I’ll be discussing the Basement Tapes with DJ Brian Wise on his Melbourne, Australia radio show, Off The Record, on Triple R radio at 9:45 Australian time.
If you miss the live broadcast, the show will be available on-demand a few days after it airs and I’ll be doing a post about that with a link to the stream.
But listen live, it’s more fun.
I’ll talk about why the Basement Tapes are important, the context for their creation and more.
Following me Brian Wise will interview T Bone Burnett about the Basement Tapes and the New Basement Tapes album Burnett produced with Elvis Costello, Jim James ad others. Should make for a great show if you care about Bob Dylan.
Since the show is broadcast in Australia, those of us in the U.S. should tune in on Friday November 14 in the afternoon at 2:45 pm, and if you’re elsewhere in the world, you can figure out when to tune in easy enough. Use this time zone converter.
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[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
One way the story goes, Bob Dylan called members of The Hawks who were still on salary with him but living in New York, and he had them come to Woodstock, at first to work on a film and then to back him on some demos of new songs.
Robbie Robertson has a different version. As Robbie tells it, the guys moved up to Woodstock and rented Big Pink and set up the basement for recording. Then Dylan came over, saw it, and wanted to record there. and asked the guys to back him.
The only problem with Robbie’s version is that before anything happened in the basement, there were sessions with members of The Hawks in the Red Room at Dylan’s house, Hi Lo Ha, in Byrdcliffe Colony, not far from Woodstock.
Still, it’s interesting to hear Robbie tell his version of the Basement Tapes story.
Here’s a transcript:
We had moved up to Woodstock, New York because in New York City we couldn’t find a place that we could work on our music without it being too expensive or bothering people or something.
We go up there, and Albert Grossman says, “Up there you can find a place, you know, that’s there no people around and you can do whatever you want.” We’re thinking, “Oh, my God, we desperately need that,” and there was some stuff that I was working on then with Bob Dylan up there, too, some film things that we were messing around with.
Anyway, we went up there, we found this ugly pink house out in West Saugerties, just on the outskirts of Woodstock on a hundred acres and there’s nothing around and we think, “All right, we can do this.” We get this place. Some of the guys live there and, in the basement of this place, I think, “Okay, we’ll set up our equipment here and this is where we’ll work on our music.”
Robbie talks about the Basement Tapes.
I have a friend of mine who knows about acoustics and recording and microphones and all kinds of things, so I say to him, “Take a look at this place and see, because we’re going to use this and we just want to make sure that it’s going to work.”
At this time, you’ve got to remember, nobody was doing this. It didn’t exist, that people would set up and now everybody does it. Back then, this was very rare. It was like Les Paul did that. Everybody else, if you were going to make a record, you went and made a record where they make records, right?
Anyway, I had this friend of mine, this guy that I know, look at the thing in the basement and he said, “Well, this is a disaster.”
He said, “This is the worst situation. You have a cement floor, you have cinder block walls and you have a big metal furnace in here. These are all of the things that you can’t have if you’re trying to record something, even if you’re just recording it for your own information, your own benefit. You can’t do this. This won’t work. You’ll listen to it and you’ll be depressed. Your music will sound so bad that you’ll never want to record again.”
I’m like, “Holy, jeez.” I said, “Well, what if we put down a rug?”
He said, “A rug?” He said, “You don’t need a rug, you need everything here. This is impossible.”
The legendary basement. Note the rug.
I thought, “God, well that’s pretty depressing,” but we’d already rented the place. We didn’t have a choice. I was thinking, should we set up upstairs in the living room? What should we do here?
I thought, well, the hell with it. We have no choice. We don’t have the flexibilities, and we got this old rug and we did put a rug down, and we got a couple of microphones left over from the tour. We had this little tape recorder and we were going to start writing and making this music for our record.
