The view from 1975: BLOOD ON THE TRACKS

 

(This originally appeared in the San Diego Reader, 1975).

While most people have waited for the new Led Zeppelin album. the rock critics, with the customary furrowed brows, awaited the new Bob Dylan release. The rabble could have their noisemakers, the critics seemed to say, just leave us alone with things that matter. Dylan was an artist for Christ sakes, and when this avatar was about to speak, all ears must be perked. Panel discussions have been arranged and quizzes will be given. so take notes. That may be an exaggeration of how the journalists have fretted over Dylan the last few years, but nonetheless, their attention has been suffocating. Now, word was out that Blood On the Tracks was Dylan's return home to serious stuff, away from the Karma clichés and kitsch he indulged in for kicks. About time, I thought. Old Bob hadn't much image left to debunk. I sat back to see what the catch would be. The critics' fears have been allayed. 

Blood On the Tracks is indeed his return to the style that made him wealthy-lousy harmonica, breathless breathing exercises, non-stop lyrics that conform to no cadence other than Dylan's whim. Everything the critics wanted is there, and the cheer goes up. Rolling Stone scuttled the usual reviews in its record section and dedicated the department to two long, ponderous essays by Jonathon Cott and Jon Landau, as well as brief consensus by other "top" critics and save for one pan by Dave Marsh, the verdict was affirmative. Greatness, poetry, the exaltation of genius, rewordings of worked-to- death platitudes said years ago but with more feeling. That's beside the point, however. More discomforting is the intensity of the reviews. To me, sequestered in Clairemont and light years removed from the magic, of San Francisco (where grassroots rockers embody everything the fan wants to find in himself), the record seems cheap shot cannibalizations of a dead style. Dylan just doesn't sound into it, and over and over come thoughts of making a man do something his heart no longer has fondness for. Dylan, tired of running, lies down in the snow and lets the hungry wolf pack rip off the remaining meat. It's not pretty.

I used to have respect for Dylan, awed as impressionable junior high kids tend to be, by the mystique he generated. He had power, presence, nerve, and plainly didn't care what others thought of him. The lifestyle was equally bizarre, endless road life (D. A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back gives a peripheral view of that), drug abuse (speed primarily, some smack and acid), and alleged homosexual relationships (with Allen Ginsberg of all people, but take that as you might). Clearly. the material was there, and Dylan, all a jitter with amphetamine insight, poured the songs out prolifically. The results were striking. if off-the-wall. That period is contained on the Highway 61 Revisited, Bringing It Al Back Home, and Blonde on Blonde albums, these are the only albums by him, I play, the only ones that exhibited a genre that Dylan was ever convincing in. The early material was of a punk doing bad imitations of dead blues and hillbilly singers, and the stuff following Blonde was uninteresting by virtue of Dylan changing his habits. He's a family man now, and accolades for domestic bliss have no punch. John Wesley Harding was merely okay, a few good lines, some ingenious reworkings of Biblical parables, but, in all, disappointing. The writers, though, quite predictably found a panacea for the social malaise from all this kicked back stuff A friend, whom I don't see much anymore, once told me that Nashville Skyline taught him (taught) that "rednecks are human too, just like the rest of us." I almost cashed in my cookies.

Before appraising Blood On the Tracks, one should first appraise the history of the dedicated fan, of which I confess to have been one. The period, 1966-67, was a time of supreme awkwardness. Dylan appealed to the acned, self-conscious kid who sat in his room writing poetry and made knee-jerk solipsistic designs for the future. Life at the time was full of dread, and worse, boredom. Everything about him, the frazzled hair, the sneering nasality, the get screwed. Jack lyrics, were the stuff fantasies were made of. Who do you want to be when you grow up? "Bob Dylan." The bard was at once a surrogate hero and collective whipping boy. He weathered the psychic storms for the kids too oppressive affluence to break out of their pampered by parents over of the trap and follow Kerouac's rule of thumb. Years went by, my interest waned to almost nothing. There were better poets around beating Dylan at his own game, but I tired of poetry entirely and sunk myself in a heavy metal mire, wanting obliteration revelation (I'd rather listen to Grand Funk than The Moody Blues any day). Dylan, spurred on by the sagging sales of Planet Waves and Before the Flood, decided to give the people what they want. Interest is raised again to see if he can cut the cake. Instead, listening to Blood On the Tracks is like looking at history through a fun house mirror. The details are there, but it's just not right.

If Blood is a suspicious album, it's also a helpful one to chronic Dylan watchers. I'd finally gained insight as to why Bob chucked his old speed-freak persona for Muzak, he doesn't have it in him anymore! Which is Understandable. If Bob had yielded to demands for the old essence, he'd have died long ago. Speed freaks seldom have life spans longer than seven years of heavy usage. But trying to recapture the old time is like trying to jar a rainbow. So, spurred on by coffee and cigarettes, I watch the record suspiciously as it makes its spin on the turntable. "You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome" is on. Dylan's voice is nasal and full of uncharacteristic resonance, akin to Elvis at his most mock sincere. Guitar chords chunk , a lousy harmonica break (wheeze, gasp, sputter), the ancient Gerdes Folk City style for those who missed out. Dylan goes off pitch. Arcane references Rimbaud, and Delacroix. references aimed at confounding the meaning seekers . Who is Dylan trying to impress? "Tangled Up In Blue" fares better vocally, less affectation, but that's all. "Simple Twist of Fate" misses. "Lily, Rosemary. and the Jack of Hearts" makes a stab at the Highway 61 surrealism, but there's no bite. The clichés pour forth, pile up high and take the air out of the room. My cigarette ash burns low and my wrist twitches. The… stuff is intolerable from someone you used to respect, but I hold my ire. I'd gotten my two cents' worth from Dylan a long time ago and shouldn't feel disappointment. There are new heroes to conquer (Little Feat. Roxy Music, Harvey Mandel, maybe Queen). Back to the job at hand. The band crunches on sloppily while Dylan is out in left field, sounding amused with his self impersonations. The parade meanwhile has passed. Which is just as well. The cheering hordes have lost sight of their icon. The record finished. The uplifts and the system shut down automatically. I turn on the radio. Led Zeppelin blasts out. Now we're cooking with gas.

I AM TIRED OF DRYING THE CAT BY HAND --a chat with Barry Alfonso and Ted Burke

Barry Alfonso

Time for Jamul to re-load?

Ted Burke

THE HAIRY EYEBALL ogles a moist towelette.

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Barry Alfonso

Skinplate had some OJ you wouldn't believe.

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Ted Burke

THE geek detector runs on Duracel

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Barry Alfonso

Where are you now, Jake...and where are my bitcoins?

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Barry Alfonso

In Santee, "drying the cat by hand" means taking a single woman out to dinner, saying flattering things to her, picking up the check and then giving her the phone number of your brother-in-law, I understand.

Ted Burke

It has been said that "drying the cat" means mispronouncing the names of jazz musicians like Theolonious Monk and Ornette Coleman in an Telegraph Avenue methadone clinic. "Drying the Cat By Hand" is a variation heard in the Tenderloin and up to North Beach, meaning that you announce to Amiri Baraka that Boots Randolph played better sax than Coltrane or Shorter.

Barry Alfonso

I've also heard that it is a derivation of the old blues expression "shave 'em dry," meaning to cut off the head of a glass of beer with a straight razor before attacking someone in the solar plexus over a Stetson hat.

Ted Burke

I've heard tell of that as well and it makes me wonder if that is related to the practice of ordering a shot and beer and dry towel twisted into a rat tail and snapped cruelly to the back of the drinker's bare neck by everyone in the bar named either "Earl" or "Ondine".

Barry Alfonso

A lot of this has been lost and confused over the years, I suspect -- a "dry cat" used to be slang for a guy with a flat top and bad dandruff. It was a custom to rub scalps like that for luck before a dice game or before rubbing spices into a jerk chic…

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Ted Burke

There was the habit among dairy farmers of rubbing their bovines with mewing kittens for no real reason; "drying the cow" became "drying the cat" over time, an understandable conflation, and the implication of the phrase is that one is standing around irritating another living creature for no good reason. But since when does anyone need a good reason to irritate someone?

