Book Corner 2025.17

Never Turn Your Back on an Angus Cow

by Dr. Jan Pol

He had a co-writer so it should have been a better read. It really had no organization, just one anecdote after another, and it got repetitive. I feel sorry to give it a negative review, because we used to enjoy the show. I would have liked a more chronological narrative approach. Instead it was, “Then there was the time I saw an animal do this and I did this. Then there was the time I did this and the animal did this.”

Book Corner 2025.16

Moni the Goat Boy (not my actual cover)

by Johanna Spyri

Another Johanna Spyri book. Makes HEIDI look like great literature. Seriously, a slight book where the goat-boy wrestles with his conscience over being a party to a misdeed, all for the sake of the love for his little goat kid. It does suffer by comparison to HEIDI; there’s no gruff old grandfather to love.

Book Corner 2025.15

John & Paul

About the relationship between John & Paul. Very sympathetic to Paul; John comes across as an extremely damaged person at best, mentally ill at worst. The cruel things he wrote to and about Paul after the breakup were the rantings of an immature and insecure individual. Paul, in this telling, was just stoic, perplexed, bewildered. I felt so bad for him.

Both young men endured terrible losses early in life; John had the much more confused and unstable upbringing, despite his Aunt Mimi’s efforts to supply the opposite. Each man named his first child after his mother.

The premise of the book is that we can read the John/Paul relationship as a bromance conveyed in their songs. Men in that time and place could not openly express their feelings, especially about each other. I guess it’s what Jim Croce said: “I’ll have to say I love you in a song.” The song analyses in the book are spot-on and convincing.

Favorite quotes:

Actually an Arthur Schopenhauer quote. “Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.” The Beatles were just on another plane.

“All of the Beatles, with the partial exception of Ringo, were promiscuous; what distinguished Paul’s philandering was the scale of it, and his attention to logistical detail. He really put the work in.” Isn’t that so him?

Paul seemed “annoyed by John’s dalliances with avant-garde art. (When Lindsay-Hogg asks, ‘Where’s John?’ Paul replies, ‘Probably in a bag in his dressing room with Yoko. I think they brought their own bag with them today.’)” Everybody’s talking about bagism.

Ramona-Hygge

Sent from their new home.

I have no doubt whatsover of their being happy, content, and well cared for.

However, Xopher said that Columbia, recently sheared, didn’t look so well this morning. She is 13. We are going to lose her (or somebody) before long, and it will leave the herd rather thin. It would have been cheery to have a baby running around. It’s a pain that we have to wait a whole year for another. Maybe longer – Annie is only a year and looks too small for motherhood. Though it’s early days; she’s daily growin’.

Book Corner 2025.14

This Wheel’s On Fire

by Levon Helm & Stephen Davis

A couple of things led me to pick up this 1998 memoir of Levon Helm. I happened upon a vinyl copy of THE LAST WALTZ in a record store, gave it some listening time, and read about it on Wikipedia. I learned there that Helm was adamantly against breaking up The Band and putting on the big Last Waltz shindig. Robbie Robertson said he was starting to feel that all the touring was “unhealthy”, leading Helm to retort, “I ain’t in this for my health! I’m a musician!” This memorable line was later used as a documentary title: “I Ain’t In It for My Health: A Film about Levon Helm.”

The Wikipedia entry referenced the book, leading me to think I should search around for it. The second thing motivating me was a Bob Dylan subreddit conversation. Someone was musing about why Dylan deliberately disappeared from the scene in 1966, and a response came along the lines of, well, it was horrible, the fame, the mobs, the pressure, and then people booing you on stage – “Levon Helm even quit to go work on an oil rig, it was so bad.” I said, wha! I had remembered from reading Robertson’s memoir that Helm quit because he didn’t like the musical direction, never liked being Dylan’s backup band, felt (not wrongly) that it had nothing to do with the American roots music the Band came together to make.

So, Helm’s side of the story: yes, he quit, and among other things, worked on an oil rig during his hiatus. He said it was awful and dangerous work, and that once he saw someone get killed, he took his very ample paycheck and quit. But it seems he quit (the music scene) mostly because he was just tired of getting booed all the time – this was the big Dylan Goes Electric period, when for some reason people would pay money to go see Bob Dylan, who they knew was playing with a band, and then boo him when he played electric. Helm had been used to being in a super-tight cracker-jack bar band that got everyone up dancing, not booing, and he basically just wasn’t into this scene.

Helm was the only American member of The Band, from a cotton farming family in Arkansas. His is the voice that comes at you in all those songs. He’s the drummer on some songs, but he’s a multi-instrumentalist, like all his Bandmates (simply amazing the number of instruments they all played).

It’s a wonderful rock-and-roll memoir. Boy does he hate Robbie Robertson, though. The digs are just ruthless. Robertson and Helm had become best friends, just kids, at the Band’s beginning. As per Helm here, the trouble started as he started noticing all the songs on their albums being credited to “Robertson”, when he knew they were all collaborative efforts. He felt that Robertson and manager Albert Grossman had become too chummy, that Robertson was starting to feel himself to be like some kind of leader, and yadda yadda yadda. The Last Waltz was the Last Straw. Boy is he mean… Robertson with his kohl eyeliner and expensive haircut, waving his guitar neck around like he was leading everyone, in every single shot, while meanwhile his singing was so bad they had to keep his mike turned off. Oh, Snap!

Really sad how much substance abuse went down and how they couldn’t keep things together. Then of course the tragedy of Richard Manuel’s suicide. Maybe Bands this good aren’t meant to last forever.