Gone but not forgotten

I always thought Richie Havens did one of the sweetest versions of "Just Like A Woman," humane, not angry. This version comes from the Bobfest, the tribute concert to Bob Dylan on the occasion of his 30th year in the business, roughly 20 years ago.

Richie Havens

Bob & Bruce (originally titled "Bob Dylan Playlist")

Apparently, the video I originally posted here is no longer available. Since I abhor a vacuum, I've found a video that fills the bill in a different way. Thanks for visiting Popmuse! 

Bob & Bruce together

That's all right, Big Boy!

Because of the mention in Nat Hentoff's "American Music Is," I thought I'd post my entry on Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup from "MusicHound Blues: The Essential Album Guide." It was a work-for-hire, so the copyright belongs to Visible Ink Press, which has gone out of business. I'm not sure if its parent company, Gale, which publishes many reference works, kept the rights to MusicHound or sold it off elsewhere. Near as I can tell, a revised version of "MusicHound Blues" was published in 2002 by G. Schirmer Books, and that company's reference book division has been sold to Gale.

The MusicHound entries had a set format, starting with a bio, moving into "must buys" (What to Buy), the next most desirable (What to Buy Next), the clunkers (What to Avoid), the rest of the artist's works (The Rest), rarities worth seeking out (Worth Searching For), and influences. The item on the artist's influences was called Rewind and the one about who the artist influenced was, what else?, Fast Forward. Ratings were given as number of bones, with 5 bones being the best.

This item has not been updated since it was published in 1998, so the recommendations are likely not current.

ARTHUR "BIG BOY" CRUDUP

Born: Aug. 24, 1905 in Forest, Miss. Died: March 28, 1974 in Nassawadox, Va.

Arthur Crudup was a 30-year-old farmworker in rural Mississippi when he learned to play guitar in an effort to pick up some extra money playing house parties. In near poverty, the guitar he was forced to learn on had a broken neck bound together with wire. As a result, he learned only a few basic chords and riffs. By 1940, Crudup had headed north, spurred by the stories of good jobs in the big cities. Instead, life was hand-to-mouth. However, the move to Chicago wasn't wasted, because soon afterward Crudup signed to Bluebird Records. Although this didn't bail Crudup out of a life of hardship -- he was slickered into selling most of the rights to his music. He made a modest living, but should have been entitled to more. Eventually, he moved back to the South, returning North only for an annual recording session that produced a half-dozen or so songs. This went on until 1954, when a discouraged Crudup gave up in despair of ever making a good income. (He had recorded under pseudonyms for Chess and Trumpet records.) In 1960, he was coaxed back into recording for Fire Records, and in the late '60s until his death, he recorded for Delmark. Although Crudup seemed hampered by stage fright during the first phase of his career, the Delmark years found him an enthusiastic performer. None of it would have mattered, if he hadn't written such evocative images and if his high, clean voice didn't sound so forlorn in songs of lost love. Crudup also indirectly changed the course of pop music, having been a major influence on Elvis Presley. Presley's hopped-up version of "That's All Right, Mama" was his first regional hit on Sun Records, and the catalyst of the rock and roll explosion of the '50s.

What to Buy: That's All Right Mama (Bluebird, 1992, 4.5 bones) is the definitive collection of Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's music, hitting the major highlights from his Bluebird years (1941-'54), starting with the rural Delta sound of "If I Get Lucky" and ending with the proto-rock and roll of "She's Got No Hair." Listen to him croon "She cries, 'Ooo-wee, I believe I'll change my mind" on "So Glad You're Mine" or hear the smile in his voice in "Shout, Sister, Shout" and you'll have had a heaping serving of Crudup's charms. Even so, there's plenty more here. Another That's All Right Mama (Relic, 1992, 4 bones) documents Crudup's return from retirement for the Fire label in the early '60s. His remakes of many of his classic tunes have much of the power of the originals, and there are a few new tunes as well. The collection supplants Mean Ol' Frisco (Collectables, 1988, 3.5 bones), which contains fewer songs from the same sessions.

What to Buy Next: Meets the Master Blues Bassists (Delmark, 1994, 4 bones) is the only reissue on compact disc from Crudup's late '60s Delmark years. He records with long-time bass collaborator Ransom Knowling, and with Willie Dixon. Crudup seemed virtually unchanged nearly 30 years after starting his career.

What to Avoid: It's not hard to avoid some bad Crudup releases since they haven't made it to CD yet, but leave Roebuck Man (Liberty, 1974, 2 bones) and Star Bootlegger (Krazy Kat, 1983, 2 bones) alone if they ever come out in a jewel box. They're not all right, mama!

The Rest: Complete Recorded Works, Vols. 1-4 (Document, 1994, 3.5 bones) collects all of Crudup's Bluebird sides. In chronological order, the collection waters down the impact of Crudup's best sides. Still, it is complete and therefore offers many good numbers not found in other collections of this often-anthologized performer.

