Previously….
It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue; A History in Performance, Part 1: 1965. Crying like a fire in the sun
Articles relating to earlier songs from the album are listed at the end.
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
By Mike Johnson
[I read somewhere that if you wanted the very best, the acme of Dylan’s pre-electric work, you couldn’t do better than listen to side B of Bringing It All Back Home, 1964. Four songs, ‘Mr Tambourine Man,’ ‘Gates of Eden,’ ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’ and ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ represent the pinnacle of Dylan’s acoustic achievement. In this series I aim to chart how each of these foundation songs fared in performance over the years, the changing face of each song and its ultimate fate (at least to date). This is the second article on the fourth and final track, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’ You can find the previous articles in this History in Performance series here: ]
- He is addressing America and appears to feed off The Lamentations of Jeremiah in the Old Testament. (Robin Witting on ‘Baby Blue.’)
- ‘I said what I said,’ (Dylan, ‘False Prophet.’)
Carl Jung maintained that dreams speak to us in the language of the unconscious. That language consists of symbols and non-literal images. The aim of that language is to express feelings, thoughts and experiences inaccessible to the conscious mind and so reveal hidden aspects of ourselves. The aim of ‘dream analysis’ is to decode or translate those symbols and images into language the conscious mind can grasp.
That brings us directly to the question of Dylan’s lyrics and how we should approach them. To my mind, Dylan’s best songs work like dreams and speak directly to our unconscious mind. To what extent, then, should we try to decode those lyrics, tame them to the conscious mind? When does explaining them become explaining them away?
There’s a history of literary criticism at stake here, a standard approach to poetry which requires a ‘dream analysis’ of a poem, translating it into rational, expository prose. The teacher will present a poem and ask the hapless students to write a paragraph explaining the poem, to nail down ‘what the poet is trying to say,’ as if poets were handicapped or verbally challenged in some way, unable to say what they were trying to say. (‘I said what I said’)
Something is always lost in translation. The magic, which lit the unconscious mind, has disappeared. You nail down a corpse from which the spirit has fled.
I face this issue when I come to Dylan’s lyrics, especially ‘Baby Blue,’ where there is a powerful emotional dynamic at work. Consider these lines:
yonder stands your orphan with his gun crying like a fire in the sun
If I were to approach these lines in the spirit of Jung’s dream analysis, I’d probably start by saying that a fire might cry because, no matter how bright it burns, it is nothing compared to the sun. The flame of the fire is lost in the brightness of the sun. Then I might start picking away at the ‘orphan’, which is perhaps yourself, as a child, the abandoned one, coming back armed for revenge.
I might be tempted to compare those lines with these, later in the song:
the vagabond who’s rapping at your door is standing in the clothes that you once wore
and draw a line from the ‘orphan’ to the ‘vagabond,’ your former self perhaps, both images approaching the same emotional nexus … and so on and so on. And the longer I go on, the clumsier and more convoluted my thoughts become and the further away from the song I get. Possibly, I am led up the garden path, cleverly tricked perhaps by the lyricist himself who delights in creating mazes and mirrors to fool the conscious mind. (Whereas some poets might write in order to be decoded – Robert Frost – others, like Dylan, seem to delight in sabotaging our dream analysis.)
I may have my piece of expository prose, but is it worth the effort? And even if it was, someone else would come along with their own interpretation. Disputes arise, while the song itself, eluding our grasp, slips away.
I’m not saying that we can’t decode a Dylan song, or analyse it, or interpret it, because, with varying degrees of success, we can. What I’m questioning is the value of it. I enjoy Dylan best when I forget all that, strip away the dream analysis and interpretations and let the song speak directly to my unconscious mind, which is what it is designed to do. The crying orphan with his gun now stands luminous in my mind, bright and fierce, an emblematic archetypal figure. It is what it is. It makes me feel. Feel loss and abandonment, feel alienation from my childhood self, feel on the brink of change. Feel grief.
“How does it feeeeel?” That is the question. Not, “What does it mean?”
