By Tony Attwood
My recent articles (see a few links at the end of this piece) concerning Bob Dylan’s early years of songwriting in the 1950s and 1960s have been, by my own admission, a ramble, because for once on this site I have started out publishing a series without knowing where it is going or what it is trying to prove – beyond the fact that we ought (in my opinion) to be spending much more time thinking about Dylan’s music rather than just focussing eternally on his lyrics.
Part of my emerging argument can be seen (I think) in How Bob Dylan turned the entire notion of how a song should be written, upside down and other recent articles under my name. And I recognise you may well have opted out of them given that Mike and Jochen have of late been offering much more considered and much more exciting pieces.
But my concern remains, and I want to try and summarise where I have got to thus far, because unformed and unresearched as it is, the concept still seems both very important and very under-researched. It is this:
What was Bob Dylan's approach to music when he started writing songs in 1959/60, and how did this approach evolve in the early years of his writing?
And I do want to explore this, because so many thousands of books and millions of articles have been written about Bob’s lyrics, it seems to me odd, that there have been so few articles considering the musical side of his work at the same time.
In many of the articles that have been published, of course it is true that lyrical issues overflow into the musical issues, and writers have recognisedd this – but in my view we are swamped by analyses of the lyrics. And important though they are, and as pleased as I have been to publish many such, they are only half the story.
So I am asking myself: what is it about the music of Dylan that is important? Or put another way, why has he written songs, rather than just written poetry (which is how many of the commentators on Bob’s work, treat the lyrics – or so it seems to me).
And to get this subject going I want to begin with the rhyme scheme. Everyone around in the 1950s for the launch of rock n roll, knew that there had to be rhymes, because songs always included rhymes, but they could be played with – a bit. Take “Rock Around the Clock” for example. Without thinking about it one might well be inclined to say that the rhyme was A A B B (hon, one; tonight, daylight) but in fact the consists of five lines when normally written out, although 12 bar blues structure makes this sound absolutely fine.
Put your glad rags on and join me, hon We'll have some fun when the clock strikes one We're going to rock around the clock tonight We're going to rock, rock, rock, until broad daylight We're going to rock, going to rock around the clock tonight
Some of course took this to be way too complicated for teenagers, and so simplified it even more until we got in subsequent songs things like…
You ain't nothing but a hound dog crying all the time You ain't nothing but a hound dog crying all the time You ain't never caught a rabbit and you ain't no friend of mine.
And yes I do know that “time” and “mine” don’t actually rhyme, but for the purposes of rock n roll they did.
But what Bob did was to break away from simplistic rhymes, just as he did with the whole rhyme scheme, the length of verses, the rhythm. “Masters of War” and “Times they are a-changing” for example are both in 12/8, which means the beat for “Come gather round people wherever you roam” is
3, 1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2 3, 1 2 3.
Masters of War plays with this “four groups of three” effect in a more pounding and forceful way
1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1 2 3 1
Come you masters of war2 3 1 2 3 1
You that build the big guns
And so having changed the whole way the rhythm works, Bob could change the rhyme scheme too – for in the first verse there is no rhyming scheme.
That song eventually has a scheme in which line 2 rhymes with line 4, and line 6 rhymes with line 8 and this applies all the way through the remaining seven verses. It is just verse one that is the odd one out.
These are changes from the norm that we don’t expect, for most of the popular music that had come before had been in straightforward four beats in a bar, with straightforward rhyme schemes which apply throughout. But Dylan made these changes work in terms of music and made them sound natural. Of course it is true that many others had used time signatures other than the straight four beats in a bar many times over, but four beats to a bar was by far the most common approach – but not that many songwriters had played with the rhyme scheme as Bob has done.
So my point is that although the prime focus has always been on Dylan’s lyrics, this has led, I think, to a view that the music is not particularly adventurous. And yet if one looks back just to yesterday’s article concerning the way that “It’s alright ma” has evolved on stage, shows us that this is a complete misconception.
At the risk of overdoing the point let me remind you of one of the versions of “It’s alright ma” which we published yesterday, and if you have a moment, this time in listening, please focus not on Bob’s voice but the arrangement of the instruments. Focus, if you will, on that descending instrumental line behind Bob’s verse. I don’t think they get it completely coordinated at the start but by the second line it really is running perfectly. What we have is a “melody” that is now little more than a declamation, but with all the musical interest now transferred to the accompaniment. I am finding it hard to think of antecedents to this approach.
