Untold Dylan

by Jochen Markhorst

The story so far…

• Highway 61 Revisited (1965) part I: Look out kid
• Highway 61 Revisited (1965) part II: On a desert island
• Highway 61 Revisited (1965) part III: Words don’t interfere

1          Open your ears; 9r”5j5&

But
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—
It’s so elegant
So
intelligent

(T.S. Eliot – The Waste Land)

In 2020 The Mekons still exist, the British-American crew from Leeds who initially created a furore as a hard, chaotic punk rock band, but has now explored just about every corner of the music world. Title plus cover of their 1979 debut album is still one of the witty highlights: The Quality Of Mercy Is Not Strnen. The cover photo, a monkey with a typewriter, clarifies the title: this chimp almost typed a Shakespeare quote (“The quality of mercy is not strained,” from The Merchant Of Venice).

The joke is, of course, based on the Infinite Monkey Theorem, which states – in variants – that an immortal monkey with infinite time one day will type the Collected Works of Shakespeare. Variants talk about a million monkeys and a million years, or an infinite number of monkeys and the typing of Hamlet, but Shakespeare is a constant in all these variants.

It’s a brilliant thesis to motivate students of the probability theory – strongly visual, humorous and fairly sharply defined (Hamlet has 30,577 words, about 130,000 letters). But solution and evidence are sobering. The odds are so small that it cannot be described in our language. If every proton in the universe from the Big Bang to the end of the universe were a typing monkey, billions more universes would be needed before we would have a 1 in a trillion chance of a flawless Hamlet.

That does not scare off. Throughout every decade, there are scientists who manage to free up a scholarship to experiment with the thesis. In 2002, students and lecturers at the University of Plymouth put six crested macaques to work for a month. The result is meagre: only five pages of text, mainly filled with the letter s. At most, the very last line is somewhat exciting still:

blbbbbnnfllmnnmjfgmnmmmassssssjjkbhnmnn 

Despite this disappointment, the work is published in a fine hard-cover edition with photographs of the authors: Notes Towards The Complete Works Of Shakespeare, by Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe & Rowan, Sulawesi Crested Macaques (Macaca nigra) from Paignton Zoo Environmental Park (UK).

More successful are automated simulation programmes. In August 2003 a virtual monkey in Scottsdale, Arizona, after billions and billions of “monkey years” produces nineteen letters from The Two Gentlemen Of Verona (“VALENTINE. Cease toIdor:eFLP0FRjWK78aXzVOwm)-‘;8.t”), other teams achieve similar successes with Richard II and Timon Of Athens, and the preliminary record is set on a website, The Monkey Shakespeare Simulator, with 24 letters from Henry IV: “RUMOUR. Open your ears; 9r”5j5&?OWTY Z0d” (likewise after billions of virtual monkey years).  

2          A cloud that’s dragonish

“Shakespeare-dropping” is a motif in Dylan’s oeuvre. Sometimes unveiled, such as Ophelia and Romeo in “Desolation Row”, Othello and Desdemona in “Po’ Boy” and Romeo and Juliet in “Floater”. Sometimes with a traceable quote, like in “Mississippi” (“Give me your hand and say you’ll be mine” from Measure For Measure) and Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” in “My Own Version Of You”, and occasionally with a loud and clear hello, like in “Stuck Inside Of Mobile” (“Shakespeare’s in the alley”). Examples from 1965 to 2020 – the bard from Stratford-upon-Avon has been receiving tips of the hat from the Hibbing bard for over fifty years.

Beyond that begins the grey zone, the zone in which the dozens of disputable Shakespeare references float around, text fragments that, depending on your tolerance limit, are eligible to apply for the “Shakespeare reference”-stamp.

In “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome” Dylan sings dragon clouds, Shakespeare’s Antony says in Antony And Cleopatra: “Sometimes we see a cloud that’s dragonish”. The Earl of Warwick in Henry VI says: “Where having nothing, nothing can he lose” – which could be celebrated by more fanatical reference seekers as the source for “Like A Rolling Stone” (when you got nothing, you got nothing to lose). The album title Time Out Of Mind might be a quote (Romeo And Juliet, Act I, sc. 4) and album title Tempest happens to be a Shakespeare title as well (all right, factually The Tempest).

Which brings us into the light grey zone: paraphrases and “inspirations’, again depending on your willingness or eagerness to see a paraphrase or a reference in it.

An exceptional suicide like to eat fire (from “Too Much Of Nothing”) can only be found once in all world literature (in Julius Caesar) and in the same Basement song, whose title echoes Much Ado About Nothing, we hear another unique expression (to abuse a king, only to be found in Shakespeare’s Pericles) plus some remarkable jargon like “oblivion”, “temper”, “mock” – words Dylan never uses elsewhere, but can be found in Shakespeare’s Collected Works by the dozen. And another Basement song (“Tears Of Rage”) offers similar possibilities of comparison with King Lear.

But by now we are leaving even the light grey zone, and we are approaching the Infinitely Typing Monkeys. After all, album titles such as Desire and Saved, for example, are also words that can be found in Shakespeare’s sonnets and tragedies – but can hardly be considered references.  Even an enthusiastic Dylan researcher like Professor Ricks would agree. But that same Professor Ricks is the leader of the faction of Dylanologists who enthusiastically promote unspectacular word correspondences and vaguely similar phrases to possible Shakespeare references – correspondences and similarities that would be classified by the scientists at the University of Plymouth under: “hits by the Infinitely Typing Monkey Dylan”.

A maverick then is the word combination twelfth + night from “Highway 61 Revisited”.

3          If music be the food of love, play on

Now the fifth daughter on the twelfth night
Told the first father that things weren’t right
My complexion she said is much too white
He said come here and step into the light he says hmm you’re right
Let me tell the second mother this has been done
But the second mother was with the seventh son
And they were both out on Highway 61

Mick Fleetwood is not secretive, in his entertaining memoirs. One of Fleetwood Mac’s older albums is named after it (the underrated Then Play On, 1969 – “Oh Well” is on the American reissue) and he also calls his autobiography Play On; Now, Then And Fleetwood Mac (2014). Why, he explains right away in the first paragraph:

“Play on. Two words, no more, but they’ve said it all to me.

They’ve been, at different times, a simple direct order, a call to action, a mantra and a comforting concept that promised rebirth. I first read them in the most beautiful and romantic couplet in Twelfth Night, my favourite of Shakespeare’s works. I’ve never forgotten it; in fact I took it to heart

immediately because it spoke to me.”

He has signed with “Play On” half his life, has a tendency to encourage people around him with these very words and Then Play On “I still count as my favourite record”.

It’s a legacy of his youth; happy he was not, in the boarding schools in Gloucestershire, but thanks to this British part of his upbringing the young Fleetwood is affected by Duke Orsino’s monologue:

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour!

… and at the same time, Mick’s declaration of love demonstrates the difference with Dylan’s use of Shakespeare: to Fleetwood, it is rhyme and reason.

Dylan of course knows the title of Shakespeare’s romantic comedy. And by now (1965) he knows the urge of many followers and journalists to dig for and find far-fetched allusions and produce insane interpretations of his lyrics. It’s the mid-sixties Dylan, so the subtlest tinge of maliciousness is enough to then play on: to liven up the quasi-Biblical enumeration of fifth daughter, first father and second mother with a twelfth night.

It’s a direct hit; among the reference seekers, this contextless Twelfth Night is still high up on the told-you-so-list, the list of references to prove how much Dylan has been influenced by Shakespeare. It’s not too convincing, though; the quotes and paraphrases never really transcend name-dropping, are mostly rhyme and never reason. Sure, Dylan’s admiration for Shakespeare is sincere and respectful, which he repeatedly confesses in interviews, such as in the Uncut interview, 2015:

“You travel the world, you go see different things. I like to see Shakespeare plays, so I’ll go — I mean, even if it’s in a different language. I don’t care, I just like Shakespeare, you know. I’ve seen Othello and Hamlet and Merchant of Venice over the years, and some versions are better than others. Way better. It’s like hearing a bad version of a song. But then somewhere else somebody has a great version.”

… but a demonstrable influence on the style of his lyrics, as the Beat Poets have, or a demonstrable artistic soul affinity, as with Kafka or Rimbaud, or even appropriations to poetically convey a story, as from Ovid or Junichi Saga – no. Dylan’s Shakespeare references are actually little more than glitter and gold dust. Like the otherwise empty twelfth night here. Which Dylan, unconsciously associating or consciously scattering glitter, amplifies some more with the subsequent, Shakespearian complexion. Shakespeare uses this word more than fifty times (three times in Twelfth Night, by the way). The only other time in his entire oeuvre that Dylan uses the word is in yet another Shakespeare reference, the one in “Floater” (2001):

Romeo, he said to Juliet, “You got a poor complexion.
It doesn’t give your appearance a very youthful touch!”
Juliet said back to Romeo, “Why don’t you just shove off
If it bothers you so much.”

… in which the use of the names Romeo and Juliet again has no function whatsoever – except as a Brechtian “V-Effekt” (Verfremdungseffekt, alienation effect) – the same function as Mack The Finger, God and Georgia Sam in “Highway 61 Revisited”.

In short, Dylan’s Shakespeare love is real, but is limited to shimmering on the surface. Or, as the Supreme Bard would say, “Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs”. (Romeo And Juliet, Act I, sc. 1)

To be continued. Next up: Highway 61 Revisited – part V

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

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

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

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

As ever, Aaron chooses the music and writes the introductions, and then sends his notes across the Atlantic where Tony tries to respond – but sometimes goes way off message.

Aaron: Just the two tracks in this episodes…

Tony: Sorry Aaron, I’ve subverted, as you’ll see.

Aaron: Tony, I was wondering if you’d like to provide some commentary around the tracks, particularly the Geoff Muldaur track with Bob on piano…to my untutored ear it sounds really different what Bob’s doing here, so I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on what’s going on!

The first track I’d like to present today is Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s “Will The Circle Be Unbroken”. This was released in 1964 on the “Jack Elliott” album – for some reason it won’t pop up into a block image to click on – just click on the link.

https://youtu.be/8Wuz2Vyrv5Y

Bob appears under the wonderful name Tedham Porterhouse. He’s definitely playing harmonica but some reports state that he is also playing guitar. It’s a track Bob knows well even all these years later.

Here’s Bob playing it in 1961.

And again, just a year ago, in Kilkenny with Neil Young

Tony: This is where I can slip into research mode as in the “Rare performances” series.  Just in case anyone is interested.  This is a hymn written in the first decade of the last century with lyrics by Ada Habershon and music by the appropriately named Charles Gabriel – although many people attribute it to “traditional”.  Ramblin Jack brought it into the modern era.

Here’s the opening verse

There are loved ones in the glory
Whose dear forms you often miss.
When you close your earthly story,
Will you join them in their bliss?

Personally if Neil Young and Bob Dylan made an album out of reading the telephone directory (if you remember telephone directories that is) I’d buy it; I just love these two working together, even though most performances seem as if they’ve hardly rehearsed what they are going to do.

I’m not sure if either of the guys is the sideman – I guess we take this from the artists’ listings, but for me they perform as equals.  And I should add if you want to get a real insight into Neil Young you should take in Aaron’s excellent review “If it sounds like me” which has multiple Neil Young videos on it.

Aaron: The second track also comes from 1964. This time Bob is backing up Geoff Muldaur on the track “Downtown Blues”.

Bob is credited as Bob Landy and is playing some interesting piano. Over to Tony to explain what’s going on here!

Tony:  So Bob is playing right up in the treble end of the keyboard (the right hand side as you look at it).  It sounds as if there isn’t a microphone near the piano, and given that it is just the treble notes being played we can only hear it in the background – but what we can hear suggests Bob is using both hands in the upper register, and the piano ain’t be tuned for a while.

It’s a standard 12 bar blues, so any decent musician could join in straight away without a rehearsal, but what makes this even more interesting is that Bob on keyboard does get the bounce absolutely correct to make his part fit with everything else.  I’ve not heard this done before in this sort of track – although I’m sure others will have tried it.  It’s a good idea.

Aaron: I’d never heard of Geoff Muldaur until recently but he is much respected amongst fellow musicians. Richard Thompson said, “There are only 3 white blues singers – Geoff Muldaur is at least two of them”. Van Dyke Parks commented “Bob Dylan didn’t want to be Woody Guthrie. He wanted to be Geoff Muldaur. Geoff was the Big Man On Campus. He still is”..

