One guy who kept reappearing in the news was Caryl Chessman, a notorious rapist whom they called the Red-Light Bandit. He was on death row in California after being tried and convicted of raping young women. He had a creative way of doing it - strapped a flashing red light to the top of his automobile and then pulled the girls over to the side of the road… Norman Mailer, Ray Bradbury, Aldous Huxley, Robert Frost, even Eleanor Roosevelt were calling for his life to be spared. An anti-death-penalty group had asked Len to write a song about Chessman.

“How do you write a song about a pariah who rapes young women, what would be the angle?” he asked me.

Dylan’s answer? “… maybe start with the red lights.”

This is not how a political person thinks. It is how a writer does. I don’t think there’s anything implausible or revisionist about that.

(I realize all this has left out the question of the music of his politics but I’ve written on that general subject a fair amount of late, and don’t have the stamina to address it now, though I’d maybe start with the way his voice camouflages his melodies.)

Alex Ross and Alex Abramovich are book-clubbing it up this week in a Slate dialogue about Dylan’s Chronicles. Which is great, because all I really want to do is, baby, talk about that book with you.

Abramovich points in his opening towards a question Mrs. Zoilus and I were talking about last night: How much do you buy his disavowal of ever having had activist intentions? His political period actually was very short-lived, but do we think he was being opportunistic, simply exploring a thread of the folk tradition at a moment that seemed to call it forth (that’s kind of the way it’s portrayed in Chronicles) or trying to change the world and then getting frightened away when the world almost did seem to change in answer to the songs he was blowin’ out into it? Show your work.

Edited to add: The marvelous Mr. Ross took up my gauntlet later in the Slate dialogue (which turned out to be all too brief). I’ll have some responses by the a.m.

Went out to see Sam Phillips tonight at the Lula Lounge, the first time I’ve ever seen the L.A. songwriter, though I’ve admired her work since the early nineties with albums such as The Indescribable Wow and Cruel Inventions produced with her (now ex-)husband T-Bone Burnett.

I haven’t kept up as well as I’d like, though, missing her recent semi-comeback discs Fan Dance and this year’s Boot and a Shoe - an omission I’m set to correct immediately. Based on my hearing tonight, Boot and a Shoe may be one of the best of the year. Yet even in my neglect I was listening to her often, since she provides the musical punctuation for Gilmore Girls, one of my few tv addictions. My favourite of her new songs, If I Could Write, was played during one of the early episodes this season, but I’d forgotten it till tonight. It’s at once a perfect pop song and a piercing meditation on marriage, its discontents and dissolutions. Listen:

I took your ring that never comes off
And put it on.
Sorry to lose you, sorry to keep you
After you were gone.
Nothing is small, nothing is unexpected,
But I want more, and when I go this time,
Don’t think I’m comin’ back.

Desire’s the element that I can’t fight,
Dream is the arm of God.
Girls looking for themselves in your eyes -
I’m looking for you.
What’s it supposed to be, some kind of perfect?
I want more, and when I go this time
Don’t think I’m comin’ back.

The music ranges from Beatlesy rock (she covered I Want to Be Your Man as an indigo-blue tango) to gypsy jazz, and she shares Tom Waits’ and Elvis Costello’s Kurt Weill-tinged tastes in arrangements. Yet she’s also about the only pop musician I can think of who if I had to describe their work in one word, it would be “patience.”

I think this quality of neither rushing nor insisting has something to do with her history: She began her career as popular Christian singer Leslie Phillips, then left behind that scene and her given name in rejecting the arrogance and intolerance of the Christian right, with an album called The Turning. So the sense of questing and unsureness, the rigour and humility of her songwriting is something special. It’s helped out by the conversational lilt she uses to such effect in her “la-la-la” GGs interludes, making her songs seem like intimate dialogues with a silent partner, often romantic but often spiritual too.

