Posts Tagged ‘Bob Dylan’

Girl billionaire gives $100M to mystery corgi

Posted: July 21, 2018 in Miscellaneous, music, Record reviews
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Gabriel 2.jpg
Is this the Lucky dog?

No, but this is a photo of Lucky, our dog. The rest is fake news — and my latest attempt to go viral. Today, inserting the word “billionaire” in your headline guarantees the attention of hordes of people starved for billionairic news. This is what happened to Fortune magazine recently when they ran a story about Billionaire Kylie Jenner (who, it turns out, isn’t a billionaire).

I don’t know who this woman is. I do know that the Jenners are always at war with the Kardassians. I also know that the Kardassians are a tribe of billionaire females who are always at war with their husbands. And I know all of this because when I pay for my food at the supermarket, the area set aside for the transfer of funds is always plastered with magazines with Jenners and Kardassians on their covers. In the United States, you can’t exchange funds for consumer commodities unless you’re in the presence of Jenners and Kardassians (and sometimes Jen, who is at war with Brad).

Sadly, inserting “billionaire” in your headline is unlikely to set your social media platform on fire because going viral is dependent on having millions, if not billions, of people already following you. Just like with Fortune. Run-DMSteve is short of that mark. Run-DMSteve regrets the error. Run-DMSteve wishes he’d never been born. Run-DMSteve is pleased to post yet another photo of a corgi. Corgis are not at war with anyone, except squirrels and, in the case of one of our dogs, birds.

This is also the time to share a photo of my 91-year-old father and his new cat, Miss Ellie.

Dad and Miss Ellie cropped.jpg
Run-DMIrving and Miss Ellie discuss Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections.

Miss Ellie is eight months old. She has a tail wide enough to wash a car. She likes food, greeting people, and watching Dad. If you’re outside the house and she’s lounging in a windowsill, she looks like a visit from a skunk. The two of them seem well-suited, napping, noshing, and watching Animal Planet.

Next week we’ll get back to some hard-core, way-off-base music writing. Until then, I hope you’re enjoying the summer, except in those areas where tariffs have been placed on your weather or you’ve been placed in a wire cage for the crime of being one of the huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. Stay strong and thanks for clicking, forwarding, pinning, retweeting, or accidentally hitting the wrong key.

Random Picks of the Day
The Bootleg Series Vol. 5: Bob Dylan Live 1975 (1975)
Hard Rain (1976)
Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan

You don’t think of Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan as a rocker? These live albums tell a different story. They’re a mix of hard rock and acoustic folk from the Rolling Thunder Revue and its weird zoo of musicians. They’re not in the first rank of Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan albums, but they showcase the man in a way we’re not accustomed to.

I can’t say Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan is in good voice here, because he never had a voice. Sometimes he sounds like Bruce Springsteen in the wake of a root canal.

The main thing I got from listening is how reverentially the audience treated Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan when he played anything from the 1960s…even though the ’60s had only just ended. Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan was already a god.

I have two Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan memories.

I saw Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan at the Boston Garden in 1979 when he’d already slipped into gospel. It was disappointing and the crowd was restless. But in the middle of the show he abandoned his 149-piece band and his 385 back-up singers and played three classics from the ’60s all by his lonesome. All of us immediately shut the fuck up.

Nobel Laureate Bob Dylan captured the Rolling Thunder tour on film: Renaldo & Clara. I crammed into a two-door clown car with five other idiots and drove from Boston to Manhattan in freezing weather to watch the premiere. Naturally, one of the tires decided to deflate halfway through Connecticut. At the theater, I fell asleep in the first hour and woke up in the third and the movie was still crawling along!

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This cat is not a billionaire. Yet.

 

Run-DMSteve explains it all for you

Posted: November 23, 2014 in music, Record reviews
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In June I set out to review every album Prince ever made. I embarked on this project because I realized that, for me, Prince was embalmed in the ’80s – the guy I heard at clubs and parties. He was that sexy M.F. who could rock, croon, talk to God, talk for God, write weird erotic scenarios, and take goofy chances. I wanted a better idea of who he really was. There had to be more to the man than “Purple Rain” playing to a gang of us nerds in a hotel ballroom at a science fiction convention.

It’s easy to follow, album by album, a band that existed for fewer than 20 years – I’ve done that with The Jesus and Mary Chain, The Pixies, The Clash, Creedence, and several others. It’s much harder to do with an artist who’s been playing and recording for 30 years or more. They change too much. They travel down side roads while you stick to the interstate. Or you change too much. It’s been a long time since I was punchin’ a clock and listening wide-eyed to Born to Run.

