Category: Music

I do hope they come my way again– I missed them when they came through here the Summer of 2008.

This had to be THE most hilarious segment on SNL this past weekend. It is absolutely HI-Larious on soooooo many levels! Gotta love the falsettos! 

Shillong, Bob Dylan And Cowboy Boots

The third-prize-winning entry — a reflection on what Shillong’s famed and unfussy love for western music implies for the city’s self-perception …

Anjum Hasan

Every year in Shillong on a grey afternoon towards the end of May, a man in a crisp white shirt walks down to a busy main street in a neighbourhood called Laitumkhraj. He carries a guitar, shiny with use, in a black guitar case and walks with measured slowness; nothing, not the kongs huddled behind minute wooden cartons that house supplies of tobacco, kwai and cigarettes, nor the anxious crowd that throngs the pavement, awaiting a crowded city bus, nor the idle waiters from Kelsang, lounging outside the restaurant’s dark doorway, cause the man to break the rhythm of his leisurely, swinging gait.

While Dylan will be performed with unrestrained passion, his feverish poetry will lose its growls and wit and wistfulness. It will evoke, instead, the languor of a pleasant evening in a small hill town.

He steps around puddles of afternoon rain without wetting his brown cowboy boots.

This year he could be on his way to the municipal swimming pool in the centre of town, one of the venues where Bob Dylan’s birthday is annually celebrated through song. In twenty minutes he will be walking down to the large swimming pool, blue as ice and empty of swimmers, a surprisingly evocative setting for an evening of what will essentially be gentle music. For while Dylan will be performed with unrestrained passion, his feverish poetry will lose its growls and wit and wistfulness. It will evoke, instead, the languor of a pleasant evening in a small hill town, and lull the listener into a sense of serene timelessness.

Here, on a low cemented platform facing the pool, looking out at the small crowd standing around, talking, giggling, and at the wooded slope beyond, lush with a rain-fed green, Cowboy Boots with his trademark grey ponytail and effervescent style will lead the Dylan concert. A couple of well-known names, some just born boy bands, some solo women performers with remarkably resilient voices, some old friends from Calcutta — all of these will join him to sing Bob Dylan numbers, songs of love, protest, mythology, warning or just plain sadness.

I never found this ritual exceptional till I came away from Shillong.

It has the sense of near-insignificance associated with a hundred people huddled in the front of a hall that can seat five times that number, listening to the same songs that they’ve heard sung in the same way as last year and the year before.

For this is a ritual — it isn’t your Channel [V]-style rock music party. It is an unobtrusive ritual, though a couple of people will always get a little drunk and tentatively scream ‘More!’ It’s not a concert that attracts hordes — it has the sense of near-insignificance associated with a hundred people huddled in the front of a hall that can seat five times that number, listening to the same songs that they’ve heard sung in the same way as last year and the year before.

And yet, till I lived in that city, all of this seemed fine. You went to the Dylan concert to hear musicians you knew play songs you knew, and their obvious talent filled you with admiration and restlessness. It worked both ways — the contained ambition of these singers, happy to be doing small things in a small town, filled one with a desperate desire to be elsewhere, to be someone else. And yet the power and belief in their voices, oblivious of the fact that they were, year after year, singing the songs of a man who was known for always being anxious to move on to the next thing, stilled you, taught you something.

But later, moving away from Shillong and meeting people who found an annual Dylan concert up in the hills utterly quaint, I began to wonder what an annual Dylan concert up in the hills actually counted for. What did Shillong’s famed and unfussy love for western music imply for the self-perception of the people of this city?

Take Cowboy Boots.

To me there is pathos not in the songs themselves, which are not especially evocative or original, but in this sphere he inhabits, a sphere full of unrecognised contradictions.

People recognise him on the streets — if not by name, if not as someone they have seen perform, then as a familiar oddball, a man who’s often seen walking around grinning, a man who is deliberately different. He is utterly irreverent, has a fantastic stage presence, sings rock and roll, does Chuck Berry-style shuffling duck walks. He is very local. He is often without work. He sings for money in the dimly lit lounges of three-star hotels on certain nights of the week.

