7-inch Picture Sleeve of the Week: Spinal Tap: "Christmas With The Devil"

Although it’s a few days after Christmas, I still wanted to highlight the heavy metal satire of Spinal Tap in their 1984 seasonal offering “Christmas With the Devil,” which appeared with the sleeve above the same year their classic film “This is Spinal Tap” was released. 

The track doesn’t appear in the movie, but the band – including Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, and Michael McKean - performed it as the musical guest on the May 5th, 1984 episode of Saturday Night Live.

Unlike last week’s entry, The Velvet Underground’s “Head Held High,” Spinal Tap’s “Christmas With the Devil” is a 7-inch that I have in my collection. The B-side features a “scratch mix” of the song which, in perfect Tap fashion, is way scratchier than it needs to be.

The sleeve itself isn't that attractive - it looks like heavy metal clip art, but, again, that's fitting. The back cover features a photo of the Guest, Shearer, and McKean as their Tap characters (Derek Smalls, Nigel Tufnel, and David St. Hubbins), and the lyrics of the song with the same bright green background as the front cover.

Spinal Tap has rev-visited the song throughout their career, including a spirited rendition on The Arsenio Hall Show in ’92 during one of their many reunion tours (supporting their album that year – “Break Like the Wind”).

You can watch them perform it on the ’92 tour – from “The Return of Spinal Tap,” recorded live at the Royal Albert Hall, London below:

So as the band says in unison as the song fades on the single: “This is Spinal Tap, wishing you and yours the most joyous of holiday seasons.” 

Ditto, from me here at Pop Goes The Culture.

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Celebrating the 45th Anniversary of The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour

It was 45 years ago today…that the Beatles presented to the world their first critical flop: the TV special Magical Mystery Tour. 

On what the British call “Boxing Day,” December 26, 1967, BBC1 broadcast the 53 minute color musical special at 8:35 PM in black and white, and reaction was mixed to say the least. It was shown a few days later in color, but it was still given bad reviews. The program has gathered a better reputation over the years, because of the quality of the music and its capturing of the fab four in their psychedelic prime, but it still remains an oddity in their canon.

Since I received the Magical Mystery Tour Deluxe Box Set for Christmas, and today is the 45th anniversary, I decided to give the spiffy new Blu ray a whirl. It’s been a long time since I’ve watched the full film, so I don’t remember a lot of it. I remember first seeing it on a VHS release in the ‘80s, and making fun of it with a Beatle-maniac friend of mine. As a kid I had loved “A Hard Day's Night,” “Help!,” and “Yellow Submarine” (and still do), but this was just weird.

One of the things I remember most from it was a grotesque scene in which John Lennon played a grinning waiter, who used a shovel to pile spaghetti onto a fat woman's plate. That's an image that certainly stands out in the color booklet that came with the original EP, and the U.S. album and is reprinted in this edition.

I later came to appreciate its psychedelic significance (i.e. it’s great if you’re stoned), but it was still weird. Let’s start with its flimsy premise - the Beatles join a odd assortment of people on a bus ride to an unknown destination. 

As Malcolm McDowell put it in his narration in the drab 1982 documentary “The Compleat Beatles”: “Largely a project of Paul’s, the idea was to travel the English countryside in a bus filled with friends, actors and circus freaks, and to film whatever happened. Unfortunately, nothing did.” 

It opens promisingly with a bouncy montage set to the Paul-sung song “Magical Mystery Tour,” and introduces us to Ringo, still sporting his Sgt. Pepper mustache, as the main character (as he was in previous Beatles movies) buying tickets for the bus tour. John Lennon’s narration tells us that Ringo and his Aunt Jessie (Jessie Robbins), who he’s taking on the trip, are “always arguing about one thing or another.” 

They bicker throughout the film, never about anything specific, as it’s all improv. This was the biggest problem with Magical Mystery Tour - its famous lack of a script. There was some pie-chart-like break down of idea sections (reprinted in the slick book that comes with the box set), but no dialogue was written, so this makes the non-song parts formless and un-engaging.

Ringo and Aunt Jessie board the bus and we meet more characters including tour director Jolly Jimmy (Derek Royle, who in a featurette on the disc tells us once played a corpse on Fawlty Towers), Hostess Wendy Winters (Miranda Forbes), Mr. Bloodvessel (Ivor Cutler), a little person photographer (George Claydon – later an Oompa-Loompa in “Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory”), a bunch of folks just credited as passengers on the bus, and the rest of the Beatles themselves, who are never properly identified or given much to do. 

The Beatles don’t even give themselves anything to do when dressed as wizards in groovy red robes and hats (their roadie Mal Evans appears as a fifth wizard), who are overseeing the bus tour from someplace up in the sky. Lennon tells us that they spend their days casting “wonderful spells,” but they don’t do anything that has any effect the entire film. Nor do they make us laugh.

Another unfortunately unfunny element is Victor Spinetti as a indecipherable motormouth Army Sergeant. At least, since he was in “A Hard Day's Night” and “Help!,” Spinetti, who died last June, offers some sort of continuity to their first three film projects. 

A lame love montage sequence between Aunt Jessie and Mr. Bloodvessel comes along to test viewer’s patience and make us wonder how could the Beatles at the height of their power think their fans would be into this?

The best parts are, of course, the songs. Like the musical bits in their other films, the song scenes have been called precursors to modern music videos, and they’ve even been extracted and played as music videos by MTV and VH1. 

“Fool on the Hill” mainly features Paul McCartney walking around the countryside looking introspective, “Blue Jay Way” has George Harrison sitting looking bored lip-syching while his fingers move on a piano keyboard drawn on the floor with chalk (there’s a better version of this with George smiling and seeming more engaged in the bonus features), but the show stopper is the “I Am The Walrus” sequence, featuring the Beatles miming the song amid the towering concrete structures at the West Malling Airbase while superimposed imagery and trippy visual trickery surrounds them. The “Your Mother Should Know” closer with the moptops in white tuxedos dancing in formation is pretty cool too. 

Surprisingly, despite these Beatles classics, the most interesting music number comes from the obscure comical rock band The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band doing the lounge lizard showcase of a song “Death Cab For Cutie.” Neil Innes, who would later embody the Lennon caricature in Eric Idle’s Beatles parody “The Rutles,” can be seen plunking away on the piano. The song also features a censored strip-tease by Jan Carson for no real reason at all.

In his “My World of Flops” entry on Magical Mystery Tour (its combined with a take-down of Paul's 1984 dud “Give My Regards To Broad Street”), the A.V. Club’s Nathan Rabin wrote that Magical Mystery Tour “anticipates both MTV’s early days, when it seemed like anything was possible and the cost of entry was exhilaratingly low, and the gleeful absurdism of Monty Python.” 

Indeed, several of the segments seem like dry runs for later Python premises – Victor Spinetti’s absurd military man is echoed in Graham Chapman’s Colonel character, a marathon involving the passengers that turns into a car chase heavily resembles the “Twit of the Year” competition sketch, Lennon’s snotty waiter from the aforementioned restaurant scene is a recognizable Python archetype (see John Cleese in “Monty Python's The Meaning of Life” dealing with the surreally obese Terry Jones), and even the footage of a large crowds’ reaction that’s interspersed throughout is reminiscent of the film of old ladies clapping that appeared to be in every episode of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

This new re-mastered version of Magical Mystery Tour boasts a bevy of special features including a 20 minute “Making of” documentary, featurettes concerning “Ringo the Actor” and the supporting cast, an interesting “Hello Goodbye” promo, and a few cut scenes including a song by Traffic (“Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush”). The best bonus feature is the commentary by Paul McCartney, but that’s more because it’s often unintentionally funny than it is insightful.

Sample quotes: “I was surprised, years later, to hear, I think it was Steven Spielberg say that they’ve shown this and taught him about it in film school as an example of a different approach to film making” and “In a way, it's sort of a disgusting scene” (guess which scene).

So there you have it, The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour TV special, still weird after all these years, finally gets a spot on my shelf. It’s a fun film to re-visit, even with its frustrating flaws. The folks at Capitol did a good job with this deluxe package. Now, please, release LET IT BE! Maybe next Christmas?