Then Bob Dylan comes out and he sees this and he says, “This is fantastic!” He said, “Why don’t we do some stuff together?” He’s like, “I want to record, I need to make up some songs for the publishing company for other people to record.”
In the meantime, Bob is taking care of all of us all of this time. We owe him to do something just to, because the idea was we were going to go into another tour but he broke his neck in a motorcycle thing and we couldn’t do that. We’re still on the payroll and it’s going on and on and on, so it was a way to do something, a gesture back.
I said, “Yeah, okay, we’ll do these things and then we’ll work on our stuff.”
He starts coming up and he comes out all the time. It’s like the clubhouse, now, this place. We love it and we’re laying down these things on tape and, in their own way, they’re like field recordings.
They sound fantastic in their own way. I think, you know what? There is something about bringing the recording experience to you in your own comfort zone, as opposed to going into somebody’s studio that has a huge clock on the wall and the guys in the union there saying, “Hey, it’s about dinner break.” You make your own atmosphere. There’s something very creative about this.
We do the stuff with Bob, we do all kinds of stuff ourselves, everything, the whole thing. It’s like nobody’s ever going to hear this thing. It becomes the first huge bootleg Rock ‘N Roll music record ever. It was like, that wasn’t the idea. That was only for the publishing company and the artists that might want to record that particular song. It became a whole other phenomenon, and it’s okay.
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[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
In early October I was interviewed about my novel, True Love Scars, on this cool punk radio show, Cheap Hooch, that’s broadcast online every Sunday from 4 pm ’til 6 pm.
I talk about some of the themes in the book and more. Plus you’ll get to hear “Hey Bartender,” one of the songs that shows up early in the book, as well as artists referenced in the book including The Stooges and Mott The Hoople. Holly Hooch, the DJ, also plays some great songs by David Bowie, the Flamin’ Groovies and much more.
The show begins with Holly Hooch talking about how she messed up and didn’t get directions to the studio to me in time, but then I end up calling in Holly and her friends in the studio interview me on the phone. It’s a good interview and theres good music too. I’ve become a big fan of Cheap Hooch Radio.
[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in the new issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Neil Young was on the Howard Stern Show on SiriusXM this morning talking for over an hour.
Rolling Stone picked out 12 highlights and you can read about them here.
Two highlights have to do with David Crosby.
“Playing with Stills and Nash in that band was really great,” Young said, purposefully not saying Crosby’s name. “I wish [Crosby] the best with his life. There’s love there. There’s just nothing else there. [A reunion] will never happen. Never happen, no, not in a million years….You have to think about things before you do them. If you make a mistake, you have to fix it right away. [A reunion] will never happen. You don’t have to worry about it. It’s easy to say ‘no.'”
At this point it appears that whatever relationship he had with Crosby is dead. What happened between them? “There’s nothing to apologize for,” Young said. “It was fixable, but it didn’t get fixed.” When Stern asked if it was Young’s fault it didn’t get fixed. “Absolutely not,” said Young. “I did everything I could to make sure it got fixed…We were together for a long time. We did some good work. Why should we get together and celebrate how great we were? What difference does it make? It’s not for the audience. It’s not for money, either. When you play music, you have to come from a certain place to do it and everything has to be clear and you don’t want to disturb that. I like to keep the love there, and if the love isn’t there, you don’t want to do it.”
Listen to the interview right now:
—
[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in a recent issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Early this year I read an incredible book about self-publishing called “Write. Publish. Repeat. (The No-Luck-Required Guide to Self-Publishing Success) by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant.
Turned out these guys, Platt and Truant, along with writer David Wright, have got a cottage industry going. They have written a lot of novels during the past few years and they’re selling books. Enough books that the three of them are making a living off the sales.
They have a website, Sterling & Stone, where, along with blogging about writing and their various projects, David Wright conducts interviews with writers and other artists.
He calls his interview series “Eight Questions.”
He asked me to participate in an interview, and I was happy to do so.
