SO I woke up this morning with this song in my head.
Now, the question is...should i get an MRI? I received a lot of head hits & concussion as a child. I don't even like this song a LITTLE bit, but my brain is still choosing songs for me like a radio station I can't skip past.
123.4 DAN FM! "Playing ALL the hits you couldn't stand when you were a kid and hate even more now." I WILL admit tho, I dislike his songs but I LOVE the grain of Bryan Adams voice. Can you imagine if his songs were actually good? That gravelly voice he's got?
The German language even has a word for it, for that specific gravelly grainy voice: "Yarrrrrgh." Mark Lanegan has it. Courtney Love has it. Rod Stewart, Bryan Adams (obv), Alannah Myles. Bry Webb (Constantines). Britt Daniels (Spoon). Kurt Cobain had it. YARGGH.
Oh! Speaking of Rod Stewart, there's a passage in Pamela Des Barres' I’m With the Band (which is excellent save for Dave Navarro’s pointless introduction) where nearly every early 1970s L.A. based rock star is @ this one party. But nobody notices poor Rod Stewart so he goes off and sulks on the steps of a school across the street. It took four girls to drag him back to the party, tugging at his stupid mod suit sleeves.
What a sulky little brat, eh? Who leaves a party where Todd Rundgren, Harry Nilsson, Alice Cooper, Micky Dolenz, Anne Murray, Brian Wilson (!), Graham Nash, Stephen Stills, and Neil Young are ALL in the same house? Who DOES that?
Rod Stewart, apparently.
Also apparent: Malibu was a fuckin madhouse in the early to mid 70s.
According to Neil Young's ten thousand page biography by Jimmy McDonough, Shakey, Bob Dylan was invited to this party but never showed. When Neil Young staggered out to his car to drive home drunk (rich people and rock stars have a different set of rules than us plebes), Bob Dylan was curled up in the back seat of Young's Cadillac De Ville, sleeping. Young was & still is forever dismantling things and putting them back together, so parts of the De Ville Dylan caught some zzz's in can be seen buried in the sand on the front cover of On The Beach. See the yellow tail fin in the foreground? That’s one part of the car Dylan slept in. A lot of people know Bob Dylan is on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Heats Club Band, but not many know that he was once found passed out in the back of Neil Young’s Cadillac De Ville that can be seen on the beach on the front cover of On The Beach. (That felt like a really dumb sentence to type out.)
Far Out Magazine says Dylan was found sleeping in Mort, Neil Young’s old hearse, but that makes no sense at all. Every hardcore Neil Young fan knows that Mort never even made it to the States because it broke down in Blind River, Ontario in 1962. After Young found success, he contacted the Blind River scrapyard where he’d been forced to leave Mort, bought the hearse back, and had it transported to Broken Arrow, his Northern California ranch. “Long May You Run” is about Mort, one of Young’s most popular songs, is about Mort. And in the second verse of that song, Young and McDonough’s stories both line up: In Blind River in 1962, Young’s hearse died. “It was back in Blind River in 1962 when I last saw you alive.”
Furthermore, I’m not convinced Young even had Mort in his possession in 1976, when Long May You Run by the Stills-Young Band was released, because in the third verse he ponders Mort’s fate. “Maybe the Beach Boys have got you now/with those waves singing Caroline/oh “Caroline No.” Young gives tribute to the fact that the Beach Boys like to sing about cars and beaches, and wonders if maybe Mort ended up with them, in some crazy, hazy California dream: “rollin down that empty ocean road/getting to the surf on time.” That “maybe” suggests, more than suggests, it pretty much confirms that Neil Young didn’t get Mort back until sometime after 1976. And On the Beach, featuring a part of the car Dylan slept in, came out in 1974. So Far Out Magazine are way off on this one. Nice try tho, guys.
