Tag: music Page 8 of 15

By the time a classic rock canon was forming, The Police were already in it. They’d had unbelievably huge success, especially with their 1983 album Synchronicity. They’d made iconic music videos at a time when that really mattered. They’d garnered widespread critical respect for literate songwriting and inventive musicianship. And breaking up immediately after Synchronicity ensured that they wouldn’t hang around to tarnish their reputation with lesser works. (Well, except for “Don’t Stand So Close To Me ’86”.)

As a part of that enshrinement, all their albums have been elevated to a lofty position of regard, including their debut Outlandos D’Amour, ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the 500 greatest all-time albums, and one of the 100 greatest all-time debuts. All that reflected glory obscured from me a fact that only became clear upon closer scrutiny: this album is weird as hell.

Let’s start with the fact that its two biggest hits are about falling in love with a prostitute and killing yourself. Then let’s move on to the sound, a brilliant but bizarre mix of reggae and punk that kept the rhythmic pattern of Jamaican music but accelerated it to a speed and aggression that made it almost unrecognizable. For instance, Sting admits that “‘So Lonely’ was unabashedly culled from ‘No Woman No Cry’ by Bob Marley”, but you have to listen pretty hard to hear the resemblance. That “white reggae” inspired the title of their next album Reggatta De Blanc, which was just a little less peculiar than the title “Outlandos d’Amour”, which is not even really French or really Spanish or really anything.

The weirdness continues into individual songs. Here’s an easy one: “Be My Girl – Sally” starts with Sting singing the same five words over and over again (more on this later), but quickly swerves into Andy Summers telling a story about marrying a blow-up doll. Then back to Sting and the five words, over and over. This is a rock song.

Or how about “Peanuts”, which is a Dr. Seuss-esque jab at an overexposed sellout rock star (apparently based on Rod Stewart), but which devolves in the middle into a chaotic guitar solo from Andy Summers, notes all over the place with no particular regard for rhythm? Then after another chorus, an even stranger instrumental break from some woodwind (a clarinet? an oboe?) that skips around the scale, caroming off the drums in squeaks and warbles, and then Sting for some reason starts yelling “Peanuts! Peanuts! Peanuts!” like a ballgame vendor before fading out with the woodwind bouncing back and forth between the same two notes.

Or here’s one: “Masoko Tanga”, a phrase which means even less than the album’s title. This is five minutes plus of a cool bass groove, backed up by drums and guitar, underneath lyrics which are literally gibberish. Like, here’s a sample of how a lot of lyrics sites transcribe this stuff:

Don’t ba bose da la lomb ba bay
Ping pong da la zoe da la la low
People know what de lee do da day
Key wo wa di com la day wa da

With occasional feeble attempts at English transcription, along the lines of “Keep the sugar warmed up, hey!”. Then there’s Genius, which just lists the lyrics as:

[Ad-libbed chanting]

And that’s why I love you, Genius.

So you get it, right? This is weird, wild stuff, with the emphasis on weird. And yet… it works! It works magnificently. Why is that? Well, a lot of reasons I’m sure, but what I really dug when listening to it this week can be summed up in two words: STEWART COPELAND. I think this guy may be my favorite rock drummer. His drums and percussion bookend the album — the very beginning of “Next To You” and the very end of “Masoko Tanga” — and in between, they define the album.

He and Sting are the bedrock of that “white reggae” sound, and while I’m not much of a musician, that sound strikes me as no simple task musically. But that accomplishment aside, there’s so much to enjoy in Copeland’s work on this album. Check out the delicate hi-hat work on “So Lonely,” especially the latter half. Check out the caffeinated, skittering fills in “Can’t Stand Losing You.” Check out the furious toms in “Truth Hits Everybody.” I don’t normally notice the drums much in a song, but even I can hear the incredible creativity that Stewart Copeland brought to The Police, even in this first album. Later on, he’d conduct master classes on songs like “Walking In Your Footsteps” and “Message In A Bottle,” but this album shows that from the beginning, he was an incredibly mature and complex player.

Just one more thing. Robby’s mom used to call Sting “Repeat Man,” and while listening to this album, I couldn’t stop laughing about that. Sure, not all the songs are as repetitive as “Be My Girl – Sally”, but the majority of them are pretty damn repetitive. I’m reading Elvis Costello’s autobiography right now, and he mentions this in passing:

The best English groups lean forward and are more concerned with “How do we start?” than “How do we end?” This is just my theory, but it might explain the impact of early records by both The Who and the Sex Pistols and why so much great English music ends in chaos.

That certainly describes plenty of the songs on Outlandos d’Amour, which when they don’t end in chaos end in the same phrase over and over. I can’t I can’t I can’t stop repeating I can’t I can’t I can’t stop repeating I can’t I can’t I can’t stop repeating I can’t I can’t I can’t stop repeating…

If I only had two words to describe A Night At The Opera, they would be “pleasant surprises.” Again and again, this album catches you off guard in the most delightful way. It starts from the first few moments — a gentle, cascading piano arpeggio more at home in a Chopin etude than a rock and roll album. But after about fifteen seconds, weird synth noises start to fly at the fringes, and then a deep, menacing figure takes over, with even deeper harmonics in the background, guitars echo through the mix, the whole thing crescendos into a screech…

And suddenly it’s just piano again, this time more purposeful, accompanied quickly by a guitar, and then the drums kick in to open the curtain on a vicious rocking takedown of a song, “Death On Two Legs (Dedicated To…)”. By the time the rock starts, we’ve had one surprise piled upon another, and the song itself is a bit unexpected, far more angry and vindictive than a typical Queen tune.

But then! Just when we’ve settled in for an arena rock album, here comes “Lazing On A Sunday Afternoon”, which is pure vaudeville, or music hall if you’re a Brit. Tinkly, jaunty piano plays behind Freddie Mercury’s vocal, in broad comedy character mode and played back through headphones in a tin bucket, to give it the hollow sound of early 20th century recordings.

That’s immediately followed by a song that is neither written nor sung by Mercury, Roger Taylor’s passionate love song… to his car. I know this because the song is called “I’m In Love With My Car.” But just in case you start to think that Queen is only capable of negative or sideways emotional displays, John Deacon’s “You’re My Best Friend” proves that they can write one of the best, most loving relationship songs of the decade.

And so it goes, just one joyous surprise after another. They don’t all work perfectly, but most of them score awfully high, and in any case it’s impossible not to admire the sheer chutzpah of the thing. Queen seems to be out to expand the concept of rock until it can take in almost everything. They can combine science fiction and acoustic folk, as they do in “’39”. They can prog out with the best of them, as on the eight-minute-plus “Prophet’s Song.” Hell, they can even rock “God Save The Queen” with layers and layers of guitars, in winking tribute to Jimi Hendrix, the British monarchy, and maybe even themselves?

Appropriately enough for an album titled after a Marx Brothers movie, one of the most fun aspects of A Night At The Opera is its sense of humor, which itself often takes the form of startling left turns. For instance, in another music hall-ish number, “Good Company”, the first verse follows a strong meter and hits rhymes based on the title: “me”, “knee”, “company”. The second verse seems to be following that same pattern until…

Soon I grew and happy too
My very good friends and me
Would play all day with Sally J
The girl from number four
And very soon I begged her
Won’t you keep me company?

