The Saddest Music in the World

Clarence Clemons (1942-2011)

2011-06-18T20:08:00.000-07:00

"It is with overwhelming sadness that we inform our friends and fans that at 7:00 tonight, Saturday, June 18, our beloved friend and bandmate, Clarence Clemons passed away. The cause was complications from his stroke of last Sunday, June 12th.

Bruce Springsteen said of Clarence: Clarence lived a wonderful life. He carried within him a love of people that made them love him. He created a wondrous and extended family. He loved the saxophone, loved our fans and gave everything he had every night he stepped on stage. His loss is immeasurable and we are honored and thankful to have known him and had the opportunity to stand beside him for nearly forty years. He was my great friend, my partner, and with Clarence at my side, my band and I were able to tell a story far deeper than those simply contained in our music. His life, his memory, and his love will live on in that story and in our band." --BruceSpringsteen.net

Another Beatle Fantasy

2010-07-15T21:49:00.000-07:00

Have you ever heard "A Toot and a Snore in '74," the bootleg of the only post-Beatles recording of John and Paul playing together? God it's awful. They were probably stoned (hence the title).

The fantasy--which will never happen, but still could--is for Paul and George Martin to break into the vault where John's solo masters are stored, and re-produce them, adding Beatlesque harmonies and more tasteful instrumentation. That would be some good music.

Beggar's Banquet

2010-05-26T19:59:00.000-07:00

The reissue of Exile on Main Street has me revisiting the Stones and their great four album run from 1968-1972. Beggar's Banquet, the first of the quartet, might just be the best, and is certainly the most important. Is it too much to say that, coming fast on the heels of the Beatles White Album, it reinvented rock and roll? Nothing before ever sounded remotely like "Sympathy for the Devil," which succeeded in transporting Robert Johnson's spirit to the rock idiom. "No Expectations," which came next, is stylistically different, but texturally identical. That texture, a vocal and instrumental rawness, cut like the real world. The Stones could never match Dylan for blind genius or the Beatles for shear beauty and variety--no one could--but with this album and the three that followed, Mick, Keith, and Co. paved the road for all the lesser immortals who followed. RIP Brian Jones.

Adams Raps Dylan

2010-04-05T20:31:00.000-07:00

Back in 2007, Ryan Adams was acting a little weirder than usual, and one day he put out something like 24 albums worth of material on his website, under names like Sad Dracula, Warren Peace, The Shit, and DJ Reggie. It was mostly original songs, in all sorts of styles, tossed off with no polish and little effort. I didn't pay any attention to it, because even though I think Adams (above, with Mrs. Adams) is as close to the Second Coming as we've gotten since Springsteen--well, I mean, the Beatles "You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)" wasn't worth listening to either, right?

Cut to 2010--today, actually--I was reading about a rap from one of the DJ Reggie records, titled "Isis," and how freaky great it was, so I thought I'd give it a listen. Took me five minutes to find and download, and about three seconds of listening to realize it was a rap version of Dylan's song from the 1976 album Desire. It wasn't exactly my kind of thing, but it was interesting, so I scanned the rest of the song titles and found "You're a Big Girl Now," which my rocket scientist brain told me was another Dylan cover. And now I share them with you, because that's the kind of guy I am.

As for the covers... Freaky: yes. Great: you decide.

Isis

You're a Big Girl Now

The Beatles Reunion

2009-07-04T11:07:00.000-07:00

It was just a matter of time. It would have happened. If John hadn't been killed. If George hadn't died. Maybe at Live Aid. Maybe at Live 8. Maybe for something like the Anthology series. But it would have happened. The Beatles would have gotten back together.

I have spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about what it would have been like. I have reached some conclusions. They would have gotten haircuts. They would have played mostly songs from their later albums. They would have been brilliant.

Here's the setlist they would have performed if it was up to me:

Got to Get You Into My Life
Revolution
Get Back
Come Together
Something
Here, There, and Everywhere
Rain
Here Comes the Sun
Blackbird
Norwegian Wood
Yesterday
Help!
Eleanor Rigby
With a Little Help From My Friends
Strawberry Fields Forever
Penny Lane
Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds
Lady Madonna
Taxman
All You Need is Love
Let it Be
A Day in the Life

Encores

While My Guitar Gently Weeps
In My Life
Hey Jude

2009-07-01T16:51:00.000-07:00

Top Thirty Dylan Songs of the Last Thirty Years (1979-2009)
...what's missing?