Worth Searching For: Crudup's Mood (Delmark, 1969, 3.5 bones) and Look on Yonder's Wall (Delmark, 1969, 3.5 bones) might still be around on crackling vinyl. Crudup proved he was a sturdy soul in these late '60s recordings.

Rewind: Robert Johnson, Big Bill Broonzy

Fast Forward: Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan

By Salvatore Caputo

No. 1 with an asterisk

There are many ways to approach writing about popular music, but the one that's the most concrete is what I'd call the "sports or athletics approach."

What I mean by that is that in sports there are winners and losers, and achievements are documented precisely. The best time in a relay race or a swim competition may be a world record. There may be intangibles in the play of a Michael Jordan, for instance, but the intangibles -- his artistry, you might say -- wouldn't matter if he hadn't won consistently.

So when it comes to pop music, the sports approach documents the top-grossing tour or the best-selling album but never deals with asthetics, which probably makes sense in a culture that rises and falls on the bottom line (mostly falling of late, but that's another topic).

Interestingly, this statistical approach to pop music achievement suffers from the same flaw as sports stats do: It's hard to compare statistics across different eras. When Babe Ruth hit his record numbers of home runs, the competition was different (black players were not in the major leagues, the pitcher's mound was a different height, etc.), the schedule was different (fewer games per season) and the potential substances used by players to cheat (saliva applied to baseballs as opposed to steroids applied to players) were different from what they were in Barry Bonds' day.

When Roger Maris failed to break Ruth's record of 60 homers in 154 games, which is the length of the season in Ruth's day, his record-setting 61st homer hit in the 162nd (and final) game of the 1961 season was given what's been called an "asterisk." In other words, Ruth's record still stood as the best ever hit in the old schedule side by side with Maris' record as the best ever hit in the new schedule.

The prevailing theory about why baseball commissioner Ford Frick decided to acknowledge the different schedules and thus preserve Ruth's record is that he biased in favor of Ruth and against Maris. Even so, it's easy to see that there's some justification for saying that a record set in one era, under a specific set of conditions, is different from a record set in another.

Possibly the best example of the sports approach to pop music writing is Chart Watch, a column ably and succinctly written by Paul Grein. (He has been doing this for a long time. He launched the Chart Beat column in Billboard magazine back in 1981, left that post in 1992 and has been doing Chart Watch ever since, first, as a wire feature for newspapers and now on Yahoo's music site.) Grein always finds an angle that lets him tie together various aspects of his report on that week's top 10 best-selling albums.

In his Chart Watch for the week ending May 3,2009, he talked about the age difference between 67-year-old Bob Dylan, who was at No. 1 with his "Together Through Life" album, and 16-year-old Miley Cyrus, who was at No. 2 with her soundtrack to "Hannah Montana: The Movie." From there, Grein launched into a quick history about how Dylan set and regained the distinction of being the oldest living recording artist ever to land a No. 1 album.

It's fun to read that Dylan set the record in September 2006 when his "Modern Times" album hit No. 1 and Dylan was 65; that he lost it when Neil Diamond, then 67, hit No. 1 with "Home Before Dark" in 2008; and that Dylan regained the record in May because he was older, almost 68, when "Together Through Life" was released. Before that, you had to go back to 1964 to even find an over-60 recording artist with a No. 1 album: Louis Armstrong, who was 62 when "Hello Dolly" hit the top of the chart.

But getting a No. 1 album in 1964 is definitely not the same as getting a No. 1 in 2009.

In 1964, the chart was compiled differently. Although people assumed it was a sales chart -- providing statistics that could not be argued -- the sales reports came not from a tally of actual sales but from a mix of sources that could distort the sales reporting. The dimensions of that distortion became apparent in 1991 when Billboard began basing its charts on sales statistics gathered by Nielsen Soundscan technology.

Using universal product codes (UPCs), Soundscan tracked sales right at the cash register, which seems a fairly reasonable way to do it.

Country and rap records, previously relegated to their own respective ghettos in the charts, suddenly took many positions in the Billboard 200 chart of best-selling albums. They also took many positions in the upper reaches of the chart, that is, the Top 20 and even the Top 10, where very few of these albums had gone before. This meant that either country and rap suddenly became very popular in the week between switching from the old reporting system to Soundscan, or that there was something very wrong in the old reporting.

Nobody has suggested that Soundscan is hugely flawed, and it seems unlikely. Its biggest and most obvious drawback would be that it could not track sales in stores that didn't use UPC technology or sales of records that didn't have a UPC, but by the time the system was instituted, this would have affected a very small number of stores and records.

Pop critics and observers had serious discussions about the whole issue at the time. Could it be that the sales of adult-oriented albums like "Hello Dolly" were overreported in 1964 and that the sales of rock 'n' roll albums were underreported in the year that The Beatles broke big in the United States? Did the sales dominance of Fleetwood Mac in late 1970s reflect reality or the reporting sources' dislike of disco?

