It is worth a short column to celebrate Gerry Rafferty's contribution to pop music. The Scottish singer/songwriter died after a long bout with alcoholism yesterday at the age of of 63. If it hadn't been for the perpetual presence of two songs on oldies radio for the past 30 years, Rafferty may have vanished without much notice.
But those two songs!
A solo effort, "Baker Street" (from 1978's five million selling LP City To City), is a soft rock classic, blending an unforgettable sax groove with a searing guitar solo and the pitch-perfect vocal of Rafferty.
The crowning achievement, though, is the continuing jukebox wonder of "Stuck In The Middle With You." Written with partner Joe Egan and recorded under the group name Stealers Wheel, the tune topped the US and UK charts in 1972. Produced by legendary songwriters Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller, 'Stuck In The Middle" is an irresistible three and a half minutes of pop heaven. Anchored by Rafferty's emotional lead slyly sneering at the industry that is ironically making him money, the song is powered by a funky bass line and George Harrison-like slide guitar.
Turn it up. Pick a partner. Or just dance along in your chair. It's great stuff.
Jay Farrar & Ben Gibbard "Absolutely Sweet Marie" Original Dylan version found on Blonde On Blonde (1966)
Last year, a seemingly odd pairing hit the road, promoting a soundtrack that the duo had written for a documentary about - of all things - the time Beat novelist Jack Kerouac spent in Big Sur, California. The music Jay Farrar and Ben Gibbard created for One Fast Move or I'm Gone drew varied reactions. But the tour that the two undertook across the US garnered raves.
Farrar, the St. Louis based musician who became a favorite on the alt-country scene with the groups Uncle Tupelo and Son Volt, is a talented guitarist and harmonica player with a distinct sounding voice. Gibbard, front man for indie darlings Death Cab For Cutie, is an adventurous vocalist and guitarist from Washington state.
As the set list solidified, Farrar & Gibbard took to encoring with "Absolutely Sweet Marie." The original, recorded by Dylan in a Nashville studio, couldn't have sounded further from Opryville with its jaunty organ reflecting the swinging '60s. In this cover, performed at Los Angeles' El Rey Theatre on 23 October 2009, the arrangement is turned inwards, with pedal steel prominent and a great harp solo by Farrar. The lyric is in Farrar's wheelhouse, a Neil Youngish vocal take complimented nicely by Gibbard's harmony.
===================================== Dylan never performed "Absolutely Sweet Marie" live until the end of the 1980s, and only sporadically pulls it out of his tour bag now. In a 1991 interview, Dylan talked specifically about the phrase "yellow railroad" that appears in the last verse of the song:
That's about as complete as you can be. Every single letter in that line. It's all true. On a literal and on an escapist level.... Getting back to the yellow railroad, that could be from looking someplace. Being a performer, you travel the world. You're not just looking out of the same window everyday. You're not just walking down the same old street. So you must make yourself observe whatever. But most of the time it hits you. You don't have to observe. It hits you. Like, "yellow railroad" could have been a blinding day when the sun was so bright on a railroad someplace and it stayed on my mind.... These aren't contrived images. These are images which are just in there and have got to come out.
Leon Russell "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" Original Dylan version found on The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963)
A native Oklahoman, Claude Russell Bridges suddenly found himself an in-demand studio musician in California in the mid-1960s. He was part of the famous "Wall of Sound" on some Phil Spector records and played on songs by artists as diverse as The Byrds, Bobby "Boris" Pickett and Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass.
By 1967, the man now billing himself as Leon Russell had a studio built for himself in the Sooner State. With partner Marc Benno, he cut his first solo album, Look Inside The Asylum Choir.
Russell's major breakthrough was his production (with collaborator Denny Cordell) of Joe Cocker!, released in 1969. The album was a hit and contained two Russell-penned compositions, "Hello, Little Friend" and a song that was to become a signature for Cocker: "Delta Lady." A highly successful - and very raucous - tour followed, resulting in the double live LP Mad Dogs & Englishmen.
In late 1970, Russell's second album, released on Shelter Records, was cut in the studio. Leon Russell and the Shelter People remains a great effort worthy of any record collection. Along with a group of stellar originals, Russell tried his hand at a number of Bob Dylan selections during the Shelter People sessions: "It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry" (which made the cut), "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue," "Love Minus Zero/No Limit" and "She Belongs To Me" (which all didn't).
And one notable other Dylan gem: "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall," the chilling and daunting number that electrified the folk community upon its introduction back in 1962. I still love the way that Russell put his stamp on this cover. His rolling New Orleans-style piano is perfectly accented by the deft slide guitar of Jesse Ed Davis and the ace drumming of Jim Keltner. The vocal is quintessentially Midwestern American - just like the original - except the geographic tone is obviously turned more to the south.
Cocker had also recorded two Beatles' tunes during the Joe Cocker! sessions. This, as well as his studio playing and production prowess, brought Russell to the attention of the Fab Four's Apple Records. Along with George Harrison and Klaus Voorman, Russell was an uncredited musician on Badfinger's Straight Up (1971), an album that spawned two big singles that remain staples on classic rock radio to this day: "Baby Blue" and "Day After Day."
By March 1971 Russell found himself in a small studio in New York's Greenwich Village, playing on and producing some new songs written by Dylan. "Watching The River Flow" and "When I Paint My Masterpiece" were included on Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits, Vol. 2.
And on August 1 of that same year, Leon Russell would be standing on stage playing bass with Harrison and Dylan at the Concert For Bangla Desh in New York City. The selection? "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."
=======================================
Reams of paper have been devoted to analysis of "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." We'll leave you with two quotes.
