By Don Jacobson

We’re getting to know the inscrutable Bob Dylan a little better each week as his Theme Time Radio Hour continues through its first month on XM Satellite Radio. Not that he gives us any heart-to-heart, Oprah-style public soul-searching, and that’s probably a good thing, all told. I’m really past the point of caring about that anyway – whatever I may discover now about how he thinks isn’t going to change my life like it may have 30 years ago. In fact, it could probably only lower him in my estimation, and God knows I need to hang on to whatever tattered bits of idealism I have left from my so-called youth.
Instead, Bob continues to let us know him through poetry and music. That’s how it should be. After theme shows about the weather, mothers, drinking and now baseball, I’m really beginning to think Dylan is just a regular ol’ guy at heart. Mom? Booze? Baseball? Hell, sounds like my life. After listening to his shows, I’m becoming convinced that Dylan’s godlike aura came about largely because of his refusal to deal with the voracious publicity machine rather than from any kind of mystical superiority. (See? That’s just the kind of thing I didn’t need to know, dammit! I want to worship my heroes, not go bowling with them!)
However, I’m finding my attempts at describing Dylan’s radio shtick to be insufficient. Nothing I can say can quite capture it. So I’m going to just give up and let those of you who are too cheap to go out and get XM Radio for yourselves to read a transcript of his baseball theme show in late May.

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Posted on May 31, 2006

By Scott Gordon

They gave up the secrets of the atom, but can they give up the funk?
George Clinton and his P-Funk All-Stars headlined this year’s Summer Breeze, the University of Chicago’s annual private outdoor party, on Saturday night. One thing to avoid here, because it’s misleading, is the funk-dork comparison. Saturday was the first time I’d ever seen a Wikipedia T-shirt, a Very Large Array T-shirt, or a “The Gates” t-shirt, but the truth is that even students at a prestigious university have a way of melding nerdiness into passable coolness. On the U of C’s campus, one sees all the normal college types, from the squirmy dork types to the kinda-skanky precocious beauties, and lots of neutral-looking cargo shorts-and-sandals boys and casually dignified girls in between. Remember, most of these people had to survive high school.
Walking around the campus before the show opened, I felt like I was on any one of the other college campuses I’ve visited. Students lined up at booths to buy hamburgers and get their faces painted, or played around in a few of those inflatable bounce-houses (see, even U of C kids can act like toddlers!). A couple of students pranced around on a small stage and sang to some pre-recorded beats (think Dismemberment Plan and Postal Service collaborating after a severe stroke). I sat down in a nearby quad and soon got hit with a Frisbee.
As students started filtering in to the courtyard, the familiarity hit me even harder, beaming me so many weeks back to my own college days. Here were all the personality and style staples, churning my memory: The guy in flattened dreds and a Jack Johnson T-shirt; guys my age wearing deck shoes; the budding politician in chinos and a conservative dress shirt; scruffy young men greeting each other with muscular, stiff-backed handshakes. As a student at Northwestern, I used to take them for granted, especially at the annual Dillo Day outdoor concert and smaller concert-hall performances by artists like Rufus Wainwright. As sometimes happened at Northwestern, the U of C’s activities board adamantly kept Summer Breeze private, even refusing outside press (I ended up buying a ticket through a student), and only now did I understand the result: A concert full of people who didn’t seem to belong at concerts.

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Posted on May 23, 2006

By Don Jacobson

Whenever I see four guys on stage wearing suits, I can’t help thinking about the Fab Four, with their ultratight action slacks and their skinny ties. And of course the Beatle boots. Funny how rock bands went so quickly from wearing suits to representing everything that was not about suits.
Of course, in country music suits and boots meant something different in the 1960s. It meant the Nashville/Opry thing where dressing up was a statement that you were a real American and certainly not a hippie. It also meant you were upwardly mobile and striving for the mainstream status that that type of sucky corporate country music unfortunately now enjoys – although even there, the suits were jettisoned sometime in the 80s in favor of carefully chosen, faux-cowboy big hats and scrupulously white muscle T’s.
So what to make of a suit-wearing country band nowadays? In the case of Raleigh, North Carolina’s Chatham County Line, the nice threads and ties seem to be the visual manifestation of the band’s utter seriousness about traditional bluegrass music. That seriousness, expressed in throwback virtuoso musicianship on the fiddle, mandolin, banjo, upright bass, and pedal steel, is not-too-subtly mixed with an alt-country acoustic rock streak, a la the Byrds of the Sweetheart of the Rodeo days.

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Posted on May 17, 2006

By Tim Willette

Air and and and at
banner bombs brave bright broad
bursting by can dawn’s does
early fight flag free gallant-
ly gave glare gleaming hailed
home in land last light night
o o o’er o’er of of
our perilous proof proudly
ramparts red rockets say
say see so so stars star-
spangled still streaming
stripes that that the the the
the the the the the the the
the there through through
twilight’s was watched wave we
we were what whose yet you

Posted on May 11, 2006

By Don Jacobson

Cue the thunder and the sound of rain splashing on concrete. A husky-voiced, female announcer says:
“It’s nighttime in the big city. Rain is falling. Fog rolls in from the waterfront. A night shift nurse smokes the last cigarette in her pack. It’s Theme Time Radio Hour, with your host Bob Dylan.”
Then comes that irreplaceable, raspy, moody voice: “It’s time for Theme Time Radio Hour – dreams, schemes and themes.”
And Bob is on the air.

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Posted on May 4, 2006

By Scott Gordon

Let’s not talk about Perry Farrell’s merely respectable taste in arranging the 2003 Lollapalooza tour. The way I see it, The Music and Queens of the Stone Age (and of course Jane’s Addiction) were true live treasures, but Incubus was mostly just good for selling tickets to teenage girls. Let’s talk instead about my impeccable judgment in choosing 13 tracks for a mix tape my friends and I listened to on our way from Seminole County, Florida, to the tour’s stop in West Palm Beach one sultry August day. Like Lolla itself, it was a judicious balancing of the weird and the accessible.
Something Better Change (The Stranglers, from Greatest Hits 1977-1990)
If the Mod kid of The Who’s Quadrophenia hadn’t been channeled through Pete Townshend and his strange Eastern dabblings, he would write a song like this. It’s a giddy blast of snotfaced aggression and souped-up Farfisa organs. Get out your cheap amphetamines and dancin’ shoes!
Wave of Mutilation (The Pixies, from Doolittle)
Hey, look, I included one artist who was at Lollapalooza. Two years later.
Ain’t That Nothin’ (Television, from Adventure)
Television could build songs on the most convoluted and bizarre riffs, or, as in this song, ridiculously simple patterns. Richard Lloyd, as usual, lays down a dizzying, bluesy solo without sounding like a failed Jimmy Page imitator.

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Posted on May 1, 2006

By Don Jacobson

When I think of the very first wave of early 1980s alternative rock groups – the first inkling that there was something beyond the Bon Jovi/Pat Benatar/Van Halen axis of radio evil – I think, of course, of the Replacements. To me, they were the eye-openers, blasting out of the Twin Cities with something akin to a righteous fury, totally rejecting the stranglehold corporations had put on the music industry.
But now that I think of it, right behind them out of Boston came the Del Fuegos. I bought and loved their Boston, Mass. album on Slash Records, which I think made me realize that alt-rock was bigger than just one group: It was a movement. Brothers Dan and Warren Zanes of the Fuegos (as well as their big admirer Tom Petty) quickly did for alt-rock’s interpretation of garage roots music what the Replacements for its take on punk – redefined it for decades to come.
Still, until I picked up a copy of Warren Zanes’ new solo album, People That I’m Wrong For, on Dualtone Records, I hadn’t thought about them for many years. They and the Replacements both set the pattern for that first splash of great alt-rock bands by blazing to glory around 1984 or so, then signing with major labels, earning snide catcalls of “sellout,” becoming commercial flops and shortly thereafter petering out as spent forces.

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Posted on May 1, 2006