In his own songs, Cowboy Boots writes about the small fry, the little man who gets conned by the big man, the guy who gets his head stuffed with education at school only to become a ‘wiser fool’. His songs are full of general observations on love and sorrow and the big themes. He stands out as a pop musician, though, because he has developed a unique personal style. He has taken the flourish of pop music, the narcissism and whimsicality that it allows for, and grafted that onto his small town anonymity. To me there is pathos not in the songs themselves, which are not especially evocative or original, but in this sphere he inhabits, a sphere full of unrecognised contradictions. In order to sustain his pop musician image he needs to live in this private ‘nowhere’, this Oz that exists only in a dream.

For the minute Cowboy Boots acknowledges the peculiarity of being a western pop star, he will cease to be anything at all.

If each dot on the world’s map functions according to its inner, inimitable logic, then pop music in Shillong, however derivative, expresses something about common sentiment.

While pop musicians in the west might be able to reflect on their situation and somehow connect their art to what is actually happening around them, should Cowboy Boots attempt to allow the outside world into his music — its language, its noises, its problems — he will lose his hold on the image he lives by. However much western pop music develops its own fictions and appearances, Cowboy Boots will always only reflect them. He is playing out the part of the showman who is playing out the part of a showman. He is a mirror within a mirror, a permanent fantasy, something that disappears on touch.

And that is why his music speaks to you only if you suspend disbelief, imagine away Shillong with its beauty and squalor, and think instead of a sanitised little world whose sorrows and joys are only universal and never particular. The audience for pop music participates equally in this act. Originality in music here never means more than writing your own songs. It doesn’t mean questioning the idiom of western pop music. But originality even in this basic sense is boring, it turns people off. A student bemoaning the lack of originality in an article in Funk, a college music magazine, quickly realises he just might be asking for too much.  ‘After reading this article this far, there would be a lot of people saying, “What the hell is wrong with this guy? If he thinks he’s so hot and oozing with creativity, let him go jam with Paul Gilbert and Billy Sheehan.”‘

So does it matter at all, this music, which is so much like the sounds Naipaul’s Mr.

In Shillong pop music is still very much practised like a traditional art. There is no self-consciousness attached to it, no reflection. Its purposes might be important, but they are unexamined.

Biswas hears in his inconsequential little neighbourhood, ‘sounds thrown up at a starlit sky from a place that was nowhere, a cot on the map of the island, which was a dot on the map of the world.’ But if each dot on the world’s map functions according to its inner, inimitable logic, then pop music in Shillong, however derivative, expresses something about common sentiment.

It points to the confusions of identify that beset us all in some measure, but it also shows how a city like Shillong can make these contradictions seem not just acceptable but cute. Shillong has space for exotic individuals like Cowboy Boots. In many ways, it is a city of make-belief. You could sing nice cover songs at concerts all your life, make people happy, and bypass post-colonial angst. You could put on a cosmopolitan air here, for other cities in the region like Kohima and Aizawl are too provincial, Guwahati too alienatingly urban, and the rest of the country too far away. You could live there for twenty-five years, as I have — loving its small-towns charms, chaffing constantly about not knowing your place in it — and spend the rest of your life fighting nostalgia.

Shillong then is susceptible to the glamour and the seductions of pop music. People like Cowboy Boots are completely at home here. Here he can be a local celebrity while dreaming irrelevant dreams about global fame.

Anxiety about the fragility of ethnic identities is expressed in diverse ways — from murder to letters to the local newspaper editor.

For he actually wishes to do nothing to be that famous. He would be lost in New Delhi or New York. Here he can be bohemian in an unthreatening way, poke fun at Backstreet Boys, speak to strangers about the vegetables he grows. He can combine in himself so many things that are typical to Shillong — the love of music, the small-town imperviousness to criticism, a certain innocence, a certain swagger…

But this also means that the stance of dissent in some of Shillong’s music cannot be much more than a harmless posture. For those people who sing the blues, swear by Dylan, do rock and roll, adore Bob Marley, are not necessarily those likely to assert a point of view, question authority, reflect on their identify as artists. There might have been a larger culture of protest that produced singers like Dylan, and the Beatles got where they did because they spoke with daring confidence to an entire generation, but in Shillong pop music is still very much practised like a traditional art. There is no self-consciousness attached to it, no reflection. Its purposes might be important, but they are unexamined.

Pop music is performed with a tremendous enthusiasm and genuine joy. Yet because of its context it expresses a yearning distinct from that of western pop. It expresses the yearning for another life, a life revealed in luminous five minute flashes, a life that we can only experience vicariously, a life that we wouldn’t know how to describe except that it seems to exist in the West.

Who are her children’s heroes? People who have somehow ‘made it’, who have travelled abroad, who wear the right clothes, who speak good English.

The differences between a Bob Dylan and a Bob Marley are irrelevant, they melt in that beautiful sadness we feel as soon as a guitar note is struck and this fantasy re-lived for the thousandth time.

Musicians, then, are friezes who come to life on stage and then disappear into the malaise of everyday life in Shillong. They play with rare spontaneity and skill, and you listen to them not to get a point of view on life in the city, but to escape it. For while there might be no real dissent in the music, all around us is more dissent than we can handle. On the streets of Shillong, protest is always so many things. Anxiety about the fragility of ethnic identities is expressed in diverse ways — from murder to letters to the local newspaper editor. This is protest that constantly impacts on the lives of people, demanding of them fixed positions and points of view. Yet pop music does not reflect these anxieties — it does not even reject them. It feeds off itself, off its own pleasures and poses.

Western music cannot enter this volatile world because the west is from where we derive the images we find desirable and wish to imitate. The west does not tell us how we should treat our neighbours or which ideals we ought to burn down shops for — all it gives us is a greatly seductive style. And no other form of culture is as susceptible to style — in the sense in which this word is opposed to substance — as pop music.

But you can’t make a living out of it. I have known pop musicians to complain that their more distant relatives consider their chosen careers ludicrous. And yet, music and ‘western’ musicians are there, everywhere.

Maybe Marley was able to make style a function of an intellectual position. He had something to say about the Carribean’s position in history, and he thereby put his own stamp on pop music. But take away this need to express something important, and all that pop leaves you with are memorable gestures.

Which is not to say that political agendas of themselves lend substance to art. On the contrary, the sense of community that forms the basis for protest and violence in Shillong, could actually be a rather restrictive thing. It is compelling and counts for a great deal, but it sets itself up as the last word on the question of who we are, when it is actually one of the many possible answers to that difficult question.

Take the case of my friend, Riti. Riti has never been on a train but her greatest aspiration is to have her children study outside the Northeast. Her parents belong to a generation that regarded all imports from the plains with awe — from English-speaking Mems to pressure cookers. Riti thinks it a sign of great accomplishment if she can get her homely traditional kitchen to turn out something like fried noodles. Her uniqueness, the uniqueness of her position is worth chronicling, just like Cowboy Boots is important for what he reveals about Shillong. But these individual aspirations, which can only be described as modern, somehow get erased in general formulations about tribal identity, and art, which could fill this gap — hold up a mirror to people’s ambiguities and specificities — fails to do so.

Hanif Kureishi writing about the Beatles phenomenon in his essay, ‘Eight Arms to Hold You’ describes what they represented to people of his generation in Britain. ‘For most, this pleasure [of listening to the Beatles] lasted only a few hours and then faded. But for others it opened a door to the sort of life that might, one day, be lived. And so the Beatles came to represent opportunity and possibility. They were career officers, a myth for us to live by, a light for us to follow.’  The Beatles were able to upturn prevalent notions of what constituted ‘culture’ because they showed now it was possible to both be creative and have a good time, to both have something important to say and eschew pretensions to high art.

Shouldn’t a singer who takes the risk of living entirely by an image of the 1960s western pop musician, who genuinely considers himself an artist, who displays a great deal of cheek and naughty humour, who sings with seductive charm, be the most sought after role model of Shillong’s west-infatuated youth? But he isn’t. His concerts are only attended by faithfuls, and are rarely sell-outs. I don’t know how many young people would be able to identify his songs. He is recognised on the streets of Shillong less for his music, and more because he has great style.

Consider my friend Riti again. Who are her children’s heroes?  People who have somehow ‘made it’, who have travelled abroad, who wear the right clothes, who speak good English. Riti desires financially secure futures for her children — and never mind where the money comes from — futures that are a whirl of lacy pink dresses and polished black boots, guitar-playing, child-bearing, church-going, house-building, money-making futures.

For music is fine sometimes, but you can’t make a living out of it. I have known pop musicians to complain that their more distant relatives consider their chosen careers ludicrous. And yet, there is music everywhere and ‘western’ musicians of all persuasions — elderly, mildly eccentric, men in Stetsons who run music schools where kids learn to play ‘I am Sailing’ on the guitar, middle-aged men from pop bands who work in government offices by day and jam with friends three nights a week, middle-aged women who play classical western piano and teach music in convent schools, screechingly loud boy bands, young honey-voiced women who sing solo or perform Christmas carols on the local television channel in December. Then there are people who just play music because it’s part of their upbringing — like the women in the neighbour’s house when I was growing up, who would drift into carpeted drawing rooms and sit at the piano for a while playing something sweet and melancholy, and then sigh and get on with their unhappy lives.

And the west is near, and yet so far. Bob Dylan could be a local hero, the way devotees sing happy birthday to him each year. But despite these birthday parties, he will never age. The words of his songs will remain frozen in memory, Cowboy Boots will do Dylan-voiced imitations every 24th of May, while all around him life in Shillong ebbs and flows to the rhythm of some other, less audible music.
via outlookindia.com 

Happy Birthday today, Mr. Zimmerman (aka, Bob Dylan)!

Jesse Cook is amazing with the guitar! One of my all-time favorites: It ain’t me babe… 🙂

HI-larious!

Rapturous performance of “I’ll Fly Away” by Gillian Welch & David Rawlings.

Happy Birthday, Bob! I’m so glad I got to see you LIVE in concert in 2007.

 

by David E. Anderson

“Folk songs are evasive — the truth about life, and life is more or less a lie, but then again that’s exactly the way we want it to be.” — Bob Dylan, Chronicles: Volume One

How many personas does Bob Dylan have?

How many pages are there in a book? Or days in a year? Or, perhaps most important, how many songs in a story?

“A folk song,” Dylan wrote in the first volume of his memoirs, “Chronicles,” “has over a thousand faces, and you must meet them all if you want to play this stuff.”

Over the course of his long career, Bob Dylan has become one of the world’s most important cultural figures. By the sheer magnitude of his talent and duration of his survival, Dylan is now an entertainment icon and elder statesman whose Delphic riddling rhymes and gnomic puns are no longer part of the countercultural margins but are sought out by such paragons of mainstream culture as 60 Minutes and Newsweek magazine.

His influence has extended well beyond the United States and well beyond his chosen genre of songwriting to literature, film, politics, and religion. His work and his many personae are, at turns, not only insightful and inspirational, wise, difficult, and mysterious but also contradictory, inconsistent and, yes, self-serving.

As he approaches his 70th birthday on May 24, one is tempted to speculate that he is also tamed, enjoying a new kind of fame — that of the establishment. Yet such acceptance — an honorary degree from Princeton, a set of Grammys, a Kennedy Center award, among many other accolades after a decade and a half of being dismissed as passé and something of a has-been — has made Dylan no easier to understand, no easier to parse, and no less compelling a writer, one who both shapes and is shaped by the best and worst of America.

You can pick your badge of honor or outrage. He sang in Mississippi during the civil rights movement, denounced the war in Vietnam, embraced a strident and judgmental Protestant fundamentalism, lauded the poetry of the gay Beat and Buddhist poet Allen Ginsberg, condemned corporate greed, remained silent on Central America, celebrated Zionist nationalism, failed to credit members of the band on one of his major albums, and appeared in a Victoria’s Secret lingerie commercial.

As attention again focuses on him, the critical debates also rage about who he is, what his work means, and what of his vast oeuvre matters.

