By Tony Attwood
- 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
- 1972, Forever Young – preparing to open a minor door
- 1973: Amarillo and a back-up just in case.
- 1974: Idiot Wind
- 1975: Isis
- 1977: Journey through the dark heat
- 1978/9: When He Returns
- 1980: Yonder Comes Sin
- 1981: Angelin
1982/3 – looking back at Dylan’s work it is difficult to distinguish what was written in which year but taking them together we have “Blind Willie McTell” and “Foot of Pride” at least by my reckoning. Dylan recorded “Foot of Pride” in several styles but none of them satisfied him. But Lou Reed gave us the version b elow … and my goodness I love this, and indeed have featured it before on this site.
Why Bob couldn’t find a way to record and release the song I don’t know, but for me, it is always there in my head. Maybe the record company just felt it was too much to throw at his fans. Maybe Bob thought that the notion of “no going back” was too much of a contradiction of the notion that Jesus will forgive everyone who is truly repentant. After all both attitudes can’t be true, can they?
But two things struck me when I first heard this song and neither of them did I find I could let go of. One obviously was the chorus:
Well, there ain’t no goin’ back When your foot of pride come down Ain’t no goin’ back
The other was the penultimate verse…
They got some beautiful people out there, man They can be a terror to your mind and show you how to hold your tongue They got mystery written all over their forehead They kill babies in the crib and say only the good die young They don’t believe in mercy Judgement on them is something that you’ll never see They can exalt you up or bring you down main route Turn you into anything that they want you to be
It is that final line of Dylan’s, “Turn you into anything that they want you to be,” that rings so true with me, and has done across the years. People do pass judgments all the time, and really there is no need. I mean, I know I offer you my judgements on Dylan’s work, but I do it from a point of admiration, sometimes bordering on devotion, but not (I hope) ever to say “he could have done this better”. Maybe he could on occasion, but I am certainly not the person to point that out; my skills are far too limited.
But I can give some indication of becoming completely overwhelmed by something Dylan has created, as for example with what what Bob made of the song
Even though Bob rejected it, it is still great music, even if somehow Bob doesn’t give the verses that same incredible dramatic power that Lou Reed found within it. With Lou’s version, I just can’t stop listening to the lyrics; with Bob my mind can drift. With Lou, it is Lou and me together, with Bob, no its just me.
The message of course, is clear: once we are overtaken by pride, there is no way out. But the musical message is one of building up. Listening to his recording the most extraordinary point about the song is the way that it builds up and up and up…. and then suddenly fades out rather quickly. (I can almost hear the album producer saying “Sorry Bob I think we’ve had enough of that”. I mean I know no one would dare say that, but I imagine…)
So for me, musically, that doesn’t work. It needs to stop, just like Lou Reed’s version does, but Bob clearly didn’t feel that and let it drift away.
But almost above everything, we still have that pounding, unyielding music, combined with lyrics, the likes of which Dylan has never produced before (at least by my interpretations).
And I say that with some thought, because here neither the music nor the lyrics will yeield to anyone. Consider for a moment lines such as
Sing me one more song, about ya love me to the moon and the stranger And your fall-by-the sword love affair with Errol Flynn In these times of compassion when conformity’s in fashion Say one more stupid thing to me before the final nail is driven in
What do we make of that “Say one more stupid thing to me” line? Is it just a throwaway line of no consequence, or is Bob telling us to stop trying to decipher where he is as a person by interpreting his lyrical lines?
I gave up trying to work out a consistent level of meaning in Dylan’s lyrics decades ago – for me the wonderousness of those lines is their combination of incompatibility and incomprehensibility, and certainly that is the glory of this song. For me, with the religious songs, Bob was telling us to believe and giving us a clear message. But then be broke away, and returned to his style of throwing out lines that just hit us (or at least hit me) so hard that I can never recover.
Indeed, I picked up that there was no way back for me, long before I heard this track, and knew that whether anyone cared for any of my work or not, was irrelevant; I could not stop writing books and songs – that was part of me. But then when Bob calls out
They like to take all this money from sin,
build big universities to study in
Sing “Amazing Grace” all the way to the Swiss banks
what am I to think, let alone reply? Am I ok because no one in a university would ever get students to study any of my music or writing?
I taught creative arts in universities, and was well paid, but I am not at all sure I managed to convince my students of the value of creating artistic works through one’s life no matter what else you do, as a way of understanding the world we live in – although for a lot of time that was the message I intended to put across. Fortunately I gave up on that point before I retired.
But I have had that life and there ain’t no going back. Except to say to you, having got yourself to the end of this very rambling account, “Foot of Pride” remains a rambling song, and pride is a complicated emotion that comes and goes and by itself, and doesn’t do much harm if you keep it to yourself. It is only harmful when it starts to try and influence other people and their behaviour. When, in fact, the foot of pride comes down. Then indeed there ain’t no going back. I still write songs, but I only send them to people who ask, and I don’t ask for their opinions. That seems to be a decent balance.
But even so, I am proud of some of my work both in music and writing, and Bob is right, I can’t do anything about that; there ain’t no going back. But if the few people who have heard my creative works find something in them, which makes the individual think a little more about what we are doing here, about how we treat each other, what we are offering to each other…. then yes maybe in a tiny way, something good came out of it beyond the simple fact that I enjoy writing songs.
I am proud of having created Untold Dylan, and love the fact that I get emails from people thanking me for doing it, and telling me they are glad to have it as a resource. So for me there is pride, and since I have no intention of taking the site down, there is no going back. In fact I don’t want to go back. My family and friends seem to be happy to spend time with me, sometimes even asking me to play them something I’ve written of late, and yes I am proud of having written the songs, as well as the articles and books. So maybe the foot of pride has come down and I have no way of going back.
But does it matter? After all, it is just my friends and me.