by Jochen Markhorst
XXIV Willie’s backward psychology
I play both sides against the middle Pickin’ up that pirate radio signal I heard the news - I heard your last request Fly around my Pretty Little Miss I don’t love nobody - gimme a kiss Down at the bottom - way down in Key West
Prepositions can be tricky. Experienced journalist Siddharth, who was trying to curry favour with the popular Bollywood actress Kangana Ranaut, probably still loses sleep over his blunder in 2013, which went viral. The actress is answering questions to promote her recent film Queen. The interviewer wants poetically to suggest that he considers her – admittedly very charming – performance worthy of a National Film Award, the Indian equivalent of the Oscar. And asks: “Are you feeling the National Award inside you?” Kangana tries to handle it professionally, but her co-star Ranganathan Madhavan, sitting next to her on the sofa, bursts out laughing, and then Kangana can’t hold it in any longer either – fits of laughter punctuate the rest of the interview. A stunt that, incidentally, was neatly replicated in 2024 by Alison Hammond (ITV, This Morning). Ryan Gosling is actually there to promote The Fall Guy, but Hammond still wants to refer to his successful role in the hit film Barbie: “Do you think, Ryan, that Ken will always be inside of you?” Emily Brunt, sitting next to him, bursts out laughing, and so does Ryan. But a moment later, Ryan has Alison Hammond’s crib sheets in his hands: “I have reason to be suspicious. It says ‘Ken will always be inside of you’ and ‘inside’ is underlined, Alison. Alison, you knew what you were doing – you knew it all along.”
Dylan also uses cue cards (on the piano), and has therefore been remarkably consistent with the lyrics across the roughly 300 performances of “Key West” since its debut in Milwaukee on 2 November 2021. Occasionally, he skips a verse, such as the fishtail ponds verse in 2023, but generally all 643 words of the studio recording are included, in the correct order too. The exception is the closing line of each verse, varying from performance to performance. The closing line of the first verse, for example, “From down in the boondocks – way down in Key West”, is Down on the bottom in 2023, and Early one morning in 2025 and 2026.
Or the one of this thirteenth verse; as early as the debut, it is Way down at the bottom, later it becomes Early in the morning, and in 2026 the audience in Omaha, Nebraska hears: Way down here in Key West. The only closing line that remains consistent across all those performances is Eastbound – westbound – way down in Key West in the eleventh verse, the Mystery Street verse. The closing lines of the four choruses are apparently more sacred: Dylan always sings them exactly as they appear in the official publication on bobdylan.com.
We see this inconsistency in the closing lines at a micro level as well: the prepositions. In the official lyrics and on the record, Dylan sings, in succession, Down on the bottom, Down in the bottom, and Down at the bottom, in the closing lines of the fifth, twelfth and thirteenth verses respectively. We do know that Dylan has a tendency towards idiosyncratic use of prepositions since the 1960s (“along” the watchtower, Judas placed a roll of tens on a footstool just “above the plotted plain”, “underneath” that apple suckling tree), but this is different; it seems as though he cannot make up his mind. For which we should perhaps blame Howlin’ Wolf.
“Down In The Bottom” is one of the many highlights of Wolf’s second LP, the self-titled Howlin’ Wolf from 1962, an album that is essentially a collection of singles and is better known as The Rockin’ Chair Album. The album is a landmark. “Little Red Rooster”, “Spoonful”, “Back Door Man”: one Willie Dixon classic after another… ten of the twelve songs are by Willie. Songs that Dixon wrote especially for Howlin’, but for which he could only get him on board via a roundabout route:
“He [Howlin’ Wolf] came in with his things and every once in a while he’d mention the fact, ‘Hey, man, you wrote that for Muddy. How come you won’t write me one like that?’ But when you write one for him he wouldn’t like it. And then I got to the place, found out that all I could do was use backward psychology and tell him, ‘Now here’s one I wrote for Muddy, man.’ ‘Yeah, man, let me hear it. Yeah, that’s the one for me.’ And so, I’d just let him have it [laughter].”
(Willie Dixon interview Living Blues, no. 82 (September/October 1988)
“Wolf’s second Chess LP features an outrageous set of sex songs written by Willie Dixon,” wrote Rolling Stone in April 2010, when they ranked the album at No. 223 on the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. And one of those “outrageous sex songs” appears on Side 2: “Down In The Bottom”. Judging by its structure, Dixon tailored it specifically for Howlin’: “Wolf, you can’t give him too many words, because he gets ’em all jumbled up. And if he gets ’em right, he still ain’t gonna get the right meaning,” as Willie explains to blues archivist, music historian and biographer Peter Guralnick (Feel Like Going Home, 1971). So he constructs the song in such a way that Howlin’ is already familiar with both the music and the lyrics. Dixon sets a few new words to the melody of Hambone Willie Newbern’s “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” (1929), and improvises on Bumble Bee Slim’s “Hey Lawdy Mama” (1935), the song that Slim re-recorded in 1936 with slightly different lyrics and called “Meet Me In The Bottom”:
Meet me in the bottom, bring my boots and shoes Oh Lawdy mama, great God almighty Meet me in the bottom, bring my boots and shoes I've got to leave this town I, got no time to lose
(using the words that Dylan in turn then reuses in “Workingman’s Blues #2”; Meet me at (!) the bottom, don’t lag behind / Bring me my boots and shoes.)
A Dylanesque approach, then, and a successful one at that; just like almost all the other songs on The Rockin’ Chair Album, “Down In The Bottom” has also secured its place in the canon. The Stones’ 1964 version is exciting, alright, but only when they perform the song live in 1995, we hear the blessings of thirty years of maturing. In the Netherlands, Wim Bieler from The Hague does a fine impression of Howlin’ Wolf on the legendary debut LP Revolution (1966) from his band Q65, world famous in all of the Netherlands. With yet another Dylanesque twist: with Q65, the song is suddenly called “Down At The Bottom”.
Incidentally, Dylan himself seems to have been unsure about the correct preposition for sixty years now. In the 1960s it was still at (buried at the bottom of the ocean – “When the Ship Comes In”; born at the bottom of a wishing well – “Motorpsycho Nightmare”); on in the 1970s and 1990s (You’re on the bottom – “Idiot Wind”; I’ve been down on the bottom of a world full of lies – “Not Dark Yet”). And in between, there was also a brief on; when T Bone Burnett set to work in 2014 with the unexpectedly found, unused lyrics from the Basement –lyrics Dylan wrote in 1967 – for the project Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes, the double album opens with “Down On The Bottom”, set to music by Jim James:
Down on the bottom Down to the last drop in the cup Down on the bottom No place to go but up
It’s at most bit odd, and squabbling over the prepositions in, on and at is ultimately, of course, insignificant. We’re just glad Dylan doesn’t sing inside of the bottom.
He does seem to have a little Willie inside of him, though.
To be continued. Next up Key West part 25: There’s a code in the lyrics
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle: 
- Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
- Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
- Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
- Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
- Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
- Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
- Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
- John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
- Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s looking for the fuse
- Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
- Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2nd Big Bang
- Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
- Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
- Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
- Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
- I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
- Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
- Bob Dylan’s 1971
- Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door
- It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry b/w Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues – Bob Dylan’s melancholy blues
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side A
- Bob Dylan takes Highway 61 – Seven mercurial songs