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7-inch Picture Sleeve of the Week: The Velvet Underground: “Head Held High”/”Train Round The Bend”

7-inch Picture Sleeve of the Week: The Velvet Underground: “Head Held High” / “Train Round The Bend”

This is the first installment of Pop Goes The Babble's 7-inch Picture Sleeve of the Week. One of the many geeky, and hipster-ish, things about me is that I collect 7-inch vinyl singles. Not sure how many I have (need to do an inventory some day), but I have a lot of cool 45s with picture sleeves that I’ll be featuring on this blog over time. This first one, however, is not one I own – just one I like: a French pressing of The Velvet Undergound’s “Head Held High”/”Train Round The Bend.”

Despite the typo - “Bend” is printed as “Bond” – the picture sleeve is a snazzy re-purposing of Stanislaw Zagorskiof’s cover art from the LP of V.U.’s 1970 album Loaded with a yellow background.

The subway entrance illustration stands out more – pops, more aptly, as it’s a great example of the era’s pop art.

Obtaining an original pressing of this 7-inch will be very costly – a vintage copy lists on Ebay for $169.99. Nevertheless, one day, mark my words, it will be mine.

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A Couple Of HBO Comedy Series Now Out On DVD

These 2 HBO comedy series drop on DVD this week:

Funny or Die Presents: The Complete Second Season

The huge amount of professionally funny people involved with this half hour sketch comedy show, including co-creators / executive producers Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, sadly does not equal a huge amount of laughs in this second, and probably last season (no new episodes have been announced) of HBO’s Funny or Die Presents.

For every good idea, like “Juggalo News” - the news source specifically for fans of the Insane Clown Posse, or “Brick Novak’s Diary” (a clever noir parody made with shots of action figures and models), there’s a plethora of bad ones like the smarmy Rob Huebel’s “Do You Want To See A Dead Body?” running segments, the potty-mouth and minded Police Dept. sketches (which seem to be about how many times they can say the word “butthole”), and the awkwardly unfunny “Welcome To My Study” bits with the laconic Mitch Magee. The wrap-around bits with host Ed Halligan (Steve Tom) that try to give the program a retro vibe are pretty laugh-less affairs too.

Still, with appearances by SNL folks like Ferrell (who only appears in one stupid skit with John C. Reilly) Kristen Wiig, Rob Riggle, Bill Hader, Chris Parnell, and Rachel Dratch, along with veteran comic performers like Thomas Lennon (appearing with his Reno 911 co-star Ben Garrant in one of the better movie satires here - “Terrorists on Flight 77”), Romany Malco (whose “Tijuana Jackson: Life Coach” shorts aren’t bad either), Rachael Harris, Fred Willard, and Ben Stiller among many recognizable others (those Tim & Eric guys are here too, but I confess I don’t “get” their stuff), hardcore comedy nerds, especially really young ones, may get their fair share of gags out of the 300 minutes (that’s the running time of all 10 episodes - there are no bonus features) available on this new 2 DVD set. For oldster comedy fans like me, the bulk of the Funny or Die stuff mostly dies.

The Life & Times of Tim: The Complete Third Season

This is for sure the final season of this little-known animated show (well, it was little known by me) as it was cancelled by HBO last summer, so this 2 DVD set is the series’ last hurrah. With its crude animation and even cruder humor, I’m surprised it made it to its third season.

Don’t get me wrong, creator/writer/director/star Steve Dildarian’s show about New York slacker Tim can be pretty amusing, but its loose tossed-off and incredibly disposable nature didn’t suggest a long running hit.

When season 3 begins, Dildarian’s Tim, who has a deadpan Ray Romano-ish delivery, is constantly lying to his girlfriend Amy (Mary Jane Otto) about his place of employment (and just about everything else), but by the end of the season, he’s back at his previous job at Omnicorp, in a lofty position as spokesperson. 

Along the way Tim has a bunch of wacky adventures, usually involving embarrassing sexual mishaps, with his friends Stu (Nick Kroll), and Rodney (Matt Johnson), as well as his boss (Peter Giles), that usually have our hapless anti-hero (I guess) reacting in his sarcastically laidback manner, which I have to admit equals a bunch of genuine laughs (especially in the episode “Action-Packed Heist/Fall Foliage”).

Much like Funny or Die Presents, the number of comic talents involved may outnumber the number of legitimately funny moments, but The Life & Times of Tim has a likable and consistently amusing vibe that with this 3rd season set should add a few more members to its mini cult. 

