 | |
| |
 |
Wednesday, September 23, 2015
The Latest From The Military Resisters Front
By Bob Meola, Courage to Resist. September 17,
2015
Free Chelsea Manning- We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind
| |||||||
| |||||||
Working to end the New Jim Crow in Massachusetts
Working to end the New Jim Crow in Massachusetts
Listed
in: Political Activism, Social Justice, Green Party, Libertarian, Freedom, and
10 more topics.
This
group is for people who are interested in drug law reform in Massachusetts and
that means legalization of cannabis for adults, as well as all other major
recreational drugs. This is for those who believe in ending the New Jim Crow.
This is also a group dedicated to statistical based arguments rather than
hyperbole or sensationalism. Yes, heroin and methamphetamine are dangerous and
very... [read more]
Other Meetups you might like
Socializing for Justice
2,763 SoJusters • Boston, MA
Listed in: Activism, Social
Justice, Farmers Market, Social Networking, Community Building, and 12 more
topics.
Americans for Bernie Sanders!
66 Leaders • Boston, MA
Listed in: Political Activism,
Liberals, Progressives, Social Issues, Social Justice, and 8 more
topics.
Cannabis Society
1,007 Intellectuals • Boston, MA
Listed in: Science, Wellness,
Drug Reform, Medical Marijuana, Politics, and 11 more topics.
Boston Knapsack Anti-Racism Group
645 Knapsackers • Boston, MA
Listed in: Activism, Social
Justice, Feminism, Multiracial, Social Movements, and 8 more
topics.
Cambridge and Somerville for Bernie Sanders 2016
40 Members • Cambridge, MA
Listed in: Political Activism,
Democratic Party, Liberals, Politics, Progressive Democrats of America, and 8
more topics.
South Shore Progressives
66 South Shore Progressives • Cohasset, MA
Listed in: Political Activism,
Liberals, Peace and Justice, Social Issues, Social Justice, and 5 more
topics.
You
might like these Meetups based on your interest in: Political Activism and Solidarity with Wall Street Occupation Protest. Add more
interests
Never miss a last-minute change. Get the app.
 | |||||||
Maine veterans to protest military's impact on oceans
Seacoast
Online has an article about the upcoming peace walk
Maine veterans
to protest military's impact on oceans
Group's peace walk to end in
Portsmouth
YORK, Maine – Maine Veterans for Peace will hold a 175-mile peace walk along Route 1 from Ellsworth to Portsmouth, N.H., from Oct. 9-24.
The walk will draw attention to what the group alleges are the links between the Pentagon’s environmental impact on the oceans and climate change. According to the veterans, the Pentagon has the largest carbon footprint on Earth and was exempted from the Kyoto Protocols. Military operations, the group says, consumes massive amounts of fossil fuels and lays waste to significant environmentally sensitive places on the planet, particularly the oceans.
Navy sonar blasts wreak havoc on marine creatures, disrupting their lives, leaving animals more susceptible to disease and lowered reproductive success, and sometimes injuring and killing them, says Maine Veterans for Peace.
“If the seas die so do humans on Earth and much of the wildlife,” said Maine VFP secretary and walk coordinator Bruce Gagnon. “Now is the time to speak out for ending the massive military impacts on the world’s oceans and for conversion of our fossil fuel dependent military industrial complex to sustainable technologies.”
Walkers will be hosted each night in local churches for community suppers where they will hold public programs about the purpose of the walk. The public is invited to walk for an hour, a day or more. The walk will be led by monks and nuns from the Nipponzan Myohoji Buddhist order that does peace walks around the world. This will be the fourth time VFP has organized a peace walk through Maine in recent years.
The walk is being sponsored by Maine Veterans for Peace, PeaceWorks, CodePink Maine, Citizens Opposing Active Sonar Threats, Peace Action Maine, Veterans for Peace Smedley Butler Brigade, Seacoast Peace Response of Portsmouth and Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. For more information, visit http://bit.ly/1QJwHL7.
