Aaron: Bob was pretty busy as a sideman in the 80s and beyond but we have already covered several of these in other articles in the past.
Bob’s session work for Stevie Nicks, Lone Justice, Carlene Carter and Nanci Griffith are discussed here.
Other sessions for Tom Petty (Jammin’ Me), U2 (Love Rescue Me), Kurtis Blow (Street Rock), Gerry Goffin (Tragedy Of The Trade & Time To End This Masquerade), Ronnie Wood (King Of Kings) and Mudbone (Home) have been discussed on their respective articles for each song.
One thing you’ll notice about all these mentioned above is that Bob is the writer or co-writer on each piece.
So, this piece will concentrate on the remainder of his session work from these decades where he was not the writer of the song. The first three in this list really show where Bob’s head was at during the early 80s. They are all over the place!
First up, Bob plays harmonica on the Keith Green track “Pledge My Head To Heaven”. This appears on his 1980 album So You Wanna Go Back To Egypt.
Now to be honest, the music is ok, but I absolutely HATE the lyrics! Although in Green’s favour this was the album were he adopted the “pay what you want” policy for albums and concerts – so you could get it for free if you wanted. Bob was good friends with him at this time and maybe he shared similar views, such as this horrendous little nugget:
Well I pledge my wife to heaven, for the Gospel,
Though our love each passing day just seems to grow.
As I told her when we wed, I'd surely rather be found dead,
Than to love her more than the one who saved my soul.
Green was killed in a plane crash in 1982.
Tony: Just to explain a little further, 1979 was the one and only year in which Dylan wrote a collection of songs, every single one was on the same subject. Where he normally meandered from blues to love to lost love to moving on etc etc, in this one and only year every single song was on the subject of his religious faith. From Gotta Serve Somebody, via When you gonna wake up and When He Returns onto What can I do for you? and See by faith
Aaron: For the second piece I couldn’t find the version with Bob’s playing online anywhere. But here is a version of the track without Bob so you can get the idea. It’s The Cruzados with Rising Sun.
The alternative version has Bob on harmonica. Recorded in 1983 but not released until 2000, on the album “Cruzados – Unreleased Early Recordings”. It was also released as a bonus tracks on the Dylan tribute album “May Your Song Always Be Sung – Vol 3”. The Cruzados shared several members with The Plugz, who backed Dylan on the Letterman show performance in 1984.
Tony: Frustratingly although part of “Unreleased Early” is on Spotify this song is not included, so if you want to hear it the only way is to buy a copy of the single track from Amazon.
Aaron: Next up, in 1985 Bob played harmonica on Sly & Robbie’s track No Name On The Bullet.
Sly and Robbie had played on Infidels and Empire Burlesque so this is Bob repaying the favour.
The last few are more renowned artists so I’ll just rattle through these ones quickly.
Bob plays harmonica on the Warren Zevon track The Factory, from 1987.
Tony: Here is one I really like, as it sounds like Dylan and what he does fits exactly into the music and meaning of the song. It’s not a great piece of music and the lyrics are pretty obvious, but at least it is a bit of fun rebellion.
Aaron: Bob plays organ on the U2 track “Hawkmoon 269” from the 1988 Rattle and Hum album, which also includes Love Rescue Me.
Tony: Quite a brave move to say to Bob, come and play the organ on our album, as you know he’s going to do something unusual. But again it really works. My kind of music – and Bob gets it just right listen to it around 3 minutes 25 seconds… you wouldn’t normally even notice the organ, but it plays its part in continuing the drive forward without it being repetitious. Simple but very effective background.
Aaron: Last one for this article is Bob’s second contribution to Ronnie Wood’s 2001 album, “Not For Beginners”. He plays guitar on the track Interfere.
Tony: An interesting choice of track for Bob to be asked to play on. And I wonder how they get Bob there on the right day. Could it really be that Ronnie phones Bob and says, “Hey Bob you doing anything this afternoon?”
Aaron: Bob also contributed vocals (and appears in the videos) for the two charity singles by USA For Africa (We Are The World) and Artists United Against Apartheid ((Ain’t Gonna Play) Sun City).
Next time, we’ll move back to the 70s and take a look at some of Bob’s work with Doug Sahm.
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
Mentioned previously be the following lyrics of a rather sardonic poem:
About suffering they were never wrong
The Old Masters: how well they understood
It's human position; how it takes place ....
In Brueghel's "Icarus", for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster.....
and the delicate expensive ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky
Had somewhere to get to, and sailed calmly on
(WH Auden: Musee Des Beaux Arts)
That human nature places one’s own interest first and foremost is a theme expressed below in the lyrics of a popular satirical song:
He takes me deep-sea fishing in a submarine
We go to drive-in movies in a limousine
He's got a whirly-bird, and a twelve-foot yacht
(Dodie Stevens: Pink Shoe Laces ~ Grant)
All the gal gets out of the relationship is what she takes after her boyfriend dies – the stuff that Dooley wanted to be buried in:
He give me tan shoes with pink shoe laces
And a big Panama with a purple hat band
And a big Panama with a purple hat band
(Dodie Stevens: Pink Shoe Laces ~ Grant)
The consequences even worse in the following song – an East Indian island sinks beneath the waves:
I was sitting at home alone one night in L.A.
Watching old Cronkite on the seven o'clock news
It seems that there was a earthquake that
Left nothing but a Panama hat
And a pair of old Greek shoes
Didn't seem like much was happening
So I turned it off, and went to grab another beer
(Bob Dylan: Black Diamond Bay ~ Dylan/Levy)
“As the last ship sails, and the moon fades away”, nothing’s happening except, amidst other goings-on, there be gambling, a Greek hanging himself, a woman in a Panama hat preparing to leave a hotel, a volcano exploding, and an island sinking.
There’s a picture on the Dylan album cover of Joseph Conrad, author of “Victory, An Island Tale”, in which it is stated that ‘the slight indentation for a time was known officially as Black Diamond Bay’ (Part Four, chapter 5). Unlike the novel with tragedy lurking everywhere, the movie based on Conrad’s book (that stars Jack Hart who wears a white Panama hat with a black band) has a happy ending, a victory, after the detached protagonist Heyst discovers that compassion has taken a hold of him; in both the book and the silent movie, the volcano does no more than threaten the island.
Not so in the song below:
The tiny man bit the soldier's ear
As the floor caved in, and the boiler in the basement blew
While she's out on the balcony, where a stranger tells her
"My darling, je vous aime beaucoup"
She sheds a tear, and says a prayer
As the fire burns on, and the smoke drifts away
From Black Diamond Bay
(Bob Dylan: Black Diamond Bay ~ Dylan/Levy)
WH Auden be influenced by Karl Marx and TS Eliot in content and style – two writers, caught between heaven and hell, whose differing views on alienation are not at all easy to reconcile:
Key West is the place to be
If you're looking for immortality
Key West is paradise divine
Key West is fine and fair
If you lost your mind, you'll find it there
Key West is on the horizon line
(Bob Dylan: Key West)
Seems everybody is stuck between dreams and reality:
When Ruthie says come see her
In her honky-tonk lagoon
Where I can watch her waltz for free
'Neath the Panamanian moon
And I say, "Aw, come on now
You know you know about my debutante"
And she says,"Your debutante just knows want you need
But I know what you want"
(Bob Dylan: Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again)
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
“My Love is Like a Red Red Rose” is one of, if not the most iconic of Scottish songs. Written by Scotland’s national bard, Robert Burns, in 1794, it is a moving statement of the singer’s love for his beloved. It has been sung, if not recorded, by every Scottish singer worth his or her salt, and by many more besides; it has been a perennial favourite ever since it was written.
But, perhaps the most significant thing to be said about it in this context is that Bob Dylan once declared his own love for the song in no uncertain terms. In an advertising campaign launched by HMV under the title “My Inspiration”, Dylan was asked in 2008 to name the lyric that had had the most impact on his life. Dylan cited Burns’s “My Love is Like a Red Red Rose.”
Evidently, this became news and The Guardian newspaper shortly after included a piece under the headline: “Bob Dylan: Robert Burns is my biggest inspiration.” Guardian readers were told: “Dylan has revealed his greatest inspiration is Scotland’s favourite son, the Bard of Ayrshire, the 18th-century poet known to most as Rabbie Burns. Dylan selected A Red, Red Rose, written by Burns in 1794.”
The song is a declaration of undying love, and one of the most appealing, the most captivating, aspects of the lyric are those places where Burns/the singer illustrates the never-ending quality of his love by saying it will last “Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,/And the rocks melt wi’ the sun” (for those not familiar with Scots patois, “gang” here means “go”). He continues: “I will love thee still, my dear,/While the sands o’ life shall run.” In the final verse, the poet switches from vast expanses of time, to distance. Evidently, he must leave his true love for a while, but he assures her “And I will come again, my Love,/Tho’ it were ten thousand mile.”
This kind of imagery was picked up subsequently by the wonderful Scottish duo, The Proclaimers, in the second of our two Scottish songs, their wonderful 1988 release, “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles).” Much more down to earth than Burns’s romanticism, they stick to vast distances:
But I would walk 500 miles,
And I would walk 500 more,
Just to be the man who walks a thousand miles
To fall down at your door.
Their repetition of this refrain, and the fact that they incongruously squeeze 500 miles into the title, would surely result in reminding any Scot of Burns’s “I will come again, my Love,/Tho’ it were ten thousand mile.”
But there are wonderful contrasts between the two songs. There is a melancholy about Burns’s song, an underlying sadness. It’s a song about the heartache of love, about its insecurities. The singer is trying to convince his love that he really loves her: “As fair thou art, my bonnie lass,/So deep in love am I.” But this makes us think that perhaps she doesn’t trust him, is not as sure of him as he wants her to be. There’s an air of desperation, maybe even neediness, in what the singer sings.
There is nothing sad about the Proclaimers’ song. Leonard Cohen insisted that love was not a victory march, but the Proclaimers know different. “I’m Gonna Be” is a triumphalist shout from the roof tops that the singer has won his girl and knows he’s going to be with her:
When I wake up, well I know I'm gonna be,
I'm gonna be the man who wakes up next to you.
When I go out, yeah I know I'm gonna be,
I'm gonna be the man who goes along with you.
If I get drunk, well I know I'm gonna be,
I'm gonna be the man who gets drunk next to you.
While Burns is romantic, the Proclaimers write of a relationship which is much more rooted in daily life:
When I'm working, yes I know I'm gonna be,
I'm gonna be the man who's working hard for you;
And when the money, comes in for the work I do,
I'll pass almost every penny on to you.
When I come home (when I come home), well I know I'm gonna be,
I'm gonna be the man who comes back home to you.
But even so, they sing of a love that will last, not until the rocks melt in the Sun, but as they grow old: “And if I grow-old (when I grow-old), well I know I’m gonna be,/I’m gonna be the man who’s growing old with you.”
“I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” is a great song in its own right, but it is also a tribute by its Scottish authors to the great Scottish song, “My Love is Like a Red Red Rose.” For all the differences in tone—from love’s insecurity and heartache on the one hand, to the overwhelming confidence that comes from finding love on the other—the songs are clearly related. In both songs, the lover demonstrates his love by his willingness to cover impossible distances to return to the beloved: ten thousand miles, or one thousand.
Dylan’s “Make You Feel My Love” of 1997, is his own tribute to the song that we know means so much to him. It’s partly for that reason, that I want to include it here as a third Scottish song. Clearly, I’m stretching the point, but let’s not forget that the album in which this song appears has Scottish features. There’s “Highlands,” for a start:
Well my heart’s in the Highlands wherever I roam;
That’s where I’ll be when I get called home.
The wind, it whispers to the buckeyed trees in rhyme,
Well my heart’s in the Highlands,
I can only get there one step at a time.
There’s an obvious Scotticism too in “Not Dark Yet.” The official lyrics on bobdylan.com give the fourth line as “I’ve still got the scars that the sun didn’t heal,” but what Dylan sings on the album is “…that the sun didnae heal.” “Didnae” is how Scots say “did not.” It seems clear that Dylan’s love of Scotland pre-dated his purchase of Aultmore House in Strathspey in 2006. Strathspey is where the renowned Speyside whiskies are distilled, including those miracles of the distillers’ art Cragganmore and The Glenlivet. And it was just a couple of years after this that he cited Burns’s wonderful love song as one of his favourite songs.
So, is “Make You Feel My Love” a tribute to “Red Red Rose”? It is, of course, different from Burns’s original and from the Proclaimers’ later echo of it, because the singer does not yet have the girl. “Make You Feel My Love” is a song of seduction. The singer is trying to persuade the girl that he loves her, and that she should trust him enough to allow herself to feel his love.
But the characteristic similarities with “My Love is Like a Red Red Rose” are there—the impossible times and distances. “I could hold you for a million years/To make you feel my love,” he sings in the second verse; and in the final two lines he says he would “Go to the ends of the earth for you/To make you feel my love.” Introducing a variation, he also sings of “crawling down the avenue.” There’s nothing so impressive about doing that for the woman he loves, you might think. But it’s clear that he’s proposing doing it when he’s in no fit state to do so—hungry, and black and blue, presumably after having been beaten up:
I’d go hungry, I’d go black and blue,
I’d go crawling down the avenue.
There’s nothing that I wouldn’t do
To make you feel my love
It’s the third line here that confirms that the two preceding lines are meant to convey extreme difficulty. For good measure, Dylan repeats the phrase “Nothing that I wouldn’t do” in the final verse.
Unlike the Proclaimers’ upbeat and uplifting tribute to Burns’s song, Dylan’s reverts to the melancholy of the original. We might also say it echoes the desperation of the original, and maybe even the neediness of its singer. Where Burns was trying to reassure his lover that he really did love her, Dylan is trying to convince his would-be lover that he really does love her. Consider the difference between the two couplets:
As fair thou art, my bonnie lass,
So deep in love am I.
And,
I know you haven’t made your mind up yet,
But I would never do you wrong.
Burns is trying to hold on to his bonnie lass, Dylan is trying to get hold of the lass who isn’t yet his. But just as Burns manages to suggest that perhaps his lass doesn’t believe him, so Dylan’s song conveys an implicit despair—a feeling that perhaps his attempts to win her won’t succeed. Consider, for example, the way he rapidly suggests this in a few deft lines:
The storms are raging on the rollin’ sea,
And on the highway of regret;
The winds of change are blowin’ wild and free;
You ain’t seen nothin’ like me yet.
Nothing is certain, or secure, and there have already been many things to regret, but in a final desperate move, he tries to make out that he’s capable of rising above all his past failures.
So, for me, Dylan’s “Make You Feel My Love” feels like a Scottish song (certainly much more so than “Highlands” could be said to be Scottish). It feels Scottish because it so obviously echoes and pays tribute to “My Love is Like a Red Red Rose.”
And, of course, these three Scottish songs have something else in common, they are all brilliantly captivating songs, and each of them has proved to be perennial favourites. Singers will continue to sing them, and audiences will continue to listen, till a’ the seas gang dry.
To the best of my knowledge, Bob Dylan wrote five songs in 1959 and 1960 that of which we have clear details, and we can be fairly sure that they were his compositions. In 1961 he wrote another nine songs.
So these two years were Dylan’s formative moments as a song writer, and it is interesting to see what he was writing about at the very start. Here’s the list of songs with the subject matter in brackets.
The following year was the year in which Dylan truly exploded onto the music scene with compositions ranging from now largely forgotten works of sublime genius such as “Ballad for a Friend” through to songs that marked him as far more than a blues and talking blues singer, “Blowing in the Wind”, “Don’t think twice,” “Hard Rain”, “Hollis Brown,” etc etc.
The extraordinary thing is that that year of explosion – 1962 – was not just a year of writing at least 36 songs (an extraordinary number given the quality of longevity of the works), but it is also extraordinary given the huge variety of the writing. For we need to recall that 1962 was not just the year of writing “Hard Rain” but also Tomorrow is a long time– which if you have not heard it for a long time you might want to divert from this piece for a moment and play it. The moments we are considering in this piece are those that were the prelude to the big time arrival of the artist whose work we have been celebrating ever since.
Thus my point here is not that there was nothing of particular note in 1960/61 but rather that there is little to prepare us for what happened in 1962.
Here is the list of the topics of the 1960/61 songs, taken from the listing above…
Moving on: 4
Talking blues (humour): 4
Blues: 2
Humour: 2
Love: 1
Tragedy of modern life: 1
These classifications are contentious of course because a “moving on” song can also be heard as a blues etc etc. But they are provided to give us at least the start of a grid concerning what Bob was writing about.
And my point here, as exemplified by the use of the phrase “Travelling in all directions at once,” is that from the earliest moment, even before he exploded onto the music scene as a fully formed genius the following year, at a time when Dylan’s music was restricted to the forms others had invented before him, he had mastered the musical forms that he knew from his life in New York.
Bob Dylan didn’t do anything much to develop or change the talking blues (although if Talkin’ Hava Negeilah blues was an original thought, then he most certainly added an extra layer of humour to the humour normally found in the talking blues) and the songs of “moving on” are the classics of the type of music Bob really enjoyed and valued. So at this moment in his life, before he started writing the songs which gave him his worldwide fame, Bob aged 20 was already utterly embedded in the tradition of the blues and popular music.
But… there is sitting in the midst of these derived song formats, something quite remarkable and unexpected: “Man on the Street”
Musically it is not particularly advanced, but this lyrical concept of observing tragedy and doing nothing about it is incredibly poignant, and not so often heard. The blues singers had tragedy in their own lives, and they sang about that. Some urged us to fight against the system, join the trade union, work for a better world for all working people. But this song, which is in my opinion, the bedrock of a major strand of Dylan’s work across the years, gave us the tragedy of one man whom Dylan observed to have been trapped in contemporary society. Musically it draws on the Almanac Singers which included Woodie Guthrie and Pete Seeger, and it sets out the inequalities and dehumanisation of contemporary urban life, but now the singer outside of the situation. It just is. This is the world we inhabit.
My point is also that Dylan’s stance on humanity is there from the very start, before he wrote any of his songs that have remained famous. And I think this point is important because we see Dylan’s consciousness about the poor and disadvantaged (which found such a powerful expression in Hollis Brown a year later) here from the very start.
Yet at the same time he was writing humour, and although the humour in music became far less important across the years for Dylan – it never vanished completely. But the tragedy of life, the notion of moving on, and thoughts about love… these themes all grew from this early moment.
If we listen today to “Man on the Street” we hear no moralising; it is as if Bob was painting the scene. There is no comment, for none is needed. The dehumanising actions of the police officer say it all.
Indeed much of the music of these two early years would not mark Bob Dylan out from tens of thousands of other musicians trying to get a gig – “When I got troubles” falls into that category; a piece of writing in a standard genre. OK in itself but not stand out.
But there are these moments, these fragments that insist that we sit up and take notice. For when we listen to these, our perspective of this young man expands even further. For example…
To me this song is completely overwhelming and outstanding. Dylan was 20 when he wrote this, and what we have is someone who has grasped the essence of the “moving on” genre utterly perfectly, not just in the lyrics, melody and accompaniment, but the entire deeper essence of the song. We know it can’t possibly be true, and yet everything about the song makes us feel that it is. If it was sung by a gnarled 50+ man we would absolutely believe it.
Thus for me what happened in these two introductory years, was that Bob Dylan accumulated every ounce of knowledge and background he could, he developed his guitar and singing style, listened to every scrap of music he could find, and opened the doorway to a lifetime of songwriting.
The power of this song is shown by the fact that it has since been taken in two directions. as it has stayed with the public consciousness by being reinterpreted. Just listen to this …
And I would urge you to listen to this all the way through, there are some wonderful moments throughout, all of which spring from the song Dylan wrote aged 20, when he cannot possibly have experienced all that he is expressing with such feeling and emotion. Plus if you can take more, I would urge you to try this second version by “Big Thief” that is also extremely informative and illuminating in its interpretation.
Now it can be argued here that all Dylan did was to take another composer’s song and re-work it. In this case the song is “500 Miles” by Bobby Bare, which in turn came from a Hedy West song written in 1961. Before that there was the folk song “900 miles” and the fiddle song “Train 45”. In short the young, inexperienced Bob Dylan was able to join in that process of writing and re-writing and did so in a way that was not just another version of an old song, but a re-write which made a real mark on the landscape. It turned what we had into another much more powerful song.
Thus my point here is not that Bob Dylan copied and adapted the music – in fact lots of people do that. Every 12 bar blues is an adaptation of someone else’s work for example. But rather I argue that the result that Dylan produced was one of great subtlety and beauty which is remarkable for a 20 year old singer songwriter and which was part of the foundations of what happened later.
The issue of where the song came from is, for me (and of course I am only writing about my reaction here, and offering it in case it is of any interest to you) is secondary. Dylan has adapted and changed a traditional tune and created something new and quite stunning out of it. Others also did. He did it more powerfully, and more engagingly.
And as a side note this is my answer to the people who often complain that Dylan is a plagiarist. It never bothers me because if plagiarism instantly leads to beautiful and wonderful pieces of music, I would sooner have the beautiful and wonderful piece of music than never have it written because of arguments about legalities. If the work is “borrowed” ok, pay the originator, but let’s have the art.
So this was Dylan, 1959 to 1961. A talent waiting to explode upon the public, but already showing us elements of what we might expect. “Man on the Street” and “I was young when I left home” gave anyone who cared to listen at that moment, clues as to what Dylan could do, and thankfully he continued and then delivered.
His influences at this point are very clear. The music of Guthrie, the talking blues and the notion that songs can be funny, the awareness of the degradation that urban life brings to the poor, and above all, I think, a sense of exploration. A sense of wanting to explore what this world has, and I mean this both in terms of its music and in terms of it people and its society. Everything I hear in this collection of 14 songs written across two years at the very start of his career shows me a man who had his eyes wide open.
There is a mention of his Jewish roots here, but there is no religious belief, no feeling of the all-powerfulness of God, any more than there is a feeling that many of the folk singers in the first part of the 20th century saw capitalism as evil. “Man on the street” does not blame capitalism per se, it doesn’t blame anyone or anything. It observes and leaves us to draw our own conclusions.
What we do have here are the roots of Dylan, the songwriter. And I think they are important, for when someone suggests that all (or most) of Dylan’s songs relate to one particular subject or issue, I feel it is handy to turn back and look at the early days to see if we can find any sign of that in the early sketches. Indeed such an activity is worth undertaking whether one looks at a painter or an actor or a novelist or any other type of creative person.
This was Bob’s base point. After this, Bob was ready to tell us what the world is. He didn’t often tell us what to do about it. But he did tell us what it looked like, and as we shall see in the next episode he did that with a vengeance.
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
In June and July my “Mississippi” series was published here on Untold. That was my attempt to write an article about that song, which got out of hand, just as before with “Desolation Row” and “Where Are You Tonight?”
Likewise, “Mississippi” is now bundled into a booklet, available on Amazon:
Below you will find an unpublished chapter from that book. I do hope you enjoy reading it.
The piano pounding madman
In 1979 Jerry Lee Lewis records a dazzling, steamy cover of Dylan’s throwaway from the Desire sessions (1976), “Rita May”, the only noteworthy cover of that particular song anyone has managed.
Lewis, according to legend, demonstrates his unworldliness afterwards, when he has asked producer Bones Howe, who wrote that song. “Bob Dylan,” Howe answers with a broad grin, for he is sure Lewis will be mighty surprised. But Lewis shows no recognition at all. “That boy is good,” says Jerry Lee Lewis, “I’ll do anything by him.”
“Anything” might be a bit of an exaggeration, but indeed: thirty-five years later, in 2014, Dylan producer Daniel Lanois will collaborate on Rock & Roll Time of the then 79-year-old rock ‘n’ legend. Lanois points to the existence of another forgotten little ditty, of “Stepchild” from 1978. Jerry Lee takes the bait and repeats his ’79 feat: the cover is undeniably the most exciting version of “Stepchild”; unwieldy, swampy and irresistible. Whether he by now knows who Dylan is, the historiography does not tell.
Conversely, there is a self-evident admiration. Most explicitly expressed in Theme Time Radio Hour, where radio maker Dylan finds, no fewer than seven times, an excuse to play a record by The Killer. Usually introduced with extensive information about “the piano pounding madman”, his tumultuous youth, his dubious predilection for young girls and its consequences, and remarkable facts from his career – such as Lewis’ role as Iago in Catch My Soul, the 1968 rock musical adaptation of Othello, which allows Dylan to play “Lust of the Blood” in episode 81, Blood…
“Ya know if anyone ever asks me why I do this radio show I can just play ‘em that. Jerry Lee Lewis singing Shakespeare — that’s what this show is all about.”
Episode 31 has the theme Tennessee, so Jerry Lee is unavoidable, as the DJ says (“You can’t stop off in Tennessee without paying a visit to the Killer.”) Dylan chooses “Night Train to Memphis”, and thus passes The Killer’s other ode to Memphis, “Memphis Beat” from 1966. Not out of ignorance; we know for sure that Dylan has the LP of the same name in his record cabinet.
Memphis Beat, like many other records of the piano beast, is a compilation of Jerry Lee’s compositions, songs written especially for Lewis, and covers. Half of the songs were recorded at the Phillips Studio in Memphis in January ’66, other songs have been waiting eight months to be released and were recorded in New York, and the album contains even two songs from a recording session in 1963. In all, less than half an hour, but it is still a reasonably successful album. The opener “Memphis Beat”, is an attractive run-of-the-mill smasher, written for Jerry Lee by two members of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, Allen Reynolds and Dickey Lee. The lyrics seem to come straight from the Memphis Tourist Office brochure:
Well they got people a-walkin'
And ridin' and swimmin'
Just tryin' to get a chance at them good lookin' women
Now we just march on down to the foot of Beale Street
Ah then dance all night to that Memphis Beat
Anyway, songwriter Dickey Lee is no small fry, of course. On this same album is Jerry’s cover of Dickey Lee’s biggest hit, the immortal, “She Thinks I Still Care”. Recorded by Elvis, Johnny Cash, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Gene Pitney, John Fogerty, James Taylor and others – after acquiring its monument status through Dylan’s idol George Jones (1962), the country god of whom Dylan says:
“Looking through my record collection the other day, I’ve got about 70 George Jones albums. If you look at ’em all, it gives you a great history of men’s haircuts.”
In between are some more and less successful renditions of songs like Jimmy Reed’s “Big Boss Man” and Stick McGhee’s smoothly swinging “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee”, with which he will score another small hit. Downright awkward is the tear-jerking doo-wop “Too Young” (“They’re trying to tell us we’re too young”). Awkward not only because of the corny lounge arrangement, but especially because of the lyrics, sung by the man who torpedoed his own career by marrying his thirteen-year-old niece Myra.
Most curious, however, is the only self-written song on the LP, “Lincoln Limousine”.
“Lincoln Limousine” is Jerry Lee’s bizarre ode to Kennedy. According to biographer Joe Bonomo in the great biography Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost And Found (2009) “one the most peculiar tracks he’s cut in his career” and…
“Jerry Lee’s odd tribute to John F. Kennedy is simply weird, so ambiguous and amateurishly written that it’s impossible to determine exactly what motivated him to write it.”
The biographer does have a point. What to think of verses like:
Well they shot him in the back seat of a Lincoln limousine
Was a great, great leader by the name of Kennedy
He fought for right and freedom, tried to keep this nation clean
But they shot him in the backseat of a Lincoln limousine
And he had ten million dollars, had the world right in his hand
But a twenty dollar rifle cut the life of this great man
He had a lovely wife and two children seldom seen
But they shot him in the backseat of a Lincoln limousine
So clumsy it almost seems deliberate, indeed. Miles away from The Byrds’ “He Was A Friend Of Mine”, Kris Kristofferson’s “They Killed Him” or Dion’s “Abraham, Martin And John”, in any case.