Also like the Funny or Die DVDs, Tim contains no special features - its just the 10 episode season spread over two discs.

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The Flaming Lips’ “Waitin’ For a Superman” now with Superman!

In the mid-‘90s, before the term “mash-ups” went mainstream, somebody had the idea to sync the movie “The Wizard of Oz” with the Pink Floyd album The Dark Side of the Moon. The myth goes that if you hit play on Dark Side right on the MGM lion’s third roar, the movie and the album go together perfectly - the lyrics, music, action, and cutting all fall in line, as if it was originally planned that way by the band.

Of course, it wasn’t, but the idea of synching music to movies is appealing to me even if I’ve rarely found any examples that really work. One I think that does, I thought up sometime in the last 15 years – synch The Flaming Lips’s “Waiting For Superman” with the scene in the 1978 Richard Donner movie “Superman” in which the Man of Steel (Christopher Reeve) takes Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) on a romantic nighttime flight. If you can forgive the crappy VHS quality of the movie clip, the song fits the scene quite well, I think - check it out:

Nice, huh? At one time I played around with syncing a scene from Oliver Stone’s “JFK” to the overture from Jesus Christ Superstar, but I’m not sure I want to unveil that just yet. Maybe next year for the Kennedy assassination’s 50th anniversary! Yeah, that’d be classy.

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Babblin’ about the rocking but exhausting 12.12.12 Concert

Whew! The six-hour 12.12.12 concert, which I watched last night on VH1 Classic, wore me out. The mammoth rock star-packed concert at Madison Square Garden to raise money for the Robin Hood Relief Fund benefiting victims of Hurricane Sandy started at 7:30 with a rollicking mini-set by Bruce Springsteen and ended a half hour after midnight with a concluding song by Alicia Keys, who at 31 was the youngest performer present.

After a opening montage of hurricane footage reminding us of all the devastating damage, the always-up-to-the task Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band kicked off the show with “Land of Hope and Dreams,” giving it all their trademark energy and power. “Wrecking Ball” from his most recent record of the same name followed, then an also appropriate gospel-tinged “My City of Ruins” from Springsteen’s 2002 9/11-themed album “The Rising.” In the intro to the last song, Springsteen spoke about Asbury park, getting a big crowd response when thanking “the arts community and the gay community” for the town’s recent renaissance.

Bruce brought up Jon Bon Jovi to duet with him on “Born To Run” which brought on more applause, but Bon Jovi’s voice wasn’t well suited to the song – it was too clean, not enough of the grit the anthem needs. But then I’m not a fan of the man, when Springsteen said that Bon Jovi has done a lot of great things for New Jersey, I couldn’t help thinking ‘yeah, his brand of strip club rock music does a lot of good for the state’s image.’

Billy Crystal, who’s on the promo circuit for his new awful-looking movie “Parental Guidance,” came on to make a few quips (like “you can feel the electricity in the building which means that Long Island Power was not involved”), do his impression of De Niro from “Raging Bull,” and make pleas for donations, something he’s very experienced at from all those Comic Relief telethons.

Susan Sarandon came on also asking for money, then introduced Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters to do several songs from his tour production of “The Wall” (“In The Flesh,” “The Happiest Days of Our Lives,” “Another Brick In The Wall Pt. 2,”) which didn’t really seem to address the concert’s theme but the audience who largely sang along didn’t seem to care. It was great that he was joined by what I presume were the “Fear Builds Walls” dancers during “Another Brick.”

Then Waters said it was time for some “stuff from “Dark Side” and performed “Money,” and a way too long (but then it always was) “Us and Them,” he was aided in singing by session vocalist Robbie Wyckoff, who looked like a blend of Daryl Hall and Eddie Vedder. Vedder was there for real, as everyone knew in advance, to do the David Gilmore vocal on the set closer “Comfortably Numb.” Vedder was well suited for the job making it a stellar version of the FM radio staple.

Rolling Stone and Vibe writer Alan Light recently wrote a book about the legacy of the Leonard Cohen classic “Hallelujah” (“The Holy or the Broken”), but the song may not be powerful enough to withstand Adam Sandler’s lame but performed with gusto satire of the song, with lines like “Hallelujah, Sandy screw you.” Paul Shaffer provided the piano backing, and some back-up singing, and, as usual, pulled it off without any embarrassment.

