Bob Dylan's Medal of Freedom Flashing

Our good friend Bob Dylan was awarded the Medal of Freedom yesterday from President Barack Obama. It's the highest award a United States civilian can win - and it balanced on his neck just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine.

Let us celebrate by pondering one of Bob's earlier epics, 1964's "Chimes of Freedom." The song is about a group of friends who run for cover during a storm and the things the lightning flashes symbolize - which is basically everything. Ask not for whom the lightning strikes — it strikes for thee.

Far between sundown’s finish an’ midnight’s broken toll

We ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing
As majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds
Seeming to be the chimes of freedom flashing
Flashing for the warriors whose strength is not to fight
Flashing for the refugees on the unarmed road of flight
An’ for each an’ ev’ry underdog soldier in the night
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing

I was never much of a fan of "Chimes of Freedom" as it originally appeared on Another Side of Bob Dylan; his performance is a little lackluster and I was frankly bored by it. 


But that changed when I saw the Martin Scorcese Bob-doc No Direction Home, which featured the following tour de force live performance from the 1964 Newport Folk Festival. 


The parade of imagery Dylan hurls upon the audience is almost overwhelming and it;s hard not to be pulled along by the sweep of his youthful vigor - he had just turned all of 23. 





Dylan seems truly visionary here, especially when you consider how far ahead of the culture he was  - this was around the same time as The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night. 


Like pretty much every Dylan tune, "Chimes of Freedom" was covered by The Byrds, who gave it their trademark Rickenbacker 12-string jangle, a sound I never tire of.





Congrats Bob. We are all starry-eyed and laughing.


Get Bob's version of "Chimes of Freedom" from Newport '64 on iTunes here.

Happy 71st Birthday, Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed (Maybe A Little)

Happy 71st to Rock Turtleneck's guiding light and blinding genius Bob Dylan.

Dylan has been making records for over 50 years and is still getting it done. One of his best songs of his so-called "late" period (which began around TIme Out of Mind in 1997) is 2000’s “Things Have Changed,” recorded for the soundtrack of the excellent Michael Douglas film Wonder Boys.



“Things Have Changed” nods slyly to his famous anthem “The Times They Are A-Changin” and perfectly caputres the film's theme of writer's block, middle age and the loss of passion. “I used to care, but things have changed,” he sings.







The tune rides on a sweet acoustic groove courtesy of one of Bob's best-ever bands featuring Larry Campbell and Charlie Sexton on guitars, Tony Garnier on bass and David Kemper on drums. 


Lyrically, Dylanesque epigrams abound. Here are three favorites:


Lots of water under the bridge, lots of other stuff too.
Don't get up gentlemen, I'm only passing through.


All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.


Feel like fallin’ in love with the first woman I meet, 
puttin’ her in a wheelbarrow and wheelin; her down the street.



"Things Have Changed" won Bob an Academy Award for Best Song. Dylan is a well-known cinephile, and he seems genuinely thrilled to win in this clip from the 2000 Oscars.





Things have not changed all that much for our hero Dylan. He used to care, and he still does. He is still plenty inspired and young at heart. He just wrapped up a tour of South America and supposedly has a new album in the can and coming out soon. When it comes out, I'm going to put it in a wheelbarrow and wheel it down the street.



Cheers, Bob. Happy Birthday.


Buy "Things Have Changed" on iTunes here.

Disco is Dead, Long Live Disco: R.I.P. Donna Summer and Robin Gibb

The Rock Turtleneck office disco ball is flying at half mast today in the wake of this weekend's deaths of Donna Summer and Robin Gibb. Both were in their early 60s and both died of cancer.

Summer and Gibb's band the Bee Gees were probably the two biggest acts of the disco era. Though I'm not sure either one of them thought of themselves as disco artists. Like most musicians, they were just trying to make the best sounding records they could.

"We never heard the word disco," Robin Gibb (left in photo) is quoted as saying in his New York Times obituary published today. "We just wrote groove songs we could harmonize strongly to, and with great melodies. The fact that you could dance to them, we never thought about."

But people did dance to them, they danced the world over, they danced all night, and they danced very well indeed. And they should be dancing. Take this guy on the left for example - hey, isn't he the one who asked me to go "off the menu" at the massage parlor last weekend?

In terms of great-sounding records, Summer's big 1977 hit "I Feel Love" is one of the greatest ever.

Produced by German uberproducer Giorgio Moroder, who met the Boston-raised Summer when she was living abroad, the tune came out in 1977 sounding like it had been sent from the future.

With Summer cooing over a hyper-robotic synthesizer bed, It's one of the coolest sounding juxtaposition of woman and machine, a track that can be enjoyed in the middle of the afternoon on your iPod, with a nightclub nary in sight. (I strongly recommend the eight-minute 12" version, linked below.)



R.I.P. Robin and Donna. The dance floor in heaven just got a little more crowded.

Buy on iTunes:
Bee Gees:  Saturday Night Fever
Donna Summer: "I Feel Love" (12" Version)

Can't You Hear Me Knocking: Mick Taylor at the Iridium

Last Thursday, my friends Dan, Kevin and I had the good fortune to see legendary guitarist Mick Taylor at the famed New York City jazz club Iridium.

Taylor, as any Rock Turtleneck reader surely knows, was the "other Mick" in the Rolling Stones for most of what is surely the greatest run of consecutive classic LPs ever recorded. His soaring, stinging leads can be heard especially all over Exile on Main St. and what I think may be the greatest record of all time by anyone, Sticky Fingers. His leads were a thrilling counterpart to Keith Richards' chugging rhythm guitar and gave the Stones a dimension that their music lacked before and ever since.

