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.

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04/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Subterranean Homesick Blues

Either a meaningless set of words with internal rhymes or a complete catalogue in three minutes of everything that was happening in the world of the mid 1960s.

Of course it makes much more sense as the latter, and many of the supposed references that writers have claimed to find the song are by and large just wild leaps of the imagination and wishful thinking.

But some of it can be traced. Jack Kerouac did write a novel called The Subterraneans, and fire hoses were used to break up demonstrations then, as much later – although if you get too close to the lyrics the fire hose bit could be taken to suggest that one should NOT get involved in civil rights protests – which given the context of so much of Dylan’s early writing, would seem odd. Or maybe he was just being post-modernistically ironic.

Some “insights” that commentators have found in the song are barely that – “I’m on the pavement thinking about the government” could be an allusion to anti-government protests in the streets, but if so is hardly mind shattering.

Then there’s the Weathermen bit – “Don’t need the Weathermen to know which way the wind blows.” Some sources cite this as the origin of the name of the Weathermen, the radical and violent anti-governmental group. Others say that Dylan was citing an already existent organisation. Either way, given the simplicity of the “I’m on the pavement” bit, he could just be talking about the weather.

Maggie turns up as well, and “Maggie’s Farm” puts in its first appearance as track 3 on side one of the album. There’s more interaction with the law (“must bust in early May, orders from the DA”) and so it goes on. If anything it is perhaps a reflection of the turmoil of life (“twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift”).

Quite why it has been so popular and so highly revered is hard to say. Rolling Stone has it in the top 500 greatest songs of all time, everyone seems to have quoted it somehow, and yet it is just a boppy little rock song with no melody and three chords. In the end it can only be because almost every line is quotable somehow, somewhere, it does symbolically catch the moment, and it is the opening to a truly great album.

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01/12/2008 by Tony Attwood.

The second of the two love songs from the first side of “Bringing it all back home” is infinitely more complex than “She Belongs To Me”. While musically it seems to be straightforward, the lyrics (and indeed the very title, written originally as a fraction) suggest Dylan has most certainly travelled to another place.

The music works around the three major chords, and the melody flows across 16 bars of 4/4 in every verse. All very conventional.

But the lyrics are not as ever heard before. There’s a Zen-like opening (My love she speaks like silence) which shows us this is another place entirely from the conventional love song, and then we realise, there are no rhymes.

It was an approach to writing that Dylan rarely used – indeed writing this I am struggling to think where else he did use this approach. It seems strange within such a conventional musical base to make such a departure, and yet that is the point. The convention of everyday is undermined by the attitude of the individual, for that is what the song is about. “She knows there’s no success like failure and that failure’s no success at all” – a radical way (but nonetheless valid for all that) of seeing the world.

It is a song about the inner attitudes and visions of the singer’s lover which allow her to co-exist with this world without compromising her visions. The visions that she and the singer share are snapshot visions – exactly as the visions within the Gates of Eden are – but these are of a Zen-like acceptance of the world which allows one to see everything far more fully than is possible most of the time. There is no battle, because the world and the singer can coexist.

“She knows too much to argue or to judge.” You can’t get more Zen like than that.

Dylan has performed the song many times and it turns up on various compilation albums, but if you are fully familiar with the original and the variations at the live shows, listen to the Newport 65 version (its on YouTube) – perhaps the fastest he has ever played it, and an amazing contrast to other approaches. But it still works, it is still true.

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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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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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