Tag: Bob Dylan

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Summer Reading Guide 2023

Photo: Consuelo Barreto | Dreamstime

The sun is shining, the birds are chirping, and the bugs are buzzing. Yep, it’s still summertime, and we’re sure that you’re all tired out from the plenty of summer and staycation activities we’ve thrown your way over the past couple months. So what better time is there to plop down on the patio (or, preferably, a nice air-conditioned room) and crack open a new (or old) book? Read on for some of our 2023 recommendations.

The Slough House series, Mick Herron

I’m not entirely sure how I fell into the world of Slough House, but I’m glad I did. It’s an eight-book series by British author Mick Herron about a bunch of losers from MI5 (the British CIA, basically) who’ve been banished to a decrepit office building in a crumbling London neighborhood.

The building itself is called Slough House, and its denizens are a group of agents with one thing in common: They’ve screwed up their careers so badly that they’ve been assigned to an obscure outpost where they can’t do any further harm to the country’s intelligence operations. Maybe they had a drinking problem or botched a critical operation or fell victim to vicious inter-office politics. They’re called “slow horses,” and each of them wants nothing more than to redeem themselves and get out of Slough House and back into the action.

They are led by the mysteriously competent — and notoriously gross — Jackson Lamb, who somehow has managed to retain a bond to MI5’s leader, Diana Tavener. She has a habit of surreptitiously using Lamb and his slow horses for off-the-books ops, and messy complications always ensue.

The horses are a colorful crew of characters, all flawed, but in ways that make you care about them. But don’t get too attached because Herron seems to have no problem with offing one of his central figures, only to replace them in his next book with someone just as weirdly interesting. He keeps enough of his central core of actors that each book offers familiar protagonists, as well as a quirky newcomer or two.

The plots are all over the place, and in a good way: kidnappings, murders, double agents, assassinations, international intrigue, betrayals of every kind. You never know who you can trust. Herron is a master storyteller with a flair for humor that he occasionally slips in like a dagger in the night.

It’s an eight-book series, and yes, I read them all. Herron has been called the “John le Carré of this generation,” and that’s high praise, indeed, but Herron is much more readable — addictive, even. Start with the first book — Slow Horses — and I bet you’ll be moving on to the second one (and third) in no time. 

— Bruce VanWyngarden

Ripe, Sarah Rose Etter

I’ll admit I wasn’t in the best of moods on April 29th. It was raining, and my friend was already an hour late for meeting me at the Cooper-Young Farmers Market. So I retreated to Burke’s Book Store, where it was dry and where I knew my mood would be lifted. As it so happened, April 29th was Independent Bookstore Day, and right at the store’s entrance was a big ol’ pile of free books as part of the day’s party favors. This, I knew, would redeem the day. After what felt like an hour, I finally found the free book I’d be taking home with me: an advanced reader’s copy of Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter, set to come out July 11th. 

The book’s cover, the juicy insides of a pomegranate, caught my eye initially. (Okay, I judge books by their covers, sue me.) But what really drew me in was the first sentence: “A man shouldn’t be seen like that, all lit up.” And then I couldn’t help but read the second sentence and then the third and then the next and the next — okay, I practically started reading it on the spot, probably standing in the way of other book-lovers looking for their own free book. I didn’t care that my friend was now two hours late (?!); I just wanted to sink my teeth into this novel. And soon, I did just that — sunk my teeth right on in and tore through the pages, all of them, in one day. 

A character-driven novel at its core, Ripe follows a 33-year-old, disillusioned Cassie, whose most loyal companion is a black hole that never leaves her side — an obvious nod to the depression, anxiety, and loneliness that enrapture the main character. A year into what should be her dream job at a Silicon Valley startup, Cassie is stuck — stuck in a fruitless romance, stuck in an unsatisfying job and hustle culture, stuck in a city where obscene wealth and abject poverty persist. When her job begins to push her ethics and she finds herself pregnant, she must choose whether to remain stuck and whether to be consumed by the black hole that follows her.

Throughout this contemporary novel full of deep and unusual reflections, Etter’s strikingly raw and vulnerable writing weighs on the reader as she explores our late-capitalist society through a dystopic lens. A master of rich imagery and language, Etter hasn’t created a “happy” book but instead an immersive book that crawls under your skin and tugs at your very being.

— Abigail Morici

The Philosophy of Modern Song, Bob Dylan

“One of the ways creativity works is the brain tries to fill in holes and gaps,” writes Bob Dylan in The Philosophy of Modern Song. “We fill in missing bits of pictures, snatches of dialogue, we finish rhymes and invent stories to explain things we do not know.” Not only is it a fundamental principle in both songwriting and song listening, it’s an apt description of Dylan’s own songs. He makes no bones about borrowing from this or that old blues tune, at times functioning more as a curator of phrases and riffs, arranging them in inventive, thought-provoking ways. 

This richly illustrated book is built on the same principle. Despite its treatise-like title, potentially offering some stuffy rubric or taxonomy, the 66 essays here, each centered on a song by another artist, whether popular or obscure, are instead a kind of pastiche, a quilt of impressions, imaginings, and history, and a celebration of the way a song can spark a listener’s creativity. Only then, with Dylan’s flights of fantasy, fiction, and fandom established as the modus operandi, will the author occasionally offer an observation on songcraft as an aside.

The end result is not unlike a Bob Dylan album, bubbling over with snatches of traditional verse, noir scenarios, archaic pop-culture references, semi-Biblical metaphysics, and the same down-home vernacular that’s peppered his language since his first Beat-flavored liner notes. “My songs’re written with the kettledrum in mind,” he wrote in 1965, “a touch of any anxious color. Unmentionable. Obvious … I have given up at making any attempt at perfection.” 

That impulse to avoid the definitive, perfect statement in favor of walking the listener through a gallery of images and dramas, all via a cultivated plain-speak that still echoes Woody Guthrie, is alive and well here. As one reads it, remember that Dylan won the Nobel Prize as a writer of fiction. Like any novelist, he inhabits the characters in each song until they become “you,” as he riffs on where you’re coming from, walking you through whole worlds suggested by the song like a figure in a dream. This, too, emphasizes the creativity inherent in the simple art of listening. “Take any lyrics and run with them,” Dylan seems to say. “Here’s one story they might hint at.”

While any song’s essay might reference a dozen other songs by way of making a point, Dylan’s no completist. The typical reader of Songwriting For Dummies won’t find chapters on Lennon and McCartney, John Prine, or many others typically revered in the pantheon of songwriting. No, this author is following his own path, dropping bread crumbs as he goes. Take it far enough and it adds up to a full meal. 

— Alex Greene

Gideon the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir

Is it too quick to judge a book by its cover, even if it looks pretty dang cool? Ok, well if that’s a bit too fast, maybe the first line of Tamysn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth might be best to clue readers in as to what’s coming: “In the myriad year of our lord — the ten thousandth year of the King Undying, the kindly Prince of Death! — Gideon Nav packed her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and she escaped from the House of the Ninth.” Coupled with Gideon’s portrait on the cover, clad in black, adorned in skull face paint and sunglasses, and with her sword scattering skeletons to and fro … buckle up.

I was a couple years late to the party, but the first book in The Locked Tomb series was sold to me by friends via an intriguing hook: lesbian necromancers in space. Gideon is a speck in the Dominicus star system, comprising nine planets that are each home to a Great House well-versed in the arts of necromancy, all of whom are in service to the Emperor/Necrolord Prime. Gideon is an indentured servant to the Ninth House, a death cult with an eternal mission to guard a locked tomb that supposedly imprisons the Emperor’s greatest enemy. One of two children at the House, Gideon is constantly menaced by her chief tormentor and heir to the Ninth, Harrowhark Nonagesimus, until a surprise summons comes from the Emperor. He’s in need of new Lyctors — powerful and immortal necromancers — who essentially serve as his lieutenants in wartime.

There’s certainly some table setting that needs doing, but of course, Gideon and Harrow find themselves as the two representatives of the Ninth House, whisked away to the isolated Canaan House with pairs from the rest of the Great Houses (so many houses), and then the real fun begins.

Muir blends her various schools of necromancy into a deep-space take on gothic horror, but the fright is constantly alleviated by Gideon’s brash and foul-mouthed perspective, moments of tension punctured by cursing, dirty jokes, or a passing infatuation with one of the other female House representatives. It really brings a refreshing take on fantasy and sci-fi adventures, blending a light touch of political machination alongside the darker instances of violence and body horror that come with the necromantic territory. There’s a slowly simmering tension underneath it all, with the ten participants expected to pass a series of tests to qualify as a Lyctor. But there’s no exiting Canaan House once the trials have begun, and something else lurks in the shadows, picking off representatives one by one. 

There’s a constant drip of psychological and supernatural horror throughout Gideon the Ninth, mixed in with a steady helping of isolated-murder-mystery-induced dread, and plenty of snarl, raunch, and snark to spare. The anxious claustrophobia snowballs as the novel really picks up pace, and I’m not sure there’s anything quite like the cocktail that Muir mixes up here (at least not something that I’ve read). So if you’re eager for a bone-crunching good time, the first Locked Tomb book won’t disappoint.

TL;DR: Lesbian necromancers … in space!

— Samuel X. Cicci

Malfunction Junction Vol. 2: Close Encounters of the Third Street Kind, various authors

In January of last year, I wrote about a group of eight local writers who collaborated on a collection of short stories. The collection, titled Malfunction Junction, contained 15 stories, covering a range of genres, but all set in Memphis. In a way, they were love letters to the Bluff City. For their work, the authors earned Memphis Public Library’s first-ever Richard Wright Literary Award for Best Adult Fiction this March, so it’s no surprise that most of these authors returned for a sequel collection and even picked up a few other writers along the way. 

Unlike the first Malfunction Junction, whose uniting element was simply that the stories were set in Memphis, this second collection explores the theme of encounters — that, yes, happen to happen in Memphis and the Mid-South area. For Malfunction Junction Vol. 2: Close Encounters of the Third Street Kind, returning writers Rikki Boyce, April Jones, Rae Harding, Justin Siebert, and Daniel Reece, plus newcomers K.M. Brecht, Cori Romani, Michael Chewning, K.D. Barnes, and Imogean Webb, have each approached the theme in unexpected ways, varying in genre from horror to fantasy to mystery. 

Within the pages, you’ll read of a vampire during the yellow fever epidemic, a satyr romping down Beale, a demon at the Crystal Shrine Grotto, an experimental project with the MPD, and a drink with a familiar stranger at RP Tracks. Compelling and unmistakably Memphis, these stories will leave a reader hoping for a third Malfunction Junction.

— AM

The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow

I’ve been addicted to Sid Meier’s Civilization games for longer than I’d like to admit. Players start in the middle of a map of unknown territory with a settler to found a city and scout to look around. The challenge is to explore new lands, discover new scientific principles, exploit natural resources, increase in wealth, found new cities, and go to war to expand your civilization until it dominates the world. The mini-narratives of alternative history which emerge from the game can have uncanny parallels with real history — when the bloody remnants of your grand army are retreating from your rival’s capital, you understand how Napoleon screwed up so badly. In my perfect world, one of the presidential debates would be replaced with a Civilization V tournament. 

But the world we live in isn’t perfect and never has been. What if we’ve been going about this “civilization” thing all wrong? 

That’s the premise of The Dawn of Everything by anthropologist David Graeber and archeologist David Wengrow. The book begins by questioning the concept of the “noble savage,” first popularized during the Enlightenment by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which posited that humanity used to live in a naive state of equality and squalor until the development of agriculture led to the founding of cities. The evolution of hierarchies like king and peasant emerged from necessity. Graeber and Wengrow use recent discoveries to weave together the argument that complex social structures and hierarchies long predated agriculture. The people who built Göbekli Tepe, the 9,600-year-old temple in Turkey that is the oldest known permanent human structure, were hunter-gatherers, not pastoral farmers. Nor is progress a given: There’s evidence that prehistoric inhabitants of England developed agriculture, then abandoned it in favor of a diet based on hazelnuts, before learning to farm again. 

At 704 pages, this is not a quick beach read. Graeber and Wengrow are good enough writers to sustain your interest through chapters with titles like “In Which We Offer A Digression on ‘The Shape of Time’” and “Specifically How Metaphors of Growth and Decay Introduce Unnoticed Political Biases Into Our View of History.” They wield a dazzling array of historical anecdotes which challenge conventional wisdom about who we are and where we came from. You’ll sometimes find yourself questioning their conclusions, but that’s the point of the book. Human societies have come in all kinds of flavors, and there’s nothing inevitable about how we live now.

— Chris McCoy 

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Music Music Blog

Bob Dylan’s Haunted Songs at the Orpheum

The Orpheum marquee, April 9, 2022 (Credit: Tom Hutchison)

Bob Dylan’s appearance at the Orpheum Theatre on Saturday felt momentous even before we arrived. Something about the confluence of our tentative return to public life, his own dogged determination, and the historic upheavals we’re all experiencing lent his appearance a greater significance than ever.

Perhaps that’s why the full house spontaneously rose to a standing ovation as soon as Dylan and his band took the stage. And though Dylan has never varied from a fixed setlist on recent tours, opening with the blues shuffle of “Watching the River Flow” was especially appropriate for a gathering in a classic theater at the foot of Beale Street, just a stone’s throw from the Mississippi.

It was especially moving if one paused to reflect that the Orpheum is still standing because of the efforts of musical auteur Jim Dickinson and other activists, who’s efforts prevented the destruction of the theater in the ’70s. Years later, when Dylan’s Time Out of Mind won a Grammy, he would name check the native Memphian in his acceptance speech. “This is for my brother, Jim Dickinson. He lives in Mississippi.”

Their common roots were highlighted with an opening tune dating back to the early ’70s, and the prominence of piano (Dickinson’s instrument of choice) in Saturday’s performance. Dylan hasn’t touched a guitar onstage for some time now, but hearing him play only piano was a first for this listener. (The last time I saw him was at Mud Island in the ’90s). It seemed entirely appropriate that Dylan’s instrument was neither some digital keyboard nor a grand piano, but a barrelhouse console piano with its back to the audience. Dylan spent the night standing at it with only his head and shoulders visible. But, given that he would occasionally step out stoically from behind it to accept applause, that was enough.

The band, with drummer Charlie Drayton, guitarists Doug Lancio and Bob Britt, multi-instrumentalist Donnie Herron, and longtime bassist Tony Garnier, would often noodle about in the key of each upcoming song, especially on the slower numbers. This sometimes made the quieter pieces seem to emerge from a cloud of notes, as if coalescing out of stardust. It also emphasized the living spontaneity of the performances.

While most of the set was drawn from his 2020 album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, the second song, “Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine,” also harked back to Dylan’s far past, with a far more ethereal approach, the band tentatively easing into a quieter treatment that was no less powerful for it.

