Pirate Radio: Not nearly enough ‘yo-ho-ho,’ or ‘gabba-gabba-hey’

At the conclusion of the new British movie, Pirate Radio, a bit of text appears on the screen that informs you of what a splendid four decades rock & roll has enjoyed, since 1966. Proof of the contention is provided in the form of quick glimpses of 40 years worth of LP and CD covers, from Sergeant Pepper to Jay-Z. The images of album-cover art keep piling up, until there are too many of them, and each becomes indistinct and cog-like: small bits of a collage, not individually discernible.

If this was the message the filmmaker was trying to impart — that the soul of rock & roll was obscured somewhere along the runaway assembly line — Pirate Radio might have been taken as a subversive commentary on a society obsessed with leisure and amusements. That’s not the message.

Once, when entertainment was something you needed to seek out, you’d pay a dime — previously a nickel, later a quarter — to listen to your favorite pop music tune through a juke box. If you got to hear your favorite song for free, on the radio, which might happen no more than five or six times each day, it was a two-minute interval of pure pleasure. Actually owning a record was a rare luxury. They were sold in limited quantities in tiny nooks of Woolworth’s, and in the back of some neighborhood drug stores, where children were discouraged from congregating.

Go, cat, go: Bill Haley's Comets rocking around the clock

That was the tail-end of the era depicted in Pirate Radio, which attempts to tell the story of the how the emergent teenage music overcame the rabid opposition of corporatist squares, an inevitable victory attained because joy is much better than gloom. Hundreds of screenplays have previously worked this theme, from “Rock Around the Clock” in 1956, past the “T.A.M.I. Show” of 1964, to the best of the genre, “American Hot Wax,” the 1978 biopic of DJ Alan Freed (which features a brief role for the unpleasant upstart comedian Jay Leno.)

It looked as though Pirate Radio had the potential to surpass the lot, with the advantages of a skilled writer-director, Richard Curtis, a decent budget, an engaging cast, and an under-worked subject in the short, happy life of unlicensed offshore broadcasters, who for a short while beamed their signals from the North Atlantic into Swinging London.

The movie works best when Curtis is left to do his miniaturist thing, and there are a couple of small, understated scenes that are at least as good as his earlier work in “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and the “Vicar of Dibley” TV series.

In one moment representative of the best of British cinema, a disconsolate newlywed DJ, just cuckolded on his wedding night by a colleague, takes silent solace from sitting on a coach with two chums, wordlessly dipping his bourbon-cream biscuit in a mate’s mug of tea. In another standout segment, a shy, middle-aged DJ, inarticulate and socially dysfunctional when not introducing records, can’t think of a single thing to say after meeting the son he abandoned at birth. The son becomes equally mute and panic-stricken — and an audience’s impulse is to look away from something so realistically intimate and touching.

Director Curtis: too much music, man

The film’s problem is that there aren’t enough of these inspired quiet moments of character study. Unexpectedly, in a rock & roll movie, there’s far too much rock & roll, and most of it is the wrong sort entirely. The historical pirate radio stations, such as Radio Caroline and Radio London, filled a need by broadcasting hit parade music interspersed with rapid-fire chatter from American-influenced DJs. The repertoire of Number One hits in the UK in 1966, spun from 45 RPM platters, included essential rock classics such as The Spencer Davis Group’s Keep On Running, The Walker Brothers’ The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore, and Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames’ Get Away — none of which is heard in the movie soundtrack. (But you lot can listen to them at Mog.com, by clicking the preceding links.)

The ‘66 British chart-toppers also included a fair bit of what we would now call unlistenable schlock: Tom Jones’ maudlin “Green Grass Of Home,” Frank Sinatra’s cloying “Strangers In The Night,” and Gentleman Jim Reeves’ just-plain-awful “Distant Drums.” Incredibly, those three chestnuts held the Number One position for a combined 15 weeks.

Recognizing that no contemporary CD soundtrack-buyer is going to pay for such schmaltz, even if it was what Pirate Radio listeners were accustomed to back in the day, the filmmakers elected to pull the old switcheroo, substituting how it should have been, for how it was. And so, director Curtis (who would have been sipping his Ribena as a seven-year-old when Radio Caroline was in its heyday) contrives to depict a Top 40 station as featuring an Album Rock format, when they are two entirely different beasts.

