Post a controversial music opinion

Highway 61 Revisited is his most perfect album - not my favorite, but his most perfect.

Prefer Morton Feldman.

i mean i prefer bob, but highway 61 is a few incredible songs and a bunch of rambling crap so fuck this argument.

Someone should do a doom metal cover of Ballad of a Thin Man.

If you like Just Like Thumbs Blues, don’t sleep on If You Ever Go To Houston. It sounds like a belated sequel.

*Tom* Thumb’s Blues

it is totally proto-doom

Rolling Stone, Tombstone, Buick and Highway 62 always work for me, the rest I get impatient with. Maybe I conditioned my young self to be impatient with the rest. Don’t think I’d given the album a full listen through since 1985.

At the time I got it, say 1983, I was knee deep in The Who and Kinks and Cream what frustrated me was the lack of riffs— it felt like it was all lyrics. I actually picked it up because I’d gotten into Johnny Winter’s cover of Highway 61. The original seemed much less rocking. But at least the motoring ones did motor along. The other made me antsy. This doesn’t happen with “lesser” Dylan albums I’ve subsequently heard, chock full of methodical ballads, but I didn’t really try any Dylan again until I was out of my teens.

Morton Feldman’s piano works, especially “For Bunita Marcos,” are sublime.

"Tom Thumb's Blues" = A+++.

another in my line of "yeah if that got memory hole'd i'd be a happier person"-
zappa

i'm sure we've covered this before, but anytime the topic gets revived, how terrible that music is just hits me all over again. i wasted so much time with that music. ugh.

Someone should do a doom metal cover of Ballad of a Thin Man.

If you like Just Like Thumbs Blues, don’t sleep on If You Ever Go To Houston. It sounds like a belated sequel.

― o. nate, Tuesday, November 14, 2023 3:54 PM (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

*Tom* Thumb’s Blues

― o. nate, Tuesday, November 14, 2023 3:54 PM (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

it is totally proto-doom

― out-of-print LaserDisc edition (sleeve), Tuesday, November 14, 2023 4:11 PM (six days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Nazareth's "Ballad of Hollis Brown" cover is totally proto doom! one of the greatest covers ever, esp halfway when it gets totally unhinged

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dw-MvBnlFg

lol

My buddy Jan just proclaimed: “no good music was released in 1987. Except the second David Behrman album.”

wow.

Tell your friend to listen to PERFECT PRESCRIPTION, DARKLANDS and ECSTASY (& WINE) loudly in the dark until he changes his mind.

um hysteria helloooo

Jan, regarding Darklands and that Spacemen 3 album “ah… yes, is so, is so”

re: Thin Man, it's rarely one I'm excited to hear, but I was listening to this compilation of "Rare Performances From the Copyright Collections" that came out a few years back that had a performance from Edinburgh in 1966 that I thought was fantastic, just totally venomous and gripping. iirc the version on the Live 66 album didn't get recorded very well, it's a lot harder to hear the vocals than on any of the surrounding tracks. (looking this up i guess it's also on the No Direction Home soundtrack which I had forgotten about.)

YOU'RE LIVING ALL OVER ME, SIGN "☮︎" THE TIMES, EXPOSE - LET ME BE THE ONE, LISA LISA & THE CULT JAM ft SOUL SONIC FORCE - LOST IN EMOTION, THE MARKSMAN (Music from the BBC TV Series), NEW WAVE HOT DOGZ...

We get it Jan, you're not much fun at parties!

JoeStork - there's a 36 CD box set of every known recording on the 66 tour. Sets are similar but the sq does vary (most of the shows are mono, some are mono audience recordings). I found it too much work to try and compare each show, inevitably I prefer the Live 1966 I've known all these years- but I'm glad it exists!

Lol Jan is a blast! He just is prone to making sweeping statements while showing off Lovely Music rarities in the late night. (In this case we were listening Eliane Radigue)

I count "Ballad of a Thin Man" as 1) typically (of '65/66) brilliant; 2) historically important; 3) my least favourite song on Highway 61. Just don't like the way it sounds, and can't remember a time when I ever did.

― clemenza

when i was a kid my mom had a copy of a record with "ballad of a thin man" on it. i don't think it was _highway 61_, i think it was a comp, but i don't know what comp it was. anyway, i thought most of the songs were boring, "the times they are a-changin'" or some shit and then there's a harmonica solo. i liked "ballad of a thin man" more. he's singing about a one-eyed midget, it reminded me of jim morrison and the weird circus shit he was singing about on "strange days" (another record my mom had). and his voice just sounded _hilarious_.

this was when i was too young for shit like symbolism and i didn't quite get the savage mockery in his voice, even though my mom had taught me _all_ about what savage mockery sounded like at that point. not too fond of savage mockery, honestly. unlike, say, frank zappa, or hell, even phil ochs in songs like "love me, i'm a liberal", dylan's actually funny, and god, if anybody deserves dylan's contempt it's the kind of liberals dylan sings about. as for all the songs being slow... to me, it makes everything he does sound that much more menacing. which it is, he is.

the thing is in contrast to someone like, again, zappa, i'd say that dylan in this period is genuinely a misanthrope, or something like one. "just like a woman" is... i mean it's cruel because it takes something that's true and it twists it to where it's just devastating, and after he twists it it's not _entirely_ true but it _seems_ true. i've known people who can do shit like that. honestly, sometimes _i_ can do that. i learned it through example, at great length.

idk. what can one do when one's as fucking _angry_ as bob dylan and is old enough to realize that writing "masters of war" doesn't actually hurt the people he's singing about? like the bob mcnamaras of the world don't even _realize_ that he's singing about them. i guess you can write "ballad of a thin man".

i'm probably overthinking things, again. the levee broke a while back. what am i doing? watching the river flow.

Zappa wasn't genuinely a misanthrope?

checks with thread title tbf

huh, i like that post rushomancy, it's sorta the opposite of how i've perceived dylan and zappa. post is causing me to think again about my feelings that dylan is a profoundly angry idealist weaponizing his observations, while zappa is more like "you're all useless, you'll never get it."

"thin man" is classic if only for garth hudson's freakouts on some of those bootlegs

> didn't quite get the savage mockery in his voice

Great observations. I haven't ever been able to recover the mockery everyone reports hearing contemporaneously in Dylan. Maybe because he's just too nuanced in his delivery to only provide one interpretation, or everyone who was influenced by the mockery imitated it in a hamfisted and obvious manner that makes mid-60s Dylan more ambiguous in retrospect.

I have a hard time piecing together how Zappa's misanthropy felt joyous and silly to me as a teen. There was "Gabba gabba, we accept you, we accept you, one of us" buoyancy that subsequent cultural shifts have deflated. See also Jethro Tull.

i'll take tull over zappa any day

Outside of who is which, maybe i need a T/S which is more effective misanthropy versus extreme cynicism

Zappa wasn't genuinely a misanthrope?

― The First Time Ever I Saw Gervais (Tom D.)

not in the sense of "not a misogynist, but a misanthrope". there's something egalitarian about misanthropy. something like "god's song (that's why i love mankind)" by randy newman, now that's what i call misanthropy! god hates us all. that kind of thing. zappa's hatred just isn't egalitarian. he hates women more than he hates men. that he also hates men doesn't excuse that.

dylan, to me, when he does songs attacking women (and yeah, he does it ambiguously... the ambiguity is what makes it really savage. "oh, you thought my saying that you break just like a little girl was a putdown? says more about you than it does about me". well, when he keeps doing that sort of thing over and over again it starts saying something about him, you know? he's angry, he's hurt, he's betrayed, i mean, these things are where misanthropy comes from. show him someone who's not a parasite and he'll say a prayer for them.

I've never thought of Dylan as angry at all tbh. Has always seemed completely in control of himself to me.

Obviously we agree to differ on both points!

Zappa seemed to revel in lowbrow culture a lot, in fact I think he genuinely liked some of those things and the people who made them, I think it was more his dislike of anyone who thought they were doing anything good or deep. maybe one of those "all culture is lowbrow culture" sort of things, except for his music of course

I've never thought of Dylan as angry at all tbh. Has always seemed completely in control of himself to me.

― The First Time Ever I Saw Gervais (Tom D.)

that's a lot of my formative experience with anger... controlled, cold rage. precise. when i'm at my angriest that's how i get. always has been. knowing exactly the things to say, knowing exactly how to hit people at their most vulnerable spots, and saying those things. it's _targeted_, specific to its recipient. zappa's anger is more of a... petulant frenzy.

Zappa’s misanthropy — and tbf his misogyny — was predicated on a kind of “you’re in on the joke, unlike all these rubes” clubbiness, and I think to enjoy a lot of his stuff you need to maintain a sense that you’re better than the rubes (and that it’s not infra dig to stick it to ‘em). In the earliest days, there was also a sense that he could turn the knife on you too, so a bit of unease. I hung out with people like that a lot in my teen years — just a circle of relentless cruelty and whiplash wit, and everyone was always dancing around to be the one calling the target if not swinging the knife. It was exhausting. Zappa, also, is exhausting.

A lot of the same applies to classic-period Dylan, IMO, so why isn’t Dylan exhausting? — the opposite, in fact. Cuz there’s more to Dylan’s world than relentless mockery? Because he’s got soul? I dunno tbh

I don’t think Dylan had many songs with the vibe you described, though(?) Like Kate said, his put-down songs were pretty… “targeted.”

I think we're talking about a specific part of Dylan too, whereas Zappa really didn't have any other mode

it's not like Zappa has the equivalent of "If Not For You" or "Tangled Up in Blue" or "Mr. Tambourine Man" or "Girl From the North Country" etc etc etc....Zappa pretty much only had one mode

Fwiw, I’ll cop to “Thin Man” never having been a particular fave of mine from that Dylan era…

as someone who loathes both Zappa and Dylan, i would rather listen to the latter than the former any day of the week. Zappa is intolerable petulant bullshit. and i say that as a jazz and noise fan.

It’s because half the time a Dylan song has multiple targets and one them is Dylan.

