Untold Dylan

All Directions at once: how Dylan chooses what to write

• 1: A song is like a painting, you can’t see it all if you’re standing too close
• 2: All directions at once: how Dylan’s lyrics empower those who wish to be empowered
• 3: All Directions at once: The prelude to the explosion (1959-1961)
• 4: All directions at once: The explosion (1962).
• 5: All directions at once: Making a name, getting known, arguing about copyright
• 6: All directions at once: learning the folk, moving on

By Tony Attwood

In my last article in this series I argued that Dylan had become a man who could operate in a whole wide range of song styles, while at the same time he had become the ultimate storyteller, able to write protest songs, love songs, gambling songs, the blues etc etc etc.

Also we looked at how Bob could not only take up the themes he had previously considered (songs of leaving, lost love, protest etc) but also bring into focus new themes such as individualism, and the thought that what defines us as individuals is the way in which we choose to see the world – not the way the world is.  A sophisticated concept not generally explored in popular music – or indeed in folk music.

The old year had ended on such a high with the creation of songs we now see as classics – songs such as When the ship comes in,  The Times they are a-Changing, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, One too many mornings and  Restless Farewell.   I imagine there must have been some debate within his record company,at this point, as to whether Bob could possibly keep up this pace and this quality of writing.  I wouldn’t be surprised if someone had said, “Even if the next batch are only half as good, we’ve still got more than enough for the next album.”  Looking back, the quality and quantity of Dylan’s creativity at this time was astonishing.

But the issue of the future was serious: after songs like that, would Bob Dylan now go into eternal decline as so many artists have done after the first flourish artistic brilliance?   And anyway, what on earth could Dylan do to top all that he had done?  He had composed 20 highly memorable songs in each of the last two years – more than most songwriters can do in a lifetime.  Could he really keep up the quality of his writing, the variety of styles and the sheer volume of excellent new songs for another year?

Of course as we know now, the answer turned out to be, most assuredly, “yes”. Inevitably  we find some songs that don’t get an automatic mention in any list of Bob’s greatest songs, as with his opening piece in the new year Guess I’m doing fine – an ironic work in which Bob actually says he is hurting.  But after that warm up, songs of the highest quality emerged once more from his typewriter, one after the next after the next.  And again that by-now famous ability to keep changing his subject matter was on display.

In my original article on this site exploring this year, in which I pulled together the list of songs written in the chronological order or their composition, I ascribed the shortest possible description of each song’s lyrics.  What I didn’t particularly note however was the remarkable fact (or at least it would have been remarkable in any other songwriter) that the first eight songs of the year were each on very different themes…

1. Guess I’m doing fine (I’m hurting)
2. Chimes of Freedom (Protest)
3. Mr Tambourine Man (Surrealism; the way we see the world)
4. I don’t believe you (She acts like we never have met) (Lost love)
5. Spanish Harlem Incident (Love)
6. Motorpsycho Nightmare  (Humour)
7. It ain’t me babe (Song of Farewell)
8. Denise Denise  (Taking a break, having a laugh)

If we didn’t know about thing about Bob’s work and were to listen to “Guess I’m doing fine,” the first song of the year, I think any record company A&R man of the day might be tempted to say, well, ok, keep trying Bob; it’s interesting but see what else you can come up with – and then give us another call.

This is not to say that “Doing fine” is a bad piece of music, but rather when one compares it with all that has gone before, it really isn’t anything special.   In fact, if you leave that recording above running it moves onto the album release of “Restless Farewell” written just a short while before.  The contrast is extraordinary.

Thus a person, unfamiliar with Dylan’s work but hearing his reputation, would I suspect have been disappointed.  But that disappointment would have been short lived because the very next piece Bob wrote was one of his all-time classic works: Chimes of Freedom.   I particularly like this video below because if you watch the mess of the start, it is hard to imagine that this guy is going to deliver anything, yet alone this piece of artistic mastery…

The core message of the song is encapsulated in that opening verse – there is hope for everyone who is not part of the powerful or the elite.  We are all going to be liberated from the shackles of this world.  Just hold on in there.  It’s a matter of how you see the world, not the way the world is…

And just in case we haven’t got who it was he was thinking about…

Tolling for the rebel, tolling for the rake
Tolling for the luckless, the abandoned an’ forsaked
Tolling for the outcast, burnin’ constantly at stake
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing

It is a most extraordinary song of hope, packed with the most brilliant images.  A song that takes the inevitably better future message of “Times they are a changin” and which then tells us what it will feel like.

Take this verse which appears part way through…

Through the wild cathedral evening the rain unraveled tales
For the disrobed faceless forms of no position
Tolling for the tongues with no place to bring their thoughts
All down in taken-for-granted situations
Tolling for the deaf an’ blind, tolling for the mute
Tolling for the mistreated, mateless mother, the mistitled prostitute
For the misdemeanour outlaw, chased an’ cheated by pursuit
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing

Maybe I missed it, but had anyone else thought of writing a folk or pop song like this before?   Had anyone else ever thought of writing a song in the popular style which ended with as much hope and positively as the lines that end this song without actually being overtly religious.

And indeed that is another point about this song: it offers the joyful future of Christian revivalist singing, without any of the religion.

Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing

Writers have commented on this song in many different ways; Rimbaud has been quoted as a source, others see the death of Kennedy as a theme.  Paul Williams called it “Dylan’s Sermon on  the Mount.”  Others get tangled up over when and where the piece was written, trying to find immediate influences and antecedents.   And I agree these are interesting points.  I also went looking for antecedents, but I would stress, not because I thought they were desperately important, but because I like to try to keep the vast number of songs in my head in some sort of order.

So for anyone who wants to go down that route then musically I’ve little doubt that the origin is Chimes of Trinity written in 1895 (if you play the recording do let it run – you’ll hear what I mean in the second half of the verse – from about 1 minutes 5 seconds onwards).

But as ever, the origin of the language and indeed the music, is an academic debate, interesting, and one which I’ll drop into my PhD if I ever finish it, but which can also be used by academics and would-be academics to hide their lack of understanding as to exactly what is going on in the work of art.

Does it matter that Bob lifted the music in part from “Chimes of Trinity”?  No, but it is interesting because it shows us he must have heard “Chimes of Trinity” somewhere – which in turn emphasises the phenomenal range of music that Bob had not only heard but also remembered, but this time.

In my view, and as I have mentioned before, breaking down a work of art into its constituent elements often tells us less than nothing about the work of art. It’s a bit like studying the brick work at St Paul’s Cathedral and expecting to learn something profound about Sir Christopher Wren.   The artist, be she or he a musician, painter, poet, architect, dancer… is creating a work.  A fulsome piece which is offered to anyone willing to look and/or listen and/or be inspired as a means of passing the time of day or perhaps gaining an insight into an aspect of the world today or the world beyond.  That’s what art is.

If we reduce this song to a “meaning” and suggest perhaps that (as Wikipedia has it) it is an “unforgiving storm giving way at the end of the song to a partial lifting of the mist,” then every single element in the song is lost and its glorious language is reduce to doggerel.

Ian Bell, an eminent and highly acclaimed writer, says that the this song is about the fact that liberty exists in many forms, and yet the song is “too over-wrought and self-conscious to be a total success,” I have to disagree.  To return to a point I made much earlier in this series, I am not at all sure that one can say what this song is about, any more than one can say what the Millennium Bridge in London is about.

But I have walked that footbridge between St Pauls and the Tate Modern art gallery countless times, and each time I am completely overwhelmed by my approach either to the cathedral or what was once upon a time a power station.  I can’t describe that walk in any way that might convince another person to do the walk, but it is, for me overpowering.

In short we do not have to be able to explain art to understand its power.  I can of course give you the chord sequence of the song, report on its origins or look in depth at the words, but none of that helps me express to you what this song is.  Your best bet, in my view, is to listen to the recording above.

Also, I don’t recommend you spend long on this cover version but to my mind the arranger and performers have not got the slightest idea of what is going on in the piece. 

Endless debates about where the lyrics “come from” and what they mean are futile, to my mind.  The composition is a work of art which either illuminates your life or it does not.  To me, it most certainly does illuminate.  The sheer beauty, power and hope expressed therein.  Breaking it down into points in a critical debate immediately removes a key part of the essence of the the song.

For me, it was the decision of the self-appointed critics of Dylan’s work around this time to express the meaning in each and every song that led to the collapse into pointlessness of critical reviews of Dylan’s work.  If Dylan wants to make the meaning clear, he is perfectly able to do so – just consider “Masters of War”.  If he wants to give us a set of shimmering images of hope, he can do that.  He can do it because he has this staggering ability with words, and to start analysing the antecedents or meanings in this song shows, I feel, a complete lack of understanding of what not only this art but all art, is about.

Yes such analysis can be interesting as an academic study of antecedents or meanings, but this activity should not be confused with appreciating the music for what it is.

But this is not to say one should not look at individual lines.   The line, “for every hung up person the whole wide universe,” for example, resonates especially as the next three songs Dylan wrote show a certain amount of being hung up – although there again, maybe that was just a coincidence.

The series continues shortly.  If you have been, thank you for reading.

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

By Aaron Galbraith; additional thoughts from Tony (sorry Aaron, couldn’t resist)

“Doug had a hit record (“She’s About A Mover”) and I had a hit record (“Like A Rolling Stone”) at the same time (1965). So, we became buddies back then, and we played the same kind of music. We never really broke apart. We always hooked up at certain intervals in our lives.”
–Bob Dylan to Douglas Brinkley, Rolling Stone, May 11, 2009

One such time was in 1972 when Bob joined Sahm for the sessions for his first solo album “Doug Sahm And Band”. He contributed guitar, vocals, harmonica, organ plus a song to the sessions. Eight tracks appeared on the album with Bob’s involvement, a further three tracks from the session appeared on The Sir Douglas Band album “Texas Tornado” the following year. Then in 2005 , five more turned up on “The Genuine Texas Groover” (this is the one to get as it includes the above two albums plus 19 more tracks!).

Dylan’s contributions to “Doug Sahm and Band” are “(Is Anybody Going To) San Antone”, “It’s Gonna Be Easy”, “Poison Love”, “Wallflower”, “Dealer’s Blues”, “Faded Love”, “Blues Stay Away From Me” and “ Me And Paul”.

Here’s “Is anybody going” with Bob on backing vocals…

The three from “Texas Tornado” are “Tennessee Blues”, “Ain’t That Loving You” and “I’ll Be There”.

The five from “The Genuine Texas Groover” are “On The Banks Of The Old Ponchatrain”, “Hey, Good Lookin’”, “Please Mr Sandman”, “Colombus Stockade”, and “The Blues Walked On In”.

Here are just a few more of the best ones from across the three albums. We all know Wallflower so let’s skip that one.

But here’s a cover of Willie Nelson’s Me and Paul with Bob on guitar and harmonica…

And now…

“Tennessee Blues” with Bob on uncredited harmonica

Coming up next is the Hank Williams song “On The Banks Of The Old Ponchatrain”

There are some more great performances with Bob and all are on YouTube if you want to check out “Hey Good Looking” or “Columbus Stockade”.

But I thought I’d save my favourite for last.  With Bob on guitar and vocals, it’s “Blues Stay Away From Me”.

Bob knows the song well, having already performed a run through of the track back in 1965 with Joan Baez at the Savoy Hotel.

Then again in 1987 he broke out the song again (the video says it’s with Tom Petty…but I’m fairly certain it’s Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, although I could be wrong!)

Note from Tony:  Aaron also included Bob Dylan’s cover of Sahm’s biggest hit – which he performed twice, and suggested he’d leave it out of this article so I could use it in my Live Rarities series.   But he’s done the research so it should go into his piece.

Aaron writes: Bob covered Sahm’s biggest hit “She’s About A Mover only twice”…once in 1988 (I think with Sahm on stage)…and again in 2000, following his death in 1999

Now if it is quite a while since you have heard this (and here is Doug singing below) you might feel there is something of a similarity with “Outlaw Blues”.  Or maybe that is just me getting carried away as usual.

And here is the original – this sounds far less like “Outlaw Blues” than Bob’s version, – it was clearly just the way Bob performed it.  And

Ah… the days when 12 bar blues were hits, even when including “hey hey in the lyrics”.

Anyway, both “She’s about a mover” and “Outlaw Blues” were written in 1965. Which came first?  I really don’t know.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the song…

“The song was named the number one ‘Texas’ song by Texas Monthly, also charting at #15 on the UK Singles Chart [which explains why Tony knows it!] With a Vox Continental organ riff provided by Augie Meyers and a soulful vocal by lead singer-guitarist Doug Sahm, the track has a Tex-Mex sound. The regional smash became a breakaway hit, and the recording was used in the soundtracks of the films Echo Park (1986), American Boyfriends (1989), The Doors (1991), Riding in Cars with Boys (2001), Sorority Boys (2002), and Beautiful Darling (2010).

Previously in this series…

• Bob Dylan: side man. Farina, von Schmidt and Bob
• Dylan with Belafonte, Hester and Big Joe Williams
• Dylan and Barry Goldberg
• Jack Elliott, Geoff Muldaur, Neill Young (plus Carolyn Hester)
• Dylan the sideman: Bromberg, Booker T, Priscilla Jones, David Blue
• Playing with friends in the 80s

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

This article continues from

• Stuck inside of Halifax with the Tombstone Blues Again
• Bob Dylan: The Titanic Tombstone Blues (Part II)
• Bob Dylan And The Tombstone Blues (Part III)
• Bob Dylan and the Tombstone Blues (Part IV)

By Larry Fyffe

A song of comedy from the happy days of youth:

Well, my telephone rang, it would not stop
It's President Kennedy calling me up
He said "My friend Bob, what do we need to make the country grow"
I said "My friend John -  Brigitte Bardot"
(Bob Dylan: I Shall Be Free)

A song of tragedy from the sorrowful days of adulthood – in the song lyrics below, the  singer/songwriter laments the murder of President Kennedy, the first Catholic elected to that position:

The day they killed him, someone said, "Son
The Age of the AntiChrist has just only begun"
(Bob Dylan: Murder Most Foul)

Construed it can easily be that some of the US presidents following Kennedy are manifestations of the metonymical AntiChrist as described by an unknown ‘someone’ in the Holy Bible:

Little children, it is the last time
And as ye have heard that AntiChrist shall come
Even now are there many AntiChrists
Whereby we know that it is the last time ....
Who is a liar but he that denies that Jesus is the Christ?
He is AntiChrist, that denies the Father and the Son
(1 John 2: 18, 22)

Words that echo, albeit ambiguously so, in the lines below:

Hush little children ....
The Beatles are coming, they're going to hold your hand
(Bob Dylan: Murder Most Foul)

Dylan obfuscates on the matter; nevertheless, it is apparent that President Obama, the first ‘black’ elected to that position, is excluded, like the idealized Kennedy, from the list of possible AntiChrists ruling the New Babylon.

President Obama presents the Medal of Freedom to Bob Dylan at the White House:

There is no doubt that President Obama is the presenter. I know a witness. In the process of being 3D’ed in the White House, behind the seated President stands my bearded nephew Graham Fyffe, son of my twin brother:

US Presidents following Kennedy are Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr,  Obama, Trump.

US Presidents following Kennedy are Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr,  Obama, Trump.

The following song quite surely takes a jab at about-to-be-ousted Pesident Nixon:

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
But even the President of the United States
Must sometimes have to stand naked
(Bob Dylan: It's Alright Ma)

Carter, a fan of Dylan’s lyrics, mentions the above song in his presidential nomination speech: “We have an America that, in Bob Dylan’s phrase,  is busy being born; not busy dying”  though the precise phrasing is “that he not busy being born is busy dying”.

