Review: 'Wake Me, Shake Me: New York City, the '60s & the Pop Youthquake'

Everyone who thinks that the world revolves around New York City should... wait, I'm not sure how to finish that sentence. Actually, a quick look at all the movies, TV shows, and books set in Manhattan alone (there are four other boroughs, you know!) kind of supports the idea that NYC is where everything is. And music? How many histories covering New York's punk scene or The Velvet Underground have there been? "A lot" is the answer.

Yet when considering what must be the most fertile period for pop music, the sixties, the New York City scene is often little more than a sidebar. While what was happening in London, Los Angeles, Detroit, and San Fransisco is often portrayed as downright mythic, what was happening on the East Coast islands seems quaint and scattered, at least when you've finished swapping legends about Lou Reed and Nico. And Dylan doesn't quite count as he was actually from Hibbing, Minnesota, and his New York City phase was just one of many. 

Review: Vinylphyle Edition of The Band's 'Music from Big Pink'

When I last got my hands on a record in Universal Music's new audiophile series, it was the decidedly lo-fi The Velvet Underground and Nico. Despite the dodgy original recording, the Vinylphyle treatment—all-analog mastering from the original master tapes, pressing at the renowned plant RTI by Joe-Nino Hernes, a mastering engineer with an impressive track record—really brought out the the best in The Velvet's noisy, druggy, mesmerizing debut.  

Review: Muddy Waters's 'Folk Singer' (Chess Acoustic Sounds Edition)

The most profound impact Muddy Waters would have on pop was just around the corner when he recorded his second album in the autumn of 1963. Since The Rolling Stones had yet to make Waters a household name in households that didn't include a blues devotee, the folks at Chess needed to think up another scheme to provide their most mature African-American artist with the cross-over appeal to reach the young white market. 

Review: Vinylphyle Edition of 'The Velvet Underground & Nico'

Universal Music recently announced a new audiophile multi-artist reissue series called the Vinylphile series. Each title is mastered from the original master recordings using an all-analog process. They're pressed at the renowned Record Technology, Inc. plant and on 180-gram black vinyl. 

The plan is to release two albums in the series per month, though the inaugural slate includes four covering a pretty wide range of styles: Nat King Cole's The Christmas Song, The Band's Northern Lights–Southern Cross, Bob Marley & the Wailers' Exodus, and The Velvet Underground & Nico. 

Review: 'Tom Petty: The Life & Music'

At a time when traditional rock and roll had seemingly flat-lined, when old-guard bands like the Stones were simply going through the motions and punk seemed determined to burn the very notion of traditionalism to the ground, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers were playing the kind of music the old-guard had been playing when they were still new. Without any of punk's nihilism or politics, any of Cheap Trick's self-effacing irony, or any of the Boss's overcooked productions and song structures, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers kept the purest essence of Rock and Roll alive while every artist was striding away from it like it was yesterday's rib roast. 

Review: 'Backbeats: A History of Rock and Roll in Fifteen Drummers'

Everyone who says the drummer is the least important member of a band has never played in a band. They may not front the group (unless they're Dave Clark) or write the lyrics (unless they're Neil Peart) or play the solos (unless they're Keith Moon) or sing the songs (unless they're Micky Dolenz or Levon Helm or those guys from the Eagles and Grand Funk), but without a solid drummer, a band sounds like a dysfunctional mess. 

Review: Audiophile Vinyl Reissue of Donovan's 'The Hurdy Gurdy Man'

The press loved to cop out and make trite Dylan comparisons, but Donovan was always a much more eclectic creature than that. Even during his early "folkie" days he was playing with jazz on things like "Sunny Goodge Street" that could never be mistaken for Bob. And once he remade himself as a sort of psychedelic-pop mystic, his albums started taking on unique and cohesive flavors quite unlike his initial solo acoustic guitar dominated albums. With his break through, Sunshine Superman, he crafted a fine and florid folk-raga record that made more extensive use of the sitar than The Beatles ever did. With "Mellow Yellow" he committed to coffee-house jazz for much of the record, and with A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, he created a children's record hippie parents surely stomached better than they would The Best of Burl Ives. 

Review: 'Decade of Dissent: How 1960s Bob Dylan Changed the World'

Bob Dylan has been narrow-sightedly lionized for his idealism, misrepresented as a protest singer, and denigrated as a disappointment for embracing beats and electricity. But despite his almost compulsive self-mythologizing, Dylan probably never wanted to be anything more than a successful songwriter, and no one's going to say he didn't achieve that. The number of powerful or timeless songs he wrote in the sixties alone is staggering. That so much of his autobiography was bullshit seems to matter little when you consider that the guy wrote "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Don't Think Twice It's Alright" and "My Back Pages" and "Positively 4th Street" and "Visions of Johanna" and so on and so on. 

Review: Robyn Hitchcock's Memoir, '1967'

Anyone who's fallen under the spell of Robyn Hitchcock's tombstone surrealism should be more than a little intrigued by his foray into the memoir world. The guy can write. Not that you'll necessarily find as much story in 1967 as you will in, say, "Underwater Moonlight". 

As the title trumpets, the narrative stays firmly planted in that year of psychedelic whimsy that would so influence Hitchcock's perspective when he began putting out his own songs a decade later. In '67 he was an unripe 14 year old consigned to boarding school, so do not expect 1967 to be the usual rock and roll bacchanal. Even as far as British schoolboy stories go, there isn't much story here. Young Hitch goes to school, where he encounters a few eccentric instructors, as well as his meathead and groover peers, none of whom we readers ever get to know too well. Clearly much more significantly for the lad, he falls in love with the likes of Syd Barrett, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and The Incredible String Band. Then he learns to play the guitar.

Review: 'Nazz' Vinyl Reissue

In a post-John Wesley Harding/post-Music from Big Pink environment, most rock bands were leaving behind the potent influence of the British Invasion to embrace a more staunchly American, borderline rural sound.  Even British bands were following Dylan and The Band's leads, as The Beatles made the New Orleans-influenced "Lady Madonna" and the Stones channelled Delta country and blues into Beggars Banquet. 

Review: 'High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape'

In the age of streaming, entertainment has become so intangible and ephemeral that it makes sense there would be some pushback. In terms of music, this is most obvious in the vinyl revival, which I consider myself a small part of as both a devoted vinyl consumer and a reviewer of vinyl reissues who excludes other formats. There's no greater antidote to a tinny stream from a tiny phone than a slab of plastic you have to pull from a lovely 12-inch jacket, wipe down, slap onto a turntable, and flip halfway through. It may sound silly or self-contradictory, but vinyl returns the soul to music by making it corporeal again.

One of the weirder offshoots of the current vogue for physical media is that cassettes have made a bit of a comeback too. Clearly, I get vinyl. Cassettes? Not really. They always sounded terrible, with their hiss and muddiness. They all look alike. Their cover artwork is shrunk smaller than a CD insert. They unravel. They melt in the sun. If you were to ask me my thoughts on cassettes, I'd say they suck. 

But while reading Marc Masters's new book High Bias: The Distorted History of the Cassette Tape, I realized my own relationship with cassettes is more complicated than this. Not as far as pre-recorded music is concerned. I think I owned about a half-dozen pre-recorded tapes when my urge to own Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn, and Jones, LTD., caused me to shift formats because the Record World in which I was shopping only had that Monkees album on LP. I bought the vinyl and never looked back to pre-recorded tapes. 

Blank tapes, however, were a different story. I loaded up on them, using them to make straight copies of albums I'd accumulated on LP and CD so I could listen to them in my Walkman or car, mixtapes I compiled from my collection, and, after I got my first Tascam 4-track, recordings of songs I'd written. The sound of a cassette demo was shoddy and hissy, but haunting and real in a way that recordings made with the high-tech digital recording apps so readily available today are not.

