It’s alright, ma, it’s only Christmas

It sits right there between Bringing it All Back Home and Desire. On my iPod at least.

Yep. Bob Dylan’s newest album, the sugar-frosted Christmas in the Heart. Not Christmas approximately or revisited, on the tracks or out of mind. In the Heart.

And yeah, kids, it’s all for charity.

Whether adopting a stance of disbelief or nonchalant acceptance when first hearing His Bobness would take on Xmas, few of Dylan’s legion followers could have predicted that title. Of course, few fans can predict anything the elder croonster will try, including sputtering the following words in the polka (!) rendition of Must Be Santa:

Who laughs this way, ho ho ho? Santa laughs this way, ho ho ho.

So what’s left? That instrumental album he’s always promised? A children’s album with Dylan infusing the Eensy Weensy Spider with equal parts Glenlivet and Marlboro? How many artistic roads can a man walk down?

But back to that lovable chestnut of a Christmas album. From the opening jingle bells to the final, sonorous amen, it’s clear that a) this is all in good fun, b) it’s Dylan’s most explicitly religious album since Shot of Love. It includes standard hymnody material like Hark The Herald Angels Sing, O Come All Ye Faithful (with Dylan croaking in Latin(!)), The First Noel, and O Little Town of Bethlehem.

But that’s not all. Dylan’s rendering of Here Comes Santa, for instance, has religious dimensions I had never fathomed. The message, however, is clearly ecumenical and devoid of the strident warnings of Slow Train Coming:

Santa knows that we’re God’s children, that makes everything right. Fill your hearts with Christmas cheer, ‘cos Santa Claus comes tonight.

Peace on earth would come to all if we just follow the light. Let’s give thanks to the Lord above, ‘cos Santa Claus comes tonight.

Can Dylan save Christmas? The critics are mixed, but stay on the slightly positive side of things. Jim Caroompas says, “for my money the very best Christmas album I have ever heard.” The Onion AV Club gives it a B-, calling Dylan a “fruitcake,” saying he “surely knows just how wrong his mangled liquefying-granite voice is for lots of this material, and there are times when he flaunts just that what-the-hell quality….” Sean Wilentz, the Princeton historian and scholar-in-residence at BobDylan.com, has Dylan channeling Bing Crosby. Well, okay.

Myself, I’m partial to Bruce Cockburn’s Christmas, so it’ll take a few more listens for me to put Christmas in the Heart.

Getting the Blues: A Review

Stephen J. Nichols, Getting the Blues: What Blues Music Teaches Us About Suffering and Salvation (Brazos, 2008), $22.99 CDN. 192 pages.

Check out my review of Stephen Nichols’ Getting the Blues (Part 1 — Part 2), published last spring in Crux, Regent College’s quarterly journal. I had almost completely forgotten about the review, which explains why I’m putting it on the site a year after I wrote it.

The review was actually in the can long before spring. I had pitched the idea to a receptive editor at a fairly large religion and culture website. When the economic downturn left him on the outside, there was nobody available to read my finished review (despite trying for months!!). Frustrated, I finally sent it to the good folks at Crux, who quickly gave it a home.

Publishers Weekly calls Getting the Blues “a splendid little book,” and I would have to agree. The blues, in all their variegated splendour, have a lot to teach us, and Nichols is an excellent guide to the genre. There are no prerequisites required. Nichols packs his little book with information, a veritable who’s who of the blues.

Like many evangelical academics, Nichols self-consciously reflects on evangelical identity in a pretty honest way, and says the blues has much to teach Wheaton and Colorado Springs.

It’s one of the facets of the evangelical subculture that might surprise outside observers. Mark Noll might be right, there’s not much of an evangelical mind, but you can still find some pretty sharp ones if you care to look (for instance, at Noll himself). Nichols has written other books along these lines, including Jesus Made in America, a cultural history of American Jesuses.

For all of that, my review stops short of unqualified endorsement. Any book on the blues might do well to take stock of black theology, which has already tread upon these grounds a quarter century ago. Nichols stops short of really engaging with black theology, admittedly not an easy task. He also has a tendency to push the blues into a systematic theological frame, where it doesn’t quite fit.

But read this book for yourself.

Dragonflies and Screws

Another week goes by, Michael Jackson dies, yada yada yada.

My abbreviated week at the Edmonton Journal included my first back-to-back A1 stories, astonishing since I thought Jacko’s death would surely trump anything else. It goes to show how papers are now purveyors of local content rather than international breaking news. How else could a giant dragonfly statue trump the biggest pop music death since Kurt Cobain?

Strangely enough, my site has been receiving thousands of hits since my post, “What Happened?: Paul Williams’s take on Bob Dylan’s ‘born-again’ period” wound up as a link on Expectingrain.com (not expectin’ grain, but expecting rain, by the way), a premier Bob Dylan fansite. Strange thing that interweb, I wrote the post last September!

