"Dylan Deluxe" Preview - Exclusive Interview!

Nobody was more surprised than je when famed protest singer Bob Dylan dropped in [left, below - Ed.] to th' Isle O' Foam© yestiddy on a worldwide tour to promote the release of Dylan Deluxe, the long awaited legacy edition of his last album for Columbia in '73.

Relaxing poolside whilst [grammar - Ed.] Kreemé served her signature kidney n' rutabaga smoothies, Dylan was keen to put the record straight. It's a lengthy interview, and those of you who free-fall straight down into the comments (hi, Steve!) are going to miss out on possibly the most revealing interview the man ever granted.

BoB That album has been more misunderstood than anything I ever done. Ever. I got so sick at heart ... (shakes head)

IoF© Tell us the story, Bob. From the beginning.

BoB I was born in Duluth, nineteen -

IoF© (cutting in) Not that beginning. Of the album?

BoB Oh! Right. Yeah. It was a kind of fallow period for me. I wasn't writing much. I was in London, England, I remember, and Bowie, David, and me were in his apartment - flat, they call them, did you know that? It's like they have words for everything. Tuppence. That's like a buck. Fifty cents.

(long pause)

IoF© And? Bowie?

BoB Yeah. It was the end of the sixties -

IoF© It was 1973, Bob.

BoB - right. End of the sixties. It was like this fallow period for him too. He wasn't writing much. I don't know who came up with the idea, him or me, but we were suddenly talking about doing covers albums, you know, other peoples' songs. British beer is like soup. Real nutritious. They serve it in hospitals.

IoF© So you both decided to do covers albums?

BoB Right there. We were scribbling lists of songs we wanted to cover. David wanted to do a bunch of show tunes, Judy Garland, Ethel Merman. I was thinking of an American Songbook, standards, some obscure stuff, songs I liked singing in the shower. That was going to be the title - Songs From The Shower, like that Leonard Cohen album, only a double, there were so many. We got real fired up! Back in the states, Columbia weren't keen on the idea. Clive [Davis - Ed.] laughed at me, right there in his office. You can't fucking sing, Bob! Like it was a big joke, him and his asslicking ... asslickers ... I never forgot that. I went ahead anyway, got some musicians together, relaxed sessions, worked through my list. When I delivered the tapes Davis [Clive - Ed.] went, well, nuts, I guess. We fought, literally fought, throwing punches. At one point I hit him with this elk's head he had on the wall, stuffed hunting trophy, like he was this brawny outdoorsy type. He fell back through a glass coffee table, smashed it completely, and held up his hands, whimpering (tremulous, girlish voice) okay, Bob, I'll release it, but it'll be a single album, and you better fucking deliver on the next one or you're all washed up here!

IoF© Wow!

BoB Pathetic. So I did like this finger pistol at him and said there ain't gonna be a next one, Mary.

IoF© Ha ha! But in a sense he had a point, The album was trashed by everybody.

BoB Broke my heart. I was in this position where I couldn't defend it, so I kind of twisted the story, saying Columbia put it out without my knowledge or permission, playing the big evil corporation against the victimised artist card. I got back a little credibility. I lied to myself, I lied to everybody, and I crucified that sweet little album.

IoF© Bowie's Pinups was a success, though.

BoB He released that? 

IoF© Uh ... so, this deluxe edition?

BoB It's pretty close to how I envisaged it, only the title's the same as Davis chose, the fucking genius. Just a bunch of nice tunes, sung when I still had a voice. It's probably my favorite album of mine.

IoF© Thanks for dropping in, Bob!

BoB Thanks for the opportunity to get the truth out there, Farq. It's a weight off my mind. You want to loadup the album up for th' Four Or Five Guys©?

IoF© Gee! That would be swell!

Not That Gigi, This One Dept.

Awesomeness.

Gigi the movie not only hasn't worn well, it was dreadful in every way on release in '58, the year after Gigi Gryce appeared at Newport. Reminiscin', his last album, is from a couple of years later, and perfectly encapsulates the vibe of 'sixties jazz. It's cool as a frosted daiquiri, swings like a sandal from the toe of a party girl, and it's an orch-tette! Oboy!

