The Gospel of Bob

I’ve known some pretty serious Bob Dylan fans. They’ll talk at length about the merits of underappreciated albums like Street Legal and Self Portrait. They’ll travel fair distances to see the man perform live. They’ll defend the integrity of Renaldo and Clara. For an artist like Bob Dylan with such a great and varied body of work, such fandom is understandable.

Then there are fans like Joel Gilbert, who actually “plays” Dylan as part of a tribute act called Highway 61 Revisited, and cranks out unauthorized Dylan documentaries the way some fans make mix tapes of Desire outtakes.

Inside Bob Dylan’s Jesus Years: Busy Being Born…Again is his latest, and it’s an exhausting two-hour look at Bob Dylan’s brief stint as born again evangelical christian and Jews for Jesus poster boy in the late 1970s.

Gilbert himself appears in the documentary, shaggy-haired, wearing a western-styled shirt, driving around the American south, waving to locals, and engaging producer Jerry Wexler, session singer Regina McCrary, Dylan keyboardist Spooner Oldham, music writer Joel Selvin and others in long, rambling interviews. It’s great hearing the late Jerry Wexler talk at length about the recording of Dylan’s gospel-inflected late ’70s output, but there’s not a single note to be heard of the actual music being discussed. (All the music on the “soundtrack” is provided by Highway 61 Revisited.)

Getting through this was excruciating. 30 minutes of Vineyard Church pastor Bill Dwyer (and others) talking about the born again “experience” is way too long for even the most hardcore Bob Dylan fan to sit through. When Al Kasha (it’s cool, I didn’t know either) talks about kneeling before his television set and placing his hand on the screen to become a reformed, born-again Jew, I actually felt a little uneasy. (more…)

I was eleven or twelve. I was riding with my dad. We were driving back from somewhere. We were listening to the radio. It was just my dad and me. All of the sudden, a strange kind of music comes on. The vaguely-Eastern sounding keyboards and guitar arpeggios sound cool enough, then the vocals start: “IF I HAD A ROCKET LAUNCHER, I’D MAKE SOMEBODY PAY.”

Whoa.

Here was a song about a guy who is singing about getting a rocket launcher — a rocket launcher — and after asking “how many kids did you kill today?” was going to make somebody pay. It was like somebody took the plot to Commando and made a song out of it. Already this was the most badass song I had ever heard, but nothing could have prepared me for that final verse.

“If I had a rocket launcher, some son of a bitch would die!”

This was on the radio! The guy not only said “son of a bitch,” but he said “some son of a bitch would DIE!” He was gonna take that rocket launcher and he was gonna kill that son of a bitch! This was in a song! The most intense lyric I had heard on the radio before that was that “the union of the snake was on the prowl.”

My dad and I got home and I ran into my room, totally energized with pre-adolescent macho awkwardness. I turned on my radio and slowly, very slowly turned the knob up and down the radio dial until I could catch that song.

Well, days went by, weeks went by, months, years. I don’t think I ever heard the song on the radio again. Then, ten years ago, I remembered the song and I went looking for it on Napster.

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I. Report from the Land of the Dead
It has a been a busy time in Deadland. Most notably, tickets went on sale this past weekend for the Deadheads For Obama show on October 13th at Penn State. Many of you will remember that earlier this year, Phil, Bobby, Mickey and friends got together at the Warfield for the first Deadheads for Obama concert. This time out, Bill Kreutzmann and Mr. Soulshine Himself, Warren Haynes, will also be in attendance.

Phil Lesh’s son is a volunteer for the Obama campaign, and he got the old man involved. While the formally “non-partisan” band stumping for Obama did cause some bad vibes among some ‘Heads (especially the Ron Paul contingent) the important thing here is to let the show speak for itself.

II. Bill Kreutzmann/Oteil Burbridge/Scott Murawski Trio
Quietly on tour earlier this year was Bill Kreutzmann’s new musical brigade. There was some debate as to what the name of the combo actually was, but Kreuztmann, Burbridge & Murawski became the standard. Some people call it the Kreutzmann Trio, others call it ‘3,’ but whatever you call it, it’s a tight, dynamic outfit.

