Newsgroup: it.arti.musica.rock
Titolo: Love and Theft - Dylan

Bringing the deep south back home
Imagine a tale of love and theft, of long, hot nights on the edge of town,
and country gals and poor boys far from home. And all around is the sound of
the blues... Greil Marcus hits the highway with Bob Dylan
Greil Marcus
Guardian
Saturday September 8, 2001
There's an old man who lives in your neighbourhood, drinking away his days
as if they were bottles. He lives by himself in a small house, though others
are known to disappear into it: "Samantha Brown, lived in my house for about
four or five... months ," he announces one day on the street, his voice
tearing like cloth. "I never slept with her eeeeeven once." As if anyone
cares.
An odd character, in his funny way of nodding as you walk by, in the cadence
of his speech when he stops to pass the time - one moment he might be
whispering a confidence, the next giving a speech - but also ordinary. On
occasion he asks you in, you and your spouse or another neighbour, asks you
into his parlour - which really is a parlour. A few old, comfortable chairs,
shelves of books. There's a spinet piano with a collection of sheet music in
the compartment in the piano bench, some of it handwritten: his own songs.
Not everything is old-fashioned. The '65 Mustang in the garage and the '59
Cadillac at the kerb seem to promise a future that merely hasn't arrived
yet. Along with the floral lampshades and throw rugs, there's a CD player
and hundreds of CDs,mostly blues and country tunes recorded in the 1920s and
1930s. "See if there's anything you want to hear," he always says, without
taking his eyes off you as you choose.
He's an explainer. One of the songs he sings at the piano, one of his own,
is called Po' Boy, though the tune sounds like the folk song Cocaine; along
with a wry couplet ("Call down to room service, say send up the room") and a
knock-knock joke, it tells a story about the Prodigal Son. Seeing you pick a
Bukka White CD with his version of the song, or anyway the title - recorded
at Parchman State Penitentiary in Mississippi in 1939, the man points out -
he leans back and lets wash over him like rain the burst of guitar notes
that seem to send this "poor boy long way from home" straight to heaven.
Then he shows you Ramblin' Thomas's 1929 Poor Boy Blues ("A Dallas street
singer," he says), then Chuck Berry's 1964 Promised Land, about the odyssey
of "the Po' Boy" from his hometown in Norfolk, Virginia, to LA. The song was
written when Berry was in prison in Springfield, Missouri, the man tells you
("When he wanted an atlas to get the route right, they thought he was
planning an escape!"), but he's just warming up. "See, what the song is
really about is the civil rights movement, the Freedom Riders, the way he
plans the Po' Boy's bus route to avoid Rock Hill, that's in North Carolina,
a Klan town, then the bus breaks down in Birmingham, where the Klan blew up
a church and killed four little girls, that was in 1963, 'turned into a
struggle', see? It's all in this book by a professor named WT Lhamon,
Deliberate Speed." Nobody has any idea what he's talking about, but the
story is romantic, somehow.
The man's own songs have pleasant names like Bye And Bye or Moonlight. The
way he sings and plays them, with a phoney-looking toothpaste smile,
suggests how he once tried to sell them. In moments they sound corny - less
like Hoagy Carmichael's Stardust than Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy's
Indian Love Call - or it's a parlour from the 19th century that comes into
view, and the old sentimental songs of home and courtship, family death and
renewal, that you almost hear, even though the songs are off. They're not as
slick as the published tunes that keep them company in the piano bench,
though you can tell they were meant to be. Often, they end with a sourness,
a sting, even a violence, that parlours were made to banish from their
doors.
The man takes midnight walks, tramping the streets even to the edge of town,
muttering about all he hates, about everything he wants to destroy,
seemingly preaching or telling dirty stories, gesturing wildly, his hair
flying. One night you heard him going on about a woman, it seemed, but then
he turned into a general on his horse as quickly as the horse then turned
into a pulpit and the general into a prophet. "I'm going to spare the
defeated, I'm going to speak to the crowd," he said, whoever he really was.
"I'm going to teach peace to the conquered, IIIIII 'm going to tame the
proud."
Sometimes he sounds crazy, but the same sound can be seductive, especially
in his seeming disdain for all those he wants dead, banished, out of his
world. You catch something strange and glamorous in his voice: how you might
feel if you had the nerve to talk like this. And it can happen right in his
house, as suddenly he is speaking with such intensity, you hear even his
rants as songs and imagine a band behind them. He can begin to speak loudly,
angrily, hitting random blues riffs on his piano, then slamming down hard
and turning to you to speak of the fun he's had and that he might - and here
he is weirdly threatening - have again. "You say my eyes are pretty and my
smile is nice," he says, though you haven't said a word. "I sell it to you
at a reduced price."
Once he told a story about a flood, then began to sing it, without the
piano: "You have to hear a banjo now," he'd said. What followed seemed more
mystical than real. It was the great 1927 Mississippi flood, it was Noah's
flood, it was Iowa just last spring, it was the entire last century as a
giant mistake, crying out for its own cleansing, asking to be washed away