It’s also hard to follow an artist with a lengthy career because every artist, no matter how talented, eventually skids into the Bad Spot. That’s the rough patch where your Muse runs off with someone younger and prettier and you’re left to grit it out on craftsmanship alone.

In the 1970s, Neil Young dissected his soul on several awe-inspiring albums. Two that’ll slay you: On the Beach (1974) and Tonight’s the Night (1975). When the ’80s dawned, Neil took a long time getting out of bed. For example, Trans (1982), which might as well have been called Tron, and Everybody’s Rockin’ (1983), his fake Fabulous Fifties record. Neil didn’t make a good record until Freedom (1989), which you’ll recall for the stunning “Rockin’ in the Free World.”

Bruce Springsteen did pretty well in the 1980s, at least until Tunnel of Love (1987). Then things went downhill. Or, in Springsteen terms, the mill closed, the state cops shut down all that street racing, and the D.A. couldn’t get no relief. After two subpar efforts, Human Touch and Lucky Town (both 1992), he recorded nothing of consequence until his reaction to 9/11, The Rising (2002), after which he reinvented himself as the Dark Knight of the 21st century.

I need a weatherman to explain to me what Bob Dylan was trying to do on Self Portrait (1970) and Dylan (1973).

David Bowie’s career after Scary Monsters (1980) is not the least bit scary.

Sadly, Michael Jackson’s career after Bad (1987) is not worth talking about.

Back to Prince. I made it through the first 14 albums. I rediscovered his ’70s disco discs. I relived my youth with Dirty Mind, 1999, and Purple Rain. I was struck as if by lightning by Sign O’ the Times.

By the time we got to the 1990s, the road Prince and I were driving developed some serious twists, the safety rails disappeared, and the paving got thinner. Loyal Reader Slave to the Garden warned me that in the ’90s, Prince, in his apocalyptic struggle with Warner Bros., dumped albums on the market that should’ve been dumped in the dump. We were approaching the Bad Spot.

The next one on my list, Come (1994), is what we critics like to call awful. I’d rather listen to a flock of trumpeter swans barking like dogs as they circle for a landing.

Prince’s 1987 bootleg, The Black Album, officially appeared in 1994. It’s not as good as black albums by Spinal Tap (1984), Metallica (1991), and Jay-Z (2003), though it’s probably better than the Marilyn Manson Black Album bootleg, if I could bring myself to listen to that one.

Looking at the rest of the ’90s, I see that Prince was either attacking the Warner Bros. Death Star or playing stuff that belongs in a galaxy far, far away. Well, what did I expect? How long can Prince go on being that sexy M.F.? (I can still pull it off, but only from a distance.) Artists have to change or they might as well be locked in a trophy cabinet. I’m convinced that Prince will emerge from this depressing era into some new and wonderful form, but I’m not going to follow every bread crumb until I catch up with him.

(There are two albums I definitely want to hear: The Girl 6 soundtrack, which is supposed to be a throwback to the ’80s, and the three-record Emancipation, both from 1996.)

What I’ve learned
Here’s what I can tell you about me: It’s hard to grow past the music that filled me with joy when I was young. Some of those artists are still recording, but they no longer speak to me. Or perhaps I can no longer hear them.

Here’s what I can tell you about Prince: Overall, no performer in the history of popular music is as talented as Prince. Some people sing better or write better or dance better, some people see deeper into the human or the national psyche. Some people are more economical (Prince does not know when to end a song).

But no one can do everything that this gentleman does at such a consistently high level. No male performer is as insistently sexy without also being sickeningly misogynistic. Carlos Santana, Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Bowie, Young, and Dylan are as prolific, but even those guys never released three discs of original material on the same day.

There’s much more to Prince than “Purple Rain.” I just don’t need it.

[Editor’s note: It’s at least twice as difficult for a female singer/songwriter to survive in a decades-long career as it is for a male. It’s much easier to find male counterparts to Prince, so I stuck with the men.]

I started out liking Prince, but after listening to the first 14 albums I really like Prince. I want to keep liking Prince. So I’ll stop here. Thanks as always for reading along.

