Brazilian Girls @ Starr Hill, Charlottesville

I went into this show with a very negative attitude.  In fact, during the preceding week, I had been avoiding the show or the thought of even going.  It was a late night show being held in another lame C-Ville venue–expensive beer, bad layout, shit stage, no smoking.  I figured it would be populated by C-Ville’s most pretentious and most hipstered out, which is doubly depressing because of how far off the mark these ‘hipsters’ are bound to fly.  I wore white shoes.

One way or another, I ended up there.  I met a couple architectural history grad students at a party and they drove me.  It was, in part, to see a show and dance, but I also wanted to get closer to my house so I wouldn’t need to take a cab.  The second part of this plan went off without a hitch.

So here I am watching the Brazilian Girls.  I knew nothing about the band.  I’d heard they were dancy, and since there name has the word ‘girls’ in it, this reminded me of the similarly dancy Junior Boys, who I think just played in C-Ville as well.  I should have gone to that.

Anyway, the thing I liked most about Brazilian Girls was what other people had to say about them.  I was told in work earlier that day that they were “like Peaches, but less raunchy.” Everyone said they were good to dance to.  A guy in the (long) line before the show (which didn’t let in until after midnight, tix said 11 o’clock doors, bullshit) told his friend that the band played in ‘bikini tops.’ (There was one female member who wore a mask for half the set and whose hair never rose above eye level a la Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.  The bass player, an eighties dude, wore no shirt, electrical tape on the nipples.  Their stage show reminded me of Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics, but Brazilian Girls were much better than the Plasmatics.) At the end of the show, I talked to the girl who drove me to the show about the band.  “They were a lot like a NY band from five years ago.  The lead singer is nicking Karen O.  blah blah blah.” She told me the band had been around way longer than the YYYs was kind of annoyed at my comment.  She was wrong.

But still, I appreciated her passion.  I appreciated the passion of everyone at this gig.  I ran into 4 or 5 people that I know.  That was pretty good.  The music was like house music.  There were a lot of reggae type songs and I liked these a lot.  They had one song whose refrain was “Pussy pussy pussy marijuana.” The punters were loving this, but they weren’t being aggressive, meatheadish, or frattish about it.  I appreciated that as well.

I was surprised by how much krautrock/Can I heard in the music, which is something that always surprises me about these middle of the road, live dance music bands.  The lead singer had a ton of energy and really was very good.   She ended the night with a semi-acapella piece (the drummer was tapping out light drum and bass-type patterns on the kit, barely audible, but nicely atmospheric).  The whole night the lead singer put on a kind of chansonneuse persona, which I know best from Jonathan Richman.  This warmed the crowd without being too pretentious, trashy, exploitative, exhibitionist.

It was a good night’s entertainment, but it was transparent.  A quarter way through the show I stared through the lead singer voguing her way across another big beat.  She was dressed all in white and it showed: a plastic pieta hood ornament with all the features worn off, in a brown sedan, on the way home for Thanksgiving.  It wasn’t nausea, but it was boredom.

Suburban Flanerie, Vol. 1

Today I want to begin a series of posts under the subheading “Suburban Flanerie.” For better or worse, better socially and spiritually, worse morally, I returned to my home suburb this weekend for a friend’s wedding. (I’ve mentioned this three times now.) On Friday afternoon, I strolled around my old suburb, Springfield, and this was something I saw. Each instance of suburban flanerie on the blog will record something I saw in the suburbs and what it meant to me or made me think about.

On Friday I was looking at lawns, or more specifically, at the trees, bushes, and other shrubs that populate suburban lawns in Springfield. My eye was drawn, particularly, to a bunch of inverse, truncated cones of greenery along Brookside Road nearer the library, across from the police station. I also took note of the various plastic animals, windchimes, flowerpots, and the like residing on the porches leading to or concluding these lawns, depending on which way you look at them.

The thought has often occurred to me, when I see people doing yardwork in the suburbs, that certain segments of our society have devolved into a nearly feudalistic way of being. I use of ‘way of being’ here, because I cannot accuse them of being feudalistic in the economic sense. Most of these weedpullers and lawnmowers are firmly entrenched in the bourgeoisie, or at least what has become of it. But over the weekend, during their leisure time, when they should be enjoying the finer things in life (whatever they are), they instead rekindle and reaffirm, confirm, their connection to the soil.

