No Nobel Prize for Music: Imagine you had just written a masterpiece. What then?

There is an index to our current and some recently concluded series on the home page of this site.  There is an index to all the previous articles in the “No Nobel Prize” series at the foot of this article.

By Tony Attwood

My last meander in the “No Nobel Prize for Music”  series was headlined  900 words, 15 identical verses, and still, it is brilliant music.

So we now come to the question of how to follow up on something like that.   In other words, supposing you had just written a masterpiece of the scale, breadth and quality of “Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”, what might you think of doing next?

And that is quite a question for you, not just because the song is an utter masterpiece, beloved by many fans, but because it is unlike any other song that you have written of late.

For Dylan, the answer was that he did nothing with the song, having recorded it.  Or maybe I should say, “next to nothing”.  There is a recording of the song by Dylan, which is not the copy used on the album, so maybe that is the concert version, but certainly, what we don’t have is a collection of Dylan’s performances on stage.   As Joan Baez pointed out when she performed it, there is a lot of it to remember.

In fact, what Dylan did was sit right back down and write another absolute masterpiece: in this case, “Tangled up in Blue”.

And this song became a standard part of Bob’s repetoire although often with rewritten words. And there is a reason for this, because this was one of the most complex pieces of music Bob has ever written.

So while Lily was left for a few others to dare to tackle, the latest count is that between 13 November 1975 and 29 August 2018, Bob played “Tangled up in the Blues” 1685 times!  That makes it the fourth most performed song for Bob Dylan, behind only the Watchtower, Like a Rolling Stone and Highway 61 Revisited.

I have, in fact, raved over the Live at Wembley Stadium version many times, and I am pleased to see that it is still available on Spotify for free even if you don’t have an account, which is jolly decent of them.   And it is worth it, for that version really is a complete rewrite of the song.

Now my point here is not to go back over other people’s versions of the song, which are often extraordinary, and have been mentioned on this site before, nor to consider the changing lyrics, but to think about the music, which is the essence of this series.

And the guitar accompaniment for this song certainly is unusual.  Now of course, all I can do is listen to the music and if I feel like it, play it as I hear it – but as may have become clear in the past, I am now in the latter years of my life and like most older people my hearing is declining – a decline enhanced through tinitus – so I might be hearing it wrong.

Besides, different people have written the chords out in different ways – the general thought seems to be that Bob, on the original recording for the opening chord alongside the lyrics “early one morning” plays E minor 7th with an A added (so I guess Em74 might be the shorthand).  I am not sure he ever used such a chord previously to this recording.

However, the reality is, it doesn’t matter exactly what is played because the song keeps moving so quickly, and there are several different ways of playing those rotating chords that accompany “Early one morning the sun was shining,” and most listeners won’t be too worried about the exact nature of the chords.

However, we do get a feel of this being in a rock/blues version of the chord of E minor – one that allows the chord of D major to enter into the proceedings, and the inclusion of the chords B and A with the line, “if her hair was still red,” adds to that feeling.   And so we get the feeling that the song clearly is in E major (and just sometimes E minor).   But the main point here is that although each element of the song’s music, which I have begun to explore here, is either novel or at least unusual for Bob at this time, it is very clearly part of the rock/blues tradition for a song in E.

What makes the song different is the number of chordal changes that occur – there are something like nine chords in each verse (depending on how you choose to play it).  That is not, I must stress, nine chord changes, but nine different chords.

Now, maybe Bob has revealed in conversation (although I haven’t seen it or heard it) which came first, the lyrics, the melody or the chord sequence. I’d guess that the opening of the chord sequence was what he started with, then along came the lyrics, and from there the rest of the music evolved.  But of course, I have no proof.

The song is around 600 words long – with only the title repeated at the end of each verse, and musically it is strophic, which is to say verse, verse, verse etc.

Yet from the moment of composition, the song took on a life of its own, with constant rearrangements turning up on Bob’s Never Ending Tour. There is an excellent description of the constant rearranging of the song on the dylan chords website.

And of course, the fact is that Bob can, or at least could, rearrange the song because he was performing it on his own, so there was obviously no need to let the band know what he had just come up with.

In all ways, therefore, this is a unique Dylan composition, of which the album version, or the version you heard in the concert you went to, was just one individual version among the many.   The song, in fact, opened up not just a new way of songwriting for Dylan, but a new way of song rewriting.  And the fact is that very, very few songwriters have the level of talent that allows them to write in this way.

But we also need to understand such songs as this as songs within the context of Bob Dylan’s compositions at the time.  My note on this site’s summary page of Bob’s compositions in 1973 shows that the last song of that year was “Wedding Song (Rejection of labelling, setting oneself free).”

Now I made up that little summary (which of course you might well feel is inaccurate or inadequate or indeed quite possibly both), having listened to the compositions of that year, and without in any way considering what came next.   For what came next was “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts”  and then “Tangled up in blue” – two songs in which musically, if Dylan didn’t exactly break the mould, then he most certainly extended the mould, so it no longer looked (or more precisely sounded) anything like the mould.

Dylan wanted to see, or perhaps better said, felt the need to see, where the concept of the popular song, built on its strophic tradition of verse, verse, verse etc, (with the occasional middle 8) could go.   In doing this, Bob kept the strophic notion of the repeated music of the verse, but the music was allowed to take the verse further than it had ever been taken before.

Of course, in itself, that is not that difficult for a composer to do.   What is difficult, however, is to take the musically repetitive verse to a point where it can accommodate the multiplicity of lyrics, without leaving the listener thinking “what the hell is going on here?”

Bod does that – and he fact he did this through these two songs written one after the other: “Lily, Rosemary” and then “Tangled”.  Indeed, my view is that through writing “Lily,” which has a much more conventional lyrical approach than “Tangled”, he saw he was going to have to go much further in the music if he wanted to take the lyrics and indeed the whole of songwriting into a new dimension.    And in this regard, you might also care to listen to Tangled Up in Blue:  “Real Live” version.

The creation of these two “mega songs”, which retained the strophic verse-verse-verse notion of folk music from which Bob took so much of his inspiration, stopped after “Tangled.”   Whether he felt he had done all he wanted to do, or had gone as far as he could without losing his audience, of course, I don’t know, but the contrast with the next song Bob wrote couldn’t be greater.

After “Tangled up in Blue”, Dylan wrote You’re a big girl now, followed by Shelter from the storm    Do those two songs throw further light on Bob and where his songwriting had got to?   Certainly in form, structure and intracy, no, although I’ll have a go at exploring the issue further next time.

I am not sure how many times I have listened to “Tangled” in the past couple of days, but my friend with whom I share my house, and who is not a Dylan fan, has had enough.   And to some extent, I can understand.   Bob was not just tangled up in blue; he was tangled up in music.  And lysics.  And life.  And, I think, he needed a way out.

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 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 a 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 words
39. Bob invents a totally new musical form
40. There is a change we can see and a change we can’t see
41. A sign on the window tells us that change is here
42. One more weekend and New Morning: pastures new
43. Three Angels, an experiment that leads nowhere
44. An honorary degree, nevertheless. But why was Bob not pleased?
45. When Bob said I will show you I am more than three chords
46. Moving out of the darkness
47. The music returns, but with uncertainty
48. Heaven’s Door, Never Say Goodbye, and a thought that didn’t work…
49. Going going gone
50. Bob goes for love songs
51. On a night like this and Tough Mama
52. I hate myself for loving you
53. Lily Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts