Untold Dylan

by Tony Attwood

This is episode 21 of the series “All Directions at Once” which reviews Dylan’s work across time as a continuing stream of creativity, rather than a set of isolated individual songs.  An index to the series appears here.

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In the life of most creative people there are many changes – ups, downs, stagnation, withdrawal, ceaseless momentum, certainty, uncertainty, desperation, lack of motivation, lack of inspiration, too much alcohol, too much inspiration, too many diversions and sudden moments of genius…

And although I have never seen a serious detailed study of the condition, I often wonder if the most common problem that highly creative people can have is that of knowing that in the past one has created something or indeed some things that are truly way, way, way above the norm, and now… it just won’t happen.  Genius, inspiration, dedication, drive – these are things that are apparently quite easy to let slip, but rather hard to regain.

What’s more, tracing the work and life of a genius is always tough because we can distracted by weird facts that may, or may not be relevant.  Einstein was thought to be rather slow while at school; Mozart from the age of five was seen as a prodigy.  JS Bach in his day was considered to be a mid-ranking composer of no importance, and besides, it turns out Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent the telephone after all.  Antonio Meucci did.  Yes being a genius can’t be easy – but nor is tracing what genius is all about.

Of course no two genius artists are the same, and although a few just seem to go on and on and on without faltering once, most geniuses have their ups and downs both of self-confidence and actual originality of thought.  Picasso, for example, famously had one of the longest tail end fading away from a career of genius of all.  Others die young, like Wilfred Owen.  Some just ceased to work: Shakespeare suddenly stopped writing and went back to live quietly in Stratford – although some suggest (without too much evidence) this was because he was going blind.

In short there is no pattern for genius.  With each we need to see what his or her life looks like, rather than try and fit the individual into a set pattern of what we expect of a genius.

And in my view what most certainly does not work is to look at each creation of the artist and compare it to his or her highest achievement, and then bemoan that it’s not quite as good as…   Such an approach might serve to aggrandise the writer, but tells us nothing about the creative genius.

The more I look at Dylan’s life and work, the more I feel it helps to track his genius via his ups and downs as a composer.  Within 18 months of his earliest attempts at songwriting he had written the astounding “Ballad for a Friend” launching an extraordinary explosion of genius, giving us those amazing early songs, which just kept on pouring out until 1967, the last year of the mass production of music of stunning brilliance.

Then those of us who marvelled at this outpouring were forced to sit and wait and wait and ultimately hope,  wondering if by and large that was it.  Maybe we had had all there was.    186 songs, some forgettable, a lot really good, and many which were works of sublime genius, plus another 120 or so from the Basement tapes which needed to be considered like a set of notebooks.  Was that it?

Certainly in the years that followed, that was how it seemed…

1968 was a year of retreat with a single song for a film, delivered late (1 song).

1969 brought a wider range of songs but by and large most commentators consider them not up to Dylan’s previous level, and nothing really stood out as a masterpiece. (15 songs).

1970 brought us what I have called a “stuttering return” – a phrase based on the fact that for many people New Morning is an uneven album with few moments of classic Dylan brilliance as a composer and quite a few others which are not.  It is noticeable that Dylan used virtually everything he wrote in the album (just as he had done with JWH)  – there was no luxury of picking the best songs from a list of 25 compositions some of which were inexplicably abandoned. This is all that he had; that is what we got.  But whereas for JWH every song (with the possible exception of the two out-of-context country songs added to the end to make up the numbers) was of interest, it may be said that New Morning didn’t really reach that level.  And it most certainly wasn’t as intriguing and engaging as JWH.

1971 gave us two Dylan songs of magic and quality, one reflecting on the nature of art, (When I paint my masterpiece), plus one on the issue of waiting for the muse to return (Watching the river flow).  There was also one legal-political protest piece George Jackson which has the hallmarks of being written in a rush, plus three we might classify as “others”.  A total of six songs.  In earlier years of high productivity, the “others” would not be noticed.  Among such a small outpouring, they look decidedly average.

So 1968 to 1972 inclusive, five years, in which the ten best songs were still superb but there were just ten.  In my view they were…

1. Lay Lady Lay
2. I threw it all away
3. Tonight I’ll be Staying Here With You
4. If not for you
5. Sign on the window
6. New Morning
7. The Man in Me
8. When I paint my masterpiece
9. Watching the river flow
10. Forever Young

And to be fair, for most other songwriters that would be a pretty decent haul.  But for Dylan, after those earlier years of productivity, no… a bit of a disappointment.  And that’s the point.  Compared to the earlier achievements of the greatest songwriter since Irving Berlin, they weren’t at the top of the list.  But compared to almost anyone else, yes that was a pretty damn good collection.

And so now we move on to 1973.  And here we see real signs of returning sparks of genius poking their ways through in a number of songs…

The first two songs of the year are songs that although I enjoy them enormously, I’m going to leave because of the arguments that inevitably surround their composition: Wagon Wheel (Rock me mama) and Sweet Amerillo.  Just as with the politics of George Jackson make it almost impossible to debate that song, so it’s not feasible to discuss these works without someone shouting about copyright infringement.  Which is a shame because I really enjoy both of them, but to avoid argument let’s pretend they are not there.   Of course you can count them as Dylan if you wish (they are reviewed on this site with links to recordings), or not if you wish (it really won’t affect anyone else).  But let us move on to a masterpiece… Knocking on heaven’s door.

It has one of the great Dylan opening lines (“Mama, take this badge off of me”) and from that moment on you just know it is going to be good.   But what we didn’t know at the time was if this was one-off like “Lay lady Lady” in 1968 and “Forever Young” in 1973 or was it the prelude to getting back on track big time.

Then we come to “Never say goodbye” for which we have on this site, two wildly differing views one from yours truly and one from Jochen.   It was the first time that we ever totally disagreed about a song, although we stopped short of coming to blows over the issue – not least because we live 450 miles apart and have never met.   But we were also honoured by a few words in a comment from Eyolf Østrem whose Dylanchords website is an utter masterpiece  of analysis.  If he thinks it’s worth posting a comment, we must be onto something!

My perspective of the geographic nature of the song was enhanced by Larry’s discovery of a lake that had its name changed – but beyond that we are not going to know much more for certain about the meaning of the song, I suspect.  However it is an incredibly unusual piece for Dylan with its modulations, and musical structure, plus what Eyolf called its descent into chaos.

Ultimately its value overall is not in whether one likes it as a piece of music, but rather that it shows Dylan was once more pushing back on the boundaries, trying to find ways forward within the world of pop, blues, rock etc, that had not been explored before.   That was the encouraging sign.  Bob was, once more, going where no man had gone before…

Within the context of Dylan at this moment it is an extraordinary piece.  The songs I have highlighted that Dylan had written leading up to this point are in form very straightforward but this is anything but.  It is undoubtedly the most complex piece of music Dylan had written up to this point.

And the fact that he wrote it at this moment when he was on the edge of coming back into the world of full-time songwriting tells us something else.  For if he was coming back, we were not going to get some more of the same.  He was experimenting like mad, just as he had when bringing us “Visions” and the rest.  Pop, rock and blues as we had never heard before.

No, Dylan was not going to give us a series simple pieces or songs reminiscent of his past.  Nor was he going to do another album like JWH where most of the songs all followed the same simple format.  This recording shows us he was determined to return with another step towards the unknown, yet again taking us in a new direction, no matter whether we liked it or not.

https://youtu.be/W2b7qwGhtC8

What more do you want from songwriting?

Then we had “Going going gone” which hasn’t really been covered much, nor performed much by Dylan – maybe it is that opening, or maybe it was thought not to be saying anything very new.  Except that it has Dylan singing unaccompanied?  Ever heard that before?  He really was trying out every option.

It is a tough piece to deliver because of its construction although I think Every Dylan Song website was way off track when they say, “Dylan spends the middle eight groping around for the proper vocal key”.  No I don’t think he does – I think he knows exactly what he is doing.  It’s unusual, it’s experimental, it’s different.  If you have time I would urge you to play both versions above in full even if you don’t like song.  That level of variation in the deliverance of one song is utterly extraordinary, and the real sign of a master craftsman back to his best.

Plus it has one of the most remarkable “middle 8” sections in the whole of Dylan.  Not only does the music change in a way we can’t possibly expect, releasing all the tension built up before, but the lyrics do that change justice.

Grandma said, “Boy, go and follow your heart
And you’ll be fine at the end of the line
All that’s gold isn’t meant to shine
Don’t you and your one true love ever part”

Grandma telling Bob how to run his love life?   Have you ever heard that before?  And here’s another thing.  Bob reading the lyrics….

Moving on we have Hazel, again is a simple song, but it is way beyond most of what Bob had been doing in recent years.  Thus it is that here, in these songs we are seeing the opening steps, the initial thoughts, the first considerations, that finally led us to Tangled up in Blue the following year.   We had to wait while he made these notes and worked on these ideas, but oh wasn’t it worthwhile?

(And to pause for a moment and put the boot in once more, don’t people who write about pop and rock compositions realise that songs do not exist in isolation?  They evolve from what has gone before, and an awful lot of new thinking.  Nothing comes out of the blue.)

But equally in my view, we should not dismiss these songs as sketches on the road to a masterpiece, for they are certainly more than just worth a listen, and they are more than simply the build up to “Early one morning the sun was shining,” that ultimate, ultimate opening line riposte to Robert Johnson’s “Well I work up this morning, blues falling down like hail.”  It took 36 years to get from Johnson’s bleak opener, to Dylan’s warm answer, but it sure was worth waiting for – and these songs are both the prelims and really good works in themselves with a beauty and elegance in their own right.

Few of these songs became key parts of Dylan shows in subsequent years.  Never say goodbye is shown as never being sung by Dylan on stage (my figures coming from BobDylan.com), Hazel seven times, Nobody cept you eight times, Something there is about you 26 and Going, going, gone, 79, but this latter total was, I am sure, down to the multiple re-writes of both music and lyric.

Something there is about you,  lasted as a tour song between Jan 74 and Feb 78, but even so, got relatively few outings, and yet it does have one most interesting musical feature, in which the bassist plays around with the notion of the complete descending bass.

Step by step bass lines are something Dylan particularly likes, starting on the key note and slowly rising up (as in Rolling Stone) or declining (as in Is your love in vain).   But there are two things that really make this stand out – the bassist keeps varying what he does, and only on occasion does he deliver the whole eight note run.  That shows a real dedication to the songs, to exploring them, to taking them musically as well as lyrically somewhere else.  True, most members of the audience wouldn’t even hear this, but the fact that Bob and the band were doing this shows that the notion of taking the form and seeing where it could go is back with us.  And that was very much at the heart of a lot of Dylan’s earlier works.  After all, what was “Subterranean Homesick Blues” if not the ultimate subversion of the rock n roll form?

