Sunday, July 10, 2016

Discography - Week 12

We're now three months into our Discography discussion and still going strong.  There are some inspired choices this week, but I'm giving special mention to Gary Beatrice for this week's selection but also for following through on his offer to provide the top 50, actually 52, Bob Dylan songs.  With his kind permission I'm also going to carve this off as a separate blog post with links to every song.

Borrowing from Dave Kelley's (one of the Daves I know) selection, I'm declaring the unofficial theme this week to be Heavenly Moments.

Oh, and nice choice Miranda and Nate.  I love the Kids in the Hall.  Last year when Cyndi and I took kids to Jordan we were sitting in the Frankfurt Airport suffering through the rambling stories of one of those most annoying students of all time.  I called up a video of Gavin talking about this kid he knew and leaned over to share it with Cyndi on the sly; I think it broke her, and the rest of the trip in the midst of tortuously long stories we would sneak glances at each other, tilt our heads, and try and give our best Gavin looks.  Somehow, they continue to let us lead students overseas.


Gary Beatrice

Bob Dylan, Tangled Up In Blue


My favorite Bob Dylan song remains Tangled Up In Blue, and oddly enough considering his catalogue that's pretty much been the case for 35 years. I could not find the original studio version on You Tube, but you've probably all heard it. This is an excellent acoustic version with several different verses off of his highly recommended Biograph collection. My second favorite song is Visions of Johanna. After those two I have a tough time ranking his songs so I've decided to order these chronologically. In part I've organized it this way because several of you were looking for places to jump into his music, but mostly I've done it this way to make it easier on myself to identify the songs and comment on them where appropriate.

This helped me make a couple observations about Dylan's music and my tastes.

1) Although I consider Dylan the best songwriter of my lifetime, my favorites of his are based upon the sound of the songs more than the lyrics. This is most apparent by the nearly complete absence of his folk and protest music from my list. Blowing In the Wind, Times They Are Changing, A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, are all clearly among his best songs, but I just don't listen to them because I don't find them musical enough.

2) Despite the fact that he had numerous great albums, a boatload of his best songs were never on traditional albums, but were singles, b-sides or songs never released outside of compilations. I don't think this is me choosing obscurities, I think it is more the fickle nature of Bob Dylan.

3) Dylan's comeback starting with 1997's Time Out Of Mind and continuing to a lesser extent through 2016, was almost unbelievable, especially in view of the garbage he released for more than a decade before that.

So:

From Biograph (the best greatest hits collection I've heard by the way, combining three disks of must haves, alternate takes, unreleased classics all organized thematically- a great jumping in set): Percy's Song, my only folk selection,

From Bringing It All Back Home: It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) and Maggie's Farm. BABH is considered by most critics to be one of his bests but I see it more as a transition album that doesn't flow the way his next several do. Bleeding captures the anger and pointedness of his protest music without sounding dated, and Maggie is a protest song that rocks and shows a sense of humor. The best version of Maggie is from an otherwise mediocre live album, Hard Rain.

From Highway 61: Like A Rolling Stone; Desperation Row; Highway 61 Revisited; It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry, Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues. A must own album, rational minds could favor the other four songs that I didn't select. Each song finds Dylan at a creative peak lyrically (I bet there are nearly a dozen phrases from this album that are now common to people who have no clue who Dylan is) and musically, with styles that range all over the roots map. The title track features a police whistle which somehow works.

Singles (can be found on Biograph and elsewhere: Positively Fourth Street, Can You Please Crawl Out My Window. Bob decided these songs didn't fit on 61 or Blonde. Maybe they don't, but either would have served as the best song in the entire catalog of several artists I love.

Blonde On Blonde: Visions of Johnanna, Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again. Blonde is also essential rock music, every bit as creative but a bit less manic than 61, perhaps because it was recorded with some brilliant Nashville session musicians.

The Basement Tapes: Crash On The Levee, You Ain't Goin' Nowhere, Please Mrs. Henry, Clothes Line Saga. Basement was recorded in secret with The Band and not released until the mid seventies (and then released a couple years ago as a six disk set as part of the Bootleg series). Each of these songs find Dylan and The Band having the time of their life playing dozens of old time instruments and styles on songs that are mostly warm and funny but sometimes apocalyptic (Levee). Basement was the polar opposite of the Sgt. Pepper era music released at the time and miles better. You can make a compelling argument that it influenced more alternative country music than anything released since it.

John Wesley Harding: I Dreamed I Saw St. Augestine, All Along the Watchtower. His most underrated album, JWH sounds similar but a bit more polished than Blonde with a series of shorter straight forward songs, several with strong biblical themes. Again, not much like late sixties radio.

Nashville Skyline: Girl From The North Country. A lot of critics praise this straight country album but I find it somewhat slight. I love this duet with Johnny Cash, however, and their voices work great together.

