Mr Tambourine Man – A History in Performance, Part 1: A masterpiece is born

 

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Mike Johnson is the author of the definitive review of the Never Ending Tour and of the series Bob Dylan master harpist

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By Mike Johnson

[I read somewhere once that if you wanted the very best, the acme of Dylan’s pre-electric work, you couldn’t do better than listen to side B of Bringing It All Back Home, 1964. Four songs, ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ ‘Gates of Eden,’ ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ and ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ represent the pinnacle of Dylan’s acoustic achievement. In this series I aim to chart how each of these foundation songs fared in performance over the years, the changing face of each song and its ultimate fate (at least to date). We begin with the first track on that side B, the song that reels us in – ‘Mr Tambourine Man’].

It’s hard to imagine compiling a list of top ten Dylan songs that did not include Mr T Man.  I read somewhere that it was Dylan’s first original melody, the first song he wrote not based on some previous melodic line. If that is true, it was a stunning debut and a great leap forward in terms of Dylan’s songwriting.

It was first publicly performed on May 17^th, 1964 and last performed on June 28^th 2010, with 902 known performances between. I’m going to be traversing those years watching the song change, trying to chart its fate, its ups and downs and Dylan’s experiments with it. As well as its final, to date, resting place.

I think we shouldn’t be shy in admitting that the song reeks of cannabis (you can smell it a mile away), not just for some give-away lyrics,

take me disappearing down the smoke rings of my mind
the foggy ruins of time
far past the frozen leaves
the haunted frightened trees…

but for its overall mood and tone, that ‘beam me up, Scottie’ desire it captures. The reason we might not want to be upfront about the druggie echo in Dylan’s songs is because we don’t want them to be labelled as ‘drug songs,’ and written off as if that’s all they were. Dylan’s songs, particularly this one, don’t lend themselves to that kind of reductionist exercise. The scent of weed is just one thread of a rich tapestry. Mr T Man is so much more than ‘a drug song’, and is ultimately about our desire to escape our humdrum existence, to escape these ‘streets too dead for dreaming’ and enter a transcendent world, an eternal present where we can ‘forget about today until tomorrow.’ At the heart of it is a yearning for the divine.

It also expresses a different vision of freedom from Dylan’s previous, more political songs. Fast forward to Rough and Rowdy Ways and you hear Dylan sing,

I feel the holy spirit inside
See the light that freedom gives
I believe it's in the reach of
Every man who lives

We can get some inkling of the freedom he’s talking about there in ‘Crossing the Rubicon’  if we relate it to the experience he’s craving in that magnificent last verse of Mr T man:

yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky
with one hand waving free
silhouetted by the sea
circled by the circus sands
with all memory and fate
driven deep beneath the waves
let me forget about today until tomorrow

Freedom is experienced as an ecstatic state, not just the right to vote or freedom from oppression, but as an upwelling of the spirit. Or, more precisely, the song expresses the desire for that upwelling of the spirit.

Because of the political context in which the song was born, it was seen to express a hedonistic turn, an aspect of Dylan’s turning away from ‘protest’ songs to more surreal, interior, drug-lit songs. Yet seen in another light, ‘the light that freedom gives,’ it is as much a protest song as any other, and its ‘escaping on the run’ can be seen as a rebellion against the ‘unlived meaningless life’ Dylan is still railing against in Rough and Rowdy Ways almost sixty years later. There is an underlying defiance in the song which brands it with the spirit of protest. The desire to escape on the drug’s ‘magic swirlin’ ship’ has its parallel in the spirit’s desire to transcend the flesh. The song’s hedonism gives way to something deeper.

According to the uploader of this, the song was written in the first months of 1964 and completed in April. Recorded at folksinger Eric von Schmidt’s home in Sarasota, FL, in early May. The words are still settling into place, and, most noticeable to me, the song has not yet found its tempo. Dylan was to play around a lot with tempos, and this song would see a variety of them. There’s no subtlety in this early recording; inflectionless strumming, a dumpty-dum, with no swing or driving syncopation. That would come later. But the song is there; we are close to the moment of its birth. I don’t know who’s playing the harmonica, probably Eric von Schmidt.

