POSITIVELY 4TH STREET MUSINGS

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In March of 2020 we took a leap into the great unknown, and began broadcasting 90 minute shows every week from home. This unexpected journey has lasted over 4 years, and led to countless informal forays into a broad range of material by numerous artists current and past. Probably the most persistent and enthusiastic requests from viewers for anything outside of the blues genre has been the repeated calls to record a Bob Dylan tribute. But how would I, an artist associated almost entirely with blues for over 30 releases, suddenly switch to recording songs by one of the greatest songwriters who ever lived? Thinking wouldn’t help. It had to start, simply put, by plugging in the mics and pressing record. It’s always a mystery...

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As it happens I grew up in Greenwich Village and was a teenager when Bob Dylan’s songs were becoming huge hits. We didn’t think it unusual to spot John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, or Bob Dylan walking down west 4th street at a time when the area was overflowing with musicians of every description and level of fame. My father’s place of business, The Allan Block Sandal shop, was a centrally located and well known hub for local musicians, and west 4th street, where it intersected the one block long street called Jones street, became the center of my universe. By the time I was in my 20’s, Dylan was one of the most famous names in the music business.

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It was during the 1960’s that I walked into Dad's sandal shop and saw an artistic looking man sitting and talking with my father. I was aware of who he was, a musician and local resident- but I was raised to respect peoples’ privacy and not fawn over anyone, known or unknown. It was just part of the general musical atmosphere that characterized the place and time.

 

The following is excerpted from my autobiography When A Woman Gets The Blues:

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DYLAN AT THE SANDAL SHOP

"I remember the hat, and the youthful face. He was not yet famous, so at that point he was among the many interesting people stopping by. He may have recently been signed to a label, but I don’t think his first album had come out yet. When I walked in he was sitting there talking to my dad, and I remember thinking that he had a very unique, artistic presence. After he left Dad told me something about the conversation. He said that Bob was a poet first and foremost who really didn’t care for the ‘business' side of things. His priorities lay in being true to his art. Right away I resonated with the message. I understood it to mean that Dylan had integrity that he would not compromise. I also understood from this that it was OK to buck the system, to reject the shiny, glossy world of business in exchange for artistic honesty, a lesson which stood me in good stead many times over the years. It was an inspiration and the way I was raised to feel about music. People like Bob Dylan served to reinforce this important, grounding piece of information."

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Choosing the Material:

As with all my recordings, the songs that move me the most deeply, touching heart and soul, are the ones I choose to record. This is always based on songs that leap up and cry out to me. It has everything to do with the message, the melody, and the energy in the song- and luckily, there is never a shortage of incredible songs to choose from.

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THE SONGS

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1. Everything Is Broken

After the album was completed, having reached over 50 minutes in length, Holger Petersen of Stony Plain Records pointed out the wisdom of adding a straight-out blues song to round things out. I chose Everything Is Broken, which turned out to be just the fresh touch we needed. After that I felt ready to release the record into the vibrating world of sound waves that last and travel forever in outer space. Quite possibly some day, a million years from now, Everything Is Broken will be captured in another galaxy where someone may find it to still be relevant. When you think of it, the laws of entropy and thermo dynamics will always cause everything we know and love to break down, malfunction, or otherwise need repairs. That’s why this song is so relatable. It's also very funny, which made it a blast to record. Everything in the outro is true angst from my life.

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The guitar: My method is to establish a tempo, then put down a click track, which I usually play by hand. This gives the track a little bit of an organic feel. Then I play a root part, often overdubbing a second layer in a different tuning (country blues style). From there I add bass parts, any other layers, and if the track calls out for drums, I create a program, usually hand placed, measure by measure. Last, I play slide. That’s the most exciting part of the process for me. I get to step out, soar around, and test my mettle. Sometimes a track calls for simplicity, other times it wants to be full speed ahead. Everything is broken needed a full throttle approach.

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2. Ring Them Bells

Ring Them Bells was the first song I recorded on this project. I chose it because I loved the powerful lyrics, the gospel theme, and the melody. But despite being the first, it was the last to be completed, even receiving adjustments after we added Everything Is Broken- but that’s a long and winding tale for another time. Finally, by some miracle, Ring Them Bells came together, and now when I hear it I feel like it’s right where I needed it to be.

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The guitar: This track was illusive from the first session until after the project was supposedly finished. We kept revisiting it because one element or another would invariably present problems. It was recorded live with guitar and vocal together, old style, with no click track for tempo reference. This created no end of headaches when adding additional layers, as nothing locked in, tempo or tuning. The problem was made worse because I had tuned the guitar well below pitch for the sake of the vocal- but the strings were so loose that the root guitar always sounded out of tune. I added overdub after overdub to cover the original, but it was always clearly audible on the vocal track. At the last minute, after adding at least two different tracks in the bass range, it seemed to find the proper balance, and the dissonance faded into the background.

Then there was the tempo challenge. You can hear the track speeding up slightly at the bridge, and then it rushes into the drum parts, but in the end it just seemed to add urgency and excitement. There really is no solo part on the song, though slide is used to bolster and strengthen in the background.

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3. Like A Rolling Stone

Possibly my favorite and most evocative Dylan song, this one just rolled out as if it was playing itself. It’s often when I don’t think I can do something that it comes out the best. If only I could explain how every brick I ever walked on in Greenwich Village cried out with this iconic song. The song is epic, life changing, and forever imprinted in the story of my consciousness.

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The guitar: The guitar parts (and vocal), were all “take 1,” and they harmonized together as if they had been written out in a chart. The effect of this seemed to land somewhere between the acoustic roots of the song and Dylan’s later evolution into electric. The original drum parts were so amazing that I tried to follow the pattern as closely as I could because the drum really leads the song, section by section. Then there are the astounding words- intriguingly honest, sometimes painful, can’t-look-away kind of words.

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4. Not Dark Yet

This song is a sermon. Not figuratively, but literally. This is another gorgeous Dylan song that releases a mysterious power into the cosmos. I couldn’t believe the meaning that jumped out of every word. “It’s not dark yet.... but it’s gettin’ there.” Make of it what you will.

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The guitar: With slide, there’s a whole different feel between rocking out, and the poignant, lingering notes of a ballad. Then it’s all about tone, and less is more. Once again these guitar parts unfolded on auto-pilot and were right where they needed to be on the first take. Sometimes I listen to a recording and wonder who played it and how it came into being, as if I wasn’t there. I comfort myself thinking my first effort is just a guide- a demo, something we can fix later- but honestly, we almost always stay with the original. Later Cindy Cashdollar played a solo on her Weissenborn baritone guitar, and when we listened back to both of our solos at once, they wove together perfectly and formed harmonies in an amazing way.

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5. Mr. Tambourine Man

This was the iconic ballad of the times, taking me back to everything I can point to and recognize about the place where I grew up. In my book "When A Woman Get The Blues” I have a chapter called “The Piebald Man.” We all saw this character tripping the light fandango down the Village streets. If he wasn’t the Tambourine Man I don’t know who was.

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The guitar: After trying several different directions for the guitar part on this track, ultimately I decided that the only thing that would work was the driving strumming of the original Dylan track. It was surprisingly difficult to hold it together while repeatedly drilling down with a flat pick. For one thing it invariably flew out of my hand. I gained a whole new level of respect for the strong rhythm guitar played by Dylan on these masterful early songs. Sometimes the simplest sound is the hardest to achieve, something my dad often told me, along with “It’s harder to play slow than to play fast.”

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6. Positively 4th Street

This is another all-out killer song from the Dylan catalog. Up there with Like A Rolling Stone, the painfully honest, biting, gritty words paint a personal picture of post-relationship dynamics we can probably all relate to. Bob always gets to the heart of the matter, and says it better than anyone else could- all without apology. Whoa baby, “You gotta lotta nerve to say you are my friend...” In my view this kind of boldness is incredibly refreshing.

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The guitar: I tried a number of different approaches, but nothing hit the nail on the head. It took a lot of experimenting to find something that didn’t sound all-out weak. For some reason my version kept seeming painfully slow, even though we had matched the tempo to Dylan’s version, which never sounded slow at all. Crazy stuff. So this meant I needed to add some energy. The original track had those incredibly iconic organ riffs played by Al Kooper, that drove the original in such a spooky and recognizable way. Eventually I put parts in the open spaces that gave a nod to some of Kooper's lines, and that enlivened things. Of course the slide came last, and at that point I had an out of body experience. I think I could have gotten a lot more edgy and sarcastic with the vocal, but Rob kept liking what was happening, so I left it alone.

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7. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

Part of why Dylan became so famous and beloved must be the way he hit every nail on the head with a precise blow, speaking “Truth To Power,” and bringing a

sense of hope to the hopeless- those who watch governments running amok in complete opposition to the needs of the people. What has become of “Government of the people, by the people and for the people”? Dylan explains it in characteristically vivid terms, as relevant today as the day it was written.

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The guitar: Ultimately I chose the same steady strumming approach I used with Tambourine Man, laying down a traditional flat picked sound for the foundation. After this I wanted something to add variety, so I tuned the guitar below pitch to a wild open tuning and just started playing arpeggios. We loved where it went, just had to find the right place in the mix to keep all the elements separate and not step on the vocal.

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8. Mother Of Muses

I had never heard this one before, but discovered it among the tracks on Rough and Rowdy Ways. The song seems to be part jazz, part classic ballad, but also partly crafted out of some entirely new basic element- not hydrogen, helium, oxygen or iron, not copper, gold, aluminum or uranium, but something entirely new, quite possibly from a different dimension. Scientists confirm that there are parallel dimensions, ones we cannot see- so this is not just a figment of an overactive imagination, but a mathematical likelihood.

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The guitar: This song was yet another one where the guitar part landed in the right place immediately. Experimenting as usual, we played take 1 and take 2 back together with no expectations- they harmonized and sounded like an old-time music box. This is why the outro is so long- because I just couldn’t let go of the intertwining melodies, and it allowed me to relax and fly free in a higher vocal register, something I learned from singing gospel.

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9. Murder Most Foul

I don’t think there is much I can say that will add to the shattering honesty of this historic tale. No one other than Bob Dylan could lay out the facts with this much power, without apology, pulling back the curtain on the depth of corruption which exceeds our ability to grasp. I still envision a full length documentary video to go along with this one. Haven’t found the film maker yet, but this song is too important not to pull out the historic footage.

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The guitar: I don’t think there is much explanation required on this one either. The guitar needed to be done with the simplest possible approach, unadorned, a support layer beneath the immense weight of the story. From time to time I added a little emphasis for emotional value, but that’s all, until the slide on the way out, where the heart aches, reflecting on the history. Then, radio silence. That’s all I can say. We cry each time, remembering the day.

Rory