Rearview Mirror (6):
Crazy Blues, Classic Rock
by Tom Hull
Bob Dylan
The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6:
Live 1964 -- Concert at Philharmonic Hall
1964, Columbia/Legacy
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One way to track the turbulent changes in Dylan's career is to note
how his live albums rework his old songs. Before the Flood, in
particular, tore into his early work with bare contempt. But he was
still a steadfast folkie, just four rapidly evolving albums into his
career, when he presented this Philharmonic Hall concert, played solo
(aside from four dreadful Joan Baez duets). He was by then a big fish
in a small pond, with a handful of iconic songs, but not so many that
the concert dwells on the overly familiar. The crowd is adulatory. His
stage patter is awkward. His harmonica is piercing, while his guitar
seems vestigial. Whereas later he'd rush through these songs, the most
striking ones here are distinguished by patience: the love song "To
Ramona" and the dialectical "It's Alright Ma," where "money doesn't
talk, it swears" and "even the president of the United States must
sometimes have to stand naked." Reminds one that in his heyday, Dylan
was regarded as an oracle.
Dave Edmunds
From Small Things: The Best of Dave Edmunds
1970-2002, Columbia/Legacy
Rockpile
Seconds of Pleasure
1980, Columbia/Legacy
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Dave Edmunds came along too late for the British Invasion -- the great
work of introducing America's teens to the hard-rocking music of their
elders had already been done. But he copped an asterisk: a
hard-rocking version of "I Hear You Knockin'." Edmunds was so devoted
to old-fashioned rock and roll and had so little artistic ambition
that he became the favored producer of England's pub rockers. But his
pals were prolific enough that he got a shot at songs like "I Knew the
Bride" (Nick Lowe), "Girls Talk" (Elvis Costello), and "Crawling From
the Wreckage" (Graham Parker), parlaying them into a series of classic
albums that peaked with 1979's Repeat When Necessary. His studio band
on that album, including Lowe, went on tour, using the name of
Edmunds' first album: Rockpile. For a while they sounded like the
great rock and roll band of the era, but their one-and-only album,
Seconds of Pleasure, didn't quite live up to their rep. They fought,
they split up, and none was ever as good again. The new reissue of
Seconds is padded out with their EP of Everly Brothers covers and
cranked up with three smoking live cuts. Now that there's no place for
anti-hype, it sounds a lot better. The new Edmunds best-of is cranked
up even more, covering a lot of years without indulging his
marginalia. All it does is rock.
The Rolling Stones
Singles 1963-1965
1963-65, ABKCO
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This is what you get for $59.98 list: one small box, 5.5 inches
square, 1.25 inches thick; 12 CDs, most under six minutes with just
two songs, in jackets scaled down from the original artwork; a 28-page
booklet, heavily illustrated with collectorama; three cards with
pictures of the band. This covers nine singles and three EPs released
in the UK: 33 short songs, which with a different marketing strategy
would fit on a single CD. So most of what you pay for here is
packaging, and most of what you get for all that packaging is a way to
focus on the emergence of a great rock and roll band single-by-single
in a time when singles were still the name of the game. With this
focus you can see that as early as "I Want to Be Loved" (Disc 1), they
were distinctive interpreters, and as early as "Stoned" (Disc 2), they
could write a jazzy vamp that let them flex their chops. They mostly
recorded covers up to "Little Red Rooster" (Disc 9) -- a series that grew
more distinctive, from Buddy Holly's "Not Fade Away" (Disc 4) and the
Valentinos' "It's All Over Now" (Disc 5) to Irma Thomas' "Time Is on
My Side" (Disc 8). Meanwhile, their own songs started to take shape,
including the magnificent "Tell Me" (Disc 7) and the ominous ballad
"Play With Fire" (Disc 11). The box stops just short of
"Satisfaction," but you know the rest.
Stomp and Swerve: American Music Gets Hot
1897-1925, Archeophone
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Mamie Smith's 1920 "Crazy Blues" is famous as the first recorded
blues. The Original Dixieland Jazz Band were the first recorded jazz
band in 1917. Both are included here, along with 1925's "Cake Walking
Babies From Home," by Clarence Williams' Blue Five, but nowadays more
commonly filed under the name of the cornet player, Louis
Armstrong. We tend to think of these records as the beginnings of
recorded music, but they are the end points of this erudite chronicle,
which starts with a march Thomas Edison recorded circa 1897 and traces
out the birth of the hot style that made the '20s roar. The ancient
recordings here include marches, rags, dance songs, and minstrelsy
that sounds as offensive now as it seemed normal then. It's shocking
how much the world has changed in little more than a century, and
surprising that music so far removed from anything we've experienced
still signifies so powerfully.
Seattle Weekly, May 12-18, 2004
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