You Can't Do Something Forever

Came across this 2004 60 Minutes interview with Bob Dylan.  At 1:30 into it Ed Bradley asks the singer about how he wrote his early songs and whether he can still do so.  The 63 year old Dylan replies:

"I don't know how I got to write those songs . . . Well, you can't do something forever and I did it once . . . I can do other things now, but I can't do that".

The lyric he recites is from "It's Alright Mom (I'm Only Bleeding)", written in 1964, and which also contains the line, "But even the president of the United States/ Sometimes must have to stand naked".

It reminded me of something he wrote in his 2004 autobiography Chronicles: Volume One, my favorite musician autobiography, a non-linear, episodic, probably partly fictionalized account.  The 80s had been a fallow commercial and reputational decade, until he made a comeback in both respects, with the 1989 album Oh Mercy!, containing outstanding songs like Man In The Long Black Coat, Most Of The Time, What Good Am I?, and Ring Them Bells.  In Chronicles, Dylan recounts how producer Daniel Lanois, just off producing the Joshua Tree album for U2, told Dylan he should write some songs like Mr Tambourine Man for the new record.  Dylan writes that he can't do that anymore because he's not that person anymore.  He was right and that was a good thing.  An older guy, trying to recapture that style would devolve into a caricature.

As a teenager in the 60s, I liked Dylan and continued listening into the mid-70s.  After that I lost track of him and, to the extent I thought about it, considered his old songs kinds of lame and passe.  I saw him in concert with Tom Petty in the mid-80s and he was terrible.  In the 90s I didn't listen to any of his new records, or old ones for that matter.  He'd disappeared as far as I was concerned.

But when it came to starting Things Have Changed in 2012, the title and inspiration came from Dylan's song in the 2000 movie Wonder Boys (which I recommend):

People are crazy, times are strange
I'm locked up tight, I'm out of range
I used to care
But things have changed

With that, I started relistening to his old stuff and also exploring the post-1980 work which I'd ignored.  The result is the 36th post with a Dylan tag since THC started.   You can find them all here.

I now appreciate the scope of his achievement.  Bob Dylan is a towering figure; there is no one quite like him.  It's not just the songwriting.  It's how he managed the transition over the years.  That post-80 material contains some wonderful songs, many interpreted brilliantly by other acts, particularly by female artists.  His books, Chronicles and The Philosophy Of Modern Song are top notch, as is his Nobel Prize acceptance speech.  An interesting and reflective man.

Some favorite Dylan covers by women artists:

Sarah Jarosz: Ring Them Bells

Chrissie Hynde: Sweetheart Like You

Bettye Lavette: Seeing The Real You at Last

Jenny Lewis: Standing In The Doorway

Nanci Griffith: Boots Of Spanish Leather

Mavis Staples: Gotta Serve Somebody

Patti Smith: Changing Of The Guards

Adele: Make You Feel My Love 

Susan Tedeschi: Lord Protect My Child

16th Ghost Notes

Enjoy the great Bernard Purdie, who turned 85 this year, explain 16th ghost notes.  The real fun starts about three minutes in when he starts talking about the high hat.  Creator of the Purdie Shuffle, which Wikipedia describes as the "use of triplets against a half-time backbeat".  Sounds right to me!

Of course that gives me an excuse to insert this video of Purdie playing on Home At Last, a Steely Dan track from their 1977 album Aja.

Lochnagar Crater

(Two photos below from Wikipedia) 

At 7:28am on July 1, 1916 a titanic explosion occurred near La Boisselle, a village in the Department of the Somme, throwing debris thousands of feet into the air.  Its cause was sixty tons of explosives placed in a mine dug by British engineers, extending 1200 feet, to the German trenches.  It was, to that date, the largest military mine explosion in history.  The resulting crater, now known as the Lochnagar, was 70 feet deep and 330 feet wide.

The power of visiting the site, which we did on our recent trip, was that it brought down to a comprehensible scale, the otherwise overwhelming scale of the Battle of the Somme, which lasted from July 1 to mid-November of 1916.  The site, privately owned and maintained, was purchased and preserved by a Briton in the 1970s, is set up as a memorial, a "hallowed place dedicated to Peace, Remembrance, and Reconciliation".  As you walk around the crater, you read exhibits telling the stories of the British soldiers who died that day, those who survived, and those of comrades who returned frequently over the years to honor their fallen friends.  A cross marks the spot where the body of a British soldier, subsequently identified, was found as recently as 1998.

