Thanks for the 15 Minutes Bob.. Of Irony and Animals

THANKS FOR THE 15 MINUTES BOB… OF IRONY AND ANIMALS….12-05

        About 40 years ago Andy Warhol predicted that in the future everyone would be “ famous” for 15 minutes …sounds  like a cross between Karl Marx and a Twilight Zone episode..we would all experience fame for 15 minutes and hence we would understand fame in all its glory and folly…we would not have to worry if our career was on the rise or decline..because we would all have 15 minutes of fame. ….Hence the euphemism 

“ his 15 minutes are  almost up “  ..used to designate a stale artist. 

No artist in the second half of the 20th century affected our culture ,our language and our angst at coming of  age more than Bob Dylan ..

      I wonder if he realizes that his interview on 60 Minutes..his first  TV interview  in nearly 20 years ….was almost precisely 15 minutes…how prophetic…

      Bob was both frank and disingenuous…His admission that his best work is behind him was very frank..His desire to be just another citizen was rather disingenuous….  If you really want to be invisible Bob  ..stop doing concerts….stop putting your face on album covers.. and by all means..don’t use 60 Minutes as a place to hide…No Bob ..you’re stuck with being Bob…and ironically owning the most common of names…

There was only one Elvis….  There are millions of Bobs..but when you talk music ..there is only one Bob… just there is only one Frank… one Pablo, one Miles…artists who continued to stretch the boundaries and worked hard not to repeat themselves…On second thought Bob…maybe it was good that you checked in every 20 years to let us know that you will always be an iconoclast.

     Bob..you should just stop testing how much your followers will tolerate. Bob had the candor to admit to Ed Bradley on 60 minutes that he has intentionally done poor albums and poor concerts. This begs the old show biz saw “ The show must go on!” and a show man must give it his all. What is your responsibility to your audience Bob? Is it to try to re-create an event that occurred before or is it to constantly re-invent that event..On her first live album, Miles of Aisles..back in the 70’s Joni Mitchell listens to the audience shout out requests during a gap between songs…She chuckles and waits for quiet..then tells the audience..” It’s tough to do the same songs night after night…that’s the difference between being a painter artist and a performance artist…nobody ever asked Van Gogh to paint “ A Stary Night “ again..he painted it and it was finished….”….A wonderful observation from a woman who is both a performance artist and a painter. ..Don McClean got so tired of performing American Pie that he retired the song in the late 70’s..He might as well have retired his career..It put him in his 14th minute…no concert promoter would touch him until he brought the song out again.

       There is no more prolific artist than Dylan…I am amazed that he is still able to recite Desolation Row a 12 minute stream of conciousness saga I have been a die hard fan of Dylan’s for forty years. I am fascinated by his story telling ability…but I can see he gets tired of telling the same stories.His show at The Chance in Poughkeepsie was both thrilling and sad, as I wrote in this column in recent weeks. He could get through the lyrics of Ballad Of A Thin Man but it had the blur of an old orthodox jew in temple half reading prayers to himself.

      Clearly..a biblical amount of social responsibility has been placed on Bob’s shoulders. A weight that would break the back of any mortal.. Every couplet a pearl dripping with meaning…He has said before that these are not “first person” observations; that his songs are  sung in the viewpoint of the protagonist…and that protagonist  is not  neccesarily Bob… but the passion of his early work was easily mistaken for personal experience.   

     The passion and the pain  and the physical ravages of age have certainly altered his performance ability…can we expect a 64 year old man to sing with the same yearning ..the same lyrics he brought forth as a 25 year old?

       Dylan has written and sung with such conviction that we believe Bob’s anger and sense of revenge in “ Like A Rolling Stone “ to be a first person query when he asks “How does it feel “…NEVER had a POP song spewed such anger and frustration , before that summer of 65 hit… pop and rock was not “angry”.unless you count one particular hit from the prior summer 

“House Of The Rising Sun “by The Animals…and lets not cut The Animals 15 minutes short. Nor Eric Burdon’s ability to continue to deliver all that he’s got toan audience.

      The instrumentation for Dylan’s “ Like A Rolling Stone “ was borrowed from The Animals..whose hit a year earlier with House Of The Rising Sun was ironically borrowed from Dylan who had borrowed it from Dave Van Ronk. ..House is on Dylan’s first disc (62)……House was The Animals second single 6/64…it was an international smash  for the Animals in the summer of 64…but three months earlier they had failed with a single version of “Baby Let Me Walk You Home” which was drawn from Dylan’s ”Baby Let Me Follow You Down”.So in both of their first two singles  The Animals were going electric with Dylan material before anyone…even The Byrds…. who would release Mr. Tambourine Man in April 65. 

