Word: lyricized
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...Angeles. He was born Aaron Chwatt, but some patrons at an early gig renamed him for his red hair and the brass buttons on his uniform. Buttons became a sudden star in 1952 with his CBS variety show, on which he danced goofily to a trademark lyric, "Hoho-hehe-haha. Strange things are happening!" That became a national catchphrase, but his show was soon dropped. He rebounded in 1957 with the film Sayonara, playing a U.S. airman in an ill-fated romance with a Japanese woman--for which he won an Oscar. "I'm a little guy," he once said...
...raspy was authentic. As he wrote in an early poem: "The only beauty's ugly, man / The cracklin', breakin', shakin' sounds're / The only beauty I understand." With extended exposure, his ugly became beauty. Intimate and accusatory, the voice twisted and tortured each word in a lyric, weirdly drawing out the silent half of a vowel sound - not "rain" but "raiiiiin", not "deal" but "deaaaaal...
...Dylan had assimilated Guthrie - gone through him and come out the other side. Now, as a singer-songwriter, he had joined the folkie scene of people who made, in the words of the New Lost City Ramblers' John Cohen, "Long-playing, short-selling records." Everyone remarked on Dylan's lyric gift and driving ambition. After just a few months, and before he was 20, he had scored his first professional gig in the Village (a supporting act to blues singer John Lee Hooker). Rejected by the traditional labels, Folkways and Vanguard (whose A&R man said, "We don't record...
...Niles lyric sounds clear enough: "Go away from my window, / Go away from my door, / Go away way from my bedside / And bother me no more / And bother me no more." But it got a softer, more complex meaning both from the melody, which has the poignancy of a lullaby to an absent child, and from Niles' rendition, his voice soaring on the first "bother me no more" so that he sounds like an unquiet spirit, or maybe a sleeper shooing a ghost out of his nightmares...
...Zimmerman bus tour of Hibbing. Instead, play those early songs again. You'll shiver at their stark profundity - at the way words, simple chords and a stray mutt's voice could combine to form an immediate and lasting legacy of pop poetry. Dylan was destined, as the beautiful lyric to "Mr. Tambourine Man" has it, "to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free." In following that fate, he taught the rest of us to dance with...