What this confirmation, this weekendly sacrament, means, socially and morally, I am reluctant to accuse. I suspect that it means something different to the tillers than it does to me. I am instructed by an example, my parents, who thoroughly enjoy yardwork. It might indeed be one of their only non-workweek pleasures. And I recall a high school public speaking project by an old friend of mine on the art of a well cut lawn, manicured up and down in contrasting grains to resemble a freshly cut baseball diamond. There is beauty in that that I do not deny.

But there is no beauty to me in the social silence one settles for when cutting the lawn, nevermind trimming the bush or hanging the windchime. I realize here that many suburban propertyholders hire others to complete these tasks. They respond, in this way, to my lesser accusation, that the cutting of the lawn, the trimming of the bush, the hanging of the windchime is a waste of time, however suburban. Suburban time is empty, and thus hated by the suburbanite, but it is also sacred to the suburbanite, because it is all the suburbanite has earned, all the suburbanite has wanted, all that the suburbanite really has. But it is utopian time, however degraded. It should not be wasted. Those who hire out their lawncare at least have this figured out.

Those who have chosen to live in the suburbs should live up to it. Let your lawn grow wild. The bush cut into a truncated inverse cone no longer deserves its Latin name. Its species is now, simply, truncated inverse bush. When this bush is placed in the field of vision, the picture of nature, it upsets this picture. So the lawn problem is not merely one of time, but of space, too. Ultimately, this space controls suburban consciousness and the bush that pollutes it is but one of the elements that has whittled that consciousness down to a point.

Finishing Up w/ Dylan

So I’ve been doing pretty well with this daily posting thing, at least up until this weekend. Attended a friend’s wedding outside Philadelphia. All went well. Very happy to see so many great, old friends and unwind, get my mind off of work, however briefly. I’m fairly crushed right now by the Eagles loss, but at least I didn’t have to watch the thing on TV, as I was on the road between Springfield and C-Ville. I don’t know how it looked or felt, but it sounded brutal and I wonder whether the Birds’ll be able to recover. Who do they have next week?

Unfortunately, I’m getting a bit bored of this track-by-track Dylan thing. And I’m afraid that if I keep it up, the pace of my posts will begin dwindling again. All that I have to say has basically been said. According to my original plan, today would have been the day when I’d review “Beyond the Horizon,” but instead I’m going to tackle the last four songs on the album and call it a day. Tomorrow, I will probably start a series of post titled “Suburban Flanerie,” and along the way, mix in reviews of some new albums I’ve been listening to. How’s that sound?

The last four songs are “Beyond the Horizon,” “Nettie Moore,” “The Levee’s Gonna Break,” and “Ain’t Talkin.’” Of the four, “Nettie Moore” is my favorite. As I mentioned last post, it was locked in a tie with “WB2″ for my favorite song on the album and it remains there. It’s definitely the most balanced song on the album. Musically, it’s gorgeous, driven by a pulsating bass and piano line. Are there pizzicato strings in there too? I’m not sure. I hear breath blowing through the song, an old man wheezing in a rocking chair. The whole thing is grey and wheezy, but it’s not nostalgic and it’s not retro. To me, it actually sounds forwardthinking in spite of the antiquity of the words, the music. I thought so immediately upon hearing the song. Unlike anything on the last three Dylan albums, this song immediately suggested to me a way forward for his music at the dusk of his career. It doesn’t sound like he’s struggling anymore for self-resolution, absolution from without. There’s a confidence in “Nettie Moore,” even though it’s a song about loneliness, detachment, death, distance.

“Nettie Moore” stands out from the rest of the album as it stands out from the last four songs on the album. “Beyond the Horizon” is a straightforward tune pitched as an old, white jazz standard. It’s parlor music, easy listening, and for all that, it’s still fine. Again, it reminds me of those pre-Blood on the Tracks, post-Blonde on Blonde Dylan albums that I’ve always liked – New Morning, John Wesley Harding. Not Dylan’s best work, I’ve come to realize, because of it’s straightforwardness, but still pleasant. A cut like “Beyond the Horizon” on Modern Times is a good chance to compose your thoughts in between “WB2″ and “Nettie Moore,” the most challenging song on the album (arguably), and the most cathartic, engaging one (inarguably).

