Homecoming

Waller Street [ 1 | 365 ]

I posted my last photographs on Instagram the other day, and included some text regarding that decision. So far, only a few people have commented (two of whom I know in real life thanks to Flickr), which doesn't surprise me in the least. It's indicative of the site's soul, I guess, or perhaps more accurately, its lack of soul. Scrolling and tapping the heart button (or not) is the norm, which I wouldn't really consider interaction. I rarely have gotten comments there in the ten years or more I've used the site. As I've complained before, Instagram has never come close to replicating the "social" media site Flickr was in its heyday, although I suspect it never was intended to be, and it most certainly was not after Facebook purchased it.

This morning, I decided to scroll through my contacts' photos with the plan of commenting on some in order to get back in the habit of doing so, rather than merely clicking on the star-favourite button à la Instagram. The very first image in my feed was a beautiful photograph taken of a church on a foggy, snowy morning with a quadcopter, so I clicked on it to comment. What I found, however, was pretty much what took a lot of joy out of Flickr many years ago. Nearly all of the comments appear to be bot-like, and include links to groups where the commenters either saw the image or were promoting. To the right are all the groups (twenty-six as I write this) to which the photographer had added the photograph. I typed out a comment that I wanted to leave, but chose not to.

Flickr screenshot

When Flickr was probably at its height (for me, anyway), someone got the great idea—and by great, I mean NOT great—of creating awards for "outstanding" photography or some such on the site. I don't recall now how exactly what went down, but I believe a group was created and others could nominate your photo(s) for what was called the Flicky awards. In the discussion section of the group, a template was posted which you could copy and paste into the comments of photos you wanted to nominate, and the template included HTML code which added flashy, obnoxious animated GIFs (pronounced JIFFs, by the way... hahaha!) to the comments, and soon these ugly things were all over the place. It SO diminished the Flickr experience. I recall, though, that the person who created the "awards" disappeared from the site, along with the stupid-ass Flickys. Nonetheless, the posting of templated comments to photographs continued unabated.

Also at about the same time, Flickr had been sold to Yahoo! and in what was probably an effort to monetize the site for that company, a feature known as Explore, was created to highlight photographs that had become popular. Many people (including yours truly) gamed the system in order to get our photographs into Explore, although for me and a handful of friends, it was the satisfaction of gaming of the algorithm we were after. Regardless, as people's photos began appearing on the Explore page, comments were flooded yet again with templated comments that were accompanied either by an obnoxious glittery GIF or some other sort of unrelated image as a matter of giving congratulations for having appeared on the Explore pages.

And so, my first attempt to dive back into Flickr hasn't yielded much joy, but I will persist.

Aquatic Cove [ 3 | 365 ]

*       *       *

Note: Most of what I've claimed here is based on my memory from close to twenty years ago, as well as after a rather lengthy hiatus from Flickr.

A Complete Unknown

Movie poster for A Complete Unknown

I was not planning on going to see A Complete Unknown, James Mangold's biopic of Bob Dylan, but Sophie wanted to treat me so I relented and saw it Sunday night.

Now, anyone who has known me for a long time has known that I spent a lot of years collecting rare and/or unreleased Dylan recordings, and before I share my thoughts on the film, I thought I'd also share some of that backstory because I think it's important to know the basis for my thoughts.

My infatuation with Dylan's music began after borrowing Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits from a friend in 1969 or so, so about two years after it had been released. I probably wasn't yet 15. By then, of course, Dylan had already become huge—"Like A Rolling Stone", "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35", "Positively 4th Street", "Subterranean Homesick Blues", and even "Lay, Lady, Lay" had all been radio hits for him—and I recall well hearing those songs on AM radio—most likely WOHO in Toledo, or CKLW out of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. A grade school classmate, George Liebherr, had been pretty fluent in Dylan and Arlo Guthrie as I recall, often half-singing/half-speaking their lyrics for no other reason, I guess, than that he could. But I'd not yet caught on.

In addition to those radio hits that Dylan performed, his songs performed by other artists—"Blowin' In The Wind" by Peter, Paul & Mary; "Mr. Tambourine Man", "All I Really Want to Do", and "My Back Pages" by The Byrds; and "It Ain't Me, Babe" by The Turtles—had also gotten considerable airplay, so while Dylan's music was certainly a part of my musical landscape, he was—until I borrowed that LP—just one of many artists that came into my ears on a regular basis by way of the AM airwaves, and therefore didn't take up much of my consiousness. He was not—like The Beatles—a media sensation, at least not in Toledo, Ohio.