NBC anchor Brian Williams, who wondered out loud if Cohen was asked permission of their “for the ages” version of “Hallelujah,” chatted with Ben Stiller at the phone bank, and then without any warning Kristen Stewart was on stage talking about Hurricane Sandy. Some mini-featurette with Bon Jovi shot like he’s in an infomercial talking up a storm about the storm is shown. 

This sets up Bon Jovi’s set in which the band performed “It’s My Life,” “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” and then thankfully brought Springsteen back up onstage to duet on “Who Says You Can’t Go Home,” a song that despite that it was a huge hit, I’ve never heard before. Then the inevitable set closer “Living On A Prayer” did its best to stink up the place.

Boy, did this make Eric Clapton look like God in comparison! After some fun in the phone bank with Brian Williams (hey –there’s Tony Danza!), and some Jon Stewart silliness (“When Roger Waters was out here singing, how many of you remembered where you hid your pot in ninth grade?) onstage, Clapton came out and sat down with his trusty acoustic guitar to do a tender “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” He switched to Stratocaster to do “Got To Get Better In A Little While,” and finished up with “Crossroads.” 

Clapton’s never really been one of my guitar heroes, but he’s a solid presence at shows like this (though I thought he overplayed his solo on “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” at the Bob Dylan 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration at the Garden back in ’92).

Chelsea Clinton, looking a little nervous, spoke for a bit about the benefit, they showed another bit of video with storm footage, and one of the evening’s most anticipated acts was introduced by the world’s biggest rock fanboy Jimmy Fallon (“I’ve got to tweet this, this is unbelievable”): The Rolling Stones, currently celebrating their 50th anniversary.

The Stones only did two songs “You Got Me Rocking,” (from 1994’s Voodoo Lounge) and their 1968 single “Jumping Jack Flash,” but they made the most of them. Still don’t think I’ll shell out $40 to watch their pay-per-view show on Saturday night though.

Stephen Colbert did his over-confident pitch for pledges, and brought out Kanye West who introduced Alicia Keys. Alone at a grand piano, Keys played “Brand New Me,” and “No One” which the audience seemed to really appreciate - with her prompting they held up their cell phones for a sea of lights effect. This surprisingly didn’t annoy me like when it does when I go to concerts in person.

After a great shot of cast members from The Sopranos manning the phone banks, it was time for one of my all-time favorite bands: The Who. Of all people, Steve Buscemi introduced them, and joked about the Stones cutting their set short and of course gabbed about Sandy and some more video was shown of Robin Hood Relief Fund folks.

It was a typical set for the Who, who I saw do Quadrophenia last month in Greensboro, but a fine one with by the numbers versions of “Who Are You,” “Bell Boy,” “Pinball Wizard,” “See Me Feel Me,” “Baba O’Riley,” the show-stopping “Love Reign O’er Me,” and the new, well from 2006, “Tea and Theatre,” which they also closed with when I saw them. 

Lead singer Roger Daltrey’s voice was pretty rough at times, and I wish he’d keep his shirt closed, but Pete Townshend did more damage to his hearing with blazing solos, and Ringo Starr’s kid Zak filled Keith Moon’s shoes with great pounding timing. Moon appeared via large video screens (from footage shot in ’74) to sing his part on “Bell Boy,” something that was cool to see again.

Dapper host Williams joked about Daltrey taking his shirt off back at the phone bank and we got a better look at all the Sopranos people (James Gandofini got the biggest crowd reaction). After this I kinda spaced out when Crystal came back and threw it to newscaster Della Crews, but Chris Rock got my attention back.

Rock introduced Kanye West who performed his set that came off like one long song in a leather skirt. With no breaks “Clique” went into “Mercy” which went into “Power” into “Jesus Walks” into “All Of The Lights” into “Run This Town” into “Diamonds From Sierra Leone” into “Diamonds.” I had to look those all up since I don’t know West’s catalog very well. More recognizable were the songs he ended his set with: “Touch The Sky,” “Gold Digger,” “Good Life,” “Runaway,” and “Stronger.” Kanye’s set didn’t make me any more of a fan, but I can’t say it wasn’t entertaining.

Back to Williams who talked with 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer, and put up with some more tomfoolery from Fallon, then SNL’s Seth Myers and Bobby Moynihan doing his Drunk Uncle character. Drunk Uncle is usually pretty reliably funny on the show but here it kind of fell flat.

After Jake Gyllenhall did more pitching for pledges, Billy Joel was up to do a lengthy (or maybe it just felt that way) set that consisted of “Miami 2017 (Seen The Lights Go Out On Broadway),” “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas,” “New York State Of Mind,” “River Of Dreams,” and “You May Be Right, Only The Good Die Young.” Jesus, why did Joel get this many songs?

Next, after Blake Lively said some stuff, the surprise in Chris Martin of Coldplay’s set was that Michael Stipe of R.E.M. showed up to duet on “Losing My Religion.” The other songs in his short set – “Viva La Vida,” and “Us Against The World” were less interesting, of course, but still crowd pleasers, even if they weren’t me-pleasers.

More phone bank fun followed, and SNL’s Jason Sudekis and the ex-Mrs. Tom Cruise Katie Holmes put in their two cents for why you should donate your two cents presented some more video (no disrespect, but yawn), and then Leonardo DiCaprio (not there but onscreen) introduced Quentin Tarantino, Jamie Fox, and Christoph Waltz, all from the upcoming “Django Unchained” who introduced the headliner everyone’s been waiting for: Sir Paul McCartney.

Over the last day rumors have been spreading that McCartney’s set would feature a Nirvana reunion with Dave Grohl, Pat Smear and Krist Novoselic joining the ex-Beatle onstage. Well that happened, with a new song called “Cut Me Some Slack,” which wasn’t bad but nobody is going to mistake it for either band’s classic material. 

With his tight touring band McCartney also played “Helter Skelter,” “Let Me Roll It,” “1985,” “My Valentine” (with a guest appearance by Diana Krall), “Blackbird,” “I’ve Got A Feeling,” and “Live and Let Die.” McCartney is one of those rich celebrities that refuses to age. I won’t speculate about plastic surgery, but he sure as Hell doesn’t look 70. The fact that most of his music refuses to age too balances it out.

Alicia Keys came back out after Macca's set and closed the show with a poignant and fitting “Empire State of Mind Pt. 2.” 

Again, whew! After all that music, celebrities, and hurricane talk, I’m exhausted. Time to call it a blog and get some rest.

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Pop Goes The Babble’s Favorite Album of 2012: Bob Dylan’s Tempest

Welcome to Pop Goes The Babble!

This is a new sister site to Film Babble Blog, that will be mostly focused on pop culture other than movies - television shows, music, books, whatever. 

This blog will be more indulgent than Film Babble as I’ll be posting on stuff I’m into at the moment - like classic and indie rock ‘n roll, and TV series I’m currently making my way through (I’m exercise-biking through the X-Files right now, but you’ll hear more about that later).

For this first post, which I believe will set the tone for the babblin' to come, here’s an essay about my favorite album of the last year:

Bob Dylan’s Tempest: Songs about love, death, the Titanic, and John Lennon

Bob Dylan has one of the most divisive voices in all of pop culture. It’s a raspy croak of a voice, that’s gotten raspier and croakier throughout the years - to the point, at times, of extreme indecipherability, especially in the realm of stage performance. 

When Dylan last played the Triangle here in N.C., at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park three years ago, a lot of people left during his set, simply because they could not understand what the Hell he was singing. Even much loved Dylan (and rock) standards such as “Like a Rolling Stone” and “All Along the Watchtower” were unrecognizable to a large part of the audience.

However, there are folks, like me, who speak fluent Dylanese, that actually enjoy the man’s particular brand of ever-changing phrasing, no matter how hoarse.

I’m part of what author Jonathan Lethem dubbed “the Biograph generation,” that is, the wave of fans that, because of their age, came to Dylan twenty years after his prime ‘60s period, around the time his career-spanning box set Biograph was released in 1985. Bob’s voice was considerably shot even by then, but the power of his back catalog, and the fact he still had stellar work like Infidels (1983) and Oh Mercy (1989) in him, that blunt instrument sounded pretty damn good to me.

