Rainy Day Women Nos. 12 & 35

My mother made the mistake of giving my sister and I her old Dansette-style record player and her collection of 7" singles as playthings when we were still quite young. Alas we didn't treat them with any respect at all. Among these doomed 45s was a copy of The Byrds' version of 'Mr. Tambourine Man', which provided me (along with my Dad's Hollies Sing Dylan LP), with my first introduction to Bob Dylan as a songwriter. I don't recall when I first heard the man himself singing, but in my early years I was unimpressed: belonging to that sizeable subset of the listening population who, while they may have admired Dylan's lyrics, didn't appreciate them when delivered in Dylan's voice.

A college friend was a big Dylan fan, and had practically all of his albums up to Knocked Out Loaded on cassette. It was through his influence that I eventually became a fan myself, with Bringing It All Back Home the album which set my conversion in motion. For all I enjoyed his classic '60s records, I never bought any of them myself until I began collecting vinyl in my mid-thirties, by which time it was a little too late - my Dylan enthusiasm having cooled again by then. In fact, so little had I been playing my copy of Blonde on Blonde that I recently set it free as part of a charity shop donation.

What I still have on my shelves is one remaining Dylan LP (Subterranean Homesick Blues, i.e. a re-titled German-issued copy of Briging It All Back Home) and this single, with 'Rainy Day Women Nos. 12 & 35' on the A side, backed with 'Pledging My Time'. It's a '66 repress with the same bright orange CBS label as that old copy of 'Mr Tambourine Man' had.

Comments

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...

In Heat

Having acquired the soubriquet "the walrus of love", Barry White thereafter became something of a figure of fun, something that misled me (and presumably others) into disregarding his music. Only within the last few years have I begun to pay it more attention. After picking up a copy of his '74 album Can't Get Enough last summer, which I loved, I sought out some of the music by his protegés Love Unlimited. From a Discogs seller I ordered well-used copies of Under the Influence of... ('73) and In Heat ('74) for only £6.25. The only unappealing thing about In Heat is its awful title. The songs and the singing are strong; the arrangements rich & warmly enveloping. As one would expect from White, the thematic focus is firmly fixed on amatory matters. The opening number 'Move Me No Mountain' (the only one on the record not written by White) offers a refreshing rebuttal to the kind of lyrical hyperbole in songs like 'Ain't No Mountain High E...

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

This is a Recording

Search This Blog