(By the way, from now until Saturday Octover 11, 2014, the Kindle version of my novel, True Love Scars, is on sale for $2.99 here.)
Here’s how the interview begins:
Michael Goldberg was a Senior Writer at Rolling Stone for a decade and wrote for Esquire, downbeat, Wired, Details, NME, British Mirabella, Creem, Crawdaddy, New York Rocker and many other publications. Goldberg founded the first web rock ‘n’ roll magazine in ’94, Addicted To Noise. Newsweek called him an “internet visionary.” Goldberg was editor-in-chief of SonicNet in the late ’90s, published Neumu.net during the first half of the 2000s and was editor-in-chief at MOG (now Beats Music) in the late 2000s. He currently publishes a popular music blog, Days Of The Crazy-Wild. Goldberg spent over six years writing the Freak Scene Dream Trilogy of which True Love Scars is the first book.
What is your daily creative routine like?
I’ve been a professional writer for nearly 40 years. For years I wrote stories about musicians and the music business. When I was writing journalism fulltime, there were days when I spent the whole day researching and preparing to interview an artist and did no writing. There were days when I just hung out with a musician or a band and took detailed notes and interviewed them. There were days when I spent the entire day on the phone doing additional reporting for the story. And there were days (and nights) when all I did was write. One time I flew to London, spent a week researching a cover story on Boy George, flew to New York and wrote the story on deadline in the New York Rolling Stone office in a borrowed office.
So I learned that I didn’t need a specific routine, or rather, the routine was that every day I got up and did what needed to be done to further the story. Prepare. Report. Write. But I’m an obsessive, workaholic. When I’m working on a project, I’m 150% focused on it and all my waking and sleeping mind is focused on is that project.
So when I started seriously working on what turned into three novels – the Freak Scene Dream Trilogy, of which True Love Scars is the first – I obsessively worked on that project. I brought my laptop everywhere. I wrote in cafes, airports, on planes, on hotel beds, in my office, on the dining room table…
When I went for walks I would make notes on my iPhone or on scarps of paper.
I probably wrote for at least six hours a day, sometimes eight or nine hours, seven days a week. I worked that way for over six years. I wrote and revised, wrote and revised, wrote and revised. When the first draft was done I went back to the beginning and wrote and revised, wrote and revised. Same for the third draft. Every word in the book was scrutinized. I probably spent three or four years getting the unique voice that tells the story just right.
I led a fiction writing group for three years – Sept. 2010 ‘til Oct. 2013 – and what I told the writers in my group, over and over, was they had to write every day. And I really believe that. When you write every day, your subconscious is working overtime on your book. Obviously it’s best if you can write for a couple hours each day, but even 15 minutes keeps the novel or short story alive in your subconscious.
Right now I’m in novel promotion mode which means I’m focused, 24/7, on promoting my first novel, True Love Scars.
I get up at 7:30 or 8 am and I get a bowl or uncooked oatmeal, blueberries, cut up apple, almond milk, and flax and eat it while I scan the New York Times. I’ve also got Feedly on my iphone with writing/publishing news. I scan through all the stories that happened after I went to bed. I run up to my office and do a quick blog post or two to my Days of the Crazy-Wild culture blog.
Then I go take my dog for a walk, go to the gym for an hour workout (very, very important to survive as a writer). Get home and work for an hour or two – emailing media people, doing blog posts about a new review of my book or an interview that ran somewhere, maybe come up with a new ad for Goodreads, research other sites where I might be able to promote the book, etc. etc. Eat lunch – an almond butter sandwich and a huge salad with vinegar and some vegan chili for a dressing, and then it’s time to get back to work. I’ll work from 2 to 6 or 6:30, have dinner and hang out with my wife and then by 8 pm we both get back to work and work on our projects until 10 or 10:30 and then I’ll read for an hour or so.
What are some of your best creative habits and what are some of the bad ones you struggle with?
