54TH GRAMMY AWARDS POST-MORTEM

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By Wayne Robins Since we do not tweet here on Wayne’s Words, nor are we driven by deadlines as we were in the old days when we received a nice salary to do the work we now do for free—oh, but I was so much older then!—here are some thoughts and comments about the 54th Annual Grammy Awards, telecast Sunday, Feb. 12, 2012, by CBS. LL COOL J. Continue reading →

College Football Bowl Preview No. 1

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by Wayne Robins College football games used to be a great New Year’s Day tradition. There would be four of them: the Rose, Cotton, Orange and Fiesta bowls, with a lesser game, the Gator Bowl, floating around in the days before. The games rarely settled arguments about which team was best in the country, but they did give one something to live for in case New Year’s Eve did not turn out well. Continue reading →

BARCELONA AT SOCCER’S SUMMIT

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by Wayne Robins Two shots of Sir Alex Ferguson, the manager and embodiment of a quarter century of Manchester United dominance, told the story of the UEFA Champions League final Saturday at London’s Wembley Stadium. With about five minutes left in regulation, Sir Alex was wound tight as a tourniquet. With his team down 3-1 against Barcelona, the camera closed in on the manager’s hands clenching, his jaws chomping chewing gum, his feet anxiously tapping Continue reading →

AMBUSH AT ANFIELD: KUYT’S FAB THREE LIFT LIVERPOOL

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by Wayne Robins Two thousand years ago (give or take a year or two) Arminius forged an historic ambush as his Germanic warriors surprised and slaughtered the invading Roman army in the Teutoburg Forest. Manchester United must have felt like that Sunday afternoon in Anfield as they showed up the favorite for a match at Liverpool. Liverpool had other plans, and throttled Man U 3-1. The game wasn’t as close as even that lopsided score suggests. Liverpool’s Dirk Kuyt was credited with all three goals; his new teammate, Luis Suarez, set up the ball perfectly for him on two of the goals. It could have been four nil had a late surge by Liverpool not been turned back. Man U didn’t score in the 90 minutes of regulation; a header by Hernandez in stoppage time enabled the world’s most famous sports franchise avoid a clean sheet, or shut out. By that time, the Liverpool crowd was singing the loudest version of “You’ll Never Walk Alone” since Megadeth performed it at a Monsters of Rock tour sound check in the 1980s. In terms of soccer relativity, Liverpool’s manhandling of Manchester essentially changed the outcome of Saturday’s tie between Arsenal and Sunderland. That match ended nil-nil thanks to the heroic goalkeeping of Sunderland’s 21-year-old Simon Mignolet, whose stops were often spectacular. With Sunderland having lost four in a row, and heavily favored home team Arsenal needing to keep from falling further behind Manchester United in the Barclay’s Premier League standings, yesterday the tie looked like an Arsenal loss. Instead, Arsenal gained a point on Man U; while a win would have closed the gap between Man U and Arsenal to one point (60-59) in the standings, the Gunners trail by three, (60-57) recoupable in one game. And that one game comes Saturday, March 12. Arsenal at Manchester United. How big will that be? The question is which Arsenal and which Man U show up. The Arsenal that lost the Carling Cup to Birmingham and tied Sunderland? Or the Arsenal that weeks ago beat Barcelona in the EUFA Champions League? Perhaps Arsenal was tired and distracted Saturday: the road to Manchester next week goes through Barcelona in the EUFA round of 16 home-and-home on Tuesday. Last year, Barcelona trampled Arsenal, 4-1 in Spain. Carling Cup, EUFA—isn’t the Premier League tough enough without those distractions? And whither suddenly vulnerable Man U? Earlier in the week, it lost a fierce battle with erratic Chelsea, and Sunday was cold-cocked by Liverpool. The ambush by Arminius stopped the spread of the Roman Empire into Central Europe; will Liverpool’s turning back Manchester similarly alter the course of this Premier League season? Google News Continue reading →

LONDON CALLING: ARSENAL HAS BARCELONA’S NUMBER

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By Wayne Robins Barcelona had been leading its UEFA match against Arsenal in London Wednesday evening(afternoon here in New York) 1-0 on an almost too easy goal by David Villa at 26 minutes. It was business as usual, as Arsenal hadn’t beaten Barcelona in five consecutive matches. Arsenal had been playing with energy and poise for most of that first half, with the exception of Alex Song, who barely six minutes into the match drew an uncontested yellow card for an ill-timed tackle of Messi, Barcelona’s scoring machine (40 goals in 37 appearances this season) and whom with Villa is the leading man among his team’s cast of stars. Referee Nicola Rizzoli did not call many fouls, and did not want Wednesday’s titanic match-up decided by an early ejection. He kept giving Song, he of the dynamic gray Afro (accompanied by matching whiskers), benefit of the doubt. But Song kept up his dangerous flirtation, seemingly bent on self-destruction and nearly demanding a second yellow card. At one point, Rizzoli pointed to Song and appeared to tell him: Do that again and you are out. A minute after Villa’s goal, a Barcelona player tried to add injury to insult, diving after a whiff of contact with Song. He hoped Song would draw the red card that would force Arsenal to play a man down. This would have been the end, since few teams on the planet could beat Barcelona even if they had an extra man—aside from Real Madrid, Barcelona’s rival in Spain’s La Liga. How dominant is Barcelona? This is a team that can afford to pay its sponsor, rather than be paid for sponsorship. The brand on Barcelona’s shirts is UNICEF. But Rizzoli, controlling the game brilliantly—there was no stoppage time in the first half at all— didn’t fall for the dive, but did give out a yellow to Arsenal’s Nasri for an unrelated infraction. At the 37 minute mark, Messi put a header into the Arsenal goal, and that would have been too high a mountain for the Gunners to climb had it counted. But the ref immediately waved off the goal: Messi was offside. The second half resumed with the same intensity as the first 45 minutes, with Arsenal working hard all the time, getting their share of shots, keeping the ball away from their side of the field as much as possible. Not that it matters much: Barcelona’s players pass the round ball with their feet with the elegance, precision and giddy joy of the Harlem Globetrotters doing a basketball exhibition. Barcelona can break your heart with a fast break in a heartbeat. To show how overwhelming Barcelona’s passing was, Fox Soccer Channel at the 60 minute mark showed a telling statistic: After one hour of play, Barcelona had completed 412 passes to Arsenal’s 203. But passes, even pretty passes, aren’t points. At 67 minutes, Messi again nearly silenced the devoted Arsenal throng, just missing a left footer that looked like it was going inside the post. A new sense of urgency gripped Arsenal: somehow, they not only maintained their intensity, they increased it, playing with firm discipline and, despite trailing, a sense of inevitability. Then it happened: Robin Van Persie, who had been close to breaking through all afternoon, scored the equalizer with 12 minutes left in regular time. Announcer Martin Tyler was keenly attuned to the shift in momentum. “Barcelona, the great Barcelona, is on the back foot here. Barcelona is feeling the pinch.” In New York, one wondered if Tyler—hoping for an Arsenal win, while always respecting Barcelona—was indulging in wishful thinking. But he appeared to be right. Arsenal had been playing a goal down as if they were even: Their confidence never waned. Five minutes later, in the 83rd minute, Arsenal went on a fast break, a pass half the length of the field, caught at the right place at the right time and passed to the Russian substitute Andrei Arshavin. Goal! Now Arsenal had the lead. But this was mighty Barcelona, and they did not crumble. But neither did Arsenal get carried away with their advantage. The final seven minutes were fierce; Van Persie drew a yellow card at 85 minutes, and as regular time expired and two minutes of stoppage time had to be endured, there were two moments when Barca seemed about to nail a second goal and leave London with a tie. But the ball just would not go in for Barcelona, and when it was over, well, it was over, and those red and white scarves waving through the Arsenal stadium made it look like Christmas. For their team to finally beat Barcelona, it surely must have felt like it. Google News Continue reading →

