Untold Dylan

This article is part of our on-going series tracing the Never Ending Tour, with commentary and audios of the performances.

A full index of all the articles tracing the tour from 1988 onward, is available here.  The previous articles about the Prague concerts of 1995 are…

• 1995, part 1: The Prague Revelation and other astonishments
• 1995, part 2: The Prague Revelation – Salt for Salt, Peak Prague
• 1995, Part 3, The Prague Revelation – down in the flood

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

Of course, Dylan’s revelatory three day residency on Prague was not the end of the 1995 story, just the beginning. He went on from there to performances equal to Prague, but not with the same consistency.

His three day residency in London, from the 29^th to the 31^st of March at the Brixton Academy, is a good example. It may well be that the recording of the London concerts was not as good. Despite their obvious audience source, there is something about the Prague recordings, how they capture the echo of the venue, and the clarity of the sound, that was not sustained in London. Yet there were some outstanding moments in London, such as this ‘Masters of War’, which equals the best of Prague:

Masters of War

For my ear, we have a ‘best ever’ performance of this song, at least in terms of acoustic versions. In my post for Master Harpist 2, I wrote regarding this performance: ‘Dylan can let rip with this song, and turn it into a howling rocker, but this performance is all restraint, a sense of holding back that emotion, which just breaks through the voice here and there, until we get to the harp, where we get a sharper, more trenchant comment. Listen to the way the guitar and harmonica surge back and forward in a syncopated manner, while Dylan’s vocal and harmonica phrasing drive the song forward. Hard to find a better Dylan performance than this.’

Another London performance we can’t overlook is this ‘Senor’, a song that takes us right to the borderlands of spiritual despair. It’s a wonderful moody song from  Street Legal (1978) and never fails to create a spooky atmosphere on stage. There is a pretty good video of this performance, and you see Dylan, once more without guitar, putting on a very Prague-like performance. (I have added the audio link in case the You Tube clip disappears)

Senor

The London concerts are remarkable for a most rare performance of ‘Joey’ off  Desire (1975). ‘Joey’ has never been my favourite Dylan song, as it appears to lionise a mafia figure. How different from ‘The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carol’ (1964) which  presents us with a harrowing tale of how a poor black woman was randomly killed by a rich crook who might have been Joey, or at least a Joey type figure. As a story, this epic failed to move me, but if any performance of the song was going to move me it would be this one. Whatever you think of the song, the power of this performance turns it into a passionate narrative of betrayal. A remarkable vocal.

Joey

‘Dignity’ was written in 1989 for Oh Mercy, but Dylan was dissatisfied with the versions they tried out. He re-recorded it in 1994, and many of us first became aware of the song from the 1994 MTV Unplugged concert. A derisive humour lies behind this song. Dignity can no longer be found no matter where you search:

‘I went down where the vultures feed
I would've got deeper, but there wasn't any need
Heard the tongues of angels and the tongues of men
Wasn't any difference to me’

You can listen to it as if dignity was a person, and the effect is quite odd.  I’ve just added the capital D to dignity.

‘Somebody got murdered on New Year's Eve
Somebody said Dignity was the first to leave
I went into the city, went into the town
Went into the land of the midnight sun’

This 1995 London performance recalls the MTV performance of the year before, but to my mind has the edge on the earlier performance, being a bit sharper and rougher.

Dignity

What I like about Dylan’s 1995 vocals is the understated softness of his voice when he needs it. Yes, he can yell it out, and often the songs build from soft to loud, but in the case of the London performance of ‘She Belongs to Me’ he pretty much keeps it soft and intimate, as if it were a love song instead of a cautionary account of how one can be bewitched and end up ‘peeking through a keyhole down upon your knees.’ The woman in question is a charmer for sure – but what is the cost of getting involved? Serving another’s ego?

She belongs to me.

Feel like kicking back with a bit of rock blues? A song that belts along with a steady rock pace? Something to dance to? Try this London performance of ‘Tombstone Blues’. On the album (Highway 61 Revisited, 1965) the song happens at quite a frantic pace, thirty years later it rollicks along. The lyrics come over nice and clearly too.

Tombstone Blues

Throughout Dylan’s songs there is a resistance to over-educated intellectualism. Dylan loved baiting intellectuals, wanna-be intellectuals and pretenders. In ‘Someone’s Got a Hold of My Heart’ he complains about ‘too much educated rap.’ There is an intellectual force behind his wild whirling words however, but it leans to the anarchic, the chaotic and the revelatory. In ‘Tombstone Blues’ we find this:

‘I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you, dear lady, from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge’

And this fucked up world is sure going to make you sick.

‘Well, John the Baptist after torturing a thief
Looks up at his hero, the Commander-in-Chief
Saying, "Tell me great hero, but please, make it brief
Is there a hole for me to get sick in?"’

A regular on Dylan’s set list, ‘If You See Her Say Hello’ wasn’t played at Prague, so it’s a pleasure to pick it up here, in London. These London performances make a nice complement to Prague.

The vocal is restrained, the harmonica sharp-edged and guitarist John Jackson gives the song a country twist. Again we get that easy, mid-tempo, catchy rhythm that makes these songs fun to listen to. It is less wrought than the album version (Blood on the Tracks, 1974), but no less nostalgic for that.

If you see her say hello

Before leaving the London concerts behind, here’s an unusual performance. On the last night, the 31^st of March, Dylan is joined onstage by Elvis Costello for a rousing performance of ‘I Shall Be Released.’ Dylan’s distinctive voice and vocal phrasing do not make him an easy partner in any duet. But here they take turns and sing together only on the chorus and it turns out pretty okay. The video of this one is pretty cool too.

I shall be released.

We now move from London to Edinburgh, 7^th April, for another rarity, the last ever performance of ‘What Was It You Wanted?’ (Oh Mercy 1989)

I have always admired this song for its portrayal of devastating emotional disconnection. Imagine two people sitting at a table. They are apparently having a conversation but what we hear is what just one of them is saying, or perhaps thinking. Are you listening to me? Are you there at all? It’s the ultimate disconnect.

‘Whatever you wanted
Slipped out of my mind
Would you remind me again
If you'd be so kind
Has the record been breaking
Did the needle just skip
Is there somebody waitin'
Was there a slip of the lip?’

This verse is obsessively repetitive, the same notes repeated eight times before a chord change, making it sound as if the needle really is skipping on the track itself. Very clever. Structurally it’s relentless, as is the alienation it portrays. Do we even know whom we’re talking to or what about?

‘What was it you wanted
I ain't keepin' score
Are you the same person
That was here before?
Is it something important
Maybe not
What was it you wanted?
Tell me again I forgot’

Of course people want something, even if they don’t come out and say it. So what’s their angle?

‘Whatever you wanted
What can it be
Did somebody tell you
That you could get it from me
Is it something that comes natural
Is it easy to say
Why do you want it
Who are you anyway?’

This kind of hidden agenda makes us suspicious. ‘Are you talking to me?’ Do these two people even know each other? Self doubt intervenes.

‘Is the scenery changing
Am I getting it wrong
Is the whole thing going backwards
Are they playing our song?
Where were you when it started
Do you want it for free
What was it you wanted
Are you talking to me?’

I don’t know why he left it behind after 1995, for by the sound of this performance Dylan is fully engaged with the song. It’s a great performance although Dylan’s voice is a bit soft or under-recorded at the beginning.

What was it you wanted?

While on the subject of songs from Oh Mercy, and still in Edinburgh, we find an equally committed performance of ‘Disease of Conceit.’ In 1996 this song too would be dropped from Dylan’s repertoire. It’s a very explicit song. There is nothing elusive in its imagery. It’s almost embarrassingly direct, and so suits Dylan’s understated, 1995 style.

The disease of conceit

That’s it for now. Next time we’ll be looking at some more compelling sounds from 1995. Until then, stay safe and happy listening.

Kia Ora

And elsewhere

There are details of some of our more recent articles listed on our home page.  You’ll also find, at the top of the page, and index to some of our series established over the years.

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

(I shall be released)

Senor

• Jet Pilot (1965) part I: Greetings from Vermillion
• Jet Pilot (1965) part II: I threw it all away
• Jet Pilot part III: A whole lotta woman
• Jet Pilot part IV: What is the most important thing in your life?

by Jochen Markhorst

V          The mixed up, muddled up, shook up world

She got all the downtown boys, all at her command
But you've got to watch her closely 'cause she ain't no woman
She's a man

“Down Town” is still in the air, when Dylan shakes his verse with the downtown boys out of his sleeve. In the third week of 1965, Petula Clark is number 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, the first in a long line of American hits for Petula. On the day Dylan records “Jet Pilot”, 5 October, “Round Every Corner” has just entered at no. 85, after she has scored a Top 3 hit with “I Know A Place” (and the next no. 1 hit, “My Love”, follows). A good year, then, for Petula, but Dylan cannot complain either; in this same week chart (3-9 October 1965), three Dylan songs are making money: “Like A Rolling Stone” on 33, “Positively 4th Street” on 34 and The Turtles’ Top 10 hit “It Ain’t Me Babe” is also still there, on 29.

But downtown boys is of course not the punchline, or the earcatcher of the rejected miniature “Jet Pilot”.

Transgender protagonists, and themes such as transsexuality and gender confusion, have been bon ton in pop music since the 1990s. Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way”, Blur’s “Boys And Girls”, “A Girl Called Johnny”, Green Day’s “She”… with Christina Aguilera’s “Reflection”, the theme has even entered the mainstream and Disney films in a watered-down form.

The way was paved twenty years earlier by superstars like David Bowie and Lou Reed, who not only thematised gender confusion in world hits (“Walk On The Wild Side” and “Rebel Rebel”, for example), but also made it part of their image. T. Rex’s Marc Bolan is the pioneer in 1971, but the success of Reed and Bowie breaks the dam. Glam rock becomes a new sub-current – the long-haired, eye-shadowed, rouged, lip-sticked and androgynously dressed men of bands like The Sweet, Mott The Hoople and Queen.

As a punchline of a pop song, it is of course a bit older than Marc Bolan. “Lola” has the scoop on that. After all, it is only in the last verse that it becomes clear that Lola is a man;

She said, "Little boy, gonna make you a man"
Well I'm not the world's most masculine man
But I know what I am and I'm glad I'm a man
And so is Lola
Lo-Lo-Lo-Lo-Lola

In the same borderland, Pink Floyd had already done pioneering work three years earlier, when the genius crackpot Syd Barrett still has some sense and is able to write brilliant gems like “See Emily Play” and “Lucifer Sam”. The first single “Arnold Layne” (March ’67) sings about a cross-dresser, with, intentional or not, a small Dylan reference;

Arnold Layne had a strange hobby
Collecting clothes moonshine washing line
They suit him fine
On the wall hung a tall mirror
Distorted view, see through baby blue
He dug it

Incidentally, based on facts, according to Roger Water: “Both my mother and Syd’s mother had students as lodgers because there was a girls’ college up the road so there were constantly great lines of bras and knickers on our washing lines and ‘Arnold’ or whoever he was, had bits off our washing lines.” The Arnold in the song does not end well. They gave him time, doors bang, chain gang he hates it.

But even the unbridled taboo-breaking free-thinker Syd Barrett is not the first to visit these caverns. In that October week in 1965, when Dylan runs his finger through the Billboard Hot 100 to see how his new and his old single are doing, he undoubtedly lingers at number 55.

Radio broadcaster Dylan announces the band with some sympathy, in November 2007 (Theme Time Radio Hour, episode 57 “Head To Toe”):

“There’s a lot of groups that people think are one-hit-wonders. One band that always ends up in that list, is the Barbarians. Their drummer was named Victor Moulton, but everyone knew him as “Moulty”. At age 14, a home-made pipe bomb exploded and he lost his hand. He got a metal hook, much like Captain Hook. He was still a great drummer, and I think, that hook brought a certain punk credibility to the band.”

That’s what Dylan tells us in introduction to a sort of autobiographical song by drummer Victor Moulton, to “Moulty”, a catchy “Hang On Sloopy” rip-off from 1966. But that’s not the hit he refers to when the DJ calls The Barbarians a one-hit-wonder – that would be the modest hit “Are You A Boy Or Are You A Girl”.

The song achieves a certain status because it is often selected for compilation albums, notably on the 1998 re-issue of the legendary Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, 1965-1968. Actually, though, like the band itself and the rest of their output, it’s rather trite. Their only, quite forgettable, LP from 1966, is otherwise filled with two songs of their own and poor covers of modern classics like “Susie Q” and “Memphis, Tennessee”. Especially The Barbarians’ adaptations of “House Of The Rising Sun” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” are deplorable, despite their “punk credibility”.

Still, the pop premiere for a song thematising gender confusion is in their name, with that song reaching its top position in Billboard on the same day when Dylan half-improvises: you’ve got to watch her closely ’cause she ain’t no woman, she’s a man.

https://youtu.be/yDpGsFI3WNg

Dylan, however, does give it a “Lola” charge. The Barbarians articulate, ironically, conservative wailing from a disapproving old nag;

Are you a boy, or are you a girl?
With your long blond hair you look like a girl
Yeah, you look like a girl
You may be a boy (Hey) you look like a girl

… and continue with a somewhat obvious, yet charming nod to The Beatles and to Dylan:

You're either a girl or you come from Liverpool
(Yeah, Liverpool)
You can dog like a female monkey, but you swim like a stone
(Yeah, a rolling stone)
You may be a boy (Hey) you look like a girl

The reassurance that it is ironic can be distilled from the appearance of the band; although no wildly waving blonde manes, no freak flags flying, they are indeed – by the standards of 1965 – long-haired themselves.

It’s a pity, though, that Dylan leaves it at this one unfinished sketch, rejecting “Jet Pilot” on the same day again, 5 October. After all, it could have been the blueprint for “Lola”, for “Walk On The Wild Side”, for “Rebel Rebel”, for all those little masterpieces that thematise female he’s and male she’s. Fortunately, they achieved immortality on their own, without “Jet Pilot”, making the world a little more beautiful in doing so. Although never on the astronomical level of the stoning scene in Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, obviously. Where men who play women have to dress up as men to avoid being seen as women. It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world.

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits (German)
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville

And elsewhere

There are details of some of our more recent articles listed on our home page.  You’ll also find, at the top of the page, and index to some of our series established over the years.

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

A new Dylan Album

By Tony Attwood

Dylan Obscuranti is an imaginary album consisting of both lesser known Dylan songs performed either by himself or other people, including re-worked cover versions of songs which take the song into somewhere completely different.

This is not the first Dylan album we have created.  Earlier we invented “Bob Dylan 1980” and we have also created “The Lost Album” which could have replaced “Down in the Groove” and (in our view) done a much better job of it!

Now I am at it against with Dylan Obscuranti.  You can hear the opening tracks on our You Tube channel or via the articles…

• Track 1 – Angelina but not as we know it
• Track 2 – Tomorrow is a long time
• Track 3 – I’m not there
• Track 4 – Mama you been on my mind
• Track 5 – Love is just a four letter word
• Track 6 – To fall in love with you
• Track 7 – Restless Farewell sung for Frank Sinatra

As you can see it is a totally personal collection: the album I would put together for commercial release if anyone was crazy enough to do invite me so to do.