Backing up slightly, at this time in my life, my older brother Mike was the record collector in the house, and he had Columbia Record Club membership. The records I recall that he'd bought were The Beatles' Meet The Beatles, Rubber Soul, and Revolver, The Beach Boys' Pet Sounds, a Dave Clark Five LP, and maybe a Righteous Brothers record or two. I was still in my Monkees phase.¹

But because The Byrds' "Mr. Tambourine Man" had reached #1 on the Billboard Charts in July and August of 1965, I heard it a LOT. At that time in my life, though, I didn't memorize many lyrics (I'm often surprised at how few songs from my younger days that I know the lyrics to), but when I heard Dylan's version of the song on Greatest Hits, I had an epiphany of sorts. I was surprised that the song had two more verses than The Byrds' version, and my impression at the time (it still is, actually) was that The Byrds left off the most important verse:  

And take me disappearing
Through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time
Far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees
Out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky
With one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea
Circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate
Driven deep beneath the waves
Make me forget about today until tomorrow

Even at 14 or 15 or however old I was at the time, I was able to recognize the poetry of those words—the impressionism, the alliteration, the internal rhymes. The power of this original studio version far surpassed that of the jingly-jangly Top 40 hit by The Byrds. I still consider it one of Dylan's most personal songs.

Not long after this eye-and-ear-opening moment, I bought my first Dylan record, which regrettably—at the time, anyway—was Self-Portrait, then his most recent release. It's a double-LP collection of mostly throw-away² covers, recorded during various sessions as a matter of warming up his voice, along with a few live tracks from his recent (and rare) appearance at the Isle of Wight festival in England. It's an album I've come to appreciate more over the years, but this particular Dylan was not the creative genius I'd heard up until that point.

Fast-forwarding to after having made a few more Dylan purchases, the Concert for Bangla Desh was held in New York's Madison Square Garden in August of 1971. We happened to be in Manhattan that night visiting my mom's father and I distinctly recall the rumors reported  (and confirmed) on the local news that Dylan would be a surprise performer. Naturally, I purchased the eventual three-LP record of the event which came out barely four months later, and went to see the film of the event three months after that. The audience's response to Dylan's appearance was thunderous.³ His performance of "Mr. Tambourine Man", while lacking its third verse, had me spellbound.

Possibly, had that appearance not been so well-received, Dylan might not have decided to tour in 1974 for the first time in eight years (tickets for which I was unable to get). By this time, I had purchased all of his available records, but one night, while at a Disc Records at Toledo's Franklin Park Mall, I came across what I learned to be a "bootleg" LP of rare and unreleased recordings of his which, if memory serves, was called The Unkindest Cut. I had stumbled onto the underbelly, of sorts, of the record industry. Upon making this inadvertent discovery, and buying a few more available bootlegs via mail order, I placed an ad in Rolling Stone looking for more rare recordings, whether studio outtakes or concert recordings. I purchased a cache of tapes from a fellow in Connecticut, then made trades with people across the country and around the world. I was invested—in more ways than one—in the music and myth of Bob Dylan. And, of course, I read everything available in print about him. Despite that I've not kept up with all of the many books that have been published since the 1990s, when my trading activity waned and eventually ceased, I consider myself pretty well-acquainted with most aspects of his public life.

So, I wasn't actually looking forward to seeing A Complete Unknown because I've seen many a lame film depiction of musicians' lives; I expected departures from historical reality, but I honestly didn't expect the film would be one fictional event after another.

In a post to her Facebook page, Joan Osborne spoke to the film's many detours from historical fact, but also stated that what's ultimately important is that Dylan's music gets exposed to a new, younger generation, and I guess I support that attitude, but it didn't make watching the film any less cringe-worthy for me when so many scenes played out that I know never occurred. And yes, I get that the film isn't a documentary, and that fiction can be a tool in telling a greater truth, but many of the distortions in the film had to do with significant moments of Dylan's life and career, and there will be those who come away from the film believing that what they've seen is factual.

I could tick off so many, but the three that annoyed me the most, I suppose, were these: Timothée Chalomet's overly mumbly voice (Dylan spoke quite clearly in recordings I've heard of him from that time); the representation of Sylvie Russo (fictional name for Suze Rotolo) as a jealous girlfriend storming away from an event she didn't even attend; and the quasi-climactic scene at Newport when Dylan kicked off his new electric sound. People did not pelt the stage with cans and bottles and other trash. Also, booing was not as loud and boisterous as depicted, and it still remains unclear as to whether people booed Dylan (no doubt some did) or the poor sound delivered by an unprepared crew.

As for the positives, bravo to Chalomet for choosing to learn the guitar and to not lip synch to Dylan recordings. As Osborne said in her post, nobody does Dylan like Dylan, but Chalomet's performance was about as good as one could expect, and except for the mumbling I've already noted, he did well to recreate a lot of Dylan's mannerisms. So, I give Chalomet a 9 out of 10... maybe even a 9.5. (I think the mumbling was based more on myth than reality.)

I was also pleased with the production quality of the film, and Mangold's ability to recreate a 1960s feel. I also liked the songs that were selected for the film, and was especially pleased to hear the snippet of "I'll Keep It With Mine", one of my all-time favourites and one of those unreleased outtakes I'd first heard on a bootleg so long ago. I was happy that Phil Ochs was given a hat tip—albeit not with a name-check—with the inclusion of his song (performed by Barbaro/Baez) "There But For Fortune". It appeard to me that Chalomet/Dylan shot a glare at someone during the performance of the song, and I wondered if that was supposed to be Ochs. I wish that "House Of The Rising Sun" had not been performed by Barbaro/Baez (early in the film) because even though she probably sang the song in those days, Dylan had lifted his arrangement of the song from Dave Van Ronk (played by Joe Tippett), who I didn't even recognize in the film. I was quite pleased with Ed Norton's portrayal of Pete Seeger, although his role in Dylan's career was not as pivotal as the film made it out to be, at least not as directly as depicted, and there's no record of a practically crazed Pete Seeger at Newport in 1965. Ditto for Alan Lomax.

Elle Fanning's portrayal of Russo/Rotolo was as good as could be expected, too, considering that there's very little public knowledge about Rotolo's relationship with Dylan, beyond what little those within their circle have been willing to share over the years, or what Rotolo herself shared in her very fine memoire, A Freewheelin' Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. I wish her depth and cultural influences on Dylan would have been explored more—that she brought him to a civil rights protest barely scratched the surface—instead of the rather uncritical and somewhat trite look at their crumbling relationship. I admit, though, that I was quite moved by the fictional scene in which she sees Dylan and Baez singing "The Times They Are A-Changin'" together. I'm not sure what to read into that scene, but it ties back to an earlier one in the film in which she finds a scrap of paper with a few lines of the song on it and reads it out loud to him before he snatches it from her hand:

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast

Upon hearing the song, did her eyes tear up because she'd originally thought the song was written about her only to discover it was something else? Did she tear up because she was witnessing genius bubbling to the top? Was she recognizing the influences she'd had on his politics? I suppose that it's this vagueness and the possibility of interpreting it in several ways that made it powerful to me.

Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez was also quite good, particularly since she was never going to fully replicate the power of Baez's iconic soprano voice, and she did well to portray Baez's tone in her speaking scenes. I didn't like the phony argument with Dylan at the microphones about which song to sing next. I can't recall now what scene it was, but there was a moment between Baez and Dylan similar to the one with Sylvie mentioned above that moved me.

There is a scene in which Chalomet is filmed walking down the street (as I recall, in a bit of a huff) passing by many of the clubs that were the mainstay venues for the folksingers of that time: Café Wha?, The Gaslight, Gerde's Folk City, maybe a few others... I found it to be an extremely effective technique of trying to rope in the many places in Greenwich Village where Dylan and his fellow musicians would gather.

The Albert Grossman character was a bit too cartoonish for my likes, which is not so much a criticism of the actor, Dan Fogler, but the script. From all accounts, Grossman was a larger-than-life figure that didn't suffer fools, and I didn't really get that sense of him in the film at all. Also, while maybe there's documentary or anecdotal evidence of him sharing a bed with Dylan at Newport, I've never heard of it, and I don't think there's a chance in hell that he wouldn't have secured himself a private room if indeed he attended the festival. I just found that scene weird.

Now, I understand the task of trying to compress five years or so of history into a two-hour film, but I think that for all the inaccurate narratives that were created, more historically accurate narratives could have been written into the script in their stead. For example, the scene involving the angry janitor in Woody Guthrie's hospital room was totally unnecessary, playing no real significant role in the film. Was it merely to show Dylan's snipey wit? I've read that Dylan himself gave blessing to the script (in addition to requesting the Suze Rotolo name change) but that doesn't surprise me. I've long known that Dylan has had an eye on his legacy, and since the film shows him in a pretty good light, by and large, of course, he approved of it.

If you've read this far, thanks for bearing with me. I'm not—nor have I ever claimed to be—the foremost Dylan scholar. I've derived great satisfaction listening to his music and marveling at what he has done with music and words and wordplay over the course of his lifetime. His real, true story is a fascinating one. I finally got to see him a in person a couple of times on back-to-back nights in 1978 (Toledo and Dayton) and, I think two other times. I was thoroughly disappointed with the last show I saw, in November of 1990 in East Lansing, Michigan, and vowed to never see him again. I haven't. I don't think writing songs has been that important for him in a long time, and I didn't even think all that much of his Grammy-winning Time Out Of Mind. In fact, I've only listened to it once or twice. I've barely listened to any of his records since. Go figure.

So, while there are many, many aspects of the film I don't like, I'd give it a 6 or 7 out of 10, and as a film in and of itself—without the baggage of depicting a meteoric rise of someone who would become the icon he became—it was enjoyable... it had good acting, and undeniably great music. Just don't take it all that seriously as a historical document.

