Damn it.

LINE
Greg Tate
1952-2012


"Be always drunken.
Nothing else matters:
that is the only question.
If you would not feel
the horrible burden of Time
weighing on your shoulders
and crushing you to the earth,
be drunken continually.
LINE
Drunken with what?
With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.
But be drunken."
LINE
Charles Baudelaire
Paris Spleen


Peter Laughner: Baudelaire

Kinderland Zim, pt. 2

So... our boy just won himself the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is well-deserved, of course, because the accolade hasn't been invented that isn't well-deserved by the likes of Bob Dylan. If nothing else, we should reward him for having been correct all those years ago: as it turns out, maintaining an ironclad grasp on his own public persona was the way to go (if this were a good novel there would undoubtedly be ironic consequences for a lifetime of antsy micromanagement, but Dylan, better than most, appreciates the barely-passing resemblance between fiction and real life). Anyway, the rubes may be inclined to use this occasion to honor his protest singer days, but we here at KSM Central prefer a more sardonic view: that an actual protest singer would've used his moment on stage with Obama to bring up the kill list, and inquire whether our President's views on that subject were, to employ his own jargon, "evolving." (It is, after all, a subject that made the original top-ten list: number six with a bullet!)


The Fugs: The Ten Commandments



I mean, really now... a protest singer? The man was a writer of protest songs, no doubt. One of the best. Maybe even the best. And look, we can debate the true criteria for that noble profession up and down, and never see eye to eye. But I have to insist that, at a bare minimum, we agree that anyone who claims the protest singer mantle and is actually worth a damn has to actually, y'know... protest against something. The operative word there in italics. Conviction of one's own righteousness is rarely a pretty thing, but you do get points for guts. You also get the contempt of the other side, sometimes long after you've stopped performing, sometimes long after you've died. It does not, most assuredly, get you Presidential honorifics.


And what's more, I don't think Bob Dylan himself ever really cottoned to that title, and I don't mean Bob Dylan: eccentric septuagenarian, I mean Bob Dylan: hero of the revolution. The guy who rolled into New York City in 1961 as a cliché -- just one more rebellious kid with an acoustic guitar. On the outside. Of course, on the inside: the mind of a genius who would redefine songwriting forever. But maybe he didn't know that yet, and besides, no one starts out like that. So he gravitates to the folk scene, because rock 'n' roll is for sock hops, and jazz is for freaky hep-cats, and all the Beats (all the important ones, anyway) have moved to Paris. In that way, we're lucky. He could've just as easily tried to track down Allen Ginsberg as he did Woody Guthrie. ('course, Ginsberg probably takes one look at that spastic Midwestern haircut and thinks, "L7." And that's that.)


But track down Woody Guthrie he does, and strikes up a friendship with him, which in time becomes a cornerstone of the Bob Dylan mythology: the torch passed across generations, from one legend to another. And we know this because Dylan tells us -- a relentless campaign of self-promotion -- about the Woody/Bob connection, regularly citing Guthrie as his personal hero before performing his songs on stage. There are also written tributes, like Song to Woody on his 1962 debut album, and Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie, a poem he reads at NYC's Town Hall in 1963. 


Bob Dylan: Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie [live]



That may sound like an epitaph, until you realize that Woody didn't shuffle off until 1967. So "last thoughts" in this case mean something else, and I wonder if they signify a kind of public breakup, because right around that point is when Dylan's star kicked its ascendancy into overdrive, and being Woody's protégé wasn't exactly necessary anymore. Remember: Bob Dylan circa '61 has the burgeoning talent, the voice, the drive, the guile -- everything but the one thing that folk music actually demands. No street cred. No one would ever mistake Bob Dylan as a man of the people. (For chrissakes, he named himself after a Welsh poet!) He could've gone out to Imperial Valley and played the picket line there, or sang outside a Greensboro Woolworth, but those kind of dues mean time and sweat and sometimes blood. And Woody Guthrie himself is just across the river in Brooklyn State Hospital, and catching the subway to East Flatbush is almost the same as riding the rails hobo-style (just like his hero!), and anyway, the official biographers can edit that part later on.





This is not meant as cynicism. If Dylan's a huckster, then the entire '60s folk revival was a giant poseur racket. Any true artist puts his own ambitions first, and as we don't generally blame Picasso for abandoning figurative art, or Miles Davis for leaving bop behind, so should Dylan get the benefit of our doubt. But it's instructive to remember that at the same time he was publicly associating himself with Woody Guthrie, he was also debuting material like A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall. I think it's fair to wonder, as sincere and starry-eyed as he may have been on those visits to Woody, if he wasn't already keenly aware that, artistically, he was already light years beyond his mentor. And that very shortly, "protest singer" was gonna be completely worthless as a job description.


