Random Access

If you want to know who put out the best album of 2006, turn into the Grammy Awards in say... about 30 years time.
That’s probably how long it will take the recording industry to figure out what really went on in its business in the past year.
It’s fascinating to look at this year’s nominees and reflect back on their careers.
Take your Bob Dylan, for example. The poet laureate of the 60s picked up two more Grammys Monday night, one for solo rock vocal performance (Someday Baby) and one for best contemporary folk album for his Modern Times CD.
Before that, he had won one Grammy in 1994 for best traditional folk album, three in 1997 for his comeback album Time Out of Mind and one in 2001 for Love and Theft.
No one in their right mind would suggest that Dylan peaked in the late 90s. Yet, according to its most prestigious honour, that’s when he came onto the recording industry radar.
If you went by his Grammy record, his Bobness might as well not have recorded Highway 61 Revisited or Blonde on Blonde or Freewheelin’ or Bringin’ It All Back Home, all of which caused nary a ripple on the Grammy meter at the time.
It was absolutely hilarious to see Dylan, whose singing was never his strong suit and who seems to have lost most of the little voice he had, up against Toronto-born and Winnipeg-raised Neil Young for the honour of top solo rock vocalist.
Yeah, that’s the same Young who the other members of the seminal rock group Buffalo Springfield were so reluctant to allow to sing lead on their first album.
Young has done wonderful, if uneven work, over four decades now and while his work remains vital, his new anti-Bush, anti-war album and last year’s mellow Prairie Wind, will not make anyone forget Everybody Knows This is Nowhere, Zuma, Rust Never Sleeps or my personal fave, the admittedly offbeat Tonight’s The Night.
The Grammy organizers have obviously figured out that they have screwed up often in the past. So they have tried to rectify their error by issuing retroactive awards for music that was produced more than 25 years ago.
You could call this the Oops category if you wanted. Blonde on Blonde and Like a Rolling Stone have been honoured via that method.
The other tack the Grammys have taken to minimize the damage is to create so many categories that they can’t possibly leave anybody out. You almost expect a “Best Performance in a New Genre of Music Yet to be Titled” award. (Frank Zappa is up for the lifetime achievement award in that one, by the way.)
At least there is one contemporary performer who won a well-deserved award this year.
In category 77, Best Spoken Word Album, the co-winner for his recording of Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis was former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. He beat out a couple of other well-known political comedians, Al Franken and Bob Newhart.