Now within this context, we have to remember that across the years there have been precious few commentaries that focus on Bob Dylan the music arranger – it is always Bob Dylan the songwriter. But listening to that arrangement above (and of course it is just one of many) I feel yet again that we should indeed be thinking far more of Bob as a musical arranger just as much as anything else.
Which brings me back to the music within Bob’s songs. In one way it is tempting to feel that Bob has not been a great innovative composer of music, but I think this is wrong. When we start considering all the different aspects there are in songs, we can see that the singular focus on the lyrics, that many have contemplated, misses a major part of the work.
The variations in the rhyme schemes within a song, the changing length of the verses, the use of unusual rhythmic schemes, the rearrangement of the accompaniment, the occasional unusual chord sequences, all of these and more changes are within the music, but largely ignored because of the insistence of focussing on just the lyrics.
But to jump back, now consider this version of “Who Killed Davey Moore” – which has a musical approach quite different from the later released version.
And in fact I think that Dylan’s music does demand much deeper investigation. Now I have tried to mention this on occasion on this site, and in this regard, I want to quote myself (generally the sign of a writer on the slippery slope, but I really can’t find a better way to say this than I did a few years back)….
As I went out one morning
“… it is indeed interesting that he wrote the music not in a normal major or minor key of the type that we hear in 99.99% of our music today, but in a mediaeval mode. I think it is the phrygian mode – if you want to experiment sit at the piano and play the white notes only from E up to the next E. That scale of eight notes doesn’t sound major or minor, but actually sounds rather old and mediaeval. That is the phrygian mode – it was quite a thing in the 15th and 16th centuries…”
One of the benefits of Bob’s experimental approach to music, both in his original writing and then (perhaps more importantly) in the subsequent re-arrangements that he has developed is that it has shown many musicians the options that exist within Dylan’s music for the songs to be re-written. Consider this extraordinarily atmospheric version of Bob’s “Seven Curses”
This is by Gavin Ghee and was recorded in June 2021. It takes Seven Curses into a totally new world – and gives us a piece of music that I for one can play over and over again. Indeed a song that I, in writing about Bob, had really set aside as an early composition (it was written in 1963), and which I suspect many fans had likewise thought of as ok, it is interesting, but not in the top rank. Yet it turns out to be an utter masterpiece once it is re-arranged.
As far as I know, Bob didn’t contemplate the arrangement, but that’s not my point here. My point is that Bob wrote a song that had the potential in it to be re-arranged, and as a musician myself I can tell you that very many songs do not have this potential within them. Take them out of their original box, and they fall apart.
But as this arrangement shows, with this Dylan song (and there are many others) a re-arrangement can bring completely new life and meaning into a song. Indeed if you have been kind enough to read my ramblings on the subject of re-arrangements you will know the excessive praise I have thrown at the re-arrangement of Tweedle Dum.
And my point remains – if we only consider Bob’s lyrics, or we only consider the songs as they occur in their original form, we are missing a fundamental issue in Bob’s work. For I don’t think anyone else involved in popular music in any of its form, has engaged in this level of re-arrangement or multiple songs before, in this way.
So in considering Bob’s music, I think we should be considering not just the way he writes the original version, but also the fact that he somehow builds into many of his songs, ways in which they can be re-engineered – (if I can use that word about the creative musical process).
That this process has been ignored by so many writers, is because this is a process that focuses totally on the music – and for some reason most writers on Bob don’t like to write about his music.
But Bob has not been primarily a poet, nor even a poet who sets his poetry to music. He has from the start been a songwriter, and in my view, we can understand him so much better if that is how we contemplate his work.
If you have found this interesting you might also appreciate…
- How Bob Dylan turned the entire notion of how a song should be written, upside down.
- The songs got longer the form started to bend, we needed patience
- Dylan’s songwriting: does it matter who wrote the music (and were we missing a deeper meaning?)
- Bob Dylan, truth and fiction from 1963 to 1995. The Restless Farewell.
- Breaking down the rigidity of the popular song. Dylan in 1963