Now, we know that Young eventually got Mort back because he auctioned the hearse off in 2017. He must have really needed the dough. Young has said in interviews that “Mort was as much a part of my personality as a horse is to a cowboy’s personality.” Divorcing Pegi must’ve cost him a fucking fortune. Young wouldn’t have willingly parted with Mort. He even had to give up his famous ranch in northern California, Broken Arrow, a ranch he’d owned since before Harvest (1972) came out. What fucking right does Pegi have to take that ranch away from Young? He wrote the songs that paid for that album, not her. While Young admittedly had sold off about a quarter of his land before divorcing Pegi (because nobody buys albums anymore and Young spends his money like it’s gonna disappear at midnight. So his move to Colorado seems like a frugality thing more than a thing he wanted to do. Land is cheaper in Colorado than in California.
Young’s two most recent albums have been made with Crazy Horse in his new Colorado ranch - a fraction the size of Broken Arrow. (Poncho retired in 2012, so he’s out, and Nils Lofgren - the only musician who can fit into any band, he’s that amorphous. To be in a band as famously tight and precise as Springsteen’s E Street Band and then join Crazy Horse? Crazy Nils.
For whatever reason, Niko Bolas, who produced some of Young’s most dated-sounding work, but also the Eldorado EP and the Freedom LP, both release in 1989. Eldorado contains a totally fuck up version of the standard “On Broadway” and two of my fav Neil Young songs, that my drummer James & I have covered, a song called “Heavy Love,” where Young’s voice goes to pieces at the end in a manner similar to Kurt Cobain on “Territorial Pissings,” and “Eldorado.”
Here is “Eldorado” from Freedom (1989)
Here’s an early version from either ‘86 or ‘87, with Crazy Horse. It really kicks ass.
Anyway, nowadays Neil Young may have possibly stretched himself too thin. Young’s two latest albums have been made with Crazy Horse (Talbot is still bass, though with some diminished capacity after a stroke, and Ralph Molina is still on drums), but his two newest records suggest he’s running dangerously low on creativity. He’s been making silly psychedelic movies with his new girlfriend, actress and environmentalist Daryl Hannah (2018’s idiotic Paradox & now a new film that accompanies the release of this year’s Barn. A film that is apparently also called Barn. Neil’s been working on his Archives project. He’s been writing a follow-up to his 2012 autobiography: Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream. He’s been previously preoccupied with Pono (although that is shut down now), his train set company Lionel, and his electric car project. All of this shows in his music. Young has never been Dylan, been he’s been a great sketcher of scenes. Think songs like “Powderfinger,” “Pocahontas,” “Cortez the Killer,” “Goin Back” (“Goin Home” for that matter, a diamond in the rough, a totally amazing song stuck right in the middle of 2002’s fairly shitty Are You Passionate? which was made with Booker T & the M.G.’s. Even back then, Young’s 9/11 song ‘Let’s Roll” had some lines that really made you groan. “Goin Home” more than made up for it though.
But now? Young has totally lost his lyrical acumen. He either no longer has the ability, or no longer gives a shit. singing songs that are so boringly literal, he may as well be singing “I moved to Colorado/now I make albums here/with the producer of Eldorado/Niko Bolas and some beer.” has both albums are titled after where they were recorded. And that’s it. Colorado (2019) and, even stupider, Barn (2021). Take, for example, the song “Welcome Back,” which is musically decent, especially Young’s lead playing, which is diamond sharp for a guy in his 70s with as much mileage as him. But the words? They are seriously lacking. Boring.
“Gonna sing an old song to you right now. Might be. a window to your soul you can open slowly. I’ve been singing this way for so long. Riding through this storm. Might remind me of who we are and why we walk so lowly.”
Okay, Dr. Suess.
Yes, these lines rhyme. But wtf is he trying to say?
Apparently what he’s been trying to say since 2003’s Greendale, a concept album about a more militant brand of environmentalism. Possibly something like The Monkey Wrench Gang, published in 1975, which promoted the use of sabotage in the service of environmentalism. Young toured Greendale as a stage play, and the album did have some great songs like “Bandit” (posted above this paragraph) and “Be The Rain” (posted below this paragraph). Six years after Greendale, Young made another kind of Greendale album with 2009’s Fork in the Road, except I didn’t think any of the songs were worth a damn. Then, another six years later, he tapped Willie Nelson’s sons to join his band (but only if they called themselves The Promise of the Real) to make an album that criticized the agricultural giant Monsanto with The Monsanto Years (2015). Once again, none of the songs did anything for me.