The lyrics below ponder the role played by Kennedy’s ‘how-many-kids-did-you-kill-today’ replacement:

Airforce One coming in through the gate
Johnson sworn in at two-thirty-eight
(Bob Dylan: Murder Most Foul)

As one might expect, analyst Kees de Gaaf throws down a ‘red herring’ and attempts to interpret the song above as one really about the crucifixion of Jesus Christ rather than about the assassination of President Kennedy.

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

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Dylan’s promotional videos – the story so far

• An emotionally tight connection in the night.
• The deal, dreaming of you, beyond here lies nothing.
• Must be Santa, Drummer Boy, Duquesne, the noir
• Sweetheart, Clean Cut Kid, Jokerman, Neil Young

For this instalment let’s take a look at a handful of videos from the Oh Mercy and Under The Red Sky albums.

First up it’s Political World, directed by John Mellencamp.

Dylan is playing at a dinner for rich (mostly white) ageing politicians, sheikhs, dictators and kings. There are woman there but they mostly seem bored to start with, until one of the rich guys starts to talk to them. Looks like money changes hands and lots of shady deals are going on around the tables. Then people start dancing to the music (the guys are very bad dancers). I guess no one is listening to the words Dylan sings!

We live in a political world
The one we can see and feel
But there's no one to check
It's all a stacked deck
We all know for sure that it's real

Moving on to our second offering from Oh Mercy, here is Most Of The Time.

This one is a fairly straight forward performance video, but it has a few things of note. Firstly, it is a new version, recorded live as the cameras roll. I’m not sure anyone else ever attempted that before. I have a feeling that McCartney might have done it but I’m not sure. So that’s pretty cool.

Secondly, it was directed by Bob’s son Jesse Dylan. Which is also pretty cool. Jesse finds some interesting angles at time and I think the lightning is stunning. Bob looks pretty cool also, certainly better than the baggy old t-shirt look he went for in the Political World clip!

Next up, we present Unbelievable from Under The Red Sky.

This one was directed by Paris Barclay and co starred a young Molly Ringwald. Paris Barclay is a highly respected TV director, winning two Emmys and directing episodes of (amongst others), West Wing, Lost, House, CSI and Glee. He also directed music videos for New Kids On The Block, Janet Jackson and LL Cool J.

The main story involves a young man chatting up a girl in a bar, he gets beat up, they go to a motel room and then she runs off with his car and money. Fairly standard music video fare. But then you introduce the Bob stuff and that’s when it gets weird and interesting!

Bob is some kind of chauffeur driving around the desert with a pig in the back, stopping every so often to play guitar on the bonnet of the car. Bob looks really cool in this video!

Last one up is this video for Series Of Dreams

I actually wasn’t going to include this one as my memory of it was flawed. I remembered it as just being a series of still pictures. But then I watched it back recently and was amazed by how well it was put together. It works extremely well for me. It’s fantastic.

Tony: In the past I’ve been jumping in with my comments all the way through, but I’ve realised (as I suspect is apparent) with these videos that I am obviously not the audience for whom they were made.  Mostly they distract from the music for me, which no matter how many times I have listened to the track, is where I focus.

Except… I really wanted to (and have) re-run the video of Series of Dreams.   Several times.  To me this is way, way beyond all the other videos we’ve looked at.   It is entertaining and clever in a way that holds my attention throughout.   The use of images grabs me by the throat and won’t let go – I am forever wondering how each can be made to fit with the music, how each was done, the clashing of images…  It all reflects the lyrics of the song, but without being forced and never doing the obvious.   It would have been so simple to use mists or shots from the era when it was written, but no… this takes us all over the place.  The lyrics say “from another world” and that is what the video gives us.

This to me is what music videos should do – they should challenge us, push us forward and back, make us rethink, make us listen as we have never before, make us hear the music in another way, make us understand what the composer was doing.

Of course it is helped by being a fantastic piece of music – but for me it has just become even more wonderful.   Utterly brilliant.

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

Previously in this series

• She Belongs To Me (1965): I – No colours anymore
• She Belongs To Me (1965) part II: Images which have got to come out

by Jochen Markhorst

III         Walking in darkness

The third verse illustrates, almost in so many words, that the title should actually be read as “I Belong To Her” or at least as “She Belongs To No One”;

She never stumbles
She’s got no place to fall
She’s nobody’s child
The Law can’t touch her at all

Choice of words suggests that Odetta’s “Stranger Here” contributed not only to number 5 of Side A, “Outlaw Blues”, but even more so to “She Belongs To Me” –

Ain't it hard to stumble
When you got no place to fall
Stranger here
Stranger everywhere
I would go home
But honey I'm a stranger

… though Harry Belafonte’s arrangement of the song might be a better candidate. As with the next song on Bringing It All Back Home, “Maggie’s Farm”, which owes the opening words to Belafonte’s performance of “Diamond Joe” (“Ain’t gonna work in the country / And neither on Forester’s farm”), the similarity is too remarkable to be coincidental. Harry’s version is called “The Way That I Feel” and has largely the same words:

It sure is hard to stumble down 
    when you ain't got no place to fall
Seems like in the whole wide world I ain't got no place at all
Well I'm feeling like a stranger here
I feel like a stranger everywhere

It can be found on the beautiful album Belafonte Sings The Blues (1958), of which the track list alone suggests that Dylan cherishes this album. It contains, for example, “Cotton Fields”, the song Dylan declares being his personal Big Bang, in his Nobel Prize speech:

“And somebody – somebody I’d never seen before – handed me a Leadbelly record with the song “Cottonfields” on it. And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me. I must have played that record a hundred times.”

Furthermore, “Mary Ann” and “Sinner’s Prayers”, of which echoes will descend later in Dylan’s “If You Ever Go To Houston” (Together Through Life, 2009); “One For My Baby”, the most quoted song in Dylan’s oeuvre (quotations and paraphrases from this song can be heard in at least six Dylan songs); and especially “Fare Thee Well”, or also “Dink’s Song”, which is on Dylan’s repertoire as well. The King Of Calypso’s version, by the way, is a crushingly beautiful version.

“Nobody’s child” and “The Law can’t touch her” reinforce the image of the untouchable lady who certainly does not belong to anyone.

The expression nobody’s child is quite unusual in the art of song. Dylan may know it from the antique “Limehouse Blues”, the old jazz standard that could be found in his record case in the bluegrass performance of Reno and Smiley (1954);

Oh, Limehouse kid
Goin' the way
That the rest of them did
Poor broken blossom
And nobody's child
Haunting and taunting
You're just kind of wild.

But more likely Dylan knows it as a song title; one of his heroes, Hank Snow, recorded it in 1949 and with the Traveling Wilbury’s Dylan will record it in 1990. It may also have been a suggestion by George Harrison, though; in 1961 The Beatles, as an accompaniment band, record “Nobody’s Child” with Tony Sheridan (released in 1964 as a B-side for “Ain’t She Sweet”) – without Harrison, so maybe George felt a need to catch up.

Being “outside the law” appears in many songs, even in amorous contexts (such as in Al Hibbler’s “You Will Be Mine”, 1955; But a woman in love, she’s above the law), but remarkable here is Dylan writing the word “Law” with a capital. No mistake; from the first edition of Writings & Drawings, in all editions of Lyrics, and on the site, law is capitalised. The connotation is Biblical, or more specifically; the five books of Moses, which the Jews call the “Torah” – “the Law”, so with a capital letter, or “the Law of Moses”, the most important books of the Jewish religion.

It is a deliberate action, writing with a capital letter, and the Jewish Dylan, who did have lessons from a rabbi in the run-up to his bar mitzvah, undoubtedly knows the meaning of the word Law with a capital letter. It does not lead, however, to a subsequent, unambiguous conclusion regarding the lady described in this verse. A shiksa, a non-Jewish woman, would be obvious, but the opposite is more attractive: Jewish, but so independent and self-willed that even Moses’ authority is not acknowledged by her.

In line with this is the other striking capital letter, the capital letter in Dylan’s instructive art confession in the liner notes: I am about t sketch You a picture. From a linguistic point of view this is only correct as reverential capitalisation, only if the writer wants to refer to God. In this case, at this point in Dylan’s career, it is more likely that the poet uses it ironically, but Christian Dylanologists, a not insignificant faction of the dogged key-seekers, will gladly see it as a profession of faith. “All my creations are at the service of Your glory,” something like that.

The fourth stanza, then, is the verse with the famous Baez trigger.

She wears an Egyptian ring
That sparkles before she speaks
She’s a hypnotist collector
You are a walking antique

… officially a Baez reference since Robert Shelton’s 1986 book, No Direction Home – The Life & Music Of Bob Dylan:

“I looked down at Joan’s Egyptian ring. “Is that a little gift from a pharaoh in Cairo?” Joan laughed: “Yes, it’s the funniest thing. The fact of the matter is that… Well, that’s supposed to be a secret. Anyway, it’s in the song.”

But Shelton, in addition to all the enviable contacts and with all his talent, also demonstrates in his Dylan interviews a susceptibility to red herrings and is quite keen on assumed hidden codes. Dylan seems to enjoy sending him into the woods, and Baez is not averse to pulling a prank either, as we know. At any rate, in her autobiography she does reveal that Dylan is far from attentive and never gives presents. Except for that one time:

“I told Sara that I’d never found Bob to be much at giving gifts, but that he had once bought me a green corduroy coat, and had told me to keep a lovely blue nightgown from the Woodstock house. “Oh!” said Sara, “that’s where it went!””

… which, incidentally, is consistent with the testimonies of other women in Dylan’s life. Ruth Tyrangiel goes public in 1994 with a lawsuit against Dylan. She alleges to have had a relationship with Dylan for seventeen years, from 1974 to 1991, claiming five million dollars in a so-called palimony lawsuit. She declares that in those seventeen years she had received a gift twice: one time a rose, another time a tangerine.

Okay, a little weird, but still: both Tyrangiel’s statement and Baez’s revelation make it all the more unlikely that Dylan would ever have gifted something as precious and symbolic as a ring to Baez. Nevertheless, it is of course quite possible that a sparkling ring on Baez’ hand is one of those images which are just in there and have got to come out. And it gives the lyrics an attractive mystical sheen, just like the continuation with the beautiful catachreses, with the unknown word combinations “hypnotist collector” and “walking antique”. Code crackers then find explanations like “Joan Baez is the frontwoman of naive political folkies, lying at her feet like hypnotised sheep”.

No, then perhaps John Cale does have a better point. In 2004, when he is a guest on the legendary BBC radio programme Desert Island Discs, the programme in which the guest has to choose the eight records he would take with him to a life on a desert island, the Velvet Underground co-founder’s first choice is “She Belongs To Me”. The record is introduced with Cale’s stories about his arrival in New York, Andy Warhol and his Factory, and the “screen tests” to which each Factory guest had to submit.

“Bob Dylan. Anybody who came by had to sit for a screentest, as it was called. And he was the only one who got up and walked off. Everybody else sat there for six minutes, but after about two he said, that’s it, I’m …”

“We better have your first record, ’cause it’s him, isn’t it. Why did you want to take this one?”

“Well, everybody was looking sideways at Bob because they were astonished at all this power that was coming out of his lyrics. And we knew that Nico had just come down to be a member of the band and she used to hang out with Bob in Woodstock. So when this song came along everybody looked at each other and said, wait a minute, this is about somebody we know.”

Photographs from that time do confirm that Nico usually wears large, flashy rings with mystical symbols and antique looking shapes. As on the cover of her debut album Chelsea Girl (1967, with Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine” on it). And from Nico, the frontwoman of the avant-garde, one indeed can say: She’s an artist, she don’t look back.

In conclusion, the guest, the castaway, must appoint the special one from the eight favourites, the one he’d pick if he had only been allowed to choose one song.

“Now, John, if you could only take one of those eight records – which one would you take?”
“I think I’d take the Bob Dylan.”
“She Belongs To Me…”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“For remembering Nico too, hm?”
“No, it’s more of Bob and…. the rusty voice of his, that’s really… A lot of character in it.”

——————-

 To be continued. Next up: She Belongs To Me part IV: Marie is only six years old

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

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece

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

by Larry Fyffe

This article continues from

• Stuck inside of Halifax with the Tombstone Blues Again
• Bob Dylan: The Titanic Tombstone Blues (Part II)
• Bob Dylan And The Tombstone Blues (Part III)

Buried be they in a Nova Scotian graveyard – a number of passengers (including Luigi Gotti of the ‘Ala Carte’ restaurant) who die when the White Star ocean liner ‘Titanic’ sinks into the icy waters of the North Atlantic.

By an American poet – a pacifist who turns antifascist:

Down, down, down, into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, and the kind
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned
(Edna Malley: Dirge Without Music)

More specific be the reference to the sinking of the ‘Titanic’ in the following song:

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

The liner ‘Olympic’ suffers not such a tragic fate. By way of analogy, according to Greek/Roman mythology, the Olympians overthrow the Titans. Zeus becomes the chief of the Olympian gods and goddesses. As the God of Thunder and Lightning, he overpowers the Giants, but not the Judeo-Christian God – not even Jesus Christ comes to rescue the travellers aboard the ‘Titanic’:

When they were building the Titanic
They said what they could do
They were going to build a ship
That the water could not go through
But God with mighty hand
Showed the world that it could not stand
It was sad when that great ship went down
(Ernest Stoneman: The Titanic ~ traditional)

In the song ‘Tempest’, for instance, had imaginary time-traveller Bob Dylan, or at least his persona, instead of turning quite leisurely away from the disaster, persuaded, or perhaps tricked, Zeus into smashing  the iceberg to pieces before it strikes the ‘Titanic’, how might history have  turned out?

For one thing, the American singer/songwriter would have no actual historical event to inspire the following lyrics:

The ship was going under
The universe had opened wide
The role was called up yonder
The angels turned aside
(Bob Dylan: Tempest)

Nor to inspire the lines below addressed to the Olympian ruler of the water world:

Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
Everyone's shouting
"Which side are you on?"
(Bob Dylan: Desolation Row)

And the hyperbolic poet from Nova Scotia would not have penned the lines below in which the mighty iceberg becomes an objective correlative for the marble-hearted God of modern times:

We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship
Although it meant the end to travel
Although it stood stock-still like cloudy rock
And all the sea were moving marble
(Elizabeth Bishop: The Imaginary Iceberg)

And Jack Dawson would not have had to sacrifice himself in to order to save lovely Rose in the previously-referenced film by Canadian James Cameron:

In the movie, Jack says:

“I don’t know about you, but I intend to write a strongly worded letter to the White Star Line about this”.

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

A list of earlier episodes of this series appears at the end of the article.

By Tony Attwood

Bob Dylan ended 1962 by writing three highly exploratory songs.  Hero Blues puts forward the proposition that one should be wary when your girlfriend loves you because you are famous.   The Ballad of the Gliding Swan says that life can throw up every surprise at you, but life still goes on.   While the final song of the year, Whatcha Gonna Do? was an unlikely venture in that it asks how we will be placed at the time of the second coming.

But unlikely though that final work may be for a young man, the music overall is stunning. Having started the year with a truly remarkable blues in terms of Ballad for a Friend, Bob ends it with something of almost the same stature.

By my rough and ready calculation Dylan had written on the following themes in the previous year

• Protest / social commentary / civil rights: 9 songs
• Lost love / leaving / moving on: 8 songs
• Change: 5 songs
• Blues: 3 songs
• Comedy: 3 songs
• Moving on, gambling: 2 songs
• The way we see the world: 2 songs
• Love / desire: 2 songs
• Do the right thing: 1 song

These are of course approximate totals – merely a guide to the type of lyrics that Dylan was writing, and one can always argue about the central message of this or that particular song.  But although approximate it is nonetheless interesting because his key themes were still there at the start of the new year; a new year which began with five songs that fitted completely into those top two categories of protest and lost love.

