The Shed on the Web

This year marked a curious point in life when both my daughters went to festivals on their own. Beth, the eldest, went to Glastonbury and Rhianna went to V festival. She took a couple of those disposable cameras with her and I offered to scan the pictures in so she could put them on Facebook. While I was doing that it struck me that I had only ever been to V festival once back in 1997 but 13 years later, as Rhianna’s photograph below shows, one of the headline acts at this years festival was The Prodigy who also headlined in 1997 when I went!

So this got me to thinking surely there couldn’t have been anyone at this years Glastonbury who had been there the first time I had gone back in 1984…….or could there?

My first find after looking at the line up was that the closest I was going to get was Femi Kuti whose father Fela Kuti played on the Sunday night in 1984. However I soon spotted a couple of acts that had been there at my first Glastonbury. Dr John played at both festivals as did Christy Moore and Billy Bragg. Even worse was that I also spotted an act that had been there at the 1971 festival and that was Arthur Brown.

So it just goes to show that time may move on and a new generation may go to festivals but some things never change…..like mud!!

Creamful headlined the Saturday Night at SoL and this was their encore.

It’s a Beautiful Day performing White Bird at the Summer of Love party

Sharron Kraus singing the River’s Daughter at this years SoL with Clare Button

This is the first track from Nigel Mazlyn Jone’s set at this year’s Summer of Love party. This track is called Fools of the Finest Degree.

Nigel Mazlyn Jones – Fools of the Finest Degree – SoL 2010 from Shed on the Web on Vimeo.

Rainy Day Women are a Dylan covers band and played on Saturday at SoL 2010. Here are two tracks that I shot that afternoon – Tangled up in Blue and Senor (Tales of Yankee Power).

The Higher State at SoL 2010 from Shed on the Web on Vimeo.

This is a rough edit of some video I shot at this years SoL festival on 23rd July of a great band called the Higher State. I shot parts of all the sets over the weekend as part of a Shed on the Web project entitled SoL – The Movie!

I recently got in touch with an old school friend of mine via Facebook and this reminded me of a gig we went to see at Newcastle poly many years ago probably around 1978. In fact it was spotting a vinyl copy of one of this artists albums in a car boot sale a few weeks ago had spurred me to get back in touch with Nick. the pair of us both listened to the BBC Radio Newcastle music program Bedrock and it could have been on that show that we first heard the track that lead us to the gig that night.

Akron Ohio was being hailed as the “new Liverpool” at that time and many artists that came from there were becoming popular. Chrissie Hynde of the pretenders came from there as did Devo, who I saw at the City Hall around the same time. However the artist in question this night was 16 years old (about the same age as us), was signed to Stiff Records and was called Rachel Sweet.

I remember we were literally at the front standing just in front of her and we flirted with her all through the show making her laugh on a number of occasions! She had these chiffon scarves that she flicked around during the show and that’s about all I remember about the evening!! She virtually disappeared from the music scene shortly afterwards although I now understand that she did record some more albums but none that made any impression of press or public. She did, however, record the theme music to the film Hairspray so that and her “hit” single B-A-B-Y baby remain as her career highlights

We were at Sarah’s Nan’s last Saturday and there was a huge pile of stuff that they had cleared from her brother’s house after he died and were intending to take to a Boot Fair the following day. Among the various bits and pieces I found a copy of an album from the dim and distant past that I used to own.

Clive Dunn cashing in on his role as Corporal Jones in the hit series Dad’s Army and his recent number one Grandad he released this album in 1971 but apart from the single and the b-side “I play the Spoons” the rest of the album didn’t set the world on fire!

William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled around his diamond ring finger

The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll has long been one of my favourite Bob Dylan songs every since I heard it on a scholarly program on BBC Radio called Bob Dylan and the language that he used. Where a self-ordained professor’s tongue, too serious to fool, spouted out about the poetic values in several of Bob Dylan’s songs. The song has stayed with me ever since and I ever memorised it while at university and used to close my eyes and recite it in my head when revision got all too much to take my mind somewhere else. I even got to see Dylan sing it, up close and personal at the Brixton Academy last time I saw him.

Well the story was based on an event that happened in February 1963 when Baltimore socialite and Tobacco farm owner William Zantzinger, drunk and rowdy at a party shouted racial abuse at Hattie Carroll who he thought was taking too long and struck her with a cane that he had been hitting people with since he arrived. She died later that night and Zantzinger was arrested and charged with murder.

The murder charge was later reduced to manslaughter and he was sentenced to six months in prison on the day Martin Luther King made his “I have a dream” speech in Washington DC – an event that Dylan attended. It’s believed that he read about the story on his way back home. The 6 month sentence was delayed so that Mr Zantzinger could get his tobacco crop in first. It was also served in what we would probably know as an open prison.