SUPER BOWL: EMINEM AD PUTS DETROIT IN THE GAME

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Passing On the Peas by Wayne Robins The tired notion that Super Bowl commercials are more interesting than the game needs to be moved from the category of conventional wisdom to that of urban legend. Sunday night’s game between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers exciting from kickoff to final whistle, ebbs and flows that alternately aroused and depleted partisans of each team. The first pre-game ad that caught my attention, for the March release of the movie “Battle: Los Angeles,” looked like the trailer for a videogame. And isn’t a movie about an alien invasion of L.A. a non sequitur? If aliens haven’t already taken over the capital of the coast, than what are those creatures on Melrose Avenue? Of course, none of the movies are aimed at my generation: Certainly not “Thor,” nor Vin Diesel’s “Fast and Furious 5,” which I take it is not a biopic about Grandmaster Flash. But “Cowboys & Aliens,” directed by Jon Favreau and starring a really grizzled Harrison Ford, looks brilliant, a concept so simple and enticing that it took one of those resident aliens in Los Angeles to scratch down the idea on a cocktail napkin. Also promising: “Super 8,” apparently another creatures/criminal scum movie (a la “District 51″), directed by J.J. Abrams and produced by Steven Spielberg. The animated “Kung Fu Panda 2,” featuring the voices of Jack Black and Angelina Jolie, may provide some gentle comic relief, especially considering clever fragment shown of a version of that Queen classic, “We Will Wok You.” There is also the matter of the latest Cameron Diaz flick, “Short Stop,” co-starring Derek Jeter. Wait…you’re telling me that wasn’t a movie promo, that a Fox camera caught Diaz with her hand in Jeter’s mouth, feeding popcorn to her Yankees’ squeeze spontaneously, with such effortless sensuality, that football announcer Joe Buck seemed embarrassed? At least that bit of reality TV was more authentic than anything we are likely to see on what is now euphemistically known as The History Channel, or THC: Certainly someone must have been on THC in creating the forthcoming cable program “Only in America,” featuring Larry the Cable Guy touring the country. What’s the chance we’ll see him visiting Watts, or even hipster Brooklyn? Git-R-done! Among the good moments: a commercial for the Motorola XOOM tablet, on which the only independent thinker on a subway full of white shrouded uber-conformists is seen reading George Orwell’s “1984.” It would have been too brilliant if the next commercial, which was for the BMW Advanced Diesel, used a piece of David Bowie’s “1984″ rather than a segment of “Changes,” which after 40 years doesn’t exactly signify “change” anymore. In a marketing coup, Bowie music was also featured yesterday in an auto ad debut in the U.K., on ITV, for the Renault Clio (“Va Va Voom”), with a fragment of a steamy burlesque scene by Dita Von Teese, a bit of peeping by Red Bulls soccer star, Thierry Henry, some Audrey Hepburn, some Marlon Brando, a bit of “Space Oddity” as well as Claire Magure’s “Ain’t Nobody” and Rihanna’s “S&M.” Much too mature for American TV. A refreshingly downbeat but defiant drive through Detroit revealed Eminem at the wheel of a Chrysler 200, closing with the rapper, now the face and voice of his city’s resilience and dignity (who would have imagined), closing the ad with the words: “This is the Motor City, and this is what we do.” The two-minute commercial may be the most expensive in history, with the Detroit Free Press quoting Chrysler’s chief putting the cost at “under $9 million.” In a cute odd couple bit, Ozzy Osbourne proved he is still the world’s supreme Ozzy Osbourne imitator, in Best Buy bit with Justin Bieber. “What’s a Bieber?,” Oz asked, echoing precisely my sentiments. For sheer American ugliness, nothing could undercut the bottom-feeding Pepsi Max ads. The first was violent with disturbing racial overtones. A black couple is arguing on a park bench. He tosses the Pepsi Max can, she ducks, and it hits another woman (of indeterminate, possibly mixed race) on the head. The black perpetrators flee after the accidental assault. In another low moment, a nerd who has been mocked by a jock at a party gets revenge when he discovers the ability to direct a Pepsi Max missile into the jock of his adversary. Evidently, Pepsi Max has zero’d in on its demographic: the “Jackass” crowd, both with and without quote marks. The blowback to the live musical moments has been intense. Christina Aguilera’s muffing of the “Star Spangled Banner” has been widely derided. But her performance should be faulted not because she blew the lyric, but because she blew the treacherous obstacle course of the melody: Putting her ego first, Aguilera added embellishments where none were needed—in fact, where to do so would be insane. The song, like so many national anthems, is histrionic to begin with. To add histrionic layers showed immense musical immaturity. Speaking of which, most of my Facebook crowd detested the Black Eyed Peas performance. True, if we were going to have a hip-hop halftime show, I would have preferred Public Enemy, but you can’t always get what you want. And in this case, we didn’t get what we needed either, though I thought the Peas were an effective anchor for the choreographed hundreds in illuminated body suits on the field, a display reminiscent of the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. I thought Fergie’s singing was the best I have ever heard her, especially under the circumstances, and especially since in the past she had displayed very little vocal skill at all. She worked hard for the moment, for the unexpected mega-stardom that has fallen on her, and for that, I congratulate her. Usher’s descent to the stage from the skies upstaged any musical muscle he might have provided. And the appearance (not a “surprise” to anyone, as his publicist claimed in an early morning e-mail) by Slash on guitar for a version of a Guns ‘N Roses song proved only that an actual musical composition like “Sweet Child O’ Mine” will always make the Black Eyed Peas’ juvenile nonsense riffs sound like TV commercials. Google News Continue reading →

ARSENAL GIVES MUBARAK SHIRTS OFF THEIR BACKS

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Arsenal of the Barclay’s English Premier League have sent embattled Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak a message in the form of a box of their uniforms. The front of their jerseys carry the advertisement “Fly Emirates.” The message was clear: Mubarak should choose Emirates Airlines when he flees his country. The flight from Cairo to Emirates’ home base of Dubai is under four hours. An ABC (U.S.) News report said that the Mubarak family owns properties not only in Dubai but in London, Paris, Madrid, Washington, New York and Frankfurt, and that it’s wealth was estimated to be between $40 billion and $70 billion. That’s quite enough to buy a majority interest in one of the mid-level Premier League teams, Bolton, or Blackburn or Stoke City. Whose got game? —Wayne Robins Google News Continue reading →

"THE PROMISE": BRUCE BEFORE THE BEATLES

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by Wayne Robins It was early New Year’s Eve, and I played Bruce Springsteen’s “The Promise” for the friends with whom we spend that night—and sometimes only that night—each year. They recognized the familiar prelude to “Thunder Road” that opens the album, and marveled how well it worked instead as the introduction to the version of “Racing in the Street (’78)” that opens “The Promise.” Soon they were filled in on the back story of “The Promise”: That these 21 completed songs (not demos), over two discs, are part of the bounty of about 40 recordings Springsteen made in 1977 and 1978 for the album that would become “Darkness at the Edge of Town.” That essential transitional album, finally released in 1978, was his first since “Born to Run” in 1975 made good on Springsteen’s claim to greatness. The delay was caused by lawsuits over management contracts, music publishing and other intellectual property. Springsteen writes a most eloquent essay about the time and circumstances, why some tracks were selected for the “Darkness” album and these left behind. “I’d been out of the recording scene for three years, I was in my mid-twenties and already trying to prove I wasn’t a flash in the pan,” he writes. “I knew who I was…and who I wanted to be. I knew the stakes I wanted to play for.” The tracks selected for “Darkness At the Edge of Town” had a specific purpose, musical, cultural and personal. Aware of punk, aware of treacherous economic times, he was acutely aware of his desire to “leave no room to be misunderstood about what I felt was at risk and what might be attained over the American airwaves of popular radio in 1978.” From the first listen to these other songs from the “Darkness,” you realize that “The Promise” was from an earlier time. But it would have been incomprehensible in 1968; in 1965, they would have sounded like a maudlin anachronism. No. This Bruce Springsteen music, in source and style, in the heart of his imagination, precedes the Beatles, although it anticipates their gift: To unify the disparate streams of early 1960s American pop and rock. Specifically, the music of “The Promise” is steeped in the sounds of 1961, 1962 and 1963. For those of us who were born in 1949 (Springsteen is about three months older than I), these were the years of sixth, seventh and eighth grade. “The Promise” is for me a vessel for time travel: I have been listening to it for quite a few weeks, in carefully administered doses with long spaces between listens, as if I know that if I spend too much concentrated time hearing it I might never come back. Sixth through eighth grade: It is in these years that most young people begin buying records, when the music moves us in ways we can’t quite explain, as our hormonal gravity pulls us in ways we definitely can’t explain. The best music in the rock era has helped us understand some of these inexplicable events. Springsteen’s essay inside “The Promise” CD acknowledges this. “Post ‘Born to Run,’ I was still held in thrall by the towering pop records that had shaped my youth and early musical education.” He cites the great songwriting teams of this era: Goffin and King, Leiber and Stoller, Barry and Greenwich, and Mann and Weil. He also mentions, of course, Phil Spector, the musical architect of mini-cities of the heart that could be heard and felt in “Born to Run.” I hear more. I hear Ernie Maresca (Dion), Frank Guida (Gary U.S. Bonds), Kal Mann and Dave Appel’s madly prolific writing and producing at Philadelphia’s Cameo-Parkway Records (Chubby Checker, Bobby Rydell, the Dovells, the Orlons, Dee Dee Sharp). I hear Beach Music, the rhythm and blues music that entertained, and in some cases woke up, the Atlantic coast, from Florida to South Jersey. In my native Long Island, New York, with its own suburban beach culture, we mirrored Southern California in the early 1960s; no one called it “beach music” and we heard little except the few national hits from regional acts like Bill Deal & the Rondells, the Tams, Willie Tee, and Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs. It is no accident that the most lasting and memorable musical moment from the 1979 “No Nukes” concert was Springsteen and Jackson Browne leading the way on Maurice Williams’ “Stay”: On “The Promise,” you can hear this an inch beneath the surface, like those mini-crabs you find scraping the damp sand away from retreating waves at the beach. On “Gotta Get That Feeling,” the second song of “The Promise,” one hears Ben E. King and the Drifters; it instills a hunger to hear Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band perform the Drifters’ “I Count the Tears.” The Drifters’ could have done “Wrong Side of the Street,” though they may have wrestled with the lyric: “You and your poetry and your cool, cool world/You’ve been working on that face of a martyr girl.” Patti Smith — already in high school in 1961—may not have been as much of an outsider if she had heard lyrics like that on the radio then. “The Promise” contains Springsteen’s own version of “Because the Night,” his gift to South Jersey’s St. Patricia of Pitman. Even some of the titles echo other songs from the early 1960s. “Outside Looking In” taps into the romantic vein of Little Anthony and the Imperials’ “I’m On the Outside (Looking In).” The next song, “Someday (We’ll Be Together)” is less related to the 1969 Supremes song than it is to the Four Seasons’ 1964 “Rag Doll,” from which it quotes explicitly. Ditto, “The Brokenhearted”: One doesn’t think about Jimmy Ruffin’s 1966 “What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted” as much as one wonders how the late Roy Orbison missed recording it, either during his 1980s comeback, or the embryonic version that perhaps appeared to the 12-year-old Bruce Springsteen in a dream in 1962. “Talk To Me” doesn’t resemble the 1958 Little Willie John song of the same title; but “Fire” (the Springsteen written hit for the Pointer Sisters, here in its minimal, sensual glory) resembles the 1957 Little Willie John hit, “Fever.” Springsteen’s “Talk To Me” contains the central riff from Little Peggy March’s 1963 hit, “I Will Follow Him.” If Little Peggy March married Little Willie John…well, in 1963, in most states, it would have been illegal, as mixed race marriages were most everywhere until a 1967 Supreme Court (Loving v. state of Virginia) ended such discrimination. “Rendezvous” has been heard before, and not just on Springsteen’s 1999 compilation “18 Tracks”: It’s one of Springsteen’s rockers most evocative of 1961-1963: The exotic Frenchness of the title, when “French” meant french kissing. It also connects with our pre-Beatles expectations of romance: “Haven’t I told you girl, how much I like you? I get a feeling that you like me too,” Springsteen sings. The emphasis was on “like,” because we were too young to understand anything as deep and complex as love. No “Love Me Do,” no “She Loves You.” It’s more like the unnamed, untamed desire of Dion’s swaggering 1961 hits after he left the Belmonts, “The Wanderer” and “Runaround Sue.” At the very least, it’s Del Shannon after “Runaway” and “Hats Off to Larry.” “Candy’s Boy” went through a complete evolution when it emerged on “Darkness at the Edge of Town” as “Candy’s Room.” The “Candy” of the well-known public version has pictures of “her heroes” on the wall: You think of it as a throwaway line—a self-editing for radio—after hearing Springsteen sing, in “Candy’s Boy”: “There are pictures of her savior on the wall.” I had no sense, for the last 32 years, what “Candy’s Room” looked like; in “Candy’s Boy,” the “pictures of her savior” bring us deep inside the room, into Candy’s struggles of spirit and soul, her conflicts, her moods, her abandon and regret. That “picture of her savior” is the reason they have to go to a “cheap motel” to go all the way; There is no motel, in “Candy’s Room”: The drive “deep into the night” becomes metaphorical, where in “The Promise,” it is literally a highway—Route 9—that must be traveled to reach a climax. A little rough for radio in 1978, “Candy’s Boy” might have led to outright banishment from radio in 1962. The comical “Ain’t Good Enough for You” is a slice of topical humor that Leiber and Stoller might have written for the Coasters, though my ear hears the Dovells singing this. The Dovells, featuring Len Barry as lead singer, were of heroic importance in the greater Philadelphia/New Jersey/New York area thanks to their hit “Bristol Stomp,” a Mann-Appel composition. The dance never became popular much beyond the confines of Bristol, Pa., where it was born in the nearby shadow of Philadelphia-based “American Bandstand.” But you can draw a straight line from “Bristol Stomp” to the E Street Band. “We pony and twisted, and we rocked with Daddy G,” the Dovells sang in the song that welcomed us to seventh grade in September 1961. Who was Daddy G? The saxophone player for Gary U.S. Bonds of Norfolk, Va., whose 1960 hit, “New Orleans,” established the party-in-the-studio sensibility of the live E Street Band, and whose “A Quarter to Three” (No. 1, June 1961) was a cornerstone of the Springsteen/E Street Band encore set for decades. Springsteen and Miami Steve Van Zant produced Bonds’ comeback in the early 1980s, and Clarence Clemons sax style is such a direct descendant of Daddy G’s that the Big Man himself played the horn on Bonds’ 1982 Bruce-produced “Out of Work.” The set ends with three songs that stand apart because of the emotional maturity, the dark realism, the pessimism of their lyrics. “Breakaway” is about people who take too much risk trying to change their (mis)fortunes with a dishonest roll of the dice and leave only mourning, disappointed survivors. It utilizes the “ronday-ronday-sha-la-la” singing syllables of the Shirelles, but it recognizes evil in the world the way the music of the early 1960s never could, the saddest “sha-la-la” ever sung. “The Promise,” something of a prequel to “Thunder Road,” captures the battered spirit of those stuck with no way out: “All my life I fought this fight/The fight that no man can ever win,” Springsteen sings. Now that’s mashed potatoes, no gravy, no steak, no fork. Just a knife. “City of Night,” the closer, is only incrementally brighter, a guy in a taxicab picking his girl late at night: “I don’t believe what I see in this street/I don’t know how people can take the heat/Well baby, I’m a liar, I’m a cheat, and I don’t care,” the protagonist sings, as he anticipates going out and painting the darkness at the edge of his town a few more dull shades of brown. It is a reverie interrupted. We have been transported to that eighth grade dance: We’ve twisted and ponied and waddled and slopped with the band everyone’s been talking about, Bruce and the Spring-Teens. And suddenly, they’re singing this really serious stuff. We stand, scowling, disoriented. Some of the girls are sobbing. The muscle guys with the Lucky Strikes rolled up in their shirt sleeves have their arms folded across their chests, sullen, bewildered and angry. It is like the dark side of that scene in “Back to the Future,” where Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) joins the band playing at his parents’ prom and brings things to a halt with yet to be invented Hendrix/Van Halen guitar feedback. “Don’t worry,” the singer is saying at my dance. “You might not like this now, but if you trust the music, it will still be yours, and will sound even better, 50 years from now.” I start to clap, alone, but soon everyone is clapping and cheering, and I’m home, not sure how I got here, but still loving it. Google News Continue reading →