Number four? I laughed out loud the first time I heard it — Brian May suckered me into thinking I would hear a “three”, and then pointed that fact out by giving me the next one in line.

Then, of course, there’s the goofy magnificence of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” What starts out as a gorgeously harmonized musing, along the lines of The Beatles’ “Because”, resolves unexpectedly into a murder ballad. That’s startling enough, but then things get deeply, deeply weird, in the most flabbergasting and hilarious way. The famous operatic section of that song strings together meaningful-sounding nonsense, sung with incredible gusto, so much passion that it somehow transitions seamlessly into a fiery hard rock crescendo of explosive guitars and steely vocals.

Mike Myers has done more to demonstrate the comedy and grandeur of this song than I ever could here, so I’ll just point out that the secret sauce of this song and its album is the genuine emotion behind all the zany hijinks. Just as with Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf, what makes Queen’s music more than a momentary laugh is that it taps into real feelings of rage, betrayal, affection, awe… a whole panoply of deep emotions. See, that’s the other part of a night at the opera. Just to one side of the Marx Brothers hilarity, there’s the grand exaggeration of human drama spilling over the edges of its container.

Not that everything has to be grand. Probably my favorite tune this time around was “Seaside Rendezvous”, a perfect meld between the music hall style and the signature Queen sound of layered vocals. You can practically see the straw boater on Mercury’s head as he struts and taps his way through the song, but even better is knowing that the “tap dancing” sound was made with thimbles on the mixing desk, and that the entire “instrumental” bridge was performed vocally by Mercury and Taylor. Silly touches like a revving engine and a ringing bell complement ragtime piano and insouciant lyrics.

The whole thing is jaunty and fun, and once again shows Queen demonstrating that rock music is large enough to contain multitudes. As I listened to A Night At The Opera, I kept thinking of the Beatles’ White Album. That collection too brought together wildly diverse expressions, and had its own music hall influences, on songs like “Honey Pie” and “Martha My Dear.” But where the White Album was a portrait of a band in dissolution, A Night At The Opera shows us a group at the height of its powers, embracing its diversity rather than letting it push them apart. That is radical acceptance, and at least here, it results in great art.

I loved Car Wheels On A Gravel Road when it came out in 1998. Consequently, I started to seek out other Lucinda Williams albums. I bought the subsequent Essence and World Without Tears, and reached back into her catalog for Happy Woman Blues. What all of these records have in common is Lucinda’s utterly unique and compelling voice. She doesn’t sound like anyone else alive. That voice can conjure up incredible ache, longing, and defiance, no matter what song she’s singing. But even with such vocal magic in action, her earlier and later albums didn’t enchant me the way that Car Wheels did, so this month I assigned it to Robby, in hopes that I could revisit it myself and figure out what makes it so special.

I think the first key is specificity, which works through Car Wheels in several different dimensions. The most noticeable of these is specificity of place. I count fourteen different specific place names on this album, all in the American South. Three of them even serve as song titles — “Lake Charles” (in Louisiana), “Greenville” (in Mississippi), and “Jackson” (in Mississippi). Car Wheels, true to its traveling title, is a virtual travelogue of Louisiana and Mississippi, with occasional forays into Georgia, Arkansas, and Texas. Grounding the album so specifically in a set of related locations gives its stories a ring of authenticity — you feel you’re hearing about the lives of actual people in actual places.

It’s not just place names, though. Another area of specificity is all the mentions of individual musical artists. The couple in “Metal Firecracker” didn’t just listen to music — “We’d put on ZZ Top / And turn ’em up real loud.” In “Lake Charles,” another couple, or maybe the same couple, drives through Lafayette and Baton Rouge, in a yellow El Camino, listening to Howlin’ Wolf. That lyric brings together places and music, just as “2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten” mentions Rosedale, Mississippi, and then in the next breath invokes Robert Johnson, who immortalized the town in song. The title track’s lyrics mention voices on the radio twice — Loretta and Hank. Thus Car Wheels gives us musical journeys alongside its physical ones, with music deeply integrated into the lives of its characters, so much so that they’re often on a first name basis with icons like Loretta Lynn and Hank Williams.

That yellow El Camino from “Lake Charles” illuminates another kind of specificity on the album: specific images. Several of the songs give us vivid portraits of the characters’ lives through the use of small, expressive emblems. The words scrawled on the bathroom wall in “2 Kool”: “Is God the answer? Yes”. The watch, earrings, and bracelet in “Right In Time.” The long, smooth guitar neck and shiny strings in “Drunken Angel.” Queen of them all, though, is the song “Car Wheels On A Gravel Road.” From the first moment, Williams sets a luminous scene:

Sittin’ in the kitchen, a house in Macon
Loretta’s singing on the radio
Smell of coffee, eggs, and bacon
Car wheels on a gravel road

Immediately, we’re there — sights, sounds, smells, and even time of day. The images continue through that song — a dusty suitcase, a screen door slamming shut, a low hum of voices in the front seat. Engine parts scattered in a yard with barking dogs. The car traveling past cotton fields, telephone poles, trees, and wires, with a child in the backseat hearing those voices, that music. Even in the deployment of a specific phrase, Williams reveals volumes: “You better do what you’re told / When I get back, this room better be picked up.” Who says that but a mother?

Yet even as specific as those images are, it can be hard to discern what the song’s about. Take them sequentially, though, and a story emerges. We start in that kitchen, but then take the child for a ride, to a house once familiar but now a mess. The narrator retrieves a suitcase, and reveals herself as a mother. That mother is traveling to Jackson with the kid, the Southern landscape flying by. She arrives at a broken-down house, and the child is weeping. And between each moment, we return to the chorus of the song and its central image: the car wheels, the gravel road.

I hear a story of a woman who has decided to leave her old life and seek a new one, taking her child with her. It’s like a prequel to the Pretenders song “Thumbelina” — “What’s important in this life? / Ask the man who’s lost his wife.”

And there we have the other bright thread weaving through this album: loss. There are a number of songs on Car Wheels that don’t invoke particular places or artists, but what those songs provide indelibly are powerful emotions of yearning, grief, and loneliness. Again, the titles tell a tale: “I Lost It”, “Can’t Let Go”, “Still I Long For Your Kiss”. The languid sensuality of “Right In Time” is inextricable from the lover’s absence. She takes everything off, moans at the ceiling, but in the end all she can do is reach over and turn off the light. The nostalgia in “Drunken Angel” and “Lake Charles” stands in sharp relief against the deaths of their subjects.

That’s a template for several other songs, with the difference being it’s a relationship that has died. “Metal Firecracker” reminisces about a wild intimacy, but circles back to a heartbroken plea: “All I ask… Don’t tell anybody the secrets / I told you”. “2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten” is even more plaintive: “I had a lover / I thought he was mine / Thought I’d always be / his Valentine”.

