the beach boys

June 27, 2025June 27, 2025

Farewell to a Beach Boy

Sometimes, I feel as if I am on dead-rock-star speed dial.
Ever since publication of Rock and Roll is Here to Stay a quarter century ago (and which you can order here), I get calls from reporters before the body gets cold.

And sometimes, the body is still warm.

After Hurricane Katrina, I got a lot of calls from journalists putting together obituaries. Problem was, Fats Domino wasn’t dead yet. He was rescued from the attic of the house where he’d hunkered down. (Or, considering he was found in the attic, let’s make that hunkered up.)

When Maurice Gibb of the BeeGees died, I was happy to talk about the beautiful harmonies those Gibb brothers spawned. Yet the AP reporter didn’t quote my comment on what I thought was one of the singer’s greatest achievements (“He fought a valiant battle against a receding hairline.”)

When Brian Wilson died earlier this month, I missed the call from the BBC and by the time I returned the message we’d passed another full news cycle. I’m not as diligent about responding during the summer.

The Los Angeles Times didn’t call me, but quoted me anyway. In this piece, they had me saying something I have no memory of saying and affiliating me with the University of Florida, with which I have not been affiliated for 15 years.

**The Beach Boys in 1970, around the time they recorded Sunflower. Left to right: Carl Wilson, Bruce Johnston, Mike Love, Brian Wilson, Alan Jardine and Dennis Wilson.**

All right, I wasn’t really crying. It was a huge loss to the world of music and to my life. Brian has been a part of my world for decades.

At least I was lucky to get the news from my pal and fellow Brian Wilson believer, Wayne Garcia. Wayne named his firstborn Brian. I’ve never gone that far, but that’s mostly to avoid saddling a child with “BM” for initials.

Brian was the only Beach Boy I never interviewed. In my Saturday Evening Post days, my mentor Starkey Flythe and I collaborated on a profile of the band for the magazine. “The Endless Summer of the Beach Boys” was credited to Samuel Walton, one of Starkey’s pseudonyms. (A plethora of pseudonymns gave readers the impression the magazine had a large staff. This was a time, my friends, before the world at large had knowledge of Walmart and its founder, with whom we shared that pseudonymn. Starkey also masqueraded as F.X. O’Connor. I liked the pen name Captain Asparagus, which I’d seen in a local zine.)

Starkey and I followed the Boys through a couple of gigs to get material for the story.

During the stay in Cincinnati on their annual summer tour, we had dinner with Mike Love and his wife. Mike is a divisive figure with fans, but all I can say is that he was a charming dinner companion, even if he did not accept my revised “California Girls” lyrics for my proposed “Prehistoric Girls:”

Well, neanderthal girls are hip, I really dig the skins they wear
And the cro-mangon girls, with the way they stalk,
They knock me out when I’m down there
The Midwest savages’ daughters really make me feel all right
And the Mayan girls, with the way they kiss,
They keep those temples warm at night
I wish they all could be prehistoric girls

Mike gave me a hard pass. (And yes, I know I am bending science history to put together this paean.)

(Later, in the 1990s, I thought about sending Mike new lyrics to be paired with the “Catch a Wave” music: Get your keyboard and go internet surfin’ with me. The scary thing is, Mike might’ve gone for that one.)

We had a great afternoon interviewing Carl Wilson and Alan Jardine. I still have a song in my head that Jardine was writing about polypeptides. (This was in the days when the Beach Boys were uber-creative, before they were doomed to life as an oldies band.)

Dennis Wilson did not want to be intervewed but asked us to his room to watch TV, then ride with him to the concert venue, Cincinnati’s Riverfront Colliseum. He was a wonderful guy. I ended up interviewing him three times over the years and he was always enchanting and hilarious. He was generous with his time and talent.

I never interviewed Brian, but perhaps that’s just as well. Starkey interviewed him when he was on the West Coast for another assignment. He said it was the weirdest interview he’d ever done. Brian was in his chain-smoking 340-pound period.

Starkey told me he’d mentioned me to Brian.

“Brian,” he said by way of introduction, “I bear greetings from your biggest fan.”

