{"id":8961,"date":"2017-07-21T18:49:04","date_gmt":"2017-07-21T18:49:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=8961"},"modified":"2017-07-21T18:50:35","modified_gmt":"2017-07-21T18:50:35","slug":"old-crow-medicine-show-proves-the-blonde-tonic-still-zings-after-50-years","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/?p=8961","title":{"rendered":"Old Crow Medicine Show proves the “Blonde” tonic still zings after 50 years"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Blonde<\/p>\n

50 Years of Blonde on Blonde<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 Old Crow Medicine Show \u00a0(Columbia Nashville)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Like snake oil healers, Old Crow Medicine Show lays hands on Dylan\u2019s myriad symptoms of unrequited or forsaken love, as detailed in his classic 1966 double album. Their zealously empathetic remake of Blonde<\/em>\u00a0on Blonde<\/em> follows Dylan\u2019s odyssey through the heart\u2019s impossibly verdant wilds.<\/p>\n

Since the late 1990s, Old Crow Medicine Show has helped forge the neo-bluegrass, old-timey band style since aped by the Avett Brothers, Mumford & Sons, and many more. None possess more\u00a0joi de vivre<\/em>\u00a0or instrumental flair. So perhaps this historical convergence was as inevitable as a rush-hour car crash between a new songwriter in town aiming at outshooting the Music Row scribes, and a car full of Nashville session virtuosos drunk on the real thing.<\/p>\n

\"old-crow-medicine-show-2017\"Old Crow Medicine Show thrives on a lively, bounding dynamic of soulful ensemble, interplay and solos. Douglas Mason\/Getty Images. Billboard.com<\/em><\/p>\n

That\u2019s sort of what happened in 1966 when Charlie McCoy, Wayne Moss, Kenny Buttrey and other pickers \u2018n\u2019 kickers, including blind pianist Hargus “Pig” Robbins, \u00a0tackled Dylan\u2019s new songs. They ranged from the woozy opener \u201cRainy Day Women #12 & 35″ where Dylan’s lyric initiated a circular pot party (which the pickers may or may not have realized), to the long, closing meditation-in-your-beer \u201cSad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to\u00a0Rolling Stone<\/em>\u00a0reporter Daryl Sanders, the recording session began by Dylan setting the bar at an almost vertiginous height of poetic intoxication.<\/p>\n

“This wouldn’t be another business-as-usual engagement. It was ‘Visions of Johanna’ \u2014 seven minutes and 33 seconds of Dylan’s muse at its most unfettered, full of dazzling phrase-making (Jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule) and profoundly suggestive pronouncements (‘Inside the museums, infinity goes up on trial’). For his part, keyboardist Bill Aikins recalls trying to understand what Dylan was saying in the song. It wasn’t like Nashville session cats \u2014 or those in any other city \u2014 typically found themselves contemplating lines such as, ‘See the primitive wallflower freeze \/ When the jelly-faced women all sneeze.’<\/p>\n

“I thought it was really …\u00a0far out<\/i>\u00a0would be the term I would have used at the time,” Aikins recalls, “and still today, it was a very\u00a0out-there<\/i>\u00a0song.” 1<\/p>\n

Anything but politically correct throughout, the set included the ultimate female stereotyping love song that remains hard to resist, \u201cJust Like a Woman.\u201d Dylan makes us think there\u2019s a grain of truth in there, for the \u201cshe breaks just like a little girl\u201d kicker line seems, to this day, an expression of irresistible empathy, love and respect for the woman he\u2019s portraying so incisively, as I hear it.<\/p>\n

A few songs earlier the songwriter laid his abject heart on the line, of course, with the stirring \u201cI Want You.\u201d<\/p>\n

And \u201cStuck Inside of Mobile (with the Memphis Blues Again)\u201d \u2013 with its insouciant, rattletrap groove and hit-the-rickety-breaks release to each new verse, resounds in many geographic and spiritual directions \u2013 a private, noirish hell riddled with nightmare details. \u00a0“An, he just smoked my eyelids an\u2019 punched my cigarette,\u201d is a surreal yet comically-pointed image worthy of a slightly outre Woody Allen gag. (These two contemporaries remain among our greatest tough-but-milquetoast-statured culture geniuses.)<\/p>\n

Or more pertinently to today\u2019s headlines, the \u201cMobile\u201d narrator reveals one brilliant way to do gun-rage catharsis that\u00a0all too few<\/em>\u00a0have learned from: \u201cHe built a fire on Main Street and shot it full of holes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ah, but the musicians on that song may have churned it so well by digging the feeling of cutting \u2013 musically and thematically \u2013 their peers in a competing Tennessee music city (Memphis, not Mobile).<\/p>\n

