David Blue - A Late Christmas Present to Myself

 I had a long walk in Canterbury this morning. I felt I needed the exercise and set off with a brief shopping list from my mother which acted as an excuse as it proved It was a clear. December morning and I took the opportunity to walk straight. All the way down the New Dover Road. Along the High Street, the bustling main thoroughfare of the Old City. Through Westgate and on past the station and The Monument a favourite hostelry to the doors of Canterbury Rock. Inside to greet Jim and a fantastic album nestling in the racks for a very reasonable price. It's been a good day. Such days need a record to trigger your memory every time you play them. I'll play this often. 

Here's something I wrote about David Blue and thus record some time back.

One of the saddest stories of all. David Blue, acolyte and com padre of Dylan and the rest from those early Greenwich Village Coffee House days.

'The Dylan Village group was a tight little circle: Victor Maimudes as bodyguard; Phil Ochs, Eric Andersen, Dave Van Ronk and Tom Paxton as sort of anvils off which he could flash his verbal pyrotechnics; Bob Neuwirth and David Blue straddling both roles. Few others could break into their scene … Of the singers and writers on the scene at this time, David Blue appears to have been closest to Dylan...” "He needed a friend," Blue said. "So he started including me in his scene and I got tight with him. 

In an interview published in the British newspaper Zigzag, David said, "Dylan just happened to be there. Maybe he was the symbol of the time, or the spearhead, but we were friends, and at one point he encouraged me. “That”s a great song you wrote‑ here’s a typewriter, take this, and let’s go up to the woods.” And that got me more interest in songwriting.” As Dylan’s fame grew, "I didn’t feel it was Dylan and me, two guys going places. It was him, and I’d go out and get a cab if he needed a cab. Not like a lackey, but just that he couldn’t go out and get a cab. But it was an equal exchange," Scaduto quoted.'

Rumored to be the subject matter of 'It's All Over Now Baby Blue'. If so, it sounds like a put down to me. Blue embarked on a musical career of his own. His 1966 Elektra debut is too obviously dressed up in clothes that Dylan has worn and discarded. 1968's, 23 Days in September, though is a very fine album, much more clearly stamped with Blue's own identity. A melancholy, beautifully orchestrated, leisurely paced record. Not perhaps, of the very top rank. But certainly high in the second division. Play the songs I've posted here and hunt down Ambitious Anna, possibly its finest track which I couldn't find a direct YouTube link to.

It didn't get Blue where he wanted or felt he should be either. To the credit, acclaim, fame and wealth his contemporaries were amassing. Still, he continued to mix in their circles. Blue, the Joni Mitchell song was also reputed to be a tribute. She denies this. They were also thought to be lovers. 

 

Still, there's a sense of thwarted loss about the songs I've posted here. Perhaps it's all retrospect. It's not as if they're any sadder than Leonard Cohen's records of the same period for example. Cohen was Blue's real surname oddly, dropped when he embarked on a musical career as he observed there were too many Cohens in the business already. The sadness is that these records are still almost unnoticed all these years after the event, following Blue's untimely, early death in 1982. He suffered a major heart attack while jogging around Washington Square Park.

Here's Cohen's touching and poetic eulogy to the man and his life:

'He died running, he fell beside the square, to the street where, many years before he had begun to sing, he fell in the fullest expression of vanity and discipline. Many of us, in our songs, had touched on the type of man that he became. Dylan raised up such a ragged hero many times before he turned to solace in the shadow of American Christianity. Joni Mitchell had spoken simply of that constant ambiguous lover, spoken of him over and over, before she entered the beautiful technology of jazz and virtuosity. Kris Kristofferson had described that gambler playing his way from Nashville to Hollywood, where finally the dangers of the game were too coarse for poetry. 

David Blue was the peer of any singer in this country, and he knew it, and he coveted their audiences and their power, he claimed them as his rightful due. And when he could not have them, his disappointment became so dazzling, his greed assumed such purity, his appetite such honesty, and he stretched his arm so wide, that we were all able to recognize ourselves, and we fell in love with him. And as we grew older, as something in the public realm corrupted itself into irrelevance, the integrity of his ambition, the integrity of his failure, became, for those who knew him,increasingly important and appealing, and he moved swiftly, with effortless intimacy into the private life of anyone who recognized him, and our private lives became for him the theaters that no one would book for him, and he sang for us in hotel rooms and kitchens, and he became that poet and that gambler, and he established a defiant style to revive those soiled archetypes. In the last few years, something happened to his voice and his guitar, something very deep and sweet entered, his timing became immaculate and we knew that we were listening to one of the finest, one of the few men singing in America and I was happy then and perhaps happier now to say that I told him that. 

He did not put away his cowboy boots. He did not take a part-time job, he was fully employed in his defiance and his originality and his faithfulness to a ground, a style, an image of which he himself was the last and best champion exponent, a style that many of us had wanted, courted, and had not won.And finally, toward the end of his short and graceful life, he had the grace to recognize the woman to whom he had always been singing, and he courted and married Nesya and because a woman of talent and beauty does not choose lightly, she made manifest for all to plainly see the qualities of love and generosity that he had forced out of his distress. The death of such a man unifies us, and recalls to us how precious we are to one another