By Tony Attwood
Previously in this series.
This series contains a totally personal set of reflections about how a few Dylan compositions have had a profound impact on me, not just when I first heard them but for many, many years thereafter.
And my point in taking on this series is not just to wallow in my own history, but also to encourage anyone who wants to think along these lines to consider the long-term impact a Dylan song can have. This is not to say “I like….” one or other particular song, but that a song has actually had a major influence on the way one thinks.
But what I find particularly interesting is that when I think of other composers whose work I like, I can’t think of any of whom I would say that their work delivered a life-changing experience to me. Yes, I liked some of their music, just as I have truly enjoyed the work of certain novelists, and I can still gaze for long times at reproductions of certain people’s works of art, and get a lot out of them. But I have tried to suggest in this short series that a few Dylan songs have actually had an impact on me that goes way beyond that. I don’t know if other people have had the same experience – I merely offer my thoughts in the hope that you might be able to find a work of art somewhere that has helped you see the world in a different way. For that is, after all, what they are for.
I would like to include “Tell Ol Bill” in this series, as it is a song the recordings of which I have played time and time again, and yet somehow it has never reached that life- changing level. I love the song beyond most others, but… did it actually change me? No, I think I had changed before that song reached my house, and it seemed to confirm the validity of the journey I had taken. And of course I can’t identify with Tell Ol Bill because I have been very lucky through my work as a writer, and it is simply not true that I have “hardly a penny to my name”. Although there is a river a little way down the road from my house, and the Domesday Book (written in 1086), confirms that the river and the village in which I live, was here, as now, 960 years ago. Which gives me a wonderful feeling.
So I have to admit that the one song that has travelled with me since I first heard it, and which has eternally, is not some obscure song of Bob’s, but rather one that everyone knows… “Visions of Johanna”.
Maybe it is that opening line, maybe it is the mistake by the bass player in the original LP version… but no, I think really it is one simple line that hit me when I was in my teens, still wondering what I was going to do with my life, that came to me then through Bob’s work, and has been with me ever since
We sit here stranded, though we’re all doin’ our best to deny it
For all my ability to chitchat about music, and quite a few other things, for all the books and articles I have written, I still admit, and that line has always reminded me, that yes, I am, like virtually everyone, stranded in the world into which I was born. I’ve travelled, been married twice, have three wonderful children and ten amazing grandchildren, and have been so lucky in life I have nothing to complain about at all.
But that great breakthrough into understanding what it is all about, what it is all for, why it is me that has been given a tiny bit of talent that has allowed me to have much of my life doing what I enjoy, and earning a living out of it, is beyond me. It has just happened.
I have never known a Louise or a Johanna, but I can understand who they are, and what they represented to Bob when he wrote the song, and what they represent to me now.
Fortunately for me, in old age, I am not normally cursed by the fate of lying in bed unable to get to sleep, I have a comfortable life, and am quite happy with what I have done with my time.
And the most curious thing is that there is not a single line from that song which I can quote and say “That’s what influenced me”, or “That is the line I have always carried with me” or anything like that. But that one song has been with me since I first bought the album while in my last year at school, before leaving home to enter the grand, exciting world of being a student.
Of course, at the time I had no idea what would really happen, and of course it wasn’t as I imagined it, and nor did it turn out as planned (although in retrospect I am rather glad about that). But all the way through “Visions of Johanna” has always been there with me.
So why is that? And what influence has it had on me? And come to that, why do I still love the song so much?
Maybe it is the opening line, which reminds me eternally that no matter what I have planned, what I have thought I could do, things have never once turned out as I imagined. I have, on occasion, exceeded my expectations, and on many others, fallen far, far short of what I wanted. And maybe that’s the key to the song. Maybe I have spent most of my life just sitting here stranded.
Except there are those Visions, and after a while, I really did resolve for myself, if no one else, what it is all about. On a number of occasions, I have managed to achieve my dream, although generally, I discovered that the dream was immediately replaced by another wish-list.
And that was the lesson of Visions. It’s not what Bob says, or at least not exactly, but it is still a decent story. You can have what you really want, but generally by the time you do get it, you may find you actually wanted something else. As the master says.