- Part 1: Wild rose in the heather
- Part 2: You can hear the air around it
by Jochen Markhorst
III That long rambling talking thing
It is, of course, not that surprising, Henry Rollins being so moved by Time Out Of Mind and by “Love And Theft”; after all, he is hearing himself. Or rather: his own words. Some of Rollins’ verses seem to inspire whole songs (“Million Miles”), in the masterpiece “Mississippi”, at least four fragments seem to have been borrowed from him, both in the outtakes and in eight of the eleven Time Out Of Mind songs, Scott Warmuth finds Rollins quotations, and again in “Highlands”, pretty obvious. The fragment “All the young men with their young women looking so good / Well, I’d trade places with any of them / In a minute, if I could” as well as “I think what I need might be a full-length leather coat / Somebody just asked me / If I registered to vote” are lovingly stolen. And diluted, more fragments qualify for the Rollins label. A terrifying line like Insanity is smashing up against my soul, for instance, does smell an awful lot like the work in the poetry collection See A Grown Man Cry, like a ferocious six-liner as
Alone looking for the quickest way to get to pain I am my soul smasher love call death trip I slashed the wrists of Destiny and took total control I watch the night strangle the sun Hail night Darkness, my brother
… “a few bad turns” Dylan also reads in Now Watch Him Die, as well as “I have new eyes” (“I got new eyes” in the last verse of “Highlands”), and there are more whole and half borrowings like that.
“Highlands” is particularly peculiarly structured. Twenty quatrains, which for some reason on paper are all represented as quintains;
I’m listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound Someone’s always yelling turn it down Feel like I’m drifting Drifting from scene to scene I’m wondering what in the devil could it all possibly mean?
… for example, which is of course just a simple four-liner, both in recitation and in rhyme;
I’m listening to Neil Young, I gotta turn up the sound Someone’s always yelling turn it down Feel like I’m drifting, drifting from scene to scene I’m wondering what in the devil could it all possibly mean?
A “restructuring” that can be done for all twenty verses plus choruses. After all, all twenty stanzas are modelled on the template, on Robert Burns’ “My Heart’s in the Highlands”: four-liners in the simplest rhyme scheme aabb.
Which is not a peculiar thing, of course. Concealing the “real” form is something Dylan, or his editor, does with prodigious tenacity in every decade and every edition of Lyrics, God knows why. No, the peculiar thing is the function structuring, the chaotic formal tripartite structure:
- Choruses: 1, 4, 7, 15, 20
- Lyrical couplets: 2, 3, 5, 6, 16-19
- “Boston one-act play”: 8-14
Bob Dylan – Highlands:
So, during seven stanzas, the song seems to have a traditional verse-verse-refrain structure, then this framework is interrupted by an epic intermezzo of seven stanzas, not to return to the original structure afterwards. This seems to be mainly due to inattention, by the way: it seems that Dylan simply forgets a refrain – if he had added only one refrain, a refrain after stanza 17, the traditional verse-verse-refrain structure would have been maintained.
The eight lyrical couplets are interchangeable. They are, in any case, not connected by a plot, but they are eight separate tableaus, connected only by the voice of the narrator: by an elderly first-person narrator who eight times expresses uneasiness, fatigue and unfulfillable longing. Most tableaus seem to be triggered by a Rollins fragment, which is then developed into a quatrain by an associating, improvising Dylan. Rollins’ “shake the bars in front of my windows” (from Now Watch Him Die), for example, seems to trigger Dylan’s opening line “Windows were shakin’ all night in my dreams”, “feel like a prisoner” from the second verse can literally be found in See A Grown Man Cry, and like this, Rollins traces can be found in each of the eight lyrical stanzas. Dylan confirms the improvised character of the song by his explanations during a press conference in London, 1997:
Q: On your album, the song Highlands seems very improvised. How well prepared are you when you go into the studio?
BD: “Well, I think that long rambling talking thing… I think I’ve recorded things like that before, real early on. In that type of form, a person can say whatever they want because the form is simple. I wouldn’t say it was improvised, but a lot of different thoughts were connected in a lot of different ways that might necessarily not be what they seem to be on the paper when they were written. This is like thoughts, you know, that could be connected over a two-month period of time.”
Beautiful tableaux, visually strong and moving enough, but in itself not that special; “just dylanesque” as it were, comparable to language, tone and content of, say, “Cold Irons Bound” or “Standing In The Doorway”. No, the real attention grabber, the distinctive strength of the song is of course, that bizarre “Boston interlude”.
Bill Lamm – (I Hate To See) A Grown Man Cry:
To be continued. Next up Highlands part 4 (final): She studied the lines on my face
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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:
- Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
- Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
- Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
- Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
- Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
- Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
- Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
- John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
- Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
- Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
- Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2nd Big Bang
- Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
- Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
- Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
- Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
- I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
- Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
- Bob Dylan’s 1971
- Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door