Village Voice
14 November 1989
9) Bob Dylan: Oh Mercy (Columbia). Producer’s record, shapely and airless. Featuring Daniel Lanois as the director who likes to chalk marks on the floor and Bob Dylan as the actor who has to hit them.
Village Voice
7 April 1990
1) Pete Seeger: “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall,” from We Shall Overcome—The Complete Carnegie Hall Concert, June 8, 1963 (Columbia). I first heard Bob Dylan’s song as Seeger sang it, just days before the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King replaced Dylan’s Armageddon with a vision of liberation. But both King and Dylan spoke the same apocalyptic language; it was never Seeger’s. His version of the song seemed like a final statement twenty-seven years ago, in the flesh or on the original, one-LP Carnegie Hall recording, but today it’s plain the moment made the music. Seeger notoriously lacked any blues feeling, and “Hard Rain” is proof he had none for country, not even for Child ballads; as Woody Guthrie or Big Bill Broonzy he was Henry Ward Beecher, Yankee abolitionist to his toenails. This performance documents one of the great musical events of the American postwar period, but the event is no longer musical; to hear how scary the song is, you have to listen to Bryan Ferry sing it.
Artforum
March 1991
1) Various radio stations: format violation (January 15). After so many years devoted to erasing the notion that in the mix of radio sounds one might expect a subject, it was a shock, on this strange, suspended day, to find the medium talking to you, in a kind of celebration of dread. No matter what button you pushed you were faced with the same conversation, the pressure drop of Edwin Starr’s “War,” or Bruce Springsteen’s cover of it, or Freda Payne’s “Bring the Boys Home,” Country Joe and the Fish’s “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag,” Gang of Four’s “I Love a Man in a Uniform,” Creedence Clearwater’s “Bad Moon Rising,” Peter Gabriel’s “Here Comes the Flood,” an unidentified woman’s “Will Jesus Wash the Blood from Your Hands,” the Beatles’ “I Wanna Be Your Man” (relief, violation of the new format within the old format; it felt fabulous). Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” and Plastic Ono Band’s “Give Peace a Chance” seemed thin and arch, too far above the mess of confused, violently random emotion, morally insulated (though not so much as Sean Lennon and Lenny Kravitz’s Peace Choir smile-button video for their new version of the latter, so removed from fear its basic message might have been that Cyndi Lauper had found a way to get back on MTV). Cutting through the many voices, even those of songs only playing in your head—Elvis Costello’s “(What’s So Funny ’bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” maybe, or Metallica’s “One,” or Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman” (“Your military arms,” so softly, “your petrochemical arms”)—was the Pogues’ “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda.” It’s a long, slow, unbearably bitter first-person account of a mutilated Australian soldier who came back from Gallipoli; Shane McGowan collapses seventy years to make the man explain why he wishes he hadn’t come back, shame and wonderment dripping from every line. When the war began the next day HBO had Top Gun scheduled and the radio was back to normal.