I don’t know what it means either is an index to the current series appearing on this website. Older series from this site can be found here. Previously in this series on Bob Dylan in 1971 we have
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.
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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…
Wallflower (1971) part 4
by Jochen Markhorst
IV “He has ’em play as stupid as they possibly can.”
It is a famous comment, the one Dylan makes when interviewer Scott Cohen triggers him with “Heart Of Gold” in 1985. I was living in Phoenix Arizona at the time, in 1972, Dylan says, and it was a big hit. “I used to hate it when it came on the radio. I always liked Neil Young, but it bothered me every time I listened to Heart of Gold. I think it was up at number one for a long time, and I’d say, shit, that’s me. If it sounds like me, it should as well be me.”
Dylan experiencing déjà vu, or rather déjà entendu, is conceivable. But probably not so much because he hears “me”. “Heart Of Gold” reaches number one on 8 April 1972. That’s six months after Dylan recorded “Wallflower” in New York. An austere recording, with exactly the same arrangement as Neil Young’s classic: acoustic guitar, plaintive harmonica, steel guitar, basic bass and simple drums. And that’s not all…
Ben Keith dies 26 July 2010 at Broken Arrow Ranch, Neil Young’s then ranch in California, where Ben lived the last years of his life. The famed steel guitarist’s obituary reads like the register of a rock encyclopaedia; Ringo Starr, Linda Ronstadt, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Patsy Cline, J.J. Cale, Willie Nelson, The Band, and many more, but surely his main claim to fame is his role in the band of his bosom friend and dear landlord Neil Young, whose musical support and companion he was for more than 40 years.
The first introduction to Neil is February 1971 in Nashville, when Tim Drummond arranges musicians for Young to record the first songs for Harvest – Drummond knows a steel guitarist whose playing is like the fingers of fog that creep in over San Francisco Bay. And indeed: Ben Keith immediately captures Neil’s heart with his majestic, goose bumps inducing contributions to such highlights as “Out On The Weekend”, “Heart Of Gold”, “Are You Ready For The Country?” and especially the simple, unearthy, brilliant swiping on “Old Man”…
“Ben and I developed the style during those sessions. When we did “Old Man” and talked about what he could play, I said, ‘Try to play those single notes and make it sound doubled. Just ride those babies all the way through there, that’s a great sound.”
(interview with Neil Young, The Tennessean,2005)
This is 6 February 1971, and from then on Neil and Ben are inseparable until Ben’s death. But the first cut is the deepest; when an interviewer in Amsterdam in 2009 asks the humble, somewhat shy Ben about it, he still calls Harvest, almost forty years and dozens of albums after the fact, his favourite album – “I don’t know. That was the first time we worked together, and it just came off so good… it just kinda stuck with me.”
After those immortal parts in February in Nashville and the completion of the Harvest recordings in September at Neil’s Broken Arrow Ranch, Ben Keith (or Bennett Keith Schaeufele, as his real name is) happens to be in New York. Harvest drummer Kenny Buttrey, who has been drumming for Dylan since Blonde On Blonde in 1966 (and on every record up to and including Self Portrait thereafter), takes him along, Thursday November 4, to New York’s Columbia Studio for the “George Jackson” and “Wallflower” recording session.
Ben impresses. From the second verse of “George Jackson” we hear him draw some tasteful, demure lines, and we also immediately recognise the hand of Neil Young: more is less. Ben knows when to fold his arms, and that will be the second big plus with Dylan. Only in the – far too long – finale does he loosen up briefly, and even then interrupts himself lightning fast when Dylan starts blowing a few notes on his harmonica again. So he gets to stay put for “Wallflower”, in which he is allowed to take the spotlight right away. Ben gets the intro, and from the first second draws his mood- and colour-defining lines – even under Dylan’s harmonica playing, this time. It’s done in one take.
Now Dylan actually seems to get a taste for the throwaway. Bassist Leon Russel and drummer Kenny Buttrey are dismissed and may go get a coffee, Dylan wants to try one more take, this time with Ben Keith on steel guitar as the sole accompanist: the “bare” take we don’t learn about until 2013, on The Bootleg Series 10 – Another Self Portrait.
Bob Dylan – Wallflower (alternate version):
It’s a wonderful take, and a strong demonstration of the correctness of Neil Young’s more-is-less adage from the early 1970s. Which some of his peers sometimes laugh about a bit, like drummer Kenny Buttrey in Jim McDonough’s Shakey: Neil Young’s Biography (2002):
“Neil tells everybody what to play, note for note. If you play somethin’ he doesn’t like, boy, he’ll put a look on you you’ll never forget. Neil hires some of the best musicians in the world and has ’em play as stupid as they possibly can. It’s just ultra-, ultra-simple, a laidback kinda thing nobody but Neil does, and if you’re right with him it sounds great, and it sounds awful if you’re not.”
“Neil thought my hi-hat playing was too busy,” Buttrey recounts as an example, to which he sullenly said: “Fine. I’ll sit on my right hand,” and then indeed stays seated on his right hand throughout “Out On The Weekend”. We also hear that simplicity, that back-to-the-basics approach on the first take of “Wallflower”, in which Kenny restricts himself to boom-tshak-tshak from start to finish – incomparable to his phenomenal drumming on Blonde On Blonde, to “Absolutely Sweet Marie”, for instance, in which an unleashed Buttrey downgrades even Keith Moon to a toddler with a frying pan.
On Take 2 of “Wallflower”, Kenny may then stay seated on both hands. The fireworks has to come from Ben Keith, that other Neil Young disciple. In which Ben succeeds, thus contributing to a remarkable change of colour; in Take 1, with band, a somewhat tired longing dominates, mainly due to the classic way Dylan deploys: flat, with gradually dosed passion in his vocals, by way of small, Hank Williams-like sobs and hiccups in the longer outings. Which sets the tone – after all, this band (the supergroup consisting of Kenny Buttrey, Leon Russell and Ben Keith) is classically conditioned and naturally shifts into “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” mode.
The protagonist of Take 2, on the other hand, is much more confident. Won’t you dance with me is no longer a meek request, but rather a compelling invitation. Ben Keith leaves the basics with Dylan, and hangs the garlands: he lays it on thick, plays counter melodies and apparently, unlike with Neil Young, feels completely free – he even boldly plays his solo over and right through Dylan’s attempt at a harmonica solo.
Which, with the wisdom of hindsight, makes it unfortunate that Neil Young only got to know him after After The Goldrush – it’s a sweet torment to fantasise what Ben Keith could have added to “Don’t Let It Bring You Down”, to “Birds” and especially to “Oh, Lonesome Me” (on the live performances, Keith then usually takes charge of the organ – also beautiful). But thankfully, he is in time for “Old Man” and all those other beauties. And for “Heart Of Gold” of course, the song of which Dylan says, “That’s me.”
Well… yes and no. Dylan hears Kenny Buttrey. And Ben Keith. And a harmonica and a bass and an acoustic guitar. The same men and the same instruments, in short, with whom and with which he did record “Wallflower” a few months before, but still eight months after those same men had recorded “Heart Of Gold” with those same instruments. So all in all, not at all inconceivable how Neil ‘Shakey’ Young, upon hearing “Wallflower” on The Bootleg Series Volumes 1-3 (Rare & Unreleased) 1961-1991 in 1991, turns it off and annoyed says: “Shit, that’s me. If it sounds like me, it should as well be me.”
To be continued. Next up Wallflower part 5: I’m your density
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