By Tony Attwood
If only there had been a Nobel Prize for Music
- 1: We might have noted the musical innovations more
- 2: From Hattie Carroll to the incoming ship
- 3: From Times to Percy’s song
- 4: Combining musical traditions in unique ways
- 5: Using music to take us to a world of hope
In the last article (Using music to take us to a world of hope) I took a look at the music of such songs as The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, Lay Down your Weary Tune, One too many mornings, and Restless Farewell and of course you may well have thought that the title was singularly inappropriate, because those songs express the negative side of the world in which Bob Dylan found himself at the end of 1963.
He had of course given us hope with Times they are a changin, and When the ship Comes In, but he had somewhat backed off this as the year drew to a close and he was in his lyrics at least, emphasising why the world needed to change, rather than just telling us (as in those two slightly earlier songs) that it was changing.
But in 1964 although the title of the opening composition (Guess I’m doing fine) was utterly ironic, the next song “Chimes of Freedom” suddenly had an uplift for the audience in its vision of the future. And indeed this occurred not just in the lyrics but also in the music. It was as if the notion of using music to take us to that “world of hope” was still very much on the agenda.
For there is something in those opening chords of “Chimes of Freedom” that really does take us to another place. I can certainly do no better than quote Eyolf Østrem’s tabulation of the guitar playing by Dylan – and even if you don’t play the guitar you’ll recognise that what we have here are not the normal major chords of a song that would be written G, D, C etc etc.
G G/d D G/d C/d G Far between sundown's finish an' midnight's broken toll G/d C/d G/d D G C/g G We ducked inside the doorway as thunder went crashing
This clearly is an example of Dylan exploring just how much he could get out of a solo guitar accompaniment. But it is interesting that also in his early live performances, he reverted to performing the song accompanied by the classic major chords only. This can be seen and heard in this performance from the 1964 Newport Folk Festival.
In fact, in that performance, Bob was varying the melody and timing – not dramatically but enough to make us feel there was something different about the song from that which we heard on the recording. In fact, although the song is quite clearly “Chimes of Freedom” Bob is already at this very early stage, exploring his creation further. Perhaps with some aim in mind, perhaps (and I suspect more likely) just to see where it might go.
Certainly, by the final performances of the song in 2012 it was at moments hard to recognise as the piece being that which was recorded almost 50 years earlier.
Maybe it is Bob’s desire to retain the complexity of the sounds of those chords that persuaded him not to play the song in public more than 56 times. Although of course, it could also be the fact that the Chimes of Freedom did not materialise in the real world, as he had originally imagined they might.
Whatever the reason for Bob not continuing regularly to perform the song over time, what then happened was that Bob had a total change of direction musically and lyrically, for the next song he composed had within it no expectation of future freedom, other than to say it is there if you want to take it for “but for the sky there are no fences facing.”
This song was also a song with a chorus, and not just a single chorus line – and choruses are something rather unusual in Dylan’s work (although not unknown of course) – and the chorus comes five times within the song. However, although this simple description makes this sound like a verse and chorus song, one of the most commonplace structures of a song, the actual approach of the song musically is quite different from that which we might expect. For although the chorus comes back in the same way each time, the music and meter of the verse both change.
Now this was a total contradiction of everything that was happening in popular music at the time. One of the most famous songs of the year, and indeed one of the most musically adventurous songs, for example, was “Pretty Woman” sung by Roy Orbison, which had the phrase “Pretty Woman” repeated within it no less than 16 times in a lyric of around about 150 words.
To explore this further, we might remember that normally when we write out the lyrics of a song they are set out in a regular pattern of perhaps four or eight beats. They don’t have to be four or eight beats, but this by far is the most common approach. Sometimes, for effect, a line (particularly the last line in a verse or chorus) might have more or fewer beats, but if so, that then occurs at the same place throughout the piece, to give it coherence. But in Tambourine Man we get something else….
Basically we have lines of eight beats (“Though I know that evening’s empire has returned into sand” [pause] is a perfect example). But then the sequence ends with a four-beat line as with the word “Sleeping” followed by “My” (which starts the next phrase but musically is in the previous phrase). This is unusual and interesting… it doesn’t cause the listener to think “what on earth is going on”, and indeed it drives the music forward. But it does give us the feeling that this is somewhat unusual, rather interesting and certainly a bit different.
This might sound complex, and although we don’t find it in most popular music, it is not a unique approach, although with Dylan the rhyme scheme is pushed beyond its natural limits where “wandering” is an implied rhyme of “under it.” It isn’t a rhyme at all of course, but we are by then expecting a rhyme, and so with the music moving on, we let it pass – our brains accept it as the rhyme our subconscious by then was anticipating.
This sort of approach is complex for any sort of popular song, be it a folk song or pop or rock song, but there is nothing wrong with complexity; it is just that normally composers of popular music since the creation of rock n roll had worked to keep their music as simple as possible. (This itself was due in part to the technology of the time – the original pop and rock songs being recorded on 78rpm singles which had a time limit of about three minutes).
However Dylan at this point is about breaking rules, and what he does at this point is extend the final verse both in terms of the number of lines, while keeping the rhyming scheme going in the first half of the verse, but then abandoning it completely. And it is a tribute to the interest as listeners that we have in the song that we feel that the repeated musical line and the rhyme of “sorrow” and “tomorrow” continues the song’s cohereance.
So in this song the first verse has ten bars of four beats while the last verse has sixteen bars of four beats. (This is counting a line such as “take me disappearing through the” as one bar of four beats. You can of course count at twice this speed, and so hear 32 bars of four beats – it doesn’t really matter as long as you are consistent).
But we have two oddities here within this song. One is a verse of ten bars, and the other is that the last verse is not the same as the first verse. Both concepts are very unusual – popular music virtually never does this, and indeed the most popular music in terms of the charts most certainly kept everything very simple and just as predicted.
Furthermore, most certainly the world of folk music doesn’t do this for the simple reason that folk music is there for everyone to sing and remember, and hence simplicity is part of the essence. In the Newport version below the song starts at 1’23”
But now if we charge through the decades we can hear what is I think the final performance of the song. This recording comes from the seventh and final part of Mike Johnson’s amazing review of this song in performance across the years.
So by 2010, the song had changed beyond belief, now with the descending accompaniment line and that extra musical bounce which occurs occasionally in the melody (listen to “my weariness amazes me“). The chords though are the same, and of course, the audience picks up what the song is just from that. But now Bob recreates the song with a world weariness expressed through that slow plodding descending bass, which suggests he is ready to welcome the Tambourine Man himself.
Also, we have an emphasis on the first beat of each bar which almost gives the song a plodding feel as if each step along the way really is both automatic and at the same time really hard going. Yet when we come to the verse the organ is playing a bouncing chordal accompaniment which adds to the feeling of keeping moving but at the same time just plodding along.
Thus through these musical changes, the song has become something quite different. Now Bob is welcoming the Tambourine Man as he, Bob, himself is tired of the world, rather than because he welcomes the new world the Tambourine Man offers. Bob has been there, seen it, done it, and had enough. The brilliance of the arrangement is that he is able to express this within the same song which invited the Tambourine Man to take him not on the final journey, but on the next journey.
So we can see that it is of course the same song – but the meaning implied through the new accompaniment is quite different. Just listen to “Let me forget about today until tomorrow”….
Therefore, within the context of this series, my point is that the song has changed from a song of a young man not liking this world and seeking escape, to an old man who has seen it all, and quite simply has no need, and no desire to see it all again. To re-arrange the song in order to change its meaning in this way is, for me at least, a truly remarkable musical achievement.
And that is the point. It is the change of the musical arrangement that has achieved this change, nothing else; the lyrics are the same, the chords are the same, and quite often the melody is the same. But through the arrangement and the style of Dylan’s delivery, the meaning has changed. And it is this ability to re-arrange songs in this way that I think is a major element of Dylan’s work that is often missed by some commentators.
Therefore as before, I am left with the feeling that if only there was a Nobel Prize for music, the extraordinary work of Bob Dylan, the composer with the ability endlessly to re-arrange his own work, could be more widely acknowledged. Most popular songs are fixed forever in the style and approach of the original recording, simply because there is not enough within them to give an arranger the chance to do something else. This is not the case with Dylan, because the music he gives us is invariably 50% of the song, not just an accompaniment to a set of interesting lyrics.
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