0 Beach Boys, "California Girls" (1965)

Aug. 7, 1965, #3
(listen)

"California Girls" appealed to me first for the pro forma geographical name-checking in the lyrics, a version of Chuck Berry's original strategy in "Sweet Little Sixteen," like ticking off boxes on a medical form: "East Coast girls are hip ... Southern girls with the way they talk ... Northern girls with the way they kiss," etc. But it's much more than a lyrical schema that appealed to a 10-year-old. The grand production, which opens so big on the chorus, is hard to miss even across staticky AM radio. Coming at the top of their game, "California Girls" remains one of the absolute best by the Beach Boys. The instrumental section reportedly took 44 takes to get, more evidence for Brian Wilson the mad genius who knew very well exactly what he was doing. What I didn't know until recently is that the song is also partly a result of an LSD experience, Wilson's first trip actually, during which he hammered out much of the musical framework (Mike Love also made contributions, evidently unconnected with LSD). I like "California Girls" for sentimental reasons, because it reminds me a lot of the first summer I spent listening to AM radio, down to specific images and experiences. But it's also a great example of the group's deceptive complexity. Modeled self-consciously on the Drifters' very fine "On Broadway," it's simple enough rock 'n' roll on one level, as filtered through Nik Cohn's concept of the high school years of the early '60s—it's not hard to believe the singer really wished they all could be California girls. But it is also rich with melody, sophistication, and production technique. Like the ocean they lived next to and reflexively exalted, in the fullness of time it beats you down to sand.

Detail: Beach Boys, "California Girls" (1965)

0 Shirley Bassey, "Goldfinger" (1965)

Feb. 27, 1965, #8
(listen)

True confession: I have never much cared for James Bond movies. But I love the music, and this song, by this artist, could well be the best of it. Welsh singer Shirley Bassey (who sang two more Bond themes nearly as good, "Diamonds Are Forever" and "Moonraker") was named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth in 1999, but don't hold that against her. She had to work hard to get this in the can. According to Wikipedia the monumental operatic note she hits and holds toward the end required her to remove her bra and nearly caused her to pass out. But by the time the all-night recording session wrapped they didn't have just a massive worldwide hit, but an iconic and indelible moment in spy, movie, and music history. The soaring, walloping two-note orchestral figure at the open, now the very signature of Bond music, was invented by John Barry on the spot in the middle of the session. Speaking of Barry, of course, there's your real auteur here, a veteran of movie music and the author of no fewer than 11 Bond soundtracks from the Sean Connery era on to 1987. Barry created a distinctive mood and sound still imitated by anyone attempting to concoct Bond themes (up to and including the recent reboot franchise with Daniel Craig, which has otherwise extruded so much of the old-school foofaraw). Still, all due credit to Barry, it is Dame Bassey who is responsible for much of the overwhelming power on display here. I love her ultra-precise diction and the cold way she spits it out. It's grim and spooky and swell. It's the essence of what made spy movies of the day so winning, and it always sounds good.

Detail: Shirley Bassey, "Goldfinger" (1965)

0 The Sound of Music (1965)

USA, 174 minutes
Director: Robert Wise
Writers: George Hurdalek, Howard Lindsay, Russel Crouse, Ernest Lehman, Maria von Trapp
Photography: Ted D. McCord
Music: Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II, Irwin Kostal
Editor: William Reynolds
Cast: Julie Andrews, Christopher Plummer, Richard Haydn, Eleanor Parker, Peggy Wood, Anna Lee, Marni Nixon, Angela Cartwright

At some point I realized that 1965 was going to be a critical juncture in this ongoing Movie of the Year project. It was the year I personally became aware of "going out to the movies" as an activity that meant something specific, and special, although parental accompaniment—or at least permission and transport—were still necessarily involved. I'm thus aware that my choice is something of a sentimental one, as seeing The Sound of Music was precisely a mandatory family activity, in the same year that I discovered top 40 radio and that the Beatles' Help! was released. I resented The Sound of Music then, rejected it as corny, and never looked back until a few years ago, when it somehow got in front of me again (also probably for sentimental reasons, with the death of my father looming). Programming note: It is also the last one I will be offering in the series for a little while, as I increasingly feel the need to research what's ahead for the early '60s, '50s, and back—March or April next year is my target for resuming, with 1964. From here on, all picks will come from retrospect, so I'm indulging one last opportunity for a movie I saw in its time, though my feelings about it are somewhat complicated.

Actually, in that later viewing, there was a particular moment that decisively turned me around on The Sound of Music, which for something like two hours I watched alternating between groaning and wincing and, surprisingly often, thinking, "Hey, this isn't so bad." When I realized the song "Something Good" was not only in the movie, but came from it, I fell in line. I had come to love the homely mystical approach of that song (both musical and lyrical) by way of a Caetano Veloso cover version of it in 2004. Coming at a swooning romantic high point of the picture, I was done. That was it. Even Julie Andrews capering about as dim bulb nun and mountain meadow maid (it has to bear some responsibility for The Flying Nun, yes?), with those magnificent snow-capped Alps peaks in the backdrop, convinced me now. I made my peace. The hills are alive, see.



In so doing, in giving in not just to a blatant musical, but to that most blatant of all musicals, the '60s musical, I realize I have gone through a looking-glass. Probably for reasons of technology and economics, '60s musicals metastasized the whole interpenetrated song and dance thing with the visuals and narrative to absurd degrees rarely seen so routinely before or since. The music churns and washes up in multiple ways, getting into everything. It is diegetic and not, sometimes within the same scenes and songs. At a casual meeting in a magnificent stone vestibule, for example, the nuns work up six-part harmony with full invisible orchestral accompaniment on "How do you solve a problem like Maria?" When Maria comes rushing in because she's always late for everything, of course, they quickly stop and have a comic exchange with the echoes of the vestibule heard. When Maria leaves again the full invisible orchestra is back and so are the singing nuns. Or there are moments, as in cars, when a single line is sung, and sounds like a studio production, and then back to the natural sound interior of the car.

I love how much some of the principals hated this movie, even as they worked on it—notably Christopher Plummer, the co-star, and director Robert Wise, who wrings the saccharine from this with abandon, rapaciously robbing the vault of totemic cinema with explicit references to Casablanca and Grand Illusion among many other great sins. But it works, it works! Plummer's venom for the property takes the form in his performance of a perfectly modulated loathing of Nazis, and who doesn't hate Nazis! Wise's larcenies have the paradoxical effect of bringing great dignity to the foofaraw, right when it needs it most, and can get away with it best, in its last third.

