My Secret Blues Life

I was born on an Air Force base in Texas in 1943, my father a young Captain from Illinois. But my mother came from a Southcentral Georgia farm family named Spivey, and all through the later Forties and early Fifties we routinely paid visits to the Spivey tobacco farm (in Mystic, a 300-person village outside Ocilla and somewhat farther from Fitzgerald).

My playmates were young black children mostly, and one summer visit I even worked in the tobacco barn, the only white boy there. Race wasn't an issue I knew anything about, but visiting local sharecropper farms with my Uncle Henry (who was an area Farm Administration bureaucrat of some sort), and listening to the older white guys talk, I later realized I was seeing and hearing white paternalism, and mild racism, in action. If I was hearing any Black Music then, it's missing from my memories.

The Spivey family had in earlier days moved from further north in the state, where Spivey forebears had been plantation folk owning over a hundred slaves (or so I was told); and years later I wondered if somehow I was slavery-connected to the Classic Blues singer Victoria Spivey, but I've never done any research to answer the question.

Meanwhile, as an AF family, we kept on the move--Oklahoma, Texas again, then a few years in New York and Virginia. I remember riding the New York Central railroad a couple of times in those years, treated with kindly attention by black porters, one of whom I swear looked like Son House as he appeared when rediscovered later--he'd been a porter working out of Rochester for many years by then. In Virginia, my Southern belle mom experienced some years of migraine headaches that laid her low and left us kids routinely in the care of a big black woman named Rhoda, our part-time maid who soon became much more.

Then we moved to Montgomery, Alabama; the year was 1955-56... which means I soon saw firsthand the results of the Bus Boycott and the rise of Martin Luther King, Jr. I remember my parents actually giving rides to the black people walking along the roads; and for years afterwards I imagined they were displaying their liberal attitude, but I suppose it's more likely they were just helping maids and gardeners and other domestic workers get to their day jobs.

Seventh grade in Montgomery was a shock to me, chubby and awkward and socially inept--and astonished by all the blatant racial remarks I'd hear every day from poor-white and upper-crust adolescents both. Boys planning to pile into a car and go "nig'-knocking." Slurs against black women. Special vituperation reserved for King and the others "interfering in our local business."

But the regional radio was amazing! Elvis and the Memphis Sun guys got air play, and more importantly so did Fats Domino, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and all those numerically named black rhythm groups. I was getting my first taste of versions of Blues music as well as seeing harsh aspects of black life and black/white relations. (I started buying records seriously then, adding to the Harry Belafonte 45 set I'd bought back in Virginia.)

Then we were shipped overseas for two years, to Izmir (old Smyrna), Turkey, where I unknowingly heard--drifting from doorways and open windows--the outcast Aegean Greek equivalent of the Blues, that haunting Piraeus-to-Smyrna music known as rembetika. Meanwhile, the local PX did bring in a few 45s and albums by Domino and the Burnette Trio and then Bo Diddley and Johnny and Joe, not to mention Jerry Lee Lewis and Buddy Holly. Yet by the time we got back to the States, the first rush of rock 'n' roll was already over, and the softer pop guys had started their ascension, along with the Kingston Trio and other folk.

It was the latter that interested me most, even though I soon began hearing too the music coming out of Detroit and Chicago, meaning Motown and a bit of Southside Blues. The nearby AF base teen club played popular r&b discs, and I danced with young black women at some teen functions--had a minor crush on one, as I kept denying the racial reality of America. (I don't know what happened to Gwen later, but her younger brother went on to a solid career as Jazz pianist and Music Dept. college prof.)

I went off to Chicago for college in 1960, but still wasn't hip or brave enough to go investigating the area Blues clubs in their heyday. I did catch a concert by Ray Charles and his amazing revue (sing it, Margie!) in a strange warehouse-like venue, but the one album that galvanized me most was this weird-sounding debut LP by a kid named Bob Dylan. I loved "Song to Woody" and enjoyed some other numbers, but was most intrigued by Dylan's covers of songs by Blind Lemon Jefferson (who?) and Bukka White. I immediately wanted to know more about the original performances and singers. (Dylan's music, of course, ranged far and wide during the ensuing decades, yet he never forgot the Blues; his Blind Willie McTell song is one of the great works of 20th Century music of any kind.)

