Wallflower Part 5: I’m your density

 

 

 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 5

by Jochen Markhorst

V          I’m your density

 The research by director Robert Zemickis and writer Bob Gale is good. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is more or less accidentally transported in the DeLorean to 1955, meets George, the boy who will become his father, and George is quite a dork. Doesn’t know how to approach his crush, Marty’s future mother. Marty gives his “father” a crash course.

Marty: Alright, okay. Alright, there she is, George. Just go in there and invite her.
George: Okay, but I don’t know what to say.
Marty: Just say anything, George, say whatever’s natural, the first thing that comes to your mind.
George: Nothing’s coming to my mind.
Marty: Jesus, George, it’s a wonder I was ever born.
George: What, what?
Marty: Nothing, nothing, nothing. Look, tell her destiny has brought you together, tell her that she’s the most beautiful you have ever seen. Girls like that stuff. What, what are you doing George?
George: I’m writing this down, this is good stuff.
[walks over to the table Lorraine’s sitting at with her girlfriends]
George: Lorraine, my density has bought me to you.
Lorraine: What?
George: Ah, what I meant to say was-
Lorraine: Hey, don’t I know you from somewhere?
George: Yes, yes, I’m George, George McFly, and I’m your density. I mean, I’m your destiny.
Lorraine: Oh.
(Robert Zemickis and Bob Gale, Back To The Future, 1985)

Poor George mangles it, but still manages to articulate the same conviction as Dylan’s wallflower: “And I know that you’re gonna be mine one of these days.” We are in the local diner where the youth hang out and the jukebox plays. And when George has gathered his courage and steps up to Lorraine, the jukebox is indeed playing one of the biggest jukebox hits of 1955: Etta James’ “The Wallflower”. Chosen well not only for its correct year, but also for its content: the whole song consists of urgent appeals to a shy boy to step towards the girl. Only the shy boy, the wallflower, is not called George (it’s “Roll with me, Henry”), but you can’t have everything.

It is one of the first, and oddly enough one of the rare times that the word “wallflower” permeates a pop song. And then only indirectly; the word “wallflower” does not appear in the lyrics of “The Wallflower”. Strange, because wallflowers are definitely an archetype in pop culture. Even before 1955 and Etta James, countless songs have been written about lonely yearning girls, awkwardly shy boys and pitiful suckers meekly watching their secret crush dance with someone else – wallflowers, in short.

It eventually takes until 1966 before a trendsetter makes the word salonfähig, acceptable, and that trendsetter is, of course, the trendsetter of the mid-1960s:

But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues
You can tell by the way she smiles
See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze

… Dylan himself, in – obviously – “Visions Of Johanna”. With which the somewhat naive term became poetically acceptable, just as Dylan had already legitimised the word “clown” by its mere use in a song (Lennon: “I objected to the word clown, because that was always artsy-fartsy, but Dylan had used it so I thought it was all right”).

And so “wallflower” now is admitted as well. Greenwich Village-mate Phil Ochs is the first to follow, on his peculiar but fascinating baroque record Pleasures Of The Harbor (1967), in “The Party”: The Wallflower is waiting, she hides behind composition / She’d love to dance and prays that no one asks her. Ellie Greenwich (of the legendary songwriting duo Barry/Greenwich) tries her hand solo in 1968, singing No one can say that you’re a wallflower / Cause you’ve always got something groovy to say in “Beautiful People”. Doesn’t have the same impact as her “Da Doo Ron Ron” or “Then He Kissed Me” or “Do-Wah-Diddy” or any of Ellie’s many other immortal world hits, but at least her song demonstrates that the spell on “wallflower” has been broken.

The word may have surfaced, but Dylan’s song “Wallflower” remains under the surface for a long time. The first release, Doug Sahm’s, goes unnoticed – the first and only covers are made in Doug’s immediate circle, by David Bromberg that is. We have to wait until 1991, until the trendsetter himself throws the song out into the world, and then it slowly comes off. Very slowly, but then steadily.

The Holmes Brothers – Wallflower:

The first noteworthy cover is eight years away: The Holmes Brothers’ 1999 contribution to Tangled Up in Blues: Songs of Bob Dylan. Noteworthy mainly because it is such a peculiar cover; the intro is played on a lone piano that suggests we will first listen to Schubert’s improvisation on Happy Birthday To You. The piano sounds out, a classic blues lick in slow motion on guitar introduces the song itself, which is then suddenly tucked into a surprisingly corny schlager arrangement. A blues it is certainly not. Mandolin, fiddle, steel guitar… everything is present to at least turn it into an attractive bluegrass cover then, but The Holmes Brothers apparently set their sights on a schlager. Weird. Fortunately, two years later they revenge with an unparalleled cover of Dylan’s “Man Of Peace”, with which the men then demonstrate that they can indeed do something great with a Dylan song.

The Holmes Brothers

Buddy Miller and his wife Julie have been paying attention. Their intense 2001 “Wallflower” is expertly stripped of all triteness, and from second 1 splashes with zest for life and joy of playing; scruffy country rock, heavenly Nashville harmonies and an irresistible drive on their Album of the Year Buddy & Julie Miller. Thanks also to insiders; Dylan’s sideman Larry Campbell plays the fiddle, and by the sound of it, guest vocalist Emmylou Harris has given two or three tutoring lessons to Julie Miller (as, by the way, the whole record sounds like a revival of Emmylou Harris with Gram Parsons – like a Return of the Grievous Angel, as it were).

Buddy & Julie Miller 

In the twenty-first century, the song is becoming increasingly popular, especially in old-timey and bluegrass circles. The charming all-women’s group Uncle Earl, for example (2007, produced by Led Zeppelin’s John Paul Jones, remarkably), with a straightforward fiddle-about-and-singalong rendition; The Bottlerockets in 2013 (who, incidentally, had “Wallflower” on their setlist as early as 1993) acoustic with banjo and featuring Jeff Tweedy; alt-country lady and multi-instrumentalist Anna Elizabeth Laube on Tree in 2017, chillingly singing her own second voice, a trick she repeats a few years later with a rather perfect “Buckets Of Rain” on Wild Outside, 2023 – and those are just the finest Wallflowers.

Anna Elizabeth Laube – Buckets Of Rain: 

Country, bluegrass, rock and blues, the surprisingly intimate pop ballad that Nana Mouskouri makes of it… still, the most beautiful remains the jazzy Diana Krall, the interpretation taking us back to the Wee Small Hours, to Oscar Peterson’s In A Romantic Mood and Chet Baker’s Sings And Plays – taking us back to 1955, Back To The Past, effectively.

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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:

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