30/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

At times I think there are no words but these to tell what’s true.

The problem with the CD version of “Bringing in all back home” is that if you have never owned the LP you don’t quite get the absolute division between sides 1 and 2. Side 1, all pop and bop and laughter, love songs, funny songs… OK that is over simplifying the situation, but it is the essence of the music.

And then Side 2, that almighty sandwich in which the bleak solitude of Gates of Eden, and the monument to individualism (It’s Alright Ma) exist between the lighter Tambourine Man and Baby Blue.

With such an extraordinary brilliance of writing existing at so many different levels, these four songs cannot be separated in terms of greatness, but “Gates of Eden” stands out in one regard because it is the definitive statement from Dylan in terms of what he was doing then, and as it turned out what he continued doing through his writing career.

The line, “At times I think there are no words but these to tell what’s true” refer to the girlfriend’s dream, and dreams were on Dylan’s mind then as now - the album contains the bizarre dream about Ahab and his ship and seemingly everything else that can be crammed in, Love Minus Zero has its own dream like imagery, and Subterranean Homesick Blues if not a dream exists part of the time as if from another world. Dylan never lost his interest in dreams – from Bob Dylan’s Dream on Freewheelin, through to Series of Dreams which turned up on the 3^rd volume of the Bootleg series, and even on to the dream-like sequences of “Things have changed.”

This is not a unique interest. Dreams were the inspiration for art and poetry through the 20^th century – as was the reinterpretation of reality in dream-like ways. If we think of the stark black and whiteness of “Gates of Eden” in these terms we think surely of Picasso’s Guernica that final masterful statement of what the world has come to.

But while Guernica was Picasso’s final statement of greatness before the long, long decline into being a servant of the Communist Party, with Dylan we are still at the start. The dreams are still fresh, although none the less frightening.

It’s a song in 6/8 – more commonly associated with Celtic folk than the torments of Dylan’s subject matter. And so extraordinary is the reach of the song that it is a shock to return to the words and be reminded that this is a strophic song with each verse of just four lines. (Although some versions in print split the lines in half, musically we have four phrases of four bars – the classic 16 bar song. It is a four line song.)

Here image after image hits us, even over 40 years after its creation. One could print the whole song as an example, but to take just one line, try this as an assassination of contemporary life: “friends and other strangers”

As chilling a group of four words as you can find – this is isolation supreme.

But more than anything else this tells us what Dylan is writing about now and in the future. Yes there are love songs, yes there are songs about his ex-wife, yes there are the political songs, but mostly these are the songs of the sub-conscious where images pile on top of images, leaving the individual acting in a world that makes no sense, isolated, alone, “leaving men wholly totally free to do anything they wish to do but die”.

From this inferno, there is no escape.

(c) Copyright Tony Attwood 2008

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29/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

There can be few opening chord sequences as distinctive as Dylan’s minor-4^th, 5^th, Tonic sequence which opens “Idiot Wind”. And there can be few opening lines to a song as distinctive as “Someone’s got it in for me, they’re printing stories in the press.”

Within those six bars – and that is another distinctive factor, for it is only six bars – we have the landscape set out. There is a coldness about that minor fourth, like a cliff face with the wind howling, which tells us this is not going to be an easy ride. There is a coldness about the words – the mere fact that it is “someone” not an identified person who is doing the mischief makes it even more chilling.

And now looking back on it, how well we know that this is not an easy rise, for this is “Like a rolling stone” part 2. Of course there are differences – here in Idiot Wind, the guilt is at least partially shared. In Like a Rolling Stone there is only blame and finger pointing. In Idiot Wind there is uncertainty which was never there in the earlier song – but maybe that’s what getting older brings.

Just compare the openings…

“Someone’s got it in for me, they’re printing stories in the press”

“Once upon a time you dressed so fine, threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?”

Equally bleak but in different ways.

And when we turn back to the musical structure we find more similarity, because both these great songs are in 2/4 (rather than the conventional 4/4) and both work in six bar phrases. It is rare in Dylan – indeed it is rare in the world of pop and rock – and he reserves it for masterpieces of anguish and annoyance.

Pete Hamill’s notes to the album veer (at least to my eye) between insight and portentous wordiness. He suggests Idiot Wind is personal – I can’t see it myself, but then obviously Mr Hamill has access to Dylan that I can only dream about. If the bit about the shooting and the inheritance is real, then so be it, but it seems more like part of the painting of an imagined landscape – the background like the windmill in the Dutch masterpiece - from where I sit. But where he does strike the mark, I feel, is with the comment that “The idiot wind trivializes lives into gossip.” This is a theme of the sleeve notes essay – for earlier he says, “And through the fog of the plague, most art withered into journalism,” the plague being the descent of America from its high ideals into the politics of the 1970s.

