- Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window? part 1: Look at Barry Run
- Index to current and recent series on this site
by Jochen Markhorst
II The density and gravity of a Dylan song
“Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?”, as we will from now call “Look At Barry Run”, is a song that Dylan struggles with for quite some time, comparable in that respect to “I’ll Keep It With Mine”, the song he also keeps fooling around with during these months (for more than a year, in fact; the Witmark demo is from June 1964, two recording attempts during the Bringing It All Back Home sessions in January 1965 and eleven takes during the Blonde On Blonde sessions in January and February 1966).
Can You Please Crawl gets seventeen takes during that fourth Highway 61 session alone. Then two attempts in the no man’s land between the release of Highway 61 and the first real Blonde On Blonde session on 30 November 1965: on Tuesday 5 October, Dylan spends another long evening (three hours, an hour and a half break and then another four hours) in the studio for a session that will prove to be not very productive. “Medicine Sunday”, “Jet Pilot”, “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window”, “I Wanna Be Your Lover” and two untitled “Instrumental Tracks”; a bunch of unfinished snippets and failed takes, not a single song is deemed good enough for Blonde On Blonde, and the best takes are not officially released until 1985, on the fascinating box set Biograph.
Those two “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window” snippets we only get to hear in 2015, on Disc 8 of the acclaimed The Bootleg Series 12 – The Cutting Edge 1965-66. Unfortunately, both were cut short (after 0’57” and after 0’49”), both at a slower tempo than the H61 takes and both even more mercurial than those earlier takes.
Seven weeks after this “in-between session”, at the first real Blonde session on 30 November, the final attempt is made. First, fourteen attempts to record “Visions Of Johanna” to the master’s satisfaction (unsuccessful), and the rest of the evening is spent on Can You Please Crawl. Right from the first take, a false start, it is clear that Dylan has ironed out the main sticking point. The Rolling Stone-esque intro is replaced by an al niente, a “to nothing”, in which the band falls silent for a bar and only drummer Bobby Gregg taps the beat on a cymbal. The idea is so successful that it is also used after each chorus and becomes one of the song’s strongest features.
This version is accepted fairly quickly. During this final recording session, it hardly changes; in fact, only organist Garth Hudson is searching for a definitive part. The faltering rehearsals and breakdown are probably due to the slightly unusual chord progression of the bridge to the verses. The esteemed gentlemen musicians do have to stay focused here, but pace, arrangement and sound for the final version of the song itself have been found. The disturbing similarities from July have largely evaporated – partly because influential musicians such as Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield are not playing on this version, of course (although Al Kooper does seem to remember playing on this session with The Hawks – but the organ part really sounds like Hudson, the piano plays far too well for Kooper’s keyboard skills and is probably Paul Griffin, and that guitar definitely is Robbie Robertson).
It is released as a single, and Dylan has expectations. In No Direction Home, Shelton tells the story of how Dylan throws the doormat on duty, Phil Ochs, out of the car because Ochs is not overly enthusiastic about the single’s hit potential.
Still, Ochs is right. In the US, Can You Please Crawl barely makes it into the charts (number 58 in the Billboard Hot 100 is the highest position), in Canada it doesn’t make it past 42nd place, and in Europe the song only makes it into the charts in England, where it is still a hit, though a minor one: it stays in the charts for five weeks, with 17 as its highest position.
The covers of the song don’t score anywhere either. In the Netherlands, even national sweetheart Patricia Paay (1975) fails with a polished but still okay version, thanks to none other than Steve Harley – who, in his glory year (“Come Up And See Me (Make Me Smile)”), finds time to produce his sister-in-law’s entire debut album and calls in his Cockney Rebels Jim Cregan (guitar) and Duncan Mackay (keyboards). EMI apparently believes in it; not only do La Paay and Steve Harley get Abbey Road Studios at their disposal, EMI also pulls out the wallet for Herbie “Walk On The Wild Side” Flowers on bass and Tony “Rebel, Rebel” Newman on drums – the crème de la crème in the session musicians rolodex. Great musicians, very nice arrangement and a short, atmospheric Make Me Smile-style Spanish guitar solo… but still not enough. The single also has a curious B-side, by the way, on which Steve Harley, now with a complete Cockney Rebel, indulges his production ambitions on “Stairway To Heaven” (but is unfortunately rather curtailed by the vocal limitations of his lovely sister-in-law).
Even with this love and budget Can You Please fails to chart. Phil Ochs’ prediction is proven right again: the song really has no hit potential.
It still is a great, mercurial Dylan song though. In his witty, autobiographical book 31 Songs, Nick Hornby devotes chapter 8 to Dylan’s “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?”. Already in the third line, he boldly confesses, straight-faced: “I am not a Dylan fan.” Of course, “like everyone who loves music”, he cherishes the three mid-60s albums plus Blood On The Tracks. But then standing in front of his record collection, he is surprised to find that he has more than twenty CDs by the master (more than any other artist), and he has to admit that he knows far more pointless Dylan trivia than he does about, say, Shakespeare or Jane Austen. And comes up with the highly quotable gem: “there’s a density and a gravity to a Dylan song that you can’t find anywhere else.”
But a fan, no.
Placing “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” among the 31 Songs is not entirely pure though, the successful British author nuances. The appeal of this particular song lies mainly in the fact that you haven’t heard it a zillion times before, so with this song, you can approximately imagine the impression “Like A Rolling Stone” or “Visions Of Johanna” must have made on those who heard them for the first time. Dylan is at his artistic peak here, with that crisp, clear organ sound, unmistakably Dylan, but it’s not such a well-known song – roughly comparable to The Beatles’ “Rain”.
That’s true. The song is a kind of Nugget, an Original Artyfact from the First Psychedelic Era. Dylan never plays the song, especially not after that flop. It doesn’t appear on any album and, as mentioned, the single hardly sells at all. It is not until 1985, twenty years after it was recorded, with the release of the successful box set Biograph, that Can You Please Crawl reaches a wider audience…
To be continued. Next up Can You Please Crawl part 3: The amusing cruelty
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 looking 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
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side A