And Bob said “Geoff’s the female Carolyn Hester”!

Tony: Well as you’ve introduced Geoff Muldaur and Carolyn Hester, here’s Geoff doing the piece as a solo – very interesting 90 seconds of him giving the background.  Such a down to earth guy.

Apart from Geoff being this sensational performer he is a great, great storyteller.  But even if you don’t want to hear the stories, please do listen to this utterly brilliant musician, who for reason I think we’ve not discussed before.

And I guess to explain Bob’s comment more fully I ought to offer this as well.  I still, after a lifetime of listening, never come to terms with Carolyn Hester’s voice.  It is not that it sends shivers down my spine, it turns me into shivers.  And reduces me to tears.

OK I’ve probably lost most of our audience Aaron, and I know I have wandered far from the topic, but I hope you found something here of interest.  What’s more if you leave this video running it takes us onto more Carolyn Hester.  As I finishing preparing my little comments, it is still running.  I don’t know how long it goes on for, but it is one hell of a find.

• Dylan the Sideman: Barry Golding
• Bob Dylan: Farina, von Schmidt and Bob
• Dylan with Belafonte, Hester and Big Joe Williams

by Jochen Markhorst

In his highly entertaining autobiography 31 Songs, Nick Hornby devotes Chapter 7 to the favourite from his teens: Rod Stewart. Rod Stewart, he argues almost apologetically, is the equivalent of Oasis in the early 1970s – you absolutely did not have to be ashamed of the man who recorded Every Picture Tells A Story and Smiler. The embarrassment comes later, with “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” and the endless line of Britt Ekland lookalikes and the straw hats and “Ole Ola”, the 1978 Scottish World Cup song. But before that, however, Hornby argues, the records with The Faces and Stewart’s subsequent first five solo records, before 1975, Rod is absolutely fine.

On those first solo albums Dylan is a common thread. Stewart records beautiful covers of “Only A Hobo” (on Gasoline Alley, 1970), “Tomorrow Is A Long Time” (Every Picture Tells A Story, 1971), “Mama You Been On Mind” (Never A Dull Moment, 1972) and “Girl From The North Country” (Smiler, 1974).

And as the best example thereof, Hornby chooses Stewart’s interpretation of “Mama, You Been On My Mind”. One of the points Hornby wants to make is: that version is more moving, elevates the original, “Stewart’s reverence seems to dignify it, invest it with an epical quality Dylan denies it.”. With this, Hornby builds a bridge to Chapter 8, about Dylan’s “Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window”, in which he already confesses in the third line, slightly provocatively: “I’m not a Dylan fan”. But, as he nuances in the following paragraphs, he finds to his own surprise that he has more than 20 Dylan CDs (“In fact I own more recordings by Dylan than by any other artist”), he must admit that he has much more pointless Dylan knowledge available than he has of, say, Shakespeare and he cherishes, Like “anyone who likes music” the three mid-60s albums plus Blood On The Tracks and Hornby launches the very quotable hit “there’s a density and a gravity to a Dylan song that you can’t find anywhere else”.

But a fan, no.

In any case, Rod Stewart is a real, straightforward fan. The beauty of his (many) Dylan covers is debatable, but they are all respectful and loving (only his “Forever Young” is quite scandalous). Now, you don’t have to be an outspoken fan to fall for “Mama, You Been On My Mind”, obviously – even for those who don’t fancy Dylan all that much, this is a song of the outside category. It is sublime love lyric; indeed, one of those lyrics in which Dylan reaches that “density and gravity that can’t find anywhere else”. Dylan finds simple words to describe a complex amalgam of emotions that strike him through an everyday but profound experience of life: the end of love.

The listener, or the reader, is moved by the narrator, mainly by virtue of the elegance the poet manages to maintain from the first line to the last. Nowhere does the text become lachrymose, the I does not give in to sourness, ridicule or reproach, the pitfall of self-pity is fortunately avoided, as well as the usual clichés.

It doesn’t take anything at all to let the image of the loved one haunt him or her again. Not a particular smell, or a song on the radio, or a scene from a film – maybe it’s the weather or something like that, but suddenly I have to think of you again. Which already reveals heart-breaking vulnerability. The following verses then surprise by the unrecognizable maturity, the soft melancholy with which Dylan speaks to his ex-lover. Is this the same man who so bitterly dismisses this same lover in “Don’t Think Twice”, so viciously in “Ballad In Plain D”? This abandoned lover resigns and has a big heart, has achieved an inner peace allowing him to be tender and sensitive, this abandoned lover is at peace and is credible when he says it no longer torments him when she sleeps with someone else. This is no longer the vindictive genius we know from the other “Suze songs” – crawling all the deeper under your skin. The poet Dylan here has found the tone of Sinatra’s Sings For Only The Lonely and In The Wee Small Hours , of the very best the American Songbook has to offer – though this poet has an even better way with words than the Jerome Kerns, the Sammy Cahns and the Johnny Burkes.

How fragile that regained inner harmony is, the music reveals. The chord progression is already unconventional, but especially the stuttering tempo and the occasional slipping from four-quarter to three-quarter time illustrates: that wound has not healed completely yet, a small push seems enough to make the narrator lose his balance.

Perhaps this is an answer to the big question as to why Dylan rejects this grand masterpiece for Another Side Of (when that record could certainly have endured another climax, if only as an antidote for Plain D) and hardly ever plays it for eleven years – is it just too personal? Too close to home perhaps? He then donates it to Baez, who – of course, she is certainly no fool – gratefully accepts. And in the long run, we also owe it to her that the song eventually returns to Dylan’s set list: during the Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975. After that the ban has been broken and to the enthusiasm of the audience Dylan keeps on performing the song; since that tour over two hundred times.

Joan Baez is by no means the only one who greedily throws herself on this brilliant throwaway. The inevitable Judy Collins is next, also in 1965, and the long list of covers is still growing steadily. In the sixth decade after the song’s conception, half the Premier League (Johnny Cash, George Harrison, Jeff Buckley, to name but a few) has placed the song on a pedestal and the echelons underneath, right down to the YouTube living room videos, are not lagging behind. Thanks to the song’s exceptional class, the covers are almost always at least tolerable, often very pleasant and sometimes brilliant – the song has a similar indestructibility as “Not Dark Yet” and “To Ramona”.

There is one notable difference: this one time the ladies do not really succeed. Some singers solve the gender problem by, like Baez, changing “Mama” into “Daddy”, others choose “Baby, You’ve Been On Mind” (Linda Ronstadt, for example) and that alone is an impoverishment, as you lose the alliterating mama – my mind. Within the women’s competition Ronstadt’s version still scores high, but apparently there is something gender-specific about this song: in a (fictional) top 10 there really are only men.

Nick Hornby does have a point; Rod Stewart’s is great, partly thanks to a beautiful, melancholic arrangement and ditto instrumentation. The lamented Jeff Buckley surpasses the intensity of the original – like Dylan, he does it without an accompaniment band and can therefore fiddle with tempo and metre forms, which works very well with these lyrics in particular. On the other hand, the driving, pulsating drive that We Are Augustines, without drums, injects into the song is just as irresistible (on the Amnesty album Chimes Of Freedom, 2012). Particularly successful is the interpretation of one Kristian Bush, also on a tribute project (The Times They Are a Changin’: A Tribute to Bob Dylan Volume 2, 1994).

The winner is Jack Johnson’s utterly attractive contribution to the I’m Not There soundtrack (2007). Inspired by the cadence of the flood of words, Johnson lets Mama flow smoothly into a rap on the words of “Last Thoughts On Woody Guthrie”; a brilliant, marvellous find.

From 1981, after five albums without Dylan cover, Rod Stewart returns to his old love at irregular intervals. On Tonight I’m Yours he sings “Just Like A Woman”, in 1995 “Sweetheart Like You” appears on Spanner In The Works, he records “The Groom’s Still Waiting At The Altar”, in 2006 “If Not For You” and a gruesome “Love Minus Zero/No Limit” in ’97, but he never approaches the intensity and unpolished beauty of the early seventies. The low point is the smoothed, cotton-candy adaptation of “Forever Young”.

Some rehabilitation is achieved on The Rod Stewart Sessions 1971-1998 (2009), a compilation of unreleased material and alternative versions. On side 4 an unknown version of “This Wheel’s On Fire” from 1992 surfaces, on which the hard rocking, unpolished and stomping Rod “Faces” Stewart suddenly shows his best Dylan side again.

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

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

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

by Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

Just in case you’ve not encountered Play lady play before, it works like this.  Aaron in the USA selects recordings of Dylan songs by female performers, and sends them with a few notes to Tony in the UK, and as the track plays, Tony tries to write down his immediate feelings, usually on hearing the track for the very first time.  The idea is not to come up with a considered review but rather an immediate response to the songs.

Aaron: For this episode we’re going to look at female covers of tracks from Oh Mercy!

Here are the Carolina Chocolate Drops with their cover of Political World. They are an old time string band from Carolina and count among their members Rhiannon Giddens who was also a member of the New Basement Tapes Collective. Here she is on co-lead vocals on this track from The Chimes Of Freedom album (I really must get this CD at some point!)

We have a problem with the video – which works for Aaron in the USA but not for Tony in UK.   There doesn’t seem to be an alternative UK version, but the recording it is also available for free on Spotify.  It’s on disk four so scroll down.  You will need an account – but there is no registration cost, unless you want the all-singing Spotify.

Tony: Oh what a knock out.  This is a really tough song to realise because it is written on one chord.  So to cover for the lack of chordal movement what the band do is create a stunning movement, exciting accompaniment, gorgeous harmonies, and above all just such fun.

This album has an astonishing 76 tracks on it which makes it worth investigating but I don’t want to take anything away from the Chocolate Drops.  If by the end of the first verse you are not sold on this then my heart bleeds for you.  This is FUN.  And if this isn’t fun then I don’t know what is .

Aaron: Next… how about this version of Everything Is Broken by Louisa Rey from her 2009 album Turning Me Jazz

Tony: A challenging introduction into which Louisa Bey fits her vocals perfectly.  The accompaniment is evolving and moving all the time, and yet she is forcing us to hear the lyrics.

What I love here is that nothing is pushing me back to Dylan’s version of the song – Louisa Bey takes it as her own, and that feels absolutely right.

And then again there is simply the concept of doing this song as a modern jazz piece.  That is quite a leap, and yet it works perfectly.  And even when after around 2 minutes 15 she takes the excitement up, it still works, because the instrumentalists stick to their cause.  No one gets carried away.  This is where it is this is what we do.  It keeps going – which is exactly what these lyrics demand.

In the end we are certain, everything really is broken.  No doubt about it.

Aaron:  Now I’m going to include two versions of Ring Them Bells, just because I love the song, I love both versions…and because I can!

First up it’s Joan Baez and Mary Black from Baez’ excellent live album of the same name (get the 2 disc remastered version if you can!). I love the piano on this version.

Tony: I’m with you on the accompaniment Aaron.  This is terrific.  What makes it work is not only the virtuoso approach but the fact that pianist stays on task.  This is right, no one is getting carried away.  It rolls along beautifully.

Yes I still have the same old problem with Ms Baez’ excessive vibrato (or so it seems to me) but this really gorgeous.

Aaron: Then, next, one that I just stumbled on and I’d never heard before by Heart. We’ve not included them in the series before now, so why not! This is from their 1993 album Desire Walks On. I like it, and it’s completely different from any ones I’ve heard before.

Tony: Yep this is fine for me, but after such originality in all the pieces chosen so far in this selection, I am getting used to the unusual, the different, the challenging.

This is good, it works well, but it doesn’t take me to a new place, and the male vocal around 1 minute 45 seconds doesn’t give me a new dimension either

Truth is Aaron, in this series you have discovered such fantastic pieces I expect every song you present to us to be another work of amazing originality.  To me this is competent and perfectly playable, but in the end the vocalists are trying too hard.

Aaron: And now for something completely different. Man In The Long Black Coat by the Elmquist/Kallerdahl Kombo…

Tony: First thing if I heard this intro without being told what was coming up, I’d never guess.  Second thing, does that introduction have anything to do with the rest of  the song?  I fear not.

