Cool clip with Neil Young talking about the making of his album Harvest.
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
Category Archives: interview
Video: Ten Films That Had a Big Impact on Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan has loved the movies since he was a kid.
Not long after his success as a folk singer, in 1965, he made his first movie, letting documentary film-maker D. A. Pennebaker tag along on Dylan’s 1965 U.K. tour. The resulting 1967 film, “Don’t Look Back,” established the sarcastic Dylan persona — to this day the Dylan of “Don’t Look Back” remains iconic.
He let Pennebaker come with him on the 1966 UK tour and the result was “Eat The Document,” a planned TV special that was shelved, but continues the mood established in “Don’t Look Back,” only taken to a more arty and at times outrageous level.
The Byrds’ version of “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding” and the Roger McGuinn/Bob Dylan collaboration, “The Ballad of Easy Rider,” were used in 1969’s “Easy Rider.”
Dylan’s fascination with the movies continued. He supplied songs to Sam Peckinpah’s 1973 film, “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid,” and acted in that film as well.
Dylan’s “Things Have Changed” was used in 2000’s “Wonder Boys.” And Dylan’s songs have been in many other films including “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” in 1994’s “Forest Gump” and “The Man In Me” in 1998’s “The Big Lebowski.”
He directed and starred in 1978’s “Renaldo and Clara” and 2003’s “Masked and Anonymous.”
Dylan was influenced by and at times has lifted ideas from films he’s seen.
Below are ten films that had an impact on Bob Dylan. I’ve also included two quotes from Dylan, following the list of films, about movie men who have loomed large in Dylan’s life: director John Ford and actor/director Charlie Chaplin.
1 “Rebel Without a Cause” (directed by Nicholas Ray)
Bob Spitz writes in “Dylan: A Biography”: It was at the State Theater, in the fall of 1955, that a movie and its enigmatic star gave Bobby the first peek at the combustible properties of attitude and self-expression. On a crisp autumn day, he sat mesmerized by the premier showing of Rebel Without a Cause, a stagy morality play about teenage restlessness in suburbia… It ever the term “born-again” applied to Bob Dylan it was then, following this celluloid revelation. He had gotten a glimpse of the future up on the screen in the form of James Dean, teenage rebel, and it appealed to his sensibility.
2 “The Wild One” (directed by László Benedek, starring Marlon Brando)
Bob Spitz: Almost overnight Bobby metamorphosed from a wussy squirt into Hibbing’s protopunk. Ge redid himself from head to toe, like a fashion model undergoing a beauty makeover. Along with another impressionable school chum, Bobby made a beeline for Feldman’s basement, the uncharted bluye-collar section of the store, where he picked out stuff Levi’s, black biker’s boots, and a leather motorcycle jacket similar to the one Brando wore in The Wild One.
3 “Blackboard Jungle” (directed by Richard Brooks featuring Bill Haley and the Comets)
Bob Dylan’s high school classmate Larry Hoikkala, after the two of them saw “The Blackboard Jungle”: Bob couldn’t believe it. … he kept saying, “This is really great! This is exactly what we’ve been trying to tell people about ourselves… Looking back that film really changed our lives because for the first time, we felt it was talking directly to us.
From IMDb: A new English teacher at a violent, unruly inner-city school is determined to do his job, despite resistance from both students and faculty.
4 “Lonely Are the Brave” (directed by David Miller, starring Kirk Douglas and Gene Rowlands)
From Wikipedia: Lonely are the Brave is a 1962 film adaptation of the Edward Abbey novel The Brave Cowboy. The film was directed by David Miller from a screenplay by Dalton Trumbo. It stars Kirk Douglas as cowboy Jack Burns, Gena Rowlands as his best friend’s wife, and Walter Matthau as a sheriff who sympathises with Burns but must do his job and chase him down. It also featured an early score by legendary composer Jerry Goldsmith. Douglas felt that this was his favorite film.