And of course, it keeps coming back to the title track, where indeed a relationship has died. We feel that pain keenly in specific places, through specific music, lit by specific images, until it winds up in the single image that sums up the whole album: “Little bit of dirt, mixed with tears”.

My thesis for this one is going to be straight out of the Linda Richman playbook: The “wild-eyed Southern boys” of .38 Special were neither wild-eyed, nor Southern, nor boys. Nor were they 38, for that matter, but the contradictions above are what made them special. Discuss.

Let’s start with the easy stuff. Don Barnes and Donnie Van Zant knew each other from their neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida, and formed .38 Special in 1974, bringing in Jeff Carlisi as a guitarist and third principal songwriter. Wild-Eyed Southern Boys was the band’s fourth album, released in 1981 when Barnes, Van Zant, and Carlisi were all 29 years old. Not in their late thirties, maybe, but not “boys” either — they were seasoned music business veterans at that point, who’d seen a few changes along the way.

One of the biggest of those changes had to do with the band’s southern rock identity. Prima facie, it seems ridiculous to claim that .38 Special wasn’t Southern. For one thing, Donnie Van Zant is the little brother of Ronnie Van Zant, legendary lead singer of the iconic southern rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. Basically, if you’re being asked a trivia question that starts “What southern rock band…”, you can probably just stop listening right there and have an 80% chance of being right with “Lynyrd Skynyrd.” So .38 Special has pretty much the ultimate southern rock pedigree, and every single member of the band is from Jacksonville, so in what way exactly aren’t they Southern?

The answer goes back to their previous album, Rockin’ Into The Night. The band’s first two albums on A&M Records were pretty much straight-ahead southern rock, and made pretty much zero impression on the charts. However, with the title track from Rockin’, the band had a minor hit, getting to #43 in the Billboard Hot 100. Here’s the thing about that song, though: it wasn’t written by .38 Special. It was instead written by the main songwriters from the band Survivor. In fact, the song was meant for Survivor’s debut album, but their producer rejected it as “too Southern,” so the scrap went to .38 Special and they made the most of it.

Well, A&M executive Jim Kalodner smelled potential, so he asked Survivor songwriter Jim Peterik to get together with .38 Special and see what happened. (By the way, isn’t it hard to imagine a record company today sticking with a band who had .38 Special’s kind of track record up to that point?) Now Peterik is a pop-rock guy from Chicago, a pretty far cry from Jacksonville, but a funny thing happened when he got together with Barnes and Carlisi at his kitchen table in La Grange, Illinois. Carlisi offered a lick (“It’s kind of a Cars rip-off,” he said), and Barnes offered a title based on some struggles he was having in his marriage. Then Peterik came up with verses, chorus, and a melody, and the result was “Hold On Loosely,” the band’s first big hit and its first great song.

The other great song from this album, and not coincidentally the other hit, was “Fantasy Girl.” Also not coincidentally, Peterik was a co-writer, this time with Carlisi alone. Both of this album’s hits were fueled by a guy who couldn’t have been less Southern, a guy whose greatest claim to fame would eventually be his co-writing credit on Survivor’s massive hit “Eye Of The Tiger,” and to a lesser extent writing The Ides Of March’s one-hit wonder, a Blood Sweat & Tears sound-alike called “Vehicle.” He could play the part well, though. In fact, the album’s title track was written by Peterik alone, not a Southern boy in sight. Turns out he originally wrote the tune for Molly Hatchet, but they rejected it.

Peterik kept contributing to the band past this album, in particular co-writing their 1982 Top 10 hit “Caught Up In You.” One of .38 Special’s later hits, “Teacher Teacher”, was written by Jim Vallance and Bryan Adams, a couple of Canadians who I believe are the mathematical opposite of Southern.

I’m not disputing the quality of the music, just pointing out that in order to realize their full potential as a band, .38 Special had to stop being quite so Southern. It took a record company executive to make that alchemy happen, to deliberately inject an arena rock flavor into what had up until then been literally Lynyrd Skynyrd’s far less awesome baby brother. Now, what quality of mood characterizes that kind of approach? Would you call it “wild-eyed”? I wouldn’t. The word that comes to mind is “calculated.”

Not that there’s anything wrong with that! But what turns out to be true is that underneath the surface of their image, this is the album where .38 Special became essentially an AOR rock band with a Southern coating. Protestations of the title notwithstanding.

Disc 3 of Biograph starts out with a kind of victory lap — one song from each of the distinct and productive periods showcased on the first two discs. “Baby, I’m In The Mood For You” is from the Freewheelin’ era, while “I Wanna Be Your Lover” has that Hawks sound of his Highway 61 mode. From the Blood On The Tracks period we get “Up To Me”, and “Caribbean Wind” dates from 1981, placing it in what at the time of Biograph‘s release were his “modern” years.

Of these, by far the best track is “Up To Me”. I love the Blood On The Tracks mode in general, and this song shares a sound and a structure with “Shelter From The Storm”, lots of verses that keep returning to a central concept, ringing changes on it as they approach it from different angles. “Up To Me” in particular is just a gem, resonating with themes that mean a lot to me — friendship, loyalty, longing, helplessness. As sometimes happens to me with songs, this one captivated me enough that I wanted to play it on repeat in my car, to learn all the words. So I did — and there are a lot of words! 12 gorgeous verses, and they’re imprinted on my heart now, after about a week of listening.

The rest of the disc is a sort of gumbo, various ingredients combined to make a tasty concoction:

• Songs made (more) famous by other people: “All Along The Watchtower”, “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”, “Forever Young”. “All Along The Watchtower” was a folksy hootenany on John Wesley Harding, albeit a spooky one. Then Jimi Hendrix came along to transform and immortalize it forever. The version on Biograph is live from 1974, and owes more to Hendrix’s version than to Dylan’s original. As Bob says in the liner notes, “I liked Jimi Hendrix’s record of this and ever since he died I’ve been doing it that way.” Tons and tons of people have covered it, and the same is true of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door.” Eric Clapton, Warren Zevon, and Guns ‘n’ Roses spring to mind. Zevon’s is the most haunting version I’ve ever heard, as he recorded it while actually dying, but I have to admit it took a lot of listens before Axl Rose’s “Ay ay ay ay yeah” left my head. As for “Forever Young”, perhaps it’s a generational accident, but The Pretenders made me familiar with it long before I ever heard Dylan’s original.
• Songs from the born-again period: “Gotta Serve Somebody”, “Solid Rock”, “I Believe In You”. I find most of Dylan’s Christian songs pretty hard to relate to, and “Solid Rock” is a good example. I don’t object to it, but it’s just miles away from my beliefs and tough to connect with. “Gotta Serve Somebody” is a little closer to my mind, and I think it expresses a general truth that’s widely overlooked, but Dylan’s quotation of the “You can call me Ray, or you can call me Jay” routine from the 1970s, which for inexplicable reasons was considered funny at the time, kind of derails the song. On the other hand, “I Believe In You” is genuinely touching and beautiful, even if Sinéad O’Connor’s version eventually placed it in the previous category.
• Latin-flavored songs: “Romance In Durango”, “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)”. For a while there in the mid-70s, Dylan was fascinated by Mexico, and a couple of numbers from that period appear on this disc. “Romance In Durango” in particular contains quite a bit of Spanish in the chorus, a dramatic climax, and a catchy tune that stays with you for a long time.
• Obscure album tracks: “On A Night Like This”, “Time Passes Slowly”. In the liner notes, Dylan says of “On A Night Like This” (from Planet Waves), “This is not my type of song, I think I did it just to do it.” Turns out, it’s not my type of song either — it just doesn’t do much for me. “Time Passes Slowly” (from New Morning) works a little better for me — it reminds me of long mountain weekends, away from everything with no reason to worry. Those have been some of my happier times.
• A couple more hits: “I Want You”, “Just Like A Woman”. On the other side from the obscure tracks are these reminders of Dylan’s hitmaking power. Both of these songs were top 40 Billboard hits, and each time I hear them that fact surprises me. I think it’s clear that I love and appreciate Dylan, but I’m always a bit startled when I see him achieve sales success. His voice is strange, his musical sensibility eclectic, and his lyrics off-the-wall even in songs such as these. But I enjoy them, and am happy to see that others do too.