Because my story is not unique, the cassette is. Vinyl is cooler and sounds better. But you can't record on it. You can't personalize it. And the idea that cassettes were great because they personalized music is the main thrust of High Bias. Masters provides one short chapter on the format's development and role as a vessel for pre-recorded music before getting into the format's really interesting qualities: its integral role in the history of hip-hop and lo-fi indie rock, DIY music distribution, bootlegging, and Portastudio demoing. He discusses the live tape trading networks that sprung up around The Grateful Dead, Bob Dylan, Throbbing Gristle, Sun Ra, and The Butthole Surfers. He explains the unique cassette cultures in Syria, India, and Egypt that don't really have American equivalents. He embraces the unraveling and the hiss.

 In the midst of the vinyl revival, there have been all sorts of books about that format's history, art, maintenance, and collectability. There aren't that many books about the cassette, but High Bias is provocative and satisfying enough to fill the void on its own.

Review: Bob Dylan's 'The Philosophy of Modern Song'

How is someone like Bob Dylan going to write a book that purports to explore The Philosophy of Modern Song? Such a title seems to suggest an academic approach to analyzing songwriting. Dylan may be clever, but he's no academic. It implies a study performed with discipline. As anyone who ever read his rambling autobiography Chronicles: Volume One or the liner notes of Highway 61 Revisited knows, Dylan sneers at discipline.

Review: 'Portrait of a Phantom: The Story of Robert Johnson’s Lost Photograph'

In 2005, guitar salesman Zeke Schein found an original photograph depicting a man he was convinced was Robert Johnson on ebay. He won the auction after bidding $3,100 (the actual sale price was $2,176.56), passed the photo around to various bluesmen and a forensics expert, and not only amassed evidence that his picture is most likely the real deal (though it remains officially unverified), but identified the photographer and the second man in the photo: Johnson’s traveling companion and collaborator, Johnny Shines. The discovery of the photo was significant because there had previously only been two known photos of the man who was arguably the key figure in blues—more because he wrote timeless songs and developed a complex guitar technique than because of any cheesy Faustian bargain myth.

Review: 'Melody Makers: Should’ve Been There'

Melody Maker was generally more significant for Barrie Wentzell’s striking B&W photos of sixties and seventies pop and rock stars than the depth of its reportage. So Leslie Ann Coles’s documentary Melody Makers: Should’ve Been There is a fitting tribute to the long-running UK music paper. The storytelling is as flimsy as a puff piece on Yes, but boy, those Wentzell photos that fill the screen throughout this film’s 88 minutes are impressive. Peter Gabriel resplendent in his daisy headpiece. Brian Jones cradling his sitar. Tina Turner commanding the stage as a Screaming Mimi in a mini.

Review: 50th Anniversary Edition of 'The Band'

Bob Dylan and The Band spent the summer of ’67 in Woodstock, isolated from the sitars, Mellotrons, and psychedelics that defined the season. When they emerged, they put out the two albums that redefined Rock & Roll for back-to-the-roots ’68. But whereas John Wesley Harding felt like Dylan’s most personal album since Another Side, The Band’s Music from Big Pink was clearly made under Dylan’s heavy influence. It’s an excellent record, but their own defining personal statement was still a year away.

The Band finds The Band leaving the Dylan-collaborations and covers behind for a completely self-created work. Robbie Robertson emerged as a songwriter with a vision nearly as individual as his mentor’s. Much has been made of the idea that The Band is a sepia snapshot of America’s past seen through the eyes of an (Canadian) outsider. However, many of Robertson’s characters seem to be born Americans, and he dramatizes them with such commitment and authenticity the backwoods funk of “Up on Cripple Creek” or the farming woes of “King Harvest (Has Surely Come)” feel completely homebrewed in American soil. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is so soaked with humanity that it’s easy to forget that its sympathetic narrator fights alongside the Civil War’s villains (apparently that’s what staunch Civil Rights activist Joan Baez did when she turned it into a hit).

