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Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Just to cheer me up.......and maybe because elsewhere I was unduly critical of Pete Seeger!
This one's for me.....and him



Night people...............
Still not back up to full speed people (people? ED) so here's a little heads up......Big O (Bless 'em) have posted a lovely Dylan set today of the 1964 Emmett Grogan Acetates......I have been hunting around the Swappers vaults and don't see to have this one......thought I had .......but this is a lovely lovely set of early demos and is great quality.........they are fab
get 'em here...before they all disappear


Big O says......
"BOB DYLAN
Emmett Grogan Acetates [Capricorn CR-2055, 1CD]

Studio outtakes. Very good to excellent soundboard.
This release from the Capricorn label is fully de-clicked. There are outtakes and alternate mixes from the “Another Side Of Bob Dylan album, plus bonus tracks. - Philip Cohen
Bobsboots.com noted:
The material was taken from acetate, but there is little white noise pop to indicate this. The tracks are perfectly quiet. For the most part, the material sounds as if it is the exact mix as on the official release, but the engineer can be heard introducing the songs. All I Really Want To Do has an extra verse, but the gem here is Mr. Tambourine Man. It is a completely different song than what was released. Your Dylan collection has to include this incredible version. It is drawn out with an entirely different laidback feel and different words. Ramblin’ Jack is heard singing along.
Thanks to Phil for sharing the tracks.
Note: A longtime music fan, Philip Cohen was a contributor to the now-defunct ICE Magazine and compiled the boxsets for The Yardbirds, The Small Faces, Humble Pie and Nice."

Mr Cohen is a legend amongst bootleggers and I have gone on about him severally, nuff said....this source is Hot Tamales! 

 Enjoy! I know I am...........

Friday, August 26, 2011

OK well the perceptive amongst you (there isn't anyone there so how can they be perceptive? ED) will have noticed I haven't been posting lately so here we go back into the fray!
Over on the Music page there's a new (well 2005) set from me and the Swappers Dungeon, sorry Archive that is Iron & Wine and Calexico gig from October 22, 2005  at the Triple Door Seattle, WASHINGTON.
Enjoy!

and while we're about it (who's WE? ED) may as well post some Wilco....like a numpty Brit I first discovered Wilco looking for Wilco [Johnson] from Dr Feelgood and didn't know there was anyone else using the moniker.......well I don't mind admitting I wasn't expecting to like them .....but I DO!

Wilco live in Canada from the same year over on the mewsic page...................


over on the music page, find it here..................

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Most of my musical compatriots that I am in touch with will doubtless have this but Big O have a 30th Anniversary edition of the Country Club Reseda 1981 gig. Nice covers if you have different versions but Big O do not duplicate the tracks from 'Railroadism: Live In The USA 1972-1981' album. It's mono and none the worse for that but frankly I have better versions if anyone is interested in the whole thing.


 
"Everybody's coloured otherwise you wouldn't be able to see them"  
Don Van Vliet
AN INSURRECTION IN BRITAIN

THIS IS HOW MARK DUGGAN DIED: PINNED TO THE GROUND BY FOUR MEN IN UNIFORM & SHOT IN THE HEAD

By JOHN PILGER
From Big O and posted on The Information Clearing House

The elites are weighing in to tell you the riots in Great Britain are not an insurrection of a ’sick society’. Tony Blair has just added his two cents. Do you still believe in Tony (Weapons of Mass Destruction) Blair? Tonys are ALL phonys.

On a warm spring day, strolling in south London, I heard demanding voices behind me. A police van disgorged a posse of six or more, who waved me aside. They surrounded a young black man who, like me, was ambling along. They appropriated him; they rifled his pockets, looked in his shoes, inspected his teeth. Their thuggery affirmed, they let him go with the barked warning there would be a next time.
For the young at the bottom of the pyramid of wealth and patronage and poverty that is modern Britain, mostly the black, the marginalised and resentful, the envious and hopeless, there is never surprise. Their relationship with authority is integral to their obsolescence as young adults. Half of all black British youth between the ages of 18 and 24 are unemployed, the result of deliberate policies since Margaret Thatcher oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in British history. Forget plasma TVs, this was panoramic looting.
Such is the truth of David Cameron’s “sick society”, notably its sickest, most criminal, most feral “pocket”: the square mile of the City of London where, with political approval, the banks and super-rich have trashed the British economy and the lives of millions. This is fast becoming unmentionable as we succumb to propaganda once described by the American black leader Malcolm X thus: “If you’re not careful the newspapers will have you hating the oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing.”
As they lined up to bay their class bigotry and hypocrisy in parliament, barely a handful of MPs spoke this truth. Heirs to Edmund Burke’s 18th century rants against the “mob rule” of a “swinish multitude”, not one referred to previous rebellions in Brixton, Tottenham and Liverpool in the 1980s when Lord Scarman reported that “complex political, social and economic factors” had caused a “disposition towards violent protest” and recommended urgent remedial action.
Instead, Labour and Liberal bravehearts called for water cannon and everything draconian: among them the Labour MP Hazel Blears. Remember her notorious expenses? None made the obvious connection between the greatest inequality since records were kept, a police force that routinely abuses a section of the population and kills with impunity and a permanent state of colonial warfare with an arms trade to match: the apogee of violence.

On 8 August, the Independent Police Complaints Commission acknowledged there was “no evidence” that Mark Duggan had fired a shot at police. Duggan was shot in the face on 4 August by a police officer with a Heckler and Koch MP5 sub-machine gun.

It hardly seemed coincidental that on the day before Cameron raged against “phony human rights”, NATO aircraft - which include British bombers sent by him - killed a reported 85 civilians in a peaceful Libyan town. These were people in their homes, children in their schools. Watch the BBC’s man on the spot trying his best to dispute the evidence of his eyes, just as the political and media class sought to discredit the evidence of a civilian bloodbath in Iraq as epic as the Rwanda genocide. Who are the criminals?
This is not in any way to excuse the violence of the rioters, many of whom were opportunistic, mean, cruel, nihilistic and often vicious in their glee: an authentic reflection of a system of greed and self-interest to which scores of parasitic money-movers, “entrepreneurs”, Murdochites, corrupt MPs and bent coppers have devoted themselves.
On 4 August, the BBC’s Fiona Armstrong - aka Lady MacGregor of MacGregor - interviewed the writer Darcus Howe, who dared use the forbidden word, “insurrection”.
Armstrong: “Mr. Howe, you say you are not shocked [by the riots]? Does this mean you condone what happened?”
Howe: “Of course not… what I am concerned about is a young man Mark Duggan… the police blew his head off.”
Armstrong: “Mr. Howe, we have to wait for the official enquiry to say things like that. We don’t know what happened to Mr. Duggan. We have to wait for the police report.”

An eyewitness to Duggan’s killing told the Evening Standard, “About three or four police officers had [him] pinned on the ground at gunpoint. They were really big guns and then I heard four loud shots. The police shot him on the floor.”

On 8 August, the Independent Police Complaints Commission acknowledged there was “no evidence” that Duggan had fired a shot at police. Duggan was shot in the face on 4 August by a police officer with a Heckler and Koch MP5 sub-machine gun - the same weapon supplied by Britain to dictatorships that use them against their own people. I saw the result in East Timor where Indonesian troops also blew the heads off people with these state-of-the-art weapons supplied by both Tory and Labour governments.
An eyewitness to Duggan’s killing told the Evening Standard, “About three or four police officers had [him] pinned on the ground at gunpoint. They were really big guns and then I heard four loud shots. The police shot him on the floor.”
This is how the Metropolitan Police shot dead Jean Charles de Menezes on the floor of a London Underground train. And there was Robert Stanley and Ian Tomlinson, and many more. The police lied about Duggan’s killing as they have lied about the others. Since 1998, more than 330 people have died in police custody and not one officer has been convicted. Where is the political and media outrage about this “culture of fear”?
“Funny, too,” noted the journalist Melanie MacFadyean, “that the police did nothing while some serious looting went on - surely not because they wanted everyone to see that cutting the police force meant more crime?”
Still, the brooms have arrived. In an age of public relations as news, the clean-up campaign, however well-meant by many people, can also serve the government’s and media goal of sweeping inequality and hopelessness under gentrified carpets, with cheery volunteers armed with their brand new brooms and pointedly described as “Londoners” as if the rest are aliens. The otherwise absent Boris Johnson waved his new broom. Another Etonian, the former PR man to an asset stripper and current prime minister up to his neck in Hackgate, would surely approve.


Note: John Pilger is a world-renowned journalist, author and documentary filmmaker, who began his career in 1958 in his homeland, Australia, before moving to London in the 1960s. He regards eye-witness as the essence of good journalism. Visit www.johnpilger.com for his articles and to order his DVDs. The above article was posted at Information Clearing House.


LOOTING WITH THE LIGHTS ON

by Naomi Klein
August 21, 2011 – 4:40 am
The physical law says if you rob the poor of their property and rights they will come right back to fuck you
We keep hearing England’s riots weren’t political - but looters know that their elites have been committing daylight robbery. By activist and writer Naomi Klein.

