STELLASIOUX’S
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THE PEOPLE
Singles
Information / Singles Discography
Steve
Lillywhite Marc
Bolan Lou Reed Ben E King Virgina Astley Top 40 John Lennon Paul McCartney White Album
Bob Dylan Julie Driscoll Iggy Pop George Harrison
Polydor Records
The label was formed in
b. 1955,
Banshees Covered “20th
Century Boy” as the B Side to “The Staircase (Mystery)”
b. Mark Feld,
Marc Bolan/T. Rex
Although initially a six-piece group,
formed by Marc Bolan (b. Mark Feld, 30 July 1947, Hackney, London, England;
vocals/guitar) in 1967 on leaving John's Children, the new venture was reduced
to an acoustic duo when a finance company repossessed their instruments and
amplifiers. Steve 'Peregrine' Took (b.
UNICORN (1971) introduced a
much fuller sound as Tyrannosaurus Rex began to court a wider popularity.
Long-time producer Tony Visconti emphasized the supporting instruments—organ,
harmonium, bass guitar and drumkit—while adding piano on Catblack, one of the
more popular selections. However, tension between Bolan and Took led to the
latter's departure and Mickey Finn (b.
American soul singer Gloria
Jones, now Bolan's girlfriend, was added to the group, but a series of
departures, including those of Currie, Legend and Finn, emphasized an internal
dissent. Although New York City bore a 'T. Rex' credit, the group had been
officially declared defunct with session musicians completing future
recordings. A series of minor hits—Dream Lady, London Boys and Laser Love—was
punctuated by I Love To Boogie, which reached the UK Top 20, but its lustre was
removed by charges of plagiarism. However unlike many contemporaries, Bolan
welcomed the punk explosion, championing the Damned and booking Generation X on
his short-lived television show, 'Marc'. The series featured poignant reunions
with David Bowie and John's Children singer Andy Ellison and helped halt
Bolan's sliding fortunes. A working unit of Herbie Flowers (bass) and Tony
Newman (drums) was formed in the wake of a new recording deal with RCA, but on
16 September 1977, Marc Bolan was killed when the car in which he was a
passenger struck a tree. The first of several T. Rex related deaths, it was
followed by those of Took (1980) and Currie (1981). A vociferous fan-club has
kept Bolan's name alive through multiple reissues and repackages and the singer
has retained a cult popularity. Although his spell as a top-selling act was
brief, he was instrumental in restating pop values in the face of prevailing
progressive trends.
b. Louis Firbank, 2 March 1942,
Freeport, Long Island, New York, USA. A member of several high-school bands,
Reed made his recording debut with the Shades in 1957. Their So Blue enjoyed
brief notoriety when played by influential disc jockey Murray The K, but was
lost in the plethora of independent singles released in this period. Having
graduated from Syracuse University, Reed took a job as a contract songwriter
with Pickwick Records which specialized in cash-in, exploitative recordings.
His many compositions from this era included The Ostrich (1965), a
tongue-in-cheek dance song which so impressed the label hierarchy that Reed
formed the Primitives to promote it as a single. The group also included a
recent acquaintance, John Cale, thus sewing the early seeds of the Velvet
Underground. Reed led this outstanding unit between 1966 and 1970, contributing
almost all of the material and shaping its ultimate direction. His songs, for
the most part, drew on the incisive discipline of R&B, while pointed lyrics
displayed an acerbic view of contemporary urban life. Reed's departure left a
creative vacuum within the group, yet he too seemed drained of inspiration
following the break. He sought employment outside of music and two years passed
before LOU REED was released. Recorded in London with British musicians,
including Steve Howe and Rick Wakeman, the set boasted some excellent
songs—several of which were intended for the Velvet Underground—but was marred
by an indistinct production. Nonetheless, an attendant UK tour with the Tots, a
group of New York teenagers, was an artistic success.
David Bowie, a longtime
Velvets' aficionado, oversaw TRANSFORMER, which captured a prevailing mood of
decadence. Although uneven, it included the classic Walk On The Wild Side, a
homage to transexuals and social misfits drawn to artist/film-maker Andy
Warhol. This explicit song became a surprise hit, reaching the UK Top 10 and US
Top 20 in 1973, but Reed refused to become trapped by the temporary nature of
the genre and returned to the dark side of his talents with BERLIN. By steering
a course through sado-masochism, attempted suicide and nihilism, the artist
expunged his newfound commerciality and challenged his audience in a way few
contemporaries dared. Yet this period was blighted by self-parody and while a
crack back-up band built around guitarists Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter
provided undoubted muscle on the live ROCK 'N' ROLL ANIMAL, SALLY CAN'T DANCE
showed an artist bereft of direction and purpose. Having sanctioned a second
in-concert set, Reed released the stark METAL MACHINE MUSIC, an electronic,
atonal work spaced over a double album. Savaged by critics upon release, its
ill-synchronized oscillations have since been lauded by elitist sections of the
avant garde fraternity, while others view its release as a work of mischief in
which Reed displayed the ultimate riposte to careerist convention. It was
followed by the sedate CONEY ISLAND BABY, Reed's softest, simplest collection
to date, the inherent charm of which was diluted on ROCK 'N' ROLL HEART, a
careless, inconsequential collection which marked an artistic nadir. However
its successor, STREET HASSLE, displayed a rejuvenated power, resuming the
singer's empathy with New York's subcultures. The title track, later revived by
Simple Minds, was undeniably impressive, while Dirt and I Wanna Be Black
revealed a wryness missing from much of the artist's solo work. Although
subsequent releases, THE BELLS and GROWING UP IN PUBLIC, failed to scale
similar heights, they offered a newfound sense of maturity. Reed entered the
'80s a stronger, more incisive performer, buoyed by a fruitful association with
guitarist Robert Quine, formerly of Richard Hell's Voidoids. THE BLUE MASK was
another purposeful collection and set a pattern for the punchy, concise
material found on LEGENDARY HEARTS and MISTRIAL.
However, despite the promise
these selections offered, few commentators were prepared for the artistic
rebirth found on NEW YORK. Here the sound was stripped to the bone,
accentuating the rhythmic pulse of compositions which focused on the seedy
low-life that Reed excels in chronicling. His lyrics, alternately pessimistic
or cynical, reasserted the fire of his best work as the artist regains the
power to paint moribund pictures which neither ask, nor receive, pity. NEW YORK
was a splendid return to form and created considerable interest in his back
catalogue. SONGS FOR DRELLA: A FICTION, was a haunting epitaph for Andy Warhol
on which Reed collaborated with John Cale. It showed another facet of the
dramatic regeneration that places this immensely talented artist back at rock's
cutting edge. In 1993 Reed joined together with his legendary colleagues for a
high-profile Velvet Underground reunion.
Banshees Covered “Super
Natural Thing” as the B Side to “Arabian Knights”
b. Benjamin Earl Nelson, 28
September 1938, Henderson, North Carolina, USA. King began his career while
still a high school student singing in a doo-wop group, the Four B's. He later
joined the Five Crowns who, in 1959, assumed the name, the Drifters. King was
the featured lead vocalist and occasional composer, on several of their
recordings including There Goes My Baby and Save The Last Dance For Me. After
leaving the group in 1960, he recorded the classic single, Spanish Harlem
(1961) which maintained the latin quality of the Drifters’ work and deservedly
reached the US Top 10. The follow-up, Stand By Me (1961), was even more
successful and was followed by further hits including Amor (1961) and Don‘t
Play That Song (You Lied) (1962). Throughout this period, King's work was aimed
increasingly at the pop audience. I (Who Have Nothing) and I Could Have Danced
All Night (both 1963) suggested showbusiness rather than innovation, although
Bert Berns's It's All Over (1964) was a superb song. Seven Letters and The
Record (Baby I Love You) (both 1965) prepared the way for the rhetorical What
Is Soul? (1967) which effectively placed King alongside such soul contemporaries
as Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Joe Tex. Unfortunately, King's commercial
standing declined towards the end of the '60s when he left the Atlantic/Atco
group of labels. Unable to reclaim his former standing elsewhere, King later
re-signed with his former company and secured a US Top 5 hit in 1975 with
Supernatural Thing Part 1. In 1977, a collaboration with the Average White Band
resulted in two R&B chart entries and an excellent album, BENNY AND US
(1900). However, King's later recordings, including MUSIC TRANCE and STREET
TOUGH, proved less successful. In 1986, Stand By Me was included in a film of
the same name and once more became an international hit, reaching the US Top 10
and number 1 in the UK, thereby briefly revitalizing the singer's autumnal
career.