But we must step back a little for at the end of 1962 Dylan gained another valuable and insightful experience, which was going to benefit his songwriting enormously; an experience that came through Philip Saville who had heard Bob perform in Greenwich Village.

Philip Saville had become known in England as an actor before becoming a screenwriter and then a man whom the British Film Institute’s website calls “one of Britain’s most prolific and pioneering television and film directors”.  At the time he saw Dylan he was working on the TV series “Armchair Theatre” – although to UK audiences he is best remembered for his later work with the series “Boys from the Blackstuff”.

It should also be remembered that at this time British television had developed in a very different way from that in America, with only two channels licensed by the government, the commercial ITV and the non-commercial BBC (the third channel, BBC2 still being a couple of years away).  Therefore audiences for both channels were huge and appearances even by unknown artists would always generate a lot of interest and comment.

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 (but which, it is said, Dylan changed during the actual performance).

Philip Saville had heard Dylan singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” one morning while Dylan was staying in his house.  On that basis the arrangement to use Dylan was made.

The programme might have been just a footnote to Dylan’s extraordinary work in 1962 were it not for  the fact that while in London Dylan spent time also visiting the clubs in what was now a very vibrant folk scene.  Here, traditional songs, contemporary re-writes and newly created pieces in the British folk style were performed one after the other and through visiting the clubs Dylan got to know people such as Martin Carthy (pictured left, now Martin Carthy MBE in recognition of his lifetime’s work) and Bob Davenport.

Martin Carthy is reported to have taught Bob Dylan his arrangement of “Scarborough Fair” which Bob then re-worked as it became the basis of “Girl from the North Country“.  Another well-known British folk song “Lady Franklin’s Lament” that Martin Carthy taught Dylan became the melody for “Bob Dylan’s Dream”.

https://youtu.be/l1NgNpeyU80

If you have never heard Lord Franklin I would (if I may) urge you to listen to the recording below.  I have had several occasions over the years where I have invited friends who know Dylan’s work but who don’t know the song to listen to it, and mouths do tend to drop open.

Bob then went on to Italy, and during these travels wrote “Masters of War” which was quickly followed by Boots of Spanish Leather and Bob Dylan’s Dream

This was an extraordinary outpouring of songs, and yet it was just the start for in this year Dylan wrote 31 songs.   And while this was slightly fewer than the previous year, many more of the 1963 songs have reached a stature such that even casual Dylan fans will know them.   Indeed when one remembers that this year included the creation of not just the four songs mentioned above but also “Davey Moore”, “Seven Curses”, “With God on our Side”, “Only a pawn”, “North Country Blues”, “When the ship comes in”, “Times they are a changing”, “Hattie Carroll” “One to many mornings” and “Restless Farewell,” you can see what a creative explosion was happening here.  And those are just  the songs I’ve picked out as the ones I can instantly recall from this year without looking them up on Untold Dylan!  As we’ll see there are many more.

After returning to New York in January 1963 Bob wrote a collection of songs for Broadside, which also published “Masters of War” among others, as Bob turned his attention back to finishing what was become Freewheelin, now working with Tom Wilson as producer.

By April the album’s recordings were completed and Dylan’s fame had reached such a level that he was booked into the Ed Sullivan Show.  Here he decided to perform Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues which he had written the previous year and which was initially scheduled for inclusion in Freewheelin’.  There were however concerns that the John Birch Society might sue for libel, (and interesting thought from a 21st century perspective) and as a result of the arguments the song was dropped from Freewheelin, and Dylan did not appear on the Ed Sullivan show.   Commentators have spent quite a bit of time bickering with each other as to which came first – the dropping of the song from the album or the  refusal to appear on TV, but I must admit I personally find such matters of little importance.   In reality there was a huge amount of chopping and changing of the songs for Freewheelin going on irrespective of the John Birch issue, simply because Dylan was writing more and more songs of significant artistic merit.   And when the album was most certainly going to include “Don’t think twice” and “Blowing in the Wind”, along with “Hard Rain,” no one could surely think there was going to be much to worry about in terms of sales.

Indeed as the tracks were pulled together it must have been obvious to everyone what an extraordinary album was being created, for apart from those tracks it was by now clear that the album also had to include “Girl from the North Country”, and “Masters of War.” No matter what the other tracks were that collection was surely more than enough to keep audiences gaping in amazement.

But then as if to suggest that maybe those brilliant songs were not quite enough Dylan then also produced Bob Dylan’s Dream, and made it one of the most evocative pieces imaginable, especially for those who did not know the original.  It sounds as if it should have been written by an old man, or at least a man of middle age looking back on his life, but this is the young Dylan showing an utter maturity in his writing (even if it was re-writing of a traditional song) that is remarkable for his age.

Indeed, the “Dream” makes me think of Ballad for a friend – not because they are musically alike, but because of the maturity both of the music and the thought behind the song.  These songs sound as if Dylan had had his life and was looking back with fondness and sadness – and yet he was only just starting out.

Of course many will interrupt here and say but “he merely copied the music, the feel and the style of the original,” and yes, he has copied that folk song.  But the fact is anyone could have done this at any time and brought Lord Franklin into the contemporary world, yet no one else did.  There was, before Dylan, very little crossover between the phenomenally rich world of British folk songs, and contemporary audiences.  Martin Carthy and others kept the traditions alive and brought them to a new audience in the 1960s and thereafter, and for that those folk singers deserve our undying thanks, but it was Dylan who introduced a world-wide audience to this heritage.

The level of emotion in Dylan’s song is quite extraordinary; it is one of those songs that above all others has stayed with me from my young days when I heard it, not appreciating what it could be like to look back on a life where so many friends have now been lost.  Now I know, it hits me even harder.

But in terms of the writing, and leaving aside debates about what to put on the album, Dylan continued composing, going back to his own folk roots with Only a Hobo, before suddenly taking off in an utterly different direction with a song about boxing (a subject that was hardly on the agenda for the socially conscious young rebel) with Who killed Davey Moore?  one more based on the English traditions – this coming from the 18th century (if not earlier).  Indeed of that song one can also say not just “who writes songs about boxing?” but also, “who writes a contemporary song using Who killed cock robin?”

What also strikes me, and not for the first time, is that in this one year Dylan produced not only what would have been five years or more’s worth of composition, but he was so varied in his writing, for he then took in the theme of desolation with Seven Curses and then goes into desperation and hopelessness with God on our Side.

Quite how the young Dylan could jump from subject to subject I am not sure; I think in the end I just have to use the get out word, “genius”.  Yes he was borrowing themes and music from classic folk music, but even so… for before we can blink he is telling us in Eternal Circle that there is nothing we can do, for nothing ever changes.

This is, no matter which way you look at it an incredible tour de force.  Not just because Dylan wrote 20 glorious, memorable songs during the course of one year, but because in doing that he jumps from subject to subject to subject, from style to style, from subject to subject, to…

And, if you are still not convinced, consider what happens next, for now he suddenly diverts his talent once again and creates (or revises, opinions disagree on the dating of this song, just as the do on the implication and meaning) Gypsy Lou – a song which has caused a huge amount of debate during the years of creating this site.  And then we are travelling in another direction by suddenly taking in a Biblical theme with When the ship comes in.

The positivism of When the Ship undoubtedly paved the way for The Times they are a-Changing which goes back to the notion found in “Paths of Victory,” proclaiming that the future will be fine, just let it happen.  (Although many people have insisted in seeing Times as a call for the young to rise up, the lyrics actually suggest no such thing.  According to this song, it’s just going to happen and there’s nothing you can do.)

Indeed in many ways these songs are a very curious mix.  In the songs that led up to “Times” Dylan was upbeat with the metaphorical ship soon to be coming in, and then in Eternal Circle Dylan is telling us nothing can change and that we are all just stuck in our own circumstances – we are all pawns in their game.

The only implication I can take from this is that just as the songs are not coded messages (as many to this day, do insist that they are) they are also most certainly not a series of instructions on how to see the world.   Indeed while writing this piece I have read Jochen’s excellent article on this site in which he highlights the nonsense of claiming that “Louise in “Visions Of Johanna” is “actually” his wife Sara, and Johanna is “actually” the absent Joan Baez.”  Jochen describes these as “One-dimensional, superficial interpretations generally, which are, in fact, repeatedly refuted by the poet himself…”  Quite so, in my view.

And I would add to that view, the fact that Dylan’s ability to write about so many different topics in so many different ways adds to the inevitable view that Dylan is not offering us a unified view of the world but rather a set of constantly varying views.  What’s more, fully to understand Dylan we really do have to stop and consider the fact that Dylan is not writing all these songs because he believes in what the song says.  No more, indeed, than a novelist or writer of a film script believes in the story that he writes.  The storyteller tells stories because he/she likes telling stories, and finds it fun and can do it well.  The storyteller does not have to preach in each story – stories can be told for the enjoyment of others.  Story tellers tell stories (in my experience as an author myself) because they are good at it and from time to time readers or listeners are kind enough to say that they have enjoyed the work.

Thus I would argue (and although I haven’t checked with Jochen, I rather suspect he feels this also) that many commentators have tied themselves up in knots trying to explain each Dylan song in terms of one consistent moral code or vision of the world.

Times they are a changing tells us that the new, wonderful, vibrant, brilliant future is just around the corner and is going to happen no matter what we do, whereas Hollis Brown tells us the world is falling apart and the level of human misery our socio-economic system continues to generate is appalling.  Indeed at the risk of becoming incredibly boring, allow me just once more to make the point that on the Times they are a changing album most of the songs tell us that times are very much not changing by human design or God’s grand plan.   Not every Dylan song has a heart-felt message tucked away inside it, any more than does every piece of modern visual art, nor every piece of contemporary orchestral music.

Of course being Dylan, immediately he has started to explore such themes and contradictions as are in Eternal Circle and Times they are a changing, he’s back pulling at every emotional heart string and political sense of fair play with The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll before taking us into the world of nature with Lay Down your Weary Tune

And finally as if all this were not enough he then comes up with what I consider to be one of the greatest songs of leaving written in the 20th century: Restless Farewell, a song based on the Irish ballad “The Parting Glass”.

What is it, I therefore feel we must ask, that drives Dylan through this extraordinary creative output?

Of course he did have a strong engagement with the protest movement and with civil rights, I am not denying that.  Of course he was deeply concerned about the well-being of the rural poor through his upbringing, although he had been considering the urban poor in New York in his time there.  Of course he is concerned about justice.   But throughout all this there are two other factors we must acknowledge.  First Dylan is a natural storyteller, and second Dylan now has access to and knowledge of the vast wealth of music that is the Scottish, Irish and English folk traditions.  He knows the songs, he knows the themes, and he knows how to bring them into the modern day.

“Restless Farewell” is one of the absolute masterpieces of the early years of Dylan’s writing – a song written quickly as the whole message poured out of him, a song about getting up and being on the road once again.  It is a song that is a picture; a picture as powerful as anything he had produced up to this point.  A song as magnificent in its achievement as “Ballad for a Friend”, “Hard Rain” and “Bob Dylan’s Dream.”  Indeed if all he had ever achieved had been those four songs he should have been remembered as one of the great songwriters of the 20th century.  But even in this one year there was so much more.

That recording above, for the Sinatra concert, shows the absolute power and insight of this song.  This version is so very different from the original, but it adds even more power to the piece than the original.

So what we have here is a man drawing on many different sources of inspiration, and seemingly quite capable of being able to shift from one musical source to another as well as one lyrical theme to another, and all within a matter of days.  A man who can write songs that he himself can rearrange weeks, months or years later and find new and even deeper meanings reflecting his own life as well as those of a musician he admires.

Consider, for example, this much earlier version of Restless Farewell

Looking at the list of songs for this year one can fully understand why Dylan became rather fed up with being pigeon holed as a “protest singer”, because such utter masterpieces as “Dream”, “Ballad for a Friend” and “Restless Farewell” are not protest songs. To call him a protest singer is to ignore these early pinnacles of Dylan’s achievement; these early expressions of his genius.

What is missing in this year is much of a Robert Johnson input – although it would soon return.  Probably it went because Bob really was continuing to move in every direction at once.  And it was through this multi-directional approach that we do see the flowering of the songs of sadness and regret for what has been left behind, and what must be left behind.

Whichever way you look at Dylan in 1963, it was the most incredible, awesome achievement to produce not just this many brilliant songs, but this many songs in such diverse forms and with such diverse visions of the world.

Earlier in this series…

• A song is like a painting, you can’t see it all if you’re standing too close
• All directions at once: How Dylan’s lyrics empower those who wish to be empowered
• All directions at once: The prelude to the explosion
• All directions at once: The explosion (1962).
• All directions at once: Making a name, getting known, arguing about copyright

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

Previously in this series: She Belongs To Me (1965): I – No colours anymore

by Jochen Markhorst

II          Images which have got to come out

Those liner notes on Bringing It All Back Home should be a goldmine for the key-seeking Dylanologist, but most exegetes prefer to ignore them. After all, the most honest lines in them, I am about t sketch You a picture of what goes on around here sometimes. tho I don’t understand too well myself what’s really happening, do demythologise Dylan’s poetry quite a bit. To the dissatisfaction of the puzzling Dylanologist with crypto-analytic ambition, it is a fairly unambiguous art statement from a thoroughbred Impressionist.

Although there is no uncontroversial definition of “impressionism”, we do agree on its essence: the artistic expression of an impressionist is a notion, an impression of a moment. “Volatility” is another characteristic, and Renoir’s paintings, for example, illustrate this perfectly; paintings with the vagueness and ephemerality of a photograph taken from a passing car. Paintings that capture a blurred impression of a moment – seems like a freeze-out, as Dylan initially will call “Visions Of Johanna”, written shortly after “She Belongs To Me”.

In any case, “a nonunderstanding sketch of what is happening here”, the somewhat more cumbersome way of saying “impression”, does indeed seem to be an adequate choice of words to describe his own poetry, certainly that of these mid-sixties.

What the poet does perceive, which event does provide the impressions, the poet discloses right at the beginning of those revealing liner notes: “i’m standing here watching the parade”. Which is, added to the “sketch confession”, rather consistent with the observation that songs like “Just Like A Woman”, “Visions Of Johanna”, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” and “Farewell Angelina”, to name but a few, are collage songs, sketchy images of the parade that goes on around here sometimes.

Such a vision clashes with the vision of interpreters who are so eager to explain that the lyrics are in fact one coded narrative, telling one life fact or event from the life of the human Dylan. And then – for example – argue that Louise in “Visions Of Johanna” is “actually” his wife Sara, and Johanna is “actually” the absent Joan Baez. One-dimensional, superficial interpretations generally, which are, in fact, repeatedly refuted by the poet himself – whatever that may be worth.

Most emotionally at that eruption from the stage in England, in the Royal Albert Hall, 27 May 1966: “I’m sick of people asking what does it mean. It means nothing!” And equally convincing in calm interviews, such as in the captivating SongTalk interview with Paul Zollo (April 1991), when the interviewer wants a reaction to another high point of the mercury years, to “Absolutely Sweet Marie”, and then specifically to that one verse I stand here looking at your yellow railroad in the ruins of your balcony. That’s just true, Dylan says at first, “Every single letter in that line. It’s all true. On a literal and on an escapist level,” to come back to it a little later:

“So you must make yourself observe whatever. But most of the time it hits you. You don’t have to observe. It hits you. Like “yellow railroad” could have been a blinding day when the sun was so bright on a railroad someplace and it stayed on my mind.  These aren’t contrived images. These are images which are just in there and have got to come out. You know, if it’s in there it’s got to come out.”

… words of a full-blooded Impressionist. Spoken a quarter of a century after those liner notes from Bringing It All Back Home – at the very least, these code-crackers and key seekers could consider taking the words of the artist himself just a tiny bit seriously. And if not, the words the poet spoke, again a quarter of a century hereafter, at the Nobel Prize speech 2017:

“I don’t have to know what a song means. I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs. And I’m not going to worry about it – what it all means.”

It is not that difficult, after all, to take the sobering self-analysis of the poet a bit seriously; both the characterization “sketched observations of fleeting impressions” and the self-analysis “images which are just in there and have got to come out” fit wonderfully well on most of his lyrics.

The same could apply for the tremendous number 2 of Bringing It All Back Home, for “She Belongs To Me”. The communis opinio seems to be that Dylan sings Joan Baez here. Gray, Shelton, Heylin… they all feed the thought that is being expressed even more widely on fan forums: Dylan once gave Baez an “Egyptian ring” (whatever that may be) and therefore this song must be about her.

It is, apart from rather thin evidence, a somewhat ludicrous statement. Not only does such a sentimental “interpretation” trivialise the lyrics, it is also difficult to keep the statement upright if you do take it seriously and put the other lines of text next to it. The opening, to begin with:

She’s got everything she needs
She’s an artist, she don’t look back
She can take the dark out of the nighttime
And paint the daytime black

The only words that could apply to Baez here are “she” and “artist”. As for the rest, for the narrative content of the verse lines: it is quite difficult to maintain that they have any relationship with the Queen of Folk. As a certified fighter for the Righteous Cause, Baez is constantly protesting, is at the forefront of demonstrations and protest meetings and lends herself at least once a week to the dernier cri du coeur. No, she is not really a lady who got everything she needs.

Equally inappropriate is the qualification she don’t look back. Three-quarters of Baez’s repertoire consists of reinterpretations of ancient songs, by now she has already written memoirs twice and she is by no means a progressive, avant-garde artist – one of her few good self-written songs is “Diamonds And Rust”, which is reflecting and looking back all the way.

Finally, the paint it black lines can at best be interpreted as a far-fetched, ironic reversal on Baez. Whatever else one may think of her, she is undeniably an angelic appearance with an ethereal, vibrating soprano – more of a light-bringer than an eclipse. Dylan himself would agree on that, as can be deduced from his autobiography Chronicles; “She had the fire,” he says, and “a voice that drove out bad spirits.” The opposite, in short, of a creature that darkens the daylight.

On the other hand, already the title is an ironic reversal, as the second verse shows;

You will start out standing
Proud to steal her anything she sees
But you will wind up peeking through her keyhole
Down upon your knees

… this storyteller cannot claim with a straight face that she belongs to me – on the contrary, he is the slavish part of this dubious relationship, allows himself to be forced to his knees and also reduces himself figuratively by fulfilling her immoral desires, to steal anything she sees.

The contrast hereto, the dominant, unassailable opponent, is bluntly painted in the next verse.

To be continued. Next up: She Belongs To Me part III: Walking in darkness

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

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece

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

by Tony Attwood

There are over 40 previous articles in the “Why does Dylan like” series and they are indexed here.

“Lady came from Baltimore” has been on my list of Dylan rarities to write about for some time, but for me it comes with baggage.  Nothing personal at all, but simply the tragedy of an oh so talented composer.

In my youth I loved the music of Tim Hardin – his first album had “Reason to Believe” as the opener on side two, and when I started to perform in folk clubs some years later I always sang this.  It simply was the type of song I always wanted to be able to write – something so clear and simple and yet so magical – but at the same time musically it just is so different from everything else in the repertoire.

Indeed it is one of the most powerful short songs I have ever come across – how he puts across so much in such a short song is completely beyond me.  Although that unexpected chord change at the start of line three has a lot to do with it.

If I listen long enough to you
I'd find a way to believe that it's all true
Knowing, that you lied, straight-faced
While I cried 
But still I'd look to find a reason to believe...
Someone like you makes it hard to live
Without, somebody else
Someone like you, makes it easy to give
Never think of myself

If I gave you time to change my mind 
I'd find a way to leave the past behind
Knowing that you lied, straight-faced
While I cried
But still I'd look to find a reason to believe...

If I listen long enough to you
I'd find a way to believe it's all true
Knowing that you lied, straight-faced
While I cried
Still I'd look to find a reason to believe...

Tim Hardin’s second album included his song, “If I Were a Carpenter” which surely everyone knows, and also therein is “Lady came from Baltimore”.

According to Dick Weissman’s book, “Which side are you on?: an inside history of the folk music revival in America” the song was written about his courtship and marriage to actress Susan Morss.

According to Bob Dylan Tour stats Bob performed this song twice on 6 and 13 April 1994.

It is a beautiful and delicate song, just like so many of Tim Hardin’s pieces.

Here is Tim Hardin

Tragically Tim Hardin died of a heroin overdose on 29 December 1980.  Here’s Reason to Believe.  It still after all these years has that same emotional pull…

Now to help me recover, something utterly different.  Trail of the buffalo

Bob played this 43 times in in 1991 and 1992.   It has of course turned up in many forms including with the name “The Buffalo Skinners” and “The Hills of Mexico”, telling the tale of a buffalo hunt in 1893 – or perhaps it was 1873.

As for why Bob likes this, apart from it being a reflection of a core part of American history, and the song allows the singer to deliver a full-on solo, without it sounding like anything else.

And moving on to the final selection…  Confidential.

Confidential was played 12 times by Dylan between 1989 and 1995.  It was written by Dorlinda Morgan in 1955, by which time she had been writing songs for some 25 years with tracks recorded by Ray Charles, Louis Jordan, and many others.  Dorlinda Morgan passed away in 1988.

This song was Sonny Knight’s biggest hit although he is noting for also writing The Day the Music Died, under his real name Joseph Coleman Smith a fictionalised account of racism in the American music business in the 1950s.

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

This article continues from

• Stuck inside of Halifax with the Tombstone Blues Again
• Bob Dylan: The Titanic Tombstone Blues (Part II)

By Larry Fyffe

The Untold Office received a call back from Bob Dylan in which he apologizes for not telling the whole truth about his time-travel journey back to the Titantic right before the steamer slams into the iceberg. “Scotty never beamed me up”, he says.

“I didn’t want anyone to know that I had violated ‘the Prime Directive’ not to interfere in past history when coming from future times”, he explains. And the songster adds that what really went down is encoded in the lyrics of “Romance In Durango”:

Sold my guitar to the baker's son
For a few crumbs of bread, and a place to hide
But I can get another one
And I'll play for Magdalena as we ride

(Bob Dylan: Romance In Durango ~ Dylan/Levy)

Tells ‘Untold’ that Luigi Gatti is the manager of a high class restaurant on the Titanic, and that the restaurateur wants to buy a gift for his son Victor back in England, and so the singer/songwriter sells ‘the baker’ his guitar. Says Dylan, “He hides me on a lifeboat in which, purely by coincidence, ‘Jack’ Astor is able to get his pregnant wife Madeleine a seat before the New York businessman drowns in the deep dark ocean”.

Anyway, Luigi doesn’t make it either; ends up buried in Halifax. To make a long story short,  the rescue ship ‘Carpathia’ picks up Dylan and Madeleine, and drops them off in New York, and they eventually wind their way to Durango, Colorado.

Turns out that ‘Jack’ Astor and Madeleine Force hightail it to Egypt after the wealthy businessman divorces his wife, and marries Miss Force who’s 29 years younger than he is. They are returning to New York City aboard the Titanic when the disaster happens to her husband Astor, from which she escapes.

Apparently, the singer/songwriter calls her ‘Mary’, and she moans “Oh, Jesus” a lot. Madeleine tells everyone she wants to be alone, gets “Jakey” looked after in New York once he’s born, and no one is  the wiser. Widow Madeleine will lose her money from her drowned husband if she remarries. Time-traveller Dylan just shrugs it off, and muses that he can’t help it if he’s lucky.

Meanwhile, of course, the time-line of the unfolding Universe has been broken all to threads. Things start to go terribly wrong for our wandering troubadour. It turns out that Ramona with the ‘cracked country lips’ is a man, and the singer shoots the ‘floater’ down like a dog:

Then I see the bloody face of Ramon
Was it me that shot him down in the cantina
Was it my hand that held the gun?
Come let us fly, my Magdalena
The dogs are barking, and what's done is done

(Bob Dylan: Romance In Durango ~ Dylan/Levy)

Suddenly, the ‘future’ doesn’t look so bright for Bob:

Was that the thunder that I heard?
My head's vibrating, and I feel a sharp pain
Come sit by me, don't say a word
Oh, can it be that I am slain?

(Bob Dylan: Romance In Durango ~ Dylan/Levy)

In another song our roving gambler encodes the message that he deals the “Zeus card” from the bottom of the deck, and saves himself from certain death:

Just then a bolt of lightning
Struck the courthouse out of shape
And while everybody knelt to pray
The drifter did escape
(Bob Dylan: Drifter's Escape)

In any event, the Captain of the Titanic gets most of the blame for the seafaring disaster:

Captain Smith must have been drinking
Not knowing that he done wrong
By trying to win the record
He let the Titanic go on
The band was loud a-playing
It playing far out on the sea
They spied the Titanic was sinking
Played 'Nearer My God To Thee'

(Carter Family: Titanic ~ Maybelle/Sara/A.P. Carter)

But I can’t think for you, you have to decide: should Bob Dylan, when he was aboard the Titanic, have gotten Zeus on the passengers’ side?

And saved everybody on the ship before it went down.

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

So far in this series

• A song is like a painting, you can’t see it all if you’re standing too close
• All directions at once: how Dylan’s lyrics empower those who wish to be empowered
• All directions at once: The prelude to the explosion
• All directions at once: Part 4. The explosion (1962).

By Tony Attwood

We left Bob Dylan having written his first absolute masterpiece, “Blowing in the Wind.”   He now followed it up with

• Honey just allow me one more chance
• Rocks and Gravel
• Quit your Lowdown Ways
• Baby I’m in the mood for you

Relationships, the ending of them, and moving on, were clearly on Bob’s mind, and as time past.  And we must remember that we are still in 1962, with the PPM version of Blowing in the wind not being released until the following year.  So Dylan was not yet wealthy – but he was getting known, as we shall see.

His first album had come out on 19 March 1962, and although sales were very modest (only 5000 copies were pressed of the first edition) the recording of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (provisionally titled at the time as Bob Dylan’s Blues) began the following month – and continued until April 1963 with the album being released on 27 May 1963.  The Wiki entry for Freewheelin’ includes the comment, “Dylan recorded four of his own compositions: “Sally Gal”… but I can’t see any evidence anywhere to back up the claim that he did write “Sally Gal”.  But he clearly liked “Sally Gal” and played it at early gigs – and it is a jolly, rousing, lively piece, exactly the way to get  the session going.

So what we now have is Dylan the songwriter continuing his work, completing on average three new songs a month, (once more reminding us of Irving Berlin, the only American songwriter who seems to have written consistently at this sort of speed).  At at the same time he was performing, and on occasion recording his compositions including Death of Emmett Till, “Rambling Gambling Willie “, and “Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues“.   (Although I must add that there are two “Rambling Gambling Willie” songs in Dylan’s collection.  The original one from the era we are dealing with is discussed here). He also recorded the traditional, “Going To New Orleans” and the 1920s song “Corrina, Corrina”, plus Hank Williams’ “(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle”

Dylan continued recording a wide range of his own recently complete compositions and classic folk and blues, songs from “Let me die in my footsteps ” through to “Talkin Hava Negeilah blues”  which was written the previous year.   He was obviously getting used to the studio just as they were getting used to him, and although these recordings are a goldmine for researchers, in the end none of the early takes were used in Freewheelin.   And indeed when we consider that he hadn’t actually written “Don’t think twice” yet and had only recently completed “Blowing in the wind” we can see why many of these early recordings were never used.

“Blowin’ in the Wind” was first performed at Gerde’s Folk City on 16 April 1962 and recorded on 9 July along with “Bob Dylan’s Blues “, “Down the Highway “, and “Honey just allow me one more chance “.  But still other songs (such as “Baby I’m in the mood for you“, were being tried out.

The fact that as we can see, ideas were pouring into Bob Dylan’s head through this, the most productive year of his songwriting, and then being tried out in gigs and in  the studio, reveals completely just how Bob was learning his craft and experimenting as he went along.  It really was a year of a talent utterly exploding in (to use my phrase again) all directions at once.  And we must be thankful that Bob did record so many of these songs.  A lot of them were rejected, inevitably, but these recordings give us a real insight into how his talent was developing.

And of course the potential of this talent was being recognised, as with the fact that the first contractual battles appeared at this time with Albert Grossman (angling to be his manager) and John Hammond (who had signed him for CBS) fighting for control over the emerging talent.  Dylan watchers see this battle as an event that changed Dylan’s personality, perhaps making him more reclusive.  I am not so sure of that – certainly they had no impact on Dylan’s creative output, which is often (among people with this level of creative talent) the first thing to falter when life beyond their art starts to contain difficulties, rows, arguments, disputes or any of the other nastier elements within life.

Indeed if anything Bob’s creativity continued to grow apace.  For what we also see is the evolution of Dylan the showman with his appearance of Dylan at the Carnegie Hall Hootenanny.  What is so interesting here is that although the recording of the show does not allow us to hear exactly what Dylan is saying, it is obvious that he already has command of his audience and is in full control of his own on stage persona.  No one is pulling strings – this is Dylan being himself and it is fascinating to compare this with the hesitant, apologetic young man who was falling over his own words to excuse his errors, after he had recorded Ballad for a friend just a eight months earlier.

The 22 September gig was called “Hootenanny At Carnegie Hall” and was presented by “Sing Out!” magazine. Dylan came on second out of six performers, the star of the show being Pete Seeger.  Dylan performed

• Sally Gal
• Highway 51
• Talking John Birch Paranoid Blues
• Ballad Of Hollis Brown
• A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

Thus self-evidently Dylan was writing songs and then almost immediately performing them on stage.  No period of reflection, no thought of re-writing the lyrics or amending the melody or chords.  Write the song, move on to the next, seems to have been the order of the day.

But this is not to say Bob was not affected by events around him, both in terms of his success on stage and in terms of his private life.  For we may note that following “Blowing in the Wind”, five of his next eight compositions were on the theme of lost love.  Ain’t gonna grieve is a civil rights song, Long Ago Far Away has political connotations suggesting nothing is changing, Long Time Gone  returns to the moving on theme.

But then, seemingly out of nowhere (other than the fact that Bob was writing, writing, and writing some more)  we hit two masterpieces one after the other, both with political connotations and both deadly serious: Hard Rain’s a gonna fall concerning the worries about a possible nuclear war (made all the more relevant by the revelations of the USSR using Cuba as a nuclear arms base one month later), and Ballad of Hollis Brown which is probably the most hard hitting attack on the plight of farmers in the USA ever written.  Even if the ideas for these two songs were not directly related to the need for material for the forthcoming concert, it seems very likely that the concert itself focused Bob’s mind in terms of what the audience might want to here.

Certainly at this time it appears that Dylan wanted to show off all sides of his ability so he gave his biggest audience so far (in order) the knock about, the blues, the humour, the contemporary tragedy and the warning of the future.

After these recordings Bob then wrote on more protest song, John Brown – an anti-war song, before he brought in another new composition, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right“, on which more in a moment.  That of course made the cut for Freewheelin, but Hollis Brown was omitted. 

On 6 December there was a final recording session of the year which included “I shall be free” and “Whatcha gonna do”, the latter being the last song Bob wrote in the year.  If we look at this list of the last 13 songs of the year we can see the incredible range of topics Dylan was covering in his songwriting….