Re: why Dylan’s screeds are more tolerable

yeah zappa has a big "there's nothing wrong with ME" complex

Dylan, crucially, is not afraid to be sincere

why isn’t Dylan exhausting?

he is very exhausting imo

This is more of a controversial ILM opinion, but I'm really sick of posters who think I want to read Christgau's opinion on literally anything. Post Christgau quotes in the Christgau thread. We don't need to hear it otherwise.

Budo proves Groucho’s First Axiom. The club ain’t having it either. C-

You appear to be using my old username sans the 'Brigadier'

xpost lol!

Zappa’s misanthropy — and tbf his misogyny — was predicated on a kind of “you’re in on the joke, unlike all these rubes” clubbiness, and I think to enjoy a lot of his stuff you need to maintain a sense that you’re better than the rubes (and that it’s not infra dig to stick it to ‘em). In the earliest days, there was also a sense that he could turn the knife on you too, so a bit of unease. I hung out with people like that a lot in my teen years — just a circle of relentless cruelty and whiplash wit, and everyone was always dancing around to be the one calling the target if not swinging the knife. It was exhausting. Zappa, also, is exhausting.

― lethbridge-pfunkboy (hardcore dilettante)

idk, i associate the sort of people who can turn on a dime and eviscerate you more with queer people than folks like zappa. in his earlier years, he _did_ have that sort of energy. after he got pushed off the stage in '71, my sense is that he became more isolated and bitter.

i get the impression that i've had that sort of unpredictability at times. hypervigilance. the feeling that i'm being threatened or attacked even when i'm not. maybe zappa excepted himself. i think the nihilism in his work is that... my sense is he believed everything was bullshit, _including_ himself. if he were to be genuinely vulnerable, well, that would just prove it.

listening to zappa's stage banter from 60s recordings is interesting. he sneers, he's snide, but it all has a different edge to it. i recall seeing an early interview clip where he says something like "something has to be done before america scarfs up the world and shits on it". that kind of idealism just seems so un-zappa-like. i was listening to that concert from miami i was talking about... he suggests an enema to an audience member, but it hits really differently than "the illinois enema bandit". the audience member is male and, i'm gonna say it, a lot of his audience back in the '60s were loud, obnoxious idiots. sometimes he would actually try to _engage_ them - a forerunner perhaps to his later appearance on talkshows. like he really did believe in talking to people. sometimes he'd let audience members onto the stage where they'd sing badly. his attempts at "participation" were often forced but he did try to bring audience members into the show. he talks about an incident at the garrick theater in his autobio, bringing some gis up onto stage where he asked them to show the audience what they'd do to a vietnamese baby (using a slur i won't repeat), demonstrate on these dolls, and they ripped the dolls to bits and he went and passed them around the audience.

it's easy to project back that easy cynicism to his earlier days. you can definitely see a through-line. his genuine idealism was... i feel like it was closer to the surface on those days. he made fun of people who wore long hair as a political statement... i do love flo and eddie's joke about david crosby, "he almost cut his hair but then he didn't". he also had crosby on stage during that era. he had john and yoko on stage during that era. and he made fun of longhairs but he wore long hair throughout the 70s, and that _was_ significant in the 60s. he talked about how the cops would hassle longhairs, the amount of shit all of them would get for having long hair. he wasn't above that. the cops didn't treat him any different. and they went on and call them girls, he went on joe pyne's show and joe pyne, who would never fucking shut up about his wooden leg, called zappa a girl, and zappa shot right back "well, i guess you're a table". and then they all went on an album cover wearing dresses, oh, so we're girls, huh? you think we're girls? honestly it reminds me a little bit of the way riot grrls would wear those same kinds of clothes on stage, this is what you think of us? this is how you see us?

and also his doing that was shitty and gross transphobia. there's both things present.

he wasn't an exception, that's the thing, and that was forcefully brought home to him in '71. oh sure he didn't get involved in politics, he didn't play altamont, didn't get the shit beat out of him by hell's angels, didn't have to listen to jerry's self-serving bullshit. he fucked groupies and did a bunch of songs about fucking groupies, even more than king crimson did, and one of his idiot fans went and burned down the concert hall where he was playing and destroyed all his equipment and thank god nobody died, and then his next concert, a week later, some other idiot fan pushed him off the stage because he thought zappa was "making eyes at his girlfriend", and then his whole band quit, and he spent nine months in a cast and got a bodyguard.

was he a nililist, in those days? maybe, but he also set up a record imprint to record people he wanted people to hear, a counternarrative to the hippie ethos. his old high school buddy captain beefheart, alice cooper, judy henske and jerry yester. he gave the groupies a voice, put out a record by them. he found larry "wild man" fischer out there singing songs on the streets, said this guy can put together some tunes, gave him a contract and recorded and released a double album by him. which was fine until fischer threatened his infant daughter with a knife. i can see how shit like that could make a person close up a little bit, you know?

One of the Zappa books describes a foreign tour, probably in continental Europe in 1969 or 70, where the audiences expected him to "lead them" and be some sort of political guru. Riots may have resulted. A woman in his entourage describes how this disillusioned him of what remained of his political idealism. I'm pretty sure this was all before his assault.