24/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Amidst all the moral relativism of Dylan, all the references to the fact that “you are right on your side, and I’m all right on mine”, all the comments about not following leaders, and the commentary that says that everyone is just a pawn in everyone else’s game, suddenly like a beacon of certainty there is When the Ship Comes In.

Never has Dylan been more certain than here that there is an answer, that you are wrong and these guys (whoever they are) are right.   There is a truth, and I am part of it.

The image of the ship itself takes us back to earlier days – to the time when the British explored the new world.  Wealthy men paid for the ships to sail to the Americas, and if one ever returned then even greater wealth and fortune was yours.  Your ship came in, and you really were made for ever more.

Dylan retains the nautical imagery through the opening verse and a half, and its all a jolly caper of exploration, until we suddenly have

And the words that are used for to get the ship confused
Will not be understood as they’re spoken.

The song is now so familiar to us after all these years it is hard to remember what a jolt those lines brought on first hearing.  Words getting the ship confused?   What is all this about?   Every reference until then has been to the nautical adventure.

Then he is back to talking about the ship literally, until  it is the final verse where Dylan suddenly develops this alternative theme, and takes us into a realisation that the ship is a metaphor for change.  We are the new army.  We are the revolution.  Stand aside, for we are the future.  Times they are a changing.  We are David, you are Goliath.

The trouble is we have no idea who or what we are – at least not from this song.  Are we the Jews entering the promised land?  Or the young throwing aside the President of the United States?  Are we overthrowing capitalism, or are we saying no to war and bringing in the world of peace and love.

We don’t know.  In the end it is the sheer vigour and vitality of the song and the guitar playing that carries us through so that after a couple of listens we really don’t care.   It is enough to know that somewhere there is an answer.

The classical structure of the song (every chord is one taken from the major scale – no flattened sevenths or thirds here), emphasises the straightness of the song – this is the positive side of folk singing (a total contrast to North Country Blues.)

We can join in the celebration – and indeed we should.  Because the whole wide world is watching.  Who cares if we don’t know why.  Let’s just enjoy it while we can.

Posted in Times they are a changing, No Direction Home, Bootleg Series volume 3, The Songs | Print | No Comments »

22/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

This is one of Dylan’s unsung masterpieces – an extraordinary piece of music to the accompaniment of lyrics about a visit to a fortune teller / possible lover.   (She’s one or the other, or both, possibly at the same time).

The guitar playing takes us into unknown structures – we can resolve what Dylan plays in the original into recognizable chords, but that’s not what Dylan plays.  The melody likewise flows in a most unDylan-like manner.  The way the second half of the melody in each of the three verses changes so dramatically from the first half is unexpected – almost shocking, certainly surprising – especially because he is so demonstrative.  There is no uncertainty here.

This is the hobo out on the streets, saying “here I am babe looking for direction” in terms of the fortune teller’s palm reading.  It’s hardly unusual in terms of the history of songwriting but there are such unexpected lines that we are forced to sit up and take notice.  Where else is Dylan saying things such as

“I am homeless, come and take me to the reach of your rattling drums.”

Or

“The night is pitch black, come an’ make my pale face fit into place, oh, please!”

Or

“You have slayed me, you have made me, I got to laugh halfways off my heels.
I got to know, babe, will you surround me?  So I can tell if I’m really real.”

What is so remarkable is the context – for this comes from the album that starts with “All I really want to do,” and ends with “It Ain’t Me Babe” – two songs that define Dylan’s obsession with not being trapped by a woman who wants to wrap him up and define his being.   It is an obsession which starts on Freewheeling and continues way into the rock era – and yet here in Spanish Harlem he is proclaiming that this woman can take him and make him into a person – through her he can discover who is really is.

It is this utter reversal of a constant Dylan theme – the laughter and sneering at those around who are defined by others rather than who define themselves, and yet here he is asking the fortune telling lover to do exactly that: to define him, make him, create him.

The fact that the defining words come in the second half of each verse, where the music itself comes alive in such an extraordinary lyrical and chordal fashion shouts out that this is a unique moment in Dylan’s songwriting.  It is a moment to cherish.

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21/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

For me, to understand of Highlands, there needs to be a view of “Time out of mind”.  While many Dylan songs can stand apart from the albums on which they make the first appearance, most of Time out of Mind is fixed within the original album.

And indeed not just fixed within the album – but within a position within the album.   “Love Sick”, the opening track, sounds as if it is the end of everything – as if the singer can go no lower than where he is now.  And yet Dylan takes us down and down until the ultimate depths of “Not Dark Yet” – the song about dying.

After which there is no way but on and on, until we enter a misty no-mans-land, a vision of what is after death.  This is not heaven or hell, nor the currently popular vision of all-encompassing darkness out of which comes something appallingly awful.  This is white mist, memories, flashbacks, strange characters, and confusion of what actually happened in the past, and what you might think happened, but which might well simply be an invention.

It’s a 12 bar blues – much extended but still a 12 bar blues with meandering guitars which help us meander to the various places.

From the very start we are transported from place to place, verse by verse.  The opening verse is not one of those classics that begins “I dreamed that…” and carries on with dreaming I was back in the good times, that you were still alive, or whatever.

In the first verse the emotions of the singer are in the beautiful land and in the second he’s back in the daily grind.  So which one is true – as the third verse shows, he has no idea, and he’s really not trying to sort it out.

Verse four is back to the vision, the emotional home, and the singer knows he can make it there, but only slowly, gradually, and the methodology of transport is not yet clear.  What a transformation this is from track seven on the album where the only way forward is to enter the darkness.   He has moved on, to a world that is beyond the death of Not Dark Yet.

Verse five, and he uses the methodology that everyone who is seriously into music will use – music as a method of transportation to another world.  In this case he tries Neil Young – it doesn’t take him to the Highlands but it takes him a little along the road – although not to anywhere he recognises.

By verse six it is all getting too much, everything is breaking up, nothing is connecting, nothing is wanted, no possessions, just a search for a mental liberty, until in verse seven there is that flash of revelation just at the moment of waking – that moment where there is a beautiful insight, but as consciousness comes pouring in, it is lost, and in verse eight he’s moved on again, this time to Boston – just another image, another past moment – real or imagined.

By now the images are becoming almost dream-like – as in those dreams where nothing is quite as it should be, and you have know it is a dream, but you don’t know it enough to get out.   The conversation in the restaurant becomes surreal, all touch is being lost with the Highlands, we are getting bogged down in dream-like detail.

The next transformation back is a sudden jump – one second in the street, next back in the Highlands, but with each of these jumps there is a further disconnection from the current world and an ever stronger link with the new imagined Highland world – and he is lost.  He can’t join in the fun and games of those around him any more, because there have been too many jumps.

He recognizes the problem in the penultimate verse:

“I got new eyes, Everything looks far away”

While the end gives us the solution

There’s a way to get there, and I’ll figure it out somehow
But I’m already there in my mind, And that’s good enough for now

Posted in Time out of mind, The Songs | Print | No Comments »

17/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Here’s a simple thought: “What is Lay Lady Lay” about? There’s an oft-repeated story that when the Everly Brothers heard it they mistook it for a song about lesbians, and turned it down. That was based on a mishearing. With the lyrics printed on hundreds of Dylan web sites we can see it isn’t so… but where does the song take us?

Whatever colors you have in your mind  I’ll show them to you and you’ll see them shine

Is almost Donovan Leitch like – I am the magician I can make you see whatever you want to see.

But then who is the man whose “clothes are dirty but his hands are clean?” There’s memories of Rolling Stone here – (You used to be so amused At Napoleon in rags and the language that he used)

But no, in this case…you’re the best thing that he’s ever seen

Of course this is a softer kinder world – the harshness of Rolling Stone is not here. “Stay, lady, stay, stay with your man awhile” is said with warmth and affection.

Contrary to all the warnings on Rolling Stone

“You can have your cake and eat it too”

Only the ending is unequivocally clear – I want to wake up next to you.

So what makes it such a wonderful song?

Certainly, if we take the warmth of the words, then it is clear that the music fits perfectly too, for it is warm and kind. But there’s more, because the chord sequence is utterly unexpected – indeed I have seen experienced hardened rock musicians who can tell you a chord sequence as they hear a song for the first time, stumble over what happens here.

A, C sharp minor, G, D

Where did that G come from? How do you get a melody to go from C sharp minor (where the top note is G sharp) to G major? Personally, I can’t think of another song that uses such a sequence.

Dylan pulls it off, and the melody glides lyrically along. Quite probably no one can ever use such a sequence again, for it is utterly Lay Lady Lay. Who cares about the lyrics this time around – it is the melody over that extraordinary chord sequence that makes it happen.

Posted in Nashville Skyline, At Boudakan, Greatest Hits Volume 2, Essential Bob Dylan, The Songs | Print | No Comments »

17/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

It is strange to think that all those years ago, my feeling about the very first Dylan album (“Bob Dylan”) was that the producer of the album had made a very odd choice as to the order of the songs. Surely one puts the strongest songs first, I thought. Get off to a flying start.

It took quite a few years to realise that this was just a Dylan thing. The whole album is wonderful, and still deserves playing. But some of the later songs from side B are particularly good and should have got a higher listing than “She’s no good” which starts the album. It’s fun and ok, but musically little more than a quick rush through a Jesse Fuller lark around.

There’s also the interesting realisation (which came much later) that there’s hardly a reference to the 12 bar blues here – the 12 bar format that formed the basis of so many of Dylan’s later songs. Ah well, so it goes.

“See that my grave is kept clean” is a stand-out song – and that at least is properly placed as the last song on the album. It is a stunning piece simply because the guitar playing is perfectly clean and understated, and the voice is remarkable. On first hearing in the 60s it gave the feeling that here was a remarkable blues singer who could take a conventional song about dying and give it something more than even Lemon Jefferson (of all people) could do himself.

In fact it sounds as if Dylan wrote it for himself to sing. We forget his age at the time – it sounds as if he knows what the blues mean – which is much harder to achieve than you might imagine. White man sings the blues? Whatever next.

Just listen to the “two white horses” verse and how he sings it. The mix of tension, anger and subtlety. The different way the word “following” is used in each repeated line…

And what is amazing is that this all comes from a man who has always said that the lyrics are what counts. “You can write a song on one note,” he once said – and yet here he uses the voice to express everything with a song that only has two lines per verse. There is plaintiveness, sadness, anger, tension… What more do you need?

There’s one last favour I’ll ask of you

See that my gave is kept clean.

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14/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

What is it that makes Dylan stay with Maggie’s Farm?  Hardly a tour goes by without it being wheeled out, it has been on over half a dozen albums and it was part of the notorious Newport Festival programme where the sound system produced a noise that excluded Dylan’s voice and it is actually not a very interesting piece of music.  So why do we still get given it?

Musically it’s a variant 12 bar blues with very little by way of chordal change – just one chord change from the tonic to the dominant in most versions – and even that cut out on the live version on No Direction Home.

Most commentators see this as a protest against the folk-protest movement.  While folk-protest protested against the stylized thought and life styles of straight culture, so, it is argued, Maggie’s Farm protests against the stylized thought and life style of protest culture.  Dylan is saying “I’m not going to be part of this, any more than I am going to be part of mainstream culture.”

On such an analysis the electric music makes sense in that it is essentially dull and repetitious – which the man forced to follow the views of others (or indeed working manually on the farm) might well feel.  The farm incidentally is supposedly a pun on Silas McGee’s Farm, where Dylan had performed in 1963.

So far, so good, but the problem with an uninspiring piece of music which makes the point about the fixed attitudes of both sides of the argument, is that it remains an uninspiring piece of music, no matter how many times you play it.  The singer might well have a “headful of ideas, That are drivin’ me insane” but that still doesn’t mean either that the music has to be so uninteresting, or the piece performed so often for the message to get across.

The clue as to Dylan’s attitude comes perhaps with the fact that although it is not necessarily the first song in a performance, it is an early song – a statement about what this is all about.  In that case it is a statement saying, “no ideas are fixed, we break them all down.”

Whether, “Then he fines you every time you slam the door,” actually is a note about a folk club where people are as constrained in their behaviour as in any other form of life, we’ll probably never know – but in the end that’s still not the main point.

What we actually have is a contribution to a much more interesting debate.  Pre-Electric-Dylan the “rule” was that black blues musicians played the electric guitar, but white protest musicians played the acoustic.  That was one of the strangest conventions there ever was, with strong racist as well as musical undertones.  For pointing out the absurdity of this situation, Dylan deserves all the accolades.   But maybe there could have been a better vehicle for this than Maggie’s Farm.

Well, I try my best
To be just like I am,
But everybody wants you
To be just like them.
They sing while you slave and I just get bored.
I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more.

Posted in Hard Rain, At Boudakan, Greatest Hits Volume 2, Bringing it all Back Home, Essential Bob Dylan, No Direction Home, The Songs | Print | No Comments »

13/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Sometimes it is a little too easy to forget just how perfect some of the early Dylan works are, and that is why the demo version of Don’t think twice is so welcome on the “No Direction Home” album. Beautifully understated, lovingly caressed, it seems the most perfect version of the song ever.

This is the start of the goodbye songs that occupied Dylan so much in the early years – “You just kind of wasted my precious time” – so much the precursor of It ain’t me babe and the other early songs of that genre.

From the instrumental introduction there is the feeling of oneness between Dylan, the song and the guitar. Through this early version you feel for him, and you even feel for the girl who is cast as the outsider – Dylan walks off with the guitar and the song, the girl has nothing save humiliation.

After all, “You’re the reason I’m travelling on” is one of the harshest lines anyone has ever sung to a woman.

It is such a perfectly simple song – the simple strophic verse-verse-verse, which makes the words become understated. Sometimes it seems that “I give her my heart but she wanted my soul” needs to be accompanied by a clash of drums, with possibly some lighting and thunder to help us along.

And this simplicity is why it can work. It is so beautifully understated. Even though “You just wasted my precious time” we have that simple chord structure and elegant melody. How could someone write such a beautiful farewell song?

Posted in No Direction Home, Freewheelin, The Songs | Print | No Comments »

10/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

This web site aims to build up a commentary on the music and lyrics of Bob Dylan.

My belief is that most sites on Dylan faithfully record who performed on each record, what Dylan was doing at the time, and the state of his private life at that moment. Few however look at the meaning of the lyrics, and fewer style at how the lyrics link with the melodies, chord structure and form of the music.

That’s the type of analysis that is going on here. I’m trying to add several new commentaries a week. They are not appearing in any sort of logical order – each one comes up because I think of it, or someone mentions it to me.

If you’d like to contribute please send in a commentary and I’ll put it up with your details.

Tony Attwood

Posted in Editorial | Print | No Comments »

09/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

In his interviews Dylan says that he wrote the Lenny Bruce song in about five minutes.   Bruce died in 1966, and Dylan wrote the song around the time of the recording of Shot of Love in 1980.  Dylan never expressed any interest in Lenny Bruce before or since, and claims he has no idea why he wrote it.

This gives us a real insight into the meaning of Dylan songs, for here, virtually by his own admission, we have a stunningly elegant piece of writing in which the words have no deep meaning, but are part of a contextual whole, equal in many regards to the melody, chords, the piano and the voice.

It works so well because the music manages to be utterly haunting, and so matches the first line (which is the only line those who remember the song actually know)

Lenny Bruce is dead but his ghost lives on and on

After that the words don’t matter too much - what matters here is the total sound.  Perform it in any other way, and a lot would be lost.

It just continues - you can put the track on and play it, and it exists there giving you a feeling about the overall sound, without any sense of the words drifting through - at least not until we get to the final line…

Lenny Bruce was bad, he was the brother that you never had.

And that is about it.  An opening line and a closing line, a piano and a voice.  All making a simple song that is haunting and exquisite.  Sometimes things just work.

Posted in Shot of Love, The Songs | Print | No Comments »

08/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

“I want to be your lover baby, I don’t want to be your boss”

“I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul”

Dylan returns to the theme of being asked to give up too much of himself that he explored in “Don’t think twice” with “It take’s a lot to laugh”, apparently previously known as Phantom Engineer. The relationship is over, the singer has shrugged, said his goodbyes and is travelling away.

The harshness of the goodbye in “It Ain’t me Babe” in which he tells the woman that she is looking for “a lover for your life”, is not here. He has simply got up, walked away, and hitched a ride on the overnight train.

He knows the woman is chasing him – these are the songs of Dylan rejecting women who want him in ways that he can’t oblige – but this time he doesn’t worry – because he admits from the off how good the girl looks when she’s by his side.

But then, in later reflection (musically separated from the rest of the song by the instrumental break) the final verse says that maybe, just maybe he is having regrets. The beautiful sunsets have given way to the winter’s cold and he comes out with those final lines…

Well, I wanna be your lover, baby,
I don’t wanna be your boss.
Don’t say I never warned you
When your train gets lost.

The train, jogging along, is the metaphor for these comings and goings of relationships. As for the music, that jogs along too. One chord suffices for the first two lines, followed by a descending bass (the exact contrary of the lead song of the album “Like a Rolling Stone”) ending up on the dominant, and then one chord again. It is a simple bounce along, with a rise in emotion every third line. It is the contrast of Rolling Stone and Desolation Row.

Why then does it work so well? How come what appears to be a throw away little song with nothing much to say (when compared with Rolling Stone and Desolation Row) can shine out across the years?

It is the simplicity – we can see the singer getting onto the night train and just going and going, looking out of the window across the landscape in a semi-dream state as the music moves with the train. Every now and then (the third line) a frown passes his face and a contradicting image rises up, but then it goes.

“I want to be your lover baby I don’t want to be your boss”. Relationships reduced to the simplicity or complexity of a train ride. It can go either way – off to the country, or back home. It’s up to you.

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