A couple of days ago I spent an afternoon listening to Pink Floyd and Justin Timberlake. I got nothing out of that. This afternoon I’m listening to Chuck Berry. Until next time, enjoy this insane video from the Neil Young of the Everybody’s Rockin’ era.

 

Let’s look for the purple banana

Posted: June 1, 2014 in music, Record reviews
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In Seattle in the early ’80s there was a fannish group that lived together in a house called Star Base. It was part of an informal chain of Star Bases around the country, from the first generation of Star Trek fans. They had a charter and I think they were incorporated as a non-profit. (I was present when the charter was dissolved, but I was too distracted by one of the female board members and the sweater she was wearing to take in the details.)

Seattle’s Star Base was part of a larger group of science fiction fans who lived around Seattle, with a satellite group in Olympia. They threw raucous parties at their house on Phinney Ridge. Bet their neighbors liked that. It was mostly women living at Star Base, and from the outside this group looked as if a) every day was Gestalt Therapy Day, or b) they were training for a covert mission overseas.

I’m not making fun of these folks. For all the hijinks and emotional maelstroms that went on there, I have never met a group of people who got so much done in a day. If you had to get to the moon by close of business Friday, they’d get you there. They ran sci-fi conventions, held jobs, and saved lives.

I just noticed that “hijinks” has three dots in a row. Looks Danish.

Raspberry beret/The kind you find in a second-hand store
When I first met them, Michael Jackson ruled at Star Base (along with Rocky Horror and a true ’70s horror, Meatloaf). Every year at Norwescon, the region’s biggest convention, at midnight during the Saturday night dance, the djs played Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” from Off the Wall (1979). If you lived at Star Base or partied at Star Base or had sex at Star Base or wanted to have sex at Star Base, you got on the dance floor and participated in a group dance that I thought was kinda dumb but everyone had fun doing it so forget me.

But Prince was already making inroads among the female population of Star Base. Just look at the cover of Dirty Mind (1980):

Prince - Dirty Mind

Michael Jackson always seemed sexless to me. Not Prince.

Raspberry beret/And if it was warm she wouldn’t wear much more
I learned about Prince thanks to the Star Base population. I’ve never really written about him, probably because he’s released more albums than Chicago and I feel intimidated when I consider him as a subject. Today I’ll do a little to make amends.

You can’t think about Michael Jackson and Prince without noting the startling coincidences in the lives of the two men. They were both born in the Midwest in the summer of 1958. Michael Jackson started out as a Jehovah’s Witness. Prince became a Jehovah’s Witness as an adult. They began their solo careers within a year of each other. Michael Jackson named his son Prince. Prince would’ve done the same thing if he had felt like it. The names Lincoln and Kennedy each contain seven letters. And so on.

Excuse me but I need a mouth like yours
But the differences are far greater. The Michael Jackson who launched his real debut effort (without his father hanging over him) with Off the Wall emerged with his sound fully formed. It didn’t change by a molecule until the day he died. Prince has experimented so much with his sound, he makes Beck look like he’s chained to a chair. Only David Bowie and maybe Paul McCartney can keep up with this guy.

Michael at his peak gave us “Billy Jean,” “Beat It,” “Bad,” and “Thriller,” but for overall accomplishment I’ll take Prince. Period. There’s a lot of uninteresting filler in Michael’s oeuvre. Of the songs I’ve heard on Prince’s army of albums, I can’t say that all of them are worth repeated listens, but rarely is something uninteresting. And as for high points – “1999,” “Delirious,” “Dirty Mind,” and “Let’s Go Crazy” are pretty good songs.

To help me forget the girl that just walked out my door
I’m launching The Prince Project beginning today. What is The Prince Project? Bill Murray to Dan Ackroyd in Ghost Busters: “I don’t know.” I’ll figure it out as I listen. Your thoughts and suggestions are welcome. You’re also welcome to keep me company in my little red corvette by loaning me a Prince CD. There are only about 35 to choose from.

If I could put Star Base to work on this, we’d finish this project before we began.

Random Pick of the Day
The Byrds, Mr. Tambourine Man (1965)
The superb Bob Dylan covers include the title cut and “Chimes of Freedom.” The Gene Clark originals, particularly “I’ll Feel a Whole Lot Better” and “Here Without You,” are like folk versions of The Beatles. The song that really kills me is Pete Seeger’s “The Bells of Rhymney.” This is one of my favorite songs of the 1960s.

I rate this album a Must Buy, even though Mr. Tambourine Man falls apart in the final laps and even though “Eight Miles High,” “So You Want to Be a Rock ’n’ Roll Star,” and “Turn! Turn! Turn!” aren’t on it.

Random Pan of the Day
Bad Company, Bad Company (1974)
Bad Company is nowhere near as good as Free or Mott the Hoople, the bands that begat them. Bad Company is nowhere near as good as AC/DC, though it’s obvious that AC/DC wouldn’t have existed without Bad Company. Whether that’s reason enough to build a time machine and return to 1974 with a bazooka is your call.

So what do we have on their debut? The origins of the arena buttrock format: “Can’t Get Enough,” which is about sex, “Movin’ On,” which is about leaving after sex, and “Bad Company,” which is about why it’s tough to be Bad Company, so I guess you should have sex with them to make them feel better. And then there’s “Seagull.”

“Seagull” is a rock-star dues song. Just the thing to include on your first album. In this epic tonal composition, “seagull” means “our awesome band” and “never asking why” means “we are so stoned” and “until you are shot out of the sky” means “until they stop buying your records.” Bad Company gets major demerits for writing a dues song when they should’ve been paying fines.

Ernest Hemingway said it best: “As musicians they are fatal.”

 

Write-a-thon, Day 33: Someone left a train out in the rain

Posted: July 25, 2013 in music, Record reviews, Writing
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Robert Louis Stevenson drew a map of an island and was inspired to write Treasure Island. J.R.R. Tolkien wrote about a Hobbit and from there drew a map of Middle-Earth. Many writers start writing after being captivated by a drawing or a photo. Others cut pictures out of magazines to help them visualize their characters or some aspect of their stories. Writing is surprisingly visual.

For my book, I bought 10 irregular sheets of poster board at an art supply store. The biggest is about 2’x3’. I took all the book covers, magazine photos, and old postcards I’d collected with a mountainous, railroady theme and spray-mounted them on these boards. I glued a balsa-wood frame to the back of each to keep them from warping, then hung them on the walls around my corner desk. This way I write while looking at the physical setting my characters are moving through.

I also drew a map of the where the action is, but my illustration skills are stuck in the sixth grade, when I struggled to draw a creditable starship Enterprise. (Still working on that one.) I keep redrawing the map for practice but I’m not getting better at it. I know the look I want and at some point I’m going to hire an actual artist to do it.

Meanwhile, it occurred to be that I could one-up Tolkien and RLS. (Boy, I never thought I’d get to say that.) I love building models. My book is full of trains. Why not build a model of something I’m writing about?

Micro 1

Nature is always trying to come indoors and take over. If you leave your car parked too long, nature will grow under it and eventually over it. Same with trains. Open-top cars left on a siding will eventually support enough wind-blown dirt and weeds to initiate agriculture. I’ve hiked past abandoned bridges that were turning into gardens way up in the middle of the air. Look at what happened to the High Line in New York:

High Line

I thought I was going to have one such bridge in my book, with an abandoned gondola astride it. So I made one. (This was also a way to sneak a garden railroad into my wife’s garden.) The wood came from an old dish drainer. The plants are a type of sedum that’s pretty much indestructible. It all lives outside; I’ll bring it in when winter comes.

Micro 2

I tried to sell these photos to Classic Toy Trains, but for some reason they weren’t enthused about showing their readers how to destroy their classic toy trains. They were very nice about it, though.

Micro 3

After further thought I decided to put this bridge in my second book. At least I’m thinking ahead. For my next construction project, I considered a half-size caboose replica, but I had some doubts I could secure trackage rights for the backyard. Maybe I’ll build that miniature Cape Cod lighthouse after all. It could double as a doghouse.

Today I went to the gym for the first time since the Write-a-thon started, so I’m feeling particularly virtuous this evening. My new mantra is short and intense workouts rather than lengthy and laid-back. Blood, not just contusions.

Random Pick of the Day
Ministry, Filth Pig (1995)
Sometime in the early 1980s I saw The B-52s at Kane Hall at the University of Washington. The opening act was a Seattle band called The Blackouts. It was an unlikely pairing, as The Blackouts were dark and noisy and The B-52s are light and zany. But it’s a rock-concert tradition to pair like with unlike. A tavern here in Portland just had Wicked Sin opening for The Punctuals. I didn’t go. I knew it was wrong.

