The Old, Weird America

Most of you reading this know I'm a big Bob Dylan fan. While he was born and raised in Minnesota, he spent just a year or so in the Twin Cities in 1959 before leaving for New York City. He was briefly enrolled at the University of Minnesota and living in Dinkytown. I was able to drive around the campus and see some of the places where Dylan was, though some of the buildings are now gone, as it was nearly half a century ago he was there.

I had a more interesting Dylan moment, if you will, when I was at James & Mary Laurie, Booksellers in downtown Minneapolis. Deep inside this twining bookstore, in the labyrinthine downstairs, I heard the opening notes of "Lo and Behold"...no, really.

Yes, The Basement Tapes was playing as I perused the cavernous, copious stacks in, appropriately enough, the basement. I was so tickled, I spent twenty minutes going through the extensive vinyl collection to find a Dylan album to buy and mark my experience.

Here's Dylan's version of "The House of the Rising Sun" - this is the kind of material he was learning and playing in Dinkytown before he left to find Woody Guthrie in the Big Apple:



And here's The Band from 1970 with a Basement Tapes cut, "This Wheel's On Fire". (That's also the title of Levon Helm's extremely readable and informative autobiography.) Those of you who've seen Absolutely Fabulous will recognize this is the original version of that show's theme song.

Hope You Guess My Name

Earlier this month, I went to the Torpedo Factory's holiday party. The history and mission of that facility is fascinating. It's inspiring to walk by it nearly everyday.

I've been to a couple of these Factory events before. All the artists (well, all who want to sell something) spruce up their stalls with food and drink. A band usually plays downstairs on the first floor.

This year, interestingly enough, the band appeared to be some young twentysomethings who perched themselves on one of the second floor walkways. I heard them shuffling through Tom Petty's "Breakdown" when I arrived. I was surprised, as I expected non-descript jazz, honestly.

I tacitly approved their choice and walked through various exhibits, turning back to look at the band every so often. One thing I noticed (and heard) was the bassist hadn't shown up yet (the keyboardist was covering with his left hand).

After a few other songs, I heard the beginning of The Rolling Stones' immortal "Sympathy for the Devil". It's classic rock, yes, but among the Stones' honor guard warhouses, this one still sounds thrilling everytime you hear Charlie Watt's initial drum patter and Jagger's taunting "yow's!"



I walked back by to watch the band up close. I noticed the singer and guitarist had lyric sheets in front of him. I nodded along to the music, mouthing the words, noting the crawl of meandering guests throughout the three levels of the Factory. Very nice, I thought.

Then they got to this line: "Made damn sure that Pilate washed his hands and sealed his fate" This kid pronounced it not like "Pilot" but rather "Puh-la-tee" .

Maybe he works out a lot to his girlfriend's fitness DVD collection, okay, but has he never gone to Sunday School?!? Where was a Hells Angel when you needed Keith Richards to order an immediate beatdown?




Like the Stones and their fans at Altamont, the late, great Hunter Thompson also had an unfortunate experience with rogue biker gangs and their decadent culture. However, Raoul Duke definitely knew how to pronounce all the lyrics in "Sympathy for the Devil"!! From the first chapter of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

"One toke? You poor fool! Wait till you see those goddamn bats. I could barely hear the radio...slumped over on the far side of the seat, grappling with a tape recorder turned all the way up on 'Sympathy for the Devil.' That was the only tape we had, so we played it constantly, over and over, as a kind of demented counterpoint to the radio. And to maintain our rhythm on the road."

I think the Stones probably asked too much for the rights to SftD for its inclusion in Terry Gilliam's 1998 film adapation of HST's novel. Otherwise, the song surely would've been snaking through the following scene. Regardless, imagine the kid singer I saw as Tobey Maguire's clueless hitchhiker. I sure did. Being ferociously schooled in the desert by Dr. Gonzo is an apt punishment.

Sailing to Byzantium

The Coen Brothers are back to form with a great adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's spare, violent meditation on morality and mortality No Country for Old Men.

I've thought Joel and Ethan have been off their game a little to a lot for the past several years. Even O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which I eventually came around to (largely because of the music), is still too knowing and pretentious for its own good. This latest one, however, is a worthy successor and maybe even equal of similarly themed Fargo and Blood Simple. It's definitely their most mature film.

I'd read McCarthy's book, so I was eager to see the Coen Brothers' first literary adaptation. It's just about exactly like the novel, which is a good thing. The dialogue is lifted verbatim for long passages/scenes at a stretch. The film's end (which elicited several groans and snorts in my theater) is directly as it is on the book's last page. It's not a Hollywood ending, as the saying goes, but it's the right rumination to end a genre picture that turns out to be a thoughtful treatise on the measure of men. (McCarthy's title comes from a Yeats poem, by the way.)

It's kind of movie that will stay with you days after you see it and quite some time after that. I highly recommend it.

Norman Mailer RIP

The Tasmanian Devil, if you will, of 20th century American letters has at last shuffled off this mortal coil. Well, more likely, God the ref waved Life off and called it a TKO. Norman Mailer may have been in corner near the end, but he was still trying to punch his way out of it.

I was working through The Executioner's Song earlier this year. It was my Delaware beach read. I remember thinking at the time that Truman Capote had done the real life crime novel better with In Cold Blood, which I reread last year in conjunction with the Oscar winning film. I will likely go back and finish TES now, as well as finally reading my dogeared copy of The Naked and the Dead.

Interestingly enough, last night, I watched The Hoax, a fine film from earlier this year about the early 70's faked autobiography of Howard Hughes. A McGraw Hill literary agent says Hughes probably chose Irving to write his book rather than Mailer because "Mailer would've made it about himself". That's likely true.

I once saw a clip of Norman Mailer actually slugging (and biting!) it out with none other than a very young actor named Rip Torn. I don't care what kind of writer you are, and Mailer was a damn good one - if you can hold your own with Artie from The Larry Sanders Show, you're something: