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Saturday, July 24
LONG BEFORE I KNEW YOU
by
Lloydville
on Sat 24 Jul 2010 12:28 PM PDT
 From the original cast recording of Bells Are Ringing, this is one of the loveliest ballads ever written for a Broadway musical. The fact that Judy Holliday and Sydney Chaplin have to strain a bit to hit their notes only adds to the poignancy of their performances. Unaccountably, and to me disastrously, the song was left out of the movie version of the show: Long Before I Knew You Above, Holliday and Chaplin with director Jerome Robbins during rehearsals.  1 AttachmentsWednesday, May 26
PROMISES, PROMISES
by
Lloydville
on Wed 26 May 2010 02:07 AM PDT
 My friends Mary and Paul Zahl made a lightning raid on New York City recently (from Florida!) to see the Broadway revival of Promises, Promises. Here is Paul's report on the show: LITTLE NOT BIG, THEREFORE BIG I think critics make a mistake when they bring ideology to a production of the theater. In the case of the new revival of the 1968 musical Promises, Promises by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, with book by Neil Simon, a lot of ideology has flowed out on paper. A lot of energy has flown, for example to the performance of Sean Hayes, the lead actor, and whether a gay actor can portray a non-gay hero. Energy has also flown to the attitudes, within the story, concerning relationships in the work place between men and women, attitudes that are supposedly typical of the 1950s and early 1960s and no longer of today. (The musical was written and first performed in 1968, although it is closely based on Billy Wilder's 1960 film The Apartment, which he co-wrote with I. A. L. Diamond.)  As I say, a lot of present-day ideology has become involved in the critical reception of this Broadway revival of Promises, Promises. No matter that, however, Variety reports that Promises, Promises is a commercial success. The weeknight performance my wife Mary and I recently attended was sold out, not one empty seat; and the audience was overwhelmingly appreciative, interrupting the show frequently and offering the cast a long standing ovation at the end. For myself, Promises, Promises is a little story, about a "little guy" who wins the girl -- because he really loves her and doesn't use her -- and therefore a big story. In drama, so goes my notion, when a personal story is well and compassionately told, that story becomes a big story. On the other hand, attempting to weight a personal story with ideology, especially pre-conceived ideology, diminishes the attempt.  Promises, Promises narrates the disillusionment of a "little guy" at Consolidated Life, whose crush on a "little" fellow employee turns out to be a crush on the mistress of his married boss. C. C. Baxter's sweet and selfless crush on his "angel in the centerfold" ( reluctant mistress to the unscrupulous Mr. Sheldrake) is crushed in the first act, and on Christmas Eve! However, when Miss Kubelik tries to commit suicide out of her own disillusionment with Sheldrake -- after a sorry tryst in C. C.'s apartment -- things both fall apart and come together. Baxter shows real love for his true love, who seems hopelessly and all the time in love with another man. With the merciful intervention of a kind and honest doctor who lives next door, together with C. C.'s urgent rising to the occasion of her overdose, Miss Kubelik rises from the dead, or the near dead. This love from a real and kind man, C. C. Baxter, as compared with the cynicism and selfishness of boss Sheldrake, touches her, and finally wins her heart. The curtain "clinch" is credible, unsentimental, and very, very touching. It is made even more credible by the reprise, this time with a positive vibe, of Bacharach and David's famous song "I'll Never Fall in Love Again". Why does the audience cry at the end? Why was the applause sustained and very loud? Why did the people leave moved, and happy? I think it's because the love of C. C. Baxter and Fran Kubelik is a universal story enacted within a particular case. C. C. wins Fran. He saves her life, both physically and emotionally; and at the very moment when her long, passionate, hopeless affair with Sheldrake is exposed -- at the very moment! This is a little story about little people. It is therefore big. Why? Because it's about everybody. Everybody knows about the little guy. Almost everybody, male and female, is now or has at some point been the little guy. It comes with being born.  There are a lot of theatrical touches to Promises, Promises that are worthy of comment. The notorious Christmas Party song entitled "Turkey Lurkey Time" is a number people seem either to hate or love. Mary and I happen to love it. I think we could say we LOVE it. "Turkey Lurkey Time" is just so unusual. Is it about men being turkeys? Mary thinks so. Is it about the Christmas turkey, soon to lose his head? Well, yes. Is it a song about the sheer euphoria of Christmas revelry and drunkenness? Yes, too. Is it a smashing production number with great ensemble dancing and an unpredictable finish? Yes, that, too. Anyway, "Turkey Lurkey Time" has to be seen and heard to be believed; and I, for one, am still singing it. (I made a mistake in the lobby at the end, as we were leaving the theater. I was too cheap to buy the T-shirt of "Turkey Lurkey Time", with snowflakes against a brown background. Heaven: and I missed it.) Then there is the unexpected moment of compassion for the "villain", J. D. Sheldrake. He sings a song entitled "Wanting Things", about his compulsion for wanting things he cannot have. The subject of the song is what theology calls "concupiscence". As he tolls his confession, shadows of the several women in his life, all in scarlet but half-hidden by the lighting, approach him, then slowly walk away, and vanish. The number is haunting, and also even-handed. No person is completely a villain.  