The British-French offensive on the Somme was designed to end the Western Front stalemate, breaking the German lines.  It was also intended to take pressure off the French Army, desperately defending Verdun against a German attack that began in February and was to continue until December.  The attack was to take place on a 25 mile front, with 19 mines, Lochnagar being the largest, detonated that morning.

The first day proved a fiasco for the British.  The troops, many seeing their first combat, had been told the week long preliminary bombardment would destroy the first and second German trench lines and were instructed, once they went "over the top", to walk slowly following the rolling artillery barrage.  However, much of the German first line and most of its second line survived the bombardment.  On that first day, the British army suffered almost 60,000 casualties, of which 20,000 were killed; the worst toll of any day in British history, and achieved very little.  The division attacking in and around the Lochnagar Crater incurred 6,000 dead, wounded, and missing, the most of any attacking division.  By the time the battle wound down in November more than a million British, French, and German soldiers were dead, wounded or missing.

What happened that morning at Lochnagar? The German first line trenches were completely destroyed.  The British soldiers followed instructions marching towards the crater.  Most of the British were part of the Pals Battalions.  With the destruction of the relatively small professional British Army in the battles of 1914, and the realization that the war would last longer than anticipated, Britain, which did not have conscription until January 1916, embarked on an ambitious recruitment program to build a large army. 

One of the recruitment tools used was the creation of Pals Battalions, for volunteers who enlisted with their friends, neighbors, or co-workers and were promised they could serve together.  For these volunteers, July 1 was to be their first day of combat.

As the British approached the crater and front trenches they found themselves under intense machine gun fire.  While the German first line was destroyed, the second line, on a ridge several hundred yards beyond, was relatively unscathed.  The Germans had an unobstructed view of the British advance and were well equipped with machine guns and ammunition. 

You can see on the photo below, behind the plaque showing the story of a British soldier who perished that day, the ridgeline where the German gunners were located.  Please read the inscription.

The surviving British never made it past the crater and trenches, with many seeking cover within the crater.  One plaque at the Crater told the story of two brothers.  One made it into the crater, but the other lifting his head for a moment at the crater lip, was hit by a machine gun and killed.  His brother, with the help of a fellow soldier, pulled the body into the crater and buried him at the bottom.

On another part of the field, a Pals regiment of 700 men suffered 235 dead and 350 wounded in the first 20 minutes of the battle.  As news of the dead and wounded came back to Britain, the enormous impact of the loss to Pal communities became evident, and the recruiting of Pals units was halted.

Butte de Vauquois and Lochnagar Crater were the most moving and evocative battlefield sites of our trip.  The Crater was saved from being filled in by the purchase of Richard Dunning MBE and the creation of the Locknagar Crater Foundation.

The Pals were not the only units to suffer heavily.  After Lochnagar, we visited the Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Regiment Memorial, located a few miles away.  We observed the remains of the trenches from which the Newfoundland Regiment of the Canadian Army went "over the top" on the morning of July 1, and the remnants of their own barbed wire protective barrier through which they were funneled through breaches, our guide pointing out why the sloping terrain left them so vulnerable to enemy fire.  Of 790 in the regiment, 272 were killed and 438 wounded in a short time that morning.  Only 80 remained alive and uninjured.

Butte De Vauquois

After tours of the Somme and Ypres, the rest of our recent WW1 trip was self-guided.  When planning the trip it proved very difficult to find information in English about touring the entire Western Front.  Information in English focused on the northern end of the front where British and Empire troops fought, while ignoring the French.

At the suggestion of a friend, I tried using ChatGPT for the first time, using inquiries about sites to visit at Verdun, Meuse-Argonne, Belleau Wood, and Chateau Thierry.  It proved very useful in leading me to locations about which I could do more research.  It was through ChatGPT I found the Butte de Vauquois which I'd never heard of.  Thinking it was primarily a hill taken by the Americans at the start of the Meuse-Argonne offensive, we decided to stop there on the way to the American Monument at Montfaucon and the Meuse-Argonne American cemetery.  It proved to be one of the most unique, memorable, and melancholy stops on our trip.

Butte de Vauquois is a small hill, rising more than 300 feet above the surrounding rural landscape.  In 1914 its flat top contained the village of Vauquois, with a few homes, barns, and a church.  From the top it provides a commanding view for miles of the countryside in all directions.  That view sealed its destruction in the Great War.

