ARCHIVES
1. What I Wrote on September 11th
2. A Wake (for Anne Waldman)
3. Marcel Duchamp
4. Review of "Tacoma Ballet" by Lucid Nation
5. Introduction to "one night"
6. Creating a Social and Historical Context for Dylan's Christian Period
7. Randy Goes to a Rave on the Rocks
1. What I Wrote on September 11th
According to the Norton Anthology of English Literature, "In Praise of Contented Mind" was one of the most popular Elizabethan ballads, and was published anonymously (as ballads often were at that time). Ironically, several aristocratic poets are most often suggested as its author—but nobody famous. There are various versions of it (also not unusual)—the one that follows is from the "Inner Temple" manuscript, whatever that is.
In Praise of a Contented Mind
My mind to me a kingdom is;
Such perfect joy therein I find
That it excels all other bliss
That world affords or grows by kind.
Though much I want which most men have,
Yet still my mind forbids to crave.
No princely pomp, no wealthy store,
No force to win the victory,
No wily wit to salve a sore,
No shape to feed each gazing eye;
To none of these I yield as thrall.
For why my mind doth serve for all.
I see how plenty suffers oft,
How hasty climbers soon do fall;
I see that those that are aloft
Mishap doth threaten most of all;
They get with toil, they keep with fear.
Such cares my mind could never bear.
Content I live, this is my stay;
I seek no more than may suffice;
I press to bear no haughty sway;
Look what I lack my mind supplies;
Lo, thus I triumph like a king,
Content with that my mind doth bring.
Some have too much, yet still do crave;
I little have, and seek no more.
They are but poor, though much they have,
And I am rich with little store.
They poor, I rich; they beg, I give;
They lack, I leave; they pine, I live.
I laugh not at another's loss;
I grudge not at another's gain;
No worldly waves my mind can toss;
My state at one doth still remain.
I fear no foe, nor fawning friend;
I loathe not life, nor dread my end.
Some weigh their pleasure by their lust,
Their wisdom by their rage of will,
Their treasure is their only trust;
And cloaked craft their store of skill.
But all the pleasure that I find
Is to maintain a quiet mind.
My wealth is health and perfect ease;
My conscience clear my chief defense;
I neither seek by bribes to please,
Nor by deceit to breed offense.
Thus do I live, thus will I die.
Would all did so as well as I!Several people set the ballad to music between 1581 and 1700, and it was popular enough to be published as a broadside as well. If my lack of knowledge of it is any indication, it is now almost completely forgotten. But for over 100 years, people sang this to each other and read its lyrics aloud and hung the lyrics on their walls.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the concept of "the contented mind" (or otium) was something of a fad (if one can conceive of a fad that lasted a century and a half). It was related to idyllic simplicity and the noble savage and holy Mother Nature, etc. My intuition is that a lot of its popularity was related to the fact that many people at the time were obviously more noble than the Nobles, but they had nothing—and would always have nothing—and that several rather nasty people had most of everything. It's the kind of song a Dalai Lama might sing. The Norton refers you to other poems in this genre such as Surrey's "My Friend, the Things That Do Attain."
The Greek philosopher Lucretius’s writings were quite popular with Elizabethan playwrights and poets at the time. One of his most popular ideas concerned "mutability." From what I can understand, he believes that everything is in a constant state of change and that there is no central core to a thing or person that is always true and true in every part (and so exists nowhere). According to Lucretius, not understanding these basic facts is the cause of most of the pain and suffering we experience. For Lucretius, this meant that we should just appreciate being here and celebrate and be super-kind to our fellow humans, since we are all in the same situation. If you read Lucretius, you want to go into the streets and give everything away to people in need. You feel nauseous when you see people spending money on frivolous things knowing that they’re frivolous things when both of you know that there are people, usually children, starving to death in many places on the globe. Or you want to go into nursing homes and get to know everyone personally before they disappear.
What Lucretius said is obvious and unarguable, and this led to something of a crisis in the Church, since if people figured this out, it would be difficult explaining how the Church chose to spend "its" money. The Church had a different theory: they taught that there was something called our immortal soul and something that was immutable (God) and that our mutable state was part and parcel of a degraded world. In this life, they taught, suffering was good for your soul, so the more suffering you experienced in this life, the more points you could earn for your soul. And at the end of this very short life, there was going to be a judgment, and how well your unreal body did on this test determined where the eternal part of you would spend eternity.
Edmund Spenser tried to integrate these two ideas—of mutability and an immutable and invisible and increasingly improbable God—into what’s come to be known as the "Book VII: Two Cantos on Mutabilitie" of "The Fairie Queen" (a runaway bestseller in its day). What we have is essentially Cantos VII and VIII, or the central cantos of a twelve-canto sequence. Spenser abandoned this "book" and it was published incomplete in 1609, ten years after his death.
The crucial distinction between Buddhist and Christian beliefs on the world’ s impermanence as a cause of suffering is that Buddhists believe mutability is the underlying nature of the material universe and that there is no reason for there to be a separate permanent world where things are realer than here, or to believe in a God that is somehow unchanging and separate from this changing world. Christians believe that the things of this world, by being impermanent, are to be rejected in favor of something that is immortal—your soul. But one thing the Christians had that other religions didn’t have was that they had two Gods—Christ, who was mutable, and God, who was not. But the differences in practice were not so great: There were gods and devils in both, for instance, and the good guys were hard to tell from the bad guys, and the world was created in order to deceive us, and the body and pleasure were dangerous.
