Category Archives: essay

Hey Bill Wyman, Bob Dylan’s Not Weird At All!

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One of our best music critics is Bill Wyman, who wrote an incredible piece about Michael Jackson for the New Yorker in 2012.

I’ve been reading Bill since at least the mid-’90s, and he always has a unique take on the artists and music he writes about.

His latest writing, an essay about Bob Dylan, is in the latest issue of New York magazine and has also been published online at Vulture.

The essay is thoughtful and informed, but I have one big problem with it: the headline.

“How Did Bob Dylan Get So Weird?”

I have two problems with that headline. First, the question asked assumes that Bob Dylan is weird.

And then it implies that Bill’s essay will explain how Bob Dylan went from normal to weird, you know, the way one might explain how a moth becomes a butterfly.

Only as far as I can tell — and this is based on reading everything I’ve been able to get my eyes on that’s been written about Bob Dylan starting in the early ’60s, as well as my one brief meeting with Bob Dylan — he’s not weird.

In fact, I would argue that for someone who has had to deal with international success for over 50 years, who has been accused of everything from being Judas and betraying folk music to inciting racial hatred, Bob Dylan is about as normal as any of us.

I mean how do you define normal?

One could argue — certainly the late Guy Debord would — that nothing about how we live, and nothing about the capitalist system that defines the West has anything to do with normal.

But anyway

One of the big themes regarding Bob Dylan’s so-called weirdness is that he tours all the time. That he practically lives the road.

But why is that a problem. Why does that make him weird?

Bob Dylan is the one who coined the phrase, ‘don’t look back,’ which he used in his song, “She Belongs To Me.”

Remember? “She’s an artist, she don’t look back.”

Dylan took lessons from such fellow travelers as Woody Guthrie and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Jack Kerouac.

Kerouac’s “On The Road,” a book about two guys who criss-cross the country many times, has been loved and appreciated by millions.

Weird? To want to wake up to something new every few days? Rather than live in the same rut for decade upon decade. I don’t think so.

From what I’ve read. Bob Dylan had some very dark moments during his life. One came at the end of the ’70s, after his marriage to Sara ended in divorce.

That was when he turned to religion in a way that many of us still find hard to understand. But there’s nothing weird about turning to religion at a time of spiritual crisis.

Millions have done the same.

Bob Dylan also lost his way musically for a while during the ’80s. As Wyman points out, Dylan still managed to write and record great songs during that period, it’s just that most weren’t released on official albums and it’s only been during the ’90s and 2000’s that we’ve gotten to hear such gems as “Blind Willie McTell.”

Wyman argues that the ’80s and ’90s “were tough for him artistically.”

I agree that the ’80s was a bad decade for Dylan, but in the ’90s he made Good as I Been to You and World Gone Wrong and
Time Out of Mind, albums that have gotten rave reviews from most critics including Greil Marcus.

The ’90s turned out to be a great decade for Dylan musically, his comeback decade.

And even the ’80s have turned out to be not a total wipeout. While Dylan’s shows with the Grateful Dead were not so hot, the recordings of his rehearsals with the Dead at Club Front in Marin County in 1987 show him to be in great form. He recorded Oh Mercy in 1989, which got great reviews and is an excellent album.

But what has any of that got to do with weird?

When you headline an article — and Bill Wyman may very well have had nothing to do with the headline — “How Did Bob Dylan Get So Weird?” and then the first graph is some musings about Dylan covering a song made famous by Frank Sinatra, as if that in itself is weird, well is this just a way to sell magazines?

What’s weird is the disconnect between the headline and the article itself.

But then that could just be those pesky editors.

Frankly, that headline doesn’t sound like Bill Wyman to me.

Early on Wyman tells us that Dylan behaves differently than others who are in the “pantheon of great rock stars.”

Duh!

That’s what makes Bob Dylan Bob Dylan. He doesn’t follow the rules. He does what he wants, when he wants and he does it how he wants.

He answers to no one other than himself, far as I can tell.