The German army seized the hill during its initial advance in September 1914 because of its military importance for observation of French movements.  Later that fall, the French began efforts to recapture the small plateau, by March 1915 controlling the south side of the village.  That remained the front line until September 1918.  The entrenchments of the armies, many of which still exist, were at points only 30 feet apart.  Both armies started tunneling into the hill to provide for supplies, barracks, and shafts for mines to be set off under each other's lines.

More than 15 miles of tunnels were built during the course of the war.  We saw a German trench mortar and the deep shaft in which it had been placed.  With trenches were so close, conventional artillery could not be used because of the risk to their own soldiers, so these high arcing mortars were brought in to bombard the French.  Entrance to one of the tunnels:

The two sides also set off more than 500 mines in the course of the war, creating a huge gulley, a rift line, running the full length of the plateau between what became the final German and French lines.  The largest explosion, in May 1916, killed 108 French soldiers and destroyed the western end of the hill.  The village of Vauquois was completely destroyed, only a few foundation stones of the church remaining.

Photo from French side:

 Photo from German side:

According to the sources I found, about 14,000 soldiers were killed on the hill during the war with the bodies of 8,000 never found. Among those killed was Auguste Chaillou, one of the developers of serum therapy to treat diphtheria.  From 1895 to 1914 Chaillou was chief of anti-rabies services at the Pasteur Institute.  Age 49, Chaillou died on the hill on April 23, 1915, while serving as a medical officer.

This was war on an intimate scale, the sides locked closely together for four years.  Even seeing it in person, it is difficult to envision what it must have been like for the soldiers on both sides, living day after day, month after month, year after year, in such proximity to each other.

When visiting today you park about halfway up the hill and then do the short, but steep, climb up the wide path.  We had the hilltop mostly to ourselves the day we were there, as we walked the trenches and gaped at the results of the mining.  We viewed the entrances to the underground tunnel system but could not enter without being accompanied by guides.

The video below provides further views and explanations and this link takes you online article.

  This video takes you through the underground tunnels.

What We Say, And Don't Say

Yesterday, I read a piece by Joseph Epstein in the Wall Street Journal, "Maybe It's Time for Jewish Self-Segregation", prompted by the increase in American anti-semitism, some from elements on the Right and institutionally on the Left, mainstreamed by academic theory as I've described before.

I was startled to see this anecdote which Epstein recounted as occurring when he was five.

My father asked me what I had learned in school one day, and I told him the poem "Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe", which I began to recite.  When I came to the n-word - before "tiger" had been substituted as a more appropriate alternative - my father angrily stopped me and told me I was never to use the word again, especially since our people, like the Negroes (as they were called then), had been long persecuted and called all sorts of terrible names.

Epstein was born in 1937 so this occurred in 1942.  What caught my attention is that I had a very similar experience with my father when I was probably six, in 1957, when attending a summer day camp for the first time.  I had already learned the version of Eenie, Meenie with "tiger" but that day a camper told me there was another version, though he did not explain why, and recited it to me. I had no idea what the n-word meant. Either that day or the next I was sitting next to my dad while he drove and I recited the version using the n-word as something new I'd learned.  Like Epstein's father, my dad angrily stopped me, explained why it was a bad word, and told me never to say it again.  I can't remember if he also, like Epstein's dad, referenced the Jewish experience, but he did at other times, telling me of what it was like growing up and encountering prejudice as a member of the only Jewish family in a small Connecticut town in the 1920s and 30s.

I'm 73 now, dad passed a decade ago, and I've not said that word since that day.  It wasn't only what he told me - he lived his life in a way that I could see by how he treated people and who he had as friends that this meant a great deal to him, and so it did to me.

Left Behind

 

Recently returned from the tour of WW1 battlefields I mentioned in a recent post.  Above is a photo I took of my friend looking at three unexploded shells along a small road near Ypres.  The pointing arm is that of our guide pointing out that this was still, more than a century later, live ordnance and that one of them was a gas shell.  He'd told us at the beginning of the tour that about 300 million shells(1), from mortar to heavy artillery, were fired in the 100 square miles of the Ypres battlefield between the fall of 1914 and September 1918, of which 20% did not explode, going on to warn us that it was possible we would encounter shells on our tour and that, under no circumstances, were we to touch them, regaling us with stories of the unpleasant results in recent years for folks who tried to remove the nose cones, which are valuable souvenirs.

