Why is the live version of “We better talk it over” so magical and superior to the album recording?

Dylan re-writes Dylan: the start, perhaps, of a new series

By Tony Attwood

Of course having an idea for a new series of articles, and then actually making it happen are two different things.  But I have contemplated doing a series of how Dylan has changed his songs on stage, several times, although with the caveat we obviously can only talk about performances for which we have a video or audio.

If you are a regular reader here you may recall my wild ravings over the live version of “When He Returns” which to my mind utterly transforms the album version into something so far superior that the live version has had about 500 plays in my house, while the LP version got one play when I bought it and maybe half a dozen when I was writing the review.

There are also several remarkable reworkings of Visions of Johanna which take us to a new level which one might consider – and I am sure many more when one starts looking.

But this is not to say that every rewrite is an improvement.  To my mind, the live version of The Drifter’s Escape, to me, totally removes every ounce of meaning and depth that can be found in the original LP version.  It was down to other artists to uncover the route to the perfect recording of that song.

So, I have opinions as to where Bob improves and where he doesn’t; as indeed does everyone who talks about or writes commentaries on Bob Dylan.  But just expressing the view itself is neither entertaining nor helpful, so I thought what I would do is start with “We’d better talk it over” which Jochen reviewed recently  and which I had a (very unsatisfactory) bash at way back in 2008 to see if I could express why I so adore the ultimate (but not the earlier) live version of the song.

And this one fascinates me because like “When He Returns” I really had no liking for the album version.  Indeed I wrote at the start of the 2008 piece, “We better talk this over is hardly a great song, but it does have a way with words that is unusual even for Dylan.”

Now I think, (in my usual arrogant manner of believing I can interpret what Bob is up to), that having listened to the live version, Bob realised this too.  He had a very unusual set of lyrics, but wasn’t doing them justice in the music.

“We better talk this over” is in the file that Heylin marks “recriminations and regrets” and the early drafts that Heylin has found certainly have an awful lot of recriminations and often go light on the regrets.  Indeed the detailed analysis of how the song changes over time does make interesting reading, if the evolution of the song interests you. (pages 133 to 136 of “Still on the Road”).

In the album version, which is available on Spotify (no subscription is needed to play individual tracks like this) Dylan has some interesting extemporisation by the piano but what comes across is the solidity of the beat – there is nothing disrupting that solid 1 2 1 2 throughout the song.

In the 1978 tour Bob played with the song in different ways and fortunately we have two recordings of these experiments.

I think this version came first

https://youtu.be/PsdzT30VXRA

And then was followed up by

He’s still got the ladies singing in the background, which keeps a strict control on the rhythm, although you can hear that on occasion he’s giving them a freer reign than to the original.

Finally Bob returned to the song in 2000 and transformed it.  You don’t have to get very far to realise what he has done here.  Just listen to how he stretches the words I’ve highlighted and see how the words have changed from the album

 

I think we better talk this over
Maybe when we both get sober
You’ll understand I’m only a man
Doin’ the best that I can

This situation can only get rougher
Why should we needlessly suffer?
Let’s call it a day, go our own different ways
Before we decay

You don’t have to be afraid to go looking into my face
We’ve done nothing to each other time will not erase

I feel displaced, I got a low-down feeling
You been two-faced, you been double-dealing
The vows that we kept are now broken and swept
’Neath the bed where we slept

Instrumental

Babe, why you wanna hurt me?
I’m exiled, and you’ll  never convert me
I’m alone in the….
new lyrics

You don’t have to yearn for love, you don’t have to be alone
Somewheres in this universe there’s a place that you can call home

Pause

Oh babes I’ll be leaving tomorrow
If I have to beg, steal or borrow
New lyrics
That goes on beyond

Instrumental

I think we better talk this over

The last three verses are dropped and the song ends.  You’ll see that I’ve opted out of trying to guess what Bob’s new lyrics are.  All suggestions welcome as always.

So why does this stretching of words and rhythms make such a huge difference?  To me it works because it truly reflects the meaning of the song – the expansion and contraction of time during a painful breakup.  When one is desperately trying to understand, trying to make it all ok again, and then accepting it is over.   And here we have the point of the song which is that it is called “We better talk this over”.

In the context of that title the extended words and paying with the rhythm, plus the stretching of the sound makes much more sense than having the female singers emphasising the word at the end of each line.

Thus Dylan has retained the notion of the word emphasis – which is absolutely at the heart of such break ups.  (In this regard all I can say is that if you have never had a lover’s argument in which one side says, “But you said…” throwing back a chance remark out of context, then you’re much luckier than I am.  Stretching words is a perfect symbolism of that sort of row.   In short the whole song now becomes not only a tale of a break up, but a symbolic representation in music of the break up).

Thus the women singing the last word of each line are at last seen to be irrelevant to the overall composition.  They might sound ok, but they don’t take the feel of the song anywhere.  In fact they just send it off track.  Getting rid of them is a significant step towards unifying the meaning of the music and the song.

In my original review ten years ago (at which time I’d had far less practice at writing Dylan reviews – it was somewhere around the 20th review, and I’ve now written well over 500 – so I have had a chance to refine the technique a little) I opened like this

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The start does not auger well with the opening lines still jarring after all these years

I think we better talk this over
Maybe when we both get sober

I can still hear myself shouting, “Oh no,” as I heard that for the first time. It is just so naff. And worse the opening is followed by two throw away lines which make one think that the great lyricist has lost it

You’ll understand I’m only a man
Doing the best that I can.

But then in the next verse we suddenly get a surprise…

Let’s call it a day go our own different way
Before we decay.

Decay? Now that is odd. Love songs – lost love songs indeed – normally speak about “getting older” not decay. This is indeed something new.

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In short I had a feeling this wasn’t working, but I couldn’t quite understand or express why.  But being infinitely better as this sort of work than I am, upon revisiting the song Bob did indeed discover what was wrong, which to me makes this whole archive of his live recordings so incredibly valuable.

Yes, of course it is interesting to hear the various versions of a song that the band played in the studio before Bob chose which one was his favourite and suitable for the album, but this return to a song 22 years after it was first recorded to give the lyrics a new meaning, is indeed something particular and special.

If you can decode the new lyrics I’d be grateful and I’ll then slot them into this little commentary.  With full acknowledgements to you of course.

And at some stage I also might have a go at trying to describe exactly why the live version of “When He Returns” is so much better than the album original.

If you have been, thanks for reading.

• Bob Dylan’s “We Better Talk This Over”: Rhyme, Rhythm, Reason and once live too.
• We Better Talk This Over: the meaning of the music and lyrics

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