It’s a perfectly good and enjoyable modern jazz version of the song.  It doesn’t do much to me because this isn’t how I see (and by extension hear and feel) the man in the long black coat.   For me he’s always been more sinister, more threatening.  More scary than jazz.

And I suppose as we get to the improvised instrumental section I feel, “where is my man in the coat in all this?”   I think one needs to be much more committed to the modern jazz idiom than I am to appreciate this properly.  My failing, no one else’s.

Aaron: Last one today is a cover of Most Of The Time by Sophie Zelmani. There are a few covers of this but I’d never heard of this lady so thought I’d include it here, but you should also check out Bettye Lavette’s version (I’ve included her several times so though it only fair I skipped her for this one!)

Tony:  Now this does intrigue.  It is a tortuous song which I suspect gets inside the skin of everyone who has recently had a lover walk out.  I like it, but somehow I wanted a little more.   But somewhere around 2 minutes 45 seconds the accompaniment started to sound like Lou Reed doing “Take a walk on the wild side”.   Which of course it isn’t at all, but there’s a rhythm in there that is so strikingly like Lou Reed that it put me off.  Not because I don’t like Lou Reed, I most certainly do, but because this is not “Take a Walk”.

It disappears after a few moments, but then I had another problem – the band is taking it as far as they can go (before taking it back down) but the singer isn’t.

This is a super piece of music and there are some gorgeous moments here, but I just think the production is wrong.  But then, I’m not a musical producer, so that’s probably just me.  Yet when around 4’50” Take a Walk on the Wild Side rhythm comes back, I think, “well, what were you trying to do here guys?”

And answer came their none.

There is an index to the other entries in this series here.

And you will find the series on the Untold Dylan: The Youtube channel

By Larry Fyffe

Singer/song writer Bob Dylan messes with the song lyrics taken from other artists, and the rhymes therein.

In the traditional song lyrics below there’s the end rhyme ~ ‘man’/’can’

Oh, I don't like a railroad man
No, I don't like a railroad man
But the railroad man, they'll kill you when he can
And drink up your blood like wine
(Bascom Lunsford; I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground)

In the lyrics below, the end rhyme switches to ~ ‘wine’/’line’

Mona tried to tell me
To stay away from the train line
She said that all the railway men
Just drink up your blood like wine
(Bob Dylan: Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again)

The following lyrics are by a country bluesman:

I'm gonna buy me a pony
Can pace, fox-trot, and run
Lord, when you see me coming, pretty mama
I be on Highway Sixty-one
(Fred McDowell: Highway 61 Blues)

End rhymes ~ ‘run’/’one’

Beneath, the rhyme gets twisted around to ~ 'pace'/'face':

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

Not twisted much the rhyme in the lines below ~ ‘run’/’one’/’done’:

God say, "You can do what you want, Abe, but
The next time you see me coming, you better run"
Well, Abe said, "Where do you want this killing done?"
God said, "Out on Highway Sixty-one"
(Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited)

And so it goes:

I've got the key the highway
Yes, I feel I'm bound to go
I'm gonna leave here running
Because walking is most too slow
(Bill Broonzy: Key To The Highway ~ Segar/Broonzy)

The end rhyme ~ 'go'/'slow'

Follows is the rhyme twist ~’go’/’know’

Well,  Georgia Sam, he had a bloody nose
Welfare department, they wouldn't give him no clothes
He asked poor Howard, "Where can I go?"
Howard said, "There's only one place I know"
(Bob Dylan: Highway 61 Revisited)

Above there’s also the end rhyme ~ ‘nose’/clothes’; beneath ~ ‘goes’/’clothes’- penned by a
“dirty blues” singer:

He gets up every morning, and before he goes
Say he don't want me to put my head out of my front door
You know he's booging me, yes he's booging me
And I'm getting sick and tired the way he's booging me
He won't buy me no shoes, he won't buy me no clothes
(Lucille Bogan: My Man Is Boogan Me)

The same end rhyme ~’nose’/’clothes’ – is repeated in the satirical song below:

Then my neighbour, he blew his nose
Just as Papa yelled outside
"Mama wants you to come back in the house, and bring them clothes"
(Bob Dylan: Clothes Line Saga)

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

By Tony Attwood

Since starting this series on the songs Bob has played only once, I have found that one of the sites I was using in finding these songs is, although very helpful indeed, not 100% accurate in terms of listing each performance, and so as I have already noted, I have thus far included at least one song that was performed more than once.   Apologies for that.

But what has happened is that I have started to find some terrific live performances of Bob of songs we don’t normally hear him perform (and often ones that I didn’t know), and then I find I have to cut it from this file, because he has played it twice.  Which is a drag.

And since the notion of “once only” was just a device anyway, I am changing this to Bob’s “rarities” file.  Mostly once-only performances but sometimes more than once, as you will see with one of these selections…

So, having put my heart and soul on the line (although not literally), here’s Bob and the band playing Money Honey which I think was performed just the once at Barton Hall, Cornell University, Ithaca NY on November 15 1999.

Money Honey

Written by Jesse Stone, it was recorded on 9 August 1953 and released the following month,  by Clyde McPhatter and the Drifters – this being the first recording for the Drifters.    McPhatter had worked with Billy Ward and the Dominoes, and “Money Honey” became an instant hit.

Rolling Stone has it as number 252 in its 500 greatest songs of all time.  It is said to have sold over two million copies across the next 15 years.

It is a dead simple tale of a man running out of cash and turning to his lady friend for help.    Here’s the original

More and more

This Savoy Hotel recording from 1965 got me interested in Dylan and this song

and then Bob performed it again with Van Morrison in New York on 16 January 1998… less successfully I think, but each to his own…

“More and More” was written by Merle Kilgore and recorded by Webb Pierce in 1954.  The song went to the top of the country charts to become the biggest hit Pierce ever had as it also moved into the pop music charts.

Just one more for today:

Ragtime Annie

https://youtu.be/xdK_4Xf1vyU

This was performed at the Metro, Chicago, IL, on 14 December 1997.

There are thousands of recordings of this song around, I’ve just chosen one that I particularly like

Also known as Raggedy Ann – this is a reel – which is to say a type of folk dance that originated in Scotland and came to America.  In Scottish country dancing, the reel is one of the four traditional dances which exists alongside the jig, waltz and the strathspey.  The reel is also found in Irish country dance music.

However it could well be that this reel didn’t come across the Atlantic as the first documentation of it comes from Texas, performed by Eck Robertson and Henry C. Gilliland in 1923.   Others quickly picked it up and it found its way into the Library of Congress collection.

However as with all these songs the source is also claimed by others, including John Johnson of West Virginia.   It is still very much a piece that one will hear where fiddlers play.

More anon…

Dylan’s once only file: the concert.   Aaron has created a Youtube file of the songs Bob has played once only and which we have reviewed.

Here are the individual sessions…

• 12 Gates, One morning, Viola Lee
• Boom Boom Mancini and Farewell to Gold
• Bob Dylan’s once only file: B-Thang, Blue Bonnet Girl and Blue Monday
• Dylan’s once only file: I defy you not to play this song twice. Or more.
• Dylan’s once only file: You’re too late and the Old Rock n Roller
• Dylan’s Once only file “1952 Vincent Black Lightning” “Blue Moon” “Weeping Willow”
• Dylan’s “Once Only” File: 10,000 men and 20/20 Vision
• Elvis, Tom, Shadows and one by mistake

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

Research by Aaron Galbraith; silly comments by Tony Attwood

If you enjoy this piece you might also enjoy An emotionally tight connection in the night

Prelude: If you’ve not come across articles by Aaron and myself before, I should explain.  We live on separate continents, we’ve never met and we’ve never even talked on the phone.  Aaron does the research, and gives some basic guidelines.  I never know what’s coming up and I try to write comments as the song plays.   And when I am trying to comment on a video, that is quite hard.

Tony

———

Aaron: For this article I thought we could leap forward to look at a few videos from the mid to late 2000s. Don’t worry we’ll go back in future entries in this series and review the other 80s and 90s videos.

 “When The Deal Goes Down” from 2006.

Judging by the videos we’ve looked at in the first article, would it be too cruel to say that in this instance they hit upon the magic formula for making a Dylan video. That is hire a great director, get Scarlett Johansson to star in it and keep Bob as far away as possible!

This was director by Bennett Miller. He directed movies such as Moneyball, Capote and Foxcatcher and has been Oscar nominated twice.

In the video Scarlett Johansson stars in a series of 50s era home movies, depicting fun scenes, scenes of melancholy and just everyday life in general. There are several nice touches, a glimpse of a Woody Guthrie book here, a Buddy Holly album cover there. I really love this video, for me it brings to life lines in the song such as :

“More frailer than the flowers, these precious hours”
“I heard the deafening noise, I felt transient joys”

A wonderful piece of work.

Tony: I really do know very little about film, so there’s no need to read my commentary, and most certainly no need to take it seriously.  I’m a writer and was a musician and those are the arts I understand.  Film – I enjoy watching, but I’m not a critic, so this is tough…

Here this doesn’t work for me because Bob is singing a lilting lullaby while the movie is jogs around and often goes at speed.   If anyone else feels this too, I’d like to know, because I’m seriously thinking of backing out of this double feature and letting Aaron (who of course selects the films as he selects the music in our other series) write the whole thing.

The problem is the video doesn’t hold my attention, whereas the music does.  I want to hear the lyrics and I am engaged by the gentle lilt of the song.  This is a distraction, and this column ain’t going very well is it?

Dreamin of you

Aaron:  Moving on to the next piece we have “Dreamin’ Of You” from 2008. An interesting video for this previously unreleased track from the Time Out Of Mind sessions, first released on Tell Tale Signs.

It stars Harry Dean Stanton as a Bob Dylan Bootlegger. The video follows his life as he travels from town to town, and gig to gig recording the shows and then compiling them into Dylan Bootleg CDs and DVDs to sell. It seems a pretty solitary life and seems to be bringing no joy to the man. In fact he looks down right miserable.

Again, I think this is a great piece of work and top marks all round for everyone involved! I was unable to find the name of the director anywhere but still kudos to him or her!

Tony:  Oh thank goodness.  This one I get and I like it.  And I disagree Aaron.  I think he does get into Bob’s music.  He lives a solitary life, but this music is all he can relate to.  Some people just can’t do social interaction – that’s this fellow’s problem.  But at least this way he can survive and admire from afar.

The light in this place is really bad
Like being at the bottom of a stream
Any minute now
I’m expecting to wake up from a dream

That verse above from the start of the song is where the guy is… in this strange dream world, where in a tiny way he can touch Bob and feel part of his greatness.

Means so much, the softest touch
By the grave of some child, who neither wept or smiled
I pondered my faith in the rain
I’ve been dreamin’ of you, that’s all I do
And it’s driving me insane

Just listening to the music as he copies it, he finds his connection with Dylan.  What really works is that as I listened I could imagine this being the music written to the video, as much as it is the other way round.

Maybe they’ll get me, maybe they won’t
But whatever it won’t be tonight
I wish your hand was in mine right now
We could go where the moon is white

He doesn’t want to be alone, he doesn’t want to be this outcast, but it is all he has.  There is nothing else.

And if a final confirmation was wanted just watch the ending.  I believe in the song, I believe in the film.  It works.

Maybe you were here and maybe you weren’t
Maybe you touched somebody and got burnt
The silent sun has got me on the run
Burning a hole in my brain
I’m dreamin’ of you, that’s all I do
But it’s driving me insane

“Beyond Here Lies Nothin’”.

Aaron: This one was directed by Nash Edgerton who is primarily a stuntman/stunt coordinator for many big budget movies (he was Ewan McGregor’s double in the Star Wars movies) but he also directed four videos for Dylan, so we’ll see more of his work in a future article in this series.

If you’re finding it hard to find any meaning within the video as it relates to the song then that might come down to how much access the director had to the track prior to filming the promo. Edgerton said of his approach by Dylan’s team to making the video “usually, you get sent a song and you listen to it a bunch and then you write a treatment. But because it was Dylan, and piracy and all that, I only got to hear the song once over the phone”.

Maybe Dylan and his people were concerned the guy from the “Dreamin Of You” video might get a hold of the song!

For me, it works as a short film. I love the way he introduces sound elements from the film to the soundtrack, keys jangling, doors closing, punches landing and a head being smashed into a wall! There is a moment when she slams the car door and it seems to fit perfectly in time with the music.

