TITO BURNS

Photo: Daily Mail/Rex Pictures

The British booking agent Tito Burns, whose heyday was the 1960s, has died aged 89. Here he is tactfully handling Cliff Richard in 1958, the year they acquired each other. He didn't look so tough when Albert Grossman was humiliating him in 1965, as seen in Don't Look Back (the D.A. Pennebaker film of Dylan's last solo acoustic tour, which was, as it happened, in the UK that spring). Burns was an ex jazz band leader who hated rock'n'roll but put up with it.

In The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia entry on the film, he gets this mention:

"[The film is] also mordantly funny: never more so than when the soon to be Newcastle High Sheriff’s Lady comes to call on Bob backstage, or when Albert Grossman gets together with one of the pompous big-name hustlers of the British ‘entertainment industry’, Tito Burns, forces him to negotiate British TV appearances for Dylan right there in front of us all, and makes this wily bully-boy look a bumbling fraud alongside Grossman’s genuine article."

The obituary in the Daily Telegraph reports that "The Searchers complained that Burns worked them too hard, and it was said that another of his pop acts, the Zombies, lived up to the name on account of being permanently exhausted."

Not only that but "In 1986, with his wife, Burns took up golf with a passion..."

FROM SHETLAND TO FLORIDA: ODDS & ENDS

I'm home after an excellent weekend in the Shetland Isles, 1530 miles away. I managed to attend various other people's events as well as both of my own, and it's the first time I've ever walked to Tesco's entirely by strolling along a footpath by the edge of the sea and then crossing a road. We were all lucky with the weather too: it never rained and the sun shone. A local remarked that "this weekend is in fact our summer".

Meanwhile I note that yesterday would have been the 85th birthday of the postwar R&B/blues star Jimmy Reed (whose 1957 'Odds and Ends' suggests itself strongly when you hear Dylan's 'Pledging My Time'), and was the 25th anniversary of the death of Eurreal Little Brother Montgomery (in Chicago, aged 79) whose 1930 'No Special Rider Blues' is one of only four pre-war blues songs to use the phrase "special rider" - the phrase that Dylan inspiredly chose as the name for his main music-publishing company, making it, as I remark in Song & Dance Man III, a telling way for him to choose to refer to his muse.



Meanwhile too, I note that Dylan's current tour leg is over - Seattle on the 4th was the last date - but that he begins again with a mostly college tour of Florida in early October:

Oct 6: Don Taft University Center, Nova Southeastern Univ., Ft. Lauderdale
Oct 7: Sun Dome, University Of South Florida, Tampa
Oct 8: Stephen C.O. Connell Center, University of Florida, Gainsville
Oct 10: UCF Arena, University of Central Florida, Orlando
Oct 11: Tallahassee-Leon County Civic Center, Tallahassee.

OCCASIONAL PHOTOS NO. 77

BOB DYLAN'S NEW PAINTINGS: THE BRAZIL SERIES

The Danish National Gallery's exhibition of Bob Dylan's new paintings The Brazil Series opens this week in Copenhagen - selected from around 50 he painted specially for this gallery over the course of the last year (that's more or less one a week, in addition to his touring and whatever else).

The Gallery's website, which is excellent, includes a short video survey of the paintings selected for the exhibition opens this week (with Danish talking heads), and a really interesting article for the uninitiated about how the exhibition was created by the gallery. There's also a brief piece by the curator, skirting around the question of whether the pictures are only of interest because they're by Bob Dylan.

It's interesting that nowhere in either article does anyone make any claim at all as to the quality of the paintings. But on the basis of the brief glimpses afforded in the video, some of them look terrific: in particular, perhaps, the one with the washing hanging on the line. This is not something dashed off carelessly.

(My attention was drawn to all this by today's Desolation Row Information Service e-mail newsletter, run by John Baldwin.)

UPDATE ON NEW ALBUMS WE'LL BE BUYING ALL OVER AGAIN

Not content with re-selling all those albums, now the Sony / Bob Dylan people have devised another was of pulling in yet more of our money - by offering something previously unreleased as a bonus CD with the Witmark demos - if you buy the "special collectors' edition".

