This Wheel's On Fire, Woodstock and Marketing the Basement Tapes

It's been a month since release of The Bootleg Series #11: The Basement Tapes, and though I've yet to weigh in I'm tilling the soil and planting seeds. There's plenty of chatter these days with almost everything Bob Dylan does. He's become an icon of our culture (though he famously disdains labels, so as soon as I wrote that I wanted to take it back.)

For the past month I've been listening to RAW, the 2-CD version of this bootleg collection, as opposed to Complete, the full 6-CD version. Simultaneously I have been paying attention to the reviews, some in surprising places. I've already noted the New Yorker feature, and I can't imagine a release of any Dylan music without a Rolling Stone feature. I suspect that marketing data is available to show that any time they can find an excuse to get a Dylan cover they increase sales by 10%. Just guessing, because those are the only ones I buy.

What's interesting about the Rolling Stone cover and the New Yorker piece is that they both rely on photos which originally appeared as part of a Saturday Evening Post feature in which a photographer and journalist went up to see what was happening with regard to Dylan's recovery from his motorcycle accident. I have had a copy of that Saturday Evening Post for so long that you can see how faded the ink has become when you compare the two pictures here. Perhaps the Rolling Stone photo looks richer because it's been re-mastered somehow. You can certainly see that it's been recycled from the same shoot.

Well, as I was saying above I've been prepping to weigh in on this latest Bootleg Series and one of the ways I've been gearing up is by reading Levon Helm's This Wheel's On Fire, a book that I will also review during another space of time. Helm was one of the original members of The Hawks, the band recruited to join Dylan in his new "electric" phase. You may recall from Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966 how these concerts generally unfolded. The first half of the concert would be Dylan solo, acoustic guitar strapped across his should, with a tight hold on his audiences. Part two would be Dylan pugged in, The Band (formerly The Hawks) producing a blistering sound that had the same effect in town after town: loud boos. The "Royal Albert Hall" Concert in Manchester culminated in one fan famously bellowing "Judas."

The tour began in the U.S. though before Dylan took it abroad, and with the exception of Texas, the results were the same everywhere, and Levon Helm really disliked it. He and the Hawks were accustomed to crowds embracing and loving their performances. Suddenly they were being disdained, almost violently. Ironically, Dylan loved it. Helm didn't say it this way but Dylan seemed to consider the publicity from this insulting treatment to be equivalent to writers who get tagged as "Banned in Boston."

Before they left the country Helm split the tour. Helm skipped about passing time in various ways including briefly bussing tables in Florida and working oil rigs off the Gulf coast. After Dylan's motorcycle accident Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko and gang were invited up to Woodstock, as was Levon Helm, and something magical happened. The creative energy was uninhibited, channeled into a different kind of sound independent of performance driven material. Whereas the Hawks cut their teeth as performers, this was a whole different gig, hanging with Bob and just letting the juices flow.

Fast forward. One of the tunes Dylan and Rick Danko co-wrote was "This Wheel's On Fire." It later became the title of Helm's book about the history of The Band (and his personal history). It also became the selected song from The Basement Tapes for this promotional video narrated by Jeff Bridges and released today to promote the Bootleg Series Volume 11. Watch it here.

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

A Piece Of Steak

Once upon a time short story writers could make very good money. In the days before movie theaters and television, magazines like The Saturday Evening Post offered some of the best entertainment around. And they paid well to get these marquis writers on their covers. Around a century ago the highest paid of these scribes was a writer named Jack London.

London was no artsy fartsy powderpuff sitting on hillsides waiting for inspiration to strike. For Jack London writing was a craft and a discipline. Day in, day out he slammed out one thousand words of prose. By age forty, though his life was cut short, his output had been immense – as many as fifty volumes of stories, novels, plays and essays.

Many of us know him for the short story “To Build a Fire,” an intense, tightly woven man vs. nature chiller that takes place up in the Klondike. Or perhaps we remember his “Call of the Wild.” And while there are many great London books and stories I could recommend, my all time favorite has to be “A Piece of Steak.”

First published in The Saturday Evening Post, Volume 182, November 1909, “A Piece of Steak” is the tale of an aging boxer. London places a lens on a single fight in boxer Tom King’s life and reveals the motivations, dreams and disappointments of this man’s entire life. It is a study of determination and will. It is also, by extension, a potent picture of the eternal struggle between youth and age, all of it hinging on a piece of steak.

Nothing makes the mouth water like a well-prepared cut of beef. Perhaps that’s why Americans eat more beef than any other meat. Indeed, no meat is more popular than steak. Whether Porterhouse, rib eye, T-bone or top sirloin, we know a good thing when we taste it.

For food value steak contains many nutrients needed by the human body. The vitamins you get from eating steak include niacin, riboflavin, and thiamine. Steak is an excellent source of protein, which is needed to build and maintain body cells. Iron and phosphorous are also important minerals our body needs. Plus it’s an excellent source of energy. Which brings us back to our story.

The opening sentence of “A Piece of Steak” not only tells the whole story, it foreshadows the end as well. “With the last morsel of bread Tom King wiped his plate clean of the last particle of flour gravy and chewed the resulting mouthful in a slow and meditative way.” Tom King is a professional prize fighter who has fallen on hard times. His wife looks on in silence as he wipes his plate clean, a meal of bread and gravy. That morning he had wakened with a longing for a piece of steak but it was not to be. And for want of this one morsel of nourishment Tom King will later fail.

Tom King’s opponent was a young boxer from New Zealand named Sandel. Since nobody in Australia knew what this kid Sandel was capable of, they were feeding him one of the “old uns.” That was King’s role, and King knew it because he had once been the up and comer, the hungry young fighter seeking fame and fortune.

As Tom King walked the two miles to the arena he reflected on his life as a boxer -- the big money, the sharp, glorious fights, the following of eager flatterers, the slaps on the back “and the glory of it, the yelling houses, the whirlwind finish, the referee’s ‘King wins!’ and his name in the sporting columns next day.”

But King now understood that it was the old ones he had been putting away. He had been Youth, rising. They were Age, sinking. This time, it was King who stood in the way of another young man’s dreams. Sandel was the aspiring young heavyweight. King was the barrier that Sandel would have to pummel his way through.

“And as Tom King thus ruminated, there came to his stolid vision the form of youth, glorious youth, rising exultant and invincible, supple of muscle and silken of skin, with heart and lungs that had never been tired and torn and that laughed at limitation of effort. Yes, youth was the nemesis.”

London’s vivid portrayals of what goes on in the ring are probably unmatched in fiction. In fact, another of Jack London’s boxing stories was so powerful that Gene Tunney, after reading it, announced his retirement. Lest you be kept wondering, in “A Piece of Steak” Sandel puts the older man away.

Tom King fought a good fight, careful, deliberate and determined. But youth continually renews itself while the old un’s strength is expended.

The story, like many other great stories, is about something more than the action within the confines of beginning and end. It is a story about life. It is also a story with many applications. To see how I used this story to make application to the oil change industry where I am a columnist for the National Oil & Lube News, you can visit this link.

Of course it is more than that. And certainly it is an example of London's writing power, style and personal vision. At a writer's conference I attended years ago, Dennis Hensley (who had published three thousand articles by age 33) recommended to us Martin Eden by Jack London. It is a novel about a writer, revealing of the challenges and the games that industry plays. It's dark and cynical but shaped by a realism that packs a punch, much like A Piece of Steak Will London be forgotten in two hundred years? It's possible. Nevertheless, he wrote some great stories. I'll recommend him, even if the critics do not.