5 “A Face in the Crowd” (directed by Elia Kazan, starring Andy Griffith)
From Wikipedia: A Face in the Crowd is a 1957 film starring Andy Griffith, Patricia Neal and Walter Matthau, directed by Elia Kazan.[1][2] The screenplay was written by Budd Schulberg, based on his short story “Your Arkansas Traveler”. The story centers on a drifter named Larry “Lonesome” Rhodes (Griffith, in a role starkly different from the amiable “Sheriff Andy Taylor” persona), who is discovered by the producer (Neal) of a small-market radio program in rural northeast Arkansas. Rhodes ultimately rises to great fame and influence on national television
6 “La Strada” (directed by Federico Fellini)
7“La Dolce Vita” (directed by Federico Fellini)
Dylan in Chronicles: There was an art movie house in the Village on 12th Street that showed foreign movies – French, Italian, German. This made sense, because even Alan Lomax himself, the great folk archivist, had said somewhere that if you want to get out to America, go to Greenwich Village. I’d seen a couple of Italian Fellini movies there – one called La Strada, which means “The Street,” and another one called La Dolce Vita. It was about a guy who sells his soul and becomes a gossip hound. It looked like life in a carnival mirror except it didn’t show any monster freaks – just real people in a freaky way. I watched it intently, thinking that I might not see it again.
IMDb on “La Strada”: A care-free girl is sold to a traveling entertainer, consequently enduring physical and emotional pain along the way.
8 Children of Paradise (directed bu Marcel Carné)
9 Shoot the Piano Player (directed by François Truffaut)
Ben Corbett writing about Ranaldo and Clara on about.com: In his Rolling Thunder Logbook, Sam Shepard (who ‘wrote’ the script Dylan’s film Ranaldo and Clara) wrote that when he arrived in New york, Dylan asked him if he’d ever seen Marcel Carné’s Children of Paradise or François Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player. When Shepard asked if that’s the kind of film he wanted to make, Dylan replied, “Something like that.” Both examples of French New Wave cinema, these films would have a huge impact on Dylan’s vision for Renaldo & Clara. In Children of Paradise, the French mime Jean-Louis Barrault plays a role in whiteface, much as Dylan would perform in whiteface during the Rolling Thunder Revue. And the same leitmotif of a flower runs through both films, in Dylan’s case a rose. But more than these similarities, the editing techniques in Carné’s and Truffaut’s masterpieces—jump-cutting, random sequencing, etc.—informed much of Renaldo & Clara’s nonlinear, almost anti-narrative dreamscape qualities.
Bob Dylan, liner notes for The Times They Are A-Changin’:
There’s a movie called
“Shoot The Piano Player”
the last line proclaimin
“music, man, that’s where it’s at”
it is a religious line
outside, the chimes ring
an they
are still ringin
From IMDb on “Children Of Paradise”: This tale centers around the love between Baptiste, a theater mime, and Claire Reine, an actress and otherwise woman-about-town who calls herself Garance. Garance, in turn, is loved by three other men: Frederick, a pretentious actor; Lacenaire, a conniving thief; and Count Eduard of Monteray. The story is further complicated by Nathalie, an actress who is in love with Baptiste. Garance and Baptiste meet when Garance is falsely accused of stealing a man’s watch. Garance is forced to enter the protection of Count Eduard when she is innocently implicated in a crime committed by Lacenaire. In the intervening years of separation, both Garance and Baptiste become involved in loveless relationships with the Count and Nathalie, respectively. Baptiste is the father of a son. Returning to Paris, Garance finds that Baptiste has become a famous mime actor. Nathalie sends her child to foil their meeting, but Baptiste and Garance manage one night together. Lacenaire murders Edouard. In the last scenes, Garance is returning to Eduard’s hotel and disaster as Baptiste struggles after her through crowds of merrymakers, many dressed as his famous character.
Wikipedia on “Shoot The Piano Player”: A washed-up classical pianist, Charlie Kohler/Edouard Saroyan (Charles Aznavour), bottoms out after his wife’s suicide — stroking the keys in a Parisian dive bar. The waitress, Lena (Marie Dubois), is falling in love with Charlie, who it turns out is not who he says he is. When his brothers get in trouble with gangsters, Charlie inadvertently gets dragged into the chaos and is forced to rejoin the family he once fled.
