My Own Version Of You part 8: A truly fascinating song

My Own Version Of You (2020) part 8

by Jochen Markhorst

VIII       A truly fascinating song

I say to the willow tree - don’t weep for me
I’m saying the hell with all things that used to be

“An exceptional song,” says a man who should know, Alec Wilder in his American Popular Song (1972). “It’s on a par with Carmichael’s experiments and was written, I’m sure, far from the maddening crowd of commercial song writers.” This is a huge compliment coming from Wilder, as he considers Hoagy Carmichael to be “the most talented, inventive, sophisticated, and jazz-oriented of all the great craftsmen.” And “Willow Weep For Me”, because that’s what he’s talking about, is “a truly fascinating song.”

The song was undoubtedly injected under Dylan’s skin by Sinatra, via Sings For Only The Lonely (1958), Sinatra’s perfect suicidal mood album. In his autobiography Chronicles, we read Dylan’s undisguised declaration of love for track 9 of that same album:

“I used to play the phenomenal “Ebb Tide” by Frank Sinatra a lot and it had never failed to fill me with awe. The lyrics were so mystifying and stupendous. When Frank sang that song, I could hear everything in his voice — death, God and the universe, everything.”

… and for more than sixty years, we have heard echoes of the remaining eleven songs reverberating throughout Dylan’s entire oeuvre. In songs like “Forgetful Heart”, “Dignity” and “Wallflower” resonate word choice and song structure; Only The Lonely songs like “One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)” and “Goodbye” are paraphrased and quoted in the Basement, in “Sign Language”, in “Scarlet Town” and in “Don’t Think Twice”, and with some cut and paste work, the classic “Blues In The Night” can be reconstructed in its entirety from Dylan’s Collected Works (there are at least nine Dylan songs with word combinations and paraphrases from that one song).

That’s no different here on Rough And Rowdy Ways. Dylan quotes “only the lonely” in “False Prophet”; So you take the high road / and I’ll take the low from “Goodbye” resonates in “Crossing The Rubicon”; further on in this “My Own Version Of You” we hear in the wee, small hours, the reference to Sinatra’s other collection of tearjerkers, the equally brilliant In The Wee Small Hours from 1955… the impact of Sinatra’s torch ballads is not limited to the unabashed tributes Shadows In The Night, Fallen Angels and Triplicate (2015-17), the albums on which Dylan reinterprets 52 songs from the American Songbook, but has also been seeping into Dylan’s own songs for sixty years.

However, the reference to “Willow Weep For Me” seems to have a little more substance than the “normal”, weightless references. The wee small hours in the tenth verse, or something like in a small café at a quarter to three in the 1970s song “Sign Language” (the setting borrowed from “Only The Lonely”, the time copied from “One For My Baby”) and those dozens of other hints in Dylan’s oeuvre: these are usually nothing more than nice but meaningless nods.

But here in “My Own Version Of You” Dylan plays with the reference: “willow don’t weep for me.” The continuation takes it even a step further, going full Hemingway: “I’m saying the hell with all things that used to be.” Alienating. The narrator seems to contradict himself. Is this the same man who, twelve seconds ago, revealed that he is studying the fossil language Sanskrit? Who has made it his mission to save the best of the past for the future and who, in the last line of this song, will say: “I wanna turn back the years”? In short, the man who extols all things that used to be now wants to send them to hell?

The interlude insinuates a Jekyll/Hyde-like schizophrenia, a man who, on the one hand, feels an evangelical urge to spread the Way, Truth and Light of old songs, ancient literature and whatnot, and, on the other hand, has a severe allergy to repetition, to rehashing things that used to be. Which is certainly an issue for the artist Dylan himself, as we know. Studio engineer Chris Shaw quotes Dylan, and is then un-Dylanesque clear and concise:

“My favourite Bob Dylan song is probably ‘It’s Alright Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)’. He has this wicked way of playing it live now, and I saw him backstage once after a show, and I said, ‘Hey, I love the new version of “It’s Alright Ma” – but do you ever play it like the original recording?’ And he looked at me, and he said: Well, y’know, a record is just a recording of what you were doing that day. You don’t wanna live the same day over and over again, now. Do ya?”
(Life with Bob Dylan, UK Uncut’s autumn special 2008)

… and even more unequivocally in the same interview, a little further on:  “Bob really, really hates to repeat himself. He just hates it.” Still, that applies exclusively and solely to his own work – after all, Dylan repeats other people’s work so exhaustively and frequently that it has become a stylistic feature. Not only by dusting off old songs and performing them as covers, but also by quoting and integrating parts of them into his own songs, by filling his autobiography with phrases and word combinations from other people’s work, by freezing film scenes and copying them in his paintings, by peppering a Nobel Prize lecture with passages copied from SparkNotes, by embellishing his film script for Masked And Anonymous with quotes from things that used to be… no, the artist Dylan is a fan of repetition, and is grateful that the things that used to be have not gone to hell. We can identify the artist Dylan with the indignant narrator from “Summer Days” (“Love And Theft”, 2001): She says, “You can’t repeat the past.” I say, “You can’t? What do you mean, you can’t? Of course you can.”

An aversion to weeping willows is more in keeping with the machismo of the creative storyteller, the genius who creates a creature who feels the way that I feel and is modelled on parts of Scarface Pacino and the Godfather Brando. This is a robot commando who has no patience for the sentimentality of a willow weeping for him. No, if he’d want the sympathy of a salix babylonica at all, then it should be from the willow in the most beautiful willow song of the twentieth century, even more beautiful than “Willow Weep For Me”: Joan Armatrading’s “Willow”, one of the breathtaking highlights of Armatrading’s crown jewel Show Some Emotion (1977):

I'm strong
Straight
Willing
To be a
Shelter in a storm
Your willow oh willow
When the sun is out

Alec Wilder may have heard Joan’s willow song (Wilder died in 1980), but if so: he did not make his opinion public. Still, we can of course guess what it would have been: “An exceptional, truly fascinating song.”

To be continued. Next up My Own Version Of You part 9: You take things and you make them your own

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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:

• 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 2^nd 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
• It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry b/w Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Bob Dylan’s melancholy blues