About then, Columbia issued its first albums resurrecting the Blues of Robert Johnson and Leroy Carr... and I was a goner. Suddenly it was all Blues all of the time. Back in Seattle for the second half of college, I went regularly to thrift and junk stores and obscure Central Area disc shops in search of 78s and 45s (eventually sold the small collection I amassed to Bob the Bear Hite, lead singer for Canned Heat). And I started buying every Blues album I could find, especially the mesmerizing reissues of then-still-obscure older Bluesmen, on OJL, RBF, and then Arhoolie Records (thank God for Chris Strachwitz!), followed by Belzona (soon renamed Yazoo). I was in heaven for a while; it was actually possible in those days to keep up with all the Blues LPs being issued.

One of my favorite early buys, though, was a Vanguard set, Blues at Newport 1963, with Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Mississippi John Hurt, and others, including a young white guy named John Hammond (son of the famous a&r man and artist discoverer with the same name). Hearing young John's amazing reworkings of Robert Johnson and Chuck Berry--some said slavish copying, but I disagreed--cheered on by the great black elders on stage, convinced me that a white boy could play and sing the Blues. (And he was soon followed on record by Koerner, Ray and Glover, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Rolling Stones, and other creditable white players.)

This revelation encouraged me to dig even deeper into what I could learn about the Blues. So I subscribed to England's wonderful collector mag Blues Unlimited, kept an eager eye out for Blues articles in DownBeat, scoured bookstores for histories by Paul Oliver and Samuel Charters and eventually others, and also attended what in retrospect were unique, and luckily captured on videotape: the mid-Sixties performances by John Hurt, Son House, Bukka White, Furry Lewis, Lightnin' Hopkins, and maybe Skip James too (I missed that one), brought out to Seattle by the Folklore Society.

I also started writing rock criticism, both locally and for newly minted Rolling Stone and then other rival publications. Among my proudest moments at Stone were key reviews of Clifton Chenier, the Memphis Swamp Jam set celebrating some of the rediscovered elders, and a major Chess Records reissue program. I also covered some interesting events for the magazine that brought me into direct contact with Bo Diddley, Albert Collins, John Mayall, Ike and Tina Turner, John Hammond, and one or two other Blues performers. An amazing couple of hours was me as "fly on the wall," backstage at a festival listening to Bo, Collins, Ike, and some of their band guys shoot the shit, talkin' smack and doin' the dozens on each other!

At the same time I had decided by 1967 that I was going to write a screenplay about Robert Johnson (somebody should, was my thinking); and I spent a couple of years researching, writing, re-writing, and finally copyrighting my fictionalization of his then-obscure life, which I titled Hellhound on My Trail. By 1970 it was beginning to circulate in Hollywood and elsewhere. A couple of agents took it on briefly, and then some fledgling producers tried their hand, but urban Blaxploitation pictures were what the studios wanted, and my script was definitely a mix of the film Sounder and some genre not yet filmed, call it maybe (excuse the pun) Blues noir.

On my own I tried to get copies to Eric Clapton and the Stones (via Jerry Wexler as I recall), but I never heard anything back. I did succeed in reaching Taj Mahal's management but not Taj himself; he told me much later that he'd never seen it. And I mailed a copy to actor-director Ossie Davis, who sent back a nice note saying he liked it and would agree to direct the picture if I could get a production going. Nothing along those lines materialized, but I did see the last portion of Hellhound published in Boston magazine Fusion.

In the late Sixties I was also writing educational films, a couple of them with race-conscious content and titles like Black Thumb and The 220 Blues; and I wrote lengthy treatments for proposed films called Betty and Dupree (more Blues) and The Arletha Jones Show (meant to be a television comedy series featuring a black pop star). But by the mid-Seventies I'd mostly become a writer-producer in marketing and advertising, and the inventive radio/TV work we did for Rainier Beer allowed me to write affectionate and successful pastiches of Blues and r&b numbers and also actually record an ale commercial with Bo Diddley. But my Hellhound screenplay languished on the shelves of Hollywood studios or wherever, and I basically forgot about it.

Over the next two decades, though, every five years or so some producer would discover a copy, call me up to praise it and ask my permission to try to get something going, and I always just said, "Okay, fine." Obviously, no movie got made. But I never stopped loving that down-child, uplifting music and I kept buying hundreds of Blues and r&b albums, new and old, and seeing the odd concert or club date by B.B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, the Meters, Taj Mahal, Gatemouth Brown, the Neville Brothers, and whoever else came to Seattle.

Around 1986 I remember telephoning Columbia Records' John Hammond (famous father, this time) in New York to ask what had become of the long-promised box set offering the complete Robert Johnson on record; he said there were hurdles and delays caused by conflicting financial and copyright interests, but it would appear some year soon... and when it did emerge at last, in 1990, the set went on to become a hugely successful bestseller, making Johnson a modern music hero all over again. I kept hoping for action on Hellhound too, but still nothing happened. So more years passed...