“Who’s that?” bathrobed Brian growled.

“Bill McKeen.”

Brian pondered for a minute, searching the fulsome settlings in his brain. “Never heard of him.”

I have been a Beach Boys fan for nearly 60 years. I discovered them during that lost period after their initial fame and before they were rediscovered as an oldies act.

If you truly love the Beach Boys, then they drive you crazy. You know they are / were capable of greatness. And you also know they can / did produce some sub-par stuff.

Years ago, a writer for the Florida Times Union in Jacksonville wrote something like this:

We can put a man on the moon, but we can’t stop people from wearing spandex pants to the mail. The Beach Boys will drive you crazy that way.

I wish I had kept that artice so I could acknowledge the writer and get the quote right.

I hardly ever listen to the early Beach Boys stuff, much as I liked it. Yet when I learned Brian died, my hand — working independetly from my brain — reached into my record bin for All Summer Long (1964).

Some of those early albums (OK, Shut Down Vol. 2, All Summer Long and Today) were marred by needle-lifting skits that I despise. At least the one on All Summer Long is kind of funny.

I prefer the albums of the “lost years,” after the huge early fame and after Brian’s magnum opus, Smile, went down in flames (which he resurrected in 2004). Those albums were all commercial flops but they remain pure and beautiful healing music: Smiley Smile and Wild Honey (both 1967), Friends (1968), 20/20 (1969), Sunflower (1970), Surf’s Up (1971) and Holland (1973). I leave out only So Tough (1972) because that album was a mixed bag — and short. (In my old age, I’ve grown to appreciate it more.)

So when I feel like listening to the Beach Boys, those albums are the ones I reach for. The band’s last album, That’s Why God Made the Radio (2012) had some of the most sublime moments in the group’s history. The last three songs on the album are heartbreakingly beautiful. The last song on their last album was, appropriately enough, called “Summer’s Gone.” It was grandly depressing and majestic.

A fan’s alternate cover for *Pet Sounds*

I have reverence for Pet Sounds (1966). Listening to it is often difficult for the emotions it churns up. It has been an indelible part of my life since I was in a teen-ager with an 8-track in my Opal, with Pet Sounds on a continual loop. That tape stayed in the player for a year, and I heard the album so much it seeped into my sinews. Kind of like Steve McQueen in The Blob: this thing absorbed me and became part of my essence.

The album is so good that I can’t listen to it. It takes too much out of me.

Plus, I don’t have to listen to it. Every vocal, every note, every banjo strum, every drum bash, every belching tuba and barking dog is stored in my head.

There’s a lot to be said about Brian. He had an odd (no surprise there) solo career that included the occasional brilliant piece of original work — That Lucky Old Sun (2008) — and intriguing albums devoted to George Gershwin and Disney music.

The Wilson brothers are all gone now. To me, the Beach Boys ceased to be when Carl Wilson died in 1998. With no Wilson onstage, there were no Beach Boys. What’s out there on the road is Mike Love with a very good (I’m told) Beach Boys tribute band.

So. Brian is gone.

We toil in melancholy, but as Brian’s music often helped me to do, I find some kind of joy inside the sadness.

**Click on the cover to order the book.**

I used the Beach Boys to frame my story of Los Angeles music in the 1960s, Everybody Had An Ocean (which you can order by clicking on the cover at left) and here’s how that book ended:

“Creating art allows us to beat the odds and find immortality, without having to do the whole Doctor Faustus thing. Though Brian Wilson and Mike Love no longer collaborate and Carl and Dennis Wilson are gone, they are all still together on the radio late at night, where they join voices and are young and golden and beautiful forever.”

And now, for fun, here are my favorite Beach Boys songs in chronological order. I realize no one gives a shit about this, but I like to amuse myself.

You will note the absence of “Kokomo” on this list. This is not an oversight. Brian was in California and was told about the “Kokomo” session in Atlanta only 24 hours before the studio was scheduled. He was unable to make the session. Brian was also absent from the recording of “I Can Hear Music” in 1969. That was during a rough period when he had trouble engaging with the human race, and marked sort of a changing of the guard. The Master (Brian) had taught his young grasshopper (Carl) well.