Gryce, whose playing was influenced by his pal Charlie Parker, was an academic at heart, an introspective bookish type whose compositions were the product of a formidable theoretical knowledge. He worked extensively as an arranger and session musician, contributing to many great albums (such as Monk's Music) but retreated from the music business into public school teaching - a kind of Bizarro Sting, leaving a relatively slender discography as leader which rewards investigation.

This post authenticated by the Veeblefetzer Homologation Department, U.S. Department of Commerce

NOW That's What I Call Rock Groups Named After Hermann Hesse Novels! Part One

The publishers knew their demographic. Dig the quote, too.

I doubt Hermann Hesse paperbacks are being much read in coffee houses or stuffed into duffel bags anymore. Do TYPOT [The Young People Of Today - Ed.] read books at all? They seem to be permanently entranced by glowing rectangles. Maybe they're reading them on their phones? What am I saying? Of course they're not fucking reading books on their phones, especially not novels by dead white dudes and especially not pipesucking entitled German-Swiss dead white dudes trying to pierce the veil of mundane existence thru rejection of contemporary mores. Fuck that shit - here's a selfie of my oat-milk latte!

Back then, though. There were four Hesse cerebral core texts [we did that one already - Ed.] that got passed around - Siddhartha, The Steppenwolf, and if you were the bookish type, Demian, and The Journey To The East. These were cult books, but it was a big cult. We didn't sit around discussing them like Oprah's book club, giving them the academic analysis, we just read the fucking things because we needed all the help we could get piercing the veil of mundane existence, which was hard work, and took dedication and a bunch of drugs.

Hesse suffered depression as a boy, gave suicide a try, got put into a mental hospital. Worked in bookshops. Kept himself to himself. Read books, wrote. Got married, travelled to the East, not finding what he was looking for there, either. Separated from schizophrenic wife. During this time he became a successful author, the cerebral core texts [give it up - Ed.] appearing between 1919 and 1932. He wrote a shitload of other stuff, including the impenetrable Glass Bead Game, glomming the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, and died in 1962, just before drug-crazed rock bands started naming themselves after his works.

Steppenwolf is the best-known. A great name for a band. Mars Bonfire, a great name for a rock musician, wrote Born To Be Wild, and the rest is history.

Demian changed their name from Bubble Puppy (who wouldn't), but the big time eluded them anyway.

Bead Game [antecedently FoamFeatured© - Ed.] were the best thing in The People Next Door movie, an achievement perhaps just shy of a Nobel Prize, but why the gorgeous Echoes Of Sweet Medusa wasn't a great big fat hit remains one of the unsolved mysteries of the business called "the music". Loaddown includes their two albums.

This post made manifest thru the intercession of The Bishop Of Rome Motor Court, Pismo Beach.

Ineluctable Audacity Dept. - The Great God Pan At The Gates Of Dawn

Hard now to appreciate just how wildly experimental and startling that first Pink Floyd album was. It's either patronised as charming but hopelessly dated, or revered as the kaleidoscopic flowering of a madcap minstrel's cracked genius (an a-Syd album). That's two blind grabs at the elephant in a dark room.

Pan, yesterday

Start with the title: it's not on the front cover, it's not the name of a song, nor is it referenced in a lyric. It's a quote from The Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahame, one of the handful of children's classics adopted by the hippies as holy texts. The Piper is Pan, the horned goat-god, bestial, wildly sexual. Pagan. We're not talking Disney here, kiddies.

"This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,' whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. 'Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!"

Meeting Pan is the culmination of the trip back to nature, to the source of magic, to the gates of dawn, or the Doors Of Perception - Heaven And Hell, the Magic Theatre. All this buried in the title to a pop album? Not for everybody - if you knew, you knew. Certainly it was deemed too arcane for the American market - Tower just stripped it right out.

In a radical break from EMI art department policy, the cover shot was lensed [oh very good - Ed.] by fashion photographer Vic Singh, using a prism given to him by George Harrison. No stylists, no special effects other than the lens, and the band in their work clothes - a kaleidoscopic moment captured forever. Today, it seems like just another generic psychedelic cover, but back then it was saturated with a-Syd intensity.

