Monday, March 9, 2009

My poetry was lousy, you said.

My parents kept the record player in the dining room of the house I grew up in. Most of the time the room was purely utilitarian, and all but a couple of the memories I have of it involve Christmas dinners, that record player and listening to Donovan in particular, as well as once deciding I was recovered enough from the flu to play ping pong and discovering I wasn't, are about all I can come up with.

My love of Dylan came from my dad, The Beatles too, but by the time I was digging through his record collection, it had spent too much time in an attic in Ohio, and most of it had warped.

My mom on the other hand has at times questionable taste. A fair number of Christmas dinners were eaten with new age versions of carols in the background, but she has moments of clarity too. Tim Buckley, Leonard Cohen. We saw Joan Baez with her on Saturday.

Joan was great. Besides Dylan, she covered John Lennon, The Carter Family, Elvis Costello, and Donovan. I would have left happy having only heard Diamonds and Rust.

My favorite YouTube videos are usually taken from live television performances in Europe. I can't quite embrace home movies made at concerts. I searched and searched, and before finding the right version to post, I also found that Judas Priest covered my favorite Joan song. I've never really listened to JP, and even knowing they took their name from a Dylan song, it surprised me. I wonder if the shred bands that covered JP's version and posted their clips knew where the song originally came from.