I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities - window-smashing in Athens or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.
But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion - a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal.
Back then the people on cable news thought looting was highly political. They said this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. After watching for so long as Saddam Hussein and his sons helped themselves to whatever and whomever they wanted, many regular Iraqis felt they had earned the right to take a few things for themselves. But London isn’t Baghdad, and the British prime minister, David Cameron, is hardly Saddam, so surely there is nothing to learn there.
How about a democratic example then? Argentina, circa 2001. The economy was in freefall and thousands of people living in rough neighbourhoods (which had been thriving manufacturing zones before the neoliberal era) stormed foreign-owned superstores. They came out pushing shopping carts overflowing with the goods they could no longer afford - clothes, electronics, meat. The government called a “state of siege” to restore order; the people didn’t like that and overthrew the government.
Argentina’s mass looting was called el saqueo - the sacking. That was politically significant because it was the very same word used to describe what that country’s elites had done by selling off the country’s national assets in flagrantly corrupt privatisation deals, hiding their money offshore, then passing on the bill to the people with a brutal austerity package.

When the leaders decided… not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this… instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable. They would do this by firing public sector workers, scapegoating teachers, closing libraries, upping tuition fees, rolling back union contracts, creating rush privatisations of public assets and decreasing pensions - mix the cocktail for where you live. And who is on television lecturing about the need to give up these “entitlements”? The bankers and hedge-fund managers, of course.

Argentines understood that the saqueo of the shopping centres would not have happened without the bigger saqueo of the country, and that the real gangsters were the ones in charge. But England is not Latin America, and its riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn’t theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behaviour.
This is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts never happened, followed by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G8 and G20 meetings, when the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this, nor to do anything serious to prevent a similar crisis from happening again.
Instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable. They would do this by firing public sector workers, scapegoating teachers, closing libraries, upping tuition fees, rolling back union contracts, creating rush privatisations of public assets and decreasing pensions - mix the cocktail for where you live. And who is on television lecturing about the need to give up these “entitlements”? The bankers and hedge-fund managers, of course.
This is the global saqueo, a time of great taking. Fuelled by a pathological sense of entitlement, this looting has all been done with the lights on, as if there was nothing at all to hide. There are some nagging fears, however. In early July, the Wall Street Journal, citing a new poll, reported that 94 per cent of millionaires were afraid of “violence in the streets”. This, it turns out, was a reasonable fear.
Of course London’s riots weren’t a political protest. But the people committing night-time robbery sure as hell know that their elites have been committing daytime robbery. Saqueos are contagious. The Tories are right when they say the rioting is not about the cuts. But it has a great deal to do with what those cuts represent: being cut off.

Water cannons, sound cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets - wasn’t just meant for the protesters in the streets. Its long-term use would be to discipline the poor, who in the new era of austerity would have dangerously little to lose.

Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes previously offered - a union job, a good affordable education - being rapidly sealed off. The cuts are a message. They are saying to whole sectors of society: you are stuck where you are, much like the migrants and refugees we turn away at our increasingly fortressed borders.
Cameron’s response to the riots is to make this locking-out literal: evictions from public housing, threats to cut off communication tools and outrageous jail terms (five months to a woman for receiving a stolen pair of shorts). The message is once again being sent: disappear, and do it quietly.
At last year’s G20 “austerity summit” in Toronto, the protests turned into riots and multiple cop cars burned. It was nothing by London 2011 standards, but it was still shocking to us Canadians. The big controversy then was that the government had spent $675m on summit “security” (yet they still couldn’t seem to put out those fires).
At the time, many of us pointed out that the pricey new arsenal that the police had acquired - water cannons, sound cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets - wasn’t just meant for the protesters in the streets. Its long-term use would be to discipline the poor, who in the new era of austerity would have dangerously little to lose.
This is what Cameron got wrong: you can’t cut police budgets at the same time as you cut everything else. Because when you rob people of what little they have, in order to protect the interests of those who have more than anyone deserves, you should expect resistance - whether organised protests or spontaneous looting.
And that’s not politics. It’s physics.

Note: Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist, syndicated columnist and author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (2007). Her 2000 book, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies, became a standard text for the anti-corporate globalization movement. The above article was featured in The Guardian; a version appeared in The Nation; and it was posted at Information Clearing House. Visit www.naomiklein.org for more.



Tuesday, August 16, 2011


Devastated to learn today that DylanNl is to stop....the BEST site on Bob anywhere and somehow more pertinent, if not for entirey sentimental reasons for me, that it should have been in The Netherlands. The wonderful guy who ran it has decided to hang up his spurs next month. Very sad day and loss to the World of Boots of His Bobness! :o(




Sunday, August 14, 2011

For Dawn.......
[35 years .....sheesh! How did you do that?!    :o)  ]

Dawn - Amsterdam 1973




Dawn - Belgrave Road, Leicester 1975

Saturday, August 13, 2011


On the eve of my 35th wedding anniversary I thought I would post some early Bobby, as my wife loves the early years and doesn't share quite so much my passion for the entire oeuvre of His Bobness and these postings over on the Dylan Pages are largely for her.

