(Personal reflections
inspired by Bob Dylan songs)
Song: “Changing of the
Guards”
Album: Street Legal
Release Date: June
1978
I was reminded this week by a friend of a
key reason why I started this Music and
Memory blog site in the first place; to try and explain the unique experience
of being a teenager in the United States in the 1970s, and maybe even more
importantly, to explain the after effects of having lived it. Those 70s years have crossed my mind off and
on over the course of this Master
Blueprint series, but to date I’ve not tapped that well nearly to the degree
that I had done for my 3 earlier year-long series on the Rolling Stones (Stepping Stones in 2012), Neil Young (Forever Young in 2014), and the Who (Under the Big Top in 2016).
Perhaps there has simply been too much
water under the bridge at this stage.
Forty years; that is a long window of time to reconnect to anything. I had expressed concern about this way back
when I started that first series (Stepping
Stones) six years ago when I turned 50, thinking I was reaching some sort
of demarcation line. To some degree, I’m
pretty sure I was right. Another thought
that came to mind this week was that perhaps I’d gotten it all out of my system
with those earlier series. But then I
thought, well, maybe these connections have become so infused with all this
writing that the thought process related to those times has shifted from the conscious
to the subconscious. Yeah, there ya go….
I’m running with that last one. This
entry then will be an attempt to bring that 70s focus back to the conscious.
Bob Dylan’s Street Legal album has such a solid 70s sound to it, with no song
better highlighting that period-production than the opening number, “Changing
of the Guards” ( https://vimeo.com/259868644 ). This is a
very complicated song, due mainly to the lyrics. Others have tried to break it down. I did not try to do that to any great degree
here. What I did do, however was tap
into that sound throughout the week, in an effort to bring back those old
memories once again, this despite the fact that the song and the album were a
million miles from my mind at the time of release. And yet…. maybe in my
subconscious it wasn’t that far away after all.
First off, a cool observation I made this
week: I was 16 years old when Street Legal was released in 1978, which
just so happens to be the opening line on that opening track, “Changing of the
Guards”:
“Sixteen
years
Sixteen
banners united over the field
Where
the good shepherd grieves
Desperate
men, desperate women divided
Spreading
their wings ‘neath the falling leaves”
Bob Dylan could have been singing about
himself here. He’d been recording for 16
years at that point, having released his first, eponymous-titled album in 1962,
the year I was born. Yes, he had been
around a while, and at this stage of the game he could have indeed felt that there
was a changing of the guards playing out…. Rock and Roll guards that is. Pete
Townshend clearly felt this way, the Who releasing just around the same time
the extremely underrated album Who Are
You, which was all about a changing of the guards (Townshend, desperately
hoping this would be a positive development, with the then advent of Punk, and
he willing to fall on his own sword to witness it (See Under the Big Top # 10: https://pete-gemsandbeyond.blogspot.com/2016/03/under-big-top-10-who-album-review-who.html ).
These thoughts brought me back to a few
months ago, when my sister Jen and her husband Dale hosted a dinner party for
my wife Nancy and I, along with Jen’s and my cousin Becca and her husband and my
longtime friend, Dave, as well as another great friend of all of ours,
Mac. The seven of us wined, dined and
grooved the night away. In the midst of it all, Jen and Dale began tossing out
verbal requests to their sound system for songs, with “Alexa” responding to
each demand as if we were the lucky first callers on the request-line of a
popular radio station. Now, I may be a bit antiquated – ok I am – but this was
a first for me. Anyhow we had a lot of fun with it, each of us ultimately
calling out a handful of our very favorite songs and building on one another’s
concepts and themes.
The music of Bob Dylan eventually slipped
into the playlist, but it was not my doing, it was Mac’s. We had begun delving into a Latino music theme
when Mac came up with the seminal “Señor” request to Alexa (see
Master Blueprint # 5). It’s not a Latino
song per se, but, well… if you’re still reading this, I’m pretty sure you get
it. Anyhow, from there the conversation
swayed to the host album for “Señor”, which as
you may have concluded, is also the host album of this week’s Master Blueprint.
Dave was asking questions about it; Mac and I were offering our critique. This reminded me of Mac and Dave bringing me
up to speed all those years ago as we listened to the entirety Who Are You on the radio not long after
its release.
