Best Music of 2008 Part Two

Cardboard Bob stands in my office next to a black velvet painting of the desert. Who knew he wanted to be Wolfman Jack?

A big part of 2008 for me was my introduction to Theme Time Radio Hour, the program hosted by Bob Dylan. I have been up early many days this year, letting the dog out, and while perusing the news on the web with my first cup of coffee, firing up an episode. The program, now in its third season on satellite radio, is a series of one-hour programs, each based on a theme – divorce, birds, hair, baseball, presidents, women’s names, smoking, with Dylan as your disc jockey. You get the idea.

“Your place for themes, dreams and schemes,” he often cackles, and he seems barely able to contain himself as he eagerly shares little-heard gems that he seems to have discovered throughout his life. If you didn’t know it, Bob Dylan is a major-league record nut. He tells a caller that all the music on the show comes from his own personal collection, and that he likes music “that was made 70 years ago and music that was made last Tuesday.”

Those are attributes I can really admire and appreciate in a DJ. According to “Inside Dylan’s Brain,” a Vanity Fair article that serves as a kind of a thesaurus for the first two seasons, more than fifty percent of the music he plays is from the nineteen fifties and earlier. He plays show tunes, novelty songs, soul and R&B. He talks with great enthusiasm about calypso and reggae, sticks up for rap and cowboy music and plays the Replacements, Green Day, the Ramones and Run DMC alongside Dinah Washington, Muddy Waters and Mud Boy and the Neutrons. Genres have no place here.

And he’s funny. “I don’t usually like to tell people what I’m doing, but I am talking to a couple of car companies about possibly being the voice of their GPS system,” he says, introducing Ray Charles’ “Lonely Avenue” on his latest theme, Road Maps. “I think it would be good, if you’re looking for directions and you heard my voice saying something like ‘Take a left at the next street. No, a right. Know what, just go straight.’”

If you have read Chronicles Part One, you’ll know the world Dylan creates from a place he calls “the Abernathy building.” He seems to revel in history, pop culture, show-biz and political intrigue, rumors and gossip. He offers perspective on Nixon and the Checkers speech, Kennedy and his women, Sinatra and the Mob, Sinatra, Kennedy and their women. He likes Willie Nelson’s voice before he became the Red-Headed Stranger. When it comes to the Three Stooges, he argues Larry is the smartest and admits that he’s s Shemp man. He talks with equal aplomb about Edith Piaf and Paul Winchell, the ventriloquist who came up with the idea for the artificial heart. He is, he says, proud to live in America, “the only place where Slim Gaillard could sing an ode to matzo balls and gefilte fish.”

Dylan answers email, takes callers’ questions and includes conversations and soliloquies with Tom Waits (who ruminates on the extinction of the passenger pigeon, among other things), Elvis Costello, Jack White, Marianne Faithful, Richard Lewis, Jenny Lewis, Luke Wilson and Penn Gillette, among others. I mean, how cool is to hear David Hidalgo explain that Don Santiago Jimenez, the father of Flaco, is the godfather of tejano music, the first one to sing lyrics over polkas?

Dylan honestly sounds like he’s having the time of his life. “We’ve told the Percy Mayfield story a couple of times here,” he says introducing the original demo of “Hit the Road Jack” on the Road Maps show. “If you haven’t heard it, go download some of our shows illegally.” Did I mention he was funny?

After reading Chronicles and listening to a bunch of Theme Times, I think I know why people might get frustrated interviewing Dylan. If I ever got a crack at him I wouldn’t ask about him any of his songs. But you can bet I would bring up that Womack brothers’ acoustic demo of “Across 110th Street” that he says “shows how funky two acoustic guitars can be.”

Hear Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour, on Sirius/XM and at Croz.FM. Read the first installment of Best of Music 2008.

A still from the opening credits of True Blood.

Beginning in 1980 and continuing into 2006, I participated in the Village Voice‘s Pazz & Jop Critics Poll. It began, I think, as a way for a small but growing number of newspaper and magazine critics to sound off about their favorite albums of the year, in the late 1970s, and by the time of its demise when Robert Christgau was fired a couple of years ago, it attracted nearly one thousand people who wrote about popular music to declare their top ten albums and singles of the year and choose a winner under a numerical rating system.

