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Young People Scream

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

Today’s post will combine a few things: there will be a link to a video of a new odd cover version of a song “Young People Scream,” written by someone who’s not Bob Dylan, and I’ll continue the behind-the-scenes story of how I’m making new musical pieces, but first I’ll explain why posts and interactivity from me has been low since the last part of June.

I’ve been sick for over a week with some kind of respiratory bug, and for a big chunk in the middle of it I was about as sick as I recall being for decades. At the worst, I was feverish and my stamina was very low — walking to the bathroom was a chore. I slept off on through a few days, and when awake I was foggy, unable to deal with any complexity.* Things have been improving over the past couple of days, though I still have a cough and tire easily. My wife preceded me with the same crud, and she’s still got her cough, so I’ll likely be dealing with that for a while yet.

I’ve been exploring some changes in how I record with my long-time friend, poet, songwriter, keyboard player, and alternative Parlando vocalist Dave Moore. A combination of things is suggesting those changes, part of which is that Dave’s playing skill-set has become constrained with age’s infirmities. I wrote last time that MIDI will give us new options to ground the pieces’ chordal cadences within modern computer recording software. Will this work, or do I even know exactly how I’m predicting it will work? Don’t know yet. I’m getting some more cabling next week that I’m thinking will offer some additional audio routing in my studio space for Dave, but today’s cover song recorded in June is an example of a way MIDI was used to shape a recording.

Super-quick intro: MIDI is a way to record things, but it doesn’t record audio. Typically, it records what actions happen when someone plays a controller — in Dave’s case, a piano-style keyboard. If Dave presses the C, E, and G keys on that keyboard, MIDI records when he pressed each of them, how hard he struck them, and how long they were depressed. The sound of that C Major chord we hear when those notes are playing together is created as a separate step. As he plays, a sound is heard, just as if he was playing an organ or conventional electric piano, but this sound is generated by software with only a small fraction of a second delay. An entirely conceptual composer could even play MIDI with no sound, but aside from Conlon Nancarrow humans naturally want to hear sounds when they use the controller keyboard.

As Dave played today’s piece live with me a few weeks ago, he heard a combo organ sound as he played and sang his part. There was a drum loop going to give us a time reference, and I played the electric guitar part you will eventually hear live with Dave and the placeholder drums.

Afterward I listened analytically to what had been played live. His without-a-net, one-pass vocal worked — and as I’ll talk about in the next segment, I discovered that I loved the song he chose to sing. My guitar part was meh, not good enough to feature, but not totally dire. That organ part? It had a few stumbles, but the greater problem was that the vocal had a nice laid-back groove, but the organ’s characteristic timing, attack, and timbre didn’t mesh with that feel. How to fix?

I extracted the MIDI from what Dave played, stripping things back to the chordal structure divorced from the sound. I used that chordal structure laid bare to guide an upright bass part, and using acoustic drum sample patterns I created a Jazzy-sounding drum set track. Having the drums, bass, and guitar grooving together, I used the program that extracted Dave’s chords for me to play that chord information derived from the live performance with a grand piano sound instead of the small combo organ Dave was hearing as he played them live.**

The resulting piece is here in this video.

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Now what about the song that all this work was done to present? I suspect “Young People Scream” speaks to something some young people are feeling. Hell, I’m not young people, and I’m feeling this! Given that it was first released in 1982 by a still in his Twenties singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock, there’s a lot of ambiguity and context shifting when we experience the same song today — probably was so from the beginning too, because Robyn Hitchcock has a long career that I’ve admired of writing songs that are attractively elusive. He may do this using surrealism’s tactic, the remixing normal to seem strange, but in this one I sense asides to irony and satire.

Hitchcock’s own version on his Groovy Decay album was performed with a rock-a-billy arrangement. This would have been then a 30-year-old musical style, but one that had been revived by young musicians spinning off from the Punk and New Wave musical rebellion — and so, “Rock This Town” by the Stray Cats was a 1982 hit. Conscious or not, I suspect a certain slyness on Hitchcock’s observation and choice there: young people in 1982 using their parents’ youthful rebellion’s mode — a mode they’d largely abandoned with embarrassment as those thirty-something Boomers moved on to the modern Rock and pop sounds or the “Greatest Hits of the Sixties, Seventies, and the Eighties.” As the first verse has it, tweaking those younger rock revivalists by telling them “It all been done before” could get a “don’t care” reply.

Despite the upright bass in this current LYL Band version, it’s not hot-tempo rock-a-billy. Instead, I wanted to let the tension-releasing satiric vitriol delivered with a dry “just the facts” attitude by the singer come through. Even if he’s not literally screaming, I think the singer, to a degree of undercurrent, has to appear driven around the bend with their disgust at the older generation — and while I don’t know the author’s intent, I think Hitchcock’s words convey that indignation. The video ends with the on-screen statement it does because I’m “older people” and I’m disgusted, though my throat is still too sore to scream aloud today.

*It was difficult to read when awake, though I had some intense fever dreams while sleeping for entertainment. I did catch up on some episodes of A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, which are outstandingly detailed and interwoven. If you like the surprising stories and unlikely connections I do here, and would like that sort of thing done at greater length and intelligent confidence within the world of Rock and popular music, you will like this too.

**The program I used for this, Toontrack’s EZKeys, does a pretty good job of automatic transcription. I’ve also used the Capo transcription app for this, but I think Toontrack’s chord detection may use some musical context information that Capo doesn’t in order to get closer to a useful chord sequence right off. Something that EZKeys clearly does: it allows one to apply music grooves or feels to the chord cadence it extracts, which saves considerable time. Those with good harmonic ears could of course do this by hand (with one’s ear? Musicians, we poets will dock you for mixed metaphor!)

I Pity the Poor Immigrant

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

It occurred to me: should I try to sing a version of Bob Dylan’s “I Pity the Poor Immigrant?”  Afterall, I, without a plan, seem to be performing songs from Dylan’s 1967 LP John Wesley Harding  recently, and that song is one of the more noted ones from the album. And immigrants, and immigration, are currently a preoccupation of my country’s inept and callous administration.

Dylan might have been writing of his own family’s immigrant history in this song — being second-generation from his grandparents emigration from the Russian Empire and Turkey. Furthermore, he grew up in the iron-ore mining area of Minnesota, a place full of folks with wide-ranging immigrant backgrounds. Given Dylan’s, and folk-song’s in general concern for the underdog, one might expect this to be a song of empathy for these close-in immigrants.

Yet when Dylan sang his song in 1967, still a young man,* there’s a duality in its presentation. The immigrants within it are portrayed then as poor not only in wealth, but also in spirit. For all of Dylan’s genius, the voice that sings this song largely speaks about how the immigrants, who’d be the elders of his town and family, are stunted in their outlook. Dylan may be a genius, but this could be the disappointed vision of a young person who sees the faults and failures there. That’s what many young people, even those who aren’t geniuses, do, and it’s an important task.

His singing on this 1967 version is calm, not accusatory — at moments even sounding concerned as he decries the immigrants fallen state. If the harmonicas play the skeleton keys to the song’s interior, the passionate timbre of his playing on that instrument in the song may well be saying he feels sorrowful about the situation. The performance doesn’t lay any blame on poverty, exploitation, or the hard road of feeling the need to leave one’s homeland to find succor with strangers. Dylan, whatever he’s expressing here, likely knows these factors. Perhaps he assumes we do too.

I think Dylan’s aim was to confound the expected here — to write a great song instead of a good one, some mere piece of civic songcraft.

I’m not a young man, and I would have to go back to relatives I never knew, and who therefore can’t be blamed for imperfect mentorship or spiritual poverty. And I know from my life, and in my time, what immigrants contribute to my country. Some of course are noticeable success stories, but I think too of the many who do the hardest and least-rewarded work of the nation. I’m hesitant to pick a bone with the quality of their spiritual insight while they are trudging through unglamourous work — but even more so in 2025 when they also get slammed by disreputable politicians as criminals, scofflaws, swindlers, and parasites. I’m sure there are some immigrants who are those things, but I’m also quite sure that those slathering on those broad charges include in themselves a good measure of those failings — and are so eagerly pointing at immigrants to divert focus on that.

So, this is how I came to create this new performance of Dylan’s song, one for our time and situation. I changed only a few words, but by phrasing and refocusing my aim from Dylan’s original performance, I tried to illuminate those opposing scapegoating forces to the immigrant’s lot.** I may not even have made a (downgraded) good song of it, but I got some things off my chest I felt I had to say.

I can’t identify all the sources for the pictures used here. Alas, my stock photo library was bereft of any suitable pictures.

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*When he wrote this, Dylan had only young children, ones not yet able to judge him and his generation’s failings. Has an older Dylan, now a grandfather, revisited this song? AFAIK, no. Expert Dylanologists may have more info, but Wikipedia says it was last performed during the latter legs of the Rolling Thunder tour many decades ago, and then as a bizarre rollicking up-tempo jaunt.

As I said recently when a reader/listener pointed out that I may have completely misread Blake’s “Holy Thursday,” my theories about what was behind Dylan’s creation of this song are in no way meant to be definitive. They are just what I hear in it, and feel free to think my new recasting of the song is a sacrilege. I’ll plead that one part of Dylan’s genius is that he sees fit to approach his own work in highly different ways, and I’m just doing what I learned from the master. You should feel something to sing a song, and this is what I felt. Feel different? Sing the song yourself.