As reported more fully in ISIS here, someone has unearthed a partial recording from a 1963 gig never previously circulated. Here's most of the ISIS report:


An article earlier this year, in ISIS # 149, about Bob Dylan’s non-appearance on the 12 May 1963 Ed Sullivan show, included reference to Dylan’s performance, two days earlier, at the “1st Annual Folk Festival” at Brandeis University. Around the time ISIS went to press, there was a rumour that a recording of this performance had been found in the Ralph Gleason archive. Meanwhile, there has been contradictory information as to whether there would be a “collectors’ edition” of the forthcoming "Volume 9" in "The Bootleg Series". Now it seems that this will happen and the aforementioned Brandeis performance will make up the bonus disc. Here is the track listing as provided earlier this year:

1. Honey Just Allow Me One More Chance
2. Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues
3. Ballad of Hollis Brown
4. Masters of War
5. Talkin’ World War III Blues
6. Bob Dylan’s Dream
7. Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues

Apparently, the opening song is cut or in some way incomplete, so it will be interesting to hear if this how it appears on the bonus disc. 'Bear Mountain' is the one song that was mentioned in a contemporary review of the concert and it always seemed an odd choice for a 1963 performance. It is now understood that this was in response to a request from the audience and we must assume that this audience member recalled the song from one of Dylan’s previous visits to the Boston area. The whole recording lasts about 40-45 minutes and, before you ask, we have neither got nor heard this recording either.

The current position seems to be that this bonus disc will not be released as an individual item, nor will be available on a widespread basis. Instead, it will be sold as part of a “Bootleg Series Volume 9” package and through just one selected retailer in any one country. Details are not yet known.

Meanwhile I note that one of the albums we'll be buying all over again, the magnificent Highway 61 Revisited, was released 45 years ago today.

DEATH OF RICHIE HAYWARD

Albeit belatedly I report the death on August 12 of Richie Hayward, the Little Feat co-founder and drummer and once a member of Bob Dylan's Never-Ending Tour band. He died of complications arising from liver cancer while waiting for a liver transplant operation. He was 64.

Here's his brief entry in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

Hayward, Richie [1946 - ]
Richard Hayward was born on February 6, 1946 at Clear Lake, Iowa, where, four days before his Richie’s 13th birthday, BUDDY HOLLY, RITCHIE VALENS and the Big Bopper played their final gig, before getting into the plane that flew off towards Fargo, North Dakota, crashing and killing them in the snow en route. Undeterred, Hayward played his first gig as a drummer in a local hall soon afterwards.

In the mid-1960s, by now a ferociously accomplished drummer, Hayward co-founded a group with Lowell George, and after its disbandment and a brief gap, co-founded another with him, Little Feat. Hayward remained with it until it collapsed after the June 1979 death of Lowell George; but he was back with the group when it reformed in 1988. Meanwhile Hayward has also performed and recorded with everyone from Joan Armatrading to WARREN ZEVON.

In 2004 he became a shortlived member of Dylan’s Never-Ending Tour band, playing drums and percussion in a supporting rôle to GEORGE RECILE (who was having problems with one arm). Hayward played from the Tulsa Oklahoma concert of February 28 (not playing on the opening number or the encore songs this first night) through till the end of the April 4 concert in Washington D.C..

BROWNSVILLE GIRL FILM RUMOUR

There's a rumour that Brad Pitt may star in a Hollywood movie version of 'Brownsville Girl'. The link (thanks, Yvonne) is here, though this is really re-writing the rumour from here.

The former site's key paragraph is this: "The film would be based on Bob Dylan's 11-minute long song 'Brownsville Girl' - and a script is already out there with Winkler Films set to produce. The screenplay (written by Gangs of New York scribe Jay Cocks, at Dylan's request) is being described as a cross between The Shawshank Redemption and Bonnie and Clyde... The project is generating heat once again (it's been around for some time) because Crazy Heart's Scott Cooper is considering directing."