10 “Cat On A Hot Tin Roof”
From Wikipedia: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is a 1958 American drama film directed by Richard Brooks.[2][3] It is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name by Tennessee Williams adapted by Richard Brooks and James Poe. One of the top-ten box office hits of 1958, the film stars Elizabeth Taylor, Paul Newman and Burl Ives.
From IMDb: Brick, an alcoholic ex-football player, drinks his days away and resists the affections of his wife, Maggie. His reunion with his father, Big Daddy, who is dying of cancer, jogs a host of memories and revelations for both father and son.
In the film Brick Pollitt (Paul Newman) says to Big Daddy’s (Burl Ives): “You don’t know what love means. To you it’s just another four-letter word.”
Dylan wrote “Love Is Just A Four-Letter Word,” which Joan Baez sings some of in “Don’t Look Back” in 1965.
http://youtu.be/OchpaSIYrDY
John Ford
Bob Dylan, talking in Rolling Stone, (Douglas Brinkley interview) in 2009 about John Ford: I like [John Fords] old films, He was a man’s man, and he thought that way. He never had his guard down. Put courage and bravery, redemption and a peculiar mix of agony and ecstasy on the screen in a brilliant dramatic manner. His movies were easy to understand. I like that period of time in American films. I think America has produced the greatest films ever. No other country has ever come close. The great movies that came out of America in the studio system, which a lot of people say is the slave system, were heroic and visionary, and inspired people in a way that no other country has ever done. If film is the ultimate art form, then you’ll need to look no further than those films. Art has the ability to transform people’s lives, and they did just that.
Dylan talking to Robert Shelton about Charlie Chaplin, December 1961, as quoted in Shelton’s book, “No Direction Home: the Life and Music of Bob Dylan”: He [Charlie Chaplin] influences me, even in the way I sing. His films really sank in. I like to see the humor in the world. There is so little of it around. I guess I’m always conscious of the Chaplin tramp.
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
Audio: Listen to Bob Dylan’s Fave Cover of a Bob Dylan Song – ‘The one recording I treasure the most’
In the fall of 1969, some months after the release of Nashville Skyline, Rolling Stone publisher/Editor in Chief Jann Wenner interviewed Bob Dylan in a New York hotel room.
The interview ended like this:
Jann Wenner: You’ve heard the Joan Baez album of all your songs…
Bob Dylan: Yeah, I did… I generally like everything she does.
Wenner: Are there any particular artists that you like to see do your songs?
Dylan: Yeah, Elvis Presley. I liked Elvis Presley. Elvis Presley recording a song of mine. That’s the one recording I treasure the most… it was called “Tomorrow Is A Long Time.” I wrote it but never recorded it.
Wenner: Which album is that on?
Dylan: Kismet.
Wenner: I’m not familiar with it at all.
[Actually, “Kismet” is a song that appeared on Elvis’ Harum Scarum scoundtrack; “Tomorrow Is A Long Time” isn’t on that album. According to Wikipedia: “Elvis Presley recorded the song (‘Tomorrow Is A Long Time’) on May 26, 1966 during a session for his album How Great Thou Art. The song originally appeared as a bonus track on the Spinout movie soundtrack album… According to Ernst Jorgensen’s’ book, Presley got into the song via Charlie McCoy, who had previously participated in the Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde sessions. McCoy played the 1965 Odetta album Odetta Sings Dylan before an Elvis session and Presley “had become taken with ‘Tomorrow Is A Long Time.'”]
Dylan: He did it with just guitar.
Below is Elvis’ version of “Tomorrow Is A Long Time,” the Odetta version that inspired Elvis to record the song, and then two versions by Bob Dylan plus Joan Baez’s version.
