Monday, 15 February 2010

EVENSONG, PENTANGLE, LORD FRANKLIN.

English virtuoso folk-blues fusionists, Pentangle, weave delicately through a maudlin 19th c.British maritime lament; the tune, the vocal phrasing and indeed some of the words became better known, globally, as Bob Dylan's Dream, sumpn he learned over in England.

On the sublime Freewheelin' album it's companion songs included , inter alia, Blowing In The Wind; Don't Think Twice, It's Alright; Masters of War; Oxford Town; Corrina, Corrina and A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall; the tunes of most of these now-classics were lifted from elsewhere. Dylan's Dream predates Pentangle's formation but its members, Renbourn, Jansch, Cox, Thompson and McShee would have long known the original song.

It is a moot point, whether the narrative ballad is improved, morphed into superstar introspection and both have their charms; the English, though, as usual, display a little more craftsmanship, savoir faire and - harder to pin down - the frail quality which we lack so much, here, in the future, that weird little seasoning, finesse.




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14 comments:

mrs narcolept said...

Not that I haven't got the CD, but for some reason the prospect of listening to this online after midnight (can't get UTube to play until then) is something to look forward to. I suppose because someone else has chosen it; for once it's not just me.

Pentangle were (was?) my special band, my music, even more than Fairport, when I was fifteen (as usual, a few years behind what was currently going on). Listening to them now takes me straight back to rural Wales, planning to run off to live with Conrad at the Capel Isaac hippie camp, where he kept goats.

15 February 2010 at 19:48
call me ishmael said...

Does conrad keep goats, yet, mrs n, and do you know the Bob Dylan connection? A near lifetime Dylan afficianado, for me the tune will ever be Franklin's and I guess that among acoustic music lovers, at least, Bob Dylan's Dream will have led many non-Pentanglers to this quietly sparkling gem.

15 February 2010 at 20:08
mongoose said...

Ah, "Freewheelin'", eh? Those were the days. Never kept me goat though.

15 February 2010 at 21:13
mongoose said...

"A" goat...

Saint Joan for you

16 February 2010 at 00:41
mongoose said...

And more de nos jours.

16 February 2010 at 00:51
call me ishmael said...

No, mr mongoose, those are so no. Don't know what I ever did to you that you send me plagues of screeching harpies, those two banshee wails were bad enough on the original records, seeing her as well is a great displeasure.

16 February 2010 at 01:05
mongoose said...

You have become a savage, Mr Ishmael. It must be Scotland doing it to you. And St Joan all those years ago was very beautiful. No Saint Bonnie, no Saint Joni, no Saint Joan. With what are we left? Room still for matins with Saint Linda? One more time...

16 February 2010 at 01:36
mrs narcolept said...

Had never made the Dylan connection before, mr ishmael; deaf I must have been. I am having to revisit him now as well. And did you follow mr mongoose's link to A Heart Needs A Home? Every time I listen to it, no idea why I find tears sliding down my face, but there they are.

Goats are not as simple as they are cracked up to be. I don't think they would have lasted long.

16 February 2010 at 04:51
call me ishmael said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
16 February 2010 at 12:46
call me ishmael said...

There is much to be found in a revisit to Bob Dylan. I keep meaning to post, mrs n, on the curious place of Song in our lives; never have we been so sung at, by so many; new singers arrive daily, clamouring for a hearing and so much is now not Song but product, another time, maybe - save to say that among those we have chosen to call songwriters - as opposed to entertainers - Maestro Thompson, in my judgement, is among the greatest. I have most of his canon here, in Windows Media, elsewhere in the house on CD and DVD but due to the impact you mention, am not always strong enough to listen to it, bone-pared as it is.

As for the Sopranos, mr mongoose, la Baez is massively over-rated. Those early albums of Childe ballads are meritorious, I suppose, in that her singing of songs like The House Carpenter and Mary Hamilton, as well as stuff like All My Trials, brought them to a new audience and, it can be rightly said, kept them alive, despite the paint-stripping qualities of her voice.

Her assumption, however, of the roles of muse, praisesinger and amenuensis to young Bob Dylan was a low-water mark, those duets ghastly, even forty years on searingly inappropriate and her awful humiliation at his hands in the film Don't Look Back charts the darker waters of genius.

She has mollified her performances these days although they remain larded with references to the glory days of her Queenship with King Bob and yet, in Birmingham's Symphony Hall, in the late 'nineties, I saw her give a fabulous, if regal concert, commanding our applause for the presence of her doddery mother, whilst delivering extremely polished versions of her greatest hits and, semingly de rigeur,her greatest peace rants.