Maybe this video doesn’t provide any deep insight to the song, which is understandable in the circumstances but for me that’s ok in this instance. As it was for Dylan and his management team also as they invited the director back to make 3 further videos, so he must have done something right!

Tony:  Again a big yes from me.  The horror of the man who needs the woman so much that he has to restrict her to his apartment.  And all the way through to that ending.  Yes this works for me.  They can’t live together they can’t live without each other.  Beyond here lies nothing.  Absolutely.

So what am I concluding?  That somehow the beat and the rhythm of the music has to fit with the beat and the rhythm of the video.  Oh yes, and I like stories, rather than just a set of scenes.

OK, I’m not resigning.  Let’s give it another shot.

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

by Jochen Markhorst

• Highway 61 Revisited (1965) part I: Look out kid
• Highway 61 Revisited (1965) part II: On a desert island

1          Captain Arab & Pirate Jenny

Well Mack the Finger said to Louie the King
I got forty red white and blue shoestrings
And a thousand telephones that don’t ring
Do you know where I can get rid of these things
And Louie the King said let me think for a minute son
And he said yes I think it can be easily done
Just take everything down to Highway 61

Debatable, but “your temperature’s too hot for taming” from “Spanish Harlem Incident” (1964) is perhaps the first: catachresis, the “wrong use”, the unknown, renewing combination of incompatible words, which nevertheless seem familiar, seem to have an old-fashioned power like proverbs or clichés. The poet has recently discovered the potential of abusio (as catachresis is also called). In “Farewell, Angelina” and especially in her twin sister “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (seasick sailors, empty-handed painter and the saints are coming through, for example), in “Mr. Tambourine Man”, continuing it on Blonde On Blonde and in the Basement songs.

A first definition of this specific language error goes all the way back to Alexander Pope (1688-1744, the poet to whom we owe fools rush in where angels fear to tread), but in the twentieth century it is elevated to a figure of speech, to a literary artifice by Dadaists, Beat Poets and Jacques Derrida.

It is a stylistic feature that derives from nearby association – grist to the mill of a stream-of-consciousness poet like Dylan in these mid-sixties. Apart from metaphors and character descriptions, he occasionally uses it for naming too: Captain Arab in “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream” is a first (the nearby association being, obviously, Moby Dick’s Captain Ahab), on this album a Saint Annie comes along, and in the Basement Dylan juggles with half-familiar names like Tiny Montgomery and Quinn the Eskimo. All too often the bard does not play with names, though – it easily degenerates into silly puns, after all.

Still, in “Highway 61 Revisited” he succumbs again.

God and Abraham in the first verse, two old song-characters in the second verse, and in the third verse the beat poet leaves the ground again: both protagonists in this verse are catachreses, recognizable names, though fictional, only through nearby association.

“Mack the Finger” is a rather witty trivialisation of Mack The Knife, the English name of one of Brecht’s most famous protagonists, Mackie Messer from the Dreigroschenoper (The Threepenny Opera, 1928). Brecht has left more footprints in Dylan’s work in previous years, which should be traced back to his girlfriend Suze Rotolo. Suze works behind the scenes in the Theatre De Lys on Christopher Street, and sometimes invites her boyfriend to drop in. In her memoirs (A Freewheelin’ Time, 2008) she talks about the explosive impact on Dylan of visiting Brecht on Brecht, a kind of best of compilation of Brecht songs, poems and theatre fragments (George Tabori, 1962). Dylan’s autobiography Chronicles confirms the event and its impact, and elaborates on the song “Pirate Jenny”,

“… a wild song. Big medicine in the lyrics. Heavy action spread out. Each phrase comes at you from a ten-foot drop, scuttles across the road and then another one comes like a punch on the chin.”

And he concludes the long hymn of praise to the song with the observation that it has been a turning point; from now on he writes totally influenced by “Pirate Jenny”.

In the same Brecht On Brecht, at the very beginning of the First Act and again as a finale, that famous murder ballad “Mack The Knife” comes along, but of course Dylan is already familiar with that particular song – Ella Fitzgerald has just received a Grammy Award for her recording, and in ’59 Bobby Darin scored a huge hit with it.

2          Louie, Louie

The abusio “Mack The Finger” gets an equally half-familiar opponent in Dylan’s song: Louie The King. Some commentators try to draw a line to the French royal family from there, but that seems a bit too far-fetched. Mack The Knife, Brecht, Ella Fitzgerald, Bobby Darin… a musical colleague is more likely. Another faction of analysts therefore jumps to King Louie from Jungle Book, unforgettable thanks to Louis Prima’s brilliant performance in one of the film highlights “I Wanna Be Like You”.

It seems obvious, indeed. King Louie, Louis Prima, and a first and perhaps even better candidate for the role was Louis Armstrong (eventually Disney didn’t dare to give a black artist the role of a monkey). But Dylan most certainly is not inspired by it; Jungle Book is a 1967 film, released two years after Highway 61. It is true that the film is based on Kipling’s book from 1894, but there is no King Louie in the book, or any monkey king at all, for that matter – the swinging orangutan really is a Disney concoction. Later Highway 61-listeners may, naturally, find enlightenment in the link, but in 1965, when writing song, the associative leap from Louie the King to King Louie is impossible.

No, the same Brecht song is nearer. The last four strophes list the victims of Macheath, nicknamed Mack the Knife, and the first name mentioned is Louie:

From a tugboat by the river
A cement bag's dropping down;
The cement's just for the weight, dear.
Bet you Mackie's back in town

Louie Miller disappeared, dear
After drawing out his cash;
And Macheath spends like a sailor.
Did our boy do something rash?

The song poet Dylan slaloms in the third verse of Highway 61 around the mercury ing-sound (Finger – strings – ring – things – King – think – think – everything), which is a more probable motive for renaming Louie Miller to Louie the King.
“It’s the sound – words don’t interfere with it. They… they… punctuate it,” as Dylan later tries to explain to journalist Ron Rosenbaum (Playboy interview 1977).

3          Brother Bill

The plot of this stanza seems to draw more from absurdist theatre than from a Brecht song. For some unfathomable reasons, Mack seems to be stuck with a handful of shoelaces and a cartload of defective telephones. Equally unclear is why he – somewhat panicky – would need Louie’s advice and directions to dump the entire package somewhere.

Sound and association have probably been the leading inspirators. Shoestring because he intuitively searches for an “ing-sound”, after finger and king, and through the expression shoestring operator the jumpy mind comes out at telephones ring. Perhaps. True, “shoestring operator” is a quite archaic term, but we know that Dylan is a William Burroughs fan, these days – according to Iggy Pop the “Brother Bill” in “Tombstone Blues” – and there are enough traces on the album to suggest that Burroughs’ The Soft Machine (1961) is on Dylan’s bedside table:

“Pantless corpses hang from telephone poles along the road to Monterrey – Death rows the boy like sleeping marble down the Grand Canal out into a vast lagoon of souvenir post cards and bronze baby shoes – “

…for example, which is only a small step towards the opening of “Desolation Row”. And Dylan has already put a mental dog-ear at shoestring operator before this fragment (Chapter 4, “Trak Trak Trak”: “Others are shoestring operators out of broom closets and dark rooms of the Mugging Department”).

Anyway, it opens another gate for the industrious Dylan interpreters. The first takes (to be heard on The Cutting Edge, 2015) are still somewhat less absurd; “I got a thousand red white blue shoestrings / and a bunch of telephones that don’t ring”, but that cannot really influence the tenor of meaning seeking Dylan exegetes.

“Telephones that don’t ring”, whether a bunch or thousand, is still a relatively unambiguous metaphor. Faulty communication, loneliness, dependency on technology… pick your choice.

The shoestrings are less unambiguous. Dylan starts the recording day, 2 August 1965, with a thousand shoestrings, but loses quite a few along the way; at the last take (the ninth recording, which will end up on the album) he has already lost 960, as there are only forty left. Which does not affect interpretation all that much, obviously. Red white blue is, of course, a well-known, loaded word combination, but shoestrings are completely unusual accessories in the art of song, nor bearers of meaning in poetry at all – let alone tricolour shoelaces. Alright, a B-side of a recent Jimmy Reed single (“I’m Going Upside Your Head”, 1964) is called “The Devil’s Shoestring”, but that is an instrumental number. And occasionally the word shoe-string appears in a Kipling poem, but there are not many more laces to be found in Dylan’s record cabinet and bookcase. Apart from Burroughs, that is.

No, looking for hidden meaning behind forty red, white and blue shoestrings is a dead end highway.

“It’s the sound…” though this time, the words do interfere.

To be continued. Next up: Highway 61 Revisited – part IV

 ———

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

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

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

By Peter McQuitty

Joni Mitchell’s comments about Bob Dylan’s “plagiarism” have surfaced again in recent Untold Dylan postings. Mitchell told the LA Times in 2010  that Dylan “is not authentic at all. He’s a plagiarist, and his name and voice are fake. Everything about Bob is a deception.” Mitchell’s comments are unfortunate but useful because they shine a light on how Dylan’s art works.

Mitchell’s comments come from a Romantic creative ethos where individual authenticity and personal experience are at the heart of artistic expression. Confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton are kindred spirits. This ethos drives Mitchell’s own art and Blue, Hejira, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter, for example, are sophisticated albums which broke new ground in popular music, not least because they focused directly on women’s experience. What Mitchell refers to as Dylan’s “plagiarism” is not really plagiarism at all, just the product of a different creative culture which she chooses not to acknowledge.

There is plenty of “me” in Dylan’s work and his songs obviously draw on personal experience.  However, Dylan is a post-modernist before he’s a Romantic and his songs are as much about the art that goes into making them as they are about his own personal experience. Everybody now knows that Dylan’s sources are extraordinarily diverse – folk, blues, rock and country music, Classical and Biblical literature, American literature, and more.  And that he draws very freely from them. His achievement is to take from so many different sources and shape that material into his own art. It is this breadth, depth, and facility that Leonard Cohen was referring to when, in Musician (1988), he described Dylan as the Picasso of modern music.

Dylan has never tried to hide his sources and in this way he draws attention to the processes involved in his artistic production. Contemporary folk practitioners were fully aware of Lord Randall, Chimes of Trinity, and The Patriot’s Game and even Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons When I’m Gone? It is the differences between these sources and the songs that Dylan made from them that is the point of his art, like the differences between the songs on the three overtly Christian albums and the Biblical texts from which the lyrics are largely lifted.

Over time, Dylan’s references – Homer, Ovid, Juvenal, Timrod etc – become more obscure but only for those not familiar with the sources.  The references – which provide depth, resonance and cultural perspective to the songs – are there to be enjoyed by those who have the cultural knowledge and to be discovered by those who do not. That “useless and pointless knowledge” sneered at in Tombstone Blues turns out to have a purpose after all. Part of Dylan’s artistic mission as he ages is, as he says (quoting Ovid) in Rollin’ and Tumblin’, “conjuring up all these long dead souls from their crumblin’ tombs.”  Or selected bits and pieces from the long dead, as he suggests on My Own Version of You.

T.S. Eliot wrote in Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919) that great works do not come from the artist’s personal feelings and emotions alone, but from the artistic process whereby the artist synthesises personal experience with impersonal external elements. The great poet “will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest” and then “weld(s) his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.” This is Dylan. Eliot writes about “the intensity of fusion” which can occur between individual experience and this external material.

This is also Dylan.  Isis and Changing of the Guards are unusual in that the fusion between personal experience and, in these cases, ancient mythology is extremely intense and almost total.  However, this fusion occurs in various forms throughout Dylan’s work. For me, the whining police siren that introduces the very colloquial confrontation between God and Abraham on Highway 61, is just one powerful example. Eliot’s theory of art turns out to be an accurate description of Dylan’s approach to making art much later in the century.

Joni Mitchell, still searching for personal authenticity, claims that Dylan’s voice is “fake”. In a 2013 interview, she said that “He’s invented a character to deliver his songs … it’s a mask of sorts.” Well, Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue provoked a lot of discussion about masks so she was onto something there.

Dylan’s work has never been about his own personal authenticity, his own voice. He has invented different masks for a number of different characters over the course of his career. And they all have different voices, each reflecting the particular issues that he is exploring at the time.

We know the main voices: the harsh voice of the downtrodden common man who is only a pawn in the games played by the powerful; the alienated but super-cool individualist who knows how society works and who rejects it; the mellow family man who really enjoys pies and other country matters; the illiberal born-again Christian ranting from the stage that Jesus can transform all human problems in an instant; and, in more recent years, often the voice of regret and bitterness.

For me, these are often more than just different masks and voices. It is as though Dylan, at different stages of his career, has adopted and completely inhabited different personas. At his strongest, Dylan was not so much a singer as a Brando-style method actor, passionately inhabiting his various roles and living out all the different dimensions within them. Ronnie Hawkins, quoted in Michael Gray’s The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, says: “But Bob is like a – what’s the word? – a schizophreniac . . .  I’m sure he’s not like that but he has different personalities for different things”. Hawkins isn’t the only person to have made that observation. This is the difference between Dylan performing his songs and others singing them. Joan Baez might make a sweeter sound but, for me, she drains the songs of personality and impact.

Dylan may have been a consummate actor, but he has always been fully conscious of the different roles and voices that he is manipulating. He makes a joke at the expense of the authentic voice in his version of The Boxer on Self Portrait where he performs a duet with himself by double tracking two of his different voices.

Joni Mitchell’s comments are sour and a bit sad. However, they can take us away from spurious notions of authenticity and point us to a greater appreciation of the multitudes contained within Dylan’s art.

Peter McQuitty.

by Larry Fyffe

Singer/musician Bob Dylan writes the following humourous, albeit rather dark, song lyrics:

What I want to know, Mr. Football Man, is
What do you do about Willie Mays and Yul Brynner
Charles De Gaulle and Robert Louis Stevenson?
(Bob Dylan: I Shall Be Free)

But he records:

What I want to know, Mr. Football Man, is
What do you do about Willie Mays
Martin Luther King, Olatunji?

(Bob Dylan: I Shall Be Free)

Why the lyrics are changed is not known. Perhaps the western movie that Brynner acts in a bit earlier ends on a slightly too pessimistic note. Yul Brynner stars in the film “The Magnificent Seven” in which seven hired gunslingers protect farmers from a bunch of marauding bandits; in the gun battle that follows, the bandits are either killed or flee; all but three of the Magnificent Seven die:

At the end of the movie, Brynner says, in a rather unRomantic tone:

“We lost….we’ll always lose”.

Not happily Romantic is the following poem; the French writer thereof seeks refuge in the irony-filled poem from the boring routine of life, from love lost, and from thoughts of death:

Ah, then it is no longer autumn
Or exile, but the sweetness
Of legends, once more the age of gold
Legends about Antigones

A sweetness that makes me wonder

"Now when did that take place?"

(Jules Laforgue: Legends ~ translated)

In the mythological legend ‘Seven Against Thebes”, Antigone faces death that is decreed by the new king; she takes it on herself to bury her brother who leads an army with six other chieftains against the Greek city in a failed attempt to gain the throne from his younger brother; both the male siblings die when they fight one another – the deceased king is given a decent burial; all but one of the invading chieftains are killed; they are left on the battlefield to rot.

Says Antigone (in ancient play based on the legend):

Behold me, what I suffer
Because I have upheld that which is high

On this dark side of the human condition dwell many of the narrators in Bob Dylan’s song lyrics:

I've stepped in the middle of seven sad forests ....
And it's a hard, and it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard
It's a hard rain's a- gonna fall
(Bob Dylan: A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall)

In the mythology of moon-goddess Diana and the sun-god Apollo, the cypress tree be a symbol of death and the underworld:

The priest wore black on the seventh day
And sat stone-faced while the building burned
I waited for you on the running boards
Near the cypress trees, while the spring turned
Slowly into autumn

(Bob Dylan: Idiot Wind)

The sorrowful sentiments of Jules Laforgue’s symbolic poetry again expressed in the song lyrics below:

Seven days, seven more days, she'll be coming
I'll be waiting at the station for her to arrive
Seven more days, all I gotta do is survive
She been gone ever since I been a child
Ever since I seen her smile, I ain't forgotten her eyes
She had a face that could outshine the sky

(Bob Dylan: Seven Days)

And to cap it all off, there’s this tragic song:

These be seven curses on a judge so cruel
That one doctor cannot save him
That two eyes cannot see him
And that three healers cannot heal him
That four ears cannot hear him
That five walls cannot hide him
That six diggers cannot bury him
That seven deaths shall never kill him

(Bob Dylan: Seven Curses)

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

by Tony Attwood

In my article “Bob Dylan and the Blues: leaving town in all directions at once” I put forward the opinion that Bob “knew from the very start that he could take any form and make a success out of it.   Which is basically what he did from here on in.”

That revelation for me started with two pieces: first the 1962 work of utter genius Ballad for a friend in which Bob took the blues and turned it into something utterly extraordinary and amazing and different.  Quite why this song was then left behind I have no idea.  How could someone so young write something so brilliant, and then leave it?

The second thought along these lines came with “Times they are a-changin’,” when it suddenly struck me that this was not a protest song at all, even though most people called it that.  The lyrics say very simply that the world changes, and there is nothing we can do to hold those changes back.

As such it is the antithesis to a protest song.  Encyclopedia.com defines the phrase “protest song” as a “Term which gained currency (first in USA) in 1960s for song which voiced feelings of protest about some social or political injustice, real or imagined, or about some int. event which aroused strong emotions, e.g. America’s part in the Vietnam war. A famous example is ‘We shall overcome’.”

Yet Bob Dylan was of course a protest singer-songwriter sometimes because of songs like “Masters of War,” but not it seems in his most famous “protest” song of all!

I made that comment about Dylan’s very early compositions as I was starting to work out how I could write a series about the lyrical themes within Bob’s music.  Having puzzled over it for quite a while I decided that the only thing I could do was try and write a series about Bob’s music year by year and see if, in doing that, I could draw any conclusions.  You may have noticed these pieces in passing – we are now right up to the most recently works – where are reviewed in this way, below.

Thus I started writing this little series in which I have tried to give a two or three word explanation for the subject matter of each and every song Bob Dylan has written, but it took me a while to get the hang of what I was trying to do – which is why, having now made some sort of attempt to bring the series up to date I am going to have to go back and re-work some of those early articles.

Although by 1964 I think I’d got the prime idea of what I was trying to do and for that year – and thereafter – came up with a list of songs and the short explanations of what they were

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

and so on.

And it did make a certain amount of sense as some key themes kept coming up over and over again.  You’ll see in the list above “lost love” comes up three times.  That’s how it goes throughout most of Dylan’s career – certain subjects like “love” and “lost love” keep coming up.

Having realised this I gradually made the subject headings tighter, and discovered that the subject matter in Dylan’s songs was very different from that which I had anticipated.  The protest songs and political or social commentary were among the most famous, but in terms of quantity, not nearly as commonplace as Dylan’s songs about love, lost love and moving on.

Through some 50 episodes I have been exploring ways of classifying Dylan’s choice of subject matter – and above all I have realised how Bob’s chosen themes have changed year by year.  Yes of course I knew that, because each album  was different from the last, but just how much Bob could swerve around in terms of content was not clear to me before that.

But within all this there has been another thought.   Most writers (I am tempted to say almost all writers) have chosen to comment on Bob’s songs individually, without particularly referencing one song back to earlier songs, or seeing it as a preparation for later songs.   As a result, themes tend not to emerge.  Albums are of course considered together, but I’ve not seen years as a whole taken together very often.  Sometimes but not much.

Indeed it is remarkable that in his 1200 pages of recording Bob’s songs Heylin spends so little time looking for consistent themes.  It is as if each song exists on its own – a standalone with no point of reference in front of it or behind it – which to me is ludicrous.

I really don’t think that is the way to consider, or indeed comprehend Bob’s songwriting.  We do need (in my view) to consider how he moved around through the themes, and nowhere more so than in considering “Rough and Rowdy Ways” – obviously the final chapter (at least for now) in my quest.

And not just the final chapter, but the most fiendish.

But let us start at the beginning, for this section also has to include one song written in the year before “Rough and Rowdy”….

• Gone but not forgotten. (Lost love)

That wasn’t too hard.  But after that there is no escaping Rough and Rowdy Ways.   And nothing I have worked on in the previous 50 articles has given me a grid or set of guidelines through which I can work.

So what do I have?  How about this….

• Murder Most Foul (A thousand influences on my lifetime)
• I Contain Multitudes (I am influenced by everything around me)
  
• False Prophet (I am the product of my past, not a vision of the future)
• My own version of you (I see the world and mix it all up)
• I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you (I am the sum of my past)
• Black Rider (Famine has been with us so long, in all aspects of life)
• Goodbye Jimmy Reed (All the past influences us but is then is left behind)
• Mother of Muses (Reflections upon receiving the Nobel Prize medal)
• Crossing the Rubicon (I have at times crossed the line)
• Key West (Reflections on the lives I’ve lived and might have lived)

That is the best I can do at this moment.  I am sure you’ll disagree.

Of course the argument may well be that these songs are far too diverse and complex to be treated in this way, reduced to just a few words, and no benefit comes from trying to reduce such complex works to a few lines.  It is a bit like reducing War and Peace to one phrase [The lives of three characters as Napoleon invades Russia] – but yes it can be done and I have found it informative.

Each short statement about a song is, of itself, not especially helpful, but… when one has such a list it helps one look at the songs in a broader context.

And ultimately that is what I have been struggling towards: seeing Dylan’s work not as a set of isolated songs, and not as works of literature to be explored in terms of influences and borrowed lines, but as the work of a songwriter with the ability to write songs covering numerous musical themes, moving through the years responding to the world around him, his own emotions, the music he loves, reflections on his past, thoughts of people he has known…

It may sound ludicrously pretentious to say that this is a way of looking at Dylan that others have not tried before, for I am sure others have worked along these lines – at least not through Dylan’s whole career.  But even if no one else has found it interesting, it has given me insights that I did not have before.

Now as I think of returning to the start of the series in order to bring the knowledge I gained in later episodes to the earlier ones, and not least now knowing what the end is going to look like, I think I might be able to add a few further insights.

What I can say is that I am absolutely convinced that the key to grasping the essence of Bob Dylan’s songs is his commentary about not knowing where the phrases that he uses in his songs come from.  That I am sure is the truth and also the key to Dylan’s songwriting.  The phrases appear in his head, they meld together in a song, and from there a meaning of sorts may emerge or may not.

The work of Jochen in showing us all the relationships between Bob’s phraseology and the musical, film and literary works of others is incredibly helpful and important not just in this study but in all studies of Bob’s writing, and I’ve been enormously aided by that.  But what I am trying to do is see how all these inputs flow across  the songs, to reflect what was in Bob’s mind as he moved through the years.

In a way this is similar to what Mike Johnson is doing here in musical terms, as he explores the way Bob has performed on the Never Ending Tour.  I guess the ultimate understanding of the evolution of Bob Dylan’s thinking will incorporate Jochen’s knowledge of the lyrics, Mike’s reporting of how Dylan’s music evolved on the NET, and then to a degree, what I am trying to add in terms of the themes and subjects that occupied Bob’s thoughts each year in the music that he composed.  I feel the need to go through my contribution again to make it even partially worthy of having this input alongside the work of my friends on this site.

If this all reads as a tedious and indeed pompous  load of tripe, don’t worry – the rest of the gang will (I hope) continue to be writing about Dylan in their own way.  There’s no obligation to read everything, or indeed anything.  Just as with an album, you don’t have to listen to every track.  You don’t have to buy the album.

So that’s it.  I have done what I set out to do – given every Dylan song as simple a meaning as possible concerning its lyrics.  Now I am going to try and turn that into a coherent journey, which I’ve not always been able to do through the individual articles.  So now the next step is to return to those early songs from the late 50s and early 60s, knowing now about how things developed year on year.

(PS – I’ll keep calling the articles “The themes within Bob’s music” so you’ll be able to spot them and easily ignore them if you find this all too boring, or maybe even too esoteric.  The great thing is we have well over 1800 articles here, and my series represents only 4% of the total.  There is plenty more to distract your mind.)

The series from start to end

Bob Dylan’s songs: the themes

You might also enjoy, from this series:

• Bob Dylan: side man. Farina, von Schmidt and Bob
• Dylan with Belafonte, Hester and Big Joe Williams

By Aaron Galbraith

For this episode in  the series in which we look at Dylan supporting other artists, we’ll take a look at Dylan’s work on Barry Goldberg’s self titled album from 1974.