A View From The Left-Understanding China & Its Unions
W.H., Intro,
Understanding China & Its Unions, for Niebyl-Proctor,
1/11/15
Most
of us intuitively know that safety-&-health protections in a union plant
will likely to be stronger than in a non-union plant, even if the union lacks an
OSH subcommittee, or if it’s ineffective.
Still,
an ineffective or absent safety-and-health subcommittee can endanger not only
workers but the union’s existence at the plant.
Counter-intuitively,
maybe, a very strong safety-and-health subcommittee can also endanger the union’s existence.
Why?
Because to survive, the union faces many other necessary tasks, for example,
equality tasks, organizational tasks. If those are not addressed, or if the
union fails to achieve a balance between several necessary tasks, that too can
bring the union down.
This
presentation argues that states formed by socialist revolutions, like China
today, or the Soviet Union before its collapse – that these states can be
compared to unions risen to state power atop great mass upsurges that broke the
old ruling class’s power. In China, that mass upsurge conquered on Oct.1, 1949,
with the CPC at its head.
Labor
unions in China, in turn, can be compared to a subcommittee of this
union-risen-to-state-power, charged with addressing one of the necessary tasks
-- defending workers’ interests in workplaces.
But
after seizure of power, the necessary tasks are much more numerous than those of
a union in a capitalist factory, they include econ. Development, and balancing
between them is much more complex.
A
union-risen-to-state-power, with far greater resources than those of a union or
a working-class party in a capitalist country, still can only make the best out
of a bad situation. Even if it somehow figures out the best solutions – there
may be many such solutions—it is still left with a bad situation. ‘Freedom is
the recognition of necessity.’
The
Soviet Union recorded enormous achievements in its 74 years of existence, yet it
still collapsed. Identifying and addressing the weaknesses and unmet challenges
that led to the Soviet collapse is essential to complete humanity’s transition
to socialism.
-------------------------------------
UNDERSTANDING
CHINA AND ITS UNIONS
SUMMARY:
There is a lot of confusion about China and its unions in the world workers'
movement. This paper compares China to a 'union risen to state power' – a
special organization of the working class – and China's labor unions as a
subcommittee of this union in state power. The labor unions are charged with the
important task of protecting workers' interests in the workplace. Other
important tasks of the 'union in state power' include economic development,
education, public health, equality for women, youth and nationalities,
environmental protection, and much more.
To
maximize its strength, the 'union in state power' needs both
relatively-independent and effective subcommittees (including labor unions)
addressing necessary tasks, and periodic harmonizing mechanisms and bodies to
balance between those tasks. This is because even a 'union in state power' must
make the best out of a bad situation.
'China
as a union risen to state power' helps explain why the education and standard of
living of workers in China has climbed in recent decades, even though labor unions
in China have not been particularly effective (although they are becoming more
so). In capitalist countries, unionized factories generally have stronger safety
and health protection for workers compared to non-union factories, even when the
unionized factories lack effective safety-and-health subcommittees. The analogy
also helps us understand that the exploiters' antagonism to China is like their
antagonism to unions: it is a class antagonism. The material foundations and
common interests exist for cooperation and unity between unions worldwide,
China's unions included.
KEY WORDS: Class
character of the Chinese state; labor unions after a socialist revolution;
relative separation and harmonizing mechanisms; making the best out a bad
situation.
In April 2010, Richard Trumka,
president of the AFL-CIO, the main federation of labor unions in the US, spoke
at Harvard University. A coal mine explosion in West Virginia a few hours before
his talk had left 29 miners missing and feared dead. Their fate weighed heavily
on him.
I asked Brother
Trumka if he would support mine-safety cooperation between US and Chinese
unions. His answer was positive. He cited health-and-safety cooperation with
mining unions in other countries, such as South Africa. The emphasis was
in the right places. Then he added: “But [unions in China] are not real unions.”
Unions do differ in
some ways in China, Vietnam and Cuba, compared to unions in capitalist
countries. But how? Indeed -- What is China itself?
This was the
question posed to me by a worker-intellectual, founder of a labor research
center, shortly before his first trip to China in April 2008. “I don't know what
China is,” he said to me. “Is it capitalist? Is it socialist?” His uncertainty
mirrors widespread confusion about China in the world workers' movement.
This
worker-intellectual came from a family of Teamsters, the union of truck drivers;
he had once been a fuel truck driver himself. One of the things I really liked
about him was that when he referred to the Teamsters, it was without a snicker,
even though he was conscious of the Teamsters' shortcomings. He understood that
it was, above all, a union, a workers'
organization, facing huge obstacles and challenges in the face of capitalist
hostility.
I said to him,
“China is as if the Teamsters had risen to state power atop a great upsurge that
broke the old ruling class's power.” He smiled. I think he understood.
UNIONS IN CHINA ARE LIKE
'SUBCOMMITTEES' OF UNIONS IN
CAPITALIST COUNTRIES
China is like a
union risen to state power, a special form of workers' organization, with a
government and army. This workers' organization in power must now address not
only defense of workers' interests in the workplace – the traditional task of
unions – but a thousand other necessary tasks as well: food supply, economic
development, education, equality for women and national minorities, environment,
public health, and other tasks . And it must find a balance between them, under
conditions where it must make the best out of a bad situation. If it seriously
fails at any of these tasks, it risks being busted or “decertified” -- a term
used in the US when workers actively or passively drive out a union that had
until now represented them. Decertification leaves workers without protection
against the exploiters. The same thing happened to workers in the Soviet Union
after 1991.
Complicating matters in a 'union
in state power', China included, is that workers generally form a minority of
the “membership”. Workers are the state's social base, but a majority of the
residents are not workers – they are peasants, self-employed, youth, managers,
intermediate layers, officials, plus a small but significant minority of
exploiters, owners of private businesses, small and large.
China's labor
unions are like a very important subcommittee of the union in state power,
with two very important responsibilities: to defend workers' interests in the
workplace, and to shape overall state policy. More on that shortly.
First, let's apply
this analogy to unions in capitalist countries. The Teamsters, for example, may
have several subcommittees that address necessary tasks, such as organizing,
safety-and-health, and civil rights (to achieve equality for African American or
women workers).
The safety-and-health
subcommittee may find that certain practices or chemicals threaten workers'
health and should be discontinued. Yet, discontinuing those practices could also
lead to unemployment for many African American workers, who are
routinely assigned the most dangerous work by the bosses. A potential
contradiction thus exists between the union's safety-and-health and civil rights
subcommittees. The organizing department, another subcommittee, may require so
many resources that it leaves little for safety and health or civil rights
tasks. How such contradictions are resolved requires harmonizing mechanisms
between the subcommittees, and ultimately will reflect the general level of
labor organization, consciousness and power.
Continuing with this analogy: In
order to be effective, each subcommittee of a union needs some independence from
other subcommittees as well as from the overall leadership. Without that
relative independence, it is difficult for subcommittees to be effective. But
without the harmonizing mechanisms, it can be very difficult for the union to
balance between its many tasks.
A union in state power that
champions economic growth at the expense of defending workers in the workplace
will weaken its social base. But poverty will distort and can compromise the
state's entire structure. So will continued social inequality or environmental
destruction. This is why periodic harmonizing mechanisms are also necessary for
the union in state power. It needs to reconcile the priorities of of the various
subcommittees and develop the state's overall policy and
decision-making.
Even
'unions risen to state power' must make the best of a bad situation. While they
have much greater resources than unions in capitalist countries, they do not
have unlimited power. They face the exploiters' hostility and anarchic economy
at every turn.
Both kinds of
unions, whether in power or under capitalist rule, must therefore balance
between many necessary tasks, no small feat. A
leadership that is unable to reconcile contradictions
between subcommittees may place them under its discipline, or even abolish them.
But then the necessary tasks of the subcommittees are unlikely to be carried out
well, if at all, and the appropriate balance between tasks will not be reached.
Labor unions in China are like a
subcommittee of the “union risen to state power.” Their very important
responsibility is to defend workers' interests in the workplace -- AND to
participate in shaping overall state policy. Thus, unions' responsibilities in
China include not only addressing wages, benefits and working conditions but
also having a voice in over-all tasks, such as environmental policy or setting
prices, to give just two examples.
The government of a
union risen to state power is not the same thing as the state. The government is
best understood as one of the state's “subcommittees” addressing two vital
tasks, organizing economic development and defense against exploiters'
inevitable attempts to bust the union. The state, on the other hand, is the sum
total of all the “subcommittees”, including government and labor unions, that
are addressing necessary tasks, AND the harmonizing mechanisms required to
develop overall policies.
Ideally, each of
the necessary subcommittees of the “union risen to state power” should be
relatively independent, effective and strong in its own right. Also ideally, the
periodic harmonizing mechanisms must be developed to balance the contradictions
between the subcommittees. Achieving both is very difficult, yet it is
ultimately essential. The Soviet Union was unable to resolve this balance, and
fell to counter-revolution 74 years after it was formed. What happened to the
Soviet labor unions after Yeltsin seized the government offices in Moscow and
began to attack workers?
A general principle applies: a
workers' organization and its sub-organizations will be as effective as the
corresponding interest and control from below, and the coordination and
harmonization from above. This requires worker empowerment and education,
internal democracy, and prompt and effective two-way flows of information in
order to arrive at decisions.
MUCH HAS TO COME
TOGETHER
In summary, the
relationship between the Chinese state and its labor unions is like the
relationship between a union in a capitalist country and one of its
subcommittees. There will be many uncomfortable moments in the process of
reconciling contradictions between union subcommittees (tasks). Why? Because the
resolution of differences between the tasks of subcommittees is not obvious. But
as long as the subcommittees remain committed to the union's overall interests
and power, productive solutions will be found while serious errors will be
avoided and lesser errors corrected.
A surprising conclusion from this
analysis is that strong subcommittees of a union -- or union in state power --
can actually weaken the union. How? The overall structure can be weakened if the
harmonizing mechanisms have not been developed. A strong and effective
safety-and-health subcommittee is very desirable in a unionized factory. But if
that strength is achieved at the cost of other tasks, such as those of the civil
rights (equality) or organizing subcommittees, the whole union can be weakened.
The same is true for a union in state power. In turn, the leadership can weaken
a union if it fails to develop and use the harmonizing mechanisms.
Much then has to come together to
strengthen labor's organizations, whether in state power or under capitalist
rule. All this while working to overcome capitalism's limitations and forced
'competition' among workers, limitations that constantly require our
organizations to make the best out of a bad situation.
WHY ARE CHINESE
WORKERS' STANDARDS OF LIVING RISING WITHOUT EFFECTIVE UNIONS?
One way to see this analogy
between unions and unions-in-state-power is as follows: In capitalist countries,
safety and health protections for workers in unionized factories tend to be
stronger than in non-union factories. This is true even when the unionized
factories lack effective safety-and-health subcommittees. How could that be?
Because there is a union in the factory.
In China,
the education and standard of
living of workers in China has risen even though unions have not been
particularly effective (although they are becoming stronger). How could this be?
Because the Chinese state itself is a ”union risen to state power.”
Effective labor
unions can strengthen the Chinese and similar 'unions in state power', such as
Vietnam, Cuba, and People's Korea; the critical requirement is that for
effective balancing mechanisms to harmonize the unions' tasks with those of
other necessary 'subcommittees', including the government (economic development
and defense). Similarly, an effective safety-and-health subcommittee will
strengthen a labor union, provided the union also has the mechanisms to balance
the union's many challenges.
EXPLOITERS' ANTAGONISM TO CHINA
IS LIKE THEIR ANTAGONISM TO UNIONS
In 2009, the capitalist media
repeatedly broadcast the false claim that the bankruptcy of General Motors and
Chrysler was due to auto unions' “greed” and “Cadillac health plans”. No mention
was made of the massive overcapacity in the industry, or the general crisis of
capitalism. The exploiters' state then acted to greatly weaken unions and
cheapen labor. The action was backed by the courts, police and prisons. Today,
the capitalist media are making the equally bogus claim that
postal worker unions' “greed” and “plush pensions” are bankrupting the US Postal
Service, and public workers' unions are similarly bankrupting local governments.