The album closes strangely, to my mind, with “Levee” and “Ain’t Talkin.’” For all its timeliness and its fine lyric, “Levee” smacks of throwaway to me, which is a shame, especially since it then leads me to hear ‘milking it,’ the disaster I mean, all within the track. A far better Dylan track about Katrina was “High Water,” which appeared on his last album, on September, 11, 2001. That’s right, I’m saying he predicted it, which wasn’t too hard considering that the Katrina disaster was a systemic failure and a tragic case of history repeating itself. Or was it farce? I’m still not sure. Tragic farce, maybe. I think that makes sense.

And “Ain’t Talkin’” ends things. I don’t think this song belongs at the end of Modern Times. “Nettie Moore” would have been my pick. And it’s not just for how “AT” sounds. It sounds like it should have started the album! It’s the lyrics, too. The song sounds orphaned at the end of Modern Times, since the rest of the album, to me, evokes statis, fear, sadness, and then courageous and incorrigible prodding of the present. “Ain’t Talkin’” is about walking away or, at least, walking through (the cities of the plain) and that, to me, doesn’t seem to fit well with what the rest of Modern Times was about. Of course, maybe that was the point. Maybe Dylan is trying to move on at the end of this new album, or maybe he is trying to take the wholly negative stance that I perceive him to be taking.

It’s not a bad ending to Modern Times, it’s an unsettling one. In fact, it’s a good song, one that I’m sure I will return to even after I stop spinning the whole album.

And a final word on the album . . . It’s Dylan’s first billboard number one since the sixties (I’ve heard), and it deserves to be (although I wonder how Blood on the Tracks and Desire never made it . . . ). It’s a great album and, as I think I’ve already mentioned on here, I believe that when Dylan’s career ends, it will be listened to with a level of reverence approaching Dylan’s greatest work. While I’ve been writing these reviews, I’ve had the chance to return to Time Out of Mind and “Love and Theft,“ and I can say, unequivocally, that this album is generally as good as them, and in certain respects, better. For instance, I still find many songs on Time Out of Mind lyrically weak if not downright cringeworthy. As I mentioned before, I prefer the stripped down production on this one to that heard on “Love and Theft”, and when I listen to the earlier album I can’t help but feel that some of its intensity is feigned. Some of the songs on Modern Times are, I believe, the most poetically and intellectually focused and concise Dylan has produced in years, maybe ever. The album, in many ways, for me, lends support to what many of us Dylan fans, young and old, late and new, have worried about for years: that he has lacked for viable material, for things to write about. Dylan has something to write about here on Modern Times, the same thing he was writing about in 1963, the same thing he was writing about in 1966, but he’s a different man writing it, which is makes it timely and potent and worth struggling with.

“Workingman’s Blues 2″ and apology

Failed to write for the past couple days. Wireless down in apartment Wednesday, in transit to Philadelphia yesterday. I know I shouldn’t be making excuses on a barely read blog, but in the future, I will try to warn of dormant periods.

Today we have my favorite or second favorite song on Modern Times, “Workingman’s Blues 2.” I’m not familiar with part one, if there is one by Dylan. A cursory allmusic search shows versions by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Johnny Copeland, and Lonnie Johnson among others. An allmusic reviewer also says Dylan copped his vocal style from Johnson on this record, so maybe that’s the part one that Dylan is referring to.

In any case, it doesn’t matter. To begin the song, Dylan plops us down in media res of the class struggle. You thought it was over?
“There’s an evening haze settling over town/Starlight on the edge of the creek/The buying power of the proletariat’s gone down/Money’s gettin shallow and weak.”

This verse just cracks me up. Probably my favorite thing on this whole album. There’s a couple other zingers on this track too, most of them using explicitly economistic language to talk about highly things or feelings ‘poetically,’ whatever that means. It’s a great effect, even better coming from Dylan who in his folkie or mephamphetamine days – that is when he was actually associated with social movements – never would have written something so dry, straightforward, Billy Bragg-like. I don’t interpret it as lazy or pedantic on Dylan’s part either though. I think he is perfectly in touch with what he’s saying, but he is seeking to interrogate the language for what it is: language that people do use and have used to speak and write objectively about things that can just as easily be analyzed in verse or song. And ultimately, Dylan’s use of proletariat here directs us back to why Marx employed the term, archaic even in his day, in the first place. By using the Greek term, Marx intended to summon up the history of the class struggle and its constructedness in Greek civil society (and throughout history). (I’m glossing this vaguely here, but the post is about Dylan, not Marx. I should also mention Negt & Kluge’s discussion of the proletarian public sphere too though in Public Sphere and Experience, where they employ the term for much the same reasons and do a good job of explaining why they do.)

