Robbie Robertson – "Robbie Robertson" (1987)

Are you out there?

Can you hear me?

Can you see me in the dark?

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Today’s 2 or 3 lines is quite different from the usual, run-of-the-mill 2 or 3 lines.  (Though now that I think about it, 2 or 3 lines is never really run-of-the-mill, is it?)

For one thing, there is no featured song.  This is the first of the 1800-odd posts that I’ve written since giving birth to 2 or 3 lines a little over 12 years ago that features an entire album – not an individual song.

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I usually introduce each post by quoting two or three lines from a song’s lyrics.  Today, I’m starting things off with one of the images from artist Kathryn Dunlevie’s Mistick Krewes series of photomontages.

That particular image is titled “Atchafalaya.”  Its caption consists of three lines from a song called “Fallen Angel,” which was released in 1987 on Robbie Robertson’s eponymous debut solo album.

I’ve strewn several other images from the Mistick Krewes series throughout this post, which will also feature Kathryn’s thoughts on New Orleans and the Robbie Robertson album.  

“Hurricane”

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You may remember that in the fall of 2020, 2 or 3 lines was graced with a guest post written by Kathryn Dunlevie, a college classmate of mine who has been creating what has been described as “wildly imaginative” mixed-media art for many years.

That post featured “Girlfriend Is Better” by the Talking Heads – a song that Kathryn saw the group perform live on their legendary “Stop Making Sense” tour in 1983.

“Avoyelles”

The post also featured a dozen images from the 2020 series of collages that Kathryn titled Women of Wonder.

About a year later, I started pestering Kathryn to do another guest post.  She delivered a draft several months ago, but it took me a lot longer than it should have to format it and get it up on 2 or 3 lines.

But as good ol’ Geoffrey Chaucer once said, “Better than never is late.”  (Today we would say “Better late than never,” of course.)

“Bayou Teche”

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New Orleans is a hot mess – it’s the most exotic and decadent place that an American can visit without a passport.

Kathryn never lived there, but she has many family members and friends with close ties to New Orleans: 

One of my best friends grew up in New Orleans, my best friend from high school has lived there since she finished college, the mother of my first goddaughter grew up there, my dad’s second wife was a New Yorker who spent her childhood summers there with her aunt, one of my brother’s best friends grew up there, and one of my daughters went to Tulane – as did the godmother of my other daughter.  

“Charybdis”

New Orleans – a/k/a/ “The Paris of the South,” “The City That Care Forgot,” and “The Big Easy” – inspired Kathryn to create the series of photomontages she named Mistick Krewes after the social organizations that orchestrate and participate in that city’s famous Mardi Gras celebrations.

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Several years after the Band broke up, Robbie Robertson – who had written the groups’s most famous songs (including “Chest Fever,” “The Weight,” and “The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down”) – released his first solo album.

“Goose Girl”

Kathryn immersed herself in the music from that album – which was titled simply Robbie Robertson – while she created the Mistick Krewes series of images:

I’m not sure when I first heard music from Robbie Robertson’s debut solo album, or how I came to own the CD, but as the images in my new series began to take shape, I knew I had to have that music playing in my studio as I worked.

Listening to it over and over got me, and kept me, in the mood to imagine a cast of characters who would have felt at home in the Crescent City. 

Robertson’s poetic lyrics, fervent music and haunting vocals transported me to New Orleans and guided me through its different eras and its many dimensions.

“The Rebirth of Venus”

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In the next 2 or 3 lines, Kathryn Dunlevie will tell us more about the history of the Mardi Gras krewes, and how the Mistick Krewes images are intended to evoke Mardi Gras traditions and create scenarios that “compel even as they mislead.”  

The remaining Mystick Krewes photomontages  will be strewn throughout that post.

“Spy Boy”

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Click here to watch the official music video for Robbie Robertson’s “Somewhere Down the Crazy River,” which was directed by none other than Martin Scorsese.  (Robertson had previously helped to create the musical scores for three of Scorsese’s movies – Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, and The Color of Money.)

