Jeffrey Lewis vs Bob Dylan

I was interviewing Jeff Feuerzeig this morning for my Daniel Johnston book.

(I'm intrigued to see the book cover at the previous link to amazon.com: as is often the case, the author is usually the last to see it. I'm surprised they didn't go for one, strong, visual.) Jeff was charming, affable, remembered to speak slowly for the benefit of my aching typing fingers - it was on Skype so I was even able to see him relaxed, stretching. We hadn't spoken before, but it felt like we had. I got a few thousand words down before family committments came calling.

During the course of the conversation, we got diverted - as often happens when two natural allies get together for the first time - and started discussing Jeffrey Lewis. In Jeff's opinion, Jeffrey is the YouTube equivalent of Dylan in '68, or Jad Fair, or old school Brian Wilson, or Daniel Johnston in his parent's basement in 1982. And the YouTube qualifier isn't meant as a perjorative, but a comment on the way music gets disseminated these days.

I agreed with him, partly - although I'd never thought of Jeffrey in such elevated company as Jad or Daniel (Dylan, certainly). As Jeff explains, Jeffrey busks all over Europe (and recently, as far as Brisbane - where he played a storming, heart-wrenching set to the accompaniment of cheap iTunes visualisers and bats flitting around the museum windows) and sleeps in sleeping bags under the bushes and under the trees...

"How could you not love that guy?" asks Jeff. "Talk about the anti-rock star. He’s a true Marxist radical. Do I prefer the lo-fi bedroom recordings of his first two albums to the album of Crass covers? Yes I do, but you can’t argue with his politics."

Well, serendipity and all - I have the new Jeffrey Lewis And The Junkyard album here on my desk, beautifully packaged as ever, poignant and sad and self-deprecating and humorous and plaintive as ever, tender and giving and with far too many words crammed into each line...and I'm thinking that I actually prefer the Crass covers, but this is first listen and all, and I'm simply glad I have it. The Jack Lewis cover is killer.

And I do wonder whether Jeff is right, that in another 15, 20 years folk like me and him (it will probably be precisely me and him) will be busting guts trying to spread the word to an uncaring world that should've paid attention back then, or will YouTube have made all the difference? And if it has, is that sad? Because, surely, part of the mythology of rock is being unable to catch your idols up close - and that way, the legend grows, in imaginations and coffee shops and left-wing radio stations.

That's how The Sex Pistols managed it. That's how Nirvana managed it (um, because Kurt died). That's how Daniel, however unintentionally or manipulatively, managed it.