In Spenser’s "Mutabilitie Cantos" we hear a lot of talk about serious disappointments (115 nine-line stanzas of them) before Spenser pulls God out of his invisible hiding place and sort of waves him around. His argument goes something like this: God and our souls are outside of time but a part of us lives in mortal time, and our immortal soul is somehow attached to it. It has been put asleep (more or less) and attached to a body that exists in a dream world where good and evil are very difficult to understand—suffering, for example, is explained by the Church as a reward if undeserved, and punishment if deserved. The world is a sort of anthropomorphogized imaginary world whose sole purpose (and it was intentionally designed for this) is to trick us into believing in it. And then, when we do, it will sap our soul and will and the very life out of us while we’re completely unconscious that this is what’s happening. And if we don’t see through the visible world’s (changing) illusion and repent to an invisible God before we die, then we will spend the rest of eternity in torment.
Further complicating things (to my mind) is the nature of "Grace"—which sounds very similar to the pagan idea of Fortuna. With Grace, God sometimes rescues people who have done nothing to redeem themselves on their own; and God can also (apparently) fail to bestow this gift on the majority of those suffering. This God apparently lacks the sense of pity that would motivate even the lowest and most degraded of humans into action.
When Greek dramatists couldn't finish a play—most commonly Euripides, and most famously his "Medea"—a basket would descend at a crucial moment near the end of the play and a God or two inside the basket would resolve the play for the struggling playwright—almost always non-sensibly or at least illogically. It would be as if in a modern cliffhanger Jesus appears out of a cloud not to save the hero but one of the darker elements in the play. You'd feel cheated and your God degraded. The decadent madness of Euripides’s late plays is the mark of the decline of nobility. Athens was falling apart. In literature, a metaphysical answer to a physical problem is called a "deus ex machina."
But I'm not even sure where Spenser was headed in "The Mutabilite Cantos." Although it'd be too much "out-of-his-time" for anything other than God to triumph in the end (and the theology of "The Fairie Queene" is much stricter than the Bible’s), Spenser seems particularly despondent about mutability. He never apparently began the final cantos of the sequence; the ones that would have explained God’s part in all this.
Thomas Gray, a poet popular during the time of '"In Praise of Contented Mind," was fond of quoting Pindar (although in the original Greek, of course): "Comprehensible to the intelligent; for the world at large needing interpretation." Sometimes I get the feeling that Spenser is winking at his readers (as Virgil and Homer did before him). At other times I get the feeling that mutability has defeated him, and sometimes I get the feeling that he argues a bit too persuasively (as Milton did in "Paradise Lost") for the dark side.
But how does this fit in with idyllic peasants and the nobility of simplicity, as we began. Ezra Pound was probably pretty close to the truth, as he almost always is in the Cantos, when he says (I’m paraphasing): "How do we stand it? With a painted paradise at the end of it; without a painted paradise at the end of it."
2. A WAKE (for Anne Waldman)
I prefer tributes when the person is actually still alive. It's like everyone's fantasy-to be present at their own funeral-a rehearsal for death. I'm so tired of memorials everyone gets up and says how great they were or what a great poet they were or how they changed their lives.
Walking up to a live person and telling them what it is that you admire in their work isn't really scary. Sometimes the truth is "I really liked your poems. They were just the right length. And they were smart, but not too smart-they weren't like poems that were smart in a superficial way, so that halfway through you begin to realize you've lost your audience, and they're staring at you like it's a mercy killing-"Please, God, let it be over." And you feel like a fish on a dock, just flopping around, not quite knowing how to get ouf of this thing. I don't know what goes through other people's minds, but that's what goes through mine. Anyway, you found a way to make it clear enough and circle back once in a while so no one really got lost." That's what I told Cole Swenson tonight.
Or what I told Akilah Oliver: "I really liked what you did-how you passed out copies of Anne's books to the audience and brought up the houselights so we could turn around and face each other."
Her instructions were to ask a question and then open the book at random-bibliomancy she called it. And we stood up in the crowded auditorium to read bittersweet, sad, innocent, tender poems to each other. Some of them were written when Anne was living in the Village, documenting the wild and extended party that surrounded Frank O'Hara and Andy Warhol and Ted Berrigan and Burroughs, Corso, and Ginsberg.. Everything seemed to be happening all day, every day-they just had to think it up and it would be real.
BE HAPPY O SAD WORLD BE HAPPY
Be happy O sad world be happy!
because you are the way you are
between joy and sorrow
Be happy O sad world be happy!
we're alive today, gone tomorrow
but you go on and on.
Anyway, that's what I told Akilah Oliver tonight after I borrowed a match from her and we talked together from the Bug Theater to the reception to the gallery.
Lewis Warsh was there on videotape, reading one of his first poems to Anne that was so impossibly true that it almost broke his heart to read it.
And we all know by now that when we die our friends will be sad and there will be emergency phonecalls and gossip and fond memories and tears-and that then everyone will adapt and the world goes on, and we go on too, without them. And that's really a good thing.
