These are hard times, likely to get much harder. But believe it or not, we are climbing Jacob's Ladder. Every rung goes just a little bit higher.
That's right — every rung goes just a little bit higher. Don't take my word for it — listen to the testimony of the Staple Singers, in their wonderful version of “Jacob's Ladder” on the album Freedom's Highway.
The band Wilco is offering a free download of a cover they did of Bob Dylan's “I Shall Be Released” if you go to their web site and promise to vote.
Remember, cute girls love guys who vote!
Jack White (of The White Stripes) wrote and produced the theme song for the new James Bond film Quantum Of Solace and performs it on the soundtrack with Alicia Keys. The movie is coming out in November but you can listen to the song now here.
It's awesome — funked-up John Barry with a nod to McCartney's Bond song and a lot of White Stripes drive. Jack's work is big because he's got so many strains of music rattling around in his brain and no firewalls of convention, attitude or fashion separating them. You could say the same of Armstrong, Presley, Hendrix, Dylan.
Alaska is a very rich state — its coffers are overflowing . . . to the tune of a five billion-dollar surplus, mostly from oil-related revenues. It still somehow manages to get more money per capita from the federal government than any other state. (When Sarah Palin canceled the “bridge to nowhere”, she didn't send the money back to Washington — she just used it for other things in Alaska.)
I doubt if Palin has ever visited the meaner streets of South Chicago, where Barack Obama did the community service she finds so laughable. It's possible that she's never met any truly, desperately poor people, unemployed, without health care, and no jobs, no hope in sight.
She should take a few moments and listen to Stephen Foster's beautiful song “Hard Times”, wonderfully sung by many people through the years but never better than by Bob Dylan on his album Good As I Been To You. It might touch her heart, and the hearts of all the soi-disant Christians who laughed along with her at an example of actual Christian charity.
The ever-intriguing web site Potrzebie reminds me of the incomparable Anita O' Day — the coolest West Coast jazz singer of all time. Her real name was Colton — she changed it to the Pig Latin version of “dough”, because she hoped to make a lot of it. Just about everything she did make went up her arm in the form of heroin, which she finally kicked after a fifteen-year habit. She did it cold turkey on her own in Hawaii — “when I got the chills I lay out in the sun, when I got the fevers I jumped in the water.”
This leads my thoughts to the romance of the South Seas and a song O'Day once recorded, “Pagan Love Song”. Many currents flow through the number. It was written by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown for the 1929 film The Pagan. It became the title song for a film Arthur Freed produced in 1950 starring Esther Williams. O'Day recorded it two years later, perhaps to capitalize on its familiarity from the film. It's kind of a silly song but O'Day doesn't goof on it — she sings it straight . . . laid back but straight. “Pagan love,” she seems to say, “yeah, that might be amusing.”
O'Day was a tough lady — she was never interested in “acting girl”, as she called it. When traveling with all-male jazz bands she carried her own luggage and picked up her own checks, as a matter of principle. She can sing a ballad in a way that breaks your heart, but she never asks for sympathy — her style is a kind of antidote to the “broken but brave” emotionalism of Judy Garland in her later concert years.
Check out “Pagan LOve Song” sometime, and the rest of O'Day's work. She hardly ever recorded a bad side.
It's hard to explain why I love lounge music so much — it's very silly music played by very professional musicians, background sounds for a vanished world, offering clues to a certain attitude about coolness that seems unrecoverable except in dreams.
Martin Denny more or less invented the Exotica (or Tiki) brand of lounge music in the Fifties. He lived in Hawaii and played this music in a lounge there. It must have made Hawaii seem like a movie set — or more like a movie set. When he recorded the music, his albums swept the nation, making everyone feel as though they were on a Hawaiian movie set.
It's early evening, in 1959 — there's a breeze off the ocean, coming in with the sound of the waves. You're in an open-air bar drinking something made with coconut milk and rum, remembering what it felt like, back during “the big one”, to get a little shore leave in Waikiki on your way to the bloody islands further west, in the general direction of Tokyo. Who knew then it would be so bad, requiring something like a miracle just to survive it all in one piece?
A girl is about to walk up to the bar from the beach, wearing a brightly-colored cotton dress, with an orchid in her hair. She's going to be trouble, big trouble — but you can handle it.
Check out “Mexico”, not the James Taylor song of the same name, but a somewhat obscure Elvis track from Fun In Acapulco. Thanks to Tony D'Ambra of the invaluable films noir web site for reminding me of it, in a post about The Big Steal, a prime example of fiesta noir — a film that starts out noir but goes goofy when it gets south of the border.
Elvis's “Mexico” is a slight bit of material but Elvis makes it fun — and manages to remind me how much I miss Baja California and La Paz.
Elvis sings the song in the movie — it can also be found on the soundtrack album and on the two-disc set Command Performances which collects most of the songs from the Elvis movies not included on the various Masters box sets.
You thought you were in bad shape. You thought you couldn't go on. Then the angels sent Bo Diddley to remind you of an eternal truth — as long as you can move your hips, life is good.
The angels have taken Bo Diddley home, but his message endures. Listen to some Bo Diddley today.
The Internet can be a spooky place — wandering through it can be like wandering through the subconscious of the culture, its deep, shadowy memories. When what you find there connects with your own subconscious, your own, deep, shadowy memories, the Internet can seem like a precinct of your self.
Some of my earliest childhood memories, from when I was three or four, include distinct images of the old record player in my grandparents's living room — a fancy console with a door that opened onto a turntable that played 78s and 45s. Another door opened onto a storage place for records — including albums that really were albums, bound volumes of record sleeves that contained 78s.
My grandparents had bought a bunch of kids' records for when the grandchildren came to visit, and I caused a sensation at the age of four or five when I could identify particular titles in a loose stack of disks, even though I couldn't read the labels. I had simply memorized the colors and designs of the labels and remembered what recordings they were associated with. The fact that some of the labels had pictures on them which related to the titles of the records did not lessen the admiration of my parents for my early signs of genius, which basically amounted to no more than the kind of trick a dog can be taught.
I had taught myself this trick, however, because the records were very important to me and I wanted to be able to play my favorite ones without having to depend on adults to pick them out for me. One record in particular captured my imagination and has never left my consciousness for too long since, even though I haven't heard it for perhaps fifty years.
Recently I found it again, virtually, online, at a site called Kiddie Records Weekly, which has posted a very impressive collection of old 78s for kids, along with scans of the albums they came in. I couldn't tell you how I found this site. It appeared at the end of a twisting series of links from various music blogs, most of which offered downloads of old out-of-print LPs ripped from vinyl. But there it was, suddenly — the cover of The Carrot Seed, a downloadable MP3 of the record, even a scan of the record label:
It was especially spooky to see the label again, which I had once taught myself to “read” by its color and design alone — it put me in touch with my pre-literate self, for whom the words on the label were abstract signs.
The record itself had a moral — you can listen to it here — and it's not too much to say that it helped form my character, taught me the value of following my own lights in the face of the world's skepticism. The heroism of the little boy who believed his carrot seed would grow in spite of all opinions to the contrary is a kind of heroism I still admire. His vindication still stirs me.
I couldn't have appreciated the allusion to sexual potency in the chant of the doubting brother — “Nyah, nyah, it won't come up, your carrot won't come up” — but who knows how it might have echoed in my psyche down through the years?
I had forgotten that the cover of the record was drawn by the great cartoonist Crockett Johnson, author of the classic Harold and the Purple Crayon. I've always had an especially warm feeling for Johnson's work, and obviously that feeling had its roots in this cover. The record derives from a book by Ruth Krauss, who was married to Johnson, which is still in print, having celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2004.
It all seems very strange — that people took the trouble to collect and preserve this record, to scan its cover and label, to digitize its audio and post it all on a web site . . . that I stumbled upon it by chance while looking for albums of vintage lounge music on the Internet. My memory and the collective memory floating eerily out there in cyberspace had merged.
Go here for a short live set the Beatles did on Swedish radio in 1963. The recording levels weren't set properly and there's a little distortion, but John Lennon once said the recording was the best ever done of the Beatles playing live.
You can investigate other rare live recordings of the Beatles here.
Jimmy
Giuffre died last month, at the age of 86 — I just heard about it. Giuffre was a
jazz clarinetist with a cool, mellow style, influenced by Lester Young. He was a fixture of the laid-back West Coast jazz scene in the 50s
and 60s and I was lucky enough to hear him play once in the 60s at my
boarding school in New England where he and his small group (a trio, I
think it was) were hired for one of our rare entertainment
treats. I can't imagine how that happened — I never identified
anybody on our faculty who had a passion for jazz — but I'm sure glad
I got to hear the cat blow in person.
In a previous post about Orson Welles's ill-fated Brazilian film It's All True
I mentioned that Welles came to see the history of the samba as the key
to Brazilian culture. I wondered if there might be a CD
collection that showcased that history. Of course there was, and
of course it was French — the French having a knack for combining
passion about American music with a logical approach to presenting it.
Fremeaux & Associates offers several historical surveys of
Brazilian music which give a good idea of what Welles found when he
visited the country in 1942. The one above surveys the samba
alone, which originated around 1917 as music for the Carnival and
eventually became a highly commercialized form of dance music
throughout the Americas in the 1940s.
The great revelation of this set is Carmen Miranda in her pre-Hollywood
days. Before she became a musical comedy star, famous for her
tall fruit-basket hats (“Bananas is my business!”), she was one of the
musical treasures of Rio — a terrific and very sexy singer.
But samba, as it turns out, is just the rio
into which all streams of Brazilian music flow. The oldest style
it incorporates is choro, an instrumental form meant for listening, not
dancing. It usually features ornate flute lines accompanied by
various stringed instruments. It started out very European in
sound, with African rhythms adding flavor, but later became a bit more
rambunctious. Its evolutions are charted in the collection
illustrated above.
Other subsets include brass marching-band compositions and various
regional styles, many of which are charted in the Fremeaux
&
Associates collection above. Fremeaux offers a couple of other
historical surveys, but these three will give you a comprehensive
picture of Brazilian music in the first half of the 20th Century.
The pleasures they deliver are not primarily scholarly, however.
There's hardly a song on any of the two-disc sets which is less than marvelous, and all of them
will set you either dreaming or dancing. (The imported sets can
be found on Amazon, most cheaply through their Amazon Marketplace
sellers.)
Listening to these CDs you'll see right away what so enchanted Welles
back in 1942 and grieve anew that he never got a chance to finish his
film about Brazil and the samba.
9 February 1964 — I’m 13 years-old, an 8th-grader, in my first year at
an all-boys New England boarding school. No access to television
— required to be in study hall between dinner and lights out in our dorms.
The Beatles are appearing on the Ed Sullivan show for the first time.
What to do?
It’s possible to sign out of study hall to work in the library.
Three friends and I do this. Just before the Sullivan show goes
on we sneak out of a bathroom window in the library, move from shadow
to shadow across the campus to the math building, where there is a
television which juniors are allowed to watch. We enter the room
with the television where about twelve juniors are gathered. The
moment of truth arrives. If the older boys decide to bust us,
we’re in serious trouble with the school authorities, with so many
demerits it will take us the rest of the term to work them off on
campus maintenance details, with all privileges suspended.
For the first time it strikes me what a strange thing it is I’m
doing. I was a nerdy straight-arrow of a kid back then — I don’t
think I’d ever knowingly broken a school rule in my entire life.
Somehow, though, the Beatles seem bigger than school rules.
The juniors smile and stare at us for a few moments, giving us time to sweat — then wave us in. We watch the Beatles on the show.
This is the same television, in the same room, where we were allowed to watch coverage
of the JFK assassination not quite three months earlier. Hard not to process the Beatles, purveyors of joy, as a kind of answer to Lee Harvey Oswald.
We sneak back across the campus, climb back in the library window . . .
undetected. The librarian, a plump, genial woman, looks at us
wryly as we sign out — I’ve always suspected that she noticed our absence over the
course of the evening but decided not to bust us, either.
The decade of rock music and assassinations, desire and transgression had begun. The Sixties were on.
Well, the rifleman’s stalking the sick and the lame,
Preacherman seeks the same, who’ll get there first is uncertain.
— Bob Dylan, Jokerman
To call Bob Dylan the greatest Christian poet of the 20th Century (and the 21st Century so far) is probably to damn him with faint praise. There just weren’t that many great Christian poets in the 20th Century. His Christian poetry, however, is more alive and vital than the work of other poets with greater reputations, like Auden and Eliot, who were nominally Christian but whose poetry is less concerned with expressing passionate faith than with charting the ennui of a faithless age.
And Dylan is not quite a poet in the modern literary sense — his words don’t live on the page, only in conjunction with the music that is inseparable, expressively, from those words, and mostly only in his own voice. Very little of his poetry survives in cover versions of his songs — although it can. (Hendrix knew how to sing Dylan, and Dylan’s Gospel songs come gloriously alive in the versions of them by black Gospel singers collected on the recent CD Gotta Serve Somebody — most other versions fail because the artists who attempt them don’t realize how deeply Dylan’s work is steeped in the blues, or have no great feel for the blues themselves.)
Dylan wrote two types of Christian songs, one type that fits more or
less directly in the Gospel tradition, however quirky his take on that
tradition might be, and one type that follows the image-collage strategy of
another American tradition, what might be thought of as Whitman by way
of the Beats.
Jokerman is of the second type. It’s a powerful evocation of the image of Jesus, or rather the images of Jesus, but it’s hardly a catalogue of familiar icons. It’s more like a passionate torrent of Dylan’s own various imaginings of Jesus, his own various attempts to comprehend him. The momentum of the work seems to be deeply personal — not an intellectual or aesthetic meditation but a desperate attempt to record a racing stream of thought in which one image of Jesus is instantly rejected as insufficient, replaced with a corollary or opposing image. The ultimate effect is a kind of lyrical portrait in the round — but a portrait in which the subject just won’t sit still.
Standing on the waters casting your bread
While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing.
Distant ships sailing into the mist,
You were born with a snake in both of your fists while a hurricane was blowing.
Freedom just around the corner for you
But with the truth so far off, what good will it do?
The first quatrain presents us with the image of an almost pagan figure — a terrible Jesus who stands in conflict with the ancient false gods, the iron gods. Dylan, too, was born with a snake in both of his fists and did not reject the terror of the predicament. (Just try to imagine Auden or Eliot with their hands full of venomous reptiles — they would certainly faint dead away, once they realized that the snakes weren’t metaphors.)
But the last couplet jolts us back to a different kind of complexity. Jesus, the lord of nature, the destroyer of false idols, is not free like the gods of old. His power is useless in the absence of truth within the hearts of men. This is the difference between Jesus and the other, older gods. His power and his freedom count for nothing if they can’t be shared, communicated, translated into the language of simple men. This fact defines his mission, his incarnation.
Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune,
Bird fly high by the light of the moon,
Oh, oh, oh, Jokerman.
Why “Jokerman”? Because the paradox of Jesus’s mission is like the paradox of a good joke — too surreal to be taken seriously by a slow-witted humanity. Many of the climaxes, the final unexpected twists, of Jesus’s parables are like the punchlines of jokes. Laughter is not an inappropriate response to them.
In Dylan’s recording of the song, listen to the yearning, the hopelessness in Dylan’s voice as he sings the last line of the chorus above. He is bemoaning the limits of language and music and human thought.
Well, the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy,
The law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers.
In the smoke of the twilight on a milk-white steed,
Michelangelo indeed could’ve carved out your features.
Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space,
Half asleep ‘neath the stars with a small dog licking your face.
In the first couplet above, the paradoxes are almost resolved. Jesus has come to fulfill the law and the scriptures, to reconcile them with the laws of nature. The message of Grace will find unsentimental expression in light of a harsh view of this world and its inexorable destructiveness. The issues, the stakes, won’t be fudged. (See the couplet at the beginning of this post.) In the next couplet above, Jesus is exalted, aestheticized — worshiped as he’s worshiped in art:
But Dylan can’t leave Jesus here — a figure carved in marble.
The last couplet above startles like a bolt of lightning — because
suddenly Dylan is back imagining Jesus as he walked the earth, sleeping
rough, on the road between two villages, as he must have done on so many
nights, getting just a little rest, and alone, probably grateful for
the affection of the little dog who undoubtedly showed up at the
disciples’ campfire looking for a handout. This is a good man,
the dog senses — he won’t kick me.
All the allegories and all the art fade away. The image of Jesus
won’t be fixed by any convention. It always returns to the dust
of the earth and to mystery. There are no “answers” in Jokerman —
just a question . . . who is this guy, who is this joker? It’s
the question Dylan is asking himself, and it’s unanswerable.
Lyrics copyright © 1983 Special Rider Music
Yeah.