Sinister: Silent Night

[P F]

- It's quiet out there.
- Yes... too quiet.

It's not quiet when Bob Zimmerman launches into
'Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You' on the new
ROLLING THUNDER 1975 LP which has cleverly been
released, not even rereleased. I think that the
ROLLING THUNDER 1975 bit shows good taste on the part
of the editors. Dylan rejigs all his tracks, making
some of them into jigs. Certain others are reels, or
rather, two reelers. They're also seven-handers, and
three-card brags. When the game finally ended up, they
had to get Christopher Ricks to analyze the grammar.

You could say it was 70s DYLAN and you wouldn't be far
wrong.

He also plays 'It Ain't Me Babe' as reggae, 'Hard
Rain' as 'Highway 61', and 'It's All Over Now, Baby
Blue' forgetfully. 'Hurricane' sounds exactly like the
LP version, which is disconcerting in the context of
dis concert.

I receieved my 70s DYLAN package in a shady
environment strewn with beer cans and drunken sinister
kids who would later *outrageously* get *kicked out*
of the joint, from a benefactor who will remain
analogous. He also tells me that when BLOOD ON THE
TRACKS came out, the girls of Durham cried in public
at the lyrics. That's something to visualize.

On an earlier occasion, he gave me THE RISE AND FALL
OF EDNA WELTHORPE AND THE ZIGGURATS FROM M.A.R.R.S. It
starts with the line 'Pushing thru [sic] the market
square'. For a while I thought it might be a Stevenage
concept album. But I got even more excited when I
heard the first chord of Neko Case's BLACKLISTED. This
LP has no right to be good - it ought to be acoustic
rants harshly sung. But actually it's astonishingly
high quality, a bolt from the blue. The first chord
(G) sounds like the Pines, cos G is easy. Then it
turns into a Gm, which is harder to do things with,
and sounds like, say, a back-up guitarist from a
recent Dylan tour laying down lead for 'John Brown'.
The quality of the acoustics, close-up and raw, sound
like very recent Lloyd Cole. This is the first 5-10
seconds! You can see why it excited me. Then she sings
some words in a rather keening way, and gets away with
things that ought to be clichés. She even makes the
phrase 'American dreams' sound meaningful and moving.
I'm not kidding.

In foreign news, my editor has gone to audition Ralph
Bellamy in Tucson. It's for a non-speaking part. They
are feasting with panthers, and possibly milking
orang-utans. If they don't post some more exciting
updates somewhere, I'll have to make some up and post
them myself.


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