No Nobel Prize for Music: 29. Dylan – taking the music into completely new territory

By Tony Attwood

The last article in this series (wrongly published originally as part 38, and although it might have seemed like that it was in fact part 28), allowed me to put forward my argument that “Visions of Johanna” was the absolute revolution in musical and literary terms that Dylan had been ravelling toward.   But perhaps because most commentators focus on his lyrics rather than his music, it was generally not seen as the most revolutionary of songs, but rather a great song.

Now looking back, the earliest musical compositions of Bob Dylan that we know about come from 1959, so by the time of the composition of Visions, Bob had been composing songs and offering them to the public as a solo artist, for about six years.  He had travelled from Hey Little Richard to Visions, in an incredibly short space of time when one considers what a musical and lyrical revolution had taken place.

His themes lyrically had generally been those of disdain, and maybe that was what he was feeling about the world at this time.  And of course the tradition of folk music at the time was that of protesting about the lives of ordinary people, folk music coming from the tradition of “the rich have everything and we suffer”.

But I can’t help wondering – and I keep wondering – what Dylan felt about his songwriting in 1965.    In that year alone he wrote 29 songs that we know about (a phenomenal number – especially when one considers the length of some of those songs and the fact that he had absolutely broken new ground).   But perhaps he also reflected that between the utter masterpieces of “Desolation Row” and “Visions of Johanna” he had written at least eleven songs (and there may of course have been more that he didn’t record), which were not at that level of achievement.

Some of those we remember because he recorded them, but I suspect that the four compositions that preceded “Visions” will be hard for many Dylan fans to recall and indeed, one of them only exists as a fragment.   In short I think Bob selected what he was going to keep, and then popularity has ensured that we too tend to remember just a minority of his compositions from this era.

In case you are interested the four songs that preceded “Visions” were…

• Jet Pilot
• Medicine Sunday
• I wanna be your lover
• Long-distance operator

So we might add that notion that Dylan was clearly both experimenting with ideas before Visions came to him, and writing down and recording whatever came to mind.  For although in fact five of his next six compositions will be recalled by most fans who have musically been travelling with Dylan, I am also sure very few of us recall all the songs he wrote.

But from here on, the question for Bob must always hvae been, does THIS song reach the astounding heights of “Visions of Johanna” and “Desolation Row?”   And if not, what was he going to do with each of these lesser songs?

And perhaps for Bob himself, the question had to be, “Must the great songs always be tragic?”  (And ok, maybe you would not describe these two giant achievements of songwriting to be tragic in their lyrical content, but hopefully you will know what I am getting at.   They aren’t love songs, they are not light-hearted – at least let’s agree on that.

Bob, however, did try to lighten things up a bit with the next composition, “Stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” and he must have liked it because it got 748 live performances across the years, compared with 654 for Desolation Row, and 216 for Visions.  (Quote Visions comes out so far down the list I really don’t know.

There’s a lot of it (nine verses, over 600 words) with the last 19 words of each verse forming a chorus which is repeated each time.

But it is not so much the lyrics that set this song at a much lower level of achievement than “Desolation” and “Visions” – it is that it “Stuck inside of mobile” is basically eight short lines with repeated chords, but without any drama in either music or lyrics.

The chord sequence C major / A minor comes three times.  Nothing wrong with that except that A minor / C comes twice and the very closely related (in sound) F / C also comes twice.  It is all pretty standard stuff.  Still worth listening to, but not in any way unusual.

Now of course, wonderful songs can be composed out of limited material, and indeed Dylan deliberately restricted himself musically with Visions and Desolation.  But he did so by utilising utterly gripping lyrics such as “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks” and “They’re selling postcards of the hanging”.

Those openers were astonishing lines, and of cours,e we can’t expect this level of arresting drama in every song.  But “Oh the ragman draws circles” is nothing much compared wih those monuments, in my personal view (which of course is what this all is).

So, having taken us up to the very peak of expectation, Dylan now let us down with rather (by his standard) ordinary lines and ordinary chords.  Even the melody avoids giving us a surprise or anticipation of more to come by its simple use of three notes in each of the first three lines.