I don't know whether anyone ever did a comparison of the Billboard album charts in the pre-Soundscan era to the sales certifications from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to see whether they correlated or were widely divergent.

The RIAA awards Gold and Platinum records. These designations are based on sales, but the RIAA doesn't use Soundscan or Billboard's old methodology to count albums sold. The RIAA tracks sales based on units shipped minus returns, statistics the RIAA gets right from its members (record labels). Certainly, the RIAA is depending on the honesty of record labels(!), for heaven's sake, to make its awards, but they would be less likely to cook the books in favor of an album that label executives liked than the people sampled in Billboard's old formula, where reporting sources in the field clearly favored certain kinds of records.

When you're a label executive, sales are sales and you don't have to like the Spice Girls -- or Bob Dylan, for that matter -- to say that their albums are selling well for your label.

Soundscan is not the only difference in the business either. To hit No. 1, "Together Through Life" racked up sales of 125,000. Compare this with the 4 million in advance orders that propelled Garth Brooks' "Ropin' the Wind" to No. 1 in 1991. Music sales have gone through the floor in recent years, so being No. 1 ain't what it used to be when the Soundscan era began.

It's very likely that "Together Through Life" sold -- and is selling -- at about the pace that most of Bob Dylan's albums have sold throughout his nearly 50-year career. He has a loyal audience of longtime fans and a spate of younger ones added through the years. Longevity is one stat that can't be argued and, in many ways, that means more than being the oldest recording artist to have a No. 1 album -- especially since you can't truly compare stats across eras.

Copyright © 2009, Salvatore Caputo

Positively official: Bob Dylan 1966

I was in my freshman year of college, which I hate to admit was in 1970-71, when I picked up the best rock concert album I've ever heard. Nobody since, not the Sex Pistols or the Stooges, Nine Inch Nails or Kiss, has outdone the teetering-on-the-abyss urgency of Dylan's Royal Albert Hall Concert.

Now, 27 years later, long after I wore out the cheap plastic of the bootlegged double album, called Zimmerman in this particular pressing, I get to hear it without Like a Rolling Stone running out in mid-song.

The album was tucked away in the back row of a run-down record store just off campus. I had no idea what the two-LP set contained, other than it was a Dylan bootleg. I thought it would be outtakes from studio sessions.

Instead, it was a live album of what we know today was a performance by Bob Dylan at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, rather than his Albert Hall concert from the same tour.

Savvy pirates

These bootleggers were smart. The concert was in two parts -- acoustic and electric. Dylan played the acoustic part first, but the bootleggers labeled the electric part as the first disc. Good move, because as emotionally charged and wondrously sung (well, compared to the way Bob sings these days) the acoustic part was, the electric part was even more so.

Dylan and the Hawks (you know, the guys who became the Band) played the most outrageous noise ever made, before anyone made up the rules for outrageous noise. To hear himself over the noise of the band, Dylan shouted the lyrics in a manner completely different from the acoustic set or from the way he sang before. (This was the beginning of the blenderized vocals he offers these days.)

The lyrics were always the point with Dylan, but his melodies usually were more than workable. He threw all that out when performing with the Hawks behind him. Instead they played the chord progressions and Dylan bent and twisted the melodies, making mincemeat of the intellectual meaning of his words.

The boy can rage

So what? The emotional intensity of the performance carried the weight of betrayal he wrote about in I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Met). The guy was definitely feeling it on stage.

This was a mean noise, but the beat, the volume, Robbie Robertson's stinging guitar leads and the undertone of Garth Hudson's organ, made it a liberating, joyful experience too.

The bootlegged copy of the concert I bought so long ago is hard to interpret. The tension between Dylan and the audience is indecipherable. Without being able to hear the audience, I though Dylan was putting the audience on when he screamed, "I don't believe you! You're a liar!" before he went into his closing song, Like a Rolling Stone. That's one reason the belated CD version that he finally released as The Bootleg Series Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966 -- The 'Royal Albert Hall' Concert is great. Listeners can hear the fuel for Dylan's furious performance.

The second side of my bootlegged LP was so crammed with music that the bootleggers couldn't fit all of Like a Rolling Stone onto it. Rather than fade the song out, they just let the groove run into the label, sending my needle skating across it and cutting off the music in mid-rage. The complete version of the CD is better, offering a chance to hear what would become Dylan's anthem, when it was fresh and without any inkling of the warhorse it would become.

Dylan has made way too many official concert albums of fairly mediocre shows. Only After the Flood, from his "comeback" tour with the Band in 1974 comes close to the fire of the 1966 tour. (Although the short set he did on Concert for Bangla Desh shows off the gentleman farmer Dylan of the early '70s to good effect.)

Regardless, Live 1966 is the only Dylan concert album you have to have.

Copyright © 1998, Salvatore Caputo