Bob Dylan

‘Climate change is going to cull us as a species’: folk hero Peggy Seeger on Bob Dylan, the ultimate love song and touring at 90

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The musician and activist answers your questions about her marriage to Ewan MacColl, being the inspiration for The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, and her mother’s legacy

As told to Dave Simpson

Touring at 90 is amazing. What was a career highlight?
When I was 60 the thought of touring when I was 70 was anathema and the thought of touring at 90 seemed dreadful! The hardest part is sitting in the car. We’re gonna be away six weeks and I’m a walking hospital case. I have meds, a step stool so I can put on compression stockings, and arthritis in both hands. My family treat me like glass, but as soon as I get on stage all these things melt away. I can only tour because I have my crew – my sons Neill and Calum, my daughter-in-law Kerry Harvey-Piper and an excellent sound engineer, Stefan Care. Or rather, they’re not my crew, I’m their singer. I don’t think in terms of career highlights because I could yet muck it up.

What’s it like being the subject of one the greatest love songs ever written [The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face]? 
In my memoir First Time Ever I devote an entire chapter to it! I was estranged from Ewan MacColl, who had been pursuing me when I came to England. It was a very passionate encounter, but I fled back to America because a married man with a five-year-old son he adored wasn’t my ideal. It turned out that both he and his wife had been unfaithful during their marriage, which made it a bit better later on. They are both gone now, and so are their issues.

When Ewan sang it to me over the phone I thought it was a nice love song, but I didn’t connect it with him and me because he was infatuated with me, and while I got to love him, I wasn’t “in love”. I felt exposed when I sang “the first time ever I lay with you”, because I was singing it as if I was him. Our first night together was disastrous! The second was what the first should have been. Then after I fell “in love” with my second life partner, Irene Pyper-Scott, I started to sing it as Ewan must have felt it.

Ewan McCall & Peggy Seeger
‘Our first night together was disastrous!’ … Peggy Seeger with Ewan MacColl. Photograph: Brian Shuel/Redferns


It’s been covered by over a thousand singers and Ewan and I hated most of them. We had a section of our record collection devoted to them called “the chamber of horrors”. When it became a huge hit for Roberta Flack I didn’t like the way she sang it, but I’ve come to like it a lot. A digital composer called Broadcaster has done it as a dance track, using my vocals, which is on my Bandcamp. If you listen to it as a song, it’s the worst version ever, but as a dance track, it’s wonderful.


Did you watch [Bob Dylan biopic] A Complete Unknown? If yes, what did you think? If no, why not? [ThankYou,John/

I haven’t had time to see it yet but I want to after the tour. I met Bob Dylan when he was Robert Zimmerman, a student. I remember him very clearly because the event organiser said: “You know that little fellow who followed you around with his briefcase? He’s Bob Dylan.” At that point I said, “Who’s Bob Dylan?”, but more power to him. He’s like me in that he hasn’t got a “good” voice but he’s got a character voice and he created the character Bob Dylan out of Robert Zimmerman. It makes me wonder if I created myself, because I’m much more of an entertainer now than I was when I was just a singer of folk songs. I do little jokes and monologues and all kinds of things I never would’ve done as the Peggy Seeger of 1962.


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“If you wanna be a bird, won’t you try a little flying?”  Antonia wrote it, and lived it. Kind of…
		

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Barbara Ann Goldblatt’s  life was no easy ride













By Odyshape | Sept 2014





Peter Stampfel’s latest as-usual ingenious slap-dash collaboration, Hey Hey It’s the Jeffrey Lewis & Peter Stampfel Band, proves that (at age 74) it’s never too late to go indie rock. As in, this record confused me after one listen but now has me spinning around the home office and wondering whether snubbing “Jersey Shore” was a mistake. And also, it has me digging through various Stampfel-associated arcana, always finding more Holy Modal Rounders records to go slack-jawed or wire-haired about, revisiting old friend Have Moicy!, nodding along with the boundless jukebox  of American musical history that comprises Stampfel’s solo records. But one barely released CD from a few years past that came with an edition of the late lamented all-things-Rounders Irish fanzine Blue Navigator (which I’ll talk more about in a second) set me on a quest to find out about Herr Peter’s Antonia.












Stampfel’s “inamorata” is what Robert Christgau called Antonia (born 1939, let’s pretend she only has one name like Madonna, not her real one, Barbara Ann Goldblatt), which captures her allure but doesn’t indicate exactly why she sets off stars in the eyes of those who knew her. So I did my best with limited resources to find out. Pregnant at 16 and on her own not long after that, she became a scenestress of the lower Manhattan folkie scene at that crucial moment in the early 60’s when sulty guitar strummers started absorbing rock and roll attitudes. Stories and relationships abound: Antonia was best friends with the brutally gifted notorious wastrel Karen Dalton, she refused to sleep with Dylan because he had beer breath, etc etc. Peter Stampfel moved in with her (on the same day he helped move out her previous boyfriend) in 1962 and Antonia quickly and deliberately introduced Stampfel to Steve Weber, thus birthing the once-and-forever Holy Modal Rounders. (She and Stampfel would separate in the latter 1970’s, and Stampfel would clean himself up but Antonia would keep the upper East Side apartment they inherited from Dalton.)