One thing that struck me while listening to this disc was when I’d hear pieces of other people’s songs referenced in some way. The live version of “Heart Of Mine” pulls part of its bass line straight from “My Girl” by The Temptations. “I Wanna Be Your Lover” takes both lyrics and tune for part of its chorus from The Beatles’ “I Wanna Be Your Man”, which was first released as a single by the Stones. No doubt this jumped out at me because I’ve also been listening to “No More Auction Block” on volume 1 of The Bootleg Series, which provided part of the melody for “Blowin’ In The Wind.”

Call them lifts, call them allusions, samples, quotes, thefts — people have called them all those things. Dylan himself minces no words when asked about whether it’s okay for him to borrow words or tunes from others: “Wussies and pussies complain about that stuff. It’s an old thing – it’s part of the tradition. It goes way back. These are the same people that tried to pin the name Judas on me… All those evil motherfuckers can rot in hell.” It’s a venomous response, perhaps due to having to give it so repeatedly, but it’s not wrong. Even in cases where he’s wholesale copy/pasted someone else’s words into his songs or his book, he always puts the quote in a transformative context. He has quoted (without attribution) a Civil War poet, a Japanese author, Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald, old issues of Time magazine, and so forth. But at no point is he writing Civil War poetry or Japanese novels or Time magazine articles, and he generally encases the lines in an entirely new work that allows each source to illuminate the other.

Certainly in the folk tradition, reworking songs and combining them with new words or variations is a longstanding practice, just as Dylan points out. When he or someone like him can take an old spiritual like “No More Auction Block,” give it new words, new melodic filigree, a new chorus, and come out with a song like “Blowin’ In The Wind,” can we really say that’s plagiarism? Sure, we can hear the similarity, but that doesn’t make them the same. Hell, even our own national anthem is part of this tradition — “The Star-Spangled Banner” is Francis Scott Key’s words set to an already extant tune, “To Anacreon In Heaven.” (For that matter, “My Country, ‘Tis Of Thee” is identical in tune to “God Save The Queen.”)

Dylan’s problem is that he’s partaking of and embodying a traditional structure that predates the matrix of capitalism and copyright in which he lives and earns his living. It was one thing for folk singers of 200 years ago to adapt and rework existing material, but nowadays we have a notion that if you create something, you are entitled to control over what happens to that thing, at least for some limited period of time. (A period which keeps growing, thanks to the efforts of Disney and others.) If you decide, consciously or unconsciously, to incorporate one of those more modern creations into your own, you can get in hot water — just ask Sam Smith or George Harrison or Ray Parker, Jr.

But where to draw the line between allusion and plagiarism, between tribute and rip-off? Is it how much of something is included, or the nature of what’s included? What if a few words are changed here and there — how many are enough to draw the line? Do some things belong to all of us more than others? How original does the new work have to be in order to “count” as new work? Who gets to make these decisions?

I think I know what Bob Dylan would say: the artist gets to make those decisions, especially if that artist is Bob Dylan. In a speech accepting his award as 2015 MusiCares Person Of The Year, Dylan said, “These songs didn’t come out of thin air. I didn’t just make them up out of whole cloth… I learned lyrics and how to write them from listening to folk songs. And I played them, and I met other people that played them back when nobody was doing it. Sang nothing but these folk songs, and they gave me the code for everything that’s fair game, that everything belongs to everyone.”

For folk singers, emphatically including Bob Dylan, everything that comes into you is yours, and if it comes out of you in a new enough, creative enough form, then you get to put your name on it. Should he mention his sources in liner notes or other supplemental material? Yes, absolutely. If nothing else he could be using his clout to draw attention to the sometimes much-lesser-known work that’s inspiring him. But should he avoid those quotations, or give songwriting credit to them? I think not. Dylan has earned the right to call his works his own, even as they incorporate the work of others. And if there is some dispute as to Dylan’s ability to create new and inspiring art out of his influences, I would enter into evidence discs 1, 2, and 3 of Biograph.

Of all the things for which the Grateful Dead are famous, I’m not sure their albums even make the top five. For me, though, this one was a way into a band I’ve always had a hard time getting into. I’ve spent an awful lot of my life in and around Boulder, Colorado, where I believe lack of enthusiasm for the Dead is technically considered illegal. I can’t help it, though. I’m just not a jam band guy. I find 30-minute versions of 12-bar blues songs interminable rather than exhilarating, and consequently could not care less about the endless vaults of concert recordings, taped with the loving approval of the band.

I dunno, maybe it’s better when you’re stoned, but considering that my pot intake is best measured on a per-decade basis, they just haven’t had a lot of chances with me. Deadhead Nation is a foreign country, and while I have nothing in particular against its residents, I also have no interest in visiting. The iconography, the cult following, the endless soloing… it just leaves me, not cold exactly, but pretty tepid.

Those aren’t my only barriers to this album. Rootsy Americana overall is a tough genre for me to connect with. I have the same issue with The Band — so much of it feels like monologues from the inner lives of white Southern hillbillies, not a terribly sympathetic demographic for me. Especially in election years.

Women in these songs are held either as saviors or objectives, often of pathetic or despicable men. “Sugar Magnolia”, who “takes the wheel when I’m seeing double / Pays my tickets when I speed,” might as well be the same woman from “Up On Cripple Creek”, who’s “a drunkard’s dream if I ever did see one.” “You’re my woman now” from “Till The Morning Comes” is an imperative similar to “Jemima Surrender”, except in the former song it seems like maybe he’s going to kick her out the door after the night is over.

Finally, there are the harmonies. I’m a huge fan of harmonies, but I find them frequently getting under my skin on this album. I’ve read that the Dead were inspired by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young during this period, and I can see the comparison, but where CSNY feel like a smooth braid, the Dead have stray hairs sticking out every which way. Jerry Garcia’s unsteady voice doesn’t blend easily those of with his bandmates, who sometimes start or stop singing at different times than the people they’re harmonizing with, giving the whole thing a ragged feel. The top note often wavers in falsetto over the foundation of the harmony, sliding in and out of pitch like a wandering eye.

And yet, even with all those negatives, I found myself enjoying American Beauty quite often. For one thing, the musicianship is just impeccable, and often sublimely beautiful. The pedal steel solo on “Candyman” stopped me in my tracks the first time I heard it — haunting, angelic, and with a tone unlike any other guitar solo I’ve ever heard. Similarly, when I put on headphones, laid my head back, and listened to the opening of “Friend Of The Devil”, it took my breath away. It was just so intricate and yet perfectly constructed — it takes a rare combination of songwriters and players to create something so complex and gorgeous. Phil Lesh in particular does a remarkable job with melodic bass lines throughout the album.

Then there are the songs themselves. Unlike the Dead’s reputation for extended jams, American Beauty‘s songs are tight and to the point. “Sugar Magnolia” and “Friend Of The Devil” are straightforward pop singles, and “Truckin'” is a rollicking rocker with a sense of humor. One of the best songs is “Box Of Rain”, which brings together the intricate musical approach and surreal lyrics from Robert Hunter, with lovely images like “walk into splintered sunlight”, and the title itself. “Attics Of My Life”, too, has lovely lyrics, and a great rhythmic motif of finding the impossible present in love:

When there was no ear to hear, you sang to me…
When there were no strings to play, you played to me…
When I had no wings to fly, you flew to me…
When there was no dream of mine, you dreamed of me

The capstone is “Ripple,” easily my favorite Grateful Dead song of all time. That’s not just because it plays during the most emotional scene in the movie Mask, although that is where I first encountered it, and that scene still has a powerful effect on me. More than that, though, this song brings together all the best parts of the Grateful Dead. There’s a gentle, sweet accord among the instruments — soft drums, warm bass, lyrical guitar, and ethereal mandolin. Most of all, there are the lyrics, a heartrending poem about yearning, destiny, love, and the essential mystery of life: “There is a road, no simple highway / Between the dawn and the dark of night / And if you go, no one may follow / That path is for your steps alone.”

Bob Dylan is often cited as the central figure who brought a literary sensibility to rock and roll. He combined the forms he’d learned in folk music with the driving energy of Elvis and Little Richard. As he says in the extended Biograph liner notes: “The thing about rock ‘n’ roll is that for me anyway it wasn’t enough. ‘Tutti Frutti’ and ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ were great catch phrases and driving pulse rhythms and you could get high on the energy but they weren’t serious or didn’t reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings… If I did anything, I brought one to the other.”

So he did, and so I found myself pondering while listening to disc 2 of Biograph some of the specific literary modes, styles, and approaches Dylan uses in his songs, to elevate them beyond the realm of “Tutti Frutti.”

Epics and Ballads

“Epic” and “Ballad” are two words that have drifted pretty far away from their literary definitions. Now we use “epic” to mean “awesome” (itself a victim of linguistic drift), and “ballad” gets applied to any slow song, especially one about love, especially especially when played by a normally more aggressive band. “Epic ballad” now means something like, oh I don’t know, “November Rain”.

But closer to its origin, “epic” meant an extended poem, generally centering on a heroic figure. Likewise, a ballad in the folk tradition is a narrative set to music, usually in a consistent rhyme scheme and stanza structure, and frequently returning to a refrain at the end of each stanza. Into this frame fit several of the songs on this disc, including one of Dylan’s greatest songs ever, “Tangled Up In Blue.” Most rock songs go verse-chorus-verse, for a few minutes, but “Tangled” goes on and on, verse after verse with no chorus, spinning a love story that spans across miles and decades, to incredibly poignant effect. Like the traditional folk ballads, it hews to a specific and consistent structure, and each verse lands on the title refrain.

“Isis” fits even closer to the epic mode. It’s a tale of adventure, but with a twist: the motivating force for the hero’s journey is his inability to live within his marriage. So he takes off, “for the wild unknown country,” and there stumbles into a scheme which he fantasizes will allow him to shower his beloved with turquoise, gold, “diamonds, and the world’s biggest necklace.” The scheme falls apart, ending in death and desolation, and the hero returns to his wife. He has no riches for her, but brings instead the conviction he lacked before: “She said, ‘You going to stay?’, I said, ‘If you want me to, yes'”. In the studio version, this sounds a bit diffident, but in the live performance on Biograph, Dylan roars out “YES!”, an explosive climax in the twelfth verse, swept up by swirling violins, guitars, and dobro.

Other songs aren’t quite so narrative, but still follow the ballad form, layering it with a series of moments or images. “Visions Of Johanna” is the longest song on this side, and in its seven-and-a-half minutes layers five long stanzas, the first four of which each follow the same A-A-A-B-B-B-B-C-C rhyme scheme, and each of which ends with some variation on the phrase “visions of Johanna.” In the fifth stanza, Dylan really lets the fireworks loose, stringing together seven B rhymes (showed, corrode, flowed, road, owed, loads, explodes) before landing back on the refrain. The song doesn’t tell a story, but similar to “Desolation Row”, it vividly limns a state of mind.

“Abandoned Love” is a little closer to earth, but not quite a narrative. Dylan uses the song’s structure to explore different thoughts and viewpoints on a relationship, progressing slowly from feeling trapped within it to feeling ready to leave. “Every Grain Of Sand” has a similar lyrical structure, but an entirely different theme, this time expressing Dylan’s faith in a higher power, the “Master’s hand.”

Apostrophe and Dramatic Monologue

When he’s not telling a story or stringing images together, Dylan is frequently in first-person character, directly addressing someone or something. In other words, he’s in apostrophe mode. In literary terms, an apostrophe is not that punctuation mark that appears in my last name and breaks computer systems. Rather, it’s a poetic mode in which the speaker addresses something or someone who is not there. It could be a dead or absent person, or it could be a personified concept or object, such as death, or autumn, or MacBeth’s dagger.

An example from this disc is “Dear Landlord.” In this plainspoken track from John Wesley Harding, Dylan makes his case to a landlord who is probably not standing there listening, and may in fact be more of a concept or metaphor than an actual human character. Of course, with many of Dylan’s songs it can be difficult to tell whether the party being addressed is present in the poem, which means that many of these songs float in the grey area between apostrophe and dramatic monologue. In the latter mode, the speaker of a poem is a character in the midst of a scene, often interacting with or addressing other people.

Obviously the “From Me To You” mode of address is extremely common in rock songs, including that very song and the vast majority of other early Beatles tunes. What sets Dylan’s songs apart is their emotional and lyrical complexity, their often brutal directness, and their frequent willingness to name a specific character or personification.

Exhibit A: “To Ramona.” The singer addresses his words to a named character, and over the course of five verses moves through a panoply of emotions about her. He wants to comfort her at first, and confesses his ongoing attraction to her, only to immediately run down a list of ways she’s deceiving herself. He deflates her naive hippie notions of equality with devastating logic: “I’ve heard you say many times that you’re better than no one, and no one is better than you / If you really believe that you know you’ve got nothing to win and nothing to lose.” Finally, he gives up, knowing he can make no difference and that she’s just going to do what she wants to do anyway. “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” continues where this leaves off, unsparingly detailing the finality of an ended relationship.