That’s one of the things that is so great about him.

That’s what I learned from him when I was in my teens.

Here’s a quote from my novel, “True Love Scars,” in which I address that very thing. I’m talking about “Like A Rolling Stone” here:

Somehow that song summed up exactly and for certain how I felt that day, summer of ’65, every loner feeling, every put down I ever suffered, every bit of existential angst, I hear it all in that song and then, top of all that, that Dylan voice which broke every rule which I didn’t actually know back then, but still I knew, in my body I knew, and what I knew was that every damn thing I’d been told was wrong ’cause if a voice like that, all sneer and sarcasm and ragged and strange, could be on Top 40 radio, anything was possible. And all the rules they taught me didn’t mean shit.

I knew.

“How Did Bob Dylan Get Weird”?

Bob Dylan isn’t weird. He’s just living life to the max, on his own terms.

[In August of this year I’ll be publishing my rock ‘n’ roll/ coming-of-age novel, “True Love Scars,” which features a narrator who is obsessed with Bob Dylan. To read the first chapter, head here.

Or watch an arty video with audio of me reading from the novel here.

–- A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

The Rant: Who The Hell Is Noah Berlatsky & Why Is He Trashing Bob Dylan?

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Yesterday at Salon, some guy named Noah Berlatsky took out a hatchet and went after Bob Dylan.

Ok, I get it. Websites need heavy traffic and attacking Bog Dylan is an easy way to get thousands of Dylan fans to click on a story. And others too.

For this particular story, the headline is:

“10 musicians influenced by Bob Dylan who are better than Bob Dylan”

So right off you and I know this is so lame we shouldn’t be wasting time on it.

Why would anyone need to compare one musician to another? And who cares if this guy thinks some musicians that were influenced by Dylan are better than Dylan?

I just couldn’t let this crap go by without commenting.

Now we’re not dealing with facts here. We’re dealing with opinion. The opinion of one man. And this guy Berlatsky, a correspondent for The Atlantic magazine, can have any opinions he wants. If he thinks Donovan is a better singer than Bob Dylan (one of his claims), hey, I can think he’s an idiot. I can even tell you he’s an idiot. But if that’s what he thinks, that’s what he thinks.

After all, plenty of people bought Pat Boone records. Journey is still popular. There was a time when Styx could fill coliseums.

Berlatsky states that Dylan “may be the most overrated performer in the history of popular music.”

He criticizes Dylan’s signing, writing: “As a singer, he mimicked the roughness of roots sources without capturing their nuance or power, often resulting in self-parody.”

Then he attacks Dylan’s songwriting: “As a lyricist, he had a tendency to mistake Beat Poet doggerel bathos for profundity.”

By the way, he tells us that Nashville Skyline is his favorite Dylan album. Now there’s nothing wrong with Nashville Skyline, but it’s not Bringing It All Back Home or Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde On Blonde, Dylan’s greatest albums.

Clueless, this guy Berlatsky.

And then he states that the following musicians are “just a few performers influenced by Dylan who are better than he is.”

The list: Jimi Hendrix, Donovan, The Beatles, Johnny Cash, Neil Young, the Velvet Underground, Townes Van Zandt, Joni Mitchell, Sly Stone and the Minutemen,

Now with the exception of Donovan (come on!), that’s a list of heavy hitters. Those are excellent solo artists and bands. But why would you spend your time making claims that they’re better than Bob Dylan.

And why trash Dylan?

This guy Berlatsky reminds me of the squares who just don’t get it. There are always people like that. They’re the ones who don’t want to watch a film if it has subtitles. Who still don’t think hip-hop is music.

We could take one view, and see Berlatsky as one of those squares. But I tend to take a more cynical view. He pulled together his list, spent a half hour cranking out his copy, and voila, a post for Salon sure to draw many curious readers. And gain some notoriety for the writer.