Self Portrait: Minstrel Boy (The Bootleg Series re-release). Minstrel Boy is, of all things, a vocal track with the Band and their voices somehow sound great in this context.

Greatest Hits Volume 2: Quinn The Eskimo. Basement tapes classics beginning to leak out. Again great but unorthodox Dylan/Band vocals

New Morning: Went to See the Gypsy, Day of the Locusts. At the time this was considered his first comeback album, he hadn't sold much since Blonde and he hadn't had much critical praise since Harding, but I see this as a decent album that happens to feature a couple great forgotten songs about Elvis and about Dylan's refusal to accept an honorary degree.

Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid: Knocking on Heavens Door. I'm not sure if this his most covered song, and there are some good versions out there including Warren Zevon's. But nobody's surpassed the original.

Blood On The Tracks: Tangled Up In Blue; Shelter From The Storm; If You See Her, Say Hello, Idiot Wind, Buckets of Rain. Blood was the great comeback, and for my money it is his best album, too. These are some of the most heart wrenching break-up songs ever put to music, all exquisitely recorded. As with Highway 61, you can prefer the other tracks on this set and I'd have no argument.

Desire: Isis (the live track from Biograph is even better). One of Bob's long standing songwriting technique is to take a historic or biblical character or image and turn it into his own historic fiction and he returns to that with pretty good effect on Desire.

Street Legal: Changing of the Guards. I think this was an unfairly ignored album. I suspect listeners were put off by the strong gospel style background vocals which foresaw

The Christian Era Bob Dylan

Dylan had obviously read the bible but I sure didn't see a literal interpretation of it coming. Here's the weird thing. The three albums, Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love, were mostly lousy, even though they sometimes featured some crack musicians. But somehow a number of unquestionably great songs emerged from this bizarre phase. Check out Every Grain of Sand, Groom Still Waiting At The Alter (which, in classic Bob style, didn't qualify for inclusion among these wretched albums until later pressings), Heart of Mine, I Believe in You, Solid Rock.

Infidels: Jokerman, Neighborhood Bully. These are two exceptional songs from one of the very few good albums he released between 1976's Desire and 1997's Time Out Of Mind. And it isn't a great album, it's just enjoyable and features these tracks which I consider to be among his best.

Oh Mercy: Everything Is Broken. Somehow in the midst of two lost decades Dylan recorded a great rock tune.

Lost track: Series of Dreams (can be found on Bootleg 8). Somehow in the midst of two lost decades Dylan recorded an even better rock song. And he decided not to release it.

Time Out of Mind: Not Dark Yet, Trying to Get to Heaven, Standing In The Doorway, Million Miles.
Love & Theft: High Water (For Charley Patton), Summer Days, Mississippi
Modern Times: Thunder on the Mountain, Working Man's Blues #2
Tempest: Pay In Blood, Roll On John, Duquesne Whistle, Tempest

And then he found his muse. Legendary musicians tend to get undue praise even when releasing adequate material. This is decidedly not the case with Dylan's return to prominence. The best of his turn of the century original material is every bit as compelling as the music he released when he was in his twenties, and if anything it benefits from his age, wisdom, and awareness of his own mortality.

There you go. I think that's 52 songs (with only one link).


Dave Wallace


Madonna's propulsive female empowerment anthem.  I know Madonna is divisive, but I think that she's made some fantastic music over the years.  Both of her greatest hits CDs are essential in my opinion, and this is my favorite thing that she's done.  Great music, great message!


Miranda Tavares and Nate Bell

Nate and Miranda, joint post due to laziness and exhaustion

The Kids in the Hall, TheDaves I Know

No, The Kids in the Hall aren't musicians, exactly, but they are artists and they are talented and we have been saving this one for a busy week when we need a quick post and we do know an awful lot of Daves. Some of our favorites are reading this right now. It's funny, it's weird, but it's also surprisingly good, musically. I mean, you known, considering. That drum beat is pretty infectious. We dare you to listen to this song without getting it stuck in your head for 5 hours.  You can't do it. It's just impossible.  Also, as you watch the video, enjoy the finest in 80's fashions and haircuts!  An added bonus! You're welcome.


Dave Mills

Lissie, Daughters

As the father of two daughters, this song caught my eye (ear?) when it was released back in February. It's an energizing anthem of women's empowerment from an artist who's got the pipes to really belt it out. Lissie's voice is a bit Stevie Nicks, a bit Brandi Carlisle, with perhaps a bit of Lana Del Rey in the mix as well. And she uses that range to full effect on this track. I hadn't thought to contribute this track to the discography, though, until last night, when my daughters and I went to Lissie's concert at Battery Park here in Burlington -- free music on the lakeshore is always a good way to spend a summer Thursday evening. She didn't have her full band, only a guy on electric guitar to accompany her while she played the acoustic and sang. So it was a rather stripped-down set of songs which really let her vocal talent shine. As she introduced "Daughters," she explained that she wrote it as an homage to the women who led the peace effort in Liberia, as chronicled in the documentary film, "Pray the Devil Back to Hell." With that background info, I can appreciate the lyrics even more.