Astley was a former member of the Ravishing Beauties along with
Nicola Holland and Kate St. John. As classically trained musicians they
attempted, with some degree of success, to cross over into the pop field,
working with amongst others, Echo And The Bunnymen and the Teardrop Explodes.
Astley broke away to pursue a solo career in 1982. Her first single, Love's A
Lonely Place To Be was a melancholy paeon to the feeling of isolation when a
love affair breaks down and the song's choral, almost boy soprano feel, gave it
an ephemeral quality. It reached number 7 in the UK Independent chart and
fitted in well with the then-current fashion for ‘quiet pop’. Her debut album
in 1983 confirmed her love of all things English and pastoral. Largely an
instrumental album, this dreamy atmospheric piece incorporated the sounds of
the countryside on a summer's day. Complete with authentic bird songs and farm
sounds, it gave the feel of a modern day piece by Delius. It took three years
for her second album to be released and the Ryuichi Sakamoto produced HOPE IN
DARKENED HEART concentrated on Astley's preoccupation with the loss of
childhood's innocence and adulthood's uncertainty. This accomplished musician
remains for the time being, on the periphery of the music scene and can
occasionally be found guesting for other artists.
The term Top 40 as it applies
to radio evolved throughout the 1950s, after an American radio executive named
Todd Storz observed that kids tended to play the same songs over and over on a
jukebox. Storz adapted this concept to the airwaves, selecting the most popular
songs —the "top 40"—and playing them repeatedly on the radio.
"Top 40" became the generic term for a radio format notable for its
jingles, upbeat presentation, and frequent repetition of popular songs,
regardless of genre. At the same time, the lists in music and radio industry
trade publications that reflect airplay and/or sales of albums and singles in
various categories came to be known as the "top 30" or "top
40"; a "top 10 single" would be a song that's popular
enough to be near the top of the chart.
John Lennon
Banshees Covered “Helter
Skelter” “Dear Prudence” & “Blue Jay Way”
b. 9 October 1940, Liverpool,
England, d. 8 December 1980, New York, USA. John Winston Ono Lennon has been
exhumed in print more than any other popular musical figure, including the late
Elvis Presley, of whom John said ‘died when he went into the army’. Such was
the cutting wit of a deeply loved and sadly missed giant of the 20th century.
As a member of the world's most successful group ever, he changed lives for the
better. Following the painful collapse of the Beatles, he came out a wiser but
angrier person. Together with his wife Yoko Ono, he attempted to transform the
world through non-musical means. To many they appeared as naive crackpots, Yoko
in particular has been victim of some appalling insults in the press. One
example shown in the film Imagine depicts the cartoonist Al Capp being both
hostile and dangerously abusive. Their bed-in in Amsterdam and Montreal, their
black bag appearances on stage, their innocent flirting with political
activists and radicals, all received massive media attention. These events were
in search of world peace, which regrettably was unachievable. What Lennon did
achieve however, was to educate us all to the idea of world peace. During the
Gulf War of 1991, time and time again various representatives of those
countries who initially were opposed to war (and then asked for a cease-fire),
would unconsciously use John's words: "Give Peace A Chance". The
importance of that lyric could never have been contemplated, when a bunch of
mostly stoned members of the Plastic Ono Band sat on the floor of the Hotel La
Reine and recorded Give Peace A Chance, a song that has grown in stature since
its release in 1969.
Lennon's solo career began a
year earlier with UNFINISHED MUSIC NO 1—TWO VIRGINS. The sleeve depicted him
and Yoko standing naked, and the cover became better known than the disjointed
sound effects contained within. Three months later John continued his
marvellous joke on us, with UNFINISHED MUSIC NO 2—LIFE WITH THE LIONS. One side
consisted of John and Yoko calling out to each other during her stay in a
London hospital while pregnant. John camped by the side of her bed during her
confinement and subsequent miscarriage. Four months after Give Peace a Chance,
Cold Turkey arrived via the Plastic Ono Band, consisting of John, Yoko, Eric
Clapton, Klaus Voorman and drummer Alan White. This raw rock song about heroin
withdrawal was also a hit, although it failed to make the Top 10. Again,
Lennon's incorrigible wit worked when he sent back his MBE to the Queen,
protesting about the Biafran war, Britain supporting the American involvement
in Vietnam and Cold Turkey slipping down the charts. In February 1970, a
cropped-headed Lennon was seen performing Instant Karma on the BBC's television
programme "Top Of The Pops"; this drastic action was another anti-war
protest. This Phil Spector-produced offering was his most melodic post Beatles
song to date and was his biggest hit thus far in the UK and the USA. The
release of JOHN LENNON— PLASTIC ONO BAND in January 1971 was a shock to the
system for most Beatles’ fans. This stark ‘primal scream’ album was recorded
following treatment with Dr. Arthur Janov. It is as brilliant as it is
disturbing. John poured out much of his bitterness from his childhood and
adolescence, neat and undiluted. The screaming Mother finds John grieving for
her loss and begging for his father. Lennon's Dylanesque Working Class Hero is
another stand-out track, in less vitriolic tone he croons ‘A working class hero
is something to be, if you want to be a hero then just follow me’; the irony is
that John was text-book middle-class and his agony was that he wanted to be
working class. The work was a cathartic exorcism for Lennon, most revealingly
on God, in which he voiced the heretical, ‘I don't believe in the Beatles …‘
before adding, ‘I just believe in me, Yoko and me, and that's reality.’ More
than any other work in the Lennon canon, this was a farewell to the past. The
album was brilliant, and 20 or more years later, it is regarded as his finest
complete work.
1971 was to be his most
creative year; following the album was another strong single Power To The
People and after his move to New York, IMAGINE was released in October. Whilst
the album immediately went to number 1 internationally, it was a patchy
collection. The attack on Paul McCartney in How Do You Sleep? was laboured over
in the press and it took two decades before another track Jealous Guy was
accepted as a classic. Only then after Bryan Ferry's masterly cover became a
number 1 hit. Lennon's resentment against politicians was superbly documented
in Gimme Some Truth when he spat out ‘I'm sick and tired of hearing things from
uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites’. The title track, however,
remains as one of his greatest songs. Musically Imagine is extraordinarily
simple, but the combination of that simplicity and the timeless lyrics make it
one of the finest songs of the century. A Christmas single came in December,
Happy Christmas (War Is Over), another song destined for immortality and annual
reissue. Again, an embarrassingly simple message: ‘War is over if you want it’.
The following year SOMETIME IN NEW YORK CITY was issued; this double set
contained a number of political songs, and was written during the peak of
Lennon's involvement with yippie-radical, Jerry Rubin. John addresses numerous
problems with angry lyrics over deceptively melodic songs. The lilting and
seemingly innocent Luck Of The Irish is one example of melody with scathing
comment. The album's strongest track is yet another song with one of Lennon's
statement-like titles; Woman Is the Nigger Of The World. Once again he was
ahead of the game, making a bold plea for women's rights, a decade before it
became fashionable. The following year he embarked on his struggle against
deportation and the fight for his famous ‘green card’. At the end of a
comparatively quiet 1973, John released MIND GAMES, an album that highlighted
problems between him and Yoko. Shortly after Lennon left for his ‘lost weekend’
and spent many months in Los Angeles in a haze of drugs and alcohol. During a
brief sober moment he produced Nilsson's PUSSYCATS. At the end of a dreadful
year, John released WALLS AND BRIDGES, which contained more marital material
and a surprise US number 1, Whatever Gets You Through The Night; a powerful
rocker with Lennon sounding in complete control. That month (November 1974), he
made his last-ever concert appearance when he appeared onstage at Madison
Square Garden with Elton John. That night John was reunited with Yoko and in
his words ‘the separation failed’.
