All Along the Watchtower

When Jimi Hendrix recorded All Along the Watchtower, Bod Dylan said he heard new things he adopted for the future. When Dylan composed it he had taken the first step out of the void, but Jimi went all out and made it epic.

Just shows how artists riff off one another. Not rip off, take note.

Now everone is in a big spin about Roy Lichtenstein who got rich while being a little too inspired by other artist's comic books. Money is of course the issue. If Lichtenstein would have died poor nobody would have cared.

These incidents are now the legends of American popular culture. In other words, world pop culture that really took off at a certain time and place. And now we still feel so deeply about these moments, that they can still cause ructions in our daily lives.

Someone called Spencer Elden has spent years trying to get Nirvana band members to pay him out for the ongoing pain he suffers from being the naked baby on the cover of Nevermind. That's ok. Spencer has a right to fight because nobody can feel what he feels.

But it does make you want to crawl into a hole, or sit under a mushroom, if you're an artist. The great debate is about what time does to art. It's that old periscope of history... which means that you can see ahead while your head is down. And who can see the future, really?

The fallback position is to make art that is about your supposedly unique pain and joy, only, so that nobody can even comprehend and hijack your feelings. Think I may try it sometime.