So with Greendale (2003), Fork in the Road (2009), and The Monsanto Years (2015) Young promotes a militant brand of environmentalism, like I said, that Edward Abbey had suggested way back in 1975 with his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. But what Young doing in 1975?
He was partying it up in Malibu and driving giant gas guzzlers like Cadillac De Ville’s around. So his current finger wagging is a little hypocritical. It is worth nothing though, that almost all Young fans agree that he made his best music in the early to mid-70s (he wouldn’t retreat fully to his Northern California ranch until Hawks and Doves). After 1991’s Ragged Glory, pretty much every Young album was about his day-to-day life on the ranch. Broken Arrow (1996). Silver & Gold (2000). Prairie Wind (2006). God, did it ever get dull for Young’s fans. We get it Neil. You have a fucking ranch. Or had one. Or…have a new one. In Colorado. With a Barn on it.
My other point, however, is this: Dylan couldn’t have been asleep in Neil Young’s hearse in 1973, 1974 or 1975 (sources vary, but the party occurred during one of those three years). It was way up at Broken Arrow Ranch, not the house in Malibu where Young made On the Beach, whose cover you’ve already seen, and Zuma, which has “Don’t Cry No Tears,” a song my band, The Big City Nights, covered on our second EP, Teenage Lust (or Lust Never Sleeps, a homage to Neil Young’s Rust Never Sleeps). Zuma also has “Lookin For A Love,” “Barstool Blues” and the ugliest LP cover of all time:
Look at that thing. Ugh. Hideous. Great album, fair title, terrible cover.
But yeah, with On the Beach, that’s the tail fin of the De Ville Dylan napped in, right there in the foreground. Hail hail rock ‘n roll.
Oh! For some reason, Bob Dylan was also wearing a turban at time. I‘m not kidding. Nobody knows why, but for a 3-4 month period when Dylan lived in Malibu, just down the road from Neil Young and that corporate sleazebag David Geffen. he wore a turban every day. killlyrics.com puts it this way: Bob Dylan is certainly an open-minded soul. He trailblazed the sixties into motion, went through a turban-wearing phase and chanced his hand at rapping. Dylan never tried rapping. That was Brian Wilson with the eye-poppingly humiliating “Smart Girls,” a song with such a convoluted backstory that it needs its own Wikipedia page. Apparently Wilson’s 24/7 psychiatrist Eugene Landy insisted that Brian include a rap song on what ended up becoming “his rejected 1991 album Sweet Insanity.”
Author/musician Jason Hartley wrote: “What is important was that Wilson was embracing rap when many older rockers thought that rap wasn't real music. As ridiculous as 'Smart Girls' may seem to you today, at the very least, Brian Wilson was on the right side of history.”
^ This is a stupid point of view. Why would a musician have to write a song in a particular style or genre in order to prove they like said genre? Why would any artist have to work in a particular medium to “prove” that they’re on the right side of history? Sure, Neil Young has never rapped. Neither has Bob Dylan. But there’s no evidence to suggest they thought rap “wasn’t really music.” There is a transcript available of late 1970s interview in which David Crosby rants and raves about how punk rock isn’t real music. The kicker? When he barks “I wouldn’t even stay in the same hotel as the New York Dolls!”
David Crosby, who has played at almost every major musical rock festival: Monterrey Pop Festival, Woodstock, Altamont Free Concert (yep, the one that was the final nail in the coffin for the ideals of the 60s. After that, hugely depressed by the death of his girlfriend Christine Hinton in a car crash, he began abusing drugs and trashed an ungodly amount of hotel rooms (which is what makes his New York Dolls statement so hypocritical, and, as Jimmy McDonough writes, “disgustingly parental.”) Also, I gotta say, the ellipsis is three periods. Not four. Like this…
So Crosby’s first solo album is a little…fuckin goofy. (The ellipsis can also be used for a dramatic pause). If Only I Could Remember My Name…..David Crosby.
