Liner
Notes by Greil Marcus
Updated October 7, 2003
Fanfare In the Garden-Essential Logic
Released: June 3, 2003
Punk promised that you could become a new person. You could live a new life in a new world. That new world wasn’t going to last, but so what? To live in it you needed a new name.
It was late 1976 when sixteen-year-old Susan Whitby answered an ad placed by a would-be “punk” band in the now defunct London music weekly Melody Maker. The band turned out to be X-ray Spex, as passionate and probing a punk combo as any there was, led by one Poly Styrene, who had left “Marion Elliot” on the sidewalk. Susan Whitby became Lora Logic.
Without such a perfect name, would there be a story to follow it? Punk wasn’t supposed to be logical-it wasn’t supposed to make sense. The name set Lora apart even as it brought her into the fold. It suggested a certain reserve, a step back, a raised eyebrow.
As Lora Logic lifted her saxophone and dove along with the rest of X-ray Spex into Poly Styrene’s songs “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” “I am a Cliché,” “I am a Poseur,” “Art-I-ficial,” “Identity,” “Let’s Submerge,” the unstoppable “The Day the World Turned Day-Glo,” and more-everyone a critique of the world at large and the punk world spinning within it, something you can hear from the studio on Germfree Adolescents—The Anthology, a 2001 retrospective on Sanctuary, from the stage (their second show) on Live at the Roxy, a 1977 set released in 1991 by Receiver-that eyebrow never came down. When Lora was pushed out of the group-two women in one band, Poly Styrene felt, was one too many-and set about finding her own music, it jiggled.
With money she saved from playing on a Stranglers album, in 1978 Lora formed Essential Logic and put out “Aerosol Burns”/”World Friction” on the Cell label, which Rough Trade sent out into the world. There was an “Essential Logic” EP on Virgin in 1979, with the original, overwhelming version of “Wake Up,” a sense of danger and desire running through the sound like a wire.
Not included on this set, that performance is one of the very few with Lora Logic’s name on it that is not playful, it is assaultive: time is running out. The version here, from the 1979 Essential Logic album Beat Rhythm News, on Rough Trade, starts off by mocking the words and the doomsday density of the first recording. There’s all the time in the world.
Lora began almost every vocal singing high, her voice shaking, the shaking becoming a style, a point of view; then often her voice thickened, and she seemed to suck the fast pace of her band into her own doubt, or bounce it off her own frustration. With a small guitar-bass-drums ensemble, her saxophone set the scene or led the sound out of its circle—led it like a beckoning finger. “Aerosol Burns” leaps with a stop-time dance beat, the vehemence of a woman insisting she will be as unexpected, as unwanted, and move as quickly, as she pleases. As the band hammers on, the saxophone seems to come from another record, another place. With Essential Logic, you weren’t going to get your bearings. As with “Albert” or “Popcorn Boy,” a song could seem to fall into a rut where idiosyncrasy was indistinguishable from predictability; then a break or an ending would have the music speaking a completely different language. What? Where? Who? Did that happen?
Lora was on the edges of an experimental, avant-garde scene at Rough Trade, adding sax to a cut on the first Raincoats album, appearing with Scritti Politi or Swell Maps, moonlighting in Mayo Thompson’s reconstituted Red Crayola, a band that in name went back to the Texas acid wars of 1967—and that in 1980, working with the London critical theorists gathered under the name Art & Language, was exploring territory Lora couldn’t reach with her own band. You can hear her beginning to run out of ideas, or enthusiasm, on the 1982 Pedigree Charm, released under her own name on Rough Trade; on Red Crayola’s 1981 Rough Trade release Kangaroo? With “An Old Man’s Dream,” not included here, she is absolutely unfettered, singing as if she’s flying over the band, all but pulling it into the air with her.
