On Halloween night we went to see Kris Kristofferson and John Prine. Kris, now 79 years old, did an introductory set of about 40 minutes, and John joined him at the end for two songs. Kris was there on the stage, humble, just picking his guitar and singing the old troubadour tunes, just like I expected.
After the break, John Prine came out with his band and was there for a full hour and twenty minutes. The video below is the encore, when Kris came out with him and joined them, singing along. It turns out, Kris was mostly loving it up there.
Kris discovered John some 45 years ago and they have been friends ever since.
While I went about my own life, Jerry Jeff Walker has also gotten old. I would never have recognized him, but the voice is unmistakable. There are so many songs that he wrote, but the most famous one was Mr. Bojangles, which is often attributed mistakenly to Bob Dylan.
Everyone has memorable or favorite songs. When we hear them, we are instantly transported back to a time in our lives, sometimes to a specific period in our lives, like the senior year of high school, or even a specific day, like that first night with that special girl by the camp fire.
I noticed that when I hear such a song, I instantly mind-travel back to that period, or season, or day, when I first heard the song, or when it was popular on the radio. Some of the associations are so vivid, I can smell the air, I can see where I drove when I heard the song, sometimes as long as 40 years ago.
So I did something that I could not have done only ten years ago: I made a list of 50 songs that had special meaning to me. Predictably, many of those were songs that were popular in my youth and younger years when I tended to be more into music. To refresh my memory, I sampled collections of hit songs in some of the target years, and favorites jumped out at me that I had forgotten about.
Then I went on iTunes and bought the collection one song at a time (unless I already had it on CD somewhere). There are no artists with two songs on the list. I just picked the top 50. I called the playlist “Nostalgia.” When I play that list, in random order, I can literally mind-travel, jump around over the years and decades, and imagery of long past events flash bright in front of me, feelings and moods come to life, and the people of those days are suddenly around again – copies of their former selves, of course.
My mind always ponders mathematical implications. I realize that my list is unique in the universe. If a million other people all picked their own top 50 favorite songs and called the list “Nostalgia,” every list would be different. I’d venture to say that if I asked any random person about their list, I might not find a single one of my songs on their list. Yet, every one of us would have those unique, personal experiences when mind-traveling down memory lane.
Why can music do this to us? How is the melodic word, propped up by rhyme and rhythm, able to create such powerful associations in our heads to recreate the smells, the feelings, the places we lived when we were first imprinted with these songs?
Modern human evolution covers only a very short time span, perhaps 200,000 years, perhaps much less. Until very recently, like only a few centuries ago, knowledge and experience had to be transmitted from one person to another, from one generation to the next, by spoken and most likely sung words. Music and poetry may well have evolved to be so important in our experience now because it helped package knowledge and experience by creating associations. It’s easier to remember a poem that rhymes and is associated with a melody than it is to remember just spoken words. Those of our ancestors that were able to make those powerful associations and benefited by surviving and passing on those skills were the ones whose tribes survived through the ages. That’s probably also why we have songs that get stuck in our heads. We call them earworms.
Our brains are not good at remembering strings of numbers or words. But they are excellent at recognizing patterns, like seeing faces in tree bark or angels in clouds or animals in the stars of the night sky. When smells, images, feelings about people and places, come together with sounds, rhymes and rhythms – in short music – then magic is created.
That magic can now fuel the trips down our memory lanes unlike any generation before us could – because we have playlists to arrange them, iTunes to buy the songs from, and YouTube to trigger our memories about periods or things we have forgotten. The Nostalgia playlist is like the shoebox of photographs in the attic on steroids.
A Facebook post by a friend of a worldclass violinist reminded me of this story that I posted some time ago of a violinist playing in the subway in D.C.
No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars.
Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats average $100.
On April 11, 1961, Bob Dylan opened for bluesman John Lee Hooker at Gerde’s Folk City. Dylan was 19, too young to get the union card he needed to play. But a friend got him in. It was his first ever concert in front of a large audience.
Bob Dylan, now 71, is on a North American Tour. For my birthday present in August Trisha bought us tickets for the concert on October 24 in San Diego.
Dylan’s opening act was Mark Knopfler and his band of 8 great musicians. I am embarrassed to say that I didn’t catch the name when he was introduced and then kept guessing through the various songs who he was, recognizing Dire Straights songs and style. Of course, googling him later I realized that Mark was the founder and key member of Dire Straights. He left the band in 1988 to go solo, and Dire Straights … died.
Dylan, like in the last concert I saw him in some years ago, didn’t pick up a guitar once. Nobody knows for sure why – try to google that. I found rumors of arthritis, rumors of an accident that had his left arm in a cast 10 years ago, but nothing substantive. Dylan played the keyboard and the harmonica, and he sang, if you can call it that.
Bob Dylan must be the worst singer ever to tour and sing live. His voice is totally shot. Most of his words come out as raspy barks and are very difficult to understand. Due to the strong keyboarding and his gravelly voice the trusty old songs are sometimes unrecognizable. It took several minutes before I realized I was listening to It Ain’t Me Babe. Visions of Joanna was barely recognizable. His band of five members played loud and rhythmical, no matter what the song. The result was that every song sounded like the one before it. They were too loud, there was too much bass, and Dylan barked over the music totally off-key with the keyboard distorting the songs even more. Every now and then the Dylan howl came through when he was yelling out some high notes and there was a semblance of a melody – and I had flashbacks to the concerts of the legend I grew up listening to.