Friday, June 26: Dragonfly designed to get tourists buzzing, A1. (Calgary Herald, July 1, B7)

Thursday, June 25: Stolen laptops a ‘warning,’ A1 (Calgary Herald, A9).

Wednesday, June 24: Lock it or lose it, police warn, B2.

Sugar my Tea?: My sister on Roger Whittaker’s putridity

I was searching through newspaper archives today when I found a hidden gem written by my sister Carmen in 1996. I thought it should be resurrected, and what better place than my website?

A little background: my sister was responding to a letter to the Calgary Herald editor about Nine Inch Nails, aka Trent Reznor. The letter, entitled “Alternative Filth,” was penned by a concerned mother of impressionable youths, who inadvertently read the lyrics from the CD collection of her children. My sister rather liked our friend Trent.

Young and sarcastic (with time on her hands), Carmen wrote a brilliant, scathing parody suggesting that there is much more to Roger Whittaker’s lyrics than his avuncular whistles and whimsy suggests (e.g. youtube video below).

Mom was appalled. Confused elderly people called our house, explaining to Carmen that they always thought Roger Whittaker was above reproach.

Re “Alternative filth,” Herald Letters, March 22.

Recently, my 49-year-old father purchased his first cassette tape called Songs of Love and Life by Roger Whittaker. After listening to the first track, Flip Flap, I was compelled to read the horrific lyrics cryptically enclosed. I had no choice but to immediately smash and burn my father’s entire collection of cassettes, not to mention his eight-track cassette player.

Why are adults permitted to purchase such filth? How can a father, whose ideals and morals shape those of his malleable children, have access to music — and I use the term loosely — that transcends the boundaries of musical taste in its nauseating sentimentality. The song Sugar My Tea, for example, has shocking implications when taken out of context, and the blasphemous song “Swaggy” needs no further explanation.

I delivered the charred remains of this abomination to the music store’s manager, who shook his head in disgust and pity, then wept. My mother tells me that there are others who listen to this detestable putridity. I cannot understand what our society has come to.

Carmen Wittmeier , Calgary.

ABC Spells “Trouble” for Ignatieff

While last weekend’s ABC (anything but conservative) Coalition talks were, well, coalescing, I told my wife, “I don’t think it’s going to happen.”

I can’t really claim to have had any sort of prescient foresight, any brilliant interpretation of the constitutional role of the Governor General, or anything of the sort. It was more of a gut feeling.

My thought? There’s no way Michael Ignatieff will go along with it.

Ignatieff in happier times

As the Liberal leadership candidate with majority MP backing (50 of 77), not to mention the coolest CV, Iggy had to back this thing or else it was a non-starter. Why would he cede his possible honeymoon period to a nice-but-clearly-a-liability-interim-leader like Stephane Dion? There was just too much to lose, especially with the type of legislation the coalition would be bringing to the table. As one of my profs once said, there’s an inelegance in spending large quantities of money. And with Jack and Gilles up on the hill, there’d be inelegance-a-plenty.

But suppose it worked. Maybe Dion would perform tremendously (and on Monday, it looked like he might). The May 2 Liberal leadership race might begin to look like a mistake. Even in the best case scenario, Ignatieff would inherit the PMO at the convention. But if Ignatieff was living in Canada for the past 25 years, he’d know that Canadian politics aren’t very nice to Prime Ministers who inherit the job (Mr. Ignatieff, since you were away, please check the Wikipedia entries for Paul Martin, Kim Campbell, and John Turner).

But Ignatieff went ahead and signed the coalition papers. And now the wheels have fallen off the wagon, Dion is looking more like Stockwell Day than the future Prime Minister.

Presuming Ignatieff is the next Liberal leader (really, who else?), I can’t see how he isn’t going to be severely wounded in the next federal election. By lending his signature to the coalition, however reluctant he may have been, Ignatieff won’t be able to amble up the rhetorical high road.

Harper is already there, turning his own blunder into a prospective majority (and shoring up his lagging western support to boot). I’m still not quite sure how he managed it. Maybe it’s because the majority of Canadians hate at least one of the coalition’s triumvirate (plus the suddenly silent Senator Elizabeth May). If Canadian elections are about the least of five evils, then maybe the evils add up!

No prescience needed for my last thought either: Ignatieff will need to execute some skillful Harperesque maneuvering to get out of this one. A speedy leadership convention won’t make it any easier.

Bob Dylan: Can a White Man Sing the Blues?

In 2007, I wrote an article on Bob Dylan’s use of the Blues in the Oxford arts magazine, Veritasse. The article was a little difficult for some people to access since it wasn’t online. But now you can read it right here on my site, thanks to the very generous permission of Veritasse.