Er, shouldn't that be Bob Dylan and Sam Shepard's song 'Brownsville Girl'? And the last rumour I heard about that was Sam Shepard wrote most of the words. Either way, it's a joint composition - and since Sam Shepard has written many screenplays, does this mean that Jay Cocks has been asked to write one for this project because Shepard has turned it down?

STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN

Stevie Ray Vaughan Statue, Austin, Texas
Photo © Steve Hopson, 2006

taken from http://stevehopson.com/index.htm

Yesterday marked the 20th anniversary of Stevie Ray Vaughan's untimely death. Here's the entry from The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia:

Vaughan, Stevie Ray [1954 - 1990]
Stevie Ray Vaughan was born in Dallas, Texas, on October 3, 1954, learnt guitar after growing to love his older brother JIMMIE’s blues-based record collection, dropped out of high school in 1972 and moved to Austin, where there was a vast student population and a burgeoning live music scene. He became a defining figure in 1980s Texas rock’n’roll (a kind of benign redneck R&B). A master of the Fender Stratocaster, with a unique tone and technique, he led the group Double Trouble. You might blame Stevie Ray Vaughan for the irritating riff on “Love and Theft”’s only weak track, ‘Honest With Me’.

Prior to Double Trouble, Vaughan had played with local Austin groups the Nightcrawlers and Paul Ray & The Cobras. In 1976, Vaughan formed his own band, the Triple Threat Revue, first re-named Triple Threat and then, when the vocalist quit in 1981, Double Trouble (though actually this remained a trio). In 1982 they played the Montreux Festival, Switzerland, where David Bowie asked Vaughan to play on what became his Let’s Dance album. This led to other stints as a sideman with the ROLLING STONES and Jackson Browne. Double Trouble’s 1983 début album Texas Flood was a critical success and sold half a million; they followed it with the far greater commerical successes of Couldn’t Stand the Weather (1984) and Soul to Soul (1985). These records were on Epic, but another album, Blues Explosion, on Atlantic, won a Grammy as Best Traditional Blues Record of the Year in 1984.

In 1986, after collapsing on stage in Germany, he checked into an Atlanta rehabilitation clinic. Two years later he seemed to be fully functioning again, performing an unplugged set on MTV and in 1989 touring with Jeff Beck and releasing the 5th Double Trouble album, In Step, which also gave him a no.1 radio hit, ‘Crossfire’.

In 1990 Vaughan recorded Family Style, an album made with brother Jimmie, co-headlined another tour, this time with Joe Cocker, and embarked on a headlining Double Trouble tour. That April 30 he laid down some guitar overdubs on tracks for Dylan’s Under The Red Sky album that Dylan had recorded that January 6th. He played on ‘Cat’s In The Well’ and ’10,000 Men’, and played lead guitar on ‘God Knows’.

Stevie Ray Vaughan died in a helicopter crash near East Troy, Wisconsin, on August 27, 1990 (having just performed as a guest at an ERIC CLAPTON concert in Alpine Valley). Bob Dylan first responded with appropriate restraint: ‘He was a sweet guy. Something else was coming through him besides his guitar playing and singing.’ Later, unfortunately, before a concert in Merrillville, Indiana, he added the vacuously inaccurate: ‘It’s almost like having to play the night that Kennedy died. He’ll probably be revered as much as and in the same way as Hank Williams’. More sweetly, he dedicated a performance of ‘Moon River’ to Vaughan that night.

Posthumous record releases are plentiful. One of the earliest was that recorded with brother Jimmie that same year; Family Style was released as by ‘the Vaughan Brothers’. There is now a ludicrous statue of Stevie Ray at Riverside Drive and South 1st Street in Austin.

[Double Trouble: Texas Flood, Epic FET/EK 38734, US, 1983; Blues Explosion, Atlantic 7 80149-1, US, 1984; Couldn’t Stand The Weather, Epic FET/EK 39304, US, 1984; Soul To Soul, Epic FET/EK 40036, US, 1985; Live Alive!, Epic, EGK/EGT 40511, US, 1986; In Step, Epic OET/EK 45024, US, 1989. The Vaughan Brothers: Family Style, Epic ZT/ZK 46225, US, 1990.]