Hopefully, if you do take a look at Berlatsky’s silly post, you’ll have a good laugh and move on down the line. Maybe put on Blonde On Blonde or Bringing It All Back Home and dig on recordings that continue to reveal themselves even after all these years.

I guarantee you that we, you and I, have better things to do than spend another minute on this Berlatsky guy.

— A Days Of The Crazy-Wild blog post —

Celebrating Bob Dylan’s, Oops, I mean Robert Zimmerman’s, 73rd Birthday

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In two days – May 24, 2014 — Bob Dylan will turn 73.

Well no, actually, I don’t think so.

I think Robert Allen Zimmerman will turn 73, but Bob Dylan? No way.

How can Bob Dylan be 73, when I swear just yesterday I spent several hours listening to the 25-year-old Bob Dylan perform at the Royal Albert Hall in 1966.

And in the days prior to that I listened to the 25-year-old Bob Dylan perform live in Glasgow and Edinburg, and I heard him duet with Joan Baez on “Troubled and I Don’t Know Why” in the fall of 1963.

Just this week you might have watched the 24-year-old Bob Dylan tour the U.K. via the great documentary “Don’t Look Back,” or listened to recordings he made in 1961.

Or those great Rolling Thunder bootlegs from 1976.

You could spend some time with a much younger Bob Dylan, if you were to read Robert Sheldon’s bio, “No Direction Home.”

Or hand with him during time he was hanging out with Joan Baez if you read “Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina.”

What I am suggesting here, and it’s not my original idea, certainly not, but Bob Dylan is a construct. A conceptual art piece created by a genius known as Robert Zimmerman.

And if Bob Dylan is a work of art – and certainly he is – than even as new versions of him show up on the Never Ending Tour, all of the older versions still exist, at least as long as someone made a video or a film or a recording or wrote a book.

Now I’m not saying that Bob Dylan is a role that Robert Zimmerman plays the way an actor plays a roll in a film.

In a way he does, but it’s so much deeper than that.

We know, however, that the middle class kid who grew up in Hibbing, Minnesota wasn’t an Okie. And he wasn’t a country-western singer. And he wasn’t the Beat/rock ‘n’ roll dude with wild hair, shades and leather jacket who showed up sometime in 1965.

Yet when the character known as Bob Dylan arrived up in New York in 1961 he spoke like the Woody Guthrie fan that he was, looked like he’d been hoboing around the country, and he told tall tales of a youth that he certainly never lived.

It has been said before, said more eloquently, that fiction is a means for getting to a deeper truth than non-fiction.

The Bob Dylan character that Robert Zimmerman created has shared many, many deep truths with us. He’s written hundreds of songs, and most of them are damn good. He’s enriched our lives in so many ways.

Somewhere in the world, Robert Allen Zimmerman is going to turn 73 on May 24, 2014. As for Bob Dylan, who knows.

So me, I’m wishing Robert Zimmmerman a very, very happy birthday, and I thank him for creating Bob Dylan.

[In August of this year I’ll be publishing my rock ‘n’ roll/ coming-of-age novel, “True Love Scars,” which features a narrator who is obsessed with Bob Dylan. To read the first chapter, head here.]

–- A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

More On What Bob Dylan’s ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Come’ Manuscript Reveals

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Page two of Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” manuscript.

Yesterday I did a post about Bob Dylan’s manuscript for “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” which is being auctioned by Sotheby’s on June 24, 2014 in New York.

I wrote that what I found most interesting about the manuscript was that Dylan had written “Hiroshima” and under that, “Nagasaki” just a few inches from the chorus to the song. I wrote “it’s clear that Dylan meant the song to refer, at least in the chorus, to nuclear annihilation.”

What I found amazing about Dylan writing the names of the two cities the U.S. dropped atom bombs on during World War II, was that he had denied that the song was about what Studs Terkel called “atomic rain,” when Terkel interviewed him in 1963.

Clearly, Dylan was putting Terkel on, I concluded.

In fact, Dylan wrote the song in the summer of 1962, as tensions between Russia and the U.S. were building to the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 – this was a time when the whole country feared a nuclear conflict.

