- The utterly brilliant Angelina, plus Maybe Someday, Under you spell
- The album title songs Dylan wrote and ignored: JWH, Nashville Skyline.
- The songs Bob has never performed: Temporary Like Achilles
- No time, time passes and Dirge
By Tony Attwood
Four songs from “World Gone Wrong” have never been performed by Dylan (according to the official site): Love Henry, Stack a Lee and Broke Down Engine.
The reason is probably because of the simplicity and repetitiveness of the song. It consists of seven musical identical verses, in which the first two lines are varied and then the last three lines are repeated from verse to verse, as in…
Strange things have happened, like never before.My baby told me I would have to go.I can't be good no more, once like I did before.I can't be good, baby,Honey, because the world's gone wrong.
But what makes the song so worth hearing is the guitar part, which shows Bob at his finest as an acoustic guitarist. It’s worth a listen just for that.
However as we know, audiences at Bob concerts are no longer respectfully quiet as they were in the early days, so the song’s chance has long since passed. Which is a shame because Bob’s guitar accompaniment really is something to hear.
And there is another point here, that is who wrote the song (the increasingly bonkers AI Overview has no doubt telling us “Bob Dylan is the composer of the song “World Gone Wrong”. And to be fair, There is an implication in some places that Bob wrote this but in fact it dates back to the 1930s.
BB King recorded it too, but there is no doubt the Sheikhs got there first.
Maybe Bob just didn’t feel it could carry off such a repetitive piece on stage, or maybe someone with a bit of copyright knowledge suggested that playing it regularly on stage might just alert someone that some copyright acknowledgement might be due, or indeed some payment. And it is not as if America was not alert to copyright by the time the song was first recorded. The first Copyright Act in the US was passed in 1831.
But whatever the reason Bob didn’t go further with the song. Having recorded it and given the song’s name to the album itself, that was that.
But lest we think all of Bob’s decisions about not performing his own songs are just weird, or petulant or crazy, I want to divert into a song from the Bootleg 1-3 that Bob didn’t play live, and in my view quite rightfully so.
It is She’s Your Lover Now, and it would be good to say that this was an early version of “Like a Rolling Stone” but this was recorded and I think written, after “Like a Rolling Stone.” It sounds to me very much like an attempt to copy “Rolling Stone” and have another piece with all the merit of “Rolling Stone” – and failing.
Maybe you like that, but I really can’t find anything good in it.
That was on Bootleg 1-3, as was my final unperformed Dylan song for today, which I find an absolute and utter masterpiece “Foot of Pride”. It turned up on Bootleg Series 1-3, and it’s a good piece there, but I never marked it out for special admiration until I heard this.
And watching it is even more remarkable as Lou appears to me to be reading the lyrics off the monitor.
I don’t know about other covers of this, but then I haven’t really looked, but the main point for this little series is that Bob wrote (in my view) an utter masterpiece, and simply never performed it. Maybe when he made the recording that turned up on the volume 1-3 Bootleg, he knew there was far more to come from this song.
But fortunately, Lou was out there and performed it, and who cares if he was reading the lyrics on the monitor? It’s a brilliant way of representing the tedium and repetitiveness of life, and everyone trying to fight their way through, without ever going anywhere, without boring us senseless.