Review: 'That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound: Dylan, Nashville, and the Making of Blonde on Blonde'

Nashville will always be the home of country, yet Rock & Rollers such as Paul McCartney, The Beach Boys, Neil Young, Mike Nesmith, The Byrds, and R.E.M. all recorded there. This pop gravitation toward Music City started in earnest when Bob Dylan cut Blonde on Blonde there in 1966. If there’s an artist who tends to lead his peers around like a Pie-Eyed Piper, it’s Bob.

Dylan’s time in Nashville is the focus of Daryl Sanders’s That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound: Dylan, Nashville, and the Making of Blonde on Blonde. At 200 pages, the book is a quick read, kind of like what a 33 1/3 book would be if the series banned its writers from pretentious tangents and navel gazing. Sanders keeps the narrative focused, describing the circumstances behind the writing and recording of each of the album’s fourteen luxurious rough gems. There’s light analysis (Sanders notes that “Just Like a Woman” is “intentionally sexist” without daring to explain why Dylan would want to write such a thing) and pretty extensive biographies of the great Nashville session men who brought Rock’s first double album to life.

Sanders could have pumped a bit more life into Nashville, itself. He plainly states the significance of having a Rock musician record in the Country Capital, but there’s only spare sense of the abrasions of two worlds colliding. The Nashville Cats think it’s a bit weird that Dylan’s songs are longer than three minutes, and some bluegrass-playing studio visitors sneer at bluesy stuff like “Pledging My Time”, but the only thing that really shines a light on the town’s friction is a short but scary anecdote in which Al Kooper discusses being chased around town by a clan of Good Ol’ Boys. Yet for a tidy rundown of session facts spiced with quotations from a lot of the guys involved in them, That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound hits the spot.

Review: 50th Anniversary Remix of The Band's 'Music from Big Pink'

When Dylan emerged from his cocoon with John Wesley Harding in late 1967, he seemingly wiped away the psychedelic excesses he helped set in motion with Blonde on Blonde instantaneously. One of the first major new bands to define the Dylan-provoked “return to roots” movement was The Band. However, the group was never as simple as their Antebellum South image implied.

First of all, they weren’t really a new band—they’d been Dylan’s backing band and collaborators for well over a year—and only one member of the group hailed from the American South. The rest were Ontario boys. The music on their debut album, Music from Big Pink, similarly defies dismissive pigeonholing. While John Wesley Harding and the eponymous debut by Creedence Clearwater Revival— that other misleadingly located face of new Americana— are as stripped to the bones as Sgt. Pepper’s or Days of Future Past are lavishly over-dressed, Music from Big Pink is a complex production full of small details that bring its sepia-hued snapshot of a dead world to vivid life. Eerily echoed backing vocals or organ lines skid out of the deep background. Trippy, leslied guitar lines creak in the foreground. Most intricate of all is The Band’s gorgeous loose-weave harmonies.

These fine details have never popped more than they do on the new, remixed edition of Music from Big Pink. The original mix sounds flat in comparison, though the new mix retains the original’s warmth, crunchiness, and antique atmosphere. Mastering is significantly louder, though at least in its vinyl incarnation, it doesn’t sound excessively loud. That 180-gram vinyl edition is presented as a double-LP set with both discs spinning at 45rpm.

For its fiftieth anniversary, Music from Big Pink is also available as a CD Super Deluxe box set and a pink vinyl edition.

Review: 'Gathered from Coincidence: The British Folk Pop Sound of 1965-1966'

In 1963, The Beatles revolutionized pop with a distinctly English ear for melody and harmony and an uncompromised big beat yanked from the yanks. That same year Dylan rearranged the face of folk with a ragged edge that brought the sanitized harmonies of The Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul, & Mary to Earth and a surreal ways with words that kicked it back into the cosmos. As dissimilar as their styles were at the time, there was already some cross-pollination between folk and pop happening. As early as 1962, Dylan rocked up his hootenanny with the obscure “Mixed-Up Confusion”, and The Beatles’ debut single, “Love Me Do” was more folk than pop with its turgid beat, absence of electric six-strings, and wheezy harmonica. Once Dylan and The Beatles became aware of each other, such heavy petting was over and the marriage was officially consummated as Dylan’s influence loomed all over “I’ll Be Back” and much of Beatles for Sale and The Beatles’ beat inspired Dylan to plug in… though his stripped down, thumping sound was always more Stones than Beatles. It took The Byrds to pointedly fuse Dylan’s far-out poetry and The Beatles’ clean jingle-jangle, officially putting a face on the new folk-rock genre.

Between Mersey Beat-dominated ’64 and psychedelic ’67, folk-rock was the dominant pop style for young, white artists. Even such hardened souls as the Stones, Kinks, and Pretty Things got sucked into it. Appropriately, Grapefruit Records’ new triple-disc collection Gathered from Coincidence: The British Folk Pop Sound of 1965-1966 limits its scope to those two years, and while it’s reasonable to wonder if its location and period limitations result in a limited listening experience, they don’t.

Instead of just spotlighting songs that reflect The Byrds’ 12-string shimmer, Gathered from Coincidence presents a variety of sounds that fall within its narrow premise. There is electric jangle (Peter and Gordon’s “Morning’s Calling”, The Silkie’s “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away”, The Hollies’ “Very Last Day”) but also solo acoustic pieces (Donovan’s “Catch the Wind”), full-band acoustic rambles (The Kinks’ “Wait Til the Summer Comes Along”), heavy-beat rock (The Pretty Things’ “London Town”, Manfred Mann’s “If You Gotta Go, Go Now”), shades of distinctly British baroque pop (Marianne Faithfull’s “Come and Stay with Me”), bubblegum folk (Twinkle’s “Golden Lights”, Heinz’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”), elaborate productions that fly in the face of folk’s dogged simplicity (Murray Head’s “The Bells of Rhymney”, Justin Hayward’s “Day Must Come”), and some of the turgid, old-fashioned stuff that Rock & Roll mostly swept away (Ian Campbell Folk Group’s “The Times They Are-A Changin’”, First Gear’s “Gotta Make the Future Bright”).

As you probably sussed from the artist and song names, Gathered from Coincidence contains some big groups and a lot of Dylan covers. It also has some varying perspectives, as parodies such as Alan Klein’s “Age of Corruption” and Micha’s “Protest Singer” protest the protest singers, though neither are particularly listenable (however, John Cassidie’s “Talkin’ Denmark Street” is the uncanniest Dylan send up I’ve ever heard). Fortunately, such bum tracks are pretty rare and Gathered from Coincidence ends up a mostly consistent and varied collection of songs from the beginning of pop’s most fruitful period.

Congratulations to Nobel Prize Winner Bob Dylan!

I always knew that "The sun's not yellow...it's chicken!" was "a new poetic expression within the great American song tradition." Now the rest of the world does too, as Bob Dylan has received a Nobel Prize for Literature for doing that kind of thing on a regular basis for 55 years. No word yet on how much Tarantula had to do with the award. Congrats, Zimmy!

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 222

The Date: May 9

The Movie: Don’t Look Back (1967)

What Is It?: There was one hell of a swelled head under all that frizzy hair, and Dylan lets it take over the screen for better and worse in D.A. Pennebaker’s classic, warts-and-all documentary. As soon as you laugh at one of D’s clever snipes, you feel the sudden pang of guilt for the victim that he surely didn’t feel when this movie was shot in 1965. When that victim is dear Donovan (whom Dylan eviscerates by saying “That’s a really good song, man”!), the guilt stings all the worse. Still, this is who the guy was, and the fantastic music he performs in the film almost justifies the egomania. After all, he does finish off Donovan by playing “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”.

Why Today?: On this day in 1965, Dylan plays the Royal Albert Hall concert featured in the film.