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By Root 566 0

wet in some other fine foxbox later; I know all the rest of the boys did, and hell, they didn’t half try. John's a strange one anyway—in some ways the true personality of the band, his bulging eyes, almost Romanly chiseled face, gleaming skin, and general weirdness mark him such deep intrinsic Soul of Honk that he comes clean out the other end of the barrel and damn my eyes if he don’t look like something straight out of Genet. Which only adds to the luster onstage, when he's standing there in his fedora and red-and-black pinstripe gangster suit whanging away at the keys like the joyride bastard son of Jerry Lee. He's a diesel cooker and an outside looker, and hell, when I slammed on my Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal tape big Lou moaning out “Heroin” in the vast asteroidal Pecos spaces of our skulls he was the only one who’d sit there with me to catch the vibe.

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Tell you something else about John Anthony: he's smart. Because he's the only Wet Willie who won’t do interviews. I tried but failed to pry a quotable out of him, and horny as he was he would only talk to Dori with the tape recorder shut off and clear in the back of the bus. Because he contends that it's all said in the music and the rest is just froth and frosting. Zen wisdom in that boy.

Yeah and it was borne out when I sat down in the bar with the rest of these bazookas, and set about spelunkin’ on roots and music and the (lordy save my ass in a sling for nuns) meaningof it all.

Q: “Lester, don’t yew think we’re the blackest white band yew ever heard?”

A: “Yeah, so what?”

Q: “Huh?”

Gotta say Wet Willie do the best white rock slash James Brown act cum Yardbirds (it's in the harp) and whatever you want since Bernie “B.B.” Fieldings’ Black Pearl. So get it while you can, look at Granny run run, ain’t everybody home, slammin’ it right there with all the fire and fuck and feed you can feel. Or filibuster.

Singin’in a honky tonk café

Nobody's hearin’ what you say

They’re too busy drinkin’ anyway

You gotta keep on smilin

Jimmy Hall said that. Bob Dylan didn’t say nothin’ this year. But then, neither did John Anthony. But then, he didn’t have to.

Creem, October 1974

Bob Dylan's Dalliance

with Mafia Chic:

He Ain’t No Delinquent,

He's Misunderstoo

It is automatically assumed that every Bob Dylan album is an event, and Desire is certainly no exception. It is not, however, the event that it might appear to be. It is not an event because of the inclusion of several drearily rambling Marty Robbins cum Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid sagas of outlaw's progress from cantina to cantina. This album is a landmark neither because of the back-cover slice of imitation Patti Smith poesy by (presumably) Dylan, nor because of the offensively portentous liner puffery provided by a senile Allen Ginsberg, who ironically was one of Dylan's major influences back when Ginsberg was perhaps the premiere American poet and Bob on his way to being declared that by people who didn’t know any better (like me, for instance).

We can’t even assign historic import to Desire on the basis of “Hurricane,” the undeniably powerful single which, in a controlled spasm of good old rabble-rousing, spits an inflammatory account of the railroading of Rubin Carter, onetime contender for the Middleweight Boxing Championship of the World, on a mid-Sixties murder rap.

If you feel yourself responding cynically when someone relates that “Dylan's returned to protest songs” as if it's exciting news, it just may be that your instincts are in healthy working order. Look at it this way: every four years Dylan writes a “new” protest song, and it's always about a martyred nigger, and he always throws in a dirty word to make it more street-authentic. I don’t use the word “nigger” for effect or to make myself look hip, but rather because just like our fathers before us that is all Jackson and Carter have been to him: another human life to exploit for his own purposes.

Dylan doesn’t give a damn about Rubin Carter, and if he spent any more than ten minutes actually working on the composition of “George Jackson