“Ballad for a Friend” is a song I have raved over on this site since I first reviewed it.  It has however not been given massive prominence on this site however because in the past I have not been able to find a copy on the internet to illustrate my points.  It is here now (below) but if it vanishes by the time you are reading this, go to Spotify or Amazon or buy the album.  It is worth it for this one track alone.

Most of us had never heard of it at all until it turned up on The Bootleg Series, Vol 9: The Witmark Demos: 1962-1964 and then the genius of the piece hit at least some of us.

The authenticity is there both at the start and the end – the start because the tape is not running at full speed as Bob starts playing, and the end as he jumps in with his nervous explanation about how he didn’t get the words right.

Everything about this song is utterly amazing.  1962, when this was written, was  the year Bob exploded on the scene writing 36 songs including “Hard Rain”, “Don’t think twice” etc.  So it was a year of genius.

But this was the first song of that year.  Prior to this song, Bob had written 14 songs – and to illustrate my point about this being an explosion, here are those 14

1959/60 

1. Hey Little Richard
2. When I got troubles
3. I got a new girl
4. One eyed jacks
5. Bonnie Why’d You Cut My Hair
6. Talking Hugh Brown (humour)

1961

1. Song to Woodie
2. Talkin New York 
3. Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues.
4. Talkin Folk Lore Centre Blues
5. Talkin Hava Negeilah blues
6. Man on the street
7. Hard times in New York Town
8. On Wisconsin (lyrics only)
9. I was young when I left home

There is very little there to prepare us for this masterpiece.  “Man on the street” gives the slightest hint, but really it is only “I was young when I left home” that can be seen as a precedent.

That song above is indeed the warm-up to “Ballad for a Friend”  and paved the way – and why neither song gained bigger prominence in the world of Dylan I can’t really say.  Neither gained a performance in public as far as we know.

But not only was Bob inexperienced as a songwriter when he wrote “Ballad”, he was also just 21.  And indeed just how new to the music scene he was can be heard by his chatter at the end.  He was incredibly nervous in making this recording.

And we can’t just say it is the guitar work, or the melody or the lyrics that stands out – the whole composition is a masterpiece.   Dylan interprets the situation as one that would affect the character in the song so much that he would have no option but to pull back from the world and just tell the story.   There’s no false emotionalism there – he just tells the story, as one can imagine the character to whom this happened, doing.

But we have to note that this is not the typical songwriting style that Dylan took up in this and the next year in which he wrote 67 songs (you’ll find the whole list in the order of composition in our article on Dylan compositions in the 60s).

What makes the melody work against the accompaniment is that the melody is based fairly and squarely around the notes of the chord of A major (A C-sharp E).  Not exclusively, but mostly.  Against this melody the guitar is playing the alternating chords of A major and D major, and then when there is no melody, Dylan throws in the blues notes of C and G.  This whole arrangement shows a rare maturity – the sort of ability and insight that one would normally associate with a much older performer.  It works because the movement of the two chords is in perfect liaison with the melody and because the blues guitar only clocks in after the singing has stopped.  The signing reports the events, it is the blues guitar that gives us the musical commentary on the horror of what has happened.

I find this remarkable, because I would have expected Dylan at this time either to be using a blues template or a Woody Guthrie approach, but this is neither.  Also it is interesting that he doesn’t indulge in any emotion.  He is numb, he just sings it.   Further, by ending each verse at the top we are pushed forward onto the next verse, and on and on.  It is like the truck rolling down the hill, it comes on and on, and nothing is going to stop it.

This theme of loss of course became one of Dylan’s favourites over  the years, but this is the loss of friendship not  the loss of a loved one, as most of Dylan’s “loss” songs are.  As such it is the precursor of “Bob Dylan’s Dream” – although there the friends are lost through the passing of time, not through a single dramatic, horrific event as here.

Some commentators have said that something akin to this story actually happened to Dylan’s friend, although the young man was severely injured but didn’t die.  I can’t verify that, but either way it doesn’t affect the utter brilliance of this conception.

The guitar is tuned to open A; the territory is the North Country, of course, the language is the desperation of the blues, but with life continuing.  This is just what happens.  Just watch it unfold.

Sad I’m sittin’ on the railroad track,
Watchin’ that old smokestack.
Train is a-leavin’ but it won’t be back.

Years ago we hung around,
Watchin’ trains roll through the town.
Now that train is a-graveyard bound.

Where we go up in that North Country,
Lakes and streams and mines, so free,
I had no better friend than he.

Something happened to him that day,
I thought I heard a stranger say,
I hung my head and stole away.

A diesel truck was rollin’ slow,
Pullin’ down a heavy load.
It left him on a Utah road.

They carried him back to his home town,
His mother cried, his sister moaned,
Listin’ to them church bells toll.

Why did Dylan never perform the song?   Probably because he was so busy writing, and indeed eight songs later he wrote the piece that was to make him a multi-millionaire all on its own: “Blowing in the Wind.”  And when placed next to that song, maybe we can understand why it didn’t get onto Freewheelin’.   It just isn’t Freewheelin’.

But also maybe because it was a song related to his hometown.  “Susan” in commentating on my original review of this song wrote, this comment reproduced below, which I find helpful in fixing the images in the song…

“In Ballad for a Friend, Dylan describes the North Country as “Lakes and streams and mines so free”. Hibbing, Minnesota is a small city that’s part of what we call the “Iron Range”, an area of the state where enormous taconite mines have provided the economic stability, or instability, of everyone who lives there. Taconite pellets were transported from the mines — via trains — to far-away places where they were made into steel.
Dylan was a “Ranger” (lived on the Iron Range), and he grew up as all Ranger kids did… with taconite mines and railroad tracks a part of the landscape, and where long, dirty, and loud trains were part of daily life as they rolled through town.
Although those things are reflected in this song, there is another piece to living on the Iron Range that I think might be referred to in at least one Dylan song, although I’m not familiar with all of his work. That piece is that everyone growing up on the Range internalizes the reality that they are all economically connected to the international marketplace for taconite pellets.
Might this be reflected as a metaphor somewhere?”

There is no other song like this that I know.  Nothing.  Indeed both when I originally heard the song, and now, having not played it to myself for a while I need nothing else.  Not tonight, not tomorrow.  Not for a long while.

It utterly deserves a place on my imaginary “Dylan Obscuranti” album.

And elsewhere

There are details of some of our more recent articles listed on our home page.  You’ll also find, at the top of the page, and index to some of our series established over the years.

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

Previously in this series:

• The Mythology Of Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan’s Mythology (Part II)

by Larry Fyffe

History shows that John Calvin’s Puritan theology with its doctrine of ‘original sin’ has a big impact on the development of the “American Dream”:

No mother's son but has misdone
And broken God's command
All have transgressed, even the best
And merited God's wrath
(Michael Wigglesworth: Day Of Doom, stanza LXVI)

Religious thinkers have their parts to play in the mythological visions of singer/songwriter Bob Dylan. According to Calvin, an individual is a member of God’s Elect from the get-go, and any doing of ‘good works’ down on Earth ain’t a-gonna help him or her make it to Heaven after death. The Almighty God plays no favorites with the life and death of his creations – as expressed in the following song lyrics:

When the Reaper's task had ended
Sixteen hundred had gone to rest
The good, the bad, the rich, the poor
The loveliest, and the best
(Bob Dylan: Tempest)

John Wesley’s Methodist theology opens up the possibility of everyone gaining God’s grace, but his keeping of the doctrine of ‘original sin’ lends itself to satire – as the song lyrics below demonstrate:

John Wesley Harding was a friend to the poor
He travelled with a gun in every hand
All along this countryside, he opened many a door
But he was never known to hurt an honest man
(Bob Dylan: John Wesley Harding)

The restrictive Calvinist doctrine ensures that the feeling of guilt is everywhere among its followers since only a relative few of them get a free pass to salvation, and even then those selected to the Elect do not know that they are; outsiders receive no such tickets for sure.

Guilt is everywhere; everyone ought to feel guilty because Eve allowed herself to be seduced by the  earth-bound Devil, and God sacrifices His Son to save us:

I dreamed I saw St. Augustine
Alive with fiery breath
And I dreamed I was amongst the ones
That put him out to death
(Bob Dylan: I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine)

Just like Anthony Quinn says in the pirate movie:

"Zac, you must be guilty of something"
( "A High Wind In Jamaica")

Repeated in the following song lyrics:

Whatever you got to say to me
Won't come as any shock
I must be guilty of something
You just whisper it into my ear
(Bob Dylan: Tight Connection To My Heart)

The lambasting of the ‘original sin’ doctrine makes up a part of Dylan’s personal mythological vision right from its early construction:

My trip has been a pleasant one
And my time, it isn't long
And I still do not know 
What it was that I've done wrong
(Bob Dylan: Drifter's Escape)

Fredrich Nietzsche called the waiting for spiritual salvation in the afterlife, instead of seeking to achieve material success it in this one, the ‘morality of slaves”; it is said by sociologist Max Weber that the early Calvinists considered material success a worldly “sign” that they be indeed members of the Almighty’s Elect.

…..And elsewhere

There are details of some of our more recent articles listed on our home page.  You’ll also find, at the top of the page, and index to some of our series established over the years.

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

By Tony Attwood

This is episode 38 of All Directions of Once.  The last two articles were…

• Where now Señor? There’s more than enough time to think
• But which direction? Bob’s 1977 solution

Please do click on the link above for the index to the whole series.  This article deals with the final compositions for Street Legal, and the opening work with Helena Springs.

—————

After writing “No time to think” in 1977, a song which I argued in my last piece in this series is an absolute masterpiece, Bob Dylan composed three more songs in the year, all of which were included in Street Legal: “True Love Tends to Forget”, “We better talk this over” and “Where are you tonight?”

And we can imagine that Bob was having some difficulties here.  First, “No time to think” an utter monument, which must have been exhausting to write.  In any other situation, we might have expected the artist to now have a break, but of course with the demand of an album, and all the inner turmoil of the end of a marriage that was not possible.   Dylan had to keep writing to enable all his thoughts to come out, and he knew he also had to complete the album.

But by way of introduction, let’s experience once more the extraordinary piece that Dylan now had to set aside in order to write something fresh…

Not surprisingly the level of extraordinary brilliance seen so far could not be maintained, and “True Love” which came next is in almost every way is a less entrancing song.  “Almost every way” because it still has a lyrical and musical highpoint in the very unexpected middle 8:

I was lyin' down in the reeds without any oxygen
I saw you in the wilderness among the men.
Saw you drift into infinity and come back again
All you got to do is wait and I'll tell you when.

And indeed Dylan must have known he’d created something special because very unusually for a middle 8, it is repeated, and repeated, in fact taking the place of a chorus.

This mid-section of the song opens by moving down a tone into the blues-orientated flattened 7th, going back to the tonic, back down to the 4th, then suddenly into the minor…  Musically it is extraordinary.   Far more powerful than the music in the rest of the song!

And the lyrics – any attempt at a literal meaning is pointless, for there is none beyond the fact that he saw her and was overwhelmed by her, but he isn’t quite ready.

“True love tends to forget” is as the title suggests a song of regret and moving on – and it is a song that outside of the middle 8 contains none of the intricacies of “No time to think” either in its musical construction, its lyrics or its rhyme.

And it is curious that this is followed by “We better talk this over”, since “True Love” suggests there is nothing to talk over.  But then, when the mind is in turmoil over the end of a relationship, logic rarely gets in the way.

Given that we have no indication of any songs that were tried out and then not used on  the album it really does look as if Bob was writing to order – and as such the quality was extraordinarily high.  We can hardly complain if the occasional song slips from the extraordinarily high standards set elsewhere.

Here we have yet another lost love song.  The explanation is that it is over, but he wishes (sometimes) it wasn’t or even thinks (sometimes) maybe it isn’t.  Or it is, but he knows he can’t accept it.

But most interestingly from a musical point of view is the fact that once more we have a song saved by a middle 8 – Bob has clearly taken note of what he has experiemented with previously.  The rhyme is perhaps somewhat forced but the meaning and the music are both so powerful.

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

And the other constant through these songs is still there, for Dylan is above all in these masterful works playing with words, seeing where they will take him.  Just consider…

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

Who else would even consider that?  It just stops us short.

But the end is something else in terms of the end of the relationship.  Has anyone ever described such a moment like this before?

I guess I’ll be leaving tomorrow
If I have to beg, steal or borrow
It’d be great to cross paths in a day and a half
Look at each other and laugh

But I don’t think it’s liable to happen
Like the sound of one hand clappin’
The vows that we kept are now broken and swept
’Neath the bed where we slept

The one-off final performance of the song shows us exactly what this could be, but seemingly Bob just couldn’t quite find the way to express his emotions constantly at the time.  And given the high quality of his writing during this period we can hardly blame him for that.

And so we come to the last song in the sequence… Where are you tonight?  (Journey through the Dark Heat).

Here, we might feel, as with several other songs in this collection, that each line is a song in its own right, but there is more to it than that because of the length of the verse – no matter how many times one hears it, the fact is that the second four lines catch one out – it feels like we have had the bulk of the verse after four long lines, but then another four come tumbling in, all with the same melody and that same, incredibly simple, endless, I IV chord sequence. The pressure builds and builds, and only then do we finally hit the dominant chord and find a way out.

Then it’s back to that relentless I IV…

There’s a woman I long to touch and I miss her so much 
but she’s drifting like a satellite.
There’s a neon light ablaze in this green smoky haze, 
laughter down on  Elizabeth Street

This is extraordinary writing and it works because the images are so visual, so varied and hence so powerful, and most of all it works because the music is so fitting.

And a lonesome bell tone in that valley of stone 
where she bathed in a stream of pure heat.

It doesn’t matter whether it makes sense or not.  It simply is Hard Rain, re-worked years later.   This is where the darling young one has been, and in the end the lines tell us where we are, what sort of world we are in…  It is the summation of all the songs already written for the album.

For no, he hasn’t gone out and revealed the truth everywhere as he promised with lines such as

I'll walk to the depths of the deepest black forest
Where the people are many and their hands are all empty
Where the pellets of poison are flooding their waters
Where the home in the valley meets the damp dirty prison

Likewise, he has not always spoken out

Where black is the color, where none is the number
And I'll tell it and think it and speak it and breathe it
And reflect it from the mountain so all souls can see it
Then I'll stand on the ocean until I start sinkin'
But I'll know my song well before I start singin'

Because somehow, it seems, the song was never fully learned for …

The truth was obscure, too profound and too pure, 
to live it you have to explode.

And it all came down to personal relationships as

She could feel my despair as I climbed up her hair 
and discovered her invisible self.

And we hear the conclusion with the last selection of I IV chords ends…

If you don’t believe there’s a price for this sweet paradise, 
remind me to show you the scars.

Was Dylan reminded of this, years further on, when he said, “I’ve still got the scars that the sun doesn’t heal?” Quite possibly – it’s hard now not to listen to “Not Dark Yet” and not remember this earlier venture into such thoughts.

And yet despite this failure to deliver on the message of hope that was offered in Hard Rain, he can still rejoice in the fact that he is still here, still alive, still singing…

There’s a new day at dawn and I’ve finally arrived.
If I’m there in the morning, baby, you’ll know I’ve survived.
I can’t believe it, I can’t believe I’m alive,
But without you it just doesn’t seem right.
Oh, where are you tonight?