I’m very self-disciplined. When I was working on the trilogy, I worked pretty much every day, seven days a week, for years and years. I read my work aloud every week to a veteran novelist who taught me a lot about writing fiction. I would read for two hours – he would stop me every 15 minutes or so and give me feedback. He was able to help me see what needed more work. Sometimes I’d be writing and revising a chapter for two months.
I don’t believe in writer’s block. I don’t really believe in the idea of inspiration. In other words, I sit down and I start writing. And if I don’t have anything to say, well I’ll start writing about how I don’t have anything to say. Weirdly, I always have something to say. And I don’t believe in waiting for inspiration. There are times when I’m totally in the zone and a scene is unfolding in this unbelievable way and the voice is perfect and words and phrases are appearing out of thin air and it’s mind-blowing. Other times it’s just all about getting my idea of what happens next down on the page knowing that I’ll be revising and revising and revising and so I never worry about whether the writing is any good ‘cause I know I’ll be fixing it anyway. Often, the next day, when I look at what I wrote, I find that much of it is useable, and even if some isn’t, it’s a hell of a lot easier to sit down to 3000 words and edit it into shape, than to sit down to a blank page. So the trick is to vomit what’s inside onto the page without any editing and then come back and edit.
I do want to note that at the end of the interview, I was asked: What do you want your legacy to be?
I answered the question, but after my final comment, I added :-), but that didn’t make the edit.
So when you read that final answer, keep in mind two things:
1) I’m smiling as I answer that question.
2) We all got a right to dream of greatness.
—
[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in the new issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
Bob Dylan will be performing 15 shows in Australia beginning August 13 in Perth, Australia. He’ll also be in Melbourne, and Sydney.
So today you can check out some past performances and interviews Dylan did in Australia.
Dylan said some interesting things during the following 1986 press conference.
Journalist: What does Bob Dylan think of Bob Dylan?
Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan doesn’t ever think about Bob Dylan
Journalist: Are you shy man?
Bob Dylan: Yeah, most of the time.
Journalist: Because of being shy, is it a burden being Bob Dylan?
Bob Dylan: Who’s Bob Dylan?
[laughter]
Bob Dylan: I’m only Bob Dylan when I have to be Bob Dylan. Most of the time I can just be myself.
And later in response to a question about the past, Dylan says this:
Dylan: We live here in the present time. You get up and have to deal with today. Yesterday’s gone, tomorrow’s not promised. So this is all we have, really.
Dylan press conference, 1986, Brett Whiteley Studio, Sydney
This was shot at a Dylan press conference in 1986. There’s 18 minutes of the press conference.
“Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” Byron Bay Bluesfest April 26, 2011:
“Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” Byron Bay Bluesfest April 26, 2011:
“Cold Irons Bound,” Byron Bay Bluesfest April 26, 2011:
“Tangled Up In Blue,” Byron Bay Bluesfest April 26, 2011:
“Highway 61 Revisited” / “Ballad of a Thin Man,” Byron Bay Bluesfest April 26, 2011:
“Like A Rolling Stone,” Byron Bay Bluesfest April 26, 2011:
Bob Dylan radio interview, Adelaide, Australia 1966:
“Ballad Of A Thin Man,” Sydney, April 13, 1966:
“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” Sydney, April 13, 1966:
“Positively Fourth Street,” Sydney, April 13, 1966:
“Visions Of Johanna,” Melbourne, April 20, 1966:
“She Belongs To Me,” Melbourne, April 20, 1966:
“Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” Melbourne, April 20, 1966:
“Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” Melbourne, April 20, 1966:
[I just published 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.
Of just buy the damn thing:
–- A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
I”ll be on Brian Wise’s “Off The Record” Triple R radio show today.
The show airs from 4 p.m. until 7 p.m. (U.S., Pacific Time) and somewhere in those three hours will be a 15 minute segment in which Brian Wise talks to me about my novel, True Love Scars.
