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.

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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 »

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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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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17/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Changing of the Guards: first track on Street Legal, failed to make it as a single (presumably because Dylan fans buy albums), and yet turns up on Greatest Hits 3 and The Essential.   Someone who selects these things (Dylan himself?) thinks it is a great song.

There is a review on Wikipedia which suggests that the song ends on the dominant chord (that is the chord based on the fifth note of the scale the song is in.)  This is completely wrong – it is performed in A flat, and ends on the chord of A flat.  There is nothing odd about the chords used – A flat, F minor, D flat and E flat – exactly as you might expect.

And it is this repetitive normality of the music that takes so much away from the lyrics – the music doesn’t do anything to make you want to understand or even listen to the lyrics.

The meaning is fairly simple: if you think of the reality of the mediaeval period (the poverty, persecution, disease, and belief that both the dead and living share the earth as everyone waits for Revelation to come to pass), you get the pictures.

Interesting stuff, but overall there is the feeling that it was as if Dylan desperately wanted to write another epic song and did a cut and paste job with a load of lyrics that had something to do with the mediaeval period, and said to the audience, “make something of that.”

Which perhaps is how we get to something so very unfitting by the third line: “Where the good shepherd grieves”.  In this song it just sounds so out of place.  OK he was about to go all Christian, but this doesn’t seem to be Christian, except in that it was a celebration of everything that was wrong about Christianity and the power of the priest at this time.

Unless (and this is just a guess from me) it is all about a reading of the tarot cards.  The clue to that comes at the very end, (“Between the King and the Queen of Swords”).

But for that sort of song, if the song is to be strophic in its form, it needs something more than the jolly bouncing melody, three backing singers and repeating and ultimately rather dull sax solo.

In the end the lyrics don’t matter, the melody doesn’t matter, nothing matters – and yet there are horrors going on in the song and I end up wondering why.

Of course Dylan knew what he was doing – the failure is mine.  I haven’t got a clue.

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16/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Dylan’s commentary on being dislocated from the world, while being within it – here but not here - spreads across a multiplicity of his songs. It wasn’t there at the start – Times they are a-changing dripped with a certainty that runs across so many early songs.

But from the development of his surreal imagery which arrived with his use of rock instrumentation we find the change. From the moment that the night started playing tricks when you are trying to be so quiet, everything fell apart.

In these songs just how often do we hear him sing “What’s going on?” – either using that phrase or something akin to it. And if ever that line feels like it should be within a song, it is within “Things have changed”.

A worried man with a worried mind
No one in front of me and nothing behind

is enough to make it clear where we are going – or rather to be clear that we have no idea where we are going. And just in case you missed it we find immediately that the singer is talking about a woman “drinking champagne, Got white skin, got assassin’s eyes”.

Assassin’s eyes? What are assassin’s eyes? Of course we don’t know, because she comes from another world – the dislocation is complete.

Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose
Any minute now I’m expecting all hell to break loose

Of course it will – this is not the real world. In this world people come and go. The past has not yet happened yet. The future was yesterday. I am you, you are him, he is not.

And of course he should be in Hollywood, be taking dancing lessons, be dressed in drag. He should, because here there is nothing to prove.

The voice is tired, the accompaniment controlled and well rehearsed, the pulse moderate, no attempt at any sort of virtuoso performance, no unexpected chord changes, because it is not the individual musicians that make the point – the point is the situation, the world gone wrong. In such a world you can hold onto the constancy of the music because there is no other constancy.

Feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet
Putting her in a wheel barrow and wheeling her down the street

Of course: where else would you put a woman with assassin eyes?

And then, just in case we think we have got the hang of this, if we really think maybe something makes sense…

Mr. Jinx and Miss Lucy, they jumped in the lake
I’m not that eager to make a mistake

‘Mr. Jinx’ was a cool cat in the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Pixie and Dixie. Today Mr Jinx is available as a tooth mug, a ringtone download, a ceramic jug, It is perhaps just a passing moment from the cartoon, or it is the reflection on the fact that both in the original and the current examples Mr Jinx was not real. Except the distinction between real and unreal doesn’t exist. I don’t want to be so unreal that I fall into the lake. Maybe the wheelbarrow was a better idea.

And the music continues, using its three chord routine with simple accompaniment. The singer doesn’t get excited. There is a continuum. It is just that the continuum doesn’t make a blind bit of sense.

Dylan’s commentary on being dislocated from the world, while being within it – here but not here - spreads across a multiplicity of his songs. It wasn’t there at the start – Times they are a-changing dripped with a certainty that runs across so many early songs.

But from the development of his surreal imagery which arrived with his use of rock instrumentation we find the change. From the moment that the night started playing tricks when you are trying to be so quiet, everything fell apart.

In these songs just how often do we hear him sing “What’s going on?” – either using that phrase or something akin to it. And if ever that line feels like it should be within a song, it is within “Things have changed”.

A worried man with a worried mind
No one in front of me and nothing behind

is enough to make it clear where we are going – or rather to be clear that we have no idea where we are going. And just in case you missed it we find immediately that the singer is talking about a woman “drinking champagne, Got white skin, got assassin’s eyes”.

Assassin’s eyes? What are assassin’s eyes? Of course we don’t know, because she comes from another world – the dislocation is complete.

Standing on the gallows with my head in a noose
Any minute now I’m expecting all hell to break loose

Of course it will – this is not the real world. In this world people come and go. The past has not yet happened yet. The future was yesterday. I am you, you are him, he is not.

And of course he should be in Hollywood, be taking dancing lessons, be dressed in drag. He should, because here there is nothing to prove.

The voice is tired, the accompaniment controlled and well rehearsed, the pulse moderate, no attempt at any sort of virtuoso performance, no unexpected chord changes, because it is not the individual musicians that make the point – the point is the situation, the world gone wrong. In such a world you can hold onto the constancy of the music because there is no other constancy.

Feel like falling in love with the first woman I meet
Putting her in a wheel barrow and wheeling her down the street

Of course: where else would you put a woman with assassin eyes?

And then, just in case we think we have got the hang of this, if we really think maybe something makes sense…

Mr. Jinx and Miss Lucy, they jumped in the lake
I’m not that eager to make a mistake

‘Mr. Jinx’ was a cool cat in the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Pixie and Dixie. Today Mr Jinx is available as a tooth mug, a ringtone download, a ceramic jug, It is perhaps just a passing moment from the cartoon, or it is the reflection on the fact that both in the original and the current examples Mr Jinx was not real. Except the distinction between real and unreal doesn’t exist. I don’t want to be so unreal that I fall into the lake. Maybe the wheelbarrow was a better idea.

And the music continues, using its three chord routine with simple accompaniment. The singer doesn’t get excited. There is a continuum. It is just that the continuum doesn’t make a blind bit of sense.

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12/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Blind Willie McTell

I suspect that for most of us, Blind Willie McTell was the name of a blues singer whose music we had never heard of.

I suspect also that for most of us it is unimaginable that such a wonderful piece of music should not appear on a mainstream album from Bob Dylan.

There have been other instances of such oddness on Dylan’s part – the delay in releasing Mississippi, for example, and the issues surrounding Dignity. In the case of the former, the original version was a love song that Dylan didn’t want to reveal – and he had to wait until he had re-written it as a political commentary. In the latter case, the piece is flawed. It is a masterpiece, but it isn’t right (as the multiple attempts to play it in different ways show. In effect it is hard to find the right way to cope with the piece – but more on that when I move on to that song).

But Blind Willie McTell falls into neither category. It is not only a perfect song, with not a word out of place, the classic recording that we have is itself wonderful. The slightly out of time piano works. The guitars work. Why not release it?

The first insight I can offer is that the song has nothing to do with the music of Blind Willie McTell. My source – “Atlanta Strut” – is a fine collection, and I am told it is representative of Willie McTell’s work. But it raises the question – what is the connection between the songs of McTell’s and Dylan’s song.

In fact, on the surface there isn’t a connection. He’s not singing at all about McTell – it is just a throw away line in the song, that no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell. Where is the connection between the famous line about “power and greed and corruptible seed” and a song like “I got religion and I’m so glad”.

There is not even the fact that McTell suffered in the way that, for example, Skip James suffered.

Musically, Dylan’s song is a true masterpiece – although in effect a borrowed masterpiece. Back to strophic form, as it has to be for a song about the blues, it never tires through verse after verse, because of the unusual chord structure.

So we are edged towards the references to Willie McTell being a reference to the whole issue of slavery, and the music of the slaves and their descendents. “There’s a chain gang on the highway”… the humiliation of the people continues generation to generation. But even here it doesn’t quite work – because if humiliation is the theme, then Bilnd Willie McTell isn’t the man to cite.

In the end, we get a clue as to where we are going, appropriately, at the end…

God is in His heaven, we are what was His

But power and greed and corruptible seed seems to be all that there is

I’m gazing out the window of the St James Hotel

And I know no one can sing the blues like Blind Willie McTell.

And that is the clue. St James Hotel was nothing to do with Willie McTell – except McTell did record the song St James Infirmary Blues (on which Dylan’s tune is based) under the title “Dying Crapshooter’s Blues”

The melody is a derivative, and I suspect Dylan wasn’t too happy with that fact, which probably explains why he didn’t put it on an album.

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10/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

Not Dark Yet is one of the triumphs of Dylan’s later work – a pivotal point on the album, the darkest moment (despite the title) which then leads the way towards light.

I’ll consider the album as a whole on another occasion, but the song itself manages to create a dreamlike quality of drifting in and out of sleep, while considering the past, and waiting for the end.

It is in many ways a return to the Taoist concept of “Darkness within Darkness, the way to all understanding” – not least achieved by the way the song stretches itself out, with the unexpected additional beat between bars, and the lack of any instrumental lead during the non-vocal verse.

From the “Shadows are falling” line, we find the simple link between the end of the individual’s life, and the end of the day, to be as one. Time and life united in its situation – it is autumn, the elderly man stares at the sunset, ready to take his leave but knowing that the time has not yet quite come. Wondering why he has to continue with memories, achieving nothing new, just being.

There are no regrets here, no sadness, not really a desire for it all to end – just an acceptance that this is how it is.

I’ve always had the feeling since I first heard the song that it is hard to understand it unless you have known an elderly relative or friend who is living alone, or in a home, finishing their days with less fun and enthusiasm than you would have liked them to have. The song captures every element of that reality of the experience and the song itself become entangled totally in life. All that is left are memories: “I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal.”

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05/11/2008 by Tony Attwood.

“There must be some way out of here”; a simple but powerful start to this comment on being controlled by organisations and responsibility.

And as the song progresses the singer begins to find his way out of here. With a harmonica style that was to be repeated with the tale of the man in the long black coat, reality is painted and then moved. The door is opened.

And yet this is done with no changes to the simple three chord basis of the entire song – musically it is just one line over and over and over again, reflecting the painfulness of existence from which the singers.

Many of the lines have slipped into the cannon of comments used by Dylan fans – “life is but a joke”….

As the song continues it simple journey the connection between the lines in terms of the words breaks down, but the music remains the same – same reality different meaning.

And so in the end, two riders approach, and the wind howls – it is just a scene from a half painted landscape. Meaningless except that each line means something.

There’s too much confusion – everyone has a part of me – I will go somewhere else, and in the space of a few lines Dylan does just that. As he says, there’s no reason to get excited… none of it is real, and that’s why you only need one line, over and over and over again.

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