It could not have inspired Dylan to his “Kennedy song” “Murder Most Foul” (2020) either, but “Lincoln Limousine” does have some impact: the intro, the first ten notes, Dylan copies almost one-on-one for the final “Mississippi” version, the “Love And Theft” version – the only studio version with this intro, by the way. The same lick is used as a bridge and the bard is very content with it, apparently: in the live performances of 2001 he plays the intro twice, in later performances the lick will be integrated in even more places in the song (as with Mark Knopfler in Zurich, 2011). But just as often he skips it, unfortunately.
https://youtu.be/Mi8HG_tugzg
In any case: at least once one little melody by Jerry Lee Lewis, despite all his qualities not a great songwriter, penetrates Dylan’s oeuvre. “He sings this song, he pounds the piano. He says he wrote it and that’s good enough for me,” as the DJ says in one of his last Theme Time Radio Hours, “Clearance Sale”, April 2009.
The song “Memphis Beat” gets a second life in the twenty-first century. Television company TNT produces the comic police series Memphis Beat in 2010 and blues musician and five-time Grammy Award winner Keb’ Mo’ is asked for the soundtrack. He has Jerry Lee Lewis on a pedestal and records a very nice cover of the song for the opening theme. The show is not a big success (after two seasons the plug is pulled again), but songwriter Dickey Lee can’t complain. “She Still Thinks I Care” is of course his goose with golden eggs, but:
“There are still seven or eight songs that have paid off consistently. I can’t believe it, but it’s still mailbox money.”
(interview Nashville Music Guide, February 14, 2012)
https://youtu.be/dFBPwqLGy_Y
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 the full set of articles in this series which traces the Never Ending Tour from its origins to the present day are given at the end of the article
————–
By Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)
In the previous two posts we have sampled the sound and style of Bob Dylan’s lead electric guitar work in 1993. When he picked up the acoustic guitar, however, Mr Guitar Man didn’t always sound like the strumming Bob Dylan of old, but rather played his acoustic as if it were an electric guitar.
This enables him to tackle his longer songs in a new kind of spirit. Rather than just strum along, he can push the song forward with his distinctive lead guitar style. The problem he has with live performances of long songs like ‘Desolation Row’ is their repetitive structure. Such songs lack any bridge passages and their momentum is generated by their lyrics alone. So the challenge is, how to prevent a ten minute song from becoming just the same thing over and over again.
Dylan solves this problem by using all the resources of his voice and his guitar to build the song to a climax. Typically these performances begin quietly, almost understated, then slowly build up energy. Sometimes reined in by a quiet harp break, as in the case of this 13.48 mins 1993 performance of ‘Desolation Row’.
Dylan keeps this performance pretty subdued until after the last verse when the guitars have a fair go. All through the song Dylan patters away against the melodic sounds of Bucky Baxter, but the effect is much easier on the ears than the Stratocaster.
Desolation Row
It’s not surprising that, when working out his acoustic setlists, Dylan should return to his early, acoustic period, songs written to be played acoustically in the early 1960s. Arguably ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ is Dylan’s first great post protest song. As he sings, it’s a song about ‘escaping on the run,’ and following the shaman wherever he may lead as long as it is ‘far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow’.
In this song we hear Dylan the master rhymer at work.
Though I know that evening's empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand
but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I'm branded on my feet
I have no one to meet
And the ancient empty street's too dead for dreaming
Reading lines like these, we have to conclude that Bob Dylan is the quintessential poet of alienation.
Dylan seldom messes up this song, and this powerful performance from his London show (02 – 07) is no exception. He plays it straight, no tricks, except the crowd teasing delay in getting his harp into action – and how they love it! Another gold star performance, with just the right amount of restraint and celebration.
After the harp break, around 5.15 mins, Mr Guitar Man steps in for some gentle notes before the last verse, which he builds vocally to a resounding ending. Wonderful. Then it’s back to the harp to finish the last couple of minutes. Hard to find better performance than this.
Mr Tambourine Man
Another beautiful collaboration between Master Harpist and Mr Guitar Man.
While on that subject, we can’t skip the gorgeous ‘Don’t think Twice’ from the Portland concert. Dylan was in very good voice at this concert. It’s a sensitive rendition, yet rousing too. The last line of the song, ‘You just kind of wasted my precious time,’ may seem cruel, but it reminds us that time is indeed our most precious commodity.
The same concern drives these lines written almost sixty years later:
‘I cannot redeem the time
The time so idly spent…’
(Cross the Rubicon)
Perhaps we all know people with nothing to do and who want you to do it with them. Time wasters. And, within the terms of the song, we can give our hearts but our souls belong to us, our soul’s journey, whether we’re on the ‘dark side of the road’ or not. Dylan wrote this one back in 1962, at the very start of his soul journey, if you like to see it that way. Again, at the other end of his life, he evokes the same imagery.
Take the high road, take the low
Take any one you're on
(Cross the Rubicon)
It’s curious that ‘the low road’ meant the road of death in the well-known Scottish ballad, just as the ‘dark side of the road’ puts the Dylan figure in the valley of the shadow of death (Psalm 23:4) in the earlier song.
So here it is. Enjoy (Spoiler alert: exquisite harp work)
Don’t think twice (A).
It’s worth comparing that smooth performance with this one. Much rougher, and the harp solo more jagged. Same arrangement with the long slow ending, reminding us of how Mr Guitar Man slaughtered such endings in his electric sets (See 1993 part 1 – Tangled up in guitars and 1993, Part 2 – The epic adventures of Mr Guitar Man) with his Stratocaster.
Don’t think twice (B).
And while we’re in the 1962 zone, let’s drop back into the Portland concert to pick up ‘Boots of Spanish Leather’.
A lot of Dylan songs contain conversations and snatches of dialogue, but this song is a sustained conversation over nine verses, and by the end has build up considerable pathos. Dylan never wrote anything else quite like this. The language is that of an old fashioned love ballad, almost an air of the 19th Century. Deep wells of sadness here, and right now I can’t think of a better performance.
Boots of Spanish Leather
From the same era, we have yet another gentle yet passionate song – ‘Girl from the North Country’. As written it is a neat piece of nostalgia, but somehow Dylan’s older, more cracked-voiced performance makes us really feel the distance of time. Like ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’, this song was remarkably mature, sensitively registering how the passing of time colours our memories and perhaps idealises our loves.
When Dylan was young, he liked to sing such songs in an ‘old voice’, with a put on crackle, as if he were much older than his tender twenty-two years. By 1993, he doesn’t have to put on any old voice; he’s got a crackle right at hand, forged in years of performance.
On the other hand, it is in performances like this that I think I detect a deliberate roughening of his voice. We can hear from his Portland and London performances of that year that Dylan can sing high and clear when he wants to, and that will become more evident in the next two years, but he can also sing rough when he wants to; when he wants to put a sandpaper edge on his voice. Go forward ten years to 2003 and that sandpaper edge has turned into a throaty roar, but I believe it all starts around 1992/3.
Another gold star performance.
Girl from the north Country
We only have to skip forward a couple of years, to 1964, to find one of Dylan’s most iconic songs, ‘It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue’. In previous posts I have described this song as love’s last song, the final, painful ending of a love.
I want to draw attention to it here, as performances will build up to epic proportions by 1995, and while this performance doesn’t scale those heights, it’s fascinating to hear Dylan pushing the song with his voice, reaching for its emotional depths. Yes, it’s hard and scratchy, but again I think some of that vocal texture is deliberate, pushing his voice for that emotional quality. The effect is a little spoiled by Dylan fumbling the lyrics at one point.
Towards the end of the song, after five minutes, you hear Mr Guitar Man playing his acoustic just as if it were his Stratocaster, driving the song along with his distinctive ‘off’ sounding guitar.
It’s all over now baby blue
Another song we have been following, and an acoustic favourite, is ‘Ramona’. In previous posts I have commented on this song quite fully, cautioning against seeing it as a love song despite that lilting melody. I have a soft spot for this song as it is my daughter’s favourite Dylan song, and she loves to quote to me these lines:
‘You say many times
that you’re better than no one
and no one is better than you
If you really believe that you know
you have nothing to win
and nothing to lose’
Classic Dylan lines, showing his love of what I call ‘parallelism’ (echoing structures), part of what makes his songs distinctive.
Ramona
That’s it for this little journey into Dylan’s early, acoustic songs as he played them in 1993. We’ve heard Dylan not just strum along but play lead acoustic in his recognisable yet contentious style.
For the next post we’ll drop in on Dylan’s famous Supper Club sets and see what all the fuss is about.
In Holland, the annual election of the Top 2000 is quite a thing. In the first week of December, millions of votes are cast by Dutch people who want to see and hear their all-time most beautiful song in the list, and from Boxing Day to midnight New Year’s Eve, the top two thousand elected songs are played and counted down 24/7, non-stop, on Radio 2. Ascending, of course, to the number 1, which almost always is “Bohemian Rhapsody”. In the twenty-first century, Freddy Mercury’s immortal chef-d’oeuvre reached the highest spot already seventeen times – and in 2019 Queen is the band with the most mentions at all; with 37 songs in the Top 2000, Queen finally beats The Beatles on that front too, for the first time. Still, Pink Floyd is the only band with three songs in the Top 10.
The run-up to the list leads to family squabbles, heated discussions in the company canteen and the workplace (mostly about the merits of “Hotel California” and “Child In Time”), Facebook initiatives try to get that one song from a local hero into the “List of Lists”, interest groups are set up to push Nick Drake and lobby groups to promote songs of a certain Christian or political signature. Then, on 7 December, the registration closes, and things calm down again.
Fully united the country is then, from Boxing Day onwards. The Top 2000 is by far the best listened to radio program in the Netherlands, and the studio, in the middle of the country, receives thousands and thousands of visitors from all corners of the country, who often have to wait hours before they may enter for a one-hour-visit. Once inside, paradise is gained and the religion teacher sings along with “Highway To Hell”, the Hell’s Angel with Whitney Houston and the respectable housewife with “Smells Like Teen Spirit”.
Dylan is a mid-tier. On average there are about nine Dylan originals in the Top 2000, “Hurricane” always the highest, somewhere around spot 60, and in addition usually three or four covers (Hendrix’ “All Along The Watchtower” is the most popular, obviously, followed by usual suspects “Mr. Tambourine Man”, the Guns N’ Roses version of “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” and Adele).
The lowest ranked Dylan song has only been in it since 2018: “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right” (no. 1850 in 2018 and at 1947 in 2019). From where this sudden revival of an almost sixty-year-old song comes, is unclear. Maybe because in the twenty-first century the song more often pops up in the voters’ subjective worlds. In the second decade of this century, Don’t Think Twice can be heard in the television series Mad Men and The Walking Dead, which are also successful in the Netherlands, in the period drama The Help, and in 2019 in the hit series This Is Us and in the crime film The Kitchen.
It is, of course, one of Dylan’s most beautiful love songs. The basis of the song seems autobiographical; the inspiration is quite likely a first relationship crisis, the end of the rose-tinted period with his first great love Suze Rotolo (the girl on the iconic cover of The Freewheelin’), who has just informed him that she will stay in Italy for a little while longer. The hurt, still very young Dylan tries to put into words a relation’s extinguishing, with controlled, mature melancholy, aloof and poetic.
Well, partially, he does achieve that goal. In the title and in the opening lines It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe / It don’t matter, anyhow he still is poetic and aloof. But the rest of the lyrics are mainly driven by hurt pride and heartbreak. It is not yet a flaming resentment, nor a vengeful venom, like later in “Just Like A Woman” or, even worse, in “Idiot Wind”, but the bitter reproaches (You could have done better but I don’t mind / You just kinda wasted my precious time and the somewhat vacuous I gave her my heart but she wanted my soul) on the one hand, and the tender despair on the other hand (Still I wish there was somethin’ you would do or say / To try and make me change my mind and stay) reveal how much the protagonist suffers. And the fact that he almost drowns in self-pity in the process is perhaps a little awkward, but still poignant.
After her return from Italy, Dylan and Rotolo do reunite (the cover photo was taken during this period), but Dylan seems to be stuck in the role of the abandoned, wounded lover. Moreover, Joan Baez is now in the picture. When an infatuated Baez introduces Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in July 1963, it becomes clear to the rest of the world as well. Suze leaves the concert sobbing, a few days later she packs up her things and moves out of Dylan’s apartment on West 4th Street. At a concert later, Baez announces her version of “Don’t Think Twice” rather ruthlessly with the words about a love affair that has lasted too long, but otherwise she spends remarkably few words on this constellation. In her extensive, candid autobiography And A Voice To Sing With she tells enough about her love rival Sara Lowndes, the later Mrs Dylan, she talks at length about those days when she falls in love with Dylan, around the corner in that crummy hotel over Washington Square, but she doesn’t devote a single letter to the girl he is cheating on at that moment, to Suze, nor to the song she herself will sing often enough about it, Don’t Think Twice.
There are countless covers of the song. Peter, Paul & Mary are the first to score a big hit with it (no. 2 in the Billboard Charts, 1963). Eric Clapton, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Melanie, Bryan Ferry and Mme Sarkozy Carla Bruni (who sings it in 2009 together with Hugues Aufray in the French translation “N’y Pense Plus, Tout Est Bien”) are just a few of the more famous artists who have it on their repertoire. On their Staring Down The Brilliant Dream (2010) the Indigo Girls are singing a beautiful version, after they also had the opportunity to sing it with Joan Baez. And on YouTube dozens of loving living room versions are to be found. Of serious looking, spectacled forty-somethings, of shy teenage girls with ukulele and shiny washed hair and of humourless, narcissistic twenty-somethings. The song can hardly be ruined; it remains a beautiful song in every rendition. Many covers approach the original and some surpass it – “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” seems to have a timeless, indestructible power.
The most beautiful cover is sung by Curtis Stigers on his CD You Inspire Me from 2003. Stigers is undoubtedly an artist after Dylan’s heart; a singing saxophonist with blues, rock and jazz in his blood. His first album already features a beautiful rendition of Nick Lowe’s “(What’s So Funny About) Peace, Love And Understanding”, the song that had almost been on both Jakob Dylan’s repertoire and that of his father. In 2007, Elvis Costello occasionally performs on stage with his idol Dylan (to which we owe the unique, acoustic duet version of “Tears Of Rage”, St. Louis, 22 October 2017);
… but in his wonderful autobiography Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink Costello reveals that Dylan actually wanted to play “(What’s So Funny About) Peace, Love And Understanding”. The two of them have been studying the song for a little while, “for a verse or two”, before Costello finally dares to say that he did not write this song at all.