Wise will be airing additional 15 minute segments from an interview he did with me a bout a week ago every week for the next three weeks following today’s show.
Note that David Kinney who wrote The Dylanologists will be on the show as will Bill Wyman who just wrote an article for New York magazine, “How Did Bob Dylan Get So Weird.”
Plus this story that ran about my novel and me in the Marin Independent Journal was reprinted in the Contra Costa Times (http://www.contracostatimes.com/…/former-rolling-stone…) and Inside Bay Area (http://www.insidebayarea.com/…/former-rolling-stone…) today.
[I just published 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.
Of just buy the damn thing:
–- A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
Plus there’s a cool video interview with Moroder at the Adult Swim site.
By the way you might want to check out the “True Love Scars” soundtrack playlist here. It’s the music that goes with the first two chapters of my novel.
–- A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –
In 1977, my wife Leslie and I interviewed Jesse Winchester. I was a young music critic at the time, and Leslie and I were freelancing for underground publications including the Berkeley Barb, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, as well as some local and national magazines.
I found the article we wrote when I was going through years of stories for a collection of my music journalism that I’m putting together. With Jesse’s passing this morning, I want to share it with those who, like I, have appreciated his music for many, many years, and for those who are hearing it for the first time today.
So here’s the article, along with a few of Jesse’s songs:
A Little Bit of Dixie in the Cool Blue North
By Leslie & Michael Goldberg
If there was ever a man who seemed predestined to be a singer/songwriter/musician it is draft-resister-turned-Canadian-citizen Jesse Winchester. His career has been riddled by strange lurches of fate. The strangest lurch of all, of course, was the Vietnam War.
Rather than be drafted, Winchester, at age 22, fled to Canada in January of 1967, arriving with only two hundred dollars in his pocket.
“I had never considered music as a profession until I was forced to,” reflected Winchester between sets in the dark, smokey Boarding House bar [in San Francisco] last week. “I tried to find a straight job when I moved to Canada in some kind of business or something. I wanted to show good faith to the Canadian government, that I was not going to be a ward of the state. So I looked around for a legitimate job and couldn’t find one.
“People heard my southern accent and wanted to know what I was doing there and when I told them they were kind of wary of hiring me. So music was the only thing I knew how to do that I knew I could make a living at. So I was pretty well forced into it.”
“The Brand New Tennessee Waltz” (produced by Robbie Robertson):
He hooked up with a Canadian rock and roll band, Les Astronauts. During the following two years Jesse was in and out of bands, writing songs and building a following in the clubs and bars of Montreal. Through fortunate circumstances Jesse happened to meet up with The Band’s Robbie Robertson.
“Robbie was a friend of a friend of the girl I was living with. He and I met in the basement of a church in Ottawa where I was working on a tape. So this friend I was speaking of brought Robbie down and he had just put out Music From Big Pink with his band So I was very impressed by him and very thrilled to meet him,” said Jesse, a softspoken, exceedingly polite man who neither drinks nor smokes.
“Robbie liked what we’d been doing. He decided we’d make a demo tape in a real studio and he would take it to Albert Grossman (Dylan’s former manager) which is what happened.”
ApparentIy Robertson, a Canadian himself with a fascination with the South, was much taken by Jesse’s heartfelt songs about his homeland.
“Black Dog” (produced by Robbie Robertson):
The Winchester family has a strong southern heritage which is evoked in many of Jesse’s songs. Jesse was born on May 17, 1944 in Shreveport, Louisiana. The Winchesters are connected to the Robert E. Lee family and Jesse’s fifth great – grandfather helped Andrew Jackson found Memphis. His grandfather gave the funeral oration at Memphis jazzman W. C. Handy’s funeral.
Jesse’s father was the first “radical” of the family. He hated World War II and initially rejected a legal career to work the land. “He was one of the original hippies in the late Forties,” said Winchester. “He took up farming to get closer to the land.”
