A list of previous articles in this series appears at the end of the piece.
By Tony Attwood
In the last article (How Dylan turned the strophic form into something new) I took a look at “Love is just a four letter word,” and unless you know the details of the order in which Bob wrote songs my thought is that you may not have been able to guess what came next. For “Love is just a four letter word” is musically, a gentle, engaging piece, and we might have expected a further development alpong those lines.
What Bob wrote next was a song the music of which can be described in all sorts of ways but for which the word “gentle” would never be one of those songs. Cash Box described it as a “rockin’-country folk blueser with a solid beat and catchy lyrics.” But I am not quite sure that does it justice.
One thing is certain, it is impossible to get further away from “Love is just a four letter word” in terms of musical feel. For the next song Dylan wrote was Subterranean Homesick Blues.
I have often thought that we can get a clearer view of what Bob was thinking by listening to the first recording of the song – the acoustic version
For much of the piece the guitar does nothing but play the chord while there is no attempt to add anything to the “melody” which actually isn’t a melody at all. It is in fact one note sung against a chord played over and over. True Bob does change chords a couple of times, and in this version we have some instrumental breaks, but the key thing is that it is repeat, repeat, repeat. So although the song is based on the notion of a 12-bar blues in a minor key, all the feeling of the 12 bar blues is taken away. This is simply pounding the beat without even the extra emphasis on the first beat of each bar.
By seeing the songs in the order they were written and focussing on the music, we can appreciate just how greatly Bob was experimenting. “Love is just a four letter word” which I looked at in the last piece has a beautiful melody. And it was probably a melody Bob felt (or actually found) he could not sing, because of the range. So he gave it to the one person he knew who would always be able to sing across such a range – Joan Baez. Bob never made a recording (at least as far as I know).
But then, following that beautiful melody, and the gentle joking of the lyrics, he wrote a song basically on one note. And to replace the gentle rhythms and movements of “Four Letter” we get nothing but a pounding beat. This is the antithesis of what went before.
And the question that we ought to ask here, but which from my own reading I have not found asked (although of course, I may have missed it somewhere) is “why?” Why prove the point? Why prove that one can write a song in which the first eight bars are all on one note, when you have previously written a song with the most elegant, smooth, gliding melody (and in case you didn’t read the last piece, here it is again).
And to go further – why play this song with no melody 120 times in concerts across the next 14 years, but never once play “Four LetterWord”?
Well there are some practical reasons. One is because “Four Letter” became associated with Joan Baez. Another is that “Subterranean” was actually a hit single in the USA – not a huge hit, but still Bob’s first hit. But perhaps more than anything Bob was announcing that he could write a song in which the first eight bars were all on one note and all with the same chord accompaniment – and people would still listen!
As for the music, I have once or twice indicated how much in awe I am of the work of Eyolf Østrem and I couldn’t help but take a look at what he had to say about the song, which, according to my hearing, is a simple three chord piece, and I am glad to say he agreed. It is almost all on A major, with a quick burst of D and E chords; in short it is as it sounds, dead simple; a slight variation on the 12 bar blues.
Now I don’t know who changed the arrangement from the first version above to the actual version that crept into the charts, but you’ll recall how it came out. But even with this limited amount of musical resources in the original Bob was still, later on, able to play with the original, and I think have some fun himself.
What I find interesting is that although the band have a fairly free improvisation around the music in the instrumental verse, Bob himself has found a new way of playing the song with a new set of variations which keeps it lively and still keeps us focussed on lyrics we’ve heard so many times before. Somehow by changing the essence of the music the meanings of the lyrics have changed too.
And of course, once the song is released into the wild everyone can have a go although few have the talent of this young man….
Obviously Bob re-recorded it with the band and we got the version we know, and by this time he and the band had worked out how to handle a song primarily on one chord and mostly without any melody. It was indeed in many ways an anti-song; quite a challenge.
But let me return to my main point. What Bob is doing with this song is experimenting again. He has taken the strophic form in which so many of his songs are written but then played with it in a way that, as far as I know, no one else had previously done, by extending the number of lines and having a rhyming pattern which changes part way through, starting out A B C B, and then moving onto D, D, D, E, F.
Now it can be argued that the rhyme is a lyrical thing, not a musical effect, and that’s true to a degree, but the music has to be arranged to work with this, and if it is not, the whole song falls apart. At the very least I would argue that this is a musical and lyrical effect – but it is the music here that gives us the song’s unique feeling.
It is also one of those songs that (for me at least) once Bob says (as he did in 2004), “It’s from Chuck Berry, a bit of ‘Too Much Monkey Business’,” that becomes obvious. I just didn’t realise before he said it.
And I would add, it shouldn’t work. It should sound all wrong. It should be horribly tedious and boring both in the original and in the reworked version, but it doesn’t and it isn’t! It always works. I still enjoy it.
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
- 14: After the Revolution – another revolution
- 15: Returning to the roots (but with new chords)
- 16. From “It’s all right” to “Angelina”. What happened?
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
- 14: After the Revolution – another revolution
- 15: Returning to the roots (but with new chords)
- 16. From “It’s all right” to “Angelina”. What happened?
- 17: How Dylan turned the strophic form into something new