They took quite the opposite approach a few songs in, when Dylan launched another classic track, “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” with a deft blues harp boogie. That, too, benefited from the new arrangement, and suited the proximity of Beale Street to a T.

The songs from his latest album were no less enthusiastically received. The steadfast blues shuffle/march of “False Prophet” was so powerful that the crowd rose to its second standing ovation as the music drew to a close, with Dylan stepping out to receive the adulation. His grim demeanor only served to highlight the gravitas of the lyrics. This singer was clearly in the zone.

“Black Rider,” while not as spare as the album version, showcased the band’s more subtle side, sans drums. And when they kicked off the next tune with a groovy boogie riff, many did not realize it was the 1967 gem, “I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.” The strong riffs underpinning “Gotta Serve Somebody” were similarly disorienting, but once you realized what was happening, the old songs took on added power, and, in the latter case, led to yet another standing ovation.

The one glimmer of joy in Dylan’s demeanor came during the lilting waltz, “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You.” The tender, reflective tune had a dramatic silence at one point, promptly filled by a fan yelling, as if on cue, “We love you, Bob!” As Dylan resumed singing, he let out an irrepressible laugh.

The songwriter’s Frank Sinatra fascination bubbled to the surface in the form of “Melancholy Mood,” a revelation of sorts in the loose but focused energy brought by the band. And then he brought it close to the heart of Memphis with the quiet “Mother of Muses.” Applause and a shiver of recognition rippled through the crowd as Dylan sang:

Sing of Zhukov and Patton and the battles they fought
Who cleared the path for Presley to sing
Who carved out the path for Martin Luther King
Who did what they did and then went on their way
Man, I could tell their stories all day

After “Goodbye Jimmy Reed,” Dylan introduced the band, name checking Sam Phillips along the way, and then drew the night to a close with the magnificent “Every Grain of Sand.” The crowd tried to rally for an encore, but most knew that the evening was complete. Dylan was done, and so were we, satisfied to have seen one of the 20th Century’s greatest visionaries make his work, both old and new, spark with fresh relevance today.

Setlist from April 9, 2022:
Watching the River Flow
Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine
I Contain Multitudes
False Prophet
When I Paint My Masterpiece
Black Rider
I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight
My Own Version of You
Crossing the Rubicon
To Be Alone With You
Key West (Philosopher Pirate)
Gotta Serve Somebody
I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You
Melancholy Mood (Frank Sinatra cover)
Mother of Muses
Goodbye Jimmy Reed (followed by band introductions)
Every Grain of Sand

Categories
Music Music Features

Bob Dylan at the Orpheum

The legendary Bob Dylan comes to the Orpheum this Thursday night. Not one to be outdone by the likes of Lenny Kravitz (playing Music Fest the next day), Marilyn Manson (playing Minglewood the same night), or Dick Dale (playing the Hi-Tone on the same night), Dylan decided to join the party and make this one of the most memorable music weekends in recent history. You’ve got some decisions to make when it comes to planning your Thursday night, but seeing Dylan at a place like the Orpheum would never be a mistake.

Although Dylan has been written about roughly seven trillion different times, it’s important to remember that this is someone who shaped the face of American pop culture, folk rock, country music, and rock-and-roll. Some of his most legendary songs have taken on new forms when tackled by the likes of the 13th Floor Elevators or the Chocolate Watch Band, but the fact that you still know a Dylan song when you hear one is a testament to the strength of the man’s songwriting capability.

Dylan isn’t a stranger to Tennessee, and his album Nashville Skyline is almost required listening material when making that 200-mile drive east on I-40. Released in 1969 with Bob Johnston at the helm, Nashville Skyline saw Dylan fully submerged into country music, and the opening track that features Johnny Cash is almost like a competition for best vocal performance. Nashville Skyline is one of Dylan’s most “happy” albums, with no tales of political injustice.

With dozens of albums under his belt, it’s impossible to predict what Dylan and his band will play this Thursday, but no matter which era of his music he draws songs from, it’s sure to be an unforgettable performance. Tickets are still available.

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Music Music Blog

Mid Week Music: Dick Dale Canceled, Man Control, John Paul Keith

The trifecta of Marilyn Manson, Dick Dale and Bob Dylan all performing in Memphis on the same night was to good to be true. Sadly, the Hi-Tone recently announced that their Thursday night bill featuring Dick Dale has officially been canceled. But don’t let that news ruin your Wednesday, because there are still plenty of other shows worth checking out. Here are a few:

Wednesday, April 29th.
The Local Saints, 8 p.m. at Lafayette’s.

Mid Week Music: Dick Dale Canceled, Man Control, John Paul Keith

John Paul Keith, 9 p.m. at Bar DKDC, $5.00.

Mid Week Music: Dick Dale Canceled, Man Control, John Paul Keith (2)

The Donkeys featuring Steve Selvidge and Robby Grant, 9 p.m. at The Hi-Tone, $8.00.

Thursday, April 30th. 
Marilyn Manson, Knee High Fox, 8 p.m.. at Minglewood Hall, SOLD OUT.