ROCK ‘N’ ROLL was released the next year; it was a tight and
energetic celebration of many of his favourite songs, including Slippin’ And
Slidin’, Peggy Sue and a superb Stand By Me. The critics and public loved it
and it reached number 6 on both sides of the Atlantic. Following the birth of
their son Sean, John became a house husband, while Yoko looked after their not
inconsiderable business interests. Five years later, a new album was released
to a relieved public and went straight to number 1, almost worldwide. The
following month, with fans still jubilant at Lennon's return, he was suddenly
brutally murdered by a gunman outside his apartment building in Manhattan.
Almost from the moment that John's heart stopped in the Roosevelt Hospital the
whole world reacted in unprecedented mourning. His records were re-released and
experienced similar sales and chart positions to that of the Beatles' heyday.
While all this happened, one could ‘imagine’ John calmly looking down on us,
watching the world's reaction and having a celestial laugh.
Paul McCartney
Banshees Covered “Helter
Skelter” “Dear Prudence” & “Blue Jay Way”
b. 18 June 1942, Liverpool,
England. Although commitments to the Beatles not unnaturally took precedence,
bassist/vocalist McCartney nonetheless pursued several outside projects during
this tenure. Many reflected friendships or personal preferences, ranging from
production work for Cliff Bennett, Paddy, Klaus And Gibson and the Bonzo Dog
Doo-Dah Band to appearances on sessions by Donovan, Paul Jones and Steve
Miller. He also wrote Woman for Peter And Gordon under the pseudonym Bernard
Webb, but such contributions flourished more freely with the founding of Apple
Records, where Paul guided the early careers of Mary Hopkin and Badfinger and
enjoyed cameos on releases by Jackie Lomax and James Taylor. However, despite
this well-documented independence, the artist ensured a critical backlash by
timing the release of MCCARTNEY to coincide with that of the Beatles' LET IT BE
and his announced departure from the group. His low-key debut was labelled
self-indulgent, yet its intimacy was a welcome respite from prevailing heavy
rock, and in Maybe I'm Amazed, offered one of Paul's finest songs. RAM,
credited to McCartney and his wife Linda (b. Linda Eastman, 24 September 1942,
Scarsdale, New York, USA), was also maligned as commentators opined that the
singer lacked an acidic riposte to his often sentimental approach. The album
nonetheless spawned a US number 1 in Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey, while an
attendant single, Another Day, reached number 2 in the UK. Drummer Denny
Seiwell, who had assisted on these sessions, was invited to join a projected
group, later enhanced by former Moody Blues' member Denny Laine. The quartet,
dubbed Wings, then completed WILDLIFE, another informal set marked by an
indifference to dexterity and the absorption of reggae and classic rock ‘n’
roll rhythms. Having expanded the line-up to include Henry McCullough
(ex-Grease Band; guitar), McCartney took the group on an impromptu tour of UK
colleges, before releasing three wildly contrasting singles, Give Ireland Back
To The Irish (banned by the BBC), Mary Had A Little Lamb and Hi Hi Hi/C Moon
(all 1972). The following year, Wings completed My Love, a sculpted ballad in
the accepted McCartney tradition, and RED ROSE SPEEDWAY, to that date his most formal
set. Plans for the unit's fourth album were undermined by the defection of
McCullough and Seiwell, but the remaining trio emerged triumphant from a series
of productive sessions undertaken in a Lagos studio.
BAND ON THE RUN was undeniably
a major achievement, and did much to restore McCartney's faltering reputation.
Buoyed by adversity, the artist offered a passion and commitment missing from
earlier albums and, in turn, reaped due commercial plaudits when the title song
and Jet reached both US and UK Top 10 positions. The lightweight, Junior's Farm
provided another hit single before a reconstituted Wings, which now included
guitarist Jimmy McCulloch (ex-Thunderclap Newman and Stone The Crows) and Joe
English (drums), completed VENUS AND MARS, WINGS AT THE SPEED OF SOUND and the
expansive on-tour collection, WINGS OVER AMERICA. Although failing to scale the
artistic heights of BAND ON THE RUN, such sets re-established McCartney as a
major figure and included best-selling singles such as Listen To What The Man
Said (1975), Silly Love Songs and Let 'Em In (both 1976). Although progress was
momentarily undermined by the departures of McCulloch and English, Wings
enjoyed its most spectacular success with Mull Of Kintyre (1977), a saccharine
paean to Paul and Linda's Scottish retreat which topped the UK charts for nine
consecutive weeks and sold over 2.5 million copies in Britain alone. Although
regarded as disappointing, LONDON TOWN nevertheless included With A Little
Luck, a US number 1, but although Wings’ newcomers Laurence Juber (guitar) and
Steve Holly (drums) added weight to BACK TO THE EGG, it, too, was regarded as
inferior. Whereas the group was not officially disbanded until April 1981,
McCartney's solo recordings, Wonderful Christmastime (1979), Coming Up (1980)
and MCCARTNEY II, already heralded a new phase in the artist's career. However,
if international success was maintained through duets with Stevie Wonder (Ebony
And Ivory), Michael Jackson (The Girl Is Mine) as well as Say Say Say and Pipes
Of Peace, attendant albums were marred by inconsistency. McCartney's feature
film, GIVE MY REGARDS TO BROADSTREET, was maligned by critics, a fate befalling
its soundtrack album, although the optimistic ballad, No More Lonely Nights,
reached number 2 in the UK. The artist's once-prolific output then noticeably
waned, but although his partnership with 10cc guitarist Eric Stewart gave PRESS
TO PLAY a sense of direction, it failed to halt a significant commercial
decline. CHOBA B CCCP, a collection of favoured ‘oldies’ solely intended for
release in the USSR, provided an artistic respite and publicity, before a
much-heralded collaboration with Elvis Costello produced material for the
latter's SPIKE and McCartney's own FLOWERS IN THE DIRT, arguably his strongest
set since VENUS & MARS. Paradoxically, singles culled from the album failed
to chart significantly, but a world tour, on which Paul and Linda were joined
by Robbie McIntosh (ex-Pretenders; guitar), Wix (keyboards), Hamish Stuart
(ex-Average White Band; bass/vocals) and Chris Whitten (drums), showed that
McCartney's power to entertain was still intact. By drawing on material from
the Beatles, Wings and solo recordings, this enduring artist demonstrated a
prowess which spans over a quarter of a century. The extent of his diversity
was emphasized by his collaboration with Carl Davis on the classical Liverpool
Oratorio, which featured opera singer Dame Kiri Tekanewa. OFF THE GROUND
received luke-warm reviews and soon dropped of the charts after a brief run.
The accompanying tour however, was a different story. The ambitious stage show
and effects undertook a world tour in 1993 and was one of the highest grossing tours in the USA during that year.
The White Album ("The
Beatles")
Banshees Covered “Helter Skelter”
“Dear Prudence” & “Blue Jay Way” all
taken from “The White Album”
THE BEATLES was, of course, the
plain-covered double LP that we came to call "THE WHITE ALBUM". (Must
we now learn to call it the White CD?) It could not have been easy to follow SGT.
PEPPER, least of all given that by 1968 the four Fabs were a group in name
only.
Like almost every double album
set that has followed, the WHITE ALBUM is one disc longer than it should be.
But take away its weakest elements—the unlistenable sprawl of Revolution 9 for
a kick-off, whimsical fillers like Rocky Raccoon and Wild Honey Pie, and the
cloddish Me And My Monkey—and you're left with some bursts of Beatle-ish
brilliance in a ragged-edged patchwork quilt. Falling apart, they still made
music that outclassed most groups at their peak.
Really, it should have been the
Black Album: Lennon plumbs new depths of bleakness in Yer Blues, Sexy Sadie and
I'm So Tired, while the hymn to his dead mother (Julia) and Cry Baby Cry convey
the merest veneer of prettiness. George Harrison sounds either bitter (Piggies,
Savoy Truffle) or morose (Long Long Long, While My Guitar Gently Weeps). And
while McCartney applies his awesome melodic gifts as winsomely as ever in
Mother Nature's Son, there's an unsettling ambivalence in Blackbird, a certain
cynical edge to Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Da and Back In The USSR, and nothing in the
least bit cute about Charles Manson's favourite tune Helter Skelter, which is
the only pop song credited with inspiring mass murder.
Their next LP was YELLOW
SUBMARINE, released in early '69, even though the film (a psychedelic cartoon
fantasy) had been out for months and the songs it contained were even older.
It's barely a Beatles album at all—the jaunty title track can be heard on
REVOLVER from three years earlier, there's the 1967 single All You Need Is
Love, and all of the second half is film-score background music by George
Martin.
Which leaves just four songs,
largely leftovers from the MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR sessions. All Together Now is a
playground skipping rhyme that may have taken Paul as much as two minutes to
compose; Hey Bulldog is John apparently making things up as he goes along, with
his mind on something else, while Only A Northern Song is George doing
likewise. But Harrison does supply this album's biggest redeeming feature, a
trippy extravaganza (its clutter is all the more evident on CD) It's All Too
Much.
The latter track is beatific
Beatles silliness ("Show me that I'm everywhere/And get me home for
tea") and the archetype of its time. It exemplifies the difference between
British pop-psychedelia and its American rock counterpart. Over there, lysergic
visions soundtracked the screaming acid nightmare of Vietnam. In giggling
little England, dressed up in the mock-nostalgic uniforms of a vanished Empire,
this "psychedelia" was only a Technicolour ticket back to Toytown.
Bob Dylan
b. Robert Allen Zimmerman, 24
May 1941, Duluth, Minnesota, USA. Bob Dylan is unquestionably one of the most
influential figures in the history of popular music. He is the writer of scores
of classic songs and is generally regarded as the man who brought literacy to
rock lyrics. The son of a middle-class proprietor of an electrical and
furniture store, as a teenager, living in Hibbing, Minnesota, he was always
intrigued by the romanticism of the outsider. He loved James Dean movies, liked
riding motorcycles and wearing biker gear, and listened to R&B music on
radio stations transmitting from the south. A keen fan of folk singer Odetta
and country legend Hank Williams, he was also captivated by early rock ‘n’
roll. When he began playing music himself, with schoolfriends in bands such as
the Golden Chords and Elston Gunn And The Rock Boppers, it was as a clumsy but
enthusiastic piano player, and it was at this time that he declared his
ambition in a high school yearbook 'to join Little Richard'. In 1959, he began
visiting Minneapolis at weekends and on his graduation from high school,
enrolled at the University of Minnesota there, though he spent most of his time
hanging around with local musicians in the beatnik coffeehouses of the
Dinkytown area. It was in Minneapolis that he first discovered blues music, and
he began to incorporate occasional blues tunes among the primarily traditional
material that made up his repertoire as an apprentice folk singer. Dylan, who
by this time had changed his name, played occasionally at local clubs but was,
by most accounts, a confident but, at best, unremarkable performer. In the
summer of 1960, however, Dylan spent some time in Denver, and developed as an
artist in several extraordinary and important ways. First, he adopted a persona
based upon the Woody Guthrie romantic hobo figure of the film Bound For Glory.
Dylan had learned about Guthrie in Minnesota and had quickly devoured, and
memorised, as many Guthrie songs as he could. In Denver, he assumed a new
voice, began speaking with an Okie twang, and adopted a new 'hard travellin'
appearance. Secondly, in Denver, Dylan had met Jesse Fuller, a blues performer
who played guitar and harmonica simultaneously by using a harp rack. Dylan was
intrigued and soon afterwards began to teach himself to do the same. By the
time he returned to Minneapolis, he had developed remarkably as a performer. By
now, sure that he intended to be a professional musician, he returned briefly
to Hibbing, then set out, via Madison and Chicago, for New York, where he
arrived on 24 January 1961.
For a completely unknown and
still very raw performer, Dylan's impact on the folk scene of Greenwich Village
was immediate and enormous. He captivated anyone who saw him with his energy,
his charisma and his rough-edged authenticity. He spun stories about his
background and family history, weaving a tangled web of tall tales and myths
about who he was and where he was from. He played in the coffeehouses of the
Village, including Cafe Wha?, The Commons, The Gaslight and, most importantly,
Gerde's Folk City, where he made his first professional appearance, supporting
John Hammond, who signed him to Columbia Records in Autumn 1961. At the same
time, a gig at Gerde's was reviewed favourably in the New York Times by Robert
Shelton, who declared that Bob Dylan was clearly destined for fortune and fame.
His first album, called simply
BOB DYLAN, was released in March 1961. It presented a collection of folk and
blues standards, often about death and sorrows and the trials of life, songs
that had been included in Dylan's repertoire over the past year or so,
performed with gusto and an impressive degree of sensitivity for a 20-year-old.
But it was the inclusion of two of his own compositions, most notably the
affectionate tribute, Song To Woody, that pointed the way forward. Over the
next few months, Dylan would write dozens of songs, many of them 'topical'
songs. Encouraged by his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, Dylan became interested in,
and was subsequently adopted by, the Civil Rights movement. His song Blowin' In
The Wind, written in April 1962, was to be the most famous of his protest songs
and was included on his second album, THE FREEWHEELIN' BOB DYLAN, released in
May 1963. In the meantime, Dylan had written and recorded several other
noteworthy early political songs, including Masters Of War and A Hard Rain's
A-Gonna Fall, and, during a nine-months separation from Suze, one of his
greatest early love songs, Don't Think Twice, It's All Right. At the end of
1962, he recorded a single, a rock ‘n’ roll song called Mixed Up Confusion,
with backing musicians. The record was quickly deleted, apparently because
Dylan's manager, Albert Grossman, saw that the way forward for his charge was
not as a rocker, but as an earnest acoustic folky. Similarly, tracks that had
been recorded for Dylan's second album with backing musicians were scrapped,
though the liner notes which commented on them and identified the players
remained carelessly unrevised. The FREEWHEELIN' record was so long in coming
that four original song choices were substituted at the last moment by other,
more newly composed songs. One of the tracks omitted was Talking John Birch
Society Blues, which song Dylan had been controversially banned from singing on
the 'Ed Sullivan Show' in May 1963. The attendant publicity did no harm
whatsoever to Dylan's stature as a radical new 'anti-establishment' voice. At
the same time, Grossman's shrewd decision to have a somewhat saccharine version
of Blowin' In The Wind recorded by Peter, Paul And Mary also paid off, the
record becoming a huge hit in the USA, and bringing Dylan's name to national,
and indeed international, attention for the first time.
At the end of 1962, Dylan flew
to London to appear in the long lost BBC television play, 'The Madhouse On
Castle Street.' The experience did little to further his career as an actor,
but while he was in London, he did learn lots of English folk songs, many from
musician Martin Carthy, whose tunes he would subsequently 'adapt'. Thus,
Scarborough Fair was reworked as Girl From The North Country, Lord Franklin as
Bob Dylan's Dream, Nottamun Town as Masters Of War. The songs continued to pour
out and singers began to queue up to record them. It was at this time that Joan
Baez first began to play a prominent part in Dylan's life. Already a successful
folk singer, Baez covered Dylan songs at a rapid rate, and proclaimed his
genius at every opportunity. Soon she was introducing him to her audience and
the two became lovers, the King and Queen of folk music. Dylan's songwriting
became more astute and wordy as the months passed. Biblical and other literary
imagery began to be pressed into service in songs like When The Ship Comes In
and the anthemic Times They Are A-Changin', this last written a day or two
after Dylan had sung Only A Pawn In Their Game in front of 400,000 people at
the March On Washington, 28 August 1963. Indeed, the very next day, Dylan read
in the local newspaper of the murder of black waitress Hattie Carroll, which
inspired the best, and arguably the last, of his protest songs, The Lonesome
Death Of Hattie Carroll, included on his third album, THE TIMES THEY ARE
A-CHANGIN', released in January 1964.