Stigers, meanwhile, makes a few jazzy albums, explores country and pop, lets his hair grow long and scores a huge hit with the smooth earwig “I Wonder Why”, records with big guns like Clapton, Prince and Joe Cocker, and sings for the television series Sons Of Anarchy a bloodcurdling version of one of the songs from Dylan’s personal Bible, “John The Revelator”.
Stigers’ “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”, however, is from his jazz phase. Jazzy arrangements do work well with Dylan songs every now and then, but rarely as well as here. This version is carried by a reverbing, rolling organ. The drums whirl off-beat around it, the bass is dry and lazy and Stigers’ phrasing is true elocution art; all the pain and all the venom within the lyrics do come out perfectly in this super cooled version.
Beautiful trumpet solo, too. You may be able to find it here, – certainly if you are in the USA and perhaps elsewhere if you are running a VPN – but otherwise we’re having a problem finding an online copy of this version of the song openly available in the UK – and although the “You inspire me” album is on Spotify in the UK, curiously that one track is not currently playable. If you find an alternative source do write in with the URL. Meanwhile you can get it on Amazon if you don’t mind paying.
———–
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
Untold Dylan 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 revised and updated 25 September 2020
In my article A song is like a painting, you can’t see it all if you’re standing too close I attempted to make the point that sometimes detailed analyses of a song, (as with any other work of art), can lead us down false trails, primarily because the artist is not always delivering a clear message. Instead the artist (and I use the word to include writers, visual artists, musicians etc etc) may be giving us a feeling or a sense of the world, rather than a “this is how it is” statement.
And I tried to explore this notion in relation to Dylan, remembering, as Jochen reminded us recently, “Donald Fagen [of Steely Dan, pictured above] repeatedly assures that the bard is the source of inspiration for their poetic and impenetrable texts. ‘No one in the pop medium had ever used that breadth of subject matter or surrealistic and dream language,’ he says in the Wall Street Journal (“Rock’s Reluctant Front Man”, July 8, 2011).”
Dylan, as we know, generally does not overtly explain each song, but he given us the occasional insight, as when he said to Bill Flanagan in 1986,
“A lot of times you’ll just hear things and you’ll know that these are the things that you want to put in your song. Whether you say them or not. They don’t have to be your particular thoughts. They just sound good, and somebody thinks them. Half my stuff falls along those lines. Somebody thinks them. I’m sure, when I’m singing something, that I’m not just singing it to sing it. I know that I’ve read it. Somebody’s said it. I’ve heard a voice say that. A song like Don’t Fall Apart On Me Tonight sort of falls into that category: I’ll take you to a mountaintop and build you a house out of stainless steel. That kind of stuff just passes by. A guy’s getting out of bed saying don’t talk to me; it’s leaving time. I didn’t originate those kinds of thoughts. I’ve felt them, but I didn’t originate them. They’re out there, so I just use them.”
I find that explanation very attractive. For although just writing, “I’ve heard a voice say that,” as the explanation for the lyrics within a song, lacks a certain depth, there is a lot in that, as one thinks of the three levels that most songs exist within. First there is the meaning of individual phrases, second there is the overall meaning of the song, and third the meaning of the music.
I’m not going to deal with that third case here, but to give the simplest of examples, most of us who are used to hearing western music hear a minor chord (for example D F A) as sad, while we hear a major chord (for example C E G) as either neutral or happy when it comes to emotions. I’ll come back to this in another article anon.
In my series of articles on the themes in Dylan’s songwriting it is the overall message or theme of each song that I have been looking at. It was an exercise that revealed to me (for the first time, despite a lifetime of listening to Dylan) just how his subject matter has changed across time, from the early days when he looked at many different themes (from love songs to protest for example) to the one year in which he wrote only on one theme – that of faith.
To see just how Dylan changed over the years we might consider the songs written in 1962 as an example. Here they are listed in the order Dylan composed them (as far as we have that information) with my briefest of subject matter summaries thereafter.
Now of course you can argue about the subject matter of any of those songs, but I suspect many people tackling that list of 36 songs would come up with a variety of topics, generally along the same lines as mine. There can be, for example, little doubt what “Joe Brown” or “Oxford Town” are about. Nor indeed for the extraordinary “Ballad for a Friend”.
Looking at those brief summaries we might agree that maybe seven of them are traditional blues songs, six seem to be are lost love songs, five or six are protest, depending on how you define that term. But what do you say about Baby I’m in the mood for you? Love? Lust? Desire? Humour? You take your choice.
Thus in my articles looking at the subject matter of Dylan’s work I am not making any claim to the effect that this subject matter list is somehow correct or perfect. Indeed although for some songs the subject matter is obvious, the attribution of subject matter of many others undoubtedly could be challenged, and indeed the whole process of classification is one of personal choice. So I am not trying to be definitive; rather I am just trying to point out the diversity of Dylan’s work year by year, and how it changed over the years.
To leap forward 16 years, I called 1978 “Dylan’s troubled year” and ascribed the meaning of his songs that year as
Moving on: 4
Love: 3
Blues: 3
Lost love: 5
Death: 1
Be yourself: 1
Again you may differ if you do your own analysis, but whatever you came out with I can’t believe you are going to find much in that collection that is happy, jolly and bouncy.
On the other hand 1979, the year that follows, is called on this site After the anxiety, the certainty in which I have no doubt that all 19 songs were songs expressing religious faith.
As I worked through the 1980s trying to ascribe a theme to each song I found myself drawn more and more to the notion that the subject matter of the songs tell us a lot about how Bob is feeling. It is perfectly clear from the songs that Bob had had his troubled year in 1978, and then gave himself over to his seemingly new found faith (“seemingly” because he had not written about it that much before) in 1979.
But this new revelation did not continue, and by the end of 1980 he had written the stunning, “Making a liar out of me,” which although not a rejection of Christianity, sounds to me like a stunning reprimand to those who try to use Bob and his music as a way of backing up their world views.
Thereafter the lyrics of Bob’s songs reveal that he slips into the gloom in his thinking, as I hope I might have reflected in the titles chosen for each year in the second half of the 1980s.
Now I know that there are some who will argue, and argue indeed very coherently, that in essence most of Dylan’s songs are primarily about faith and religion. I, rather obviously given the above, disagree – and there are two strands to my thinking here.
One is that if I wanted to convert you to a religion and wanted to do it by using such artistic talent as I have, I would write songs that are clearly about that religion, the benefits of being part of it (eternal salvation for example) and what might happen if one doesn’t believe (eternal damnation etc). And indeed this is exactly what Dylan did for a year and half.
But if I was trying to convince you to follow my religion of choice, why would I write songs which take quite a large stretch of the imagination to be seen as religious songs? Why be obscure when trying to convert? Of course there is nothing wrong with obscurity – Bob is often at his best when being obscure (Johanna is a perfect example) – but if the message (rather than the subtle textures and hints) is the central point, surely obscurity is pointless.
Now I have to add that I have a small amount of experience in this. Of course I am not comparing my work with any of the major talents in the world of the arts, or even the minor talents – I have spent my life writing books and articles in part because I couldn’t make any money out of my earlier careers of playing in a band, writing songs and working in the theatre. And besides I quite enjoy writing books and articles.
But I know, with my own very, very, very minor talent as a songwriter, and slightly larger talent as a writer of articles and books, that phrases can come to one out of the blue, and can linger in the mind, sometimes without necessarily having any associated meaning and sometimes through having multiple meanings.
I have touched often before upon the phrase that Dylan borrowed from those who have gone before him, “Beyond here lies nothing,” and I must admit I rather wish he hadn’t used it, because I would have loved to have written a song, or a song cycle, or a novel using that phrase and exploring some of the meanings. In fact if I was going to write a book about what Dylan wrote about after the 18 months of overtly religious songs, I would almost certainly have “Beyond here lies nothing” at least as the working title, while the text was being written. It means something, I am sure of it. I am just not sure what.
Of course I am drawn to the notion that Dylan uses phrases he happens to like, because he likes them, not because they have a meaning that fits into the song, because of my personal views. Which in turn implies that I am not claiming that anything I happen to mention here is definitive. My explanations and thoughts are simply references to how I see his work, not definitively how the work actually is, as measured by some universal set of standards to which I don’t have access.
This is exactly the same as the individual who sees Dylan’s songs as primarily religious in nature is offering his chosen explanation. We interpret art through the filters of our own preferences, our learning and our experiences. This is not a science with a definitive answer.
But it is helpful if we can find some evidence and some logic to support whatever theory we are putting forward – and in that regard what Bob has said about his own work counts as one layer of evidence. Then again, the theme of each song as expressed in the lyrics is more evidence. Also the way Dylan has moved through various different themes across the years is another set of evidence (in that if we find him writing about certain themes over and over again then we can take that those themes are very much on his mind at the time).
And this is interesting and useful for it turns out that going through all of Dylan’s songs and ascribing to them a brief statement of the subject matter gives us an insight into the beauty, elegance, power and longevity of Dylan’s work. It comes from the fact that he uses words in a way that can portray different things to different people, while regularly shifting from subject to subject. Indeed I don’t see how he could have achieved his staggering longevity and popularity as a songwriter if he had not moved through so many different subjects across the years.
Thus overall, what I am suggesting is that Dylan is able to create works that have multiple possible meanings in part because he has changed the subject matter and the perspective of his songs so regularly. In my view, and as I hope to show in future articles, if Bob had restricted himself to one subject only (such as the truth of the Christian message) he would not have worked in such a variety of musical and lyrical styles because they simply don’t lend themselves the lyrics portraying faith.
What’s more, because of this variety Bob does not try to give us the answer to life, the universe and everything (to use Douglas Adams’ wonderful phrase) because as he moves from style to style he finds there is no definitive answer. At least there isn’t “most of the time”.
Now this doesn’t mean that every Dylan song is obscure. “Day of the Locusts” has the giveaway line about the degree in it, so we can accept that it was about his getting his honorary doctorate. And whether, “Don’t think twice” is about an actual relationship or just about breaking up a relationship doesn’t really matter too much – it is a song of leaving, and that is the point which we can all grasp straight away. “Look out your window and I’ll be gone” is the giveaway, and besides songs of leaving are very common both in Dylan’s output and in the music that he obviously enjoys himself.
In fact the “look out your window” example is perfect for this discussion, because looking out your window to find that your lover has gone is exactly what you don’t do. You look in the house. The empty road outside says nothing until you’ve searched the house. But we don’t ponder that because we are drawn into imagining that she is looking around the house saying, “Bob where are you? Bob? Bob!!!” and answer comes there none. Then too late she looks outside. None of that is said however. We have “Look out your window and I’ll be gone” and the rest becomes understood.
“I’ll be gone” here is perfect in that it has the meaning, “I will have left long before you wake up and notice I am not there.” And thinking on that, what do you know, we are back with “Beyond here lies nothing” again. The empty road outside the house is not proof that he’s gone but rather is a symbol of the emptiness she will now feel. It is a way of saying “You’re going to miss me when I’m gone,” but a much more powerful way of saying it. It is a perfect use of language, and typical of the man who has written so many songs of moving on.
Thus Dylan picks up words, phrases and ideas, and re-uses them, quite often seemingly without too much thought. He then leaves us to be creative in the way we interpret them.
This is the opposite of seeing Dylan’s songs as predominantly religious, or indeed predominantly anything else. The religious interpretation suggests he is telling us (or indeed lecturing us) to see that “this is how it is”. The alternative – I should say the opposite – approach of moving in every direction at once gives the job of interpretation to us.
And maybe that’s what I find so wonderful about Dylan: he gives me the power to interpret his work. He doesn’t tell me how it is. He hints, rather like a Turner paining.
Meanwhile elsewhere
There are details of some of our more recent articles listed on our home page. You’ll also find, at the top of the page, and index to some of our series established over the years.
If you have an article or an idea for an article which could be published on Untold Dylan, please do write to Tony@schools.co.uk with the details – or indeed the article itself.
We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with getting on for 10,000 members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down
Writes Les Fyffe in reference to Bob Dylan’s song entitled “Tempest” – a song about the sinking of the Titanic:
“I’ve heard a rumour that Dylan’s lyrics originally included the verse below but the song was already too long so he decided to leave it out. Never been substantiated though –
"And 149 lost souls whose names have long been forgotten
Were taken by fishing boats to Halifax pier
And laid beneath the snowflaked stones of McGrattan
Never to be held again by those who loved them dear"
MaGrattan operates a granite works in New Brunswick in the days of yore. There’s a bit of leg-pulling on the part of my identical twin brother, but the retired geologist co-authors a published article in the “Atlantic Geology” journal entitled:
“Investigation of Sheriff Stuart’s Black Granite Quarries In Charotte County, Southwestern New Brunswick, Canada: Implications For The Source Of The Titanic Headstones In Halifax, Nova Scotia”
(by Leslie R. Fyffe and William W. Gardiner).
In short the article concludes that the black granite with the snowflake pattern, like that from coal trimmer J(oseph) Dawson’s headstone in a Halifax graveyard, strongly supports the contention that the granite comes from a particular quarry in Charlotte County NB, and not from the High Sheriff’s nearby. A photo of the Halifax headstone is included with the article.
That grave marker becomes famous because James Cameron in the movie “Titanic”, supposedly by coincidence, has actor Leonardo DiCaprio play an artist named Jack Dawson. In 3rd Class on board the Titanic, Dawson ends up sacrificing himself to save the lovely Rose whose mother wants her to marry wealthy passenger Cal whom Rose does not like. Reminds one of Rosemary, the Jack Of Hearts, and Big Diamond Jim in Bob Dylan’s narrative song ‘Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts”.