Has the situation of lost love ever been summarized so perfectly?  The man who sang of his love in “Isis” is back, and he’s just had some more amazing experiences.  He’s “stayed at a lot of people’s houses which had poetry books and poetry volumes” and he’s read them all.

And yes of course there is a train, there’s always a train.  Train’s were there as early as 1962 in the first, stunning, overwhelming masterpiece

Sad I’m sittin’ on the railroad track,
Watchin’ that old smokestack.
Train is a-leavin’ but it won’t be back.

But just as “Ballad for a Friend” is, as far as we know, fiction, so “Where Are You Tonight?” does not have to be the truth.  Maybe it is, but that is not the point.  It is just an expression of feeling, not reality.

If you want to know more, I thoroughly recommend Jochen’s consideration of the piece.  It’s fun, and it really reveals where the notions in the song come from.

•  “Where Are You Tonight?” Chanson d’automne
• The first two Spanish sestets
• From Rapunzel to the Battle of Passchendaele

But as Jochen notes, ‘In the end, the poet Dylan uses the images from Grimm’s fairy tales only superficially – just as superficially as, for example, the references to Roman mythology in “Changing Of The Guards”, to Charley Patton in “New Pony” or to Jesus in “Señor”.’

Indeed, Dylan had found a way to use the turmoil of emotions and feelings that he felt over the breakup of his marriage and the fight over access to his children, to create a set of what I find some of the most amazing and extraordinary pieces of music he has ever written.  And why not bring in some fairy tales?  As I said, he was after all, fighting over the issue of access to his children.

The only problem musically was, he didn’t yet have an album’s worth.

1978

The remaining two songs from the album were written the following year – “New Pony”, and “Baby Stop Crying”, while in between Bob’s new-found hobby of writing songs with Helena Springs was being explored for the first time.

Perhaps it was through feeling exhausted from his earlier writing, or perhaps through having simply run out of ideas, or perhaps because he couldn’t write anything more about his marital disharmony, Dylan now went back to his traditional approach: he picked up a Charley Patton song from 1929, “Pony Blues” (1929) and it got his brain going once more.  The image of the new pony is sexual – it always has been through the blues; the story is about the end of a relationship (ditto).

Even the name is amended from elsewhere (Jochen has saved me the trouble of looking it up: it is Arthur Crudup’s “Black Pony Blues” recorded in 1941, with bits of Dylan put in between).

It’s a fun reworking of the traditions and there’s nothing wrong with that, but given that all of the songs written so far have a theme, it is strange to have this piece plopped down among the rest of the album.  But then, that has often been the way through the history of pop and rock.  The music is controlled by the medium – the allotted length of the 45rpm single, the LP and then the CD, not to mention the unwillingness of radio DJs to play anything over three minutes long.  Pop and rock have always been art forms controlled by the medium.

And then, after one derivative piece we get another: the joint composition, “If I don’t be there by morning” written with Helena Springs – one of many joint compositions that followed.

There’s again a borrowing here, this time from “Friend of the Devil” written by Robert Hunter and Gerry Garcia and recorded by Grateful Dead.

Blue sky upon the horizon,
Private eye on my trail,
And if I don’t be there by morning
She’ll know that I must’ve spent the night in jail.

The song is not listed on BobDylan.com as a Dylan composition although the Clapton album clearly lists it as Dylan/Springs.  (And I wonder in passing if Dylan’s share was sold along with all the rest of his publishing rights.  I guess so).

It’s a 12 bar blues, and Clapton doesn’t have much commercial success with it, but unlike Dylan who won’t touch it, Clapton can’t leave it alone.  And it is certainly possible to see what attracted him.

First, it is written (or at least it is performed by Clapton) in B.  Which is very, very unusual.  Indeed I can’t think of any pop or rock song I’ve ever been asked to perform in B (although that could just be my memory failing as I get older).

But then we have the middle section which is, well, even odder than B.  It’s not really a middle 8 at all, it is an appendix to the verse.  The lyrics are simplicity themselves ( see below) but the chords….  Well!  Not only is it in B but it is now going

F#m,  B,  E,  F#m,  B,  C,  C#,  F#

OK if you are not a musician that is just a load of gibberish, but believe me it is strange.  F sharp minor (F#m) is not a chord one generally finds in the key of B, and yet we go straight from it back to B, and then E (a chord you would expect to find when playing in B).

And then towards the end of the middle 8 we have B, C, C#, F# – no wonder Clapton loved this because the guitar maestro is given opportunities here that he surely had never contemplated before.   Believe me you simply don’t write songs that go B, C, C#…

All of which makes me think that either Bob was larking around with his newfound friend, or else Ms Springs was thinking, “I’ll show Bob I can write original stuff too”.  Either way when we have

Finding my way back to you girl, Lonely and blue and mistreated too. 
Sometimes I think of you girl, Is it true that you think of me too?

Dull words, but musically it works.  And yep, in my band playing days if someone had given me a song with that middle 8, I’d have grabbed it.  The fun you can have…

I’ve not read a definitively assertive note about who wrote what in this co-composition, but the general view is that Ms Springs always took second place to the maestro in the songwriting department.  But no, I don’t hear it like that.  Perhaps (although I doubt it) Bob wrote all the lyrics, but to argue he wrote the music means accepting he then decided suddenly to use a musical construction he never ever used before or since in a solo song (and to good effect, within the context).  Or at the very, very least we have to allow that Ms Springs wrote the middle 8.  And if she wrote that, she probably wrote most of the rest of the music, which, in comparison, would have been much easier to write.

I suspect, contrary to most other commentators, Helena Springs wrote most of this song, Bob added a few bits, but later it was agreed to put it in the Dylan catalogue to maximise sales – and possibly give a few pennies to Ms Springs as and when the entire catalogue was sold.

That’s a guess of course.  But it’s less of a guess than simply asserting Bob wrote it, without any evidence or commentary on the construction.  I’m sure, Bob just wouldn’t write that chord sequence.  Nor, in my view, those words, although that’s a harder one to prove.

Footnote: Sorry these pieces are getting so long.  It’s not deliberate, it just seems to take quite a while to unravel the ebb and flow of Bob, his life, and his writing.  And here’s a funny thing: there is no Wikipedia article on Helena Springs.

And elsewhere

There are details of some of our more recent articles listed on our home page.  You’ll also find, at the top of the page, and index to some of our series established over the years.

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

by Jochen Markhorst

• Jet Pilot (1965) part I: Greetings from Vermillion
• Jet Pilot (1965) part II: I threw it all away
• Jet Pilot part III: A whole lotta woman

IV         What is the most important thing in your life?

She's five feet nine and she carries a monkey wrench
She weighs more by the foot than she does by the inch

The forged entrance gates with which Dylan surprises in 2013 are elegant, playful and funny examples of craftsmanship and artistic pleasure. Within a tight framework of iron, the welding artist Dylan fills the void with alienating compositions of scrap metal, motorbike parts, a meat-mincer, a horseshoe, bicycle chains, cogwheels and: tools. One or more tools are incorporated into each gate. Spanners, socket wrenches, combination pliers, pincers… and an occasional monkey wrench. The publicity photos shot for the first exhibition (Halycon Gallery, London) show staged photographs of Dylan in his workshop: a medium-sized room with wooden shelving along the walls, overflowing with scrap metal and iron objects, by the look of it sorted by shape. A collection of monkey wrenches is not to be seen. If there are any, they are obviously too precious to him to incorporate into his fences.

He does seem to have a thing for it, in the first half of the 1960s. Already in “Bob Dylan’s New Orleans Rag” (1963) the singer describes a long-legged man coming down the hall,

He muttered and he uttered
In broken French
And he looked like he’d been through
A monkey wrench

Two years later, on 5 September ’65, a month before he records “Jet Pilot”, the plumber’s tool is apparently still bouncing around in the back of his mind, as Dylan slaloms through the mostly stupid questions of journalists at the press conference in Beverly Hills. Like “what is the most important thing in your life these days?” The correct answer to that would be: “My towel,” as we all know from Chapter 3 of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. But Dylan is no Ford Prefect nor Arthur Dent, and answers: “Well, I’ve got a monkey wrench collection and I’m very interested in that.”

Susan Edminston and Nora Ephron, who interviewed him a few days later for the New York Post, did also notice, and they check, just to be sure:

BD: I don’t know what the songs I write are. That’s all I do is write songs, right? Write. I collect things too.
E/E: Monkey wrenches?
BD: Where did you read about that? Has that been in print? I told this guy out on the coast that I collected monkey wrenches, all sizes and shapes of monkey wrenches, and he didn’t believe me. I don’t think you believe me either. And I collect the pictures, too. Have you talked to Sonny and Cher?
E/E: No.
BD: They’re a drag. A cat gets kicked out of a restaurant and he went home and wrote a song about it.

The latter is a false sneer at “I Got You Babe”, the world hit about which Cher indeed reveals that Sonny Bono wrote it after they were banned from a restaurant because of their attire. Why Dylan is so condescending about the song is puzzling. It is a song beyond criticism and four weeks earlier it had knocked the Herman’s Hermits’ abominable “I’m Henry VIII, I Am,” off the top of Billboard’s Hot 100. That alone deserves respect and gratitude, but perhaps Dylan is plagued by competitive pressures; these same days, The Beatles (with “Help!”), The Beach Boys (“California Girls”), The Righteous Brothers (“Unchained Melody”) and Dylan’s own “Like A Rolling Stone” are all trying to knock Sonny & Cher from first place (The Beatles win the race; on 4 September, “Help! “, after three weeks of “I Got You Babe”, tops the charts). And the song is in a double sense, both lyrically and musically, the mirror image of “It Ain’t Me, Babe” – perhaps that itches too.

Anyway – monkey wrench collection. According to the respectable and distinguished Guardian journalist Ed Vulliamy, Dylan is still a collector twenty years later. In his 2018 memoir, When Words Fail: A Life with Music, War and Peace (published in America as Louder Than Bombs), Vulliamy recalls the press conference in London to promote the mediocre film Hearts Of Fire, in 1987. The journalists present bombard Dylan with questions as empty, useless and unanswerable as those in 1965 Beverly Hills, and a weary Dylan answers accordingly absurdly;

A pompous journalist from the Sunday Times challenged the bard to come clean about what interested him. “I’ve got a monkey-wrench collection in my garage back home, and I’m mighty interested in that,” came the reply.

Vulliamy’s integrity and professionalism are actually beyond question, but here he seems to be slipping into a constructive memory. Other coverage of the same press conference does mention the annoying questions and conflict seeking remarks by the Sunday Times journalist (it’s Philip Norman), but an answer like the one Vulliamy quotes is nowhere to be found – this monkey wrench answer that also sounds suspiciously literal like Dylan’s answer in Beverly Hills, back in 1965. Vulliamy’s own questions can be found too, and they show that The Guardian’s star reporter chose wisely, not to pursue a career as a master interviewer (first question: “Do you like England?”, second question: “What are your thoughts on this country at the moment?”).

Still, the monkey wrench does reappear, years after those first unserious uses. Over the years, Dylan has developed an irregular habit of introducing his band members to the audience at the end of the concert, just as irregularly provided with nonsensical, humorous biographical details. “Over here on violin is the youngest member of the group, never been away from home before, David Mansfield,” for example. Or “And Tony Garnier’s been with me longer than I been with myself, playing bass guitar.”

The same loyal Tony Garnier is at four concerts in June 1995 introduced with:

“On bass guitar Tony Garnier is playing tonight. I know that he tried to milk a cow with a monkey wrench, I know that.”

Dylan speaks that nonsensical introduction on 2 June in Seattle, and it’s not a slip of the tongue or anything. On 4, 6 and 21 June, he introduces Garnier in much the same words, each time with the nonsensical biographical fact that Tony once tried to milk a cow with a monkey wrench.

Clearly, it is a word combination that keeps on imposing itself on Dylan, that does not lose its attraction even after more than thirty years. The language artist is, presumably, touched by the intrinsic absurdity of the combination monkey + wrench, a combination that indeed has the power of a catachresis, of an incompatible set of words. Comparable to a honky-tonk lagoon (“Stuck Inside Of Mobile”), to seasick sailors (“It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”) or to curfew gull (“Gates Of Eden”), to unusual combinations of words, in short, which through the combination take on a dry-comic charge. The actual etymology of “monkey wrench” is unclear, by the way. Presumably the adjustable spanner was so named, because adjustable ship parts also had the modifier monkey (monkey foresail, monkey bridge).

So: an overweight lady with the physique of a man (thanks to data collected from the federal Centers for Disease Control, we know that five feet nine has been the exact average height of an American man for over half a century now, compared to five feet four for a woman), evidently blessed with an irresistible sex appeal to all the downtown boys, walking around with a monkey wrench.

Granted, it is an intriguing image.

To be continued. Next up: Jet Pilot part V: The mixed up, muddled up, shook up world

—————

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits (German)
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville

And elsewhere

There are details of some of our more recent articles listed on our home page.  You’ll also find, at the top of the page, and index to some of our series established over the years.

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

by Larry Fyffe

According to the mythological visions of Bob Dylan that are transported through his music and lyrics, we observe in the early history of ‘discovered’ America, the mill wheel of life grinding along quite simply, and rather smoothly.

According to the Puritan Calvinist point of view, those of the Elect are destined for Heaven; those not, doomed to Hell for all eternity, never to escape its fiery pits.

Well, perhaps not forever … maybe when Hell freezes over, or:

When Heaven is Hell, when ill is well
When virtue is vice
When wrong is right, when dark is light
When nought is of great price
(Michael Wigglesworth: A Short Discourse On Eternity)

As goes Dylanesque mythology,  nowadays things have changed, have gotten more complicated in the hustle and bustle, ups and downs of modern times. Appears that everything is broken.

Fredrich Nietzsche launches his ships, and looses Hell upon the New Babylon:

Now everything's a little upside down
As a matter of fact the wheels have stopped
What's good is bad, what's bad is good
You'll find out when you reach the top
You're on the bottom
(Bob Dylan: Idiot Wind)

The Romantics and Transcendentalist writers have fled into the hills. In the mythology proffered by the singer/songwriter/musician, childhood is the only chance left to enjoy life before happiness is trampled asunder by the walking dead. One has his/her choice of poison in regards to how this is to be achieved – whether overseen by overly strict, or by uncaring, or by corrupt officialdom:

Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a gypsy queen
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle all dressed in green
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle 'til the moon is blue
Wiggle 'til the moon sees you
(Bob Dylan: Wiggle Wiggle)

(Please note there is a 17 seconds introduction on the recording below)

The loss of hope, and the possibility of its regeneration be a motif in Dylan’s mythological outlook.

Where have all the heroes gone long time ago, those individuals who took a stand against corrupt authorities?  Below,  song lyrics that reference the movie ‘On The Waterfront’, starring Marlon Brando, and Karl Malden – “You lost the battle, but you have a chance to win the war”:

Your didn't know it, you didn't think it could be done
In the final end he won the war
After losing every battle
(Bob Dylan: Idiot Wind)

In these modern times, the oft sorrowful loss of love be another theme:

If you travelling in the north country fair
Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline
Remember me to the one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine
(Bob Dylan: Girl From The North Country)

In these modern times, self-sacrifice seems to have flown out the window; religious dogma like ‘original sin’ is scoffed at  ~ while the shortness of life reminds the wise to seize the day:

Shake the dust off of your feet, don't look back
Nothing now can hold you down, nothing that you lack
Temptation's not an easy thing, Adam given the Devil reign
Because he sinned, I got no choice, it run in my vein
(Bob Dylan: Pressing On)

Apparently, what the mythology declares most of all is that the walls of platitudes are full of holes:

Never could learn to drink that blood
And call it wine
Never could learn to hold you, love
And call you mine
(Bob Dylan: Tight Connection To My Heart)

There are details of some of our more recent articles listed on our home page.  You’ll also find, at the top of the page, and index to some of our series established over the years.

