"All Along The Watchtower" featuring Warren Haynes - Song Around the World/Playing for Change

 

"I remember having a daydream about the opening acoustic guitar part of 'All Along The Watchtower' ending with a Native American scream and a big native drum on the downbeat. That was the spark to assemble one of our biggest and deepest Songs Around The World. From Beirut to New Orleans to the Lakota Nation, musicians play and sing like a musical army determined to stop suffering and greed all over the world. As a society, we need to get back to our roots and connect deeper with our ancestors and native people in general so we can find the wisdom we need to move forward as a human race. As Jimi Hendrix once said, 'If there is something to be changed in this world, then it can only happen through music.'"

−Mark Johnson, Playing For Change Co-Founder

 

See the previous Song Around the World/Playing for Change videos: The Band's "The Weight" here, Led Zeppelin's "When The Levee Breaks" here, Peter Gabriel's "Biko" here, and U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" here.

Learn more about Song Around the World on the Playing For Change website -- and check out all those other videos!

 

Now Reading: Bob Dylan by Anthony Scaduto

"Highway 61 Revisited was at that time—and may be still today—one of the most brilliant pop albums ever made. As rock, it cut through to the core of the music—a hard, driving beat without frills, without self-consciousness. 'Like A Rolling Stone,' 'Tombstone Blues,' among the finest rock ever recorded. As living poetry the album demonstrated that Dylan's talent had matured to the point that it seemed capable of expressing in word-rhythms the depth of his visions. Despite what the literary keepers of the esoteric flame may say, no matter how much they sneer, Dylan's works are poetry: 'Desolation Row,' for just one example, amply demonstrates that. It is a decent into a modern Inferno, an eleven-minute freak show that portrays a world of alienation ruled by madmen, a world in which humanity has been estranged from its own possibilities, a world in which man's once free mind has been so totally suffocated by the one-dimensional society that it accepts lies as truth and beauty, permits creativity and naturalness and Eros to be perverted by the social 'reality.' Not since Rimbaud has a poet used the language of the streets to expose all the horrors of the streets, to describe a state of the union that is ugly and absurd."

– Anthony Scaduto

Book Received: That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound by Daryl Sanders

So I asked for, and received, a copy of Daryl Sanders's recently published tome, That Thin, Wild Mercury Sound (Chicago Review Press, October 2018), from my daughter and son-in-law for Christmas. (I learned years ago that one needs to provide a Christmas "wish list" to family, otherwise one ends up with questionable -- and often impractical -- tchotchkes as gifts. This way, one always gets what one wants! So, a huge "thank you" to my family!)

The book's subtitle: "Dylan, Nashville, and the Making of Blonde on Blonde" sums up exactly what this book is about. Blonde on Blonde was Bob Dylan's seventh studio album, released on June 20, 1966 -- and holds the distinction as the first rock double-album.

To accompany my reading of this book, I had previously purchased a copy of the limited release of Mobile Fidelity's Original Master Recording of Blonde on Blonde: a stunning three-LP box set mastered at 45 RPM. This LP release is no longer available (except on the secondary market), but the Super Audio CD (SACD) version is still being sold at retail, and that is the link I've provided.

"Detailed and diligent, Daryl Sanders has played local detective, seemingly digging up every Nashville cat who was in Studio A when Dylan did it his way in 1966, changing country and rock for good."
–Clinton Heylin, author of Trouble in Mind: Bob Dylan's Gospel Years and Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades Revisited

"Major victories like Blonde on Blonde often seem inevitable and easy. But Daryl Sanders has interviewed the survivors, noted the casualties, and pondered the battlefield strategies that conquered a country."
–Daniel Wolff, author of Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913

Now Reading: Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards by Al Kooper

This book was originally published in hardcover as just Backstage Passes in 1977, covering the years 1958-1968. You may think, What could Al Kooper have done, between the ages of 14 and 24, that demands an entire book?

Al Kooper scored his first professional gig at the very young age of 14 as a guitarist in the band the Royal Teens. He later joined the avant-garde blues-rock band Blues Project as a keyboardist in 1965; and after leaving that band, he then formed his own band, Blood, Sweat & Tears, in 1967. And let's not forget the Monterey Pop Festival, also in 1967, and something called Woodstock in 1968....

Let's see, what else: Al Kooper co-wrote the #1 pop song "This Diamond Ring," recorded by Gary Lewis and the Playboys when, I believe, he was just 20 years old. When Bob Dylan went electric in 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival, that was Al Kooper on the stage, playing Hammond organ in Bob's backing band. Kooper had just finished working with Dylan on the recording session for his iconic song "Like a Rolling Stone," so Dylan asked Kooper to join his backing band at Newport.

Following the festival, Kooper then went on to play on the sessions for the rest of Dylan's highly successful album Highway 61 Revisited. Al Kooper was 21. (Note: During those recording sessions, Al Kooper met guitarist extraordinaire Michael Bloomfield; the two later recorded together the albums Super Session and The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, both in 1968.)

Speaking of the recording session for "Like a Rolling Stone," Al Kooper actually bluffed his way into that session -- he had never previously played a Hammond organ until then. Here's just a bit of what he writes about that experience:

"Imagine this: There is no music to read. The song is over five minutes long, the band is so loud that I can't even hear the organ, and I'm not familiar with the instrument to begin with. But the tape is rolling, and that is Bob-fucking-Dylan over there singing, so this had better be me sitting here playing something. The best I could manage was to play hesitantly by sight, feeling my way through the changes like a little kid fumbling in the dark for the light switch. After six minutes they'd gotten the first complete take of the day and everyone adjourned to the control room to hear it played back.
...
If you listen to it today, you can hear how I waited until the chord was played by the rest of the band, before committing myself to play in the verses. I'm always an eighth note behind everyone else, making sure of the chord before touching the keys...."

So, what do you think? Is that ten-year span sufficient to fill a book? And though I've mentioned just the cursory points, the author goes into depth on the bands and musicians, the songs, the sessions, the cities and the places, and the events of the day.

Twenty years after this book had been published, and long since out of print, Al Kooper found a new publisher willing to reprint the book as a trade paperback. But, the author chose to revise those first ten years (with more pointed detail) as well as adding his personal experiences over the next thirty years. And with the reprint came a new, more descriptive title: Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards: Memoirs of a Rock 'N' Roll Survivor.

But wait, there's more! The book was reprinted yet again, in 2008, to cover additional years from 1998 through 2007. Al Kooper had to deal with some very serious health issues by this time, which he faced with aplomb.

According to Wikipedia, Al Kooper had a sixty-eighth birthday celebration at the Regatta Bar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on February 4, 2012. And, I assume, Kooper is still performing to this day.

"...The other amazing thing about cutting that album [Bob Dylan's Blonde on Blonde] was the firsthand knowledge that you were making history. After I cut the Highway 61 Revisited album, I heard those songs everywhere. I will probably hear them all my life, anywhere I go. They were instant classics because they were prime Dylan. Imagine how it felt playing on a session where, by virtue of the fact that you had already done it once before, you knew that whatever you played would last forever. That's a heavy responsibility for a punk from Queens. Thank you, Bob, for giving me that opportunity."

–Al Kooper, Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards

Here are a few album recommendations for those who might like to pursue the music of Al Kooper -- most, but not all, should be available on CD (and again, I can't speak to streaming as I prefer the physical media). By the way, this list is excerpted from a full eight pages of Kooper's body of work.

As musician–

• The Best Of The Blues Project (Rhino Records, 1989)
• Blood, Sweat & Tears - Child Is Father To The Man (Columbia, 1968)
• Al Kooper - I Stand Alone (Columbia, 1968)
• Mike Bloomfield / Al Kooper / Stephen Stills - Super Session (Columbia, 1968)
• The Live Adventures Of Mike Bloomfield And Al Kooper (Columbia, 1968)
• Soul Of A Man: Al Kooper Live (MusicMasters, 1995, 2-CD)

As producer/arranger–

• Lynyrd Skynyrd ‎– (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd) (MCA/Sounds of the South, 1973)
• Lynyrd Skynyrd ‎– Second Helping (MCA/Sounds of the South, 1974)
• The Tubes (A&M, 1975)
• Nils Lofgren - Cry Tough (A&M, 1976)

I would have included some of Al's more recent works but, sadly, they saw limited release and are currently out of print. His last (so far) solo album, White Chocolate (A Minor Record Company, 2008), would certainly have been on this list.