"Everybody’s building the big ships and the boats. Some are building monuments. Others are jotting down notes...."

You won't have to wait even half a minute to see Kris Kristofferson in this clip of "Big Top Pee-Wee."

You may wonder, what's he doing there, but there he is...

"Can I touch your beard?"

"It has often been suggested that as [Bob] Dylan assembled his distinctive persona while climbing to international fame, he borrowed some of it, including a certain attitude and a caustic streak..."

"... from [Bob] Neuwirth. 'The whole hipster shuck and jive — that was pure Neuwirth,' Bob Spitz wrote in 'Dylan: A Biography' (1989). 'So were the deadly put-downs, the wipeout grins and innuendos. Neuwirth had mastered those little twists long before Bob Dylan made them famous and conveyed them to his best friend with altruistic grace.' Mr. Neuwirth, Mr. Spitz suggested, could have ridden those same qualities to Dylanesque fame. 'Bobby Neuwirth was the Bob Most Likely to Succeed,' he wrote, 'a wellspring of enormous potential. He possessed all the elements, except for one — nerve.' Mr. Dylan, in his book 'Chronicles: Volume One' (2004), had his own description of Mr. Neuwirth: 'Like Kerouac had immortalized Neal Cassady in ‘On the Road,’ somebody should have immortalized Neuwirth. He was that kind of character. He could talk to anybody until they felt like all their intelligence was gone. With his tongue, he ripped and slashed and could make anybody uneasy, also could talk his way out of anything. Nobody knew what to make of him.'"

From "Bob Neuwirth, Colorful Figure in Dylan’s Circle, Dies at 82/He was a recording artist and songwriter himself, but he also played pivotal roles in the careers of Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin" (NYT). 

Neuwirth, we're told, taught Janis Joplin the Kris Kristofferson song "Me & Bobby McGee," and he co-wrote "Mercedes Benz" with her. 

ADDED: Spitz's use of the words "hipster shuck and jive" undercuts the argument that Neuwirth created this style of personal presentation. This obituary shows the New York Times carrying on the long tradition of making black people invisible.

From the Wikipedia article "Shuckin' and jivin'":

Shuckin' and jivin' (or shucking and jiving) is African-American slang for joking and acting evasively in the presence of an authoritative figure. It usually involves clever lies and impromptu storytelling, to one-up an opponent or avoid punishment.... 

According to the linguist Barbara Ann Kipfer, the origins of the phrase may be traced to when "black slaves sang and shouted gleefully during corn-shucking season, and this behavior, along with lying and teasing, became a part of the protective and evasive behavior normally adopted toward white people."... 

In 2008, New York attorney general Andrew Cuomo said of the Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama, who was running against Hillary Clinton, the candidate Cuomo supported: "You can't shuck and jive at a press conference." Cuomo received criticism from some for his use of the phrase. Roland Martin of CNN said that "'Shucking and jiving' have long been words used as a negative assessment of African Americans, along the lines of a 'foot-shufflin' Negro.'"

From the Wikipedia article "Hipster (1940s subculture)": 

In 1938, the word hepster was used by bandleader Cab Calloway in the title of his dictionary, Cab Calloway's Cat-ologue: A "Hepster's" Dictionary, which defines hep cat as "a guy who knows all the answers, understands jive"... 

In 1944, pianist Harry Gibson modified hepcat to hipster in his short glossary "For Characters Who Don't Dig Jive Talk".... Initially, hipsters were usually middle-class European American youths seeking to emulate the lifestyle of the largely African-American jazz musicians they followed....

In The Jazz Scene (1959), the British historian and social theorist Eric Hobsbawm... described hipster language—i.e., "jive-talk or hipster-talk"—as "an argot or cant designed to set the group apart from outsiders"....

The hipster subculture rapidly expanded, and after World War II, a burgeoning literary scene grew up around it. In 1957, the American writer and adventurer Jack Kerouac described hipsters as "rising and roaming America, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere [as] characters of a special spirituality." Toward the beginning of his poem Howl, the Jewish-American Beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg mentioned "angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night". In his 1957 essay The White Negro, the American novelist and journalist Norman Mailer characterized hipsters as American existentialists, living a life surrounded by death—annihilated by the atomic war or strangled by social conformity—and electing instead to "divorce [themselves] from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self".

Sting, "Girl from the North Country"... Mark Knopfler – "Restless Farewell"...

Jackson Browne, "Love Minus Zero/No Limit
"...  Bryan Ferry, "Bob Dylan’s Dream"... Carly Simon, "Just Like a Woman
"... Bad Religion, "It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue"... My Chemical Romance, "Desolation Row"... Ke$ha, "Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
... Taj Mahal, "Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream"... Dave Matthews Band, "All Along the Watchtower"... Kris Kristofferson, "Quinn The Eskimo"... Eric Burdon, "Gotta Serve Somebody"... Marianne Faithful, "Baby Let Me Follow You Down"... Pete Seeger, "Forever Young"...

The full list. The one I'd be most interested in hearing? Oddly enough, it's Taj Mahal doing "Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream"... which just by chance is kind of Thanksgiving-appropriate:

I was riding on the Mayflower
When I thought I spied some land...
“I think I’ll call it America”
I said as we hit land
I took a deep breath
I fell down, I could not stand

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Here at Meadhouse, it's pre-dawn and we're eating pancakes. (We just invented peanut butter pancakes.) I'd give you an Amazon link for that Bob Dylan cover songs album so you could buy it, but it's not available yet. Feel free to buy something else at Amazon. For example, here's Taj Mahal album I really like. Listen to the title track.

"Copyright time bomb threatens music labels."

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Under a US copyright law from 1978, artists who sold themselves to the recording companies could reclaim their copyright, and the precious royalties that go with it, in 35 years. All they need to do is file "termination claims" at least two years in advance.

As the deadline approaches the ageing stars of rock'n'roll are reaching for their lawyers. Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Bryan Adams, Tom Waits and Kris Kristofferson are already reported to have filed claims with the US Copyright Office. Other music legends seem ready to join battle.

The record labels are attempting to fend off the devastation by arguing that the albums were "works for hire," which, under copyright law, would mean that the artists were employees working for the record companies and the companies therefore always owned their work product.... sort of like what The Byrds were singing about in "So You Want to Be a Rock 'n Roll Star":

So you want to be a rock and roll star
Then listen now to what I say
Just get an electric guitar
Then take some time and learn how to play...

Then it's time to go downtown
Where the agent man won't let you down
Sell your soul to the company
Who are waiting there to sell plastic ware

Ha. That was back in 1967, when the idea that you were involved in making something plastic was supposed to be horrifying. That's why this was supposed to be so funny:



That's "The Graduate," which came out in 1967. 1967, that was a hell of a year. A year for shunning plastic. The Summer of Love. I was 16. Where were you?

Now, it's 2011. Do we have any sympathy for the record companies today? Their product isn't even plastic anymore. You know they've lost a lot of money in the switchover to digital. Or do you align with the artists? Are they still artists, these people who sing and play on the recordings?