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Thursday, March 12, 2009
DREAM BABY
Roy Orbison
1962
Available on : The Soul of Rock and Roll
Sony Legacy : 2008
[Buy It]
I HAD A DREAM
Howlin' Wolf
1967
Available on : Ain't Gonna Be Your Dog
Universal : 1994
[Buy It]
DON'T WAKE ME UP, I AM DREAMING
Arthur C. Clough
1911
Edison Amberol 696
DREAMS, DREAMS
Smokey Robinson and the Miracles
1969
Available on : Whatever Makes You Happy
Rhino : 1993
[Buy It]
BOB DYLAN'S DREAM
Bob Dylan
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan
Columbia : 1963
[Buy It]
I DREAMED I SAW SAINT AUGUSTINE
Bob Dylan
John Wesley Harding
Columbia : 1968
[Buy It]
This week I had a conversation about dreams, and then a dream about that conversation about dreams, and then another dream that came true, and then a conversation about the dream that came true.
The conversation about dreams happened one afternoon this week, and it must have stuck in my head, because that night I repeated it, with variation. In the real conversation, I was sitting across a table from someone who was talking about dreams: not specific dreams, but the entire category, what dreams might mean, what they can't mean. That night's dream was about a conversation, too, but in the dream-conversation I was talking about renting a truck. The person in the dream, who wasn't quite the person I had spoken to in real life, explained to me that the truck I was interested in renting had a compartment behind the driver's seat filled with tools that I wouldn't recognize. That's the phrase that stuck: "filled with tools you wouldn't recognize." Even at the time, while I was sleeping, I assumed that this was a dream about my conversation about dreams.
Before I woke up, I had a second dream. I dreamed I was at a conference somewhere rural--there were mountains and a lake--and a friend of mine was at the same conference. This wasn't a fake friend that my dream invented, but a dream version of a real friend. The whole thing was faintly documentary. I was attending this conference alone, and I called my wife and my kids to say hello; in the dream my phone number was the same as it is in real life. (Again, faintly documentary.) My friend was attending with her mother and her sister, and we were all called to a breakfast meeting. Just after the food was served, my friend left the table. Her mother looked upset but said nothing at the time; a few minutes later she asked me if I would go find my friend. I found her sitting in a meeting room by herself. She had written the word "blue" on the dry-erase board in red marker. "Your mom wants you to come to breakfast," I said. She explained that she couldn't because she needed to write a thank-you note to the owner of the shop that had repaired her boot heel for free. "Look," she said, lifting up her foot to show, "all fixed."
I sneered at her. "Who cares?" I said. "It looks worse than ever." It looked fine, actually. I went back to the table and she showed up a few minutes later, and we had breakfast and talked with her mom and her sister about the conference we were attending. It was a nice dream: no monsters, no missiles.
Today on the phone I mentioned that dream to the real-life friend. "What?" she said. "I just took a boot to have the heel fixed this morning."
"Right," I said.
"I'm serious," she said. "What else did you dream?" I told her the few other things I remembered-- that her phone wouldn't work, that she was wearing a brown skirt--and none of that rang a bell. She hung up, relieved, but evidently it was still bothering her, because she sent me an email a little later: "Tell me if you have any more dreams about what happens to me. I don't trust that you're not dreaming things that might be true. Or, maybe even better, don't tell me anything about them at all."
I understood the problem, partly. Everyone likes dreams but everyone has mixed feelings about the process by which they are shared. Dreams, we tend to believe, are ways of dealing with areas of our lives that we can't politely discuss (fear, libido), and so there is always something a little unclean in the retelling. What did the boot heel represent? Was it something more intimate? Even if a boot heel is just a boot heel, why would I feel connected, even for a second, even asleep, to a female friend's footwear? And why did I have to go and be rude? She was just trying to show me the repair.