Dave Kelley

Patty Griffin, Heavenly Day

My choice this week is Heavenly Day by Patty Griffin. I value happiness and peace of mind over all other things.  Money, success, fame, talent, sex, popularity are all worthless unless they give you happiness and peace of mind. 


Here Griffin uses her tremendous voice to sing a simple and beautiful song about a perfect day.  The fact that she has said the song is about a peaceful afternoon in the back yard with her beloved dog after coming home from a your only makes it more special to my canine loving soul. 


Gary Scudder

Adhan

OK, this week I've clearly gone rogue and am I'm really going to stretch the boundaries of the definition of a song.  Ramadan ended this week and it put me in mind of the Islamic call to prayer, which is, in a traditional setting, sung five times a day by the muezzin from the minaret of a mosque.  I'm one of the few westerners who immediately fell in love with the call to prayer, although at the beginning it may have just been because it seemed the very definition of an exotic world my mind had manufactured.  A lot of first time visitors to the Islamic world are quite horrified to be startled out of a sound sleep by hearing the Adhan blaring out at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning from the mosque across the street.  Not me.  The first place I ever went overseas was Dubai in the United Arab Emirates so the Adhan became synonymous with foreign travel for me.  On my early trips I would often come back to Vermont and download a program onto my office computer that would automatically play the call to prayer through my speakers, which proved just about as popular with Champlain College security as you might expect when the Adhan broke out around 10:30 every night during the last prayer (and seemingly no one was in the building).  I chose this particular version because I like it, but also because it doesn't have the words printed on the screen, which allows you to just listen to the eerily beautiful sound and replicate my initial experience.  More importantly, in this context, I want to talk not about the Adhan as a religious message, but rather as an aesthetic experience.

It sparks any number of memories, but I'll briefly share three.  First off, the popular perception is that one and a half billion Muslims all stop five times a day to pray in unison, which is a romantic (or maybe frightening, depending upon your worldview) image, but of course it never happens that way, partially because every country's call to prayer is dependent upon the amount of daylight in that particular country.  More importantly, unless you live a more simple existence in a small village in the mountains of Morocco not all Muslims actually pray five times a day.  There's nothing like being in a remarkably posh mall in someplace like Abu Dhabi and hearing the call to prayer blasting out of the mall speakers, and seeing the vast majority of Muslims ignoring it because they're busy shopping.  Secondly, I was in Cairo, Egypt one time and my passport went missing, which left me with several days to kill while I waited to get it replaced (it's not as horrifying as it sounds, although I did end up offering to bribe almost everyone in the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior).  One afternoon I was just walking into a tiny little store to get some water when the muezzin called out the midday prayer.  The older shop owner, wearing a traditional dishdash, just rolled out his prayer rug in the middle of the floor and began to pray.  The store was so small it essentially meant that all business had stopped, so I just stood nearby and quietly read potato chip bags and tried to not look unhappy (because I certainly wasn't because I'd had a lot of experiences like that).  Suddenly his son, wearing western jeans and a t-shirt and standing in the even tinier back storage section, saw me standing there and clearly saw a potential sale disappearing.  He tried to get by his father as delicately as he could, but he essentially stepped over him, and I quickly had my water and potato chips.  The thing was that I knew exactly what each of them was thinking: the son was thinking, "this is exactly why this shop is so crappy," and the father was thinking, "oh, you are so clearly going to hell."  Classic generational clash.  Thirdly, as the excellent Cyndi Brandenburg can attest, Jordan is my favorite overseas location, and it was a great pleasure to share it with her last spring.  However, when I first visited there over a decade ago I wasn't that impressed, at least initially.  It just seemed scrubby and rock-strewn and even the desert was the not the romantic Lawrence of Arabia style desert of mountains of sand dunes (that just starts to begin in southern Jordan and I was in the north).  I remember very clearly thinking, "Who the fuck would ever fight over this?"  However, within a couple days I found myself at Mukawir, which is a hilltop featuring some ancient Roman ruins; it was where Salome danced and John the Baptist had his head chopped off.  It was getting dark, and you could look out to the west over the Dead Sea and see the lights of Jerusalem just starting to twinkle.  And then in the gloaming the Adhan came filtering out of the darkness from a mosque on a nearby hill, and then a couple seconds later it was joined by another version of the Adhan from another mosque on another hill (each would have had their own muezzin, and they never get it synced).  At that moment I just got it, and I can remember breaking down.

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