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

This article is part of our on-going series tracing the Never Ending Tour, with commentary and audios of the performances.

A full index of all the articles tracing the tour from 1988 onward, is available here.  The two previous articles about the Prague concerts of 1995 are…

• 1995, part 1: The Prague Revelation and other astonishments
• 1995, part 2: The Prague Revelation – Salt for Salt, Peak Prague

————

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

In the first and second of these posts on his March, 1995 Prague concerts (see links above), I covered some of the finest performances of the 1990s phase of Dylan’s Never Ending Tour.  “So what is left but the leftovers?” you might ask. And it’s a valid question, but with Prague, even the leftovers make a wonderful feast.

Take ‘Just Like a Woman’, for example. Dylan performed this controversial song twice at Prague, on the 11^th and 12^th of March. It’s controversial because of the sweet savagery of the lyrics and its outright attack on ‘Queen Mary,’ the subject of the song. Is this yet another example of Dylan putting down women?

There is too much contempt in it for us to feel easy with it. And that ‘breaks just like a little girl’ at the end feels like a final kick in the guts. Or is it the line ‘you fake just like a woman’ that does it, as if being fake is particular to women?

Interestingly, Nina Simone, a powerful woman if ever there was one, could take it to heart, identify with it, while avoiding the ‘fake’ line. Here’s her version of the chorus:

‘I take
Just like a woman
Yes I do
And I make love
Just like a woman
And I ache
Just like a woman
But I break
Just like a little girl’

But doesn’t the singer indicate that he too might break like a little boy? Look at this last verse:

‘It was raining from the first
And I was dying there of thirst
So I came in here
And your long-time curse hurts
But what's worse is this pain in here
I can't stay in here

Ain't it clear that I just can't fit
Yes, I believe that it's time for us to quit
But when we meet again, introduced as friends
Please don't let on that you knew me when
I was hungry and it was your world’

Ashamed of his neediness? And vulnerable. Miserable in the rain, compelled to go to her.

Also it strikes me that the real target here is not the woman so much as pretentiousness and falsity. The fakery of masks. The same target we find in a range of songs from ‘Ramona’ to ‘She’s Your Lover Now’.

Listening to these Prague performances, I hear the song as a love song, that desperate edge of a love that just can’t fit. It’s a confession, and we shouldn’t be deceived by the opening line, ‘nobody feels any pain’, as the whole song is reeking with pain, and it might be that which saves it from its contempt. We often turn our vitriol on those who have exposed our weaknesses.

Here’s the first, from the 11^th. Hard to find a more anguished performance. Or more wonderful harp work.

Just like a woman (A)

The performance on the 13^th is somewhat more muted, perhaps a little more reflective. I like the strength of the first version, but the second is better structured, with the harp break taking us right to the end, rather than letting the band do the last chorus alone.

Just like a woman (B)

Time to kick back with something a bit more relaxed and watch the river flow. The easy beat of ‘Watching the River Flow’ (1971) might disguise the heavy dose of fatalism that runs through the song. A rather tongue in cheek expression of ‘go with the flow’ hippie philosophy. According to the session men, Dylan wrote the lyrics in a few minutes in the studio.

‘Oh, this ol’ river keeps on rollin’, though
No matter what gets in the way and which way the wind does blow
And as long as it does I’ll just sit here
And watch the river flow’

I love the down-home, gutsy sound of the band on this one.

Watching the river flow

Speaking of the blues, and songs penned in 1971, this performance of ‘If Not For You’ is given a bluesy twist here, especially when Dylan pulls out the harp at the end. Those interested in the origins of the song could do no better than check out the version on  Another Self Portrait (Bootleg Vol 10).

This one, from the 11^th, kicks along nicely.

If not for you

I still think the song ‘God Knows’ reached its performance peak in 1993, with Mr Guitar Man playing a guttural, intricate weave of sound (See, NET, 1993, Part 1). I don’t know if Dylan picked up the guitar for this one on the 11^th of March, but it sure sounds like it. Dylan is in great vocal form. The song is a somewhat frantic mix of despair and hope:

‘God knows it's fragile
God knows everything
God knows it could snap apart right now
Just like putting scissors to a string’

God Knows

Since 1992 Dylan had been developing slow, bluesy endings to his performances. Some of these endings last almost as long as a whole pop song. ‘Don’t Think Twice’, especially when sung in a fast, peppy manner, lends itself to a slow, thumping end, which is what we get here. There is an unexpected emotional sophistication in what sounds like a bit of ditty, the title being a throw-away line.

‘I'm a-thinkin' and a-wond'rin' walkin’ way down the road
I once loved a woman, a child I am told
I give her my heart but she wanted my soul’

We might be hard put to explain the difference between heart and soul here, but we can feel the difference. Some people just want to consume you. They don’t want you to be your own person, and Dylan is all about being his own person.

In the last lines I detect a touch of tragedy. There’s nothing worse for the artist than being trapped in a time wasting relationship. There’s a deeper calling for the ‘road’, the dark side. The road would become perhaps the defining motif in Dylan’s songs.

‘I ain't sayin' you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don't mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don't think twice, it's all right’

This situation is repeated years later in ‘Caribbean Wind’, (1981).

‘Would I have married her? I don't know, I suppose.
She had bells in her braids and they hung to her toes
But I kept hearing my name and I had to be movin' on.’

And again in ‘I And I’ in 1984.

‘Noontime, and I'm still pushin' myself along the road, 
    the darkest part
Into the narrow lanes, I can't stumble or stay put
Someone else is speakin' with my mouth, 
    but I'm listenin' only to my heart’

In this performance Dylan keeps the bounciness of the original, and delivers another soft, intimate vocal.

Don’t think twice.

‘I Don’t Believe You’ is another song from Dylan’s early acoustic era that has gone through many changes.  The original was a wildly sarcastic romp, which turned into a wailing screamer during the 1966 tour, which turned into… this upbeat 1995 version, with that easy, catchy, mid-tempo beat that Dylan had been working on for the last couple of years. It works as a foot-tapper. My complaint about these later versions is that they don’t capture the wry self-irony of the original, the humour inherent in the situation that lifted it above being a mere complaint.

I don’t believe you

Dylan performed ‘All Along the Watchtower’ twice, on the 12^th and 13^th. There is little to choose between the two performances. I once used the term ecstatic rock to describe this frantic, full on guitar fest. This one is from the 12^th.

All along the Watchtower

‘Maggie’s Farm’ may be a rejection of stifling conformity, but it is also a good, beaty, hell for leather rock song. Who can forget the moment during the 1964 Newport Folk Festival when Dylan first belted out his new rock sound. This is the song Dylan chose to finish the shows on the 11^th and 12^th (with encores to follow). This one is from the 12^th, and you can hear Dylan introduce the band which is: Bob Dylan (vocal & guitar),Bucky Baxter (pedal steel guitar & electric slide guitar), John Jackson (guitar), Tony Garnier (bass) and Winston Watson (drums & percussion).

Maggie’s Farm

‘Just Like a Rolling Stone’ may be Dylan’s most iconic hit. It was the way the song caught the public that did it. It is Dylan’s sharpest ‘attack’ song, portraying a rich girl blinded to her own pretensions and having to face the truth about herself. Voted by Rolling Stone magazine as the greatest rock song ever, it was a wonderful way to finish the last evening of his Prague residency. A triumphant finish to three triumphant performances.

Like A Rolling Stone

Of course the year didn’t end with Prague. Rather it started there. In the next post I’ll be looking at 1995, post Prague to see what goodies we can discover. Until then, all the best and happy listening.

Kia Ora

What else?

There are details of some of our more recent articles listed on our home page.  You’ll also find, at the top of the page, and index to some of our series established over the years.

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

by Jochen Markhorst

• Jet Pilot (1965) part I: Greetings from Vermillion
• Jet Pilot (1965) part II: I threw it all away

III         A whole lotta woman

Well, she's got Jet Pilot eyes from her hips on down
All the bombardiers are trying to force her out of town

From jet pilot to bombardier is indeed a small associative leap, but it still is, of course, a completely unusual word in a rock song, or in song culture at all. Bing Crosby had a hit in 1942 with the propagandistic, martial Lorenz/Hart song “The Bombardier Song”, an unimaginative confection song, which hardly could have made any impression at all on Dylan. It’s an archaic word anyway (bombardiers were the artillerymen who operated the mortars until the nineteenth century). Maybe Dylan has Rudyard Kipling on his bedside table; Kipling uses the word with some regularity (‘Is girl she goes with a bombardier / Before ‘er month is through).

However, the rest of the song fragment, despite the alienating monkey wrench, varies on a much more common theme; on the attraction of a big fat woman.

She's five feet nine and she carries a monkey wrench
She weighs more by the foot than she does by the inch

Once upon a time it was a beauty ideal, the Big Fat Woman. Rubens’ (1577-1640) paintings document in great detail the ideal of voluptuous bosoms, flabby flesh and legs like tree trunks. So much so that Rubenesque has become a term in the dictionary, where it is defined as: plump or rounded usually in a pleasing or attractive way; full and shapely; voluptuous.

From the eighteenth century, the Western ideal of beauty shifts to slim and small-waisted, and slowly “fat woman” in the arts descends into a physical quality characteristic to achieve a comic effect – being fat becomes ridiculous.

Rarely vicious, by the way. In most poems and song lyrics in which fat women are sung, the protagonist is indeed in love, he loves his fat wife in spite of, or precisely because of, her impressive size – the comic note is usually good-natured mockery. As in Leadbelly’s straightforward miniature “Big Fat Woman Blues” from 1944, which is skilfully enriched with two extra verses by Tom Rush in ’63 (on Blues, Songs and Ballads):

She's a fine lookin' woman, got great big legs
Big Fat Woman got great big legs
Ev'ry time she moves, move like a soft boil'd egg

… like Queen’s “Fat Bottomed Girls”, Mika’s “Big Girl (You Are Beautiful)”, Destiny’s Child’s “Bootylicious”, Status Quo’s “Big Fat Mama”; all of them declarations of love. Only Joe Tex’s 1977 comeback hit, “Ain’t Gonna Bump No More (With No Big Fat Woman)”, is questionable – but then again, that one is still funny. A true renaissance takes place with the rise of rap music; obesity is praised so structurally and passionately that the Rubenesque ideal of beauty seems to be back. The heavy ladies are more often described as “chubby” or “curvy” than as “fat”, though, and the fascinated gentlemen call themselves chubby chasers – a term that, obviously, is considered offensive outside rap circles. But shared still; Quentin Tarantino has a good sense of the zeitgeist, of the revaluation of Rubenesque proportions, and in his breakthrough film Pulp Fiction (1994) he lets Fabienne dream of a pot belly;

fabienne

No. Pot bellies make a man look either oafish, or like a gorilla.  
But on a woman, a pot belly is very sexy. The rest of you is 
normal. Normal face, normal legs, normal hips, normal ass, but 
with a big, perfectly round pot belly. If I had one, I'd wear 
a tee-shirt two sizes too small to accentuate it.

The standard-bearer of all Fat Woman-odes is written in 1977, and is of course AC/DC’s “Whole Lotta Rosie”. She ain’t exactly pretty, ain’t exactly small (“Fourt’two thirt’ninefiftysix, you could say she’s got it all”) and she’s certainly not a lightweight:

Ain't no skin and bones
But you give it all you got
Weighin' in at nineteen stone
You're a whole lotta woman
A whole lotta woman
Whole lotta Rosie

Based, as a matter of fact, on a real Rosie, a heavyweight lady from Tasmania (nineteen stone is 266 pounds, 120 kilograms), a one-night stand of singer Bon Scott, according to goofy guitarist and composer Angus Young, in an interview with Vox Magazine, 1998:

We’d been in Tasmania and after the show [Bon Scott] said he was going to check out a few clubs. He said he’d got about 100 yards down the street when he heard this yell: ‘Hey! Bon!’ He looked around and saw this leg and thought: ‘Oh well!’ From what he said, there was this Rosie woman and a friend of hers. They were plying him with drinks and Rosie said to him: ‘This month I’ve slept with 28 famous people,’ and Bon went: ‘Oh yeah?!’ Anyway, in the morning he said he woke up pinned against the wall, he said he opened one eye and saw her lean over to her friend and whisper: ’29!’ There’s very few people who’ll go out and write a song about a big fat lady, but Bon said it was worthy.

Which further suggests that as a rock star, you don’t have to be too witty, ad rem or eloquent (“Oh yeah?”) to find a bed partner.

Dylan does sing them too, every now and then. In “California”, the primal version of “Outlaw Blues”, the narrator goes south, and there some fat momma kissed my mouth one time. The john in “Goin’ To Acapulco” looks forward to goin’ down to see fat gut – goin’ to have some fun and in “High Water” he has found shelter with one Fat Nancy.

In the throwaway “Jet Pilot”, the narrator expresses this specific physical quality with the mercurial, surreal elusiveness which characterises the poet’s output these years: She weighs more by the foot than she does by the inch. A semantic hair-splitter might argue, of course, that this does not necessarily indicate that the “she” is obese, but Occam’s razor has a strong argument; any blues text mentioning the weight of a lady, always depicts a heavy woman. It is unlikely, though, that the poet was inspired by a real Rosie. But if so, then she can be proud that her size inspired something infinitely more poetic and wittier than she’s a whole lotta woman.

Peter Paul Rubens, by the way, was married twice. The first time to Isabella Brant, who died of the plague in 1626 at the age of 34, and four years after Isabella’s death to the then 16-year-old Hélène Fourment. Isabella was slim, Hélène at most slightly chubby, according to the portraits. No chubby chaser himself, old Peter Paul.

To be continued. Next up: Jet Pilot part IV: What is the most important thing in your life?

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits (German)
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville

What else?

There are details of some of our more recent articles listed on our home page.  You’ll also find, at the top of the page, and index to some of our series established over the years.

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

This is episode 38 of “All Directions at Once”, a series which considers Bob Dylan’s songwriting in the order in which he wrote the songs, attempting to see Dylan’s creativity as a wave form, endlessly ebbing and flowing, considering how each song affected the next.

The previous episode was All directions: where now Señor? There’s more than enough time to think

The full index to the series is here

By Tony Attwood

In this series we  have now reached 1977, and when we look back at how Dylan progressed through the 70s to get here we find an extraordinary journey.  It is a journey that I fear many commentators upon the compositions of Bob Dylan have not taken into account as they consider Dylan’s work song by song, looking only at what was happening to him at the time, rather than what he had written in the months or years before.

As such, these commentators don’t see the journey that his songwriting has been travelling.  They miss the ebb and flow of a creative person’s world, instead treating each work as an object standing in isolation, rather than seeing it as part of the continuing evolution of the artist’s thoughts, through his evolving creativity, through thoughts influenced by interactions with the world around, by beliefs, friends, ideas…

So, to try and make this a little clearer in terms of how this progression has been working with Dylan in the 1970s, I’d like at this point to take an overview of how that decade has panned out thus far.

My aim in particular is to see how the composition of “No time to think” came out of all that went before.  Because this is indeed what I think happened.   I feel that over time there was a build up of thoughts and ideas which enabled Dylan to compose what I perceive as the utter, sublime masterpiece that is “No time”.

The start of the decade saw Dylan in retreat, composing what became “New Morning,” starting with the exquisite “Time passes slowly” – a song title which is the exact opposite of “No time to think” at the end of the period.  Indeed these two titles alone should give us a clue as to what was happening to Dylan over these years.   And that awareness should be leading commentators on Dylan to ponder how he evolved his writing across the years.  Yet they have not done this, because generally they do not see Dylan as an artist whose work is itself an ebb and flow; a ceaseless progression of possibilities and ideas.  Each creation, each song, is an isolated incident to be dissected without reference to anything beyond the immediate moment.

And yet across these years Bob moved from a comment that he was, “Starin’ out the window to the stars high above; Time passes slowly when you’re searchin’ for love” to one that says, “In death, you face life with a child and a wife, Who sleep-walks through your dreams into walls.”   That is quite a journey, and it fascinates me as to how Dylan happened to take it.

After such thoughts of the rural idyll, 1971 was a year of pause and explorations, not least because unless one has a burning imperative in one’s work, and one has plenty of money, there really is no reason to go anywhere.   Yet we can feel a contradiction here because this was the moment when Bob Dylan composed “When I paint my masterpiece” a song which expressed a yearning for greater artistic development which in itself suggested that the rural idyll was all right for a while, but not forever.  He was ok where he was, but knew there would be a change somewhere down the road.  The masterpiece was just slightly visible above the horizon.

As Dylan returned to contemplate the wider world around him he regained a fascination with the everyday reality of life, so it is not too surprising that there was also a venture into writing about a real person.  The George Jackson song that followed annoyed many commentators who felt that art should be truthful rather than, well, artistic, but I feel Dylan knew where he was going with this.

Another pause followed until in 1972 we had “Forever Young” – a song which took us back to the family idyll of “no reason to go anywhere”, and then the composition of the film music – another exploration into the unknown.

So we find the emergence of the notion that there is more to art than contentment until the dam burst in 1973 and the songs began to pour forth once again without any form of restriction or desire to push everything into the same constraining idyll of rural life.

At first there is no direction so that as the creative genius flexes his muscles once more (if being a creative genius allows one to flex muscles) and Dylan seeks his new direction, exploring everything from “You Angel You” and “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” through to “Dirge” and “Wedding Song”.

And I do think it is worth pausing for a moment to reiterate the enormous steps taken  between the first two and the last two of those songs.  “You Angel”still  has a lot of rural idyll within it; the notion of perfection, of pleasure, of the sheer joy of his feelings.

Could it actually be the same composer who in the same year also composed “Dirge”?  It seems hard to believe but it was, and we can only conclude that something profound had happened to Dylan during that year.

To be able to switch style and genre in this way in the course of a year is remarkable, and most certainly those last two songs (Dirge, and Wedding Song) shout out to anyone willing to listen, that Bob is now travelling in a very new direction.    Plus those last two songs of the year must have told Dylan (as if he didn’t know) that he could now go in any direction he wanted, and create the music that he wanted to create, no matter what it was.

So what does he do?  He gives us either his greatest ever, or at least one of his greatest ever, works (or at least a sigh of relief that it is not a bad work) in 1974 producing song after song of such utter and sublime genius that someone unfamiliar with Dylan on hearing it for  the first time might mistake it for his greatest hits.  And he does it through a unique approach to popular song writing: through exploring people with their different views of reality.  Blood on the Tracks.

But that in turn leaves a huge problem.  For what does one do after producing one’s masterpiece?  Sadly for many creative artists throughout all art forms, the answer turns out to be that the artist declines as he or she desperately seeks to create something as good, or even better, but can’t, while the critics say of each new work that it is “not a patch on….”

Yet amazingly, Bob had no such problems for he immediately gave us an extraordinary  song in a minor key (unusual for Bob) and a tale of an outsider performed as a duet, in “One more cup of coffee”…

You've never learned to read or write
There's no books upon your shelf
And your pleasure know no limits
Your voice is like a meadow lark
But your heart is like an ocean
Mysterious and dark

followed by a gentle love/lost love song with “Golden Loom”.   Indeed if one listens to “One more cup of coffee” and then “Golden Loom” it seems extraordinary that one was written after the other.  This is an extraordinary progression both lyrically and musically.

And then if that were not enough Bob is off again, changing directions once more as we have “Oh Sister” continuing his back and forth exchange with Joan Baez, which had started with “Diamonds and Rust.”

So now we are clearly thinking families and close relationships.  Thus “Abandoned Love” makes an obvious follow up and the songs are in a pattern; it is making sense as a theme.  People, their ways of seeing the world, their thoughts…

This was how Dylan seemed to be considering the world through his compositions when Jacques Levy turned up and added a new level: not just songs that are personal but songs that are much broader. Songs in which real and mythical people are entwined with real and mythical places.  People and places that are not just different in themselves but can change overnight.

One after the other they arrived, and if we listen to the songs in the order written it becomes clear: the real and the mythical are deliberately mixed, often as with “Joey”, even in the same song.  Sometimes also with cynicism mixed with humour (as “Mozambique” is recast from war-torn poverty to an island paradise and paraded as a jaunty happy advert).

Next we had songs about actual real people.  “Rita May,” and “Hurricane” as Bob lept thither and yon, playing with the history of real places (Black Diamond Bay, Mozambique, Durango, Laredo) and these real people.  They all turn up in the next sequence of seven songs before we suddenly have another change, announced appropriately enough with the “Changing of the Guards”

To create this many changes of style, direction and message over the space of a few years is an utterly extraordinary creative endeavour, and it is not surprising that as we reach 1977 Dylan clearly felt he had done that and now a new sound and a new approach was required.  So he goes a travelling on a “long-distance train rolling through the rain,” knowing that it is time to move on once more…

So, he’s admitted it is a time for change, a time for asking questions, and ultimately, just as the notion of religion is slowly emerging into his mind, he returns to the notion of the old man, the Wandering Jew as Chaucer has it, and (at least in his stories) Dylan meets the old man and writes “Senor”.

But in this new land where truth and fantasy merge (at least given the way that the story of the old man changes each time Bob tells it) it is clearly also an opportunity for Bob to look at creating new poetic and musical forms.  And if the musical form is not totally new, at least it is a form that no one had ever used in popular music before.   So we had “No Time to Think.”  So complex indeed that Bob never once played it on stage, which is very much our loss…

To consider this song we have consider the purpose of the lyrics.  Are they there to tell a story, describe feelings and emotions, paint a picture, encourage the listener to dance, express sadness?   And the answer is yes of course, all that.  But not just that because they can also portray the abstract.  We have words and music, but not meanings that can be expressed as words alone.  We have emotions and feelings that need more than words.

In such a situation the words may not make sense in the rational way, but they will still express something – and that something is valuable indeed because it is expression through words of an essence that cannot be portrayed through words.    Jochen noted this in his review when he picked out, “Bible references, echoes of ancient mythology, unusual word combinations (so-called catachresis) and replicated fragments from old songs.”

But instead of seeing this work as a brilliant opening of the door onto a new dimension of song writing, some critics found it lacking.

Yet for me it is a towering masterpiece, not only as a single song but as a summation of Dylan’s work.   It is such a perfect description of a world that doesn’t make sense.  A world the human race is rushing to destroy, while praying to its own gods for salvation.   A world where Christianity has flourished simultaneously as a power for good and a centre for child abuse.  Where every image, thought, idea, complexity and contradiction crashes into each other, so that we really do have no time to think.

But because much of the phraseology doesn’t make sense in the conventional sense it is dismissed.  And yet if the world makes no sense, why shouldn’t the song make no sense? Just consider these couplets…

In death, you face life with a child and a wife
Who sleep-walks through your dreams into walls.

Betrayed by a kiss on a cool night of bliss
In the valley of the missing link

….the country priestess will want you
Her worst is better than best.

I'd have paid off the traitor and killed him much later
But that's just the way that I am.

Madmen oppose him, but your kindness throws him
To survive it you play deaf and dumb.

Warlords of sorrow and queens of tomorrow
Will offer their heads for a prayer.

You know you can't keep her and the water gets deeper
That is leading you onto the brink

You've murdered your vanity, buried your sanity
For pleasure you must now resist.
Lovers obey you but they cannot sway you
They're not even sure you exist.

Fools making laws for the breaking of jaws
And the sound of the keys as they clink
But there's no time to think.

You turn around for one real last glimpse of Camille
'Neath the moon shinin' bloody and pink

Bullets can harm you and death can disarm you
But no, you will not be deceived.
Stripped of all virtue as you crawl through the dirt,
You can give but you cannot receive.

No time to prepare for the victim that's there,
No time to suffer or blink
And no time to think.

There has never previously been a song like this.  It is an utter monument to a way of portraying the emotions and feelings of uncertainty in a world moving so fast that even trying to decode a fraction of it means you miss the next bit.

Yes Dylan agrees, “I’m only a man, Doin’ the best that I can…”   And it turns out that this best is so much better than everyone else, because no one that I can recall has attempted to venture into this territory through the medium of writing a song.  It is The Drifter’s Escape in full glorious technicolor detail.

But sadly, many who analyse the songs from this period tend to forget the creations as works of art and instead become fixated by Bob’s life.  Few, if any, get near the notion that this might just be Bob following his intellectual and creative direction as he has moved away from there being no reason to do anything at all.  After all as Jochen said in his book on the album, “This is 1978, Dylan has been saying je est un autre for over a decade now, but to no avail.”

As Dylan says in interviews, “It’s the sound and the words. Words don’t interfere with it… they give it purpose.”   And the self-appointed (one sometimes feels one should actually write “self-anointed”) critics don’t like it.   In fact I suspect they would have liked it even less if they had woken up to realise that the source of Dylan’s inspiration is T.S. Eliot’s “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats.”  If you want the full detail there is no better place to find it than here.

In short, Dylan has taken an established (if not widely known) classic form of writing, and has found words to fit into the form.  Indeed the form, not the message, has become the centre, the heart-beat, the essence.  Of course it is ok if, as a listener, as a fan, you don’t take the form on board, and instead you listen to the music and enjoy it.  But then it is also fine if you don’t like the music and you turn it off.  As Dylan said, song long before, there’s no reason to go anywhere.  Reason doesn’t have anything to do with it.

But the professional critic, the self-ordained interpreter of Dylan, the writer who invites the world to see his workings out and his opinions as definitive, really needs to understand that when the fans are faced by critics who miss the whole point of the creative endeavour, what is the point of the critics?

What we actually have here is Dylan creating a totally new artistic concept, taking his mood from a movie, and his form from an utter master of 20th century English poetry, while adding to it his own unique literary and musical style.   And the result is a totally new direction for, what for want of another phrase, we call “popular music”

As for Bob’s 1977 problem, it was simple.  After a masterpiece such as this which breaks every boundary we knew existed and then a few more that the rest of us hadn’t discovered, where next?  Where next indeed.

There’s nowhere else because when there is no time to think this is all there is.  Just play it again.

By Jochen Markhorst

Jet Pilot (1965) part I: Greetings from Vermillion

II          I threw it all away

Well, she's got Jet Pilot eyes from her hips on down.
All the bombardiers are trying to force her out of town.

It is a somewhat awkward segment of Dylan’s autobiography, in Chronicles (2004), the part in which in a rather woolly and mystical manner rambles on about a “highly controlled system” working “in a cyclical way”, helping him out of an artistic impasse in the 1980s. The system, the autobiographer reveals, was already explained to him in the 1960s by Lonnie Johnson:

“I didn’t invent this style. It had been shown to me in the early ’60s by Lonnie Johnson. Lonnie was the great jazz and blues artist from the ’30s who was still performing in the ’60s. Robert Johnson had learned a lot from him. Lonnie took me aside one night and showed me a style of playing based on an odd-numbered instead of even-number system. He had me play chords and he demonstrated how to do it. This was just something he knew about, not necessarily something he used because he did so many different kinds of songs. He said, ‘This might help you,’ and I had the idea that he was showing me something secretive, though it didn’t make sense to me at that time because I needed to strum the guitar in order to get my ideas across.”

Dylan then spends more than 600 words on a kind of explanation of this “system”, which, it seems, is based on varying the 2, the 4 and the 7 of the diatonic scale. Solemnly, he declares that it is “for real” and “most advantageous”. Using, in short, the jargon with which a vague acquaintance of yesteryear tries to persuade you to take part in a pyramid scheme. Dylan concludes, confusion-inducing:

“I’m not a numerologist. I don’t know why the number 3 is more metaphysically powerful than the number 2, but it is.”

… just when the reader thinks, well, apparently it’s all about the 2 and the 4 and the 7, the not-a-numerologist serves up the bouncer that the 3 is “more metaphysically powerful”.

Anyway, the admiration for Lonnie Johnson is deep and sincere. Lonnie Johnson (1899-1970) is already a legend when Dylan meets him in Greenwich Village. The young Dylan is invited by Victoria Spicey to sing and play harmonica on “Sitting On Top Of The World” on Three Kings And A Queen (1963), the album on which Spicey is accompanied by Big Joe Williams, Roosevelt Sykes and Lonnie Johnson, and already well before Chronicles, in the Biograph booklet (1985) he expresses his admiration and gratitude:

“I was lucky to meet Lonnie Johnson at the same club I was working and I must say he greatly influenced me. You can hear it in that first record, I mean Corrina, Corrina… that’s pretty much Lonnie Johnson. I used to watch him every chance I got and sometimes he’d let me play with him.”

In 1992, for Good As I Been To You, he records Lonnie’s biggest hit (seven weeks at number 1 on the R&B charts), “Tomorrow Night” from 1947, the song Dylan would perform no less than sixty times in the 1990s – almost always in the same way as his example Lonnie Johnson. In Theme Time Radio Hour he plays two Johnson songs, both times introduced with eulogies (“our next performer is truly one of the greats”) and extensive life sketches.

In 1965, when Dylan records “Jet Pilot”, the reverence is more subtle. For the opening line, she’s got Jet Pilot eyes from her hips on down, Dylan quotes from a fairly unknown Lonnie Johnson song, from “Bow Legged Baby” from 1961:

Yes, my baby 's so fine and mella, bow legged from her hips on down.
Yes, my baby 's so fine and mella, bow legged from her hips on down.
And the way she throws them hips when she walks, 
                       she'll make a rabbit hug a hound

Lonnie’s other big hit then provides a shaky bridge to that absurd Jet Pilot eyes. In 1947, Johnson scored not only with “Tomorrow Night” but also with the scabrous “He’s A Jelly-Roll Baker”, the title DJ Dylan also mentions both times when he talks about Lonnie. It’s a catchy blues with exactly the kind of corny ambiguities Dylan has a soft spot for:

I was sentenced for murder in the first degree,
The Judge's wife call up and says, "Let that man go free!
He's a Jelly Roll Baker, he's got the best jelly roll in town.
He's the only man can bake jelly roll, with his damper down."

