Musical Marathon, part 2--Bob Dylan

Fri, July 15

My July music marathon continued with Bob Dylan’s concert at the Orange County Fair.  Here’s a brief timeline of my relationship with Dylan: 

• 1960’s:  I loved all his earliest work up through about Nashville Skyline while I was in college.  He was the king of attitude, the poet of my generation.
• 1970’s-2000‘s:  Dylan was in the background of my musical life.  I listened to opera, then great American songbook.  I didn’t know his music at all.
• 2008:  I saw jazz singer Paula West in San Francisco, and she included Like a Rolling Stone in her set.  I realized what a great song it was and decided it was time to revisit this idol of my youth. 

So....I listened to the albums I had known in college--the early “protest” songs and youthful angst anthems--and found them still exciting and compelling.   Then I began to explore all the music I had missed, from Blood on the Tracks onward.  I read books and reviews and generally tried to make up for lost time.  I shared the general dismay with the Dylan of the 1980’s, but in general I was overwhelmed by the great music I had ignored for decades. 

I am especially crazy about his music since Oh Mercy in 1989  (Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft, Modern Times, Together Through Life).  To my peers who haven’t followed him recently, I highly recommend these five CDs.  I think they are the equal of his early triumphs.  Dylan has aged and his music evolved just as we all have.  Rather than endlessly recycling early hits Dylan has written original, profound, and tuneful songs about getting old, being old, looking back on your life and facing your death.  These recent five CDs provide the view back at a life lived just as the early songs shone light on an uncertain and frightening future.

With all of this under my belt, I went to see Dylan last year in Las Vegas.  I invited a good friend and former student who lives there and who had no particular attachment to Dylan.  Despite all the build up, I couldn’t help being a little disappointed in the concert.  I couldn’t understand most of the words and I couldn’t see Dylan very well.  Even the tunes were hard to identify since he never tries to reproduce the original versions.   I still loved all the music, and I heard many accounts of Dylan concerts that were similarly ambivalent.  (My friend was totally frustrated at the incomprehensible lyrics and gave up on Dylan, at least in live concert.)

When I heard that Dylan would open the Orange County Fair, I decided that I wanted to see him as often as I could since I had missed so many years--and at 70 he might not have that many concerts left.  So I headed down to my old stomping ground of coastal Orange County to the OC Fair.  I resisted the deep fried twinkies and chocolate covered bacon and headed to the amphitheater.  The first thing I noticed was how many old geezers were there....Then I realized they were my peers!  Yes a lot of folks in their sixties actually made it to another big outdoor rock concert!  Good for us!

There was no opening act.  Bob just came out with his current band and started playing.  He played 17 songs: 
Gonna Change My Way Of Thinking
Don't Think Twice, It's All Right
Things Have Changed
Tangled Up In Blue
Beyond Here Lies Nothin' (Bob on guitar)
Sugar Baby
High Water (For Charley Patton)
Tryin' To Get To Heaven
Summer Days
A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
Highway 61 Revisited
Forgetful Heart
Thunder On The Mountain
Ballad Of A Thin Man      
(encores)
Like A Rolling Stone
All Along The Watchtower
Blowin' In The Wind. 

You’ll notice that they range from old songs (Blowin in the Wind, Like a Rolling Stone, Ballad of a Thin Man, etc.) to new songs (Beyond Here Lies Nothin, Thunder on the Mountain) and some in between (Tangled up in Blue, Watchtower).  I can’t think of anyone who could put together such a powerful concert with songs spanning half a century. 

(By the way, you can find playlists and reviews from all of Dylan's concerts back to 1995 at boblinks.com.  This website makes clear that Bob Dylan still has an incredibly loyal following around the world.  Check it out.  You can also see the set list with links to the lyrics of all his songs at bobdylan.com.)

Dylan doesn’t talk between songs, except for introducing the band members before the encores.  They just play and he sings.  This time I was prepared.  I had binoculars and I spent most of the time looking through them.  Dylan definitely has moves!  They are sort of old man moves, but he moves to the music in his own way.  And he smiled every so often as he sang. 

Perhaps because of this visual connection I could identify most of the songs.  Although they sounded different from the CD, they were all undeniably great songs.  I got more and more into the music with each song.  As always, Tangled Up in Blue stirred me with its glimpse into life’s complexity, and A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall is still ominous and menacing. 

I was especially taken by Ballad of a Thin Man (Because something is happening here--But you don’t know what it is--Do you, Mister Jones?) which seems so timely (Mr. Boehner?  Mr. Rove?  Mr. Romney?).  With that song I realized that Bob Dylan still speaks to us from outside the halls of power, outside the conventional wisdom, outside the comfortable illusions that flood our lives and drown out our true voices. 

Bob Dylan still follows his own path and just sings it like it is.  He’s been rich and famous for over 50 years, but he’s not part of any establishment.  He continues to represent the best of our generation by urging us to eschew conformity and conceit and to be true to ourselves.  And he still travels around the country singing for all of us night after night.  Bravo Bob!

So I drove home from Costa Mesa inspired and exhilarated, Dylan blasting on the stereo.  What could top this?

Tomorrow night--a new musical at the Pasadena Playhouse called Twist (from Charles Dickens, not Chubby Checkers).

Musical Marathon, part 1--Les Miserables again

Bastille Day!  Thurs, July 14

My summer music marathon began very appropriately with a second performance of Les Miserables.  I was reasonably certain that I would enjoy the performance as much as I did a couple of weeks ago, and I was right.  I loved it!  Perhaps because it was on Bastille Day, the audience seemed even more excited and enthusiastic. 

As with any great work of music, the more I listen the more I hear.  I was again swept along by the emotional and historical waves in this opera, but I also noticed more about how musical themes recurred in different forms at different points in the story.  This serves to connect the sprawling narrative into a focused story and also amplifies the emotional echoes among the many characters and events. 

(By the way,  I think Les Miserables is an opera.  It is sung through with no spoken dialogue, and it requires operatic type voices.  If Nixon in China, Dead Man Walking, and other modern works are operas, why not Les Miserables?)

I was again struck by the Verdian aspects in this opera.  Verdi often addressed the issues that arise when individuals try to reconcile their personal life situations with their roles in history, and this is a major theme in Les Mis.  Javert's ultimate self-destruction is rooted in his inability to reconcile his personal feelings with the social order.  Marius and his fellow student revolutionaries sacrifice their personal lives for a social movement, while Valjean intervenes to rescue Cosette's personal happiness from the defeat of the revolution.

Verdi also often wrote about parent-child, and especially father-daughter relations (Nabucco, Luisa Miller, Rigoletto, Traviata, Trovatore, Boccanegra, Aida, etc.), and they are often more important than the romantic relationships in the story.  This is also the case in Les Mis where the relation between Valjean and Cosette is central to the whole story and links Valjean’s past and Fantine with Marius and Eponine and the student uprising they are part of.  (Note how the degraded father-daughter relationship between Thenardier and Eponine parallels the Valjean-Cosette relationship.)

It’s clear to me that Boublil and Schonberg were Verdi lovers, but their primary inspiration is obviously the French Romantic writer Victor Hugo.  This provides another link with Verdi who used dramas by Hugo for two of his most popular operas (Ernani and Rigoletto).   Both Verdi and Hugo were Romantics and tried to reflect in their art the vast panorama of individual and collective human life.  Much of popular culture today, Les Mis included, continues the traditions of the Romantic Era.

As for the abundant tunefulness and mass popularity of Les Mis, Verdi’s middle operas especially were endless founts of tunefulness and massively popular in their day.  After all, everybody was humming La Donna E Mobile after Rigoletto burst on the scene. 

Now Les Miserables might not be the equal of Rigoletto or Traviata, but it is part of a long tradition of music dramas in European culture.  It is neither better nor worse for being so popular.  The ultimate value of Les Miserables lies in the ability of the music and the drama to move audiences to a deeper understanding of their own lives and of the world around them.   That would be my thumbnail description of what art is about, and Les Miserables is a brilliant work of dramatic and musical art.

Tomorrow--off to the Orange County Fair and Bob Dylan!

West Side History

This is the 50th anniversary of the film West Side Story.  In 1961 when I was a freshman in high school this brilliant movie hit the country like a meteor.  With a seemingly endless collection of great songs by Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim and a new style of daring and exciting choreography by Jerome Robbins, all in service of a classic romantic tragedy with Shakespearean roots, West Side Story pushed the national artistic vision into the future.

To celebrate this half century anniversary the Hollywood Bowl and L. A. Philharmonic presented a hybrid version of the film this weekend--a live orchestra to play Bernstein's brilliant score and the film itself on a big screen for the original vocals by Natalie Wood, Rita Moreno, Richard Beymer and the incredible ensemble of singers and dancers who are the real stars of the film.    I hadn't seen West Side Story in many years, and my memory was a little fuzzy.  The individual songs are of course unforgettable--Maria, Tonight, Somewhere, Officer Krupke, Life in America, I Feel Pretty, Cool, the Jets' theme song, etc.  These we hear in many versions in many settings, and it was awesome to hear them one after another in the film.

But I hadn't remembered as clearly the brilliance of the orchestral parts that underscore and amplify the action.   Bernstein's music is a muscular combination of romantic drama and near-dissonance that pulls us inexorably into the tragedy that unfolds on the streets and alleys of New York.

And then there's the dancing--bold, daring, aggressive, it propels the action deeper and deeper into a realm of myth and legend.  Robbins draws on the raw energy of youth found in the dense urban environment, harnessing it to serve the ageless story of a passionate love that defies all social norms.  At the same time he ennobles the rivalries and struggles for survival that motivate the players in this drama.

After fifty years and many losses of innocence, some of the dialogue and situations seem a little corny or dated, but the core contradiction facing the Puerto Ricans seems spot on as immigrants today weigh the opportunities offered in the US against the hostility and resistance they often encounter.  Bernstein's basic idea of linking the characters and problems of modern urban life with Shakespeare, our most revered artistic icon, is deeply progressive.   Rewarded as the movie was with 10 Oscars, it was still controversial at the time.  I suspect the surging right wing movement of today would still be uncomfortable with West Side Story.

So I was blown away by this movie again on Friday.  It deserves to be celebrated after 50 years.  It remains one of the most vibrant, original works of American movie-making.

My musical July is continuing in fine form.   Next:  Les Miserables (again) on Bastille Day.  Vive la revolution!

My musical July

I have a very exciting set of musical events planned for July, ranging from the icy empress Turandot at the Bowl to the gravel-voiced guru Dylan at the Orange County Fair.

It started spectacularly at the 25th anniversary production of “Les Miserables” at the Ahmanson Theatre.  I took my younger son Lorenzo and his friends Gerald, Alexi, and Ranly--all about 19 years old.  We loved it.  It is of course a deeply moving work in so many ways--exhilarating at times, then tragic, comic, inspirational.  Like the novel, the musical is firmly on the side of the oppressed--prisoners, prostitutes, workers, students, children--and it captures both the sweeping historical drama of struggle against authority and the poignant personal dramas of love and loss that play out on that big stage.  In this sense it reminds me of the operas of Giuseppe Verdi, my favorite operatic composer. 

I know Verdi’s operas pretty well, and many of them take place at the intersection of history and personal drama.  I’m thinking of early works like Attila, Nabucco, Giovanna d’Arco, and of course the later masterpieces Simon Boccanegra, I Vespri Siciliani, Don Carlo, and Aida.  Some may find my comparison of Les Miserables with Verdi a bit of a stretch, but I’ve been asking myself why we don’t call Les Mis an opera?  It is completely sung with no spoken dialogue, and otherwise exhibits all of the characteristics of opera.  I’d love some comments on this matter. 

In any case, I love to be swept up in the passions of historical struggle, and so I love Les Miserables.  I confess to coming late to being a Les Mis fan however, and I know most of you have probably loved it for decades.  I was basically ignorant of the work until about a year ago when I started hearing songs from it at the opera and show tunes singer showcases I was going to.  I think I was too rigidly focused on opera to notice a mere musical.

I thought I should find out about it so I listened to a recording, then another, and then another!  In my usual semi-obsessive way I found and listened to all the various versions on CD and read all about the history of the musical.  I also watched as many of the film versions of the novel as I could find.  Then I listened to the other Boublil and Schonberg works--Miss Saigon, Martin Guerre, Pirate Queen, La Revolution Francaise. 

