Dedicated to the books that grab your attention and keep it, until you’re (drum roll…) Booked Solid (rim shot!), Booked Solid is about the paper snacks you devour in one sitting, the modest meals you finish in a matter of days, or the banquets upon which you feast for weeks, even months. Any book that consumes, and is in turn consumed, is one worthy of Booked Solid.

The first installment: Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

One of three covers for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and all-around whiz kiz whose masters thesis was immediately published upon his graduation and revered as a nifty slice of genius, is, by all accounts, a damn good writer. Kavalier & Clay is no exception.

Widely considered Chabon’s masterpiece, the novel follows the lives to two fictitious characters, Sammy Klayman, a Jewish Brooklynite with big dreams and bigger stories, and Joseph Kavalier, Sammy’s cousin, a Czech-born artist who “immigrates” (you will see just what I mean) to the U.S. in search of modest success and the money necessary to help his family escape from Nazi-occupied Prague, as they both attempt to realize a dream in a very real time. Including encounters with notable celebrities like Orson Wells, Salvador Dali, Stan Lee and Max Baer, the novel is steeped with the perils and privileges of American Pop Culture, laden with themes of bigotry, Pre and Post-War America, homosexuality, the American Dream, and packed so full of substance you can almost feel all 700+ pages struggling to rip themselves from their binding.

This is, indisputably, a book for the ages and destined to be viewed as one of the greatest novels of the 21st century. It may be long, but it sucks you in, destroys your sense of time, and ushers you along on an incredible journey through a remarkable era, one of the Second World War and the Golden Age of comic books. Each read is consistently satisfying and joyful, rife with Chabon’s exceptional wit, dazzling turns of phrase and seemingly limitless vocabulary.

I implore you to set aside some time, get comfortable, lay down with this and really, really book yourself. While, to many including myself, this book will be seen, and hefted, as quite an undertaking, getting to know these magnificent characters, the world in which they live, and accompanying them on their amazing adventures (pun intended) is, in a massive understatement, time well booked.

For a Sunday soundtrack wisdom says something easy, something happy, but the energy is delicate, and capturing it complicated. Too fast and the music is passing you by. Too slow and it’s bringing you down. That’s why I turn to the blues, an art form of shifting tempos, ranging moods, soulful soliloquies and solo songsters. I pray to the master: Charlie Patton.

(Enlarged)

The top photo is the only one of Patton known to exist. He is considered by many to be “the Father of Blues” (a title also extended to W.C. Handy, with whom Patton is thought to have briefly played), and his influence can be found in the work of every bluesman since his first recording in 1929.

At the age of nine, Patton moved with his family to the Dockery Plantation, the place where Robert Johnson would later receive his first guitar. It is here that Patton met his mentor, Henry Sloan. Sloan was known for a new, peculiar style of guitar, which today would be most closely related to modern blues. Patton learned everything he could from Sloan and later inspired such legends as John Lee Hooker and Howlin’ Wolf, both of whom lived at Dockery.

Patton was known for a booming voice, rumored to project upwards of 500 yards without amplification, and a flashy style that involved playing the guitar in numerous iconic positions such as behind the head and back.

In 1933, Patton’s throat was slit, almost killing him. This inspired one of most productive recording periods of his career. He died a year later of heart failure.

The 54-odd recordings he left behind are some of the most significant in recorded history and, without a doubt, some of the best I’ve ever heard. “Pony Blues”, a song Patton composed by the age of 19, is in the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry and the first in a series of wondrous accomplishments. Patton’s technique and progressions have defined a genre of music for nearly a hundred years and, on these recordings, they still manage to sound fresh and surprising. Desensitize yourself to the strong hiss of tape and it falls away, revealing a smooth and sharp guitar sound that digs, digs, digs into your pleasure centers. Patton’s deep, gutteral voice shifts nimbly from a bellow to a howl to a hiss and whisper. Time dissolves and so does age.

Robert Palmer, musicologist, describes Patton as a “jack-of all-trades bluesman”, Tom Waits as “one of the pillars of the Delta Blues.” He goes on to say that Patton was, “clearly not only a blues man but a songster as well and a teacher to all who would follow”.

His guitar soothes. His singing saves. In the spirit of Sunday, he is a preacher and his songs a sermon for all time.

Tribe.

The Low End Theory is a watershed album in rap music, and A Tribe Called Quest’s masterpiece. It defined alternative hip-hop as a genre and established a cohesive union of East Coast and West Coast influences.

The album centers largely around the love of music, most notably jazz, and features performances from Ron Carter, one the most influential jazz bassists of all-time and sideman to jazz greats Miles Davis, Freddie Hubbard, Eric Dolphy, and McCoy Tyner. Tribe makes a connection between the birth of be-bop, its transition into the jazz mainstream and the golden age of hip-hop. Both, to Tribe, birthed the abstract: the indescribable, the indefinable, and the mysterious quality of movement in music, capable to move people, bridge gaps, incite and penetrate. Both then moved the abstract into the people’s realm, one of accessibility, cradled in a still-young and marginalized art form. And Tribe is doing just that, right before your eyes like the be-boppers before. You know it the second the needle hits the groove and the bass (dum dum dah, da-dum dah) escorts Q-Tip to the center of your aural focus:

Back in the days when I was a teenager / Before I had status and before I had a pager / You could find the abstract listening to hip hop / My pops used to say, it reminded him of be-bop / I said, well Daddy don’t you know that things go in cycles

And from there it keeps on pushing, sampling from artists like the aforementioned Hubbard and Davis, to other jazz icons like Art Blakely, Lonnie Smith, Grant Green and Cannonball Adderley (not to mention the slew of rock, funk, and soul gods like Hendrix, James Brown, the Ohio Players, and Funkadelic, who also receive the royal treatment). The record functions like a music history course, traveling through time, era after era, cutting and chopping and fusing some of the most recognizable and ground-breaking artists there ever were into one simple and comprehensive thesis on how good music can be when it’s done right.

The Low End Theory hits on all the notes that People’s Instinctive Travels… missed. The experiments all succeed. The mellow, mean sound Tribe achieves on this record, while so lean, spreads like a thick, buttery sauce over themes of sexual abuse, political unrest, mistreatment and violence in hip-hop and blends them all into one solid, consistent statement: a manifesto of things to come, places to start and how to find the groove.

Betty Mabry married Miles Davis in September 1968, less than two years after she met him, and took his name as his second wife. This simple act of holy union forever changed the music world.  She introduced Miles to Sly Stone; she introduced Miles to Hendrix, with whom she was widely believed to be having an affair. These relationships helped to form the basis of Bitches Brew: one of the most important recordings of Miles’s career, and jazz history.

But as all things must take their course, Betty and Miles hit splitsville and Betty departed to the UK to resume her modeling career, where other things took hold of her.

She wrote music, with the intention of performing with Santana. But instead she assembled an all-star band with members of Graham Central Station, Sly & the Family Stone, and Santana’s band sitting in. Throw in the Pointers Sisters and Merl Saunders and you have one hell of a funk outfit. The result of this fantastic assembly: her first record, Betty Davis, and a statement to the world at large that shit is about to go down.

Betty hit her stride on They Say I’m Different, her second record. With allusions to her open sexual attitude, promiscuous past, and complicated relationship to Davis, it remains her most electric, sensual and provocative recording to date. The addition of ex-Hendrix guitarist Buddy Miles and a few other select line-up changes helped Davis to refine and refinish her sound, which began to border closely on perfection. “Shoo-B Doop and Cop Him”, the opening track on this record, burrows down into the funkiest part of your soul. “He Was a Big Freak” follows as the second track, eliminating all doubts and taking a firm hold over your mind, tracing its seam and preparing to split it wide open.

Combining elements of hard funk, glam and old-style P-Funk psychedelic freak, The Say I’m Different is the realization of a funk fusion that echoes back to the bridge Miles first created. Davis reaches deep and wide, ripping the roots and tearing pieces of everything from here to there and throws them in her cauldron, where they simmer into her own masterpiece. Take it from Davis herself: “I used to beat him with a turquoise chain.” This is one strong bitches brew.

A lot of people have devoted a lot of ink to praising this record, and I can’t disagree with any of them. It is strikingly different from Young Prayer. It does evoke Pet Sounds. It is a romp through musical history. It is deeply personal and worth of the “Best of 2007” tag. There is no sense in summarizing the tracks or dissecting the sound. The charm is not conveyed in words (see album art). Simply put, it is a marvelous, marvelous record.

That being said, every time you listen to this record it sounds different. It deserves monthly, if not weekly revisiting. I remember for the first year I had this record I could barely wrap my head around it. I thought I had it all figured out, absorbed even. It sounded so lush, so layered, so effortless, and so perfect. Little by little, ever so slowly, all those thoughts changed shape.

It is sparse now, simple and minimalist and heavily labored. It shows its seams like deep scars. It’s like the record was packaged with an accompanying haze, an obscuration to distract from itself and propel the listener’s focus down this deep rabbit hole, a dreamland of false doors, back alleys and dead ends. With time and revolutions the haze slowly dissipates; the false doors are painted on, the back alleys just exercises in artist’s perspective, and the dead ends all tie together. You see it. You finally see it, and it’s even better than before. It is by no means flawless, and that’s what makes it perfect.

So I filled a mug and put on Nighthawks at the Diner, inspired by the Hopper painting of same name and one of the best anytime, down tempo, soul-feeding jazz records I’ve ever heard.

The story behind Nighthawks is simple: Bones Howe, Waits’s record producer, and Herb Cohen, Waits’s manager, wanted a live record, one that could bring the jazz out in Waits more strongly, but he was still new. He was a great performer but, a real bona fide live record? So, they thought, something in between. They put together a crack jazz band of old pros (one of whom was Pete Christlieb, one of the best tenor sax players in the world, and another Bill Goodwin, who drummed for Phil Woods) and packed a room at the New York recording studio Record Plant for two nights straight with a sold out crowd. They put in a bar and some tables, wheeled in a console, hired a stripper as the opening act and got it all on tape.

As one might imagine, this record is more of a performance piece than a live record. Waits breaks up his set with seven rambling and arresting introductions, rife with the wordplay, bawdy, and blue-collar magic for which Waits is so famous. The songs play out, in his own words, like “inebriational travelogues,” combining poetry, scat, short fiction and memoir to form a sultry smoke of Waits’s own sub-conscious, tinted by the bright neon lights of the Los Angeles underworld.

You can hear the whiskey going down, the cigarettes fuming; the crowd is rowdy and the bass player “should be chained up somewhere”; Waits is at the center, making dark, wine-stained mornings brighter with jazz and beautiful simplicity.

Without a doubt one of Wilson Pickett’s best albums, and the one that launched his career, The Exciting Wilson Pickett is loaded with some of the best cuts in soul history. It established Pickett as a premier, top-tier soul man and a major figure of the 1960’s music scene, and the personnel on this collection of tracks…God…let me name just a few: Steve Cropper, Donald “Duck” Dunn, and Al Jackson Jr. (better known as three-quarters of the backbone of soul: Booker T. and the M.G.’s), Tommy Cogbill, Roger Hawkins, Jimmy Johnson, Chips Moman, and Spooner Oldham (all-stars of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section), Charles Chalmers (saxophonist and Grammy award-winning songwriter and arranger of such hits as Aretha’s “Respect” and “Chain of Fools”, Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man”, Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” and more), Jerry Wexler (the Atlantic Records A&R man responsible for coining the term “rhythm and blues” and signing or producing acts like Led Zeppelin, Ray Charles, Aretha, and Bob Dylan), Jim Stewart (co-founder of Stax Records) and finally Tom Dowd (world famous recording engineer and producer responsible for innovating multi-track recording, inventing the fader, and capturing more classic albums than almost anyone under the sun).

Phew. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s take a closer look.

Every track on the record clocks in at under three minutes and, with thirteen tracks, this is a perfect one-stop morning mix. Fast, frenetic and just fun, each song on here is an absolute gem. There’s not a single second of lag, not a moment of temptation to hit the “seek” button, and if you’re a hits-focused person, take the hit singles “Land of 1,000 Dances” (which has the best danceable gibberish ever), “634-5789 (Soulsville, U.S.A.)”, “Ninety-nine and a Half (Won’t Do)”, and “In the Midnight Hour”: all reached the top fifty on the charts (or just missed) and all are rifled through in the first twenty minutes.

Can you do the mashed potato? Can you do the twist? How ‘bout pony like boney maroney? Regardless of how you choose to move, this record will have you moving smoothly all day long, from the first “1, 2, 3,” all the way to the very last second.

I think it’s only fitting we start with a personal favorite, and recent Notes of Note subject: Bob Dylan.

Today’s music of the morning: Modern Times.

After the music business wrote him off as “dead in the water”, Bob Dylan responded in 1997 releasing the first in a string of some of the strongest material of his career. On 2006’s “Modern Times,” the string of that rebirth continues on. We see an aging Dylan in a modern world reconnecting with and reinventing his way of worship, redefining and rediscovering his idea of love and- most strikingly of all -causing us to rethink our idea of “Bob Dylan.”

The album’s first three tracks alone, clocking in at just under 20 minutes, are the perfect eye-openers for a morning playlist:

#1. “Thunder On The Mountain” – a driving slow-groove shuffle with a positive bent for the hardest part of the morning: getting vertical.

#2: “Spirit On The Water” – a cooled off two-step toasting love and the lust for life to help coast through the daily routine.

#3: “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” – Two eggs down, shoes tied tight and everything looks just as you like, this Muddy Waters cover is the hammer’s head, pounding the last nail in place before it’s time to take the day.

And it just gets better and better as the record continues, blasting on the car stereo the whole way in.

Modern Times has just what it takes to grease your wheels. Take it from a caffeine addict, much better than a cup of coffee.

We start with Notes of Note: the musical portion of this website. Notes of Note will focus on all things musical: records new and old, instruments, artists, any developments in the world of sound and silence set to time worth noting.

This entry is devoted to Bob Dylan and his “Nashville Skyline”, a peculiar redheaded step-child that deserves a place in everyone’s collection.

Nashville Skyline

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It’s 1966. Bob Dylan sits relatively still, lighting smoke after smoke in the green room beneath the stage of the world famous Royal Albert Hall. In typical Dylan fashion, he is relaxed; he is calm. A young, blond haired English man stands at a slouch, fingers running rapidly up and down the ebony and ivory of blues standards. Alan Grossman, Dylan’s overbearing manager, fiddles with a misbehaving harp as Dylan sings the room into silence. “The empty-handed painter from your streets / is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets.” He quietly strums on his beaten, but not yet broken, Guild acoustic. “It’s time, Bobby.” Bob straps up his electric and locks in his harp to the strange metal clamp around his neck. Still puffing, he makes his way through the darkened labyrinth of corridors, up the stairs and to the wing of the stage. Inching to the center, the crowd silent, he plugs in and informs his band of his newest, ever-changing ideas for the night’s arrangements.

“Traitor!” someone screams.

“JUDAS! Traitor! Where’s BOB DYLAN?” another audience member yells.

“JUDAS!”

Dylan stands at the head of a ready band, reveling in the calm before the storm.

“I don’t believe you. You’re a liar,” he states plainly into the microphone. He steps away, leaning towards his drummer, Mickey Jones.

“Play it fucking LOUD, man!”

Dylan’s audience is and always has been his most devoted and most severe critic. This scene from D. A. Pennebaker’s famous film, Don’t Look Back, puts that violent dichotomy on display.

With the release of his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, this passion and devotion became a movement all its own. Songs like “Blowin’ in the Wind”, “Masters of War”, and “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” put words to the social anxiety and unrest weighting down the youth of the time. Communists, The Cold War, and a post-WWII false confidence left the public fearful of nuclear holocaust and consequentially instilled a hatred of war, violence and weaponry.

Dylan readdressed the concerns of nuclear rain, war-mongering hawks, and a unified cry for peace on The Times They are A-Changin’ and extended his eye beyond them into the political, tackling civil rights, racism, and social injustice. The public began to clutch to Dylan and his poet image, believing he expressed what they never could. But this Dylan could not handle. He was not a topical songwriter. He had no message. He never meant what he said. He didn’t mean anything. He simply wrote to write. He didn’t even believe in anything (which resulted in accusations of a “nihilist” attitude in the press).

He just wanted you to dig it, man.

And so, following the riotous electric outbursts of Bringing it all Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited that framed the drama in Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back, Dylan left London in search of further release from the prison of his own poetry. With the taste of John Wesley Harding in his mouth, he set out for the South, musicians waiting and a batch of songs in tow, where he plunged himself deep into country music and found solace in its clichés, popular trends and the warm distance of Nashville Skyline.

It remains a bold outlier in the Dylan oeuvre, but stands also as a record with great charm and surely one of his warmest. The reason for this is not only the new country croon of Dylan that so many claim, but also the framework of country music, in particular its obsession with love, and the way Dylan chooses to embrace it on these recordings. Each song on Nashville Skyline is an ode to love and the lavender haze hangs heavy over this record, pushing the focus to the now, to the future, to the positive and new.

“Nashville Skyline Rag”, the second cut on the record and only song on the album without lyrics, is the most “country” of all. It is apparent in every pluck of Earl Scruggs’ banjo, every tear dropped from Pete Drake’s pedal steel, and every twinkle of a key from Dylan’s memorable piano line that this rag is about a different kind of love, a love not for a woman, but for Nashville, and a celebration of country music as a whole. It is a joyful release from the politics of meaning, and the meaning of politics. In the rag Dylan finds catharsis, a break and a home.

This catharsis is present throughout the record, manifesting itself not only in Dylan’s choice of voice as mentioned before, but also in the character of one woman, to whom Dylan expresses his lust, his happiness, and his feeling of security in this new place. As there are always two sides to Dylan’s coin, he is equally as ready to express his regrets, but rather than dwelling on them they serve as affirmations of self, cornerstones of belief that he must dust off to recognize and reminders that everything, at best, is temporary.

The opening number, “Girl from the North Country,” is the only one of near twenty duets recorded with Johnny Cash that was not rejected and sets the rose-colored tone. In classic Dylan style, this tale of lost love shows no anger, and only subtle signs of regret. It is his wish to be remembered, and remember, fondly that drives his plea and echoes in “I Threw It All Away” and “Tell Me That It Isn’t True”, two songs that postulate on the necessity of love and the perfection of hindsight. This is 20/20 vision of the past is not so removed from Dylan’s own personal life and his departure from the hearts and socially conscious minds of so many in the 60’s who saw him once as “the toastmaster of a generation”, an idea which Dylan felt, “needed to be uprooted”.

“To Be Alone with You”, “Peggy Day”, “Lay Lady Lay”, “One More Night” and “Country Pie” all refuse to be burdened by the pains of the past. We hear a happy, fun-loving and cocksure Dylan, wishing only to have fun right now and move on. In the spirit of the record, the message is commemoration, liberation, and celebration! When he says, “Tonight, I’ll Be Staying Here With You”, there are no expectations of waking up next to him tomorrow. He will, no doubt, remember the night and remember it fondly but, like the great trope of the traveler, when the morning comes he’ll be gone, leaving his past like footprints in the road, the Nashville skyline hanging low behind him as he moves toward escape, moves toward what it is in life that he wants: a different self-portrait and a new morning.

Poured from 330mL Trappistenbier bottle in Chimay goblet

Poured from 330mL Trappistenbier bottle into Chimay goblet. The color is a beautiful golden blonde. Very fine bubbly head. Mild retention and lacing. Clear and sharp. Looks very crisp.

Sour yeasty smell is the first to present itself. Hints of butter, tropical fruit. A bit piney and floral hop odor. Smells like a Belgian.

Bitter, crisp taste. Similar to a high gravity lager. Sweetens as it warms. Hops come through strongly but there is no oily dominance. The alcohol is well hidden. This beer is a precisely crafted ale with the impeccable balance and composition that is the signature of the Trappist monks.

The mouthfeel is similar to champagne except slightly thicker and creamier. Very carbonated. The word “crisp” represents each and every quality of this beer.

This is an extremely refreshing and drinkable brew, despite the alcohol content. However, one too many and you might wake up in some strange places.

A-, and on The Drunkard’s Progress Scale, “Step 3: A glass too much” and a curb for a pillow.