*       *       *

¹An episode of the Monkees television show had a scene which took place on an old Cowboy Western-type set, and involved a character that resembled the television show Gunsmoke's Chester, played by Dennis Weaver. To understand the gag, however, you had to be familiar with Gunsmoke and its main character, Sheriff Matt Dillon. I can't recall the scenario exactly, but the Monkees came up to this Chester character for help and he said he'd go get Mr. Dylan (sounds like Dillon... get it?), and when they asked him if he meant the Sheriff, he said something like, "No, Bob Dylan... he can write a song about your problems."[back]

²By throwaway, I mean not intended to be released, not that it's a bad or unusable performance, although certainly that could apply in some cases.[back]

³I've long posited that George Harrison very slyly played "Here Comes The Sun" prior to introducing Dylan.[back]

Un petit poème

Comme un livre ouvert ©2024 Patrick T. Power. All rights reserved.

I was going through my old blog posts here, deleting most of the political rants that I had written back during the Bush administration, when I came across this post, which at the end mentioned Montréal and linked to the website of the North American Folk Alliance. I discovered that the link no longer worked, so I found the organization's current URL and fixed it.

In 2005, I attended the International Folk Alliance Conference in Montréal, so I was rather delightfully surprised to find, upon visiting the website, that the annual conference will once again be held this coming February in Montréal. That brought back memories not only of my early days of Flickr activity, but of a woman in Canada with whom I had become quite smitten. I suggested she make the long trip from where she lived in the western provinces to Montréal to meet me, and to spend four days with me immersed in music. As those memories came back to me, so did I recall that I'd written a poem for the occasion that would not come to pass.

Je désire ton amitié
by Patrick T. Power

je désire te rencontrer à Montréal
si la neige commence à tomber
si le vent du nord souffle
on trouvera la chaleur et le confort
on utilisera des mots pour allumer un feu

mes yeux
tes yeux
ma main
ta main
mon cœur
ton cœur

tout allumer pour le feu
et continuer la chaleur

je désire ton amitié
je ne désire rien jusqu'à ce que j'aie ton amitié
dans mes mains
dans mon coeur

je désire ton amitié

*   *   *

moins de 46

Photo copyright 2024 by Patrick T. Power. All rights reserved.

you didn’t make it to 46.

often i wondered
what you might think of me
once i was no longer of this earth,
or if you would even
think of me at all.
i never would have guessed
that you
would go first.


NOTE: I've decided to abandon my Substack account because of that platform's decision to create a partnership with right-winger Bari Weiss's organziation. I will migrate what few posts I've published there to this site. This post was originally published on 27 May 2024. I wish I'd re-published it on the 19th of December, the second anniversary of her death.

That Summer of '78

or A Whole Lot of Temporary

Me and Sandy Harley ©2024 Patrick T. Power

NOTE: I've decided to abandon my Substack account because of that platform's decision to create a partnership with right-winger Bari Weiss's organziation. I will migrate what few posts I've published there to this site. This post was originally published on 9 November 2024. I've since done some minor editing

My former mother-in-law died a little less than two weeks ago, and as is my wont, I started ripping up my apartment trying to find photographs I’d taken almost thirty years ago on film to see what I might have of her. I didn’t take near as many photographs in my film days as I have since going digital, but I tended to have my camera at all the family get-togethers so that there would be some kind of record of the events. Somewhere along the line, though, I stopped putting the prints into photo albums and stashed them and the negatives away for I don’t know what. Typically, I would get double prints, so I could share the extras with others if they wanted something so I still have two copies of a lot of them. When Kodak began offering Picture Discs with low-resolution scans of the negatives, I cared even less about keeping an accessible archive of the prints.

All that to say that I found a handful of photographs that I knew I had around here somewhere, but had no clue where I might have stashed them. But I guess as the saying goes, the minute you stop looking for something, you find it. So along with the photographs that I was looking for, I found the ones I’d been wondering about, as well as something to write about.

As the school year was wrapping up in Bowling Green, Ohio in the spring of 1978, my older brother Mike suggested that I come out to Minnesota to work for the summer. He’d been living in the Minneapolis area for a couple of years with his then-wife Carol, and son Christopher, and they’d just had a newborn daughter, Angela, in February. If memory serves, he was the Operations Manager at the Big A Auto Parts’ distribution center in Edina.

It’s weird now in this age of internet and text immediacy to think about that conversation because we didn’t really talk all that often. Long-distance charges were a thing back then, and it tended to keep calls few and relatively short. Did he call me to suggest it? Did I call him just to chat and he presented the idea to me? Had I mentioned that I didn’t have a job lined up for the summer and it just popped into his head? I’m coming around to the likelihood that I answered the phone and after a few niceties, he asked “What are you doing this summer?”

I worked at the campus media center during the school year, processing film and doing copy photography, and again if memory serves, I had worked the previous summer at Commercial Aluminum Cookware (later known as Calphalon) about halfway between home in Toledo and school. After working full-time there for over two years, I decided I wasn’t going to work fifty hours a week the rest of my life in a polishing powder-filled factory—despite the relatively good money—and off I went to school. I stayed on in a part-time capacity for a little while, but I became a persona non grata with the newish, buttoned-up manager when I drew a life-sized comic-caricature of him. He decided the company no longer needed a part-time employee.

