THE NEVER-ENDING SAGA OF THE NEVER-ENDING TOUR Just some thoughts on the comments about Bob Dylan’s 1987 Wembley show, posted below by Steve, who was at that show, didn’t recognise a single song Bob played and is baffled when people describe Dylan as a genius for trashing his back catalogue ‘for his own amusement’. Steve, as he says, just doesn’t get it. Well, neither did a lot of people that night. Hence the bristling outrage in the seats behind me, where a furious John Peel could barely stifle in his anger at what Dylan was doing – Peel in fact is so livid, he writes a long and stinging article in one of the weekend’s Sunday papers, giving Bob unmerciful grief for vandalising his classic songs. What Steve and Peel ‘didn’t get’ is that this is something Dylan needed to do – as he explains in one of the most revealing sections of Chronicles. By the late-80s, Bob was in a rut of pointless touring, playing songs from his past that no longer meant anything to him. Chronic writer’s block and dwindling self-confidence meant there were no new songs for him to sing. He was at the end of his tether, lost, on the point of giving it all up. To re-connect with himself, he had to take apart the myth he had created and allowed to grow around him, which meant to an extent the dismantling of everything he had written, to find new ways into the songs that had made him famous and which meant so much to so many people This has sometimes meant taking a cosh to them, taking them apart to put them together again. To which extent, Dylan at that Wembley show wasn’t merely ‘trashing’ his back catalogue - and certainly not for his or anyone else’s simple amusement – he was trying to find himself again, and the drama of that enterprise has been a fascinating process of rediscovery and renewal that made the Never Ending Tour that followed the most compelling drama in rock. Of course, even now that things have settled down and Dylan seems at peace with himself if not the world, people still bellow and carp, apparently vexed somehow by Dylan’s endless touring. For me, Bob appearing so regularly is a bit like calling up a local decorator to come around and spruce up your living room and a couple of hours later answering the door to find Picasso standing there with a step-ladder, a brush, a couple of tins of paint and some far-out plans for your front-room ceiling – genius on tap, as it were, and no job too small. Meanwhile, if you’re in the mood for more Dylan, here’s a link to a curious bit of footage of Bob playing ‘Mr Tambourine Man’. It’s fantastic – but can anyone tell me where it’s from, where it was shot – and why? http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=1168397530

Since I made a passing reference to the forthcoming Stooges album yesterday, it occurred to me that I should write something more about this fairly auspicious event. It is, after all, the first record Iggy and the Ashetons have made together for 34 years. And it is, also. . . Well. . . OK. First up, as I suggested in my last post, Awesome Color's debut album does this sort of thing better. And comparing "The Weirdness" to the first three Stooges LPs is a bit of a disaster. But let's accentuate the positive, for a paragraph at least. The first couple of songs, especially "Trolling", are great. It's a pleasure to hear Iggy fronting a band that sound like a street gang, rather than session metal musicians. Ron Asheton is in fiercely crude form. Steve Albini's production is crisp and raw. There's no doubt it all feels fresher than any number of will-this-do? Iggy solo albums. Under the circumstances - men approaching 60 trying to sound like tremendously dumb delinquents, fixated on their cocks - that should be enough. The thing is, though, I'd convinced myself "The Weirdness" was going to be a total return to form. The collaborative tracks on Iggy's last album, "Skull Ring" - especially "Electric Chair" - were really promising, and a song on a Junior Kimbrough tribute ("You Better Run") was genuinely excellent. Most baffling is that while priapic, fearless Iggy sings incessantly about his penis, he sounds exhausted; curiously weedy, even, as he staggers around, croaking his way around the vicinity of notes, buried deep in the mix. Who'd have thought, especially after their fine gigs in the last couple of years, that the Stooges' singer would prove to be the weak link?