There has been a great deal of discussion about the accuracy of Dylan’s version of events, for example he got Zantzinger’s name wrong and wrongly claimed that he he was charged with first degree murder (it was second) and people claim he got the number of Hattie Carroll’s children wrong. However most of these inaccuracies could be explained by poetic licence and shouldn’t take away from the fact that this protest song was one of the most powerful statements put to music.

The one thing that is never stated in the song is that Carroll was black and that Zanzinger is white but every one who hears the song instinctively knows that. The power of the song springs from the understatement throughout. The chorus runs

But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain’t the time for your tears

until the final injustice is mentioned that six month sentance which Dylan delivers in a unemotional voice and then it chages to:

Bury the rag deep in your face
For now’s the time for your tears

The verse structure is interesting too. The first verse is only six lines long and states the fact that William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll. The second verse is 8 lines long and tells of Zanzinger, how he owns a tobacco farm, with wealthy parents and high office relations.

The third verse is 11 lines long and starts off about Hattie Carroll and outlines the differences between them

Who carried the dishes and took out the garbage
And never sat once at the head of the table
And didn’t even talk to the people at the table
Who just cleaned up all the food from the table
And emptied the ashtrays on a whole other level

The word table is repeated as if to emphasise the monotony of her existence. The verse then turns to the actual murder and at that point the rhymes change, all the rest of the song the words at the end of each line have feminine sounds but at the moment of murder the sounds change to hard masculine sounds:

Got killed by a blow, lay slain by a cane
That sailed through the air and came down through the room

The verse then returns to Zanzinger and reminds us that “she never done nothing to William Zanzinger”

The song then moves into a harmonica break which had it signalled the end of the song could have left it as a song about the injustices done by whites on blacks, men on women or rich on poor which in itself would have been a powerful statement but Dylan then returns with a final verse which again is 11 lines long so as not to overshadow the verse about Hattie Carroll and the song then deals with the injustice done by failing to punish Zanzinger.

In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all’s equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain’t pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled
Once that the cops have chased after and caught ’em
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom
Stared at the person who killed for no reason
Who just happened to be feelin’ that way without warnin’
And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished
And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance
William Zanzinger with a six-month sentence

The song became a powerful message in the fight for equality but there are those who say that Dylan distorted the truth and that has been the subject of a BBC radio 4 program about the song presented by Dylan biographer Howard Sounes. Howard once called the real William Zantzinger to ask about the song but as soon as he told him who he was Zantzinger launched a tirade of abuse about Dylan calling him a son of a bitch and saying he should have sued for deformation.

Having listened to the program and read some internet discussions I can’t see what the problem is. The main thrust of the argument seems to be the inaccuracies in Dylan’s song but as I have already said they could be explained by poetical licence – Zanzinger flows better than Zantzinger, first degree scans whereas second degree is more clunky etc.  the other discussion was whether the blow was what called her death. She had a history of illness but the court decided that either the blow or the stress from the racial torments metered out by Zantzinger that caused her to suffer a brain haemorrhage and die. Zantzinger was arrested that night but not for the murder, he was arrested because he had already assulted other members of staff and guests, including a pregnant woman, with the cane that he bought in a fairground. It was only later, after Carroll died that he was charged with murder.

It also turns out that the six months weren’t the only time that Zantzinger spent in prison! After he sold his farm he went into real estate and got into financial trouble and some of his properties taken off him by the county due to unpaid taxes. Mr Zantzinger however continued to collect rents on the properties even though he no longer owned them, in fact he even took some of the tenants to court for unpaid rent. Eventually it came to light and he was sentanced to 18 months on work-release in the county jail, 2,400 hours of community service and about $62,000 in penalties and fines for fraud.

There were mixed feelings about him because some argued that he gave homes to people who couldn’t otherwise afford somewhere to live but given that this was in 1991 and many properties were run down without even basic essentials like running water other people feel differently about him. One guy interviewed during the program, who kept referring to him as Mr Zingzanger, said he should have been strung up! It was also revealed in the program that some of Hattie Carroll’s children aren’t happy about Dylan either believing that he got rich off their mother’s death while they have and continue to live in poverty.

In any case William Zantzinger died in January 2009 aged 69, almost 45 years after the incident. The song he protested about would probably have worked even if Dylan had changed the names but the fact that it was based on a true story lent more weight at a time when there was such a strong Civil Rights movement in the US and like Blowing in the Wind before it gave strength to those who were fighting for equal rights in the USA.

Bob Dylan – The lonesome death of Hattie Carroll
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