Arlo Guthrie On Macy’s Parade

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by Wayne Robins Arlo Guthrie and his daughter, Sarah Lee Guthrie, were on NBC just after 10 a.m. at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, singing Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land.” Riding on the Ocean Spray float, they got their minute before being preempted by Kermit the Frog, but that minute would have never happened back in 1967, when Arlo first released his 19 minute Groucho Marxist comedy manifesto, “Alice’s Restaurant.” A counter-culture Thanksgiving tradition in its day, “Alice’s Restaurant” is a wily folk humor narrative backed by his guitar strumming about the protagonist, Arlo , going to jail for littering in a Berkshire mountain village. The absurdities pile on: the police take his belt, because they don’t want a suicide in the cell, in case he decides to kill himself for littering. Later, at a New York draft center (this is the peak of the Vietnam War), attempts to portray himself as an insane G.I. Joe (“I wanna kill. Kill!) does nothing to discourage an army psychiatrist from finding our protagonist fit for military service. I guess I should toss in a spoiler alert, if you can’t see it coming, but the narrator is found unsuitable to serve in Vietnam or even be in the army because he is a moral hazard, as the result of his criminal record: his arrest and incarceration, for littering. As TV entertainment, Arlo and Sarah Lee’s minute was a cleansing karmic balance to the season of Bristol Palin nearly winning “Dancing With the Stars.” Bristol, apparently, had what used to be known as two left feet compared to many more clearly talented contestants. But the judges disdain for Bristol’s dancing was overwhelmed, until the final week, by the Internet popular vote, which was so overwhelmingly pro-Bristol that it is now clear that her success on the show was the result of what could be considered an arm of her mother’s political action committee and can be seen as part of a soft launch of the 2012 Sarah Palin for president campaign. This all makes me miss the absurdity of Arlo’s plight even more. I miss the relevant sanity of the 60s war years. Say you what you will about our decade of assassination, war, riot, protest, 55,000 dead young Americans dead in Vietnam, and the endless collateral damage—we were one nation. Divisible, for certain—not since the 1860s had we been more divided. But at least we were one country. Not even Richard M. Nixon at his most toxic would identify with the venomous Republican party today, whose strategy for America is similar to the one our military pursued in Vietnam: To destroy the country in order to save it. Google News Continue reading →

