Richard Thompson: Holy Blues

I have been reading, with much interest, the estimable Greil Marcus’s Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010. On the cover is a quote from the San Francisco Chronicle – ‘Why read anyone else’s work on Dylan?’ Well, you would do so given the fact that such a figure as Dylan is liable at any time to inspire more than just one worthy interpreter; furthermore, because for every one sentence of Marcus’s that you might agree with, there’s liable to be another that will have you dropping your bacon sandwich. To take just one from the latter subset: Marcus’s Village Voice dismissal of Oh Mercy (1989) as ‘shapely and airless’, characterising Dylan as an actor who was merely hitting marks chalked by producer Daniel Lanois. Well... apart from any dissenting listeners’ views, Dylan’s Chronicles would seem to suggest otherwise.
I must digress, though, because really I want to say something about Richard Thompson. Bear with me...
The scholar-journalist/filmmaker/bon viveur Kevin Jackson is, among his many claims on artistry, the authorised biographer of writer-director Paul Schrader, and it was in this capacity that in 1991 he filed a set report from New York for Sight & Sound concerning Schrader’s movie Light Sleeper. One of the many fascinating cineaste-matters discussed between the two therein was Schrader’s quest to score his movie with a sequence of songs that would have both an authorial connection and a linking, pervading soulfulness to them. Schrader first called upon his friend Bob Dylan, for whom he’d once directed a promo clip. The hope was that Dylan would license a number of songs, chiefly from Oh Mercy. But Dylan wasn’t having it. Thus a short-order head-scratcher for Schrader, on which Jackson tried to be of some assistance in proposing alternatives. Who could deputise for Bob Dylan? Van Morrison? ‘Too Irish’ was Schrader’s understandable opinion. Richard Thompson? ‘Maybe too English’ was, if I remember right, the final Schrader ruling...
But just as it’s no shame for George Eliot to be compared with Tolstoy even she’s adjudged to suffer slightly by the match-up – it’s quite true that in Richard Thompson England has a musical treasure/songsmith-guitar hero to set by the finest the world might offer. Somehow I managed to miss that he was lately made an OBE. The Old Kit Bag is my favourite of his recent albums, 'Gethsemane' (below) my favourite song thereupon. Thompson is of course a practising Muslim, and his faith has never inflected his work quite as thoroughly as Dylan’s did his c. 1979-1981. But the cadences of the preacher are present always, nonetheless.

The Exorcist: bless that Captain Howdy

Ah, The Exorcist... What frightful pleasure it's given down the years in the many and varied forms it’s taken (thus following the fashion of Satan himself, with his legion of names and faces.) I must have been 10 or 11 when some schoolmates and I discovered William Peter Blatty’s bestselling shocker of a novel: we passed it round, taking gleeful turns to read aloud the grossest, most horrendous bits (not all of which I quite ‘understood.’) William Friedkin’s extremely frightening movie version wasn’t nearly so accessible at that time, but I had definitely seen it by the late 1980s, when my brother was studying at Georgetown University and, in the course of a stroll through the neighbourhood, pointed out to me those infamous ‘Exorcist steps.’
Ten years later, in my editorial chair at Faber and Faber, I prepared an edition of Blatty’s screenplay for publication and had a number of chats with Bill Blatty himself, a highly affable and courteous man who always addressed me as ‘Rich’ and seemed very pleased that I was interested in the fortunes of the Georgetown Hoyas college teams. A few years after that, I oversaw a revised edition of Kevin Jackson’s marvellous book of interviews with Paul Schrader, at the point where Paul was putting the final touches on Exorcist: The Beginning, the third official sequel (actually a prequel) to Friedkin’s movie. You may know what happened next: Schrader was removed from his post after screening the film for his studio financier, and Renny Harlin was hired to shoot from scratch a less cerebral, tackier and more effects-heavy version. I confess I still haven’t managed to see Paul’s cut, though it looks terrific, but the Harlin was on telly last week and the low calculation of it was there for all to see.
That said, it's hard to blame the suits for finally trying to do what some Exorcist sequel surely had to do if it was seriously looking for a place in the market: namely, to resurrect the Linda Blair model of the foul-looking, foul-mouthed female demon: as I call her in Ten Bad Dates, ‘a vile goblin who masturbates with a crucifix, knows all your dirty secrets, vomits forth obscene insults like bile, and also vomits forth a good deal of bile.’
The other obvious move was to get more of that Captain Howdy stuff going. Howdy (pictured) is of course the name little Regan MacNeil gives to her ‘imaginary friend’ in the early stages of her possession, and the name Exorcist fans gave cheerfully to the demonic face glimpsed in subliminal flashes during the movie. Warners certainly didn't stint on Howdy in the trailer below for Friedkin's 1973 original, a trailer that apparently had to be suppressed for being too disturbing, to which one could fairly say, too bloody right.

