The Gates of Eden – A History in Performance, Part 1: 1964 Ancestral voices prophesying war

 

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 first article on the second track, ‘Gates of Eden.’ You can find the links to the ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ articles at the end of this article ]

And I try to harmonize with song
The lonesome sparrow sings

If we follow the chief spell-caster, the tambourine man himself, down those ‘foggy ruins of time’ we might find ourselves standing before the gates of Eden. There is no specific mention of any gates to the earthly paradise of Eden in Genesis, but gates often symbolize a boundary between the sacred and the profane, the unknown and the known. On this side of the gates we stand in the fallen, nightmarish world and face the ineffable, the mystery of mysteries, all that lies beyond our known world of pain and war, beyond the weary world of words. What lies behind the knowable?

Dylan is not the first poet to explore this encounter with the mysterious and the unrevealed. The song reminds me of one of humankind’s earliest poems, the Tao Te Ching by the shadowy Lao Tzu, especially the first poem which I think is worth quoting in full:

the way that can be told is not the eternal way
the name that can be named won’t last
the nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth
the named is the mother of ten thousand things
ever desireless, one can see the mystery
ever desiring, one can see the appearance
these two spring from the same source
but differ in name
this appears as darkness within darkness
the gate to all mystery

That is to say, ‘there are no words/but these to tell what’s true.’

However particular the imagery of the song is to the mid-twentieth century, it’s fascinating to think that some two thousand five hundred years ago another poet stood before the same gate(s), behind which lies the source of all truth, hidden and revealed: ‘there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.’

Of course much of the haunted feeling that we get from the song (the song itself is a kind of haunting) arises from its chord progression. I noticed its similarity to ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’ by Gordon Lightfoot, written over ten years later, but more than that it seemed (hauntingly) familiar to me, like something ancient and only half-remembered. A melody line half submerged in history. So I contacted our super-knowledgeable editor, Tony Attwood, asking him about what I called a ‘Celtic feel’ to the chords, and if perhaps Dylan had based his composition on some much older song in the folk tradition. The answer was yes and no. It’s not based on any particular song but is written in the Dorian mode, rather than in a major or minor key.

‘The modes were the approach to writing songs up to around the 16th century, and the easiest way to understand them if you are not used to them is through the white notes of the piano. The Dorian mode runs from D to D, but only using white notes – whereas the key of D major, which runs from D to D, has F sharp instead of F and C sharp instead of C. We hear this as Celtic, as quite a few songs from Scotland and Ireland were preserved in their original form because of the isolation of the communities where they were sung.’ (Thank you Tony!)

There’s a grandeur in that chord progression that Dylan was to take full advantage of. When played slowly, with a lilt, there is a stateliness to it, a sense of unfolding majesty, and it is that, combined with Dylan’s nightmarish imagery, that gives rise to the powerful affect of the song, its emotional pull, its aura of deep time.

Before looking a little more closely at this imagery, let’s hear the second only performance of the song on the 31st October, 1964, at the New York Philharmonic Hall, the song having been written mid-year, after ‘Mr T Man.’ While that song was performed over 900 times during its performance lifetime, ‘Gates of Eden’ was performed a mere 217 times. It never became a favourite in performance, despite Dylan recognising the importance of the song by placing it on side B of the ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ single in 1965. This comparative rarity makes the recordings we have all the more precious, and none more so than this one, sung in that high register Dylan’s young voice could handle so well.

(Live at Philharmonic Hall, New York, NY – October 1964)

Note the extra chord between verses that Dylan was later to drop.

If the musical mode is medieval, so is the imagery, the ‘motorcycle black Madonna’ notwithstanding. There is a kinship of spirit with the hellish visions of Hieronymus Bosch. While what happens behind the gates is an enigma, this side of the gates it’s a hell on earth Hieronymus Bosch style, with distorted creatures like the ‘grey flannel dwarf’ and ‘shoeless hunter’ and hell hounds baying at ‘ships with tattooed sails.’ The image below is ‘The Hell’ from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights.

I’m not suggesting that Dylan took imagery from Bosch, rather that both artists drew the same kind of surreal and distorted world to show what life is like on the wrong side of the gates of paradise. Wikipedia comments, ‘The abstract poetry inspires a nightmarish vision.[8] Each verse provides a separate description of a decaying society.[7] Although the song’s title seems to provide hope of paradise, there is no paradise in the place this song describes. Rather, the imagery evokes corruption and decay.’

As with Bosch there are biblical roots to some of this imagery. Take these lines:

Leaving men wholly, totally free
To do anything they wish to do but die

This scary idea is echoed in the Book of Revelations (9:6), ‘During those days men will seek death, but will not find it; they will long to die, but death will elude them.’

Much later, in ‘Precious Angel ‘(1979) Dylan will return to that Revelations verse:

My so called friends have fallen under a spell
They look me squarely in the eye and they say, "Well all is well'"
Can they imagine the darkness that will fall from on high
When men will beg God to kill them and they won't be able to die.

These ‘so called friends’ get a mention in ‘Gates’ too:

The foreign sun, it squints upon
A bed that is never mine
As friends and other strangers
From their fates try to resign

In my NET series, and my articles on ‘Mr T Man’ in this series, I argued that there is not such a sharp division between Dylan’s early, protest songs, and his mid-sixties surreal songs as has been assumed. I argued that ‘Mr T Man’ was another kind of protest song in its expressed desire to escape from the ‘crazy sorrow’ of this world. The strain of protest is perhaps even sharper in ‘Gates of Eden’:

The savage soldier sticks his head in sand
And then complains

In ‘Gates’ we see the world through a distorted mirror, but it is recognisable as our violent and twisted world. The surreal imagery is not there for its own sake, or to just sound weird, but to expose a world where ‘not much is really sacred’ as he will sing in the next song on the album, ‘It’s All Right, Ma.’ Intense alienation is a natural response to being in this corrupt and profane world.

A foreign sun, it squints upon
A bed that is never mine

While the Philharmonic Hall recording is clearly the best, this performance from San Jose, also 1964, although not as well recorded, is of interest because there is no supporting harmonica. The song sounds even bleaker and starker.

(Live San Jose 1964)

Dylan also dropped the harmonica for his 1965 performances, perhaps because it’s a long enough song as it is with nine verses. At this stage Dylan is singing all the verses. There were only ten performances of the song in that year. The one that stands out is this one from Manchester in May.

(Live at Free Trade Hall, Manchester, UK – May 1965)

After 1965, Dylan abandoned the song until 1974, when he hit the road again after an eight year break from touring. The song was not sung during the famous 1966 world tour.

Of interest, however, is this informal studio recording with George Harrison on May 1st 1970. It’s a fragment, but fascinating in the way Harrison’s electric guitar backs up Dylan’s acoustic. Beautiful guitar work by Harrison, the way he works around the Dorian mode chords. Perhaps that melody line haunted Dylan as it does me, for here he does a ‘la la la la’ for the opening verse. I think he’s enjoying the music quite aside from the lyrics. That hypnotic lilt!

I’ll leave it there for now and pick it up in 1974 in the next post.

Until then

Kia Ora

Notes:

  • The Tao Te Ching is thought to have been written around 600 BC. This translation is based on that by Gia-Fu Feng and Jane English, 1973. I have tweaked it a little.
  • My title comes from Coleridge’s ‘Kublai Khan,’ another poem that evokes the ineffable and mysterious with its ‘sunless sea’ and ‘ancestral voices prophesying war!’ There’s a kinship of feeling between this poem and ‘Gates of Eden.’

The Mr Tambourine Man series

2 Comments

  1. Well aware of by singer/songwriter Bob Dylan, both William Yeats and Robert Graves were influenced by Lao Tzu who envisioned a yet-to-be corrected imbalance between the male and female principles within the universe as it now stands.

  2. I opened my heart to the world, and the world came in (Bob Dylan: False Prophet)

    Without opening your door/ You can open your heart to the world (Tao Te Ching)

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