The 2012 Grammys Puddles of Myself Play-by-Play

Last night Matt Domino covered the 2012 Grammys in the only way he knew how—by doing a Puddles of Myself play-by-play of the entire telecast.

World's Coolest Dude 1911-2011, (1981-1990)

We continue with the eighth installment of the World's Coolest Dude list, which covers the years 1981-1990.

Puddles of My Guest Columnists Special: David Stern

Welcome back from the holy holiday week and weekend of the Judeo-Christian religions, my Puddlers. Today's post will be starting a run over the next few weeks of a few special guest posts contributed by the non-weekly columnists for the blog. As I've mentioned before, if you ever want to contribute some puddle of yourself to the blog, I would be more than happy to read, review and consider it.

Today's contributor is David Stern of the Sanctuaries who has been on the podcast and has contributed much to my very own life. He has decided to tackle the importance of one specific song and write about it with passion and a narrative—the two focal points of the Puddles of Myself aesthetic. I'll drop the introduction and let you enjoy today's Puddles of My Guest Columnist post.

My Experiences “On Fire”

David Stern

As an appreciator of music, one of the criteria I have—like many of you probably do—for assessing a song’s value to me is how it makes me feel.  Whether the feeling is noticed or is even consciously part of my assessment, the degree to which I feel any emotion and the degree of lucidity of the emotion are directly proportionate to the personal value I give a song.  There is certain music I listen to for the simple reason that I think it sounds cool.  Much of Alvin Lucier’s work is music that I approach with emotions off the court; it is there for sound and sound only.  Pop music however, operates in feeling.  “My Girl,” for example, is a song that has great worth to me because from start to finish it elicits something strong within me; when I hear those first guitar strings plucked over the teasing introductory bass notes and then the finger snaps drenched in reverb that seem to fill any room, it’s all rays of sunshine, nostalgia, warmth, and a few other clear and positive emotions (sometimes I think about Macaulay Culkin getting stung by bees, too). 

While many songs are successful in enhancing what you already feel, the real accomplishment—in my opinion—of “My Girl,” is that regardless of what is already going on inside me, my emotions are slaves to the music.  I think only the best songs, or tracks, have the ability to truly dominate you.  That said, no song has ever ruled me more completely than “I’m On Fire,” the sixth track off of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A..

Before discussing this specific track, I want to talk about my relationship with the Boss.  At some point in high school, when I was less jaded to the idea of the “Boss”, I listened to every Bruce Springsteen album (with varying levels of attentiveness) starting with his debut, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., and ending with Tunnel of Love (thank you Napster, Morpheus, KaZaa).  Concerned at the time with only what was considered canonical, I was taking strides in expanding my musical knowledge… trying anyway.  Thing is, I never really fell in love with Springsteen.  In fact, I would say I did not like him very much.  To this day I find there is an element of cheesiness to some of his most appreciated music that I just cannot get over.  “Badlands,” “Atlantic City,” and “Glory Days” are all examples of songs that, to me, have overwhelming schmaltziness and pomp.  I felt that certain songs and sides of Springsteen were heartbreaking, but there was just too much filler for me to really consider him someone I love.  And while my suburban, upper-middle class Jewish high school self just couldn’t relate to his workman’s lyrics, I also found that much of them seemed forced and that they were easy candidates for ridicule.  “Really, Bruce?  By this point in your career you’ve been playing music professionally for over a decade.   Save the ‘I ain’t got a job’ crap.”  (“Working on the Highway” seemed to work almost magically but that is an entirely different Puddle.)

It wouldn’t be until a few years ago that some of Springsteen’s songs would strike chords in me.  Maybe I hadn’t developed the tools or musical muscle needed to appropriately digest what was happening on his albums until recently. “Stolen Car,” the last song on side three of The River, was the first one to really get to me.  On an intellectual level, I was impressed by the economy of its writing.  With the exception of a few chords starting with an E minor near the song’s instrumental fadeout, “Stolen Car” is made up of only G and C—I and IV in the key of G major (Wreckless Eric’s “Whole Wide World,” in E, is another song that contains only the I and IV chords yet it lacks the depth of “Stolen Car”).  The song also has a binary (AABAB) structure (until the fadeout) with the second B section being slightly altered and elongated. 

Then there are the lyrics.  Without divulging too much or going into detail, Springsteen paints a vivid picture of a love gone bad.  As almost everything the listener needs to know is in the first stanza (“I met a little girl and I settled down/ In a little house on the edge of town/ We got married and swore we’d never part/ Then little by little we drifted from each other’s hearts”), it is the narrator’s lack of specificity that makes the lyrics so relatable; we’ve only heard the first verse and we’ve all already lived “Stolen Car.”  By the time Springsteen describes his fear of disappearing in the pitch black night in the song’s last section, we are acutely aware of the withdrawnness and detachment a spoiled love can make us feel even from ourselves. 

Academic dissection aside, the track hits all the right nerves.  The simple lyrical content coupled with the sparse arrangement makes the narrator’s pain that much easier to feel.  My appreciation and love of “Stolen Car” comes from the sympathetic loneliness I experience after listening to it.  It’s the kind of song that I listen to, get inoculated by, and then ask “how did he do that?” after considering the unornamented material that was used to create it.

As a side note, I must admit a certain preference I often display for what I refer to as “songs that don’t do anything.”  This describes a purely musical aspect of different songs in which chords, verses and choruses, and other musical material seem to morph into each other.  Change seems to be brought on slowly and each section is a miniature meditation.  The antithesis of this is characteristic of songs by bands like the Who, whose chords are punctuating, intentional, and sometimes jarring.  Dana Carvey once joked that when some guitarists switch chords they look surprised as if having just seen a magic trick.  In my opinion, the Who are—and don’t get me wrong, I love the Who—an example of a band whose music lends itself to this “surprise.”  “Stolen Car,” on the other hand, has a certain languidness that my body agrees with, as do the title track off of Paul Simon’s Graceland and most songs by the Feelies (Neu is another great example of a band that employs this but then you’re getting into Krautrock, which I separate from most other popular music).  “I’m On Fire” has it, too.

The first time I ever allowed “I’m On Fire” to get under my skin was in January of this year.  My band, the Sancturies (plug!), were in Nashville recording what is going to be our debut album and companion EP.  During one of our mixing sessions we were graced with the presence of Jake Orrall, the singer, guitarist, and songwriter for Nashville garage wunderkinds Jeff the Brotherhood.  After chatting in the control room for a few minutes, Jake extended an invitation for the three of us Sanctuaries who were still down there to go to a show he was hosting near the studio.  As soon as the day’s work was done, we armed ourselves with 40s of Old English and headed over.

When we got there, I couldn’t believe how remarkably similar the interior made me feel to being at shows at Death By Audio in Brooklyn.  After all, this was in Nashville where everything had so far seemed alien to us.  Surrounded by tight clothing, beards, the stale stench of spilt beer, and hipsters getting down to crunked out raunch-rap, I was reminded of how Bard College felt when I would visit someone there after graduating from Skidmore: familiar soul, unfamiliar faces.  We had arrived in time to catch the last band, an admitted joke duo who played heavy metal and threw Monopoly money around while wearing suits.  Oh, and there was some fake blood.  In short, everything pathetic and everything fun about a show like that back home was exactly the same.  I was momentarily in Bizarro-Brooklyn.