... And they just keep accelerating. I love that rich music as much as ever, even if Chicago-derived Blues by white artists has become something of a cliche. I play scores of Blues and related records and CDs weekly if not daily. And from the early Seventies on I added the Caribbean version, reggae, to that on-going, soundtrack-for-life mix. In fact I program Blues and reggae at home so much, one daughter recently commented that I must have been born a black person in some previous incarnation.

Could be, I suppose... or maybe it's just the South Georgia Spivey blood--luckily, in my case, resulting in an admiration for African-American music and culture (meaning artists Jacob Lawrence and Romare Bearden, writer Ralph Ellison and those of the Harlem Renaissance, and a host of other black figures) rather than a Southern white racist antipathy.

I'm nearing 66 now, and that screenplay has been a well-kept secret for almost 40 years. Time to let it be known. That's why I've posted it now at http://robertjohnsonhellhound.blogspot.com (use the connecting button down at the bottom of this page), in its warts-and-all entirety, for anyone curious to read.

My secret's out.

Rock Redeemed (Part 2)

I regret never having attended performances by many of America's heavy-hitters... Magic Sam, Howling Wolf, and Sonny Boy Williamson (the later, touchy one); Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk, and John Coltrane do all come to mind.

But for rock at any time between the mid-Sixties and the Nineties, I tried to see every act that mattered--the Beatles on their 1966 tour, moptop-cute but impossible to hear above the din of fans; the Stones many times over the years, never so right as during their Banquet-to-Exile period; Dylan with and without the Band, and later on too--but ignoring his team-ups with Tom Petty or the Grateful Dead, both groups always better on their own whether rockin' out or noodling cosmically. (Wish I'd been somewhere when Dylan sang "Blind Willie McTell," if he ever did it live. Certainly one of his greatest songs, too little known because held back for so long. But I do have an unlikely bootleg from Japan where Bob actually sang a few other major numbers with a symphony orchestra!)

I saw Hendrix and the Who at Monterey Pop, and the Who later for Tommy and then also after Keith Moon's death. Missed the Byrds but got to the Flying Burrito Brothers three times and the Doors twice; Crosby Stills and Nash with and without Young, who wowed me more both in Buffalo Springfield and then on his own tours (Rust Never Sleeps, yes!); Winged and band-running Paul McCartney in his cheery heyday; the Beach Boys with Glenn Campbell in place of Brian Wilson, but the harmonies still intact; Sonny and Cher when she was 18 and astonishingly gorgeous and he was in a tux, trying to Go On from The Beat.

I followed the changes for both Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood, the latter soul-voiced kid graduating from "Stevie" in the Spencer Davis Group (yes, they played Seattle) through "Steve" in the hallowed days of jazz-tinged Traffic, to some other, more adult but kinda boring Winwood years later on his own. He also figured briefly in the shortlived Blind Faith with Clapton and Ginger Baker, both of whom I'd already gawked at in Cream. And guitar-god Eric just kept on cruising after that, first with Delaney and Bonnie and then scoring brilliantly as Derek and the Dominoes, and forever after in various solo ventures. (Backing up for a moment, I once had an interview scheduled with Delaney and Bonnie which was suddenly canceled, because Duane Allman had just been killed and Delaney was jetting back South. Loved that Southern soul duo for as long as they lasted together, and their cohorts like Leon Russell, whom I watched in amazement as he plunked funky piano while conducting the massive backing for Joe Cocker on that infamous Mad Dogs and Englishmen tour.)

Running somewhat parallel to Winwood and Clapton, I regularly checked out both Van Morrison's latest incarnation and Jimmy Page's Led Zeppelin (well, Zep twice only)--that long-gone quartet about to reunite just this month for a huge one-off fundraiser in Los Angeles (which only the celebrity charity price keeps me from travelling to see), and Robert Plant having just released his surprising and splendid duet album with perfect vocalist Allison Krause. But Van the Man was really more my style, and I love almost every one of his albums, though I gave up on him live after a couple of near no-show performances, once when he had a cold and the other time when he just didn't feel like singing!