I haven’t been drinking, and I’m not being merely mopey or hoping that someone with the right kind of clout will read this and give me as a result of what I’m about to say a substantial pay rise – I really mean it when I say I can’t think of a better job than editing Uncut. Sure, some days it’s nose to grindstone, not exactly shifts at the coal face or the biscuit tin factory, but hard enough work in its own way. But most days of most weeks, it really feels like the best job in the world. I mean, take today. I’ve just come back from a lunchtime press conference at somewhere called The Hospital in central London, where The Who announced the dates for their 2007 European tour, at which the band – or what’s left of the original line-up, namely Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey - played a four-song 20-minute acoustic set and then hilariously fielded questions from a motley cross section of journalists that suggested they may somewhere in the past have missed parallel careers as a comedy duo. After some apparent technical hitch that had serious-looking boffin types muttering mysteriously into various miniature microphones and tugging at the leads, wires and connections necessary for the performance and simultaneous webcast, the right plug seemed to find the appropriate socket and into the large converted exhibition space where a small stage had been decorated with The Who logo and two chrome and leather stools had been placed, in walked Townshend and Daltrey, Pete picking up an acoustic guitar and provocatively announcing “a reactionary rock’n’roll song about bringing back the Conservative party and elevating racism and Nazism”. Cue a furious “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, Townshend giving the guitar a fair hammering, and Daltrey delivering the kind of vocal delivery often described as “blistering”. It was about 12.30 at this point, and it struck me as unlikely that either Townshend or Daltrey has played this early in the day to an audience since they went on at Woodstock , just as the sun was coming up. Anyway, back at The Hospital, Townshend is telling us why they’re here. “Basically,” he says, “Roger wanted to prove to you cynical press people that he can still do this.” “Do what?” Daltrey wants to know. “What you’re doing.” “I just didn’t want to have to sit at a table, answering stupid questions,” Daltrey admits, people in the audience closing their notebooks quietly. They then play, beautifully, “Behind Blue Eyes”. Townshend follows this with a very funny account of the recent South Bank Awards ceremony, at which he sat next to conceptual artists Gilbert and George. The Who had been presented with an award, before which clips of them in their 60s prime had been shown. Upon resuming his seat, Gilbert – “the extremely faggy one,” of the famed artistic duo, according to Townshend – had said something to the effect that in the slides just shown Pete looked young and beautiful and now looked old and rather resembled a vicar. “I said, ‘You little cunt, that’s how I may look now, but you’ve ALWAYS looked like a vicar.’” Townshend and Daltrey then play “Mike Post Theme” and “Tea And Theatre”, the poignancy of the latter’s lyrics seeming for a moment to get to Daltrey, who by the song’s lingering climax seemed visibly moved by what he’d been singing. As lunchtimes go, it went. Brilliantly.

Feels a bit like 1987 here again; after raving over Dinosaur Jr's unlikely renaissance yesterday, today's Uncut pin-up boy is Thurston Moore. Not that he's releasing anything new with Sonic Youth, as far as I know. But for the past 25-odd years, Moore has been running a label called Ecstatic Peace, a home for some pretty deranged music - not least his own extra-curricular projects, where Moore pits himself against various heroes of free jazz, subterranean noise, art-skronk and that kind of thing. What's happening right now, though, is that Ecstatic Peace has finally committed to proper UK distribution, which means there's a bunch of excellent albums coming out here in March. We've been hammering a couple, especially. One is by a youngish Ann Arbor trio called Awesome Color, whose stab at sounding like The Stooges circa 1970 is slightly more convincing than the efforts of Iggy, at least, on the forthcoming Stooges comeback. Awesome Color were purportedly taught their skills by Scott Asheton, and they've got that evil "Funhouse" drone down to a tee. Thurston produced this one, too. The other is "Green Blues", yet another psych-folk beauty, by a wild collective called MV + EE And The Bummer Road. The gist here is that, while acid folk's West Coast acid folkies like Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom have gone overground, East Coast originators like MV + EE have become more feral and uncompromising. There's a lot more about this one in next month's Uncut. But anyway, J Mascis plays Mellotron on it, and I promise I'll find something to write about tomorrow that has nothing to do with the old flake.