I don’t know what it means either: an index to the current series appearing on this website.
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Mr Tambourine Man – A History in Performance, Part 2: 1966 – Darker hues.
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). This is the second article about the first track, ‘Mr Tambourine Man.’ Find the first article here: A masterpiece is born]
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In the last article we saw the birth of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and its early performances in 1964 and 1965, a bold declaration of a desire to escape this world of ‘crazy sorrow’ into a world of ecstatic freedom, a desire to get stoned and disappear ‘through the smoke rings of my mind’ to a wild, untamed place – the ‘windy beach’ with its ‘diamond sky.’ That very desire itself, I suggested, was a form of protest against what he would later call ‘the unlived meaningless life.’ (‘False Prophet’)
When we get to the 1966 performances however, the mood of the song has radically changed. Its defiance has given way to a darker, crazier mood, its yearning underpinned by the sombre sense that following the pied piper might just lead us to a land of shadows rather than joyful freedom. Dylan achieves this switch of mood through vocal intonation and timing, a touch of syncopation in the guitar playing and a madcap, lonely, swooping harmonica.
‘Mr T Man’ was not the only song to be radically reimagined in 1966. That frail little acoustic ballad ‘One Too Many Mornings’ turns into a slow-paced anguished rocker and ‘I Don’t Believe You’ loses something of the humour of the acoustic version in an angry rock outburst.
It is the voice Dylan adopted in 1966, the voice he used for Blonde on Blonde, undulating, full of innuendo and implication, that brings about the darkening of these earlier songs. That voice, once unflatteringly described by Canadian novelist Robertson Davies as Dylan’s ‘moo-cow’ voice, brings everything it touches into question. Nothing can be taken at face value. Forthrightness gives way to leering insinuations. It is a bitchy, sneering, petulant, hurt voice that remains always vulnerable and open to self-questioning. It’s a voice that undercuts its own assertions with ‘bitterness and doubt’ (‘False Prophet’).
When that voice takes on ‘Mr T Man,’ the idealism of that song, its jauntiness, gives way to the darker undertones inherent in the lyrics. There’s a darker side to getting stoned that Dylan will explore in ‘Visions of Johanna’ and ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,’ but, in performance, Dylan almost manages to turn ‘Mr T Man’ into a Blonde on Blonde song.
Dylan’s vocal timing plays a huge role here. The line ‘let me forget about today until tomorrow,’ becomes
let me forget about today until to morr ow
The dragging out of the word ‘tomorrow’ makes us wonder if tomorrow is going to be any fun, maybe not, maybe ‘to-morr-ow’ the reckoning will come, and the awakening from the drug-dream may not be so pleasant.
That voice calls other things into question too. Consider these lines:
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
What are these ‘waves’ that can bury ‘memory and fate’? Remember the ‘roar of a wave that could drown the whole world,’ from ‘It’s A Hard Rain Gonna Fall’? Could those ‘waves’ be billows of drugged oblivion? I mean, where would you be without your memory and your fate? Might not these ‘waves’ drown your identity, plunge you into a forgetfulness and obliteration no sane person would court? The tambourine man becomes a master of illusion who will lead you to a land of smoke and mirrors, your wonderful freedom delusional, the ‘dancing spell’ not a celebration but a curse.
I put all this in the form of questions, for these are the uncertainties that arise from Dylan’s 1966 performances. Nothing taken at face value; everything called into question. Getting stoned is a double-edged sword. We can kind of read backwards from ‘Visions of Johanna’ to see in ‘Mr T Man’ a prefiguring of that later song.
There is a direct line of descent from the happily expectant night of ‘Mr T Man’ to the unquiet night in the opening scenes of ‘Visions of Johanna.’ From the brightly swirling ‘Mr T Man’ to the darkly swirling ‘Visions.’ I’m suggesting that we can view ‘Mr T Man’ as a prequel to ‘Visions’. Take the last lines of that later song:
and Madonna, she still has not showed we see this empty cage now corrode where her cape of the stage once had flowed the fiddler, he now steps to the road he writes ev'rything's been returned which was owed on the back of the fish truck that loads while my conscience explodes
If we ask, how did we get here, to this godforsaken place, we can answer that it all began when, gripped by the desire to escape, we volunteered to follow the pied piper – ‘take me on a trip upon your magic swirling ship.’ You can’t be sure that that ship is not going to take you to a night that plays ‘tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet.’ Get stoned enough and this is where you’ll end up. Not a good place to be, and one step away from paranoia.
Before playing the first recording from Sheffield, the most famous of the 1966 performances, we have to say something about Dylan’s harmonica playing. In my first article for the Master Harpist series I attempted to describe Dylan’s harp work on these 1966 performances, describing them as ‘fey sounds.’ That’s one way to put it. Against the repetitive thrumming of the guitar, the harp rages in a jagged, scissor like dance, as if in a desperate attempt to escape the confines of the melody. It is the dance of freedom and restraint. You can hear the entrapped spirit beating up against the walls of the world during the verses, then, at the end of the verse, a long slow, despairing blues note swooping us into the next verse. It’s giddy, exultant and more than a little demented – a dance of madness.
The performance at Sheffield on May 16th is generally considered to be the finest of the 1966 tour, and I have to agree, if just for the final harp solo that keeps pushing higher and higher as if it could go higher than the notes can take us; higher, stoneder, crazier; both gentle and frail yet piercingly insistent. I hear the beating of luminous wings in the darkness. The term tour-de-force might have been invented for this very performance.
Note Dylan’s sly attack on the anti-electric crowd with his opening crack about his electric guitar never needing to be tuned onstage. He sounds very zonked.
1966 Sheffield
This more darkly driven mood reminds me, not just of ‘Visions’ but another night-time walking song, ‘Love Sick’ (1997). Like ‘Mr T Man,’ it begins with a description of physical and mental exhaustion:
I'm walking Through streets that are dead Walking Walking with you in my head My feet are so tired My brain is so wired And the clouds are weeping
And with ‘Mr T Man’ we find:
My weariness amazes me I’m branded on my feet I have no one to meet And the ancient empty streets too dead for dreaming
And:
My senses have been stripped My hands can't feel to grip My toes too numb to step Wait only for my boot heels to be wandering
The mood of the two songs is very different, but both are night songs, walking-the-dead-street songs, both chronicle the physical sensation of alienation, alienation from the street and its inhabitants, and both songs threaten to leave us ‘hanging on to a shadow,’ (‘Love Sick’) while the ‘ragged clown’ of ‘Mr T Man’ is chasing ‘a shadow.’
There’s nothing comfortable about the numbness described in these two songs, and others. The same sensations are approached in ‘Not Dark Yet’ (1997):
I was born here and I’ll die here against my will I know it looks like I’m moving, but I’m standing still Every nerve in my body is so vacant and numb I can’t even remember what it was I came here to get away from
And getting away from it all is what ‘Mr T Man’ is all about. There is a hopefulness about that in ‘Mr T Man’ (remember LSD guru Timothy Leary’s ‘turn on, tune in and drop out’) that is not sustained in the later songs. The inherent hopefulness of the song, however, is compromised by the 1966 performances which seem driven by a desperate madness.
Dylan clearly understood the importance of the song, placing it in his acoustic set along with behemoths like ‘Desolation Row’ and ‘Visions of Johanna,’ as well as ‘She Belongs to Me’ and ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.’
There’s no point in needlessly visiting further performances from 1966 except for the Sydney concert of April 13th. To my ear, the Sydney performances have a bleakness to them unmatched by other performances of the tour (If you haven’t already, try the Sydney ‘Visions of Johanna.’). The ‘spooky’ sound from some of the venues is absent here. Here Dylan saves ‘Mr T Man’ for last song in the acoustic set.
1966 Sydney
Arguably these are the finest renditions of the song in Dylan’s career, but we can’t make that judgement just yet. Changes are coming, Dylan will abandon his 1966 undulating voice for a different kind of ambience, and the song will reflect a more upbeat mood from the trippy 1966 performances. After 1966 Dylan will seek a new voice for his songs, the voice which, to the consternation of his 1966 fans, he will use for ‘Nashville Skyline’ and ‘Self Portrait,’ and in Dylan’s collaboration with Johnny Cash. Nashville Bob is waiting in the wings.
How ‘Mr T Man’ will fare with Dylan’s change of direction will be the subject of my next article. Catch you then.
Until then, stay tuned
Kia Ora
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A full index to Mike Johnson’s 144 episode “Never Ending Tour” series – appears here.