“No Nobel Prize For Music” is a series of articles reflecting on the fact that when commentators write about Dylan’s compositions they tend to engage fulsomely with the issue of his lyrics, but less commonly consider his music in the same depth. In this series, I try to rectify this to some degree. A list of previous articles in the series is given at the end.
By Tony Attwood
In my recent articles I have been arguing that Dylan’s “My Back Pages” was the moment when Bob very fulsomely announced to anyone interested, that he was going to change his approach to music, and would be moving on. He would, in short, abandon his style of writing songs in the standard folk music style of the 1960s, and move onto something quite different.
That he did this is easy to see with his next composition, “Gates of Eden”, and as I have tried to explore in my last article in this series, Bob not only achieved this through his lyrics but also with his approach to music. For in this song he abandoned the traditional major and minor keys in which pop, folk and rock music had been written for years, moving instead to something more in line with the Dorian mode which had dominated music until to time of JS Bach.
However, Dylan didn’t stick exactly to the strictures of the Dorian Mode in his writing, but allowed himself free reign, which resulted in one of the most revolutionary pieces of music supposedly in the rock genre that had been written up to that point.
But the question then was, how does one follow up on a revolutionary masterpiece? The answer, “by writing another revolutionary masterpiece,” sounds rather obvious, but when we look at the chronology of Dylan’s compositions, this is exactly what he did. For after writing “Gates of Eden” he wrote, “It’s all right ma”.
Indeed if we look at the sequence of Dylan’s compositions at this time, we can see how he suddenly moved across to the notion of leaving and moving on. One only has to play a recording of “My Back Pages” and then a recording of “Gates of Eden” and contemplate the fact that these songs were written one after the other, to perceive the change that had happened within Dylan’s thinking.
And just in case we might be tempted to think that “Gates” was a one-off, a clever idea out on its own, we just then need to listen to It’s all right ma to see that this notion makes no sense at all. The only way to perceive Dylan’s writing of the music at this time is to accept the message of “I was so much older then” as a rejection of that period that many of us go in early days through in which we really think we know it all, and recognise the music starting with “Gates of Eden” as the new dawn in Dylan’s compositional ability.
Of course on this site we have considered “It’s alright ma” over the years from a lyrical point of view, but here I want to think about this song as a musical composition which is part of the new land that Dylan is now exploring – an exploration that began with “Gates of Eden” and now continues apace.
To know exactly how the effect of the music is achieved I can do no better than refer you to Dylan Chords which has (as ever) a masterpiece of analysis enabling anyone who wishes to play it as Dylan does, so to do. And if I may lift a comment from that analysis, if you are not a musician, you can take it that, “The verses mostly consist of a descending bass line played on the fifth string.”
Now my point is not in any way to extend the complete analysis in that article, because of course it cannot be extended, but rather to come back to my key point, that Bob had proclaimed that he was now no longer writing songs in the tradition of the folk music revival, as he had done for his albums “Freewheelin” and “Another Side” but he was now truly travelling a new path: his own path.
This he was doing lyrically with openings such as
Of war and peace the truth just twistsIts curfew gull just glidesUpon four-legged forest cloudsThe cowboy angel rides
from “Gates of Eden” and
Darkness at the break of noon Shadows even the silver spoon The handmade blade, the child’s balloon Eclipses both the sun and moon To understand you know too soon There is no sense in trying
from “It’s Alright Ma”. That we know and has been contemplated here and elsewhere many times. But what I feel we must also note is that Dylan was also changing the construction of the music. In fact, as I have previously noted, all the chordal rules that dominated the folk music revival were jettisoned in “Gates of Eden” and replaced by a chord sequence that sounds more in tune with the modes of the mediaeval period than the major and minor chords of the later centuries.
And now Bob went a stage further and by using the descending bass takes us through a set of chords that cannot be described in simple terms of major and minor, their effect being dominated by the descending bass. If you wish to follow it in a written out form, then Dylanchords gives the best representation I have seen.
D 000232 G/b 02003x (or -0 or -3) Csus2 030030 Bb6 x1000x (or x10030 or -x) F/d 000211 G/d 000433 A 202220
but for something simpler you could just add a descending bass line on a guitar or keyboard instrument. Indeed a version on a piano that plays a bass line of
D Darkness at the break of noon C# Shadows even the silver spoon C The handmade blade, the child’s balloon B Eclipses both the sun and moon Bb To understand you know too soon A D There is no sense in trying
But there is an important point; Dylan bade farewell to the old way of writing both lyrically and musically when he composed Gates of Eden, exactly as he suggested he would in “My Back Pages”. As a result in “Gates” he used the chords that were simply not part of compositions based on the recent folk revival.
However now, as if that had not been enough to make his point, Dylan now started using chords that no one else was using at all – chords that emerged from the descending bass line, while at the same time, the melody was reduced to little more than one note – with the exception of the occasional inflection down a tone or two.
Now this too is an important point. Folk songs, often being performed unaccompanied, are all about the melody and the lyrics, Here melody is abandoned and evereything is dominated by the lyrics holding onto one note as the bass descends deeper and deeper. There is in fact, no melody to speak of, while in earlier songs the melody was much closer to our concept of what folk music melodies should be. Indeed even “Mr Tambourine Man” which is closely associated with “Gates of Eden” and “It’s alright ma” through being released on the same side of the same album, still has an alluring melody, and chords that are clearly related to the key of D in which Dylan performed the song.
But now we have go to the point of a lack of melody, and instead we have a recitation that fits exactly with the lyrics. In effect only three notes are used against the first 100 words….
Darkness at the break of noon Shadows even the silver spoon The handmade blade, the child’s balloon Eclipses both the sun and moon To understand you know too soon There is no sense in trying Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn Suicide remarks are torn From the fool’s gold mouthpiece the hollow horn Plays wasted words, proves to warn That he not busy being born is busy dying Temptation’s page flies out the door You follow, find yourself at war Watch waterfalls of pity roar You feel to moan but unlike before You discover that you’d just be one more Person crying
Thus this is in fact an abandonment of the main musical elements of a song (by which I mean melody, rhythm and accompanying chords. There is no melody to speak of, in fact, the rhythm is simply the rhythm of the words. (And I would add a point here: if you want to explore further what Dylan has done, take the lyrics of “Mr Tambourine Man” and recite them as if a poem. Then do the same for “It’s Alright Ma” and the effect is totally different – to recite the latter song in any way other than as a continuing drive forward – there is no lyricism implied at all. In short as a poem the lyrics would be the same as they are in the song. They have their own implicit rhythm.
In fact on the recording, the only thing that is changing alongside the lyrics is the bass which descends, giving us a sense that singer and the world he is singing about, are there, held tight wiithin a structure, part of the world but still somehow reflecting upon the world.
Of course, the brilliance of this is enhanced by the contrast of a semi-chorus (semi in the sense that the music is constant but the lyrics change, except for the main part of the title line. But the key point is that musically the final three lines have such a level of contrast with the music of the verses that they do sound as if they are intended to be the chorus, and the major pronoucement of the song, even though the lyrics change each time…
So don’t fear if you hear A foreign sound to your ear It’s alright, Ma, I’m only sighing
There is also the extraordinary brilliance of the changed rhythm for the title words in the third line of the “chorus” as each one is accented, followed bythe pause before the crowing glory
As for the rhyming pattern of the song, that is again different from anything we had heard before. It runs
A, A, A, A, A, B C, C, C, C, B D, D, D, D, D, B E, E, F
But there are more complexities within for there are variations in the number of lines within each verse. The six-line verses become five-line verses for example, but the power of the song and Dylan’s delivery of it, are such that we are simply driven along without noticing any such changes in the structure.
Overall what we have is Dylan removing the melody as a key part of the song at this point, but instead letting the driving energy of the recitation take us through to its ultimate conclusion, not as the title suggests, “I’m only bleeding” but rather “It’s life and life only”. And as such with the energy that builds up within the song, we are carried forward in the knowledge that there is no escape. It happens all around us everyday, it moves on and on until we get to the extraordinary message at the conclusion of the song
And if my thought-dreams could be seen They’d probably put my head in a guillotine But it’s alright, Ma, it’s life, and life only
which demands a powerful upbeat musical conclusion which the construction of that three-line postscript to each verse delivers.
It is the driving energy within the music matches the lyrics perfectly, which makes us ignore the complete lack of melody, and yet makes this a spectacular song, even though the spectacle we witness is that it is people that are the problem. For as the final lines point out
I’m only sighing I can make it It’s life, and life only
And the fact is that were there to be any melody it would get in the way of the power of this message, for the rhythm and the rhyme contain all the power that we need as the message becomes clearer and clearer. This is not a protest song; there is no message of hope for the future if only we rise up and change the world.
In short, there is no dream; simply this is life. This is what we have, this is all you get. Life goes on and on and on – which is exactly what the music does, it stays on that same basic chord with the chord changes primarily implied from the descending bass, so yes there are changes beneath, but they just keep taking us round and round in circles.
Thus the composer who we previously found was telling us that times were not only changing but changing for the better is now telling us that “There is no sense in trying.” The world, it seems, is what it is. It goes its own way. We are born, we die, nothing is sacred, and “It’s only people’s games that you got to dodge.”
Which is why the music has to be reduced to a minimum. A melody within this song would destroy the message, for it would suggest variance and change when in fact thjere is nothing to show him.
And even worse
"if my thought-dreams could be seen They’d probably put my head in a guillotine
which is why that melody is almost all on one note while underneath the bass continues its descent. Because as the ending of the song tells us, this weird and dangerous world out there is the one that we live in every day.
We are descending.
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
- 12: Dylan does gothic and the world ends
- 13: The Gates of Eden