The producers of Promises, Promises have added two songs from the Bacharach-David repertoire to their revival of the show. One of them, "A House Is Not a Home", has to be one of the great American pop songs. Both lead characters, Fran and Chuck (C. C.), sing it in separate contexts, at different points in the narrative. It is almost unbearably affecting. The actress Katie Finneran (above) also has a star turn as Marge MacDougall, the woman Chuck picks up in a bar on Christmas Eve just after he has learned the truth about Fran's affair with Sheldrake. Critics of the show who panned it otherwise, mostly for ideological reasons of one kind or another -- you can adore Mad Men but you can't say a good word about Promises, Promises -- loved Katie Finneran's extraordinary scene. You have to agree with the critics about the scene, and the actress. But it's also true that Sean Hayes, the lead, reveals a comic brilliance and timing as C. C. Baxter; and Kristin Chenoweth has a lovely voice and compelling stage presence. (To me the actress seems a little petite for the role, given the slightly tough persona she is supposed to have.) Two other things to mention:  The character of Dr. Dreyfuss is played by Dick Latessa (above, with Chenoweth and Hayes), who puts this role on the map. Dr. Dreyfuss is the physician/wise man/priest of the play and even invokes God, sincerely, in a moment of crisis. Also, the number, "Where Can You Take a Girl?", which is reprised twice by an enthusiastic quartet of young executives, is comic and even slapstick. We would wish to believe that the kind of thinking expressed in the song doesn't take place any more. But it does, whatever one's moral judgments are. It's just that today the targets are not "secretaries" but "part-time staffers", or "interns", or "campaign workers", of both sexes. "Where Can You Take a Girl?" is a spoof. Everyone in the audience laughed, even if they didn't quite want to. Visually, the play is saturated in early '60s office decor. (Think kidney-shaped ash trays.) The art direction reminded me of Frank Tashlin's 1957 Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?. But the props don't overwhelm the story and the music. The choreography is terrific. The dancers and their costumes look right to the period, and they're not small bodies. Yet there are also not too many of them. The high points of the dancing occur at the very beginning of the play and during "Turkey Lurkey Time". (As far as I am concerned, you could almost rename the show "Turkey Lurkey Time", that song is so eccentric and memorable.)  Mary and I had a blast. It's rare you do something on an impulse -- like getting on a plane within a few hours of deciding to go, with the sole purpose of seeing one show you hope you're going to like -- and it works. Promises, Promises works. It works on almost every level. If you are going to take offense -- at anything -- on purely ideological grounds, I guess you could infer something you didn't like. That may be true of almost any piece of popular art. But I think it would be doing an injustice, here, to the combined talents of Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, of Burt Bacharach and Hal David, of Sean Hayes and Kristin Chenoweth, Dick Latessa and Katie Finneran; and of Neil Simon. Together they bring together a story of a little yearning man and a little beat-down woman (Kerouac's understanding of a "beat-ness"), whose love affair becomes a big story. Tuesday, May 4
RED RIVER SHORE
by
Lloydville
on Tue 04 May 2010 12:09 AM PDT
 Bob Dylan's song "Red River Shore", from the compilation album Tell Tale Signs, has no direct precedents that I know of, but it references a couple of older cowboy songs. The first is "Red River Valley", a standard from the second half of the 19th Century: From this valley they say you are going. We will miss your bright eyes and sweet smile, For they say you are taking the sunshine That has brightened our pathway a while. So come sit by my side if you love me. Do not hasten to bid me adieu. Just remember the Red River Valley, And the one that has loved you so true. The last line is often rendered as "And the cowboy that loved you so true". This song in turn was probably influenced by (or possibly influenced) another cowboy song, based on an old English ballad, "The Girl From the Red River Shore", whose title is a recurring phrase in Dylan's song. Both are songs about loss -- the second describes a cowboy who gets into a fight while riding to marry a girl from the Red River shore. Her father, who disapproves of the marriage, has ridden out to meet him with a cohort of gunmen -- the cowboy kills several of them and now can never go back to claim his love. I don't know how old this second song is -- an arrangement of it was copyrighted and recorded by the Kingston Trio in the Sixties but its words have a 19th-Century feel. I also don't know why the Red River became associated with lost love . . . it was probably just an accident, although "Red River" does suggest the coursing of the blood, the beating of the heart.  