Greil Marcus takes a fulsome measure of Bob Dylan through a seven-song “biography”

Book review: Folk Music, A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs, by Greil Marcus, paperback, 2023, $18, hardcover, 2022, $27.50 Yale University Press.

Look ahoy, mariners!
For perhaps 200 years, The Humanities have sailed the crosscurrents to wisdom, enlightenment and progress. I take the oceanic view here on Greil Marcus because he’s long proven himself arguably our best writer when it comes to popular music, partly because of the breadth of this knowledge which expands the impressiveness of his depth of insight and interpretation.
Of course, interpretation is always debatable, yet Marcus invariably gives you plenty to chew on, and an imaginative and transporting voyage in the process. That’s why his recent book Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs is so valuable and not to be missed. It was published recently in paperback, even though the prolific writer just published a short hardcover memoir.

And regarding at least related recent publications, Dylanophiles and pop music lovers should be onto the maestro’s own publishing masterwork to date The Philosophy of Modern Song, still only in hardcover as of this writing. Because that is Dylan writing prose (with admitted brilliance and range) about other people’s music it runs too far afield from this review’s focus, which is Dylan’s own songwriting.
Marcus has long understood that Dylan is our cultural lodestar if you can place that mantle on any given person. The singer-songwriter’s Nobel Peace Prize in Literature is an imprimatur because no other pop music figure, (read: mere songwriter) has ever won that award.

Bob Dylan the songwriter, pausing at the typewriter in the mid-1960s. The Criterion Collection

Yet anyone who has observed Dylan’s career would probably not vociferously dispute such accolades, especially if their own observation has been accompanied by those of Greil Marcus. Not that our man Friday has ever left Bob to his own Robinson Crusoe-like devices.
Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes helped Marcus put his deep stamp on Dylan’s pathfinding,
Since then he’s also given us Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (2005), and the collection Bob Dylan by Greil Marcus: Writings, 1968-2010 (2010).
This all came after his shot across the bow, the rainbow-like Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music in 1975. No less a rock savant than Bruce Springsteen said, “(Mystery Train) gets as close to the heart and soul of America and American music as the best of rock ‘n’ roll.”
In that book, though he didn’t dedicate a chapter to Dylan per se (The Band, “his” band crucially, did receive one), Bob was close to the most-referenced artist in the book’s index.
And to truly understand the range of Marcus’s perceptions, I highly recommend the anthology that he co-edited, the voluminous A New Literary History of America.
His own contributions to that book reach back at least to Moby-Dick, which earns him a lookout spot on the mainmast of my list of American cultural authorities.
By contrast, the comparative conciseness and range of Folk Music (239 pages of text) reveals how he’s understands a pop music readership while still challenging it.

Now, he at first undersells “Blowin’ in the Wind” as “kitsch,” then proceeds to write a long love letter, acknowledging the song’s many suitors.

However: “in Dylan’s performance, a quick measured strumming from his guitar suspends the song in the circle of its own melody in the moment it begins. Across four minutes the feeling is unearthly, a hum seems to have been in the air of history: the sound of bodies going back to dust, the hum of thousands of insects bringing people who once lived into the earth, a humming snatched out of that air and forced to hold still.”

A bit grand perhaps, but Marcus’s own poetry strives to capture the song’s, with space and specificity. And notice how he acknowledges Dylan’s instrumental prowess, which is rarely done.
He goes on: “It is one of the most powerful, early manifestations of the quality that the defines Dylan’s music in its most uncanny moments throughout his life’s work, the quality of empathy. ‘I can see myself and others’: Here he sees himself in others and more than that disappears into them…
The fictional character he has created in the performance is still living the story out. History exists only in the future, when the story can be told out loud.”

The poet Joshua Clover summed up: “a figure on the order of Picasso or Stein – sui generis, seeming to lift the entire field onto his shoulders with heroic insouciance.”
“Heroic insouciance” sounds like Dylan through and through.

How many roads must a man walk down/

before he is called a man?

…And how many times must the cannonballs fly/

before they are forever banned?