“Workingman’s Blues 2″ also contains another of my favorite lyrics on Modern Times: “I sleep in the kitchen with my feet in the hall/Sleep is like a temporary death.” I just lovelovelove that. There’s a similar Nas lyric, I think on the first song on Illmatic, “I don’t sleep/because sleep is the cousin of death.” Is that like an expression I never picked up, or a bluesism? Where did the turn of phrase come from? Did Dylan and Nas come up with these turns independently or had Dylan heard the Nas lyric? Exciting stuff.

The production and the band and the melody on “WB2″ also sounds as great or greater than the rest of Modern Times. It has a pretty piano intro and a catchy chorus. We’re going to find a lot of the same things on “Nettie Moore,” which is the song I mentioned earlier being neck and neck with WB2 for my favorite. A catchy chorus in a Dylan song is still so welcome for me. His songs are so long and even when they’re good these days, they can be hard to keep up with. There’s nothing better than a punchy chorus to fix that problem. WB2 has it.

OK, so obvious I’m rushing this review, which is a shame because I love the song. But I’m starting to get worried about the wedding that I’m supposed to attend later this evening so I think I’m going to get on that. I need to get a haircut and a card beforehand. I might write more later. I want to review the new YLT album.

“Someday Baby”

Boy, am I tired today. Probably the toughest day in my week. Class beginning at 9:30, three classes, on campus teaching until 7:00 p.m. So it’s good that today is the day I’m reviewing “Someday Baby,” probably the song on the album about which I have the least to say. When I first started listening to Modern Times a couple weeks ago, this was one of the first songs that grabbed me, because I already liked the song, which is the second blues adaptation on the album. It’s probably even simpler and more straightforward than “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.” At first, I thought I dug this one better, but now I’m having second thoughts. This is a good blues, but it does little to separate itself from the rest of the album. I do love the guitar tone on the solo though, which is so dirty it’s nearly non-existent, like a drying polaroid intentionally tampered with for artistic effect.

“When the Deal Goes Down”

Lyrically, this is probably the most ambitious song yet on Modern Times.  It’s a promise sung to a lover at the dimming of the day, at the end of life.  With all these lachrymose songs on Modern Times I wonder if Dylan really is dying.  That would be a shame.  He’s still making amazing music.  I was telling the people at work today that I think these last three albums will definitely be listened to with the same reverence as his 60s work or Blood on the Tracks when Bob’s career is finally over.  Bravo.

“When the Deal Goes Down” is ambitious, but it’s not great.  Unfortunately, the lullaby guitar lines and stand-up bass on this one just don’t work for me.  I love the lyric.  It reminds me of a straightforward Dylan song from the 60s, the kind that he’s give to the Band or the Byrds to make a hit out of.  He should give this to someone today.  But who? Mercury Rev comes to mind.  But the problem with the song is that the lyric really can only be sung by a 60 year old man.  Sung by anyone younger, it would certainly fall painfully flat.  It’s a song about death and striking a hard won deal with it through the love of another, and in the mouth of anyone under 30, it would sound pretentious and insincere, if not utterly false.  Tony Bennett should do a version of this song.  That I could accept.

I thought I was going to have to write that this was the first song on Modern Times that I really didn’t like, but then I listened to it 30 times before writing the review and I want to listen again.  That tells me something else.

“Rollin’ and Tumblin’”

Like “Thunder on the Mountain,” this one has another one or two note guitar solo, but this time it comes at the beginning of the song (and again and again between verses), and it’s played with a slide. I guess we could even call it a riff or a lick, but there’s nothing much more to this song, musically, than another, more driving riff (played by the whole band), so I’m going to categorize this opening thing as a solo.

This is the first of two songs on Modern Times based on well known blues. The other is “Someday Baby.” Dylan isn’t usually so transparent with his source materials.