Sure, Dylan’s voice has deteriorated much more since, but on a strong run of studio albums starting with 1997’s Time Out of Mind, he’s delivered critically acclaimed, award-winning, and, most surprisingly, chart topping music - very vital stuff that’s proved that that oh-so difficult voice is largely beside the point. 

The 71-year old Dylan’s newest release, his 35th studio album Tempest, should further cement that position. It’s a stirring collection of songs about love, death, the Titanic, and John Lennon, that’s maybe the man’s best since 2001’s Love and Theft.

Tempest, which was recorded with Dylan’s touring band Tony Garnier, George G. Receli, Donnie Herron, Charlie Sexton, and Stu Kimball, shares some of Love and Theft’s atmosphere and love of old timey blues and rockabilly (as well as a 9/11 release date), but much of it seems set in much more savage terrain.

Take for instance, “Pay in Blood,” a stand-out rocker, with stinging Stones-like chords, that muddies up the melody from Love and Theft’s “Mississippi” to a great gravelly effect.

When Dylan growls such lines as “You’ve got the same eyes that your Mama does, if only you’d could prove who your father was,” “this is how I spend my days, I came to bury, not to praise,” and the chorus’ “I’ll pay in blood, but not my own” we know we’re in the midst of a severely different psyche than the one who sang “I've got nothing but affection for all those who've sailed with me” a decade ago.

In appraising the other songs, the moon-lit ballad “Soon After Midnight,” sounds like a sequel to Time Out of Mind’s “Standing in the Doorway,” or a spiritual descendant of Oh Mercy’s “Where Teardrops Fall,” in the tradition of Dylan’s late-night laments.

“Scarlet Town” channels “Ain’t Talkin’” from Dylan’s Modern Times, likewise the opener “Duquesne Whistle” has a “Thunder On The Mountain”-thing going on, but it doesn’t come across like Bob repeating himself. More like, he’s refining a style he’s been pursuing since his first album fifty years ago. 

The dark brooding nine minute “Tin Angel” is probably the darkest and bloodiest song here, as it tells a love triangle suicide story, which gets more menacing with each verse.

Of course, with Bob, you’ve got to expect a few blues shuffles and they’re there in “Narrow Way,” and the “Mannish Boy”-ish “Early Roman Kings” (featuring David Hidalgo on accordion). Some may complain about how obvious and done-to-death these swampy rhythms are, but if you’re not a fan of Bob churning out cutting couplets over deep blues progressions, then you’re just not into Bob. 

In his fourth self-produced disc in a row, Dylan shifts through a variety of genres including ragtime, vaudeville, Chess Records R & B, swing, cocktail-lounge crooning, and, his old standby folk, which, intertwined with an Irish waltz ambience, rules on the epic Titanic-themed title song.

“Tempest,” an almost 14-minute track about the 1912 sinking of the Titanic, makes me envision Bob sitting on his couch with his guitar watching “Titanic” on TBS, and riffing on what’s happening onscreen. How else do you explain the name dropping of “Leo” (DiCaprio), and the line about a woman telling “a sad, sad story of the great ship that went down”?

As pivotal and engaging as the track “Tempest” is, and it does immediately join the pantheon of essential long-form Dylan songs like “Desolation Row,” "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” “Joey,” “Brownsville Girl,” and “Highlands” (still the longest Dylan song at 16:31), Dylan’s John Lennon tribute “Roll on John,” the album’s fitting closer, is definitely more affecting.

In what could be considered another late-night lament, Bob quotes from Beatles’ songs, and utters the epitaph: “From the Liverpool docks to the Hamburg Red-light streets, down in the quarry with the Quarrymen, playing to the big crowds, playing to the cheap seats.” A few years back, Dylan visited Lennon’s childhood home in Liverpool, and that can be felt in the affectionate reverence of “Roll on John.” 

Dylan’s previous album, 2009’s Together Through Life, had its off-the-cuff, live-in-the-studio charms, but Tempest is a vast improvement in arrangement, production, and songwriting, with lyrics that are as sharp as the singing is raggedy. It makes a compelling case that Bob’s voice, even at this late date, still has a mighty place in our present culture.

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