Barry Goldberg was part of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and indeed played keyboards for Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 when he first went “electric”. Besides his own solo work he has played on a number of classic albums including those by the Flying Burrito Brothers, Leonard Cohen and The Ramones. Nowadays he is a member of Stephen Stills’ excellent new band The Rides.

Now onto this album, which is, in my opinion, the one “Dylan As Session Man” that every Dylan fan should own. Now that’s not because it has Dylan’s best performance (for my money that would be Carolyn Hester’s Come Back Baby) or indeed the best song (maybe Sammy’s Song by David Bromberg). No, the reason to own this one is because for the first and only time Dylan produced another artist’s album.

Dylan co-produced the entire album with Jerry Wexler and played some percussion and sang backing vocals on five tracks on the album. He worked closely with Goldberg on the vocal tracks and mixes. And then Wexler came in and made Goldberg redo several of his lead vocals and remixed the whole thing. So it would seem to me Dylan produced the album and then Wexler came in at the last minute and suggested they change some things, unnecessarily.

“Bob told me, ‘Leave the vocals just like they are, they’re fine. Don’t let anybody mess with them.’ They had a vibe to them,” Goldberg recalled.

But Wexler came in and told Goldberg they had to re-work the vocal tracks, and that’s where things went wrong. “It’s bothered me all these years,” Barry said. “Here I had this great opportunity to work with Bob, to have him produce me–which he never did for anybody, ever–and it just didn’t turn out right.”

Then in 2009, in preparation for the CD reissue, he was able to revisit the album and use Dylan’s original mixes and vocal tracks.

The original “Dylan” mixes are a revelation. How could they not be? What with those fine Muscle Shoals musicians, Goldberg himself along with Dylan’s excellent production.

Here are the five tracks with Dylan’s percussion and backing vocals :

Stormy Weather Cowboys

It’s Not The Spotlight – co-written by Gerry Goffin and later covered by Rod Stewart, Bobby Bland and Beth Orton amongst many others.

Silver Moon

Minstrel Show

Big City Woman

Jerry Wexler went on to produce Dylan’s Slow Train Coming album. In 1989, Barry Goldberg returned the favour to Bob and produced his version of “People Get Ready” for the movie Flashback.

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

• NET 1993 – Mr Guitar Man Steps into the Light: Part One – Tangled up in guitars
• There is an index to all the Never Ending Tour articles here.

———

By Mike Johnson (Kiwi poet)

You won't amount to much, the people all said
'Cause I didn't play guitar behind my head…’ (Goodbye Jimmy Reed)

In the previous post (1993, part 1, Tangled up in Guitars), we saw the emergence of Mr Guitar Man (Dylan on lead guitar), and something of a renaissance in Dylan’s voice. And we saw some long, epic performances of ‘I and I’, ‘God Knows’ and ‘Tangled up in Blue’. I’ll be following these development in this post.

Performing extended, epic versions of his songs is a feature of 1993. Often the last verse will come about half way through the performance, with the rest given over to harp and guitar breaks. In some ways this is backward looking, as the great age of rock guitar solos probably petered out in the 1970s. Endless blues solos became de rigueur for rock performances, and after a while they became boring as they really added nothing much to the songs, but rather became occasions for a lot of showing off.

By my reading of these songs however, Dylan is not showing off, and his baroque extensions usually add to the song in some way. In my Master Harpist series, I showed how Dylan uses that little instrument to up the emotional ante of the songs, to give them an emotional colouring – sudden moments of whimsicality or a piercing sadness. Dylan’s subversive guitar work may have a similar purpose, for it never allows a song to become just pretty or catchy. It often provides a disturbing undercurrent of dark sounds. We can never quite relax and just tap our feet with Mr Guitar Man keeping us on edge.

While we can still find some epic, extended versions fuelled by Mr Guitar Man right up until Dylan put the instrument down in 2002, after 1993 he was to rein in the songs. It is as if, in 1993, Dylan wanted to let his hair down and to allow himself and the band to rip loose. The evolution of the NET is towards more disciplined sounds, so I suggest we enjoy these free flowing epics while we can, even when things get a bit messy.

Take ‘If Not for You’. It’s a modest little love song, really. At least it started out that way. There’s a lovely, plaintive version on the ‘Alternative Self Portrait’, official bootleg. In this 1993 performance it gets pushed out to 13 minutes. He keeps the tempo slow, slower than the released versions, which brings out the anthemic property of the song. It’s not long before Mr Guitar Man begins to play around with the melody, but not in the fast, hard driving way we heard  in part 1. He doesn’t alter his punky sound, but shows how he can work it at a more gentle level.

If not for You

You could say pretty much the same thing about ‘Lay Lady Lay’. Part of what made that song a hit is its modesty and apparent simplicity. It’s a lot more like a three-minute pop song than a lot of Dylan songs. And quite seductive when Dylan sings it in his Johnny Cash era voice on Nashville Skyline (1969). The song became pretty raucous during the Rolling Thunder years with the band joining in on the vocals.

None of this, however can prepare us for this impassioned nine and half minutes. Gone are the modulated vocals of the original, this is a raw appeal for love, ripped from his throat. Not quite so seductive. As he sings, his Stratocaster keeps up a constant dark under-thread, but stays in the background.  He keeps it pretty minimal through some of the choruses as well, keeping the song dampened down. He finishes the verses in about four minutes, and the next five minutes is given over to Mr Guitar Man exploring some of the softer edges of his sound.

Lay Lady Lay

It’s hard to know just quite how to take this. This style of playing does not hark back to the endless blues solos of the 1970s. It’s not blues. It’s a lot more like jazz, where the tradition of the lead instruments taking long breaks survives. And it’s not necessarily pleasant listening; it’s not supposed to be.

‘She belongs to Me’ makes three of a kind here, although this song is not quite as modest as the other two. The original album version takes only 2.48 mins to make its statement. This 1993 performance runs to 8.30 mins. He slows the tempo right down, which adds to the time, but by 4.48 mins he’s finished the last verse and we are treated to another four minutes of nicely lazy instrumental. Lead guitarist John Jackson sounds very sweet here, but Dylan doesn’t. After all, it’s not a sweet song. There is a bitter pill.

She belongs to Me

At just under five minutes for the Blonde on Blonde album version, ‘Just like a Woman’ can hardly be described as a modest little number. And it’s neither simple nor a love song. I’ve said it’s a song about vulnerability in love. I’ll go further now and suggest that it is a song about wounding and being wounded; at least that’s the way it comes over in this 8.30 min version.

It’s a song better suited to epic treatment than the previous three, and Dylan is in fine vocal form. This would have to rank as one of Dylan’s finest performances of the song. It sounds to my ear as if he’s singing a full octave above the studio version, at least in parts, but it’s in a different key as well, so I can’t be sure.

Once again, the last verse is completed about half way through the performance, and we have another three and half minutes of Dylan and Santana working their way through several choruses. At about 6.15 mins Dylan quietens it all down for a while until his Stratocaster gets to work again, and we have another round hammering on the strings in the key of Dylan.

Just like a Woman.

Phew! It’s a bit too easy to say that Dylan is ruining these performances with his kind of atonal guitar playing, but I’m sure tempted to stop listening after the last magnificent verse.

‘I Believe in You’ is another song that lends itself to epic treatment, since it’s something of an epic expression of faith. I don’t think there’s any performance to match the Toronto 1980 show, but he does it full justice here, despite messing the words up a little at the end. This nearly nine minute version holds to the pattern we have seen in this post. In this case, the song finishes at about 5.30 mins, and in the guitar work that follows we get one of the clearest demonstrations of Dylan’s method. John Jackson plays high and melodic, cruising on those sweet chord changes, while Mr Guitar Man pecks away those same sweet chord changes from below, threatening to overwhelm them.

I believe in You

‘One More Cup of Coffee’ is another inherently epic song. None of us will be able to forget the soaring Rolling Thunder performances, when the song really had its day. Dylan’s 1993 voice is up to the challenge, and he soon works his way into a passionate rendition, raspy as it might be, but the lucid beauty of those 1975/6 performances cannot be repeated, at least not with Mr Guitar Man eating away at the melody line with his guttural tones.

Once more the last verse is sung by 4.30 mins, and we get three more minutes of guitar work. Hard-edged and trenchant, the Dylan/Santana combo manages to pull this one off, fully exploiting the grandeur and pathos of the original.

One More cup of coffee

An odd thing happened to me while listening to this substantial performance of ‘Just like Tom Thumb Blues’. I had been listening to some 1940s big band swing to take my mind off Dylan for a while, and for a moment, listening to Tom Thumb’s Blues, I got my signals crossed and I transposed the guitars to horns, saxes and trumpets, and I was suddenly back in the big band era. Dylan swings this junky’s lament. Try it for yourself when the full band cuts in around three minutes and again at six minutes. I can see Stan Kenton smiling and tapping his feet.

Dylan throws himself into the vocal while Mr Guitar Man and Santana do the swinging. Some great driving drum work too from Wilson Watson. This one just seems to fall together as they hit the groove.

Just like Tom Thumb blues

‘Under the Red Sky’ brings us back to quieter, more modest songs, in this case rather sly and laconic as Dylan songs go. It has a dry, doleful edge to it, but in this 7.30 min version the sweetness of the melodic line is nicely set up by Bucky Baxter’s gentle slide guitar. A vibrant vocal from Dylan. The last verse is over by 4.30 mins, and we get another couple of minutes of comparatively muted guitar work by Santana and Dylan, until the climax that is.

Under the red sky

So ends our survey of the epic, 1993 adventures of Mr Guitar Man. In later years he was to moderate his approach, and it is hard to know, when you boil it down, just what to make of it all. Is this genius or madness? Does Dylan really know what he is doing? Obviously that punky, key of Dylan sound is deliberate; there’s a strategy behind it, the question is, does it come off?

Your call.

Next post we’ll discover what happens when Mr Guitar Man picks up the acoustic guitar.

Kia Ora for now

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

Highway 61 Revisited (1965) part I: Look out kid

by Jochen Markhorst

1          Mozart is my man

In 2015 Keith Richards is promoted to castaway on BBC Radio 4 and is granted to present his eight Desert Island Discs in one of the world’s longest running and most popular radio shows. It’s a cast-iron, simple and brilliant concept: a guest has to choose which eight pieces of music he would take with him to a desert island, plus one object and one book. It leads to often frank and revealing conversations with usually interesting guests – and to useless but always entertaining statistics.

The show has been on since January ’42, so over twenty-five thousand pieces of music have been chosen by now.

Classical composers win on all fronts. The whole Top 10 consists of classical pieces (at the top “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth, and Beethoven is still three more times in the Top 10), the Top 3 of most requested artists is Mozart, Beethoven and Bach.

They are not in Richards’ Top 8. Keef does surprise, though, with Vivaldi’s “Spring” from the Four Seasons, with an equally surprising, sheer poetic argument:

“I was agonizing over this list, ’cause Mozart is my man, you know, basically. But then I found out, reading some of Mozart’s letters, that the only good word he had to say about any other composer in the world was Vivaldi. And then I tried to put this together with being on a desert island, and I’m thinking: desert island – no seasons. So when I came down here, I picked the Spring section of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. I think he’s a brilliant composer.”

…but otherwise there are few real surprises. Chuck Berry, Hank Williams, Etta James… songs and names that just as easily could have been chosen by a Paul McCartney or a Bob Dylan, for example. That certainly applies to the Rolling Stone’s finale: “Key To The Highway”, the classic that Richards wants to hear in the rendition by Little Walter.

 2          Key To Highway 61

“Key To The Highway” is an indestructible monument. Little Walter’s update from 1958 to a raw Chicago blues has become the standard, the exercise on the legendary LP Layla And Other Assorted Love Songs by Derek And The Dominos (1970), with Eric Clapton’s and Duane Allman’s brilliant guitar dialogue has elevated the song to the aristocracy, and the same Clapton has been convincing every new generation for half a century now – in concert, unplugged or as an accompanist, as in 2013 with Keith Richards at the Crossroads Guitar Festival, and with B. B. King on the occasional project Riding With The King (2000).

