Details of the previous articles in this series are given at the end of the article. Details of all the series were are currently running, and some recently concluded are given on the home page of this site. We always welcome ideas for new series, and indeed offers to write for Untold Dylan. If you are interested please email Tony@schools.co.uk
By Tony Attwood
If we look at the first seven songs composed by Bob Dylan in 1965 we can see one theme suddenly coming to the fore: relationships. Or put another way, “Should I stay or should I go?” Bob puzzled over such matters in songs such as Farewell Angelina. Love is just a four-letter word, Outlaw Blues, and of course Love Minus Zero and She Belongs to Me.
These are often very personal songs – completely different from many of the songs Dylan offered just a year or two before, and as noted before, the music in “Love minus zero” and in “She Belongs to Me” does not stick to either the classic chords of folk songs (as for example Bob does with songs such as “Times they are a changing”) nor to the tradition of the blues, (wherein we often find the addition of a chord from outside the key in which the song is written).
Of course, blues songs often do this – as indeed do composers of quite a lot of pop music – by adding a chord based on the flattened seventh of the scale (so for example including the chord of D major in a song in E major. But Dylan’s added chord is different. His added chord, if thinking in E major, is the chord of F# major.
Clearly the issue of love – not a regular topic in his songs thus far – was on his mind, for the next song he wrote was “It’s all over now baby blue.” Indeed this has been a favourite Dylan song over the years – the 28th most performed song in his concerts, if my adding up is correct, with 607 performances (as of June 2025).
And in terms of those performances I can of course do nothing better than refer you to Mike Johnson’s seven-part series, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, A History in Performance”. If you want to dip into that series there is an index to the articles on Baby Blue at the end of this piece.
Let’s just compare the first with the last that we have from that series of articles on this song. First 1965.
And now by way of comparison, sixty years later: 2025
And so the music has changed quite considerably over those intervening sixty years, and it is only the lyrics that really tell us this is still “Baby Blue.”
But take this 1974 performance, which like the version from 1965 above is a performance by Dylan and his guitar only. Same melody more or less, same chord sequence, same lyrics, but, I would argue, a new meaning.
My point here therefore is that Dylan has used the music (which, to be exact, means the melody, the way the lyrics are related to the melody, and the way the accompaniment then relates to lyrics and melody) to say something different from that which was said at first.
The song is always about the end of a relationship, moving on, walking away, but it now also offers new insights. For example, in the first version the song moves along at a fairly rapid pace and thus it puts the emphasis on those powerful opening lyrics, “You must leave now, take what you need…” This emphasis on moving on does require a fairly brisk musical arrangement of the song.
But also one can argue that in the song’s five verses there are five messages. In verse one the message is that the singer has just reached the conclusion that you must leave. In verse two there is the warning – there are some strange and maybe nasty people out there. For verse three we find some of these people have been damaged, as the world changes. So we are warned: Don’t think everything is going to be the same.
Then in the final verse there is the more urgent plea: don’t try and rebuild the past, the changes are wholesale and there is no going back. The “it” in the title that is all over now, is not, it seems, just the relationship, but rather, everything. Everyone is affected, the entire world is changing. Thus, we might presume, the meaning of the concept of “relationship” has changed too. (Indeed my guess would be that when he first wrote the piece Dylan did take “it” to mean the relationship, but as the decades slipped past, “it” did become “everything”.)
Such a set of lyrics has a profound impact on the song. Obvioulsy Dylan writes a strophic song as he often does (which is to say, it runs verse, verse, verse etc through the five musically identical verses), in order to help the lyrics carry this sense of moving onwards, and also to give focus to the notion of moving onwards, as the world itself changes.
But at the same time this is a strophic song, meaning that each and every verse is the same musically. So the composer is left with the question, how can the music reflect the urgency of the message?
One good way to understand this in any Dylan song is to go back to the original recording, made obviously before all the embellishments that followed in the performances across over 600 concerts. For in listening to the album recording again we can hear what Dylan does musically.
To begin the harmonica played right at the start gives a slight edge, a slight element of uncertainty. It is not unknown to have the harmonica play right from the start, but it is unusual, especially as the harmonica note is gone almost as quickly as it begins. Likewise, the guitar is playing just one chord. Quite often, where the band plays before the vocals appear, they give a feel of the song, across several chords, but here it remains just the one chord. The music is moving at some speed but with just one chord it is going nowhere, for there is no melody and hence no changes to be found. We are here, we are stuck.
And then suddenly as the vocals start, (contradicting that feeling of stasis with “You must leave” and we realise that there is a second guitar part playing a simple counter- melody, and Bob opens with the line “You must leave now take what you need….” and he sings it not on the key chord but on the dominant 7th chord.
Of course, by now some of us have been listening to this song for 60 years, but even so, to come back and focus on the elements within that recording can be a shock.