Because another point where The Sound of Music is undeniably strong is its rampaging narrative, which goes where it will. Mostly it plays as an insipid romantic comedy musical that is busy with charming incident for two hours or so, which works well enough for me because I'm partial to romantic comedies. Then it disposes of the romantic comedy with the happy ending of a spectacular fairy tale wedding (the invisible orchestra sawing away variations on "Maria")—remember that among its many weaker points The Sound of Music is a story of vastly privileged white people. And then it pivots seamlessly into a musical thriller about Nazis, with a very good tale of escape and/or hiding from Nazis, which of course is a basic staple of Nazi movies and stories, starting with Anne Frank.

For as good as the ending of The Sound of Music is, it does take some time getting there. It must be said clearly that you are in for a baggy, loose narrative overflowing with schmaltz in The Sound of Music. I hope this does not come as too much of a surprise. There's no end of wince-worthy mugging and pratfalls and adorable children in the long story of recalcitrant nincompoop Maria leaving the convent to become a governess of seven children, where she is a spectacular and beautiful success, not least because she knows how to put on a song and dance show. Their father (Plummer) is a widower and a mighty fine military sea captain (that's why the Nazis insist he stay), a proud not to say jingoistic Austrian not happy to see the developments in his homeland and, oh yeah, he's pretty handy with a guitar too. There's a lot of mangling of history here, so probably best to look away from the details. As always, rely on the appearance of the swastika to quickly distinguish the players. As for the length, think of it as a long hot soapy bath. Sing along, as inclined.

Top 10 of 1965
1. Repulsion
2. The Sound of Music
3. Fists in the Pocket
4. For a Few Dollars More
5. The Collector
6. Bunny Lake Is Missing
7. King Rat
8. Red Beard
9. Pierrot le fou
10. Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines

Detail: The Sound of Music (1965)

0 Out of Our Heads (1965)

(Misbegotten first attempt here. Main song here.)

The Rolling Stones re-discovered Chicago Blues at a time when Muddy Waters was painting ceilings for a living. (Patrick King, Amazon review, 2006)

For my purposes, Out of Our Heads stands in for all five of the first Rolling Stones albums, staunch and enduring classics each one: with England's Newest Hitmakers, 12 X 5 (photo session for which used again here), The Rolling Stones, Now! and December's Children (and Everybody's). Stick all five in a CD changer, set up the playlist shuffle in digital, and see for yourself. The quality across the 60 songs (and various outtakes, demos, and whatnot) rarely flags, rarely falls below anything less than first-rate. I'm talking here about the US version of Out of Our Heads, but I'm not particularly splitting hairs over US and UK versions—it matters, I know, but that's what Wikipedia is for. This is approximately where the scope opens up regardless.

The playing is all in place, notably evident on the live track, "I'm All Right," which briefly reveals the dimensions of what all they were up to in performance too, and it's remarkable. Rhythm section sewn up tight and perfectly unconscious, the dancing prancing singer Mick Jagger working out his repertoire of stylistic conceits, and the guitar players Brian Jones and Keith Richards, defining fundamentals of the practicing rock band. On some levels it almost sounds ordinary now, perhaps from the overexposure, but even under withering scrutiny over the years it bears an indefinable magic spark. The music speaks for itself.

Recorded in Hollywood, Chicago, London.... We hope that this album gets you OUT OF your HEADS listening to it, as we got making it. (Andrew Loog Oldham, liner notes, 1965)

Talk about attack: Out of Our Heads was the third of four albums released by the Rolling Stones in the US in 1965. It included two of their biggest hits, later worn to nubs on oldies stations and elsewhere: "The Last Time" (#9 in the spring) and "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" (#1 for four weeks in the summer). They are great songs, of course—"Satisfaction" is arguably their greatest—and likely the reason the album became the band's first US #1.

Out of Our Heads is my go-to of the early handful from the expedient of living with it. It didn't hurt that it featured "Satisfaction"—that was one for playing over and over, which led to favoring the second side of the album where it was the first song. My brother got the album as a birthday gift the same year it was released. It scared me a little—their faces were put right in ours on the cover, and the music tended to be as dark as that cover, sultry, preening, brisk and economical, and infinitely grown-up somehow. And what did they mean "out of our heads"?

In the early R & B phase, they were wildly exciting but also crude, derivative, very limited, and they shaped up only as a short-term craze. But then, just as things were wearing thin, Jagger and Keith Richards suddenly upped and exploded as writers. Out of nowhere, they started churning out monsters.... All that mattered was the new sound—an adapted Spectorsound but less symphonic, less inflated—and the murderous mood it made. (Nik Cohn, Rock From the Beginning, 1969)

Out of Our Heads is actually majority originals. On the second side they are a supermajority, 5-1. The three best songs on the album are on that side—"Satisfaction," "Play With Fire," and "The Spider and the Fly"—and they are all originals. But the covers are not to be neglected either. The choice of artists alone is another kind of audacious by our present standards: Sam Cooke ("Good Times," a #15 hit for Cooke just the year before), Marvin Gaye ("Hitch Hike," Gaye's first hit, a #30 in 1960), and Otis Redding ("That's How Strong My Love Is"), plus Solomon Burke ("Cry to Me") and Don Covay ("Mercy, Mercy," a #35 hit the year before). As producer and PR man Andrew Loog Oldham mentions, the locations for recording sessions included the Chess Records studio in Chicago. These cats were getting around.

Out of Our Heads has a foot in the past and a foot in a past future. It's that old now. The majority of pop albums of the time were still mostly collections built around one hit single original with 11 covers of other hits of the day. But the Stones, following the Beatles lead (and Bob Dylan, of course), appeared to know what was coming, or they rewrote the rules book expressly to change that. Some of their covers are hits, some are not, and none are exactly by preapproved artists for a band of white British wannabes, except that rule got changed too approximately here. Essential.

Detail: Out of Our Heads (1965)

0 Rubber Soul (1965)

(Previous cryptic comments on UK version here.)

