False Prophet (2020) part 6: The gospel of rock ‘n’ roll

False Prophet (2020) part 6

by Jochen Markhorst

VI The gospel of rock ‘n’ roll

I’m the enemy of treason - the enemy of strife
I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life
I ain’t no false prophet - I just know what I know
I go where only the lonely can go

“Can you play this, but change it a little bit here?”, the words with which Paul Simon turns General M.D. Shirinda and the Gaza Sisters’ song “Tekadzovo Undzi Bebula” into “I Know What I Know” will also have been, approximately, the words with which Dylan has his band play Billy ‘The Kid’ Emerson’s 1954 “If Lovin’ Is Believin’”. The relatively unknown William Robert Emerson has been indirectly honoured by DJ Dylan on his radio show on one occasion;

“I could do this whole show and play nothing but Sun records, and here’s one of my favorites. It was originally recorded by an R&B singer named Billy ‘The Kid’ Emerson.”

… announcing “Red Hot”, thus failing to mention that Emerson also wrote “Red Hot”. The DJ only plays a snippet of that original – to then give way to the childhood hero who won his place in the rock pantheon with “Red Hot”, Billy Lee Riley. And omitting to share fun facts like the noteworthy trivia that Emerson also wrote “When It Rains, It Really Pours”, the song Elvis recorded four times between 1955 and 1968. Or the irresistible “Every Woman I Know (Crazy ‘Bout Automobiles)”, which is on the setlist with Ry Cooder, among others.

“If Lovin’ Is Believin’” is the B-side of Billy Emerson’s first single “No Teasing Around” from 1954 (with Ike Turner as bandleader and guitarist). The differences from “False Prophet” are minimal, as acclaimed musicologist and Dylanologist Eyolf Østrem points out in his wonderful article “False Prophet” vs. “If Lovin’ is Believin’” – Greedy Plagiarism or Lovin’ Recycling?” on his great website Things Twice:

“The recurring riff is copied note for note almost without a change, but also with regards to the sound: the distorted guitar and the parallel melody line in different octaves. The tempo is exactly the same (78.5 bpm) and the swing ratio is indistinguishable (slightly less than 2:1; Emerson maybe closer to a straight 2:1, but it’s hard to tell)”

… Østrem analyses, with written-out musical notation of both songs in evidence. The changes, Østrem says, are limited to a shortening of the riff and of the verse (both two bars less), and at the end of the paragraph “Exhibit G: False Prophet but True Crime?” he is even more unrelenting:

“Dylan and his band copy everything: sound, rhythm, phrasing, key, tempo, swing, chord structure, adding nothing of substance, other than what Dylan always does when he sings.”

So in the end, the only real differences between the two songs are the vocal delivery and – obviously – the lyrics.

Which is not an insignificant difference, of course. But even for that feat we may shift some credit to Billy Emerson, since Dylan, like Paul Simon, seems to be guided by the music when looking for the words to sing. As the opening line of this third verse does illustrate. Content-wise it is empty. I’m the enemy of treason – the enemy of strife to describe a protagonist is as meaningless as, say, I like good things and I don’t like bad things. At least, apart perhaps from Loki, the Nordic god of chaos and lies, and Mars, the god of war, there are not too many “friends of treason” and/or “friends of strife”. Still, the line is a fourteener, as C.S. Lewis would note with satisfaction, of similar length and rhythm to Billy Emerson’s opening line You been so deceivin’, tell me when are you leavin’ or to Emerson’s closing line From there we’d start working on a brand new family tree

Just as empty in content, just as strong rhythmically, but more euphonious is verse line 3, I ain’t no false prophet – I just know what I know. An initial association of most listeners in 2020 is presumably Paul Simon’s “I Know What I Know”, but with the wisdom of hindsight Dylan seems to have been fed again by Awakening Osiris, the poetic translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, where in Chapter 64, “The Family”, he puts a tick in the margin at:

“I am a great, yellow, stalking cat—mesmerizer, healer, companion—tender and fierce, a beast of fur that blinks. I know what I know in my body. I hold the rat in my golden gaze. I lick the dust from my kittens.”

Though it’s still more likely that neither one is a source. After all, the word combination is not too distinctive. And not too important for the tenor of the lyrics – which, of course, is determined by the first part of this third verse line, I ain’t no false prophet.

It is a sort of refrain line (it is the only word combination that is repeated, sung three times), as well as the song’s namesake, and for that reason alone the song’s key phrase. Linguistically a godsend for crypto-analysts and nitpickers. The ungrammatical double negation opens the gateway to analyse that the I-person indeed is a false prophet, as he is denying being not a false prophet. But that should be easy to refute; in the blues idiom a double negation has been an amplifier, an intensifier of negation for more than a century now, and has permeated English-language grammar as such anyway, and rock, folk and all other genres since Chaucer. “I ain’t no fortunate son,” for example. Or “ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone”. Motörhead’s Lemmy declares “I ain’t no nice guy,” “I can’t get no satisfaction,” sings some band from London, and thousands of other examples.

A second red line from the schoolmasters has thus also been refuted. After all, the negation, says the language purist, only says what the narrator is not, as opposed to telling what he, in fact, is. Well – yes and no. That same intensifying function does signal that the narrator emphatically states what he is. So Lemmy wishes to point out that he is a bad boy, John Fogerty communicates being an Average Joe, Jagger expresses his sense of alienation. And Dylan’s narrator, if we follow this line of argument, thus then emphatically makes himself known as a true prophet.

A prophet who, as we begin to suspect after Mary Lou, Miss Pearl and the closing line with its ostentatious reference to Roy “Lefty Wilbury” Orbison (“Only The Lonely”, 1960), preaches the gospel of rock ‘n’ roll.

To be continued. Next up False Prophet part 7: A minstrel collecting words

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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