Mississippi
Brownsville Girl
Blind Willie McTell
Red River Shore
The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar
Trying to Get to Heaven Before They Close the Door
Every Grain of Sand
Cross the Green Mountain
Most of the Time
Things Have Changed
Sweetheart Like You
High Water (For Charlie Patton)
Jokerman
Dark Eyes
Caribbean Wind
Series of Dreams
Tight Connection to My Heart
Ain't Talkin'
Slow Train
When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky
Not Dark Yet
Trouble in Mind
Dignity
Tell Old Bill
The Man in the Long Black Coat
When He Returns
Shooting Star
Nettie Moore
Precious Angel
Forgetful Heart

New Morning - Bob Dylan (1970)

2009-05-19T14:43:00.001-07:00

Listening to the remastered version of Bob Dylan's New Morning, I am struck by how lovely the album is, and how light--it feels like it could up and float away at any second. For that reason it feels inconsequential, unsubstantial. The substance it lacks, it seems to me, is longing, be it romantic ("Boots of Spanish Leather"), philosophical ("A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall"), spiritual ("Mr. Tambourine Man"), or even vengeful ("Like a Rolling Stone"). Who wants to pay good money to hear someone else rhapsodize about their happy life? That's why "Sign on the Window" feels like such a cold gust of truth:

"Her and her boyfriend went to California
Her and her boyfriend done changed their tune
My best friend said 'Now didn't I warn ya
'Brighton girls are like the moon
'Brighton girls are like the moon...'"

The yearning in those lines refutes all the blissed-out platitudes that come before and after them. Listen close and you can hear the "Idiot Wind" howling in the distance.

Emmy the Great

2009-05-16T22:43:00.000-07:00

My musical tastes generally run toward old Jews from my father's generation, like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, or country-tinged tortured souls like Lucinda Williams and Ryan Adams, so I am more than a little surprised to find that my favorite album for the last few months has been First Love by Emmy the Great, a 24 year old Anglo-Chinese “singer-songwanker” (to borrow her phrase). How good is her debut album? It’s right up there with the best folk-rock albums of the last decade: Summerteeth by Wilco; Heartbreaker by Ryan Adams; Car Wheels on a Gravel Road by Lucinda Williams; More Adventurous by Rilo Kiley; even, so help me, “Love and Theft” by Mr. Zimmerman and Ten New Songs by Mr. Cohen.

How is this possible? It’s a miracle, plain and simple. So is the birth of any true artist. Nothing in Dylan’s background, nothing in Cohen’s, nothing in Adams’ or Tweedy’s pegged them for genius. They were just normal kids from normal families with some highly unusual, perhaps defective chromosomes that made the rabbit holes in their backyards pathways to their own private Wonderlands, rather than tunnels dug by cute rodents. (Lucinda, of course, did have an artistic background, with a famous poet for a father, and Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis was a child actress who co-starred in a sitcom with Lucille Ball.)

This is what I know about the life of Emma-Lee Moss, aka Emmy the Great. She spent her first dozen years in her mother’s native China, then moved to her father’s native England. A little out of the ordinary, but no more likely to turn her into a great songwriter than any other self-perceived misfit born in the mid-eighties. I guess what I’m saying is, put explanations out of your head and just appreciate her work.

The sound of First Love is, indeed, lovely, all acoustic guitars, violins, and Emmy’s clear, generally melancholic soprano. It sounds like what a 21^st century folk album should sound like. But it’s her songs that make Emmy more than just a latter-day Lisa Loeb. They’re full of surprising rhymes, startling images, and raw emotions.

How surprising? How startling? How raw? How about this for a song title: “If I Had Known the Last Time Would Be the Last Time I’d Have Let You Enjoy It.” There’s a whole novel’s worth of pathos and regret just in the title. The song itself lasts barely over a minute (it's not on her album).

I could go on, but instead I’ll let Emmy do the work for me by quoting a few of my favorite lines, some from the album and some from the various singles she released while she was developing her artistry.

“You were stroking me like a pet/ But you didn’t own me yet.”