**Carl Wilson became the leader of the band onstage and in the studio after Brian withdrew to his room in the late 1960s.**

Both “Kokomo” and “I Can Hear Music” feature Carl’s angelic voice. It was funny to see the flurry of posts by fans after Brian’s death. Seems like everyone posted “Kokomo,” a song on which he did nothing.

So here is my list, though no one outside a lunatic asylum cares about this:

1962: “Surfin’ Safari.”
1963: “Surfin’ USA,” “Farmer’s Daughter,” “Shut Down,” “Surfer Girl,” “Catch a Wave,” “The Surfer Moon,” “In My Room,” “Our Car Club,” “Boogie Woodie,” “Little Deuce Coupe,” “Car Crazy Cutie” (musically identical to “Pamela Jean”), “Cherry Cherry Coupe.”
1964: “Fun Fun Fun,” “Don’t Worry Baby,” “The Warmth of the Sun,” “This Car of Mine,” “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” * “I Get Around,” ” All Summer Long,” “Hushabye,” * “Little Honda,” “We’ll Run Away,” “Wendy,” “Don’t Back Down.”
1965: “Do You Wanna Dance?,” * “Good to My Baby,” “Don’t Hurt My Little Sister,” “Dance Dance Dance,” “Please Let Me Wonder,” “I’m So Young,”* “Kiss Me Baby,” “In the Back of My Mind,” “The Girl From New York City,” “Girl Don’t Tell Me,” “Help Me Rhonda,” “California Girls,” “You’re So Good to Me,” “The Little Girl I Once Knew.”
1966: “Wouldn’t it Be Nice?,” “You Still Believe in Me,” “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder),” “I’m Waiting for the Day,” “Sloop John B,” * “God Only Knows,” “Caroline No,” “Good Vibrations.”
1967: “Heroes and Villains,” “Vegetables,” “Little Pad,” “Wind Chimes, “Wonderful,” “Wild Honey,” “Darlin’,” “Aren’t You Glad,” “I Was Made to Love Her,”* ” Let the Wind Blow,” “Mama Says.”
1968: “Friends,” “Wake the World,” “Little Bird,” ** “Be Still.” **
1969: “Do it Again,” “I Can Hear Music,” * “Cotton Fields,” * “I Went to Sleep,” “Time to Get Alone,” “Our Prayer,” “Celebrate the News,” ** “Cabinessence.”
1970: “Their Hearts Were Full of Spring,”* “Slip on Through,”** ” This Whole World,” “Add Some Music to Your Day,” “It’s About Time,” ** ” Forever,” ** “All I Wanna Do,” “At My Window,” “Cool Cool Water.”
1971: “Long Promised Road,” *** “Feel Flows,” *** “‘Til I Die,” “Surf’s Up.”
1972: “You Need a Mess of Help to Stand Alone,” “Marcella,” “All This is That,” “He Come Down,” “Cuddle Up.” **
1973: “Sail On Sailor,” “Steamboat,” ** “California,” # “The Trader,” *** “Only With You,” ** “Funky Pretty.”
1976: “Palisades Park.”*
1977: “Mona,” “Johnny Carson,” “Good Time,” “Honkin’ Down the Highway,” “The Night Was So Young,” “I’ll Bet He’s Nice,” “I Wanna Pick You Up,” “Airplane.”
1978: “Sweet Sunday Love.”
1979: “Good Timin’,” “I’ll Be in Heaven When My Angel Comes Home,” *** “Love Surrounds Me,” ** “Baby Blue.” **
1980: “Goin’ On,” “Sunshine.”
1981: “San Miguel.” **
1985: “I’m So Lonely.”
1986: “California Dreamin.’ ” *
1998: “Soulful Old Man Sunshine,” “Loop De Loop,” “Sail Plane Song,” “Barbara.” **
2012: “That’s Why God Made the Radio,” “Isn’t it Time,” “From There to Back Again,” “”Summer’s Gone.”

All songs by Brian Wilson, usually with a collaborator or two. The exceptions are (*) songs written by people outside the group. Other songs written by (**) Dennis Wilson, (***) Carl Wilson and (#) Alan Jardine. These are in order by release date. “San Miguel,” for example, was recording in 1969-70, but not released until 1981.

August 13, 2024June 28, 2025

The Heroes of Woodstock

This was written for Curiosity Stream.

The Woodstock Music and Arts Fair wasn’t even in Woodstock when it planted its cultural flag 55 years ago. Woodstock didn’t want the festival. Neither did neighboring towns in upstate New York. An industrial park downstate even passed on the opportunity.

**Woodstock Ventures logo (PRNewsFoto/Woodstock Ventures)**

So when we look back on that momentous weekend of music, the first hero we see is a dairy farmer named Max Yasgur, who offered his fields near White Lake, New York, to the high and hirsute concertgoers.

The festival’s four investors saw the horde descending on the concert site and decided to forego profit and turn it into a free-for-all. Though it took years to repay the debt, it was the right decision.

For the record, the business half of the mangement team was John Rosenman and John Roberts, self-described as “young men with unlimited capital.” The music-and-artists half of the team was promoter Michael Lang — the ever-smiling explosion of curls who became the face of Woodstock — and Artie Kornfeld.

(Kornfeld had an interesting career trajectory. He was just a few years down the road from the time he wrote car songs with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and Jan Berry of Jan and Dean. After that, he became the producer for the Cowsills, the family band he had brought to prominence. The Cowsills became the model for the television show “The Partridge Family.”)

Certain impending apocalyptic disaster was avoided due to the soothing and soporific voice of emcee Chip Monck, cautioning the crowd about poor-quality acid, and Hugh Romney (aka “Wavy Gravy”), the commune leader who helped feed the masses and care for those overcome by the event and / or drugs.

Romney deserves enormous credit, not only for helping Monck keep a calming and placid lid on the weekend, but for solving the too-real problem of feeding many more guests than were expected. (Apropos of nothing, it’s interesting to note that Romney was married to Jahanara Romney, who — as Bonnie Beecher — had inspired the song “Girl from the North Country,” written by her college-era boyfriend, Bob Dylan.)

That weekend also gave us indelible images of a generation of musicians:

Jimi Hendrix played to the departing crowds on the festival’s last day, delivering a pre-elegiac performance. (He was dead 13 months later.) His version of the national anthem became iconic.

Janis Joplin sang with grit and fervor, lost and fragile and unbearably intimate in front of a half-million listeners.

Sly Stone was his revolutionary self, bringing together the sacred and profrance with a beat you could dance to.

Rain-soaked Joe Cocker passed on a message from the absent Beatles: we get by with a little help from our friends.

Of course, not everyone as at their best. Members of the Grateful Dead still shake their heads over how bad they were at Woodstock. Jerry Garcia once said the Dead always seemed to be at their worst when they had the largest audiences.

Maybe you were among the half million that wallowed in Max Yasgur’s mud. The odds are against it, so what you know of Woodstock comes from the three-hour documentary film — oddly, called Woodstock — released in 1970.

The film crew that worked for director Michael Wadleigh included a diminutive cameraman scrambling around the front of the stage.

That young filmmaker, Martin Scorsese, trained his camera on the ecstatic faces and the skilled-and-sure fingers of the performers. He offered the film audience an intimate view of musicians at work. (Let’s tip our hat to Scorcese’s long-time collaborator, Thelma Schoonmaker, whose innovative editing talents conveyed the weekend’s magic.)

Woodstock was the career-making performance by a new group from San Francisco called Santana. Michael Shrieve, the group’s drummer, had turned 20 just the month before. The closeup images of Shrieve that appeared a year later in the Woodstock documentary showed a creative mind at work — you can admire Shrieve’s ability during his solo, but the camera’s focus on his eyes as he challenges and surprises himself is revelatory.

It’s a rare and wonderful look at an artist at work. More than a half-century after that weekend, we still have that. All those involved in telling the story are heroes of a sort.

Woodstock set a standard still in need of an equal.

December 22, 2022June 28, 2025

22 Chicken Skin Moments

Chicken Skin Music was the title of a Ry Cooder album of long ago. The title referred to music that gave you chills.

Since we waste time on social media with lists, I decided to list the songs that unfailingly give me this feeling.

Goose bumps. Hair on the back of the neck. That stuff. Nearly all Celtic music does that to me. It must be my ancestors calling.

But for the list. I’ll try to be specific and point out the parts of songs that affect me so.

This is just today’s list. Another day might be radically different.

Great collection of songs here. You can thank me later for giving you this wonderful afternoon of listening. Click on the title to hear the music.

Let’s start with Ryland Peter Cooder.

“Rally ‘Round the Flag” by Ry Cooder. He sounds like the last survivor of Chickamauga. He can barely mutter the battle cry of freedom, but he’s determined to try. This might get us off to a slow start with our musical program, but so what? I believe that’s Van Dyke Parks on piano. Great slide playing, of course. (Ry Cooder, duh.)

“My Back Pages” by the Byrds. The whole thing, but especially McGuinn’s evocative solo. We could also add “Chestnut Mare.” To me, the solo carries the emotional weight of the brilliant lyrics. This has become my motto — I was so much older then; I am younger than that now.

“Series of Dreams” by Bob Dylan . Especially his buildup to the fade and the fade. There’s something swirling and mythic and wonderful about this song. I always put it on repeat. I’ve often played it four or five times in a row.

“The Dark End of the Street” by Aretha Franklin. There are so many great versions of this song, from James Carr‘s original to the version by the songwriter, Dan Penn. (The Clarence Carter version is below.) But the bridge of Franklin’s version takes us to Jupiter. It’s truly, deeply otherworldly. And that desperation: “They’re gonna find us, they’re gonna find us.”

“Mother Country” by John Stewart. Especially the second verse about the blind man in the sulky. I don’t like narration in songs, but John Stewart pulls it off. From the opening strum, this song has me.

“This Whole World” by the Beach Boys. Brian Wilson’s moment at the end, when the instruments drop out and it’s just him. Or maybe that’s Carl Wilson. They give us this whole world … and they bring it in under two minutes. This is beauty and craftsmanship.

“Not Fade Away” by the Rolling Stones. The opening chords. I fucking love Buddy Holly, but dude, the Stones beat you at your own game on this one.

“Gulf Coast Highway” by Nanci Griffith. She kept re-recording this, but she got it right the first time (in the 1988 recording) with Mac MacAnally. When she gets to the final verse, I nearly go into a coma. If only she’d spelled her first name Nancy, she would have been perfection.

“Candy’s Room” by Bruce Springsteen. After the whispered introduction, Max Weinberg’s drums explode into the song and create one of those Great Moments in Rock’n’Roll History.

“Sweet Old World” by Emmylou Harris. Just about everything on the Wrecking Ball album gives me chills. It’s that Daniel Lanois fellow, her producer. He knows how to push those buttons. For more Emmylou chicken skin, listen to her Christmas album as Neil Young flies in from Mars to warble ‘hallelujah’ in the background of “Light of the Stable.”

“Four Strong Winds” by Ian and Sylvia. The whole damn thing. A nearly perfect recording. Ian Tyson gets the testosterone boiling. This is a beautiful blend of male and female voices. Sylvia Fricker sings so beautifully on “Someday Soon.”

“Add Some Music to Your Day” by the Beach Boys. A pleasant enough song until midpoint, when Brian (or is it Carl?) sings, “Music, when you’re alone, is like a companion for your lonely soul.” Then he soars. Poultry time, my friends. Pawk, pawk.

“Bugler” by The Byrds. Sung by Clarence White. A boy tells us how his dog, his best friend, died. This reminds me so much of my childhood in Texas … and that old movie, Biscuit Eater. (Don’t get me started on Old Yeller.) When one of our family dogs died, we were not allowed to utter the dead dog’s name again. Dry your eyes and stand up straight — Bugler’s got a place at the pearly gates.