Another way to divide my narrow little world: those who believe Rubber Soul properly kicks off with "Drive My Car," as found on the UK version, and those who believe it starts with "I've Just Seen a Face," on the US. Neither song appears on the other version, which is part of what makes this debate so intractable. And each song frames what follows differently, though the great majority of what follows is nearly identical, only shuffled about a bit and with a few additions or deletions. Suffice to say: the lean studied exuberance of "Face" leads off an album I like quite a bit more than the one that starts with a honking shambolic limo fantasy. Earlier this year the collective marketing geniuses behind 50 years of united Beatles mess finally closed one circle and released some 13 US versions of Beatles albums on CD (with the inevitable box set of all of them), for which I was humbly grateful, welcoming back an old friend. (I recently learned the hard way that trying to work with the tags and labels of digital music is harder and less rewarding than you would think.) The distinction between the two versions has turned out to be critically important to me. In fact, when it comes to the UK versions, I think I even understand better the other side of another issue that divides my world, preferring Revolver to Rubber Soul. But Rubber Soul—the US version—is one of the first albums I really knew and it has always been a good deal more than a collection of songs. For me, for various reasons, it feels like no less than the Beatles at their absolute best, inventing a kind of chamber pop music full of moods and shadings, inventive yet simple, charming but never shallow, insinuating itself well into the grains of my life, and forever listenable.



My parents gave me Rubber Soul for my 11th birthday in 1966, which is the album I had asked them for. They were relieved it was the right Beatles album because they had not been able to make out the title for the proto-psychedelic lettering of the brown blob in the upper left corner. They also gave me an anthology of horror short stories, which they knew I liked. I have a birthdate that falls early in the month of March, and many years, especially when I was a kid, it cast a kind of glow over the whole month, which is otherwise useless. That year was a notable example as I immediately retired to my bedroom in all my leisure hours, playing the album front to back to front to back and reading the stories.

The stories leaned toward established classics with a literary veneer. I don't remember all the titles but there were things by Poe, Henry James, and Ambrose Bierce, along with "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Open Window" by Saki, "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell, "The Monkey's Paw" by W.W. Jacobs, perhaps "A Distant Episode" by Paul Bowles. My own preferences happened to be for even more shocking fare, with twist endings—e.g., Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life"—but anything that was weird and macabre would do.

Years later I came to realize how deeply impressed by the album and book both together I was. At some point the track sequencing of the album became so familiar that I could hear the beginnings of next songs in the ends of many—even still felt disembodied stirrings to flip a record after hearing "Michelle" and "Run for Your Life"—and many of the moods of the stories were compressed into the music as well. This is no doubt part of the reason I keep making such a big deal out of the versions. When you expect to hear "Think for Yourself" following on the ending strains of "You Won't See Me," and what you get is "Nowhere Man"—which does not belong on Rubber Soul (though it does, and I understand why)—it's naturally upsetting to a certain sense of the order of things. The stories and songs began to interpenetrate more and more.

"The Yellow Wallpaper" is one example, first published in 1892 and now considered a milestone of feminist literature. It's actually a rather long story that takes the form of journal entries by a woman who has been confined by her husband, for the sake of some kind of recuperation, to a single bedroom. The door is locked, the windows barred, and she is forbidden books to read. Even the journal she keeps has to be secret. Gradually she goes mad, evinced by an ever more intense fascination with patterns she sees in the wallpaper of the room. I could lay there in my bed idly reading such a fevered narrative and I happened to have some wallpaper of my own I could look at and search for patterns. Then, perhaps, would come John Lennon singing the lovely song he wrote with Paul McCartney about a strange, tentative one-night stand, "Norwegian Wood": "She showed me her room / Isn't it good Norwegian wood." We are all looking at the walls now.

"Norwegian Wood" remains a solid candidate for the most memorable song of Rubber Soul, of course, and I think it's so good it's even managed to grow some in stature for me over the years. It's famous partly as the place where George Harrison's fascinations with Indian music and the sitar began to be felt, as a sitar is used—much like a Western instrument but adding a strange and wonderful texture. What I notice most about the song now is how artfully structured it is, poised and balanced almost like Japanese art, with a light but certain hand, words and music fitted together seamlessly. In 1987, in fact, a Japanese novel inspired in part by the song was published, Norwegian Wood, which was later made into a movie in 2010. Lennon wrote "Norwegian Wood" in part based on an affair he'd had, though he was at pains to hide that fact from his wife of the time, Cynthia, which accounts for the elliptical way the story proceeds. McCartney finished off the lyrics, making a strange situation even more so by making it sound as if a lover denied sex has burnt the place down in retribution. That is so at odds with the otherwise gentle and plaintive tone of the song as to be positively disorienting. For years I thought the perception had more to do with the stories I was reading than with anything objective in the song, but McCartney later owned up to it. "She led him on, then said, 'You'd better sleep in the bath,'" he told one interviewer. "In our world the guy had to have some sort of revenge." It cheapens the song, though the conflagration was actually the perfect note for me back in my room reading my book of stories and playing the album all the time.

Another story I read: "The Open Window" by Saki (H.H. Munro, a British writer), first published in 1914, a quick piece of stunt work, done in swift sure strokes. Stories by Saki often seem motivated by effect in the same ways as those of O. Henry, and Saki could work his elements cunningly, as the very short "The Open Window" shows. A young girl tells tales and things are not what they appear. The final result is something of a joke, but somehow with a sickening undertow. In my daydreamy hazes, I heard the end of the first side of Rubber Soul with this: Harrison's "Think for Yourself," the weirdly discombobulated "The Word" that followed it, and finally the soothing tones, veering off into incomprehension with the French, of "Michelle." They suit the Saki vibe. "You're telling all those lies," Harrison sings in "Think for Yourself." "Do what you want to do / And go where you're going to." Then "The Word," a wailing shouter it took Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison to concoct, injects a kind of unpleasant anarchy. The most vilified track on Rubber Soul has always been McCartney's "Michelle," which along with "Yesterday" is widely taken as McCartney's nadir (with the Beatles) of "silly love songs" and/or ample reason even not to take him seriously at all. I really don't have a problem with "Michelle" and never have—certainly it's a bit on the cloying side, but it is also disorienting and weird with the language shift and I like that. I see links in "Michelle" to concurrent European pop strains just then coalescing, part of a broader insinuation of pop song with image, practiced by the Beatles themselves (or director Richard Lester) in A Hard Day's Night. The film director Jean-Luc Godard put Chantal Goya in Masculin Feminin. David Lynch later picked up the mantle and extended it with Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Dr., and other films. By its very blandness and gorgeousness, there is something in "Michelle" of the unworldly conflation of beauty and horror. Or maybe that's the book I was reading.

