Maria Muldaur & Bob Dylan: The Shot of Love Incident

In "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," a chapter in his 1989 book Dylan: A Biography, Bob Spitz relates a series of interesting Bob Dylan anecdotes from the early '80s (i.e., the "Gospel Years") as told to him by Maria Muldaur. In one of them, Muldaur describes being blown off by Dylan after she'd dropped in--and been made to cool her heels for a long time in a waiting room--at the Shot of Love recording sessions. (Besides being an old and close friend of Dylan's--even accompanying him a few months earlier on his last visit to Mike Bloomfield--she had been invited to the sessions by the background singers.) "Finally, I saw his face at the little window," Spitz quotes Muldaur as saying. "He looked right at me and right through me [italics in the original]. Then he whispered something to a friend and ignored me, which was a message, I guess, so I took off."

Spitz then writes:

"Put yourself in the place of someone who had known Bob all those years and tried to keep up with the conflicting messages he sent out.... [Y]ou attempt to ride the highs and lows as long as it is humanly possible. But after awhile, you just give up trying.

"Maria went back to San Francisco feeling like [sic] she'd lost one of her best friends, just as others before her ... had felt when they had been dismissed from the entourage with similar blunt shrift."

I asked Muldaur about this incident when I interviewed her in January 1993 for the Door. The main subject of the interview was her Christian faith, so I excluded her Dylan comments from the article. But they were very interesting. As you will see from the unedited transcription below, what she made of that 1981 episode and what Spitz made of it were entirely different.

.....................

MULDAUR: What happened was that I went to the rehearsal studio because by now I had made friends with all the girl singers, right? And he [Dylan] had always welcomed me there before. I had gone there before. And so they said, "Oh, come on. We're rehearsing." And I said, "Are you sure it's O.K.?" "Oh, sure! Bob always wants to see you."

So I went, and it was just this funky warehouse in Venice, California. And I went upstairs, and I was sitting on the couch. I mean, I wasn't about to go bursting in. It was this big, kind of loft room. Everyone was set up, and the girls were at one end. And he kept peering at me. But, you know, he's very myopic. He didn't have his glasses. But I didn't know it at the time, and he was, like, squinting, almost glaring at me, right? And I started to think, "Oh, God! I probably shouldn't have been here."

And I knew everybody in the band--[Jim] Keltner and everyone. But I just thought, "Well, I'll just sit here. I'll leave during the break and just say goodbye to the girls and tell them to meet me later or something." Because I'd known him for so many years. I'd known him to show up at my house unannounced then make everybody uptight as if they'd shown up long after he had. You know what I mean? So it wasn't throwing me, personally, for a loop. I just thought, "Well, he just wants to have his privacy. This is obviously not the right time to be here."

Well, what happened was--and I don't know if this is in the book--he [Spitz] sent me the book, but I have never had the time to read it--all of a sudden, there was this commotion! And the music abruptly stopped, and I saw these two roadies whisk this chick with short hair, this chick--and I had been to some of his other concerts, both in the Northwest and down around here--her name is Carmella or something [Carmel Hubbell]. She, like, goes--I'm still good friends with Victor Maimudes, who's been his road manager for thirty years, and the last time I spoke to him [Maimudes], he said this woman's still following him [Dylan]. She must have untold money and just finds out where he's playing. She does things like goes to his hotel, says she's Sara Dylan, and sometimes gets the key to his room. He'll walk in from the bus, and there she is! I mean, this chick is like--she follows him everywhere.

Well, that day she showed up while I was sitting there at the rehearsal. I guess she had come around a couple of times before, and he had been really bugged. And what I didn't know and found out later from Keltner is that--like, Keltner had brought his son--you know, people were just bringing too many people by the rehearsal. And it was making Dylan edgy and nervous. And, unbeknownst to the girls, he had just said, "O.K., if you don't check with me, I don't want you just bringing anybody by the rehearsal." And the roadie told me later that he [Dylan] couldn't see who I was from where he was sitting.

