Steve Jobs' Favorite Bob Dylan Song: "One Too Many Mornings"

The next time someone mocks your all-consuming obsession with Bob Dylan, you can now say "Let me tell you about another Bob Dylan fanatic — a different-thinking kid named Steve Jobs."

With the release of Walter Isaacson's epic, authorized, eponymous biography of Jobs, we are learning much about the man that had only been hinted at before, including his love of Dylan.

A Jobs/Dylan summary from Rolling Stone detailed that Jobs and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak first bonded over their love of Dylan's music. They would go on expeditions to Berkeley to track down reel-to-reel Dylan bootlegs and would spend hours listening dissecting his lyrics. This, said Jobs, "struck chords of creative thinking." Well put.

We also learn that Jobs and Dylan met a couple of times, first in 2004 when Dylan's tour rolled into  Palo Alto, CA.

On their second meeting, Jobs told Dylan his favorite song of his was "One Too Many Mornings," a forlorn ballad from his 1964 The Times They Are A-Changin' LP, and Dylan played it for him in concert that night.




Dylan has revisited "One Too Many Mornings" again and again throughout his career. He did an epic version on his 1966 tour with The Hawks (later The Band) with a nice support vocal from Rick Danko on the word "behind."

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A few years later, a gum-chewing Dylan took a crack at the tune with his pal Johnny Cash during the sessions for Nashville Skyline, which also produced their wonderful album-opening duet of "Girl from the North Country."



Dylan did a sweet version during the final weary leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour in 1976, captured on the underrated Hard Rain live record and film.



Like Jobs and Dylan, "One Too Many Mornings" was done by Joan Baez. Jobs earned his status as a hall-of-fame Zimmermaniac by dating Baez in 1982, when he was 27 and she was a cougarish 41.

She also supposedly had a fling with John Lennon during the height of Beatlemania in the mid-60s, making her the only person to TCB with the three most creative people of the last 50 years. Maybe Isaacson should do a book about her next.



One question remains: of the many versions of "One Too Many Mornings," which one was Jobs' favorite? I guess the answer is blowin' in the wind.

Get yer Bob Dylan on iTunes here

Wilco's Tiny Desk Concert: A Gen-X Perfect Storm

The idea of Wilco playing an acoustic set up in the offices of NPR as part of their Tiny Desk Concert series is some sort of left-wing Gen-X, latte-loving, Wall Street-occupying perfect storm. A bigger mutual love-fest is unimaginable.

Good thing Wilco is an transcendent band that's well suited for any venue, from big old theatres to tiny desks. And they sound fantastic and full here, even with virtuoso drummer Glenn Kotche reduced to playing a drum kit from Staples.

It's important to note that while Jeff Tweedy may be the leader, singer and songwriter for Wilco, he's far from a solo act. Everyone has an important role to play and does it well, particularly with the backing vocals of nimble bassist John Stirratt and pan-instrumentalist Pat Sansone (pictured above with Tweedy.)

WIlco play four songs: "Dawned on Me,"" The Whole Love," and "Born Alone" from their new record The Whole Love, and go out with Yankee Hotel Foxtrot's "War on War." Without further ado, here's the band in action.



When you're done, you can also download an mp3 of the set here. Might as well - your tax dollars are paying for it!

Buy Wilco's The Whole Love on iTunes here.

Hail! Hail! Chuck Berry: Happy 85th Birthday

Rock Turtleneck wishes a Happy Birhtday to Chuck Berry, who turns a whopping 85 today.

The idea of an 85 year-old rock star is a little disconcerting, sort of like a 30 year-old paperboy or a 12 year-old bride. 

But he is one of the two or three key creators of the greatest music genre known to mankind. Chuck wasn’t all that young when he got started — he didn't his first hit "Maybelline" till he was around 30. If Elvis was still alive (he is, by the way), he would be a relatively young 76 right now. 

Let’s celebrate the great man with a clip RT has been wanting to showcase for a long time. It's from the must-see 1988 documentary Hail! Hail! Rock & Roll, Keith Richards' musical love letter to his idol. After Keith admits it's because of Chuck that he plays guitar, we cut to a clip of them having a row over the intro to "Carole." Chuck is a mean sonofabitch, but then again, so is Keith. And when the two go at loggerheads, my advice is to get out of the way.

Chuck is a legendary miser. Rather than pay the road expenses for a proper band, and plays with a pick up band of local musicians wherever he goes. He drives himself and inisists on being paid in cash before every show. And he's still doing it at 85.

Keith made Hail! Hail! Rock & Roll because he knew Chuck deserved better, and wanted to give him the experience of playing live with top-shelf musicians, including the great drummer Steve Jordan (who would join Keith in the X-Pensive Winos), Chuck's original pianist Johnnie Johnson, Eric Clapton, Robert Cray and Keith himself, who plays some mean guitar throughout. We are all the better for it.

