Bob Dylan 14: Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid

In the midst of his writing drought, Bob was asked to contribute music to the film Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, starring James Coburn and Kris Kristofferson in that order. Before too long, Bob got himself a part onscreen, as a character named Alias whose most memorable scene involves reading the various labels off cans on the shelf of a store.

The soundtrack album itself didn’t come much easier. He was never really known for his instrumentals, and he didn’t feel up to writing ten new songs for the movie; instead we got three versions with vocals of “Billy” (none of them very good), two instrumental versions used for the “Main Title Theme” and “Final Theme” (the latter of which is pretty good), some equally iffy instrumentals and the epic (and hit single) “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”, for which one has to be in the mood.

That’s an admittedly rough assessment, but Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid simply isn’t a major album. There are some moments to be had, however. “Main Title Theme” would be okay if we didn’t have so many repetitions on the same three chords. “Bunkhouse Theme” hearkens back to “To Ramona” in a Tex-Mex way. The bluegrass “Turkey Chase” sounds as unlike Dylan as “Nashville Skyline Rag” or any of the instrumentals on Self Portrait. “Final Theme” manages to inspire a feeling of majesty whenever it hits a welcome minor chord. And Dylan himself would continue to tinker with the verses of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” onstage, well after people learned the song from the likes of Eric Clapton and Axl Rose.

Still, it’s not bad for an album that mostly arose out of one set of lyrics and several hours of jamming in the studio with a few ringers to keep him interested. It’s far from the worst 35 minutes of Dylan captured on vinyl, but we were still hoping for something, shall we say, substantial.

That didn’t stop people from digging for gold once some of the hours of jamming made it out to bootleg collecting circles. One intrepid prep school kid added more lyrics to a throwaway called “Rock Me Mama” and ended up with an international hit called “Wagon Wheel” that got even more legs when Darius Rucker (aka Hootie) covered it. The original recording was finally released officially, kinda, on 50th Anniversary Collection 1973, along with other such sketches as “Billy Surrenders”, “And He Killed Me Too”, and “Goodbye Holly”, and multiple rehearsals for “Billy”, “Final Theme”, and “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”. Like his other copyright dump releases, this one had extremely limited availability.

Bob Dylan Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid (1973)—2½
Bob Dylan 50th Anniversary Collection 1973 (2023)—2

Julian Lennon: Valotte

Scott Muni, the legendary DJ and Rock ‘n Roll Professor, always started his show with a Beatles or John Lennon song, and would usually get to another before the end of his shift. It was during one of those that he unveiled the elusive “Leave My Kitten Alone”, a good twelve years before its official release on Anthology 2, and Everybody’s Dummy was hoping to hear it again one day when Scottso announced the new single by Julian Lennon. It was hard to catch the title in the phonetics (it sounded like “The Lot”) but it was the title track to his debut album, and from the first note it was something special.

Valotte sounds enough like his father to impress anyone, but it was a hit on its own, as nothing his father ever did sounded like “Too Late For Goodbyes”, which got all the airplay but hasn’t aged well at all. But of the rest, it’s the bluesy “On The Phone” and “Lonely”, the dreamy “Space”, the Merseybeat-meets-game-show bounce of “Say You're Wrong” and, of course, that title song that make the album much better today than it deserves to be. Some of it sounds well entrenched in the decade that spawned it, particularly in the Simmons drums and synth sounds producer Phil Ramone remembered from his work with Billy Joel. But even 25 years on, it evokes the freshness that was such a nice surprise when “Valotte” appeared on the radio.

Julian himself said that every new artist puts all of his best stuff into his first album, but only has a few weeks—a fraction of a lifetime—to create the second. The less-than-stellar followup (1986’s The Secret Value Of Daydreaming) and the drastically different third album (1989’s Mr. Jordan) were bought by fewer and fewer people each time. 1991’s Help Yourself got airplay in England with a rewrite of “Strawberry Fields” called “Saltwater”; the few that invested would have gone repeatedly back to “Other Side Of Town”, a gorgeous duet with Paul Buchanan of the Blue Nile. Since then Julian has laid low, releasing the occasional album and striving to thrive in not only his father’s shadow, but that of his half-brother. It is a burden he will never be able to shake off.