before it was too late. "Made it to Kansas City," he says of someone called
Big Joe Turner: in his mouth the words seem to name as well such real-life
but mythicised American icons as frontiersman Davy Crockett, the steel
driver John Henry, the killer Stagger Lee, the outlaw Railroad Bill, each
bestriding the continent.
He plays with old songs inside the story: the mountain ballad The Coo Coo,
say, turning the benign lyrics inside out, or revealing their true menace.
"The coo coo, she's a pretty bird, she warbles as she flies," he says with
easy pleasure, then changing into Robert Mitchum's preacher in The Night Of
The Hunter, still smiling: "I'm preaching the word of God, I'm putting out
your eyes." Then he goes back to the piano and sings about how he hopes
she'll meet him in the moonlight. Then he passes out, and everyone leaves.
The stories people tell of the nights they've spent with the man have long
since become local legend. But the legend that sticks hardest comes from
what people will call "Sugar Baby": the message the man leaves on his
answering machine when he leaves town. Given what people have heard before,
as they listen they can almost spin the slow, deliberate words of the
message into singing, and the singing into an elegant orchestration of slow,
deliberate chords - something that years from now they won't be able to get
out of their heads. "Sugar Baby," they'll still say to each other, probably
long after the man himself is dead; it's become a saying, meaning "That's
life" or "There's nothing we can do about it."
Some people will remember how the man used to take out an album by a
stone-faced character named Dock Boggs, a singer from the Virginia mountains
who first recorded in 1927, the man would carefully explain; he'd play a
song called Sugar Baby. That was real killer-inside-me stuff; Sugar Baby was
what Boggs called his lover, who you weren't sure would survive the song. On
the message the man leaves, "Sugar Baby" - the words leading off every
refrain - seems to be the name of a horse. The feeling, though - the sense
of a life used up, wasted as every life is finally wasted, leaving the earth
as if one's life had never been - is the same. The feeling is that there is
all the time in the world to take stock, if only in the ledger you keep in
your heart to settle accounts, to tell jokes you half hope no one will get.
"I'm staying with Aunt Sally," the man says on the machine, "but you know
she not really my aunt." You laugh, and then something in his tone pulls you
down into the emptiness he's speaking from. As in the parlour, he has led
you to relax into his exile.
That is just a story. But Love And Theft (released this week by Columbia
Records) is an album of shifting stories, some told to the end, some of the
most remarkable only hinted at. High Water Everywhere (For Charley Patton)
is both.
Born perhaps as early as 1887 or as late as 1901, Patton, a founder of the
Mississippi Delta blues, recorded from 1929 until his death in 1934. "His
vowels were stretched out, inflated from within; they expanded until they
were all but unrecognisable," wrote the jazz pianist and critic Tom Piazza
recently of how hard it can be to hear him - but in the teasing murk of his
sound, Piazza said, "he opened a window in time for himself". It's that
window Bob Dylan walks through as if it were a door. While you can find a
transcription of Patton's High Water Everywhere in the late John Fahey's
1970 study Charley Patton (a book reprinted as part of Screamin' And
Hollerin' The Blues: The Worlds Of Charley Patton, a seven-CD boxed set due
in October from Revenant Records), his singing could hardly be more
underwater. "I firmly believe, and have believed for years," one listener
says, "that Charley Patton is not singing in English on High Water."
Compared with the dirt in Patton's voice, the rubble in Dylan's may sound as
smooth as glass, but the impenetrability of Patton's song is there in
Dylan's: in riddles and parables.
Verse by verse, the flood spreads, takes in and upends more lives, making
everyone understand that your freedoms under the Constitution are nothing
compared with what God wants from you this night. "You dancing with whom
they tell you to," says one Bertha Mason, "or you don't dance at all."
"It's bad out there," a verse ends. "It's tough out there. Things are
breaking up out there." But then, in the midst of the disaster, a fable
stands out as if clearing its own space in the maelstrom. "Well," Dylan
says, "George Lewes told the Englishman, the Italian and the Jew (who just
walked into a bar),
You can't open up your minds, boys, to every conceivable point of view
They got Charles Darwin trapped out there on Highway 5
Judge says to the High Sheriff, I want him dead or alive
Either one, I don't... care."
Dissolving into mystery as soon as it seems clear, the story will be there
as long as any in Dylan's signature Highway 61 Revisited; this could be a
verse from it. But the heart of Love And Theft - the window Dylan's new
music itself opens up in time - is in that final "care", dropping off its
line like a body falling out of a window, with the same thud. A whole world
of rejection, of nothingness, of the humour shared by dead men walking
because the graveyard is full - a whole way of being in the world, and a
whole way of talking about it, opens up out of that single word, out of the
way it's thrown away, and what it throws away with it. As Raymond Chandler
had Philip Marlowe say in 1953 in The Long Goodbye, in the same voice: "It
all depends on where you sit and what your private score is. I didn't have
one. I didn't care." Then Marlowe went out and solved the case.

