Watching The River Flow part 5: The rest is just the same, isn’t it?

Watching The River Flow (1971) part 5

by Jochen Markhorst

V The rest is just the same, isn’t it?

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

It is one of the many unforgettable scenes from the masterpiece Amadeus (Miloš Forman, 1984), and yet another of those for which Oscar-winning screenwriter Peter Shaffer barely had to adapt his own stage text. Mozart makes his appearance with the Emperor, who intends to surprise Mozart; seated at the forte piano he laboriously plays a welcome march Salieri composed especially for the occasion. With a pained grimace, the court composer Salieri endures the little mistakes made by the plodding Emperor, while Mozart is ushered in by the chamber servant. When the courtesies have been fulfilled and the nervous Mozart has made a few more faux pas but still has been given the Imperial commission to compose a German-language opera (Die Entführung aus dem Serail), the Emperor hands him the manuscript of Salieri’s welcome march as a parting gift.

MOZART: Keep it, Majesty, if you want. It is already here in my head.
JOSEPH: What? On one hearing only?
MOZART: I think so, Sire, yes.
Pause.
JOSEPH: Show us.
Mozart bows and hands the manuscript back to the Emperor. Then he goes to the forte-piano and seats himself. The others, except for Salieri, gather around the manuscript held by the Emperor. Mozart plays the first half of the march with deadly accuracy.
MOZART (to Salieri): The rest is just the same, isn’t it?
He plays the first half again but stops in the middle of a phrase, which he repeats dubiously.
MOZART: That doesn’t really work, does it?
All the courtiers look at Salieri.
MOZART: Did you try …? Shouldn’t it be a bit more… (he plays another phrase) Or this – yes, this! Better.

… and virtuoso improvising Salieri’s stiff, repetitive march transforms under Mozart’s hands into the brilliant march we will hear later in Le Nozze Di Figaro, in “Non Più Andrai”.

Mozart plays Salieri’s Welcome March (Amadeus):

The third stanza of “Watching The River Flow” offers musicologists a nice little treat. Musicologist and Dylan researcher Tony Attwood puts it this way:

Musically this is not the third stanza at all but the “middle 8”. And it is a treat because this musical technique is very rare in Dylan compositions.

The blues and folk music (in which Dylan is so well versed) is in a form known as “strophic” which basically goes “verse, verse, verse, verse” for as long as you wish. This is Dylan’s classic style of writing and the overwhelming majority of his songs are in this style.

But there is a variant approach which was very popular in the 1940s, and has carried on to today, in much pop music and within most ballads, in which there is a variant section of the music. It is often known as a “middle 8”, because it was traditionally 8 bars long and came between verse 2 and verse 3 – which is not quite the middle of the piece but as a description is good enough for pop and rock.

Bob Dylan, being a blues man, has primarily written in the standard blues approach of verse, verse, verse (the strophic approach). Listen to “TheTimes They Are A-Changin’” and you’ve got it.

But in this song he moves across to the form used by many composers of popular music in which you have a couple of verses, followed by the variation (the middle 8) and then goes back to the original verse.

However that’s not all, for in this case we have a fairly classic blues rocker in F, a deadpan blues chord scheme, lyrically the tried-and-tested couplet + refrain line structure – but then with the less conventional modulation from F to C (via the chord of G) – and that is our second variation from the norm for Dylan.

Modulations are rare in pop and rock music, and when composers in these genres want to change keys they simply bang us from one key to the next with a jolt. Indeed modulations in Dylan are extremely rare so it is worth pausing for a moment to see what he does.

In fact he uses a technique that was absolutely commonplace in 1930s and 1940s popular music to take us (just for a moment) from F major (the key the music is written in) to C major via the chord of G (which has no place in the key of F major). That G major tells us we are changing, and the C major chord tells us we have arrived. Here it is…

F
What's the matter with me,
       Bb
I don't have much to say,
G
Daylight sneakin' through the window
                                C
And I'm still in this all-night cafe.

