Bad Folk Rock,
or, Bob Dylan, David Blue and Me
 Much of my taste in popular music is founded on the cornerstone of Bob Dylan. An adolescent fixation on his mid-60s era work left me with an indelible appreciation for good lyrics and a boundless tolerance for rough-hewn but expressive vocals. Since I grew up 20 years downstream from Bob's prime, the tides of time had already washed away a lot of the residue of his influence from those years, including the slew of Dylan imitators and followers whose work was pervasive in the early 70s. Over the years, I've tried to hunt down specimens of this species and found them a very mixed bag. Strident protest singer Phil Ochs eventually matured into a genuinely tragic Romantic poet, and his last few albums are as great as any music made in the late 60s, whereas hacks like Tom Paxson started bad and only got worse. I thought John Prine's first album was Dylan when I first heard it - a mistake I'd never make about his departed colleague, the occasionally-inspired but often-insipid Steve Goodman.
One name from that era that always intrigued me was David Blue (né Cohen), a hanger-on from Dylan's Greenwich Village period who recorded a few records in the late 60s and early 70s that were reputed to be the closest emulation of Dylan's style that anyone dared commit to vinyl even in those shameless times. However, Blue died sometime ago and his oevre is now entirely forgotten (save by current-day folk gangster John Wesley Harding, who memorialized him in a song called "Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Steve Goodman, David Blue and Me"), so I despaired of ever hearing it for myself.
Enter Don, my ex-brother not-in-law (e.g., my girlfriend's sister's ex-husband), owner of the finest record collection in Appleton, if not the entire Fox River Valley, whose enthusiasm for this sort of music runs deeper than can possibly be imagined. He was good enough to provide me with David Blue's magnum opus, These 23 Days in September, which he had painstakingly transferred from his original vinyl to CD - along with "bonus tracks" of fellow forgotten folkies from that era such as Eric Anderson and Patrick Sky. 30,000 miles over Billings, Montana, I had my first listen.
Does anyone here remember a track on an old Simon and Garfunkle album called "A Simple Desultory Philippic," in which Paul Simon does a merciless parody of the Dylan style over an organ-driven blues track? Imagine an entire album of this, meant to be taken seriously. Bad singing, flat melodies, pretentious lyrics that miss by a mile, dated production, the works – all cringe-inducing, but not quite terrible enough to be funny in spite of itself. I guess when even Bob Dylan himself is a second-rate Bob Dylan imitator these days (at least when he performs material from his 1960s catalog), what did I really expect? Oh well – I guess some historical time-pieces are meant to stay buried.
10:30:09 AM 
|
|
