Happy birthday David Hidalgo -> October 6: David Hidalgo is 60 Happy Birthday
Here are Los Lobos with 2 great Dylan covers: “Billy 1” & “On A Night Like This”
Billy 1:
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October 6: R.E.M. released Automatic For The People in 1992
Automatic for the People is the eighth album by R.E.M., released in 1992 on Warner Bros. Records. Upon release, it reached number two on the U.S. album charts and yielded six singles. The album has sold 18 million copies worldwide and is widely considered one of the best records released in the 1990s. It was released 10 years after their debut in 1982.
“Turning away from the sweet pop of Out of Time, R.E.M. created a haunting, melancholy masterpiece with Automatic for the People. At its core, the album is a collection of folk songs about aging, death, and loss, but the music has a grand, epic sweep provided by layers of lush strings, interweaving acoustic instruments, and shimmering keyboards. Automatic for the People captures the group at a crossroads, as they moved from cult heroes to elder statesmen, and the album is a graceful transition into their new status.”
– Stephen Thomas Erlewine (Allmusic)
R.E.M. – Find The River (live):
Continue reading October 6: R.E.M. released Automatic For The People in 1992
Bob Dylan: Infidels outtakes (Rough cuts)
For the first time in his career, Dylan books a month of sessions to record an album. The sessions will take place at the Power Station in New York, across the way from Sony Studios. Dylan coproduces the album with Mark Knopfler. The band they have devised for the sessions ranks as one of his most inspired gatherings. The rhythm section is Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare. The two-pronged guitar attack is to be provided by Knopfler and ex-Stones axeman Mick Taylor. Keyboardist Alan Clark has been enlisted from Knopfler’s band. The sessions result in 16 original new songs, 14 cover versions, and a couple of instrumentals (copyrighted under the titles, “Dark Groove” and “Don’t Fly Unless It’s Safe”).
~Clinton Heylin (Still on the Road: The Songs of Bob Dylan Vol. 2, . 1974-2008)
Here we have some brilliant outtakes from the Infidels sessions. Most importantly the electric versions of “Blind Willie McTell”.
Studio A
Power Station
New York City, New York
April 11 – May 17.
October 5: Muddy Waters Electric Mud (1968)
Electric Mud imagines Muddy Waters as a psychedelic musician. Producer Marshall Chess suggested that Muddy Waters record experimental, psychedelic blues tracks with members of Rotary Connection in trying to revive the blues singer’s career.
The album peaked at #127 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart. It was controversial for its fusion of electric blues with psychedelic elements, but was influential on psychedelic rock bands of the era.
” It’s a classically wrongheaded, crass update of the blues for a modern audience.”
I can understand the sceptics then, but I’m not a blues-purist and I really love the record!
She’s allright (audio):
Chuck D(Public Enemy) is a big supporter of the record:
“To me, it’s a brilliant record. I’ve played it a thousand times. It took me a while to warm up to traditional blues, but what struck me right away was the Electric Mud thing.”
And check out the great inlay cover, the man looked great! :
Continue reading October 5: Muddy Waters Electric Mud (1968)
Bob Dylan’s best songs: You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
Situations have ended sad
Relationships have all been bad
Mine’ve been like Verlaine’s and Rimbaud
But there’s no way I can compare
All those scenes to this affair
Yer gonna make me lonesome when you go
~Bob Dylan (You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go)Much of the song is thus delivered, so lightly as to suggest that it’s in brackets, with the same sparkling, generous humour. Astonishing that a man who, by the time he made this album, had been monstrously famous for over a decade and had been acclaimed as a genius before he was 25, could have the down-to-earth self-knowledge to
throw out, in this song, so ordinarily humorous and puckish a phrase as the one that ends this stanza: ‘You’re gonna make me wonder what I’m doin’ / Stayin’ far behind without you / You’re gonna make me wonder what I’m sayin’— / You’re gonna make me give myself a good talkin’ to . . .’
~Michael Gray (The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia)
And how smoothly the album slips from this orgy of marital upchuck into the lightest, most innocent, most enticing love song of the whole batch, a throwaway which on closer inspection seems quite as brilliant (in composition and performance) as anything else here: “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go.” So clever, so perfect, to have a song that puts any separation squarely in the future, instead of present, near past, or distant past.
~Paul Williams (Bob Dylan: Performing Artist, Vol 2: The Middle Years 1974-1986)
Grooveshark:
Spotify:
Continue reading Bob Dylan’s best songs: You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go