The music, for a start, owes nothing to The Beatles, who are widely credited with the invention of the sixties. Mostly composed by Barrett, it was a revolutionary clash of fairytale whimsy and cosmic soundscapes, much of it instrumental. Not instrumental as in surf music or The Shadows or RnB or jazz or anything else current at the time. Indescribably far out and mind-blowing, it was music of the spheres teetering on the brink of collapse but always underpinned by structure and order, prefiguring Kraut Rock. It's what you might expect when three formalist architectural students get inspired by a whirling dervish shaman. Nick Mason's drumming is supernaturally right, at once powerful and retrained, a tribal metronomic. Roger Waters' bass has that freakbeat power and pulse. Rick Wright is feeling his way, but never hits a wrong note, adding color and depth. And Barrett's guitar is a psychedelic scythe, a slashing blade. And his lyrics are frequently sublime:

Lime and limpid green, a second scene
A fight between the blue you once knew.
Floating down, the sound resounds
Around the icy waters underground.
Jupiter and Saturn, Oberon, Miranda and Titania.
Neptune, Titan, stars can frighten ...

I was listening to this while chowing down on my gha-pow moo today, washed down by an icy tin of Kirin. In The Wind In The Willows, Pan grants his worshippers forgetfulness of their meeting, so their lives will not seem smaller in comparison. I was trying to remember seeing the Floyd in '67. It's all gone. Just memories of memories, ripples flattening from that original splash. False memory foam, froth on the daydream. But the music - my song-dream - is still as startling, all there at the tap of my phone, worlds and lifetimes colliding, as ineluctably audacious as ever.

Saucerful Of Secrets

I've forgotten the derivation of the title - I think it's another literary reference. The cover (the band's first by Hipgnosis) features what looks like a light show - much of it from a Strange Tales page. Doctor Strange is clearly visible on the original Tower release [above, at right - Ed.], but almost totally obscured on the U.K. edition. Strange! Other elements come from alchemical texts. Because 1968.

Generally perceived as a "transitional album", Easy-going Rog nixed Barrett's Scream Thy Last Scream and Vegetable Man, replacing them with his execrable Corporal Clegg. My version redresses this calumny, and incorporates contemporary singles in a reshuffled sequence you may find mildly satisfying. Oh - it's all in stereo, as the baby Jesus intended. To claim the mono version (which was the only one I had for many years) is in any way better is just perverse. Stereo was arguably part of the composing process - the band and Norman Smith knew what they were doing - widening heads, not narrowing focus. Loaddown in comments. Gee - is it ever swell!

How I Overcame The Shudder & Cringe Factor And Learned To Enjoy The Music Of Sting Dept.

 

Sting at the launch of his scrotum-scented candle range, yestiddy

It's his grinding, slatey-faced humorlessness. The leaden, witless, pompous self-seriousness. Can you imagine a worse person to be stuck with at a party than Gordon Sumner? As this was never even remotely likely, you'd think this wouldn't be an issue, and I could appreciate his music for what it is, but no. I've always loftily advocated art, not the artist, but made an exception for Sting. Something about his unique wonderfulness - singlehandedly saving the rainforest, marrying a posh bint (c.f. easygoing funsters Elvis Costello and John McLaughlin), dabbling in thespianism and vagina-scented Buddhism, bringing Jungian philosophy to the masses. All the while fending off unwanted advances from schoolgirls.

His interviews have that effortless quality of making you want to grab a lungful of fresh air. There's a doozy on Rick Beato's YewChewb© channel. Rick understands just how deceptively clever and sophisticated Sting's songs are, revering the guy as a composer and performer, but not as much as Sting, who has a Chapman stick up his ass and an expression on his pan that would do credit to a Merovingian emperor.

But I find myself suddenly enjoying his albums much, much more than I feel comfortable with. They're just so damn ... musical? And there's a bunch of tunes in there I find myself singing along with, such is their compelling melodic heft. Today's loaddown consists of Turtles, Nothing, and Tales, which is probably as deep as I want to wade. I'll still be looking over his shoulder at parties for someone more interesting to talk to - perhaps that insurance salesman keen to contact me about my extended car warranty - but I'm pleased that art, not the artist has passed its perhaps most stringent test.