The words “Jelly-Roll Baker” have an approximate sound and rhythm similar to the words “Jet Pilot eyes”, so who knows – the wordplay part of Dylan’s associative, playful and meandering creativity does make even bolder leaps in these mercurial years, after all. The second part, from her hips on down, popping out of the same Lonnie Johnson drawer, does make sense, in that case. Coincidentally, “He’s A Jelly-Roll Baker” can be found on Blues & Ballads, the album Johnson recorded with Elmer Snowden in 1960 – which also includes the other song radio broadcaster Dylan plays on Theme Time Radio Hour and the performer Dylan has on his repertoire, “Backwater Blues”.

“Jet Pilot” is immediately rejected again, so the alienating expression jet pilot eyes doesn’t get a chance to penetrate the rock vernacular, doesn’t get a shine like jewels and binoculars, or Mr. Jones, or weatherman. It did have the potential, as the charming, understated Dylan reverence “You’re A Big Girl” shows, taken from the most Dylanesque, and most successful album by British band The Charlatans, Tellin’ Stories (2004);

See her through jet pilot eyes
Mysterious and thin
Like a raven breakin' free
From the towers they keep you in

https://youtu.be/5Iyiw2BhUH0

… for one of the many subtle, unobtrusive Dylan references, the Madchesters choose the relatively obscure jet pilot eyes.

Tellin’ Stories is still a great album, by the way – with The Charlatans’ answer song to “Like A Rolling Stone”, the more melancholy “Get On It” (no matter how you’re feeling, you’re never on your own), and with The Charlatans’ upbeat riposte to “Girl Of The North Country”, the bouncing “North Country Boy” (I threw it all away / I don’t know where I put it / But I miss it all the same).

Very nice songs, all of them. Varying on the 2, the 4 and the 7, undoubtedly. Though never as beautiful as their slightly weird, yet irresistible cover of “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You” (2002).

To be continued. Next up: Jet Pilot part III: A whole lotta woman

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits (German)
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville

What else?

There are details of some of our more recent articles listed on our home page.  You’ll also find, at the top of the page, and index to some of our series established over the years.

If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

by Larry Fyffe

Bob Dylan pays tribute to folk, country, gospel, and blues songs as well as nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and higher forms of literary output:

The party's over, there's less and less to say
I got new eyes, everything looks far away
Well, my heart's in the Highland at the break of day
Over the hills, and far away
(Bob Dylan: Highland)

Above, the singer/songwriter/musician references a nursery rhyme, a Scottish poet, and pays tribute to a satirical musical play from yesteryear; there’s the Dylanesque “rhyme twist” ~ ‘say’/’away’/’day’; ~ ‘play’/’stray’/ ‘away’/’day’:

And I would love you all the day
Every night would kiss and play
If with me you'd fondly stray
Over the hills, and far away
(John Gay: Over The Hills And Far Away/Beggar's Opera)

A long rendition of nursery rhyme ‘Tom The Piper’s Son’ goes thusly:

Tom with his pipe did play
"Over The Hill And Far Away"
Tom with his pipe made such a noise
That he pleased both the girls and boys
(Tom The Piper's Son ~ traditional)

Dylan does a well worn end-rhyme ~ ‘door’/’before’ ~ to express that life, especially as it moves along to its latter days, can feel at times rather monotonous:

Every day it's the same thing out the door
Feel further away than ever before
(Bob Dylan: Highland)

Saved Bobby be by his one true love – popular music accompanied by lyrics that refer, directly or obliquely, to ‘low’ and to ‘high’ works of art – including humourous and satirical ones like Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera” that’s cited above.

There’s another Tom, too; perhaps Freud’s great great grandfather  – Tom Thumb’s tiny, but he’s a little rascal; always poking his head into things, and getting himself into all kinds of trouble, like falling into pudding batter, getting cooked, and then saved because of a fart:

Let the wind blow low, let the wind blow high
One day the little boy and girl were baked in a pie
(Bob Dylan: Under Red Sky)

Troubles trouble Tom; Tom’s always getting into trouble:

They got some hungry women there
And they really make a mess outta you
(Bob Dylan: Just Like Tom Thumb's Blues)

John Gay’s work evoles into the “Ten Penny Opera”:

Look out, Miss Lotte Lenya, and old Lucy Brown
Yes, that line forms on the right, babe
Now that's Macky's back in town
(Bobby Darin: Mack The Knife ~ Weill/Brecht/Blitzstein)

And Tom’s still operating too – under a different name:

Now, every boy and girl's gonna get their bang
'Cause Tiny Montgomery's gonna shake that thing
Tell everybody down in old 'Frisco
That Tiny Montgomery's coming down to say hello
(Bob Dylan: Tiny Montgomery)

by Tony Attwood

Getting on for five years ago I wrote a little piece in which I tried to highlight a few of Bob’s great lines which were not the ones that everyone would immediately know.

Most of my choices were lines that every Dylan fan would surely know, but three of them were lines that although the avid connoisseur would identify at once, not everyone would.  Furthermore they are lines which, although we might be able to explain them, are still lines that can make us (or perhaps I should just say, “can make me”) stop what I am doing and think.

And then think some more.

Here are the three I found in that earlier article.

• My patron saint is a-fighting with a ghost
• Everyone is wearing a disguise
• There’s a black Mercedes rollin’ through the combat zone

The point is not just that they are a trifle obscure in the sense that there will be many Dylan fans who can’t place these lines at once, but also they have that level of enigma that I really love about a lot of Dylan’s work.

Lines such as “There must be some way out of here said the joker to the thief” have that enigma as well, but we are so used to such lines that the initial impact has long since gone.  They have now become part of the vocabulary.  But where we can find lines that have slipped through the net of general consciousness, such lines can give us a further pause for thought.

Two suggestions that were given in the earlier article about this very much met my criteria of enigma and not being a line that maybe not every Dylan fan knows were

By Jochen Markhorst

Well, she's got Jet Pilot eyes from her hips on down.
All the bombardiers are trying to force her out of town.
She's five feet nine and she carries a monkey wrench.
She weighs more by the foot than she does by the inch.
She got all the downtown boys, all at her command
But you've got to watch her closely 'cause she ain't no woman
She's a man.

The success of Biograph, the 1985 compilation box, sets a trend. The 3-CD set collects 53 released and unreleased tracks and goes platinum – which is mainly thanks to the eighteen unreleased tracks.

Record companies are becoming aware of all the gold uselessly glittering in their archives, and so in the following years the market is flooded with similar basement clearances. Many of these are, alas, utterly superfluous, slightly tweaked Greatest Hits collections and, above all, painfully transparent attempts to extract money from the pockets of fans. Lou Reed tries it with the saltless Between Thought And Expression, Aerosmith pleases the fans with Pandora’s Box, Elton John with To Be Continued, Beckology is Jeff Beck’s half-successful attempt, Eric Clapton’s Crossroads… it’s a long list, and the companies succeed in their objectives: the collector’s boxes generally sell very well.

The accompanying booklets are especially appealing to fans; also following in the footsteps of Dylan’s Biograph, most compilers put love and energy into extensive booklets with background information on the songs, commentaries by the artists themselves, recording details and often an essay-like contribution by a musicologist or talented journalist.

For Biograph, that part is taken care of by Cameron Crowe, the versatile author and film director (Hard Times At Ridgemont High, Jerry Maguire, Vanilla Sky) who has always remained an editor for the music magazine Rolling Stone in between projects.

His work for the Biograph booklet is thorough and entertaining enough, larded with interesting interview fragments, but for the seasoned Dylan fan, the comments from the master himself are of course the most fascinating. Dylan openly apologises for the viciousness of “Ballad In Plain D”, for example (“It was a mistake to record it and I regret it”), suggests curious candour here and there (“I was thinking of living with somebody for all the wrong reasons,” with “Caribbean Wind”), has intriguing opinions about his own songs (“This is not my type of song, I think I just did it to do it,” on “On A Night Like This”).

There is also an amusing by-catch for the know-it-alls. The well-informed authority Cameron Crowe gets it wrong every now and then and grants the everyday rock fan a few moments of petty glory. The short commentary on “I Wanna Be Your Lover”, for instance, opens with a somewhat embarrassing error by the Rolling Stone editor. “A tip of the hat to the only song recorded by both The Beatles and the Rolling Stones – Lennon and McCartney’s I Want To Be Your Man.”

Apart from the misspelling (the title is “I Wanna Be Your Man”): three-quarters of the participants of any given pub quiz in any sleepy little country town would effortlessly rattle off four, five, six songs that were recorded by both The Beatles and The Stones. “Money”, “Carol”, “Memphis, Tennessee”, “Roll Over Beethoven”, “Little Queenie”, and if the pub quiz compiler likes trick questions, you can continue for a while with songs the Fab Four and the Glimmer Twins recorded together: “Dandelion”, “We Love You”, “All You Need Is Love”).

Comparably poorly documented, and equally unimportant, is Dylan’s quoted comment on “I Don’t Believe You”: “I wrote this in Greece, Athens, or maybe Vermillion, a town up to the coast.” The spelling of the village’s name causes more authors problems. With some biographers, the story pops up that Dylan spent a few weeks with German chanteuse Nico, pre-Velvet Underground, travelling from Paris to a town near Athens, to the coastal village of “Vernilya” (according to Clinton Heylin) or “Vermilya” (according to Robert Shelton).

The place does not exist in either of the three spellings. More reliable is the bequeathed testimony of Dylan’s handyman Victor Maimudes, who tells he drove Dylan for a short sunny holiday to Vouliagmeni, a coastal town that is indeed 23 kilometers south of Athens.

A third slip by Cameron Crowe finds more followers and is found in the short commentary to a song, to “Jet Pilot”:

“This un-issued track from 1965 offers a humorous glimpse at the historic sessions for Highway 61. ‘The songs changed all the time,’ recalled Al Kooper. ‘We would try different tempos, he would try other words. Most of the songs had different titles.’ […] This song, complete with a surprise ending, was the original version of Tombstone Blues.”

It is, without a second thought, taken up in articles, on websites and in reviews. “The unfinished songs like Jet Pilot, which later became Tombstone Blues,” writes the Australian Rolling Stone (January ’86). “The original version of the very different Tombstone Blues,” writes Graham Reid on his entertaining website Elsewhere, and comme ça, Crowe’s mistake slowly becomes a music history fact.

It is, however, demonstrably false, both Crowe’s attribution of the song to the Highway 61 sessions, and the claim that it is a primal version of “Tombstone Blues”.

“Jet Pilot” was recorded on 5 October 1965, when Highway 61 Revisited had been in the shops for five weeks, with “Tombstone Blues” also on it, and so, if you want to catalogue it under an album title at all, it should be classified under “The first Blonde On Blonde recording session”. In fact, though, the recordings on that Tuesday in October fall a bit between two stools. The day begins with “Medicine Sunday”, the primal version of “Temporary Like Achilles”, followed by “Jet Pilot” (one take only, of 1’27” – on Biograph the same take is shortened to 49 seconds), two half-takes of “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” and the day ends with very attractive improvisations by The Band (“Instrumental Number One”, a kind of mercurial mash-up of “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window?” and “She’s Your Lover Now”). The only recording that could have actually been released on Blonde On Blonde is one of the six complete takes of “I Wanna Be Your Lover” – but is ultimately passed over.

In short, none of the 5 October recordings, nor any of the song titles at all, end up on Blonde On Blonde. The next recording session is eight weeks later, on 30 November 1965, the day with the first takes of “Visions Of Johanna” – it is in any case purer, factually more correct, to qualify this November day as “The first Blonde On Blonde session day”. So let’s consider 5 October 1965 as a washed-out island between two mighty continents, as a Medicine Sunday between Desolation Row and the Lowlands.

Crowe’s mistake is, of course, not at all incomprehensible. “Jet Pilot” has the same drive as “Tombstone Blues”, Robbie Robertson plays a copy of Bloomfield’s lick, it’s in the same key (E) and The sweet pretty things are in bed now of course has the same rhythm, the same number of syllables and is recited with the same snarl as She’s got Jet Pilot eyes from her hips on down.

Ain’t got no shoes either, probably.

To be continued. Next up: Jet Pilot part II: I threw it all away

———–

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits (German)
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville

Do you have a tale to tell via Untold Dylan?

We now have over 2000 articles on this site, and many of them are personal tales about attending a concert, listening to Dylan, cover versions, or the individual writer’s own appreciation of Dylan and his music.

These articles are written for Untold by Dylan fans, and if you have a view of Dylan that you feel could be of interest to others, we’d love to hear from you.

To see the variety of approaches we have included in this site, just go to the top of the page and look at the various headings under the picture – each one contains an index of articles on a Dylan theme.  Or look at the latest series listed on our home page.  If you write a piece you can add to these, or create your own theme, or simply send in a one-off contribution.   As long as it gives a different insight into Dylan and his work, we may be well interested in publishing it.

Sadly, we don’t have the funds to pay, but Untold Dylan does have a very wide readership, so your work will be seen by a huge number of people.   If you have an article please email Tony@schools.co.uk   If the article is ready, please attach as a word file.

One other thing: we never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

And one other, other thing: we also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

This is part of our mega-series covering the whole of the Never Ending Tour.  There is an index to the series here.

By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

In the first post in this 1995 series ( See Part 1 ) I introduced Dylan’s 1995 Prague concerts with some sample sounds. This post I’ve set aside for my favourite performances from Dylan’s three night gig, 11^th 12^th, and 13^th of March. For my ear, this is the cream of the cream, maybe the best Dylan you’ll ever hear, although it’s difficult to make such a claim because of the changes in Dylan’s voice and style over the years.

There is magic in these Prague concerts. Perhaps the flu stretched him to the point where… I don’t know, something else happened. A breakthrough of a kind in terms of the range of his vocal expression, and emotional expression in his harmonica playing. He wasn’t just up there grinding it out; there is a fire in these performances, and a sense of restraint. We feel the banked up emotion behind the restraint, just as we do with the great blues singers like Lightning Hopkins and Otis Span.

The setlist over the three nights varied, with not many songs done on all three nights. ‘Tangled Up in Blue’, however, on its way to becoming one of the three most performed Dylan song ever, did turn up on all three setlists. While Dylan achieves an extended emotional range by slowing down many of the songs performed in Prague, with ‘Tangled’ he speeds it up, or at least gives that impression from the urgency of the backing. All three performances crackle with energy. They are more disciplined than the ten, twelve minute versions we find in 1993/4, years in which epic versions ruled, but all the more punchy for it. (Those interested in the evolution of this song might enjoy the two postscripts to my Master Harpist series.

• Tangled up in Harmonicas: Part 1
• Tangled up in Harmonicas: Part 2

The first performance, from the 11^th, scintillates with energy, with Dylan’s voice swooping through the lyrics, with the sharp edged harmonica to finish off. If you don’t start moving your feet to this one, they may be glued to the floor.

Tangled up in Blue: 1

The performance from the 12^th kicks along at about the same speed but the sound is more full bodied. That might be the recording, it’s hard to tell. With these faster versions we get the sense of a life flashing by, or hurtling by; it all goes by so fast. Before we can catch up with events, more events have piled on top. The slower version from the album and the even slower version from the 1974 New York recordings, the first takes of the song, make it a much more contemplative, reflective song than it is here, performed at this hectic pace. We fall headlong through life, from one scene to the next, with hardly time to remember, ‘all the people we used to know.’

Tangled up in Blue: 2

On the 13^th Dylan introduces the song with the harp and launches into another faultless vocal performance. What is amazing is that if you listen to all three vocals you find he sings it differently each time, emphasising and elongating different words, creating different tonal effects.

Tangled up in Blue: 3

‘License to Kill’ is a quiet, reflective protest song from Infidels. The chorus centres around a bereaved woman, lamenting the death of a loved one, maybe a soldier. The verses tend to focus on the training and brainwashing of a killer, and the subsequent plight of mankind. When I wrote about this song when it appeared in 1993, I quoted these lyrics:

‘Now, he's hell-bent for destruction, he's afraid and confused,
And his brain has been mismanaged with great skill
All he believes are his eyes
And his eyes, they just tell him lies’

I suggested that this reminded me of more current killers, those who think that a license to carry firearms is a license to kill. (See NET, 1993, Part 5) That was written before the January 6^th attack on the Capitol in the US. Now the lyrics seem even more contemporary:

‘Now he worships at an altar of a stagnant pool
And when he sees his reflection, he's fulfilled
Oh, man is opposed to fair play,
He wants it all and he wants it his way’

In this last verse the attack opens up to include all of humanity, the killers and the colluders. It’s humankind’s massive greed that gets in the way.

This may not be Dylan’s greatest protest song, but this performance from the 13^th is certainly the greatest performance of the song. The power of performance is such that Dylan convinces us that it is a great song. The plaintive harp break at the end is the icing on the cake.

License to Kill

‘Man in the Long Black Coat’ is a spooky song based on the Devil at the Dance motif from Oh Mercy (1989) Dylan had been cultivating for three years. Those following these posts will have been alerted to the growing strength of this song in performance, with Dylan trying out slow tempos and varying musical arrangements. Its evolution has been from a swampy supernatural story to a cosmic drama of demonic seduction. As with the best Dylan songs, the drama pulls us into its orbit with its more universal application:

‘Preacher was talking there's a sermon he gave
He said every man's conscience is vile and depraved
You cannot depend on it to be your guide
When it's you who must keep it satisfied’

The message is dark: we cannot alone find our way in the moral jungle, especially as, according to the old saying, the devil can quote scriptures.

‘He looked into her eyes when she stopped him to ask
If he wanted to dance, he had a face like a mask
Somebody said from the Bible he'd quote
There was dust on the man in the long black coat’

This leaves us in a limbo where we are neither alive nor dead but ‘float’ in some kind of intermediary zone:

‘But people don't live or die people just float
She went with the man in the long black coat’

These words remind me of  ‘the disrobed faceless forms of no position’ we can find in ‘Chimes of Freedom’ way back in 1964.

At Prague the song was another of those rare ones that was performed on all three nights, and what a magnificent sequence they make. At last we feel that the song has come into focus. Enjoy these three performances, as the song will never sound so good again.

On the first night, the 11^th, it’s all in place except the harmonica. The long drawn out sounds on the steel guitar, the deep, thundery base. Magnificent.

Man in the long black coat: 1

Magnificent as that was, it was just a warm up for what was to come on the 12^th, with Dylan’s triumphant harmonica to the fore.

I wrote about the March 12^th performance for the Master Harpist series. I can’t say it better now than I said it then, so, with my editor’s indulgence, I’m putting in this quote from that article:

‘The pop and rock music of the 1980s veered towards creating sonic landscapes, orchestral sounds, and we don’t normally associate Bob Dylan with this kind of music, but in this grand and grandiose version of ‘Man in The Long Black Coat’ you hear Dylan and his band aiming for a full orchestral effect, which is where the harmonica comes in, lifting the song into one huge wall of sound. It’s a pity that the recording devices, or the original sound system for all I know, was not up to capturing the full range of this magnificent achievement – not to mention the limitations of MP3s! It’s a sheer blast, with long sustained harmonica notes pushing the music ever higher, finally floating above the wall of sound, thin and insistent, and ultimately as haunting as the song itself. The first solo is just a warm up for the climax to follow the last verse.’

I can’t add much to that except to say that every time I play this one, it exerts the same deep, magical pull. It is undoubtedly one of Dylan’s finest moments onstage.

Man in the long black coat: 2

The third performance of the song, on the 13^th seems like an anticlimax when compared to the 12^th,  but of course it is another out of the box rendition. The vocal is just as magnificent and while the harp does not soar into the stratosphere, it has a sharp, cutting edge.

Man in the long black coat: 3

Two songs always linked in my mind are ‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ and ‘It Ain’t Me Babe.’ Both were written about the same time (1964) and both seem to be get lost songs. But things are not always what they seem when it comes to Dylan. These may be goodbye and good luck songs, but they are also love songs of the highest order, particularly ‘Baby Blue’.

‘It Ain’t Me Babe,’ may sound brash and dismissive if it’s sung that way, and it does work that way, but sung in a lonely, tender voice it becomes something else. Can we ever dismiss a lover without some tinge of regret, some strain of sorrow? And can love ever be banished by such brave assertions and protestations? Listen to this performance from the 12^th and decide for yourself. And if you are in any doubt, try that most gentle and fragile harp break. Such exquisite restraint.

It ain’t me babe

But for the final coup-de-grace as far as outstanding performances go, and a strong candidate for the best ever Dylan harp performance, we must turn to ‘Baby Blue’ on the first night, the 11^th.

Once again, I wrote about this performance for the Master Harpist series, and again with my editor’s indulgence I’ll quote myself:

‘Baby Blue’, performed in a strident, declarative, in-your-face manner, might be classed as one of Dylan’s put-down songs: get yourself together and piss off! But sung the way he does at Prague, the song, all through the vocal, skirts the edges of heartbreak, and when the harmonica takes over, the mood is pushed into outright heartbreak. There’s been a lot of tedious speculation as to whether this song is for Joan Baez (do we really care?), or was written as a farewell to the protest movement (ho-hum), but what these speculations might obscure is that ‘Baby Blue’ is a break-up song, which implies heart-break, finality, the end of love. It is love’s last song.

Suddenly the lyrics don’t sound so tough any more, and we wonder if he’s exhorting himself to get a new life as much as the ‘you’ he’s addressing. Listen to how Dylan lifts his voice in the last verse, how the harmonica takes over from where the voice leaves off, lays bare the real heartbreak and gives unrestrained voice to grief. Dylan can’t cry onstage, but his harmonica can, and boy it sure does, and how painful it is at the end as he repeats the same notes over and over, like one of those protracted goodbyes everybody hates but sometimes you just can’t escape. Just one more goodbye…one more… all the way to emotional exhaustion:

It’s all over now baby blue

What a note on which to end this post of the best of the best at Prague, 1995. I’ll be back soon to finish off what Dylan started at Prague.

Kia Ora

————

Do you have a tale to tell via Untold Dylan?

We now have over 2000 articles on this site, and many of them are personal tales about attending a concert, listening to Dylan, cover versions, or the individual writer’s own appreciation of Dylan and his music.

These articles are written for Untold by Dylan fans, and if you have a view of Dylan that you feel could be of interest to others, we’d love to hear from you.

To see the variety of approaches we have included in this site, just go to the top of the page and look at the various headings under the picture – each one contains an index of articles on a Dylan theme.  Or look at the latest series listed on our home page.  If you write a piece you can add to these, or create your own theme, or simply send in a one-off contribution.   As long as it gives a different insight into Dylan and his work, we may be well interested in publishing it.

Sadly, we don’t have the funds to pay, but Untold Dylan does have a very wide readership, so your work will be seen by a huge number of people.   If you have an article please email Tony@schools.co.uk   If the article is ready, please attach as a word file.

One other thing: we never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

And one other, other thing: we also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

Bob Dylan And Andrew Marvell Part 1

By Larry Fyffe

Take what you have gathered from coincidence, but both poet Andrew Marvell, and singer/songwriter Bob Dylan present to their audience a Gnostic-like vision of the Cosmos; it’s physical side, pierced by darkness and death; its spiritual side full of light.

A love lost cuts down any thoughts of the beauty in natural environment:

Unthankful meadows, could you so
A fellowship so true forego
And in your gaudy May-games meet
While I lay trodden under feet
When Juliana came, and she
What I do to grass, does to my thoughts and me
(Andrew Marvell: The Mower's Song)

Akin to the  sorrowful sentiment expressed in the song lyrics below:

Shadows are falling, and I've been here all day
It's too hot to sleep, time is running away
Feels like my soul has turned into steel
I still got the scars that the sun didn't heal
(Bob Dylan: Not Dark Yet)

At the very least, there is a Jungian link to the lines quoted beneath; detracted the mower be, and accidently cuts his flesh with his own scythe:

Hark how the Damon mower sung
With love of Juliana stung
While everything did seem to paint
The scene more fit for his complaint
Like her fair eyes the day was fair
But scorching like his amorous care
Sharp like his scythe his sorrow was
And withered like his hopes the grass
(Andrew Marvell: Damon The Mower)

In the following rural poem, the physical plane, represented by blinking glow-worms, is no match for the idealized plane, represented by Juliana, who’s beloved by the narrator – the loss of contact with the spiritual world of light, that she represents to him, displaces his mind:

Your courteous lights in vain you waste
Since Juliana is come
For she my mind hath so displaced
That I shall never find my home
(Andrew Marvel:The Mower And The Glow-Worms)

The glow-worms are replaced by a night watchman in the song lyrics below:

We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it's him or them that's insane
Louise, she's all right, she's just near
She's delicate, and seems like the mirror
But she's just makes it all too concise and too clear
That Johanna's not here
(Bob Dylan: Visions Of Johanna)

In the above city song, the physical plane is represented by Louise with her handful of rain; she is no match for the idealized plane, represented by Johanna, who’s beloved by the narrator – the loss of contact with the spiritual world of light, that she represents to him, conquers his mind:

Lights flicker from the opposite loft
In the room the heat pipes just cough
The country music station plays soft
But there's nothing, really nothing to turn off
Just Louise and her lover so entwined
And these visions of Johanna that conquer my mind

However, there’s still hope for both artists – Marvell and Dylan – who have suffered in the physical world – their art will give them life after they’ve gone:

He writes, everything's been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my consciousness explodes
The harmonicas play the skeleton keys in the rain
And these visions of Johanna are now all that remain
(Bob Dylan: Visions Of Johanna)

Do you have a tale to tell via Untold Dylan?

We now have over 2000 articles on this site, and many of them are personal tales about attending a concert, listening to Dylan, cover versions, or the individual writer’s own appreciation of Dylan and his music.

These articles are written for Untold by Dylan fans, and if you have a view of Dylan that you feel could be of interest to others, we’d love to hear from you.

To see the variety of approaches we have included in this site, just go to the top of the page and look at the various headings under the picture – each one contains an index of articles on a Dylan theme.  Or look at the latest series listed on our home page.  If you write a piece you can add to these, or create your own theme, or simply send in a one-off contribution.   As long as it gives a different insight into Dylan and his work, we may be well interested in publishing it.

Sadly, we don’t have the funds to pay, but Untold Dylan does have a very wide readership, so your work will be seen by a huge number of people.   If you have an article please email Tony@schools.co.uk   If the article is ready, please attach as a word file.

One other thing: we never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

And one other, other thing: we also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

by Tony Attwood

This is episode 37 of “All Directions at Once”, a series which considers Bob Dylan’s songwriting in the order in which he wrote the songs, attempting to see Dylan’s creativity as a wave form, endlessly ebbing and flowing.   The most recent episodes are….

• 34: Onwards from manipulated reality
• 35. Durango ends the affair, Bob seeks a new way, Patti’s gone.
• All Directions 36: all hail the new direction

The full index to the series is here

We are now in 1977 and have in the previous article considered “Changing of the Guards” and “Is your love in vain”?  And the next song composed, Señor, has already been mentioned in my plod through Dylan’s songs as they are considered in the order written, noting that it contains an element of “Seven Days” in it.

And now as we move on we also have to take into account the fact that such reports as we have of Dylan’s private life, he was now in the first elements of conversion to Christianity, while also settling his divorce.

So perhaps it is not surprising that the tales we are told of the recording sessions for Street Legal are tales of chaos – Dylan coming and going, not settling, being in a bad mood etc etc, and the album that resulted is one that, according to the reviews I have read, was particularly disliked in the USA although not in all the countries where people took a particular interest in what he might do next.

But these events in Dylan’s life are of interest as I seek to explore his compositions as a continuing stream of events, not as isolated moment.   And so Señor, the next composition, is interesting in that  it was performed regularly across subsequent years, unlike songs such as, “Where are you tonight” which hit the dust before the end of 1978.  It would seem that Señor had something for Bob that lasted beyond the turmoil of this year.

In 1978 Dylan also told the story of how he was on a train going from Mexico to San Diego and how a strange old man got on the train, and Dylan felt the urge to talk to him.  But it seems the story told in the concerts started off as a fairly simple tale and gradually adding the notion that when Dylan finally did want to talk to the man, he had gone.  In short, over time the story changed, perhaps to fit Bob’s changing mood.

From the moment I first heard the song I felt a link to Bryan MacLean’s masterpiece “Old Man” which is found on Love’s “Forever Changes” album.  It is not just the opening verse which tells of a somewhat mysterious person

I once knew a man
Been everywhere in the world
Gave me a tiny ivory ball
Said it would bring me good
Never believed it would until
I have been loving you

but also the fact that Bryan MacLean was part of the Vineyard Christian ministry which Dylan joined.  “Old Man” was written in 1966, so pre-dates Señor, but I am sure Dylan would have known the song, and it is possible that MacLean was part of Dylan’s conversion.  The notion of the Old Man, the passing stranger, indeed the Wandering Jew, is of course ancient, and I cannot believe Dylan did not know “Forever Changes” – it is one of the albums that at the time everyone who had an interest in the way popular music could be expanded into something ever more insightful, ever more interesting, knew inside out.

If we accept that Dylan did know “Old Man” the ins and outs of Señor are easier to place

Señor, señor, do you know where we’re heading?
Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?
Seems like I been down this way before
Is there any truth in that, señor?

I also hear reference to a religious conversion in the song…

Well, the last thing I remember before I stripped and kneeled
Was that trainload of fools bogged down in a magnetic field
A gypsy with a broken flag and a flashing ring
Said, “Son, this ain’t a dream no more, it’s the real thing”

The later verse involving cutting loose from the past, walking away from all that was previously known, getting going onto the new life is certainly what MacLean had to do.  For he was offered a solo contract, once Love had broken up, only to have it cancelled because the quality of his work was not considered to be up to scratch.  One great song, and that’s it, it’s over.

The recording below is not from the “Forever Changes” album, but offers an extra insight into how MacLean saw the song himself.

Forever Changes was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008 as well as being added to the National Recording Registry in May 2012.  Sadly Bryan died on Christmas Day 1998 before these ultimate accolades appeared.

Now I am not suggesting that Dylan’s old man is MacLean’s old man in any way, but there are similarities and as I say, they did both go to the same church.

I am also taken with the fact that Christopher Rollason, in his review, called “Señor” “a wasteland with no easy answers… Political and religious readings are both possible, but, at least on first listening, this song propels the listener into a dark and desolate borderland world, where nothing can be taken on trust.”

In short, it is as if the Old Man on this occasion gives all the wrong answers – but the maybe suggests the positive answers were just around the corner.  Finding the Old Man was the key, but the journey was far from easy.

It is interesting that in Señor what we have is darkness, despair and destruction: the trainload of fools – just as Dylan is facing his divorce and all that this entails.

In death, you face life with a child and a wife
Who sleep-walks through your dreams into walls
You’re a soldier of mercy, you’re cold and you curse
“He who cannot be trusted must fall”

What Dylan has done is captured these snatched moments from his darker times and turned them into a song.

And let us not forget the imagery.  That gives us the thought that there is no literal meaning to each line, no need to analyse, we go around in circles, ideas bumping into each other like the lines bump into each other here.   This is “Not Dark Yet” but without the resignation.

There is also the element of being used – everyone wants a bit of Dylan for themselves.   As he says, “You fight for the throne and you travel alone…” only to be “Betrayed by a kiss on a cool night of bliss”.   

“Equality, liberty, humility, simplicity” – everything we ever wanted, all now seems to be mashed up in a melting pot (if you see what I mean).   The man destroyed by divorce has not recovered but he is partially here admitting at last that there is “No time to choose when the truth must die.”

I disagree with commentators who talk about this song having apocalyptic themes, the Bible and all the rest.  To me this is about the emotions of rejection, the arguments, love gone, now she hates me and wants to take me for every penny.  That is the start and the end of the song.   All the hurt comes pouring out.

But there is more, and I certainly get it until Jochen pointed it out that the weird rhyme scheme comes from a letter written by TS Eliot to Anthony Laude thanking him for dinner.   Jochen tells us that it is a “rhyme scheme that one will not find anywhere in the world literature: aab-ccb dd-ee-ff.”

In death, you face life
with a child and a wife
Who sleep-walks through your dreams into walls

You’re a soldier of mercy,
you’re cold and you curse “He
who cannot be trusted must fall”

Loneliness,
tenderness,
high society,
notoriety

You fight for the throne
and you travel alone
Unknown as you slowly sink
And there’s no time to think

No honey, I suspect you all
Of being intellectual
And so, instead of gushin’ on
Let’s have a big discussion on
Timidity, stupidity, solidity, frigidity
Avidity, turbidity, Manhattan and viscidity
Fatality, morality, legality, finality
Neutrality, reality, or Southern hospitality
Promposity, verbosity
I'm losing my velocity
But let’s not talk about love

This is the Dylan I have been trying to write about – the Dylan where the words are more important than the meaning of the words, the phrases too being more important than their meanings, but where underlying feelings are expressed through the connections created which would otherwise never be considered.

If only we can escape the tyranny of the meanings of the words, and accept  the words as simply a part of the music, then appreciation becomes much easier.  No one (or at least no one I know) worries about the fact that Dylan might record a song in F sharp but then play it on stage in A flat.  No one gets worked up at how many times he uses the 12 bar blues format.   And, indeed, Dylan has made this oh so clear, as for example in a Playboy interview in 1977.

The gourmet cat was of course Cumberleylaude,
Who did very little to earn his dinner and board,
Indeed, he was always out and about,
Patronising the haunts where he would find,
People are generous and nice and kind,
Serving good food to this culinary lout!

With care he chooses his place to dine,
And dresses accordingly, if he has time,
Tasting all that Neville Road offers,
With never a thought for anyone’s coffers!
The best is only fit for the best he opines,
When he wants salmon, or duck, or expensive French wines.

In death, you face life
with a child and a wife
Who sleep-walks through your dreams into walls
You’re a soldier of mercy,
you’re cold and you curse “He
who cannot be trusted must fall”

Loneliness,
tenderness,
high society,
notoriety

You fight for the throne
and you travel alone
Unknown as you slowly sink
And there’s no time to think

by Jochen Markhorst

Infidels (1983), which is celebrated as a resurrection, is not Dylan’s first comeback. That would be the album New Morning (1970), another work for which time has been less kind than the press and fans were when it was released. The album was revalued in 2013, after the release of The Bootleg Series 10 – Another Self Portrait. On it, there are nine rejected New Morning outtakes and the flaring sentiment is comparable to the regret after the release of the Infidels outtakes: New Morning could have been a so much better album. The alternative arrangements by the later frustrated Al Kooper –

“When we had recorded everything, Bob pulled out some random tracks he had cut in the last year and added those to the oversupply we already had from the current sessions. Then we began to select and sequence. He changed his mind daily and the weeks began to drag on. This drove me nuts. We had a final title and cover artwork, but we had a new sequence and songlist every day,”

– the strings in “Sign On The Window”, the truly splendid rasping and growling horns in “New Morning”, Leadbelly’s “Bring Me A Little Water”, “If Dogs Run Free” without the nerve-racking scat of neurotic Maeretha Stewart… all of them wonderful variants, more compelling, more musical or more charming than the choices Dylan eventually puts on record.

Only the forgotten gem Time Passes Slowly does not lose its lustre even 44 years later. On Another Self Portrait there are two alternative, very successful versions, which are much more groomed anyway. The #1 is sung with passion and is enriched with the catchy lalala blabbering that is eventually used for “The Man In Me”. Al Kooper has put even more love into #2. Roaring organ work in an arrangement copied almost exactly from Joe Cocker’s “With A Little Help From My Friends” and once again a passionate Dylan. It is definitely a remarkable piece of work in his oeuvre; this sound and this Janis Joplin-like energy are hardly anywhere to be found. But for once the master is right: with this song, with these introspective, pastoral lyrics, the arrangement is completely out of place.

The record version is rough, small and intimate – and above all honest. Indeed, in this messy format, the music immediately gives voice to those first words. Time passes slowly, here in the mountains.

Considering all the effort and the struggles that have been fought over this song (from March to August 1970, this song keeps him busy, thirty recordings are made, the twenty-fifth appears on the album), it is all the more confusing that Dylan drops it immediately after New Morning, to never play it again. It is, however, rightly selected for the retrospective Biograph (1985), so it is not entirely vilified.

But it is no more than an isolated outburst; Dylan will never play the song after 1985 either. The master thus places “Time Passes Slowly” in the same category as, for example, “Never Say Goodbye” and “Clothes Line Saga”, wonderful songs that chronicle a peaceful life outside the frenzy of the day, that bear witness to a wrinkle-free existence, that breathe a corniness that cannot be accused of any worldly commitment – except for home sweet home and harmony. And perhaps that is why these songs are not taken to the stage; they are far too small for that.

As an extreme metaphor for that life outside Time, for that domestic peace, for “no reason to go anywhere”, Dylan the poet again chooses the image of the fishing dad. Apparently, that is one of the poet’s first associations with peace and quiet. In “Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread” (1967) trout fishing still has an exuberant, adventurous air, but three years later “fishing” illustrates idyllic peace of mind. “Sign On The Window” sings of trout fishing as one of the things “what it’s all about”, in “Tangled Up In Blue” the narrator has some peace when working on a fishing boat, when Hurricane doesn’t have to box, he looks for paradise where the trout streams flow and in “Floater” he doesn’t fish for trout for a change, but for catfish (“bullhead”, of the catfish genus). There are no testimonies of Dylan fishing, and there are no photos of the master in mud boots with a fishing rod. It is therefore likely that “fishing” is mainly meant metaphorically – to illustrate a detachment of the narrator.

Judy Collins is quick on the uptake. New Morning is released on 19 October 1970, but in August 1970 “Time Passes Slowly” is already on her album Whales and Nightingales. The album has some curiosity value because she has a few humpback whales singing along, on a rather insufferable a cappella arrangement of “Farewell To Tarwathie”. A song that has left traces before, by the way; in ’64 Dylan discovered the song in Baez’s record collection, probably on Ewan MacColl’s and A.L. Lloyd’s Thar She Blows! (1960), and decided to use it as a template for “Farewell Angelina”. It’s a nice whaling ballad in its own right, but not really a traditional, which is what Baez, Collins, Wikipedia and dozens of other sources parrot after each other to this day. Lloyd introduced the world to Tarwathie with an earnest, quite impressive story in the liner notes, in which he reveals that the song was sung by whalers in the nineteenth century and how it was probably written by one George Scrogie somewhere near Aberdeen around 1850. And Lloyd himself learned it in Durban from a native of Ballater (Aberdeenshire) in 1938.

The German folklorist Jürgen Kloss convincingly shows on his fascinating, rich website Just Another Tune, that this song too is in fact a forgery – the folk giant A.L. Lloyd (1908-1983) suspiciously often “discovered” ancient folk songs that he had actually created himself. Ironically, in this case, he probably based it on two American Cowboy Songs from Lomax’s collection (1938), “The Railroad Corral” and “Rye Whiskey”.

Anyway, Dylan’s “Time Passes Slowly”. The song fits on my album, Judy Collins later writes in her autobiography Sweet Judy Blue Eyes, because it, too, is one of the songs that “explore the power of nature in our lives, the idea that all life is sacred, and the idea that the planet, in its beauty and fragility, is being hunted, like the great whales, to depletion”. Big, perhaps a little too theatrical words, which do, however, fit Collins’ approach to “Time Passes Slowly”; stately and very serious, with violins and all. But in spite of that, her version still seems to have loyal fans, or maybe because of it. Perhaps, though, Collins could have let the song mature a bit first.

Nevertheless, she is to be credited with being the first, and one of the few, to recognise the power of the song; to the present day it is very rarely covered. A sympathetic exception is Ted Shinn’s version on the wonderful tribute project Positively Pikes Peak – The Pikes Peak Region Sings Bob Dylan (2011); in any case, a much more intimate, and much more mountainous, reading than Collins’.

Both are surpassed by Rachel Faro, who in 1974, with the help of legendary producer John Simon (The Band, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen), is allowed to record her first record, the forgotten gem Refugees. Simon’s influence on the arrangement and sound are unmistakable, but Rachel is a force of nature on her own: gorgeous rustle on her voice, beautiful phrasing, and heartbreakingly fading away in the final, slow minutes as she sings Time passes slowly and fades away. Her rendition of the song does pass very slowly, as it should.

Rich Robinson deserves credit as well. The former guitarist of The Black Crowes and acknowledged Dylan fan, who always left the singing to big brother and fellow Dylan fan Chris, sings “Time Passes Slowly” on stage every now and then and does a brilliant job. He incorporates the Another Self Portrait version #1 partly into his interpretation and scores especially with his delivery: Robinson sings “behind the notes” and thus demonstrates, arguably even more so than Dylan does, the languid carefreeness of the narrator.

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits (German)
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville

Two footnotes from Tony:

If you don’t have a CD of Another Self Portrait, it is available in full on Spotify, and really worth a play.

And to add one other thought: Jochen and I have been having a very friendly exchange of different opinions over the value of Judy Collins’ interpretations of Dylan, after I initially raved over her “Time Passes Slowly” and then tried (not very well) to justify myself in a little piece “Judy Collins Sings Dylan”.  In my view, its really worth a listen.

And while we are on the subject I’d also like to include a mention for Aaron’s remarkable series Play Lady Play which takes on the whole issue of women singing Dylan and is really worth looking through.  There are some utterly stunning renditions there too.

———

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits (German)
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville

Do you have a tale to tell via Untold Dylan?

We now have over 2000 articles on this site, and many of them are personal tales about attending a concert, listening to Dylan, cover versions, or the individual writer’s own appreciation of Dylan and his music.

These articles are written for Untold by Dylan fans, and if you have a view of Dylan that you feel could be of interest to others, we’d love to hear from you.

To see the variety of approaches we have included in this site, just go to the top of the page and look at the various headings under the picture – each one contains an index of articles on a Dylan theme.  Or look at the latest series listed on our home page.  If you write a piece you can add to these, or create your own theme, or simply send in a one-off contribution.   As long as it gives a different insight into Dylan and his work, we may be well interested in publishing it.

Sadly, we don’t have the funds to pay, but Untold Dylan does have a very wide readership, so your work will be seen by a huge number of people.   If you have an article please email Tony@schools.co.uk   If the article is ready, please attach as a word file.

One other thing: we never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

And one other, other thing: we also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

by Larry Fyffe

Andrew Marvell is grouped in with the Metaphysical poets; he advances the “carpe diem’ theme that’s present in the poems of Robert Herrick as well – seize the day, including having have sex every chance you get, before it’s too late.

In the days of the lyrics below, “hue” and “glow” rhyme:

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning glow ....
Now let us sport us while we may
And now, like amorous birds of prey
(Andrew Marvell: To His Coy Mistress)

A theme that runs in the song lyrics below wherein it seems that the author thereof wishes he had a bed big enough, and lots of time to use it:

Why wait any longer for the world to begin
You can have your cake and eat it too
Why wait any longer for the one you love
When he's standing in front of you
(Bob Dylan: Lay Lady Lay)

There be new girls to conquer, and there be new worlds to conquer. In the following poem, there’s a fanciful vision of Puritans seizing a supposed Promised Land to the west.

By not employing the standard English structure “bright orange”, the author avoids the problem of there being no proper rhyme for ‘orange’:

He gave us this eternal spring
Which here enamels everything ...
He hangs in shades the orange bright
Like golden lamps in a green night
(Andrew  Marvell: Bermudas)

In the humorous, ironical lines of the song below, the narrator heads off in search of the western paradise, but he doesn’t get very far; nor does he find the holy Grail Of Rhyme:

Pulled my cap down over my eyes
And headed out for western skies
So long, New York
Howdy, East Orange
(Bob Dylan: Talking New York)

More seriously, the followers of Almighty God fail to seize the opportunity to conquer themselves, to make up for their bodily and materialistic desires, to redeem themselves.

So saith the Holy Bible:

We see not our signs
There is no more any prophet
Neither is there among us
Any that knoweth how long
(Psalm 74 :9)

For which the poet below admonishes himself:

When for the thorns with which I long, too long
With many a piercing wound
My Saviour's head have crowned
I seek garlands to redress that wrong
(Andrew Marvell: Coronet)

The narrator in the song below takes the easy way out; instead of changing himself, the metaphorical stallion changes mares:

Well, I got a new pony, she knows how to fox-trot, lope, and pace
How much longer
She got great big hind legs
And long black shaggy hair above her face
(Bob Dylan: New Pony)

Borrowing from:

I'm gonna buy me a pony
Can pace, fox-trot, and run
(Fred McDowell: Highway 61 Blues)

Despite the assertions of the “It’s The Music Stupid School Of Dylanology”, Bob Dylan lyrics, whether you agree with them or not, do contain meaningful messages.

Do you have a tale to tell via Untold Dylan?

We now have over 2000 articles on this site, and many of them are personal tales about attending a concert, listening to Dylan, cover versions, or the individual writer’s own appreciation of Dylan and his music.

These articles are written for Untold by Dylan fans, and if you have a view of Dylan that you feel could be of interest to others, we’d love to hear from you.

To see the variety of approaches we have included in this site, just go to the top of the page and look at the various headings under the picture – each one contains an index of articles on a Dylan theme.  Or look at the latest series listed on our home page.  If you write a piece you can add to these, or create your own theme, or simply send in a one-off contribution.   As long as it gives a different insight into Dylan and his work, we may be well interested in publishing it.

Sadly, we don’t have the funds to pay, but Untold Dylan does have a very wide readership, so your work will be seen by a huge number of people.   If you have an article please email Tony@schools.co.uk   If the article is ready, please attach as a word file.

One other thing: we never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

And one other, other thing: we also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down