Dylan's song was recorded during the sessions for Time Out Of Mind but left off that album for some reason. Curiously, it influenced a song on a later album, Modern Times, "Nettie Moore". The title and the first two lines of the chorus of that song were taken from an 1857 song called "Gentle Nettie Moore", which is about a man's longing for a young girl who has gone off somewhere else. The older song references good times past, including boating on a river, and Dylan adds a river to the chorus of his song, after the quoted lines: Oh, I miss you Nettie Moore And my happiness is o'er Winter's gone, the river's on the rise I loved you then and ever shall But there's no one left here to tell The world has gone black before my eyes This echoes the plight of the narrator of Dylan's "Red River Shore", who goes back to the place where he knew his lost love and can't find anyone who remembers her, or them together. In a final, mystical image, the narrator wonders if anybody anywhere ever saw him, except that girl -- suggesting that he only had authentic being in her eyes, that if she isn't looking at him he's dead. This is why that last verse references Rabbi Jeshua of Nazareth, someone who knew how to bring the dead back to life. If the girl from the Red River shore is really gone, then the rabbi might be the only hope of life left, a dubious hope in the narrator's estimation. The song thus becomes something much more than an exercise in nostalgia, in romantic longing -- it becomes a kind of cry of existential terror.  One day, as you drift into your fifties, you wake up and realize that you are closer to the end of things than to the beginning. It's not necessarily a bad or depressing realization, but it does induce different kinds of thoughts than you've ever had before. It makes you think seriously about what your life might add up to, when all is said and done. Lost loves come back to haunt you. For me these ghosts are often sweet revenants, because they remind me of the times I did feel most alive, of the times when my being seemed fullest.  In "Red River Shore", Dylan has written a great song about this phenomenon. It will certainly speak most clearly to people who are nearer to the end of things than to the beginning -- but the truth is that this could be any of us, for all we know, whatever age we're at, and all of us will get there eventually. There's a girl (or guy) from the Red River shore in every life, and eventually he or she will become a ghost, even if it's only the ghost of the youth of someone you've always been with. Eventually that ghost will show up at your door one day and say, "Remember me?" . . . and the question will really be, "Do you remember who you were when you were most alive?" It's an important question -- since that memory might be the only thing you'll take with you from this world, the only thing worth taking with you from this world. Thursday, April 8
DYLAN AND GODARD
by
Lloydville
on Thu 08 Apr 2010 08:38 AM PDT
 Jean-Luc Godard always had a strong identification with Bob Dylan, a sense that their careers, their artistic journeys and even their lives were somehow linked, even though they never worked together. The idea is not as strange as it sounds. Both were artists steeped in tradition, the tradition of cinema in Godard's case and the tradition of American music in Dylan's. Both were looking for ways to bring what they loved from those traditions into the present, to give them a form that would be alive for the future. Both were re-mixers, who made startling recombinations of old things that they then inflected with a purely contemporary resonance. Both also had serious motorcycle accidents that resulted in periods of seclusion.  In the late 70s, each artist began to lose touch with his traditional audience -- Dylan wasn't making much of a showing on the charts anymore, Godard was finding it harder and harder to get financing for his films. They weren't cutting the same figures on the cultural stage that they had in previous years.  Godard took an interest in Dylan's fortunes, kept track of his successes and failures -- since they seemed in some ways to mirror his own. It wasn't just a question of sympathy with a fellow artist in a similar predicament -- it was a question of an almost mystical identification with one of the only artists of the 20th Century operating at his level of genius and accomplishment, and thus one of the only artists of their time who could possibly understand what it felt like to be Jean-Luc Godard in commercial and cultural isolation.  Most surprisingly, Godard has reported that when Dylan "turned to Christ" in 1978, he said to himself, "That will happen to me, too." Then he forgot about it, until he made Hail Mary in 1984. "Look," he said. "Dylan warned me." Sunday, March 28
FLOATING AWAY
by
Lloydville
on Sun 28 Mar 2010 12:03 AM PDT
 [Photo © Hugh McCarten] A year ago today Oscar Fruchtman died, way before his time. Oscar was an extraordinary presence in the lives of everyone who knew him -- brilliant, hilariously funny, haunted by demons. He was a gifted musician and songwriter, who could write funny and also write sweet. My friend Hugh McCarten was one of the people who knew him best, and Hugh was asked to deliver the eulogy at Oscar's memorial service, which is linked to below. But before you read it, listen to a song Oscar wrote (with Hugh contributing some to the lyrics), "Floating Away", which is both funny and sweet -- a song about Noah, about hope and rebirth and faith: Floating Away (© 2010 A. Fruchtman/H. McCarten) This is a live recording from The Rose Tattoo in Key West, Florida, from March of 1979 -- with Oscar and Ed "Woody" Allen on guitars, Din Allen on bass, Hugh on toy organ, Oscar singing lead and the other lads doing back-up vocals. Here's what Hugh had to say about Oscar when it came time to bid him farewell: Eulogy For A Luftmensch (In the eulogy, Hugh quotes the lyrics from another song by Oscar, "Brooklyn Boy" -- you can listen to Oscar perform it here.) 1 Attachments
CELEBRATING OSCAR
by
Lloydville
on Sun 28 Mar 2010 12:01 AM PDT
 EULOGY FOR OSCAR Oscar Fruchtman died on the morning of Saturday, March 28, 2009 in his apartment at the Kenmore Residence on East 23rd Street in Manhattan. This eulogy was given on Monday, March 30, 2009 at the Plaza Jewish Community Chapel, 630 Amsterdam Ave. Previous speakers at the service were Rabbi Emeritus David H. Lincoln and Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove, both of the Park Avenue Synagogue. My name is Hugh McCarten and I was Oscar’s longest serving friend. I was his best friend. Rabbi Lincoln said we should always be prepared for circumstances like this, but I wasn’t prepared when Oscar passed away on Friday [from the audience, Janet Moss, Oscar’s mother: “Saturday!”] Oh, right – Saturday. And I’m not prepared for what I’m doing now, but as Oscar’s dad Carl used to say, “These are the knishes that prevail.” So we’re going to go ahead. The topic is remembering Oscar and I’m trying to think of the best way to do that. Rabbi Cosgrove suggested that perhaps Oscar, following Talmudic tradition, was one of the “Lamed Vovniks”, 36 righteous individuals who are on the earth at any given time and without whose divine presence the world could not endure. That’s possible, but I came across a word recently that I am sure applies to Oscar and the word is “luftmensch”, literally an “air man”, a dreamer. And apparently Oscar was a dreamer from the beginning. I first got to know him and his wonderful family back in the early 1970s and he told me that practically his first memory was of his parents' liquor store, South Ferry Liquors. As a young child, he said he couldn’t quite understand what “South Ferry Liquors” meant and thus he envisioned some kind of fantastic combination boat/store that went careening around the New York harbor. And so began his dreaming . . . He told me he had been named after his grandfather, whose spirit it was suggested he had inherited, and he told me about his grandmother Sadie, who liked to invoke the 11th Commandment: “Don’t Get Caught!” And about his Uncle Louie who died in 1957 at Yankee Stadium in the middle of a New York Giants football game and about growing up in Brooklyn on Ovington Avenue and later on Eastern Parkway. He told me about going to Stuyvesant High School and becoming the International President of USY – United Synagogue Youth. Oscar was, as some of you know, a great songwriter and I wish I could sing a bunch of his songs today, but we don’t have time, so I’d like to read the lyrics of a song written in the 1970s that sums up his youth and its title is “Brooklyn Boy”: BROOKLYN BOY I don’t say much but I’m a fast talker I never look I’m a jay-walker I guess you could say I’m a New Yawker I’m just a Brooklyn Boy From Flatbush to Brooklyn Heights You better not miss those Brooklyn sights Botanical Gardens and Prospect Park But you better lock your door when it gets dark I used to root for the Brooklyn Dodgers Duke Snider, Pee Wee Reese, the late Gil Hodges I used to love to watch Roy Rogers I’m just a Brooklyn Boy Coney Island, down by the sea I just hop right on that BMT Mom cooled Pepsi right in the fridge And Daddy tried to sell the Brooklyn Bridge! I used to eat in a delicatessen Turkey on club with Russian dressing Then I would take my piano lesson I’m just a Brooklyn Boy I’m just a B-r-o-o-k-l-y-n I’ll probably sing it once again I’m just a B-r-o-o-k-l-y-n Brooklyn Boy (Music and lyrics by O. Fruchtman) (©2010 A. Fruchtman) [Here's a link to Oscar performing the song live -- "Brooklyn Boy" .] Then the Brooklyn Boy went to Princeton and after appearing in some Triangle Club shows there, he started making his way in the showbiz world. He began playing the guitar and singing with Princeton classmate and friend Ed (Woody) Allen and later I joined the two of them and we formed a band – Oscar and The League Of Weenies. In 1974 we became the first band ever hired to play at the club CBGB and two weeks later we were the first band ever fired from playing at CBGB. All through the early and mid-70s Oscar was hanging around some of the most creative people on the New York scene, especially the folks involved in the early years of the TV show Saturday Night Live. At one point Michael O’Donoghue, the head writer for the show said,” You know, all Oscar needs is a little success.” But Oscar never found any real commercial success and at crucial moments he seemed to have a special knack for sabotaging his opportunities and, frankly, manipulating and ultimately alienating people. I asked him once about this tendency and he said, ”Well, you know my motto – I’ll burn that bridge when I get to it.” And so – he did! And he turned away from the traditional path and became his own creative universe. He was a poet, a singer and songwriter, a street performer, a painter, a collagist . . . A message from Oscar on your answering machine might be a miniature masterpiece. I’m now holding up a business card he had made up for a fictional concern located on Medford Avenue in Fairlawn, N.J. And the outfit is called: “Mind Your Own Business!“ and their slogan is “Don’t Call Us and We Won’t Call You!”. You didn’t hear Oscar on the radio or see him on TV, but the whole world was his canvas. And he travelled with a mission. He was seeking the essential humorous truth of life. And this was his exacting discipline: He was the master of taking any situation, finding the precise comic center and putting it into words – words that made you laugh. In my opinion he was quite simply the funniest person ever. Nor did it matter if he was the butt of the joke – what was paramount was the comic truth. And he filled his memorable songs with humor and they overflow with warmth and humanity. So this was a brief attempt to take the measure of my friend Oscar Fruchtman. He was a luftmensch who had enough adventures and burnt enough bridges for several lifetimes. He loved his family, he loved his friends, he loved his music and, above all, he loved to create laughter, that rarest ability and his special gift to all. Oscar, you did a lot of surprising things in your life, but what you did on Saturday surprised me the most. And Janet and Annie and Peter and I will never forget you, because you are unforgettable. And we are so proud we had the chance to share your time on earth. Rabbi Cosgrove said he was going to pull on his earlobe if I was talking too long and he hasn’t done that yet, so I’m going to get out my guitar and sing a song Oscar and I wrote – it’s mostly Oscar, but I contributed a little. (While getting set up, I took a swig from a bottle of Poland Spring [from the audience, Janet Moss, Oscar’s mom, “Drinking on the job!"]) This song is very appropriate for this setting and you’ll hear why. It’s called “Floating Away” . . . FLOATING AWAY ‘Twas the night that Noah went crazy And he started to talk about building a boat 'Twas the night that Noah went crazy And he started to talk about floating away Floating Away – I don’t care what the people say For I’ll be floating away, waiting for the break of day Everybody laughed when he talked about building his craft and floating He talked about taking two of each kind He talked about leaving it all behind And he grabbed his hat and he grabbed his coat And he mumbled something about floating away Floating Away – I don’t care what the people say For I’ll be floating away, waiting for the break of day Hey, what’s with Noah? If he don’t move that ark they’re going to tow it away But he just ripped up the ticket and he stowed it away Cause he’s soon to be floating away Floating Away – I don’t care what the people say For I’ll be floating away, waiting for the break of day First there came the wind – I hope he’ll let us in Then there came the rain, maybe Noah’s not insane! ‘Twas the night that Noah went crazy And he started to talk about building a boat 'Twas the night that Noah went crazy And he started to talk about floating away For forty days it rained then the sky was clear and the land was dry And the bird of peace flew by and Noah got high And again he was floating away Floating Away – I don’t care what the people say For I’ll be floating away, waiting for the break of day (Music by Oscar Fruchtman/Lyrics by Oscar Fruchtman and Hugh McCarten) (©2010 A. Fruchtman/H. McCarten) 1 AttachmentsWednesday, January 27
BOB DYLAN'S MICRO FICTION
by
Lloydville
on Wed 27 Jan 2010 12:55 AM PST
 In his brilliant and eccentrically revealing memoir Chronicles: Volume One, Bob Dylan talks about a crucial inspiration in his development as a songwriter -- the first time he heard "Pirate Jenny", from Brecht and Weill's The Threepenny Opera. The lyric is written in the voice of an oppressed young girl, who recounts her fantasy of a pirate ship which will appear in the harbor of her city and bombard it in her name, destroying all her enemies and rescuing her from a life of servitude.  It is thus a surreal fiction set within the slightly less surreal fiction of the opera itself, both modes operating here within a single song. Dylan says this expanded his notion of what a song could be. He was of course already familiar with the narrative conventions of folk songs, especially the murder ballads, and he would follow these conventions in many of his own works, telling self-contained fictional or historical tales, usually with a strong social message, but "Pirate Jenny" set him off on another strategy, involving fantastical tales within tales.  In "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream", from Bringing It All Back Home, Dylan tells a tale in the voice of a crew member of the Mayflower, which is somehow commanded by Melville's Captain Ahab and lands in America for a series of comic anachronistic adventures. (Among the artifacts surrounding Dylan in the photograph on the cover of Bringing It All Back Home is the Lotte Lenya album on which he first heard "Pirate Jenny".)  "Desolation Row", from Highway 61 Revisited, offers a similar bit of jumbled-up, surreal narrative but has become less buffoonish, more poetic.  "Desolation Row" conjures up a vision of a very specific place inhabited by an improbable cast of characters, drawn from every aspect of culture. The real-life poets Pound and Eliot have a mythical fistfight, The Phantom Of the Opera shares the scene with Ophelia and Cassanova. It's a vision, on one level, of culture as it's actually experienced in the imagination. Lon Chaney and Charles Laughton and Victor Hugo are forever linked by The Hunchback of Notre Dame -- Desolation Row is that precinct of the mind where all four of them meet up and hang out together.  On the same album, in "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues", Dylan presents a variation on this fractured narrative strategy, this time with a series of vignettes and anecdotes about some beat characters hanging out in Mexico. Each element of the song seems to open onto a whole narrative episode which, however, is only suggested, not recounted. It's like shards of a Kerouac novel discovered at an archaeological dig and displayed in glass cases, inviting the viewer to reconstruct the whole from them. (This is, of course, just an extension, or extreme compression, of the fragmented narrative style of Kerouac himself.)  