By Tony Attwood
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
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Dylan’s compositions at the start of 1965 were extraordinary, both musically and lyrically ranging from “Farewell Angelina” to “Subterranean Homesick Blues” from “She Belongs to Me” and then onto “It’s all over now baby blue”. Songs that for almost any other composer could be the definitions of a lifetime’s work were composed in a run of eight compositions which were just the opening salvo of a year’s work that concluded with the monumental “Visions of Johanna”.
But of course at the time, we couldn’t see where Dylan was going, and could only know that whatever he did next it would be a surprise. And surprise it was as unexpectedly he turned to humour with Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream – a song that got six perofmrances in 1988 (that is to say 23 years later) and then was once more put away in the locker and left.
It is a song that I have described as “Beat poetry as rock music” and an “update on talking blues” with a touch of Dada. In the live performances however Bob turned the song into a persistent 12 bar blues which has a modicum of a melody within it, but not much. However it did to me seem to take Bob a step or two toward finding a new form. Maybe Dada maybe something else – but I got the feeling then, and still get it now, that he knew there was somewhere else to go and something else to find, but as yet he didn’t know what or where.
In terms of compositions the Dream this was followed up with “On the road again” which did not ever make it onto the stage – yet another 12 bar blues that again seemed to be reflecting the total chaos and meaninglessness of the world around us. One can suggest it is about moving on, or about the artist taking on society or… well, whatever you wish. But what surely we must note is that after the compositional originality and gorgeous musical arrangements of “She Belongs to Me” and “It’s all over now Baby Blue” Bob seems to have retreated into the very basic essence of rock. For to tell the truth, neither “115th Dream”, nor “On the Road Again”, have much musical originality in them. Indeed if I can find an artistic form that they seem to approach it would be Dada.
And given the low number of performances we might feel Bob felt the same way even though he included these songs on the LP. But then Bob did compose a song he was willing to perform – and how. It got over 1000 performances across 45 years: Maggie’s Farm. Here is one from 2009 taken from the Never Ending Tour series on this site.
It is fun, and Bob has found some variety in the piece across the decades as we might note in this comparison with 1988. And indeed it is such a simple song it is quite remarkable that the music could be varied at all, but it is.
And yet still what we really have a bouncy rocker, in this case primarily on one chord with the first line of lyrics repeated, and then followed by a rhyming line. If someone who didn’t know Bob’s work just heard this they would struggle to know what all the fuss is about – and even if they did enjoy the lyrics or find originality in them, there is still the question: there’s not much originality in the music, is there?
That is not to say there is anything wrong with the song or these performances but rather to note that there is no profundity, no depth, no innovation, no message. It is indeed as if all the innovation, insight, beauty and feeling that we found in “Baby Blue” has been used up, and Bob has nothing left to do but to create a few 12 bar blues and their variants.
That doesn’t make the songs unenjoyable, but musically and emotionally they are so different from the first eight songs of the year, one wonders what happened. And indeed at the time, one wondered what would happen next.
What in fact happened was yet another 12 bar blues: “Bob’s 115h Dream”.
But again we have the 12-bar blues format, with very little musical variation, and again not much use for the song in the shows: six performances in October 1988 and that was it.
In compositional terms this was then followed by On the Road Again a song which in fact garnered no performances “Maggies’ Farm” came next and again gave us more of the same – which is not to say that these are not enjoyable Dylan compositions, but rather to point out that when we consider them in the order of composition, they have little to offer in terms of musical originality. Indeed if we consider Maggie’s Farm then we might say that like “On the road again” it tracked the notion of moving on, along with the concept of the artist against society. And this one did get played, over one thousand times in fact.
But there is moving on and there is moving on, and quite where this was taking us I remember wondering at the time. At least until something happened, for it is almost as if a voice from on high says, “Bob even with one or two chords, you can still have a melody” for that is what we got with It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry. It appeared on Highway 61 Revisited and Bob gave it 213 performances – but perhaps most noteworthy is not the number of times he sang it, but how long it took to get through those 213 editions. 50 years it took. And I am sure you don’t play a song across fifty years unless it really resonates.
In an earlier article I raved over a 2003 performance, and I still do love that. But now try this from 2019…
What makes this work for me is that by now we all know the song, we know the lyrics, there are only three chords, and they come in the classic “12 bar” order. But the way the accompaniment now works is just something else. The beat is great, but it’s not just that. This is the breathing of new life into the old dog. We are still reaping the benefits of the works of all those blues singers through the ages, but with a new life put into their work. It is as if Bob is now saying, “I have walked that road up and down throughout my life. I’m still singing the 12 bar blues, and I can even remember now to include a bit of a melody along with the beat and those unexpected chord changes.”
To me this 2019 version does more than knock new life into an old song, it shows us what there is in the song, and what was happening to Bob at this moment.
But back then Bob had not seen his way through what I think was something of a songwriting crisis. His next song Sitting on a barbed wire fence concerned moving on, just as most of these songs seemed to, although with the secondary ingredient that nothing at all makes sense, and then that was it. In fact Bob had written song after song about travelling and the concept of “moving on” – and with the wonderful It’s all over now baby blue it had worked perfectly. But with the subsequent “moving on” songs that we have considered here (from “115h Dream” to the “Barbed Wire Fence”), the moving on becomes tired and gradually makes less and less sense. So the music because less and less inventive. There is still music that we can enjoy, particularly in “It takes a lot to laugh”, but we are still just moving on and moving on, and “Sitting on a barbed wire fence” which was written next did nothing to transform these thoughts.
However, it all did have to come to an end at some time, and Dylan achieved this by pulling all his feelings of moving on and never finding the end, together in one song. And indeed it was a song in which he chose a new musical approach – that of the ascending scale in the bass against the same note in the vocal line. And it worked brilliantly beyond belief. Bob asked all of us how it felt, and at least in terms of “like a complete unknown” most of us knew.
It was indeed as if all those moving-on songs had finally led to their rightful conclusion. And as for that musical innovation of the rising scale in the bass against the same note held in the vocal – maybe most people who heard the song didn’t realise it, but that announced to anyone ready to hear that everything in popular music was up for grabs. And that is before we think about the vocal line in the chorus being followed by, not accompanied by, the chord changes. Bob truly had innovated, and from this moment on popular music would never be the same again.
Why did Bob innovate so extensively in this song, which when look back to the compositions immediately before it, seems to have come out of nowhere? I don’t know, and I rather suspect if asked he wouldn’t know either (although of course that is just a guess). But he did suddenly change, and thus after a long series of pieces created on and around the notion of the classic 12 bar blues we got a song unlike anything any of us had ever heard before. And oh my, it was certainly worth the wait.
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
- 21: It’s over. Start anew. It’s the end.