By Tony Attwood
In my recent articles I have been trying, in my own haphazard way, to think about the various musical styles and approaches he has used, ranging from the classic 12 bar blues, through to songs that expand the number of lines within each verse, change key and otherwise meander far from the norms found in the construction of both traditional and popular songs.
And this is of interest since by doing this at the very start of his songwriting career Bob was experimenting with the way in which musical forms could be expanded. Experimenting indeed in a way that no other creator of popular, pop, or folk songs had ever done before.
For example, if we take the Ballad of Hollis Brown we have what might appear to be in the form of a classic 12 bar clubs (first line repeated, then an answering line) but in fact is in a minor key with all three lines of each verse based on the same chord. Now that in fact was not unique, but it was unusual. And it was part of a process that Bob was engaged in: considering long established musical forms that we all can recognise and feel comfortable with, but now with variations.
Indeed this is more than just a bit of variance on a single form, for we might notice that immediately prior to Hollis Brown, Bob wrote “Hard Rain’s a gonna fall” – a song which is packed with variations and novelties when compared with the classic way in which folk songs were created.
“Hard Rain ” is held together by having the opening two lines as a repeated question to his son. And through that simple mechanism Bob opens up the widest possible rangeo f questions that we perhaps all should be asking. Questions about the world around us from which we can at least make some attempt to understand this strange world in which we live. A world in which contains this utterly amazing range of life forms and experiences, but which is threatened by immanent destruction at any moment through the ever present threat of the hard rain.
Now to make a song such as “Hard Rain” appreciable by a wide audience Dylan needed to keep the music simple, for the lyrics were already challenging enough, and he did this by using just the three standard major chords of popular music. The melody is memorable indeed… everyone can have a bash at singing the opening line.
But the music is not extended and challenging in the way. It becomes memorable because the music of the opening two lines is always the same with just action-verb changed with each verse, ending with “what will you do now?”
So that all seems fairly simple and straightforward – once the composer has the idea of the question at the opening of each verse (where have you been? what did you see? what did you hear? who did you meet?) then the structure of the music and lyrics is set. The question is asked, and then in the remainder of the verse, the question is answered.
Except there is more to it than that…
At the start the blue-eyed son stumbles, walk and crawls, in a world that through the verse becomes less and less attractive leading us to the dozen dead oceans and a graveyard with a mouth 10,000 miles wide.
Then in the second verse the threats build: the baby is surrounded by wolves, the glittering highway is unvisited, there is blood, and no one can see the way through the horrors, no one can speak and the children have guns…
In short as we move on we find the warnings are all of collapse and disaster, but no one heeds what they can see and hear; nobody is listening – we have forgotten the clowns and the poets who can help us see what is really going on.
As the fourth verse shows, the world has gone wrong in every regard, we are all hurt, we have lost ourselves and our world, our vision has gone, and a hard rain is gonna fall.
But the poet does not let this happen, for he vows to go out and tak on all the failures of the world and our society. He will never give up this battle to show people the world as it has become, and point our where it is all going to end,with of course the predicted falling of the hard rain which points to nuclear war.
Now this is an utterly extraordinary piece of music in many ways. First, I am not sure I can lay my hands on other songs in a popular or folk tradition which varies the length of the verses as this does. Maybe there are some but not many.
Nor can I instantly think of songs with so many images that represent the decline of the world, and/or our civilisation. Nor indeed that many songs that warn us of the horrors of what is to come. Nor popular or folk songs that completely abandon any rhyming scheme. But even if there are songs that do each of these things within the lyrics, there surely are very few that adopt all of these techniques within one song, and yet despite such complexity have become very well known and immensely popular.
But my point here is not that this song is unusual for all these points: musically from the variation in the number of lines, lyrically from the lack of rhyme scheme. It is that Dylan uses the musical effects of changing the rhymes and length of each verse, to unsettle us, while listening to what is, if not a worrying set of lyrics then at least an exciting, thrilling lyrical piece that may well make us shiver. There are no clashing or unexpected chords – we just have the three conventional chords found in much popular music. It is the lyrics that do the work.
Now it is true that in playing the song on an acoustic guitar Bob does also use a very common technique of returning the bottom string from E down to D to give a more sonorous feel to the accompaniment and he does occasionally use passing notes to give the accompaniment some variation with five verses in a song that normally lasts for getting on for seven minutes and has multiple lines that open with the same lyrics, and all of which have the same chordal accompaniment.
This structure incorporating the same musical line heard over and over again. Indeed in the song, leaving aside the opening two lines of each verse, with each pair asking a different question, there are 50 lines to the song telling us what the singer has experienced, or in the last verse, what the singer is going to do, to try and set the world straight.
To have a song which normally takes about seven minutes to perform, but which is based on just three chords in the accompaniment, and in which there are just three musical patterns, is quite extraordinary. Indeed so brilliant is the construction and performance that we normally don’t notice the musical pattern. Yet pattern, there is (of course). It is in fact two opening lines (asking the question), between five and 12 lines in which the singer answers those questions, and then two lines concluding each verse telling us a hard rain is gonna fall.
Now what Bob has done here is extended the concept of traditional song writing far beyond its normal limits. But not only are there three sections there is also no consistent rhyme scheme, just as there is no regular length to each verse.
And yet despite this, the song hangs together. In effect Bob has broken every rule of basic folk song writing, abandoning in particular any recognised structure, and any regular rhyming pattern that appears throughout the song.
Indeed Bob has, in several publications and websites, been noted as the first songwriter whose work is widely known, yet who has abandoned the traditions of folk music while still appealing to a widespread musical audience, many members of which will not have received a musical education relating to form and structure. Which is not to say that no one had done this sort of thing before Bob, but rather that through the abandonment of traditional rhyme schemes and having verses always of the same length and form, Bob did indeed take elements from contemporary and avant garde songwriting and use them in folk music. Even something as basic as the abandonment of the fixed length of verses, was virtually unknown in popular music before his songs such as “Hard Rain”.
But more, for once he had explored this notion, he used it repeatedly in songs such as “Hattie Carroll” and “Hard Rain”, sometimes in the verse, sometimes in the chorus.
This in fact was the start of Bob’s overturning of the notion of fixed form in song writing, removing rhyme schemes, and changing rhythmic structures to ensure that the music and the lyrics were more linked together than they would be if the song was forced to have exactly the same musical form for every verse. It was a revolution of extraordinary power, although of course many popular songwriters did not have either the talent, or perhaps the nerve, to follow this lead themselves. But it was there for anyone who wanted to use it as a stepping stone.