by Tony Attwood
This song is mentioned in The Copyright Files by Tim Dunn where it is suggested that it comes from early 1981, and registered for copyright in 1985. Otherwise there seems to be little or nothing said about the piece.
I don’t have a stand alone version of this song, but it does turn up on “Between Saved and Shot” at 25 minutes.
For the most part it consists of the title line over and over with a few extra lines which are pretty much impossible to hear well enough to transcribe.
Because of the highly repetitive nature of the song there is a huge temptation to move on to something else, but then suddenly out of nowhere the whole piece takes off at 28 minutes and we get 45 seconds of a jolly bouncy 12 bar blues before one final reminder of “All the way down”.
https://youtu.be/mrsRBrajx9Y
What is interesting is that the song clearly has been rehearsed, or at least run through once or twice because the rhythms and pauses are not what one would always expect. Yes of course the backing band and singers can have picked it up as they go along but the change noted above at the 28 minute marker does make it clear that the ladies and gentlemen of the band did know something about what was going to happen.
And that is about it for this song. Mostly one line with 45 seconds of really intruiging music right at the end. I wish there was more of the latter and less of the former, but that’s Bob in a rehearsal for you.
I’m adding it to the list of Dylan compositions that we keep simply because I want that list to be as comprehensive as possible, but it is really just a sketch.
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Bob had something here, but not enough to turn it into a finished song. He had a wailing sound, and he had a theme: the singer can see that someone he cares about is going to be made miserable by a third party, he can see that she’s hurting now, and it’s painful to see, but he can’t really do anything about it. That’s how it sounds to me, anyway.
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http://thebobdylanproject.com/Song/id/4867/All-the-Way-Down
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“God Only Knows” CD Dylan bootleg includes “All The Way Down”