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‘She’s Your Lover Now’

“What do you want to call this, for now?” Bob Johnston asks Bob Dylan, whose reply to his producer is punctuated by giggles. “This is called… yes… we’ll call it ‘Just a Little Glass of Water’.” And, on January 21, 1966, in Columbia Records’ Seventh Avenue studio in New York City, Dylan and his musicians — Mike Bloomfield and Robbie Robertson on guitars, Garth Hudson on the organ, Richard Manuel on piano, Rick Danko on bass guitar and Sandy Konikoff on drums — launch into the first recorded pass at a song that would become known to bootleggers as “She’s Your Lover Now”.

What turned out to be the best version — which we now know to have been take 15 — was included on a couple of the early bootlegs I bought in 1969/70: Forty Red White & Blue Shoestrings and GWW: Seems Like a Freeze Out. It’s a song I quickly grew to love, seeing it as part of the “revenge” series that began with “Like a Rolling Stone” and continued with “Positively 4th Street” and “Can You Please Crawl  Out Your Window?”, although for years I wrongly imagined it to have been recorded in Nashville during the sessions than began on February 14 and yielded the bulk of what became Blonde on Blonde.

Now, thanks to the release of the $599 18-CD “collector’s edition” of The Bootleg Series Vol 12: The Cutting Edge, we know how hard Dylan worked on this song before abandoning it at the end of the day. Indeed, we know how hard he worked on many of his songs. The many takes that were needed before “Like a Rolling Stone” emerged from its chrysalis were not the exception. On this evidence, any idea of Dylan’s attitude to the recording process as being one based primarily on intuition and spontaneity would be seriously to underrate his interest in detailed development.

As with several of his songs, mostly notably “Like a Rolling Stone” , “She’s Your Lover Now” began life in a rather stately triple metre before finding its ultimate destiny in a fast 4/4. (The many takes of “One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)”, for example, begin with a voice-and-piano sketch in 6/8 before making the change almost immediately.)

In terms of format, “She’s Your Lover Now” probably the most complicated song he ever wrote: by my amateur calculation its structure settles on A-A-B-C-D-A-E, where A is 8 bars, B is 13 (yes!), C is 8, D is 10 and E is 8. The contrasting cadences and their associated harmonic suspensions make perfect sense, but they must have been hell for the musicians to remember, particularly while trying to keep up with Dylan’s constantly changing attitude to the song’s metre and tempo, which by take 4 has temporarily settled on a rather plodding rock backbeat.

Between takes 10 and 11, with Dylan having taken over at the piano, we hear Johnston, with Dylan’s approval, suggesting a “double beat”: a fast 8/8 instead of the soggy 4/4. Immediately the song reveals its true personality. But the take breaks down, and Dylan is not satisfied. “It’s not together, man,” he says. “Just play it together. Just make it all together. You don’t have to play anything fancy or nothing. Just together. Okay?”

He also massages the lyric as he works through the song, most significantly changing the key line from “You’re Her Lover Now” quite late in the process, while experimenting with different stresses in his phrasing. Take 15 goes further than its predecessors and builds a terrific momentum until breaking down as he sings “Now your mouth cries wolf…”, possibly having run out of words.

At the end of the session, clearly having abandoned hope of getting it right with the band that day, he lays down a version alone at the tack piano. “Last take, any time,” Johnston says. “Okay,” Dylan replies. “It’s not going to be really exactly right.” He’s still exploring, and we can hear how, left to his own devices, he finds a 12/8 feel that somehow synthesises and incorporates all previous metrical variants. He would never return to the song, leaving us with a fascinating work-in-progress document of one that didn’t quite make it.

* The photograph is by Jerry Schatzberg and is included in the Collector’s Edition of The Cutting Edge (purchase details: bobdylan.com).

Annette Peacock at Cafe Oto

“I live alone,” Annette Peacock told the audience as she settled at the piano stool on Monday evening. “So I talk to myself.” The sense of a continuous interior monologue is always present in the work of this most original composer and performer, and so it was throughout the second of her two nights at Cafe Oto.

She took the stage in semi-darkness. Like Bob Dylan these days, she prefers to do without a frontal spotlight. Still slender and seemingly lithe at 74, she was wearing a grey fur hat pulled down to her eyebrows and a dark tailored jacket, possibly velvet, with ruched shoulders; she looked like something from Tolstoy, as though she’d just come indoors from a snow-covered St Petersburg street in the 1850s.

But this was Dalston in 2015, and the audience rewarded her hour-long set with such keen appreciation that it felt as though Annette Peacock’s time has come at last. Not that she is probably much concerned, having been through several brushes with fame since she arrived in Europe in 1971 with her then husband, the great Canadian jazz pianist Paul Bley, promoting the music in which they (mostly she) explored the possibilities of the Moog synthesiser.