It has a sad resonance also, for this week I learned of the passing of an old friend, John Northcote, of whom it is fair to say he was as big a fan of the music we all share as anybody I have ever had the good fortune to meet and an old friend. First friends when he ran 'Sunshine Records' shop in Oxford and a good friend to my brother Steve, John went on to great things with the Academy Music Group that did such fantastic things with what seems like most of our really great music venues across the land, including some of everyone's favourite venues, the Zodiac in Oxford for us locals, to his days at Break For The Border in the early ‘90s, to AMG with John at the helm of the 'Border Line' in Charing Cross, arguably London’s hippest live music venue, to the legendary Shepherd’s Bush Empire and the world-famous Brixton Academy.

If ever we wanted to hear something new we knew we could rely on John to introduce us to something from his days at Sunshine Records shop, where he turned me onto all sorts of music from around the globe, he introduced me to Louisiana Cajun & Zydeco classics like Clifton Chenier and thus to Professor Longhair, to 'new' country stars like Dwight Yoakam, Lyle Lovett and John Prine - still stalwarts of my listening habits today. He and his first wife Heather were responsible for my never forgetting Dylan and his importance was always a default position when spending many a weekend with them in Oxfordshire. In between the Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Bob Marley, Grateful Dead et al. His knowledge was peerless, taste discerning and information encyclopaedic
It is many happy memories from happier times I chose to recall at this sad time and our thoughts go out to his ex-wife Heather, son & daughter, Kian and Kirsten, my old school pal, his brother 'Bill' and sister Jan, as well as as his current wife and family too, whom sadly it was never my pleasure to meet or get to know. To all the extended family and friends these Dylan bootlegs postings are for him.
His obituary over at AMG says it all very well and I am proud to have known such a gentle soul and muso par excellence bar none.
John Northcote - Obituary AMG


Thursday, August 11, 2011

ANARCHY IN THE UK

Panic on the streets of London
Panic on the streets of Birmingham
I wonder to myself
Could life ever be sane again ?
The Leeds side-streets that you slip down
I wonder to myself
Hopes may rise on the Grasmere
But Honey Pie, you're not safe here
So you run down
To the safety of the town
But there's Panic on the streets of Carlisle
Dublin, Dundee, Humberside
I wonder to myself





 
Thanks to Rob Power for the link :o)

Monday, August 08, 2011

I used to post links from Big O regularly elsewhere...........but here's a revisit to my favourite source of ROIO's and a wonderful new posting of 'Little Village' from San Francisco in 1992. A legendary 'super-group' of mammoth proportions in my view but their official release didn't catch the public's attention nearly as much as the stars of this band do indivually. They are of course Ry Cooder, John Hiatt, Nick Lowe and Jim Keltner. I have a few boots of these guys and this is a brilliant example. Well worth a punt and no mistake

 go get it here Little Village at Big O
Lineup:
Ry Cooder - guitar, vocals
John Hiatt - guitar, vocals
Jim Keltner - drums
Nick Lowe - bass, vocals

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _  _  _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Thursday, August 04, 2011

I first heard 'Candy Man' by Mississippi John Hurt and it remains a favourite version but here's the legend John Fahey tackling it live from the wonderful German tv concerts Rockpalast programme



Here's the Reverend Gary Davis' version!


Now 'Candy Man' has been sited as a drug song the candy man being a fairly obvious euphemism for the 'Dealer' and Sammy Davis et al made it more wholesome and seemingly about chocolate. Whatever your addiction [ .o) ], I love this number personally I like to think it's about lovemaking a la Mississippi John's version which is fairly clear.....ahem!

Mississippi John 'Candy Man' from 1928


ADVERT BREAK!
Now quite why Maxwell House didn't ever use this as an advert is beyond me (unless anyone knows otherwise) but this one comes right from the bottom of Mississippi John's cup and allegedly where The Lovin' Spoonful got their name......I love this song and it never fails to bring a smile for it's humour and blatant advertising



John Fahey's requiem for Mississippi John


Tom Paxton's tribute to Mississippi John (Doc Watson does a blistering version of this song)

Tuesday, August 02, 2011



In the few minutes between rushing around doing my several jobs (it's complicated!) here's a couple of odd items for your delectation....I thought I would make available a couple of broadcast programmes from the radio, namely the Legacy Podcasts (won't they all have these already? ED....Ha HA, you admitted it. You said 'they all' which means you acknowledge there IS someone out there listening! Ha HAH!.......well, yes 'they ALL' will probably have these but you know me!....yes, I know you very well indeed but 'listening' I don't think so....anyone stumbling across your random blatherings is 'reading' not listening Ha HAH! right back atcha! ED)

........and, before I was so rudely interrupted, the BBC Radio 2 Broadcast by legend Whispering Bob 'The Bomber' Harris, called Dylan's Women' still both worth having if'n you ain't not got 'em! The Legacy Podcasts are narrated by lifelong Dylan fan and poet muso Patti Smith
over on the Dylan page.......duh!