Another major vocalist and band back then was the no-longer-Small Faces with Rod Stewart and pre-Stones Ron Wood. The group came to Seattle riding the crest of their wave and put on a high-spirited show that I remember as less raggedy than the critics always accused them of being. Rod the Mod was in fine gravel voice on song after song, and he did his other specialties, fencing with the mic stand and kicking soccer balls into the crowd. I had an interview scheduled backstage that night, not with the Faces but with opening act Family. But en route I did get to shake hands with cheerfully friendly Ron Woods and then sort of wave at totally exhausted Rod, slumped in a chair looking almost exactly like the cover of one of his great early albums! He just grunted at me.

The bigger names kept touring, but their ticket prices kept rising too, so from the mid-Seventies on I focussed more on new or lesser-known acts--for example, early cheap-price tours by snarling Elvis Costello and the rhythmic Police, before either had exploded into their well-deserved global fame; and around then too, Los Lobos ahead of their Will-the-Wolf-Survive break-out, at a student-sponsored concert on the U.W campus. Needless to say, they rocked the house. I danced more that night than I had for years, and I still try to see the band almost every time they hit Seattle, even though I don't dance as much these days! (Coincidentally, Los Lobos' producer/saxman Steve Berlin lived up here on Vashon Island for several years; and big David Hidalgo came into my bookstore one time, bought some small item I've forgotten, maybe a Billie Holiday bio, and had me special-order a poetry book for him. And did I get his autograph on a pair of albums? Oh yes.)

I would also particularly like to thank the music gods for the Clash (and the Punk Explosion in general), waking up the turgid, torpid music industry around 1977-78 and some after. I caught the Clash during their suddenly-triumphant London Calling tour, and the show was a barnburner, rousing us punters to the rafters, but also providing an enlightening Reggae experience courtesy of a black deejay playing hot cuts between the acts.

Speaking of reggae, two life-affirming concerts I was fortunate to get to were Toots and the Maytals in all their soulful, high-stepping glory, and this one: the pairing of Jimmy Cliff and headliners Bob Marley and the (non-Tacoma) Wailers. Cliff came on a half hour late or so, which was standard practice back then, and did a fine opening set ranging from slow to fast, misses to massive hits. And then we waited... and waited... and waited...

Finally, about midnight, out danced spliffed-up Marley and his I-Threes and the Barrett Brothers-led band; and Bob and friends proceeded to put on an eye-opening, body-shaking, soul-enhancing object lesson in making music and working the crowd. In minutes he had the whole two-tiered sitdown-theater crowd up and dancing in the aisles, beside and atop their seats, all of us trying to keep up as Bob tossed his dreadlocks and his body every whichaway, still playing rhythm guitar and singing his Redemption songs. More than just a night to remember, those two Wailer hours marked a never-to-be-equaled moment in spirit and time...

((Next time, a few other such moments, Merle to Bruce to Mac--no, not Fleetwood--and a possibly hopeless attempt to sum things up.))

I Witnessed Music (Part 1)

Over a 50-year stretch of time, I've managed to see a goodly number of historically important musicians. Writing about a few of them may be of interest...

As I noted in an early blog chapter, I was living in Montgomery during the Bus Boycott and the rise of Elvis, whose original rockabilly music and later more pop-oriented records I still love today. But sadly, stupidly, I never managed to catch him live until his sorry, unhealthy later days. Still, by the mid-Fifties I was buying Long Play albums rather than 45s (Fats Domino's great Rockin' n' Rollin', The Johnny Burnett Trio's amazing lone release, the first Little Richard and Bo Diddley LPs, and Elvis's first two are a sample), but living overseas from 1956 to 1958 kept me away from the classic concerts and tours that were crisscrossing much of the U.S. in the first great explosion of rock 'n roll.

By the time I returned to the States, music was already moving on into its Folkie period, with the Kingston Trio, Harry Belafonte, and others (I did catch Harry live then but I don't remember anything besides his fine voice and polished stage show). The most satisfying of my first live events instead was a pair of high school dances, one with Tacoma's original Wailers of "Tall Cool One" fame playing--two Wailers were students at the same school I was attending--and the other a Prom night with the astonishing, brass-blaring Stan Kenton Orchestra alternating between (to my uneducated ears) dissonant Jazz and simpler music for dancing. Also, while in San Francisco, briefly checking out the Beat Scene (I was 16), I did venture into the Hungry i for an evening of Lenny Bruce, back when he was still uproariously funny rather than stridently political, plus Barbara Dane and Glenn Yarbrough (pre-Limeliters).

Came Fall 1960 and I was off to college in the Chicago area, where I soon heard Bob Dylan on the radio, but didn't actually see him live until a serendipitous few minutes at a Joan Baez concert a couple of years later, when the pure-voiced singer brought him out from the wings for a few duets. He was cool and Chaplin-charming in his cap and black leather gear that night, vindicating (so I arrogantly thought) my early interest in his records.

I still hadn't learned enough to know Chicago as the center of urban, electrified Blues, so the only concerts I remember from that scholarship-student, 1960-1962 period were a pair situated in an odd warehouse-like venue I had heard about somehow. A ticket holder arriving at this North Side location saw a brick building with windowless facade and a ground floor door, minimally signed, which led to a long, narrow flight of stairs heading up to a large, echoing open space filled with folding chairs. But once there I got to see both ends of the popular Black Music spectrum: Ray Charles and His Orchestra, and The Modern Jazz Quartet! Margie was still a Raelette then, and the band's arrangements were brilliant and oh-so-soulful, with Ray doing his patented swaying on the piano bench. Greatness. And I loved the elegance and carefully arranged chamber Jazz of the John Lewis-led MJQ. (Saw Milt Jackson alone many years later, but his mallet control had diminished some by then.)

I soon transferred to the University of Washington, and then began writing rock criticism, so my live-music outings increased fourfold. Best to organize these "greatest hits" by genre maybe, starting with rockabilly originals I saw over the next decade or so: Jerry Lee Lewis tearing up the place, pounding the piano with his feet, dancing on top of it, and kicking his bench across the stage; garbed-in-black Johnny Cash in his great heyday touring with boppin'-the-blues Carl Perkins, June Carter Cash, and the Tennessee Two; plus Eighties wannabes like Robert Gordon and the Stray Cats.

Blues greats... While I missed out on Chicago, I did see Muddy with Johnny Winter years later, and Bo Diddly (I actually cut a commercial with Bo); and over the years I caught powerful sets by Bobby Blue Bland (his choke/snort vocalizing a soulful treat), B.B. King (in fine voice, still on his feet in those days to wrest bluesy cries from Lucille), and Ice-cool guitarman Albert Collins--Robert Cray too when his album with Collins enabled Cray's own breakout. But more importantly, in the mid-Sixties, thanks to the U.W.'s Ethnomusicology Department, a handful of Country Blues giants journeyed out to Seattle, and I got to stare flabbergasted at separate performances by elders Son House, Bukka White, and Furry Lewis, all still up to much good. (These shows were videotaped and many years later became major archival sources for Blues historians.) Lightnin' Hopkins was in there too, lazily drawling his crafty story-songs. And gravel-voiced Blues-revivalist Taj Mahal still comes to Seattle yearly.

The U.W. also hosted some amazing Jazz concerts over the decades, with the two standouts being the Charles Lloyd Quartet back when Keith Jarrett was the pianist, and the stunning earth-to-space music of the post-Ornette Coleman group known as Old and New Dreams, that great quartet of Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell, plus Dewey Redman valiantly filling in for Ornette. In a similar Free Jazz vein, I swung and swayed through a rousing, high-stepping performance by the World Saxophone Quartet--David Murray, Oliver Lake, Julius Hemphill, and Hamiett Bluiett--at a U.District tavern.

For some reason Seattle has always been a good place for Jazz--starting way back with Jelly Roll Morton, through Big Band visits in the Swing era, to Ray Charles and Quincy Jones, both of whom lived here for periods of time, to Stan Getz who got arrested here in his Fifties junkie days, and still later to local-boys-made-good Larry Coryell and Jimi Hendrix (who could play Jazz as well as every other guitar sound). Many clubs came and went over the years, but Jazz Alley's three different locations (starting back in 1979) make it the longest-lived holdout now. As a newly divorced man (1980 on), I spent many a night hanging out at the Alley in all its locations, eyes and ears opened wider, mesmerized by sets from Dexter Gordon, Art Pepper, Dizzy Gillespie, McCoy Tyner... and many many others over the ensuing three decades of the club's existence.

But I'll end today's jaunt down music's Memory Lane with two remembrances of Miles Davis... The first time I saw him was in the mid-Sixties, at a basement club in Seattle's Pioneer Square area, his backing group the famous second quintet with Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams--titans all. The music was complex and sometimes stop/start jagged, but it swung me into better health, even when Miles amusingly pulled his regular stunts of turning his back on the audience, leaving the stage during other players' solos, and so on.

The second event was even better, or maybe I just mean stranger: this was about 1969 or '70, and Miles had moved on, helping to solidify Fusion Jazz. His group by then had Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette, John McLaughlin, Michael Henderson, Airto, and other now-familiar names--basically the band that played the famous Cellar Door Sessions. And in retrospect, now familiar with those players, I remember most of them here for his concert at Seattle Center's original Arena, with the band set up theater-in-the-round fashion.