Julian Lennon Valotte (1984)—3½

Pete Townshend 7: Deep End

During the promotion for White City, Pete put together a fairly stellar band dubbed the Deep End for a pair of charity shows at London’s Brixton Academy. A full-length video that’s pretty entertaining was released in early 1986, while a promotional EP was extended into a sparsely packaged official album by year’s end. It’s an odd grabbag of songs and covers, such as “Barefootin’”, “I Put A Spell On You”, and The English Beat’s “Save It For Later”. The crowd goes nuts for the Who songs, but his own version of “After The Fire” (a hit that year for Roger Daltrey) made it essential.

Nearly two decades later Pete released an official bootleg of the complete second show on CD as part of an ongoing series via his website, after which it went out of print, only to be revived two decades after that as part of a box set. It’s still an essential listen. For starters, the album’s original ten tracks work much better in this context. There are a few more trad jazz and R&B covers—including “Harlem Shuffle”, before the Stones got their mitts on it—and Pete even turns the microphone over for two songs to special guest David Gilmour, who sings his own “Blue Light” and “Love On The Air”, which Pete co-wrote. (Granted, he also lets Rabbit Bundrick do a song of his own, but you can always skip that one.) Gilmour’s on fire for duration of the show, making this essential for Floydheads too.

The Deep End performed on just one more occasion—the MIDEM music conference in the south of France a few months after the Brixton shows, and originally broadcast on the German Rockpalast TV show. The Eagle Rock label put out Face The Face, a combination CD and DVD set of the performance some three decades later, with a shorter setlist including three songs not performed at Brixton. Unfortunately, “Hiding Out” is driven by a primitive computer, “Rough Boys” is missing the electric fire of the studio version, and he forgets several words in “Slit Skirts”. The band doesn’t seem as tight, and Pete even seems like he’d less than thrilled to be on the stage. But when it gels, it gels well, and more so with the video counterpart.

Way back then, however, the ten songs on the mini-album were something of a tease, and some of us were saving our pennies in hope that Pete would do a larger-scale tour. At this rate, it seemed, he had a lot more music in him. But looking back, the shows can be seen as something of a peak, since his career was about to plateau, as we shall soon see.

Pete Townshend’s Deep End Live! (1986)—3
2006 remaster: same as 1986, plus 2 extra tracks
Pete Townshend Live > Brixton Academy ‘85 (2004)—4
Pete Townshend’s Deep End Face The Face (2016)—3

Bob Dylan 13: Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II

Unbeknownst to the fans—though they might have guessed—Bob Dylan hadn’t been writing much lately. So the record company decided to put out another Greatest Hits album, this one a two-record set. And again, most of the songs weren’t exactly hits.

Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II also doesn’t pick up where the last hits album left off, either. Nine of the songs came from albums that predated the first hits album, and some had been huge hits for other people, such as “My Back Pages” for the Byrds and “All Along The Watchtower” for Jimi Hendrix. “Lay Lady Lay” was a hit for the man—his biggest, actually—but chances are most fans had that album already.

But even with the spotty equation, the album succeeds due to the quality of the music. It also broke new ground in the process, by including songs that not only hadn’t been on an album yet, but hadn’t even been released. “Watching The River Flow” had been a summer single, where he admitted to having nothing to say. “When I Paint My Masterpiece” was from the same sessions, and is preferable to the Band’s version released earlier in the year. The touching “Tomorrow Is A Long Time” is included from the unreleased Bob Dylan In Concert album of eight years earlier, and is miles better than any of the studio versions he smartly buried. And to tease the fans even more, three new recordings of Basement Tapes songs close the set. (“You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere” has different lyrics, though another Basement Tapes track, “The Mighty Quinn” appears in its Self Portrait incarnation.)

It was a nice gesture, but there was still a handful of tracks yet to be included on any albums. For example, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” was recorded live with the Band in 1966 and released that year as a B-side, but the version that appears here is the standard album version instead of the exciting electric confrontation. And while we’re nitpicking, the concurrent single “George Jackson” (available in acoustic and “big band” takes) wasn’t included either.

Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II is still a good collection, and a great place to start before you collect the individual albums. (The cover photo, which neatly mirrors its predecessor, was captured at that summer’s Concert For Bangla Desh, the album of which included a full side of Dylan performances accompanied by George, Ringo and Leon Russell.)