I came out of this whirlwind of listening and reading a genuine fan of Les Miserables, so when I saw that it was coming to LA I snatched up a bunch of tickets.  Lorenzo and his friends (whom I had previously taken to see Verdi’s great opera Rigoletto) enjoyed it very much, even though they had some trouble with the details of the plot.  We were all blown away by the drama and spectacle of the production as well as by the great singing.

I liked it so much I went right over to the box office and bought another ticket for next week.  I figured I might not have a lot of chances to see it for a while, so what the heck!

After the matinee performance we walked over to Clifton’s Cafeteria at Broadway & Seventh for dinner.  I remember going there as a child and try to go every so often now.  It hasn’t changed a bit.  By the way, Clifton was a real progressive during the depression and fed thousands of people at little or no cost. 

I have lots more great music lined up for the month. 

• This Friday I’m going to the Bowl to see the hybrid presentation of the movie “West Side Story” with the voices from the film and a live orchestra.  That should be exciting.  
• Then next Friday I’m going to hear Bob Dylan at the opening night of the Orange County Fair.  This is another case where I’m making up for lost time.  I had a mixed experience seeing him last year in Las Vegas (couldn’t understand a word!), but I love his music so much, especially the more recent CDs, that I feel I should see him again when I have the chance.  Dylan has been an artistic and cultural institution for half a century, and he is clearly one of the most profound and brilliant musical geniuses of all time.  And he belongs to MY generation!  I grew up listening to Dylan and now I’m growing old listening to Dylan. 
• I just got a ticket for the new musical “Twist” at the Pasadena Playhouse.  It sounds like a lot of fun. 
• Then I’m going to see Puccini’s “Turandot” at the Hollywood Bowl with Dudamel conducting and a great cast headed by Christine Brewer as the ice princess in a concert performance.  This is a thrilling opera with plenty of vocal pyrotechnics to fill the night air at the Bowl. 

All in all a great musical line up for July.  I’ll be sharing my experiences with all of you. 

School is OUT!

Friday June 24 was the last day of school.  I had forgotten the emotional intensity generated by the rhythm of the school year.   The excitement and anticipation (and trepidation, even dread) of September may have mostly been due to my return to the classroom after 20 years absence, but I know it’s an annual set of emotions for teachers.  Then, as you who have followed this blog know so well, the year was a roller coaster ride of contention and self-criticism leading to a surprisingly successful project in the final five weeks. 

That project, in which the boys explored a neighborhood problem of their choice, provided a very satisfying ending to the year for all of us.  The boys enjoyed the well known benefits of project based learning.  They felt more in charge of their learning and thus responsible for their own destinies and less harassed by me.  I felt satisfaction at seeing them working together diligently to accomplish a shared goal based on the learning standards.

Thus the “Solving a Neighborhood Problem” project effectively set the stage for the rapid swirl of emotions that characterize the final weeks of school.  Some of these boys--after a year of battling with me, resisting my directions, disrupting lessons and inciting rebellion--are suddenly my best friends!  For my part, I am equally visited by a growing affection for even the most troublesome boys.  I even find myself regretting the failing grades I had to give some of them (although I didn’t change the grades). 

As we approach the end of the year, students begin to experience classic “separation anxiety” and act out in all of the diverse ways that any feeling of anxiety leads to.  I think  they act on the unspoken (and unspeakable!) feeling that they actually like coming to school, seeing their friends, doing school work, etc., and they will miss it over the summer.  Or at least they may like it better than doing nothing, even with all the complaints and conflicts with teachers and counselors

As a teacher, I am going through the same emotional stages as the school year ends and a summer of idleness begins.  Of course I’m thrilled to get more sleep, read novels, fix up my house, work in the yard, and generally RELAX, but....there is a little voice deep in the back of my mind anxiously asking what my goals, deadlines, preparations, and obligations are.  “Make a list!” this voice is saying.  “Make more lists!  Start doing things!  Get something done! Prepare for next year!”  etc. etc.  Clearly the mental habits of nine months of hectic, relentless, overwhelming obligations and tasks won’t dissipate easily.  Still....I am finally getting enough sleep!

(Summer lassitude has clearly arrived; it has taken me over a week to get this post finalized and on the blog.  Coming up:  My musical July; plans for the fall; more on the state of education.)