By Tony Attwood
So far in this series…
- “I don’t know who I am most of the time. It doesn’t even matter to me”.
- I don’t know where I am going, nor what it will look like
- Bob Dylan and the ever changing personality. Four early songs.
- How the meaning of a Dylan song can change across the years.
Following on from my thoughts about whether Bob’s comments concerning his well-being (to the effect that he has regular personality changes during the course of a single day – which to me sounds like quite a serious medical condition for which he might need some help) I have been wondering if this effect (if it is indeed real) is reflected in the songs Bob has written over time.
And staying, as I have been in this series, with the early songs Bob wrote, in particular in 1963 and 1964 I did look again at the order in which the songs were written, and noticed some interesting contrasts.
For example in early 1964 Bob wrote these five songs one after the other….
- Spanish Harlem Incident
- Motorpsycho Nightmare
- It ain’t me babe
- Denise Denise
- Mama you’ve been on my mind
At first there might seem nothing to connect the songs – at least nothing in their music or the lyrics, since they cover issue of love, humour, taking a break and lost love. And indeed even if you don’t feel my briefest of descriptions of the themes behind each song are accurate or detailed enough, it surely is clear that these songs are based on different concepts.
However there is one thing that links them which is the issue of emotions and feelings. But then again, one might say that something like 90% of all pop and rock songs have something to do with emotions and feelings. So maybe that is not such an important observation.
And yet despite the similarity of the themes, the songs are fundamentally different, each dealing with a different approach to that all-consuming issue of emotions and feelings in response to the actions of others.
If we start with Spanish Harlem, Bob’s lyrics suggest that the singer is so overwhelmed by the lady in question he cannot believe she is real…
“You have slayed me, you have made me, I got to laugh halfways off my heels. I got to know, babe, will you surround me? So I can tell if I’m really real.”
Those lines perfectly describe that feeling of meeting another person who just seems so perfect it is hard to believe she is indeed a real, or at least a real person who would take an interest in the “other” (in this case Bob).
Meanwhile, at this stage in his career that Bob was learning that in a live performance, the lyrics are not enough – for indeed if all we have is the lyrics then is probably better to leave the piece as a poem and simply recite it.
And so after this one performance, Spanish Harlem Incident was left – at least by Dylan, and by most cover artists. But do spare a moment if you can to listen to Dion’s version from 1978, which tackles every single one of these issues, and shows us what the potential of the song really.
Now I generally agree that it is not a clever thing to do for writers to look back at their earlier commentaries and quote themselves (I certainly try not to do that), but with this song I do feel somehow (almost certainly more by luck than judgement) I hit the nail with my comment when I said,
“What is so remarkable is the context – for this comes from the album that starts with “All I really want to do,” and ends with “It Ain’t Me Babe” – two songs that define Dylan’s obsession with not being trapped by a woman who wants to wrap him up and define his being. It is an obsession which starts on Freewheeling and continues way into the rock era – and yet here in Spanish Harlem he is proclaiming that this woman can take him and make him into a person – through her he can discover who is really is.”
I still think that is a reasonable description of the song and the recording, and I think it relates to the theme of this little series of articles. Bob’s lyrics can proclaim both a desperate desire to be with a woman, and at the same time, a fear of throwing himself into a relationship.
Indeed as I also noted, “It is this utter reversal of a constant Dylan theme – the laughter and sneering at those around who are defined by others rather than who define themselves, and yet here he is asking the fortune telling lover to do exactly that: to define him, make him, create him.”
So what we do seem to have here is an early example of Bob doing exactly what he proclaimed years later – although over a slightly longer timescale. He is shifting from one possibility to another , almost from one personality to another.
What’s more having composed “Spanish Harlem Incident” Bob then wrote “Motorpsycho Nitemare which seems designed to throw away all the delicacy and love in the former song and provide something so outrageous that Bob can hardly bring himself to sing it.
And then if these changes were no enough, Bob produced “It ain’t me babe” which reverses the previous themes as he is apparently asking the fortune telling lover to define him, make him, and in fact create him.
It is most certainly possible to argue that Bob is deliberately moving from theme to theme in his writing (and as far as I can tell these four songs were written in the sequence I have usd above) and is perhaps responding to his inner being which tells him each day he is a different person.
But there is another explanation in which Bob feels that he wants to write both different music and find a different theme within his lyrics with each song he writes. “Denise” is a straight love song (it even starts with a line about “your eyes so blue” which is a totally different theme from “It ain’t me babe”. Such a contrast in the themes developed could indeed be caused by the changing personality that Bob described recently, or it could be a deliberate move by himself as a songwriter, to prove to the world around that every song could be different. Or it could be a one-off chance effect, perhaps caused by something he read.
Now this can be an important point for a songwriter, and indeed for a musician, because commentators on such music (and indeed journalists generally) love to put the people they write about into categories. Their argument in doing so, is that it makes it easier for the listener or reader to hold onto the concept or the storyline.
I am not at all sure that this explanation of why writers do this, is correct. Basically it seems to me that it is much easier to write either a song or a story about a person with very clear characteristics – but then I’m just an amateur at this business, and I’ve never come across a song writer who clearly describes how he or she comes to write each individual song.
But I think we can see this with the song “Denise” in which Bob seems to have taken the title of hit by Randy and the Rainbows and had a bit of fun from that point onwards….
… and then create his own song in a classic 12 bar blues format, complete with repeated opening line….
Denise, Denise Gal, what's on your mind? Denise, Denise Gal, what's on your mind? You got your eyes closed Heaven knows that you ain't blind
Well, I can see you smiling But oh your mouth is inside out I can see you smiling But you're smiling inside out Well, I know you're laughin' But what are you laughin' about
and so on.
Is this Bob finding his personality has suddenly flipped, and so he writes a song to fit where he is today, or is this Bob, the consummate songwrite, exploring all the different options that seem to be at his disposal? I go with the latter, but of course I can’t prove it.