         I had the pleasure of having dinner with Eric Burdon, lead singer of The Animals , at Coppola’s in Hyde Park in 1982 ..when he was appearing at The Chance. Then owner ,Pete Francese often gave me the job of “babysitting” the headliner at dinner time …this would keep the artist out of the stage managers hair.

       I remember speaking with Eric about  how The Animals had gotten short shrift. That their unique british/blues/rock sound was as pivitol as The Stones or Yardbirds. Their strength was never the guitar solo but..the organ solo and Eric Burdon’s incredible vocals. We talked of his friendship with Jimi… He was waiting for Jimi to show up for a dinner engagement the night Jimi died. It was the Animals bassist Chas Chandler who “ discovered” Jimi..We talked of his alliance with War..his quest to break down racial boundaries.. His brief  and accidental involvement with the radical German Bader Meinhoff gang during a gig in Berlin turned out to be a lesson in staying partly insolated  from your fans…Let your management people keep a layer of protection. Burdon almost wound up in a web of international espionage and intrigue….

      Eric Burdon and I also talked about Dylan. He still had the utmost respect for the wordsmith of our generation..and I began to realize that The Animals were as major an influence on Dylan as Dylan was on them. Look at the film Don’t Look Back , the documentary about Dylans last acoustic tour of Britain in 1964 and you see him hanging around with Alan Price..organist of The Animals. When I went home after my dinner with Eric I played House of The Rising Sun 6/64 back to back with Dylan’s Like A Rolling Stone 6/65…….  I was struck not only with  the similarity of style in juxtaposing a gospelly organ with a folk/rock guitar lick..but the irony of the title….it should have been called…Like An Animal….because it certainly owes more to The Animals than to  The Rolling Stones.

      As we pour on the ironies Rolling Stone Magazine recently published its top 500 albums of all time. Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisted (which featured Like A Rolling Stone) was voted the number 4 album of all time and the Animals did not even appear anywhere in the top 500 albums. A great injustice…..what if the name of the magazine were Animal..and not Rolling Stone…not to diminish the power and glory of Dylan’s masterwork. It certainly deserves to be at Number 4 behind The Beatles and Beach Boys,

But the Animals first album showcased Chuck Berry and Ray Charles gems like The Girl Can’t Help It  and The Night Time Is The Right Time.

It appears that The Animals 15 minutes are not up….. there are numerous best of compilations in the cheapy bins…..and somehow the Animals and Dylan share the first five of those 15 minutes…..

       I think of Bob nearly every day as I commute to the WDST studios in Bearsville (100.1 fm or wdst.com) (shameless plug)…every day I drive by the Woodstock Center for Photography which was once The Café Espresso and I look at the upstairs apartment which… as legend has it ..was where Dylan wrote Blonde On Blonde… I am reminded of Elliot Landy’s great photos of Dylan and The Band and Van Morrison in the late 60’s . All of them taken in this immediate area. There certainly is a mystical beauty to this little notch in the mountains we call Woodstock..  

   Every day I head north on the Thruway from New Paltz to Kingston..and about 10 miles up I get a panoramic view that gives me a hint  to the mystical properties.. Rip Van Winkle, Dylan,,The Band all rolled up into one story ..as Van Morrison said in Working..”been up the Thruway down..up the Thruway down..” Last week when I hit that spot on the thruway where the view comes into sight I was coincidentally listening to the last Woodstock 69 disc called Woodstock Diary released a few years ago. And there was Joe Cocker’s beautiful interpretation of the Dylan/ Danko composition “ I Shall Be Released..” originally recorded by Dylan and Happy Traum in the basement of Big Pink in West Saugerties..now I listen to it being performed in White Lake in 1969 ..some  60 miles away..in a town that would not get credit for the event that the village of Woodstock shunned..

I listen to I Shall be Released  performed live by Joe Cocker, an artist who would wind up being managed by Michael Lang ..the concerts producer..and I look at the notch in the mountains where Woodstock ..my destination lays…and wax poetic over her past…and hopefully future glories…and the inspiration that the physical village..and the metaphorical village of Woodstock have represented…and I Shall Be Released is a perfect song from those glory days..”but I remember every face of every man who put me here”….and I wonder if  Bob Dylan could ever possibly return to visit Woodstock.

        I know you told Ed Bradley that you don’t like restaurants anymore Bob ..but  I wonder if you  and Eric Burdon  and Van and Joe Cocker and Mike Laing  and Happy Traum ..and Artie Traum John Sebastian..Garth and Levon.and whatever other Woodstock “locals” are still in town would like to have lunch at The Little Bear..your late manager Albert Grossman set it up on the creek at Bearsville because he loved Chinese food and wanted to be able to walk there without having to drive to Eng’s in Kingston.. We can sit by Albert’s grave just a hundred yards away and reflect on our fifteen minutes…. Bob ..if there’s any restaurant in the country that you could feel at home in ..I hope it’s this one……lunch is on me….