By Tony Attwood
Previously in this series…
- “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.
- How the meaning of a Dylan song can change across the years.
- How Dylan jumps from theme to theme, music to music
This series is about whether Bob’s comments that he has regular personality changes during the course of a single day is reflected in the songs Bob has written over time.
I started the series extremely doubtful about the validity of Bob’s claim. And as I have continued to listen to his music I have continued to feel that this is not a valid or reasonable way to approach his work as a composer. And yet I have had doubts… for Bob has, from his earliest times as a composer, had an urge to see just how far the contemporary form of songs can be developed and changed. And this I think has been a fundamental focus for Bob both in terms of the lyrics and the music. Sometimes the changes have been subtle – the extra line in the last verse of Visions for example. Sometimes we really are taken “somewhere else.”
Thus when I return to “Mama you’ve been on my mind” what I now find, in approaching the song from the perspective of Bob’s claim to have multiple personalities existing in multiple worlds, I think I begin to see exactly what he means. And if there is a song that suggests he does have Dissociative Identity Disorder, (something which was previously known as, and which I think Bob describes as multiple personalities) this is where we first see it.
Now of course the cause of composing in a way that has not been attempted before, could be caused through a response to his own extraordinary creative powers. And I think that is true. But I have to admit that in examining his songs from the point of view of Bob’s claim to change personalities on a regular basis is proving to be a very difficult issue. But I think I’ve actually found some evidence that helps point to the fact that Bob was indeed telling the truth when he talked about his multiple personality profiles.
In 1964 alone Bob wrote 20 songs that have survived, (and goodness knows how many others that have been lost) because he sketched them out but didn’t record them. And in this little piece I am going to consider “Mama you’ve been on my mind” a song which was written as part of this sequence of 20 compositions shown written in 1964, as below in
So Bob was moving from theme to theme at this time, but one thought that did appear quite often was that of relationships – and here we have different songs expressing different elements of relationships, which I think built up to “Mama you’ve been on my mind” in which the singer confronts this dichotomy head on for the first time.
Now if a songwriter finds himself writing about the end of relationships in three consecutive compositions, then in order to make each song have some validity and be worth keeping, he has to vary the music, otherwise he will quickly and rather obviously be criticised for writing the same song over and over again.
And in this regard Dylan is very successful. He does on occasion like to visit and re-visit the same theme, but he seeks to vary both the lyrics and the music in each case. Indeed in “Mama” he most certainly does this to quite an extreme, as indeed we can see just from the line
“Pretendin’ not that I don’t know”.
But at the same time the music takes on a form of its own. The chord sequence is not only unlike anything we have heard before from a Dylan song, it varies from verse to verse – and then changes again in a live performance. DylanChords quotes it as
C E
Perhaps it's the color of the sun cut flat
Am D7/f#
An' cov'rin' the crossroads I'm standing at,
C /b Am G C/g
Or maybe it's the weather or something like that,
G G6 G7 C G
But mama, you been on my mind.
Even if you are not familiar with how chords work in popular music, it is possible you will be aware that the sequence C, E, Am D7 is, if not unique, most certainly very unusual indeed. (As I write this I am still trying to think of another song that uses that sequence; it may be obvious but I can’t find it).
The lyrics are most certainly unusual too – it is the opposite of a love song – it is a song concerning thinking about a woman, while not being in love with her. And added to which we have images the likes of which I am not sure we have been offered by any song before – right from the start. (Although here of course I am on dodgy ground – there are trillions of songs, I only know a few hundred, and can easily forget some of those!)
But still, we might take it that the opening two lines are a description of a sunset above the crossroads. That seems obvious but even here I can’t think of a song that starts with the sunset but then takes us into sadness.
So here we have in this song recorded on 6 September 1964 which is a plaintive lost-love or maybe uncertain-love song (or at least a song about a woman he can’t forget) which opens with the most extraordinary images, not of the woman, but of the sunset and the crossroads.
And then perhaps not too surprisingly, given what the lyrics have done, we get the most extraordinary chord changes. For the moment, in writing this review, I can’t think of another song that start C, E, A minor, D7. If there are any that were written before Dylan produced this piece, I suspect they are rather obscure. But if you know one, do tell.
Now part of the oddity of the song – and a reason why many of us do remember it particularly, is the fact that it starts in C and ends the second line on D – it just gives us a musical feeling of complete uncertainty.
And that matches totally with the lyrics. After all the whole song begins “Perhaps” – the defining word in terms of discussing uncertainty. And I mention that because “uncertainty” is quite a rare theme in songwriting. Most songs are about the opposite – about certainty of being in love, or occasionally the certainty of not being in love.
To compose a song like this I think Bob himself needed to have a real insight into the uncertainty about which he was singing. And I think this takes us much closer to his inner feelings than he assertion that he can people a number of different people in one day.
