{"id":3083,"date":"2015-03-05T17:58:18","date_gmt":"2015-03-05T17:58:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.longkeshinsideout.co.uk\/?p=3083"},"modified":"2015-03-05T17:58:18","modified_gmt":"2015-03-05T17:58:18","slug":"stuck-outside-of-lisburn-with-the-long-kesh-blues-again-beano","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.longkeshinsideout.co.uk\/?p=3083","title":{"rendered":"Stuck Outside Of Lisburn With The Long Kesh Blues Again: Beano"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stuck Outside of Lisburn with The Long Kesh Blues Again.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Bob Dylan was one of those artists who had a universal appeal amongst the Loyalist Prisoner population throughout my tenure at Her Majesties various establishments during the seventies and eighties.\u00a0<\/strong> <\/em><\/p>\n

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When us young ones started getting turned on by the Zimm\u2014that\u2019s seventies hippy parlance by the way-in the wake of Dylan-Planet Waves and the live Before the Flood which appeared in 1974-Before The Fire-many of the auld hands let us know that Bobby D was in fact old hat and that they were humming his protest songs ten years earlier.\u00a0 They bored you with the stories that Dylan ripped the Seegers off or that he\u00a0 was poor man\u2019s protest singer compared to Tom Paxton.\u00a0 We weren\u2019t deterred.\u00a0 Of course we had our own recollections of the Byrds Tambourine Man or Blowin in the Wind by his auld flame Joan Baez.\u00a0 Come to think of it there was hardly a song of his she didn\u2019t cover but that was the one that was best known I suppose.
\nBy late 75 there were new songs in our rapidly filling Bob repertoire.\u00a0 From Planet Waves we were introduced to Forever Young and from the masterpiece Blood on the Tracks in early 75 you could have your pick of classic songs. \u00a0If you overdosed on Shelter from the Storm or Idiot Wind sure you could always fall back on You\u2019re a Big Girl Now-which of course could arguably contain one of the greatest lyrics of all time. \u201c \u2013with a pain that stops and starts—-like a corkscrew to my heart\u201d<\/em><\/strong> —a corkscrew to my heart….You could almost feel it piercing your skin.\u00a0 \u00a0A true wordsmith and genius at work.\u00a0 There was talk in mid 1975 of a proposed massive tour coming later in the year.\u00a0 The Rolling Thunder Review.\u00a0 A huge tour with a wonderful ensemble of musicians-a travelling caravan of troubadours as it was described in one music magazine. The tour was split in two..and the first half kicked off in the North West states and Canada in the autumn of 75.\u00a0 The southern states and the west coast welcomed the troupe in the Spring of 1976.\u00a0 In between times the epochal Desire was released-January 1976.\u00a0 It received the highest of critical acclaim and this was echoed through sales.\u00a0 Almost forty years later it continually ranks in the top ten of Dylan albums in polls.\u00a0 In 2013 a reader\u2019s poll for the prestigious Rolling Stone magazine listed it as the 5th<\/sup> best Dylan album of all time.<\/p>\n

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\nThere are no sub standard songs on Desire-many of the compositions on the album are character driven-either real or imaginary.\u00a0 There is an 11 minute biography of famed Mafia don Joey Gallo and the album closes with a tribute to Dylan\u2019s long suffering wife Sara.\u00a0 Many of the songs were co-written with Jacques Levy-who was, amongst other things, a songwriter-a theatre director and a clinical psychologist.\u00a0 But it is the opening track that will linger longest in our retrospective catalogue.\u00a0 From the first, immediate staccato lyrics\u2014\u201c \u201cPistol shots ring out in the barroom night-enter Patty Valentine from the upper hall\u201d-<\/em><\/strong>
\nwe are flung head first into that maelstrom of a night in The Lafayette Bar and Grill, Patterson New Jersey in 1966.\u00a0 For those of us who who didn\u2019t know the background to the song it led us to search for that information. \u00a0\u00a0We revelled in the story that such was Dylan\u2019s interest in Carter that he organised a concert in Clinton State Prison in December 1975.\u00a0 This led us to thinking that maybe we should request Clubsound or Big Tom and the Mainliners to play for us in Compound 21.<\/p>\n

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\nSoon we were experts in the injustice that Dylan\u00a0 sang about-of the racially motivated and wrongful conviction of a man who but for unlawful imprisonment could have been\u2014\u201cthe Champion of the World\u201d.\u00a0 <\/em><\/strong>According to The Bard.\u00a0 Hurricane became much more than a modern day protest song and developed into somewhat of an anthem.\u00a0 The 8 plus minutes provided enough snippets of catchy lyrics to satisfy the best of us.\u00a0 The song was a veritable timeline of Carter\u2019s supposed crime-his trial and subsequent \u201cfalse\u201d imprisonment.\u00a0 In the early months of 1976 and stretching long into the summer the soaring strains of Scarlet Rivera\u2019s violin could be heard swooping through the huts.\u00a0 The Dansette played on repeat-Desire and in particular Hurricane was rivalled only by The Eagles Greatest Hits and the tearful wrench of Lying\u2019 Eyes.\u00a0 One was favoured by the young, energetic and champions of the underdogs rights.\u00a0 The other by the Sad Sack brigade whilst writing letters back home.\u00a0 The energetic types used the track as a timer of sorts for a bout of activity in the gym-as they did with Bat Out of Hell a couple of years later-due to the length of the track.\u00a0 A sustained attack on the heavy bag reduced a man to a sweating, quivering rack by the time Hurricane morphed into the second track-Isis-a tale of unrequited love -the Mexican kind.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=gGMSfiH850o<\/a>
\nHurricane sustained us and gave us our fix\u2014many by now had fallen to this fresh addiction…like the junkies we were we went in search of the old tablets-the vinyl pills that would get us through.\u00a0 The Dylan register was exhausted.
\nOf course us new found Dylanites- or in the case of the more extreme-Dylanologists-were open to stick from the more staid-old fashioned-side shade-checked shirt brigade, who taunted us with versions of Benny Hill\u2019s Go Round Again.\u00a0 But do you know what?\u00a0 See even if you listened really closely to Benny..and even if you admitted that he had a passable nasal twang..and that he could cram loads of words into the one sentence..he wasn\u2019t a patch on the Master.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=D6xc3Bm3tGQ<\/a><\/p>\n

Beano<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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