That is what Bob Dylan (says he) did during the lockdown.
Let's all read "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" for Bob.
And I had done a hellish thing,
And it would work 'em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
As for Zappa, he was alerting us to "The emptiness that's you inside" ("Hungry Freaks, Daddy") and raising the question whether the people we know are melted plastic and soft chrome ("Who Are the Brain Police?").
The perfection for the pandemic of "Brain Police" must have to do with the long middle section repeating "I think I'm gonna die" and "I'm gonna die." It's interesting to picture Bob grooving on that and thinking How eloquent... perhaps while laying floor tiles.
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"I changed the door panels on an old 56 Chevy...."
I bet I'm not the only one who read that and thought, yes, I received you letter yesterday, about the time the doorknob broke.
Everything’s broken…
…and no use jokin’…
Read it again, a lot of source material for "Master and Commander" there, taking out *most* of the supernatural stuff. It reminded me of "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" by Edgar Allen Poe, about Antarctica, which reminded me of Poe's "The Philosophy of Furniture", which I am betting influenced Bob Dylan.
your letter
Proud consumer of The Mothers since the day Freak Out hit the shelves. Remarkable man, remarkable family. Clapton was quoted as saying Frank was the best guitarist around. Dweezle is no slacker either!
Thanks, Althouse. Just finished the interview. He's a genuinely thoughtful man who knows his own mind. If I were to judge him from his responses, it would be his genius is not from brilliance but because he has a firm grasp of the obvious. A first principles thinker.
How many golden hours did we fritter away in the 1960s arguing about whether the letter arrived at roughly the same time that the doorknob broke or whether the letter itself contained information about the occasion of the doorknob having broken?
At age 17 I was reading a music magazine (remember them?) in 1969 and they had album reviews at the back of the issue. Most were long and esoteric but only one said "Buy this record!" and it was for the Mothers Freak Out double set. Like Bumble Bee, I have purchased every Mothers or Zappa album and love to sing along with Flo and Eddie!
I ignored the lockdown, pretended it didn't exist.
I complied to the barest legal only when I had to and was as obnoxious as I could be while resisting.
As kung flu lies come to light it becomes more and more obvious that this was the right approach
John Henry
Haven't read Rime in a long time, I may dig it out again. The ones I've read over and over and over again are The Raven (Poe), Ulysses, and The Lady of Shalott (Tennyson). And Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey (Wordsworth).
I didn't do anything different during 'lockdowns' either, save for the bare minimum I had to. Never did contract the covids.
Good he likes Peggy Lee. So do I.
Suzy?
Suzy Creamcheese?
You know if any other person had all these answers in an interview, I'd say they were bs-ing. Bob Dylan is probably the only person I believe.
"Dweezle is no slacker either!" I've seen him 4 times. Great player, and distinctive. As good as his dad, and unique enough in his approach that he doesn't sound like he's recycling stuff from other players. He doesn't anything like his dad's stage presence, though. Luckily, he surrounds himself with musicians who are good onstage, many of them alums from Frank's bands.
I'm a little surprised at Dylan's generous appraisal, since he was an occasional target of Zappa's satire. Shows how level headed he is, and how confident he about his own accomplishments.
“ How many golden hours did we fritter away in the 1960s arguing about whether the letter arrived at roughly the same time that the doorknob broke or whether the letter itself contained information about the occasion of the doorknob having broken?”
The placement of the word “yesterday” makes the one correct interpretation clear.
I'm a little surprised at Dylan's generous appraisal, since he was an occasional target of Zappa's satire. Shows how level headed he is, and how confident he about his own accomplishments.
Zappa was blown away by "Like a Rolling Stone". Of it he said in 1965:
"When I heard Like a Rolling Stone, I wanted to quit the music business because I felt: 'If this wins and it does what it's supposed to do, I don't need to do anything else.'"
He later had mocked Dylan in some songs.
Dylan didn't seem to mind and supposedly asked Zappa to produce Infidels.
>>I'm a little surprised at Dylan's generous appraisal, since he was an occasional target >>of Zappa's satire. Shows how level headed he is, and how confident he about his own >>accomplishments.