coincidenza. Ho appena finito di ascoltarlo. Sugar Baby e' il pezzo che
chiude l'album, sembra quasi non voglia mai finire.....Piu' lo ascolto, piu'
trovo che sia uno degli album piu' profondi e densi di significato del
menestrello di Duluth. Piu' misteriosi, in effetti. E Greil Marcus rende
bene quel senso di non detto, di cupo, di antico che pervade l'intero
album....Vengono in mente Faulkner e Steinbeck a leggere i testi. E allora
cosa aspettano in Scandinavia a dargli l'Oscar per la letteratura ?!?!
ciao bp


wrote:
ancora qui? :-))
cm volevo solo augurarti un caloroso "in bocca al lupo" :-)) (anzi no
mejo de no conoscendote :-)) diciamo allora "in culo alla
balena".....no no meglio di no potrebbe cagare, cioč cerca di non fare
indigestione, :-))   cioč insomma buon viaggio, buona permanenza,
trova un cazzo di computer e raccontaci cosa ascoltano li dive vai ;-)
Saliu't L.
----------
I miti sono necessari: i giovani devono avere delle T-shirt in cui
credere (Ellekappa)

 trova un cazzo di computer e raccontaci cosa ascoltano li dive vai ;-)
pare che nei negozi vendano solo ed esclusivamente cd taroccati.........ma
temo che Rock of Ages della Band rimasterizzato manco sanno cos'e'....:-(
ciao bp

 cosa aspettano in Scandinavia a dargli l'Oscar per la letteratura ?!?!
I testi non li ho letti vedrò di farlo al più presto
gianni

 tonalità quasi spettrale, sembra quasi registrata nel 1930...
Concordo. Le prime volte l'ho ascoltato come si ascoltano gli album buoni ma
non eccezionali, godendo della straordinaria perizia della band,
dell'energia stilizzata, di quel rantolo di voce (come un nugolo di voci
incarognite, la scorza ruvida ed il cuore colmo). Col tempo, e col diradarsi
degli ascolti, è successo proprio questo, che il peso specifico è aumentato
e quello che sembrava riappropriazione di antichi standard è diventata
riflessione sul proprio infinito rappresentare e rappresentarsi, andando
clamorosamente vicino alla polpa della questione, che è archetipo e
universale, tradizione e infinito rinnovarsi del (nel) futuro.
Seghe mentali a parte, non stupisce che il disco ne esca tanto godibile,
appagante, addirittura coinvolgente. E che rimbombi di mistero.
Anche per me, un gran disco.
ciao
nello
--------------------------------
Inviato via 
http://usenet.libero.it

 degli ascolti, č successo proprio questo, che il peso specifico č
aumentato
quando ne parlai sull'ng al tempo della sua uscita lo avvicinai ad album non
imprescindibili come Street Legal o New Morning (peraltro da me amatissimi,
da buon dylaniato). Oggi devo correggere quel giudizio: trattasi di
capolavoro, della stessa pasta di un Time out of Mind o di un Oh
Mercy........E piu' lo ascolto, piu' svela qualcosa di nuovo, o meglio, di
antico...:-)
ciao bp