Dignity part IV: I contain multitudes

Posted on October 21, 2020 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

Previously in this series

Herodotus finds it worth mentioning in his Histories. The father of classical history reports on the rise of the Persian Empire in Book 1.

With, as always, an eye for the peculiarities that make his work so worth reading. But often they also bear witness to some arrogance – such as paragraph 139:

“There is another peculiarity, which the Persians themselves have never noticed, but which has not escaped my observation. Their names, which are expressive of some bodily or mental excellence, all end with the same letter- the letter which is called San by the Dorians, and Sigma by the Ionians. Any one who examines will find that the Persian names, one and all without exception, end with this letter.”

…Herodotus really thinks he is the first to notice that all Persian names end in an s. “The Persians themselves have never noticed.”

Funny, but more interesting is his observation on the Persians’ funeral rites: “the body of a male Persian is never buried, until it has been torn either by a dog or a bird of prey.” Herodotus is the first to inform us of the existence of the Towers of Silence, the remote structures where the corpses are laid down for the vultures. For centuries the place where the vultures feed. The practice still exists today; in Mumbai and in Karachi, for example. But the population of vultures has been severely depleted, due to urbanisation and antibiotics (especially diclofenac in the corpses is toxic to vultures), so after thousands of years there seems to come an end to this rite.

However, in the 1980s, when Dylan writes “Dignity”, with that chilling verse I went down to where the vultures feed, there are still some 80 million vultures in India (a few thousand today) – so the protagonist may have gone via Mumbai, on his quest. But the sequel of this quatrain shows that the stream of consciousness of the poet has not yet reached the subcontinent, not even the Orient, but is still in Asia Minor, in Ephesus, to be precise:

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

The tongues of angels and men… that is quite unmistakable. The “Excellence of Love”, 1 Corinthians 13, from the First Letter of Paul to the congregation of Corinth: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels”. Then those vultures probably are biblical too; Jesus’ answer to the question of the disciples where the wicked shall be taken. “Where there is a dead body, the vultures will gather” (Luke 14). Now, that is again a part of the New Testament where Jesus does his utmost to answer even the simplest questions with cumbersome and ambiguous parables, but this much is clear: it’s not a place the local tourist bureau will advertise, this place where the vultures feed.

In any case, they are beautiful, mysterious and sparklingly poetic lines. At first, however, the poet himself does not seem to attribute much expressiveness to them. On Tell Tale Signs we hear them in version #1, but they have been bluntly removed from version #2. They do return, fortunately – also in the live performances; up to and including the most recent version (Fuengirola, 2019) the searching protagonist goes to the vultures.

https://youtu.be/pjUV8lJbkU4

This also applies to the two preceding verses – they differ from version to version, and only seem definitive after Greatest Hits 3. In the end, the poet decides in favour for:

Blind man breakin’ out of a trance
Puts both his hands in the pockets of chance
Hopin’ to find one circumstance
Of dignity

I went to the wedding of Mary Lou
She said, “I don’t want nobody see me talkin’ to you”
Said she could get killed if she told me what she knew
About dignity

… a mysterious tableau with a blind protagonist and the elegant, ambiguous catechises pockets of chance, followed by a classic dialogue from a film noir, including ungrammatical double negation, a sinister content and a wedding, the cliché decor of any mafia film.

Nothing wrong with it, intriguing and poetic, but with the choice of these verses we unfortunately lose the fascinating quatrain VI from version #2:

Don Juan was talking to Don Miguel
Standin' outside the gates of Hell
There ain't nothing to say, there ain't nothing to tell
'bout dignity

That can only be Don Miguel de Manara, the Don Miguel who lived in Seville in the seventeenth century and became known under his nickname Don Juan … indeed, the shameless womanizer and fighter. Not the Don Juan, obviously (who was a fictional figure, after all), but after seeing Tirso de Molina’s play, The Trickster Of Seville or The Stone Guest (presumably 1616), the primeval version of all Don Juan stories, including the very greatest, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, it is said that it became Don Miguel’s vocation to be “Don Juan”. And he succeeded in getting there. Later, after many scandals and even a murder, he enters a monastery and, bizarrely enough, one year after his death in 1679, he is nominated for canonisation in Rome. The Vatican meticulously examines his life and, after ten years of research, finds that the life of Brother Don Miguel de Manara is edifying enough to make him a Venerable, the preliminary stage of beatification or canonisation – the case is still ongoing today.

It’s a beautiful Dylanesque image, the trickster Don Miguel talking at the gates of Hell with his alter ego Don Juan – a twin with an enemy within, a Jokerman who contains multitudes, a Satan who has become a Man of Peace, a monk and a Casanova… this one line of seven words from a rejected verse of “Dignity” brings together archetypes from more than fifty years of Dylan songs.

But it clashes, as the lyricist Dylan perhaps thinks, with the following bridge, with the place of action where the vultures feed, the place where according to Jesus the wicked go – also Hell, that is. So, Don Juan and Don Miguel can go to hell – Dylan ruthlessly deletes the stanza. The lieder poet being on steam anyhow, effortlessly dashing off the verses, as well as the archetypes; “the list could be endless.”

Still, pity.

To be continued. Next up: Dignity part V

————–

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan. It is simply a forum for those interested in the work of the most famous, influential and recognised popular musician and poet of our era, to read about, listen to and express their thoughts on, his lyrics and music.

We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers. Sadly no one gets paid, but if you are published here, your work will be read by a fairly large number of people across the world, ranging from fans to academics. If you have an idea, or a finished piece send it as a Word file to Tony@schools.co.uk with a note saying that it is for publication on Untold Dylan.

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8000 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

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Why does dylan like Pontchartrain, Legend in my time, and Homeward Bound?

Posted on October 21, 2020 by TonyAttwood

Selection by Aaron Galbraith, words by Tony Attwood

The Lakes of Pontchartrain

This is a rarity – for we can start with an explanation of how Bob came to learn one of the songs that needs covering in the “Why does Dylan like?” series.

In the film below Paul Brady, singer / songwriter from Northern Ireland explains how he taught Bob how to play the song! If you have a long running interest in folk music and its liaison with popular music you may recall Paul from Planxty. Sorry about the odd width / height disparity – that’s how this video is.

As for the song, it is of 19th century US origin, about a man who is helped by a woman from Louisiana, he falls for her, but she is already promised to a sailor and so turns him down.

Here is Bob with the song.

Bob played the song 18 times between June 1988 and July 1981. As for why he likes it – I think the fact that he sought guidance on how the chords were built up shows – it is in itself a beautiful and interesting song, but beyond that it is a song which has the opportunity to build around it an accompaniment that is only possible once you know about the tuning and the resultant chords.

And here is Paul Brady’s version…

Up next we have “Legend in my time” which was played three times in 1989 and was written by Don Gibson, known sometimes as the “sad poet” as so many of his songs were of “lost love”. He was born in 1928 and died in 2003.

Among many hits that he wrote and performed there was “I can’t stop loving you” and “Oh Lonesome Me”. “Legend” is one of those songs that many performers find a taste for and it has been recorded by talents as diverse as Connie Francis, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, BB King and Sammy Davis Jnr.

https://youtu.be/Zh-QXhL1Rzw

Don Gibson reported that the song was written on the road to Knoxville, Tennessee, in a car with Mel Foree. “I was reading an article in a magazine I had picked up about an entertainer. He was talking about show business and his career and how he would like to be a legend in his time. I told Mel that that would be a good title for a song, so I started humming.”

This is Don Gibson with two of his most famous songs…

Finally this time around, “Homeward Bound”.

We know Bob and Paul Simon have toured together, and so obviously recognise the value of each other’s music and can get on with each other

The original version of the song was produced by Bob Johnston and released as a single on January 19, 1966.

There is a plaque on Widnes railway station (near Liverpool on the north of the Mersey) stating that this is the place where Paul Simon wrote “Homeward Bound” for his girlfriend, although he has never confirmed that it was that station, as far as I know, and other railway stations have claimed the honour. Paul Simon has been quoted as saying that anyone who has ever been to Widnes will understand why he was so anxious to get back to London.

As we have noted many times Bob has a lifelong interest in songs of moving on, although less so in terms of songs of coming back home. And personally I simply cannot come to terms with Bob’s performance of this song, which takes it from its lyrical origins and turns it into something I really can’t understand at all. But that’s obviously just me, not Bob.

Here’s the Paul Simon singing it live on TV – as ever you will have your own views. For me this one still pulls at the emotions, even after all these years.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

All directions at once part 10: Everybody’s shouting, “Which side are you on?”

Posted on October 20, 2020 by TonyAttwood

by Tony Attwood

Links to the previous articles in this series appear at the foot of this piece and on the “All Directions” Index

In this series I am trying to put forward the notion that while there is a lot to be learned both from the in-depth analysis of Bob Dylan’s songs, and from seeing Dylan’s links with other writers, further insights into Bob Dylan and his music can be gained by looking at the flow of the songs Dylan wrote and recorded. In this way, I am arguing, we can see how Dylan’s interests, visions, approach to music, and thoughts on the world have ebbed and flowed across time, and where his thoughts were taking him.

Within this “All directions at once” series we are now in 1965, in the last episode having left Dylan after the writing of his 11th song of that year – “Maggie’s Farm,” one of a series of Dada-inspired pieces. (For a very brief discussion of Dada please see that article).

“Maggie’s Farm” was the last song that was included in “Bringing it all back home” to be written, and it is interesting how very few songs composed by Dylan were not used in that year. “Farewell Angelina” is the most well-known, but there also a couple of others: “Love is just a four letter word”, and “California”. But that is nothing like earlier years when well over half the songs written might never found their way onto an album.

“Maggie’s Farm” was recorded on 15 January as we have noted, and the album was released on 22 March. In May in an interview in the English weekly music paper “Melody Maker” Bob suggested he had a number of new pieces ready for the next album, but as yet they were not finished, and he was yet to decide what shape the next record would take. Certainly “Phantom Engineer” – the song that became, “It takes a lot to laugh, it takes a train to cry” was being tried out in May, which adds to the general commentary that Bob did not take any sort of break from songwriting once, “Bringing it all back home” was recorded. There was no holiday – he just carried straight on. He was, it seems in quite a hurry to get that next set of songs down on tape.

One might of course ask, “why should he take a break?” and there is no reason, save that for many musicians the experience of writing and recording an album is quite exhausting. One hears the songs over and over again, and then some, especially if a tour is then organised to promote the album. The tradition often was: record the album, go on tour to promote the album, take a break, and then the record company reminds the songwriter that new songs are required to fulfil the obligation to produce the next album. At least for most songwriters that process gave them the chance to find a new “voice” for the next album.

But Bob, certainly at this time, was not needing any prompting. He just carried on, which is again why looking at the songs in terms of the order of their composition, and in terms of what form they took and what they are about, does give us a particular insight into how Bob was thinking about life, and about the world.

However in the build up to the next collection of songs we really ought to pause and consider an attack that was made upon Dylan at this time, an attack that was launched by some who had welcomed him into the field of folk music. In particular I think it is worth contemplating the article written by Ewan MacColl, not just because of its vitriol, but because MacColl was a songwriter of amazing ability in his own right.

The article was not published until late August 1965 (in the September issue of “Sing Out!”) but I think most people who were interested in Dylan’s music were aware of the upset Dylan’s movement away from folk-inspired themes and into his own unique approach to lyrics and his use of rock instrumentation, had caused.

Looking back now at MacColl and the tradition from which he came, it is not at all hard to understand why he took such a strong view about Dylan’s music. Nor is it hard to understand why Dylan would not have been touched in the slightest by what MacColl said. They were both talented songwriters (although MacColl wrote far less than Dylan) from different eras, different backgrounds and with different perspectives.

In considering the history two factors stand out. First, MacColl was of a different generation from Dylan, MacColl being born during the first world war and growing up in depression hit Lancashire in northwest England, Dylan being born in the second world war in the upper midwest, at a time when its own economic decline was setting in.

Thus economic decline was known to both of them, but MacColl was also brought up within an atmosphere of revolutionary political thinking which was common among the Scots who lived in their part of England near the Scottish border. But while Bob travelled to a thriving rejuvenated New York in his youth, MacColl saw only the failure of capitalism all around him, and so joined the communists… And thus their outlooks went different ways.

To those in power in the USA, rock n roll and its antecedents were often pictured as a threat to the white man’s way of life because rock n roll and R&B presented to the impressionable white audiences of the baby-boom generation, “decadent” black music and dance forms. This, the political leaders of the day realised, meant that these young people were (in the words of a Rolling Stone article) “beginning to question the morality and politics of postwar America, and some of their musical tastes began to reflect this unrest.”

But I am not sure that the US authorities particularly considered Bob Dylan a danger to the state, despite his appearance with Joan Baez at the Washington DC Civil Rights Rally in 1963. And this, as the Rolling Stone article continued, was primarily because “for all its egalitarian ideals, folk was a music of past and largely spent traditions. As such, it was also the medium for an alliance of politicos and intelligentsia that viewed a teen-rooted mass-entertainment form like rock & roll with derision. The new generation had not yet found a style or a standard-bearer that could tap the temper of the times in the same way that Presley and rockabilly had in the 1950s.

But Ewan MacColl in England did not see folk music in this way and he was certainly not seen in this light by the authorities. He was considered by military intelligence in Britain to be a very serious danger to the safety of the state (and several reports suggest that even the British Communist Party thought he was rather extreme). So while Bob Dylan never joined a political party (as far as I know) and was considered a folk singer who could write hits, and (presumably) a welcome tax payer, MacColl was thought to be in favour of an uprising, and the sooner the better and thus needed to be watched.

As such, MacColl did not see folk music as a thing of the past, as Rolling Stone suggests it was, but rather, as the way of keeping alive the revolutionary feel that Britain had experienced after the first world war. Britain’s history at this time was totally different from that of the USA; there was a major uprising in Ireland (then a unified country) at the end of the first world war, with acts of terrorism perpetrated by both the state’s troops and the revolutionaries, in both Ireland and England. Eventually the UK granted most of Ireland its independence.

Meanwhile at the end of the war there were repeated mutinies of conscripted soldiers ordered to return to France to keep civil peace, while the votes for women campaign, and the strikes by miners, although peaceful in parts, were also viewed as a terrorist plot by some of the authorities.

It’s not my place here to describe the mayhem of that era, but to note it, because out of it grew a solid, radical, and sometimes revolutionary left wing movement, which saw traditional folk music as the true art of the working man.

Thus it was that as an inheritor of this tradition Ewan MacColl wrote in “Sing Out!” that, “Our traditional songs and ballads are the creations of extraordinarily talented artists working inside disciplines formulated over time …’But what of Bobby Dylan?’ scream the outraged teenagers … Only a completely non-critical audience, nourished on the watery pap of pop music, could have fallen for such tenth-rate drivel.”

Of course I disagree, and I would not be writing this if I did not, but MacColl’s work, along with that of Peggy Seeger and Dominic Behan, is still highly regarded. Indeed I suspect many Dylan fans will know, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” which MacColl wrote for Peggy Seeger. You may also know “Dirty Old Town” which was recorded by seemingly everyone from the Spinners to Roger Whittaker, the Dubliners, Rod Stewart, and the Pogues.

This is just one approach to “First time ever”…

Ewan MacColl died in 1989. His archive is housed by Ruskin College, Oxford University, and there is a plaque commemorating him in Russell Square, London.

Those who booed and jeered at Dylan’s early electric sets were not necessarily followers of MacColl, but they retained the notion that somehow there was a purity in the folk music of earlier times – particularly the folk music of the British Isles which can be traced back to the 15th century and occasionally earlier. The music of the people, by the people for the people.

Yet of course Dylan knew this music… “The Parting Glass” became “Restless Farewell”, as we all know, but Dylan could also perform his own versions of the classic Irish folk songs…

In fact I suspect Dylan was far more aware of and knowledgeable of the traditions of English, Scottish and Irish folk music than many of the people at Newport who objected to his first electric set. And maybe that experience influenced his writing very deeply; after all it was only a few days later that Bob recorded “Positively 4th Street” one of his most angry songs of all time.

But now I am getting ahead of myself, and I do want to continue taking the songs in the order they were written, which means going back to “Phantom Engineer”. A song that suggests that the whole issue of “moving on” which had been the subject of so much of his work, was not always a practical answer.