The other weird thing that happened--meanwhile, my being there was totally minor because he would've come over during a break and seen it was me and it would've been fine. But what happened was this chick showed up, and they jumped up and stopped the rehearsal, and the girls were freaked because--don't forget, that wasn't long after John Lennon was assassinated. So they whisked her away, they called the police--it was the first spring day, and the roadies had absentmindedly left the--even though they were watching for her at the normal door, she had come up a ramp into the loading area. They'd left the loading door open.

So that was the end of that. That's when Jim Keltner came down and said, "Oh, God, this shit's been going on, and this girl's been hanging around and driving us crazy, and we can't just call the police because she hasn't really done anything. But now that she's trespassed--" You know.

So they were in the throes of all that, and the girls had just picked a bad day to invite me.

Shivaree: Ghost in the Machine (Illinois Entertainer, 2000)

Finding a fresh angle on the New York-based trio Shivaree is as hard as classifying its music. Although it came together four years ago, the group--Ambrosia Parsley (vocals), Duke McVinnie (guitars), Danny McGough (keyboards, gadgetry)--didn’t release its first album until last October (on Capitol/Odeon), and already the band has been the subject of over a dozen prominent features in magazines such as Billboard, Spin, Detour, and Elle, not to mention the subject of album and concert reviews in every publication worth its salt and many that aren’t. In short, Shivaree has been picked clean.

Actually, it's Parsley who has undergone the picking. So far, McGough (pronounced “McGoo”) and McVinnie (pronounced “McVinnie”) have combined to do a total of exactly zero interviews. So, for the what seems like the hundredth time: yes, “Ambrosia Parsley” is her given name, and, no, her middle name is not a food (please, hold the “eating Nicole” jokes). Yes, her father was a coal miner from West Virginia, and hence she, like Loretta Lynn, is a coal miner’s daughter. Yes, she made her public debut at age seven, fronting a ninety-nine-piece senior-citizen banjo band at a southern-California Shakey’s Pizza, singing “All of Me” and “Goody Goody.” Yes, she got the idea for the title of Shivaree’s album--I Oughtta Give You a Shot in the Head for Making Me Live in This Dump--from the name of the song that was playing in the stomach of a cow that swallowed a radio in an episode of Green Acres. Yes, she sings like the country-jazz chanteuse of David Lynch’s dreams, and, no, she’s never heard of Julie Miller. Yes, she smokes Parliaments, and, no, she doesn’t only smoke brands named after funk bands. Yes, she’s twenty-eight, and, yes, she’d like for McGough and McVinnie to talk with the press once in a while, but she doubts that they will. “They kick me out the door and make me do all the interviews and take all the pictures because they hate doing it,” says Parsley, chuckling. “I’m like the sacrificial lamb.”

Speaking of sacrificial lambs, Parsley insists that the refrain of “Arlington Girl,” which goes, “She’s waiting around for Jesus,” has no Christian significance and means only “waiting around to die.” Furthermore, the seventy-four-second “Ash Wednesday” has no Christian significance either, but it does mention toys, candles, cats, stupid boys, and the New York Yankees and, like the album‘s other eleven selections, sounds as if it belongs in a pop firmament other than one in which ’N Sync, Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and Christina Aguilera are big stars.

At first I Oughtta Give You a Shot sounds “experimental,” its unpredictable stylistic shifts, weird rhythms, electronic noises, and production effects calculated to knock listeners off-balance just enough to keep their preconceived notions from operating at full strength. Actually, though, “accidental” would be a better term for the album’s slow, tortured gestation. In 1996, shortly after assembling and circulating a three-song demo, Shivaree--based at the time in Los Angeles--found itself at the heart of a major-label bidding war. Then, after signing with Capitol, the group found itself in the studio with Joe Henry, the justly celebrated Mammoth Records singer-songwriter and Madonna’s most famous brother-in-law. An unspecified but sizeable amount of studio time and money later, both Henry and Shivaree had to admit that scrapping the album would be the quickest way to put it out of everyone’s misery. “We had to start over,” remembers Parsley.

Starting over meant relocating to the recording studio in Henry’s backyard, the studio in which “a big chunk” of what finally made the album was recorded. In the two-to-three years that followed, Shivaree added, subtracted, remixed, and shuffled songs, eventually recording in New York and intermittently benefiting from an array of outside producerly input (Mickey Petralia, Tony Mangurian, George Drakoulias, the Elegant Two).