Dylan told journalist Robert Shelton that he wrote “A Hard Rain” in response to the Cuban Missile Crisis, which wasn’t exactly true: “Every line in it is actually the start of a whole new song,” Dylan said. “But when I wrote it, I thought I wouldn’t have enough time alive to write all those songs so I put all I could into this one.”

The reason I’m coming back to this is that today I got a comment about my post. A reader wrote:

“Interesting that the notations about Hiroshima / Nagasaki would be pulled out from all the other random notations in the song notes as ‘proof’ that the song is about nuclear fallout and nothing else. Surely that theme is an influence here, but I don’t think it means that Bob was lying’ in the interview by saying that meaning expands beyond that. It’s the rare Bob song that is about one thing and one thing only, in my opinion!”

Now I certainly didn’t mean to say or imply that the song is only about nuclear war, but I think it’s pretty clear that one of the meanings of “hard rain,” was “atomic rain.”

Dylan is infamous for misleading or putting on interviewers. Since the early ‘60s he’s said whatever he felt like saying, whether it was true or not. In fact, he purposefully made up fictitious stories about his past. In the fall of 1961 he told CBS that he’d worked in a carnival, which wasn’t true:

Dylan: Yeah, well, I was in the carnival when I was about 13 — all kinds of shows.

CBS: Where’d you go?

Dylan: All around the Midwest, uh, Gallup, New Mexico, Aptos, Texas, and then … lived in, Gallup, New Mexico and …

CBS: How old were you?

Dylan: Uh, about 7, 8, something like that.

“Bob Dylan” is, in fact, a character that Robert Zimmerman created, a character that changed from a scruffy acoustic guitar playing folk singer to a mod rock ‘n’ roller to a Nashville crooner, to mention just a few of Dylan’s personas. One could look at the character “Bob Dylan” as a kind of living montage — a character Zimmerman created and then has been refining and developing ever since.

So misleading Terkel was nothing new, and Dylan has continued to mislead and confuse interviewers in the 51 years since that Terkel interview. That’s part of what “Bob Dylan” does. And in fact, what he’s doing is similar to what fiction writers do. They invent a story that, if they’re good, gets closer to the truth than non-fiction.

Regarding the “other random notations in the song notes” that the commenter brought up, I don’t think they’re all random.

Bob Dylan frequently looked to older songs and poems, sometimes as more than inspiration, when he wrote his own songs.

“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” is structurally based on the question and answer refrain pattern of the traditional British ballad “Lord Randall”, published by Francis Child, according to David Hajdu, author of “Positively 4th Street.”

For his melodies Dylan had been borrowing from old folk songs, so his notations of old folk songs including “Black is the Color (Of My True Love’s hair)” and “Railroad Boy” don’t strike me as random, but rather they may have been songs he was thinking about as he came up with the music for “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”

Writing the name of the rock ‘n’ roll group, The Dominos, and their hit, “Have Mercy Baby,” shows that even in 1962 when he appeared to be a hardcore folky, Dylan was into rock ‘n’ roll. And the references to comic book super heroes and a line from Edgar Allen Poe show that Dylan was drawing from a wide range of pop culture in addition to old folks songs and poetry as source material for his songs.

Perhaps most telling is that he wrote “Robert Houdin book” on the manuscript. As I wrote yesterday, that “likely refers to a book about the French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, who is considered the father of modern conjuring.”

Dylan himself has proven to be quite a magician, transforming a middle-class kid from Hibbing, Minnesota into an international rock star, and conjuring up from bits and pieces of pop and folk culture, some of the greatest songs ever written.

[In August of this year I’ll be publishing my rock ‘n’ roll/ coming-of-age novel, “True Love Scars,” which features a narrator who is obsessed with Bob Dylan. To read the first chapter, head here.]

– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

Am I a Crazy Dylanologist?

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Author David Kinney puts it all in perspective.