Nots, Mancontrol, 8 p.m. at Rocket Science Audio, free with limited seating.

Bob Dylan, 8 p.m. at The Orpheum, $62.00 – $92.00.

Mid Week Music: Dick Dale Canceled, Man Control, John Paul Keith (3)

Neutral Milk Hotel, 7 p.m. at the Lyric in Oxford, $35.00.

Mid Week Music: Dick Dale Canceled, Man Control, John Paul Keith (4)

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Opinion The Last Word

The Rant (October 15, 2014)

While going through an old box of stuff, I came across a program I had saved from the Fillmore East dated December 19, 1969. The Byrds were headlining that night, supported by Keith Emerson & the Nice and the San Francisco horn band the Sons of Champlin. As an added attraction, the immortal Dion DiMucci appeared to perform his latest hit, “Abraham, Martin, and John.”

That collectible brought back a lot of memories, most of them bad. When I was 20, I dropped out of college and moved to New York City. I was chasing the flimsiest of music offers from someone I barely knew. A high-school acquaintance had graduated from Yale as a poetry major and gotten a job in an apprentice program for Columbia Records. He had shown some of his work to the legendary talent scout and record producer John Hammond Sr., who encouraged him to find a collaborator to help transform his poetry into songs. I suppose I was the only musician he knew.

When “Tom” called, he mentioned the names of several friends we shared in common and asked me to come to New York with the understanding that I would eventually have a chance to audition for CBS. He said I could live rent-free in his apartment and only needed to contribute my share of grocery money. After calling a few people and asking if this guy was for real, I packed my guitar and a suitcase and flew to Manhattan.  As soon as I arrived, the problems began. I took a cab to the address I was given only to find a short-order grill there. The cabbie informed me that my friend lived above the restaurant. When I lugged my gear up four flights and found the apartment, the couch I was promised was already occupied by one of Tom’s college buddies who was waiting for renovations to be completed on his place. I was asked if I minded sleeping on the floor for a little while. No sooner had I caught my breath than Tom sat cross-legged on the floor and asked if he could play my guitar. Nobody played my guitar.

After I had reluctantly handed it over, I realized that he had no musical ability whatsoever. He was the kind of guy who had to look at his left hand when he changed chords, and his poetry consisted mainly of abstractions that only he understood. I thought briefly of returning to the airport and booking the first flight out, but I’d already told my friends I was going and didn’t want it to appear that I had turned tail and run. I knew that if anything was to be accomplished, we would have to start from scratch. While I was lying on the floor using my leather jacket as a pillow, I wondered what in the world I had gotten myself into.

Tom and I grew to dislike each other so much that I would deliver a melody to his cubicle in the morning, and he would write poems to fit during the workday. The problem was, his lyrics were mainly about some phantom girlfriend that I never saw and nothing else in the known world to which I could relate. Our hostility grew so bitter that he asked me to leave. I had never been kicked out of anywhere. I found a single room in a decaying brownstone on W. 82nd Street. It had a single sink that looked like it had been clogged since the Prohibition and a bathroom down the hall shared by 10 other tenants. My rent was $11 a week, and I still had to call home for financial help. The street was a magnet for hookers, junkies, and transients, but since I wore a frayed pea-coat from Navy surplus and a battered wide-brimmed fedora, I blended right in. After several tortuous months, we finally came up with a number of songs sufficient for an audition.

I stood with my guitar beside the desk of John Hammond. Just the knowledge that he had discovered Bob Dylan would have been intimidating enough, but since my dad was a fan of swing music, I also knew that Hammond had discovered Billie Holiday and put together the Benny Goodman Band. Now he was sitting a foot away, staring up at me. I began to play an up-tempo song featuring some of Tom’s metaphorical lyrics, but I couldn’t look him in the eye. When I had finished, Hammond proclaimed with a big smile on his face, “My, we have a singer here.”

He was impressed that I had once recorded for Sun Records and arranged a full demo session in the CBS Studios. I arrived early on the appointed day only to find a Vegas-like lounge singer in the studio while his slick manager was addressing Hammond as “Baby” in the control room. After apologizing for the delay, Hammond told me to go ahead and set up. I put my chord charts and lyric sheets on a music stand and went down the hallway to ease my severe cotton-mouth with a drink of water. When I returned, the lounge singer was gone, but so was all my music. Hammond sent the engineer racing after the pair, but when the out-of-breath engineer reappeared and told us he had shouted at the pair from the street but they jumped into a cab and sped off. They had stolen all of my notes.

Frozen with dread, I somehow managed to record the songs from memory. Ultimately, nothing came of the entire eight-month-long project. Hammond told me that because of a shakeup in the top brass at Columbia, “I no longer know where I’m at in this company.” After I had quietly returned to Tennessee, my former host informed me that Hammond had said, “A lot of people have stuck around a lot longer than he did.” Two years later, Hammond signed Bruce Springsteen to Columbia Records. Still and all, I’m the only artist in recorded history to have been produced by both Sam Phillips and John Hammond. It ain’t bragging if it’s true.

Randy Haspel writes the “Recycled Hippies” blog, where a version of this column first appeared.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Tangled up in Dylan lore.

In 1998, Todd Haynes released Velvet Goldmine, a rapturous but prickly ode to glam-rock that referenced genre stars such as David Bowie and Iggy Pop but clung to a fan’s perspective.

He tries something similar with I’m Not There, a pop meditation “inspired by the music & many lives of Bob Dylan” that is less concerned with presenting Dylan’s life in a realistic sense than on ruminating on the character of Dylan as experienced by his most ardent fans.

To do this, Haynes employs six actors — Christian Bale, Richard Gere, Ben Whishaw, Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett, and African-American adolescent Marcus Carl Franklin — to play otherwise unconnected roles (none of them named “Bob Dylan”) that each embody a different facet of Dylan’s protean public persona.

Bale is the early, serious folkie Dylan in his first signs of dissatisfaction with the earnestness of the scene. Ledger is an actor who played lead in a “Dylan” biopic whose real life — in his courtship, marriage, and break-up with a sad-eyed lady of the lowlands played beautifully by Charlotte Gainsbourg — represents the most widely known segment of Dylan’s own domestic life. Whishaw plays a man in an interrogation-style interview who claims to be (Dylan influence) Arthur Rimbaud. Franklin is a boxcar-hopping musician who dubs himself “Woody” after Woody Guthrie and eventually visits the great folksinger (as Dylan did) on his deathbed. Blanchett is a scream as the most iconic of Dylan figures, the messy-haired mid-Sixties rock prophet. And Gere — in a dull recurring segment that threatens to stop the movie dead — actually plays an aging Billy the Kid in a reference to the film Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, which Dylan acted in and provided music for.

Through the weaving of these six sections, Haynes touches on reams of Dylan lore, iconography, and soundbites — his electric folk-festival debut, being called “Judas” in London, his relationship with Joan Baez, his motorcycle accident, his chauvinism, his embrace of Christianity, etc. The Blanchett scenes are the strongest, filmed in black-and-white to make them not just a reference to that period of Dylan’s career but to the way it’s been perceived through the lens of D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back.

The result is probably the most personal and most ambitious musical “biopic” ever attempted. For remotely obsessive Dylan fans, it’s endlessly compelling, if not always successful. For more casual fans, it’s likely to be entirely inexplicable.

I’m Not There

Opens Wednesday, November 21st

Studio on the Square

Categories
Cover Feature News

Zombified

Some ironies are too delicious not to mention, no matter how obscure the points of reference might be. In 1987, on an episode of the awful Suzanne Somers sitcom She’s the Sheriff, daffy Deputy Max Rubin described a dire situation to dippy Sheriff Hildy Granger as being, “Just like in that old movie I Was a Zombie for the F.B.I.” As usual, Max had it wrong. Zombie, which will screen at this year’s Indie Memphis Film Festival as a part of its “Back in the Day” series, was shot by a crew of mostly unpaid Memphis State University students in 1982.

Although it had the look of a backlot studio screamer from the 1950s, Zombie had never received any kind of theatrical release. It entered the public consciousness on Halloween night in 1985 via the USA Network’s Night Flight programming. It was aired as part of a special fright-night double feature, paired with the schlock classic Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. Needless to say, Deputy Max’s ill-informed reference probably fell beyond the frame of reference of most She’s the Sheriff viewers.

But Zombie, which was director Marius Penczner’s first and only film, and which was only shown once in Memphis, six times on Night Flight, and nowhere else, somehow penetrated deeper into the American psyche than its too-brief provenance might suggest.

In December 1985, Spin magazine published a column slugged “Dylan on Dylan,” in which the iconic musician and occasional actor said I Was a Zombie for the F.B.I. was a movie he really wished he’d been in.

With Dylan’s mention, Penczner’s film, which was always “out there,” was now officially “out there.” Today, Penczner consults for political campaigns and makes commercials.

So what was it about Zombie, a film described by its creators as a parody of black-and-white science fiction films and serialized cop dramas, that helped it into the canon of cult cinema? The irresistibly wrongheaded title certainly helps, as does the film’s failure as a parody. I Was a Zombie for the FBI plays as straight as Reefer Madness, giving it a rare authenticity and deceptive charm.

Larry Raspberry, former lead singer of the Gentrys, and his cousin James Raspberry play a couple of agents investigating the alleged death of the infamous Brazzo brothers, who have disappeared in a UFO-related plane crash. But Bart (John Gillick) and Bert (Lawrence Hall) aren’t dead. They’re in the employ of aliens who intend to conquer the Earth by contaminating the soft-drink supply.

Zombie’s credits read like a who’s who of Memphis theater. Jim Ostrander, for whom the local theater awards are named, makes a brief but memorable appearance as a ruthless corporate executive. Award-winning actor/director Tony Isbell and character actor Rick Crow play a deadpan pair of alien henchmen. Raspberry was Memphis’ original Dr. Frankenfurter when Circuit Playhouse staged The Rocky Horror Show in 1976.

