Welcome to Light On Light Though episode 414, the complete "radio documentary" on WFDU-FM from 1977 -- "Life & Death of a 20th Century Troubadour" -- in which Josh Meyrowitz and I discuss the life, death, and timeless impact of Phil Ochs and his music.
If ever there was a time-travel ticket to a past and a place that you knew so well you could still see the sun glinting through the tree leaves, hear the din of the eateries as you walked by, and, most important, still hear the music that actually defied any given time or place, it would be David Browne's book, Talkin' Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America's Bohemian Music Capital. That's because Browne has a way of writing, an eye for detail, a penchant for commentary, that draws you in to fill the background you in one way or another actually experienced, or, what Marshall McLuhan called "cool".
Yeah, I sang doo-wop in Washington Square Park with my acapela group The Transits in the early 1960s, and then my folk-rock group The New Outlook a few years later (Ellie Greenwich and Mike Rashkow heard us uptown one Sunday afternoon in Central Park, and signed us to Atlantic Records, after changing our name to The Other Voices), but the way I really got to know the village was finishing up my BA in Journalism at NYU, then going a few blocks up to the New School for an M.A., then back to NYU for my PhD in the 1970s. (I even managed to write three pieces for The Village Voice just before all that, my sum-total career as a music journalist.)
Turns out David Browne and I could have passed each other in the street -- David arrived to pursue his BA in Journalism at NYU in 1978, and I left, thankfully finished with school, in 1979 -- or bumped into each other going in and out of the diner southeast of the park. But David stayed focused on the Village and its clubs and their music, to the present day, while I pursued music on the radio, MTV, iTunes, and anyplace I could hear it, and only came to the Village with my wife to eat in a great Italian restaurant near Houston Street, or go shopping at Balducci's.
And Talkin' Greenwich Village is one of the results of Browne's passion -- he's written more than half a dozen other books about popular music, and writes for Rolling Stone -- and delivers a cornucopia of vignettes, insights, and are what in effect mini reviews of dozens of artists. You know, I always judge a book by how well it treats a subject I know something about. My wife and I were/are devoted fans of Phil Ochs -- I consider his "The Crucification" right up there with the very best songs that Dylan wrote -- and Browne not only got everything right in his discussion of Ochs and his life in the Village (with an intermission in California) over the 1960s and 70s, until he took his own life the year my wife and I got married (we went to the Memorial Concert for Ochs that Browne also aptly describes), but I also learned something from his description of Ochs. It's become hard-wired into Ochs's story that he was broken when Dylan did not include him in his Rolling Thunder tour. But Browne provides a missing piece of the story, telling us how Ochs badgered Dylan, when Dylan was first beginning to put together the group that would tour. Which means, it's not quite true that a callous or jealous Dylan simply didn't include Ochs on the tour.
But in addition to, I don't know, at least vignettes of 50 artists spread across 8 chapters and an Epilogue teeming with information -- Browne lists every interview he did for the book in its Bibliography -- he focuses on two artists, Dave Van Ronk, and the Roche Sisters (and, also of course, Bob Dylan), and makes them, in effect, centerpieces and guides to what Browne is telling us happened in these magical decades. I only saw Van Ronk once (at the Phil Ochs 1976 Memorial Concert at the Felt Forum) and the Roche Sisters only on YouTube. But Browne's accounts of Van Ronk and of the Roches across the decades amount to mini but in-depth biographies of the two, and make Talkin' Greenwich Village irresistible reading just on their own.
But lest you think everything in this book is as serious as Ochs, or even Dylan, Browne also has a knack for the kind of detail that will make you chuckle, or even laugh out loud. Seeking the name of a song on one of The Blues Project's just-recorded albums, the response to the person who's writing down the titles is "'What song? You mean Steve’s song?' To [Steve] Katz’s chagrin, 'Steves Song,' complete with a missing apostrophe, became the title." Or, "when Orbison and Ronstadt huddled in his dressing room, [Jerry] Brown [then Ronstadt's boyfriend], waiting patiently outside, finally began pounding on the door: 'Let me in! I’m the governor of California!''' Or, "the worst [performers in this Village venue] were booed or heckled. When asked if one contestant should be booted off the stage, [owner] Porco grumbled, 'No, I think we should shoot him.'”
Of course, no volume is perfect, and I'll tell you the one thing I missed in this New York Public Library of a book. I was a big fan of The Blues Project, and to this day I find myself humming or singing to myself "Cheryl's Going Home". The song was written by Bob Lind (who wrote "Bright Elusive Butterfly of Love"), who does a pretty good job singing it. But the Blues Project rendition, with those piercing guitar notes, and their interplay with organ, is something else. Browne tells us almost as much about The Blues Project, Danny Kalb in particular, as he does about Van Ronk, the Roches, and Dylan. But not a word about that elusive heart-breaker Cheryl. I guess she was already home and out of sight.