From Michael Gray's "Bob Dylan Encyclopedia":
[In December 1982], a scruffy-looking figure turned up unannounced at the gate of Zappa's house claiming to be Bob Dylan. Zappa reported to the veteran British music-journalist Karl Dallas: 'I get a lot of weird calls here, and someone suddenly called up saying ''This is Bob Dylan. I want to play you my new songs.'' Now I'd never met him and I don't know his voice but I looked at the video-screen to see who was at the gate, and there, in the freezing cold, was a figure with no coat and an open shirt. I sent someone down to check, to make sure it wasn't a Charles Manson, but it was him.' Dylan was asking if Zappa would be interested in producing his next album. Zappa: 'He played me his eleven new songs and I thought they were good songs. He seemed like a nice guy. Didn't look like it would be too hard to work with him.'
[...] There was, for Zappa, one specific area of difficulty. At this point, the end of 1982, Frank had a fair head of steam going against the Born Again Christian New Right, as his recent work had stressed; Dylan had only made one album since the evangelising Slow Train Coming and Saved: and even that one subsequent work, 1981's Shot of Love, had certainly not repudiated that evangelising, and had included 'Every Grain of Sand' and 'Property of Jesus'. Faced, therefore, with Dylan playing him a new collection of songs ('He basically just hummed 'em and played 'em on the piano'), Zappa said afterwards: 'I asked him if it had any Jesus in it. I said: ''Do these songs have the Big J in?'' and he said no; [but] when I took him upstairs to give him a sandwich, my dog barked at him. I told him to watch out, my dog doesn't like Christians. And he didn't laugh.'
This Zappa-produced Bob Dylan album never happened, unfortunately.
Dylan trips the light eclectic. In another thread, commenter Amexpat persuasively argues that Dylan quotes a Gilbert & Sullivan line and uses a Gilbert & Sullivan character as his mouthpiece for that line. Disturbing if true. Hard to picture Dylan getting into HMS Pinafore.....I wonder how Dylan feels about Richard Rodgers. Richard Rodgers is the colossus of American music. He's as pervasive and inescapable as the air we breathe and, perhaps for that reason, easy to ignore....Rodgers' music is more inclusive than that of Dylan. Depending on the lyricist, you can find shades of Tin Pan Alley, Verdi, or Cole Porter in Rodgers music. From the kitschy to the sublime, it's all there. He' like a fine artist sometimes painted like Picasso and at other times like Norman Rockwell or even Walter Keane and did so with perfect sincerity. You almost never hear anyone argue for the genius of Richard Rodgers, but he was. The bet here is that in one hundred years Rodgers will get more airplay or playlist play or whatever than any of the artists Dylan mentioned or even Dylan himself.
Huh. I had a 56 Chevy BelAir coupe. Yer alright Bob.
I don't understand how some can say they "did nothing different" during the Lockdown. Some of my regular places to go were closed, others required strict compliance with the damnfool directions from political experts. So I went different places, frequented park benches and waterfront walks, and stayed home when nothing else availed.
I did my usual chores around the house, and found more time for reading (which is normally a big share of my time anyway) and watching movies at home (formerly half at least of my movies fix would have been going out to moviehouses).
First I re-read all of Alexander Pope's poems except the Dunciad (which I had re-read the year before) and his Homer. Several other big re-readings followed at intervals. If we can assume it's really over now, the last of my Lockdown re-reads was Thucydides' Persian War in Thomas Hobbes's translation.
As noted elsewhere, I re-watched some favorite movies accompanied by director's commentary tracks, something I'd avoided pretty completely until this time. Exactly as I expected, very few worth damn-all, yet a few priceless.
>>I wonder how Dylan feels about Richard Rodgers. Richard Rodgers is the colossus of American >>music. He's as pervasive and inescapable as the air we breathe and, perhaps for that reason, >>easy to ignore....Rodgers' music is more inclusive than that of Dylan.
There may be a clue in the fact that Dylan has performed and recorded "Blue Moon," "My Funny Valentine," "This Nearly Was Mine," and "Some Enchanted Evening."
Frank Zappa's music--and "humor"--for the most part leaves me cold. The one great exception for me is his album WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH. I enjoy that album from beginning to end.
The music of Zappa's high school friend (and later professional frenemy) Don Vliet, aka Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart is far superior to Zappa's. (However, Vliet, by all accounts, was a difficult band leader, psychologically abusive to his musicians in the way a harsh cult leader would be.)
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