I get the impression that in his writing Bob had been seeing “moving on” and “leaving” as two separate parts of the same issue. One could “leave” because of the break up of a relationship or friendship, but one could be “moving on” because that is the continual lifestyle choice of many people – including indeed Bob Dylan in the times of the Never Ending Tour.

It seems to me, all these years later, that concerning “It takes a lot to laugh” we can still argue about all different possible meanings – and that now seems to be the point for me. We can take from it a lot of meanings, just as one can from an abstract painting. If Dylan had wanted to give us a clear meaning, he was most certainly capable of doing exactly that. But since he didn’t, the most obvious reason is that he wanted to give us impressions – exactly as many a modern artist wishes to do.

Indeed this video shows us just how much the song was changing as it evolved. Just because one version was released on the album, that doesn’t automatically make it any more “right” or “official” than any other version. It just happens to be the version that was put on the album.

In fact “It takes a lot to laugh” has a particular importance in terms of Dylan’s journey at this point, for it sets the scene for one of the two dominant themes that followed: moving on and disdain, combined with that Dadaistic feeling of using art to disrupt, that we’ve already explored. Indeed the next song Dylan composed followed a similar theme…

But then he clearly decided to up the level of disdain, writing “Like a Rolling Stone”, which was quickly followed by Why do you have to be so frantic also known as “Lunatic Princess” (another song of disdain), Tombstone Blues (more Dada) and then suddenly the definitive statement that even though the world is a total mess, it is not the world that is important, but rather the way in which we see the world: Desolation Row.

“Like a Rolling Stone” and “Desolation Row” are of course among the absolute masterpieces of Dylan’s early rock period – or come to that of all of his creative life. Not just because they are huge, extraordinary works, with few (if any) antecedents in popular music terms, but also because by the time of their release Dylan’s fame was so great that they were bound to be heard by millions. Even if the popular music stations complained they were “too long” to play all the way through (presumably in the belief that their audiences’ minds were so immature or addled by drugs that they were unable to focus for that long), Rolling Stone in particular still got played.

Between them these two songs amount of around 1000 words, which in a sense doesn’t seem that many (a popular novel might be 100 times as long). One is a song of disdain, and the other a song is either about a place or a state of mind, depending on your point of view.

By contrast “Blowing in the wind” is 181 words long (159 if you don’t count the repeated words). “Ballad in plain D” which I must admit sounds interminably long to me, is a mere 438 words.

Now you might well be asking, what idiot counts the number of words in a song? And of course that is a fair question. And my answer is that in writing such works, Dylan was in solidifying what he had just recently done: extending the form beyond anything that was previously thought possible.

Up to this point the bands which wanted to create extended pieces did this through long, mostly improvised, not always inspired, instrumental sections played between the penultimate and the final verse. Dylan however didn’t need this. He wanted to write longer songs because he had more to say. To see the contrast consider this: “Too much monkey business” the Chuck Berry song has, leaving aside the repetitions of the chorus, 83 words. It’s alright ma is 667 words long.

And maybe that is what started frightening some politicians. Could it be, they wondered, that there was something going on in there and they didn’t know what it was?

What’s more these songs were now pouring out of Dylan at an incredible speed; for most writers “Desolation Row” would be enough for a year or two, but it seems it was not much more than a couple of day’s work from Bob, who was then quite capable of shooting off in a new direction with From a Buick 6 a song which by and large seems to be saying, “I got this woman who does everything”. Not exactly earth shattering, revolutionary or even dada.

What I am trying to say is that Dylan was hereby doing to popular music what Picasso did to modern art with Guernica – the painting shown at the top of this article. He was dramatically expanding the form to a previously unimagined and unimaginable level. Of course lots of words don’t make a great song, any more than a big canvas makes a big picture – and Picasso was by no means the first to paint a big picture. But sometimes the bigger canvas is needed to put the radical thought across.

The penultimate verse of Desolation Row beings

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn

Edlis Cafe contained a comment

"Nice pun on 'titan', as Neptune was the son of Saturn, a
titan."

I wonder if Dylan realised it. Or was it just a "coincidence"

My thought is, probably not. For if it is a pun, we might expect the rest of the verse also to have meaningful antecedents, and I am not sure they have. Rather they are disconnected couplets bombarding us from all sides without profound connection or meaning. Maybe it does mean, “We are all distracted,” and that is fair enough, but in that case the meaning is of a level of importance so far below the elegance and fun of the words, that it is suddenly not important. But then after being told that

...nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row

we have the instrumental break – not just there, because it is there, nor because writers often put a musical break before the last verse, but rather because we are about to change direction. The ultimate verse is utterly different from anything else in the rest of the song.

The crazy world in which Cinderella, Cain and Abel, the Phantom of the Opera, Ophelia, Robin Hood, Einstein, Doctor Filth etc etc coexist in meaningless jumbles, is swept away. We are with the singer, isolated, desolated, out of touch, out of reach. The expression of the whole piece is made clear: this is how I see this crazy life, I’m stuck in it, and I can’t communicate with the outside world.

Ewan MacColl in his rejection of Dylan’s dadaist songs was himself effectively “shouting ‘Which Side Are You On?'” which itself was a popular slogan of the political radical left at the time, and which Dylan found pointless. Indeed commentators on Dylan’s extraordinary masterpiece often seem blithely unaware that “Which Side Are You On?” that clarion call from the penultimate verse, is Dylan’s answer to MacColl, for it refers to a song written in 1931 by trade union radical activist Florence Reece. Pete Seeger not only sang it but collected it in the way that Cecil Sharp gathered thousands of tunes both from rural England and the Southern Appalachians region of the United States. Indeed had it not been for Cecil Sharp many of the traditional songs Bob has sung would not have survived for him to sing.

In using this phrase Dylan, I am certain, knew exactly what he was saying in response to Ewan MacColl.

Of course Dylan didn’t mention Ewan MacColl, he went for the intellectuals Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, rather than the revolutionary working man. His point amidst all these colliding images is that it doesn’t matter which side of the ship you are on, if the ship is sinking. It didn’t matter if Hollis Brown took his family out to the front or the back of the house either. What matters is richest society in the world caused this, and allowed it.

And this is really the heart of it all. MacColl wanted to fight the repression of people by big business and the state by collecting and performing the radical left wing works that reflected his manifesto. Dylan was reflecting the fact that while this is going on, ordinary everyday people mostly try to survive and find their own solutions to the horrors of everyday life. And like Hollis Brown, some don’t make it.

Desolation Row thus is a patchwork of images, just as Guernica is. Gallery visitors can inspect the detail of Picasso’s masterpiece (as one can see at the top of this page) and undoubtedly find their understanding of the work illuminated by such inspection. And we can examine individual lines in Dylan’s “Desolation Row” and gain much from so doing.

But in my view, in both cases, we also need to appreciate also the overall piece.

As others have said before me, “Desolation Row” is like a Rorschach test: we see lots of dots and by interpreting them we reveal as much about ourselves as we do about Dylan’s masterpiece.

And interestingly psychologists often argue that those who are unwilling to explain their interpretations are the people most likely to be suffering from thought disorders. Maybe so, but then having an awfully large number of Dylanologists set forth an awfully large number of interpretations doesn’t actually help much either.

Of course Dylan has given lots of answers as to where Desolation Row is, because that’s the point – it is wherever we feel it and see it. We can all interpret the world in our own way; no one is right no one is wrong.

It became a very fashionable approach, but really, if everyone can have their own interpretation, is there any point in discourse about Dylan?

Bob Dylan who never advocated violence as far as I know, wrote a song that began “They’re selling postcards of the hanging”. Ewan MacColl, who spent his life fighting for an armed communist uprising to overthrow the British state wrote one of the most beautiful songs ever composed in the English language. Everyone may shout “which side are you on?” but it doesn’t really help.

All directions at once

This series looks at Dylan’s work from the point of view of the ebb and flow of his writing. Thus rather than only examine a song and relate it to where the ideas came from in terms of literature and music, the series sees Dylan’s changing themes and styles within the music as a clue to what is happening in his life.

So far we have

An index of the articles is also being compiled at All Directions at Once

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Bob Dylan And Harold Pinter part 1

Posted on October 19, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Larry Fyffe

In the empty lot where the ladies play 
       blindman's bluff with the key chain
And the all-night girls they speak of escapades out on the 'D' train
We can hear the night watchman click his flashlight
Ask himself if it's him or them that's insane
(Bob Dylan: Visions Of Johanna)

Though not by any means as angry as “the angry young men” writers, singer/songwriter Bob Dylan is aware of their semi-realistic, lower-class imagery. Akin to the already mentioned ‘Victory, An Island Tale’ by Joseph Conrad there is the dark-humoured and symbolic play ‘The Birthday Party’ by Harold Pinter.

Seemingly a fragmented dream by the householder’s lonely wife, the play focuses on a birthday party for the child-like adult boarder Stanley Webber to which two gangster-like strangers come. MacCann and Goldberg turn the should-be happy occasion into a Halloween nightmare; Stanley, once a piano player, receives a toy drum from a vulgar young gal, and is subjected to taunting and exhausting questions like, “Why do you pick your nose?” In the mixed-up whiskey confusion, a game of ‘blindman’s bluff’ is played. The lights go out. Eyeglasses broken, Stanley turns violent, and sexually attacks the girl; the two strangers restrain him. Unknown to the householder’s motherly wife, Stanley is taken away in a black limousine.

‘The Birthday Party’ is rather Deconstructionist and Nietzschean in character in that it can be interpreted that the hypocritical master class and their priests keep a strong hold on the social order. Shouts the householder as the boarder is led away, “Stan, don’t let them tell you what to do”.

Another song lyric that shows a symbolic kinship to those found in Pinter’s play:

Bow down to her on Sunday
Salute her when her birthday comes
For Halloween, buy her a trumpet
And for Christmas, give her a drum
(Bob Dylan: She belongs To Me)

There’s the ominous black limousine in the following lyrics:

Tommy, can you hear me
I'm the Acid Queen
I'm riding in a long, black Lincoln limousine
Riding in the backseat next to my wife
Heading straight on in to the afterlife
(Bob Dylan: Murder Most Foul)

In Pinter’s play, sex becomes a sign that one is on their way down the road to death; so Stanley tries to avoid it; Nietzsche considers sex a means whereby women exercise their ‘will to power’ in a society that is dominated by men:

Well your railroad gate, you know I just can't jump it
Sometimes it gets so hard you see
I'm just sitting here beating on my trumpet
With all these promises you left for me
But where are you tonight sweet Marie
(Bob Dylan: Absolutely Sweet Marie)

Male sexual frustration again expressed in the following song:

Sad-eyed lady of the Lowlands
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes
My warehouse eyes, my Arabian drums
Should I put them by your gate
Or, sad-eyed lady, should I wait
(Bob Dylan: Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands)

The male in turn attempts to exercise his will to power through economic control:

Well, you better fix it ma
You gotta fix it ma
You better fix it for me real quick
Because I'm outside your gate
If you wanna get along with me
(Bob Dylan: Fix It Ma)

https://youtu.be/tFSAfO0K09I

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Dignity (1989) part III: One line brings up another

Posted on October 19, 2020 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

It suits well, the poetic perfection of the opening verse. So much so that the poet uses it as a template for the next quatrain:

Wise man lookin’ in a blade of grass
Young man lookin’ in the shadows that pass
Poor man lookin’ through painted glass
For dignity

Just as wonderful, although the verses are much more unambiguous than the previous ones. The wise man looking for lost dignity in a blade of grass reminds the Dylan fan of “Every Grain Of Sand”, the well-read listener of William Blake’s Auguries Of Innocence and the Christian of Psalm 147 or Matthew 6. One of the writings, in any case, reminding the reader that God’s greatness is recognisable in every hair, in every grain of sand and in every blade of grass – and the poet adds through the choice of words, “blade of grass”, a pleasant sounding mirroring with the blade of steel from the opening line.

Equally pastoral poetic is the archaic shadows that pass, which by the way strongly recalls Baudelaire’s “The Owls” (from Les Fleurs Du Mal);

Man, enraptured by a passing shadow,
Forever bears the punishment
Of having tried to change his place

… probably due to artistic kinship rather than direct inspiration. The first association of the listener, and probably of Dylan himself, is Plato’s cave, where shadows that pass is the prisoners’ only observable reality.

Only in the third metaphor does the poet become more unambiguous; painted glass can really only refer to churches, and thus to religion.

Added up, and if, for the sake of convenience, we continue to assume that the poet here wraps a condition humaine in metaphors, the enumeration in this verse leads to an exacerbation of the first one; in God’s creation, in philosophy and in religion there is no dignity to be found either.

The lieder poet knows that now, after two verses, either a chorus or a bridge to the chorus should come. And seemingly Dylan obeys that law. The quatrain

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

… ends with three ascending chords (from C to D to F), with the deceptive promise that we are climbing a bridge to the chorus. Lyrically, indeed, a refrain-like quatrain follows;

 Searchin’ high, searchin’ low
Searchin’ everywhere I know
Askin’ the cops wherever I go
Have you seen dignity?

… but musically we are back to the verses; both chord scheme and arrangement are identical to the verses, the melody deviating only slightly – in exactly the same rhyme scheme.

In terms of content, the bridge marks a further deepening. Only now do we get the first hint that dignity is personified – after all, “dignity” was the first to leave a New Year’s party. In a semantic discussion, one could maintain that the poet is expressing that after that murder, the situation became undignified, perhaps indecent. In any case, there was no longer any dignity. But a little further on, the protagonist asks the policemen whether they saw dignity, and in the last bridge is even a picture of an alleged “dignity” shown. Yes, this is really a personification… and with that the lyrics are really an allegory – quite an unusual genre in Dylan’s oeuvre.

The turn to allegory is inserted in a film noir-setting. Murder On New Year’s Eve happens to be the title of a murder mystery from 1937, published under the name of Patrick Quentin, the nom de plume of a writers’ collective that has Agatha Christie-like crimes solved by a detective named Peter Duluth – what’s in a name, indeed. By the way, Quentin’s bibliography does surprise Dylan fans quite a few times; Little Boy Lost, Who Killed The Mermaid?, Going, Going Going, Love Comes To Miss Lucy… it’s a parade of song fragments, names, remarkable idiom and half-song titles from Dylan’s oeuvre. Coincidence, of course, but still a funny coincidence.

Apart from that funny coincidence, Dylan’s choice of setting is a classic setting for an old-fashioned crime film or novel. The floodgates of the stream of consciousness open, apparently. After a rather empty transitional line (went into the city, went into the town), the bridge closes with the intriguing choice of scenery the land of the midnight sun. Perhaps a nod from Dylan to Bobby Bare’s gruesome mutilation of the beautiful folk song “He Was A Friend Of Mine” (1964), to which Bare added the line he died ‘neath the midnight sun, perhaps an echo of the ancient folk song “Clayton Boone” (I rode until the midnight sun), but more obvious is another bow to Jerry Lee Lewis, who in these years more often puts a fingerprint on a Dylan song (on “Mississippi”, for example). In 1965 The Killer records a somewhat corny but still catchy version of Johnny Horton’s “North To Alaska” for his LP Country Songs For City Folks:

Sam crossed the majestic mountains to the valleys far below
He talked to his team of huskies
As he mushed on through the snow
With the Northern lights a-runnin' wild
In the land of the midnight sun

Once in that tunnel, Dylan arrives almost naturally at Elvis for the simple “chorus” with the repetitio searchin’, at one of those forgotten, irresistible one-and-a-half-minute throwaway rockers that Elvis recorded on the assembly line in the mid 1960s, at “Long Legged Girl” (1967), the song in which Elvis too is searching all over the world. Granted, not for dignity, but still for an equally desirable greatness:

I've been from Maine to Tennessee, Mexico and Waikiki
Rain or shine, sleet or snow
Searchin' high, searchin' low
Everything depends upon
That long legged girl with the short dress on

https://youtu.be/yAXGQj1EEto

Well, presumably at least – according to his own words, the walking jukebox Dylan is unleashed by the writing of this song, the words flow in as if by themselves. Or, as the autobiographer puts it in Chronicles:

“This song is like that. One line brings up another, like when your left foot steps forward and your right drags up to it.”

