Come On Down

I'm happy to report the madness seems to run in the family: Over the holidays it was revealed that my sister's family, for obviously esoteric reasons, is enamored of the word "vouchsafe." Admittedly, despite always loving the word mainly for its look (admittedly, too, I've always had a tough time pronouncing it, somehow instead of saying it vouch-safe, I tend to garble it as vow-chafe, which I believe is a condition many young aspiring priests suffer from), I had to look the word up to get its full meaning. Basically it means "to condescend," although as the venerable A Dictionary of Modern American Usage by Bryan A. Garner points out, it is now commonly/erroneously used for "to bestow or grant."

Which all leads to the bigger question: What's so wrong about condescension? I guess here in America where all men (and women) are created equal, and especially here in modern America where if one is perceived to be or acts as if one is above anybody else, there will be hell to pay and then some, the very notion of condescension, especially the act of asking one to condescend, is rather odious. But I believe the word condescend used to have a much less negative connotation/denotation, and I believe there can still be a use for this particular connotation/denotation. So, even if the word condescend has too much negative baggage these days, thankfully we still have the word vouchsafe, and I believe we need to use it more often.

Certainly in prayer (remember that oldie but goodie, folks) it is proper and probably safer to address one's higher power in such language. Oh Powerful One, please vouchsafe to us, You who have such a plethora of more important concerns on Your Hands, and bestow upon us peace, health, sustenance, and a championship for Cleveland. If anyone's going to get his/her knickers in a twist about the Supreme Being condescending to him/her, I advise looking into some flame-retardant duds with an eternal guarantee.

But God isn't the only one we can call upon to vouchsafe to us. We might all be born equal, but in the real world, we aren't. Say what you will about Tiger Woods, but the man can still play golf. If I'm lucky enough to find myself playing in a pro-am with him someday, I believe the proper way to ask him for a pointer or two to help me cure my snap hook would be to say, "Hey Tiger, can you vouchsafe to look at my humble swing and tell me what the hell I'm doing wrong here?"

Barack Obama's got three hundred million people to worry about, and half of them think he's Karl Marx himself, so if I should somehow find myself at a State Dinner (the one I think he's planning for overworked booksellers who love Bob Dylan and bacon, covered in chocolate!), I think it would be appropriate if I said, "Hey Prez, you mind vouchsafing a bit over here near the bacon, covered in chocolate! troughs so I can give you my thoughts on health care and those lousy White Sox?"

If Bob Dylan himself would ever vouchsafe to play his song "Never Say Goodbye"--a song he's never played in public and one of my no arguments brooked all-time favorites--at a concert I am attending (and if God could then simultaneously vouchsafe to beam the late Rick Danko down to the concert stage to re-create his awesome bass lines [with all due respect to Tony Garnier]) I would probably shut up all my vouchsafing pleas for a Cleveland championship for the rest of my life, the thrill would be that great.

Anyway, maybe we should all practice a little vouchsafing by taking a good look at our lives, recognizing the various high horses we ride on, and make the effort to get off them and come on back down to Earth a bit. In other words, as a mere baby step, I don't hate Mark Johnson; I just hate having bad Cleveland winter weather hectored at me.

Thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day and vouchsafing to read my babble.

Bob Dylan and The Band-Never Say Goodbye

Untagged, I Tag The World (Under That Apple Suckling Tree, Oh Yeah)

As a kid, I loved playing sports, and while I may not have been all-world, I held my own. Rarely if ever the first one picked in pick-up games, I don't think I ever suffered the cliched cruel fate of the last one picked, either. Thus, my bemusement at not being a part of the cyber game of tag that's lately been going on. It seems that among music bloggers, a game of tag has broken out. You post a song that makes you happy and write some glowing words about a blog you like, thus "tagging" that blog(ger), who in turn does the same and tags another blog(ger). I've been waiting, but, alas, the game seems to have passed me by.


But I will not weep! If the world of bloggers will not have me in their game, I will tag the world, Mother Earth, this mortal coil, third rock from the sun, our gorgeous home this spinning orb. In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I give thanks for this extraordinary planet, the best I've ever known. I thank it for flat ground, which always amazes me when I realize it's really rounder than Santa's belly. How does it do that?

I thank it for the (literally) thirty minutes a year I get to stand in an ocean's surf, never failing to remember Melville's claim in the first chapter of Moby-Dick that all men are drawn to the sea.

I thank it for being the only place I know with guys named Gary and gals named Dottie: I've never met an unpleasant Gary or Dottie.

I thank it for wind.

I thank it for spinning madly and never making me dizzy, unless cotton candy and rollercoasters are involved.

I thank it for clouds.

I thank it for the words "open late nite."

I thank it for the holy gulps of orange juice it provides.

I thank it for all its various musics.

Speaking of which, this song here, Bob Dylan and The Band's "Apple Suckling Tree" is, or me, the antithesis of sadness. It's been on the top of the charts of my funeral dance songs list forever (I call it this because I think the songs should be played at my funeral, just to make sure I'm truly gone, because upon hearing them, I cannot keep still).

Most people, probably none of them named Gary or Dottie, tend to pass the song off as a mere nonsensical trifle, which, unapologetically, it is, but nonsensical trifles as joyous as this demand to be celebrated. Listen how Bob's primitive, percussive piano baits the others for a long ten seconds at the start, tempting them to join him in exploring just how ebullient music-making can be. You hear Garth Hudson (organ) and (probably) Richard Manuel (tambourine) kick the dirt a little, maybe shy about hitching a ride on this crazy train. But then daring Rick Danko revs up his bass like a bull scratching in the dirt and the whole thing sets sail (I know I'm mixing metaphors, but with nonsense like this, you have no choice). And the drums. Most people seem to agree that Robbie Robertson, guitarist by trade, is the one pounding and kicking, though Manuel and even the long-absent Levon Helm get some votes, too. Whoever, praise be. He sounds either like Adam discovering percussion before he's even named the animal, or a drunk fumbling for a misplaced bottle, pounding on a set of drums that sounds more like a collection of boxes the boys rummaged from the garage (or, if you prefer, the Basement) of Big Pink, the house at 2188 Stoll Road in West Saugerties, New York, where in the summer and fall of 1967 Dylan, recovering from his motorcycle crash of the year before, and the Hawks, soon to be The Band, were making daily music for the best reason: for the sheer exuberant hell of it.

Dylan, "always the thief," adapts the tune from the ancient mind-blower "Froggie Went A-Courtin'"--which he then waited 25 years to record in its own right quite wonderfully. And the words, well, yes there are words, not that it makes much difference. I've seen about seven completely different transcriptions of what Bob is supposedly singing here, and none of them make complete sense, probably because Bob didn't know what he was singing half the time. It's holy gibberish that makes you sing along with your own noises and half-words. I prefer to hear one word as "Bartholemew," maybe the only Bartholemew in popular song, though you're free to hear anything you want. All that matters is the inviting, salacious, raucous, innocent, humane wish/desire/prayer/insistence that just "you and me" are going to be "underneath that apple suckling tree." Oh yeah, don't forget those "oh yeahs" with Rick and Richard joining in, the foam on the tall cold draft beer of this song. The rest is just snatches of coherence: "take a look," "on the avenue," "seven years." But hear, oh please hear, the ecstatic glee with which Bob sings, on the verge of cracking up throughout, cracking up not into laughter, really, but out of sheer delight. Ululation, speaking in tongues, what have you, deliriously.

