BLOG.KOBEK.COM: Archive for ‘music’ Category

Archive for the ‘music’ Category

July 13th, 2007
Glenn Danzig has Bob Dylan’s Disease

By Jarett Kobek

Amongst those who dubiously self-identify as Dylanologists (a stupid term coined by the vile A.J. Weberman, arguably the most loathsome of all 60s counter-culture figures) it has been long recognized that Bob Dylan suffers from a rare form of mental insanity. This madness, and madness it is, is not listed in the DSM but can be identified by its sole symptom: those with Bob Dylan’s Disease will, and for no apparent reason, put weak material on officially released albums while hiding simultaneously recorded material of superior quality.

With Dylan, this started early– “Mama You Been On My Mind”, “Farewell, Angelina”, and the masterpiece “She’s Your Lover Now”– and has continued throughout his whole career. Think “Up To Me”, “Abandoned Love”, and “Blind Willie McTell”. The appearance of “Mississippi” on Love and Theft, a track originally recorded for Time Out of Mind, makes us wonder if Dylan isn’t still at his old tricks. (Although it’s just possible that Dylan may have been in the right, as producer Daniel Lanois reportedly had layered polyrhythmic drumming on the Time original.)

With Tuesday’s release of The Lost Tracks of Danzig, a 2CD set of outtakes from the history of Glenn Danzig’s eponymous band, we must report sadly that we have found another sufferer of Bob Dylan’s Disease. Some of my readers might, of course, wonder if there is any genuine qualitative difference in any of Danzig’s output– ain’t that all just some gol danged heavy metal crap?

Well, no.

Glenn Danzig has had some strange luck– the Misfits were great, but what in the hell were they? A band so weird that it took suburban kids 15 years to turn them into a cheap psychobilly cliche. Samhain? Well, jeez, I love Samhain but even I can’t tell you what the heck that was about. And then, yes, finally, Danzig. Again the odd luck held– the first album was released in ‘88, the second in ‘90. Both surfed on a wave of accessible, radio friendly metal, getting Glenn Danzig a house in Los Feliz but tarnishing his reputation as a metal goon, something the man’s endless cock of the walk posturing has done nothing to abate.

Both albums offer a uniquely weird blues based rock structured around a super crunchy guitar sound and The Voice’s lyrical throwaways on the motifs that have consumed Danzig from, we presume, early adolescence– skulls, blackness, blood, demons and women. Then came Danzig III, an album I like, but which really is kind of metal, and then the live album/double-EP that gave us the ‘93 single of “Mother”, solidifying forever Glenn Danzig’s reputation as Metal Dude. The follow-up was Danzig 4p, a great album and the most successful of all of Danzig’s experiments. (It is also almost certainly the only major label release to reference the Scientology off-shoot The Process Church of the Final Judgment.)

And then came the darkness. With a demonic host of malign and bloody skulls, Danzig fired the band that’d been with him for all four albums (and was the final Samhain lineup) and made 5: Blackacidevil, an album of Trent Reznor fanfic about three years too late. Then 666: Satan’s Child, and then 7: I, Luciferi. The less said of either, the better. 2004 saw a happy return to form with Circle of Snakes. The Voice sounded terrible on the previous two albums, and while weaker with age, it’s fine on Circle; the major problem being production. For whatever reason, the album is poorly leveled on big systems while sounding just fine on headphones.

And that was supposed to be it: Circle of Snakes was the last album by Danzig, the band. But Glenn Danzig, the man, had a vault full of inverted crosses and unreleased tracks, and he began rumbling about releasing them, and so he has. And I am here to report that The Lost Tracks of Danzig is significantly better than anything since Danzig 4p, and also that Glenn Danzig has Bob Dylan’s Disease.

The first disc is all Danzig 1-4, and yeah, of course that’s going to be great. But the second disc has outtakes from 5-7, and they’re so much better than anything on those albums that unless you accept mental insanity as a defense, it’s impossible to figure out why they were omitted in favor of the tracks that comprised the original albums.

Music may be the only artform where murdering your darlings constitutes a mistake. That’s weird, but how else do you explain it? Actual insanity? Monstrous egotism? The total inability to discern one’s own efforts?

I have no idea! But boy I really like The Lost Tracks of Danzig. This is all.

·· cataloged as 60s, bob dylan, glenn danzig, music ··

Permanent Link

July 24th, 2007
tangled up in blues

By Jarett Kobek

Throughout the Kingdom, it has been long contended that the apogee of American songwriting is found in 4 of the cuts from Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. While arguments are had as to which make the list, at least two of the songs are set in stone: “Tangled up in Blue” and “Idiot Wind.” I’d also throw in “Up To Me” (inexplicably kept off the original LP and not released commercially until 1990) and “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts.”

None of these are my favorite songs, nor even my favorite Bob Dylan songs. I am, and will always be, a bigger fan of imperfection. Especially when it comes to Bob Dylan, an artist whose mistakes and accidents are always as fascinating as his triumphs and conquests. The Basement Tapes, for instance, with all their glitches, false starts and nonsense lyrics speak more directly to my tastes; but I know well enough that my preferences are subjective and not the final arbiters of quality. It is impossible to deny the awesome and solemn power of the 4 Blood songs. It is as if, for a brief period, God decided that He would write lyrics directly and His instrument would be Bob Dylan.

The songs mark a significant shift in Dylan’s writing– gone is the singular phraseology, gone is the unique delivery, gone is the clever word play, gone is the possible social commentary, gone is the humor, gone is the Individual Viewpoint, gone is everything that distinguished Dylan throughout the 60s. And in its place is a vision of reality, a solid, explicable thing of itself, where the people and subjects under discussion as are real as Dylan or you or I. All those silly, one line characters from the long, tedious songs of the 1960s have been discarded and replaced by actual personages.

Dylan’s brilliance is in the economy with which he achieves this and in the fact that these Monumental Works are still, you know, killer as songs. They transcend their form without breaking it. When compared against Dylan’s earlier work, they also happen to be an excellent demonstration of the shift from the lyrical to epical that James Joyce writes about in the last part of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Today, while looking for something else entirely, I came across young men (always the men) distributing videos of themselves performing “Tangled up in Blue”. There’s a certain admirable arrogance to the idea of any joe with a guitar trying to master a song of which Dylan himself lost control immediately after it was recorded, and so I thought I’d share some of these videos, just to demonstrate that even though you might have the world’s hottest song, you still gotta be a certain hella kid of performer to pull off a line like, “Lord knows I’ve paid some dues gettin’ through.”

So here goes!