There’s a freedom that comes from working with other people’s ideas, singing someone else’s words: you can disappear, then reappear as if you can see the world and it can’t see you. That’s what happens on the jittery, drifting “Born in Flames,” a 1980 Red Crayola/Art & Language single—the title song from Lizzie Borden’s film about feminist revolution. A note echoes on a piano; singing in her highest, most unstable register, Lora steps across the lines of the tune as if she’s tip-toeing over bodies—daintily, and a little crazily. “We are born in flames,” she trills—and then the last word is taken even higher, floating off into the air like a balloon filled with helium, pure signifier, no longer any kind of word. She turns around—you can hear her reverse position, as if in the studio there’s a mike in front and a mike in back—and begins to shout, to make you listen, grabbing you by the lapels. It’s a performance of swirling mystery—“Of America’s mysteries/None remain!” she insists, but the mystery of who the singer is, what she’s about, what she wants, why she’s here, is unsolvable. Words jump in the singer’s voice—“brutality,” “we broke the hidden tyranny,” “for which we stand,” “brings us to our knees—but they fly off her body; Lora sings not as if she’s recording for a film but trapped in one. Two years later she would be walked through a lead role in Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s deadly Crystal Gazing, playing a singer and saxophonist, appearing on stage, in a video on TV; in “Born in Flames” she is far more ordinary, and infinitely more compelling: she’s trapped because she has glimpsed a liberation. Like the actress Miou-Miou, looking back on her life as a teenage seamstress in Paris, at the time the uprisings of May 1968 broke out, remembering that she had the strangest thought, that a revolution demanding “Change Life!” “might have something to do with me,” in “Born in flames” the singer has been given a glimpse of a self she didn’t know she had.
In the years that followed Lora went into the world of Hare Krishna; through the 1980s there were occasional recordings. In 1995 she worked with Poly Styrene for the X-ray Spex album Conscious Consumer on Receiver. In 2000 and 2002, Essential Logic numbers recorded in 1998 and 1997 were posted on the Internet sites peoplesound and Vitaminic. They were different. They spoke of a sense of life in which there is all the time in the world, because time has run out.
That is what I hear in “The Beautiful and the Damned,” from 1997, with guitars, keyboards, bass and drum beats by Martin Muscatt. Lora’s saxophone, playing very quietly, in a long, dizzying moment against a guitar solo run backwards, seems to come from a faraway place; regret, waste, and despair are in every note. The voice of the instrument, which barely takes shape before it slips away, gives you a face, and perhaps a picture of a woman sitting in a room no one else is allowed to enter; the voice of the singer puts the woman in a rocking chair. Throughout, there is a tiny guitar riff, buried deep in the sound, as if it were leaking in from some other recording, that counts a cadence of absolute loss: da da dadaaaaaaa … and as the song ends the saxophone plays against this, too. Against it: there is a reverie in the notes Lora plays that time can’t reach, let alone stop.
Always, Lora Logic has made odd music. A punk band wasn’t supposed to have a saxophone in 1977. In 1980, avant-garde post-punk artists on Rough Trade didn’t sound girlish, like they knew a secret they’d sworn not to tell. In Red Crayola, no one else knew how to sing as if there were secrets they didn’t know. In no time have many people been able to leave their time, giving you the feeling that the war raging outside you door is not real. But punk was, as Lora Logic put it in 2002, a time “when a lot of people could get heard.”
“You know,” Lou Reed once sang over a horrifying “Waltzing Matilda” beat, “some people got no choice and they can never find a voice to talk with that they can ever call their own, so the first thing they see that allows them the right to be why they follow it; you know it’s called—bad luck.” It was 1978, on “Street Hassle,” just as Lora Logic was first putting her voice on tape for “Aerosol Burns.” It was t time when a lot of people discovered they had a voice they themselves could hear, even as at least a few other people listened in, and this set is a history of one of those discoveries.
-Greil Marcus
The Last Waltz (Special Edition DVD)
DVD Release Date: May 7, 2002
Starring: The Band, Ronnie Hawkins, Dr. John, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell, Muddy Waters, etc.
* Director: Martin Scorsese
* Format: Color, Widescreen, Dolby
* Studio: MGM
* DVD Features:
* Commentary by Robbie Robertson and Martin Scorsese
* Additional commentary by Greil Marcus, and others
* Theatrical trailer(s)
* New 5.1 audio remix and new transfer
* Featurette: "Revisiting The Last Waltz"
* Archival outtakes: Jam 2
* Photo gallery
* 8-page booklet written by Robbie Robertson
* Widescreen anamorphic format
Sid & Nancy (Criterion Collection Edition)Released: October 20,1998
Starring: Gary Oldman, Chloe Webb, See more
* Director: Alex Cox
* Format: Color, Widescreen
* DVD Features:
* Commentary by writer 'Abbe Wool', actors Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb, cultural historian Greil Marcus, filmmakers Julien Temple and Lech Kowalski, and musician \
* "England's Glory", a documentary about the making of "Sid & Nancy"
* The infamous 1976 Bill Grundy interview with the "Sex Pistols"
* A rare telephone interview with Sid Vicious
* Interviews with Sid and Nancy from "D.O.A.: A Right of Passage"
* Widescreen letterbox format
Jubilation- The Band
Released: September
15,1998
In the first pictures of the Band, taken thirty years ago by Elliot Landy, five young men pose in neat black suits with string ties and weathered hats; Garth Hudson braces his fiddle against his chest, mountain-style. The quintet looks less like any pop group of that day--or this one--than, say, the New Lost City Ramblers of 1958, or one of the 1920s old-time music groups, the Tar Heels or the Skillet Lickers, that the New Lost City Ramblers themselves were trying to look like.
