by Jochen Markhorst
XIX The striding of the gods
You got the right spirit - you can feel it you can hear it You got what they call the immortal spirit You can feel it all night you can feel it in the morn Creeps into your body the day you are born
On the 2020 recording, Dylan already balances between singing, reciting and conversing, and over the years, on stage, his style shifts more and more towards reciting. The lean melody lines wear off as the years progress, and in the spring of 2025, Dylan draws a radical conclusion: 90% of the musical accompaniment is discarded. The verse lines are recited in a vacuum.
At the end of each verse, Dylan himself places dramatic exclamation marks, commas and punchlines on the piano with Thelonious Monk-like phrasing and dissonances, bassist Tony Garnier hesitantly plucks a string here and there, guitarist Bob Britt hardly contributes, and if so, only minimalistic, we get some random toms – but the men behind Dylan remain mostly silent. Culminating in the long final verse, in which the band almost completely ceases its activities. The song has now truly become a recitative, and within that recitative, Dylan works towards this quatrain, towards lines 13-16 of this stanza.
It is a very rhythm-driven passage, which Dylan initially recites staccato, but in 2025 largely glissando, with syllables flowing into one another. Opening with a fourteener (“The fourteener has a much more pleasant movement, but a totally different one: the line dances a jig,” as C.S. Lewis teaches us), Dylan bombards the listener with an undylanesque barrage of repetitions. In a quatrain of only 44 words: seven times “you + verb”, twice “spirit” and three times “feel it”… verse lines from a rapper, from a singer, not so much from a man of letters, and the pleasure with which Dylan recites them every night is unmistakable.
Bob Dylan — My Own Version Of You, Tulsa, OK, 25 March 2025:
Content is secondary. The quatrain expresses something like the magic of a song, and the words the poet chooses to communicate that are not particularly spectacular. In “you can feel it, you can hear it” we hear a faint echo of “See Me, Feel Me” from The Who’s Tommy, the Mother of All Rock Operas (1969). Just before this (or just after; it is unknown when Dylan recorded which song), Dylan also pays a friendly tribute to Tommy, in “Murder Most Foul” (line 59: “Tommy, can you hear me? I’m the Acid Queen”). At first glance, it is a somewhat alienating tribute; The Who’s pretentious, rather Wagnerian rock opera seems light years away from Dylan’s phonotheque and taste, but on second thought, it’s not that inconceivable at all.
Pete Townshend shares Dylan’s deep love for old country blues and folk tradition, and it shows. During the Tommy recordings, The Who also recorded Mercy Dee Walton’s “One Room Country Shack” (but couldn’t fit it into the story) and, above all, the brilliant cover of “Eyesight To The Blind” from the man who is held in towering high esteem by Dylan as well, Sonny Boy Williamson, the song sung by Richie Havens in the orchestral version of Tommy (1972).
Eyesight to the Blind – Richie Havens
No, it’s understandable alright, Tommy scoring quite a few bonus points with Dylan. And at the time of the conception of “Murder Most Foul” and of “My Own Version Of You”, Tommy seems to float somewhere on the surface of Dylan’s stream of consciousness. We already heard “Can you look in my face with your sightless eye” in the third verse; in the sixth chorus we hear Dylan sing “I’ll bring someone to life – spare no expense”, a word combination we also already heard with Tommy;
We need more room Build an extension A colourful palace Spare no expense now
… in “Welcome”, the song on Side 4, just minutes before the catastrophic collapse of Tommy’s movement; and now we hear this “See Me, Feel Me” echo – which was presumably chosen primarily for the strong pulse of the word sequence you-can-feel-it, you-can-hear-it, for its potential to be spat out staccato.
However, the only truly remarkable combination of words in this excerpt is, of course, the immortal spirit. The narrator expresses something like “divine power,” like “the striding of the gods,” as Hesse’s Mozart calls it. But in 2020, Dylan seems to have a momentary difficulty naming God. At least, this is the only phase in his long, long career that he spells “God” as “G-d” (in the official publication of the lyrics on the site, in “Goodbye Jimmy Reed”, stanza 6: G-d be with you, brother dear). Weird, but it’s only a very short phase; in The Philosophy Of Modern Song (2022), Our Good Lord has all his vowels back (seven times “God”).
Anyway, for now, not “divine” or “God-given”, but: “immortal spirit”. An unusual combination of words, probably ended up in Dylan’s working memory via the immortal bard; from Measure For Measure (1604), the comedy from which we have heard traces in Dylan’s oeuvre before (Give me your hand and say you’ll be mine in “Mississippi”, for example, or the plot of “Seven Curses”). And here from Act 1 Scene 5:
Lucio: “I hold you as a thing enskied and sainted By your renouncement, an immortal spirit, And to be talked with in sincerity, As with a saint.”
Thin, but still: there are not that many immortal spirits wandering around Dylan’s library or record collection. And in any case, just as fitting for what Dylan’s narrator wants to express here: the divine spark, Pegasus’s wingbeat, the Muse singing to us through Homer, the immortal spirit that after Homer’s death descends into Aeschylus, then Sophocles, flutters on to Gilgamesh, inspires Confucius, Juvenal, Monteverdi, Shakespeare and Mozart and William Blake and so on into the 21st century, where it creeps into the body of My Own Version Of You.
Dylan’s narrator has acquired a body, he has invited a spirit, now all there is left to do is bring the body to life, let it be born…
To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 20: If you’re okay, say something
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 2nd 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