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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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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