Ask Greil: February 15, 2023

Three unrelated comments/questions (TIM JOYCE):

1) I've been listening to the alternate takes of “Not Dark Yet” on Fragments and I've been truly amazed by how different the song is. Often with Dylan one thinks "oh, this version is so much better he should have used it on the album," etc. But in this case I feel like the alternate versions—and the one that made its way on to the album—sound almost like different songs and any of them can stand alone, could have been used in that format on Time Out of Mind. It's almost as if the song stays perfect whichever way he decides to arrange it and it just so happens that he landed on the eerie, haunting version on the album when he released it. I usually don't say that with his outtakes. This is my favorite collection of outtakes that Dylan has put out amongst his archival releases.

You’ve hit on the oddest and most counter-intuitive aspect of this collection/selection. Ordinarily you’d expect two versions of the same song with completely different words—if not a different mood, a different atmosphere—would not fit with other songs as if there was no essential difference at all. But that’s what happens all over Fragments. This a real field of study, and I hope Timothy Hampton takes it up.

2) Driving home the other day a song came on satellite radio by a band I have a deep, active dislike for—Jefferson Airplane/Starship (both iterations of the band I don't care for). But the song is one of my absolute favorite songs from the late ‘70s—“Count on Me.” It's the only song of theirs I've ever loved and even though I can't stand 99% of their catalogue, this one song supersedes—however briefly—my dislike of them. I almost didn't want to admit to myself at first that I loved the song so much! I'm sure you can come up with hundreds of examples... But can you name a few songs that stick out that you adore in spite of despising the artist/band?

Other than Journey, I’m not sure there are bands or performers I despise. Could care less about, think they subvert the openness and playfulness and deep seriousness of real music from the Five Keys “Dream On” to Eminem’s “Stan”—and here I mean the likes of Ben Harper (no, wait, I do despise him, for the horrible albums he’s made and self-flattering covers of people on the order of Mississippi John Hurt) and Lucinda Williams, sure. There’s slime all over everything they do, the slime of narcissism—and that’s what they’re selling. But let’s take it down to two of the most boring bands ever—REM and U2. But then came “Losing My Religion”—what is his religion? What has he lost? Have you done the same without even knowing it? And what is it about the swirling, rhythmically exact music that makes you forget about answering any such questions? And then there’s “Elvis in America” where Bono is both prideful and humble, almost acting out the notion that if he can fill himself with enough wonder at who Elvis was and what he did, how he failed, why he vanished from the earth, he himself could become Elvis. And you can hear him turn his back on the notion, and go back to the band.

3) Live albums are tricky creatures as they so often fail to capture—it's almost impossible to capture—the sweaty intensity of the in-person performance. Up until recently, the only live album that consistently did that for me was Take No Prisoners by Lou Reed. But since Neil Young's Live at the Roxy came out I find myself playing that live version more than the original Tonight's the Night album. That's something I never thought I'd feel about a live performance. Can you name any artist/band that you love whose live album (focusing mainly on one studio album) is as good or better than the studio version?

No. But questions like this almost always instantly empty my mind. I start thinking about Cat Power’s recent show where she performed the songs from Bob Dylan’s 1966 Manchester concert, aka The Royal Albert Hall live album—so you’ve got a live show version of a live album that was not a studio album now self-covered live, and now we’re lost in the woods.   

The first live album that made any impression on me was the Rolling Stones’ Got Live If You Want It. Today it might sound like a lot of junk thrown together without anyone even trying to get it right. But that was what was so exciting about it. Whether you conceptualized it or not, that was why it seemed so powerful, so unprecedented: the whole idea of getting it right, as if in rock ‘n’ roll there could be any such thing as the right being torn down to the ground and tossed out the window. And then you found out that people made live albums and re-recorded the vocals and guitar solos in a studio and dubbed them in over a rhythm section. Or recorded a whole album in the studio and dubbed in crowd noise. So what are the live albums that carry that sense of open possibility, the feeling that on some special night a song could take its players anywhere? Bootlegs.

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Have you seen The Lying Life of Adults on Netflix? If you have, I’d be interested if it evoked Time Out of Mind—the odd, vaguely menacing scenes she finds herself in. The estrangement from the beliefs. —ANDREW CALLIS

Any work as strongly crafted and emotionally deep as Time Out of Mind is going to evoke its presence in countless ways and situations. I haven’t seen The Lying Life—I’ve never been able to maintain interest in an Elena Ferrante adaptation—but I don’t doubt it might be there.