By Michael Goldberg

I always wondered if I was a bit, well, over the top when it came to Bob Dylan. After all, I’ve been listening to his records since I was 13, and I’m still listening.

Yeah, a long fuckin’ time.

And just this past week I watched D.A. Pennebaker’s addendum to “Don’t Look Back,” a film called “1965 Revisited,” finished up Larry “Ratso” Sloman’s On the Road with Bob Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Review, watched a YouTube clip of Dylan and John Lennon having a very stoned conversation in the back of a cab for the benefit of a cameraman shooting the never released “Eat the Document,” and listened to outtakes from Blood on the Tracks, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde, recordings made when Dylan rehearsed with the Grateful Dead in 1986, mostly unreleased recordings of a 1963 Dylan appearance at Town Hall in New York and, and…

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

In my crowd in Marin County in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, I was the one leading our explorations into the new frontiers of rock. I was the first to get into the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out, and Captain Beefheart’s Safe As Milk. I got my folks to drive me into San Francisco to buy an import copy of Pink Floyd’s trippy The Piper at the Gates of Dawn at the long-gone Gramophone Records on Polk Street. This was when Pink Floyd didn’t have a U.S. record label; when Syd Barrett hadn’t yet blown his mind.

Regards Dylan, I was his #1 fan, at least that’s how I saw it.

Sure the others I hung with dug Dylan, but I was the only one who bought the Great White Wonder bootleg when it showed up in a record store bin, and soon enough I had quite a few Dylan bootlegs, mysterious collections of songs that weren’t on his official releases, each in a white sleeve, usually with the name of the album stamped on the cover with one of those rubber stamps you could get made at a stationary store, typically to stamp your address in the left hand corner of an envelope.

These days we know artists record songs that don’t end up on official releases, and in fact, officially releasing those recordings years after they were made has become business as usual. But in 1969, when Great White Wonder was first released, it was a total shock to discover all this music I’d never heard before by an artist I totally dug. It was as if the world I’d known just fell away and another world was revealed, one with a hell of a lot more Dylan music than I had previously known.

When I got my hands on the supposed ‘Albert Hall’ live set (actually recorded at the Manchester Free Trade Hall as we learned many years later), and played it for the first time, it was the most ecstatic listening experience of my admittedly short life.

So you can understand why I’ve always considered myself obsessive regards Bob Dylan, and worried that there was something, well, extreme, maybe even a bit mental, about my obsession. There was a time — now this is back when I was 15, 16, so please don’t hold it against me — when I wanted so bad to look like Dylan, which I didn’t. (I’ve applied some of my own real Dylan fixation to the fictional character Writerman in my first novel, “True Love Scars,” which I’m publishing in August of this year.)

So I owe David Kinney a big thank-you. His excellent book, “The Dylanologists,” put my concerns to rest. I mean compared to the Dylan freaks profiled in Kinney’s book, I’m an average run-of-the-mill Dylan fan. Yeah, to be a Dylanologist you have to be operating on a whole other level.

Take Bill Pagel, who actually moved to Dylan’s hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota. Pagel spent years trying to buy the Hibbing house Dylan grew up in, and he succeeded in buying the Duluth, Minnesota house where Dylan’s folks, the Zimmermans, lived when Bob was born. Pagel also bought Dylan’s highchair, for God sakes! And a ceramic candy bowl that at one time belonged to Dylan’s grandmother.

Me, I can’t compete with a Bill Pagel.

For the rest of this column, please head to Addicted To Noise.

– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

Books: Tom Spanbauer’s 1st Novel in Seven Years, ‘I Loved You More,’ is For Sure the Real Deal

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There are two things you need to know before you read my review of Tom Spanbauer’s fifth novel, “I Loved You More” (Hawthorne Press). Thing one: I was in Tom’s Dangerous Writers writing group up in Portland, Oregon for a year and a half, and Tom was my fiction writing teacher for six years. So I’m biased, I admit it; I think Tom’s a damn good writer, one of the best.