Or maybe it's true that the dead live on in the people they've touched. (I know this is true. When Allen died a little spark of him flew off into dozens of people, each picking up a facet of him.) And it's sad when they get to the point where they don't know anymore, where they're not so sure, where they begin to feel in the way-as if they're cluttering up the highway, so it's time to go.
Nothing, not even this, lasts-or maybe even exists-and that's pretty sad at first, and then it's both sad and miraculous-then it goes back and forth.
The mail piles up, there will be letters that arrive too late. What people say about you at your funeral is never what anyone expects. There's a poem by Catullus about his brother who died in Greece, his body too far away to be returned to Rome, and how Catullus journeys there, at least to bury him, wondering what it means, that his brother is dead and he is still alive.
What Lewis Warsh has gained from being no longer beautiful or young is an amazing presence that has all the wide-eyedness of knowing what's really true. His appearance on videotape, reading poems from Anne's childhood steps in front of her MacDougal Street walk-up, squinting up into the sun, was like someone waving goodbye from a burning ship.
You start out writing poems you think will do something or be something because you think that's what you're supposed to do. And then you realize that reading the poem can only bring you to where you are at that moment, and it's got to be something more than being self-conscious about being onstage or not knowing what kind of poem to read at a reading or how to read it.
Sometimes I worry about poets like Frank O'Hara and Ted Berrigan whose work was so obviously written during a headlong race toward death. Ted was always more alive than anyone in the building, and he knew it. He wasn't afraid. His readings were like tragic masses-when Ted crashed and burned, it was horrible, but you also never forgot it. It was like a village sacrifice.
But no one changes anything forever, like we think they will. That's part of the tragedy, too.
I didn't understand Ted until I heard him, and how the first thing I noticed was that he was the same person between poems. He was always bigger than his poems too, but he never made himself small in order to read them-he never burlesqued. Sometimes he was above them or beside them, and that's where his humor came from-that he read them with equal seriousness, especially the funny ones.
On the day Laurie Anderson took her Buddhist Refuge Vows in NYC in the eighties, I think, it coincided with the appearance at Tibet House of young monks, who had never been out of Tibet. While Laurie was repeating her vows, she felt as if she was hearing them for the first time. Panicking, she grabbed one of the monk and dragged him to a coffeeshop directly after the ceremony. She sat him down and handed him a double cappuccino and asked him what she’d just done. Did this mean that she could never again look to her music as entertainment-did she really have to turn it into a vehicle for relieving all humankind from suffering? The monk drank his cappuccino down in one long swallow, and then listened to the exasperated Anderson. Finally he raised his hand and shouted at her: "Don’t limit yourself! Don’t be so strict! Open it up!" He paused for a moment and started at Anderson: "And another thing. The Mind is a wild white horse and when you make a corral for him, make sure it’s not too small. And another thing: When your house burns down, just walk away. And another thing: Keep your eyes open. And one more thing: Keep moving. Because it’s a long way home."
Notes: "Be Happy O Sad World Be Happy" is, of course, a poem by a teenaged Waldman.
The monk that Laurie Anderson abducted was one in the Dalai Lama’s retinue, who had come to NYC (in 1991) to perform the Kalachakra Ceremony (a prayer to heal the earth).
3. Marcel Duchamp
Marcel Duchamp gave up painting (or "retinal art") in his twenties because he found it too tedious.
For him, Art was too important to reserve it for museums and "art"? The experience of art happened
in your mind, and if you could learn how to look for art outside of the museums, then you could live in
a continuous museum. Imagine your fireplace as a painting-wouldn’t that be the coolest painting of
all time?And then why not an art that was composed of gesture? Why not walk into a room with the same expectations that you'd have walking into a museum? Or better still, why not be a moving painting moving through the room?
Duchamp spent decades playing chess for the French National Team. The way he'd play was to make each move because it pleased him-visually or conceptually. And then his opponent’s move would add onto his, creating a continuous somewhat controlled, somewhat unpredictable moving sculpture that only existed in time and the mind. How would you capture anything so marvelous on canvas? When asked to, he could play an entire game backwards from memory, but only his last game and only immediately afterwards. We can reverse time, he claimed.
So if you were no longer trapped in time, would you exist in a different way, and what would it look like, and was there any reason to? He said it was like following the thread to the Minotaur-that at every moment you’re never sure if you’re going in the right direction or if you’ll be eaten when you get there. After that, he said, meeting the monster was almost an anti-climax.
4. Lucid Nation: "Tacoma Ballet" Brainfloss Records
Will "Tacoma Ballet" be the Nation's break-out record? Could be. It's certainly their most cohesive, coherent, and mature release, and also my personal favorite. And at 135 minutes and 32 tracks, it's not a minute too long.
The most remarkable fact about "Tacoma Ballet" is that it, like all of Lucid Nation's live and studio work over the last three years, was completely improvised in the studio--and I mean completely improvised, including the extensive lead vocals (there are no instrumentals here). Jazz has featured album-length free improvisations for years, but never to my knowledge with full, improvised lyrics. Rock bands such as King Crimson, the Patti Smith Group, and The Doors have all incorporated improvisational passages into their live shows and studio recordings. But no one, as far as I know, has ever recorded a document of this length with lyrics and music improvised simultaneously in the studio.