Bob Dylan Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits Vol. II (1971)—4

David Bowie 11: Station To Station

For his next album, Bowie shrugged off the camp. His hair was still orange, but now he was dressed in a stark black suit and presenting a new character, who made his “return” debut on the new album.

Station To Station neatly bridges his previous style with his next style, though the next one wasn’t easy to predict. With only three songs per side and an equally minimalist cover, there was no hint of what was within.

The train of the title track rumbles from speaker to speaker before the band comes in, then after what seems like an eternity the “chorus” proclaims the arrival of the Thin White Duke. After a long verse based on the intro, the chorus returns before the blatant shift into the next act, which he swears is “not the side effects of the cocaine”. Roy Bittan, borrowed from the E Street Band, tinkles the piano over and out on the long fade, and dominates the rest of the album ably. (Mike Garson would not be heard from again for twenty years, though the solid rhythm section of George Murray and Dennis Davis, plus the ever-reliable Carlos Alomar, would serve through the rest of the decade. While we’re at it, Earl Slick is better suited to these tracks than he was to Philly soul.) “Golden Years” is something of a cousin to “Young Americans”, with its nostalgia for youth. It was a hit, even with the Zappa-like swagger in the voice. Fake strings introduce “Word On A Wing”, one of the most tender songs from an otherwise harsh era. Something of a prayer, you can tell he means it all the way through the song, and the wordless vocals on the fade only heighten the mystery and yearning.

“TVC 15” starts another perfect album side, a jaunty if obscure tale of a girl swallowed by her television. The “transmission” bridges and catchy choruses always make for fun listening. The disco sound is filtered through a nightmare on “Stay”, pinned around that stabbing ninth chord and a growling lead. It’s another one of those songs that must still be playing somewhere beyond the fade. A Johnny Mathis song covered by Nina Simone, “Wild Is The Wind” closes the album (complete with the Ws of the previous side). It’s one of Bowie’s best, and still a striking performance.

Station To Station has remained a strong album over the years, and one that most fans seem to deem a classic. There’s still a mystique about its creation; indeed, for many years, Bowie would aver that he was so out of it in that period that he couldn’t remember recording the album in the first place. Perhaps those six songs were all he had, and they more than delivered. Outside of the full-color cover, the only bonuses on the Ryko reissue were live versions of “Word On A Wing” and “Stay”. Then, when the album got the expanded treatment in 2010, it was made available as a Special Edition that added the entire concert from which the Ryko bonuses had been taken. A pricey Deluxe Edition also added the 1985 RCA CD mix, a disc with five single edits, and a DVD containing various mixes in higher quality and surround sound options, vinyl versions of the album and the concert material, and loads of memorabilia.

The two concert CDs were eventually released separately as Live Nassau Coliseum ’76 following their inclusion in the Who Can I Be Now? box set. Bowie’s in a good mood for this show, fronting a band including Alomar, Murray, and Davis, with the previously unknown Stacey Heydon ripping it up on lead guitar and Tony Kaye, once of Yes, on keyboards. The set revolves around the new album, with surprises like a mildly funky “I’m Waiting For The Man” followed by “Queen Bitch” and an abbreviated “Life On Mars?” “Panic In Detroit” stops halfway through for a drum solo, which is even more mammoth in its unedited form, available briefly as a download, that runs another eight minutes. (“Changes” is capped by a bass solo, but nowhere near as long.)

David Bowie Station To Station (1976)—5
1991 Rykodisc: same as 1976, plus 2 extra tracks
2010 Special Edition: same as 1991, plus 13 extra tracks (Deluxe Edition adds another 7 tracks)
David Bowie Live Nassau Coliseum ’76 (2017)—3½

Paul McCartney 15: Give My Regards To Broad Street

He’d been talking about making a movie, a fantasy about a rock star, for years. (There were other films he’d planned since Wings started but they don’t matter here.) Once Paul finally finished one it got slammed, and rightfully so. While Magical Mystery Tour was considered an expensive home video, it did have decent tunes, and has aged well enough to influence the first MTV generation. However, Give My Regards To Broad Street was behind the times and hasn’t proven to be influential at all.

