MICHAEL JACKOSN'S FATAL TRAJECTORY

A telling side effect of a celebrity's death is the degree to which it prompts some people towards autobiography, memoir, or to indulge the urge to examine their own history as a parallel course to the trajectory of the more famously deceased. Those of us over fifty have only to recall the unending tide of essays and books where Americans recalled where they were, precisely, the day and moment that John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The effort, of course, was more than merely paying tribute the brilliance the departed embodied; more than that, it is a recollection of how they'd been made to imagine greater possibilities for a  world they otherwise couldn't challenge.It's the tiresome ode to a dream deferred . There is something to the notion that celebrities cease to  be human in our estimations once they acquire certain saturation in the culture--they become, in a sense, a personal god one measures their best and worst qualities against. It is a tendency that can become pathology  Patti Davis, daughter of the departed President Ronald Reagan and someone who knows something about growing up in a fishbowl, weighed in with a brief commentary in Newsweek last year  about the unexpected death of Michael Jackson. The piece isn’t as cloying as one would have suspected—she notes the similarities between Jackson and another child star, Judy Garland, reasonably speculating reasonable that these talents were essentially raised in a bubble by a horde of managers, executives and an unlimited variety of sycophants whose interests weren’t those of their nominal employer, but rather their livelihoods. There’s more than enough evidence to support for Davis to make her case, which we find in the case of Jimi Hendrix and certainly Elvis Presley, two major talents and money makers who , it seems, lacked the discerning voice in their midst to say “no”, or to give advice that was free of enabling. Davis, though, spoils her entry with a rationalization that absolves Jackson and a host of other bright unfortunates who’ve met with untimely demises of any responsibility for the odd choices they’ve made.

Michael Jackson, Jack Kerouac, , Jack Kennedy, Charlie Parker, Sylvia Plath, Jimi Hendrix, and the lot died of causes that had nothing to do with the fact that each of them had varying degrees of talent. People die daily who haven't distinguished themselves as singers, dancers, writers, poets, jazz improvisers; they drank themselves to death, they overdosed, they committed suicide due to untreated clinical depression, they were merely in the wrong place at the wrong time. No one, though, latches on to a single name of the average anonymous drug casualty or suicide and speculates as to the nature of the sad, early death, no one really wonders about the soul of the every-man that just might be too sensitive to deal with the harsh facts of life and is driven to end the endless pain. Rather, we shrug, we say”ain't that shame" and then go about our business, mildly annoyed. We love celebrity hood, though, we are obsessed with as a culture, and indeed celebrity has become our religion--we create a mythology about the doings of the famous Gods and wonder about their inner lives, their moods, and their ability to cope.

Davis, a marginally well known artist/writer herself, picks up the stalest cliches around, the most exhausted of all tired tropes, the most insipid of perspectives by wondering aloud if there is something in the tortured psyches that compels the brilliant and the intensely gifted to short circuit themselves and bring an end to their lives. The implication is that sensitive artist types are sentenced fates even an enemy shouldn't suffer, an especially perverse elaboration that artists are not really the source of their talents and the inspiration that comes with it, but rather a channel of a Higher Power's wisdom and good graces. Davis not only gives absolution to doomed geniuses and near geniuses,but offers up the notion that for them Free Will is impossible. One always has a choice, though, and anyone of the people named in the second paragraph, not least of all Jackson, all the the ability to choose what their circumstances would be and the company they could keep; brilliant or not, they, like the rest of us, make bad decisions and they, like some of us, make choices that sooner or later prove fatal. Assuming without question that the tragedy was inevitable due to predestination only makes the tragedy deeper. What freedoms and insight the work might have provided us is negated by an overwhelming assumption that divine forces were at play. The circumstances, though, are human, all too human.

It's  irritating  enough that Davis concludes her commentary so insipidly, but it is also aggravating she's given such a big microphone from which to entertain her morbid hero worship. This is the same worship of the Celebrity Dead that had surrounded the discussion of the Confessional Poets for so many years, the not-so-subtly disguised attitude that a poet so categorized would only be regarded as great if they met with a tragic death, preferably by their own hand. Only in that instance do they become poets worth taking seriously. Serious as in examples to avoid , I think, and what's to be avoided as well is Davis' unfortunate comment, in a subordinate clause, that " true artists", by in large, are burdened by the creativity God or may not have blessed them with and lack the stamina to survive a life in any of the metaphorical food chains the celebrity culture creates. Davis handily enfeebles artists in general, poses no counter argument that art is more likely to make the artist more resilient in their daily struggles, and she seems willing to let the issue rest in a bed of sighing fatalism. This won't do.

BOB MOSLEY

I had the fortune of being a music writer for the San Diego Reader in the mid-seventies, a time when I was lucky enough to meet  a good many musicians I admired greatly. It was also a period when I was teaching myself how to write. Among the best pieces they published by me was an interview with bassist/vocalist/songwriter Bob Mosley, best known for his work with Moby Grape, a short-lived critical favorite at the height of the San Francisco rock scene of the Sixties.  Critic and pop music historian John D'Agostino had given me a contact phone for Mosley back then, and with a couple of calls to the musician, we arranged for an interview. The Reader piece, if you're interested, can be read  here.

