The songs Bob Dylan never performed: 2 Motopsycho nightmare

Previously:

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By Tony Attwood

I did quite a long review of this song on this site ten years ago, and also did actually find a couple of cover versions to put into the “Dylan Cover a Day” series.  So yes we’ve done our duty to this song, apart from what is probably going to be the last reason for coming to it: Dylan has never performed it.  Thus it fits into this series looking at some of the songs in that category – which is in fact the largest category of Dylan’s songs listed by the number of performances.  I estimate that over half of Bob’s compositions have never been performed by him on stage.

But what can one say about this song which was good enough to go on an album, but not good enough for Bob to perform.   Indeed not many others have covered it, although I did find another cover – and this one is a live performance

It is well recognised that the song relates lyrically to some degree to Hitchcock’s “Psycho” and is less often commented on as being a talking blues (which it isn’t quite).  And of course musically it can be noted that it is a standard, but very fast 12 bar blues.

Commentators have noted that the song points to the fact that all political statements are protected by the First Amendment to the American Constitution (which came into force in 1791 – at the time of the French Revolution) and which I’ll spell out in case you are like me a non-American citizen.  It protects the freedom of religion, speech, the press, assembly and the right to petition the government for redress of grievances.  (And of course, as a UK citizen I am fascinated by constitutions since in the UK we don’t have one).

The freedom of religion was a particularly hot issue at the time, given that the French Revolution started in 1789, and although Maximilien Robespierre was himself not an athiest (he tended to quote Voltaire to the effect that, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him”, during the revolution, the state religion was replaced for a while by the Cult of Reason.

But anyway, back to Dylan.   Motopsycho then turned up again as Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream which was in fact played on six consecutive shows between 13 October and 19 October 1988, 24 years after Dylan first recorded Motocycle, although I have not been able to find a recording of any of these performances.

So although in a sense the creation of “115th Dream” excuses the non-performance of the preceding song, although it too died an early death on stage.

The non-performance of the song gives me a bit of a problem at this point as this article was seemingly going to be rather short, but I was then rescued by the song in French.

Hugues Aufray recorded this in 1965 – and I have just found, he was born on August 18, 1929, and as far as I know he is still with us, meaning he is not far short of his hundredth birthday.

So I went looking and found a more recent picture… still going strong in 2009 – that’s him on the left, unless you are reading this on a phone in which case he might be above or below.

Digging further I found the statement that “as of March 2023, with the death of Marcel Amont, he becomes the oldest active male artist in French song.”

And then, encouraged to go further, I discovered this is not the only version in French but there is also a version by Sarclo which doesn’t seem to be on the internet but is on Amazon if you have an account.

But we can’t leave it at that because there is also

And (you might be thankful to read) that is about as far I as can go.  A song recorded by Dylan for an album, not played by Dylan, and by and large not played by many others, which raises the question, why did Bob want to put that on “Another Side”?   Was Bob trying to show his versatility, or was it just a filler?

Ten years ago in my little piece on the song I made the point that it was a song, without which, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,”  might not have happened.  That doesn’t really explain why Bob particularly wanted this song on the album, and then never played it in public.  But maybe it just seemed like a good idea at the time.

But there we are. It is there, on the album, and I guess some of us still play it, if at no other time than when we play the whole album from start to finish.

Ah well.   Such is life.

One comment

  1. Dylan did few of these straight 12 bar blues in early-mid sixties, they are generally album filler. It was pretty boring and long as Motopsycho and didn’t improve as 115th Dream. If that seems harsh, it is important to recall all artists make some mediocrities in process of creating works, and ithat is part of getting to creating the good stuff. It can’t all be the Mona Lisa, there are going to be mediocrities along the way. Dylan is no exception to the laws of creativity, and occasionally he would put on of these mediocrities on an album, to fill it out the running order. Why? Who can say, he certainly had better material that he recorded and discarded, but that is also part of the process and the decisions making involved!

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