Watching The River Flow (1971) part 4: Cocker Meadow

Watching The River Flow (1971) part 4

by Jochen Markhorst

IV         Cocker Meadow

People disagreeing on all just about everything, yeah
Makes you stop and all wonder why
Why only yesterday I saw somebody on the street
Who just couldn’t help but cry
Oh, this ol’ river keeps on rollin’, though
No matter what gets in the way and which way the wind does blow
And as long as it does I’ll just sit here
And watch the river flow

 At least once, Dylan is following in Joe Cocker’s footsteps, rather than the other way around. Dylan celebrates his 59th birthday with a memorable concert in Dresden. He treats himself and the audience to an upbeat opening with “Roving Gambler”, a nostalgic “Song To Woody”, beautiful and loving performances of audience favourites like “Mama You Been On My Mind” and “To Ramona”, cake is served too with “Country Pie”, which so surprisingly appeared on Dylan’s setlist in 2000, and when, after an hour, Dylan wants to resume the concert with “Ballad Of A Thin Man” after a short break, the audience spontaneously sings Happy Birthday To You. “Why, thank you,” beams the happily surprised birthday boy. And again at the end of the show: “Thank you! I will remember this birthday for a while!”

The closing words of a very successful performance in the Junge Garde, the small amphitheatre in the Großer Garten, Dresden’s city park. As Dylan looks up one more time, he sees the, “Cocker Meadow” on the other side, since 2016 the official name of the grassy area that for centuries was called Blüherwiese. Colloquially the stretch of park has been called Cockerwiese since Cocker’s legendary performance 2 June 1988, when the GDR still exists and the Party, in an attempt to ward off changing times and the imminent fall of the Wall, suddenly allowed West artists to perform. It is a close encounter of the third kind, as if a spaceship is descending, C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. There are an estimated 125 thousand visitors at this first concert by a Westerner in Dresden, and in the collective consciousness of former GDR citizens the event still occupies a shining place. As Joe Cocker himself, in an interview shortly before his death in 2014, reflects on it with emotion:

“I would say that the Dresden show was one of those things in life that will always endure. In a collage of outstanding events in my life, the Dresden concert would definitely be one of them.”

In the concert the Sheffield steelworker, as so often, again exuberantly honours his hero Dylan. The opening song is “Dear Landlord”, halfway through is “Seven Days”, and if Dylan listens very carefully on that birthday night in May 2000, he might still be able to hear the reverberations of the last chords of Joe Cocker’s last song in 1988: the encore closes with “Watching The River Flow”, the song that seems to have been tailor-made for Cocker anyway.

Dylan fan Cocker continued to cover Dylan songs throughout his career. His first record already features two (“Just Like a Woman” and “I Shall Be Released”on With a Little Help from My Friends, 1969), the next LP opens with “Dear Landlord”, and in the decades that follow, Joe keeps on embellishing his records and his concerts with his idol’s songs. Dylan appreciates it, and, as a token of his appreciation, grants Joe a scoop in 1976:

“I was a bit nervous about even approaching him. I just asked him for something he hadn’t recorded and he said, “Tell you what, I’ve got this old blues I wrote about Catfish” — and he gave me a demo.”
(J.P. Bean, Joe Cocker : the authorised biography, 2003)

Joe Cocker – Catfish:

… and thus the rather insignificant blues rocker “Catfish”, a throwaway song by Dylan and Jacques Levy from the Desire sessions, ends up on Joe’s 1976 LP Stingray. The subsequent LP, the strong 1978 album Luxury You Can Afford, then features the song with which Cocker will bid farewell to Dresden ten years later, “Watching The River Flow”.

It is a steamy, cram-packed interpretation, expertly arranged by the grandmaster Allen Toussaint, who also sets the dreamy accents with his Fender Rhodes. We hear five horns, a backing chorus featuring Clydie King and Mona Lisa Young, the ladies who will soon chirp with Dylan himself, three guitars and master drummer Steve Gadd – Joe has apparently been given a nice budget by Asylum Records for the only album he will make for that record company. Commercially perhaps not too wise (the LP scores moderately), but artistically a hit. Allen Toussaint knows he is working with Joe Cocker, and understands what that means for his work.

Joe Cocker – Watching The River Flow:

Joe Cocker, for his part, is in his element. “Watching The River Flow” is a co-production of Leon Russell and Bob Dylan – the song is on the crossroads of his heart and soul, here his blood brother Russell and his hero Dylan come together. And, being a true fan and a true gentleman, he polishes off the weird, ugly mistakes in the lyrics.

In writing, in Lyrics and on the site, it looks like Dylan was in a particularly ungrammatical mood that March day in 1971. It already went wrong in the opening of the second stanza, and here in this bridge-like third verse, it goes wrong again:

People disagreeing on all just about everything, yeah
Makes you stop and all wonder why

On second glance it is not that bad, though. These limp opening lines we may really attribute to the transcriber on duty. Dylan sings something like People disagreeing on oh, just about everything, and in the next line Makes you stop and a-wonder why. However, Joe won’t allow even a shadow of a language error, grabs his cleaning rag and sings:

People disagreeing on everything, 
Makes you stop and wonder why
Why, only yesterday I met somebody 
Who couldn’t help but cry
Oh, this ol’ world keeps rollin’ slowly on, though
So I’m gonna sit here on this bank of sand
And watch the river flow

A discreet and elegant correction. A bit drastic, perhaps. But not quite as drastic as Dylan himself, who, fifty years later, on the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour 2021-2024 and on Shadow Kingdom, intervenes heavily in the lyrics. Rewriting this third verse to:

People disappearin’ everywhere you look 
Don’t know where to draw the line 
Only yesterday I seen somebody 
Who was really in a bind 
This ol’ river keep a-rollin’, though 
Where it stop and where the wind might blow 
I sit right here 
And watch the river flow

The operation coincides with the song’s promotion to concert opener. Major promotion, even: in almost all 202 shows of the Rough and Rowdy Ways Tour, “Watching The River Flow” is the opening chord. Just like on 3 July 2012, by the way, when Dylan is back at the Freilichtbühne Junge Garde in the park in Dresden, opposite Cocker Meadow, and can make the opening chords of his show converge with the last distant echo of Joe Cocker’s closing chords from 1988.

To be continued. Next up Watching The River Flow part 5: The rest is just the same, isn’t it?

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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:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)