DAD, DAUGHTER AND DYLAN

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BOB DYLAN AND HIS BAND IN CONCERT AT THE EVENTS CENTER AT BINGHAMTON UNIVERSITY, BINGHAMTON, N.Y. Nov. 17, 2010 By Wayne Robins I don’t remember the last time I saw Bob Dylan in concert, but I do remember the first: February 1966, it was Bob Dylan and the Hawks (soon to be known as The Band), at the Island Garden, a dank, long defunct minor league hockey arena in West Hempstead, Long Island. Since then, I’ve seen many, including the Rolling Thunder revue, the Last Waltz, the Columbia Records 30th anniversary tribute, and a number of shows in the early “let’s stump the audience” period of extreme, spontaneous rearrangement of the classics. But I hadn’t seen him since his songwriting and recording renaissance that began with ” ‘Love and Theft’ ” in 2001. So when my daughter Liz, a junior at Binghamton University in upstate New York, called about six weeks ago to say that Dylan was performing on her campus Nov. 17, I jumped at her invitation to drive up and see the show with her in the not-quite-full student section. She paid $25 for reserved seats. Liz is not a Dylan fan, but she is an admirer: she certainly has had more exposure to his music than most of her peer group. She does have a curatorial ear, however, which she displayed last year on her radio show on the campus radio station. She would mix in a Dylan standard with her alternative rock and classic rock faves. But her DJ fingerprint was playing a cut each show by Ella Fitzgerald. Call her on her cell phone, though, and her ringback tone was “All Along the Watchtower,” the unmistakable voice of Bob, pleading, “There must be some kind of way out of here.” My daughter understood from the get-go that no one has ever gone to a Dylan concert or bought a Dylan record for the singing, and that at age 69 he was not being considered for the next “Three Tenors” tour. Still, the new arrangements that bewilder some and excite others are partly the results of compressing the melodies so that Dylan can deliver the lyrics without having to hit notes that were barely in his range 30 or 40 years ago. Compared to Dylan’s rasp, Louis Armstrong, Jimmy Durante and Joey Ramone could be the Three Tenors, but they wouldn’t have his material. Dylan, wearing a Cordoba hat and looking like the undisputed don of the hacienda, took the stage with his band at the Binghamton Events Center at 8:10 p.m., and finished their efficient performance just before 10 p.m. The band is skillful and versatile: Charlie Sexton and Stu Kimball on guitars, Tony Garnier on bass guitar and standup bass, Donnie Herron on pedal and lap steel and an assortment of other string instruments, and George Recelli on drums. Dylan spent much of the time playing electric organ, but also piano, guitar and, of course, harmonica. The combo sounded like a particularly gifted 1950s or early 1960s roadhouse band. Call them Bobby Dee and the Starliters, tag their music Iron Range Rock, the kind of big beat perfection Dylan might have imagined before leaving Hibbing, Minn. The show was a steady rolling collection of savory riffs from “Rock Around the Clock” and “Blue Suede Shoes.” It is not a band of show-off soloists, nor have Dylan performances ever been constructed that way. But the playing was magnificent, performed with purpose. Receli’s fully funky backbeat provided the acceleration on songs as unlikely as “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Met),” the oldest one of the night. It was first released on Dylan’s last unaccompanied acoustic album, “Another Side of Bob Dylan” in 1964; hearing it with full band and jazzy harmonica put the song in a new light. “The Man in Me,” from “New Morning” (1970), dropped its familiar pastoral mode with Dylan’s harmonica phrasing packing the fat urban wallop of soul legend King Curtis’ tenor saxophone. From what I’ve seen, Dylan and company never play the same set twice, and with a repertory of so many hundreds of songs to choose from, why should they? This is anything but a greatest hits or “best of” tour; it’s a celebration of a lifetime of writing, recording and performing. There were three songs from “Highway 61 Revisited,” and three from “Modern Times.” 1965, say hello to 2006. And there were songs before, later, and of course, in-between. But it’s the mix that makes the magic, and the selection and sequencing Nov. 17 in Binghamton was a Dylan fan’s 116th dream. Every song was a surprise, starting from the opener “Gonna Change My Way of Thinking,” a Jesus blues from his best “Christian” album, 1979′s “Slow Train Coming.” After “The Man in Me” came a dip into the primo stuff, “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” from the historic pinnacle “Blonde on Blonde,” the 1966 album that rephrased the conversation about the boundaries of rock and roll music and lyrics. Dylan played electric guitar; the jagged singing did not diminish the thrill of the lyrics, which have such lived in beauty that one felt oneself levitating. After “I Don’t Believe You” were the only songs back to back from the same album: “The Levee’s Gonna Break,” featuring Herron on electric mandolin, and “Spirit on the Water,” which weren’t sequenced together but certainly could have been on 2004′s “Modern Times.” Dylan took charge on both organ and harmonica while guitar lines rippled through “Honest With Me,” a tune from ” ‘Love and Theft’ ” (2001). Then it was back to the shrine of “Desolation Row,” from 1965′s “Highway 61 Revisited.” Instead of the surreal despair of the recording, Dylan’s phrasing was playful, as if to acknowledge that Desolation Row too has become gentrified. The undercurrent of the arrangement flirted with the pop/R&B colors of Ben E. King’s 1961 hit “Spanish Harlem.” Back to ” ‘Love and Theft’ ” for “Tweedledee & Tweedledum,” which had Dylan back on guitar on a five-alarm arrangement that sounded like the versions of Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love?” recorded by two Dylan affiliated bands in the 1960s: Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, and the Blues Project. “Blind Willie McTell” was another treat for loyalists, a cult favorite that was one of Dylan’s most widely beloved bootlegs until his version was finally released on “The Bootleg Series 1-3.” This rendition, though, was something else: a kind of spook house blues, as if it wasn’t a once obscure Dylan song, but a still obscure Screamin’ Jay Hawkins tune. The title song from “Highway 61 Revisited” gave way to “Love Sick” from “Time Out of Mind” (1997) and “Thunder on the