By Tony Attwood
Previously in this series, which is becoming known (to me at least) as Dylan, the composer, I’ve looked at…
- Blowing in the Wind and No More Aucion Block
- Bob Dylan’s Dream How the most subtle of musical changes gave the song a totally different meaning
- Masters of War How Bob Dylan became a poet first and a songwriter second
- Girl from the north country, Farewell, All Over You, The Death of Emmett Till
- Davey Moore and Joni Mitchell’s complaint
- Walls of Red Wing and New Orleans Rag
- Seven Curses and With God on Our Side
- Dylan 1963, the era of other people’s songs: From talking blues to eternal circle
- North Country Blues and the evolution of the equality of lyrics AND music
- Dylan in 1963: “Gypsy Lou” and “Troubled and I Don’t Know Why”
- When the Ship Comes in: from Pirate Jenny onward.
- When Bob said Times they are a changing it is quite likely he didn’t fully realise how.
In the last article I included a recording of Times they are a changin’ performed 32 years after its composition, by which time Bob had performed it perhaps 500 or more times in concert. The 12/8 time is still there, recognisable through the slow pulsing beat, and the lyrics are the same, but the melody has changed considerably, as has the tempo. It would be too much to say it had become a new song, but the level of change between the original recording and that performance is reminiscent of what happened to folk songs prior to the days of recording technology. Only with folk songs different performers changed them; here Dylan was doing his own transformations.
And it is worth contemplating for a moment just how radical this notion of re-writing one’s own hits was, for in the years leading up to Dylan’s emergence, the recorded version of a popular song was considered to be the definitive version of the song. When people went to a pop or rock concert they expected to hear and see the band perform as they knew the song from the record. This in turn, often led performers on TV to mime their hit songs while the released recording was played. Indeed, there often was little attempt to hide the fact of the miming, since quite clearly there were no cables running from the guitars to amps.
However I don’t recall ever reading that Dylan mimed one of his own songs for the sake of a broadcast, and indeed I think that would be completely against his whole concept of what music is about: it is about the performance. Besides, he has changed the arrangements of his songs so often that miming would surely be against the whole concept of song creation that Dylan has propagated, although if you have come across a clear instance of Dylan miming, please do let me know. Even better if there is a video of such an event; I’d love to see it.
Of course, one of the great benefits of the regular revision of the songs has been that Bob could keep performing them across the years without either he or us getting totally bored with the pieces. Indeed, when we note that three songs have been performed in concert over 2000 times live, and another seven have been performed over 1000 times live, this surely becomes a necessity for the mental well-being of both Bob and the band. The regular gigs could not have existed without the changes.
But it is easy to forget just how unusual this notion of re-arranging was when Bob started doing it. Indeed in Chronicles Bob does explore his idea that live performances should revise existing arrangements and performances all the time, suggesting clearly that he realised others didn’t appreciate why he was doing what he was doing. And I would argue that this is unusual. I am sure other artists and bands have since taken up this idea – and if you’d care to give me a few examples, I’d be grateful, but I do think Bob was one of the first, if not the first, to go out of his way to return to the folk music tradition of re-inventing the songs as one travelled around the country giving performances.
My key point here is that Bob did this musically. Although some verses were missed out, and some mistakes were made, I think (just relying on my memory here) that Bob by and large left the lyrics alone – although I do recall “Rolling Stone” and “Blowin in the Wind” getting some changes lyrically.
But we can compare a couple of versions of “One Too Many Mornings” first from 1965 with its utterly plaintive message…
… with a performance one year later where the instrumental opening before Dylan sings (at around 17 seconds) seems to owe more to “Like a Rolling Stone” than it does to the BBC Studios version one year earlier (above).
I am not sure (or perhaps better said, I haven’t seen this expressed) why Bob has regularly done this. Is it because he has a new vision for what the song means, or just because it can be done (as in, “hey lets see what happens if we give it a beat”). But it is something as we can hear above, that he has done from the very early stages of his career.
