Mississippi

Uneasy sleep last night after watching to many programs about volcanos. One was on Super Volcanos, the kind that are so big they will just about wipe out the whole planet. The second was about Mt. Vesuvius and how it wiped out Pompeii and Hericulanium and lowered the global temperature a degree or two. Out here our own Mt. St. Hellens puffed out a small plume of steam which looked non threatening enough as it wafted it's way across the sky.
Casey sent me a copy of American Idiot by Green Day which is a mighty album and I can't wait to digest it fully, and Pete gave me a copy of the new Album by The Darkness which is lovely right down to it's last crunching AC/DC inspired power chord and annoying false setto metal singing.
I heard an amazing thing yesterday. On her album The Globe Sessions Sheryl Crow did a version of Dylan's song Mississippi. At that time Dylan hadn't released it. It was written for Time Out Of Mind but he and Daniel Lanois had a spat over the arrangement and Bob canned it. He re-recorded the song and it's on Love And Theft. So granted that Sheryl Crow couldn't have heard it in it's finished version, but assuming that she had something else to go on other than just the lyrics, it's just amazing to me how someone could have gotten a song so wrong. She reads the song as a tight mid-tempo rocker stuffed in three quarters of the way through the album. Worse she races through the lyrics against a chord progression that forces her to rush through lines; the effect being that she sounds like doesn't really care, or know about, what she's singing. Does she know that the chorus comes from an Alan Lomax field recording called Prison Blues Of The South? Men in the Mississippi State Penitentiary actually sang these words themselves. Perhaps the words were all they might have had to keep them together from day to day. Doing time. Chain gangs. Hard labor. "Only one thing I did wrong / Stayed in Mississippi a day too long...." This is real stuff and it's hateful when people obviously don't know (or don't care) what their singing about. The inevitable squabble will ensue here about whether or not at this point Dylan himself knows much about this stuff and is able to sing it with any really authority or honest weight behind him. But round two there might wait. Here's the words to Mississippi:

Every step of the way we walk the line
Your days are numbered, so are mine
Time is pilin' up, we struggle and we scrape
We're all boxed in, nowhere to escape

City's just a jungle, more games to play
Trapped in the heart of it, trying to get away
I was raised in the country, I been workin' in the town
I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down

Got nothing for you, I had nothing before
Don't even have anything for myself anymore
Sky full of fire, pain pourin' down
Nothing you can sell me, I'll see you around

All my powers of expression and thoughts so sublime
Could never do you justice in reason or rhyme
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

Well, the devil's in the alley, mule's in the stall
Say anything you wanna, I have heard it all
I was thinkin' about the things that Rosie said
I was dreaming I was sleeping in Rosie's bed

Walking through the leaves, falling from the trees
Feeling like a stranger nobody sees
So many things that we never will undo
I know you're sorry, I'm sorry too

Some people will offer you their hand and some won't
Last night I knew you, tonight I don't
I need somethin' strong to distract my mind
I'm gonna look at you 'til my eyes go blind

Well I got here following the southern star
I crossed that river just to be where you are
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

Well my ship's been split to splinters and it's sinking fast
I'm drownin' in the poison, got no future, got no past
But my heart is not weary, it's light and it's free
I've got nothin' but affection for all those who've sailed with me

Everybody movin' if they ain't already there
Everybody got to move somewhere
Stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow
Things should start to get interesting right about now

My clothes are wet, tight on my skin
Not as tight as the corner that I painted myself in
I know that fortune is waitin' to be kind
So give me your hand and say you'll be mine

Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay
You can always come back, but you can't come back all the way
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long

Copyright © 1997 Special Rider Music

Dylan might live in a big house in Big Sur, wear an unfortunate pencil mustache, and thousand dollar sets of clothes, but he can write this stuff. He can see it somewhere in his head. He's learned, it seems, from everything he's come into contact with. All older sources than himself. Listen to him sing Mississippi on Love And Theft. It's slow, lazy, hopeless yet vibrant. The Time Out Of Mind songs are completely homeless, terrifyingly alone, and made luminant by salvation rooted somewhere in the American blues tradition. In Trying To Get To Heaven he spends three verses wandering a wrecked and bleak landscape ending with the plain spoken statement that no one wants to hear "When you think that you lost everything / You find out you can always lose a little more / I'm just going down the road feeling bad / Trying to get to heaven before they close the door". Then he makes his run for it. At peace (or pissed off enough) with the empty world he leaves it. Alone. The lines that come in the fourth verse line aren't "out loud" lines. Their mental. They come when you finally fix your vision on something far away and wander towards it. Let the tossers burn down with their barstools I'm outta here. He left without saying goodbye, only goodnight. Mantra-like:

I'm going down the river
Down to New Orleans
They tell me everything is gonna be all right
But I don't know what "all right" even means
I was riding in a buggy with Miss Mary-Jane
Miss Mary-Jane got a house in Baltimore
I been all around the world, boys
Now I'm trying to get to heaven before they close the door.

You got to feel what you sing and sing what you feel. And if you feel it learning the history helps. A lot.
But I was writing about Sheryl Crow and her toss off of Mississippi. This isn't a broadside against her. I remember some years ago driving to gigs in New England in a borrowed Volkswagen Jetta and finding the "Sheryl Crow" album at a gas station. The car had a tape deck and I listened to that album for a week. I loved it (and I thought she was hot). I thought she had that weighty sense - or I thought I thought she had it. I was wrong. She doesn't have it. She has Lance Armstrong. Lucinda Williams has it though. Lucinda's hot for sure and her songs live in trailer parks. But I digress.
I'm not sure why it's so hard for some musicians to accept the fact that everything has already been said. But, if taken seriously, your own personal experiences, longings, dreams, and failures will provide that you express yourself in your own way. Just don't get in your own way. Just do your best. Dylan didn't write the chorus of Mississippi (and most of the lines in Trying To Get To Heaven are nicked from old songs) but that's what makes them so good. They have a weight behind them. The songs have historical and mythic backbone. Their not marooned in the presant. I have musician songwriter friends who don't listen to music and will explain when asked why not that they are on a mission to connect with the higher universal vibe. They don't want anything to cloud or color their own ability to let God whisper sweet songs into their left ears and come through with music that is truly original. They eat right and do yoga, don't listen to music, and like some of them OK. Friends of mine in a band on this kind of spiritual quest recorded a song that is an exact copy of All Along The Watchtower and when this was pointed out didn't know the reference. Which, then, makes one wonder of God isn't singing Dylan into their left ears and having a bit of a laugh. Doctors have to know about the body before they can operate. Writers how to spell. Bakers how to make bread. Car mechanics need to understand the internal combustion engine. Jazz musicians seem to know everything there is to know about the universe. Ya' gotsta' know your history. Or at least do your best.
I'm wondering again about in what form Sheryl Crow first heard the song Mississippi. There is a copy of it that I hear floats around the Dylan circles - the take from the Time Out Of Mind sessions. The version that Bob and Daniel Lanois had such a fight about. According to a Rolling Stone interview with Mr. Bob, he felt that the song should be played in straight time while Daniel insisted it should be "sexy". This led to a big storm between them. But I'm thinking Bob was right. The song is about a state, a state of mind, and a river. The chorus is taken from the sining of inmates in an impossibly hard place. The song simply must respect that and echo, as best it can, the color of the mud on the river bottom from which it was dredged. To do less belittles the lives of the men who provided the chorus. Songs are strands on their own double helix spinning off in some parallel universe. They can cross over. They seem unopposed to being written down. Fingers on guitar strings can form the new groundwork for their new incarnation. They will meet the writer half way and allow themselves to be colored with one's own personal experiences. They don't seem to mind. But they do seem to make a silent demand of respect. If distorted out of their own context they will retaliate by sounding empty or just not sounding "right". Worse, they will go flying past in a jumble of truncated verses against a backdrop of music to which they don't identify. This is their trumpcard. Their final blessing or rejection. They are older and wiser than any singer. They have seen more and lived longer. They do not judge you or your ability. They just are. Finished. Unfinished. Songs reflect back on a singer more than a singer can reflect on a song. They don't care how you are dressed or wheather or not you have perfect pitch. They just demand that you know them. If you do they will travel with you. If not they will drift back into that from which they came.
The headwaters of the Mississippi form in Itasca, Minnesota. The delta spills out 2,552 miles later through the levies south of New Orleans. That's a long song.
There's cyotes yelping in the cow pasture in the dark across the way. I go outside to listen but their gone.