Knock Knock.
Who’s there?
Bob Dylan.
No he’s not.
Yes he is.
Bullshit.
Shut your gob, he is so.
Why is it called I’m Not There, then?
Bob sings the title track.
No he doesn’t, Sonic Youth does.
Well yes, them too and very well, I might add, but Bob’s version — which he recorded with the Band in the basement at Big Pink back in the Sixties — is the final cut (track 36 on this bloated 2CD spectacular) and it’s a dusty classic made of gold, hands-down the best track I’ve heard all year.
No shit?
Uh-huh.
What’s that Eddie Vedder tune like?
You ever had bird flu?
No!
Neither have I, next question.
Yo La Tengo’s Fourth Time Around, any good?
Drop-dead gorgeous.
How about Cat Power’s Stuck In Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again?
Rollicking.
And Stephen Malkmus’ Ballad of a Thin Man?
F. Scott Fitzgerald-quoting slacker bohemian invective!
Who’s in charge of this whole shebang?
I reckon Sonic Youth’s Lee Renaldo assembled the house band (The Million Dollar Bashers) because not only does he play, but he produces too. The group features his SY bandmate Steve Shelley on drums and two of the avant-garde’s modern guitar greats (the shredder Nels Cline, who you can hardly hear, and the poet Tom Verlaine).
Is that all?
Hardly. There’s also Tex-Mex desert music marauders Calexico backing up My Morning Jacket’s Jim James, Willie Nelson and the Iron and Wine dude on a trifecta of sun-blazed tunes ripe for an unnamed Mexican beach with a pouch full of limes, a bottle of Tequila and a voluptuous waitress named Valdez (‘Goin’ to Acapulco’, ‘Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)’ and ‘Dark Eye’s respectively).
Your descriptive powers are very odd, yet it sounds kind of neat. Have you left anything out?
Well, pretty much all of CD2. I feel the first disc stacks the deck with most of the aces, though you simply must hear Jack Johnson’s version of ‘A Fraction Of Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie’.
Really?
No, I’m kidding.
This has to be like the worst knock-knock joke ever.
You say that like you’ve heard a good one?
Now listen you, don’t knock knock-knock jokes, my life would be incredibly hollow without them.