This blatant misrepresentation is further confounded by having his DJs play tunes that wouldn’t be recorded for another 12 months or more after ‘66, such as Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale,” John Fred & the Playboy Band’s “Judy in Disguise (With Glasses),” and Leonard Cohen’s “So Long Marianne.” While it’s true enough that Noel Harrison had a minor hit with Cohen’s “Suzanne” in 1968, it’s absurd to think that any Top 40 radio station might ever have subjected its listeners to Lenny’s idiosyncratic moaning.

Do we split hairs? I think not. Evidently the budget of Pirate Radio exceeded $50 million, owing to the director’s penchant for recreating period details with painstaking accuracy. To spend a fortune trying to accurately depict obscure gauges, meters, and broadcasting instruments, and then take an inauthentic approach to the music selection, is to reveal the director’s priorities. No Beatles. No Lovin’ Spoonful. However, there are two tunes by the Turtles, including “Eleanor,” which the pirate DJs seem to have been prescient enough to play two years before it was even written. (Top that trick if you can, Jimmy Savile.)

Sir Jimmy: Gifted, but not clairvoyant

Not that you’d blame poor Curtis for being disinterested in the music. Who wouldn’t be? When you’ve spent your entire life submerged in the Baby Boomer rhythm, as we all have, it’s hard to imagine that it ever might have been fresh, interesting, or anything you’d ever go to effort of tuning in. Rock & roll is just too readily available a commodity to command any attention these days.

There’s a bit of dialogue in an earlier rock movie, the Monkees’ 1968 release, “Head,” where one of the bad guys taunts our heroes, regarding their obsession with the usual caprices such as sex, drugs and rock & roll: “Be careful of what you wish for, fellows. One day you just might get it.”

I would say that adage applies to a force-fed diet of endlessly recycled tunes, most particularly when they are so obviously being used to accompany someone’s desperate attempt to sell you something. The makers of Pirate Radio want to sell you a glimpse of how much fun  broadcasting used to be, but you’ll find it more satisfying to stay home and catch a re-run of WKRP in Cincinnati.

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• 11/22/09: Anyone with any degree of interest in the real pirate radio should visit http://radiolondon.co.uk/, a comprehensive, addictive site run for more than 10 years by Chris and Mary Payne.

There’s no business like show business, except maybe the business of misery

Apparently a singer just died, there was a big memorial event in L.A., and it’s all over the news.

While we’re dispatching entertainers to play to capacity audiences in the Biggest Room of All, it behooves us to bid adieu, too, to Vancouver’s Serf-of-Pop, Terry Black.

Very Terry: The Japanese pressing

Mr. Black seemed to have the chops, but he couldn’t catch the breaks.  The parallels with this other dead entertainer, one Michael Jackson, are minimal, except that back in the 1960s, they were both tapped to become the next big thing in teenage music. One rose; one fell.

Mr. Black came out of British Columbia with a hit record, and moved to Hollywood, where there was talk of putting him in the next Elvis movie, as Presley’s brother. It never panned out. Mr. Jackson emerged from Gary, Indiana — a less-likely point of origin than B.C., if such is possible — with four of his brothers and a hit record, and moved to Hollywood, where he married Elvis’s daughter. That didn’t completely work out, either.

Mr. Black’s record revolved at 45 rpms, precisely the same rotation rate as Mr. Jackson’s hit singles, and both recording artist’s recordings had big holes in the middle, where you placed an adapter before putting the record on a spindle. Mr. Black’s “Unless You Care” was played frequently on Canadian radio stations for decades, at least in part because the law required broadcasters to play music by Canadians. He sang the peppy lead vocal on “Try a Little Harder,” a memorable 1972 track by the Toronto band Dr. Music, and warbled on the soundtrack of Ivan Reitman’s 1979 motion picture “Meatballs” (listen here.) When he died last week, he’d been working as a disc jockey in Kelowna, a small city in B.C. populated by retirees.

It has not been a good week for Canadian disc jockeys and other entertainment industry figures.

Two more sorry specimens are the theatrical impresarios, and just-convicted fraudsters, Garth Drabinsky and Myron Gottlieb.

The Livent Lads, on the move

If you followed their courtroom occurrences, the former principals of Livent could tend to get a little fuzzy regarding certain details of their business dealings. They are crystal-clear on one point, however: They don’t want to go to jail.

This is understandable. After all, Drab has at least one close friend named Black — not Terry Black — who is serving time right now in a Florida slammer, and most likely there isn’t much good to say about the experience.

