Previously:
- 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
- 6: Chimes of Freedom and Tambourine Man
- 7: Bending the form to its very limits
- 8: From Denise to Mama
- 9: Balled in Plain D
- 10: Black Crow to All I really want to do
- 11: I’ll keep it with mine
Over 10 years ago on this site, writing about “My Back Pages” I noted that in 1965 Dylan made a comment to the effect that he used to know what he wanted to write about before starting a song, but since then he has taken a different route. The implication is that he starts writing and then lets the song itself direct where matters were going.
What I didn’t consider then was how this affected the music, and so in part this series aims to rectify this. It is music that is the focus here. And here we turn to My Back Pages.
Dylan performed My Back Pages some 260 times in concert between 1978 and 2012, which itself is interesting as it was written in 1964, when Dylan was 23, and sung in public for the first time when he was 37.
And although we might take it that Dylan didn’t want to perform the piece at first is because it is very much a “closing the door on the past” type of song, rather than a song about now or the future, there is perhaps another reason for the lack of performance at first. And that could be that musically it is a simple strophic four line song, across six identical verses with no musical variation throughout.
The song itself consists of four lines of two rhyming couplets, the last line (Ah, but I was so much older then, I’m younger than that now”) being the same for each verse.
Musically there really are no surprises. The song is played in C major, and all the chords used in the song are the chords that can be found in any music theory book as being the chords that are “natural” within the key of C. Which is to say, chords that can be made out of the notes in the scale of C major: C major itself, plus A minor, Eminor, F major, and G major.
To explain this a step further: if you were to play the scale of C major on the piano, you would only use the white notes. Play any of those five chords noted above (each of which can be found in this piece), and again you will find yourself only playing the white notes. They can all be formed out of the notes of the scale of C major. It thus sounds like a standard folk song, with no blues or rock input.
But what gives the blues and a lot of rock music its special feel is its deviation from the rigours of staying within the key – if playing in C major then adding chords such as B flat major and maybe Eb major into the accompaniment. These are chords that can’t be formed from the notes of the scale of C major and which thus take the music away from the classic feel of traditional folk.
But as I say, Dylan would have none of that here. He is simply writing and performing a song in the classic mode.
What’s more, the chord sequence of the opening line “Crimson flames tied through my ears, rolling high and mighty traps” takes us through the complete sequence of these chords (C, Am, Em, F, G, C) while the second line does the same but ends on the G – a standard way of showing us the verse is only half way through. OK, it is true, we don’t have D minor in that sequence, and that is the one other standard chord that can be formed just from the notes of C major scale, but five out of six chords used is itself quite unusual, and makes it very clear where we are.
Then, in addition, in the final line the sequence C, Am, C, F, G, C is repeated to show us this is the end of the verse. After that, with no lyrics we get the G major chord again, to show us there is more to come. It is the classic way of pausing between two verses.
But, in a strange sense, we have a lyrical and musical contradiction here. The lyrics are telling us that he’s moved away from the folk protest movement, wherein he expressed the idealism of “Times they are a Changing” using a very similar set of chords. There are no “blues” notes or blues chords – this is straight folk.
In short, Dylan has composed a straight folk song, performed in a straight folk manner, to say he has had enough of that idealism that was expressed in the straight folk approach, (which eschewed the use of any blues notes). He then recorded the song in June 1964 and did nothing more with it until he performed it in July 1978. It thus did seem very much a farewell note, and remained as such until he was indeed 14 years older and could perform it with additional meaning.
If you are interested in this, you might wish to have a read of Joost’s article from 2017 on this site to explore the implications of all this a step further.
But for now we can take it that when Bob wrote that chorus line “but I was so much older then I’m younger than that now” he did mean “I’m reborn, I am fefreshed, I am going somewhere else, somewhere that befits a person looking out on the world afresh.
Within that message is the thought that he has been misled by false idealism, but now reality has returned, and the musical form that is classical folk with its standard folk chords with no blues or modulation, is no longer the musical form he needs. Nor is the notion that the music should be utterly unchanging throughout the piece.
And then….
Well, having got that out of his system, Bob changed, and how! Indeed I would suggest that unless you have studied the list of Dylan’s songs in the order that they were written you might be a bit surprised. Because having written “My Back Pages” Bob then wrote…
Gates of Eden.
It was first performed on 24 October 1964 and to date has been performed by Bob 217 times, although he has not touched upon it since 2001.
Now I think that because we generally tend to think of Bob’s music in terms of albums we (or perhaps I really ought to say “I”) can forget some of the incredible dramatic moments in which Bob moved from one form of creativity to another.
And yet there is a link here because part of a sequence of six compositions of Dylan’s in the latter part of 1964 all of which focussed on the same issue: individualism. These songs have other contexts within them as well, but in each case they have at their heart the expression of the individuality of the performer.
The songs were
Now it is of course true that these songs have within them other issues and messages – “All I really want to do” is also a song of farewell, while “I’ll keep it with mine” is a song about the need not to follow leaders.
“My back pages” differentiated itself from the others through its focus totally on the disillusionment of the singer in lines such as
“Equality,” I spoke the word as if a wedding vow Ah, but I was so much older then I’m younger than that now
The youthful demands for equality and justice have gone, and the composer sees the world afresh. And so next he wrote something utterly different…. “Gates of Eden” Nine verses which is essence tells us that everything is wrecked as “All and all can only fall, With a crashing but meaningless blow…” There might be another world, a better world, and not a world of this reality where everything has crumbled but if there is, he’s not quite sure where it is.
And so with such a dramatic change what of the music?
Of course Bob could have continued to write as before, leaving the lyrics to express his new mood and new vision, but that would have made much less of an impact on the audience, and actually little sense musically.
And so, musically, Dylan suddenly did the most dramatic thing with his music: he abandoned the whole concept of major and minor, and moved into the Dorian Mode.
Now even if you are not a musician, I’m guessing you will know about major and minor. Songs in the major keys tend to sound happier and lighter than songs in the minor keys. (There’s nothing inherent in the music that makes us think this; it is simply what we have got used to).
Every note in western music, from A up to G sharp, can have two scales based upon it – one major and one minor. If you want to explore this further there are many articles on line that do it; here’s one you can try for starters. JS Bach was the giant of music whose name is forever linked with establishing the new direction of music using the major and minor keys as he wrote the “48 preludes and fugues” (often known simply as “the 48” – two pieces in each of the newly established keys.)
Prior to the arrival of the new major and minor keys we had the modes now sound mediaeval to us, and few composers write in them today. But for his great transition away from his own past, into thoughts on a more global or even cosmic scale, Dylan turned back to the modal approach and wrote “Gates of Eden”.
After three songs about saying farewell, not following leaders, and above all highlighting the benefits of individualism, we not only got a horror story about the modern world, but in order really to make us sit up and notice, it is written outside of the world of major and minor keys. And it works because Dylan is saying, this neat division between the positive world of major chord, and the negative sad world of minor chords, is itself false. We are trapped in a world that makes no sense in the traditional way, because there is no longer right and wrong. This is simply a world gone utterly wrong in every regard. A world in which there is nothing we can do to put things right.
In fact, this is the world as it was perceived in mediaeval times, when it really was a world that mankind could not change because there was no technology there to achieve change. So all people could do was pray to the gods or God they believed in.
But now the message that nothing makes sense, nothing works, or perhaps, everything is wrecked, is a message in which we can’t understand anything because “there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden.” And since we most very certainly are all very much outside the Gates of Eden, there is nothing we can do to make sense of any of this.
Thus this is a song about the desperate world that we inhabit – a world of lies, of horrors, of unreality, where friends are strangers, and strangers are friends.
So how does one portray this world, in a musical form that we can understand, and which we can tolerate listening to, but which is written to express the horrors of the era in which we live?
The classic idea would be to write in a minor key because songs in the minor key are invariably felt to be sad. But Dylan is far too good a musician just to give us the obvious. So he starts with a major chord, but immediately the vocal goes to a note not in that chord. The guitar plays G against “Of war and peace”, but the vocal lines sings the notes D and F and F is not part of the chord. Immediately we are confused. And then to rub it in, the guitar moves to D minor, which accommodates the note F, but is not one of the chords that exists in the key of G.
Now I appreciate if you are not a musician this is all getting a bit confusing, but the point is simple: Dylan is not giving us either the notes of the melody nor the chords of the accompaniment that we expect. But he is not offering chaos – notes and chords at random. The twist is that the notes sung don’t immediately fit the chord, but then the chord is changed to accommodate this. Then as if giving in the melody line falls moving along a classic three-chord blues change of F, C, G. But we are very clearly not listening to a traditional blues song!
It is symbolic, and gives musician and non-musician alike a feeling of edginess, uncertainty and darkness, or at the very least something not being at all right. A feeling amplified by the appearance of the chord of D major (not D minor) at the end of the penultimate line.
But less we should think that this signifies everything being OK, we find that it is played against the word “black”.
G Dm
Of war and peace the truth just twists
F C G C/g G
Its curfew gull it glides
G Dm
Upon four-legged forest clouds
F C G C/g G
The cowboy angel rides
G Bm' Am G
With his candle lit into the sun
G Bm' C D
Though its glow is waxed in black
G Bm' Am G C/g
All except when 'neath the trees of Eden
We are of course on this site publishing a whole series on what became side B of “Bringing it all back home” which has multiple versions of Bob performing this song (links to this song, appear at the end of this piece). Therein there are multiple examples of this song. I’ll just pick one for the moment. And as you listen, perhaps you might for a moment just recall that the song written before this was “My back pages”. And maybe like me, feel it is worth contemplating what such a change from one song to the next, tells us about Bob Dylan at that moment.
And as you listen to this, perhaps you might spend a moment just contemplating once more the sequence of compositions we are considering here….
A History in Performance: 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