Talking Highway 61 Revisited-My Take on Bob Dylan’s Iconic Album from 1965

So, I've been doing a lot of recording today, and I actually finished all the songs for Highway 61 Revisited, the 1965 album, which is considered the landmark album in Bob Dylan's career. And it has some of his most iconic songs on it. It's got that rock and roll vibe because he was working with Mike Bloomfield from the Paul Butterfield Band, and Al Kooper playing that famous keyboard riff on Like a Rolling Stone.

If you watch A Complete Unknown, you'll know what I'm talking about. They do a pretty faithful representation of the making of those songs. And it's got, of course, Like a Rolling Stone, which is one of the most iconic songs of the 60s, let alone in Bob Dylan's career, but kind of a song that defines the 60s.

And that's one of my go-to songs. I love playing that song. It's a great song.

It's got fantastic lyrics and imagery, but it's tight. It's kind of like all that stream of consciousness and the experimentation he had on his previous album, bringing it all back home, kind of gets tighter and locked in a groove because of the work that he's doing with his bandmates, the blues band. And it just feels more like a rock and roll song.

So Like a Rolling Stone. If we go through all these songs, again, maybe it's better if I grab this book, the lyrics, rather than this book, which is a chord song book. And it's great to play with, to play the songs with, but the lyrics are a little bit small in this one.

Much easier to read if you're going to go through a Bob Dylan album and look at the songs. This is a much better book to choose. Bob Dylan, The Lyrics.

And we're already on page... I forgot about Farewell Angelina. I was going to cover that one, but maybe later. We're already on page 165, Highway 61 Revisited.

And this is, of course, the iconic album cover, or at least part of it. It's a close-up of Bob Dylan, his face on the iconic album cover. And behind him, I'll just put this up on the video, but show you the cover.

But you see Bob Dylan looking very kind of, kind of emo. I mean, I guess Timothee Chalamet kind of captured that aspect of him pretty well in the movie, in this phase of his career. Looking pretty tough, like, “don't fuck with me.”

He's got he's got a motorcycle t-shirt on. He's already been riding a motorcycle with a leather jacket. It's kind of, I don't know, his James Dean phase, his Marlon Brando phase.

Who knows? But, you know, behind him in the cover photo, I actually looked this up today to prepare, but behind him is Bobby Neuwirth, who was another musician who became a good friend of his. And he's portrayed in the film as well, A Complete Unknown. So if you've seen the film, Bobby Neuwirth and Bob Dylan are hanging out a lot in the, I'd say, the last third of the film, and getting into trouble together and so on.

So you can't see all of Bobby Neuwirth. You can't see his face, but he's holding a camera, or at least he's got a camera. Yeah, I think he's holding a camera.

And he's got this striped kind of Sailor's t-shirt on in the background. So kind of a mysterious figure who you'd only know who it is if you look it up. But I don't think we need to, I don't have the album with me at the moment.

So I don't think we need to do a deep dive into the album cover or anything. That's all you need to know for now. And it starts out with Like a Rolling Stone.

So I don't know if it's worth going through all these lyrics in detail. I think Like a Rolling Stone is such a well-known song. Who is he addressing, I guess, is one of the questions.

Once upon a time he dressed so fine through the bums of dime. People said, hey, beware doll. So it's a woman.

He's often addressing a woman in his songs. Seems like it would, yeah, I mean, Miss Lonely, obviously it's a woman. It seems to be a woman who was from a kind of privileged background, but sort of maybe is down on her luck, has to live on the street, deal with the bums and the vagabonds and the mystery tramps.

And then the song just gets more and more surreal as it goes. You used to ride a chrome horse with the diplomat who carried on his shoulder a Siamese cat. I mean, he's just, I don't know if you can really make sense of some of these lines.

I mean, some of them make sense. Some of them don't. I never quite got the reference to the diplomat on the chrome horse.

Pretty people drinking, thinking they got it made. It sounds almost like David Bowie. It reminds me of like David Bowie 10 years later, Changes and that kind of thing.

And David Bowie obviously was greatly influenced by Bob Dylan. So yeah, you better lift your diamond ring. You better pawn it, babe.

Used to be so amused at Napoleon in rags and the language that he used. Again, Napoleon. But he keeps dropping these sort of famous figures or characters from literature, characters from novels, characters from musicals, biblical characters, all sorts of characters get dropped into his songs.

So it's no surprise that Napoleon and rags. Who is that? We don't know. Another bum.

You know, it's hard to say. A drug dealer. Who knows what these references are? Does Bob Dylan even know? Is there any definitive sort of understanding of these songs? I don't think so.

That's what makes them fun. They're kind of this poetry that is very hard to pin down, but that gives you certain feelings and the characters give you kind of certain associations. Then we got Tombstone Blues, which is a fun, upbeat blues song.

And you know, blues is the baseline of this whole album because it was a blues band that he was working with. It was kind of rock and roll sounding folk music rooted in the blues. So the lyrics sound very kind of it's his style of folk poetry going back to sort of his his influence with, you know, Woody Guthrie and all the great folk generation songwriters.

And then he's also deeply rooted in the blues. There's a lot of blues, both in structure and form and in the contents of the lyrics in this album. And then there's the rock and roll elements.

So it's really a combination of all those going into this album. Tombstone Blues. Paul Revere's Horse, the Ghost of Bell Star, Jezebel.

He's just throwing names at you. Jack the Ripper. So, you know, this is something that he's doing more and more.

You really see it in this album. He's just throwing one famous name or, you know, reference at you after another and letting you kind of digest them and figure out what he means by all this. And that's the one with the refrain, Mama's in the factory. She ain't got no shoes. Daddy's in the alley. He's looking for the fuse. I'm in the streets with the Tombstone Blues. So again, kind of reference to maybe working class people, people down on their luck. This is the song where he references John the Baptist.

John the Baptist, after torturing a thief, looks up at his hero, the commander in chief, saying, Tell me, great hero, but please make it brief. Is there a hole for me to get sick in? Again, you know, his weird and wacky touches of humor pepper these songs. And of course, that's the next verse.

It ends with the sun's not yellow, it's chicken, which is one of the most memorable lines from this song. So yeah, that's a fun one. Ma Rainey and Beethoven.

I mean, he's just throwing these cultural references at you one after another and letting you catch up. And then there's kind of a quaint song.

It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry.

It's another very bluesy song. Riding on the mail train, baby, can't buy a thrill. A little bit cliche, not the most memorable song in this collection.

It almost feels like, along with the last album, Bringing It All Back Home, he kind of uses these more standard blues songs as kind of a little filler in between his more memorable songs. Anything particularly memorable or remarkable about this song other than the title, the wintertime is coming, the windows are filled with frost. I want to be your lover, baby, I don't want to be your boss.

I mean, it's not his best songwriting. So the album in that sense, maybe a little bit uneven. If you were to rate this album by every song, there are some songs that really stand out that are among his best songs ever written, in my opinion, the opinion of a lot of people.

And then there's others that are a little bit more forgettable. From a Buick Six, again, I mean, I've got a graveyard woman, you know, she keeps my kid, but my soulful mama, you know, she keeps me hid. So it's, again, kind of a ripping off various blues songs to kind of create this tune.

A steam shovel to keep away the dead, I need a dump truck mama to unload my head. You know, she's bound to put a blanket on my bed. So it's a very, like, standard blues song with a lot of references or a lot of homages to more traditional blues songs.

So he's, again, kind of paying homage to the blues tradition in America with these two songs. But they're not very remarkable. I, like, learned them for the first time today, at least learned the lyrics.

I never really paid much attention to them. Whereas the next song, Ballad of a Thin Man, is, again, one of his most famous songs. It's such an iconic song, you know, about Mr. Jones.

There's something happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones? I mean, everything about this song, the music, it's got this very sort of creepy, loungy feel to the music. The Mr. Jones character, who kind of a stand-in for the everyman, you know, doesn't really get what's happening with, it could be the counterculture, with what's happening in politics, what's happening in, you know, in the world. But he just, again, peppers the song with all sorts of strange, bizarre characters that feel like they come out of a freak show or a carnival of sorts, like lumberjacks, professors.

You've been with the professors, they all liked your looks. With great lawyers, you've discussed lepers and crooks. You've been through all of F. Scott Fitzgerald's books.

There he is, just dumping another cultural reference on you. A sword swallower. Somewhere in here, there's a geek that eats chickens, live chickens.

A one-eyed midget. So it's a very kind of freak show, sort of carnival feel to it. I think they captured it quite well in that film, I'm Not There.

That was a great scene in the film, I'm Not There. And then there's Queen Jane, Approximately. Your mother sends back all your invitations.

Your father to his sister explains, you're tired of yourself. Won't you come see me, Queen Jane? Won't you come see me, Queen Jane? So it's got kind of a more traditional refrain. It feels a little bit more like a standard pop song.

The flower ladies, the smell of their roses. It feels, this song feels a little bit more tangible in terms of his imagery and the refrain. It's like there's some meaning here.

Your advisors, the clowns that you have commissioned, your bandits. I mean, it seems that Queen Jane is this powerful woman who has all these people at her beck and call, and they're giving her, supporting her and giving her advice. But maybe they're not doing a great job with it.

The clowns have died in battle or in vain. The advisors heave their plastic at your feet to convince you of their pain. The bandits that you turn your other cheek to lay down their bandanas and complain.

So there, it's interesting. There's a, there's a rhyme throughout, through each verse. The, you know, explains, remain, in vain, your pain, complain.

And that's the only, and obviously that rhymes with Queen Jane. And, and that's the only rhyme you really get in the whole, oh no, that's not true. You have invitations, creations, lent you, resent you.

So, so this, sorry, I take it back. The rhyme form is A, B, A, B, B for each verse. So invitations, explains, creations, Queen Jane, Queen Jane.

Because the refrain or the chorus, whatever you want to call it, is repeated. So it does have a very kind of conventional structure, a pop sound. It's a really tight, good, and, and I'd say memorable song, Queen Jane, Approximately.

It's definitely one of the better songs. But it's, it's not up there with, you know, his most famous ones from this album. Like Highway 61 Revisited, the eponymous song on the album, just starts with such a, a powerful verse.

God said to Abraham, kill me a son. Abe says, man, you must be putting me on. God says, no. Abe says, what? God say, you can do what you want, Abe, but next time you see me coming, you better run. Abe says, where do you want this killing done? God says, out on Highway 61. So obviously that's the biblical reference to the story of Abraham and his son Isaac.

Abraham going up the mountain to sacrifice his son Isaac because God commanded it. And, and at last the, the angel intervenes. He was just showing, he was just forcing, or not forcing, compelling, what's the word, Abraham to show his faith in God by agreeing to sacrifice his son.

So it's one of those very powerful stories from the Old Testament. Why does he start with that, that story? And then he goes into other little stories about criminals and, I don't know, people kind of down and out, all converging on Highway 61. And I'm not sure what the fifth daughter on the twelfth night is all about exactly, the roving gambler.

So a lot of sort of nefarious characters all kind of converging on Highway 61, which of course was the highway going all the way from Minnesota, where Bob Dylan grew up, all the way down south to Mississippi. So it's the famous highway of, that kind of bisects America. And, and you could say it was a, it was a highway for the blues to, a conduit for the blues to, to come up north from the American south and so forth.

So it's a very legendary highway. It's a very, obviously it's deeply connected to the story of the blues, which is the baseline, as I said, for this album. And then we have, but then, you know, how does that relate to Abraham and Isaac? Again, that's up for speculation, right? Why does, why does Bob Dylan use this kind of biblical story? And it's interesting that Leonard Cohen also wrote a song about that story, the Story of Isaacfrom the perspective of the son.

So both of them, both Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan were deeply steeped in and, and, and certainly used Biblical stories throughout their, their songwriting careers. And then we have Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues, which seems to be another kind of down and out song. It's, it's not quite a blues form, and it's a little bit more melodic than a typical blues, but it really, it does tell a story.

You're lost in the rain in Juarez and it's Easter time too. And it seems to be about a man who's down in Mexico and visiting brothels. Rue Morgue Avenue, if you see St. Annie, tell her thanks a lot.

Sweet Melinda, the peasants call her the goddess of gloom. She takes you to her room and takes your voice and leaves you howling at the moon. That's a great line.

Up on housing project hill, it's fortune or fame. Cops don't need you. Man, they expect the same.

So there's authorities, there's sergeant at arms. There's a lot of characters also appear in this, in this song. And then finally it turns into the first person.

I started out on burgundy, but soon hit the harder stuff. Everybody said they stand behind me when the game got rough, but the joke was on me. There was nobody even there to call my bluff.

I'm going back to New York city. I do believe I've had enough. Interesting that the song, all the verses are, you know, more second person talking about you, you this, you that.

And then finally it ends on the first person.

Desolation Row, definitely one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs. And I did at one point memorize this entire song, all 10 verses.

Probably could, could get it back with a little practice. There was so many great lines in this song, so many memorable characters. And it just feels like a song as you, especially if you, if you try to memorize it, you can, your brain starts putting together a story, starts kind of creating a story out of it.

It does seem rather nonsensical at first, but it kind of makes sense. It's one of those things, it's like a dream. It's a lot of these songs from this phase in Dylan's career.

It's like a dream. It kind of makes sense and yet it kind of doesn't, right? So it's sort of on walking a tightrope between something that's meaningful and something that's nonsensical. In the first verse, one of the characters is a tightrope walker.

The blind commissioner, one hand is tied to the tightrope walker, the other's in his pants, whatever that means. So, so many characters, so many, again, just dropping name after name. Cinderella is one of the characters in the second verse.

She puts her hands in her pockets, Betty Davis style, and then Romeo comes in. So we have Cinderella, we have Romeo. They all seem to be connected to this mysterious place, Desolation Row, which again connects to Highway 61.

It connects to all the imagery of the blues and all the legends, selling your soul to the devil like Robert Johnson on the crossroads. There are just so many characters that seem to be on the fringes in this whole album that are down on their luck or they've hit the skids. Skid Row, that kind of, you know, is Desolation Row, similar to Skid Row.

Maybe it's the American West, the mythology. Again, he's definitely exploring and excavating American mythology, but it's also, you know, he's making so many references to modern literature. It's just such a rich pastiche of imagery and characters.

This song alone, not to mention the whole album. Fortune-telling ladies, that seems to be another trope of his that comes up very often in his songs, a fortune-telling lady, a gypsy reading your palm. Cain and Abel, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the Good Samaritan, Ophelia, Einstein, Dr. Filth, who knows what that's about.

Phantom of the Opera, Casanova. I'm just looking for specific names of characters that people would recognize here. Nero, Nero's Neptune, the Titanic, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, the two great modernist poets of the early 20th century.

You could, again, like if somebody could write a whole book just about this song, I feel probably somebody has done that. I'm sure there are many YouTube videos where people try to dissect this song. It's just there's so many possibilities of how to interpret it, how to read the meaning in each verse and each character and so on.

Very, very rich song. A lot of these songs are kind of deceivingly simple, at least in terms of in terms of the music, you know, maybe just three chords. It's usually just a one, four and a five chord.

So again, going back to the blues roots, you know, a one, four and a five chord. You can tell infinite stories just with those three chords. Nine, yeah, nine songs.

There are nine songs on the album. So we covered all the songs that are on the album. So, yeah, I mean, I think that these three albums, right, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited.

And then the next album that I'm going to cover might take a little while, but we'll see, is Blonde on Blonde. I think those three are the triumvirate. They are, you know, mark kind of the high point in his career as a young songwriter.

It doesn't get any better than those three albums. I mean, yes, he gets more mature. He continues to explore.

He continues to take lyrical and musical journeys. I still think Blood on the Tracks is in many ways his best album, but it doesn't really get any better than these three albums. I think in a way he kind of reaches his pinnacle as a songwriter with these three albums.

Everything else that he does is, yeah, some of it can match up to those albums, but doesn't really get better. I think everybody who is a fan of Bob Dylan acknowledges that these three albums are the high point of his career. And after that, he's, you know, he's created this incredible legacy of songs and characters.

And then I think for the rest of his career, he's going off on tangents, but he's also kind of defending his legacy as the great songwriter. The Muhammad Ali of songwriting, right? He's the like the world champion songwriter at that point. And he's just keeps, you know, it's interesting that to note that some of these songs on Highway 61 Revisited, he would continue to play for the rest of his career in concerts.

And I think Like a Rolling Stone is one of the most played songs in his career live. Also Ballad of a Thin Man, Highway 61 Revisited. Those are all songs that he plays very frequently.

So it's kind of like, you know, if we're to make an analogy with the Beatles, it's like Paul McCartney with Yesterday, Hey Jude, Blackbird. You know, he reached the pinnacle of his songwriting with those songs. And for the rest of his career, he's going to play those songs to audiences, whether he likes it or not, because that's what they demand.

That's what they want to hear. It's been a great experience recording these songs. Once we get through Blonde on Blonde, we're getting into, for me, some kind of foreign territory.

I don't know his music after Blonde on Blonde as well until we get to Blood on the Tracks, of course. And I know that album quite well. So it's going to be a real journey, a real adventure.

I hope you stay along for the ride. And I'm pretty exhausted. It's been a long day of filming and recording songs.

And so I'm going to say goodnight.

Reading Philip Larkin’s Poems “Reasons for Attendance” and “Dry Point”

Today [for my random poems series] I have chosen Philip Larkin, The Complete Poems. So, who was Philip Larkin? We'll talk about who he was and what his style was, but let's read a couple of poems first. These are short poems, so I'm going to read a couple of them.

This is Philip Larkin, from The Less Deceived, “Reasons for Attendance.”

[note that the transcript of my reading of the poem renders the format different to the original and there may be different spellings for certain words]

 The trumpet's voice, loud and authoritative, draws me a moment to the lighted glass, to watch the dancers, all under twenty-five, shifting intently, face to flushed face, solemnly on the beat of happiness. Or so I fancy, sensing the smoke and sweat, the wonderful feel of girls.

Why be out here, but then why be in there? Sex, yes, but what is sex? Surely to think the lion's share of happiness is found by couples. Sheer inaccuracy, as far as I'm concerned. What calls me is that lifted, rough-tongued bell, art, if you like, whose individual sound insists I too am individual.

It speaks, I hear, others may hear as well, but not for me, nor I for them. And so with happiness, therefore I stay outside, believing this, and they maul to and fro, believing that, and both are satisfied, if no one has misjudged himself or lied.

This book of poetry was published in 1954, and according to scholars, this marks his maturity as a poet.

He was born in 1922, so he would have been in his 30s, early 30s at this time. And the poem tells a story that he's, not really a story, but just a little vignette in his life. He's looking through a glass window at what's obviously a dance party, like a jazz dance party, because it starts with trumpets, right? The trumpet's voice, loud and authoritative.

And the trumpet figures throughout the poem. Later, he calls it a rough-tongued bell, whose individual sound insists I too am individual. So he's drawn to the music.

He's drawn especially to the sound of the trumpet. He must have been somewhat into jazz at that time. There are references to famous songs in the poem, but not for me.

This is after World War II, right? So it's kind of in the flush of post-World War II victory and yet devastation, people trying to find happiness where they can. In England, which of course was devastated by the war, and everybody's on rations, it's a difficult time. He comes from a sort of maybe middle-class, upper-middle-class family.

He was born in 1922, and he did go to Oxford. You can tell that he's very well-educated in his poems, a lot of literary references. He's trying to find a distinctively modern voice here.

There's definitely rhyming in this poem, and yet a kind of modern feel to it as well. So he obviously respects the classical tradition. He's familiar with the classics of literature, but he's trying to reach beyond.

But it's not ultra-modern. It's still I think kind of Brahmsian in that it's modern, but it's still structured by tradition. The theme of the poem seems to be that he's looking dispassionately at a very passionate scene.

You have young men and women dancing together to the sounds of jazz. This is right before the rock and roll revolution, so they're all dancing tightly, closely. There's smoke and sweat.

You can kind of sense the hormones flowing. So it's really kind of a dance club scene that seems to have taken place in some kind of student environment. He was a librarian, I believe.

Not that that has anything directly to do with this, but he seems to be making a comment on the allure of sexual attraction, the passion and the heat versus the dispassionate observer. As a scholar of nightlife, I can kind of identify with this poem. It's interesting that coincidence drew me to it, but not for me nor I for them.

And so with happiness, therefore I stay outside. So even though he's aged out of this scene, he makes a point that the young people in this scene are all under 25 and he's in his early 30s. So he's definitely not the same age group, probably wouldn't have the same pull as the young men.

Young people tend to be attracted to each other. Only in rare cases would they be attracted to older people. And that's, I suppose, the natural state of things as he alludes to.

This is nature, this is the forces of nature's sexual attraction, that we are drawn to each other through our innate sexual attraction for each other. But can this lead to happiness? He seems very doubtful, very skeptical. And I think that explains the title of the book, The Less Deceived.

Yeah, this is a very interesting poem. It's a poem that you can read through a few times and get more out of it. It's almost like a conversation, like he's talking to you.

It's not quite... you know, it sort of hovers between poetic language and conversational language. Why be out here? But then why be in there? Sex? Yes, but what is sex? So I think he's contemplating, he's talking to himself, he's talking to the audience. He's trying to make a point about maybe abstention.

That seems to be a theme in his poetry. I know that he never got married. He had some relationships with other women, some long-term relations, but he was a passionate disbeliever in marriage, as you can see from some of his other poems.

This one too, he says at one point, surely to think the lion's share of happiness is found by couples, sheer inaccuracy as far as I'm concerned. So marriage or coupling does not necessarily lead to happiness, probably leads to the opposite over time.

And then there's this other poem here, “Dry Point,” which is interesting.

Endlessly, time-honored irritant, a bubble is restively forming at your tip. Burst it as fast as we can, it will grow again until we begin dying. Silently it inflates till we're enclosed and forced to start the struggle to get out.

Bestial, intent, real. The wet spark comes, the bright blown walls collapse. But what sad scapes we cannot turn from them.

What ashen hills, what salted shrunken lakes, how leaden the ring looks. Birmingham magic all discredited. And how remote that barren sun-scrubbed room, intensely far that padlocked cube of light, we neither define nor prove.

Where you, we dream, obtain no right of entry.

A bit of a mysterious poem, but if you read the commentary, because one nice thing about this collection of Philip Larkin's poems is that it has extensive and very scholarly annotations and commentary in the back. So actually, there is more commentary than there are poems, I think, in this book.

It's one of those kind of books, very scholarly. So if we read the commentary, it's about sex. It's about how sex dominates our lives.

That's what he, the poet himself, said to a friend. “I get endless trouble about Dry Point. School girls write to me about it, and I have to explain that originally it was one of two poems about sex and that modesty forbids me to say any more.

“Dry Point is saying how awful sex is and how we want to get away from it.” I think what you can see in this poem is he calls it an irritant. So it's the sexual desire kind of bubbles up inside of us like an irritant, and the bubble keeps building until it explodes, maybe with a sexual climax, and then it begins again, right? So it never ends.

It's something that's always in us, wanting to get out, and then gets out, collapses, dies, and then starts up again. It's kind of the rhythms of life. So it definitely connects to the other poem I just read, “Reasons for Attendance.”

So both of them are about the lure of sexual attraction, but also the fantasy, the illusion that this will lead to happiness. This is not just some kind of innate state. What sad scapes we cannot turn from them, what ashen hills, what salted shrunken lakes.

It sounds very much like Keats, doesn't it? It's like one of Keats' odes, but it's much more, I suppose, modern and cynical than that, than Keats. Yeah, so these are two of Philip Larkin's poems from the bursting of his maturity as a poet from The Less Deceived, and reading these poems and analyzing them definitely makes me want to read more of Philip Larkin. I think he has an interesting and rather unique voice in English poetry, and that's what this project is all about, is trying to dig deeper into poetry and trying to form a better appreciation of the great poets of modern and maybe even ancient times.

Who knows? I have a lot of books of poetry. I've recently expanded my collection, and looking forward to digging into more poems with you again. We'll see how far we can go with this little project of mine.

Reading Paul Muldoon's Poem, "At the Sign of the Black Horse, September 1999"

Following is a transcript of the podcast video I made reading this poem by Paul Muldoon and then discussing its meaning and significance.

G'day everybody, welcome back to my series on random poems. So I've chosen a book of poems from my collection. This is Paul Muldoon, Selected Poems 1968 to 2014.

And as you can, as you might be able to guess from his name, well you wouldn't be able to guess, but he's Irish. Certainly you could guess that he's of Irish heritage. And let's just read a little bit from the inner jacket here.

Paul Muldoon's Selected Poems 1968 to 2014 presents 45 years of work drawn from 12 collections by a poet who began as a prodigy and has gone on to become a virtuoso. Says Michael Hoffman. Hailed by Seamus Heaney, that was the last poet I read, as one of the era's true originals, Muldoon seems almost to defy definition in his work.

Nevertheless, this selection, chosen by the poet himself, will serve new readers as an indispensable introduction to his trademark combination of intellectual hijinks and emotional honesty. And for those readers already familiar with his work, the volume provides a panoramic glance across the meteoric career of a poet who performs high above the regular traffic of poetry, Sunday Times. So I opened it up to this poem, and it's a rather long poem, but you know, as per the rules, that's the poem that I opened up to.

So I'm going to read the entire poem, and it's called “At the Sign of the Black Horse, September 1999.”[the formatting of the poem below is different from the original, and some words may be spelled differently due to the transcription. For all purposes academic or otherwise, please look up the original poem]

Awesome the morning after Hurricane Floyd to sit out in our driveway and gawk at yet another canoe or kayak coming down Canal Road, now under 10 feet of water. We've wheeled to the brim of the old Biltright pram in which, wrapped in a shawl of Carrick macross, lace, and a bonnet of his great-grandmother Sophie's finest needlepoint, Asher sleeps on, as likely as any of us to find a way across, the mill race on which logs, trees more than logs, are borne along, to which the houses down by the old Griggstown locks have given up their inventory.

I'm happy for once to be left high and dry, happy that the house I may yet bring myself to call mine is set on a 250-year-old slab, happy that, if need be, we might bundle a few belongings into a pillow slip and climb the hill and escape. Please examine your change to a place where the soul might indeed recover radical innocence. A police launch maneuvering by brought-back troops on maneuver.

Some child kin of my children dipping a stale crust in his bowl of kale while listening to his parents complain about the cost of running a household. In the Poland of the 1930s, the child who, please hold, a peaked cap would shortly accost for the whereabouts of his uncle, the sofa. Awesome, however stormy yesterday's weather, to calmly don a safari hat that somewhat matches my safari coat, and determine, as I am, to make the most of the power cut here on Ararat.

Tear another leaf from Edward Bulliard Lytton's King Poppy to light the barbecue. The barbecue, shortly to be laden with Dorothy's favorite medallions of young rat and white-lipped peccary taken this morning, not with old-fashioned piano wire but the latest in traps, I'll rake the ashes of the fire on which they'll cook, no turn on red, and watch the Mediterranean do its level best to meet the caribon, as Dorothy pronounced it once, on Canal Road, no way out, having taken down from the attic the ancient underwood with the one remaining black ribbon, and set up a shop in a corner of the garage. When we wheeled the old biltrite baby carriage to the brink this morning, I was awestruck to see in Asher's glabrous face a slew of interlopers, not from Magary, as I might have expected, or Magara, or Magarafelt, though my connections there are now few and far between, but the likes of that kale-eating child on whom the peaked cap verboten would shortly pin a star of yellow felt, having accosted him on the mosaic, proscription, please secure your own oxygen mask before attending to children, on the eating of white-lipped peccary. 

Just one step ahead of the police launch, meanwhile, a 1920 Studebaker had come down Canal Road, do not fill above this line, carrying another relative, Arnold Rothstein, the brain behind the running during prohibition of grain alcohol into the states, his shirt the very same day-glo green of chlorophyll. On the surface of a cattle bath, or the canal itself, the canal that ordinarily reflects berm, bank, and towpath, as calm as calm, Gene had been fixing Asher a little gruel from leftover cereal and crumbled zwieback. When Uncle Arnie came floating by the nursery, there was Arnold Rothstein, who had himself fixed the 1919 World Series by bribing eight Chicago White Sox players, keep back 50 feet, to throw the game.

So awestruck were we by his day-glo shirt, we barely noticed how low in the water his Studebaker lay. The distribution of its cargo of grain alcohol, filtered through a makeshift charcoal-packed double downspout by an accomplice, Waxy Gordon, somewhat less than even. The peccary's hind foot, the pinked cap would inquire, you call that cloven? Asher slept on, his little pout set off beautifully by the pillowcase, into which we might yet bundle the foul madams, the couscous, the tabouleh carry-out, full of grit from the Sahara. 

Well, Uncle Arnie had taken his lawyer's advice, maintaining that he paid none of the eight White Sox, who stood in the witness box as much as a nickel. Racketeering maybe, extortion maybe, maybe vice. But not throwing games, it wasn't an area in which he had expertise, not an expert.

Isaac Wolfe of New Haven, meanwhile, had unzippered a freezer bag and made a dent in the defrosted dough in which we'd meant, to wrap the loin of peccary, please use tongs, in an Aussie version of the secret recipe the Duke of Wellington had secured, from the kilidar of Perinda, one which substituted quantongs for apricots. Well, Asher slept on, half-hid, under the cradle hood, his great-grandfather Jim Zabin, an adman who held, of all things, the Biltright account, please examine your change, as mistakes cannot, nodded from his deathbed to the red stain on the muslin cloth that covered the peccary in its autoclave, as if that cloth were an obstacle whereby the haystack and roof-leveling wind bred. On the Atlantic might at last be stayed, by which authority another great-grandfather, Sam Corlitz, would blast from his hardware store in Lawrence, Mass.

Did you deny Asher a bris? A chainsaw had let rip, our next-door neighbor Bruce was making quite a hand of amputating a sycamore limb that had given its all to the wind and rain. Asher slept on, his shawl of caric macross lace, his bonnet tied with silk reputed to come from Samarkand. While Dorothy stood where the Delaware and Raritan Canal and the Millstone River, combined to carry ton upon ton of clay, hay, hair, shoes, spectacles, please use the hammer to break the glass, playing ducks and drakes, with the child kin shortly to be riven from her family and I, the so-called Goy from the Moy, scrubbed the trap made in Marengo, Illinois, by which we took that white-lipped peccary as if scrubbing might leave me shriven, a flicker from behind Asher's sleeping lids, all covered with little wheels and welks, as Jean's distant cousin Helen Hanf began to rub a mix of cumin and baby talc, cornstarch more than talc, into another loin of peccary.

This being a trick, Helene had picked up from the individual who started a trend by keeping a rabbit worn, come dovecoat in a muse off Charing Cross Road. Hard hats must be worn, an individual who picked up from whichever wha deemed a pram in the hallway the end. Of art, a wha who could no doubt trace it back to Wellington and the Killadhar of Perinda.

I looked up in dismay as the helter-skelter I'd raised in lieu of a lonely tower, part-floating Derek, was nudged by the millrace. The increasingly eccentric Helene, meanwhile, continued to rub cornstarch into the remains of whatever curled in the autoclave, almost inaudible now. The sycamore moans as, almost inaudibly, I myself continue to scrub the latest in traps with a wire brush.

From Sam's hardware store in Lawrence, Mass., you ignore the midrash. By which authority? I could hear small incendiary devices going off in the midst of the pleasantries, exchanged at this as every family gathering. Please do not leave window ajar, where the stricken face of Uncle Arnie's friend, Fanny Bryce, peaked from her astracan. 

According to Horace, Arnie maintained, every water pitcher started out as a wine jar. You may take Fanny for a nincompoop, but I fear she may well be the only one here who's actually read King Poppy. I fear, moreover, the way the smoke flings and flails itself from your barbecue brings back that terrible morning in Sing Sing. 

They fried Charlie Becker. Helene looked up from her cummin splitting, while Bruce began to pulverize a young strand, a stand of young sassafras, with all the zeal of a chainsaw catachoumin. And the groundbreaking Irish navvies continued to keen and kvetch, through the hole, cut for a dimmer switch, in a wall of deadeye stiffened with deadeye.

Next to Moore, his little punt at our dock, was Joe Hanff, the banker who helped Louis B. Meyer and Thomas Edison develop a cool projection lamp. Where he'd come by the coke and bucket of popcorn, God only knows, he handed them to Dorothy for safekeeping, while he concentrated on the minutiae of the peccary trap and the great trebucket, with which we'd been known to take even larger critters, setting and upsetting the trebucket, as would an obsessive compulsive out of order, until he was himself ousted by Sam. Sam, who repeated the opening phrase, Ashery, Hayish, Asher, of the Book of Psalms.

As he handed Asher of Burbecker and Rowland upholstery nail, which Asher held as grim as grim, while sleeping on, ton upon ton of clay, hay, hair, shoes, and spectacle frames, made it less and less likely that we would land, on our feet, on the Griggstown causeway, any time soon. Ramp divides, please examine your change, as mistakes cannot be rectified. The almost inaudible roar of the millrace drowned out a great-grandfather's prayer. 

By which authority did we deny Asher a moel? By which authority did we deny Asher a reeb? Asher, meanwhile, slept on, his most crepe-creepered of cribs, riding out the torrent, riding out the turmoil, of those thousands of Irish navvies piling clay, hay, hair, into their creels, and bearing them at shoulder height or above, with all the zeal of creel catatumans. A tattoo on the left forearm of some child-kin of my children, a very faint tattoo. Once more the storm was howling, and something, da-da-da-da, something about that clay and hair going down the sluice, brought back an afternoon in St. Louis, something about raking the ashes of the barbecue at the end of the veranda, and turning over the loin and flank of a young peccary, its loin so lean and lank, its little ribcage rode narrows, something about turning over that runt of the peccary pharaoh, with a dink and a dink and a dinky dick, brought back that afternoon, something about Sam lighting a menorah and reading a commentary on the Torah, something about Arnie distancing himself from the night and fog of Murder, Inc., to a disbelieving Duke of Wellington and Killadar of Perinda, brought back the day of our own Nacht und Nebel Erlas, on which I'd steadied myself under the gateway arch and pondered the loss of our child.

It was Arnie who'd been the brain behind running rum to those thousands of Irish schlemiels who dug the canal, a flicker from Asher's lids, the little welks and wheels, as if he might be dreaming of a pina colostrum, on Bosco Bell Beach, some young beauty dipping his foot in Johnson's baby oil. Fanny peeked from her astracan, its poil, the poil of a stillborn lamb, again a chainsaw letting rip, again I scrubbed the very latest in traps, while Helene rubbed cornstarch into whatever was curled rar and rar in the autoclave. That peccary with the hind foot, the peaked cap would inquire, it's a bad case of spina bifida.

