Songs For Maddie in Preparation of Seeing Bobby

Alright, so here are some tunes you could be listening to, picked off Bobby's recent concert playlists. This is some of the stuff he's been playing.

The thing to remember with Dylan is that 1) He's got more songs to choose from than any other artist in history and 2) He reinvents his songs constantly.

Bob's been on the road, every year, non-stop since about 1991. Most bands tour in promotion for a new album, do a year long tour, then take a couple years to break and make a new record, then go out and tour some more. Bob just tours. He doesn't stop.

What this means is that he's never really promoting a new album. While most bands will be on a tour for a specific album and play half a dozen or more songs from that album, Bob will play two, maybe three. He's got plenty of other stuff to choose from.

Also, he changes songs. Reinvents them. So that what you hear live is never what you heard on the record. Especially now, with his current band, and especially when they're playing stuff from Bob's early career.

What's exciting is that the music Bobby's making now is unlike anything anyone's ever done. Not anybody, not anywhere. It's this incredible synthesis of what he's been doing for over forty years, and what it turns into is something wholly unique.

Should be a blast.

Okay. So...

Take a listen to Like a Rolling Stone and All Along the Watchtower.

"No reason to get excited," the thief he kindly spoke.
"There are many here among us, who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I we've been through that, and this is not our fate.
Let us not talk falsely now...the hour is getting late."

What's important to remember about Dylan is that no one wrote like this until he came along. Before Dylan, what you had in rock n roll was smooth, easy listening, uncomplicated lyrics, and the subject was always adolescent love. Rarely, someone wrote a song about adult love, but before Dylan, rock n roll (and all other music) was incredibly, undeniably simple in its approach and limited in its subject.

You might take a listen to Ballad of a Thin Man and Highway 61 Revisited, which he's been playing a lot.

God said to Abraham, "Kill me a son."
Abe said, "Man, you must be puttin me on."
God said, "No."
Abe said, "What?"
God said, "You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin you better run."
Abe said, "Where you want this killin done?"
God said, "Out on Highway 61."

Bob's been playing a lot of stuff from his last few albums, so anything there is fair game. But I'd check out Thunder on the Mountain and Summer Days.

Where do you come from? Where do you go?
Sorry that's nothin you would need to know
I've had my back to the wall so long it seem like it's stuck
Why don't you break my heart one more time just for good luck

If we get lucky, he might pull out something rare, like Blind Willie McTell, and that one is definitely worth your time.

See them big plantations burning
Hear the cracking of the whips
See that sweet magnolia blooming
See the ghosts of slavery ships
I can hear them tribes a moaning
Hear the undertaker's bell
Nobody can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell

No matter what, it will be a fun experience, and later on when you tell people about it those of us out there with some taste will be jealous. I'm glad you're coming with me, and I'm looking forward to a good time.

Until then...

The New York Times At Bargain Rates

My goal yesterday was to acquire a copy of the Sunday New York Times. We actually get the Times for free here on campus. They're located in half a dozen buildings, and I'd seen a few upcoming stories in the Sunday edition I really wanted to read.

Little did I know...

I walked a couple blocks that morning to a nearby Shell station, which of course didn't carry the Times. This was disappointing, and since it took me a while to find the newspaper rack (in the middle of the store) it looked like I had been shopping around. Not wanting to look suspicious, I bought a couple Cokes and a bag of chips.

Back home, I got into my car. All the way on the other side of town (I make this sound like a goodly distance...it's not) is a Safeway. I drove across town, decided instead to stop at Starbucks, which is next to the Safeway.

Surely, Starbucks, being modern and hip, will have the Times. In I waltz, and Whammo! their stand claims to sell the very paper I am after. But there are no copies.

Excuse me, mame, but do you have any more copies of the Times?

No. That stand is a liar. We don't carry the Times.

Not wanting to appear suspicious, I order a coffee and a donut.

To Safeway, where I'm sure I can find the times. Can't find any newspaper rack up front, so away I go to the magazine isle, where it makes sense to perhaps find the news. But alas, there are no papers here. Only magazines.

I go to the counter.

Excuse me, mame, do you carry the Times?

Of course. Billy, get this man the Times.

Thank you.

Wait. That's not the Times. I'm a liar. We carry the Wall Street Journal.

Not wanting to appear suspicious, I buy a copy of GQ and Entertainment Weekly. Who the hell knew that Patrick Swayze died anyway?

To another gas station. Conoco. A last ditch effort, which doesn't pay off.

Now, faced with failure, it is obvious there are no Times in Cheney. I must go to Spokane.

Not like I'm doing anything better.

Twenty minutes later I'm in Spokane, at the mall, in Barnes and Noble. I know I will find what I want here, so I take my time. Oh, a newly reduced copy of a collection of Stephen King comics. How lucky I am to have come today!

Excuse me, mame, where can I find the Times?

We don't carry the Times.

Excuse me?

We don't carry the Times.

A pox on your house and a curse on all of your grandchildren.

Thank you sir.

A plague upon the moist places of your body.

Perhaps you could try the Starbucks across the street.

Not wanting to look suspicious, I buy the Stephen King comics.

Across the street, there is a Starbucks. I'm losing hope. I wander across four lanes of vicious traffic and enter this last resort.

My God! There is the Times! It is here! Like finding water on the moon!

My hopes, once dark and dreary, light up like an all night liquor store.

Praise be to Jesus and all the sons of Abraham!

I'll take one of these, mame. And a thousand blessings on all your relatives.

Thank you. That will be six dollars.

No. Just the paper, mame.

Six dollars.

Listen, don't play with me, sugar. I can't take it any more. You don't know what I've been through.

Six dollars, sir.

And thus it was. Six lousy dollars and all of an afternoon, to get the damn Times.

I need a subscription

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BRUCE!

Check your calendars. Bruce is 60 today.

Long live the Boss.

A Rare Book

I've got a book for you, friend.

It's that rarest of books found today in the late hours of mankind: a collection of short stories that will break your heart, not with profound truths (though you'll find them here, over and over again like little stones in a brook) but with a precise and brutal kind of honesty almost unheard of in our fiction. It is even rarer still because it is a first book, and such honesty is hardly ever found in young writers.

The book, Girl Trouble, by author Holly Goddard Jones is one of the finest collections I have ever read, and one of the bravest. Brave, first, because writing short stories today is in itself an act of defiant bravery. Our culture no longer reads them, no longer accepts them, and the short story is winding down a narrow and stoney path that may end with it tumbling over the edge into oblivion. At the bottom it may meet up with epic poetry and iambic pentameter. Anything is possible.

Brave, more so, because Holly Jones lays out, story by story, emotional honesties that cut deep, that draw blood. There is the wounded mother of the story Parts, who finds herself unable to move past the brutal murder of her only daughter. She hates her husband because he is able to do what she cannot, put his life back together. But even after their divorce and his remarriage, Jones shows us an even more bitter and human truth: the mother cannot, in spite of her hate, deny that her husband is a good and decent man.

Such contradictions are wadings out into murky water, a place where few writers dare to go. Most of us want tidy answers, simple truths, with no complications. If a character hates, they hate completely. If they love, their love is absolute.

But being human is a contradiction. And the best of our writers hold the oppositions together.

What may be most stunning of all is Jones's ability to take tabloid scenarios and turn them on their head, finding the emotional core of stories we would otherwise dismiss as juicy gossip. She brings us into the world of the high school girls basketball coach who is having an affair with his star player, the life of a tired, worn down father who's only son is accused of raping a fifteen-year-old girl, the young man who must come to terms with the fact that he's fallen in love with his best friend, another young man, and his own first sexual experience, which turns tragic.

Painted broadly, they are the usual plots of smutty stories. In Jones's hands, they break you. They haunt you. They make you understand just why it is we read at all.

If the short story is to survive, we will need more writers like Holly Jones. More writers this brave, this honest.

Treat yourself and hunt down this debut, because I have a feeling you're going to be hearing Miss Jones's name quite a bit in the future.