Happy 80th Birthday Bob Dylan - Cold Iron Bounds

His Bobness turns 80 today and the tributes are flowing.  So let me join them.  We have been so lucky to live in his time.  A flawed character like all of us, but his genius prevails.

There's many favourite songs to choose from, but I am going for Cold Iron Bounds from the 1997 album Time Out of Mind which marked his 'comeback' after a fallow period in the 80's and 90's.

This is a fabulous live video of Bob and his band shot for the film Masked and Anonymous.  All done in a single take without missing a beat.  The band is absolutely cooking and Bob turns out some wonderful guitar licks.  

About four minutes in he turns to the lead guitarist to give him 'the look' - 'come back in to the rhythm man it's time for another verse.'  The guitarist gets another look signaling the end of the song.  All great stuff.  Even Bob can't help but flash the faintest of smiles at the end - he knows that was good, real good.

Throw Bob on the turntable and toast to his good health.  Until next time, peace and love.

The Double Life of Bob Dylan - Vol.1

 His Bobness - as I like to remember him

A couple of weeks back I posted about the arrival of a new book The Double Life of Bob Dylan Vol.1 1941-1966 - A Restless, Hungry Feeling by Clinton Heylin, apparently reputed to be the world's leading Dylanologist (yes, that's a word).

The world doesn't need another book about Bob Dylan we all know; however, Heylin was granted first access to Dylan's archives which he sold off a few years back for $22M (that's USD by the way).  Expect a flurry of books this year on Dylan as he turns 80, including Vol.2 to this series.  I expect quite a few of them will be rubbish as it's become an industry to write rock books by simply trawling the internet as research.  Here at least Heylin has the exclusive on a lot of new written and recorded material.

Any book on a figure like Dylan needs an angle otherwise it will be a dull affair.  Heylin's angle is essentially that Dylan has been a supreme bullshit artist from the get go, so much so that he himself doesn't know where the truth and myth begin and end.  Heylin also argues that many of the accounts from people who were there, but recounted decades later are often not to be relied upon - Robbie Robertson for one (I actually read Robertson's book and really enjoyed it, but I have no way of knowing how truthful it is). 

This is a cracking read and I ploughed through it at a rapid pace.  I'm no Dylan obsessive, but the period through to 1966 was his most productive and influential and has always interested me the most.  He undoubtedly changed popular music forever at this time.  Until Dylan came along 'pop' music was not taken seriously and something only for teenagers.  He ensured that would never be the case again.

Not that this book is any hagiography.  Heylin, while recognising the genius, does not hold back in his criticism of Dylan the man and the composer.  He doesn't particularly rate The Times Are a Changing or Another Side of Bob Dylan for example (nobody rates the first album apparently except Rod Stewart it seems).  Freewheelin' and the first three electric albums are another matter though.

Mercifully we don't a spend too much time in Dylan's childhood and the action really takes off with Dylan hearing Elvis and tuning into southern radio stations which played what was then known as 'race music'.  Dylan starts off on the piano and pounds out tunes like a teenage Jerry Lee Lewis before switching to guitar.  His heart always was in rock and roll.

The switch to folk was a gradual thing through exposure to folk blues and of course Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson.  Robert Zimmerman eventually lands in Greenwich Village in 1960 and sees this as the moment to create Bob Dylan the myth as he starts to play in the pass the hat folk clubs.  There's nothing new in this, but some of the anecdotes from contemporary accounts and stuff captured on tape at the time are always interesting.  So what are the few things I learned:

• Bob Dylan was a determined to make it and used every opportunity to learn (take) from others.
• He was absolutely confident that he was in another league compared with his fellow musicians, including the Beatles.
• Joan Baez, who had a national profile when Dylan was just starting out, plotted and schemed to partner up with Dylan, particularly once his star outshone her own - Dylan was in love with her sister.
• He was not a particularly nice boyfriend to Suze Rotolo and had lots of other liaisons at the time.
• When he went electric he really had no idea to play in a band and refused to rehearse or teach the band the songs - they were expected to jump in and pick the song up immediately.  This drove the musicians crazy.
• On the world tour in 1966 his drug use was so wild that many of the people around him thought he may not not see his 26th birthday.
• People were invited into his inner circle, but often found themselves ejected very quickly.
• He signed some dumb contracts and his manager Albert Grossman completely stuffed up the contract with Columbia.
• And so on.

I would only recommend this book if you have an interest in Dylan and some familiarity with his music from that period.  Heylin's style is lively and some of the tales are quite amusing.  I thought he spent a little too much time on Dylan's aborted book Tarantula which, going by the extracts, was terrible.  Funnily, he classes Dylan's memoir Chronicles as mostly a work of fiction (I actually loved that book, but again I have no idea how true it might be).

