No Nobel Prize for Music: Add one chord, keep it simple, sing of love

This series looks at Bob’s compositions from a musical point of view considering the songs in the order that they were written. Details of earlier articles in this series are given at the foot of this piece.

By Tony Attwood

By 1965 and the writing of “Love Minus Zero”, Bob had written something like 102 songs, and of those about 14 relate in some way love as a major theme in the lyrics.   (At least that is the total that shows up on the chronological chart created on this site, and by and large it has served us quite well as the site and its readership has grown.)

But of those, by my reckoning, only two were actual love songs.   The other songs with love within the lyrics are better described as “lost love” songs.  Now if you really want to check my counting and my definitions you can do so through that link above where in a fairly clumsy but perhaps still useable way, I have given the briefest possible summary of the meaning of each song.  And if I am wrong and the number of lost love songs is slightly higher or lower, the fact is that the songs about “lost love” outweigh the songs about love by about 50 to 1.

This is not a thought that I have mentioned here before, although I have found it very interesting because, of course, it is quite often possible to reclassify many Dylan songs as being in essence about something different.  But I spent quite a while doing the classification and even if a few of the songs I have classified in other ways can be considered differently, and even if many people say “it is impossible to classify a Dylan song in this way,” I still get some insight from this review.

Put simply: Bob writes about many different subjects, but certainly, in this early period of his lyric writing, when he touches on love as the central theme (which happens about 14% of the time) he almost always writes and sings about lost love.

From the early trio of 1962 songs (each seemingly written one immediately after the other) onwards to Corrina Corrina, Honey just allow me one more chance, and Rocks and Gravel and on and on to “Love is just a four letter word” in 1965, lost love, and love gone wrong, are fairly common themes for Bob.  “Love” pure and simple, is hardly touched upon.

In fact by 1965 the notion for Dylan that “love” as a concept is a myth – that it doesn’t exist at all – has arrived, with Love is just a four letter word.     “Is love real?” the poet asks, and the answer seems to be fairly clearly, “no”.  Which pretty much separates Bob as a songwriter, from all the other songwriters – as if he were not already separated enough by his genius.

But then after a quick diversion into the world in which the artist in general, or perhaps the poet in particular, takes on everything and everyone else (I refer to Subterranean Homesick Blues and Outlaw Blues  created in 1965), everything changed.  Because even if love has existed it exists no more, “Farewell Angelina” ends…

Machine guns are roaring, the puppets heave rocks
At misunderstood visions and at the faces of clocks
Call me any name you like, I will never deny it
But farewell Angelina, the sky is erupting 
                                and I must go where it is quiet

Angelina, it seems from the song, and whoever she was, was indeed once loved.  But times were againsst the couple.  Yet that song gave us a clue as to Bob’s view of love.

The camouflaged parrot, he flutters from fear
When something he doesn't know about suddenly appears
What cannot be imitated perfect must die
Farewell Angelina, the sky is flooding over 
                            and I must go where it is dry

Of course, there are many ways to interpret that but for me it has always meant that Angelina was the singer’s one love, she is gone and can never appear again, and he knows that now, somehow, he must stop crying, he must move on.  He cannot take the pain but he knows, there will never be another.

And yet, and yet, that was not it at all.   Because two of the next three songs Dylan composed were love songs – seemingly Bob’s first love songs (as opposed to lost love songs).   And even if you disagree and would classify some of the earlier 100 or so compositions as love songs, the song composed in between Love Minus Zero  and She Belongs to Me was clearly a song about moving on – one of Bob’s main themes.  That song is California.  It is a song of walking away:

But if we listen to that song above, and to “Love Minus Zero”, it is hard to believe that not only the same composer wrote each one, but the same composer wrote these songs one after the other.  And yet he did.  California is a straight 12-bar blues.  Musically the songs written either side, each add just an extra chord, and yet through that change the feel of the music is utterly different.  Here’s a performance of “Love Minus Zero” that I particularly enjoy, and having listened to the piece above, it helps me calm down at this point.

But I must admit and as I have tried to acknowledge in the past, the date of compositions with Dylan songs can often be uncertain.   Yet I retain the view that even if the dates of compositions are challenged, there is a real significance here, for the number of songs written, and the number of lost love songs among the 102 compositions, so far exceeds the number of love songs, it seems Bob primarily saw love as a painful farewell, or a restriction on his liberty.

Why Dylan suddenly moved into writing love songs I will perhaps come back to another time.  But what interests me is whether in making this change of subject matter, Bob changed the way he wrote the music.

And here it is interesting indeed (at least to me) that musically these two love songs are so closely linked while the song not on this topic, but written in between these two love songs, (California) is utterly different musically, in every regard.  And yet, all three songs are linked in one way, for all three of these songs are strophic (ie verse, verse, verse etc) and they spend most of their time accompanied by the chords I, and IV.

What’s more each of the two slow songs also throws in a chord we don’t expect.    In “Love minus zero” we get the D minor chord at the opening of  “Yet she’s true, like ice, like fire” and “Valentines can’t buy her”.  In “She Belongs to Me” the piece is in G but suddenly in the penultimate line, we get the unrelated chord of A major added.  However so expert is the composing that it almost seems like a slip, for as quickly as she has taken the “Dark out of the nighttime” on that chord of A major, we are back on track with “and paints the daytime black” on the chords of C and G.

These are simple changes.  Indeed the chord of D minor is one that can often be heard within pieces of music composed in C major.    And although the chord of A major isn’t one that naturally occurs in a piece in G major, adding it in is hardly revolutionary.   It gives us a slight element of surprise, a slight wondering about where we are, which fits exactly with the line “She can take the dark out of the night-time” but the line is resolved immediately back to the chords that we expect.

Thus we have two gentle songs of love and admiration.   And in both cases the women have everything and they know they have everything.  In one case “My love winks, she does not bother, She knows too much to argue or to judge,” and in the other “She never stumbles, She’s got no place to fall. She’s nobody’s child, The Law can’t touch her at all.”

One can indeed only sit and admire, and quite possibly, even at the distance a sound recording brings, imagine that one could also love the lady if only we had met.

And yet, in between writing these two songs, Dylan did compose something else – although it is more than likely there was an overlap in the writing.  The song was noted in our reviews of Dylan songs in the order they were written as an alternative to “Outlaw Blues”.   You can find a recording and review here: California by Bob Dylan.    It is a straight 12 bar blues, and sounds very much as if Bob was trying to shake himself free of those two love songs!

“Love Minus Zero” was played 365 times in concert, “She Belongs to Me”, 491 times.  Both clearly songs Bob loved and enjoyed.   And quite rightly so.   He had suddenly, out of nowhere, decided to write two love songs – something he was most certainly not used to doing.  They came out of nowhere, and they were both simple pieces of music and yet both masterpieces.

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 strophic became something new: Love is just a four letter word
• 18: Bob reaches the subterranean
• 19: The connundrum of the song that gets worse