No Nobel Prize for Music, from the SimpleTwist to Idiot Wind

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By Tony Attwood

The idea of this series is to make the point that although most books and articles on Bob Dylan focus on his lyrics, he has been a really big innovator in terms of how the music in folk, pop and rock songs can also be varied to make a real contribution to the songs that we hear. Indeed, as we have been seeing in this series of articles, Bob was regularly trying to take the music of pop and rock forward into new dimensions, without losing his audience along the way.

But for a long time, his variations in terms of music, although there, were subtle. And indeed, we can see in the first of today’s two songs, looked at from the musical point of view, the music in “Simple Twist of Fate” is as simple as the “simple twist of fate” in the lyrics. Only the penultimate line of each verse changes the shape and feel of the song.

Now this is a very curious arrangement in fact, but it provides the solution to the dilemma Dylan has given himself in the lyrics with the problematic end of the penultimate line, where suddenly the vocal line rises in both pitch and volume.

So I do think Bob has given himself an interesting problem here with these decisive half lines, and I am not sure the problem is fully resolved by the rise both in pitch and volume for these half lines, although it is a song Bob has tackled in concert over 800 times. But he does (mostly) find the rhymes he needs. The freight train is the oddity, but he’s Bob Dylan, so he can get away with that one. Here are these penultimate rising lines….

wished that he’d gone straight
hit him like a freight train
a blind man at the gate
he just could not relate
how long must he wait
I was born too late

I feel that Bob realised he had created a problem for himself in this song and not fully resolved it, and this feeling led him to try and resolve the issue by changing the chords and to some extent the melodic line in live performances. It is an interesting thought, because with Bob’s regular changing of his own compositions, we are never sure if he is just doing it for the sake of having a variation, or because he feels he has found a better way of expressing himself musically.

By 1975, some of the penultimate lines rise far less….

And by 2024, there was further rewriting

But I also feel that there was something in the music of “Simple Twist of Fate that pushed Bob towards one of his greatest moments in songwriting, by which I mean the composition of “Idiot Wind,” although here we find Bob only performed the song 55 times. Mind you, it is a long and complex song, and maybe the strain on Bob and indeed the band was just that bit too great for what he felt were successful live performances.

However, whatever caused the writing of “Simple Twist of Fate” it is clear that everything musically within Bob’s thinking was building up to “Idiot Wind”, which in every regard is unique both in Dylan’s musical work and indeed that of other composers in the rock genre. There is nothing else quite like it.

What is remarkable about Idiot Wind is that lyrically the song is utterly vindictive – we start with the clear statement that “Someone’s got it in for me” and move through the verse to “You’re an idiot babe it’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.”

In fact, in every regard this is absolutely the opposite of a love song. And that in itself is interesting since there are very few vindictive songs in any genre. Love songs yes, lost love songs aplenty, but vindictive? It’s hard to think of many.

Pop and rock music, growing out of the popular songs of the 1940s, was built around songs of love, lost love and dance, not songs of revenge, hatred and anger. Indeed, the lost love songs are generally sad and plaintive, not aggressive or vindictive. So Bob had the task of creating the first (or perhaps one of the first), truly successful aggressive, angry and blaming rock songs about the end of a relationship.

Of course, he did this in part through the lyrics – you will recall the opening line “Someone’s got it in for me, they’re planting stories in the press”. But much more powerfully, he did it with the music.

The opening chord sequence of C minor, D and G is, I believe, unique in folk, pop, rock and popular music. The C minor chord has nothing to do with the key of G, which the song is performed in, and that movement from C minor onto D major tells us that this is a song about disconnection, disharmony, anger etc. As indeed does the rising melody.

This is in fact Bob Dylan being utterly unique in his songwriting; Dylan moving as far away as possible from the known and recognised three chords of the 12 bar blues. And most pointedly of all, he does it at the very start of the song. We don’t get any gentle introduction – we are straight into that jarring contrast of C minor, D major and G major.

The descending chord sequence gives us a feeling of descent in fortunes and indeed a movement toward a feeling of chaos. This is one of very few Dylan songs that starts on a minor chord. But then it moves onto a major chord before resolving onto the key chord – in short it takes three chords for us to be sure what key we are in. And even if one is not a musician, that feeling of uncertainty comes across. This is not just something that Bob had never done before – I can’t think of any other song (at least any other song written before Idiot Wind) which does this.

The chordal sequence shows us clearlywhich key we are in (and Bob has played it in different keys at different times) but it is that mix of major and minor chords that keeps on taking us to the very edge no matter what key he is in. Add to this the way Bob takes the melody up to the highest pitch he manages at the end of each line, and we have a revolutionary composition.

Have we ever had lyrics before (or possibly since) which have as much anger as the lines “You’re an idiot, babe, It’s a wonder that you still know how to breathe.”

Indeed if Bob is going to write lines such as

You’ll never know the hurt I suffered
Nor the pain I rise above
And I’ll never know the same about you
Your holiness or your kind of love
And it makes me feel so sorry

…then those lines are going to need some harsh chords with which to make the music fit the words, and yet Dylan solved this dilemma very simply using the simple sequence of C sharp minor, G sharp minor, A minor, and E. These are all chords that are available if writing in E major – there is no sudden invention of a new chord progression here. The anger and indeed hatred that pours out comes from the contrast between this sequence and the chords used against the chord lines starting “idiot Wind” and of course, the pure energy that Bob puts into the song.

Bob only performed the song some 55 times on stage; perhaps it just took too much energy and anger to perform. Yet it is an absolute masterpiece of rock music – and here I mean to emphasise the issue of music, as much as the lyrics. For the song would not have worked as a song of disgust and despair without the right combination of both lyrics and sounds. Which is why I guess so few composers have ever tried writing a song with such harsh lyrics or with such a variation of major and minor chords that are not directly found within the key that the piece is played in.

This is Bob Dylan, master musician, at the height of his game.

Previously in this series….

No Nobel Prize for Music, from the SimpleTwist to Idiot Wind

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