The website of Jonathan Bogart, writer and cartoonist.
Epilogue: That Ribbon Of Highway
If you have kept faithful count, you know that we have made our way through only ninety-nine recordings. There is one straggler still on the road, journeying with us to the rising sun.
R.I.P. James Luther Dickinson.
There’s been a lot of music-related death this year. This may be the one that ends up affecting me the most personally.
I got into James Luther Dickinson when some year-end best-of list in 2002 had his second album, Free Beer Tomorrow, on it; based on a mention in that writeup, I tracked down his rare and quasi-legendary 1972 debut Dixie Fried and memorized it, then got the followup. He’s put out three since, all of which I’ve bought as soon as I saw them in the store. His recording of the Jobim/Bonfá bossa nova standard “Samba De Orfeo” was the first track I posted on this tumbleblog; his recording of the garage-rock standard “Wine” is one of the key tracks in my version of the 1970s, country and soul and funk and rock and blues and folk and punk and gospel all at once.
I was a fan, in short; and the nice thing about being a Jim Dickinson fan was not having to share him with anyone else, because no one else gave a shit. The music he made after the 70s no longer spoke to the current pop moment in any significant way (even his kids are roots-rock, i.e. jam-band staples); but who expects a senior citizen to do that anyway? It was enough to know that his swampy, Basement-Tapesy, slightly askew version of American rock was still out there, plugging away with humor and attitude and all hearts out on the sleeves where they belong. He kept finding more songs to record that he could incorporate into his universe, and they all sounded of a piece, sung in his ragged, unkempt vocal style with his wheezy, gristly band behind him. The last three albums have had a logo in the liner notes: World Boogie Is Coming. Perhaps it’s still on its way; but we’ve lost a prophet.
Anyway. Just wanted to leave a mark in the ether to say I’ll miss him.
Scene Seven: Que Le Arde
The inner dialectic of American history is in stark black and white; Kodachrome has not yet reached our deepest instincts.
Scene Six: Hold Back The Dawn
And breaks the dam, and the deluge comes, sweeping all before its path, the world we knew and the world we thought we knew, together drowned in the same all-consuming torrent of noise, noise noise boiling up from the underground, from the shacks (chicken and shotgun and all-night and love) of the backwoods, the brothels of the cities, the lonely trails in the swamps and on the uplands where men don’t congregate or if they do they don’t talk about it later.
Scene Five: A Hand Me Down Broom
The last time we looked at the official, overground version of 1940s pop for any length of time was back in the first half of this list, when we suggested that Frank Sinatra in 1945 was at the tail end of a tradition of songwriting and interpretation which would be swallowed up bodily by the subsequent waves of vernacular pop on the one hand and prissy nostalgia-mongering on the other.