HB and TCB from the RT, Chuck. 

Get some essential Chuck Berry on iTunes here

Wilco: They Love Their Label (And Nick Lowe Too)

After taking a week or so to mourn the official passing of R.E.M., I have been getting into Wilco's latest release The Whole Love big time. Like R.E.M. from the early 80s to the mid-90s, Wilco is on a seemingly endless run of great albums, each with a distinct personality, each showing growth from the previous effert, and The Whole Love shows the band putting on a dazzling display.

If you have not ordered The Whole Love yet, I strongly suggest you spend a couple extra bucks on the Deluxe Edition, which contains four extra songs. It's worth it alone for their cover of Nick Lowe's "I Love My Label," a tune from Lowe's classic first LP Jesus of Cool.

The tune has special meaning for the band. Like many big acts whose major label conglomerate contracts have expired, Wilco has started their own label dBpm records. I think it stands for "decibels per minute" which is some sort of music-geek joke. I'm laughing on the inside.

Here's the band recording "I Love My Label" in their Chicago loft studio, quite possibly the greatest man-cave in North America.



Lowe opened for Wilco on their most recent tour, and has become something of an elder-statesman among singer-songwriter types. A recent profile of Lowe in the New York Times mentioned that Lowe had been in pretty dire financial straits in the early 1990s until a cover of his song "(What's So Funny About) Peace, Love and Understanding" was featured on the soundtrack to the 1992 Whitney Houston/Kevin Costner film The Bodyguard. The soundtrack wound up selling 40 million copies and Lowe made a life-changing pile o' quid as a result. I like it when the good guys win.

Here's Lowe doing a countrified version of his musical 401(k) on Jimmy Kimmel's show.


And here's a vintage clip of Lowe and his great band Rockpile (featuring Dave Edmunds) doing his classic "And So It Goes" (also from Jesus of Cool) on The Midnight Special in 1978. Hmmm.... sounds a lot like Wilco.


Buy on iTunes:
Wilco, The Whole Love (Deluxe Edition)
Nick Lowe, Jesus of Cool

Here, There & Everywhere: Macca Ties the Knot Again

Cheers to Sir Paul McCartney and his new bride Nancy Shevell, who exchanged vows in London yesterday. This is their official wedding portrait, a very cheeky, slightly twee snapshot taken by Paul's daughter Mary.

The former Ms. Shevell is intelligent, well liked by Paul's children, business-savvy (she runs her family's trucking company and is on the board of New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority) and independently wealthy. And these are just a few of the ways she has a leg up on Heather Mills, Paul's gold digging, double-crossing second wife, who is quite possibly the most despised woman in England.

Interestingly, the two made it legal at Marylebone Register Office, the same place where Paul wed Linda Eastman on March 12, 1969. The first marriage of the Cute Beatle set off riots in front of the courthouse. Here's some footage from the era, set to a couple of Paul's early solo career odes to Linda, "Maybe I'm Amazed" and "Lovely Linda."



After yesterday's wedding, Paul, Nancy and a legion of fabulous guests (including Ringo and Ronnie Wood) allegedly had a raucous party at Macca's digs in St. John's Wood, a stone's throw from Abbey Road studios. (Rock Turtleneck's Evite apparently got snagged in our spam folder. Bugger that.) Supposedly the cops were called to the house due to noise complaints from neighbors. Really, who calls the pigs on Paul McCartney on his wedding day — Yoko?

Anyway, let's go out with Paul's 1991 Unplugged performance of "Here, There and Everywhere" from Revolver, which he has said may his favorite song he's ever written. And he's written some good ones.



Like yours truly, Macca has married himself a Jersey girl. Well done, old man! Hope the third time's the charm.

Buy on iTunes:
The Beatles
Paul McCartney

R.I.P. Steve Jobs: The Next Dylan

The "Next Dylan" was a moniker that was thrown around often beginning in the late 60s, used to describe the heir to the Bob Dylan visionary troubador throne, when it became clear that it was a throne Dylan was never really interested in in the first place.

The "Next Dylan" title was almost exclusively applied to singer songwriters with acoustic guitars, gravely voices and harmonicas around their neck, including Leonard Cohen, Loudon Wainwritght III, Bruce Springsteen, Tim Buckley, Jeff Buckley, Beck and Conor Oberst. Yet the label never stuck, chiefly because anyone with a Dylan-sized ambition would never follow directly in Zimmernan's footsteps. They would blaze their own trail and find a different way to change the world.

That is exactly what Steve Jobs did. But rather than a guitar and a harp, technology for the masses was the medium for his message.

Jobs was a well-known music lover, not surprising for the inventor of iTunes. Among living artists, Jobs held Dylan in the highest regard, even to the point of dating Joan Baez in the 1980s. Jobs used Dylan and The Beatles as inspiration in his own work. He featured Dylan and John Lennon in Apple's famous "Think Different" campaign, and would name-check them in public any chance he got, as this montage demonstrates:

Like Dylan, Jobs had a blazing intelligence, vision and drive that enabled him to do things in his chosen field that no one had ever dreamed of and make it look effortless.

Both men would surely say that it was simply the result of hard work, and while this is true, they both posess that spark of genius that comes along a few times in a century.

As a Jobs quote from his obituary in the New York Times noted,  Apple's amazing products were, above all, a triumph of taste, of “trying to expose yourself to the best things humans have done and then trying to bring those things into what you are doing.”

Rock Turtleneck tries to do the same, and has found immeasurable inspiration from all of these men over the years, and herewith  with two of Steve Jobs' favorites from Bob Dylan and The Beatles.





R.I.P. and TCB, Mr. Jobs. You are missed.

Living in the Material World: The George Harrison Documentary Worth Getting HBO For

I’m actually thinking about starting a subscription to HBO tonight, just so I can watch George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Martin Scorcese’s three or four-hour, two-part documentary about the magical, mystical Beatle.
The film was created with the cooperation of George’s wife Olivia and son Dhani, and features a treasure trove of previously unseen footage, plus interviews with rock royalty including Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, Tom Petty, and wife-swapping buddy Eric Clapton.



The following preview clip recalls the history of perhaps his greatest song, “Here Comes the Sun,” which he wrote whilst strolling around Slowhand’s country estate. Interestingly, "Here Comes the Sun" is the most downloaded Beatles song on iTunes. Take that, Macca!



Harrison was an interesting cat, perhaps the most interesting of The Beatles, and a documentary devoted solely to him is more than justified. He helped define the school of modern rock guitar playing, was one of the first to merge Eastern and Western music, and wrote several of the Beatles most beloved tracks. He was also the coolest-looking Beatle. Amazingly, he was only a wee 26 years old by the time The Beatles broke up. 


At the same time, Mr. Within-You-Without -You was also a devotee of recreational drugs, a lifelong womanizer, a race-car driver and a devoted gardener. And only through the quick thinking of his wife and a nearby lamp was he not the second Beatle to be assassinated. So there is much to chew on here.


Living in the Material World won’t be available on DVD until the spring of 2012, which sounds like a long time from now. Bad Karma on the part of on the Harrison organization  for holding me hostage to premium cable. Very un-George-like.

As long as we’re on the subject of “Here Comes the Sun,” let’s go out with a lovely version of that optimistic Abbey Road ditty from the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971. I believe the guy accompanying him on guitar is the late Pete Ham from Badfinger.



Get George and the Fabs on iTunes:
The Beatles
George Harrison

Presenting Rock Turtleneck's Turtleneck Rockers of the Month: Johnny Headband

The Rock Turtleneck in-box is overflowing with solicitations from hungry young musical artists looking for the career-making RT Seal of Approval, the musical equivalent of getting your novel in Oprah's Book Club. Very few make the cut, but a recent musical solicitation, "Over There" by Johnny Headband makes the grade in spades, and it all started with a mutual love of turtleneck-based rocking.

Dear Rock Turtleneck,
I'm writing on behalf of a music video I just directed. In the video the two main band members wear turtlenecks and sport coats. The video was just released on Monday, and I found you today — the blog serving the aging hipsters. Hopefully it doesn't feel like a waste of 3.5 minutes, as I enjoy your blog writings, and have believed in the school of Stevie Wonder since I was a young lad (pre turtleneck years). 
Best regards,
Chad Thompson


Chad Thompson (I'm not sure if he's on the right or the left) is very modest. He not only co-directed the video, he's in the band along with his brother Keith, and in "Over There," they have created one of the catchiest most infectious pieces of electronic pop I've heard in a long time.

"Over There" recalls contemporary electronic artists like MGMT and Air, but also reaches back to Roxy Music and Berlin Trilogy-era David Bowie. The video, directed by Chad and Keith, is a hoot too - these guys know what they're doing in every way.

Johnny Headband - Over There from Johnny Headband on Vimeo.

Johnny Headband is a Detroit-based quartet that formed in Detroit in 2004. "Over There" is the very promising first single from the forthcoming record Who Cooks for You, to be released in early 2012. You can download "Over There" on iTunes here and their earlier records Happiness is Underrated and Phase 3 here.


Looking for the RT Seal of Approval? Drop us a line at rockturtleneck@gmail.com