Something to chew on came my way at lunch circa 2006:
Time is Precious. But Truth is More Precious than Time.
Wow. Alas.
The Man’s too much …
Aw hell …
Rickie Lee Jones is currently playing up and down the east coast, then is off to Europe.
A Connecticut show tomorrow — Thursday Oct 29 — will be streamed at 8pm Eastern at www.mvyradio.com.
Her new album — BALM in GILEAD — was completed this past summer and is now available at discount on Great Big Island.
And December 7 — she’s at Carnegie Hall!
She was there years ago — around the time of POP POP! — and was it sweet and swell.
Perhaps the best tickets I ever scored on the fly outside the gate were at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles, an amphitheater, for Rickie Lee Jones in 1991, near the end of the summer’s FLYING COWBOYS tour.
Third row. Most memorable was an exquisitely theatrical “Something Cool.” June Christy’s signature tune. The sad song of Blanche DuBois.
Days later, a similar score in San Diego. And then, the tour closer, in Santa Barbara — where I danced in the grass before the stage with the Celestial herself during “Ghetto of My Mind.”
Earlier on, closer to home, I once got into Madison Square Garden for Springsteen without a ticket of any sort, by paying a brazen snappy fellow, reminiscent of Michael Parks in Then Came Bronson, whom I — and four others — simply followed past an elderly black ticket-taker, a distinguished looking gent with grizzled lambchops, who granted entry to each Vandal with a sober nod, summing, I imagine, his piece of the action.
Dem was the daze.
But dose days are gone.
This past Sunday, this veteran of Gotham — and a visiting friend, under his aegis — walking south for John Hammond and The Blind Boys of Alabama at City Winery in the Village, were taken for fools and parted from their money by a pair of slicky boys hocking bogus Van Morrison tickets on 33rd and Seventh.
Marx warned us about technology. Advances in home printing have brought us to the pass where none but a box-office expert may now distinguish false ducats and the real thing.
But surely, you wonder, would even the most credulous of chowderheads not have balked at the $300 face?
Well … That’s what the high-ends were going for at the Box. Van is cashing in his chips with this Astral Weeks extravaganza. And this wasn’t the Garden’s basketball arena, but the former Felt Forum, a sideshow theater with about seventeen hundred seats.
Even so, you may wonder if something less than a perfect putz might have at least nosed a whiff of suspicion when the sellers agreed to $80 per.
Well … The thought was that showtime was ten minutes off and the boys were happy, at that point, to dump at any price, eighty bucks being better than zero by multiples indeterminate.
Imagine my humiliation …
An insult all the more peccant and piquant when perceived piling on my unemployed back.
With a friend on my arm.
Under my aegis.
Her first time in New York for anything more than business affairs.
Oh it burns. It burns. The city’s red face, and my red ass.
The fish rots from the head. Bear Stearns and Lehman. AIG and Goldman Sachs. Bernie Madoff and …
And now one can’t trust the local scalpers.
I imagine, indeed, they no longer exist — the honest brokers, I mean. For the falsifiers have burst the bonds of trust and surely none but a ditzy dunderheaded diptstick would dare, henceforth, to buy tickets off the street.
Dem daze indeed are done.
Whither hence, my friends?
Theyre selling postcards of the hanging
Theyre painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
Theyve got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad theyre restless
They need somewhere to go
As lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row …
Dylan’s first (only?) reading of this lovely thing is on the first Bootleg Series CD (where every track’s a winner).
But I’ve never seen the poem in print before. Came to my attention by way of this gent.
Worth filing away for rainy days.
While suffering with the business of a crashed hard disk, lost or busted back ups, and thus a lot of lost writing and history, I’ve been reloading music, and finding an old organ grinder, Graham Parker, medicinal.
These, e.g., soothe — from SQUEEZING OUT SPARKS, 1979, the year I gave college a second try, as the Ayatollahs revolted, and Rickie Lee Jones made her fab debut, on the eve of Reaganite destruction:
I try to pull my weight, study my geography
It doesn’t seem to get me anywhere
I hold a picture up, everybody thinks it’s me
I get a thrill out of tampering with the atmosphere
Hey baby, I’m out of favour
Can’t always be the right flavour
It just seems that no matter what you do
Someone somewhere’s suddenly gotta punish you
Nobody hurts you
Harder than yourself …
Did they tear it out, with talons of steel
And give you a shot, so that you wouldn’t feel
And wash it away, as if it wasn’t real ?
It’s just a mistake I won’t have to face
Don’t give it a name, don’t give it a place
Don’t give it a chance, it’s lucky in a way
It must have felt strange, to find me inside you
I hadn’t intended to stay
If you want to keep it right, put it to sleep at night
Squeeze it until it could say
You can’t be too strong
You decide what’s wrong …
Only thing that I did wrong
Was staying in the wilderness too long
Keep your eyes on the prize
Hold on
The great questions in the air — about how much lasting constitutional and foreign-affairs damage Bush-Cheney have done, about the ways and means of turning things around, and the capacity of the american people to be citizens rather than consumers — leave me for the moment speechless.
I do think the turn in the works is a major turn.
A premise there, however, is that the forces behind the Fascist Shift of the new century are not deeply rooted and are exhausted for now — leaving the new administration a horrible mess, yes, but also a durable mandate and some elbow room.
But — if the premise is false, then four years from now we may see Romney on the verge of victory, and the young Obama already a has-been.
This was one reason why, this past winter, I thought Hillary the better candidate for the Donkeys to nominate — to allow her to absorb the worst of the blast, while holding Obama in reserve.
But … The hour of doom is at hand. Let the sun shine …
The mandate will not be large. LBJ in 1964, riding a wave of sympathy re Kennedy’s murder the year before, gathered 486 EC votes and carried 44 states.
Nothing near that is in the cards for Obama. Rather, somewhere between 289 and 364 votes, with 22 to 27 states, plus D.C.
Clinton got 370 votes and 31 states in ‘92. And 379 and 30 in ‘96. Plus D.C. in each.
Reagan has the all-time high, against hapless Mondale in ‘84, with 525 votes and 49 states. Then FDR in 1936, against Landon, with 523 and 46 (of 48 total) states. And then Richard Nixon in ‘72, contra hapless McGovern. 520 votes and 49 states.
Then again … Even the greatest EC landslides were, roughly speaking, five people voting chocolate and five vanilla. Fifty-three Pistachio, forty-seven Rocky Road.
No matter what happens on Tuesday and across the next four years, there is no escaping or re-writing the fact that the failures to apply Due Process in the 2000 election, and to depose Bush-Cheney in 2004, were costly beyond measure and plain evidence that, on the national level, we are not a functioning democracy.
Only thing that we did right
Was the day we began to fight
Keep your eyes on the prize
Hold on
It’s an open question — whether WE can fight at all.
But … Team Obama has. They’ve run an amazing campaign — principled and potent.
Can the example revive an increasingly impoverished and brain-dead citizenry?
Seems all my NY friends are holing up Tuesday night. Me, I think it’s the first thing in the public sphere worth celebrating since …Â Can’t recall.
Let’s have a General Strike on Wednesday. And then, to the business of rebuilding.
Where’s my blue suede shoes?
Aha — a final pre-election postscript:Â Great overview from a waning & weeping Laissez Faire fellow in the London Daily Telegraph.
Democrats sixteen years ago were desperate to boot the GOP from the White House.
Ed Note: After a spirit-deadening summer, Rickie’s latest album, from last year, is bringing me back to life.
Below is my original quick review — which while not lacking for enthusiasm no longer quite does the album justice.
Its depth is … reminiscent of T.S. Eliot. It takes a while to get there … Down the well …
And people who shuffle their Favorite Songs on an Ipod will never get there at all.
Rickie Lee Jones has a new album coming in early February. I posted this capsule review over at Amazon because the glib ne’er-do-tell who did the official thumbnail there couldn’t be bothered to listen or think. Odd they can’t find better help. The dud’s name is McLeese and he concluded by reporting “Some of this music is oddly affecting; much of it is merely odd.”
That’s alright, I know where he lives.
===================
BORN ANEW
Beneficiary of an advance copy of this life-hugging album, let me say (pace Mr McLeese) that THE SERMON is not “merely” anything at all. To begin: two tracks are extemporaneous meditations expounded on the spot — neither composed nor rehearsed (!?!) — and the second of these miracles, “Where I Like it Best”, now reaches me as the richest song in the collection.
(See producer Lee Cantelon’s pennyhead.com for the amazing story of how the record was born.)
It IS a departure from the studied studio perfection of her prior work. Much of the music is by younger collaborators, and the tracks were recorded with a “liveliness” that takes one back to the garage bands and stoop singers of foundational rock. “It was so different from a musical environment I would make,” she said in a recent interview, “and that helped me become something different.”
The mystic religiosity springs from mediations on the life & words of Jesus — another departure — but then again on stage she often refers to the songs of her mystical masterpiece Ghostyheads as “prayers.” Both albums are deep echoing wells, a bit spooky to slide down into (“Watch your elbows — I don’t KNOW how deep, watch you don’t burn your hands”) — but once down it’s heaven. I’ve no faith in the divinity of Jesus but these meditations, born out of the smouldering rubble-strewn spiritscape of America post 2004 elections, have been just what the flamen ordered.
There IS something happenin’ here, after all. And what it is AIN’T exactly clear. In a world gone wrong, post 2004, she found a way to sing. And perhaps it was the only way. Perhaps any other would have been false to the moment and have failed.
Maybe it’s like this (from Deep Space on The Magazine):
This tear will finally fall
Keep your eyes here
When there’s no net at all
Where the Lord’s face is like an all-night cafe
There’s a woman who will wait on
What you have to say
The equestrienne of the Circus of the Falling Star will be found not Born Again here, but born anew. Maybe there’s more to miracles than meets the eye. Rejoice and be exceedingly glad for this troubadour, our companion voice these long years in the wilderness.
Hey! There’s a limited edition DVD on sale (the link above) for pennies more than the regular CD. Has video, a 5:1 surround mix, and high quality mp3 files for downloading. Plus an expanded booklet. Great package, less than $20.
GO ORDER A COPY! The release date is February 6 or similar.
The Dylan film is beginning to show across country.
Should/must be seen in a theater — the music and images flow and surround.
Tell me what you think. (My thoughts linked above)
