Author Archives: TonyAttwood

Bob Dylan And Edward Cummings: The Romantic Revival by Larry Fyffe The poet Edward Cummings, inspired by the preRomantic poetry of William Blake and the subsequent Romantic Transcendental Movement, looks back to the innocence of childhood in search of natural … Continue reading →

by Tony Attwood This is yet another Basement song with no information on the official site – it’s never been played by Dylan, and has no official lyrics.  Indeed the inestimable Eyolf Østrem comments that,  “The lyrics seem to be nonsense … Continue reading →

by Tony Attwood “Going to Acapulco” is one of those songs in which the official lyrics don’t match the lyrics that we hear.  It is most annoying when that happens – but here it is the result of re-writes and … Continue reading →

  By Larry Fyffe Though an orthodox Christian awaiting the future return of the Messiah, Romantic poet Samuel Coleridge finds temporary relief from worldly pain – a saviour and messianic fervour in opium: Weave a circle round him thrice And … Continue reading →

By Tony Attwood “Dress It Up, Better Have It All” (seemingly known originally just as “Better have it all”) is one of those songs that vanished for many a long year, yet were known about by having been on a … Continue reading →

By Larry Fyffe The poems of William Blake and Percy Shelley influence William Yeats, a Modernist latter-day Romantic poet. Within the electric song lyrics of Bob Dylan, howl the ghosts of William Yeats’ Symbolist poetics: All perform their tragic play … Continue reading →

By Tony Attwood The first thing to say is that this is not a review of “All I have to do is dream” which was written by Boudleaux Bryant  and recorded by the Everly Brothers.  But just because it is … Continue reading →

by Tony Attwood In this article the lyrics are taken from those provided in the excellent “Expecting Rain” with a few very minor changes of my own.   A new song by Dylan – or better said, the release of a … Continue reading →

  By Larry Fyffe Many of the song lyrics of Bob Dylan reveal the influences of poets TS Eliot, Walt Whitman, and Percy Shelley: When Bob Dylan read a bit of TS Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’ on the air, he introduced the … Continue reading →

By Tony Attwood In once sense “Silent Weekend” is quite remarkable, for it is just about the only rock song that I know which deals with narcissism and emotional abuse. The “silent treatment” that the song refers to is usually … Continue reading →

With Dylan, there’s no pinning him down. by Tony Attwood In a rather interesting piece of pop and rock research the American news and culture website Quartz collected data from the AllMusic site on 53,630 artists, of which about 25,600 were … Continue reading →

By Tony Attwood “Minstrel Boy” is an extraordinary Dylan song that really doesn’t sound like a Dylan composition.  Indeed if I were to hear it without any knowledge of the song, I don’t think I’d guess it was Dylan at … Continue reading →

By Tony Attwood Quite why the wonderful people at Sony Music, Columbia Music and BobDylan.com collectively chose to put the “alternate version” of “Don’t ya tell Henry” on The Bootleg Series 11 is something that I’ve never been that sure … Continue reading →

by Tony Attwood One of the great things about writing reviews of some of the more obscure Dylan songs from the Basement Tapes era is the tracing back of the influences playing on Bob’s mind as he quickly made up … Continue reading →

  by Larry Fyffe The spoken Romantic ‘Beat Poetry’ of Vachel Lindsay, a social conservative who thinks of America as a decadent Babylon, presents black Africans and American ‘Indians’ as ‘noble savages’ from another world. He contrasts the ideals that … Continue reading →

By Tony Attwood I was writing recently about lines from Bob Dylan which are taken from within his songs (ie not titles or opening lines) and which really have moved me. And pondering whether I could take this any further … Continue reading →

By Tony Attwood When discussing “Times they are a changing” with a journalist from Melody Maker magazine Dylan is reported to have said that the song was “about the person who doesn’t take you seriously but expects you to take him … Continue reading →

Bob Dylan And Bottichelli, DaVinci, Delacroix, Duchamp, Picasso, And Van Gogh by Larry Fyffe As well as songs, poems, short stories, novels, and movies, Bob Dylan draws upon paintings in a number of his Freudian Surrealistic song lyrics: Inside the … Continue reading →

  by Larry Fyffe There are English Romantic stories that idealise real or fabled characters from past history, like Robin Hood, who stands up for equity and justice in a society controlled by an aristocracy. Romantic Transcendentalists look back to … Continue reading →

by Tony Attwood Revised June 2018 with addition of another alternative version. There are two versions of this song recorded: the Basement Tapes version (from 1967 and re-issued in 1975), and the Greatest Hits version in 1971. It was first … Continue reading →