I was a great believer in albums, and rating my favorites against my peers was really fun at the time, but I don’t miss it, for various reasons, but mostly because I don’t really listen to albums as albums anymore. Who does, I wonder? I still review five or six a year and will readily admit that I can be rewarded by listening to an entire compact disc several times. I might play one all the way through because it is actually created that way, (Ry Cooder’s Chavez Ravine comes to mind) or if it is an artist I really like (Bob Dylan’s Tell Tale Signs, although that one sounds just as well in shuffle as in sequence). Otherwise, the whole idea of listening to albums seems rather quaint.

This might sound strange coming from someone whose enthusiasm for the recorded album as an art form helped lead me into a career as a writer.  Today I don’t necessarily rely upon albums to find music. One of the top songs of the year for me is Jace Everett’s “Bad Things” (see below), but the only times I hear it is while watching the HBO series True Blood, for which it is the title song. I was led to Sarah Bareilles “Love Song” by a Rhapsody commercial. I find all kinds of good stuff on YouTube and in the blogs of music fans.

I continue to hear out friends who tell me that music isn’t as good as it used to be or are disillusioned with it. And I just don’t get it. The good stuff is perhaps not as centrally located as it used to be, and you certainly can’t keep up with everything even in a small genre, but I continue to be challenged by more great music out there than any time in my memory. That includes music that was made seventy years ago and music that was recorded last Tuesday, as Bob Dylan said this year on this radio show. We have reverted back to the days of the jukebox, ie. you’re only as good as your last single.

Having my music in a database that I can access instantly, of course, is a big part of the richness and variety that I need. If I don’t have anything in mind to listen to, I turn on shuffle until I find something I do want to explore. If I don’t like something, I just cue up the next song.

The way I see it, as music labels continue their inexorable decline (and don’t miss Steve Knopper’s Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age for that particular story), musicians will take more control over their work. And, since there are more musicians and bands out there and the marketplace less organized and controlled by labels, learn to take less for their art than perhaps they have been accustomed and find ways to make it work.

‘Nuff said. But here’s part one of the bounty I have found this year, those songs that keep me hitting the repeat button, that force the Jukebox in My Head to pick up the needle and start it over. Whenever possible, I’m providing links to YouTube videos or some site so you can hear the music, too.

Billie and I are huge fans of True Blood, HBO’s tawdry, witty, bloody vampire soap, and part of the charm is the use of Jace Everett’s rockabilly rave, “Bad Things,” as the title song. Judge for yourself, but I find the video, like the series, particularly unsettling yet wonderfully strange. I can’t think of a southern cliché that isn’t found somewhere in this minute and a half slice of Louisiana religion, voodoo, sex, violence and racism. Bad pickup line of the year: “I want to do real bad things with you.”

Jakob Dylan's first solo record is titled Seeing Things.

Jakob Dylan’s first solo record, Seeing Things, produced by Rick Rubin, is a quiet acoustic affair that, like Chavez Ravine, actually works as an album for me. Rubin’s tasty arrangements never work against Dylan’s guitar scratching or his vocal delivery. Best song is the first one, “Evil is Alive and Well,” a commentary on the strange year of 2008 like no other.

His songs (“See You Later Alligator,” “Walkin’ to New Orleans”) are universally known, but Bobby Charles has worked in complete obscurity almost his whole life. This year he released Homemade Songs, a terrific set of his own tunes, including this funky version of “But I Do”, a song I  learned decades ago from  Clarence “Frogman” Henry.

OK. What would a year be without a good old rowdy rock band tune? The Hold Steady’s “Sequestered In Memphis” has the kind of bozy, guitar-band energy that I cut my musical teeth on, and though I’ve heard a variation of this song a thousand times before, I still love it when I hear it.

I don’t know where I found “Soul Of A Man,” since I don’t have the Modern Guilt disc, but this quick little song kept my attention whenever it came on. This video from an outdoor concert doesn’t hold up as well as the single.

Amy Winehouse belts it out from the green chair.

I was only vaguely familiar with the Zutons’ “Valerie,” but I really like the way Mark Ronson, with vocal assistance from Amy Winehouse, turns a punky pop/rock song into a soul rave.  Looking for the video where I found this song, I ran across this quiet, stripped-down Winehouse rendition, accompanied by only an off-camera guitar.

Winehouse also adds her vocals to Mutya Buena’s “B Boy Baby,” which moves my aging loins much as the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” did in 1963, when those loins were more supple.

Coming: Theme Time Radio Hour, Bobby Womack, why YouTube beats concerts and more.