The Sydney Dylan Soc webpage has been revamped. An interesting thing to note is that March 19th, 2012 is the 50th (!) anniversary of the release of Bob Dylan, the album.

May 24! Bob's birthday! 70 years old no less!

I did an 8tracks. It's mostly covers since 8tracks rules are you can't have more than two songs by the same person. Some originals and some "tributes" too.

The picture I took at the recent Sydney show.

FINALLY updated the Sydney Dylan Society page with 2011 dates. As there is a tour shortly I'll update later on where we will be meeting before the show. It's usually the Crystal Palace but as we now meet at the Market Tavern maybe it will be there. Will consult and get back to you.

So I went and saw Emmylou the other week. I didn't immediately rush to blog with it because of the redundancy of anything I could say. If she hadn't been sublime, that would be news. I'll play fearless citizen journalist a bit and say there was something a bit off about the sound. As we know, I am a dullard at musical perception but my old cloth ears picked up an imbalance to the band, a clattering loudness to the drums at time and a sharpness at times to the mando and an indistinctness at others. Due once again to the herculean incompetence of my nemesis, Ticketmaster, I wasn't in the front row where you expect a certain muddiness, but half way back in the prime position for the mixers.

In any event I shouldn't complain, she did "Goodbye" and "Pancho and Lefty" plus a whole bunch from Wrecking Ball including "Every Grain of Sand." And a new song dedicated to Kate McGarrigle.

Bruce Springsteen, The Promise This is truly beautiful stuff. Also essential is watching the HBO documentary of the making of Darkness on the Edge of Town, with amazing footage of inside the studio and lots of real insights into the artistic process. Darkness was actually the first Springsteen album I owned so I've always had a soft spot for it, seeing the album or mores worth of great material from those sessions gives a better understanding of what the album is, on relistening, as well as adding 20 odd quality tracks to our collections. It is a case of what the album could have been but was not, by deliberate choice. And it's not often we really get that level of stickybeaking into creation. Even people not into Bruce would benefit from seeing the doco, it's a real close examination of the artistic process.

Bob Dylan, The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964 (The Bootleg Series Vol. 9) Well it's Bob and lots of good stuff but not as essential as the Bruce for the reasons above. Recently I have been obsessing over some gospel era live shows and those are my personal pick for Bootleg Series 10. I know that at least for April 20, 1980 Massey Hall Toronto gig there is an officially recorded by Sony audio and video record. Bob's ambivalence or otherwise about the era is unknowable of course, but I'd love to see something new added to the official record. Of course, the unofficial record has been ahead of the curve for decades, this article is worth reading for that, "the wisdom of bootleggers over gatekeepers"

Riley, Grandma's Roadhouse As this Nashville Scene article says "long lost country rock gem" featuring Gary Stewart.

Everything from Soundway To wit, The World Ends: Afro Rock and Psychadelia in 1970s Nigeria, Nigeria Special, Volume 2: Modern Highlife, Afro Sounds & Nigerian Blues 1970-6 and The Sound of Siam : Leftfield Luk Thung, Jazz and Molam from Thailand 1964 - 1975

Next Stop .... Soweto Volumes 2 and 3 series from Strut. Free tracks, info and sounds at the Volume 2 and Volume 3 microsites. I'll single out Vol. 3 Vol. 3: Giants, Ministers and Makers: Jazz in South Africa 1963-1978 since the rock, funk soul crate digging comps are a dime a dizen these days so I really loved hearing the jazz side of things.

Crazy Heart, The Soundtrack See here.

Kris Kristofferson, Please Don't tell Me How the Story Ends, The Publishing Demos 1868 - 1972

Keith Richards, Vintage Vinos - Tres cool collection of Keef's non-Stones work, solo and with the X-Pensive Winos.

A Heartbeat and a Guitar: Johnny Cash and the Making of Bitter Tears (Nation Press) by Antonino D'Ambrosio is a very passionately conceived and written book. That album (as I must have mentioned a score of times on this blog) is one of my favourites and definitely worthy of full-length treatment, but overall I felt unsatisfied by the book.

"The making of" in the title is in the broadest sense, painting the entire social changes of the early 60s as its backdrop. Of course as an early 60s "protest album" (Cash's own description of the record) that context is not irrelevant, but I think the book fails to really distinguish between the topics with a primary relationship to the album, and those that reside in the outer circles of background. It's A Rough Guide to the Greenwich Folk Boom, the Civil Rights Movement, Music in the Civil Rights Movement and Johnny Cash and Peter La Farge and Some Other Stuff from the Last 50 years in American Popular Culture, which is ... well, OK in theory and would have been better received by me if basic facts of the album itself did not remain cloudy. Also, it's a short book and each of those topics is Big, you know? It's a lot for 230 pages.

Some of the songs of the album (the official album, let alone the outtakes etc) actually go unmentioned through the whole book, and from reading it you wouldn't know, say, who played drums on it. Perhaps I have been trained by Dylanology to expect too much; books about his albums include details of every running sheet, every session, every player, every outtake and alternative version. I'm open to the idea my expectations are skewiff, but even trying to step back from that, there were rather more questions than answers.

The Johnny-Cash-on-the-studio part of the making of Bitter Tears sometimes left me confused. For instance, in the space of a page or so we have conflicting information about Cash's contract at Columbia. On page 64, "[L]earning from his tenure at Sun, Cash made sure the freedom to explore and record different kinds of sounds ... was included in his new deal at Columbia." This is interesting; of course Sam Phillips' aversion to letting his hit machines branch out is well known. (He wouldn't even let Cash record a gospel album, which you would think not terribly controversial in the mid-century mid-South.) But I'm very interested to know of the actual terms in his Columbia contract which guaranteed more artistic freedom. Sadly The Smoking Gun doesn't have a copy of the contract. A couple of pages later, the book quotes producer Bob Johnston (of "Is it rolling, Bob?" Highway 61 Revisited fame) saying Cash was "encountering the same king of stuff [creatively] at Columbia [as he had at Sun."] It leaves me wondering, if "the freedom to explore" was really included explicitly in Cash's contract a) in what terms and b) how could he encounter obstacles to something to which he was contractually entitled? How did that all actually work? Alas, the book does not tell me.

At this point in the story is the recording of The Lure of the Grand Canyon, a project I was not familiar with and still has not been released on CD. Released in 1961, it consists of six tracks, the first five of which are classical pieces and the last Cash's spoken word; you can hear the Cash track here (complete with singing mules!), at the wonderful WFMU Beware of the Blog. Please do so. Composer Ferde Grofé and conductor Andre Kostelanetz have other albums on Columbia going back to the 50s and before, and rather than a mavericky tangent powered by the singular artistic vision of J.R Cash, doesn't it make sense to see the Lure of the Grand Canyon as a project Columbia would have done anyway, and used Cash's mainstream star value to lift up its profile? D'Amrosio says Cash "brought in" conductor Kostelanetz, implying our hero was the creative force. Perhaps true, and I'd love it to be, but I dunno, I'd like to hear more about it to accept that story. This is what I mean that the book raises more questions than it answers.

In Stephen Miller's Johnny Cash: The Life of an American Icon it states it 'was an employee at Columbia Records, Gene Ferguson, who had first alerted Johnny to "The Ballad of Ira Hayes." A Heartbeat and a Guitar doesn't mention Ferguson and gives the impressed the Bitter Tears album sprang solely from Cash palling around Greenwich Village with La Farge and others. No doubt Columbia preferred Cash the hitmaker to Cash the artistic maverick with mavericky ideas about, say, doing a live album from a prison but I find myself wondering exactly what the internal involvement was with the genesis of the record. I would like to have known more of the actual mechanics of how the record comes to pass. It does not diminish the importance of Johnny Cash as a popular artist who pushed and exceeded the boundaries of his genre and time to know that, like all of us, he was pushing and being pushed amid many forces, administrative and bureaucratic as much as any else. I would never begrudge a retelling of the Birmingham bus boycott story but the book is more interested in those wider social events as animating forces than the mundane facts of life, even creative life, that actually produced this record.

I do know a fair bit about the Greenwich folk boom and the Civil Rights movement of this period so I admit that might lie behind some of my frustration. The Native American politics of that period (or any period really) are far less familiar and you may call me hypocritical for accusing the author of the opposite on this score: I would like to have heard more about it. Peter La Farge was not "an Indian", but like Cash adopted that as a persona which makes for a fascinating parallel between the two which I was hoping to see teased out more. I recall as a child people telling me, while contemplating Cash LP covers, "you can see the Indian in his face as he gets older" and it seemed reasonable to me. But of course you couldn't. Cash had no Native ancestry, and he sheepishly retracted the claim after he got sober in the 60s ("the higher I got, the more Indian I got.")

