by Jochen Markhorst
II To me writing a song was, you know, a miracle
Mother of Muses, sing for my heart
Sing of a love too soon to depart
Sing of the heroes who stood alone
Whose names are engraved on
tablets of stone
Who struggled with pain,
so the world could go free
Mother of Muses, sing for me“That’s the first thing I wrote, I think. It may have been the first thing I wrote. With this friend of mine, Martin Sharp, when I lived in Chelsea in the 60s. He had the lyrics and I had just got a very simple progression. But I was a stumbling songwriter and I really didn’t have any knowledge of theory or how to go about it. To me writing a song was, you know, a miracle. I could probably come up with about a song a year at that stage.”
Eric Clapton reveals a particularly likeable, modest and humble side of himself in the documentary Fresh Live Cream (Martin Baker, 1993) when he talks about the song “Tales Of Brave Ulysses” – which, by his own account, was the first song he ever wrote. Although “wrote” is perhaps a bit of an overstatement, “As it happened, I had in my mind at that moment an idea inspired by a favourite song of mine by the Lovin’ Spoonful called Summer In The City,” Clapton explains in his autobiography (2007), and the lyrics are not particularly original either:
And you know you cannot leave her For you touched the distant sands With tales of brave Ulysses How his naked ears were tortured By the sirens sweetly singing Cream – Tales Of Brave Ulysses:
… for example, and we hear lines and snippets of verse such as “And you want to take her with you” and “She drowns you in her body” and more fragments, all of which have been copied in full or in part from the song that flatmate Martin Sharp apparently listens to a great deal, from Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” (which, at that time, in the spring of 1967, he could only have known in Judy Collins’ version).
A collage-like, Dylanesque product, all in all – bits of text and music from various sources stuck together. And with a leading role for Homer’s Odysseus, of course (“Ulysses” is the Latinisation of the Greek name Odysseus).
Just as collage-like as the album cover, incidentally, the cover for Cream’s immortal masterpiece Disraeli Gears – a psychedelic explosion of colour, flowers, books, wings and the three heads of Ginger Baker, Jack Bruce and Clapton up there in a sort of Mount Rushmore pose. Also designed by lyricist Martin Sharp. “Tales Of Brave Ulysses” can be found at No. 6, between the raw psychedelic rock gem “SWLARB” and Ginger Baker’s peculiar, hypnotic “Blue Condition”, the song of which Clapton says:
“This is Ginger’s number – he wrote it and it’s the track where he sings for the first time, his singing debut, in fact. We insisted that he write a number and sing on it on the album and we all think it’s really nice. He’s very extreme with his dialect, so English – he sounds like an English Bob Dylan.” (Record Mirror, 18 November 1967)
In Clapton’s song, references to Homer’s works are far more prominent than usual. The name “Odysseus” or “Ulysses” and derivatives such as “odyssey”, “sirens”, “Troy”, “Achilles” and others are used frequently enough in songs, and always metaphorically. “Odyssey” usually for “long journey” or something similar (“City of New Orleans”, Jimmy Buffett’s “Living It Up”), “sirens” for irresistible temptation, or as in George Brassens’ “Heureux qui comme Ulysse” (1970) to describe relief and joy when a goal has been achieved… but ultimately, even in “Tales Of Brave Ulysses”, Homer is merely a provider of imagery. Heureux qui comme Ulysse – Georges Brassens:
Dylan takes it a step further, though. Initially, awe, respect and devotion seem to guide Dylan, both in the first verse and in this second verse. Both verses are undylanesque, or at least, in all their grandeur, deviating from the overall vibe of Rough And Rowdy Ways; no alienating touches such as “Armageddon Street” or “the size of your cock” or “greedy old wolf” or “I’ll cut you up”, no anachronistic visitors like “Anne Frank” or “Scarface Pacino” or “McKinley”, but solely classical, Homeric, marble verses. The poet who, at the end of this side of the record, in “Key West”, will sigh: “I’m searching for love, for inspiration”, demonstrates here quite openly where he has found the “love and inspiration” for these two opening verses and, by extension, for the entire song itself. After all, Homer’s Iliad opens (in Robert Fagles’ translation) with:
“Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles, murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses, hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls…”
… and even more famous is the opening of Homer’s Odyssey:
“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns driven time and again off course, once he had plundered the hallowed heights of Troy.”
Dylan has certainly copied the rhetorical device of invocation, but we can also see the influence in the content: the Muse, of course, the forest nymphs, the deep dark sea (which, incidentally, Homer always refers to as the wine-dark sea), honour and glory, the struggle with pain, the solitary heroes, fate and departure… we previously heard Dylan copying entire sentences from the Iliad and the Odyssey into his songs (eight years earlier, on Tempest in 2012: “They hauled your ship up on the shore” and “You been cooped up on an island far too long” in “Roll On John”, for example, and “I’ll lead you there myself at the break of day” in “Duquesne Whistle”, and even two consecutive lines as in “Early Roman Kings” (I’ll strip you of life, strip you of breath / Ship you down to the house of death), now, eight years later here on Rough And Rowdy Ways, he adopts idiom, and in “Mother Of Muses” both idiom and style.
At least, in the two opening verses, that is…
To be continued. Next up Mother Of Muses part 3:
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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 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
- Bob Dylan