Elvis Presley, “Tomorrow Is A Long Time”:
Bob Dylan,”Tomorrow Is A Long Time” (April 12, 1963, Town Hall, New York City):
Odetta, “Tomorrow Is A Long Time” (1964 recording):
Bob Dylan,”Tomorrow Is A Long Time” with intro (April 12, 1963, Town Hall, New York City):
Bob Dylan,”Tomorrow Is A Long Time” Whitmark Demos, December 1962):
Joan Baez, “Tomorrow Is A Long Time” (early 1963):
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
Portlandia’s Carrie Brownstein Leaves Open Possibility of Sleater-Kinney Reunion
“Portlandia” star Carrie Brownstein suggested during an interview posted at Stereogum today that the Sleater-Kinney story isn’t over yet.
Asked if Sleater-Kinney will reunite, Brownstein said:
I’m not sure. It’s a hard question. This is something I was actually talking about with Tavi Gevinson who does Rookie Mag. I’m such a fan of hers and her writing, and we were having coffee in Portland and we were just talking about how when something is very tied to a certain time in your life — it’s sometimes hard to reenter that at a different age or with a different perspective. So, it’s like finding a way into the container that is Sleater-Kinney, finding a way of entering that with something that isn’t necessarily as urgent as it was for me when I was 22. What I appreciate about Sleater-Kinney is that we did six records and they all felt different. It was a band that was able to encapsulate different sensibilities because we were focusing on it as music and art and not as a statement. That was something other people ascribed to it more than we did. So I would be curious. I think we have more to say. I think we ended at a time when it wasn’t tapering off, actually. I would be curious to know what the rest of the story is with that band.
Read more of the interview here.
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
Ten Books Bob Dylan Digs: ‘I went through it from cover to cover like a hurricane’
Bob Dylan reads, and over the years he’s read an eclectic mix of fiction and non-fiction. He’s name-dropped writers in his songs and in his interviews. “Ballad of a Thin Man” famously mentions F. Scott Fitzgerald:
You’ve been through all of,
F. Scott Fitzgerald’s books,
You’re very well read,
It’s well known.
In “Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again,” he sings:
Well, Shakespeare, he’s in the alley,
With his pointed shoes and his bells,
Speaking to some French girl,
Who says she knows me well.”
Dylan spends pages of his memoir “Chronicles” talking about books and authors.
Below I’ve listed ten books that Dylan has read and appreciated. Some are featured on his website, others he’s spoken about in interviews.
In some cases I’ve included text off Dylan’s website. In others there are quotes from Dylan about the book.
1 Bound For Glory by Woody Guthrie
Bob Dylan, in “Chronicles”: I went through it from cover to cover like a hurricane, totally focused on every word, and the book sang out to me like the radio. Guthrie writes like the whirlwind and you get tripped out on the sound of the words along. Pick up the book anywhere,turn to any page and he hits the ground running. “Bound for Glory” is a hell of a book. It’s huge. Almost too big.
2 The Conscience of the Folk Revival: The Writings of Israel “Izzy” Young by Scott Barretta
From Dylan’s website: Israel G. “Izzy” Young was the proprietor of the Folklore Center in Greenwich Village from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. The literal center of the New York folk music scene, the Center not only sold records, books, and guitar strings but served as a concert hall, meeting spot, and information kiosk for all folk scene events. Among Young’s first customers was Harry Belafonte; among his regular visitors were Alan Lomax and Pete Seeger. Shortly after his arrival in New York City in 1961, an unknown Bob Dyan banged away at songs on Young’s typewriter. Young would also stage Dylan’s first concert, as well as shows by Joni Mitchell, the Fugs, Emmylou Harris, and Tim Buckley, Doc Watson, Son House, and Mississippi John Hurt.
The Conscience of the Folk Revival: The Writings of Israel “Izzy” Young collects Young’s writing, from his regular column “Frets and Frails” for Sing Out! Magazine (1959-1969) to his commentaries on such contentious issues as copyright and commercialism. Also including his personal recollections of seminal figures, from Bob Dylan and Alan Lomax to Harry Smith and Woody Guthrie, this collection removes the rose tinting of past memoirs by offering Young’s detailed, day-by-day accounts. A key collection of primary sources on the American countercultural scene in New York City, this work will interest not only folk music fans, but students and scholars of American social and cultural history.
3 The Anchor Anthology of French Poetry by Angel Flores, editor
From Dylan’s website: Introduction by Patti Smith.
4 On The Road by Jack Kerouac
Bob Dylan on his website: “I read On the Road in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.”
Bob Dylan in “Chronicles”: Within the first few months that I was in New York I’d lost my interest in the “hungry for kicks” hipster vision that Kerouac illustrates so well iin his book, “On the Road.” That book had been like a bible for me. Not anymore, though. I still loved the breathless, dynamic bob poetry phrases that flowed from Jack’s pen, but now, that charaacter Moriarty seemed out of place, purposeless — seemed like a character who inspired idiocy. He goes through life bumbing and grinding with a bull on top of him.
From Dylan’s website: Few novels have had as profound an impact on American culture as On The Road. Pulsating with the rhythms of 1950s underground America, jazz, sex, illicit drugs, and the mystery and promise of the open road, Kerouac’s classic novel of freedom and longing defined what it meant to be “beat” and has inspired generations of writers, musicians, artists, poets, and seekers who cite their discovery of the book as the event that “set them free.” Based on Kerouac’s adventures with Neal Cassady, On The Road tells the story of two friends whose four cross-country road trips are a quest for meaning and true experience. Written with a mixture of sad-eyed naïveté and wild abandon, and imbued with Kerouac’s love of America, his compassion for humanity, and his sense of language as jazz, On The Road is the quintessential American vision of freedom and hope, a book that changed American literature and changed anyone who has ever picked it up.
5 One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding by Robert Gover
Dylan praised the book during an interview with Studs Terkel on radio station WFMT in 1963. “I got a friend who wrote a book, it’s called ‘One Hundred Dollar Misunderstanding,’ it’s about this straight-A college kid, fraternity guy, and a 14-year-old negro prostitute, and it’s got two dialogues in the same book. One chapter is what he’s doing and what he does, and the next chapter is her view of him. It actually comes out and states something that’s actually true… This guy who wrote it, you can’t label him. He’s unlabelable.”
6 The Oxford Book of English Verse by Christopher Ricks, editor
From Dylan’s website: Here is a treasure-house of over seven centuries of English poetry, chosen and introduced by Christopher Ricks, whom Auden described as “exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding.” The Oxford Book of English Verse , created in 1900 by Arthur Quiller-Couch and selected anew in 1972 by Helen Gardner, has established itself as the foremost anthology of English poetry: ample in span, liberal in the kinds of poetry presented. This completely fresh selection brings in new poems and poets from all ages, and extends the range by another half-century, to include many twentieth-century figures not featured before–among them Philip Larkin and Samuel Beckett, Thom Gunn and Elaine Feinstein–right up to Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney.
Here, as before, are lyric (beginning with medieval song), satire, hymn, ode, sonnet, elegy, ballad, but also kinds of poetry not previously admitted: the riches of dramatic verse by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, Webster; great works of translation that are themselves true English poetry, such as Chapman’s Homer (bringing in its happy wake Keats’s ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’), Dryden’s Juvenal, and many others; well-loved nursery rhymes, limericks, even clerihews. English poetry from all parts of the British Isles is firmly represented–Henryson and MacDiarmid, for example, now join Dunbar and Burns from Scotland; James Henry, Austin Clarke, and J. M. Synge now join Allingham and Yeats from Ireland; R. S. Thomas joins Dylan Thomas from Wales–and Edward Taylor and Anne Bradstreet, writing in America before its independence in the 1770s, are given a rightful and rewarding place. Some of the greatest long poems are here in their entirety–Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey’, Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, and Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’–alongside some of the shortest, haikus, squibs, and epigrams.
7 Thucydides: The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians by Thucydides (Author) , Jeremy Mynott (Translator)
Dylan in “Chronicles”: “[It’s ] A narrative which would give you the chills. It was written four hundred years before Christ and it talks about how human nature is always the enemy of anything superior. Thucydides writes about how words in his time have changed from their ordinary meaning, how actions and opinions can be altered in the blink of an eye. It’s like nothing has changed from his time to mine.”
8 Last Train To Memphis by Peter Guralnick
From Dylan’s website: Train to Memphis was hailed on publication as the definitive biography of Elvis Presley. Peter Guralnick’s acclaimed book is the first to set aside the myths and focus on Elvis’ humanity, as it traces Elvis’ early years, from humble beginnings to unprecedented success. At the heart of the story is Elvis himself, a poor boy of great ambition and fiery musical passions, who connected with his audience and the age in a way that has yet to be duplicated.
9 The Life and Times of Sonny Barger and the Hell’s Angels Motorcycle Club, by Sonny Barger
Bob Dylan in the 2012 Rolling Stone interview: Look who wrote this book. [Points at coauthors’ names, Keith Zimmerman and Kent Zimmerman.] Do those names ring a bell? Do they look familiar? Do they? You wonder, “What’s that got to do with me?” But they do look familiar, don’t they? And there’s two of them there. Aren’t there two? One’s not enough? Right? [Dylan’s now seated, smiling.]
I’m going to refer to this place here. [Opens the book to a dog-eared page.] Read it out loud here. Just read it out loud into your tape recorder.
“One of the early presidents of the Berdoo Hell’s Angels was Bobby Zimmerman. On our way home from the 1964 Bass Lake Run, Bobby was riding in his customary spot – front left – when his muffler fell off his bike. Thinking he could go back and retrieve it, Bobby whipped a quick U-turn from the front of the pack. At that same moment, a Richmond Hell’s Angel named Jack Egan was hauling ass from the back of the pack toward the front. Egan was on the wrong side of the road, passing a long line of speeding bikes, just as Bobby whipped his U-turn. Jack broadsided poor Bobby and instantly killed him. We dragged Bobby’s lifeless body to the side of the road. There was nothing we could do but to send somebody on to town for help.” Poor Bobby.
10 Confessions of a Yakuza, Dr. Junichi Saga
In the 2012 Rolling Stone interview Bob Dylan was asked about some lines in songs on Love and Theft that seem to be very close to lines in Saga’s book and Dylan responded: Oh, yeah, in folk and jazz, quotation is a rich and enriching tradition. That certainly is true. It’s true for everybody, but me. I mean, everyone else can do it but not me. There are different rules for me. And as far as Henry Timrod is concerned, have you even heard of him? Who’s been reading him lately? And who’s pushed him to the forefront? Who’s been making you read him? And ask his descendants what they think of the hoopla. And if you think it’s so easy to quote him and it can help your work, do it yourself and see how far you can get. Wussies and pussies complain about that stuff. It’s an old thing – it’s part of the tradition. It goes way back. These are the same people that tried to pin the name Judas on me. Judas, the most hated name in human history! If you think you’ve been called a bad name, try to work your way out from under that. Yeah, and for what? For playing an electric guitar? As if that is in some kind of way equitable to betraying our Lord and delivering him up to be crucified. All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell.
Seriously?
I’m working within my art form. It’s that simple. I work within the rules and limitations of it. There are authoritarian figures that can explain that kind of art form better to you than I can. It’s called songwriting. It has to do with melody and rhythm, and then after that, anything goes. You make everything yours. We all do it.
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
Morrissey: ‘I see no difference between eating animals and paedophilia. They are both rape, violence, murder’
In a Q&A on his fan site, True To You, Morrissey goes after meat eaters:
If you have access to You Tube, you should click on to what is called The video the meat industry doesn’t want you to see. If this doesn’t affect you in a moral sense then you’re probably granite. I see no difference between eating animals and paedophilia. They are both rape, violence, murder. If I’m introduced to anyone who eats beings, I walk away. Imagine, for example, if you were in a nightclub and someone said to you “Hello, I enjoy bloodshed, throat-slitting and the destruction of life,” well, I doubt if you’d want to exchange phone numbers…
I would like all governments to be forced to engage an Animal Protectionist MP. I would like a complete zoo and circus ban. I would like every television commercial that promotes ‘flesh-food’ to be followed by a commercial showing how the living pig and the living cow become the supermarket commodity, step by step. I would like the Queen of England to be asked why she wears an electrocuted bear-cub on her head. I would like to ask all so-called celebrity chefs why they believe that animals should have no right to live. If Jamie ‘Orrible is so certain that flesh-food is tasty then why doesn’t he stick one of his children in a microwave? It would taste the same as cooked lamb. The singer Cilla Black recently appeared on television telling us how she was preparing leg of lamb for dinner, and since a lamb is a baby, I wondered what kind of mind Cilla Black could possibly have that would convince her that eating a baby is OK. On another TV program an actor called Jeremy Edwards explained how excited he was at the discovery in Siberia of preserved Woolly Mammoths with enough DNA (flowing blood) to resurrect the animals – which have obviously been extinct for thousands of years. Edwards was excited by this because he said “I’d really like to try a Mammoth burger.” This, alas, is typical of the human idiot. Although the meat industry alone is destroying the planet, I would like to ask President Obama why he says nothing on the subject. Although the meat industry puts an intolerable strain on the medical profession I would like to ask world leaders why they say nothing on the subject. Although meat products are killing off half the human race very speedily, I would like to ask world leaders why they do not care in the least. Money, and only money, makes the world go around. I would also like to ask meat-eaters why they are so certain that animals deserve such barbaric and horrific treatment. I would like to ask meat-eaters why they believe that animals should not have any rights to live their own lives, whilst humans fiercely demand a god-given right to live as they wish simply by reason of their birth alone.
Read the entire Q&A here.
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
Watch: Arcade Fire’s Win Butler Interviewed in Car by Rainn Wilson
Rainn Wilson talks to Win Butler about music, his inspiration, Hatti, advice that Neil Young gave him and what went into making Reflektor.
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
Pussy Riot Members Meet the Press: ‘I don’t want to live in [Putin’s] terrifying fairytale’
On Friday December 27, 2913, two days after Christmas, the two just-freed members of Pussy Riot, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina held their first press conference since their release at the studios of the Russian opposition TV station, TV Rain. The spoke before 100s of journalists.
Here are some of their comments:
Tolokonnikova:
“The message of our action in the cathedral is still valid. Our attitude to Putin hasn’t changed at all. By Putin we mean the bureaucratic machine he has built. We’d like to do what we said in our last action – we’d like him to go away.”
“Vladimir Putin is a very closed, opaque chekist [Russian slang for a secret policeman]. He is very much afraid. He builds walls around him that block out reality. Many of the things he said about Pussy Riot were so far from the truth, but it was clear he really believed them. I think he believes that Western countries are a threat, that it’s a big bad world out there where houses walk on chicken legs and there is a global masonic conspiracy. I don’t want to live in this terrifying fairytale.”
They spoke about their new human rights organization, Zone of Law [ a play on “the zone,” shorthand for “prison camp” in Russian]. The new organization will offer legal aid to prisoners who complain of violence, threats, abuse and overwork, according to Rolling Stone.
Tolokonnikova:
“We already started to do this [human rights work] in the camp. There we had nothing; the only thing we had was our will. After my hunger strike and letter, the 16-hour slave-working day has become a thing of the past, and they’ve begun to release people on parole. Fear has appeared among the guards at the colony. It’s unbelievably important now to continue this work.”
Alyokhina:
“We really are provocateurs. But there’s no need to say that word like it’s a swear word. Art is always provocation.”
Tolokonnikova said her thinking has evolved while in prison, and it was now “absolutely obvious” that if she could redo the past, she would not participate in the band’s 2011 “punk prayer” against Putin.
Tolokonnikova:
“I was smaller, I was younger and I had other understandings about my goals. I don’t think that you have to chain yourself to some moments in the past. I would like to be judged by those things that I’m going to do now.”
And there will be no Pussy Riot concerts to capitalize on their notoriety.
Alyokhina: “I think we can popularize our ideas without concerts.”
For more of this story:
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
Bobby Womack Working on Followup to ‘ Bravest Man In The Universe’ with Stevie Wonder, Snoop Dogg, Rick Ross
Soul great Bobby Womack has been working on a followup to his incredible comeback album, Bravest Man In The Universe,
he said in an interview with Okayplayer.com
He said he may also work again with Damon Albarn and XL Records boss Richard Russell, who both produced his previous album.
I told Damon and Richard that whenever they’re available to record I will make myself available. But I was already Working on a new album, I have Stevie Wonder on it, I have Rod Stewart, Levert, Snoop Dogg is on it, this lady from Motown–now what was her name? Well, I have a lot of songs where you hear Stevie Wonder singing the song and you hear me on the same song, so you really get the style, because I think that’s important. You don’t get that style anymore. Like Sam Cooke and Ray Charles I love both because they’re both so different. Nowadays its more about fitting everybody in with the latest style or the latest fad–and then that’s how they get rid of you so quick when the fad goes out—except maybe Mariah Carey, she still has that voice and that sound you recognize. But you know I heard an interview with Gloria Gaynor the other day and what she was saying was true: mostly you have to really fight to get your own sound and get it down. It takes time; sometimes it takes a few records that don’t sell till you find it. Anybody– Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye–they all fought the labels to put their own sound down and that’s why they lasted.
Read more here at Okayplayer.com.
Bobby Womack, “The Bravest Man in the Universe”:
Time Tripping Back to 1970 with Neil Young: “Live at the Cellar Door”
“Opening up and finding what’s inside me to write.”
By Michael Goldberg.
Neil Young bangs away at the chords. And there’s such sadness in his voice. He’s playing an acoustic guitar. He’s nearly finished his third song of the night. Banging away too hard. Or maybe the way he’s banging at those chords is perfect. And oh, the sadness.
In that quavering voice he sings:
Yes only love can break your heart, What if your world should fall apart?
Love broke my heart, and my world fell apart. I was 17. When you’re 17 you don’t know you’ll recover. When you’re 17 everything about love is the first time, even if it’s not the first time.
When you were young and on your own, How did it feel to be alone?
She had long brown hair, almost down to her waist. She wore white peasant blouses and worn denim overalls. It was 1970 and the world was so different. There are a lot of clichés about the ‘60s, which actually didn’t end until the early ‘70s (countercultural movements don’t conveniently end as a new decade begins), a lot of misunderstanding about what it was like back then.
There was a day in 1970 when we sat together, her and I, in the swing that hung from a huge tree in her family’s very private, very large front yard, and the wind was making the leaves in the trees shimmer, and the future seemed wide open, full of possibility, I mean anything was possible. Her body warm against mine as we swung back and forth. The whole world about to be remade, I just knew it.
I am lonely but you can free me, All in the way that you smile.
Yes, that was exactly it. Exactly.
Neil’s music was part of my soundtrack during the ‘60s and the ‘70s. He sang the sad songs and as a teenager I didn’t want to know the pain I heard in his voice. But I did know it. Every time her and I were apart, I knew it. Still I loved to hear Neil’s voice.
And later, after it was over, when we just couldn’t make it together — that girl and I — I knew for real how true Neil’s words were, and today they’re still true.
Neil’s new album, Live at the Cellar Door, was recorded in 1970, 43 years ago, at the Cellar Door, a club in Washington, DC. Listening to it I see, hear, feel, smell those days, a rush of moving images, as if my life was captured on film and these old recordings are the key to starting up the projector. All the ways I blew it, and how crazy it got. And she wouldn’t take my calls, wouldn’t see me when I came to her door, and I thought I’d explode.
Yes, love can break your heart — a cliché and so what, ‘cause it’s the truth.
Hearing Neil sing those old songs in that tenor voice, the tenor voice of a young man, it breaks my heart all over again. Neil was 25 when he played those songs at the Cellar Door.
For the rest of this column, head to Addicted To Noise.
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-