By Tony Attwood
This series looks at the way in which Bob Dylan’s compositions have evolved both musically and lyrically over time. An index to previous articles is given at the end.
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In the 1960s, Bob Dylan wrote over 240 songs, and that excludes anything that appeared on the Basement Tapes where the origin of many songs is unclear. The subject matter was incredibly varied, ranging from the obscure visions of one person, to being a drifter, from love to lost love, from party freaks to natural and man-made disasters.
But by the end of the decade, the subject matter had pretty much come down to love and lost love, and at the same time, the musical structure and form of the songs had retreated into popular simplicity. Except that in 1969, there were signs that Bob’s musical compositions might just be taking a new direction – even if the lyrics were staying in the same place.
Listening to the recording of Minstrel Boy we can hear at once that this is a song that travels in a different direction. It is clearly not finished, and what we have is the band joining in behind Bob on a rough first edition. But the melody is much more wide-ranging than for most Bob songs, and the notion of the harmonies also takes us into new directions.
Indeed, if you go looking for the chord sequence of the song on internet sites, there are several different versions. As ever, the one that seems to my ear to get closest is Dylanchords
C F6 G11 C
Who's gonna throw that minstrel boy a coin?
F C
Who's gonna let it roll?
C Em F6 G11 C
Who's gonna throw that minstrel boy a coin?
F C G7 C
Who's gonna let it down easy to save his soul?
Of course, we can all draw our own conclusions from what Bob was doing, suddenly introducing a much more varied melody line and a chord sequence that as far as I know, he has never previously gone anywhere near, but I think for most people the effect is not one that draws them into the song. It is indeed an experiment – an attempt to take the music somewhere completely different. As I said in my last piece, Bob seems to have lost his way.
And what I mean by that is that in song composition, one can do the unusual, but because popular songs are normally designed to have an immediate impact and make the listener want to hear the song again, this sort of sudden variation into the new, on this scale, doesn’t normally work. Yes of course, songwriters can be different, but being that different tends to dissuade the listener from going back for a second listen.
If we then jump to the last song written that year, this once again is not the Dylan we know, but at least the song is approachable by an audience hearing it for the first time. It is a tuneful song, that most people can happily sing along to. But that’s not really what we normally turn to Bob Dylan for.
Had Dylan been told to go mainstream? Had he really been told that some of his recent experiments had just gone too far away from what his fans really wanted?
Now these songs are so utterly different in every regard that at the time, if one was aware of both pieces, one would have been utterly bemused as to where Bob was going to go next.
My guess was that Bob put this song together because he couldn’t come up with something completely new of his own. As I have noted before, the origin of this song was undoubtedly “Singing the blues” written in 1954 by the wheelchair bound Melvin Endsley and recorded by just about everyone from Johnny Cash, Marty Robbins, Guy Mitchell (also covered by Tommy Steele in the UK) and on to Andy Williams, Paul McCartney, Stonewall Jackson, and Ricky Skaggs.
The song is much more melodic than most Dylan songs and is a simple lost-love piece. Just what a popular TV song would have wanted, and something that might suggest to long-term fans that Bob had turned yet another corner in his writing. In short, what we have here is a deliberate attempt by Bob to turn that next corner – wherever it happened to lead.
Except that it is not a corner into a straight composition. For Bob, in this song, modulates from C major to G major, in the conventional way via D major, but then very takes us back to C major. Don’t worry about following that if you are not a musician – my point is that in what appears to be a very straightforward classic popular folky song, Bob is playing games with the chord sequence. And it doesn’t stop there because in the final line he runs through the chords of G, F, Dm, Em Am F.
It is as if he is saying, “Look, I can play around with the standard format of the music and it doesn’t have to freak you out. There are more places to go.” And with the next song he wrote Bob really did show us all that he had now got this musical adventurousness both in his mind and under his control. In “Time Passes Slowly” the beat is very unusual for Dylan (it’s in 3/4 time with variations), and the melody suddenly shoots off in a most unexpected direction at the end of the verse.
Another most extraordinary thing about this song is that the chord sequence changes from verse to verse. Another point is that the song is in the structure of a classic pop song of the era – three verses and a “middle 8”. So the form is classic, but the music is not.
Verse one begins, “Time passes slowly”. Verse two is “Once I had a sweetheart”. Then we get the middle 8 starting, “Ain’t no reason to go”, and then finally we get the fourth verse (up here in the daylight), which again has some new chord changes introduced. It would be stretching the point to call this a “through composed” song in the classic tradition, but it is not what we normally get in pop and rock music.
Taking the data from DylanChrods what we have for the last two lines are
Asus4 G Asus4 G Like the red rose of summer that blooms in the day, Asus4 G F#m Em . . . . Asus4 Time passes slowly and fades away.
Whereas in verse one we had as the chords
F#m Em/g F#m/a Em/g D C G F#m /a G
What Dylan has done is move about as far away from the music of Tambourine Man (a song of major chords and a couple of suspended fourths in passing) as possible without travelling into the avant-garde.
And what strikes me as being so clever and so effective in this song is the fact that this musical revolution is not only played out in a way that everyone who likes Dylan’s music will happily accept, but it is also played out against lyrics which deliberately take us back to the “old days” which the song portrays.
Once I had a sweetheart, she was fine and good-lookin'We sat in her kitchen while her mama was cookin'Starin' out the window to the stars high aboveTime passes slowly when you're searchin' for love
Now in this regard, it would be incredibly easy for the song to become something that Dylan fans who like a conventional approach to music could reject. It is, after all, a love song celebrating the old ways in the old days. But those chord changes and the sudden leap of the melody at the end of each verse do give us something new to contemplate, whether we understand what Bob is doing musically or not.
Lyrically, this song is the antithesis of “Times” which comes with its threat that “you better start swimmin’ Or you’ll sink like a stone For the times they are a-changin’.” Here there is no threat.
And indeed musically the two songs are at opposite ends of the spectrum. “Times” is based on musical simplicity just one step away from the 12-bar blues (G, Em, C, G repeated regularly). The message as we all know, is that Times are changing, and if you don’t recognise that, you’re sunk.
But now nothing is changing at all, except when it happens within the natural order of things, as “Like the red rose of summer that blooms in the day, Time passes slowly and fades away.
Now it is easy to argue that Bob has moved from being the messenger of the revolution in the former song, into the old man living the comfortable rural life in the latter song, but that would miss part of the issue. The music of “Times” is straightforward and simple; music any folk performer of the day could hear once and then strum along to.
But now the music is much more complex, just as the lyrics tell us everything is naturally following its own course in its own simple way.
In short, in each case, the music is exactly what we would not expect for the lyrics.
So why does it work in each case? Because the message of the former song is “change is here – just look at it” which is actually a very simple message. But in the latter song the message is that “change is happening every day, and is mysterious and continuous” and that is a much more complex message. Put another way it is the message of “Get up and join the change” turning into, “change is happening all around you, you don’t have to do anything.”
Thus message and music have changed, and affecting that change in songs is part of Dylan’s brilliance.
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