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February 20, 2009

Numerology: 61, Visited

Have you heard the 61 salutes?
Can you hear the simple truth?
What swell party this is…

Have you heard?”

-- Thea Gilmore, “Have You Heard?”

When Roger Maris hit his 61st homerun of the 1961 baseball season, breaking the long-standing record held by Babe Ruth, he brought a new measure of notoriety to the 18th prime number. Now that the excesses of baseball’s steroid era have effectively obliterated 61’s special status to sports fans, the number’s association with a certain highway immortalized by Bob Dylan is pretty much set in asphalt. Before we head down that well-trod road, an excursion through some less traveled paths seems in order.

The Kissaway Trail - "61"

Odense, Denmark, is the birthplace of Hans Christian Anderson, King Canute IV, and the Kissaway Trail, aka the Danish Arcade Fire, an act whose existence lends credence to the music industry truism that if you get big enough, you will be imitated. Just as Nirvana gave us Seven Mary Three and Cher stirred up a shitstorm of auto-tuned vocals and R.E.M unleashed a thousand jangles, Arcade Fire begat the Kissaway Trail. From the opening banjo lick and on to the cattle-driver ‘s “yeah” that sets off the proceedings, “61” delivers that ineffable marching-through-the-streets-in-a-ruffled-shirt-playing-kettledrums vibe that Arcade Fire ostensibly invented. But if you can forget all that and just go with it, the charms are there. Now let’s head to Germany.

Unknown Artist - "Berlin 61"

While Google has rendered moot the kind of debates that used to rage in smoky bars, about who was the bass player for a certain unheralded ‘60s band or who directed a particular B movie—technology also poses questions it can’t easily answer. For example: the identity of the band behind “Berlin 61,” a song I found floating around cyberspace and cannot seem to find anything else about. With a title that refers to the year the Berlin Wall was erected, this Teutonic Motorhead/Ramones hybrid shares the name of a TV movie—and apparently, if you liked it, the sages at IMDB say you would also dig on Der Tunnel. Thanks. I’ll get right on it. But right now, I have to catch a plane back to the states.

West Virginia is the winter home of Dean Wells, a Vermonter who churns out records under the name the Capstan Shafts. He’s often compared to Robert Pollard of Guided By Voices, and for good reason: the man embraces a DIY, lo-fi aesthetic, is shockingly prolific, and deals in short songs with inscrutable titles (e.g., “Vegans and Meteors,” “Bluegene V. Debs” “The Trilateralist Told You Not To”). In the past five years or so, he has released something like 10 albums and 12 EPs, all packed with songs that rarely exceed two minutes.

Capstan Shafts - '61 Sideburns'

Like many of his songs, “61 Sideburns” has touches of absurdity and sincerity. 61 Sideburns sounds like the title of a Dali painting, but there’s nothing surreal about the song’s central line: “We lived in the last genuine time.” From the raspy passion with which he delivers it, I took it fairly literally, but Wells himself set me straight. He told me he was actually writing about “the same complaint everyone has as they mature: ‘In my day, we had… ‘Music was ...’ Crap like that. We borrow from the past, use modern conveniences, and still think, WE were the real people. I do that anyway.”

I do too, and so do you. As for the sideburns in question, I was off the mark in imagining a motley collection of 31 muttonchopped dudes, with one of them sporting a single sideburn. The title actually refers to an old photo of Mr. Wells that inspired a friend to comment on his 1961-era beatnik facial hair. I find it refreshing that when you tease apart the layers of this fascinating miniature, there’s a lot less ambiguity and deliberate surrealism than one might have suspected. In any case, with just Wells’s occasionally double-tracked voice, some handclaps, and a fuzzed-out acoustic guitar, “61 Sideburns” leaves more of an impression in one minute than most properly produced, traditionally executed corporate pop ever will.

“A road is a road, but sometimes it’s more. Sometimes a road sings.” That’s what it says on thesixtyone.com—an extremely civilized Web site where artists and listeners can upload and share music. If any road can be accused of singing, Highway 61—which cuts a line through the American heartland from the Mississippi Delta up through Minnesota—has some serious pipes. Known as the “blues highway,” U.S. State Highway 61 has become virtually synonymous with the blues, with its name serving as the basis for a couple of classic blues songs, a long-running blues festival in Leland, Mississippi, and an Internet radio station dedicated to the blues. “Highway 61 Blues” was a hit for Jack Kelly & His South Memphis Jug Band, an outfit that lasted from the ‘30s to the ‘50s, while the venerable bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell’s “Highway 61” has been covered by both kindred spirits like Sunnyland Slim and mainstream titans like Billy Joel.

In his primal, lonesome, slide-guitar-driven lament, McDowell entreats the Lord, “If I happen-a die/’Fore you think my time has come/I want you to bury my body/Out on Highway 61.” McDowell labored in relative obscurity until the late ‘50s, then recorded several influential records in the ‘60s before his death in ’72. The Rolling Stones covered McDowell’s “You Got to Move” on Sticky Fingers, and his slide guitar technique has been much admired by Bonnie Raitt and others.

Mississippi Fred McDowell - “Highway 61”

But let’s get down to brass tacks. The 61 song that’s most identifiable to folks today is Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited,” the title track from his 1965 album that ranks up there with his very best—and that’s saying something. It’s hard to imagine that Dylan wasn’t familiar with one or both of the aforementioned Highway 61 songs, but in a 1967 interview with Rolling Stone, he rejected the idea that there was any major significance to his choice of the road in this striking track. All he would say is, “Highway 61 exists—that’s out in the middle of the country. It runs down to the south, goes up north.” Dylan was never a very cooperative interviewee, but he knew full well that Highway 61 is a route shrouded in mystery and myth. The intersection of 61 and Highway 49 in Clarksdale, MS, is the crossroads where Robert Johnson was said to have made his deal with the Devil. Elvis Presley grew up near it, and the great blues singer Bessie Smith’s fatal car crash occurred on 61. (A few years after the Dylan song, Martin Luther King Jr. was felled by an assassin’s bullet as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, right off 61.)

Bob Dylan - "Highway '61 Revisited"


At any rate, “Highway 61 Revisited” is the sound of the newly electrified Dylan at the height of his powers. The song is grounded in the blues, but true to its title, Dylan revisits the blues, and the result is a barn-burner and a lyrical tour de force. In the very first line, Dylan paraphrases the Book of Genesis: “God said to Abraham kill me a son/Abe said, man, you must be putting me on.” From there, the scenes shift to a sprawling hallucinatory tapestry, peopled with a seedy cast of characters like Louie the King, Mack the Finger, Georgia Sam, a promoter, a roving gambler and 49 red white and blue shoestrings. And with its tricky references within references about the twelfth night and the seventh son, the song is also numerical bounty. And it all cruises along on a rollicking current of sound augmented with a screaming slide whistle and Mike Bloomfields siren-like guitar fills, evoking cars and trucks whizzing past on the open road.

It might be said that Bob Dylan made the world safe for singers to take the stage armed only with a guitar, idiosyncratic lyrics and the voices of character actors rather than leading men. In short: people like Dean Wells of Capstan Shafts. Now if Dylan would only set me straight on “Highway 61 Revisited” the way Wells did for “61 Sideburns,” this article would be truly groundbreaking. Sadly, Dylan’s music has engendered so much deep thought and attempts at interpretation that the man would be downright foolish to nail it down for his listeners. For every Dylanologist out there who claims that, “The second mother was with the seventh son” is some kind of incest reference, there’s me on the sidelines reminding them of what he said regarding a verse in “The Man in the Long Black Coat” from 1989s’ Oh Mercy. When asked about the line, “People don’t live or die/people just float, he said something like, “I just needed something to rhyme with ‘boat.’”

“Highway 61” can claim a rightful place among the great songs of the rock era. Dylan has called it one of his favorites among his own songs, and has reinterpreted it many times over the years, including a powerhouse version from the legendary “Tour ‘74” with the Band. Cover versions abound—by the likes of Johnny Winter, the Blasters, Georgia Satellites and Karen O—all of which have their strong points. Son Volt’s “Afterglow 61” is a loving tribute to both the tune and the road, but best of all has to be P.J. Harvey’s bristling assault on the song, an absolute marvel of reinterpretation and homage that clocks in a full 30 seconds shorter but packs even more explosive tension than the original.

PJ Harvey - "Highway '61 Revisited"

Numerology is our pal Dave's ill advised quest to find the definitive song for every number from one to a hundred. The higher the digit, the lonelier the climb.

Previously: No. 1, 2-4, , 4 (redux), 5-7, 6 (redux), 7 (counterpoint), 8, 9, 10/11, 12/13. 13 (counterpoint), 14/15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26/27, 28 , 29 , 30, 30 (counterpoint), 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, Footnotes, 57, 58, 59 , 60

Posted by David Klein at February 20, 2009 11:40 AM

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Posted by: jonny at February 26, 2009 11:14 AM

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