The point is that what happens in those two utter monuments of contemporary song writing, everything pulls together as we are taken on our journey, but here there is nothing pulling us along.   If we compare those opening lines

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks 
when you're tryin' to be so quiet

and

They’re selling postcards of the hanging, 
they’re painting the passports brown

with

Oh, the ragman draws circles Up and down the block
I’d ask him what the matter was But I know that he don’t talk

there is no compairson that can be made.  Which means that the music has to compensate.  At which point we may note that in the opening lines of Desolation Row Dylan only uses two chords.  With Johanna it is three chords.

It thus isn’t the chords that make the difference; it is the lyrics and the melody.

My speculation would be that Bob realised that he had failed to deliver another masterpiece with “Memphis Blues” and so he went absolutely out of his way with the next composition to compensate, which he did achieve with Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands

It is not that the chord sequence here is revolutionary; it certainly isn’t, but it has a shape that holds the whole song together.

My point here is this: listening to Dylan’s compositions in the order they were written, I get a feeling that at this time he finds it very easy to write song lyrics.   In a sense, that is me citing the “bleedin’ obvious” (as we say in England – don’t know if that phrase is used elsewhere).   But he can get stuck both lyrically and musically.  Yet he is such a genius that even when in a period of being stuck, moments of staggering genius burst through.

At this point in writing this article, I felt the need to stop and look back, just to check I was getting thie right.  My argument is that within three years of Bob starting to write and keep a range of songs, he was producing works of genius.

In 1962, Dylan wrote 36 songs.   In the “genius” group, I’d place “Ballad for a Friend”, “Blowing in the Wind”, “Tomorrow is a Long Time” (Bob’s version, not the Elvis version), “Hard Rain”, and “Don’t Think Twice”. That’s five songs out of 36.

In 1963, there were 31 compositions, and the genius was pouring forth: “Masters of War,” “Spanish Leather”, “When the Ship Comes In “, “One Too Many Mornings”.

By 1964 Dylan is on another planet writing “Tambourine Man”, “Gates of Eden,” and “It’s all Alright Ma”.  And of course, there were, as in each of these years, many other extraordinary works that he produced, but I am trying to make the genius level a level that really is beyond everything else.

So to 1965.  I’d give the accolade to “It’s all over now Baby Blue”, “Like a Rolling Stone”, “Desolation Row”, and “Visions of Johanna” out of the 29 compositions from that year that have survived.

Thus in the four years considered above (1962-1965) Bob composed 116 songs – you can find them listed in order of composition here.    And I am saying that to my mind, 16 of those songs (around 14%) are works of sheer absolute genius.  Which is extraordinary by any standard.

Now of course, one might argue that 14% genius is not really genius, in that Shakespeare wrote 38 plays and they are all works of genius.  But a play is a massive construction, and actually, they aren’t all works of genius, although most are.  But we are obviously talking about constructions of utterly different sizes and complexities.

So simply using my own judgement, I place Dylan right up there at the top – not because every song he wrote was fantastically wonderful, but because in four years he produced 16 utter masterpieces which took the genre he was writing in, into utterly new territory.

• 1: We might have noted the musical innovations more
• 2: From Hattie Carroll to the incoming ship
• 3: From Times to Percy’s song
• 4: Combining musical traditions in unique ways
• 5: Using music to take us to a world of hope
• 6: Chimes of Freedom and Tambourine Man
• 7: Bending the form to its very limits
• 8: From Denise to Mama
• 9: Balled in Plain D
• 10: Black Crow to All I really want to do
• 11: I’ll keep it with mine
• 12: Dylan does gothic and the world ends
• 13: The Gates of Eden
• 14: After the Revolution – another revolution
• 15: Returning to the roots (but with new chords)
• 16. From “It’s all right” to “Angelina”. What happened?
• 17: How strophic became something new: Love is just a four letter word
• 18: Bob reaches the subterranean
• 19: The conundrum of the song that gets worse
• 20: Add one chord, keep it simple, sing of love
• 21: It’s over. Start anew. It’s the end.
• 22: Desolation Row: perhaps the most amazing piece of popular music ever written
• 23: Can you please crawl out your window
• 24: Positively Fourth Street
• 25: Where the lyrics find new lands, keep the music simple
• 26:  Tom Thumb’s journey. It wasn’t that bad was it?
• 27: From Queen Jane to the Thin Man
• 28: The song that revolutionised what popular music could do