Bob Dylan: Song to Woody

Bob Dylan's 1974 release Blood on the Tracks

Birthday greetings to Bob Zimmerman, aka Bob Dylan, who famously celebrates No. 70 today.

From here, the only question is whether Dylan’s Blood on The Tracks is the greatest album of music ever made, or second greatest. Of course, there are probably Dylan fans who wouldn’t rank it in their top five — of Dylan albums (I once had a consistent late-night visitor who wanted to hear nothing but Blood on the Tracks at 3 a.m., and insisted it was the greatest album ever made; surely a night of carousing had no influence on his judgment).

If nothing else, Blood on The tracks must surely have some of the greatest liner notes ever written. “So forget the Dylan whose image was eaten at by the mongers of the idiot wind,” wrote Pete Hamill on the album’s backside. “Don’t mistake him for Isaiah, or a magazine cover, or a leader of guitar armies. He is only a troubadour, blood brother of Villon, a son of Provence, and he has survived the plague . . . Listen: the poet sings to all of us.” 

The poet Dylan is reputed to be named for, Dylan Thomas, died at 39 in 1953 while on a poetry-reading tour in New York. Dylan has often denied it, and said he took the name from an “uncle.” “I’ve done more for Dylan Thomas than he ever did for me,” Dylan said in 1966. (Ironic that Dylan Thomas might have been the namesake for Bob Dylan, and his verse certainly was for the title of the great baseball book “Boys of Summer.”)

A link to Dylan’s Song to Woody, one of his very early songs.

Hey, hey, Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
‘Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along.
Seems sick an’ it’s hungry, it’s tired an’ it’s torn,
It looks like it’s a-dyin’ an’ it’s hardly been born.
                                                                                           Bob Dylan, 1962
 

Source: walesonline.co.uk

Around the World: Czech Republic’s Miroslav Vitous

Miroslav Vitous' 1992 album Atmos, with Jan Garbarek

If you’ve ever seen or heard a bass solo by Miroslav Vitous, born in Prague in 1947 when it was Czechoslovakia and Communist, and wondered where the energy came from, the answer is an unlikely place: the swimming pool. Vitous was an Olympic-caliber swimmer as a teen, before he toweled off and left for America in the 1960s and the Berklee School of Music.

Since then he has gone the distance — one of the founders of Weather Report, one of the feuders with the late Joe Zawinul, one of the record label ECM’s most celebrated and featured artists.

Vitous, from a 2004 interview at innerviews.org (link below): “There wasn’t much choice. I wanted to play music, so I went. Someone gave me something absolutely amazing: the discipline and strength to deal with physical situations. As a professional athlete, you have to conquer so much in training. There are so many difficulties. Even when you cannot go anymore, you have to keep going. You have to catch your second breath . . . What I learned physically from swimming I transferred to my mental state. You can imagine how tough it was to be a young 19-year-old from a Communist country in New York alone. You need a lot of mental strength to hold things together. I learned how to survive and keep going. I owe all of that to swimming.”

It was that mental strength that helped him during a less-than-amicable split from Weather Report, which lingered like a bad divorce years later. “There are some things that happened when I was departing,” Vitous said in the innerview.org interview, more than a quarter century later. “It was dirty. It was not fair. There were other things not done well besides the money . . .”

Vitous moved on — to other groups, including his own, other collaborations and other continents, moving back to his native Europe in the late 80s after two decades in North America. He’s continued to teach and compose and play and record.

Vitous from allaboutjazz.com: “I am a Slavic musician and it is deeply inside of me.”

Below is a link to the song Epilogue from Vitous’ 1969 album Mountain in the Clouds, with John McLaughlin (guitar), Herbie Hancock (piano), Joe Chambers (drums) and Joe Henderson (sax).

Sources: innerview.org, miroslavvitous.com, ejn.it/mus, allaboutjazz.com

Miroslav Vitous interview

Leo Sayer: Bedsitterland

Leo Sayer

Birthday greetings to singer/songwriter Leo Sayer, who celebrates No. 63 today.

In every music collection, there’s hidden in the corner of the room or a folder on the computer a guilty pleasure. Sayer’s mine.

I’m not sure what it is — the seemingly unending cheerfulness, goofy poses, full head of hair or feet that seem too big for his body, like a clown’s — but there’s always been something about Sayer that led me to keep his albums out of sight when company was over.

Years ago a Village Voice writer confessed that John Cougar Mellancamp was his guilty pleasure, as painful as it was to admit. I’m not sure which is worse (somewhere, there’s a Mellancamp album among mine, too, but far more of Sayer’s).

Sayer’s biggest hits — You Make Me Feel Like Dancing and When I Need You — were the biggest reasons why his albums were hidden. They were, to me, unlistenable. But his 1975 album “Another Year” was something else entirely — far more gloomy, raw, real and desperate, as if written by a different artist.

Sayer has continued to make music ever since Another Year, which has stayed in the corner of my collection ever since, hidden. Until now (except that since today is the End of the World, he’ll remain just that).

 A link to a song from the Another Year album below.

source: Leosayer.com