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Leamington Letters #129: Summer Days are gone

11/9/2017

7 Comments

 
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Photo Credit: AP
Today is the anniversary of the release of Love and Theft, the album which re-launched Bob as a recording artist. I depend on these anniversaries to send me back to the original albums and revel in the music whilst remembering where I was, and why I was where I was, when I first listened.
 
On 11-09-2001, or 9/11 as the world now knows it, I was struggling with an ad campaign for a car manufacturer. My limited edition of Love and Theft, the one with a couple of bonus tracks from the early ‘60s, had been purchased and was waiting, pristine, for a first listen with a glass of white Burgundy that evening.
 
And then the phone started ringing with the news from New York.
 
I didn’t listen to the album that night, and didn’t listen properly for some days. Even a new Bob album paled into insignificance on that day, in that week. We were transfixed by the images of the World Trade Center and, in my case, anxious for news of a friend who worked high up in the South Tower. (He was fine – fortuitously out of the country.)
 
So the conversations on the evening of the 11th of September were not of Bob. For once, Bob did not speak to us. The debate concerned the implications of the attacks.
 
“They had it coming” was the judgement of Professor Beard and it received a nod of acknowledgement if not approval from those of us who remembered other 9/11 events: notably the US-backed coups in Haiti and Chile. We discussed the nature of the inevitable US response, contrasting the shocked reaction of Bush with that of Cheyney and Rumsfeld, for whom this was not a tragedy but an opportunity.
 
In retrospect, we can see that even the most pessimistic and cynical of us failed to predict the total transformation in world affairs which 9/11 initiated: Afghanistan, Iraq, Al-Quaida, ISIS, the attacks on major cities throughout the west. When the centre cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
 
These are my thoughts as I listen now to Love and Theft, as I hear Bob sing of Summer Days – they’re gone! – and High Water (for Charlie Patton) and the apocalyptic dirge that is Sugar Baby:
 
“Some of these memories you can learn to live with/And some of them you can’t.”

7 Comments
Darren
11/9/2017 11:39:00

Timely. And moving.

Reply
Allan
11/9/2017 11:42:34

Hope you're back for good. At the risk of a Bob banality from Po' Boy, which I am also listening to as I type, let's hope that 'things will be alright, bye and bye'.

Reply
Chris
11/9/2017 12:37:55

I tenner 9/11 for 9/11 rather than a Dylan album but it is true that everything else seemed irrelevant and trivial on that day. I didn't know until now of the other events on 9/11 but it doesn't seem to me to change or mitigate one's horror and condemnation of what was done and the consequences. I know your shtick is Bob our contemporary and this is not a bad read but 9/11 was 9/11 and should be considered and condemned for what it was and is.

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Sam
11/9/2017 12:56:23

Chris, I have no idea what you're talking about. And not, I suspect, will Max.

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(Notthat) Bob
12/9/2017 07:19:03

It was a 'fateful' day, wasn't it? I also make a point of listening to a much-loved album on the anniversary of its release, and for the same reasons. The way that, irrespective of the album content, it conjures memories. We have measured out our lives in Dylan albums and we wear the bottoms of our trousers rolled.

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Fenway Frank
12/9/2017 07:42:36

You will also be aware that 9/11/1918 was the day that the Sox beat in the Cubs, our last series win until 2004.

Reply
DanL
12/9/2017 11:11:52

Had forgotten the anniversary. I suppose because so much has happened since and, you're right, because of that awful event in New York. Good post.

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    Max Smith

    European writer, radical, restaurateur and Red Sox fan. 70-something husband, father, step-father, grandfather and son. Resident in Warwick, England.

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