One from Dylan himself, in a 1963 interview with Studs Turkel on Chicago radio (courtesy transcript in Jonathan Cott's compilation Dylan On Dylan: The Essential Interviews): "No, it's not atomic rain, it's just a hard rain. It isn't the fallout rain. I mean some sort of end that's just gotta happen . . . In the last verse, when I say, 'the pellets of poison are flooding the waters', that means all the lies that people get told on their radios and in their newspapers."
The second is from an emotional Allen Ginsberg, from the Martin Scorsese film No Direction Home:
Sufjan Stevens "Ring Them Bells" Original Dylan version found on Oh Mercy (1989)
[Ed. note: Regular readers of this blog know that Bob Dylan is affectionately referred to as the "Patron Saint" of TNOP. This weekly feature sifts through the thousands of cover versions of Dylan songs and provides you with our favorites, as well as a quick memory of our first exposure to the Dylan original.]
Sufjan Stevens is a native Michigander who has been a prolific singer-songwriter over the past ten years. A multi-instrumentalist, Stevens' unique voice on the music scene has drawn both heavy critical praise as well as a few accusations of pretentious navel gazing.
Regardless of personal opinion, there is to be no argument that Stevens makes selected songs of other artists he admires (Joni Mitchell, Daniel Johnston and Lennon/McCartney, for example) his "own," rearranging melody and sometimes adding new verses. This Dylan cover is no less different.
When one considers the whole of Stevens' career to date, his selection of Dylan's "Ring Them Bells" for inclusion in the I'm Not There soundtrack makes perfect sense. The themes of faith and justice weave themselves through Stevens' albums, but in a subtle way. As he told The Village Voice in 2005, "I don't think music media is the real forum for theological discussions. I think I've said things and sung about things that probably weren't appropriate for this kind of forum. And I just feel like it's not my work or my place to be making claims and statements, because I often think it's misunderstood."
************************************* Like many a Dylan fan(atic) back in 1989, the pending release of a new album from my favorite artist was a reason for cautious excitement. While Down In The Groove and Knocked Out Loaded were bitter disappointments, and the much-ballyhooed tours with Tom Petty and The Grateful Dead mostly hype, word was leaking out that a "return to form" was surely on the horizon. First, the previous fall George Harrison - who had recently worked with his long-time pal in The Travelling Wilburys - had enthused to a reporter about a cache of songs Dylan supposedly was holding close to the vest. Within a few months, the same story had surfaced, this time linking U2's Bono to the chorus of encouragement.
But Dylan supposedly was down about the method in which his more recent albums had been recorded. Enter Daniel Lanois, the then 38 year old Canadian musician and producer who was surely on a hot streak. In succession, he had been at the helm of Peter Gabriel's So, U2's The Joshua Tree, Robbie Robertson's self-titled solo effort and was about to enter the studio to record another album which would be lauded, Yellow Moon by The Neville Brothers. Given Lanois' involvement with Bono and Robertson, it was easy for Dylanophiles to connect the dots.
Dylan talks at length about the recording process and the great vibe of New Orleans, where Oh Mercy would be recorded, in his bookChronicles, Volume One. It makes for great reading.
Personally, I was excited about the album as a whole when it was released in September 1989, particularly the sequencing of the ten tracks. But "Ring Them Bells" stood out for its musical simplicity as well as lyrical complexity. Aside from the background sonic accents from (I think) Lanois' omnichord, it is just Dylan sitting at the piano alone, singing this compelling, plaintive narrative about age-old, wearying challenges that all walks of life confront and the accompanying faith that may in fact keep a "world on its side" from tipping completely over.
It is vintage Dylan with juxtaposition of "right and wrong" on one side of the scale and "the shepherd and his lost sheep" on the other. While all of his literary tricks seem to be in play here, I remain convinced that Dylan has not cavalierly named three saintly presences simply as a ruse. St. Peter (a disciple who publicly sinned three times and then would lead a movement dedicated to a nonviolent revolutionary), Martha (the wife of Lazarus and sister of Mary, who anointed Jesus' body) and St. Catherine (a highly learned woman who was brutally murdered for espousing and practicing her beliefs) are all symbols of humility and the virtue of the underdog.
But serious contemplation aside, the memory that sticks most permanently with me about "Ring Them Bells" is that this song could have been nestled quite comfortably within the tracks of New Morning (1970). While Oh Mercy seemed to mark a new, fruitful chapter in Dylan's career, I kept thinking of the photo on the back of that particular album. It seemed like in the best of all worlds, blues singer Victoria Spivey would be playing the gospel piano, harmonizing on the chorus while Dylan cut this song in one, live take.
On this date in 1943, George Harrison is born in Liverpool, England to Harold and Louise Harrison. He would have been 67 today, had he not gone away back in 2001.
So happy birthday to The Quiet One.
“I’m really quite simple. I don’t want to be in the business full time because I’m a gardener. I plant flowers and watch them grow. I don’t go out to clubs and partying. I stay at home and watch the river flow.” ---George Harrison, from his autobiography I Me Mine
Happy birthday to film director Martin Scorsese. But rock 'n roll, you ask? Absolutely: check out the ever-present soundtrack running in the background of Goodfellasand Casino. More importantly, Scorsese (shown with The Band's Robbie Robertson, above) has turned out to be one of the more influential figures in rock documentaries. He was a young camera operator and editor on Woodstock. He chronicled The Band's swan song with an incomparable guest list at San Francisco's Winterland Ballroom back in November 1976, resulting in The Last Waltz. In recent years, Scorsese has tackled the rise of Bob Dylan in No Direction Home as well as the career of The Rolling Stones in Shine A Light. A bio-pic on Frank Sinatra and a documentary on George Harrison are now in the works.
Posts
