by whiteray
In last week’s post about Dion’s “Daddy Rollin’ (In Your Arms)” – the B-side to “Abraham, Martin and John” – I mentioned that I found the 45 in a box of records I got from Leo Rau, the man who lived across the alley from us in St. Cloud, Minnesota. I was fourteen and pretty pleased with the records – for reasons we’ll get to in a moment – and didn’t quite understand what Mr. Rau did for a living.
My dad said Mr. Rau was a jobber, and then explained to me
that Mr. Rau had a chain of vending machines – candy machines, cigarette machines
and juke boxes – that he kept stocked with what seemed to me the good stuff of
life: Snickers, Nut Rolls and Juicy Fruit Gum among the candy; Camels, Winstons
and Herbert Tareytons among the cigarettes (not such a good part of life, as it
turned out), and records by performers such as Sandy Posey, Petula Clark and
Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass.
As I headed into my teens, being across the alley from the Raus
seemed like a pretty good deal. Steve Rau, who was four years or so older than
I (and played the drums, which I thought was kind of cool), decided one day to
get rid of his comic book collection and gave it to me: Lots of Jughead and
Archie, some war comics – stories of World War II, which was just more than
twenty years past – and comics based on television shows of the mid-1950s, none
of which I recalled. It was a treasure trove.
And several times, Mr. Rau passed on to me a box of 45 rpm
records. I don’t recall everything he gave to me; I know one of them was Procol
Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” because I still have it. Another was Bob
Dylan’s “I Want You.” And there are a few others that Mr. Rau gave me that have
survived the fifty-some years since. (A list of those survivors, from what I can
remember – I had several sources over the years for mid-1960s 45s – is at the
bottom of this piece.)
The
Raus were good folks to
have as neighbors. When they – Leo and Ilamae – were out in their back yard at
the same times as my folks were in ours, the four would often have alley-side
conversations that might last an hour or might last as briefly as it took for
my folks – or just my dad or mom – to hand over some home-grown rhubarb and
accept from one or both of the Raus some cucumbers ready for the table.
And, as I mentioned, several times during the mid-1960s,
Leo Rau would hand me a box of records that had outlived their usefulness in the
juke boxes he stocked. As I look back at the 12- to 14-year-old boy that I was
then, it’s remarkable that any of them survived. At that age, I was distinctly
unhip. I did not listen to Top 40 radio. I had only a few LPs and no singles to
speak of in my record collection. And I didn’t listen to many of the records
Mr. Rau gave me. Instead, I used them for target practice with my BB gun.
So when I say that some of the records survived, I am being
literal. I have no idea how many 45s I aimed and shot at, punching neat little
holes in the grooves. Maybe a hundred. A lot of the records Mr. Rau gave me
were country & western, a genre that was far less cool (and far more real
and gritty) than country music is today. I do remember a lot of Sandy Posey,
Sonny James and Buck Owens, records that it would be nice to have today.
But I know a good share of the records that met my BBs were
pop and rock, simply because of those that survived, including the two I mentioned
above: the Procol Harum and the Dylan. And it’s knowing how close I came to
destroying the Dylan record that makes me shake my head in something near
disbelief, because years later, I learned that the B-side of the Dylan 45
offered listeners a true rarity: the sound of Dylan performing live. The B-side
was an incendiary version of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” recorded live – the label
says – in Liverpool.
It’s
a noteworthy record. Here’s
what Dave Marsh said about it in his 1989 book The Heart of Rock and Soul:
The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, where he ranked the B-side of the
record at No. 243.
If you liked the jingly folk-rock of “I Want You” enough to
run out and buy the single without waiting for the album (which only turned out
to be Blonde on Blonde),
you got the surprise of your life: A B side taken from Dylan’s recent European
tour on which he and a rock band (which only turned out to be The Band) did
things to “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues,” a song from Highway 61 Revisited,
that it’s still risky to talk about in broad daylight.
Rock critics like to make a big deal about B sides but
there are only maybe a dozen great ones in the whole history of singles. This
one’s rank is indisputable, though, because it offers something that wasn’t
legally available until the early Seventies: a recorded glimpse of Dylan’s
onstage prowess. “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” came out before anybody ever thought
of bootlegging rock shows, before anybody this side of Jimi Hendrix quite
understood Dylan as a great rock and roll stage performer. And so this vicious,
majestic music, hidden away in the most obscure place he could think of putting
it, struck with amazing force.
The group behind Dylan wasn’t exactly The Band: The drummer
for the European tour was Mickey Jones. Levon Helm had become fed up with
performing in front of angry and jeering crowds who wanted to hear Bob Dylan
the folksinger and were being presented with Bob Dylan the rock and roll
performer. He’d had gone back to Arkansas and wouldn’t rejoin the other four
members of what became The Band until after the tour, when he joined them and
Dylan in Woodstock (where the six of them began recording the music later
released as The Basement Tapes and where The Band began work on its
debut, Music From Big Pink.)
Now,
we come to an oddity.
The visual in the video below tells us that this version of “Just Like Tom
Thumb’s Blues” comes from the so-called “Albert Hall” concert, which actually
took place May 17, 1966, at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester and was released
in 1998 as The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966. According to
the label on my 45, the B-side version of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” was
recorded in Liverpool, England. The concert schedule tells us that would have been
on May 14, 1966.
But the version of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” offered in
the video below matches the sound on the B-side of my 45, and I think it’s the
same as the version of “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” from the official release
of the Manchester Free Trade Hall Concert. There was a mistake somewhere, and I
have no way to sort it out. Maybe what was actually the Manchester performance
was mislabeled on the 45 as being recorded in Liverpool. I dunno. In any case,
the music in the video below is the version of the tune that Marsh celebrates
in his book.
I
look at the fragile 45
that survived my BB gun and shake my head. It’s undeniably a treasure, but it
didn’t survive because I knew that. It didn’t survive when so many other
records were splintered by BBs because it was by Bob Dylan. I was unhip enough
at the ages of twelve to fourteen to have no real good idea who Bob Dylan was;
that awareness would take at least another four to five years. It was a happy accident,
pure and simple, that I never looked past the sights of my BB rifle at the
Dylan record.
Dave Marsh sums up his comments about the record: “Today it sounds like the reapings of a whirlwind, Dylan’s voice as draggy, druggy and droogy as the surreal Mexican beatnik escapade he’s recounting, Robbie Robertson carving dense mathematical figures on guitar, Garth Hudson working pure hoodoo on organ. Slurred and obtuse as Little Richard reading Ezra Pound, there’s a magnificence here so great that, if you had to, you could make the case for rock and roll as a species of art using this record and nothing else.”
I
probably got more than a hundred
records from Leo Rau during those few years in the mid-1960s. These, I think,
are the survivors:
“Downtown” by Petula Clark
“Red Roses For A Blue Lady” by Vic Dana
“I Want You/Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues (live)” by Bob Dylan
“Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead” by the Fifth Estate
“Dandy” by Herman’s Hermits
“Don’t Go Out Into The Rain” by Herman’s Hermits
“No Milk Today” by Herman’s Hermits
“This Door Swings Both Ways” by Herman’s Hermits
“Look Through My Window” by the Mamas & the Papas
“Monday, Monday” by the Mamas & the Papas
“Winchester Cathedral” by the New Vaudeville Band
“Single Girl” by Sandy Posey
“Whiter Shade Of Pale” by Procol Harum
“Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby, Standing In The Shadows” by the Rolling Stones
“Snoopy vs. The Red Baron” by the Royal Guadsmen
“Lightning’s Girl” by Nancy Sinatra
“The Beat Goes On” by Sonny & Cher
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