Thing two: I’m straight. It’s important you know that, given the story Tom, who is gay, tells in “I Loved You More.”

Tom’s book – which spans 25-years starting in the mid-‘80s — is about a gay man, Ben Grunewald (Gruney), who falls in love with a straight man, Hank Christian (the Maroni), and then, years later, in the third and final part of the book, while still in love with Hank, becomes emotionally involved with a straight woman, Ruth Dearden. Ben is devastated, and feels totally betrayed when Hank hooks up with Ruth and those two get married.

OK, that really doesn’t do it, so let me try again.

Tom’s book is 466 pages of heartbreak. Think about the love affair that went so wrong for you, the one that tore you down, left you devastated and in pieces. Yeah, that’s this book.

When the “I Loved You More” starts, everything that Ben is going to tell us has already happened. And Ben reveals right up front, in the first nine pages, that this story is about a love triangle, and that Ben ended up the odd man out. Tells us right at the start that Hank married Ruth. In other words, tells us upfront that this is a tragedy, and things are not going to end well.

The rule of three.

Tom writes:

More than likely, you’re like me and think that something like this could never happen to you. That you could love a man, then love a woman – two extraordinary people, two unique ways of loving, from different decades, on different ends of the continent, and then somehow, through an accident of the universe, or a destiny preordained – either way you’ll never know – what’s important is that what happens is something you could never in a million years have planned, and there you are the three of you, dancing the ancient dance whose only rule is with three add one, if not, subtract. If three doesn’t find four, three goes back to two.

Add or subtract, that’s the rule.

So we know at the start how it ends. Well sort of. Not exactly. Tom makes us readers think we know how it ends, but of course we don’t.

Read the rest of this review here.

Books: Alex Chilton Bio, ‘A Man Called Destruction,’ Coming Mar. 20, 2014

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Holly George-Warren’s heavily researched biography of Big Star frontman Alex Chilton, “A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Times of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man,” (she spoke to over 100 sources) will arrive on March 20, 2014.

Reviewing the book in the National Review, John Lingan writes:

In the summer of 1967, The Box Tops’ first single, “The Letter,” took over American radio so fast that the Memphis band’s tour schedule filled up before anyone outside Tennessee even knew what they looked like. In between gigs with The Beach Boys and The Doors, they were also occasionally booked at black venues, whose owners assumed the gravel-voiced singer would fit in fine. But when a wispy-haired white boy barely old enough to drive showed up to play, managers were mystified. One booking agent at the Philadelphia fairgrounds forced bandleader Alex Chilton to sing a capella just to prove who he was.

That summer would be Chilton’s last experience with superstardom, but the next four decades of his music career were marked by similarly bemused audiences and parried expectations. His second band, Big Star, was a soulful pop-rock group who barely sold any records in the 1970s; Chilton responded by pushing the band in an ever less-commercial direction then embarking on a willfully shambolic solo career. As time wore on, he retreated further and further from the mainstream music industry, playing the occasional club show but more often noodling the piano in his beloved house in New Orleans’ Treme neighborhood.

But by the time Chilton died of a heart attack in 2010, aged 59, he had become an icon of intensely pure artistic integrity and an acknowledged influence on innumerable later acts including R.E.M., the Replacements and Elliott Smith. Rather than the failed or self-destructive pop star he appeared to be by 1980, Chilton had come to embody a new archetype: the unpopular pop musician, a performer whose reputation rests on a willful rejection of commercial considerations altogether. Without him there could have been no Tom Waits, who exchanged his piano for percussion instruments literally borrowed from junkyards; no Jeff Mangum, who disappeared from public life right after his band Neutral Milk Hotel recorded one of the ’90s’ most revered albums; no Jeff Tweedy, whose critical viability was secured when a major label dropped his group Wilco for making an “uncommercial” record with abstract lyrics and tape loops.

Holly George-Warren’s new biography bears the subtitle “From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man,” promising to tell how, exactly, the growling teen idol gave way to the romantic songwriter, who in turn became a punk icon, jazz crooner, and alt-rock figurehead….

