By Tony Attwood
I have recently posted three articles which relate to the claim that Bob has made that he has an ever changing personality. In order of publication they are
- “I don’t know who I am most of the time. It doesn’t even matter to me”.
- I don’t know where I am going, nor what it will look like
- Bob Dylan and the ever changing personality. Four early songs.
And by chance today I spotted a comment from Billy Joel in which he is quoted as saying,
“Well, Dylan is, for me, he was the top guy,” Joel said. “Nobody wrote like Dylan before Dylan. And even after Dylan, nobody wrote like Dylan.”
It is an interesting comment, but even then, in that interview, Joel admitted that deciphering exactly what Dylan meant with some of those famous lyrics can be another matter entirely.
“Sometimes I don’t know what the hell he’s talking about,” Joel said. “And he’ll even admit to that. But his style of writing is totally unique. He was the only guy who really did that to this day. And he’s still kicking it…
“He had a way with lyrics. You didn’t always know what he was talking about, but the lyrics sounded like he knew what he was talking about.”
Now although I agree with all of that, I think it also has to be clearly pointed out that sometimes the obscure phrases Bob uses do have a meaning, as indeed within Mr Tambourine Man as Billy Joel said.
Concerning the origin of the song, the information that is quite widely circulated is that Bruce Langhorne who played as a session guitarist on a number of Dylan tracks from around the time Mr Tambourine Man was written, also had what is described as a “wagon-wheel-sized Turkish frame drum/tambourine” which he brought to a recording session and this was the inspiration of the song.
And I think as we consider the origins of the images and concepts that Bob includes in his lyrics, such chance moments can prove to be important in our search for understandings.
Of course most of us wouldn’t immediately call Bruce Langhorne “Mr Tambourine Man” as Dylan did, but even if that happened, to move from there to a five and a half minute song focussed on that phrase, is something that would be beyond most song writers. And for that song then to be so good that it has remained popular to this day. is something else again.
But if we consider both the music and the lyrics we can see that Dylan has undertaken some interesting and unexpected in approaching and later in changing this song.
The most immediate point of course is the very start of the song. All songs are in a particular key, and in most (not all but most) popular and folk music the opening chord of the song is the chord of the key the song is written in. In this case the key of the song is D major, but the chords of the opening line of each verse run like this (I have simplified what is played slightly to make the point clearer to see, in case you are not too familiar with chord sequences). All the chords are major chords, and as per the convention, major chords are just designated by their name of the note on which they are based. So the opening chord is G major, which is made up of the notes G, B, and D
G A D G Hey Mr. Tambourine Man play a song for me D G A I'm not sleepy and there is no place I'm going to.
Now the whole song continues through the use of of just these three major chords, and the fact that it is in the key of D is emphasised both by it only having two other chords in it (G and A major) and the fact that the song ends each verse on the chord of D.
My point here is that Dylan clearly wanted an accompaniment that was simple in its structure since the tambourine itself is the simplest of instruments – you either tap it or shake it.
And that emphasis is needed as there is no tambourine in the performance of the song; for the whole point is Dylan is singing about a person and an instrument who is not there. The singer is calling out the tambourine man who has passed by to help him. There is of course Bob on acoustic guitar, and later harmonica, and there is a countermelody played softly on a second acoustic guitar in the background by the aforementioned Bruce Langhorne. But the song is about a man playing the simplest of all instruments and through that is able to represent and communicate with the whole world. The world can be, and through the tambourine man is, reduced to its simplest parts.
And of course over the years, as our reviews of the song have shown, even with this minimalist accompaniment it was very possible for Bob to change the song quite dramatically. The instrumental verse in this version from the Never Ending Tour is particularly beautiful.
Now I have included this version of Tambourine Man here because I think it illustrates the issue of the meaning behind Dylan’s song. For although this is the same song as we heard on the album, it has changed so much, I think the meanings of the lyrics and music have also changed. Indeed this is why having multiple live versions of Dylan’s songs on this site is, for me (if no one else!) so important.
I am not sure if I can do any justice to the way the meaning has changed between the original album version and this later live version, but musically what has changed is not just the speed and accompaniment (both are obvious) but the way in which Bob delivers the lyrics.
If we just take a single half line such as “I have no one to meet” – this is now the throw away line of a man who could, if he wished to, meet anyone in the world. He has millions of fans out there, each of whom (including me of course!) would be utterly overwhelmed by the change to have a two minute private chat with Bob.
So in the original I take “I have no one to meet” to be both an expression of the loneliness and sadness of the man who is on his own, and as I imagine it, in an urban environment, and the expression of the loneliness that can beset a man who has a million friends because of his fame, but who cannot communicate with any of them.
Yet also in this new edition, the Tambourine Man is an old pal to whom Bob can turn to follow, and with him find if not the new world, an escape from the old world. Here the new world is as real, as the world just left behind. He really will go wandering, not through desperation, because he has by now done it all. He’s been there and done it. But he still needs to keep on moving on, somehow, somewhere.
Of course I have the benefit of hindsight here – I know the version above was recorded on the Never Ending Tour and so came much later than the album version – by this time Bob’s success has been secured for ever. But that does not detract from Bob’s extraordinary skill to take what is musically a simple song with multiple repeated musical lines, and give the self-same lyrics as before a new meeting. Now he is world-weary but he is still ready to go wandering and exploring.
And that of course is why, as long as Bob re-writes his songs, his performances have been so worth attending. Because he is endlessly showing us that these are songs not poems, and the meanings of the songs come from both the lyrics AND the music. Which is why that performance above is worth listening to all the way through.
Now this does not fully deal with the contentious issue of Bob’s claim to have an “ever changing personality” but I would say, from my perspective, that the transformation of this song in this way, is related to that issue. The lyrics are the same, but the melody (to an extent) and the musical accompaniment (totally) transform the meaning of the song. He still has no place he’s going to, but he does have so many places he has been.
That is why the performances on the Never Ending Tour are so important, and why they need to be kept for posterity.
Whether the reason for these transformations is a quirk in Bob’s personality as he claimed, I can’t say. But without them we would not even be able to start contemplating what he meant when he said, “I don’t know who I am most of the time.”