Dave's Fiction Warehouse

  I magine if Bob Dylan had been blessed with Timothée Chalmet’s looks and singing voice. He could have been a big star. Haha. We were getting caught up on SNL episodes the other night and finally got to this one: Timothée (not crazy about that diacritic and double e) up there covering three of Dylan’s lesser-sung tunes: “Outlaw Blues,” “Three Angels” and “Tomorrow Is a Long Time.” He did a pretty good job – just as you’d expect from someone who’s spent the last couple of years learning to ape Dylan’s style for “A Complete Unknown.” As SNL musical guests go, you could do worse. GloRilla, for example, who was on the week before. But I found something about it kind of off-putting.  There’s the shameless movie tie-in, of course, with Oscars only a month out. But then SNL’s stylish staging and video effects made it seem that Chalmet wasn’t paying tribute to Dylan so much as inhabiting the man’s persona. Here was Dylan 2.0 (in the parlance of our times), with a cuter face and clean...

The many moods of Jeannie C. I ’ve mentioned before how sometimes random songs come out of nowhere and get stuck in my head. There the song will stay for days or weeks, its various verses on infinite loop until another useless memory arrives, just as mysteriously, to replace it. It seems to happen a lot these days. I blame it on getting older. Maybe at a certain stage in life the brain decides it’s time to start clearing out the attic. So it rummages through the sagging boxes of memory, once in a while holding up random items for inspection: You want this? You sure? Maybe you should listen to it a few million times before you decide. This time the song is “Harper Valley PTA.” It’s been lodged in my head since before Father’s Day. Don’t ask me why. It was a dumb song in 1968 and it’s a really dumb song now. If there’s ever a ’60s tune I would gladly purge permanently from all recollection, this is it. Well, that and “MacArthur Park” (also from 1968). And yet my brain is humming as I w...

Blossom Dearie at the height of her powers. H appy vernal equinox! I’m a solstice man myself, preferring the extremes of too much day in June and too much night in December. But this day of balance between the two is also great and would suffice. I don’t know about you, but it feels like spring arrived a bit too soon this year. Winter came and went in a few short weeks. I had to deploy the snow shovel only half a dozen times, and probably could have gotten by with less. Winter in this part of the country is not what it used to be. But then nothing is, if you believe certain men of a certain age. Still, what are you gonna do? It’s spring, so I suppose one should clean house and do some yard work and take a walk in one’s shirtsleeves even though the mornings are still a little too chilly for that.  Or one could take a couple of minutes and listen to Blossom Dearie’s lovely “They Say It’s Spring.” (You may have to wait a few seconds to bypass the damned ads.) It’s a tune I often find...

I usually don’t just post links to things, but since no other topic leaps to mind, this video is the best thing I’ve seen in awhile: Aboard the International Space Station, Astronaut Chris Hadfield (also a Canadian) plays and sings with the Barenaked Ladies. It made me kind of misty-eyed. Apart from the cool factor, it’s also a pretty good song. And how about that photogenic young choir? I might be persuaded to sing tenor with those lovelies. I’ve long been a fan of BNL, and it’s good to see they’re still out there making music. What can I say? Canadians rule.

I'm not outraged that Apple has bumped the price of its music downloads a cool 30 percent, a move followed a day later by Amazon and then by Wal-Mart. I'm not sure why they don't raise the price 50 percent, or 100 percent, or 1,000. The music industry is on the ropes, after all, and it needs every extra freaking dime you people can spare. Screw Darfur; let's step up for Sony and EMI. All these music retailers have taken pains to point out that not all songs will cost more. Some will cost as little 64 cents -- really great songs by Yoko Ono (above) and assorted American Idol alumni who did not make it to the top 10 in season three. It's quite a bargain. Just think: Under this new pricing structure, you can have 100 tunes nobody wants for the low price of $64. Pennies, really -- 6,400 of them. I'm for anything that helps this beleaguered industry survive. I'm for anything that will put food on the table for Madonna and Britney Spears and, to a lesser extent,...