#0058: Bob Dylan - Highway 61 Revisited [**]

Okay strap in folks, this is the money shot.

This is the highest ranked of all Bob Dylan's 35 studio albums.  Critics seem to agree it is the most important of his works with one author even claiming the Sixties "started" with this album.

So I'm gonna set the counters to zero.  I'm gonna pretend I've never heard of him.  I'm gonna _try_ as hard as I can to see something positive in it.  The odds are not good, but I'm still willing to put my money down.

1. Like a Rolling Stone

I know this song well and I have always loved it.  It's the one song that completely suits his ill equipped vocal style and the harmonica is used sparsely, which is a blessing to us all.  Cuz even in short bursts, it's fucking horrible.  Still, it says in the Bible that even a fool when he keepeth his silence is considered to be wise and keeping the lid on that mouth organ was a very wise move indeed.  

It's a wonderful starting point for the album too.  It's a driving rhythm with rich layers of simple parts supporting his voice at its weakest points.  

It's always been unusual for a longer song to be a hit and at 6:13, this was the one of the first aberrations of running time for a US top ten hit.  The really surprising thing is that I looked up at the display when I was starting to lose interest to find that there was less than a minute left.  So I feel good after the first track and having cracked the 5 minute barrier, hopes are high in spite of the overriding concern that it will be short lived.

2. Tombstone Blues

2:08.  I managed two minutes and eight seconds before my heart sank.  It's a quick song, snare on the up beat, rockabilly style.  His words are for the most part indecipherable and his voice has returned to that persistent whine created by a child unable to form words so urgently making whatever noise it can to get its point across.  It gnaws at my nerve endings like a razor to the spine but I was hanging in there.  

After the second chorus loop, I thought the instrumental section would deliver the reprieve I needed but my hopes were dashed.  The guitar "solo" we are treated to is as monotonous as his caterwauling as he drives on like a drowning comedian who has gone over time but is flailing in the water, gasping for a big laugh that will never come so he can leave the stage with some dignity.

This is the pattern of my torture.  Three times round the keel is my body drawn, my skin reattached and flayed once more.  Until finally I hear the words of the chorus reprise and blessed rescue from my horror is promised as it must mean now that this corrosive cocksweat will cease.

3. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry

Now why can't he play harp like that all the time?  It's like every mistake he made in track 2 has now been addressed.  The progression has a nice turnaround.  The rhythm has a rolling, easy feel to it that carries you along.  When the third verse comes in after the harp break, he shortens the vocal before the next repeat.  Has he done a Bill and Ted and popped off in a time machine to do a course?  Even his voice is bearable.

It's totally surreal how he can swing between these stark extremes of the most utterly abhorrent noise and...quite acceptable.  

Okay, 2-1 to Bob and everything to play for.

4. From A Buick 6

Well at least now I know where Stephen King got the idea for his book From A Buick 8.  That and the layers are the only positive notes I have on this though.

I found myself reaching out to the organ sound that is used throughout this piece to satisfy my need for notes but was disappointed.  It was too high in the mix for the simple padding it provided.  If they'd dropped that down and got somebody else to sing it would've been passable but #4 on the Rolling Stone list?  

At 3:19 it's the shortest track so far though so...there's that, at least.

5. Ballad Of A Thin Man

Something is happening here and I don't know what it is.  I've got a pretty good idea though.  A perfectly decent descending minor progression, given character by a wild-west-saloon of a honky tonk piano and a squealing but properly placed organ line is being crucified with each nail his pitifully inadequate vocal drives into the pleading hands of what could've been a great song.  

It really could have been a great song as demonstrated by the Grateful Dead, Golden Earring and Kula Shaker to name but three of the twenty artists who have made a better job of this.

6. Queen Jane Approximately

Once upon a time, in an effort to placate the Dylan fans who attended the pub quiz I used to run, I used this song in a music round themed on "Queens" for QE2's diamond jubilee.  

Good words in this and while the title is pretentious beyond the pale, the wise decision to recapture the sound of track 1 for the beginning of side 2 means that faith is restored.  Until the vocals come in that is.  

In fairness, they're not as piercing on this track and it is also one of the shorter tracks meaning a minimum 20% reduction in harmonica and weasel strangulation.

7. Highway 61 Revisited 

Entrance Of The Gladiators, you may already be aware is the title of that piece of music inextricably associated with the clowns at a circus.  You have only to hear that chromatically disjointed melody and the image of 12 middle aged men piled into a very small car becomes so vivid in your mind you can smell the greasepaint and the shaving foam.  