Recommended for Dylan fans.

Until next time, peace and love.

Mending not ending - again

Recently the Soldersmoke blog posted a link to this great video by The Spirited Man about fixing and repairing things.  I only wish I was half as good as this bloke at fixing things.  

I am currently doing battle with a salt pool chlorinator that's stopped chlorinating.  A call to the manufacturer for a few tips was turned into a sales pitch to buy a new one at $1380.  It's so easy to flash the plastic and buy another, but I refuse to do so - yet.  I am running out of ideas, but not yet ready to surrender to the evil lords of consumption.

On the plus side this morning I fixed a chair whose canvass seat had rotted away.  A piece of MDF board screwed on to the frame, some foam rubber and liquid nails has restored (maybe that's overstating it slightly - let's try 'returned') this chair into service in my shed.  A small victory over the evil lords!

Until next time, peace and love.

Two recent reads

Just a quick post about two recent books I have read.  Infinite Country by Patricia Engel tells the story of a Colombian family which escapes poverty in their home country to the U.S.A. and in the process become undocumented migrants in the land of the free.  Spanning twenty plus years it describes the precarious existence poor migrants face with the threat of deportation ever present.  A great book which tells a story not often heard.

Megan Nolan's novel Acts of Desperation is the story of a young millenial woman who falls in love with the wrong man and how some people seek validation in the love of others.  This book is gritty and Nolan's writing crackles on the page.  I am clearly not the intended audience for this book, but it gave me an insight into a young woman's life.  Recommended.

In the meantime I am ploughing through the Bob Dylan book I recently posted here.  It's thoroughly enjoyable, but probably for Dylan fans only.

Until next time, peace and love.

HF portable receiving loop project

The finished portable loop - the module is hiding in the grey case

Coming up in June this year I will heading off to the NSW central coast to participate in a DXpedition with three other radio enthusiasts.  Although all involved are amateur radio operators we won't be transmitting on the amateur bands.  Instead this DXpedition is aimed primarily at receiving medium wave broadcast band stations from the Pacific and the Americas.  

In preparation for the trip I decided to build a receiving loop antenna which could be easily packed into a suitcase and assembled quickly at the receiving site.  I have a Wellbrook receiving loop at my home which gives impressive performance on the MW bands; however, it is not suitable for portable operations.  

There are a few options on the market and I decided to go for the Australian made Mini-kits EME 232 which comes just as an amplifier module which needs to be constructed.  The advantage of this approach was that I was free to design the loop component of the antenna so as to maximise its portability.  It also helped having the manufacturer based in Australia in case any problems arose.

The Mini-kits module is based on the proven LZ1AQ design, although it lacks the versatility of the original which can be used to switch in multiple loops.  The trade off is that the Mini-kits version is a fraction of the cost of the LZ1AQ module.

Construction of the circuit board was fairly straightforward.  Component wise the board comprises roughly 50% surface mount components.  I had not attempted a surface mount construction before and was a little apprehensive as to how I would go, but as it turned out there was nothing to worry about.  A fine point soldering iron, thinner spec solder and my magnifying LED lamp made the job easy.

The surface mount side of the board

Next was to flip the board over and install all the through hole components.  This was straightforward enough.  

The through hole component side of the board

Along with the main module I constructed the Mini-kits bias tee board which is used to power the module by sending 13.8 volts through the coaxial feed line.  

Once the bias tee was completed it was time to tackle construction of the loop antenna itself.  I dug about in the shed for some plumber's PVC pipe to construct the frame to give some mechanical strength to the loop.  For the loop I had some LMR400 50 ohm coax in the shed which I cut to about three metres in length to give me a one metre diameter loop.  On each end of the coax I soldered the inner conductor and the coax shield together and in turn soldered each of these ends on to two lengths of 3mm wire which plug into the module.

Next was the moment of truth.  Would it work?  I did a voltage check of the module as recommended by the manufacturer and found the voltage at the board was about 1.5 volts less than that specified.  A quick email to Mini-kits who confirmed the voltage supplied would be sufficient.  

Once satisfied with the voltage supply and the construction I plugged the antenna into a SDR receiver and gave it a test run.  I was immediately impressed with the performance of the antenna.  It has slightly more gain than the Wellbrook loop, but at the expense of a slightly higher signal to noise ratio.  Given my noisy urban location I wasn't too worried about this as the DXpedition will be (hopefully) relatively quiet noise wise.

The physical construction of the loop is not suitable for a more permanent installation, although the antenna has been set up in my backyard for a couple of months now and faced up to all sorts of weather.  I may look at building a LZ1AQ loop next time and experiment with some of the other antenna designs which can be utilised with this version.

A round up of the Dxpedition will follow in due course and I will let you know how the antenna performs in the field.

Until then, peace and love.