Bob Dylan has released 34 studio albums of original material, starting with his self titled album in 1962 (which was mostly blues covers), and ending with Christmas In the Heart in 2009. During this almost-50-year span, there have been several standouts- Modern Times in 2006, Blood on The Tracks in 1975 and The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in 1963. But three of his albums shifted the very firmament of music in America: his fifth album, Bringing It All Back Home, his sixth, Highway 61 Revisited, and seventh, Blonde On Blonde, released between 1964 and 1965.
Robert Zimmerman was born in Hibbing, Minn., in 1941 and emerged as Bob Dylan, (a name derived from of his love for Dylan Thomas’ poetry), some time around 1960 in Minneapolis. He moved to New York in 1961 and became proficient at covering folk songs he had first heard only a few years earlier. By the end of the year, Dylan had recorded his first album, Bob Dylan, released in March of 1962, with help from John Hammond of Columbia Records. It included only two original songs: Talkin’ New York and Song to Woody.
During his early days in Greenwich Village, there were two significant subcultres of youth: the folk singers and the beat poets. The folk singers sang songs from the 20’s and 30’s, mostly rural American, while the beats preferred jazz, claiming local coffee shops as their stomping grounds. Though it was unfashionable for these cultures to mix, Dylan, only 21at the time, was fascinated by everything, including beats like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Dylan put out three more albums between 1963 and1964, (Another Side of Bob Dylan, The Times They Are a’Changin’, and The Freewheeling Bob Dylan), which not only increased his notoriety within the folk community but also helped him fine tune his now prolific songwriting. These songs were mash ups from classic folk melodies, old lines found in the Anthology of American Folk Music and Dylan’s smart and vicious social commentary.
By 1965, Dylan had befriended Ginsberg, who was famous in the counter-culture for stream of conscious poetry, Howl being his best known work. Perhaps because of this friendship, Dylan’s songs began to miss the social core of a protest singer and his themes became difficult, if not impossible, to follow with the release of Bringing It All Back Home that spring. Also important for this record was the shift to electric music; side A is electric, side B acoustic. A few months after this album’s release, the famous controversy at the Newport Folk Festival occurred when Dylan took the stage and played Like A Rolling Stone, which would be released on Highway 61 Revisted.
Every Dylan fan I talk to has a different take on the importance of these three albums, but mine is this: Bob Dylan, tired of being pegged as a well-read, defiant folk singer, and brimming with creative energy, stumbled onto something important: “there are no truth’s outside the gates of Eden.” Bringing It All Back Home guides us to that conclusion; Highway 61 and Blonde on Blonde set it up as their premise. [The motorcycle wreck in 1966 put an end to this source of Dylan’s creativity. His next project would be a partially scripted documentary for ABC called Eat The Document, which was rejected by the network as “incomprehensible.”]
This is my favorite album of all time. I fell in love with it while living in Paris, reading lots of Henry Miller and Nietzsche. This is a young man’s album. It’s Dylan’s final words before a long journey into foreign lands. Bringing It All Back Home is Dylan’s swan-song to the folk revival. “It’s all over now, baby blue” he sings to Donovan. It’s his Declaration of Independence from the expectations of the establishment, (“I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more”). Here, Dylan transitions from Greenwich Village to The Void as he follows the Tambourine Man into the fog of the jingle jangle morning- and the jingle jangle morning is electric.
Hi, friends,
Our next show is on Tuesday, March 22. The poster will be updated to reflect this date.
Here is a video recap of our last event to get you event more excited for the next!
“I was just doing songs for the next rock album, and I decided that what always took me so long in the studio was the writing. I would get in there, and I just wouldn’t have the material written, or it wasn’t written well enough, and so I’d record for a month, get a couple of things, go home write some more, record for another month — it wasn’t very efficient. So this time, I got a little Teac four-track cassette machine, and I said, I’m gonna record these songs, and if they sound good with just me doin’ ‘em, then I’ll teach ‘em to the band. I could sing and play the guitar, and then I had two tracks to do somethin’ else, like overdub a guitar or add a harmony. It was just gonna be a demo. Then I had a little Echoplex that I mixed through, and that was it. And that was the tape that became the record. It’s amazing that it got there, ‘cause I was carryin’ that cassette around with me in my pocket without a case for a couple of week, just draggin’ it around. Finally, we realized, “Uh-oh, that’s the album.” Technically, it was difficult to get it on a disc. The stuff was recorded so strangely, the needle would read a lot of distortion and wouldn’t track in the wax. We almost had to release it as a cassette.”
