Final Sign of the Apocalypse: Bob Dylan Records Christmas Album
by Jim Washburn
Just as heterosexual weddings would be lackluster, styleless affairs without the help of the gay-infused wedding industry, Christmas would be a grim teutonic holiday without the contributions of Jews. They write the songs. They sing 'em. And they also brought Jesus to the party. So many Jews have recorded Christmas albums that by now even Meir Kahane must have done one. But there's always been a lone holdout from the Christmas cavalcade: Bob Dylan. Back in the 80s, Bob did three "Christian" albums, yet he never assayed any major manger melodies. (By the by, I was at a Dylan press conference back then that gave a good example of why artists hate the press. Someone--Entertainment Tonight, I think--asked him, "Bob, are you a Jew again on this tour?" Bob: "I'm only Jewish when I hafta be." "Then are you a Christian again?"...)
Well, perhaps you've heard recent reports that Dylan is finally breaking through the yule logjam and is releasing his first Christmas album on Oct. 12, titled Christmas in the Heart. Thanks to Amazon UK, you can hear snippets of the album's 15 songs.
How 'bout that? Bob sings his ass off, relatively speaking. Instead of that sing-songy, emphasize-every-seventh-syllable pap he does live these days, or the purloined blues lines of his albums in this century, he sounds present and engaged. Check out "Hark the Herald Angels Sing": it's almost as radical shift in singing style as the one he graced Nashville Skyline with. And how about "I'll Be Home for Christmas"? Every line he sings, it sounds like a vacuum cleaner starting up.
One song he doesn't tackle is Irving Berlin's "White Christmas," perhaps because the definitive Dylan version of it was already done by someone else. Remember the "Senator Bobby" version of "Wild Thing" done Bobby Kennedy style that was a hit in 1967? The same comic group, the Hardly-Worthit Players, also parodied Dylan with a spot-on version of "White Christmas" that sounded like it could have been a Highway 61 Revisited outtake. Parody plus time equals reality. Can a Bob Dylan Buns of Steel DVD be far behind?
Comments
If the comment above makes no sense (and it won’t), it’s because I’ve fixed the author field so that Jim gets properly blamed for this blasphemy. I am in Las Vegas for a writers’ convention, which I’m only attending because I’m playing in the band, and by the way I was asleep by 9:00 last night, so that tells you how much I love Vegas. Anyway, I fixed the name (which I already said, but I hate typing on a laptop keyboard so won’t go back to change anything). Jim could do this himself, using the instructions I’ve e-mailed everyone on this fakakte staff at least half a dozen times, but none of them remember because they’re they’re all acid casualties.
And, yes, Tony is first because he’s alphabetically superior, last-name-wise.
2009-09-18 by Nathan Walpowyou guys were made for each other.
2009-09-22 by Donna
Please don’t blame Tony for this blog post. It was written by me, Jim Washburn, who is not so adept at this bloggy stuff, and when the FourStory site logged me out because it had a date or something, after I restored the page, it had already gone back to the coveted Tony Chavira default, which Tony gets either because he writes most everything on the site or because he’s alphabetically superior to the rest of us. I don’t know how to switch the names back, and our overlord Nathan is off hunting elk or on a mystery writers’ cruise to Cabo or some other worthy endeavor that calls for radio silence.
2009-09-17 by jim washburn