Too much of nothing: the music and the meaning

By Tony Attwood

This review was amended in 2016, in particular incorporating the fact that Dylan recorded two very different versions of the song, the second of which came out on the Basement Tapes CD that came out in the UK in 2014.  It was a point I missed in the original version of this article – thanks for correspondents who corrected me.

The original Basement Tapes LP is certainly not one of my favourite Dylan albums, but within it, there are gems.  This Wheels on Fire, I’ve already written about. Here’s the other masterpiece: Too much of nothing.

The title tells you we are in no man’s land, for it gives us a quick reminder of the start of King Lear where he speaks to Corelida, “Nothing will come of nothing.”

But that’s only the start.  Dylan is in another country here, coming back from his own darkest days, and he does something musically that he does nowhere else in this writing, within the recording that appears on the original Basement Tapes LP.  He tries to represent the madness behind such the concepts of nothingness and madness, which is also part of his theme here, with a simplistic musical device that absolutely doesn’t work.  It is a device that every young student of composition tries in his or her second week and then realises that this is just too obvious and so quietly puts the manuscript away, or deletes the recording. We’ve all been there and done it – except Dylan kept the tape and it came out on the LP.

What Dylan does through the four lines on what I will call the original version (ie the version on the original Basement Tapes LP)

In the day of confession
We cannot mock a soul
Oh, when there’s too much of nothing
No one has control

is take us up chord by chord as a way to evoke the decline into madness and hysteria.  Where the first four line have a simple melody very effectively based around the chords of G, F and C suddenly Dylan takes up rising up higher and higher like a set of manic screams.   Just listen to those four lines and hear what is happening.  It is just a device as a device, not a piece of real music making.

Those four line go through these chords one after the other

G, G sharp, A, B flat, B, C, C sharp, D

Only the resolution from this horror through the chorus…

Say hello to Valerie
Say hello to Vivienne
Send them all my salary
On the waters of oblivion

which leaps up to F, and then runs through a set of chords which (although not all associated with the key of C major),  once more makes  musical sense and return us to the key of C, gives us stability.

In one moment Dylan reveals the problem with writing about mental illness.  The vision from within the tormented individual is so different from the way we witness the individual that it is hard to represent.   It can be done in art form – The Scream by Edvard Munch  does it visually, but at least with a painting you can look away.  Just stirring the pot around musically and having a lot of hysteria doesn’t work – at least it doesn’t work for me.

So what we have is a situation in which we have some superb lyrics, but with music which (at least in the chorus) fails musically.   But it could have worked, as the subsequent recordings showed.  It just needed a totally different approach.

Dylan then made a second take, and it was this one that was picked up by Peter Paul and Mary  (Peter Yarrow, Paul Stookey and Mary Travers) – for there was no way their sweet harmonies could have made sense of the chromatic version that appears on the LP.   Although known for a musically gentle form of protest song such as “If I had a hammer” and “Where have all the flowers gone” they actually did a huge amount to make Dylan popular in his early days, and from what I understand Dylan was friendly with the ensemble – at least until they played around with the lyrics here.

Now I know It seems strange to say it now but Peter Paul and Mary were instrumental in getting Dylan exposure.   While many older listeners to Dylan might still remember the simple “Puff the magic dragon” the fact is that their recording of Blowing in the Wind in 1963,  and their versions of Times they are a changing, Don’t think twice and When the Ship Comes in were responsible for getting many people to buy Freewheelin

The PPM version (the version that was released on the 2014 CD set, has a much more conventional chordal accompaniment in D:

D, G, Am, G, D for the verse

C, G, D for the chorus

and it all sounds in the verse, very jolly.  It is only when the mood changes in the chorus that we are forced to go back to listen to the lyrics, and think that there is something else here.

But then, for a reason that is not clear, they changed the chorus by changing one of the names from Dylan’s original to Marion.  And this is where we find the real story.