“You didn’t stop/ When I told you to stop/ And there was a month/ When I wasn’t sure/ If the next time I saw you/ Out on the road/ I’d have something to say/ Other than pay/ All of the money that you owe.”

“I thought romance was pretty/ But you went and spoiled it/ Every time I think of you/ I have to go to the toilet.”

“First we were born then we ran slowly out of luck/ And you’re still not Charles Bukowski and I am not Diane Cluck/ And I would suck the life from you/ If there was any left to suck.”

“The saccharine smear of baby spit/ The secret trail it leaves upon the tit.”

“They pulled a human from my waste/ It had your mouth, it had your face/ I would have kept it if I stayed.”

“I knew you best/ Back when love was just a feeling that ran out between my legs/ On to the back of my dress/ On to the clothes that I was wearing.”

It’s interesting to note that the most shocking, or perhaps naked, of these images come from songs that predate the album. I wonder if she decided some of this was just too soul-baring for mass public consumption.

Not that Emmy is all gloom and doom. There is an almost heartbreaking faith in love in “Bad Things Coming, We Are Safe,” and a strain of wonderfully sarcastic humor in “My Party Is Better Than Yours,” an attack on a friend who has betrayed her:

“Me and all of my other chums/ Will sit and talk ‘bout your smelly bum/ ‘Cause you’re not my friend any more.” (This line was actually replaced with something innocuously unscatological in a second draft of the lyric.)

But I’ve gone on long enough. For those of you who’ve made it this far (or were smart enough to skip ahead), check out a live Emmy performance from the Flying to Paris Sessions, which includes her great cover of Skeeter Davis "End of the World."

Blood on the Tracks Covered

2009-01-25T13:51:00.000-08:00

Artists hate it when you call their work autobiographical--it reduces all their toil, creativity, artistry to the level of mere diary. So I won't say "Blood on the Tracks" is autobiographical. For all I know, every song on the album was inspired by a different Chekhov story, as Dylan claimed in "Chronicles: Volume 1." But when I hear the singer's voice, I envision him in my mind's eye up on a high lonesome farm in Minnesota, literally dying of love and loss. He is living simultaneously in the present and the past--maybe a bit more in the latter. He is alone except for his nursemaid from Ashtabula, who gives him everything his beloved won't anymore--and it doesn't matter a bit. He is already looking ahead to the bittersweet moment when Miss Ashtabula leaves--more than likely at his behest. Alone, walking the endless acres of green fields, he tries to find the words to win back his beloved, or destroy her, experimenting with attitudes of contrition, blame, indifference, acceptance, rage, revenge:

"We always did feel the same, we just saw it from a differnt point of view."
"Maybe she'll pick him out again, how long must he wait?"
"I always did believe she was my twin."
"I'm goin' out of my mind with a pain that stops and starts, like a corkscrew to my heart."
"I can change, I swear! See what you can do..."
"You hurt the ones that I love best and cover up the truth with lies. One day you'll be in the ditch, flies buzzin' around your eyes, blood on your saddle."
"I noticed at the ceremony, your corrupt ways had finally made you blind. I can't remember your face anymore, your mouth has changed, your eyes don't look into mine."
"Well, I struggled through barbed wire, felt the hail fall from above. Well, you know I even outran the hound dogs. Honey, you know I've earned your love."
"If you see her, say hello."
"Now there's a wall between us, somethin' there's been lost, I took too much for granted, got my signals crossed."
"Beauty walks a razor's edge, someday I'll make her mine."
"If you want me, honey baby, I'll be here."
"Everything about you is bringing me misery."
And the coup de grace, the final words of powerless devotion:
"Life is sad, life is a bust, all ya can do is do what you must. You do what you must do and ya do it well, I'll do it for you, honey baby, can't you tell?"

Do the words win her back? We'll never know for sure. The story ends on an ambiguous note, like Mickey Rourke high up on the ropes at the end of "The Wrestler." Even if she comes back, a love this idealized can't last--it has nowhere to go but down, from the heavens to the burning depths of hell--or anyway, to the cold reality of Earth. Yes, the writer will survive this love, he'll marry again, split again, but he'll always hold something back. He'll always have one eye on the nearest exit. He'll always be "on the road, looking for another joint." The road, after all, is neverending.