“That Lovin’-You Feelin’ Again” by Emmylou Harris & Roy Orbison. Lord, I’m a mushpot. But I can’t deny that I love this song. What beautiful voices.

“Like a Rolling Stone” by Bob Dylan. Yes. Every time I hear it, I’m slayed. I’ve never been able to hear this without turning it up. I especially like it as the song roars toward the conclusion and Dylan makes that sound, as if he can’t himself believe what he’s in the middle of doing. Fucking awesome. Every time I hear it.

“Making Love (at the Dark End of the Street)” by Clarence Carter. He used only one verse from the original “Dark End of the Street” and spends the first part of the song preaching about cattle copulating. Never have I heard the ridiculous and sublime so well married in a song. After talking about mosquitos fucking, he manages to achieve some kind of majesty at the end of the song. Chills. And marvel: how did he do that?

“Hello in There” by John Prine. Thinking about my late grandparents. Prine’s whole body of work is chicken skin music. Sometimes, his songs are so good that I can’t listen to them. I’m afraid I’d collapse. On The Tree of Forgiveness (2018), his last album, there’s a song called “Summer’s End.” It destroys me. From beginning to end, John Prine had it.

“2000 Miles” by the Pretenders. The way Chrissie Hyde’s voice rises as she sings “it must be Christmastime.” I have a firm tactile memory of this song — driving cross-country through a blizzard to see my children. I always associate this and Dylan’s Infidels and Emmylou’s Wrecking Ball as cold-weather albums.

“Me and the Wildwood Rose” by Carlene Carter. The best and most autobiographical song on an album dealing with her considerable family legacy. The last verse moves one to tears. Great storytelling. If you loved a grandparent, you’ll understand.

“The Lakes of Ponchatrain” by Trapezoid. Feel free to assassinate me while this song is playing. It’s so beautiful, I won’t mind. Really. The dulcimer solo carries home this song of doomed and impossible love.

“Mama Tried” by the Everly Brothers. On the great Roots album, this follows a snippet from an Everly Family radio broadcast when Don and Phil were in single digits. That moment, when the broadcast ends and the opening of this Merle Haggard cover begins, is one of many high points on that great album. Also: a slow remake of their early song, “I Wonder if I Care as Much.” Sorry, Merle, this is the odd moment when a cover version beats your original — but just by a badger hair.

“Hey Jude” by the Beatles. My favorite Beatle song, especially for the fade – and for the time and place where that song came in my / our history. This song is so connected to that tumultuous, overwhelming year, 1968.

Pet Sounds by The Beach Boys. The whole thing. A cop-out, I know, but when I hear “Wouldn’t it be Nice” — especially the fade –- “Sloop John B,” “God Only Knows” and the rest of it, I’m both exhilarated by the beauty of the music and saddened that the world is without the angelic voice of Carl Wilson. Carl could even take a weak song – Mike Love’s “Brian is Back” comes to mind – and turn it into a thing of beauty. When I hear them fading away at the end of “Wouldn’t it Be Nice,” they truly are forever young.

“Spanish is the Loving Tongue” by Michael Martin Murphey. The singing and playing is beautiful and the song even manages to overcome one verse that is spoken, not sung. I’m a mushpot, so this one always gets to me. You know who you are.

“Born to Run” by Bruce Springsteen. Sorry to be so obvious. This is the best Phil Spector record that Spector never made. Phil would have crammed this whole world into a shorter record. Too bad how it ended with Phil. I’d like to see his remix of this. I bet he’d bring it in under three minutes. It would be a tight, claustrophobic record.

“Blind Willie McTell” by Bob Dylan. Hypnotic. Masterful. This song never fails to get to me. Wonderful use of language and image. And to think – it was an outtake. “Lord, Protect My Child” is another beautiful Infidels outtake.

“Highwater (for Charley Patton)” by Bob Dylan. One last Bob song. This is of a piece with “Series of Dreams” and “Blind Willie McTell.” This is Dylan’s whole history of the doom and dread of the 20th Century. I’m utterly drained after every listen.

