I don’t know what it means either is an index to the current series appearing on this website. Wallflower Part 1 is here.
Details of the book “Bob Dylan’s 1971” which is available in English, Dutch and German, and how it can be ordered are given at the end of the article.
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1971 is the fourth year of Dylan’s Seven Lean Years, the dry spell that Dylan himself places between John Wesley Harding (late 1967) and Blood On The Tracks (late 1974). These are the years when Dylan sits on the waterfront, watching the river flow, waiting for the inspiration to paint a masterpiece.
Then, in January ’71, a tape of Leon Russell floats by, inspiring a brief but long-legged revival: the songs Dylan recorded with Russell in March ’71 are on the setlist 50 years later, throughout the Rough & Rowdy Ways World Tour 2021-2024, night after night, some 200 times.
Apparently, they mean something to Dylan…
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Wallflower (1971) part 2
by Jochen Markhorst
II “He once played with Hank Williams!”
“That was the Sir Douglas Quintet, the greatest little English group from San Antonio Texas, lead by Doug Sahm, featuring Augie Meyers on the Vox organ. Doug was a child prodigy. He turned down a spot on the Grand Ole Opry in order to finish Junior High School. As a youth he performed on stage with Hank Williams. Over the course of his career, he combined country, blues, R&B, Mexican conjunto, norteño and cajun music, along with British Invasion rock ‘n’ roll, garage rock and even a little bit of psychedelic into music which could only be called pure Doug Sahm.”
(Dylan in Theme Time Radio Hour Episode 6, “Jail”, aired on June 7, 2006)
DJ Dylan is a fan, in his Theme Time Radio Hour. In the three seasons of the radio show he plays a Doug Sahm record five times (twice Doug Sahm solo, three times Sir Douglas Quintet), each time with resounding words for the Texan. He calls him the great Doug Sahm, twice the DJ recalls that Doug was a child prodigy who stood on stage with the greats already as a little schoolboy, and likewise twice the impressed DJ reports, “As a matter of fact he once played with Hank Williams!” And Augie Meyers being a member of the band is also worth a mention every time – including a brief biography, in which the DJ tells the amusing anecdote of how Augie became such a great keyboardist:
“He was raised by his grandparents, and they didn’t want him to wander off. So they tied a six-foot rope to him, and tied the other end to the family piano. Augie realized he couldn’t go anywhere other than the piano – and learned how to play it. And we’re glad he did.”
Not empty words. The musician Dylan is an outspoken fan of Augie as well, has him playing mood defining parts on Time Out Of Mind and “Love And Theft”, calls him “the shining example of a musician, Vox player or otherwise, who can break the code,” and seeking his advice in the studio;
“When he did Time Out Of Mind, he says Augie, if you and Doug did this thing, what would you do? I said now we wouldn’t have two different drummers, we wouldn’t have two very different guitar players. I said you write this on the piano or on the guitar? He said I wrote it on the piano. So well you play piano and I’ll play organ, just this here organ in the back. And that’s the way we did it. And he would ask me questions like that. Which was nice.”
(Augie Meyers interview on The Paul Leslie Hour, 2020)
Dylan’s first studio experience with Augie was a quarter of a century before those Time Out Of Mind sessions in 1997: at Atlantic Recording Studios in New York, 1972. On Monday 9 October, Dylan reported there for the first of four sessions (9-12 October) to record Doug Sahm’s first solo record Doug Sahm and Band under the direction of Arif Mardin and Jerry Wexler.
It is a remarkable, unusual footnote in Dylan’s rich career. It almost seems as if Sahm asked him to join the band, and Dylan accepted the invitation. In the liner notes he unobtrusively ranks sixth in the list of musicians, after Doug Sahm, after violinist Ken Kosek, drummer George Rains, bassist Jack Barber and Augie Meyers. With no particular distinction, either: “Bob Dylan – vocal, harmony, guitar, harp, Hammond organ & Vox organ”, and then the list simply continues with Dr John, David Bromberg and 11 more musicians. With names we will encounter again later in Dylan’s career, by the way.
Jerry Wexler, of course, who will produce Slow Train Coming so beautifully in 1979. David Bromberg Dylan already knew from Self Portrait and New Morning, and in June 1992, the two men will record a whole slew of covers – recordings, a few of which are circulating in bootleg circles and contain wonderful gems (Jimmie Rodgers‘ “Sloppy Drunk”, for example), and two of which will eventually be added to The Bootleg Series, Volume 8: Tell Tale Signs (“Duncan And Brady” and “Miss The Mississippi And You”), but most of which are still waiting for an official release.
And furthermore, men like Flaco Jimenez, the admired accordion prodigy, Augie Meyers of course (who is persistently, three times, referred to as “Augie Meyer” on the sleeve), the legendary Dr John, the brilliant saxophonist David ‘Fathead’ Newman… it’s definitely a band in which you can imagine Dylan would feel perfectly happy. With Bromberg and Sahm alone, he would have two walking jukeboxes alongside him who are just as music-encyclopaedically versed as himself.
For each of the 12 songs, Doug Sahm lists some additional information on the cover, where it is not entirely clear why he mentions some musicians and not others. For example, under the title of the opening track “(Is Anybody Going To) San Antone” we read: “Charlie Owens, steel; Doug Sahm & Bob Dylan, vocals; Doug Sahm & Ken Kosek, twin fiddles.” Dylan is listed separately on three more songs. “Bob Dylan, lead guitar”, “Bob Dylan, guitar solo” and “Bob Dylan, harp”. On which songs Dylan then plays “Hammond organ” and “Vox organ”, and what he contributed to the other eight songs at all, is not clear.
What is mentioned though – of course – is a songwriter’s credit. As a valued band member, Dylan gets to contribute one song, much like Harrison with The Beatles – perhaps if the band had existed longer and made more records, Dylan, like George, would have been allowed to write more songs over the years. Anyway, at least now he gets to contribute one. And so this is the album with the official world premiere of the Dylan song “Wallflower”. Side A, track 5:
- Wallflower
(By Bob Dylan; ram’s horn music, ascap. Time: 2:35)
Bob Dylan, lead guitar; Dave Bromberg, dobro; Dr. John organ; Bob &
Doug, vocals.
Doug Sahm and Band – Wallflower
It is an enjoyable introduction. Loose, upbeat and pleasantly messy. The start is hesitant, Dylan’s and Sahm’s harmony vocals are unpolished and mixed rather far back, they are not 100% text-proof, Flaco Jimenez’s accordion is leading, the drums sound as if one of the coffee ladies has taken a seat behind the kit for a moment, and the overall association is: “The Band in a spring mood.” Dr John’s organ does have a Garth Hudson vibe, Robbie Robertson could not have bettered Bromberg’s dobro.
David Bromberg seems particularly enamoured with the song. The first cover is to his name anyway, on 1974’s Wanted Dead Or Alive, as an appealing bluegrass ballad with an inspired inner dynamic – from joyfully carefree to poignantly desperate. The song remains on his setlist. On Live New York City 1982, “Wallflower” can be found again, again in a scintillating performance, and in 2023, the now 77-year-old Bromberg is still playing the song, still just as passionate, with “very special guest” Jeff Tweedy as guest vocalist. At New York’s Beacon Theatre on Broadway, half an hour’s walk from the Atlantic Recording Studios at 157 W 57th Street, where more than fifty years earlier he forged that first official recording of “Wallflower” with Dylan and Sahm.
David Bromberg & His Big Band ft. Jeff Tweedy – Wallflower:
To be continued. Next up Wallflower part 3: Really it’s just a sad song
NL: Bob Dylans 1971 : Markhorst, Jochen: Amazon.nl: Boeken
UK: Bob Dylan’s 1971 (The Songs Of Bob Dylan): Amazon.co.uk: Markhorst, Jochen: 9798329337044: Books
US: Bob Dylan’s 1971 (The Songs Of Bob Dylan): Markhorst, Jochen: 9798329337044: Amazon.com: Books
DE: Bob Dylans 1971 (Die Songs von Bob Dylan) : Markhorst, Jochen: Amazon.de: Boeken
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
- Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
- Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
- Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
- Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
- Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
- Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
- Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
- John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
- Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
- Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
- Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2nd Big Bang
- Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
- Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
- Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
- Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
- I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
- Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
- Bob Dylan’s 1971