The transparency works for me on “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” and even more so on “Someday Baby,” but that might just be because I like that song better. Always have. Dylan does a good job of twisting the original lyric, a grief-tinged party song into something a lot more remorseful and a bit more introspective without underselling the archetype or Muddy Waters’s definitive version.

Like the first two songs on Modern Times, the production here is great. I’ve had the chance to revisit “Love & Theft” since I started writing the track-by-track and I’m really preferring the sound of the newer stuff. Not that “Love & Theft” is bad, but it’s definitely more glossy. There’s more reverb, more overdubs, there was obviously a lot of mixing done. Modern Times on the other hand, has a lot of warts on its sonic profile, and I like that, it lends the album depth. Plus, it’s a great way to get across the sound of the great band. Great bands should not be produced perfectly (if you like the Replacements despite the sound of their records, or Husker Du in spite of Spot, you should agree with this statement). The strength of Modern Times’s production really starts to show itself on “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.”

One last thought on this one: The solos here and the way the band always rocks, but never really cooks makes me wonder how much better some really smoking guitar leads could make a lot of Dylan songs. Especially the bluesy ones. Dylan had something like this going with the Rolling Thunder Revue band, with Mick Ronson of Bowie fame on lead, but for all the bluesiness and cacophony and heaviness of Dylan sides you rarely hear a real facemelter of a guitar solo or a really heavy guitar at all for that matter in many of his songs. I know this may be wishful thinking and maybe misguided thinking but I’d love to someone like Doug Martsch or Bob Mould or Richard Thompson or even Dean Wareham digging in over a sweet Dylan progression, melody, and lyrical field.

“Spirit on the Water”

The first verse of the Bible:

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.”

The beginning of the second song on Dylan’s new album:

“Spirit on the water

Darkness on the face of the deep

I keep thinkin bout you baby

And I can’t hardly sleep.”

Who’s he thinking about? God or a woman? Or both? Are they one in the same for Dylan? It’s hard to tell.

And of course, the song doesn’t really start that way. It starts with a beautiful, plucky guitar, bass, drums, piano intro crisper than most anything I’ve ever heard on a Dylan album. In his recent Rolling Stone interview, Dylan complained that no one can or ever will record something that sounds as good as Pet Sounds again, and I agree. It’s like putting a man on the moon, or just building a space shuttle in the 60s. We can do it again, but we can never do it the same way. There’s something to be said for breakthroughs. But Dylan here, at the beginning of “Spirit on the Water” has broken through to something, but I think it has more to do with his band than the way they’re recorded. Comparing this new outfit, which Dylan has claimed as his best, I have to wonder if those 60s bands or even those Nashville session guys had anything on this crew. I think music can only be played like this when it’s cultivated over so many years, just like Dylan has cultvated his music. (And I know that I’m disparaging the Band here too, and I hate to do that, but this new Dylan band just sounds great.)

So we have the first verse, and here we are, at the beginning of the Bible, but what follows is far from Biblical. I do think it’s about God though, at least in part. Otherwise it just doesn’t make a lot of sense. The song lasts for seven minutes and that’s pretty long considering how simplistic it is, but I think it’s just fine. I like the way Dylan starts it off, he earns the 7 minutes after minute one and then he just weaves a lot of pretty images and bluesisms into a soothing ballad like something off side 2 of John Wesley Harding.

The song also has a great ending too, which brings the song full circle by taking us back to The Beginning, in and out of the Garden, East of Eden where we belong:

“I’m gonna be with you in paradise

and it seems so unfair

I can’t go to paradise no more

I killed a man back there

You think I’m over the hill

think I’m past my prime

Let me see what you got

We can have a walkin good time.”

And the most important thing about this song: Dylan’s fucking voice. I’ve never heard him sing like this before (well, OK, I have), but it sounds great. Trebly, reedy, whispered, almost falsetto, or as close to falsetto as I would imagine Dylan can do. It’s fun and weirdly seductive. Luckily, he’ll do this voice again throughout the rest of Modern Times.

The New Dylan Track-by-Track (“Thunder on the Mountain”)

It has recently been brought to my attention (self-consciousness?) that I need to be posting here more often. Reading other blogs, I’ve realized that the only way to really write a good blog is to post to it with some regularity, something I have failed at pretty miserably.

