Flashback Friday: Something's Burning

Fire is one of those things that can be endlessly fascinating, and equally frightening when out of control. We all know what it is, but might be hard-pressed to define it, so here are the first two definitions from dictionary.com:
1. a state, process, or instance of combustion in which fuel or other material is ignited and combined with oxygen, giving off light, heat, and flame.
2. a burning mass of material, as on a hearth or in a furnace.

When I woke this morning I was thinking about how frequently the word fire was used or came up as a metaphor in rock 'n roll. Here's a short list off the top of my head.

"Goodness gracious, great ball o' fire!" ~Jerry Lee Lewis

"I'm just a hunk, a hunk of burning love." ~Elvis

"She's cool like ice, like fire." ~Dylan

Earth, Wind and Fire

"Let me stand next to your fire." ~Hendrix

"Fire... I'll take you to burn." ~Arthur Brown

"Come on, baby, light my fire." ~The Doors

"Don't you play with me or you'll play with fire." ~Rolling Stones

"We didn't start the fire..." ~Billy Joel

"Something's burning, and I think it's love." ~Kenny Rogers

"I've seen fire and I've seen rain..." ~James Taylor

* * *

The Greek's left us a tale about how fire came to mankind, the story of Prometheus. In Greek mythology Prometheus is credited with creating man from clay. (My son used to make people from clay, too, when he was young.)  As he watched these people whom he created he observed that they suffered during the winter time while the gods all sat around being content in the warmth of their environment.

Prometheus asked Zeus to provide fire for the people but Zeus demurred stating that fire might make people strong and wise like the gods. In addition, fire is dangerous. Someday people might sings songs about it and work themselves into an uncontrolled frenzy.

Prometheus chose to act on behalf of the people and defied Zeus, an action that made him memorable to us but caused him great sorrow. One day he stole fire from Zeus' lightning and snuck it off to the humans that he cared about. Though there is much more to this tale the scene we remember most is the payback Prometheus received for defying Zeus. Prometheus was chained to a rock and each day an eagle (symbol of Zeus) would fly down and tear out his liver. This horrible thing never killed him, however, as the liver would regenerate and he would have to look forward to the same thing happening the next day once more, and the day after ad infinitum.

Fire did ultimately prove to be useful for the people of our world. But it's also done some damage. Homes have been destroyed. Lives have been taken. Fire has caused much destruction.

The story of Zeus and Prometheus seems like a generational thing. "Parents just don't understand." Sometimes parents are wise to be cautious. Fire can be a powerful force. On a cold mid-winter's night, though, I wouldn't want to be without it. When it's raging out of control, however, it can be a pretty scary thing.

Does fire frighten you or comfort you? Respect its power.

Elliott Landy's Woodstock Photo Shoot, Nashville Skyline and a Few Extras

Landy's famous shot.  The music was great, too.

Many of us are unfamiliar with the name Elliottt Landy, but most of us recognize a few of the photos he took. One set of photos from the Landy portfolio is the iconic cover shot of Dylan's Nashville Skyline. Two weeks ago a friend sent this story about that famous Woodstock photo shoot. The article prompted me to plunge into one of my containers of Dylan memorabilia to find the Saturday Evening Post in which another photo shoot of Dylan at Woodstock took place. Were these Landy's as well? It's not the same guitar. Nor the same outfit. And the article by Alfred G. Aronowitz offers no clues, cites no identity for the various photos of pop legends.

The first three featured stars in the article, titled Pop: The Royal Family, are Jimi, the Doors and Janis. Morrison, Hendrix and Joplin all dead within a couple years.

Dylan in hibernation mode at Woodstock.

It was an unusual time, when the recording industry took risks. Not everyone who got a swing at the plate would have Dylan's longevity. Some of the artists in this Post overview included The Fugs, Ravi Shankar, Tiny Tim and Charles Lloyd, who were all in the spotlight for a time. The Beatles' unending allure had already been cemented, but within a year or so the Fab Four would splinter, releasing the individual members to produce work that corresponded with their own internal rhythms. Simon & Garfunkel likewise parted to follow their own paths.

Interestingly enough, when the Post article came to Dylan he was clearly separated from the herd. His portion of the the Post's coverage of the pop music scene was titled, Enter the King: Bob Dylan. He was the very definition of hip. (Click link for a list of others who were featured in the article.)

All this to say it was fun to read the article about Landy at the BestClassicBands.com. And while looking for that old 1968 Saturday Evening Post I came across a few other images that seemed worth sharing, some quite local in scope. Enjoy!

The times were a-changing. This was a generation in motion.

When The Post Called Dylan King

"When you're young, you think you're going to live forever. The sooner you learn that you're not, the more time you have to do something about it." ~Alfred G. Aronowitz

So begins the 1968 Saturday Evening Post feature story on the royal family of pop music. It's more pictorial than text, but that's what magazines like Life and National Geographic did for us in such vivid color. The showed us, and didn't just tell us the stories, each picture worth a thousand words.

The cover of this November 2 issue is a photo discretely captioned, "A rare picture of Bob Dylan in seclusion." In the upper right of the page, where it lists the exclusive stories in this edition, we read, "Bob Dylan and the Pop Scene."

Publications like Readers Digest and the Post work overtime coming up with story titles and cover shots that will sell more magazines. Testing must have shown that for this story Bob Dylan would draw more buyers than the clan of pop music characters assembled within.

The first portion of the article is called "Pop: The Royal Family." In retrospect, the opening lines are almost frightening by their prescience. The first three pictures feature Jim Morrison and the Doors, Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. All three would be dead by age 27. It's a sobering beginning to a piece that is aimed at celebrating the antics and excess of youth. But in the world of pop, excess appears to be the path to success.

The selection of celebrated musicians ranges across genres and anticipates much. Janis holds center stage on her page, surrounded by smaller images of Buck Owens, Frank Zappa, Country Joe McDonald, B.B.King, and Arlo. Grace Slick and the Jefferson Airplane feature prominently on the next two page spread, surrounded by The Fugs, Aretha Franklin, Ravi Shankar, Dionne Warwick, Tiny Tim, Al Kooper, Otis Redding, Merle Haggard, Mavis Staples and the Beach Boys. The next spread is equally exciting for fans of the era. Ritchie Havens, Diana Ross, Charles Lloyd, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles, Herb Alpert, and The Rolling Stones fill this spread.

Turn the page. Big black and white shot of Dylan playing his guitar and smiling big. Caption across the centerfold reads: Enter the King, Bob Dylan. The article is a one page summary of how Dylan ended up in Woodstock, how he'd gather Robby Robertson and the band to join him there where the rented a house nicknamed Big Pink. It's the story of Dylan's controversial motorcycle accident and convalescence out of the public eye.

Aronowitz spells out why young Dylan was king to many followers of the scene. "He had started a civil war in the folk community, rearranged the pop charts, fathered a new generation of poets and helped shaped the probability that contemporary music will become the literature of our time. Even the Beatles, after they met Dylan for the first time in 1964, yielded to his influence."

This period of seclusion seems, in retrospect, to have been one of the most significant decisions the young Dylan made. Pulling out of the spotlight gave him a chance to incubate in preparation for a much longer career than many of his peers.

The following summer a major event occurred in Woodstock. Everybody who was anybody would have loved to be there performing. A motion picture came out of the event. Albums as well. And the musicians who played became household names.

But quietly, the resident of Woodstock spent the weekend packing his bags, for he was heading to another concert that week, where he would be the headliner. It would be his first live performance in three years... the Isle of Wight. 

TO BE CONTINUED

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.

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