Drab and his locked-up pal (you know the name; he writes books) share another friend, who is the lawyer, Eddie Greenspan. Ed defended them both — unsuccessfully, as it turns out. Having not achieved his desired outcome, which would be his clients absolved of all charges, and left to clink champagne flutes with their attorney while they all cackle like hyenas, Eddie has seized the opportunity to fabricate lemonade from lemons.

Don’t send my boy to jail for 10 years, judge, your worship, he has suggested to Madam Justice Mary Lou Benotto; please, please don’t put this good man behind bars.

Ed’s offering up a whale of an alternative concept. Why not just let Drab and Myron, those luverly Livent Lads, put on a show?

Ed says the boys are prepared to set off on a cross-country lecture tour, if it means they can bypass a cell in the stony lonesome. Drab and Myron will star in “Community Service: Tonight!”, with performances at universities, community colleges, and technical institutes from coast-to-coast. Drumming up interest in the idea, Ed says Drab “would teach students the discipline of the craft, the enormous role that integrity and honesty play in the theatre, the importance of fulfilling contractual responsibilities [and] the avoidance of unethical conduct.” Throw in some recycled Gallagher-and-Sheen patter, along with a good set of PowerPoint slides, and you just might have box office magic.

The inspiration for Fast Eddie's lecture series?

The fellow who wants to put the producers behind bars, Crown Attorney Alex Hrybinsky, seems to think Ed-the-lawyer’s follies will bomb in New Haven. Yes, there are precedents for the type of staged entertainment Ed envisions, but they have never been imposed as a legal remedy in a criminal case. The lawyer seems to have been inspired by the exhibits of human curiosities and oddities described by author Gregory Gibson in his recent book “Hubert’s Freaks,” which is about the long-running Times Square peep-show of the same name. If what Ed has in mind is to place his clients into some kind of travelling carnival, where onlookers can gawk, and the attractions can make a bit of money answering yokels’ questions and selling souvenir postcards, that constitutes a macabre revenge-scenario worthy of fellow-showman Tod Browning.

On with the Drab 'n' Myron Show: A Tod Browning revenge fantasy?

Our layman’s prediction: The Drab ‘n’ Myron Road Show will never happen. Ed’s courtroom string of bad luck appears to be not yet over, and as much as the impresarios must long for the roar of the greasepaint and the smell of the crowd, this final act has Bialystock & Bloom written all over it, if you happen to recall the ending of Mel Brooks’ “The Producers.”

Plaudits to the other legal Greenspan sibling, Brian, who is representing Myron. Brian has come up with a wonderful reason why Myron shouldn’t have to go directly to jail: It seems the former Livent CFO is really kind of reluctant to mingle, and doesn’t get all out much. According to Brian, that’s equivalent to being under house arrest, and should be calculated as time served. Madam Justice Benotto must be stroking her chin over that one, in a stagy form of contemplation, or else doing a slow-burn pantomime, as perfected by the late actor Edgar Kennedy.

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What is more tragic than a pair of impresarios who may find themselves incapable of producing a theatrical extravaganza, for the next eight-to-10 years? How about a broadcaster whose mike has been abruptly shut off, following a 25-year career serving one media outlet? Martin Streek, a D.J. with radio station CFNY-FM in Toronto, reportedly parted ways with his employer in May. He committed suicide this week, reports say.

Mr. Streek entered the radio business out of high school, right around the time stations were switching to an automated voice-tracked format. All the talk, in the 1980s, was that the day of the disc jockey was through. Indeed, when the early-’90s recession hit, the entire medium of commercial radio was considered to be in jeopardy, with some licensees walking away from their equity, unable to pay their whopping power bills through advertising revenues. In other words, it was very much like the situation that daily newspapers find themselves in today.

The role of the disc jockey endured, nonetheless, and it’s said Mr. Streek was crackerjack at his work, and a decent bloke, to boot. Especially disturbing is the news that he left a suicide note on his Facebook page. There are already web sites that make light of celebrity deaths, and the popularity of so-called social networking sites can’t be disputed. I fear that the posting of suicide notes to the Internet may already be a trend, and that some web entrepreneur not unlike Rupert Murdoch will quickly move in to exploit this as a niche opportunity. The round-the-clock coverage of Mr. Jackson’s death leaves little room for doubt that there is any human misery either too large or too small for someone to avoid capitalizing upon.

Dylan v. Elvis? Stop the fight, referee. It’s no contest

Theatre of the imagination. That phrase sums up the reason why Bob Dylan’s weekly show works so well on radio, and why Elvis Costello’s new program is such a dreary flop on TV. (Those unfamiliar with the Dylan audio extravaganza can check out a pirated MP3 version here, providing they have no scruples concerning intellectual property protection.)

Without pictures, the listener is left to imagine Dyl, sitting in a darkened broadcasting studio, illuminated only by a scattering of red and green LEDs, wearing Ray-Bans, in front of a pair of well-used turntables, puffing Old Golds and chuckling to himself while he spins 45s and 78s from his own collection.

A bad habit, and not to mention, one that could stunt your growth

We know that’s not at all how his Theme Time Radio Hour comes together on XM Radio, and that it’s more a matter of ISDN lines and digitized voice-tracks. Well, of course we know that. But the point is that we can’t actually see old Bob in reality, being handed his script by a flunky and then straightening his reading specs and patting down his toupee, and muffing one line after another, sputtering while he tries to pronounce Hawkshaw Hawkins. So we visualize him the way he should be: as a reincarnated Al “Jazzbeaux” Collins, sharing intimate knowledge and magical tunes with a secret fraternity of those wide-awake at four in the morning in the Bay Area and beyond. Or as a latter-day Herb Jepko, a bemused, calming presence in the middle of the Salt Lake City night, as in the days when Herb would offer solace to brother and sister Nightcaps in 38 states and Canada. Dyl deserves to be mentioned in the same paragraph as those radio legends. He’s that fine a disc jockey, no less impressive for having all the while maintained and sharpened his songwriting and performing talents. And, yes, you’re listening to a fan talking.

Herb, now as always, on the night shift

I’m also an admirer of Mr. Costello’s music and lyrics, but his new chat-show offering on the cable network Bravo is — let me put this delicately — not good. Part of the problem is that Elvis has placed himself on visual display, and you kind of wish he hadn’t. A decade younger than Dylan, Elvis is missing the ironic fashion sense of the man from Hibbing, but, sadly, that doesn’t stop him from experimenting. He covers his bloat and pudge with an Edwardian frock coat and tablecloth-sized cravat, and tilts his trademark porkpie hat at a rakish angle over his unshaved, swollen punim. The effect is more than a bit tragic. You have yesterday’s angry young man coming across like J. Wellington Wimpy, about to cadge a hamburger today, promising re-payment tomorrow. As the familiar saying goes, his is a face designed for radio.

The Elvis show, called “Spectacle,” is a reminder of those small-market syndicated gabfests of two generations back, hosted by third-tier TV curios such as Al Capp, and sceened on the uppermost part of the UHF dial. These programs, seen by the few in the small hours, attracted oddball guests who started out removed from the mainstream, and mostly stayed that way. On the other hand, here were venues where performers of the level of Sir Monti Rock III could show up and let their hair down.

Mr. Costello, sans spectacles

Mr. Costello’s stilted formality provides no such promise, in Norm Crosby’s words, that Everything Goes. He comes across like a man channelling David Frost, and not the acceptable version you saw in the Frost/Nixon movie. He’s the creepy Frost you remember the Westinghouse network distributing from the Little Theatre Off Times Square: an insecure, distracted Englishman in New York, fervently wishing he had somewhere else to be, and someone more interesting to talk to. (In Elvis’s case, he at least appears grateful that he has a studio to hang around, and that he doesn’t have to spend any additional time listening to his wife, Canada’s own Diana “Makes Your Skin” Krall, punish their children by murmuring show tunes to them.)

Elvis’s guests are either big-shot megastars who leave the impression that they’re humoring the host by appearing on his wee program, or non-entities who get the full-out Costello fawn. One such talent-free visitor recently was Bob Dylan’s kid, who made fifteen minutes seem like an all-day telethon. Jakob Dylan has supported himself in the business-of-show for a decade now, and seems to think of himself as a revered fixture on the entertainment scene. He told Elvis a pointless and petulant story about how his mother once threw out one of his articles of clothing without his permission. Okay, the vest was a gift from Joe Strummer of the Clash, but that still doesn’t elevate this thin gripe to a story worth re-telling. Yet, the interviewer, Mr. C., seemed captivated by Jakob’s yarn, in the fashion of Art Linkletter marvelling over how kids say the darnest things.

It must be pointed out to Elvis and his producer that, for certain, Bob Dylan wouldn’t dream of having his son as a guest on his own radio show. So, what is this? A feeble effort to butter up Papa, hoping Dyl will reciprocate by playing one of Ms. Krall’s cornball sides on Theme Time Radio Hour? Won’t happen, Jackson.

The promise of “Spectacle” is that it has nowhere to go from here, except further down — and that’s when things might get interesting. Elvis presiding over an old-timey Al Capp-style TV freak show sounds like a more promising concept than whatever it was they originally had in mind. When Sting and James Taylor refuse the invitation to drop back for second appearances, Elvis will turn to the C-list of bygone days. I, for one, would love to see, and not just hear, Elvis interview Sir Monti Rock III, and the Capp parade of put-on artists, along with the genuinely deranged, damaged, and deluded. Now, that would be something worth imagining.

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• Now meet one of the New Dylans who might be ready to stage a comeback, 40 years after her not-so-smash debut

For this no-hit musical wonder, the Golden age may be just beginning

Whole Lotti sound

The award-winning actor insisted on my listening to his copy of an obscure record called “Motorcycle Michael” by someone named Lotti Golden, because he loved the album, and because we were in his living room talking about motorcycles, and perhaps, too, because, in his self-absorption, he must have thought my name is Michael.

This kind of thing used to happen frequently enough, when someone was paying me to do that kind of work. Wealthy, famous, ego-driven specimens were keen to show you they were just like all the other bike-riding proletariat, except they could afford to indulge in their tastes for the esoteric and the elaborate: hence the garages filled with vintage two- and four-wheeled vehicles, right down to the fine old Rolls-Royce with its Saskatchewan plates. Hence, too, the basement that had been converted in its entirety, zoning bylaws be damned, to the neighborhood’s largest bird-cage, rafters filled with rare songbirds and homemade guano.

Spun once, the title track of the record, running at eight minutes and 14 seconds, never entirely worked its way out of my mind. Lotti Golden had some set of pipes, and someone at the record company, maybe Ahmet Ertegun hisself, had plainly told her to get out there and sing like Janis Joplin. That was a trick for which Lotti was suited, since she could match Janis squeal for squeal, growl for growl, and 20 million Big Brother fans will tell you that ain’t exactly nothing.

Let Lotti go loose on a scat-line, and you’d swear she had a big future in the music bid’ned. Yes, the song was no “Piece of My Heart,” and not much like Lorenz Hart, either, essentially conveying the repeated message that Michael “let me ride his motorcycle.” Nothing more to add to that, no word on whether it was red or black, street- or dirt-bike, a Royal Enfield Bullet or your Uncle Cyril’s Whizzer, no descriptives beyond another minute or two of Lotti’s high-quality grunting and yelping.

But this quizzical song has a way of making itself at home under your skin, in spite of, or because of, the producer having thrown everything listed in the Record Producer’s Sourcebook into this track. Mussel Shoals horns; Ninth Ward hand-claps; Motown choirs; Memphis chords; bass lines from Cosmo’s Garage: you got ’em all, starting, stopping, repeatedly banging into each other, and then struggling to separate and do it again. The only reason a Moog synthesizer had been left out was probably because Mr. Moog was tied up in the lab, still trying to bolt his contraption together.

Crewe you: Fifties guys lost in the sixties, Bob Crewe produced Bobby Darin, who would have bopped him on the nose for trying the production tricks he pulled on Lotti

That’s what they used to call acid-soul, or even East Coast psychedelic. If you say this is the most over-produced record in rock-n-roll annals, kitchen sinks being hurled back and forth to no apparent purpose, that might sum it up. The genius behind the mixing board was Bob Crewe, who produced “Walk Like a Man” for Frankie and the Four Seasons, and recorded, under his own name,  the Herb Alpert-like “Music to Watch Girls By.” To contextualize, it was a time when young Republicans were scoring acid in the country club parking lot, Frank Zappa was mentor to the Monkees, and even Pat Boone had signed up for a community college course in how to get hep. Crewe was an old pro in his thirties, and desperately trying to prove something to the Love Generation.

The very same forces at Atlantic Records who ruined the Lotti Golden sessions by trotting in another dozen horn players, and another, and tambourine-shakers by the bus-load, pretty much did the same thing to Laura Nyro, and others. I guess it was the fashion of the day, in art and letters, and pop music.

But the thing about rock-n-roll is that the most disposable tune will resonate on and on, on and on. Lotti Golden, letting it rip, hollers and hoots that Michael’s her daddy, Michael’s her baby, and you know without being told that this little lady’s got more than just misspent ants-in-her-pants, but possesses the goods, the rare commodity that we astute critics call “talent.”