Anyway, however the offer came to pass, I agreed to go to Minnesota. Before heading out, I recorded a bunch of my albums onto cassettes for the ten- to twelve-hour drive. Dylan had just released Street Legal, so that was at the top of the list; I also no doubt included most of his discography in the mix. At about the same time, Springsteen released Darkness On The Edge Of Town, so I recorded that along with his first three records. I had only become a fan of his after Born To Run had come out so I was still kind of getting to know his stuff—I had to bring all of it. The Allman Brothers’ Brothers and Sisters also made the cut—the record was five years old at the time, but still a goodie. There are two songs from amongst all the tapes I brought with me that I can’t not associate with the trip: the Allman Brothers’ “Jessica” and Springsteen’s “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” from The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle—both for very different reasons.

Within a week or two, I packed up my 1974 Volkswagen Super Beetle and was on my way. I stopped in the Chicago area to see my mom’s brother, Skip, and his family, and I spent a night there to break up the travel. At that time in my life, I could drive for hours with nary a break, but aside from that overnight pit stop, I tried to get there in as little time as possible. I took I-94 through the heart of Wisconsin, and as I made my way into the greater Minneapolis area, Brothers and Sisters was playing. It was raining a bit, and as traffic was getting thicker, I had to keep pace with it. It was then that I discovered that there might not be a greater driving song than “Jessica” (and, I might add, for dancing in your chair).

I took I-35W south from I-94 to where Mike lived in Burnsville. The highway would become more and more familiar to me over the course of the coming weeks as it was my way to and from work each day. (35W crossed the Minnesota River near Bloomington by way of a bridge that twenty-nine years later suffered a catastrophic collapse.) Traffic was backed up as I approached Burnsville and because I abhor sitting in a non-moving vehicle, I got off the highway and followed a route that took me west of Burnsville, near Shakopee, where I would cross another stretch of the river. It probably didn’t save me a bit of time but I was at least in motion.

I started work the following Monday. I stocked car parts for the other workers—assemblers—to pull for orders. I learned later that I was getting paid a dollar more per hour than my peers, which ruffled a few feathers—something I didn’t know when I was hired. I don’t know how my co-workers found out. I enjoyed the people I worked with, though. Too many years have passed so names elude me, although I’m pretty sure one of the four or five guy assemblers I regularly cavorted with was named Steve Gilford. There were a couple of women assemblers, too… one a quiet blonde who seemed suspicious of me, and Sandy Harley, with whom I'd become smitten.


Sandy Harley, July of 1978 ©2024 Patrick T. Power

At first, I didn’t know what to make of things with her, whether she was seeing someone or not. My social clumsiness meant not asking, I guess, and I wasn’t about to ask my new co-workers, but eventually we started going out. I think one of our first dates was to go to a blues show at The Cabooze, but when we got there, it wasn’t happening. I never figured out why. We drove around for a bit and eventually found another place with live music. The band played Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns and Money” during their set, which I thought was pretty cool as I was a big fan of his, and I drank my first St. Pauli Girl. I also attended my first classical concert with Sandy—French flautist Jean-Pierre Rampal was the guest conductor with the Minneapolis Philharmonic. I bought his Suite For Flute And Jazz Piano that night. Sandy also turned me on to the Lamont Cranston Band, a local boogie-blues group that had—it was rumoured—caught the ear of John Belushi and was going to appear on Saturday Night Live that fall. We saw them at a place in Shakopee… Doc Holliday’s maybe?

The Minnesota Kicks, Minneapolis’s team in the now-defunct North American Soccer League, was a pretty big deal at the time, as was something new to me, tailgating, so a few of the guys and I met up at Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington to party on a couple of occasions. It was at my first tailgate that a couple of young women approached me seemingly out of nowhere. Had I been eyeing them up? They me? We chatted for a bit and one of them gave me her phone number and maybe even her address. It was the first time something like that had ever happened to me. Her name was… Sandy. In the weeks that followed, I picked up the phone and dialed six of the seven numbers a couple of times, but things seemed to be moving ever-so-slightly forward with Sandy number one, so I stopped and put the phone down.

Sandy, the first one, lived upstairs in a beautiful old Victorian house near Lake Of The Isles, an area made famous in the opening credits of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. We hung out there on occasion, and went canoeing on the lake once. We also picnic’d and sunbathed (mostly) at a couple of other downtown lakes, Harriet and Nokomis. The above photograph was likely taken at one of the two. I seem to recall that Lake Calhoun (which I just learned is now known by its original Dakota name Bde Maka Ska was the least of Sandy’s favourites for reasons that escape me now.

It’s interesting to me how as I write this, more details from those twelve weeks or so come to my memory’s surface. I had been a pretty major collector of rare Bob Dylan recordings for several years, so I was immersed in reading Larry Sloman’s On The Road With Bob Dylan: Rolling With The Thunder, reading it in the car during my lunch breaks. Dylan’s film Renaldo & Clara had been released in January and I’d obtained a recording of just the audio earlier in the year, so I was pretty thrilled to get a chance to actually see it in Dylan’s home state when the cut version was released.