There aren’t any shows up at the LMA yet, however, many recordings of their shows can be found (in beautiful lossless FLAC) on http://bt.etree.org. I did find this (along with several other clips) on YouTube. Here is “The Bill Kreutzmann Trio” live, 4/20/08, at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago for the Earth Day Festival: (more…)

Another sad day in Floyd land.

“The Violent Sequence” (early version of “Us and Them” from the Zabriskie Point sessions, 1970)

“It Would Be So Nice” (single version, 1968)

“Remember a Day” (from Saucerful of Secrets, 1968)

“Summer ‘68″ (from Atom Heart Mother, 1969)

“Embryo” (from Picnic: A Breath of Fresh Air, 1970)

“Stay” (from Obscured by Clouds, 1972)

“Any Color You Like” (live, 1974)

Since the world is about to end, I figured I would get into the spirit and post this — the first Test of the DOOOOMERANG!!! DOOOOOOM is the serious bidniss, as we will learn today.

I used to work in San Francisco. After work, I would get a vegan raw almond milkshake at Cafe Gratitude and then go over to the fantastic Aquarius Records on Valencia Street. I would spend hours in that cool little shop and look through the new releases. Crazy reggae dub records, crazy experimental stuff, crazy field recordings, and some seriously intense metal and psych records.

That’s where I learned of the mighty Sunn O))) and the sonic sitar drive of Lamp of the Universe. I was set hip to Kiss’ prog rock album (produced by none other than Bob Ezrin and featuring additional lyrics by Lou Reed, no less) and I bought my first Jesu records.

I also discovered Monarch.

Monarch are, or were actually, a French drone/dooooooooom band fronted by a young lady named Emilie Bresson. This three (sometimes four)-member unit of unholy sludgemerchants poured out the slow and lumbering death-lurch like so much black sticky hash resin. They released a handful of records — three full-lengths, some EPs, a few platters split between other artists, and a ‘Best Of’ release. It was unusual for such a slowwww and doooomy band to have a female vocalist, but Emilie has seemed to attract quite the following. (more…)

It was the summer of 1985. There was me, Kromlock the Warrior, my friend Dennis, better known as Garmo the Wizard, and Peter, a.k.a. Hendrix the half-even ranger. We were wandering the dark woods of Falcomar at the mercy of Doug Dexter, our dungeon master.

Doug Dexter was the best dungeon master I had ever known. It was easy enough to read aloud the buoyant prose that framed “The Temple of Elemental Evil” or “Against the Giants,” but Doug Dexter was downright theatrical. He had a million voices, a million accents and dialects from Halfling to Lizard Man. When we stayed up for 32 hours straight trying to defeat “The Tomb of Horrors,” Doug Dexter’s Acererak voice was absolutely horrific. “WHO DARES DISTURB THE SLEEP OF ACERERAK!?!” He would roar with a flashlight shining under his chin.

Doug Dexter had cassettes of classical and baroque music that he had cadged from the local public library. These tapes would play quietly on his Radio Shack tape player under the table while we wandered the dark woods or asked around a sleepy hamlet for information about a local guild of thieves hiding in the area. But whenever we entered a combat situation, Doug would slam the tape player on the table, hit play, and the distorted assault of King Crimson, Rush, Black Sabbath, or Gustav Holtz ‘The Planets’ would blare from that crappy tinny-sounding speaker.

Those marathon D&D sessions were my first exposure to King Crimson and their fantastic Red album. To this day, when I hear the title track, that initial blast of wooshing keyboards and harsh guitars, I reach for an imaginary d20 on my dashboard or my desk to roll for initiative. In later games, things like Slayer or Metallica became our “battle music,” but there was something about that proggy King Crimson or Rush vibe that made the game feel more epic.

Which brings me to Black Mountain and their epic album, In the Future. Replete with trippy album art and a grimoire full of hype, “In the Future” is the Canadian band’s follow-up to their self-titled 2005 debut. You can get it on two big greasy slabs of vinyl or one shiny CD, though a 2-CD bonus edition exists. (more…)

I had originally intended to post this during the week of August 1st and August 9th, but I wanted to give a shout to Isaac Hayes last week. Get out your copy of Hot Buttered Soul, throw it on the hi-fi, and get with somebody.

Jerry Garcia waltzed into this world on August 1st, 1942, and waltzed back out on August 9th, 1995. We’re already 13 years out from Jerry’s death, the demise of the Dead, and that really, really horrible summer tour.