The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind…”

The line “before he is called a man” is taken to heart by many African-Americans, as Mavis Staples claims, she who young Bob Dylan had once fallen in love with.
In this fulsome chapter, as in others, Marcus characteristically sees the song pointing to a pathway only he perhaps can see to other songs, but he lets us see it too. In certain instances even Dylan himself might be astonished by the ideas, but without necessarily discounting them.
Indeed, in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” Dylan effortlessly raises a long forgotten Black hotel worker to mythic status.
A man named William Zantzinger murders her in cold blood for no apparent reason. A clear hate crime as he brands her a n—–. “Having reduced the charge to manslaughter, the judge remanded Zantzinger, an aristocratic tobacco farmer, just to the county date jail, delaying this time until after the fall, so that he can oversee the harvest of his crop.”

“I wrote “Hattie Carroll in a small notebook, in a restaurant on seventh Avenue,” Dylan said in 1985. “I felt I had a lot in common with the situation and was able to manifest my feelings.”

And you who philosophize disgrace/ and criticize all fears/

take the rag away from your face/now ain’t the time for your tears”

“We listened in complete silence, as if we were holding our breath, as if we didn’t know how the tragedy would conclude –
in the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
to show that all is equal and the courts are on the level…
and he spoke through his cloak, was deep and distinguished
and he handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance,
William Zantzinger with a six-month sentence –
“When you listen, it’s as if the singer can barely expel the last word. It breaks and stumbles in his mouth, as if he will never not be shocked”

Bury the rag deep in your face/ Now’s the time for your tears.” The song’s last chorus ended, but for power and dominion as those qualities gathered in the music, in the air, and public square they didn’t touch the tone of voice on the last four words of the last verse.”

Perhaps debatable, but here Marcus acknowledges another underappreciated quality: Dylan’s typically roughhewn singing, almost always a marriage of voice and song.
These two chapters — on ”Blowin’” and “Hattie” — are marvels of extended interpretation, almost worth the price of the book.
He his far more concise in his discussion of “The Times They are a Changin’ ” Such a fearless interpreter may have felt that all the 1964 song’s history had said its peace as much as he could, even if that would fully stop him, though he says “The Times they are Changin’” felt obvious, in the 1960s. Fair enough.
But now he takes the “Changin”” story to where one might hope he would: to January 6 2021.

Trump supporters swarm police in the infamous January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol. Roberto Schmidt/Getty Images

 
“By then ‘The Times’ didn’t seem obvious, and history exposed how vulnerable it really was. The people flooding to the Capital, smearing feces on the marble, hoisting Confederate flags as John Calhoun and Charles Sumner looked down from the walls, smashing into the Senate chamber, beating police to the ground and kicking them where they lay, weren’t chanting ‘Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call…’
“But they could have been. Instead they sang ‘Old Dan Tucker’ shouting get out of the way you fucking n—– at Black capital policemen – They’re saying: Trump is our rightful president. Nobody voted for Biden,’ ”

***

The placing of the author’s own name in the 2010 collection astride Dylan himself, suggests Marcus’s ego billowing in the wind.
So, not every word or thought here is golden. Full disclosure: At times I resorted to a bit of skimming, especially in his elaborations on “Ain’t Talkin,” a relatively obscure song from Modern Times, one of the longest chapters. What’s worthwhile buried within the essay is Marcus’ oddly-placed discussion of “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” — an  astonishing masterpiece from 1962 — a litany of surreal poetic imagery. The singer is a cold-eyed witness: “I saw a black branch with blood that kept drippin’/ I saw a roomful of men with their hammers a bleedin’. The song foreshadows the Cuban Missle Crisis —  when the world almost errrupted into it’s first nuclear world war — and seemed an inside-out view of the zeitgeist, “my first three-dimensional song” as Dylan told Studs Terkel. But this author, for all his cultural erudition, never comes close to persuading that “Ain’t Takin'” is comparable in any way. He even meanders through comments on the old Black folksong “Old Dan Tucker,” which perhaps he now regrets, given its bastardized appropriation at the January 6 riot.

Consider the book’s frontispiece, the photo below of Dylan and James Baldwin, which helps to underscore Dylan’s prominence as a comparable spokesperson for Civil Rights in the era, as much as Dylan disliked the role, per se.

