Seen, just now, in a prominent place, which I won't name, out of mild avoidance of spoiling.
You know, Bob Dylan recorded "Tangled up in Blue" on the second-to-last day of the year 1974 — half a century ago. And he was telling the story of something further back in the past: "It didn't pertain to me. It was just a concept of putting in images that defy time – yesterday, today and tomorrow. I wanted to make them all connect in some kind of a strange way." It's hard to say what year there was that "revolution in the air." Perhaps a decade earlier.
And now the "revolution in the air" is in the crossword puzzle.
Speaking of revolution "in the air" in the 1960s, I always think of the 1969 Thunderclap Newman record, "Something in the Air." Maybe if "Tangled up in Blue" didn't pertain to Bob Dylan, it pertained to Thunderclap Newman. He'd have heard their song in the air:
Call out the instigators/Because there's something in the air/We got to get together sooner or later/Because the revolution's here....
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Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers perform a nice cover of the Thunderclap on TPATH Greatest Hits (1993).
There was something in the air that night
The stars were bright, Fernando
They were shining there for you and me
For liberty, Fernando
And Dylan didn't sing a single song from "Blood on the Tracks" at the Omaha concert. Bitterly disappointed.
A great and well-remembered song from that era. I had the album at the time. The literally adolescent lead guitar seen in this video, Jimmy McCulloch, went on to be lead guitar in Paul and Linda McCartney's band WINGS in the mid-70s, and then onto other bands. He died young, about 25 or 26.
Hell may include a marriage of the voices of Thunderclap Newman and Neil Young… 24x7 reminders of one’s evil, sordid deeds.
“He died young, about 25 or 26.”
Heroin will do that.
Hootie And The Blowfish Only Wanna Be With You:
"Put on a little Dylan, sitting on a fence
I say that line is great, you ask me what it meant by:"
...
"Yeah, I’m tangled up in blue
I only wanna be with you
You can call me your fool
I only wanna be with you"
Man… I ruined my Monday @10:24AM…
Pissarro: “I remember that, although I was full of fervour, I didn’t have the slightest inkling, even at forty, of the deeper side to the movement we were pursuing by instinct. It was in the air!”
"I had the album at the time"
I still have it
The bass player on the album is Pete Townshend
Belaire, ref the Hootie song: there was a great spoof on the radio back then, called I Only Got A Three Inch Tool.
RR
JSM
Thanks for highlighting that song.
Big fan of Something in the Air. One of my guitar heroes, Pete Townsend of the Who, wrote this song and played bass on the Thunderclap Newman recording. It is the only song written by Pete that went to #1 on the billboard charts in America. His only #1 hit. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers covered it during their epic 1997 two-week stand at the Fillmore West and it is on that boxed set.
WSW for the quick-draw first comment! Nice.
Looking at that band, all the long hair. LOL
Revolution in the air, yeah… I came of age in the 60s. The Rev was always coming but never arrived. Eventually I realized it never would. One of my most fervent comrades decided it was all too stupid for her and she became a doctor.
"Big fan of Something in the Air. One of my guitar heroes, Pete Townsend of the Who, wrote this song and played bass on the Thunderclap Newman recording."
Pete didn't write it.
From the linked Wikipedia article: "Something in the Air" is the debut single by British rock band Thunderclap Newman, written by Speedy Keen who also provided lead vocals. It was a No. 1 single for three weeks in the UK Singles Chart in July 1969.[2] The song has been used for films, television and advertisements, and has been covered by several artists. The track was also included on the band's only album release Hollywood Dream, over a year later.[3]
Background "In 1969, Pete Townshend, guitarist with The Who, was the catalyst behind the formation of [Thunderclap Newman]. The concept was to create a band to perform songs written by drummer and singer Speedy Keen, who had written "Armenia City in the Sky", the first track on The Who Sell Out. Townshend recruited jazz pianist Andy "Thunderclap" Newman (a friend from art college), and 15-year-old guitarist Jimmy McCulloch, who later played lead guitar in Paul McCartney and Wings. Keen played the drums and sang the lead."
Pete didn't write it.
And it did NOT reach #1 on Billboard charts, topping out at 37 during a 15-week run in top 200. Apparently the late great Tom Petty, who recorded an intro for the song containing the erroneous info I posted above, was mistaken when he recounted the Thunderclap Newman saga on the Tom Petty Radio (ch 31 on Sirius XM).
I regret regurgitating those falsehoods. But I was too lazy to check.
"Call out the instigators".
I'll take things DeSantis says when there is a jail break at the new ICE prison in the Everglades for $400, Alex.
It was #1 in the UK
I thought that might be the song from "Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid," but that was "Knockin on Heaven's Door." Same era, though, and Dylan (and Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge) were in the movie. If somebody asks you what Bob Dylan's "Kevin Bacon number" for Chill Wills, or Slim Pickens, or Jack Elam, or a few other classic Western actors is, it's one.
Something is in the air today. The internet seem to be having some sort of brain fog/aneurysm. The Musk/Epstein/Texas flood confangle with a side of Democrat racist death worship is making everybody crazy.
Maybe it's just Monday after a 3 day weekend. It's a rare challenge of the first world .
JAORE: I deny the allegations, and I demand to see the alligator!
RR
JSM
I love that Thunderclap Newman song, and the entire album which I own and listen to every once in a while. I had no idea that Jimmy McCullough was only 15. That's some pretty tasty guitar for a kid. I can see how his voice is an acquired taste but the instrumental work on the album is stellar.
That whole band would easily transition today with minimal investment in hormones, surgery, or makeup.
“Make some wooden knickknacks”
driftwood artist John Malkovich should know that one.
Reading the answers I got a 'New Mexico' vibe.
THORN
DEARDAD
CACTUS
RESORTS (images that defy time)
Because the revolution's here
And you know it's Right.
Thanks for the Thunderclap song link, Althouse. I’d almost forgotten that one.
Great stuff, Mike & AA. On his XM 'Buried Treasure' show, Petty once played another of theirs, "The Reason." Helped me (I'm in my early 60s) understand why their fame perhaps never lingered, as it's something of a "Something in the Air" clone.
“I lived with them on Montague Street, In a basement down the stairs,” ------Bob Dylan
The literary critic Alfred Kazin wrote in his memoir, A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment, about living on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights in the 1930s-1940s.
"We were radicals; our friends Richard and Felice Hofstadter on one side of Montague Street, Richard and Eleanor Rovere, Bertram D. Wolfe and his wife, Ella, on the other.....
"At 68 Montague Street, Bert Wolfe (an early leader of the American Communist Party, long since expelled as a Lovestoneite, a right deviationist), and his jolly wife Ella, covered a wall with photographs of their old comrades and friends from many countries in the "movement" (O holy word!). The central photograph was of Lenin looking (it seemed to me) at all the others with his usual disapproval of anyone not up to his harsh standards."
There was something of a radical revival in the area again in the 1960s, but Montague Street had been radical long before that too.
"'I had the album at the time'
"I still have it"
Well, I did keep it for decades. But when I moved out of NYC in late 2021, I sold or gave away all my vinyl records and all but a handful of cds. I have retained a portion of my former music library digitized, but not all of it, not even half of it. After decades of non-stop music-listening, I just don't listen to music enough anymore to keep all that heavy space-consuming stuff.
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