Coming to Nelson Music Room this weekend: the new, weird America.
That's one way to describe Howard Fishman, the maverick singer and guitarist who will bring a three-night revue of music from Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes to campus Thursday through Saturday.
The show examines the famous series of recordings Dylan and the Band cut in Saugerties, N.Y., in 1967, which author Greil Marcus described as capturing "the old, weird America."
Why not alter that phrase to capture Fishman? After all, everyone seems to struggle to find a description for him-even Fishman himself.
"I get asked that question so much, and you'd think I'd have an answer for it, but I still don't," he said during an interview earlier this week, as he tuned his 1933 Gibson while chatting and preparing for the trip south. "The music I play is very personal, it's very-it runs the gamut stylistically. For me, genres are like the colors a painter would use. Playing music is about communicating and forging a sense of community."
In fact, he said, it was this search for identity that led him to interpret The Basement Tapes, a record he'd known since adolescence.
"What intrigued me about this project is people don't always know how to categorize me," Fishman said. "What I'm trying to do is create context for my music. I would never put myself or my band on a level with [Dylan and the Band], but it's kind of what I'm emulating-American, irreverent, spontaneous, fun, deep. I just see a lot of similarities to what I'm trying to do."
Although The Basement Tapes is one of Dylan's more neglected albums, it contains a raft of classics, including "I Shall Be Released" and "You Ain't Going Nowhere"- arguably better known from versions by the Band and the Byrds, respectively-as well as absurdities like "Million Dollar Bash."
And although his versions of the tracks have become a popular draw for him, his Duke concerts will mark only the second performance of the full suite since its debut at Joe's Pub in New York City in May 2006.
The three nights are arranged by subject material. Night one comprises the folk tunes and covers Dylan and the Band recorded. The second night will include songs from the sessions that Dylan did not release on the 1975 album (most of these tracks have gradually seeped out over the years, either through covers or bootlegs). During the third night, Fishman will play songs actually from the record.
He sees a particular allure in the unreleased songs. One of them, "I'm Not There," gained fame as the title of the Oscar-winning Dylan flick last year, but has long been a Holy Grail for Dylan obsessives, who consider it his unfinished masterpiece.
It's a song Fishman included on the live album he recorded at Joe's, and he'll tackle it again Friday night.
"That song was really hard to approach," he said. "You have to invest this intense emotion into words that make no sense, which is a trick. I listened and listened and listened and cobbled together some set of lyrics that felt like they had some continuity to them. I worried, 'Maybe there's going to be Dylan fanatics out there who say, "Oh this is heresy."' When Greil Marcus sent me his notes, I said, 'Well, if Greil Marcus likes it, who gives a s-?'"
Certainly, Fishman's versions of the songs are not slavish. But he also said he didn't want to chop songs up for chopping's sake.
"I don't think they're so ripe for interpretation, this group," he said. "In the beginning, I thought, 'How in the world am I going to interpret these?' That's what makes them so great, it's that they're so personal. I just sort of came to the conclusion that the only way to do it was to see how it felt that night, and bring what I thought and felt, without being clever about it, not just doing some weird time signature-y'know, 'This Wheel's on Fire' in 7."
Fishman will perform his versions with his band-or rather, one of his bands. He likes to keep a staple of various musicians and mix and match them for shows.
"I pick people that I work with based on how I like them, not what [instrument] they play," he said. So maybe it's not surprising that he could end up with a combo of guitar, bass, drums, violin and trombone. The effect, Fishman said, is to ensure a spontaneous, improvisational feel on the bandstand. At any given time, all the musicians will know the song they're playing, but may have never played it together.
Duke Performances Director Aaron Greenwald said he booked the show partly out of his own appreciation for The Basement Tapes.
"It represents an alternative history of American music, which is probably closer to the real history of American music, which provides a window to American history," he said.
Greenwald added that he also wanted to bring someone he says is a quintessentially cosmopolitan, "New York-y" artist to Durham in the midst of the Bull City's most New York-y event, the Full Frame Film Festival.
So, for all this cosmopolitanism, does a quirky, peculiarly individual artist like Howard Fishman worry that he'll be profiled as a Dylan repertory artist?
"I'm not worried about being pigeonholed as a Dylan interpreter because this is not a Dylan and the Band tribute band," he said. "In this day and age I don't think it would be a disingenuous thing to say it's like Charlie Parker covering Gershwin."
Plus he's got several other projects already in the pipeline-including a New Orleans brass band project. None of them has a release date yet, but it's a fair bet that none of them will be commonplace.
"Anything that's weird is good as far as I'm concerned," Fishman said. "I'm all for it. The weirder and the more personal the better."
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