The band’s set ended when I was about halfway done with my OE and the usual dispersing took place.  I had been expecting some more Major Lazer-esque music to start pumping out of the PA speakers but five minutes went by of overhearing chatter in the otherwise silent room where I could finally enjoy the wall I was leaning on as I treaded in 20 ounces.  As they tend to do when I am nearer to lubrication than moroseness (#stealingfromMadMen ), my eyes followed the movements of a dirty-blond and I wondered if she were the type of person she is because she has good taste or because tight-fitting clothing makes her ass look good.  I wanted to know if I could learn something from her if I ever decided to talk to her. 

And then it happened.  That never-changing barebones drumbeat beneath guitar arpeggios and the haunting synthesizer of “I’m On Fire,” brisk and chilling like January air, started coming out of the speakers.  The opening bars, screaming nothing but focus and forward motion, made me feel borderline psychotic.  By the time Springsteen’s cool, airy vocals entered, I was already as obsessed with whatever was in front of me as the narrator was with his female subject in the second stanza.  “Tell me now baby is he good to you/ Can he do to you the things that I do?/ I can take you higher/ I’m on fire.” I thought it was the perfect song for the moment but I would soon learn that it is the perfect song because it creates moments.

Now, there are always intangibles when judging a track.  This is why cover versions, live versions, alternate versions, and sometimes even studio versions (Tom Petty famously broke his hand by punching a wall after several failed attempts of recapturing the demoed vocal spirit for the song “Rebels” during the recording of Southern Accents) don’t retain the magic of whichever version you originally fell in love with.  The other thing about intangibles is that they are hard to describe.  Luckily, thanks to a rumor I read on the Internet there is a point of reference in the movie Badlands to help ease the ineffability. 

 For those who haven’t seen the movie, Badlands is about Kit (Martin Sheen) who charms the teenager Holly (Sissy Spacek) and, after murdering her father, takes her along for the ride on a cross-country killing spree.  Directed by Terrence Malick, the film uses the big sky backdrop of the South Dakota badlands to illustrate the dispassion of Kit’s violence and his matter-of-fact attitude towards the killings.  It is a well-accepted fact that Springsteen saw Badlands and that it inspired him to write the song of the same name as well as the title track from Nebraska.  According to one possibly erroneous messageboard post, the film also inspired the writing of “I’m On Fire.”  I’m not really concerned with the verisimilitude of some shmohawk’s online claims, but I do see some connections between the two works.

Starting with the obvious, the sweep of the Midwestern sky is present in the sparseness of the track.  There is a stillness in the song, like the stillness that passively observed Kit’s cruelty, that hangs above the male subject who is tempted by “a bad desire.”  In both film and song, the un-judging atmosphere is present before and after the story is told.

Lyrically, there is some ambiguity when it comes to who Springsteen’s character is referring to right in the first lines, “Hey little girl is your daddy home?/ Did he go away and leave you all alone?”  Clearly, the little girl whom he addresses with a rockabilly vocal rhythm is the object of his sexual desire.  But who is her “daddy?”  Considering the competitive sentiment of the second stanza, one might believe that it is the little girl’s suitor.  The fantastic video for “I’m On Fire” supports that idea and suggests that her daddy is really her sugar-daddy.  If the word “daddy” were to be replaced by a word that is not a familiar term for a father, one would be led to believe this even more strongly; the song would fall in line with a long list of others (Joe Jackson’s “Is She Really Going Out With Him” and the Beatles’ “This Boy,” to name a few) in which the male character not only yearns for the female, but also shows disdain for her current lover.  Keeping in mind the possible Badlands connection however, the little girl (she was a teenager, after all) and her “daddy” may very well be Holly and her father, respectively.  This notion adds a deeper element of desire and obsession to Springsteen’s character.  It would be one thing to question the love a peer of yours has for the girl you long after, but who has the audacity to compete with her father?

If the song was in fact inspired by Badlands, Springsteen did one hell of a job capturing nearly every aspect of the movie in such short time.  Kit’s sexual and violent desires, his psychosis outlined in the bridge (“Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife, baby edgy and dull/ And cut a six inch valley in the middle of my skull”), and the haunting landscape are all in there.  If it wasn’t inspired by Badlands, then Springsteen was still successful in using the song as a vehicle for what happens to be the emotional composition of the film. 

 “I’m On Fire” is not the first song that has changed the complexion of a day for me.  Last March, I woke up one morning and put on Bob Dylan’s “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” had a mental breakdown and called in sick.  Though still an impressive feat, it was more of a function of the song’s mixture with borderline alcoholism, nascent depression, dissatisfaction with work, and the recollected loss of a promising person’s friendship and interest.  “I’m On Fire,” as I recently learned, has the ability to work alone (on me).

I had heard the song several times after that night in Nashville but I hadn’t given it my full attention during those subsequent listens.  The song would be on when friends were around, when I was cleaning my room listening to Born in the U.S.A., or when I felt like hearing it but was preoccupied with other responsibilities (I had been obsessing over the completion of the Sanctuaries’ album).  This past Sunday was different.  I had come home from a short band practice at around 9:30, put my guitar and jacket away, and sat down to listen to music.  Our album and EP had just been finished and I could finally enjoy other people’s songs the way I am accustomed to (without any distractions or other activities going on) and give it my full attention.  The first track I put on was “I’m On Fire.”  Seconds after its fadeout, I was struggling against the thirst I had for forward motion but I quickly lost the fight.  My jacket was back on, iPod buds were in my ears and transmitting the song on repeat, and before I knew it I made a left on Broadway heading north.  I didn’t care or know where I was going but with my hood up and feeling insane I would walk straight until something got in my way.  I took Broadway up until it hit Union Square East and continued on through its transformation into Park Avenue.  About thirty-five blocks after leaving my apartment, what got in my way was Grand Central Terminal.  This whole time, listening to nothing but this one song, I felt hijacked; it wasn’t my decision to leave my apartment and it definitely wasn’t my decision to walk the three miles (roughly) that made up the entire trip.  I was a shell of a person, obsessed with reaching an unknown goal.  I turned left at 42^nd and then took 5^th Ave south until it met back up with Broadway at Madison Square Park.  I was soon back in Union Square, walking through it scared like it was the set of the “Thriller” video and watching skateboarders as if they were riding some alien vehicle.  I made my way down University, left on 8^th St, right on Mercer and then back home.  My iPod was put to sleep and, like nothing happened, I was answering my roommate’s questions about our slightly overdue rent check.  The rest of the night was completely normal.

In addition to the ways in which I’ve been affected by “I’m On Fire,” a remarkable feature it has—for me—is its freedom from context.  As fans of not just songs but of actual bands and artists, us listeners tend to either give or take away appreciation of works based on where they come from and the sometimes-cultural settings in which they are experienced.  On one side of the spectrum there is the whole, “every Beatles song is great” viewpoint (save for “Lovely Rita” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” I am admittedly mostly guilty of asserting this), in which an audience member gets wrapped up in the iconic nature of the greatest band of all time and dismisses what would be duds if other bands recorded them.  On the other side, a band like ABBA, despite having some fantastically written pop songs, often gets unfairly shrugged off for their associations with disco.  It’s true that songs, albums, and all other forms of art do not get birthed in vacuums, which is why I am so impressed by “I’m On Fire.”  Springsteen has never been an artist I have been in love with.  Although I now see his lyrics as portraits of a simple life and I adore a good bunch of his songs, I would never call myself a fan of his.  In a case where context seems like it should work against him, one of his songs has earned more of my personal appreciation and value than perhaps any other.

