Flashback Friday: Off the Record, An Oral History of Popular Music

The late Tom Petty

Imagine that you have been invited to a huge party, and when you get there everyone is a somebody... a Somebody in the history of pop music. Who do you talk to first? Do you walk around looking for your favorites first? Or do you just saunter around talking with whoever you run into next?

 

That's what it's like to pick up the book Off the Record: An Oral History of Popular Music.

Obviously a party like that can only be assembled by someone with connections. In this case the author is Joe Smith, who happened to be president and CEO of Capitol Industries-EMI (the same ones who signed the Beatles, Dylan and so many more.) Before this he had been president of Warner Bros./Reprise and Elektra. A Yale grad who became a popular and successful disc jockey, Smith seems like just the right guy to gather all these other pop celebs under one roof.

The book is handled just right. There are no long interviews. Like the party, you can bounce around for a brief spell with Tom Petty, then George Harrison, Little Richard, Ray Charles. Over here is Dylan and is that Yoko Ono? Oh yes, talking with Joni Mitchell, Phil Collins and Ella Fitzgerald. Joan Baez, Robert Plant and James Taylor seem to be enjoying themselves over there with Tina Turner and David Bowie. Then you see the jazz guys, Lionel Hampton, Stan Getz and Dave Brubeck staring out the window onto the lawn where Quincy Jones is listening to Robbie Krieger, Mary Travers, Frankie Valli, Al Kooper and Herbie Hancock. Donovan pensively listens to John Fogerty and David Lee Roth. Judy Collins seems to be reminiscing with Graham Nash and Stephen Stills. Lou Rawls and Tom Petty can't seem to get enough of Henry Mancini.

O.K., you get the picture. And the stories they tell are fascinating because pop culture has played a role in all of our lives.

My bedtime reading ended with Mike Nesmith talking about the Monkees. They were not a music group, they were characters on a television show. The purpose of the show was not to end up with hit records, he says. But one day they're driving along in the car and hear that their song Last Train to Clarksville is #2 on the national charts. Nesmith says the very notion of it was bizarre. Suddenly everything changed.

Jimi

The Monkees were shipped to London to prepare for a road tour as a music group, but they weren't really sure about how they really felt, nevertheless they followed through. One strange quirk about the tour was having Jimi Hendrix open for them. Mickey Dolenz had heard Hendrix in a London club and made the recommendation, which Nesmith off-handedly thought was O.K., sight and sound unseen. When they arrive in Raleigh, North Carolina, to do their first gig, the Hendrix trio is mind blowing, even in appearance, but the teeny bopper screamers are there only for one purpose, and it's not the Experience of Jimi Hendrix.

Nesmith says he disguised himself and went into the crowd to snatch a listen. He'd never heard anything like it. "It was the most exhilarating, the most majestic, the most entertaining, the most fulfilling music I'd ever heard," said Nesmith.

But the mismatch was self-evident and after eight gigs Jimi had had it. The girls were chanting, "We want the Monkees," and in the middle of a song the most incredible guitar player of a generation left the stage in the middle of a song, disgusted.

For the record, this book offers a lot. It's real, it's intimate, up close and personal. Recommended.

You can find the book here on Amazon

Illustrations by the author

Tom Petty Passes But His Songs Will Live On

“It’s shocking, crushing news. I thought the world of Tom. He was a great performer, full of the light, a friend, and I’ll never forget him.”
--Bob Dylan

Was Cream the first "Supergroup"? Some would say, though there were many combinations of talented musicians and teams of musicians in the 60's and 70's, many of them together for one album before moving on. Cream broke and re-configured itself to become Blind Faith. The Byrds morphed into CSN&Y.

In the late1980's a set of veteran friends from earlier road warrior days were joined by a young upstart songwriting talent to become yet another legendary supergroup. When Tom Petty joined up with George Harrison, Roy Orbison, Bob Dylan and Jeff Lynne, the Travelling Wilburys were born.

Like many others yesterday, I was transfixed by what I was seeing and reading on my Twitterfeed detailing the horrors of Sunday's mass shooting in Las Vegas. In the middle of all this there appeared a mid-afternoon tweet announcing that Tom Petty had been taken to the hospital with cardiac arrest. A short time later he was pronounced dead.

Many Dylan fans associate Tom Petty with a worldwide tour in which he and the Heartbreakers accompanied Dylan "Down Under" in 1986. No doubt the friendship formed at that time helped stimulate the mutul respect that led to the formation of the Wilburys. When asked about how he became involved he jokingly said that it was stressful auditioning for the likes of Mr. Harrison and Mr. Dylan. (This quote is a very rough paraphrase, and someone will no doubt correct me in the comments.)

Like many rock musicians who have made it, Petty experessed the sentiment like this: "Do something you really like, and hopefully it pays the rent. As far as I'm concerned, that's success."

You can tell music was his life by the way he talked about it. "Music really isn’t supposed to be perfect. It’s all about people relating to each other and doing something that’s really from the soul." This quote and others like it makes me think of many of the talented and serious musicians I myself have gotten to know over the course of a lifetime. (Read more Tom Petty quotes here.)

The Wilburys lost their first member within months of the release of their album. Roy Orbison died in December of 1988. George Harrison departed to join Orbison 19 years later.

There are several music videos featuring the group of friends. "Nobody's Child" (below) is a special song to me for a variety of reasons. And here's another.

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Read the N.Y.Times tribute to Tom Petty here.

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Thank you, Tom, for all your great songs and the joy you shared through your music.

The Birth and Valor of Dylan's Never Ending Tour as Presented by Andrew Muir

One of my current readings is Andrew Muir's One More Night: Bob Dylan's Never Ending Tour. During a business trip in November I downloaded the beginnings of a dozen or so Dylan-themed books and ordered a couple more for my collection, including this one. One More Night is a compelling read for any Bobfan,

Actually, I should be reading The Razor's Edge (2001) which details the first half (or will it be first third) of the Never Ending Tour (NET). But alas, I have my seatbelt on and will ride this one to see where it takes us.

Have you ever sat and watched an artist draw portraits at an art fair? In a few minutes you find a very accurate rendition of a child or old man in the fewest of brush strokes. And this is what Muir has done in the book's first chapter titled Before the Never Ending Tour. It is one of the most concise and lively sketches of Dylan's career that I have ever read, from Greenwich Village to the kickoff of the NET.

In four pages Muir carries us from the Village to the Vineyard. The next three or so pages walk us from finding Jesus to getting lost in Philadelphia. The next segment highlights events leading up to the Live Aid Concert (1985). Two billion people saw live one of the worst performances of Dylan's life. I myself was disappointed but usually avert my eyes to that memory. But Muir tells it like it was. The puffy bloated Dylan was unprepared and the remarks he made appalling. Accompanied by Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood, I personally felt there was no connection between these superstars and the hungry masses they sang to raise money for.

"So by the summer of 1985 Dylan had managed to lose any ground he had regained with Infidels, and his career had reached its nadir," Muir writes. "He had to start turning things around."

This is what I like about the book. He's a fan but he calls it as he sees it. His depiction of that performance rings true and telegraphs to fans that this is going to be an honest book, not a bunch of fawning accolades.

Live Aid was not Dylan's low point, however, but it was something of a wake up call. He managed to do some things to get on track and in 1986 did two tours with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Next came his touring with the Grateful Dead, which wasn't all that fulfilling for Dylan because the Deadheads were there to see and hear the Dead, not Dylan. Though 1987 went badly, something good emerged. That something was a whole new approach to his music... as a performer.

It's 26 years later with Dylan performing more than 100 concerts a year. The female vocalists and big sets are gone. It's all about the show, each one unique, many of them remarkable. In all that time the longest Dylan has gone without touring is three months in 1997 when he suffered that heart issue that some thought might kill him. And though the Grateful Dead experience was less than illustrious, that which emerged does have one similarity: the manner in which the fans follow along, trading bootleg recordings of the concerts, sharing concert reviews, turning the circus into a family of distant cousins bonded by a common passion.

Muir's book documents the Never Ending Tour in a manner I have not yet seen. If you have not read it yet, here's an interview with Andrew Muir at L4LM (Live For Live Music.)

If you're a fan and on the fence, you can read reader reviews at Amazon.com. Here are the titles:
Muir Delivers
Delightful!
Never Ending Enjoyment
The Missing Link... Revealed
and
Top Notch

Till the morrow.... and Keep on Truckin'