Antonia’s proximity, her personal connections and her Mad magazine sexuality make her a signal character, if perhaps not quite the doyenne, of the Greenwich Village folkie dystopia, but her legacy is her writing. She wrote (often co-wrote) short stories that have surfaced through the years, some in conjunction with Rounders record releases and many frankly pornographic. Much more importantly, she wrote (often co-wrote) a crucial clutch of Rounder-related tunes: “Griselda”, “Bird Song” (as close as she ever came to a hit), “Livin Off the Land”, “God, What Am I Doing Here”. Read these lyrics separate from their music now and you appreciate an artist with a keen eye for stories about common, wacky folk and with the insight that carnal desire is often messy and wet.





I learned these and many more details of Antonia’s life mostly through John McFadden’s lovably low-budget Bear Suit Follies, which collects various essays, historical recollections, short stories, and song lyrics (she continued to write long after her separation from Stampfel, with whom it seems she remained amicable). McFadden is her long-time friend, dating back to an evening hosting the early Rounders when they were a full band playing a gig at McFadden’s alma mater, Bucknell University. He’s also a clergyman these days, and he holds back some of the most salacious of Antonia’s writings. They must be pretty salacious, because “Wicked Arabella”, the short story he prints (co-written with Stampfel and initially accompanying the Rounders’ Alleged In Their Own Time) is basically just a lurid description of an evening of statutory rape.  McFadden wraps Bear Suite Follies up into an implied narrative that Antonia became everyone’s favorite hipster big sister.





And she must have been, but in between the lines there is more to it. Details of Antonia’s life remain enigmatic to a person like me who knows about her mostly through murky printed details. Sure, we might not deserve to know how Antonia and Stampfel fell out exactly. But Antonia doesn’t seem to have ever held a paying job and royalties from a few Rounders songs couldn’t cover the rent on a Manhattan apartment, even a rent-controlled one– how’d that work out? And Antonia is fondly remembered by all, but she was also on anti-psychotics for long stretches, and they don’t give those to you for good behavior.





And those anti-psychotics were probably necessary largely due to Antonia’s long-standing methamphetamine use, which evidently continued almost right up to the time that her family moved her to Florida and into an assisted-living facility in her mid-60’s, where I suppose she still is now. McFadden’s book goes up to 2007, and the last mention of her I can find is from 2012, when she was still to her good fortune alive and well. (Antonia deserves her own Wiki page, can somebody get to that?) To get a sense of what meth did to her, one has only to look at how it affected her physical appearance, as evidenced in Bear Suit Follies. Because pictures of Antonia from her early 20s reveal a woman of striking, almost unbearable beauty— straight blond, almost white hair, full, thick lips, big teeth, comely eyes. By her 60s, that young beauty is long lost, Antonia is unrecognizable: her teeth are gone, she’s got rotten hair sticking at angles, her face is a mess. She still has a lovely, life-engulfing smile though. Bear Suit Follies doesn’t shy away from Antonia’s drug issues, but you can’t emphasize the consequences they had on her too much: I mean, not many people these days end up in an assisted-living facility in their mid-60s.













And yet Antonia’s art is underappreciated, and you should pay attention when you play your Rounders records to which songs bear her authorship. Or skim through Bear Suit Follies, which contains lyrics she wrote from her teenage years onward—substantial stuff, and it’s a shame more of them haven’t found a way to be recorded.





Or better yet, find that Blue Navigator issue I was telling you about (Antonia Tribute, #9, from 2006) and, can it be, still available from Jeffrey Frederick’s website. Much of what is said about Antonia in this issue gets reprinted in Bear Suit Follies, but the accompanying CD, Antonia’s 11, is one of a kind: This is Peter Stampfel’s tribute to Antonia, his versions of her songs, a few you know, some you might have heard about (that one where they are doing something to sailors in Chinatown), and some that would be new to anyone. I’ve always figured that Stampfel has so many songs memorized because he truly understands how great the songs in his head really are—it’s impossible for them to fade like most memories do. And plenty of his head’s songs are Antonia’s. I wish there was more information included about why Stampfel chose these particular songs to represent Antonia’s gifts, but maybe he just wanted the collection to speak for itself—it’s a relatively relaxed (by Stampfel standards) set, many of the songs evidently freshly recorded for this release, and leans to the elegeic side (cf. “Going  To See The King”). But rarely did the Rounders record songs as sadly beautiful as the lullaby “Laura the Horse” or the dreamy “Float Me Down Your Pipeline”.  It’s a shame this CD hasn’t seen a wider release, just as it is a shame that we don’t have a fuller accounting of the story of the person who became Antonia. There is great tale here, and an important lesson as well.





