In the mid 1980s, Bob Dylan found his career hitting an unmistakable low point. In his autobiography, he recalls “Everything was smashed. My own songs had become strangers to me, I didn’t have the skill to touch the right nerves, couldn’t penetrate the surfaces. It wasn’t my moment of history anymore.”
For a while, Dylan toured with Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers, and it only led him to one conclusion: “Tom was at the top of his game and I was at the bottom of mine.” It was time to pack things in, to exit music altogether.
Before he could retire, Dylan agreed to do some shows with The Grateful Dead. In the summer of 1987, the singer-songwriter traveled to San Rafael, California to rehearse with the band. But it turned out to be trying, more than he could have ever imagined. In Chronicles, Volume 1 he writes:
After an hour or so, it became clear to me that the band wanted to rehearse more and different songs than I had been used to doing with Petty. They wanted to run over all the songs, the ones they liked, the seldom seen ones. I found myself in a peculiar position and I could hear the brakes screech. If I had known this to begin with, I might not have taken the dates.… There were so many [songs] that I couldn’t tell which was which‑I might even get the words to some mixed up with others.
Dylan eventually excused himself from the studios, intending never to return. But an encounter with a local jazz band — call it a simple twist of fate — brought him back. Dylan and The Dead started playing through his big repertoire. It was tough sledding at first. “But then miraculously,” he adds, “something internal came unhinged.” “I played these shows with The Dead and never had to think twice about it. Maybe they just dropped something in my drink, I can’t say, but anything they wanted to do was fine with me.”
It’s a great little story. Even better, the rehearsal is recorded for posterity. Thanks to the Internet Archive, you can sit back and listen to 74 tracks, which includes some classics — “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” “Gotta Serve Somebody,” “Maggie’s Farm,” “Tangled Up in Blue,” “Simple Twist of Fate,” and more.
You can stream all of the tracks right below, from start to end. Or find individual recordings here.
When I was young, the first songs every aspiring rock star would learn on guitar were Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” and Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here.” I dutifully learned both baroque compositions before stumbling on to sludgy three-chord hardcore punk. “Wish You Were Here,” the song is, yes, a staple of high-school talent shows and every singer/songwriter in every coffeeshop, but that’s only because it is an incredibly powerful song from an incredibly powerful record, also called Wish You Were Here (WYWH). The documentary above tells the story of that record’s making. It begins with the atmospheric blues of “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” and its tragic inspiration, Floyd’s former leader Syd Barret—whose absence haunts the band as they discuss the genesis of WYWH—then the film continues on to the band’s collective sense of ennui after the success of 1973’s Dark Side of the Moon. All along, we’re treated to lengthy interviews, impromptu solo performances from Roger Waters and David Gilmour (never in the same room, of course), and fascinating looks at the recording process at Abbey Road Studios. An excerpt from the film description cites more specifics:
Wish You Were Here, released in September 1975, was the follow up album to the globally successful The Dark Side Of The Moon and is cited by many fans, as well as band members Richard Wright and David Gilmour, as their favorite Pink Floyd album. On release it went straight to Number One in both the UK and the US and topped the charts in many other countries around the world. This program tells the story of the making of this landmark release through new interviews with Roger Waters, David Gilmour and Nick Mason and archive interviews with the late Richard Wright. Also featured are sleeve designer Storm Thorgerson, guest vocalist Roy Harper, front cover burning man Ronnie Rondell and others involved in the creation of the album. In addition, original recording engineer Brian Humphries revisits the master tapes at Abbey Road Studios to illustrate aspects of the songs construction.
Richard Metzger at Dangerous Minds reviews the film here.
In November of 1966, the great jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus was forcibly evicted from his apartment in New York City. Thomas Reichman’s documentary Mingus (above) captures the sad moment when the musician, with his five-year-old daughter Carolyn at his side, looks through his scattered belongings the night before city officials arrive to cart everything away.
With the camera rolling, Mingus plays a few notes on a piano and then picks up a rifle and shoots a bullet into the ceiling. He finds a bottle of wine and gives a sip to his daughter. He recites his own version of the Pledge of Allegiance:
I pledge allegiance to the flag–the white flag. I pledge allegiance to the flag of America. When they say “black” or “negro,” it means you’re not an American. I pledge allegiance to your flag. Not that I have to, but just for the hell of it I pledge allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. The white flag, with no stripes, no stars. It is a prestige badge worn by a profitable minority.
