Recent posts…
- Murder Most Foul part 14: A cool breeze from a camel’s ass
- Bob Dylan: From a song a day, to no new songs, to “kick your shoes off”
By Tony Attwood
One of the factors that interests me about Bob Dylan’s early compositions is the way that Bob jumps from one lyrical and musical theme to another. It is as if he was able, at least in the early 1960s to write a really interesting song centred on one particular subject and then move on, not just move to a completely different musical approach but also to a totally different outlook on life.
I think that quite a bit of this attitude is expressed in a now long forgotten (and indeed very basic) song, “The Ballad of the Gliding Swan” which contains the verse
"I've got a sad surprise," the doctor said "A twenty-pound baby without any head" And the swan on the river went looking by The swan on the river goes gliding by
When I came to summaries The Ballad of the Gliding Swan in my pages on this site in which every Dylan song got a one one summary of its lyrics, I came up with “Life throws up every surprise, but life goes on through its random course” and that still seems to me a fair summary.
And yet songs such as “Times they are a changing” which I also looked at again recently do seem to contain moments of hope – hope for the improvement in everyone’s left.
Now personally I find the notion of a totally random world in which there is no pattern of events and thus no chance of our influencing the future, very worrying and not something I wish in any way to believe in. In fact I find it frightening. I find I don’t want to be in a world in which anything can happen and given long enough probably will.
But also when Bob sings of a future in which everything is random and stuff can happen no matter how hard you try to stop it, I really do feel unhappy. That is not how I see the world – but more to the point that is not how I want the world to be.
Now in writing this today I found my mind flittering on to some terrible things that might actually happen by pure chance and which would distress me very deeply indeed. And I wonder if the writing of the The Ballad of the Gliding Swan Bob was saying anything can happen, and quite possibly will, no matter how much we hope otherwise.
If that is what he was saying, and that was what he believed, then “Times they are a changin” becomes a song not about the lives of everyone on the planet getting better, but rather that times change in random ways and we should not expect the world of tomorrow to be anything like the world of today, since anything can happen. And of course “anything” incudes some very nasty stuff.
And indeed writing that last line brought home a dreadful thought. For as I wrote the last sentence of the paragraph above my mind started to generate some really nasty visions of things that could happen to me and members of my family whom I love deeply, and perhaps even worse could happen today by chance.
Which raises the issue of whether the world progresses by design or by chance. Dylan wrote a song about this in fact.
However trying to describe the notion of the “feel” of the blues is hard; but it does have something to do with the speed, and the way the guitar accompaniment in the version below is not a solid plod-plod-plod chordal style of the Witmark version but has far more off-beat additions. Here the guitar part tells us as much as the lyrics; in the Witmark version, it is simply there to hold the beat.
The voice in this slower version is much more in sympathy with the lyrics – there is no sense of hurrying through the verses: it is all about the feeling. And of course it is not harmed by the fact that Robert Johnson himself, on one of his more together days, might have played the guitar like this.
The song is utterly simple – the opening line and its completion sung three times followed by the concluding lines – which vary in the slower version from the official text provided on the Bob Dylan site.
Tell me what you’re gonna do When the shadow comes under your door Tell me what you’re gonna do When the shadow comes under your door Tell me what you’re gonna do When the shadow comes under your door O Lord, O Lord What shall you do?
The focus of Whatcha Gonna Do? is how will you be placed when forced to explain your life after you have died and proceeded to meet the Almighty, and obviously this is a theme long explored in religious music.
But listening again today, it started to make me wonder if Bob had also focussed on what happens in life as a result of the way one spends one’s early years. Do the early years matter? Is the reward for living a “good life” only to be found in the afterlife?
As far as I can tell “What you gonna do” was the last song written in 1962, and maybe the writing of that song was influenced by the Christmas or New Year festivities of that year. But whether that is so or not, it appears that the next song Bob wrote was Masters of War – which interestingly continues the them of the afterlife being an answer to the life one has lived in the lives we know.
Thus “What you gonna do?” only asks the question
Tell me what you’re gonna do When the shadow comes under your door Tell me what you’re gonna do When the shadow comes under your door Tell me what you’re gonna do When the shadow comes under your door O Lord, O Lord What shall you do?
but the very next song Bob wrote (at the start of the following year) posed the same question in a more roundabout manner, and between these two songs there is a fundamental change in Dylan’s lyrics.
As we have seen, the last song of 1962 asks the question “Whaat shall you do?” but then the very first line of the first song of 1963 is “Come, you masters of war, you that build the big guns”. This of course is not a question but a statement, and Bob ends the verse with another statement, “I just want you to know I can see through your masks”.
Seen as two connected songs, Whatcha Gonna Do? and Masters of War are a question and answer. The answer to What are you going to do? is simple – there is nothing you can do because Bob says,
And I hope that you die and your death will come soon I will follow your casket by the pale afternoon And I'll watch while you're lowered down to your deathbed And I'll stand over your grave 'til I'm sure that you're dead
These are among the strongest, most stirring lines that Bob ever wrote, and I feel they become even more moving when one considers them in the knowledge of what Bob wrote in his previous song. In fact it is perhaps not too fanciful to consider that it was the writing of “What you gonna do?” at the end of 1962 that cleared the way for Bob to write “Masters of War” at the start of the following year.