Okay Dave. You’ve been through a lot. Just next time, remember. Three periods for an ellipsis, like a hockey game. Not four. Not two.
The ellipsis can be a powerful tool/technique. As shown above, it can be used for a dramatic pause: She opened wide the door with a hard yank and standing there in bloody rags…was her father. Like, that would be a typical line from a Western.
An ellipsis can also be used to let the reader fill in the information. I’ll stick with Western genre:
The man with the the bloody hammer kicked the door to Mr. Gray’s shop down, and loomed above the cowering, bleeding figure on the floor who was whispering “don’t hurt me.” But the man wasn’t listening. He raised the hammer high above his head and brought it down on top of Mr. Gray’s skull…
So that would be a way of giving your reader a gruesome killing without actually describing the death blow. You stop just before the weapon kills the person. The reader fills in the image.
The ellipsis can also be used to convey a sense of exhaustion, of too many choices. Kerouac and Pynchon both did this a lot. Here’s a paragraph from Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, an extremely complex novel set in the years between 1893 and 1914, just before WWI. Pynchon here is talking about collusion. If robber barons and evil capitalists were bad people (and they were), then how much worse were “those who took care of their problems for them.” You see these kinds of servile-yet-strong henchmen everywhere in the pre-WWI era. Remember James Cameron’s Titanic? The evil husband Cal, played by Billy Zane? And how he employs this big, hulking Pinkerton man as a bodyguard (in those days, the Pinkertons were a worldwide detective agency).
If Capital's own books showed a balance in clear favor of damnation, if these plutes were undeniably evil hombres, then how much more so were those who took care of their problems for them, in no matter what ignorance of why, not all of their faces on the wanted bills, in that darkly textured style that was more about the kind of remembering, the unholy longing going on out here, than of any real-life badman likeness...
So! Cal is a snobbish dickhead (a plutocrat, and evil). But Rose’s mother is insisting on the marriage because her own husband (Rose’s father) has died amd put the family in a very precarious financial situation. Rose not not want to marry Cal, but because he is heir to some Pittsburgh steel fortune, she does it out of loyalty to her mother. So! Cal Hockley represents the plutocrats. But how much more evil is this dickhead who not only leaves Jack (DiCaprio) to drown by handcuffing him to a pipe, taunts him by saying “you know, I do believe this ship may sink,” & then punches Jack in the gut & leaves.
The second half of Pynchon’s paragraph talks about how, in the Wild West, the “Wanted” posters rarely looked much like the actual person who was wanted, and how this represents, for us in the 21st century “a kind of remembering.” We have the luxury of choosing how we want to interpret the past. James Wood explains this better than I ever could:
Pynchon is saying that the drawings on the "Wanted" posters never looked like the real men, and that their unlikeness - their "darkly textured style" - tells us more about a "kind of remembering," an idea, or Barthesian "mythology" of the Wild West, than anything else.
And then, finally…The ellipsis in the above quotation is Pynchon's, and marks a section break; and in a way, the ellipsis is the only place this long sentence has to go--into the empty terminus of broken meaning.
So an ellipsis can mean
let the reader imagine what happens next
overwhelm the reader with a barrage of info, a list, or such a rhapsodic style of argument that the only way for the paragraph to end is by hitting a wall, by hitting “the empty terminus of broken meaning,” Wood writes. The ellipsis is the writer running out of fuel
finally, it can be used as a dramatic pause, or in more Victorian times to suggest sexual contact without actually using any words
I’m not a grammar Nazi, I’m just saying. Crosby’s first album title is ridiculous. As is outsider filmmaker Neil Breen’s 2009 film I Am Here.... Now.
ANYWAY If anyone can find any audio evidence of Bob Dylan rapping, send it my way @ littleghostrecordingco at google mail dot com.
