1964 – 74 – From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
By Mike Johnson
I read somewhere once that if you wanted the very best, the acme of Dylan’s pre-electric work, you couldn’t do better than listen to side B of Bringing It All Back Home, 1964.
Four songs, ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ ‘Gates of Eden,’ ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ and ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ represent the pinnacle of Dylan’s acoustic achievement. In this series I aim to chart how each of these foundation songs fared in performance over the years, the changing face of each song and its ultimate fate (at least to date). This is the first article on the third track, ‘It’s All Right Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ You can find the previous articles in this History in Performance series at the end of this article.
In these previous articles in this series, and in my Never Ending Tour series, I have argued that there is a greater continuity in Dylan’s early work, up to 1966 anyway, than is suggested by the narrative that Dylan abandoned ‘protest songs’ in favour of ‘surreal songs’ when he switched from an acoustic to an electric sound. This narrative is too simplistic. To my mind, the spirit of protest, while it might have changed in focus, was just as strong in the later work.
Dylan’s songs may have become deeper and more wide-ranging (although even that is arguable) but were driven by the same moral outrage from ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’ in 1963 to ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again’ and ‘Visions of Johanna’ in 1966. Indeed, we could argue that the whole of Dylan’s oeuvre has been driven by that moral outrage. It has just taken different forms in different periods. Try ‘Foot of Pride’ (1984), an angry protest song if ever I heard one.
‘I am the enemy of the unlived, meaningless life,’ he sings in ‘False Prophet,’ written in 2020. If we want to know what he means by that, we can’t do better than return to ‘It’s All Right Ma’, written in 1964, which is, I maintained in my NET series, a sweeping denunciation of all things false and phoney, and may well be the greatest of Dylan’s protest songs. The song is about the ‘unlived, meaningless life.’
Old lady judges watch people in pairs Limited in sex, they dare To push fake morals, insult and stare While money doesn’t talk, it swears Obscenity, who really cares Propaganda, all is phoney
When ‘all is phoney’ the search becomes for the real and the true – ‘what else can you show me?’ Unfortunately the real and true don’t exist this side of the gates of Eden.
It’s easy to see without looking too far That not much is really sacred
This tour-de-force of a song dominates not just the second side of Bringing It All Back Home, but the whole album, possibly Dylan’s whole output up to that date. Only ‘A Hard Rain’s A Gonna Fall’ and ‘Chimes of Freedom’ come close to it in depth and breadth and sheer length. ‘It’s All Right, Ma’ is one of Dylan’s long songs. ‘Hard Rain’ is framed as a narrative, highly traditional in structure, while ‘Chimes’ is also a narrative that uses the device of a storm, lightning and thunder, to present the real and the true as revelation. ‘It’s All Right, Ma’ eschews such devices and comes straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were, Dylan in full Jeremiah mode. I don’t evoke this prophet lightly. It’s worth recalling that Jeremiah railed against idolatry, social injustices, and moral decay, which is precisely the territory of ‘It’s All Right, Ma.’ He doesn’t need a narrator.
Disillusioned words like bullets bark As human gods aim for their mark Make everything from toy guns that spark To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark It’s easy to see without looking too far That not much is really sacred
If you want to see the song in terms of the standard narrative, which would see Bringing It All Back Home as a transitional album, catching Dylan as he pivots away from protest, then it might be taken as a final broadside, a final burst of invective against the godless materialism that rules the modern world, the protest song to end all protest songs, with all the previous protest songs building up to this one. Going out with a bang. Tempting as this picture is, it’s not quite true. There will be further broadsides and bursts of invective, and godless materialism will never be too far from Dylan’s sights.
Dylan is apparently aware of the importance of the song. He stuck with it until 2013, performing it, to date, 722 times, seeking a variety of musical expressions for it, but never tinkering with the lyrics, the way he has done with other songs.
As with ‘Gates of Eden,’ the best place to start is with that seminal concert on Oct 31st, 1964 at the Philharmonic Hall, New York City (The Bootleg Series Vol 6). Note the tempo, which is medium, not as fast as he will do it in 1965, and the hypnotic bending of his voice at the end of each line, drawing our attention to the rhyme. We can hear the master rhymester at work. A beautifully clear recording.
1964 Philharmonic
I found this next one undated in my archives. It sounds to me like 1964 but could be 1965. A reader might be able to identify this from the opening comments by what sounds like a folk club intro. I notice that Dylan gives the title as ‘It’s All Right, Ma (I’m Only Sighing)’ and that he’s accompanied at least by one other guitar. This sounds to me like a very early experiment with ‘going electric.’ The tempo has picked up a little from the Philharmonic performance.
For the album version, Dylan picked up the pace again. Now he was rapping out the lyrics at a mind-bending speed. It’s difficult now to convey the stunning effect of this song when it first appeared. I remember as an eighteen year old, with friends, clustered around a crappy old portable record player on full volume, staring at each other in astonishment – what the hell was this? There were no lyric sheets. We just had to figure it out, if we could keep up. We played it again and again. It was incomprehensible and hypnotic.
In retrospect, we can see Dylan as the grandfather of rap, or hip-hop. It’s most obvious in ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ but it’s here in this stunning 1965 performance. This could be as good as it gets, folks, it depends on how you view later manifestations of the song. And how fortunate that we have this video, shot in stark black and white, as a record of that performance. (May 1, 1965 Liverpool)
1965 Liverpool
It is the effect created by the flat, almost inflectionless vocal delivery and the driving rhythm that drives the song. Tempo is all important here, and we could argue that in 1965 Dylan got the mix just right, and that the slower, more deliberate rock versions we later find in the NET lose the momentum of the song.
But I get ahead of myself, let’s stay in 1965 for one more of the six wonderful performances of the song in that year. This one’s from Sheffield, April 30th, or at least that’s the date on the Live 1962-1966 – Rare Performances From The Copyright Collections (2018) collection. One of the YouTube comments however claims that the recording is really from Newcastle, May 6th.
1965 Sheffield
Dylan did not perform it in 1966, and it would be 1974 before he brought it back to the stage again, the song now ten years old.
For many of us, Dylan’s howling 1974 delivery brought the song back into focus after the ten-year break. We’d never heard it like this before. Gone was the flat, rapid-fire vocal delivery of 1965. He kept the fast tempo, in fact he increased the tempo to a manic rush, knocking nearly a minute off the performance time, but rather than the suppressed emotion of the earlier versions, we get an amped-up emotional delivery, a caterwaul of outrage and anger. Deciding which of these two approaches you prefer to listen to might depend on your mood. The sharp, restrained intensity of 1964 versus the unrestrained roller-coaster ride of 1974. ‘I have to stop listening, I feel sick,’ one YouTuber comments. I can understand that. The performance takes us to the vertiginous edge, listening to it a giddying experience. Not everybody likes what they see as Dylan’s ‘shouting’ 1974 performances.
This first is the performance from Before the Flood, at Los Angeles, February 14th.
1974 Los Angeles
That wasn’t the only stand-out performance of that year, but none of them surpass the Los Angeles version. We’ll move on 1975, the first year of the Rolling Thunder tour, in the next article.
In the meantime, don’t let them get you down.
Kia Ora
The second ‘undated’ version is from the Les Crane Show, Feb 17, 1965, with Bruce Langhorne accompanying on guitar.