School Violence: Answers Are Still Blowing in the Wind.

"How many deaths will it take till we know that too many students have died?
The answer, my friend..." 
--Bob Dylan (paraphrase)

* * * *
While snowblowing the driveway, a fierce wind blowing snow in my face, I kept thinking about the students. And my mind kept returning to the tragedy that is our current political morass.

What would happen if our legislative "leaders" actually decided to lock themselves in a room and be human toward one another and commit to open dialogue as human beings and not legislators, talking honestly and openly and sometimes even with weeping as they wrestled with this epidemic of gun violence in the schools?

Here's what I fear would happen. Is it possible that most of our legislators are no longer capable of being free agents and humans because they have constituents who have financed their campaigns and whom they (claim to) represent. Undoubtedly a candid remark might be recorded and later used against them on social media or in a newspaper editorial. Posturing and grandstanding is the way it works these days. When someone proposes a good idea, the opposition party sits on their hands because "we can't let those guys get credit for a good idea." And so it goes.

But what if... what if a bipartisan subcommittee were assigned to hash out a realistic response? What if there were citizens on that committee who work in various capacities at the schools, who had no political aspirations of their own, whose sole desire happened to be to really and truly... listen to one another. What if they remained in that room for however long it took? (Food trucks can park outside the back door.)

The reality is that we do not want our freedoms restricted, yet we want to feel safe.

Advice for that committee: A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.

* * * *

As it turns out, today's widespread cynicism about political solutions is not isolated to our unique moment in history. Take a listen to H.L. Mencken's somewhat disturbing assessment of the political class. This is the opening paragraph of a 1940 essay titled "The Politician."

After damning politicians up hill and down dale for many years, as rogues and vagabonds, frauds and scoundrels, I sometimes suspect that, like everyone else, I often expect too much of them. Though faith and confidence are surely more or less foreign to my nature, I not infrequently find myself looking to them to be able, diligent, candid, and even honest. Plainly enough, that is too large an order, as anyone must realize who reflects upon the manner in which they reach public office. They seldom if ever get there by merit alone, at least in democratic states. Sometimes, to be sure, it happens, but only by a kind of miracle. They are chosen normally for quite different reasons, the chief of which is simply their power to impress and enchant the intellectually underprivileged.

The essay, which you can read here (which appeared in the January edition of The Sun) has a number of choice morsels to chew on. This sentence popped out from paragraph three in which Mencken describes the process politicians go through to become successful barnstormers. They learn early on that when making speeches telling it like is is makes people uncomfortable. It "disquiets and alarms" them.

The truth, to the overwhelming majority of mankind, is indistinguishable from a headache.

It is undoubtedly true that the issue of school shootings, like many other features of our time, has no easy answers. That is why politicians are averse to addressing it. For zebras, wildebeest and gazelles there is safety in the herd. Take a bold step away from the herd and you're suddenly a target for lions. There is safety in numbers.

If only... 

Blowing in the Wind and Dylan's 1981 Concert in Avignon

Last weekend I was listening to Bob Dylan's 25 July 1981 concert in Avignon, France while painting in my studio. It was the last show from his summer European tour during which he was riding the energy of his Gospel period to an appreciative audience, no longer being booed for his "latest change of direction."

From the end of March to somewhere near his 40th birthday in late May Dylan recorded the third album from his Gospel period, Shot Of Love. In June he took his show back on the road, first in the U.S. with a handful of concerts and then to Europe, beginning and ending in France, with concerts in England, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Austria and Switzerland in between. This last concert at the Palace des Sports was to be recorded for an album from this tour.

The concerts that summer were packed with great songs both from that period in his life and from his early portfolio. On average he performed 25 to near 30 songs a gig. In Avignon he had a 26 song setlist with three additional songs in the encore, which began with Blowin' in the Wind.

According to notes from Bjorner.com the concert was interrupted at one point by a tragic accident when someone in the crowd fell into the electric cables which resulted in two deaths and a total power loss during the song Saved. Dylan and the band improvised “unplugged” until the power was restored. After the unplugged interlude Saved was started again from the beginning. In the accident two people were killed, but the show was completed in spite of this.