Actor-fella wondered what I thought of the selection. I told him I liked it a bunch, and, parading my astuteness, observed that the chick sounded pretty wild. I asked him what else she had recorded, and he said nothing of which he was aware. He added that, owing to her patently unbridled intensity, it would not surprise him to learn that Lotti had done checked out. I tsked, and headed off for my IBM Executive typewriting machine, where I wrote a profile for the motorcycle magazine, leaving out any mention of the subject’s musical tastes. Our readers were more the Aerosmith type. The LG LP was 15 years old when I first heard it, and long out of print. I spent some time looking for a copy here and there, and gave it up as a wasted effort. I did eventually locate and purchase a copy of Lotti’s follow-up album, released on GRT Records, a label that had quickly gone out of business. Second time around, her music was more conventional and approachable, but lacked that initial compelling insistence of the previous release, an allure one might interpret as, “Hey, buy me a coffee; I just signed myself out of the nuthouse.” Robert Christgau, the Village Voice reviewer, thought the sophomore record was a big improvement. He wrote: “Golden’s egregious overstatement registers as a strength – her passion, even if affected, is intense enough to embarrass you.” If you know about Christgau, you’ll take that as an honest complement.

I was recently looking for some basketball scores on the Internet, and blundered across a reference to the actor’s daughter, who is now old enough to be working on her second or maybe third career, and is still regarded as an up-and-comer. She told an interviewer that when she was growing up deprived, her family possessed only two records: one by Frank Zappa (well, of course), and, she said with a flourish, “Motorcycle Michael by Lotti Golden.” Poor kid. I heard the tune only once, and it flash-fried my brain. It never occurred to me that the actor might be forcing his family to listen to the record again and again. Grown-up children, freeing their repressed memories, have tried to send their parents to jail – and for lesser misdeeds.

Because one thing always leads to another on the web, I followed a couple of links, and it emerges that there now exists an entire cargo cult formed around Lotti Golden.

From Chuck Shepherd, the syndicated newspaper columnist, we learn that Lotti was written up in a September 1969 issue of Look magazine, where she declared she wanted to be just like Bob Dylan. Shepherd disproves the actor’s earlier guess that Lotti had split the scene, at least in 1982, when she was busy producing an electro-funk band called Warp 9, which released two singles. She has knob-twiddled for others – hopefully having learned restraint from the negative example provided by Bob Crewe – and written new songs, none of which I’ve heard.

Others have taken the Lotti Revival movement further. One enthusiast, taking the bull by the horns, has converted her original vinyl release to MP3s, and posted them for downloading. We’re in a murky area here, if you care about intellectual property protection, and I hope you do. Is this copyright infringement? Is it ethical for the fan to have done this, or for me to identify the download site? Perhaps we can pursue that avenue at a more appropriate time, when we discuss Kensington Market’s out-of-print recording, “Avenue Road.”

And while traces of Lotti herself are scarce on the web, as you’d expect, there are strong hints that she is around, and may be planning a re-emergence. A web domain has been registered in her name, apparently by her sister, who lives in Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and seems to run a modelling agency. A radio station in Rhode Island has been playing Motorcycle Michael, and has tried to persuade her to appear on the air – without success to date. There is an e-mail address where messages may be sent.  A Google search also turns up the sad news that her father, “Sy” Golden, died on a New York City tennis court two years ago, at the age of 82. It sounds like he was a hell of a guy, and I offer my condolences.

So, yes, I downloaded the record, burned it on a disc, played it through the Bose speakers in my car this weekend. It sounded no less strange, and every bit as captivating, as when the actor was spinning the platter, and making the chatter, way back when. Atlantic Records never bothered to re-issue the album in CD release, which is astonishing when you consider all the dreck they’ve unloaded from the back catalog. Likewise, an official version on I-Tunes is a complete unknown, as Dyl would say. All the same, I’d like to think Lotti’s on her way to becoming an overnight success, 40 years in the making, thanks to the unusual persistence of her art, and the power of listeners’ preferences, unleashed by the Internet. I’m not sure I’ll ever need to hear her opus a third time, but I’d like to think she’ll turn up playing Hugh’s Room in Toronto, where I’d have the waitress send her over a pinot gris between sets, to keep the vocal folds lubricated. It’s all still a long way from happening, but don’t try to tell me this isn’t the age of miracles and wonders.

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• While some of the New Dylans struggle in the new century, the Old Dylan seems comfortable as Herb Jepko behind the golden microphone. See Mitch’s comments…