By Tony Attwood
(Preliminary note: I do know that I included this street performance of Hattie Carroll in an article under a week ago. But I include it again because it is one of the most extraordinary cover versions of a Dylan song I have ever heard. I’ll try and restrain myself better in future).
This article continues from If only there had been a Nobel Prize for music, part 1
In various earlier articles, I have tried to trace what Bob has done as he has moved away from the love and lost love lyrical themes that have dominated pop and popular music since the development of the phonograph, into songs in which the music and the lyrics are of equal significance. And Bob has done this by varying a whole range of factors, including
The length of the song. Gone are the days of two and a half minutes (a concept created by the technology of the 78rpm record).
The length of the verse. With Dylan we found we could have verses that can have different numbers of lines as the song progresses – something virtually unknown in popular music or folk music before Bob came along.
The changing rhyme scheme. Previously the rhyme scheme within each song was more or less fixed, and might be written as A A B B or A B C B with each letter representing a rhyme. But this notion of there being only a handful of acceptable rhyming schemes restricts what the music can do. Thus as Bob has varied rhyme schemes or even abandoned them part way through a song, he has evolved ways of changing the feel of the song without in any way losing the concept that we are in the same song.
Of course, it can be argued that the rhyme scheme is part of the lyrics, a notion that would in some degree exclude it from my approach that says that Bob should be seen as a musician as well as a poet, but the rhyme of a song really does affect the way the music runs, as much as the sound of the lyric at the end of the line. The rhyme scheme plays a part in determining how we “feel” the music. Non-rhyming lines (including lines with the same word at the end of each line) in which the music is the same, keep us on edge, in the way that rhyming lines don’t.
Just consider the impact of this in the song we were looking at in the last article
Hattie Carroll was a maid of the kitchenShe was 51 years old and gave birth to 10 childrenWho carried the dishes and took out the garbageAnd never sat once at the head of the tableAnd didn’t even talk to the people at the tableWho just cleaned up all the food from the tableAnd emptied the ashtrays on a whole other levelGot killed by a blow, lay slain by a caneThat sailed through the air and came down through the roomDoomed and determined to destroy all the gentleAnd she never done nothing to William Zanzinger
Those end-of-line words give an edge of desperation to the music so that we hear the ceaselessly repeated line of music as painful. If the music had been jolly the immediate complaints of many would be “But it doesn’t rhyme”. In this case, however, no one makes that complaint.
Changing the structure of the song. With Bob we can often find that we are no longer working to the A A B A format, (or verse, verse, middle 8, verse as I have been describing it) but instead, as also I have been trying to show in recent articles, we can come across the variant verse (known as the middle 8) not where it normally appears (between the second and third verse, and then subsequently alternating with the verses through the rest of the song). For now, it can turn up between the third verse and before the fourth, and then no more as we just get verse, verse, verse etc.
This movement away from the accepted structure of pop and rock again puts us on edge, because we don’t know where the song is going, except we feel that things are not going to end well – which is exactly the point of “Hattie Carrol”
Adding to the importance of the last line of music by repeating it. This is not a major change, and it is taken from earlier folk music, but it has an impact and has not been that much used in popular music. Thus the last line of each verse of “Times they are a changing” is always the same. It seems obvious when it is done, but it was not that often done before Bob came along.
Massively increasing the number of words in the song As we noted there are just 52 words in “White Christmas” which means there is precious little chance of changing the music as we go through the song. But massively increasing the number of words gives many more opportunities for the music to change within the song. Bob explored increasing the number of words and out of this idea he found that he could amend the music as he went as well..
Varying the message, including a message that everything in the world is going wrong, rather than an insistence that everything is fine because “I love you” was an incredibly powerful step. Of course there had been sad songs before, songs of lost love and death, but few if any which explored all the tangled emotions that we can experience as people, when the world seems to be transformed, or indeed no longer makes any sense.
When one stats investgiating an idea like this we soon find that the music has to be transformed to meet this added dimension. “Visions of Johanna” is almost ten times as long as White Christmas, because it expresses a world of contradiction and incompleteness as in…
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it
Of course Bob didn’t adopt all these new approaches to lyrics and thus to the music he created immediately, for he started out writing what we might call “straight songs”, even when taking on board lyrical subjects that were certainly not commonplace in popular or folk music before he came along…. Gypsy Lou is a song about art and protesting for example. Two lines of music, a chorus, and a harmonica break is basically all there is. And yes I know there’s a mistake in the performance, but I do love the way Bob approaches the song in this version.
Indeed if we were just to listen some of Bob’s early recordings we might think he would never get away from the verse / chorus / verse approach, complete with repeated lines within the chorus.
When the ship comes in however does seek to take us in a new direction by having the repeated title line halfway through each verse, rather than at the end of each verse as had always been traditionally the case.
But now here is the point: as I noted in earlier articles, “When the ship comes in” was only performed three times in public despite being very unusual in the context of folk songs, having a great buoyant melody, and an intriguing message of hope.
But could it be that, fun though the music is, Bob really was at this moment looking for songs that did something else musically, as well as in terms of the message it portrayed. Or maybe at the time, it felt a little bit too religious. But maybe also Bob realised that he could go a lot, lot further still, in terms of where he took the music.
The series continues.