It's hard not to overstate the impact of a record album as an artifact—at the time for a lot of people and certainly for me in my room. My door was closed, and I lay on the bed reading the book, and I would take breaks every 15 or 20 minutes to turn the album. Sometimes I wanted to look at the album instead of the book. The front and back were two different worlds, the front a color shot from a strange angle with a strange lens, a background of thick green foliage in shadow and the browns and blacks of the Beatles and their leather jackets. The back was more of a toss-off, a collection of black and white shots pasted up around the track listing. I was fascinated by the image of Paul smoking a cigarette, holding it in his mouth, eyes closed against the smoke which wreathes his face. The cigarette made it seem grown-up, sophisticated, and hardened. Then I considered the shot of George dressed as a cowboy, in vest and boots and jeans and cowboy hat. It annoyed me somehow. It was too cheeky. I preferred another shot of him with his head tilted, in shadow. And there was Ringo flaunting his rings. John peeking out from a bush.

Another story I read: "The Most Dangerous Game" by Richard Connell, first published in 1924, which I ran into later being taught in high school. There's something at once daring and safe about this story—daring in its willingness to embrace the taboo of premeditated murder as sport (and cannibalism and darker regions by implication), and safe in its assumption that the entertainment of such ideas will always be taken as provocative. Today it feels like the world the story was written in had to be safer just by its ability to be so easily shocked. The song I associated with it was the obvious one, that self-consciously very bad song by Lennon, "Run for Your Life"—I mean "very bad" in the transgressive, immoral, juvenile delinquent sense, which thrilled me very much. But it's also one of the few Beatles songs in their whole catalog that has aged most poorly, with that extremely unpleasant and very direct shot of misogyny at the center. But it was a high point for me at the time, I have to admit. It's got a great fast tempo, and it's tuff, and as the last song on the second side I was frequently inspired to stand up on my bed and jump up and down and then right then turn the record over and play it again. Reflex.

I should note that the tones and textures of these songs may arguably be too tight. Many seem almost interchangeable, or maybe that's something about the way I played the album. This was notably the case with "Think for Yourself." I have always been confused about which side of the album it belongs on and I have spoken with others who have the same confusion, and it's always this song—side 1, in case you were wondering. And I wonder sometimes if this isn't also related to missing "In My Life" almost entirely. More likely that's a song I needed to grow into. I think now it's almost certainly the most remarkable song on the album, the one the album should be known by if you had to pick one. It is an amazing song to have been written by a 25-year-old and 23-year-old, Lennon and McCartney, though they later disagreed on who did what and how much. No matter. Few songs anywhere so completely capture and define a feeling that lies on the far side of sentiment. Not nostalgia exactly—not nostalgia at all, I would argue—but simply a poignant awareness that time steals all things but memory, and memory finally fades too with the rememberer, and all that's left are artifacts such as these, and mysteries. The simple lines can be searing: "There are places I remember ... Some have gone and some remain ... Some are dead and some are living ... I know I'll often stop and think about them." The Lennon who'll often stop and think about them has been gone for decades but it's the Lennon I knew and loved best: idealistic, inevitably disappointed, wearing cynicism only as a shallow mask, a last-ditch shield. But holding close—he believed in love as much as any of them, maybe more. Though it may be all you need is love (an inferior song) in the end all we have is each other. That is the wisdom of "In My Life." I also think of it as one of the best examples of a Beatles collaboration. Lennon may be the primary author but he has entirely absorbed McCartney's affinity for gentle affection, and adapted it to his own pain. Fifth Beatle George Martin kicks in a lovely bridge and it's done. The best Beatles song on this album, one of the best they ever made, and only getting better to this day.

Detail: Rubber Soul (1965)

0 Repulsion (1965)

UK, 105 minutes
Director: Roman Polanski
Writers: Roman Polanski, Gerard Brach, David Stone
Photography: Gilbert Taylor
Music: Chico Hamilton
Editor: Alastair McIntyre
Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Ian Hendry, John Fraser, Patrick Wymark, Yvonne Furneaux

It's probably not right to call Repulsion a horror movie—it's much too arty and urbane for that. And in spite of a few (highly effective) shock cuts, the disquieting narrative turns are all too naturalistic in the context of mental illness. But I came out of the theater the first time I saw Repulsion with a feeling of desolation I could not shake, and overnight that turned into a case of food poisoning. In spite of the obvious cause, I blamed the movie and not the bad pork ribs and thought of my sickness as profoundly existential. The association has stuck. Repulsion is the kind of movie that inspires one to such things. In fact, it was so disturbing I was even unwilling to look at it again until recently.

It's the first picture in director and co-writer Roman Polanski's so-called "Apartment Trilogy," with Rosemary's Baby from 1968 (in many ways much more the conventional horror picture, because the fantasy might be real and the madness not) and The Tenant from 1976. The idea of a trilogy is a critical figment—I'm not sure anyone thinks Polanski consciously intended them that way—but the elements they share are obvious: isolated individuals lost in great anonymous metropolises slowly going cuckoo inside their apartments, which serve both as sanctuaries and as killing fields. The way they walk the streets, the way they look at the world through peepholes, the obnoxious neighbors, the phones ringing and no one on the other end. All three dwell inside the heads of their protagonists nearly as much as outside. Spoilers ahead.



In Repulsion, Catherine Deneuve plays Carol, a Belgian transplant to London who works as a manicurist and shares a flat with her sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux). Carol is painfully introverted, clearly overwhelmed by her environment, and trying to adjust to a life she doesn't understand. The picture is almost primitive, it's so simple, and it feels very much like a '60s art film, shot in high-contrast black and white, with a deliberate pace, sparse dialogue, unusual camera movements, and a surprisingly intricate sound design. Chico Hamilton's jazzy score sets a tone that at once highlights swinging London and somehow throws the disaffected anomie into sharp relief, subtly underscoring the nagging sense that something is very wrong.

Lots of things about Repulsion are insidiously familiar, a mark both of its influence and of the influences it absorbed. One nightmare scene looks like something out of Jean Cocteau, with disembodied arms grasping blindly from the walls of a dark narrow hallway. The rabbit carcass, which starts out as an entrée early in the picture for a dinner party abruptly canceled and then rots away in the kitchen of the apartment for the rest of the picture, looks like something from Eraserhead. A murder that occurs in the apartment feels like it could have been the model for the horrific murder in Heavenly Creatures. A bathroom scene looks and feels like Psycho. I also see many affinities with the Sissy Spacek character in Three Women. The street musicians feel like a Fellini or Truffaut gesture recontextualized.

