SONG TO BOBBY

Cat Power--Chan Marshall. Cette chanson est extraite de son dernier album Jukebox. Seul morceau original de l'album, "Song to Bobby", raconte l'histoire vraie de sa rencontre avec son idole de toujours, oserais-je dire l'homme de sa vie, Bob Dylan : "Giving you my heart was my plan".


And after Chan Marshall's "Song to Bobby," here's a rare clip of the man himself playing with some old friends. Back in 1966, an unwitting Playboy reporter asked Dylan what made him choose the rock and roll life.

Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a "before" in a Charles Atlas "before and after" ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy - he ain't so mild: He gives her the knife, and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?

RAIN SONGS

It's still raining. I've never seen rain like this--and I've lived in the Pacific Northwest all my life. Rivers are rising. 68 roads are closed for flooding. There are plenty of great rain songs. Here are some rain songs.

The clip above is REM in their golden days, performing "So. Central Rain (I'm Sorry)." The song was released in May 1984 as the first single from the group's second studio album Reckoning.

The clip below is Dylan performing "Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues" from the infamous 1966 tour with the Hawks (later called The Band). Rain figures prominently in Dylan's music from Hard Rain to Buckets of Rain, and people are expecting rain or back in the rain. High water is rising, there's a crash on the levee, and we wait for the flood. This song captures that rain-soaked feeling when your gravity fails and negativity won't pull you through.

"When you're lost in the rain in Juarez..."

BLOWUP!

This is a cool clip of the swinging London go-go scene of the mid-60s from Antonioni's "Blow-up." Carnaby Street fashions, mod birds in mini-skirts, cool rock music, and Thomas, played by David Hemmings, loosely based on mod photographer David Bailey, racing around London in a sports car convertible trying to solve a murder he thinks he's accidentally photographed in a park.
What more could you ask for? How about The Yardbirds, featuring Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page? They're the uncredited pop group in this scene. Groovy, baby. By the way, I love the chick with the striped pants. Meet you at the discotheque.