Click below to buy the Robbie Robertson album from Amazon:

(All the photographs of Kathryn Dunlevie’s art that are included in this post are © 2016-2020 by the artist.  All rights reserved.)

Robbie Robertson – "Robbie Robertson" (1987)

 

I'm a man with a clear destination

I'm a man with a broad imagination

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In the last 2 or 3 lines, we learned that the artist Kathryn Dunlevie immersed herself in the solo music of Robbie Robertson – who is best-known as the lead guitarist and primary songwriter of the Band – while working on her Mistick Krewes series of photomontages.  (If you missed that post, it's just below this one – just scroll down until you see it.)

Like that previous post, this one starts off with one of the Mistick Krewes images.  That particular image is titled “Rag Man.”  Its caption consists of three lines from a song called “Somewhere Down the Crazy River,” which was released in 1987 on Robbie Robertson’s eponymous debut solo album.

I’ve strewn other images from the Mistick Krewes series throughout this post.

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“Erato”

Kathryn explained to me that the title of the Mistick Krewes series was inspired by New Orleans and the social clubs – known as “krewes” – who create a Mardi Gras parade float, host a Mardi Gras ball, or otherwise participate in Mardi Gras celebrations:  

In New Orleans in 1857 a newly formed secret society, the Mistick Krewe of Comus, began the tradition of celebrating Mardi Gras with a torch-lit procession of extravagant floats.  My Mistick Krewes series is an homage to the rich jumble of that city’s overlapping heritages and the still perceptible aura of its tempestuous history.  

“Bayou Lafourche”

Since its founding in 1718, New Orleans’ cultural, political and natural landscapes have been continually invaded and eroded, bought and sold, enriched and transformed.  A visitor to New Orleans today might pass through districts, buildings and gardens that exhibit the intertwining of centuries of Native American, Spanish, French, African and American influences.  City streets are named for Greek muses, native tribes and 18th-century French nobility.  Surrounding swamplands are swallowed by encroaching gulf waters.  The atmosphere is charged with an air of mystery, a strange sense of desire, and a whiff of something hazily remembered, beckoning from just around the next corner.  It is a place where history is revered, and where it can sometimes be “mistickally” re-experienced.

 

“Tchoupitoulas”

In these works I am combining my photographs with imagery from popular as well as archival sources.  Adding layer upon layer, revisiting each composition again and again, I am working toward scenarios that compel even as they may mislead.  Interweaving elements from nature, history and contemporary life conjures up landscapes populated with plants, wildlife, and otherworldly beings, evoking lost times and the Mardi Gras traditions that celebrate them.

“Terpischore”

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Robbie Robertson and the other musicians who would eventually become the Band got their start in 1958 playing behind Ronnie Hawkins, a rockabilly singer who was a native of Arkansas.  Later they backed up Bob Dylan.

Despite the fact that all the Band’s members save one were Canadian, their music has always sounded more Southern than anything else.  

“Calliope”

One critic described their first album, Music from Big Pink, as “country soul.”  Others noted elements of folk, rock, jazz, and R&B.

The Band’s rootsy, eclectic style is a perfect fit for the cultural melting pot that is New Orleans.  Not surprisingly, Robertson – like Kathryn Dunlevie – feels a deep affinity for the Crescent City.

“New Orleans has always felt like a second home to me musically and spiritually,” he once said. 

“Calcasieu”

A few years after completing work on the Robbie Robertson album, Robertson traveled to New Orleans to collaborate with Aaron and Ivan Neville on the 1991 album, Storyville – which got its title from the New Orleans neighborhood that was once the city’s red-light district.  

Many of Storyville’s brothels employed musicians – Joe “King” Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, and Louis Armstrong were among them – to entertain their patrons.  

“Pontalba”

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Click here to listen to “Testimony,” the final track on the Robbie Robertson album.