I heard the bottom drawer, open somewhere, the red stain on the lint that covered whatever it was in the autoclave, brought back an afternoon in Poland, when the smoke would flail and fling itself, maximum headroom from a crematorium at Auschwitz. It was not without some trepidation, so that I trained my camcorder on this group of creel carters bearing clay hay hair at shoulder length or above, through the awesome morning after Hurricane Floyd, as yet another 1921 Benz or 1924 Bugatti came down Canal Road and yet another peaked cap was inquiring of my child kin the meaning of Ashkenaz. Place mask over mouth and nose, my trepidation became more and more pronounced as that smoke would flail and fling itself over Auschwitz.

I looked up from our make-believe version of Boskobel Beach to a cauterized stump of sassafras or sycamore, as the creel carters piled more and more clay hay hair spectacle frames, willkommen, onto the line of carryalls and camions by the edge of the flooded stream, those creel carters imagining in excited reverie the arches of the bridge wrought with the model motto, Albeit Macht Frei. Well I looked up through the swing and swale of smoke, please leave a message after the beep, and watched the kebab babby we had lost a year or two back put on its best bib and tucker and watched it put out its little bit of a wing all tinged with char as if to set off for the real Boskobel Beach on which we had met Sandra Hughes and Anton Heyer, oblivious to the piles of hair, spectacle frames, booties and brogans born along from whenever, wherever. The full name is Auschwitz Birkenau, Sam was explaining to Anton and Sandra, who had somehow summoned themselves.

Asher slept on of course despite his thrush, despite his diaper rash, the flood water having receded from the point on the driveway at which the Pakisandra had earlier been swamped, the point at which Arnie had fixed some class of a tow rope to the chassis of the Studebaker. I simply don't have it in me to bribe a ball player, he would maintain, steadying himself with a handful of main as he hooked the rope to the hams of a draft mule. This truck makes wide right turns.

The fact that the slew of interlocutors in Asher's glabrous face now included, of all things, the peccary runt, do not litter, left me no less awestruck than if the Studebaker would be suddenly yanked back to the factory in South Bend from which it had been packed off, open this end. Then if the soul of one of the dozen stillborn lambs sewn into Fanny's astracan were to recover radical innocence and learn, then if scouring the trap by which I had taken that peccary so lank and lean by its dinky hind leg, don't walk, then if don't walk, then if don't walk, then if scouring might make it clean. An overwhelming sense of deja vu, the creel caravan swaying along the salt route into Timbuktu, Fanny taking up a handheld microphone and embarking on second-hand rows, the convoy of salt merchants setting down their loys at one and the same moment, our pileated woodpecker tapping at the bark of three successive sycamores in the hope of finding one tune.

The piles of clay hay hair spectacle frames, hand-me-down booties and brogans now loaded onto the ark, causing it to lie so much lower in the water that Uncle Arnie gives a heavy hint to Fanny that she should cut the chorus of second-hand rows and jump ship. The white wall tire, Helaine concurs, is the beginning of the pram in the hall. Asher sleeps on attended by two teddy bears, his soul less likely than ever to recover radical innocence and learn at last that it is self-delighting. 

At a correlate, Sam's widow is drawing up A, B and C lists as of the correlates for bears, whom she'll invite to a reception thrown by herself and Arnie, unapproved road for the 1919 World Series winning Cincinnati Reds. If there's no hatred in a mind, Isaac Wolfe pounds and expounds, assault and battery of the wind can never tear the data from the leaf. As for the killdeer, Helaine peeks from an aster can almost as natty as Fanny's, you're thinking in all likelihood of the killdeer of Perinda.

The ark now lies so much lower in the water, stop ahead, that Uncle Arnie gives another heavy hint to the Cincinnati Reds that they should also jump ship. Achtung! The 1920 Studebakers just one step ahead of a panther tank, nodding approvingly through the ghetto after the Germans have massacred the Jews of Bialystok. The wind bred on the Atlantic has broken Belmar and Siegert, Boundbrook is broken.

The roof leveling wind profane and irreverent, the wind which was at the spearhead of the attack on the ark, almost inaudible, the memory of a three-month growth spurt, no more than a flicker for rent. Behind Asher's sleeping lids, the A, B and C lists of his forebears in his glabrous face, Hanf, Wolfe, Reinhardt, Abrams. A Reinhardt beginning to fuss as a peaked cap inquires about the orthodox position on the eating of white-lipped peccary. 

The train stopped in Bialystok's running neither to Warsaw nor Leningrad. Helene, uttering a little cuss as the yellow of that star brings back the out-and-out yellowness of a cylinder of gas she once saw on Charing Cross Road. Now Isaac Wolfe, a Yale grad, looks on helplessly at the mill race on which signposts, signboard, birdseed, keep out, bridge freezes before road, do not drive in breakdown lane, live bait, my lonely helter-skelter $500 fine, the makeshift oven in which we meant keep clear all directions, the Vermont decal on that bugotty load of grain alcohol, slow, the out-and-out yellow of the signpost that points toward the place where the soul might recover radical innocence, no stopping except for repairs, the makeshift oven in which we meant to bake the peccary en croute, contents under pressure, the freezer bag into which we bundled the carry-out from the Sahara, the signpost that points to where the Missouri had not as yet been swollen, hump, no shoulder, no rail, are all born along toll booth to where Uncle Arnie's father, Abraham Rothstein, one of the founders of Beth Israel, yes, Beth Israel, joins Fanny Bryce in the version of My Man she first sang in the Ziegfeld Follies, a flicker from behind the lids as if those children kin might flee as they fled the Cossacks in the Ukraine, please remember to take your belongings when you leave the train, woken as they now are by a pileated Roland and Burbecker tapping into a sycamore, Asher's face, a fox's mask, nailed to a long-gone doorpost by an Irish schlemiel, as likely as not to mosque his brogans for a ladle of rum, what's with these police captains like Charlie Becker, Arnie puts his arm around Helene who being chosen finds life flat, contents may have shifted during flight, who think they're above the law, who think they're born without belly buttons, the police launch maneuvering by brings back riot shields and batons, some child kin of my children picking at his kohlrabi, now Helene leaves off rubbing cornstarch into the arch of whatever lies in the autoclave, sets the little beak of her colibri wobblingly to a cigarette, pull to open and reaches into a drawer for the poultry shears, the hacking through a babby bone, no obstacle but Gregory's wood and one bare hill slippery when wet, bringing back the morning Dr. Patel had systematically drawn the child from Jean's womb for hire, Uncle Arnie all the while hanging a white walled tire about the draft mule's neck, the draft mule no less throwered thrawn than whichever wall deemed the pram in the hallway the end of art, the peaked cap sweet talking that young Abrams or Reinhardt with the offer of a tin of waffle at ten, should he feel able to enlighten him on the particular house in the Bialystok ghetto in which his uncle is hunkering down, Asher puts his lips to the shofar of a long-gone pacifier as Isaac Wolfe expounds to Fanny Bryce it's from ghetto a foundry not boar ghetto, a burrow, on that little gore that little gusset of ground into which my cast of thousands of Irish schmucks have been herded, halt, Asher opens his eyes once more the storm is howling as it howled when Isaac shouted down the board of Yale, the black horse tavern still served ale, when Sophie was found dead in the bath, a ringed plover with all her rings stolen please cover, when Sam discontinued his line of Burbecker and Roland upholstery nails for sale, when we might yet have climbed the hill and escaped by copper mine, when Uncle Arnie was gutshot by George McManus for non-payment of tight-lipped poker-faced debts, when Helene Hanf the celeb was found asleep in the Dewitt nursing home in the arms of Bulwer-Lytton, follow detour, when Fanny tried to stop the leak of a so-called confession by one Joseph Gluck which fingered her ex-husband Nicky Arnstein, when the trebucket of my lonely tour was tripped for the very last time by Joe Hanf, no egress when a cantankerous young Reinhardt or Abrams, no children beyond this point, was borne along at shoulder height by the peat cap out of bounds, when the cry went up from a starving Irish Lameel who washed an endosperm of wheat, dada, from a pile of horse kick, held to the rain one of those thousands of Irish schmucks who still lull, still lull and lollygag between the preposterous towpath and the preposterous berm.

Well that was quite a long poem to read all at once. It really tired me out. I'll just share some initial impressions because I haven't done any research on this poem and there's a lot that I don't understand but the themes that I'm seeing coming through, first of all it seems to take place during this flood that follows Hurricane Floyd. The title of the poem is “At the Sign of the Black Horse, September 1999.”

There seems to be a story in the poem but it's a bit obscure. The narrator of the poem is with his family and with a baby named Asher who sleeps on throughout the poem.

And, uh, there's plenty of, I suppose, Irish references here. You know, a shawl of Carrick Macross. I'm assuming that's Irish, but I could be wrong.

I'd have to look it up. Quite a lot of place names that I don't necessarily recognize, but then there's a lot of references to, first of all, World War II, the Germans, the Jews, Auschwitz, basically the Holocaust. A lot of Jewish, Judaic references and vocabulary and names.

Kind of a whole litany of Jewish figures in this poem slash story, including Arnie Rothstein, who rigged the 1919 World Series, and Fanny Bryce, the singer and Ziegfeld Follies dancer. So a lot of historical references back to World War I, World War II, but then a lot of contemporary references as well. So it kind of keeps going back and forth between the present and the past, which creates, uh, you know, for the reader, kind of a rather confusing story that somehow weaves together a lot of repetition in this poem.

You can't tell from the reading of it, but there are, I guess you could say, signs that appear in the poem, standard signs that are in capital letters throughout the poem. Canal road, no way out. Please secure your own oxygen mask before attending to children.

Do not fill above this line. So a lot of sort of instructions and warnings that are in capital letters throughout this poem, something about cooking a peccary. And I actually have to look that up because peccary, it sounds familiar, but I'm not quite sure what that is.

So let me, I mean, there's a ton of words in this poem that I would like to look up, but I don't feel like I, uh, want to spend all that time. It would take a long time. Yeah.

As I thought, it's a, it's a kind of, um, boar, uh, related to a hog or wild hog, wild hog, wild boar peccary. Why they're cooking a peccary. They're native to neotropical regions, South America to Central America and portions of Arizona, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. 

So, um, where is this story taking place? Where is the sign of the black horse? I don't know. That's a mystery would definitely have to look up the background to this poem. A lot of repetition of language, a lot of place names being thrown down and, um, characters who are kind of doing things together like cooking.

And there seems to be kind of a barbecue going around along and, uh, and, uh, some kind of conversation between these historical and contemporary characters, some biblical references here and there. I think, you know, what stands out to me of this poem is his use of language, that he is such a master of language that all the place names seem to be carefully chosen. That the names of things that he chooses, um, seem to be carefully chosen to have a particular sound, a particular, you know, connection to the language of the poem.

Creel Carter's piled more and more clay, hay, hair spectacle frames. That's, that is also repeated throughout the poem and must have some significant meaning, uh, onto the line of curials and camions. And again, these are words that I think one must look up to really understand them. 

Lots of, uh, different, you know, linguistic references, uh, German thrown in here might connect to the story of the, of the Jews. Uh, it might be a migration story. It seems also he's connecting the story of the Irish people to the Jewish people in different ways, kind of weaving together those strands. 

At the very end, he says, uh, one of those thousands of Irish schmucks, and he also says Irish schlemiels. So he's kind of connecting the Irish to the Jewish people and maybe, uh, you know, migrant people who are escaping devastation, war, starvation seems to be a common theme. Uh, migrants who went to America, perhaps, uh, because, uh, you know, the, a lot of the story seems to take place, Hurricane Floyd in America, uh, would have to look up, you know, that would be an important thing to look up, Hurricane Floyd.

Um, I don't really want to look up this poem because I feel like there's probably a good explanation of this poem somewhere on the internet, but I kind of like going through a poem and trying to understand it in my own way, rather than kind of reading somebody else's explanation of what the poem was about. Hurricane Floyd struck North Carolina in September, 1999. Okay. 

I kind of remember that. So this is sort of a historical event that's very specific to a part of, a part of America. Why he's chosen that event, whether or not he was there at the time, I don't know enough about his biography to know whether Paul Muldoon was, was there and witnessed Hurricane Floyd. And he's kind of channeling that into, into this poem, whether he read about it. It's all a bit of a mystery, but I'm going to stop there because I think the poem kind of speaks for itself. 

It's the language of the poem and the flow of the poem and this sort of dreamlike set of imagery and associations that speaks for itself. And I think it's up to the reader or the listener of the poem to try to figure out for yourself what the, what the meaning of this poem is. So, plus I've got other stuff to do and a big full day ahead and more papers to grade.

So I'm going to sign off for now. And, and if you like what I'm doing here, please make a comment. I always appreciate comments.

So see you next time.

[returns]

All right. This is a little addendum to my interpretation of the poem. 

I said, I wasn't gonna do a lot of searching and stuff, but of course I got curious and I decided to search the internet and find out more about the poem and about Paul Muldoon and his biography. And now it all makes a lot more sense to me because his wife is actually named Jean, Jean Hanff Korelitz. And all three of those names, Jean, Hanff and Korelitz come up repeatedly in the poem. 

So that, those are references to his wife and her family. And she is Jewish. His children, Dorothy and of course Asher, the baby in the poem, are therefore part Jewish and part Irish. 

And so now the poem makes a lot more sense. It's a at least semi-biographical poem about his family, how they are bringing together the Irish and the Jewish roots. And I think that the flood then kind of serves as a metaphor for the flood of migrants, the flood of people around the world converging in different ways.

So it connects to the story of this flood of Irish migrants who helped to build the canal, as well as the Jewish migrants who did all kinds of things, including gangsterism, as in the case of Arnie Rothstein. So it's interesting. His wife, Jean, is actually a Dartmouth graduate.

So she's comes from my own alma mater, Dartmouth College. She was class of ‘83. And she is a very well-known novelist.

And I didn't know anything about her until I looked her up. Shows how connected I am to the world of literature these days. But, you know, it's these kinds of activities that make you more connected.

The other thing is that it appears that he actually was there for Hurricane Floyd. So this is also kind of a biographical moment. He was a professor at Princeton, and New Jersey definitely did receive a big share of the flooding during Hurricane Floyd.

So it kind of makes sense that he led from this real personal experience, and then used association and all of these various techniques to kind of build a long poem out of this very unique and powerful experience that he had with his family experiencing the floodwaters in New Jersey. This is my guess. I could be wrong, but it all makes sense to me.

So now the poem makes a lot more sense, even though it's still a very dreamy and associative poem, which is very much in the format of his style and his way of expressing himself in poetry. And I think there's also some references to W.B. Yeats in the poem as well that I read about online, but I'm going to leave those aside. I think that's the most important piece that I wanted to share with you.

And now I am really done and moving on with my day.

Ted Hughes “Saint's Island” From Flowers and Insects (1986) (Part 1 of My Random Poems Series)

All right, I've decided to experiment with a new activity, which will be randomly choosing a book of poems from my poetry collection, and randomly opening up to a poem and reading it. And then after reading it, maybe talking about it a little bit. So this one is by Ted Hughes.

It's from his Collected Poems. And this poem is from Flowers and Insects, a collection of poems published in 1986. It's in Ted Hughes's Collected Poems. This one is called “Saint's Island” for Barry Cook.

[note the following poem is not formatted as it originally was in the book]

This is a day for small marvels. The mayflies are leaving their mother.

Seven horsepower, our bows batter the ridgy lough. Weird womb, beneath us it gestates a monster. Monstrous, but tiny.

When it appears, we'll call it the green drake. At the moment, down there in the mud, it's something else. The dream of an alchemist.

The nightmare of the sunk pebble that feels the claws gripped lightly. But today it wants to be born. It's had enough of the mud.

At a brainwave, overpowered by it, does not know what. What is it doing on earth anyway? It kicks off from its burrow. It rises, fueled by the manias of space and inspiration that coil round the sun's mask.

It rises as if it fell towards that magnet core, where blindness glances the sun's water image, shivered by our shockwave as we bounce past. The mayflies are leaving their mother. I glimpse one laboring, a close-up in the brow of a wave.

I glimpse the midget sneeze. A dream bursts its bubble. As much machinery as the up-spurge of a big oak.

One time I found one had failed. It wallowed in the oil of light. I saw through my lens a tiny leech, corkscrewed onto its head.

Luckier in millions, a catkin green dragonish torso hauls from its sleeping bag. A yacht has a blown stubborn moment, falters, lifts from the low's melt. The mayflies are leaving their mother.

And there they go. The lough's words to the world. This is what it thinks.

This is what it aspires to, finally. This is the closest it comes to consciousness and the flight into light, into life. All morning leaving their mother, the mayflies spinning on their weak centers, poetic electrons with their vision of the sun's skirts, an idea faceted like a fly's eye, a rose window in blood cells, a holy grail of neurons, blow and dither downwind toward the island, toward the gray crumble of monastery.

They crowd in under the boughs, keels under every leaf, dangle on claws, cluster their ripenings, letting the sun touch them through chlorophyll. Spooky fruit. Spooky because this isn't their world.

Their world is over. Their feastings are complete. Their jaws are tied up.

That is their underworld, their beachhead in death, because they are already souls. So many they gauze and web the maybush bloom and leaf. As they digest their shock, the vision, it nourishes them, it consumes them, it peels off the last drudgery of the lough.

And they are creeping out of their lives. None resist or defer it, or settle for terms or evade it. Already they have dressed themselves in mayfly, a lace of blackish crystals, as if our lives were lichenous rock, or a sleep of roots, or a tin of sardines, an apple, a watch, a thermos.

Everywhere under the leaves you see their mummy molds, the refuse of their earthliness clinging empty, the blood chart in their wings still perfect, still waiting, already seeming dusty. But they've gone up into sunlight, a wet shimmer in their smudgy veils, sooty fairies. We watch them through binocs, on and off all day till evening.

They are dancing above the trees, rising and falling to windward airs, to woodwind airs, clouded or sunny, to bowings of thermometer or barometer. Over and over, a real unending and Irish. What time will they come out? Will they come out? No hurry.

The long-bellied females, pith-naked, tender two-inch snippets of live nerve cord, tipped with the three black fork-hairs even longer. And the males, darker, smaller, they are rediscovering each other, familiars of the ten billion years. They jig in a spin, in a column.

They are tossed and are tossed. Their happiness is to prolong this, to prolong it till the moment opens and it happens, and an escaping climax of the music lifts them over the top, and they are coming out. But now, like dervishes, truly they are like those touched by God, drunk with God, they hurl themselves into God.

They have caught the moment. Their dancing has found that fault in time, to break through, to break out, into beyond. They are casting themselves away.

They abandon themselves. They soar out of themselves. They fall through themselves.

Where can they go? Space can't hold them. The blue air is snowing. All around us, trickling giddily down, they try to pirouette.

The wind carries them out. Under the outer waves of the lough, the big trout wait. Under the island lee, anchored in the mirror between light and dark, on the skin of shivers, we wait.

What are we doing on earth? All around us, fanatics faint and wreck, shuddering gently onto the face of evening.

And that is the end of the poem. It's a long poem. One, two, four pages long. Many, many verses. It's a free verse poem. We're not looking for rhymes in this poetry. There are some internal rhymes, but it's more alliterations, boughs, batter, weird womb. It's more wordplay.

It's thick description. The focus is on these insects, these mayflies being born in huge proliferations. The mayflies are leaving their mother. I think that must be mother earth. So it's about the miracle of birth. It's the miracle of life. What are we doing on this earth is a question. It's a very religious poem. It's a close observation of nature. He's kind of teaching us how to observe carefully and closely the phenomena of nature, like to be a naturalist, but to capture it in the language of poetry, which kind of puts him in the same category in a way as other poets like Nemerov, like A.R. Ammons, very much a nature poet, using multiple perspectives and multiple ways of describing a natural phenomenon. Spooky fruit. Spooky because this isn't their world. Their world is over. Their feastings are complete. Their jaws are tied up.

This is their underworld, their beachhead in death because they are already souls. So it's kind of about the miracle, but also the ephemerality of life and death. He's watching this kind of birth struggle, but it's also a death struggle because at the very end, you know, what is waiting for them under the outer waves of the lough. Is it low or lough? I'll have to look that up. L-O-U-G-H. Obviously, it's a place name.

The big trout wait. So these mayflies have just been born, and yet, like most creatures that are born, insects and fish and so on, they're born in a great proliferation, but most of them are gobbled up. Right.

That's why insects and spiders and fish and other creatures give birth to a have multiple children, maybe thousands, hundreds, thousands of children, because maybe only a small fraction will survive long enough to proliferate. So again, it's kind of the questioning life. What are we doing here? Why is life so brief and fleeting for so many creatures? There seems to be a bigger picture here of nature, Mother Earth, of the network of nature, of creatures being born to feed other creatures, and this very rich, elaborate network of life.

Yeah, it's a very powerful and deep poem. I'm glad that I selected this one, even if randomly. And just as a little addendum, I did look up the word l-o-u-g-h.

It's a variation of loch, like the lochness monster, and it's pronounced loch. So it's somewhere between loch and lof, lough. So I'm not going to bother to read the poem again with that knowledge in mind, but just if you do read the poem again yourself, that's something to keep in mind.

Hope you found it interesting, and let's do this again sometime. Over and out.

Two Poems by Seamus Heaney (Part 3 of my Random Poems Series)

Poet Seamus Heaney and Joseph Brodsky, from an article I found about their relationship https://www.thearticle.com/seamus-heaney-and-joseph-brodsky-a-poetic-friendship

I am going to choose randomly from my poetry collection another book of poems to read, at least a couple of poems, maybe one or two, we'll see how long they are. I'm just gonna grab this one. Seamus Heaney, famous Irish poet and scholar of poetry, and this is his Selected Poems, 1988-2013.

I have two poems here that I've opened up to, one is called “Vitruviana” and the other is “Audenesque”. Sounds very intellectual, maybe “Audenesque” is about the poet W. H. Auden, but we shall see. And then “Vitruviana” for Phileme Egan, don't know who that is, maybe we'll find out.

Let's read “Vitruviana” first. Get my poetry reading voice ready.

[note the following poems are not formatted as in the book, they are formatted as I spoke them or as the transcriber interpreted me speaking them, in prose style:]

In the deep pool at Port Stewart, I waded in, up to the chest, then stood there half suspended, like Vitruvian man, both legs wide apart, both arms out buoyant to the fingertips, oxter-cogged on the water. My head was light, my backbone plump (oh, not plump, plumb) my backbone plumb, my boy nipples bisected and tickled by the steel-zip-cold meniscus. On the hard scrabble of the junior football pitch, where Leo Day, the college drillie, bounced and counted and kept us all in line. In front of the wooden horse, one, two, in, out, we upped and downed and scissored arms and legs and spread ourselves in the wind's cross, felt our palms as tautly strung as Francis of Assisi's in Giotto's mural, where angelic neon zaps the ping-palmed saint with the stigmata. On Sandy Mount Strand, I can connect some bits and pieces, my seaside whirly-gig, the cardinal points, the gray matter of sand and sky, and a light that is down to earth, beginning to fan out and open up.

Wow, that's quite a poem. Gonna take a little while to unpack that one.

“Audenesque”

in memory of Joseph Brodsky

Joseph, yes, you know the beat. Whyston Auden's metric feet marched to it unstressed and stressed, laying William Yeats to rest. (Is it Yeats or Yates? Yates.) Therefore, Joseph, on this day, Yeats's anniversary, double-crossed and death-marched date, January 28. It's measured ways I tread again, quatrain by constrained quatrain, meeting grief and reason out, as you said a poem ought. Trochee, trochee, falling, thus, grief and meter order us, repetition is the rule, spin on lines we learnt at school, repetition too of cold in the poet and the world, Dublin airport locked in frost, rigor mortis in your breast, ice no axe or book will break, no Horatian code unlock, no poetic foot imprint, quatrain shift or couplet dent. (Oh, it keeps going. It's got another two pages.) Ice of archangelic strength, ice of this hard two-faced month, ice like Dante's in deep hell, makes your heart a frozen well. Pepper vodka you produced once in western Massachusetts, with the reading due to start, warmed my spirits and my heart, but no vodka cold or hot, aquavit or whiskabog, brings the blood back to your cheeks or the color of your jokes, politically incorrect, jokes involving sex and sect, everything against the grain, drinking, smoking, like a train. In a train in Finland we talked last summer happily, swapping manuscripts and quips, both of us like cracking whips, sharpened up and making free, heading west for Tampere, west that meant for you, of course, Lenin's train trip in reverse. Nevermore that wild speed read, nevermore your tilted head, like a deck where mind took off with a mind flash and a laugh, nevermore that rush to pun or to hurry through all yon, jammed enjambments piling up as you went above the top, nose in air, foot to the floor, revving English like a car, you hijacked when you robbed its bank, Russian was your reserve tank. Worshipped language can't undo, damaged time has done to you, even your peremptory trust in words alone here bites the dust, dust cakes still see Gilgamesh, feed the dead, so be their guest, do again what Auden said, good poets do, bite, break their bread.

Whoo, that is quite a poem. They're both powerful verses, words that I might have to look up, allusions to people in places that I may know very little about.

Vitruviana obviously alludes to Vitruvian man (nothing like coffee to take the frog out of your throat.) So who is Vitruvian man? I believe that was that great drawing by da Vinci showing the man in various poses with his arms, a naked man with his arms and legs spread in various directions. Vitruvian man? In the deep pool at Port Stewart, I waded in. So it's a little vignette, probably biographical. I can't imagine that he's just imagining this. I think this is an experience that the poet is having and feeling, and he wants to get it on paper. Waded in up to the chest and stood there half suspended like Vitruvian man. So kind of when you're wading, when you're buoyed by water and your arms and legs can kind of move around. So he likens that to Vitruvian man.Both legs wide apart, both arms out buoyant to the fingertips. Oxtercogged on water. That's it. What does that mean? Oxtercogged. I don't know. Should we look that up? Did he make that word up? I mean, I think Seamus Heaney perhaps has been known to make words up or to draw words from the vast lexicon of the English language, often words that have been forgotten or perhaps words that go back to his Irish heritage.So hard to say. Oxtercogged on water [I did look it up and it’s an archaic term meaning held up from under the armpits]. My head was light, my backbone plumb.

Boy nipples bisected and tickled by the steel-zip cold meniscus. What is a meniscus? That word sounds awfully familiar. The meniscus. Let's look it up. Sometimes you have to pause and, you know, if you're really trying to dissect poetry and somebody comes up with a word that you are less familiar with, sometimes you have to look it up. The meniscus. Yes, runners would know about a meniscus. A meniscus is, I guess, part of your knee. Torn meniscus. Yeah, it's a piece of cartilage in your knee. So let's look at how he uses that again. Steel-zip cold meniscus. So he's referring to that piece of cartilage in his knee. And then he goes into another section on the hardscrabble of the junior football pitch where Leo Day, the college... I don't know. Is he referring to an injury that he had in his knee from his days of youth when he was being drilled on the football pitch? So this is, for Americans, this would be soccer.

Upped and down, scissored arms and legs, and spread ourselves greatly. Tautly strung as Francis of Assisi in Giotto's mural. So he's now referring to a famous painting. Maybe I'll put that up on the video. Where angelic neon zaps the ping-palmed saint with the stigmata. Wow. I mean, very few poets can come up with a line like that. This is amazing, amazing English poetry. Zaps the ping-palmed saint with the stigmata. I mean, you can see that Seamus Heaney is truly a master of words. And not only that, he has mastered pretty much all of the various components that go into poetry. He's a scholar of poetry. He's well-versed in other poets. He knows them personally, as the next poem makes clear. He writes essays and makes speeches on poetry.He knows all the various components and parts that go into poems. And he's able to use those masterfully. On sandy mount strand, I can connect some bits and pieces.

My seaside whirligig, the cardinal points, the gray matter of sand and sky, and a light that is down to earth, beginning to fan out and open up. And it kind of reminds me of a painting. Like his poetry is almost like a painting. There's so many references to great painters and artists in this poem. Obviously, he's using poetry as a kind of a painting in words. And he's also invoking and perhaps admiring the great artists of the past.From Da Vinci with his Vitruvian Man to Giotto. It's a poem that pays homage to the great artists of the past.

As he does in his next poem, “Audenesque.” And this one is in memory of Joseph Brodsky. Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet. I actually had the privilege of hearing Joseph Brodsky give a speech to, in fact, I believe it was our graduating class. Was it our graduate or the class before us? I think we got Elizabeth Dole. But at Dartmouth, I think it was the graduating class before us, the class of 90, got Joseph Brodsky as the keynote speaker. And I remember he gave a speech about boredom, which has resonated with me ever since. He said, just beware of boredom. He wasn't trying to warn the students about success or career or whatever. It was just like, as you get into the forest of adulthood, you may find your life getting more and more dull and boring. It was kind of that message. Anyhow, I should have some Joseph Brodsky, at least one book of Joseph Brodsky's poems in my collection. I'll have to remedy that someday.

So he's writing to Joseph Brodsky in memory. Joseph Brodsky has already passed away. Joseph, yes, you know the beat. So as he begins the poem, he already is describing a kind of familiarity, like he's friends with this guy. Joseph, yes, you know the beat, Wyston Auden's metric feet. So now he's referring to the other great poet, W.H. Auden, the other great English poet whose book, collected poems I do have, as well as some of his other books. So we'll be reading him eventually. March to it unstressed and stressed, laying William Yeats to rest. So now he's mentioning two great English poets, two of the greatest English poets of the 20th century, Yeats and Auden. So I would say for Brodsky, it must be a very flattering if he were alive to know that he's being compared in one verse to Yeats and Auden. And that must show a great deal of respect for by Seamus Heaney for Joseph Brodsky. And he's writing on Yeats' anniversary.

That's interesting. On this day, Yeats' anniversary, double crossed and death march date, January 28 [both poets died on this day]. It's measured ways I tread again, quatrain by constrained quatrain, meeting grief and reason out as you said a poem ought. So notice the rhyme scheme. What is that called when you rhyme, but it's not quite the same sound? There's a word for that. We'll have to look that up. You can find examples of this kind of rhyme throughout the entire. Yeah, so let me look it up. Slant rhyme. Exact rhymes are words that rhyme exactly the same way. Some rhymes do not end in exactly the same way. Example, dine and time. They both rhyme, but not perfectly. Yeah, a slant rhyme, a near rhyme, approximate rhyme. I don't know. Maybe there's a technical term, but I can't seem to find it at the moment. So let's continue. Trochee, trochee, or is it tro-key? Let's look that one up. See, you know that you're dealing with an intellectual poet when you have to look so many words up. You're learning because he's a teacher of poetry. He's not just a poet. Merriam-Webster dictionary. Okay, now we're getting to, so let's listen. Tro-key, so it's [pronounced] tro-key. A metrical foot consisting of one long syllable followed by one short syllable, or of one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable. Apple, that's a trochee. So trochee, trochee, falling thus. Grief and meter order us. Repetition is the rule. Spins on lines we learned in school. So it's kind of, he's also referring to academic poetry here. And you wonder if he's not teasing his friend a little bit in the process. I don't know.It's hard to say at this point, but I kind of get the sense that there's a little bit of teasing here. Friendly teasing. Repetition two of cold in the poet and the world.

Dublin airport locked in frost. Rigor mortis in your breast. So rigor mortis refers to death, of course. The corpse freezing up in death. Rigor mortis in your breast. Why is it connected with Dublin airport locked in frost? I don't know. Is the poet at Dublin airport? Was Brodsky somehow at Dublin airport? Ice no axe or book will break. No Horatian code. See, now he's referring to another poet, Horace. The great Roman poet of ancient times. No Horatian code ode. No Horatian. Boy, that's a hard one to read. No Horatian ode unlock. No poetic foot imprint. Quatrain shift or couplet dint. So it's really a poem about poetry. He's referring to all these great poets.

So in the last one, he was referring to great painters and artists. And in this one, he is making lots of references to great poets and to different elements and components of poetry. Ice of Archangelic strength.Ice of this hard two-faced month. Ice like Dante. There you have another great poet. [Archangel was where Brodsky spent time in a gulag in Russia before leaving the country]. One of the greatest of all. Of all poets, Dante. Dante's in deep hell makes your heart a frozen well. We'll have to look up how and when Brodsky passed away and what his relationship was with Seamus Heaney. But obviously they had a friendship going. Pepper vodka you produced once in Western Massachusetts. So this is a very personal memory of him, of the two poets sharing pepper vodka. With the reading due to start warmed my spirits and my heart. This warms my heart.

Reading this line about the friendship between poets. This reminds me of Chinese poetry. Sometime we'll have to dig into Chinese poetry. It's kind of more of a forte of mine actually, but given that I'm a China scholar. But yeah, this I'm starting to feel a connection with Chinese poetry here. Two poets sharing a glass of vodka, drinking together. What a great memory. But no vodka cold or hot. Aquavit or whiskabog brings the blood back to your cheeks.

So again, he's going back to the death of the poet and his sadness for the loss of his friend. Again, this very much reminds me of Chinese poetry. Politically incorrect jokes involving sex and sect. Everything against the grain. Drinking, smoking like a train. So obvious. So I'm guessing that Brodsky was a chain smoker. I don't remember seeing him smoking during the speech that he gave at Dartmouth College during graduation, but apparently so. In a train in Finland. That's interesting. They were sharing a train ride in Finland. We talked last summer happily. So this is a friend. So Brodsky just passed away. Last summer, they were in a train in Finland. Now he's gone. It's a sad poem, but it's also a happy poem. It's a very spirited poem.

So he's sharing all these beautiful personal memories of his friend and the good times that they had together and the trips that they took. Swapping manuscripts and quips. Both of us like cracking whips. Sharpened up and making free. Heading west for Tampere. West, that meant for you, of course, Lenin's train trip in reverse.So he's referring to Brodsky's origins from Russia. And of course, to the Finland station, right? Lenin's famous trip back to mother Russia to start the revolution, 1917, right? The October Revolution is what he's referring to here. Nevermore that wild speed red. Is it speed red or speed read? Read is one of those words that could be read or red. So wild speed red. Nevermore your tilted head like a deck where mine took off with a mind flash and a laugh. So he's just remembering the brilliance of his poetic friend. It really is an homage. There's a little bit of friendly teasing there, but it's just a loving poem to this friend of his who passed away.