Although Jesse insists on his Canadian loyalty, he is proud of the South and has turned to it for his songwriting inspira-tion. Perhaps his exile in Canada has fueled the fires of this great passion.
“I think I hear a noisy-old John Deer/ In a field specked with dirty cotton lint/ And below the field runs a little shady creek/And there you’ll find the cool green leaves of mint/ Mississippi you’re on my mind/ Mississippi you’re on my mind/ Oh, Mississippi you’re on, my mind.” — “Mississippi You’re On My Mind”
“Mississippi You’re On My Mind”:
Jesse Winchester is one of the best contemporary songwriters working today. Not only do songs like “Mississippi, You’re On My Mind” evoke crystal clear images and moods of the South, but his good natured songs about relationships transcend the merely personal to the universal.
“I’m no good company/ I guess that’s true/ I like my silence/ Like I love you/ But if you feel like talkin’/ Talk away/ I’m gonna hang on/ Every word you say.” — “Every Word You Say”
Although many of the songs on Jesse’s five albums are about the South, until recently he has had no way to tour the U.S. and thus expose his music. Despite highly favorable reviews of each album, starting with his first (and only) Robbie Robertson produced album, Jesse Winchester, right up to his latest, Nothing But a Breeze, Jesse was unable to sell many records. He lived off club work and the royalties that came in from versions of his songs, “Brand New Tennessee Waltz,” “Isn’t That So,” “‘Yankee Lady” and “Mississippi, You’re On My· Mind” recorded by better known artists including Joan Baez, Jimmy Buffett, the Everly Brothers and even Wilson Pickett. Carter’s amnesty was welcomed because it allowed Jesse to tour the U.S. for the first time and promote his records.
We caught two of Winchester’s many sold out shows at the Boarding House. Drawing from each of his albums, Winchester presented a powerful, cohesive performance that far surpassed his best recorded efforts. His was one of the best club appearances so far this year. The Midnight Bus, his terrific band, glided easily from Nashville-style country to funky blues and moody ballads.
“Biloxi”:
Winchester’s sense of humor, a side seldom revealed on record, balanced the serious tone of many of the songs. For a new tune, “Rhumba Man,” Jesse danced, bopped and gestured comically as he sang about the joys of doing the Rhumba.
Winchester’s tour through the U.S. has been wildly successful. Still, he feels uncomfortable with all the fanfare and his notoriety as the draft-dodging songwriter. “My feelings are ambivalent,” he admitted freely. “On one hand I know that a lot of publicity has come to me because of it and on the other hand I think it would be just in the worst possible taste to purposely capitalize on something like that. So I’m benefiting from an ugly thing. And it’s a fine, delicate line to tread and I just have to try extra hard to do the right thing, say the right thing all the time, be as forthright as I can on the subject.
“I’d like to be able to forget the whole thing. But on the other hand I can’t pretend it didn’t happen. I just have to play it by ear and do the best I can. My job at the moment is to play the best music I can and I think if I do that, eventually it will be the thing that will stand. I really have to concentrate on that and let the political stuff do what it will.”
Jesse, his French-Canadian wife Leslie, 26, and their two children, James, 5 and Alice, 2, make Montreal their home Jesse became a Canadian citizen in 1973.
“Yankee Lady”:
“I feel that can’t come back to the U.S. to live because I made a decision to move to Canada and not away from the United States. So I’m doing my best to be a good Canadian. I have nothing against the United States. I love the United State and always will. But my loyalties lie with Canada now. I’m very grateful to the country and I want to be a good citizen.”
When asked what he meant by the key lines of the title track of his new album “Me, I want to live with my feet in Dixie/ And my head in the cool blue North, Jesse explained, “It’s just talking about how people want to have their cake all eat it too. You kinda want both sides of things and it’s hard to make up your mind, that’s all.”
Elvis Costello, Jesse Winchester & Sheryl Crow play “Payday”:
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –
