FROM STABLE TO CROSS

I see that Bob was in concert last night in the Stabler Arena, Bethlehem (PA). Can't help but wonder if there was straw on the floor and frankincense during the encore.

Yesterday, with mild existential serendipity, was the anniversary of both the birth of Screaming Lord Sutch (1940) and the death of Richard Lord Buckley (1960). There's an entry on the latter, but not the former, in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia. It ends like this:

"...Dylan once called him, rather grandly, 'the fuel to my success'. Lord Buckley died in Columbus Hospital, New York, on November 12, 1960, probably from a stroke. He sounded about a hundred years old but he was only 54. His death certificate nonetheless read 'natural causes'. His ashes were scattered in Red Rock Canyon, just west of Las Vegas."

And earlier in the entry, writing of Bob Dylan's early recording of Buckley's 'Black Cross' (written by Joseph S. Newman, uncle of actor Paul Newman), I have this to say:

"He comes to ‘Black Cross’ very early on, performing it at his first concert - at the Carnegie Chapter Hall in New York City on November 4, 1961; recording it on the December 22, 1961 tape made privately back in Minnesota a month after he’d recorded his début album in New York, and performing the song again in 1962 at the Gaslight - it is, unfortunately, one of the numbers omitted from the official release Live at the Gaslight (2005), though it has circulated.

The Minnesota recording is simply great. He took it from Lord Buckley, but incontestably he made it his own. No-one in the world can deliver a talking song or a half-talking song as Bob Dylan can. It’s a facet of his genius that he has remained in full control of, and it’s certainly evident when he produces the perfect mimickry of the white voices and the black voice on ‘Black Cross’: not just a mastery but his audible joy in exercising it: a generous, sharing joy."