Tonight she was accompanied by The Section Quartet (which opened with stupid string arrangements of classic rock hits, and I don’t mean good stupid, but recovered with their gorgeous backup, especially Eric Gorfain’s parts on Stroh violin, an instrumental oddity also prominently featured on Waits’ Alice), as well as Patrick Warren on synth and pump organ and, most of all, drummer Jay Belarose, a big guy who moved like a gracefully dancing bear behind a kit that included a huge parade drum in place of a bass drum and an array of other personalized percussion. He played colours more than rhythms, layering them over Phillips’ songs like a Monet.

Phillips herself radiates self-possession, a cool distance worn just askew, so that a corner of vulnerability can be seen, enough to ensnare your empathy. She’s really one of the most immensely likeable performers I’ve ever seen, measuring out her songs and her stage chat so judiciously and respectfully, confident of her songs’ value but never presuming upon the audience’s attention. The show was brief, about an hour, but crafted like a small, well-lit short story. There’s a sly cabaret theatricality but not a hint of Broadway anywhere. She fixes the audience in her sights and takes an obvious pleasure in song by song firing her little arrows of honesty and heart break: They’re torch songs, she said, “as in torture, or as in carrying a torch, which means you love someone but they don’t love you but you still hold out hope. I have travelled all this way to tell you tonight: The hope will kill you.”

That’s typical of her wit. When she walked on stage, she stood silently for a moment and then said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Sam Phillips,” which set a tone of tongue-in-cheek formality she kept up whether she was imploring Canada to invade the U.S. if Bush were elected, or asking before the end of the set if the audience would be interested in an encore: “This is Toronto - we don’t need to play those silly games with each other.”

Suffice it to say I won’t be taking Sam Phillips for granted again: A few la-la’s on a tv show is decidedly not enough.

Edited to add: This show also had the highest Globe music staff turnout in recent memory. Senior music critic Robert Everett-Green was there with his family (his 10-year-old daughter’s a big Sam fan, apparently) as was our blues specialist Brad Wheeler. Robert’s review of the show came out Tuesday.

Seems I’m not the only one who’s been thinking about the faceoff between blind certainty and close-reading complexity this week. Read Ron Suskind’s excellent Times Magazine cover on the Bush regime today, “Without a Doubt“. It opens with Bruce Bartlett, a former adviser and official in both the Reagan and Bush Sr. White Houses:

“I think a light has gone off for people who’ve spent time up close to Bush: that this instinct he’s always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do. …

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The responses to this week’s column so far have ranged from Bill’s thoughtful appreciation of Derrida to the phone message today that called me “one of those faggot liberals who knows nothing about rock music” (ending with the flourish, “Why don’t you move to Cuba,” which made me feel nice and American). I think the guy was mostly upset about my (admittedly too quick) dismissal of Sergeant Pepper’s. It’s a beautiful world where everybody can express themselves.

Here’s a somewhat more temperate letter from Colin Campbell, a grad student in the Program in Social and Political Thought at York University,

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Sorry about blog lameness this week. Anybody who was confused (like Rough Idea in the Comments) about where my column was in today’s Globe - for the near future it’s going to be in the Saturday paper, which is nice because it gives it a bigger readership, etc. So check it out this weekend.

Subject matter: The new-millennial boom in concept albums/rock operas, considered as a political epiphenomenon, and the death of Jacques Derrida (pictured).

(Advance warning: Due to other commitments, no column the following week, Oct. 23. But reg’lar as prune juice after that!)

If you’re looking for other things to read meanwhile: You quite probably missed my mixed review of the Shurum Burum Jazz Circus in the Globe earlier in the week.

As well, there’s plenty of grey matter at The Regular.org, a new web newsreader from Downhill Battle, the music activists who brought you the blogosphere-wide Grey Tuesday Danger Mouse protest action earlier this year.

And finally, if you’re wondering what’s happening at Tin Tin Tin this month [...]

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Catching up, slowly, slowly, on the stacks of recent albums piled around my desk, this week I’ve been soaking in Joanna Newsom’s The Milk-Eyed Mender (Drag City). I know the U.N. declared March the official Go Nuts for Joanna Newsom Month, but I’m glad I waited till October, when leaves are turning gold and falling down in arpeggios like Newsom’s pittering, pattering harp notes, when mice are pulling pumpkin carriages, and wise withered child-crones are rasping out secrets older than sex. [...]

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