My Own Version Of You IV: Tough and tender, granite and satin

Posted on June 10, 2025 by Tony Attwood

 

by Jochen Markhorst

IV         Tough and tender, granite and satin

I’ll take Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando
Mix ‘em up in a tank and get a robot commando
If I do it upright and put the head on straight
I’ll be saved by the creature that I create

 “I’ll be your Valentino,” Freddie Mercury sings in “Seaside Rendezvous” (A Night At The Opera, 1975), and again a year later in “Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy”. “Never been no Valentino,” Tom Waits notes regretfully (“Better Off Without A Wife”, 1975) and The Four Seasons have wild fantasies: “In my dream I’m bigger than Valentino” (“Silver Star”, also from 1975 – sung not by Frankie Valli, by the way, but by drummer Gerry Polci). And like this, there are hundreds more songs, poems, film scripts and novels in which “Valentino” is used as a mark of quality. In short, the stage name of the young-deceased Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Piero Filiberto Guglielmi has long since dissociated itself from its bearer – and like, say, “Adonis” or “Don Juan”, has become a synonym for attractive man or heartbreaker.

In the early 1950s, a new member joins the Don Juan Association: Marlon Brando. The intensity and sexuality with which he plays Stanley Kowalski in the film version of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) is the entrance ticket, his blushing bare chest in Julius Caesar (1953) secures him a seat in the board of directors, and after the leather jacket in The Wild One (1953) he can take over the gavel; “Marlon Brando” as a five-star designation for a desirable man is from now on established. And thus from now on used as an updated alternative to “Valentino”. Peggy Lee herself gives the go-ahead in 1961 in her self-written evergreen, “I Love Being Here With You” (I like Brando’s eyes), which was even recorded by Ella Fitzgerald. And then the floodgates open. Van Morrison (“Wild Children”), Madonna, R.E.M., David Bowie, Elton John and Leonard Cohen: the trendsetters of the 20th century perpetuate the label, and in the 21st century, “Marlon Brando” has become commonplace. And remains so. The Killers, Robbie Williams, Slipknot, Mark Knopfler… when Dylan uses the name for characterisation in “My Own Version Of You” in 2020, he joins a long line.

Peggy Lee

There is a huge difference, though. Madonna, Peggy Lee and John Mellencamp (“You’ve Got To Stand For Somethin’”, 1985) and all those others mean the wild one, the sexy hunk, the Brando of whom Joan Baez swoons so infectiously:

“It must have been two years later that someone took me to see a double bill of Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront. Shortly after, I saw The Wild One. Goodbye world. I was struck by blue lightning. There he was, the magnificent dark horse who was a winner, the punk, the hurt child, the rebel. The most appealing man I’d ever seen. A veritable sex extravaganza, tough and tender, granite and satin.”
(Joan Baez – And A Voice To Sing With, 1987)

… but Dylan explicitly refers to the Godfather Brando, the actor who had to put twenty pounds back on before the picture could start, according to his autobiography (Songs My Mother Taught Me, 1994). Granted, Don Corleone has a tender side as well, definitely is both satin and granite, but by no means a veritable sex extravaganza. Dylan obviously wants to avoid that, the sex appeal, given the specification of the other half of his “robot commando”: Scarface Pacino.

After all, in The Godfather Al Pacino is indeed sexy, a hurt child, a magnificent dark horse – having all the qualities of the troubled Johnny Strabler from The Wild One and the brooding darkness of Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Which Pacino hardly acted, if Brando’s testimony in the autobiography is to be believed. “Wonderful actor,” Brando says there about his colleague, but “when I met him on The Godfather, he was quite troubled.” Pacino’s own recollections in Sonny Boy – A Memoir (2024) confirm Brando’s observation: “I was going through a difficult time, feeling like I had the world on my shoulders, knowing that any day the axe could fall on me.” Understandable, as Pacino knows Paramount considers him unfit. The studio bosses want to replace him, and even his guardian angel director Coppola is starting to have doubts as well. “Feeling unwanted, feeling like an underling, was an oppressive experience,” and that feeling persists right up to and including the restaurant scene in The Bronx, the scene in which Michael transforms from the dreamy, immaculate Benjamin to the dark avenging angel who executes mobster Sollozzo and the corrupt police officer McCluskey;

“Francis showed the restaurant scene to the studio, and when they looked at it, something was there. Because of that scene I just performed, they kept me in the film.”

Equally awkward are Pacino’s memories of Brando. He is starstruck. Brando is too big. Coppola insists the two of them should have lunch together to get to know each other, but it is not a success. Brando sits on the bed in the room where they will shoot the hospital scene and eats chicken cacciatore with his hands. “His hands were full of red sauce. So was his face. And that’s all I could think about the whole time.” He remembers Brando being friendly and asking all sorts of questions, but he doesn’t really reach the starstruck Al. “He looked at me in a quizzical way, as if to ask, what are you thinking about?”

Anyway, Godfather Pacino, Al’s Michael Corleone is unfit for Dylan’s robot commando. The Dr Frankenstein from Dylan’s song needs Scarface Pacino, the manic psychopath Tony Montana from the gory hit film in which the impressive number of 207 “fucks” is achieved (1.22 per minute). The film also from which Dylan seems to borrow another “my own version of you” on Side B of Rough And Rowdy Ways: the unorthodox music of “Black Rider” does at the very least seem to be inspired by “Tony’s Theme” from the Scarface soundtrack.

It is a strange combination then, Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando: a self-destruction machine with a safety catch. A creature “who will save me”. One half the strategic, reserved Don Corleone, the man Brando characterises as a decent person regardless of what he had to do, as a modest, quiet man. “The part of Don Corleone lends itself perfectly to underplaying,” Brando analyses, and that is true. The diametric opposite of the other half, of what Tony Montano demonstrates. “Bigger than life and everything about it was exaggerated,” as Pacino reflects in Sonny Boy:

“That crazy character, the smoke and the blood and the three-hundred-pound machine gun. […] You can’t forget Tony Montana was heading to the sun like Icarus, flying higher and higher until he exploded. Too damn unwieldy.”

Dylan’s robot commando, the work of art created by the narrator of “My Own Version Of You”, is apparently a combination of extremes, a dangerous creation combining yin and yang, or, as Dylan defines the perfection of Sinatra’s “Strangers In The Night” in The Philosophy Of Modern Song:

“Now you’re yoked together, one flesh in perpetuity – into the vast eternity – immortalized.”

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To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 5: The whole world is a cactus

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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:

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