The question, I suppose, is whether the fallibility of music heroes lessen the quality and worth of the words and music they made. It's tempting to think so, it's convenient to take the causal shortcut as to why innovations and styles of the sixties began to go stale, go wrong and in general lose any useful edge they might have had on the artists themselves. False prophets, fakes, liars,  they fucked it all up for the rest of us. Nothing of the sort, I would say. No musician ever conspired to harsh my mellow during that supremely self-regarding decade.

 Suitably enough, D.H. Lawrence wrote in his 1923 book Studies in Classic American Literature that we should "Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it”. In this case, what matters is how resilient the work is, resistant to fad, fashion, moral outrage and critical dismissals . And, we should add, reader disappointment in author's character. It is the work itself, viewed as works of art and subject to criteria that is quite apart from a moral compass (the artist obeying his muse, not his indoctrination), which needs to be considered wholly. It is the work, studied for structure, theme, conflicts, resolutions, and philosophical underpinnings , all independent of a creator's success or failure as a full actualized human being, that we must regard solely.  

 

It is only then that we can draw legitimate pleasure, insight, illumination, catharsis. My current favorite critic, Harold Bloom, has a view coinciding with Lawrence's view that it is the work that only , finished volumes with their beginnings, middles and conclusions, that we can trust, free of the expectations that the author is someone to personally regard as a role model. Literature's sole value, he says, is to help us, the readers, think about ourselves in a world that contains millions of other citizens who, as well, have their sense of personal narrative.  

 

For Mosley and Moby Grape, they are victims of the times, with easy access to sex, drugs, a widespread contempt for conventional morality and the institutions that enforce them, and they fell apart at their prime; just at the precise moment when they seemed poised to truly dominate the underground rock scene and perhaps far beyond that, drugs and insanity laid them low. Much the same is true of Electric Flag, Blind Faith, Cream, the original Butterfield Blues Band. Ego, drugs, and the intervention of a reality that didn't quite curve with the spirit of the times, brought these bands to an end and, as a consequence, began the spin that personalities, not talent, was responsible for the music we loved and took to be harbinger of a historical dialectic in process.  

 

A collective depression fell over the audience, musical innovation became stale formulations, radio became rigidly formatted yet again, underground newspapers folded, we suddenly noticed a lot of our friends dying on the vine or going crazy . So, what remains? Some good music, things we can still listen to five or so decades later and not be embarrassed by the passé add-ons of bad poetry, fad, fashion, and so on. Bob Mosley wasn't a saint, not a poet, not a philosopher, not a visionary, and neither was anyone else in Moby Grape and certainly not any other rock musician who rose to prominence in the Sixties. They were musicians and their genius, or the radiations of talent ranging from mediocre to good to genuine excellence, lay in their skills as instrumentalists, singers, songwriters. When the embarrassment fades, the pontificating abate, the audience resentment at their heroes letting them down as heroes, it is the music, the actual work that was done, that will be judged. Mosley, in my quirky estimation, had a hand in writing and performing a handful of truly great songs from a band that, however great they happened to be for a period of time, could not keep their collective muse engaged. They couldn't hold it together. They drifted apart, re-grouped in different formations in a series of “reunions”, and never approached anything like the best , most sublime moments of their first two records. 

 

This is assuming that a listener from back in the day survives the trauma of getting older and finding that the cosmological suit they were wearing no longer fits, that one has merged well into the territory called adulthood and developed an interest in other things--books, politics, ongoing education, new and different kinds of music and other arts--and can be amused by their presumptive, youthful arrogance and find among their old vinyl records those solid pieces of work, those great songs that remain riveting today, that something good did come out of the Sixties, something  added to our lives that improved it.

Haunting, mumbling minimalism from Traffic

Traffic's" Low Spark of High Heeled Boys", the title track of  what is arguably their best album, is one of those tracks that starts so evocatively, with mystery, hesitation, a  suggestion of paranoia as one progresses into an imagined unknown that goes sour quickly. I have long admired the songwriting and vocal skills of Traffic, Winwood especially, but cringed mightily when they attempted long improvisations. There was the idea in the Sixties that rock music had come into it's own as having an extensive enough technique to support extensive soloing, an idea that, save for the emblematic albums of a select few bands, was more conceit than fact. The hunt-and-peck soloing by Winwood on piano and the generally rasping attempts by saxophonist Chris Wood to emulate Wayne Shorter does a serious disfavor to this genuinely haunting melody and lyric (and Winwood's soulful vocal). The hesitant meandering makes you wish they had called in some guest stars for the solos, perhaps Keith Emerson for the piano and Dick Heckstall-Smith for the saxophone . What the lyrics suggest, sorrowful consequences resulting from a character entering into a  problematic relationship without an idea of  what he or she wants, is diffused along with the  sluggish improvisation; while the middle section scrapes along without a change in tempo, and the pace is reduced to foot dragging, you imagine what this melody and lyric would have sounded like had their been sensible virtuosos at the ready, musicians who could dig deeper into their technique and opened up tonal moods and create textures of conflicting harmony and counter rhythms that might could have created true feelings of the senses released, made transcendent from mere gravity.  Miles Davis , Phillip Glass tand  the never-dying Pink Floyd  (among many others)show us that how to use a minimal amount of notes and not sound empty. The band on this track, I think, is playing at their peak. I wish they'd done better with such an amazing tune.

SOMETHING ABOUT TOM RAPP

Tom Rapp, co-founder, guitarist, singer, and principal songwriter for seminal Sixties Underground band Pearls Before Swine,  died in 2018, age 70. He and his band, Pearls Before Swine, were all over the underground press in that bristling 60s, and it wouldn't be a stretch that his folk roots mixing with jazz and rock and blues and all sorts of other things that the umbrella term "psychedelia" came to merge in unexpected ways, were the inspirations for hundreds of artists after their time in the sun. It would seem that they did not sell many albums, but nearly everyone who had bought one of the albums went on to start their bands and compose their songs against the grain of commercial radio, so for a time changing the direction of popular music. Odd, though, that Rap and PBS aren't discussed more often even among the deepest of the deep-cuts specialists. I had three albums by Pearls Before Swine in my time as an earnest seeker of weird new music, One Nation Underground, These Things To and Balaklava at various times. Like fellow travelers Kaleidoscope, and the Holy Modal Rounders, PBS emerged from the Folk Boom of the early Sixties, when the interest in roots music and sounds from other cultures had largely by-passed the interest in creating yet more safe, commercial Top 40 hits; the interest was newly aligned with poetry, expanded improvisations, motifs previously heard only in university special collection listening rooms, an interest in trying out ideas to see what it would sound like,  however ragged or rarefied. I wasn't a Rapp devotee, but I did like his general approach to being a product of the counterculture. His songs were simple but alluring, just exotic enough to surprise you when you otherwise might have switched albums. His lyric writing was haphazard, kissing the edge of psychedelia but smartly confining itself in an amiable surrealism that relieved the verities of being young and naive.  Other times, his lyric was sharp and beguiling from the imagery stance; he never achieved the polish of a Cohen or Simon, the feathers and lace lyricism of Mitchell, or the dark, rococo symbolism of Dylan, but there was an appeal he, a genuinely odd take on circumstances he found himself involved in, and sly wit that undercut what might have been insufferable pretensions by many drug-informed bands of the time. The Sixties were an age when naive art had, in large measure, gone far beyond the endearingly insular to levels of unprecedented pomposity and egocentric self-regard. Rock and roll, suddenly an art form with nascent critics and literature department drop outs egging the rabble onward with their guitar bashing and cotton-mouthed pronouncements, became the refuge for many of the marginally musical who overrated their abilities and sought to crowd out the real talent from whatever crash pad couch they happened to be sitting on.  The joy of Tom Rapp and Pearls Before Swine was that he wasn't concerned with convincing the world of his genius. Like any poet I admire, large talent or smaller, the business of writing poems, or songs, was one of accurately recording one's impressions, perceptions and fleeting grasp of intangible details, catching them as exactly, as faithfully to the phenomena itself, eschewing the construction of an ersatz philosophy. This hearkens back to my taste for William Carlos Williams and other Modernist poets who desired that their language have fidelity with the world, that their task wasn't to make sense of the world, to render it coherent to a narrative still be written, but rather to have a sense of the sphere one inhabits, that is, a sense of participating in the commotion, marveling and dismaying in turn as events unfold. Rapp wasn't so melodramatic as I might make him sound--he was, in spirit, a what-the-fuck-hippie not dislike the Grateful Dead's lyricist Robert Hunter in temperament. Rapp had whimsy to temper his fatalism, and he lacked the fashionable weariness so many singer-songwriters affected during this period. He never pretended to be 3o years older than he was; he acted the age he truly was, which made the reports from his imagination seem fresh and enduring, if, as already mentioned, a bit awkward and unpolished.  I enjoyed them for what they were, unique, minor, a breath of fresh air. Much more fun than the Incredible String Band.

THE GREATEST ROCK GUITAR ALBUM EVER MADE

High impact,yes it was, but I need to say that in decades that followed this followed genius's death, I've come to be weary of Hendrix when his name comes up in conversation. It's a matter of those from my high school graduating year all over the world turning this innovative musician into a deity, making him less an artist and more of a fetish item. Hendrix more or less gave us five studio albums of finished work --I am including Cry of Love   and Rainbow Bridge (1971), both released posthumously, because the songs there upon are as good as the ones released during his lifetime. I think these songs are heard by us more or less (that phrase again!) as Hendrix intended. His body of finished work is a little broader than we might remember.Electric Ladyland is the best double record studio release from a rock musician. It's often guessed at what Hendrix might have expanded his guitar sound into had he not gagged on his own wretch while asleep--jazz? cosmic funk? jazz fusion with Miles Davis? electronic music? orchestral material with larger ensembles? 

Electric Ladyland gives us indications that the power trio format would not long hold Hendrix-- the variety of styles, the shimmering brilliance of the production and mixing, the exhilarating guitar improvisations and the multi-tracking of guitar parts to produce a nuanced weave of sound, textures and short riffs and counter melodies playing tag in in even the strictest arrangement. And Hendrix was about to emerge as one of the most important songwriters of his generation, not just a windup guitar hero, but an actual auteur. His lyrics had by this time taken the street grit of the urban black experience, combined it with equal doses of Muddy Waters, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, Bob Dylan, The Impressions and, yes, his good friends in Cream and created a vibrant, always engaging eclecticism that remains, soothing, bracing, energizing, whatever you need it to do all these decades later. "Burning of the Midnight Lamp", "House Burning Down", "Crosstown Traffic", "Gypsy Eyes", "1983 (a merman I should be)...". 

These songs were the work of a writer coming into his own as both melodist and lyricist. Yes, lets give credit for his interpretations of Dylan and Earl Hooker, but the attraction of this album is as much about Hendrix's own compositions as it is his guitar prowess. And make no mistake, I am one who thinks that this is a rock guitar record that is unlikely to be equaled by anyone at any time. It showcases everything that Hendrix could do with the latent talent that he had and it revealed, as well, how he could absorb influences, other styles of music and juggle personas as he merged, melded and mashed together genres that wouldn't normally be a good fit for one another but which, in Hendrix's imagination and application, resulted in sounds that exhibited the dual qualities of sounding new, distinct, the work of no other, but which also made you appreciate how organic his inventiveness sounded. Even with all the electronic hardware and studio technology in his employ, his personality was never buried under the audio brilliance . Somehow it all linked to the blues tradition of old, the fabled grizzled, trouble black troubadour on a stage, a porch, a campfire, playing his funky rhythms on guitar and speaking his mind on what haunts him and what vague hopes keep him moving to the next day. Hendrix spoke of his world and made the special effects a servent to his all consuming muse.This album makes me think that the loss of Jimi Hendrix is about the only instance where the world was robbed ; we lost fifty years of genius with his departure.

BULLDOZER METAL

Tokyo Tapes - Scorpions (RCA) 

Recorded live in Japan and released in 1978, the German Scorpions play their way through four sides of machine-shop heavy metal. The songs are generally undistinguished (this band exhibits little originality in the songwriting department) , the drum work tends to be as rigid as rigor mortis, and the singing, in phonetic English, approximates the sound of a barking dog_ What makes the album a delight, though, is the guitar work of Ulrich Roth. Like Edward Van Halen, Roth's style combines flash (ala Jeff Beck and Johnny Winter), technique (Allan Hold s worth and Harvey Mandel), power (Leslie West a and Hendrix) and taste (Ritchie Blackmore). His solos are swooping, over-powering sorties, with dizzying sonic riffs, fleet-fingered note configurations and screaming obstinate sustains. This leads to a monotonous virtuosity that begs to be paid attention to, though. As  is the case with most fret masters in rock and roll, the harmonic palette is limited compared to the full chromatic smorgasbord classical or jazz formats afford musicians given to playing many notes; after a bit , all those scurrying steeple races up and down the guitar neck resemble inspiration and melodrama less and the mechanical fury of factory machines more. Maybe that’s the point.

This 1980 release suggest what fusion jazz would sound like if all the musicians were in the thralls of an encroaching dope sleep.Fred Simon and Michael Bard, a pianist and multiple reedman respectively who' ve been around the jazz scene virtually unknown the past few years, here emerge from relative obscurity with their first record Musaic, an effort that strikes me as an example of  playing-it-safe: the melodies are pleasant and draw on a number of recognizable sources, the rhythm section does its chores competently, and the solos display the requisite knowledge of technique. But, the music never takes chances.  Admittedly the skill level is high,  but Simon and Bard s insist on tilling styles that have been farmed  too long to less bountiful yields: their sources sound like an over-familiar cross of Paul Winter, Oregon and Dave Bruebeck: with a dash of Ellington thrown in for good measure - makes the stuff on Musaic merely run of the mill. Even Larry Coryell's appearance on the funk jam "Fancy Frog" fails to liven things up. The usually idiosyncratic guitarist sounds more than happy  cruise on the tepid flow of things, content to only dish out cliche blues licks and occasional fast runs instead of really pushing himself or anyone for that matter. Bear in mind, the music is not atrocious. It's nice and would make the ideal backdrop for when your mother was over for dinner. Otherwise, your time would be better spent catching up on your sleep, or staying up all night watching black and white movies highlighting big lizards devastating Japanese coastal cities. 

DON'T SING DYLAN LYRICS, DANCE THEM!

