Sunday, December 30, 2007

Old Acquaintance

Much of the weekend, the bit when I've not been in work, has been spent catching up with old friends - and eating well in the process. A sound use of time, as was listening to the Elvis Costello collaboration with Allen Toussaint The River in Reverse. Why can't music this good be played in supermarkets? I ask this simply because when we were shopping at the appropriately named Giant Supermarket at Parkway Parade yesterday somebody had deemed it appropriate to play something for the shoppers' delight that involved this chap doing irreversible damage to Leaving On A Jet Plane (with a Latin beat!) and, even worse, Blowin' In The Wind. Now I can accept that the former is something of an open target due to its excessive sentimentality, but surely Mr Dylan deserves better. And why anyone would think of treating his gently fragile masterpiece as a kind of jauntily upbeat cabaret show-stopper is beyond my understanding.

In passing, Dylan does an extraordinary live version of Blowin' In The Wind with the Band on Before The Flood. He reinvents the song as a kind of celebratory, rabble-rousing call-to-arms. It shouldn't work, but does. It's a safe bet they'll never play that in Giant.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

My favourite Dylan is "Tangled Up in Blue".

Brian Connor said...

Excellent choice. Possibly the best introduction to mid-period Dylan and the reason I bought Blood On The Tracks on vinyl all those years ago.

Anonymous said...

Mr. Tambourine Man is more quotable though. On a whole though, Dylan is very quotable.

Brian Connor said...

He certainly is - and the last verse of Tangled contains some of my favourite typically tangled Dylan lines: All the people we used to know / They're an illusion to me now / Some are mathematicians / Some are carpenter's wives / Don't know how it all got started / I don't know what they do with their lives.