• Don’t think twice (Song of Leaving)
• Mixed up confusion (Rock n roller is confused)
• I’d hate to be you on that dreadful day (Bob gets the ship ready to come in)
• Paths of Victory. (The future will be fine)
• Train A Travellin’  (Stand up and protest about what’s going on around you)
• Walking Down the Line (keep on moving on)
• Ye Playboys and Playgirls  (Stand up and change the world)
• Oxford Town (Racism Protest)
• I shall be free (comic talking blues)
• Kingsport Town (lost love, moving on)
• Hero Blues (beware when your girlfriend loves you because you are famous)
• The Ballad of the Gliding Swan (Life throws up every surprise, but life goes on)
• Whatcha Gonna Do? (How will you be placed at the second coming)

The Freewheelin version of “Don’t Think Twice” was recorded on 14 November and has widely been noted as an autobiographical response to Bob’s girlfriend prolonging her stay in Italy.  And we can also note that as with many other songs, Bob was utilising earlier material as the basis for his writing.

The original version was, “Who’s gonna buy your chickens when I’m gone” which over time, through numerous re-writings had mutated into “Who’s gonna to buy your ribbons when I’m gone.”

The melody and some lines of the lyrics use by Dylan were taken straight from Paul Clayton’s re-working of the folk song from “Who’s gonna buy you chickens” into “Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons When I’m Gone?”

Now what we have to note here is that Dylan and Clayton knew each other and were on friendly terms, and Clayton recorded his reworking of the traditional “chickens” song two years before Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice.”

This then raised a copyright issue, as Dylan’s version included lines from Clayton’s song such as “T’ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, darlin’,” and, “So I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road,” along with much of the melody, but the question then was, how much of the lyrics and music that Dylan used came from the original “chickens” song which was long since out of copyright and now considered “folk music” and thus copyright free with no composer assigned the piece, and how many came from Clayton’s own re-working of the folk song.

Even more confusing is the point that when first performing the song Bob Dylan changed some of the Clayton lyrics, but Clayton’s original lyrics did gradually drift back into Dylan’s performances as time when by.

Clayton performed in Greenwich Village and was friends with Dylan in his early years, but the use of the song by Dylan did result in a legal case between each artists’ respective publishers, fronted by the duo’s respective recording companies.  Inevitably the case was settled out of court, almost certainly (although obviously I don’t have access to the legal documents so I can’t prove this) because of the difficulty of considering the copyright ownership of a traditional song which had already mutated over time, and already been re-written for contemporary use.  In other words, did how much copyright did Clayton actually own in terms of his recording, given that he had himself borrowed it from a traditional folk song.  I suspect both sides realised that the case could cost a fortune, with neither side being certain to win, and an out of court settlement would be the best way forwards.  It appears that some of Dylan’s earning from the song would go to Clayton, and it is reported that Dylan and Clayton remained friends.  Sadly however Clayton suffered from severe bouts of mental illness and ultimately committed suicide in 1967.

The song has of course turned up many times over the years in films and TV programmes, and its simple message of “Don’t worry about it” is in fact quite different from the message within the original folk song in which the woman left behind after her benefactor has died, has a lot to worry about.

“Don’t think twice” is itself a summation of Bob’s numerous lost love songs and songs of leaving of this period.  In the months prior to writing “Don’t think twice” Dylan wrote Corrina Corrina,  Honey just allow me one more chance,  Rocks and Gravel, Down the Highway, and Tomorrow is a long time all of which dwell on the theme of the end of the affair, leaving and walking away.   This song summed it all up, although with that underlying feeling of putting on a brave face by walking away first, while there is the suggestion that at least some of the anguish and hurt is still there, underneath.

As I said at the opening of this piece, relationships, the ending of them, and moving on, were clearly on Bob’s mind.

The series continues…

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

I:  No colours anymore

Mick Jagger is a fan. In her memoirs (Faithfull; An Autobiography, 1994) Marianne Faithfull tells about her copy of The Basement Tapes: “I drove Mick crazy playing it over and over again,” but Jagger has been making it clear in various ways for almost sixty years now that he is and remains an admirer. Quite outspoken, even. When Mick Jagger is a guest on a Dutch talk show in 2001, the renowned interviewer Sonja Barend tries to make a point of his age in a cumbersome way. Laboriously searching for words, she stumbles over a series of half sentences that eventually lead her to some kind of a question: whether Jagger isn’t afraid that he will come across pathetic when he is sixty (he is 57 now), jumping and running over a stage. Miss Barend also seems to sense that this is becoming somewhat awkward, but Sir Michael Philip Jagger is every inch a gentleman and accordingly answers elegantly:

Jagger: Do you like Bob Dylan?
Barend: Yes, I do like Bob Dylan…
Jagger: Well, he is over sixty and I quite like watching his shows. I think it’s quite fun and I enjoy watching him performing.
Barend: Yes, I enjoy watching him, but his voice is…
Jagger: You don’t like his voice? It’s a funny voice. It’s like… it’s a voice that’s never been one of the great tenors of our time…
Barend: No… [audience laughter, Jagger smiling patiently]
Jagger: … but it’s got a timbre, it’s got a projection and it’s got a feeling. And you were talking earlier about getting older… you know as you get older, your voice takes on a certain different resonance and a different pitch… so, there’s something to be said for that.

It is not a one-off outpouring. Throughout all the decades Jagger confesses his admiration. In 2012 he posts on his Facebook page Bob Bonis’ photo Mick Jagger with Bob Dylan album, Savannah, Georgia, May 1965 #1 (the album being Bringing It All Back Home, obviously), at the memorial service for his partner L’Wren Scott he sings “Just Like A Woman” and when interviewers start talking about the assumed depths or the poetic beauty of his own lyrics, Jagger almost always brushes it off by pointing out the quality difference with Dylan. As in the Rolling Stone interview with Jonathan Cott, in 1968:

What about people who see your songs as political or sociological statements?
Well it’s interesting, but it’s just the Rolling Stones sort of rambling on about what they feel.
But no other group seems to do that.
They do, lots of groups.
What other group ever wrote a song like “19th Nervous Breakdown,” or “Mother’s Little Helper”?
Well, Bob Dylan.
That’s not really the same thing.
Dylan once said, “I could have written ‘Satisfaction’ but you couldn’t have written ‘Tambourine Man.’”
He said that to you?
No, to Keith.
What did he mean? He wasn’t putting you down was he?
Oh yeah, of course he was. But that was just funny, it was great. That’s what he’s like. It’s true but I’d like to hear Bob Dylan sing “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction.”

Dylan’s influence on Mick’s lyrics is fairly obvious on Between The Buttons (1967). And on the overall feel as well; “She Smiled Sweetly”, incidentally the first Stones song without a guitar, is in a few ways a “Just Like A Woman 2.0” – the mercury organ sound, Jagger’s way of singing, the waltz tempo and the atypical lyrics, with Dylan echo’s like

There's nothing in why or when
There's no use trying, you're here
Begging again, and over again

That's what she said so softly
I understood for once in my life
And feeling good most all of the time

That Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde have been on Jagger’s turntable a lot is even clearer in the most Dylanesque song in the Stones catalogue, in one of the other highlights of the underrated Between The Buttons, in “Who’s Been Sleeping Here?”:

Don't you look like, like a Goldilocks
There must be somewhere, somewhere you can stop
Yes there's the noseless old newsboy the old British brigadier
But you'll tell me now, who's been sleeping here  

… a fairy tale reference, a hallucinatory procession of Dylanesque archetypes like an “old British brigadier” and a “noseless old newspaper boy”. Elsewhere in the song “a laughing cavalier”, “the three musketeers” and “cruel old grenadiers” pop up, Brian Jones plays his utmost Dylanish harmonica, couplets ending with a recurring verse line … it’s a great, folk rocking Dylan song, larded with vile Stones rock and some psychedelia.

But the album Jagger so impressed is admiring, on that beautiful pool photo in Savannah, provides the inspiration for one of the greatest Stones songs ever, for “Paint It Black” (Jagger prefers writing it without a comma);

I see a red door and I want it painted black
No colours anymore, I want them to turn black
I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes
I have to turn my head until my darkness goes

… words that may already be bubbling up as Sir Mick is listening to “She Belongs To Me” by the poolside, listening to

She’s got everything she needs
She’s an artist, she don’t look back
She can take the dark out of the nighttime
And paint the daytime black

Jagger doesn’t call himself a poet, and he may always quickly be pointing to Dylan, but meanwhile, he does deliver superb, poetic hits. The interviewer complimenting “19th Nervous Breakdown” does have a point;

You're the kind of person you meet at certain dismal, dull affairs
Center of a crowd, talking much too loud, running up and down the stairs
Well, it seems to me that you have seen too much in too few years
And though you've tried you just can't hide your eyes are edged with tears

… is, of course, thematically a “Like A Rolling Stone” decoction, and indeed written shortly after its release, but apart from that a beautiful, well-nigh literary quatrain, which – like Dylan so often does – conceals by its layout that a classical, medieval template is the basis. In this case this quatrain is “actually” a sestain with an aabccb-rhyme scheme:

You're the kind of person
you meet at certain
dismal, dull affairs
Center of a crowd,
talking much too loud,
running up and down the stairs

… a “restructuring” which can be applied to each verse of “19th Nervous Breakdown”. The song actually has the same rhyme scheme as Dylan’s “She’s You Lover Now” and (later) “No Time To Think” and “Where Are You Tonight?”, and, moreover, the same scheme as one of the absolute highlights of French literary history, Paul Verlaine’s brilliant masterpiece Chanson d’automne (1865).

Which is not to say that Jagger deliberately copied this template or made a study of French classical poetry, but it at least shows that – despite himself – he is a poet, an artist who at least has an intuitive sense of rhyme, rhythm and reason. “I watched in glee as your Kings and Queens fought for ten decades for the gods they made” is a delightful, flowing, extremely musical and frightening verse (from “Sympathy For The Devil”). The fact that Jagger not only points to Dylan when mentioning “19th Nervous Breakdown”, but also in relation to “Mother’s Little Helper”, is understandable too:

"Kids are different today"
I hear ev'ry mother say
Mother needs something today to calm her down
And though she's not really ill
There's a little yellow pill
She goes running for the shelter of a mother's little helper
And it helps her on her way, gets her through her busy day

… the mockery and sarcasm of the best of Dylan’s mid-60s work, like Dylan’s best songs conveyed in superior rhyme, rhythm and reason.

And in this “Paint It Black” a fine verse like I wanna see the sun blotted out from the sky does have a highly visual, apocalyptic, Dylan-worthy quality in terms of content as well – the Glimmer Twin should be proud.
“i am called a songwriter,” the heartbreakingly young Rolling Stone reads, as he studies the Bringing It All Back Home’s liner notes, in Savannah, May 1965, “a poem is a naked person … some people say that i am a poet.”

————–

To be continued. Next up: She Belongs To Me part II: Images which have got to come out

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

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece

By Larry Fyffe

This article follows on from Stuck inside of Halifax with the Tombstone Blues Again

In an exclusive interview at the Untold Offices atop the St. James Hotel in New York City, singer/songwriter Bob Dylan talks about another one of his time-travelling experiences – this time back to the sinking of the steamship ‘Titanic’ in the Atlantic after it struck an iceberg – that he recalls in the song ‘Tempest’.

{The Interview}

Untold –

To whom are you referring in the lines quoted below?:

"Wellington was sleeping
His bed begins to slide"

Dylan –

Not sure. When I first came on board the sinking ship, I thought I heard someone yell, ‘Wellington, never mind the bra. No time. Grab a life jacket.” But it might have been “Willingham” instead, or something like that.

Untold –

Everyone wants to know whom you are talking about in the lines given below?:

"Calvin, Blake, and Wilson
Gambled in the dark
Not one of them would ever live to
Tell the tale of the disembark"

Dylan –

A little poetic licence here and there. Like Davey the Pimp, and Jim the Dandy. And ‘Cal’ refers to the bad guy in the movie “Titanic” – the name’s short for Caledon there, not Calvin. However,  Blake and Wilson are the names of actual people I met on board the Titanic when I dropped in for the visit. There was Bert Wilson, second engineer, who did not survive; said for me to call him ‘Bertie’. There was Helen Wilson,1st class, she survived….I lied about her. She managed to make it back alive after having travelled to Egypt.There was crew member Percival Blake, worked with the coal, who also survived. Known as ‘Nunk’ he was. There was Stanley Blake, son of a William Blake, a short fellow with brown hair, a mess steward; he did not survive. And Thomas Blake, another coal worker, who did not make it either.

Untold –

What about this line: “Leo said to Cleo ‘I think I’m going mad’ “?

Dylan –

Lots of people think I’m referring to the movie actor Leonardo DiCaprio who starred in the movie ‘Titanic” as J. Dawson. No, I ran into my namesake on my time-travel trip; had a little chat with him. Leo Zimmerman, in 3rd Class, headed for Saskatoon. I found out later that he did not survive. A German farmer on his way to visit his brother. I just threw in Queen Cleopatra because it rhymed, and Egypt was a popular place for the wealthy to visit at the time.

Untold –

You spoke with John Astor, the wealthy businessman on board?:

"The rich man, Mister Astor
Kissed his darling wife
He had no way of knowing
Be the last trip of his life"

Dylan –

Yes, in 1st class. He and his wife were headed back to New York after visiting Egypt. He told me to call him ‘John’; sadly, he did not survive though he helped his wife escape into a lifeboat.

Untold –

And the following lines?:
"The captain, barely breathing
Kneeling at the wheel ....
Needle pointing downward
He knew he lost the race"

Dylan –

Here, I’m talking to Captain Edward Smith, and the ship starts really sinking. The captain in the tower didn’t survive, as you know. He told me that he blames himself for the disaster, for steaming too fast through Iceberg Alley –  told me so just before I opened up my communicator, and said, “This is ‘Cupid’ – Scotty, beam me up!”

{End of Interview}

Conducted by myself in secret …

I swear all this is true…

Cross my heart.

Recent Posts

• Dylan’s Rarities: Nadine, More and More, Money Honey, Milkcow and Maggie
• False Prophet: ‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?’
• Dylan pulling The Band into Nazareth II: who wrote what?
• All directions at once: Part 4. The explosion (1962).

By Tony Attwood

This series giving videos and recordings of songs Bob has only ever performed once or twice or maybe even three times on stage, now has its own index here.   The most recent articles are…

• Bob’s live rarities, from a bottle of bread to mountains of Mourne (and rock n roll)
• Bob’s live rarities: As I went out, Billy, Get out of Denver.
• Bob’s once only songs: 12 gates; one morning; Viola Lee

So we start today with Nadine, a song which Jochen has mentioned in some detail in his review of Subterranean Homesick Blues

Setlist.fm has this recording coming from The Muny, St. Louis, MO on June 17, 1988.  The video itself has the same year but sets it in New York.  Setlist says this is the only time Dylan sang the song, but maybe not… which is exactly why we changed the name of this series from the “Once only file” to “Rarities”.

The song, as of course you will know, comes from Chuck Berry – here’s a latter day recording.

The song was the first that Chuck Berry released after coming out of prison having served a sentence under the Mann Act, which relates to immorality, prostitution and debauchery.  He was sentenced to 3 years inside – not the only famous person to be caught by the act (which has long since been amended).   Charlie Chaplin and Frank Lloyd Wright were also prosecuted under it.

The track was released in 1964 having been recorded the previous November and is in fact a reworking of of Chuck Berry’s own song, Maybelline.

And at this point I want to turn to Allmusic, because it has two interesting and separate points to make about this song.   The first is about the song itself and Allmusic notes its similes, which are not unknown in pop, but still not that common.  Such as, “She moves around like a wayward summer breeze; Moving through the traffic like a mounted cavalier; and I was campaign shouting like a Southern diplomat.”

Allmusic also says the song had a “profound influence” on Dylan, particularly with “Bringing it all back home”.  Bruce Springsteen, it notes, was also a fan of the lyrics.

So now moving on, we come to Milkcow’s Calf Blues, a Robert Johnson song which Bob recorded in the Freewheelin sessions.

Here is the original…

This is a different song from Milkcow Blues written and originally recorded by Kokomo Arnold in the 1930s.  Here are the lyrics…

Tell me, milkcow, what on earth is wrong with you
Hoo hoo, milkcow, what on earth is wrong with you
Now you have a little new calf, hoo hoo, and your milk is turnin’ blue
Your calf is hungry, and I believe he needs a suck
Your calf is hungry, hoo hoo, I believe he needs a suck
But your milk is turnin’ blue, hoo hoo, I believe he’s outta luck
Now I feel like milkin’ and my, cow won’t come
I feel like chu’in’ and my, milk won’t turn
I’m cryin’ pleease, pleease don’t do me wrong
If you can old milkcow, baby now, hoo hoo, drive home
My milkcow been ramblin’, hoo hoo, for miles around
My milkcow been ramblin’, hoo hoo, for miles around
Well, she been troublin’ some other bull cow, hoo hoo, in this man’s town

Now for a bit of sorting out.   I found this on the internet….

But that ain’t the Bob Dylan I know.  I mean that really is not him at all.  In fact I think this is Barbara Dane, although quite a few sites seem to suggest it is Dylan.   But take a listen…

However Bob has sung the song as we will soon see.

“Little Maggie with a Dram Glass in Her Hand” is a bluegrass song that originates in the  Appalachian song tradition and as ever, appears in many different formats, but invariably in the mixolydian mode (which is a scale that was used prior to the dominance of the major and major scales we have today.  Its notes are C D E F G A Bb C.)

The song was recorded by the Stanley Brothers in 1946, when their music was more old-time than bluegrass in style.  Here is Bob’s recording of it while in Scotland…

Bob also recorded it for “Good as I’ve been to you.”

Oh, where is little Maggie
Over yonder she stands
Rifle on her shoulder
Six-shooter in her hand

How can I ever stand it
Just to see them two blue eyes
Shining like some diamonds
Like some diamonds in the sky

Rather be in some lonely hollow
Where the sun don't ever shine
Than to see you be another man's darling
And to know that you'll never be mine

Well, it's march me away to the station
With my suitcase in my hand
Yes, march me away to the station
I'm off to some far-distant land

Sometimes I have a nickel
And sometimes I have a dime
Sometimes I have ten dollars
Just to pay for little Maggie's wine

Pretty flowers are made for blooming
Pretty stars are made to shine
Pretty girls are made for boy's love
Little Maggie was made for mine

Well, yonder stands little Maggie
With a dram glass in her hand
She's a drinking down her troubles
Over courting some other man

Hope you enjoyed one or two of those pieces.  Maybe we’ll find some more anon.

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

by Bob Jope

‘Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?’

With characteristically fastidious self-deprecation, TS Eliot’s Prufrock, in a poem alluded to – almost quoted from – by Dylan in ‘Desolation Row’, announces:

I am no prophet – and here’s no great matter

Dylan, by contrast, insists over and over, with an unPrufrockian defiance reaffirmed by a driving blues beat:

I ain’t no false prophet

The insistence draws attention to the telling epithet, ‘false’, as much as to the key word ‘prophet’, and there’s a typical ambivalence here, something that underscores the song and its possible meanings: by declaring that he’s not a ‘false prophet’ is the speaker here denying prophetic qualities or affirming that he’s not ‘false’ – ie he is prophet of sorts, and one we can trust, or should pay heed to? I’m very much inclined to the latter.

It’s a cliché to say that we live in an age of ‘fake news’, but like so many clichés (it’s how they become them) it contains a truth: we’re confronted and affronted everywhere by fakery and falsehood, by lying politicians and their sycophantic media cronies inventing ‘facts’. By insisting on not being a false prophet the voice of the poem is setting itself apart from and in opposition to fakery.

The claim to be a prophet is a large one, but it calls to mind William Blake (whose ‘Songs of Experience’ are referenced in ‘I Contain Multitudes’) and his vision of the poet as seer, possessing a wisdom, an ability to see what others are blind to, a prophet who speaks truth to the present day from the perspective of an outsider, even a voice in the wilderness, one, perhaps, who goes ‘where only the lonely can go’:

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, & Future sees

Blake claims that Milton, for example, was ‘a true poet’ who regarded that kind of Energy ‘call’d Evil’ as the ‘only life’. Blake considers Energy to be opposed to Reason, the force which, he believes, restrains desire. He exalts the life of the passions over that of Reason and the true poet/seer/prophet should exalt passionate life and deny imprisoning restraint, the ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ (in ‘London’) that chain us down. Comparably, Dylan’s prophet declares:

I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life

(Intriguingly, too, where Blake is the enemy of reason (mocked punningly as a god, Urizen) Dylan’s prophet – or seer – declares himself ‘the enemy of treason’.)

This elevation of Energy led Blake to believe that Milton in Paradise Lost was unconsciously on Satan’s side: the reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790)

Dylan’s ‘enemy of the unlived meaningless life’ can appear to be something like an embodiment of that Blakean Energy and Passion as he declares with a kind of snarling swagger:

I’m first among equals - second to none
I’m last of the best - you can bury the rest

Don’t care what I drink - don’t care what I eat
I climbed a mountain of swords on my bare feet

The extravagant boasting culminates in a reference to Wumen Huikai  a Chinese Chán (in Japanese: Zen) master during China‘s Song period, apparently famed for the 48-koan collection The Gateless Barrier, including this:

You must carry the iron with no hole.
No trivial matter, this curse passes to descendants.
If you want to support the gate and sustain the house
You must climb a mountain of swords with bare feet.

The commands are knowingly absurd, the feats demanded hyperbolic. That’s their point. Dylan’s Prophet, though, will have us believe that he’s achieved at least one of them.

In fact, as elsewhere on this multitudinous album – ‘Key West’, for example, is a rich, mesmerising dramatic monologue – we find ourselves wondering about the voice we’re hearing, who we’re hearing, as Dylan again appears to be adopting a persona – and part of the challenge of engaging fully with the song’s meaning(s) is coming to terms with that persona, or in this song’s case, personae? After all, ‘I is another’: ‘I and I’.

The image accompanying the early-released single offers a cryptic clue. It’s a loaded pastiche of the cover image for The Shadow #96, featuring the stories ‘Death About Town’ and ‘North Woods Mystery’. (Death About Town, we also read, ‘stalks rich and poor alike’.) The skeletal figure is The Shadow himself:

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? Every fan of old-time radio, the fruit of a “golden age” on the American airwaves which lasted from the 1920s until television took hold, can tell you the answer: The Shadow knows.

http://www.openculture.com/2016/04/orson-welles-stars-in-the-shadow.html

The Shadow knows the evil lurking in men’s hearts and here he (or a version of him) carries a syringe with an intention we can only guess at (poison or a vaccine?) while behind him the silhouette of a hanged man has a Trumplike forelock. Dylan’s speaker stalks the land, and like The Shadow, ‘I just know what I know’.

Then again, ‘It may be the Devil, it may be the Lord…’ The persona, the voice, swings from boasts and vengeful threats, like an Old Testament Jehovah (Blake’s ‘Nobodaddy’) ‘here to bring vengeance’, to inveigling seducer as oily as Satan – who can also, of course, come disguised ‘as a Man of Peace’ –  tempting Eve in the Garden of Eden:

What are you lookin’ at - there’s nothing to see
Just a cool breeze encircling me
Let’s walk in the garden - so far and so wide
We can sit in the shade by the fountain side…

Shade cast by the Tree of Knowledge, Blake’s ‘Poison Tree’?

Tracking the voice as it addresses us through the verses, we begin with a world-weary, even cynical note of resignation:

Another day without end - another ship going out
Another day of anger - bitterness and doubt

Shadows are falling but it’s a day without end, dragging towards eternity, ships ‘going out’, their journeys unnamed, unremarked upon. Days wearily repeat themselves, full of tellingly unspecified ‘anger’ and coloured by ‘bitterness and doubt’. The near-hopelessness, though, shifts to something closer to a worldly knowingness, the voice of a prophet looking back, one who’s seen it all, who saw, too, what was coming  – ‘I know how it happened – I saw it begin’ – but one who also suffered, martyr-like, in his truth-telling and in his searching, we later hear, for ‘the holy grail’:

I opened my heart to the world and the world came in

If you ‘open your heart’ to someone, you tell them truths, your real thoughts and feelings, because you trust them – but in doing that you’re at the same time rendering yourself vulnerable, opening yourself to another’s exploitation if that trusted person turns out to be anything but trustworthy: you can be taken advantage of, something that’s implied here by the embittered follow-on, sung with a tired sense of seen-it-all beforeness: ‘and the world came in’. You ‘open your heart’ to or confide in usually one person, not to ‘the world’, but the speaker’s naïve mistake was perhaps to have assumed that his audience would listen and respond with generosity of spirit rather than seizing an advantage, moving in and, as it were, setting up camp *. Perhaps that’s why the speaker now seeks refuge in isolation, the safety of being ‘where only the lonely can go’, the prophet’s wilderness…

(*There’s likely to be an autobiographical note here, of course: the world-addressing, world-admonishing proselytiser – ‘so much older then’ – found himself claimed, owned even, as a voice or ‘spokesman’, a mouthpiece for others and their causes.)

On the other hand, while he may go where ‘only the lonely can go’, he’s not unaccompanied:

Hello Mary Lou - Hello Miss Pearl
My fleet footed guides from the underworld
No stars in the sky shine brighter than you
You girls mean business and I do too

‘Hello Mary Lou’ is pretty harmless pop stuff but Jimmy Wages’ ‘Miss Pearl’ sounds more like trouble:

Miss Pearl, Miss Pearl
Daylight recalls you, hang your head, go home…

Whatever she gets up to at night in her ‘underworld’ before daylight ‘recalls her’ we can only guess –  the admonishing singer sounds desperate –  but Dylan’s False Prophet welcomes his Miss Pearl and Mary Lou as ‘guides from the underworld’, subterranean muses calling to mind Maggie who once came ‘fleet foot Face full of black soot’. Ready now to do business, the three form a threateningly unholy trio – that ‘I do too’ is added with sardonic relish. The Shadow and his ‘guides’ are, as Elvis sang, ‘Lookin’ for trouble’.

That troublesome ‘business’ is intimated in the next verse with its implied declaration of intent, listing the enemies, the targets to be taken on:

I’m the enemy of treason - the enemy of strife
I’m the enemy of the unlived meaningless life

Another intriguing trio: treason, strife and life not fully lived.

Treason, an act of criminal disloyalty, typically to the state, is a crime that covers some of the more extreme acts against the nation (or its sovereign). It implies betrayal, and the voice here might well have in mind both personal experience (reminding us of the ‘world’ that ‘came in’ when he opened up his heart?) and something grander: a political leader (I can’t help but think again of that Trumpean silhouette)who betrays his own nation and all that it stands for. ‘Strife’ might well have a contemporary relevance, too, suggesting as it does, ‘angry or bitter disagreement over fundamental issues’, or ‘vigorous, bitter conflict’: a nation at war with itself – and with a leader at war with his own nation.

The lines, then, a condemn betrayal and destructive conflict, while, again, Blake comes to mind in the enmity towards ‘the unlived meaningless life’. Treason and strife are, by implication, life-denying, dark negatives, symptoms or products of the ‘Mind-forg’d manacles’ Blake hears in ‘London’, manacles that a lived, meaningful life would presumably be free of, the ‘chains’ that Rousseau and, later, Marx, saw as denying life and liberty. The speaker’s own freedom is expressed, in fact, in the triumphant separateness of the declaration that follows:

I’m first among equals - second to none
I’m last of the best *

(*Robert Currie’s Genius has a lot to say about this essentially Romantic concept, the creative artist as the One versus the Many, reaching something of an apotheosis in Nietzsche’s notion of ‘Man and Superman’: or ‘Man and The Shadow’?)

Michael Goldberg’s thoughts come to mind here:

The funny thing about ‘False Prophet’ is that when Dylan sings, “I ain’t no false prophet/ I just know what I know,” he could be indicating that he’s actually the real thing…In this new song he also sings,

“I’m the enemy of treason…
“Enemy of strife…
“Enemy of the unlived meaningless life.”

That final line is a theme of the Beats, as I was recently reminded when I read three books by the novelist/memoirist Joyce Johnson, who in her youth was Jack Kerouac’s girlfriend when On the Road, written in 1951, was finally published in 1957. “Enemy of the unlived meaningless life.” It’s as relevant today as a philosophy of life as it ever was.

https://rhythms.com.au/the-shadow-knows-what-he-knows/

The triumphant note is sustained in the next snarled insistence:

you can bury the rest
Bury ‘em naked with their silver and gold
Put ‘em six feet under and then pray for their souls

The implication seems to be that ‘the rest’ are those whose (‘unlived meaningless’) lives have been dedicated to – and wasted – on material, earthly pursuits, falling in love ‘with wealth itself’ (‘I Pity the Poor Immigrant’). Wrong-footing us again, though, a sudden, challenging question, ‘what are you lookin’ at?’, turns into an ambiguous reassurance, ‘There’s nothin’ to see’: he’s invisible now, but, as I suggested earlier, there’s a possible dark undercurrent here, the invitation to ‘walk in the garden’ on the one hand possibly innocently meant but on the other calling to mind the wily serpent (hinted at in the wind’s winding movement, ‘encircling me’)in the Garden of Eden, not actually invisible but, of course, the Devil in disguise, something picked up on a few lines later:

You don’t know me darlin’ - you never would guess
I’m nothing like my ghostly appearance would suggest

Again we’re left wondering about the voice, its tone (Inviting? Reassuring? Deceitful? Boastful?) and its intention: who, exactly are we hearing and ‘What was it [he] wanted?’ Unsettling us still more, the swaggering shifts into vengeful mode again:

I’m here to bring vengeance on somebody’s head

That ‘somebody’s head’ is particularly unnerving – somebody could be anybody – and the ‘ghostly appearance’ is now still more insubstantial, ‘nothin’ to hold’ where a hand should be. The threat of vengeance, on the other hand, is horribly actualised or particularised, stuffing with gold the mouth of the ‘poor Devil’ who can, perhaps, only look up and see, not ever reach or experience the City of God – the new Jerusalem, or Paradise: Paradise lost to Adam and Eve, corrupted by Satan – who himself was hurled out of Heaven:

Put out your hand - there’s nothin’ to hold
Open your mouth - I’ll stuff it with gold
Oh you poor Devil - look up if you will
The City of God is there on the hill

This already cryptic, allusive song (addressed by whom, and to whom?) concludes on yet another dense and enigmatic note, loaded with questions:

Hello stranger - Hello and goodbye
You rule the land but so do I
You lusty old mule - you got a poisoned brain
I’m gonna marry you to a ball and chain

You know darlin’ the kind of life that I live
When your smile meets my smile - something’s got to give
I ain’t no false prophet - I’m nobody’s bride
Can’t remember when I was born and I forgot when I died

Ambiguities, uncertainties abound: the voice of a/the Devil, or a/the Devil addressed? Hello – and goodbye –  to a stranger who rules the (strange?) land –  ‘but so do I’? Once again: ‘I and I’? And that stranger is now a poison-brained ‘lusty old mule’ who’s threatened with marriage, but not a marriage to a wife, instead – vengeance again – an ironic, punishing  ‘ball and chain’, calling to mind, for me, Shakespeare’s Lucio who’s punished by, in his words, marriage to ‘a punk!’(By delightful chance, Cockney rhyming slang for ‘wife’ is not, of course, ‘ball and chain’ but ‘trouble and strife’,  while in Janis Joplin’s song, Love is the ‘ball and chain’ that drags her down.)

The voice, meanwhile , telling us again that he’s no false prophet, adds that he’s ‘nobody’s bride’ (not ‘Nobody’s Child’), whereas, we might remember (and Dylan reminds us in ‘The Groom’s Still Waiting’) the church is the ‘bride of Christ’ in John’s Gospel. Mischievously, too , the voice, the Prophet or Seer – Blake’s eternal Bard – not only can’t remember when he was born but, weirder still, ‘forgot when I died’.

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

by Jochen Markhorst

This article continues from Dylan pulling The Band into Nazareth: 1 – Lessons from the master craftsman

The song indeed is in Robbie’s name, and in his autobiography Testimony he devotes more than five hundred words to the genesis of the song. In doing so he insists that he wrote it all by himself. The opening words I pulled into Nazareth, for example:

“Upstairs in the workroom across from my bedroom on Larsen Lane, I sat with a little typewriter, a pen and legal pad, and a Martin D-28 guitar that said NAZARETH, PENNSYLVANIA on the label inside the sound hole. I revisited memories and characters from my southern exposure and put them into a Luis Buñuel surreal setting. One of the themes that really stuck with me from Buñuel’s films, like Viridiana, was the impossibility of sainthood—no good deed goes unpunished. I wrote “The Weight” in one sitting that night.”

A little further on he emphasises that “The Weight” is “something I had been working up to for years”, he claims that an impressed producer John Simon confides to him that he’s fascinated by the lyrics, that the guys from the band “reacted very strongly to the song,” and that a speechless Dylan wants to know who wrote that “fantastic song”. “Me,” I answered.

It’s an annoying element in Robertson’s memoirs: the blowing on his own horn. Virtually always through a transparent, quasi-modest detour; Robertson lets interlocutors burst out in hymns, jubilation cantatas and exalted tributes. If you believe him, Robbie spends large parts of his life making his way through crowds of devout Robertson fans like John Simon, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Albert Grossman, Elton John and Van Morrison, who are alternately stunned, furiously patting Robbie’s back, delighted, confessing to be inspired by him and breathlessly admiring him.

It’s a bit sad and moreover unnecessary; Robertson has toured the world with Dylan, is a great guitarist, has timeless songs like “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”, “Davy’s On The Road Again” and “Somewhere Down The Crazy River” to his name, the world’s top directors ask him to make the film music (Raging Bull, The Color Of Money, Any Given Sunday, and many more), he wins awards and scores hits – the well-deserved recognition and appreciation is there.

And maybe he wrote “The Weight” all by himself, who knows. But especially Levon Helm has reservations:

“The main thing was the spirit. We worked so hard on that music that no matter what the song credits say—who supposedly wrote what—you’d have to call it a full-bore effort by the group to show what we were all about.”

And in interviews he sharpens that further, claiming that the lyrics might be about sixty percent Robbie’s, the rest is written by Danko and Manuel and a bit by himself, and that the music should be for a large part on Garth Hudson’s account.

Oddly enough, no one mentions Dylan’s influence. That’s also noticeable in the otherwise captivating episode “The Band” in the series Classic Albums (1997), a very successful television documentary series that highlights the ins and outs of classic rock albums for an hour. Actually, this episode focuses on the “brown album“, The Band from 1969, but in fact it has become a kind of mini documentary about the first two albums and the Big Pink-experience at all. Here too, the name Dylan barely stands out, and not at all in relation to the songs the men from The Band write there in that big pink house.

The peculiar Garth Hudson, who does speak out about Dylan’s influence in 2012, is hardly present in this documentary. The documentary makers do try it, up to two times even, but Hudson continues to play jazzy chords and funky riffs half in a trance deep over his keys. Garth talks with music.

Recognition of the influence of Dylan’s songs is at most indirectly spoken, by Levon Helm, not coincidentally in response to the success of “The Weight”:

“Of course, the Dylan connection helped. The funny thing was, when Capitol sent out a blank-label acetate of Big Pink to press and radio people, everyone assumed ‘The Weight’ was the Dylan song on the album. The Band fooled everyone except themselves.”

Levon finds it funny that everyone thinks “The Weight” was written by Dylan, but of course it’s rather obvious. The opening lines are a copy of the opening lines of “Lo And Behold!”, the song features Basement-like supporting characters like Old Luke and Crazy Chester, and in idiom and less tangible features like colour and atmosphere, songs like “Tiny Montgomery”, “Million Dollar Bash” and “Don’t Ya Tell Henry” resonate.

This is true for most of the songs of Music From The Big Pink; lines to the Dylan songs and the covers the men have heard, played and recorded over the past few months are easy to find. In the beautiful “To Kingdom Come” for example, in a quatrain like

Don't you say a word
Or reveal a thing you've learned
Time will tell you well
If you truly, truly fell

…in which pieces of “Frankie Lee And Judas Priest”, “I Don’t Hurt Anymore” and “Odds And Ends” resonate. Or the boisterous rhyme, alliteration and rhythm fun of “Caledonia Mission”:

She reads the leaves and she leads the life
That she learned so well from the old wives
It's so strange to arrange it, you know I wouldn't change it
But hear me if you're near me, can I just rearrange it?

…which Robertson would never have written if he hadn’t heard “To Ramona” dozens of times, if he hadn’t experienced twenty takes of “Fourth Time Around” or hadn’t witnessed how Dylan dashes off “Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread”.

“Yazoo Street Scandal” is a “Tombstone Blues” 2.0, and just as Dylanesque sounds “Chest Fever”:

I know she's a tracker, any scarlet would back her
They say she's a chooser, but I just can't refuse her
She was just there, but then she can't be here no more
And as my mind unweaves, I feel the freeze down in my knees
But just before she leaves, she receives

 …an eloquent rhyming, rhythmic barrage à la “Subterranean Homesick Blues”.

In 2000 Capitol Records releases the remastered versions of the first four albums (Music From The Big Pink, The Band, Stage Fright and Cahoots). Band biographer Barney Hoskyns writes extensive, rich and loving liner notes for all four albums, but these are rejected by Capitol and/or Robbie Robertson and Canadian music professor Rob Bowman is recruited to write new ones.

Hoskyns publishes his rejected liner notes on Rock’s Backpages and opens the door to the slightly paranoid suspicion that Robertson has dismissed those lyrics because Dylan is too prominent in them; alone in the liner notes to the first record, Music From The Big Pink, the name “Dylan” is mentioned eighteen times and his impact is fully acknowledged and articulated.

Rick Danko says they wouldn’t have been more than a pub band if Dylan hadn’t given them the freedom to develop and that those “one hundred and fifty songs we recorded in about seven, eight months led us to start getting our writing chops together – we started learning how to write songs.”

Robertson is quoted as saying it was on Dylan’s insistence that The Band started recording at all:

“There was nothing that we had to do, no obligations. But Bob had been wanting us to record for a long time, and our fun was beginning to run out. We needed to take care of business a little.”

Hoskyns further argues that the unfashionable, traditional, rootsy arranging and production technique is a result of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and calls Robertson’s song “To Kingdom Come” (admiring) Dylanesque.

It all doesn’t detract from the beauty of both albums, from Music From The Big Pink and The Band, obviously. The men are widely recognized as the founders of the successful music movement Americana, still winning new fans half a century later and in 2018 the anniversary release, the 50th Anniversary Edition, the “CD Super Deluxe Box” with six outtakes and alternative versions, is once again a success.

But downplaying, covering up, ignoring Dylan’s influence, “our fearless leader” (according to Robertson), remains a bit peculiar.

https://youtu.be/ZiE0fHX-HFc

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

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece

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

So far in this series

• A song is like a painting, you can’t see it all if you’re standing too close
• All directions at once: how Dylan’s lyrics empower those who wish to be empowered
• All directions at once: The prelude to the explosion

By Tony Attwood

As you can see above, the previous episode of this series was called “The prelude to the explosion”.

The point of that title was simple this: from 1959 to 1961 Bob Dylan wrote 14 songs.  Their subject matter consisted of…

• Blues: 2
• Love: 1
• Humour / talking blues / satire: 7
• Travelling on: 1
• Social issues: 2
• Celebration of one place: 1

There is some variation there, and as a newcomer to the art, writing 14 songs across the three years is a very decent output indeed.

But then in 1962, Bob Dylan settled down to writing seriously.  In fact having written 14 songs across three years he now wrote 36 songs of which we have copies (and probably more that have been lost) in one year.  It was a huge step forward.  But more than that he wrote them on a wide variety of topics, some of which he had never touched before.

And the songs included some utter masterpieces, two or three of which most people who listen to music today will probably know, and which anyone who confesses to like Dylan’s music will most certainly know.  Songs written some 58 years ago (if you are reading this in the year I wrote it – 2020) and yet songs of which millions can still quote the lyrics, unprompted

Three of the first four songs of 1962 were blues, Ballad for a friend, Poor Boy Blues, and Standing on the highway, and one of those three – the very first song of the year – turned out to be a sublime masterpiece and a great curiosity.  A curiosity because nothing in the earlier years of writing seems to have prepared either Dylan as the writer or those of us in the audience, for it, and yet it takes Dylan to new ground.  And also a curiosity because it remains unknown save by those who know every piece Dylan has composed.

If you are not familiar with the song and that video above has vanished by the time you get here, it is available on Spotify (no subscription is required) and I would urge you to listen – indeed even if you know it and haven’t played it for a while I would urge you to listen.

Despite the fact that the song has been highlighted on this blog since our earliest days, no one seems to have picked up on it, the covers are very basic affairs by amateur musicians and have little to recommend them, and despite years of searching I still can’t find an antecedent to the song.  That doesn’t mean there isn’t one, but it is interesting that no one else seems to have found one either.

Dylan was 21 when he recorded “Ballad”, and even after all these years of playing the song over and over I find it by itself an extraordinary achievement in both composition and performance.  Taking into account the composer’s age, it’s unimaginable. When talking at the end of the piece (to explain away a mistake) he sounds like a nervous uncertain 15 year old.  Musically he has reached absolute maturity, and thus perhaps it is no surprise that just a few months later he came up with a billion dollar hit.

What Dylan does in “Ballad” is throw away all the conventions of the blues, apart from the fact it deals with sadness.  The song itself doesn’t actually sound sad, but that works because Dylan is not raging against the world; he is just desolate, reporting what has happened, removed from the reality.  When I first wrote about this song I described him as “Numb, desolate, far too distraught to cry,” so “he just tells the story. There is no dressing up of the reality, no repeats, no chorus.  It just was.  It just is.”  That still feels right to me.

The language is old-time blues, and this is perhaps why Dylan doesn’t revisit the song, lyrically it is not the Dylan that we got to know during the rest of this year, so it remains a sketch, a one-off, an oddity…

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

Now over the years we have become used to Dylan, the singer songwriter who can cover all subjects, but at the start of 1962 when Dylan’s talent exploded across different topics in his songs, he opened cautiously.

The first four songs of the year primarily concern the blues and the traditional blues themes of death and moving on.

Then suddenly Bob changed course and after four blues songs we had four songs of social commentary: Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues, Death of Emmett Till, The Ballad of Donald White, and Let me die in my footsteps. Bob in four songs was taking on right wing politics, bigotry and social injustice.

“Let me die” is a remarkable song about the situation in the USA at the end of the 1950s when as a response to the Cold War people were buying or building their own fallout shelters to protect them in case of nuclear war.

Again this is an incredibly assured piece of writing.  Dylan himself said in Chronicles he took the melody from a Roy Acuff ballad – although the first Bootleg album says that it is Bob’s first original melody.  I think the point is that it sounds like it ought to be a Roy Acuff ballad, but the fact that not many (if any) people have identified which ballad suggests that one might better say the song is in the style of Roy Acuff.

In all, there we were, eight songs written in quick succession at the start of the year, following some standard themes – but containing two stunning (if now somewhat forgotten) masterpieces in “Let me Die” and “Ballad for a friend”.   But what strikes me about both these songs is their assured quality of writing and delivery.  There is nothing hesitant in the composition of either of the lyrics or the music – these are well-rounded songs that make sense and have an impact at every level.  And Dylan wrote them after just a couple of years of songwriting in which he explored a few themes across 14 interesting, but not outstanding songs.

These two songs (“Let me Die”, and “Ballad,”) written in the early part of 1962 show an assured writer, confident, in command of both his musical and literary worlds.  And the fact that these two great songs are so different in style and language suggests very strongly that there is much more to come.  And so it turned out to be.

I have the feeling that after writing “Let me Die” and “Ballad for a friend” Bob Dylan absolutely knew that he could “do it” whatever “it” might happen to be.  He didn’t have to write another blues, or another song protesting about the current state of America.  He could do something totally different.  Or not, as the case might be.

And so he wrote “Blowing in the Wind”.

Dylan himself has said that the melody came from “No more auction block” and one can certainly hear that…

… but that is simply the start of the journey of Blowing in the wind 

Dylan also said in an interview early on that, “Too many of these hip people are telling me where the answer is but oh I won’t believe that.”   And certainly there is no answer in “Blowing in the Wind”, other than the fact that there might be an answer out there somewhere.

In my earlier series which gave a very short summary as to the subject matter of each Dylan song, for “Blowing in the Wind” I chose “It’s not the world, it’s the way you see the world” – and now some years later, that still seems fair enough.   In short, you choose the answer – it’s out there, just take your choice.  I’m not going to tell you how to see the world.

Now that seems at one level an incredibly simple a vision, but it is equally incredibly complicated.  We live in a world in which people tell others what to do, what to believe and how to behave.  From parents to school teachers to politicians to religious leaders, from people on Facebook to, well, everyone, people seem to want to tell everyone else not just how to behave, but how to see the world, what’s right and what’s wrong.   Everyone seems to want to have a say.  Everyone not only has an opinion, everyone wants to have their opinion noticed.

But go further and we realise it is the decision making which decides what is to be debated, that can be more important than the outcome of the debate – and that particular approach to questioning what the question is, did not arise until much later in popular music.

And yet it is here in this song.  So we must ask, if we really want to get inside the music of Bob Dylan, how did Bob come to write this utter gem early in 1962 after just a couple of years sketching out songs with varying success in a variety of forms?

We certainly can’t say he was working his way up to it.  If we take the songs that lead up to Blowing in the Wind we find

• The Ballad of Donald White
• Let me die in my footsteps
• Blowing in the wind 

“Let me die” we have mentioned, but if you are not aware of “Donald White” then you will most certainly be in the majority.  It’s a song that was quickly put away by Bob and not returned to after he had given it two outings, once in September and once in October 1962.  You may not want to play the whole piece, but just a few moments give us an insight.

I am not suggesting that this is not a worthy piece, but rather saying that it is a worthy attempt which does not stand any comparison with “Blowing in the Wind.”

So how could Bob write something of perhaps moderate interest to Dylanologists but not many other, as with “Donald White”, then compose the powerful protest song but still ephemeral “Let me die,” before composing a song that is still performed constantly today “Blowing in the Wind”.

Certainly the title itself is of interest.  The use of “wind” to suggest change or randomness or chance goes back a long way.  The word “windblown” dates from the 16th century, and turned up in the phrase “blown by the wind” which in the present tense became “blowing in the wind.”  And when transferred to everyday language “blowing in the wind” comes to embody the meaning of being “out there” but hard to grasp or hard to define.  But it certainly is “out there” and that is the important thing.  It is there if you look hard enough.

