Bob Dylan’s composition of 1972 – preparing to open a minor door

By Tony Attwood

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Previously in this series, which offers my very personal 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
• 1970: Time passes slowly
• 1971: When I paint my Masterpiece, and Watching the River Flow

Now, as I have noted before, I write and then publish these articles individually, so when I started this series, I had no clear idea what song I would choose for each year.  Likewise, having written about 1971, I had no clear thoughts on what I would say about 1972.   Except I did know that what this series of articles would show is that one year for Bob Dylan is very much not like another.  True, Bob’s compositional activities ebb and flow, but that doesn’t make his work cyclical.  The ebb and flow process tends to take Bob in new directions, not back and forth.

The early 1970s were a period when Dylan took something of a rest from songwriting.  He still wrote some amazing works, in particular “When I paint my masterpiece” and “Watching the River Flow” in 1971, but overall, there was a real slowdown in his output.   And why not?   After years of multiple works of genius, Bob slowed down with just five compositions (that we know about) in 1971 and then just two in 1972 – if you count “Billy the Kid” as one item.

So for me, this year has the easiest of choices to make.   “Forever Young” or “Billy the Kid”, and it has to be the former.  It appeared on “The Complete Budokan in 1978, and between 1974 and 2011, it notched up almost 500 live performances by Bob.

Musically, the descending bass line has always been a favourite of the more adventurous rock music composers, and here we can hear it perfectly

Forever Young seems to be one of those song titles that has been used lots of times. Let’s remind ourselves of Bob’s take on the title, from The Band’s Last Waltz concert,

And even all these years later, it is still interesting to note that this song has some unusual features.  There is a contrast between the opening line of each verse, which is basically on one note, and the expansive music of the chorus.   And there is the fact of the chorus itself, which consists of the lyrics “Forever young, forever young may you stay forever young.”  Two lines of music and four chords, which appear in full after each verse, which is to say three times.

Dylan has, of course, used the end of a verse as a chorus line itself before – take for example “When I Paint My Masterpiece” in which the title line appears no less than eight times, or the phrase “Visions of Johanna” which appears in the last line of each of the five verses.   Or “Desolation Row” where the phrase appears ten times.   Indeed, even the three verses of “Blowing in the Wind” manage to get the title in no fewer than six times.

But nowhere do we get to the abundance of use that “Forever Young” had with the phrase being used 12 times in just three verses.  And the fact is that in each case, we never feel that the song title is being overplayed – each repeat (even the multitude of “Forever Young” lines) feels just right for the song.

However, even then, nothing quite prepares us for the multiplicity of “May you” and “May your” lines in “Forever Young” in which we have five starting “may your” and 13 beginning “May you”.

Now this is not mere pedantic counting on my part, for songs do use repetition to make them memorable and to secure in the mind of the listener the essence of the piece.  Indeed, listen to a Beethoven sonata played in full and you will hear whole sections repeated.  In fact, a repetition is what the recapitulation of a sonata actually is.

Repetition helps secure the feeling and the “message” of a piece of music, whether it is the first movement of a symphony or a song written for popular consumption.  And in this regard, Bob takes the concept of repetition to the limits.  And yet, despite this, the music still holds us enthralled, largely because of the emphasis on the word “Forever”.  If one is writing a song on the theme “just stay as you are,” radically changing the music partway through will not work.

Now I have often noted before that Bob’s favourite approach to songs is the “strophic form” of Verse, Verse, Verse etc, but here in each of the verses, the final three lines have an even greater emphasis placed on them by being identical in each verse, both musically and lyrically…

May you stay forever young
Forever young, forever young
May you stay forever young

This cements the meaning and feeling in our mind, and we can appreciate that this approach to the last line of a song is very much one that Bob enjoys.   In “Blowing in the Wind” for example, we immediately note that the last two lines of each eight-line verse are always

The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind

“Hard Rain” written not long after “Blowin’ in the Wind” uses the same approach, as does “Don’t Think Twice”.  But useful though this technique is as a way of finishing off a verse and indeed a song, one of the multiplicity of issues that makes Bob Dylan far more than just a writer of lots of popular tunes, is that having had success with this repeating format in 1962, he moved away from it in 1963.

If we consider the lyrics of the early 1963 songs we find the repeating lines have vanished, and although I doubt that Bob thought this process through (for I rather suspect it just came to him naturally) in “Girl from the North Country”, lines are not repeated, which emphasises the unique positiion of the “one who lives there” in the singer’s mind.  For here he is not hoping for her return, but instead cherishing the memory of days that will never return.

Thus, my view is that through this consideration of the rhymes used, we can see how Dylan explored the ways in which he could use the strophic form of writing while still making each song truly memorable.  Which is not to say he consciously pondered the problem and found a solution, although that could be true, but quite likely felt himself moved toward a different form of rhyming when creating the lyrics of songs of leaving.

Indeed, the early songs of 1963 were songs of leaving, with four of the first five compositions of that year being devoted to this topic

• Girl from the North Country
• Boots of Spanish Leather
• Bob Dylan’s Dream
• Farewell

So, to return to the issue of 1972.  Bob had written 15 songs in 1969, another 15 songs in 1970, six in 1971, and two in 1972.   It might be suggested that he had already burned himself out,  not least as”Forever Young” was a wonderful piece of music with which to conclude.   But it was not to be, for there was, of course, far, far more to come.  Not least because Bob now discovered the new power music could offer him if he tried writing in a minor key.  Indeed, as it turned out, the road of musical exploration had hardly begun.