by Jochen Markhorst
III Next time you come to the bridge, jump
It must be the winter of my discontent
I wish you’d taken me with you wherever you went
They talk all night - they talk all day
Not for a second do I believe what they say
(LP: Not for a minute do I believe anything they say)
I want to bring someone to life - someone I’ve never seen
(LP: I’m going to make…)
You know what I mean - you know exactly what I mean
“I like to see Shakespeare plays, so I’ll go — I mean, even if it’s in a different language. I don’t care, I just like Shakespeare, you know. I’ve seen Othello and Hamlet and Merchant of Venice over the years, and some versions are better than others. ”
(Dylan in the 2015 AARP interview)
Dylan’s Shakespeare love is well-documented and professed often enough; his catalogue is littered with references, winks, quotes and borrowings. Much more than an idle name-check, like Shakespeare, he’s in the alley with his pointed shoes and his bells in “Stuck Inside Of Mobile”, or an irrelevant nod (like the fifth daughter on the twelfth night in “Highway 61 Revisited”) it’s usually not. Slightly more weight have borrowings like Ophelia in “Desolation Row” and Romeo and Juliet in “Floater”, or copied word combinations like eat fire, ill at ease and abuse a king in “Too Much Of Nothing” (from Julius Ceasar, Othello and Pericles, respectively). And we may put the even heavier stamp “influenced by” on songs like “Love Minus Zero”, “Seven Curses” and “If You See Her, Say Hello”, on songs that seem to owe the Shakespearean tone colour and elegance to the bard from Stratford-upon-Avon.
The Shakespeare paraphrase with which the second stanza of “My Own Version Of You” opens (“Now is the winter of our discontent / Made glorious summer by this sun of York”, the opening monologue of Richard III, 1591) seems at first glance to fall into the first category: an irrelevant wink, chosen rather randomly. Dylan could also have chosen, say, “Life’s but a walking shadow” or “All that glisters is not gold” to express similar gloom with a Shakespeare quote. But given the context – this song, and the overarching theme of this record side – surely the weightless inaccuracy my discontent rather than Shakespeare’s our discontent seems not so much an inaccuracy as a deliberate intentionality: the no-false prophet integrates a reference to yet another forgotten page from the American Songbook, to Alec Wilder’s “The Winter Of My Discontent”, gratefully welcoming the double-whammy.
Alec Wilder is indeed one of those names featured on the to-do list of a prophet who wants to proclaim the via, veritas, vita, the Way, the Truth and the Life of songs. An arranger and conductor, Wilder was at the beginning of Sinatra’s solo career in the early 1940s, producing seven consecutive Top 10 hits for Ol’ Blue Eyes. Sinatra himself is also a fan of the composer Wilder; when, after much begging and pleading with his employer Columbia, he gets it done that he is allowed to live out his non-commercial conducting ambitions, he chooses six of Wilder’s pieces (Frank Sinatra Conducts the Music of Alec Wilder, 1946). Moreover, Alec Wilder writes the music and lyrics for the evergreen “I’ll Be Around”, one of the highlights of Sinatra’s monumental In The Wee Small Hours (1955), one of the songs Dylan seems to use in 2002 for the cut-and-paste song “Waiting For You” (with the refrain line “And I’ll be around, waitin’ for you”).
Sinatra continues to record Wilder songs. “Where Do You Go?” in 1959, for example. And “Where Is the One?”, the song recorded by Sinatra for Where Are You? (1957) and chosen and recorded sixty years later by Dylan himself for Devil Dolls, the second record of the triple album Triplicate, Dylan’s third and final “Sinatra album” (2017). Others are equally happy with Wilder; Tony Bennett records several Wilder songs (“It’s So Peaceful In The Country”, for example), and Peggy Lee “While We’re Young”. With which Wilder is discontented, by the way. He writes Peggy a short note: “The next time you come to the bridge, jump!” – apart from being a talented composer, Wilder was also a sharp critic with a gift for words. He even wrote a standard work that is undoubtedly also on Dylan’s bookshelf: American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950 (1972), which bears witness to the same missionary zeal as Dylan does, writing with the same love about lyricists like Johnny Mercer, about songs like “You Go To My Head” and about composers like Irving Berlin as Dylan professes in word and deed.
“The Winter Of My Discontent” is a lesser-known song by Wilder. It is passed by Sinatra, and first picked up by Shannon Bolin with Milton Kaye and His Orchestra (1955), but Dylan is presumably more enamoured of Anthony Newley’s version (1964) or, even more so, Helen Merrill’s 1967 version. Indeed, the opening lines, the rhymes and the gloom all suggest that the song is yet another one of those songs that deliver word, line and story to Dylan “t’unlock my mind”:
This is the winter of my discontent Like a dream you came and like a dream you went Before I had a chance to know what rapture meant Came the winter of my discontent
… he is in a deeply dark phase of life, he is in a disconsolate state of mind: “you” has left and will never return, after which the remaining stanzas still thicken the dreary state of the narrator. There is “no joy, but only deep despair”, ruins are burning and “there is no love at all”, and the singing prophet will be particularly struck by the bridge:
The world is full of dissonance The scheme of things is wrong The air resounds with the resonance Of a harsh and spiteful song
My life is wrong and full of discord, all around me is hate and wickedness, the air shimmers “with the resonance of a harsh and spiteful song” … it is a bridge that by itself already invites to jump.
Thankfully, Dylan’s narrator is more assertive and less cynical. They can blab all they want – not for a second do I believe what they say. And he knows how to combat misery, trouble in mind and feelin’ blue: bring someone to life. We know exactly what he means.
—————
To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 4: Tough and tender, granite and satin
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 2nd 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