1964 was to see a huge shift in
Dylan's songwriting perspectives. Now separated finally from Suze Rotolo,
disenchanted with much of the petty politics of the Village, and becoming
increasingly frustrated with the 'spokesman of a generation' tag which had been
hung around his neck, the ever restless Dylan sloughed off the expectations of
the old folky crowd, and, influenced by his reading the poetry of John Keats
and French symbolist Arthur Rimbaud, began to expand his own poetic
consciousness and wrote the songs that would make up his fourth record, ANOTHER
SIDE OF BOB DYLAN—including the disavowal of his past, My Back Pages, and the
Illuminations-inspired Chimes Of Freedom—while yet newer songs such as Mr.
Tambourine Man (which he recorded for but did not include on ANOTHER SIDE) and
Gates Of Eden and It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding, which he began to include
in concert performances over the next few weeks, dazzled with their lyrical
complexity and literary sophistication. Here, then, was Dylan the poet, and
here the arguments about the relative merits of high art and popular art began.
The years 1964-66 were, unarguably, Dylan's greatest as a writer and as a
performer; they were also his most influential years and many artists today
still cite the three albums which followed, BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME and
HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED from 1965 and 1966's double album BLONDE ON BLONDE as
being seminal in their own musical development.
ANOTHER SIDE OF BOB DYLAN was
to be Dylan's last solo acoustic album for almost 30 years. Intrigued by what
the Beatles were doing—he had visited London again to play one concert at the
Royal Festival Hall in May 1964—and particularly excited by the Animals'
'folk-rock' cover of House Of The Rising Sun, a track Dylan himself had
included on his debut album, he and producer Tom Wilson fleshed out some of the
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME songs with rock ‘n’roll backings—the proto-rap
Subterranean Homesick Blues and Maggie's Farm, for instance. But the song which
was perhaps Dylan's most important mid-'60s composition, Like A Rolling Stone,
was written immediately after the final series of acoustic concerts, played in
the UK in April and May 1965 and commemorated in D.A. Pennebaker's famous
documentary film, Don't Look Back. Dylan said that he began to write Like A
Rolling Stone having decided to 'literally quit' singing and playing. The
lyrics to the song emerged from six pages of stream of consciousness 'vomit';
the sound of the single emerged from the immortal combination of Chicago blues
guitarist Michael Bloomfield, bass man Harvey Brooks and fledgling organ-player
Al Kooper. Like A Rolling Stone was to be producer Tom Wilson's last, and
greatest, Dylan track. At six minutes, it busted the formula of the
sub-three-minute single forever. It was a huge hit and was played, alongside
the Byrds' equally momentous version of Mr. Tambourine Man, all over the radio
in the summer of 1965. Consequently, it really should have come as no surprise
to those who went to see Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25 that he
was now a fully fledged folk-rocker. But, apparently, it did.
Backed by the Paul Butterfield
Blues Band, Dylan's supposedly 'new sound'—though admittedly it was his first
concert with supporting musicians—was met with a storm of bewilderment and
hostility. Stories vary as to how much Dylan was booed that night, and why, but
Dylan seemed to find the experience both exhilarating and liberating. If, after
the UK tour, he had felt ready to quit, now he was ready to start again, to tour
the world with a band and to take his music, and himself, to the farthest
reaches of experience. Just like Arthur Rimbaud. Dylan's discovering the Hawks,
a Canadian group who had been playing roadhouses and funky bars until
introductions were made via John Hammond and Albert Grossman's secretary Mary
Martin, was one of those pieces of alchemical magic that happen hermetically.
The Hawks, later to become the Band, comprised Robbie Robertson, Richard
Manuel, Garth Hudson, Rick Danko and Levon Helm. Dylan's songs and the Hawks'
sound were made for each other. After a couple of stormy warm-up gigs, they
took to the road in the autumn of 1965 and travelled through the USA, then, via
Hawaii, to Australia, on to Scandinavia and finally to Britain, with a hop over
to Paris for a birthday show, in May 1966. Dylan was deranged and dynamic, the
group wild and mercurial. Their set, the second half of a show which opened
with Dylan playing acoustically to a reverentially silent house, was
provocative and perplexing for many. It was certainly the loudest thing anyone
had ever heard, and, almost inevitably, the electric set was greeted with
mayhem and dismay. Drummer Levon Helm was so disheartened by the ferocity of
the booing that he quit before the turn of the year—drummers Sandy Konikoff and
Mickey Jones completed the tour. Offstage, Dylan was spinning out of control,
not sleeping, not eating, apparently heading rapidly for rock ‘n’ roll
oblivion. Pennebaker again filmed the tour, this time in Dylan's employ. The 'official'
record of the tour was the rarely seen Eat The Document, a film originally
commissioned by ABC-TV. The unofficial version compiled by Pennebaker himself
was You Know Something Is Happening. 'What was happening,' says Pennebaker,
'was drugs…'
Dylan was physically exhausted
when he got back to America in June 1966. But he had to complete the film. And
he had to finish Tarantula, the book that was overdue for Macmillan. And he
owed Columbia two more albums before his contract expired. And he was booked to
play a series of concerts right up to the end of the year in bigger and bigger
venues, including Shea Stadium. Then, on 29 July 1966, Dylan was injured in a
motorcycle accident near his home in Bearsville, near Woodstock, upper New York
State.
Was there really a motorcycle
accident? Dylan still claims there was. He hurt his neck. He had treatment.
More importantly, the accident allowed him to shrug off the responsibilities
that had been lined up on his behalf by manager Albert Grossman. By now, the
relationship between Dylan and Grossman was to be less than cordial and
litigation between the two of them would be ongoing until Grossman's death
almost 20 years later. Dylan was nursed through his convalescence by his wife,
Sara—they had been married privately in November 1965—and visited only rarely.
Rumours spread that Dylan would never perform again. Journalists began to prowl
around the estate, looking for some answers but finding no one to ask.
After several months of doing
little, feeding cats, bringing up young children, cutting off his hair, eating
a bit, Dylan was joined in the Bearsville area by the Hawks, who rented a house
called Big Pink in West Saugerties. Every day they would get together and play
music. It was the final therapy that Dylan needed. A huge amount of material
was recorded in the basement of Big Pink—old folk songs, old pop songs, old
country songs—and, eventually, from these sessions came a clutch of new
compositions, which came to be known generically as the BASEMENT TAPES. Some of
the songs were surreally comic—Please, Mrs. Henry, Quinn The Eskimo, Million
Dollar Bash; others were soul-searchingly introspective musings on fame, guilt,
responsibility and redemption—Tears Of Rage, Too Much Of Nothing, I Shall Be
Released. Distributed by Dylan's music publisher on what was to become a widely
bootlegged tape, many of these songs were covered by, and became hits for,
other artists and groups. Dylan's own recordings of some of the songs would not
be issued until 1975.