Nevermore that rush to pun or to hurry through all yon. Pun and yon, again, that's the near rhyme, the slant rhyme that we talked about. Jammed enjambments piling up as you went above the top. So enjambments are when a rhyme is, or the end of a line in a verse is placed at the beginning of the next line. Enjambments, I think that's what it means. So it's another poetic term.

Nose in air, foot to the floor, revving English like a car. I absolutely love this line because revving English like a car, he's likening the English language to a car and he's revving it up, right? You hijacked when you robbed its bank. Another metaphor. So robbing the bank of English, right? Russian was your reserve tank. That is such a brilliant line right there that revving English like a car. You hijacked when you robbed its bank.Russian was your reserve tank. Worshipped language can't undo. Damaged time has done to you.

Even your peremptory trust in words alone here bites the dust. Dust cakes still see Gilgamesh. Now this is interesting. He ends with a reference to Gilgamesh. And of course, Gilgamesh is one of the greatest ancient classics of poetry and storytelling from ancient Sumeria. The story of this prince king Gilgamesh who becomes friends with Enkidu who's kind of like a wild version of himself and Enkidu dies. So he is kind of likening their relationship to that of Gilgamesh and Enkidu. And of course, Gilgamesh eventually goes, it's one of these stories where he goes down to the underworld to try to find his friend who has died. It's such a powerful story. So I think, yeah, it totally makes sense given how deep their friendship must have been that he would feel this way that he would invoke Gilgamesh at the end of this poem. Dust cakes still see Gilgamesh. Feed the dead so be their guest.

Do again what Auden said, good poets do. Bite, break their bread. So again, a reference to Auden at the very end.

There's so much to unpack in this poem. It's such a beautiful, powerful poem. It's amazing. It's amazing that I just happened upon this poem which I had never read before and that it kind of brought tears to my eyes at one point. There's just so much story and so much feeling in this poetry, but also the language, his mastery of the language and the form and all of the various things that you can say through language. The feelings you can evoke, but the jokes you can make, the memories you can have.

It's really an amazing poem. So both of these poems really stand out. It makes me want to just spend the rest of the day reading more Seamus Heaney, but I don't have time for that. I've got to grade papers and I have to do a bunch of other things. So that's it for today. I guess this has been a relatively long one.

I don't know how long we went, but pretty long, maybe even 30 minutes just for two poems. We'll see if anybody actually watches this, but it doesn't matter. I'm just enjoying doing this myself. Again, it's just a project for me to dig into the poetry that I have here on my shelf and share it with others. So hope you enjoyed this video and more to come.

Talking Another Side of Bob Dylan

So, you may recall a couple months ago I got this book with all of Bob Dylan's songs. It's got like 600 pages worth of songs. Pretty amazing. And what I like about it is it's got the chords, the lyrics. You can see at a glance the entire song. You don't have to turn the page to play the song. And, yeah, the font is a little bit small, a little bit on the small side, but I can still see it just fine when it's sitting in front of me on my music stand. So I've been using this book to play these songs from [the album] Another Side of Bob Dylan. And the songs are kind of deceivingly simple. The chords are actually a little bit more complicated than they seem to be at first. So it's good to have the chords and the lyrics all laid out in front of you when you're singing these songs. So if you want to sing the songs in the way and play them in the way that Bob Dylan did, maybe not exactly, but at least getting the chords right and matching the chords with the lyrics, then it's really useful to have this book in front of you.

Otherwise, usually what I do is I just have song lyrics on my iPad. If I haven't memorized the song, I have memorized maybe 30 or 40 Bob Dylan songs, but that's still less than 10% of Bob Dylan's output. And it's pretty much impossible to memorize all his lyrics. Even he, I don't think, has done that. But I want to talk about Another Side of Bob Dylan, which I just finished recording. All the songs, there are 11 songs on this album from 1964.

I feel in a way this is kind of an underrated album of Bob Dylan's. It's not sort of the go-to album from that era. The next one that we're going to cover, Bringing It All Back Home, is definitely one of his, I think one of his best. Certainly it has some of the most remarkable songs on it. But Another Side of Bob Dylan is sort of, maybe I would say it's like kind of the pinnacle, maybe not the pinnacle, but it's still in the mode of what he was doing in his previous albums. So he's, before he really broke through with his stream-of-consciousness lyrics and just kind of created a new style of music on the next album.

So I think this album, Another Side of Bob Dylan, has been, you could say it's been overshadowed in a way by his subsequent albums, the next three albums, which are considered among the best that Bob Dylan ever made. But this one has some really good songs. And some of them were actually covered by The Byrds. And I think it was The Byrds who kind of recognized the beauty of these songs and took them to another level, or at least made them more palatable for a larger audience.

So one of them is All I Really Want to Do, which I originally was familiar with The Byrds’ version. And that's a great [song], it's got great lyrics. That's the one that's, I ain't looking to compete with you, beat or cheat or mistreat you, simplify you, classify you, defy, deny, defy or crucify you. All I really want to do is baby be friends with you. And it's got six verses.

So it's all like, I don't want to do this to you. I just want to be friends with you. So it's almost like a thesaurus of negative words that, you know, negative things that you could do to a person. I don't want to straight face you, race or chase you, track or trace you, or disgrace you or displace you or define you or confine you. So it actually is quite a fun song to sing. Bob Dylan sings it in 3-4 time. And I think The Byrds did it in 4-4 time, which is more the rock and roll beat. So that's a great song.

And then Black Crow Blues is back to a kind of a standard blues arrangement. And I think Bob Dylan just shows his mastery of this folk music form, this African American folk music tradition that is so quintessentially American. He really shows his mastery of this tradition throughout his entire career. There are blues songs that are in kind of the standard arrangement with a little bit of tweaking here and there.Black Crow Blues, I wake in the morning wandering, wasted and worn out. I was standing at the side of the road listening to the billboard knock. If I got anything you need, babe, let me tell you in front. Sometimes I'm thinking I'm too high to fall. Black Crow's in the middle across a broad highway. Don't feel much like a scarecrow today. So it's kind of blues standard with a line and then the line is repeated and then kind of a punch line all in 1-4-5 basically. So Black Crow Blues is a good one.

Spanish Harlem Incident. It's interesting how many times gypsy women appear in Bob Dylan's songs. He has some kind of strange obsession with gypsy women. I don't know where that comes from exactly. Maybe somebody who's watching this video knows the answer and can put it in the comments. I still need to read through my Bob Dylan biographies. I bought a whole bunch last year and I was planning to read them, but lately I've been reading a lot of Rolling Stones literature, trying to get into their story, do a deeper dive into their story. So I will get back to the Bob Dylan story. So Gypsy Gal, the hands of Harlem cannot hold you to its heat. That's a really nice song and I'd say kind of an underrated song, a hidden gem in this album.

The next one is To Ramona, which is a song about a woman. Your cracked country lips I still wish to kiss. So it's obviously, it's kind of a cowboy song. It's got that flavor of a cowboy song. It kind of evokes sort of a little bit of a Wild West theme. And again, it just shows his mastery of the idiom of American music that he had mastered so many different styles and forms and traditions of folk music by this time. And he's really just showing, showcasing his mastery of kind of Americana, the American folk tradition. So it's kind of a love lost song about a woman. And it's a nice one, too. I'd say it's another hidden gem on this album, To Ramona.

And then Chimes of Freedom, which is one of the more well-known songs from this album. And again, this was a song that the Byrds made famous. And I can't remember if they, I think oftentimes because Bob Dylan had so many verses in his lyrics, they would usually cut a few of them off and maybe do three verses instead of six because they're trying to keep it in that radio friendly, like three minute format. But this is an epic song. I feel like this is up there with his best lyrics. Far between sundown's finish and midnight's broken toil, we ducked inside the doorway, thunder crashing. This has a very poetic feel. It shows that he had absorbed the poetry of the modernist poets. I think Rimbaud was one of his, he definitely names Rimbaud in a song or two. And it's a beautifully evocative song. And the way that the lyrics are crafted, there's a lot of alliteration, a lot of, I don't know if you could call it onomatopoeia, where the sound of the word suggests what he's singing about. So the chimes of freedom flashing, the majestic bells of bolts struck shadows in the sounds. I mean, he's really showing his mastery of the English language here. There's a reason why he won the Nobel Prize.I mean, this is, you know, this is a Nobel Prize winning song, if any. So that's a great song. And again, he sings it in, plays it in 3-4 time, whereas the Byrds did it in 4-4 time. And yeah, so there, if you listen to his original version and then compare and contrast it against the Byrds version, you can find a lot of interesting contrasts.

And then there's, I Shall Be Free No. 10. This is one of his kind of just humorous songs.

It's a bit of another ode to Woody Guthrie. You know, I Shall Be Free No. 10. And it just shows that he could just spin out these songs. He had so many lyrical ideas and story ideas. This one is a ramble. It doesn't really have a coherent story. He has one, there's one verse all about Cassius Clay, who, of course, is Muhammad Ali, the great boxer, the great fighter. So here he's kind of ripping on Cassius Clay and saying that he's going to knock him out. Obviously, it's a joke. And I think he and Muhammad Ali had some kind of meeting together and did a little bit of, you know, fake sparring and stuff. So they obviously respected each other a great deal. So, yeah, it's just it's full of a few cliches. Well, I don't know, but I've been told the streets in heaven are lined with gold. I asked how things could get much worse if the Russians happen to get up there first. So now he's just, you know, kind of making a dark joke about the Cold War era and this, you know, our demonization of the Russians from the USA perspective during that time. So he's kind of taking the piss. If you don't know that [term], that's a kind of more of a British slang for just making fun of of all these different types of people, maybe in American society, liberals and conservatives and the McCarthy era, all this, all this stuff that's kind of embedded. He's he's riffing on the upper upper class society. There's one verse about playing tennis in the noonday sun. And so it's just it's just a hodgepodge, not one of his best tunes, not one of his best songs lyrically and kind of very conventional in terms of the in terms of the music itself. I Shall Be Free No. 10.

And then there's Motor Psycho Nightmare, one of the more unusual and memorable of Bob Dylan's song titles, Motor Psycho Nightmare, which is kind of a riff on Psycho, the Alfred Hitchcock film, because the story that he tells in this song is about he he's riding his motorcycle. He comes upon a farm. It's kind of a cliche story. Comes upon a farm. He needs a he needs a place to stay for the night. So he asked the farmer if he can stay. And the farmer says, OK, but just don't touch my daughter. And of course, his daughter. It's hard to tell if she's trying to seduce him or trying to murder him because he says that she looks like Tony Perkins and she's asking him to come up and take a shower. So obvious allusion to the Psycho movie. And he says, I've been in that scene before. You know, so, yeah, I've been through this before. So it's a funny song. And and then he figures out a way to kind of get out of this mess by yelling out that he loves Fidel Castro and his beard. Of course, the farmer farmer goes after him with a shotgun. So again, he's kind of riffing on current politics and the the American fear of communism and so on and so forth. So this is a fun, good time song. And then there is another another set of famous songs from this from this album.

It Ain't Me, Babe, which is sung in the film A Complete Unknown. So if you've seen that film, there's a scene where they're at the Newport Festival and he's singing with Joan Baez and the Suze Rotolo character. I forget her name in the film now [Sylvie Russo]. She's kind of watching and in tears because she sees how close those two are. And I don't know. It's one thing that I guess a lot of people didn't quite like about the movie, that it became sort of this love triangle story. But anyway, the song It Ain't Me, Babe, it's a you could say another one of as many kind of cynical songs about women like, don't expect too much from me. If you're looking for somebody to close his eyes for you, someone to close his heart, someone who will die for you and more. It Ain't Me, Babe. So this is this is one thing that people sort of liked about Bob Dylan is that he wasn't overly romantic. He didn't try to romanticize relationships. He kind of he drew a line. He understood the complexity of human relations and that love is often, you know, all of these kind of love songs like the Beatles and all that era of love songs. He was he seems to have been very cynical about that. There's really very, very few songs that Dylan writes that are kind of conventional love songs.

And then there's My Back Pages, which again was, I think, made more famous through the Byrds. And and again, he does this in three, four time, whereas they choose to do it in four, four time. And the original song has six verses. I can't remember if the Byrds song cut cut a few verses, but it's probably likely that they did. But again, this is another real standout in the album. Lyrically, crimson flames tied through my ears, rolling hot, rolling high and mighty traps pounced with fire on flaming roads using ideas as my map. So it's a very --it's, the lyrics are complicated. They are there's no sort of coherent story here. It's he's sort of getting into that stream of consciousness mode that he then that then becomes more dominant in his next albums. But it seems to be about academic knowledge versus sort of the real world, maybe somebody coming out of college or somebody who's, you know, I think of Bob Dylan as somebody who was kind of this perennial outsider in the intellectual world. But he was invited in, you know, the colleges would open their doors to him to to sing and perform. But he's kind of stands back on the outskirts of academia and sort of pokes fun at academics. A self-ordained professor's tongue, too serious to fool, spouted out that liberty is just equality in school. Equality, I spoke the word as if a wedding vow. Ah, but I was so much older than I'm younger than that now. So the punchline just keeps coming. That's like the refrain of the song. And it's a great punchline.So there's that one, My Back Pages.

And then another, I would say this one is kind of another hidden gem as well. I Don't Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Met), another cynical sort of, you know, unrequited love song where he gets ghosted by a girl. So he has a beautiful night with this woman, and then the next morning she sort of disowns him and sort of pretends that nothing happened. So who knows? Is this an autobiographical song? I'm sure it could be. It's the kind of thing that could happen to any guy who gets a lucky night with a lady and then the next day she kind of regrets and maybe just tries to brush off the entire night, whereas he's sort of hung up on her. So I'm sure this is kind of, it's kind of a universal situation for men and women. It could also be seen easily from the woman's point of view. Either, you know, the guy was just, you know, then I realized who he really was and I just didn't want to have anything to do with him anymore. Or it could be a girl getting ghosted by a guy. So there's a lot of universal sort of themes in this song. And it's a good song. It's a well-crafted song, I think, lyrically, musically. Definitely not up there with My Back Pages, Chimes of Freedom, or these other songs that just tower above the rest, right, on the album. But a pretty good one.

And then there's Ballad in Plain D. And this one is probably the most controversial, one of the most controversial of Bob Dylan's songs that he ever wrote. Because it's, it is so deeply autobiographical. It is so biting, painful. It's kind of a painful song because it's about, apparently it's about his relationship with Suze Rotolo, how her sister and mother kind of got involved in their relationship. And he had some bad times with her sister and mother and some bad arguments. And that's all in the lyrics of this song. The tragic figure, her sister did shout. Leave her alone. Goddamn you, get out. An eye in my armor turning about and nailing her to the ruins of her pettiness. Beneath a bare lightbulb, the plaster did pound.

 Her sister and I in a screaming battleground. And she in between, the victim of sound, soon shattered as a child beneath her shadow. So it's a real, yeah, devastating song. And I think, you know, a lot of people expressed, I don't know, just anger that he would write such a song. I don't know if he ever performed it later on in his career. Have to look that up. I somehow doubt it. I think this is one of those songs that he kind of had to get out of his system. Maybe later regretted that he had written this song and put it on the album.That's my guess. I mean, I could be totally wrong. And again, if you're a Dylanologist and watching this by any chance and want to make a comment and give us the more accurate picture, please feel free.

I do not pretend to be an expert on Bob Dylan, but I'm trying to become one in a way. I guess part of my journey here is to become an authority on Bob Dylan. I'm definitely not right now at this moment. But I think if I continue this project of recording every album song by song, I've got, I know, 30 plus albums to go. So there's a long journey ahead of me and it's taking a little bit longer than I thought because first, I get distracted with other music and other songs. And secondly, there are times when I just don't have time to sit down in the morning and work on these songs. It actually, I think I said this with The Beatles, and The Beatles, I know left, right, center, up, down, forwards and backwards. I know all their songs so well. And even then it took me on average, maybe 30 minutes of work to get each song down until I could play it smoothly. And with Bob Dylan, I think it's kind of similar because the songs in a way are a little simpler than The Beatles. They don't have all the complex chord changes, but lyrically, they're more complex. There are different chords that come through that you have to pay attention to. It's not as conventional as it might seem. And so I would say, you know, and I listen, I'll listen to the album many times to familiarize myself with all the songs. On this album, I knew maybe 30% of the songs pretty well already, but most of the songs I had to kind of learn from scratch. So again, it might take, you know, 30 minutes to an hour for me to really grasp to each song well enough to be able to perform it in a smooth way. And I'm not trying to replicate all the fancy guitar work on any given song or let alone the harmonica work. I mean, that would be another task entirely to try to nail the harmonica bits because, you know, they are quite unique, I think, in these songs.

So I haven't really, I haven't really bothered to do that. But even so, it might take me like an hour per song just to get the song down. So it does take a while to go through and really get these albums down. But I think it's a worthy effort. I think if there's any singer songwriter who's worth delving into this deeply, it is Bob Dylan. I do plan to read more books on Bob Dylan.

I wish there were better podcasts on Bob Dylan. There's no equivalent to like Something About the Beatles. There's that podcast that I talked about, Robert Rodriguez's podcast. I haven't really found an equivalent. There was a good podcast called Is It Rolling Bob, which I used to listen to. Unfortunately, it seems that they stopped making that podcast, which is a real shame. I really loved that podcast, Is It Rolling Bob. But I haven't really found a good Bob Dylan podcast. I think there's Pod Dylan. A lot of the podcasts seem to kind of focus on one song at a time. I'm not really, that doesn't really interest me as much as kind of more broadly talking about Bob Dylan's career or his, you know, the influences that went into his different songs, different phases of his career. That's what I really liked about Is It Rolling Bob. So I hope those guys somehow get it back together and continue that podcast. So if you're out there and listening, just know that I really appreciated your podcast. So that's it for today.

I just wanted to round up the experience of, you know, making my versions of Another Side of Bob Dylan. And next up is Bringing It All Back Home. I know I've already recorded a few of the songs, so I'm kind of partway there already. But that's also going to be a real challenge for me in the next few weeks to get that one down, especially It's Alright Ma, which is one, I think, one of his best songs. So we'll get to that in the next few weeks. If I can do one album a month, maybe that's a good pace for Bob Dylan. Anyway, over and out. And I hope you enjoyed this podcast, podcast, this YouTube video. I suppose it could be a podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you have any comments to share or you want to share some thoughts about, you know, your own appreciation of these songs or of this album, please feel free to comment and see you next time.

Talking Bringing It All Back Home: A Song By Song Appreciation of One of Bob Dylan’s Best Albums

This is a transcript of a talk I recorded on video for my Youtube channel, after posting my acoustic versions of all the songs on this landmark Bob Dylan album.

Good evening, folks. I'm going to wrap up my, um, my week with a discussion of bringing it all back home. I know I've been doing a lot on my channel lately, including my new poetry, um, project, but, uh, you know, it's all connected.

I'm trying to, this project is kind of a deep dive into music, into lyrics, poetry. Uh, it's a bigger project. Uh, so I'm kind of starting to see the contours of it.

Yeah. I want to talk about this epic album, bringing it all back home. In fact, I'm going to go get the album. 

Yeah. So here's the album. It's actually one of only two Bob Dylan albums that I currently own.

I didn't collect Bob Dylan record albums when I was growing up. And I don't think my parents, the parents that I grew up with had Bob Dylan albums either. My dad was the big Bob Dylan fan.

So he has a pretty good collection, at least from sixties and seventies. But, um, I don't remember where and when I got this album, but it's always been a favorite of mine. I think it's in some ways, this could be his best album of all.

It's, it's the album that really put him over the top in terms of his lyricism, uh, the, the poetry of his lyrics, the depth of his lyrics, the kind of stream of consciousness, you know, the, the prophetic vision that, that he had for humankind really comes out in this album. So I think it's kind of a culmination of the work he had been doing up until, up until this time, 1965. And it marks just a new maturity, but it's also very experimental.

It's, um, you know, I think it's, it's another phase in his career as a singer songwriter. It's, it's not the be all end all of his music. When I say it's his best album, I'd have to temper that.

I mean, I think, I think in, in some ways, uh, uh, Blood on the Tracks might be his best album. It's my favorite album. It's a more approachable album.

This one is more abstract. It's like watching an abstract expressionist at work, like a Jackson Pollock of, of lyricism. You, you know, there's structure in there, you know, there's training, there's, uh, intense thought that goes into the work, but, but sometimes it's hard to discern the, the, the meaning of it. 

Um, there are a lot of songs in here that seem on the surface to be kind of meaningless and you have to really tap into them and listen to them many, many times to, to get the meaning. Um, I was just thinking you could easily write a doctoral dissertation just about this album and I'm sure, I'm sure that's been done. There is a whole field of Dylanology after all.

I mean, he created an entire field of study. Um, he's the one singer songwriter who has, you know, uh, maybe hundreds of books, thousands, who knows, uh, published about his work, his life and work, mostly his work. It's a little harder to understand his life, but I, I do have some biographies back there that, that, uh, a couple of which I've read and some of which I'm hoping to crack later on.

But you know, he's a hard man to understand. He's not, he's not given to, uh, like ruthless promotion of his real life. He's kind of in the movie, uh, uh, which I saw again recently, he kind of comes across as not a charlatan, but somebody who deliberately kind of makes up, uh, things about his life, uh, kind of creates his own persona.

You get a sense that he's really struggling as an artist, um, struggling to get beyond some kind of threshold in this album. And, uh, I'm going to use, so, so we have the, we have the album itself. (Pardon if you hear some noises, I live in a rather noisy apartment building here in China, in Kunshan, which is always on the move and always growing and developing and building.) 

Visuals on The Record Album

But anyway, we have his album and, uh, we've got the liner notes, we've got some photographs of him. Um, first of all, the album cover is interesting. Let me see if I can, I have a light over here.

Um, you see him in a kind of living room with a, a fireplace with a mantelpiece and some old, um, paintings, uh, an old painting on, on the mantelpiece and this, uh, elegant woman in a red dress, kind of mysterious, elegant woman who I think seemed to recall it was Albert Grossman's wife [Grossman was his manager]. I'd have to look that up to confirm, but, uh, you know, as usual, this is kind of unscripted I haven't, I don't like to script out these, uh, these videos that I make because I want them to be kind of spontaneous and to reflect my thought and my reactions, uh, rather than, you know, sitting down and writing out an essay and doing research and then presenting. Um, so there's no script here, but anyway, I do think that's Albert Grossman's wife, as I recall, don't remember what her name was [it was Sally]. 

You have a Time magazine with Lyndon Johnson on the cover. Um, and, and we know that Bob Dylan liked to kind of rip up magazines and newspapers and sort of spread things on, on the floor and kind of make a collage and then draw ideas from the collage and maybe juxtapose. So it was one of his songwriting techniques and you can actually see that in, um, at least in one scene in A Complete Unknown. 

So I kind of take it back. I think after watching that movie three times, I think they do a pretty good job of giving you a sense of how he approached songwriting. Um, you know, obviously they couldn't go too deep into that for the sake of a movie, but I actually found that movie, um, I actually found that I gained a deeper appreciation of that film each time I watched it.

Um, but anyway, so you kind of, kind of see a collage of items, magazines, and it's kind of hard to see. My, my old eyes are going on me, but Folk Blues of Eric [Von Schmidt], don't know who that is. So he seems to have, oh, Robert Johnson. 

Are those record albums? Those may be our record albums that he has, uh, behind him. He's holding a little cat. That's kind of cute. 

Little gray cat, um, kitten. Uh, there's a sign for a fallout shelter. So kind of suggesting the times these are existential, uh, times, you know, there's the Cuban Missile Crisis.

They're just, um, people live in kind of existential fear. And remember that this is the sixties. This is a time of great change and great and move powerful movements and assassinations and so on and so forth.

Uh, the Vietnam war is cranking up. So, yeah, I think the cover kind of gives you a sense of what the album is going to be like. And then on the back we have photographs.

There's one great photograph here at the top of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. What an amazing, uh, power music couple they were, you know, it's, uh, no wonder that the, the movie, the filmmaker decided to make that a central focus of the film. Uh, his, his complex relationship with Joan Baez, who was brilliant in her own way, but not, not the brilliant songwriter that he was, but certainly a brilliant singer, performer, musician, uh, amazing in all those regards and that she could recognize his genius, I think was a big part of that story as well.

Um, so you've got Joan Baez, then here you have some encounter with the police and this man scratching his head. And again, I'd have to look it up. I don't recognize that person offhand.

Don't know who that is. Uh, below you have Bob Dylan on, on piano with his sunglasses. You have him in a kind of a top hat with a smirk on his face.

That was the one thing that I didn't quite like about the film, which I explained in another video, is that I think Timothee Chalamet didn't quite capture his mirth, his, uh, impish humor, I think was kind of missing in that portrayal of Bob Dylan. Um, and I don't know what these other photos are. Somebody who's an expert on this album would surely know the backgrounds of all these photos.

It was kind of like photos of him performing and photos of the times. Um, and then, and then there's a, uh, very interesting, this is probably going to be a long one. I think this is, this is going to be a rather long video only for those who really want to dig deep into, into this album.

Liner Notes by Bob Dylan

So I'm going to just read out the, uh, the liner notes here, what they call the liner notes in the back of the record. And I think this is Bob Dylan, uh, Bob Dylan's writing:

I'm standing there watching the parade feeling combination of sleepy John Estes, Jane Mansfield, Humphrey Bogart, Mortimer Snurd, Murph the Surf, and so forth. 

Erotic hitchhiker wearing Japanese blanket gets my attention by asking, didn't he see me at this hootenanny down in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico? I say, no, you must be mistaken. I happen to be one of the Supremes. Then he rips off his blanket and suddenly becomes a middle-aged druggist up for district attorney. 

He starts screaming at me. You're the one that's been causing all them riots over in Vietnam. Immediately turns to a bunch of people and says, if elected, he'll have me electrocuted publicly on the next 4th of July.

I look around and all these people he's talking to are carrying blow torches, needless to say. I split fast, go back to the quiet, nice country. I'm standing there writing what on my favorite wall when who should pass by in a jet plane but my recording engineer.

I'm here to pick you up and your latest works of art. Do you need help with anything?

Pause.

My songs are written with the kettledrum in mind, a touch of any anxious color, unmentionable, obvious, and people perhaps like a soft Brazilian singer.

I have given up at making any attempt at perfection. The fact that the White House is filled with leaders that have never been to the Apollo Theater amazes me. (That's a good one, actually.)

Why Allen Ginsberg was not chosen to read poetry at the inauguration boggles my mind. Here he's giving his influences. If someone thinks Norman Mailer is more important than Hank Williams, that's fine. 

I have no arguments and I never drink milk. I would rather model harmonica holders than discuss Aztec anthropology, English literature, or history of the United Nations. I accept chaos.

I am not sure whether it accepts me. I know there are some people terrified of the bomb but there are other people terrified to be seen carrying a modern screen magazine. Experience teaches that silence terrifies people the most. 

I am convinced that all souls have some superior to deal with, like the school system, an invisible circle of which no one can think without consulting someone. In the face of this, responsibility, security, success mean absolutely nothing. I would not want to be Bach, Mozart, Tolstoy, Joe Hill, Gertrude Stein, or James Dean. 

They are all dead. The great books have been written. The great sayings have all been said. 

I am about to sketch you a picture of what goes on around here sometimes, though I don't understand too well myself what's really happening. (There's a nice admission). I do know that we're all going to die someday and that no death has ever stopped the world.

My poems are written in a rhythm of unpoetic distortion, divided by pierced ears, false eyelashes, subtracted by people constantly torturing each other with a melodic purring line of descriptive hollowness, seen at times through dark sunglasses and other forms of psychic explosion. A song is anything that can walk by itself. I am called a songwriter. 

A poem is a naked person. Some people say that I am a poet.

End of pause.

And so I answer my recording engineer, yes, well, I could use some help in getting this wall in the plane. So yeah, that's Bob Dylan's stream of consciousness, sort of explanation of this album. And it's interesting.

He's saying, I am a poet, but I'm also not a poet. I'm a songwriter. But some people call me a poet. 

You can see some of his influences here, like, got to go get my medicine. All right, I have returned, having a little whiskey soda. I think that will go well with this discussion about psychedelic states. 

I'm not a consumer of psychedelia… of psychedelic …psychedelics myself. This [alcohol] is pretty much the only drug that I limit myself to. But alcohol, a little drink now and then doesn't hurt. 

As long as you don't overdo it. Yeah, and I want to get back to talking about his influences. Hank Williams, he mentions, he mentions at some point, Allen Ginsberg, the great beat poet.

Beat Poets, Beatles, and Psychedelic Influences

So obviously he's, the beat poets were a great influence on him for this album. He was reading the beat poets, he was reading the beat generation authors like Kerouac, Ginsberg, maybe William Burroughs, really kind of digging into that sort of that literature that was heavily influenced by drugs. Let's face it.

I mean, drugs are a big part of the culture here in the 1960s. At this point, I think it's safe to say that he was a regular user of marijuana, maybe LSD. Those definitely influenced his lyrics.

I mean, it's almost impossible to explain this kind of creative mind without some sort of narcotic influence, which I think is totally overlooked in the film. I think that's another critique of the film is that, yeah, they make some little mild allusions to it. Maybe at one point he's smoking a joint, but they don't really say it, right? Alcohol seems to be a part of the scene in the movie, but not drugs, at least not overtly.

But obviously, they had a huge influence on him when he was at this stage in his songwriting career. And there's that famous episode, I think it was, I can't remember if it was ‘64 or ’65 [it was August 1964] where he introduces the Beatles of all people to marijuana. Can you imagine? I mean, that event in itself is such a huge moment in the history of popular culture, right? Because Dylan's influence on the Beatles was enormous.

And they admitted that they were fascinated by his music. I think this was one of their big albums that they loved. Obviously, there's so many influences that Dylan's music and his lyrical style had on the Beatles' development. 

Their breakthrough album, Rubber Soul, and then Revolver and Sgt. Pepper, I think they were all influenced by Dylan's lyrics, Dylan's style. Even though the Beatles still continued to write in a different way, and their songs were kind of tighter and more melodic and more maybe intricate chord-wise, and also chords and melody and structure, and also more compact and pop-oriented, whereas Dylan was writing just verse after verse. I mean, so yeah, this is such an important album in so many ways.

His influence on the music world, on the world of lyrics, on the world of pop music, on the Beatles. I mean, again, you could easily write a doctoral dissertation or a book just on this album and its influence in the world. So enough said about that.

Let's go into... So I've decided to use this book, Bob Dylan, The Lyrics, to just go through song by song because it's just a little easier. The lyrics in this book, they're not accompanied by chords or any musical elements. It's just lyrics straight out as if he was writing poetry.

Songs on the Album

So we can start with the list of songs that are on this album. There's Subterranean Homesick Blues, She Belongs to Me, Maggie's Farm, Love Minus Zero Slash No Limit, Outlaw Blues, On the Road Again, Bob Dylan's 115th Dream, Mr. Tambourine Man, Gates of Eden, It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding, and It's All Over Now, Baby Blue. And in this collection, they include an early version of Outlaw Blues as well as Farewell Angelina, which was also performed by Joan Baez.

And it appears in the film A Complete Unknown as well. At least she sings a verse of it, I think, at one of the festivals, the festival scenes. And Love is Just a Four-Letter Word.

I also am a big fan of Farewell Angelina. I think that's such a wonderful song. And I've played that, you know, I play that song as well.

In fact, I should probably record that one next. But yeah, so you get a sense, bringing it all back home. The title, interesting that it's about bringing, coming back home.

So there's a sense of a homecoming. But I think there's also a sense of you can't go back home. Again, once you're on the road, you're an outlaw.

You're an outlaw on the road, right? That's Outlaw Blues on the road again. It's All Over Now, Baby Blue, suggesting the end of something and maybe the beginning of something else. You've achieved a certain state of knowledge about the world. 

You just, you can't go back to the comforts of home and your childhood. You're now out there in the world. You're experiencing the world in all of its, he's really, like I said, prophetic. 

He's showing the world as it is. And I think that's one of the functions of these narcotics, for want of a better word, these mental stimulants, these psychedelic substances that he takes to enhance his perspective and his songwriting. They kind of blow off the, they open the doors of perception, as Aldous Huxley famously said.

And they allow you to see things in a different way and experience things differently and maybe throw off the veils and the shadows on certain realities. So I think that's also what this album is about. It's coming to a realization about the way the world is, something that he's been moving towards in his previous albums. 

But his previous albums show a kind of younger, maybe more naive Bob Dylan. And now he's sort of reached this threshold where he's no longer so naive. He's seeing the world with different eyes. 

So let's get into it. I know that was a huge, long preamble. May have to cut it down a bit, but we'll see.

Subterranean Homesick Blues 

That's the one that starts out with Johnny's in the basement mixing up the medicine. And that sounds itself like a drug reference.

It's like right at the beginning of the album, he's making kind of an obvious drug reference, mixing up the medicine. I'm on the pavement thinking about the government. So I'm on the pavement.

What does that mean? Is he a bum? Is he busking on the pavement? Is he begging on the pavement? Why is he thinking about the government? Why is he on the pavement? The man in the trench coat, badge out, laid off. That almost sounds like a spy. We think of detectives or spies as wearing trench coats, this kind of disguises. 

Badge out, obviously some kind of authority figure or some kind of FBI, who knows. I'm sure by this time, and that's the other thing about drugs, they make you paranoid. Everybody's out to get you. 

Everybody's following you. Maybe by this time, he's kind of thinks he's being tailed by the FBI or something. And that could be, I don't know.

I don't know much about his relationship with the FBI. I know a lot more about John Lennon's. But yeah, it's a good question.

Says he's got a bad cough, wants to get paid off. Look out kid, it's something you did God knows when, but you're doing it again. It's kind of like, this is like a rap.

It's almost like a rap. You know, he's just throwing out these lines. It's like he's the precursor of rap music.

You know, you better duck down the alleyway looking for a new friend, the man in the coonskin cap and the big pen wants $11 bills. You only got 10. And then there's this mysterious character, Maggie. 

Maggie comes fleet foot, face full of black soot, plants talking that the heat put plants in the bed, but the phone's tapped anyway. So again, the paranoia go up, up, up, up, up. It's my dog walking around making noise.

