Tampa Calling

Bob Dylan
Together Through Life

Despite leaning heavily on the signature instrument for the bratwurst-and-polka crowd, Bob Dylan’s new album, Together Through Life, manages to wring rhythm and soul from an overgrown squeezebox.

David Hidalgo of Los Lobos plays accordion on each of the album’s 10 tracks and much of the backing band’s beat reminds us of the best work by Hidalgo’s group. Hidalgo adds great Flaco Jiminez touches to Dylan’s new songs, and at times Together Through Life sounds as if we’ve wandered into a Ry Cooder album.

But it’s Bob Dylan, of course. That blown-speaker growl of his is unmistakable, and although this is an album of purported love songs — what else would the title Together Through Life suggest? — nothing is ever so simple or straightforward in Dylan’s world. And, for that matter, when was the last time he wrote a conventional love song?

Case in point: “My Wife’s Home Town.” A stock-in-trade tuneslinger from Tin Pan Alley might come up with a rhapsodic reverie about visiting the place where his beloved grew up. But not Dylan. The refrain on this tune is “Hell is my wife’s home town.” And then . . . and then . . . a couple of times during the song, Bob . . .  cackles.  In his 47-year recording career, has he ever cackled before?

In short, Bob’s having fun here.

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Here’s a few shots from the Mile High Music Festival in Denver, including a wind-exposed Colbie Caillat and Michael Franti of Spearhead:

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— Nicole McKeen

Libation report: Lots of water, one beer. I’m proud of my self-control.

Today is our seventh anniversary and we are spending it at a rock festival. A fine meal and trinkets – we can do that shit anytime. But how often does something like this happen? And so for our anniversary meal, I bought my bride a Philly cheesesteak — a cheesesteak, I might add, prepared by a University of Florida graduate and served by a Florida State alum (the cook’s wife).

Today, the professor has gone to school. I teach rock’n’roll history at the University of Florida and often the students burn CD’s for me of their favorite bands. I listen and often like what I hear, but with that magnificent medium of radio in decline, I get easily depressed about ways to find new music.

Yesterday was dominated by Tom Petty and Steve Winwood. Today’s sets are by a number of younger artists, some of whom have already been around a fairly long time (Dave Matthews, near geriatric status), but a lot of these people are new, even to the college crowd that dominates this festival.

Let me tell you – some of these artists make this geezer very happy:

• Ingrid Michaelson: A wonderful, engaging young singer with a great sense of melody. Nicole turned me on to her song, “The Way I Am,” a sublime piece of music. Wonderful stage presence.
• Martin Sexton: Somewhat traditional blues, but with a softer edge. Great performance.
• Rose Hill Drive: Great hard rock. For the first time in my five decades on earth, I’m thinking about becoming a headbanger.
• Flogging Molly: Any rock act that uses Celtic themes gets to the Irish in me. Hairs on the back of my neck would have stood up but for a recent prison-camp cut.
• Rodrigo Y Gabriela: All the Latin rhythms of Santana, but none of the mysticism. Listen and decide if that’s a good or a bad thing. I say good, though I still love Carlos.
• Colbie Caillat: I’ve lived with her music for a year, thanks to Nicole. Is it so wrong to produce pleasant, melodic music? The wind has been blowing over potted plants and trash cans, so Colbie’s short-dress choice was somewhat controversial. But her song choices — including a an effervescent cover of the Jackson Five’s “I Want You Back” — were on point.

What I’ve heard today is melody. So much of the recent music I’ve heard is ponderous and dull. Today I heard a lot of joy again, and it reminds me why I like this stuff in the first place.

— William McKeen

Libation report: I stopped hours ago, like a good citizen. However, the couple next to me produced an astonishing and pungent aroma and perhaps I am feeling its effects.

Young Wilson is a local rock journalist who appears to be 14 but has been out of college for two years already. Kid, I got socks older than you.

We ran into him in the parking lot and he has been our entertaining, helpful (two words: beer runs) and energetic Sancho Panza for the day. At the end of the evening, he and I end up side-by-side on a hillside as Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers take the stage.

No doubt Wilson — connected young music junkie that he is — can quote chapter and verse on so many of the bands here that I can even pretend to have heard of. But now, he’s ready for what he readily admits is the highlight of his day: a rock star even older than this dude standing next to him — me, of course.

The band opens with “You Wreck Me.” Wilson responds with whoops and claps, then turns to me and says, “Is this a new song? I don’t know it.”

You have much to learn, Grasshopper.

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My father used to have office stationery that struck his colleagues and patients as kind of odd. But, speaking as one of his kids, we dug it.

It had a picture of a little man, sitting in a box, looking out at the world, saying, “People are no damn good.” Say what you will about the sentiment. What I remember is that little man looking out at the world. “Who is that?” I asked my dad once. “He’s the Peoplewatcher,” he said. “And he’s watching you.”

Watching people has always been one of my favorite pastimes. What greater place to watch people than a rock festival?

