Publisher’s note: The original version of this post was fine upon putting it up, but it subsequently corrupted. My apologies for this – I’ve not seen this happen before and it has taken me a day to get it sorted out. I’ve had to remove one of the musical examples and part of the text but otherwise it is still the same article.
By Tony Attwood
I began my series on the music (as opposed to the lyrics) of Bob Dylan with an article
I found the issue to be one of some interest, and so chose to evolve that thought into a series of six articles (the links to which, if you are interested, are published at the end of the article referenced above. and I reached the conclusion through those articles that Bob had at one stage in his career turned away from making the lyrics the key element in each song, and instead made the music and the lyrics of equal importance in each of his compositions. As a result the compositions were significantly different from those hehad written before.
This pattern of composing continued through to the writing of the song Isis which sought to return to the most simple approach to the music of a rock song (it is based on three chords repeated over and over through the song) but with a remarkable range of variations in the melody.
Of course I am not sure if Bob specifically thought that this was what he was doing, but as we look at the sequence of his writing, this is certainly how it appears that the compositions evolved.
Thus musically, the end of 1974 and the early period of 1975 was one of Bob’s greatest periods of compositional virtuosity. Idiot Wind had that unprecedented chord change at the start of each verse, while One More Cup of Coffee moved us through the pain of departure- the opposite of the vigour of moving on through one’s own decision to go out and find pastures new.
In this regard, the series ended with Isis, a song that showed once more that three chords repeated over and over could still create incredible music that just demanded to be listened to if the melody and lyrics were right. The three chords give us the repeated background of life, the pattern of day following night, but within that, there can be infinite variation.
This then whetted my appetite for more writing about Bob’s music, although hopefully within it, there is some recognition of the fact that my audience is primarily made up of people who enjoy Bob’s compositions and performances, but are not musicians. That series began with the article “If only there had been a Nobel Prize for music” which took as its starting point not just the fact that most people comment not just primarily but solely on Bob’s lyrics, and so the revolution he created in popular music as music was, in such commentaries, largely ignored.
That it was ignored can be seen by reading the reviews of Bob’s work, for although there are exceptions, by and large they make little reference to his music. Yes, we now have access to many of Bob’s initial recordings of songs, and we can hear the music as well as the lyrics evolve through recording sessions, but compared with the level of discussion of the lyrics, there is little said about the way the music changes.
I attempted to pick up this point with the series “If only there had been a Nobel Prize for Music” which opened with the forthright claim that Bob had deliberately taken us, at this point, into a new musical world as he had taken us years before into a new lyrical world.
The very first song I noted in what was to become a rather long series is repeated below, and I think if you just listen to this with an ear for the music, the point that I have laboured over during these months may make itself clear. I doubt anyone would nominate the lyrics of this song as one of the high points of Bob’s compositional achievements, but with this new accompaniment, suddenly the song takes on new meanings and reaches new insights that were hard (if not impossible) to perceive previously, not just in Dylan’s writing but in anyone’s lyrics.
Now I know I have given my favourite example of this multiple times, so please do skip forward if you are now bored with it, but if you have not heard this before, or if, like me, you can never hear it enough, just consider this example below. If you want the whole journey of this song’s mutation, it is here. But if you want to take my word for it, here it is in its final edition…
The question I asked myself when I first heard the version above was quite simply, how on earth could any composer get from the original version to this new version?
Bob Dylan both wrote and recorded “Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum” in May 2001 and it was released four months later, as the opening track of “Love and Theft”. Musically, it is a development of the classic 12-bar blues, but reduced from its normal three-chord format to two chords. Bob obviously felt the song was important: it was, as I have just noted, the opening track of the album. But I wonder, did many of us really appreciate its depth? I certainly did not.
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