Dylan writes the song entitled ‘Tempest’ about the sinking of the world’s ‘biggest metaphor’ based on the old Carter Family song, “The Titanic”:
The watchman was a-dreaming
Yes, dreaming a sad, sad dream
He dreamed the Titanic was sinking
Out on the deep blue sea
(Carter Family: The Titanic ~ Maybelle/Sara/A.P. Carter)
In Bob Dylan’s lyrics, Leonardo Dicaprio gets a nod from the singer/songwriter – apparently, not even Dylan can make ‘Rose’ (played by Kate Winslet) rhyme with ‘Leo’:
Leo said to Cleo
"I think I'm going mad"
But he lost his mind already
Whatever mind he had
(Bob Dylan: Tempest)
Quote from the movie:
Rose: "You're crazy"
Jack: "That's what everybody says...."
Unlike jealous and nasty Big Jim in Dylan’s “Lily, Rosemary, And The Jack Of Hearts”, and the likewise Caledon in Cameron’s movie, a man of means gets depicted as a hero in the verse below:
Jim Dandy smiled
He never learned to swim
Saw the little crippled child
And he gave his seat to him
(Bob Dylan:Tempest)
Cameron gives Bob Dylan a nod as well:
Dawson (playing cards): "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose":
From the following song lyrics:
When you ain't got nothing, you got nothing to lose
You're invisible now, you got no secrets to conceal
(Bob Dylan: Like A Rolling Stone)
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
If neither work in your area of the world trying typing into the search engine “Bob Dylan – Sweetheart Like You official video” (without the inverted commas).
Aaron: Couple of things to note this time:
Bob’s facial hair is very fluffy!
His miming of the words is absolutely perfect. It’s almost like he is singing live.
Ok, so point one is a bit of a joke (although true!). Point two is interesting, this is really the first music video Bob ever made (Subterranean Homesick Blues excepted). Maybe he was taking it really seriously at this stage, maybe he enjoyed the process, maybe he thought he would have a hit? Who knows!
The lady playing guitar is also on point with her miming of the solo. Her name is Carla Olson and she went onto make a tremendous album in collaboration with Gene Clark, “So Rebellious A Lover”. As a thank you for appearing in his video Bob gifted her the (then) unreleased track “Clean Cut Kid”. She recorded it with her band The Textones and released it on their 1984 album Midnight Mission, a year before it appeared on Empire Burlesque.
So let’s have a mini episode of Play Lady Play and see what Tony thinks of the Textones early version of Clean Cut Kid (by the way, that’s Barry Goldberg on piano, for those following the Dylan as Session man series!)
Tony: Clean Cut Kid is one of those songs that caused me to have a real bash against Clinton Heylin when I reviewed it, not because I disagree with his knowledge of the social sciences (which he attacks without evidence in his review) but rather because of his sheer and utter ignorance of the social sciences and what they have done to improve the human condition. Hearing this again reminds me of the annoyance I felt at the time, and still do feel about people pontificating on subjects of which they know nothing. And yes of course I do the same here, but I do at least make some attempt to admit the limits of my knowledge.
This is a good and bouncy version that seems to reflect the lyrics well, and that piano really does makes a good additional counterpoint to the overall pattern of the traditional rock band. And it is an interesting song because its emphasis on the harm done to an individual by military service and war is much more in keeping with very early Dylan than latter day Dylan.
Dylan writing about the way individuals are manipulated by social settings and socio-economic situations, has always seemed to me to be Dylan at his strongest as a message giver. As I said in the review, “The message is awful, the music is bouncy and jolly. Not a care in the world. Just like the weapon manufacturers and the politicos who utilise them.”
Aaron: So, our second video of the day is this little promo for Jokerman, in which Bob invents the lyric video! This was directed by Larry Sloman and George Lois and is one of my favourite Dylan promos.
There are some really interesting images in this video, combined with the lyrics as they come up on the screen, sometimes to startling effect. I wish I had more knowledge on some of the art pieces on show, maybe someone can help us out in the comments below.
Images of Dylan through the years are shown along with the words:
Shedding off one more layer of skin,
Keeping one step ahead of the persecutor within
And then, shockingly, Hitler shows up to this line:
Manipulator of crowds, you're a dream twister
Brilliant, but shocking. I’m not sure who chose the images, if it was Dylan or the directors, or a mixture of all three, but for me they are spot on choices.
During the sections with Bob singing, again his miming is perfect and this time, tellingly he keeps his eyes closed whilst singing for almost the entire song. Only towards the end does he risk a peak, perhaps just to check that we’re still there with him.
Towards the end we see the Kennedys and Martin Luther King aligned with the line:
Only a matter of time 'til night comes steppin' in
And then Batman’s arch nemesis the Joker morphs into Ronald Reagan. Maybe a touch “on the nose” but it works for me.
I love this video, and song. Looking back at Tony’s review of the track from 12 years ago (!!Geez has the site being going that long!!) it would appear his opinion has somewhat different back to mine. I wonder if that opinion has changed any by now and if he will like the video as much as me?
Tony: Yes my opinion has changed quite a lot Aaron, both in the way that everyone’s opinion can change over time, but particularly because this was one of the earlier songs I reviewed. Working my way through reviewing all 600+ songs by Dylan I’ve learned a lot more about Dylan through needing to make my own inner feeling overt in order to make the review intelligible. But also the mere experience of writing the reviews has, I think, given me a much deeper understanding of Dylan.
When I get around to re-presenting all the reviews as a book, I think a lot of them will change just because of this deeper understanding of all the songs and what Dylan has been doing. In a little way I have touched on this in the recent piece A song is like a painting, you can’t see it all if you’re standing too close which more clearly represents where I am now.
That’s not to say I expect anyone to take any notice of what I think; it is always a bonus when someone does. But yes, my opinion on many songs is now very different from where it was 12 years ago.
Aaron: I do agree with Tony’s opinion expressed in previous entries that Dylan, and his label seem at a bit of a loss with how to approach music videos for his singles during the 80s.
Sixties contemporaries such as the two Pauls (McCartney & Simon) obviously still had the expectation of big hit singles well into the 80s and beyond (particularly Macca) and so had the backing of their labels, large budgets and their choice of off-screen creative talent, which meant they could produce amazing, inventive videos like Pipes Of Peace and The Boy In The Bubble, two of the most inventive and expensive videos ever made in their day. Someone like Neil Young who was in the same boat as Dylan when it came to an expectation of hit singles went the other way and made a string of endearingly goofy videos during the 80s, for track such as CSNY’s American Dream and his own Wonderin’ – from the same year as these two Dylan videos.
Tony: Oh this is sort of video I like. Aaron – can’t we just do a series on goofy videos?
Aaron: Videos like this show what can be done on a relatively small budget and with your tongue planted squarely in your cheek. I’m not saying that Wonderin’ is a better song than Sweetheart Like You (obviously it’s not!), but if I was the video DJ at MTV in 1983 I know which one I would have on heavy rotation.
I still think that the Jokerman promo is 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
Aaron: One of the great joys of this series of articles on Dylan’s session work for other artists is in reacquainting myself with some excellent works I’d completely forgotten about!
First up is one such track by David Bromberg called “Sammy’s Song”
This is from his debut album “David Bromberg” released on Columbia Records in 1972. The song is the closing track on the album.
Not only is the track itself tremendous, Bob’s harmonica piece is wonderful and complements the song beautifully. It’s a fantastic album, by the way, including a co-write with George Harrison called “The Holdup”.
Tony: It is a reminder of just how good Bob can be at stepping back. The song does nothing for me; the subject matter is horrific, and it left me thinking, do I want to listen? Actually no I don’t. But of course I have to for this article and it turns out it is not just the subject matter, it is the repeating over and over of the chord sequence of a four bar phrase. That can work, and Dylan has done it, but I don’t think this guy has it.
And at the end I wonder if Bob’s final harmonica accompaniment is more a sound of despair about how long the song is going on for, rather than for the plaintive and desperate nature of the lyrics. But that’s not his fault – he didn’t write the song.
Aaron: Moving on to 1973, Bob contributes harmonica to two more tracks.
Booker T & Priscilla Jones “Crippled Creek” was released on the album “Chronicles” and as a single.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXMvX5gYvQ4
The song was written by Donna Weiss, the song writer who also has a claim on Sweet Amerillo.
The second session that year was for Roger McGuinn on his self titled debut solo album. Not only does Bob contribute harmonica he also gets a name check in the lyric, along with John Lennon and Mick Jagger.
Tony: Ms Jones also co-wrote one of my all time favourite songs, “Bette Davis Eyes,” a song to which I have danced so many times – it allows an evolution of dance in multiple directions at once, and very few songs do that. That is a masterpiece. But this… It really doesn’t work for me.
But hell, what do I know? Booker T and Bob Dylan are involved and they are the masters.
Aaron: Moving on to the final selection today we have David Blue with “Who Love (If Not You Love)” from his 1975 album “Com’n Back For More”.
Tony: Blue was part of the Rolling Thunder Revue tour and appears in Renaldo And Clara (playing a pinball machine, talking about the Greenwich Village scene and Blowing in the Wind. Apparently at the Fat Black Pussycat, Dylan asked told Blue to strum a chord sequence as Dylan wrote out lyrics for what was quickly to become “Blowin’ in the Wind.” His best known song is “Outlaw Man” which the Eagles released as a single and on the “Desperado” album.
He was also on the cover of Dylan’s TheBasement Tapes, wearing a bowler hat crouching down next to Rick Danko alongside the other members of the Band and the circus freaks.
But David Blue is a bit of a mystery – as Rolling Stone says, “Bob Dylan befriended him, Joni Mitchell helped support him, and the Eagles covered one of his songs. So why did success elude the late singer-songwriter?” They also described him as the sad eyed cowboy of the lowlands. And tragically he died of a heart attack aged just 41.
Bob Dylan played harmonica on “Who Love (If Not You Love”).
But I would like to sneak in something else in memory of David Blue
The version of this really lovely song that is on the “David Blue” album is much harsher and “produced” (if you see what I mean). This live recording from a radio studio captures the utter beauty and delicacy of the song. A moment to treasure of a man who should have been much more widely recognised. It brings tears…
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
It is a missed opportunity for IBM. They should of course have called their talking supercomputer HAL, the name of the talking computer from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odessey (1968). Writer Arthur C. Clarke later stated, quite convincingly, that it was just a sheer coincidence, but to no avail: the fact that an alphabetical one-letter shift changes “HAL” into “IBM” (H becomes I, A becomes B, and M becomes L) is too good to be coincidental. Film fanatics and Dylanologists don’t differ that much – some of them really do have a tendency, or perhaps an urge, to see more than there actually is.
IBM, however, misses the opportunity for free publicity and brand awareness. Perhaps also because HAL is not that nice; after all, he kills almost the entire crew of Discovery One, including, in a cowardly manner, the three travelling scientists who spend the journey time frozen, in “cryonic sleep”, in their survival capsules.
It will eventually become “Watson”, which may be a second mistake. It is meant as an honourable naming after Thomas J. Watson the founder of IBM, but of course the whole world only thinks of Sherlock Holmes, of his sounding board John H. Watson. Not necessarily the association you want to evoke if you want to sell a supercomputer, since Watson is the permanently amazed, never understanding, in all respects average side-kick of the superior, human supercomputer Holmes.
Anyway, the commercial is funny. In 2015 the IBM marketing department manages to attract Bob Dylan for an amusing advertising film, in which Watson converses with the bard. Watson claims to have analysed all of Dylan’s songs.
“Your main themes are,” Watson concludes, “Time Passes and Love Fades.”
“That sounds about right,” Dylan answers amused.
Watson’s claim really is about right. IBM spokeswoman Laurie Freedman officially reports that the researchers have actually fed 320 of Dylan’s songs into Watson and his analysis has in fact distilled the themes mentioned. Watson’s ability to “personality analysis, tone analysis and keyword recognition” has helped to better understand the data. All right, not “all of Dylan’s songs” (Dylan has written more than six hundred songs), but still more than half of them.
It doesn’t cost Watson any effort of course (by his own account he reads 800 million pages per second), but he could have saved himself some trouble: Watson would already have been there if he had confined himself to “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right”.
Dylan writes “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” in 1962, records it in the autumn and 27 May 1963 it appears on the legendary LP The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. To put it mildly, the song is indebted to “Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I’m Gone)” from Dylan’s friend Paul Clayton, who in turn based it on a nineteenth-century “Negro song”, on “Who’s Gonna Buy Your Chickens When I’m Gone”, as well as quoting from the traditional “Scarlet Ribbons for Her Hair”.
Not only the melody, but also considerable fragments of text from Clayton’s 1959 song Dylan copies almost unchanged: It ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, darlin’ and So I’m walkin’ down that long, lonesome road and You’re the one that made me travel on, for example.
Which is not considered plagiarism in those days – it is customary to polish up or cut up each other’s songs, or old folk and blues songs. However, it is not very honourable to claim copyright, which is what Dylan does. By the way, he effortlessly acknowledges his indebtedness:
“Paul was just an incredible songwriter and singer. He must have known a thousand songs. I learned Pay Day At Coal Creek and a bunch of other songs from him. We played on the same circuit and I traveled with him part of the time. When you’re listening to songs night after night, some of them rub off on you. Don’t Think Twice was a riff that Paul had. And so was Percy’s Song.”
(liner notes Biograph, 1985)
Twenty years earlier, in an interview with Helen McNamara for Toronto Telegram (3 February 1964, published in Gargoyle too), Dylan is similarly enthusiastic about Clayton, and confesses a mystical awe for his qualities as a folk musician:
“The only guy I know that can really do it is a guy I know named Paul Clayton, he’s the only guy I’ve ever heard or seen who can sing songs like this, because he’s a medium, he’s not trying to personalize it, he’s bringing it to you … Paul, he’s a trance.”
The admiration is mutual, and the openly homosexual Clayton may also be a bit charmed by the young Dylan, so it does not disrupt the friendship. Outside the courtroom, lawyers from the respective music publishers settle on a buy-off of any claims. Clayton receives a modest amount of money, and does not complain.
To Clayton, it hardly could be a sensitive issue, for that matter. He may be “an incredible songwriter”, but he is above all, just like Dylan, a thief of thoughts, a miner who digs up old melodies, ennobles them and records them (Clayton has released about twenty records). He does this digging at home in West Virginia, in the university library of Charlottesville. That’s where he found the template for his “Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I’m Gone)”; in an obscure booklet from 1923, the collection Eight Negro Songs. Editor Alfred J. Swan admires in the foreword the musicality and originality of those nineteenth century songs,
“the rich imagery, the racy humour, the naive pathos, and the simple, yet original philosophy of the modern negro’s mind,”
and also gives a crash course negro dialect, for he has transcribed the songs as faithfully as possible:
Who gon bring you chickens when I’m gawn? Aw! Ba-beh!
