- I don’t know where I am going, nor what it will look like
- “I don’t know who I am most of the time. It doesn’t even matter to me”.
By Tony Attwood
One of the very interesting things about Bob Dylan’s compositions, it seems to me, is that he doesn’t seem to have spent much time thinking about his audience, and what we, the people who buy his music, actually wanted. That of course might be the mark of a true artist who has a vision he wishes to portray, rather than one seeking to please an audience, but beyond that it does mean that Bob has always been free to follow his own mind and his own musical inclinations.
Which is really the outcome of the point that I considered a couple of days back as I started this series with the articles noted above.
But there is a downside in this as Bob doesn’t always seem to be able to distinguish the works of genius from just another passing 12 bar blues. Mind you, that is of course a statement of supreme arrogance from me, for it suggests I can make judgements that are beyond Bob.
Now I would defend myself in that regard with reference to Ballad for a Friend.
This was originally called “Reminiscence Blues,” and I have written about it often before. But my point in bringing it up yet again is that it shows the fact that in 1962, before fame and fortune came Bob’s way, he could produce a work of such amazing elegance as this – although it appears that the record companies didn’t recognise it as such since it didn’t get released.
And I come back to this point following my last two articles which started from Bob’s statement that he constantly changes personalities not just day by day but even hour by hour.
Of course he could be making this up or he could be exaggerating, but this notion of the ever-changing personality could help us understand the regular changes of styles and approach, which very few composers in the world of pop, rock, blues etc have ever managed.
Now I don’t disbelieve Bob when he talks about the notion of jumping from musical form to another. But I am suspicious of his more recent statement that he changes personality several times a day. And to find some evidence of a greater stability in Bob’s outlook I have turned back again to his first great year of song writing – 1963.
Of course what happens in one year does not tell us what happens in Bob’s life all the time – but the psychological issue Bob discusses when he talks about changing personalities several times a day is so extreme that it does suggest to me that he was probably exaggerating. For if it were true, surely it would be reflected in his compositions.
Yet if we take a look at the early songs from 1963 we can easily find a set of songs written early in that year which were all on the related themes of lost love and moving on…
Now it is clear that all four songs, written one after the other deal with the loss of a love, a consistency that doesn’t readily fit with Bob’s notion of becoming a different person several times a day.
In “North Country” there is a desperation about the girl he has lost…. and that is not there at all in “Boots of Spanish Leather” with the throw away line
I don’t know when I’ll be comin’ back again
(Incidentally if you have not heard it I would refer you to the Carnegie Hall version)
My point is that although these songs are of course quite different they are both dealing with the emotions of the one person who travels onwards, and the one who is left behind. And these songs we must remember were written one after the after.
These themes are then also found in the next two songs Bob wrote as well: “Bob Dylan’s Dream” and “Farewell”. In fact what we have are four songs wherein the lyrics dwell on the themes of leaving one’s lover, and the effects of this lost love.
Now the point I would particularly make here is that these songs are not written as a sequence of songs telling a continuing story, but rather they are songs that explore different elements of the same theme wherein one person wants the couple of stay together, while the other wants to be travelling alone. For the one who leaves, it is the travelling on that is more seductive and alluring than staying with his lover.
This does in some way relate to Bob’s notion that he is often different people at different times in a day, for such a person would need to explore different worlds all the time. And this leaves me thinking that if this is true, it is either only something that happened later in his life, or it is something that he has engaged in deliberately. Unless of course we argue that he only writes songs when he is in one of his particular personalities…. which I fear is beginning to take this whole notion a bit far.
For these four songs, make an extraordinary tetralogy – something so unusual in songwriting that the word “tetralogy” itself is virtually unused these days. And of course I don’t know how long it took Bob to write those four songs nor whether other approaches to music flitted in and out of his mind, but as far as we know he just focussed on these four songs within the same theme and wrote them one after the other.
Indeed it does seem unlikely that he did anything other than write these four beautiful pieces one after the other. That doesn’t mean his mind might not have jumped into other thought processes or even that he didn’t become other people, but even if that unlikely scenario was true, we can see that Bob did indeed have the ability to return to his central theme of the moment (the lover moving on) and write that sequence of songs. Which makes me wonder just how accurate Bob’s description of himself as a person who is in fact multiple people, actually is.