I had never listened to Bob Dylan before except in the way that it’s impossible not to have listened to Bob Dylan. His unfriendly, indecipherable whine and mumble is ubiquitous to American culture, to the air and sky and car radio and malls and Starbucks of the nation and probably the world. But if I’d listened before, I’d never noticed. I took the Counting Crows out of my portable CD player, and put in Blonde on Blonde. My Dad had also bought me Highway 61 Revisited, Blood on the Tracks, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Bringing it All Back Home, and Desire, and I’d get to all of them, eventually, each one its own singular obsession and backdrop to a particular section of my life. But during that train ride, the rest of that year, and in a way the rest of my life, I never really got past Blonde on Blonde.

Blonde on Blonde is, admittedly, kind of a weird album to give to your teenage kid. Although I know I’m not the only child of the I-Had-Tickets-to-Woodstock-But-Didn’t-Go generation whose parents put Bob Dylan and Lou Reed and the Stones on the You Need To Know This list along with great literature and Carl Sagan and geometry and how to drive.

But my main memory of that first listen is of being plunged into the depiction of experiences I had never had. As the album begins, the harmonica and the guitar and the rest of the band, exhausted, high out of their mind and fed up with this byzantine ritual of a recording session, assaults you with the opening of “Rainy Day Women Nos 12 & 35.” Dylan, according to legend, wrote the songs on Blonde on Blonde in a minute-beyond-the-last-minute speed-fueled race, locked in the studio after the time they were supposed to start recording had come and gone. He didn’t emerge until around 4am, and the session men chain-smoking and playing cards while they waited for him had never seen the songs before playing them. They had no idea how long these tracks would be, no idea Dylan would, in the era of the three-minute radio barrier, ask them to record five and eight and ten and twelve minute songs. Much of the energy and noise of this first track on the album, the giddy, drunk-parade build of it is the sound of a bunch of the best and most famous session-men in Nashville growing more and more confused as yet another verse comes after the last verse they played, as one more time the song, for some reason they can’t understand, doesn’t end but insists on repeating its nonsense. The album is the sound of a bunch of people trying to learn how to do something while doing it for the first time, baffled at what it asks of them.

The first words Dylan utters are about getting stoned. So is the rest of the four minutes and thirty seconds of the opening track. Everyone was getting stoned — Dylan, Dylan’s band, the people they were singing about and the audience they were singing to. I was a very sheltered teenager and had never done any drugs at all. If everybody was getting stoned, I wasn’t everybody. The album reminded me that I was waiting to enter the experiences everyone else in the world was already having.

In the thirteen other tracks that follow, Blonde on Blonde moves through lust, regret, adultery, love, marriage, divorce, and why it’s a bad idea to mix whiskey and gin. I had never done any of these things. I wanted to be the person singing, and I wanted to be all the people Dylan sang about, all the begging and heartbreaking and abject and unfaithful women. I wanted to be all the train-jumping cowboys and drunks and liars and poets passed out in alleyways as whom Dylan disguises himself. I wanted to be Joanna and Louise and Marie and the debutantes and chambermaids who betrayed him and lied to him and bummed cigarettes from him, and were such crazy bitches that he had to write a song about them. I wanted in. The album was the warm yellow window of someone else’s house as you walk by on a cold night. Listening to it was the feeling you get when you look into this stranger’s window and wish you lived there.

I liked the complexity of the songs. I liked that I didn’t get it. I liked that it didn’t seem to want me to get it. I liked that Bob Dylan didn’t seem to like me and seemed annoyed that I liked him so much. I listened to that album every night as I fell asleep the entire year before I left for college, not to mention in my car and in my room and on my headphones walking around while awake. It became the language for the new world of adulthood that was approaching,that as far as I was concerned couldn’t come fast enough.

Arguably, the defining experience of adulthood is falling in love. Dylan is disdainful of or resigned about or angry at all the Louises and Joannas and Maries and women-who-are-probably-Joan-Baez in the first thirteen songs on the album. He launches a whole host of emotion at women, in general and in specific, but it’s not until the final track that he deals with the central experience of maturation: Falling in love. Knocked on your ass, whole life given up to another person. Gone, surrendered, fucked, whatever you want to call it. Falling in love.

“Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” is eleven minutes and twenty seconds of infuriating, boring, indecipherable music that has been accurately described as the greatest love song of the 20th century. For the length of an entire side of a record (as it was originally released), Dylan does nothing but list nonsensical attributes of the woman to whom he’s singing.  The lyrics are even more opaque than most of his songs. The music has no variation, dragging around and around in a circle. It feels like the end of the night, after the party’s been dismantled and the bar’s been closed and everyone’s gone home except one last drunk couple, half-asleep and slow-dancing to music only they can hear. The song is a closed experience, and feels the way it does when, in loving one person, you are happy to shut down and ignore the rest of the vivid, pointless, crowded world that isn’t them. It’s not for the people listening, the people buying the album, playing it in their homes, playing it at parties and on the radio. It’s for one woman. The list is an accounting; in love we want to gather the object of our feeling to us, as though if we could know them well enough, could list them comprehensively, we could finally fully possess them. The repetition, starting over again and again, shows how we never quite do, how we always fail.

I grew up, got into college, left home, moved to New York, got laid, got stoned, fell in love, betrayed people, left people and was left, hurt people and was hurt. Eventually I did all the things Dylan whines about on Blonde on Blonde. I never stopped listening to the album. When I finally did get stoned, it never felt enough like “Rainy Day Woman No.s 12 & 35.” Every time I take any kind of drug, I hope this time it will. But it never has, and being in love has never felt quite like “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” either. Not that the songs were incorrect about the experiences, and not that the experiences have been unspectacular or lacking. But that, spectacular as they may have been, they never lived up to the Dylan songs that had first imagined them for me.

I tend to share albums and songs with the people I date, and therefore tend to lose a lot of music in breakups. I have ruined every single song and album and band and artist I have ever loved by associating it with a relationship. Every single one except Blonde on Blonde.  Perhaps that’s happy accident, but I don’t think so. My relationship to the album is already a complete relationship, in and of itself. Not only does it not need a flesh-and-blood relationship to link itself to, I don’t think it has space for one. I think the things we love most, we don’t want anyone else to understand. We are selfish with them as with the people we love, feeling that we will dilute their importance through sharing.

The way Blonde on Blonde sounds is what we miss about the people we love but choose to leave anyway, what we never get over about them. A friend of mine would say, much later, Bob Dylan made her feel like she’d known her Dad when he was young. When she told me this, I’d realize, perhaps just a little, why my Dad had bought six CDs on a train ride from Boston to New Haven and told me not to talk to him until I had an opinion about them. This is literally the music of my parents’ past, but it’s also the music of the things we can’t quite share with people, the attempt to make someone part of your past despite the fact that they can’t ever quite understand your past because they weren’t there. This album makes me feel like I knew my parents when they were young, and at the same time reminds me how much I didn’t, how much I can’t ever know what their life was like before me. When you love someone, it becomes painful that you weren’t part of their past, that they weren’t part of yours. This album is the attempt to make someone part of a past experience by telling them about it, the attempt to enter someone’s past by listening closely enough to the stories about it. We build our expectations of love, of getting stoned, of any life experience, from someone else’s stories. Those stories are always fictions. When we encounter the actual experience in our own life, the distance between it and the expectation is always present. This album manages to be an expression of that omnipresent distance, the ache and comfort at the center of it, raucous and elegiac, passed down imperfectly through generations.

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In his new collection of essays, Listen to This, Alex Ross writes about the type of person I was five years ago. I was what the crusaders for classical music call a “culturally aware non-attender.” I talked about Virginia Woolf as if she were my girlfriend. Björk made me swoon. I nearly wept at my first Radiohead concert. I could kill the mood with a discussion about the mise-en-scène in European art films. But if you asked me about Gustav Mahler, I would roll my eyes. Classical music smelled of mothballs and elitism—why attend a performance with a bunch of folks who wear tweed and love early-bird specials?

Ross uses the techniques of memoir, journalism, and criticism to remind us that music is music. He profiles subjects such as Björk, Bob Dylan, and Radiohead, and reexamines the work of Verdi, Brahms, Mozart, and Schubert. There are also histories of music recordings and, in one of the collection’s best essays, a genealogy of the lamenting bass line of Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused” that goes back four centuries. Whether the music is classical or popular, Ross urges us to search for the moments when the familiar becomes strange.

In the title essay, Ross describes his evolution as a music lover. He grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, but at heart he was a child of the 1930s and 1940s, the decades when classical music was at its middlebrow peak. Instead of Pink Floyd and Dylan, he listened to Mahler and Beethoven. The formative album of his musical life was not Dark Side of the Moon or Blood on the Tracks; it was Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony. The music begins in the key of E-flat but, ten seconds in, a C-sharp “waylays” the main theme. Leonard Bernstein described the moment as “stab of intrusive otherness.” To a modern listener the note is not, as Ross admits, the shock it once was; on first listen you won’t clutch your chest and spill your wine on the carpet. But that brief and elusive C-sharp goes to the heart of Ross’s pursuit as a critic: He is always looking to relive that moment of surprise.

