by Jochen Markhorst
II The Ghost of Casey Jones
I been into the baggage room Where the engineer's been tossed
Steel guitarist Bill Schlotter acknowledges that Rod Morris (1919-1980) may not have been as great a musician or as great a singer as, say, Roger Miller, but: what a songwriter. In the 1950s, Schlotter was the regular steel guitarist of Rod Morris And His Missourians in the studio and on stage, and he recorded a dozen or so songs with him for Capitol Records and later some more for Morris’s own label Ludwig Records. The record contract, Schlotter knows, was only offered because Capitol wanted to bring in the songwriter Rod Morris – the artist Rod Morris they then accepted as part of the deal. He recorded skillful country swing songs. Most of them are actually quite nice, but have since dissolved into the mists over the Waters of Oblivion. Except for the evergreen “Bimbo”, of course, the mega-hit for Jim Reeves, and maybe Slim Whitman’s “North Wind”. Schlotter’s paean to Morris’s writing skills even outlines a Dylan avant-la-lettre:
“Rod was a talent, a great talent. That’s why Capitol wanted him so bad, ’cause his writing ability was unquestionably great. He could sit down and hear some off the wall saying and write a song. Even during a recording session. They said, ‘That song’s too short.’ So he sat down at the piano and wrote another verse to it. Just uncanny how he could write.”
Pretty close to the exceptional working method and uncanny writing talent as described by eyewitnesses of Dylan’s studio sessions. And one of those songs Morris shakes out of his Stetson seems to echo somewhere in the back of the mind of the walking music encyclopaedia Dylan when he writes the first song for Highway 61 Revisited in the spring of 1965, for the time being calling it “Phantom Engineer”: “Ghost Of Casey Jones”, the B-side of “I’d Trade My Place Up In Heaven” (1958). Well, seems to be haunted by the same ghost, at least.
“It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” is the first song of the first Highway 61 Revisited session, 15 June 1965. The session lasts three hours. The second hour Dylan, producer Tom Wilson and the six session musicians then attempt to get an acceptable version of “Sitting On A Barbed Wire Fence” on tape; the last hour is spent on the first, embryonic takes of the earthquake “Like A Rolling Stone”. The next day, 16 June, is entirely devoted to “Like A Rolling Stone” (yielding THE version), and after that Dylan is busy with other things for a month and a half. The final version of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry” is only realised towards the end of the third session day, more than six weeks later, on 29 July. The fourth session in fact; 29 July is divided into a morning session and, after a lunch break, an afternoon session – the fourth and final take of that afternoon session is the “It Takes A Lot To Laugh”-version that goes on the album.
On that Thursday afternoon at Columbia Recording Studio A, the song is still called “Phantom Engineer”. Or, to be even more precise: the first recording sheet reads “Phantom Engineer Number Cloudy”, the one from the last session “Phantom Engineer”. An educated guess is that Dylan initially set the song up as a semi-epic ballad, something like “Ballad Of A Thin Man”, or “Mr. Tambourine Man”, songs in which a protagonist is placed “in some sort of predicament”, and then just wait and see what happens – as grandmaster Stephen King teaches us in On Writing (2000). And Dylan today opts for an engineer on the mail train – which inevitably leads the flow of thought to Casey Jones.
John Luther “Casey” Jones was killed trying to stop his train and save the lives of his passengers. The collision occurred on 30 April 1900 when Jones’ train, “Ole 382”, collided with a stationary freight train near Vaughan, Mississippi. His friend and colleague Wallace Saunders wrote a song about it, thus immortalising Casey – the song almost immediately found a place in the canon.
Dylan learns the song from John Koerner, as he writes in Chronicles (“I learned a lot of songs off Koerner. John played “Casey Jones,” “Golden Vanity” – he played a lot of ragtime style stuff”), but by the spring of 1965 he undoubtedly also knows the versions by Johnny Cash, by Pete Seeger, by Bing Crosby, and more. In 1992, he recorded the song himself with David Bromberg, and as a DJ in 2007, he plays one of the primal versions on his radio show: Furry Lewis’ 1928 “Kassie Jones”. The DJ seems to know the primordial version from 1900 as well, penned by Alan Lomax, and that one might just be the version that fertilised him in these mercurial days – at least, it is the only version that features the professional term “flagging down”: Lawd, they flagged him down but he never looked back (according to all official accident reports, Casey Jones ignored or missed the warnings of Flagman Newberry, who is said to have pointed out the danger with flag signals), and it is one of the few versions that explicitly says Casey’s train carries mail (“Cause I’m way behind time with the Southern mail”).
All in all, it seems fairly obvious that Dylan is thinking of Casey Jones as soon as he brings up a train engineer in a song. And of that one picture of Casey leaning on the windowsill. However, he has already left the folk scene; this will not be an epic ballad like “Rambling, Gambling Willie” or “Ballad of Hollis Brown” or “The Death of Emmett Till”. Dylan in these days has converted to the Beat Poets, to Kerouac, Michael McClure and Ginsberg, and to bookseller/poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whose shop City Lights in San Francisco he visited in 1965. Robbie Robertson is there and keeps his eyes open:
“Allen Ginsberg had put this gathering together, and I had come to appreciate the strong link between Bob and the Beat poets. Before Bob, nobody had written songs overflowing with the kind of imagery he conjured; he shared with these writers a kind of fearlessness when it came to pushing limits….”
(Robbie Robertson – Testimony, 2016)
… and a fearlessness that Dylan especially shares with William “Brother Bill” Burroughs, with whom he has an unfortunately barely documented date in a Greenwich Village café in the days leading up to the conception of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh”, in late March, early April 1965.
Burroughs’ impact on Dylan’s songs in the mercurial years is undeniable. Apart from the name-check in “Tombstone Blues” (“Now I wish I could give Brother Bill his great thrill”) and Dylan’s outspoken admiration in interviews, we also see how much he tries to imitate the chaotic, alienating cut-up technique not only in his prosa (Tarantula is on visual page level alone, graphically, a twin sister of Burroughs’ Nova Express) but also and especially in his songs. We find dozens of borrowings of unreal word combinations and striking idioms – too many in any case to attribute to chance. In the embryonic phase of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh”, for example, “phantom” in particular seems to owe a debt to reading Burroughs. “Phantom” is one of those striking words that Burroughs uses dozens of times, and then – even more strikingly – often as Dylan does today: as an adjective to a noun, often enough function designations. With Burroughs, we find a phantom gun, phantom interrogators, phantom voices, phantom porters, phantom tendrils, phantom motor scooters, and more.
Apart from those external triggers we then have, of course, Dylan’s own eternal preoccupation with trains. “That’s just my hang up, you know, trains,” as Dylan says in 1991’s radio interview with Eliot Mintz. “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” is already the thirteenth Dylan song in which a train comes along, and in the album’s liner notes, too, a train is again alpha and omega: “On the slow train time does not interfere” is the opening, “Vivaldi’s green jacket & the holy slow train” are the closing words (before that odd coda, in which Dylan weirdly echoes Harry Haller’s last words from Herman Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf – “I understood Pablo. I understood Mozart” vs. Dylans “quazimodo was right–mozart was right”).
Anyway: Robert Johnson, The Foggy Mountain Boys, “Roll In My Sweet Baby’s Arms” and “Rambling On My Mind” and “Ghost Of Casey Jones”, Furry Lewis, Ferlinghetti, William Burroughs and a train… all the undercurrents are in motion. Dylan has a setting and a protagonist, the song will now write itself.
To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 3: La petite morte
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