The songs got longer the form started to bend, we needed patience

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks when you're 
                                         tryin' to be so quiet
We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it
And Louise holds a handful of rain, temptin' you to defy it

Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In this room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off

Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind

And Madonna, she still has not showed
We see this empty cage now corrode
Where her cape of the stage once had flowed
The fiddler, he now steps to the road
He writes everything's been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes

But then having done that experiment I am not sure how often (if at all) Bob came back and re-used the approach, even though it works so well.  For even if one doesn’t appreciate the actual technique is still very unsettling and adds a real sense of expansion and desperation as we approach the line “Oh how can I explain”.   It is in fact a moment of songwriting genius, for the power mustered at, “How can I explain” is there irrespective of whether we appreciate what has happened musically, or not.

Thus I would argue the early days of playing with a band was a time of regular song-writing experiments by Bob, which we can easily miss, or maybe just accept as part of the song, even though they make the song feel a bit odd because it suddenly doesn’t follow the traditional rules.

If we take “Thin Man” for example it consists of seven verses of identical musical structure, but there is also what we might call a “B” section which crops up after verse three but nowhere else…

You have many contacts among the lumberjacks
To get you facts when someone attacks your imagination
But nobody has any respect, anyway they already expect 
     you to all give a check
To tax-deductible charity organizations

If we were to try and describe the form in the classical way, it would be

A  A  A  B  A  A  A  A

… a form which has no name and indeed which I don’t think I’ve noted in any other song or any era.

Now of course there is nothing in the rule book that says that songs have to be in a particular form – it is just that folk songs have evolved in a certain style in order to make them memorable and recognisable, in an era when live performance was all we had.

And I suspect like all species, humans like to have certain things around them that are recognisable, which in musical terms means a structure everyone can recognise, even if the listener has no musical experience or education.    So although not all songs follow the repeating formats of either Strophic Form (Verse – Verse – Verse…), or the variant Ternary Form (Verse – Verse – Middle 8 – Verse), most popular songs do, because that makes them easier to appreciate, and easier to remember.

Indeed it can seem rather shocking to note the fact, but in terms of 99% of popular songs, the only form the song exists in is either “Strophic” or “Ternary”, and these two are hardly massively different, in that a ternary song is just like a strophic song but with a “middle eight” or “B” section added, usually after the first two verses (or “A” sections).

But what it seems to me that Bob has done from his earliest days, is to look for ways to make changes to these two all-pervading structures, but without the music becoming incomprehensible to his audience.

Thus we have the fairly obvious techniques such as the repeated last line such as, “The answer is blowing in the wind” and the repeatedly re-used “The times they are a changing” to give a sense of unity to the strophic songs.

But we also get the revolutionary idea quite early on that not all the verses have to be exactly the same.  Of course, if one wants to keep the strophic structure of verse – verse – verse then each verse has to be recognisable as having the same musical basis, and that makes the music memorable but the songwriting restrictive.  But what Bob did from quite early on was explore the notion of these extra lines within a verse, and a move away from rhyming.

Consider for example “Hard Rain”.   Verse one starting “Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?” has nine lines.  Lines one and two rhyme:

"Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?"
Oh, where have you been, my darling young one?

but after that there are no rhymes at all.

The second verse has 11 lines with a couple of partial rhymes (“dripping” and “bleeding”)

I’ve stumbled on the side of twelve misty mountains
I’ve walked and I’ve crawled on six crooked highways
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it’s a hard, and it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
And it’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall

Verse 3 has 11 lines but verse 4 has only ten lines, while the final verse has 16 lines.  This is an approach which if not totally unknown elsewhere either in pop / rock music or in folk music is at least extraordinarily unusual.

And we have to remember that Dylan was entering a world in which the song in popular music lasted between two and a half minutes to three and a half minutes.  This tradition goes back to the early days of the phonograph and the limitations of that technology, but also reflects the move from the song as a way of recording important events in history, or (for example with Scarborough Fair) listing a range of near impossible tasks for the would-be lover to perform in order to show that he is truly in love with the singer.

We should also remember that prior to Dylan, the most eminent of all American songwriters was Irving Berlin (who is estimated to have written around 1,250 songs many of which became classics) who along with everyone else wrote songs that lasted around three minutes.  Indeed if we consider his most well-remembered song (White Christmas), we can note that contained just 52 words in the lyrics, there being just two verses which are then repeated.  “Visions of Johanna” in terms of words is over eight times the length.

“White Christmas” – the most famous song by the most prolific and successful songwriter of all time, reveals an approach which is the exact opposite of that of Bob Dylan.  Berlin’s Christmas deals with a simplistic vision of an imagined perfect event.  We might compare that with a song containing a vision that itself cannot be trusted as being representative of reality (as the very first line of the song says – “Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re trying to be so quiet”).

But the length of the song is of course not the key issue.  What “White Christmas” does it give the listener a simple reassuring message – and reassuring not just because of what type lyrics say, but because the complete set of lyrics comes twice.   “Visions” is absolutely the opposite.  Everything is confused and uncertain from those famous opening lines…

Ain't it just like the night to play tricks
When you're tryin' to be so quiet
We sit here stranded, though we're all doin' our best to deny it