Events like this make me want to sink to my knees and thank God that I am not 20 years old. I embrace my 53-ness.

There are two wonderful things about aging.:

No. 1: You know when to say when. Getting drunk and throwing up loses its appeal some time in your thirties. Trust me on this.

The No. 2:  You reach that certain age when you just don’t give a fuck. You don’t wear trendy clothes, listen to the band du jour or follow the lemming-like political path that leads, ultimately, to intercourse. (And isn’t that why we do so much of what we do?)

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Greetings from the land of the incredibly healthy. For a metabolically challenged son of the South, it’s hard to stroll the grounds of the Mile High Music Festival and not feel inadequate as a human being. It’s also hard not to feel old.

I’ve been writing about music for 40 years and doing the backstage-pass thing for nearly as long.  For the last decade, I’ve gone to shows every-other-year-or-so, so I suppose I’m in concert-going retirement.

So this huge Denver festival is a hell of a coming-out party for me. Forty-seven bands in two days over five stages – it’s a little overwhelming. I remember the quaint old days of the early 1970s when I finagled backstage press passes and stalked  the likes of Jefferson Airplane, the Byrds, Poco and B.B. King. Once you had the backstage pass, you were golden. I remember standing outside the portable biffy to pee once and chatting with Ritchie Furay of Poco. I let him cut in line because he had to do his opening song and I was just the pimpled teen-age rock-journalist-wannabe with the back pack.

The Mile-High Music Festival covers more acreage than many college campuses. And it looks a lot like a college campus. In my day job, I’m a college professor, so the clientele of this festival looks familiar. But as I say, it’s Colorado and you don’t see many people of my controversial girth. These are some supercilious sprout-eating motherfuckers. We drove in from Aspen today, doing most of the trip in low gear, cranking the rental up the mountains. And right along side us were some smug-bastard cyclists, reaching back for their third wind as they pumped it into Loveland Pass. They looked at us in the Taurus as if we were dried spots of gruel on a filthy kitchen floor.

Taking a stroll through the festival grounds, the closest thing I see to something like me is a tanned pot-bellied man with pouty, pierced nipples. (Full disclosure: I have no piercings, but the weekend is young.) The fans are all horribly young. I haven’t seen anyone else yet — except for an occasional festival vendor or security guard — who I would call a fellow geezer. These people are uniformly young, and can be divided into two groups: the clothed and the nearly clothed — tight bellies, abundant cleavage, droopy pants with protruding boxers. I’m 53, but I feel 80 years old today. My wife is 32, but I’m wondering if even she is beginning to smell the first whiffs of a generation gap.

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My husband, Bill, and I are in Colorado to promote the hell out of his latest book, Outlaw Journalist: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson. The book tour coincides with our seventh anniversary and the inaugural Mile High Music Festival. So after seven years of marriage, four kids, four horses, five chickens, a rabbit and a dog, a week away is heaven. But, another romantic dinner to celebrate the nuptials? Really? We can do better. So, I got crafty.

We’re both journalists. He is a rock’n’roll historian, a know-it-all (like really annoyingly knows-it-all but has honed a very endearing way of being the smartest guy in the room). So we should cover the music festival, right? The festival is a bevy of music awesomeness. Amazing bands. Bands I’ve known: Dave Matthews Band, Tom Petty, John Mayer, the Black Crowes . . . musical institutions for America’s nearly 40-somethings. But what really intrigued me is the indie throwback bands. The same artists’ voices that have been pumping through my interns’ office iMac for the past three months — admittedly, music I have become addicted too; Brett Dennen, Ingrid Michaelson, the Flobots, Colbie Caillat, and of course Dave Matthews,whose voice is like a turbo-charged aphrodisiac (more on that later).

But the fun will be his take versus mine. He’s 53 and I am 32. He’s a traditionalistwho courted me with love-CD soundtracks featuring Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, James Taylor,  Dennis Wilson, Otis Redding, Rick Nelson, Dan Penn, Joe Cocker . . .  you get the idea.

So this musical buffet in Denver should provide an eclectic view from a rock ’n’ roll historian and his wife.

To get  prepped for the gig I interviewed the experts: my staff at The Florida Engineer (the magazine for the University of Florida College of Engineering). They prepped me. Marilee, my rabbit of a writer; Holly, the associate editor, and John, the quirky designer. Marilee made me a CD of “cool” bands she thought I’d dig. John was just slightly — no, totally — jealous. And Holly, knowing my incessant pursuit of corporate-cool fashion, suggested I get hip before covering the festival.

“Yeah,” I said. “Hey, how about those really short funky bangs? Can I pull it off?”

“Suicide bangs?” she said. “Yeah, that’ll do it.”

So sitting at my desk with Photobooth open (for non Mac users, just Google it) so I could see myself, Holly took the office scissors and gave me some kick-ass-hip-styling suicide bangs. We’ll see if the bangs achieve in masking the mother-of-four skin covering my wild child inside.

— Nicole McKeen