Dylan is reported to have been very angry with hearing that PPM had changed the names – a name change that even continued with the rather uninspiring later Fotheringhay recording with Sandy Denny singing.   It is an important point, but we should not let this put us off the PPM version for the understatement of the PPM version really does work – and once you know the story behind the song it becomes one of the most frightening pieces that Dylan wrote.  It also explains fully what he was trying to do with the chromatic version that came out on the LP.

In Dylan’s original, the characters are Valerie and Vivienne – not surprising since this is the era of writing about Louise and Johanna, and other combinations of women.   These were the wives of TS Eliot, the poet that Dylan was by now used to quoting (most famously by having him in the captain’s tower in Desolation Row) – but it is clear from this reference that he really did understand.  Some writers feel that Dylan refers to Eliot’s The Waste Land with “in the wasteland of your mind” from “When The Night Comes Falling from the Sky.”   Indeed on Theme Time Radio Hour he once read TS Eliot, and often has seemed to glory in quoting from numerous sources in the way that Eliot did with “He do the Police in different voices” which was the original title of The Waste Land, and comes from Dickens’ “Our Mutual Friend”…

“I can read my Bible and most print. And I do love a newspaper. You mightn’t think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices.”

But now, to disentangle the song, we need to know a spot more about TS Eliot.

TS Eliot’s first wife Vivienne is seen in different ways by different writers.  She might have been the source of inspiration for Eliot, or a woman who seduced Eliot into a hopeless relationship.

https://youtu.be/S46KvLCBc2Y

Whatever the situation the outcome was an awful tragedy: she suffered severe mental illness over a period of time.  Eliot did not take his wedding vow seriously however, and seeing her condition separated from her, and went to the US to take up a professorship, leaving Vivienne in a mental hospital in Stoke Newington – a part of north London that was certainly not one that would be associated with a genteel middle class caring establishment for the mentally ill, at the time.  I happen to know Stoke Newington well – it is where my grandparents on my father’s side of my family lived and where my dad was brought up.   It is what we would call a solid working-class environment.

Eliot never once visited his wife in the mental hospital, and just left here there.   But upon her death in 1957 he secretly married Valerie Fletcher – his secretary at his publishers, who was 38 years his junior.   In his later years and thereafter it was Valerie who worked to preserve the legacy of Eliot.

So we must take it that Too Much of Nothing is about Eliot and his wives, at least in passing, which surely suggests “Too Much of Nothing” is a brief response to the overwhelming magnificence and complexity of Eliot’s the Waste Land.

Dylan’s language is of course utterly different from The Waste Land.   His form is brief, his message simple.  It is in effect a kick at Eliot, suggesting that there is another part of the Waste Lane that Eliot forgot to mention – the Waste Land of his wife, abandoned and forgotten in a mental institution in North London, while he was lauded and celebrated as he lectured in America.

Eliot’s masterpiece is the poem of nothing, the poem where

I will show you fear in a handful of dust

For this is the world where “you know only a heap of broken images” where Eliot asks “who is that on the other side of you?” and where most famously April is the cruellest month

This is Dylan’s moment of attack upon Eliot’s whole approach:

Too much of nothing
Can make a man abuse a king
He can walk the streets and boast like most
But he wouldn’t know a thing
Now, it’s all been done before
It’s all been written in the book
But when there’s too much of nothing
Nobody should look

Say hello to Valerie
Say hello to Vivienne
Send them all my salary
On the waters of oblivion

The song is, for me, a brilliant conception, and it is a sadness not so much that Dylan recorded the chromatic version as an experiment, but that he let it be released on the original Basement LP.

But we did have the PPM version, with that bareness of the chorus.  It doesn’t work totally, and the change of name is extremely annoying because it leads us completely away from the central meaning.  But it showed us where this song might go until ultimately Dylan released his version of this alternative approach.  The PPM version is on You Tube

The straight (ie non-chromatic) version by Dylan is on Spotify as “Too much of nothing take 2”.  If you only know the Peter Paul and Mary version I defy you to listen to this and not have shivers up and down every single part of your nervous system.

Elsewhere

• Index of over Dylan 300 songs reviewed on the site
• Dylan’s best opening lines: an index
• How Dylan writes songs, and other articles.
• Dylan’s songs in the order they were written.