I don’t know what it means either is an index to the current series appearing on this website.
Details of the book “Bob Dylan’s 1971” which is available in English, Dutch and German, and how it can be ordered are given at the end of the article.
1971 is the fourth year of Dylan’s Seven Lean Years, the dry spell that Dylan himself places between John Wesley Harding (late 1967) and Blood On The Tracks (late 1974). These are the years when Dylan sits on the waterfront, watching the river flow, waiting for the inspiration to paint a masterpiece.
Then, in January ’71, a tape of Leon Russell floats by, inspiring a brief but long-legged revival: the songs Dylan recorded with Russell in March ’71 are on the setlist 50 years later, throughout the Rough & Rowdy Ways World Tour 2021-2024, night after night, some 200 times.
Apparently, they mean something to Dylan…
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Wallflower (1971) part 3: Really it’s just a sad song
by Jochen Markhorst
We don’t get to hear the original, Dylan’s own version, until 1991. “Wallflower”, like “George Jackson”, is still passed over for the precursor to the Bootleg Series, the successful 1985 compilation box Biograph. Insulting actually; 53 tracks, 18 of which were previously unreleased (plus three only available on single), but not even for this eclectic collection “Wallflower” does qualify. The premiere, finally then, is 26 March 1991, the release date of The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991. Not very glamorous at that; the song is tucked away at the end of the second CD, track number 16, and is effectively nothing more than a wallflower. In March 1991 radio interviewer Eliot Mintz wants to know if there might still be something to report on the song, in a three-part broadcast on Westwood One Radio Station devoted entirely to the release of the box-set:
EM: Any thoughts about the song Wallflower?
BD: No. Really it’s just a sad song, sad experience, one of those pathetic situations in life, that can be so overwhelming at times.
It is plausible that only the first syllable of that answer is entirely true; “no”. And that the rest is improvised because Dylan can’t quite remember that insignificant ditty offhand. The addition that it’s just a sad song is already a bit weird. “Wallflower” is in a major key, waltzes to a very danceable three-four time and the thin story the lyrics tell is in fact not too sad: a lonely boy falls in love with a lonely girl, asks her to dance, expresses the conviction that she is the woman of his life, and finally asks if he can take her home. It really does require some harsh cynicism to see a “sad experience” and an “overwhelmingly pathetic situation”.
No, it is more likely that in this radio interview Dylan is a bit caught off guard by the question. He did sing “Wallflower” once with Doug Sahm about 20 years ago (and that was only the third time he sang it anyway), and never played or even heard it again after that. Apart from the title, he only half remembers the second line (“I’m sad and lonely too”), and then constructs the memory that this half-forgotten throwaway was probably a lament about loneliness or something like that.
Dylan’s – presumed – forgetfulness is understandable and forgivable. After all, the lyrics don’t offer memorable one-liners like Inside the museums, Infinity goes up on trial or even just She was workin’ in a topless place and I stopped in for a beer, “Wallflower” isn’t blood-curdling storytelling like “Hollis Brown” or “Hurricane”, nor monumental poetry like “Changing Of The Guards” or “Not Dark Yet”. Dylan filled the rejected B-side at the time, 20 years before this interview, with uninspired clichés like
Wallflower, wallflower Won’t you dance with me? The night will soon be gone
… and similar lines of verse. Which indeed will not have left a lasting impression.
Fitting it is, though, as a conclusion to that barren year 1971, in which Dylan also thematises “searching for inspiration” in the songs he painstakingly manages to squeeze out. In September 1978, in the radio interview with Matt Damsker, Dylan reflects on the period when he struggled so much to write songs. He places the dry period between John Wesley Harding and Blood On The Tracks, roughly between late 1967 and late 1974 – the seven lean years, as it were:
“It’s like I had amnesia. […] I couldn’t remember how to do it. I tried to force-learn it, and I couldn’t learn what I had been able to do naturally like Highway 61 Revisited. I mean, you can’t sit down and write that consciously.”
And when Dylan explains this in more detail, he is quite consistent: “Blood On The Tracks did consciously what I used to do unconsciously,” which again he repeats literally so in the interview for Rolling Stone with Jonathan Cott two days later, including that dramatic image with amnesia: “I more or less had amnesia.” With which, retrospectively and with some exaggeration, we could classify the receding years ‘67-’74 as one big writer’s block. Slightly exaggerated, as Dylan still wrote some 50 songs in these seven years, including songs like, say, “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door”, “Lay, Lady, Lay”, “Going Going Gone” and “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” – so this writer’s block was not a total blank.
On the other hand: the vast majority of those fifty songs are definitely among the most mediocre in Dylan’s oeuvre. As he himself seems to think as well; most of the songs from this period, almost 70%, evaporate quietly, drifting away on the Waters of Oblivion. They are not played live, do not appear on compilation albums, and, for that matter, are covered remarkably little. “On A Night Like This”, “Tough Mama”, “Three Angels”, “Tell Me That It Isn’t True”, “Living The Blues”… and we could go on – it’s a long list. Plus: remarkably many of the few songs Dylan still does allow into his setlists are rewritten. “To Be Alone With You” and “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, to name just two examples, and with others, such as “Going, Going, Gone” and even crowd favourites like “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” and “Lay, Lady,Lay”, the words vary almost per performance, demonstrating Dylan’s own dissatisfaction with the original lyrics.
No, “writer’s block” is, on balance, a defensible qualification. Indeed, Dylan’s own utterances about these years fit the definition of that annoying phenomenon as articulated by Stephen King. Creative writing, King explains, is waiting for the visit of the musa, a “scruffy little fleabag” smelling of “whatever nasty mess it’s been rolling in”, living in the “the thickets of each writer’s imagination”. As an inspiration-seeking writer, there is not much more you can do than sit in a clearing in your mind, and then wait for the musa to come:
“Some writers in the throes of writer’s block think their muses have died, but I don’t think that happens often; I think what happens is that the writers themselves sow the edges of their clearing with poison bait to keep their muses away, often without knowing they are doing it.”
(“The Writing Life”, Washington Post 1 October 2006)
“One doesn’t call it,” King warns, “that doesn’t work.” Which Dylan learns by trial and error. “I tried to force-learn it,” and then spends seven years trying to lure the musa with poisonous bait. She occasionally comes frustratingly close. “It usually comes, drawn by the entrancing odor of hopeful ideas. Some days it only comes as far as the edge of the clearing, relieves itself and disappears again”:
I have seen you standing in the smoky haze And I know that you’re gonna be mine one of these days Mine alone.
To be continued. Next up Wallflower part 4: “He has ’em play as stupid as they possibly can.”
NL: Bob Dylans 1971 : Markhorst, Jochen: Amazon.nl: Boeken
UK: Bob Dylan’s 1971 (The Songs Of Bob Dylan): Amazon.co.uk: Markhorst, Jochen: 9798329337044: Books
US: Bob Dylan’s 1971 (The Songs Of Bob Dylan): Markhorst, Jochen: 9798329337044: Amazon.com: Books
DE: Bob Dylans 1971 (Die Songs von Bob Dylan) : Markhorst, Jochen: Amazon.de: Boeken
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
- Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
- Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
- Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
- Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
- Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
- Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
- Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
- John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
- Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
- Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
- Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2nd Big Bang
- Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
- Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
- Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
- Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
- I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
- Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
- Bob Dylan’s 1971