Over the course of six CDs now (www.lucidnation.com), the two constants in Lucid Nation have been Tamra Spivey on vocals and occasional guitar and bass, and Ronnie Pontiac on guitar, some songwriting, and occasional vocals. On this outing they traveled to Tacoma, Washington (their first recordings outside their native L.A.) to record with Wes Weresch at Uptone Studios, and were joined by Patty Schemel of Hole on drums, Greta Brinkman of Moby's touring band on bass, Larry Schemel on second guitar, Diane Naegel on keyboards, and Kayla Tabb on occasional percussion. It's one hell of a solid band, and in every song at least one player steps up to surprise you.
The two CDs of "Tacoma Ballet" have their own titles from Gertrude Stein's last words-- "What's the answer?" and "What's the question?"--but it’s up to the individual listener to decide for themselves why a particular song appears on one or the other of the disks, and what in fact these titles might mean in relation to what they're hearing. I have my own theory, and that is that the songs were recorded in more or less chronological order. I do know that the journey we go on has a sense of being a real journey that follows a certain particular sequence of events, like real life does. And by the end we have traveled all the way from politics and culture to private midnight anxieties ("why can't I keep friends?").Tamra begins at her most confrontational, singing of claustrophobia, of ties that bind, of being stuck in something old, of having reached the end of something. But by the time we get to the opening song of "What's the question?" it seems that Tamra has decided the answer is to "try something new before we die." And so the last songs seem to be about the scary pleasures of getting out, of finding release. By the final track (significantly entitled "Shelter") I felt like I had just heard rock's first novel.
But to describe these CDs in literary terms is to do a disservice to the fact that "Tacoma Ballet" is above all a genre-hopping journey through country blues, Ramonesesque punk, dark psychedelia, electronic sound collage, with a very strong nod to the Rolling Stones, including a loopy deconstruction of "Happy" off "Exile on Main Street," and, perhaps most of all, a blending of the aggressive, menacing bass sound of Peter Hook at the height of Joy Division and the band's general enthusiasm for all things Pere Ubu.
And this is probably one of the few bands who understand that my reference is to both Pere Ubus: the band and the founder of dada. In fact, the CD rips open with "Happy Accident" a song about what it's like to actually live the life contemplated by our dadaist and situationist forebears-a life of complete improvisation.
I've heard a tape of a Lucid Nation radio broadcast a year ago that began with "The Rain Song"-a song about getting lost in a downpour on the way to the studio and the various emotional reactions to the situation inside the bus, an incredibly candid account. I got the feeling that Tamra was, in a way, working magic on every member of the band to bring their emotions to the surface so that they could be used as fuel.
Improvisation in a rock format has all the perils of spontaneity, but multiplied by six or seven factors. Each member has to listen to all of the others and play at the same time, if only by keeping quiet. In addition, improvisation is a two-edged sword because it creates a picture of your mind. When someone asked Kerouac how a piece of spontaneous prose could have a form, he answered "mind is shapely, art is shapely."
As for the contents of Tamra's mind this time out, we begin with the vague dread and paranoia common to many works of art created in the days preceding 9/11. And in at least one example truly worthy of Blake (or Kafka), the song "Manzanar Recess" is about the fascist underpinnings of concepts like "homeland" defense (using those words), and how the government will soon know where we are and what we're doing "24/7." (For those unfamiliar with Manzanar, it was a United States concentration camp built in the California desert where we interned Japanese nationals for the duration of World War II.)
On "Tacoma Ballet," Ronnie Pontiac's guitar sound is more stellar than ever-able to crunch with the best of them like AC/DC in one song and then to hammer and bend the strings into waves of ethereal beauty on the next. With such a strong rhythm section, on later tracks he forays deep into the use of "rhyming" harmonics and drones and gentle feedback to float shimmering clouds into the airy spaces inside the songs. Guitarist Larry Schemel, a longtime gem of the Northwestern scene, knows why the Stooges and early Creedence songs sounded so good: in the early stages of a song he drives the rhythm forward by slyly anticipating its curves and then, after the song has found its shape, he'll tease something new out of it with a flurry of unexpected notes that somehow develop into an entirely new--but always right--direction.
Another star of this recording is Greta Brinkman, whose bass lines can be menacing, sinister, and snarling in one moment, and then innocently wandering off to explore the edge of the melody or to create a melody of her own. A surprising new voice is Diane Naegel on keyboards. Reportedly this is her first recording experience and her first appearance in a band context and her first experience playing a musical instrument since she was twelve. She applies tasteful accents on Memorymoog, Prophet 5, piano, and optagan that etch stark moods or toss off witty asides. Her sense of rhythm and crescendo serve the music well. I hope Lucid Nation invites her out on their next tour.
Sitting in the middle of a roomful of improvisational musicians anxious to play, drummer Patty Schemel does her job well by keeping the musicians and the song within the same structure and keeping everyone in time. And then, halfway through the second CD, when each of the musicians have begun exploring looser and quieter ways to play, Patty does some exploring too, and the result is like releasing one of those rubberband-driven toys--the entire band shoots off into several different directions all at once, tossing of sparks like a roman-candle. It's the release the musicians, and the audience, have been waiting for. And the journey isn't over yet.
When Tamra opens her mouth, every song becomes a Lucid Nation song. And here, over a period exceeding two hours, Tamra uses language as a probe into the center of the human psyche, beginning with daily life inside the grind, which isn't pretty. After three years of experience improvising onstage, Tamra steps into the microphone at full speed, and then finds ways to make it go even faster. Sometimes to surprise herself she paints herself into a corner just for the pleasure of finding some way out.
