This I loved in 2012

Lucian Freud, 'Pregnant Girl' (1961)

Faber now makes a habit of asking its author to select some end-of-year cultural highlights for posting at the Thought Fox blog, and mine were included in this tranche a week before Christmas. I think I said all that needed saying: to be honest, my list includes just about everything that I found time to take in over the last twelve months - certainly the one exhibition I got to, which was Lucian Freud, need you ask. But if I had spread my categories a little to mention memoirs read then I would have wanted to extol Pete Townshend's Who I Am and Jack Straw's Last Man Standing, each of which seems to me exceptionally insightful of its author and in its field. And then if I hadn't been making such a fuss of Bob Dylan and Mozart I would have saluted the wondrous Catherine A.D. and her album of cover versions, Reprise, which followed 2011's superb mini-album Communion, and includes the Crystals cover below. I was stunned to learn that back in July of last year Ms AD also managed to publish this.

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.

Singing live, for your vote, Robert Allen Zimmerman...

This year’s X Factor competition? I'm wishing success on the young black woman with the Liverpool accent, who has a very good voice – but more importantly because a fortnight back, if I heard rightly, she sang a Dylan song. It’s possible she knew it by way of its more popular covers, but I’d rather believe she was displaying a spark of musical intelligence and feeling hitherto unseen among X Factor wannabes and their ludicrous panel of 'mentors'/'judges'.
Granted, it’s a ridiculous notion, Bob-does-The-X. If by some magic the young Greenwich Village Dylan were a candidate for the c. 2010 show he’d be ridiculed and kicked out at audition - partly for the voice, which Larkin (who liked it!) thought ‘cawing’ and ‘derisive’, but mainly for writing his own songs, being an artist, his own man, etc etc...
Still, I’ve begun to amuse myself by imagining an entire X-evening devoted to Bob’s songs… just as I understand there have been tributes to such heavyweights as Elton, Queen, Take That, George Michael… Most likely the biggest scrap among contestants would be had over ‘Knocking On Heaven’s Door’, with the winner probably deciding to knock off the Guns N’ Roses version – whereupon one can picture Simon Cowell doing 'that pause' and pulling 'that face' (by which he tries to pretend that he is thinking impossibly complicated thoughts, thoughts for which language, even by his high standards, is inadequate) before saying that the performance was quite unprecedented in its brilliance and the X Factor just so great because it’s so much more than karaoke, blah blah etc.
It could be done, though: a whole night of X-Goes-Bob. One of the older contestants would do ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ with a choir and get those arms a-waving in the crowd. One of the young lads could sing a new sort of number for the laydeez - maybe ‘Visions of Johanna’, or a quirkier choice, ‘Sweetheart Like You’ off Infidels? I’d expect one of the ‘girls’ who specialize in that vibrato thing they all do these days could bring a new stretched-out-ness to one of the ballads of the Christian phase – ‘I Believe in You’ perhaps. And there’d be a special prize for the claiming by any candidate who took on ‘Idiot Wind’ and strolled boldly right up to the judges’ table, spitting each syllable into their awful freeze-dried life-denying faces:
‘Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your mouth,
Blowing down the backroads headin' south.
Idiot wind, blowing every time you move your teeth,
You're an idiot, babe.
It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe…’

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.'"