Now, a decade after the Band made a second founding, with Richard Bell, Randy Ciarlante, and Jim Weider joining original members Hudson, Rick Danko, and Levon Helm, something of a truly old-timey sound feels like the engine of the Band's new music. There might be a call back to the past in the words of merely the titles of any number of the new songs on Jubilation: in "Booke Faded Brown," "White Cadillac," "French Girls." But the rickety feeling of the faster rhythms, the way voices curl together around lines that can carry no date ("Ain't that somethin'/The big doghouse thumpin'") is at once old and unheard, a sound that only has to be hear for the first time to feel as if it's being remembered.
In "Last Train to Memphis,"the train feels like it's being held toegether by rubber bands and chicken wire, but you have no doubt you can get on whenever you like or that you'll pull in on time. An ensemble comes together--the Band forms--as you listen, with the picture of a string band chasing a full moon out from behind the clouds framed by Eric Clapton's electric guitar, the song ending a movie you've seen all your life, and have never seen at all. "Films about America should be composed entirely of long and wide-shots, as music about America already is," the German film director Wim Wenders once wrote; this is what he was talking about. Unless he was talking about "White Cadillac," like so much of the music here bound up and sent forth by Hudson's accordian, which in any given moment can sound like almost any other instrument. Here the music is running on pure Cajun cooking oil, as for an instant the spectre of 63-year-old Ronnie Hawkins, the Band's first mentor, trumps a 63-year-old Elvis Presley--or even a 33-year-old version. "Camelwalk, back-flip, mohair what a touch"--it's a shout made by voices from all over the room.
Jubilation is the seriously comic absurdity of Clarence "Frogman" Henry's "Ain't Got No Home" in what the Band do with "You See Me," Allen Toussaint's perfect version of New Orleans walk-and-talk; it's the way Danko's singing on "Book Faded Brown" grows more quiet, more still, every time the song plays. But improvisation on synthesizer and soprano and tenor saxophones. It comes from a melody Hudon first worked out in 1971, for lyrics by Jean-Yves Labat: "I said to him, give me words about two French guys sitting outside at a cafe, talking about an old girlfriend they had both admired, someone who was elegant and sweet." The lyrics were lost; you don't need them to be sitting in that cafe, wondering who will pass by next, or where you'll go when you rise from your table and move on to whatever new story the day holds.
Greil Marcus
The Band is:
Garth Hudson-Saxophones,
Accordian, Organ, Piano, Sythesizers and Percussion.
Levon Helm-Vocals, Drums, Mandolin, French Harp, Acoustic
Guitar and Percussion.
Rick Danko-Vocal,s Guitars and Bass.
Randy Ciarlante-Vocals, Drums and Percussion.
Jim Weider-Dobro Guitar, Electric Guitar, Mandolin and
Acoustic Guitar.
Richard Bell-Piano, Keyboards and Accordian.
The
Basement Tapes
Released: Jul y 1, 1975
Some years back, The Band cut a song called "The Rumor." It's a tune that could well describe the music now collected here. "The Basement Tapes" are a bit like the phantom 1956 session that brought Elvis, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash together for the first and last time. In spite of the bootlegs and cover versions, "The Basement Tapes" have always been more of a rumor than anything else.
Some facts, then. The twenty-four songs on these two discs are drawn from sessions that took place between June and October, 1967, in the basement of Big Pink, a house rented by some members of The Band, up in West Saugerties, New York. Bob Dylan sings lead on sixteen numbers; one of them, "Goin' To Acapulco," has never been bootlegged -- for that matter, it has never even been rumored. Richard Manuel, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, and Robbie Robertson take the lead on eight others, none of which has ever surfaced either. There's a lot of back-up singing all around.
The instrumental line up is: Rick Danko, bass (mandolin on "Ain't No More Cane"); Garth Hudson, organ (sax on "Orange Juice Blues (Blues For Breakfast)," accordion on "Ain't No More Cane"); Richard Manuel, piano (drums on "Odds And Ends," "Yazoo Street Scandal," "Ain't No More Cane" and "Don't Ya Tell Henry," harp on "Long Distance Operator": Robbie Robertson, lead guitar (drums on "Apple Suckling Tree," "You Ain't Goin' Nowhere" and "This Wheel's On Fire," acoustic guitar on "Ain't No More Cane"); Bob Dylan, acoustic guitar (piano on "Apple Suckling Tree"). Levon Helm, who had left The Band when, as The Hawks, they were backing Dylan on stage in 1965, had yet to rejoin his group when most of the material with Dylan was recorded; he was back, on drums (mandolin on "Yazoo Street Scandal" and "Don't Ya Tell Henry," bass on "Ain't No More Cane"), for the tunes by The Band.
Cut live on a home tape recorder, with from one to three mikes, all of the tracks have been remastered; highlights have been brought out, tones sharpened, tape hiss removed, and so on. The sound is clear, immediate, and direct; as intimate as living room and as slick as a barbed wire fence.
As for the quality of feeling in the music -- well, that has never been in doubt.
"...with a certain kind of blues music, you can sit down and play it...you may have to lean forward a little." -- Bob Dylan, 1966
In 1965 and 1966 Bob Dylan and The Hawks played their way across the country and then around the world; those rough tours pushed Bob Dylan's music, and The Band's, to a certain limit, and they had made stand-up, no-quarter-given-and-no quarter-asked music if there ever was such a thing. In the summer of 1967 Dylan and The Band were after something else.
Neither "John Wesley Harding," made later that year, nor "Music From Big Pink" (for which all of The Band's numbers here were at one time intended), sound much like "The Basement Tapes," but there are two elements the three sessions do share; a feeling of age, a kind of classicism; and an absolute commitment by the singers and musicians to their material. Beneath the easy rolling surface of The Basement Tapes, there is some serious business going on. What was taking shape, as Dylan and The Band fiddled with the tunes, was less a style than a spirit -- a spirit that had to do with a delight in friendship and invention.
As you first listen to the music they made, you'll be hard put to pin it down, and likely not too interested in doing so, What matters is Rick Danko's loping bass on "Yazoo Street Scandal"; Garth Hudson's omnipresent merry-go-round organ playing (and never more evocative than it is on "Apple Suckling Tree"); the slow, uncoiling menace of "This Wheel's On Fire"; Bob Dylan's singing, as sly as Jerry Lee Lewis, and as knowing as the old man of the mountains.
There's the kind of love song only Richard Manuel can pull off, the irresistibly pretty "Katie's Been Gone"; there is the unassuming passion of The Band's magnificent "Ain't No More Cane," an old chain gang song that ought to be a revelation to anyone who has ever cared about The Band's music, because this performance seems to capture the essence of what they have always meant to be. There's the lovely idea of "Bessie Smith," written and sung by Robbie and Rick as the plaint of one of Bessie's lovers, who can't figure out if he's lost his heart to the woman herself or the way she sings. There is Levon Helm's patented mixture of carnal bewilderment and helpless delight in "Don't Ya Tell Henry" (and the solos he and Robbie stomp out on that tune) -- and the tale he tells in "Yazoo Street Scandal," a comic horror story wherein the singer is introduced, by his girlfriend, to the local Dark Lady, who promptly seduces him, and then scares him half to death.
"The Basement Tapes," more than any other music that has been heard from Bob Dylan and The Band, sound like the music of a partnership. As Dylan and The Band trade vocals across these discs, as they trade nuances and phrases within the songs, you can feel the warmth and the comradeship that must have been liberating for all six men. Language, for one thing, is completely unfettered. A good number of the songs seem as cryptic, or as nonsensical, as a misnumbered crossword puzzle-that is, if you listen only for words, and not for what the singing and the music say -- but the open spirit of the songs is as straightforward as their unmatched vitality and spunk.
One hears a pure, naked emotion in some of Dylan's writing and singing -- in "Tears Of Rage," especially -- that can't he found anywhere else, and I think it is the musical sympathy Dylan and The Band shared in these sessions that gives "Tears Of Rage," and other numbers, their remarkable depth and power. There are rhythms in the music that literally sing with compliments tossed from one musician to another -- listen to "Lo And Behold!," "Crash On The Levee (Down In The Flood)," "Ain't No More Cane." And there is another kind of openness, a flair for ribaldry that's as much a matter of Levon's mandolin as his, or Dylan's, singing -- a spirit that shoots a good smile straight across this album.