“Can a White Man Sing the Blues?” was partly inspired by my love of blues music and partly by my reading of the great Black Liberation theologian, James Cone.

Bob Dylan’s work has long relied on the blues (from his 1962 cover of “See that My Grave is Swept Clean” to his 2007 near-copyright-infringement, “Rollin’ and Tumblin'”). A white Minnesotan using the music of an oppressed people, however, might seem to some more like Theft than Love.

I argue that the jury may still be out on whether Dylan’s use of the blues is ethical or not. But the language of the blues, in Dylan’s hands, is undeniably powerful. For an artist who prizes his privacy so dearly, the blues allows him to speak freely about God, death, and apocalypse. And in doing so, Dylan keeps the blues alive.

Veritasse magazine is currently on a bit of a hiatus due to printing costs, and might re-emerge in online form. But the magazine is only one aspect of Veritasse’s overall mission of promoting and celebrating Christian artists. Check out their website.

Grand Weepers and Grim Reapers: Tom Waits and Vancouver

“All weather is strange when you’re strange.” So observes Tom Waits while introducing Strange Weather for his album, VH1 Storytellers.

Vancouver can be a dreary place of strange weather.

Someone once described the city to me as claustrophobic. There’s the rain. The clouds hang low in the sky. Hedges shoot up and out. The mountains and hills clog the horizon. In recent days, grey, green, and glassy condos are popping up everywhere. Everything conspires to enclose you, to suffocate you.

Today was a typical Vancouver day. But I stood tall and refused to get bogged down. My reason: Tom Waits VH1 Storytellers album.

“Songs have to be anatomically correct,” Waits tells his audience while introducing his gorgeous Picture in a Frame. “You’ve gotta put a change of clothes in there. You have to put the names of towns and it’s good to put something to eat in there as well. And some weather.”

With all of its weather, Waits is a perfect companion in Vancouver. His repertoire is full of rain, and not just in Strange Weather or A Little Rain. His songs are full of sonic humidity, breezes, and precipitation.

While I crossed the Granville bridge into downtown Vancouver, I couldn’t help thinking that there was something especially fitting about the moment. The gravelly torch ballads, minor keys, and the sheer randomness of Waits’ world seem congruent with this one. I love Waits’ “Grand Weepers and Grim Reapers,” as his wife calls them; or as one of my friends once commented, they’re “awfully good.”

As I listened to this album on the bus, the crackling, nonsensical yarns in between songs cracked me up more than once (hopefully, no one noticed). “There are 35 million digestive glands in the human stomach,” he points out in his introduction to I Can’t Wait to Get Off Work. “I’ve used each one of them.”

The world’s a little stranger when you’re listening to Tom Waits. But it’s a whole lot better.

In Praise of the Polaris Music Prize & Caribou’s Andorra

I am really liking the latest Polaris prize winner, Caribou’s Andorra.

But I’m liking the Polaris Prize itself even more.

The Polaris prize is an annual award for best Canadian album, regardless of popularity and/or record company backing. Or so “they” say. Really, the albums picked tend to be the ones flying under the radar of most Canadians, such as myself, who do not have the time/chance/money/wherewithal to find the best stuff out there. Last year, the winner was Patrick Watson’s Close to Paradise, which was picked over better known acts like The Arcade Fire or Feist. After hearing about Patrick Watson’s album, Close to Paradise became one of my favourites for the rest of the year.

The prize is modeled after the UK’s Mercury Music Prize and comes with a $20,000 prize. Chump change for bestsellers in the recording industry, but a hefty sum for an independent musician.

Caribou, a.k.a. Dan Snaith, is a PhD in Mathematics and a hell of a percussionist. He was formerly known as Manitoba, but was bizarrely sued by an old and no-longer-prolific American singer, Richard “Handsome Dick” Manitoba (former lead singer of “The Dictators”).

The album is spacy, ethereal, ebullient, psychedelic, a mix of electronica and rock. Awesome.

Or not? Check out this other blog I’ve been following, which claims the Polaris prize is really about Torontonians promoting bottled water.

“What Happened?:” Paul Williams’s take on Bob Dylan’s ‘Born Again’ Period

Bob Dylan’s turn to premillenial, charismatic Christianity in the late 70s is a baffling chapter in his career. From writing anthemic ‘protest’ songs to introspective love songs, Dylan had spent more than fifteen years speaking into the lives of countless fans. Although he had renounced all prophetic mantles, Dylan couldn’t live up to or escape his iconic status. Even when he found Jesus.

The 1979 album, “Slow Train Coming,” represents a shocking turn to what most fans considered backward religion. Confident, strident, and uncharacteristically well-produced, the album features Dylan sermonizing with reckless, patriotic abandon. “When You Gonna Wake Up” and “Slow Train” both chronicle the personal, political, social, and spiritual ills of American life. It’s an album of binaries: “you’re gonna have to serve somebody (it may be the devil, or it might be the Lord)”, “lost” and “found” companions, a “different set of rules,” “you either got faith or unbelief, and there’s no neutral ground.”

The change was so shocking that Rolling Stone’s co-founder Jann Wenner reviewed “Slow Train Coming” himself, explaining the album from a “broadly drawn historical perspective” of Dylan’s work. Thus, Wenner claims Dylan’s “apocalyptic visions and Biblical symbolism are wholly consistent with the ‘protest’ or ‘message’ songs that are the historical foundation of his work.” The album is nothing less than the “logical progression of Dylan’s Manichaean vision of life and his pain-filled struggle with good and evil.” As great a review as it is, Wenner casts doubt that Dylan has truly been ‘born again.’

As a Dylan buff with a bit of experience with fundamentalist Christianity, I find this period fascinating. Fascinating because it’s a bit of a “slow train” wreck… Fascinating because Dylan took such a personal risk and brought religion into conversation with pop culture… Fascinating because Dylan’s “Christian trilogy” of “Slow Train,” “Saved,” and “Shot of Love” features some very underrated work… and fascinating because I’ve always wanted to know what happened.

So I finally got my hands on the 1979 Paul Williams book, “Dylan: What Happened?” Rare and long out of print, the book is well-known to fans Dylan’s “Born Again” period. Williams wrote the book in November 1979, two or three weeks after attending a week’s worth of concerts in San Francisco’s Warfield Theatre. The concerts marked the warm up for Dylan’s first Christian tour, where he introduced the songs which would become “Saved,” and also notoriously refused to play his old, “secular” songs. According to rumours, Dylan himself was so pleased with the book that he purchase hundreds of copies for his own distribution.

“What Happened?” is really worth the read (and needs to be reprinted [and apparently has been, see the comment]). The book is great rock journalism and an excellent contrast to other takes on the “Born Again” Dylan, such as the truncated one in Todd Haynes’s film, I’m Not There. Although not a Christian, Williams is capable of great sympathy to Dylan’s new, strident faith. He disagrees with Dylan at points, takes him to task on social conservatism and ‘America,’ but is careful to ease the “Born Again” Dylan’s reception to reluctant fans. Williams is passionate and insightful and the book even hazards a couple of guesses, based on a few lyrics, that turned out to be true: 1) Dylan was secretly married during the time, and 2) there was a decent possibility that Dylan’s Christianity (at least in its most explicit form) might only be temporary.

“Tell Tale Signs:” Mining the Bob Dylan Bootlegs

I was just perusing bobdylan.com and noticed the upcoming release of the latest installment of Bob Dylan’s bootleg series (vol. 8!), “Tell Tale Signs.” Basically, the collection is comprised of a lot of Oh Mercy outtakes, with a few live cuts and outtakes since Dylan’s re-emergence in the late 90s thrown in for good measure (plus a cover of Robert Johnson’s politically incorrect 32-20 blues). 

Please allow me a little cynical interjection: For a number of years, Columbia has (re)mastered the art of selling Bob Dylan. Since 2001’s Love and Theft, there have been 6 releases of non-original material to only one studio album (2007’s Modern Times). If you count the actual number of CDs, you have 13 CDs of old material (bootlegs, live tracks, and sundry repackaging) to 1 new album, not including ‘deluxe’ versions! Particularly unnecessary (and downright redundant) was 2007’s “Dylan,” a 3-CD re-release of greatest hits. Coincidentally, all were released at intervals conducive for maximum consumption, to a fan base largely comprised of a demographic group well-known for shelling out for plastic discs.

Tsk! Shame on you, Columbia. It used to be about the music.

However, there is still reason to rejoice (in addition to padding the label’s coffers). The Bootleg Series has been a mostly judicious series of landmark performances and fascinating castoffs. Although spanning almost 20 years, these Tell Tale Signs looks promising as a collection. I’ve heard the Oh Mercy sessions (previously circulated as the “Deeds of Mercy” bootleg), which are truly a marvel. The performances are sharp, full of great phrasing, interesting alternate lyrics, and are in many cases equal to or better than the studio album. Particularly noteworthy is Born in Time, not to be mistaken for the adequate version on Under the Red Sky. Finally, this gem will be publicly revealed in its original, driving, messy glory. Dignity, an astonishing omission from Oh Mercy, also appears in a rougher, piano version.

But you gotta give it to Columbia. To get all of the bootlegs, you have to shell out an extra $110 ($129.99) for the deluxe set featuring a third disk and a hardcover book.

One final note, to any record company marketing personnel: I await the release of the bootlegs of Dylan’s Christian concerts (and am willing to pay top dollar for it too).