Dreams may or may not be psychological skeleton keys. The jury has been out on that for centuries, and then especially for the last century. But they are, at many levels, powerful creative acts, and because of that they have featured regularly in human artwork: paintings, novels, movies. In pop songs, dreams tend to have a more specific function: they provide evidence of life's nasty habit of snatching away objects of desire. Roy Orbison's "Dream Baby," among the most famous dream songs in rock and roll, is about an unattainable woman--"how long must I dream?" he asks, as tortured as he is pleased--and in that it harmonizes with other songs like Howlin' Wolf's "I Had a Dream" or Arthur C. Clough's "Don't Wake Me Up, I Am Dreaming," where love and joy and power are attainable in sleep but cruelly withheld by waking life. There is a countermovement, of course, where dreams aren't a sign of what's been taken, but a reminder to firm your resolve and bring about the dreamed-about thing. This principle is encapsulated in Martin Luther King, Jr's "I Have a Dream" speech and much of the positive-themed soul that ran parallel to and followed it. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' "Dream Dream" makes the argument, as Parliament would make in "Fantasy is Reality":Dreams oh dreams baby
Go up like a puff of smoke
Dreams oh dreams baby
Wake up and your heart is broke
And I've got to do something bad
Because it's getting the best of me
I've got to make these dreams a reality Bob Dylan has dreamed liberally throughout his career, from "Bob Dylan's Dream" (a melancholy lament for lost innocence) to "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" (a rollicking, stoned bit of surrealism) to "Series of Dreams" (an intentionally fragmented lyric that challenges the very idea of interpretation). In the most beautiful of his dream songs, "I Dreamed I Saw Saint Augustine," he goes deep into the past, where he meets with the fifth-century philosopher and witnesses the ways that leaders can be destroyed by the crowds that follow them:I dreamed I saw St. Augustine,
Alive as you or me,
Tearing through these quarters
In the utmost misery,
With a blanket underneath his arm
And a coat of solid gold,
Searching for the very souls
Whom already have been sold. Here, the object of desire, a comfortable relationship between saints and the rest of society, is taken violently, as Augustine is hanged (this did not, of course occur in real life). The dream is fully realized in the technical sense: it ends mid-song, and Dylan's narrator (who is, most likely, Dylan himself) wakes to consider what he has beheld:I dreamed I saw St. Augustine,
Alive with fiery breath,
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death.
Oh, I awoke in anger,
So alone and terrified,
I put my fingers against the glass
And bowed my head and cried. Augustine himself, of course, had an abiding interest in dreams. He admitted that they could be deceptive, ways of betraying the world as it is presented to us, though he also thought they could be a form of communication with the divine. Beyond the epistemological dimension, there was an ethical one: if your dream self does something morally wrong, Augustine wondered, are you responsible? (In this he was following the inquiry of several other theologians, including John Cassian, who wondered about assigning culpability for impure thoughts experienced while dreaming.) Augustine decided that a dreamer wasn't responsible for the contents of a dream, but wasn't certain why not. This is obviously one of the issues that Dylan is addressing--if he is there while the mob hangs Augustine, is he implicated? Maybe the dream revealed a secret desire to hang. Maybe an ethical man would have objected, even in his own dream. I'm interested in going back to my conversation about dreaming to discuss this at greater length, but it's trapped in the past and unavailable--or rather, I'm trapped in the present and unavailable to it. Maybe I'll have another dream about a conversation about dreaming, and I can sort it all out. Until then, it's left to me to wonder, and to feel bad for the thing that I said about the boot--again, it looked fine, a nice boot in a nice dream.Labels: ben, folk-rock, rockabilly
posted by Ben
LINK |
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
BAD BOY
Eddie Taylor
Vee-Jay : 1955
Available on: Bad Boy
Charly : 1993
[Buy It]
BAD BOY
The Jive Bombers
Savoy : 1956
Available on: Savoy Chart Busters
Savoy Jazz : 2005
[Buy It]
BAD GIRL
The New York Dolls
New York Dolls
Island : 1973
[Buy It]
BAD GIRL
The Zakary Thaks
J-Beck : 1966
Available on: Form The Habit
Sundazed : 2001
[Buy It]
BAD MOTORCYCLE
The Storey Sisters
Cameo : 1958
[Out of Print]
BAD MAN FORWARD, BAD MAN PULL UP
Ding Dong
Available on: The Biggest Ragga Dancehall Anthems 2006
Greensleeves : 2006
[Buy It]
My bad. *My bad what?