Antonia’s 11 : https://music.apple.com/us/album/antonias-11/1522221907
Bear Suit Follies https://www.amazon.com/BEAR-SUIT-FOLLIES-Stories-Letters/dp/0615137733

			


					
			





	

					

				
‘Unhalfbricking’: Fairport Convention covers Dylan with Percy’s Song
		

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By Tony Atwood





Ask anyone who has performed a song on stage which has multiple repeated lines: it is much harder to pull off than a song with ever changing words.  You have to do something to those endless repeats in order to take the audience with you, but it is so easy to go over the top when you sing the same line for the sixth time or more.





If you want a perfect example of how to carry it off, then the 1963 Carnegie Hall recording of Percy’s Song is it.  You never get tired of the repeated lines, you are utterly spellbound by the story, and its journey.





I think Dylan’s personal journey to this song is, for me (if for no one else) directly connected to Ballad for a Friend.  The recordings of Percy’s Song comes from 1963.  Ballad for a Friend which deals with an actual motor crash was recorded the year before.  A song that is reportedly related to the accident of Bob’s friend Larry Kegan accident which left him in a wheelchair.





If this is so, consciously or sub-consciously, then it is a remarkable journey for Dylan, for in Ballad for a Friend he is saying goodbye to a dear friend seriously injured in a car crash, (in the song the character actually dies) while in Percy’s Song he is pleading against the disproportionate sentence of man-slaughter for a man whose driving has killed four.





The song itself comes from the English ballad of the 17th century “The Twa Sisters” in which a girl drowned by her sister – a song which quickly became transmuted into “The Wind and Rain” and many other versions – which is where Dylan’s phrase comes from.





But it is not the question of how original this song is as a Dylan song that fascinates me, but the beauty of the rendition in the Carnegie Hall version.





It is all so astoundingly simple





Bad news, bad news
Come to me where I sleep
Turn, turn, turn again
Sayin’ one of your friends
Is in trouble deep
Turn, turn to the rain
And the wind





and yet verse after verse Dylan pulls it off.





As I say, it is all so simple, so low key, and that is what makes it work so well, for what is resting on the story is the life of a man – a man who is imprisoned for 99 years.





Listening to the song again today I suddenly thought also of the Drifter’s Escape, perhaps for no reason than that too is a dead simple song and it has a judge in it.  But there the judge is sympathetic to the accused – it is the jury who gets it all wrong.  One way or another though, Dylan is never a fan of the legal system.





I am not saying Dylan thought of one song as he composed another, rather it is probably just Dylan working out themes over time in different ways.  But even so somehow I find this connection between these simple songs delivered with such power and assuredness, each in a different form, each with the legal incidents being seen from three different angles with three different outcomes, to be completely fascinating.





Percy’s song revolves around the life imprisonment, in the Drifter’s Escape there is the walking out of the courtroom following the lightening strike, and in Ballad of a Friend the death of the man hit by the truck.





And so Percy’s Song ends





And I played my guitar
Through the night to the day
Turn, turn, turn again
And the only tune
My guitar could play
Was, “Oh the Cruel Rain
And the Wind”





One interesting point about the music – at the end of each verse it doesn’t get back to the key chord, the tonic, around which the song is focussed, but ends on the dominant at the end of each verse, preparing us for another verse and another and another as the story continues.





Which I guess is in keeping with the outcome of the tale – the man in imprisoned for the rest of his life.





However…





what disturbs me with this song is that the essence of the singer’s plea is that “he didn’t mean it.”  Is this a valid defence or not?





When I learned to drive a car (and of course I learned in England, not in the US) I was taught that part of the essence of driving was that one had to expect the unexpected.  You have to drive with caution.





Now of course most of us don’t much of the time, but that is what the basic law of the road in the UK requires.  You don’t have to be ready to avoid a sheep suddenly walking into your lane on a motorway while you drive at 70mph, but in an urban area with a pavement and shops next to the road one has to drive with the awareness that a pedestrian might do something silly and step out into the road.





We don’t do 99 year sentences for manslaughter in England, but I don’t think we let people off on the grounds that they didn’t mean it, either.





And so at this point, somehow the transmutation of the song from its early origins into the modern day breaks down for me.  To enjoy the song I must forget the meaning and listen to the music and the voice (without a focus on the words) it is awe-inspiring and other worldly.  With the meaning, I feel uncomfortable in a way that I never am with Ballad of a Friend – and yet knowing that Dylan wrote Ballad of a Friend from point of the victim’s friend, and then Percy’s Song from the point of the guilty man’s friend, just one year apart is, well, strange.





But no one else ever seems to have mentioned it, so I guess it is just me.





Source: Untold Dylan