Cash gravitated towards the persona of the outsider in his public life, and this sort of fantasising is part of the addiction, in a way. It's not politically unproblematic of course but at least he disavowed it when his mind cleared of barbiturates. The magical thinking of La Farge, who died in 1965 and sadly never made it to the "survivor" phase of his addictions, is a more interesting case. His father was a Pulitzer Prize winning novelist who was very active in "Indian" rights advocacy, leading one of its major organisations. The books sort of suggests he "let people believe" he was Native. Perhaps initially, but once he made a clean break of his Colorado upbringing and landed in Greenwich Village did people "just believe" or did he given them a nudge along? The liner notes of the Bear Family release of La Farge's As Long as The Grass Shall Grow and On the Warpath, written in 1990, state flatly he was "a full-blooded Nargaset Indian" which is simply not the case. He had no Native American ancestry. I don't enquire into this to judge him or wag a finger (the Native American activists quoted in the book don't seem to reflect on it) however failing to deal with it left a gap in the treatment of La Farge in the book. It doesn't take an enthusiastic armchair psychologiser to see some low hanging fruit here. Here's kid who grows up in the shadow, and eventually becomes estranged from, his Pulitzer Prize winning father, who also happens to devote most of his time not to his kids but to public advocacy for Native American rights and the misfit son adopts a "more Indian than thou" public persona. Daddy issues, much? I don't mean to be flippant (well perhaps I do) but D'Ambrosio is not averse to some critical theory or reaching into the minds of his "characters" and yet on this interesting issue of cultural appropriation - which goes to the heart of his project, yes? -- he lets it slide by without a mention. If you're going to devote two whole pages (in a 200 page book) to the history of Carnegie Hall, as the book does, but not give a paragraph in passing on this stuff, I'm sort of afraid you have lost me.

I was moved to read about how "As Long as the Grass Shall Grow" is still regularly spun on radio stations serving upstate New York around "Lake Perfidy" and the extensive bibliography has given me a lot of things to follow up for which I am grateful. If you were the kind of person who wanted to read a whole book about one album, you should probably still get this one but I think the topic is very far from being fully explored in print.

Best Dylan Album -- Equal winners: Together Through Life and Christmas in the Heart (I'm with Tom Russell on this gem)

Best Non-Dylan Albums:
I think if you looked at my most played album released in 2009 it would be Leonard Cohen: Live in London but I'm gonna exclude live recordings, reissues and compilations from this ...

1. Easy Come Easy Go - Marianne Faithfull. I got this back in January and here it still is, top of the list.
2. Blood and Candle Smoke - Tom Russell. Typically full-bore TR effort of weaving biography and myth, now with mariachi horns
3. The Bright Mississippi - Allen Toussaint. Refreshing, transfixing, dreamy masterclass
4. Midnight at the Movies - Justin Townes Earle. No sophomore nerves here, proving the first album was not a fluke.
5. Hills and Valleys - The Flatlanders. Slipped a little in list over time but still an album of a grade Americana song to song
6. Traditions in Transition - Quantic and his Combo Barbaro. Genre tinkering with respect and passion, Latin on the wild side
7. One to the Head, One to the Heart - Gretchen Peters. What I said at the time
8. A Friend of a Friend - David Rawlings Machine. Should be higher really, but couldn't drop anything.
9. Mountain Soul II - Patty Loveless. Infectious bluegrassy country, highly polished but full of affection
10. Get Out While You Can - Dan Sultan. Well now, I only got this yesterday so given a few more days it could have really shot up the charts. Brilliant collection of soul, country and blues and heaps more soul. Dan is a star, no doubt.
11. Potato Hole - Booker T From the show in April
12. What Have You Done My Brother? - Naomi Shelton and the Gospel Queens. Preach it, sister
13. Dirt Town City Limits - Mat d and the Profane Saints. See Jim's great review.
14 Today, Tomorrow and Forever - Pete Molinari feat. The Jordanaires. Only an EP, but a perfectly formed one.
15. For the Mission Baby -- Malcolm Holcombe.
16. Ready for the Flood - Gary Louris and Mark Olsen. Was rather "meh" on it for eight of the last nine months but sort of started to grow on me ....
17. Animals in the Dark - William Elliott Whitmore. Should be higher also, what can you do? Lists are stupid. Hat tip Phineas, some very cathartic tracks on here believe me.
18. Cotton - Sam Baker. Also needs more time but exceptional story songs and that kind of creaky Texas voice I love.
19. Lucky One - Raul Malo A little bit country, a little bit croony, very pleasant listening.
20. The Soul of Black John - John Black