"New" Music from Half Price Books: Some Half Price Music

My wife and I hit Half Price Books today. I didn't look at books. Instead, I spent most of my time going through music.

What did I get?

First, I picked up a 2002 release from the Elms called The Chess Hotel. I love the Elms. I saw them after they'd released an EP, before their first LP came out. They were young and friendly and so happy to be able to play their music. The Beatles were a huge influence on them, clearly, and like them, lead singer and composer, Owen Thomas, has a great sense of melody. [Click on all the images below to see them in full.]

I also got two by Dylan. Blonde on Blonde, which I think, my friend Richard has said is his favorite Dylan release. It came out in '66 and the CD I picked up is digitally remastered.

I also got a remastered version of Infidels. It came out in 1983, ostensibly after Dylan's "Christian phase," though frankly I believe that he's always been, again as Richard puts it, a Jewish Christian...even before the Christian phase.

You hear that in a lot of his stuff. The very title of Infidels evokes Old and New Testament themes---you might want to check out the entire Old Testament as well as the New Testament book of First Peter to see if I'm leading you astray or not. It can refer to the faithlessness of the faithful, of which I have firsthand knowledge as a sinner saved by grace...to the exile of Israel and Judah...Or maybe to believers being, in First Peter's phrase, "aliens and strangers" in the world. (An old hymn, picking up on this theme, said, "I'm but a stranger here, heaven is my home.")

Historian and bishop N.T. Wright points out that from the earliest days of the Church, the Jews who followed Jesus made a claim that would have horrified them just a few years earlier: That Jesus and Yahweh--God--were one and the same. Dylan, as Richard pointed out to me a few weeks ago, seemed to make a similar claim in the title track of his 1967 release, John Wesley Harding, one of my favorite Dylan LPs. Richard points out that the initials of Dylan's criminal-hero, JWH, are a rough transliteration for the vowel-less Hebrew word for God's Name, Yahweh (I AM). Richard also pointed to some of the lyrics Dylan used to describe the fictional Harding, which might as readily describe Jesus:

John Wesley Harding
Was a friend to the poor...

...he was always known
To lend a helping hand...

[and most evocatively of all:]

All across the telegraph
His name it did resound,
But no charge held against him
Could they prove...

Richard's hypothesis holds up for me when one considers the name Dylan gave his hero. Jesus, in spite of no charge that could be proven against Him, was subjected to the form of execution reserved for the worst criminals. John Wesley Hardin was an outlaw and all-around bad guy.

Why do you suppose Dylan added a "g" to the last name of his crook? Do you suppose it was because he saw the One convicted as a criminal as being one and the same as somebody we call by a word starting with "g"? Hmmm.

(Infidels was produced by Mark Knopfler, who also played guitar on it. The first time I ever heard Dire Straits, Mark Knopfler's band, I thought it was a new Dylan track. Dylan claims not to hear any similarity between his and Knopfler's voice. I often wonder why most of us can't hear what other people deem so obvious.)

I also got a copy of James Taylor's Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon. I owned this on vinyl right after it was released in 1971. It was the first thing I bought by Taylor. I so fell in love with Mud Slide then, that I bought Sweet Baby James, which had been released earlier. I love the home cooked feel of this LP, although Peter Asher, formerly of Peter and Gordon and brother of one time Paul McCartney girlfriend Jane Asher, doesn't allow the LP, as so many it its ilk do, to fall into sloppiness. (Think Wildlife by McCartney.)

I saw Taylor in concert in Columbus back in 1972, right after the release of One Man Dog and his marriage to Carly Simon. I took a girl named Lisa with me. I'd had a crush on her when we first met at freshman orientation together at Ohio State. I got over that and we became good friends.

I knew that Lisa did some drugs--grass and the then-popular qualuudes, known as sopors because they made people soporific--and I was death on drugs. (Still am, for that matter.) But I liked Lisa. I liked James Taylor and I knew that she did too. So I asked if she'd like to go to the concert with me.

The first thing she said when she got into my car that night was, "I know that you don't do drugs. But I've got one sopor in my purse and we can split it if you want to."

I wasn't sure what the etiquette was for turning down a date's offer of an illegal substance. So, I just said, "No, thank you," although I wanted to add, "I'd prefer to actually take in and remember the concert."

She deferred to my preferences and so far as I know, she didn't drop the sopor. Taylor was wonderful...too wonderful to put behind a drug-induced fog.

Here's what One Man Dog and John Wesley Harding looked like.

[UPDATE: Richard also pointed out the second track of Infidels to me a few weeks ago. It's called 'Sweetheart Like You' and it's definitely about Christ. Check out the lyrics here.]

[ANOTHER UPDATE: Richard and I have dialogued about Dylan before.]