Last Thoughts on Woody

The voice of Bob Dylan … the music of Chris Copping

It was a great pleasure, a few days back, when a CD dropped into my pigeonhole at work, containing the latest versions of a most intriguing extended piece of music featuring two artists whose work I've always enjoyed a lot: Chris Copping and Bob Dylan!

Entitled Last Thoughts on Woody, the music sets, and offsets, Dylan's bizarre, scathing, ultimately uplifting stream-of-consciousness, towards the end of which he mentions the dying Guthrie, the singer-writer hero of his youth, in a more-or-less spiritual light. Since Chris Copping is by his own admission 'a huge fan' of Dylan there is perhaps a double, nested act of homage in this highly original … and highly commercial … concept [Excerpt 1 (mp3) … all the excerpts on this page are about 400k].

A tiny bit of history: Dylan met Guthrie in early 1961 as the latter lay in a New Jersey hospital suffering from Huntington's Chorea. This was the very start of Dylan's career: Song for Woody, Dylan's first recorded original composition, was written a month later, and eight weeks or so after that he gave his first paid performance. Two years on, Dylan gave a major concert at New York's Town Hall, his first ever recital of only self-penned pieces, and it included the Guthrie poem Chris Copping has now set to music, the only known instance of Dylan reading his own poetry or prose in public. Columbia recorded the show, which was widely bootlegged, bits finding an outlet on Greatest Hits Vol. II and Biograph, and Chris came to know it from the Columbia boxed set, 'The Bootleg Series'.

Last Thoughts is a wide-ranging text of many moods, partly a quest for salvation and a quest of hope, ending with Dylan looking either for the right church to find God in, or for Guthrie dying in hospital: its strange 'Grand Canyon' finale needs to speak for itself [Excerpt 2]. Eliot's The Wasteland springs to mind as one reads its sweeping portrayal of barrenness and disillusion. Though the text looks like a rant in the beat traditions of Whitman and specially Ginsberg, Dylan takes it at a terrific speed and with no great vocal clarity; Chris's technique of cutting it up into rhythmic chunks (there are some re-arrangements, supplying a very nice hook that links the two main parts of the piece) mitigates the rush of the original, and makes it a lot easier to focus on the imagery and the sense. I would say this does a significant service to the Dylan original, and it certainly brings out some of the Reidy parallels in his most paranoid proclamations: 'And your sidewalk starts curling and the street gets too long, and you start walking backwards though you know its wrong' / 'And you're knee-deep in the dark water with your hands in the air, and the whole world's a-watching with a window peek stare' / 'And your bell's banging loudly but you can't hear its beat …'

Whereas I'd heard some preliminary work from Chris via mp3, it had always been on a 'your-ears-only' basis; this new CD came with the suggestion that we might be interested in airing a bit of it at BtP, by way of a sample of Chris's current work. The Dylan monologue had now developed into three spoken sections [Something Special Part 1, Something Special Part II, Grand Canyon and Epilogue (yes, the titles are a little bit Wormesque, and you do hear two chords that suggest that down in the forest a young man is about to come riding! [Excerpt 3]) and then the instrumental tracks, presumably for DJs to busk their own monologues over]. Furthermore it was evident that the piece had developed greatly since I'd first heard bits of it, and it had grown a great hook and some sophisticated contrasts.

This unusual meeting of elements from 1963 and 2000 was immediately seized upon by my daughter Jane, who wanted to play it at work … the spoken component to ravish the 40-50-something Dylan obsessives there, who manufacture violins in the basement, and the bassy-drummy-trancey musical element to entice the 'young things' who do the non-craftsmanlike stuff in the rest of the building. [Excerpt 4]

So I mentioned to Chris that BtP would be very glad to feature this highly promising 'collaboration' and offered a number of 'prompts' to flesh out the story:

So there we have it … much interesting activity from the Procoler-down-under, and we wish him the very best of luck with it all. Enjoy the mp3 excerpts on this page (all extracted with Chris's permission … here's one more [Excerpt 5]) and let us know your reactions: these will be passed on to Professor Copping.