No Nobel Prize for Music 13: Gates of Eden

Posted on May 21, 2025 by Tony Attwood

By Tony Attwood

A list of previous articles in this series is provided at the foot of the piece.

My last outing in this series: Dylan goes Gothic and the world ends, dealt with Dylan’s dramatic move from his final rejection of the old way of seeing the world, and indeed his old way of perceiving how to write a song, with a review of his announcement of moving on in My back pages and then (in one of his most dramatic changes ever), moving from that classically constructed song to the anarchic Gates of Eden the lyrics of which incorporate seemingly protesting against the entire western world as it now exists, while examining the cult of individualism, and the contemplation of a world that makes no sense.

And perhaps most dramatically and importantly of all, it can be argued that that song was a song outside of the normal structure of major and minor keys,while the opening seemingly meaningless lyrical lines describe a chaotic unstructured world:

Of war and peace the truth just twists its curfew gull just glidesUpon four-legged forest clouds The cowboy angel rides

But perhaps even more extraordinarily, for an audience brought up perhaps on the traditions of follk music and rock music, here the music refuses to obey the normal constraints of major and minor keys, or indeed the standard patterns of the pop, rock and the blues.   We can hear this particularly well in this 1988 version:

The one thing we can say for sure is that the song is strophic: verse, verse, verse etc through nine verses.  These verses are conventionally published as having seven lines…

At dawn my lover comes to meAnd tells me of her dreamsWith no attempts to shovel the glimpseInto the ditch of what each one meansAt times I think there are no wordsBut these to tell what's trueAnd there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden

But in effect the performances reveal the song to be made up of four line verses…

At dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreamsWith no attempts to shovel the glimpse 
       into the ditch of what each one meansAt times I think there are no words but these to tell what's trueAnd there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden

Although this structure is maintained, the rhyming scheme itself is varied (which is  unusual within popular and folk music).  Using the four-line format we start with A A B C, and a consistency for the listener is obtained, by having each verse end with the title of the song.

Indeed by verse four we have an established rhyming pattern of A (lamp), B (Calf), B (laugh), C (Eden)

But in the following verse (“Relationships of ownership”) we have a variation in the rhyme: A A A B (wings, kings, sings, Eden).

After that for the remaining verses, we have a mixture of these three different rhyming schemes.   This is not to suggest that in listening to the song either initially or after having heard it many times, we are that conscious of the changing rhyming scheme, but rather that these changes sit in the background of our consciousness as we are faced by a set of lyrics that at first hearing make no obvious sense.

So overall what we have is a powerful guitar part using a set of chords which challenges the conventional notions of key as perceived in folk and popular music, a set of verses set out in traditional strophic form (verse, verse, verse with no chorus, but a repeated end line), lyrics for which the meaning is at best often obscure, and sometimes impenetrable, but at the same time a sense of regularity across nine verses all of which are of identical musical form, and with identical musical accompaniment, and which end with the same four words.

Beyond this musical structure, the meaning of the lyrics can of course be debated, but the meaning, or perhaps one might say the “essence” of the lyrics, is one of a powerful, unending drive – a feeling of continuity expressed particularly by the repeated last line.  No matter what we look at, or how little sense it makes, the last line suggests, we won’t really understand anything unless we enter the Gates of Eden (the essence of which is left undefined by the song’s lyrics).

Hence the music, being unerringly strophic, does indeed provide a stability that contrasts with the constantly unexplained and indeed inexplicable images and metaphors.   Thus we start with

Of war and peace the truth just twists its curfew gull just glidesUpon four-legged forest clouds the cowboy angel rides

and end with

At dawn my lover comes to me and tells me of her dreamsWith no attempts to shovel the glimpse 
                      into the ditch of what each one meansAt times I think there are no words but these to tell what's trueAnd there are no truths outside the Gates of Eden

The notion in those last lines that our dreams as they stand, without interpretation, are the closest we get to understanding what is inside the Gates of Eden (wherein lies all truth), or perhaps what the Gates of Eden are, give the sense of constancy and continuity beyond this life, which contrasts dramatically with everything expressed in the previous 338 words.  But so overpowering and dominating is the overall musical experience for many listeners, that wave after wave of imagery can be accepted, either in this performance which lasts three and a quarter minutes, or in the album version which performed at a completely different speed, is over three quarters as long again.

As a result, when listened to after the performance above the original album version has a bleak empty quality.

Beyond any doubt this song took Dylan, and indeed the music he composed (whether we call it folk, contemporary folk or anything else) into another previously unexplored level of songwriting.   And here I think it is helpful to put this composition within the context of Dylan’s other writing at the time.

The songs composed around this time in the chronological order of composition (with a very short description of the subject matter in parenthesis) were.

  1. I’ll keep it with mine (Don’t follow leaders; individualism)
  2. My back pages (Individualism)
  3. Gates of Eden (Protest, individualism, a world that makes no sense)
  4. It’s all right ma – (Protest; Individualism, again, a world that makes no sense)

To summarise my previously offered comments within this series of articles, “I’ll keep it with mine” was a song about needing to be an individual and not follow leaders.  “My back pages” focussed again on the individual, this time adding the concept that in a world that makes no sense, only the individual counts.

But what has happened here is that Dylan has attempted (very successfully I would suggest) to write the music in a form that is still readily understandable to us.  For while others have moved into the field of the avant-garde, Dylan retains the musical form and structure of the folk song, while extending this structure further than has been seen before.

However, in considering the songs we must also note that not only has the form been stretched, the lyrics have moved on to explore areas of consciousness that are not (and indeed I suggest have not been) part of the normal landscape of lyrics for songs of any category or type.  But meanwhile, the music, (although fully understandable and acceptable to the audience to whom Dylan was directing his work), is no longer firmly in a recognisable key.  And indeed the convention of writing the song’s lyrics out as a set of seven-line verses emphasises this (although of course, I do recognise it could be argued that this convention is established simply to emphasise the different nature of this song from all that has gone before).

So in effect, with this one song, Dylan has torn up the notion of what we might consider a song in the “popular” or “folk” vein to be.  He has not done so by taking us into the avant-garde genre, which could have the danger of alienating critics and fans alike, but despite the new ground covered, Dylan made the song accessible enough for those attracted to his music to enjoy it, to want to buy the LP and to want to hear Dylan perform more and more variations of his music on stage.

Indeed, to show just how different this work was from the dominant form of popular music of the day we might note that the album containing this song was released on 22 March 1965.   The popular songs of that month included “King of the Road” by Roger Miller, “Can’t you hear my heartbeat?” by Herman’s Hermits, “Stop in the Name of Love,” by the Supremes, “Ferry Cross The Mersey” by Gerry and the Pacemakers, and “Goodnight” by Roy Orbison.

This of course is not a definitive list, but these songs were featured heavily in the selection of the music that was available to an interested radio listener in North America and the UK, at the time Dylan’s “Bringing It All Back Home” was released.

But Dylan was not the only experimenter at the time in terms of popular music.  To take one example, Roy Orbison’s song “Goodnight” which comes from this period and which wsa a chart hit, is a song that breaks away from the tradition of verse-chorus songs, and replaces this by a song which is closer to the through-composed tradition of the Romantic era.

To take another example from this same year we have “King of the Road” in which the emphasis is on retaining the traditional approach of a strophic song while adding variations within the production, with the finger clicks, and variations to the accompaniment, as established by the second verse.   Through this, we, as listeners, are invited to appreciate the subject of the piece and his personality.   Musically the interest is retained by the additions to the accompaniment, which is then reduced at the end.

The emphasis here is on the overall sound, and the memorable lyrics, with the equally memorable title line, and the fact that the opening verse appears three times within the performance.

The song in short establishes a simple image of a person’s life with a highly memorable melody and unique accompaniment, none of which is part of Dylan’s presentation of “Gates of Eden”.  And yet we should note, both songs written and released in the same year.

From this, it is easy to see that Dylan was establishing a completely new and different musical as well as lyrical tradition, far away from popular music, and equally far removed (again both lyrically and musically) from folk music.

Thus the musical form of Dylan’s “Gates of Eden” has some similarities with that of Roger Miller’s “King of the Road”, for both are strophic songs (ie verse, verse, verse etc) although Miller’s song is shorter, and has eight verses, of which three are identical.  But also we should note that musically, Miller’s song fits completely within the pop song tradition of a song based around three chords that are immediately recognisable as the three main chords of the key in which the song is played.

The rhyming scheme (which in almost all popular songs helps hold the piece together musically, and make it memorable for the listener) is predominantly AABB, although every other verse breaks this to allow the verse to end “King of the Road”.

Thus both are songs from the same year, with both using the musical structure that we can immediately recognise as a song, and yet through Dylan’s use of unexpected chords, a melody we might call “more jagged,” a beat that is persistent and which removes all “swing” from the song, we have two songs in 4/4 time which are utterly different from each other in terms of their music and their lyrics.

But more than this.  Dylan offers us a song which appears to challenge every concept about our lives in the 20th century.  “King of the Road” suggests that even though some people are without a home or job, they can still be happy; a theme which helps to establish and maintain the viability of capitalism as a reasonable underlying structure in our society.   Dylan rejects this notion by making the song’s lyrics difficult to interpret.  For Dylan suggests the notion that we can look at the world and see what it all means, is false.  For how else can we interpret “Of war and peace the truth just twists, its curfew gull just glides; Upon four-legged forest clouds, the cowboy angel rides”?

And my prime point here is that these are both songs, presented in a form that is instantly recognisable as a “song”.   Indeed one doesn’t need to be a musician to say, “This is a song”.   But in each case, the message is put across not just by the lyrics, but also by the music.   To reduce things to the most simple of terms, “King of the Road” is light, simple, based around three chords and with a sense of swing.   “Gates of Eden” is edgy, with a sense of uncertainty and with five chords in the first line alone.   Thus in each case the feel of each song is achieved not just by the lyrics, but also by the music.

It is of course impossible for us to hear either song without knowing the lyrics, but if we can try and imagine this for a moment, the implications and meanings of the songs are still there.  My point is thus that both Miller’s and Dylan’s music as much as the lyrics tell us the meaning, within and behind the song.  In the former, everything is fine, even the huge social and financial differences between the king of the road, and the rest of society.  In the latter, the message is, “Don’t be fooled, we have nothing, we know nothing, we are nothing.  There is only knowledge and satisfaction beyond the Gates of Eden.”

Which when we start to think about it, produces a momentary challenge for those operating radio stations.   Which message are they trying to put across?   Of course, they don’t openly debate the issues raised by Gates of Eden, since most radio stations just play the songs related to the three classic subjects of popular music: love, lost love and dance.  When songs contain, as “Gates of Eden does” a message about the state of the world and how we might feel about that, the choices of those running radio stations are extraordinarily important.

Likewise when a song opens with one chord (G) followed by two which are not chords related to  that opening chord (D minor and F) and then before we can even take that in, returns to the key implied by the opening chord (C, G) we are confused and lost and even if we don’t fully realise it, we are asking “What on earth is going on?”  Or indeed “Where am I?”

(And a personal PS: for having spent quite a while writing and re-writing the above article, this recording now speaks to me more directly than any other.  So yes, just in case you ever wondered, the writer can be affected by his research and the resultant words.  Or at least this writer can).

Previously:

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