My Own Version Of You (2020) part 13: “One of the sweetest motherfuckers you could ever meet”

My Own Version Of You (2020) part 13

by Jochen Markhorst

XIII       “One of the sweetest motherfuckers you could ever meet”

You can bring it to St. Peter - you can bring it to Jerome
You can move it on over - bring it all the way home

 “Jerome Green was Bo Diddley’s maracas shaker. He’d been with him on all the records and he was sloppy drunk, one of the sweetest motherfuckers you could ever meet. He would just fall into your arms.” Keith Richards was quite fond of Jerome Green, as we can gather from his autobiography Life (2010). During The Stones’ first UK tour, a shared bill with the incredible line-up of the Everly Brothers, Bo Diddley, Little Richard and Mickie Most in the autumn of 1963, Keef and Jerome hit it off, and Jerome even stayed with Keith for a while when Jerome fell ill towards the end of the tour and couldn’t continue. But Keith already had Jerome on a pedestal way before this shared experience, as we can deduce from a diary entry dated 5 January 1963:

Got wallet back,
Richmond
Cock up. My pickup clapped out completely. Brian played harp and I used his guitar. “Confessin’ the Blues” “Diddley-Daddy” & “Jerome” and “Bo Diddley” went well. Mad row with promoter over money. Refused to play there again. Discussed new demo disc. To be made this week with any luck. “Diddley-Daddy” looked good. With Cleo and friends as vocal group. Band earned PS37 this week.

By “Jerome” the Glimmer Twin means “Bring It To Jerome”, the B-side of Bo Diddley’s third single, “Pretty Thing”. “Bring It To Jerome” was written by Jerome Green, and besides the maracas, we also hear his voice; he sings the chorus together with Bo Diddley, the words that Dylan copies: Bring it all home, bring it to Jerome.

At first listen, the song doesn’t seem all that spectacular. An “ordinary” B-side, a simple two-chord riff repeated from start to finish, with a run-of-the-mill blues lament about the woman who treats me so badly. The kind Bo Diddley could pull out of his left sleeve while signing an autograph for Mick Jagger on the cover of Have Guitar Will Travel with his right hand.

Simple and not particularly original or idiosyncratic, but apparently, the song has a magnetic power that attracts all the greats. So The Stones included the song in their set list in 1963; Manfred Mann graced his first (and best) American album, The Manfred Mann Album (1964), with it; the song is one of the highlights on ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons’ second solo album, The Big Bad Blues (2018, awarded “Blues Rock Album of the Year” by The Blues Foundation, on which, incidentally, Bo Diddley’s “Crackin’ Up” is the finale); but above all: Sir Paul himself often plays “Bring It To Jerome” as a warm-up – we know of ten recordings of soundchecks in which McCartney puts his heart and soul into the song, sometimes on his Höfner 500/1 Violin Bass, sometimes on guitar.

Paul McCartney – Bring it to Jerome (Soundcheck in Sunrise, FL, 2002): 

The Stones, a Supreme Beatle, and now the name-check in a Dylan song… despite its seeming insignificance, “Bring It To Jerome” is one of the very rare songs that has penetrated all three members of the triumvirate. And apart from his song, Jerome Green also left his mark on music history in other ways: he infected the British Invasion with maracas. Since Jerome, we have seen Mick Jagger, Phil May of The Pretty Things, Van Morrison (then still with Them), The Animals and Manfred Mann’s Paul Jones shaking the samba balls – and Jagger’s unforgettable, stylish shaking of the maracas on American television (The Mike Douglas Show, 1964) in The Stones’ version of Buddy Holly’s Bo Diddley rip-off “Not Fade Away” brings the song right back home, back to Diddley and Green.

The introductory recommendation You can bring it to St. Peter is an intriguing, Dylanesque riddle. The idea that Dylan is indulging in a play on words here, a playful nod to the meaning of the name Peter, “rock”, and with it the implication that Dylan’s “own version” will lead us via blues and spirituals to rock music, is appealing. However, the context, after the closing line of the preceding verse, the verse with Judgment Day and Armageddon and especially with I’ll hear your footsteps – you won’t have to knock, almost inevitably leads the associations to the heavenly gatekeeper Peter, who springs into action after he hears knockin’ on Heaven’s door. A poetic stroke of luck, perhaps. It seems obvious that Dylan first decided that his creation should immortalise the song “Bring It To Jerome”, and that his meandering inspiration then lingered on another gem by Bo Diddley and Jerome Green, on their version of “Sixteen Tons” (on Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger, 1960), the classic with the chorus

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

… and with prominent maracas. There are, obviously, more songs and more possible sources of inspiration in which St. Peter appears (not least Dylan’s own “Ring Them Bells”, of course), but we know that “Sixteen Tons” has been under Dylan’s skin for at least sixty years already:

“I changed words around and added something of my own here and there. Nothing do or die, nothing really formulated, all major chord stuff, maybe a typical minor key thing, something like “Sixteen Tons”. You could write twenty or more songs off that one melody by slightly altering it. I could slip in verses or lines from old spirituals or blues. That was okay; others did it all the time.”

… from Dylan’s autobiography Chronicles, chapter 5 “River Of Ice”. In which Dylan, the songwriter, again expresses the secret of his core business, this time in a completely clear, demystifying way. “You change the words here and there,” “slightly alter a melody,” “smuggle in lines from old spirituals or blues”… and then “add something of myself.” The autobiographer describes this creative process in 2004, when Chronicles is published, and in doing so reveals his recipe for success in a surprisingly unambiguous way, the recipe that he expresses here, in “My Own Version Of You”, in a much more poetic way –demonstrating it in the process: You can bring it to St. Peter – you can bring it to Jerome / You can move it on over – bring it all the way home… “I changed words around and added something of my own here and there.”

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To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 14: Carrying a noose on a silver tray

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door
• It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry b/w Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Bob Dylan’s melancholy blues