On Digging That Cat Bob Dylan...

It was my friend the massively erudite and prolific author/journalist Kevin Jackson who first introduced me to the technical term 'BobCat', maybe 2-3 years ago now? As I recall, it was while we were dining with the polymathic filmmaker Paul Schrader, a hero to this Blog, and himself a conspicuous BobCat. But the very fact that the whole BobCat business was all news to me as recently as then is testimony to the truth that I'm only a very amateur and third-rate sort of a Bob Dylan Fan.
I do have most of his long-playing records, and I dabble on the fringes of Dylan scholarship, albeit far removed (even alienated) from the serious esoterica and apocrypha. Moreover, like a whole bunch of practising novelists, be they good, bad, or mediocre, I often write with music on for the purpose of mood and glancing inspiration; and so I can say that a fair bit of Crusaders was written to the soundtrack of Dylan's so-called 'Christian' albums (Slow Train Coming, admittedly, much the favourite of these.) But that's about the size of my Bobcatness. (Actually, hang on, for what it's worth there are a few hommages to Dylan lyrics in my The Name of this Book is Dogme 95, which were astutely spotted and thrown back to me by the Copenhagen-based scholar and Bobcat Carsten Jensen.)
So why are these selective Visions of Bob now keeping me up past the dawn? Well, for one thing, the aforementioned K. Jackson recently dropped me a line to let me know he was ploughing 'through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books', and I was slow enough to ask him why... It so happens that Kevin is writing another of his daunting scholarly works, this one on the modernist literature of the 1920s. But still, honestly... No BobCat, I, to have missed that glaring reference. Nonetheless, however weakly, I managed to shoot back to Kevin that I 'couldn't even touch the books he'd read', in point of numbers at least... And we had a good exchange about the particularly Dylanesque love/hate of lists of learned reading, a matter on which Bob expounded further in the little-read Tarantula, which is as near as I get to his esoterica.
Furthermore, me and this Blog are pleased to have received another commendation from the excellent and previously cited The Story and The Truth maintained by Anna French and Dan Hartland; and while rooting round that site I just read this fine essay by Hartland on the 'great late trilogy' formed by Dylan's most recently released trio of albums. Again, like a heretic, I must admit that of the three in question only Time Out of Mind gets much play round my house. But then I played it just the other day, during novel-writing hours... See, I'm tryin' to get to heaven, before they close the door...
On which topic, I must just squeeze in this morsel from Ian Parker's assiduous observational New Yorker profile of Christopher Hitchens, published back in 2006 - one of those journalistic snapshots that just sticks with you, both the story and the telling of it:
"Hitchens went into the house and put on Bob Dylan's 'Tryin' to Get to Heaven'; he stood in the doorway and sung quietly along. He quoted Philip Larkin on Dylan: a 'cawing, derisive voice.' He repeated Larkin's words a few times, approvingly. His daughter got out of the pool, and said, pleasantly, 'Can we close this door, so nobody else has to hear this?'... She went back to her friends. 'Look,' Hitchens said happily. 'They're waiting for us to die.'"