But every page of this pulsating encyclopedia of whirling words is worth reading. The fall of Greenwich Village and its clubs and taverns and whatever you want to call them brought tears to my eyes, because David Browne had made it seem like a beloved living organism, a mini gaia of music just several blocks long. My only really lasting regret about this book is that it wasn't ten times longer. As it was, it's 400 pages went by too quickly, because I just couldn't put the book down.
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Check back here at the end of the month for my upcoming interview with David Browne.
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in Kindle, paperback, and hardcover
My wife and I just got back from seeing A Complete Unknown, the Bob Dylan biopic. We both loved it. The following is my take on the movie.
Dylan recently famously tweeted (on X) that Timothée Chalamet is "a brilliant actor so I’m sure he’s going to be completely believable as me. Or a younger me. Or some other me." Unsurprisingly, Dylan got it entirely right. Every biopic ever made is about someone inevitably a little or lot different from the subject of the movie. Not only can the actor not possibly look 100% like the subject -- unless they are the subject's identical twin, and the producer somehow managed to go back in time and talk the twin into playing the subject's part in the biopic -- but there's inevitably dialogue left out or changed, streets and buildings that don't look the same as the originals, etc, etc. Look, frankly, even a documentary is never entirely truthful. It may be more truthful than the biopic, but the director inevitably has to make easy and painful decisions to leave certain things out, etc, etc. In a phrase, all biopics and docu-dramas are alternate histories (and documentaries, too, just a little less so).
But A Complete Unknown is so good because it managed to get so many things right. Chalamet as Dylan and Edward Norton as Pete Seeger were letter and note perfect in the words they spoke, the songs they sang, and even what they looked like and how they moved. Monica Barbaro was not quite there singing as Joan Baez, whose rich mellifluous voice back then is unmatchable, but Barbaro hit all the notes well, and certainly captured Baez's attitude, energy, and intelligence with style. I don't know what Suze Rotolo at that age was like, even in video. She was inspiration for the part of Sylvie Russo in the movie, because Dylan (to his credit) in our current time didn't feel right about having her character by name in the movie, because she left the world in 2011 and couldn't give her consent to be portrayed in the movie -- but Elle Fanning did a fine job in the part. (The obvious explanation is Dylan wanted the name changed because some of the interactions with Dylan and Russo in the movie are at variance in some significant way with what really happened between Dylan and Rotolo.)
In addition to Dylan's songs, which were immensely enjoyable to see written, and see and hear performed, there was a symmetry, a kind of rhyme, in the movie, which I expect will stay with me for a long time. One of my favorite examples is Woody Guthrie's "So Long, It's Been Good to Know You". It starts off the movie, which begins in 1961, as Dylan comes to New York, and goes to see Woody Guthrie, who was already seriously ill (in reality, he'll live until 1967), and meets Pete Seeger (who had a wonderful cover of the song, solo, and earlier with The Weavers). At that point, it seems like the song is about Dylan and Seeger saying goodbye to Guthrie. But when the movie ends, with Dylan going the apostate electric way, the song is played again, and the goodbye is to the Dylan who has forsaken acoustic folk for an electric band with Al Cooper et al.
The title itself of this cinematic triumph underwent a transformative rhyme. Dylan is "a complete unknown" when he first crosses the Hudson and arrives in New York City and the movie begins. And of course the song that plays out the movie as Dylan commits to high voltage is "Like a Rolling Stone," in which "a complete unknown" is one of the many signature phrases.
The implication in the movie -- actually a little more than an implication -- is that Dylan did this because he wanted to be as famous as the Beatles. I don't know Dylan personally, and have no idea if that's true, but I do know that both kinds of Dylan -- "Blowing in the Wind," "The Times They Are A-Changin'," and "Masters of War" evolving into "Like a Rolling Stone," "Just Like A Woman," and "Positively Fourth Street" (I don't think the last two were in the movie) -- were equally works of genius in their own ways. And I also know, for whatever it's worth, that the lyrics Dylan wrote are in a class of their own, at the top of the best lyrics ever written, surpassing the timeless word-craft of Cole Porter, John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
There was one scene I found annoying in the movie. One of the highlights of the momentous Newport Folk Festival scene has Joan Baez singing "There But for Fortune," a huge hit for her, written by Phil Ochs. Dylan is shown offstage, not looking very happy. Maybe he's understandably nervous. Or maybe he's jealous. But the song isn't identified by Baez. And in fact there's no mention of Ochs anywhere in the movie. Whether an accidental oversight or a deliberate cut of something that was filmed ... who knows. It certainly doesn't make sense given the prominence of the song in that scene, not to tell the movie audience who wrote it.