The more I see Repulsion the more impressed I am with the sound design, which is busy but subtle. For example—and this is something that was used very well in The Tenant too—practically every disconnected strange sound anyone has ever heard inside a big apartment building makes an appearance here: slamming doors, an elevator clanging and rumbling, sex sounds from neighbors, a piano practicing, televisions, footsteps. At times, as in Carol's recurring nightmare of a home invasion, all sound drops out entirely, save for a ticking clock.

One very effective point is that Carol has a fascination with cracks and a horror of them—in sidewalks, in the walls of her apartment, by implication of course in her mind. It's an obvious but potent sexual charge. A lot of it is obvious on a Freudian level, but Polanski works it well, especially in the second half, as the walls crack wide with terrible scraping sounds.

It's all sexuality, of course. Carol appears to be profoundly sickened by physical intimacy, so when her sister's skeevy boyfriend Michael (Ian Hendry) starts staying overnight, leaving his things around the place, and making ambiguous plays for her, it represents a terrible crisis, and the downward spiral begins. When Helen and Michael make plans for a two-week holiday Carol objects to Helen leaving her alone in the apartment. She's afraid of something and we soon find out what.

This is where Repulsion is particularly effective, putting concrete images and sounds in front of us but obscuring the context. We see Carol struggling with her isolation in the apartment after Helen and Michael have left, but we only learn indirectly that she has actually lost three days altogether, where she didn't go to work and didn't call anyone. She barely seems to understand how much time has passed when she is trying to explain herself to her coworkers, and more and more she lapses into stupors.

Meanwhile, the apartment is becoming repugnant. In one panic Carol pulls kitchen shelves out of the cupboards and uses a brass candle holder to nail them across the doorway, attempting to barricade herself in. Late in the picture the apartment is a horror house—with the rabbit carcass and the human corpses, and the sound of flies buzzing, it's not hard at all to imagine how bad it smells.

And so it goes. It's not named Repulsion for nothing. But it is a little surprising how deeply perverse this movie turns out to be, almost deceptively so, while remaining reasonably innocuous on the surface. You know it's not going to be a fun ride, but it's still surprising what it can do.

Detail: Repulsion (1965)

0 Help! (1965)

(There's a less fragmented version here. And see also A Hard Day's Night, now with complete updates, here.)

More on the mess made by the marketing laboratories of early/mid-period Beatles. For the record, I am officially in sympathy with the Beatles who wanted to put chopped-up dolls and cuts of meat on the cover of the US-only Yesterday and Today. It's a travesty. At this point these UK track sequences can still be alienating too. (I still feel like someone midway in transition from a QWERTY to a Dvorak keyboard. It messes with my mind.) Example: WTF is "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" doing here? Or "Yesterday"? They are less like albums (let alone soundtracks) and more like collections of songs that sometimes clump. For this album, the first seven tracks also appeared in the movie and on the US version of the soundtrack. To me they are the core of Help! and then there are some pretty good random Beatles songs and/or weird soundtrack blurts, depending on the version you have or know or prefer. In short: Help! I need somebody.



"Help!"

"The Night Before"—This Paul McCartney song opens up the world of 1965 Beatles proper, behind the hits, among other things making a good start to a puppy love song project, which seems to inform so many songs here. Of course, it was always love, love, love with these guys—if only because ultimately it's the major theme of pop music itself—but the flavors and approaches changed a lot, perhaps nowhere so plain and deliberately as on this otherwise innocuous "soundtrack" album. After years of touring, years of songwriting and studios, years of a train and a room, a car and a room, and a room and a room, they were evidently in the mood for novelty in their songwriting. Point of view, balance of power, the particularity of unique situations—they played with all these elements, with their usual energy and abandon. On "The Night Before," for example, the point of view belongs to the boy, who wants his girl back. She has the balance of power now, but only, perhaps, because he thought he had it in the first place, and was wrong. Which only makes it worse for the foolish singer: "Love was in your eyes ["eye-hee-izz"], ahh, the night before / Now today I find you have changed your mind / Treat me like you did the night before," he begs her helplessly. The chug-chug tempo might be slow (a continuing problem actually with many of the songs on this album) but the point is made, and then the guitar solo by Paul McCartney is made (which Wikipedia characterizes as "terse and stabbing"), and then the point is made again. Give me back my yesterday!

"You've Got to Hide Your Love Away"—Influenced by Bob Dylan and the coming of folk music, this John Lennon song is considered by many, including Paul McCartney, as Lennon simply doing a Dylan impersonation. I don't much hear it that way myself—for one thing, Dylan would never use the fruity flute solo at the break—but OK, sure, the influence is apparent enough. The Beatles more or less gave this song away to another UK act, the Silkie, who made a #10 hit out of their faithful cover in the fall of 1965. Overall its sentiments may be more mature than other songs in the puppy love song project. The object of adoration is nowhere in sight. The singer has been abandoned, and boy, is he bummed. His opinion of how to proceed from here? Denial. Pretend it didn't happen, pretend you aren't feeling the feelings you're feeling, and fob the blame off on "the world" (society) for the necessity of such repressions. Yes, it's only levels of petulance, thus perhaps not really so mature after all, nor that far removed from teen boy and girl concerns. But it's also one of the loveliest songs in their catalog, flute solo and all, convincing because it is so careful and deliberate and stays so close to the sadness. The aggressive macho Lennon everyone forgets is here replaced with the self-pitying Lennon who bleats honesty for betterment of the world. As a conceptual understanding of Lennon that's a bit overdone, but one of its clearest sources is here in this song.

"I Need You"—A George Harrison song, and a very good one, looking forward to Rubber Soul in its way as much as "Tell Me What You See" does, later on this album. One key hook of "I Need You" is the strange, backward-sounding noise Harrison makes on his guitar using a volume pedal—it seems to push against the direction of the song, like a car skidding against wet pavement into sand. That reminds me I should say again that all these songs have the general headlong momentum of the Beatles during this period, the canny and unexpected ways of stitching together pop music. "I Need You" also has a pensive feel to it, which fits the lyrical thrust nicely. In terms of the puppy love song project, "I Need You" falls in the more conventional bin, though perhaps marked by more vulnerability and openness than usual. The point of view is the boy's, and the balance of power falls to the girl. She has left and he wants her back, but he knows he has no hold on her. The song is a plea—for attention, for pity, for anything he can get. It's only about a notch above groveling. Thus the extremities of it, the honesty (searing or otherwise—it's never really moved me much that way), set it apart some. The circumstances and situation described are familiar—make that overfamiliar—to pop songs. But it's the Beatles from arguably their best period, it's George Harrison figuring out how to write Beatles songs, and it has hooks and an endearing mood. It's a winner, that's all.