Mountain,” his triumph from “Modern Times,” with Dylan’s funniest blues line in decades: “I was thinkin’ ’bout Alicia Keys, couldn’t keep from crying…” It was back to the canon with “Ballad of A Thin Man,” a young man’s furious indictment of the clueless mainstream media in 1965, a song that launched 500 underground newspapers and alternative weeklies. Listening to this after the election of 2010, I couldn’t help but wonder who the shallow and fatuous “Mr. Jones” of the title would be today, and who might have usurped the voice of his angry antagonist: Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity, god help us? That was the finale. The reaction of the audience was mixed: There was no consensus on applause that would demand an encore. Some people clapped, some sat on their hands; some people left, some held up their cell phones, some checked messages on the cell phones. Dylan and band came back, did a spirited Bill Haley-style “Jolene” (from 2009′s “Together Through Life”). And then the conclusion, with OUR national anthem: “Like A Rolling Stone.” Band introduction, band bowing together, good night, Binghamton, and good night Bob, we’ll see you down the road. The next day, over coffee in the Vestal, N.Y., Barnes & Noble, Liz told me that the reactions to the concert on campus Facebook pages were divided: About half didn’t know what to make of the songs and couldn’t bear the singing; the other half felt fortunate to be able to absorb a part of history. Some people just want to breathe the same air as a living legend, and if you’re a college student, and all it costs is $25, why not? It’s part of your education. If Dylan confounds their expectations, that is partly because of his determination not to live as a legend. He got the reclusive hermit act out of his system back in the late 1960s, when he nearly folded from the expectations placed upon him. Dylan spends his life do the most honorable thing he can think of doing: going to work every day as a musician and practicing his craft, as long as there’s gas in the tank. Some days on the job are better than others. Nov. 17 was a good night’s work. Google News Continue reading →

MAN U LOSES TIE TO WEST BROM

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By Wayne Robins Or, to put it another way, West Bromwich Albion defeated Manchester United Saturday afternoon, 2-2. This is one of those results that makes some Americans soccer phobic: Americans find unbearable: How can you play for 90 minutes and enjoy a tie? Manchester United, the mighty mights of the English Premier League and on some level the world’s premier sports franchise, was well favored playing at home in front of more than 75,000 of its loyalists against the surprising West Bromwich Albion (WBA). And game adhered to the script almost from the beginning: After five minutes, WBA goalkeeper Carson blocked a Man U shot, but made the mistake of deflecting the ball, which bounced in front of the waiting foot of Man U’s Hernandez for an easy goal and a 1-0 lead. WBA’s defense was porous, Man U poured on the pressure, and when Nari scored a too easy goal as the 24th minute ticked to 25, the 2-0 lead for Manchester seemed so insurmountable that I switched from ESPN2 to Fox Sports Channel, where Birmingham City’s Nikola Zigic, a 6′ 8″ Serbian, popped a header past the Arsenal keeper for a goal that seemed inevitable: As the announcer put it, “From the moment it left his head, that ball was destined for the far corner” of the net. Arsenal has been underachieving so far this season: the Birm City goal ended any chance of Arsenal achieving a “clean sheet” or shut out, as we Americans call it. One nil Birm City. But some reprehensible refereeing changed the course of the match. The ref, Martin Atkinson, called a penalty on Birmingham defender Scott Dann near the goal as Arsenal’s Chamakh fell to the ground despite what the replays showed was no contact. “I have to say Martin Atkinson made a mistake; he (Chamakh) simulated the situation,” was the polite way the Fox announcer described it. But the damage had been done: Arsenal’s Nasri easily beat the goalie on a free penalty kick, and it was 1-1. A few minutes later, Chamakh, the Moroccan striker, hit the ground again, and the announcers began to mock him outright. “Let’s call it a low pain threshold,” they said. At this point, their accusation was literal: “Birmingham is disgusted. Every player to a man knows Chamakh was guilty of diving.” It ended 2-1 Arsenal. At halftime, I went upstairs to play Snood. This always takes longer than planned, and so when I came downstairs, it was around the 60 minute mark, and Arsenal had scored another goal. Birmingham did not seem able to overcome the sense of futility Atkinson’s call had instilled in them, so I switched back to the Manchester United – West Bromwich Albion match. And it was 2-2! Late in that game, around the 80th minute, another extremely dubious call favoring Man U, the home team, gave them a penalty kick. The kick was taken by one-time Mr. English football Wayne Rooney, who reportedly will be sold by Man U in January. He’s not getting along with team manager Sir Alex Ferguson. Something about Rooney cavorting with two prostitutes while his wife was five months pregnant. And not playing well at all. Rooney’s kick was way wide and his effort, like much of his play this season, seemed subpar. Ian Darke, the soccer announcer whose articulation and knowledge is to Man U matches what the great Vin Scully is to Dodgers baseball games, described the home team mood in one word: “Consternation.” Hardly any visiting team ever comes back from 2-nil down at Manchester United’s turf. But uncharacteristic bad bounces and misplays around the goal had allowed WBA to tie it up, freaking out Man U and its supporters, who feel quite the sense of entitlement when they have a lead at home. When it was over, the Man U fans throatily booed, while West Bromwich Albion rooters were overjoyed. In Premier League football, a team gets three points for a win, no points for a loss, and one point for a tie: League standings are based on such point accumulations. So West Bromwich got a point it did not expect to receive; Man U did not get the three points it expected, settling for the one point tie. Psychologically, Man U felt like it lost two points, WBA felt like it gained one. As Ian Darke said post-match: “A great point for Bromwich, a worry for Manchester United.” Which is why it is easy to see that in the game ending 2-2, West Bromwich won—and Manchester lost. Just do the math. Google News Continue reading →