Blowing in the Wind, first cut on The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, is a timeless song that continues to speak directly and profoundly to our time. It's a song Dylan has performed nearly 1400 times in concert, and that has appeared on 16 of his albums in various permutations.

Though delivered with quiet simplicity on Freewheelin', there is nothing quiet about the questions it asks and nothing simple about the issues it addresses.

Dylan first performed the song on April 16, 1962. Most recently he performed it live in July this summer, though it would not surprise me if he sang it tonight at this weekend's Desert Trip.

The song is a meditation. Will we never learn?

Blowin’ In The Wind
Written by: Bob Dylan

How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
Yes, ’n’ how many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?
Yes, ’n’ how many times must the cannonballs fly
Before they’re forever banned?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind

How many years can a mountain exist
Before it’s washed to the sea?
Yes, ’n’ how many years can some people exist
Before they’re allowed to be free?
Yes, ’n’ how many times can a man turn his head
Pretending he just doesn’t see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind

How many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
Yes, ’n’ how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, ’n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind

Copyright © 1962 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1990 by Special Rider Music

Avignon
Here's the setlist from the Avignon concert.
Here's information on the Second Shot of Love Tour, Europe 1981.

* * * *
Duluth 2016

Next weekend, October 15, we're gathering to celebrate 25 years of the KUMD radio program Highway 61 Revisited, hosted by John Bushey, listened to worldwide through streaming media, Here are details and 7 reasons for you to join us.  

 Here are 9 more reasons for Dylan fans and music fans to join us next weekend.

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Dig it.

Dylan No Stranger to Plagiarism Charges; They're In the Wind

My first 45 was "All Day and All of the Night" by the Kinks. The song was released the year our family moved from Cleveland to New Jersey, a year of many big events for me including my 12th birthday which included a trip to Manhattan with my dad to buy a reel-to-reel tape two-speed Estey tape recorder. I also got my first record player, and first records.

The Kinks were part of the British Invasion which was hot, in large part due to the Beatles and the Ed Sullivan Show. And disc jockeys like Cousin Brucie, on WABC, introduced us to everything that was climbing and flaming. The Kinks reached a top ten with that song.

By the time The Doors broke through a few years later I had a much nicer Lafayette stereo system and was collecting albums in earnest. Waiting for the Sun came out in the summer of '68 and was immediately added to my collection. I loved the sound. "Hello I Love You (Won't You Tell Me Your Name)" flew to number one. It had a catchy great sound and a catchy riff. It never entered my mind to connect it to my first 45, but Ray Davies who wrote it for the Kinks certainly. He sued in a high profile plagiarism case and won, after which he received all royalties from sales of the Doors' song.

George Harrison similarly stumbled stumbled when he released My Sweet Lord after the breakup of the Beatles. He evidently failed to notice that the tune which emerged in in his head had an earlier origin: "He’s So Fine," the Chiffons' 1963 hit.

In recent years critics have been taking Bob Dylan to the woodshed with charges plagiarism. He’s purportedly stolen tunes, lyrics and arrangements. I've half wondered if the nearly countless strands of sentences and phrases in the songs on Tempest and a deliberate "in your face" response to these critics. That is, "I read the news today, oh boy, and how many other lines can you find here that came from somewhere else?"

Lee Marshall's Bob Dylan: The Never Ending Star defends Dylan's use of other material by explaining how a lifetime of internalizing the history of folk and blues music, it's all inside him and part of him now. Or, to quote Alex Moore, "Bob Dylan is not plagiarizing, he’s just way better read than you are."

While reading Robert Shelton's Dylan bio No Direction Home this week I discovered that even in the beginning Dylan had to deal with charges of pilfering a song, in this case one of his most significant, Blowing in the Wind. After it hit the charts via Peter, Paul & Mary, a rumor began to circulate that Dylan had stolen the song. Shelton, who wrote for the Times, got a call from a Rutgers prof that Dylan bought the song from a kid in Millburn, NJ, named Lorre Wyatt. The prof offered details that when presented to Dylan only made him angry.

In 1963 the young Wyatt wrote a letter to Broadside (a periodical that covered music scene then) that dissed the professor's story, but that he had actually written a song called "Freedom Is Blowing in the Wind." Because the titles were similar, he had friends who felt he'd been ripped off.

Interestingly enough, the story doesn't end here. In 1974, Wyatt wrote a story for the New Times about this whole stolen song incident. In the '74 piece he confessed to having lied with regard to haveing written anything remotely like Blowing in the Wind. He ended by stating, "I'm just sorry it's taken me 11 years to say 'I'm sorry.'"

Thinking of the incredible events that unfolded from 1963 to '74, globally and in Dylan's amazing epoch of song production, it's easy to imagine that this little blip had been long forgotten.

Lesson: don't believe everything you read and hear.  

Meantime, life goes on all around you.

NOTE: Today is FREE FRIDAY. Download for free my featured eBook of the Day: Newmanesque

The Dylan Pool

Dylan the Elder Statesman, by ennyman.

Last year, every night’s show on Bob Dylan's Never Ending Tour was different. That is, the playlist got shaken up, re-arranged, and if you were going to a show you never knew what he'd be playing next. It kept Dylan feeling fresh and his bandmates on their toes. Same with 2011, 2010 etc. back to the launch in 1988.

But in 2013, things changed. If you check out the play lists from his most recent engagements through May of this year, you’ll find the same songs in the same order. In other words, something entirely new, at least for this veteran showman. Each night began with Things Have Changed (a favorite) and concluded with Ballad of a Thin Man (another favorite.) In between there are cuts from his earliest decade (Visions of Johanna, All Along the Watchtower) to the most recent Tempest cuts (Early Roman Kings, Pay In Blood, Scarlet Town).

SO, what will it be then when the Dylan Train rolls into Duluth in two weeks? Will his performance tonight in West Palm Beach signal the next leg of his tour? Or will Dylan revert to his former ways and give us an unpredictable future?

These are the kinds of questions Dylan fans often ask after having purchased tickets. Some even go so far as to have made a game of it, a Never Ending Pool. The Dylan Pool is comparable to the March Madness office pools co-workers produce each spring, or Fantasy Baseball player selections.

I don’t really have a strong need to know but if you are interested in taking a guess, now's the time. Because if the next series of Dylan shows follows the pattern of his spring shows, tonight's set list in West Palm Beach will likely be the one we hear July 9 in Bayfront Park when Dylan brings it all back home.

Here's the program Dylan played through May, with several cuts from his last fall's Tempest album: 

Things Have Changed
Love Sick
High Water (For Charley Patton)
Soon After Midnight
Early Roman Kings
Tangled Up In Blue
Pay In Blood
Visions Of Johanna
Spirit On The Water
Beyond Here Lies Nothin'
Blind Willie McTell
What Good Am I?
Thunder On The Mountain
Scarlet Town
All Along The Watchtower
Ballad Of A Thin Man

Selecting songs to make an imaginary program is a challenge because it's hard to divorce what you hope to hear from what you really think. Nevertheless, here's my stab at prognostication with regards to tonight's set list. 

My Back Page
Just Like A Woman
Cold Irons Bound
Simple Twist of Fate
Watching the River Flow
Early Roman Kings
Girl From the North Country
Blowing in the Wind
It’s All Good
Thunder On the Mountain
Million Miles
Tangled Up In Blue
Desolation Row 
Highway 61 Revisited

The last two would be during his encore.

Honestly, no matter what they play, it's an incredible pool of material this legend has to choose from, and it will all be good. 
 

EdNote: Wordless Wednesday will continue next Wednesday, maybe.

Reclaiming the Sixties

The Sixties, like all periods of our history, cannot be lumped into one homogenous experience. Yes, some things were shared universally. Our president was assassinated in 1963. Our values were challenged. Our cities burned. Viet Nam and the Deep South racism, so highly visible through the medium of television, scarred our national conscience. The values of the American Dream were called into question.

But as time has elapsed the Sixties became more associated with hippies, drugs, psychedelic music, and dropping out… all having the appearance more of faddishness than significance. The sense of hippiedom being a fad was reinforced by the rapidity with which Seventies youth embraced the Yuppie values of high fashion and glitz.

For the record, I became depressed by the new wave of Yuppie values. Perhaps because I truly bought into many of the key issues that had been brought to the forefront during the Sixties. These are the primary values that resonated with me, and which I still hold as valid.

1. Question authority. In other words, don’t accept everything you hear, wherever you hear it from… including here. Think things through, make your decisions because you have weighed things out for yourself. Even the Apostle Paul in the Bible said that his words should not be taken as authoritative until his hearers checked things out with the Old Testament truths that had been handed down.

This idea flew directly in the face of the prevailing attitude of the day, “My country, right or wrong.” No wonder the “hippie philosophy” created so much ire.

2. There is more to life than the material world. More than anything, the youth of the Sixties were especially misunderstood on this point, and in retrospect misunderstood their parents’ generation. We did not know what it was like to be raised during the Great Depression. When our parents gave us clothes and stocked refrigerators and gifts, they were doing something for us that seemed meaningful. My mother remembers living on navy beans for a while in West Virginia. Grandpa would come home with a hundred pound sack of navy beans. That was all they had, all they could afford.

And so, many young people in the Sixties had large homes in suburbia, surrounded by manifold blessings of the good life, and still felt empty. They learned through experience that there was more to life than things. Without love, even a castle is little more than collection of empty rooms.

And so, there was a reaction against materialism, against “things.” There have been many misunderstandings on this matter, but the message remains true that life is more than gadgets, toys and things. “Love is all you need” is a bit of a simplification, since I can’t pay my heating bill with “love.” But love for my family will sufficiently motivate me to do what it takes to provide for my family, which includes paying those nasty heating bills.

3. The “Beautiful People.” I remember sitting in the donut shop in Athens, Ohio with some other Ohio University hippie-type students and thinking, “These people are so beautiful, but in the ‘success’ world they would probably all be rejects.” The one fellow’s beard concealed a weak chin, another girl did not fit the Barbie mold, yet each was a person, a human being with special value. To the degree that we determine value based on outward appearance, race, economic earning power or social status, to that very degree we have become impoverished as a culture.

4. Increasing awareness of the power of the Military-Industrial Complex. Might makes right was not a value of the hippies. Flower Power, which is looked back on as something of a joke today, had at its heart a seed thought: ideas have power, too. Yes, there is evil in the world, and naivete was certainly part of the reason the seeds of Flower Power found such fertile soil in our hearts. But there were real issues being raised as regards what war and the military-industrial complex was doing to our humanity. On this, there is more to say, but we’ll follow up on that tomorrow.

Here’s a song from Bob Dylan’s second album which became somewhat of an anthem for that era. I remember singing it as part of our youth group at First Presbyterian Church in Pluckemin, NJ. Its questions still beg for answers today.

Blowing In The Wind

How many roads must a man walk down, before they call him a man?
How many seas must a white dove sail, before she sleeps in the sand?
How many times must the cannonballs fly, before they are forever banned?

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind.

How many years must a mountain exist, before it is washed to the sea?
How many years can some people exist, before they're allowed to be free?
How many times can a man turn his head, and pretend that he just doesn't see?

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind.

How many times must a man look up, before he can see the sky?
How many ears must one man have, before he can hear people cry?
How many deaths will it take till he knows, that too many people have died?

The answer my friend is blowing in the wind,
the answer is blowing in the wind.

NOTE: The image at top left, titled Reclaiming the Sixties, was created by Susie, the Down Home Creator. Please click to enlarge.