Amster Dammit (Never Bet the Devil Your Head)

Received an email from James Riedel, author of the recent biography of Weldon Kees (please refer 2 blogs back; you might also trawl through some of them again as my Keeper of the Website Tanya Strano occasionally updates old entries with new visuals)-- some of his friends forwarded my recent commentary on the Kees/Dylan connection to him, and he wrote me directly acknowledging my sleuthing...nice to know I am being read in academic circles ... he's going to send his new bio in exchange for some of my albums...very cool!

in Amsterdam now after an intense, sweaty concert in Brussels with lute meister Jozef Van Wissem Saturday night at the ancien Theatre Marni. We got treated royally by the distaff theatre staff (thank you Joelle and Isobel!) and artistic director Jules, who drove back to Brussels from France on the very day of our concert with a bottle of fine champagne specially for me and Jos, which he broke out at the after-party (also a box of succulent Leonidas chocolates--a confirmed chocoholic, I must say that Belgian chocolates are right up there with their Swiss counterparts). It was thunder and lightning and rain hammering down outside as Jos and I coaxed an admixture of the sacred and profane from our respective instruments (guess who was contributing what here) and the crowd attended on us, rapt and hushed, as if at the unfolding of an arcane ritual...

The night before, my last night in London for a bit, I went with mad Scotsman John Stewart to see my pal Warren Haynes and his band Gov't Mule at the Mean Fiddler, the same joint where The Magic Band held forth in June. John was an hour late meeting me at Gaby's in Leicester Square (excellent salt-beef there) due to flooding on the tube, but we managed to catch a good hour and a half of the Mule's kicking set. Warren is an excellent guitarist and singer (and songwriter--check out "World of Confusion", which we wrote together, and which appears on the Mule's "The Deep End Vol. Two" album-- these days, more relevant a song than ever) and if you're a fan of Southern rockers he is definitely one of the best, observing the eternal verities of the form while pushing the band into prog and jamband territory.

Now I am in Amsterdam on a day off visiting my friend the director Flip Nagler at his NGN studio (Flip made an early documentary on my work, "Guitar Unbound", for the Dutch Kunst Kanaal tv network, it was shown 6 times in one day upon its premiere in 1995, and it's available from my website), the studio is on a beautiful leafy sidestreet off the Singel, and it is utterly delightful outside, a shimmering "Sunny Afternoon"-ish kind of day, and I am about to take a stroll where ever ...staying tonight at the good old Winston, a real rock 'n roll hotel on Warmoestraat in the Red Lights, the Winston is where I used to give concerts in exchange for room and board, nice to see that it hasnt changed much (yes, there is still a Durex Room)...

this must be my 40th or so visit to Amsterdam, a major base of operations for me in Europa, I've been coming here since 1978 and have logged literally hundreds of concerts playing up and down the lowlands or should I say the highlands, "in the Dutch mountains"...:-); I have spent many actual months of residency in Amsterdam, undoubtedly one of the most beautiful and "thrilling cities" in the world (remember Ian Fleming's book)-- and have written some of my best known songs here as well (including "Dream of a Russian Princess", composed in a fever-dream shortly after Christmas 1991 in the atelier of my friend, the great Dutch painter Joep Ver)...

in short I adore it here, Holland was the first country in Europe to embrace my work in a big way, and everytime I pass through Amsterdam it feels like a homecoming...

xxGary

Lost Time Is Not Found Again

THE PEOPLE, YES! We've had several winners for my last contest; in fact 2 different folks emailed me within 10 minutes of posting my last blog on Sunday, with 2 different correct answers: namely, Picasso and Stravinsky. As it turns out upon further research, TS Eliot is also a correct answer, as is (apparently) Salvador Dali ...so...do you think all of these great men/grand personages were guilty stealing this line... from each other? As they were all fairly contemporaneous. Who actually was the ur-originator of this priceless bon mot...or did this apercu just suddenly appear in medias res as a meme (pronounced MEEM, look it up) from outer space that popped into the popular consciousness all by its lonesome?

Dunno, but I'm not wasting any more time on this, as the London sunshine is pouring down like honey outside the McDonald's internet station on Finchley Road where I sit and write now and the fabulous Ray Davies is singing (gloriously) "Waterloo Sunset" on the radio station piped in here and I must make haste forthwith for a stroll in the light up Haverstock Hill or I will go mad with the french fry stink that pervades this joint...

so please, please dear readers, please desist in sending me any more solutions to the last quiz (for the time being anyway, there will be more brain teasers to come) as those 2 guys referred to at the top of this had it all sewn up from the getgo (they know who they are--and will be duly rewarded with copies of my Gods and Monsters live DVD when I get back home in October)...

btw, had a wonderful recording session with Paul Humphreys and Claudia Brucken today on their new Onetwo album project...lovely people, we truly made some beautiful music together...

xxGary

Odds and Ends (the Kees to the Kingdom)

Was Bob Dylan a Weldon Kees fan? An oh-so-germane question in these days of the ongoing canonization of Bob and general voracious media scrutiny of all things Zimmerman, but probably the most relevant first question to ask here is-- who was Kees? Go ahead, google him up-- and then read Anthony Lane's excellent recent New Yorker piece on this mainly unsung proto-Beat poet, novelist, film editor, film critic (mentor to Pauline Kael) and all-around American avant-gardist and dandy perhaps best known for (most likely) flinging himself off the Golden Gate Bridge in the mid-50's. And then check the last line of Kees' poem "June 1940", published in the early 50's:

'An idiot wind is blowing; the conscience dies'

I first came across a fragment of this poem in a TLS review of a recent biography of Weldon Kees last summer, but the reviewer failed to either see or make the obvious connection ...so...I ran this by Alice Quinn, my neighbor and the poetry editor at The New Yorker who sent thanks for sharing my little discovery with her; and I also queried my friend Bob Holman (see my earlier blog on BH), founder of the Bowery Poetry Club (where I just played a gig on Friday) and charter member of the NY poetry mafia in general, who said after I hipped him to this, "Dylan MUST have read Kees!"

So anyway, I thought I'd share this tidbit with you guys, now that Dylanmania is being fostered and fomented anew by Columbia (The Rock Machine Turns You On!) for what must be oh the 40th time or so since the release of Bob's first album in '63...and thought you might like to know, that this particular someone does not got it in for old Bob...and I am not trying to plant stories in the press, well the blogosphere, either :-)... I really respect and love the guy, Dylan being my avowed alltime favorite artist alongside Miles. But ever since Dylan let at least some of his dirty laundry "all hang out" in the clothes line saga known as 'Chronicles' last year (which I read staying up all night in a Golden Tulip Hotel after a gig in the north of Holland last autumn), especially in the chapter about his voluminous reading and prodigious trawl through his friends' library in a pad he crashed south of Houston in the early 60's soaking up literature and history and philosophy, his past influenza (after The Fall) like a sponge, and how Weill and Brecht influenced Bob's poetics of song after a sit-through of "Threepenny Opera" at what is now the Lucille Lortel Theater on Christopher Street (just around the corner from where I write this)...after this, and all the other media spew paving the way for Dylan's putative lock on the Nobel Peace Prize this year (a slam-dunk so sayeth Ed Bradley, in his interview with Bob on CBS last fall--Bradley asks Bob how he would account for his 40-some year seemingly steady rise and fo'wad march on the Kingdom, and Bob, without batting an eye, fixes Ed with his almost truculent, po-faced stare--not a happy camper here--and says in essence, "Because of the deal I made at the beginning...I held up my end of the bargain." And who, says Bradley, was that deal struck with?

"Why, with the Chief Commander who runs this World..."

Oooeeeooo, as Ed (now "Edward") Sanders used to say....

...after such mishegas, I thought I'd throw in my own tout sense of all things Dylanological--especially as Christopher Ricks seems to have missed this particular concordance to things Kees-ian. Also Michael Gray (his book "Song and Dance Man" is actually pretty obsessively amazing overall, he really pulls some academic rabbits out of various hats while tracing crazy patterns on Bob's sheets--"Clothes Line Saga" again!...and please also note here a connection to that particular Basement Tape song and "Arnold Layne"'s lyrical content, wonder if Pink Floyd's first producer Joe Boyd slipped Bob a copy of that early Floyd single, it was Joe's steady hand on the mixing desk at the '65 Newport Folk Festival during Bob's second rock bar mitzvah (his Elston Gunn high school assembly appearance being Dylan's first) that helped usher in the great Folk-Rock epoch... actually Michael Gray, Paul Williams and Clinton Heylin are my fave explicators de Dylan....Love and Theft, indeed (in other words I still find this stuff entertaining/amusing). (A copy of my Gods and Monsters live DVD sent to the first reader who writes in identifying the celebrated-- painter? composer?--who first remarked that "mediocre artists borrow...great artists steal").

Speaking of mad hatters (note Dylan's first use of top hat in rock pre-dating Beefheart, in a photo on the back of 'Bringing It All Back Home"--also Dylan's first use of "uh" for "a" as a printed lyric sheet trope), here is Van Vliet on Dylan: "Trash poet! What is 'the times they are a changing', but 'a partridge in a pear tree!'" Also: "I threw Bob Dylan out of Barney's Beanery in 1966!"

I asked Bobby Neuwirth at the Winnipeg Folk Festival in 1989 whether he could lend any credence to this particular assertion, he just shrugged and answered smiling, "Well, if it makes him feel any better..."

I'm off to London (again) tomorrow to start a new tour, in Belgium, Holland, Germany, France and the UK...just getting over the jetlag from my last trip, and here we go again...

xxGary

ps anybody else notice how scarily close (in tonality, overall feel, and dark drone 'o-D) the take #1 version of "Desolation Row" that graces the new Sony "No Direction Home" album is to the Velvet Underground's "Heroin"? Did Tom Wilson play a pre-release acetate of this version to Lou and the boys (and grrl) in revenge for being replaced by Bob Johnston?

Also, whose good taste was timeless enough on those final "Highway 61" sessions to insist on inserting Charlie McCoy's lilting Spanish guitar throughout the track, which lifts "Desolation Row" to Parnassian heights on the official released version?

Is it rolling, Bob?