Category: Music

The Story Behind the Album Cover: Dylan’s “Blonde on Blonde”

Blonde on Blonde

I have been enjoying listening to the new Bob Dylan release, The Cutting Edge 1965–1966: The Bootleg Series Vol.12 (2015). The new package in the Bootleg series — which is available as a 2-CD, 6-CD, or 18-CD set — features outtakes, rehearsal tracks, and alternate versions of songs from the sessions for Bringing It All Back Home (1965), Highway 61 Revisited (1965), and Blonde On Blonde (1966). So, while thinking about those classic albums, it is a good time to revisit the album cover for Blonde on Blonde.

In this video, Bob Egan from PopSpots interviews Jerry Schatzberg, the photographer who took the classic photo of Dylan that appeared on the cover of Blonde on Blonde. Together, the two men travel the streets of New York City to tell the story of how the album cover photo came to be. Check it out.

You may check out a similar video about the story behind the photograph on the cover of Highway 61 Revisited.

Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Visiting the 14 Cities of “The Heart of Rock & Roll”

    Cities Huey Lewis

    Like many of us, Mike Feld is a fan of Huey Lewis and the News. But Feld did something creative with his love of the band by visiting each of the fourteen cities that Lewis name checks in “The Heart of Rock & Roll.” Feld also takes us along for the ride in a new video he made.

    Feld explains that he started out on the journey to see what connected those cities in a way that Lewis would list them in his song. And so Feld set out to travel “10,484 miles on 11 planes. 636 miles on 4 trains. 962 miles in 5 rental cars.”

    Check out Feld’s version of the song where he helps prove “the heart of rock & roll is indeed still alive and beating.”

    “The Heart of Rock & Roll” appeared on the 1984 Huey Lewis and the News album Sports. The lyrics “the heart of rock and roll is still beating” developed from a comment Lewis made after the band had performed in Cleveland. On the tour bus, Lewis noted, “You know, the the heart of rock and roll really is in Cleveland.” From that comment, the song developed as a tribute to great rock and roll cities. But in the evolution, Cleveland ended up with a brief mention despite the fact that the city provided the original inspiration for the song.

    On tour, though, the band often altered lyrics to highlight the name of the town where they were performing. The heart of rock and roll is wherever you make it.

    Fianlly, if you wonder what Huey Lewis thinks of Feld’s version of “The Heart of Rock & Roll,” he answered that question with a tweet.


    Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    • Isolated Vocals of Bowie and Mercury: “Under Pressure”

    Under Pressure We were sad to hear of the passing of David Bowie. Much will be written about his extraordinary contributions to music, pop culture, art, and other areas. He inspired many artists both on earth and in space. And the man could sing, including on one of my favorites, his collaboration with Queen on “Under Pressure.”

    “Under Pressure” appeared on Queen’s 1982 album Hot Space, as well as later collections. The song was created by Bowie and Queen jamming together, and of course it went on to become a classic. In 2014, Rolling Stone magazine readers named it the greatest duet of all time.

    In the audio below, the vocals are isolated. So you may hear Bowie’s and Freddie Mercury’s voices without the music, or even that memorable riff. Incredible.

    If the isolated vocals made you want to hear the full recording, below is the original release of “Under Pressure.” In the song, Bowie and Mercury remind us (in lyrics written by Bowie), “And love dares you to care for / The people on the edge of the night; / And love dares you to change our way of / Caring about ourselves.”

    Somewhere, I hope Freddie and David are singing to the angels. RIP.

    Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    What Song Did Jennifer Jason Leigh Sing in “The Hateful Eight”?

    Jennifer Jason Leigh Jim Jones Song In one of the rare touching moments in Quentin Tarantino’s film The Hateful Eight (2015), the captured fugitive Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh) picks up a guitar and sings a song about a prisoner on a ship. Although Domergue eventually adds a few lines of her own about getting revenge upon her captor John “The Hangman” Ruth (Kurt Russell) and escaping to Mexico, the song itself is a traditional Australian folk song called “Jim Jones at Botany Bay,” or sometimes simply “Jim Jones.”

    “Jim Jones at Botany Bay”

    The song refers to the first Australian penal colony, Botany Bay, where England sent convicts beginning in 1788. Star Trek fans may recognize the name because the ship that carried Khan Noonien Singh and his comrades was named the S.S. Botany Bay after the penal colony.

    In “Jim Jones at Botany Bay,” the singer Jim Jones is an English convict who has been sentenced to ride the ship to the penal colony, although the judge first threatened to hang him. On the trip, the men on the ship repel a group of pirates, but Jones thinks, “I’d rather joined that pirate ship than come to New South Wales.”