Let’s down-shift a bit to the present recording. On \u201cObviously True Believers,\u201d the Medicine Show pickers and fiddlers make us believe the power of their bluegrass\/newgrass to hold its own energy in a reflective chrysalis, embracing those original sessions, even to release the music like a new sort of winged beauty.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re facing a high bar, here, too. Like The Band (then known as The Hawks), Dylan’s chosen collaborators back North, OCMS is three-lead-singers strong. Nobody today can match The Band\u2019s craggy-hillside three-part vocal harmony, notably when covering a Dylan song or backing him. And no single band matches Rick Danko, Levon Helm, or especially Richard Manuel, as lead singers. Is that unfair to note? The younger band surely and humbly understands how The Band influenced them.<\/p>\n

But the remade Blonde<\/em> is more about solo vocal takes and, in lead turns, these singers (Ketch Secor, Critter Fuqua and Kevin Hayes) vocalize with at least as much passion as Dylan did, but without his accompanying layers of nuanced and biting tonal irony.<\/p>\n

I love their ardor and fire, and how they up the ante with energy. Yet, it\u2019s like they\u2019re in love with these\u00a0songs<\/em>\u00a0like would-be or lost lovers. So it\u2019s cool to be aurally reminded of Dylan’s genius and how superbly his songwriting fit the Nashville players\u2019 ratty-holed couching of it. As with any good tribute remake, the new album should send you back to the original, not just to accept this as a substitute.<\/p>\n

Dylan let\u00a0Blonde on Blonde<\/em>\u00a0grow across the Tennessee hills and worm itself into the collective consciousness, with roots as abiding as the tides of time. So it was that this project arose, half a century down Highway 61\u2019s ever-worn path, from his native Minnesota to the deepest South where most of his favorite musical vernaculars came from. But he\u2019s too great of an American poet and visionary to leave his roots at that.<\/p>\n

Not coincidentally, another American road introduced this great band for me when Ariana Karp, the daughter of my photographic collaborator Katrin Talbot, popped Old Crow\u2019s first CD into the car player some years ago. We were headed East in research quest of Herman Melville, for my book about the great American novelist-poet-visionary never quite recognized as such in his time. Melville is also deeply ingrained in Dylan\u2019s experience, from his evocations of Ahab on\u00a0Bringing It All Back Home\u00a0<\/em>to his description of\u00a0Moby-Dick<\/em>\u00a0in his recent Nobel Prize-winning speech:<\/p>\n

\u201cHe pursues the whale around both sides of the earth; it\u2019s an abstract goal, nothing concrete or definite. Calls Moby the Emperor, sees him as the embodiment of evil. Ahab\u2019s got a wife and child back in Nantucket that he reminisces about now again. You can anticipate what will happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

You sense the affinity of Dylan\u2019s own restless search, to grapple with his own demons just ahead of him, and his better angels following warily behind, a search which has proven amazingly fecund over these years, for avoiding self-destruction. And Ahab\u2019s wife is his own \u201cgirl from the north country,\u201d and Dylan\u2019s own is Sara Lownds, whom he had only wed shortly before he took off for Nashville to tip the world\u2019s balance in his sprawling musical adventure.<\/p>\n

He\u2019d revisit his exquisitely-doomed Nashville romanticism after recovering from his real-life, near-fatal motorcycle nightmare, to finally record the kinder, gentler\u00a0Nashville Skyline,<\/em>\u00a0which sits in history right behind Dylan\u2019s healed motorcycle ass, even as the mythical\u00a0John Wesley Harding<\/em>\u00a0remains his \u201chealing up\u201d transition album.\u00a0 What heady times these were for the forming American \u201croots music\u201d genres (along with The Band\u2019s efforts, among other things) and they were not lost on the members of Old Crow Medicine Show.<\/p>\n

You can\u2019t help feeling that way, after hearing this, or perhaps seeing them live (they just performed the album in Milwaukee on June 9) as this is a triumphant live recording at the Country Music Association Theater Fame in downtown Nashville. Nearby stands The Johnny Cash Museum dedicated to the only actual country music contemporary of Dylan\u2019s who could go toe-to-toe with him in Cash’s lifetime, and on\u00a0Nashville Skyline<\/em>. OCMS band member and album annotator Ketch Secor conveys how the band grappled with time’s motion captured in amber, which itself bounces and tumbles down the river. Secor writes: \u201c50 years is a long time for a place like Nashville, Tennessee. Time rolls on slowly around here like the muddy Cumberland River. But certain things have accelerated the pace of our city. And certain people have sent the hands of the clock spinning. Bob Dylan is the greatest of these time-bending, paradigm-shifting Nashville cats.\u201d<\/p>\n

