My Own Version Of You part 2:   Take the head off of him and sew it onto this guy

by Jochen Markhorst

• Part 1: Keys t’unlock my mind

II          Take the head off of him and sew it onto this guy

All through the summers and into January
I’ve been visiting morgues and monasteries
Looking for the necessary body parts
Limbs and livers and brains and hearts

I want to bring someone to life - is what I want to do
I want to create my own version of you

A month after his smashing album Bone Machine (1992) was released, Tom Waits is in KCRW’s radio studio in Santa Monica to be interviewed by Chris Douridas for the daily “adult album alternative” programme Morning Becomes Eclectic. It is 9 October 1992 and the station is broadcasting on 89.9 FM from the Santa Monica College campus, some 25 miles from Dylan’s home at 7118 Birdview Avenue in Malibu. But alas, at the time of the broadcast, Dylan is in Pittsburgh for a concert at Duquesne University’s A.J. Palumbo Centre and may perhaps hear a Duquesne Whistle, but certainly not the radio programme. And neither Tom Waits explaining how he constructed his songs for Bone Machine. He had some 60 songs and song fragments, Waits explains:

“You always throw out a lot of songs. Not throw them out, but you cannibalize them. That’s part of the process. Frankenstein that number over there. Take the head off of him and sew it onto this guy, immediately. Keep him alive until the head has been severed. It’s part of song-building.”

Well, maybe Dylan’s son Jesse recorded the interview for his dad. The bizarre album cover was created by Jesse, who took and edited a photo of a freeze frame from the music video he made with Jim Jarmusch for Waits’ “Going Out West”, track 10 of Bone Machine. Anyway – we hear Waits in the radio programme use an imperative of the self-styled verb “to frankenstein” to describe his artistic production process. Which is indeed an understandable association: the songs were recorded in the basement of the Prairie Sun Recording Studio, “just a cement floor and a hot water heater,” in Waits’ words, the arrangements are bare, grotesque and alienating, with an emphasis on metallic percussion… the sound of the record is like being created for the soundtrack of a horror movie featuring a mad scientist in some hellish laboratory.

Tom Waits – Going Out West: https://youtu.be/27LLPANAgzw

Waits then milks the metaphor even more plastically than Dylan does in his song: “Keep him alive until his head is off, and then sew the head onto this other guy as fast as you can.” Still, the imagery, Doctor Frankenstein as songwriter, is identical. “It’s part of song-building,” Waits explains anyway just to be sure.

We know the Dr Frankenstein character has been dormant in the back of Dylan’s mind for a couple of decades. In the draft manuscript of “High Water” printed on page 496 of Mixing up the Medicine, we see Dylan noted the hunch “Dr Frankenstein” under an earlier version of the opening couplet. In the Bob Dylan Archive in Tulsa, we even find a completely rejected verse for the song:

Doctor Frankenstein's still up there at his castle on the hill 
If he ain't come down by now 
I guess he never will
Livin' there in the underworld, I ain't sayin' it's wrong or right 
The sun is shining down 
Like it's twelve o'clock at night. 
Like a nightmare up there
High water everywhere.

… noting that Dylan also had the film character in mind here, not the novel character from Mary Shelley’s novel (1818). There is no castle in Shelley’s book; only in film versions is Dr Frankenstein portrayed as an eccentric mad scientist in a castle. We have seen that before, by the way, a literary celebrity as a protagonist whom Dylan apparently knows only from the film adaptation. Similar, for instance, to protagonists in Dylan’s songs like Captain Ahab in “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” (he was stuck on a whale – that’s Gregory Peck in the film, in Melville’s book it doesn’t happen) or Cinderella, who puts her hands in her pockets “Bette Davis style” (“Desolation Row”).

As also here in “My Own Version Of You” Dr Frankenstein scavenges the necessary body parts by nightly visits to morgues and monasteries; these are film images. In the book, Dr Victor Frankenstein loots bones from charnel-houses (“I collected bones from charnel-houses”), tissue and organs from “the dissecting room and the slaughter-house” (chapter 4). Dylan apparently has the 1931 film in his mind’s eye, with the doctor digging up corpses in the cemetery with his assistant or, more likely, the Mel Brooks parody Young Frankenstein with the brilliant Gene Wilder and his clumsy assistant Marty Feldman (whose “Walk this way”, by the way, inspired Aerosmith to their world hit) and indeed residing in a “castle on the hill”. But admittedly, All through the summers and into January / I’ve been visiting morgues and monasteries sounds a lot more melodic and intriguing than Shelley’s “The dissecting room and the slaughter-house furnished many of my materials”. And Dylan is certainly not the only artist who uses the film character as opposed to the book character. Even grandmaster Stephen King writes: “feeling a little like Dr Frankenstein animating his monster in the castle tower” (Duma Key, 2008).

And Stephen King offers another analysis of art production, again similar to what Tom Waits and Dylan’s protagonist offer. In King’s superb semi-autobiographical On Writing (2000):

“Words create sentences; sentences create paragraphs; sometimes paragraphs quicken and begin to breathe. Imagine, if you like, Frankenstein’s monster on its slab. Here comes lightning, not from the sky but from a humble paragraph of English words. Maybe it’s the first really good paragraph you ever wrote, something so fragile and yet full of possibility that you are frightened. You feel as Victor Frankenstein must have when the dead conglomeration of sewn together spare parts suddenly opened its watery yellow eyes. Oh my God, it’s breathing, you realize. Maybe it’s even thinking. What in hell’s name do I do next?”

… showing, incidentally, that King is very well familiar with the source text:

“His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.”

Indeed, at the moment suprême, after two years of working to exhaustion, Victor Frankenstein has no feelings of triumph or euphoria, but rather “breathless horror and disgust filled my heart,” causing him to flee from his creation – not knowing what to do next.

Meanwhile, King’s use of the metaphor is more wide-ranging than Tom Waits’, which refers only to “song-building”. King, on the other hand, covers Dylan’s other fields as well. After all, Dylan’s autobiography Chronicles is in part also a “conglomeration of sewn together spare parts”, as is his painting, for which he takes the necessary body parts from Hollywood films, and even more literally, it applies to his sculpturing, for which he actually scavenges the necessary body parts from scrap metal and discarded machinery, reviving those remains by forging them together and recreating them into gates.

More poetic, however, and also more fitting, is the view that the protagonist of “My Own Version Of You” is, like Waits, talking about songwriting. The morgues, where the forgotten songs lie decaying under the dust of centuries until a troubadour like Dylan digs them up again and reanimates them; the monasteries, where the troubadour hears the old Protestant hymns (Dylan: “My songs are either based on old Protestant hymns or Carter family songs or variations of the blues form,” Robert Hilburn interview 2003), the troubadour declaring elsewhere, “Those old songs are my lexicon and my prayer book,” referring to songs like “Let Me Rest On That Peaceful Mountain”, “Keep On The Sunny Side” and “I Saw The Light”… the charnel houses and convents where the song and dance man finds the body parts, the words, tunes, stories and lines “t’unlock his mind” – to frankenstein his songs.

Stanley Brothers – Let Me Rest On That Peaceful Mountain: 

To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 3: Next time you come to the bridge, jump

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971
• Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door