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How do you like Mystery Train being smack #50 on David Bowie’s 2013 100-book reading list? Do you think he was an enlightened person? —JENGIZ HAAS

Just about anyone would be happy to be on a list with The Great Gatsby. Even better than the list, in some ways, is John O’Connell’s “Bowie’s Bookshelf,” with uniquely incisive critical captures of each of Bowie’s choices. Was Bowie an enlightened person? I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone I’d call enlightened.

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I know I asked you before your view on Robbie Krieger's book, but I'd now also like to ask you if you read Ray Manzarek's Light My Fire and what you thought of it.

And if you can believe I'm not asking for a list as opposed to an observation, I want to ask if you ended up reading John Densmore's other books (Unhinged and Seekers) and if any other books on the Doors ever met with your approval. —BEN MERLISS

I didn’t read Ray Manzarek’s book. I’d heard him often enough on the radio and he gave slickness a bad name. I looked at John Densmore’s other books without finding anything I wanted to know about. I read other books on the Doors that were written before mine and they told me no one was writing about what I wanted to write about, so that was helpful. I always liked Eve Babitz’s Morrison portrait and found nothing in Joan Didion’s “Waiting for Morrison,” even though John Densmore did. Most interesting, most helpful, real treasure chests: Greg Shaw’s 1967 interview with the band in Mojo-Navigator and Ben Fong-Torres’s 2006 The Doors. Otherwise it’s released music, the Boot Yer Butt bootleg set, Densmore’s Riders on the Storm, and Oliver Stone. And all the times I saw them in 1967, and all the times Larry Miller played them on KMPX, the first rock ‘n’ roll FM station in San Francisco. And then hearing them on a half dozen stations all through the late ‘90s.

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I'm sure you're too discreet to tell us what it's like to talk to Bob Dylan, but...what's it like to talk to Bob Dylan? —CYRUS ROBERTSON

I approached Bob Dylan after a Joan Baez show in 1963, having just seen him sing but not knowing who he was. We exchanged a few words: eleven, to be exact. I met him in 1997 in New York when he was receiving an award. That’s it. What’s it like to talk to Bob Dylan? Be on your toes.

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Hello Sir! Hope you’re still doing well. In Mystery Train you said that Elvis’ Golden Records Vol 4 did not contain a single interesting track. Considering that "A Mess of Blues" and "It Hurts Me" (among others) were on that LP, would you like to revise your comments just a little? Regards —JAN-ERIK KJESETH

No. I never liked "A Mess of Blues." So many of the performances are tired retreads of songs already done to death, from "What'd I Say" to "Ain't That Lovin' You Baby."  The hits or at least played-on-the-radio-more-than-once numbers collected here are third-rate ("[You're the] Devil in Disguise," "Indescribably Blue") and “Just Tell Her Jim Said Hello" is pathetic—can you really imagine Elvis, or anyone with that voice, wanting someone to hug him and tell him it'll be all right? It's as wrong for Elvis as it is for Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller (he'll be 90 in March—happy birthday), who wrote it.  The whole thing just reeks of the bottom of the barrel—the bottom of the barrel falling out.

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[The morning after I wrote this, you posted your fine pieces on early Reed, Haynes & “Heroin.”]

David Denby’s recent appreciation of Norman Mailer in the New Yorker mentions Mailer’s second wife Adele Morales. Another college-educated New York Jewish writer a generation later, also attentive to masculinity, was Lou Reed, whose second wife was Sylvia Morales.

Kinfolk, connection or coincidence? Thanks, Greil. —MIKE MOSHER

I have no idea. It’s not not an uncommon name.

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I was so pleased to discover that you like Lesley Gore. I hadn't seen The TAMI Show for years when the DVD came out about 15 years ago. Sometimes you return to a movie like that and discover that something you only gave passing thought to earlier was really something. I was knocked out by her. She had terrific stage presence and really commanded your attention. James Brown is still the best thing in the film, but she's every bit as good as the Stones. Maybe better. —JOSEPH TAYLOR

You know, everyone is good in that movie, including the audience. Jan and Dean sidewalk surfing on skate boards at the start. Marvin Gaye. The Miracles (speaking of miracles—the whole line up in one place). Gerry and the Pacemakers. Moulty's hook.  Maybe the Beach Boys seemed out of their element—I mean, they seemed intimidated. And the Rolling Stones did not embarrass themselves following James Brown. Not even close.