Perhaps that points us to the biggest difference between Rolling Stone and Idiot Wind. In the latter Dylan says, “you are talking nonsense,” in the former he says, “you are nonsense.”

Much of its history pop and rock has been about love, lost love and dance. The lost love sub-genre has generally been of sadness and wanting the lover back. Dylan singlehandedly invented a completely new sub-genre: despair, disgust and dismay. “Like a rolling stone” was the first high mark of this style of writing, “Idiot Wind” the second. It may be extremely uncomfortable, but it is the ultimate antithesis of relativism. Every approach to life is not equally valid, equally understandable and equally excusable. There are people of whom we must say, “You are utterly wrong.” And that’s what he says here, even where he says, “yes I got it wrong sometimes too.” The latter does not excuse the former.

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26/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

We better talk this over is hardly a great song, but it does have a way with words that is unusual even for Dylan.

The start does not auger well with the opening lines still jarring after all these years

I think we better talk this over
Maybe when we both get sober

I can still hear myself shouting, “Oh no,” as I heard that for the first time. It is just so naff. And worse the opening is followed by two throw away lines which make one think that the great lyricist has lost it

You’ll understand I’m only a man
Doing the best that I can.

But then in the next verse we suddenly get a surprise…

Let’s call it a day go our own different way
Before we decay.

Decay? Now that is odd. Love songs – lost love songs indeed – normally speak about “getting older” not decay. This is indeed something new.

Next verse…

I took a chance, got caught in the trance
Of a downhill dance.

Another surprise. Downhill dance. The previous lines of the verse are mundane, but suddenly there’s a jump into this different language.

and just to show this was no accident, it turns up again next time around – again with the 3^rd and 4^th line

I’m lost in the haze of your delicate ways
With both eyes glazed.

So it goes on, the mundane clashing two lines later with the extraordinary. I don’t know if Dylan quotes the Zen stories elsewhere, but he brings in the most famous Zen image at this point…

Like the sound of one hand clapping

Followed by more unexpected imagery.

The vows that we kept are now broken and swept
Beneath the bed where we slept.

There is then a musical jump – an instrumental pause which goes nowhere at all, followed by a totally unexpected repeat of the “middle 8” (the B in a ternary analysis). Again I can’t think where else this happens in Dylan – if he is in ternary he stays in ternary, and ternary does not repeat the middle 8…

Why should we got on watching each other through a telescope ?
Eventually we’ll hang ourselves on all this tangled rope.

So is this a song in which Dylan deliberately mangled the mundane with the extraordinary? If so, why? Or is it that he just ran out of ideas, needed another song quickly to complete the album and put in a half finished version of what could have been a masterpiece?

The music is not exceptional, and the story line of lost love is not just commonplace but also obviously what was on his mind at the time. So mundane music, mundane topic, mundane lyrics… but mixed with extraordinary imagery.

As always will don’t know and won’t know. It remains a curiosity, but with some moments to treasure.

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25/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

There’s a long-distance train rolling through the rain, tears on the letter I write.

There is a set of Dylan songs where each line is a song – you can take the line and it has an image so powerful that it doesn’t matter what the rest of the song is about.

Yes, you can read the history of “Where are you tonight?”, and think, ah yes, he is singing about Sara and her attempt to take the children away from Dylan – Hawaii was the place she chose at that moment. The court battles, the hatred, the horror of losing one’s children; everything that a woman who wants the kids and doesn’t want the man, can throw into the ring.

Much of the song could be said to be about this – but who knows with Dylan?

“There’s a babe in the arms of woman enraged…” It all seems to fit, and yet, and yet…

Stand back for a moment and just look at the lines in splendid isolation, and there is even more life to be had here.

What adds to the feeling of line after line each being a song in its own right, is the length of the verse – no matter how many times you hear it, the fact is that the second four lines catch you out – it feels like we have had the bulk of the verse after four long lines, but then another four come tumbling in, all with the same melody and that same, incredibly simple I IV chord sequence. The pressure builds and builds, and only then do we finally hit the dominant chord and find a way out.

Then it’s back to that relentless I IV…

There’s a woman I long to touch and I miss her so much but she’s drifting like a satellite.

There’s a neon light ablaze in this green smoky haze, laughter down on
Elizabeth Street

So it goes on. You don’t need the songs, you only need the lines. Where Jokerman failed so totally in putting together a collection of images this song works – it works because the images are so much more powerful, and most of all it works because the music is so fitting.

And a lonesome bell tone in that valley of stone where she bathed in a stream of pure heat.

How else could you sing this but over a simple rocking chord change? How else could you make this long stream of images work other than in an endlessly repeating verse line.

It is in fact Hard Rain, years later and in the end it is the lines that tell us where we are, what sort of world we are in…

The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure, to live it you have to explode.

Or if that doesn’t get you, try this

She could feel my despair as I climbed up her hair and discovered her invisible self.

And the last selection of I IV chords ends…

If you don’t believe there’s a price for this sweet paradise, remind me to show you the scars.

Was Dylan reminded of this years further on when he said, “I’ve still got the scars that the sun doesn’t heal.” Quite possibly – its hard now not to listen to Not Dark Yet and remain immune to the effect of this song.

What makes one ultimately have to put the stylus back one track, or flip back the button on the CD is the end

There’s a new day at dawn and I’ve finally arrived.
If I’m there in the morning, baby, you’ll know I’ve survived.
I can’t believe it, I can’t believe I’m alive,
But without you it just doesn’t seem right.
Oh, where are you tonight?

Has the situation of lost love ever been summarised so perfectly? The man who sang of his love in Isis is back, and he’s just had some more amazing experiences. If only Dylan had sang of his life forever, and never got sidetracked.

But that would be too much to ask.

(c) Tony Attwood 2008

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23/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Numerous reference books suggest that Jokerman is one of Dylan’s masterpieces. A great poetic adventure that encapsulates everyone and everything from Ode to a Nightingale by John Keats (1884) to… well, anything you like. All mixed with a mature and detailed reflection on Judaism, and the books of laws in the Old Testament.

Such approaches tend to ignore the fact that Dylan himself doesn’t like the piece much (see http://www.interferenza.com/bcs/interw/1991zollo.htm for one such interview), and the fact that when he has sung it live he has often chopped out verses seemingly at random and just thrown it in cos the kids like it.

Dylan’s view seems to be that it is a failed song, a song the lyrics of which he changed too often for it to work any more. As for the music, it is more complex than the old 12 bars tunes but not exactly the first movement of a string quartet.

And one thing is for sure (and is missed out in most commentaries) the music and the lyrics have nothing in common.

The music is simple, bouncy, fun, but not especially exciting or unusual. It works, it serves as a basis for a stream of words, but not much more. For the song to work, the lyrics have to be both electrified and at one with the music, meaning they have to be bouncy and fun.

Consider for a moment the great work which apparently was recorded in time for Infidels but didn’t make the cut – “Blind Willie McTell”. Here the brooding melody and chord changes fit perfectly with the brooding lyrics, even if neither have anything to do with Blind Willie McTell. That’s fine because the man of the title has nothing to do with the song.

But in Jokerman we have a muddle – a bouncy tune that has nothing to add to the feeling – except that the Jokerman is a Jokerman. Which would work if there was something jokey in the lyrics, but even from line two, “While the eyes of the idol with the iron head are glowing” we have nothing funny. Are you going to make a joke out of “a snake in both of your fists”? I suspect not.

OK, comes the answer, he’s not that kind of Jokerman – he’s more the kind that plays a joke on the whole universe – a nasty twisted joke – a devil with an evil laugh.

Right - so where does that leave, “Jokerman dance to the nightingale tune, Bird fly high by the light of the moon”?

It is all so confusing, that we look for some sort of way out. This is not surrealism, or the musical version of a Jackson Pollock, it is something quite different. It is just a muddle. So when we hear, with that same bouncy 2/4 tune which mutates into 4/4 at the chorus, that suddenly Dylan is talking about Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the books of laws in the Old Testament, we think, maybe this is going to sort it out. Dylan is laughing at the old laws – that’s what the bouncy song is about.

And here there certainly needs to be comment and a half. Leviticus is the book of the Bible that tells us to stone to death married women who have sex with another man, who tell us not to approach the house of the Lord if wearing clothes made of two or more cloths, and not to approach if our eyesight is not sound (which cuts out anyone wearing glasses). There is a lot of stuff about killing goats too.

But there is nothing on this. Not even with the wildest imagination is there anything there that offers us any insight. I am not searching for meaning any more than I am searching for meaning in Jackson Pollock, to take the example that came into my head earlier. All I am doing is looking for an insight. A way of saying yes, this is why the melody is like it is, why we have a 2/4 verse and a 4/4 chorus. Why we have a Jokerman.

I think Dylan was right in that interview – there is nothing but nothing here apart from a set of lines along a vaguely messianic theme to inappropriate music.

And that is not to remove the one great track from the album, as some would have it. Rather it is to let us look elsewhere, where the issue is entirely Israel. Neighbourhood Bully, for example, is a song that I, with my political views, am extremely unhappy with, unless I twist the meaning so much I think I leave behind anything Dylan meant. But as a work of art, it is something far more than Jokerman ever became.

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21/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Of course you never know with Dylan, but it is hard to put any interpretation on “She Belongs to Me” other than that it is about a child – a daughter most like, but it could be the daughter of a friend.

Never has a 12 bar blues sounded so beautiful, so relaxed, so warm, so kind. Perhaps a listener who is in his 20s smoking dope might not find it so, but anyone who has a daughter instantly sees it, feels it, warms to it.

If the lyrics don’t convey the message then the music and the accompaniment does. The most famous version of course is on Bringing it all Back Home, but there are also examples on the curious Self Portrait album, recorded at the Isle of Wight, and a truly lovely version on “No Direction Home”. This last version is perhaps the earliest attempt by Dylan to have an instrumental break without a lead instrument – something that he worked on over and over again in the concerts and recordings of the late 90s and early 21^st century.

The girl in the song has everything – she never stumbles, she has an Egyptian ring, she’s got everything she needs…

Of course it is a child – the child who can play forever with the simplest toys, who can paint or crayon a picture and make it exactly what she wants it to be. She is the girl you idolise, the girl you bow down to, the girl whose birthday you make into the biggest occasion in the history of the world. The girl to whom you want to say, “I made you, you are everything, this is the world I give you.”

And of course you buy her toys.

What father would not have wanted to give her such a beautiful eloquent testimony as this elegant song, in that most simple and traditional of formats, the 12 bar blues with its repeated opening line.

Quite how it is possible to interpret the song differently, and still make sense of the title is beyond me – although I must admit much of the world is beyond me. The girl has the freedom of the world – which only the young have. And yet she belongs to the adult in her life. Only with a child is the title, the general lyric, and the final line about the trumpet and drum meaningful, without getting into the most convoluted analysis of the trumpet and drum, not to mention the title and half of the lyrics being symbolic for something else.

In a case like this, let’s live with Occam’s Razor – if there is a simple explanation why not take it, and make it so.

If you haven’t heard the version on No Direction Home, give it a try. It is just something to behold.

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19/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

And what are we to make of Dignity. Raved over by many Dylan fans, it didn’t turn up on the mainstream albums, but appeared on the Essential album, and twice on the 2008 outtakes album.

The Essential Bob Dylan version is presumably to be considered the definitive version – although so many recordings of Dylan and band it contains errors by the backing musicians, who clearly have not practiced the piece enough.

It is one of the “long songs”, and it almost works. But not completely. “Have you seen Dignity,” the recurrent theme doesn’t quite make sense in each version. Prince Phillip at the home of the blues could well be a clever reference to the blue blood of the British royal family, except the remainder of the lines (money up front etc) doesn’t quite fit.

But this is not to say it is not a fabulous piece of music that for any other writer will be the crowning glory. It is a song that you instantly recall, and yet it is also a song which the histories tell us was recorded and re-recorded and Dylan was never satisfied.

The reason is, in my opinion, because although it is a brilliant conception, it is flawed by the notion of Dignity itself. Dylan has written many songs in which the same line or part line ends the verse – here it is the endless set of allusions to Dignity as the finishing touch each time around. And yet the concept of dignity just doesn’t fit into the surreal set of pictures the song paints, nor into the way the song happily putters along. You can have that sort of melody, that sort of descending bass for “land of the midnight sun” etc, that sort of I IV chord interchange through the verse, and those sorts of surreal images, all mashed up into one song. But they don’t have anything to do with dignity.

In fact the way to hear this song is at a distance, not taking in the lyrics, not really knowing what Dylan is singing about, not feeling ill at ease about the moralistic point about the worth of humankind that he somehow never succeeds in making.

A re-write of the lyrics would do it – a new theme to fit the tune – but as it is, it is great, but flawed.

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19/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

According to Wikipedia “Mozambique” was just a game, based on how many words rhymed with Mozambique. If that is the case the answer is three.

More interestingly perhaps, according to Allen Ginsberg writing the sleeve notes, if Dylan can do it, America can do it.

And in this case Dylan just wanted to write a simple straightforward bouncy jolly tune with no deeper message than the fact that life can be good.

As a result we have a minor masterpiece. It might be a throw-away song, but my goodness it works. It is simple in the standard ternary form (A A B A), with a gorgeous tune, never varying from its approach – a gentle celebration of the country and its people, a simple fun recording that above everything else just works.

On the album it is a shock, coming as it does straight after the thrusting edge of Isis, and being followed by the Spanish slowness of One more Cup of Coffee, spoilt as that song is by the opening error by the violinist who forgets there’s an extra bar before the singing starts. But Dylan’s never been one for editing a take due to an error.

Mozambique has no such slips – it is a perfect recording of a simple song – but what gives it a curious link to Isis is that the chord structure (the tonic, the flattened seventh and the subdominant) is exactly the same as Isis. Maybe that’s the trick – from the ice and the rain of Isis to the aqua blue sky. They are both magical lands, the land of Isis and the land of Mozambique, but in such very different ways.

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18/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

The Theme Time radio programmes resulted in at least one album: a double sided affair which includes “Don’t Take Everybody to be your friend” by Sister Rosetta Tharpe and the Sam Price Trio.

Recorded in 1947 when Dylan must have been what, 3 or 4, this song edges all the others for its vibrancy and vitality. It is the sort of thing that Traveling Willburys might have recorded if they had been around some years earlier, and it is worth the price of the recording on its own.

Sister Rosetta Tharpe had a voice that was staggering, swooping up to the notes, hitting them hard, but beautifully, she doesn’t need to warm up – she’s there from the off. She gives you complete comprehension of the lyrics without stressing the words.

Meanwhile behind her the trio plays so stunningly brilliantly it is a track you can play over and over without ever getting bored. You listen to the lyrics, you listen to the piano, you listen to the bass… they are all masters.

The song is a simple 3 chord trick, with the 7ths and a hint of a minor 4th thrown in on the way down - it has been used a billion times. But never with such vigour and fun.

Some will cause you to weep, some will cause you to moan

Some will gain your confidence and cause you to lose your home…

How up to date do you want your music to be? This is such fine you just want to get up to jive, and then want to play it because you missed something. What Bob Dylan has done is highlight an absolute masterpiece of social realism set to be great beat. This is how it can be - not love, not lost love, not a song about dance, just a word of warning in hard times.

Oh yes. More please.

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17/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

And so, Isis. So revered that the longest running Dylan magazine is named after the song.

But why – what is it in Isis that is so powerful, so overwhelmingly important in terms of the Dylan genre?

Certainly it is a hard song to pin down. Those funny people at Wikipedia have it as being in B flat in ¾ time – actually you only have to sit at a piano to find it is in B, and you only have to be a musician to know it is in 6/8. Try conducting it in ¾ - with half a minute your hand is ready to drop off. But the real clue is hitting you in the ears in every verse. Put it in 6/8 and the piano is hitting 3 equal notes for each half a bar – exactly as 6/8 requires.

So, a strophic song in 6/8 – unusual for Dylan. And the melody wanders – there is a basis but the song doesn’t quite stay where the melody is laid down.

Is it a song about his wife Sara? Well, maybe, perhaps, but it is a strain to make the story work. Again I would refer you to the Wiki article which simply takes a stream of events, without asking the rather relevant question – what the hell is going on in this SEQUENCE.

Sequence is the key issue here. Isis was the Egyptian god of nature. She befriended all those at the edge of society – slaves, workers, the poor. She gave them hope – but not of working harder for salvation. Simply hope.

The Egyptian link is clear because there is the line about coming to the pyramids (albeit covered in ice, with snow and the like circling about – somewhat unusual just down the road from Cairo.) But we get the full Egyptian bit with the breaking into the tomb, the casket being empty and all that.

And where are we now – nowhere but in a B movie about raiding the pyramids and stealing the treasure. All the usual stuff about getting stuck in the sandstorm – except it is an icestorm.

In the end it seems more like the science fiction stores of the 1950s in which Mars with its deserts is recast as the Wild West – the new frontier with bars and bandits and searches for treasures. And in the end I am more comfortable with that – another world. The Empress from the tarot features heavily on the sleeve – maybe that’s it – Isis, the Empress.

Isis is a mystery, and the story makes no real sense – it is just a set of irrational images struggling from one episode to another without that sequence that we so crave. And that’s why it works. It tempts you to think there is a meaningful sequence here, but as you try to grab it, it walks away.

That’s the beauty of the song – each time you grab its simple structure is just gets up and walks away.

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