So a paradigm shifted in the slightly askew but inevitable collision that produced a strangely beautiful music that few ever anticipated, maybe not even Dylan himself, then a 25-year-old explorer of American vernaculars and poetics. The shift seems signified in the slightly out-of-focus photo of Dylan on the album cover.<\/p>\n

\"rs-240573-Blonde-On-Blonde\"The original cover photograph of Dylan’s epic “Blonde on Blonde” double album. courtesy amazon.com<\/em><\/p>\n

And Secor writes outright he \u201cloves\u201d Dylan twice, and the artistic bromance probably septuples among OCMS members. So we\u2019re talking \u201cdoomed,\u201d improbable and inevitable romance, once again, of a different stripe. \u201cThe greatest spinner of rhyme and couplet since Shakespeare,\u201d Secor rhapsodizes, and that remains debatable, but also now as inevitable a discussion as the Nobel Prize for Literature for the first pop songwriter. That raised some already high literary brows but solidified the assertion on an international Rock of Ages. So these guys clearly love the songs and cranky old Bobby Dylan, if not various real or mythologized women.<\/p>\n

The result is this exuberantly loving re-imagining of the time a pop music artist knew he had two albums worth of strong stuff, especially when he found his Nashville cats. Amid long, arduous sessions often going deep into wee hours, the original studio players had their limits, being accustomed to three-or-four minute recordings. They admittedly seemed to run out of gas in the closing verses of the original 11-minute-plus “Lady.” 2<\/p>\n

But Dylan clearly was setting new boundaries for a recorded rock music statement. So, with a gulp of extra literary oxygen at that point,\u00a0we can see that \u201cSad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands\u201d counterintuitively stands tallest of the songs. The lady-on-a-pedestal looms like a mythic goddess of shadowy ardor engulfing the countryside. 3 This time, the younger band that began by busking on New York city streets in 1998, have plenty of wind to the end.<\/p>\n

Dylan asked repeatedly of his lady, \u201cShould I wait?\u201d Through yawning glens the \u201cmedicine show\u201d echoes \u2013 singing, sighing, crying. Time waits and heals wounds and cultural schisms, over 50 years and beyond.<\/p>\n

Today, when the rural South and much of the urban seem worlds apart from Dylan’s hip New York street corners \u2013 much less the hallowed judgements of the Nobel Prize \u2013 Blonde on Blonde<\/em> retains a lasting, redemptive power. The twains did meet in 1966, and the times changed forever.<\/p>\n

__________<\/p>\n

1http:\/\/www.nashvillescene.com\/news\/article\/13038289\/looking-back-on-bob-dylans-blonde-on-blonde-the-record-that-changed-nashville<\/a><\/p>\n

2. How hard did these musicians work to realize the simmering creativity of Dylan, who reportedly worked on little more than Cokes and chocolate bars during the long sessions? They went along with his idea to get a more “ramshackle sound” for “Rainy Day Women,” first by bringing in a trombonist for the song’s “wha-wha” effect, reports Andy Gill in Dylan: Visions, Portraits and Back Pages<\/em> (Dorling Kindersley, 2005). Then Kenny Buttry disassembled his drumkit and deadened his snare drum to approximate the sound of a marching band drummer. Charlie McCoy also performed a dazzlingly ambidextrous party trick of playing bass and trumpet simultaneously, one in each hand. The ultimate story of the epic Blonde on Blonde<\/em> sessions is found in Chapter 4 of Sean Wilentz’s remarkable history\u00a0Bob Dylan in America<\/em>\u00a0(Doubleday, 2010).<\/p>\n

3. “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” is ranked as Dylan’s third-best song ever in the critical anthology Dylan: Visions, Portraits and Back Pages, <\/em>characterized there as\u00a0<\/em>“Eleven minutes-plus of serpentine psychodrama.”<\/p>\n

A short version of this review was originally published in Shepherd Express<\/em>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

50 Years of Blonde on Blonde\u00a0\u2013 Old Crow Medicine Show \u00a0(Columbia Nashville) Like snake oil healers, Old Crow Medicine Show lays hands on Dylan\u2019s myriad symptoms of unrequited or forsaken love, as detailed in his classic 1966 double album. Their … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8961","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-www-kevernacular-com"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hJWE-2kx","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8961","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8961"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8961\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8976,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8961\/revisions\/8976"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8961"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8961"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kevernacular.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8961"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}