The Bird Flu, H1N1, any old mere virus you can muster can't hold a candle to infectiousness this potent. And then, nearly two minutes into the two-minute, forty-nine-second song, when you realize you'll be happily sick with this song for the rest of your life, it leaves the stratosphere entirely. Garth Hudson, ladies and gentlemen, on organ. What, you need words? This is beyond verbal. How about a lone skater on a frozen country lake basking in the realization that he is indeed the happy genius of his own world? Sam Phillips famously once said of the music/voice of the legendary Howlin' Wolf, "This is where the soul of man never dies." Well, Garth Hudson's organ solo, from 1:58 to 2:22 on my digital counter, is where the soul of man dances endlessly, completely inebriated with love, life, solitude--all the old verities. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, if reincarnation is our fate, I want nothing more than to come back as this organ solo; 24 seconds of sheer bliss, replayed forever through headphones, car radios, bedroom boomboxes, and living room speakers, beats nirvana every time. And then the singing comes back for one more chorus, with a couple Garth fills just to remind you, yes, that was me granting you a glimpse of heaven. And then Robbie, or whoever, packs up the song with a few more feral beats, and we're back to the humdrum of our lives.

Thank you, Bob, Rick, Richard, Robbie, (maybe Levon), and especially Garth. On behalf of the whole world, thank you. Oh yeah!

Bob Dylan and The Band-Apple Suckling Tree

Buncha Basement Noise

I've been duped. For years I recalled reading somewhere that some survey of linguistic bigwigs had determined that the seemingly mundane phrase "cellar door" was the most beautiful in the English language. I had my quibbles--for starters I'd take the phrase "another brewski, dude?"--but I liked knowing this rather obscure fact. Well, it's neither obscure (the first person I assailed today by shouting "cellar door" at her immediately said, "Isn't that like the most supposedly beautiful phrase in the English language or something?" [she quibbled too, preferring the phrase "Harvey says hello"]), nor apparently fact. Once again, the know-it-alls at wikipedia seem to have the full, and quite interesting, scoop here. It seems that the estimable (though unread by some who shall remain nameless) J.R.R. Tolkien is the likely candidate for starting the cult of "cellar door" in an essay and later an interview. From there the tale winds through heavyweights H.L. Mencken, Jacques Barzun, anonymous Chinese or Japanese of Italian students (no, it doesn't involve someone saying, "Sell her door, she'll be back tomorrow for hinges and knobs") and even Donnie Darko. The survey, alas, is apocryphal.

Too bad, because I was all set to reveal numbers two through ten here today: "cheesey breeze," "more bacon?" "that blonde likes you," "sufferin' succotash," "liposuctions performed here," "he was the nazz, with God-given ass," "idiot's delight," "Uma Thurman" and "hellfire." But I guess that joke's gone.

Now in his defense, Tolkien says you have to detach the phrase "cellar door" from its meaning and its spelling. Okay, J double-R. But that's kind of like taking the sugar out of cotton candy. Anyway, I can't detach anything from the word cellar. The word freaks me out, to be honest, conjuring all sorts of nasty images of Kansas tornados, earth-mothers preservering pickles in big jars whose lids (the jars) never come off correctly, cobwebs, the ultimate fantod word "dank," sump pumps, and people not hip enough to use the word basement. And those doors! Those maw of hell flapping wooden things! Not for nothing did my sister and I spend half our childhoods trying to convince the other to accompany her or me whenever we had to go to the basement for something. There weren't monsters under my bed (too crowded what with all the dirty clothes), but down in the dank cellar, just the other side of the cellar door, lurked hideous things that J.R.R. couldn't imagine in his worst fevered nightmares. I'm sorry, no "cellar door" on any best of list for me.

In fact, if it weren't for my beloved Bob Dylan, I might have no use for basements at all. But after all, Johnny was mixing the medicine down there, and of course "I lived with them on Montague Street, in a basement down the stairs," and the pinnacle of any kind of basement talk celebration, "Look here you buncha basement noise," on the album titled, naturally, The Basement Tapes. In fact, I think my lifelong fear of cellars and such only abated enough for me to go down there unshaking after I discovered The Basement Tapes, ironically, around the same time my sister went off to college.

So, balderdash or not, I just can't credit "cellar door" at all. To me, the sweetest sounding word/phrase in the English language is really quite apparent, once you give it some thought. It's anytime Smokey Robinson sings "baby..."

Bob Dylan and The Band-You Ain't Goin' Nowhere

The Ramones-I Don't Wanna Go Down To The Basement