A week or so after that, Dylan was in Britain and we catch this performance from the Royal Albert Hall, May 17. The song is no more than a month old. The pace is slow and the delivery reflective, world weary; the harmonica wavering, almost uncertain, hovers around the melody. I think it’s fair to say that at this stage the song, magical as it is, has not yet lifted off, not the way it does at Newport a couple of months later. Here’s Royal Albert Hall:

The version that stole my heart, however, is this outdoor performance from the 1964 Newport Folk Festival in late July. In terms of tempo, the song has found its feet and Dylan’s windswept performance is captivating. The up-tempo, head-on approach makes us think of protest songs even if this is not protest in the more conventional sense. He shouts it out. The mood might be described as celebratory rather than world-weary. We’re already on that ‘swirlin’ ship’ and the ‘dancing spells’ are doing their work.

The basics of Dylan’s performance skills are evident here. He does not act out the songs or over dramatize them with facial expressions (think Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull), but stands in front of the mic and lets his voice and the words do the work. He’s not interpreting the words for us in terms of stage action but lets them work their own magic, lets them fall where they may. A welcome addition here is the harmonica, light and squeaky, capturing the dancelike spirit of the song.

By 1965, bold and declarative. Almost combative. Here defiance and world-weariness mix in a weave. It suggests weary defiance, mid-tempo, almost marching. You think this isn’t protest?

The first recording is from the famous July 25^th, 1965 Newport, great ‘electric controversy’ concert.

Strangely, this next 1965 Liverpool performance is not listed on Dylan’s official website as featuring Mr T Man. It strikes me that while the song represents a yearning, and although ‘it’s not aimed at anyone,’ and is just ‘escaping on the run,’ there is a confrontational side to it in the very forthright directness of these ‘stoned’ images, a kind of brutal honesty about wanting to get high and follow the pied piper.

1965 Liverpool:

At this point we can pause again and consider some of the beauties of this song. For one thing it’s a masterpiece of rhyme. These ‘skipping reels of rhyme’ are deft, light on their feet and tossed off with apparent ease. Consider this self-portrait, the poet as ‘ragged clown.’

Though you might hear laughin’, spinnin’

swingin’ madly across the sun
It’s not aimed at anyone

it’s just escapin’ on the run
And but for the sky there are no fences facin’
And if you hear vague traces of skippin’ reels of rhyme
To your tambourine in time

it’s just a ragged clown behind
I wouldn’t pay it any mind
It’s just a shadow you’re seein’ that he’s chasing

 

Look at how the final word, chasing, throws us back to the multiple ‘ing’ rhymes of the opening lines, and feel that lovely accumulative intensity of: rhyme/time/behind/mind. These are jingle-jangle rhymes, they gather us up as they go and swirl us along. Once we have joined the dance of the pied piper, there’s no turning back.

The last verse is a sustained lyrical movement worthy of a Samuel Taylor Coleridge or John Keats. Again, it builds, it has rising action, held together by the lone rhyme of sorrow and tomorrow, and driven by couplets,  buoyed by half rhymes and assonance until we are finally ‘driven deep beneath the waves’

Then take me disappearin’ through the smoke rings of my mind
Down the foggy ruins of time
far past the frozen leaves
The haunted, frightened trees
out to the windy beach
Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow

Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free
Silhouetted by the sea
circled by the circus sands
With all memory and fate
driven deep beneath the waves
let me forget about today until tomorrow

I’m particularly struck by the ambiguity of the experience. It leans into ecstasy. And yet it cannot escape a lingering darkness, those ‘haunted frightened trees’ and ‘twisted reach’ and when we do get to dance beneath that ‘diamond sky’ it is with only ‘one hand waving free’ – what about the other hand? Perhaps it is tied behind his back. Perhaps this is just all shadow play. The shadows ‘that he’s chasing.’

Dylan would fully exploit this ambiguity in the more darkly-driven performances of 1966, and we’ll turn out attention to them in the next article, part 2 of Mr T Man in Performance.

Until then

Kia Ora