"Another Girl"—This song and the next are where I was first alerted to the puppy love song project of the core songs in Help!, maybe because they both use the word "girl" in the title and present such strikingly different narratives. "Another Girl" is a Paul McCartney song but not exactly a "silly love song." In fact, it's a good deal like a John Lennon song in attitude. The point of view and the upper hand in this song both belong to the boy, who boasts aggressively to his girlfriend that he can leave her any time (because he has got ... "Another Girl"). Typically, the edge is filed off the dominating sentiment—it's puppy love, remember—by retreating to a more upbeat, positive, even gentle message, meant to distract. The girl addressed may not be a good girl (she's making the singer say he's got nobody but her), whereas the girl on the side, according to the singer, "will love me to the end / Through thick and thin / She will always be my friend." Compare this expression of need and vulnerability with "I ain't no fool and I don't take what I don't want," just a verse or two earlier. Will the real Beatle please stand up? But that's part of the fascination of the project. Sometimes in love the bear eats you, and sometimes you eat the bear. Wait, no, I'm not saying that right. Well, PC or no, I still like "Another Girl" quite a bit, of course, but the song is more intriguing to me now for the light it throws on the Lennon-McCartney collaboration. It was written by McCartney on his own, with no input from any of the others, including Lennon, who is nonetheless fully internalized in it.

"You're Going to Lose That Girl"—Pronounced "you're gonna lose that girl," this song sounds in attitude much like a certain type of John Lennon song, and that's Lennon on lead vocals in his mode of hypermasculine aggression. But it appears it was actually more a genuine collaboration with Paul McCartney. In addition to use of the word "girl" in the title, it ties itself to the previous song with an unusual chord change in the bridge that occurs in both. In the puppy love song project they remain two of the most interesting. "You're Going to Lose That Girl" is also unusual in another way. Its point of view is not of either principal in a relationship, the girl or the boy, but rather a friend of the boy, standing off to the side, speaking frankly. The singer does not like the way he sees his friend treating the girl. The balance of power here is complex. The girl has none, she is in the song only as an object that is coveted and cared for poorly. The boy appears to enjoy most of the power over her. Interestingly the friend, who normally in a situation like this would probably be a bit of a sad sack, instead sounds remarkably sure of himself. "I'll make a point / Of taking her away from you," he boasts (and "yeah!" the backing singers McCartney and George Harrison enthusiastically chime in—everyone's on the singer's side in this one). Things soften again as usual toward the end—"And I will take her out tonight / And I will treat her kind"—but still, it's not the best situation, and the girl is just a cipher. This might just be an argument about whose dick is bigger.

"Ticket to Ride"—With this song we more or less conclude the basic core of Help! essentials, all of which are in the movie, on this album, and on the US version of the soundtrack too. "Ticket to Ride" was also a pretty big hit in its own right, making it up to #1 for a week in May 1965, before the movie was released. It was also much beloved by a particular babysitter of ours, who played the radio when she was watching us. Because of her, I never stopped listening to pop music on the radio. I think "Ticket to Ride" is still pretty well loved, appearing on Rolling Stone lists of this and that and elsewhere. John Lennon claims the authorship, but Paul McCartney, who gets lead guitar duties here again, remembers working closely with him on it. In terms of the puppy love song project, it's reasonably straightforward: abandoned boyfriend POV, he is sad. The girl has the upper hand and indeed appears only as an absence: "She's got a ticket to ride and she don't care," etc. I like the jangly, thumpy, mechanical way it proceeds, but the truth is it's lost much of its appeal for me over the long years. The matter of the title is interesting: some take it for the obvious (she's traveling away), some think it refers to the town of Ryde on the Isle of Wight, and still others speculate it's about health documentation carried by prostitutes in Hamburg, Germany, to assure prospective customers. Well, whatever. Even mediocre Beatles songs from this period have their charms, if only because of the band's unmistakable sound and some nice touches. Here it is the delicate guitar figure on the attack and the big "my baby don't care" finish, spanning whole scales.

"Act Naturally"

"It's Only Love"—Rubber Soul

"You Like Me Too Much"—The second George Harrison song on this album (as it happens, the first since With the Beatles to include Harrison songs at all) bends toward nothing-burger, I'm afraid, which I will lay at the feet of a poky tempo. And juvenile lyrics, which at least bear their own interest in the annals of the ongoing puppy love song project of the wider era. "You Like Me Too Much" was not in the movie and not on the US version of the soundtrack either, relegated instead to Beatles VI. It might be fair to say it's a weak song, but it's unmistakably Beatles of this era and has multiple points in its favor. It's great to hear another Harrison song and also another song with Harrison on lead vocals. The piano intro involved George Martin and Paul McCartney at either end of the keyboard playing at once, a musical figure Bob Dylan later recreated for Blonde on Blonde's "Temporary Like Achilles." In terms of puppy love songs, here we find the boy with the upper hand, bragging. He has nothing to worry about in this relationship and knows it, enjoys it even: "Though you've gone away this morning / You'll be back again tonight," he starts. "You've tried before to leave me / But you haven't got the nerve," he continues. "You'll never leave me and you know it's true," he concludes. But no fears, the reasons are all good, all good: "'Cos you like me too much and I like you," they bawl in harmony. Well, all right. But we'll have to get back to you about the unsettling undertone.

"Tell Me What You See"—All signs are that this song is something of a bastard stepchild, with John Lennon disavowing any part in it and a hazy Paul McCartney thinking he might have written 60% of it, according to Wikipedia, and everybody else more or less hiding their love away. It was another one not in the movie nor on the US version of the soundtrack, but rather packed off to Beatles VI. It must be said it also doesn't have a whole lot of pick up and go, sauntering along at sluggish tempo, though of itself that's not such a problem. The melody takes place in a nice lower register and it's fun to sing with; the lead vocals are a joint effort by Lennon and McCartney. The Everlys harmonies are slowly but surely taking on more of the folk textures then current, with the songwriting, though it's all couched still in terms of the puppy love song project, which I think is actually more the problem. If Help! is the place where the Beatles really made a point of working out the permutations of puppy love songs, "Tell Me What You See" is approximately where they ran out of ideas. The passivity is numbing. I hate to be the grumpy grown-up who does not understand, but look, the yearning that is the point of this song could be eliminated absurdly quickly by speaking up once to the object of adoration. One grows impatient—suck up and tear off the band-aid, etc. Maybe the most interesting feature of the song is the spinet-sounding keyboard at the bridge, foreshadowing some of the baroque textures ahead on Rubber Soul and "In My Life." They would be leaving the puppy love songs behind soon enough, more and more.

"I've Just Seen a Face"—Rubber Soul

"Yesterday"—Speaking of the puppy love song project, here is arguably the biggest, greatest, most insidiously pervasive puppy love song of all time—#1 for four weeks in the fall of 1965 and now with 2,200 cover versions and counting. "Yesterday" came just after the peaks of Beatlemania, shortly after John Lennon's Jesus remark. It was not in the movie. It's the first Beatles song performed by just one member. Though never particularly a favorite I don't despise it either the way some do, such as John Lennon himself so publicly years later. It's obvious in every way that the little shorty (all of 2:08) is a Paul McCartney "silly love song." It's conventional enough that at one point I wanted my parents to listen to it for their opinion. The strings made it classical, or classy, or something (thoughts of a 10-year-old). That was probably the peak of it for me. I think Lennon's raging about it as some kind of hideous abomination was misplaced, of course, some sort of unfortunate Freudian event. Someone might have taken him aside and reminded him Elvis Presley was waist-deep in these waters by 1957. Elvis was the original rock 'n' roll prostitute. That said, there is something undeniably insipid about "Yesterday" too: "Things were so much better in my immediate past, oh boo hoo, la la la" is small-scale at best. But ultimately there's no shame in "Yesterday." McCartney appeared happy to play the role of the heartthrob, teen or otherwise, and this plays very nicely to that. He's sad. He's available. He needs a shoulder. Will it be yours? [SCREAMS] Cha-ching.

"Dizzy Miss Lizzy"—How did this—what the ruck is it doing here? One more homeless Beatles rock 'n' roll cover looking for a place to lay its head, and I think one of their best actually (albeit with naysayers too). First point of confusion: I thought this was on the US album Something New, but it is actually yet another on the US Beatles VI (which incidentally must make the Beatles among the first to that particular Roman numeral). "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" is not in the movie. Second: As best I can tell from a cursory Internet search, it appears that people who don't like "Dizzy Miss Lizzy" don't like the Larry Williams original, arguing it's a knockoff of Little Richard's "Good Golly Miss Molly." But Larry Williams is actually, I think, one of rock 'n' roll's great semi-hidden treasures, chipping in at least one stone classic with "Bonie Moronie"; he never has been a knockoff of Little Richard though obviously he has a similar way with words and names (his biggest hit was "Short Fat Fannie"). John Lennon and Paul McCartney were big fans of Williams (and Little Richard, of course, McCartney's favorite) so no surprise that the Beatles also covered Williams's "Slow Down" and "Bad Boy." There's something maybe a little detached and cerebral about this version of "Dizzy Miss Lizzy," which might in turn be due to yet another somewhat lackadaisical tempo, but George Harrison's guitar is wicked stinging, Lennon's vocal has all the authority of his full roar, with screams, and it sounds unself-consciously in love with rock 'n' roll and with everything about itself, which is infectious. Maybe it shouldn't work, when you break down the elements, but it does.

Detail: Help! (1965)

0 Sonics, "Boss Hoss" (1965)

(listen)

So many choices when it comes to the classics of Pacific Northwest rock 'n' roll it's ridiculous, like choosing a favorite snowy peak from all the Cascade Range. Shasta? Rainier? Hood? First I had to settle on the Sonics over the Wailers, Kingsmen, Raiders, and others, and then I had to settle on "Boss Hoss" over "Strychnine," "The Witch," "Psycho," and others. You have to start somewhere; it might as well be here. It's two and a half minutes, a notably pure example of raunchy powerhouse, music made by boys that sounds like men fighting in bars. It rumbles in and moves with the grace and mass of a flashy big car made for cruising and racing. As it happens, that's what the song is about. The singer saved his money and bought these wheels, this boss hoss, for the express purpose of beating everyone and getting the chicks. Now he's bragging. That's what the song is. You hear it in the way his singing veers toward a species of jeering. Maybe, on that level, my favoring it is something to do with the specter of Big Daddy Ed Roth, which hovers around the edges of anything from the '60s to do with cherry rides and monster vibes, maybe even a little more so on "Boss Hoss." Maybe it's that chattering sax solo that erupts like a volcano out of the middle of it. Or maybe I couldn't make a choice after all and "Boss Hoss" is just a placeholder, sitting in for dozens more songs and bands behind it. Listen up. This is the kind of thing you pulled out of a cereal box and your life changed forever.

Detail: Sonics, "Boss Hoss" (1965)

0 Highway 61 Revisited (1965)

(There's a short version here.)

I have to start with basically facts from my life—this album and especially the breakthrough hit that opens it, "Like a Rolling Stone," have grown so deeply ingrained into my mode of being it is as if they have been ground down to liquefaction. Now it's a matter of saturation, leached in profoundly, which I understand among other things makes me cliché on certain obvious levels, as it is also leached in profoundly to a good many, who never want to stop talking about it. Love him or hate him, as they say. So I also want to attempt to be short.


In 1965, "Like a Rolling Stone" was all over the top 40 AM radio when I started listening close to top 40 radio that summer. Our babysitter brought her own radio with her, tuned to the stations that mattered (in the Twin Cities, in 1965, that was WDGY and KDWB). I recall the rapid-speaking DJs were all pretty excited about the song, and about Bob Dylan more generally, hyping it and all the Dylan covers making it big around that time (by the Byrds, Cher, Turtles, etc.). But I did not care for "Like a Rolling Stone"—it seemed to me too long, whiny, aimless, sour, and already I resented external pressure to like something. As I recall, my own first purchases of 45s that summer were "Save Your Heart for Me" by Gary Lewis & the Playboys, "I Got You Babe" by Sonny & Cher, and "Help!" by the Beatles (as much for "I'm Down" on the flip as anything).