For the rest of the review, head to the National Review.

If, somehow, you aren’t familiar with Big Star, check this out:

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

Considering the Fate of the ‘Literary Bad Boys’

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Two literary bad boys: William Burroughs and Tom Waits. Photo via http://www.tomwaitsfan.com/

It’s one hundred years after William S. Burroughs’ birth. To celebrate, the New York Times has published two intriguing essays regarding what the Times calls the “so-called literary bad boys.”

James Parker writes:

It’s the question every writer faces, every morning of his or her life: Am I Malcolm Gladwell today, or am I Arthur Rimbaud? Do I sit down with my pumpkin latte and start Googling, or do I fire a couple of shots into the ceiling and then stick my head in a bucket of absinthe? Which of these two courses will better serve my art, my agent, my agenda? Old hands are ready with the answer: If you want to stick around, kid, if you want to build your oeuvre, you’ve got to be — in the broadest sense — sober. You’ve got to keep it together. There’s no future in going off the rails. “You go in dutifully, slavishly, and you work,” commanded Norman Mailer, his head-buttings long behind him. “This injunction is wholly anti-romantic in spirit.” But his sternness communicates the strain, does it not, the effort required to suppress the other thing: the room-wrecker, the Shelley inside, the wild buddings of Dionysus.

This is where the literary bad boy lives today, at any rate — in the mind of the writer…

Rivka Galchen writes:

In the seventh grade I admired a charismatic, witty girl who had a particular way of writing her lowercase a’s. After some practice, I took to writing my lowercase a’s in the same fashion. Sometimes we find ourselves emulating a trait that’s merely proximate to something wonderful — you can wear a white suit every day, but it won’t get you any closer to revolutionizing American journalism. Emulating that girl’s charisma or wit would have involved much more work, and trying to think and write like the best of the “literary bad boys” can be near on impossible. The handwriting, or the suit, are manageable.

And I would argue that certain traits we associate with the “literary bad boy” — traits we spend the most time excoriating or lauding, with excoriation and laudation amounting to almost the same thing — are more like the handwriting or the suit than the essential substance. They have little to do with the genuinely countercultural thinking or the intelligently transgressive prose. Instead they are, upon inspection, just the fairly straightforward qualities of persons with more financial or cultural or physical power who exercise that power over people with less. There’s nothing “counter” about that, of course; overpowering in that way implicitly validates things as they are, and implies that this is how they ought to be. So I presume that when we value literary-bad-boy-ness — and there is a lot to value there — those traits wouldn’t be, if we thought about it, the essence of bad-boy-ness; those traits aren’t even distinctive. They’re just trussed-up versions of an unfortunate norm.

Even William Burroughs mocked that idea of a literary bad boy. In his oft quoted short story, “The Lemon Kid,” he wrote: “As a young child Audrey Carsons wanted to be writers because writers were rich and famous. They lounged around Singapore and Rangoon smoking opium in a yellow pongee silk suit. They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful native boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.” The passage is funny, hyperbolic and also somehow psychologically accurate. Audrey dreams of the trappings of a writer, not of writing. Burroughs’s language illuminates the covert dream within the dream: the moneyed associations of Mayfair and the yellow pongee silk suit, and the de facto purchasing of a person whitewashed into the term “a faithful native boy.” The transgression in the fantasy is revealed to be a self-flattering illusion; the real fantasy, nested inside the manifest one, is the standard and childish desire for dominion….

Read both essays here.

Plus a review of Barry Miles’ “Call Me Burroughs: A Life” here.

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

Video: Bruce Springsteen Sings ‘The Times They Are A-Changing’ – Finding Hope Where I Can

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Today I was thinking about the huge gap that now exists in the U.S. between the very very rich, the .01 percent, and everyone else, when I came across the beautiful rendition of “The Times They Are A-Changing” that Bruce Springsteen performed on December 7, 1997 when Bob Dylan was honored by President Bill Clinton at the Kennedy Center.

