BOB DYLAN – JOHN BIRCH SOCIETY BLUES
Before I get into The Iguana Chronicles – the series of albums of Stooges music put out by Greg Shaw of Bomp! Records – I’ll take some time to relate my early acquisitions of albums of this kind. There are records out there which are not authorized that can include recordings that fans cannot get any other way. They are usually referred to as “bootleg” records and consist of music that was never officially released. “Pirated” records are illegal copies of major-label releases, and they are a different thing altogether. That is what got Napster into so much trouble many years ago. Bootlegs exist in a grey area and are generally (if grudgingly) tolerated by the music industry. In the same way, the major record labels almost never try to retake possession of the early promo copies of albums that are supplied to DJ’s and rock critics ahead of the official releases, even though they are typically marked with something like: “Licensed for promotional use only. Sale is prohibited.”
That memorable time – I always thought it was late 1969, but based on the dates I see in Wikipedia and elsewhere, it must have been in 1970 – I went by the Record Bar in Raleigh near the North Carolina State University campus, and there were several tables full of bootleg records that had been set up in the middle of the store. I picked up four that day: two by Bob Dylan, Great White Wonder and John Birch Society Blues; one by the Beatles, Kum Back; and one by the Rolling Stones, The Greatest Group on Earth. The music I got that day was a revelation and has informed my record collecting habits ever since.
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One might think that my other Bob Dylan bootleg acquisition that day long ago, John Birch Society Blues would have been completely overshadowed by Great White Wonder, but that isn’t true at all – it is a blockbuster album as well. Like many bootleg records, John Birch Society Blues has had several editions over the years, and with some variation in the songs provided on the album.
The first cut, “Mixed Up Confusion” was my introduction to Bob Dylan’s very first 45, as I have written about previously. With Dylan backed by an electric band, the song dates from November 1962 and was released on December 14, 1962 – 6 months before Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan came out, and fully 2½ years before the electric Dylan hit with full force on “Like a Rolling Stone” – but it was almost immediately pulled from the market and is now a great rarity. The flip side of this single, and the only song that I recognized on John Birch Society Blues was “Corrina, Corrina”; an alternative take of the song was included on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, but I had heard the song previously before I heard it there, by somebody somewhere. Wikipedia lists so many recorded versions of “Corrina, Corrina” that I have no idea which one it was; probably it was the Ray Peterson recording of “Corrina, Corrina” in 1960 that made it to #9 on Billboard Hot 100.
Two of my favorite topical songs by Bob Dylan, “Who Killed Davey Moore” (a live performance) and “Percy’s Song” are included on John Birch Society Blues. Davey Moore was a boxer who lost a fight in March 1963 and died a few days later. One by one, beginning with the line “not me”, Dylan sings a verse on behalf of the referee, the crowd, the manager, the gambling man, the boxing writer, and finally, his opponent in the match (Sugar Ramos), “the man whose fists, laid him low in a cloud of mist” – demonstrating that they each shared some culpability in what happened but could ultimately not be blamed directly for the death. Dylan shows some of his trademark humor when talking of the gambling man and how he wasn’t liable: “Anyway I put money on him to win”. The final verse ends with a quote from Davey Moore’s widow about her husband’s death, “it was God’s will”.
“Percy’s Song” – identified on John Birch Society Blues as “Turn to the Rain and the Wind” – has the singer learning that a good friend had been involved in an auto accident and had been convicted of “manslaughter in the highest of degrees”, resulting in a 99-year sentence. Interspersed with a recurring refrain, “Turn, turn, turn again / Turn, turn to the rain and the wind”, the singer tries to get to the bottom of what happened and argues to no avail with the judge that the sentence is too harsh, closing with “But he ain’t no criminal / And his crime it is none / What happened to him / Could happen to anyone”.
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Some of the very early pressings of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan that are now extremely rare included four sterling Bob Dylan songs that were later left off the album: “Rocks and Gravels”, “Let Me Die in My Footsteps”, “Gambling Willie’s Dead Man’s Hand” and “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues”. Two of these four songs, under the names “Ride Willie Ride” and “John Birch Society Blues” are included on John Birch Society Blues. The latter song is an hilarious but quite harsh take on the anti-communist group called the John Birch Society that has nice things to say about Adolf Hitler and neo-Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell. One verse goes: “Well, I investigated all the books in the library / Ninety percent of them have gotta be thrown away / I investigated all the people that I knowed / Ninety-eight percent of them have gotta go / The other two percent are fellow Birchers / Just like me.”
“Ride Willie Ride” is an entertaining if outlandish tale of the adventures of a superman gambler who is eventually shot dead while holding a pair of aces and a pair of eights – the “dead man’s hand” made famous when Wild Bill Hickok was killed while holding those cards.
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I will have more to say about Bob Dylan bootleg albums in a future post(s), but I will mention in passing that Dylan has released a staggering amount of his older music in a variety of formats, including but not exclusively in The Bootleg Series. When Dylan agreed to start doing this, he secured an agreement from the record company that was non-negotiable: The recording quality has to be good no matter what. The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991 was released in 1994 and includes a live version of “Who Killed Davey Moore”. I had to play it several times to be sure but finally concluded that it is the same live performance included on John Birch Society Blues, even though the difference in the sound of the two recordings is dramatic. Even so, I am happy to have both of them; I was never dissatisfied with the quality of “Who Killed Davey Moore” as it appears on John Birch Society Blues. A new volume in this series, The Bootleg Series Vol. 13: Trouble No More 1979–1981 about Dylan’s Christian albums, was released in November 2017.
(September 2017)
