Smoked Fish

So there I was, surrounded by stiff tissues and trying to get to grips with the similarities between 'Scarborough Fair' and 'Girl From the North Country' when my head was flung around by the sound of a long reverberating squeak at the window. Dressed in only a white towel at the waist I gripped it tighter and faced the window cleaner who was 3/4 profiling his face and now focusing on only the dirty pane his length of rubber was strigiling. Had he turned as I did? Which of the two lyrics below is the most pleasing? I decided to leave the room for a glass of orange from concentrate and smoked mackerel, perhaps with some of the fruit loaf I knew I had left. I closed the window on the west-facing wall to help the cleaner, to give him a bit of resistance, and to hide from his ears the lines:

Remember me to one who lives there.
She once was a true love of mine.

Remember me from one who lives there,
For she/he once was a true love of mine.

A'wonder how many stories window cleaners; and gas men, telephone-line installationists, paper-boys, septic tank-diviners - what sort of stories they tell each other. A'wonder how many variations on the teenager wanking, the au-pair fucking, the cleaner sucking, the dog shitting, the husband throttling they come across and tell their friends in the work. A'wonder if they decide that the stories are boring and start to discuss the changing tastes in wallpaper and dado rails. A'wonder if they have physician-style tradesmen's oathes, or a butler's discretion, never to see and certainly never to tell of.

I'd finished the mackerel and washed down the oil with orange juice when the window cleaners knocked, they wanted paying. What I really needed was an audio recording of 'Scarborough Fair' and 'Girl From the North Country' and a working-class upbringing.

Empire Burlesque

Writ drunk.

I’ve long admired at least some of the songs on Empire Burlesque in the same manner as I’ve admired anything else by Bob; “I’ll Remember You” and “Dark Eyes” have always struck me in particular. My trouble with the album as a whole was always the production; “Never Be the Same Again” was a major offender, having once driven me, while listening on headphones, into the very depths of The Fear, necessitating a two hour walk into The Field.

Time, and my switching of principal mind-altering substance to wine, have conspired to take the edge off my unwillingness to so much as countenance what my demons still call ‘80s production. Truth, though, as I see it, is that an awful lot of it’s awful shite, but that tends to be when coupled with poor musicianship and/or a lack of imagination, roots and, for want of a better word for there is no better word, soul.

Soul is the key word here; soul in the broad sense of the realness of intent and performance, and soul in the sense of the musical idiom that goes by that name. This is nothing wholly new to Dylan, his two albums with Jerry Wexler being cases in point, but it was Empire Burlesque where he immersed himself fully in secular soul waters, writing songs with the vocabulary of Smokey Robinson and Holland-Dozier-Holland. “Emotionally Yours”, covered memorably by The O’Jays is perhaps the best example of this, along with “I’ll Remember You”, but I urge you to listen to “Trust Yourself” and The Staple Singers’ “Respect Yourself” in the same sitting; the production on the former is perhaps not wholly sympathetic to the intended feel, but there can be no doubting the nod to the latter, albeit in a concoction that is one part empowerment to twenty-seven parts bitter cynicism.

There is on the album a bona fide stab at stadium rock in the form of “When the Night Comes Falling From the Sky” (a fine song a rendition of which with the E. Street Band I would more often than not prefer to hear), and a handful more fairly straight rockers (the best of which is “Seeing the Real You At Last”, a song that it didn’t take me too long to appreciate, and that I’ve dug fully since the Fleadh Festival of 2004), and then of course there’s the acoustic “Dark Eyes”. The overall feel, though, and not only in the overtly soul-inflected numbers, is of Soul Music, that finest of pop forms. A return to Muscle Shoals with Jerry Wexler and his people, and a shade or two of the glorious, dirty, dense, frantic sound of Street Legal (pop’s most underrated album if I’m the judge) might very well have improved Empire Burlesque; that said, it’s a solid album devoid of bad songs and with plenty of truly grand ones.

Further Notes writ immediately afterwards:

N.B. Revise to make reference to “Seeing the Real You At Last” [I did that]

Also the abhorrent album cover… It’s Ian McLagan’s shirt, but that doesn’t explain the jacket or the graphic design; God couldn’t explain the jacket or the graphic design.

Five minutes after completing this mini-essay, I feel compelled to refute the suggestion that Empire Burlesque was Bob’s first full immersion in soul, even secular soul – Street Legal surely trumps that – Changing of the Guards, Baby Stop Crying, True Love… I think the argument still carries water, but needs refining – clarification regarding song (specifically lyric) structure… E.Y. and I.R.Y less ‘wordy’, though still very much Bob… though even that’s spurious… I’m talking shite, frankly, though I stand by most of it – it’s a fine album, sure, but probably the main reason I wrote about Empire Burlesque rather than Street Legal is the complexity of my feelings regarding the latter, a truly great album the importance of which to myself I can’t currently express…

But listen to Empire… it’s tasty…

Please, fellow Bobcats, I know what I wanted to say here but tied myself up in knots – mercy! If you can fill in any gaps in my thoughts, don’t hesitate to do so – you may know my mind better than I do. In fact, I’m sure that you do.

The Boatman: Part One of Three

Where Lethe forgets what it is and becomes Eridanos of no fixed designation, the water leaves the foggy gloom and is home to Nyami Nyami, merry snake with his basket of bread, and the banks are green; the Southern shore is the reflection of the fields of Aaru in earthier hues, still ripe with reeds; the Northern shore is Salley Gardens, where pleasant men weep silently to strains of The Waters of Tyne, strummed for coppers by Orpheus, on the lam with his lyre. Lethe remembers sometimes to dip her feet in the river that bore her name upstream, just to be sure it’s still moving. She’s on the Salley side. A jetty juts from either bank a little further downstream, where the meanders of Eridanos first mingle with the flowing of Ymir’s blood from the North Sea. For a flagon of wine, the boatman (Jones to his friends) will take you across from shore to shore. Throw in a golden apple, or even a simple apple crumble, and you might persuade him to take you out to sea, across chopping waves on his little wicker ferry, to the bay where cormorants swoop at the backs of fishermen unawares, the shore where the first of the Eastern guests, the Three Pure Ones and Rostam the champion, have already crossed the beach and are on the road that will take them to the Court of King Jelly Roll, for the feast.

A young woman came down to the jetty one morning where Jones sat smoking his pipe. They were on the south side.

“Boatman,” she said, and he looked up, smiling slightly, “Will you ferry me across the river?”

“Of course dear,” he said, “If you have the means to pay.”

“Certainly I do,” she said, reaching towards her pouch, “Should I pay you now or later?”

“Now, I should think,” said Jones, amusedly, “But what manner of vessel is that for transporting wine?”

Both were looking at the pouch, “It... isn’t,” said the young woman, “It’s full of money and such things.”

“Ah, yes. Hard currency. It’s wine I’ll be needing, though. That money stuff’s wasted on me, dear.”

“But I haven’t any wine,” she protested, “And I do have rather a lot of money, coins of all denominations, and traveller’s cheques too!”

It was no use, though, and Jones told her, kindly enough, to return again with wine, and passage would be assured. And so she headed off, somewhat frustrated.

The next day, or two days later, she arrived at the jetty just as Jones’s boat returned, unladen, from the other side. She walked down and crouched to repeat her previous request.

“Of course dear,” he said, “But I shall need a sip of that wine first, for it’s thirsty work being a boatman. More than you might realize. You do have the means to pay, yes?”

“I did…,” she began, hesitantly, raising the remnants of a flagon, “But it was spilt on the way…”

“Oh dear.”

“I was hoping, perhaps, to offer you this instead,” she said, holding out a diamond ring.

“Hmm,” pondered Jones, “I’m sure it’s pretty enough to look at, but I daresay it does very little for a dry mouth. It’ll have to be wine, I’m afraid.”

She sighed and headed off.

Saddled

It has been noted by a few astute-but-hard-of-hearing listeners that the song "Temporary Evil", from the St. Cuthbert's Burials E.P. of the same name, is a mite frustrating for those who like to make out words. The chattering in the background must, for the time being, remain enigmatic, but I can provide you here with the main body, as it were, of the text:

Saddled like a growing undertaker. Mislaid in the undergrowth that tried but couldn’t twine the poplar trees while they were there. Evidenced by cooling of the ground from sunset, culminating in the coldest earth before the dawn. Distracted by the finches, didn’t know what kind of finches. Bolstered by a breeze that hardly shook the hay from loose forgotten bails. Hidden by the height of hedges, honeysuckle melting with the branches of the lesser bushes. Exited stage right before the sun was coming up.

Thanks for listening! Ho ho.