Buddy Holly & The Late Italian Renaissance

I have often been amazed how Buddy Holly
anticipated the changes in song writing that
Bob Dylan was to personify in the mid-1960s.
(Of course it was The Beatles who really made
it stick as they entered their middle and late
periods and proved its commercial viability.)

The comparison might seem strange as Holly's
song never grew lyrically complex, and he
very seldom developed a song much beyond two
verses, but the complexly sensitive male singing
Well All Right is completely alone among the
rock stars of his time.  He is petulantly self-assertive,
but he also realizes the woman he's speaking to is
as fully alive (with her own desires and inner life)
as he is himself. 

And it's practical knowledge:  the man who
sings Words of Love has a very sophisticated
ability to talk to women - again  unique among
his fellow greats singing lines like "She's sure
fine looking, man; she's something else" - this
after comparing his love to his car.

Even Rave On anticipates a vocabularly 30 years
or more in the future.  (And again the woman
takes the initiative. )  But Rave On reveals some-
thing else about Holly:  not only did he anticipate
the future, but by some strange coincidence, he
developed a style of singing very close to the
Sprezzatura so highly prized by composers of
the late Renaissance such as Caccini, Cavalli,
and most notably Claudio Monteverdi.


Sprezzatura means something like negligence,
but in a good way, and the freedom with which
Holly's voice bent and spread out against a
disciplined bass line would have allowed
Monteverdi to trust one of his composition's into
Holly's hand with confidence:

For comparison sake compare Holly's singing
on Rave On with what starts around the :40
mark of Monteverdi's  Zefiro Torna, 
e di soavi accenti  from his 8th Book of Madrigals.


Rave On


Zefiro Torna, e di soavi accenti.

Buddy Holly continues to astound over
fifty years after his death.  He has the most
densely compact career of any rock 'n roll
great, having in just a handful of years and
songs reached back into the centuries and
looked forward into the decades.

The New Dylan, The Old Springsteen

                                                                                                    •
Looking on-line for an appropriate sound track to CHRONICLES,
Bob Dylan's memoirs, I came across this cover by Bruce Springsteen
of one of Dylan's greatest songs:

I Want You.

It's an amazing version, both awkward and heart-breakingly beautiful.
It's from Before Born to Run, a period of his career where Springsteen was
known as the New Bob Dylan, but this version is not the version of younger
man.  The younger singer stole a back page from older and aged the song.

While the great original version expresses the frustration of the young
and self-assured at being unable to extend his feeling of power as far
as the object of his desire, in Springsteen's version the vocal is
secondary to a haunting high-pitched drone which feels like nothing
less than the accumulation of loss that we are forced to carry around
as we grow older.

The cover goes off the rail a bit - also sounding quite like
I Came For You, itself a song of young potency  - when he sings
about fathers and true love and not thinking about it, because otherwise 
he's singing from that period of life when you hold onto the most painful
love the hardest, fearing that when the pain is gone, it'll be all over
for you and love.  And in your numbness you'll feel yourself
living that much closer to death.