Maggie says that many say they must bust in early May orders from the DA. So again, drug busts, kind of the, you know, people being followed, people being busted, a lot of kind of, yeah, just paranoid feelings about the government, about authority, about um, people trying to get, get you for, for doing drugs or for whatever subversive activities that you are engaged in. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

I think that's a reference to the, to the Weathermen, right? So 1960s, obviously a lot of, a lot of references to kind of sixties counterculture, right? Get sick, get well, hang around the inkwell, ring bell, hard to tell, right? Jump bail, get jailed, join the army if you fail, you're going to get hit by cheaters, losers, uh, six time users, cheaters, six time losers, hang around the theaters. So again, this sort of stream of consciousness, uh, free verse that he's doing here, get born, keep warm, short pants, romance, learn to dance, get dressed, get blessed. So it's sort of like daily life, uh, especially for young people thinking about their looks, thinking about what they're going to wear, going dancing, having fun, uh, sexual sort of imagery, uh, buy, please him, buy gifts, don't steal, don't lift, exhortations to be a good person when you're young. 

They put you on the day shift, look out kid, keep it all hid, jumped in down a manhole, like yourself. It's almost like he's just thinking about his life. Like you got to keep things covered.

You know, um, you can be subversive, but you have to do it in a subtle way. So his, his messages don't pound you over the head, right? They're kind of more subtle designed for a, a, an era when people were being watched, phones were being tapped, people were being followed. So yeah, it's, it's really, it seems to be a, he's, he's starting the album with this song about the counterculture sung at the street level. 

You know, here's what I learned from the streets. You know, you got to watch out, you got to do this, you got to do that. Got to watch your back.

Subterranean homesick blues, right? So subterranean, keeping underground. It's all about being underground, being a countercultural figure. So he's now identifying fully with the counterculture.

He was in the folk movement, which was a little different. And now he's kind of part of this countercultural movement, which involves drugs, which involves phones being tapped and so on and so forth.

She Belongs to Me is the next song.

She's got everything she needs. She's an artist. She don't look back.

So this is a more sweet song about a woman that he admires, right? We don't know who the woman is. I don't know if there's any, there must be some speculation as to who she is in this, in this song, but she's an artist. She can take the dark out of the nighttime and paint the daytime black.

Wow. That's powerful. You will start out standing proud to steal her, anything she sees, but blah, blah, blah.

You will wind up peeking through her keyhole down in your knees. So she obviously has some power over him or over whoever you is, right?

You start out standing, you end up on your knees. She never stumbles. She's got no place to fall.

It's a bit of a blues structure, so yeah, you repeat the first line twice and then you've got the punch line at the end. So it's very much a blues structure, but the music is not, does not sound like standard blues. She's nobody's child.

The law can't touch her at all. Wow. So we were talking about the law, we were talking about authority, we were talking about the government and being chased and being followed and pursued in the previous one.

Now it's like the law, she's beyond the law. Law can't touch her. She wears an Egyptian ring, sounds like, it almost sounds like the gypsy woman that he seems to be continually obsessed with in his songs.

Wearing an Egyptian ring, some kind of mystic. She wears an Egyptian ring that sparkles before she speaks. She's a hypnotist collector. 

You are a walking antique. His songs are so full of humor. He just drops these killer lines.

You are a walking antique. Bow down to her on Sunday. Salute her when her birthday comes.

So again, a man who's worshiping this woman, who's down on his knees, who's bowing to her, giving her birthday presents, almost like she's a goddess, deserving all of his worship and attention. For Halloween, give her a trumpet and for Christmas, buy her a drum. So that's She Belongs to Me.

That's, I would say, you know, a sweeter, more approachable song in this collection of songs from the album. And then we have Maggie again, the mysterious Maggie.  

Maggie's Farm.

I ain't gonna work on Maggie's Farm no more. And this one is kind of a farmhand song, so it kind of, it harkens back to to Woody Guthrie and the songs about farmhands, the songs about the dust bowl and the depression era. I ain't gonna work on Maggie's Farm no more.

So it's the voice of, you know, definitely a blue-collar worker, you could say, a farmhand down on his luck, who's just working for scraps on this mysterious Maggie's Farm. I ain't gonna work for Maggie's brother no more. I ain't gonna work for Maggie's pa no more.

I ain't gonna work for Maggie's ma no more. I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more. So, you know, and then he describes each of those characters on the farm and how they abuse him in different ways as a worker.

So it's kind of a, yeah, it's sort of a pro-labor song, anti-management, pro-labor kind of song. It's a really powerful song. It's one of his rock and roll songs, so that's, you know, this is one thing that I haven't mentioned yet, but if you watch the film, it's obvious that, you know, this was his breakthrough rock and roll album when he was, I wouldn't say he was trying to become a rock star by any stretch, but he was using the methods of rock and roll to get his points across.

So, you know, he brought blues musicians into the studio to work with him, like Paul Butterfield and others. I mean, this is when he was beginning to do that. I guess Highway 61 Revisited is kind of even more rock and roll in that respect with like Rolling Stone.

I'm getting a little tired, but hopefully a little liquid courage will keep me going. I do want to finish this video. I feel whiskey is the appropriate drink for Bob Dylan for some reason.

This is Jack Daniels, by the way.  

Love Minus Zero/No Limit.

My love, she speaks like silence without ideals or violence.

So this, again, is kind of a sweet, sweet love song, you could say, but it's also a mysterious love song. It's not like, I love you, I hope you love me too, that kind of song. It's more using poetic imagery to explore the theme of love. 

She doesn't have to say she's faithful, yet she's true like ice, like fire. People carry roses, make promises by the hours. My love, she laughs like the flowers, valentines can't buy her.

So all of those kind of commercialized ways that we express our love, valentines and flowers and so, doesn't really apply here. In the dime stores and bus stations, people talk of situations, read books, repeat quotations. There's a story here, but it's a bit obscure. 

It's not easy to discern. It is a little bit more stream of consciousness. Read books, repeat quotations, draw conclusions on the wall.

Some speak of the future. My love, she speaks softly. She knows there's no success like failure and that failure is no success at all. 

And then he drops this line, this, again, killer like bomb. There's no success like failure and failure is no success at all. Great paradox in the likes of Yogi Berra or Ringo Starr even.

The cloak and dagger dangles, madam lights the candles. I like his, what I was talking about earlier today about near rhymes or slant rhymes. He uses a lot of slant rhymes in his, in these songs. 

Dangles and candles. Ceremonies of the horsemen, even the pawn must hold a grudge. Statues made of matchsticks crumble into one another.

So, it's just kind of litany of imagery that you can't quite put a finger on it. It means something, but you don't know quite what it means. My love winks, does not bother.

She knows too much to argue or to judge. So, it seems to be a very wise woman. And again, kind of contrasting to she belongs to me, which is more about worshipping this woman who has some kind of power over you. 

In this one, it's more, you get a sense of a wise woman. My love winks, she does not bother. She knows too much to argue or to judge. 

The bridge at midnight trembles. The country doctor rambles. Bankers' nieces seek perfection. 

Expecting all the gifts that wise men bring. The wind howls like a hammer. The night blows cold and rainy.

My love, she's like some raven at my window with a broken wing. Wow, he ends with this like stunning image that makes us think of Poe's The Raven. So, he's also hearkening back to a great American poet in this song.

My love, she's like some raven at my window. Lenore. It's really a beautiful and mysterious song. 

It's definitely a song that I want to work on more and kind of make part of my repertoire in the future.  

Then we have Outlaw Blues and On the Road Again. And Outlaw Blues is an obvious blues song. 

So, it's got the structure of a blues. Ain't it hard to stumble and land in some funny lagoon? Ain't it hard to stumble and land in some muddy lagoon? Especially when it's nine below zero and three o'clock in the afternoon. So, I won't go into the this song too much.

It's got mentions Robert Ford and Jesse James. I got for good luck my black tooth. I'm not quite sure where that comes from, having a black tooth. 

And my dark sunglasses. I got a woman in Jackson, brown-skinned woman, but I love her just the same. This one doesn't strike me as, you know, a real standout. 

It's kind of a conventional blues song with some sort of clever but a little bit cliche images of an outlaw. Probably not, you know, definitely not one of his better-known songs. Moving on to On the Road Again. 

I woke up in the morning. There's frogs inside my socks. Your mama, she's hiding inside the ice box.

Your daddy walks in wearing a Napoleon Bonaparte mask. Then you ask why I don't live here. So, the whole like punchline of this song is he just sees one thing after another.

A pet monkey gives him a face full of claws. He goes to for something to eat. He gets brown white rice and seaweed and a dirty hot dog.

So, it's kind of a funny song about maybe somebody who he knows, but he doesn't want to live with that person because there are all these weird things going on and I'm thinking it's her house. Then you ask me why I don't live here. Honey, do you have to ask? So, obviously, it's a woman. 

Honey, do you have to ask? Honey, I can't believe you're for real. Honey, how come you don't move? So, I don't know. This is kind of a little bit more of his older style of songwriting.

It's not, again, not really a standout on this album, although there is some funny imagery in there. But then we have Bob Dylan's 115th Dream, which really is one of the standouts on this album. This is the one where he's riding on the Mayflower. 

I thought I spied some land. I yelled for Captain Arab. So, it's basically he's taking a tale about a sailor on a ship coming to America.

First, it's the Mayflower, but by the end of the song, he references Columbus. It's sort of, again, a kind of exploration of American history through this sort of slanted view. I think I'll call it America as we hit land, but then Captain A-Rab and the sailors get locked up, and he spends the rest of the song trying to get them out of jail.

So, it is kind of a funny story. He meets all these different people. He goes into a restaurant.

He goes into a bank. He goes into a person's house. Everywhere he goes, people are kind of not very, they're very hostile and not welcoming him and not helping him out. 

So, yeah, many, many verses, but it's kind of this funny satirical exploration, sort of a Swiftian, almost like a Swiftian sort of exploration of America through many lenses and sort of seeming to invoke many different eras in America's history. And finally, he references Captain A-Rab again, which is obviously a thinly veiled Captain Ahab, which, of course, is a reference to Moby Dick. When I last heard of A-Rab, he was stuck on a whale.

So, again, he just drops these lines that make you laugh. He was stuck on a whale that was married to the deputy sheriff of the jail. But the funniest thing was when I was leaving the bay, I saw three ships assailing and they were all heading my way.

I asked the captain what his name was and how come he didn't drive a truck. He said his name was Columbus, and I just said, good luck. So, it's kind of this parody of America, of finding America.

Yeah, that's a good one. I think that's a classic. And then we have the classic. 

I think if there's any classic on this album that stands out above the others, it's got to be Mr. Tambourine Man. I think everybody's familiar with this song. It's one of the few songs that I think everybody knows, or at least they're familiar with the refrain, hey Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me.

I'm not sleepy and there's no place I'm going to. Hey Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me. In the jingle jangle morning, I'll come following you.

And it sounds almost like a children's song, like a, I don't know, Mother Goose rhyme or something, Mr. Tambourine Man. It sounds almost like it was a song made for children, but it's obviously not. I mean, when you listen, when you hear the rest of the lyrics, you immediately realize that this is quite a complex and deep and also somewhat psychedelic song.

I know that evening's empire has returned into sand. I mean, this is where all of a sudden, you are just blown away. It, I can, you know, anybody who heard this song for the first time and just listened through the lyrics must have just been blown away by by the lyricism. 

Evening's empire has returned into sand, vanished from my hand, left me blindly here to stand, but still not sleeping. My weariness amazes me. I'm branded on my feet.

I have no one to meet and the ancient empty streets too dead for dreaming. So there's a sense that he's in the dreamscape here in this song, that it is kind of a dreamscape or maybe a drug scape, a kind of psychedelic trip that he's on. Take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship, right? Okay.

If you, you know, there's Puff the Magic Dragon and then there's Mr. Tambourine Man. Take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship. My senses have been stripped.

My hands can't feel the grip. My toes too numb to step, wait only for my boot heels to be wandering. I'm ready to go anywhere.

I'm ready to fade into my own parade. Cast your dancing spell my way. I promise to go under it.

So it's like going under a spell. It could be drugs. It could be just a state of being, a state of consciousness or unconsciousness that he's diving into. 

So it could be the effect of music on the soul or on the brain. It just brings you into this mental state. It's about, again, about dreams, about, I guess, mental journeys or journeys of the imagination. 

You might hear laughing, spinning, swinging madly across the sun. If you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme to your tambourine in time, it's just a ragged clown behind. That's quite an arresting image, a ragged clown.

I wouldn't pay it any mind. It's just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing. So each verse kind of takes you deeper into this dream state. 

And finally, take me disappearing through the smoke rings of my mind down the foggy ruins of time. Oh my God, you're just, again, it's just mind blowing. These lyrics, far past the frozen leaves, the haunted frightened trees.

Now we're getting into something very dark, like the trip has gone bad. The haunted frightened trees out to the windy beach, far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow. And then the most brilliant line of all, the one that's always quoted.

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free. Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands. If you're skeptical about the Nobel Prize, this poem, I mean, this is, again, a prize worthy poem. 

This would be a prize worthy poem, right? If it were a poem, but it's a song. And that makes it all the more miraculous that you can perform this as a song. And it's this kind of sing along song that it's fun with, you know, you could play it to children and they'll be, and they'll enjoy it and maybe sing along to the refrain, but they won't really understand, or maybe they can sort of understand some of the meaning of, well, how much can we understand this anyway? It's really, it's a very profound song. 

It's one that I do love to perform as well. We're going deeper and deeper into this state of, I don't know, subconscious state, almost Jungian state. I think there's a lot of Carl Jung in Bob Dylan.

That would be something to explore further.

Gates of Eden is the next song. And I've always found this to be a really mysterious and beautiful song as well.

It evokes like a painting by Salvador Dali. It's very surreal. Of war and peace, the truth just twists.

It starts out almost like a Homeric epic, right? Of war and peace, the truth just twists. It's curfew gull just glides. I don't know why curfew gull.

That doesn't make any sense to me, but somehow that's the word he chose. Upon four-legged forest clouds, the cowboy angel rides. There's the Dali imagery right there.

You can just imagine a Dali painting of a cowboy angel riding upon four-legged forest clouds, right? With his candle lit into the sun, though its glow is waxed in black, all except when neath the trees of Eden. So Eden being this sort of state of bliss, of pure naivete, of maybe natural purity. You know, before we fell, this is obviously the biblical Eden before Adam and Eve fell from grace and had to enter the real world of life and death. 

So the Gates of Eden, it's a very mysterious title. And the refrain is always about the gates of Eden. We have the trees of Eden at the very beginning, but after that, it's all gates of Eden, gates of Eden.

So there's 10 verses. I once actually memorized this song. You know, I suppose with a few days of effort, I could probably get it down by memory again.

But it's a very abstract set of images that are thrown together. And I don't know quite how to make sense of it all. The lamp post stands with folded arms, its iron claws attached to curbs neath holes where babies wail, though its shadows metal badge.

I feel like it's kind of pointless to read all these lines. There are so many and so many images, a shoeless hunter, a savage soldier, soldier, hound dogs baying on the beach, a ship with tattooed sails, a compass blade, Aladdin and his lamp. So he's starting to this.

You can see the first stirrings of, well, in this whole album, all of these famous characters from literature that he references in his songs. Here we have Aladdin and his lamp and sits with Utopian hermit monks. Almost makes you think of like that movement that was also kind of connected to the beat generation and Allen Ginsberg of people following Buddhism and, you know, Kerouac, Dharma Bums, and Gary Snyder, the poet.

So you can kind of imagine he's connected. He's connecting the song to those people, utopian hermit monks, sidesaddle on the golden calf. But it's kind of a cynical view.

And on their promises of paradise, you will not hear a laugh, all except inside the gates of Eden. He just kind of keeps digging deeper and deeper into this imagery. We have kings, we have sparrows, the lonesome sparrow. 

We have a motorcycle black Madonna. That's a very memorable line. Two-wheeled gypsy queen, kingdoms of experience, kings and paupers, princes and princesses, foreign son, men free of their fates. 

My lover coming to me at dawn, telling me of her dreams. Who can make heads or tails of this song? This is one of the most mysterious songs in the Bob Dylan canon. There's something there.

It's one of those songs that you want to try to find a meaning to the entire song. And yet it just kind of evades you. It's the set of imagery and ideas that are sort of loosely connected to each other.

But something about gates of Eden. Maybe shattering your illusions, maybe your naivety and confronting the real world. I've thought before that maybe it's another take on America, you know, that America is the gates of Eden, that it's this kind of utopian promised land that everybody goes to.

But then when they get there, they realize it's not such a promised land after all. I think, you know, I think all generations of immigrants have gone through that realization. And of course, you know, Dylan came from a family of Jewish immigrants, as did my family, at least part of my family.

So yeah, maybe it's another take on America and on American society. He does seem kind of obsessed with the American dream and the American mythology throughout his career. It's sort of, he's plumbing the depths of the American mythology and all of the characters in the American mythology.

The Western, you know, the bums and the hobos and the rich and the powerful and the downtrodden and the laborers. So yeah, it could be about that. I really don't know. 

That one really... And then as if we, as if our brains had been pounded enough, It's All Right, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding), darkness at the break of noon. And again, this is kind of almost like a rap, but a very kind of dark muttering kind of rap, darkness at the break of noon, shadows even the silver spoon. It's almost like a chant, like an incantation.

Like he's making an incantation, like he's a wizard, he's a warlock or something. He's a prophet and a medicine man, a healer, a shaman. He's like a shaman in this song.

Darkness at the break of noon, shadows even the silver spoon, the handmade blade, the child's balloon, eclipses both the sun and moon. To understand you know too soon, there is no sense in trying. So it's really just this chant, this long chant with like 15 verses.

It's a very long song and a very dark song. And I think there's a theme of a prophet. I was thinking about John the Baptist here.

You know, Bob Dylan was very Old Testament, right? He kind of grew up with that. And you can find biblical references just scattered throughout his lyrics. Like sifting for gold in a river. 

The fool's gold mouthpiece, the hollow horn plays wasted words, proves to warn that he not busy being born is busy dying. So again, it sounds like a biblical kind of prophecy. He not busy being born is busy dying. 

And he references temptation and preachers. But then you also have advertisers, disillusion. He comes, uses the word disillusioned.

Disillusioned words like bullet spark, human gods aim for their mark, make everything from toy guns that spark to flesh colored Christ. So it's kind of about the commercialization of the sacred, right? Nothing is sacred anymore in this capitalist world that we live in, where everybody's trying to commercialize and advertise everything. And it's kind of destroying the mystery and the sacredness of being in life.

So there's, again, it feels like a prophecy. For them that must obey authority, that they do not respect in any degree who despise their jobs. It's a very dark song.

Their destinies speak jealously of them that are free. This is a heavy one. It's really one of his best. 

I do think it's one of his best songs. It's got so many powerful lines in it. And it's very much a critique of American society.

One who sings with his tongue on fire gargles in the rat race choir. Just all these, boom, these incredible lines, fake morals, obscenity, money doesn't talk, it swears. That's a great line.

Graveyards, false gods. If my thought dreams could be seen, they'd probably put my head in a guillotine. But it's all right, Ma.

It's life and life only. So yeah, it seems like a prophetic cry in the wilderness. Like John the Baptist, you know, repent of your evil deeds.

Oh, ye of little faith. It really does kind of lift him up into this role of a shaman or a prophet of American society. This is the status that he had taken on. 

But he's doing it in his own way. He's not, it's not like the older songs like Blowin’ in the Wind, which I can see why he, it kind of reminds me of Radiohead's Creep. I don't know if that's a good analogy. 

But it's like you do a song, it becomes very popular. It becomes an anthem. Everybody loves it.

Everybody loves to sing it and loves to sing the chorus and everything. But then you're like, you kind of disown it because it's just too obvious. You know, and you want to do something a little bit more subtle. 

So if you're Radiohead you go on and you make you know Okay Computer and In Rainbows and all those wonderful albums that they made. And you sort of disown your early stuff and I feel like he was. Yeah, he's becoming a more subtle prophet. Rather than the hit them over the head with the with the big message kind of folk singer that he was before. 

Finally, we have one of my favorite songs from this album.

It's All Over Now, Baby Blue Which is definitely part of my standard repertoire. I play this song all the time And it's a wonderful song.

It's a beautiful. It's a beautiful tune great refrain. It's all over now, baby blue, which is kind of sad, but also bittersweet. All of this, uh imagery, um, you know, you must leave now, Yonder stands your orphan with his gun, crying like a fire in the sun. Um, there are saints there is an empty-handed painter. There are seasick sailors and Here it says reindeer armies. I I hadn't seen that before: Reindeer armies.

Okay. Maybe there are variations. I think that I think there are a lot of variations to his lyrics because Sometimes he brings out different Different lyrics for for the same song Reindeer army is the lover Taking his blankets from the floor and walked out your door. 

So all these people kind of walking out of your life, right? It's all over now, baby blue. Leave your stepping stones behind so go on to something new. I feel like he's talking to his audience now. He's saying hey my my days as the great folk poet are over and I'm stepping into something new. You know this stage of my life and career is over. And you got to get over it and move on. The vagabond, Who's rapping at your door, is standing in the clothes that you once wore. Strike another match go start anew.  

And I think that's his final message. And it kind of presages the coming of his next great album Highway 61 Revisited Which I look forward to recording and analyzing In the next week or two.

Talking Freewheelin' Bob Dylan: Some Thoughts on his Iconic Album from 1963 and my Own Attempts to Replicate his Songs

Talking Freewheelin' Bob Dylan-MP3

I've decided to give a short summary of what I've been posting on YouTube, maybe make this a weekly habit, and this week I want to talk about the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, which is the album that I worked on last week and posted all 12 songs of the album. It's a really landmark album in the history of pop and rock and roll, I guess, early rock and roll. I don't know if you can call it rock and roll, but maybe you can see the first stirrings of Dylan's journey to becoming kind of a rock star.

I have trouble with saying that Dylan was a rock star. I always think of him as more of a roots musician, deeply rooted in the blues, which you can definitely see in this album. There are several songs that are basic blues songs, but also in American folk music, obviously his strong connection to Woody Guthrie is apparent in this album as well as his first album. 

So I want to talk a little bit about the album, talk about the process of my recording my own versions of the songs and some of the challenges that I came up with, and why this was such an important and landmark album in the career of Bob Dylan. So this was his second album, came out in 1963, and a very groundbreaking album. It was the first album that he made with entirely his own songs.

So he wrote all the songs for this album, whereas in the previous album, I think he'd only written his first album, he'd only written two of the songs that he performed. So it's an original album in that sense, although, as I said, it's deeply rooted in the blues and in American folk music traditions, which also have their roots in European folk traditions. So he's drawing on a vast and deep wellspring of music to create this album.

It's amazing that he made this album at the age that he was, 22 years old. I mean, it's just unbelievable to think about that. This guy was just an engine, a powerhouse of music, because when you listen to that album, it's a combination of the songwriting skills, which I feel are kind of way beyond that of a typical 22-year-old in terms of their maturity and depth.

Also, his playing. I mean, he had amazing guitar skills. I think sometimes Bob Dylan is a bit underrated as a guitar player.

His guitar playing techniques, his picking and strumming techniques were just unbelievably strong in that time of his life. And also, and I didn't try to replicate this in my own versions because I think it's too difficult, but singing, playing, and playing the blues harp or harmonica, however you want to call it, all at the same time is just an unbelievably amazing skill set that he brought to this second album. I think that's the product of all his years of playing in coffeehouses, playing in Greenwich Village.

I guess if you've seen the movie Complete Unknown, you'll get a sense of that. I haven't seen the movie yet. I'm looking forward to watching it sometime.

I'm sure it'll be incredible in some respects and disappointing in others, as are all music biopics when it comes down to it. But I'm really looking forward to seeing that movie. It's hard to imagine Timothee Chalamet with his five years of training kind of coming anywhere close to what Bob Dylan was like in that time.

But yeah, you got to give him credit for learning the guitar. I think that's a wonderful part of that movie. Anyway, back to the album.

So The Free Will and Bob Dylan, a very significant album in terms of the individual songs that come out, which become iconic songs of the 1960s and are still iconic songs for Bob Dylan today. I don't know how often he plays these songs, probably very little in his concert. I mean, he's written like over 500 songs. So he has a vast repertoire to choose from when he performs. And certainly he doesn't have the guitar chops that he had back in his early 20s. But these are songs that still resonate with people today.

They are songs that have a raw vulnerability to them, but also this emotional power, also the social critique, the critique of politics, the name dropping, all these characteristics that would kind of come to define Bob Dylan's songs over the next generation. They're all in this album. So I think for any Bob Dylan fan, this is an essential album to know and have.

If you collect vinyl or CDs, certainly it's an essential album to listen to in depth. And I think another thing that you can talk about with this album is how did he come up with the songs? How did he challenge, sorry, challenge the times, but also channel? I want to use that word channeling because I think it's such an important word. How did he channel the ideas and the concepts? Where did he draw from to bring out those musical and lyrical ideas that are so well developed in this album? As such a young man, again, quite an amazing thing to think about. 

Obviously, he was drawing on his times. It's kind of in some senses, maybe it's like reading newspapers and absorbing all the news that's going on at the times and all the conversations that must have been happening in those coffee houses with all those highly intelligent musicians that surrounded him in that early stage of his career. All the people that frequented those scenes.

I think he's really channeling a much bigger voice. Maybe you could call it the village voice. Oh, that's probably not. Well, maybe. That's kind of a joke, but I'm not saying that the village was the one and only place where he was learning this stuff. He does seem to be kind of tapping into this sort of New York zeitgeist of people reflecting on and critically thinking about the world.

He's also tapping into the Beat generation. It's well known that Bob Dylan was drawing influences from the Beat generation, from Kerouac and Ginsberg and others in his thinking, in his poetry, the poetic aspects of his songwriting. Multiple sources just coming into this young man.

He's just absorbing them like a sponge and producing these amazing songs. Some of the notable tracks on this album are Blowin’ in the Wind. Obviously, that's one of his most iconic songs.

It's a simple song with a simple message, but a very powerful, profound message. It's also a song that I think is easy to kind of replicate, but it's also kind of easy to parody. I seem to remember a song when I was a teenager, something about “your raincoat is flapping in the wind.”

It's kind of like an easy song to take and parody. I could easily see a parody of that whole film, A Complete Unknown, kind of in the style of the parody of the Johnny Cash story that was done years ago [Walk Hard]. But anyway, I'm getting a little off track.

Like I said, this is a little bit of a stream of consciousness, stream of consciousness, sort of thinking about this album and its significance. So Blowin’ in the Wind, obviously a very important song in Bob Dylan's career, one that kind of identified him with the culture of protest movements that were emerging, that were growing in the 1960s, that were such an important part of culture in the 1960s, not just in the US, but all over the world. The 1960s was such a special era.

And then we have A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall. I think that's another one of his most iconic songs from this album. A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, it's kind of an apocalyptic vision of the world.

Is the hard rain, is it nuclear war? Is it acid rain? I don't even know if that was a concept back then. I suppose it was among certain circles. But somehow humanity is destroying itself.

I mean, that seems to be a big theme running throughout this whole album, because he's also got Talking World War III Blues. There's obviously an existential crisis going on in this album that he is capturing in his songs, and he's expressing the angst of an entire generation of people, people who had come out of, you know, many of them had come out of the ashes of World War Two. And now we're going into the 60s, the Vietnam War is heating up.

There was the Cuban Missile Crisis around the time that this album was being made. I mean, it was just a very dark time. I think it came out before the Kennedy assassination.

But it's that time period. So he's channeling a lot of dark visions of humanity, which connect to our world today. So I think there's a, you know, a kind of a timeless feeling to this album.

So A Hard Rain is Gonna Fall and then Masters of War. So Masters of War is a more biting and direct critique of the world that we live in, and who is pulling the levers of warfare, right? We live in a world of constant warfare. Who is profiting from that? Whose lives are being sacrificed? This is a really powerful song, and it's a very direct voice that comes out of this song.

It's quite different, I think, to his later music, where he kind of wraps his messages in a different package. You have to kind of unwrap the package to get the message. It's not as crystal clear.

So I think there's something kind of naive about this album, that he's, you know, it's kind of the voice of a young man, of an angry young man, right? Just telling people, this is what the world is like. “This is what I hate about the world. This is what I love about the world.”

Very direct messages. You know, he continues to be direct, in some sense, into his later work, but not quite as aggressive, I would say, as he is in this album. So it's kind of the aggressive voice of a fighting young man.

And, you know, there are a lot of other songs on the album that have a different tone to them, more of a kind of a parody of society, a funny tone to them, kind of, again, drawing on Woody Guthrie, the humor of the folk artist come out in a lot of his other songs. So it's not all just darkness and, you know, and anger. There's so many emotions that come through in this album. 

So I think it would be too tedious to go through song by song. I think if you're, you know, a fan of Bob Dylan, you already know this album, you're already familiar, at least with those songs, and maybe some others. I'll mention a couple others.

I think Don't Think Twice, It's Alright is also one of my favorite Bob Dylan songs. It's a much more kind of deeply personal song with the kind of imagery. It's based on the theme of, you know, basically a man leaving his woman, leaving his woman behind, and wandering off for some reason or another.

Either she didn't satisfy him enough, or he had conflicts with her, or he's just a wanderer by nature, and he's got to get on the road again. So it's one of those sort of, I'm going on the road, sorry honey, sorry to leave you, which is kind of a universal theme in folk music as well, and in rock music for that matter. But it's a beautiful song. 

Not just the songwriting and the imagery, but also, and the voice, but also the song itself, the way the song is so carefully crafted. It's just got this, it's an archetypal kind of folk song. It's a lot of fun to pick on guitar. 

So when I worked on these songs, I'm not trying to you know, I don't have the ability or the interest to try to replicate what Bob Dylan does on guitar. That's just way beyond my capabilities. So I like to simplify the songs and just kind of, you know, bring them down to their essence.

Just try to perform them at a level to which people would recognize that, oh yeah, that's this Bob Dylan song. I'm not interested in singing exactly like Bob Dylan. Again, I think that that kind of imitation just comes across as a little weird.

I think it's better to like sing Bob Dylan songs in your own voice and interpret them through, channel them through your own voice, your own way of playing and singing, rather than try to replicate Bob Dylan. I mean, if you want to hear a song in the style of Bob Dylan, just listen to his albums. Why bother listening to somebody else try to imitate him? So my strategy with, I think, with all kind of the pop and rock music that I perform is to try to play them as simply as I can and directly and in my own voice. 

Rather than try to get complicated. There's exceptions, you know, when there are songs that require a certain style of playing like Blackbird, for example. I mean, I think to play that song properly, you really do have to learn how to play it.

But, and that may be true. I mean, people might push back and say, “well, you should really learn this style of picking for this Bob Dylan song. I think that really fits well.”

And maybe I will in the future. But right now, I just don't have the time. If I'm covering an entire album to try to learn one particular song at that level.

So that's the way I've approached this project. For me, it's about, you know, it's about kind of hovering close to the ground of Bob Dylan's legacy and just learning the lyrics, being able to perform the lyrics, maybe not memorize them. Because again, I don't have time to memorize. 

These lyrics are long and complicated, a lot of verses. There's no way I can memorize a particular song in such a short amount of time. I do have some down relatively well from memory, like Don't Think Twice, It's Alright.

But mostly, I just rely on a lyric sheet to reproduce the song. So I think that, you know, just to wrap up, because I want to keep this under 20 minutes. I think this album obviously has great resonance and a long lasting influence and is a signature part of the Bob Dylan legacy. 

It showed what an incredible performer and songwriter he was and what he was capable of. There's still a lot of kind of maybe you could say young man's naivete in this album. And [over time] he was able to kind of mature and really develop and refine and hone his songwriting skills, his lyrical skills.

I think that you can see the seeds of his poetic powers in this album. You can also sense his humor and his pathos in the album as well. This is a man who has a voice of a much older, much more mature man, even in his early 20s.

So he's really coming out. He's kind of coming out of his chrysalis and the beautiful butterfly of Bob Dylan is emerging in this album, if I may use such a metaphor. And again, these are songs that resonate with the day. 

They have an enduring power. And I think they're just a signature and significant part of the Bob Dylan canon. So it's been a great pleasure to try to recreate these songs in my own way.

Archiving My Music On Youtube -- Why I'm Doing It (And Why You Should Consider Doing It Too)

The following is a transcript from an off-the-cuff video I made today about my recent efforts to archive my own personal music videos on Youtube. I’ve been in the habit of recording myself performing rock and pop songs on guitar (and sometimes on piano) for years now, but I only started posting these videos on Youtube recently. These are some reflections on why I’m doing so now and why other musicians and singers might consider taking on a similar project.

Greetings everybody out there in YouTube land. I wanted to take a moment to think about why I've decided to archive my own personal versions of rock and pop songs and put them on YouTube after all these years.

I've been a musician, I mean obviously non-professional, not a working musician, not making money from music, but I've been a musician playing instruments, well, since I was a kid getting into piano and guitar and taking lessons. As I've mentioned in previous discussions on my Beatles project, it was the Beatles who kind of got me started, who really inspired me to pick up the guitar or learn to play piano to try to play their songs. And after nearly 50 years of playing music, I feel like I have some of their songs down now.

When I started this project, putting [my videos] on YouTube late last year, I decided that I was going to record all of the Beatles songs. And as I explained in a couple of previous videos that I made I knew enough of the Beatles songs that I felt like I could do this task. There were a lot that I didn't know, a lot that I had to kind of learn on the spot, but I had quite a few of them down. 

And of course, I know all the Beatles songs by heart, at least in my ears, from playing Beatles songs and Beatles records since I was a kid. So if there's any group that I know extremely well and know all the kind of nuances of their songs, it's the Beatles.

I since decided that I was going to do something similar with the Rolling Stones, who I don't know as well as the Beatles. I've certainly heard all their hit songs since I was a kid, and I know those pretty well. And I've played a few, quite a few Rolling Stones songs in the past. But I think the Rolling Stones will be much more of a journey, much more of an adventure for me, learning songs that in some cases, I've never heard before.

I do think that if there's any other band that comes close to the Beatles in terms of their overall achievement as songwriters, and as performers, it's the Rolling Stones. There are a lot of similarities, even though I think the Rolling Stones is basically a harder blues band with a more aggressive sound than the Beatles. But they have a wide range of music, wide range of sounds, so it's really a joy to relearn, or in some cases, learn new songs by the Rolling Stones.