Then we are back to the chord of F quickly followed by another B flat and that tells us we are firmly back in the key of F major (because the key of C doesn’t have a B flat in it). As a listener, we don’t really notice all this technicality but instead just hear it as a little variation. A musician however is likely to say “Did Bob write this? That is not like him at all!”

But that is not to say that Dylan is averse to playing around with musical form and structure. If you want an in-your-face example try “Too Much of Nothing” where instead of gently gliding us from one key to another (as here) he goes crashing through the keys without trying to make any of them connect at all.

My suspicion for what it is worth, is that someone in the band suggested it, or played it, and Dylan thought it was nice. If that didn’t happen, then I’d say he had been listening to some 1940s songs and thought he’d use the technique.”

With which musicologist Attwood indirectly confirms the story that Leon Russell had already recorded the musical accompaniment on his own before Dylan reported to the studio; he hears two “variations from the norm” that are unusual for Dylan and finds them so untypical that he suspects those norm deviations came from “someone in the band”.

Textually, the third stanza behaves like a bridge as well; the perspective shifts. For two stanzas we have listened to the narrator’s private concerns; now the gaze shifts from inside to outside, from the personal to the universal. Overly philosophical it is not, of course – People disagreeing on just about everything has little depth, and we know the observation approximately from earlier songs as well. From “Love Minus Zero”, for instance;

In the dime stores and bus stations
People talk of situations
Read books, repeat quotations

The same switch from personal to general, the same observation of “people”, and the same superficiality. Even “read books” Dylan will copy again today (fourth stanza: Makes you wanna stop and read a book), so it seems, indeed, that during the creative phase of “Watching The River Flow” Dylan’s own masterpiece “Love Minus Zero”, consciously or not, was reverberating somewhere in the back of his mind. And with the roughly same function, too; contrasting the narrator’s Zen-like, almost fatalistic state of mind with the restless, volatile rush all around him.

That tenor remains the same in the 21st century’s rewriting. On Shadow Kingdom and at all the concerts, we now hear Dylan singing:

People disappearin’ everywhere you look
Don’t know where to draw the line
Only yesterday I seen somebody
Who was really in a bind

… where the change from disagreeing to disappearing is striking, but certainly a well-chosen rephrasing to express existential loneliness; in the end, all the people around you are just passers-by, and you yourself are your only company from start to finish, something like that.

Curiously, the fourth stanza, the final couplet, escapes rigorous revision. Curious, as the rest is just the same, isn’t it, as Mozart would say. In the 1971 original, that undylanesque repetition was already striking. Not only musically repetitive – again that “bridge couplet” – but also lyrically:

Stanza 3 1971
People disagreeing on just about everything,
Makes you stop and wonder why
Why only yesterday I saw somebody on the street
Who just couldn’t help but cry
Stanza 4 1971
People disagreeing everywhere you look
Makes you wanna stop and read a book
Why only yesterday I saw somebody on the street
That was really shook

… practically the same thing. With anyone other than Dylan, we might have raised some questions about that lazy rhyme look-book-shook and its substantive silliness. When Leon Russell records his cover in 1999, he simply omits that whole verse, thus reducing the lyrics to three stanzas. But Dylan doesn’t seem to be bothered by it. After he has had 50 years to think about it, it eventually becomes:

Stanza 3 2021
People disappearin’ everywhere you look
Don’t know where to draw the line
Only yesterday I seen somebody
Who was really in a bind
Stanza 4 2021
People disappearing everywhere you look
Ever stop and wonder why?
Only yesterday I seen somebody
Too sad to cry

Leon Russell – Watching the River Flow:

Still, there can be no question of laziness or fatigue; after all, Dylan elevates the song to the welcome march of the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour and for four years, some two hundred concerts, he opens the show with this variation of “Watching The River Flow”, with people disappearing everywhere, people who won’t bother me again, non più andrai, notte e giorno d’intorno girando, turbando il riposo – no more will you go night and day walking to and fro, disturbing the rest, as Mozart would say.

To be continued. Next up Watching The River Flow part 6: “Life is so transient”

————

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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