2. Don't Think Twice, It's All Right


I'm at a bit of a loss to explain why this is in the slices. Could be it's there as a tribute to Sylvan Lake alum Suze Rotolo, who Dylan wrote it about. Could be it's just one of those tunes that Ira likes to sing (and as discussed earlier, the rare Dylan song that achieves RGS), so it made the cut. It's certainly one of his sweeter breakup songs, which, I guess, makes it a little more appropriate for Lower Seniors to sing than, say, Ballad in Plain D. But enough about Bob Dylan! Let's commence to talking about Elvis.


If anyone on the planet ever came close to "getting" Dylan, it had to be Elvis Presley. A young singer, a meteoric rise to superstardom, the pressure of fans with great expectations -- Dylan's practically the Jewish Elvis. (Hmmm... The King = extreme reverence for his mother, plus was regularly paired up with the original shiksa. On the other hand, fried PB-&-banana sandwiches only sound treif. Really, it's a toss-up.) There's an Elvis cover of Don't Think Twice, and we'll get to that, right after I set that up with his absolutely bee-yoo-taful version of Tomorrow Is a Long Time.


Not exactly Dylan's most famous work, I know. It didn't get an official release until his second greatest hits LP in 1971. But that performance is a live take from 1963, and it was enough of a staple of his at the time (plus there were bootleg copies even then) that it was known. It's a nice-enough tune about finding peace with one's true love. Within his own catalog, it's pretty forgettable, and in fact I always confuse it with Simon & Garfunkel's Kathy's Song, which almost certainly rips it off.

Elvis' version appears as a bonus cut on the 1966 Spinout soundtrack. That's merely the first awesome thing about it. (And it's one of the biggest disappointments of my life to discover that the song isn't actually in the movie.) The second awesome thing about it is that Elvis got into it after hearing Odetta's cover on her 1965 Odetta Sings Dylan album. In a million years, I would not have assumed Elvis Presley knew who Odetta was, let alone was familiar with her arrangements. The thing is, I've heard Odetta's version, and it's good. But it in no way prepares one for the smooth bluesy number that Elvis purrs forth like a sultry wildcat. When Dylan sings this, its the smart play: it's a bookish, mumbly high school kid penning a paean to romantic love right before his girl, who's clearly out of his league to begin with, calls it quits on him. When Elvis sings this, it's pure hormonal vibe on every twang, and never mind his lady who's swooning with every line, the girls two coffee houses over are groovin' on the contact high. And just imagine the teeny-bopper who picked up the Spinout LP for grade-A Elvis crap like Adam and Evil or Beach Shack, and then got waylaid by this scorcher. Yowza! (And Dylan knew it, 'cause he told Rolling Stone in 1969 that it was his fave cover of any of his songs.)


Elvis Presley: Tomorrow Is a Long Time

Skip ahead a few years. 1973 Elvis is thicker and crabbier and doesn't give a crap. He's in his Vegas phase, during which his recorded output is not exactly inspiring. 1973 Elvis would not -- could not -- have recorded Tomorrow Is a Long Time, and made it hum like that. But '66 EP wouldn't have known what to do with Don't Think Twice, whereas it fits '73 EP like a velvet glove. To be sure, this is not stellar material. Elvis is clearly over-enamored with the "rooster crows" chorus, so much so that he sings it four-and-a-half times. He also skips the middle two verses, conveniently the ones where the singer suggests his own stake in the relationship (and thus hints at his own culpability in its deterioration). With those out of the picture, the song becomes kind of a faux-classy-sounding way to tell your ex to blow off, which, one imagines, is almost certainly the mood Elvis was trying to strike. It's not difficult to picture him doing a twelve-minute on-stage version of this, with a dozen-or-so rooster choruses, each one a nasty little morsel of bitterness to be savored. (By Elvis. Not necessarily by anyone else.) Oddly enough, '73 BD, just starting to write Blood on the Tracks, may have thought about this what '66 BD once thought about Tomorrow Is a Long Time.


Elvis Presley: Don't Think Twice, It's All Right

Against type, I'm not exactly comfortable leaving this post with bitter '70s Elvis, so I'll hit you with one more cover. A few years ago, the rapper K'naan -- whose take on With God on Our Side is one of the better tracks on the Amnesty comp -- teamed up with producer J.Period to create The Messengers, a remix project paying tribute to Bob Marley, Fela Kuti and Dylan. Good stuff, most of it, and I particularly dug this remix of Don't Think Twice, which makes good use of sampling the original song to paint a broader retrospective of the artist. Props to the end, which presents a few different takes on Dylan's fame (including his own, and Ronnie Gilbert's) without attempting to draw any definitive conclusions. The Messengers can be (legally) downloaded in it's entirety (for free!) here.


J.Period & K'naan:
Don't Think Twice [messengers remix]



Next time: the Jester.


Peace & Vinyl,
The KassaNostra


CODA: The revolution will not (not) be commodified! Occupy This Album, another venti-sized comp project, went on sale a couple weeks ago. Among the featured 99 artists (seriously) is Kinderland-alum all-star badass supergroup Black Dragon, deftly blending a Phil Ochs sample into the middle of some deep bass grooves. I'd give you the link to buy a copy, but that'd be sooooo one percent (nah, just kiddin').