Mac, Dave and I go way back…. to 16 years
old and beyond. We’ve always valued each
other’s insights on just about any topic, but most particularly when it comes
to music. This has worked out
tremendously for one and all over the years, because each of us has helped the
other climb his own proverbial Tower of Song, which has played out between the
three of us in countless concert halls, on turntables, in heavy discussions, as
well as while listening to those aforementioned nocturnal emissions on car
radios. The process was baby steps for
me at first. I had a solid foundation
with the Beatles by the time I turned 16, but this love affair was kinda
becoming a stranglehold. If I was ever
going to be multidimensional with my musical knowledge, I needed to start
building on top of that Fab Four base.
The first floor built on that Beatles
basement of my personal Tower of Song was interesting and all over the
map: Albums like Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp, the Cars first, self-titled
album, Rush’s Permanent Waves,
Supertramp’s Breakfast in America, and
Tom Petty’s Damn the Torpedoes, all
of which were released in the late 70s.
But talk within my circles gave me insights that these popular selling
albums were or would-soon-be underlain by deeper, lesser known material by
these same artists, of which the only offense was that this other material was
simply not as commercial sounding. For
example, in the years following his debut, Look
Sharp, Joe Jackson would be releasing Jumpin’
Jive, a classic, underappreciated effort. Many ‘fans’ would soon be jumping
off his bandwagon and on to other commercial endeavors by other artists. Not Mac.
He helped open my eyes to the treasures buried in Jackson’s and many other
great musician’s discographies. I dug
deeper with the Cars as well, tuning into their second album, the more seasoned
“Candy-O”. Even though these musicians were not at the
top of the Rock and Roll heap, this kind of rounding out was extremely
important in completing the first floor to my Tower of Song.
At the same time, I was flirting with the
heavy hitters, but it would take some time to break free of their greatest hits. Indeed, by the late 70s I was listening to
the Kinks (Kronikles), the Rolling
Stones (Hot Rocks), and Neil Young (Decade), getting my feet wet so to
speak. The puzzle pieces were coming
together. A big breakthrough would be
that evening in the car with Mac and Dave, listening to the Who Are You album for the first time, where
my Tower of Song would soon begin to add floors at a far more rapid rate. This was an original studio album, released
during my coming of age, and by a top tier band. The sky was now the limit.
That same summer and fall of 1978, the
Rolling Stones would release Some Girls,
Neil Young came out with Comes a Time,
Bruce Springsteen released Darkness on
the Edge of Town, and Elvis Costello gave us This Year’s Model. And
amidst all this creativity, there was Bob Dylan rolling out that
under-the-radar, 70’s-sound album Street
Legal. Listening to it reminds me of
one of the great things about Bob Dylan: Each decade he’s morphed his sound,
with so many others often carrying suit. I mean, he basically created the 60s
sound. But despite that lofty
achievement, he never hung his hat on that success. He just continued to build on it with new
floors.: His own personalized Tower of Song.
Franklin, Massachusetts was a small, rural
New England town in the 70s, with more woods than neighborhoods. It was an
idyllic world for that 70s sound. I’ve
said this before in this series, but it’s worth saying again: In the 60s, music
was simply a part of the scene, but in the 70s, the music was the scene, at least for young impressionable teens like Mac,
Dave and me. What was especially great
about the vibe was that we had 2 decades of material to work with. In other words, until Punk, the 70s was not
only about its own evolution of sound but it was also about honoring the
generation of music that was made in that prior renegade decade. Several musicians who persevered from one
decade to the next helped to gel these two generations of sound, including Pete
Townshend, Ray Davies, Joni Mitchell, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Neil Young,
and of course Bob Dylan.
Even though I have no recollection of
“Changing of the Guards” or anything else on Street Legal upon its release, I’d like to believe I took it in
somewhere. Maybe it was on my drive to
work one evening, listening to WBCN in my white button shirt and black pants,
to bus tables at Welik’s Coach House Restaurant. Maybe it was in the attic of good friend
Bruce, who benefited from having older hip siblings, each of them having left
behind many of their albums as they spread their respective wings on their own
individual journeys. Maybe it was on a
boombox, by a fire, during the infamous “Bucko’s Keg” gatherings deep in the
woods. Or perhaps on the turntable in
the party-central mansion-home of friend George. The song and album have that type of ring of
familiarity to them. That bygone era,
when Dave, Mac and I ruled the world.
- Pete
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