Bob Dylan and writer James Baldwin on the occasion of Dylan receiving the Thomas Paine Award at the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee dinner celebrating the 172nd annivesary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights, Dec. 12, 1963. Photo by Ted Russell/Polaris

And Marcus devotes only ten pages to “The Times They Are a Changin’” and ten more to 1965’s “Desolation Row,” Dylan’s cinematically vivid yet metaphorical tracking through the lowliest sufferers, with its lacerating opening line: “They’re selling postcards of the hanging.”

Marcus does get into the meat of that line’s historic legacy. Dylan was alluding to a lynching of three Black circus workers in Duluth, Minn. in 1920, accused of raping a white woman, without evidence (she passed out during the alleged attack). A fourth “rapist,”  Max Mason, was imprisoned until he died in 1942. Gov. Tim Walz granted Mason the state’s first posthumous pardon in 2020, on the grounds that no rape took place.

Marcus also quotes Joshua Clover, who wrote in 2021, “Even if ‘Desolation Row’ is not his greatest song (I might make the case for 4-5 others, depending on the year) it’s where the bodies are buried.” This is great reporting but followed by some provocative speculative comment about Dylan’s grandfather, and father. Did they attend the hanging?

Ah, but perhaps Marcus wanted to devote more attention to more recent Dylan, and threw a curveball in the process, and Bob “ain’t talkin'” as has often been the case. After all, how many readers under the age of 35 think all this ancient stuff is just blowin’ in the wind?

And yet, lookout for another curveball, slow and junk-filled! We also get 46 pages on “Jim Jones.” Instead of a song about the notorious cult suicide murderer, this “Jim Jones” is about a musty old folk hero/mariner from days of yore, for what reasons as a choice I know not.

I think “Shelter from the Storm” or “Lily, Rosemary & The Jack Of Hearts” or “Tangled Up in Blue,” from the mid-career summit Blood on the Tracks might’ve been better choices than “Jim Jones” or “Ain’t Talkin’.”

“Blood on the Tracks” album cover

I hope Marcus would welcome suggestions like mine, to temper his drama-queen impulses and idiosyncracies, although he could easily claim Dylan his “co-conspirator.” With a writer this good (think of both writers), you can live with some of that.

He finally leaves us swimming in 12 pages of iconic presidential blood in “Murder Most Foul” from 2020, In that final chapter, Marcus takes extended measure of the recent Dylan song that meditates on John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Again, the event may be mere historical rhetoric to some, especially those many born long after it transpired. But Marcus helps us see how Dylan escorts its resonances down through history, even as its subject remains crucified on the grassy knoll in Dallas in 1963.

History is the most elusive of mistresses and yet we continue to pursue her siren song or just turn away and misunderstand it, often to our downfall, for her ghost fingers so often point to illumination.

And truth told, at first reading of the chapter, I felt Marcus was overcome or daunted by the historical moment. In a second reading I finally realized he had, in quotation, aligned with an eloquent review of the pioneering bluegrass group The Carter Family’s ‘Mid the Green Fields of Virginia collection — as an oblique yet apt summation of “Murder.”
It was written by John Pankake and Paul Nelson, coeditors of the 1960s folk music publication Little Sandy Review.

The editors wrote: “Certainly the Carter family intuitively understood and magnificently expressed in their songs and messages what has taken the sociologists and historians decades of thoughts to discover: that we are a nation of outcasts from Western civilization, doomed to forever devour then plunder the land we cannot cherish, to dream of fathers and kings and to love guiltily in the night. The hopeful falsehoods of our ’official’ art pale before the nightmare of our folk art, and though it speaks its truths in absurd sentimentality to balm with self-pitying tears the pain of a direct confrontation.

“Like the Carter family longing for the green fields of home, we may share these songs of lost innocence, but neither the sharing nor the innocence is the essential experience we see. It is, rather, the longing itself.”
Pankake further reflects “the more sentimental of us have difficulty facing the knowledge that when these singers are gone, they shall have taken a part of America with them, and their kind will never be seen on the face the earth again.”

It seems that sentiment of finality still abides John F. Kennedy’s martyr-like demise. May we live to honor another morning soon, of one brief, shining moment, that burns beyond the last blowin’ wind.

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Peter Mulvey and SistaStrings imagine a promised land right on our own soil

 

Singer-songwriter Peter Mulvey (center) is touring with SistaStrings (Monique Ross, cello, and Chauntee Ross, violin) and drummer Nathan Kilen. Courtesy The Bluegrass Situation

Peter Mulvey & SistaStrings will present album release performances at 7 p.m. Saturday, October 8 at The Bur Oak in Madison, and at 8 p.m. Sunday, October 9 at Colectivo Coffee Backroom, 2211 N. Prospect Avenue in Milwaukee. 

For tickets and the full tour schedule, visit: https://www.petermulvey.com/

ALBUM REVIEW: Peter Mulvey & SistaStrings Love is the Only Thing (Righteous Babe Records)

If only we had more people of power and influence with the spiritual wiles and wisdom of singer-songwriter Peter Mulvey. We’d be doing much better than barely muddling through as a society, even risking our democracy. Mulvey’s new album, with the marvelous Milwaukee string-playing duo SistaStrings, delivers a variety of truths and revelations and invokes extraordinarily capacious compassion.

Album cover courtesy americanahighway.com

First comes exquisite overtones on his acoustic guitar, introducing the traditional “Shenandoah,” yearningly lovely, feeling like a ritual blessing.  “Soft Animal” ensues, with an idea from poet Mary Oliver, which evokes the “soft animal” within each of us, slightly Emersonian in its sense of inner sacredness, even as a breathing creature. Mulvey brings that animal vividly to life, with the Ross sisters’ violin and cello boosting it with warmly vibrant utterances, here and consistently throughout.

“Oh My Dear (The Demagogue)” pulls back the curtain of illusion but doesn’t simply point fingers: “What kind of storm blew through?/ The demagogue, the general, the priest/ who needed you most but loved you the least.” Then it shifts from rhetorical second to first person: “I couldn’t hear you while I was out in the wind/ I traded your life for my original sin.”

“Old Men Drinking Seagram’s” candidly scrutinizes the facile discriminations, bred of cultural isolation (or misinformation?), of the haves towards the have-nots. Why is it, the more people have, the more they resist, with a hollow righteousness, sharing it?

Then, funky and caffeinated, “You and (Everybody Else)” eloquently bemoans another current reality, people addicted to “staring at a screen”: “They gave you everything that you could want/ now you’re sitting there hungry like a ghost…full of nothing that you want/ you and everybody else.”

“Pray for Rain,” epigraphed with a James Baldwin quote, is the most pointedly political song: “Now the better angels have fled this field/ and the people sway to a devil’s song/ every bittersweet seed has come to fruit/ common mercy deserts the throng…” But notice how often Mulvey traffics in mythically terms rather than gratuitously naming names. This allows us to consider the historical roles of all humanity in our great failings.

Mulvey switches gears to the profoundly personal on “See You on the Other Side,” which grapples, finally affirmatively, with the murky metaphysics of death. Yet that ties in with poignant power to the album’s most moving piece, “Song for Michael Brown,” the young black man infamously shot and left dead in a trail of blood on a Missouri street, which inspired the Black Lives Matter movement. Here, Mulvey and his extraordinarily simpatico accompanists plea for compassion for everyone involved, of all colors and persuasions, “and most especially for the next child we know will fall.” And then, as if imploring a wailing wall: “I know God loves us. I know God loves us. I know God loves us. I don’t know how,” sung with raw passion.

Its gravitas buoyed by hope, this amounts to one of the most humanely open-hearted songs I’ve heard in recent years. As elsewhere, the song conveys the intimacy of deep feeling in its textures of fine engineering, recorded live at Cafe Carpe, the almost-famous little Midwestern engine of singer-songwriting that always could.

