By Tony Attwood
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Previously in this serie which offers my choice of Bob’s greatest composition year by year we have….
- 1961. “I was young when I left home”
- 1962: Tomorrow is a long time
- 1963: Seven Curses
- 1964: Gates of Eden
- 1965: Visions of Johnanna
- 1966: One of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later)
- 1967 part 1: “Drifter’s Escape”
- 1967 part 2: I’m not there
- 1968: Bob stops but even so (Lay Lady Lay)
- 1969: I’ll have you any time
This series is wholly personal to me, and I’m writing it because I enjoy the challenge of selecting something as arbitrary as the best song of each year, and because of the memories that looking back at Bob’s work in each particular year brings to me. For I find myself not only taken back to the music, but also to the people and events that I suddenly remember from focusing on each year.
You can find a list of all the songs Bob composed, arranged year by year, via this link and I feel the need to stress that I am absolutely not making any claim to the notion that my selection of the best song of each year is somehow right. Rather, I think I am mostly enjoying myself by making these selections, and in that way suggesting you might like to do the same. I’m certainly enjoying the exercise.
Indeed, if you do and your selection is different from mine, you could always email it to me (with or without comments) and I’ll publish your list (if you give me permission). Tony@schools.co.uk
Anyway, enough rambling, here is 1970, a year regarding which I offered the article Dylan in 1970: a stuttering return to song writing reflecting on the notion that Bob had been producing 20 or more excellent songs each year through much of the 1960s, but had at the end of the decade, come to a bit of a halt.
Reading through this list once again, and hearing the songs in my head, I still think Bob was struggling a bit, although there are some good works here, nothing immediately leaps out to me now, in 2026, as being a song that I must dig out and play. Sometimes it is the music, sometimes the lyrics, sometimes both – nothing seems to leap forth.
Songs like “If not for you” are certainly good, but “good” was never the accolade that we used for Bob – he was (at least most of the time) much better than “good”. And there are songs here that I really haven’t played more than a couple of times since first getting the album. Indeed, I’ve just played “Three Angels” for the first time in decades and I really didn’t want to hear more than maybe 20 seconds.
In the end, I settled on the first song Bob wrote during the year as my prime choice: “Time Passes Slowly”. But I did then go a bit further.
I still do like the accompaniment in the way that the piano and guitar interact in different styles and manners, and the fact that Bob has written an exciting and original melody. There is also on occasion, an interaction between the piano and guitar as if the two are arguing with each other. Maybe that’s how Bob felt.
“Time” is one of the words Bob has used most in the title of his songs, but even that, and the fact that this was the opening of the album, doesn’t really lift the song much above the level of “best of the bunch” half a century after the composition.
And I really do like sometimes to reflect on the notion that we don’t have to be rushing here, there and everywhere all the time, and that we can just stay in the countryside and look and listen. Of course, in this I am helped by the fact that although originally a Londoner who did rush here there and everywhere, I do now live in a small village, ancient enough to be in the Domesday Book, with the Domesday map showing the manor house and river exactly as it is now, 940 years later. That thought keeps me going.
But what fascinated me more than anything was that Bob, the man who sang “Times they are a changin'” in praise of change, now sings of a song in praise of the exact opposite. A song of stability, a song telling us there is no reason to travel anywhere at all because nothing changes.
Although certainly, for myself at my advanced age, that is what I feel. It wasn’t always thus, I was forever on the move, visiting and even living in weird places, but now I’m happy just here. Although I appreciate that there “ain’t no reason to go anywhere” I still feel that sometimes there is. As, for example, this afternoon when I plan to take a little present to one of my grandchildren. So sometimes there is a reason to travel, but certainly not as much as I used to.
There was one alternate version of the song recorded, which had George Harrison on guitar, while adding some harmonies. The alternative version is here.
But in fact, despite this song being a strong feature of New Morning, Bob never felt inclined to perform it, and so all we have is the album version and the rejected version, and nothing more.
In case you are interested, our list of the songs Bob wrote in 1970 is still avaialable, showing alll the songs Bob wrote in the 1970s, in the order he wrote them (as far as we can ascertain).
And for me, looking through that list, it still does seem that Bob was experimenting with his work, but not yet finding the new sound or new approach that perhaps he felt was still out there, waiting for him to discover it. He wrote 15 songs in all during the year (or perhaps I should say, 15 songs that have survived and of which we have found copies of Bob performing all of them – except one), and I still feel all these years later that Bob was primarily looking for something musically that he couldn’t find.
If one listens to, for example, “If not for you” it is a simple love song. There’s nothing wrong with it, and I’d certainly listen to it if it came on the radio, but there is nothing there that immedaitely make me want to play it a second time as there is with Dylan’s greatest works, no matter how many times I have heard them before.
If there is one other song that I might rate highly this year, it would be “Day of the Locusts” but again, there are no live performances of the piece, so I guess Bob didn’t like it. Maybe it is the number of times the line “The locusts sang” turns up. Maybe it is his admission about how out of place he felt.
But no, musically, the song doesn’t do much for me. And maybe this is a personal thing, for I remember when I got my research degree, and my wife and parents were there. One of my proudest moments. I’m sorry Bob didn’t get anything out of his award.
No, all things considered, I need to go back to “Time Passes Slowly”. I write this on a beautiful spring morning, looking toward a manor house that was here at the time the Domesday Book was written, and that is enough for me. Although I know that Bob only wrote six songs in the following year – 1971 – two of them are in my list of all time favourites. So that’s going to be an easier article to write – although it was good to revisit “Time passes slowly” one more time.