I was already “off the bus” when Jerry died. My Dead train derailed after a miserable cold December night at the Oakland Coliseum. There was such an air of joylessness that night. I was third-wheeling it with a friend and her new boyfriend. I overheard people talking about speed and guns in the men’s room. The music was anemic at best. That entropy had started to show, but worst of all, it just wasn’t fun anymore.

So the new issue of Relix features a cover story about Jerry and how once again, Jerry Garcia is considered “hip” and “cool” among the folks at the “cool kid’s table” in the pop culture cafeteria. The article sites the presence of some humorous Dead graffiti in a subway station - (”…tagging the Grateul Dead’s Steal Your Face skull over a smiling Asian woman in surgical scrubs…”) as well a drunk college kid stumbling along singing “Box of Rain” in the hipster streets at dawn, as proof of the Dead’s new status as hipster iconica. A few musicians (Devendra Banhart, Bonnie Prince Bill aka Will Oldham, and others) weigh in on the matter and come up with a collective “I guess they’re pretty cool.”

The ultra-slick entertainment magazine The Fader did a double-sided cover story on Jerry last summer to much greater effect.

But the real message of the story isn’t Relix’s own need for validation from the Indie community, it’s about how the Dead continues to influence a whole new generation of musicians who are of a much different stripe than the likes of Phish or Widespread Panic. But is it really the Dead who are inspiring Akron/Family or Animal Collective or any other band that might let their music get lost on a lysergic space jam? Or is it just that preternatural sonic stew of bluegrass, blues, modern jazz, folk, and rock and roll that initially fueled the Warlocks? Besides, Relix telling readers that Jerry is cool because the guys in Animal Collective say he is is one thing; the fact that Relix started as a Grateful Dead fanzine back in 1974 is quite another. (more…)

Our regular featured test will appear next week. Peace and farewell, Black Moses…

For Test of the Boomerang III, I retired to a simple cottage in the Welsh countryside to reflect. This post was done acoustically.

Hey gang, today I have brought three shows for show and tell. Each has been dredged up from the depths of the Live Music Archive. They’re all totally different, but they’re all 100% live and ready to be streamed, shared, downloaded, burned, and loved.

Kawabata Makoto Live - June 18, 2008, Hemlock Tavern, SF

A solo gig by Kawabata Makoto of Acid Mothers Temple which I, like Gandalf, will not speak of here, other than they have my vote for the greatest album title of all time: STARLESS AND BIBLE BLACK SABBATH.

This is not your ex-girlfriend’s Spiritualized CD. This is not your college roommate’s experimental guitar noise project he put together for his Music Appreciation class and got a C+ on. These are serious hyperdelic drones from the vast depths of space. This is what Terence McKenna’s self-transforming machine elves listen to on their little self-transforming turntables. Do not listen to this while driving or while operating heavy machinery, lest you become one with the heavy machine figuratively and spiritually, man.

Makoto explains his interstellar muse: (more…)

“I would like to thank everybody here for coming, thank you to the clowns for their nice entertainment. They were quite good. Thank you…”

Grateful Dead 12/6/80 Mill Valley Recreation Center, Mill Valley, CA

This is a pretty remarkable and strange little show. Just a couple months after their acoustic residencies at The Warfield and Radio City Music Hall, this great recording finds the band playing a Christmas party at the Mill Valley Rec Center for some kids and their parents. After a lady calls for quiet from the audience, she proceeds to introduce the band to hilarious effect. Before “Cassidy,” a young man can be heard saying “I want rock and roll,” to which Jerry replies, “You do? This is sorta like rock and roll.” Also I’ll be damned if I don’t hear a ping pong ball being volleyed around in the background.

Oh and the “Special Guest” the emcee lady mentions was none other than Santa Claus.

All novelty aside, this is a real solid performance (killer “Jack-A-Roe,” great “Cassady,” and check out that jam in “Bird Song”), and the sound quality is pretty good. Recorded by the famous Betty Cantor, it’s a Betty AUD tape, and when was the last time you came across one of those? And because it’s an AUD recording, you can go ahead and download the sucker!

For more acoustic Dead, check out:

“Phil and Friends” Berkeley Community Theatre 9-24-94

Bob: “I was plugged in, I was just plugged in backwards.”
Jerry: “Just like you always are man…” (more…)