MAN U LOSES TIE TO WEST BROM

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By Wayne Robins Or, to put it another way, West Bromwich Albion defeated Manchester United Saturday afternoon, 2-2. This is one of those results that makes some Americans soccer phobic: Americans find unbearable: How can you play for 90 minutes and enjoy a tie? Manchester United, the mighty mights of the English Premier League and on some level the world’s premier sports franchise, was well favored playing at home in front of more than 75,000 of its loyalists against the surprising West Bromwich Albion (WBA). And game adhered to the script almost from the beginning: After five minutes, WBA goalkeeper Carson blocked a Man U shot, but made the mistake of deflecting the ball, which bounced in front of the waiting foot of Man U’s Hernandez for an easy goal and a 1-0 lead. WBA’s defense was porous, Man U poured on the pressure, and when Nari scored a too easy goal as the 24th minute ticked to 25, the 2-0 lead for Manchester seemed so insurmountable that I switched from ESPN2 to Fox Sports Channel, where Birmingham City’s Nikola Zigic, a 6′ 8″ Serbian, popped a header past the Arsenal keeper for a goal that seemed inevitable: As the announcer put it, “From the moment it left his head, that ball was destined for the far corner” of the net. Arsenal has been underachieving so far this season: the Birm City goal ended any chance of Arsenal achieving a “clean sheet” or shut out, as we Americans call it. One nil Birm City. But some reprehensible refereeing changed the course of the match. The ref, Martin Atkinson, called a penalty on Birmingham defender Scott Dann near the goal as Arsenal’s Chamakh fell to the ground despite what the replays showed was no contact. “I have to say Martin Atkinson made a mistake; he (Chamakh) simulated the situation,” was the polite way the Fox announcer described it. But the damage had been done: Arsenal’s Nasri easily beat the goalie on a free penalty kick, and it was 1-1. A few minutes later, Chamakh, the Moroccan striker, hit the ground again, and the announcers began to mock him outright. “Let’s call it a low pain threshold,” they said. At this point, their accusation was literal: “Birmingham is disgusted. Every player to a man knows Chamakh was guilty of diving.” It ended 2-1 Arsenal. At halftime, I went upstairs to play Snood. This always takes longer than planned, and so when I came downstairs, it was around the 60 minute mark, and Arsenal had scored another goal. Birmingham did not seem able to overcome the sense of futility Atkinson’s call had instilled in them, so I switched back to the Manchester United – West Bromwich Albion match. And it was 2-2! Late in that game, around the 80th minute, another extremely dubious call favoring Man U, the home team, gave them a penalty kick. The kick was taken by one-time Mr. English football Wayne Rooney, who reportedly will be sold by Man U in January. He’s not getting along with team manager Sir Alex Ferguson. Something about Rooney cavorting with two prostitutes while his wife was five months pregnant. And not playing well at all. Rooney’s kick was way wide and his effort, like much of his play this season, seemed subpar. Ian Darke, the soccer announcer whose articulation and knowledge is to Man U matches what the great Vin Scully is to Dodgers baseball games, described the home team mood in one word: “Consternation.” Hardly any visiting team ever comes back from 2-nil down at Manchester United’s turf. But uncharacteristic bad bounces and misplays around the goal had allowed WBA to tie it up, freaking out Man U and its supporters, who feel quite the sense of entitlement when they have a lead at home. When it was over, the Man U fans throatily booed, while West Bromwich Albion rooters were overjoyed. In Premier League football, a team gets three points for a win, no points for a loss, and one point for a tie: League standings are based on such point accumulations. So West Bromwich got a point it did not expect to receive; Man U did not get the three points it expected, settling for the one point tie. Psychologically, Man U felt like it lost two points, WBA felt like it gained one. As Ian Darke said post-match: “A great point for Bromwich, a worry for Manchester United.” Which is why it is easy to see that in the game ending 2-2, West Bromwich won—and Manchester lost. Just do the math. Google News Continue reading →