It’s entirely possible that Dylan liked or likes rap, since it pushes lyrics to the forefront in a manner similar to his first 3 or 4 albums, which he performed solo with only the harmonica as accompaniment. All of Dylan’s pre-Another Side of Bob Dylan albums had that austerity and space, so the lyrics had to be good done. But by the early 90s, thirty years later, stung by the critical reception to his 1990 album Under the Red Sky, Dylan had completely withdrawn from society and was recording & releasing albums consisting entirely of cover songs. In the heyday of early 90s G-funk and West Coast gangsta rap. Dylan released an album with “Froggie Went A-Courtin.” And I actually really like this version. Dylan fingerpicks like no other guitar player on Earth:
Under the Red Sky had a song on it called “Wiggle Wiggle” that critics pounced on as evidence that Dylan had lost his fucking mind. The lyrics are pretty odd: “Wiggle wiggle wiggle like a bowl of soap\Wiggle wiggle wiggle like a rolling hoop/Wiggle wiggle wiggle like a ton of lead/Wiggle you can raise the dead.”
Despite Dylan’s protests that he’d written the song for his children (well, Jakob would’ve been twentysomething by then, Jesse in his teens. But according to Wikipedia, Dylan has 4 other kids. So who knows? Maybe “Wiggle, Wiggle” was written for some toddler-aged kids Dylan had at the time. There’s no question though, that it’s the worst song he’s ever written.
Now, let’s go back in time. Back to the Malibu party, where Neil finds Bob Dylan asleep in his Cadillac De Ville.
Young offered Dylan a ride home but Dylan sat up, rubbed his eyes, and declined. He INSISTED on hitchhiking home. As he weaved dangerously down some Pacific adjacent avenue, Young caught a glimpse of Dylan in his sideview mirror. The man who wrote songs like "Blowin In The Wind," "The Time They Are A-Changing," "Like A Rolling Stone," Subterranean Homesick Blues," "I Want You," "Lay Lady Lay," and albums like Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde on Blonde, John Wesley Harding, & Nashville Skyline.
Driving off Young glimpsed Bob Dylan in his sideview mirror, standing roadside, adjusting his turban & trying to thumb a lift home. Incidentally, this was the period when Dylan was recording what many people think is his best 1970s record, Blood on the Tracks. It was also a fertile period for Neil Young, who was recording On the Beach and Zuma pretty much simultaneously. It's weird though. Tonight’s the Night had already been recorded, but it wouldn't be released until after On the Beach. And Tonight’s the Night had only been out for 7 months when Zuma came out. Incidentally, Blood on the Tracks came out that same year too. 1975 was a helluva year for music.
Only Neil Young would move to fuckin’ MALIBU to make the most depressing album of his career. THREE of the On the Beach's eight songs have the word "blues" in the title.: “Revolution Blues,” “Vampire Blues,” & the heart-wrenching “Ambulance Blues.” Anyway, the next night after the party where Rod Stewart ran off to sulk, a disheveled Dylan turned up at Neil Young's house for about two hours and tickled the ivories (played the piano) on a version of "Danger Bird."
But Neil Young, who perversely declines to release his very best music (a habit he shares with, or learns from Dylan), decided not to put the version of "Danger Bird" feat. Dylan on the album. He did put Danger Bird on 1975's Zuma, but a Dylan-free version. The mind boggles. See, for my money (which right now is a loonie, a nickel, and a quarter) Neil Young's greatest song is "Interstate," and the best version is here, on YouTube, recorded live at Farm Aid 1985. But man, I’d love to hear Dylan on “Danger Bird.”
It is a beautiful, haunting, lonely piece of music, but you can’t buy it because Young has only ever released it in extremely limited fashion, a stripped-down take that Young tacked onto the vinyl version (and only the vinyl version) Side B of the critically savaged Broken Arrow (1996). Here’s that version:
It's pretty, but it’s can’t touch the 1985 version. It reminds me of R.E.M,’s New Adventures in Hi-Fi for some reason. I don’t think it’s because they were both released the same year. They just both have this stark, empty desert feel to them. I love “Interstate” but somehow it doesn't depress me. It's a song about carrying on. Keeping going, no matter what. Young has always sung about this. Think of the title Rust Never Sleeps, one of his best-selling albums. The title refers to the corrosion we must face as we age. Of course, Young was forced to face a very public reckoning with the media when Kurt Cobain quoted the line “it’s better to burn out than to fade away.”