More than a little crazy, at times flatly bizarre (take "Million Dollar Bash," "Yazoo Street Scandal," "Don't Ya Tell Henry," "Lo And Behold!"), moving easily form the confessional to the bawdy house, roaring with humor and good times, this music sounds to me at once like a testing and a discovery -- of musical affinity, of nerve, of some very pointed themes; put up or shut up, obligation, escape, homecoming, owning up, the settling of accounts past due.
It sounds as well like a testing and a discovery of memory and roots. "The Basement Tapes" are a kaleidoscope like nothing I know, complete and no more dated than the weather, but they seem to leap out of a kaleidoscope of American music no less immediate for its venerability. Just below the surface of songs like "Lo And Behold!" or "Million Dollar Bash" are the strange adventures and poker-faced insanities chronicled in such standards as "Froggy Went A-Courtin'" "E-ri-e," Henry Thomas's "Fishing Blues," "Cock Robin," or "Five Nights Drunk"; the ghost of Rabbit Brown's sardonic "James Alley Blues" might lie just behind "Crash On The Levee (Down In The Flood)" ("Sometimes I Think That You're Too Sweet To Die," Brown sang in 1927, "And Another Time I Think You Oughta Be Buried Alive") "The Basement Tapes" summon sea chanteys; drinking songs, tall tales, and early rock and roll.
Along side of such things -- and often intertwined with them -- is something very different.
"Obviously, death is not very universally accepted. I mean, you'd think that the traditional music people could gather from their songs that mystery is a fact, a traditional fact." -- Bob Dylan, 1966
I think one can hear what Bob Dylan was talking about in the music of "The Basement Tapes," in "Goin' To Acapulco," "Tears Of Rage," "Too Much Of Nothing," and "This Wheel's On Fire" -- one can hardly avoid hearing it. It is a plain-talk mystery; it has nothing to do with mumbo-jumbo, charms or spells. The "acceptance of death" that Dylan found in "traditional music" -- the ancient ballads of mountain music -- is simply a singer's insistence on mystery as inseparable from any honest understanding of what life is all about; it is the quiet terror of a man seeking salvation who stares into a void that stares back. It is the awesome, impenetrable fatalism that drives the timeless ballads first recorded in the twenties; songs like Buell Kazee's "East Virginia," Clarence Ashley's "Coo Coo Bird," Dock Boggs' "Country Blues" -- or a song called "I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground," put down by Bascom Lamar Lunsford in 1928. "I wish I was a mole in the ground -- like a mole in the ground I would root that mountain down -- And I wish I was a mole in the ground."
Now, what the singer wants is obvious, and almost impossible to really comprehend. He wants to be delivered from his like, and to be changed into a creature insignificant and despised; like a mole in the ground, he wants to see nothing and to be seen by no one; he wants to destroy the world, and to survive it. Dylan and The Band came to terms with such feeling -- came to terms with the void that looks back -- in the summer of 1967; in the most powerful and unsettling songs on "The Basement Tapes," they put an old, old sense of mystery across with an intensity that has not been heard in a long time. You can find it in Dylan's singing and in his lyrics on "This Wheel's On Fire" -- and in every note Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson, Levon Helm and Rick Danko play.
And it is in this way most of all that "The Basement Tapes" are a testing and a discovery of roots and memory; it might be why "The Basement Tapes" are, if anything, more compelling today than when they were first made, no more likely to fade than Elvis Presley's "Mystery Train" or Robert Johnson's "Love In Vain." The spirit of a song like "I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground" matters here not as an "influence," and not as a "source." It is simply that one side of "The Basement Tapes" casts the shadow of such things and in turn, is shadowed by them. -- Greil Marcus
Bob Dylan -- Acoustic Guitar, Piano & Vocals
Robbie Robertson -- Electric Guitar, Acoustic Guitar,
Drums & Vocals
Richard Manuel -- Piano, Drums, Harmonica & Vocals
Rick Danko -- Electric Bass, Mandolin & Vocals
Garth Hudson -- Organ, Clavinette, Accordion, Tenor Sax
& Piano
Levon Helm -- Drums, Mandolin, Electric Bass & Vocals
Recorded in the basement of
Big Pink, West Saugerties, NY., 1967
Recording Engineer -- Garth Hudson
Mixing Engineers -- Rob Fraboni, Nat Jeffrey, Ed Anderson &
Mark Aglietti
Mixed at Village Recorders & Shangri-La Studios
Mastering Engineer -- George Horn
Photography -- Reid Miles
Design Consultant -- Bob Cato
Compiled by Robbie Robertson
Produced by Bob Dylan & The Band
