Links to all the previous articles in the “No Nobel prize for music” series are given at the end of this article.
By Tony Attwood
In recent articles, I have been arguing that as Bob continued to write songs at a pace through the 1960s (36 in 1962, 31 in 1963, 20 in 1964, 29 in 1965, and 22 in 1966), he not only changed the subject matter of his lyrics, he also made changes to the way he wrote the music. These two sets of changes ensured that his originality was never in doubt. He could, it seemed, just go on and on writing songs. Not every one would be a masterpiece, but many were highly enjoyable, and some most certainly were worth considering at least as masterpieces of the genre, if not as works of genius (which indeed some would claim they are, and it is most certainly an accolade I would give to at least a dozen songs Dylan had written up to this point).
Of course, coming from a folk and blues background, and without a formal musical education, Bob was clearly influenced by the strophic approach (that is, verse, verse, verse etc), which dominated folk music, but he did also seek to vary this in both conventional and unconventional ways. For example, early on, he saw the power of having a repeated chorus (as in “Sooner or Later One of Us Must Know”), but then again, he also discovered the idea of simply adding an extra line to a verse (as in Visions of Johnaan). On other occasions, he would adopt the popular music approach of having a second musical section which could appear after two or three verses (as in Absolutely Sweet Marie).
Some of these variations (such as the “B” section) have been part of songwriting for centuries, but others (such as the sudden addition of one extra line) appear to have been invented by Dylan himself.
But what is really interesting is that throughout his writing, these modifications are there and can be felt by the listener, but they don’t jolt or surprise us – they fit in with the music. Indeed, they generally fit in so well that most listeners don’t know they are there.
At the same time Bob takes us into worlds that are rarely explored in popular music, such as surrealism (in “Stuck inside of Mobile”), the feeling of randomness (“Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat”), disdain (“She’s your lover now”), the artist moving against the norms of life (“Rainy Day Women”), and sadness (“Obviously Five Believers”). And all such changes come before we contemplate the way that Bob has extended the length a song can be – in popular music, before he came along, 2.5 minutes was the general rule.
Of course, Bob has not been the absolute first person to venture into these topics, and the exact meaning of some of his songs can be disputed. But even if it were to be argued that Bob has done little to move the subject matter of popular song along (at which point I would simply direct the listener to “Desolation Row” to illustrate just how far along that road Bob had taken us) the fact is that Bob has constantly been making subtle changes to the way folk / pop / rock music (as opposed to lyrics) can work.
Of course, sometimes the changes he made to popular music are obvious, as in the length of Desolation Row, or sometimes suble (as in the aforementioned extra line in Visions), but they are there. Bob was neither writing music in the same form and style, song after song, nor was he simply taking the approach of popular, pop, rock and folk music as his style. He was making changes to the form of music, to the style of the music, and to the lyrical content, which was venturing into areas that no one had touched before. Love, lost love and dance as the three classic subject matters allowable in the two-and-a-half-minute pop song were now a thing of the past.
The last song I considered in this series, “I Want You,” showed that this approach of exploring musical variations that others had never considered within popular music could take the subtlest of forms. It is a verse and chorus song, but with a middle 8 (not common for Bob although well used in popular music generally), but with one little twist at the end. For the final verse ends
But I did it, because he lied andBecause he took you for a rideAnd because time was on his side andBecause I...
We know by this time that of course, the “I” leads on to “I want you”. But in every previous version of the chorus, “I want you” is the first line. Yet the “I” has already been sung as the last word of the final verse. So it can be dropped from the first line of the chorus.
It is the tiniest of all tiny changes, and yet for the listener who plays the song over and over again on the album, it is there, another subtlety. Maybe not fully recognised, but nevertheless there, and adding to our enjoyment of the song.
And I find that interesting, because after “I Want You” Bob wrote a series of songs that you may perhaps be less familiar with. Songs that didn’t appear on an album or in concerts. Some don’t even appear on the definitive list of songs on the official Dylan songs on the official website, such as Definitively Van Gough. It is a song which is built around the regular chords and melody of a popular song, but with a rhythmic structure never heard before. Yet it is lost by officialdom.
Musically, the next song, “Don’t Tell Him” seems to go back to the norm; in fact, some might say, too much back to the norm for a Bob Dylan song. And that to me seems interesting; first there is a song with a rhythmic structure that is so full of surprises it doesn’t seem to hold the song together, and now a song that is as straight down the middle with chords, melody and lyrics as possible: there are no surprises at all.
The next song Bob wrote was “What kind of Friend is this?” which we analysed with a complete recording in 2018. It is a variant 12-bar blues but is extended into a 16-bar verse, which works perfectly. It is one of those songs that, if you go back and listen to it, you are liable to ask, “why did he just abandon it?” It is not a hugely original piece, but it is great fun, and those extra bars really give it an additional twist.
So what we have had here are three songs in a row in which Bob was experimenting, particularly with the music, not with the lyrics. And I do feel that the recordings that we have of these unfinished and unreleased songs, which were written one after another at the end of 1966 we can certainly hear Bob looking for those musical variations that do have a most significant place in his work, if we only spend time looking for them.
The musical changes away from the standard norm of blues music are not great, but they are there. In “If you want my love”, the next song Bob wrote, sounds like a 12-bar blues, that is what it is, but the subtleties are in there – as for the “middle 8” which, as far as we can tell from the recording, has both a minor chord and chord II as a major. Another unusual twist for Bob.
The fact with this song is that the lyrics were fully written, but it was clearly the musical variation that was giving Bob the problem and which caused the song to be abandoned. In short, the conclusion seems (reasonably to me) to be, he wanted to put in the musical variations, but those he tried out did not satisfy him. Put another way, he felt the song needed a variation but he didn’t know what.
I’m not going to try and dig any further into Dylan’s next song, “If I were a king” than I have done before, for to me what we have of that song simply confirms my point: Bob was experimenting, as all artists do, but not reaching a conclusion as a result of the experiments.
The chord sequence is certainly interesting, as several times it sounds as if we know exactly where it is going, but then it changes. Bob seems to be trying to balance the desire for an unusual change in the music away from what we expect to something that is different enough to be interesting, but also which keeps us within the confines of the song. Many song composers face that dilemma, and it is a tough one to crack.
What is interesting here is that we have the lyrics fully formed and an interesting melody, but I suspect the conclusion that Bob reached is that this somehow simply isn’t enough. The result overall sounds somewhat like a number of other songs. In short, neither the melody, nor the chord sequence, nor the lyrics are enough to make this a song worth keeping. There is nothing wrong with the song, save that it does not have one utterly outstanding feature that makes us want to go back to hear it again, and again, and again. Instead, the strophic nature of the song (verse, verse, verse etc) just keeps us going on, and on.
In short, I think this song could have shown Bob that he was quite right to look for something different and unusual in each song he was taking forward to publication. In essence, in this case, that extra spark of originality had gone.
As I listen again to Bob’s next song, “I can’t leave her behind” I think I hear him battling with this realisation. This song does contain a melody that is very unusual and much more varied for Bob. And as a result, possibly, I feel he was almost there with “I can’t leave her behind” but Bob abandoned that too, and went on to one more song. He did however, compose one more piece at this time, as he searched for another composition.
As we can hear through all these compositions, Bob is searching for something new, something that he feels is not quite there.
And indeed he kept on searching for the next set of songs he wrote, or part wrote, were those that we know from the Basement Tapes. What we have been exploring above is indeed the prelude to that collection.
I may well have missed it, but I have not seen this collection of songs described as that prelude, yet to me, in listening to them, what we have is a set of songs Bob wrote but wasn’t happy with – for reasons that I think we can hear.
But I think the point that may be missed here is that Bob wrote and experimented with this run of songs after “I want you” and other “Blonde on Blonde” songs. Those songs seemed to come pouring out of him with no difficulty, but then… it is as if a door closed. Not so that Bob couldn’t write songs any more, but because he couldn’t write songs that he really valued and wanted to work on any more.
In fact, what we can see is that the songs above were the prelude to the Basement Tapes. The man who had previously been able to sit down and write a song that we would all want to hear (and possibly sing) over and over was now writing songs that no longer grabbed many of us in the same way.
The fact is that having written “I Want You,” which is a pop song (and nothing wrong with that) Bob clearly wanted a change of direction, but whereas such musical changes of direction had come to him naturally and easily in the past, this time it didn’t happen. He was writing songs, and these songs that we now see as a prelude to the Basement Tapes were songs that many singer-songwriters would have happily added to their repertoire. Yet they were not satisfying Dylan. And that gave him the creative person’s biggest problem of them all. He was creating, but simply either didn’t like what he was creating or didn’t feel it was quite good enough. And that is where the real problem starts.
A person in a non-creative job can go to work, and on a bad day might actually work somewhat more slowly, and even make a few slips, but the work carries on. The car is serviced, the bricks are laid, the customers are served, and the broken pipe is mended. Maybe the jobs take a bit longer than normal, maybe the worker is not very communicative, maybe there is the odd slip, maybe the worker is not as neat and tidy as normal, although probably there is nothing that cannot be put right.
But for the creative genius, there is no such acceptable drop in the output. If the latest painting, novel, design or album is not as good as the last one, critics (who by and large couldn’t do anything half as good) will let the artist know in no uncertain terms. And unfortunately, when that happens, no one knows how to turn the tap marked “creativity” up a notch…
Previously in this series….
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 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 appened? 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 29: Taking the music to completely new territory 30: Sooner or Later the committee will realise its error 31: The best ever version of “Where are you tonight sweet Marie?” 32: Just like a woman 33: Most likely you go your way 34: Everybody must get stoned 35: Obviously 5 Believers 36: I Want You