Many Dylan songs can be seen as collages of poetic images, but most are more acutely perceived as collages of story fragments, micro fictions, which suggest great narrative vistas seen fleetingly through a narrow window whose shutters open and close quickly. His song "Floater", from Love and Theft, suggests a whole cycle of Faulknerian novels glimpsed in this way. Ironically, many lines in "Floater" were lifted almost straight from a Japanese as-told-to autobiography called Confessions Of A Yakuza, yet Dylan has used them in the context of a series of interconnected micro fictions about a place and time and characters that seem indigenously, essentially American.  Here are eight lines from "Floater": My grandfather was a duck trapper He could do it with just dragnets and ropes My grandmother could sew new dresses out of old cloth I don't know if they had any dreams or hopes I had 'em once though, I suppose, to go along With all the ring dancin' Christmas carols on all of them Christmas Eves I left all my dreams and hopes Buried under tobacco leaves I doubt if any of this reflects actual memories from Dylan's own life, but the lines do seem to sum up the whole life of some particular person, in a kind of generational saga told through lightning flashes of imagery.  The precise details, the dragnets and ropes, the old cloth, the ring dancing, seduce us into emblematic episodes, in somewhat the same way that the brief flashbacks in A Christmas Carol seduce us into emblematic episodes from the happier early years of Scrooge. And Dylan doesn't just leave his hopes and dreams behind, he leaves them "buried under tobacco leaves". Here the detail is more symbolic, more open -- did the narrator lose his hopes and dreams in the drudgery of work, or just in wasted hours marked out by the smoke of cigarettes?  The details and episodes evoked in these lines propel the story Dylan is telling into our own imaginations, prompting us to fill in the rest, to travel back in time like Scrooge, to visit the narrator's lost world, to construct our own sense of it, our own dream of it. And this, of course, is what all good stories do. What's left out of them is what eventually belongs most securely to us, almost as if they were our own experiences, because we have collaborated in the making of them.  This was one of the secrets of storytelling that Hemingway knew well, and consciously, almost from the very beginning of his career as a writer. All of his best work uses this "strategic opacity", as Stephen Greenblatt has called it, referring to Shakespeare's method of storytelling -- this uncharted space that the hearer of the tale must fill in for herself. Dylan is a great singer, a fine tunesmith and poet, but not least among his gifts is the gift of storytelling, in a fragmented, micro-fictional form of his own devising. Friday, January 15
THE REAL DEAL
by
Lloydville
on Fri 15 Jan 2010 12:15 AM PST
 After yesterday's jeremiad about the Pat Robertson brand of Christianity, it was good to be reminded by my friend Paul Zahl of what Charles Dickens found when he looked over the shoulder of one of his characters as she gazed into "the eternal book": Harriet complied and read -- read the eternal book for all the weary, and the heavy-laden; for all the wretched, fallen, and neglected of this earth -- read the blessed history, in which the blind, lame, palsied beggar, the criminal, the woman stained with shame, the shunned of all our dainty clay, has each a portion, that no human pride, indifference, or sophistry through all the ages that this world shall last, can take away, or by the thousandth atom of a grain reduce . . . -- from Dombey and Son  That quote in turn made me think of these lines from Bob Dylan's "Chimes Of Freedom", whose rhythm and language are so oddly like those of Dickens, with a Beat twist to them: Through the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales For the disrobed faceless forms of no position Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts All down in taken-for-granted situations Tolling for the deaf an' blind, tolling for the mute Tolling for the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute For the misdemeanor outlaw, chased an' cheated by pursuit An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing . . . Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse An' for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing. Dylan may have had the eternal book in mind when he wrote this, with that "cathedral night" and that climactic image of the "hung-up person", a bit of Beat lingo which, in this context, puts one in mind of some later lines he wrote: There's a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pourin' out of a boxcar door, You didn't know it, you didn't think it could be done, in the final end he won the war After losin' every battle. Wednesday, January 6
EPIPHANY
by
Lloydville
on Wed 06 Jan 2010 12:08 AM PST
 Another epiphany rocks the word, another Christmas season ends. Bob Dylan's Christmas In the Heart reminds us that all is not lost in the art of our time. This year, let's all stand up and change everything, retake our culture from the vile corporations and the sick, demented people who run them. What good are you anyway if you can't stand up to some old businessman? -- Bob Dylan [Image by Gentile da Fabriano, just a toiler in the trenches of Renaissance art.] Wednesday, December 23
O' LITTLE TOWN OF BETHLEHEM — IN THE HEART
by
Lloydville
on Wed 23 Dec 2009 08:07 AM PST
 Have you ever wondered what Bethlehem looked like at the time Jesus was born there? It wasn't something Pieter Bruegel the Elder wondered about -- he knew it looked just like any small town in the Netherlands, where he lived, and that winter there was pretty much the same as the winters he grew up with. So in 1566 he painted The Census At Bethlehem, above, from life, as it were, simply inserting Mary and Joseph and their donkey into the scene. As you can see, the inn looks pretty crowded -- have Mary and Joseph waited too late to arrange for accommodation? Mary is about to give birth -- suppose Joseph can't find her a room? Well, thereby hangs a tale . . . Dylan closes his very strange Christmas album with this song about Bethlehem, and closes the song itself with a quiet, heartfelt "Amen". Bethlehem is no stranger to Dylan than it was to Pieter Bruegel -- he sings about it as though it's as real and familiar as that little whistle-stop up the road, where the only motel in town is tiny and the diner closes at nine.  Why does Dylan feel so at home there, just as much at home as Pieter Breugel once did? It's a mystery which the art itself has no obligation to resolve. Much has been made of this exchange from an interview Dylan gave to Bill Flannagan of the Street Newspaper: BF: You really give a heroic performance of "O’ Little Town Of Bethlehem". The way you do it reminds me a little of an Irish rebel song. There’s something almost defiant in the way you sing, “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in thee tonight.” I don’t want to put you on the spot, but you sure deliver that song like a true believer. BD: Well, I am a true believer. Dylan watchers will know enough to catch the ambiguity of the response. "A true believer in what?" we might ask. As far as I'm concerned, Dylan's personal religious beliefs are entirely irrelevant to Christmas In the Heart. Nothing he might say or not say about them can change a note of what's on the record, and nothing on the record can constitute reliable evidence about what he "really believes" -- anymore than Jan Van Eyck's Altarpiece of Ghent can tell us anything definitive about Jan's personal religious beliefs.  What we can say is that Dylan sings "O' Little Town Of Bethlehem" in the voice of a true believer, that the performance is incredibly moving, whether considered as a work of art or as a witness of faith. The way he hits the word "dear" in the phrase "the dear Christ enters in", the solemn humility and peacefulness of that final "Amen" . . . these are things to marvel at, things that touch the heart.  As with Van Eyck's altarpiece, Dylan has brought a lifetime of craft to this work, an extraordinary commitment of feeling and care, without a trace of cowardly, modernist irony. It is deeply "religious" art, in subject and execution, art that transcends the personality of the artist . . . the sort of art we don't see much of these days, and a wonderful reminder of what we've been missing. Art like this doesn't ask (much less answer) the question "What does the artist really believe?" It asks the question "What do you really believe?" The sarcastic scorn being heaped upon Christmas In the Heart in some quarters, with knowing, cowardly, modernist irony, tells us all we need to know about the sorry state of our culture in this troubled holiday season of 2009. Dylan's album tells us that things could be different, should be different. Can I get an "Amen"? Tuesday, December 22
THE CHRISTMAS SONG — IN THE HEART
by
Lloydville
on Tue 22 Dec 2009 09:05 AM PST
 Bob Dylan's Christmas In the Heart, track by track . . . Dylan just eases into this one, with a quiet pleasure that summons up an image of him settling back in an armchair before the fire, wearing his Bing Crosby cardigan and filling up a pipe -- with tobacco! The ghost of his favorite dog from childhood, old Shep, is curled up at his feet, he can smell the turkey roasting in the oven and he knows that the egg nog in the icebox is just about ripened. Boy, that's gonna be good.  The night wind is whipping snow against the windowpanes, and Bob is entertaining visitors, even though nobody but him can see them.  He's communing here, with Bing and Nat and Frank, not trying to outdo them, just happy to be in their company.  In short, he's messing with your head. He's messing with his own head. But what the heck? Just throw another log on the fire, settle back in your own armchair and enjoy it. It's Christmas . . . the happiest season of all. Monday, December 21
CHRISTMAS ISLAND — IN THE HEART
by
Lloydville
on Mon 21 Dec 2009 08:27 AM PST
 Bob Dylan's Christmas In the Heart, track by track . . . How'd you like to spend Christmas on Christmas Island? Dylan and his devilishly cute-sounding girl back-up singers make it seem like a swell idea.  In an interview about the album, Dylan said he knew nothing about Christmas Island -- not even if it was a real place. It is -- that's a picture of it above. It's the largest coral island in the world, sits in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and was discovered in 1777 by Captain Cook -- on Christmas Eve, natch. It was unpopulated then but now has a few thousand inhabitants and, due to its position relative to an international date line, is the first inhabited place on the globe to ring in the New Year.  