Watching The River Flow (1971) part 1

I don’t know what it means either: an index to the current series appearing on this website.

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Watching the River Flow part 1, by Jochen Markhorst

I           Your enemy’s corpse will soon float by

The Western World’s Most Erudite Man, Umberto Eco, muddies the already murky waters in the Postscript to The Name Of The Rose (1980): “But there is an Indian proverb that goes, Sit on the bank of a river and wait: your enemy’s corpse will soon float by.” Confusing, as barely five years earlier, in James Clavell’s 1975 bestseller Shōgun, we were told that it is a “Japanese wisdom”.

Sean Connery does not listen to Eco. He believes James Clavell. When he plays former police captain John Connor in the successful crime thriller Rising Sun in 1993, where he is portrayed as an “expert on Japanese affairs”, Connor-san sprinkles ancient Japanese wisdom throughout the film, and towards the end of the film there is a fitting moment to throw in the passing corpse aphorism. Which in turn inspires Blizzard Entertainment’s game designers; in Overwatch, one of their most successful multiplayer first-person shooter games, we hear it again, spoken by the Japanese fighting hero Hanzo: “If you sit by the river long enough, you will see the body of your enemy floating by.”

Just as often it is attributed – of course – to Sun Tzu, to The Art Of War, or quoted as a “Chinese proverb”, which is at least closer to the actual source of the saying. The original Chinese – i.e. not Japanese – wisdom is a completely failed translation of Confucius is; “The time is passing like a river running day and night,” is the approximate best translation. The Chinese characters for passing time can be understood as passed away, deceased, and from there a well-meaning but slightly too creative translator went wrong. There is no mention of corpses floating by with Confucius, in any case.

It is apparently a multi-purpose metaphor, watching-the-river-flowing-by. Indeed, the narrator in Dylan’s “Watching The River Flow” does the opposite of Connor-san – not death, but life flows by. Completely zen, however, he is not:

What’s the matter with me
I don’t have much to say

… are the opening lines. Words of a man tormented by a blank mind, a lack of ideas, and not understanding why. So it seems that, as with that other song today “When I Paint My Masterpiece”, Dylan stays close to himself. After all, we are in the seven lean years, the years when we are scraping the bottom of the well that once seemed inexhaustible, the years when Dylan fills songs with empty talk like Winterlude, this dude thinks you’re grand and uninspired theft like They say that nighttime is the right time / To be with the one you love (‘To Be Alone With You’), the years when his protagonists admit out loud that they have no words, like By golly, what more can I say (“Peggy Day”) and You’re beautiful beyond words (“Never Say Goodbye”).

Which song came first is not entirely clear. The recollections differ. Drummer Jim Keltner recalls that Masterpiece was done pretty quickly, and that they did “several takes, but not many” on Watching next. Tireless archive sleuth Michael Krosgaard has been unable to find any studio logs and has only been able to listen to one of the three tapes – on which there are first 11 takes of Masterpiece, and at the end one full take of “Watching The River Flow” – the final one, the one from Greatest Hits. Leon Russel, on the other hand, is pretty sure Watching was the first one:

“So, I took Jim Keltner and Carl Radle and Eddie [Jesse Ed] Davis up to New York. And I gave them some changes to a song, and we cut this track. And Bob listened to it, and he walked around with his [note] pad in the studio and allowed me to walk around and look over his shoulder, and he wrote ‘Watching the River Flow,’ was the first one. And the second one was ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece.’ I constructed the changes in this track, and then he listened to the track and wrote those songs. And he allowed me to watch him do that, which is what I wanted to do. It was great.”
(Bill Janovitz – Leon Russell: The Master of Space and Time’s Journey Through Rock & Roll History, 2023)

… and Leon Russell is – obviously – a reliable source. Also the fact that Dylan apparently found Masterpiece unfinished (as evidenced by the re-recording on Day 4, with lyrics changed and bridge added), as well as the content of the opening lines of Watching, are arguments for Leon Russell’s recollection; first “Watching The River Flow”, then “When I Paint My Masterpiece”. The one tape Krosgaard managed to find in the Columbia archives is then presumably the third and last tape from those days at Blue Rock Studio, on which the engineer added a copy of the best Watching take for convenience.

Eventually, studio owner Eddie Korvin’s notes and recollections, which are now at the Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, make it official: on Day 1 a practice session with a few covers (“Spanish Harlem”, “That Lucky Old Sun”, Hank Snow’s “I’m A Ladies Man”, Josh White’s “Blood Red River” and “I’m Alabama Bound”), on Day 2 “Watching The River Flow”, Day 3 “When I Paint My Masterpiece” and on Day 4 mixing.

Not too important, of course. But it better fits the obvious assumption, that Dylan is trying to overcome writer’s block by thematising that same writer’s block – and that the first words on that day of creation then are What’s the matter with me, I don’t have much to say. Although, as on Masterpiece, Dylan confidant Jim Keltner, the drummer, has his doubts whether “Watching The River Flow” was really created on the spot:

“Bob was standing right up against the wall as if to have the words bounce back into his ears, and he was singing, or at least his mouth is moving. He had a tablet, and he was writing. I have a feeling that he probably had those songs fleshed out, mostly, and just honed in on them when we got there.”
(in Ray Padgett’s “Jim Keltner Talks Thirty Years of Drumming for Bob Dylan,” Flagging Down the Double E’s, 2021)

Leon Russell may be the Big Man, the go-to guy of these recording sessions, but Jim Keltner is inner circle, drumming intermittently for Dylan for more than 30 years, and is a certified emotional, sensitive man of feelings, an utterly engaging man who sits sobbing behind the drum kit on occasion, overcome by the beauty or content of a Dylan song. This has been the case since his third Dylan session (after “Watching The River Flow” and “When I Paint My Masterpiece”), since “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” in 1973: “It was such a touching song. It was the first time I actually cried when I was playing.” Dylan is touched. He invites Keltner to the Slow Train Coming sessions in 1979, and at the first listening session a pack of Kleenex is waiting for Jim on the side table. Of which, indeed, Keltner has to make copious use again.

Anyway, when this sensitive Dylan expert with ample inside experience says, “I have a feeling that he probably had those songs fleshed out, mostly,” well, that’s worth something. Even if his gaze may have been clouded by tears.

To be continued. Next up Watching The River Flow part 2: The situation comes first

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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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