But it’s an anecdote from the album’s Joe Henry phase that best indicates the interest that the group was generating within the music community as well as the degree to which the unexpected came to play a role in the album’s creation. “There are some little samples that sound like tap-dancey things going on in ‘Arlington Girl,’” says Parsley, “which was one of the songs that we got to work with Jim Keltner on. He’s a friend of Joe’s, and he lives up the street. He came over one night, helped us out, and told us all these really neat stories. The next day, we’re working, and all of a sudden there’s a knock, and it’s Jim Keltner. He’s holding all this sampling equipment, and he says, ‘I hope I’m not bothering you guys. I wanted to come over to try this thing out on “Arlington Girl.” I haven’t used it since I recorded “Kokomo” with the Beach Boys.’”

Not that I Oughtta Give You a Shot evokes Aruba, Jamaica, Key Largo, Montego, or Bermuda--the Bermuda Triangle is more like it. Parsley has spoken often about “Goodnight Moon” (the song, incidentally, that Shivaree performed on the Conan O’Brien show in late April) and the real-life haunted-house incidents to which the song refers, but it turns out that, like Paul Harvey’s, there’s more to her story. “It was a really funky, gnarly, majorly haunted house,” she says of her former SoCal domicile. “I could never go to sleep in the house until the sun came through the window.”

Had her life been a Wes Craven film, audience members would’ve shouted at various points, “Just get out!” “Well,” she says, “it’s hard to just get up and move, and it was such a great little place.” Besides, she says, the ghost “started out [doing things that were] kind of cute and funny, but then it started to get mean--relentless--and not good-feeling at all. “All the lights would go out, and you’d get the creeps; and the phone would ring, and you’d get the creeps; and the stereo would go on, and you’d get the creeps; and the stereo would go off, and you’d go see why, and all the CDs that were in the stereo would be stacked in the middle of the living-room floor; and dog toys would be rolling across the floor for ten minutes from one end to the next; and things would be missing and show up in really weird places.”

Then there were the “really horrible dreams, scratching, laughing, and running footsteps.” “Everything creepy you’ve ever seen in any ghost-story movies that freaked you out as a kid started to happen in this house.”

And then, one night, she saw It. “Duke and I had just come home from Joe’s house. He walked me to the door, and I said, ‘Good night.’ I closed the door, and then I heard this noise, this low, weird hum that made all the hairs stand up on the back of my neck and made all the bones in my chest rattle. It wasn’t a sound that I’d ever heard before or that I could recreate. And when I turned around, it was standing in the corner of the living room. It was this gray, short blur that ran--whooshed--right by me. I saw it go into the kitchen, and then it turned the corner into the bedroom.”

Hysterical, she ran down her front walk after McVinnie, who accompanied her back to the house, placed a small pile of salt in the corners of each room, and assured her that all would be well. “I locked myself in my bedroom,” says Parsley, “turned on all the lights, turned on the T.V., and sat there just completely freaked until the sun came up. Then I took a nap.”

Strangely enough, Parsley made no connection between her ghost and the presence in the living room of a six-foot statue of Satan carved in 1919 in Africa, the prize possession of her folk-art-collecting landlord. “It was called The Devil Root,” she explains. “It had the head of an owl, a big beard, and a big, muscular body, and it was wearing a skirt. It had tiny wings on its back and a big tail that curled up over its head.”

To make the statue less frightening, Parsley would sometimes “dress him up in drag,” replete with feather boas. One can’t help thinking that perhaps The Devil Root didn’t appreciate the makeover. “Too bad!” she snaps. “He needed a hat, some feathers, and some jewelry because he was really creepy looking.”

Now, three time zones, many months, and over a dozen well-placed Shivaree features later, Parsley has achieved the ultimate musician’s perspective on the ordeal. “It was a nightmare,” she admits, “but we got a pretty funny song out of it. Anyway, it was always all very Scooby-Doo, you know?”

To which one can only say “Zoiks!” and suggest that in the future the First Lady Of Shivaree avoid houses with hungry demons who might mistake someone named “Ambrosia Parsley” for a Scooby Snack herself. #####