Hotel Point--

"Trying to think how to

say what Bobby "Blue" Bland's voice does, mostly in the later recordings, sweet with maybe just a few burrs, a pebble or two for "texture" and out of nowhere a

snarling "Oh Lord" that's like a dog shaking a rabbit. Spooky good. Bob Dylan talks about "the early singers who sang like they were navigating burning ships." Enough

to make one into a connoisseur of voice-styling metaphor. Or Dylan (on Roy Orbison): "He was now singing . . . compositions in three or four octaves that made

you want to drive your car over a cliff. He sang like a professional criminal." What I did, clumb'd up out the gully, is read that Chronicles thing, writ in

Dylan's tetchy voice "fire, brimstone, a little half-crack'd, lying is formidable fun and allows the Saviour reason to reach down and "tetch" you, var. of teachy,

teechy, tetchy, tetchie, tecchy, titchie, tichy. Or dial. titchy, tertchy, tatchy, tachy ( ME. tecche, 16th c. tetche.) Say, short-

tempered; peevish, irritable; testy. Bonkers, touch'd. As Shakespeare saith: "Pretty foole." (Somewhere Dylan points to Pretty Boy Floyd and Al Capone, the latter

technocrat nobody's idea of folk-material, no scuff and devilment to him.) And: "I practiced in public and my whole life was becoming what I practiced." "