Dylan acknowledges the importance of the song too, and underlines that importance in his MusiCares-speech, 2015:

“Big Bill Broonzy had a song called “Key to the Highway.” I’ve got a key to the highway / I’m booked and I’m bound to go / Gonna leave here runnin’ because walking is most too slow. I sang that a lot. If you sing that a lot, you just might write…

Well Georgia Sam he had a bloody nose
Welfare Department they wouldn’t give him no clothes
He asked poor Howard where can I go
Howard said there’s only one place I know
Sam said tell me quick man I got to run
Ol’ Howard just pointed with his gun
And said that way down on Highway 61”

… the entire second verse of ‘Highway 61 Revisited’, the Georgia Sam stanza.

It is not that easy to follow, though. The other examples Dylan mentions to downplay his songwriting skills, or at least to put them into perspective, are clearer. From when you go down to Deep Ellum to when you’re down on Rue Morgue Avenue, the bridge from “Deep Ellum Blues” to “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is imaginable; John Henry said a man ain’t nothin’ but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down as inspiration for “Blowin’ In The Wind” can also be recognised, as can the sources Dylan mentions in this speech for “Boots Of Spanish Leather” and “The Times They Are A-Changin'”.

But “Key To The Highway” seems at first sight only to provide that one word highway plus a tense of the verb to run. Besides that, the song is just a traditional lament, a ten-a-penny blues dirge of a poor loser who, after a broken love affair, starts wandering again. Which in any case has little in common with Dylan’s song, and certainly not with this one verse, this Georgia Sam stanza which, after all, is quoted by Dylan to demonstrate how self-evident the line from “Key To The Highway” to “Highway 61 Revisited” is.

3          Georgia Sam Blues

Dylan’s text is hardly a run-of-the-mill lamentation. This verse, for example, is a sample of the best that Dylan’s song art has to offer in these years: a surrealistic tableau in which an alienating clash of archetypes from various artistic disciplines is painted – all in a rhythmic barrage bursting with linguistic delight. We’ve already heard a first run-up to the style on The Freewheelin’ 1963), in “Bob Dylan’s Blues” (The Lone Ranger and Tonto they are ridin’ down the line), the style that will climax on Blonde On Blonde (1966) and which Dylan will still be reaching for in 2020 (“I Contain Multitudes”).

Here Dylan is still quite close to home. Blind Willie McTell, the blues legend that is a thread in Dylan’s oeuvre anyway, gets a name-check through Georgia Sam, one of Blind Willie’s recording names. At least, that’s the “fact” that is stubbornly mentioned in every story about “Highway 61 Revisited” and is now even invariably mentioned in articles about McTell. The source of that statement, the statement that “Georgia Sam” is one of McTell’s “recording names”, can no longer be traced, but it has already been copied thousands of times, so many times in any case, that it now is regarded a music historical fact.

It is quite debatable. The Georgia-born William Samuel McTier indeed made recordings under a number of pseudonyms, between 1927 and 1950: not only as “Blind Willie McTell” but also as “Blind Sammie”; “Georgia Bill”; “Hot Shot Willie”; “Blind Willie”; “Barrelhouse Sammy” and “Willie Samuel McTell”. But never ever as Georgia Sam. Bizarrely enough, even on tribute sites, on which all McTell recordings and his recording names are collected, the fun fact that Dylan in his song name-checks McTell with his recording name “Georgia Sam”, is always served out. After which, usually on the very same page, the complete discography is listed – without a single Georgia Sam.

Now, the alleged reference is not too far-fetched, obviously. Both “Georgia” and “Sam” are two occurring names among all those pseudonyms, and Blind Willie did come from Georgia and was called Samuel. Nevertheless, the rock poet Dylan does not seem to refer to McTell, but simply, really, literally, to a real “Georgia Sam”: to the protagonist of the single “Georgia Sam Blues / Cool Daddy Blues” from one of the forgotten blues ladies of the early days, from Anna Lee Chisholm, 1924:

In a southern town far away,
There’s a man they call Georgia Sam
There were times I used to love him dear
But now he’s gone astray

Granted, quite obscure, but then again: Dylan’s encyclopaedic knowledge of obscure songs is proverbial. More fitting anyway, since Sam’s opponent in Dylan’s song, “poor Howard”, is a fictional character as well, also from an old song, from “Poor Howard”. Recorded by Lead Belly, and quite recently by Robert Plant, and in a harmless, boring, bloodless version by The Weavers in 1949, but Dylan’s baggage probably contains the black humour version by Eddy Arnold:

Poor Howard's dead and gone, left me here to sing his song
Poor Howard had a wife and she nagged him all his life
So he used his butcher knife---like I said he had a wife
Now poor Howard's dead and gone...

4          A sweetheart like you with a bloody nose

So, the protagonists of this second strophe from “Highway 61 Revisited” are probably inspired by two song characters, one of whom has a nosebleed, wardrobe problems and an urge to flee, and the other only serves as a signpost. Still, he points the way with his gun, which does add some colour. Context is completely lacking, like with “All Along The Watchtower” for example, thus throwing the doors wide open to every conceivable interpretation. For the poet himself, however, as so often, the sound of the words has undoubtedly been decisive.

It does have impact anyhow. A bloody nose has never been an element of description in song art. Sure, black eyes, broken noses, or just plain “blood” often enough, obviously, but a bloody nose is simply a bit too childish, too corny. Until now, that is. Just like Dylan has made the word “clown” salonfähig, artistically acceptable (Lennon: “I objected to the word clown, because that was always artsy-fartsy, but Dylan had used it so I thought it was all right”), after  “Highway 61 Revisited” bloody nose has become acceptable. Elton John (“Made In England”, 1995), Billie Eilish (“Bad Guy”, 2019), Kings Of Leon, Bon Iver, The Who (“Doctor Jimmy”, 1973), John Mellencamp… Dylan has used it, so it’s all right.

The most beautiful bloody nose is on Gillian Welch’s thrilling masterpiece The Harrow And The Harvest (2011), an album studded with subtle and less subtle Dylan references anyhow. As in the moving “The Way The Whole Thing Ends”, in which verse fragments such as standing in the doorway crying and once you had a motorcycle but you couldn’t ride it right are explicit enough already, and the verse:

Momma's in the beauty parlor
And Daddy's in the baseball pool
Sister's in the drive-in movie
Brother's in the old high school

 … which is winking pleasantly, unobtrusively at “Tombstone Blues” and “Desolation Row”. And just as charming Gillian incorporates a playful nod to “Sweetheart Like You” and to “Highway 61 Revisited”:

Now what's a little sweetheart like you
Doing with a bloody nose?

5          P.S.

In June 1995, England’s national treasure, the irresistible Marianne Faithfull, is invited to be the castaway at Desert Island Discs. Number four on her list is “Highway 61 Revisited”:

“One of my greatest all-time favourites. I couldn’t live without it.”

To be continued. Next up: Highway 61 Revisited – part III

—————

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

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

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

By Larry Fyffe

Looking back at rhyme part 1

Let us go you and I to where some lyrics from poems and songs are spread out in Bob Dylan’s song lyrics  – for example, we’ve recently looked at poets Robert Frost, Anthony Raferty, Robert Browning, and Edward Taylor.

Here be more tributes – this one to the blues song below:

AlI I could see was the rain
Something grabbed a hold of her
Felt to me honey, Lord, like a ball and chain
(Janis Joplin: Ball And Chain ~ 'Big Mama' Thornton)

Switching the rhyme from ~ ‘rain’/’chain’ to ‘brain’/’chain’ in the following revenge-filled lyrics:

You lost your mule
You got a poison brain
I'll marry you to a ball and chain
(Bob Dylan: False Prophet)

Beneath, Bob Dylan pays tribute to a melancholic song:

Each place I go only the lonely go
Some little small cafe
The songs I know only the lonely know
(Frank Sinatra: Only The Lonely ~ Heusen/Cahn)

In the following lyrics,the singer/songwriter sticks to the same rhyme ~ ‘go’/’know’:

I ain't no false prophet
I just know what I know
I go where only the lonely can go
(Bob Dylan: False Prophet)

Now a a tribute paid to a melancholic Gothic Romantic poet- quoted below:

My heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
(John Keats: Ode To A Nightingale)

Changes ~ ‘pains’/’drains’ to ‘pain’/ ‘drain’:

It's not dark yet, but it's getting there
And my sense of humanity has gone down the drain
Behind every beautiful thing, there's been some kind of pain
(Bob Dylan: Not Dark Yet)

As indicated in the lines above,  a true artist fears not intellectual contradictions, ambiguity, and confusion – so too in the lines below in which fame is compared to an alluring woman:

Make the best bow to her, and bid adieu
Then if she likes it, she will follow you
"You cannot eat you cake, and have it too"
(John Keats: On Fame)

Ah yes, why not grasp contradiction; this time play your hand outright; invert the sentiment and gender; and at the same time retain most of the rhyme ~ ‘adieu’/’you’/’to’?:

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

Keeping on keeping on – a nod to a Romantic Transcendental poet, an optimist in the days of youth:

There was a time when every meadow, grove, and stream
The earth, and every common sight
To me did seem apparelled in celestial light
The glory and freshness of a dream
(William Wordsworth: Imitations Of Immortality)

Below, the Romantic poet’s theme of the innocence of youth lost in th sorrows of adulthood; keeping the rhyme ~ ‘stream/’dream’:

I cross the Green Mountain
I slept by a stream
Heaven blazing in my head
I dreamt a monstrous dream
(Bob Dylan: 'Cross The Green Mountain)

In short, a goodly part of the artistic creative process involves borrowing from the lyrical art of yesterday, and adding appropriate musical accompaniment in order to make it appealing to today’s audiences of the popular entertainment business.

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

by mr tambourine

As we begin a new series on this massive page, in this very first episode I would like to start from the more recent cases and go further to the past.

The focus should be mostly on Dylan originals, maybe a collaboration with someone else in the songwriting process here and there too. But no covers.

The first one we can mention is “Narrow Way” from Tempest, a heavy blues where Bob “raps” typical Dylanesque lines, which many people view as an unfortunately what-seems-to-be buried song already. Maybe not?

We don’t know what the future holds for Dylan’s live performances. But never say never. Still, at this moment, it’s untouched live and we have to try and understand why.

Tempest currently, compared to other Mod-Bob albums (albums from Time Out Of Mind onward, without Rough And Rowdy Ways in this case since it never even had a chance to be promoted live in concert) has three songs that are untouched live.

All three of those, to be fair, to me at least, look like very expected and understandable choices.

Those songs are along with Narrow Way: Tin Angel and Tempest. Three very lengthy pieces.

So we ask ourselves now, why Narrow Way?

Aside from being lengthy and would need Bob to either memorize a lot of lyrics, or have him sit on the piano while reading the lyric sheets?

First of all, Dylan is no stranger to ignoring bluesy numbers.  Previous albums had their own ignored blues numbers: Dirt Road Blues, Someday Baby, Shake Shake Mama.

But why Narrow Way? It seems like a song Dylan could play. If he did Rollin’ And Tumblin’ and Highway 61 Revisited and similar styles, why ignore this one?

I’m not a fan of this song, to be honest. I don’t like the studio version. I do find a lot of brilliance in the lyrics. And I’m not saying the song is bad. For my taste, it’s too repetitive. I’m not sure I ever finished it unless I decided to listen to the full Tempest album.

That’s not to say that live it wouldn’t be better. Maybe it would. Still, I’m glad it was rejected.

I have barely swallowed Summer Days and its 800+ live performances over the last 20 years now. Or even Thunder On The Mountain which improved in the 2017-2019 period.

I’m pretty sure that if Bob ever debuted this one, it would get 500 performances at least and other songs like Early Roman Kings and Pay In Blood would be played less because of this one.

Luckily for me, unluckily for some fans of this song, it never happened.

But still… Why?

I really can’t say, other than the song is pretty tricky because of its length and the lyrics that keep spinning around.

The sound of the song is very easy for his band to catch, and Charlie Sexton would probably be the leader in those arrangements, and I can absolutely see it working on piano for Bob.

But then again “it’s a long road, it’s a long and narrow way”, lyrically speaking. It would probably feature a lot of lyrical revisions too.

I would imagine this song sounding its best in 2014 and 2015. Bob’s voice would be perfect then for this song. Mixing standards with this one would have been some great gigs for sure.

