Midnight Rambler OR Get Ready! Tonight Park and Barb Are Staying Here With You

Late night, exhausted.

Sometimes I write down little bits of things, stick them in files labeled “column fodder.”

Sometimes I go through them. That’s what I’m doing now, while Barb relaxes on her computer after a day of writing about horrible things happening to clever people in her prose novel… funny how when you work in comics you have to start sticking a word in front of “novel.”

I’m listening to Pandora (http://www.pandora.com), which despite its flaws is one of the better ideas ever thought up… pity someone has to pay for it – lucky it isn’t me. I pick out songs to rest on to amuse Barb, from Warren Zevon’s “For My Next Trick I’ll Need a Volunteer” one second to Bing Crosby crooning “Stardust” the next.

“Something There Is About You” by Bob comes on.

Oh, lord, Bob’s changed his front page image again. This might link to it, but it cycles through a few. Here's the one I mean in color. “I don’t mean to disillusion you or make you question your fundamental precepts about the kindness or impersonal harshness of the universe and how it works, but… you MUST pay the rent.”

[falsetto] “I _cahn’t_ pay the rent!”

“But truly, even though you seem like a nice enough girl and I can relate to what yer’ sayin’ an’ all, you MUST pay the rent!”

Here’s how geeky _I_ am: The line “Rainy days on the Great Lakes, walkin' the hills of old Duluth.” In his autobiography CHRONICLES, Bob often talks about the Iron Hills country in Minnesota where his hometown of Hibbing is… walking and riding in the Iron Hills… But all I could ever think of was Dain of the Iron Hills who, with his party, sought out the advice of Gandalf as to who could sneak into the lair of Smaug and check things out, and, with the help of Bilbo, later became (briefly) King Under The Mountain until the War of the Five Armies.

Ahem.

And so into this I have Bob Dylan, growing up out there with the dwarves, east of Erebor, far to the north of Mordor, dreaming about being a big star like James Dean, and how soon he’ll ride down to Rohan, play some greasy spoons and bars, hone his craft, maybe add to his folk record collection, and then before too long, the big time: Gondor.

GEEK!

Here in the “Column Fodder” word file is a thing I transcribed from Barb about Bob: “The thing about Bob is that he understands what girl groups understand – if you lost your girl it really is the end of the world… pull back and pull back and pull back until it IS a national tragedy that Bob Dylan’s lost his girlfriend, and you start to believe it after you’ve been struck in the head with all these images… he pulls back until… that’s kinda it… oh my god my girl’s gone and I feel so bad and nothing makes any sense…”

Then she and I both marveled over the name of the live album “Get Ready! Tonight Bob’s Staying Here With You”…

Then “You Won’t Have To Cry” by Barb’s beloved Byrds. But something I skipped hit a chord of melody and now I’ve got “Dead Man’s Party” by Danny Elfman in my head for pity’s sake, even though that’s not the song that played and I haven’t heard it for years. Funny old world, innit?

Barb has me pass on a Jam song, still hacked off about The Jam’s “Start” (the one that sounds like “Taxman”) used on that car commercial right now. THE JAM? The man that The NME used to call Chairman Weller, suddenly allowing a song to be used for a freakin’ car commercial? It’s not as bad as when Mercedez-Benz used Janis Joplin’s “Oh Lord Won’t You Buy Me A Mercedez-Benz,” ignoring the scorn that was her point, but then nothing is. We instead take refuge in Pet Shop Boys doing “Where The Streets Have No Name.”

Next song over, we forgive the Jam for the length of “David Watts.” “Fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa,” as King Mob once sang… “I swear he did that just to see who’d get the fa’s,” I tell Barb. “I counted those fa’s you know.”

Next, “Picture Book” by the Kinks. Who cares if it was in a commercial.

Kate’s “Sat in Your Lap.”

Beatles, “Do You Want To Know a Secret.” “John supposedly got the idea for this from watching some Disney film as a kid, Snow White or Cinderella, probably the latter…” murmurs Barb, my encyclopedia of rock, my doctor of Lennon Studies…

“Only thing is that ‘A Taste of Honey’ should come next…” she laments… it’s not, so I zip over to http://www.imeem.com... Denied. Imeem is great, and in some ways it’s even more satisfying than Pandora, but it’s the myspace of free music: it’s run by dumb kids who don’t know nuthin’ ‘bout nuthin’ good except anime soundtracks. Finding a certain song that an adult might want is sometimes impossible. I play her Les Baxter’s version. “Cleanup on aisle 6,” she says.
I try Herb Alpert. “This just reminds me of how crappy the FM stations were when I was a kid.”

“Well I don’t wanna remind you of your past…”

“Nah, what the hell, I used to pray for something as cool as this back then.”

I go back to Pandora – Bob’s “Tangled Up In Blue (Live).” Usually anything I could get live, I like better in the studio, if it ain’t Cheap Trick live at the Budokan (and not the one I can find on Imeem – the one I remember from my youth, you can REALLY hear the little girlies screaming their heads off singing along whenever the guy pauses – “CRYIN’ CRYIN’ CRYIN’”), but beggars can’t always be choosers on Pandora, and Barb sometimes likes the live version better anyway, and this is one of those times, she claims.

In Column Fodder, strangely, happens to be a transcript of Barb saying stuff about Tangled Up In Blue… I’ll just give you the highlights: “What Bob’s trying to do as a postmodern thing is make all time one by making I he and she all one as if he’s I he and she even if there’s three shes in it… sometimes I feel with Tangled Up In Blue that he’s not sure what story he’s telling, either… there’s so many hes shes and its I get confused… It feels a lot like the way the movie Last Year at Marienbad uses the same things written by the same person… you might know him as the guy that did Hiroshima Mon Amour…”

Suddenly Barb gets excited about “For One Moment,” as I make her play Guess That Singer… Lee Hazelwood, of course. “Oh, yeah, THERE’s the choir!”

Me, pretending Lee Hazelwood just dropped by: “Why, Lee, what a surprise! But where’s the souls of the damned? Did they stay home?”

Me, gruffly, pretending to be Lee Hazelwood: “Naw, they’re in the car. I’ll go wake ‘em up.”

Barb: “Wow, listen. The damned DO cry.”

I try making a Pandora channel based on Lee Hazlewood, but I’m not satisfied with what I get. I return to Imeem to search for what I want. I have to search for it carefully, because the dumb children on Imeem don’t always know how to label tracks properly. On the other hand, they ALL know about Nancy’s “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),” since it was in Kill Bill. On the other hand, they ALL know about Nancy’s “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down),” since it was in Kill Bill. Put it in a hot movie, and the Children of the Electron are all over it. It is a great song, though -- I like it better than Cher's.

I get excited at one point about how a certain brass riff is identical to those in Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger,” which I know intimately because when I was a kid my friend Greg made me a tape of all the classic James Bond theme songs, and I would ride my bike all over the place listening to it with headphones, using up the batteries on the tape player, going home for new ones, then going back out and listening again…

Finally I return to Pandora, where John Cale sings his “Buffalo Ballet.” I didn't really use much from the Column Fodder file, but what the heck. This column is about all kinds of geekery now. Last call, everyone. Time to go home.