My own version of You 21: Here sit I, forming mortals after my image

by Jochen Markhorst

XXI       Here sit I, forming mortals after my image

“My Own Version Of You” is, apart from the oddball “Murder Most Foul”, the only song on Rough And Rowdy Ways that is not named after the chorus line. Dylan’s song naming has not been particularly exciting since 1967, since John Wesley Harding. Before that, roughly from Another Side Of (1964) to Blonde On Blonde (1966), Dylan is in his “Margritte phase”, the phase in which he, like the Belgian surrealist for his paintings (“Golconde”, “La condition humaine”, “Le blanc-seing”), comes up with alienating, poetic, often incomprehensible and sometimes unrelated titles. Titles that might insinuate an explanatory, underlying idea (“Spanish Harlem Incident”, “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry”), suggest a deeper meaning to the lyrics, but more often than not they are simply alienating and seem to have no relation to the lyrics (“Rainy Day Women #12 & 35”, “Fourth Time Around”) or are vaguely cryptic encodings (“Subterranean Homesick Blues”).

From 1967 onwards, the song titles are “normal” again. Often the opening line, just like old folk songs and poems are named (“As I Went Out One Morning”, “The Wicked Messenger”, “Went To See The Gypsy”), often the recurring refrain line (“I Threw It All Away”, “If Not For You”, “Watching The River Flow”) or the chorus (“Forever Young”, “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”, “Shelter From The Storm”). And that’s how it is, with a few rare exceptions, to this day. Exceptions are song titles such as “Wedding Song” and “Romance In Durango”, titles that are at least fairly unambiguous and cover the subject matter.

“Margritte titles” have been virtually extinct since 1967. At most, “Floater” (2001) and “Tin Angel” (2012) are comparable – words that do not appear in the lyrics and whose relationship, if any, is not immediately clear. But apart from that, almost all songs since 1967 have had unspectacular, self-explanatory titles, and Dylan’s tendency towards extra-textual mystification has virtually evaporated. Virtually evaporated; we can still see the residue of it in the album titles. Planet Waves. Street-Legal. Infidels. Rough And Rowdy Ways. Code breakers with crypto-analytical ambitions are served, at least, with the album titles (as well as with the lyrics themselves, obviously).

Anyway, “My Own Version Of You”. Dylan demonstratively chooses not to use the recurring line “I’ll bring someone to life” as the title. All eight other regular songs on the album are named after (part of) the recurring refrain line, but for this song, he chooses a combination of words that only appear once in the song. A reflex we hardly ever see, by the way. Songs such as “Long And Wasted Years”, “Boots Of Spanish Leather” and “Abandoned Love” are also named after a single word combination from the song, but these are always closing lines, punchlines, the apotheosis, which in themselves have an extra, striking value. Elevating a fragment from somewhere in the middle hardly ever occurs in Dylan’s oeuvre of some 700 songs. “Changing Of The Guards” and “Under The Red Sky” are about the only other examples. Apparently, Dylan attaches special value to the words my own version of you, words that we only encounter at the end of the first verse:

I want to bring someone to life - is what I want to do
I want to create my own version of you

… as the closing words of the first chorus, at that – the seasoned Dylan fan who has been singing along since “Blowin’ In The Wind” through to “I Contain Multitudes”, knows what to expect: my own version of you is the title and the closing hurrah of the first chorus – this is what we’re going to hear at the end of each verse. Just like in dozens, perhaps hundreds of Dylan songs between “Blowin’ In The Wind” and “I Contain Multitudes”, just as in, say, “Shelter From The Storm” and “Make You Feel My Love”, “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and “When The Deal Goes Down”. But behold, this time things turn out differently:

2
I want to bring someone to life - someone I’ve never seen
You know what I mean - you know exactly what I mean

3
I’ll bring someone to life - someone for real
Someone who feels the way that I feel

4
I’ll bring someone to life - in more ways than one
Don’t matter how long it takes - it’ll be done when it’s done

… the recurring refrain line really is I’ll bring someone to life, and the second remarkable thing is the insignificance of the surrounding words at the end of verses 2 to 4. Lazy rhymes (seen-mean, real-feel and one-done), substantively empty (“You know what I mean – you know exactly what I mean”) to even somewhat awkward filler (“someone I’ve never seen”? – as opposed to “I want to bring someone I’ve seen before to life”?). Only chorus line 3, “Someone who feels the way that I feel”, still has some weight as it echoes both a God who creates in His own image and the Prometheus myth – but given the emptiness of the other chorus lines, that weight now seems to be due more to happy coincidence than to poetic insight, more to the wishful thinking of the analyst than to the inspiration of the poet.

5
I’ll bring someone to life - balance the scales
I’m not gonna get involved in any insignificant details

6
I’ll bring someone to life - spare no expense
Do it with decency and common sense

7
I want to bring someone to life - use all my powers
Do it in the dark in the wee small hours

The Nobel Prize winner seems to realise this from verse 5 onwards. The chorus lines become more ambitious. The rhymes are no longer banal (the scales-details, no expense-common sense, powers-hours), a line such as I’m not gonna get involved in any insignificant details is technically challenging for a master of phrasing, not to mention its tongue-twisting quality (Dylan fails on the recording: “I’m not gonna get involved    any insignificant a-details”), and we hear thoughts with substance and funny references (“in the wee small hours”).

John Mayer – In The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning:

https://youtu.be/NwypuAAEBqA?list=RDNwypuAAEBqA

I want to bring someone to life - turn back the years
Do it with laughter - do it with tears

And finally, the Nobel Prize-worthy apotheosis, the confession of the songwriter who wants to keep honouring and reviving tradition and heritage in his own version of you, declaring that his songs shall cover the entire spectrum of human emotions, comedy and tragedy, from laughter to tears;

Here sit I, forming mortals
After my image;
A race resembling me,
To suffer, to weep,
To enjoy, to be glad,
And thee to scorn,
As I!

… laughter and tears, as already prescribed by that former Modern Prometheus, Goethe’s Prometheus.

To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 22 (final): From the chord fairy

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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