I think Cobain Aging never sleeps. Rust never sleeps. Time marches inexorably forward and we are carried along with it. Anyway, with that in mind, have a listen to his wretched ballad feat. Bryan Adams, Sting, and Rpd Stewart. It could not be confirmed whether or not Stewart sulked on set because insufficient attention was being paid him. ROD: But guys, this is "All For One." Where's MY ham sandwich on rye? BRYAN: You're a vegetarian, Rob. There's a platter over there for you. ROD: *WORDLESSLY STOMPS BACK INTO DRESSING ROOM AND SLAMS DOOR*
Dylan spent most of the 1980s working & re-working on a song called “Caribbean Wind.” He played it at almost all of his 80s shows, so after a while, fans got sick of bootlegged versions and said they wanted an album version. Here’s a 1981 demo version, from back when Dylan was a fanatical Christian. (He converted shortly before writing the songs for 1979’s Slow Train Coming.) I’m not sure, but I might like this version better than the other “official” bootleg.
But remember! Dylan was and is just as perverse as Neil. Around 1988 he drifted some rumours to the press that the song would finally be recorded in properly. He then entered the studio with Daniel Lanois, who was fresh off making U2 international rock stars in 1987 with their album The Joshua Tree. It’s the one that has most of their hits: “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “Sunday Bloody Sunday,” “With or Without You,” and a buncha other bullshit with too much delay on the guitar. (On a clear night, you can still hear the final notes of “Mothers of the Disappeared,” the album’s closer, screaming across the sky.) The Joshua Tree was such a big hit that ten years after it came out, the band decided to re-rerecord the one song they left off the album, “The Sweetest Thing.” It too went #1 on the charts. Think about that. A song considered not good enough for a classic rock album is released ten years after that album & it instantly rockets to the top of the charts. Even their shit (or as the Irish & English say, “shite”) was gold.
So when Oh, Mercy came out in 1989, Dylan’s Lanois album, fans and critics alike were aghast. Not only was there was no “Caribbean Wind,” the album was a very weak batch of songs, even by Dylan’s 80s standards. (And those standards were low indeed.) There are a few decent ballads on Oh, Mercy. ‘“Most of the Time” is probably the best of the bunch, and it received renewed attention when it was put on the soundtrack during a break-up scene in High Fidelity, a 2000 rom-com directed by Stephen Frears & featuring John Cusack, Jack Black, and a cameo performance from Bruce Springsteen.
Doing the press rounds for Oh, Mercy, Dylan began to get visibly irritated when asked about “Caribbean Wind.” “When it’s done!” he barked at one hapless reporter who asked when the song would be released. He’d tried it twice for 1981’s Shot of Love, the above demo and this more fully-fleshed out version”
But once again Dylan had left off what critics and fans unanimously agreed was his best song of that decade. Now, that might not be saying much, as Dylan’s 80s records are abysmal, save for a few choice cuts like “Jokerman” and “Dark Eyes.”
Here is yet another version, thought to be recorded around 1985:
As of December 9 2021, Bob Dylan has still not officially released “Caribbean Wind.” He’s been chasing it for years & years. Apparently he gave it another shot for 2006’s Modern Times but was so dissatisfied with the results that he stormed out of the studio.
Then in 2010, without providing any explanation, Dylan stopped playing guitar entirely. If you went to see him, he’d be either singing without a guitar or singing while playing piano. (Rumour has it Dylan’s a much better piano player than guitarist. But we’ll never know unless Neil Young releases the Dylan version of “Danger Bird.”
There is precedent for a song taking this long to get right. Neil Young wrote “Silver & Gold” in 1981. He tried to record it on every acoustic-heavy album he did: Harvest, Comes a Time, Old Ways, Harvest Moon. Then, ten years later, in 2000, he finally nailed it, according to his own standards. To my ears, the song does not differ much from his usual 90s and 00s output, lyrics about life on the ranch and that clawhammer fingerpicking technique. But Young finished it. That’s what matters:
Young caught his Moby-Dick. Maybe Dylan will too. Maybe one day he’ll wake up with the song in his head and yell “Eureka!” and run down to the studio & finally track he motherfucking thing.