Who gon bring you chickens when I’m gawn?
Six mont’s in jail ain so long, Aw, dahlin
Hit’s wukkin on dat county farm.
Clayton turns those chickens into ribbons, and concocts some sentences around them. By the looks of it, he has browsed a few more pages; on page 36 “Dat Lonesome Road” is printed:
True love, true love, what hev I done
To mek you treat me so
You’ve made me walk dat lonesome road,
Like uh nuvvuh done befo’
Look down, look down dat lonesome road,
Hang down my head an’ cry
According to commentators, Clayton takes a few melodic things from another old West Virginia folk song, from “Call Me Old Black Dog”. An antique recording of that song by Dick Justice, 1929, does not illustrate this claim, though:
Anyway, Clayton is actually doing the same thing as Dylan is doing with Clayton’s Ribbons song – which is why indignation would be somewhat misplaced. Entirely in line, by the way, with the somewhat cynical quote attributed to Clayton:
“If you can’t perform, write; if you can’t write, rewrite; if you can’t rewrite, copyright; if you can’t copyright, sue.”
Paul Clayton dies 30 March 1967 in his New York apartment. He sits down in the bathtub and electrocutes himself by dropping his electric heater into the water. It is less than two years after Dylan’s electric attack on acoustic folk, after “Maggie’s Farm” at the Newport Folk Festival. Far-fetched perhaps, or even a bit disrespectful, but it almost seems as if the intelligent and sensitive Clayton, the standard-bearer of acoustic traditional folk music, has staged his suicide as a metaphor.
It ain’t no use in turnin’ on your light, babe, I’m on the dark side of the road.
To be continued. Next up: Don’t Think Twice – part II: Love Fades
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
Untold Dylan 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
Though the lyrics of songs by Bob Dylan do not saddle the the human race with such doctrines as ‘original sin’ imposed by the officials of some organized religions, his lyrics express a cynical view of the nature of humankind, a sorrowful view akin to the state found in the Holy Bible where individuals are left abandoned and alone awaiting deliverance to a ‘Promised Land’ or else the return of a departed ‘Saviour’ to help them.
In many of Dylan’s source lyrics that pertain to the microlevel of individual existence, filled as they are with the trials and tribulations of love affairs, gambling, and death, so too is this sorrow reflected:
Down in the willow garden
Where me and my love did meet
Oh, there we sit a-courting
My love dropped off to sleep
I had a bottle of the burglar's wine
Which my true love did not know
And there I poisoned my own true love
Down under the banks below ....
My father always taught me
That money would set me free
If I'd murder that pretty little miss
Whose name is Rose Conley
(Grayson/Whitter: Rose Conley ~ traditional)
Happy endings few and far between:
Come around you roving gamblers, and a story I will tell
About the greatest gambler, and, you know, you should know him well
His name was Willie O'Conley, and he gambled all his life
He had twenty-seven children, yet he never had a wife
(Bob Dylan: Gambling Willie's Dead Man's Hand)
Also drawing a card from the deck of the following song:
He put the money in the pot
And passed the cards around
I saw him deal from the bottom of the deck
So I shot the gambler down
(Bob Dylan: The Roving Gambler ~ various/traditional)
https://youtu.be/SD82d33GOA0
Below, into the song (with the objective correlative of a “sallow” or “willow” tree) substituted be the word “flowery” by an Irish songster:
Down by the flowery garden
Where me and my true love did meet
I took her in my arms
And unto her gave kisses sweet
She bade me take love easy
Just as the leaves fall from the tree
But I, being young and foolish
With my one true love I did not agree
(Andy Irvine: You Rambling Boys Of Pleasure ~ traditional)
The song of yore is reworked by a modern Irish poet, and his words changed a wee bit by a songstress:
Down by the salley gardens my love and I did meet
She passed the salley gardens with little snow-white feet
She bade me take love easy, as the leaves grow on the tree
But I, being young and foolish, with her would not agree
(Marianne Faithful: Down By The Salley Gardens ~ William Yeats)
More lyrics by the same poet, rendered by a songstress with a very slight change in the wording:
Through hollow lands, and hilly lands
I will find our where she has gone
And kiss her lips, and take her hands
And walk among long dappled grass
(July Collins: "Golden Apples Of The Sun" ~ William Yeats)
Reflected the above poem be in the following song lyrics:
You're gonna have to leave me now, I know
But I'll see you in the sky above
In the tall grass, in the one I love
You're gonna make me lonesome when you go
(Bob Dylan: You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You go)
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
It was Dick Dale, “king of the surf guitar,” who said “every song is like a painting.” It is not a massively famous quote any more than Dick Dale’s music is remembered worldwide, but it gives an indication of a way of looking at Dylan’s work that I think is sometimes ignored, but which can be rather helpful.
For it seems to me that although the examination of literature line by line, phrase by phrase, can be highly informative and indeed exceedingly interesting, it is not all there is in a song. Most self-evidently there is the music as well. The vocal and the accompaniment. Put it together and you can get the overt meaning of the lyrics (“I love you” is one of the most commonly used phrase) plus an additional expression via the music, of the emotions which cannot be fully expressed by the lyrics.
To take one simple example, the phrase “Beyond here lies nothing,” can express despair, it can be a powerful version of “at the end of the line,” and it can also be something more, a looking out into the mists of the future. It can even (and more literally) suggest looking into the blackness of space. Or, it could be used the vision of the writer who has just created her/his ultimate masterpiece and knows nothing else could ever be half as good again. Or there again a rumination on the collapse of a civilisation or a marriage, or… nothing at all.
Part of the problem, if we continue to examine that phrase and all it implies, is that we are not very good at examining “nothing” because in our real lives there is always something. And after death, well, others retain memories of us, plus as far as I can see, most people seem to have some belief in a life thereafter.
To consider this further, we might recall that in the days of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire (an era lasting roughly 1000 years) there was plenty of maths. They were very precise about this, with a Roman legion not being a big bunch of fighting men, but a team of 6000 soldiers divided up into ten cohorts, with each cohort containing ten centuria.
All very exact, but rather interestingly all created without the concept of zero. There is no “0” in Roman numerals. Or put it another way, “no nothing”. Which meant the response to the question, “If I had half a dozen bananas to sell in the market and I sold them, how many bananas do I have?” has to be “Yes there are no bananas.”
Now, to come back to reality, we can enjoy the notion, “Beyond this lies nothing” but it might take a bit of thinking about really to get into the concept. And it is also a reasonable view to think that Bob Dylan came across the phrase in the ancient texts, thought, “there’s a lot in that phrase” and used it, just like that, without an immediate notion of where it might go. Just as Jackson Pollock perhaps could not explain why he wanted to throw a sudden burst of pink across a canvas at a particular point in a particular way. For each artist, it just seemed the right thing to do at this point.
But the option of introducing abstraction into art through the use of phrases, colours, patterns or images that have been used before, but without accepting their previous meanings, is not the only issue when considering the art of the poet or songwriter. There is also the issue of, “is it true?”
Now most of us can readily accept that when a novelist writes a story it can be totally a work of fiction, even when written in the first person. And we can accept that a modern artist might draw or paint an abstract piece of work or paint a picture of a person who does not exist.
For the viewer it might be a bit of a laugh to see the cube or the squiggle as representing something, but it quite probably isn’t what the painter had in mind, just as it can be fun to say that the person in the painting looks like my auntie Ethel, but that doesn’t actually mean the painter knew my late aunt.
And yet a similar disassociation between the lyrics of Bob Dylan and what Bob himself feels, believes or thinks, or what has actually happened to him, is something many who listen to his music seem to find a hard step to take. And this for two reasons. One, because on some occasions it most certainly does sound as if what he is singing is what he believes most passionately. And two, because we might want him to believe what we believe.
It isn’t always like this in popular music of course. When Elvis sang “Heartbreak Hotel” I don’t think too many people assumed he’d just lost his lover. Nor indeed did those who thought a little further assume that the writers of the song had. Indeed as Tommy Durden reported, he began writing the lyrics for “Heartbreak Hotel” when he was inspired by a Miami Herald story about a man who committed suicide, leaving a note that read “I walk a lonely street.”
But when Bob put “It ain’t me babe” on an LP, the hunt was on to find who the “babe” is or was. When he sang “Masters of War” everyone believed he was against the arms race. When he wrote 19 songs about Christianity and faith in 1979, and nothing else, everyone took it that he had converted to Christianity. And earlier when he wrote “All along the watchtower,” likewise people looked for a meaning (mostly metaphorical, not many went looking for your actual watchtower).
Meaning is what we seek. In fact I suspect there are some who have sought, and indeed found a meaning in “Drifter’s Escape”….
But really, for most of us, this is where it breaks down. What is to be made of the lyrics of that song? It is in essence meaningless. There is no sequence, no sense, no relationship to reality, anymore than one finds such things in a lot of Kafka – whose work was clearly influencing Bob Dylan at the time.
Of course artists in all walks of art are drawn to subject matter that interests them or about which they feel they have something to say. To put it at its most obvious, Picasso could not have constructed Guernica without feeling the pain and anger. And maybe one might be able to argue that Bob could not have written “Positively 4th Street” without having someone specific in mind. Likewise When He Returns could not have been written by a non-believer…. Or maybe I should say WOULD not have been written by a non-believer. Because she or he would surely choose to write about something else.
And so I come back to the simple proposition made earlier: if the person characterised in “4th Street” had been placed in a short story, we would in all probability not be particularly trying to think who it was. We’d have seen it as fiction, and a rather engaging fiction at that; a story of the way friendships can break apart. OK maybe we might have dug away into the author’s past to work it out an origin, but still, we might have accepted it was not a literal representation of an individual. It starts as one person, but through the artistic process becomes something else.
Now of course everyone who writes poetry or novels has the option of writing about real people or fictional characters. The first seventeen of Shakespeare’s sonnets are addressed to a young man, with whom the poet has an intense romantic relationship. By and large the writer is trying to convince the young man to marry and have beautiful children who will look just like their father.
The general assumption is that Shakespeare’s writing at this point is so intense, and there are so many beautiful sonnets here that the poet must have been writing to a specific person. And yes there indeed are several hints and suggestions dotted around that this is so, such that some will write today that it is all perfectly obvious and agreed that Shakespeare was writing to… [fill in your choice of suspect].
Well, maybe. Certainly writing this many sonnets along the same lines to an imaginary person would seem a little curious. But without a clear statement of intent we can never be completely sure. Besides, to write all that Shakespeare wrote, to have the success he had at the Curtain Theatre, and then tear down the whole theatre, ship it across the river and build the Globe where they had greater success and fame, and then to leave London and settle down in his home village once more, thereafter writing nothing of significance, seems to us today a little odd. (Or unlikely, depending on your point of view).
Odd and unlikely because although we know some parts of Shakespeare’s life, such as why they moved theatres, so much is missing. Shakespeare, very annoyingly, did not leave a detailed diary. A bit like Bob Dylan not telling us what all his songs mean.
And please allow me to divert from my thesis for a moment. Dylan’s work is often denigrated on the basis that he is a plagiarist – with many examples being given. But I rarely, if ever, see those who complain of this, also note that Shakespeare was the same. “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players,” is indeed one of the greatest metaphors of our language. Others have used it since (Oscar Wilde: “The world is a stage, and the play is badly cast,” Allan Moore: “All the world’s a stage, and everything else is vaudeville.”) But few condemn Shakespeare for nicking the line from the Greek playwright Juvenal in the second century, “All of Greece is a stage, and every Greek’s an actor.” Shakespeare was a great plagiarist. So what?
But back to my theme, and broadening out the issue somewhat, I am hoping after travelling with me this far you can see even greater difficulties within the debate. If the writer confesses neither the details of what lies behind his or her writing, nor leaves notes on the source, we can never be quite certain – especially as there might not be any real person or events referred to at all. There is, after all, nothing to stop one writing a love song to an imaginary person. And indeed many have done it. Just as there is nothing to stop one taking an image or idea from a previous writer and using it as one’s own. Phrases can be copyrighted, but not ideas.
So let’s see how any of my thoughts before the diversion into taking ideas from previous wrtiers, apply to a (to take one song as an example) “Masters of War”. On the surface it seems unlikely that Bob Dylan could have written that song without actually believing that it would be good if the creators of armaments did not continue their ghastly industry. Just as surely he must have believed in the reality of the New Testament when writing 17 songs in one year on Christian themes.
Except even here the idea of the writer believing in what she or he writes breaks down. Consider, for example, professional writers of horror fiction and science fiction. Do they seriously believe all they are writing will come to pass? I am most certainly not classifying myself as an author of particular merit – a jobbing writer seems a better description – but I can at least say that for my two published science fiction novels I most certainly didn’t believe they were portraying the future. I was evolving an entertainment, nothing more. And the few full time writers of such fiction I met at that time, were most certainly of that point of view.
So on this basis let’s just dip back for a moment to “Masters of War”. Bob wrote that in 1963, the same year that he wrote “Times they are a changin'” What both of these songs have in common is a sense of fatality. Neither says we can rise up and do this or that and the world will be a better place. Yes there is a reference to the death of the armaments manufacturers, but not because young people are going to kill them. He simply says he will celebrate trusts that they and will be called to account in the afterlife.
I think you will find
When your death takes its toll
All the money you made
Will never buy back your soul
There’s a similar theme in Times they are a changin’
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’
Dylan is telling us here that the songs are about the fact that things change, and everything moves on. Yes there might be an element of hope for the downtrodden in each case – the masters of war will suffer eternal damnation, and the losers of the past will get their rewards in the future. But it is all quite vague and not too much is certain except that times do change and the future is not a repainting of the past with a few extra bright colours added for effect.