Choreographer Twyla Tharp's 2006 dance interpretation of Bob Dylan's songs, creakily titled "The Times They Are A-Changin'," brings to mind Richard Goldstein's remark in his old collection "The Poetry of Rock" that interpreting Dylan's lyrics is "...like running a USO in Hanoi" because the chance of getting "hit by flack" was unavoidable. Everyone has Their Own Private Dylan. Unless one's interpretation of the songwriter's lyrics achieves genius nearly equal to the subject under review--I'm thinking of Greil Marcus's critical book the Invisible Republic-- each spin and burnishing of Dylan's writing will be found wanting. I had a chance to see Tharp's "Times..." show in San Diego and couldn't escape the desperation to make such an adaptable body of work lend itself to theatrical presentation; as mentioned, the songs are fine as rock and roll numbers and work within criteria independent of other forms, but they are rather redundant, repetitive, musically constrained to furnish material for the work a choreographer is supposed to do. Billy Joel and the Beach Boys are obvious choices for dance interpretations simply because the songs have more bounce, variety, invention than the relatively primitive strumming. Dylan preferred; a successful dance sequence derived from "Good Vibrations" isn't far afield. "Times...", though, seemed without ease or grace, and the dancers might as well have had tire chains around their ankles. The storyline, such as it was, was Kerouac kitsch filtered through some cracked lens of euphoric recall. The movies in my head when I was seventeen listenings to "Blonde on Blonde" on headphones was more potent than the busy mess Tharp gave San Diego audiences, and her mistake was trying to make sense of what I think might have been her similarly subjective and private response to Dylan's work. What she's mounted and now brought to New York is a buzzkill. It's like trying to explain why a Coen Brothers movie is funny. It cannot be done.

CLARENCE CLEMONS

I've never been a Bruce Springsteen fan, but neither have I  been one of the over-stating haters who've seen the last three decades decrying the man and his music. Although I think The Boss's music, overall,  hyperventilates to the extent that the version of rock and roll passion seems appropriate for a musical than a bar band with roots in a working-class community, I never thought there was a phony nor malicious bone in Springsteen's body. I approached him with a grudging yet growing respect--for all the promiscuous use of cadenzas, the solemn and unsubtle lethargy of his message tunes, the crazy blending of Dylan lyrics, Van Morrison vocals, and the greased pulse of urban rhythm and blues that never, never really moved to do anything other than changing the channel or to look elsewhere in the record bins for a more spurious excitement, I simply had to resign from the debating team and admit that  I didn't get it. Not that I rescind my former criticisms--Bruce almighty was and remains more rock and roll spirit and drive than I will ever be, even if I don't care for his accent. Springsteen sang about the things all writers of songs marketed to teens talk about, the desire to get away from the parents and find a place of their own; this runs through Elvis and Chuck Berry through the Ramones and upwards to the Foo Fighters and Tool and their moody ilk. It's not that I resisted "getting it," as it were. It's more that I wasn't convinced by the songs he wrote and sang, in large part. It's just as likely that I had turned toward literature, steep reading in American and European traditions, as a means of examining the further reaches of a bad mood and that intractable sensation of feeling apart from, set aside, and put upon by forces one could not control--love?hate?politics? Vanity? Cruel gods? Songs are a snapshot of the mood, which is fine, but Springsteen over-packed them like he was going on a long trip with only a split-seamed carry-on. I do respect him for trying and cheering him on the occasional successes --"Tunnel of Love" is an especially taut, pared-down exploration of the aforementioned bad moods. At the time, though, I wasn't in the mood for pop tunes: I wanted the dense fugues given me by Mailer, DeLillo, Pynchon, Burroughs, et al. To quote Danny Glover, I was too old for the shit that came beforehand. Not that I didn't think of it fondly and at times sneak back in through a bedroom window.

ART ENSEMBLE OF CHICAGO

Nice Guys — The Art Ensemble of Chicago (ECM): 
By definition, avant-garde or "free" jazz is supposed to be difficult for the uninitiated to warm up to, but the Ensemble's latest seems (to me at least) to be the one '79 release in the genre that even Mangione fans can find enjoyable. Nice Guys is a brilliant crazy quilt of styles and strategies, with the shifting textures and coloration of saxophones, trumpets, drums, bass, and a plethora of more obscure instruments proceeding through a fascinating session of unconventional improvisation. 

A LINE OF DEFENSE FOR BUDDY MILES

From the start I admit that the late drummer Buddy Miles wasn't the flashiest stick man that had ever climbed a big drum set, and it should be noted that his reputation as a musician suffered in the long run . His skills on the drumheads had become a punchline to a joke that didn't have to be set up. Still,I was sorry twhen I heard in 2008 that he   Miles, had pased away. Best known for his work with Mike Bloomfield's Electric Flag and for Jimi Hendrix's Band of Gypsies from the faraway 60s, has passed away due to apparent heart disease. The odd thing was that even with playing with the likes of John McLaughlin, Carlos Santana, Jeff Beck ,Wilson Pickett as well as Hendrix and Bloomfield, Miles got little respect as a musician, often being derided as a monotonous time keeper who's straight forward , rock solid drumming were a drag on the greater musicians who opted to play with him. It was a bad rap and Miles deserved better. He certainly did better on disc than his detractors claimed. 