Barry Alfonso

That's right! Now I remember. Will Rogers did a bit about this and in fact got arrested in Tulsa for demonstrating how it was done. There's a famous photo of Junior Samples from Hee Haw "drying the cat by hand" behind Stringbean's back when he thought the cameras were off.

Ted Burke

*Absolutely! This in turn inspired Pynchon's famous opening line of his magnum opus 'The Crying of Litter Box 29". "A dry cat came screamng across the sky..."

Barry Alfonso

Right, that was a literary in-joke for many years standing. Hemingway took a swing at Frank Yerby after he wrote that Papa had been drying the cat with both hands for years...

Ted Burke

On a related note, Norman Mailer misunderstood Russell Kirk when he announced that what really wanted was a "cat dried by hand". Mailer took this to be a translation of Parsian street slang used among working girls meaning that the person who uttered the phrase was in desperate need of being buggered, but that lacked the needed ticket for admission.Mailer told Kirk that he had his ticket "right here" and demanded Kirk "give up the cat." William Buckley was amused by the whole thing and had Mailer on his tv show several times.

Barry Alfonso

Well, I do remember Gore Vidal giving Buckley the hairy eyeball on TV during the '68 Democratic convention and saying, "You really are drying the cat by hand a little hard tonight, old boy" while Buckley let something moist and shiny collect above his upper lip.

THE STOOGES IN THEIR ELEMENT

 

Iggy Pop was a drummer in blues bands before he and his fellows formed the Stooges in the 60s, and as this song demonstrates, the experience wasn't wasted. Iggy and his mates understood, that is to say, felt the vaguely described but conspicuous force that blues had, simple, sonic, repetitive and impolite to any standard measure of tempo. This was the kind of music that was the blend of instinct and wits, a boxer's set of reflexes to things that get in your way. Guitar, drums and are a distorted grind and the tempo of nails hammered.

The Ashtons smashed mightily. Iggy, of course, was the man alone, a three-semester course of unreconstructed Id that inhabiting the center of every ganglion of nerves the brain tried to lay claim to; the superego to twitch and become more reptilian by the second. He was that kid in drainpipe jeans who carried a sharp stick with a brown, mung encrusted nail through it, waiting on the corner for someone as yet unknown to walk by and get poked with it. There was no fun, so you made your own, just to see what happens. These were Mailer's White Negros for a fact, except they shivved me a man who was tailing them and talking too much in the other muse mute streets of two-story burn pads and deserted storefronts that had their front windows sealed with concrete and layers of old concert posters and spray paint exclaiming gang signs and Jesus. Anyone daring to talk past this kid deserved to be whacked with the rusty nail. It was cruel and pointless until something genuine happened to change everything; the bit that everyone knows in the world of the Stooges is that transcendence is not on the agenda, ever.

No band embraced nihilism with more profound off-handedness than The Stooges. Part of their genius lies in t their lyrics, hardly cliché but not conventionally poetic, these were rhymes that were spare and simple, and powerfully to the point, talking about the small matters of frustration that send the young mind into paroxysms of rage and self-recrimination. Ever say something or overheard a phrase from someone else uttered in exasperation or another kind of brain locking state where what is said is so starkly simple and clear and unadorned by apology or other sorts of mental equivocation that it resembles brilliance? That’s my take on the collective lyrics of the Stooges, words as an instinctive reflex, Nor was their music dependent on the trivial concern of instrumental virtuosity.

This was the sticking point with many critics at the time when their first album, The Stooges, was released in 1969. In a counter-culture that was ironically putting premiums on the extreme professionalism of well-trained musicians who could hit notes precisely and improvise at length over increasingly tricky time signatures, the Stooges were the textbook example of the anathema, an insult to the taste-maker elite. Reviews were generally insulting to the band’s repetitive slam and clang approach, and it is one of the wonders of staying alive long enough to see a groundbreaking band, unfiltered from the start, outlast the negativity and change the critical consensus. The intelligentsia had to catch up with them. The Stooges rejected formal instruction on their musicianship and, in turn, weren’t about to suffer the instructions the snoots and snobs demanded they follow.