The British conducted some of their first nuclear bomb tests there in the late Fifties and early Sixties -- radio reports of which may have entered Dylan's subconscious at the time. Graham Greene mentioned the tests in his novel Our Man In Havana, clearly struck by the irony of such things happening on an island so named.  The song was first recorded by the Andrews Sisters (above) in 1946, reflecting America's fascination with the Pacific islands in the post-WWII era. After the horrors which unfolded on them in that war, they took on a paradoxical aura of magic, making Hawaiian shirts, exotic tropical drinks and "Tiki" music irresistible. Were they the symbol of an innocent paradise lost in the war, which we wanted to recover? Or did we simply feel a new, proprietary affection for the places where so much American blood was spilled?  All the contradictions were embodied in works like South Pacific, the stage and film musical, and in John Ford's Donovan's Reef (where a South Seas Christmas celebration figured prominently in the tale.) Both these works explored the subject of racism, in a setting where the issue was perhaps easier to engage, metaphorically, than on home soil. (Thanks to Paul Zahl for noting the Donovan's Reef connection.)  Musically, the Tiki style, with its pedal-steel guitar, influenced country-western music (and, as Mary Zahl has reminded me, Dylan's own Tiki-inflected pastiche, "Beyond the Horizon"). Bing Crosby and Jimmy Buffett, both of whom Dylan admires, recorded covers of "Christmas Island".  So a lot of cultural lines intersect in this song, as they do in all the songs on Christmas In the Heart, but the best thing about Dylan's version is that he plays it straight, without "quotes" around the number -- it's not about nostalgia or irony or attitude. It gets to the heart of what made the Tiki style so appealing -- a dreamy, lyrical vision of places where love and life are easy, simple, natural . . . places where goodness calmly gets the better of meanness . . . places where all your Christmas dreams come true. Sunday, December 20
THE FIRST NOËL — IN THE HEART
by
Lloydville
on Sun 20 Dec 2009 07:01 AM PST
 [Image © 2007 Midolluin] Bob Dylan's Christmas In the Heart, track by track . . . As I wrote recently to a friend, Dylan has a capacity to re-imagine Christmas as though the past 2000 years of institutional church nonsense never happened. He seems to be singing from the apostolic era of Christianity, as an eyewitness to what went down back then. On this song, I have no trouble hearing the voice of one of the original shepherds in Bethlehem who first saw the momentous star and followed it to a stable, where a baby was being born. The shepherd was a boy then -- now he's an old man, but he's telling the story one more time, just as he remembers it. "And by the light of that same star," Dylan sings, in a tone that suggests he's saying, ". . . that star, boys, the one I was telling you about, the one I saw."  And as he's telling it, he gets caught up in the excitement of it . . . one more time -- not just reporting anymore, by the end of the account, but adding his voice to the angels' chorus, quite carried away by the word they kept repeating . . . "Noël!" He's probably dined out on the story more times than he cares to remember, to the point where the old-timers of Bethlehem are sick of it, but it still gets to him, in spite of himself. It makes him feel like a kid again. Saturday, December 19
SILVER BELLS — IN THE HEART
by
Lloydville
on Sat 19 Dec 2009 12:09 AM PST
 Bob Dylan's Christmas In the Heart, track by track . . . Dylan's version of "Silver Bells" has a country-tinged arrangement, which subtly suggests that the singer is far from home this holiday season, looking around in wonder at the city celebrations, "Santa's big scene". Dylan delivers the lyrics with a quiet sort of reverence, though -- as he listens for the transcendent meaning of it all, which he hears in the silver bells ringing out from the steeples of churches, high above the bustle, echoed perhaps in the hand-bells of the sidewalk Santas.  You're bound to think of the vision delivered in Dylan's own song "Ring Them Bells", in which sacred bells toll out their timeless commentary on "the wheel and the plow". In the middle of the urban hurly-burly, Dylan is looking for something that isn't immediately apparent, something that speaks only to the heart. Friday, December 18
MUST BE SANTA — IN THE HEART
by
Lloydville
on Fri 18 Dec 2009 12:01 AM PST
 Bob Dylan's Christmas In the Heart, track by track . . . The raucous arrangement here is led by David Hidalgo, of Los Lobos, on accordion. His Tex-Mex style comes full circle, back to the polkas played in south-Texas German communities which morphed into the Latin-inflected border music of today.  It's all part of the delirious free-fall through American music that Dylan takes on Christmas In the Heart, into a place where there are no borders between styles, genres, periods. No borders, either, between high-brow and low-brow taste, deeply religious and secularized Christmas music, fun and faith. In short, this is a journey into culture as it's actually experienced, a jumble of modes and moods and images that somehow adds up to Christmas in America. Dylan is down on his knees at one moment, up on his feet dancing at another. This is not chaos -- it's life.  He's dancing on this song, proving that joy to the world doesn't have to be delivered on an organ in a church, or in a choirboy's voice. Further commentary would be useless -- you need to get up off the couch and dance to this one.  As the wacky video of the song suggests, it's one way of shooing the Devil and all his works out the window. |
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