I've also decided to put up songs by Bob Dylan. I've been playing Bob Dylan songs for a long time now, and over the past couple of years I've tried to memorize a few dozen of his songs. So I'll be putting those up and trying to learn more Bob Dylan songs.

I'm not sure how far I'm going to get with either the Rolling Stones or Bob Dylan, whether I'll be able to cover their entire output of songs as I did with the Beatles, but we'll see. But I'm going to try to keep up with this project over the next year or so, and we'll see how far I get. I also have a lot of other songs that I've covered over the years that I'd like to preserve, to archive.

So fundamentally I think of this as an archiving project. I am a historian, so I'm used to working with archives, and I guess in my personal life I like to archive everything I do. And so it's kind of in my nature, I think, to want to archive my songs, the songs that I've worked on, the songs that I'm passionate about, the songs that I will often play if I'm playing in a gig or an open mic session or whatever. 

I think there are several benefits that one can gain as a musician from doing this, and I've spoken about this before. One thing is that by recording yourself, you get to listen to yourself, you get to criticize yourself and maybe work on your imperfections. Also, I think that when you...it's one thing to record songs for yourself, and I do that a lot.

As a practicing musician, I'll often make a video of myself playing a song, singing a song, go back and just see how I did and what could be adjusted or what worked well. And it also keeps a record of the song I played, how I played it, how I sang it, so I can go back later and review and see, oh, that's how I tackled that particular song. So I think personally, it's a good thing.

It's very helpful for any musician to record yourself playing songs, especially if you want them to become more of a permanent part of your song repertoire. Also, if you're recording songs and presenting them to the public in a format such as YouTube, it really forces yourself to learn the song at least well enough so that you can play it smoothly.

You know, I've said before, the songs that I post on YouTube, I'm not looking for perfection. I just don't have enough time in my day to work a song to perfection or to record it until I get it down perfect. So there's little flaws in there. And I think there's nothing wrong with that.

I think musicians should not be afraid of flaws. I think the key to being a good musician is not that you make mistakes along the way, but that you continue to play smoothly over your mistakes. You know, every musician makes mistakes, even the most professional of musicians, especially when they're up on stage. 

I mean, here's another thing I wanted to mention. Okay, we have this culture, it's kind of bifurcated in music. We've got the live music performance culture, right? And we expect high standards from our best musicians, of course.

And then we have the recorded music industry. So most musicians, we know through their recorded music. And of course, they go over and over and over again until they get it down perfectly. They'll do take after take until it's perfect. So when you're hearing recorded music, you're hearing a very artificial version of the music. It's not what you're going to hear when they play it live.

And I think that's why people still gravitate to live music. People still like to hear their favorite artists playing music live. They'll still listen to a live recording, even if it's not as good as the recorded music.

So I think we have this standard of perfection for recorded music. And maybe some musicians like to impose that on themselves, especially if they're professional musicians and they want to present a perfect face to the world. Obviously, I don't have that issue because I'm not a professional musician.

I don't really care if people see me make mistakes. I think that's part of the process of being a musician. It's part of the fun of being a musician is to see where are you in terms of your development? Are there difficult runs that you've tried to play that you just didn't quite get right? Maybe you'll get them right another time if you keep working on them.

When I work on a song to try to get it down really smoothly, especially if I want to memorize it, I'm memorizing the lyrics, memorizing how to play it on the guitar. It usually takes a couple of weeks of steady practice, maybe playing it three times a day for two weeks until it gets ingrained in my long-term memory. And then I just have to kind of brush it off and review it a little bit in order to play it again. 

But you've got to go through that, for me, like a two week. Maybe you could stretch it out to a month. If you took a song and you play it and sing it steadily for one month every day, maybe two or three times a day, you're really going to get that song down.

And if there are some difficult runs or difficult parts of the song and you work on those steadily for two weeks to a month, you're going to get those down. So there's no magic formula here. It's just work.

It's just practice. And so I think when you're a practicing musician, you have to always make a compromise between how perfect do I want to make this particular song or this particular part of the song versus do I want to go off and work on other songs and add those to my repertoire.

For me, I'm more of a guy who, my goal is to be a human jukebox. So I'm not going to play any song necessarily perfectly, but my goal in life as a musician is to learn as many songs as I can. So I kind of err on the side of quantity. I want to get more songs under my belt. They don't have to be perfect. I don't have to have them perfectly memorized. I can rely on the chord and lyric sheet if I need to.

Maybe there are a few songs that I'm working on consistently that I am trying to memorize, am trying to get down. But for most songs, I'm content with being able to play them smoothly with or without the assistance of a chord and lyric sheet, tabs in other words, guitar tabs. So going back to this archiving project, I've learned hundreds of songs over the years. I've recorded dozens of them maybe. I've been recording myself playing music for umpteen years. I would say that recently as I've become more serious about performing music in public settings, I've done a lot more of recording myself playing music. 

So there was just a kind of a jump to decide to put these on YouTube. I've been resisting it for a while because I guess I kind of bought into the idea that you've got to be really good. You've got to be a really high quality musician to put your stuff out on YouTube.

Putting that stuff out into the world where you're vying for attention with all the best musicians in the world, it's kind of a quixotic venture, right? Most of us aren't at that level and we'd probably shy away from being that public with our musical repertoire. But one thing that I decided was I think I'm good enough that I feel confident showing my work to the public. They'll know that I'm not seeking perfection, I'm not a professional.

There are a lot of amateur artists out there who put their stuff out on YouTube for different reasons. So you have to kind of overcome the idea that only the top echelon of musicians should be making their work public like this. That's one thing.

And then you have to decide, well, ultimately I'm doing this for myself and for my own personal growth. I'm not here to teach people how to play music or how to sing songs. If somebody watches my video and gets something out of it like, “Oh, that's how you play that song. That's cool. That's a nice idea. Maybe I'll try that.” That's wonderful. And please put a comment on my video to say that it helped you. That would be nice to know.

But it's certainly not what I'm aiming to do. There are plenty of professional guitar teachers out there in YouTube world who do a wonderful job of instructing people how to play different songs. Maybe that's a topic that I'll cover in another video. I love those guys. They're all great, wonderful. It's so fantastic that they're putting their videos out there for the world to learn.

I mean, it's such a different world than it was when I was a child. Growing up in the 1970s and the 1980s, we had no access to this kind of material, this kind of educational environment. We had to learn the hard way through charts, sheets, through music teachers. 

Maybe I'll make other videos to talk about some aspects of learning how to play music. But I do think it's really important to have real teachers. I cherish all the music teachers that I've had in the past growing up.

But ultimately, you do have to step out and go on your own and pursue the music on your own. You can't be learning from a teacher forever. Teachers are good when you're in the nest and you're sort of learning how to flap your wings and you're looking down and like, how am I going to fly out of this nest and survive? And they get you out of the nest and then you're flying around.

But then it's up to you to carve out your own environment. So going back to the archiving, I think it's good for any practicing musician to build up a record of your development as a musician, your tastes, your style, what you like, what you're good at, what you need to develop. And I think doing a public archive is kind of a wonderful way of doing that.

I feel like YouTube has given us this unique opportunity to build up a public archive of our efforts. I actually enjoy looking at other practicing musicians on YouTube who have built up a record of their practice and just see how they've developed over the years. I kind of regret that I didn't start doing this earlier. But now that I'm doing it, I feel like it has kind of a momentum of its own. I feel this it's become like a habit. I have this desire every day to add to my record.

But there's another thing that I want to end with because I don't want this to be too long. But there's one other thing is that there's kind of a ticking clock for me. I'm in my mid-50s, so no spring chicken, right? And I think that as you advance in age, you start encountering health problems.

Personally, I had a major health crisis last year [in 2023], and that was a real eye-opener for me. So there's health issues. And then you have to think about how long can I keep up this stamina as a musician? It takes a lot to play music.

I think we take it for granted because we see all these great musicians and they make it seem effortless to sing and to play. But it is a hard practice. It's a tough skill to develop and to maintain.

And I think as you get older, things start to go. Your fingers might start to get arthritis, God forbid, or your voice might start to go. I would like to at least preserve myself when I still feel like I'm in my prime as a musician as I advance in age.

So I think for me, I'm speaking, there's a kind of a timing factor as well. And also going back to what I said earlier, I don't want to forget what I've learned because it's so easy for me. I may go through hundreds of songs in a year, learning them, learning how to play them smoothly. And then I'm on to the next songs and on to the next songs. And I don't want to forget what I achieved and how did I play that song? How did I sing that song? Oh, that's right. I knew that song at one point. I forgot that I actually was playing that song.

So as you advance in age, I don't want to stereotype or denigrate those of us who are advancing in age, but your memory does sometimes play tricks on you and you sometimes forget what you've been up to. And that's why I like keeping a record of things.

I keep a record of the books that I read in a given year, at least those that are outside of my teaching because I have those archived in syllabi and articles that I write and so on. But personal reading, I like to keep a record of my personal reading. And so in that vein, I think it's good to keep a video archive of the songs that I learn and love to play.

So that's all I'm going to say for today. I hope this video has been maybe useful to you if you're also a practicing musician and you're thinking of going on this similar journey of archiving your own work as a musician. See you next time.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai.

If The Beatles Are Beer, The Rolling Stones Are Gin, And Bob Dylan Is Whiskey, Then What About Leonard Cohen?

As should be clear to any long-term reader of my blogposts, growing up in the 1970s-1980s, I started loving the Beatles at an early age, 4 or 5 to be precise, and my love affair with the band just got deeper and deeper over time. By the time I was 12, I had collected maybe a dozen of their albums, including all the major ones plus several minors. Of course, as an American I had all the American versions of their albums. Later in high school I acquired some of the British versions of their classic albums as well.

I never bought a Rolling Stones album, but my parents had several, and I did listen to them now and then. I remember they had Goat’s Head Soup, and Let It Bleed, and maybe a collection of their early hit songs. But mostly, like every other kid growing up in that era, I imbibed and absorbed the Stones via radio. They were ubiquitous on all the major rock stations, such as WBCN (I grew up outside of Boston). Since they were still active and touring and coming out with new albums, I heard all their latest hits on the radio and many of their back catalog songs as well. But I can’t say I became a real fan of the band until my 20s, when I moved to New York City. The first album that I truly dug was Beggar’s Banquet, which somehow jibed well with my experience living in NYC. Over the years, I steadily learned more about the band and their music, but never in a fanatical way.

As for Bob Dylan, although I knew about him as a kid, I never really listened to his music in a deep way until I was in my 20s. When I was in my youth, there was something about Bob Dylan that was a bit of a turnoff. The mop of curly hair, the rough, gravelly voice, and the folkloric style didn’t appeal to me in the least, nor to any of my friends. We just didn’t have the background or context to appreciate his work. My dad was a fan of Dylan’s early work, but unlike some of his other musical interests—jazz mainly—it didn’t trickle down to me. My mom and stepdad didn’t seem to care much for Dylan either. Although I was vaguely familiar with some of his most well-known songs from the 1960s, mostly through the work of other artists like the Byrds, Peter, Paul and Mary, Judy Collins and the likes, I didn’t know much if anything about him.

All that changed when learned how to play guitar in graduate school and started digging into folk music. But the real game changer was when I discovered his 1975 album Blood on the Tracks (I happened to be living in Japan and Taiwan at the time, but that is another story). This was a real “where have you been all my life” moment, which I think I share with millions of other fans who were turned onto Dylan by this album. Unlike his work from the 1960s, this was a more accessible album, with stories you could relate to and vivid character development, not just a laundry list of famous names. It was his most personal album to date, and perhaps his most coherent one as well, and so it’s no wonder that I identified with this album as I was going through my own personal struggles and trying to “find myself” as a young man. It’s no coincidence that I also discovered Tom Waits around this time.

Now for the analogy with alcohol. I first took an interest in beer as a young boy, just as I did with the Fab Four. I remember when I was 7, my dad once “bribed” me to eat a clam for a sip of beer. I’ve never been a big fan of mollusks but was willing to down one for a taste of the sudsy gold. Then, when I was 10 or 11 and I started going to weddings (my own parents’ weddings but also other relatives’), I discovered that it was fun to have a beer or two and turn into an energizer bunny for a while before nodding off in some corner. Champagne, the tasty bubbly drink also offered in weddings, was even more fun.

To me, The Beatles felt—and still feel—like drinking beer or fizzy champagne. It tastes nice going down, and you get a wonderful energetic buzz. It doesn’t zap you or overwhelm you, and it’s hard to get really wasted unless you are chugging it in huge amounts, and the bubbles usually prevent you from doing so unless you are a 200 pound frat boy named Gus who drinks beer by the pitcher (I knew such a guy at Dartmouth—many of them in fact). Like beer (or champagne), you can acquire a strong taste and even a deep craving for Beatles music at a very early age. Then, as you age, you learn to appreciate the subtleties of beer, the varieties of it and the craftsmanship that goes into brewing beer (let’s drop the champagne analogy for now and stick with the brewskis). As you age, you also learn a great deal more about the Beatles, their story, and all the ingredients and techniques and craft that went into making their music. In other words, you can imbibe Beatles and beer at any age and always find something new to appreciate about both.

As for the Rolling Stones, they are the gin of the music world. Why gin, you say? First of all, it’s a distinctly British drink, and the Stones have a very British feel to them, more so than the Beatles I’d say. It’s stronger than beer and much more of an acquired taste, but even a teenager can mix gin with tonic water and enjoy the tasty buzz. It’s probably the first alcohol you got really drunk with, unless of course it was vodka. But really, gin is just vodka with some additional taste supplied by the juniper berries, right?

The Rolling Stones is not a band that a child would typically embrace, but certainly one that a teen can appreciate. They’re not as cuddly as the Beatles. They’re not the kind of band that you and your ten-year-old mates would replicate with four teddy bears, one assigned to each of the lads. There’s something naughty about the Stones, something downright nasty even. They’re much more of a hard blues band than the Beatles ever were, but even their more melodious songs have a strong tinge of sarcasm to them, and much more misogyny, though you could interpret them as parodies of British working- and upper-class mores as well. Like gin, the Stones grow on you over time. You develop a taste for the strength and subtlety of their music beyond just the loudness and the angst. The killer combo of Jagger and Richards is like a gin and tonic. Bubbly like champagne but with a darker tone, and a louder finish. And you can get really wasted on gin. Especially those strong pours, where you don’t realize how much you’ve had until it’s too late. It was just two G&Ts. What happened?

Now, on to Dylan and whiskey. The analogy is so obvious I need not belabor it here. First, there’s the voice: rough and gravelly, but over time you come to appreciate the finer tones, and the wide range of his singing. It’s like discovering all the great whiskeys out there in the world. Some are strong and bitey, while others are mellow with a hint of caramel. With Dylan, you’ve got the plummy voice of Nashville Skyline, the “old man” voice of his early folk tunes, or the hard gravel voice of his later albums. Whiskey is a drink for which most kids have no appreciation. I don’t remember ever having whiskey at all until I reached my 20s. Then, as a young adult, you begin the road to discovery, from the Irish and Scotch whiskeys to the Single Malts. You start with Jack Daniels or Johnny Walker and coke. Jack Daniels is Blood on the Tracks. Strong, smooth, potent. The earlier albums are the Johnny Walker Reds and Blacks. The later albums are the Single Malts. And then comes Tom Waits, and now you are in Bourbon territory.

So then, what about Leonard Cohen? Well, obviously we are now in wine country. As a kid, I could take a sip from a glass of wine now and then and though I didn’t like it a great deal, I certainly didn’t hate it. Then in high school you discover wine coolers. Those are the Dylan and Cohen soundalike bands—the ones you dug in high school with their cool and fruity lyrics. The New Wave bands of the 1980s in other words. But you still don’t have a taste for real wine. You start to develop that in your 20s. About the time I got into Bob Dylan, I was also starting to listen to Leonard Cohen and learn some of his songs. Suzanne was the first song of his that I learned to play on guitar. Then came his other classics, like Famous Blue Raincoat and Story of Isaac and That’s No Way to Say Goodbye. Later you discover he wrote that song Hallelujah. Eventually, you’re deep diving into the incredible depth and breadth of the Grand Canyon of his work and discovering that he tapped a goldmine of Biblical and mythological references and concocted them into a fine golden tapestry of songwork that is unmatched even by Dylan. You’ve discovered fine wines in other words, and you can identify their bouquets and their provenance with a taste or even a smell. Yep, Cohen is for oenophiles all right.

Building Worlds Out Of Words: Some Books I Enjoyed Reading For Pleasure In 2024

It has become a custom of mine to look back on each year and write about the books I read over the year for pleasure and for personal enlightenment. As an academic, I do a lot of reading relating to my research projects and to the courses I teach, but I also try to keep up with other fields and subjects that I find interesting, which may or may not connect to my own research interests or teaching areas. I think it’s important for academics to read widely and well outside of their chosen disciplines, lest we become “mentats”—academics who only know a great deal about a very narrow area of the world. (Here I’m borrowing the category of human computer from one of my favorite sci-fi novels of all time, Frank Herbert’s Dune).

This past year, while continuing to recover from my close brush with death the previous year (I relate the story of my heart attack in a previous post), I chose many books dealing with the “big questions” of life, the universe, and everything (anybody familiar with Douglas Adams will get that reference). Why are we here on earth, where are we going, how will we know when we get there? That sort of thing. These are after all the questions that drove me to study Chinese and Japanese language and culture, to absorb the wisdom of the ages embodied in the great East Asian tradition. And they still drive me to this day.

While others prefer to be “buffeted by the episodic” (as one of my Dartmouth College history profs, Gere Daniell was fond of saying), I like to focus on the big and enduring questions that run like a thread though the history of humanity. Maybe that’s why I gravitate to big-picture people like Dante (whose wonderful documentary bio by Ric Burns I saw this past year) and Leonardo Da Vinci (ditto by brother Ken Burns which just came out last month), who asked big questions about life and death and everything in between.

But how do we approach these “big questions?” Through religion? Philosophy? Science and Nature? Music? Sci-Fi and Fantasy? Perhaps the best answer is “all of the above.” And while you might think my reading habits are a bit random, there is a method to my madness, as I will try to explain below.

Anyhow, I digress a bit. (Drumroll please) Here’s my list of faves from the past year’s reading.

Sci Fi and Fantasy

Lately, I’ve been indulging quite often in sci-fi and fantasy literature. Perhaps the desire to escape into another universe is just too strong to resist. Maybe my recent encounter with my own mortality has influenced this choice as well. Since I’ve proven my steadfast loyalty to George R. R. Martin and his Song of Ice and Fireseries or Game of Thrones—see last year’s reading post--it was time to try out Fire & Blood, the epic and massive prequel to the series, which inspired the HBO show House of the Dragon. I enjoyed both Seasons 1 and 2 of this show, which takes a sort of Shakespearean approach to the medieval dragon-invested fantasy world of Martin and his favorite family, the Targaryens (not to be confused with the Kardashians, nor with the Roys of HBO’s Succession fame, though there are intriguing parallels). I wasn’t sure how this long and detailed back-story of the world of Ice and Fire would compare with the action-packed swashbuckling stories of the Ice and Fire series. Yet once I started the book, I found it hard to put down, and I swept through the saga as if it were another volume of Ice and Fire. Despite the detailed and voluminous nature of the book, it still reads like a gripping work of fiction, and you find yourself following all the threads, all the kings and queens and princes and princesses and all their various friends and foes as they parade their way through the book. If only real history writing could be as interesting (a subject I will return to below). I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’m not the first one to note that George R. R. Martin is the Stephen King of fantasy fiction—once you start reading, you just can’t put his books down (or perhaps you should never pick them up in the first place, but that’s another subject). All I can say is that for lovers of the Martin fantasy world, this book is a must read.

Last year, as I wrote in my previous post at the end of 2023, I decided to tackle the Isaac Asimov Foundation series, which I read in conjunction with watching the show along with my daughter (the show was interesting but was a great departure from the books). It was such a great revelation to read this series and find out how the master architect of space-faring sci fi paved the way for generations of visions about humanity’s quest for the stars. This year I picked up two Asimov novels, Caves of Steel and The Gods Themselves. Caves of Steel is a classic sci fi detective novel about a human detective, Elijah Baley, who is unwillingly partnered with a humanoid robot named R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a crime. It’s a brilliant story that evokes a future world as powerfully as its successor Philip K. Dick and the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep that became the inspiration for the film Blade Runner, though Asimov’s world is funnier and not as dark as Dick’s portrayal of a world featuring replicants. The Gods Themselves is about a parallel universe, and a near-future world where humanity has learned to suck energy from that universe, only to learn that doing so may bring down both universes. It’s so far out there in terms of the thinking that it is literally mind-blowing, and the highlight is the second section which narrates the parallel universe and the heroic and bizarre creatures that inhabit it. I simply stand in awe of Asimov’s ability to conjure up worlds on scientific premises. Nobody can touch him. If Martin is the King of fantasy, Asimov is the Tolkien of sci-fi.

While I read some of Asimov’s books in my youth, Stanislaw Lem was my favorite sci-fi author in high school, and I think I read everything he wrote that had been translated into English language. Imagine my surprise and delight when at the beginning of this year I discovered a book of recently translated fiction by Lem, called The Truth and Other Stories. The short stories in the book represent the “scatterings from his workshop” as a fellow sci-fi author puts it, and they presage his brilliant novels and works of creative “non-fiction”. The sad and gripping story of a robot created just for the pleasure of being hunted down and destroyed by humans is alone worth the cost of the book. Like so much of his literature, this story delves deeply into the question of being, and whether sentient beings created by humans just for sport have souls and think as deeply as we do—a burning question for our current age of Generative AI. I only wish Lem had lived long enough to experience a chat with ChatGPT.

Having rekindled my love for this Polish sci-fi author, I tackled his most famous novel, Solaris, which I hadn’t read since college. This is a story about a spacefaring age when we have discovered an ocean planet with fascinating properties that suggest that the entire planet possesses some sort of intelligence. This sci-fi story then blends with a kind of horror story in which the human occupants of the station set up on its surface to investigate the planet are haunted by people from their past. Among the best features of this novel are the descriptions of the bizarre structures that emanate from the planet. The book gets you thinking about the nature of intelligence and our capacity as humans to identify alien forms of intelligence that are beyond our imagination. And then there is the probing of the human psyche by the planet itself. No wonder it was made into two films.

Since I live in China, I am not unaware of the great contributions that Chinese sci-fi authors have recently made to the genre. While I have yet to tackle the Three Body Problem (maybe that will be a project for this coming year), this past year I read another Chinese sci-fi story by Hao Jingfang called Vagabonds. I picked up the novel out of pure curiosity at the Foreign Language Bookstore in Shanghai, and it had been sitting on my shelf for a while, when I decided it was time to try it out. To be honest, it took me some time and a lot of patience and perseverance to really get into the story. It’s a slow burner all right, which spends a lot of time world-building before getting into the action. But for those with the patience to get through the first 200 pages, the book offers plenty of rewards as the story picks up in the middle and end. There are many things I like about this novel. First, the main protagonist is a young woman, who judging from her name is ethnically Chinese, though Chinese nationality does not seem to play any direct or obvious role in the story. Instead, the bifurcation is between Martians (humans living on Mars) and Earthers (folks living on Earth). Growing up in a city composed of glass tubes, under very different gravity conditions, the Martians have evolved a very different culture, ethos, and way of life to the Earthers. The main conflict of the story is between the Earthers and the Martians, who seem to have a far more socialist and collectivist mindset than the enterprising Earthers. Their inventions and discoveries get integrated into their system of life, rather than into a profit-oriented corporate economy. I think what the author does best is to describe this alternative world in great and fascinating detail, including how people dance, dine, socialize with and entertain each other. There is a lot of discussion about clothing and the technology that goes into fashion, which you won’t get in Lem or Asimov, that’s for sure. In other words, the author provides a more feminine, nuanced, and one could even say Chinese perspective on world-building. For that reason alone, it’s worth reading. The story itself could be stronger, but there is enough interesting action and culmination of story strands towards the end to make it a satisfying read.

Speaking of Philip K. Dick, I picked up a hard copy of the Man In The High Castle at the Foreign Language Bookstore a few months ago, and found it a very interesting read. Some say it’s his best work. I can’t testify to that because I haven’t read all his other books, but I found a very engaging story with a lot of food for thought. The premise of the story is that the Axis Powers won World War II, and now (c. 1960s when the book was published) the USA is divided between the West Coast occupied by the Japanese and the East Coast occupied by Nazi Germany. A very interesting proposition indeed, and it gets us to think more about the countries in the post-war era that were divided and occupied by the US and Soviet Union, notably Korea, not to mention Berlin.

Music

As followers of my research projects and posts know, I am a huge advocate of popular music in all its various manifestations. As a practicing (if not professional) musician myself, I listen to a lot of music every day, and I’m constantly learning to play, sing, and perform new songs on guitar or piano. I even dabble in songwriting, though I don’t perform my own songs much (maybe that will change soon). Anyhow, I always enjoy reading books about musical styles, bands, and musicians I like to listen to, and last year was no exception. Nick Mason, Inside Out: A Personal History of Pink Floyd was one book I enjoyed reading. I’d always been curious about the Pink Floyd story—how the band formed, how they discovered or created their own musical style, how and why they split up (well, why Roger Waters split from the band) and this book offers an insider’s view by the band’s drummer, who tells the story with a mixture of humility and humor. Another book that I enjoyed greatly was Lori Majewski and Jonathan Bernstein, Mad World. This book offers interviews with members of some of the most memorable bands from the 1980s, bands that were labeled “new wave” or progressive for the time, mostly coming out of the UK scene. These were bands that I followed and loved in my teen years (I’m thinking of writing a memoir called My Teen Ears but that’s another story for another time). It’s a real revelation to find out how they look back on their own musical achievements and on this age of musical exploration, when synthesized music became integrated into the musical mainstream and drum tracks started to replace real drummers. Though often looked down upon by musical purists, this was a great age of musical innovation, and the book is a fantastic record of that era. I discovered this book last summer (thanks Kindle Unlimited!) in conjunction with attending the Totally Tubular Music Festival in Boston, where I saw some of my musical heroes from the 1980s including the band Modern English (I Melt With You!), Tom Bailey from the Thompson Twins and Thomas Dolby (I discuss his new novel below).

As for my more “classical” musical tastes, while I delved into some books on Bob Dylan last year, this year I chose to focus on Leonard Cohen and The Beatles (I may do a deeper exploration of Bob Dylan next year). One was Sylvie Simmons, I’m Your Man: The Life of Leonard Cohen which is probably the best book on Cohen’s life and certainly the best biography of him that I’ve read so far. Cohen had such a fascinating life as an artist, from his early days in Montreal to his seven-year stint on the Greek island of Hydra, not to mention his time mingling with other bohemian artists in 1960s New York City. Then there was his five-year retreat to a Zen Buddhist monastery outside of LA in his later years, and his triumphal return to the stage towards the end of his life, and all the while he was creating compelling, mysterious and beautiful songs. Speaking of which, Harry Freedman, Leonard Cohen: The Mysterial Roots of Genius does a great job of illuminating the various influences including Biblical stories that inspired his songwriting.

Keeping with the subject of great songwriters, last year I picked up Ray Connolly, Being John Lennon on the recommendation of my favorite Beatles podcaster, Robert Rodriguez, (Something About The Beatles) who has interviewed Connolly on several occasions. Since I have already posted a lengthy review of this biography, I will just say that this is essential reading for any deep fan of Lennon and The Beatles. Speaking of which, I also recommend The Beatles Complete Chord Songbook for any musician looking for a comprehensive guidebook to their music. If you are a guitar player and wish to expand your knowledge of Beatles tunes, this is the best book for your collection. I used it last fall to cover every Beatles tune written and posted my covers on Youtube. I know that sounds nuts, but again, there’s a method to my madness and doing such things helps me improve my own musical skills and deepen my knowledge of music, as I relate in a previous post.

Another music history book I enjoyed last year around the time of Mozart’s birthday in January was Paul Johnson’s brief and cogent biography and analysis of the works of Mozart: A Life. Johnson is a wonderful guide and curator of the Mozart Museum, providing insights to many of his greatest works while placing them in historic context of his life, family, career, and environment, and all in a slim and easy to digest package. This book is worth another read for sure.

Academics

As I wrote earlier, this post is about my non-academic reading habits, not my academic ones, but I thought I’d include a few books here that have been helpful to me as an academic. One is Bryan Penprase and Noah Pickus, The New Global Universities. This book, co-written by a colleague of mine at Duke University, tells the stories of several global ventures in university-building in recent times. The only disappointment, though totally understandable, is that it doesn’t cover universities in China including our own Duke Kunshan University. If you want to get a deeper understanding of how universities have gone global in recent decades, this is the book to read.

Another book that I found quite useful for my own academic work is Mario Luis Small and Jessica McCory Calarco, Qualitative Literacy. This book offers many fine examples of how to do more nuanced and rich qualitative research and is a great boon to anthropologists, sociologists and ethnographers who conduct qualitative research and writing projects. Meanwhile, Tilar J. Mazzeo, How to Write a Bestseller gives excellent advice to academics about how to write for a broader audience than your colleagues in the field. If you want to write a history book that will read more like a George R. R. Martin novel than a yawny monograph, you should read this book. One good piece of advice: take yourself out of the story. No matter what your experience is as a researcher or writer, Howard S. Becker, Tricks of the Trade: How to Think About Your Research can help you think more deeply about your research projects. If you’re just starting out as a researcher, my dear colleagues Thomas Mullaney and Christopher Rea’s recent book Where Research Begins is a great way to think about how and where to begin.

If you’re a seasoned researcher and writer like myself but still find it hard to schedule your writing and integrate it into your busy life of teaching, advising, admin work, family life, and personal enjoyments, Joli Jensen, Write No Matter What: Advice for Academics provides you with a no-nonsense perspective, starting with the elimination of the false notion that as an academic you will have big chunks of time to write. Then the book offers much more practical advice on how to chip away at projects regardless of your limitations of time. One good piece of advice is to always keep one project on the “front burner” while others are simmering on the “back burner.” This is advice that I really take to heart, since I’m always pursuing multiple research, writing, and film projects while serving as a professor in a highly demanding academic institution.

Science and Nature

As readers of my blogsite know by now, I love trees. I also love birds. David George Haskell, The Songs of Trees brings these two loves together. It’s a poetic book about a deeply scientific subject, exploring how the world weaves together the various strands of biology into a great symphony of being. The complex and intricate relationships between flora and fauna in various parts of the world are lovingly described and analyzed by the author, who also inserts himself into the story as the observer, not afraid to get bitten, stung, entangled, or even poisoned by the environment he embeds himself into while learning firsthand about how nature really works.

On another note, Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Mozart’s Starling tells the story of the world’s most famous composer and his pet starling, and speculates how his singing bird may have inspired and influenced his compositions. She does this while also giving the reader plenty of vignettes of life with her own pet starling, a much maligned and misunderstood species of birds. It’s a wonderful story about the relationship between humans and our avian friends. And for Mozart lovers, the book provides many fine insights into his personal life and his career as a composer.

I also love stars, and reading Roger Penrose, Cycles of Time gives one a finer appreciation of them as one gazes out into the infinity of the cosmos beyond our tiny planet earth. How did the universe first arise? What was “there” before “there” was “there”? These are the great conundrums that humans have been pondering for millennia, and Penrose comes as close as any human can to providing some fascinating scientific explanations for the how and the why. I find this work mind-boggling in a good sense. Even though much of the science and the math in this book goes beyond the meager abilities and limitations of my own feeble human brain, I find it a great exercise to read such a book and try to understand some of the basic concepts.

Jim Goodman, Xishuangbanna: The Tropics of Yunnan was another book I enjoyed reading. I’m placing this book in the science and nature category even though it’s focused more on the human aspect of this part of the world. I found this to be a great read as we explored the area known as Xishuangbanna is the southwesternmost part of China last week (see my previous post). It’s a fine effort to integrate the natural and human world in a bid to understand what makes this part of China so complex and interesting, with so many distinct ethnicities and cultures that complement the astounding variety flora and fauna that occupy this tropical corner of the world.

Fiction and Poetry

I tend to read more non-fiction than fiction books, but here are some of my favorites from the past year outside of the sci-fi fantasy category that I explored above. One of my finer fiction reads was by the unlikely author Thomas Dolby, whom I’ve loved as a songwriter and musician since the early 1980s.  His first novel Prevailing Wind which came out last summer is a stunning debut. Like his songs, which capture poetic vignettes of life, he demonstrates a remarkable ability to capture a lost world of boating and sailing and to tell the intriguing story of the confluence of wealth and poverty in the yacht clubs of early 20th century New England. If you are drawn to the lost arts of yachting and sailing, this is a great read. Dolby obviously did his homework, and his grasp of nautical terminology alone makes the book worthwhile, but I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the other aspects of the book as well, including the character development, the dialogue, and the thick descriptions of life in a small Maine coastal town and in turn-of-century New York City. This is a wonderful work of historical fiction--one of my favorite genres--by one of my favorite “new wave” songwriters from the 1980s.

This past year I spent a lot of time reading poetry and expanding my own collection of books of poetry. One of the great revelations for me was reading Lord Byron’s book Don Juan. The book is divided into sixteen “cantos” composed of one hundred or more verses each in identical form of iambic pentameter with a particular rhyme scheme, A B A B A B C C. While the story follows the life of the famous fictional character Don Juan and his many amorous adventures across the European landscape, the author indulges in many long digressions and disquisitions, all the while keeping up his trenchant sense of humor while subtly or not-so-subtly critiquing the society of which he was a staunch member, along with occasional bold attacks against his fellow poets Wordsworth and Southey (not even Keats emerges unscathed). The poetry alone is a work of great genius, and the book must be read along with annotations that illuminate all the various historical and cultural references he drops into each stanza. Admittedly it takes some time and a great deal of patience and persistence to get through each of the sixteen cantos, and one can easily lose the thread of his story and ideas (which he often admits and feels guilty about, though he never stops digressing). This book reminds me of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. If Pynchon wrote poetry rather than prose, he would probably be very close to Byron in style.

Other than Pynchon, whose entire oeuvre I’ve read, some books more than once, one author I’ve kept up with consistently over the years is T. C. Boyle. I’ve always enjoyed his dark sense of humor and his ability to write from the perspectives of so many different characters. This year I found his book of short stories I Walk Between the Raindrops to be a very enjoyable reading experience, and very timely—there is even a story about a man caught on a cruise liner during the early stages of the global pandemic known as COVID-19. One of my favorites in this set is about a man who makes a deal with a woman to take her apartment after she passes, but she ends up outliving him (sorry to give it away, but you’ll still enjoy the story nonetheless).