**Even fewer words in my plan than you’ll hear in the video, as some other different words slipped in by accident while singing. Here’s a link to the original lyric. Changing the song’s concluding couplet is the only indictable premeditated felony, and the video underlines my approach to make the sins that Dylan’s 1967 performance directed at only the immigrants as more of a dialectic. An accidental, unintended, change that I regret in this version: “Shatter like a  glass” is inferior to the original “Shatter like the  glass,” and looses the possible intra-album connection with the glass that has fingers pressed up against it in “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.”

I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine, with connections

~ Frank Hudson ~ 1 Comment

I’m not one to closely follow religious matters, though many poets over the ages have — the history and the weight of all that combined belief and its inconsistent practice is considerable. I did have an interval as a youthful churchman of the Protestant kind, attracted by the community bonds and social activism of the Martin Luther King era,*  but it was recent reading of those fresh drafts of history that we call the news that brought the selection of a new Catholic Pope to my attention. For a moment my country was caught up in ancient offices as a break from the depravity of our domestic head of state.

So, first the death of the serving Pope, then the mourning, then the secret conclave in its smoke-emitting room, then the new Pope and the follow-up consideration of his background and concerns — extended this time by his North American origins. My BlueSky feed of wits supplied me with humorous predictions based on Bob/now Leo’s Chicago origins, but the pedant in me snorted most heartily when I read this news service summary of Leo’s biography explaining that he was a member of the Augustinian Order, monks with a call to service and piety. The wire-service, no doubt constrained by the spread-so-thin-the-bread-tears nature of modern journalism, informed its readers that the Augustinians were founded in the 13th century by Saint Augustine.

I have no idea what the titrated level of history buffery is within my treasured readership, but they were off by near a millennium — St. Augustine being a 4th century North African early church father! The medieval founders of this order of monks were looking back to late Western Roman empire times for a guiding light.

The Parlando results of my guffaws? I thought of a song that abides with me that I found on one of the first three record albums I bought as 1967 turned into 1968: “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine”  from Bob Dylan’s slightly undervalued LP John Wesley Harding.**   Dylan was on the face of it no more accurate than our news-service scribe. His apparition of St. Augustine is a troubled man, as many spiritual people are, and he briefly charges us with his preaching in the song, but Dylan’s Augustine is also specifically a martyr who was put to death, presumably by the authorities. Unlike many saints, Augustine of Hippo was not a martyr. While Augustine’s town was under siege by Vandals (the original ones, doing business as that tribal name not as members of DOGE)***  he died an old man from natural causes.

Dylan’s song is brief, brevity being an unusual virtue Dylan exercised in all but one song on John Wesley Harding.   And yet he was bringing history into the three verses, no choruses, no bridge song structure of his song. Within his seeming historical inaccuracy was his choice of a borrowed tune. “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine”  uses the melody and the structure of a 1930s song setting by Earl Robinson of a 1920s poem by Alfred Hayes**** about a man put out to death in 1915: “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night.”   I believe Dylan clearly meant to link the two men, in the way that dreams can combine things we never see in waking hours.

This song, and Dylan’s performance of it, has always touched me — and so having the coincidence of Augustinians being in the news, and the hopes that the new Pope may preach to our current overly-gifted Kings and Queens, I went to record myself singing this song of a remarkable comparing. Since it’s a copyrighted work, I present that performance today as a YouTube video. The few-hundred views one of my videos might gather would not make even a widows mite, but it’s my understanding that any revenue gathered from those annoying YouTube ads can be claimed by the rights holders. For my video I mingle artists representations of Augustine and Hill. If you can’t tell, the photos are Joe Hill and a news photo of a memorial march for him in 1915. Our 4th century Augustine was camera-shy, and has to be represented by artists’ paintings.

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*My youth included a couple years working at a hospital still being actively managed by an order of nuns in those days.

**In search of more footnotable connections: was it coincidence that the then considered inscrutable cover of the LP has two Bengali Baals, singers in the tradition of the first songwriter to win the Nobel Prize, Rabindranath Tagore. Surely the Bob Dylan of 1967 didn’t know he’d eventually be the second. Another connection: Joe Hill was a songwriter who sang for union organizing meetings and “He who sings, prays twice” is a saying attributed to Saint Augustine.

***Augustine’s writings include thoughts on The City of God that may survive the fall of empires. Shortly after Augustine’s death, the Vandals sacked his city. Stories have it that these Vandals were impressed by Augustine’s learning, and spared the library he had established there. The current ones aren’t up to that level of civilization.

****Hayes had a long writing career. Wikipedia tells me he was an uncredited screenwriter for the famous Italian film The Bicycle Thief.   It also claims he wrote a script for The Twilight Zone, but IMDB doesn’t confirm that.