Free Forest City Redemption Project Day 1: Little Runner

Fame is a strange thing. It’s not something tangible that sticks with a person. At its height, it can be frighteningly alluring, repulsive and inspiring all at the same time. When it wanes, you wonder why you or anyone else ever wasted their time; why that person endeavored or made the effort to put themselves or their work out into the public; or, if that person’s fame came without perceived labor, why you even bothered to care, why you wasted rainy nights or quiet mornings to follow their next thought, move or release. We all want to be relevant, but the degrees that separate relevance, fame and immortality are great and often confusing and it’s easy to forget what really matters or which aspect we truly want.


Forest City was clearly not a famous band. But to me, someone who is clearly biased, they were the best band in Brooklyn for a period of time. Their concerts were shambolic, loose and messy, but not in the legendary way that we remember Bob Dylan, the Replacements, Faces or Bruce Springsteen. They were messy because that’s just what they were. There was no great statement. The music was a take on country music, a sincere take that was meant to be lived in—and the band was lived in if it was anything. That is to say, four separate lives and ambitions carried on outside the parameters of the band and the shows they played, which made the fact that they were loose and messy make so much sense. Yet, in the days of head nodding and pretending to drink too much, Forest City concerts were the only places without computers were I saw honest dancing; where the sense of happiness, warmth and friendship that I look for in music best manifested itself in a close proximity to me (the albums I love are distant pinnacles with impossible sounding drums that play at the corners of my apartment on speakers and reverberate in my mind). People left Forest City concerts saying things about “fun” that eased my heart because, for a moment, they loved country music and that made me happy. And without knowing it, they loved what rock n’ roll was originally about: fun and loss.

In the midst of loving The Larry Sanders Show and watching the 2011 NBA All-Star Game in L.A., what I mean to say is that I’ve lived in Brooklyn for about three years. Nearly all of my friends are in bands. As someone who wants his words to be seen by the entire world, I know that all of us aren’t going to be famous. It is quite possible that the Tony Castles are the only band I know that are going to gain a modicum of fame; and even that isn’t a prediction. And I know that we’re going to feel shitty and petty toward each other to get to what we want, to get to that level of relevance for our work, of who we are, that level that may or may not resemble fame. Whatever that level of relevance may be, we should never forsake our art. And, even if we manage to do that, we will surely fall short of immortality.

And as I grow tired of Brooklyn and music and think about my search for an audience for my words, as I think about people that I’ve spent weekends with who have now died, I feel OK for moments about falling short of immortality. I feel OK because I know that I have this batch of songs. Not that they are extremely poignant or mind-blowing, but simply because they exist and I can remember a happiness from an era of my life as we move past it and into the vastness of whatever fortune will make of us or what we choose to make of it. I feel OK because in that era I could see these songs played on a Friday with friends, new characters in my life, new people who influenced me and one poor soul who I admired. In that era of song, I saw the first marriage of my young life unfold right before my eyes between two friends. And most of all, I formed a lifelong bond with someone who I thought would never be able to surprise me, which is a phenomenon that I am forever thankful for.

Of course, all of this isn’t in this set of eleven songs. However, some of it may be in you, so just take a listen.

 
Click here to listen to "Little Runner," track one of the Forest City album, Forest City.

My Top Ten Albums of 2010

Good evening, my Puddlers. It’s a cold evening and I have been reading about Jonathan Franzen and getting inspired to be a better writer than him so I’m going to take my talents to the manuscript of From Here to the Last Mound of Dirt this evening instead of providing you with one of my trademark lengthy posts.

Instead, in the spirit of the end of the year, I am going to give you a list of My Top Ten Albums of 2010.  Now, you can consult my list from last year in order to understand my criteria for the albums of the year.  They basically consist of any album from any year that helped to define 2010 for me in some way.  It may not be helpful in terms of helping a person decide what to buy or ask for for Christmas or to determine what the actual “best” album of 2010 was, but I liked these albums, damnit, and that deserves some credence in any person’s mind.

So, without further ado or explanation on how I came to this decision, here are My Top Ten Albums of 2010.  I hope you either buy or illegally download these albums somewhere and have some of the heart-stopping revelations about the soul, life, love, and death that I have had this year. Obviously, you can’t top my number, but you can try to come close – and the trying is what really matters.

10. Transference – Spoon (2010)

9. Keep Me Comin’ – Jesse Ed Davis (1973)

8. Hounds of Love – Kate Bush (1985)

7. Have One on Me – Joanna Newsom (2010)

6. Watertown – Frank Sinatra (1970)

5. Born in the USA – Bruce Springsteen (1984)

4. Destroyer of the Void – Blitzen Trapper (2010)

3. Teen Dream – Beach House (2010)

2. Veedon Fleece – Van Morrison (1973)

1. Lisbon – The Walkmen (2010)

There you have it – My Top Ten Albums of 2010. Let the arguing and slapping of my back begin.

Tomorrow, Mr. Alex Ramsdell graces the blog with his prose presence.

Stay warm, my Puddlers.

Running From Updike and the Boss

There is nothing like having a strong negative opinion about an artist, object or idea. It is a stance that gives you a bizarre, almost perverse sense of power. The kind of opinion I am referring to isn’t born out of ignorance, because when you express this opinion, you know full well what you are doing.  You engage in an argument with your friend or acquaintance who likes a certain band.  They explain why you should enjoy said band and in doing so explain why they personally believe in said band.  As they are doing this, the idea of the band crystallizes in your mind – all of their annoying tendencies, the clichés and tropes they rely on, the repetitive nature of their songs.  All of these traits become completely palpable as an object.  Then, you build up steam.  You feel it rising behind you and before you know it, you have your response to your friend or acquaintance: “Pink Floyd fucking sucks!”  You of course follow that up by mocking their trademark sound and try to win by submission.  However, if you are polite, you finally concede that said band just isn’t your kind of thing.

This sort of chain of events would perfectly describe my relationship to Bruce Springsteen and John Updike over the past ten years of my life. Precisely from when I was sixteen years old and I first read “A & P” and then saw it in a million different anthologies; when I realized that people put way too much faith into Bruce Springsteen right after 9/11.  However, in some bizarre coincidence, over the past few months I have found myself coming around to the work of both of these artists.  My change of heart hasn’t come begrudgingly either.  I have in many ways embraced both Updike and Springsteen forthrightly and, in doing so, I have found my own way to trace similarities between their work.  In specific, I want to focus on Updike’s Rabbit, Run and a trilogy of Springsteen songs off Born in the USA: “I’m Going Down,” “Glory Days,” and “Dancing in the Dark.”  The tie-in of these different snapshots for two prodigious (well, maybe Updike is truly more prodigious) and beloved artists has been able, at least in feel, to articulate a strange impalpable feeling that I have always struggled to define or express: that feeling is entrapment.  When I say “entrapment,” there is no element or air of espionage – it is the “entrapment” of the soul, of those strange and powerful moments when we see the light fade and the possibility for maneuvering, for finding that other way out of the room, strictly and firmly disappear.  What does that momentary loss mean?  How do we overcome it? And most importantly, what does it teach us about humanity?  What does it teach us about the soul?

John Updike was always a writer I chose to stay away from and it was mainly due to his reputation. I, as I foolishly do from time to time, grouped him in with a bunch of writers of the mid-20^th century such as Philip Roth or Thomas Pynchon (someone he is nothing like) and Don Delillo.  I frowned on his reputation for writing gratuitous sex scenes and disapproved of his affiliation with the New Yorker, classifying it as some kind of mid-century snobbery that was fit for those post-modernists and other hacks who made their careers because “they were lucky and sucked.”  I was in a word “unfair” to Mr. Updike.  Unfortunately, it was upon his death and the subsequent press that that event garnered when I decided to pay him due attention.  I read about his prodigious ability and hard work ethic.  I admired his outward desire to write for “a dusty bookshelf in a town somewhere east of Kansas.”  I slapped him (and myself) on the back for his appreciation and gratitude towards James Joyce.  Updike, it turned out, was a true man of letters; a man who understood and saw the American tradition, but greatly appreciated the European sensibility and aesthetic.  He was a prodigious and dedicated talent – the kind of which I always imagined and sought myself to be.  Once this vision of the artist had firmly been secured in my mind, it was time to begin actually appreciating his work.  To do this, I decided to turn to one of his first novels.  The one whose tight, direct, present tense style helped to establish is reputation – Rabbit, Run.

Rabbit Angstrom is a former basketball prodigy (like me, well, OK, I’ll let you decide if that’s true or not).  However, there is no place for basketball in his life anymore.  There is no room for basketball in the literal sense or basketball in the figurative sense, basketball as something that one is good at, something that gives one joy and in turn gives the world joy in witnessing that “thing.”  With basketball no longer in his life, Rabbit finds himself restless.  I’m not going to describe or explain the plot.  I’m merely going to discuss this revelation of “basketball” and its approximation in our own lives. For Rabbit, basketball was his youth, it was a way for him to stake his hands into the world and be a part of it. Rabbit was not only a part of the world, but he was an integral element of life in the area of Pennsylvania where he grew up.  He was raised to a level of hero – a natural at the sport of basketball who made the game look beautiful.  What makes Rabbit a compelling character is the fact that he is not a bullish or boorish jock.  He glorifies his playing days, sure, but he also expresses a deep love of the game of basketball; the great rush one gets from the bounce of the ball, the feel of the spring in your thighs and calves, the roundness of the edge of the ball as you grasp it to rise for a layup.  He doesn’t fall into the easy clichés of a faded athlete. Rabbit doesn’t drink.  He appreciates the merits of working, the responsibilities of fatherhood (whether he exemplifies those responsibilities is another thing) and the fact that his glory days are indeed behind him.  Rabbit is a very self-aware character on many levels.

Rabbit is also compelling because he is a failure and he does not take full responsibility for his actions or the situations he finds himself in, though his path to those places may be innocent and misguided enough that any of us can relate to it.  The reason why we relate is precisely because of that element of “basketball” in our lives.  It may be a generalization to say that at one time in any person’s life, they had something they were good at.  There was something that they did that brought a smile to someone else’s face just because he or she was doing what they do best. For athletes, this can extend for a great period of time, like say the joy of watching Michael Jordan, or for a brief period of time, someone like Rabbit, Len Bias or Marcus Dupree. For others perhaps it is a period of tremendous sexual prowess, the artistic ability one exhibited in junior high school, being the fastest kid on the playground, being the student government president at college or the head of a fraternity. For perhaps all of us it is just being a child and the fact that  our parents, upon seeing us sprawling around on the carpet or hearing us chirp up with some indecipherable phrase, could do nothing but smile because we were in our element, we were a new addition to life, to their lives, to the idea of a family, and just being a child made them endlessly happy.  There is a role we fit at one time in our life that stands above all others.  It is our collective “basketball” and very often that period cannot last but a handful of years.

Rabbit is now a man of the everyday.  He has a wife he doesn’t love very much, a job he is apathetic about, a child that he cares and empathizes for but doesn’t necessarily love and yet he still has a heart that drives him and spurns him on, the same heart that pushed him on the basketball court.  It’s this heart that leads him to leave his home for no apparent reason other than he doesn’t feel at home there anymore.  There isn’t the same thrill.  He isn’t pleasing anyone the same way he pleased the spectators on the basketball court.  So, in order try and find a place, he takes up with a “part-time prostitute,” who is really just a woman that has slept with multiple men and maybe taken money afterwards once or twice.  Rabbit can almost make her happy, but in the end he has to return to his wife who is giving birth to his second child.  Rabbit has to succumb to the fact that even though the world is beautiful and there is that constant tugging on our hearts no matter how old we grow, there is still that one time when we shone brighter than the other times of our life.  And that isn’t a sad or bad thing.  It is merely true, because we wouldn’t want anything to burn incredibly brightly for a completely prolonged period of time.  Rabbit comes to vaguely comprehend this idea, but only after he suffers more than a few losses.

Updike relays his story with subtlety and poise. The narration closely focuses on the characters from the present tense and leaves you with an almost modernist feel to the narrative.  Details, colors, objects are relayed with that kaleidoscopic focus/unfocus that the best of the modernists could write with. There is a terrific element of control among the chaos that keeps the pace of the story, but never overwhelms the reader with presence.  Things just happen, which is precisely the point.  Rabbit has entered a point in life where things just happen.  His life no longer has that outside meaning that it once had when he was a basketball star, so now the awareness of action for the character and the repercussions are not as strong as they should be.  Perhaps they never were even at those heights of hardwood stardom.  Rabbit’s world is a world of the mundane and Updike presents that world with the utmost clarity.  We get the sense of a bombed out or soon to be bombed out Pennsylvania town.  There are beat up cars and small streets with cracked sidewalks, small town churches whose congregations are strong on Sundays.  Everything feels immediate and vibrant in its utter hopelessness.  There is a truth to the broken down environment of the world that Updike renders and that Rabbit lives in that calls out to you.  This is a part of Updike’s ability as a writer – it is part of his Joycean skill.  The beat up and normal, the “daily bread” as Joyce once said, becomes the stuff or art, of poetry, of something ephemeral and universal.

Bruce Springsteen is often credited with the same ability of making the mundane streets and cars of suburbia seem like the stuff of poetry, although he has come to that accolade through methods and phrasing that are much more crude.  When it comes to poetry and to heralding the mundane, Springsteen is wildly overrated.  He has made it through the decades on brute force and sweat, while simultaneously overwriting about characters with the same attributes.  And he is successful because he frames these tried and clichéd situations and characters with vibrant, heartfelt rock n’ roll, which is the testament to the format of guitar, drums, earnest vocals and horns to bring the message home.  I’ll never give my heart entirely up to the music of Bruce Springsteen, but I have come to a place where I can admit that sometimes he is just right about certain things.

Born in the USA is a fine album.  The title track is better as the first song on the album than it is when you hear it on the radio or in a stadium somewhere – it is actually quite harrowing. “Darlington County” is one of the most carefree songs in perhaps the history of rock n’ roll. “I’m On Fire” is meditative and concise and “No Surrender” is inspiring and predates the great sound of those Travelling Wilburys records.  However, where the album really picks up steam, where it really gets everything right is on three of the last four songs of the album: “I’m Going Down,” “Glory Days,” and “Dancing in the Dark.” When you take these three tracks into account as a whole, you get a sad, concrete picture of small town life, of feeling as though there is no way out – feeling that sense of entrapment.

“I’m Going Down,” to me, sounds the way that Rabbit, Run feels.  The track rumbles along on a classic rock n’ roll/rockabilly beat that is completely infectious. It’s a story about a couple that could be married or just long time lovers who are slowly falling apart. The song is all grey skies of  a November morning or the cold, windy bitter evening of February or January in some small town. The song finishes with a simple and devastating verse: “I pull you close but when we kiss I can feel a doubt/I remember back when we started/My kisses used to turn you inside out/I used to drive you to work in the morning/Friday night I'd drive you all around/You used to love to drive me wild/But lately girl you get your kicks from just driving me down.” There is nothing overtly dramatic in those lines, but there is some element of truth, a presentation of a terrible relationship that seems undoubtedly real.  And as much as Springsteen uses the “driving” motif to death in all of his songs, here it feels appropriate. It’s a different detail.  There is an intimacy of driving a lover to work in the morning, either to her job or to the train to go to work.  It suggests a mutual agreement, working together that makes this anonymous couple seem that much more present in the middle of the music.  When that detail is matched with the fact that the girl used to drive the guy wild and now all she wants to do is drive him down, you get the full scope of their misery.  These people are both trapped in a terrible relationship in what feels like a small, working class town where the skies are always impossible grey in the fall and the warmth of the car heater and the living room of some home are never enough in the winter.  All of those elements remind me of the relationship between Rabbit and his wife Janice in Rabbit, Run.

A song of a failed relationship leads into a song literally about failure in “Glory Days.” The parallels between “Glory Days” and Rabbit, Run are obvious, but the poignancy comes with how the song can extend beyond a person who was just a successful athlete or once a beautiful girl in a high school.  Many people are averse to “Glory Days” because it has nearly been played to death and because its bright organ and overproduced drums just seem as obvious as the theme itself.  I’m a sucker for an organ (love that J. Geils Band “Centerfold”), but I can completely understand that criticism. The song is brash; Springsteen sings with a somewhat corny affect; and the fade-out/rock-out is out rightly cheesy. Yet, on repeated listens, what gets you about this song is Springsteen’s ability to make you focus on little details. They are scenes or poses you have seen in movies or heard about characters doing in other songs, but for some reason, Springsteen is able to make them stand out.  In “Glory Days” just like “I’m Goin’ Down,” it is the last verse that truly accomplishes this feat: “Now I think I'm going down to the well tonight and I'm going to drink till I get my fill/And I hope when I get old I don't sit around thinking about it/but I probably will/Yeah, just sitting back trying to recapture/a little of the glory of, well time slips away/and leaves you with nothing mister but/boring stories of glory days.” We all have glory days in our lives, whether you were a great jock or some kind of prom queen.  The details that hammer it home for me every time are the mention of glory days passing you by in the “wink of a young girl’s eye” and “I hope when I get old I don’t sit around thinking about it, but I probably will.”  The first detail gets me because, yes, when I am older, what will most remind me about being young is catching eyes with a young girl my age and all of the promise that a quick encounter can promise, because for the both of you the rest of your lives and the world are ahead of you – glory days are always just around the corner again even if they did already happen when you were in high school.  The second detail gets me because, well, even though I wasn’t an outstanding athlete who lived and died by his accomplishments on the court or on the field, sometimes I just can’t help thinking about those old sports glories and those old tricks I used to play in high school; all the times I used to sneak out and party and go on adventures with my friends – those were all glory days as well and if you think about them or talk about them too much, you’ll end up looking stupid just like a washed up pitcher or shooting guard.  Once again, Bruce is able to make the obvious, the cliché and the boring, seem universal and groundbreaking – that is to say, he hits the truth of the matter.

Finally, there is everyone’s favorite single, “Dancing in the Dark.” Out of the three songs, “Dancing in the Dark” is the best song, not only stylistically, but also formally. It has the best hook, Bruce’s singing threads the fine line between tasteful evocation of the character and becoming overwrought and the production doesn’t get in the way of enjoying the song – this is why it is one of the most liked Springsteen songs even to non-Springsteen fans. It’s hard to explain what exactly is so moving about the song.  It stems mostly from the driving synth melody and also the drums, which are unrelenting. As I’ve documented before, this song also has my favorite Springsteen line, “Man, I’m just tired and bored with myself.”  That line is just one of the many that pop out of the mix of the song.  And at the heart of any good song, that’s what makes it stick.  At so many turns, Springsteen yelps lyrics of desperation like “I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face/Man I ain’t getting nowhere/I’m just living in a dump like this/There’s something happening somewhere/Baby I just know where that is” or “You can’t start a fire worrying about your little world falling apart.”  It’s a feeling of restlessness and it isn’t that well-covered restlessness of youth that Born to Run epitomized.  The restlessness on “Dancing in the Dark” is the same restlessness that Rabbit Angstrom felt.  There is no way out even if you know that the world exists out in the dark and that “there is something happening somewhere.”  Even if you know how to get to that place, you can’t leave because you don’t know the way out.  The funny thing about the song is that the each verse and chorus ooze with a desperation; the narrator is desperately seeking help and he knows what he needs, he suggest that he’s open for any kind of connection any kind of warmth or human interaction, but he just can’t figure it out.  “You can’t start a fire worrying about your little world falling apart.”  It’s advice that should hit us all in the gut.  You can’t hope to make strides forward if you are worried about the little worlds that we create for ourselves falling apart.  They are meant to in a certain way.  Perhaps figuring out what that way is is the key to it all.  By running away, Rabbit Angstrom allowed his world to fall apart.  He was penned in, he was pacing the room just like the singer and the feel of “Dancing in the Dark” suggest.  But when you act, when you decide to start a fire, whatever that fire might be, you have to be prepared to let things burn.  And maybe that was what Rabbit Angstrom was missing.

There is no easy way to connect Updike’s Rabbit, Run and these three songs off Springsteen’s Born in the USA.  However, there is a certain feel that both the book and the album contain.  Really, like most things, the feel is simply about understanding how time changes things and how you need to understand how certain times of your life fit into the overall story of your life.  You can’t become preoccupied with chasing down something you were once good at, the “basketball” of your life.  We are all given certain gifts and we are all given the ability to make someone else happy, to make them smile, even if it is for just a short period of time in our lives – for many of us it is that unconscious period of childhood where our mere existence makes our parents happy. For others of us, hopefully we can achieve that time again when we fall in love with the person we are meant to be with – that doesn’t happen for all of us, though we try our hardest.  And for still others, like Rabbit Angstrom or one of the characters in “Glory Days,” there is a period of youth where some of us excel at a sport or at being beautiful and graceful and young and those postures alone – that feel of running down the basketball court after a steal, catching a touchdown in the back of the end-zone, chasing someone down the line and taking the ball in a soccer game – can make others happy, fill them with joy and inspiration.  However, those moments will inevitably fade for us, even though, out in the strange night of whatever town we live in, they seem to burn on in all the windows that straddle the hillside or the curve along the shore.  We want that inexpressible joy in our lives, that ability to seem vital and important, we want to run and not care about our shortcomings or ourselves.  And there are moments when we can achieve that, but we have to let them pass.  If you spend your life chasing, you have to be prepared for the consequences and to understand what exactly happens when you bring that burn on the inside out into the world itself – that world of cracked pavements and grey upholstered car seats, those impossible misty November mornings and windy, orange February nights.

Blonde on Blonde

I’m not a famous person, so I have no inkling as to the problems someone who is famous faces.  However, I have tried to be charming for most of my adult life so I know what it means to turn a certain face to the public world; to attempt to instill a feeling, - if not of confidence, then entertainment or amusement – to the greater world, whether that world be two people who know me, eighteen students who revere my eccentricity and care or a larger audience who couldn’t give a shit about my vanity.  I say this because there are many of us who desire to be famous, to change the world or at the very least be successful at our art, without an inkling of what kind of mental toll it can take or how it can warp one. 

Blonde on Blonde is not an album directly about the trappings of fame, but it is an album that shows you what can become of one when so much is expected of and assigned to that person’s image.  It is an album of red herrings and lyrical dead-ends with only the occasional sign of truth or non-fiction, which is why it is perhaps Dylan’s best work.  It is crafted in a non-perfect sense, that is, it is meant to reflect the nature of feeling dogged down by the press, being world-weary and having only fragments of thoughts, remembered phrases and emotions to convey it – and very often the time to convey these things is late at night, which is when I most recently listened to the album.  I was driving my friend’s white, 1996 Jeep Cherokee on Interstate 91 in Vermont at 2:00 AM.  My Friend With the Jeep was asleep in the passenger seat, his dog sleeping behind me curled up next to a cooler with beer and a compression pack for our sleeping bags.  I was revved up on strong gas station coffee and chewing nicorette gum.  The rain of Hurricane Earl intermittently spit down in meek waves while the fog rose from and across the newly paved, deep black highway.  My first thoughts were of Jack Burden driving a car alone in the night on the highway in All The King’s Men, ruminating on the nature of driving alone at night and how there is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain and how at that point you are not you, because there is no one else there to make up the you that you are, for you are only you in relation to other people.  When you are alone in that car at night in the rain, says Jack Burden, you are another you, the you that is driving alone on the highway at night in the rain.  However, I was not alone.   The Friend With the Jeep was next to me sleeping, so there was no overwhelming vastness of the dark firs and pines and dim mountains, so there should be no other me.  But I was driving and listening to Blonde on Blonde and was enjoying driving and the nature of moving so I felt that I was not Me, although my friend next to me could easily wake up and identify Me as the Real Me, the Me that he had known since boyhood years of drinking beer on the back decks of beach cottages that hung over the water, that were still abandoned in early May when life was just beginning before summer would throw it into full relief against the heat.  But the Me chewing nicorette gum (I don’t smoke) and riding high on coffee singing Bob Dylan lyrics, was not that Boyhood Me or even the Current Me, but someone deep inside, someone that indentified with the Bob Dylan who was singing about drunken politicians and having a poison headache and who could make it without someone if he just didn’t feel so all alone. Although, that Bob Dylan was not even the Bob Dylan who sang those lyrics in 1966 – he was someone else entirely.  But the Bob Dylan on RECORD on Blonde on Blonde is the Bob Dylan of 1966: fatigued, pessimistic, romantic and bored.  And I suppose the Me driving that car through Vermont to see his Great Friend, who was living in a log cabin with his girlfriend in some vision of domesticity and peace, could relate to the Bob Dylan of 1966 more than the Great Friend who he had known in his boyhood; the legendary friend and friendship that the rest of the world was jealous of and could only understand through books and movies and never in their own lives. Maybe it was because that Me, that Other Me driving a car at night had left those other Me’s of the past behind and was trying to find a new identity to embrace like the Real Bob Dylan of 1966.  Before me, there was actual rural life, behind me New York dug its nails into my back and legs.  All this just like Bob Dylan when he crashed his motorcycle.

But as I drove through the night and the album spun forth, while The Friend with the Jeep and his dog slept, until finally the last harmonica and organ notes of “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” faded away, I couldn’t help but think of those other Me’s; the ones who had crossed paths with this Bob Dylan of 1966; the Bob Dylan on record who created an artifice and a persona to shield him from a world of expectations and questions.  It was that “wild, thin, mercury music” that spooled from his imagination late at night and because it was necessity, it became art, it became his means of communication.  We all try to communicate in our own ways, whether its through our own art or through someone else’s and Blonde on Blonde is one of those great examples because it puts you in a world and a mood that allows you to take on a voice that is not your own and when you appropriate that voice, you can begin making your own fictions that will perhaps reveal the truth about you in small doses.  And so, as the fog turned tremendously white against the fresh black of the highway, and road signs flashed by, I let the album play again and let those other Me’s, those Me’s of the past rise and curl just like the fog that the high-beams of the Jeep were cutting through with each tenth of highway mile.

There was a First Me in a faded, tight blue t-shirt that said “Pearl S. Buck Elementary School Field Day on it.”  The color blue was still strong, vivid and royal, but the threads were worn and stretching, especially under the armpits because the shirt was meant for a eight or nine year old child and not a sixteen year old stoner.  The hair of this Me was shaggy and unkempt but not yet long and on top of the hair, there was a tight, ribbed brown skull cap.  And this me sat in the back of his Creative Writing class with another thin, though painfully thin, youth.  A kid with stringy long hair, that was dirty and on the verge of dreadlocks.  This young kid had wild bug eyes and sometimes wore a Jamaican hat over his dirty straw hair.  This youth whispered about William Burroughs and Lou Reed into this First Me’s ear and the First Me listened and nodded and wrote in his notebook, feeling excited about things but also very tired.  This First Me liked to look at the images of girls as they flashed by cars parked in the parking lot or yellow school buses and in the brick hallways and think about who they might be, but didn’t really care about who they were.  And this First Me wrote stories about kissing a girl in a parlor room with blue carpet while an ass played the piano, and in these stories the protagonist drove his car across the country to sit in a red wood forest with a jug of wine, to then hike to the beach on the Pacific Ocean and think about the distance of America.  This First Me had been “turned on” and had one day, with the slime of the mall still on his hairless arms, walked across the parking lot with a CD copy of Blonde on Blonde in his hands, ripping the cellophane off and hastily throwing it away, while throwing the CD onto his Discman. The First Me listened to songs like “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” or “Visions of Johanna” and thought about being high; thought about Beat poetry and how he wanted to write it.  So, this First Me wrote Beat Poetry:

Alcohol stomachs raise,

    Drenched in rain,

Mind numbing,

    Hallucinatory craze.

Can’t get a feel for anything anymore.

    No more emotions

    Except pain, and not feeling quite right.

Wake up early in the morning,

     Can’t sleep anymore.

The drunkard, the drunken bard.

-2002

And this Me listened to the kid with the dirty straw hair, until one day the kid whispered in that Me’s ear about having sex and taking advantage of someone’s younger sister in and that Me realized that the kid was full of shit for that reason and for a variety of other reasons.  That First Me told the kid with the dirt straw hair off and then went running, listening to Blonde on Blonde along the way.  But that First Me didn’t have a good attention span, he couldn’t listen to fourteen lengthy tracks all the way through.  Sure, he was swept up in “Visions of Johanna,” “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat,” and “I Want You,” but he could never make it all the way to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” and after awhile all the songs mixed together.  This First Me’s hair grew longer until high school was almost over and then this First Me cut his hair and introduced himself to a girl.  And that was when the First Me bowed out.

The roads grew darker on Route 91 and that Me driving the car, who you could call the Current Me, thought about how there was something funny about the fact that the main conflict in Bob Dylan’s catalogue, in his “life” was the rural versus the urban; and how, as many times as you could write about it, it would never get old.  For that might be the main conflict of American life in general: balancing a frontier identity with the necessity to be around people, to be the center of the world, to have the greatest cities and the greatest quality of life – to prove that Europe is nothing but a museum compared to whatever vitality is inherent in the word and shape of America. So, people will get lonesome and restless in their small space in a city and think of the country and those decisions that could have led them to a happy life there.  On the passenger side, through the trees, far-off lights glinted as the car rolled along, pulling slightly to the left.  And there are cities everywhere as much as there are forests and maybe that person in the log cabin, chopping wood, preserving food for winter and drinking water from a well will hear the train whistle and wish that they hadn’t left home and all those people that lived in the city: the drooping telephone wires, the reflections of light from a family room out onto a front lawn, the sound of the baseball game from a transistor radio on a front stoop, while firemen laugh in the pizza place next door and a bum goes through piles of leaking soda cans and beer bottles in black bags.  Those images will pile up, and whatever You is facing You in the mirror at that time will get restless and feel cornered and perhaps the only way to escape is to create another You, someone who can get to those places that the You that came before can’t – we splinter ourselves into a world of our own design in order to navigate through that world presented to us.  Like Bob Dylan holding a light bulb in a press conference in 1966.

My friend continued to sleep and the fog continued to press in against the windshield ahead of me and, even though I knew the song lay imminently at the end of the album, I thought about “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and about another Me, this was the Sad Me.  Now, don’t let the name fool you, this Sad Me was not just sad, but made up of a variety of experiences, this was the Me who had the mantra of “trying to forget something sad that happened to me a long time ago,” stuck in his head, which of course game directly from The Great Gatsby.  This Sad Me, had a short haircut (still remains) and asked barbers to cut his hair as if he “were just getting of the boat back home from WWII,” which pleased the barbers because they saw it as some kind of reverence for that great war, but it was really just vanity and confusion and trying to look like the real Jack Kerouac circa 1946. 

This Sad Me went to college and saw it as an idyllic paradise and seeing it as such, had to create himself into a persona that could be parlayed as a villain and proceeded to act that way along with the help of alcohol. Strangely, enough, he found similar souls who were interested in the same process and they proceeded to break things together and smoke lots of cigarettes.  This Sad Me left behind a girl he may well have loved and who may well have loved him as young as they were. And in an effort to chase after literary ambition and to get away from this love that he left behind and foolishly and unsuccessfully tried to get back, this Sad Me studied abroad in Ireland. Where, thinking of “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” he wrote poems:

Writing an elegy for the color red,

Was told to me as impossible,

Because it was a thing of the past,

Arching and piercing those tugging

Notions that rumble in my chest.

The summer is dark and smells of peaches,

And there lies the color red,

Bleeding upon me and my hot skin,

Which is drawn cold in mystery and the

Destruction of understanding growth.

I left my shoes behind me

Because they simply wouldn’t fit,

And also since you left yours

Lying on the wood, so that I could

Carry you and feel the color red.

Those pebbles of promise, who

Promenade in my veins and along

The thick ridges of my mind, Thump

When I am alone because I am gray

And longing for the color red.

“Why are tears so forceful?” I asked,

And why does their hue blaze,

And hurt me so much when all

You want to do is reach,

And cry and rest on my shoulder.

I was told that tears are as

Strong as you make them – just

As you proceed with your fears,

And all those rocks lightening your load,

But weighing down your companions.

Let me climb the bluffs which

You crash upon, and allow me to

Drown in the life affirming scent

That falls forth from your

Shoulders and runs down your back.

There is no hiding the coastline

In your smile, or the fingerprints

That will soon appear on your arms,

Which are completely foreign to me,

And cause me innumerable distresses.

I have been kicked from my throne,

Left to sit in a chair at night,

Like your father laying upon the porch,

Watching moths flicker in the light,

And hearing the mailbox open and shut.

Two men will sit side by side,

Whereas they once glared, absently

Trying to figure out that they

Were both the same person, and

Wanted to use the same color.

When your summer skin sighs,

Years after I knew how sweet it was,

I can’t help but see my downfall

In the future, and how

I was absent on salvation’s day.

However, in the end you are

Absolutely the color red, flowing

Forth through the streets and

Over the trees, reaching into my window,

And my chest, and leaving me

Alone on an airplane, far away,

As I notice the color of my shirt.

-2005

These poems made the Sad Me feel better, but not completely better, so in his restlessness, the Sad Me used to go down to the streets around St. Stephen’s Green and pan handle change, pretending that he was a bum.  The Sad Me didn’t go to class, but he did meet pretty girls from California who let him go to their hotel rooms – these kinds of girls had chauffeurs.  But this Sad Me rode buses across Ireland in the night and he listened to Blonde on Blonde in its entirety.  He grew to appreciate songs like “Fourth Time Around” and “Absolutely Five Believers,” he first noticed the manic and thrilling piano on “Sooner or Later (One of Us Will Know) and as the  hillsides passed he thought that he might be able to make it if he just didn’t feel so all alone.  He also thought of New York in the winter and how much he longed to go back there. So, when his time was up in Ireland, he went home, but the Sad Me couldn’t appreciate being back in New York, so, restless again, he walked the yellow lines on roads late at night in some attempt at a statement.  Then, one night, as the snow was melting on his college campus he spoke to that girl from years ago on the phone.  And as they spoke, he realized that time had changed.  He also realized that the two of them had both indeed changed as well - but that was OK.  So that summer, the Sad Me went home and spent most of the days outside and made sure that he swam in salt water every day. That was when the Sad Me bowed out.

The Current Me, the Me driving the Jeep, sped across slick patches on bridges that ran over creeks.  The Current Me hugged the side of the highway as the road construction made the lanes squeeze right and then left again, butting against concrete dividers and striped cones weighed down by water.  The Current Me looked over at the sleeping Friend with the Jeep and then thought once more about the Great Friend who they were going to visit.  The Current Me felt a sensation that was familiar and that was the sensation of enjoying the motion of travel rather than the actual destination, which was one of the sensations contained in Blonde on Blonde. That is, the idea of enjoying moving and not actually arriving anywhere.  When you’re stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again, you just want to be anywhere but where you are and the only place you can be anywhere but where you are is when you are moving, and perhaps that Current Me driving the car thought of that because when you are moving, like Jack Burden says, you don’t have to be anyone.  And that’s what Bob Dylan of 1966, the Bob Dylan on record was aiming for – a place of motion where he didn’t have to be any of the identities that had been placed on him.  When that car is in motion or when that train is in motion, you are in a world that is your own – there is nothing but that car, that contained space, that womb of upholstery, light and leg room.  And rain briefly pelted the windshield as that Current Me enjoyed moving, but still wanted to be somewhere. And that Current Me remembered one of those other Me’s that still roved amid the rain and the fog.

