No Nobel Prize for Music: I Want You

By Tony Attwood

This series explores the argument that the structure and approach to the music in Dylan’s compositions is of equal interest and equally worthy of study, as his lyrics (to which most commentators devote their entire attention).  Recognising however, that most of my readers are quite probably not musicians, I’m attempting to set out my argument in as non-technical a way as possible.

A list of the previous articles in this series is given at the end.

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In the last piece I looked at (Obviously five believers) I noted how Bob Dylan added in a few variations to the normal musical form that he had used.   That song contained repeated musical phrases (nothing unusual there) except that we are given seven and five note phrases (which are unusual and which I think Dylan had not used before).   Also of note in that song is the fact that it is in a 12-bar blues format, but itself isn’t 12 bars long, plus it includes an instrumental line after the fifth vocal line, which again is unusual.

What is remarkable is that with such variations, it sounds fine, and indeed, I can’t recall any reviewers writing about the construction of the song, although it really is most unusual.  But that is how it goes.  Reviewers review his lyrics, not his music.

So then, for anyone who had been able to follow Bob’s song constructions at the time, the question would have been: what would he do next?   How far could he take these variations in the classic 12-bar blues format without the listeners getting utterly lost, feeling perhaps Bob had now gone a step too far for his non-musically educated audience?

My view is that such questions may well have been in Bob’s mind as he wrote these songs we have been looking at of late in this series, and nowhere more so than with “I want you” which he performed live 214 times between 1976 and 2005.

We get a full instrumental introduction (not unique but unusual in Dylan) and a very bouncy rhythm (again unusual for Bob – and unexpected given the lyrics).  In fact, the music and the lyrics, if considered apart, don’t seem to have a relationship with each other.  The singer is desperately sad, but the song is jolly and bounces along.

Musically at first listen the construction is utterly standard – the verse is 16 bars long – the most common length for the verse of a song in all forms of popualr music,   The chorus is eight bars long although it does contain a little surprise when having finished its eight bars, Bob puts in a sort of PS, in the form of another “I want you” leading into the short musical interlude before the next verse starts.   That is of course, quite understandable as it gives the listener a chance to come to terms with the overall construction of the song without engaging in any sort of counting of the bars.  It simply feels right.

What also helps the song feel “right” is the descending bass line – although this is done in a very clever non-standard way.   The bass plays C, B, A, G – a classic descending line.  But the chords played with it are C, E minor, A minor, G.  That’s not unique, but it is unusual.

Then, in the next lines the chords take us down one more step before bringing us back up and finally coming to rest on G (what is known to musicians as the dominant chord)

F, G, Am G

And from there it is a natural step back to the tonic chord (C major) for the first “I want you.”

The point about this is that these chords are all chords that feel obvious, right and normal for this song.  No one, musician or non-musician alike, feels anything out of place – and that fits exactly with the theme of the song “I want you”.

But we can note that at the same time, the lyrics are not of the “why did you leave me?” and “I feel so bad” type.  What Bob is actually saying in the words is that there is a world out there in which everyone has their own thoughts and worries, and that these are reflected in the broken world in which we live.    We don’t know why the undertaker is guilty, why the organ grinder is lonesome (although we can guess) or why the saxophone music says what it does.   But as the lyrics go on, we get the sense of a broken world (cracked bells and washed-out horns for example) but why it is all like this, we don’t know.  It just is.

Yet still the music bounces along, giving all the more force to “But it’s not that way, I wasn’t born to lose you.”

So musically and vocally, we get the point; he has lost her, but he is not going to let that lead him into dark misery.  It is the world gone wrong.

And apart from everything else, what this bouncy music does is carry us along so we don’t immediately fixate on the changing rhyming scheme

A A B C C D B

Now this view of the rhyme scheme is contentious because it counts the sixth line as “And asks me to open up” thus rhyming with “cup”.  The official site, however, sticks to the seven-line verse, which is in itself very unusual, but is certainly another way of seeing the piece.

But what holds us together is the chorus, which in effect is the title line four times with “so bad” added partway through, which is itself very un-Dylan.

The middle 8 then, is a classic middle 8 with no oddities at all

How all my fathers, they’ve gone down
True love they’ve been without it
But all their daughters put me down
’Cause I don’t think about it

Then we are back to the expected (although still very unusual) rhyming scheme, although the pattern that we might feel from the ending of verses 1 and 2 with “you” is broken as the third verse ends with “matter” and the last verse with “because I”.

In short, what Bob is doing is giving us a standard bouncy pop-style song with a rhythm that I can’t recall him using elsewhere (perhaps because it is so bouncy), all the while singing words of utter desperation.  And he pulls it off, to such an extent that most listeners are quite happy to accept this song as a jolly bit of fun, and not see any contradiction therein.

What’s more, this extraordinary effect is achieved through using the absolutely standard ternary form, which runs

• A (Chorus)
• A (Chorus)
• B
• A (Chorus)
• A (Chorus)

The prime difference we might feel from a pop song is that the lyrics keep changing – in pop music, we more commonly get a verse and the middle 8 (signified as B above) repeated.  But no, Bob only gives us a middle 8 once.

So what Bob is doing is making us feel that this is a lost-love song, but with two surprises.  Firstly, the music doesn’t reflect the sadness of the singer’s position – the music is bouncy, lively, and fun while the lyrics are desperate.  And second, he wants her, can’t have her and of all things, is finding solace with his “chambermaid” as the music continues to bounce along in its jolly way.

When I first started to think about this song (as opposed to just listening to it and enjoying the contradiction between the bounce of the music and the sadness of the lyrics), I found myself taken to the famous line from The Handmaid’s Tale:

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.”

and then of course realised that Margaret Atwood wrote her novel some 18 years AFTER Dylan composed “I want you”.   Could she be a Dylan fan?  No, of course not – you might recall (if you follow such things) that when Bob got the Nobel Prize and she was asked about that, she replied “For what?”  So no, just a coincidence.  Or maybe she did hear the line and it stuck in her subconscious.

But to return to my theme.  What Bob has done here is musically extremely interesting, for he has taken the lyrics of desire and desperation (remember it is not just “I want you” but “I want you so bad”), and combined that with a jolly, bouncy song.  If we fail to take equal note of both music and lyrics, we fail to grab the key message, that the singer is continuing to put a good face on what’s going on but feels desperate about it all, at the same time.

Bob pulls this off perfectly, although the refusal of most commentators to comment upon Bob’s musical style means that this double meaning (the brave face over the inner desperation) is not seen in the context of the music (the brave face) and the lyrics (the desperation).  As a result, quite often, as here, the full meaning of the song overall is missed, and thus this next stage of Dylan’s progress in exploring where pop and rock music might be taken is simply not observed.

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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 
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 appened?
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
22:Desolation Row: perhaps the most amazing piece of popular music ever written
23:  Can you please crawl out your window
24: Positively Fourth Street
25: Where the lyrics find new lands, keep the music simple
26:  Tom Thumb’s journey. It wasn’t that bad was it?
27: From Queen Jane to the Thin Man
28: The song that revolutionised what popular music could do
29: Taking the music to completely new territory
30: Sooner or Later the committee will realise its error
31: The best ever version of “Where are you tonight sweet Marie?”
32: Just like a woman
33: Most likely you go your way
34: Everybody must get stoned
35: Obviously 5 Believers