Things Have Not Changed

As Beyonce and Bruce skip to the side of Clinton, and Ted Nugent grabs his crotch for Trump, it's refreshing that there is no likelihood of Bob "I've lived through a lot of presidents" Dylan getting involved with any of them.

It's best put by Andrew Kirell in his look at Dylan's refusal to be goaded into taking sides in a Rolling Stone interview that spent an inordinate amount of time asking him about Barack Obama.

Kirell writes: "His reluctance to play the game should serve as inspiration for those of us who feel disillusioned with a two-party system that has become, at its core, a competition amongst used car salesmen. 

"Platitudes are exchanged, harsh words are spewed, the promise of 'reform' is parroted over and over again, but nothing ever really changes. And if it does, it’s not because some politician in a big office made it so. Dylan understands that."

Dream Gig

It seems that some rock 'n' roll dreams do come true... Alex KP, the remarkable singer-songwriter, mentioned on this blog in the summer, was not only persuaded to add her spine-tingling voice to tracks on our new Russ Payne and Unison Bends album, 'Liquor And Iron', but she has agreed to perform with the band at our 'live' album launch in Brighton on November 26.

It promises to be the most exciting gig that the band has done. I wouldn't want to miss it.

Softness In The Machine

Interesting reading the official Robert Wyatt biography to find that this one-time highly individual drummer and latterly remarkable singer has long been plagued by feelings of musical inadequacy and anxiety dreams of the onstage shit hitting the fan.

Maybe he's just particularly honest in owning up to it... Since there are many more musicians who experience such worries...

Wyatt was there from the beginning with The Soft Machine – named after the William Burroughs novel of the same name – and he probably appreciates as much as anyone that this reference to the human body as a soft machine is apt. The human machine can do amazing things, but its software is often vulnerable.

Even though 'Different Every Time' is an occasionally hagiographic 'authorised' book, it does not shy away from the vulnerabilities of this particular soft musical machine. And it's an excellent read.

At last...

I've been away... I'm back.

And what better way to write a new post than to hail Bob Dylan's being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature - at long last!

The carping from those who don't get it has already started... but as the Poet Laureate of Rock 'N' Roll pointed out some time ago, something is happening and they don't know what it is.

Those who know and love Dylan and his work  - and know what it has meant to them on this long journey from the Sixties to here - will get it and will be overjoyed.

Rich Men's Blues

I love Eric Clapton's guitar playing. He is likely to be the greatest guitarist ever to pass through here... But tickets have just gone on sale for his Albert Hall concerts in May 2017. And the cheapest are £100 each, with a £12 booking fee per ticket.

The £12 booking fee per ticket actually seems more out of order than the £100 for a cheap seat.

So to echo my comments about Buddy Guy recently, I'm sorry but I'm not prepared to pay that much. And how many young blues fans who should see Eric before he goes are going to be able to pay that amount?

I confess I paid over £300 a ticket (from criminal touts) to see Cream's reunion at the Albert Hall (although a lot less to see their first farewell there in 1968). But that was to see Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker as well as Eric.

With Bruce dead and Baker in a bad way, Clapton raking in yet more money seems to stick in the craw – even though he richly deserves to be rich.

Let's not forget that Cream (i.e. Bruce and Baker) made him much bigger than John Mayall's Bluesbreakers ever did. A benefit night for Mr Baker might haver persuaded me to part with £112.

But as it is, I hope all those rich old men enjoy their outing to the Albert Hall.

Just The Type

It has been 'revealed' that Lady Gaga writes her lyrics on a typewriter. One wonders why. Everybody used to, of course. Bob Dylan turned out most of his early masterpieces with a typewriter and a stream of cigarettes. Just like reporters did in the old days when I first joined a newspaper.

The discipline of the typewriter is that you have to try to get things right without starting again too many times, otherwise you create a mess – either on the page or in the wastebin or on the floor.

All those screwed up bits of paper used to be used in the movies to show how hard the writer was working – or how hard the writing process was.

Perhaps Gaga also sits surrounded by balls of discarded paper to illustrate the intensity of her creative processes.

And maybe also typewritten lyrics are not a bad investment for the future – since they'll be around to be sold to collectors in a few years' time, and far more of a genuine historical musical document than a computer printout.

Brown Shoes (Still) Don't Make It

A report by the Social Mobility Commission, quoted by the BBC, suggests that candidates who wear brown shoes to interviews tend not to get the job. People who get hired tend to be those "who fit in".

Loud ties and ill-fitting suits also have much the same effect as brown shoes, apparently. 

This is hardly news. Frank Zappa observed, at some length, on the Mothers of Invention 1967 album "Absolutely Free" that "Brown Shoes Don't Make It". Anyone who has heard that early Zappa magnum opus on the ills of society would hardly need the Social Mobility Commission, whatever that is, to tell them that brown shoes don't make it...