…and once your left foot has already stepped towards Jerry Lee, you don’t have to drag your right foot very hard to get to Elvis.

We are at exactly a quarter of the way into the song, and the final form has been found. The final version follows the construction of these first four quatrains;

– two verses of four lines each

– a four-line bridge

– a kind of chorus of four lines

After this opening sequence, the poet will repeat this three more times; “Dignity” is like a traditional four-movement symphony – four times four quatrains, each time two verses, a bridge and a “kind of chorus”.

Then, after establishing this structure, the poet Dylan can unleash his poetic powers.

To be continued. Next up: Dignity part IV

————–

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Bob Dylan And Chuck Berry, and some wonderful videos

Posted on October 18, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Larry Fyffe

If you’re talking about Bob Dylan and rocknroll, you’re talking about both the lyrics and music of Chuck Berry who hypes up rhythm and blues:

Bertha Mason shook it, broke it
Then she hung it on the wall
Says, "You're dancing with whom they tell you to
Or you don't dance at all"
(Bob Dylan: High Water)

https://youtu.be/48jd7a0PEMM

Bertha Mason is a mad woman from the ‘Jane Eyre” novel, but the lyrics below are from the ‘Father of RocknRoll”:

She could not leave her number
But I know who placed the call
'Cause my uncle took the message
And he wrote it on the wall
(Chuck Berry: Memphis, Tennessee)

There’s this song:

I got eight carburetors, boys, and I'm using'em all
Well, I got eight carburators, and I'm using'em all
I'm short on gas, my motor's starting to stall
(Bob Dylan: Summer Days)

A reference to the following song;

She just don't have the appetite
For gas somehow
And, Dad, I got four carburators
Hooked up on it now
(Chuck Berry: Dear Dad)

Listen to this one:

Learn to dance, get dressed, get blessed
Try to be a success
Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don't steal, don't lift
(Bob Dylan: Subterranean Homesick Sick Blues)

And then this:

Working in the filling station, too many tasks
Wipe the windows, check the tires, check the oil, dollar gas
Ah, too much monkey business, too much monkey business
I don't want your botheration, go away, leave me be
(Chuck Berry: Too  Much Monkey Business)

A sentiment expressed in the folk rock song below:

The only thing I knew how to do
Was to keep on keeping on
Like a bird that flew
(Bob Dylan: Tangled Up In Blue)

Bringing it all back home to:

Ah, Nadine, honey, is that you?
Seems like every time I catch up with you
You up to something new
(Chuck Berry: Nadine)

Rendered below:

Ah, Nadine, baby, is that you?
Seems like every time I catch up with you
You got something else to do
(Bob Dylan: Nadine ~ Chuck Berry)

https://youtu.be/rVXlyjk4Lwo

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

All directions at once 9: So far ahead of the game we lost sight

Posted on October 17, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood

If I wanted to point you to just one moment in Dylan’s songwriting life that justified the title “All directions at once,” and if I really was told, “just one moment, no more, just one,” I would probably choose the period in 1964 that has been the heart of the last article. The period that covers the writing of the songs from “Mama you’ve been on my mind” through to “If you’ve gotta go”. And if I had to go further, and really tie it all down to an actual moment, rather than a matter of weeks, I would go for the evening during the Newport Folk Festival when, on the spur of the moment, Dylan decided to play an electric set with Paul Butterfield the next day.

But before I come to that I fear I must set the scene a little more carefully. And at the risk of you turning away saying, “Oh for goodness sake, you’ve told us this already” I will give you the list of 11 songs in the period under discussion in this article, with the simplistic subject matter title that I have accorded each one.

Mama you’ve been on my mind (Lost love)
Ballad in Plain D (Lost love)
Black Crow Blues (Blues, The sadness of lost love and moving on)
I shall be free number 10 (Talking Blues; humour)
To Ramona (Love)
All I really want to do (Song of Farewell; Individualism)
I’ll keep it with mine (Don’t follow leaders; individualism)
My back pages (Individualism)
Gates of Eden (Protest, Individualism, A world that makes no sense)
It’s all right ma (Protest; Individualism, A world that makes no sense)
If you’ve gotta go, go now (Song of Farewell; Individualism)

I really don’t know what else to say but (yet again) this is an amazing mix of songs and subjects. Dylan is dealing with his very real pain at the break up of an affair (Plain D), expressing love (Ramona), contemplating the concept of individualism (various), considering the notion that the world makes no sense (Eden and It’s all right ma) and saying goodbye (All I really want to do, and If you’ve gotta go).

Now in global terms, there are two ways of writing songs – one, you can abstract yourself from the meaning of the lyrics and simply write, or two, you can express your own emotions within the song. Most songwriters that I have talked with say that the second is the dominant process, adding perhaps that the former can be done but unless one is careful the result tends to sound simplistic or false. The tendency is to lean on works that have come before, and rather unfortunately, that approach can often show through.

Of course we don’t know for sure what Dylan was doing, but given that we do know he was expressing his own emotions in “Plain D”, then we might expect he was expressing at least some of what he felt in other songs around that time, which means he was at this time travelling one hell of a roller coaster of emotions. On the other hand if he was expressing these emotions without feeling them, then he absolutely had totally mastered the art of songwriting within a couple of years. He had already become the absolute songwriting genius.

I think the second option goes too far: the events we are looking at in this article show that Bob was reacting to emotions – which reach their heights with Plain D and at that crucial moment when he decided, seemingly on the spur of the moment, to play an electric set at Newport.

But also I feel, looking at the songs written after Plain D it seems to me clear that Bob’s recovery from the depths of anger and despair was not just thankfully rapid, but also a real bounce upwards because what suddenly appeared next was a much, much happier, and one might say, quite cheeky song of farewell: All I really want to do.

However there is more to that song than saying “no” or “no more” in a love affair, because this is a piece celebrating individualism – a song which through its popularity – particularly via the cover versions created by the Byrds and by Cher – emphasised the fact that Dylan was not restricting himself to songs about society and the way it inevitably seeks to control our lives.

And here we see the extent of this change of direction, because from here on for the rest of the year Dylan’s prime focus was not on protest, not on society and the way it works, but individualism, and as it turned out, an artistic form of rebellion against established norms.

For what we see is that around 18 months after writing such powerful works about society, as Masters of War, Walls of Red Wing, You’ve been hiding too long, Seven Curses, With God on our Side, Talking World War III Blues, Only a pawn in their game, North Country Blues, When the ship comes in, The Times they are a-Changing, Percy’s Song, and The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll – Bob Dylan suddenly discovered that there is more to the world than the way society works.

For after, “All I really want to do” Bob turned to songs such as I’ll keep it with mine with its focus on becoming an individual. This, for me, is indeed the launch of another break through into the new Dylan. Who else could have written in a popular music format, at this time…

I can’t help it
If you might think I’m odd
If I say I’m not loving you for what you are
But for what you’re not

Then in My Back Pages he sings…

“We’ll meet on edges, soon,” said I

The “edges” indeed. What edges? Where are these edges? Wherever they are, whatever they are, they have become of lesser importance. Our meeting is of greater substance than where we meet.

Here is the individual seeing the world from his own unique standpoint – a standpoint that most others (he suggests) will not and indeed cannot feel. It is the “it’s not the world, but the way you see the world” vision put firmly within Dylan’s own view of reality. Dylan now perceives himself as a creative artist who has the ability to change himself, and we discover, a wish to challenge others.

For thus far Bob had had it easy. He was singing all those early protest songs to the converted. They already believed. He didn’t have to persuade them any further.

Now those of us who read novels tend to choose certain authors because with them we know what we are going to get. Science fiction from one writer, murder mysteries from another, political dramas elsewhere, love stories from someone else, and so on. We go and buy that writers’ latest, because we know what he or she does. If our favourite author of crime thrillers had suddenly written a love story we’d be disappointed, we’d find it odd. Yet this, in songwriting form, is what Dylan did.

But although Dylan was changing direction, we don’t find just random jumping from one topic to another. “My Back Pages” for example contains the lines

In a soldier’s stance, I aimed my hand
At the mongrel dogs who teach
Fearing not that I’d become my enemy
In the instant that I preach

which prepare the way for “Don’t follow leaders”. This in turn is the natural consequence of the “Chimes of Freedom” – the chimes are there for anyone who can hear them, but we each hear our own “chimes”, and thus see the world in our own way.

And what is extraordinary is that after writing that masterpiece of “My back pages” Bob turned to Gates of Eden where this new individualistic approach gains perhaps some of its most powerful expression. For now we hear that society has nothing to offer – except the false hope that if we behave in the right way and think the right things we can achieve the promised land: the afterlife.

We are firmly in the realms of a world in which it is not reality that matters but the way that we see reality. The world that we see is in part the world we create. If, as Blake said, we can see beauty in a grain of sand, then we are making real progress – but what we see and how we see it is totally up to us. Yet again, it is not the world but the way that we see the world.

This theme continues to build with the next song It’s all right ma emphasising that contrary to the notion that accompanied Bob as the protest singer, the implication of his new way of thinking is that there is no reform to be had, other than living one’s own life in one’s own world. The world beyond has indeed gone totally wrong, and the only response left is one of individual survival. Maybe times are a-changing, but as suggested in that song’s lyrics, that changing process just happens. Change occurs. It’s just life.

Fate suddenly has become inexorable; all we can do is live our lives as we can. Yes if you want to move on, of course you can, because it is up to you how you see the world and therefore up to you what you do. Hence it is perfectly reasonable that the year ended with If you’ve gotta go, go now. Choose your own vision of reality and your own direction of travel; off you go. As an individual, with your own vision, you are of course free to say farewell and move on any time you want. When you are ready, leave this vision behind, and just go.

And in moving on if you are able to hear those Chimes of Freedom that’s fine. But for Bob moving on was now vital because he had (it appears) begun to feel that some views cannot be expressed in normal everyday story telling. We need to go somewhere else because we have not only given control of the world to the wrong people, we’ve forgotten how to forge our own visions and live by them. We have allowed others to become leaders of our thoughts, and forgotten how to think in new and different ways.

On the death of Irving Berlin, America’s other truly dominant songwriter, the New York Times wrote, “Irving Berlin set the tone and the tempo for the tunes America played and sang and danced to for much of the 20th century.” Now, in this year we begin to find that Bob Dylan was himself setting the tone and tempo for the tunes that reminded America of where it had come from, how far it had fallen from its great ideals, where it might yet go, and what was happening to the people within his country.

Although Berlin dominated songwriting during his lifetime, and was nominated for Academy Awards eight times, he never got one. But no one can ever doubt the importance and genius of the man who wrote, “White Christmas” and “God Bless America”. “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Cheek to Cheek”, “There’s No Business Like Show Business”, “Blue Skies” and “Puttin’ On the Ritz.”

But just as Berlin reflected his age, so was Bob Dylan. And Bob’s age was an age where questions started to arise.

Certainly by 1964 people were realising that Bob had, in under three years, challenged the whole notion of what popular music could be about. Indeed in an earlier article, written long before I tried to pull all of Dylan’s lyrical themes together and make some sense of the pattern of his writing, I used the title “Bob Dylan in 1964: adding new themes.” And I still think this works as a way of describing the year although perhaps I would now add, “and taking those themes to the limit”. These are songs stressing that reality is all about how you see the world, which implies that the future is out there for us to describe as we see fit, as we venture through the various minefields of love, lost love, moving on, and of course individualism.

I have, in my attempt to continue describing each song in as few a words as possible, added a new term starting with this year, in relation to Dylan’s writing: Dada. It applies as you can see below to songs such as Subterranean Homesick Blues, Outlaw Blues, Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream, On the Road Again and Maggie’s Farm, and I think I must now explain what I mean by that.

Dada emerged as a creative response to the horrors of the first world war. As Hans Arp put it at the time, “While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might.”

But Dada was not just an expression of artists being against the war, or against all war, but rather artists being against the whole essence of the bourgeois life that allowed war to happen. It was not of itself strongly left wing, but it attracted many people associated with the radical left.

What I feel Dylan was doing was expressing at this point was his reaction to the way in which folk music had elevated itself onto a platform of self-righteousness, through which some might seem to feel that by singing “We shall overcome,” the forces of prejudice and darkness would be set aside. Or indeed that by singing “Kumbayah” one is actually doing something to fight racism, rather than just getting that lovely warm feel of being among like minded people – who were also singing along.

Given the way many people seemed to feel at the time, rejecting the notion that the fight against “power and greed and corruptible seed” (as Dylan later put it) could be continued through peacefully singing in concerts, was pretty damn dramatic, but that’s what Bob expressed.

The immediate response to this suggestion would then normally be to go to the opposite extreme, suggesting that the proponent of such a view wanted an uprising or revolution. But the Dadaists offered a different way – through art which rather than making the audience feel comfortable (as for example being part of a large group singing a simple song together can do), actually made people uncomfortable.

Of course I don’t know exactly what Bob was thinking when he suddenly decided to play that electric set with Paul Butterfield, but whatever it was, it had the effect. But I am pretty sure it wasn’t, “hey guys wouldn’t it be interesting if we played these songs with the whole band rather than just have me up front.”

In fact playing in front of a band at that specific gig was a pure Dadaist statement – self-evidently so, because some people who were there to hear Dylan the folk singer actively booed him. Which I suspect Dylan didn’t mind at all. He had made his point.

Of course, if we look back to our ancient LPs or less ancient CDs and find a copy of Bringing it all Back Home – Dylan’s next album – we know of the contrast between side one and side two. Three quarters of side two (Tambourine Man, Gates of Eden, It’s alright ma) was written in 1964. But now in 1965, side one of the album was written very quickly, and indeed recorded in the same way: the whole recording taking just three days. And side one, you will recall, was Dylan and the band.

In terms of writing, this extraordinary burst of creativity (we have stories of Bob getting up in the middle of the night and typing up lyrics, as well as ceaselessly typing through the nights and days prior to the January recording) led to eleven songs …

Farewell Angelina (Song of Farewell)
Love is just a four letter word (Is love real?)
Subterranean Homesick Blues (Beat Poetry as rock music, the artist vs society; Dada)
Outlaw Blues (Moving on, The artist vs society; Dada)
Love Minus Zero (Love)
California (Blues, moving on)
She Belongs to Me (Love)
It’s all over now baby blue (Song of Farewell)
Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream (Beat poetry as rock music; update on talking blues, humour; Dada)
On the Road Again (Moving on, the artist vs society; Dada)
Maggie’s Farm (Moving on, the artist vs society; Dada)

So there we had the rest of the album created in record time, and indeed recorded in just two days (13 and 14 January), along with a couple of songs that didn’t quite fit in.

But also in considering this revolution in the type of sound Dylan was creating on the album we should note the dates. The album was recorded immediately after the songs above were written and was released in March. And to complete the chronology, in July “Like a Rolling Stone” was released and later that month Dylan performed his first electric set – at the Newport Folk Festival.

Thus this was a revolution that really did take Bob, and his audience in all directions at once: the writing of the songs, the recording of this radically different album, the first electric concert, writing “Rolling Stone”… it all happened in a very short period of time. And that tells us quite clearly that Dylan must have been absolutely certain of what he was up to. He knew where he was going, and no one was going to lead him in another direction. Thankfully the record company also knew by now to let him have his head. He’d been right so far.

But to return to my earlier point, we should not forget that the reports that we have of the first electric set suggest that Dylan decided to play electric not “on a whim” as some would have it, but in a definite response to the reaction of the audience to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Dylan had not rehearsed with the band over a matter of days or weeks – it was simply decided on the night before, and the band set to work.

I think this tells us a lot about Dylan, and it fits in with what we have learned through these explorations of Dylan. “All directions at once” itself suggests spontaneity, and indeed Dylan has shown this throughout his career. He gets the feeling, he understands what it means, and he does it. It might come out ok, it might not, but that is how he wants to do it. He does it this way to capture to essence of the music rather than have an over-rehearsed, over-prepared sound. When it does work it is sensational. When it doesn’t, well, that’s just the price that has to be paid.

We can see this approach very clearly in the songwriting too. Clearly many of the Dylan compositions have been written very quickly; where the revisions are to be made, those come later, ready for later performances, which is how we get so many different versions of some songs as time goes by.

