our piano-tuner friend is getting the 88s back into shape and I am reclaiming my study from the clutter and dust. It seems - and looks - like it has be eons since I took care of business here and now it is done!One of the things I love about doing house cleaning is the way new thoughts and musical ideas bubble up around the corners of the work. As I was scrubbing the floor I found myself thinking of one of my favorite Dylan laments: Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues. It was near perfect on the Highway 61 album back in 1965 (I can still remember buying my first copy like it was yesterday) and it still rocks my world 45 years later. That album is FILLED with disturbing and wonderful songs - from the anthemic Just Like a Rolling Stone to Ballad of a Thin Man and Highway 61 Revisited. Someone said the whole thing sounds like Salvador Dali after he strapped on a Fender Stratocaster! Rock critic Bill Janovitz wrote this about Tom Thumb:
For anyone else, its extravagant imagery and literary references would make it a sophisticated, comic tour de force...the singer comes in sounding tired and telling a tale about being lost in the rain in Juárez, Mexico, at
Easter time ... [The singer] encounters shady women like Saint Annie and Sweet Melinda, as well as corrupt authorities ... drinks and drugs his way into helplessness, and having done so, declares ironically at the end, 'I'm going back to New York City / I do believe I've had enough.'" Like many songs on Highway 61 Revisited, 'Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues' is overflowing with literary references, including images recalling Malcolm Lowry's novel Under the Volcano, a street name taken from Edgar Allan Poe's short story 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' and the title's reference to Rimbaud's 'My Bohemian Life (Fantasy),' in which Rimbaud refers to himself as 'Tom Thumb in a daze.'
Over the years I've come to embrace others versions of this masterpiece, too. Many critics HATED Judy Collins' live take in 1971 - much better to me than the baroque-like version she did with recorders and a string quartet in 1966 - because it SOUNDS weary, jazzy and a bit aloof. But then there is Nina Simone's incredible reworking from 1967 (and with this video the song is so broken-hearted.)
The Grateful Dead reworked it (with Phil Lesh out front on vocals), Linda Ronstadt gave it a shake and then Bryan Ferry ROCKED its ass-off with some English soul and attitude. It is amazing to me - now that the study is cleaned - how one song can evoke so many different good interpretations for the each bring out part of the wisdom of the music.
Ok... now I'm off to do the kitchen!
Did some housework here, too, RJ. Missed the reference to Under the Volcano in Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues (will have to listen more carefully), but Lowry is a favourite of mine. I keep returning to The Forest Path to the Spring (which is Very hard to find; you might luck in in an anthology somewhere), his most hopeful and perhaps lucid work.
ReplyDeleteI am going to check Lowry out - I don't know his work in any detail - so I'll keep you posted as I find and digest it. Thanks, my man.
ReplyDeleteHey... just scored BOTH a copy of Jacob's Wound and The Forest Path to the Spring. Should be here next week: thanks for the the tips.
ReplyDeleteAwesome! I just got my own copy of "Cairo" today, along with a copy of Robert Crumb's illustrated Book of Genesis.
ReplyDelete"Forest Path to the Spring"? Wow! You ARE a 'net detective!