Dylan’s complete transformation of “All I really want to do”

 

By Tony Attwood

As a not particularly successful musician, but still nonetheless a musician through my early working life, I lived and worked with the firm belief that music itself carried a meaning.  Not always a meaning that could be expressed in words – and indeed if it could be expressed in words, why would we bother to express the idea in music?   But still a meaning – and when it comes down to it, mostly a meaning that is tangled up in emotions.

Indeed almost all us respond to something in a minor key as being very sad, while songs in a major key with few or no minor chords are thought (by most people brought up in “the west” at least) to be happy.

If you want an example of a Dylan song in a minor key try Senor

and if you want more, try Love Sick

But of course music would be very dull if all we had were happy songs and sad songs; there is of course every nuance that you can imagine in between.

So if we take a song like “All I really want to do” it is in a major key and it is happy (in that there is something he really wants to do and it sounds quite possible) but with a touch of uncertainty (with the implication that she wants more than just friendship and he’s having to deal with that).

Quite often this meaning could be emotional.

And as we can hear, the original performance of the song is also somewhat plaintive, as befits a song that contains a lot of what he doesn’t want to do and the suggestion that she wants a lot more.

The song has been performed over 100 times by Dylan, but in performance, it has a problem, in that all we really have are two lines of music, which are repeated, and then the repeated two lines of the chorus.  And given there are six verses, that means that we hear the two musical lines of the verse 12 times, and of course the chorus six times.  That’s a lot of repetition, especially as the message is so simple and clear.

Which tends to make it a song that can be really interesting first time through, but after a number of listens, musically and I suspect lyrically, it begins to fade.   Indeed given that the verses all begin “I ain’t looking to” or “I don’t want to” it does mean we have pretty much got the hang of the song on the first hearing.

That’s not to say it isn’t fun, or that it wasn’t interesting at first, it is just that after hearing it quite a few times, there can be a problem.    And yet Bob gave “All I really want to do” over 100 appearances live on stage.  This is 1965 – the one with the cough…

Now the problem is that the structure of the song is so clear and specific, it doesn’t readily allow itself to have small or gentle changes.  So what Bob did was to turn the piece from a plaintive piece about not wanting to be involved, into a jolly, bouncey celebration that could be shared between friends who know they are together tonight but that doesn’t mean anything beyond tonight.   This ain’t the start of a love affair – this is just fun here and now.

Here is Los Angeles 1978

Suddenly we have a totally different song.   This is a song of two friends going out dancing and singing and just having a totally great time.  The worst thing that could happen to this couple is that they end up in bed together.

The jolly approach is emphasised by the piano and the bounce and that repeated five note intro to each line of the chorus.

One other interesting thing with this new approach is that the friendship becomes much more meaningful – at least for me!  This time I really do believe he wants to be friends, whereas in the initial version, I always took the song to be a put-off; he’s saying friends but has no intention of seeing her again.

At the Budokan in the same year we have the same arrangement but the tempo is slower and the key lower.  He starts “I ain’t looking to make you cry” – which is a bit different from before.

I have noted before how Bob loves to change the key he is performing in, and he does it again in London in 1978, as well as losing some of the melody in order to declaim rather than sing.  This is probably about as fast it could get.

For me this is one of the most enjoyable set of transformations Bob has ever made to one of his own works, exploring a whole range of meanings out of a very simple set of lyrics.  There’s nothing much of the original left by the time we get to this last version – and not for the first time I am left wondering if anyone else has ever re-arranged his/her own work as much as Dylan.

But I also feel that this re-arranging work has never really has as much positive attention as it might have done.  I did try it a bit myself with the Never Ending Tour Revisited series on this site, but the focus then was on the tour.   But this way of changing one song really does show me just how much insight Bob has into the possibilities of his work.  For him the recorded version was never the end.

I’ve taken the plunge and suggested this article might be the first of a series of songs transformed, but I am not sure where I go next.  If you have idea please do write in.  You can leave a comment often a (now much reduced) set of ads at the end of the article.  Or indeed if you have an idea for an article of your own, or a whole series you can drop me a line at Tony@schools.co.uk

3 Comments

  1. Dear Tony. I am teased but I do not share your enthusiasm about the way our hero transformed the 1964-version into the 1978 version. It is not very difficult to transform any song in an oompa-boompa ‘music for the millions’ – version. All you require is the decision to only play 50.000 to 100.000 seat stadiums and bad taste.
    Where you write:

    “Which tends to make it a song that can be really interesting first time through, but after a number of listens, musically and I suspect lyrically, it begins to fade. […] That’s not to say it isn’t fun, or that it wasn’t interesting at first, it is just that after hearing it quite a few times, there can be a problem. And yet Bob gave “All I really want to do” over 100 appearances live on stage.”

    you ignore enormous gap of 13 years between the 10 performances of the original version and the 92 peerformances of the oompa-boompa version in 1978, plus that he never performed the song ever since in any other way. Would there be any other song that our hero only performed in two such “string of performances”? Maybe someobe else wan tto figure that out…
    Our hero must have had a deliberate reason for to include it in the 1978 setlist, but because of this worldtour oompa-boompa set up it absolutely HAD to be molded into that concept and, in my opinion at least, it was a big UGLY failure in comparison with the original version. To admire our hero for this transformation-capability is overdone, I would say: it’s not difficult at all.
    All the best!
    All the best

  2. Myladies,
    i just want to lead your attention to the words and the voice in that song. In 1964, it’s a young man, sparkling with high spirits, king of the words, reigning o’er them, playing with them with soo much fun – as you can hear. And it was perfectly matching (i guess) with what he wanted to say to the “you”. In 1978 he’s no longer in that funny kind of mood (at least it seemed to me then he wasn’t). Not so much playing with the words, using them, professionally; different moods shining through (–> i don’t want to be your clown, i don’t want to make you cry), seriousness, bitterness may be. And these things might interfere with the musical approach, perhaps not even he takes, but simply he has in 64 or in 78.
    Concerning this “changing one song”, uhh, i wouldn’t know, there are so many, it’s for sure one reason i’m staying with Dylan’s work. Perhaps “Rainy day women #12&35” could be one. Somehow may be even a kin of “all i really…”, working the other way round, starting as Oohmmtata, leaving elsewhere. Once i did a cassette for a friend, who was not particularly into Dylan, but somehow knew “Rainy day women” and really loved it, more than other Dylan songs; the cassette contained all versions of it i could find at that time. I hope she liked it, i never did ask her (perhaps she was #13, didn’t ask her either). Okay, thanks for your time, have a healthy one. Markus

  3. I was born in 1973, and in my early teens I fell in love with the work of Bob Dylan. I remember driving in a car with my two uncles and they had an eight track and they put on a Bob Dylan a track and I was frozen in my seat and I asked them who is this and I said it was Bob Dylan. From that moment on, I was hooked. I analyze every song I hung onto every word every way that every word was sung has so much meaning later on in my later teens I got tickets to see Bob Dylan live in Canada I remember people saying oh he hates playing in this city. And I thought that was a bit absurd, but nevertheless, I didn’t care it was Bob Dylan. And I went to the show and I didn’t care he could’ve done nothing he could’ve just stood there and I would’ve been mesmerized. I don’t think I analyze a single bit of the concert. I was just in awe of his presence.

    I think the next two times I saw him over the next few years maybe five years I’m not really sure I began to look at it with more of a critical view. I think those were the years that he was touring with G Smith, and some of the Saturday Night Live band And that was pretty cool because wow, I had no idea that he would play with them. I never imagined that so it was sort of a double bonus but at that point I started to think this isn’t the song that I know he’s totally changed it around and all they understanding and meaning that I hung onto with every word, disappeared. It was becoming a bit of a major disappointment for me.

    I recall there was one festival that I was at that included Joe Cocker and a bunch of other fairly significant bands at the time and that performance was one of the best and true to the way that I understood the songs that would’ve been in the late 80s. and I’m grateful for that later years looking back I’m grateful for every time that I got to see him perform. And the thing with seeing Bob Dylan perform live is that he really does not care about what you think of how he’s performing. he’s doing it for himself and you need to just need to accept it.

    And later years, I had a senior role at a concert venue in New Zealand. And was able to get as close to the big man as I ever could. The first time he performed, I recall looking at his rider and I think it just included cigarettes and ashtray Matches or a lighter, red wine and that was about it. I thought that was fairly. Typical of older artists. They don’t mess around. They just keep it simple. The next time he performed despite us having a large artist area with many rooms he wanted a separate trailer outside of the venue I was told it was so that he could smoke weed. He’s the only artist that ever asked for a totally separate space for himself and again trailer, cigarettes, ashtray, and red wine.

    I’m just glad I got to see a wide variety of his performances over the years and learned to respect and understand somewhat that his music is his.

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