In 1970, on a garage sale outing with my father, I found a reel-to-reel tape recorder in perfect condition for cheap. My best friend in high school, Peter, had a hip older brother in college and Peter seized the opportunity to make tapes for me of things he thought I should hear. The first batch included albums by Miles Davis and the Mothers of Invention (Peter would also steer me to great shows by Captain Beefheart and Miles Davis in 1971 at the old Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, my first concerts). One tape had Highway 61 Revisited on one side and Are You Experienced by the Jimi Hendrix Experience on the other. That was the one I could not stop playing.

In 1985, I moved from Minneapolis to Seattle, selling most of what I owned until I could get the rest to fit into a U-Haul trailer (which as it was barely made it over the third mountain range I had to get over, the Cascades). I knew I would need furniture, a kitchen, clothes, and other essentials, but I allowed myself the extravagance of a crate of albums. Half the fun there was the agony of picking and choosing, one of the ultimate lists I have ever made, and a welcome distraction from the ongoing upheaval in my life. It's exciting to move but also stressful, as you may know. I was just numbly going through it, one step at a time.

Highway 61 Revisited still mattered a lot to me, so its inclusion in the crate was a basic no-brainer. What surprised me, at the other end, sitting in my tiny studio, with a view of the Puget Sound harbor, and the Olympics, and the spectacular sunsets of that September, was how the tremendous dimensions of the album somehow unfolded even further for me at that point. This wasn't just something I used to like in high school. Now it sounded more fresh and vital and alive than I had ever heard it. My days were spent wandering my strange new city, worrying about money and finding work and what I was doing (30 years old, ironic adult with so-called responsibilities, etc.). In the late afternoon I shopped for food and beer and went home and played this album loud, baying at the sunset and half-drunk or better by the time it was dark.

OK, so fair question, what's the connection among these events? What is the appeal of Bob Dylan? And/or Highway 61 Revisited. From my biased view, first, it seems as good as any litmus for one of the very longest musical recording careers in all history (not least because the history of musical recording careers is not that long. But even so, no one has made more albums). If your opinion of Highway 61 Revisited is that you only tolerate it, I can see how some other Dylan album might seem better or even much better, Blonde on Blonde or Freewheeling or whatever. But if you don't like it at all, I have to think you don't like Bob Dylan at all. Interestingly, I understand that too, as (more clichés) I was deeply alienated from him for several years in the late '70s and early '80s, and mistrustful for many years beyond that. He really can be so fucking annoying when you're on the other side of it.

But that's part of his game, isn't it? He has made a career of setting up polarities—in case anyone wonders how he got tagged as a protest singer, for example, there is "Masters of War." Then he implies his support of one extreme ("Masters of War" again, on the potentates controlling the military/industrial complex: "And I hope that you die / And your death'll come soon"). And then he elaborately rejects those who follow him there, and on to the next crisis—folk, protest, rock, country, divorce, makeup, Sam Peckinpah, Jesus, Daniel Lanois, death itself, on and on it goes.

That dynamic is core to Highway 61 Revisited. It's heard perhaps most explicitly in "Ballad of a Thin Man," which is a good deal more severely cutting than most of the loopy word salad and inspired punch lines of the rest. That dynamic is also the main winning feature of "Like a Rolling Stone"—which, yes, of course I changed my mind about in time. In fact, it now seems to me compelling and irresistible (do not miss it in Martin Scorsese's 2005 No Direction Home documentary). It's totally of a piece with the core Dylan dynamic I'm talking about and one of the most interesting and strangest hits in all of U.S. top 40 history, with way too much of everything—too long at six minutes, too smug and insular and wordy, and definitely too mean.

I'm pretty sure half the appeal of Bob Dylan is something about flattering oneself. I say this truly with all due humility (and I have so many reasons for humility). There is something you like about yourself in being able to get it—whatever "get" means exactly and whatever "it" means exactly. But a smug feeling of complacence, of course, is no reason for anything, much less a persuasive basis for taste. It is, in fact, a deplorable state of affairs, tribal and primitive. But I suggest that it happens anyway and we all do it on some level. And that it's arguable Bob Dylan is perfectly well aware of this—whether or not that is consciously is another question entirely, one I'm not going to touch—because it explains the practically slapstick dimensions of his ever-hopscotching career, which has now lasted more than 50 years. He cannot escape it and frankly neither can his followers.

So here we are. I realize I have probably explained nothing. But I can talk about the album if you want, as this is such a natural point to pivot into it. So much is so well known (again, see No Direction Home). It does not hurt that it is yet another amazing band among the many, many such that Dylan has assembled for the studio, this one led by Mike Bloomfield, and with Al Kooper famously faking it for all time playing an organ. But the main point for me about all nine of these songs, always, is how crackling alive and funny they are. It's word salad, it often doesn't add up, the lampoonish assertions within the songs continually negating one another. But the images can be so stark and so swift, continually swimming up and flashing by, for example in "Tombstone Blues," which happens to be playing at the moment: the famous "sun's not yellow, it's chicken," one of the early surprises, a turn to King James with "death to all those who would whimper and cry," and the eloquent complexity (complete with punch line) of "Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain / That could hold you dear lady from going insane / That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain / Of your useless and pointless knowledge." I would not even necessarily call "Tombstone Blues" one of the "better" tracks, but it's hard to judge when everything here is as good as everything here is. The first side of the album has the greater contrasts in highs and lows, with both "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Ballad of a Thin Man." But somehow the four-song suite of side 2 has always opened me more to the extraordinary purities here, notably in "Queen Jane Approximately" and especially the epic "Desolation Row," which lasts nearly 12 minutes, going verse after verse after verse, and continually taking the chorus from new angles, and featuring tremendous, amazing harmonica playing. Maybe now I'm just remembering the ends of those half-drunken nights new to Seattle, but "Desolation Row" seems to me still one of the greatest and most signal of Bob Dylan's many achievements, a song one simply lays back into, that has tremendous resilience and appeal and depths. As I say elsewhere, it's "at least 75% joy," title notwithstanding.

Well, I could go on (and have), I'm sure you know. But you also had to know I would probably say things like that sooner or later in a piece like this. Highway 61 Revisited is nearly 50 years old now, so everyone has had fair opportunity to know what this artist, career, and album are all about, and, as always, in all things, YMMV. As for me, it's my favorite.

Detail: Highway 61 Revisited (1965)