Still, I don’t have a lot of time to post on here, so I’ve figured that a good way to get a head of steam might be to start small. To that end, I’ve decided to initiate my more regular blog routine with a review of Dylan’s new album “Modern Times” that proceeds through the album track-by-track.

I’ve never been a big fan of the track-by-track review, but then again I haven’t been much enamored with the review format period lately. Like any cultural form, it has shrunken and repressed itself to a dire point at which it has much less to do with criticism or critique than with simply selling albums, or your website, or the lifestyle brands that advertise on your website. Also, since Dylan’s album is so expansive, so complex in sound, language, and execution, a whole album review that would do it justice would be very hard for me to pull off without it sounding more utterly like goobledygook than my normal reviews.

So I’ll start here today with “Modern Times”’s first track “Thunder on the Mountain.” The track starts out great with a series of false start downstrums, cymbal crashes, and slides up and down the neck of the lead guitar, but even before this happens I’m digging the title. It reminds me of the Dead song “Fire of the Mountain,” just like a couple other titles on the new disc, “Workingman’s Blues 2″ and “When the Deal Goes Down,” remind me of the Dead. “WB2″ obviously gestures towards the Dead’s best studio album (and a lot more), and “WtDGD” is the chorus to the tune “Deal” of Jerry’s underrated first solo album. (I think this might also have been a folk tune of some type, but no matter.)

I don’t know if all this Dead stuff adds up to anything anyway. Death does seem to be a theme on “Modern Times,” its simultaneous embrace and avoidance, but like any lyrical theme or trend on a Dylan album its pursuit would seem to lead everywhere and nowhere at once. Of course, this could be said for almost any theme, put forth by any author, but what’s important in Dylan’s case is that this ellusiveness and obtuseness seem to appear by design.

“Thunder” starts the album off well. It’s a straightforward song, musically, if not lyrically, and it hits all the right notes to silence the Dylan audience that is most certainly going to immediately compare it to everything that has come before. I know I did, and I was satisfied. Dylan is up to something not totally different from what he’s been doing since “Time Out of Mind,” but different enough from that album and “‘Love and Theft’” to make it matter, and different enough from his 60s and 70s work to make it matter even more. His backing band sounds great. Throughout the album, the rhythm section really swings even if it really never smokes, and that’s fine. I especially like the drums, which render a lot of the lengthier, bluesier numbers on the disc more bearable, less boring, more immersive. Dylan is in fine voice, and this will get even better as the album progresses. Besides the lyrics, Dylan’s voice is probably the best part about “Modern Times.”

Here, in “Thunder,” it immediately digs into the stellar Alicia Keys verse which I would imagine every reviewer of the album will bring up. It’s Dylan at his funniest and least mystical and for that reason people are going to read way more into it than they need to. For if there’s anything weird about this lyric, it’s that it sounds weird coming out of the mouth of an old man, and not just Bob Dylan. It reminds me of Woody Guthrie’s tribute to Ingrid Bergman or Dylan’s many references to busty euro-stars, e.g. Bardot, on his transitional folk albums (“Freewheelin’” and “Another Side,” look it up).

And this great verse is immediately followed by a great 2 or maybe 3 note guitar solo that sounds as pretty as a ringing bell, that is, as pretty as a Chuck Berry solo and that’s saying a lot. But it’s also a hell of a lot more gritty, tone-wise, which is what really drew me in. And frankly, at this point, I’m drawn. Dylan has me. Since I picked the album up and listened to this song maybe ten times, the rest of it after the solo has kind of whizzed by, and I’m comfortable with that, for now.

The rest of the song is tough. Dylan switches in between a verse that clearly has something to do with Katrina (the second), a love verse (the third), and a sex and violence verse (the fourth), and just keeps on shuffling those images, cliches, colloquialisms, weirdnesses in a fashion far more fast and loose than even his methamphetamine driven classical period. Back then he wasn’t dropping in lines about cell phones.

“Thunder” is definitely a stand out Dylan opener even if it’s not one of the best songs he’s started an album with. (For me, that would be a toss up between “Rainy Day Women,” “Political World,” and “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum,” but anyway . . .)

Tomorrow: “Spirit on the Water”