The European Me used to ride trains across Europe for a period of time. That Me had money from teaching and saving and he used that money to go to Europe to visit someone who he loved.  And at points during that trip, he was with the one he loved and those times were terrific and tumultuous.  However, the European Me had a profound revelation when he was riding on a train across the width of Italy and the tracks rose up through a pass in the mountains as it bore down from Venice to Rome.  He peeled an orange in his train seat and watched as tall, snow-capped peaks of the Apennine Mountains passed by underneath an absolutely blue sky.  The European Me ate his orange and then snapped into an Italian tea biscuit and as he did so, he realized how happy he could be if he was just in motion all the time.  Behind him in Spain the girl he loved lived, but their connection was impossible so it had to end at some point.  Ahead of him was a return to the United States and to trying to publish a novel he had already outgrown and to get a job he didn’t know or think existed.  Instead, it might be possible to travel forever.  For the European Me, when the train was moving, there was nothing else to existence – there was only his travel bag and its little pouches, pouches where he put market bought oranges and small loaves of bread, plastic packs of prosciutto and compact boxes of crackers.  The European Me could ride on these trains forever and watch the people that came and sat next to him; the European Me could look out the window and feel no attachment to the love he would need to leave behind, to the friends that waited for his return to the United States, to the family that cared about him; the European Me could ride and ride and explode in little pockets of electricity just like the cars of the train – the European Me was elemental and not made of any kind of substance, he could be something that existed at all places and at all times.  But that train stopped in Rome and the European Me sat outside of a Chinese restaurant in Rome and drank beer on the curb.  That European Me eventually went back to the girl he loved in Spain to figure out what to do.  The European Me eventually came back to the United States and used up his money trying to publish his novel, he lived with his parents until finally several things happened, time passed and that European Me was gone into the ether of life along with the First Me and the Sad Me.

Now, the Current Me has listened to Blonde on Blonde countless times and could tell you all of the mythology behind “Fourth Time Around” and its similarities to “Norwegian Wood” and the first time that the Beatles smoked pot with Bob Dylan and about how “Long, Long, Long” on The White Album is an ode to “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”  If you’d listen, the Current Me could tell you plenty of stories.  He could tell you a story about a game he and his friends played in Vermont in September one year, when they all picked the best going to sleep song and someone picked “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”  The Current Me could also tell you about listening to “Visions of Johanna” while riding the subway late at night and how that vision of country music playing soft from the opposite loft reminds him somewhat of what the word “romance” should mean, or rather how it could possibly be personified.  The Current Me would also be quick to tell you that there is nothing quite like listening to “Obviously 5 Believers” when walking in the Grand Central Station subway terminal on a rainy day, while people fumble with their umbrellas and insecurities and all you can do is strut and stride along to a searing electric blues guitar while Bob Dylan openly admits to feeling desperately alone.  There is something to that emotion and that tone in his voice that rings true to the Current Me. The Current Me would also tell you that he listens to “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” on random occasions and doesn’t really think of much anymore, other than perhaps how on a late summer day if you are on the right street corner and if the humidity is correct, you can absolutely smell the ocean in the middle of Manhattan and how that perhaps means something.

The Current Me made it to his friend’s home in Vermont, successfully listening to Blonde on Blonde twice in the pitch black of the highway night.  When he arrived, he was greeted by his Great Friend in the slow light of five in the morning.  The Great Friend showed him his bed in the loft space of his log cabin.  So, the Current Me climbed the large wood log steps to the loft, sneaking past the Great Friend’s sleeping girlfriend and laid out on his temporary bed.  Next to the bed, there was a small door that opened to a small wood log ledge.  The morning air blew in cool and the Current Me lay on the mattress looking at the slow light turn into blue dawn light.  The cool air came in streams and, although the Current Me was cold, he didn’t reach for a blanket, he simply let himself rest, knowing that next to him was an open door where cool air blew in and where outside the sun would slowly turn the light of the day to brighter shades as he slept on a bed that was not his own – on a bed that did not even truly belong to his Great Friend.  The Current Me would sleep knowing that this was a bed where he could stretch his legs and that there would be different beds from time to time, except that here, the next morning he would wake up and his Great Friend would be down in the kitchen frying eggs and making black coffee to drink.  The Current Me would wake up to find his Great Friend down there with his girlfriend, along with the Friend With the Jeep, and he would walk down and greet them all with a smile and make a joke because perhaps they would like that.  They would like that because they had the entire day before them, in fact they had a few days before them and those are the kinds of things that you like to enjoy along with the black coffee you drink.

A lot of people I know want to be famous or at least successful at their art.  Blonde on Blonde is what being famous sounds like.  It sounds like it in the way that 1966 Bob Dylan was famous.  Fame changes its sound with age, but its principles are always the same – trapped, constantly moving, feeling lonely, ungrounded, money, access to anything you desire, lack of desire, mistrust of love.  We all put up red herrings and other false meanings in our regular lives in order to keep people off our track, but when you are a public figure those things are more likely to happen – those things are necessary.  For Dylan in 1966, the language of Blonde on Blonde was the only way that he could communicate with the world.  He couldn’t give them anything direct, he could only give them cryptic word associations and images that they could put together.  There was passion behind the songs and they were structured, which of course gave them meaning in their loose stories.  Yet, it was a means of escaping and the escape was from a world of motion, a world of constantly escaping one town to the next, one show to the next, one press conference to the next.  The 1966 Bob Dylan would never have survived, which is why that motorcycle accident becomes a cosmic event – it seemed like it had to happen for the story of Bob Dylan to continue.  We all know that the myth of Bob Dylan continued on.  We all know that he retreated to a life of domesticity, to writing country songs with direct lyrics that were terrific, but that seemed to lack some kind of passion or epiphany that his earlier work, especially Blonde on Blonde exemplified. 

What Dylan’s work immediately after Blonde on Blonde exemplified was perhaps what the main sentiment of Blonde on Blonde was, which is (to take a line from Bruce Springsteen) “I’m just tired and bored with myself.” That is the sentiment that I am the most attracted to.  We are all made up of different versions and characters of ourselves that rise up at different points in our lives and who then fade away into that impossibility of time, love and friendships.  Those other versions of ourself seem strange but we can look to them to reveal something about ourselves; about how fragmented we are.  We can also look to those other versions to prove how far we’ve come and about how tired we are with ourselves as a subject, because the only way to become a better artist is to grow tired with yourself.  Then, you can take those fragments of yourself and begin to put them into other objects, put them into characters, put them into art in order to let those objects rise and flourish and take on a life of their own.  That also seems as though it is the key to life itself: growing past oneself in order to move forward with life, to care about others.  No one ever claimed that Bob Dylan didn’t care about himself or that he actually moved unselfishly forward with his life; perhaps the best he did was to present the world with a vision of the weary, successful, famous artist who longs for something else.  No one knows if Dylan ever did find that something else.  We know his story and we attempt to know his myth, but we’ll never know for sure and that’s OK.  It’s OK because we have this album and his other albums and our different selves can listen to them on all the different roads of life.  Perhaps Blonde on Blonde will be that beacon of light that we look to when we ourselves are famous and looking for a way out.  When we realize that there is nothing but exhaustion and it is only when we are exhausted with ourselves that we can begin to forge ahead to whatever may be next - that next version of yourself that will hopefully contain and trump all the others.