Midnight Cowboy is a great, somewhat dated movie and is, to date, the only X-rated movie ever to win best picture. (The stuff it got an X for in 1969 you can now see on cable TV any day of the week. X has since been replaced by NC-17.) I mention this because that movie was the first time the great majority of us had ever heard ‘Everybody’s Talkin.'” And what a great, plaintive song it was and is. There are times that I still relate to the lyrics: Everybody’s talking at me I don’t hear a word they’re saying Only the echoes of my mind People stopping, staring I can’t see their faces Only the sha ..read more

By late 1967, Bob Dylan had pretty much outgrown his “protest period.” In fact, he’d gone from folk/protest to electric back to folk/rock and country-rock. The album John Wesley Harding comes in between Blonde on Blonde and Nashville Skyline. (Discounting a greatest hits album.) According to Wikipedia: “John Wesley Harding shares many stylistic threads with and was recorded around the same time as, the prolific series of home recording sessions with The Band, partly released in 1975 as The Basement Tapes, and released in complete form in 2014 as The Bootleg Series Vol. 11: The B ..read more

Time for some new stuff. This may be the mellowest list I’ve had for a while. I’m digging everything here. Hope you do too… From his bio: “Declan O’Rourke has been crafting songs from his mid-teens, his attention snagged from the age of 13 when he was given a guitar by a priest whilst visiting Kyabram, north-central Victoria, Australia. By the time he was 24, he had returned to Ireland, landing in the middle of – and settling comfortably into – a fiercely creative music scene in Dublin that was the fertile breeding ground for the likes of Glen Hansard/The Frames, Paddy Casey, Gemma Hayes, Dami ..read more

If you stick around to the end of this one, I’ve got a couple of surprises near the end that inspired this post. (Photo by Anna Webber.)  A little history courtesy of Wikipedia: “David Van Cortlandt Crosby was born in Los Angeles, California, second son of Academy Award-winning cinematographer Floyd Crosby, and Aliph Van Cortlandt Whitehead, a salesperson at Macy’s department store. Crosby briefly studied drama at Santa Barbara City College before dropping out to pursue a career in music. With the help of producer Jim Dickson, Crosby recorded his first solo session in 1963. Hang ..read more

I didn’t have the slightest idea that today was Bob Dylan’s 80th until I read the news today oh boy. So I am woefully unprepared but Christian pulled together a nice list and tribute. And then something interesting arrived. I am no longer a Rolling Stone subscriber. But I do receive their newsletter. RS has for years treated Dylan as the messiah he did not ever want to be. In service of that, over the years they published quite a few interviews, lists, reviews – you name it. If you read all this it should add appreciably to your useless and pointless knowledge. And thoughtfully – not a word on ..read more

“People think that fame and riches translate into power, that it brings glory and honor and happiness. Maybe it does, but sometimes it doesn’t. I found myself stuck in Woodstock with a family to protect. It seems like the world has always needed a scapegoat – someone to lead the charge against the Roman Empire. But America wasn’t the Roman Empire and someone else would have to step up and volunteer. I really was never any more than what I was – a folk musician who gazed into the gray mist with tear-blinded eyes and made up songs that floated in a luminous haze. Now it had blown up in my face a ..read more

Not sure exactly what made me think of this album. Maybe it was due to the recent perusal of Rolling Stone’s latest Top 500 Albums. At number 60, RS says this: “Astral Weeks was the sound of sweet relief. Van Morrison was newly signed to artist-friendly Warner Bros., after a rough ride with his previous U.S. label, Bang, when he made Astral Weeks in the summer of 1968. He used the opportunity to explore the physical and dramatic range of his voice in his extended poetic-scat singing, setting hallucinatory reveries about his native Belfast (the daydream memoir “Cypress Avenue,” t ..read more

I slapped some headphones on and listened to some Gordon Lightfoot – I think it was “The Circle is Small” – and what’s left of my tiny brain made an instant connection that I had never made before – James Taylor. They both have a nice, smooth easygoing voice and traffic in folk and soft-rock sounds. Here’s six by Gordo, Wikipedia: “Gordon Meredith Lightfoot Jr. CC Order of Ontario (born November 17, 1938) is a Canadian singer-songwriter and guitarist who achieved international success in folk, folk-rock, and country music. He is credited with helping to define the  ..read more

Now the first of December was covered with snow And so was the turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston Though the Berkshires seemed dreamlike on account of that frosting With ten miles behind me and ten thousand more to go Encyclopedia.com: Veteran performer James Taylor ushered in the singer/songwriter movement in the early 1970s and refined his style over the course of three decades, all the while maintaining the distinct musical craftsmanship that had led to his early success. Taylor appeared on the cover of Time in 1971 and was touted by the magazine as the originator of the singer/songwriter ..read more

“It’s beautiful music when the thunder rolls.” – Native American Rolling Thunder, as quoted in the film.  Wikipedia: “The Rolling Thunder Revue was a concert tour by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan with numerous musicians and previous collaborators. (Dylan drives the bus! -ME). The purpose of the tour was to allow Dylan, who had now become a major recording artist and concert performer, to play in smaller auditoriums in less populated cities where he could be more intimate with his audiences. Some of the performers on the tour were Joan Baez, Roger McGuinn, Joni Mitchell, Ronee Blake ..read more