Does it work to say that while Bob's been on the cover of Rolling Stone 23 times (regardless of what you think of that rag), TLW has been thrilled to be in The Leader Post AND Prairie Dog? I think so. Also, Bob and TLW like women, smoking, drinking, eating meat, performing, touring, and the like perhaps to the detriment of any notion of healthy living. Bob believes in God, and TLW believe in an 88% certainty of something else out there. Bob's a boxer, some of us have watched boxing. Bob wears western wear, and we would like to make more money to buy better western wear. Uum Kalthoum is Bob's favourite singer, and The Hat has a double cd of her, that he bought at Sears of all places. The music she delivers is weird and foreign in Jim Jarmusch kinds of ways, but entrancing nonetheless. Bob is a trance artist himself, and is not that dissimiliar to jam bands, of which local band Sun Zoom Sparx is a sort of cousin of 13th Avenue Records. "I'll Be Your Baby Tonight" was one of the first songs The Hat and his lady first jammed to, and it is the first Bob cover TLW did when it got started. It is interesting to think of Bob writing that tune when he was just a new daddy. Bob has six kids, TLW have five (possibly more in the future?), and on the children angle, Slow Train Coming has "Man Gave Name To All The Animals" a tune so excellent that Townes Van Zandt covered it.
Speaking of Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle said once that he'd stand in Bob Dylan's living room, on Bob Dylan's coffee table, in his cowboy boots, and say that Townes Van Zandt is a better songwriter than Dylan. I love Steve Earle, and TLW is keen to play The Gateway Festival http://gatewayfestival.ca/ with him (same day would be crazy cool), but he is a chickenshit, because he neglects to mention whether or not Bob is actually in his own house when all this is happening. Even Townes probably told Steve to shut the fuck up, but, you know, drugs rule (pre-jail Steve Earle is something I want to read about, and apparently he's writing a book!) And everyone knows Bob has enjoyed drugs. He has stated "I think everybody's mind should be bent once in a while", and 111% of TLW (the extra 11% is Pipesmanda) are masterbenders of the mind, or at least aficionados of that notion. "Come over here pony, I wanna climb up one time on you" is one helluva lyric, and would take cajones/cojones to sing - TLW has sung about killing and really should sing more about ponies, like Bob. Still, we do have "Now she's pukin' in the bathtub, I'm watchin with my longjohns on"
Maybe that does not comprise 72 links between Bob and us, but that is 72 minutes of typing, and 72 minutes is a grand amount of time, the amount of time that a solid double album pushes you for its duration, kind of like Time Out of Mind does, one of Bob's finest albums ever. However, to end this post in honour of Bob and his completion of the sixth cycle of 12 years, along with our thrill of performing in his long shadow on the same planet as him on May 24th, 2013, and to preview yet more spilled ink on Bob to come from Sleights quite soon, here's something no one else will touch for decades, if not centuries, to come, created when the man was around the same age as me. THAT is just nuts.
Hat