On the 9th of August, Springsteen performed a show at The Agora Ballroom in Cleveland and it was broadcast live across the country—all three hours!—and I listened in the solitude of my room. It cinched my Bruce fandom. And wouldn’t you know it… “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)” was his first encore.

As the summer wound down, Sandy and I made a trip to the north shore of Lake Superior for a camping weekend. We stopped at her parents’ place (in Anoka, I think) and I met her mom and one of her brothers.


Sandy and my Super Beetle ©2024 Patrick T. Power

On the way up—actually a bit out of the way—we passed through Hibbing Minnesota, where Dylan had grown up. We didn’t tool around town looking for his boyhood home or anything, we just drove through on the main drag, stopping to get gas, then passing by the high school. I guess I wanted to say I’d been there since I was so close. We also made a brief stop at the Hull-Rust-Mahoning Open Pit Iron Mine, one of the other three things for which Hibbing is famous… the other two being that it’s the hometown of Roger Maris and Greyhound bus lines. The magnitude of the open pit mine is both breathtaking and heartbreaking.


Me, somewhere along the way

We camped at a totally rustic site and the only vivid memory etched in my brain is that when I washed my hair in the lake, it was so cold—despite being near the end of August—it felt like by scalp was on fire. And yet somehow, others were diving in and swimming as if it were a reasonable thing to do. I just couldn’t imagine doing to my whole self what I’d done to my scalp.

On the way back to the city, we stopped in Duluth. Sandy had gone to the University of Minnesota-Duluth so she showed me a little of the campus and told me that most—if not all—of the buildings were connected so that people wouldn’t have to deal with the sub-zero temperatures during the winter. Much of the city is built on hills, and although I had never been to the city in which I now live, I told her Duluth looked kind of like a mini-San Francisco. We went out to the North Pier Lighthouse and I snapped a series of photographs with her 110-cartridge-film camera that I later mounted as a panorama in a photography class.


Duluth panorama — Photo by Patrick T. Power. All rights reserved.

Possibly the worst moment of my summer came shortly after returning from the camping trip. I was working one day when out of the blue, Scott, a guy who worked in the office and was best buds with Sandy confronted me. He wanted to know why I had written on one of the walls of a bathroom stall that I’d had sex with Sandy during the camping trip. Of course, more vulgar terminology had been used. First of all, we hadn’t had sex, so it wouldn’t have occurred to me to write such a thing, and two, I’ve never in my life told another person—must less publicly boasted—about my private moments with a woman. It’s just not my nature. Scott seemed convinced of my innocence, that someone else had done the deed in my name. I can’t recall if I confronted anyone about it. I think the guys I hung out with liked and respected Sandy, so I didn’t really suspect any of them, but you never know. Sandy never knew until I brought it up with her many years later. I’m so glad she didn’t know about it then as it would have crushed her to know that her work mates talked about her like that.

There are a few other details I recall about the trip, such as learning that just before I’d arrived, Mike had quit smoking when his toddler son, Chris, decided he wanted to eat something from one of the ashtrays. I helped Mike with some decorative landscaping around the house, which mostly meant shoveling white stone around the patio area. Also, Mike rented a copy of the brilliant Das Boot and I somehow managed to fall asleep. I think I babysat the kids once so that Mike and Carol could have a night out. Pope Paul VI died while I was in Minneapolis, and I recall watching Wimbledon during that time and playing pool on the table just outside my room. Big A had a company picnic and we played softball. I recall one of the bosses, Dennis was his name, I think, blasted a ball over my head in center field. I got the last laugh, though, as I threw him out at third base. Also, I won a digital watch in the raffle. The battery wore out within a year or so and I never replaced it. It was the last watch I’ve owned. It had an alarm setting that played a classical piece that I can’t at the moment recall.

So much, of course, is a blur these forty-six years later.

Sandy and I remained in touch briefly after my departure. I made a surprise trip to see her on Hallowe’en that year. It didn’t go well. Scott had moved to Madison, Wisconsin by that time, so I stopped to see him on the way home seeking solace. I think she and I exchanged a couple of letters after that, and after I’d gotten married four years later, my wife and I visited her. As I think about it now, both she and Penny probably thought it was a stupid idea but neither said so. Sandy moved to the San Diego area at some point. After Big A, she went to nursing school. I don’t know if she ever got married (I guess it’s weird that I never asked), but she had a daughter twenty-some years ago. Despite that I’ve been to San Diego a couple of times for work since I moved to California, my trips were short and getting together wouldn’t have been practical. Sandy died four years ago on my son’s thirty-third birthday, 16 February 2020. In a weird kind of synchronicity, in just three days from now, on the 12th of November, she would have turned 68.

I also maintained a connection with the second Sandy for a little while. We exchanged a few letters, I sent her mix tapes (one of which I recall opened with Dylan’s “Girl Of The North Country”), we talked several times on the phone. Despite that it all seemed pretty great, it just sort of ended because sometimes distance makes decisions for us.

Seeing Zaho

or Fanboy, Part II

Aspiration ©2024 Patrick T. Power

As I wrote last month, I was excited about being able to see Zaho de Sagazan perform in person, which I did a couple of nights ago at The Independent here in San Francisco. I'd seen on her Instagram account that she had been to Montréal at least a couple of times, so I figured if I were to see her in concert, it would have to be either in Montréal or somewhere in France. I totally didn't expect she'd tour the states anytime soon, but not long after following her account, a graphic was posted that announced shows in New York, Los Angeles, and SAN FRANCISCO! Within twenty-four hours, I bought tickets and asked my former girlfriend Sophie if she wanted to go. I figured she'd like Zaho's music, so I sent a couple of YouTube links as samples. I'm glad I acted right away as the show sold out pretty quickly. (As did her two nights in New York City, where a third show was added. She also had a date in Los Angeles, but I don't believe it sold out.)

The day of the show, I had to take something to the post office, so I decided to go to the one in the Haight and along the way, stop at The Independent, where Zaho would perform. I asked one of the stage crew setting up the event if I would be able to bring my "real" camera to the show. I had attempted to contact Zaho's management to get permission to no avail so I thought it would be prudent to ask up front. She doesn't appear to have an actual website—only a merchandise site which has no contact information or webform—and looks to rely on Facebook and Instagram as her conduits to the world. I was told that "usually, cameras with interchangeable lenses" were not allowed. The operative word, of course, is "usually." I thought I'd call the office when I got home to get clarification and maybe even get permission from her management who was traveling with her, but I decided not to bother. I also considered just taking the camera and concealing it beneath my sweater but ultimately decided, "Fuck it... I'll just use the phone."

We arrived about fifteen minutes before the doors opened, and while in line, we met a couple who had traveled in from Chicago for the show. Like Sophie and I had, they'd met in Paris—he a native French person from near Rennes, in Bretagne, and she a Chicagoan. She told us that he is related in some way to Zaho (his brother is married to someone in her family, I think?). I told him that we had been to the Bretagne region in 2011 for our friends' wedding, and I showed him a picture or two from that trip. I told him the civil wedding took place in Sainte-Avé and a second one took place at the reception site at Au Domaine du Porho, which I think he searched for on his phone to discover that it was near Vannes, with which he was very familiar.

Once the doors open, we got separated from the couple as we gravitated towards the outer area of the floor space. (I saw them later in the second row of people near center stage.) We had been to a concert at The Independent only once before—to see Johnny Flynn in 2010—and we sat to the right of the stage that night. When I checked that area out, though, I found it had been reserved, so we went to the other side of the room where there was similar space. We opted instead to stand. While we waited, the venue became fuller and fuller and it became clear to me that many of the people were French, which, I determined, was why the show had sold out so quickly.

A little after 8:00, a trio of musicians came out—a woman who sang and played a keyboard and a drummer and bass player. I hadn't been aware that there'd be an opening act, but I wasn't all that surprised. She was not particularly good... neither her songs nor her voice were anything special. In fact, she often had trouble finding the notes, but I guessed she was probably nervous. The biggest response she got was a performance of The Cranberries' "Linger". I never looked into the Cranberries when they were a thing, so I didn't know the song. But Sophie did, as did the woman to our left. Both agreed that this performer's voice was no match for Dolores O'Riordan's. I said she probably should have done more cover songs.

As the time for Zaho's set drew near, we got closer to the stage. Somehow, space seemed to open up and we found ourselves about four rows away from the stage, directly in front of where a keyboard occupied the stage. I was happy with that as I knew Zaho would play a song or two at the keyboard. We got into another discussion with a woman to our left, and she and I shared how we'd become obsessed with Zaho. She had seen her performance at the opening of the Cannes Film Festival whereas, as I've noted before, a reel of her had popped up on my Instagram feed.

Zaho and her band came out a little after 9:30, and I was surprised that she immediately sat down at the keyboard. I was also surprised that the first song was "La fontaine de sang" (The Fountain of Blood) as it's a bit somber both in tone and sound. (I discoverd just now, too, that French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote a poem with the same title.) I took a photograph of her at the keyboard but because there was a light directly behind her, it created quite a bit of flare. I got better pictures of her during "Aspiration" (below, and at the top of this post).


Aspiration II ©2024 Patrick T. Power

Years ago, when I was active on the listservs for Dar Williams, Richard Shindell, and Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer, I would scribble down the setlists for shows I attended so that I could post them to the discussion lists. I sort of wish I'd done that the other night. I also sort of wish I'd taken more photographs than I did, but there was a part of me that wanted to take in the show more than I wanted to record it. I recorded no video because I didn't want to obstruct the view of anyone behind me for the length of a song. That I'm a little over six-foot tall was probably enough of an inconvenience for them.

Based on her translator-assisted conversation with English pop star Tom O'Dell, I was under the impression that Zaho didn't speak much English, so I was surprised about her rather lengthy introduction to "Mon inconnu" which tells of the love affairs she has in her head with 'unknown' people because she has no romantic love in her life.


