by Jochen Markhorst
This is a chapter from the new book “Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side C”
It’s 16 March 1971, and Dylan reports for duty in a small, relatively new studio on Spring Street in Manhattan’s SoHo district, Blue Rock Studio, which he is quite charmed by. It is close to home, unknown and discreet. He will return there in October, this time as a session musician; Dylan plays the piano on Barry Goldberg’s recording of “Hi Heel Sneakers”. These three (or four) days in March, however, are all about Dylan. And Leon Russell is the Master of Ceremonies.
“But I’ll sit down on this bank of sand and watch the river flow,” he sings today, in “Watching The River Flow”. It is one of the rare stirrings in Dylan’s “dry years”, the early 1970s, when Dylan is devoted to his home and hearth, and produces virtually nothing artistically. It is a special song though, mainly because of its genesis. We owe the details thereof to the English music journalist and author Peter Doggett, who in 2004 publishes the wonderful article “Whose Masterpiece Is It Anyway?” in the fanzine Judas!, including one after another Dylan-related anecdotes told to him by pianist Leon Russell in 2002.
It may have been more than thirty years ago, but Russell still feels the excitement, and with infectious enthusiasm he reveals the ins and outs of his studio experience with Bob Dylan. Obtained, as the long-haired piano beast easily tells us, by shamelessly nagging:
“I said to him, ‘I’ve heard that when you were doing Nashville Skyline, while the producer was listening to the playbacks, you were out in the lobby doing the next song. I’d like to see you do that!’ I begged him and begged him, and after a little while he agreed to show me. So I called my guys – Carl Radle on bass, Jimmy Keltner on drums, and [Jesse] Ed Davis on guitar – and we went up to Blue Rock Studios in the Village, and I cut these two tracks for Bob. It took about 30 minutes. Then Bob came down, and I said, let me see you write songs to these.”
… and Dylan then writes the lyrics to “Watching The River Flow” and “When I Paint My Masterpiece” with Russell looking over his shoulder. Strange working method, actually. Leon doesn’t seem to have a problem with it, but the journalist, judging by the title, “Whose Masterpiece Is It Anyway?” of his article, notices too; Russell has already recorded the musical accompaniment without any interference from Dylan. He doesn’t get any credits – although for “Watching The River Flow”, for example, Leon reuses a piano lick from his own “Dixie Lullaby” from 1969.
Other details of those sessions are just as remarkable. Dylan spends a lot of time on covers, and biographer Bob Spitz (Dylan: A Biography, 1989) claims to know which ones: “That Lucky Old Sun”, “Spanish Harlem” and two blues ballads – “Alabama Bound” and “Blood Red River”, in which Spitz admires qualities like “Bob’s rich, hoarse delivery” and remarks how much both those blues ballads “captured the spirit of Bob’s partnership with this band, however fleeting, in all its rollicking glory.” So Spitz is suggesting that he has heard the recordings. And, by extension, would be joining a very select elite. Russell, the bandleader and organiser of the session, has no memories of those songs, nor of hearing any recordings, for that matter. He does, however, remember:
“Dylan cut about fifteen Jimmie Rodgers songs while we were up in that studio. They were real obscure songs that I’d never heard before.”
Apart from that, Russell says that all recordings were destroyed on the spot: “After he got through cutting these songs, he went over to the engineer and demanded that they erase the tape. He watched them erase it.” And anyway, it is rather unlikely that Leon would forget recording songs like “Spanish Harlem” and “That Lucky Old Sun” with Bob Dylan. No, unfortunately it seems that Spitz, like on quite a lot pages in his questionable and overly dramatic biography, spreads information he found in the thin air. Which would be a shame; after all, any love of Dylan for “Blood Red River” could, fifty years on, be catalogued as a first seed for “Crossing The Rubicon”.
It is quite likely that Dylan knows “Blood Red River” in Josh White’s version. From the early 1960s onwards, he often mentions White in interviews, usually in the Belafonte-Odetta-Guthrie line-up, in the list of artists he admires immensely and tries to imitate, and just as reverently, White’s name is mentioned in Dylan’s autobiography Chronicles. Finally, in the Q&A interview with Bill Flanagan (2017), Dylan puts the fattest exclamation mark: “I had heard Lead Belly and Josh White and that changed everything.”
Josh White recorded “Blood Red River” in 1933, when he was just nineteen, astonishingly enough (a year, by the way, after he recorded “Howlin’ Wolf Blues”, also in New York). Dylan’s record cabinet probably contains one or more of the many compilation albums; Josh White’s respectable oeuvre is rediscovered every ten or fifteen years and celebrated with yet another compilation release.
The track lists are a feast of recognition; “St. James Infirmary”, “John Henry”, “Black Girl”, “Casey Jones”, “Which Side Are You On?” (White was briefly a member of Pete Seeger’s and Woody Guthrie’s Almanac Singers), “Delia’s Gone”, “Well, Well, Well”, “Lonesome Road”… titles, lyrics, paraphrases, licks and melody lines that we hear echoing throughout Dylan’s oeuvre. And, to complete the bridge to the Rubicon, after White’s bloody red river from 1933, which flows by again in the second verse of Dylan’s “Crossing The Rubicon”: in 1955, Josh White recorded “Run, Mona, Run” – which just might be revealing an identity;
Mona, baby, are you still in my mind? -
I truly believe that you are
Couldn’t be anybody else but you who’s come with me this far
… the mysterious Mona from the last verse of “Crossing The Rubicon”. Fitting that Dylan here seems to be singing about a search for inspiration, for his Muse; after all, Josh White’s oeuvre has been a source of inspiration for Dylan since 1962, and still is in 2020.
Anyway, Spitz’s report about covering “Blood Red River” during those March days with Leon Russell is not too reliable, alas. Russell’s own recollection, “about fifteen Jimmie Rodgers songs”, is more reliable, and does lead us to another Dylan masterpiece. Among those fifteen Jimmie Rodgers songs are surely “Rough And Rowdy Ways” and “My Blue Eyed Jane” (the song Dylan both plays in his Theme Time Radio Hour and shall record himself for the tribute album The Songs Of Jimmie Rodgers, 1997). “Miss The Mississippi And You” in any case, and then presumably “Mississippi Delta Blues” as well, “Mississippi Moon” perhaps, and maybe “Mississippi River Blues”… Jimmie Rodgers also leads to a pièce de résistance, to one of Dylan’s Very Great Songs, the song he writes exactly halfway between “Watching The River Flow” (1971) and “Crossing The Rubicon” (2020)… the river Dylan watches flowing in his mind’s eye back then in 1971 must be the “Mississippi” (written in 1996).
But then again: the record on which “Crossing The Rubicon” shines is called Rough And Rowdy Ways, after the Jimmie Rodgers song, and on it we also hear, at the end of Side 1, in “My Own Version Of You”: “I’m gonna make you play the piano like Leon Russell”.
“All these songs are connected. Don’t be fooled. […] I didn’t think I was doing anything different. I thought I was just extending the line. Maybe a little bit unruly, but I was just elaborating on situations.”
(Dylan, acceptance speech MusiCares Person of the Year 2015)
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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 in both 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 second Big Bang
- Time Out Of Mind: The Rise of an Old Master
- Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s late-career classic
- Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other kind 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 melancholic blues
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side A
- Bob Dylan takes Highway 61 – Seven mercurial songs
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side C