All directions 55: “After the loss, the rebuild”

Suddenly Bob is here, offering himself in totality – the ending is surely one of the greatest of any Dylan songs.

In the hills of mystery,
In the foggy web of destiny,
You can have what's left of me,
Where we were born in time.

The images are sublime and we have the sense that even the ground starts moving and the picture vibrates as the woman of the song walks along.  In the end he can’t take it, because he can’t focus enough to make it real.  So she appears like an image in a movie, she isn’t real, she is more than real, and as such can’t ever be held onto…

You were snow, you were rain
You were striped, you were plain

He can’t take it, he can’t let go of it, it is all just too much, too overwhelming, too, too absolute… until in the end, “You can have what’s left of me.”

And here we see Dylan exploring the musical world as well as the poetic, as he really, truly gets to grip with the “middle 8” –  that variant section that appears usually (when it is used) after a couple of verses.

Dylan first played the song in concert in February 1993 and gave it 56 outings before bringing down the curtain ten years later – so it wasn’t one of his all time concert favourites.  But what makes this not only such a beautiful song, but such an unusual song for Dylan, is the way the melody is woven above such an unusual chord sequence.  And that means unusual not just for Dylan, but in any folk, pop or blues music.  It’s not a unique sequence, but it is made to sound as if it is, because of what the melody does.

Also somewhat unusually for Dylan (in my personal opinion) what we have here is a song that is remembered for its melody – a melody built over a simple and (apart from the C minor) oft-used chord sequence:

G, Em, Am7, C, Cm, G

That sequence remains intact, as melody and rhythm change to accommodate the lyrics – the effect is loving and beautiful, as he announces that “You can have what’s left of me” – a phrase which again seems to tell us what he thinks of himself.

Indeed if we are listening to Dylan’s work chronologically we know what he means.  By this time he’s been seemingly everywhere possible with his lyrics, and with his music, and he’s just there saying, “I’ve done it all, if you can find anything still worth having here, it’s yours.”

But now he is facing the traditional problem of course; the problem of what next?   What could Bob write that would be up to the standard set in “Born in Time”?

The answer was that he continued to emphasise the uncertainty of the future or at least of his future in “God knows” – a remarkable rocker which starts with lyrics that suggest anything but certainly.   Indeed quite what those lyrics mean beyond the simple statement that the lady in question isn’t the prettiest girl in the club, is anyone’s guess…

God knows you ain’t pretty
God knows it’s true
God knows there ain’t anybody
Ever gonna take the place of you

And it is followed a little later by

God knows that when you see it
God knows you’ve got to weep
God knows the secrets of your heart
He’ll tell them to you when you’re asleep

It certainly reads as if Bob had written that exquisite first verse, and then wondered what he could do to keep it going, so just kept on writing.  Coherence?  Who needs it!  But it turns into one hell of a rocker as the live performances showed.

https://youtu.be/PH03B2yazgw

And maybe Bob was already thinking about Jimmy Swaggart, who is often remembered with his claim that he had a direct line from God (who conveniently told Swaggart that his activities with prostitutes didn’t matter) which led Bob naturally from “God knows” to “Disease of Conceit”.

Once more, as is the hallmark of this remarkable year, Dylan is musically adventurous, while retaining his new spirit of reflection upon human nature and the way it bounces up against issues of religion.  Thus Dylan has entered the arena of the tricky nature of people who say one thing, mean another and do something else.   It’s a very difficult subject to write about, especially within the confines of a popular song, but now long gone are the original blues concepts such as “my baby done me wrong,” and we are now going much deeper than that.

Indeed issues of the uncertainty of what people really mean and really want, come to the fore – this has now become Bob’s project in understanding the strange nature of people and their behaviour.   “What was it you wanted?” indeed focuses on the curious nature of people – not just those around the composer, but of himself too.   He is realising that he is drawn along the time lines just like anyone else; the era of great moral certitude is well and truly over.

So we enter the realms of mystery with, “What was it you wanted?”  Perhaps one of Bob’s most spooky and mysterious songs, at least in its original form, and it is a song that is absolutely packed full of possibilities….

Thus Dylan had composed two excellent songs, exploring new ground (“Born in Time” and “Disease of Conceit”) and he really was on a roll, as each song from here on seemed to be exploring a new and different arena, just as happened in, for example, in 1976.  Every song takes us somewhere new.  Dylan had his songwriting genius back.  Those chordal experiments in “God knows” have really paid dividends.