It is not quite the reverse of the belief of our ancestors (at least my ancestors, being English).  For in the dark ages those who lived where I now sit would have said “Wyrd bið ful āræd.”   Fate is inexorable.  But no, Dylan will have none of fate.  Yes there is chance implied in “Blowing in the Wind” but also the notion that we can all go out and create our futures.  It is there for us to choose, to do with as we please.  We are no longer ruled by the gods.  The future is out there, go make it.

I think “Blowing in the wind” is still popular not just because of the universal appeal of its core message, and because of its inherent ambiguity, but also because it does imply both this hope and this freedom to make of life what we can.  Whatever “it” is, it is still out there being blown around waiting for us to get hold of it.   “Blowing in” also suggests that randomness and chance is very much part of everyday life today, rather than something that has occurred in the past or something that is laid down at our birth.  It gives it a sense of “now” and possibility which of course was how the song came to be a favourite of the civil rights movement.  “They” might be planning for wars and telling us to build air raid shelters, but we can make another life.

Thus the song has that feeling of multiple interpretations.  There is no fixed answer any more, which moves us onto dangerous ground, because if there are no fixed answers then there is no right or wrong.  Which in turn is an interesting contradiction from Bob’s alternative mode of writing at the time, as with the four songs that Dylan wrote immediately before “Blowing in the Wind” which took a very different stance

• Talkin’ John Birch Society Blues
• Death of Emmett Till
• The Ballad of Donald White
• Let me die in my footsteps

These songs all take a stand and a position which is on the civil rights side of American politics.  But now with “Blowing” we are being told the answer is out there, which is reassuring to some degree, but not quite as reassuring as having someone telling us what that answer actually is.

So did Bob change his mind after writing those for songs?   I personally very much doubt it.  For here was a man who could write songs at the drop of a hat (as we have noted he wrote 36 songs this year that survived in a recorded form, and goodness knows how many more that were written an abandoned).

Listening to each of these songs in turn it seems to me that Bob deals in ideas, lyrical phrases and musical phrases.  Put the three together and (obviously) you get a song.  I suspect the phrase “Blowing in the Wind” came to him, a musical phrase came to him, and then suddenly he had, “The answer is blowing in the wind”.  Add four chords, a melody forms above, and there we are.

This is not to denigrate Bob’s song writing or the fact that “Blowing in the Wind” is a magnificent work – it wouldn’t have lasted this long had it not been.  But rather, put the phrase in front of the master songwriter in the making, and off you go.  It was probably the same with Irving Berlin, the only American songwriter who can be compared to Dylan.  I suspect that when the phrase “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” occurred to him, the rest probably just fell into place.  What rhymes with “band”?  “Hand”.  “Sand.”  “Land”… right let’s get writing.

Come on and hear, come on and hear, Alexander's ragtime band
Come on and hear, come on and hear, it's the best band in the land

But to return to Dylan’s song, and again to travel in a slightly odd direction, although everyone associates “Blowin’ in the Wind” with Peter Paul and Mary the first cover version of the song was recorded by the Chad Mitchell Trio (pictured at the start of this article), but it is said that their record company would not release the song as it included the word “death” which was against company policy!  How to throw away a lifetime of fame.

And so the version we remember came from Peter, Paul and Mary.  It sold over a million copies, and Bob Dylan made his first serious money as a songwriter.  It is said that he was (to put it mildly) rather surprised when he got the first cheque.

Now, it would be easy to stop at this point and move on to the next song Dylan wrote, but there is another issue I feel the need to raise here – and that is to consider the element of chance.

Self-evidently, no one planned this string of events.  Dylan was writing and having written he moved on, and in passing he happened to write one of the classics of the 20th century.

Indeed we can tell that because the next song Bob added to his repertoire was not another song of his own, but rather “Corina Corina” which the record company and his official web site later insisted on noting as WRITTEN BY: BOB DYLAN (ARR).  If you have been around this site for a while you’ll be yawning here knowing that I am about to start shouting “What does that mean?????”  He either wrote it or he arranged the work of another composer.  Not both.

It is in fact a simple 12 bar country blues first recorded by Bo Carter in 1928 and copyrighted by Mr Carter four years later.

So Bob did not follow up “Blowing in the wind” with a series of similar or related songs.  Instead he worked on

• Corrina Corrina (Lost love)
• Honey just allow me one more chance (Lost love)
• Rocks and Gravel (lost love, moving on)
• Quit your Lowdown Ways (do the right thing)
• Baby I’m in the mood for you (Absolute desire)

And seeing that list one might well wonder what happened to the writer of “Blowing in the wind”.  Certainly there is no follow up.  Three lost love songs, followed by a song telling the lady to stop misbehaving and do the right thing, followed by a little exploration of absolute desire.  Because of it being recorded so many times, many of us would have known “Corrina Corrina” anyway.  “Honey” might be remembered because it was on Freewheelin’ but the others…

Bob Dylan, having written an absolute masterpiece, was once again, travelling in all directions at once.  And he still had 22 more songs to write before his third year of composing, and his first serious year of songwriting, came to an end.  What on earth could he come up with next?

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

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Bob performed Yea Heavy and a Bottle of Bread live twice. First in 2002 at Madison Square Garden, where it appeared as the second song in the set. Right at the end he says, “that was a request”.  I believe it was from someone he was talking to backstage just before they went on!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uI1kt4xUOyk

Clearly though there has been some rehearsal as the guys in the band know when and how to come in with the vocal accompaniment.  I called it “abstract weird” when reviewing the song   But if you really want an in depth analysis of what is going on here, Jochen’s review takes us through every highway and byway that could have anything to do with the song.  His conclusion was that “Although similar in structure, melodic charm, catchiness and humbug, “Yea! Heavy And A Bottle Of Bread” never reaches a status like “Quinn The Eskimo”, “You Ain’t Going Nowhere” or “Million Dollar Bash”.”   But he still finds some fascinating covers of the song.

Bob performed it once more in London in 2003.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-bjl6QHqpc

Performing off the cuff like that (if that is what he was doing, and I am not convinced) is not too hard musically as it is a simple musical piece, but the fact is that he can remember all the lyrics – that is an extraordinary feat of memory, and gives quite an insight into the way his brain works.

Now the Mountains of Mourne – all fifty seconds of it.

https://youtu.be/Ogd_3MpKFqo

It was played at the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre, Glasgow, February 3, 1991 – a fact that explains why the audience was so enthusiastic about the performance.

The song opened the performance before Dylan went into Subterranean Homesick Blues!  The piece was written by 19th century songwriter William Percy French, who is also known as a watercolour artist.

And now for something completely different.   “Shake Rattle and Roll”

This came from the Leyendas de la Guitarra concert on October 17, 1991.

It is a classic 12 bar blues, and was written in 1954 by Jesse Stone (known as Charles E Calhoun for reasons that will not become clear at this point), and recorded by Big Joe Turner.   That version was a hit, but it became an even bigger hit for Bill Haley and His Comets – one of a long series of hits the band had.

by John Radosta

When Dylan started singing the song that followed “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” at the City Coliseum in Austin, Texas, fans might have been forgiven for thinking that they were listening to an acoustic version of “Lonesome Day Blues.” It had the same vocal rhythms, the same rhyme scheme. The two long lines to start each verse, both with that characteristic pause, before getting resolved in the second half of the verse. It was all the same. But the lyrics would have confounded them. There was that one line, “Since she’s gone and left me” but it didn’t seem to fit in to the rest of the stanza.

Except they couldn’t have confused it for “Lonesome Day Blues,” because the date of that show was October 25, 1991, almost exactly a decade earlier than the release of “Love and Theft.”

As Tony Atwood noted on this site in July, Dylan was singing a Gene Autry tune for the first, and perhaps only, time ever, called “20/20 Vision.” Dylan’s arrangement and phrasing bear no resemblance to Autry’s recording, though “Walls of Red Wing” and some of his late ’60s country songs, like “I Threw it All Away” and “Waltzing With Sin” (on the Basement Tapes Complete collection) have recognizable echoes. Instead, he’s taken a composition stored in that vast warehouse of his mind, and transformed it entirely.

Here’s Dylan’s version:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jr28R_yicb0

And here’s Gene Autry’s:

After taking it for a spin, Dylan put it back on the shelf, but clearly never forgot it. In keeping with the blues tradition of recycling elements such as riffs, rhythms, and rhymes, when Dylan came to record tracks for “Love and Theft,” his one-off performance was still rattling around in his brain.

“Lonesome Day Blues” incorporates all of these particles. As I mentioned above, only a single phrase, “gone and left me” connects this song with Autry’s. Instead, Dylan used the structure to combine any number of other bits of literature—it’s this song that famously includes lines from Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza, Virgil’s Aeneid, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and others. Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy, provides a rack on which to hang many hats.

Here’s Dylan singing “Lonesome Day Blues” at Madison Square Garden, just a few weeks after its infamous release on 9/11:

This isn’t the only time Dylan has stored away a tune for use many years on (I’m putting aside completed songs that got repurposed, such as when “Phantom Engineer” became “It Takes a Lot To Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry” or “Danville Girl” formed an early draft of “Brownsville Girl,” or “Dreaming of You” donated lines to “Standing in the Doorway”).

On The Cutting Edge, the collection of tracks from his epic mid-60s trilogy, Dylan sings the fragment “Lunatic Princess.” It was recorded in January of 1967, during the Blonde on Blonde sessions. The frantic lyrics are tossed off vitriol of a lesser vintage of “Positively 4th Street.” But Al Cooper’s driving organ riff is extremely familiar: it forms the backbone of “Dead Man, Dead Man,” recorded in the spring of 1981 for Shot of Love.

Here’s a side by side comparison:  first Lunatic Princess.

If you are not able to play that video try here.

and now “Dead Man, Dead Man” in London, 1981:

Again if you can’t play that one try this

It’s a cinch that there are hundreds of tunes swirling through the mind of Dylan; his encyclopedic knowledge of American music across two centuries or more, demonstrated in his one-offs, and snippets of lyrics scattered across his catalogue, prove it. It’s why we keep listening, storing away the bits for future illumination and fascinating connections.

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

by Jochen Markhorst

At the beginning of December ’67 it starts to itch, with The Band (which doesn’t have a name at that time – but in the village, in Woodstock, the boys are always called the band). Dylan has been away three times in the past six weeks. To Nashville, to record John Wesley Harding in three shifts. In the meantime, the men, now with Levon Helm, have merrily continued playing. Levon remembers:

“When I reported for duty in the basement the day after I arrived in Woodstock, they were working on “Yazoo Street Scandal.” Richard was playing drums. (…) I was uptight about playing, because I’d been away from it for so long, but soon they had me working so hard, there wasn’t anything else to do. Richard was writing and singing up a storm. We cut his “Orange Juice Blues” (also called “Blues for Breakfast”), with Garth playing some honky-tonk tenor sax. Richard sang and co-wrote (with Robbie) “Katie’s Been Gone,” and Garth overlayed some organ. Rick and Robbie did a great song called “Bessie Smith.”

(This Wheel’s On Fire, Levon Helm, 1993)

Robbie Robertson expresses the creative explosion in a similar way. They decline Dylan’s offer to play on the album, but are happy to accept his painting for the cover (which includes the elephant, five musicians and a sixth character supporting the pianist), and it’s also pretty clear that they want the Dylan song “I Shall Be Released” and both co-productions “Tears of Rage” and “This Wheel’s on Fire” on the album, despite the abundance of their own songs to choose from:

“Rick felt quite strongly about “Caledonia Mission” and wanted to give that a go. We all agreed. I definitely thought “Yazoo Street Scandal” was right up Levon’s alley. (…) I wrote “The Weight,” which was also becoming a contender. “Chest Fever” too, with its crazy “basement” words, and Garth’s new “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” intro, borrowed from Bach. We had to choose between “Lonesome Suzie” and “Katie’s Been Gone.” Both had Richard’s sympathetic sentiments. I liked that “Katie’s Been Gone” had no intro and that Rick’s harmony in the ending had a touch of Pet Sounds influence, but “Lonesome Suzie” was so moving. I suggested we let John Simon decide.”

And Richard Manuel’s anecdote about the genesis of “Tears Of Rage” illustrates with what ease and how quickly, off the cuff, all those beautiful songs from the masterpiece Music From The Big Pink came into being:

“He came down to the basement with a piece of typewritten paper … and it was typed out … in line form … and he just said “Have you got any music for this?” I had a couple of musical movements that fit, that seemed to fit, so I just elaborated a little bit, because I wasn’t sure what the lyrics meant. I couldn’t run upstairs and say, “What’s this mean, Bob?” “Now the heart is filled with gold, as if it was a purse.”

(Conversations with the Band, The Woodstock Times, 1985)

… virtually the same lightning process as that other masterful co-production from the Basement, in “This Wheel’s On Fire”, about which Rick Danko says in the same interview series in The Woodstock Times:

“We put together about 150 songs at Big Pink. We would come together every day and work and Dylan would come over. He gave me the typewritten lyrics to “Wheels on Fire.” At that time, I was teaching myself to play the piano. Some music I had written on the piano the day before just seemed to fit with Dylan’s lyrics. I worked on the phrasing and the melody. Then Dylan and I wrote the chorus together.”

Technically, we owe the Basement Tapes to Garth Hudson, who has been conscientious from day one about recording and archiving those around 150 songs.

He’s the best musician in The Band, and also the taciturn one. At least, he rarely gives interviews, and in those few interviews he gives, he doesn’t let himself be tempted to look back too deeply into the past – Garth talks with music, period. He thinks “Yazoo Street Scandal” is one of the best songs Robbie Robertson has written, and in he admires his skilfulness “with the legal pad and pencil”.

And in the same interview with Mark T. Gould for Sound Waves Magazine, November 2001, he mentions Dylan’s influence, but on a surprising level:

“He gave me the greatest lessons I ever learned about how to work in a studio. He would go in with us, play a new song only partway through, we wouldn’t much rehearse or much less play it all the way through to learn it, and he’d turn on the tape, and we’d get it down in a first or a second take.”

But then it’s 2012. Hudson helps a Canadian friend, the archivist and producer Jan Haust, who is already preparing for The Basement Tapes Complete, listens to all those tapes, selects what has survived and can still be listened to in terms of sound quality, and Garth is willing to reminisce a little more about that special summer of 1967 – for the first time in forty-five years. Mumbling, hesitating and not always coherent he does his story for the documentary Down In The Flood by Prism Films. In it he is the only band member who clearly, in so many words, recognizes Dylan as the architect of The Band, calls him a master craftsman and an educator, a teacher, and tells:

“He would sit at the coffee table, on an old Olivetti I think it was, and type out a song and we’d go downstairs, in the basement, and record it. And we watched this happen. He worked also with Richard and Rick on lyrics. I think he saw that we were all songwriters to some extent and he would show us a talent that… he was sure of what he could do, and I don’t know how many songwriters do this, but he would make a song up on the spot. Very quickly.”

And the men are good students. All the songs of Music From The Big Pink and part of the successor The Band (“The Brown Album“) are written in Woodstock – two undisputed pop monuments.

The prize song for Music From The Big Pink is “The Weight”. That is a great song, which understandably has a position on the various lists of “Hundred Best Songs All Time”, “Most Beautiful Songs From The Twentieth Century” or whatever those senseless and always fun elections are called.

But it’s one of the nails on The Band’s coffin as well. Halfway through the 70’s, a separation arises between especially Robbie Robertson and the rest of The Band, and that has a lot to do with dissatisfaction – the dissatisfaction that Robbie puts a bit too generous royalties on his own name, copyrights on songs to which the other band members feel to have contributed as well. “The Weight” is an example thereof.

To be continued. Next up: Part II – Our fearless leader

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

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece

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