There are a few works that I reread along with some that were new to me. I’ve been a fan of Jorge Luis Borges since college, and rereading Ficciones, his iconic collection of short stories and fictional non-fiction essays, was great fun. Talk about mind-blowing, each story twists your brain into a pretzel in different ways. Another book I picked up and ended up enjoying (though it’s a dark story indeed) was Disgrace. This book by the well-known South African author J. M. Coetzee focuses on the story of a 50-something academic who indulges in a casual affair with a student, doesn’t undergo the appropriate repudiations of his careless act, and ends up leaving academic life to join his daughter on her farm in the countryside. Her own encounter with sexual violence is a poignant counterpoint to his affair. It’s an unforgettable story about race relations, generational conflict, and family relations that goes beyond the time and the place.

Speaking of which, Herman Hesse, Siddhartha, is another classic that I read in college and revisited last year that explores life, sex, family, generation gaps, and the inner life. I’ve been a fan of Hesse’s work since college and have read most of his oeuvre over time, including several readings of his most famous novel The Glass Bead Game (I’m due for another reading soon), but I hadn’t revisited Siddhartha since I first read it as a college student, and since I’ve spent at least some of my career teaching and learning about the history of Buddhism, I thought it would be nice to return to this classic work. It was certainly worth a re-read, and for those who haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend it. What’s interesting is how the book is a reflection of the story of the original Buddha and his enlightenment in ancient India, and yet it is not about him, but about a contemporary of his who goes through his own individual journey towards enlightenment.

Another book I decided to reread after many years was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Pirsig. I first read this book in college and read it again around 15 years ago while on a big road trip with my then six-year old daughter. This was my third read. I like the combination of the “on the road” story of the father and son, and the mental journey into his inner psyche in the form of a mysterious character named Phaedrus. Plenty of food for thought as he dissects western civilization and philosophy and compares the great thinkers of the West (including Aristotle) to the eastern traditions of Daoism and (not as much as the title suggests) Buddhism, as he searches for the nature of quality and how to recognize it. It’s a question that jibes with me in the realm of academic life, where everything is increasingly corporatized and quantified.

Rounding out the fiction section of this long annual book review is Seicho Matsumoto, Tokyo Express. Again, this was a book I picked up by chance at the Foreign Language Bookstore in Shanghai, the best English-language book shop in China. It’s a relatively short novel that takes place in Japan during the late 1940s and starts out with a suspicious “lover’s suicide” on a beach that is eventually investigated by local police and by Tokyo police as a possible murder case. The way the detectives eventually discover the truth is simply ingenious, having to do with train schedules, and I won’t say anymore except that this book is a must-read for any lover of mystery and detective novels, and of Japanese fiction.

Well, that pretty much sums up some of the best of my pleasure reading for the year. Hope to see you again this time next year for a roundup of 2025!

Getting Back to Banna: After All These Years It’s Still Magical, If A Lot More Touristy

The White Pagoda in Manting Park.

Xishuangbanna. The name resonates like a beacon, calling you back to a lush tropical paradise wedged in between southwest China’s Yunnan Province and the bordering countries of Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos. You’ve been there before, 26 years ago to be precise, and now you’re heading back to see how this part of China has weathered the 21st century. As predicted, it’s become a lot more accessible, and a great deal more commercialized and touristified. Yet it still holds its charms and natural beauty and is well worth a return visit.

The last time you came here was in 1998, with your mother. You went there to seek adventure, as a young man does, and your 55-year-old mom was up to the task. For a week, she accompanied you on bus rides over winding mountain roads to remote villages to visit the local temples. She even spent hours with you circumnavigating a reservoir in search of exotic birds, only to lose your way by dusk and you were fortunate to find a road and a van to take you back to civilization. But the peak experience of your journey was when a local young lady, a member of the Dai minority that dominates this part of China, invited you to her best friend’s wedding and you spent the afternoon eating and drinking with local Dai villagers in a stilted home, the kind the Dai were (and still are) famous for in China.

Now, you are your mother’s age when she accompanied you on that journey long ago, and you are taking your own teenage daughters and your wife on the return journey. You’re hoping to discover some of the same pathways and have similar experiences, though you know that’s impossible because 25 years have passed and China has carried on its merry way, marching into the new century in brazen glory. When you came here with your mother, you flew, but you had to change flights in Kunming. This time it’s a direct flight from Shanghai to Banna, bringing thousands of tourists who prefer the balmy sun of a tropical place to the cold and grey Shanghai winter. Far more tourists come from northern China. Most have flown and arrived in big tour packages and are being bussed around to the typical tourist sites. Many more live here in the winter, and cars from Henan, Hebei, Heilongjiang, and Beijing abound on the roads (you can tell from the license plates). New buildings and housing complexes are rising around the city of Jinghong like “mushrooms in spring rain” as the saying goes, and speculation is rife. On the other hand, the surrounded mountainsides that had been stripped bare by the rampant rubber tree industry are at least somewhat restored to their original greenery.

You arrive in Jinghong, the main city in the Banna region, and settle into your hotel, a Sheraton resort hotel in the southern part of town that reminds you of a White Lotus hotel. It’s big and capped with traditional style roofs, has a large pool in the back, and has plenty of tourists from all parts of China (and a few foreigners as well). You arrive in the afternoon and decide to head out to Manting Park in the city and check out the park and the Buddhist temple there. It’s a lovely park and temple and the golden temple statues blaze in the blue sky. It feels kind of like Thailand, but you’re still in China. They say Banna is the only place in China that really has a Southeast Asian feel to it, and you agree (though perhaps Hainan Island comes close as well).

The following morning, your wife talks to one of the attendees at the front entrance to the hotel, and he recommends a driver, a local man named Y, who appears in a white SUV. This will be a far more comfortable ride than the taxi you took yesterday. Mr. Y is a native of Banna of Hani ethnicity, and he proves the perfect guide for your four-day journey. This will be a somewhat less adventurous one than the one you took with your mother 25 years before, and more comfortable rides as well. But you’re much older, and you and your wife and daughters don’t have quite the same stamina as you and your mom did back then. Even so, you are ready and willing to get off the well-trodden path of tourism, which you eventually will do.

Time for some water splashing in Primitive Forest park.

On the first full day of your stay, you decide to visit the “Primitive Forest” located around an hour’s drive through and beyond the city. After braving city traffic your driver climbs the valley into the surrounding mountains (the city of Jinghong is surrounded on all sides by low mountains) and you reach the site. Buses of tourists are there at the entrance and more busloads show up. Your driver buys tickets (he can get a discount) and takes you to the gate, where you get on a vehicle that conveys you and other tourists up a mountain road to the first big station, a large open space surrounded by vendors selling sweets and snacks, where a man leads the tourists like a preacher his congregation or a DJ in a disco. Huge basins of water are set up around the perimeter. A group of costumed dancers walks down a ramp to the middle of the open space and performs. Then everyone is welcomed onto the space for a water splashing event. Known as po shui, this is a regular ritual in this part of China and one of the reasons why so many tourists come from all over China (and the world) to this remote place. The big event known as po shui jie takes place in April, but it seems that all round the year there are folks splashing water on each other. A cleansing ritual to be sure, and an exciting part of the tourist experience here in Banna.

Walking down the forest path

You and your family move on and take an hour long walk through the tropical forest, stepping on walkways made of bamboo strips. It’s a pleasant experience, though you are surrounded by tour groups marching on the same pathway.

The next day, your driver takes you to an even more faraway place, following the Lancang River on its southeastern course almost to the border of Laos. On the way (even though you are still in China) you go through a border station and the border police stop your car and ask where you are from and where you are going. They then wave you on to your destination: the Botanical Garden.

A stilted house in the Dai village

But before you arrive there, you stop in a traditional style Dai village, and a Dai woman shows you around the village and takes you up the stairs into her stilted home. It turns out there are four generations of Dai style homes in the village, she explains. You see some stilted homes that are obviously older, with traditional wood fittings, and others made of concrete that are clearly more modern. Beautiful plants and flowers decorate the homes and gardens of the village. At the end of the village tour, she takes you to a large hall where they are selling all kinds of local items: tea, fruits, and locally made silver jewelry, but with no obligation to buy anything.

In the Botanical Garden

You depart the village and continue your journey to the Botanical Garden, famous for its staggering variety of plants, trees, and flowers. After buying tickets and taking a vehicle to the center of the Garden, you walk around for a couple of hours, enjoying the scenery. The weather is typical of December: balmy, warm, sunny, not too hot, maybe around 25 degrees. It’s a pleasant afternoon to enjoy a stroll amidst forests of trees with names you barely recognize. Each tree is labeled for easy identification. It’s a botanist’s bonanza all right. You can pay to take a hot air balloon ride (not so much a ride, just a lift to a higher elevation), but you choose to view the Garden from ground level. Late in the afternoon, you walk all the way back to the Garden entrance and your driver takes you on a two-hour ride back to your hotel, which ends up taking longer owing to the traffic and some road construction.

Looking at tea plants on the foggy mountain

On the third day, you agree to be driven up into the mountains of Nannuoshan southwest of the city. This is Hani territory, and the driver is intimately familiar with the mountains. He takes you up a steep, winding mountain road, and towards the top of the mountain the fog thickens and it’s much colder than down below. You mildly regret not bringing your jacket, but with a long sleeve shirt you aren’t too uncomfortable.

The driver tells you that only the tea at this higher elevation is really good. He takes you down a mountain path surrounded by tea trees on which large spiders have built impressive spiderwebs, and you walk under the webs. He shows you that the best tea leaves are the buds on the very end of the branches.

Serving tea in a mountain teahouse

The driver takes you to a teahouse, newly built out of concrete, owned by friends. In the teahouse, his friend, also Hani, serves you white tea that is quickly steeped in hot water—up to 20 steepings are permitted. They feed you black peanuts and other snacks, and the teahouse wife sings a couple of Hani songs for your entertainment. Then they show you the back room where they bake and dry the tea leaves.

An 800 year old tea tree

After that, the driver takes you uphill to a spot where you walk down another mountain path to a locally famous tea tree. The tree is famous for its age: 800 years. The path, wide and well-constructed, then winds back up around the mountain to exit down the road where the driver picks you up after a 40-minute walk on the mountain path. As you walk the path, more trees are labeled for your edification. It’s quite a nice walk and far more pleasant than the one you took two days ago surrounded by waves of tourists. There are a few others on the path, but not enough to distract you from the quietude and the beautiful scenery (though it would be more beautiful if the fog lifted). An hour later you are back down the mountain and resting in your hotel.

Looking at jewelry in the night market in Jinghong

Later that evening your driver takes you to a night market in the middle of town. Row after row of shops selling exotic clothing and photography shops where you can dress up and have your photo taken. In the night market, there are food stalls and plenty of shops selling various knick knacks. It’s a lively place, “people mountain and people sea” as the Chinese say (meaning, big crowds).

Walking up the stairs to the Big Bodhisattva

Day four is your last day in Banna, and your flight back to Shanghai (a four-hour flight) is set for the evening. Around noontime, your driver takes you to the Big Buddha located on a hill overlooking the city from the north. You walk several sets of stairs up the hill, reaching the main hall, then the great Bodhistatva atop the hill, then a chedi complex behind that. It’s a rather long and hot hike up the stairs and takes at least 30 minutes of steady walking to get to the top. You enjoy the view from the hilltop and all the iconography and statuary of the various buildings—the elephants, nagas (snakelike dragonish lionfish beasts that grace the stairs) and other fantastical beings.

The Mei Mei Cafe in Jinghong

After coming back down from the hilltop, you tell the driver to go into town where you will rest at a café. Some friends who came here long ago recommended the Mei Mei Café, so you head there and are not disappointed. It’s a fine café with western food, great coffee and even better homemade ice cream. The café itself is in an oldish building, surrounded by greenery with outdoor seating in the front (where a string of cafes may be found) and in the back. It’s in the Jinglan hotel complex.

Then it’s time to head home to Shanghai and to the cold grey dreary winter, but you are carrying back fond memories of a family adventure, which though not quite as adventuresome as your last visit 26 years ago, will still be remembered for a long time to come. And hopefully, next time you will not wait so long before returning to Banna.

Afterthoughts on Beatles Mountain Project: How and Why I Recorded and Posted Covers of 180 Beatles Songs on Youtube

Good evening, everybody. Good evening from Kunshan, China, where I live and work, and where I have just completed my ongoing project recording cover versions of all the Beatles songs from A to Y. I just finished the last song on the list, which is “Your Mother Should Know”, and with that song, I complete this project and give it over to the world, for better or worse. So I thought since I had just completed the project, I might share some words about it, why I did it in the first place, and what I feel I've gotten out of it, maybe what you can get out of it too, if you're a musician especially.

So let's start with why I decided to do this crazy project, which is covering all the Beatles songs from A to Y. I think the first inspiration was when I picked up this book recently. It's called The Beatles Complete Chord Songbook, and it's one of many Beatles songbooks that I own and that I've collected over the years. But this is definitely, I would say, if you're going to buy one Beatles songbook, this is it. It's really a wonderful book. It's not perfect. No songbook is going to be perfect, but you can see how it has the chords, the lyrics, the chords.

Obviously, you have to know the tunes to play them. So you can go through this book, basically song by song, and play each song in the original key, or if like me, sometimes you have to transcribe the song or transpose it to a different key because it might be too high for you in the case of some of the Paul songs. I've tried my best to play all the songs in the original key, but sometimes I had to go low.

 So I think it was with this book that I got the inspiration. I was going to go through the entire book and play all the songs, and then I decided, hey, why not record myself playing them? Because you can always learn a lot by recording yourself playing songs if you want feedback on your songs, listen to the recording, maybe make adjustments to your playing and so forth. I think the other thing that I like about recording songs as a musician is that it kind of forces you to really hone the song so that you can play it smoothly, especially if you plan to release it to the public on Facebook or YouTube or some other social media, and so that your friends and family or the public at large can see the products of your work.

 Of course, you want to hone the songs and make them listenable. So recording yourself playing songs until you get them to play smoothly is, I think, a good practice for any musician, regardless of your level, regardless of whether you are a non-professional musician like myself or a professional musician. I think it's a good thing to do. So the other reason I did this was because I've been, you know, as I've explained in other videos I've made, I've been a lifelong Beatles fan. I've been a fan of the Beatles ever since I was four or five years old. They've been a big part of my life. They've been kind of the archetype of music for me. They are the, you know, the band that I always refer back to in my mind, and I thought it would be a good practice to systematically go through all their songs, even though it can feel a bit tedious to do that. Up until this time, up until I started this project, I should say, I knew quite a few Beatles songs.

 There are a few that I had under my belt either playing on guitar or on piano. I would say somewhere between maybe a quarter and a third of the songs in the Beatles canon I already was accustomed to playing and singing. Some of them I know quite well, some of them I play frequently. They're kind of a part of my repertoire. Others I had played occasionally or had tried out before, and then there were others that I had never played in my life. There were many that I had never tried out before. So that was interesting, learning songs that I had never tried to play, partly because, you know, some of the Beatles songs are just kind of less attractive to musicians who just want to play them on guitar or piano. Others are very attractive. Some are like, you know, must-haves for any guitarist or piano player who likes the Beatles, and others are kind of maybe a little bit obscure, or they just don't lend themselves well to covering them, especially as a solo artist.

 So it was interesting to go through all the songs and find out that actually all of them, every single one sounds pretty good. Mostly I played them on guitar. There were only a few cases where I decided it was best to play the song on piano, but mostly I was playing them on guitar, and I was thinking that when Paul or John or George wrote those songs, they wrote them using a guitar, or in Paul's case, sometimes a piano.

 So they started by writing the songs using a guitar or a piano and just playing them for themselves, and then they added all the panache to the songs, the orchestration, all the finishing touches, the vocal harmonies, all the wonderful packaging that makes them beautiful Beatles songs. But I think one thing that I love about the Beatles and all great music is that when you strip away the fancy packaging, you still have a great song. You don't need all that fancy packaging to have a wonderful song. I mean, what does a song come down to? It comes down to three things. A great song, or any song, really comes down to chords, melodies, and lyrics. And that is where I think the Beatles really shone as great artists.

 In all of their repertoire, there is not one song in their entire repertoire that isn't interesting in its own right, that doesn't have some unique feature to it. And I'm not, again, I'm not talking about all the bells and whistles, the orchestrations, the fancy, the vocal harmonies and all that, which is wonderful, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm just talking about the basic structure, the chords, the verses, the bridges, et cetera, the basic melody, the lyrics.

 Every single Beatles song has some kind of unique twist to it. There is no Beatles song that just takes a boilerplate chord sequence and puts some good lyrics on it. No, every single song has interesting lyrics written over very interesting and unique melodies and chord changes. So they may be based on some fundamental kinds of music or styles, like, you know, a lot of Beatles songs are blues-based, but there's no Beatles song that doesn't take a little twist, interesting kind of unique twist, to that basic blues form and turn it into something new. And that was, I think, their genius as songwriters. And you really feel that when you go through each of their songs and try to replicate them, at least the most fundamental features of the song.

 So I think it's a wonderful exercise for any musician who loves the Beatles to try to go through all their songs. Again, it could be seen as a very tedious act. It certainly takes a lot of time. I devoted about one and a half to two hours a day to this task, and it's taken me a couple of months to complete it. I was probably, at first, I was trying to get in three songs a day, usually in the morning. So I would line up the songs, whatever was next in the alphabet. There are different ways to do this. I suppose you could do it by album by album, from their earliest albums to their latest albums. That would be another way to do this project.

 I just chose to do the A to Z method because of this chord book, so I could just go through each song. There are some songs in this book that I did leave out, and those are the more obscure, I would say, earliest songs that were never recorded on albums that we only heard later when the Anthology albums came out. Those songs were never really a part of my childhood or growing up. I didn't really learn about them until later. I don't cherish them the way that I cherish all the songs that went on to the album. So all the songs that I chose were on all of their major albums.

 So I would say there might be a dozen or more songs in this songbook that I left out, but pretty much if it's on a major album, I covered it. So I feel it's a good exercise. It's something that musicians can consider, especially if they love the Beatles. You have to love the Beatles, obviously, to undertake such a project. It's not an easy task. I'm sure there are many great musicians out there who are capable of doing it, but it does take a lot of time and patience and persistence. I did it literally every day for the last two months. I did not miss a day. So you have to work through, maybe you're feeling sick, maybe your voice is not feeling that great, maybe you're pressed for time, maybe you're feeling fatigued for some other reason. I think most musicians who are working musicians are probably used to working through all of those issues. But for me, it also meant sacrificing practicing other songs from other musicians, which I normally do in a day, and just focusing on the Beatles.

I think my method was pretty simple. I would wake up in the morning. Sometimes I would just go through the songs the night before just to kind of get them fresh into my mind, work out any kinks in the songs, any difficulties, and then I would play them in the morning. Usually I would run through the song once or twice before recording it. Sometimes I had to do a few takes before I got it right. So I would say each song from start to finish maybe took about 30 minutes of my time. Some of them I could get maybe on the first take after a little warm up because I'm used to playing them. Others, playing them for the first time, it may take a couple of takes to get it smooth. None of these are perfect. I don't think there's any such thing as perfection in covering music. And I did sometimes allow little flaws to creep into the songs, which you might hear if you listen to some of these songs. But my goal was not to make them perfect, but to make them smooth, to make them from start to finish, that if somebody wanted to listen to it, it would be a continuous, smooth process. The Beatles themselves made mistakes, which is part of the fun of listening to the Beatles.

 You can listen to the little mistakes that they make, and some of them are kind of enshrined in Beatles lore. And I think that's true of all recorded music. So yeah, the little imperfections kind of sometimes make the recordings even a little more fun. But the goal is to play through them smoothly, to at least get down the basic chord structure, verse and chorus structure, the bridge, all the fundamental features, the melody, the lyrics. In some of the songs, I went in using GarageBand and I added vocal harmonies. Some of them I used, I actually have two of these melodicas and I would use them to substitute for solos because I really didn't have time to learn the solos of like George Harrison, and I'm not a solo guitar player to begin with.

I don't spend a lot of time learning guitar solos. That's really not my thing. I'm a singer. I use guitar and piano to accompany my singing. So the focus was on singing and on just getting the chords, the chord changes, and backing up the vocals. But this came in handy and my other melodica as well came in handy when adding some little enhancements. So that was fun. That was a fun part of the project, but it took a lot of time. And eventually I decided, as I got towards the final stretch of the project, I kind of decided just to go with the recording itself and not add a lot of bells and whistles to it and just make it a very simple acoustic cover, which I think is very much in the spirit of this project, which is also to demonstrate how the Beatles songs work well no matter how you perform them, as long as you get the basic elements, the fundamental elements down.

 So there are all sorts of ways to cover songs, and I just chose kind of the fundamental, the real basics, and try to, you know, emulate them as best I can with whatever instrument that I'm playing, usually piano or guitar. So that's kind of how I went through and did it. There are a lot of great musicians on YouTube who do wonderful versions, wonderful covers of Beatles songs with a lot of complex, fancy, maybe guitar work or piano work, or sometimes they take different interpretations of them. But for me, it was more of a nuts and bolts thing. I want to get the basic song down. I want people to feel that they can sing along or they could harmonize with the song, or if somebody is a solo artist out there, they could play the guitar solo during the song if they wanted to.

 So that was kind of my basic strategy for getting through these songs. I didn't have a lot of time, you know, just a few minutes to get each song down and then lay it down as a recording and then work on it a little bit on the computer and then load it up to YouTube. And it's been interesting to see, you know, if there's any reaction to this project. Obviously, I'm an unknown musician and just throwing all this stuff out on YouTube. It's interesting to see. It's kind of like throwing bait into a vast ocean and seeing if any fish bite.

 So that's been an interesting process. I have gotten some likes on some of the videos and a few mostly, you know, very kind comments from people, which is always nice. It's always, you know, touching to know that somebody somewhere out there in the world, some other country heard the song, listened to it, thought it was a good cover, you know, gave it a thumbs up. That's always nice. It's interesting to see which songs get the most attention. I'm not quite sure how the whole process works.

 I'm not, you know, very well versed in YouTube algorithmics. There are a lot of people who really make a living posting their videos out onto YouTube and they understand all the dynamics of how this all works and how to get people to like your posts and to follow you and all that. And I don't know, it's just not it's that hasn't been my goal. I make a fine living as an academic, so I don't need the extra money from YouTube for my for my work, although it'd be nice. But, you know, it's been interesting to see which songs get more reactions. One thing that I found interesting was that one of the songs that seemed to get a lot of attention relative to the others was “I Am The Walrus”.

 And I'm not sure exactly why that song got so many more views than other songs, but I suspect maybe because, you know, a lot of the more obvious songs tend to be covered by a lot of artists, so people are probably used to seeing them being posted. But a song like “I Am The Walrus” probably gets less coverage and it's kind of a complicated song, both lyrically and in terms of the chords. So maybe some people want to know, oh, how did you cover that? What chords did you use to cover that song? I think for that song I basically used the chords that were in this book to cover that song.

 So that was one of the ones that got a lot of attention. And there were some others that I thought was, oh, that's interesting. Why is that song getting so much attention? One of them was “I'm So Tired” on the White Album, this John Lennon song. I don't know why it got so many views as opposed to the other songs. But yeah, it was interesting to see the dynamic, to see which songs started getting a lot of, you know, I'm just talking about maybe hundreds or maybe a thousand or more views. I'm not talking about going viral, but the ones that got more attention and the ones that it seems like very few people saw, if any.

 So that's an interesting dynamic. Again, if you have insights as to how this whole process works, please let me know. It's not something that I've investigated a lot. This is my first time posting a lot of videos on YouTube. I've kind of posted them, I've posted videos sporadically, but most of them have been about China and not about music per se. So that's been an interesting part of the process. I guess I'm going to leave these videos online and maybe organize them somehow and see where they go, see if they get any more attention or if they just disappear into the ocean of YouTube and social media and are never seen or heard from again. But I can tell you that, you know, if you're a musician and you're interested in undertaking such a project, please do let me know. I'm happy to share tips with you on how to do this, which I already have.

 So I would say probably if you're going to try to do this, you better know a lot of Beatles songs to begin with. It's definitely not the kind of project that a musician with no experience singing or playing Beatles songs can achieve. It's just, I don't think, unless you did it really slowly. I wanted to do this in a kind of reasonable span of time, so I devoted, you know, I gave myself a couple of months to complete the project. But I think, you know, I suppose another way to do it would be to do one song a day if you're still learning all these songs. But even that would be challenging because some of these songs really do take a lot of time to get down.

 And some of them I've been working on and playing for years and years and still don't feel that I, you know, have a really, you know, I don't know, you know, some of them I feel like, man, I really should know this song up and down, left and right by now. I've been playing it for so many years and yet still little pieces of it elude me because, let's face it, Beatles songs are complicated. Like I said, each song is unique.

 Each song has its own unique, like, musical footprint. And there are just complexities to these songs that make them not easy to learn or to memorize or to kind of, you know, become part of your repertoire. So I guess those are the thoughts that I have for now on this subject.

 I probably will go on to, you know, record some other artists now because I think I've given the Beatles quite a lot of attention and it's time to move on to some of my other favorite artists. So thank you for your attention. Thank you for supporting this project with your views and your likes and subscribing, etc., etc.

 And looking forward to your feedback. Bye, everybody.

 ( Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai)

Climbing Beatles Mountain: Covering All the Beatles Songs from A to Y

(following is the transcript of this video I made and posted on Youtube)

The focus of my project now is to cover all the Beatles songs from A to Y. There's no Z, no Beatles song starting with Z.

So A to Y, why did I take this up? I guess because I've loved the Beatles since I was a kid. They were my foundation group.

I started listening to them probably at the age of four or five, my earliest memories of being alive. A lot of them have to do with the Beatles listening to the Yellow Submarine or Sergeant Peppers albums. I think when I was six, I graduated to Abbey Road. A lot of this I write about on my blogs.

So the Beatles are a deep part of my childhood, my earliest memories. They were, you know, it was a love that I shared with my classmates, with my friends growing up in the 1970s. I think very few people weren't exposed to the Beatles at that point.

They had broken up. Their entire repertoire was available. And we were able to just go through all the Beatles albums from their earliest to their latest. And kind of pick up all the songs and get to know them.

I think by the time I was 12 years old, I had collected pretty much all their albums, at least the American versions. I think when I was a teenager, I started collecting the British versions, the imports.

So I knew their records up and down right and left. Their songs were deeply embedded in my head. And like I said, they were the foundation group for me. They were the group that all other popular music somehow in my head was compared to the Beatles was, you know, it either came out of the Beatles because I think all of the music I listened to in the 1980s was somehow influenced by the Beatles.

So they were, you know, a huge influence in my early life. And I later kind of rediscovered them, I guess, in my 20s and again in my 30s.

So you kind of once if you're a Beatles fan at a young age, you can you keep circling back to them. You'll go and explore other other bands, other kinds of music. I've, you know, over the decades, I've explored a lot of jazz, I've explored a lot of classical music, a lot of other popular music.

But I always come back to the Beatles. It's like a, you know, Mobius strip or something, you just kind of keep weaving back to the Beatles, re-grounding yourself in them. And things keep coming up that kind of remind you of how important they were. It might be a documentary film or a book that was just published or, you know, hey, they even come up with a new song now. And then you thought the Beatles were through.

You know, last year they popped out a new song. So something keeps bringing us back to the Beatles. And those of us who loved the band in childhood, I think you never lose that love, all the memories that you have of listening to their different albums, getting to know the different albums, the different songs, getting to know them as personalities, getting to know their individual characters and their voices.

And what they did after the Beatles is just an endless fascination. So these days, I listen to podcasts. I still, you know, occasionally will add a new book to my Beatles book collection.

And I continue to listen to their songs on a regular basis. And over the, you know, 30, 40 years that I've been playing piano and guitar, a lot of my inspiration for playing those instruments came from the Beatles, came from listening to their songs and wanting to reproduce them, wanting to sing them, wanting to play them, wanting to learn how they were structured, how the, how the chords worked, how the melodies worked, how the harmonies worked.

So over those decades, I mean, starting from when I was 10 years old and learned my first chords on guitar, you know, I was trying to learn Beatles songs, Eleanor Rigby, Get Back, Rocky Raccoon, all those songs that I wanted to know. Back in the USSR.

I think I learned my first bar chords to Back in the USSR. So, you know, so the Beatles were my first inspiration to want to play music, to want to sing songs.

And as I got more proficient in guitar and piano, I kept building up my repertoire with Beatles songs.

But, you know, far and away, I know more Beatles songs than any other band or any other popular artist.

So I probably already knew how to play somewhere between a third and half the songs that the Beatles ever wrote.

This project, I've decided to cover every single Beatles song. Well, maybe not everyone, but almost close to it.

And in doing so, I'm learning, you know, songs that I've never played before, never sang before, a lot of songs that don't fit nicely into the acoustic guitar repertoire or the piano repertoire.

Songs that are more obscure that you wouldn't expect people to play or sing or perform.

And those in addition to all the songs that I know and love and already have been playing for many years, and songs that are in between, songs that occasionally I've tried to play, but never really became part of my repertoire.

So I call this climbing Beatles mountain. It's like a pilgrimage for me to go into each song and experience it directly by trying to reproduce it the best way I can.

So mostly on guitar, I think most Beatles songs fit quite nicely on guitar and probably were composed on guitar.

Then there's another set of Beatles songs that, more or less written by Paul, who was working on piano.

And, you know, there are certain songs like Hello Goodbye and Hey Jude and Let It Be and Long and Winding Road and Lady Madonna.

Those kind of songs that almost demand to be played on piano.

There are certain songs that I feel are best played on piano even though you could play them on guitar.

But between piano and guitar, I think you can play pretty much any Beatles song ever written.

Obviously, you know, there are exceptions. Revolution 9. Come on.

No, that's not really a song, is it? It's more of an experiment in sound.

And as much as I appreciate and respect that being on the White Album as a kid, I listened to that incessantly and was always curious about how it was put together and what it all meant and what they were, all the different voices and what people were saying. But, you know, obviously that's not really a Beatles song, is it?

So there are, you know, a few exceptions. But all the songs written by Lennon and McCartney, the songs written by George Harrison, that for the Beatles, those are all candidates. They're all songs that I think any guitar or piano player with some experience can learn at least the basics without too much difficulty.

Right. So my goal, like I said, as a musician, is to be able to play songs that I can sing to, not to get too fancy with my piano work or guitar work, mostly just supporting the singing.

And yeah, it's been so far. It's been quite a fun experience. It is a practice. I have to, you know, basically I do this every morning after breakfast.

It probably takes me on average about 30 minutes to from practicing the song a little bit to get it down to performing it and recording it to putting it together as a video to posting it on YouTube.

I would say on average 30 minutes per song. So I'm spending, you know, maybe 90 minutes in the morning working on three Beatles songs. I try to get through at least three Beatles songs every morning as I build up.

I'm now in the Hs and the Is are next. Anybody who knows the Beatles songs know that the greatest number of songs that start with a letter is the letter I.

A lot of songs about I want. I won't. I, you know, I do this. I do that.

So, so the Is are next and I figure once I get through the Is, it's kind of downhill from there, getting through the rest of the letters.

But it's a fun experience. I do appreciate getting likes and especially comments from other people telling me that they liked the rendition I did.

But it's not a huge goal of mine to get a lot of likes or a lot of comments. It's more like I said, it's kind of a practice for me and it's a way for me to express my admiration for the Beatles to kind of pay homage to their incredible body of work.

And I really can't think of any other popular artist or group that has such a rich body of work as the Beatles in terms of loving and knowing all their songs, having specific memories with each song, each song being kind of a gem or a jewel or a pearl on a necklace.

There are a lot of, you know, there's a lot of bands that I love and with most bands or most artists, you know, I might have a dozen songs of theirs if it's if I really love that band or that artist that I know and love and can play and sing.

But with some, it might be more like, you know, with Bob Dylan, it might be 30 or 40 songs because I love Bob Dylan. But, you know, Bob Dylan wrote, I don't know, 500 songs. I mean, he wrote a lot of songs.

So I only know a small percentage of Bob Dylan songs. But I know all the Beatles songs. I love all the Beatles songs. There are certain songs I love more.

But there's no Beatles song that I don't like. There are songs that I like less than others. But there's really no Beatles song I can think of that I don't like or I don't have a positive memory of or doesn't make me smile when I listen to it.

So I think the Beatles are pretty quite unique in that regard, not just for me, but I think for millions of other fans out there, there was something incredibly unique and incredibly special about the Beatles, something that I think certainly not in our lifetimes will ever be repeated again.

And I think that we were all fortunate to have have been living in this age of the Beatles, you know, and I count my generation, especially fortunate because even though I was born when the Beatles broke up, I was still close enough in time so that they were still very relevant.

They were still very much a part of the culture. And even as a kid, I felt deeply connected to their songs and to their music and those connections have just become richer and more powerful over time.

So I consider myself incredibly fortunate. You know, I can think of several great musicians that I feel very fortunate to have have been living within a time frame when they still feel quite relevant and incredibly powerful from Bach to Mozart to Beethoven to the Beatles [ok I forgot to mention Duke Ellington!].

So that's all I'm going to say in this video. So thank you for your time. And if you like these videos that I'm posting, please, please do push the like button and feel free to give comments, even if they're critical comments, I also welcome critical comments as well.

I’m just happy that some people are listening to them and appreciating them and know and have, you know, and that the Beatles mean as much to them as they mean to me.

Cheers.

Being John Lennon: Some Thoughts on Reading the Lennon Bio by Ray Connolly

Readers of my blog know that I am a huge fan of the Beatles. I have been so since I was four or five years old. I have posted many entries about them in the past. For decades I’ve had an idea in the back of my head that someday I’ll write my own book about the Beatles and how they influenced my life. But that’s still just an idea.

Meanwhile, I do try to keep up with Beatles literature now and then. Last winter, while in the USA for a short visit, I picked up the book Being John Lennon by Ray Connolly (Pegasus Books, 2018). I’d been listening to the podcast Something About the Beatles frequently (and still do), and Ray came on as a guest and talked about his memories and experiences covering the Beatles as a journalist. He knew the Beatles and their entourage quite well and was present for many of the biggest moments in Beatles history. Robert Rodriguez, the podcaster, highly recommended his book and so I kept an eye out for it and finally scored it in a book shop in Berkeley, CA (book shops are a dying breed and we must do what we can to keep them alive.)

Author Ray Connolly

Like most of the books I collect while on the road, this one went onto my bookshelves, joining other Beatles books I’ve collected and read in the past. I had the intention of reading it this year, and eventually I got round to it. After starting the book in late September, I found myself hooked. Connolly is a good writer. He’s written novels, plays, TV shows, a bio of Elvis—the man can write. And it shows. The book is a real page-turner. I found myself digging into chapter after chapter. The chapters are short, there are a lot of them (64 to be precise) and each one digs into a nugget of John and Beatle history (the two are inseparable, even after their separation c. 1970). It’s a biography for sure, focusing on John’s life, from early childhood to his death in 1980. But it’s more than that. It’s an intimate portrait by a man who was both a journalist and a good friend—somebody who spent time in the intimate inner circle of Beatledom and continued to remain close to John after the group split up.

In terms of knowledge gained, I’d say the book mainly reinforces everything else I picked up over the decades of reading Beatles books, listening to podcasts, and watching doc films about the Beatles and about John Lennon. There are far more Lennon docs than any other Beatle. Let’s face it—John is by far the most interesting member of the Fab Four. I love the others just as strongly, the way one would love a group of dear uncles (the Beatles were basically my parents’ age, so they could have been my uncles in terms of age difference). Yet John stands out from the group as the main instigator of the band, and the most eccentric, creative, and outrageous personality of the lot. He was after all the oldest Beatle, so the others were like his younger brothers. As Connolly makes clear throughout his loving yet candid portrait of John, the Beatles was a family. They were like brothers, or sometimes, like a marriage. The book contains lots of references to John and Paul being “married” in a way through their songwriting partnership, and their breakup being like a “divorce,” and certainly Yoko seems to have thought of them in that way.

Young John and Auntie Mimi

John was special. The book certainly emphasizes that. First, his upbringing. He was basically abandoned by both his parents and raised by his stern yet loving Aunt Mimi and his Uncle George (bless them both). He did reunite temporarily with both parents in different points of his life but lost them both for different reasons. His mother was killed in an accident when he was young, and his dad was continually estranged and even after reconciliation in his later years, John ultimately rejected his father. Though it can’t explain everything about John, his alienation from his birth parents certainly had a huge influence on his life, his behavior, and his music. And that lasted until the bitter end of his life and career.

But what really made him special was his verbal and artistic genius. There is no doubt in my mind that John had a unique mind, and that was reflected in all his art and songwriting throughout his life, not to mention his capacity for verbal quips, puns, putdowns, and shattering humor. In this regard, he shared some of that talent with the other Beatles—they were certainly clever wordsmiths and full of humor, which contributed to their charm and ultimately to their success as a band. But John was off the charts. Just look at the songs he wrote and compare them to Paul and George’s songs, which are far more down to earth. John wrote the best Beatles lyrics, including “I Am the Walrus”, “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and “Julia” (a song about his mother). Paul was certainly more gifted musically, which John realized, but John’s poetic abilities were stronger. When the band met Bob Dylan in the mid-1960s, it was John who really cottoned on to Dylan’s lyrical gifts and attempted to better him (and did in many ways), thereby changing the course of Beatles history and by extension the history of pop music.

I’m not saying John was a better lyricist than Bob Dylan. Dylan still holds the crown and deserves his Nobel Prize. But for a while, John put up a good fight, and musically he was more creative in my opinion. Dylan tends to take tried and true musical structures as his baseline and build incredible verses on top of them, but John’s musical structures were as complicated and rich as his lyrics. It helps that he had Paul with whom to bounce ideas. Collaboration was ultimately the not-so-secret sauce that made the Beatles great. But without John’s unique genius, they wouldn’t have achieved nearly what they did. That much is indisputable.

Connolly shows how John’s early interest in children’s literature like Lewis Carroll’s books and poems contributed to his wordsmithery. Even his song “I Am the Walrus” was taken from Carroll’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter”. As Connolly points out, the walrus in the story was the capitalist exploiter, not the carpenter, but as John pointed out, “I Am the Carpenter” just doesn’t have the same ring to it, and the walrus is a lot more fun.

Throughout his life, John was chomping at the bit for more creative pursuits, which explains his attraction to Yoko Ono. Not happy to just be a rock star or pop idol, he published his own books, wrote articles in news journals, and consistently drew throughout his life. His cartoon artworks are masterpieces of the form. As Connolly suggests, he could easily have been a cartoonist or an ad man—he also had the uncanny ability to come up with jingles and catchy refrains that would have made him rich on Madison Avenue. But instead, he chose the path of the true creative artist. Or did he? One never gets the sense that John or any of the Beatles wrote hits merely to rake in the dough. The only case where they were given a song title to work on as an assignment was for the film A Hard Day’s Night—and they created a masterpiece of rock and roll out of it.

In other words, John and the Beatles had a sense of integrity that is rare in the world of pop music, and getting increasingly so in my own opinion. Not to say they didn’t enjoy the cashola that flowed with each hit song, but obviously they were not businessmen. When Brian Epstein, their hardworking yet tragically addicted manager, died of what appears to be an overdose, they were suddenly thrown into the deep end of the pool, and these boys didn’t know how to swim in the shark-infested waters of the music industry. This partly explains their ultimate breakup, since John brought his own shark to the table, aka Allan Klein, while Paul preferred to work with his father-in-lawyer Lee Eastman (after he married Linda). John would come to regret bringing Klein into the picture, and Paul would have his I-told-you-so moment, but that would be years later, and in the meantime, the two ex-Beatles hurled musical thunderbolts at each other—these were the gods of songwriting after all, and until this day, it’s hard to think of anyone else who comes close.

John and Yoko in their favorite place: bed

Of course, the other explanation that often comes up when discussing the Beatles breakup is Yoko. Connolly is as fair as can be to John’s second wife, and hardly blames her for the Beatles bustup. He certainly is up front about her egotism, her cunning manipulations of other people, her opportunism, and her codependency on John, his money, and drugs (in that order). Yet he does spend time in the book discussing her artwork, which though not popular or widely regarded at the time, was certainly avant-garde, in-your-face, and pioneering in its own way. Johnandyoko (as he calls them, or perhaps they called themselves) loved to push the boundaries of both the art world and the world of popular culture and did so incessantly after they became a couple in the late 1960s. Whatever you say about Yoko, she comes across as a fascinating human being, one not to be reckoned with lightly, a person who was firm, fierce, and controlling, yet who in her own way was also a visionary. It’s easy to see how the two coming together caused so many sparks, and so much heat, if not a great deal of light.

Yoko was much older than John. If Cynthia became like a sister to him (which helps explain his impotence towards her later in their marriage), Yoko was a like a mother figure, and indeed he came to call her mother. Yet the relationship was a complicated one, not just the codependency, the drugs, and the “bed-ins”, the forays with political activism, but also in terms of their mutual fidelity. John after all was one of the most sought-after young men in the world, and had been surrounded by adoring women throughout his career as a Beatle, which didn’t help either of his marriages. Yoko was a twice-married woman with a husband (whom she divorced to marry John) and a daughter Kyoko, who her ex-husband Tony Cox took custody of when their marriage broke up.

Then there is the episode known as the “lost weekend,” as expressed in a sad joke the couple shared after the fact. As has been well documented in books, doc films, and her own autobiographical account, May Pang, the young 22-year-old assistant who worked for the couple in New York City, was approached by Yoko in a scheme to tame John’s ever-errant libido by becoming his temporary mistress. With Yoko’s approval, John and May became lovers, and of course (who could resist?) she fell in love with her boss man. Unlike Yoko, May was seriously into rock music (Yoko pretended I think but didn’t seem to really catch the vibe). May was young, tall, smart, capable, and good looking, and she and John became a natural couple very quickly in their relationship. Obviously, there was a great deal of mutual love if not respect (the respect like so many of John’s relationships was largely one-sided on her part).

John and May

May even put up with John’s worst behavior, exacerbated by his tendency to mix drugs and alcohol while partying with veteran rockers like Keith Moon, Alice Cooper, and Harry Nilsson. As Connolly puts it, he had a Jekyll-and-Hyde personality, a trait shared by many alcoholics, who seem quite charming when sober but get mean, ornery, and verbally and physically violent while under the influence. Connolly does not shy away from telling stories that reveal the dark side of the man. Yet, the devil’s pact they signed on to with Yoko at the beginning of their 18-month romance had to be paid in blood, so to speak. John eventually went back to Yoko, breaking May’s heart in the process, though he continued to see her secretly for years afterwards, and she remained a close confidante.

Eventually, the couple had a son, Sean Lennon, who was born strangely on October 9 1975, sharing the same birthday with his dad. Yoko’s obsession with numerology and astrology might have something to do with the unusual birth date. Sean quickly became the apple of their eye, and John spent several years in the Dakota apartments in NYC taking care of his son, though it’s dubious whether those were blissful years or not. After all, John was one of the world’s most gifted creative individuals, and it’s hard to imagine him content with diaper changing and toddler care. Nevertheless, Sean was certainly a great boon to the couple in their last years together. Eventually, John got off his rocker and started writing songs again, and by 1980 the album Double Fantasy came out, which shared John and Yoko songs (needless to say, John’s songs are the reasons the album is great).

As we all know too well, John’s life ended tragically and violently on the night of December 8, 1980. Connolly notes that anybody alive and above a certain age would remember where they were when they heard the sad news. I was in my bed when my step-dad came into the room early in the morning to tell me what had happened. “John Lennon was murdered,” he told me somberly. We were all deeply shocked by the news. I was in sixth grade back then, and our whole school was grieving as we took in the news. This was our own Kennedy moment. It was the first time someone who had been the object of so much love, affection, and high regard had been taken from us like that. To this day, I’ve never completely recovered from the shock of that day.

John Lennon would be 84 years old if he’d lived a long and healthy life. I won’t speculate how or why he was murdered—there are plenty of others who do so. It’s obvious there is more to the story than meets the eye. What I do remember is that that year his album Double Fantasy came out, and the radio stations were playing his songs in high rotation. “Watching the Wheels” is still one of my favorite Lennon tunes, and when I used to sing in karaoke pubs, “Just Like Starting Over” was one of me faves. I also think “Nobody Told Me” is up there with his best work.

While I don’t recall any great revelations or big stories I hadn’t known about already, the beauty of Connolly’s book lies in the details. There are all the conversations he gathered patiently and methodically over the years with John and others, the personal observations he has of the man and his life, the deep wisdom that age has brought to the writer, who has had a long lifetime to ponder the subject of his book. Connolly comes at the subject with a great deal of love and respect, deep honesty, and a sense that this is a “great man” in modern human history, all of which I share as a fan of John and the Beatles. “To know know know me is to love love love me” he once sang in the Cavern Club of Liverpool, and “yes it is, it’s true.” John was a “yes” man, for whom love was an art and a religion. Even if his own personal flaws and foibles prevented him from being as loving and caring to other humans as he could have been, that’s still the ultimate legacy of John Lennon and the Beatles, and their greatest gift to the world.

Gods, Guitars, and Guided Tours: Three Full Days in Tokyo with Local Guru James Farrer

Last week was the Chinese national holiday. I decided to take advantage of our week-long break from teaching and go pay a visit to my old friend and Shanghai Nightscapes co-author Dr. James Farrer, whom I hadn’t seen in person since the pandemic started in January 2020. I also hadn’t been back to Tokyo since 2018 and was long overdue for a visit. James has been living in Tokyo for nearly 25 years now, which is as long or longer than my sojourn in Shanghai. Over the years he has morphed from a China-focused sociologist to a Japan-focused one. At the same time, he has moved from researching sexuality (his first book Opening Up explores youth sexuality in 1990s Shanghai) to nightlife (our book) to food studies (his latest book is The Global Japanese Restaurant). His next big book project will be on the life of a neighborhood in Tokyo—his neighborhood of Nishi-ogikubo—and it promises to integrate all his research interests together into a fine package.

James teaches sociology at Sophia University, a Jesuit university located in Yotsuya in the middle of Tokyo. I’ve been there many times over the years, have given many talks and screened my films there before. This time I had the opportunity to screen my latest film “A Century of Jazz in Shanghai” and to give a talk about the jazz scene in Shanghai. I also took many walks around different neighborhoods of Tokyo, mostly with James, and I saw a concert of Japanese jazz artists on my final night. Throughout my brief sojourn there, I sampled many different varieties of Japanese cuisine, witnessed a religious ritual in a Buddhist temple, and worshipped guitars at a Fender flagship store. Here are some of the highlights of my three-day trip to Tokyo.

I arrived on Wednesday, October 2, and made my way from Haneda Airport by trains to Yotsuya. At Haneda, I purchased a Suica, a plastic card that proved quite handy throughout my trip. I highly recommend that visitors to the city get this card at the airport, since you can use it to swipe the train entrances and exits and pay for your fare instead of buying tickets each time. You can also use it in convenience stores and in the ubiquitous vending machines that are everywhere and sell nearly everything (drinks in particular).

James gave me instructions on how best to get to Yotsuya: “There are multiple ways to get from Haneda to Sophia. The best, I think, is to take the Monorail from Haneda to Hammatsucho 浜松町. Then take the Yamanote Line to Kanda　神田駅, and from Kanda take the Chuo Line to Yotsuya　四ツ谷駅. So you change trains twice, but the distance you travel within the stations is quite short.  Sophia 上智大学　is right in front of the station.” I followed these instructions to the letter and it took around 1:20 to get there.

On the campus of Sophia University getting ready for my screening

I met James at his office and we walked around campus for a while and met a colleague or two before setting up for the screening and the talk. The talk was attended by a dozen or more people, not a big crowd but certainly a captive audience for the film. Afterwards, the audience members asked many excellent questions about the film and about the jazz scene in Shanghai. Then James took me and two other colleagues to dinner at a nearby yakitori (bbq chicken) restaurant in an alley across from Yotsuya station. After dinner, we headed to his home in the neighborhood of Nishi-ogikubo, located to the west of Yotsuya and Shinjuku, one of the main stations and central areas of Tokyo.

a post-talk dinner at an Edo-style yakitori restaurant in Yotsuya

James and his wife Gracia live in a modest yet cozy home in a low-rise neighborhood. It’s around a twenty-minute walk to and from the station. I found it hard to recognize the streets and alleys leading to their home, since they all seem to look alike as do the houses, and James told me he got lost the first few times after they moved there, but obviously he knows it like the back of his hand now. He and Gracia walk to and from their home to the station every day. Once on the train it takes James around fifteen minutes to get to his uni from that neighborhood, and for Gracia who teaches at Waseda, it’s about the same. So maybe a 45-minute commute from home to school.

One thing about Tokyo is that taking the trains is an essential part of city life. In Shanghai I’m quite spoiled—I usually drive my own car or else take a didi (hired cab) to get places. Seldom do I use the metro, although it is quite well developed in Shanghai now. I can even get from Shanghai to my home in Kunshan on the metro now. But I find driving from point A to point B a lot more comfortable and convenient, even though in Shanghai I have to drive through the usual mess of urban traffic to do so.

In Tokyo, fewer people own cars and most people use the train and subway system to get where they are going. For over twenty years I’ve been going to Tokyo for occasional visits, and each time I have to relearn the system of JR lines (the overground lines) and subway lines, which are all connected. I also need to relearn the names and locations of the neighborhoods that compose the city. It must be quite bewildering to foreign visitors who don’t know the language. I’m fortunate in that I know Chinese and can recognize the kanji (characters) and I also took a few years of Japanese language in grad school, so I have little trouble remembering the place names, and could ask for directions if necessary. But I must confess, and this is an ongoing theme of all my visits to Japan, that my language skills aren’t nearly as well developed as I’d like them to be. While I have a pretty solid foundation, I find myself struggling to understand people when they speak at a normal pace, let alone respond in a proper way.

The following day, my first full day in Tokyo, James left early for work, and I accompanied Gracia to the station via their usual pathways. I met James in Yotsuya Station at noon, and we headed to another neighborhood where he was giving a tour to some students. This was the Fukagawa neighborhood, which is east of the Sumida River (sumidagawa), a main river running through Tokyo. This was once a working class neighborhood where commoners who served the needs of the elite samurai and daimyo society of the Tokugawa era lived. It was also a temple district.

The Fukagawa Inn where we had lunch

We had lunch at a special restaurant that serves old Edo style food, the kind of food the locals used to eat back in the old days. We enjoyed a lunch of rice cooked with clams (a fisherman’s meal), and another rice dish that if I recall correctly was a carpenter’s meal.

The carpenter’s and fisherman’s meal

Afterwards we hung out in a trendy little café on the third floor of a building along with some young Japanese hipsters. At three pm, we met the students at the Fukagawa Edo Museum. There we explored the life of this old part of the city during the Tokugawa era. The museum provides a reproduction of an old Edo neighborhood replete with stories about the shop and home owners who occupied that neighborhood a few hundred years ago. The highlight of our visit to the museum was joining an 84-year old Japanese guide as he passionately explained the different ways that people ate and drank, celebrated the moon festival, and fought fires. There’s an impressive fire tower in the exhibit and the windows of the tower point in all directions except for the Shogun’s palace. I love exhibitions that bring history to life, and this one was enchanting—there was even a cat on the roof of one home that howled every now and then.

an 84 year old guide tells us about the fire tower behind him while we enjoy Edo-style tea

After visiting the museum, we went to a nearby park, Kiyosumi Gardens 清澄庭园 with a pond and gardens dating back to the Tokugawa era. These gardens dating back centuries provide a welcome interlude to the hustle and bustle of Tokyo.

Then we walked along a canal pathway while communing with the great poet Basho who once lived in this historic neighborhood. James took us to a Tantric Buddhist temple, where we experienced a full-on ceremony led by the monks and priests of the temple that included chanting and singing, drums and bells, and blessing objects in a ritual fire. The ceremony lasted around 30 minutes and was a deep dive into local Buddhist culture. Other audience members lined up for the monks to bless their bags and belongings by waving them over the ritual fire. I suppose I should have done the same.

inside the temple (we weren’t supposed to photograph the ritual so I didn’t, but I do have an audio recording of it)

After James’s tour ended, we parted ways with the students and got on the train, hoping to make it to another academic talk at Sophia, but we found ourselves running late and starving, so we bagged the talk and instead went to a canalside restaurant to have dinner. After that, we wandered through Shinjuku, checking out the various nightlife districts that make up this district, including the famous Kabukicho and Golden Gai areas. We found both to be full of curious foreign tourists from countries all over the world. According to James, the nighttime establishments of these famous nightlife districts, once closed off to most foreigners, are now eager to seek the foreign tourist business, especially in light of the pandemic which put a huge dent in the mizu shobai or “water trade” of Tokyo.

at an English language bookshop in Jimbocho

The following day, after enjoying a curry rice lunch at a neighborhood restaurant with a Michelin rating, James brought me to the area of Jimbocho, where we cruised the numerous bookshops that line the streets and alleys of this neighborhood. I was quite amazed at the quality of the second-hand English language bookshops, which carry beautiful hardbound and weighty books in the fields of literature, history, and philosophy. There are also countless Japanese bookshops that specialize in different types of literature, and huge collections of ephemera such as old magazines, maps and other materials. You could spend days exploring this neighborhood, especially if you are a bibliophile like me. Later I met another friend named Jeff who was in town for a visit, and we cruised up and down the “guitar street” of neighboring Ochanomizu, a locality named for the high quality of the water (mizu) which was ideal for making tea (ocha) for the shogun or emperor. This street features numerous guitar shops selling new and used electric and acoustic guitars, causing any guitarist to drool at all the models displayed on the walls and windows.

After our window-shopping expedition, Jeff and I joined James back in his own neighborhood of Nishi-ogikubo, where he has become a local celebrity for his knowledge of the shops, businesses, restaurants, cafes, and bars and the people who run and frequent them. For many years, James has run a blog focusing on his neighborhood, and recently he hosted a TV show for NHK World where he took a tour of the hood. James took us on a brief walking tour of the neighborhood around the train station, which goes back a century and half to when the area was farms and fields, and has developed rapidly and urbanized to become a part of Tokyo since the 1920s. We then had dinner at a local restaurant that specializes in mackerel, and James took us on a tour of the warren of alleys that surround the station, full of little bars and eateries. We settled in a bar run by a Chinese migrant from Suzhou, who was very friendly and knows James well, and hung out with some Japanese customers (it was mostly a male crowd). Then we headed down the alley to a tiny sunaku bar where James is also familiar with the owners, and we sang karaoke songs for a while. I got to relive my old days in Sapporo and sing a few Japanese enka folk tunes that I still astonishingly remember after all these years. I was pleased to find that the old karaoke bar culture of Japan still thrives in these little neighborhoods.

James showing off his Nihongo with a Japanese song

The following day was my last full day in Tokyo. After getting some rest in the morning, James and I headed out to meet Jeff at another neighborhood in the northern part of the city not far from Ueno. We took the trains to Nippori station, met Jeff there, and then walked over to the area known as Yanaka Ginza, a quaint area lined with shops, bars, and restaurants with an old Edo feel to it. We walked around in a light drizzle as people held umbrellas over their heads. Again there was a surprising number of foreign tourists in the neighborhood. In addition to shops and restaurants, there are also many temples and graveyards in the area. Graveyards in urban Japan are next to temples, unlike in China where graveyards are placed deep in the countryside away from people.

Entering Yanaka Ginza

After walking around the neighborhood and enjoying a leisurely cup of coffee in an old kisaten run by an elderly Japanese woman, we headed by train to Harajuku, where Jeff and I walked through the trendy cosplay neighborhood to the Fender Flagship Store and oggled the expensive and flashy guitars that lined the walls of the four-floor establishment.

A display at the entrance to the Fender Flagship Store in Harajuku

We then went to Shinjuku where we had a light dinner at an Oden restaurant. Oden are boiled snacks like tofu, daikon or radish, and other treats in a clear broth—they are popular in Chinese convenience stores as well.

After dinner we found the Pit Inn, an underground jazz club in the nichome district of Shinjuku. My old friend and fellow Dartmouth alum Cliff, who has lived in Japan a few years longer than James, had reserved seats for us. He was running late, and so we settled in the club along with others called in by the managers to sit in rows of seats in front of the stage. Eventually the band came out and started playing. Cliff arrived a bit later and so did James.

The band was the Setagawa Trio, composed of a pianist, a bass player, and a drummer. They have been playing together for nine years and have cut two albums. Their latest album called Progress came out in 2023.

The three musicians, all thirty-something Japanese men, played two sets. They’d clearly been playing together many years and had a fine onstage rapport with each other and with the crowd. I thought the bass player was the show-stealer. He was a large framed man with a funky hat and a beard who played a huge upright bass with tremendous joy and passion. At one point he even broke a string and had to replace it onstage while the piano player filled in with a jaunty piece.

The trio was obviously grounded in classic jazz, but they had an experimental side to them and they obviously enjoyed pushing the envelope with their music. I heard a few standards such as “Stella by Starlight”, “Li’l Darling”, “Make Someone Happy” and at the end of the concert, for an encore they performed their own version of John Lennon’s “Imagine”. They also played a few original compositions. All in all it was very high level playing that could have been heard in the best jazz clubs of any world class city. The experience made me wonder if I ought to make a film about Japanese jazz someday.

After the concert ended around 10 pm, we went our separate ways and James and I wended our way in the rain through the gay quarter of Shinjuku, which once again was full of foreigners, before heading back to the station to take the train to his neighborhood and walk back to his home.

The next day I caught my flight back to Shanghai, taking the trains to Haneda Airport from James’s neighborhood. It was a smooth journey, and I felt fairly comfortable riding the trains. I am certain that if I spent a few months in Japan, my language skills would be greatly solidified, but alas, that hasn’t happened in all the years since I first lived in Sapporo in the summer of 1993. But that is a story for another occasion.

I’ve always been impressed with how well Japanese society seems to integrate traditional cultures with modern everyday life and this trip offered many opportunities to experience that integration firsthand, especially when it comes to food and religion. On the other hand, Tokyo is such a frenetic society. People are always on the move, and the quintessential Tokyo experience is getting caught up in the mad rush of commuters in enormous stations like Shinjuku. People also seem perrenially tired, and I see a lot of snoozers on the trains.

The other impression I’m always left with when I visit is what I call the otakuness of Japanese society. Otaku means someone who delves deeply into a small subcultural phenomenon, and I may be misusing the term, but I apply to all the cases where people are obsessed with some particular taste culture, whether it’s collecting old rock and roll magazines or running a restaurant that specializes in mackerel or a bar that only serves genuine bourbon from the Deep South (of the USA). With everyone lining up for seats and then sitting there quietly (except when applauding) throughout the entire performance, even the jazz club had an otakuness to it that Shanghai clubs don’t seem to have. That tendency to delve deeply into one very specific pursuit or cultural interest seems to be very characteristic of Japanese society, which is one of the many things that makes Tokyo an endlessly fascinating city to explore. 

Impressions on Seeing Gary Wang and the JZ Band at the New JZ Club on Hengshan Road

(I admit I’ve been quite derelict in not keeping up with posting on my website. There are reasons for this dereliction, though I’m not sure exactly what they are. Suffice it to say I have been in a bit of a writing slump lately, but the first step to the cure is to admit the problem. The second step is to start writing again.)

Last night I joined around 20 DKU students at the JZ Club in Shanghai. I had organized this special “field trip” along with our Jazz Club president Jesse Campbell. We met at the club around 7 pm to see the JZ Big Band perform a set of arrangements by conductor Gary Wang (Wang Kaiji). Throughout the performance, the conductor and arranger interspersed the songs with lengthy explanations of them in Chinese. The majority of guests were Chinese so I suppose that made sense, though it might have been nice to have a few brief summaries in English for the non-Chinese-speaking customers. Nevertheless, it was a fine mixture of music and musical education for the audience. Many of the customers brought their spouses, friends, and families, and there were many children in the audience.

Our “field trip” group of Duke Kunshan University students, sponsored by the Jazz Club. Club president Jesse Campbell is just below Nick Xue posing with Alec Haavik in the back.

I will not belabor the reader with lengthy descriptions of the pieces and their arrangements. Instead, I’ll just describe them as long, grand, intricate, winding, full of delicious inuendoes. These were smoothly satisfying compositions that blended all the instruments together into a mélange of melodies, ideas, and textures while giving plenty of soloists a chance to soar above the orchestra. The 20-piece band represented the A-list of Shanghai jazz musicians, including a piano player on a Yamaha Grand piano, an upright bass player and a drummer, a trumpet section, a trombone section, a saxophone section, and other reed players including a flutist. You can find their names on the poster promoting the event:

A closer view of the horn section with trumpets, trombones, sax and other reeds

Now I would like to share some of my own impressions of the scene and the setting, and how the music made me feel over the course of the evening concert.

Arriving at the venue by Didi (China’s equivalent to Uber), I found myself in a new restaurant and bar zone called No. 8. The JZ Club recently moved from its previous location in the subterranean zone known as Found 158 to this present location. This was my first experience with the new JZ Club. To find it, you walk down a narrow pathway off of Hengshan Road, not far from the corner of Wulumuqi Road. You stroll past the main bar and restaurant area of the No. 8 Zone, following the beacon of the red JZ sign. The entrance to the club is very modest and a bit mysterious. It leads underground down a set of stairs to the club two floors below.

The modest club entrance off of Hengshan Road

The main hall of the club is cavernous with a high ceiling. The club is decorated in red with red lighting and red curtains. The stage is large and in front of the stage is a large polished wooden floor area filled with small round tables lit by LED lamps. There are semi-circular sofa seating areas behind the tables, and then up a level is the bar at the back of the room. On the two wings are elevated spaces for people to sit as well. All the seating is arranged by ticket price. For the lower price of our tickets, we took the area in the wings. The high barstools we sat upon weren’t too comfortable, and I had to get up and stretch now and then, but we certainly had a good view, if an oblique one, of the stage. During the show I went around and took photos from different angles. There is no spot in the club that doesn’t afford a good view of the stage. The sound quality is good as well, and unlike the previous venue there are no loud neighbors to disturb the performances (in the Found 158 venue, you could hear the boom-boom of nearby discos reverberating through the walls).

Even though the new venue works well as a performance space, highlighting the excellent musical talents of the Shanghai jazz scene, it doesn’t feel quite as cozy as the two previous venues. The now legendary club on Fuxing Road and the previous one in Found 158 felt more like comfy hangouts where it was as much about sociability and meeting cool cats in the scene as it was about the music itself. In the new JZ Club, the music seems to be the highlight, and socializing has taken a back seat. At least that was my impression of the new space. It feels too cavernous for an intimate jazz lounge and designed more as a performance theater. I will have to come back again perhaps later in the evening to see if the social environment of the previous JZ still thrives.

All in all, I think it was a wise decision for the club to move out of Found 158, which had become a kind of “foreigners’ ghetto” over the years with its rowdy beer halls and restaurant bars and discos (though since the pandemic, most of the customers are now Chinese). The new location on Hengshan Road is far more elegant and befitting of the upscale vibe that the club wishes to project, even if the No. 8 Zone hasn’t quite caught on yet with the fashionable Shanghai crowd. And the space is far more protected from errant sounds. Certainly, the new JZ Club succeeds as a performance venue.

Alec Haavik taking a solo

Highlights of the evening included solo performances by bandleader and lead tenor sax player Alec Haavik, as well as lead trumpet player Jeremy Sinclair, two of the finest foreign fixtures of the Shanghai jazz scene. Solos by sax players Nick Xue, Huang Ye, and others rounded out the evening, and we even enjoyed a few piano, bass and drum solos. (I’d have to go back into my recording of the evening’s performance to analyze the performance any further.) After the final song of the evening, the band was encouraged to do a lively encore of more old-style jazz which gave many players a chance to do one more groovy solo.

Throughout the performance I was thinking about what a shame it is that jazz has become almost completely separated from the dancing that characterized the great Jazz Age of the 1920s-1930s. If this band had been swinging these tunes in that era, the floor would have been full of dancers decked out in their finest tuxedos and ballroom gowns, swishing away and switching partners on the floor. Now everybody sits quietly and compliantly in their seats, watching the band (though I noticed a lot of the guests were constantly on their phones or else using them to video the show). Back then, people entered a social scene and took risks, showing off their dancing and their social skills and helping to create the scene. I feel that our present world is far more passive and flaccid in comparison, and though I take pains not to glorify the old days (especially in Shanghai during a violent era of famine, disease, revolution, and war) I feel we’ve lost a big piece of our collective humanity.

A broad view of the stage and main floor from the wings

Some of our students also remarked on how the new place (like so many clubs today) is set up to maximize potential profits with tables clustered up to the stage, not allowing much if any room for dancing or socializing on the main floor. In this sense it operates more as a restaurant or fixed-seat theater. I know there are times when they change the arrangement to accommodate dancers, particularly on the swing dance nights that Alec and his band the Shindiggers lead, and I should go and attend one of those events to see how it goes. But while listening to the epic sweep of the jazz orchestra last night, I did feel a sense of yearning, a nostalgia for a lost era of elegance, decadence, bravery, and risk-taking. Someday we will all mourn the loss of the Dancing Age. True, there are other clubs where you can go that feature dancing (though the dance floors have shrunk a great deal since the dance-crazy age of the 1990s), but wouldn’t it be nice to have more of it at the JZ and other jazz clubs?

Binging The White Lotus: A Tragicomic Series on HBO

Last week, I watched the first season of the much touted HBO series The White Lotus for the first time. Being sick with Covid over the past three days gave me the chance to binge the second season. That these are six- and seven-part series respectively makes it easier to binge a season as opposed to the typical 10-to-13-part series for many shows. The two seasons are very similar in some respects. Both take place in an international resort hotel called The White Lotus in an exotic location.

Season 1 unfolds in Hawaii. Season 2 happens in Sicily. Both are beach and poolside resorts giving ample opportunities for parades of flesh. Apparently Season 1 was filmed during pandemic restrictions which limited the variety of settings. Most of the action takes place in the hotel or on the beach. Certainly, it doesn’t do justice to the gorgeous variety of Hawaii that one comes to know and love over many visits to its different islands. Season 2 offers a more lavish portrayal of Sicily including the beach town of Taormina where the hotel is located, and the city of Palermo. It is far lusher visually, much more integrated with the locality, and will make anyone who sees it want to visit Sicily (I know I do). No wonder the Italian government offers a 40% tax break to make such shows in country.

In terms of themes, the first season is focused on the haves versus the have-nots with a healthy dose of colonialism thrown in for good measure. It's somewhat of a Gatsbian tale with wealthy, privileged, and connected people getting away with irresponsible behavior while causing collateral damage to those less fortunate around them. The entire ensemble does a fantastic job of portraying these intertwining characters and stories. The scene stealer in Season 1 is Armond, the hotel manager, who is a wound-up ball of mad energy and so much fun to watch. None of the other characters is likeable except Belinda the spa staffer (who is mistreated in the end) and perhaps Quinn, the sullen teenage son who ends up joining a squad of local Hawaiian rowers. Hands down the most uplifting scenes are of Quinn getting Shanghaied each morning on the beach to join the Hawaiian bros on their craft. And the breaching whale is a touch of magic.

Season 2 hovers around the theme of illicit sexuality, with a craven carnival of concupiscent carnality leading to carnage by the end. Again, the ensemble cast do impeccable jobs of portraying various modes of the human condition, including horniness, excess, selfishness, peevishness, jealousy, irresponsibility, duplicity, and dissatisfaction. In Season 2, my two favorite characters are the gorgeous young local hooker Lucia and her talented musician friend Mia, who frequent the hotel and seek gainful opportunities by manipulating various guests and staff members, outwitting them at every turn.

The only person to appear fully in both seasons is the dysfunctional and physically and emotionally bloated heiress to a massive fortune named Tanya McQuoid. Her terse lover and then husband Greg also appears in Seasons 1 and 2. While Jennifer Coolidge’s performance of Tanya is outstanding and one of the highlights of both seasons, I found her character and role to be the least believable in the series. How could a woman so amazingly wealthy be traveling abroad to such exotic locales alone and unprotected? Basically, she is shark bait.

(Spoiler alert) When her mysterious aging and obviously ill hotel neighbor Greg falls for her, we know something is up but we’re not sure what. Is this just a casual fling of opportunity? Given her physical and emotional unattractiveness (though she sure knows how to dress the part), why should a guy like Greg jump into bed with this woman? He makes clear on several occasions in his gestures that he is repulsed by her, yet he wants to sleep with her nonetheless. Later in Season 2, we find that Greg has married Tanya and later it is revealed that he is indeed plotting to get rid of his wife and claim the bounty of her inheritance. For this nefarious task he employs an old British expat friend based in Sicily named Quentin (played with great finesse by Tom Hollander) along with his gay companions. When Tanya shows up in Sicily with only her assistant, a clueless young American girl named Portia out for an adventure, only to be abandoned by Greg who returns to the USA for mysterious purposes, we know trouble is brewing. Eventually the odd companions figure this out, but only after it is too late to avoid the consequences.

It is hard to imagine that a woman like Tanya with that much financial clout wouldn’t be surrounded with an entourage of people serving all her needs including protection from all the hustlers, opportunists and other evil doers who must circle around such people like sharks. And how could she not hire better assistants? She claims at one point that she has bad luck hiring people, but come on, this woman has access to half a billion dollars. Is there any reality to this scenario? And yet it drives a significant portion of the plot.

Most of the other scenarios are more believable, with families and friendships festering with internal conflicts, rivalries, and secrets. In Season 1, the emasculated father Mark, powerful mother Nicole, college age daughter Olivia, and teenage son Quinn portray an authentically dysfunctional family dynamic that strikes me as somewhat universal. Only the classmate friend of Olivia, a girl of color named Paula, has a bit more nuance and bravado as a character, if in a tragic vein. The story of the newlywed couple Shane and Rachel strikes me as realistic. He is a wealthy and arrogant young man who can’t stop complaining about everything that doesn’t go his way and thinks money is the cure to every problem, while she is a beautiful and idealistic young woman from a modest background who must now come to terms with having married into the moneyed class.

The trio of men in Season 2, including the patriarch Bert (played fantastically by F Murray Abraham, who is the main reason I wanted to see this show in the first place), his son Dominic (played by Michael Imperioli of Sopranos fame) and grandson Albie are fun to watch as they attempt to discover their ethnic and family roots in Sicily while dealing with issues of infidelity and sexual addiction. Meanwhile, the foursome of thirty-somethings who get tangled in their own sexual rivalry of sorts are amusing to watch and they put on a credible show as they sort out the complex dynamics of their new relationship. “Alpha Dog” Cameron reminds me of a typical Dartmouth fraternity bro who went on to NYC to engage in high finance. High octane testosterone runs through his veins. His college roommate Ethan “Big E” is an introverted and nerdy guy, who made it big when he sold his tech company. Now Cameron is angling to get into a business relationship with his long-lost pal. Meanwhile, their wives Harper and Daphne are trying to come to terms with each other’s alien value system and outlook on life while dealing with the explosive and troublesome friendship between the two bros. Toxic masculinity is a keyword here. While none of these characters are likeable in any real way (expect perhaps the kind-hearted Albie though he is hopelessly naïve—and maybe that’s why we root for him in the end, like some hapless character in a Woody Allen film) they come across as real and nuanced people.

Yet ultimately what I find unconvincing is how the main characters all leave the country at the end of each season just after major crimes have been committed and need to be investigated and prosecuted. They are not detained as witnesses to sort out the sordid details of said crimes. Is this an indictment of the Hawaiian and Italian justice system a la Ripley (also a fantastic series recently aired by Netflix)? It seems incredibly naïve to think that major theft and murder cases would be left to the locals to tie up, while the perpetrators, abettors, and witnesses fly away unscathed. The end of each season turns tragic, so you could say this is a tragicomedy masking as a dark situational comedy.

Despite these caveats, the series was a great deal of fun and a blessed distraction from my second round of Covid. Sometimes laughing at others’ pain eases your own. And the next season which takes place in Thailand—one of my favorite places on the planet— will surely be just as delightful.

My Top Five Beatles Albums and their Significance as Artists

A few years ago while suffering from insomnia in the solitude of my apartment, I gave a late night soliloquy about the Beatles. I’d been reading some books about the band, and it was the 50th anniversary of Abbey Road so I had Beatles on the brain. I recorded my musings on my iPhone, and ended up with this 5000-word discourse focusing on five of their top albums in my own reckoning, which I transcribe below. Over the past two days, I edited the recording and added some visuals to make a video for YouTube and a podcast of sorts. So, here goes:

So, introducing the Beatles, which came out on VJ Records in July 1963, and there's the UK version, and the US, I guess this is the US version. I'm thinking it has I Saw Her Standing There, Misery Anna, Chains, Boys, Love Me Do, Baby, it's You, Do You Want to Know a Secret, A Taste of Honey, There's a Place, Twist and Shout. So, there's that album, which really started their career.

Now, there's the UK version, which is basically, Please, Please Me. So, it has, I Saw Her Standing There, Misery, Anna, Chains, Boys, Ask Me Why, Please Please Me, Love Me Do. P.S. I love You, Baby, it's You, Do you Want to Know a Secret, A Taste of Honey, There's a Place, Twist and Shout. So, it's quite interesting that the American version didn't have the song Please Please Me. I can talk about the two different versions, the one with and without Please Please Me. And then talk about all of their influences as they were forming their band and forming their sound and their style. And I think it just reflects how the Beatles were like sponges absorbing all these various influences in music without prejudice. You know, they were taking from so many different sources, so many different musical genres. It was borrowing so much and then integrating it into this, evolving into our style that they had, which made the Beatles so fascinating that, in 1959, in the 60s, and these were, you know, more sophisticated, much more sophisticated, much more imaginative.

Much more, you know, sophisticated, much more imaginative, creative, lyrical musicians. And obviously, their story has been told again and again. There are dozens of books that you can read to get a sense of their story and how they develop their sound and everything that was going on in their lives. And I think as part of this project, I'm not so interested in telling their own life stories or retelling all the anecdotes that surround their songs, except when really necessary. Because I think the principle of art is that art is transcendent. So it's important to, in a way, detach the artwork from the artist. Of course, it helps to know the lives of the artists. But I find that a lot of the analysis of the Beatles gets too caught up in the details of their lives and the anecdotes that they use to explain their art.

I remember in high school, we learned about this fallacy of taking the artist at their word. I think great art transcends the artist. So you have to take it out of the context of the artist and what he was going through because great art tells a much deeper story. It delivers a deeper message. And that's the power of great art. It's transcendent. It's not caught up in the detail. It's not like a diary of that specific person's life or what was going on at that moment. Although some of the Beatles’ songs are kind of like diaries, journals, journaling their life story.

But I think what makes these albums great is that they're archetypal. Each of those albums represents a different stage of human development and also some of the fundamental themes of the human experience. So going back to the beginning when they're still kind of coming out of their teenage years and discovering love and sex and kind of the freedom of being dependent on their parents to being these young adults in the process of discovering their own power. And those songs are very thrilling. They're very happy and energetic, not that original because a lot of their songs as I said were covers. So the Beatles were, they started out like most bands. They started out as great cover artists. They became masters at covering other people's songs. And they had a couple of their own. But even their own original songs were pretty derivative. Like they sounded like the artists that they were admiring at the time.

So for example, Please Please Me sounded like Roy Orbison, maybe a sped up version of a Roy Orbison song, whom they deeply admired. But obviously they were showing their creative powers with that first album. But anyway, that album, Please Please Me or Introducing the Beatles, I think that represents the energy, the excitement of youth. Obviously, you know, it's about falling in love. There's, there are a lot of sexual themes in the songs. It's just about kind of libidinous energy dancing. They were coming out of, you know, playing in Hamburg, coming out of playing in the cavern club in Liverpool. So it's really, these are dance tunes. They're meant to get an audience shaking. They're, you know, it's the kind of music that they eventually got whole stadiums of young, especially girls screaming at the top of their lungs. That kind of libidinous youthful energy. So that's album, you know, that’s the last album that we're going to, so we're going to go backwards. So, you know, we're going to go backwards from, from their, their last album to their, to their earliest.

So, but the first stage is youth and pleasure and fun and thrill and kind of all the things that, you know, young people, young people get into. Not too much thought. There's not a lot of, you know, reflection and thought and it's just a very kind of energetic, energetic album.

But then, you know, Rubber Soul is probably, [the next breakthrough album] you know, because, you know, the next albums, I think, kind of continued in that line. But then they were getting more creative. They were, they were making their own songs, but they were still kind of sounding, you know, sounding quite similar. The love songs that they became so famous for in the early 60s. But then Rubber Soul represents another stage of their development where they're starting to get much more reflective.

They're starting to really think about life and art and music and, you know, they were at that point hanging out with people like Bob Dylan and starting to see music as something where you could really express yourself lyrically, poetically. So, they're getting beyond the kind of love songs that they had been famous for, you know, in the early stage of their career. So, this is like 1965. So, you can kind of see their development, this rapid development within the span of a couple of years. So, Rubber Soul. I originally grew up with the American version, which starts out with, I've Just Seen a Face. And then it goes into Norwegian Wood, You Won't See Me, Think for Yourself, The Word, Michelle. And then side two is It's Only Love, Girl, I'm Looking Through You,In My life, Wait and Run For Your Life. So, that was the album that I grew up familiar with as, you know, because I grew up in, in the USA. So, that was the album that that we had. But then there's the British album, which I discovered much later, which starts with Drive My Car. And that song had been put on to another album that was, that was released in the US. So, Drive My Car, Norwegian Wood, You Won't See Me. Nowhere Man, Think for Yourself, The Word, Michelle, What goes on? Girl, I'm Looking Through you, In My Life, Wait, If I Needed Someone and Run For Your Life. So, two slightly different albums. I really associated Rubber Soul with that song, I've Just Seen a Face. I just feel like Rubber Soul is not complete without that song. I think that was the better choice than Drive My Car, to be honest. So, I'm going to focus on the American version. And, hey, you know, the US was their biggest fan base. So, I think the albums that sold in the US were in a sense more important, at least in terms of their overall popularity than the original British albums.

So, that album came out in December 1965. And, you know, I think it represents, as I said, more, obviously, much greater maturity. They're telling stories now. Norwegian Wood is one of the iconic songs. But, You Won't See Me is a really interesting song too. And, there's a lot you can say about that song. And, they're starting to develop a sense of time. Time becomes very important. So, it's kind of, you can see it as, like, there's a lot of loss on this album. There's a sense of the fleeting, you know, they're starting to come out of their youthful periods. So, life is fleeting. Love is transient. You know, that kind of young love. Time marches on. All of these themes that are, you know, people can be deceptive. Oh, my God, my life, you know, in my life. So, run for your life. There's starting to think of the bigger picture of life. So, it's kind of represents a phase of awareness, a heightened awareness, growing awareness of the temporality of life, you know, from when you're a teenager and you kind of feel like you can live forever to, oh, God, things are going by so fast, getting much more reflective. But still within the idiom of, you know, popular music as they knew it.

But then, you know, 1966, Revolver was then another new, another breakthrough album. And much, much deeper than, than rubber soul, much more cynical, you know, starting with Tax Man, and then Eleanor Rigby, which I think I would argue was their first masterpiece. That was, that song is just, lyrically, it's musically, it's rather simple. But lyrically, it just took them to another level entirely.

And then, you know, some going back to kind of, but some more like mature love songs, like Here There and Everywhere. She Said, She Said, again, kind of communication, but there's some drug motifs there that you could talk about. Good Day Sunshine in the British version And Your Bird Can Sing, which is a lovely, a lovely song. Dr. Robert, again, kind of referencing the drug culture they were now a part of. I Want to Tell You, Got to Get You into My Life. And then, of course, Tomorrow Never Knows, which was another kind of breakthrough in popular music, much more psychedelic than anything. And, you know, referencing religion, they were starting to get into kind of mysticism and starting to move towards, you know, more focused on religion.And on that, what's the deeper meaning of life? In other words, they're starting to get interesting. It's kind of, they're going to college now, you know. For guys who never went to college, who never had a higher education, so to speak, they're kind of, now they're going to college. They're studying, they're reading, they're learning, they're kind of getting much more philosophical. So that's, yeah, that's Revolver.

And then, of course, 1967, the great Sergeant Peppers. There's obviously, you know, Sergeant Peppers is still considered one of the greatest popular music albums ever made. It's often ranked as their greatest album. I'm not sure I agree, but that came out in June 1967. And it has the theme, kind of, they've disguised themselves as another band, kind of referencing an earlier age, maybe a Victorian era. They are, you know, experimenting with sounds and styles and, you know, continuing this experimentation that started with Revolver.

And getting more, more lyrical, somewhat more, yeah, more reflective and philosophical with, like A Day in the Life, more imaginative with Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. But also, yeah, philosophical, mystical Within Without You. Now they're kind of thinking way forward to, you know, When I'm 64, so they're like projecting themselves way into the future.

And then there's just a lot of fun songs about kind of daily life. So it's like, how do we find the deeper meaning in our daily lives and in the places that we happen to be, you know, have grown up in or are living in kind of the life of the city or of a small town or going to the park or, you know, and most Beatles historians would argue that the two songs, Penny Lane and Strawberry Fields kind of belong with this album, even though they were not on the album. So getting very whimsical and nostalgic about the place where they grew up. So it's kind of like they know they're leaving home. So like She’s Leaving Home. And the she could be them, you know, they're leaving home. They're never going to be liverpudlians again, you know, they're leaving. They're, they've gone out into the world. But they're still grounded. They're deeply grounded in their childhoods in the memories that they have of growing up there.

And not just that, but they then ground themselves even further in the history of popular music and popular culture and entertainment in their country. So, you know, Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite, referencing a circus poster that goes back to maybe the late Victorian age. So, and the, the style of the music as well, they're referencing music, all music from the 1920s and, you know, they're referencing even earlier stuff, folk tunes that probably go back centuries. So they're kind of getting ready to depart, but they're deeply grounding themselves in the past. So it's like they're setting off on this much bigger journey, mystical kind of search, but anchoring themselves in, you know, who they are. And what culture that they came from, the people that they grew up with and so forth. So that's Sergeant Pepper.

And then, of course, they, they went even further with that, with the Magical Mystery Tour, which had, you know, some pretty cool songs like Fool on the Hill. Of course, I Am the Walrus, really, you know, it was Strawberry Fields, Penny Lane. I mean, some pretty amazing songs on there. But I think overall the album was, it was just too heavy-handed. They kind of, rather than giving a subtler message, they kind of put it front and center. Like, we're going on a magical mystery tour and, and look at us, you know, how clever we are. We're going on a bus. And, you know, it kind of parodied. It was like a parody of itself. And so it didn't quite work. Whereas Sergeant Pepper, people could kind of indulge in the project because they disguised themselves. They put on these costumes on the cover and they kind of turned themselves into something different. Whereas, you know, Magical Mystery Tour just didn't quite work as a concept.

So we're going to skip that one. And then, go on to, you know, let's skip over 1968. And we're going to skip over the White Album and, you know, like I said, that was, I mean, there were some great songs that came out from this period, but, but let's move on to what was their last and perhaps greatest album, which is, which is Abbey Road.

Why is it the greatest? Well, here's my theory of Abbey Road. You know, a lot of people who analyze this album will put it in the context of they were breaking up, but it was a happy album. They wanted to create something happy before they departed. And there's some truth to that. It was the final studio album, which George Martin produced. It did represent a collective effort. So they've kind of brought their bits and bobs of songs that they were working on. Here are some reasons why I think this was their best creation.

Conceptually, it holds together extremely well. It's the sequence of the songs, the themes that they, the musical themes within the songs are very coherent. And there's a classic element to the music. This is by far their most classical album. It's an album that has resonances with Bach and Mozart and Beethoven.

So they're digging even deeper into the wellspring of music. Paul found a poem written for a play in like 1600. So going way back in history, Golden Slumbers, which I think is really the keystone to understanding this album. It's that song. And this was my revelation with this album. I won't tell you what I was on, but I remember one day, just I guess listening or thinking about this album. And it just occurred to me that that's a song about death.

The golden slumbers is the slumber of death. That's it. And so it's, you know, smiles awake you when you rise. Sleep pretty darling. Do not cry. It's kind of like a laying down to death. It's the death of the Beatles. It's an acceptance. I will sing a lullaby. I think what is saying is we have to accept death. And we have to tell ourselves kind of the myth that we continue to live on after we die. We need to tell ourselves that myth. And that's what all religion tells us that our souls continue to live or that we're reborn.

But it's a myth. You die, you die. You're gone. And I think they kind of understood that. And that was deeply embedded into this album. They knew that after this album, the Beatles would be gone. There would be no more Beatles. They would live on as individuals, but the magic that they had woven together as four musicians would never exist again.

Would it be transcendent? Would it stand the test of time? You know, I'm sure that they were wondering, you know, how long are we, we were, we were this incredible band, but are we just a product of the 60s or will this last on? And what will we do as individuals.

So I think all that's woven into this album. And I liken this album to Dante. The first side is the Inferno. That's the hell. Maybe it's the hell that they were going through as they as they broke up. Terrible fights, fights over money, over artistry. They were probably going through a kind of a personal hell because, you know, they, they were very sad that this couldn't last. And I think they all, you know, they were, they had gone through so much together. So it was kind of like a divorce in a way. The band breaking up as they went on with their lives. And like a divorce, it was pretty messy. It was, there was a lot of anger and a lot of resentment and negative feelings and, you know, that really comes out on the first side of the album.

With like, you know, I Want You. She's so Heavy. Oh, Darling. I mean, there's a lot of screaming. There's a lot of, you know, emotions, a lot of pent up emotions and anger on this first side. Maxwell's Silver Hammer, you know, that's an interesting one was, is this, I don't think that that song can be taken literally. I think it has to be, I think this, the hammer is figurative. I think it's, it's a metaphor, you know, the hammer of justice, the hammer of freedom. It was, they're, they're smashing a relationship in order to gain their freedom, their artistic and personal freedom. They're breaking up what was the greatest band on earth in order to attain their own freedom and peace of mind. So, you know, I think if you analyze that song, it's all about smashing authority figures. It's kind of a cultural revolution. The aspect to it. I can even kind of see a cultural revolution poster in my mind of a, of a young revolutionary with a hammer trying to smash all the olds [in 1960s China]. And maybe that's what it's referencing. Just smashing, you know, teachers, old girlfriends or judges, the kind of people who are holding you back. So, I think it has to be taken figuratively. I don't think it's literally a story about a serial killer. And especially because it's told and sung in such a whimsical way. Obviously, it's not, this is not a dark, this is not a Peter Gabriel-like serial killer kind of song.

So, yeah, so the whole first side just has this, you know, there's, it's dark, it's, it's, it's earthy, it's fair, it's the inferno. Here come ol’ flat top, you know, it's Come Together, a song, which is about as creepy a song as you can get as bluesy and dark and, you know, from the earth, from the ground up. And Octopus's Garden thrown in there is kind of an underwater, underworld sort of adventure with caves and darkness and something primordial. And, you know, an octopus is kind of a fearful, fearsome creature, you know, you don't really want to, you know, be swimming and kind of come across an octopus all suddenly without warning. So, you know, it's, that's a dark, that's the dark side of the album. And, it represents kind of the winter of their discontent and their aggression and anger.

And then you turn the side over and it's, and you're, and it's the Paradise. Now they're ascending to heaven. So, the flip side is, you know, Here Comes the Sun, one of the most joyful popular songs ever made. It's, every winter, it's a song that you sing in March when the flowers start to bloom again after a long cold, lonely winter. So, that was George Harrison and that was his kind of sense of freedom and happiness that he was no longer a Beatle, he could go, he could find his own destiny now. He had so much to share that had been suppressed by the Beatles and now he was going to let it all out.

You know, then, You Never Give Me Your Money which is such a deep song, such a, it's a sad, but it's also about freedom about, you know, crossing bridges. And, you know, leaving a place that you know you'll never go back to and so you're sad about that, but you're now finding your freedom and you're kind of finding yourself, a self that had been lost.

And then the whole, the whole medley, of course, which is just a brilliant concoction of these old bits that they had kind of, you know, scraps of songs that they, that they had been working on that had never really jelled into full songs and they put them together in this medley. And somehow it worked. And so it ends the album with this, and it's very kind of dreamlike, it's, like I said, it's very heavenly, the Sun King, a lot of themes of sun and light and joy.

And, you know, then you, you kind of go back to these mundane characters, but they're very, you know, Mean Mr. Mustard, Polythene Pam, kind of the people that you might see on the streets and Liverpool or in the clubs, but they're very iconic, very archetypal figures. And, and then She Came in Through the Bathroom Window. I mean, that song, I think you can only understand by knowing the anecdote about the Apple Scrufs and Paul and kind of the end of Apple Records, but you could also see it as kind of, I guess it's their relationship to their fans in general that their fans are just invading their private space and they're kind of sick of that. They're ready to move on. An then of course, Golden Slumbers, which I had explained is kind of, it's a poem ancient, not ancient, but, you know, several hundred years old poem, which I think was about death. And, kind of the myth, the mythology of rebirth that, you know, that we're told like a, a bedtime story. And then finally, The End, it's the end. And that's where they all come together for this jam session, which is quite amazing and really, and then of course, Paul's statement about the love you take is equal to the love you make. And what are you saying is, life is finite. We don't know what's going to happen after we die. We don't know what, of that we produce will be remembered or cherished. But at the end, it all equals out. What you take is equal to what you make. So, whatever you consume or enjoy ultimately is, it's going to be equal to what you produce in the world. If you're loved by people, it means that you loved them. You can't get anything for free. You have to put in as much as you get out.

So, it's an interesting way. It's a final message. And then there, of course, there's that the final final thing tacked on, which was just a kind of a whimsical mistake that they decided to keep, which was the little, the little bit Her Majesty, which I think it's such an unfinished little, I mean, it sounds almost like a jazz song from the 1920s. It's very kind of classic early, early 1920s popular song in its structure. And it could have been something much, much bigger and much more joyous, but they just kind of just tacked it on at the very, at the very end of the album as kind of a little surprise, very folksy little bit.

But, you know, all their songs can be played in so many different ways. But what I really, so there's the Heaven and the Hell motif, you know, the Dante's Inferno to the Paradise. And kind of ascending, I think in the, you know, they're ascending to the heavenly Pantheon. They'll always be known as this great band, seminal band. And they kind of, I think they recognize that the band would outlive them. They would go on as individuals, but nothing would ever be as important as the Beatles in their lives. Even though it was so short, so fleeting, it just passed by in like six, eight years, you know, and then they get there, they get to live the rest of their lives.

So, I think structurally and musically that album really came together. There are so many recurring motifs and themes. And I think in a way, it was kind of like their Ninth Symphony. You know, when you listen to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, it encapsulates pretty much everything that he was known for musically. And just takes it all to greater and greater heights. And it's about joy and about the beauty of humankind and about art and love.

And I think that that was the message of Abbey Road as well. It was kind of continuing on from just that, so love in a way is kind of the message that love is transcendent. You know, it started out with the childish, it starts out with the teenage love, which is kind of a lusty, lusty love, but kind of a zest for life. And then, and then they got more reflective over time and, and more imaginative and lyrical and transcendent, and then finally, but it's always cycling back to that message about love. And that kind of never, that never left, you know, so it's, so love was always the message that, in a way, very Christian, as opposed, that you have to, you have to love the world. You have to love the people in the world, even though they'll let you down, even though there will be nasty breakups, there will be wars, there will be death, there will be struggle. The only way for us to keep going on is to have just believe in the power of love, believe that there's a some kind of greater power, and, and that love is coursing through the universe. And that was kind of the deepest message, I think, that resonated through their music.

Surviving 2023: Looking Back on a Challenging Year

In 2023, the world experienced some terrible natural disasters and more horrible wars. On the other hand, China and the rest of the world were emerging from the worst years of the COVID pandemic. International travel was picking up again, and China’s doors were opening wider to international visitors. Colleagues, students and friends were now streaming back to China and spending more time in the country. For me, this was also a year of extensive travels within China (20 cities in 40 days). Some highlights of my year included the launching of my new book Rocking China, an extended visit to Beijing, and hosting a doc series on China’s Grand Canal. Mostly I will look back on 2023 as my year of reckoning as I struggled to survive and recover from a major assault on my life. At the age of 53 (54 now), I must now face my own mortality and better prepare for the inevitable.

For those of us living in China, 2023 began with a bang. After three years of striving to prevent the virus from spreading in the world’s most populous country, the government suddenly and unequivocally put an end to all restrictions and measures to stop the spread of COVID-19. This happened in mid-December of 2022. At the time, I was living in a house by Dianshan Lake, the largest lake in Kunshan, where I live and work on weekdays. My wife and daughter were in our apartment in downtown Shanghai. As soon as the measures were lifted, the virus struck the city and hit the rest of the country like a tsunami. Everybody I know in China came down with it over the next week or two. My wife was down with fever and other symptoms for a week or so while my daughter recovered more quickly. Not wanting to throw myself into this wave of illness, I chose to weather the viral storm in my lake house. I ended up sheltering there for nearly a month as the virus passed like wildfire through the population of China. I holidayed alone at the lake (at least I had my dog for company) and reemerged in early January, returning to Shanghai to be with my family and rejoining a post-viral society. Thus, I avoided the first big wave of the virus since China declared its war on COVID in early 2020.

Adding up that time along with the months that I spent alone in my lake house during the lockdown periods of 2022, I probably spent around four months sheltering there during that year. The year 2023 would be a year of reemerging and reintegrating with society and with campus life at DKU. Once it was clear that the virus was no longer actively passing through the community, I rejoined the social world of Shanghai.

Looking out on the new Phase II campus of Duke Kunshan University

At the same time, the campus of DKU was picking up speed and students and professors were returning from abroad to rejoin campus life. In July, Phase II of DKU opened and we stepped onto a much larger campus with a new library, community center, and sports center.

Having gotten through the worst phase of the virus’s spread, Chinese society was in recovery and people were enjoying the return to a somewhat more normal life without all the restrictions, testing, and lockdowns of the previous few years. Like the rest of the world, Chinese society had suffered in so many ways and the psychological and economic toll of the anti-viral measures of the previous three years were incalculable. Businesses large and small were affected and the city and country were facing an economic downturn. Everyone I know in China had family members who were seriously affected by the virus, and the sounds of ambulances careening through the city were heard for several weeks in early 2023. Yet 2023 also began with a tone of optimism that the worst of the pandemic years were coming to an end and normal life could begin again. Finally we could say goodbye to daily testing in neighborhood stations, to green, yellow and red QR codes, and to endless masking, not to mention the existential threat of being sent to a facility for COVID positive people.

Jud and me playing some songs at Ray’s bar in Shanghai

Over the years, I’ve been working on honing my skills as a musician. I play piano and guitar and sing, and prior to the onset of the lockdowns in 2022 I was fronting a rock n roll cover band composed of other foreign expats, and we were getting some gigs at local bars in Shanghai. Then the lockdowns began and most of our band members escaped China and have yet to return. In 2022, while sheltering in solitude in my lake house in Kunshan, I spent a lot of time working on songs. I developed some daily habits for memorizing song lyrics and worked on them on guitar and piano. After the lockdowns ended in mid-2022, it was time to go back into society and share the fruits of my labor with others. Jud and I, the two remaining members of our band, had been playing in bars and clubs as a guitar duo. We continued to do so in 2023, and we joined a group of merrymakers who ran a nighttime jam session and open mic night every Tuesday and Sunday at different venues in the city.

On a tour of Shanghai’s Former French Concession with my students in early 2023

From January to March, I taught my Shanghai History course at DKU. It was refreshing to have the international students, most of them at least, back on campus, and many international faculty were returning as well. After the previous year of constant disruptions and lockdowns, not to mention the absence of most international students and many faculty, the campus was thriving again.

Filming the Grand Canal doc in Hangzhou, one of 20 cities we visited in 40 days or more. This is the famed Gongcheng Bridge, considered the entranceway to Hangzhou along the Grand Canal.

In late March, I embarked on a long journey to document the story of the Grand Canal, which stretches from Hangzhou to Beijing (there are other sections, but this was the one we traveled on). I had signed on as host for a joint project between Jiangsu TV and National Geographic to produce a two-part series on the Grand Canal for television. With our intrepid director Richard Hughes and a crew of producers and camera and sound people, we traveled to around twenty cities in the span of forty days, following the Canal southward from Yangzhou to Ningbo and then northward from Yangzhou to Beijing. At nearly every town and city we stopped at, I met interesting people who became part of the film as they told their own stories about the Canal and their connections to it. These included fisherfolk, barge captains, artists, designers, hotel owners, landscapers, scientists, and a famous influencer among others. We ended the journey on May 1 in Beijing, and I remained there for another week over the May Day holiday.

In 2022, testing positive would have struck fear in the hearts of anybody in China, since it meant being sent to a facility for recovery. In 2023, it was as routine as catching the flu.

Upon returning to Kunshan, I immediately came down with the dreaded virus, and spent three days with fever in bed. After a week or so, testing negative again, I rejoined my family in Shanghai. The long summer was beginning to unfold.

A flyer for my Beijing book talk made by DJ BO

In late May, my new book Rocking China came out in publication. I was invited by old friend DJ BO to join him for a book talk in Beijing. Though my mother-in-law warned me not to go, having just recovered from my recent bout with COVID, I travelled once again to the national capital where I gave a book talk to a small yet highly engaged audience. My plan was to stay in Beijing for three days, then fly back to Shanghai. What’s that they say about mice and men?

On the third night of my stay, I was hanging out with a colleague and some of his friends in one of my favorite live music bars in Beijing. Some of them were musicians and they were playing acoustic guitars and singing songs on the small stage of the bar. After they finished, I was called up to the stage, borrowed a guitar, and sang a few songs with my colleague B--, and a few more on my own. My heart was flying, but I attributed that to nervousness. Not that I had any reason to be nervous, I’d been performing songs to crowds large and small for a while now. When I finished my set and walked off stage, I was suddenly hit with sharp pains in my stomach, upper back, shoulders, and arms. At this point, alarm bells should have been ringing in my brain, but I attributed it to having eaten something foul as well as fatigue from not having played that vigorously in a while. Amazing how the brain rationalizes just about anything.

Despite my colleague B—offering to take me to a hospital, I told him I’d go back to the hotel and rest and see if my body calmed down. It didn’t, and I found myself tossing and turning a while and then realizing I had to get myself to a hospital and quick. Long story short, after arriving at the wrong hospital, I was taken by ambulance to the right one. The diagnosis was crystal clear: acute myocardial infarction.

B—arrived at the hospital along with another friend and colleague J—and they helped me get through the preliminary paperwork as I waited anxiously for the doctor to roll me into the operating theater. There, the doctors performed a routine procedure that saved my life. Known as an angiogram, this painful procedure involved running a thin tube up my artery from my arm to my heart. “The procedure was a great success” announced the doctor in flawless English. I was now the proud bearer of a stent in the spot where my coronary artery had been blocked.

They wheeled me into the ICU as I high-fived B—and J—who waited in the hall. My wife arrived later that evening. For the next two weeks my body fought to survive and recover from this vicious attack on my mortality. I was in one of the best hospitals in the country and under great care from the team of doctors and nurses who treated me. I was extremely fortunate to have ended up there.

The first week was all about survival. All my key bodily functions had gone on vacation, and I was struggling just to breathe. I found it extremely difficult to eat and sleep. I was forced to lie down for several days and could barely move. Yet gradually, and through tremendous will power and effort, I began to recover and eventually was able to sit up and eat some food. The second week in the hospital went more easily and I found myself recovering by degree of magnitude each day. By the end of my hospital stay, I was eager to be released back into the world.

Since then, I’ve been on daily medications. The first two months of recovery were a bit touch and go, and I found it easy to fall ill if I overtaxed myself. But the past three months have been better, and I feel my health and energy steadily rising. I’ve been seeing a cardiologist in Shanghai, and signs of recovery are looking good. Still, since this terrible episode happened, I’ve had a feeling that a Damocles sword is hanging over my head and not letting me forget my mortality.

Movers shelving books in my new apartment in Kunshan in August 2023

July and August were mostly spent moving. We decided to move to an apartment, a townhouse really, located close to our daughter’s new school, Shanghai American School. At the same time, I had to move out of my cherished house by the lake and find an apartment much closer to the DKU campus. I ended up moving back to the same building in Kunshan that I left in 2022, where I’d lived the past seven years. After living in solitude by the lake, nearly an hour’s drive from campus, I was very happy to be back “home” in another apartment in this building and neighborhood, and to be a ten-minute car ride from campus again. Naturally, I missed the lake, but I would return to it now and then to continue a documentary project with students filming the people who continued to live in an old water village by the lake, which was slated for immanent demolition. Mostly I was happy to be reintegrating into campus life again after nearly a year of lockdown-enhanced solitude on the lakeshore.

Over the fall of 2023, as I continued my journey of recovery, I became steadily more involved in campus life. In addition to the usual advising, I was mentoring several students engaged in various stages of their Signature Work projects. As the advisor to the Jazz Club, I started a blues workshop, which continued off and on to the end of the semester. Along with the student president of the club, I started an open mic night on campus in our Student Performance Cafe, the first of its kind. These events gained some traction over the fall and we will continue them in spring.

Posing with students in the cast, crew and band after the performance of the musical play Now Here This in the DKU Student Performance Center, Dec 2023

Meanwhile, some students convinced me to join in a musical performance on campus. The Musical Club was staging a performance and they needed a guitar player for the band. I didn’t have much time to learn the songs, which are of course much more complicated to play and perform than typical pop/rock songs. Somehow, it all came together for the two shows, even though I wish I’d had another solid week to practice the songs. The two performances got their deserved applause from the audience of students and at least one administrator. I hope this is the beginning of a long trend on campus of live music and stage performances by our talented students.

The Grand Canal documentary series I hosted was broadcast in October on Jiangsu TV. We are still waiting for more news of its international release, but I was very happy with the production and grateful to have the opportunity to work with such a talented production team and the director Richard Hughes.

In mid-December, I traveled with my wife and daughter to California. Over the past two weeks we have been catching up with our relatives here, some of whom flew out from the East Coast to see us. Given my condition, we were happy to meet them “halfway” rather than having to fly all the way over to the East Coast. We also enjoyed a visit to our elder daughter’s campus, UC Santa Cruz, where she is in her second year.

All in all, it's been quite a challenging year for me and for the world. Let’s hope 2024 goes better for us all. Peace, love, and joy to the world and Merry Xmas from California!