His drum work on John McLauglin's landmark Devotion album, a seminal session of pulverizing jazz-rock riffing and fret scraping, is sharp, hard and bracing in sound, uncompromising as a project that was bringing jazz-fusion , as a form, into a viable mode of hard-luck ad-libbing, an application of an eight- to- the- bar tempo with chitlin' circuit rim shots anchoring the explorations of others who were catering the shotgun wedding of jazz and rock. It's a great, sharply textured album, wonderfully refreshing and alive with the spunk soloing, quite distinct from the muzaky malarkey the music later turned into. It's been said that the initial release of the live Band of Gypsies contains some of the most inspired, impressionistic and brilliantly fluid guitar work Jimi Hendrix ever recorded, to which I would agree, and to which I'd add further that Buddy Miles steady, consistent , hard charging drum work deserves much of the credit. 

The generally favored Hendrix drummer, Mitch Mitchell, had jazz chops, sure, but the truth is that what he, Hendrix and bassist Noel Redding did on stage was flail about, out of key and erratic in tempo and transitions; the task of waiting for those moments when Hendrix "took off" and gave us one of those pockets of genius amid the miscues, the bad notes and feedback often was more work than it was worth. The Band of Gypsies was a steadier thing, a firmer base for Hendrix to improvise over; as Hendrix died young, we'll never know if he'd improve his technique and advance on to playing with drummers like Tony Williams or Elvin Jones, but for the moment all the graces Hendrix had--original sound, emotion, a mastery of volume--fell into place when he had Buddy Miles as his backbone. Buddy Miles did good Thanks, friend.

DYLAN IS NOT A POET, BUT HE PLAYS ONE ON TV

 1.

photograph by Jim Marshall

An old peeve, this: Bob Dylan is not a poet. He is a songwriter. What he does is significantly different than what a poet does. In any relevant sense, the best of what poetry offers is read off the page, sans melody from accompanying guitar or piano and a convincingly evocative voice. The poet's musical sense, rhythmic properties, and other euphonious qualities are derived from the words and their clever, ingenious combinations alone. A reader may appreciate the words, the rhymes, the cadences, the melodious resonance, and dissonance, as the case may be, but all this comes from the poem's language alone, on the page, without music. The musicality we speak of when addressing such rich and soul-stirring sounds of nouns and adjectives conjoined has everything to with the poet extending the limits of everyday speech. You can read Shakespeare to full literary potential, I think, because his verse, in the guise of dialogue, still satisfies as writing, with metaphors, rhythms, cadences swirling and ringing to a heightened sense of what the complexity of human emotion can sound like if there were words, allusions, similes, and metaphors that could give life and texture for what are, in his plays, inchoate feelings brewing at some base level of the personality before the mind can give them an articulate if flawed rationale.

It was the task of Shakespeare, the poet, and the playwright combined to give verbal music to what were speeches that made private thoughts, half-plotted schemes, inarticulate resentments, paranoia, the whole conflicting brew of insecurity, self-doubt, and malevolence into something that was the equivalent of music, a sweet and stirring sound that bypasses the censoring and sense-making intellect and which makes even the foulest of schemes seem just and only natural. The writing approximates music from the page and provides for a more complicated task when considering our responses to a provocative set of stanzas. Dylan is a songwriter, a distinct art form, and his words are lyrics, which cannot be experienced to their fullest without the music that goes along with them. One may, of course, hum the melodies while pouring over the lyrics and mentally reconstruct of listening to songs of an album, but this proves the point. Of themselves, Dylan's lyrics pale badly compared to page poets. With his music, the lyrics come alive and artful, at their best. They are lyrics, inseparable from their melodies, and not poems, which have another kind of life altogether.

The lyrics are flat and unremarkable save for their strangeness, which is not especially interesting in verbal terms. With music, voila! Transformation. This is a condition that makes what Dylan does songwriting, not the writing of poetry. These are distinct art forms with features and rules of composition that are crucial and non-negotiable. Cohen is an interesting case since he inhabits several writing mediums, IE, novels, poetry, plays music. He's not especially prolific in any of these areas--over the forty-plus years that he's been on my radar, his output has been meager, albeit high quality--but it occurs to me that he's more of an actual writer than Dylan is. They are different sorts of geniuses. Cohen, of course, is a novelist overall—“Beautiful Losers,” “The Favorite Game”--and a poet, someone wholly committed to making the words from their own music, rhythm and power so that the sort of splendid, soul-racked suffering he specializes in, that deliciously wrought agony that's midway between spiritual experience and sexual release, is fully conveyed to the reader and made as felt as possible.

Cohen tends the words he uses more than Dylan does; his language is strange and abstruse at times, but beyond the oddity of the existences he sets upon his canvas, there exist an element that is persuasive, alluring, masterfully wrought with writing, from the page alone, that blends all the attendant aspects of Cohen's stressed worldliness-- sexuality, religious ecstasy, the burden of his whiteness-- into a whole, subtly argued, minutely detailed, expertly layered with just so many fine, exacting touches of language. His songs, which I find the finest of the late 20th century in English--only Dylan, Costello, Mitchell, and Paul Simon have comparable bodies of work--we find more attention given to the effect of every word and phrase that's applied to his themes, his storylines. In many ways, I would say Cohen is a better lyricist than Dylan because he's a better writer overall. Unlike Dylan, who has been indiscriminate for the last thirty years about the quality of work he's released, there is scarcely anything in Cohen's songbook you would characterize as a cast-off.



Cohen takes more care in words he selects to tell his tales. He creates his moods, as he provides a sense of location, tone, and philosophical underpinning while also working subtly working to suggest the opposite of whatever mood he might be getting at. Cohen is simply more careful than Dylan.
In word selection, more discriminating; the architecture of literary influence is displayed in the disciplined rhymes of Cohen's parable-themed lyrics, elegantly so. It is, to be sure, a matter of choice how a writer manages their word flow. Cohen's writing has a sense of someone who labors hard to make the image work, to have that image compliment and make enticingly evocative a scenario that starts off simple and then arrives at a moment of fatalistic surrender to powers greater than oneself, both sensual and spiritual. My feeling for Dylan's method is that he is an admirer of what Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac regarded as Spontaneous Bop Prosody, a zen-like approach to an expression where it was regarded that the first thought was the best thought one could have on a subject.

Good poets, great poets, are writers when it gets down to what they do, and it’s my feeling that  Cohen’s experience as a novelist, short story writer, and playwright has given him a well-honed instinct for keeping the verbiage to a minimum. This is not to say Cohen is a chintzy minimalist, such as  Raymond Carver, or that fewer words in a piece are, by default, superior to longer word counts; rather, Cohen just has a better sense of when it’s time to stop and develop a  lyric further.

Dylan's genius is closer to the kind of brilliance we see in Miles Davis, where the influences of unlike styles of music and other elements-- traditional folk, rock, and roll, protest songs, blues, country, French symbolism, Beat poets--were mixed in ways that created a new kind of music, and required a new critical language to discuss what it was he had done with the influences he'd assimilated, and the range of his influence. It is possible to look at aspects of Dylan's art. Fine individual strands wanting--his lyrics may be unfocused or strange for their own sake, his melodies are either borrowed or lack sophistication, his singing is nasal and grating--but taken together, music, words, voice, instrumentation fused, one experiences catharsis, power and galvanizing mysticism in the best recorded moments. "Ballad of a Thin Man" is a flat, curious scribble of a lyric read by itself. Still, with the minor key intonations of Al Kooper's keyboard and Mike Bloomfield's interned guitar, coupled with Dylan's leering, a snarling dramatization of the lyric, we have an art that is riveting n terms that are purely musical; yes, one might go on at length and create a cosmology of what Dylan's lyrical creations make of the experience, but the emphasis needs to remain on the whole.

" It's Alright Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)"is a terrific, innovative song lyric, and as a lyric does not have the same power as a well-written poem has on the page when that lyric hasn't the music to give it momentum. The power of the lyric has a sustained "oh wow" element, one line after another summarizing the sad state of the Perfect Union, the Idealized world in harsh, ironic terms, each image and beat of the intoned images, critical, lively, surreal in a seamless mash-up of dissimilar concepts, are lifted, foisted, tossed to the listener by the steady and firm strums of the simple guitar Dylan maintains. Lyrics have their advantages and can be quite artful and subtle, but I maintain that they're a different art form; the words are subservient to the song form, where poems of every sort are autonomous, structures made entirely of language. (Unless, of course, you're a Dada poet who just arrived here with a time machine).

"Desolation Row" and "Visions of Johanna," two songs from what I think is the center of Dylan's greatest period as a song-poet, if you will, likewise are not to make their fantastic excursions through Daliesque landscapes alone on the page, as flat print. Dylan's chords, his voice, and his forward-march rhythms are what make these extended lyrics crisp and suggestive of metaphysical chaos under a thin the thin guise of civility and reason. Drums, organs, twangy and tuneless guitars, police sirens, his braying voice bring a dimension to the lyrics that aren't there without it. Dylan's lyrics especially--more so than Cole Porter, more so than Chuck Berry, more so than a host of his contemporaries--are not self-sufficient as page-poets are with their work. It can be argued that what Dylan has done is more complex, subtler, and requiring a new vocabulary to discuss than what poets have done, and something I would subscribe to on principle. Dylan remains a songwriter first and foremost and a poet only through loose analogy. In all, Dylan's lyrics serve the musical experience, the concept of a song, which makes Dylan a songwriter of genius, but not a poet. When they are writing poetry and not novels or songs of their own, poets are committed to making language and language alone, the means through which their ethereal notions will be preserved. Successor failure on their part depends solely on how well they can write, not strum a guitar or croon a tune.

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2.