–Bruce Springsteen, recalling the early stages of the recording of the album Nebraska, Rolling Stone Magazine interview, December 1984
There are musicians who fit perfectly in a time and place- those who embody the spirit of the days in which they live. Nebraska takes us beyond Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town, beyond The River, where he stands in the middle of a paradox, like a guitar string suspended between life and death. Nebraska is a leap into the darkness. On this record,everything happens with dead certainty. There are no choices and no chances. We are as fixed as the course of a river. We are taken to see that Mansion on a Hill, but we know before the end of the second verse that the gates of hardened steel completely surround it, preventing us from ever entering. We ride along with a killer whose only explanation for the things he’s done is “I guess there’s just meanness in this world.” We are the men poking the dead dog with a stick, hoping that if we do it long enough, it’ll get up and run. Springsteen wrote this during a period of depression, (and a winter in New Jersey), so it’s no wonder that the recordings made with the E-Street Band didn’t make the record. It’s lonely in the Darkness.
After Nebraska’s commercial failure, (He never even toured on this album.), Springsteen returned to full band arrangements, moving away from killers, mobsters and losers and focusing on the working class, while paradoxically becoming “The Boss”. His next album, Born In The USA, sold more than 15 million copies, and seven songs off the album were released as singles. Springsteen has sold over 61 million records in the US, but it’s the little, dark acoustic record recorded in a bedroom in Colts Neck, NJ, in the early 80’s that speaks to the darkness in us all. Hegel says the truth of the acorn is the tree. And while many Springsteen fans saw this demo-quality record as the acorn- a blueprint for something grand to come — we see it as the tree.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eOGuxGEi3Q
“Tupelo Honey” Documentary with Interviews & Behind-the-Scenes Footage
filmed by: David Felman & Chris Showlater
On the cover of 1971’s Tupelo Honey is a dreamy photo of Van Morrison’s then-wife Janet Planet riding horseback, and he’s walking alongside her. They were young and in love. It’s hard to believe Van Morrison was 26 once.
He wrote most of the record’s songs in Woodstock, and left because the place was getting too popular. His music seemed to follow the same trend though, increasing in popularity, and it has remained so ever since. These days, you’re just as likely to hear “Tupelo Honey” performed by some middle-aged cover band on the patio of a Mexican restaurant as you are to hear it playing in an indie record store. This seeming contradiction might be the illogical dance that makes it a classic.
After Woodstock, Morrison landed in California, where he finished Tupelo Honey. Like the rest of his records, it was recorded as live as possible in the studio. He originally wanted to make a country record, but it threaded a life all its own along the way. At times it sounds like the country record he intended, full of carefree love songs and John McFee’s pedal steel floating in and out, (not to mention a song called “Moonshine Whiskey”), but it’s certainly got the soul power his fans had already come to know and love from songs like “Brown Eyed Girl.” More Moondance than Astral Weeks, the record is just so approachable—especially considering that Morrison is quite possibly the most unapproachable man in music.
Predictably, Tupelo Honey was a success—it charted at #27 on the Billboard charts and eventually went gold. But the artist and his art were on two different paths. Morrison canceled a tour after the record came out because he’d developed a paralyzing case of stage fright. And he divorced his brown-eyed girl in 1973. Tupelo Honey became a time capsule—an organic, soulful look into a life that only lasted a season.
Morrison’s an old man now, and he’s still making music, though people seem to pay more attention to his controversial personality. But it doesn’t matter, because every time Van Morrison kicks some kid off his lawn, a happy couple dances to “Tupelo Honey” at their wedding. Every record turns into a time capsule sooner or later—I can’t wait to open this one on Thursday.
Our next event is on December 2 and will feature Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey.” And to accompany the sweetness of the melodies, we’ll be serving our lovely ticket buyers a biscuit with some tasty honey.
We hope you can join us at Sister Louisa’s Church, (formerly Danneman’s). We’ll have roughly 65 tickets to sell at the door, which is the cut off. So come early to make sure you can be a part of this sure-to-be-fantastic evening.
Photos from Abbey Road!
Courtesy of Tobi Ames
40 Years of Abbey Rd.
By: Ryan Burleson
At 28 years old, I’m the same age that John Lennon was in September of 1969, the month that saw the initial release of Abbey Road, which featured the final material The Beatles would ever pen together. Of course, to suggest that this is “humbling” would be irresponsible and foolish: Sure, I play music, but like most of you, I don’t inhabit so much as the same stratosphere as Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison or Ringo Starr, with regards to competence in songwriting. (OK, maybe a few of you can touch Starr’s capabilities). No, I make the point to give this little blurb some context, some window into the remarkable amount of work the infamous quartet had accomplished by the time they hovered around what I would consider my still young age.
Indeed, it was only six years and a few months earlier that they’d unleashed Beatlemania on an unsuspecting public with the release of Please Please Me, initiating a run of 12 LPs that evolved the band’s sound dramatically in just over half a decade. (In that context, the stylistic “leaps” that bands like Radiohead have taken seem less severe, no?) For The Beatles, progress circumvented artless appeals to the public every year, though it’s a testament to the quartet’s instincts that their fans followed the band’s every whim — Abbey Road, for all of its experimentation, spent 17 weeks atop the UK charts and has been certified Platinum 12 times, marking one of those rare moments in rock history where the phrase “critically acclaimed” is a mere afterthought in light of the simple genius of the buying public. Though I‘m no purist, suffice it to say that those days are long gone.
But, what makes Abbey Road a classic, a collection of songs worthy of being covered from top-to-bottom today? For one, even in a vacuum far removed from the hype lavished on the record at any point in its 40-year history, it remains an infinitely rewarding listen. Strip away the narrative of the Beatles as sonic frontiersman, personal rivals, boyish heartthrobs, drug-induced spiritualists, political activists, utopian humanists or “the most influential band ever,” and casually forget that the four of them knew Abbey Road would herald the end before they recorded the first note, and you’ve still got one of the most wistful, heart-wrenching, near-perfect records of all time. From the opening, cryptic groove of “Come Together” and the equally hypnotic “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” to the glacial, triple-tracked harmonies of “Because” and the Side B,16-minute medley of largely unfinished, though no less affecting songs that were spliced together by McCartney and George Martin, Abbey Road represents every facet of The Beatles’ aesthetic that is adored and envied in equal measure. It’s blues-y, psychedelic, imaginative, poppy, silly and most of all, profoundly moving, a work that feels more self-effacing than Sgt. Pepper’s or The Beatles, an effort that was meant to provide finality for its composers as much as anyone else.
Like all great records, though, the backstory does matter, and Abbey Road’s is certainly worth noting. For a couple of years before those sessions in the spring and summer of 1969, the four Beatles were hardly talking to one another, the product of nearly every type of tension that can form between collaborators, personal, creative and otherwise. 1968’s The Beatles (affectionately known as “The White Album”) had sparked a period of internal dissent that continued on through Yellow Submarine and the Get Back/Let It Be sessions, when even the manner in which the band made their records began to take a less collaborative tenor. But, at Martin’s urging, after being beckoned by McCartney, the band decided to make their final album in a way that was reminiscent of its early days, though it’d be naive to assume the same collegial spirit filled the studio with any consistency.
The tale of Abbey Road has other highlights worth mentioning, as well, perhaps no more so than the heightened influence of the late, beloved George Harrison. Already having sealed his spot in posterity as a legendary guitar player by this time, Harrison in the mid-to-late ‘60s began to refine his chops as a songwriter, as well, duties that historically belonged to Lennon and McCartney in The Beatles. But, on “Something” and “Because” — in my opinion, two of the strongest songs on the album — Harrison proved that his nascent compositional interests were not only valid, they were extraordinary. In particular, “Something” gave the band its first Harrison-penned hit, a song that Frank Sinatra allegedly once called “the greatest love song ever written.”
For its part, “Because” was actually the first Abbey Road song I ever heard. But, not by way of Harrison, Lennon or McCartney. It was at the turn of the century, in 2000, and I was finishing American Beauty for the first time from the bunk of my dorm room. In the credits of that film, the late, great Elliott Smith harmonizes with himself majestically over a sparse, reverent arrangement of the original. Until that moment, The Beatles were merely on my cultural periphery, worthy of my respect though hardly my attention. Yes, at that point I was still invested in the regrettable, high school-born idea that everything new was by definition an improvement on everything old. God, was I wrong. Years of investment into The Beatles’ music, story and significance followed, and I can now say without reservation that Abbey Road is one of my favorite collections, period, a worthy farewell to the band’s brief, but storied career.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fEs0JLeQNI
“That Was Your Mother” from Paul Simon’s Graceland
Performed by Troy Bieser on August 3, 2010