In January 1968, Dylan appeared
with the Hawks, at this time renamed the Crackers, at the Woody Guthrie
Memorial Concert at Carnegie Hall in New York. The following month JOHN WESLEY
HARDING was released, a stark, heavily moralistic collection of deceptively
simple songs such as All Along The Watchtower, The Ballad Of Frankie Lee &
Judas Priest, Dear Landlord and Drifter's Escape, many of which can be heard as
allegorical reflections on the events of the previous couple of years. The
record's final song, however, I'll Be Your Baby Tonight, was unambivalently
simple and presaged the warmer love songs of the frustratingly brief NASHVILLE
SKYLINE, released in April 1969. After the chilly monochrome of JOHN WESLEY
HARDING, here was Dylan in full colour, smiling, apparently at ease at last,
and singing in a deep, rich voice which, oddly, some of his oldest
acquaintances maintained was how Bobby used to sound back in Minnesota when he
was first learning how to sing. Lay Lady Lay, Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With
You, a duet with Johnny Cash on Girl From The North Country—it was all easy on
the ear, lyrically unsophisticated and, for some, far too twee. Nevertheless,
NASHVILLE SKYLINE was an extraordinarily influential record. It brought a new
hipness to the hopelessly out-of-fashion Nashville (where, incidentally and
incongruously, BLONDE ON BLONDE had also been recorded) and it heralded a new
genre of music—country rock—and a new movement that coincided with, or perhaps
which helped spawn, the Woodstock Festival of the same summer. A return to
simplicity and to a love that was in truth only a distant relation of that
psychedelically celebrated by the hippies in San Francisco a couple of years
earlier, to whom Dylan paid no heed whatsoever. There are, therefore, no
photographs of Bob Dylan in kaftan, beads and flowers or paisley bell-bottoms.
Actually, Dylan chose to avoid
the Woodstock Festival (though the Band—the newly re-christened Crackers, who
by now had two of their own albums, MUSIC FROM BIG PINK and THE BAND, to their
credit—did play there), but he did play at the Isle Of Wight Festival on 31
August 1969. In a baggy Hank Williams-style white suit, it was a completely
different Bob Dylan from the fright-haired, rabbit-suited marionette who had
howled and screamed in the teeth of audience hostility at the Albert Hall more
than three years earlier. This newly humble Dylan cooed and crooned an
ever-so-polite, if ever-so-unexciting, set of songs and in doing so left the
audience just as bewildered as those who had booed back in 1966.
But that bewilderment was as
nothing, compared with the puzzlement which greeted the release, in June 1970,
of SELF PORTRAIT. This new record most closely resembled the Dylan album which
preceded it—the bootleg collection GREAT WHITE WONDER. Both were double albums;
both offered mish-mash mix-ups of undistinguished live tracks, alternate takes,
odd cover versions, botched beginnings and endings. Some even heard SELF
PORTRAIT'S opening track, All The Tired Horses, as a caustic comment on the
bootleggers' exploitation of ages-old material—was Dylan complaining 'How'm I
supposed to get any ridin' done?' or 'writin' done?'. There was hardly any new
stuff on SELF PORTRAIT, but what was there was Blue Moon. The critics howled.
Old fans were (yes, once again) dismayed. Rolling Stone was vicious: 'What is
this shit?' the review by Greil Marcus began.
'We've Got Dylan Back Again,'
wrote Ralph Gleason in the same magazine just four months later, heralding the
hastily released NEW MORNING as a 'return to form'. There was Al Kooper; there
was the Dylan drawl; there were some slightly surreal lyrics; there were a
bunch of new songs. But these were restless times for Dylan. He had left
Woodstock and returned to New York, to the heart of Greenwich Village, having
bought a townhouse on MacDougal Street. It was, he realised later, a big
mistake, especially when A.J. Weberman, the world's first Dylanologist, turned
up on his doorstep to rifle through his garbage in search of clues to unlocking
the secret code of his poetry and (unintentionally) scaring his kids. Weberman
saw it as his duty to shake Dylan out of his mid-life lethargy and reanimate
him into embracing political and moral causes. Remarkably, with some success.
On 1 August 1971, Dylan turned up at the Concert For Bangladesh benefit, his
only live performance between 1970 and 1974, and in November of the same year,
he released George Jackson, a stridently powerful protest song, as a single.
Little else was to happen for some time. Dylan popped up so often as a guest on
other people's albums that it ceased to be anything to boast about. He began to
explore his Jewishness and was famously pictured at the Wailing Wall in
Jerusalem. In 1973 he played, with some aplomb, the enigmatic Alias in Sam
Peckinpah's brilliant Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, for which film he also
supplied the soundtrack music, including the hit single Knocking On Heaven's
Door.
Also in 1973, in a move which
confounded industry-watchers, Dylan left CBS Records, having been persuaded by
David Geffen of the advantages of signing to his Asylum Records label. The
disadvantage, some might say, was the cruelly spurned Columbia's misguided
desire to exact a kind of revenge. They put out Dylan, an album of outtakes and
warm-ups, presumably intending to either embarrass Dylan beyond endurance or to
steal some of the thunder from his first Asylum album, PLANET WAVES, newly
recorded with the Band. In terms of the records' merits there was no contest,
although a few of the Dylan tracks were actually quite interesting, and the
only embarrassment suffered was by Columbia, who were widely condemned for
their petty-minded peevishness.
A USA tour followed. Tickets
were sold by post and attracted six million applications. Everybody who went to
the shows agreed that Dylan and the Band were fantastic. The recorded evidence,
BEFORE THE FLOOD, also released by Asylum, certainly oozes energy, but lacks
subtlety. Dylan's trying too hard, pushing everything too fast. It is good, but
not that good.
What is that good, unarguably,
incontestably, is BLOOD ON THE TRACKS. Originally recorded (for CBS, no hard
feelings etc.) in late 1974, Dylan substituted some of the songs with versions
reworked up in Minnesota over the Christmas holidays. They were his finest
compositions since the BLONDE ON BLONDE material. Tangled Up In Blue, Idiot
Wind, If You See Her Say Hello, Shelter From The Storm, Simple Twist Of Fate,
You're A Big Girl Now …one masterpiece followed another. It was not so much a
divorce album as a separation album (Dylan's divorce from Sara wasn't completed
until 1977), but it was certainly a diary of despair. 'Pain sure brings out the
best in people, doesn't it?' Dylan sang in 1966's She's Your Lover Now; BLOOD
ON THE TRACKS gave the lie to all those who had argued that Dylan was a spent
force.
If Dylan the writer was reborn
with BLOOD ON THE TRACKS, Dylan the performer re-emerged on the Rolling Thunder
Revue. A travelling medicine show, moving from small town to small town,
playing just about unannounced, the line-up extensive and variable, but
basically consisting of Dylan, Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Ramblin' Jack Elliott,
Allen Ginsberg, Mick Ronson, Bobby Neuwirth and Ronee Blakley, the Revue was
conceived in the Village in the summer of 1975 and hit the road in New England,
in Plymouth, Massachusetts, on 31 October. It was a long wished-for dream, and
Dylan, face painted white, hat festooned with flowers, was inspired, delirious,
imbued with a new vitality and singing like a demon. Some of those great
performances are preserved in the four-hour movie Renaldo And Clara, the
self-examination through charade and music that Dylan edited through 1977 and
defended staunchly and passionately on its release to the almost inevitable
uncomprehending or downright hostile barrage of criticism which greeted it. The
Revue reconvened for a 1976 tour of the south, musical glimpses of its
excitement being issued on the live album HARD RAIN. A focal point of the Revue
had been the case of wrongly imprisoned boxer Hurricane Carter, to whose cause
Dylan had been recruited after having read his book, The Sixteenth Round.
Dylan's song Hurricane was included just about every night in the 1975 Revue,
and also on the follow-up album to BLOOD ON THE TRACKS, DESIRE, which also
offered several songs co-written with Jacques Levy. DESIRE was an
understandably popular record; Isis, Black Diamond Bay, Romance In Durango some
of Dylan's strongest narrative ballads.
This was further borne out by
the songs on STREET LEGAL, the 1978 album that was released in the middle of a
year-long stint with the biggest touring band that Dylan would ever play with.
Some critics dubbed it the alimony tour, but considerably more funds could have
been generated if Dylan had gone out with a four-piece. Many of the old songs
were imaginatively reworked in dramatic new arrangements. AT BUDOKAN, released
in 1979, documents the tour at its outset; the Earl's Court and Blackbushe
concerts caught it memorably mid-stream; while an exhausting trip around the
USA in the latter part of the year seemed to bring equal amounts of acclaim and
disapproval. 'Dylan's gone Vegas,' some reviewers moaned. True, he wore
trousers with lightening flashes while behind him flutes and bongos competed
for attention with synthesizers and keyboards, but some of the performances
were quite wonderful and the new songs, Señor (Tales Of Yankee Power), Changing
Of The Guard, Where Are You Tonight? (Journey Through Dark Heat), True Love
Tends To Forget, sounded terrific. Who would have thought that…
In 1979, Dylan became a born-again
Christian, released an album of fervently evangelical songs, SLOW TRAIN COMING,
recorded in Muscle Shoals, Alabama with Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett and
featuring Mark Knopfler and Pick Withers from Dire Straits, and in November and
December played a series of powerful concerts featuring nothing but his new
Christian material. Cries of disbelief? Howls of protest? Well, of course. But
the record was crisp and contemporary-sounding, the songs strong, the
performances admirable (Dylan was to win a Grammy for best rock vocal
performance, Gotta Serve Somebody), and the concerts, which continued in 1980,
among the most powerful and spine-tingling as any in his entire career. The
second Christian album, SAVED, was less impressive, however, and the fervour of
the earlier months was more muted by the end of the year. Gradually, old songs
began to be reworked into the live set and by the time of 1981's SHOT OF LOVE,
it was no longer clear whether or not—or to what extent—Dylan's faith remained
firm. The sarcastic Property Of Jesus and the thumping Dead Man, Dead Man
suggested that not much had changed, but the retrospective In The Summertime
and the prevaricating Every Grain Of Sand hinted otherwise.
After three turbulent years, it
was hardly surprising that Dylan dropped from sight for most of 1982, but the
following year he was back in the studio, again with Mark Knopfler, having, it
was to be subsequently established, written a prolific amount of new material.
The album that resulted, INFIDELS, released in October 1983, was given a mixed
reception. Some songs were strong—I&I, Jokerman among them—others
relatively unimpressive. Dylan entered the video age by making promos for
Sweetheart Like You and Jokerman, but did not seem too excited about it.
Rumours persisted about his having abandoned Christianity and re-embraced the
Jewish faith. His name began to be linked with the ultra-orthodox Lubavitcher
sect, the inner sleeve of INFIDELS pictured him touching the soil of a hill
above Jerusalem, while Neighbourhood Bully was a fairly transparent defence of
Israel's policies towards its neighbours. Dylan, as ever, refused to confirm or
deny his state of spiritual health.
In 1984, he appeared live on
the David Letterman television show, giving one of his most extraordinary and
thrilling performances backed by a ragged and raw Los Angeles trio, the
Cruzados. However, when, a few weeks later, he played his first concert tour
for three years, visiting Europe on a package with Santana put together by
impresario Bill Graham, Dylan's band was disappointingly longer in the tooth
(with Mick Taylor on guitar and Ian McLagan on organ). An unimpressive souvenir
album, REAL LIVE, released in December, was most notable for its inclusion of a
substantially rewritten version of Tangled Up In Blue.
1985 opened with Dylan
contributing to the We Are The World USA For Africa single, and in summer,
after the release of EMPIRE BURLESQUE, a patchy record somewhat over-produced
by remix specialist Arthur Baker but boasting the beautiful acoustic closer
Dark Eyes, he was the top-of-the-bill act at Live Aid. Initially, Dylan had
been supposed to play with a band, but then was asked to perform solo, to aid
the logistics of the grande finale. In the event, he recruited Rolling Stones
Ron Wood and Keith Richards to help him out. The results were disastrous.
Hopelessly under-rehearsed and hampered both by the lack of monitors and the
racket of the stage being set up behind the curtain in front of which they were
performing, the trio were a shambles. Dylan, it was muttered later, must have
been the only artist to appear in front of a billion television viewers
worldwide and end up with fewer fans than he had when he started. Matters were
redeemed a little, however, at the Farm Aid concert in September, an event set
up as a result of Dylan's somewhat gauche onstage 'charity begins at home'
appeal at Live Aid. Backed by Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers, it was
immediately apparent that Dylan had found his most sympathetic and adaptable
backing band since the Hawks. The year ended positively, too, with the release
of the five album (3 CD) retrospective, BIOGRAPH.
The collaboration with Tom
Petty having gone so well, it was decided that the partnership should continue
and a tour was announced to begin in New Zealand, Australia and Japan with more
shows to follow in the USA. It was the summer's hottest ticket and the
Petty/Dylan partnership would thrive for a further year, with a European tour,
the first shows of which saw Dylan appearing in Israel for the very first time.
Unfortunately, the opening show in Tel Aviv was not well received either by the
audience or by the press, whose reviews were vitriolic. The second show in
Jerusalem was altogether more enjoyable, until the explosion of the PA system
brought the concert to an abrupt end.
In between the two tours, Dylan
appeared in his second feature film, the Richard Marquand-directed Hearts Of
Fire, made in England and Canada and co-starring Rupert Everett and Fiona
Flanagan. Dylan played Billy Parker, a washed-up one-time mega-star who in all
but one respect (the washed-up bit) bore an uncanny resemblance to Bob Dylan.
Despite Dylan's best efforts—and he was arguably the best thing in the
movie—the film was a clunker. Hoots of derision marred the premiere in October
1987 and its theatrical release was limited to one week in the UK. The poor
movie was preceded by a poor album, KNOCKED OUT LOADED, which only had the epic
song Brownsville Girl, co-written with playwright Sam Shepard, to recommend it.
Increasingly, it appeared that
Dylan's best attentions were being devoted to his concerts. The shows with Tom
Petty had been triumphant. Dylan also shared the bill with the Grateful Dead at
several stadium venues, and learned from the experience. He envied their
ability to keep on playing shows year in, year out, commanding a following
wherever and whenever they played. He liked their two drummers and also admired
the way they varied their set each night, playing different songs as and when they
felt like it. These peculiarly Deadian aspects of live performance would soon
be incorporated into Dylan's own concert philosophy.
DOWN IN THE GROOVE, an album of
mostly cover versions of old songs, was released in the same month, June 1988,
as Dylan played the first shows of what was to become known as the Never-Ending
Tour. Backed by a three-piece band led by G.E. Smith, Dylan had stripped down
his sound and his songs and was, once again, seemingly newly re-energised. His
appetite for work had never been greater, and this same year he found himself
in the unlikely company of George Harrison, Jeff Lynne, Tom Petty and Roy
Orbison as one of the Traveling Wilburys, a jokey band assembled on a whim in
the Spring. Their album, VOLUME ONE, on which Dylan's voice was as prominent as
anyone's, was, unexpectedly, a huge commercial success.
His Wilbury star in the
ascendancy, Dylan's next album turned out to be his best of the '80s. OH MERCY,
recorded informally in New Orleans and idiosyncratically produced by Daniel
Lanois, sounded fresh and good, and the songs were as strong a bunch as Dylan
had come up with in a long time. However, for reasons best known only to
himself, it transpired from bootleg tapes that Dylan had been leaving many
excellent songs off the albums he had been releasing in the '80s, most notably
the masterpiece Blind Willie McTell, which was recorded for but not included on
INFIDELS. Indeed, despite the evident quality of the songs on OH MERCY—Shooting
Star and Most Of The Time were, for once, both songs of experience, evidence of
a maturity that many fans had long been wishing for in Dylan's songwriting—it
turned out that Dylan was still holding back. The crashing, turbulent Series Of
Dreams and the powerful Dignity were products of the Daniel Lanois sessions,
but were not used on OH MERCY. Instead, both later appeared on compilation
albums.
Not without its merits (the
title track and God Knows are still live staples, while Born In Time is a
particularly emotional love song), the nursery-rhymey UNDER THE RED SKY,
released in September 1990, was for most a relative, probably inevitable,
disappointment, as was the Roy Orbison-bereft Wilburys follow-up, VOLUME III.
But the touring continued, with Dylan's performances becoming increasingly
erratic—sometimes splendid, often shambolic. It was one thing being spontaneous
and improvisatory, but it was quite another being slapdash and incompetent.