Here is a you YouTube from 2011. Knopfler did not sing with Dylan during our concert, but he played one song with him. It gives a feeling of the concert, though.
I don’t know how many songs there were, but the concert was too long. The average age of the crowd around us must have been 62 or so. They were yelling and cheering Mark Knopfler like he was a superstar, but Dylan only got polite applause. Dylan does not play for the audience. He plays for himself. He does not interact with the audience. He never did in all the concerts I have seen him in. It’s worse now. He messes with the music and the songs to please himself, and somehow his band keeps up with him. The seats around us started thinning out about half-way through, and people continued to leave before the concert was over.
I have never been to a Bob Dylan concert where he didn’t play Like a Rolling Stone, mostly held up as one of the greatest rock ‘n roll songs of all time, if not the greatest. Dylan always, ALWAYS rocks the venue with Rolling Stone, driving the audience to its feet, making them dance, shout, sing and thunder.
This time, even Rolling Stone didn’t break through. Dylan didn’t reach his fans. Rolling Stone flopped, and Dylan walked off after only one song of encore, which I can’t remember now, and the audience stumbled out quiet and subdued, the fire burned out.
Dylan gets away with this. He has inspired people for over 50 years with his music. He has shaped generations of musicians. He has made millions of people for decades fiery eyed with his lyrics. His music takes me back to my youth.
If you are not a Bob Dylan fan, this concert must be torture. I didn’t listen to good music, except for Knopfler’s opening hour. But I was surrounded by kindred spirits who all came searching for vignettes of memories of their coming of age and melodies that tied together their lives. I was one of them and I let the legend on stage do his magic and enjoy himself. I let the chords wash through me. For a couple of hours I got to be part of that legend.
Very seldom do I stumble across poetry that really touches me. Mondnacht (moon night) is one such poem. I saw it as a youth, memorized it, thanks to a persistent, and at the time loathed, German teacher. I wrote it into the cover of a book some time later. Then I completely forgot about it. Last week, I happened upon the book that lay dormant in a box for 40 years, opened the cover, and there it was. It touched me deeply once again.
[I cannot convey this in English. If you can read German, may it lift your soul and fly away with you.]
Mondnacht
Es war, als hätt’ der Himmel
Die Erde still geküsst,
Dass sie im Blütenschimmer
Von ihm nun träumen müsst’.
Die Luft ging durch die Felder,
Die Ähren wogten sacht,
Es rauschten leis’ die Wälder,
So sternklar war die Nacht.
Und meine Seele spannte
Weit ihre Flügel aus,
Flog durch die stillen Lande,
Als flöge sie nach Haus.
I have, in these pages, often decried Germans and the harm and hurt they have collectively caused the world in the 20th century. To be fair, they have also immensely contributed to the world’s treasures in literature, poetry and music. All three are represented in the musical rendition of Mondnacht above. Enjoy!
Joe is my brother-in-law (accurately: boyfriend of my sister). He runs a language school in Germany, and he is a hobby songwriter and poet. He is also a fellow Bob Dylan fan. He wrote the ballad below as a present to Bob Dylan for his 70th birthday.
Back in 1978 or so I started buying cassettes to listen to while driving. I had sets of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. I had Bob Dylan, John Denver, Pink Floyd and many other popular artists.
I also subscribed to Earl Nightingale’s “Insight” audio magazine around 1987 and received the subscription until Earl Nightingale passed away in 1989. It was a monthly cassette. On one side Earl recorded motivational snippets, the second side was an introduction to another Nightingale Conant published author and speaker. For the 1980 period, a brilliant marketing approach. There was no Internet where you could buy and listen to online.
When I listened to Insight in later years, the exact moment where I was walking or driving when I listened to it for the first time would come back to me like a vivid memory. I loved the Insight program by Earl, and it was never the same after he was gone.
But all those cassettes, now over 30, some of them 40 years old were no longer working so well now. They dragged, they were slow, and for the most part, they were in boxes and every time I moved, I moved them with me.
We’re moving house this weekend, and the boxes of cassettes finally went into the trash. It was time.
I saw this 2007 movie shortly after it came out, but didn’t get to do a review at that time. I caught it again now and I must say it works better the second time. Written and directed by Todd Haynes, this is not really a movie but rather a collage of snippets designed to make sense of the legend that is Bob Dylan.
If you are a Dylonite, like I, you will enjoy this film. If you are not, you will be confused and baffled. To understand the movie I’m Not There, you almost must have read a Dylan biography or two, and you must certainly love his music. Without the two combined, I imagine it might be difficult to sit through two hours and fifteen minutes of scattered images that make no sense all by themselves, and only come together as a story of Dylan the artist, Dylan the man and Dylan the legend.
Dylan is played by six or seven different actors, portraying his life at different stages. Some are obvious, like the young artist in Greenwich Village, some are very obscure, like the sequence played by Richard Gere, showing Dylan as an actor in a Western movie. How does that fit?
Some sequences make sense, and some are completely baffling.
Then there is the music, the soundtrack, of, you guessed it, all Dylan songs. Dylan authorized the use of his music, performed by himself and others in some cases, and the music seems to fit the imagery or scenes perfectly. It seemed to me as if Haynes wanted to play all my favorite Dylan songs for me, one after the other, and entertain me with intriguing photography and off-beat scenes. Some made the laugh, like the one where Dylan is shown frolicking in the grass with the Beatles.
I am on my way to New York City today. I’ll be there for the weekend. Will do a little live research on the history I learned about in New York: The Novel.