Now of course, we know that folk songs and the early blues all changed over time, simply because they were songs handed across from one performer to another. Some of the changes would have been made deliberately to “improve” the song, some made deliberately to accommodate the vocalist’s range, some because of which instruments were available, and some happened because the travelling musician/s couldn’t remember how the song used to go. Bob, however, as we can hear from the example above, took this on as a core idea in his work from the early days of touring. The songs were not static: they were living, breathing creations, which like their creator, could develop and evolve over time.
But at the same time, we have to recognise that Bob was also writing new songs, and exploring different approaches as he did. And as a little bit of fun while I was writing this, I asked a couple of knowledgeable Dylan pals what song Bob wrote straight after “Times they are a changin’.”
Now of course there can always be some arguments about what came when, but in reality I was the only one who knew, and that was because I’d just looked it up. And indeed I have to admit I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t looked it up, even though I’ve written the chronology in the past. Here is what I think is the right answer.
Now the point I would make is that this song has nothing in common with “Times They Are A-changin’,” which came immediately before. It is also true that Bob credited Paul Clayton with the melody and that credit suggests that yes, Bob wrote the lyrics but was still unsure about his ability to find melodies to accompany what he could do lyrically, despite what he had achieved with “Times they are a changin'”
In fact it is often reported that the music Dylan created to the lyrics was taken from the Scottish ballad “The Twa Sisters” but really, I think this is stretching things a bit….
Although I think I can hear a closer resemblance from this next version, and that makes me think there perhaps was another version (there are indeed many, many versions) that Bob heard, but I am suspecting at this moment that this is one of those tales where someone says, “Bob’s music comes from x” and everyone else keeps saying that. But please do correct me if you have found a source that sounds a little bit like Bob’s version.
The song relates the story of a fatal car crash and a subsequent manslaughter conviction and 99-year sentence in Joliet Prison that is handed down to the driver (a friend of the first-person narrator). The narrator goes to ask the sentencing judge to commute his friend’s sentence, which he considers too harsh, but the sentence stands. The story of the hard-hearted judge is reminiscent of the Child ballad “Geordie”.
The song has 16 verses but only two new lines in each verse (the other two being “Turn, turn, turn again” and “Turn, turn to the rain and the wind” and takes up the theme, common in the folk music of previous sentences, in which a friend of the singer is sent to prison for 99 years. The singer locates the judge and says that it can’t be possible for his friend to have committed such a crime, but the judge will have none of it, and the singer is sent away.
It is in fact a classic tale of either blatant injustice or justice having no heart – and the fear among the less educated that the world has no understanding of them and their lives. They were at the mercy of the rich, the powerful, and events.
The song has of course, mutated many, many times, and I am not at all sure which version Bob heard but I rather think (without any direct evidence) it might have been one of the versions that went like this….
So what we have, not for the first time, is Bob being confident in his lyrical writing, but less confident in his composition of music – although this we might remember, was immediately after composing “Times they are a changing”.
Perhaps what is the most interesting and informative element in this moment of Bob’s writing career was that following this sad tale of the 99 year prison sentence, Bob’s next song was another song of injustice, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll.
And it does strike me that there is a point to be made here, and that is that on occasion, knowing the sequence in which Bob wrote the songs, we can see connections between them. This is not always the case, but it appears that “Times they are a-changin'” did not lead Bob to write more songs about a bright and positive future created by the young, whose parents did not understand their own offspring, but instead led him to write not about a bright future, but about the injustices in the past and present. Why Bob’s writing did take this turn, I’m really not too sure, but maybe you can help explain it or maybe it will come to me in due course.
What is true is that the success of “Times” which appears to be a completely original Bob Dylan song in terms of the music, did not lead him immediately to create more songs with his own music, for there again part of the song came from the folk tradition – in this case “Mary Hamilton”. Somehow Bob didn’t seem to believe in himself as a composer, even after writing “Times”.
The series continues.