* I've always wanted to ask, since I was on vacation or something when that phrase hit the street. Anyway, I am bad, truly. Alex asked me to post, oh, *ages* ago, and I'm only stepping up to the plate now. I've always been bad with deadlines - *superbad* with deadlines, in fact, as a legion of aggrieved editors will tell you. But that's okay, because we all know that "bad" means "good." I believe that this has been traced back to a specific usage in Yoruba, I think it is. But some of us who grew up encased in the mantle of certain religions I won't name here had intuited the concept even before Shaft and James Brown sent entire roomfuls of Andy Rooneys to sputtering outbursts of distress and confusion and ire a generation ago. And for some of us, it all started with "He's a mean motor scooter and a bad go-getter," which is a line from "Alley Oop" by the Hollywood Argyles (1960) that immediately transcended its context and became common if precious coin in the schoolyard vocabulary. Naturally, there's bad and there's bad. If I say, "I think that milk is bad," will that cause you to drop everything and go guzzle it? I mean, you're welcome to do so, and I'll make sure we have some frosty cold bad milk on hand whenever you drop by. And if you hear it said of someone, "He's a bad man," you're likely to think that he cruelly pokes animals and makes merciless fun of small children. But if the same party should be called a "bad boy" instead, all sorts of romantic notions may possibly come rushing into your head. As for bad girls...at my advanced age I'm ambivalent, having seen one of them absquatulate with priceless family heirlooms, and having forsaken at least one European throne for the hand of another. Believe me, good girls are just as hot. But I digress. We also know that bad art is sometimes so bad it's good - in fact it's better than good art, which risks being so good it's bad. Let's face it, badness accounts for a major portion of the cultural history of the past fifty years. Is it running out of fools, or is it just getting started?Labels: blues, doo-wop, garage rock, luc, punk, reggae, rockabilly
posted by Luc
LINK |
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
NORTH TO ALASKA
Johnny Horton
Columbia : 1960
Available on: Greatest Hits
Columbia : 1987
[Buy It]
WHEN IT'S SPRINGTIME IN ALASKA (IT'S 40 BELOW)
Johnny Cash
Personal File
Sony : 2006
[Buy It]
ROCKIN' LITTLE ESKIMO
Bobby Swanson
Igloo : 1959
Available on: Nashville Rockabilly
Stomper Tome : 2003
[Buy It]
THE MIGHTY QUINN
Solomon Burke
Bell : 1969 (Unreleased)
Available on: Proud Mary: The Bell Sessions
Sundazed : 2000
[Buy It]
STEPHANIE SAYS
The Velvet Underground
VU
Polydor : 1985
[Buy It]
THE MIGHTY QUINN
Hopeton Lewis, Henry Buckley & Dienne w/The Gaylettes
Available on: Trojan 60s Box Set
Sanctuary : 2004
[Buy It]
WHEN IT'S SPRINGTIME IN ALASKA (IT'S 40 BELOW)
Johnny Horton
Columbia : 1958
Available on: Greatest Hits
Columbia : 1987
[Buy It]
Readers of Moistworks!
On this, the twenty-third day of our millennium's eighth January it is cold as stone/ice/witch's teat/Kerouac's liver/someone who's digging for gold, and throwing away fortunes in feelings! But nowhere is it colder than in the United States Internets' 49th State of Alaska, which the following bullet points are intended to clear some pretty nasty preconceptions goings on about town about Alaska:
- People in Alaska arrive in Alaska by crossing over a land mass which covered the Bering Strait tens of thousands of years ago
- People in Alaska have a median income of 3.6
- People in Alaska are 5 years of age or older
- People in Alaska are not people in Alaska
- People in Alaska are polar bears
"My initial impression is that Alaska is very very big. And cold, too, sometimes." So writes a friend who's actually been to Alaska. But these, too, are misconceptions. In fact, visiting, or even reading or watching television about Alaska tells us very little about Alaska itself. For this, we must look to song.
The recording artist Jewel, who is from Alaska, and has never recorded a song about Alaska, but other, equally talented recording artists have. Our personal favorite? The Gaylette's "Quinn The Eskimo," which if this wasn't the theme song for Jamaica's bobsled team then, OMG/WTF/BFF/QWERTY/TGIF/UOK?
But, of course, "Quinn, The Eskimo" was written and recorded by Bob Dylan, who had this to say about it in his memoir:On the way back to the house I passed the local movie theater on Prytania Street, where "The Mighty Quinn" was showing. Years earlier I had written a song called "The Mighty Quinn" which was a hit in England, and I wondered what the movie was about. Eventually I'd sneak off and go there to see it. It was a mystery, suspense, thriller with Denzel Washington as the Mighty Xaveir Quinn a detective who solves crimes. Funny, that's just the way I imagined him when I wrote the song "The Mighty Quinn." And, of course, our other friend - let's call him Dan - has this to say about "The Mighty Quinn," the film, which he's actually seen, and which I saw him talking up just the other (equally cold) day, to yet another friend - let's call him Garnette - who is actually from Jamaica but not, to the best of my knowledge, a police detective or Eskimo:A-
Denzel Washington, the police chief Xavier Quinn, from The Mighty Quinn (1989). The general idea is mostly that he's chasing his childhood friend Maubee, who is accused of murder. Quinn considers his case with a lieutenant:
XAVIER: You think Maubee did it? Cut a man's head off?
JUMP: That fucker, he does that! That's why he's like that!
XAVIER: Try and make sense when you talk, Jump.
Denzel gets to do a vague West Indian accent, wear a white suit, and sing.
XAVIER: I had the blues
I had the blues so bad
It put my face in a permanent frown
But I'm feeling so much better, I could cakewalk into town . . .
and
I woke up
One morning
Felt so good I got back into bed
Put that big leg over me mama
I might not feel this good again . . .
Watch me cakewalk, y'all.
The black people in the movie sing "Quinn the Eskimo" at him a lot, and drink beer, and go to work; the white people in the movie lurk around being racists, attempt and fail to sleep with Denzel, and try to overthrow governments. Some of the black people try to sleep with Denzel, too, but that's neither here nor there. Overall it's a pretty accurate picture of the universe. There is no actual cakewalking, which, as I understand it, was a dance that took as the source of its name competitions held by slaveholders, with slices of hoecake as prizes for the best dancers.