***

Nobody sings Dylan like Dylan, but these songs glow like burning coals in whatever context they find themselves. Here are covers of every song on the album. Enjoy! (Though to quote their composer, I don't know how anyone could enjoy this kind of pain.)

Blood on the Tracks Covered
An NSD Production
complete with stewART

1. Tangled Up in Blue - Jerry Garcia Band
2. Simple Twist of Fate - Jeff Tweedy
3. You're a Big Girl Now - Lloyd Cole
4. Idiot Wind - The Coal Porters
5. You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go - Shawn Colvin
6. Meet Me in the Morning - Freddie King
7. Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts - Tom Russell, Joe Ely, and Eliza Gilkyson
8. If You See Her Say Hello - Jeff Buckley
9. Shelter From the Storm - Rodney Crowell and Emmylou Harris
10. Buckets of Rain - Neko Case

Bonus Track
11. Up To Me - Roger McGuinn

Top Ten Albums

2009-01-17T21:38:00.000-08:00

Blood on the Tracks (Bob Dylan)
Born to Run (Bruce Springsteen)
Revolver (The Beatles)
New Skin for the Old Ceremony (Leonard Cohen)
Bridge Over Troubled Water (Simon and Garfunkel)
Get Happy!! (Elvis Costello)
I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight (Richard and Linda Thompson)
Late For the Sky (Jackson Browne)
Lucinda Williams (Lucinda Williams)
Heartbreaker (Ryan Adams)

The Only Living Boy in New York

2008-12-19T10:06:00.000-08:00

Paul Simon wrote this song in 1969, when his partner Art Garfunkel went down to Mexico to Film "Catch-22." It's all about being alone, adrift, untethered from everyone and every thing you know and love or know and hate but at least know. What Paul knew when he wrote it, but Art didn't know when he left, was that "Simon & Garfunkel" were through, and only Simon and Garfunkel would remain. We've all been there, leaving friends, lovers, schools, jobs behind. When you make the choice, it's bittersweet. When the choice is made for you, it's just plain bitter. Paul is somewhere in the middle, left behind in the short term but preparing to make the break for good.

Tom, get your plane right on time.
I know your part'll go fine.
Fly down to Mexico.
Da-n-da-da-n-da-n-da-da and here I am,
The only living boy in New York.

In the song he refers to Art as Tom, the name Art used when they were a teenage duo called Tom & Jerry. When they were fifteen, they actually had a hit single, "Hey Schoolgirl." Imagine that! Paul had ditched Art once before, in 1963, after they cut their first album, "Wednesday Morning, 3 A.m." The album was going nowhere on the charts and Paul went off to England, worked solo, fell in love. He liked it, maybe he was even happy to be shed of his childhood chum, but then some wiseguy producer added drums and electric guitars to "Sounds of Silence" and made it a Number 1 hit. So Paul came home, left Kathy behind (memorializing her in "Kathy's Song"), and rejoined Art for the sake of history.

So when he wrote this song, these guys had been together a long time, side by side, but now Paul remembers that beautiful feeling of freedom that came over him in London and he wants to fly solo:

I get the news I need on the weather report.
I can gather all the news I need on the weather report.
Hey, I've got nothing to do today but smile.
Da-n-da-da-n-da-da-n-da-da here I am
The only living boy in New York

Ah, that moment of sweet freedom, nothing to do, no one to consider but yourself. It feels great. Listen to the way Simon's voice, usually such a melancholy vessel, soars as he sings that line: "I've got nothing to do today but smile"--for just a moment we're back on the 59th Street Bridge, "Feelin Groovy." But oh how that mood can shift to loneliness in a flash:

Half of the time were gone but we dont know where,
And we dont know where,
And we dont know where.

How do you make those two feelings co-exist, freedom and loneliness? How do you tell the one you're leaving it's over? Dig down and find the honesty to speak the truth:

Tom, get your plane right on time.
I know you've been eager to fly now.
Hey let your honesty shine, shine, shine
Da-n-da-da-n-da-da-n-da-da
Like it shines on me
The only living boy in New York,
The only living boy in New York.

What a song! Shawn Colvin does a beautiful cover in concert (I've included it below). Doesn't bother to change it to "Only Living Girl in New York." It's just a state of mind, and she can capture it as well as any boy--except maybe the one who wrote it.

Simon and Garfunkel version

Shawn Colvin version