(Hey) Joe Returns to Kill Again

Songs of the folk tradition can have long umbilical cords stretching back hundreds of years.  (This one is over 800 years old.) More recently, a song like Streets of Laredo has a musical and lyrical DNA that can been traced to Irish ballads and British sea chanties from the19th century. In America, these Anglo progenitors of tune- and wordsmithery were added to a cultural gangbang of cowboy ballads and laments on the American frontier. A tradition built on a platform of African American cowboys, Mexican troubadours, and even a wank by way of New Orleans. By 1924, all of this cultural spunk ended up in the mouth and pen of cowboy singer Frank H. Maynard who was bestowed with Hey Joe’s official attribution by a journalist and academic. What exactly was Maynard’s contribution we’ll never know but before him there was likely a hundred years of curation by, and with the fingerprints of, others. So, music of the folk and minstrel traditions, and likely all music to a degree, is like a whorehouse child – aside from its mysterious progenitors, there was also a lot of stepparenting. Such is how culture is made.

This is also the history of Hey Joe, though less plains, deserts, and ocean crossings and more of an urbanized terrain – coffeehouses, taverns, and clubs. Joe also has the parentage of many donors. After this trajectory of borrowing, thieving, plagiarizing, and various appropriation, we’re left with the hard polished nugget that has been through the mouths of hundreds of recordings and performances.

And while the family tree may not be nearly as leafy as Streets of Laredo, thanks to attorneys and publisher privateers, Joe’s paternity was also forced into the possession of a stepfather with one name: Billy Roberts, a California-based folkie who’d register the song’s copyright in 1962.

Then comes Dino Valenti: Best known as the composer of The Youngblood’s Let’s Get Together (still a much-used song for period soundtracks) and Quicksilver Messenger Service’s Fresh Air, Valenti would be sent to Folsom Prison from a police shakedown and a marijuana possession charge. To pay for his defense, Valenti sold the rights to Let’s Get Together for $100. While at Folsom, Valenti would meet Billy Roberts who at the time was playing with Johnny Cash’s band when he famously played there. Valenti would talk Roberts into transferring the rights to Hey Joe to help him woo the parole board with his status as a working musician. The ruse worked and Valenti was released and soon would be peddling the song to Los Angeles record companies. Mira Records would be the first to buy. 

At Mira Records, and the reason we know the song at all, was the Angeleno garage band The Leaves. Their version would at last free the song from the folk clubs and put it on the radio with their hit 1965 recording. Their version that would be the conduit that brought Hey Joe to Jimi Hendrix’s attention. His iconic version would appear less than a year later.

After Hendrix, the tale of the gun-wielding rake of the song would receive many injustices from voices and fingerings of many along the way. Yet, it still bears the spunk of its stepparents The Leaves and Hendrix.

And then in 2002, Robert Plant and his rootsy outfit Strange Sensation offered a revitalized and reductive slow-burn take of the erstwhile overworked jewel. In Plant’s retelling, the circle of fifths refrain was diluted, droning and other non-bluesy elements were offered, and a nod of tribute to the Stratocaster of Hendrix. All coming together to gave this Joe an understated power that patiently bides its rage until nearly the end, waiting almost four minutes before releasing the full furious extent of its, er, payload.

After 55 years – and 36 after Hendrix – dusky Joe once again is fired from a gun worthy of his caliber.



And Billy Roberts; the father no one remembers:

Dylan Goes Hard

Evolution is an act of defiance. A defiance of order that’s necessary to create change and progress—this is true whether art or biology. (Whether the change is good is another matter; it’s also completely inevitable.) The birthing of evolutions, like biological birth, can produce profound labor pains.

Regarding the particular evolution of Bob Dylan, he was evolution squared: He evolved “folk music” while blithely battering it as it had been known—yet always doing it with a kind of ham-fisted love. Clearly, he was a fanboy of folk and traditional American musicks—even calling himself an acolyte of Woody Guthrie. But he could never bring himself to simply pay it homage. His evolution of the art he loved, birthed something far more radiant and radioactive. Especially when he took it electric. As we know, the loyalists were vociferously appalled. In recent interviews, Robbie Robertson addresses this issue explaining how the initial audiences were beyond disappointed—expressing shock and sometimes rage. But booing wasn't enough—people charged the stage and threw objects. One audience member famously screamed “Judas!” Dylan responds by calling them a liar.

According to Robertson, Dylan was never discouraged. The resistance only made him more defiant and utterly resolved that he was on the right path. Eventually, the audiences relented.

His songs became the gold standards of generations. The only evolution he couldn't surmount was age. So when the time came, the aged troubadour was bestowed with the Nobel Prize and the career at last set in marble and parchment for evermore: Dylan canonized as an institution.

And the traveling companion to this difficult evolution was his voice: a chameleonic instrument he’d change like a mask. With his very first album, as heard on Gospel Plow, he offers himself in a conventional gospel growl and sounds uncharacteristically tuneful. By 1966 that was all gone as evident in Like a Rolling Stone (below). At this stage, he replaces the tuneful with atonal insolence, aggressive in ways even Johnny Rotten wouldn’t match. Its defiance rendered in agonized beauty. And the songs: bouquets that often offer surprising melodic secrets when you hear other people sing them.

Dylan was more punk than Elvis ever was.

The Rolling Thunder Revue of Maggie’s Farm is Olympic and yet again, his voice is more conventionally dynamic. It’s some of the hardest music of his career. It also sounds as if he’s aware of the punk that was happening at the time. Even Dylan™ seems to realize how significant the cultural moment of punk would be—though not nearly as commercially significant as his own moment beginning 15 years before.









On A Hard Rain Is A-Gonna Fall, Dylan paints the moment as “Where black is the color/where none is the number...” And then in Like a Rolling Stone and much of the rest of Blonde on Blonde, he locks that moment into his voice: