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http://www.rollingstone.com/artists/bobdylan/articles/story/26445175/dylan_records_surprise_modern_times_followup
Expectations rising…no mention of tutus here…bring it, Bob.
Drive-by Dept.
Listening Party
by Ben Greenman, The New Yorker
March 9, 2009Jimmy Fallon Lakeside Lounge, on Avenue B, is known for many things: close quarters, cheap drinks, a photo booth, but most of all for its jukebox, which is full of raw R. & B., country, and early rock and roll. Last Monday afternoon, a short man in his sixties wearing oversized sunglasses and a black fedora cocked his ear toward the speaker overhead. “Joe Turner,” he said. “Big Joe.”
The song was “Honey Hush,” a No. 1 R. & B. hit in 1953 for the Kansas City blues shouter. The man was Van Morrison, the Irish singer and songwriter, who was in town to play a pair of shows that week at the WaMu Theatre, at Madison Square Garden. The concerts were recitals of an old record, the 1968 album “Astral Weeks.” But Morrison wanted to talk about even older records. “There was a place in Belfast called Atlantic Records,” he said, his accent strong, his speaking voice lighter than his singing voice. “They imported the stuff from here, actually: jazz records and blues records. I’d go with my father from when I was three.”
Joe Turner had stopped coming out of the jukebox. Now it was the founding fathers of rock and roll, in quick succession: Jerry Lee Lewis singing “Sixty Minute Man,” Chuck Berry with “Tulane,” Bo Diddley’s “Dearest Darling,” Little Richard on “Rip It Up.” Morrison acknowledged each song with a nod. He looked slimmer than he has in the past, and he had long red hair of a hue reminiscent of Sumner Redstone. He sipped tea from a mug, and his press agent brought him a bagel with tuna salad. “The first Little Richard song I heard was ‘Tutti Frutti,’ ” he said. “No, it was the one from the movie ‘The Girl Can’t Help It.’ Little Richard was doing rhythm and blues, but with horns,” Morrison went on. “It was different than Elvis Presley, and so I preferred it. Why would you like Elvis if you had the real stuff? I also preferred Carl Perkins and Gene Vincent. Vincent was different. He was rock and roll, dangerous.”
Morrison mentioned Wynonie Harris, the ribald singer of the late forties and early fifties known as Mr. Blues: “I heard one of his on the radio, on a daytime show. Someone probably played it by accident.” He held forth on Leadbelly: “He did everything from children’s songs to cowboy songs to show tunes.” He talked about the blind harpist Sonny Terry (the first record he ever bought was one of Terry’s), the powerhouse vocalist Bobby Bland, and the skiffle pioneer Lonnie Donegan. When someone grouped Donegan with other practitioners of “pre-Beatles rock and roll,” Morrison pulled up short.
“That’s a cliché,” he said, adjusting his sunglasses. “I don’t think ‘pre-Beatles’ means anything, because there was stuff before them. Over here, you have a different slant. You measure things in terms of the Beatles. We don’t think music started there. Rolling Stone magazine does, because it’s their mythology. The Beatles were peripheral. If you had more knowledge about music, it didn’t really mean anything. To me, it was meaningless.”
Behind Morrison, the press agent was miming a “cut” signal, slicing the air in front of his throat with his hand. He was worried about rush-hour traffic—more specifically, about asking Morrison to sit in the car in rush-hour traffic. “I’m good for more,” Morrison told him, and additional bills were fed into the jukebox. Fats Domino, the subject of Morrison’s highest-charting single, “Domino,” came on with “Careless Love,” his trademark rolling piano already in place in 1951. “I never played piano myself,” Morrison said. “There was a small organ that I used to play in the early sixties, but I don’t think we could afford a piano.”
Morrison—now forty years and nearly forty albums into a solo career—said that he rarely goes to see young bands. “I’ve seen all the people I wanted to see,” he said. “Ray Charles loads of times, James Brown lots of times, Mose Allison, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf. Why do I need to keep finding new bands when I have the originals?”
On Monday night, Morrison will be the musical guest for the première of Jimmy Fallon’s late-night TV program. He had not previously heard of Fallon, whose inexperience as a talk-show host he found appealing. “I wouldn’t think he would be so in-a-box,” Morrison said. The music wound down. Sam Cooke sang “Mean Old World.” Morrison stood and went out past the jukebox. ♦
“The next time you say ‘forever’ I will punch you in your face,” Neko Case vows on “Middle Cyclone,” an album filled with cataclysmic love songs. It’s Ms. Case’s sixth studio album on her own, in a career that also includes her on-and-off membership in the New Pornographers. In her latest songs nothing is constant: not romance, not life, not memory, not even the rhythm or the shape of a melody. Putting her big, torchy voice behind larger-than-life imagery, she’s fearless through every transformation, merging herself with storms — one song is titled “This Tornado Loves You” — and seeing herself in animals like a killer whale and a vulture. She’s as dangerous as she is devoted.
“I’m a man-man-man, man-man-man-eater,” she sings in the poppy refrain of “People Got a Lotta Nerve,” adding, “But still you’re surprised when I eat you.” The album’s most forthright song declares, “I’m an Animal,” with marchlike drums and ringing electric guitars as she insists, “My courage is roaring like the sound of the sun.”
On the surface Ms. Case’s songs qualify as alt-country or Americana. The production often harks back to 1960s and ’70s rock, backing her concise melody lines with finger-picked acoustic guitars or twang and reverb. But surreal, unexpected sounds — echoes, voices, noise — well up within those arrangements. Her version of Harry Nilsson’s whimsically fatalistic “Don’t Forget Me” becomes a lofty expanse of choral voices and multiple pianos.
Her own songs melt down structures. Instead of fixed verses or choruses there are two-chord patterns that run as long as Ms. Case wants, or as short; they might add or subtract a beat, suddenly switch chords or support an entirely new tune in mid-song. Subliminally that rhapsodic approach keeps the songs off balance and suspenseful, ready for every possibility of disaster or exaltation. JON PARELES, NY TIMES
This Note’s Not For You (www.newyorker.com)
Neil Young was mad at Warner Bros./Reprise for pulling his videos from YouTube, but he isn’t mad anymore. In a statement released over the weekend, he appeared to reverse his earlier position, which seemed to suggest that Warner Bros. was being greedy when it demanded payment for all YouTube videos. The new statement was far more conciliatory and corporate-friendly:
It is time for industry-wide standards of artist’s compensation on the web. Reprise and Warner Bros artists deserve what artists from other labels are getting. Let the people decide what constitutes success. Warner Bros and Reprise are looking for a level playing field. Until they get one, these problems may not go away. That is the essence of the issue between Warner Bros Reprise and You Tube.
Young’s reversal seemed to throw everyone, even the people over at the Thrasher’s Wheat fan site, who have now spent days deciphering Young’s position. Is he mad at the record label, is he mad at YouTube, or is he mad at everyone?
A fun read!
Re: Glasses – – right there with ya, sister! Got about 5 pr of cheaters lying around the house.
Re: Bad Dream – – face the demon and make it flee.
Rock on, miss p. Gotta love the Bastards. I even think tony may be coming around to them (“winking emoticon inserted here”).
http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/149030-heartless-bastards-the-mountain
A fair review, with some valid points.