And, in case I've made them sound too stuffy, there is a lot of humor in this music, and a lot of variety. I have my favorite track-"Everyone Has an Area 51," which sounds like a Jim Morrison story channeled through Laurie Anderson. But there are also plenty of hits here including, certainly, "Seven Stringer," "Note to Self," "Absence Breaks the Heart Grown Fonder," "Pharmaceutical Soup," "Kindred," and "30 States in 30 Days." But don't just take my word for it. Pick up a copy and make your own list. Lucid Nation's "Tacoma Ballet" invites comparisons to "Exile on Main Street" and The Beatles "White Album." Can their "Abbey Road" be far behind? -
5. An Introduction to "one night"
In April, 1983, the Grateful Dead came to Boulder, Colorado, and played in the Balch Fieldhouse at the University of Colorado. From my seat in the stands, I could see Allen Ginsberg cavorting backstage with members of the band-later I learned they were trying to get him to go out and recite some poetry. It was the first time they had seen each other since the last Acid Test in 1967, and, on the way out, Bob Weir handed Allen a baggie of black blotter acid.
About a week later, Allen was trying to decide how to pay me for some work I'd done, and he found the baggie of blotter acid in his fridge asked me if I was interested. I was.
I didn't consider at the time that I might actually do any of it. But they were fun to look at-they had tiny Arabic characters in white ink and alchemical symbols worked into the design of a tetragrammaton. They were like museum pieces-acid from the Grateful Dead.
It took me about a week to convince myself to try one. I discussed it with my wife and we decided I should do it after she went to sleep-that way I could be alone if I wanted to but if I needed her she'd be in the next room.
I don't remember much about that night except that I spent most of it on my back, staring at the ceiling, which had become a brightly lit fluorescent network of white molecules that were floating down toward me, while my body had become a cloud of brightly lit red fluorescent pulsing molecules that were rising and mixing with those of the ceiling. "Wow," a friend of mine said to me later who was into New Physics, "It's like how you're exchanging molecules with the chair you're sitting in right now-but you actually got to see it."
The last thing I did before I went to bed that night was to write a letter to Anne Waldman about her poem "I Digress," which I was about to publish in the first issue of Friction magazine. I had requested a copy of the poem after hearing her read it a week before, and it had arrived in the mail that morning with the following footnote, hastily scribbled in ink on the last page: "With thanks to Chogyam Trungpa's explication of Abhidharma." I was so opposed to including her footnote that I couldn't fall to sleep until I'd gotten out of bed and written a response.
In April, 2001, Jeff Grove asked me for a poem for his psychedelic web site. I remembered that at one point during the trip I had gotten very scared, and found that writing in my journal grounded me and quieted me down. I went back into my journals and found the following unpublished poem and letter, and asked Anne if I could reprint her poem "I Digress…" as part of a book, creating a snapshot of my 29-year-old mind over the course of one night in 1983.
6. CREATING A SOCIAL AND HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR DYLAN'S "CHRISTIAN PERIOD"
I want to talk about the Christian period in Dylan's life, but first, in order to really understand it, we're going to have to backtrack a little bit and put it in a social and historical context. For the weight it sometimes carries, it's important to remember that Dylan's Christian period lasted for only two years-that is if you date it from May 1st, 1979, when he entered the studio to record "Slow Train Coming," until May 1981, when he finished recording his third and final Christian LP, "A Shot of Love."
Dylan actually dates the beginning of his Christian conversion to his days with the Rolling Thunder Revue-a crosscounty folk caravan Dylan embarked on in 1975 with a variety of performers such as Joan Baez and Roger McGuinn. The master of ceremonies for that tour was T Bone Burnett, a Born Again Christian, who saw that there was something profoundly sad and self-destructive in Dylan at one of the most successful periods of his life, and began talking to him about the "inner light" he'd discovered in Christianity.
Dylan had a hellacious 1977. He spent almost the entire year editing "Renaldo and Clara" from film shot on The Rolling Thunder Revue, releasing a four-hour version of the film on January 25th 1978. The film cost more than $1.2 million and was universally savaged in the media. One memorable headline appeared on the cover of the Village Voice, where a Godzilla-sized Dylan towered over the Manhattan skyline underneath the banner "Giant Ego Attacks Earth." 1977 was also memorable for the grotesque details of his personal life with wife Sara that were reported in the papers during their divorce proceedings, which she initiated on March 1st, and for which she was ultimately awarded $12 million dollars, half of his assets, as well as custody of their children. In addition, he made the papers as one of a number of show business personalities who had been cheated out of a fortune by a Ponzi scam that year, and the 3 million dollar house he'd been building in Malibu that the press had nicknamed Xanadu for its copper dome and his endless and expensive redesigns, which he'd insisted on keeping as part of the divorce settlement, was declared by geologists to be slipping into the sea.
After the financial fiasco of "Renaldo & Clara," his divorce, and Xanadu, Dylan was broke and designed a world tour which became known in the press as "The Alimony Tour." It began in Japan in February 1978, and two early shows at Budokan were recorded with plans to release a double album by the time the tour arrived in America. Dylan performed these early shows in full Las Vegas era Elvis drag, wearing a rhinestoned white jumpsuit and rarely playing guitar but mostly hoisting a handheld microphone and awkwardly and stiffly meandering around the stage while warbling his old tunes to new and peculiar arrangements heavy with syrupy flutes and violins. The results were so bizarre that Columbia decided not to release the album in the U.S. after all. And so Dylan, in the midst of a world tour, took time off to fly back from Australia and record an album of new material in April and May at his studio in Santa Monica. The resulting album, "Street Legal," was mastered, pressed, and released in less than a month in order to coincide with a series of shows in L.A., his first U.S. appearances since the Rolling Thunder Revue. In July "Bob Dylan at Budokan" was released in Japan and the clamor in America, which was underwhelmed by "Street Legal," convinced Columbia to release the double album in the U.S. as well in August. Ironically, the LP came with a fold-out poster of Dylan in full Elvis regalia at the time Dylan had gone back to black leather, having abandoned the Las Vegas road show featured on the albums for some of the most powerful and longest rock and roll shows of his career-sometimes playing as many as 32 songs and over 3 hours of material a night. The band hit their stride during the European portion of the tour, where one concert at Blackbushe Arena outside London attracted over 500,000 people. Closing out the rollercoaster year of 1978, in November he re-released a much shorter version of "Renaldo and Clara," but the movie sank as quickly as the original.
During a show in San Diego in November of 1978, nearing the end of the "Alimony Tour," someone in the audience threw a small silver cross onstage and Dylan picked it up and put it in his pocket. When he arrived in Tempe Arizona for his next show, he felt that he "needed something that he never needed before" and reached into his pocket and found the silver cross. At that point, Dylan knelt down to pray in his hotel room and had a vision of a heavenly and infinite power that entered the room and was trying to communicate with him. Later he described his experience to a Born Again friend of his that "Jesus put His hand on me. It was a physical thing. I felt it all over me. I felt my whole body tremble. The glory of God knocked me down and picked me up." His friend contacted members of her church, the Vineyard Fellowship in Los Angeles, who came to Dylan's house to discuss the Bible with him. They recommended a 3-month Bible study course, which Dylan wasn't interested in at all. But a week later, he went to bed at dawn and woke up from a very deep sleep at 7 a.m., got out of bed, and before he knew where he was going, found himself driving to the Vineyard Fellowship, an experience he described as being pulled there by a strange hypnotic force. Dylan attended the Vineyard Fellowship's School of Discipleship Bible study program five days a week for the next 3½ months and never missed a session, and actually took part in a lot of other programs there as well. He described this experience as "making Christ the Lord of your life. You're talking about your life now, you're not talking about just a part of it, you're not talking about a certain hour every day. You're talking about making Christ the Lord and Master of your life, and King of your life. And you're also talking about Christ, the resurrected Christ; you're not talking about some dead man who had a bunch of good ideas and was nailed to a tree-who died with those ideas-you're talking about a resurrected Christ who is Lord of your life. We're talking about that type of Christianity." He was baptized in May 1979, and then returned to the studio with 16 new songs, and in 11 days he recorded 9 of them for "Slow Train Coming."
Word had already leaked out that Dylan had become a Christian, but it was still a surprise when "Slow Train Coming" was released just how fundamentalist Dylan had become. Not surprisingly, the LP was attacked in the media, although it also became his bestselling album to date. Greil Markus for example-the same guy who would later write "Invisible Republic," a book celebrating the Basement Tapes era of Dylan and the Band-accused Dylan of using Christianity to pump up a badly deflated career, and to polish his tarnished mystique after a divorce in which he was accused of generally bizarre behavior, rock star eccentricities and absences (such as missing the birth of their last child in order to finish a chess game), physical abuse, and some serious lapses in good judgment, such as bringing a new girlfriend down to his kitchen in the morning to have breakfast with his wife and children. And Joel Selvin, music columnist for the S.F. Chronicle, wrote that "Dylan has written some the most banal, uninspired, and inventionless songs of his career for his Jesus phase. Years from now, when social historians look back over these years, Dylan's conversion will serve as a concise metaphor for the vast emptiness of the era." To understand the severity of his criticism, it's important to remember that the big hits that year were Rod Stewart's "Do You Think I'm Sexy" and the Village People's "YMCA."
After an appearance on Saturday Night Live on October 20th 1979, Dylan began his first Christian tour with fourteen shows at the Berkeley Community Center beginning on November 1st 1979. The excitement of seeing Dylan in a 2000-seat arena quickly turned into impatience and resentment when the evening began with a gospel trio singing six tent-show revival hymns accompanied by pianist Terry Young, before Dylan took the stage with a band consisting of some of the best studio musicians on the west coast-including Fred Tackett, Spooner Oldham, Tim Drummond, and Jim Keltner-to play the nine songs of "Slow Train Coming," followed by eight of the nine songs that he'd later release in 1980 as "Saved"-a performance that ended with boos and catcalls from an outraged audience who expected at least something from Dylan's extensive back catalog. The reviews were resoundingly negative. The headline in the S.F. Chronicle read "Bob Dylan's God-Awful Gospel," and Philip Elwood of the San Francisco Examiner wrote under the headline "Born Again Dylan Bombs," "Ninety minutes of poorly played, poorly presented and often poorly written sounds is a pretty grueling experience."
Undaunted, Dylan repeated the exact same show from start to finish for every one of the 78 nights on that year's U.S. and Canadian tour. At certain points during most shows he would preach from the stage. The longest speeches often preceded a song which he introduced as "Hangin' On To A Solid Rock Made Before The Foundation Of The World," which would later appear as "Solid Rock" on "Saved." One of his shortest and most coherent speeches comes from a concert on Thanksgiving night: "The world as we know it now is being destroyed. Sorry, but it's the truth. In a short time-I don't know, in 3 years, maybe 5 years, could be ten years-there's going to be a war. It's gonna be called the War of Armageddon. It's gonna be fought in the Middle East. Russia's gonna come down first. Anyway, we're not worried about that. We know there's gonna be a new kingdom set up in Jerusalem for a thousand years. That's where Christ will set up His Kingdom, as sure as you're standing there, it's gonna happen."
There were also other more spontaneous interactions with the audience. At almost every show, people would get up and make dramatic and noisy exits, shouting at Dylan from the crowd. But this was a situation where Dylan always excelled, whether it was at the Newport Folk Festival, the Forest Hills Stadium, or the Freetrade Hall in Manchester. In Dallas, for example, when someone yelled out for "rock and roll" during the middle of one of his "end times" speeches, Dylan yelled back, "If you want rock 'n' roll, you can go down with rock 'n' roll. You can go and see Kiss and you can rock 'n' roll all the way down into the pit!"
By the time Dylan reached Denver in January 1980 (playing three shows at the now non-existent Rainbow Music Hall), Allen Ginsberg was living in Boulder and mounted a caravan of poets to appear at the concert and confront Dylan publicly about his new-found Christianity. That night, Dylan's only speech to the audience occurred before "Slow Train Coming," where he said, "I wanna tell everybody here to stay away from those-what do they call them-cults. To get out. There's only one gospel. Don't let yourself get fooled." After the show, when Ginsberg went backstage to talk to Dylan, Dylan refused to see the man he'd personally chosen to be the resident poet for the Rolling Thunder Revue five years earlier, the man he'd once called the greatest poet in America, and sent a message that he would pray for the poet instead.
In November 1980, almost exactly a year after his first Christian appearance, Dylan returned to the Warfield Theater in San Francisco to play another extended series of concerts backed by the same band-but something was very different. First of all, although he was still singing several songs from the Christian LPs, they were now performed less as religious tracts and more as raunchy rock and roll numbers. Secondly, songs like "Like a Rolling Stone," "Just Like a Woman," and "Simple Twist of Fate" were back in the set list, performed with a passion and fire that harkened back to the shows at the end of the 1978 tour. And finally, on many nights he welcomed old friends to the stage who were mostly far from saved, including Jerry Garcia, Carlos Santana, Maria Muldaur, Mike Bloomfield, and Roger McGuinn.
Dylan's final LP of the Christian trilogy was recorded in April and May of 1981 and released on August 12th as "A Shot of Love." Although still largely Christian in nature, the LP also included a song praising the decidedly un-Christian Lenny Bruce, as well as songs he decided not to release at the time, such as the earthy "Need a Woman" the very secular love song "Angelina," and a still unreleased version of "Mystery Train."
In January 1982, less than two months after the last of the Christian shows, Dylan was in his studio recording "Do the Meditation Rock" with Allen Ginsberg, the man he'd lectured from the stage about being part of a cult barely two years before.
Dylan's next major world tour began in Europe after the release of the somewhat hermetic and rocking "Infidels," and although this tour included two songs from the Christian period-"When You Gonna Wake Up" and "Every Grain of Sand"-they were in the decided minority, and it was clear that this was yet again a new Dylan or maybe an old Dylan or a Dylan who, it was rumored, had returned to his Jewish roots.
7. Randy Goes to a Rave at the Rocks, 21 July 2000
The first surprise was that the audience was mostly shorthaired college kids-short hair not in a skinhead kind of way or in a fashionably unfashionable kind of way, but in a "I'm majoring in business" kind of way-not the longhaired misfits I expected. I didn't see a single tie-dye all night-but those bizarre light sticks and phosphorescent jewelry were everywhere. The sight of so many elaborate tattoos and piercings made me slightly ill. I remember Amy saying at a Cure concert how odd it was that the audience wasn't making music. Anyone who's been to a rave knows exactly what she means. This wasn't a normal concert situation where there's nothing happening, and then the opening band comes on stage and do their thing and disappear and then there's nothing happening and then the headliners come on stage and then it's over and you go home.
There was a dj playing when we came in and he also came back between sets (and I think he got more people out of their seats and kept them there than the headliners), and two video screens and lasers and dry ice and dancers on stage and in pod-like metal structures on either side of the crowd-although this may have been an open area taken over by enthusiastic audience members. There was no reserved seating so people moved around at will (all concerts should be that way). It was a little like a cross between the usual concert scene (you stared down at the stage from rigid seats, but there was plenty of room for dancing and a sense of "your space" if you wanted it; but if not you felt free to move around) and having a rave in a small industrial place where you feel contained and powerfully secret and slightly illegal, and the world outside is some place you don't want to return to. And in a large room, where hardly anyone can even see the dj, YOU are the scene-whatever's happening in front of you is the party, and the music is something you can either dance to or walk away from.
The first headliner was a guy called BT-and he was so pumped up (literally-his left arm punched into the air above his head in a constant up-and-down piston-like rhythm from the moment he hit the stage) that his excitement was physically palpable. It was a kick just to see someone having so much fun. By then everyone-performer and audience alike-knew that a strong bass 'n' drums track got the crowd up and dancing, and the minute the music wandered into more experimental, mental, space-type sections, the crowd would drift off into animated, pleasant conversations. But BT was having more fun than anyone, and was so over-excited that he threw his keyboards into the audience at the end of his set (what are they playing, anyway? Samplers? Synths? Switchers? Computers?). I began to feel that the people who'd offered me $60 for my ticket on the way in knew what they were doing (sad faces holding signs looking for tickets lined the road for several miles).
Then the dj again for a much-too-long period of time it seemed to me-an hour-especially since BT only played for 40 minutes, and it's not like they're setting up a drum kit and multiple microphones-but what do I know? Maybe it's tremendously difficult to hook up all that gear-but none of the roadies seemed to be moving with any sense of urgency. All I know is that after about 30 minutes the audience-mentally and physically-wandered away. What was happening in every little enclave was a million times more interesting anyway. This wasn't a show where your neighbors were ignored and tolerated-your neighbors were your neighbors-the heart-to-heart conversation between two high school girls completely loaded on ecstasy who sat beside me and bummed cigarettes, two at a time, was infinitely more moving than anything that was happening half a football field away. The music was coming out of speakers, for God's sake.
When Oakenfold finally came on it was instantly clear that we were in for a completely different experience-gone were the bass 'n' drums and suddenly we were faced with a video-enhanced image of a man who was very, very serious-and who would alternately and inexplicably (to me) thrust BOTH his arms into the air above his head like Rocky or, more commonly, cross his arms and stand back from his bank of keyboards with an extremely self-satisfied glower like Zeus showing the mortals exactly who's boss-which was, I must admit, pretty effective. But neither of the headliners had learned what the dj knew so well; that the most important thing was to have no real breaks in the music-any sudden silence or applause was just plain weird if not something infinitely more disturbing. But Oakenfold persevered through the gradual toning down of the audience and continued to play more cerebral, spacey, non-beat, elaborate "compositions."
The crowd was pretty wasted at this point and I couldn't help but notice that walking was becoming more and more of a problem for a large portion of the audience (myself included). But the lasers and dry ice and projections and flash pots always got a roar from the crowd (and the sudden appearance of the moon was pretty well received too). And the projected films instantly became much more interesting-layering audience shots with solarized, high contrast transparencies of heavily manipulated computer animation, weird vintage documentaries, Brakhage's trick of writing on black leader, and some fifties porno films that were immediately censored by whomever was running the film/live mix-and it was at this point that the too-frequent crowd shots began to resemble those tacky MTV beachparty tapes.
Overall, the scene (and it was a long show, I left well beyond midnight and the show was still going strong) was composed of heavily repetitive, rather dumb music, dancing; videos; lasers; and smokepots-but it was also rather schizophrenic, with props designed to focus attention away from the stage and onto the good humor in your immediate scene, which included open sexuality (one woman was making out with two guys and the only emotion anyone felt toward them was tenderness and protectiveness) and uninhibited drug use (by the way, what is the Deep Dish someone tried to sell me?). I have to admit that I was a little shocked to have someone not old enough to buy cigarettes sit next to me and ask me-quite formally, calling me sir during the entire long and painfully insincere prelude and its brisk and final question, like getting hit on in a highway rest room-if I had any crack.
But, as I said to someone when the thought became conscious to me after about an hour in the crowd, it was clear that Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary had actually won! In the sixties these things were clandestine and socially threatening, much smaller, unchoreographed, and illegal ... and, most importantly, a thing of the past. And I wondered aloud what Allen Ginsberg would have thought of a rave.
But with that "wide acceptance" comes a cost-it reminded me of the jocks in my high school when they started turning on. Getting stoned with them was strange and angular-the intense spirituality I experienced wasn't part of their experience at all-smoking dope was basically a substitute for beer and had the same effect-they got fucked up and stupid. There was no sense in this crowd of being on the verge of really changing the world. But who knows? Maybe they're better off without it. These slightly jocky guys and girls (and there were a LOT of very clean-cut girls) were proud of having a good time-and God bless them-and Monday morning they'd be back in accounting classes. It was like a huge frat party, without the macho drunks and noise. I had more pleasant conversations with complete strangers at this show than I've had at any of the concerts I've ever been to-and, yes, that includes over forty shows by the Grateful Dead since 1972-most of them asking if I had an extra cigarette. People were so polite and well behaved that I found myself commenting on it to several passersby. Even the skinhead with his baseball cap on sideways-his name was Brandon and he works at the Sink in Boulder and they have a new cook who's a real cook who makes a killer Mahi-mahi and the stuff I remember the Sink for, like their hamburgers, well, yeah, they still have bar food but, man, you should really try to the Mahi-mahi, or, do you like Mahi-mahi?-meant it as a compliment when he said before he wandered off that "It's good to see you old folks come out."
8. A Review of Jackie Sheeler's "The Memory Factory"
9. from "Ekphrasis and Cathexis"