Alex Ross

Those moments are most evident in his essays about “popular” music. When Björk was recording her album Medúlla, Ross visited the singer in Reykjavik and Salvador and New York. He gives us an overview of her career, but as he searches for the signposts that lead to her otherness the essay grows lyrical; it’s no surprise that his search leads to classical music. He settles on her untrained voice, which he compares to that of Maria Callas, the famous opera singer. Björk, like Callas, has the uncanny ability to combine “precision of pitch with force of feeling.” Her uniqueness lies in her voice’s flexibility. At its extremes, it can evoke the purity of a choirboy and the growl of a lion. Björk is an exceptional singer who can convey a variety of emotions in a single breath, but it’s the slight imperfection of her voice—the trembling ‘rrrrrrrr’—that makes hearts thump.

Ross’s approach is all the more refreshing because so many writers have a tendency to lead discussions away from the music. Mozart, for example, has fallen victim to psychology, with scholars, biographers, and musicologists long arguing about the composer’s personality and its effect on his music. Does it really matter if Mozart was a genius or an outcast, a punk, a hooligan, or a tortured soul? In an effort to move beyond the myths, Ross spent three months listening to Mozart. As a result, the music becomes a “storm of style” in which comedy and tragedy, happiness and despair, and the sacred and the profane, coexist as one.

The Mozart essay shows how Ross’s obligations as a journalist strengthen his skills as an essayist. Unlike, say, a scholar who traces the use of E-flat throughout Mozart’s oeuvre, Ross, a staff writer for The New Yorker, blends in info about the composer’s background and biography, in that way appealing to both the novice and the expert. He summarizes and synthesizes information, as any journalist does, always veering from the general to the specific—and ending at the music.

And he’s at his best when he ventures into memoir and expresses what other critics choose to avoid. Music is emotional, and so too is criticism. In an essay about the evolution of recorded music and its impact on performance, he ends with an impassioned list of both live and recorded music that had an emotional impact on him. From the 400 singers in Mahler’s Eighth Symphony to the six musicians who played in a church under an Austrian twilight, to his LPs of Beethoven’s Eroica and Mahler’s Sixth, music is Ross’s autobiography.

Listen to This, as implied by its title, is a declaration. Its goal is to collapse the distinctions between the old and the new. Ross is an evangelist for serious music that stirs the emotions in strange ways. He shows that respect for the past can increase enthusiasm for the present. An appreciation for Messiaen or Stravinsky can enhance your understanding of Radiohead. A love of Maria Callas can increase your adoration of Björk. Music isn’t an either/or game, and music criticism should move beyond categories and classifications to focus on the moments when sameness gives way to otherness.

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How I Became a Music Critic

At age 19, I was assigned to review Bob Dylan in concert, despite the fact that I had very little sense of who Bob Dylan was. I was doing a summer internship at my hometown paper, and the regular critic had fallen ill.

So it was off to the library, where people went before God invented the Internet, and where I discovered that Dylan had recorded 150 albums.

The show was at the Shoreline Amphitheater, a venue built atop a landfill in Mountain View. Dylan had just released Knocked Out Loaded and would soon join the Traveling Wilburys. It was not a good time for him, though I didn’t know that. I found a seat on the grass and started scribbling adjectives that seemed to bear some relation to the songs he was performing, the names of which I didn’t know. I also included observations of significant physical detail, such as, “Dylan stares at crowd” and “Dylan turns away from crowd” and “Dylan appears to need a blood transfusion.”

I had no technical training as a musician. Had I been quizzed on the meaning of the word glissando I would have answered (with some confidence, I’m afraid) “a type of fancy ice cream.” Not to be confused with vibrato, which was a gynecological instrument.

If this sounds absurd, consider the proposition that greeted me when I arrived at the El Paso Times two years later, fresh from college. Would I like to be the paper’s music critic? Of course I would. It was like being handed a license without having to take any exams, a license that granted me front-row tickets to all the big concerts and phone interviews during which I could indulge in the fantasy that, for example, Edie Brickell and I really were pals, based on our intense twenty-minute tête-à-tête, and that she really meant it when she urged me to stop by her trailer “to say hey,” and that if things went well in her trailer – which they very well might, thanks to my dazzling prose and chestal pelt – we would wind up engaged in a sweaty duet on top of an amp, an indiscretion she’d try to write off as a fling except that she’d be unable to forget that tall, virile music critic from the West Texas town of El Paso, meaning more breathy phone calls, more visits, an eventual leak to the press, and a clandestine elopement captured by People magazine. As it is, Brickell wound up married to Paul Simon, a man much shorter than myself.

Did it ever occur to me to learn more about music? Not really. I worked for a Gannett paper. The whole point was to write at a fifth-grade level.

Am I making excuses for being such a lazy and frankly suckass reviewer in El Paso? Yes. But I was also, in my own frankly suckass way, up against an ontological dilemma: the description of one sort of language (physical, auditory, intuitive) by another (abstract, intellectual, symbolic).

Talented critics can, of course, describe music with sonic precision. Take, for example, this passage from Sasha Frere-Jones’s review of the Canadian singer Feist in The New Yorker, a magazine I keep stored in my bathroom for research purposes:

The song is built around Feist’s vigorous acoustic-guitar strum: she plays like a street busker, strong on the downstroke and evenly loud. A three-note motif on a glockenspiel and an organ runs through the song, softening the forward motion of the guitar. In a short chorus, the guitar stops and Feist sings harmony with herself: “Ooh, I’ll be the one who’ll break my heart, I’ll be the one to hold the gun.” Then Gonzales plays a rising and falling two-note ostinato on the piano, subtly coloring the song. The accretion of felicitous musical details is typical of the album’s smart, unfussy arrangements.

Frere-Jones is certainly not messing around. He covers instrumentation, performance style, and lyrical content. True, he risks losing those of us who are musical dolts, but it certainly didn’t kill me to look up the word ostinato, which means “a musical phrase persistently repeated at the same pitch” and which I plan to incorporate into every discussion I have for the next ten years. The real problem here is emotional. The prose, for all its technical fidelity, conveys almost nothing about what the music feels like.

Consider the famous chord progression that Angus Young plays at the beginning of “Back in Black.” A good writer could tell us about those grinding, seismic chords, the distinct rhythm of their deployment, even that sly, arpeggiated little five-note lick that acts as a segue from one volley to the next. But those are just pale approximations of what it feels like to hear that intro, the squirt of sinister glee that makes most people – even decent religious folk – reach for their air guitar.

Now consider the rest of the song: the rhythmic structures (bassline, drums), Brian Johnson’s howling vocal, harmonic and tonal relationships, etc. But okay, let’s say you’ve taken your Rock Crit Steroids and you’re able to describe all these elements. How, then, do you convey the simultaneity of all that noise, the blissful riot of sound we experience as a singular thing (the song)? But okay, okay, let’s say you’ve taken your Rock Crit Steroids for years, you’re the Barry Bonds of Rock Crit, and so you manage to get this, too. You’d still be left with the Basic and Insoluble Crisis of Melody: words cannot be made into notes. And even if you somehow magically solved that crisis (which you couldn’t) you’d still be missing what it feels like for a particular fan to hear a particular song (let alone songs, let alone in concert) because this involves a collaboration between the music and the fan’s own needs: his or her own lust for joy, sorrow, power, rage, sex, and – oh what the hell – hope.

The closest I came to grappling with the Rock Crit Paradox was at an MC Hammer concert. I stood beneath the stage watching Hammer twitch in his weird Sinbad jodhpurs while a battalion of dancers in identical Sinbad jodhpurs replicated his every twitch. Hammer barked lyrics about jewelry and torture. The melodies, sampled from bubblegum hits, affixed themselves to the artillery of drum machines. Lights popped and scrolled. Sparks vomited from some invisible portal. It was like watching an ad for a delicious soda that makes people want to commit murder. But then I looked at the people around me, there in the fifth row of the Pan Am Center in Las Cruces, New Mexico. They were all dancing wildly. Hooting at the sweaty-boobed flygirls and barking along with Hammer and (without even realizing it) mimicking little Hammerish flourishes: the frenetic Egyptian jazz hands and his mincing bucklestep. These people were plugged into a powerful communal experience. They didn’t look upon MC Hammer as a musical huckster, but an entertainer of the first rank and maybe even, in a sense, a prophet of self-assertion, proof that any man endowed with sufficient determination – no matter how meagerly endowed with talent – might gain trespass into the kingdom of fame. Yes, I was stoned.

Still, it was clear my fellow congregants were having a radically different experience from the assigned critic. So I wrote two reviews that night, which ran side by side the next morning: one from my perspective (i.e. one that cold-cocked Hammer) and one from the perspective of the fans (i.e. one that fellated Hammer). This struck me as perhaps the cleverest thing anyone on earth had ever done. Pleasantly, copies of the reviews don’t exist to contradict me.