Dylan could be either, and was sometimes both. His audiences began to dwindle,
his reputation started to suffer. The three-volume collection of outtakes and
rarities, THE BOOTLEG SERIES, VOLUMES 1-3 (RARE AND UNRELEASED) 1961-1991,
redeemed him somewhat, as did the 30th Anniversary Celebration concert in
Madison Square Garden in 1992, in which some of rock music's greats and
not-so-greats paid tribute to Dylan's past achievements as a songwriter.
There was, however, precious
little present songwriting to celebrate. Both GOOD AS I BEEN TO YOU (1992) and
WORLD GONE WRONG (1993), though admirable, were collections of old folk and
blues material, performed, for the first time since 1964, solo and
acoustically. GREATEST HITS VOLUME 3 (1994) threw together a clump of old
non-hits and UNPLUGGED (1995) saw Dylan revisiting a set of predominantly '60s
songs in desultory fashion. Even the most ambitious CD-ROM so far, HIGHWAY 61
INTERACTIVE, while seemingly pointing to a Dylan-full future, wallowed
nostalgically in, and was marketed on the strength of, past glories, and though
Dylan's live performances became more coherent and controlled, his choice of
material grew less imaginative through 1994, while many shows in 1995, which
saw continued improvement in form, consisted almost entirely of songs written
some 30 years before. Time, perhaps, for doubters to begin to consign Dylan to
the pages of history. But, as time has often proved, you can never
write Bob Dylan off. He is a devil for hopping out of the hearse on the way to
the cemetery.
Julie Driscoll
Banshees Covered “This Wheels
on Firw”
b. 8 June 1947, London,
England. Driscoll was employed by producer/manager Giorgio Gomelsky as
administer of the Yardbirds’ fan club when the former suggested a singing
career. Her singles included a version of the Lovin' Spoonful's Didn't Want To
Have To Do It (1965) and an early Randy Newman composition If You Should Ever
Leave Me (1967), but this period is better recalled for Julie's membership of
Steam Packet, an R&B-styled revue which also featured Long John Baldry, Rod
Stewart and the Brian Auger Trinity. Driscoll remained with the last-named act
when the larger unit folded, and in 1968 scored a number 5 hit with Bob Dylan's
This Wheel's On Fire. Her striking appearance engendered much publicity, but a
cool, almost disinterested vocal style formed the ideal counterpoint to Auger's
jazz-based ambitions. Jools left the group following the release of STREETNOISE
in order to pursue a more radical direction. She contributed to B.B. Blunder's
WORKERS PLAYTIME, and released the excellent JULIE DRISCOLL, which featured
support from members of the Soft Machine, Nucleus and Blossom Toes as well as
pianist Keith Tippett, whom the singer later married. She has since appeared on
many of her husband's avant garde jazz creations, notably Centipede's SEPTOBER
ENERGY (1971) and the expansive FRAMES (1978) as well appearing and recording
with Brian Eley and the experimental vocal quartet, Voice.
Banshees Covered “The
Passenger”
b. James Jewel Osterburg, 21
April 1947, Ypsilanti, Michigan, USA. The emaciated ‘Godfather Of Punk’, Iggy
Pop was born just west of Detroit to an English father and raised in nearby Ann
Arbor. He first joined bands while at high school, initially as a drummer, most
notably with the Iguanas in 1964 where he picked up the nickname Iggy. The
following year he joined the Denver blues-styled Prime Movers, but a year after
that dropped out of the University Of Michigan to travel to Chicago and learn
about the blues from former Howlin' Wolf and Paul Butterfield Blues Band
drummer, Sam Lay. On returning to Detroit as Iggy Stooge, and further inspired
after seeing the Doors, he formed the Psychedelic Stooges with Ron Asheton of
the Chosen Few. Iggy was vocalist and guitarist, Asheton initially played bass,
and they later added Asheton's brother Scott on drums. Before the Chosen Few,
Ron Asheton had also been in the Prime Movers with Iggy. The Psychedelic
Stooges made their debut on Halloween night, 1967, in Ann Arbor. The same year
Iggy also made his acting debut in a long forgotten Françoise De Monierre film
that also featured Nico. Meanwhile Dave Alexander joined on bass and the word
‘Psychedelic’ was dropped from their name. Ron switched to guitar leaving Iggy
free to concentrate on singing and showmanship. The Stooges were signed to
Elektra Records in 1968 by A&R man Danny Fields (later manager of the
Ramones ). They recorded two albums (the first produced by John Cale ) for the
label which sold moderately at the time but later became regarded as classics,
featuring such quintessential Iggy numbers as No Fun and I Wanna Be Your Dog.
Steven MacKay joined on saxophone in 1970 in-between the first and second
albums as did Bill Cheatham on second guitar. Cheatham and Alexander left in
August 1970 with Zeke Zettner replacing Alexander and James Williamson
replacing Cheatham—but the Stooges broke up not long afterwards as Iggy fought
a heroin problem. Stooge fan David Bowie tried to resurrect Iggy's career and
helped him record RAW POWER in London in the summer of 1972 (as Iggy and the
Stooges, with Williamson on guitar, Scott Thurston on bass, and the Ashetons,
who were flown in when suitable British musicians could not be found). The
resultant album included the nihilistic anthem Search And Destroy. Bowie's
involvement continued (although his management company Mainman withdrew support
because of constant drug allegations) as Iggy sailed through stormy seas
(including self-admission to a mental hospital). The popular, but poor quality,
live METALLIC KO was released in France only at the time. Iggy Pop live events
had long been a legend in the music industry, and it is doubtful whether any
other artist has sustained such a high level of abject self destruction on
stage. It was his performance on British television slot 'So It Goes', for
example, that ensured the programme would never air again. After RAW POWER
there were sessions for KILL CITY, although it was not released until 1978,
credited then to Iggy Pop and James Williamson. It also featured Thurston, Hunt
and Tony Sales, Brian Glascock (ex-Toe Fat and later in the Motels ), and
others. The Stooges had folded again in 1974 with Ron Asheton forming New
Order(not the same as the UK band) and then Destroy All Monsters. Steve MacKay
later died from a drugs overdose and Dave Alexander from alcohol abuse.
Thurston also joined the Motels. Interest was stirred in Iggy with the arrival
of punk, on which his influence was self evident (Television recorded the
tribute ‘Little Johnny Jewel’), and in 1977 Bowie produced two studio
albums—THE IDIOT and LUST FOR LIFE—using Hunt and Tony Sales, with Bowie himself,
unheralded, playing keyboards. Key tracks from these two seminal albums include
Night Clubbin', The Passenger, and China Girl (co-written with and later
recorded by Bowie ). Iggy also returned one of the several favours he owed
Bowie by guesting on backing vocals for LOW. In the late '70s Iggy signed to
Arista Records and released some rather average albums with occasional
assistance from Glen Matlock (ex-Sex Pistols ) and Ivan Kral. He went into
(vinyl) exile after 1982's autobiography and the Chris Stein-produced ZOMBIE
BIRDHOUSE. During his time out of the studio he cleaned up his drug problems
and married. He started recording again in 1985 with Steve Jones (again ex-Sex
Pistols ) featuring on the next series of albums. He also developed his acting
career (even taking lessons) appearing in Sid And Nancy, The Color Of Money,
Hardware, and on television in Miami Vice. His big return came in 1986 with the
Bowie -produced BLAH BLAH BLAH and his first ever UK hit single, Real Wild
Child, a cover of Australian Johnny O'Keefe's '50s rocker. His rejuventated
BRICK BY BRICK album featured Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash, who co-wrote four
of the tracks, while his contribution to the Red Hot And Blue AIDS benefit was
an endearing duet with Debbie Harry on Well Did You Evah?. This was followed in
1991 by a duet with the B-52's Kate Pierson, who had also featured on BRICK BY
BRICK. 1993's AMERICAN CAESAR, from its jokily self-aggrandising title onwards,
revealed continued creative growth, with longer spaces between albums now
producing more worthwhile end results than was the case with his '80s career.
Throughout he has remained the consumate live performer, setting a benchmark
for at least one generation of rock musicians.
Singles Information / Singles Discography