I'm also sorry we didn't hear any of "God On Our Side" -- especially relevant on this day -- the most irrefutable anti-war song, pinpointing the hypocrisy and insanity of war, ever written.
But I guess that's just personal opinion, and I also think that, just like Dylan's songs, this movie will never grow old. It will be watched long into the future, after which people might watch Peter Jackson's documentary about The Beatles, and then Martin Scorsese's. But there's no need to wait for the future. My recommendation is see A Complete Unknown as soon as you can.
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One of the real people left out of the movie is Terri Thal, Dylan's first manager. Here's an interview Frank LoBuono did with her on his Being Frank podcast on May 30, 2024.
For more on the movie, see David Browne's piece in Rolling Stone.
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Welcome to Light On Light Through, Episode 181, in which "Captain" Phil Merkel interviews me about the recent solar eclipse, politics, Phil Ochs, online learning, origin of Covid, defense of Dr. Fauci, and much much more (including a shout-out to the Applebee's in Batavia, New York, near the end of the episode).
I didn't think about November 22, 1963 much yesterday, as I usually do on one of the worst anniversaries of my and maybe your lifetime, because I was busy with all kinds of other things, including doing a little virtual concert at Philcon (a science fiction convention) of songs from my new album, Welcome Up: Songs of Space and Time, my first new album in almost 50 years.
But I was on my son Simon's Tumblr page today, scrolling back through his posts, and came upon this one from back in March. The world has been so crazy since then and now, with Covid and the election, and I've been so immersed teaching online classes, writing, doing podcasts, and the like, that I didn't get a chance to listen to Dylan's "Murder Most Foul" until today.
It's the best Dylan lyric -- as in emotive power, tear up the street and rip up your soul, but maybe you can put it back together -- since, I don't know, "Hurricane"? -- and, no, actually, "Murder Most Foul" is a lot more than that. Because of its subject. The story of our lives, or everyone's who was alive and cognizant in 1963 and all these years since. The song is almost a couplet with Dylan's 2012 Roll On John, about another unfathomably unacceptable assassination, but a much shorter song, and almost a warm-up for "Murder Most Foul," which joins Phil Ochs' masterwork, The Crucifixion, as an extraordinarily insightful song about the event which in a single moment changed the course of history, inextricably and unalterably, for the worst. But "The Crucifixion" was at the moment, written back then. And "Murder Most Foul" is about then, and now, and all time time in between. About the end of the joy and innocence and optimism for the future that surged through the early 1960s, an extinction that the world has manifestly still not recovered from.
I know I haven't. I think about it often. Even write about it in my science fiction. It's reassuring that Dylan hasn't either. "Murder Most Foul" captures all of this and more with a lyric which, if you want to know where I'd place it, it would be among the best lyrics Dylan, the greatest lyricist of the 20th century, ever wrote. Plays upon words about playing songs and playing parts. I may teach a course about this song someday. It even has a recondite reference to Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon," one of my all-time favorite science fiction stories. But the killing of John F. Kennedy was too terrible to be fiction. And Dylan caught it all. In a gruff, plaintiff voice that floats halfway between speech and song, over a piano played by Fiona Apple that will pierce your heart. And here in the 21st century, with a fifth of it almost gone, this song could well be one of the greatest of this century, too.
On a lesser but still significant note -- at least to me -- Dylan's song also scratches an itch I have had about songs about DJs that also goes back to the 1960s. I even wrote a short story about that -- Sam's Requests -- and just a month or two ago created a Spotify songs-about-DJs playlist with that theme. Dylan's song eminently belongs there, containing a series of requests, that in some arcane, nearly endearingly inscrutable way reflect Dylan's commentary on the times, to Wolfman Jack, whom I actually worked with. I just added Dylan's song to the playlist. Yeah it belongs there, and in a permanent place in the thoughts of those of us who lived through that era-shattering day.
No, we never made it to the New Frontier, but we'll never stop trying.
a happier time
Further reading:
I've always loved The Beatles. First as a fan, always as a fan. How much as a fan? Well, I was delighted to find a subscription to Sirius/XM Radio in my new car, early this month, and I promptly tuned it to MSNBC. Until The Beatles channel checked in on May 18, and that's what I listen to when I'm driving now. Even when I'm not driving - I just came in from my driveway, because I wanted to hear the end of "Baby You Can Drive My Car". I'd probably still be there, if the urge to write this review had not been so strong.And here's "It's Real Life" -- free alternate history short story about The Beatles, made into a radio play and audiobook and winner of The Mary Shelley Award 2023
Rehearsals for Retirement is the name of a great Phil Ochs' album - check it out some day, you'll see what I mean. It could also have been title of tonight's season 10 finale of Bones.
