's all to the good:  not only does he provide me food for thought from a congenial political point of view, not only does he educate me on aspects of the left that I'm not as familiar with as I should be, but he helps me better understand the community I live in (even though he doesn't live here anymore).  Cool. 

But God, what a dick he's being in that post, right?  And more so in the comments.  Now, I get it:  there are cultural tensions between Eugene and Springfield that pretty neatly mirror the major cultural tensions in the American left as a whole.  Intellectual vs. working class, environment vs. industry, college vs. factory (or sawmill), New Left vs. Old Left.  Spotted owls vs. loggers.  Hippies vs. blue-collars.  And I'm entirely willing to allow that Loomis might have scars from his childhood here;  we all carry that kind of baggage.  So I can forgive him being a dick, a troll (it's his blog, right), and whatever. 

I'm more saddened by how ready we on the Left are to break into warring tribes:  it's the old circular firing squad, the Fractured Left meme, and it's exactly what They want us to be doing.  Which we know - even Loomis knows it, or I should say especially him, because he's out there fighting the good fight, trying to remind the Left what it has spent the last few decades forgetting, that it doesn't win without labor, and in fact that labor rights are human rights.

United we stand, in other words.  But all that goes by the board when there's a chance to point and laugh at hippies.  I've never understood this.  I've seen it for decades, from precisely the people who should know better.  I spent part of my sophomore year in high school in an ongoing argument with a punk girl, trying to convince her that hippies weren't the enemy, that we were all on the same side, had more in common than not, that we'd be better off allying to fight the real enemy.  Never worked.  So we get people like Loomis, who, instead of welcoming people to the Left no matter what their motivation, or failing that, instead of, you know, live and let live, points and laughs.  Like a dick. 

Because that's all he's doing, is pointing and laughing.  There's no reasoned argument in there that X political approach is ineffective, or that Y lifestyle is actually pernicious in some way;  there can't be reasoned argument, because he's not bothering to address any actual thing.  He just says "hippies," and the other bullies all know what he means.