I think everything she did, everything for which she is famous, rather, is over-sung, her plunking arpeggios on that wee Martin pedestrian and unimaginative. But today she'll be in Barcelona or Sidney and people will be Miss Ba-ezing her, applauding her every warble whilst here,mr mongoose, I sit, so patiently, waiting to find out what price you have to pay to get out of going through all these things twice.

16 February 2010 at 12:58
mongoose said...

Don't Look Back I have not seen for a year or ten, though it was on recently, I seem to recall. I think that I saw ten minutes but I can't be arsed with all of that clever but pointed shit. Stephen Fry in cowboy boots and silly sunglasses. Let's not, Bob, you don't want to disappoint anybody. But then that was the point, mr mongoose, you eegit.

It seems to me that we have different ears for that end of the ladies' range, Mr Ishmael. And I have always tended towards the spare and uncluttered rather than the polished and produced. Not exclusively so but the bias exists. Some of Saint Sandy's early stuff is ragged and shouty but no less beautiful for that. Can't think of the name of a track but I may by the end of the paragraph. Let us hope so. Prevaricating. Still. There must be some way out of here.

It was all so early and so there is none on Youtube but you will find some good stuff on "The Original Sandy Denny". This is the wonderful, folky stuff she did before the suits got to her and made her wear a necktie and a Panama hat.

And then there is Saint June Tabor of whom we have talked before. Frankly, she is almost an aberration on my part. Doesn't fit really but a fantastic singist of the old school. And as an example of the naive end of the production continuum, we have this. Which may not be to your taste but deep in your heart you know you can't escape.

16 February 2010 at 14:13
call me ishmael said...

All those people that you mention, mr mongoose, yes, I know them....

I like Tabor best of all with Martin Simpson and Prior with the Carnival Band and I think their nearest US equivalents, equally patchy and idiosyncratic are Kate and Anna McGarrigle, but mainly Kate, grande dame, now, and mother of the upstart, Rufus Wainwright.

That's a nice vid, Agincourt Carol, not long ago I sick-read Bernard Cornwell's Azincourt; frogs for dinner; a great read, as we say.

16 February 2010 at 15:03
woman on a raft said...

Goats are not as simple as they are cracked up to be.

That's true, that is. They come over all bleaty and affectionate but one of them ate my Dad's transistor radio, taking a chunk out of its real mock leatherette carry case.

Looking back, I can't see why we took a new solid-state transistor radio to the petting section of the London Zoo, or to the zoo at all. As a child, I didn't think to question it, regardless of the fact that you couldn't hear it outdoors in all the hubbub.

I still don't know why Dad bothered with a radio. He didn't like them, couldn't tell you what was on, and we spent half our lives trying to point it in the right direction just so he could shout "What, what'd he say?"

Eventually he got a plug-in aerial for it which slotted over the passenger window of his van. Thus Mum could have the radio on her lap and reception then relied on which way the car, and hence the aerial, was pointing.

Unfortunately we came over travel sick on the way to the Isle of Wight and Mum wound down the window to get some emergency air in to the back of the van where we were stashed securely among the suitcases and fishing rods, like goods on the Berlin air lift.

Inevitably the aerial was pushed up and off the glass, vanishing in to the birch forests along the A3. It was damn lucky she hung on to the tranny or that would have been out the window like a fish on a line, jerked straight out of a pond.

It didn't affect the reception much - it remained sporadic - but she had to go back to twizzling the radio and menacing Dad with the telescopic aerial. She had taped up the goat-munches with left-over carpet tape, having lined the front of the van with left-over carpet. With the radio on and a cup of real instant Nescafe from the thermos, the van was like a tiny mobile front room. Travelling in the equivalent of the cupboard under the stairs was OK if you wriggled in to a nitch and dozed off, although I was relieved when the firm upgraded him to a 'shooting brake' and we could see out of the windows. I always looked to see if there was a glint of feral aerial somewhere in the trees.

The only other van I liked as much had a light-up Michelin Man on the roof but Mum took against that as she said it was eccentric and would show us up.

16 February 2010 at 22:44
mongoose said...

Fantastic stuff, Mrs WOAR. I may never stop laughing.

Maddy, Mr Ishmael, is wonderful. I love this. It is the voice not the music I begin to think.

17 February 2010 at 01:29

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