All the Memories of Her Recent Past

Here’s the third and final part of my Let’s Do Breakfast chat with Jenando. We talk Archie & Ruby, The Waifs, Tim Rogers, Moby (Moby!), and of course Scarlett Riviera.

This week (for the paid subscribers) we have Jenando and myself performing Bob Dylan’s Black Diamond Bay. In programming this song I was tempted to recycle the piece I wrote on Facebook a couple of years back about playing tribute shows (and I’m sure I ultimately will do that). But I think Black Diamond Bay has always been such a big song for me it needs to stand on its own.

I think its importance lies in the fact it was one of the first full story songs I became aware of that wasn’t presented as a finger-in-the-ear, laboured folk club ballad. For the sixteen year old Mick Thomas it was all guns blazing. It had testament and bravado. It seemed to be saying something important (I’m not sure just what). It was playful, it was risqué. It was sexy.

And it was great fun to sing. It has the most beautiful and convenient lyrical phrasing - courtesy of Jacques Levy who cowrote it with Dylan apparently. Lines where the way the syllables fall is as crucial as the meaning of the words themselves. Such as:

She wears necktie and a Panama hat…

Or: He tried to grab the woman’s hand says here’s the ring it costs a grand she said that ain’t enough…

Or: As the floor caved in and the boiler in the basement blew…

I think the iconic backing vocal delivered by Emmy Lou Harris is particularly important in that (so the story goes) Dylan refused to rehearse it with her before the actual ’take’ in the recording session. So while it feels like she is chasing him, (perhaps just slightly behind), it is the intricate beauty of the way the syllables fall in quick succession that make the performance possible.

I’ve never been able to find conclusive evidence of what inspired the song. On Wikipedia they say the Joseph Conrad novel Victory could have been a particular influence on the track and I certainly think there is a sense of brooding, prophetic unease in that book that makes that plausible. But - there is a novel by Patrick Leigh Fermor (pretty much the only novel he ever wrote) that was written a few years before Black Diamond Bay that documents a volcano erupting and an island sliding into the sea while the displaced aristocratic French people ride around in ‘horse-drawn taxis’. It’s called The Violins of Saint-Jacques by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Surely worth a thought? And if nothing else, a nice quick, entertaining read. Conrad’s Victory is not too bad as well, now I think of it.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter at all as the story itself was one I always found gripping and fulfilling in its own right, in so many ways. Not the least being the jolt at the end as the narrator finds himself back in America drinking beer, watching the nightly news. The way he ultimately distances himself from the story is pure genius to my mind:

Seems like every time you turn around there’s another hard luck story that you’re gunna hear…

And I never did plan to go anyway, to Black Diamond Bay.

Black Diamond Bay is seven verses long and each one is around thirty seconds - or, the time it takes me to swim one lap of the 25 metre pool at the Collingwood Leisure Centre (I’m a slow swimmer). This means with eight laps out of a prescribed forty left I can launch into the song (in my head of course) and the required kilometre is accomplished in no time at all - leaving the last lap as a dreamy breaststroke rumination on what the rest of the day might hold for me. Whatever gets you through I suppose.

(pic of Jen at Roundhead Auckland by Lola Fountain-Best)

It’s so lovely to hear Jenando’s violin on this recording as a heartfelt tribute to someone who’s playing meant so much to her. Thanks Jen, for your insights and your time with these interviews. I’m going to run a few random bits and pieces in the next couple of weeks and then kick in with a Brooke Taylor talkfest. I’m currently sorting through an interview and mixing some choice tracks - all for the paid up subscribers of course. So, on that note, just ask yourself, do you really want to be the one shuffling their feet in embarrassment, staring into the distance when someone says: Have you heard Jenando’s violin on Dylan’s Black Diamond Bay? Hmmm?