So, Bob the folk singer had gone electric, Bob the protest singer had embraced dada. Of course others followed, but at the start he was so far out in front, he seemed like dust on the horizon.

If you have been, thanks for reading.

All directions at once

This series looks at Dylan’s work from the point of view of the ebb and flow of his writing. Thus rather than examine a song and relate it to where the ideas came from in terms of literature and music, the series sees Dylan’s changing themes and styles within the music as a clue to what is happening in his life.

So far we have

An index of the articles is also being compiled at All Directions at Once

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Dylan’s Rarities: Hang me, Hey Joe and Heartbeat

Posted on October 17, 2020 by TonyAttwood

by Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

If you have been following the “All directions at once” series you may have noticed a mention of the traditional song “Hang me oh Hang Me”

Philip Saville invited Bob to perform three songs in a live TV drama “Madhouse on Castle Street”. “Blowin’ in the Wind” was used at the start and the end of the programme over the credits. Dylan also performed two traditional English folk songs, “Hang Me, O Hang Me”, and “Cuckoo Bird”, and then “Ballad of the Gliding Swan” for which Saville had written the words.

Well Aaron has spotted the fact that in 1990 Bob Dylan revisited “Hang me o hang me” and performed it on stage. We can’t find out why Bob chose this moment to perform the song – Tony wondered if it coincided with the passing of Philip Saville who had invited Bob to work on the show with him, but that was not the case. Maybe something just jogged Bob’s mind – or maybe Philip Saville (who was indeed very much alive at the time) was in the audience that night.

This performance from 1990 was the one and only time Bob performed it (as far as we know) after that play.

But of course the internet is full of curious things and there is an article that says “The TV show opened with Oscar Isaac, singing “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me” at the Gaslight Cafe,” followed by this link.

We’re pretty sure this performance doesn’t have anything to do with the TV show – not least because a) the BBC archive recording of the song was lost, and b) the show was made in black and white.

You’ll notice the line “all around the world” in the song, which is a song the Grateful Dead have performed…

This again is a traditional song, with the earliest recording dating from 1937. We can’t find any of the early recordings, but this one is one of a number that reflect the song in what is probably fairly close to the original approach

https://youtu.be/ERGlwiNIK5w

And now, as they say for something completely different.

Bob Dylan did once perform “Hey Joe” It is not, to my ears, a very convincing performance, but he did it.

This was apparently recorded on 12 July at Jazz a Juan. You will, we are sure, know all about the original…

And for something very different from that….

That from the Academy of Music, Philadelphia, 23 November 2014. Of course what we are getting onto here are not songs actually performed in concert but in the sound checks on stage. But clearly everyone could drop straight into the song.

That’s all for this time. Hope you enjoyed at least one or two of the recordings.

Songs that Bob Dylan has only ever performed once or twice live.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

My own love song – Dylan’s instrumentals and other soundtrack songs

Posted on October 16, 2020 by TonyAttwood

by Tony Attwood

Mike Smith has reminded Aaron and myself that Dylan wrote a series of instrumental pieces for Olivier Dahan’s film “My own love song.”

This gives us a problem on Untold Dylan, because I have for years proudly proclaimed that we were reviewing all the Dylan compositions, and in saying this I didn’t exclude the instrumentals. And yes I did cover the Billy instrumentals quite a while ago.

So time to make amends.

Life Is Hard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SjZ5agESpkg

Sweeping The Floor

This is an engaging 12 bar blues with a relaxed rocking feel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxyiCM_ruGk

Bumble Bee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJydDId7IEw

Bob’s still keeping to the standard three major chords that most popular music uses. A little piece of atmosphere.

Jane’s Lament

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwiWIpP_RE8

This could be improvised with the guitarist playing along to whatever what on the screen at the time.

Joey’s Theme (alternative version of Forgetful Heart)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIV96fwjMQ4

Again there are suggestions of improvisation here – the whole piece is on one chord and there is a sense that the accordion player is simply playing around the chord as the banjo player plays the chord over and over. I’m rather glad I wasn’t the bass player on this.

The album also has some of the covers from the movie by various cast members

https://youtu.be/343mqZxRc5A

Precious Angel by Renee Zellweger

This rendition really makes the most of a most beautiful song; I’m so glad it is not overplayed but kept completely under control especially in the build up to the “couldn’t make it by myself” life – I have heard so many artists go far too far, far too quickly at that point.

I Believe In You – Don Sparks

The elegance of the performance of “Precious Angel” is retained here. I find this rendition utterly moving.

Life Is Hard – Renee Zellweger

And in keeping with the rest of the music, this is perfectly poised, delicate but not fragile.

Here is the complete list of tracks used in the movie – including some more links to the songs. I’ve not put in links to music from the Classical-Romantic repertoire, as that is not what Untold is primarily about, but I have included the more contemporary songs that were used in the film.

Anything missing, is missing because I can’t find a copy on the internet.

Bob Dylan – Forgetful Heart (Dylan)
Bob Dylan – Life Is Hard (Dylan)
Bob Dylan – Sweeping The Floor (Dylan) *
Bob Dylan – Bumble Bee (Dylan) *
Bob Dylan – Jane’s Lament (Dylan) *
Bob Dylan – Joey’s Theme (Dylan) *
Ron Eaton – Preludes, Opus 28 #6 in b Minor (Chopin)
Bob Dylan – I Feel A Change Coming On (Dylan)
Bob Dylan – Driving South (Dylan) *
Georges Drakoulias – What Good Am I (Dylan)
Forest Whitaker – What Good Am I (Dylan)
Bob Dylan – Back Alley (Dylan) *
Bob Dylan – Snow Falling (Dylan) *
Bob Dylan – Billie #30 (Dylan) *
Chopin Nocturne 7
Renee Zellweger – Precious Angel (Dylan)
Bob Dylan – Road Weary (Dylan) *
Bob Dylan – Click Clack (Dylan) *
Bob Dylan – Life Is Hard (Dylan) (instrumental)
Bob Dylan – Robbie Robert’s Lament (Dylan) *
Robert Johnson – Me And The Devil Blues

Bob Dylan – New Orleans Drums (Dylan) *
Bob Dylan – Janet’s Step (Dylan) *
Source Music – Late Night Blues For Leroy Carr

Ron Eaton – Preludes, Opus 28 #4 in e Minor (Chopin)
Don Sparks – I Believe In You
Bob Dylan – Swingin’ (Dylan) *
Bob Dylan – Blues Club (Playback) (Dylan) *
Renee Zellweger – This Land Is Your Land

Bob Dylan – It’s All Good (Dylan)
Bob Dylan – East Texas (Dylan) *
The Bourbon Street Stompers – Down By The Riverside

Georges Darkoulias – What Good Am I (Dylan)
Ron Eaton – Preludes, Opus 28 #15 in Db Major (Chopin)
Renee Zellweger – Life Is Hard (Dylan)
Bob Dylan – Beyond Here Lies Nothing (Dylan)

Again particular thanks to Mike for alerting us to this omission on the site. And if you find a legal way to provide recordings of the missing tracks (other than the classical-romantic pieces, and the Together through Life tracks, which we have of course already reviewed, please do write in. As ever it is Tony@schools.co.uk

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Bob Dylan And The Tombstone Blues (Part VI)

Posted on October 16, 2020 by TonyAttwood

The series so far…

By Larry Fyffe

In his song lyrics, generally speaking, singer/songwriter Bob Dylan avoids making direct comments about specific politicians – most of the time.

Concerning a Jewish American senator who’d run for US president (and lose) against Lyndon Johnson, Bob Dylan writes the humorous lines quoted below:

Now I'm liberal, but to a degree
I want everybody to be free
But if you think that I'll let Barry Goldwater
Move in next door, and marry my daughter
You must think I'm crazy
(Bob Dylan: I Shall Be Free No. 10)

Nixon is not mentioned by name in any of Bob Dylan’s song lyrics, but it’s not much of a stretch to consider that he’s the President who stands naked.

President Bill Clinton is not directly mentioned either in any of his song lyrics, but Dylan performs “Chimes Of Freedom” at Clinton’s inauguration concert so it’s reasonable to assume that the newly-elected President’s political position is not anathema to the singer/songwriter:

Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake
Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned, and forsaked
Tolling for outcast, burning constantly at stake
And we gazed upon the the chimes of freedom flashing
(Bob Dylan: Chimes Of Freedom)

A song that pays tribute to hymn below:

Tolling for the outcast, tolling for the gay
Tolling for the millionaire, and friends long passed away
But my heart is light and gay as I stroll down old Broadway
And listen to the chimes of Trinity
(Peerless Quartet: Chimes Of Trinity ~ MJ Fitzpatrick)

Keeping with the political agenda, First Lady Hillary Clinton gives an address at Ulster University in Belfast, Northern Ireland; at the time my first cousin Trevor Smith (son of my mother’s brother), is Vice-Chancellor there; he makes the introductory remarks (see:11/O2/97 video at C~Span, ‘Northern Ireland Peace Process’). The Clinton sex scandal is yet to break; Dylan’s constant concert touring stopped because of a medical problem.

In the lyrics below, it might be suggested the ‘Uncle Bill’ refers to Clinton, and that ‘Uncle Tom’ is Obama in the White House who slavishly carries on a Clinton’s political agenda beneath Capitol Hill in Washington:

Uncle Tom still working for Uncle Bill
Scarlet Town is under the hill
(Bob Dylan: Scarlet Town)

Seems a nasty stretch, however, in that Dylan and Obama have a personal connection – Dylan performs “The Times They Are A-Changing” at Obama’s celebration of the civil rights movement in the White House (later receives the Medal of Freedom there from the same President):

Come senators, congressman
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
(Bob Dylan: The Times They Are A-Changing)

In his so-called “Christian phase”, Dylan writes some lyrics that can certainly be construed as ‘right wing’, but he returns to the idealism engendered by the presidency of John Kennedy – a mythical paradise that is lost with his assassination:

Your brothers are coming, there'll be hell to pay
Brothers? What brothers? What's this about hell?
Tell them, "We're waiting, keep coming"
We'll get them as well
(Bob Dylan: Murder Most Foul)

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

Dignity (1989) part II: You can never play too much Bob Wills

Posted on October 15, 2020 by TonyAttwood

Previously: Dignity Part 1: A bloody mess

by Jochen Markhorst

II You can never play too much Bob Wills

“The list could be endless,” says Dylan, referring to the many archetypes appearing in “Dignity”. Thus, the songwriter implicitly reveals that he already had a “list-song” in mind at the time of conception, a song like “Political World”, “Forever Young”, “Everything Is Broken”, “Blowin’ In The Wind”… that list is endless too. Well, not endless, but he has written quite a few – depending on your definition, about fifteen to thirty.

Within that category, “Dignity” is really only comparable to “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” – a similar explosion of metaphors testifying to Dylan’s “pictorial way of thinking”, as the Nobel Prize Committee later will call it. The opening stanza is an excellent example thereof:

Fat man lookin’ in a blade of steel
Thin man lookin’ at his last meal
Hollow man lookin’ in a cottonfield
For dignity

The colour of the lyrics is also comparable to Hard Rain: bleak. Where Hard Rain evokes apocalyptic visions, due also to Dylan’s own commentary on the song (declaring, falsely, to have written the song during the Cuban crisis and that the resulting mortal fear was the trigger), this first verse pushes the associations towards the Holocaust.

This is mainly due to the hollow man-vers line. Coincidence perhaps, but the image is practically identical to Primo Levi’s description of his fellow concentration camp residents. From the beginning of the most moving, and at the same time stylistically brilliant book about the Holocaust, from Ecce Homo (“If This Is A Man”, 1958):

“Imagine now a man who has been deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, of literally everything, in short, that he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, heedless of dignity and restraint, for he who loses everything can easily lose himself.”

“A hollow man, heedless of dignity”… It is conceivable that these crushing words of one of the greatest Jewish authors of the twentieth century resonate with Dylan.

In hindsight, then, the first line has the same sinister undertone as the stage direction from “Lily, Rosemary And The Jack Of Hearts” (“Rosemary started drinkin’ hard and seein’ her reflection in the knife”) and the second line involuntarily evokes the misery of Levi’s starving fellow-victims in Auschwitz.

Technically, it is “just” a list-couplet like there are dozens of them, just a list of an eclectic range of men. Dylan himself undoubtedly rocked along with Sinatra’s “The Look Of Love” (not Dusty Springfield’s song with the same title, that of the James Bond film Casino Royale, 1967) on Softly, As I Leave You (1964);

I've seen the look of a jockey on a winner
I've seen the look of a fat man havin' dinner
I've seen the look of those spacemen up above
But the look that closes the book is the look of love

…and Dylan must also be familiar with Mother’s Finest’s world hit “Piece Of The Rock” from 1977,

A millionaire lookin' for another million dollars
A poor man lookin' for one
A chainstore owner lookin' for another store
A hungry man lookin' for a hamburger bone.

The walking music encyclopaedia Dylan could effortlessly name another twenty songs; as a template the form is not too original. But his execution thereof, the content, is. Usually a song poet uses the enumeration to express something like “inside we are the same” or “we all have our problems”. Judy Garland’s “You Can’t Have Everything” (Rich man, poor man, beggar or king, you just can’t have everything), “God’s Children” by The Kinks, Gershwin’s “Love Is Sweeping The Country”… there are dozens of songs with such a tinker tailor soldier listing that try to express that naïve household philosophy of basically-we-are-all-equal. But, despite its superficiality, it’s an irresistible, golden formula, and it inspires catchy variations -like Elvis’ “King Of The Whole Wide World” (1962);

A poor man wants to be a rich man
A rich man wants to be a king

… which sixteen years later shall resound in Springsteen’s masterpiece “Badlands”:

Poor man wanna be rich
Rich man wanna be king
And a king ain't satisfied
'Til he rules everything

Otherwise, as in Mother’s Finest’s song, the enumeration is used to express social injustice. As in the song that gets a name-check in Dylan’s “Murder Most Foul” in 2020, in Bob Wills’ “Take Me Back To Tulsa” from 1941 (Poor man raise the cotton rich man makes the money). Originally Wills sings the rather racist darkie raise the cotton, white man gets the money, but successors like Merle Haggard prefer to change that particular line. In Theme Time Radio Hour episode 20, “Musical Maps”, broadcaster Dylan plays the original though, with that questionable text, but he doesn’t waste a single word on that darkie. Dylan does, however, quite explicitly profess his love for Bob Wills (“Here on Theme Time Radio Hour we believe you can never play too much Bob Wills”) and concludes the broadcast with a heartfelt incident regarding an injustice that has been done to his hero:

“In Gruene, Texas, there is an eight-foot statue for Bob Wills. On Saturday May 2, 2006, vandals knocked it over, and knocked its arm off. Local radio stations offered a reward for information leading to an arrest. I don’t know if anyone was arrested, but if you’re listening: stop vandalizing that statue. Bob Wills is a national treasure and must be respected.”

In itself, though, the antithesis in “Take Me Back To Tulsa” is classical, a contradiction like in “Fortunate Son”, like in the dozens of songs in which a rich man is set against a poor man, or a fat man against a thin man. In 2006 disk-jockey Dylan even devotes an entire broadcast to it (Theme Time Radio Hour episode 13, “Rich Man, Poor Man”).

The choice of cottonfield, however, suggests that Dylan is indeed singing that Bob Wills song in the back of his mind. But his implementation is idiosyncratic.

All other songs use these archetypes to illustrate either essential equality or a crying injustice. Dylan’s find frees “Dignity”’s opening stanza from such one-dimensionality. First off, the choice of words puts the listener on the wrong track. Only after the third line, after hollow man, we hear how “looking” is used as a transitive verb. The men do not look in a blade, at a last meal and in a cotton field respectively, but look for, for “dignity”, apparently.

These last two words, for dignity, is a brilliant, confusing find that torpedoes the listener’s expectations and tilts the previous lines. Predictable would be a traditional contrast; the fat man is an exploiting bad guy, the thin man an exploited poor soul, and then, after that hollow man in the cotton field, we would expect a solid man on the veranda, something in that vein.

But no; it is only then we understand that the list of archetypes is not a list of men set against each other, but rather a list connecting them – they all are searching for dignity.

The ambiguity of Dylan’s directing instructions provides the magical, poetic brilliance of this quatrain. The fat man may be sitting at a dining table, staring, like Rosemary did back in the days, at his reflection in the blade of his knife. Or, like Rosemary back in the days, about to commit murder. Or he is the victim and an aggressor holds the knife in front of the fat man’s face… possible too. But it is more appropriate, of course, to appreciate the parable-like quality of this verse fragment, and of the whole text at all; it does not say what it says. A “blade of steel” then depicts something transient, like “weaponry”, and the fat man is the archetypal master of war, a Goering type, a warlord or arms dealer who earns his living from war – and now seems to be at a moral crossroads: “What the hell am I doing?”, something like that.

Just like the thin man’s last meal opens several doors; in extremis literally his last meal, a last meal on Death Row, or he stares hungrily at fat man’s last meal, or – the most obvious, but therefore not necessarily the best interpretation – he looks at the remains of his own, most recent meal. But on a transcendental level, the thin man represents the fat man’s antithesis, meaning the one standing on the other end of that weaponry. And the hollow man then is the real victim of both, the concentration camp prisoner, the slave, the man reduced to suffering and needs, heedless of dignity and restraint, as Levi says.

The insight that he can turn the opening into such a compact triplet only gradually subsides, as the alternative versions on The Bootleg Series 8 – Tell Tale Signs (2008) reveal. An overarching Holocaust narrative can still be distilled from the first version, the naked piano version (“fat man lookin’ in the shining steel”), but has evaporated from the brilliant second version:

Fat man lookin' at a ferris wheel
Yellow man lookin' at his last meal
Hollow man lookin' in a cottonfield
For dignity

The versions on the illegal bootlegs open with the final, official lyrics, just like the MTV Unplugged recording – apparently the poet lacks the aggressive charge of steel with ferris wheel, and does, on second thought, need the antithesis fat man – thin man (and probably is not too happy with the ugly, unintentional inner rhyme yellow – hollow).

He is right. And the great artists of Solas are wrong; for unknown reasons they skip precisely this verse, in their wonderful cover on The Edge Of Silence (2002). The definitive twenty-three words of the opening quatrain form a perfect, closed in itself tableau of a condition humaine.

To be continued. Next up: Dignity part III

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

All directions at once: Bob Dylan in 1964; (while we were still in 1963)

Posted on October 15, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Tony Attwood

This is part 8 of “All Directions at once. Previous episodes are…

In 2020 by the time “Rough and Rowdy Ways” was released, most of us had already downloaded and played endlessly the extracts from the album that Dylan and his record company had agreed to put on line for public consumption: it was “in the wild” long before it was “released.”

Although it is hard to appreciate now, the reverse was true in terms of Freewheelin’. It was released in May 1963, but unless one was living in New York, or completely up to date with the very latest trends in the American folk music scene how would one have known? Maybe some US radio stations played it – I wouldn’t know. But I do know that by the time many of us had bought it, “Times they are a changin'” had been written and Bob was lyrically and musically somewhere else.

Then it happened again. As (I suspect) most of us were trying to come to terms with the evolution between Freewheelin’ and its successor, Bob had already moved on and was writing “Another Side,” which came out the following August. Thus in the space of 15 months (May 1963 to August 1964) Dylan released three utterly ground-breaking albums: Freewheelin’, Times and Another Side. And written a huge lot more.

The compositions that appeared on these three albums are harder to date exactly but “Blowing in the Wind,” the first Freewheelin’ song was almost certainly written in April 1962, while “My Back Pages” the last of Another Side, was written in early June 1964. So all those works within those albums were written in a 26 month period. Given the diversity of these songs, that is an amazing achievement.

But that was not all. For within that period of writing the music for those three albums Dylan actually wrote 75 songs. That in itself is phenomenal – even composers of the most mundane of songs who churn them out to order, can’t compose that many songs in 26 months. But to write that many and include within that era so many phenomenal masterpieces is utterly extraordinary. Then on top of that to go through at least three major stylistic changes, is beyond belief. To my mind if one wants a simple justification of the notion that Dylan is a unique genius, then that one burst of songwriting is enough to achieve that.

And even this burst of composition was not everything. For having achieved all that and recorded the three albums that made and secured his reputation, Dylan then amused himself in the remainder of the year by writing three classics of the “individualism” genre “Gates of Eden”, “It’s all right ma” and “If you’ve gotta go, go now”.

The first two have within them strong elements of the “protest” genre, as well as a lot of Dylan’s latest fascination: the notion that the world very much does not make sense. And then the year ended (in terms of compositions) with another song of farewell. What we see therefore is that by now Dylan had a set of themes for his songs which he liked to use and re-use, and I’ll return to this as we progress through the years. New themes were certainly found from time to time, but many of the old ones returned time and time again throughout Bob’s writing career. The blues, lost love, moving on… he returned to these themes time and again, no matter where else he ventured.

That of course doesn’t mean that Bob’s music was the same. Musically and lyrically “Gates of Eden” and “It’s all right ma” take us into new fields. Anyone hearing those songs at the time of composition would know at once that Dylan’s next album was going to be different again.

Obviously Dylan’s music was getting a fulsome exposure on radio stations in North America, where stations catering for all tastes already existed. Britain, and Europe generally however had very restricted radio services which had no space available for such a rapidly evolving talent.

But in 1964 the first pirate radio station appeared in Europe. And to be clear, Radio Luxembourg was never a pirate radio station although Bob has suggested it was; that station found a niche because the amount of popular music broadcast on radio stations in the UK was extremely limited, and so R. Luxembourg (based in the principality and fully licensed by the government of the country) became the evening and night time broadcaster of top 40 music to the British Isles.

But it was thoroughly a top 40 station, financed by the record companies that released the pop music of the day, and so even there one was not going to hear Dylan. The fact that he existed and his music was revolutionary and radical was a matter dealt with in the four weekly pop and rock music papers. In the end, if you wanted to hear the music, you had to take a chance and buy the album.

And I suspect this is how it was over much of Europe, and quite possibly parts of North America. The music was being recorded and released, but unless you knew someone who was into Dylan, or read the music weeklies, it was hard to find out more. If you wanted to hear it, you had to take a chance and buy the record.

Then two things happened. Late night programmes on pirate stations like Radio Caroline and Radio London picked up on Dylan, and cover versions of Dylan’s songs began to appear and get coverage on mainstream radio. The Byrds, Sonny & Cher, the Hollies, Manfred Mann and others recorded songs, that simply seemed different, and the word spread: these songs resonated with the way many people who were unmoved by contemporary pop actually felt. These were songs that reflected their own feelings about the world in which they lived. Songs that were about more than love, lost love and dance (although Dylan as we have seen wrote a lot about the first two. But even then, when he did choose love and lost love as his themes, he did so in a way that was so completely different from everyone else).

As we got to know the music of “Times” we could hear that here, at last, was a man who was singing about the issues that many of us were concerned about. But what we didn’t know was that while we were marvelling at the “Times” album, Bob was writing Guess I’m doing fine (a simple folksong about being hurt) and then Chimes of Freedom (a song of hope, which I noted at length previously) followed by Mr Tambourine Man (an utterly different song concerning the way we see the world and touching on surrealism).

And although it was beyond the understanding of most late night disc jockeys and weekly newspaper pop music journalists, some of us did grasp the fact that, “Let us forget about today until tomorrow” is the antithesis of the fight for justice at the heart of the protest movement, although curiously it resonates strongly with “Times they are a changin” wherein the times appear to change by themselves, without any interaction from us. Likewise the Chimes of Freedom simply are there, “Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended.” We don’t do anything; life moves on. That wasn’t quite what those who were protesting against capitalism and society in the city streets in the 1960s, were thinking.

These two songs are linked; they both touch on the relationship between music and the world, and to a degree the way in which we are in control of how we see the world. They concern the relationship between the artist and the world, as well as the implication that just as we will all experience the change predicted in “Times” so we can all see the world in a new way, if we choose to.

This was an utterly revolutionary approach to any concept of popular music that had existed previously. Songs which debated the passing of time, and our appreciation of the world around us as philosophical concepts were simply not known. And indeed ever since then these songs have often seemed to baffle commentators, who flailing in the face of such challenging concepts have retreated to debates about whether Dylan stole the music or lyrics from somewhere else, or indeed who he was dating. Such debating has always been irrelevant; at this moment it was even more irrelevant than usual.

For anyone who was actually paying attention to the music and the lyrics, rather than its sources, it would have be no surprise that after the success of “Times they are a changin'” both in terms of the song and the album, Bob changed again. Some might have expected Bob to stay with the writing of protest songs, at least for a while, but no, that has never been his way. Instead he wrote I don’t believe you (a lost love song), Spanish Harlem Incident (a love song) Motorpsycho Nightmare (back to Dylan’s unique brand of humour) It ain’t me babe (a song of farewell unlike anything we’d heard before) and Denise Denise (a song about taking a break and having a laugh).

Now this approach of Dylan’s involving moving on from subject to subject within his songs, is a fundamental of his work. Only once did he abandon the approach and that was 1979, when he wrote every song on the same subject. We will obviously get to that later – but not for a while.

But now another change was happening. Everyone recognised the huge success Peter PAul and Mary had had with Dylan’s work, so from 1964 onwards, other singers and groups fancied a bit of the action and so started to notice Bob’s music and began to record it. And this, I think, was the third big event of this period. First he had jumped from theme to theme in what he was writing. Second he was exploring lyrical themes that no one else touched, and now third other esteemed performers were hearing his songs and re-interpreting them.

And this third point is a key issue that I think is sometimes missed. The notion of taking a Dylan song and re-arranging it completely is what we are all used to in terms of the Never Ending Tour; it is what we expect, it is what we are there to hear. But this was new in the 1960s. In this regard Bob had already started to become not just a one man songwriting industry, but a producer of songs that could be taken apart and rebuilt. Here’s an early example

Mama you’ve been on my mind is a beautiful song of lost love – one of Dylan’s favourite themes as we have noticed. It came immediately before (in terms of Dylan’s writing), the oh so painful desperate poem of lost love and dislike Ballad in Plain D. Plain D got the attention, but it can be argued that “Mama” is the much, much more exquisite piece. The contrast, if noted at the time, was rather baffling, not least because we didn’t know the guy was writing enough to produce not just two but five albums a year, should he have wanted to. But also because he could change subject so quickly.

These two songs cannot have a greater contrast between them. Plain D recounts the disintegration of a relationship and the conflicts surrounding this. It is fair to say that no one else had written a song like this at the time (and I am not sure there have been many since).

But then “Mama” although a totally different type of song, is equally revolutionary, and to my mind far more successful. Both songs use the same unusual approach to the chord sequence, involving variations of what in classical music is called the “interrupted cadence” which simply put means ending a line with a most unusual and unexpected pair of chords

But Mama goes much further both musically and lyrically.

Just consider …

Perhaps it’s the color of the sun cut flat
An’ cov’rin’ the crossroads I’m standing at
Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that
But mama, you been on my mind

OK, if you have known those lines for years they might float by, but just look at them. We can by and large work out a meaning, but quite what has each line got to do with the next? Yes given a few moments we can work something out – but even then there is still a problem. The poet is saying over and over, it’s nothing, I’ve just been thinking about you, that’s all. Except that he says, “pretendin’ not that I don’t know” – and if we think we are bound to ask what on earth he is talking about? That “pretending” line means “I’m pretending I know” which means “I don’t know” … or does it. Trying to work that line out we go round in circles, which is exactly what the singer of the song is doing. He doesn’t know, he doesn’t understand, and Dylan expresses this both musically and lyrically in a way that I suspect has never been done before in folk or pop.

And he does this immediately before writing Ballad in Plan D!

I don’t mean trouble, please don’t put me down or get upset
I am not pleadin’ or sayin’, “I can’t forget”
I do not walk the floor bowed down an’ bent, but yet
Mama, you been on my mind

If ever there is a Dylan song in which, to understand it, you need to listen to the music and lyrics, and not just the lyrics, this is it.

If we go back to the version on Bootleg Series volumes 1 to 3 (disk 2 track 4, recorded 6 September 1964) what we find is a plaintive song with endless unexpected chord changes (sometimes catching us out by coming half a beat to early or late). But it is none of this that causes us to stop and think “what?”

It is the musical structure which gives us two four bar phrases in standard 4/4, but with a bar (in the first verse) in 3/4 time. Even if we are ready, the next verse throws us out again, because that interrupting half-way house bar is reduced to a beat. By the third verse it has become a complete 4/4 bar.

So it goes on with the timing of the piece becoming ever vaguer and more and more unexpected. And no one at the time was doing anything remotely like this in popular music.

What aids these curious rhythmic changes is the fact that the lines of the verses over run, cut short, change… there is in fact no rhythmic constancy. Conventionally the lyrics are written (depending of course on the version you are listening to) as

Perhaps it’s the colour of the sun cut flat
An’ cov’rin’ the crossroads I’m standing at
Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that
But mama, you been on my mind

But equally we could have

Perhaps it’s the colour of the sun cut flat An’ cov’rin’
the crossroads I’m standing at
Or maybe it’s the weather or something like that
But mama, you been on my mind

Or in the second verse

I don’t mean trouble, please don’t put me down or get upset
I am not pleadin’ or sayin’, “I can’t forget”
I do not walk the floor bowed down an’ bent, but yet
Mama, you been on my mind

could actually be

I don’t mean trouble, please don’t put me down or get upset
I am not pleadin’ 
or sayin’, “I can’t forget”
I do not walk the floor bowed down an’ bent, but yet
Mama, you been on my mind

However we play with them, the words express the mixed up feelings that we can all get at the end of a love affair, where the narrow thoughts are eating us up, but we are trying to deny it is happening. We desperately want to get out of conventional angst (that was very much the thinking of the 1960s – we don’t have to think like our forefathers) – but he knows that this is not really true – he’s just “pretending not that I don’t know”.

And the ending is so powerful that it takes us several hearings of the song to get this right…

I’d just be curious to know if you can see yourself as clear
As someone who has had you on his mind

Can you see yourself as clearly as I can see you? Now, there’s a thought and a half. Utterly simple, utterly complex.

What we have here is a piece in which the music follows the words, but the words endlessly tumble over an the music is trying to catch up, until by the end the words follow the music. Words can get extended in different versions as in the final verse in the second line suddenly the “I” in “I won’t be near” is curiously given an extra beat and a half in some versions – but not others.

Of course this works in the early recordings because it is Dylan on his own – you can’t so easily do this with a rock band, or even if singing a duet. And so as time has gone by the song has become fixed into set rhythms, although Dylan’s own performance with Joan Baez retains some of the rhythmic oddities, but in the end it loses all the subtleties. If you want this song as it was intended you have to have a solo version.

And maybe it is because the song can exist in so many different versions that we never had a version of it on the early albums. Certainly the song was intended to perhaps for Times They Are a Changing or Another Side of Bob Dylan but came out on neither, and we had to wait for the live versions, and the Bootleg series.

So this is a song whose rhythm we can’t hold down, and indeed nor can we with the chords – version after version of the song has been recorded with different chords, and of course different feelings.

And maybe this is the mark of a great, great song – because it can be reinvented so many, many times. Contrast the Buckley version above (if you dare) with Rod Stewart’s version on the “Reason to Believe” album, which works in a Rod Stewart sort of way, but utterly, utterly fails with the twiddly instrumental cover for the pauses that some idiot somewhere decided to put in. They mean nothing, have no relation to the song, and destroy what could have been an entertaining version of the piece.

But the fact that you can have so many different versions shows what a song this is.

So magnificent is this song that you don’t need to know the origins of the lyrics, but for completeness, let’s record the fact that it is the breakup with his girlfriend Suze Rotolo (or at least that is what the commentators say) that led to the song. But the notion of Oliver Trager which suggests this is a “straightforward love song of separation and yearning” is to miss the point. That is the start, but not the end.

People who suffer romantic breakups as Dylan had done react in different ways – and often different ways at different times. Some are devastated, some remain in a very depressed or even desperate state for months or years. But Bob, it seems, after writing that piece could pick himself up and just move on. It must also have been a warning note to any other woman, and indeed the family of any such woman, with whom he had a relationship!

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

More Ginsberg and Dylan – the final chapter (we think)

Posted on October 14, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

We have over the years looked at Bob Dylan’s work with Allen Ginsberg a number of times – the articles noted above are the main ones. Not with any intention of doing a series on Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan but rather as a way of recording what we have found (mostly what Aaron has found) as the information has come to light.

This article looks to pull in the other work the two did together which we haven’t touched on so far – and so (as far as we know) round the articles off. But if you we have missed something… please see the plea at the end.

—————-

Bob was involved in two sessions with Allen Ginsberg, once in November 1971 and again in January 82. These resulted in a number of tracks which appeared on the Ginsberg album “First Blues” and subsequently on two further Ginsberg box sets. Tony has already reviewed the Ginsberg/Dylan co-writes “Vomit Express”, “Jimmy Berman Rag”, “September On Jessore Road” and “ For You, Baby”. So now let’s take a listen to some more tracks from these sessions featuring Bob’s musical backing.

First up, with Bob on vocals, guitar, piano and organ… it’s “Goin’ To San Diego”

Tony: What I can’t work out is whether Ginsberg actually can’t sing in tune and has no sense of time and rhythm, or if this is just put on to make a politico-musical point. The clarinettist is however a fine musician – his work contrasts with the lyrics. Is that the point? I wish I knew.

Aaron: Next Bob contributes vocals, piano, organ and guitar to two poems by William Blake, A Dream and Nurse’s Song. I’m not sure anyone will listen to these all the way through. To be honest, they are a bit of a chore, still it’s interesting to hear Bob’s arranging skills.

Also from the same sessions was Ginsberg’ own composition “Spring (Merrily Welcome)”. Bob plays guitar, piano, organ and provides backing vocals. This one is (mercifully) a bit shorter than the others and much more upbeat.

Tony: Ginsberg is highly rated by many people, and Dylan is known to be hyper critical of his own work (just see Dignity Part 1: A bloody mess – the start of Jochen’s new series on “Dignity”). So as for what is going on here, I remain puzzled as before.

Aaron: The final two this time were taken from the 1982 sessions, these were released in 2016 on the “Last Word On “First Blues”” box set. They are a lot funkier than we are used to and here we have the unusual pleasure of hearing Bob join in on bass guitar!

And the second…

Tony: If there is someone who is kind enough to read Untold Dylan, and who has an insight into the music of Ginsberg and why Dylan recorded these pieces with him, I would love to receive either a comment below, or a whole article (send to Tony@schools.co.uk) on Ginsberg and Dylan – or if you prefer Dylan and Ginsberg – which we can publish.

Or indeed if you have a book that explains it all, please do let us know what it is and we’ll try and get a copy. Bemusement exists within the Untold Offices.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Dylan at the mercy of the Muse: Girl from the Red River Shore and Mother of Muses

Posted on October 14, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Peter McQuitty

Girl From the Red River Shore and Mother of Muses are unusual in the Dylan canon. These songs are not about any of the earthly muses who have inspired Dylan’s work and they are not about human relationships. They work on a philosophical level, exploring the relationship between the artist and the Muse, that mysterious source of inspiration and creativity that transforms people into artists. They are also, of course, a window onto the artist’s state of mind. (For ease of reference I will refer to the artist in these songs as Dylan, although I fully understand that not all Dylan songs are self-portraits).

Dylan uses the opening stanza of Girl from the Red River Shore to provide a rough definition of the artist. Some of us are content with the beauty of the natural world; we turn off the lights and “live/In the moonlight shooting by.” Others – the artists – want more. They leave the light of the natural world behind and “scare ourselves to death in the dark,” questing further and higher to the source of things, to “be where the angels fly.”

By the time he recorded Girl from the Red River Shore, the creative confidence of Dylan’s early career was long gone. While the beauty of the natural world can still give him a song he is painfully aware that he is no longer flying with the angels. His Muse – symbolised here by the elusive girl from the Red River shore – has abandoned him. The song is an elegy for the death of the artist’s creativity (and thereby part of a noble tradition, in which the poet writes a great poem lamenting the failure of his poetic powers).

Dylan tells a tale of despair. From the moment that he first laid eyes on the Muse and discovered the joys of creativity, he has known that he “could never be free.” As a confident, young man he assumed that “She should always be with me”. He learns the hard way that she is not that kind of girl; she rejects his marriage proposal and is definitely not available on demand. She wonders whether he is strong enough to live the artist’s life: “she said/Go home and lead a quiet life.”

The good and creative times – “All those nights when I lay in the arms/Of the girl from the Red River shore” – are now “a thousand nights ago,” like something from a fairy tale. Dylan is “living in the shadows of a fading past” and there are those critics who say that he and the Muse have never been united: “Everybody that I talked to had seen us there/Said they didn’t know who I was talking about.” He is bereft: “Well, the dream dried up a long time ago/Don’t know where it is anymore.”

And then in the last stanza we have a dramatic and radical transition as he takes us suddenly into Biblical territory, with Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. This is a powerful intervention, given the importance of Christian iconography in Dylan’s work. It is particularly powerful because Dylan uses it not as a metaphor for hope but as a gauge of his despair. He is not here this time to praise Jesus or to preach his gospel. He is here for himself and this tale of resurrection only serves to counterpoint the death of his own creativity: “Well, I don’t know what kind of language he used/ Or if they do that kind of thing anymore”. That guy “who lived a long time ago” can work his miracles for Lazarus but it’s unlikely that he can help this artist: “Sometimes I think nobody ever saw me here at all/Except the girl from the Red River shore”.

As the evidence shows, the Muse did not desert Dylan. His long creative career has had peaks and troughs and the old artist in Mother of Muses is at ease with himself and his Muse. He doesn’t expect her to be with him every hour of his life and he is confident that, wherever she is, she will hear his prayers.

Mother of Muses is many things. It is a prayer for inspiration. Dylan prays to the Muse to stay with him to the end, to clear his vision and remove the invisible barriers that are blocking his creative path. It is a prayer for consolation. As he nears the end he asks her to sing of the things that he has loved – the mountains and the seas, the lakes, the nymphs of the forest and the heroes who have shaped his world.

It is also a prayer for his artistic legacy to be remembered. It is appropriate that Dylan – who has lived the performance artist’s life – as he sings in Dark Eyes, “in another world/where life and death are memorised” – should invoke Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and remembrance. It is also appropriate because memory, remembrance and artistic legacy are important themes in this song. He wants to be remembered for and through his art and he prays to the Muse to “Forge my identity from the inside out.”

While Dylan’s praise for the Generals who defeated slavery and Nazism should come as no surprise his real themes in this section are memory and legacy rather than the military. Names carved on tablets of stone will crumble into dust, but memories live on and grow. As Dylan says of his Generals: “Man, I could tell their stories all day.” And as he writes about memory and legacy he is also writing about himself. He concludes the stanza praising “the heroes who stood alone” with a plea for his own legacy: “Mother of Muses, sing for me.”

His explicit alignment of himself with other writers on this album is unexpected and is a slightly sad legacy plea. He “contains multitudes” like Whitman; he’s got “a tell-tale heart, like Mr. Poe,”; he “writes songs of experience like William Blake”; he “was born on the wrong side of the railroad track/Like Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac.” And then there are ostentatious Shakespeare references – “the winter of my discontent,” “to be or not to be”. Dylan seems to be drawing attention to his own credentials as an artist by highlighting the artistic company he keeps. As he sings on False Prophet: “I’m first among equals/Second to none.”

The final stanza of this song sets out a much more convincing legacy strategy, one so bold that only Dylan could have thought of it and only the irreverent Greek mythology that he is working through could have enabled it.

Dylan has already outlived his life by far and has been “slow coming home” but he’s ready now. And he certainly doesn’t intend to just fade away. He asks Mnemosyne to take him to the river – probably the Lethe, one of the five rivers leading to the underworld. Those who drink from the Lethe experience forgetfulness and oblivion but Dylan goes a step further. He uses the Greek mythic convention where divinities have sex with mortals to envisage a final and dramatic consummation of the relationship between artist and Muse: “Take me to the river, release your charms/Let me lay down a while in your sweet, loving arms/Wake me, shake me, free me from sin.” This final consummation will lead to a dramatic metamorphosis. His physical presence will be obliterated and he will become “invisible, like the wind”. I’m not saying that vanity got the best of him but he certainly plans to leave here in style.

In conclusion I would like to say a little more about Dylan’s dazzling ability to manipulate genre. In Girl from the Red River Shore he exploited and disrupted the cowboy ballad formula. In Mother of Muses he adopts a form from “Long before the first Crusade/Way back ‘fore England or America were made.” Mnemosyne, Calliope, and the “women of the chorus” are hardly familiar figures in rock music and Douglas Brinkley, in the preface to his New York Times interview with Dylan (12 June 2020) demonstrates how alien the song is to many when he describes it as “a hymn to . . . gospel choirs.” Dylan, in his sly way, does imply a sideways allusion from the Greek chorus to the women who sang their hearts out in his own past backing bands (and who became part of his life) but this song is definitely not about gospel choirs. Similarly, his reference to “the nymphs of the forest” inevitably takes us back to the “glamorous nymph with and an arrow and bow” who misguidedly wandered into the lyrics of Sara.

Dylan is sufficiently confident about the formulas within which he is working to make a joke about genre. His relationship with Mnemosyne is strong and he mentions to her that he is “falling in love with Calliope,” one of her daughters. Calliope is the goddess of epic poetry, a long narrative form which celebrates the deeds of warrior heroes and gods. The Iliad – the story of Achilles and the Trojan Wars – is the most famous of all epics and is referenced in My Own Version of You. Dylan has co-opted some elements from this now unfashionable genre into this song and into Murder Most Foul and he wonders in passing if Calliope might have a future with him: “She don’t belong to anyone, why not give her to me?” This is just his passing thought. Dylan writes very long songs but these do not in themselves constitute epics. And, as we have seen, he is in any case more interested in the mother than the daughter.

In a song that is full of surprises, one if the best is to learn that Dylan could sit around all day telling stories about the military exploits of his five favourite Generals. That could lead to a new audience for him.

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

Posted in Uncategorized | 8 Comments

Dignity Part 1: A bloody mess

Posted on October 13, 2020 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

I A bloody mess

Oh Mercy! is quite a beautiful album anyhow. Otherwise we would have been forced to impose a serious reprimand on Dylan for omitting the masterpieces “Series Of Dreams”, “Born In Time” and “Dignity”. One reproach can still be made, though: “Dignity” would have been a much more successful opening than the equally driving, but melodic and lyrically much less catchy “Political World” – great song, but hardly as monumental as “Dignity”.

In Chronicles the bard remembers the rise and fall of the song. As usual crystal clear, yet incomprehensible. He describes how he is shocked by the news flash on the radio about the sudden death of the basketball player ‘Pistol’ Pete Maravich, whom he admires († 5 January 1988) and writes the whole song (and more) in a kind of inspired frenzy in the course of the same day and following night. “It’s like I saw the song up in front of me.” That primeval version is a bit longer, with even more archetypes, he tells. Big Ben, Virgin Mary, the Wrong Man and more: “The list could be endless.”

However, the connection between the legendary basketball player or his death with one of these characters, or with the theme of the song lyrics at all, remains unfathomable.

While writing, Dylan already hears the music in his head, too. Rhythm, tempo, melody line, everything. And He saw that it was good: “This song was a good thing to have.” He is in no hurry recording it, though. A song like this he won’t forget, he knows, and recording it is so boring. What’s more: “I didn’t like the current sounds.”

All of a sudden there appears to be a sharper discernment than we are used to from the man who, in this decade, doesn’t think recordings of brilliants like “Angelina”, “Caribbean Wind” and “Blind Willie McTell” are good enough. Fear of the disastrous effect of the 80’s sauce over a song like “Dignity” is indeed justified and it is to be applauded that the bard prefers to wait for better times with a fresh producer.

He does not have to wait very long. Just over a year later, in February 1989, better times have come, and a skilful, passionate producer has been found: Daniel Lanois.

Dylan will provide a series of beautiful recordings for Oh Mercy. And indeed, Dylan hasn’t forgotten “Dignity”; it’s one of the first songs of which a demo will be made.

Things are going well until then, at least: according to the chronicler himself. There’s nothing wrong with a first, sparingly instrumented recording with the vocals up front, he thinks, but an infectiously enthusiastic Lanois has some wild dreams about what he can achieve with this song when they record it tomorrow with Rockin’ Dopsie and his Cajun Band. Dylan lets himself be convinced.

And that is where the downfall of “Dignity” begins. After a day of muddling through text changes, tempo modifications and alternative keys, and after more than twenty recordings, the promise “was beaten into a bloody mess”. Disillusioned, Lanois and Dylan turn away from the song. The demo and one of the many outtakes can later be found on Tell Tale Signs (2008), others on bootlegs like Deeds Of Mercy and The Genuine Bootleg Series.

After Oh Mercy the song seems to be forgotten for a while, but in ’94 it reappears at the MTV Unplugged sessions. At the time ignored and even vilified, for obscure reasons, but as a matter of fact still very enjoyable today.

The same goes for the version used for Greatest Hits Vol. III (November ’94). Producer Brendan O’Brien (from, among others, Pearl Jam) waltzes off with the Lanois recordings, throws away everything except the voice and puts his own beautiful organ under it. This version also receives all the (un)necessary criticism, which from a present-day point of view seems just as empty; it really is a beautiful, “dry” recording, exciting and subdued at the same time. Dylan himself seems to think so too; a lot of (and the best, actually) live performances in the Never Ending Tour are grafted onto this version – with the troubadour singing better and better, too.

MTV Unplugged

The lyrics are from a Dylan at the top of his game. Fascinating, rich and mysterious, and by all means comparable to a highlight like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”: a collage of unrelated images, half-known cinematic fragments, literary references, cool humour and biblical imagery, which together sketch a gloomy, grim world view in which there is no place for Dignity.

The images are connected by a literary stylistic device we don’t encounter too often in Dylan’s oeuvre: the allegory, the personified abstraction, in this case Dignity. The narrator searches from Alaska (“The land of the midnight sun”) to the Valley of the Dry Bones (from one of Dylan’s favourite Bible books, Ezekiel), searches in literary masterpieces (in Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre, among others) and everyone he meets along the way is also looking for her – in vain. He is stranded on the shore of a lake and seems to give up – in this world he will no longer find Dignity. Gloomy indeed.

Fortunately, the music offers hope. It pushes forwards, expresses optimism and does not fade away – on the other side of the lake we will resume our quest.

A strong unity apparently, the lyrics and the music. The covers seldom deviate, do imitate the compelling urgency of the rhythm and tempo of the original and copy remarkably often percussion guitar and organ (Joe Cocker, the French “La Dignité” from Francis Cabrel, the splendid Italian “Dignità” by Francesco Di Gregori). Even the implausible Nana Mouskouri adheres to this format (1997), puts a pleasant piano part under it, and then confirms the prejudices by inviting a gruesome women’s choir into the studio.

Elliot Murphy does not fall for that trap. His version is beautiful but doesn’t really add anything (on the “Reporters sans frontiers” album Dignity, 2002).

Robyn Hitchcock, in contrast, does his utmost best to be original, but unfortunately – he produces a weird, monotonous cover that only gets some attraction halfway, when the bass joins in.

No, the best cover is recorded in Amsterdam, by The Low Anthem (2 Meter Sessions, 2009). The quintet from Rhode Island leaves the ambiguous character of the song for what it is and opts for a one-dimensional, text-oriented acoustic interpretation that shines thanks to a gloomy clarinet. Singer Ben Knox Miller browses the different versions in a seemingly random way, choosing the verses he likes the most, messing up the order as well.

Surely the master will allow all that – Ben Knox Miller is, after all, a young man lookin’ in the shadows that pass.

To be continued. Next up: Dignity part II: Blades

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Bob Dylan And Elizabeth Bishop

Posted on October 13, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Larry Fyffe

Whether the singer/songwriter is simply catching the waves breaking on rocky shore of some unconscious Jungian sea, or instead has actually read a particulat poem, in the lyrics of Bob Dylan, the influence of the emotionally detached poetry of Elizabeth Bishop can be detected:

The art of losing isn't hard to master
So many things seem to be filled with the intent
To be lost that their loss is no disaster
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
Of lost door keys, the hour badly spent
The art of losing isn't hard to master

(Elizabeth Bishop: One Art)

Indirectly expressed in the precise object-oriented poem above, there’s revealed the personal hope of finding ideal happiness on earth before life is lost to death, and the door closed to any possibility of reaching it.

Though thematically very similar, in contrast to Bishop there’s a direct personal, emotionally charged “I”-aspect in the song lyrics below:

When you think you've lost everything
You find out you can always lose a little more
I'm just going down the road feeling bad
Trying to get to Heaven before they close the door
(Bob Dylan: Trying To Get To Heaven)

Influenced Bishop be by the objective imagery of anti-Confessionalist poets like Marianne Moore. Anti-Confessionisalist poets centre their focus on external things, on objects, not on internal emotions:

Pink rice-grains, ink-
Bespattered jelly-fish, crabs like green
Lilies, and submarine
Toadstools, slide each on the other
All external 
Marks of abuse are present on this
Defiant edifice

(Marianne Moore: The Fish)

More detached from emotionalism than ‘Trying To Get To Heaven’ is the imagery in the song lyric below; yet evoked is the lack of something that’s desired:

See the primitive wallflower freeze
When the jelly-faced women all sneeze
Hear the one with the moustache say, "Jeez, I can't find my knees"
Oh, jewels and binoculars hang from the head of the mule
But these visions of Johanna, they make it all seen so cruel

(Bob Dylan: Visions Of Johanna)

A transcendentalism of one sort or another (as in the conscious and subconscious memory of the human mind), seems to linger hidden behind the poetic curtains of the objectivist lyricists regardless of any claims to the contrary, and whether or not they employ the “I”-word.

A few years of her early childhood Bishop spends in Great Village, Nova Scotia, from which she is taken away; Elizabeth never forgets that she’s left something behind, but her poetic lyrics, akin to those of Robert Frost, lean in the direction of detached objectivism:

A moose has come out of the impenetrable wood
And stands there, looms rather
In the middle of the road
It approaches, and sniffs at
The bus's hot hood

(Elizabeth Bishop: The Moose)

Methinks it’s very like an iceberg:

It's weight the iceberg dares
Upon a shifting stage, and stands and stares

(Elizabeth Bishop: The Imaginary Iceberg)

While the song lyrics of Bob Dylan often tip quite heavily toward the side of emotional expressionism:

If you're travelling in the north country fair
Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline
Please say 'hello' to the one who lives there
For she once was a true love of mine

(Bob Dylan: Girl From The North Country)

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The art work of The World Gone Wrong

Posted on October 12, 2020 by TonyAttwood

A list of the other articles in this series is given at the foot of this piece.

by Patrick Roefflaer

Released: October 26, 1993
Photographers: Ana Maria Vélez Wood (front) & Randee St. Nicholas (back)
Liner Notes: Bob Dylan
Art-Director: Nancy Donald

Many people have the impression that the photo on the cover of Dylan’s second acoustic album of the Nineties was carefully staged, like the one on Bringing It All Back Home.

What certainly adds to the impression is that Bob is dressed in character: a black coat, black gloves, a top hat and a walking stick (it’s actually an umbrella).

Then there’s a the setting: a green wall, a green table cloth and what looks like one of Dylan’s painting behind him. On the table there’s a blue bottle with a red candle…

The light coming from the right, with the singer face half hidden in the shadow. The photo is printed in a slight tilted angle, accentuated by the black line with the artists’ name and title of the album.

Certainly, Bob Dylan is dressed the same in the video Dave Stewart made for one of the songs from the album: ‘Blood in My Eyes’. But the circumstances of this photo session remained a mystery, until twenty years later.

From 25^th October to 8^th November 2012, there was an exhibition in Battersea, London, called Blood in my Eyes. More than hundred photos were on display; all made by Ana Maria Vélez Wood on one day: July 21^th, 1993. The day both the video and the photo were shot.

There was a catalogue available, in which the photographer and the director gave their comments on what happened that day. As much time had passed since then, they contradicted each other on some of the details. For example Dave Stewart and Ana Maria Wood differ about where and when the photographer got involved. Dave says he asked her about an hour into the shooting and she met them at Camden Lock, while Ana states that she met Dylan at The Church Studios, well before filming started…

In this story, all of the quotes from Wood and Stewart were taken from the catalogue of the exhibition. Thanks to the great Dutch Dylan collector Arie de Reus, for helping me by providing scans from the catalogue. So here it goes:

In the middle of the night, Dave Stewart and his wife Siobhan were alarmed by the phone ringing unexpectedly. When the former Eurythmic picked up the phone, he heard a man with an American accent saying something like: “Hi, this is Bob. I’m coming to London in a couple of hours to make a video. Would you help me?”

A sleepy Stewart soon realized that it was Bob Dylan who needed his help. He surely knew Dylan was in Europe at the time, as his Summer Tour had ended in Germany, four days before the call.

Although he hadn’t heard from Bob in a long time, the call didn’t come completely out of the blue, as Stewart has worked with Dylan before. In August 1985 he had been executive producer for the video clip of ‘Emotionally Yours’ and a few months later, Dylan even came to London to try out Eurythmics’ studio, The Church, in Crouch Hill, North London.

A few hours later, Bob Dylan meets Dave on his houseboat on the Regents Canal in Camden Town. There is not much of a plan and certainly no script for the video of ‘Blood In My Eyes’. So, they decide to do what Dylan usually does in this situation: go out in the street and see what happens.

This is something he picked up from photographer Don Hunstein during the shoot for his second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.

It must have been a strange sight for the shopping people on the streets that Wednesday morning: there is Bob Dylan, wearing a strange outfit and accompanied by Dave Stewart carrying two 8 mm cine cameras. No security.

Bob is in a very good mood, willing to give autographs and chatting to people young and old, as they stroll through town.

“I decided this should be documented as it became quite surreal”, explained Dave Stewart in August 2012. “We had been filming for about an hour. Then we had a 5 minute break and a cup of tea outside a cafe,

I seized the opportunity to call the one person I knew I could rely on and would drop everything and get to our location in record time, and she did!’

Stewart refers to Ana María Vélez Wood, a Colombian dancer, guitarist and singer he had worked with some time ago.

“Ana told me later she was a photographer,” Stewart recalled, “and actually came to the UK by winning a photographic contest in her home country Colombia. Over the years I got to know and love Ana’s sense of humour along with her lack or fear and ability to tackle anything from opening a Eurythmics show to cooking for 20 people at ten minutes’ notice!”

Ana remembers Dave sounded excited on the phone, “but in his characteristically laidback manner told me Bob Dylan had called him at 4am wanting him to film and direct a video for one of the tracks of his new forthcoming album ‘World Gone Wrong’, and he asked me if I could come along and shoot some stills.”

It appeared it was cheer luck she was in town: she had just returned from Colombia, where she had made a trip to the Amazon on her own.

“I still had the musty smell of the jungle and my photo equipment was in a plastic milk canteen I had used as a photo bag. This was a preventative measure so that my photo equipment would float in the event we overturned in any of the small canoe journeys through the small islands in the swamps of the Amazon River.

I was still in bed when Dave called so I got up quickly and transformed my photo bag into a ‘first world package’, took a taxi, got some film, and went straight to Dave’s recording studio [sic].”

“Ana immediately became invisible”, Dave adds, “and started shooting at a short distance aware of the fragility of the situation and the possibility that this could bring even more attention to a crowd that was growing by the minute. I introduced Ana to Bob and he immediately felt comfortable with her gentle way, so now we were three!”

“The first shots were done on the Lock”, writes Wood, “where curious onlookers started gathering slowly and Dave ( as only he can do), recruited them to be part of the video and escort Dylan across the bridges and paths, to perform juggling acts and support; at one point even recruiting a German Sheppard carrying a stick in his mouth who proudly paraded on a lead with Dylan. All along Dylan stood out underneath his top hat, but strangely, at the same time blended in perfectly with the surroundings.”

From Camdem Lock, they turn to the Camdem High Street, with their “small army of followers, in front of souvenir shops, zebra crossings, hair dressers and barber shops, slowly covering the length of High Street.”

Some scenes are required where Bob can mime some lines from the song.

“We stopped at café and this time Dylan took up position at a table by the sidewalk. As the waitress engaged in conversation with Dylan, a passing busker joined Dylan and Dave at the table.”

As this proves to be too busy, they search for something quieter. They find a another small café, called Flukes Cradle, where Bob can sit inside, the light coming through the window. In some scenes you can see the people on the outside, looking in, while Dylan’s face is reflected in the glass. There’s a painting on the wall behind the singer, “propped up” on it’s left side by the mantelpiece.

In one of the photo’s in the exhibition, there’s a young man with an impressive quiff, sitting at the same table. In 2014, the guy is identified as Desmond van Oostrom. The Dutchman, was 21 years old at the time. He was shopping in London with a friend when he is approached by female photographer for a photo shoot. He is seated at a table in a cafe where, completely unexpectedly, as a table guest the legendary singer/songwriter Bob Dylan is next to him. Desmond is taken by surprise and Dylan – of course – is stoic. With a simple ‘thanks’ from Dylan, Desmond is thanked for the cooperation and he can go.

Although he leaves his address with the photographer, it’ll take more than 20 years before he receive the indisputable proof of his Bob Dylan moment.

So, in a way, the photo shoot wasn’t completely spontaneous after all.

After this scene, they return to Dave’s houseboat, where an impromptu film set is set up for more singing scenes, “with lights and everything in a space of not much more than a square meter”, as Wood remembers.

When all necessary filming is done, the small party heads to The Church Studios, to wind down. That was needed particularly for Dylan, explained Wood as he “Surely deserved his own space to shed the persona he adopted throughout the entire day’s shooting.”

When Dylan has changed, Dave hands the photographer an acoustic guitar to sing a few songs in Spanish and Portuguese for Dylan. The evening is wrapped up in a local Indian restaurant in Crouch End.

While Dylan heads off to his hotel, Dave and Ana Maria go “straight to Joe’s Basement, a 24-hour photo lab in Soho, to develop the film.

We asked for an express service, then walked the few blocks to Dave’s flat in Covent Garden. In less than an hour we returned to pick up the photographs.”

As Dylan has already flown to L.A. the next morning, Dave Stewart follows him the next day, to present him the photographs.

Bob picks one of Ana Maria’s photos from inside the restaurant for the cover of World Gone Wrong. Another photo, taken on the house boat is selected for the inside sleeve. On this Dylan is seen holding a glass of whiskey.

L’étranger

As stated earlier, the painting in the café was not by Bob Dylan. It was already there. The extraordinary story of the painting was revealed in 1995 by it’s painter, Peter Gallager, in a letter published in Isis Magazine.

“This story began in the early months of 1993, when, together with a friend of mine from the states, I trawled the art galleries of London, hoping to break into the closed-shop art exhibition circuit with a pile of heavy canvasses and portfolio of photographs and slides.

My heavily dour and moody portraits did not excite the optimistic decorative galleries, and we were shown the door many times before I could skate across the polished wooden floors to lay out my paintings for viewing. It seemed that our efforts were all to no avail, until we happened upon Flukes Cradle Cafe bar in Camden, who exhibit the works of many London artists. The manager decided to give me a chance and after two weeks of frantic preparation, my paintings were hanging shoulder to shoulder around this popular coffee bar.

After a steady start, I began to sell regularly and Flukes Cradle kept me on. Spring and summer passed and the autumn was drawing to a close when a bizarre chain of events occurred. This series of events began when I received a ‘phone call from a lady who, for the purpose of this essay will be known as Katherine. Katherine had called with a view to buying one of my paintings entitled “L’Etranger” which was hanging by the window at Flukes Cafe. Despite it’s catalogue price, I’d previously given the picture, as a present to Phil, a close friend, and I explained this to her. Curiously, she said, “I must have it!” and demanded my friends phone number. After I refused several times, she announced she was prepared to pay a lot of money for the painting. She said it no longer concerned me anymore, now that I had given it away. It interested me to know what she would offer my friend so I gave her his telephone number. It turned out that she was prepared to pay £500. Phil and I discussed this matter and decided to come to an arrangement, whereby we split the money between us.

On October 30th 1993 we met Katherine at Flukes Cradle Cafe bar, she was accompanied by a friend. I told the manager that I’d found a buyer for “L’Etranger”. He said that the painting would now be worth a lot of money. I didn’t understand what he meant, until he told me that Bob Dylan had sat beneath the painting and had been video’d by Dave Stewart, during the summer, with an album cover in mind. It was quite a surprise as you can imagine, especially since I’d been a regular patron there and nobody had mentioned it until now. Quite unbelievable really.

The painting itself shows a desperate and forlorn figure, on a beach having just committed a murder. His name Meursault, from Albert Camus’ famous (1942), novel, “L’Etranger”. The picture was “propped up” on it’s left side by the mantelpiece, in the front room of the café. The picture had fowled there when I had originally hung It, and to me it seemed that the mantelpiece “steadied” the painting from it’s dizzy and reeling subject matter. I was content to leave it tilting in such a way for this effect.

It’s always been my policy to be around personally to hand over my paintings to buyers and this was not going to be an exception. I like the feedback. The paintings mean a lot to me and I put my heart and soul into them. We spent a full hour with Katherine and her friend and I told her about Bob Dylan’s interest in the picture for his album cover.

It didn’t stir much of a response in her, she hardly twitched. I asked why she wanted the picture so badly. But equally, she hadn’t liked it when she first saw it, but had got to love it gradually, and she hoped to hang it above her bed and wake up to it every morning. She said it would bring her luck. Really? I thought. She seemed more intent on talking to my friend Phil, and Quantum Mechanics were mentioned several times between them. The only thing I know about Quantum Mechanics is that when a butterfly flaps it’s wings, there’ll be a blowin’ in the wind. Katherine was perhaps thinking of other things when she bought the picture.

A couple of weeks passed and my sister’s boyfriend rang me to say that he had just seen Bob Dylan’s CD ‘World Gone Wrong’ in Tower Records, London, and that my painting was indeed featured in the background. London Underground were now running large 5′ x 4′ posters of the album sleeve (the format of the posters was actually taller than that of the album cover, and in consequence displayed even more of my picture). There was a promotional video of the album’s single ‘Blood In My Eyes’ filmed in Camden, showing on national network T.V in the States. Full page magazine adverts. A number of people even likened my style of painting to that of Bob Dylan.

That was the good news, now for the bad. I had signed the painting in the bottom right hand corner, but unfortunately it was obscured by Dylan’s top hat. ‘Sony-Columbia’ had not approached me, and there was no mention of my name on the album credits. But for the manager of Flukes Cradle making a cursory remark two weeks previous, I might have come face to face with my painting on London Underground, late at night, alone on a platform, in a drunken stupor. What would you have done? Jump! This is the misery line.

Like all good euphoric attacks there is an equally disabling depression just around the comer. Could not the record company have said something; asked permission. My brother suggested I ring Sony Columbia in London. I had started off in Camus and ended up in a Kafka novel. Look for a decision maker. Find the responsible person forget it! I got a music solicitor to find out why nobody asked me for license to use the painting. I still had copyright, and it was my intellectual property. Why no credit? What followed was, almost a year of knee bending, twitching swordplay, legal bluff. Noise of wind, in impotent gusts wafting to and fro across the Atlantic. More blowin in the wind. Gastro Enteritis I call it.

It was in February 1994 that Sony Columbia informed me that Bob Dylan had bought the painting “with the specific objective of avoiding any further difficulties.” In March, Sony’s New York law dept. continued with a letter. It followed that; “Jeff Rosen (from Dylan’s New York office), had asked one of Dave Stewart’s employees to purchase the painting, so he would have rights to it when the album was released. Two of Dave Stewart’s employees located the (Camden) restaurant but were told that the painting had been sold to Katherine.” Within 48 hours they met Katherine and had bought the painting from her for £2,500. Well, she had said it would bring her good luck! £2,000 profit in two days. I call that incredible good luck!!

Strange to say that as a sixteen year old I used to play tennis with a Bob Dylan fan. I had little interest or awareness of his hero’s songs until one day he rammed Dylan’s lyrics down my throat and told me I must be stupid if I didn’t understand him. I just felt hurt. I have never listened to a Bob Dylan album since that day, apart from ‘World Gone Wrong’ It’s all the more poignant now. I did however, like the album.

As a painter and musician in my own right, it’s been a strange year. Bob Dylan on one side, me on the other and a minefield of legal jargon between us. I still don’t understand him. Has the World Gone Wrong? To avoid further calamities I accepted the painting back from the Dylan camp and they agreed to a credit on future printings of the album. Sony paid my legal fees and suggested I could make a good price from the painting, because of its association with Dylan.”

The photo on the back sleeve is made by celebrity photographer-designer Randee St. Nicholas. She’s the ex-wife of Steppenwolf singer Nick St. Nicholas – hence the name. The photographer, living in Los Angeles is specialized in photographing musicians and perhaps most famous for her Prince book 21 Nights (2008). Other photos from the Dylan shoot were used as late as 1997 on the single ‘Dreaming of You’.

Because Dylan had been criticized for being very vague about the authors on his previous acoustic cover record, Good As I Been To You, he wrote extensive (and excellent) liner notes, titled About The Songs (what they’re about). This filled the rest of the vinyl album’s back sleeve.

Previously published…

Posted in Uncategorized | 4 Comments

Bob Dylan, Jerry Lee Lewis, And Jimmy Hendrix

Posted on October 11, 2020 by TonyAttwood

By Larry Fyffe

Poet William Blake critiques organized religion for suppressing sex as a unifying fiery force within the physical world; he envisions sexual union as a holy spirit that ought to be enjoyed by humankind rather than the spiritual sexual urge being chained up and confused by the doctrine of death -‘original sin’ – as taught by black-robed priests:

Unless the heart catch fire
The God will not be loved
Unless the mind catch fire
The God will not be known
(William Blake: The Pentecost)

The preRomantic poet draws on metaphoric gnostic-like imagery of the Christian God found within the Holy Bible:

His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow
And his eyes were as a flame of fire
(Revelation 1:14)

Blake’s sensual imagery is not lost on the rocknrollers of modern popular music.

With piano a-pounding:
I laughed at love because I thought it funny
You came along, and you moved me honey
I've changed my mind, this love is fine
Goodness gracious, great balls of fire
(Jerry Lee Lewis: Great Balls Of Fire ~ Blackwell/Hammer)

With guitar a-blazing:

Say my arrows of are made of desire, desire
From far away as Jupiter's sulphur mines
Way down in the Methane Sea
(Jimmy Hendrix: Voodoo Child/Slight Return)

Singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan grows up in an era when rocknroll music dominates the air waves emanating from popular music radio stations:

They killed him on the altar of the rising sun ...
Play 'Lucille'
(Bob Dylan: Murder Most Foul)

‘Lucille’ – piano a-pounding:

I woke up this morning, Lucille was not in sight
I asked my friends about her, God, all they did was laugh
Lucille, come home where you belong
(Jerry Lee Lewis: Lucille ~ Collins, et.al.)

Likewise, an earlier rendition thereof:

I woke up this morning, Lucille was not in sight
I asked my friends about her, but all their lips were tight
Lucille, please come back where you belong
(Little Richard: Lucille)

Quieted down is the guitar tempo in the gnostic-tinted song below:

Well, I went back to see about her once
Went back to straighten it out
Everybody that I talked to had seen us there
Said they didn't know who I was talking about
(Bob Dylan: Red River Shore)

The guitar subdued again in the song below:

They walked along by the old canal
A little confused, I remember well
They stopped into a strange hotel
With the neon burning bright
He felt the heat of the night
(Bob Dylan: Simple Twist Of Fate)

Piano a-rolling in the following lament:

He had a lovely wife, and two children seldom seen
But they shot him in the backseat of a Lincoln limousine
(Jerry Lee Lewis: Lincoln Limousine)

Slowed down piano in the double-edged lament below with the alliterations still abounding; John Kennedy’s physical body is destroyed, but the memories of his lively spirit are not:

I'm riding in a long, black Lincoln limousine
Riding in the backseat next to my wife
Heading straight on in to the afterlife
(Bob Dylan: Murder Most Foul)

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

“Fix it ma”: Another Dylan song we missed: now with the lyrics

Posted on October 11, 2020 by TonyAttwood

Commentary by Tony, research and opening comment by Aaron:

Here’s a track which Bob tried out five times in soundchecks in 78, this one is from Paris. It’s called Fix It Ma. Not the best sound quality but here it is. (It does get a little clearer as it progresses, stay with it…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFSAfO0K09I

This was the year in which Dylan wrote a number of songs with Helena Springs. As far as we know the only songs that were not written with Ms Springs that year were (in chronological order)…

So this would make the 11th Dylan solo composition of the year. But what about the lyrics (apart from “You better fix it ma”)? Earlier we asked if anyone wanted to have a go at writing them out, and Larry Fyffe duly obliged

It was down around Tokyo, ready or not
Get out of pokey Ozzie, dead or a alive
You better fix it mama, fix it mama
You better fix it mama, you better fix it mama
You better fix it mama real quick
If you wanna get along with me
Just fix at me

Well you want to go down, and get your bad tooth, slam the door
Well you tried to tell the daddy-o that he broke the law
Well you better fix it ma
You gotta fix it ma
You better fix it for me real quick
Because I'm outside your gate
If you wanna get along with me

Musically it is a standard 12 bar blues. We have two verses here, with the first four lines containing the original lyrics. Then we have four lines of “you better fix it ma”.

I should add that the phrase “12 bar blues” has long since been a misnomer, and is now used to refer not to the number of bars of music, but to the structure of the chord sequence, which in this case would be written…

I, I, I, I
I, I, I, I
IV, IV, IV, IV
I, I, I, I,
V, V, V, V
IV, IV, I, I

which will mean quite a lot to rock musicians.

The song is listed on BobDylan.com although without any information added to the title. Olof Björner has it listed as being played five times in 1978, but Heylin makes no mention of the song at all. It was included on the bootleg album, “All this tangled rope.”

In fact around 20 websites have the song mentioned – but none go into any detail of the music nor the lyrics. The music is simple to decode, but the lyrics… here is your chance of immortality.

By all means write your version in the comments below, but if you email them to Tony@schools.co.uk (please write Fix it ma in the subject line) I’ll get to see them quicker, and integrate them into this text, with a full acknowledgement.

Thanks.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

She Belongs To Me (1965) IV: Marie is only six years old

Posted on October 10, 2020 by TonyAttwood

by Jochen Markhorst

She belongs to me

IV Marie is only six years old

The brilliant closing stanza, finally, reaffirms the ironic overtones – though on a different level. As with, for example, the beautiful Basement song “Nothing Was Delivered”, or in “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, or “Highway 61 Revisited” (there are many examples), we see in this verse Dylan’s artistic kinship with that other great Jewish poet, with Heinrich Heine, the patriarch of the Ironische Pointe, the ironic punch line. With this stylistic tool, the writer destroys expectations by ending lofty, sentimental or melancholy lines with an inappropriate platitude, a dry comic footnote or a vulgarity. Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters is one of Dylan’s best-known, but this one ain’t bad either:

Bow down to her on Sunday
Salute her when her birthday comes
For Halloween give her a trumpet
And for Christmas, buy her a drum

The first two verses still are a logical result of all the previous character descriptions. This is a very special lady, far above us, simple footmen, a lady who may only be admired kneeling and from a distance. The poet emphasizes her majesty with appropriate, status confirming imperatives: bow down and salute her, to finally contrast all the more inappropriately with the sobering punch line. The glorified dame receives a trumpet and a drum.

A trumpet and a drum? For an unassailable highness? Is this really a majestic ladyship being sung here?

In 1958 Chuck Berry records “Memphis, Tennessee”. The song undeniably belongs to the rock canon, to the elite of indisputable rock monuments – after all, the song is a member of the very exclusive and very small club of songs recorded by the Holy Trinity; by Elvis, The Beatles and The Stones. And large parts of the premier league just below that Olympus also honour the masterpiece with studio recordings and live performances. The Who, Jerry Lee Lewis, Led Zeppelin, Roy Orbison, Bo Diddley, Rod Stewart and, well, anyone who can hold a guitar, basically.

The song is deceptively simple. Two chords. The primal version, Chuck’s recording, is rough and rowdy. Simplistic drumming on a single tom, no bass (the low strings of the electric guitar provide the service), languid, sloppy licks by Chuck on his guitar, and after two minutes and a bit it’s done. Pieced together all by himself, as Berry remembers in his memoirs (Chuck Berry: The Autobiography, 1987):

“Memphis Tennessee” was recorded in my first office building at 4221 West Easton Avenue in St. Louis on a $145 homemade studio in the heat of a muggy July afternoon with a $79 reel to reel Sears & Roebuck recorder that had provisions for sound-on-sound recording. I played the guitar and bass track, and I added the ticky-tick drums that trot along in the background which sound so good to me. I worked over a month revising the lyric before I took the tape up to Leonard Chess to listen to. He was again pressed for a release since my concerts (driving on the road then) kept me from the recording studio for long periods.

On the level of details, Berry’s book is full of minor mistakes (in those years, Sears & Roebuck didn’t have a $79 reel-to-reel tape recorder for sale that would allow sound-on-sound, for example), but the big picture is probably correct. Berry also recognises what makes the song such an exceptional masterpiece: not so much the music, however brilliantly simple it may be, but the lyrics, on which he has been polishing for more than a month after that primal recording.

The unbridled brio, obviously, is in the twist. For three verses we hear a pitiful sucker trying to call his girl in Memphis – but he has lost the number. He begs the operator to help him –

Long distance information, give me Memphis, Tennessee
Help me find the party trying to get in touch with me
She could not leave her number, but I know who placed the call
Because my uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall

… and desperately bombards the poor telephone operator with useless information about Marie and her whereabouts (“her home is on the south side, high upon a ridge, just a half a mile from the Mississippi Bridge”). So far not very striking; song lyrics in this category, the desperate suitor who cannot reach his girl, we already have come to know in enough variations. Chuck indeed does freely reveal that he copied it from some run-of-the-mill song:

The story of Memphis got its roots from a very old and quiet bluesy selection by Muddy Waters played when I was in my teens that went “Long distance operator give me (something….something), I want to talk to my baby she’s (something else)”. Sorry I don’t remember anymore now but I did then and spirited my rendition of that feeling into my song of Memphis. My wife had relatives there who we were visiting semi-annually but other than a couple of concerts there, I had never had any basis for choosing Memphis for the location of the story.

Again, incorrect at a detailed level, probably. Muddy Waters may have a song called “Long Distance Call” (1951), but that song doesn’t contain the word operator, nor a verse that resembles Chuck’s remembered words. Little Milton’s “Long Distance Operator” looks a bit like it,

Long distance operator
Can I talk to my girl tonight?
I feel so sad and lonely
And you know, I just ain’t feeling right

…but that single was not released until February ’59. Jimmy Reed’s 1957 “Baby What’s On Your Mind” might have been a candidate (“I’d call up the operator and tell her give me your private line / I feel so bad, baby, livin’ downtown all alone”), but that still doesn’t add up to Chuck’s recollection that he heard it in my teens – that should be somewhere in the 1940s.

Not too important, of course. There are dozens of songs in this category. Here too, at least, the spirit of Chuck Berry’s story will be true; that he borrowed the plot’s setting, a man laments his sorrow to an anonymous operator. Just as Dylan and The Band will do for their “Long Distance Operator” (The Basement Tapes), by the way.

More important is the brilliant twist, the punch line that tilts the entire lyrics:

Last time I saw Marie she's waving me goodbye
With hurry home drops on her cheek that trickled from her eye
Marie is only six years old, information please
Try to put me through to her in Memphis Tennessee

This is 1958 – it is perhaps the first pop song to thematise child custody and the resulting suffering of the father after a divorce. And moreover: such an adult theme is enormously out of tune in these years, the years of bubble-gum, surfing fun and high school romance. So, at first, the Chess record company does not quite know what to do with it. It is finally put on a B-side (from “Back in the USA”) in June ’59.

After “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, for which Dylan uses as a template Berry’s “Too Much Monkey Business”, the Father Of Rock and Roll seems to inspire Dylan again, this time on a lyrical level: to the surprising punch line of “She Belongs To Me”, to the conclusion that the sung lady is a girl of about six years old. Who can look forward to a classic Christmas present: a drum.

However, unlike with “Memphis, Tennessee”, the surprising twist does not tilt the whole text. With hindsight, parts of the lyrics take on a different meaning, though. She don’t look back of course suits a six-year-old (who, after all, has no past), nobody’s child suddenly suggests a custody battle and next to a child you are a walking antique, evidently. But fragments like peeking through her keyhole suddenly get a – no doubt unintentional – creepy charge, so: no.

No, “She Belongs To Me” is and remains a beautiful collage song, a mosaic which sketches what goes around her sometimes. With a sparkling twist demonstrating a poetic congeniality with both one of the greatest European poets from the early nineteenth century and the twentieth-century, very American “Shakespeare of rock and roll” (Dylan), Chuck Berry.

The song, with its enchanting melody, is an instant success. Alone in the year of its release, 1965, seven covers are recorded, of which Barry “Eve Of Destruction” McGuire’s is the best known. Attractive drive, beautiful harmonica solo, but the affectionate vocals and Barry’s artificial recital do not stand the test of time. Then the chaotic, disrespectful cover of the weirdos from The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band (also ’66) is more bearable – but equally dated.

Most charmed, Dylan himself undoubtedly is by Rick Nelson’s cover (Rick Nelson And The Stone Canyon Band, 1969), given his appreciative words in Chronicles:

“Ricky’s talent was very accessible to me. I felt we had a lot in common. In a few years’ time he’d record some of my songs, make them sound like they were his own, like he had written them himself. He eventually did write one himself and mentioned my name in it.”

Ricky scores a small hit with it, but this cover really is a bit too unimaginative. In that area The Nice, also in 1969, is doing better. In which regard they do have an obligation, of course, being a progrock group and all. Theatrical and with a spun-out, Teutonic middle part they stretch the song to twelve minutes, but it still has an equally fascinating, magnetic appeal as, for example, the cover of Simon & Garfunkel’s “59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy)” on The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper.

Tina Turner turns it into “He Belongs To Me”, the Grateful Dead loves the song and has been playing it since the first concerts in 1966, it is popular in folk, country and rock circles, is translated all over the world – “Elle m’appartient (C’est une artiste)” by Francis Cabrel from 2008 is the most beautiful – and Dylan cherishes the song too; in 2016 it is still on his set list (46 times even), thus making Olof Björner’s list of Songs Performed More Than 500 Times.

The best cover comes from Norway. Ane Brun is blessed with an unearthly voice (and was rightly recruited by Peter Gabriel as a backing vocalist), and does everything you have to do if you dare to do a Dylan cover: an idiosyncratic approach, respect for the original and an enriching je-ne-sais quoi.

Recorded for one of the best Dylan tribute records of this century, Subterranean Homesick Blues: A Tribute To Bob Dylan’s ‘Bringing It All Back Home’ (2010), performed by artists who weren’t born yet when Dylan released Bringing It All Back Home – all of them artists who, thankfully, do look back on this walking antique.

———–

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Untold Dylan

Dignity part IV: I contain multitudes

Why does dylan like Pontchartrain, Legend in my time, and Homeward Bound?

All directions at once part 10: Everybody’s shouting, “Which side are you on?”

All directions at once

Bob Dylan And Harold Pinter part 1

Dignity (1989) part III: One line brings up another

Bob Dylan And Chuck Berry, and some wonderful videos

All directions at once 9: So far ahead of the game we lost sight

All directions at once

Dylan’s Rarities: Hang me, Hey Joe and Heartbeat

My own love song – Dylan’s instrumentals and other soundtrack songs

Bob Dylan And The Tombstone Blues (Part VI)

Dignity (1989) part II: You can never play too much Bob Wills

All directions at once: Bob Dylan in 1964; (while we were still in 1963)

More Ginsberg and Dylan – the final chapter (we think)

Dylan at the mercy of the Muse: Girl from the Red River Shore and Mother of Muses

Dignity Part 1: A bloody mess

Bob Dylan And Elizabeth Bishop

The art work of The World Gone Wrong

Bob Dylan, Jerry Lee Lewis, And Jimmy Hendrix

“Fix it ma”: Another Dylan song we missed: now with the lyrics

She Belongs To Me (1965) IV: Marie is only six years old

Blogroll

Meta

Recent Posts

Archives

Indexes and reference pages

Recent articles