men in uniform

Since when my friends and neighbors greeted me and offered me the opportunity to serve I declined it,  I don't have any war stories like my fellow correspondents,  I did have a year of ROTC in college however and once a week I had to go to drill and that meant if you had a class just before it or just after it and couldn't get back to the dorm inbetween, you had to wear that Goddamn uniform walking around and in class, and if you passed any officer you had to salute them,  War was hell.


The character in Llewellyn was very loosely based on Dave Van Rock, in the sense that it didn't have much to do with him.,  Dave actually had something of a career, I'm sure he had a few LPs.  The summer after the summer of love there was a controversy raging in the bay area over the cool new medium of FM radio and whether he or Joni Mitchell sang Clouds better.  I liked his version better, he had one of those gravelly voices.

In the movie, right at the end Llewellyn, trying to be a true blue folksinger and failing at every turn walks off the stage just as some Dylanesque singer takes to it and begins singing in that scratchy manner.

There was a connection between Bob and Dave.  It was Dave who gave The House of the Rising Sun the treatment that Dylan stole to make a hit of it.  Dave was a little pissed, but what could he do?  Later when the Animals stole the version that Bob stole from Dave, Bob was a little pissed.


I can't believe that Old Dog would toss this really funny, really good, movie into the dustbin of uneven because in one scene a guy is wearing the wrong army uniform.  For Chrissake.  I'm a sucker for even not very good movies set in Chicago and they are always getting the streets wrong, and I don't care, and you know what, the movie guys know they are getting it wrong, but it's something they do because it helps the story, because they are telling a story, not giving a history lesson,  If when I am painting corn I make a cob too uneven or too even just so that it looks better to me, I apologize to nobody.


I left Bob after Nashville Skyline, picked him up again after those late 90s cds and now I am filling in inbetween