A comedian, possibly Eddie Izzard pointed out the ludicrous incongruity of the title with its application but in the case of this track, the tables are turned.  Surely the siren whistle was associated with the circus long before it was used on this recording?  It does make a mockery of the song somewhat.  

Some background reading reveals that somebody brought the whistle into the studio for other purposes but that it was suggested Dylan use it instead of his harmonica.  I can only assume that was some kind of practical joke made at his expense.  In the absence of confirmation it remains a lamentable low point in what one might reasonably expect to be the flagship song. 

For those who haven't heard it, it begins with a siren whistle, which reappears throughout.  That's what I get for trying to cut the poor guy a break: a clown's sound effect.  There's nothing else of note.  The background music just seems to be a jam the band thought up to try to disguise the fact he was yet again shoehorning syllables hamfistedly into lines on the same repeated note.

He just never learned how to fit his poetry into tunes did he?  Not being able to sing you can understand why but surely he could not have been so arrogant as to not recognise his limitations?  

Art is art.  Somebody, somewhere will like it.  Whether I can understand that or not is immaterial.  I think the reason this baleful racket irritates me so much is because it is so highly praised so I am obligated to listen to it and expected to agree.  

Heat a rapier until it's white hot and then shove it up a goose's butthole and you don't even get close to the hideous claxon of his voice.  It defies the definition of singing in the most fundamental of ways.  And the worst thing is that people have been emulating it because it has been so lauded they think it's okay to make these noises themselves.  It's truly heartbreaking.

8. Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues

A pattern is emerging.  The slower songs have more chord changes and this seems to guide him to attempt different notes.  On quicker songs, the chord endures, supported by a riff of some kind but he is unable to negotiate the scale and produce a melody.

The harmonica is not atrocious on this one.

9. Desolation Row

He's pronouncing row the wrong way.

The longest track on the album by some 4 minutes begins with the vocal delicately disguised by a solo acoustic guitar line.  

Then 2, 3 maybe 48 verses later something interesting happens.  The song ends.  Eleven minutes.  Occasionally the acoustic just drops out, presumably because the soloist has fallen asleep and needs a poke.

At one point my girlfriend held a knife to her eye and begged me to turn it off.

If you're a fan of Bob Dylan I hope you feel equally tortured by the length of this review.  Fair exchange is no robbery.

Final score 6-3 in my favour and there was chalk dust on Queen Jane Approximately.  So I'm converting that to a percentage and rounding down to yield the star rating shown.

What a waste of my time.  I actually feel sick with bitterness.

#0057: The Byrds - Mr Tambourine Man [**]

It's not because it's a Bob Dylan song.  The version of Mr Tambourine Man found here is marvellous.  It's the hit version I was referring to in Bringing It All Back Home.  Lovely harmonies and doesn't go on so long you skip the land of Boredom completely and arrive instantaneously in the Vale of Pass-Me-A-Scissors-That-I-May-Gouge-Out-Mine-Eyes.  That's what you need from a chilled out 60s pop hit.  Job's a good'un.

The mistake The Byrds made is to collect 11 songs of almost identical rhythm and key and put them on the same album, which, it turns out is aptly named because that's what we've got here: twelve versions of Mr Tambourine Man.

Just to show there's no bad blood I'll put the title track on a compilation but this soporific, directionless drone couldn't hold my attention if you had my balls in a lion's gob while I was listening to it. 

#0056: Bert Jansch - Bert Jansch [****]

This is one man and an acoustic guitar recorded in what sounds like the same take.  In the opening track Strolling Down The Highway there are moments where it feels like he could've benefited from recording the vocal separately. 

The guitar accompaniment is quite complex being a sort of country blues vamp and on occasion the vocal seems to buckle under the strain of coordination.  When it first started, my redneck radar kicked in but I think it was a false alarm.  His voice is slightly southern but not to the point of irritation.  It's calm.  The guitar too is more sophisticated than the picking patterns I've heard before in this style. 

Smokey River, the second track is instrumental and shows off his guitar technique but it's a very short piece and that speaks volumes about how this guy is serving the music rather his need to show off.  This is followed by a song much more toward the folk end of the spectrum.  Again, his voice is just present and comfortable.  There are no vocal gymnastics here and no over-stylised quirks and licks.  It's simple, which compliments his quite busy guitar accompaniment.

He has command of more than a few patterns tho so each song sounds a little different from the last even though they are in closely related if not the same keys.

I've never heard of Jansch before so I had no expectations but I have to say I'm very pleasantly surprised by this most mellow of recordings.  The first time I heard Mellow Morning by Spirit or Going To California by Led Zeppelin or Solid Air by John Martyn, I had this wave of happy calm come over me.  My first joint was still years away but I already knew what it was to be nicely crusted.   

Yeah.  We like this one.

I was just about to leave it there and then the last track started.  It's called Angie and it's a minor descending progression with a hook made out of a turn.  I've heard I don't know how many acoustic guitarists play this at various nights and never knew it was Burt Jansch.  I love it when that happens.

#0055: The Beatles - Rubber Soul [*****]

There has to be a list of Best or Most Iconic opening bars of an album somewhere.  If there isn't, we should start one and this should be on it.  Not at number one.  A Hard Day's Night would obviously be ahead of this but I do listen to those first few notes of Drive My Car and think, "Yeah, I'm alright for the next 35 minutes."  There are other albums that produce the same thought albeit with different running times.  You've got yours too.  You feel alright cuz you know there won't be a single track you feel like skipping over.  

In the old days, we'd just zone out if one of the songs was a bit shit.  We'd become more involved in the conversation or go and make a cup of tea, have a piss, smoke a fag - something to take up the time while the crap song finished cuz the album was on tape and you knew better than to try to fast forward.  You don't wanna break the continuity.  

I first discovered Rubber Soul in...I wanna say 1987.  It was the same year Sgt Pepper Knew My Father came out.  Remember that?  The 20th Anniversary of Sgt Pepper saw the collaboration of artists to recreate the album.  The original album I think was remastered on CD at the same time.  My brother bought it.  But when he got it home, even though the CD was printed with the Sgt Pepper title and the Sgt Pepper track list, the album on that CD was Rubber Soul.

I had no idea of course, I'd never heard either one.  My intention was to listen to the original album so that I would know whether Billy Bragg's version of She's Leaving Home was worth all the fuss they were making over it.  So I did.  Got right into it too.  My brother came into my room one day while I was singing along to Drive My Car and instead of berating me for nicking his CDs he went "yeah, great album Rubber Soul".  

"No, no", I corrected him loftily, "this is Sgt Pepper.  I can't believe you've got two copies of this CD and you don't know how it goes?"

My brother chose that moment to reveal his ruse.  

"Yeah.  I had to buy another copy cuz the first one had Rubber Soul on it."  

"Wha'?", I intelligently enquired.

I can't recount what he actually said next.  It was over 25 years ago and he does have a tendency to over egg the pudding with his yarns does my brother.

Apparently, he'd got the CD home, played it, realised the mistake and thought, "Fuck it", and then simply bought another one.  His thinking was, "I like Rubber Soul and you never know, it might be worth something in a few years."  

And indeed today, that CD is worth approximately fuck all.

I've no idea what a mis-burnt copy of Sgt Pepper is worth in mint condition but the one I found down the back of my brother's sofa in 1998 was barely passable as the thing that stopped all the loose change going down inside the frame.

Nowhere Man I think was the first song I ever knew off this album.  It was included in that Stars On 45 medley I mentioned on Hard Day's Night.  I wouldn't say that I was a loner through school but I certainly felt alone a lot of the time.  But I didn't realise that until I heard this song and I figured they were singing about me.  

Really?  You sure you weren't just an adolescent narcissist who thought _every_ song was about you?

I dunno.  Maybe.  Who cares - it was 30 odd years ago.  What matters is that I'm now a middle aged narcissist who _knows_ every song is about me.

Clearly, I can't write a bit about every song or we'd be here all day so I'll just mention two more and if I skipped your particular favourite then please be assured that I love it only marginally less than you do.

Girl - who would've thought of recording a man taking a breath in harshly over his teeth?  It expresses the mixed feelings of the song with unbeatable brevity.  

And then there's Michelle.

Michelle captures the story of a man falling in love across a language barrier and has so much character.  Its simplicity elegantly camouflages its musical complexity.  The word genius is often used with regards the Beatles but in my view this tune is one of the cases it is truly warranted.

I wouldn't put it at #5 of my all time list as Rolling Stone did but still a wonderful album that I love very much.

#0054: BB King - Live At The Regal [***]

I heard a story about a guitarist I know, though I haven't seen him for a few years.  This guy was (and as far as I know still is) a fuckoff guitarist.  Satriani, Vai, Page, Slash, Blackmore and Howe - he could play it all.  

Let's call him Jeff.  

Some fellow muso (Dave) was having a piss and a moan about Jeff having said in a rehearsal at some point in the past that during his solo, the rest of the band should sit back and come down in volume so that his notes could be heard.  

"You're the backing band", he said.  

Dave was extremely put out at the arrogance of this statement.   If Jeff had been talking about the whole song then Dave would have had a point.  As it was, Jeff was just talking sense to a band that weren't listening to each other; a band that weren't serving the song.  You need to be able to hear the solo prominently over the rest of the instruments in the same way you need to hear the words.  If the rest of the band are playing too freely it gets messy fast.  

From the top of this album you can hear that what the producers most want you listening to is the lead guitar.  It stands head and shoulders above all other voices - and with good reason.  It's full, rich and rounded.  That may be just a matter of hardware.  Why is such a fuss made of the player?  Maybe he came up with the combination of whatever it is - amp, pickups, compression and what-have-you.  

Either way, you listen to his choice of notes and the tiny little details of expression intently poured into them and you know you're in the presence of greatness.

That said, these are all 12 bar blues songs and I couldn't tell you which was which.  It's great.  The arrangements are tight and that vibrant audience noise captures the atmosphere in its tried and tested way, giving us a taste of the zeitgeist.  But I get bored after a few tracks.   

There's a flourish of 4 songs at the end of the album that gave me the variety I had been craving but it was too little too late.  Worry Worry is a slower blues number with a storming instrumental middle section and if I was doing a mix tape...

That's an idea.  I might do a ".pd.'s 1001 - best of the xxxties" series of playlists.  Let me know if that's something you'd be interested in.

But yeah, Worry Worry would go on that compilation for sure.  Outstanding track.

#0053: John Coltrane - A Love Supreme [****]

This is a post-bop, modal jazz album.  You either get it or you don't.  There will be many among you who would be tortured by this 33 minutes of saxophone, piano, bass and drums.  If it transpires that those people are the same ones that find Bob Dylan soothing and insightful then I will not be surprised.  This is about as far in the other direction as it gets.  

There are 10s of notes jockeying for position at the forefront of your attention at every instant.  It spirals and darts and weaves and interweaves.  It drops away suddenly into a drum or a bass solo and returns thrashing like a crocodile in a vat of acid.  

For the most part, however, it is not my bag.  It's too vague and repetitive for my taste and the so-called 'Trane is not inspirational to me, an aspirational saxophonist.  Well, that's not strictly true.  The opening of part 2 of this 4 part concept (Resolution) has a lovely main melody (or "head" as the jazzers call it) and as he plays it, I can hear purity, texture and intonation that I would sell a kidney to have.  It is only when he goes into one that he loses me with that esoteric squawking and the seemingly random interval jumping bringing me to picture a pissed vampire going round a crazy golf course.  At noon.

Haven't mentioned the piano player yet though have I?  Holy Mother Of Fuck.  His name is McCoy Tyner and I have never heard anybody as fast or as precise.  That's not much of a yardstick, I realise but these 4 stars are given mainly because I will be returning to this album mostly just to listen to his playing.  It is very rare that I listen to a piano player and with jaw already dropped have to shout at the stereo to fuck off.  

I used to have a running joke with my friends that when I was really impressed with somebody I would say, "if I ever meet him I'm gonna smack him in the face".

McCoy Tyner is still alive, y'know.  He might still have time to make .pd.'s shiner list.

#0052: The Beach Boys - Today! [***]

Remember how flinging flanging ridonculous the Bee Gees looked and sounded in 1978?  I poured scorn on that disco crap from the ivory tower I'd painstakingly built over my 9 year lifespan.  Today, Night Fever and Stayin Alive are among my favourites.  Things change us and in turn change the way we see things.  

The Bee Gees weren't doing anything new though it seems.  They were just copying the Beach Boys and the Beach Boys may well have nicked their falsetto style from the soul singers.  I'm not in this for the history.  All I'm saying is that I thought they both sounded stupid when I first heard them.

I've never been a big fan of the Beach Boys but over the years I've come to want to listen more closely to what Brian Wilson achieved having heard about him through friends who were a lot more interested.

This album kinda reminds me of the Phil Spector Christmas album a while back.  Its fat production and reverb-drenched drums put me particularly in mind of Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer.  The other Christmas connection I get is that feeling I described before; of hearing what is peaceful and/or happy music but being nevertheless over-swept by some underlying melancholy.  

If you listen to the words, these tales are dripping with sadness.  From the vexatious uncertainty of When I Grow Up To Be A Man to the repentant self-castigation of She Knows Me So Well these songs ooze regret, jealousy, confusion and despair - the main food groups of rock and roll.

Now, you can't listen to a Beach Boys album without talking about the harmonies.  This is apparently their 8th album and I don't know what the previous 7 sounded like but the chords the 3 and 4 voice parts form throughout are nothing like anything I've heard from the sample group to date.  Daringly dissonant on occasion, I can only marvel at what was either a profoundly able inner ear or an insatiable appetite for trial and error.

