By Tony Attwood
Next year is the sixtieth anniversary of the release of the Basement Tapes, and I thought it might be interesting to go back and have another look at what was a set of experiments in music.
But the experiments had lyrics and these lyrics gave us quite an insight into where Bob was at the time. And the fact that this collection takes us toward 20 songs in total in which the central themes concern disasters, life just being a mess and everyone being trapped within that mess, gives us quite an indication as to where Bob’s thoughts were going when he undertook the recordings that eventually became the Basement Tapes.
Of course not every song in that sequence fits into a neat pattern or description, but to me it appears to be a dominant force, at least at the very start of the recording sessions. And because no one has written articles for this site about that selection of songs, and indeed because there are many other Dylan compositions I would sooner write about, they have been left as part of the list of songs from the basement tapes period, with a just simple article for each one.
But of late I have become more and more interested in the way that Bob composed this sequences of songs, rather than just writing individual songs for the guys to play in the studio, and as I have pondered the issue it seems to me that the songs recorded at this time do to offer the chance of a few insights into Bob’s writing.
In other words, instead of taking just one Dylan song and considering that in some depth (which of course can be incredibly interesting and lead to many insights as for example Jochen’s work shows) it can also be worth considering how Bob became interested in certain themes, and how that interest continued through a series of songs.
Indeed I first contemplated this when listening afresh to the Basement Tapes. But when I first determined to have a review of each and every Dylan composition on this website, I put the songs in the order in which they were recorded, (as far as I could tell from the available information), and I have retained that order. And in doing this I found that certain themes seemed to grab Bob’s attention and stay within the songs for a while.
One such theme was that everything was a mess and couldn’t easily be fixed. Another, which followed on fairly quickly (again as far as I can tell from the lyrics) was that the singer was (or at least felt) trapped.
This sequence of “life is a mess” and “I am trapped” songs, runs from “Please Mrs Henry” to “I’m alright”; a sequence of 18 songs.
Now of course not all of them are on the theme of life being a mess, but what has always struck me is that even when they are not on that theme, the theme of negativity is never far away, often combined with the notion of being trapped or at least stuck.
And yet, quite extraordinarily Bob keeps on writing and rehearsing the songs, and recording them, one after the other without having a nervous breakdown, or at least simply packing up and leaving. And that for a simple reasons: the songs might be about life being awful, but the songs themselves are so good.
Of course I am reminded that just because a songwriter writes a specific set of lyrics that doesn’t mean he feels the emotions there in, but if we look at the lyrics of “Please Mrs Henry” for example, it is easier to conclude that the composer felt at one with the lyrics than that he did not. But then, when we consider that the song was followed by the composition of “Lo and behold”, and recordings of such songs as “Crash on the Levee”, “Dress it up” and “I’m not here” it surely becomes apparent that negative feelings were at the centre of the songwriter’s mind.
So because a songwriter writes, or a singer sings, the line “Please Mrs Henry please I’m down on my knees and I ain’t got a dime” that does not mean the writer feels the song, But it is a lot harder to write successfully about negativity when one is feeling happy. Indeed why would one want to write about negativity when one is feeling happy?
Please Mrs Henry was followed by Lo and behold – a song in which nothing at all seems to make any sense at all. Now clearly, from the recordings we can hear that Bob had rehearsed the song with the Band, but he has done so in order to present two compositions in which everything in the world is nonsensical. For within these songs there is no pattern or direction. If “looking for my lo and behold” means anything surely it must mean, “I am looking for something or someone to believe in. But certainly not “I have found something to believe in”.
And then comes “Crash on the Levee”, a variation on the 12 bar blues format and again a song in which the negative is emphasised.
Now this doesn’t mean that Bob didn’t write any other negative songs – of course not. After all one of his greatest songs beings “They’re selling postcards of the hanging,” and Bob has often specialised in telling us how wrecked our world has become both at the individual level and in terms of the whole of society.
But songs such as “Desolation Row” have a multiplicity of images which flow one into the next and overwhelm the listener with a sense that this world of ours has been wrecked – and yet we carry on – we are still going to the carnival no matter what.
Thus “Desolation Row” is a perfectly crafted song, as songs of utter negativity need to be. What we have here on the “Basement Tapes” are songs which just tell us of the disaster, without any context – not even the metaphorical context that we have in “Desolation Row”.
So with “Crash on the Levee” what we get is just the feeling of everything going wrong. There is no real crafting in the song, there are no insights, it is just a statement that there is a disaster but you can keep dancing anyway.
Crash on the levee, mama Water's gonna overflow Swamp's gonna rise No boat's gonna row But oh mama, ain't you gonna miss your best friend now? You're gonna have to find yourself Another best friend, somehow
But I think what is particularly worth noticing is that this song was written in the midst of a collection of songs about everything being messed up. Indeed four songs in a row from the Basement Tapes at this point were all about life being a mess …
And it is hard to write in such a way and not be dragged down by the emotions expressed in the songs.
I’ll try and continue this thought in a future article looking further into the basement tapes.