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Hi Greil,
I hope 2023 brings with it a year of good and renewed health.

As a longtime Bruce Springsteen devotee, I (along with many other “Tramps”) have hoped that the Holy Grail of “lost” Springsteen albums will someday surface—“Electric Nebraska.”

I’m starting to think the existence of such a beast is mostly wishful thinking.

However, Ryan Adams just released his unique reworking/reinterpretation of Springsteen’s Nebraska, and I find the results remarkable. It might just fill the void of wanting Bruce’s lost masterpiece. Ryan’s takes on “Mansion on the Hill” and “State Trooper” are especially noteworthy, if not downright transcendent.

I’m wondering if you’ve heard the Ryan Adams version of Nebraska and what your thoughts are on it. —BILLY INNES

Springsteen did record the Nebraska songs with the band, but ultimately decided that the home cassette he’d made had the sound and feel that he and the songs wanted. Just like Bob Dylan recorded “Blind Willie McTell” more than once with a band, but has only released the rehearsal with Mark Knopfler.  I haven’t heard the Ryan Adams version of Nebraska.

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Loved Folk Music! I like your word for what Dylan does with his characters: inhabit. It’s like he’s living there, but there’s room for others—it’s richer than simply “becoming” the character. Aside from Dylan and Laurie Anderson—are there others that have that have struck you with that mysterious ability to have multiple points of view happening simultaneously in their performances? I hear it in cabaret singers like Agnes Bernelle, but also in Mississippi John Hurt—detached but connected. —ANDY CALLIS

I like what you say about there being room for others in Bob Dylan’s songs. That’s something he focuses on in The Philosophy of Modern Song—the way confessional or autobiographical songs make no room for the listener, freeze the listener out. But I think what we’re really talking about are not necessarily songs with multiple points of view so much as plainly fictional songs, songs regardless of any personal-experience origins erase them and operate on a fictional plane. And maybe Robert Johnson and Warren Zevon did that best. And together!  Here is Zevon with the Hindu Love Gods on Johnson’s “Travelin’ Riverside Blues.”

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“Ode to Billy Joe” takes place in Carroll County. Is this the same county as mentioned in Porter Wagoner's “Carroll County Accident”? In my mind I picture it being the same.

Thanks for taking the time to answer questions and I offer my thoughts and prayers on the loss of your daughter. —JAMES PROCTOR

“Ode to Billy Joe” doesn’t actually take place in Carroll County—the reference to “the Carroll County picture show” means the movie theater is in another county than the unnamed county where the family gathers to talk about Billy Joe jumping off the bridge—which if you accept the idea that “Ode to Billy Joe” is an allegory of the lynching of Emmett Till would be Leflore County. That isn’t to say you aren’t fundamentally right: “Carroll County Accident” (1968) is as much a spin-off off “Ode to Billy Joe” (1967) as you’ll ever hear, and that includes the Dylan/Band “Clothesline Blues (Answer to Ode)” (1967).

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I picked up The Old Weird America at a library books sale and just finished it. It is the first book I have ever read that I wanted to start again as soon as I finished. I especially loved the chapter on Dock Boggs and how you worked through so many influences from a generation or two prior to Dylan and the Band. I immediately got Harry Smith's Anthology and another collection called American Epic. Thank you for writing such a lyrical, informational book.

It got me thinking about how you worked so hard to capture the feeling of the basement tapes and the feeling of the original influencers. One current musician that exhibited the lyrical, emotive, storytelling element was Kelly Joe Phelps. His “Dock Boggs Country Blues” is the immediate tie-in, but so much of his music was like this. I attended a show in Boulder in which he shared about his performances that he tried to live each story fresh every night. He never knew how the songs would go until he started playing them. Having been to half a dozen of his shows, he was always like that live. He passed last year and a lot of heartsick fans are still in mourning. If ever you are looking for another subject for a music biography, please consider Kelly Joe Phelps. Guy was extraordinary. A virtuoso. —DANIEL WEISS

Watching videos of Kelly Phelps performing at the Freight and Salvage in Berkeley in 2012, I can see what you’re talking about. To me he sings not from inside the songs but on top of them, as vehicles for his guitar playing, which may be more than they need. He reminds me of Chris Smither in his modesty, but Smither has a presence that while never erasing his modesty can also escape it, until you realize that whatever he’s singing, the moment it makes is a singular event in the life of the song.  I’m glad you find sustenance in Phelps, but for me he’s not quite there.

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