A couple hundred people singing in an island juke joint sound like this:
Come all without,
Come all, within
You aint seen nothing like the Mighty Quinn.
No, actually, that's not what they sound like. So: We sincerely hope that clears up whatever mis-and-preconceptions you might have had about Alaska, and goes some way towards freeing your doubting mind/melting your cold cold heartsLabels: alex, country, geography, reggae, rock and roll, rockabilly, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Monday, June 11, 2007
SUMMERTIME
Rahsaan Roland Kirk
Boogie Woogie String Along For Real
Warner Bros : 1977
[Out of Print]
Thanks, perhaps, to the immense popularity of Moistworks dot com, people come up to Ben, Brian, James, Joanna and me all the time: Rank strangers, but they ask us, have we been ignoring you? Or, how do hydroelectric dams work? Or, what have you been listening to? Strangers: I can't speak for Ben, Brian, James, or Joanna (actually, I can speak for Joanna - she's been listening to the Zombies non-stop for the past 18 months or so) - but I've been listening to this spider web of a song: Rahsaan Roland Kirk, in New York, post-stroke, in 1977. From his last recording session.
A SAD SAD SONG
Charles Crawford
Hy-Sign : 1973
Available on: Shreveport Southern Soul: The Murco Story
Kent : 2000
[Buy It]
Stranger, here's something else you'll like: Sir Shambling's Deep Soul Heaven. Countless 45s, annotated, indexed, transferred to MP3, and free to each and every one of you. I downloaded everything - then the iPod and I had a lovely candlelit evening all to ourselves. It's where I found Charles Crawford's "Sad, Sad Song," which also happens to be the only song Charles Crawford recorded. Too bad, no?
. . . . . . . . . .
NOCHE AZUL
Unknown Cuban Orchestra
[Test Pressing for a certain Mr. Madriguera]
Available on: Music of Cuba: 1909 - 1951
Sony : 2000
[Buy It]
MOONLIGHT HIGHLIFE
Dr. Victor Olaiya
Available on : Lagos All Routes
Honest Jon's : 2005
[Buy It]
I've been collecting old Cuban recordings, and - this isn't entirely unrelated - obsessing over Congolese music from the 50s and 60s, and Nigerian and Angolan music from the 60s and 70s. Hoarding it, really, in hopes of dedicating Moistworks to Cuban music, or African music - or bleed-through between the two - for a few weeks, exclusively. But who has the time? So, in lieu of theme weeks, here are two of the loveliest things you'll hear this summer.
. . . . . . . . . .
TOP TEN ROCK
Fuller Todd
King : 1958
Available on: King Rockabilly
Ace : 2001
[Import]
Next up, a kick-ass rockabilly track (which I know next to nothing about - it seems fairly google-proof), one of the best things Willie Colon ever (what's the appropriate cliche here - committed to wax?), and some old, equally google-proof funk from Ohio. Let me know if it gets you through the day.
LA MURGA
Willie Colon & Hector Lavoe
Asalto Navideño
Fania : 1970
[Buy It]
JUNKIE'S HUSTLE
Earth's Delight
Black Forest : 1970 (?)
[Out of Print]Labels: african, alex, cuban, funk, jazz, rockabilly, salsa, soul
posted by Alex
LINK |
Monday, May 21, 2007
NASTY DAN
Johnny Cash
The Johnny Cash Children's Album
Columbia : 1975
[Buy It]
RED HOT DAN
Thomas Waller with Morris's Hot Babies
c. 1927
Available on: Fats Waller and his Friends
RCA : 1992
[Buy It]
DANNY'S DREAM
Jeanne Newman
Available on: Memphis Belles: The Women of Sun Records
Bear Family : 2002
[Buy It]
MIDNIGHT DAN
Julia Moody & Her Dixie Wablers
Available on: Tight Women & Loose Bands: 1921-1931
Louisiana Music Factory : 2000
[Buy It]
DAN THE BANANA MAN
Nettle Brothers String Band
Bluebird : 1938
Available on: Tulsa Twist: Stompin' Singers & Western Swingers
Proper : 1999
[Buy It]
DANNY SAYS
Tom Waits
Orphans, Brawlers, Bawlers, & Bastards
ANTI : 2006
[Buy It]
HUSTLIN' DAN
Bessie Smith
Columbia : 1930
Available on: 1929-1933
Allegro : 1998
[Buy It]
ROLLIN' DANNY
The Fall
This Nation's Saving Grace
Beggars UK : 1985
[Buy It]
&
LONE STAR : KINKY FRIEDMAN ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
by Dan Halpern
The New Yorker : 2006Labels: alex, blues, jazz, rock, rockabilly, western swing
posted by Alex
LINK |
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