Peter Mulvey. Courtesy The Bur Oak

The album ends with the title song (written by Chuck Prophet) with the refrain, “Love is a hurting thing. Ah, but love is the only thing!” Throughout the album’s fetchingly hilly melodies, the tender textures of Mulvey’s scarred soul seem palpable in his voice. Sage-like, he poetically renders ideas revealing that compassion has many colors and many coats, and surely there’s at least one to fit any listener, to make their heart grow stronger, and warmer. Mulvey, long an iconoclastic activist, embodies such broad possibilities.

Canny and knowing of darkness and hatred, he remains persuasive, with extraordinary grace and street-smart artistry, which leaves no one left behind because, in the world he still envisions, love has long coattails. This is song-making of a high, healing order, just for these times.

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Tedeschi Trucks articulates their full voice and vision on “Let Me Get By”

Susan Tedeschi’s soul-stirring voice soars and dips more majestically than ever, on an eagle’s wing. Listen to “Anyhow.” It’s a broken heart with tenacious muscles. Time after time, Derek Trucks’ slide guitar solos, searing and catchy, nail a song’s heart. Kofi Burbridge’s sinuously gleaming flute emerges periodically like a spectral angel. The band’s a glorious monster, like we’ve never quite experienced before. Yet there’s more, much more.

We’ve watched The Tedeschi Trucks Band grow before our eyes into the 12-musician offspring of the most blessed musical couple in American music. I’m hardly alone in thinking they’re the best performing band we have today. It’s also amazing how they become so great so fast, even while still coalescing. Their collective and individual talents have slashed through and absorbed thickets of influences, up the mountain to the roots-rock summit. Then, they reach out to pull you up with them. Their path betrays the sheer toil of inspired dedication, performing on the road for more than 200 days for the fifth straight year in 2015 — and they’re currently on another summer-long tour.

On Let Me Get By, their third studio recording,  they articulate overarching purpose and meaning more clearly than ever. That statement is quite evident on the basic album, as it should be. But it becomes more fully realized in the album’s two-disc deluxe edition, which includes eight bonus tracks, three of them live concert performances, and a David Bowie cover. I’ll address the bonus material in a second post, to try getting a handle on a great collective group finding its fullest self. Remember, TTB’s reputation remains foremost as a live band, despite their Grammy for their 2011 debut studio album Revelator.

Cover of the two CD deluxe box of “Let Me Get By.” amazon.com

The new album title and cover say something like “unchain your heart!” A Mongolian golden eagle has broken free from its master’s glove, and seems bound for new heights — bound for glory, as the band put it, on a great song from Revelator.

“’Let Me Get By’ actually refers to a lot of things,” says Trucks in their website profile, “like the band becoming more self-reliant than ever before—writing our own songs and producing our own music in our own studio. It’s about moving on to a new recording label (Fantasy/Concord) with a deal that gives us more freedom.

“It definitely took time for us to get here. I think the connections we have in this band and among the crew and extended family are the real reason why.”

His spouse and band co-leader, singer/guitarist Susan Tedeschi comments, “Derek hears everything from a big picture stance. Not just track-by-track but the album as a whole.”

Adds Trucks: It’s a bunch of different true stories meshed into one.”

So much feel-good P.R. talk? Listen closely, after you’ve felt the music, and judge for yourself. The road-tested communal feeling Trucks speaks of feeds into the band’s ethical worldview, which seems more clearly crystallized on Let Me Get By. Lyricist and background singer Mike Mattison’s emergence speaks plenty about the band’s step forward. He gets his first two lead-vocal spotlights on a TTB album (on “Crying Over You” and “Right On Time”), and his increasing mastery as a lyricist and songwriter is more central than ever to the band’s vision. Despite their prodigious musicianship and Trucks “guitar hero” status, they funnel those powers into the songs, and a sense that the collective sound fuels human aspirations.

Even vocalist Tedeschi, like her spouse, seems lacking in typical leader ego. She started a kind of joke about her joy and gratitude, Trucks says. “After shows, she started to say to everyone, ‘Thanks for letting me be in your band’ and we’d all laugh. Now we all say it.”

Joy and gratitude ooze from Let Me Get By, amid more complex emotions, and as qualities that might help heal and make a difference in a deeply injured earth and troubled society.

Derek Trucks and Susan Tedeschi at Red Rocks Amphitheater in 2015. Courtesy iwebradio.fm/Kell Yeah Photography

Hear the clarion call of Tedeschi bracing opening note of “Anyhow” signaling the “wreckage in my soul”: Running from a bitter taste/took a rest from all the chase/feeling something anchored in my soul./ played the game by all the/learning lessons no one gets to choose. The song continues about a personal relationship, but that first verse can speak to anyone in the economic 99% feeling betrayed by the game and its rules — the rigged system — whether you lean left or right. The song goes on to speak of cold-hearted desperation among the unemployed and even working poor, and invokes Biblical myth: “Cain and Abel lit the flame/we can never go that way again.” This clearly references brother-on-brother crime, whether it is inner-city shootings, police brutality/homicide, or white-collar financial betrayal.

Yet “Anyhow” is an absolute soul-stirrer — not a downer. And TTB doesn’t preach, they understand the philosophic pause and the medicine of laughter, in the ensuing “Laugh About It.” This band’s ethically-driven sort of communal political synergy resonates from the rapturous gospel choruses right into the groundswell roar of the Bernie Sanders political movement, a sense of empowerment and transformation.

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Here is The Tedeschi Trucks Band in a NPR Tiny Desk Concert, performing “Just as Strange,” “Don’t Know What it Means,” and “Anyhow” from the album “Let Me Get By”:

http://www.npr.org/2016/03/24/471725403/tedeschi-trucks-band-tiny-desk-concert

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The instrumental break in “Laugh About It” shows how tight and rich their grooves and arrangements have become, with Truck’s guitar quick-stepping through horn and rhythm counter-punches. You can dance along to it or your music head can marvel. And Susan does laugh about it at the end.

“Don’t Know What It Means” shows this band reaching new heights in its pop appeal, in the power of call-and-response. The refrain glows with as much warm infectiousness as a vintage Sly and the Family Stone song, another collective-oriented stylistic precursor. That refrain melody descends like the slowing last yards of an exhilarating roller coaster ride, and the rhythmic hand-clapping helps turn that dynamic into a Juneteenth Day gospel-infused parade.

The lyric continues the previous song’s laugh-it-off wound-licking: If the story feels exactly like a dream/ don’t know what it means… And you can’t just turn the page and let it go/ things that you’ve been told/ deep down in your soul.”

Rather, it’s time to strategize: “Don’t make your move too early” or you may “surely lose your way.” And the shyster or con man may be poised to snooker the unwittingly earnest. Yet TTB believes self-empowerment perseveres: Now don’t look down in the dirt/ just to find out what you’re worth… To work hard and do it right/ learn to speak up and fight/ the truth is gonna beat them down the line.”

If that sounds preachy to some, it’s hardly fire-and-brimstone browbeating. Rather, it the sort of uplift that even the ostensibly angry American black writer James Baldwin articulated in the voice of his preacher father-figure in his transformative 1962 novel Another Country. The black minister’s own son had committed suicide, yet the father counselled his congregation, all grieving his own son’s death: “Don’t lose heart, dear ones, don’t let it make you bitter, try to understand. The world’s already bitter enough. We got to try to be better than the world ‘…Except for someone — a man weeping in the front row — there was silence all over the chapel…” 1

You find no comparable moments of low-key compassion on this recording, as this band has achieved on their brilliant story-song “Midnight in Harlem.” But the new “bunch of different true stories” now mesh into a bramble-strewn path rising toward sunlight.

“Learn to speak up and fight” can mean collective song as much as righteous chants. A group of remarkably persevering protest singers in Madison, WI have assembled every noon each weekday at The Capitol building for five years — over 1,300 consecutive weekdays — to sing. The Solidarity Sing Along sustains the spirit of the original massive protests of Gov. Scott Walker’s collective bargaining-busting, anti-education Act 10 “repair bill” — which has helped decimate and polarize my home state. The Sing Along’s 60-plus song repertoire ranges from Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” to adapted country blues classics and a Ramones song, to originals by participants. The Act 10 bill and its 100,000 protesters helped inspire Occupy Wall Street and now the Bernie Sanders “revolution.” 2

TTB’s solidarity stresses human commonality, via a collective gathering of cultural tribes, from Tedeschi’s ex-gospel choir singer-cum-blues mama roots to Trucks’ voraciously wide-ranging “big picture stance.” Trucks rose from country-blues bottleneck guitar to Allman Brothers’ band trademarks – gutsy singing, swampy blues, pealing guitar riffs for modal flights. And his Coltrane/Shankar micro-tonalities help summon this band’s patented “swamp ragas.” That simmering instrumental vocabulary facilitates exquisitely meditative introductions or segues, which help embrace a more worldly cultural vision.

Flutist-keyboardist Kofi Burbridge highlights “Swamp Raga for Holzapfel, Flute and Harmonium” on “Let Me Get By.” Courtesy Wikipedia.com

And all the band members seem attuned to the wellsprings of the blues, ‘60s-‘70s gospel and R& B, free and funk-jazz, and modern pop-rock, epitomized, of course, by the Beatles.

Which leads me to album’s next song, the slightly tipsy rollick of “Right on Time,” Mattison’s vocal seems to channel John Lennon’s gentle side, “What is it that you lack? What is it that you seek?” Then, the gently bouncing harmonized refrain: “Does a smile come alive when you share the wine..?” and a “Hey!” refrain, with woozy dance-hall horns. The whole effect, the George Martin-esque arrangement, could’ve fit right into Magical Mystery Tour or even The White Album. Heresy? So sue me.

Lyricist and backup singer Mike Mattison of Tedeschi Trucks Band gets two lead vocal spotlights on “Let Me Get By.” Courtesy pghintune.wordpress.com 

For blues-rock buffs who fear they’re getting too cute, the title song is another full-throated empowerment barn burner. “Let me get by/cuz time won’t wait!” And then, they pause again, for a reality check. “Just as Strange,” co-written by Doyle Bramhall II, is a stripped-down Robert Johnson-like wail about abject craving for sex or drugs, as pure  bedevilment.

Mattison’s fervent lead vocal on “Crying Over You” with the deliciously cheesy line “I caught you snooping ‘round swimming pool” segues to a lovely, haunting swamp-raga. The album’s last few songs tread in lost-romance/relationship territory, but very convincingly.

However, the final song (of the non-deluxe album), “In Every Heart,” resounds like a thematic recapitulation, blending reality and inspiration. Mellifluous horn harmonies, the ever-ready background singers, and an easy, reflective groove cue Tedeschi’s voice, honoring a warm primary influence, Bonnie Raitt. Yet “Heart” is TTB’s own statement: “In every heart there’s a name/under the perfume and the blame.” It’s about coming to terms with your true identity and your “story,” admittedly no easy task. “In every heart, there’s a song/ turning the pages… In every song, there’s a psalm/ coming to find you to sing along.”

With a surrogate family like the Tedeschi Trucks gang, one need not be alone. They deliver the power of the song. Perhaps some existentialists will call that mere sop. Me, I’d rather not stand in the rain of my spiritual solitude.

PART 2. I’ll consider the deluxe bonus disc of Let Me Get By and that 2-disc total package in another post, coming shortly.

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  1. James Baldwin, Another Country, Vintage International, 1993, 121

2. Scott Walker, who survived a re-call election driven by the Act 10 protests, later declared, “If I can take on 100,000 protesters, I can do the same across the world,” in reference to defeating the terrorist group ISIS. The spurious analogy may have marked the beginning of the end of Walker’s short-lived presidential nomination bid. Meanwhile, he’s back in Wisconsin working his same far-right agenda and the singers continue, as they say, “until Wisconsin gets better,” as one of their mottos declares.The Solidarity Sing Along is open to anyone each weekday starting at noon at the Capitol. Their Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SolidaritySingAlong. At times, noted musicians have joined the participants, including Woody Guthrie’s famous son Arlo and Billy Bragg, who wrote music for and recorded unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics in his Mermaid Avenue project with Wilco.

For the full story on the Wisconsin protests, see John Nichols’ book Uprising: How Wisconsin Renewed the Politics of Protest, from Madison to Wall Street.

“Let Me Get By” album cover at top, courtesy zumic.com