As with ‘It’s Alright Ma,’ ‘Baby Blue’ was pushed to one side in the Rolling Thunder tour. The song was performed only twice in 1975, both in Canada at the end of the tour, Toronto on 1st Dec and Montreal on December 4th. It may have been a bit of an afterthought, but both performances are worth catching.
This is Toronto. Beautifully paced. Incomparable vocal. Enjoy.
1975 Toronto
And another superlative performance in Montreal. The sound may be a bit better, at least a bit sharper, than the Toronto performance. The quivering, emotional voice Dylan found for Rolling Thunder suits ‘Baby Blue’ just fine. It sounds like he’s saying these things to try to find his own courage.
1975 Montreal
Dylan did do the song once in 1976, but the recording is poor and the performance unexceptional, so I’m going to gloss over it and jump to 1978, a year which saw his old material, including ‘It’s Alright, Ma,’ get a big makeover. Adapted for a big band.
‘Baby Blue,’ played at most of the concerts that year, sounds like a different song, not because of the big band, that is quite minimal, but Dylan’s extraordinary voice. Pitched in the upper register, with an ecstatic edge that was to mark the coming three years of gospel songs. There is triumph and desperation all mixed up together in that voice.
The first leg of the 1978 tour, Japan, has received all the attention with the Bodokan concert and its subsequent upgrade and re-release, but for my money the last leg of the tour, the American leg, provides the most exciting performances.
This one’s from Chicago, Nov 18th
1978 Chicago
With this next one from that American leg (exact date unknown), we can hear how the band fits together at the beginning of the song. There’s a hard, brittle edge in Dylan’s vocals.
1978
The song is dropped in 1979 (when Dylan sang only his new material) and reappears in 1980 for a handful of performances. We can’t go past this Portland performance. I have previously suggested that, regardless of what he was singing, 1980 and 1981 were peak years for Dylan’s vocal. His main instrument. His voice.
This vocal performance is mind-blowingly good – vivid, nuanced, stretched, pain and reconciliation all mixed together. Remarkable. It has me reaching for my ‘best ever!’ placard, which I haven’t used since the 1966 performances. The recording too is impeccable.
The audience is ecstatic. They can barely contain their excitement. Here is their old Bob back! Stripped of big band and girl chorus and the trappings of faith, Bob alone with his guitar and harp, singing out his heart.
This has the feel of an historic moment. In 1965, as the last track on the transitional album Bringing It All Back Home, the song seemed to signal a farewell to an era, the era of Dylan, the acoustic, folk singer. Perhaps the particular poignancy of this 1980 performance is that it also signals the end of an era. It’s all over now for the pre-Christian Bob, everything that came before his conversion – ‘Look out! the saints are coming through.’
1980 Portland.
1981 also saw only a handful of performances, just enough to keep the song alive. The London performance was chosen for the collection Trouble No More (The Bootleg Series Volume 13), which may not have the emotional vibrancy of the 1980 Portland version but is a good solid performance:
1981 London
Next we turn to 1984, which saw a dozen performances of the song. I’ll be picking up the trail in the next article.
Until then,
Kia Ora
Tambourine Man
- Part 1: A masterpiece is born
- Part 2: 1966 – Darker hues.
- Part 3 – Chasing Shadows
- Part 4. 1978-1986. Far From the Twisted Reach
- Part 5: 1986-1993: Evening’s Empire
- Part 6: 1994 – 99: My weariness amazes me
- Part 7: 2000 – 2010: the jingle jangle.
Gates of Eden
- Part 1: 1964 Ancestral voices prophesying war
- Part 2: 1974 – 1991 A crashing but meaningless blow
- Part 3: 1991 – 2001. Where Babies Wail: A Spooky Grandeur
It’s alright ma
- Part 1 1964 – 74 – From the fool’s gold mouthpiece
- Part 2: 1975/81 – Stuffed graveyards and false gods.
- Part 3: 1984 – One who sings with his tongue on fire.
- Part 4: 1988 – The darkness at the break of noon
- Part 5: 1999 – 2004. Stuffed graveyards, false goals.