These false claims are then used to attack the unions, cut wages and plunder
union pension plans.
How many times have
the capitalist media also claimed that China is behind the loss of jobs in the
US, that China is trying to poison our children, or that its “currency
manipulation” is bankrupting the US?
The exploiters' antagonism to
China is like their antagonism to unions here, a class antagonism. It reflects
the fear and hatred of the exploiters towards organization of the exploited.
China is a special form of labor
organization, a 'union risen to state power'. It is in world labor's interest to
defend China and similar states-- and their unions -- against the exploiters'
attacks, just as it is in our interest to defend the Teamsters and other unions.
It is in labor's interest to
develop cooperation among all of our class's organizations, in power or not,
flaws and all, to enable humanity to overcome capitalism's cruel and deepening
limitations.
This
paper was prepared for a US-China Labor meeting at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst, May 28, 2011. Special thanks are due to professors Cheng
Enfu, Liu Shuchun, Feng Yanli, and Ding Xiaoqin of China's Academy of Marxism
and the World Association for Political Economy (WAPE), and Liu Cheng of
Shanghai Normal University. US-China Labor meetings are dedicated to
facilitating understanding between unions in the US and China, with the goal of
developing cooperation around necessary tasks, such as environmental tasks,
organizing or international labor solidarity.
Eric Brooks, Bonnie Weiss and
Maja Weisl of the Communist Party USA, and Dave Campbell and Mike Zielinski of
the United Steel Workers all contributed to this article, along with Al Sargis
and the Boston China Study Group. This article is dedicated to Maja Weisl, who
died shortly after helping shape this article.
I Did It My Way-With Bob Dylan’s Shadows In The Night In Mind
I Did It My Way-With Bob Dylan’s Shadows In The Night In Mind
From The Pen Of Bart Webber
Recently Sam Eaton an old friend of mine from high school days down at Carver High School in Southeastern Massachusetts whom I reunited with at a class reunion via the “magic” of the Internet which seems to be able to ferret out anybody who has ever put the slightest information on any website (and which has been recorded by our “friends” at NSA and other “big brother” operations done in “our interest” by the American government but enough of that for now as that is a subject worthy of another time) did a review of Bob Dylan’s latest CD brought out in 2014, Shadows In The Night. The album a tribute to the king of Tin Pan Alley songwriter fest, Frank Sinatra, in the days when there was something of an unwritten code or maybe not unwritten but assumed by the division of labor that the singer and songwriter were strangers in the night in another sense. (Also later, after a semi-successful screen career where he did excellent work in the film adaptations of James Jones’ From Here To Eternity and Nelson Algren’s wrenching The Man With The Golden Arm and some notoriety as the leader of a rat pack of Hollywood and Los Vegas celebrities, named the “Chairman of the boards,” the boards being the stage upon which his fame rested as a singer, actor and hail fellow, well met.). In that review Sam noted that such an effort to go back to an aspect, an off-shoot of the great American Songbook of which Dylan knew so much even early on before he became famous as the “king of folksingers” was bound to happen if he lived long enough.
Going back to the Great Depression/World War II period that our parents, we the baby-boomers parents (although Dylan born in 1941 missed the big generation of “68 boat but for Sam’s purpose that was okay he got tagged as an honorary “68er) slogged through for musical inspiration. Going back to something, some place that when were young and immortal, young and thinking that what we had created would last forever we would have, rightly, dismissed out of hand. And since Dylan has lived long enough, long enough to go back to some bygones roots here we are talking about something that let us say in 1970 Sam would have dismissed as impossible, dismissed as the delusional ravings of somebody like Sam’s older brother, Mason, who hated almost everything about the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s both before he did two tours in Vietnam beginning in 1965 even before the big call-ups after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, enlisting naturally, without a scratch on him, before he got married to his high school sweetheart who had waited, had waited through those two long tours for him maybe sensing that he would come through unscratched, got his little white picket house in hometown North Carver away from his South Carver working class son of a bogger (cranberry bogs the only thing that keep the town together back then and for which it had been famous for generations), and after when he would, along with the lovely bride stand in front of abortion clinics and spew hateful words and make threatening gestures against poor bedraggled young women (mainly) up against it after some guy left her in the lurch to worry and fret about bringing another baby into this wicked old world and fag bait (without the bride as far as Sam knew, they were not exactly on the best of terms then, or now for that matter) every guy in town whose had a word to say about peace and went crazy when somebody mentioned that gays (in the closet gays) had served in the military during his war and would think nothing of punching any guy who he thought was “light on his feet” (lesbians he seemed, according to Sam, he skipped for some reason), had been ready to spill blood it seemed to cut off the heads of anybody who wanted to breathe a new fresh breath not tinged with our parents’ worn out ways of doing business in civil society. (A whole dissertation or at least a serious long article could be written about how the gap of maybe three years, graduating in say 1961 like Mason and 1964 like Sam created a whole divide in social/political/cultural attitudes in many families. Not all but many where the fresh breeze of the Kennedy Camelot minute dream breeze had not been strong enough to check the desire of the former grouping to serve one’s country, right or wrong, marry one time forever, and get that little white fence house that was a step, maybe two, up from Ma and Pa.)
Strange as it may seem to a generation, the generation of ’68, today’s AARP generation, okay, baby-boomers who came of age with the clarion call put forth musically by Bob Dylan and others to dramatically break with the music of our parents’ pasts, the music that got them through the Great Depression and slogging through World War II, he has put out an album featuring the work of Mr. Frank Sinatra the king of that era in many our parents’ households. Dylan’s call, clarion call if you will of Blowin’ In The Wind and The Times They Are A-Changin’ (those dropped “gs” a sign of the folk informally and a general mid-country phenomenon) written and sung by him which began a trend in music that pulled the mythical Tin Pan Alley marquee down (and a lot of non-singing-instrument composers and professional studio musical on cheap street) were direct assaults on whatever Grandfather Ike, the Cold War death bombs mentality or the deep freeze cultural and personal red scare which had carried the country (and Frank) through the 1950s.
The music of the Broadway shows, Tin Pan Alley, Cole Porter/Irving Berlin/ the Gershwins/Jerome Kern, Sam who along with his interest in rock and roll, urban blues and protest-tinged folk music a la Dylan (and Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Utah Phillips, Tom Paxton and a group of other who I forget that he was always talking about ) also knew about and hence his status as “professional” amateur archivist and reviewer so forgive me if I have left anybody of importance out. Have I missed anybody of importance, probably, probably missed some of those Rogers and Hart Broadway show tunes teams, and so on.
That proposition though, at least as it pertains to Bob Dylan as an individual, seems less strange as Sam pointed out to me if you were not totally mired in the Bob Dylan protest minute of the early 1960s as I was although folk music beyond Dylan and a couple of others made my teeth grind, left me flat and even with Dylan it was an iffy proposition when he was cranky-voiced in live performances like one time, maybe 1964, when Sam, at Sam’s insistence, forced me since I had access to a car to go down to the Newport Folk Festival one hot July night to hear “the bard ” and he croaked out his set. Those were the days though when even I realized that whether Dylan wanted that designation or not, he was the “voice of a generation,” catching the new breeze a lot of us felt coming through the land.
In the end Dylan did not want it, ran from it (with the “help” of a serious motorcycle accident which kept him out of the live limelight, holed up in Woodstock along with musicians who would be the Band (the rock and roll back-up band for Dylan and later on their own), although not out of big time album making, that being a rather prolific album period for him, did not want to be the voice of a generation, had no banner to way, no sign to hold up for humanity as say Joan Baez, an ex-girlfriend or something like that, and Phil Ochs did, although he liked and wanted to be “king of the hill” in the music department of that generation, no question.
