by Jochen Markhorst
One of the many gems on the legendary compilation album Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965–1968 (1972) is the Like A Rolling Stone rip-off “A Public Execution” by the Texan garage rock band Mouse and the Traps. It’s a near-perfect copy, or perhaps a pastiche, of Dylan’s Highway 61 oeuvre. First and foremost thanks to the lyrics by Knox Henderson – an extremely Dylanesque, scathing put-down (I’d like to say I’m sorry / But it’s no longer my concern) – and the talents of singer Ronny “Mouse” Weiss, described by music historian Richie Unterberger as “like vintage Dylan, a grinning, surrealistic, half-spoken rant”. The sound, the guitar-organ tandem, the strategically placed piano interjections as a mocking counterpoint at the end of the verse lines, and the Al Kooper-esque organ riffs in the background… it’s all pure mercury. But the stroke of genius elevating the recording to Indistinguishable-From-The-Real-Thing is heard right from the very first seconds: the opening riff that sounds like a out-of-tune toy piano – an unmistakable, unique stylistic hallmark.
To Dylan, harmony isn’t really a big concern. The discordant guitar in “Queen Jane Approximately” (despite a fairly in-tune Take 2, Dylan opts for the out-of-tune Take 7), the slightly dissonant “Love Minus Zero”, the piano in “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, Blood On The Tracks, half the songs on Good As I Been To You (1992) and World Gone Wrong (1993), the bass in “Tough Mama”, the off-key harmonica during the Letterman performance of “Jokerman” (1984); there are dozens of arguments in favour of the claim that Dylan does not consider pitch accuracy to be all that important. Which is explicitly confirmed by Malcolm Burn, the engineer on Oh! Mercy (1989):
“The only thing that took us a long time to get right – and this is another interesting aspect of his approach – was when he was fixing a vocal part. You know, if he wanted to re-record just a section of a song. It was never about whether it was in tune or out of tune or anything like that. It would be – let’s say he’s singing a replacement line – he’d sing it and you’d try to mix it into the original track, he’d listen to it and he’d say, ‘Ah, nah, nah, nah. That’s not the guy.’ And I’d say, ‘The guy?’ And he’d say, ‘Yeah. It’s not the same guy.’”
(Uncut – Tell-Tale Signs Special Part 2, 2008)
“It was never about whether it was in tune or out of tune.” In that respect, the dissonances in the studio recording of “Mother Of Muses” are not particularly remarkable. But on a deeper level, they are; this time it’s not an out-of-tune piano, an off-key guitar or a wrong note like the bassist’s slip-ups in “Visions Of Johanna”. “Some of the sung notes simply don’t fit with the chords,” as a surprised Tony Attwood writes, and:
“Quite why Bob has taken what is in essence a simple, but nonetheless utterly delightful and beguiling set of lyrics, and the melody to go with it, and then given it such twists and turns in the chordal accompaniment that one is taken aback, I’ve no idea.”
Tony is, of course, referring to the second line of each verse, and perhaps also to the end of every fifth line, with what Eyolf Østrem calls “the rather awkward twist to the F#m towards the end” (www.dylanchords.com). Eyolf’s comment seems to offer an explanation for “the notes that simply don’t fit” in the second lines: Blake Mills. The exceptionally talented guitarist who has such a defining influence on the colour and atmosphere of seven of the songs on Rough And Rowdy Ways (we hear him not only on “Mother Of Muses” but also on “I Contain Multitudes”, “False Prophet”, “My Own Version Of You”, “Crossing The Rubicon”, “Black Rider” and “I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You”) seems to have strayed slightly off course here:
A D Dsus2 A
Mother of Muses, sing for me
A E6 E7 A
Sing of the mountains and the deep, dark sea
A Em Em . G/b
Sing of the lakes and the nymphs of the forest
A/C# D E/g# D/a
Sing your hearts out, all you women of the chorus
D6 A/e A C#7 F#m
Sing of honour and fate and glory be
A/e E6 E7 A
Mother of the Muses, sing for me
(transcription Eyolf Østrem)
… comparable, for example, to “I Contain Multitudes”; essentially an everyday chord progression underpinned by an appealing, yet basic, almost nursery-rhyme-like melody – a “simple, but nonetheless utterly delightful and beguiling set of lyrics, and the melody to go with it”, as Attwood describes it. It certainly seems that Dylan presents his session musicians with the basic outline of the song and then gives them very little time to make something of it. A scenario consistent with what Blake Mills himself says about it in an interview with the Belgian magazine Knack:
“The most important thing is that you put yourself at the service of the song, the story or the mood. But of course, you’re also allowed to follow your instincts. Dylan doesn’t tell you exactly what to play. He does, however, expect you to play what needs to be played. That may seem the same, but it’s a world of difference.”
(Knack, 9 March 2021)
In virtually all of Mills’ contributions, that freedom works a treat. “I Contain Multitudes”, for example, where Mills makes the utterly ordinary chord progression C-Am-G-C shine by building exquisitely elegant, tasteful bridges from one chord to the next, creating ethereal beauty with slightly dissonant accents, and integrating tension with jazzy “bridging chords” such as D#dim and G11.
But here, it seems, something goes awry; a musicologist like Attwood is puzzled by “the twists and turns” of the chord progression: “The inter-relationship of voice and chords does not sound right to me.” Which, in the end, Dylan seems to feel as well: in the 276 live performances since the debut (Milwaukee 2021), both the “inter-chords” and the dissonances have disappeared. Throughout those 276 performances, the song retains – certainly by Dylan’s standards – a remarkably consistent arrangement. Typically featuring Tony Garnier’s long, slow lines on the upright bass, elegant, sparse guitar accompaniment, minimal percussion, and above all: Dylan’s vocals without a single dissonant note – the only dissonances are Dylan’s familiar piano slip-ups, on which he usually follows Dizzy’s Rule, as he should (from Dizzy Gillespie: “if you play a wrong note, you should play it again so people think you meant to do it”).
It is a lovely, monumental, harmonious ode to the Mother of the Muses.
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon in both 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 second Big Bang
- Time Out Of Mind: The Rise of an Old Master
- Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s late-career classic
- Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other kind 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 melancholic blues
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side A
- Bob Dylan takes Highway 61 – Seven mercurial songs
- Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side C