On Music
GOODMAN, JOHN
ON MUSIC By John Goodman Last week, for a laugh, I played i a track from Donovan's new album, A Gift from a Flower to a Garden (Epic, B2N 171), for a loquacious friend of mine. The tune was...
...In contrast, "I Am the Walrus" shows the group more aware of "significance"—perhaps because they want to leave Donovan's Garden or perhaps because of all the critical fuss made over a "Day in the Life," from Sgt...
...We shall fill their days with fairies and elves and pussys and paints, with laughter and song and the gentle influence of Mother Nature...
...At the end of each verse, with "the world spinning 'round," an infectious two-beat, oom-pah chorus comes on to underscore some of the song's ironies...
...Included is a 24-page full color picture book to guide you through the Magical Mystery Tour to marvelous places...
...Eventually this will invigorate pop music for us all...
...The tune is a light rock-march...
...And if John Cage, as recently reported, now considers music merely "child's play," well, so be it...
...Still, both Dylan and the Beatles provide some of their best work in those little open-ended allegories like "The Fool on the Hill" and "All Along the Watch-tower," a fine tune from Dylan's new album, John Wesley Harding (Columbia, CS 9604...
...Dylan's nasal, not always pleasing voice still has great range, as in "The Wicked Messenger," a kind of Biblical blues of fine drive and urgency...
...the second has five tunes that have already appeared as singles...
...it is merely disguised...
...Pepper, which "I Am the Walrus" resembles...
...An early Dylan vocal sound is counter-pointed against full orchestral and electronic effects, with voices entering both garbled and clear...
...Nor has he lost his flair for political comment and irony: "As I Went Out One Morning" is an allegorical description of the singer's encounter, "in the shadow of Tom Paine," with "the fairest damsel ever bound in chains...
...If you can get through this emetic and puerile display (none of it is necessary...
...The effect becomes repetitious...
...This approach may seem as laughable as Donovan's ministering to newborn babes, but I think it is clear that rock has reawakened, for the kids at least, a fundamental bardic spirit expressed through song...
...Sorry I gave him that library card," etc...
...Over the electronic mumbling at the end we can make out the conversation of Edgar and Gloucester from Act IV of King Lear, on the subject of Oswald: "A serviceable villain...
...this is not program music) to listen to the record, you may even like the first side...
...The tune was "Little Boy in Corduroy," one of those wholly sincere Youth Poems that affect some of us so ambivalently...
...Rorem traces the recent history of song as a musical genre and proposes that the Beatles have used rather conservative musical devices but owe their patent superiority to Paul McCartney's melodies and the ability of the group to project them...
...Photos of our boys in wizards' robes and animal masks accompany a cartoon story telling how an ordinary bus trip was transformed through the spells of "4 or 5 magicians...
...It is more blatantly commercial, more of a put-on, hence considerably less innocent with respect to its audience...
...was a 19th-century gunman and gambler who apparently played the role of Robin Hood to the poor, and Bob Dylan may conceive his relationship to his audience in not very different terms...
...Admittedly, it is hard to be quite serious about such music and Donovan's jacket comments do not help: "I honestly believe my generation is a blessed one and that we will tend to these newborn ones, so fresh from God's hps...
...innocence) in their struggle to communicate...
...No one, presumably, wants to return to the days when we listened to folk and New Orleans jazz as embryonic art-music...
...His songs are rich in meaning and value on several levels, although the coy and cryptic "key" to his album?a parable Dylan wrote for the jacket—is not...
...Perhaps rock, by exposing the futility of conventional critical canons, can show both critics and listeners a way of escaping our insufferable musical (and cultural) sophistication...
...He's really stepping out...
...These qualities are part of their newest disc, Magical Mystery Tour (Capitol, SMAL 2835), which, as everyone has said by now, is not as good as Sgt...
...If the group attempts to make itself over in either of these images, we can clearly anticipate the end of its innocence...
...Each of his albums has always presented a variety of material, but the general push of his development has been from youth protest songs ("The Times They Are a-Changin' ") to songs of wider social import, musical power, and humor ("Subterranean Homesick Blues, "Like A Rolling Stone," and "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35," to name some of the more famous ones...
...This is his first album with a unified theme and musical treatment: The songs deal with drifters, losers, outcasts, the alienated generally...
...Rock and the new music generally is music of, by, and for youth...
...My friend immediately came on with the Lenny Bruce bits and began zinging into the humble minstrel: "Dig him...
...His expression of this feeling is neither innocent nor insolent...
...and, finally, they are young...
...The album shows much more obliquity than his previous releases, but it seems to be sincere within the limits of Dylan's personal defenses against the hostility and injustice he finds around him...
...The casually tossed-off ironies of "Penny Lane," a Beatle standard, are carefully understated, both musically and verbally...
...I'll Be Your Baby Tonight," for example, sounds like almost pure Hank Williams, yet with an unmistakable Bob Dylan lyric...
...on the other hand, the music of Ravi Shankar and India, not to mention that of Stockhausen and Company, is incredibly sophisticated...
...The excitement originates (apart, of course, from their talent) in their absolutely insolent—hence innocent—unification of music's disparate components...
...He has brought together folk, blues, and rock in his own amalgam, varying the proportions when and as it suits him in response, I suppose, to his own personal growth...
...The music of the Beatles is formally uncomplicated, and this is why eclecticism will work just so far for them...
...More than insolence, I think, is involved in the emotional appeal of the Beatles, but Rorem is right to identify it with innocence and naturalness...
...Ironically, however, Lenny Bruce and Donovan share the same stance as performers (the child facing a hostile world) though they use opposing strategies (experience vs...
...and the musical influences of Woody Guthrie and Hank Williams are very prominent...
...The wit and sophistication of the late Lenny Bruce provide a nice antithesis to the radical innocence that Donovan seeks...
...In "Flying," the use of a vocal chorus recorded off-mike is balanced nicely with a fine solo guitar introduction in the verse (which we don't hear too often from the Beatles) and (again unusual) an effective use of the oscillator for an electronic fade-out...
...One would think that once we have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge there is no going back to the Garden, either as flowers or for flowers...
...and the vignettes of English types are totally disarming...
...John Wesley Harding represents a re-grouping of Dylan's forces after a year's retreat from the publicity cult that he hates but seems to encourage in spite of himself (no motorcycle accident in history was ever so notorious...
...Trie same might be said for Harrison's experimentation with the sitar...
...After all, John Wesley Hardin (Dylan added the "g," a further disguise...
...Aside from the questionable seriousness of their intent, the Beatles seem to have learned some lessons in obscurantism from Bob Dylan, whose defenses in that area are finely honed...
...The first side contains six songs from a Beatles' television film...
...Pepper...
...The Fool on the Hill" is one of those Beatles songs in which everything seems to work: Lennon's lyric is a crazy parable of spatial and social relations...
...rest you...
...all of us are, much of the time, irrelevant...
...In the past year or two the critics have begun to take rock very seriously indeed: Some, like Ralph Gleason, jump on every bandwagon...
...Bob Dylan's incredible success is due to an appeal potentially even wider than that of the Beatles...
...George Harrison's "Blue Jay Way" uses waves of these electronic distortions without much real musical point...
...The Beatles have shown Ned Rorem at least the problem, and his recent piece in the New York Review of Books (January 18) should be read by anyone wanting to understand the implications of the new music...
...What, is he dead...
...The results are neither art songs nor pop tunes, says Rorem, but they are exuberant and exciting...
...And this is certainly what has been happening to "serious" music in our time, retreating into the sterile confines of the academies and opting to express itself in the bleeps Music Child's Play and squawks of electronic machines...
...The approach is understandable enough: These artists are subject to enormous public pressure from the curious...
...If "God's lips" suggests to you some ultimate blasphemy and the last phrase recalls a once highly-touted laxative, you will never dig Donovan...
...McCartney's tune is orchestrated fittingly but with unusual combinations for the group, such as concertina, recorder (?), and piano...
...Sit you down, father...
...irritation instead of incantation...
...But in the new song the ironies are laid on with a heavy hand...
...most find prolix significance in tiresome noise or accidental form...
...Within his musical scope Dylan is a true eclectic and his playing on this disc, with a Nashville rhythm section, is low-keyed, relaxed, but powerful...
...The lyrics offer surrealistic nightmare images, with suitable collapses of syntax and a chorus of "GOO GOO GOO JOOB" (walrus noises...
...to the extent that it evokes any response in adults, we ought to admit candidly that it touches the childlike, or the childish, in us...
...their musical attitudes depend heavily on irony...
Vol. 51 • January 1968 • No. 3