Introducing Mon inconnu ©2024 Patrick T. Power

If she wasn't all that fluent at the time she'd met O'Dell, she has made enormous strides since; she's quite funny as well. Of course, expressing her vulnerabilities while speaking in a foreign language only made her more charming—plus charmante.


Dis-moi que tu m'aimes ©2024 Patrick T. Power

I was quite sure that when she sat down at the keyboard again she'd perform "Dis-moi que tu m'aimes" (Tell Me That You Love Me), and after a brief prelude, she played the opening notes of the song. I wasn't able to hear to know for sure, but when she paused before the first words, she reacted to someone in the audience by turning to her (I'm sure it was a woman) and half smiling/half laughing, and my thoughts were that the audience member started singing the song before Zaho was ready to start. (You can see the interaction in this video at about the 1:40 mark.) These are the things I've seen in videos that have drawn me to her as an artist. There is something about her that seems egoless. She seems to actually see her audience as more than just dollar (or Euro) signs to be collected at the end of the night. As I watched her, she regularly made eye contact with people, acknowledging them in a way I've not often seen with performers, especially those in the pop world.

Zaho also gave a lengthy introduction to what is probably her most well-known song, "La symphonie des éclairs" (Symphony of the Lightning) in which she talked about her hypersensitivity—the basis for the song—and saying that as a child, she would cry without really knowing why. It is the song, of course, that had popped up on my Instagram feed back in June or July, and I have listened to it so many times I almost have the whole thing memorized. As has been customary for some time now, Zaho extended the song a bit in order to foster a sing-along of the chorus with the audience:

Il fait toujours beau au-dessus des nuages
(It's always beautiful above the clouds)
Mais moi, si j'étais un oiseau, j'irais danser sous l'orage
(But if I were a bird, I would go dance in the storm)
Je travererais les nuages comme le fait la lumière
(I would traverse the clouds as light does)
J'écouterais sous la pluie la symphonie des éclairs
(I would listen in the rain to the symphony of the lightning)

Without a doubt, it is the centerpiece of her shows, and it has appeared to me that she thoroughly enjoys that her audiences sing along with her. I can only imagine the thrill she got when she heard it for the first time.

The concert proceeded from there into the dance portion of the evening. As I noted in my earlier post, techno-dance is part of her thing, and while several songs throughout the night were indeed dance-inducing, Zaho took off the white blouse you see in the photos above because it was time to let rip.

Now, something you don't now about me is that when I was a freshman and sophomore in high school, I danced. The Funky Chicken was big in those days, and at the school dances, it was common for little circles to form, with one person after another taking turns dancing solo in the middle of the circle. I was one of those people. But since then, I've become reluctant to dance in public for reasons I can't explain. I just lost the desire or inspiration or nerve, I guess. Still, I had a feeling that if there were a night I would dance, this might be the night. Might be. Sophie freely dances and on several occasions tried to pull me into moving and I tried. Sort of. But I just can't let go to the degree that she does or would like me to.

The last song of the evening was "Danser" (Or "Dansez", I'm not sure which) in which Zaho basically implores her audience to dance to a driving techno beat. Midway through the song, she came down into the audience to dance with the crowd. She danced for a minute or so directly in front of centerstage, then moved in my direction and stopped to dance with me, even reaching up and putting her hand on my shoulder. It was a little surreal. And I loved it. But it left me a little stunned because it just... happened! When it was over, the woman next to me, with whom I'd had the conversation earlier about how we'd discovered Zaho, tapped me on the arm in approval.

Zaho and the band left the stage then came back for an encore, David Bowie's "Modern Love", which she had performed at the Cannes Film Festival. There was more singing along. And then the show was over.

As I look through the photographs I took, I count only fifty-five frames, but all are little sequences of frames that were taken during four or five songs. Sixteen alone were taken during her introduction of "Mon inconnu." I guess that I didn't want to spend my evening taking pictures after all, although surely I would have had I brought the real camera. (I really would have preferred higher quality images, especially considering my proximity to the stage and Zaho.)

But here's the thing... I mostly appreciate having had the experience of seeing Zaho in concert... of not seeing her through someone else's lens. I'll say it again: I've not been this excited about an artist in a very long time, and even still, I can't seem to bring to words to describe why that is (despite all the words in this post). I hope I get to see her again sometime, maybe in Paris. That would be sweet. In lieu of that, I hope she thought enough of San Francisco during her brief visit (she was here for barely a day) that she returns soon. Maybe I'll have memorized most of her lyrics by then.

SET LIST (as best as I can recall, and likely not in order):
La fontaine de sang
Aspiration
Le dernier des voyages
Ô travers
Je rêve
Tristesse
Hab sex
Mon inconnu
Dis-moi que tu m'aimes
La symphonie des éclairs
Ne te regarde pas
Danser (Dansez?)
Modern Love (encore)