    Jones dreams of escaping and joining “the bold bushrangers there Jack Donahue and Company.”

    And some dark night when everything is silent in this town,
    I’ll kill the tyrants one by one and shoot the floggers down;
    I’ll give the law a little shock, remember what I say;
    They’ll yet regret they sent Jim Jones in chains to Botany Bay.

    The song was first published in 1907, although The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature notes that scholars speculate that the song was written around 1830 because of the reference to the bushranger Jack Donahue (sometimes spelled “John Donohoe”). Donahue was an Irishman sentenced to Australia in 1825. But he later escaped, forming gangs that stole from wealthy land owners. He eventually was killed in a shootout in New South Wales.

    So, the song would have been around during the years after the Civil War, which is the setting for The Hateful Eight. And it might not be unusual for someone like Daisy Domergue to be fond of a ballad about another outlaw.

    Versions of the Song

    “Jim Jones at Botany Bay” has been performed and recorded by a number of singers. Bob Dylan recorded “Jim Jones” for his Good As I Been To You (1992) album. You may hear a clip of Bob Dylan’s version on his website.

    The video below features Old Crow Medicine Show performing the song at Byron Bay Bluesfest in 2010. Check it out.

    For a complete recording of “Jim Jones at Botany Bay,” below is a version by Australian singer-songwriter Gary Shearston.

    In modern decades, the song has been used as a song of defiance as it was in The Hateful Eight. For example, English folksinger A.L. “Bert” Lloyd sang ““Jim Jones at Botany Bay”” at London’s Westminster Hall during a rally in support of releasing political activist Angela Davis in the 1970s. So, whenever you are feeling a bit rebellious, crank up “Jim Jones at Botany Bay.”

    And that is the Story Behind the Song.

    Photo via YouTube. Leave your two cents in the comments.

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    Elizabeth Cotten: “Freight Train”

    Cotten Freight Train Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten was born on January 5, 1895 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, although some sources list the year of her birth as 1893. Cotten began playing the banjo at the age of eight and soon thereafter turned to the guitar and at the age of twelve wrote “Freight Train,” a timeless folk song that would eventually stand beside other classics in the canon of great train songs.

    Early Life, Discovery, and “Freight Train”

    As a young woman, Cotten put aside any hopes of being a musician for marriage, motherhood, and work. But after a divorce in 1940 led her to Washington, D.C., Cotten’s work in a department store led her to be discovered by the world, according to Nigel Williamson’s The Rough Guide to the Blues.

    While working in Landsburgh’s Department Store around the mid-1940s, Cotten found a lost girl and helped reunite the girl with her mother. The mother turned out to be Ruth Crawford Seeger, and the little girl was Peggy Seeger, who was the sister of Pete Seeger. The chance encounter led Cotten to working in the Seeger household, where the family’s interest in music rekindled Cotten’s own musical talents.

    Eventually, Peggy’s brother Mike Seeger produced Cotten and her unique finger-picking guitar playing for an album with Folkways, Folksongs And Instrumentals With Guitar (1958). The album included the song about death that Cotten wrote as a 12-year-old, “Freight Train”: “When I die, oh bury me deep / Down at the end of old Chestnut Street, / So I can hear old Number Nine / As she comes rolling by.”

    Music Career

    Audiences came to love Cotten’s performances at folk festivals, where she would tell stories about her life and perform songs with her distinctive guitar playing. As her friend and musician Dana Klipp would later explain, “It wasn’t just her music; it was her entire personality and her spirituality. It was a very gentle and graceful spirituality.”

    Still, she kept her day job of doing domestic work until 1970. She made additional recordings, and the album Elizabeth Cotton, Live won a Grammy award in 1984 when Cotten was 89.

    Later Life and Death

    Cotten spent the last years of her life in Syracuse, New York, which in 1983 named a small park “The Elizabeth Cotten Grove” in her honor. But Cotten still continued to perform in her later years. Cotten’s last performances occurred at the 1986 Philidelphia Folk Festival and at a New York City performance arranged for her by Odetta in 1987.

    Cotten passed away on June 29, 1987, and although in “Freight Train” she asked to be buried “Down at the end of old Chestnut Street,” her body was cremated.

    Cotton’s music and spirit, however, live on. Cotten left behind a lot of fans, while others are still discovering her today. Below is one of her late interviews, when she was interviewed by Aly Bain for his 1985 series Down Home.

    Cotten’s songs have been covered by many performers, including Jerry Garcia and Peter, Paul and Mary. Another of her many honors is that she was included in Brian Lanker’s book I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America.

    What is your favorite performance by Elizabeth Cotten? Leave your two cents in the comments.

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