The music wasn’t much better—there are only a few new songs, and he chose to do brand new versions of Beatles classics and some solo songs, none of which would replace the originals. There’s a handful of Revolver-era remakes with a brass ensemble, a truly hideous version of “Silly Love Songs” surpassed in its idiocy only by its film counterpart, an extended ending to “Eleanor Rigby” and a pointless retread of “The Long And Winding Road” with a sax solo right out of Vegas. (If he was so upset with what Phil Spector did with the original, why does he keep on recording similarly embellished variations?)

As for the new material, “No More Lonely Nights (ballad)” was the first single, and a good choice for a change. Avoid the dance remix “playout version” if at all possible. “No Values” and “Not Such A Bad Boy” are Rock again, similar to late-70s Wings songs like “I’ve Had Enough”. The CD and film also included the same band members playing “So Bad” (included on the cassette, and the CD also had that plus a music-hall instrumental, “Goodnight Princess”).

If we take the three decent new songs here, a couple from the Pipes Of Peace debacle, a B-side or two and maybe some of the proposed Cold Cuts he’d been tinkering with, we’d have 45 minutes of music that would be far better than anything he used to hold up an undercooked concept. Give My Regards To Broad Street is one of those albums that you listen to every now and then just because you spent money on it. Whatever respect he’d regained since the end of Wings was shot out from under him, and he’d nobody to blame but himself. It seemed the well was running dry—which for anyone else wouldn’t be surprising after fifteen years of nonstop output—and he’d start to take more time between albums from here on out. (That wouldn’t always help, but…)

Paul McCartney Give My Regards To Broad Street (1984)—1½

Neil Young 30: Broken Arrow

Neil had become a pretty busy guy of late. First, there was Dead Man, a Jim Jarmusch film no one liked. Neil’s extemporaneous score has its moments, just improvised guitar under some dialogue. But it was just a blip on the radar that didn’t distract us from the real issue soon at hand.

Right on schedule, a year since his last album, came Broken Arrow. Why he called it that is a mystery; there are lots of authentic Native American pictures all over the packaging and underneath the impossible-to-read lyrics, none of which seem to reference the Buffalo Springfield song of the same name. Many of the songs are on the long side, with a really murky Crazy Horse sound. The result is hypnotic.

“Big Time” is supposedly about David Briggs, his longtime producer who died shortly before the album was recorded. “I’m still living the dream we had” indeed, with another nice long outro. “Loose Change” gets its groove going straight on, with harmonica and a good singalong melody. Then he hits one chord and the band holds it for seven minutes (we counted) while he solos slowly over it. (Zappa made a killing doing just that.) “Slip Away” is said to reference Courtney Love again, but it’s still one of the best here. Like most of the rest of the album, the vocals are mixed right at band level for an almost ghostly feel. It’s great stuff, and that’s half the album already.

“Changing Highways” has a nice chunky Rawhide feel, and the riff/solo in place of the chorus is a perfect touch; this had been kicking around since the Zuma era. “Scattered (Let’s Think About Livin’)” is of a piece with the first half of the album in its spaciness. It reminds one of Tom Joad’s speech at the end of The Grapes Of Wrath, only Neil’s going to be in the music like a comet in the sky, and he hears someone’s name wherever he goes. “This Town” is a short idea with another chunky rhythm and a guitar line that’s half “Blue Moon” and half Roxy Music’s “Over You”. “Music Arcade” is impossibly quiet and acoustic, sung almost like it’s the middle of the night and he doesn’t want to wake anyone. It ends beautifully and simply. (He’d explore this style for his next album.) Then it’s back to the bar in Santa Cruz where he and the Horse played warm-up shows. “Baby What You Want Me To Do” is a faithful reading of the Jimmy Reed classic, recorded and mixed at bootleg level with lots of crowd ambience.

This was three loud, sloppy albums in a row, and all good. For all the complaining he’d done about Crazy Horse over the years, when given the right tunes—the sound and content of which can best be described as fuzzy and murky—he has the most fun stomping away with them. Broken Arrow didn’t get raves upon release, but it’s still a good one for an evening with the windows open.

Neil Young & Crazy Horse Broken Arrow (1996)—4