“Mr. Tambourine Man” conjures a whole different range of feeling. In it, Dylan writes about music in general, under the guise of speaking to an archetypal character. It’s one of his most romantic songs, revealing a much more joyful love than comes across in most of his love songs. “To dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free” is such an indelible image, and one that perfectly and beautifully captures the utter elation of musical elevation.

Back in the realm of human relationships, there’s “more despair, more sadness.” “You’re A Big Girl Now” is one of the most heart-rending songs in Dylan’s entire catalog, an absolutely piercing portrait of a failed relationship. The version on Biograph is both more resigned and even more aching than the one on Blood On The Tracks — it’s amazing that’s even possible. When a relationship breaks, there is almost always one person moving on and one person left behind. This song is told from the point of view of the one left behind, and it evokes that excruciating pain with awful and yet understated accuracy.

On the more triumphant side of sadness are the kiss-offs, and two of Dylan’s best adorn this disc. “It Ain’t Me Babe” is a classic with good reason — it couldn’t be more merciless as a relationship ender, but it does so while surgically dismantling the set of delusions that underpin almost every immature love affair. Then there’s one of my favorites, “Positively 4th Street.” Over a gorgeous-sounding track of joyful organ and chiming percussion, Dylan excoriates a false friend with perfect rhymes and savage honesty. I’d like to quote it, but I’d just end up quoting the whole thing — every word is just that good.

Comedy and Absurdity

Because of his amazing facility for writing powerful and emotional songs, it’s easy to forget that Bob Dylan can also be a straight-up goofball. But think about “Motorpsycho Nitemare”, “Rainy Day Women #12 and #35”, “Tweeter And The Monkey Man”, or some of the wackier songs from Freewheelin’. The guy can be very silly, in a fun way, and we get a little bit of that Dylan on this disc. “Quinn The Eskimo,” for one, is just a strange song but clearly a playful one — lines like “it ain’t my cup of meat” display a Dali-esque absurdity. On the briefer side, “Jet Pilot” merrily saunters through a similarly offbeat realm.

“Million Dollar Bash” is even goofier. I mean, the ridiculous lyrics are one thing, but beyond that is the over-the-top ludicrous way he sings it. He sounds for all the world like an exaggerated Dylan imitator on “I punched myself in the face with my fist / I took my potatoes down to be mashed.” Or, to be more accurate, “I puuuunched myself in the faaaaaaace with my fiiiiiist! / I took my potaaaaaatoes down to be maaaaashed.”

It’s easy for me to rhapsodize about Bob Dylan, but songs like these are welcome reminders that he’s still just a person, and that his idea of music emphatically includes fun, as well as all the deeper, more wrenching emotions of his other songs.

There are a couple of lesser lights on here — “You Angel You” sounds like Dylan was making it up as he went along, and in the liner notes he confirms that he probably was. “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window” is fine, but it’s one of those tracks that was unreleased for a reason. Not awful, but a long way from his best work.

Still, overall, what an amazing collection this second disc is. I think I liked it even better than the first one. Disc 3 is coming up, and I’m less familiar with a lot of its songs. The thrill of discovery awaits!

U2 has had a long habit of reinventing itself. From the coming-of-age concept album Boy they shifted gears into the Christian rock of October, and then dove straight into political anthems with War, hitting the big time in the process. From there, they started a pattern of huge albums followed by offbeat departures, seemingly as a corrective to overwhelming success. After War came a live album and then an atmospheric, abstract record in The Unforgettable Fire.

Thanks to Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois, Unforgettable‘s sound was a major departure from the martial rock anthems of War (with the notable exception of “Pride (In The Name Of Love)”), but its blurry, impressionistic music and lyrics were jettisoned for The Joshua Tree, a classic stuffed with incredible songs, and not coincidentally an unbelievable hit-making machine. The band pulled back again with Rattle and Hum, a partial live recap of Joshua interspersed with tribute covers of favorite artists, and new songs which felt a bit like outtakes from the last album.

Achtung Baby introduced yet another new sound, this time a buzzy, industrial brand of effects-heavy alternative rock, and while the result didn’t quite reach Joshua heights sales-wise, it wasn’t far behind, and was an artistic triumph to boot. On the heels of that success, U2 threw yet another change-up with Zooropa, an experimental, sometimes almost avant-garde record that once again left familiar territory behind and let the band’s creativity roam free.

Based on this pattern, one would have expected Pop to be another massive album, something to match War, The Joshua Tree, and Achtung Baby. Funny thing, though — it really wasn’t. It was another change of course, yes, but this one had a feeling of desperation rather than exploration. Seeing the members of U2 dressed up as The Village People in the video for “Discothèque”, it almost felt to me like the band had become its own detractors, and had nothing left but to ironize and satirize their own success. All the way through Achtung Baby, stylistic changes aside, what all of U2’s music had in common was commitment and sincerity. Zooropa injected a bit more distance, on an intellectual plane, but Pop was the first record in which the band themselves seemed emotionally detached.

This is a long-winded way of setting the stage for All That You Can’t Leave Behind, in which sincerity, commitment, and songcraft came roaring back. This was the album I wanted Pop to be, worthy of standing alongside the band’s other peaks. They waste no time making their mission clear on “Beautiful Day” — as soon as that huge guitar/drum combo kicks in, and Bono moves from his head voice to his chest voice, we know what U2 meant when they said that they were “reapplying for the job of best band in the world.” Application accepted, and by five songs in, you’ve got the job.

After “Beautiful Day”, the album falls into two sections, the first focusing on the personal and the second on the world, the micro and the macro. Songs like “In A Little While” and “Stuck In A Moment You Can’t Get Out Of” resonate with empathy for loved ones who are struggling. Of these two, “Stuck” is the stronger song, both because of its stirring, heartening lyrics and because of the queasiness-inducing bit of “Little While” in which the speaker seems to be saying he’s known his current girlfriend since she was a baby. (“That girl, that girl she’s mine… When I first saw her in a pram they pushed her by.”)

On the other hand, “Elevation” and “Walk On” both deal heavily with inspiration. “Elevation” lives on the more romantic, sexual plane, though knowing U2 there’s always the chance they’re talking about God, a la “Mysterious Ways.” (However, “the orbit of your hips” would seem to rule against that interpretation.) “Walk On” seems addressed to a personal inspiration for leadership, offering both admiration and encouraging words. That song includes one of my favorite U2 lyrics, one from which I’ve drawn inspiration myself during tough projects: “You’re packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been / A place that has to be believed to be seen.”

The gem of the collection, though, is “Kite”. So many of U2’s strengths coalesce on this song. There’s a musical warmth, thanks to Adam Clayton’s strong, thrumming bass, and spiraling, swooping Edge guitar. Bono’s performance is breathtaking, rising through calm, through fear, and into a heartfelt declaration of faith. In the peak moments of the song (“You don’t need anyone, anything at all”, “I’m a man, I’m not a child”), the band holds him up to the heavens so that he can reach the power he needs to bring the full emotion across. The metaphor in the lyrics beautifully encapsulates a tenuous but strong connection between people, and the surrender that must come with real love.

In comparison to these songs, the more macro-level ruminations like “Peace on Earth” and “When I Look At The World” feel just a bit more strained, like they’re trying to make a Big Statement. If there’s any group ready to make those grand gestures, it’s U2, and those songs are fine, but I find I like the band a little better when they’re a little closer to the ground. On the other hand, “New York” is thrilling, especially at 2:10 when the song suddenly explodes with energy befitting its subject.

The album ends with a synthesis of the personal and the global, in “Grace.” In some ways U2 has spent its career refining the art of speaking about the spiritual, the romantic, and the political in the same breath, and “Grace” is one of its most explicit attempts to do so. “Grace, it’s a name for a girl / It’s also a thought that changed the world.” The lyrics describe a state of mind, personified as a woman, and in doing so achieve the rock and roll synthesis they always crave most, making love with God to save the world.

My next few assignments to Robby are taking a different tack than usual. I did a bunch of Bob Dylan research a while back, in support of a Watchmen article, and in the process wishlisted a few different Dylan things, including his 1985 box set, Biograph. Now I have it, and I’ve been listening to it, and thinking about it, and therefore I am hereby expanding the definition of “album” to include collections, including box sets. However, 53 songs is an awful lot to digest, even in two weeks, so I’m following the same approach I took with Art Of McCartney, and considering each disc a separate album for listening/writing purposes.

But I don’t think Biograph was designed with CDs in mind. It was one of the first box sets ever released for a rock artist, and in 1985 CDs were still just a small segment of the music market, albeit a rapidly growing one. So Biograph was released as both a 3-CD set and a 5-LP set, with more or less the same running order. This was back in the days when albums had sides, kids, and what I found while listening to this first disc is that those sides were pretty meaningful thematically. Even though it’s called Biograph, the set isn’t assembled chronologically. Rather than the story of Dylan’s life, it’s the story of many Dylans.

Bob Dylan The Lover

The first five songs on Biograph demonstrate a variety of approaches Dylan has taken to the love song, and unfortunately for me it starts with my all-time most hated Dylan song, “Lay Lady Lay.” I mean, I’m obviously a fan of the guy’s work, but this song is a giant exception, because it irritates the hell out of me every single time I hear it, and I end up saying out loud to the speakers, “Stop!” Stop with the smarmy lyrics. Stop referring to yourself in the third person. Stop, for God’s sake, STOP singing in that horrible Gomer Pyle voice. (Well, I guess I mean the singing voice you’d expect Gomer Pyle to have rather than Jim Nabors’ actual singing.)

Anyway, life gets better fast once we travel back to 1962 for “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down”, a cut from Dylan’s debut album. It’s a simple blues love song, sung right before the artist got a whole lot more complicated, and stopped recording covers for a long time. In fact, it’s the only tune on this collection for which Dylan lacks a songwriting credit. “If Not For You” flips the other way — like a number of Dylan’s songs, it’s more famous for its cover than the original, in this case the gorgeous version cut by George Harrison. (Not to mention the easy listening version by Olivia Newton-John. No really, not to mention it.)

“I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight” is a bit like a continuation of “Baby, Let Me Follow You Down” — a return to simplicity from post-motorcycle-crash Dylan, and a tender declaration of protection and love, at least for tonight. But for my money, “I’ll Keep It With Mine” is the most touching song from this side. Dylan isn’t necessarily known first and foremost for his love songs, and he’s certainly left his share of relationship wreckage behind him in his personal life, but this song is such a sweet, understated offer — to share a burden, to make things a little easier… maybe just to save you a little time. It’s a loving gift, made more so by being offered so nonchalantly.

Bob Dylan The Folk Poet

One, two, three. “The Times They Are A-Changin'”, “Blowin’ In The Wind”, “Masters Of War.” Any one of these songs would have been the absolute tip-top pinnacle of somebody else’s career. In fact, most artists never put out a single song anywhere near this good. Dylan put all three of them out within nine months of each other, two of them on the same album, and laid down about a dozen other stone classics in the meantime. Seriously, is it any wonder the guy was hailed as a genius at the age of 22?

These songs are so absolutely timeless, it feels like they’ve been around forever. I mean, he actually sat down and wrote “Blowin’ In The Wind.” Even though it feels exactly like it’s been passed down through oral tradition for hundreds of years, Bob Dylan wrote it on paper, from his brain. “The Times” is still damned electrifying, 52 years on, and hundreds of listens in, for me. “Masters Of War” could have been written yesterday. In fact, in some ways it’s more timely today than ever, with destruction having become ever more corporatized and commodified, and the weapons of war so effectively marketed that now they’re available to anyone who wants to stage their own personal My Lai massacre at the local nightclub, movie theater, or elementary school.

What a gift this man had, and what a gift he gave us. To sing truth in such a universal, compelling way that it can resonate with generation after generation… it’s a special and rare thing. Even a song like “The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll”, which is literally about a story that was in the newspaper a few months before the song’s release, is still spellbinding today in the light of all-too-fresh miscarriages of justice, shining a light on the disgraceful fact that even more than 50 years later, we still find ourselves having to insist that black lives matter. “Percy’s Song” is perfectly paired with it, as it shows the flip side of judicial injustice — where in “Hattie Carroll” a casual and unrepentant murderer escapes with a 6-month sentence, Percy gets 99 years for being at the wheel in a car accident.

Bob Dylan The Rocker

With side two having impeccably established Dylan’s folk credentials, side three opens with a rocker from the same 1962 vintage. “Mixed-Up Confusion” hearkens back to Dylan’s high-school idolization of Little Richard and Elvis Presley, galloping along like it can hardly be restrained. Let a few years flow by, and that same urgent beat resurfaces in the utterly amazing “Tombstone Blues.” Man, this song is just the essence of cool. Like a lot of the tracks on Highway 61 Revisited, you can practically hear Dylan’s sunglasses on his face, as he spits out lyrics as fierce and fast as any rapper. The lyrics themselves are in that surreal Highway 61 mode, throwing archetypes and images into a blender, achieving a startling alchemy as mysterious as it is powerful.

Could Dylan still write in that mode when Biograph was current? “Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar” says, “Hell yes!” A 1981 b-side left off Shot Of Love (and later reincluded on the CD release), this was one of the songs that rang down the curtain on Dylan’s “Born Again” period, and it’s a very strong return to form. I particularly love:

Try to be pure at heart, they arrest you for robbery,
Mistake your shyness for aloofness, your silence for snobbery,
Got the message this morning, the one that was sent to me
About the madness of becomin’ what one was never meant to be.