In other news, directly before making this album Brian Wilson took up smoking pot.

Towards the end of the album, the levee of levity breaks and the waters of that thinly shrouded sadness pour through.  Even the harmonies drop away by the very last track, written by Brian Wilson's brother Dennis.  Interestingly, all the tracks on side 2 were written by Brian Wilson except In The Back Of My Mind (Dennis), whereas the first side was all collaborative.  Can it then be assumed that the influence of Mike Love on side 1 is what stopped this from being a giant, wallowing miseryfest?    

I vowed I would not give half stars but I really think - for the harmonies alone - this is worth more than 3.  But I don't think it's good enough for 4.  I don't think I'll come back to it that often.  I've gone back and forth on this and here's why I've stuck with 3.  

The very last track isn't a song.  It's a recording of them sitting around chatting and eating.  It's...self indulgent wank.  Maybe some fans would be entertained by hearing the band talking about being on tour, how many mistakes they made, blah blah.  It does lighten the mood so that shows some self awareness that the order of these songs is taking the listener on a downer.  

But I expected more.  

This is a band that released FOUR albums the previous year, a band that after this offering would release two more albums in the same year.  I think that's a prolific enough output that if they needed filler material they could just have written another song instead of leaving the tape running while they jerk each other off over french fries.  Is that asking too much?

#0051: Otis Redding - Otis Blue (Otis Redding Sings Soul) [*****]

I can't tell you what a relief it is to be starting the new year with an album I not only enjoyed but actually struck home to me very deeply.  That happens less frequently the older you get.  Each experience desensitises you to the next until finally you die, bored shitless, having seen it all before.  Maybe that's what ultimately kills us; there's nothing good on telly.

I've been aware of Otis Redding for many, many years but have never gone looking for more than the one song I knew.

When I was a teenager, I loved a girl.  You'll read that more and more as we approach the music of my adolescence and beyond.  But I did.  As I loved many girls.  Well, inasmuch as I became sufficiently fixated on them to write a song of desperate longing, hope and ultimately rejection and vilification.  Ah the pubescence of an infatuation junky.  I used to fall in and out of love so quickly you could hear a faint humming as I passed.  Sad perhaps, but at least I never got chlamydia.

In spite of my affliction, I did manage to build up genuine, honourable feelings for this girl and we were very close.  One night, she put on I've Been Loving You a Little Too Long, and we danced to it in her living room.  Then we had a cup of tea and I went home.  

Yeah, maybe I should have kissed her.  

But looking back at who I was, I don't think it would've ended well.  So I'm content to have the memory of a beautiful evening rather than the memory of a beautiful evening that I ruined by trying to start a relationship I wasn't capable of having.

So now that I've told you that story, you can understand there is a certain bias toward this particular singer for me and perhaps unconsciously my earlier attachment to Sam Cooke is partly explained by the similarities between their two voices.  Indeed, two of Cooke's songs are present on this collection.  

A Change Is Gonna Come isn't indistinguishable from Cooke's version.  If I remember rightly, the original is mostly accompanied by piano but their voices are very similar and I don't believe it would've been appropriate at the time to have made changes that would have detracted from the central message of the song.  It is a rare circumstance when the political objectives of the song are more important than how it is played but this is certainly one instance.  

Wonderful World is very different from the version that perhaps most people associate with Cooke's easy, laid back rendition.  This is much more in the soul vein with stabbing horns and harder corners.

My Girl,  a song made famous by the Temptations and dosed up on saccharin even further by the schmaltzy film of the same name is given a treatment here that actually lets you enjoy the simple contentment of the song, rather than spending the whole time looking for somebody to hold your hair.  

Up until I heard this album I had not realised Respect was originally a song for a man.  From the lyrics in this version, it seems to be a song about an unreasonable woman, who isn't doing her part in a time when the man worked and the woman stayed home.   Must've been wonderful for the hardcore feminist lobby when Aretha turned it round on the chauvinist phalanx and made it an anthem for women ever since.  

I think it would've have tasted sweeter if a woman had written it from scratch, mind you.  There is a part of me that tends to think of this as Adam being stabbed with a knife made from his own rib.  But that in itself is a cautionary tale to the established axiom, "Don't shit where you eat."

I could bang on about this album for hours (and I may already have) and talk about the addictive party feel of Shake, the exhausted, noble misery of Old Man Trouble and the version of Satisfaction so good that Ronnie Wood says the Stones now emulate it themselves. 

It's just superb and I'm gonna listen to it again.  Right now.