“There were times when I spent hours tied up with my arms over my head in a basement in July,” says Memphis theater veteran Christina Wellford Scott, confessing that all the suffering was worth it.

Scott plays Zombie‘s Penny Carson, an eternally imperiled heroine who isn’t afraid to slug a zombie with a piece of heavy equipment or fill the bad guys full of lead.

“They were making the story up as we went along. Marius would make up these wild stories and tell me I was going to have to jump from a building onto a bunch of mattresses. And I believed him.”

Penczner cut 33 minutes from his film prior to its 2005 release on Rykodisc, improving some effects and adding an omnipresent electronic soundtrack that moves things along to a raunchy porn groove. The result is faster paced, less confusing trash cinema that is still entirely too slow and completely confusing. And even for fans of bad film making, that’s a good thing.

I Was a Zombie for the FBI

Monday, October 22nd, 9:40 p.m.

Categories
Music Music Features

Johnny Cash’s Block Party

The Nixon years were not a good period for national unity. With American soldiers dying in Vietnam and American cites suffering the after-effects of resistance to the civil rights movement, the country saw its own citizens pitted against each other — Nixon’s Silent Majority against a growing, vocal counterculture.

Amid these rifts, there was a cohort of pop musicians who sought a third way: progressive, pluralistic, in opposition to the worst of America’s mainstream culture yet also respectful, even reverent, of tradition. This included, perhaps most prominently, the music made — together or independently — by Bob Dylan and the Band at the time, records such as Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline, the Band’s Music From Big Pink and The Band, and the jointly recorded “basement tapes,” which wouldn’t see release until later the next decade. Other artists, such as Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Byrds, and Neil Young, followed similar paths.

But the artist who embodied this spirit as much as anyone was Johnny Cash, who brought the spirit of a pluralistic, progressive, yet deeply traditional American culture into homes across the nation via his ABC-TV variety show, The Johnny Cash Show, which broadcast from Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium between June 1969 and March 1971.

The Best of the Johnny Cash TV Show, a four-hour, two-DVD collection of 66 musical performances selected from the show’s 58 episodes, marks the first time any material from The Johnny Cash Show has been released on video or DVD. The collection, which was released in late September, is hosted by Kris Kristofferson, of whom Cash was an early champion, scoring a hit with Kristofferson’s song “Sunday Morning Coming Down” and singing a full version of the song — including the lyric “wishing, God, that I was stoned” — on the show, against the wishes of ABC. Other interview subjects include Cash’s son, John Carter Cash, Hank Williams Jr., for whom Cash was something of a surrogate father, and people who worked on the show, including bass player Marshall Grant and hairdresser Penny Lane.

Cash’s first show featured Bob Dylan, rarely seen on television and still considered a counterculture icon despite the recent release of his more traditional Nashville Skyline album. But it also featured Cash and his standard ensemble — wife June Carter, band the Tennessee Three, sidekick Carl Perkins, and backup singers the Statler Brothers — doing the Perkins-penned remembrance of family gospel sing-alongs, “Daddy Sang Bass.” And that’s how it went. With the Vietnam War tearing the country apart, Cash did his best to put it back together again on national TV every week, reconciling the rebellious impulses of the counterculture with the home-and-family traditionalism of older, more mainstream America. It was like a country equivalent to Dave Chappelle’s Block Party with a much larger audience.

In the days before punk, disco, and hip-hop pulled American music in such far-flung directions, it was easier to insist on such a musical big tent, of course, and The Johnny Cash Show was both tribute to and tutorial on the blues and country roots of American pop music.

There were limits, despite Cash’s impeccable taste and ornery insistence on having his show reflect that taste. There’s no Sly & the Family Stone or James Brown here, for instance, though Stevie Wonder does give a sharp reading of his tough-minded “Heaven Help Us All” (with a key lyric likely to challenge much of the show’s audience: “Heaven help the black man if he struggles one more day/Heaven help the white man if he turns his back away”). But rarely (James Taylor’s wispy reading of “Sweet Baby James” is an exception) does a performance collected here seem unworthy of the show.

Within the context of Cash’s self-imposed musical mission, the breadth of music (and musicians) on display is tremendous. Pre-rock legends are given the showcases they deserve, including Bill Monroe doing “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and, most notably, an appearance by Louis Armstrong. The true titan of 20th-century American popular music, Armstrong is eight months from death and frail, when he appears, but he’s magnetic, playing trumpet alongside Cash as they duet on Jimmie Rodgers’ “Blue Yodel #9,” which Armstrong had recorded with Rodgers in 1930.

The collection also captures some of Cash’s early rock contemporaries (including Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis), country stars (Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty), then-emerging songwriters (Kristofferson, Tony Joe White)), and some of the biggest and best rock acts of the day (CCR, Neil Young).

