A Glimmer of Zimm and other stories from the Diaspora

[Tom McPhillips]

We’re moving in June, selling our present house and having a new one built. Where we live now I have a large basement where my CD and LP collection lives with minimal space restrictions. Our new house will include a library but shelf space is limited. To serve that space impediment I think I’ve found a solution. It’s called an Olive Musica – basically an ipod for the home. It’s really a CD player and recorder amalgamated to a 160GB hard disk, you feed it CD’s and it stores them. I’ve chosen a higher bitrate for the MP3 translation, and I’m not sure yet how much of my collection I’ll be able to store… the basic idea is that all my CD’s etc will be in storage boxes elsewhere and this unit will allow me to access my music without having the physical CD in the room.

I’m on my first pass, it’s the ones I know I want to store, so the editing process has started… it’s fascinating to watch myself go through and pick – what makes the cut and what doesn’t…. needless to say it really focuses the mind as to what has endured and what is lost in its own time.

I always bring the weather into this, it somehow measures time and place – well when I last wrote we were going through an earlier than anticipated bitter cold, and now since New Years it’s been unseasonably warm at times… usually being so continental we have big weather system followed by big weather system, by which I mean that the weather stays the same for weeks at a time. Right now we can have 50 degrees in the morning, tanking well below freezing late afternoon and back up to 45 by lunchtime of the following day. I leave you to make the Celsius calculations….but basically it’s swinging between extremes on an almost daily basis…

Also as usual I’ve been traveling a fair bit… And, as I walk through the airport concourses the inevitable sight as I pass by the magazine racks is the ubiquitous picture of Jennifer Anniston on the cover of almost every other magazine. A well exhibited symptom of America and its unnatural obsession with celebrity… Now I’ve been in a hotel bar, inches away from Jennifer A. and Courtney Cox and her hubby, and frankly she’s nice, not exactly a stunner but somehow she’s ultra famous and wildly celebrated. Well to cut to the chase, what I’m saying is that even if you might profess to hate the paparazzi, to get that depth of media coverage you have to have a hardworking and very efficient PR working for you – it doesn’t just happen by itself. But we’re talking 2006 – but let's turn the clock back to 1965….

For Christmas, my son bought me ‘No Direction Home’ by Robert Shelton, a biography of Dylan, it was his follow-up present to the DVD he bought me for my birthday. I can’t imagine that Dylan had any PR machine in place, but the media just gravitated. And the more he fooled and protested the greater his gravitational pull on them became. I think the two things I came away from the book with were, one, how interconnected his scene was with what our generation was latching onto at the time, like we were into Kerouac, Feringhetti, Lautreamont, and Baudelaire, but we didn’t necessarily think that he would have been reading the same books… (I was really floored when Durrell was mentioned as being on his reading list) plus two, how close it all was to “A Mighty Windâ€

[Con Murphy]

Great stuff, Tom. Good luck with the move.

The Bride Unfastens her Braids the Groom Faints by Etty Ben Zaken

Sorry to hijack the thread, but what a great title. I like it almost as much as A Lambkin Has Commenced Bleating by Nadka Karadjova. Maybe that's a subject for another thread: Great Songs with Great Titles.

[David Godwin]

Tom, there's a very interesting recently updated article on this album - try the official website bobdylan.com/ links/electric dylan.

[David Godwin]

who appeared on "Blonde on Blonde", in "Fitzcarraldo", and "Once Upon a Time in the West" and then disappeared from Blonde on Blonde?

[Con Murphy]

who appeared on "Blonde on Blonde", in "Fitzcarraldo", and "Once Upon a Time in the West" and then disappeared from Blonde on Blonde?

I'm sorry, I only enter quizzes if there's a freebie on offer :-)

Is it Claudia Cardinale?

[David Godwin]

blimey Con, that was quick - I must admit that I have always wondered why claudia was upset when her picture was used on 'Blond on Blonde'. I would have been flattered, but maybe this was her form of protest when Bob went electric.

[Con Murphy]

blimey Con, that was quick

Yeah sorry, coincided with my lunchtime browse. I actually didn't know about the Blonde on Blonde connection, it was just a guess based on the fact that she was in both films. Tell us more - the wording of your question implies that she was removed after appearing in those films. That can't be right, can it?

[David Godwin]

The first issues in the US, Canada and the UK had nine photographs inside the gatefold sleeve, four on the left and five on the right. Those on the right hand side included a large portrait of the actress Claudia Cardinale, and another smaller photo of a still-unidentified female (a fan? a journalist? not Edie Sedgwick, anyway) bending over and speaking into Dylan's ear. After the first print run the right hand layout was changed on the US mono and stereo editions; Claudia Cardinale had objected to the use of her photo, so this was removed, replaced by an enlarged and slightly fuller version of the photo of Dylan with the white scarf. Note The picture with the other woman was also dropped, quite possibly just because it was hard to fit into the revised layout.

This change took a long time to cross the Atlantic, though, and the original photos stayed on the UK sleeve until the late 70s, when the revised seven-photo layout took over. The final UK vinyl edition from Sony had a cheap single sleeve with no inside photos at all. The 1997 Sony pressing from Holland, surprisingly, came in a gatefold sleeve with the original nine-photo inside spread, despite having the revised version of the music. Perhaps the revised photo layout never reached the Netherlands at all. Simply Vinyl's 1999 UK reissue also used this first version of the sleeve. Sundazed however, were unable to get legal clearance to use the original inside photos for their 2002 mono reissue; perhaps Claudia Cardinale's injunction on the use of her photograph applied specifically to the USA.

[Tom McPhillips]

Tom, there's a very interesting recently updated article on this album - try the official website bobdylan.com/ links/electric dylan.

Thanks for the link - I had no idea that the release history was so tortuous - I presume that the album I bought in Nashville was the latest non 5.1 version - I don't think I've listened to the album since I retired my vinyl collection a very long time ago and since I probably bought the original double LP the week it came out in the UK it was whatever version that was - I must dig it out, I have the suspicion that I was still buying Mono...

Actually I was kicking myself that I didn't get the 5.1 copy... John McBride, husband of Martina, has been building an amazing studio in Nashville.. He showed me round the other evening - the whole complex is absolutely stunning, but there's one room that's really special. If you go to his site, http://www.blackbirdstudio.com/ - and go to studio C you'll see what I mean - there are millions of those sticks sticking out of the wall and every one is a different length - the result is that it's the most amazing place to listen to music on the planet. He had me listening to "Bohemian Rhapsody" in 5.1, in the sweet spot of the room and it was breathtaking - I had B&B with me so as to hear something more familiar ... It was just as astounding, but as I say, I wished I'd had the surround version instead!

John is a big Beatles fan, (hence "Blackbird") and his studio specializes in having a huge collection of vintage analog gear, especially mikes, to get that warm fuzzy sound. The Dixie Chicks are currently in the studio making their new album...

[David Godwin]

http://www.macgayden.com/MacMainPage_content.html

This link says that Mac - an especial favourite of followers of Charlies' programmes - played uncredited on Blonde on Blonde. I have never understood this!!!

[joel]

Tom:
Want to sell your record (LP) collection?