Wanted too to be the king hell troubadour entertaining the world for as long as he drew breathe, as long as he had a song to sing (in what kind of voice god only knows, reptilian the last time I heard him a few years ago on some aspect of his never-ending tour gig and Sam said in that review of the Sinatra tribute album that they must have had to come up with some miracles of modern “fixer man” music technology to get his voice to sound even as bad as it did on his covers which were just short of spoken verses like some New Jersey Best Western hotel lounge lizard act) and he has accomplished that, the longevity part.
What Dylan has been about for the greater part of his career though has been as an entertainer, a guy who sings his songs to the crowd and hopes they share his feelings for his songs. As he is quoted as saying in a 2015 AARP magazine article connected with the release of his Frank Sinatra tribute what he hoped was that like Frank he sang to, not at, his audience. Just like Frank did when he was in high tide around the 1940s and 1950s and our bobby-soxer mothers were tripping all over themselves like he was Elvis or something and throwing who knows what his way, maybe, notes with telephones numbers and promises of the best time he ever had. That sensibility is emphatically not what the folk protest music ethos was about but rather about stirring up the troops, stirring up the latter day Gideon’s Army to go smite the dragon, to right a few, maybe more of the wrongs of this wicked old world. Dylan early on came close, stepped into Mississippi for a day or so, then drew back, although it is hard to think of anybody from our generation except maybe Joan Baez and Phil Ochs who wrote and sang to move people from point A to point B in the social struggles of the times.
What Dylan has also been about through it all has been a deep and abiding respect for the American songbook that he began to gather in his mind early on (look on YouTube to a clip from Don’t Look Back where he is up in some European hotel room with Joan Baez and Bob Neuwirth singing Hank Williams ballads like Lost Highway or stuff from the Basement tapes (either set, the recently released five CD set in the never-ending bootleg set or the rarer “Genuine Basement” tape which is where he runs the table on a few earlier genres, especially country and show tunes). In the old days that was looking for roots, roots music from the mountains, the desolate oceans, the slave quarters, along the rivers and Dylan’s hero then was Woody Guthrie. But the American songbook is a “big tent” operation and the Tin Pan Alley that he broke from when he became his own songwriter is an important part of the overall tradition and now he has added his hero Frank Sinatra to his version of the songbook (at least he called him his hero but Sam said he would be hard-pressed to name one song Dylan covered of Frank’s even as a goof.)
Sam said (an I agree somewhat, as much as I am going to with folk songs that can still make my teeth grind) that he may long for the old protest songs, the songs that stirred his blood to push on with the political struggles of the time like With God On Our Side which pushed him (and dragged me along in his wake, for a while) into the ranks of the Quakers, shakers, and little old ladies and men in tennis sneakers in the fight for nuclear disarmament, songs from the album pictured above, you know Blowin’ In The Wind which fit perfectly with the sense that something, something undefinable, something new as in the air in the early 1960s and The Times Are A Changin’ stuff like that, the roots music and not just Woody but Hank (including an incredible version of You Win Again), Tex-Mex (working later with George Sahms of the Sir Douglas Quintet, the Carters, the odd and unusual like the magic lyric play in Desolation Row, his cover of Charley Patton’s Highwater Rising or his cover of a song Lonnie Johnson made famous, Tomorrow Night, but Dylan has sought to entertain and there is room in his tent for the king of Tin Pan Alley (as Billie Holiday was the “queen”).
Having heard Dylan live and in concert over the past several years with his grating lost voice (for Sam it was always about the lyrics not the voice although in looking at old tapes from the Newport Folk Festival on YouTube his voice was actually far better then than I would have given him credit for) I said to Sam I really did wonder, like he did, though how much production was needed to get the wrinkles out of that voice to sing as smoothly as the “Chairman of the boards,” to run the pauses and the hushed tones Frank knew how to do to keep his audience in his clutches. Yeah, still what goes around comes around.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)