The Never Ending Tour Extended: Beyond here lies nothing

 

The Never Ending Tour Extended: This series primarily uses recordings selected by Mike Johnson in his inestimable masterpiece The Never Ending Tour, and looks at how those performances of individual songs change as time goes by.   The selection of songs from the series, and the commentary below, are by Tony Attwood.   A list of all the songs covered in the series is given at the end.

An index to all the current series on this site appears on the home page: I don’t know what it means either.    We’re also on Facebook – just type in Facebook Untold Dylan.

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Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ appeared on “Together through Life” and was performed 435 times between 2009 and 2024 by Bob Dylan.

Mike was so taken by what Bob was doing with the song (especially the harmonica work) that he included three separate recordings from different shows in his article The blood of the land in my voice: Together Through Life” in which he reviewed the performances of 2009.

And indeed if you click on that link above you can take in all three of Mike’s selected versions.

But I am going to jump forward to 2011: Quick man, I gotta run to see if Bob had actually taken the piece any further forward.

Of course one of the problems we have is that each recording is made by a different recordist with different equipment, so sometimes the quality makes it harder to compare one version with another.

But I really rather like this version in that somehow the accompaniment holds itself back and allows Bob to deliver the verses in a stand-out way, that makes us aware of the construction of the song.

And that’s important because the song is, in effect, very simple – just four verses of six lines with one of those lines always being the title line.  Looked at on its own the ultimate verse, does nothing in particular without the music, but within the context of music these lyrics it really work in delivering a picture of life as a journey reaching its end…. and not least because of the guitar part.

My ship is in the harbor
And the sails are spread
Listen to me pretty baby
Lay your hand upon my head
Beyond here lies nothin'
Nothin' done and nothin' said

The first of the 2014 articles was simply designated The Setlist, the first half, and now we start thinking Bob has stopped changing his song – but just wait a second, the accompaniment now turns into something else.

And combined with the way Dylan is singing we get a far more mysterious almost dystopian version of the song.   It is a soft interweaving of themes which still keeps the song as a 12 bar blues (with one extra chord added) but the mixture of sounds makes this very much more an “edge of the world song”.

This really makes me think of what Bob was looking for when he first wrote the track – the music here is much more in keeping with the lyrics in my view.  And his delivery is perfect.  As for the instrumental breaks, to my mind these have now taken us onto a different level.

This is a portrayal of the edge and the end, exactly as the lyrics suggests.

So let us jump on again to 2017: part 3.  You went through my pockets while I was sleeping

A strange beginning of confusion but there is no mistaking that rhythm, and now Bob has removed much of the mystery – it is as if he has taken the song as far as it can go and now he is giving it a rerun without too much enthusiasm.

The last look we can take at the song comes from 2019: We can either play or we can pose

What are we to make of this musical introduction?  A symbolic expression of chaos in keeping with the words “Beyond here lies nothing”?  Maybe so, but it doesn’t seem right for me.

In fact, by this point I find the words of this song playing over in my head

I'm movin' after midnight
Down boulevards of broken cars
Don't know what I'd do without it
Without this love that we call ours

Those words create an image that I don’t find is ever fully captured by the accompaniment of this song on the tour.  And this final version confirms that thought – each instrument seems to be doing its own thing, demanding to be heard no matter what.   That is an expression of the chaos “beyond here” but is for me, not in keeping with the song.

In fact, I’m left feeling critical…. with a feeling there is something better that could be done with this song – just listen to the final instrumental verse.   What does it tell us?   The planet is a mess?  Life is a mess?   Something like that…

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