Now of course I don’t know that. I’m not a psychiatrist, and I am certainly not familiar with the inner workings of Bob’s mind such that I can determine where and how he suddenly changes direction, but I am a musician, and that gives me the starting point here. For the song’s chordal accompaniment is particularly unusual, as I have noted, and that implies having an unusual set of lyrics to go with the music.
Thus the lyrics of the opening of the song stress uncertainty. He’s thinking about her, but doesn’t know why. Is it the sunlight, the weather….
But then immediately the song tells us that this is NOT a regular love song – he certainly isn’t pleading for them to get back together – he is just thinking about her. And yet nothing affects the facts that he is thinking about her. There’s no jealousy or anything like that. He just thinks…
Yet what he is trying to do is to deny that he has been thinking about her – and he’s obviously very unsuccessful in that! He just wonders if she’s thinking of him, as much as he’s thinking of her. It really is an utterly plaintive song (if it catches me on a bad day it can still make me cry – but that says more about me than about the song) – and as much as he says he is not pleading, the feeling comes across that he is pleading.
But what can I say by way of introduction, except “Oh 1964: what a year!” Dylan cut his writing down; after 67 songs written across the previous two years he now limited himself to a mere 20 completed works in 1964, but even so included lines such as….
I don't mean trouble, please don't put me down or get upset, I am not pleadin' or sayin', "I can't forget you." I do not pace the floor bowed down an' bent, but yet, Mama, you been on my mind.
How would you react if someone sang something like that to yo?
Likewise the music changes as the song progresses – we do get more used to this effect as Dylan’s compositions progress, but at this point it is a real shock. And each one of these oddities makes us think, “What is he doing?” – which in fact is exactly what the words make us think. Why does the song have these subtle changes, after all, the singer is so obviously wanting to be with her, why is he in endless denial?
Now the notion of expressing such uncertainty by changing from four beats to three beats in a bar and then back again is itself very unusual – and made even more disconcerting by the fact that it is not there in every verse. The musical structure in fact changes as the song progresses – giving a total feeling of uncertainty, of the singer telling himself that he doesn’t want to go back to her, but oh… she is still on his mind. And in that latter regard I think by the end of the song we simply don’t believe him. Of course he wants her.
What this means is we have what I have previously described as “no rhythmic constancy,” – a really interesting musical attribute, which Dylan later had to abandon as it kept confusing the musicians in the accompanied pieces. But it could still work in these solo songs.
So what we have here is a song of desperation and uncertainty, a piece in which the music follows the words, but the words endlessly tumble over an the music is trying to catch up, until by the end the words follow the music. Words can get extended in different versions as in the final verse in the second line suddenly the “I” in “I won’t be near” is curiously given an extra beat and a half in some versions – but not others.
Of course this works in the early recordings because it is Dylan on his own – but you can’t do this with a rock band, or even if singing a duet (I tried and we gave up). And so as time has gone by the song has become fixed into set rhythms, although Dylan’s own performance with John Baez retains some of the rhythmic oddities, but in the end it loses some of the subtleties. If you want this song as it was intended you have to have a solo version.
And maybe it is because the song can exist in so many different versions that we never had a version of it on the early albums. I feel this utter masterpieces was intended to be on Times They Are a Changing or Another Side of Bob Dylan but came out on neither, and we had to wait for the live versions, and the Bootleg series.
So this is a song whose rhythm we can’t hold down, just as the singer can’t hold onto the relationship which is there, but not there. Indeed nor can we with the chords – version after version of the song has been recorded with different chords, and of course different feelings.
And maybe this is the mark of a great, great song – because it can be reinvented so many, many times. If you want to explore the depth there are more versions on the internet, just go searching. Some work, some don’t. If you find it, Jeff Buckley handles it particularly well.
Somehow he keeps the hint of the rhythmic uncertainty through the different length of the lines – nowhere else can I find a way of expressing the pain of the singer to the songwriter. When I hear this I feel I am in the empty room with him. And the room is still empty.
And if you think less of the Buckley version than I do, please stay with it, until that last verse. For me, it is the definitive verse of the definitive version.
So magnificent is this song that you don’t need to know the origins of the lyrics, but for completeness, let’s record the fact that it is the breakup with his girlfriend Suze Rotolo (or at least that is what the commentators say) that led to the song.
So when Oliver Trager which suggests this is a “straightforward love song of separation and yearning” is to miss the point. That is the start, but not the end. For this verse…
I am not askin’ you to say words like “yes” or “no” Please understand me, I got no place for you t’ go I’m just breathin’ to myself, pretendin’ not that I don’t know Mama, you been on my mind
really takes us somewhere else. The lyrics and the music are equally confused, and that is what makes this so wonderful, and why the song loses its flavour when sung as a duet where it is harder to get the time changes together for both musicians.
“Pretendin’ not that I don’t know”. You work it out. Maybe it’s just me, but it still makes me cry. And if you are in that state, don’t play the Rod Stewart version. It’s here just in case you didn’t like any of the earlier versionjs.