OK, so two songs like that might well be saying to us, that is what Dylan believed. But I would argue that as with most writers, we do have to be fairly careful in our reading of the songs, because many people appear to have convinced themselves that these are revolutionary songs extolling the young to see off the old ways. But a closer study of Bob’s work shows not only that Dylan has written many, many more love songs than he has written songs of the world changing, he has also written many more lost love songs than world changing songs, as well.
Finally, I’m going to add one final theme here, to try and make my point a little clearer. Let’s take the theme of moving on.
In the same year as “Masters of War” and “Times they are a changin'” Bob Dylan wrote a series of twelve songs about moving on and leaving.
Does that mean that we have to believe that he was indeed “doing some hard travelling too” in the physical and geographical sense? Maybe he was moving around a bit, but I don’t think that was the prime motivation here. As I look back to 1963 and the 31 songs Dylan wrote in that year, I don’t hear this as an autobiography with lots of moving from place to place. Rather a much easier explanation for what Dylan wrote about that year was that he was a storyteller exploring his art.
I doubt that many people take Dylan’s songs of moving on literally. And so I find myself asking, if I am not going to take these songs of moving on literally, why should I take others literally? But then if I am not taking them literally, why do I take the songs of 1979 literally and believe Bob was propagating a belief in Christianity?
Simply the answer is that just because Bob wrote only about faith in 1979, that doesn’t mean there was faith underpinning all his earlier and later works. Just because he wrote about moving on a lot in 1963 it doesn’t mean that he had been moving on, or that he believed in moving on as a way of life, or that”moving on” underpins his whole life. Yes of course there is a connection: we call it the “Never Ending Tour”. But that is not exactly the same as the blues tradition found in “Hell Hound on My Trail”.
No, part of Bob’s genius, as with Shakespeare as it turns out, is surely his ability to move from subject to subject in such an engaging manner, on occasions perhaps actually believing in the truth of his subject matter, other times exploring fictional themes and ideas. Just because he wrote about moving on, love, and lost love a lot, it doesn’t mean all the songs are on these topics. Just because he wrote Christian songs for 18 months, that doesn’t mean Christianity is the underlying message in all his songs before or since.
So what I take from these early songs of moving on, is a set of images of the hobo jumping freight trains and moving on from town to town, and of lovers getting up because of the urge to move on because that’s what’s in their heart and soul.
But here’s the irony. The hobo doesn’t change, but the world around the hobo does keep on changing. The Christian faith that Bob espoused as the sole subject matter of his 1979/1980 songs clearly does not change (although it is modified along the way to fit with changes in thought about things like the equality of the sexes) but as the years come and go, Bob’s thoughts change, as do everyone’s. The hobo can be heroic, but can also be tragic: remember for example Man on the street from 1961. And so eventually the world gets totally out of joint.
Throughout I see Bob as observing and reporting his feelings – feelings which could later change. As I said once before, he has spent a lot of his life leaving town in all directions at once. (That’s my closest attempt at creating my own version of “Beyond here lies nothing”. It’s not real, but it has a feeling about it that makes it worth using).
That is my starting point for understanding the compositions of Bob Dylan. He has used multiple themes and ideas. He was only telling us what to do very occasionally, and each time he did, he then moved on. He has rarely told us about his life. He has been writing songs in the style of, and with the approach of, composers who had gone before him, and then, being a masterful composer, has been adding new layers over the top. His subject matter flows around him, he varies the themes as he goes.
Bob doesn’t tell us to rise up. He doesn’t (any more) say “Worship the Almighty,” the “get up and move on”. Rather he says, “here’s a picture I painted last week.”
To be continued…
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 with track selections by Aaron Galbraith
What makes Bob pick one of his own songs, perform it just the once and then move on? Sadly that is a rhetorical question – I have no idea of the answer, but I really wish I did. I’d love to know how the idea comes up, and then having been executed well, is just set aside forever more.
John Wesley Harding was released at the end of 1967, and Bob waited five years before giving it an outing, and then that was that.
The venue was Toronto, at the Maple Leaf Gardens, and the date was 10 January 1974.
As you can hear it is performed with vigour and determination. There is nothing here to suggest that Bob isn’t enjoying the performance, the singing is clear the lead guitar is perfectly suited to the performance, the crowd welcome the appearance of the song.
And that’s it. Never again.
Here’s another unexpected piece: Billy, performed 22 March 2009 at Berns Club in Stockholm.
And again I am wondering, why here, why on this day, why not again? It really is a little bit strange I find.
Perhaps less strange than “As I went out” because it is a bit of a plodding tune, and the accompaniment isn’t especially inspired, but it is an interesting and unusual 12 bar blues – certainly one of the most inventive 12 bar blues melodies that Bob has written.
But then, no one can out guess Bob.
Finally, a selection from Tony
This was performed in the State Theatre, Detroit, 16 March 2004 and is a song by Bob Seeger. Here is the original
Bob Seger has sold more than 75 millions records worldwide, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2004. He finally made his farewell tour in 2018/9. Like Bob he is the great survivor at a time when so many around him faded.
Apart from the songs he recorded himself he also co-wrote (among many others) the Eagles’ number-one hit “Heartache Tonight”, and his recording of “Old Time Rock and Roll” was named one of the Songs of the Century in 2001. Here it is (just in case you need reminding!)
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
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
Aaron:For this episode I’d thought we’d continue on from where the last one left off and look at the next three directed by Nash Edgerton, who if you remember also directed the Beyond Here Lies Nothing promo.
First up is this fun filled video for Must Be Santa.
This time he gets to work with Dylan, who for some reason wears a long grey wig under the obligatory Santa hat. There are some really fun moments for me, Dylan suddenly popping up from behind the bar with two bottles of whiskey, Dylan dancing(!!) and Edgerton shows his stuntman background with the rather raucous ending. It’s great fun and perfect for the song.
Tony: Errrrrrrrr…. I guess my sense of humour has gone down the drain.
Aaron: In the interest of completeness there was also a neat little video for Little Drummer Boy, directed by Jeff Scher. I don’t have too much to say about this one except I liked it!
Tony:Now this I will go with. Bob sings this in a meaningful way, and the video itself has a meaning within the context of the song. That is not to say that I expect everything in life or indeed in art to have a meaning; indeed I’m currently struggling in writing an article which makes this point across many Dylan songs. Meaning, I wish to argue, is not everything. But when there isn’t meaning there needs to be something to make the song worth hearing, or the video worth watching.
This video has both; it is not something I’d go back to, but yes I enjoyed it, and I wouldn’t turn away from it if it came on again.
Aaron: The next Nash Edgerton video was for Dusquesne Whistle.
Aaron:This one borrows a lot from Spike Jonze’s short film How They Get There (we’ve added a link at the end of this piece). Except in this case the girl wants nothing to do with the guy, rightly so in this case, as he’s being a total creep! He probably thinks he is being romantic but his behavior is completely inappropriate, and he ultimately gets what’s coming to him in the end.
These scenes, which take place in the daytime are nicely juxtaposed with shots of Dylan and his posse strolling coolly through the city at night. When the two converge, Dylan and gang just step over the young fool’s beaten body on the sidewalk without a second look. It is as if Dylan is stepping over himself as a young man, with it’s optimism of youth and foolish notions of romance and moving forward as an older man with an acceptance of the past. Don’t Look Back indeed.
Tony: Arghhhhhhhhhhh. I love this song, always have from the moment the album came out, and this video adds nothing. In fact it detracts greatly for me, so I am beginning to wonder how other people see this. The story has nothing to do with the song – ok that doesn’t matter, but it detracts from the music, as I watch it.
OK I am not expecting every video to be a literal exposition of the song, but when we have a song with the lines
I can hear a sweet voice gently calling
Must be the Mother of our Lord
what on earth does the video have to do with it? The closest I have got is the link between the casual destruction of the 2011 multiple vortex tornado in the town and of the way the guys beat up the would-be lover. Others have seen the Whistle as a warning about death and perhaps the impending final judgement. Yet others go for the train service that used to run between New York Penn and Pittsburgh Penn Stations, which was named after the 18th century Fort Duquesne.
No, I didn’t find that video added anything for me. In fact the reverse. I need to play the song again without the video (probably several times) to get over it.
Aaron: The final video for today from Dylan is Dylan’s cover of The Night We Called It A Day.
Again directed by Nate Edgerton and by now I think we are beginning to get an idea on how this director works, highly stylized with a heavy emphasis on violence.
This time it’s a film noir pastiche, with Dylan involved in a love triangle with ex-Bond villain Robert Davi and a young female singer who is much, much, much too young for either of them. It’s pretty creepy actually.
She ends up murdering Davi. Dylan is an accomplice to the crime and then…well I’ll leave you to watch and see what happens at the end. I really like this video and for once Dylan’s acting is pretty good. The clip definitely brings new meaning to the lyrics
The moon went down stars were gone
But the sun didn't rise with the dawn
There wasn't a thing left to say
The night we called it a day
Tony: OK yes this is the best of the lot by far, and yes the video adds to the meaning of the song by giving it one interpretation.
But the whole experience has left me wondering what impact these videos have on the record sales or the popularity of the performer. I’d love to hear more from people who like these videos and why they do. It is, I guess, an art form (at least in the guise we see it here) which is completely beyond me.
But that is not always the case. Aaron has mentioned Spike Jonze’s short film How They Get There, which I didn’t know, but have looked at, and yes I see this, understand it, get it.
This works for me, just as a lot of contemporary dance works for, but the videos here don’t. Maybe I am just blind to the form.
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
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
A quick review. It’s a deep artistic well from which singer/songwriter/musician Bob Dylan draws, Jungian or deliberately, in a number of his song lyrics.
From a Romantic poem, darkly hopeful:
Column, tower, and dome, and spire
Shine like obelisks of fire
Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean
To the sapphire-tinted skies
(Percy Shelley: Euganean Hills)
Echoed is the sentiment in the ominous song lyrics below:
There's a woman on my lap, and she's drinking champagne
Got white skin, got assassin's eyes
I'm looking up at sapphire-tinted skies
(Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed)
From a song in which there be sparks of hope in an otherwise dark world:
I saw, I saw the light from heaven
Shining all around
I saw the light come shining
I saw the light come down
(Bascom Lunsford: Dry Bones)
In death for sure if not before:
I saw my light come shining
From the west down to the east
Any day now, any day now
I shall be released
(Bob Dylan: I Shall Be Released)
From a poem featuring “Blake-light” tragedy; without darkness, there’d be no light:
It is right it should be so
Man was made for joy and woe
And when this we rightly know
Safely through the world we go
(William Blake: Auguries Of Innocence/Joy)
Below, a darker talking song that sinks much deeper into Gnostic gloom:
Millions of babies in pain
Millions of mothers in rain
Millions of brothers in woe
Millions of children no where to go
(September On Jessore Road ~ Ginsberg/Dylan)
From an over-the-top Romantic light opera/movie,”Rose-Marie”:
But if when you hear my love call ringing clear
And I hear you answering echo so clear
Then I know our love will become true
You will belong to me, and I'll belong to you
(Nelson Eddy/Jeanette MacDonald: Indian Love Call ~ Firml et. al.)
The sorrowful song lyrics quoted beneath express a longing for love unfulfilled:
Sadly I look out my window
Where I can see the raindrops fall
My heart is many thousand miles away
Where I can hear my true love call
(Bob Dylan: California Brown-Eyed Girl)
From a ‘film noir” movie:
"I'll have some rotten nights after I've sent you over
but that'll pass"
(Private detective Sam Spade: The Maltese Falcon)
Following be cynical song lyrics concerning relationships that turn sour:
Well I have had some rotten nights
Didn't think that they would pass
I'm just thankful and grateful
To be seeing the real you at last
(Bob Dylan: Seeing The Real You At Last)
Observed it is that Bob Dylan pays tribute to artists who shatter the glass of mirrors that reflect an illusion of the existence of a perfect world.
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
You’ll find some notes about our latest posts arranged by themes and subjects on the home page of this site. You can also see details of our main sections on this site at the top of this page under the picture. Not every index is complete but I do my best. Tony Attwood
Tony: So there I was watching the clock and trying to finish off my piece, “The song is like a painting, you can’t see it all at once if you’re standing too close” when in comes an email from Aaron saying, “Have you seen the news?”
The article is in German but Aaron has translated it
Aaron’s tranlation: Bob Dylan is always good for a surprise. Not only did he finally release new songs with “Rough & Rowdy Ways”, now he’s reviving his radio show. The new episode of his “Theme Time Radio Hour”, which was created during the lockdown, is even two hours long and his theme is “Whiskey”…
“The radio of Bob Dylan again is a huge surprise, but the time he takes us to the realm of “whiskey” for two hours is not surprising, because he has now launched his own bourbon brand, “Heaven’s Door”.
“Between 2006 and 2009, Bob Dylan produced 100 radio shows for Sirius XM. Each show had a special theme, and Bob Dylan proved not only to be an outstanding music connoisseur, with an exquisite record collection, but above all to be a great storyteller. Otherwise Bob Dylan is rather literal, rarely gives interviews and at his concerts he has not spoken to the audience for a long time.
“But as a radio DJ, Bob Dylan shows a very different facet of his personality. His “Never Ending World Tour” was interrupted by Corona and for the first time in many years he is not to be seen on the stages of the world.
“Then the “Nobel Prize winner” just makes radio again and has doubled his airtime. So the broadcast title “Theme Time Radio Hour” isn’t quite right anymore and Dylan isn’t sure who’s still listening to classical radio, but these two hours on the subject of “Whiskey” are a real radio highlight.
“Bob Dylan’s Theme Time Radio Hour” is original and exclusive, September 24 between 11-01 p.m.”
Tony: Which of course leaves the question: on which station?
Someone please let us know. In the USA for Aaron, and the UK for Tony.
Highway 61 Revisited (1965) part V: The roving albino
by Jochen Markhorst
1 Foreverly
Now the rovin’ gambler he was very bored
He was tryin’ to create a next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before
But yes I think it can be very easily done
We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun
And have it on Highway 61
Billie Joe Armstrong, the foreman of Green Day, one of the most successful punk rock bands of the last thirty years, is not afraid to step out of his comfort zone. In 2013 he records Foreverly with Norah Jones, a re-make of The Everly Brothers’ second album.
Billie Joe follows The Everly Brothers also in terms of guts; in 1958, the brothers, in turn, were pleasantly indifferent to the iron laws of commercial success. The previous year The Everly Brothers (1957) was released, featuring the three singles that brought them to the absolute top: “This Girl Of Mine”, “Bye Bye Love” and especially “Wake Up Little Susie”, the crossover world hit that hits 1 in the country charts, the “Black Singles” R&B hit list and the Billboard Hot 100. The monster hits hereafter (“All I Have To Do Is Dream” and “Bird Dog”) will be included in 1959 on their first Greatest Hits LP, but in between Don and Phil merrily step off Success Road, right in the middle of their first peak; in December 1958 they release the charming Songs Our Daddy Taught Us.
The album is ahead of its time. Far ahead of its time. The Everly’s indeed sing the old songs they learned from their father Ike and produce a rootsy tribute to tradition and folklore – without too much exaggeration it could be celebrated as a first Americana album, avant la lettre.
Dylan will have appreciated the album. Woody Guthrie’s “Who’s Gonna Shoe Your Pretty Little Feet”, “Barbara Allen”, Charlie Monroe’s “Down In The Willow Garden”, “That Silver Haired Daddy Of Mine” by Gene Autry… songs and artists that Dylan has on a marble pedestal. And the opening song is the spark: “Roving Gambler”.
“Roving Gambler” was first recorded in 1927, by Kelly Harrell. Indirectly Dylan already refers to him in 1963, in that remarkable piece For Dave Glover, in the program booklet of the Newport Folk Festival. Remarkable, because Dylan here, like fifty years later in his MusiCare speech, reveals the sources of his songs, acknowledging them by name:
The folk songs showed me the way
They showed me that songs can say something human –
Without “Barbara Allen” there’d be no “Girl from the North Country” –
Without no “Lone Green Valley” there’d be no “Don Think Twice”-
Without no “Jesse James” there’d be no “Davy Moore” –
Without no “Twenty one Years” there’d be no “Walls a red wing”
… and just before that he shares:
I gotta sing “Hollis Brown” –
I can’t sing “John Johannah” cause it’s his story an his people’s story –
I gotta sing “With God On My side” cause it’s my story an my people’s story –
I can’t sing “The Girl I Left Behind” cause I know what it’s like to do it –
I gotta sing “Boots a Spanish Leather” cause I know what it’s like to live it
“John Johannah” is also a Kelly Harrell song Dylan already knows, again thanks to that famous Anthology Of American Folk Music from Harry Smith, the collection with Bascom Lamar Lunsford, “Down On Penny’s Farm” (the template for Dylan’s “Hard Times in New York City”), “John The Revelator” and “When That Great Ship Went Down” and “John Hardy” and all those other songs that have taught him the lingo, and that will echo through his oeuvre for the next sixty years.
Harrell can be found on Volume 1 twice. The second song from Side C is the song about the assassin of President Garfield in 1881, “Charles Guiteau” and will be played by broadcaster Dylan in Theme Time Radio Hour (episode 68, “President’s Day”). The last song of Side B is the song Dylan mentions in For Dave Glover, with the posed – and untrue – addition that he cannot sing that song “because it is his story and the story of his people”. Posed, because John Johannah’s story is a ten-a-penny story of a farm worker who is being exploited; a protagonist like Dylan will perform in “Maggie’s Farm”, and the kind of protagonist under whose skin Dylan has crawled dozens of times in 1963 (“Walkin’ Down The Line”, for example). Still, he never sings “John Johannah”, that much is true. He does steal the melody, though; he uses it for “Long Time Gone” (although the melody also resembles that other song he “can’t sing”; “The Girl I Left Behind”).
But Dylan will sing a third song by Harrell. A song he will sing longer even than any other song – apart from his own songs, of course. “Roving Gambler” has been on his repertoire since 1960 and returns with interruptions until 2002.
2 From El Paso up to Maine
This roving gambler, the gambler in the last verse of “Highway 61 Revisited”, wants to start a new world war out of sheer boredom, but still is better off than his namesake, who spends his days in jail after shooting a card opponent because I saw him deal from the bottom of the deck.
This path the jumpy mind of the rock poet does not follow. As is often the case, Dylan seems to be mainly triggered by topography. The original roving gambler does travel around: in the first verse he is still in Washington, but by the time we arrive at the fifth verse, the gambler has already come quite a way:
I left her in El Paso and I wound up in Maine
I met up with a gambling man
Got in a poker game
From Washington via El Paso to Maine, back and forth in fact – even if he takes the shortest route (which is not too likely), he is still nearly five thousand miles on his way to that table where he will draw his gun.
Dylan will visit El Paso more often (“She’s Your Lover Now”, “Wanted Man” and “Billy”), but here “Maine” seems to stir Dylan’s stream of consciousness.
In songs, Maine is mostly used like in “Roving Gambler”; as a topographical metaphor for “very far”. Like in “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill” (From San Diego up to Maine) or in Belafonte’s “Farewell Jamaica” (Though I’ve been from Maine to Mexico), but it seems obvious that in the back of Dylan’s mind one of Sinatra’s signature songs plays: “The Lady Is A Tramp”, which opens with
I've wined and dined on Mulligan StewAnd never wished for TurkeyAs I hitched and hiked and grifted tooFrom Maine to Albuquerque
A hint for this guess we find towards the end of Sinatra’s classic:
I go to Coney, the beach is divineI go to ballgames, the bleachers are fineI follow Winchell, and read every lineThat's why the lady is a tramp
… “The Lady Is A Tramp” is probably the only song in Dylan’s baggage with that atypical word bleachers, which appears so alienating in the penultimate line of this last “Highway 61 Revisited” verse. Sinatra also sings I like a prizefight that isn’t a fake in the next verse, which is a link to Dylan’s half boxing reference in this same stanza, to he found a promoter.
Creative and wild, these supposed associations, but roving – tramp – Maine – bleachers is still a fairly straight line. More likely, in any case, than the content-driven interpretations of diligent analysts who cloak themselves in the alleged deeper intention behind he was trying to create a next world war – even in the twenty-first century, there are still plenty of Dylanologists who do recognise a “clear political undertone” herein, see it as an expression of apocalyptic fears, taking “world war” quite literally. Not necessarily nonsensical, but once again, the Nobel Prize speech words of the bard seem more apt than these over-serious analyses here:
I’ve written all kinds of things into my songs. And I’m not going to worry about it – what it all means. (…) But it sounds good. And you want your songs to sound good.
“We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun / And have it on Highway 61”… yup. Sounds good.
3 Complexion much too white
Although “Highway 61 Revisited” is one of the many, many highlights of the Golden Five Hundred Days, the days when Dylan is at a mercury peak and produces Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde On Blonde (plus small masterpieces like “Farewell Angelina”, “Positively 4th Street” or “I’ll Keep It With Mine”, the songs rejected for those albums), it is still remarkable that Dylan doesn’t immediately recognise the special magic of the song. It does not appear on the set list of performances in the US, Canada and England in ’65, nor is it played during the world tour of ’66, and only at that Isle Of Wight concert, 31 August 1969, does it have its premiere.
Perhaps the persuasion of the men of The Band is needed. On Dylan’s return to the stages, together with The Band in 1974, the song is ignored for another month, but from the twenty-seventh concert, the evening concert in New York on 31 January, Dylan seems to have given in – the rest of the tour the song has a fixed place, somewhere at the end of the setlist. Apparently, Dylan is still not entirely convinced, though – it will take another ten years, until 1984, before he plays the song again. And it is not until 1987 that he is finally won over; since then it has been on the programme almost continuously. Today “Highway 61 Revisited” is even one of his most frequently played songs. On the list of the tireless Dylan watcher Olof Björner, the song is number three in 2020, with 2,032 performances.
The colleagues were already convinced a long time ago. Irresistible stomp, dazzling drive, brilliant, funny lyrics… the song is often and gladly covered.
The most famous is probably the one by the albino guitar god Johnny Winter, who records a splendid cover for his LP Second Winter (1969), and considers the song since, together with “Johnny B. Goode” of course, as one of his signature songs: until his death he continues to play it at almost every concert.
His last performance shall be in France, Quatorze Juilliet 2014. The fragile seventy-year-old Johnny has to stay seated, opens with a flaming “Johnny B. Goode”, plays a set of eleven classics and then returns for his last encore: Robert Johnson’s “Dust My Broom” and finally the very last song he will play in his life: “Highway 61 Revisited”.
He dies two days later in Zurich. Cause of death unknown, but presumably albino related – his complexion was much too white, after all.
Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:
mr tabourine has prepared this amazing video sequence, which I have to admit I have been playing since the moment he made it go live.
It is a sequence of the last performance of Dylan songs between 2012 and 2019, and it runs as a sequence in the order given below. Over 80 songs across eight hours of continuous video, in each case the very last performance.
Of course we all want the virus to be beaten and for Bob to tour again, but we have to admit this might not happen. So this is an incredibly valuable document, and I am so grateful first for mr tambourine creating it, and second for mr tabourine giving Untold Dylan the chance to publish it.
Reviews may follow – but for the moment I am just sitting here with my mouth open
All Dylan songs played for the very last time live (so far), from 2012-2019
01. My Back Pages (Montreux, July 8 2012)
02. Absolutely Sweet Marie (Lyon, July 18 2012)
03. This Wheel’s On Fire (Carhaix, July 23 2012)
04. Saving Grace (Johnstown, August 29 2012)
05. This Dream Of You (Winnipeg, October 5 2012)
06. Nettie Moore (Edmonton, October 9 2012)
07. Hattie Carroll (Sacramento, October 20 2012)
08. Hollis Brown (Sacramento, October 20 2012)
09. Love Minus Zero (Broomfield, October 30 2012)
10. John Brown (Broomfield, October 30 2012)
11. Joey (Toronto, November 14 2012)
12. Sugar Baby (Toronto, November 14 2012)
13. Mississippi (Philadelphia, November 19 2012)
14. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere (Brooklyn, November 21 2012)
15. Chimes Of Freedom (Brooklyn, November 21 2012)2013
16. Shooting Star (Denver, July 31 2013) – second to last, the last recorded version in circulation. The very last was played the next day in Salt Lake City.
17. It’s Alright, Ma (Stockholm, October 12 2013)
18. Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat (Rome, November 6 2013)
19. Queen Jane Approximately (Rome, November 6 2013)
20. Every Grain Of Sand (Rome, November 6 2013)
21. Man In The Long Black Coat (Rome, November 7 2013)
22. Positively 4th Street (Rome, November 7 2013)
23. Rollin’ And Tumblin’ (Rome, November 7 2013)
24. When The Deal Goes Down (Rome, November 7 2013)
25. Under The Red Sky (Rome, November 7 2013)
26. Ain’t Talkin’ (Rome, November 7 2013)
27. I Don’t Believe You (Rome, November 7 2013)
28. Roll On John (London, November 26 2013)2014
29. Huck’s Tune (Osaka, April 23 2014) – last recorded version circulating, the last one was exactly two months later in Athens, but not in circulation unfortunately
30. Most Likely You Go Your Way (Stavern, July 11 2014)
31. Million Miles/Cry A While (Stavern, July 11 2014) – Bob starts singing what would turn out to be the last performance of Million Miles to date, but then switched to the lyrics of Cry A While (even laughs when realizing what he’s done)
32. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues (Gothenburg, July 15 2014) – last singing version. The song would be played 6 or 7 more times in 2019 but as an instrumental closer. Bob’s official site doesn’t list those instrumentals as live performances of this song.
33. Watching The River Flow (Gothenburg, July 15 2014)34. What Good Am I? (Hamilton, August 9 2014)2015
35. Waitin’ For You (San Sebastian, July 11 2015)
36. Forgetful Heart (San Sebastian, July 11 2015)
37. ‘Til I Fell In Love With You (Albi, July 12 2015)
38. Jolene (Saint-Malo-du-Bois, July 13 2015)
39. I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight (Lorrach, July 16 2015)
40. The Levee’s Gonna Break (Lorrach, July 16 2015)
41. Shelter From The Storm (Lorrach, July 16 2015)
42. Tweedle Dee And Tweedle Dum (Lorrach, July 16 2015)2016
43. She Belongs To Me (Gilford, July 17 2016)
44. Masters Of War (Indio, October 7 2016)
45. Rainy Day Women #12 & #35 (Indio, October 14 2016)2017
46. Standing In The Doorway (Stockholm, April 1 2017)
47. To Ramona (Portchester, June 14 2017)
48. Lonesome Day Blues (Dover, June 17 2017)
49. Blind Willie McTell (Dover, June 17 2017)
50. A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall (Dover, June 17 2017)2018
51. Spirit On The Water (Salamanca, March 24 2018) – last recorded version in circulation, played three more times on March 26, 27 and 28 in Madrid, but those are not in circulation
52. Visions Of Johanna (Sydney, August 18 2018)
53. Duquesne Whistle (Newcastle, August 22 2018)
54. Desolation Row (Auckland, August 26 2018)
55. Tangled Up In Blue (Christchurch, August 28, 2018)
56. Summer Days (Christchurch, August 28, 2018)
57. Workingman’s Blues #2 (Tucson, October 5, 2018)
58. High Water (Tucson, October 5, 2018) – last circulating version, played two more times on October 7 and October 9, but neither of those are in circulation
59. All Along The Watchtower (New York, November 29, 2018) – last2019
60. Dignity (Fuengirola, May 4 2019)
61. Cry A While (Roskilde, July 3 2019)
62. Boots Of Spanish Leather (Braunschweig, July 6 2019)
63. Don’t Think Twice (Mainz, July 7 2019)
64. Scarlet Town (Stuttgart, July 10 2019)
65. Like A Rolling Stone (Kilkenny, July 14 2019)
66. Love Sick (Kilkenny, July 14 2019)
67. Blowin’ In The Wind (Kilkenny, July 14 2019)
68. Long And Wasted Years (Irvine, October 11 2019)
69. Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ (St. Louis, October 22 2019) – last circulating version, played the final time the next night but not in circulation
70. It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue (St. Louis, October 22 2019) – last circulating version, played the final time the next night but not in circulation December 8, 2019 Washington (last show currently that Bob performed)