Highlights are plentiful: Ray Charles delivers a spectacular, bluesy reinvention of Cash’s own “Ring of Fire,” to a standing ovation. Cash and George Jones swap vocal sound effects on a duet of Jones’ “White Lightning.” Cash and Merle Haggard duet on Haggard’s beautiful prison ballad “Sing Me Back Home.” Eric Clapton leads Derek & the Dominoes through an inspired rendition of the Chuck Willis R&B standard “It’s Too Late.” You sense Cash’s drive to unite different audiences when he greets the British rock band onstage at the Ryman after the performance and says, “I really am proud to see that the people here love you like they do.” This followed immediately by Perkins joining Cash and Clapton on a fierce version of Perkins’ Sun-era hit “Matchbox.” And some of the finest moments come when the show is winnowed down to Cash and his own extended musical family, particularly on gospel numbers.

For those who weren’t privileged to see the show at the time, The Best of the Johnny Cash TV Show is a revelation, but these 66 performances seem to be only a sliver of what Cash presided over during the show’s 58 episodes. The entire series deserves to be given new life, if not on DVD, then via new television broadcasts. (CMT, are you listening?) Hopefully, The Best of the Johnny Cash TV Show draws enough attention to make that happen.

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Music Record Reviews

Dylan and the Dolls:

Much to my surprise, Bob Dylan’s Modern Times is not the recent album from a pre-punk icon I’ve enjoyed the most. Instead, that would be One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This, an unlikely comeback album from ’70s proto-punk band the New York Dolls.

(Columbia)

The 32-year gap between the Dolls’ second album (1974’s Too Much Too Soon) and third album makes a folly of the 21 alleged lost years Dylan spent between 1975’s Blood on the Tracks and recording his 1997 critical/commercial triumph Time Out of Mind, a period that contained plenty of music, much of it plenty respectable.

On what I feel comfortable calling the best rock band “comeback” album ever, the Dolls are down to the band’s only two living original members: singer David Johansen, who provides inspired lyrics, and guitarist Sylvain Sylvain, who composes most of the album’s music, with help here and there from new recruits.

One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This opens with such a ferocious sense of purpose that, for a while, it might be even better than the band’s earlier classics. The opening “We’re All in Love” introduces a careening guitar sound that isn’t quite as sharp as that of the dearly departed Johnny Thunders, but it isn’t too far off. It sounds close to old times — more precise, more polished, but with a smidgen of the past’s raggedy glory — but Johansen has updated the band’s world view, making the gutter-glam politics explicit with an insta-classic New York Dolls lyric: “Jumpin’ ’round the stage like teenage girls/Casting our swine before the pearls,” which is followed by words that deftly communicate 30-plus-years of personal pop history and a basic theme: “Excommunicated then canonized/When love is strong, life intensifies.”

The medium and message established in the opening minutes, the album’s music explodes: “Runnin’ Around” is a leering, bluesy sex song that could be vintage Stones but is deepened by Johansen’s joyous gender confusion. The reverie “Plenty of Music” taps into the Phil Spector/Brill Building beauty that fed so much of Too Much Too Soon. And my 20-month-old daughter and I agree that “Dance Like a Monkey” is the song of the year.

Deploying simian sound effects seemingly left over from Too Much Too Soon‘s “Stranded in the Jungle,” Johansen tops it with his own sound effects and lusty chatterbox exhortations over sped-up Bo Diddley beats, as he drags the culture war onto the dance floor to negotiate a truce.

A vast middle stretch brings the record back down to earth. Several songs with music from new guitarist Steve Conte are less inspired than Sylvain’s numbers but are ace evocations of the Dolls’ ’70s sound. Then, as if having saved-up energy, they reach for greatness again to close it out, with the warp-speed punk-blues demand “Gimme Luv & Turn on the Light.” The lovely closer, “Take a Good Look at My Good Looks,” addresses those who might think it unseemly for a 56-year-old man to be prancing around in lipstick and heels: “Call us what you will, but/Love made us like this/So what/Yeah, the whole world is just artifice.”

It’s a poignant record but also playful and spiritual. It updates a sound you wouldn’t think would make the 30-year transition easily, and, most meaningfully, it brings a long latent generosity of spirit to the surface, emphasizing a quality the band’s many respectful imitators over the years have been least likely to duplicate.

(Roadrunner)

Much like Dylan’s “Love & Theft“, One Day It Will Please Us To Remember Even This is a life record made from an aged (by rock standards) artist — mortal and eternal at once. Despite the reflexive hype Dylan’s stature and recent resurgence inspires, Modern Times suffers by comparison to both. It’s still a terrific record. It doesn’t have the musical juice and lyrical focus that made “Love & Theft” an instant top-five album in rock’s most impressive discography, but it’s likely to be a grower.

Where “Love & Theft” leaps from jazzy rockabilly rave-ups to pre-rock crooner pop to gutbucket blues, Modern Times is less gleefully dynamic. But it does boast an ease that’s sure to make it a more durable listen than the more ponderous Time Out of Mind, a good record that hasn’t aged as well as expected.

Dylan’s delirious phrasing, portentous/playful wordplay, and rhyme-for-rhyme’s-sake that rivals any rapper is, as always, the calling card. As on “Love & Theft“, the musicality and wit overwhelm seductively elusive meaning, except this time even more so despite a little less musicality and a little less wit.

— Chris Herrington

Grades: Dolls: A; Dylan: A-