No Nobel Prize for Music: On a night like this and Tough Mama

By Tony Attwood

In the last episode in which I pondered the music of “You Angel You”, I edged to the conclusion that Bob was both musically and lyrically deliberately seeking to break away from his musical past, while still using the musical forms and approaches of pop and rock music.

The next song in his sequence of compositions in 1973 was “On a Night Like This” and as I noted before “we can say Bob Dylan was at this point in his compositional career, deliberately seeking to use the compositional techniques of pop music, rather than the traditions of folk music and his own musical inventiveness.”

Now, because we rarely consider Bob’s music in the order in which it was composed, but instead consider it either via his albums or his concerts, the way in which he dived into certain themes and styles can remain somewhat obscure. But when we recognise that the next song he composed was On a Night Like This then we can see the pattern appear more readily.

Clinton Heylin calls On a night like this “anodyne”, but he’s never been a songwriter. If he had he would know it is as hard to write a memorable bouncy love song as it is to write “Like a Rolling Stone”. Although it is true that Bob has seemingly never performed “On a night like this” it on stage

It is true that the lyrics are not among Dylan’s most important contributions to literature, but that is not the point – just listen to the melody, that is where all the emphasis has been directed, and it is unfortunate that Heylin has the influence he has had, while having no grasp of such issues as melody.

Or come to that, chords, for here the accompanying chords do their part in pushing the song along. The chords are fairly standard (E, A and B) with an A minor against the word “reminisce” in the first verse, “bliss” in the second, and “hiss” in the third. But no other variation arises musically until the middle eight, which comes after three (rather than the normal two) verses.

The middle 8 (which begins with “Put your body next to mine”) has the modulation to B major (at “Please don’t elbow me”) which I find one of Bob’s more amusing lines – and it appears to be the only way he could find a rhyme of “company.” The modulation itself is standard – it adds the chord of F sharp major (which is not a standard chord in the key of A major) but which is handy as it leads us naturally to B major.

My point is that this is all standard (or fairly close to standard) pop music writing. It is nothing like Bob’s work from the days of “Desolation Row”, it is pop, exactly as the previous composition “You Angel You” was. If you played either of these 1973 compositions and then one of the songs from the previous decade, or even the opening songs of 1970, and had no idea of the composer, it would be unlikely for you to put the chosen songs as by the same composer. Both had indeed ventured into a new world – a world of bouncy pop love songs.

And although the lyrics are not quite so radically different from those of a decade before, they are still novel

Let the four winds blow
Around this old cabin door
If I’m not too far off
I think we did this once before
There’s more frost on the window glass
With each new tender kiss
But it sure feels right
On a night like this

There is no story or social message in the lyrics, nor are we taken into a strange new world that we are still trying to understand after the fifth playing of the song. Nor indeed are we being warned about the collapse or civilisation or even the direction our society is taking. No this is a song about being happy, which isn’t how more casual observers see most of Bob’s compositions. The music is bouncy and fun and above all lively.

And then we get Tough Mama, which got 44 plays across 35 years.

And really, we can see how Bob was trying to push the music further and further by the time we got here. In fact, it is pushed so far that it is quite possible to be somewhat unsure as to which key the song is actually in. The opening chords suggest D major – but if so we also have a modulation to the key of G major and then A major for the line, “Can I blow a little smoke over you”.

So yet again we have another Bob Dylan composition which is in itself a real experiment musically, taking the songwriter into new grounds; taking him in fact as far away from the 12 bar blues and the classical folk chords of “Times they are a changing” as we can imagine. Indeed, although it is possible that before this song, someone else had written the sequence…

D     Bm      A
  Tough Mama meat shakin' on your bones

…I can’t recall it lyrically, chordally or melodically. And indeed, if we remember the four songs Bob wrote immediately before this track (Hazel, Something there is about you, You Angel You, and On a night like this) the only connection seems to be that they are about ladies. It is as if Bob is thinking through the list of all the women he has known, and sifting out their different personalities and writing a very different song for each.

Which makes Bob not the campaigner or the observer of the world at large, but perhaps simply someone sitting alone writing about the women he has known – good and bad. There is nothing wrong with this, but we should note there is no social commentary, although there is a mixture of fun, and perhaps cynicism. But, (and this is my key point here) the music most certainly changes song by song.

The problem for the songwriter is that you have maybe 500 words at most to play with, and you have to have a melody that the listener is going to hear maybe four times during the course of the song, and you still have to make it listenable and memorable rather than irritating or instantly forgettable. But equally, it needs to be catchy, so that the phrases of music and lyrical phrases can be remembered readily by the audience.

So Bob turns his hand to a different type of song, and being the supreme songwriter he is, he makes it work.

Additionally, the concept of the lyrics is fairly unusual – the lady comes round, seemingly by surprise, in the depths of winter, the singer is delighted, they go to bed, as they have done once before. Everyone’s happy. Hardly War and Peace, but still not the usual love or lost love concepts that dominate pop music. As a positive take on casual sex it seems to me to work fine.

What also makes it fun is the fact that although it is a pop song, Dylan sneaks in the unexpected. For example, “burn, burn, burn” comes from Kerouac’s masterpiece, “On the Road” – a regular influence on Dylan of course.

And there’s the sudden end of romance in the “middle 8” when, having got the woman into bed, he stops all the elegance of his seduction and moves to the prosaic…

There is plenty a room for all
So please don’t elbow me

Of course, I’ve never played this song over and over as I have done with Desolation Row, Johanna, Not Dark Yet etc etc, but just because it isn’t in the style of the greatest of Dylan’s masterpieces, we should not, in my view, reject it. It might just be a sketch or a bit of fun, but that doesn’t make it any less worth a listen.

Part of Dylan’s supremacy as a songwriter is that he has regularly reached out to every corner of contemporary music, from the nursery rhyme to the epic, and here he was doing that again, playing with the music, and giving us something to think about along the way.

Previously in this series….

No Nobel Prize for Music: On a night like this and Tough Mama

Leave a Reply

Blogroll

Meta

Recent Posts

Archives

Indexes and reference pages

Recent articles