Scenes from the apartment are intercut with footage of Mingus and his sextet performing at a little club in Peabody, Massachusetts called Lennie’s-on-the-Turnpike. The combo features Mingus on bass, Dannie Richmond on drums, Charles McPherson on alto saxophone, John Gilmore on tenor saxophone, Lonnie Hillyer on trumpet and Walter Bishop, Jr., on piano. The music includes parts of “All the Things You Are,” Take the ‘A’ Train” and “Secret Love.”
But the film is more about the man than the music. It records an especially painful moment in Mingus’s life. He had hoped to use the loft at 5 Great Jones Street in Greenwich Village as a music school. In the final sequence, a crowd of reporters and cameramen jostle for position to record the humiliating scene as Mingus’s belongings, including his musical instruments, are hauled out to the curb and loaded onto a truck. Tears appear in Mingus’s eyes when the police block him from going back into the building. When the cops find hypodermic needles among his things, Mingus himself is loaded into a police car and taken away.
Jerry Garcia — it would have been his 70th birthday today. But he exited far too soon. At only 53. Here we have him a short year before his death singing a soulful version of Peggy‑O. Lyrics here. More Jerry goodness awaits you at the Free Grateful Dead Concert Archive. Enjoy…
In 1966, John Lennon found himself in Almería, Spain working on Richard Lester’s film, How I Won the War. Between shots, he began writing Strawberry Fields Forever, a song Lennon later called “psychoanalysis set to music” and “one of the few true songs I ever wrote.” Although the song became one of the Beatles’ most refined and intricate recordings, it started off simply, with Lennon trying out lyrics and chords on his acoustic guitar, then recording solo demos upon his return to England. Listen above.
Once the Beatles started recording the song in November, 1966, the band spent at least 45 hours, spaced over a month, working through new versions. Around and around they went, tweaking, polishing, recording new takes, trying to get it right. Eventually the song, as we know it, came together when George Martin, the Beatles’ producer, pulled off the “Big Edit,” a technological feat that involved speeding up one recording and slowing down another and fusing them into the song we know today. (Amazingly, the two tracks were recorded in different keys and tempos.) Strawberry Fields Forever was released as a double A‑side single in February 1967 along with Penny Lane, and it was accompanied by a promotional film, a precursor to music videos we know and love today. You can watch it below.
Some child actors are unendearing, snarky types (think Selena Gomez or a young Dakota Fanning). Others, you root for because even if they’re cloying they seem real (Haley Joel Osment comes to mind).
Daniel Radcliffe, who was most certainly a child when he was cast as Harry Potter at 11, may fall more into the second camp. He’s as hapless and earnest as Harry, and it turns out that he’s endearingly nerdier in real life than Harry himself could ever be.
Radcliffe, who celebrated his 23rd birthday this week, sealed his fate as a bit of an anorak when he appeared on the BBC’s Graham Norton Show and nervously sang Tom Lehrer’s song The Elements.
Maybe Radcliffe’s best subject at Hogwarts would have been potions. On television he admits to being a little nervous before launching into the homage to Lehrer, explaining that he’d stayed up all night trying to memorize the song. One of Lehrer’s classics, it actually sets the periodic table of elements to music. In the best versions, Lehrer accompanies himself on piano while reciting all of the chemical elements known at the time of writing (1959) to the tune of a Gilbert and Sullivan melody.
Harry Potter’s birthday is next week (July 31), the same day author J.K. Rowling celebrates hers. Perhaps Potter fans could cook up a birthday celebration for Potter involving a song about lawrencium, which was added to the periodic table two years after Lehrer wrote his song. As he cleverly noted himself at the end of the tune,
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Ha’vard,
And there may be many others, but they haven’t been discavard
Good stuff. Worthy of the boy who survived.
Kate Rix is an Oakland-based freelance writer. See more of her work at .
Here’s a little something to end your week with a smile: Conan O’Brien improvising the blues with a group of first graders. The segment was taped in Chicago–home of the electric blues–during the Conan show’s one-week stand there last month. O’Brien and his bandleader, Jimmy Vivino, brought their guitars to the Frances Xavier Warde elementary school on the city’s Near West Side to investigate what a group of six- and seven-year-olds might be blue about. The result is the sad, sad, “No Chocolate Blues.”
By day, Bob Egan is a mild-mannered commercial real estate agent in New York City. By night, and on weekends, he transforms himself into something of a pop culture detective, searching out the locations of famous record album covers and other famous pop images. About a year ago he started a Web site, PopSpotsNYC, to share his findings, and the site has been growing in popularity ever since.
Egan’s fascination with album cover locations began in 1977, when he moved to his first apartment in Greenwich Village and discovered he was only a block away from the place on Jones Street where The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan cover photograph was shot in 1963, which showed Dylan walking arm-in-arm with his girlfriend, Suze Rotolo, on a cold February day.
“Living in Greenwich Village in the late 70s,” Egan told Open Culture, “I was surrounded by sites I had read about in college: Bleecker and Macdougal, The Bottom Line, the Mudd Club, CBGB’s, etc. I was soaking up information for years later, I guess, because it wasn’t until the mid 90s that I first went into Bleecker Bob’s and asked if they knew where the cover of Blonde on Blonde was shot. When they didn’t know, I said, Well why not find out myself?”
The Blonde on Blonde location remains a mystery, but Egan has tracked down a number of other Dylan cover locations, including Highway 61 Revisited (the front steps of a town house on Gramercy Park West), Another Side of Bob Dylan (the corner of 52nd Street and Broadway), and the single “I Want You” (a warehouse district on Jacob Street that was torn down long ago).
The Jacob Street location, also the site of a July 30, 1966 Saturday Evening Post cover of Dylan, was one of the hardest to find. “I searched through every curved street in New York and finally found it online in an old photo from the library,” Egan said. “The entire street, which was next to the Brooklyn Bridge, had been demolished 50 years ago, but I finally clicked on a library image and found myself staring straight into the exact spot Dylan was in the photo. I let out a whoop!”
Egan has found the exact locations of record albums and other famous images of a number of artists, including Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, The Who, and Simon & Garfunkel. The choices reflect his taste in music. “I grew up during the classic rock era,” Egan said. “My ‘musical comfort food’ is Dylan, Van Morrison, Lou Reed, and The Grateful Dead.”
Even though the Grateful Dead was a West Coast group, Egan makes use of online tools like Google Street View and Bing Bird’s Eye to explore locations from his New York home. The 1970 album “Workingman’s Dead” is one of Egan’s current projects. “The Dead photo was supposedly taken next to a bus stop in the Mission District of San Francisco,” said Egan. “I bought a vintage map of the bus route from 1969 from the San Francisco transit museum and searched all the bus routes through the Mission with Street View, but still haven’t found it.”
When we asked Egan what drives his obsession, he said, “I think of it like this: If I went to England and someone asked me if I wanted to see Westminster Abbey or Abbey Road, I’d take Abbey Road.”
Below are several examples of Egan’s detective work. To see more, and to read the story behind each location, visit PopSpotsNYC.com.
The album cover that started it all for Egan was The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, featuring Don Hunstein’s photo of Dylan and his girlfriend Suze Rotolo walking through snow at the north end of Jones Street, in Greenwich Village.
The location of the cover photo of Dylan’s 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited posed a challenge. Egan always assumed that Daniel Kramer’s photo of Dylan was taken indoors, but he eventually tracked it down to the front steps of a town house on Gramercy Park West that was the home of Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman. The person standing behind Dylan in the photo, holding a camera by its strap, is the singer’s friend Bob Neuwirth.
What could be more British than the 1979 cover of The Kids Are Alright, by The Who? Actually, Art Kane’s photo was taken in America, at the little-known Carl Schurz Monument in the Morningside Heights area of New York City. Egan gives directions on how to find the place at his Web site.
Egan found the precise location of Henry Parker’s cover photo for Simon & Garfunkel’s 1965 debut album, Wednesday Mourning 3 A.M.: the lower subway platform at Fifth Avenue and 53rd Street, for the outbound E and F lines.
Leo Friedman’s cover photograph from the original 1957 cast recording of West Side Story shows characters Maria (Carol Lawrence) and Tony (Larry Kent) running through the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York. The location was actually one of Egan’s easier discoveries. “How did I find it,” he says on his Web site? “Pretty simple. If you look closely at the garbage can to the left of Maria–the address is right on it! 418 West 56th Street.” (All images courtesy Bob Egan/PopSpotsNYC.com)
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