CHELSEA GROUNDS THE FLY EMIRATES

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by Wayne Robins You know that a visitor from another planet, or an American watching in New York, could find the team uniforms for Barclay’s Premier League (aka the English Premier League) a bit confusing. Team names are rarely visible to the TV eye, even the HD version. It seems odd and a little unsporting for an American to complain about excessive commercialization of sport—I thought we were the world champions—but we’ve got nothing on English, or in fact, any nation’s, professional soccer. So if I were tuning in for the first time to the Premier League match of the weekend, it would have been easy to think of the teams as the Samsung vs. Fly Emirate—or, as I prefer to call them, The Fly Emirates. (Possible band name, North Londoners?) But I’ve been watching long enough—since the season began some seven weeks ago—to know that the team in Samsung blue is Chelsea, and the Fly Emirates, in red, can only belong to their London rivals, Arsenal. Both teams played wide open, attack/counterattack: There was very little stalling around playing footsie, 90 minutes of high energy back and forth. Chelsea won 2-0, on two highlight-reel goals: Around the 39th minute, Didier Drogba made a perfect kick from an improbable angle just inside the near post, off the bar and into the net. It’s been quite a week for Drogba, born in the Ivory Coast, who had a stadium named for him in Levallois-Perret, France, near Paris. The French fourth division team Levallois is where Drogba started as a youth league player at age 15. Trailing one-nil after the first 45 minutes, the Fly Emirates looked ready to rally in the second half, putting Chelsea on its heels in defensive mode for 10 or 15 minutes. Reversing the American football cliche, Chelsea realized the best defense was a good offense, and eventually returned the pressure. A yellow card around the 84th minute handed to Arsenal defender Laurent Koscielny led to a free kick for Chelsea. At first it appeared that Drogba would take it, but it was Alex (Alex Rodrigo Dias da Costa, who like many Brazilian stars goes by just his first name) who stepped to the ball and wailed it, a fast, quick rising missile that soared and twisted into an unreachable far corner of the net. (Alex is not to be confused with Arsenal’s Alex Song, from Cameroon, who is immediately identifiable for the apparently dyed gray hair that makes him look like, oh, a keyboardist for Parliament-Funkadelic.) The other great haircut I saw on TV soccer Sunday morning was in the Italy Serie A match between Roma and Napoli. Napoli’s Marek Hamsik, who also sports some nasty tattoos, has really let his Mohawk grow out, higher and stiffer than it was in South Africa, where he played in the World Cup for his native Slovakia. Goal.com also named Hamsik “top of the match” player: I only watched the scoreless first half, so missed Hamsik scoring the first and decisive goal in the 72nd minute as Napoli won, 2-0. Marshaling the energy I knew I’d need to watch Arsenal-Chelsea, before the American football day started, I stepped away from the TV, drank coffee, and pondered the meaning of part of a dream last night, in which Lyle Lovett asked my advice on how to improve ticket sales on his concert tour. Wondering if it was some kind of zen riddle, it was a question to which I had no answer. Google News Continue reading →

MEEK INHERIT EARTH: CHELSEA, TOTTENHAM, AND ARSENAL ALL LOSE

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by Wayne Robins This was a super Saturday for the English (Barclay’s) Premier League on U.S. television, with three consecutive live games featuring the haves against the not have so much. From 7:30 Saturday morning eastern time, three giants fell, three struggling teams gained hope. First up was Manchester City vs. Chelsea. Man City is not a mediocre team: It’s just that Chelsea is off to a fantastic start, was undefeated and in first place in the Premier League. It was a matchup between two billionaire-owned clubs, the ultra-rich who have changed English football the way that money has both enhanced and distorted American team sports. Sheikh Mansour, the Abu Dhabi businessman who is Man City owner, is said to be worth upwards of $5 billion, though estimates go much higher. With the stroke of a pen last January, the Sheikh erased Man City’s 305 million pound debt (that’s nearly $500 million U.S.) and turned it into equity, and then added perhaps the highest payroll in professional sports in the world. Not quite to be outdone, Chelsea owner since 2003 has been Roman Abramovich, a Russian businessman estimated by Forbes to be the 50th richest person in the world, with a worth of a mere $11.2 billion. Both men have followed the strategy George Steinbrenner used to restore the New York Yankees to prominence: Buy the best players. Chelsea’s Ya Ya Touré of the Ivory Coast is, according to goal.com,is said to be the highest paid player in the history of the Premier League, earning tens of millions of dollars in salary and incentive and licensing deals. Ian Darke, the World Cup announcing MVP, who was making his debut for ESPN’s U.S. Premier League coverage, noted Ya Ya earns 300,00 a week, but I wasn’t sure whether that was pounds, or, if in dollars, would be about $450,000. His size and explosiveness was at times a fierce force on the field. But at the end, it was the goal by Man City’s Carlos Tevez that was the only score. With minutes to go and Man City clinging to that one-nil score, Chelsea seemed to become unglued and overaggressive. Said Darke: “Man City is nearly there…it would be a very famous win.” When it was over, Man City’s fans sang a full-throated version of its theme song, “Blue Moon” (not the Marcels’ version, I’m afraid) and Tevez lifted his jersey to reveal happy birthday wishes to his mother scribbled on his undershirt. I didn’t catch any of the games in their entirety, but the TV stayed on during errands and some deadline efforts at the computer. So when I went downstairs, I wasn’t surprised to see the score after 60 minutes that score in the Arsenal-West Bromwich Albion match, played in front of 60,025 fans at Arsenal’s home Emirates Stadium, was 2-nil. I blinked three times at score, and was able to verify with my eyes that it was a shocking 2-nil in favor of heavy underdog West Bromwich. Then Jerome Thomas scored, and it was 3-nil West Bromwich Albion in the 73rd minute. Arsenal mounted a ferocious counterattack, and it quickly paid off: two minutes later, Arsenal’s Samir Nasri scored. The heat was on. At the end of regulation, the referees allowed five minutes of extra time—an eternity with Arsenal attacking, and it paid off immediately: Just a few seconds into the overtime, Nasri scored again. Arsenal could salvage a point yet, and momentum was swinging their way. But WBA never lost its poise, or its aggressiveness, and goalkeeper Scott Carson was stalwart. How big was this win for West Bromwich? It was the first time it had beaten Arsenal on Arsenal turf in 27 years. I think the consensus going into the arch rivalry between London teams West Ham and Tottenham match was that West Ham was not all as bad as its winless, last place showing has been. West Ham striker Frederic Piquionne’s goal in the 29th minute accounted for all the scoring; though teammate Victor Obinna didn’t score, he led the maroon-and-white with courageous play in what the Fox Soccer Channel announcer called an “heroic performance.” Google News Continue reading →