The last election in the U.S. was between a .01-percenter, Mitt Romney, and a man of the people, President Barack Obama.

The majority of Americans who voted, voted for President Obama despite attempts by Republicans to limit voting, in particular, to make it more difficult for people of color to vote. We’ve all seen the video of the long, long lines at the polls. Old people waiting for many hours to exercise their right.

And yet nothing really has changed since President Obama was reelected. The Republican-controlled House of Representatives has stopped pretty much any meaningful legislation from getting passed.

The gap between the super rich and everyone else has only widened.

It is with the heavy weight of that knowledge upon us, that I listened to this song of hope and change today.

Sometimes it seems that the “darkness at the edge of town” that Springsteen sings about is covering everything.

Music is such a powerful force. We all know how one song can completely change our mood, turn a bad day to good. The corporate world we now live in wants to co-opt everything. They take music that meant something and turn it into a soundtrack for selling yogurt, or cars. It’s like they want to drain the meaning from the songs.

Yet songs remain powerful.

“The Times They Are A-Changing” is a song that gives us hope. Perhaps it’s a fool’s hope, but I’ll take it where I can get it.

-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-

The Modernization of Bruce Springsteen

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An artist who was once at one with the times tries (again) to reinvent himself

By Michael Goldberg.

Bruce Springsteen was once a myth, a myth we all could pretend was real. He was a myth the way Bob Dylan was a myth, is a myth.

During the Sixties it stopped being OK to be an entertainer. Musicians got onstage wearing the same jeans and t-shirts they wore around the house. It was cool to keep it real. But it turned out that the jeans and t-shirts were as much a costume as Elvis’ crazy stage garb.

So when Bruce Springsteen showed up in the early ‘70s with his leather jacket, his jeans and his motorcycle boots singing about the Jersey shore – one of the ‘New Dylan’s’ that were appearing with frequency — we wanted to believe it was real.

And I did believe it.

I didn’t think of Springsteen as a writer creating a persona, a cast of characters and a story that was ultimately spread across seven albums. I thought he was the guy singing stories from his crazy youth: ‘Rosalita’ and ‘Mary Queen of Arkansas’ and ‘Blinded By The Light’ and ‘Thunder Road’ and ‘Born To Run’ and all the others. Sure he was writing in an almost embarrassingly derivative style that owed everything to Dylan’s mid-60s surrealistic word games, but Springsteen pulled it off. And by 1973 the real Dylan seemed to be losing his luster anyway. (And soon enough Springsteen settled into his own voice and sound.)

I found a version of myself in Springsteen’s songs. When he sang in ‘Thunder Road,’ “It’s a town full of losers, I’m pulling out of here to win,” I knew that was me. Fuck yeah, I was going to become a successful writer, write for the New York magazines, leave all the chumps I’d put up with in high school and college behind.

Sure I was working as a copy boy at the San Francisco Chronicle in 1975, but that was gonna change. That was temporary, a way to pay the bills until I broke into the writing business.

In the late fall of 1975, two months after the release of Born To Run, Bruce Springsteen toured the west coast. There were five of us loaded into Karen’s car the night of October 29, 1975, Our destination was the Sacramento Memorial Auditorium in downtown Sacramento, the state capital, a two-hour drive north east of San Francisco. Two hours? We didn’t care. I mean this was our chance to see Bruce Springsteen!

In the car were me, my girlfriend Leslie, my best friend Dave, Dave’s girlfriend Karen and another friend, Dana, who co-led a band with Dave. Springsteen was also playing at the Paramount Theater in Oakland, but that show was sold out, and anyway, there was something romantic, Springsteenesque even, about driving two hours in the early evening to Sacramento, a town seeming stuck in the past. The Sacramento Memorial Auditorium, after all, had been built in 1926, and it looked it. It was like time-traveling when you passed through the front doors – it’s one of those grand old theaters.

For the rest of this column, head to Addicted To Noise.