When the lights dimmed, all the cats strolled out one by one (no Miles yet), sat down or settled into place, and started tuning up, just tootling around--or so we thought--except that they continued on, found a groove, and then out came Miles, joining right in with his spare tone and few notes placed... just... so. The one tune went on and on, maybe 40 minutes without pause. And then Miles stopped and sauntered off, and one by one so did each player, until drummer DeJohnette hit a final snare or whatever, got up and left.

The concert was over. No bows, no encore, the end! Just so cool. Miles always knew how to play a crowd...

((Next time the Beatles, Stones, Dylan, and whoever--Cream to Clash, Marley to Emmy Lou.))

Dylan for Dollars

In 1961-62 I was a sophomore at Northwestern University in Evanston, just north of Chicago. Sometime that year I discovered a terrific folk music radio program, on WLS I think, that was regularly playing this amazing song by an unknown new folksinger... yes, Bob Dylan and his "Song to Woody."

A few hearings convinced me I had to find this guy's album and add it to my meager array. I bought it, a bit puzzled by the young-punk picture on the jacket, but reassured by the rave review of a Dylan club appearance reprinted on the back. I spun the platter (people still talked like that) and discovered... whoa, a reedy, nasally voice packed with attitude, backed by some excellent guitar--blues and folky stuff but no other piece as compelling as Dylan's original, his tribute "Song to Woody."

But the album grew on me almost immediately, and I went home at spring break, back to Tacoma, eager to play it for friends and girl friend. Well, everybody hated it--ex-high school pals, my girl, my parents and sisters. They all dismissed him as some wiseass who couldn't sing. I refused to back down, arguing his case to anyone who would listen (but secretly doubting my own taste too).

Bob in hand, I returned to Northwestern for a few more months, until summer break and my official transfer to the University of Washington in Seattle. I kept playing his album, people kept shutting their doors... but I'd fallen for his trickster air, his seemingly amateurish performing style. So I kept watching for a new album to show up. And when Columbia announced the date of release, posted I guess at the record store I was frequenting, I was determined to be one of the first to buy Dylan Redux.

On release day, I scooped up a copy of The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan and took it straight to the turntable. Sitting there, trying to absorb, trying to dig his new songs, and also reading the liner notes, I gradually realized that the list of titles on the jacket and labels and the music in the grooves just didn't match up...

Maybe you can see where this is leading. Yes, I had in my possession one of the early, mistakenly released, tried-to-be-corrected copies of his second album, resulting when constraints applied by the Ed Sullivan Show, or complaints by Columbia's sales force, or Dylan's own last-minute second thoughts caused a new version of the album to be rushed into production; various reasons were given later.

Although the jacket list of titles and even the labels (in some cases) got changed, a few copies of the original disc still got shipped to the West Coast in the rush to meet the release date, creating copies like the one I bought that had four songs not matching. I had "Let Me Die in My Footsteps," "John Birch Society Blues" (the one rejected by Sullivan), "Rocks and Gravel," and "Gamblin' Willie" in the grooves instead of the four last-minute and available-ever-since substitutions.

So what did I do? Of course. I returned it to the store as defective and got a copy that did have the correct titles and tracks. If we jump ahead 40 years, collectors everywhere would definitely die in their footsteps to find a copy like the one I gave back, fool that I was, back in the days when rock 'n roll or folk records were just stuff to play rather than cultural artifacts to preserve and collect. A copy as pristine as mine was would fetch around $15,000 now, it seems...

Oh well, easy come, easy go.

Back in the Sixties, I kept listening to Bob, even when he stopped writing protest songs and started with the personal and increasingly obscure stuff, and then--horrors--went electric. There was just something about the guy's whole gestalt that was amazing and magical. I was lucky enough to see him live for the first time when Joan Baez brought him out from the wings to sing a couple of songs with her--black leather gear, goofy cap, Charlie Chaplin insouciance, cocky grin and all. And over the years since, a few more times with The Band and other backing musicians... and rarely (did it happen or is it just wishful thinking on my part?) just Bob and his guitar.

I'd pay a lot to see/hear Dylan lay down his weary tune once more, even if, as he sang in that perfect take he recorded but refused to issue for years, "no one can play the blues like Blind Willie McTell." Hit or miss, many misses in fact, once in a while Bob can still knock the fractured and fractious competition right into his old cocked cap.