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By Tony Attwood
“I Got a New Girl” is one of the tracks on the recently released Dylan collection, Volume 18. And in a sense, I can see its value as a piece in an audio museum, but as a piece of music that I actually want to play, I really don’t get it at all. For me, and of course, all reviews like this are totally personal; it is very difficult to listen to, and leaves me with no feeling either that I have learned something, or that I want to go back and listen to it again.
But it is not just the song, for what I find particularly distressing is that the guitar is out of tune. And I can’t imagine why Bob kept going without tuning the guitar properly.
It raises the question for me: Is every scrap of recording that Bob ever made to be valued? If so, would that include him singing a nursery rhyme, if such a recording existed? And if yes again, should I really be charged money for obtaining a recording of that?
It is, of course, interesting to hear how a great composer creates his compositions, but I am not at all sure that this recording tells us much in that line either, particularly since we now have hundreds of different recordings of Bob varying his own compositions. The fact is that we know he can do it, and do it with great aplomb, so what does this recording tell us?
Indeed, I would say, in terms of actually offering pleasurable listening, the track doesn’t score at all. Nor does it tell us anything about how Bob wrote any of his later, more important pieces.
But I am not trying to dismiss this totally and say, “I’m right, it is of no value.” Rather, I would like to know what I am missing. In short, I want to know why this song is worth keeping and offering on a rather expensive album collection. Is it just so we can have a copy of every single Dylan recording he ever made? And if so, “Why?”
Now the official note about the album released by the record company reports that “Through The Open Window tells the story of Dylan’s emergence and maturation as a songwriter and performer, from Minnesota to the Greenwich Village bohemia in the early 1960s.”
And I would ask whether that is actually true, at least in terms of this track (and indeed others, but I will stay with this one. And of course, I know that in a sense, studying the early work of any artist working in any field tells us something, but often not very much. This recording maybe tells us that Bob started out using the lyrical themes that were commonplace in popular music at the time, but I am not sure that is a very valuable bit of knowledge. We can also learn from this piece of music that Bob was using the standard guitar chords to be found throughout rock n roll and popular music, at the time. Again, not much of a revelation. And that he was using very, very basic rhythmic structures – but then all contemporary writers of popular and folk music do that.
When we turn to the lyrics, the same concerns arise.
Well I got a new girl She says she's my one But my new girl she won't come home Come on now baby say you'll be mine always And I'll be your one for eternity Come on little doll little Take a little, give a little love Come on little doll little Take a little, give a little love Well I got a new girl She says she's my one But my new girl she won't come home Come on now baby say you'll be mine always And I'll be your one for eternity
To a degree, the lyrics are interesting in that Bob has not bothered at all with rhyme, which suggests that the lyrics are improvised, given that, through most of his work, Dylan has used rhyme as part of the “glue” that holds each piece together. But there is a sense of improvised lyrics even in the middle section with the line “Come on little doll little” which doesn’t seem to have much meaning or offer much in the development of the music.
We could instead say that this is interesting because it gives an insight into how Bob started writing, but I am still really not sure that is so. It would be quite a stretch of the imagination to take that central “come on little” part of the lyrics and suggest it led anywhere significant in Bob’s writing.
This is not to say that the recording should not be made available to fans, musicologists, historians etc, but I suspect with this piece that it really isn’t of much (if any) significance even to the most august researcher, unless he is determined to find a meaning in every scrap of music Dylan ever wrote. I am led instead to thinking about Picasso drawing five lines at random on a piece of paper aged six, and being told this has significance. It might do, but it might also just be five lines on a piece of paper.
And then finally back to my headline question… For me, recordings either entertain or inform. If they don’t do either, then I am not sure of their value. And I guess I am saying here that I was neither entertained nor informed by anything in this recording. But of course, if you got something out of it that I missed, then I’m wrong, and it is mewho is missing out. But for now, the only other reason that I can see for including this song on the collection is simply to fill up the album. And that doesn’t seem to me to be a very good reason, for it would imply that Dylan, making up songs as he went along, at the age for five or six, as many children do, would tell us something. But I doubt it does.