By Tony Attwood
Dylan in 1967 was the Dylan of the Basement Tapes, a period which was followed by the total transformation of his work and style with the composition of the John Wesley Harding songs. These recordings seemed to include a fair amount of Kafkaesque influence until the last three compositions of the year.
These three songs were indeed different, however: “Dear Landlord,” “I’ll be your baby tonight,” and “Down along the cove” – the first of these being a song based on a stream of thoughts and the last two being love songs, which were not at all typical of Dylan’s recent work. Indeed, I would surmise that if you didn’t know these were Dylan songs, you would never guess. Although I am primarily concerned with the music in this series, it is hard to imagine any music other than the 12-bar blues format that Dylan used for Down Along the Cove, being introduced here. Still, at least Bob’s friend and eternal bass player has a great time. Maybe it was just written so that he could have some fun.
And I do mean that comment seriously; I would really like to know how that bass part came to be. Did Tony Garnier pick up on a Bob improvisation, start to create his bass accompaniment, and then have Bob say, “We’ve got to put that on the album?”
Certainly, Tony Garnier deserves some recognition. He joined Bob’s band on June 10, 1989, and has subsequently been called “bass player and musical director” (by Duke Robillard). He is undoubtedly the musician who has played the most shows with Dylan.
And although he is not as old as Bob, he is, by my calculations, approaching 70 years of age as I write this in 2025, so maybe the two older guys get on well together.
One interesting thing that Garnier might well bring into his work with Bob is that he has had extensive experience working with other excellent musicians, ranging from Loudon Wainwright III to Paul Simon. He was even in the Saturday Night Live house band for a while and indeed also appeared in “Masked and Anonymous.”
But to take ourselves back to Down along the Cove, it is hard to see anything Dylanesque here, other than the need to fill up the album. The lyrics alone surely tell us that. Just three verses of which the first is…
Down along the coveI spied my true love comin' my wayDown along the cove,I spied my true love comin' my wayI say, "Lord, have mercy, mamaIt sure is good to see you comin' today
1968 was, of course, a year that remains famous in American history, and indeed, one could go on and on forever writing about 1968. And yet with America turning itself inside out, what was Bob’s response?
Of course, I was not there, what with being a student in England at the time, but looking back at Bob’s work from the era, I see no references to the issues of the assassinations, the war, civil rights, going to the moon, Chicago…
As far as I can tell, the issues that so occupied Dylan’s mind in earlier years were now all coming to the boil, and yet Dylan wrote Lay Lady Lay, a love song. And of course, there is no reason why he should not write that or any other song. It is just that after all the songs that touch on social issues, he now co-wrote “Nowhere to go” with George Harrison, a song that basically seems to say that we need to look after ourselves, as if we don’t, no one else will. (I only know of one recording of Nowhere to go and you can find it through that link, but if you don’t know it, be warned, the quality is very rough both technically and musically).
What happened to the man who wrote “Masters of War”, and “Times they are a changin'” and so on? Well, seemingly, he vanished.
Of course, I might be totally wrong about Dylan the composer in 1969, and indeed, maybe there is a book out there which explains why Dylan wrote what he did in 1969, but if so, I’ve missed it, and for now, I am baffled. The man who wrote “Desolation Row” found the image of the world around him that he had reported poetically in his songs, becoming true. And his reaction was to write “Minstrel Boy” – a song which basically says we should look after ourselves (the implication being that if times really are changing, they are most certainly not changing for the better).
In fact, of the 15 songs that I can trace to being written in 1969 by Bob, the key themes seem to be that we need to look after ourselves because no one else will do it, and beware of love, because it can lead to lost love.
In fact, I can’t pick a song from the list of Dylan compositions for that year because nothing written at this time matches what had gone before. There is nothing that I find that is politically telling, or musically original, or indeed insightful or beautiful. But what Bob clearly found was country music, and it was his experimentation in that area that brought Dylan back to songwriting. Indeed, without that twist, he might never have written again.
But there is a caveat to all this: the dating of Minstrel Boy is uncertain. Musically, I feel it fits in 1969, but it is impossible to prove. However, we can be quite sure about what Bob did write at this time, even if the order of writing is not always clear. This was Dylan’s era of writing about love and lost love. Song after song is on the two sides of the same theme.
In terms of lost love, we have “I threw it all away”, “I don’t want to do it”, “One more night” and “Living the Blues”.
In terms of the lost songs we have “I’d have you anytime”, “To be alone with you”, “Peggy Day,” “Country Pie” (although that song could be seen as being about something else), “Tell me it isn’t true”, “Tonight I’ll be staying here with you”
Only then, at the end of the compositions for the year, do we get a change of theme, with songs like “Wanted Man”, “Champagne Illinois”, “Ballad of Easy Rider and “Living the blues.”
What we actually have during the period, however, is a real level of experimentation for Bob in terms of the music he was writing.
Indeed, as I have pointed out before, if we go back to Minstrel Boy it feels incredibly laboured, and incorporates a chord sequence of E minor, F6 and G11 which feels to me as if it is introduced simply because it is different, and not because it works with the lyrics or within the musical concept.
In short, one is simply left thinking, “What on earth is going on?” And that is before we even ask what happened to Dylan the great creator of lyrics: Minstrel Boy consists of two verses and a chorus heard three times.
Who's gonna throw that minstrel boy a coin? Who's gonna let it roll? Who's gonna throw that minstrel boy a coin? Who's gonna let it down easy to save his soul?
Is that Bob talking of himself, or a kid he saw playing a banjo with a hat in front of him or …. well what?
What I think we can see at this time is that Bob felt he needed to change – perhaps because he felt that his songs of protest were no longer relevant, given that half the world seemed to be protesting around him.
But the problem was that he looked at country music for inspiration in guiding that change, and yet country music is by and large a musical form that is fixed within certain musical concepts, while in fact (in my view) what Bob needed was to change musically, by finding a completely different type of music to work with.
In short, going from the complexities of “Visions of Johanna” to “Country Pie” was a musical route that went backwards, backwards and then backwards some more, and there was sadly nothing that was influencing him in another direction.
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 36: I Want You Creativity dries up 37: Creativity dries up - the descent towards the basement. 38: One musical line sung 12 times to 130 worlds 39: Bob invents a totally new musical form