That dominant 7th chord which opens the accompaniment to the melody, is the chord that normally is heard towards the end of a verse leading us back to the tonic chord – the chord that is at the heart of the piece. In this case the piece of music is in C major, and it opens on G7 (the dominant) and then the melody falls back down as the chords progress from G7 through F to C.
In effect this is the reverse of what happens in most songs. Generally, if the song is written in C major, then the chord of C major is the first chord we hear. There is no absolute rule about this, but in folk, pop and rock music this is normal. Likewise if the song is about the affair ending, it opens with a reminiscence of how good it was in the past.
Take “Times they are a changing”. It is in the key of G and the song starts on G. The first line (Come gather round people etc) has the chords G, E minor, C, G. Thus G is firmly established at the start and the end of the line.
But here in Baby Blue, most of the first line is G7, the lyrics are “take what you need” and at the end of the first line we fall back to C major. It is as if we are on the edge of the cliff, but take a step back, both emotionally and physically, and end up a safe distance away contemplating how to let life continue (“you think will last”).
And then, extraordinarily, the next line repeats the process, and we are back at the end of the cliff and have to been drawn back once more.
G7 F C But whatever you wish to keep, you better grab it fast.
Of course this is not something that can be repeated too often, especially as there are five verses that are musically identical, and so we are drawn back, and effectively in the next two lines we have moved away from the cliff face and are sitting down on the grass looking at the cliff edge and out to the great unknown. But even there the most appalling danger lurks.
Dm F C Yonder stands your orphan with his gun, Dm F C Crying like a fire in the sun.
It is a brilliant contrast from the taking of what is needed and getting out, to the reflection upon those who are left behind, uncomprehending. (Could the orphan really be saying, “if you leave I’ll shoot myself”? Or is it “if you go I’ll shoot you”? Both are equally horrific).
And then the completely unexpected, we get E major; a chord that has nothing at all to do with the key Bob is peforming in. Not only is it unexpected, the lyrics proclaim this is a warning of what is to come.
E F G7
Look out the saints are comin' through
Dm F C
And it's all over now, Baby Blue.
And then that final calming last line. The lyrics tell us it is all over now, and taking the music firmly back to the key of C (by using D minor, F and C, chords directly associated with C major) we instinctively know we are home. Besides, the saints have arrived; they’ll sort it out.
Likewise, the melody which has reached the heights with “Look out” now returns to lower levels and we end up almost an octave below where we started. This is both lyrically and musically, an absolute roller coaster.
This is not to say that Dylan invented a new technique here; what he does is unusual, but I suspect others must have done the same before. But what is important to note at this point is that Bob is already mega-famous, and has already developed a number of other new approaches – not least moving from the folk music basis of a singer and guitar to playing accompanied by other instruments too.
No, what Bob does at this point is that he is taking issues that are of interest or concern to him, and writing about them in a new musical and lyrical way, but without giving us any background. We don’t know why this group of people are in chaos. And indeed, if we did not know “Baby Blues” as we do now, and heard the opening chord and bouncy rhythm for the first time, we’d be assuming that a jolly love song might follow. But no, the opening line “You must leave” knocks that assumption aside, as does the melody starting high and then delining, before by line three being in a lower register, as if offering an aside. Except the character now introduced has a gun! And yet the music is still quite bouncy and jolly in style.
It is this an utterly extraordinary set of contradictions that Dylan introduces for the first time, that sweeps us up into a new world. It is now of course impossible to recapture what it was like for those of us old enough to have been there some 60 years ago when we played side two of the album for the first time. But we can still get a slight feel for what was happening:
Tambourine Man suggests we are on a magic swirling ship. But that swirling ship is shipwrecked at the Gates of Eden and those aboard are forced to consider the broader and deeper issues of war and peace rather than having a nice gentle song played for us.
And although “It’s all right ma” suggests everything is fine, and if this is a description of “life and life only” then indeed we are in the darkness being serenaded by a deeply grim masterpiece. “Where is the jolly tambourine man now?” when we need him, when it is seemingly indeed all over now. Or is it worse than that. Are the depths to which we have been taken part of a never-ending spiral? It might be all over now, but then it starts anew. And another circle will turn; the vagabond is wearing your clothes, and who is to say that the world won’t turn once more and those clothes will come back to the original owner? It’s all over, except that it never is over. We play the album again. It just repeats.
The magic swirling ship has taken us to the gates of Eden, where all hopes are false hopes. I am bleeding, and it really is all over until we are forced to start again. Side two of the original LP is indeed a comprehensive musical masterpiece. A description of life in all its horrors. How, one wondered at the time, could this extraordinary genius, ever climb such heights again?
Previously in this series….
- 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 conundrum of the song that gets worse
- 20: Add one chord, keep it simple, sing of love
Articles on the history of performances of “It’s all over now baby blue”
- Part 1: 1965.
- Part 2: 1975.
- Part 3: 1984 – 1989
- Part 4: 1990 – 1995
- Part 5: 1996 – 2001
- Part 6: 2002 – 2010
- Part 7: 2011 – 2025.