Drawing on five decades’ worth of compositions, she dramatised her lyrics by alternating between her low speaking voice and that striking upper register. The ever-present sense of the erotic, explicit and implicit, was supercharged by the cold reverberations of her stark piano phrases, often picked out with the contrapuntal effect of a single-note line in each hand, sometimes against the background of digital string sounds from her Roland synthesiser — a pleasantly kitschy effect reminiscent of Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtracks — and the occasional rhythm pattern from a drum machine.

The set included “The Succubus” from 1979’s The Perfect Release and “b 4 u said” from An Acrobat’s Heart, the album with a string quartet released by ECM in 2000, and “Nothing Ever Was, Anyway”, first recorded by Paul Bley in 1968 and 28 years later by Marilyn Crispell (on both occasions with Gary Peacock, Annette’s first husband, on bass). There might also have been songs from 31:31, the album she quietly released on her own Ironic label in 2009, but since a new copy nowadays costs a minimum of £184 on Amazon, I’m unable to tell you that.

For her last song, she cued up a slow-jam backing track of funk bass and percussion. She sang for a while, then got up, and — while her pre-recorded voice and the instruments continued — walked quietly through the audience and away.

* The photograph was taken shortly after Annette Peacock had left the stage. Here is a track from 31:31, with an accompanying film directed by Dale Hoyt. Her first album, originally called Revenge, recorded in 1969, released in 1971 and then credited to the Bley-Peacock Synthesiser Show, has just been reissued by Peacock on her own label and under her own name, retitled I Belong to a World That’s Destroying Itself, after one of her songs. I would also recommend Annette, the album of her tunes played by Paul Bley, Gary Peacock and the trumpeter/flugelhornist Franz Koglmann, recorded in 1992 and most recently reissued on the HatHut label in 2010.

Turning Turtle

Of all the performances I was able to catch at this year’s EFG London Jazz Festival, the one that will probably stay with me longest was the evening at Cadogan Hall titled An Evocation of Kenny Wheeler, featuring Dave Holland, Norma Winstone, Ralph Towner, Stan Sulzmann, Nikki Iles, John Parricelli, Henry Lowther, Evan Parker, Steve Beresford, Percy Pursglove, Louis Moholo and others, including the members of the London Voice Project. The proceedings began with a group of half a dozen trumpeters playing from the gallery above the stage and closed with a poignant recording of Wheeler playing solo, that softly burnished trumpet sound and those vaulting phrases bringing tears to more than a few eyes.

A significant absentee was the pianist John Taylor, whose death in July came 10 months after that of the trumpeter, his collaborator for four and a half decades. I went home and played Taylor’s debut album, Pause, And Think Again, released in 1971 on the Turtle label. Wheeler is prominently featured on this elegant and still striking record, recently reissued as part of a box set called The Turtle Records Story: Pioneering British Jazz 1970-71.

As that subtitle suggests, the story of Turtle Records was a short one. The box contains its entire output: just three albums. Taylor’s is one; the others are Mike Osborne’s Outback and Howard Riley’s Flight. Together they provide a valuable snapshot of British modern jazz at a particularly interesting stage of its evolution.

If Taylor’s music is characteristically considered and lyrical, Osborne’s — with Harry Beckett on trumpet, Chris McGregor on piano, Harry Miller on bass and Louis Moholo on drums — is much looser and more overtly impassioned. Riley’s trio, with Barry Guy on bass and Tony Oxley on drums and electronics, is a more cerebral unit, its music offering a greater challenge than that heard on the pianist’s earlier albums for CBS, Angle and The Day Will Come.

Turtle was founded in London by Peter Eden (pictured above), a record producer whose credits already included the early Deram albums by Mike Westbrook, John Surman, Alan Skidmore and Mike Gibbs. He moved on to Dawn, a Pye subsidiary, where his artists included Mike Cooper, Mungo Jerry, and the Trio, as Surman, Barre Phillips and Stu Martin called their group. And then, frustrated by the inadequacies of the major labels, Eden made what must have seemed the logical next step, striking out on his own.

All three Turtle albums had the benefit of excellent recording quality, good pressings and almost excessively lavish packaging. The gatefold sleeves of the Riley and Taylor albums featured semi-abstract artwork, making them look like the products of the progressive rock bands of the time. Eventually, not surprisingly, they became collectors’ items. The new box set miniaturises the original artwork and contains a booklet featuring highly detailed sleeve notes by Colin Harper, incorporating the views of several of the participants.

Eden was a modest and unobtrusive man of great discernment. He chose to work with highly creative musicians and let them get on with it. The contents of the box set show how well he succeeded, even if the market did not agree.

* The Turtle Records Story is released by Cherry Red.