Like “Tombstone Blues”, it strings together thoughts and stories, returning rhythmically to a chorus that evokes desperation and wrongness. “Most Likely You Go Your Way” rocks out in a different fashion, showcasing Dylan’s remarkable facility for reworking his songs in live performance. I’ve only seen him in concert once, but the thing that most impressed me was his ability to rearrange his own songs to make them sound brand new. That’s exactly what happens here, as a rather shambolic tune from Blonde On Blonde becomes a strutting rave-up live, with Dylan shouting out the last word in every verse.

Finally, side 3 ends with “Like A Rolling Stone”, one of Dylan’s most iconic songs, and the one that proved his rock and roll prowess beyond any doubt, much to the dismay of 1965 folk purists. Books and books have been written on this song, so I’ll add nothing except to say that it’s a fitting capstone to this rock side.

Other Sides Of Bob Dylan

Towards the end of the disc, the LP structure starts to break down, as there isn’t enough space on the CD for side four. So let’s look at these last three songs just as encores for the concepts above. “Lay Down Your Weary Tune” is a fine unreleased track from Dylan in folk mode, recapturing the mood of Scottish ballads. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” was the first declaration of Dylan’s rock direction, as the first song on the electric side of Bringing It All Back Home. And “I Don’t Believe You” puts it all together, as a live rock reworking of a folk original in which Bob the lover is left scratching his head at a sudden rejection.

It’s been a satisfying trip so far, but there’s so much more left. On to disc two! (Well, after my next assignment, at least.)

In my 2015 music mix, I sang the praises of Elton John’s “Rocket Man.” Now that Robby has assigned me Honky Château, I’ve spent a lot more time with the song, and I love it more than ever. For one thing, it’s built so beautifully. First we just hear Elton’s voice and piano. He hits an aching falsetto on (appropriately) the word “high” — that falsetto will return throughout the song, punctuating moments of emotion in an extraordinary vocal performance.

Moments later, a tender bass part comes in to support the melody, then soft drums building to that first chorus. A guitar strum brings in the chorus, with sparkling harmonies from the band. The song hits its first peak at the words “rocket man” — a huge cymbal crash gets pierced by reverb-drenched slide guitar, a sound that smoothly ascends the scale into the heavens. Producer Gus Dudgeon puts together a sound here that brilliantly echoes the song’s subject, but without a sterile 2001 feel, because after all the song is about loneliness, not science fiction.

The slide guitar goes up, but also comes down at various places in the song, and the first of these leads into the second verse, where all the instruments drop away and we’re left again with only the vocals and piano, the haunting slide occasionally shooting past like a distant star. Halfway through that verse, a new sound comes in: cascading synths, which step to the front accompanying the line “and all the science” — again, the sound echoing the subject. But just to make sure we don’t get the impression this is turning into proto-new-wave, Elton’s voice hits its most poignant run, singing long, sweet notes on “man” at the end of the verse, reprising the notes he sang on “high” at the beginning of the song.

Then the synth joins the rest of the band as another slide and prominent strum leads back into the chorus. It’s even more emotional than last time, with an even warmer sound somehow. Then the chorus repeats, resolving into a repeating outro of “and I think it’s gonna be a long long time.” Each instrument takes its turn behind those words — the synths, the slide, the rhythm guitar — and we get just a few more of those sweet falsetto notes as the song fades away.

Even more than Dudgeon’s production and John’s melody, though, what touched me this time was Bernie Taupin’s lyrics. It’s no accident that he chooses the word “rocket” to emphasize, because I believe Taupin is using the astronaut as a metaphor to describe the touring rock star. He paints a portrait of a man in a capsule, taking a long trip away from home. He’s “high as a kite” for this trip, drug slang for the rock star turned literal for the astronaut. This man may be the subject of popular adulation, but “I’m not the man they think I am at home,” he says. He’s lonely, longing for connection even as he makes his timeless flight.

He’s just a man doing a job, five days a week. That’s a part of the song that’s always confused me — how is an astronaut in space only working five days a week? But it made more sense when I thought about it in context with the metaphor. The rock star may have nights when he doesn’t play. The astronaut may have days when he doesn’t “work” on experiments or observations. But he’s still in space. He’s still on tour. The environment may be exotic, but it’s inhospitable to domestic life — “Mars ain’t the kind of place you raise your kids,” and neither is a rock and roll tour. And it’s going to be a long, long time until he returns to that earthly life.

The contrast between ancient rural purity and modern urban corruption is one that fascinates Taupin in album after album, but it’s especially prominent on Honky Château, from a number of angles. In “Honky Cat” we hear from the smalltown boy who breaks away from his country life and is thrilled to be in the city. Despite all the voices from home that tell him “living in the city ain’t where it’s at,” he decides to quit his redneck ways, and knows the change is going to do him good. “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters” tells the opposite side, or perhaps just the next chapter in the story. The speaker’s romantic visions of New York, nurtured by the Ben E. King song “Spanish Harlem,” get shattered by the reality of the city, caught between the subway and the starless sky. And yet even in this “trash can dream come true,” he finds people who help him sow his own seeds in the city, the agricultural metaphor settling into an uneasy truce with urban grit.

Elsewhere on the album, the country is celebrated, mainly as it’s personified in women. In “Susie (Dramas)” we get a classic Taupin country portrait, one that would have been perfectly at home on Tumbleweed Connection. Rural imagery straight out of Oklahoma! abounds — fringe on a buggy, a frisky colt, ice skating on the river, and an “old hayseed harp player” sharing the moonshine (in a double meaning) with a “pretty little black-eyed girl.” “Amy” wrecks the dreams of a young kid who adores her from afar and drives her crazy up close. The lyrics don’t reference country imagery in the same way, but Jean-Luc Ponty’s wild electric violin links the song with “Mellow”, another down-home portrait of love where the singer snuggles with his girl in front of a coal fire, occasionally sending her “down to the stores in town” for more beer.

Knowing a little of Taupin’s biography makes sense of this fascination — he grew up in a very rural setting, and in fact his family had no electricity for the first 5 years of his life. It wasn’t until his late teens that he found himself in London, where he suddenly skyrocketed to fame alongside John, who was the Captain Fantastic to Taupin’s brown dirt cowboy. That partnership with John not only gave Taupin the perfect vehicle for his lyrics, it gave him an extraordinary empathy for people in very different circumstances from his own. Nowhere is that empathy more visible than on “Rocket Man”, where Taupin finds the perfect emotional note for both the astronaut and the rock star.

His connection with Elton comes up in a more playful way on “Hercules”. The song is cartoonish throughout, starting with its narrator, a country character who stays gritty up to his ears “washing in a bucket of mud.” This fellow sports colorful ailments like “a busted wing”, and laments how the object of his affection has focused her attention on a “muscle boy” named Hercules. What’s the connection to Elton? Well, it so happens that when Reginald Kenneth Dwight legally changed his name in 1967, it was to Elton Hercules John. There had to have been moments for Bernie Taupin when he felt jealous of Elton John’s stardom, even as he watched his friend suffer under the spotlight, but in this song, at least, his rivalry with Hercules seems like nothing but a laugh. In some ways it’s an extension of “Rocket Man”‘s empathy, taking the hornet’s sting out of what could be a bitter contention, and sowing the seeds for many productive seasons to come.