Bob Dylan: why would you do this?

By Tony Attwood

By Tony Attwood

I’m going to make a confession.   I can’t remember all of the articles we’ve published on this site.   Worse, I can’t even remember all of the articles I personally have written for this site.

Now that is due in part because of my now advanced age, in part because we have published almost 4000 articles on Untold Dylan, in part because we started in 2008, which, according to my calculator, is around 17 years ago.  And it is in part because I also write on other subjects.  And indeed I have one or two other hobbies, like dancing and watching football (soccer) matches.   So no excuses – it’s all pretty much my fault.

And besides, 17 years ago, when all this started, I was still getting up when the alarm went off and driving to my place of work, putting in the statutory eight-hour day, before coming home and quite often doing the work I hadn’t managed to get done during the day.

But it is only just this year that it has struck me that among those almost 4000 articles, there are some real gems (not I hasten to add written by me) and some exquisite, or at least interesting, recordings of Dylan compositions – ranging from those performed on the Never Ending Tour (which we have been discussing somewhat of late) and cover versions, like the one below….

There are, of course, many that I have come back to before, including the original recording of “Hard Rain” followed by Dylan performing an exquisite rock n roll version in 1975.  Playing those two recordings one after the other really still does knock me out.

But yes, it is true that sometimes I come to selections and wonder why I got quite so excited about cover versions as with “Acquaraggia play Dylan” which I think I would now downgrade to “interesting” rather than anything more.   But at the time…

And this makes me think there is a broader issue here.   It is not just that Bob has written so many songs, each of which we have reviewed, but also that there have been so many variant versions of the songs that have been recorded by Bob and, of course, so many other performers, that it is difficult to take all the songs and all the variant performances into one’s head.

Indeed, to try and reflect upon this a while back, we ran a series called “Beautiful Obscurity”, which, by chance, I turned back to this week, while trying to trace all we had written about a particular song.  And this activity caused me to start to work my way through a few of the past articles on this site.  Not, I must add, because I wanted to read what I had written (I mostly skipped the text), but because the series contained some lesser-known versions by various artists of (occasionally) lesser-known songs.

Now my point here is not that each one of these recordings is brilliant musically, but rather that mostly they offer a new insight into what actually resides within each song.  By which I mean, a thousand people can record “Times they are a-changin'” without giving us any new insight into the song, but occasionally an artist will take a Dylan composition and offer us a new version which does somehow add something to the meanings that we can draw from the song.

Add to this the fact that around half of the songs listed on the BobDylan.com website as Dylan compositions have never been played by Dylan in public (not even once) shows how strange this situation is.   Yes, we might expect a composer to reject some of his work, but to write a song, put it on an album, and then never across a whole lifetime on stage, perform it in public – that is (to me at least) a bit odd.

If you want to see the vast list of songs that Dylan has written and recorded, but not performed you can work that out from the data on the official Dylan site, but here a few of my favourites.

Now I know that I have mentioned most of these before, but when I have, it has been a case of one song per article.  But when one starts to gather together the list of beautiful songs Dylan has created but never performed, one cannot help but wonder, why not?

I’m back with this theme because I truly do find these songs really interesting and worth listening to in their different forms.   And each one leaves me wondering exactly what it is that has made Bob record the songs but never perform them in concert.  Indeed setlist.fm kindly gives us details of over 3,700 gigs.   And yet even with that number, we have some songs Dylan felt were good enough to go on an album, yet not right to perform ever in public.

Songs such as “Alberta”, “Time Passes Slowly”,  “Dirge”, “No Time to Think” (see above), “Farewell Angelina”

And after that list, which goes on and on through hundreds of songs, we have compositions such as “Angelina”, which Bob recorded, but didn’t put on an album and again never sang in concert.   This, for me, is one of the great, great, great Dylan compositions….

Then, in addition, there are the songs that Bob did record, but then abandoned, only to have another performer show the world just what was in a song

I have to admit that some of these decisions are utterly incomprehensible to me.  “Foot of Pride” seems to me to be beautiful, elegant, expressive, interesting, demanding… and Bob actually records it but then leaves it off the playlist.  Why would you do that?

But let me leave you with one more.   Abandoned Love is a beautiful, original piece and yet never once has it had an outing.  We only know about it because of “Biograph”.  And I am left wondering, “why?”   It can’t be because the performance needs a violin – Bob has endlessly rearranged his music.   Maybe he just forgot the song…