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This is an excerpt from the book “Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life” (which we love). For more about the book, go to StevenAlmond.com.

***

Read “Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life #1.”

Read “Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life #2.”

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“I never stay in hotels,” Craigie says.  “Not when my fans are always willing to offer up their homes for the night.  It’s a much more personal experience for both of us.”

For the last six years, Craigie has lived the life of a troubadour poet, sojourning across the country on an odyssey that has covered 49 of the 50 US states (only because you can’t drive to Hawaii).  Averaging about 200 shows a year — mostly bars, coffee shops and yes, living rooms — Craigie travels from town to town armed with little more than a banjo, a ukelele, an assortment of harmonicas, and of course, his signature painted guitar.

“I know what you’re thinking, and no, I didn’t paint it myself,” Craigie is quick to clarify.  Covered in trees, rainbows, peace symbols and butterflies, the guitar has been by John’s side since he started performing back in 2002, when he was a student at UC Santa Cruz. “A group of my fans painted it after a house-concert one night.  It kinda spiraled out of control.  But they were all having so much fun, I just let them go at it.”

The story of his painted guitar’s origin is a perfect analogy for what makes John Craigie such a special performer — there’s a give-and-take between Craigie and his fans that’s uncommon among modern performers.  One of his most popular new songs, the hilarious “Chuck Norris’ Tears Cure Cancer (But Too Bad He Never Cries)” was written ten minutes before a show in Columbia, MO, with lyrics cribbed from the many Internet sites dedicated to charting the alleged powers of the ersatz Texas Ranger.  “I was joking with some fans after a show that I’d basically written a song about everything under the sun.  Someone asked ‘What about Chuck Norris?’  I said ‘Yes, of course,’ thinking we were still joking.  Six months later, I’m back in Columbia, and before the show I get like five requests to play my Chuck Norris song!  So I snuck backstage and googled ‘Chuck Norris’ and wrote the song during the opening act.”

It’s those off-the-beaten path towns, like Columbia, Sandpoint, Idaho and Rapid City, South Dakota that are Craigie’s bread and butter.  “I’ve got some dedicated fans in the small towns.”  Craigie says.  “Last year I played a show during a flood Aberdeen, South Dakota.  2 feet of water and they closed the streets so cars could not come.  About two songs in, as I was singing to the drenched collective who had made it early, and a guy burst through the doors, soaking wet.  We all looked over at him and he yelled ‘I fucking swam here!’ Some people are big in Japan, but let me tell you, I’m huge in South Dakota.”

Those smaller towns, the ones that don’t see many musicians passing through — let alone a musician who will hang out and lead a sing along of Beatles tunes after the show — really seem to thrive on Craigie’s Folk/Americana sound, hilarious storytelling and intimate live performances.  And Craigie thrives on meeting each and every one of them.  His nation of fans has been cultivated slowly, one new friend at a time.  In an age when many bands spend their off-hours adding hordes of strangers on MySpace, Craigie estimates he personally knows 75-80% of his MySpace and Facebook friends.  “You can’t drive to the next town and surf the internet at the same time,” he says.  “So I let the people add me.  Usually the day after a show there will be all the new friends I met the night before waiting for me online.”

It’s his solo show — equal parts Bob Dylan and Mitch Hedberg — that usually wins over the converts.  On any given night, a John Craigie show can range from hilarity to pathos and back again.  The performer expertly intertwines humorous songs, like the aforementioned “Chuck Norris” and “Talking American Idol Blues” (which charts John’s ill-fated attempt to try out for the popular singing competition), comic banter bits like “Do Water into Wine” (a musing about how Jesus’ wedding day miracle must have been “like his Freebird”), and poignant songs and stories of the heartbreak and longing, like  “Down the Tracks” and “Portland Basement,” which are culled from his years of travelling.

“It’s the blessing and the curse of life on the road,” Craigie says.  “You meet all these amazing people in each town you stop at, but in the morning, you’re off to the next town.  It’s bittersweet, but I know I’ll see them again the next time I’m passing through.”

Back in his home state of California, Craigie is taking a rare break from touring and preparing to record his sixth studio album this month.  After that, it back to the road for another couch-surfing, cross country trek.  “Half the time I’ll roll into a town not knowing where I’m going to stay after the show,” Craigie admits.  “Maybe at an old friends’ house, or maybe a new one.  You never know what’s going to happen.  But it always works out.  And that’s why I love this life so much.”

“Chuck Norris’ Tears Cure Cancer (But Too Bad He Never Cries)”

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