What’s Going On by Marvin Gaye. The whole thing. When I got the original LP, I thought, “This album is so great that if there isn’t a Side 2, I’d still be happy with it.” That suite on Side 1 is so beautiful, especially when Gaye preaches and begs us to save the babies! save the babies!

I can’t type anymore.

Chills, dude, chills.

November 4, 2022June 28, 2025

Playdate with Bob Dylan

As I contemplate the many pleasant afternoons in my life, oddly enough, it’s one of the non-carnal ones to which I often return in memory.

It was an afternoon in the Tune Town record shop in Bowling Green, Kentucky. I was still in my twenties, a young dad, and I was there to pick up a book I’d lent to the guy behind the counter, Bill Lloyd.

**Bill Lloyd in his Foster & Lloyd days.**

Yes, that Bill Lloyd, A few years later, he was half of Foster & Lloyd and on his way to his career as one of the most admired, beloved and respected musicians in Nashville.

But on that day, he wanted to return my copy of It’s Too Late to Stop Now, a book of essays by Jon Landau, who had forsaken writing about music to become Svengali for Bruce Springsteen.

I went to pick up the book but luckily the afternoon went as I’d hoped and elongated. It became an adult playdate.

You’ve got to hear this, he said — again and again.

It was a weekday, so the store was essentially ours. A few customers came and went, but Bill kept pulling records from under the counter and popping them on the store turntable.

He guided me through an afternoon of songs — wonderful, swirling music, stuff I’d never heard before. With the record shop at his disposal, he took me through his world, and played me stuff from Buddy Holly’s demos, recorded in his apartment just weeks before his death. He introduced me to The Dictators Go Girl Crazy and I became a lifelong fan of Handsome Dick Manitoba. I was stunned by the import-only White Trails by Englishman Chris Rainbow. That was a thrilling collection heavily influenced by the Sunflower / Surf’s Up era of The Beach Boys.

I kept notes in the plain pages at the back of the Landau book. Within a couple of years, I’d tracked down and bought all of the records Bill played for me that day.

I love adult playdates and now I feel as if I’ve had another rewarding musical afternoon, this time with Bob Dylan.

Dylan’s new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song, is sort of like that long-ago afternoon with Bill Lloyd, only without the music. (I hope a soundtrack album to Dylan’s book is imminent.)

It’s as if we’re seated on the floor in front of the turntable, and Dylan is flipping through his albums saying, You’ve got to hear this.

He’s picked out 66 songs from all across the musical map, and he tells us about them. There are no details about recording and only once or twice does he examine the songs from a professional songwriter’s viewpoint. He never indulges in self-reference, about a particular song’s influence or ways in which he would approach the same material.

So it’s not a discographical reference. Like a lot of Dylan’s prose, it’s fanciful, often hilarious, and notoriously unreliable. We assume the recording details at the front of every chapter are correct, but all bets are off when it comes to his flights of fancy.

And he takes such flights frequently. With several songs, he goes off on wild tangents.

Consider this meditation on footwear, which I excerpt I from his commentary on “Blue Suede Shoes” by Carl Perkins:

There are more songs about shoes than there are about hats, pants and dresses combined. Ray Price’s keep walking back to him. Betty Lou got a new pair. Chuck Willis didn’t want to hang his up. Shoes reveal character, station and personality. But for all that shoes revealed, they did not give up their secrets easily. [Consider] the white buck, a shoe so proud if its immaculate surface that it came with a small brush to buff any blemish from existence. And one can’t forget blue suede shoes. Has ever a shoe proclaimed its frivolity more joyously? Has any article of clothing ever said more plainly that it wasn’t meant for the farm, that it wasn’t meant to step in pig shit? Poor Carl Perkins, watching Elvis Presley sing his song “Blue Suede Shoes” on TV in 1956 from a hospital bed. At that point, Carl’s version had sold a million copies, but a car accident slowed the momentum of Carl’s career and it never truly recovered. Elvis, on the other hand, was all sullen eyes and sharp cheekbones, backwoods-born but city-livin’, truck-drivin’, hip-shakin’ with a feral whiff of danger. Carl wrote this song, but if Elvis was alive today, he’d be the one to have a deal with Nike.