The Blackouts eventually met a heavy-metal industrialist named Al Jourgensen and under his leadership formed Ministry and became even darker and noiser. Filth Pig is a good example. On this disc, Ministry did everything it could to clear the dance floor. The album name was thought up by a 16-year-old boy with bad skin and no hope of getting laid. The cover art is grotesque. The track listing is unreadable. Most of the songs are as listenable as a space shuttle in need of a new muffler. The singing is not so much singing as it is screaming at Orcs.

But! This album has their cover of “Lay, Lady, Lay” (track 9, since you’ll never decipher the info on the CD). The first time I heard it, I thought it was a joke. I listened a second time because I was looking forward to the laugh, but I didn’t laugh. I just listened. Now I’ve heard it many times and I think it’s beautiful. (Dylan does it again.) “Lay, Lady, Lay,” and tracks 1, 2, and 10 redeem Filth Pig for me.

Random Pan of the Day
Fun Boy Three, Waiting (1982)
The musical equivalent of the plastic garbage floating around in the Pacific Ocean. David Byrne produced this thing, after producing another inept record earlier in the year, The B-52s’ Mesopotamia. But 1982 also saw Talking Heads’ first live album,  the excellent The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads. Strange year for David Byrne…The only FB3 song worth its weight in vinyl is one of their two collaborations with Bananarama, “Really Saying Something,” and in that one they let the girls sing the leads.

I know I said I wasn’t going to do anymore music reviewing while the Write-a-thon was on, but I can’t seem to rein myself in. So many bands to insult, so little time.

 

Countdown to Clarion

Posted: June 16, 2013 in Miscellaneous, music, Record reviews
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Dear Loyal Readers: Thank you for your many compassionate comments after we lost our dog, Storm Small. They’re much appreciated. Though we plan to recruit a new dog soon, we will never replace our little man. He was the comeback kid and our most valuable player.

But now I have to get my act together, because in one week I begin the Clarion West Writers Workshop Write-a-thon. I’ve pledged to write an hour a day and double the size of my novel by the time this marathon ends on August 2. Two people have already put up honest-to-God money to support me, which means no screwing around, I have to do it. All hail my supporters:

Karen G. Anderson
Mitch Katz

They will receive an original piece of Run-DMSteve art, which I will create once this thing is over, plus my ever-lasting, ever-lovin’ thanks!

During the course of the Write-a-thon I will post every day on this blog with something (I don’t know what yet) about my progress. Your comments are welcome, however snarky, and I thank you in advance for reading along. See you on Sunday night, June 23.

What’s so hard about Web 2.0?
In April, at a social-media marketing conference here in Portland, I attended a presentation about how even an idiot without a camera can make a video and post it on YouTube. The guy was right because now this idiot has done just that!

Random Pick of the Week
Roy Orbison, Mystery Girl (1989)
It’s about time I said something positive about Jeff Lynne (of ELO infamy) and here it is. He was one of the founders of The Traveling Wilburys. The Traveling Wilburys (Lynne, George Harrison, Tom Petty, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, and Jim Keltner) gave Orbison a new lease on his musical life. Lynne then went on to produce Orbison’s farewell, Mystery Girl, released the year he died.

Roy Orbison’s voice belonged in a higher league. When he recorded Mystery Girl, Orbison still had most of that voice left, and though the material at hand was inconsistent he did a fine job with “You Got It” (written by Lynne, Petty, and Orbison) and “She’s a Mystery to Me” (Bono and The Edge). Either of these songs would’ve made a fitting B-side to “Oh Pretty Woman,” and what greater compliment can you give? So thank you, Jeff Lynne.

Random Pan of the Week
Macklemore, “Thrift Shop” (2011)
Oh come on. “This is fucking awesome” is not a lyric. Macklemore’s vocabulary never gets out of second gear and he wouldn’t know a metaphor if it hit him with an impact equivalent to one U.S. ton of lead. “I’m a take your grandpa’s style/I’m a take your grandpa’s style/No for real – ask your grandpa – can I have his hand-me-downs?” The grandpa in the video is wearing the same clothes my Dad wears! Eat your heart out, kid – someday I’ll inherit all of Dad’s clip-on ties from the ’60s.

But the video is fun.

I’m not impressed by a white rapper named Macklemore. The guy to watch is Wallpaper. (OK, it’s four guys. Shut up.) Have you heard “#STUPiDFACEDD”? “White boy wasted/gluestick pasted.” This is fucking awesome!

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