IfYouOnlyGotANickleIt'sTheStatenIslandFerryVille
Why?
Because I agree with Bigger E. that 'A Complete Unknown' is not good.
For example, what I was looking for was actual insight on how Dylan went from straight-up mimicking Guthrie to re-working 'Down On Penny's Farm' to come up with this particular tune to generating the magnificent artistry that soon followed...
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Here's more on the re-working of the traditional 'Down on Penny's Farm', for 'New York Town and, later, in a very different way, for 'Maggies Farm'...
And here's Janet Maslin's review of Elijah Wood's book that James Mangold used as the framework to make the movie...Interestingly, Ms. Maslin gets closer to the bones of the thing in a few hundred words than Mr. Mangold did with his two hour and twenty minute movie.
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6 comments:
I haven't seen the film, I just have a store of mental pictures and an archive of sound from the time, all coloured by being teenage in Californnia coinciding with the decade, and living with parents who were more than a bit bohemian. My mother, always Maggie -not-mom, as kind and giving a figure and full of music and books and garden and community as anyone I've known, but sometimes a stern taskmistress, who famously became the namesake of our own versions of Maggie's Farm. Tommy Saunders at KYA rolled out Subterranean Homesick Blues late one night and, lordy, lordy, what a splash. Soon after, Maggie started adding the odd Dylan LP to the family stack. There was a rumour that Dad, in some part of his misspent youth in NYC, had spent a few dissipated and inebriated nights in the company of Woody Guthrie and one Huddie Ledbetter, unverified, and, didn't Dad once tell us (pre-1958) that he had pitched for the Brooklyn Dodgers? I think my left leg is still a millimeter longer than the right as a result. Nice cover.
A little off topic but interesting. Some of us were arguing last Saturday morning at a post run brunch about RFK and Vaccine denialism. We agreed that it was mostly about Social Darwinism. Fast forward to today when this interesting paper popped into my feed. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0281072
Geez Ross, that’s the business !!
Wow - thanks Danneau. Learning more about Mr. Ledbetter is something I've assigned to myself - a truly amazing and talented guy who is much more important to what became Americana than most people realize I reckon.
And as to Tommy Saunders...Here is what the internet is still good for, from a piece by Ben Fong-Torres, circa 2005:
"...Saunders, who got into radio at 16, was only 20 when he arrived, along with DJ Russ "the Moose" Syracuse and newscaster Larry Brownell from Buffalo, N.Y. (Saunders' hometown). There, they'd worked at a station whose owner had just purchased KYA. "I thought I could come out here, go to school and support myself by doing radio, and become a teacher." He took courses at UC Berkeley, then drove over the Bay Bridge to KYA's Nob Hill studios for his 9 p.m.-to- midnight shift..."
And here's what Mr. Saunders sounded like in 1967.
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Most interesting - thanks Gar!
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Thanks Keith--
Initially, I was trying to do it straight up, keeping the vocal mimicry at bay. But then, as I was working the tune up, I decided - what the hell.
Essentially, I realized that I actually like trying to sound like what that then kid thought Woody sounded like.
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