Maybe we’ll get to hear it some day live if all goes well?   But until then, it’s a long and narrow way.

You may also enjoy

Narrow Way available free on Spotify

Narrow Way, Bob Dylan’s absolutely ultimately most brilliant blues ever 

By Tony Attwood

August 16 2009, Bob Dylan decided to play a song for the one and only time.  It was “Heartbreak Hotel”.   The venue was Harvey’s Lake Tahoe Outdoor Arena, Stateline, NY.

https://youtu.be/-uiBGiIivCE

So why that song on that day?  Well, that’s where you come in, because I don’t know.

The Elvis single was recorded on 10 January 1956 in Nashville, and issued two and a half weeks later.

The song was co-written by Tommy Durden and Mae Boren Axton who is also credited with introducing Elvis to Colonel Tom Parker, and was involved in getting RCA to sign Presley to their label.  The song then got into the top of the Country and Western, pop, and Rhythm ‘n’ Blues charts simultaneously, which when one comes to think of it, is rather bizarre.

Durden 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.”   However I suspect Durden did not get his songwriting contract properly sorted because although he wrote songs for  Tex Ritter, Johnny Cash and Johnny Tillotson he later worked as a dishwasher repairman which is really sad.  I think we should honour the composers (even part composers) of masterpieces.  He died in 1999 at the age of 79.

Heartbreak Hotel was top of the Billboard and Cashbox charts for seven and six weeks respectively and became a millon seller.  Elvis last performed in on 29 May 1977.   In 1995 (four years before its co-writer’s death) “Heartbreak Hotel” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.  I can only hope someone remembered to invite its co-composer.

It is just about the only song I can think of that has its first chorus accompanied only by the double bass.  Indeed the whole accompaniment is a stunning masterpiece.  Even if you know the song inside out, I’d urge you to play the Elvis version and try (if possible) to ignore the voice and just listen to how the accompaniment changes, verse by verse.  It really is adventurous orchestration – especially considering when it was written.

As for my second selection from the once only files today, this is just absolute pure emotion on my part, for I don’t think I have ever been so upset at the passing of one of my life time heroes as I was when the news of Tom Petty’s death was announced.

Bob played “Learning to Fly” on 21 October 2017, just under three weeks after Tom Petty’s passing on 2 October.  The venue is 1st Bank Center, Broomfield, CO, USA

There are so many recordings of Learning to Fly that could be inserted at this point but I am going to cheat and insert a double header “I Need to Know” and “Learning to Fly”.  If you want to skip the first track starts at 2’43”.

Well, some say life will beat you down
Break your heart, steal your crown
So I've started out for God knows where
I guess I'll know when I get there

by Jochen Markhorst

Broadcaster Dylan only once plays one of his songs, a song from the legendary Bascom Lamar Lunsford (“Poor Jesse James”, in episode 92, Cops And Robbers). By way of introduction, he tells a few things about the archetype Jesse James, but nothing about Lunsford. Just as The Minstrel Of The Appalachians is mentioned twice in Dylan’s autobiography Chronicles, both times without further introduction:

“Logan was from Kentucky, wore a black neckerchief and played the banjo…was an expert in playing Bascom Lamar Lunsford songs like “Mole in the Ground” and “Grey Eagle.”

And a little further on:

“Elliott was far beyond me. There were a few other Ramblin’ Jack records that he had, too — one where he sings with Derroll Adams, a singer buddy of his from Portland who played banjo like Bascom Lamar Lunsford.”

Bascom Lamar Lunsford (1882-1973), apparently, needs no further introduction, but is a point of reference in itself; Dylan only uses his name, remarkably, to introduce other supporting actors. Like saying “he sings like Caruso and plays guitar like Hendrix” – you don’t need to explain further who Caruso and Hendrix are, they are, on the contrary, themselves the points of reference to describe the qualities of a character.

Well, maybe Lunsford does have that status, this “being beyond explanation”, for Dylan. References and borrowings can be found throughout Dylan’s entire oeuvre, after all. From the two Lunsford songs alone on the ground-breaking compilation album Anthology of American Folk Music, Dylan draws for three, four songs.

The Anthology of American Folk Music is a three-part double album compilation from 1952 with eighty-four folk, country and blues songs, collected by the eccentric amateur music-anthropologist Harry Smith. “I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground” is on Volume 3, containing the famous lines Dylan will reuse in “Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again”:

Oh, I don't like a railroad man
No, I don't like a railroad man
A railroad man, they'll kill you when he can
And drink up your blood like wine

 As it is, Dylan has an unlikely memory of songs he has heard once, but these lines come flying by more often. The aforementioned album he is referring to in Chronicles, that Ramblin’ Jack Elliott with Derroll Adams record, is The Rambling Boys from 1957. The last song on it is the pleasantly unpolished “Roll On, Buddy”:

Well I never liked no railroad man
I never liked no railroad man
Cause the railroad man will kill you if he can
Drink up your blood like wine

(and in the following verse “I slept in the pen with the rough and rowdy men”, by the way). The rest of the track list also suggests that Dylan has played the album more than once: “Buffalo Skinners”, “Danville Girl”, “East Virginia Blues”… all songs whose echoes descend in Dylan’s work over the years.

The other Lunsford song on that Anthology is on side 4: “Dry Bones” (not to be confused with “Dem Bones”, the hit of the Delta Rhythm Boys from the 40s).

Lunsford records “Dry Bones” in 1928, after he learned the song, according to his own words, in North Carolina from one Romney, an itinerant black preacher. It is a powerful, simple song with a colourful, biblical text. The five short verses meander haphazardly through the Holy Scriptures, as through Genesis in the first verse:

Old Enoch he lived to be three-hundred and sixty-five
When the Lord came and took him back to heaven alive

The next stanzas pluck from Acts, Exodus and Ezekiel, so criss-cross from the Bible. The first great aha moment for the Dylan fan is the chorus:

I saw, I saw the light from heaven
Shining all around.
I saw the light come shining.
I saw the light come down

… an inspiration for one of Dylan’s outside category songs, for “I Shall Be Released”. The second eye-opener is the third verse:

When Moses saw that a-burning bush
He walked it 'round and 'round
And the Lord said to Moses
"You's treadin' holy ground"

(Bascom Lamar’s recording is a historical treasure, but unfortunately quite rough and rowdy. The Handsome Family’s rendition from 2003 is beautiful:

The structure of “Highway 61 Revisited” is the structure that keeps on fascinating Dylan, for the time being. Five unrelated verses, only held together by the same decor which is always revealed in the recurring refrain line: Highway 61, indeed. The same set-up as “Desolation Row”, “Stuck Inside Of Mobile”, “Watching The River Flow”… up to and including “Crossing The Rubicon” (2020), the poet Dylan remains attracted to this topographical variant of the medieval François Villon ballad structure.

The rhyme schemes are just as archaic, for that matter; Dylan varies on abab ccc and on aaaa-bbb – schemes that we have known since the Romans and that are still popular in 21st century rap music. Dylan uses it in two of the five verses in the classical way; in the fifth line, the line that breaks the rhyme, the perspective shifts. In the other three a monologue continues; all too conscientiously the lieder poet did not shape his text.

That decor, finally, is well known and loaded. The highway running from Dylan’s hometown of Duluth to New Orleans, the U.S. Route 61, is a 2300 km long highway that roughly follows the Mississippi and is called the Blues Highway. Along the way, the highway cuts through quite a few mythical places. Elvis’ Memphis, for example, Chuck Berry’s St. Louis, Muddy Waters’ hometown Rolling Fork, the crossroads where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil and whatnot.

Officially the name has existed since 1926, completed the Highway was in 1929 – and it has been sung at least since 1932, since Roosevelt Sykes recorded his “Highway 61 Blues”. Between Sykes in 1932 and Dylan in ’65 a good dozen songs about Highway 61 were written and recorded, so Dylan’s addition “revisited” also has a music historical connotation. The walking music encyclopaedia Dylan is probably familiar with most of those predecessors, as well as with related songs like Big Joe Williams’ “Highway 49” and – of course – Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues”. But neither in content nor in stylistic terms does Dylan’s song have much in common with all those Highway 61 songs; for that the poet especially thanks Bascom Lamar Lunsford, the Minstrel of the Appalachian, the banjo-playing lawyer, who with his “Dry Bones” provides the template for that crushing opening stanza:

Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61”

… the comic effect achieved by trivialising Holy Scripture, by putting popular slum jargon in God’s and Abraham’s mouth, Dylan has learned from Lunsford. Dylan amplifies the effect by shortening the name of the patriarch to the buddy-buddy variant Abe and by making God talk like a Mafia boss – although the latter, with some flexibility, can be heard with Lunsford too. The Lord said to Moses: “You’s treading holy ground” could be understood as “Look out kid”, after all.

But that’s another story and shall be told another time.

To be continued. Next up: Highway 61 Revisited – part II

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

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

Untold Dylan: who we are what we do

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

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

We also have a very lively discussion group “Untold Dylan” on Facebook with around 8000 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

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

by Larry Fyffe

As illustrated previously, Bob Dylan travels back in time in order to stimulate his creative juices; drops hints of what poems and songs he sources by employing the same rhymes or twisting them a bit.

One version of a song:
The evening sun is sinking low
The woods are dark, the town is too
They'll drag you down, they run the show
Ain't no telling what they'll do
(Bob Dylan: Tell Old Bill)

The rhymes above ~ ‘low’/’show’; the rhymes below ~’know’/ ‘snow’

Whose these woods are I think I know
His house is in the village though
He'll not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow ....
He only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake
The woods are lovely, dark and deep
But I have promises to keep

(Robert Frost: Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening)

Another example, and with ~ ‘too’/’do’ again:

Today and tomorrow and yesterday too
The flowers are dying like all things do
Follow me close, I'm going to Ballinalee
I'll lose my mind if you don't come with me
I'll fuss up my hair, and I'll fight bood feuds
I contain multitudes
(Bob Dylan: I Contain Multitudes)

Note the Dylanesque “rhyme twist” ~ ‘Ballinalee’/’me’ – from the above song;

~ ‘Bally-na-Lee’/’Raferty’/’me’ – from the following Irish ballad:

On my way to Mass to say a prayer
The wind was high, sowing rain
I met a maid with wind-wild hair
And madly fell in love again ....
A table was set with glasses, and drink was set
And then says the lassie, turning to me
"You are welcome, Raferty, so drink the wet
To love's demands in Bally-na-Lee"
(Anthony Raferty: The Lass From Bally-na-Lee ~ translation)

The following song lyrics also go back in time:

And you who philosophize disgrace
And criticize all fear
Take the rag away from your face
Now ain't the time for your tear ...

And he spoke through his cloak, most deep and distinguished
And handed out strongly for penalty and repentance
William Zanzinger with a six month sentence
Ah, but you who philosophize disgrace
And criticize all fear
Bury the rag deep in your face
Now is the time for your tear

(Bob Dylan: The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll)

There’s the rhyme ~ ‘disgrace’/’face’in the above song; ‘disgrace’/’face’/’erase’/’place’ – from the dramatic monologue below:

Take the cloak from off his face, and at first
Let the corpse do its worst!
How he lies in his rights of man!
Death has done all death can ...
Ha, what avails death to erase
His offence, my disgrace? ....
I stand here now, he lies in his place
Cover the face!

(Robert Browning: After)

Looking back at another example:

With your silhouette when the night dims
Into your eyes were the moonlight swims
And your matchbook songs, and your gypsy hymns
Who among them would try to impress you?

(Bob Dylan: Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands)

Above ~ ‘dims’/’swims’/’hymns’; below ~ ‘dim’/’within’/’swim’ – from a Baroque poem:

You want clear spectacles: your eyes are dim
Turn inside out, and turn your eyes within
Your sins like motes in the sun do swim: nay, see
Your mites are molehills, molehills mountain be

(Edward Taylor: The Accusation Of The Inward Man)

Now a Dylan song that makes reference to a bluegrass tune:

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

(Bob Dylan: It's Alright Ma)

Thusly ~ ‘fates’/’waits’/’plates’/’gates’/’states’; and ~ ‘fate’/’wait’/’late’:

Why meet a terrible fate
Mercies abundantly wait
Turn back before it's too late
You're drifting too far from the shore
(Monroe Brothers: Drifting Too Far From The Shore ~ C. Moody)

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 

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