 I do admire the work of artists who remain interesting as they get older, but it is a fact that many writers, poets, songwriters do their best, most compelling work in their early years. Dylan is one of these--the greatest songs, in my view, were those that combined equal elements of Surrealism, Burroughs-inspired language cut-ups, blues and rural south music vernaculars, and heavy doses of French Symbolism by way of Rimbaud and Mallarme. This gave his stanzas a heightened, alienated feeling of sensory overload, making him the principal Lyricist of the bare existential absurdity that life happens to be. No one got to the infuriating heart of the sensation that life had ceased to mean anything after those matters that "mean" the most to us--marriages, friendships, tastes, financial security, spiritual or religious certainty--were changed, destroyed, or simply vanished. Dylan's writing was of the individual suddenly in the choking throes of uncertainty, batting back encroaching gloom with the kind of swinging, poetic wit that reassembles existence. The stance, a state, an aesthetic state of being that made it possible for him to fire on all cylinders for a good run of time. Generally, Dylan's poetic quality and intensity in the longs on the list I made are a substantial body of work that lines up perfectly with and matches the strongest work by Eliot, Pound, WC Williams, Burroughs Ginsberg. It is also not the kind of work you can keep doing for a lifetime; like Miles Davis, he had to. His mature work has often hit the mark and offers a long view of experience, especially moving. Just as often, I think he misses the mark and overwrites or is prone to hackneyed phrasing. 

There is much quality to the later songs, but they are not among Dylan's greatest as a body of lyrics. Dylan is called more often than not a poet because of the unique genius of his best lyrics; I don't think he's a poet, but a songwriter with an original talent strong enough to change that particular art forever. I do understand, though, why a host of critics through the decades would consider him a poet in the first place. My list is the songs I think that justify any sort of reputation Dylan has a poetic genius. I like most of the songs mentioned above for various reasons other than the ones on my initial 35 choices; the longs there manage an affinity for evoking the ambiguities and sharp perceptions of an acutely aware personality who is using poetic devices to achieve more abstract and suggestive effects and still manage to be wonderfully tuneful. No one else in rock and roll, really, was doing that before Dylan was. On those terms, nothing he's written is quite at the level of where he was with the songs on my list; this list consists of the body of work that substantiates Dylan's claim to genius." Just Like a Woman" is one of the finest character sketches I've ever heard in a song. What's remarkable is the brevity of the whole, how much history is suggested, inferred, insinuated in spare yet arresting imagery. I rather like that Dylan allows the mystery of this character to linger, to not let the fog settle. It is the ambiguity that gives its suggestive power, and there is the whole element of whether the person addressed is a woman at all, but rather a drag queen. It's an open question; it's a brilliant lyric.

"Drifter's Escape "was on twice and is now a single entry. There is a concentration of detail in the lyric, a compression of Biblical cadence and sequence that makes the song telling and vivid not in its piling on stanzas but in its brevity. He does the same for "All along the Watchtower," which I regard as a condensed "Desolation Row," a commentary, perhaps, from the tour bus just passing through; the tour guide finally tells the driver, "there must be some kinda way outta here." I regard the true "poetry" of Dylan's music in the earlier music, where he is spectacularly original in how he forced his influences to take new shapes and create new perspectives. Post JWH, I just find too much of his lyric writing prolix, and meandering, time-filling rather than revealing; the surreal, fresh, colloquial snap of his language has gone and is replaced with turns of phrase that are trite, hackneyed, ineffective;' they strike my ear as false. Even "Blind Willie McTell," a song that has been persuasively defended by intelligent fans of Dylan's later work, strikes too many false notes for my tastes. Musically, it drags and philosophically seems a victim of convenient thinking,  a PC version of Song of the South; some of the imagery is simply cloying and seems more suitable more for Gone with the Wind than a poet of arguable worth.

...See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
Smell that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a-moaning
Hear that undertaker’s bell...

Really, that is awful, a dreadful presentation of atmospheric detail meant to create historical context and mood, but it trades on so many received ideas of slavery, racism, the south, et al., that the intent no longer matters. It strikes as more minstrel show than tribute. Had anyone submitted this to serious poetry (or lyric) writing workshop, it would have been handed back to us for revision, with the advice that we rid the narrative of the creaky, questionable window dressing? "When I Paint My Masterpiece" works wonderfully because of its lack of any messages about social justice. It works because it is a sharp, terse, vivid travelogue, vague and evocative in equal measure. The ambiguity and absence of relevance to anything other than Dylan's need to speak offhandedly about an interesting time in a particular character's life is what makes this song memorable.

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
Ancient footprints are everywhere
You can almost think that you’re seein’ double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs
Got to hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece
She promised that she’d be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece

Well, I had a feeling that the general good feeling this album conveys is that Dylan wasn't trying too hard to prove he's a genius. The record is straightforward, and the language is remarkably free of affectation, a tendency that has plagued him post-JWH. I especially like "Sign in the Window"; it has the sincerity and actual and momentary acceptance of where one happens to be in a certain part of life and offers a new set of expectations. The perfectly natural language here, good and unexpected rhymes, telling use of local detail that give us color and history without sagging qualifiers to make it more "authentic," the lyrics are a recollection of a trip, of places visited, of perspectives changing, a nice string of incidents in a language that sounds like a real voice telling real things, with genuine bemusement.