He is hailed, but not unanimously, as a superb songwriter and musician and lauded as one of the best poets of the second half of the 20th century. He is the subject of hundreds of academic articles, numerous college courses, and dozens of books, including literary critic Christopher Ricks’s “Dylan’s Vision of Sin” and New Testament scholar Michael J. Gilmour’s “Tangled Up in the Bible: Bob Dylan and Scripture.”. A more complete edition of his song lyrics has been published, providing both fans and scholars ready access to the songs as written (but not necessarily as performed).

Over the years, Dylan has refused to be confined to the boxes into which his fans — and sometimes critics — seek to put him, whether political, religious, or even musical. He seems almost a caricature of the American Adam, constantly reinventing his public and musical self, always ready, like Huck Finn, “to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest” when Aunt Sally and “sivilization” (his fans and critics) threaten to hem him in. We all should have learned by now that “he not busy being born is busy dying.”

Still, as a 21st-century version of Walt Whitman, the poet he perhaps most emulates, he has consistencies and repeated themes in his many selves and their reinventions, whether amid the radicalism of the 1960s or the religiosity of the 1980s. From his first recordings, when he was still apprenticing himself to the folk and blues traditions, religious concerns and moral motifs have permeated the work as they do those musical traditions. Religious and biblical language has been a consistent but always complex and sometimes contradictory element. As he said in a 1963 interview, “There’s mystery, magic, truth, and the Bible in great folk music. I can’t hope to touch that. But I’m going to try.”

Such language seems to run through his work in the way theologians once talked about some “red thread” versions of the Bible used to denote the words of Jesus. Religious and biblical language has been part of the many public versions of Dylan, whether political, religious, countercultural, or minstrel. He may well be among the last generation for whom biblical language is a normal part of literary allusion and discourse and not an affectation or a necessary signal of a dogmatic belief system.

Thus it is important to note that at root, as English critic Michael Gray has pointed out, Dylan is a moralist rather than the prophet many of his fans, both secular and religious, have longed for. His songs are about the struggle for a moral code, and it is, ultimately, the music that provides his religious framework. As Gray puts it in his important study of Dylan, “Song and Dance Man III,” “Along with this unfailing sense of the need for moral clarity, Dylan’s work has also been consistently characterized by a yearning for salvation. In fact the quest for salvation might well be called the central theme of Bob Dylan’s entire output. To survive, you must attain that clarity of morality: you won’t even get by without going that far, and then you must go beyond — get rescued from the chaos and purgatory and find some spiritual home.”

Dylan’s use of religious motifs and biblical imagery has sparked a host of commentaries and critical analyses, many by evangelical Christians. As fans and critics in the 1960s sought to make Dylan a spokesman for a generation involved in the civil rights and antiwar movements (a role he ultimately rejected, as he writes movingly but not always convincingly in “Chronicles”), so too many evangelicals welcomed his celebrated conversion to fundamentalist Christianity and sought to define the minstrel as minister. For a brief period after his 1978 conversion, Dylan appeared willing to play that role, sometimes preaching from the stage, just as he had, for an equally brief time, embraced the persona of himself as the reincarnation of Woody Guthrie, social critic.

For some evangelical Christian critics who were drawn to the music but not to the civil rights and peace politics of the 1960s and who dismissed Dylan’s “contemptuous insult-songs,” such as “Masters of War” and “With God on Our Side,” the conversion to fundamentalist Protestantism was a vindication of their politics, an affirmation of their religion and their notion of the “prophetic.” The simplistic contempt for the “unsaved” in Dylan’s “born-again” songs (”Ain’t No Man Righteous, No Not One” and “Gotta Serve Somebody”) didn’t seem to bother them at all, and some even admitted to smirking at the discomfort of Dylan’s non-evangelical fans who were either puzzled or turned off by the thoroughgoing religious songs.

But the fundamentalist phase didn’t last long, either. Dylan was soon back to playing his old songs, even if he kept his public distance from their politics, and writing new material that was less strident in its religious expression. Yet it should be noted that he has not renounced or recanted the songs of his fundamentalist period any more than the songs of his political protest period. The best of both continue to be part of his repertoire.

While certainty of conviction can be a virtue in religious belief systems, it can work against creativity, which requires the artist to go beyond the last poem, the last canvas, to a new configuration. For a songwriter and performer like Dylan, there is always a new story to tell, a new way of telling the old story, and unlike dogmatic formulas, such new tellings change the meanings of the old versions.

In a famous interview with David Gates of Newsweek, Dylan put it this way: “I don’t know who I am most of the time. It doesn’t even matter to me. … I find the religiosity and the philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. … I believe the songs.”

Ultimately, that is what “Chronicles” is — a kind of musical memoir rather than an autobiography. It is the past remembered and refracted through time and the imagination, not a literal reconstruction. There is very little of politics or religion or any of the other controversies that have marked Dylan’s career. For all the sense of intimacy, there is little for those seeking clues to Dylan’s “real” life — the private life — beyond the songs. Those wanting details of the 1966 motorcycle accident or the role of drugs or the Bible study at the Vineyard church won’t find much in the book. Perhaps in the promised volumes two and three.

What they will find is a warm and generous and at times exuberant reflection by Dylan on points of his pilgrimage — the first days in Greenwich Village; the making of the 1989 “Oh Mercy” album at perhaps one of the lowest points in his career after the born-again phase; his incubator time in Minneapolis, where he was exposed to many of the folk traditions that were growing in popularity.

“Chronicles” is also instructive for critics and theologians like Ricks and Gilmour, whose interpretations of Dylan’s work, while often fascinating, informative, and suggestive, are sometimes overdetermined. Dylan writes, for example, of trying to “fix” the last line of “Ring Them Bells” — “breaking down the distance between right and wrong.” Ricks stresses Dylan’s use of the word “distance” rather than “difference” between right and wrong. “This makes all the difference in the world and in the other world,” he writes.

But Dylan writes that “while the line fit, it didn’t verify what I felt. Right or wrong, like it fits in the Wanda Jackson song, or right from wrong, like the Billy Tate song, that makes sense, but not right and wrong. The concept didn’t exist in my subconscious mind. I’d always been confused about that kind of stuff, didn’t see any moral ideal played out there. The concept of being morally right or morally wrong seems to be wired to the wrong frequency.”

Reading “Chronicles” is a little bit like listening to a Dylan album. There are always stunning moments, puzzling moments, and some clinkers. The book is studded with wonderful lines that defy easy explication. Of Roy Orbison he writes: “He sang like a professional criminal.” You know it’s a compliment, but what exactly does it mean?

Among the off notes is a chapter called “The Lost Land,” which reads a little like every celebrity’s put-down of the price of fame even as they pursue it. It is cliche-ridden (”Truth was that I wanted to get out of the rat race”) and unconvincing (”I was more a cowpuncher than a Pied Piper” and “what I was fantasizing about was a nine-to-five existence, a house on a tree-lined block with a white picket fence, pink roses in the backyard”). Sure, Bob. Yet there is nothing here of family, nothing of the meaning and significance of fatherhood, only the textureless assertion of the fantasy.

What shines in “Chronicles,” however, is Dylan’s warm and generous assessment of other musicians, those he learned from, those he admired, and even, like Joan Baez, those with whom he has broken. Many fans will be surprised at the wide range of his musical tastes and interests. There are, of course, the obvious folk, blues, and gospel performers such as Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson, and Odetta, along with his own contemporaries, especially Dave Von Ronk, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Mike Seeger. But he also expresses regard for many of the performers dismissed by folk “purists” of the 1960s, such as the Kingston Trio, and voices appreciation for the music of jazz musicians Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, and Duke Ellington, as well as pop and early rock singers such as Ricky Nelson.

Which is to say that “Chronicles,” like the person — and for good or ill — is mostly about the music and his own highs and lows in relationship to it.

“A song is like a dream,” writes Dylan, and it seems true of his long career as well, “and you try and make it come true.”

David E. Anderson is senior editor for Religion News Service.

via pbs.org

Love the bluegrass version of a classic that has been performed every which way– except like this– until NOW! Bravo to all of you!

Incidentally, I’m very familiar with the piano version of this famous classical piece, btw, thanks to my two daughters who can play it on the piano.