Bob Dylan, rhapsodizing about blue.

In "The Philosophy of Modern Song," Bob Dylan — writer of "Tangled Up in Blue" and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" — gets carried away by the color blue a few times:

About "Volare (Nel Blu, DiPinto Di Blu)" — "To Fly (In Blue, Painted Blue") — he writes:

You get the mental picture, Utopia, and it’s painted blue. Oil paint, cosmetics and greasepaint, frescoes with blue slapped on, and you’re singing like a canary. You’re tickled pink and walking on air, and there’s no end to space.... Supposedly it’s about a man who wants to paint himself blue and then fly away. Volare, it means, “Let’s fly away into the cielo infinito.” Obviously, the endless sky. The entire world can disappear but I’m in my own head.

About "Blue Suede Shoes":

These shoes are not like other shifty things that perish or change or transform themselves. They symbolize church and state, and have the substance of the universe in them, nothing benefits me more than my shoes.... They neither move nor speak, yet they vibrate with life, and contain the infinite power of the sun. They’re as good as the day I found them. Perhaps you’ve heard of them, blue suede shoes. They’re blue, royal blue. Not low down in the dumps blue, they’re killer blue, like the moon is blue, they’re precious. Don’t try to suffocate their spirit, try to be a saint, try to stay as far away from them as you possibly can.

There's other blue in the book — singing the blues, "Blue Bayou," "Blue Moon," "Blue Moon of Kentucky," blue veined, blue blooded, baby blue eyes, Bobby Blue Bland, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes...

That podcast I keep recommending.

As you may have noticed, I'm a big fan of Andrew Hickey's podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs." I discovered it around the first of this month. (I forget why, maybe Spotify pushed it.) And I've truly binged on it, getting all the way through the 133 episodes that are currently available. 

There are bonus episodes, most of which are available only to those who subscribe on Patreon, and I've done that, the first and only time I've subscribed to an individual on social media. I have some subscriptions, but only to things that begin with "New York": The New York Times, The New Yorker, New York Magazine, and The New York Review of Books. Wait there's one more: The Times (London). I have a couple subscriptions that were gifts: The Washington Post, Reason. But basically, I'm a subscriber to big media, not to social media. This one thing — "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs" — is my exception. 

I've recommended the podcast a few times. Click the "Andrew Hickey" tag to read all the old posts. I love that there's a published transcript, making it super-bloggable. I have to resist over-blogging it, because there are so many interesting things in every episode.

But let me blog 2 things that stood out to me over the 133 episodes I've consumed. Maybe it's evidence of something wrong with me, but I am drawn to stories of the impoverished childhood of a person who goes on to be very successful. So here are 2:

"Elvis went over and started noodling on the piano. This immediately caused Jerry Lee Lewis to start showing off."

"He went over to Elvis and said 'I didn’t know you could play.' Elvis responded 'I can’t,' at which point Jerry Lee said, 'Well then, why don’t you let me sit down?' Elvis just replied 'Well, I’d like to try,' and carried on noodling.... [T]he majority of the [Million Dollar Quartet session] consists of Elvis on acoustic guitar or piano, Jerry Lee on piano when Elvis isn’t playing it, and them all singing together, with Elvis or Jerry Lee taking most of the lead vocals.... Both Elvis and Jerry Lee were brought up in the Assembly of God, a Pentecostal 'holy roller' church.... ['Jesus Walked that Lonesome Valley'] is interesting, as even though it’s a call-and-response song and starts with Elvis taking the lead and Jerry Lee doing the responses, by the first verse Jerry Lee has already taken over the lead and left Elvis echoing him, rather than vice versa. You can hear there exactly how this friendly rivalry was already working. Remember, at this time, Jerry Lee Lewis was nobody at all, someone who had one single out which had been out a matter of days. But here he is duetting with the 'King of Rock and Roll,' and seeing himself as the person who should naturally be taking the lead."

From "Episode 51: 'Matchbox' by Carl Perkins" in Andrew Hickey's phenomenal podcast "A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs."

Here's full recording of the session on Spotify.  

You can listen to the recording of "Jesus Walked that Lonesome Valley" on YouTube here. 

And here's a link to the Wikipedia page for Lewis, where I went because I wanted to check my belief that he's still alive. He is. But I also saw: "On November 22, 1976, Lewis was arrested outside Elvis Presley's Graceland home for allegedly intending to shoot him... 'Elvis, watching on the closed-circuit television, told guards to call the police... The cops asked Elvis, "What do you want us to do?" And Elvis told 'em, "Lock him up." That hurt my feelings.'" Elvis avoided death that night, but proceeded to die on his own, 8 months later.

Bob Dylan gives us another new song — "I Contain Multitudes."

Got a tell-tale heart, like Mr. Poe
Got skeletons in the walls of people you know
I'll drink to the truth and the things we said
I'll drink to the man that shares your bed
I'll paint landscapes and I'll paint nudes
I contain multitudes...

I sing the songs of experience, like William Blake
I've got no apologies to make
Everything's flowing all at the same time
I live on a boulevard of crime
I drive fast cars, while I eat fast foods
I contain multitudes

Pink Pedal Pushers, Red Blue-Jeans
All the pretty maids, and all the old queens
All the old queens, from all my past lives
I carry four pistols and two large knives
I'm a man of contradictions, I'm a man of many moods
I contain multitudes...

ADDED: "Pink Pedal Pushers" is an old Carl Perkins song — listen here. "Red Blue Jeans" is Gene Vincent — here.

AND: "Pretty maids" might refer to this Eagles song. Dylan's previous song, "Murder Most Foul" contained the names of 2 of The Eagles ("Play Don Henley, play Glenn Frey").

"If you don't want my peaches, honey, please don't shake my tree."

Early peaches, this morning:



Peaches on a peach tree naturally makes me think of song lyrics, and I found this on Wikipedia:

The ‘peaches’ verse ["If you don't like my peaches/Don't you shake my tree/'n Get out of my orchard/Let my peaches be," in "Sitting on Top of the World"] has a long history in popular music. It appears as the chorus of an unpublished song composed by Irving Berlin in May 1914: “If you don't want my peaches / You'd better stop shaking my tree.” The song "Mamma's Got the Blues", written by Clarence Williams and S. Martin and recorded by Bessie Smith in 1923, has the line: "If you don't like my peaches then let my orchard be". In her version of "St. Louis Blues", Ella Fitzgerald sang, "If you don't like my peaches, why do you shake my tree? / Stay out of my orchard, and let my peach tree be". In 1929 Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded “Peach Orchard Mama” ("... you swore nobody’d pick your fruit but me / I found three kid men shaking down your peaches free"). In later years lines using similar imagery were used in “Matchbox” by Carl Perkins and “The Joker” by the Steve Miller Band. Ahmet Ertegun was able to convince Miller to pay him US$50,000, claiming authorship of the line in his song "Lovey Dovey". This verse and its ubiquitous usage is an example of the tradition of ‘floating lyrics’ (also called 'maverick stanzas') in folk-music tradition.

In "The Joker," it's "You're the cutest thing that I ever did see/I really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree." Video.

"Matchbox" is the most familiar one to me, and it's the version I've put in the post title: "If you don't want my peaches, honey, please don't shake my tree." (Here's Carl Perkins, performing the song I learned from The Beatles.) Though the history of the "floating lyric" suggests the opposite, Carl is talking about the masculine anatomy.