Feral whiff? It’s writing like that that makes me wish Dylan published prose more often.

Turns out he’s not just the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, he’s also the master of the Dad Joke.

These vamps are like transcriptions from those off-the-wall monologues Dylan used to deliver when he hosted his Theme Time Radio Hour on satellite radio. The book is much like the show in the sense that he wants to educate us about the music that made him.

A treatise on the bluegrass music of the Osborne Brothers’ 1957 recording of “Ruby, Are You Mad?” somehow morphs into a discussion of heavy metal music. He concludes the two forms of music have a lot in common: “This [bluegrass music] is speed metal without the embarrassment of Spandex and junior high school devil worship.”

He loves tall tales. Discussing Roy Orbison’s “Blue Bayou,” he references Linda Ronstadt’s hit version of the song. “A lot of people cite The Dickson Baseball Dictionary as listing ‘Linda Ronstadt’ as a synonym for a baseball,” he deadpans, because the ball “‘blew by you.’ When Herb Carneal announced a Twins game and the opposing team’s batter would take a strike off a fastball, Herb would giddily exclaim, ‘Thank you, Roy Orbison.’”

There’s no such entry in my edition of the Dickson book, but why quibble. I’m not sure Dylan’s writing would last more than a couple of minutes in the fact-checking department of The New Yorker. Those carnivorous Keepers of Truth would roll up the manuscript and toss it in the dustbin. But who cares? Dylan’s obviously having fun.

Except when he isn’t. There are a couple startling essays on music than turn tragic and unforgettable. You’re laughing along with his word play and then suddenly shocked into silence.

Somewhere, Ry Cooder is blushing. Dylan lavishes the great guitarist with Himalayas of praise. His chapter on “Old Violin” reminds me that I need to rethink Johnny Paycheck. I’m suddenly questioning if I missed something in the singing of Perry Como. And what love Dylan’s shows Judy Garland.

The artists range from hillbillies to rappers, with Frank Sinatra, Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby thrown in, alongside The Clash, Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes and artists you’ve never heard of. He cares little for political correctness and says, at one point, that as a field of knowledge expands and is stretched tighter, the skin of society becomes too thin for the comfort of ideas.

There’s a lot of pocket wisdom in the book and it’s as if he just used the premise of writing about records to reveal this wonderment of prose writing.

Note: There are no entries for The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones or Dylan.

It’s a beautiful book, filled with oddball and esoteric illustrations. The cover features Little Richard, Alis Lesley (she called herself the Female Elvis) and the great and doomed Eddie Cochran.

As much as I love hard copies, I supplemented this purchase of paper with the audio version of the book. I heard Bob was doing part of the narration. He ends up doing his fantasias, which sound like coffee-shop beat poetry read aloud. His segments have a different audio texture than his other narrators.

And what a cast of collaborators. The lineup includes Jeff Bridges, Steve Buscemi, John Goodman, Oscar Isaac, Helen Mirren, Rita Moreno, Sissy Spacek, Alfre Woodard, Jeffrey Wright and Renee Zellweger.

**Helen Mirren, part of the narration crew**

You’ve got to hear this. Bob doesn’t point us to any of his recordings, but he does include some contemporaries — Willie Nelson, Cher, Jimmy Webb and others — and, of course, honors the forefathers of rock’n’roll: Little Richard, Rick Nelson, and Johnny Cash.

But — and here’s where you need to take notes — he introduces us to recordings that mean so much to him: “Take Me from This Garden of Evil,” an unreleased song, recorded by Jimmy Wages in 1957; Harry McClintock’s 1927 recording of “Jesse James”; and “Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy,” recorded by Uncle Dave Macon in 1924. I know I’ll be tracking down “Doesn’t Hurt Anyone” by John Trudell, released in 2001 … one of only two songs from this century to make Dylan’s cut.

And that makes sense. Bob Dylan is, after all, a pure product of America. He is the American musical experience wrapped up in the bones of sinews of one human being, and he wants to share his love with you.

You’ve got to hear this.