Farmers and builders still encounter about 250 tons a year of these shells and put them by the side of the road for collection.  It was one of our fellow tourists who noticed these shells by the wayside and our guide quickly pulled over.

Flying in and out of Brussels, we saw, in order, the Somme, Ypres, Verdun, the Meuse Argonne - site of the great American offensive at the end of the war, and ended up at Waterloo, along with visiting the Museum of the Great War in Meaux, near Paris, the closest the Germans came to the city in September 1914, before being repulsed in the First Battle of the Marne.

At the Somme and Ypres we did all day tours with a guide.  At the Somme we were with four Australians, one whose grandfather was shot in the face during the 1918 battle, but survived to return home.  Although I knew Australians fought on the Western Front, I was unaware of the scale of their participation, with 46,000 dying along those lines.  At Ypres we spent the morning with four other Australians and two Brits, the Australians leaving us at lunch.  

The rest of the trip we served as our own guides, visiting museums and the battlefields on our own.  And the military cemeteries.  The endless cemeteries.  There are 410 military cemeteries at the Somme, and more than 250 at Ypres; the Meuse Argonne contains the largest American military cemetery in Europe, the final resting place for more than 14,000 soldiers.  We saw many as we passed by and visited British and Empire, French, German, and American cemeteries.

The scale of all this death and destruction occurring within a relatively contained geographical area is overwhelming.  During the entire American Civil War there were about 200,000 battlefield deaths while about 300,000 American died at on the battlefield or shortly thereafter during WW2.  During the 4 1/2 months of the Somme, 300,000 soldiers perished; during the ten month Battle of Verdun the same year, another 300,000 died.  In four years at Ypres the toll was another 400,000.  Including wounded there were between 2.5 and 3 million casualties at these three locations.

At the British cemeteries you will see many gravestones simply reading A Soldier of the Great War.  The German cemetery at Ypres contains a mass grave with the bones of 25,000 unidentified soldiers.  For many other tens of thousands not enough was ever found to bury.  On a wall at the Australian National Monument at the Somme are the names of 11,000 soldiers never found.  The British monument at the Somme is in memory of more than 70,000 who disappeared in the mud, the rain, and the repeated shelling (60-70% of Western Front casualties were from artillery).  The Menin gate at Ypres lists more than 50,000 soldiers of the British Empire who disappeared defending the city.

The bond between the people of Ypres and Britain remains strong a century later.  The Germans never took the city but it was completely destroyed by the deluge of German shells.  After the war, Ypres was rebuilt as it existed before 1914.  The city is filled with British, Australian and Canadians visitors and they receive a warm welcome.  Our hotel contained a small museum of artifacts recovered from the battlefield.  At 8pm every night since 1929 (except during WW2), a bugle band consisting of local volunteers plays at a ceremony at the Menin Gate.

Below are photos of the Tyne Cot British Cemetery at Passchendaele (Passendale) five miles from the center of Ypres.  From its low ridge, the towers of the Ypres Cathedral could be seen.  In 1917, the British, Australians, and Canadians launched an attack to capture the ridge.  It took 100 days and 75,000 lives to advance less than five miles, with the German suffering similar losses.  The cemetery is placed on top of the ridge at the limit of their advance.  On the photo at bottom, the wind turbines in the distance mark the approximate starting line for the British attack.

 

______

 

(1)  Doing some further research, while I've seen the 300 million figure as well as 1.5 billion for the number of shells fired on the entire Western Front from 1914 to 1918, I have my doubts whether this is accurate.  I've found some smaller figures, as well as amounts of shells produced individually by Britain, France, and Germany.  There is no doubt that staggering amounts of shells were fired, for instance, one million by the Germans on the first day at Verdun on February 21, 1916 and 1.7 million by the British and French on July 1, 1916 at the Somme, but if 300 million were fired at Ypres, that works out to about 210,000 a day, which seems high given weather and campaigning variation, as well as that until mid-1915 all the armies had shortages of shells.  My sense is the number is less but still impressive.

A further note, at Verdun and the Somme, the first day artillery barrage was intended to destroy the enemy lines and allow large advances by the infantry.  In both cases, though much death and destruction was inflicted, the expected advances did not occur, as enough enemy survived to maintain resistance.