Surrounded by an ad-hoc band of studio and touring pros, Taylor gave a master class in emotion and feel at his Iridium set. He does not play particularly quickly or rely on any sort of gimmicks or fancy effects. Rather, he simply makes every note count, and he knows intuitively exactly what notes to play.

Mick went light on the Stones material, playing only the instrumental coda of "Can't You Hear Me Knocking" (he wouldn't be able to get out of there alive without doing so), and pulled out his Gibson SG for a hot version of the Robert Johnson standard "Stop Breakin' Down," which the Stones covered on Exile.

Mick played some of his signature slide leads here, which more than made up for the fact that this "early show" was only an hour or so long. Some guy sitting WAY behind me was kind enough to record it.

Making the show particularly special was the fact that my buds and I scored tickets in the very front of the venue. I was literally right against the stage, close enough to reach out and touch the man, were I not a man of wealth and taste. (All of these pictures were taken with my iPhone, with no zooming or cropping necessary.)

While waiting for someone with the same surname Turtleneck to get out of our reserved seats, we struck up a very brief conversation with longtime Rolling Stone writer David Fricke. He was kind enough to write a detailed review of the show, which you can read here.

Mick Taylor has fallen on hard emotional and financial times in recent years, but has lost none of his musical gifts. I suggest he cash in his pedigree with a tell-all book about his years with the Stones, replacing Eric Clapton in the Blues Breakers and backing up Bob Dylan on the Infidels album and underrated 1984 European tour.

Here's the "other Mick" and the original Mick, back in the day, doing some fine work on the country romp "Dead Flowers." 



Buy the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers on iTunes here (no zipper required)

Don Draper Never Knows: The Beatles on Mad Men

Sunday night’s episode of Mad Men ended with Don Draper's mod young wife Megan handing him The Beatles' new LP Revolver and telling him to put on “Tomorrow Never Knows.” 

My first thought watching it was “this must have cost a fortune.” Indeed, the show paid $250,000 for the song, a huge amount for a single use. You can read the show-biz backstory here. In Rock Turtleneck’s opinion, 'twas a bargain. For no song better illustrates how quickly the times they were a-changin’ in 1966 and how Don Draper, once the living vanguard of Madison Avenue, was now hopelessly and arrogantly out of touch at age 40.

Earlier in the episode, we learn that Don can't even wrap his head around the A Hard Day’s Night-era Beatles of two years earlier, and already the Beatles and the culture had moved on. The culture train has left the station and Don is standing on the platform, drinking a scotch.



With the possible exceptions of "A Day in the Life" and "I Am the Walrus," “Tomorrow Never Knows” is probably The Beatles’ most far-out track. 

A Lennon tune written around the single chord of C, It was the last song on Revolver, but the first to be recorded. 


Which means that the Fab Four went straight from largely acoustic (though equally brilliant) Rubber Soul tracks like "In My Life" into demoing an LSD-fueled track with lyrics based on the Tibetian Book of the Dead (which was referenced in an earlier Mad Men episode when Roger Sterling and his young wife take LSD.) 

As Lennon said of Revolver, “Rubber Soul was the pot album, and Revolver was acid.” 

Much of the genius of “Tomorrow Never Knows” lies in Ringo Starr’s innovative, hypnotic drumbeat, which many have called a precursor to techno and house music. Ringo also came up with the song's title.

Lennon originally wanted a chorus of singing monks in the background but settled for the seagull-like squeals made from tape loops of guitars played backwards. He sang the song through a rotating Leslie speaker, which is normally used for Hammond organs, giving the song its trippy effect.



It’s amazing how quickly bands like The Beatles were evolving back then, making radical changes from one month to the next. Now bands like U2 and Radiohead evolve over years and even decades, with spaces between albums that are as long as the Beatles' entire recording career.


46 years on, “Tomorrow Never Knows” still sounds ahead of its time. A few years ago, for the soundtrack to their Cirque de Soleil show LOVE, the producers did a remix combining "Tomorrow Never Knows" with George Harrison's Indian drone "Within You, Without You." Turn off your mind relax and float downstream.

Buy The Beatles on iTunes:

Revolver

LOVE soundtrack

R.I.P. MCA of the Beastie Boys

Left to Right: Mike D, Ad-Rock, the late MCA

Great sadness today to hear of the death of Adam Yaunch, aka MCA of the Beastie Boys. MCA had been battling cancer for a few years and missed the band's deserved induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame last month.

MCA was like the George Harrison of hip-hop: the third banana in the biggest group, with a devotion to Eastern mysticism (he was a Buddhist) and a great sense of humor, who produced films and staged benefit shows (the Tibetan Freedom Concerts).

The Beasties were true rap pioneers, doing what Elvis did with rock & roll - taking the black man's music and making it their own.

But one of the things that made them really interesting was the way they experimented with other types of music, from hardcore to jazz instrumentals to straight-up arena rock like "Sabotage," driven by MCA's strummed bass line.

I saw the Beasties at Lollapalooza in 1994 on Randall's Island in NYC, probably the same week as the above appearance on Letterman. They performed in orange prison jumpsuits and rocked the house, far out-rocking the headlining Smashing Pumpkins, who I stopped liking after their obnoxious performance that night.

Their fantastic LP Ill Communication was one of the key records of my summer of '94 soundtrack (along with Beck's Mellow Gold, Urge Overkill's Saturation and Hole's Live Through This), and for that I thank them.

When my homies and I needed to do some pre-gaming before heading downtown, we would break it down and put on "Root Down."



R.I.P., MCA. Because you can't, you won't and you don't stop.

Buy the Beastie Boys' Ill Communication on iTunes here.