Bells ringing

The Jeep is ready.

Chicagoland Auto ensured this for (only) $377.09. Who knows if this is justified as I am dum and dummer when it comes to this stuff. For the ride down, I received an oil change, "fluids," an air filter, fan belt, clamp and something smart was done for the air con. That was crucial.
More news: I was confirmed by the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival for my press credentials. Once my Habitat work is finished, I will be covering the festival for this publication. While some wowsa stars are scheduled (Dylan, Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Allen Toussaint), my story will actually focus on what I find down there. How has the tenor of the New Orleans music scene changed? And are there still drunk-as-crap tourists peeing in doorways? (answer: probably yes)

This blog has been stimulating since I started it up. Stimulating as in, I'm learning about what George W. calls "the Internets." I called my URL Ring Them Bells after a Bob Dylan song I love. It's on an overlooked 1989 album called Oh Mercy. I listen to this album A LOT. Mostly while walking, it is made for motion, slow, usually in the dark with few people around. This sounds pretentious, but on a trip to Paris I walked around that entire city at night, in thet December rain, with this album playing on repeat. It is the sound of someone's mind in the dark rain. The lyrics are made up of mostly questions we all ask ourselves: what good am I if I'm like all the rest? Shady characters enter and exit — The Man in the Long Black Coat hovers. I love this album because it gets into the thick of things immediately; the songs are weary, the voice who sings them feels he's lived long enough. I like songs where you can LEARN something from the person singing. Here's where he is coming from, pull up a stool.

So I picked my URL somewhat randomly. "Ring Them Bells" is a song from the album. It could be played in a church. In fact, it should. Just because you're not a 14th century Franciscan monk and dated Joan Baez once upon a time doesn't mean you can't speak to God in your music.
Anyway, today I made another connection. Oh Mercy was recorded in New Orleans. I could show you the building on Esplanade where it took place. The producer was Daniel Lanois, a Canadian known for his work on most of U2's stuff. He was living in New Orleans at the time. Dylan talks about making this album in his recent memoir Chronicles Volume One. He moved there, rented a house, suffered writer's block, and stayed up at night in the kitchen listening to the local radio DJs. He was depressed. He took the streetcar. He walked through the wildlife gardens. General soul searching of a guy at the top but was creatively suffering a long dry spell.

Here's what he wrote about this song:

"Later that night we began cutting "Ring Them Bells." There was one line in the song that I was trying to fix, but never did...the last line..."breaking down the distance between right and wrong." The line fit, but it didn't verify what I felt. Right or wrong, like it fits in the Wanda Jackson song, or right from wrong, like the Billy Tate song, that makes sense, but not right and wrong. The concept didn't exist in my subconsicous mind. I'd always been confused about that kind of stuff, didn't see any moral ideal played out there. The concept of being morally right or moreally wrong seemed to be wired to the wrong frequency. Things that aren't in the script happen every day. If someone steals leather and then makes shoes for the poor, it might be a moral act, but it's not legally right, so it's wrong. That stuff troubled me, the legal and moral aspect of things. There are good deeds and bad deeds. A good person can do a bad thing and a bad person can do a good thing. But I never did get to fix the line."

The album grapples with those questions: what makes us human? Our dignity? And does that really matter in the end, anyway? Is life really a con and we're the ones left empty-handed? It is soaked in doubt, hope, sadness. I've listened to this album so much, I can't shake it out of me.

In Chronicles, Dylan talks about New Orleans and the lure.

"The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds — the cemeteries — and they're a cold proposition, one of hte best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres — palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay — ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing — spirits, all determiend to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in the their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you now it's here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is. ...

" ... Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou Temple-type cottages an dlyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Reivial standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades — thirty-foot columns, gloriously beautiful — double pitched roofts, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomrorow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After awhile you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds. Spirit empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemand, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place fo rhis commander to seek refusge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, or worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. a great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. a place to come and hope you'll get smart — to feed pigeons looking for handouts. A great place to record. It has to be, or so I thought."

(Hi, this is me writing:) You walk there, it's true, you feel you're in a picturebook from the past and as you enter it, the walls separating then and now dissipate. The rest of the USA has made a concentrated effort to pave its history, flatten it with malls, but in New Orleans you do get a sense, as you might in the Grand Canyon or maybe the Badlands or probably in the middle of the Great Lakes, that something wild was once here.

Any good song makes you tap your feet, hum. Any great song stops you in your tracks, its lyrics and its sound, elastic in time.

For instance:

Ring them bells, ye heathen From the city that dreams, Ring them bells from the sanctuaries Cross the valleys and streams, For they're deep and they're wide And the world's on its side And time is running backwards And so is the bride. Ring them bells St. Peter Where the four winds blow, Ring them bells with an iron hand So the people will know. Oh it's rush hour now On the wheel and the plow And the sun is going down Upon the sacred cow. Ring them bells Sweet Martha, For the poor man's son, Ring them bells so the world will know That God is one. Oh the shepherd is asleep Where the willows weep And the mountains are filled With lost sheep. Ring them bells for the blind and the deaf, Ring them bells for all of us who are left, Ring them bells for the chosen few Who will judge the many when the game is through. Ring them bells, for the time that flies, For the child that cries When innocence dies. Ring them bells St. Catherine From the top of the room, Ring them from the fortress For the lilies that bloom. Oh the lines are long And the fighting is strong And they're breaking down the distance Between right and wrong.

Copyright © 1989 Special Rider Music PS: Someone email those last two lines to the White House.