Testimony is also the title of Robertson’s 2016 autobiography, which the New York Times described as “[c]onfident and well oiled, [with] the mythic sweep of an early Terrence Malick movie.”  (If you’re familiar with Terrence Malick’s first two movies, Badlands and Days of Heaven, you know that’s high praise indeed.) 

Click below to buy Testimony from Amazon:

(All the photographs of Kathryn Dunlevie’s art that are included in this post are © 2016-2020 by the artist.  All rights reserved.)

The Band – "Chest Fever" (1968)

“She’s stoned,” said the Swede

And the moon calf agreed

“Chest Fever” is a hot mess – but hot messes are not unwelcome in the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME.

The track opens with a dramatic organ solo – which is said to have been inspired by Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor – performed by Garth Hudson.  (Unlike the vast majority of rock and jazz organists, Hudson eschewed the Hammond B-3.  He preferred a Lowery organ.) 

Garth Hudson and his Lowery organ

Robbie Robertson gets the songwriting credit for “Chest Fever,” but I’m not sure that it’s really accurate to say that the song’s lyrics were “written.”

Robertson says that the lyrics were improvised in the recording studio because lead singer Richard Manual needed something to sing while the group was rehearsing the song.  He never got around to rewriting the words.

“I’m not sure that I know the words to ‘Chest Fever’,” Robertson later told an interviewer.  “I’m not even so sure there are words to ‘Chest Fever’.”  

Click here to read the lyrics to “Chest Fever.”

Click here to listen to “Chest Fever.”

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

The Band – "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" (1969)

In the winter of '65

We were hungry, just barely alive

By May the 10th, Richmond had fell

In the last 2 or 3 lines, I told you about driving to Farmville, Virginia, to ride my bike on the western half of the High Bridge rail trail in southern Virginia.  I also explained why I spent the night in Appomattox, a half an hour’s drive from Farmville.  You can click here to read that post.

Before driving to Farmville, Virginia to ride the eastern half of the High Bridge rail trail the next morning, I made a brief detour to visit the Appomattox Court House National Historic Park, where Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered the remnants of his tattered and depleted Army of Northern Virginia to Union General Ulysses S. Grant, on April 9, 1865.

I’ll tell you more about some of the events that preceded that surrender in the next 2 or 3 lines.

It was a brisk 39 degrees in Appomattox that morning:

Lee’s surrender didn’t end the Civil War – several large Confederate armies remained in the field – but the handwriting was on the wall for the Confederacy after Lee threw in the towel.  By June, the remaining Confederate commanders had given up, and the Civil War was officially over. 

Lee signed the surrender documents in the parlor of a house belonging to Wilmer McLean, who had moved to Appomattox from Manassas, Virginia, to get away from the war.  (McLean’s farmhouse in Manassas had come under artillery fire during the First Battle of Bull Run in 1861.)

The parlor of the restored McLean House

After the ceremony, Union generals Edward Ord and Philip Sheridan handed McLean some gold coins and helped themselves to the parlor furniture, some of which ended up in the Smithsonian Institution’s collection.  

A Union captain picked up a small rag doll belonging to McLean’s seven-year-old daughter and took it home as a souvenir.  Eventually the doll was returned to Appomattox and placed on display in the park’s museum.

Lee surrenders to Grant

McLean was unable to afford to make his mortgage payments, and sold the house in 1867.  It was later sold to an entrepreneur who planned to take it apart and then reassemble it in Washington as part of a planned Civil War museum.  But he ran out of money after he dismantled the house, and the piles of bricks and other building components just sat in the yard until the National Park Service took possession and rebuilt the McLean house many years later. 

A park ranger and tour group in
front of the McLean House

I’ll tell you about my second day’s ride on the High Bridge rail trail – the highlight of which was the famous High Bridge itself – in the next 2 or 3 lines.

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“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” – a first-person lament about the defeat of the Confederacy sung by a poor white Southerner – was released by the Band on its eponymous second album in 1969.

The song was written by Robbie Robertson, one of the Band’s four Canadian members, although Arkansas native Levon Helm later said he helped Robertson with the historical research he did prior to writing the song’s lyrics.

Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy, actually fell to Union forces in early April 1865.  If the narrator was using Richmond as a metonym for the Confederacy rather than referring literally to the city itself, May 10th was as good a day as any to pick as representing the fall of the Confederacy because that was the day that Confederate President Jefferson Davis – who had met with his cabinet and dissolved the Confederate government a few days earlier – was captured by Union soldiers.

Here’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon:

The Band -- "Chest Fever" (1968)

"She's stoned," said the Swede

And the mooncalf agreed

I'm like a viper in shock

With my eyes on the clock

She was just there, somewhere

And here I am again

And as my mind unweaves

I feel the freeze down in my knees

But just before she leaves

She receives

I know this blog is called 2 or 3 lines, but I thought it was better to quote the entire final verse and chorus.  Quoting just two or three lines out of context might have been confusing -- but when you read the entire verse and chorus, it all makes perfect sense . . . right?

I first heard this song over 40 years ago -- the Three Dog Night version, not the original version by The Band -- and I had no idea that these were the words.

The Band

This may be TMI, but if you've never heard the term "mooncalf," it originally referred to a miscarried fetus of a cow.  (Superstitious folk believed that the moon could cause miscarriages.)  Later, the term came to be used to describe malformed or grotesque creatures -- it appears in Shakespeare's The Tempest, an H. G. Wells novel, the Harry Potter books, and The Bank Dick (a 1940 W. C. Fields movie).

"Chest Fever" is from The Band's first studio album, Music from Big Pink, which got its title from the pink-siding-ed house in upstate New York where The Band and Bob Dylan hung out in the mid-sixties.  (The Band had been Dylan's backup band on his 1966 tour, and he wrote or co-wrote several songs on the album).

The Band had a unique style.  You might say they were the quintessential American roots rock band, except for the fact that four of the five members were natives of Ontario.  (Levon Helm -- who died of cancer just last year -- grew up in Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, an unincorporated community near Helena.)

Music from Big Pink wasn't a big seller at first, although Al Kooper's rave review of it in Rolling Stone helped.  Eric Clapton liked its laid-back, rootsy style so much that he quit Cream so he could take a different musical direction.  (Clapton's work on the Blind Faith, Delaney and Bonnie, and Derek and the Dominoes albums demonstrates how influential The Band was on him.)  George Harrison loved it, and Roger Waters of Pink Floyd said it was the second-most influential rock and roll record ever (behind only Sgt. Pepper's).

"Chest Fever" is credited to Robbie Robertson.  He freely admits that the lyrics don't make any sense.  That's a fact, Jack!  (Levon Helm says that the lyrics were originally improvised by him and Richard Manuel.)

Garth Hudson at the Lowery organ

The song begins with a very Bach-like organ solo played by Garth Hudson.  Unlike most rock organists, Hudson played a Lowery organ -- not a Hammond B-3.  

I'm not a huge fan of roots rock, but you can't argue with songs like "Chest Fever," "The Weight," "Up on Cripple Creek," "The Night they Drove Old Dixie Down," "Rag Mama Rag," and "Don't Do It."  The first 500 songs featured in 2 or 3 lines didn't include anything by The Band, but now I've made up for that oversight.

Here's "Chest Fever":

Here's a link you can use to buy the song from Amazon:

Three Dog Night – "Circle for a Landing" (1969)

Circle for a landing

It’s time to come on down 

YouGovAmerica, a market research firm, recently asked thousands of adults this question:

How confident are you that you could safely land a passenger airplane in an emergency situation, relying only on the assistance of air traffic control? 

46% of the males surveyed but only 20% of the females said they were either “very confident” or “somewhat confident” of their ability to bring a plane down safely in an emergency. 

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The only surprising thing about this finding is that the male number isn’t a lot higher than 46%.  

You can chalk that up to the modesty that is so characteristic of the male sex, because males clearly have a big edge when it comes to God-given airplane-handling aptitude.

46% of men disagree

If you don’t believe me, let’s consider the facts.

The Wright brothers were male – right?

Charles Lindbergh was male, too – as was famed test pilot Chuck Yeager.  

Not to mention astronauts Alan Shepard, John Glenn, and every one of the 12 astronauts who have walked on the moon.

“Sky” King, Han Solo, Pete “Maverick” Mitchell – the list of great male pilots goes on and on! 

Of course, not all famous pilots were men – there’s Amelia Earhart, for example.

I don’t know about you, but if I was to be seated next to Amelia Earhart on a plane and the pilot of that plane suddenly became incapacitated, I’d start saying my prayers.

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In closing, let me quote a recent Washington Post article:

Last May, a Florida man was returning home from a fishing trip in the Bahamas when the pilot of a single-engine Cessna 208 fell ill. With the guidance of an air traffic controller and flight instructor, Darren Harrison safely touched down at Palm Beach International Airport.

Darren Harrison was a male.  (Just sayin’.)

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Three Dog Night was a very underrated group – possibly because they didn’t write their own songs.  (Neither did Frank Sinatra or Dusty Springfield, of course.)

Instead, Three Dog Night covered songs by accomplished songwriters like Hoyt Axton, Dave Mason, Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Harry Nilsson, Laura Nyro, Robbie Robertson, and Neil Young – to name just a few.

“Circle for a Landing” was written by Don Preston, a session guitarist who toured and recorded with Leon Russell, Joe Cocker, and others.  He and Russell co-wrote “Stranger in a Strange Land” – a truly great song.

Click here to listen to Three Dog Night’s recording of “Circle for a Landing,” which was released in 1969 on the group’s second (and best) album, Suitable for Framing.

Click here to buy the recording from Amazon. 

Three Dog Night – "Lady Samantha" (1969)

The tales that I told round the fire every night

Are out of proportion and none of them right

She is harmless and empty of anything bad

Three Dog Night’s Suitable for Framing was one of the albums I listened to over and over when I was a senior in high school.

I didn’t brag about it, of course.  I viewed Three Dog Night as a lightweight band, and would never compare them to Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones or the Doors.  I’m actually surprised that I bought one of their albums.

Three Dog Night put out a lot of good singles – their first hit, “One,” is one of the best singles of its era – but they put out some pretty hokey stuff as well.

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Three Dog Night made a living off other people’s songs.  They wrote a few of the songs they recorded, but mostly did covers.

You’ve got to give them credit – they chose songs written by some of the very best songwriters of the sixties and seventies.  I’m talking Harry Nilsson (“One”), Laura Nyro (“Eli’s Coming”), Randy Newman (“Mama Told Me Not to Come”), Robbie Robertson (“Chest Fever’), Dave Mason (“Feelin’ Alright”), Neil Young (“The Loner”), Tim Hardin (“Don’t Make Promises”), Hoyt Axton (“Never Been to Spain”), and many others.

I didn’t know until recently that today’s featured song, “Lady Samantha,” was an Elton John-Bernie Taupin song.  In fact, “Lady Samantha” was Sir Elton’s first American single.  (It didn’t chart.)

Three Dog Night’s cover is quite similar to John’s version, with one important difference.  For some reason, John repeated the first chorus in what seems like a blatant attempt to stretch a too-short, two-verse song to an acceptable length.  

You can repeat the final chorus.  Hell, you can repeat it five or six times if it’s really good.  But you shouldn’t repeat the chorus the first time you sing it.

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I can’t think of a band other than Three Dog Night that had three lead vocalists.  (Plenty of groups have three singers, but there’s usually only one lead vocalist.  The others may occasionally get to sing lead, but are first and foremost backup singers.)

I took my older kids to see Three Dog Night perform live at the annual “Hometown Holidays” celebration in Rockville, Maryland.  I’m thinking it was the early nineties – maybe ’92 or ’93 – but I can’t be sure.  I’m pretty sure they didn’t perform “Lady Samantha,” which was never released as a single.

Here’s Three Dog Night’s version of “Lady Samantha”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: