Catfish: Bob Dylan continues working with Jacques Levy, but to what ends?

by Tony Attwood

Apologies: I originally posted an early draft of this piece by mistake; here’s the correct version. (That’s what comes of changing time zones by 11 hours).

Sometimes it seems to me that commentators – be they reporters of the work of sports teams or commentators on the creations of songwriters – expect every moment of the waking life of a genius, itself to be a work of genius. But the Dylan/Levy partnership needed the occasional break, and time to explore other ideas, as much as any other combination of writers. And after writing “Black Diamond Bay” both men might well have been inclined to take a bit of time reflecting on what else was possible.

And this was certainly the case with their next composition was “Catfish”, and the one after that: “Mozambique”. Catfish was not used on the album, but instead turned up on Bootleg 1-3, so can of course be found there. It is an exploration of what might be possible in a different way of doing things – rather as Mozambique is.

It is a slow atmospheric blues with a reverberating harmonica played throughout – while the blues band does its blues band thing. If anything I think (and this is just my view) the individual instrumental parts – the harmonica and the various guitars – are overplayed and end up competing with each other, which rather spoils the effect that I feel Dylan was after: the turning of a sports event with all the wild cheering and appreciation that goes with it, into an aesthetic moment that speaks to us about the essence of human life, exactly as the blues can do.

However I do not wish to decry what has been tried by way of experiment. Most people would have ended up with crowd cheering dubbed over the song. Dylan, always the master of the alternative approach, went for atmosphere in a completely different way – a way that probably no one else would have ever contemplated.

But this means that there is ultimately so much going on that at times the song appears to be in danger of becoming a mishmash of sound rather than a piece of atmospheric writing which gives us an insight into deeper meaning.

I have also, on occasion, wondered a little if the two composers were deadly serious in what they were doing here; but of course you’ll have to decide. It starts off fine, but … well maybe some of the accompaniment would probably have been edited down if the song had made it on to the cut of the album.

The theme of this extended 12 bar blues song is the pitcher Jim Hunter who was known as Catfish Hunter. I will have to leave it to others to explain exactly what he did, since I know little of the sport myself. Seen on their own, the lyrics don’t really inspire much in the way of deeper thought or meaning, and so they are, I guess, completely dependent on one’s cultural knowledge and on the emotion and feeling portrayed by the accompaniment.

Lazy stadium night
Catfish on the mound
“Strike three,” the umpire said
Batter have to go back and sit down