Off to see Jeff Tweedy tonight, which should be highly entertaining. I've seen Wilco a few times now and they always surpass expectations. They're a bit like Don Mattingly, the great Yankee first baseman, in that regard (When Yogi Berra was asked if Mattingly had surpassed expectations with a particularly great season, he said, "I'd say he's done more than that"). Baseball and humour are themes that both Wilco and Tweedy have frequently explored. Wilco's summer tours have often used minor league ball parks for venues, for example - I saw them in August of 2009 at Dutchess Stadium in Wappingers Falls, New York - and Jeff Tweedy is a very funny person. He could have been a stand-up comic, probably, but I'm glad he devoted himself to music. Here's a clip that I hadn't seen before, which shows his sense of humour and his musicianship, a cover of Bob Dylan's "Simple Twist of Fate": (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRuU_IkGUyo&feature=related). And go see Tweedy (and/or Wilco) in person if you can.

Big news: Roxy Music are touring (Europe only, so far) and Bryan Ferry has got a new album coming out in October. Ferry is another of the great songwriters whose beginnings were influenced by disciplines outside of music - in this case, visual art. He studied with Richard Hamilton (who's been called the English Warhol) at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, but eventually opted for music, luckily for us. Of course, his work is deeply rooted in the visual: glamour, style, and the emotions that they simultaneously express and mask. Perhaps no recording artist has ever explored romance, in all its facets, as deeply as Ferry.
I mentioned on Sunday that Ferry (like Lou Reed and Ian Hunter) was greatly influenced by Bob Dylan, as both a writer and a vocalist. Of course, he's made no secret of the fact - recording cover versions of many Dylan songs and eventually releasing an entire album of them: Dylanesque (2007). You can clearly hear a similarity in tone (by which I mean attitude) to Dylan on many of his performances, especially the early ones. As well, many of his early lyrics feature a relentless verbiage that is, well, Dylanesque. Check out "Do the Strand", for an example. As time went on, he became more economical with his language. A good example is "Avalon", where a fairly innocuous story of romantic indecision is punctuated with the single word from the title, which opens a window into a world of romance (in its broadest sense) and imagination.
Over the past few years, Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry have finally received some of the credit they've deserved for a long time: some writers have said that they're second only to The Beatles in terms of influence on British rock music, which sounds about right to me. But there's one thing that always bothers me when I think about Ferry and Roxy: when people are asked to name their favourite album, no one (that I know of, anyway) ever chooses mine - Siren from 1975. Tomorrow, I'll try to explain my reasoning.

Bob Dylan, as a vocalist, is hugely important. First of all, his rhythmic delivery is awesome. Listen to "Like a Rolling Stone", for example, where his singing is easily the most powerful timekeeper in the group. Also, the melodic contours that he finds are not the usual ones. Try singing "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue", and you'll see what I'm getting at. Third, he makes us consider what we are getting from listening to a singer. For instance, many people who see him in concert are astonished at how he changes the phrasing and melodies of his songs, almost to the point where they are unrecognizable - one of the main reasons that he does so is a simple one: he doesn't want the crowd singing along with him. And finally, in terms of influence, leaving aside the obvious examples (virtually any "singer-songwriter"), the rockers Lou Reed, Ian Hunter and Bryan Ferry are directly and deeply in his debt as vocalists. Listen to "Prominent Men", "Sweet Angeline", and "Virginia Plain" for evidence. I don't know about you, but I don't even want to imagine a world without The Velvet Underground, Mott the Hoople, and Roxy Music. Could these groups have existed without Dylan? The answer, my friend... (Suggested listening: "Queen Jane Approximately")

Dylan's switch to electric instruments is rightly considered a pivotal moment in rock history. Both Don't Look Back (1967) and No Direction Home (2005) do a good job of documenting some of the fallout. But just as significantly, Dylan's lyrics were undergoing a radical transformation at approximately the same time. He was moving from the tangible world to a symbolic one, and his lyrics became both more puzzling and more direct - quite an achievement. When songs become symbolic, the listener is called upon to do much of the work, i.e. to return the descriptions and events back to the physical plane of existence. Let's take a look at a song performed in Don't Look Back - "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" from Bringing It All Back Home (1965):

You must leave now, take what you need, you think will last
But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast
Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the sun
Look out the saints are comin’ through
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue

The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense
Take what you have gathered from coincidence
The empty-handed painter from your streets
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets
This sky, too, is folding under you
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue

All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home
All your reindeer armies, are all going home
The lover who just walked out your door
Has taken all his blankets from the floor
The carpet, too, is moving under you
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue

Leave your stepping stones behind, something calls for you
Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore
Strike another match, go start anew
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue

No doubt there are some wonderful lines in this song (the one about the lover and his blankets, for example, has always struck me as hilarious). But without symbolic interpretation, the listener might feel a little stranded. The first verse, for example, tells us about "[our] orphan with his gun/ Crying like a fire in the sun", who might be thought of as representing something that has been abandoned during a life, but which now has a brooding or even threatening presence and can't be ignored. And the second part of the line ("Crying like a fire in the sun") asks if one more person crying really matters in a world like this one. But of course, these are only some of the possibilities. The fun and usefulness of this type of writing is found by each individual listener (or reader), and the meanings keep on changing, and adding up.

At this point in his career, Dylan was probably looking for a way of expressing his ideas without giving himself away entirely - many of the confrontations in Don't Look Back seem to emanate from this point, it seems to me. He had already written "Blowin' in the Wind". What else needed to be said in a song about civil rights? Some have said that Baby Blue is Dylan himself, and that this song was written to keep himself bucked up in the face of the many gathering storms ahead. I doubt we'll ever know if that's true, but I do know that it can do so for us, if we want it to.

I'm always amazed when I think about Bob Dylan's output from 1963 to 1966. During this three-year period, he wrote and recorded Freewheelin', The Times They Are A'Changin'; Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bringin' It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde. How could this happen? Six albums in three years, two of them in Rolling Stone's all-time top ten, some of the greatest songs ever written, covered by thousands of artists in all styles (one of the greatest jazz performances I've ever heard was the bassist Dave Young's solo version of "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright". If anyone out there knows of a recording, please let me know.) At first glance, this explosion of creativity seems to have come out of nowhere. For example, his first album (released in March of 1962, a full year before Freewheelin's May 1963 release) contained only two original songs and eleven covers of standard folk songs.
His autobiography, Chronicles, Volume One, contains some clues. The first chapters deal with the characters and musicians that he met in his early days in Greenwich Village. He also shows great knowledge of the traditions and artists of folk music. And there are some wild and wonderful descriptions of rock and roll singers: for example, Roy Orbison " sang like a professional criminal." But the most telling sections are about the reading that he was doing in those days. He was playing as much as he could, but making next to nothing. Therefore, he was forced to crash on couches of friends and peers. During his free time, he read their books - everything from the classics to history, modern literature to poetry, medicine to philosophy. He's very honest about how he went about it - starting in the middle and going back to the beginning if he liked the book, and not necessarily finishing everything, for instance, but never stopping the reading itself.
I had a music teacher once who would try to encourage his students to keep slogging away by saying, "You have to take root to fly." It seems like that was what Dylan was doing in those days: taking in the sights, sounds and people of New York; listening deeply to folk, blues and rock and roll; singing and playing at every opportunity; and reading creatively, with great width and depth. The results? The astonishing period from May 1963 to May 1966 described above, and an incomparable recording and performing career of over forty-eight years that continues to this day.