What’s ironic is that Rolling Stone, the arbiter of quality in matters of the New Rock, still had integrity in their record reviews at the time and allowed one of their original rock critics, Ed Ward, to let the air out of the inflated importance of over-serious rock music and the earnest critiques they inspired by his review of the album. The first two paragraphs have Ward offering a thumbnail sketch of the band’s background, quickly followed the expected litany of sins, that Iggy is a bad Jim Morrison imitator, the lyrics are sub-literate, the guitar and drum work is lifeless and lacking even the dignity of being mechanical. The something wonderful happened halfway through. He summarized his feelings thusly “Their music is loud, boring, tasteless, unimaginative and childish.” Then something remarkable happened.

With the grievances listed, and the verdict delivered,Ward added, in a single sentence, standing alone , unencumbered by other sentences, “I kind of like it”, Ward performed an endearing bit of proto-deconstruction, using the aforementioned deficiencies in the music as examples of virtue, value, honesty, artistic vision. It was one of the great pieces of rock criticism because here Ward created the basis of real aesthetic argument that maintained, essentially, that the Stooges were the true face and sound of a rock and roll that was relevant to life as it was being lived by millions, a voice, sound, and poetry from the curb, alley and shuttered doorway that wanted nothing to do with millionaire musicians with long hair striving to achieve legitimacy by mimicking and misreading the most superficial elements of High Culture. Ed Ward established the concerns that Lester Bangs soon picked up and turned into a masterful argument with the dying of the light. We can thank Ed Ward and the Stooges for that relief.

This was a band that went in the other direction when they began their quest to find what lay beyond avant-garde posturing in Music during the 60s away from trudging drum solos and long-form guitar essays. Iggy and the Stooges were primitive, out of tune, irritated and irritating in turn. It was a matter where the band and their frontman, Iggy Pop (nee Stooge) blended perfectly, given their ability to turn something that sounds horrible and repetitive into a crashing, sustained drone of attitude, and Iggy's serpentine stage presence and clipped verbal dexterity. He was the guy who couldn't sit stand and would stand for nothing less than what he wanted in full, and they were the grind of the city turned into a droning inner voice prodding him to smash down whatever walls came before him. It wasn’t that he was a bad boy going contrarily to the niceties of all things middle class and calcified, it wasn’t that he as a sentient being had identified an artifice he disliked and defined himself in opposition to it; it was more like Iggy Stooge was unaware of the feelings of others, greater ramifications of dangerous self-gratification, or any code of behavior the rest of us depend on keep drivers and pedestrians, for example, on the streets and the sidewalks, respectively. He was the unadulterated id, a squirming mass of impulse that transgressed boundaries, mashed together poetry and porn, and displayed no interest in theorizing about what he had done or about what he was thinking of doing. His was the case of living in the present tense solely, and whatever sensation presently was utmost.

Let us not be mistaken about this, as Iggy Stooge’s persona and psyche had the virtue of being monochromatic; his immediate impulse was not the only thing that mattered. There simply wasn’t anything else. All this play against the quarrelsome insomniac raunch of Ron Ashton’s guitar work, elementary, rudimentary, undeniable effective, endlessly influential. What he lacked in technique he made up for in essence, a counterpoint to the corrosive thrills of Iggy’s distilled juvenile delinquency; his guitar work might be politely described as “steady”, but this a dodge against the annoyance factor this band turned into a new aesthetic. “Persistent” is more apt, like a dislodged bit of a fender dragging along the highway, kicking up sparks near the gas tank, or a door slamming for hours in a strong wind, or jackhammers at night carving up your street at precisely the moment your brain demands you sleep or die inanely. Obnoxious, profound without knowing. We should all be grateful these guys wielded musical instruments, not guns. Or worse.