So when Bob sings “Something there is about you that brings back a long-forgotten truth”  the descent of the bass is finally there, down to the recovery of the long-forgotten truth.

And that long-forgotten truth is….?

Well, we don’t quite know, although we might note in passing these were not easy times for Bob, for in 1994 Ruth Tyrangiel served Bob Dylan him with a $5m law suit, claiming they had lived as husband and wife for 17 years. The case apparently was ultimately settled out of court.  Or so I am told.

But what Bob most certainly did have was the return of the ability to switch styles and keep trying out very different ideas – something that was very much at the heart of his music before he took his long sabbatical.

For those with ears to hear, this was one of the most exciting of moments in following Bob’s music.  What on earth would he come up with next?

Untold Dylan

As we approach 2000 articles on this site, indexing is important, but sadly chaotic.  You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.

Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc.  We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan.  We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers.  Although no one gets paid, 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 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

This article by Christopher John Stephens first appeared in Pop Matters.

It’s unlikely that Bob Dylan will retire anytime soon and take up a career as a Professor of Literature, and that’s one of the more refreshing conclusions we can make about his 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature Lecture. As delivered on 5 June 2017 in accordance to conditions for the Prize, the audio of Dylan’s speech is a strange, rambling, beautifully coherent reflection on the books that have moved him, the role of the folk song oral tradition, from Homer through Leadbelly, and the difference between songs and literature. “They’re meant to be sung, not read,” Dylan notes in the final moments of his 30-minute lecture. Whether or not Dylan read the flurry of pearl-clutching indignant commentary from literati who immediately took offense that the Prize was going to this song and dance man is unknown. That he weighed in with his verdict is what matters here.

In the days following Dylan’s Lecture, those prone to dissecting texts (especially his) in order to discern motivations dismissed his examinations of Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey as junior-level Cliff notes. In fact, more than a few complained that large portions of this text were generously lifted from other sources. Could he have written this speech by himself? Where did he get these ideas? These questions have followed Dylan since shortly after he arrived in New York City in 1961, the grungy and doughy Woody Guthrie replicant looking for a posse he can call his own.

Now, more than a year after receiving the Nobel Prize and over four months after delivering this typically idiosyncratic lecture (just as his deadline approached), Simon and Schuster has released The Nobel Lectures in a collectible edition, suitable for quick reference and essential for Dylan completists. It’s standard operating procedure for the Nobel Prize Lectures. The price for accepting the prize money and prestige is demonstrating a willingness to firmly enter the establishment, to have your speech printed on thick paper and published in a pocket-sized hardcover that can easily find space in any earnest undergrad’s bookshelf. The Dylan fan remembers lines from his 1965 classic “Ballad of a Thin Man”, where he sings in his typical disdain of the time:

“You’ve been with the professors, and they’ve all liked your looks… You’re very well-read, it’s well-known.”

Are Dylan’s thoughts the dismissible ramblings of an insecure autodidact still trying to impress the professors? Certainly, his reflection that “’Moby Dick’ is a… book that’s filled with scenes of high drama and dramatic monologue” doesn’t break any new ground. Later, when Dylan adds “[T]his book tells how different men react in different ways to the same experience” we stay with him because we know he understands the text. Herman Melville was writing about the American experience, how all our myths are intertwined to push the story forward. “We see only the surface of things,” Dylan notes. “We can interpret what lies below any way we see fit.” The fact that Ishmael survives from the opening line of the book through the end to float on a coffin in the middle of the sea is the alpha and omega of this story, and the fundamental truth of this is all that matters to him. We are tested, we suffer, and we endure.

Dylan doesn’t shy away from the classics, and it’s refreshing how he finds comfort in their orthodoxy. Some have argued that he’s drowned in them and at 76, in the wake of a music recording cycle that’s had him record scores of classics from the Great American Songbook, his days of giving birth to the greatest new songs are over. The problem with these noble guardians of the Academic Ivory tower dismissing Dylan’s right to pontificate about American literature is that they can’t come up with lines like this about All Quiet on the Western Front:

“This is a book where you lose your childhood, your faith in a meaningful world, and your concern for individuals.”

Dylan’s summary of the Erich Maria Remarque novel goes on for a while, addressing us directly. “You don’t fit anywhere,” he says. “You killed a man yesterday, and you spoke to his corpse.” Not only does Dylan draw us into this vortex of pain and brutality that’s the exclusive domain of any warfare, he doesn’t let us go. “You’re on the real iron cross,” he notes, making a painful allusion to Jesus, “and a Roman soldier’s putting a sponge of vinegar to your lips.” Dylan keeps us in World War I, in those trenches with the enlisted grunts from the novel. He reflects on the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle and Socrates, and makes this definitive conclusion: “…I put this book down… I never wanted to read another war novel and I never did.”

As for The Odyssey Dylan starts his summary in a minor way and the reader gets worried: “’The Odyssey’ is a strange, adventurous tale of a grown man trying to get home after fighting in a war.” Don’t we already know this? Didn’t we all read it in high school? What makes Dylan’s observations particularly vivid is that we have no reason to doubt his bona fides as a traveling man, heading endlessly from one gig to another, never staying long enough to plant roots, never knowing if he’ll reach his destination because he has forgotten what home really means. He draws in the songs “Homeward Bound”, “Green, Green Grass of Home”, and “Home on the Range” as he reminds us that they’ve all been swirling together in our collective cultural DNA.

“In a lot of ways, some of these things have happened to you,” Dylan notes. “You too have had drugs dropped into your wine.”

The Dylan fan will remember lines from his “Stuck Inside of Mobile (with the Memphis Blues Again)” and chuckle knowingly about images where railroad men drink up your blood like wine. It’s all there. Everything about the evolution of Dylan as a writer and torch bearer of the oral tradition was there from the beginning, and we see it when he reflects in this lecture about North Carolina blues legend Charlie Poole, whose song “You Ain’t talkin’ to me” pointedly noted to the Generals and Majors in charge: “Killin’ with a gun don’t sound like fun/ You ain’t talkin’ to me.” From Phil Och’s “I ain’t marchin’ anymore” to Dylan’s own “Masters of War”, the horror of following the tempting clarion call of dying on the battlefield for a futile cause has always been with us.

The most touching reflections in Dylan’s lecture come early, before discussing the books, before concluding that song lyrics are in fact not literature. In his 1998 Album of the Year Grammy Award acceptance Speech for Time out of Mind, Dylan spoke emotionally about seeing Buddy Holly at the Duluth Armory, shortly before the latter’s death.

Nearly 20 years later, Dylan’s picture of Holly is even more vivid:

“He was powerful and electrifying… I watched his face, his hands, the way he stood, his neat suit… He looked me straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something…”

The picture Dylan creates here seems more like the huge, lumbering Gary Busey version of Buddy Holly from the 1978 film than the real one, but there’s no need to quibble about the legitimacy of this recollection. This lecture seems to be more about honoring tradition, identifying direct influences, and then getting down to the business of analyzing literature. It’s about understanding the consequences of language as it travels through its endless forms. In her 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature Lecture, fellow American Toni Morrison noted that “Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.” In a variation of what Dylan would say later in his lecture, Morrison declares quite conclusively:

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”

For Dylan, dangerous language is not about specific singular words but rather how they work in different contexts. Furthermore, the measure of our lives is also about how we adapt the language of our ancestors. How and when and in what form will we receive the message and pass it to somebody else? If that doesn’t happen, the message dies. Buddy Holly shined for such a brief time, from 1956-1959, during the years Dylan was flirting with life as a teenaged rock star. It was the ancient ballads and country blues that came naturally for Dylan, but the rest had to be learned from nothing.

“I had all the vernacular down,” he notes. “I knew the rhetoric. None of it went over my head… But I had something else as well. I had principals and sensibilities and an informed sense of the world.”

How we absorb this lecture will probably depend entirely on our tolerance for sentimentality. Robert Zimmerman, from Hibbing Minnesota, created the myth of Bob Dylan the moment he landed in New York City in January 1961, playing his songs for an ailing Woody Guthrie and following a distinctly American path. This beautifully realized lecture, with piano background accompaniment by Alan Pasqua (who last worked with Dylan nearly 40 years ago) is recorded in the style of the old Jack Kerouac beat poetry performances of the ’50s, where Tonight Show host Steve Allen added non-intrusive keyboards. To argue that everything Dylan’s done (especially in the past 20 years) is simply a cut and paste collection of original ideas from other sources is to miss the point.

Whether it was Woody Guthrie, Buddy Holly, or everyone and thing in between, the truth of Bob Dylan rests in the foundation of his childhood; it’s a way to understand human nature, and a standard by which to live life. The legacy of Bob Dylan is firmly secured in this text. The market of Bob Dylan material coming out in the final quarter of 2017, including the boxed set Trouble No More: The Bootleg Series Vol. 13/1979-1981, continues adding chapters to his storied life and times. With his memoir Chronicles Volume One and scores of other prose ephemera he’s published over the years, he’s on his way to building an impressive paper trail that will entertain analysts for years to come. More important, The Nobel Lectures conclusively proves that Bob Dylan’s body of work warranted this prize.

Untold Dylan

As we approach 2000 articles on this site, indexing is important, but sadly chaotic.  You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.

Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc.  We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan.  We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers.  Although no one gets paid, 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 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

by Jochen Markhorst

Tombstone Blues (1965) part I: Daddy’s looking for the fragmentation bomb’s fuse

II          Duck back down

We probably owe the oh-la-la-connotation of The Alley to Little Richard. And he, again, owes it to a spindly adolescent girl with braids and a white starched collar from Opelousas, Mississippi. That is what an unlikely but still verified story tells, anyway. Producer Bumps Blackwell (who will produce Dylan’s song “Shot Of Love” in 1981) tells it to writer Charles White for his biography The Life And Times Of Little Richard (1984), and it is authorised for publication by both Blackwell and Richard Penniman, Little Richard himself – so it might just be true.

Blackwell tells that in November 1955 he receives a phone call from the popular radio DJ Honey Chile, who thinks he should come on over. She introduces him to a young girl. Her name is Enortis Johnson, she is about sixteen, seventeen years old, looks like a chorus girl at a Baptist meeting, and she has a heartbreaking story:

“So Honey Chile said to me, “Bumps, you got to do something about this girl. She’s walked all the way from Opelousas, Mississippi, to sell this song to Richard, ’cos her auntie’s sick and she needs money to put her in the hospital.” I said okay, let’s hear the song, and this little clean-cut kid, all bows and things, says, “Well, I don’t have a melody yet. I thought maybe you or Richard could do that.” So I said okay, what have you got, and she pulls out this piece of paper. It looked like toilet paper with a few words written on it:

Saw Uncle John with Long Tall Sally
They saw Aunt Mary comin’
So they ducked back in the alley

And she said, “Aunt Mary is sick. And I’m going to tell her about Uncle John. ’cos he was out there with Long Tall Sally, and I saw ’em. They saw Aunt Mary comin’ and they ducked back in the alley.”

I said, “They did, huh? And this is a song? You walked all the way from Opelousas, Mississippi, with this piece of paper?” (I’d give my right arm if I could find it now. I kept it for years. It was a classic. Just a few words on a used doily!)”

Beautiful, old-fashioned melodramatic story. And well alright, Opelousas is not in Mississippi but in Louisiana – but that’s still about 180 miles to New Orleans, still a four days walk for such a young girl like this mythical Enortis Johnson. And well alright, it doesn’t quite explain why the copyright for “Jenny, Jenny” and for “Miss Ann” is also attributed to “Penniman/Johnson”, but let’s not spoil a great story with too much fact checking. Little Richard goes to work with those few paltry words, according to this story, and they indeed do inspire – it leads to “Long Tall Sally”, one of the greatest rock’n’roll songs ever:

I saw Uncle John with Long Tall Sally
He saw Aunt Mary comin' and he ducked back in the alley
Oh, baby, yeah now baby
Woo baby, some fun tonight

… a song from the Pantheon, recorded by Elvis, The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, The Kinks, Jerry Lee Lewis and, well, by everyone else, actually.

Since then, the alley has seen a coming and going of piquanteries, shady types and French girls, and the word combination ducked back in the alley echoes in pop music for decades to come. Paul Simon scores his world hit in 1986 with “You Can Call Me Al”, in which the protagonist, who clearly is in a mid-life crisis, seeks his adulterous salvation with some bimbo in the alley;

He ducked back down the alley
With some roly-poly little bat-faced girl
All along, along
There were incidents and accidents
There were hints and allegations.

And what Dylan’s kid from “Subterranean Homesick Blues” is doing there is unclear, but this choice of words at least insinuates promiscuity;

Look out kid
It’s somethin’ you did
God knows when
But you’re doin’ it again
You better duck down the alley way
Lookin’ for a new friend

 … a new friend for whom the man in the coon-skin cap wants to be paid with eleven dollar bills. A somewhat awkward amount, by the way, but then again: nothing or nobody escapes inflation – sooner or later it reaches the dingy back alleys too.

It’s not the first and not the last time the alley is a set in a Dylan song. In Hard Rain we find a clown crying there, in 115th Dream the narrator meets a French girl in the alley, who a little later, in Stuck Inside Of Mobile, still seems to be hanging out there, this time with one Shakespeare. It’s getting crowded over there; on this same album Blonde On Blonde it turns out that besides Shakespeare also Achilles is in the alleyway (“Temporary Like Achilles”) and in the following years thievin’ is going on there (“Seven Days”), the alley is frequented by the devil (“Mississippi”), Don Pasqualli (“Cry A While”) and, to complete the circle, by back alley Sally (“Cat’s In The Well”) – it’s but a small selection; there are quite a few songs with this decor.

The latter, back alley Sally, is a sympathetic reference to the one and only King of the Alley, to Little Richard. Just like Wilson Pickett takes off his hat (in “Land Of 1000 Dances”; Twist in the alley / With Long Tall Sally), Elvis in “Down In The Alley” and Paul Simon’s choice of words is no coincidence either, of course (Simon is quoted in White’s biography: “When I was in high school I wanted to be like Little Richard”).

And so are Daddy’s whereabouts in “Tombstone Blues” probably at least an indirect greeting to Uncle John from “Long Tall Sally”. After all, for the rhyme Dylan doesn’t need that alley;

Mama’s in the fact’ry
She ain’t got no shoes
Daddy’s in the alley
He’s lookin’ for the fuse
I’m in the streets
With the tombstone blues

… Daddy could just as well be in the kitchen, on the front porch or at the races. At most the pleasant assonance daddy/alley is a nice by-catch, but that assonance is not necessarily sought-after – the other lines of the verse demonstrate that the poet is mainly guided by rhythm rather than sound.

Daddy’s activities in the alley are somewhat mysterious – the search for the fuse there is actually just as absurd as the revelation that Mama is working barefoot in the factory. It suggests that the poet Dylan, as in more lyrics from this mercurial period, confines himself to rhyme, and leaves the reason just for what it is. The chorus lines have to work towards the final line, towards the words tombstone blues – hence Mama has no shoes, and Daddy is looking for the fuse.

As for why the I person is out in the street with this enigmatic tombstone blues, or what the hell that actually is supposed to be, this lamentation over a headstone… well, that is an entirely different question.

Maybe Blind Willie McTell has something to say about that.

To be continued. Next up: Tombstone Blues 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
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits (German)

12 years of Untold Dylan

As we approach 2000 articles on this site, indexing is important, but sadly chaotic.  You can find indexes to series linked under the image of Dylan at the top of the page and some relating to recent series on the home page.

Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc.  We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan.  We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers.  Although no one gets paid, 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 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

by John Henry

Dylan’s roots in the traditions of folk music have ensured that murder ballads feature regularly in his repertoire. Ballads are songs that tell a story and murder ballads are songs where the story is about a murder. Early examples are “The Ballad of Donald White”, “The Ballad of Hollis Brown”, “Who Killed Davey Moore?” “The Death of Emmett Till”, “Only a Pawn in Their Game”, and “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll”.

The obvious thing about these examples, however, is that they are all songs of social conscience, written by Dylan when he was seen as a “protest singer”. Each is concerned with the plights of “the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse”. The aim of the songs is not simply to tell the story of a murder (or multiple murders in “Hollis Brown”), but to point to the exploitation and unjust treatment of the subjects of the songs (whether they are murderers like Donald White and Hollis Brown, or victims like Davey Moore, Emmett Till, and Hattie Carroll).

So, these are definitely not the kind of “murder ballads” celebrated, for example, by Nick Cave on his album of that title. They are not at all like the traditional murder ballads that Dylan was also singing at this time—songs like “Omie Wise”, “The Two Sisters”, and “Railroad Bill”. These are songs where, typically, the victim is murdered by his or her former lover, or by a rival for love. There is no social conscience in these songs, sometimes the murderer shows remorse, but for the most part, murder is considered to be just another aspect of life… and love.

If we leave out Dylan’s murder ballads written as protests against injustice—which also means leaving out “Hurricane” and “Joey” (which presents Joey as another victim of injustice, and anyway was written by Jacques Levy, Dylan has claimed)—we might suppose that there are only two traditional-style murder ballads written by Dylan: “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts” on Blood on the Tracks, and “Tin Angel” from Tempest. After all, there is no murder mentioned in the song of “John Wesley Harding” (even though John Wesley Hardin was a prolific killer).

Although the official Dylan website lists “Little Sadie” (and “In Search of Little Sadie”), from Self Portrait, as being written by Dylan, the song actually dates from 1922 or earlier. Even “Tin Angel” is highly derivative, heavily borrowing material from two traditional songs, “Gypsy Davey” and “Matty Groves”.

Given that Dylan has tried his hand at writing songs in just about every other traditional form, it seems strange that he never turned his hand to trying out an old-school murder ballad before Blood on the Tracks. It is evident that he has always been impressed by their power, because Good As I Been To You and World Gone Wrong include a number of traditional murder ballads (“Frankie and Albert”, “Love Henry”, “Delia”, and “Stack A Lee”). We might expect, therefore, more than just “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts”, and the derivative “Tin Angel”. Significantly, Nick Cave chose a Dylan song to round off his album of Murder Ballads (1996), but it is the only song on the album that isn’t a murder ballad (“Death is Not the End”). If Nick Cave had wanted to include a Dylan-penned traditional-style murder ballad, he might have believed that the only one he could choose (in 1996) was “Lily, Rosemary, and the Jack of Hearts.”

As a matter of fact, though, there was another one he could have chosen. If Nick Cave overlooked it, he is by no means the only person to have failed to recognise that Dylan had presented us with a traditional-style murder ballad, although one that is wonderfully inventive, long before Blood on the Tracks. Part of the reason for its being overlooked is that it is one of those highly subtle murder ballads, where the murder is hardly acknowledged in the song. It is easy to miss, for example, that the traditional “In the Pines”, or “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”, is a murder ballad. Among the repeated verses asking his girl where she slept last night, and her repeated claims that she slept in the pine wood, is a single verse:

Her husband was a hard working man.
Just a mile and a half from here,
His head was found in a driving wheel,
But his body never was found.

Another wonderfully subtle murder ballad is the achingly beautiful “She Moves Through the Fair”. In the first of three verses, we learn that the girl’s family disapprove of her intention to marry the narrator of the song. In the second verse the singer tells us how beautiful his girl is. Then, in the third verse, we learn that his love is dead, and comes to him as a ghost. We have to piece together for ourselves the fact that his girl was the victim of a so-called “honour killing”, killed by her family to avoid bringing dishonour on them for marrying the wrong class of man. Evidently, for such parents, there is no dishonour in killing one’s daughter. Although “She Moves Through the Fair” is originally Irish and well over a century old, these kinds of “honour killings” continue to take place in many parts of the world.

Interestingly, there is a possible link between this song and an early murder ballad sung by Dylan. In the now lost BBC television drama, “Madhouse on Castle Street” (1963), a young Dylan performed a few songs including one written by the playwright, the poet Evan Jones (1927–2012), called “The Ballad of the Gliding Swan”. The opening lines make it a murder ballad:

Tenderly William kissed his wife,
Then he opened her head with a butcher knife.
And the swan on the river goes gliding by,
The swan on the river goes gliding by.

It’s possible that Jones (or Dylan, if, as rumoured, he changed some of the lyrics—see Tony Attwood’s “‘The Ballad of the Gliding Swan’: Bob Dylan’s lost song, found”) was thinking of the infinitely more subtle, “She Moves through the Fair”:

Then she made her way homeward
With one star awake,
As the swan in the evening
Moves over the lake.

Another superb example of the understated murder ballad is Bobby Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe”, where it is only through hints that we can surmise that the singer had an illegitimate child by Billy Joe MacAllister, and together they disposed of their baby, before Billy Joe went on to commit suicide (by throwing himself off the bridge too).

That nice young preacher, Brother Taylor, dropped by today.
Said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh, by the way,
He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge,
And she and Billy Joe was throwing somethin' off the Tallahatchie Bridge.

Nick Cave recognised the power of subtlety in his “Where the Wild Roses Grow”. In this duet between the lovers, the murderer tells us simply that:

On the last day I took her where the wild roses grow,
And she lay on the bank, the wind light as a thief.
And I kissed her goodbye, said, "All beauty must die",
And I lent down and planted a rose 'tween her teeth.

We have to assume that he has in fact murdered her at this point, because in the previous verse, his lover has already told us:

On the third day he took me to the river.
He showed me the roses and we kissed;
And the last thing I heard was a muttered word,
As he knelt above me with a rock in his fist.

For her it was their third day together, but he knew it was their last.

Dylan’s unnoticed murder ballad is equally subtle, and its subtlety is one of the reasons why it has not been recognised as a murder ballad. I say “one of the reasons” because another reason is surely the fact that whenever the song is discussed the discussion always focuses upon the song’s relation to John Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood”. Yes, Dylan’s long overlooked murder ballad is Blonde on Blonde’s “Fourth Time Around.”

The song opens straight away with the singer and his woman in a vicious recriminating argument—so vicious in fact that she “breaks” his eyes. While they are exchanging words, she seems to be the one in control: “What else you got left?” she asks sarcastically. She chides him for merely taking from their relationship, and not giving anything back (“But she said, ‘Don’t forget/Everybody must give something back/For something they get.’”), and when he tries to act innocent, or uncomprehending, of this charge, she scornfully says, “Don’t get cute!” Eventually, she throws him out (“She threw me outside”). It’s at this point the jilted lover turns the tables. He gets back in to her place on a pretext, and after another exchange of words where she shows she will no longer comply with his wishes (“No dear”), he kills her. Of course, our narrator doesn’t admit this to us, rather he tells us, without any explanation, of her sudden change:

She screamed till her face got so red.
Then she fell on the floor.
And I covered her up and then
Thought I'd go look through her drawer.

I told you it was subtle. The singer avoids saying that he has murdered her, but it is clear that he is covering her dead body here. Even the selfish lover portrayed in the song wouldn’t cover up a merely ill woman and immediately go off to see what he could take from her flat. But here we learn that he takes some time (“When I was through” does not suggest that he just had a quick look), and takes all he can (“I filled up my shoe”), before leaving with her still on the floor. So, it is clear that he has either strangled, or possibly beaten to death, the woman who has tried to get rid of him.

In case we are in any doubt of that, Dylan continues to portray the narrator of the song as an example of inconsiderate toxic masculinity—a man with an unexamined sense of entitlement. Immediately taking his ill-gotten gains to another lover, the only positive thing he has to say about her is “You didn’t waste time”. Clearly, the narrator means, you didn’t waste my time, as he believes the murdered lover did.

But, in case she wants to come on strong, he immediately pushes her back. “I never asked for your crutch”, he callously says, “Now don’t ask for mine”. This is a highly complex image, resonating in a number of ways, especially as it is the song’s closing point. We learned earlier in this song that this accommodating lover needs a wheelchair, but maybe she can sometimes walk with a crutch. So, a straightforward way of reading this is that the singer is saying don’t expect me to help support you—you’ve got your crutch and I’ve got mine (and I’m not sharing mine with you). But, given the sexual tension in the song, it is easy to imagine that the singer is actually rejecting intimacy: “I never asked for your crotch, Now don’t ask for mine.” Either way, we are listening to the words of a mean-minded specimen of humanity.

So much for the internal logic of the song’s lyrics. But another way of reading these closing lines, of course, is as a dig at John Lennon. “Norwegian Wood”, on the Beatles’ Rubber Soul album, is generally regarded as one of those songs written by Lennon when he was trying to emulate Dylan. It is well known that “Fourth time Around” was Dylan’s way of showing Lennon that he had a long long way to go. I believe this clinches the interpretation presented here—that “Fourth Time Around” is a murder ballad.

“Norwegian Wood” tells of a misogynistic “joke” against a woman who wasted the time of the song’s male narrator—clearly, another man with a strong sense of personal entitlement. As in Dylan’s song, the woman seems at first to be in control. The narrator tells us he was “biding my time”, but when the woman says “It’s time for bed”, she immediately scotches any ideas the narrator might have about sex: “She told me she worked/In the morning and started to laugh.” The singer is left with no choice but “to sleep in the bath”. Lennon deftly shows us that the woman is in control: the singer does not gallantly choose to sleep in the bath, but “crawled off to sleep in the bath.”

As in Dylan’s song, the narrator soon gets the opportunity to turn the tables. When he wakes in the morning, the woman, as she said the night before, has had to go to work, leaving him alone in the flat. So, as revenge for wasting his time, and not inviting him into her bed, he sets fire to her room, which is lined with Norwegian wood panelling (but otherwise seems trendily minimalist in its furnishing—“there wasn’t a chair”).

Lennon’s narrator is almost as nasty a piece of work as Dylan’s. Maybe not quite almost; Dylan’s outdoes Lennon’s by murdering the woman who wastes his time. Dylan’s song does not just outdo Lennon’s by being richer and more complex, but it also outdoes it in portraying an even more extreme misogynistic response to a woman who tries to control her own life.

There’s one more important point to note about the comparison between “Norwegian Wood” and “Fourth Time Around”. Given that “Norwegian Wood” was talked about at the time of its release as an attempt by Lennon to imitate Dylan’s style, it is easy to see why Dylan might have been offended so much that he felt obliged to write his riposte. It is not just that “Norwegian Wood” is such a trivial pop song—let’s face it, it is much closer to earlier (and, for that matter, later) Beatles’ songs than it is to anything in Dylan’s output. “Norwegian Wood” conforms to the pop song format, after all, running at 2:05 minutes.

Certainly, it is a wonderful, and rightly, much loved song, but it is a Beatles’ song and doesn’t really seem much like a Dylan song. If this had been the only problem with Lennon’s song, Dylan might simply have concluded that this wasn’t very much like his work, and might have moved on without bothering to respond. But the real problem with Lennon’s song is that it is quietly, but nonetheless maliciously, immoral.

There is no hint in “Norwegian Wood” that the narrator has done anything wrong. On the contrary, as he sets fire to the girl’s room, the singer declares “Isn’t it good, Norwegian wood?” It burns well, and in the context of the song, that’s what makes it good; but the phrase “Isn’t it good” inevitably conveys the narrator’s sense of smug satisfaction at setting fire to the woman’s home.

Of course, back in 1965, Lennon was able to deliver this as a jokey piece—albeit a misogynistic joke. Nobody at the time would have considered it as a song with a moral message, or rather a song without a moral message—nobody, except perhaps an affronted Dylan. As a song-writer, Dylan has never failed to take a moral stance in his songs, even in his humorous songs. “Fourth Time Around” does not share the same uncaring immorality as “Norwegian Wood”. Certainly, it is true that Dylan does not explicitly moralise in the course of the song—although the woman’s “Everybody must give something back/For something they get” hints at retribution.

There are no comments in the song about the rights or wrongs of what is happening. There is no authorial voice here, as there is, for example, in “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (“But you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears/Take the rag away from your face/Now ain’t the time for your tears”), or in “Hurricane” (“How can the life of such a man/Be in the palm of some fool’s hand?”), commenting from “outside” the action of the song on the morality of the events described.

In “Fourth Time Around” Dylan paints a picture of a brutal and deeply unpleasant man, a casual murderer who is obviously selfish and self-justifying, but he does not overtly say his actions are bad or wrong. But Dylan does not need to moralise in any explicit way, because he has set “Fourth Time Around” firmly in the tradition of murder ballads. As a murder ballad, “Fourth Time Around” carries the implicit moralizing of the whole tradition with it.

Murder ballads were never written to glorify, much less promote, murder. Indeed, many of them include explicit moralising in the course of the song. But even those that do not explicitly moralise owe their popularity and longevity in folk traditions to their ability to remind us that murder is always wrong, especially when performed by those who pretend to be, or want to be, our lovers. By escalating the crime of his narrator from setting fire to a would-be lover’s room, to murdering that lover, Dylan automatically introduces a moral stance into his song that is completely lacking in Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood”—it is the unspoken moral stance of the tradition of murder ballads.

Dylan has always had an unparalleled knowledge of all the forms of popular song, and how to use those traditions in innovative ways in his own song-writing. Seeking to out-do Lennon’s “Norwegian Wood”, Dylan effectively turned the villain in Lennon’s song from an arsonist into a murderer, and in so doing made a brilliant contribution to the tradition of murder ballads.

12 years of Untold Dylan

Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc.  We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan.  We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers.  Although no one gets paid, 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 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

• Part 1: Bob Dylan: Fearful Symmetry
• Bob Dylan And Fearful Symmetry (Part II)
• Bob Dylan And Fearful Symmetry (Part III)
• Bob Dylan And Fearful Symmetry (Part IV)
• Bob Dylan And Fearful Sympathy (Part V)

by Larry Fyffe

A mythology is a narrative, usually from yesteryear, of imagined characters on a quest who are depicted as heroes, villains, and fools – a narrative that may have some basis in actual historical happenings.

As with ‘Dylanologist’ Kees de Graaf, Northrop Frye’s Christian viewpoint that holds the myths of the Holy Bible to be a “Great Code” of unity is  problematic – everybody’s heading off in the same direction.

At least contends the literary critic Harold Bloom. Says he: William Blake’s poetry can be considered mythological as well as based on the Holy Bible, but essentially Blake’s mythology is a personal one. According to the American literary critic, who like Frye is wary of Deconstructionists, Blake looks at the Holy Bible from a Gnostic-like point of view –  Blake’s  methodology is fragmented rather than unified, caught as it is in a particular space and time; it’s associative, metonymic, and demonic. The ‘New’ rebels against the ‘Old’, says Bloom; and the ‘Old’ can come back as though ‘New’ again.

A view expressed in the following song lyrics, laden with metonymies:

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep you eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no telling who it's naming
But the loser now will be later to win
(Bob Dylan: The Times They Are A-Changing)

Consequently the courageous Tiger-like God of the slave-escaped Hebrews ought not be likened to the sacrificial Lamb of God ~ the Jesus worshipped by Christians, Fryed up together, so to speak.

As expressed below, with plenty of associative diction again:

I don't need your organizations, I've shined your shoes
I've moved your mountains, and marked your cards
But Eden is burning, either get ready for elimination
Or else your hearts must have the courage for the changing of the guards

Frye compares Ecclesiastics of the Old Testament to the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, and finds unity in their meaning:

Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done in earth
As it is in heaven
(Matthew 6: 10)

William Blake and/or his motifs show up in the mythological aspects of a number of Bob Dylan song lyrics; there may indeed be nothing new under the sun, but there be things that are lost and forgotten – like an old black-humoured vaudeville tune concerning Afro-American poverty in America; and, of course, there’s Little Richard who’s mentioned previously:

Open the door, Richard
I've heard it said before
Open the door, Richard
I've heard it said before
But I ain't gonna hear it said no more
(Bob Dylan: Open The Door Homer)

Then again what’s forgotten can be re-discovered, revived, and revised:

I go right to the edge, I go right to the end
I go right where all things lost are made good again
I sing of experience like William Blake
I have no apologies to make
(Bob Dylan: I Contain Multitudes)

In at least one “misreading”, the mythological tragic story-song below can be construed as the above mentioned poet, accompanied by  a Puritan, and a Beach Boy, heading out West to America:

Calvin, Blake, Wilson
Gambled in the dark
Not one of them would ever live to
Tell the tale of disembark
(Bob Dylan: Tempest)

Dead men, dead men.

12 years of Untold Dylan

Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc.  We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan.  We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers.  Although no one gets paid, 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 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

And perhaps I could make this a suitable reminder that Untold exists as it does, because people who enjoy Dylan’s music from all over the world, send in articles.  Without all these contributors we would be as nought.

12 years of Untold Dylan

Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc.  We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan.  We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers.  Although no one gets paid, 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 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

by Jochen Markhorst

I           Daddy’s looking for the fragmentation bomb’s fuse

In the Collier’s Weekly of 1 September 1928, at the height of the Prohibition, star journalist John T. Flynn devotes an extensive article to the enormous success of the homebrewing phenomenon: “Home, Sweet Home-Brew”. The four best-selling grocery items at the moment are, according to Flynn, malt, grapes, bottles and caps. When added to the turnover generated by the sale of the necessary equipment, Flynn calculates dizzying sums of money moving around: about $600 million, which today amounts to around $10,000,000,000 – ten billion dollars, that is. That may seem a bit exaggerated, but his point is clear: since the Prohibition, self-distilling and brewing of alcoholic beverages has grown extremely popular, and there is an insane amount of money involved in that business.

Flynn introduces the article with a verse from “Prohibition Song”, which he picked up somewhere:

“A Rotary Club poet in Cooperstown, N. Y., thus translates this great American household industry, built on the cookstove and the kitchen sink, into song:

Mother's in the kitchen
Washing out the jugs;
Sister's in the pantry
Bottling the suds;
Father's in the cellar
Mixing tip the hops;
Johnny's on the front porch
Watching for the cops”

The source of that Rotary Club poet from Cooperstown is clear. Two years earlier, 4 November 1926, the South Carolinian Chris Bouchillon in Atlanta, Georgia, recorded the first talking blues, with the verses

Mama's in the kitchen, preparin' to eat
Sister's in the pantry, lookin' for the yeast
Papa's in the cellar, mixin' up the hops
Brother's at the window, lookin' for the cops!
Makin' home brew!
Makes ya happee!
Hic! Hic!

The inspiration leading to the invention of the talking blues is prosaic. Bouchillon cannot sing very well, it’s pretty horrible actually, but his “recording producer” (the somewhat grandiose function title for the man pressing the record button and then pressing it again after three minutes) always collapses into uncontrollable laughter because of Bouchillon’s manner of speaking, and suggests simply reciting the lyrics. It’s a wonderful idea.

Bouchillon’s lyrics are amusing at best, but his very dry recitation and his witty, half-mumbled commentary in between increases the funniness exponentially. Woody Guthrie not only copies large fragments of Bouchillon’s lyrics, but also his way of reciting and the interjections, which Dylan, in turn, copies one-on-one by for his talking-songs. The copies are quite faithful; the similarities between Bouchillon’s approach and Dylan’s recital style on songs such as “Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues” and “Talking New York” are unmistakable, despite the detour via intermediate station Guthrie.

For “Tombstone Blues” Dylan borrows – obviously – not the talking form, but some content; the chorus paraphrases Bouchillon’s “New Talking Blues” and Woody Guthrie’s adaptation thereof, “Talking Blues”;

Mamma's in the kitchen fixin' the yeast.
Poppa's in the bedroom greasin' his feet.
Sister's in the cellar squeezin' up the hops.
Brother's in the window just a-watchin' for the cops

Johnny, basement and mixing were used a few months ago for the opening of “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (“Johnny’s in the basement, mixing up the medicine”), but there is still plenty left:

Mama’s in the fact’ry
She ain’t got no shoes
Daddy’s in the alley
He’s lookin’ for the fuse
I’m in the streets
With the tombstone blues

… which, remarkably enough, vaguely echoes some content of Bouchillon’s original; the constellation that Mama is at work while Daddy is dallying outside, can be found at Bouchillon several times, in slightly different variants:

Ain't no use me workin' so hard.
I got a gal in the white folks' yard.
When she kills a chicken, she sends me the feet.
She thinks I'm workin'. But I'm loafin' the street.
Havin' a good time. Talkin’ about her. To two other women.

By the way, contrary to what the lyrics suggest, Bouchillon is white.

However, Dylan’s primary source is probably Guthrie. The opening couplets already do indicate so;

The sweet pretty things are in bed now of course
The city fathers they’re trying to endorse
The reincarnation of Paul Revere’s horse
But the town has no need to be nervous

The ghost of Belle Starr she hands down her wits
To Jezebel the nun she violently knits
A bald wig for Jack the Ripper who sits
At the head of the chamber of commerce

… admittedly a wild, seemingly completely unrelated huddle of archetypes and historical figures from all corners of cultural history, but mentioning Paul Revere and Belle Starr in the same breath actually does point to Woody Guthrie; his autobiography Bound For Glory (1943) is probably the only book in Dylan’s bookcase, if not one of the very few books at all, in which both names are within shooting distance of each other. True, separated by a few pages, but Dylan is, according to his own words, imbued with Woody’s book:

I went through it from cover to cover like a hurricane, totally focused on every word, and the book sang out to me like the radio. Guthrie writes like the whirlwind and you get tripped out on the sound of the words alone. […] Bound for Glory is a hell of a book. It’s huge. Almost too big.
(Chronicles Chapter 5, “River Of Ice”)

So, maybe one traceable association. Which does not alter the fact that “Tombstone Blues” has one of the most unleashed lyrics from Dylan’s mercury period, of course.

Six octaves separated by a recurring chorus. The octaves being divided into two quatrains, which are hardly connected content-wise, but still technically connected: by the rhyme aaab-cccb. And in content a fragmentation bomb of disrupting word combinations, off-course actors, alienating side-paths and exuberant rhyming pleasure.

From the first verse on, the delight for language game and linguistic pleasure are leading. The lieder poet rhymes of course with endorse and horse, without worrying about something as futile as a storyline or lyrical expressiveness – so we’ll have a town council trying to endorse the reincarnation of Paul Revere’s horse. Because why not.

The unusual word combination handing down wits is followed by a kind of antithesis: Jezebel the nun. Antithesis, as Jezebel is not exactly a paragon of virtue in the Bible. The Old Testament Jezebel is a power-hungry queen who dies an ugly death (she is thrown out the window and trampled to a pulp by the horses of Jehu’s chariot), the New Testament Jezebel is a false prophet (Revelations 2:20). And in blackface minstrel shows of the nineteenth century, “Jezebel” is quite the opposite of a nun; there she is the stereotype of the adulterous, sexually-voracious black woman, the opposite of the sober, virtuous Victorian lady.

At this point, the poet gets truly unleashed. “Violently knitting” is a beautiful, funny catachresis, a non-existent word connection. The “bald wig” is a contradictio in terminis with a word-playful follow-up to head of the chamber of commerce. Jack the Ripper, the archetypal English killer who turns up in between, completely out of place, probably owes his supporting role to the preparatory work of Belle Starr, to the association with an archetypal American outlaw. And to the poet’s love of sound, perhaps – “rip” does sound nice, after all, among wits, knits, wig and sits.

Outrageous, surrealistic and irresistible. And it shall get even worse.

To be continued. Next up: Tombstone Blues 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
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits (German)

12 years of Untold Dylan

Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc.  We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan.  We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers.  Although no one gets paid, 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 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

By Tony Attwood

Apologies if you found the formatting on this article problematic near the end.  I think it is fixed now.  Tony

——–

This article continues from 1971: When I paint that masterpiece I’ll be ready to tour again and is part of the “All directions at once” series.  You can find a full index to the series which considers Dylan’s compositions from the 1950s onwards, at “All Directions” 

—————–

If art is politically incorrect, does that make it bad art?

Do I worry if some traditional blues songs often have overtly misogynistic lyrics?  Or do I excuse that because “that’s what those guys thought at the time”?  Do I worry about Little Richard’s sudden change of view, or Chuck Berry’s thoughts on particularly young ladies?  Do I worry that Bob Dylan seems to have suggested he feels mankind’s exploration of space is not a good idea?  Does it change my appreciation of Bob’s music knowing that for 18 months he wrote a whole stream of seemingly overtly Christian songs; a challenge for me as I am overtly atheist.

In short, when considering songs, does background matter, do lyrics matter?  Is it the message, the clever word conjunctions, the melody, the chords, the accompaniment, or that oh so difficult thing to define – the “feel” of the music, that is the essence of it all?  Is it that just because it is Bob, it is good?  Is it that because it is Bob, he can get away with anything he likes?

What makes me say that “Visions” is a masterpiece, and that the various versions by Old Crow Medicine Show surpasses every other version I have heard?  Certainly the lyrics, and the hard-to-define message, and the way the music is interpreted gives me that feel of something worth contemplating.  And what makes me adore one live recording which got tucked away in a review I wrote?

And I know it is just me, because when with ludicrous excitement I introduce friends to the Old Crow versions of “Visions” mostly they just don’t get it.

All these questions tumbled forth as I considered Dylan’s 1971 compositions, because of  “George Jackson” and the work this year with Allen Ginsberg, and the rest.

With “George Jackson” I can’t recall any review that separates the music from the meaning of the lyrics, and indeed from the lyrics itself.   Which is a shame because when you consider the lines

Sent him off to prison
For a seventy-dollar robbery
Closed the door behind him
And they threw away the key

I think, “what? Bob wrote that?  Oh come on!” and more or less stop there.  I am not at all sure there is any need to consider what sort of man Jackson was, the songwriting is pretty naff.  “Lock him up and threw away the key” is so passée surely Bob could do better than that.  So I wonder if he was even bothered.  Especially in the year when Bob opened a song with

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
Ancient footprints are everywhere
You can almost think that you’re seein’ double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs

Thus, for me, the debate about who George Jackson was and what he did, isn’t really very important, because actually, it’s not (in my personal opinion of course) a very exciting work in terms of its literary input, nor indeed its music.  I don’t even get to the worries about whether George Jackson was a good guy wronged or a bad guy being wrongly excused with such ordinary lyrics as this.  Did the same brain come up with “my love she speaks like silence”?

And that’s not the only piece of Dylan’s that I happily live without.  Before “Masterpiece” we had “Vomit Express” – there’s a copy on this site within the review of the song with the complete lyrics – but I only put it in because I was working towards this site being comprehensive,  What exactly is the point of this joint composition?  I certainly didn’t know first time I heard it, not after I reviewed it.  I don’t get it, I live without it.

I’m not going to try and take the debates on Jackson or Ginsberg any further – but it raises a major point to which I wish to divert: if a composer has views that I find utterly unacceptable would that reduce the quality of the piece of music in which they are expressed, or in all his music, or not at all.

Supposing a great visual artist is a wife-beater, does that reduce the esteem in which we might hold his art?  If not, would it, if the artist painted abstracts which learned professors see as representations of his violence?   If the greatest songwriter of the era spends his time trying to convert his fans to a particular religion does that make those who don’t follow his urgings unable to appreciate the music?  Does it reduce the quality of the music?

It’s an issue I will explore in depth when we get to 1979 and in particular with “I believe in you”.  If you, by any strange chance, recall my review of Sinead O’Connor’s performance of this song, and  the reasons behind it, you’ll know what I mean.  But the key point is that the lyrics and feel within a brilliant, flexible song can be manipulated into multiple meanings.

But for now, faced with George Jackson the question is – what are we basing our opinions on?  The melody, the accompaniment, the lyrics, the meaning, the chord sequence, the history, how memorable it is, the morality and lifestyle of the performer, how many times we can listen to it…   And I guess the answer is “all of that,” but that each of us places different emphases on each of these.

So I am wondering what made Bob write “George Jackson” and “Vomit Express”?  What made him write “Ballad in Plain D”?  Could it be that sometimes he is just  “writing without thinking”.  Or was it just that he was angry?

Let’s step back a little and try answering this in relation to the years recently covered in the series and think of the reasons for writing each song or in some cases a whole album:

• 1967: JWH album: contractual reasons, wanting to get away from complex songs that couldn’t be made to work in the studio, running out of songs at the end so adding a couple of simple country numbers…
• 1968: Lay lady lay and nothing else: just being tired of the writing process, finding no ideas would come…
• 1969: Love, lost love and country music: thinking about his love life, getting further away from his earlier music.
• 1970: New Morning: trying to express the essence of his life
• 1971: When I paint my masterpiece, George Jackson, Watching the river flow….

Seen with this sort of “why is he writing like this?” question in mind, I think I can now finally tackle what I sat down to write about several days ago and then got stuck: “Watching the river flow.”

“Watching the River Flow” is a rhythm and blues song: a song of beautiful simplicity for which the lyrics work perfectly. A song that says, “I’m just watching and waiting and seeing what happens next.”

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

Versions of the song range from around three minutes to more than twice that length – it just depends how contemplative of the river Bob wants to be.

And yet it is a song that critics and analysts have laboured over, instead of taking the easy route which says, he is just sitting, waiting, observing life, wondering what is going to come along next.

In one sense we can see it as Dylan’s own commentary of the rural idyll of New Morning, where he worships the countryside and the whole concept of doing not very much at all.   But here he has a real old time rock bounce which is utterly unlike anything in the albums of the era.  Different producers, different musicians, different sound, different style.  Back to R&B.  He’s not sitting back doing nothing.  Not with that music.  He is playing and enjoying it.

Just the opening lines tell us where we are

What’s the matter with me?
I don’t have much to say

He feels this isn’t all there is, but he isn’t ready to take a step in the new direction yet

If I had wings and I could fly
I know where I would go
But right now I’ll just sit here so contentedly
And watch the river flow

The artist has to be an observer or an activist or both, just as the activist has to be an observer at times, and the observer comes an activist through the interpretation of the world around him that he uses in his work.

But Dylan’s multiple viewpoints – the value of life, the need to express the validity of basic human rights no matter who you are, the abhorrence of war, the delight in old folk songs, the love of blues, the invention of a beat generation form of music (with Subterranean Homesick Blues), the creation of rock style songs where time does not run true and extra bars and beats pop up, these all need reflection to be drawn into the debate.

And for me this is the essence of the failure of most reviews and critiques of Dylan.  They take a song, and analyse that, without taking overall context of Dylan’s progression, of Dylan the artist who is questing and questioning, who is sometimes reflective, sometimes offering opinions.  It’s not that unusual in the world of the arts at large – it is just unusual in popular music.

People disagreeing on all just about everything, yeah
Makes you stop and all wonder why

Yet it is not so difficult.  The artist is the observer and the interpreter, for how else does the artist work?  What was Dylan doing when he created “Desolation Row” but observing the events around him, and then drawing out the key points and commenting upon them?  Where did Visions of Johanna come from, apart from watching people sitting in isolation, failing to make proper contact with each, lacking within themselves the glue that holds society together.

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

The movement from passive observer to active artist comes at the moment of artistic creation.  The moment the band begins to play the rhythm and blues and Dylan scribbles on his notepad

What’s the matter with me
I don’t have much to say

And yet at the same time he is once more active, interpreting his role, re-analysing the world, recognising that you don’t write “Like a Rolling Stone” every day of the week, and fortunately you don’t have to.

A few years before watching the river flow would have been a case of doing nothing other than sitting back in the gentleness that is painted in New Morning, and watching the river flow.  But in reality few can ever do nothing; eventually most of us become engaged with the world once more.

And what is that whole first verse but a verse expressing this restlessness, saying that just watching the river flow is not enough…

Daylight sneakin’ through the window
And I’m still in this all-night café
Walkin’ to and fro beneath the moon
Out to where the trucks are rollin’ slow
To sit down on this bank of sand
And watch the river flow

So now finally we can understand “George Jackson” and “Vomit Express”.  He’s watching the world go by, but also launching out on the first few experiments, thoughts, ideas, options…

Most artists (I’d say maybe all artists save those who tragically die very young) need periods of disengagement from public life and from their art in order to think and re-think.  These down times are not what make the artist famous – but most artists have such days.

Besides, when you listen to the song, it is nothing like the sitting in the log cabin and going out to catch a fish for the evening meal as we hear in New Morning.  This is the river of life that is so incredibly energetic that you certainly do need to sit back sometimes, just to draw breath from everything moving past you at ten thousand miles an hour.

Indeed it is quite possible to argue that Dylan is having a bit of fun here.  “Hey,” he is saying, “so you liked the rural charm of New Morning?  Ok, I’m going  to just sit back in my little log cabin up in the mountains and watch the world go by….  Like hell I am.    I might be sitting in looking at the river, by inside me that old rock n roll is still playing.

Besides, he is in the all-night cafe, he’s not going to bed as the sun goes down and getting up in the morning at sun rise.  He is in the country in the style of New Morning, but unlike New Morning he very much does not want just the peaceful idyll and nothing else.  He wants to be in the city.  Maybe today he doesn’t want to be in the middle of the action, but I suspect even Che Guevara had the occasional day off.

The clue is in that phrase “I don’t have too much to say.”   For it has multiple meanings.

One is, I ain’t anyone special, rather like “Don’t follow leaders” – as in “do your own thing, not what I say”.  I’m just this guy, you know.

Another is that I am a quiet man, a man in retreat.

Another is that, just at this moment I am contemplative, considering, building up information.  I have no idea where my next masterpiece is coming from, but it’s in there, or out there, somewhere.  Just give it time, and before you know it “Tangled up in blue” will emerge.  Don’t know when, don’t know quite how, but there are these stirrings…

Another is that the answer to the question is so simple I can say it in a few lines.  As in, “It’s not that complicated.  Just be kind, forgiving, loving and giving.  What else do I need to say?”

So my point is that “I’m fresh out of ideas” is just one of the many interpretations of the song.  It is the one most people have jumped on, but it is by no means the only one and personally I think there’s a lot of evidence to suggest it isn’t the right one.  Dylan is always far more complex than that.

So let’s go right, right back to the start.  Remember this

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

No one who has heard Ballad for a Friend has ever said that at this point he was losing it because he just sitting, without too much to say. He’s contemplative because his friend was in an accident.  That is a reasonable state of mind to be in, to cope with the sudden catastrophe.

“Watching the river” is a song of restlessness.  “I’ve got somewhere, I want to go on.”  The exact opposite of the run down artist fresh out of ideas.

Wish I was back in the city
Instead of this old bank of sand
With the sun beating down over the chimney tops
And the one I love so close at hand

If anything those are lines from a love song, not a “oh woe, I have lost my muse” song.

He is in fact just as content as he was in his house up in the hills in “New Morning.”  The only difference is now he is content because he know it is nearly time to move on.  This is nice and peaceful here.  Give me another minute.

There is a pattern to life that goes way beyond our individual time on this earth – the fundamental Taoist philosophy…

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

In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if Dylan hadn’t been reading Lao Tzu’s 81 poem masterpiece Tao Te Ching with its images of the river of life against which you cannot fight.  And why not – it is a volume that has brought inspiration and comfort to millions.

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

Bob wrote two more songs in this year: “Wallflower”, a simple country song and “For you baby,” another piece of experimentation along the lines of “Vomit Express”.  He was still sitting, watching the river flow, not especially hurried about doing anything else.

Wallflower is a country song not saying anything new.  A jotting.

Here’s another look…

And it is a perfectly decent piece of country music which has been recorded by many other artists who have generally maintained its simple visions

Wallflower, wallflower
Won’t you dance with me?
I’m sad and lonely too
Wallflower, wallflower
Won’t you dance with me?
I’m fallin’ in love with you

Just like you I’m wondrin’ what I’m doin’ here
Just like you I’m wondrin’ what’s goin’ on
It continues in this approach and then ends
I have seen you standing in the smoky haze
And I know that you’re gonna be mine one of these days
Mine alone

Wallflower, wallflower
Take a chance on me
Please let me ride you home

Now just because Dylan wrote “It’s all right Ma” and “Desolation Row” and the rest doesn’t mean that simple songs are no good.  Many of us can still, after over 50 years, listen to “That’s Alright” by Elvis Presley and get a lot out of the song.  It’s just that somehow the simplicity doesn’t seem to have anything else with it to make it worth hearing more than once.  But I think it is just my lack of connection with country music – because clearly so many other people feel quite differently about it.

When Diana Krall included the song on her 2015 album she was asked by Billboard why she used the song and said, “I love Dylan and always have. I got stuck on ‘Wallflower,’ listening over and over again.

Sometimes that is all it takes.  But that doesn’t mean that somewhere out in the distance, that river is flowing, and maybe even a wild cat is growling.

12 years of Untold Dylan

Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc.  We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan.  We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers.  Although no one gets paid, 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 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

This is episode 21 of the Never Ending Tour series by Mike Johnson (Kiwipoet)

A full index of all the articles in the Never Ending Tour series is given here.

This and the previous post are dedicated to the songs of the 1960s, and how Dylan was bringing them back to life in 1994. Without any recent albums introducing new material into the shows, Dylan was thrown back on his old favourites and that core of songs that made him famous in the first place.

Prominent in this core group is ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’(1963), one of Dylan’s earliest and perhaps greatest protest songs. In musical form it is based on the 19th century ballad ‘Lord Randal’, but oh, what a makeover it gets when Dylan performs it in front of a full orchestra. If you haven’t already found this on You Tube you’re in for a treat. Dylan went to Japan for The Great Musical Experience, which is just what it was.

Dylan has learned with this song, and other long, repetitive songs like ‘Desolation Row’, to start quietly and build the vocal to a climax. Guitar and harmonica breaks are also staged to gather to a climax. These climaxes are not built into the musical form but created by Dylan to introduce an element of musical drama the originals lack. This ‘Hard Rain’ is a beautiful illustration of Dylan’s developing vocal mastery.

With the full orchestra, these climaxes are accompanied by the swirl of strings and the wail of horns. It shouldn’t work but it does.

Readers of these posts know that I don’t use You Tube links, partly because many of the songs I look at are not on You Tube, but also because those links may vanish as fast as they appear, and all too often we’re confronted with a ‘This video is not available’ notice. But there is special fascination I think in seeing Dylan out of his usual habitat, with solemn Japanese playing their violins as if Dylan were Beethoven, and Dylan himself turning that ballad into a wonderful musical epic. It is lavish and extravagant. Enjoy. I have put the audio link in as usual in case some day the vid falls foul of the Web sheriff.

Hard Rain

The rumourmongers have been hard at work explaining how come Dylan’s voice improved so much. Dylan got singing lessons before going to Japan. Dylan gave up drinking in 1994. Take your pick or make up your own, but don’t forget to enjoy the results. Not Caruso exactly but getting there…!

I have described ‘Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues’ as a junky’s lament. It’s a bleak song. Take this encounter with a prostitute:

‘Sweet Melinda, the peasants call her the goddess of gloom
She speaks good English and she invites you up into her room
And you're so kind and careful not to go to her too soon
And she takes your voice and leaves you howling at the moon’

The third line refers to the practice of allowing time before going to the woman’s room in order not to alert the police to her activities. And we are in a place where ‘the cops don’t need you/and man they expect the same’.

In performance, Dylan has found a tempo that kicks it along, and while it may not achieve the bone-grating desperation of the 1966 performances, it carries us along just fine.

Tom Thumb Blues

According to my often unreliable sources this is the only time Dylan played the song in 1994  (August 26).

While we’re hanging around Highway 61 Revisited (1964), what better than to go to the next track on the album, ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ itself. In previous posts I have suggested that this song is more serious than it sounds. On the album, it has a manic energy and a bouncy upbeat melody, as if this were some cheerful, throwaway exercise. It is, however, anything but cheerful and throwaway, being about God and Death and Mercy and World War III – and a girl whose complexion is much too white.

Not quite as energetic as the studio version, it also clips along at a fair, crowd-pleasing pace and Dylan’s vocals are spot on. If it’s energy and madness you want, wait until the guitars come in blazing…

Highway 61 revisited.

‘Positively 4^th Street’, from the Highway 61 Revisited era, but not included on the album, is one of Dylan’s most famous attack songs. Most decidedly not a love song, and maybe best delivered in a jeering voice. Look at how Dylan twists the popular saying that to have empathy for a person you need to able to ‘stand in their shoes’.

I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes
And just for that one moment I could be you
Yes, I wish that for just one time you could stand inside my shoes
You'd know what a drag it is to see you

Positively 4^th Street (A)

The You Tube clip of this performance is replete with hyperbole: ‘Fantastic!!! Exceptional…’ It’s a wonderful performance but shouldn’t be oversold. Because then we have no adjectives left, or run out of exclamation marks, when we come upon a truly moving performance like this understated one, so much more deadly for not being too accusative. Touches of gentleness and hurt are allowed to show, and the song’s greatness is revealed. Not a single moment of the nine minutes feels wasted. It becomes more contemplative and dreamy, more in the vein of ‘Queen Jane Approximately’.

Positively 4^th Street (B)

My problem is that I can’t confidently date this performance. It turned up in my lists, an orphan. I can’t even be sure that it’s from 1994, and would be happy if a knowledgeable reader could identify it. There was nowhere else to put it, and it’s so good I couldn’t leave it out.

‘It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’ comes at the cusp of Dylan’s changeover from folk singer to rock singer and has often been seen as a farewell to his old life. Significantly, the last track on Bringing It all Back Home (1965). This may well be true, just as it may well be a farewell song to Joan Baez, but as I suggested in my Master Harpist series, it may be one of Dylan’s greatest love songs – love’s last song. The final gut wrenching moment of separation. Admirers of Dylan’s 1995 Prague performance of the song will find earlier versions of that arrangement here, in 1994.

It’s driven by an insistent, compelling beat we don’t find in the original. Against that beat Dylan can pit his voice and his harp, using both to push and explore the emotional reaches of the song. Images of sadness and separation are all the more effective by being surreal and indirect:

‘Yonder stands your orphan with his gun
Crying like a fire in the sun’

The throes of love are expressed in an equally elusive and suggestive way:

‘The empty handed painter from your street
Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheet’

It’s the wonder of poetry that in two lines you can express something it would take a couple of paragraphs of prose to explain, and you still wouldn’t have it. The great thing about poetry is that it can’t be reduced to prose explanations without loss of essence.

I’ve chosen two performances of this great song, partly just to enjoy a good thing, but also to show how hard Dylan was working on it. Each performance is just different enough for us to hear the search for the most perfect expression of the song. That would have to wait until next year. In the meantime this performance (Germany, don’t have exact date) sees Dylan reaching for that balance between restraint and passion in a performance tremulous and heartbroken.

It’s all over now (A)

Dylan was trying out this new arrangement all through the year, giving rise to a number of brilliant performances, each one approaching the song with a slightly different emphasis and vocal intonation. This next one (date unknown) is slower and more empathic. A different kind of balance, Dylan’s voice soaring in counterpoint to Garnier’s long, low drawn out notes on the double bass.

It’s all over now (B)

This is a good place to pause. There is more but you can have too much of a good thing – Dylan’s core songs given such rich and imaginative treatment. I’ll be back soon with the final in this Absolutely Vintage Dylan season – Encore.

Stay safe and keep rockin.

Kia Ora

12 years of Untold Dylan

There is an index of some of our recent articles on the home page of this site.

Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc.  We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan.  We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers.  Although no one gets paid, 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 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

by Aaron Galbraith.

Back in 2015 RCA & Legacy Records had a massive worldwide hit album, “If I Can Dream,” using the original vocals of Elvis Presley and newly recorded backing tracks from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. This led to further albums, two more from Elvis, two from Roy Orbison, a Beach Boys set, Buddy Holly, Rod Stewart and there is even one from Cilla Black.

Then this month came Johnny Cash’s set, which included amongst the tracks a new version of Bob and Johnny’s Girl From The North County duet from the Nashville Skyline album. It is stunning! See what you think.

I got goosebumps listening to this! I have quite a few of these “… with The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra” albums..couple of Elvis, two Roy Orbison, a Beach Boys and a Buddy Holly..but this Johnny Cash one might be the best of all!

Could there be a full Dylan with The RPO album? Based on this one I think it would be tremendous, but I’m not sure what tracks they would choose!

This track is a start… but man this was tough to whittle this down to just 12 to make a album. I tried to steer away from just including the 60s classics and tried to throw a few curve balls in also. Really wanted to include “Living The Blues” for some reason! I just thought it would work well. Also thought about “Tell Ol’ Bill”, maybe these two could be bonus tracks on the deluxe special edition!

Here’s what we came up with.

1. Boots Of Spanish Leather
2. Forever Young (Rod Stewart’s rewrite already appeared on his RSO album)

3. Sugar Baby (just came across this great version)

4. I Shall Be Released
5. Tomorrow Is A Long Time
6. Up To Me
7. Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here With You
8. Mississippi
9. Only A Pawn In Their Game
10. Abandoned Love
11. Blind Willie McTell
12. Blowin’ In The Wind

Of course the album doesn’t exist… but maybe someone from the RPO might see this idea and think about the possibilities.

Or perhaps they already are working on it.  But just in case they need a bit of help here’s a remembrance of time past…

and by way of variation

Footnote from Tony: (sorry Aaron, I just can resist jumping in)

I’m not sure about Blowin in the Wind – its been done so often in so many ways, so I think it would be good to challenge the orchestrator with one of those Dylan songs that has only one or two lines.   I’ve written so much about the “Drifter’s Escape” in this regard of late I won’t torment you with any more (although I am contemplating an article on Dylan’s two line songs) but if they really want a challenge and a half after orchestrating Abandoned Love, and  how about working on this piece of genius…

Explanation: In case you have not come across “Aaron and Tony” articles before – Aaron lives in the USA and Tony in the UK.  Our only communication is via these articles – Aaron kicks them off and does all the work, and Tony jumps in at the end and pontificates a bit.

We quite enjoy it, and it keeps us happy, and not too many other publications indulge in this sort of thing.   But if you have an idea for an article or a series that goes off in some other weird direction, please do send it in, preferably with a sample of what it would look like.  Tony@schools.co.uk

12 years of Untold Dylan

Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc.  We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan.  We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers.  Although no one gets paid, 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 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

by mr tambourine (videos selected by Tony)

Bob was first supposed to have an American Summer Tour announced from June 4 to July 12. Like the Japanese tour before it, it was cancelled.

But…

What if the pandemic had actually started after July 12, for example in late July/early August, just so Bob could do his tours?

In the first article considering this, we looked at the Japan tour.

In the second part we moved to the USA Bob Dylan’s American Spring and Summer Tour

And now the conclusion

June 28, 2020: Southaven, Mississippi – BankPlus Amphitheatre @ Snowden Grove

https://youtu.be/12ewncLKo1A

1. Things Have Changed
2. It Ain’t Me Babe
3. My Own Version Of You
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. Can’t Wait
6. Black Rider
7. Honest With Me
8. Make You Feel My Love
9. Man Of Peace
10. Pay In Blood
11. Lenny Bruce
12. Early Roman Kings
13. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere
14. Mother Of Muses
15. Not Dark Yet
16. Just Like A Woman
17. Gotta Serve Somebody
18. Crossing The Rubicon (live debut)

Encore

19. I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You
20. Like A Rolling Stone

June 30, 2020 – Brandon, Mississippi – Brandon Amphitheatre

1. Things Have Changed
2. It Ain’t Me Babe
3. My Own Version Of You
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. Can’t Wait
6. Black Rider
7. Honest With Me
8. Man Of Peace
9. Make You Feel My Love
10. Pay In Blood
11. Lenny Bruce
12. Early Roman Kings
13. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere
14. Mother Of Muses
15. Not Dark Yet
16. Just Like A Woman
17. Gotta Serve Somebody
18. Crossing The Rubicon

Encore

19. I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You
20. Like A Rolling Stone

July 2, 2020: Nashville, Tennessee: Bridgestone Arena

1. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere (Bob on guitar)
2. It Ain’t Me Babe
3. My Own Version Of You
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. Tombstone Blues
6. Black Rider
7. Lonesome Day Blues
8. Man Of Peace
9. I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You
10. Pay In Blood
11. Lenny Bruce
12. Early Roman Kings
13. Lay Lady Lay (first performance since 2010) (Bob on guitar)
14. Mother Of Muses
15. Not Dark Yet
16. Just Like A Woman (Bob on guitar)
17. Gotta Serve Somebody
18. Crossing The Rubicon (Bob on guitar)

Encore

19. False Prophet (Bob on guitar)
20. Like A Rolling Stone

July 3, 2020:  Alpharetta, Georgia: Ameris Bank Amphitheatre

https://youtu.be/TRoiwSR32Jo

1. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere
2. It Ain’t Me Babe
3. My Own Version Of You
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. Can’t Wait
6. Black Rider
7. Honest With Me
8. Man Of Peace
9. I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You
10. Pay In Blood
11. Lenny Bruce
12. Early Roman Kings
13. Lay Lady Lay
14. I Contain Multitudes
15. Not Dark Yet
16. Just Like A Woman
17. Gotta Serve Somebody
18. Crossing The Rubicon

Encore

19. False Prophet
20. Like A Rolling Stone

July 5, 2020: Virginia Beach, Virginia: United Veterans Home Loan Amphitheatre

1. Goodbye Jimmy Reed (live debut, the line “can’t you hear me callin’ from Down in Virginia” makes crowd go crazy) (Bob on guitar)
2. I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You (Bob on guitar)
3. Highway 61 Revisited
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. Can’t Wait
6. Black Rider
7. Honest With Me
8. Man Of Peace
9. Lay Lady Lay
10. Pay In Blood (new arrangement)
11. Lenny Bruce
12. Early Roman Kings
13. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere
14. I Contain Multitudes
15. Not Dark Yet
16. Just Like A Woman
17. Gotta Serve Somebody
18. Crossing The Rubicon

Encore

19. False Prophet (Bob on guitar)
20. Billy 4

July 7, 2020: Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania: Mohegan Sun Arena

1. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere
2. It Ain’t Me Babe
3. Highway 61 Revisited
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. False Prophet
6. Lay Lady Lay
7. Honest With Me
8. Man Of Peace
9. Make You Feel My Love
10. Pay In Blood
11. Lenny Bruce
12. Early Roman Kings
13. Goodbye Jimmy Reed
14. I Contain Multitudes
15. Black Rider
16. Just Like A Woman
17. Gotta Serve Somebody
18. Crossing The Rubicon

Encore

19. My Own Version Of You
20. With God On Our Side

July 8, 2020: Forest Hills, New York: Forest Hills Stadium

1. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere
2. Lay Lady Lay
3. Highway 61 Revisited
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. False Prophet
6. Make You Feel My Love
7. Honest With Me
8. Man Of Peace
9. I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You
10. Pay In Blood
11. Lenny Bruce
12. Early Roman Kings
13. Like A Rolling Stone
14. Mother Of Muses
15. Not Dark Yet
16. Just Like A Woman
17. Gotta Serve Somebody

Encore

18. I Contain Multitudes (Bob on guitar)
19. Crossing The Rubicon (Bob on guitar)
20. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues (Bob on guitar, crowd goes wild after “I’m going back to New York City” line)

July 9, 2020: Saratoga Springs, New York: Saratoga Performing Arts Center

1. Things Have Changed
2. Lay Lady Lay
3. Highway 61 Revisited
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. Can’t Wait
6. Make You Feel My Love
7. Honest With Me
8. Man Of Peace
9. I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You
10. Pay In Blood
11. Lenny Bruce
12. Early Roman Kings
13. Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
14. Mother Of Muses
15. Not Dark Yet
16. Just Like A Woman
17. Gotta Serve Somebody

Encore

18. I Contain Multitudes
19. False Prophet
20. Tears Of Rage

July 11, 2020: Essex Junction, Vermont: Champlain Valley Explosition

1. Things Have Changed
2. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere
3. Highway 61 Revisited
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. Can’t Wait
6. Make You Feel My Love
7. My Own Version Of You
8. Man Of Peace
9. I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You
10. Pay In Blood
11. Tears Of Rage
12. Like A Rolling Stone
13. Early Roman Kings
14. Mother Of Muses
15. Not Dark Yet

Encore

16. Moonlight In Vermont (cover, live debut by Bob Dylan)
17. Key West (Philosopher Pirate) (live debut)

July 12, 2020: Bethel Woods, New York: Bethel Woods Center for the Arts

https://youtu.be/LTa9ZDMiwXk

1. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere (Bob on guitar)
2. Lay Lady Lay (Bob on guitar)
3. Tears Of Rage (Bob on guitar)
4. Black Rider
5. When I Paint My Masterpiece
6. I Contain Multitudes (Bob on guitar)
7. My Own Version Of You
8. Man Of Peace
9. Key West (Philosopher Pirate)
10. Lenny Bruce
11. Like A Rolling Stone
12. Early Roman Kings
13. Mother Of Muses
14. Not Dark Yet

Encore

15. Murder Most Foul

12 years of Untold Dylan

Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc.  We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan.  We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers.  Although no one gets paid, 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 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

by Jochen Markhorst

Ballad Of A Thin Man (Part 1): Along came Jones

Balled of a Thin Man (Part II) Freaks Geeks and Simples 

III         A one-eyed midget down on his knees

I fell to the floor
I got down on my knees
Then I looked at her, and she at me
Well, that's the way that I want it to stay
And I always want it to be that way for my Lola

 The Kinks’ “Lola” is a classic example of a song in which you only realise at the fourth or fifth listening what you are actually singing. And that song is actually still rather clear. Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now” is already more difficult – the song is so cheerful, exuberant and catchy that it takes a while before the hedonistic, promiscuous character of the lyrics gets through. “Ring My Bell” by Anita Ward, Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer”, Christina Aguilera’s “Genie In A Bottle”… the taboo on openly venting the joy of sex is a particularly potent driver of poetic inspiration.

In 1972 the American comedian George Carlin writes the monologue in which the picket lines are drawn refreshingly clearly: “Seven Words You Can Never Say On Television”. The seven words are, according to Carlin, shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker and tits. There are more taboo words, of course (explicit indications of the male sex organ, for example), but roughly speaking the list is quite correct; these are indeed the words that artists have had to avoid for centuries, causing poets to twist and bend and jump through ever more flowery hoops.

The furthest corners thereof have been explored by – obviously – the old blues pioneers. By now, pretty much all the fruit metaphors have been squeezed out. “Let Me Roll Your Lemon”, “Banana In Your Fruit Basket” (actually, just about every Bo Carter song), “Let Me Squeeze Your Lemon”, I like your apple on your tree up to Prince’s “Peach “… ah well, figs, melons, squashes and eggplants have been popular symbols since the Renaissance, from Raphael to Caravaggio. Something similar applies to any synonym of “locomotion” or “physical activity”; words like ride, shake, gravel, rock, drive, bang a songwriter no longer can use without immediately evoking nudge nudge wink wink reactions.

And after those antique fruit metaphors and the obvious “repeated movement” comparisons come the wilder, more and more explicit concealments. “Let Me Play With Your Poodle” by Dylan’s hero Tampa Red, Dinah Washington’s “Long John Blues”, “I Want Some Of Your Pie” by Blind Boy Fuller… hardly anybody will think that Tampa desires to express his affection for a canine or that Fuller communicates his culinary interest in a pastry product. Alice Cooper may roar my heart’s a muscle all he wants, we all know what he means with his “Muscle Of Love” (“Lock the door in the bathroom now / I just can’t get caught in here”)… after a century of sexual innuendo in song lyrics, the listener is conditioned.

Still, somewhere a grey zone can always be found by the creative poet, a zone where the ambiguities are vague enough to make one wonder whether there’s sexual intent, the ambiguities where the listener doubts whether the allusions he hears are due to his own dirty mind, or to some perverse intentions of the writer. “Willie And The Hand Jive” really, really is about a man who makes dance movements with his hands, as Johnny Otis insisted for the rest of his life. And

When you call my name, it's like a little prayer
I'm down on my knees, I wanna take you there
In the midnight hour, I can feel your power
Just like a prayer, you know I'll take you there

… is really meant to be pious, Madonna bravely perseveres. She doesn’t convince Pope John Paul II though, and the accompanying music video is objectionable too; the Vatican calls for a boycott of the singer (1989).

The devil there, like with “Lola”, is in that down on my knees, which in the conditioned, gradually perverted mind of the average music lover can only indicate the granting of certain oral sexual favours.

This connotation “Ballad Of A Thin Man” cannot escape either:

Well, the sword swallower, he comes up to you
And then he kneels
He crosses himself
And then he clicks his high heels
And without further notice
He asks you how it feels
And he says, “Here is your throat back
Thanks for the loan”

“Sword swallower”, “kneels”, “throat”, “he asks you how it feels”, plus the high heels suggesting a Lola-like, sensual transsexual… it’s true, the poet Dylan makes it quite difficult to ignore the Freudian allusions here. And consequently, there indeed is a faction of interpreters who see in the song an encrypted account of a rather pornographic experience, and some even believe that Dylan here gives air to homosexual fantasies.

The next verse provides more ammunition for this understanding.

Now you see this one-eyed midget
Shouting the word “NOW”
And you say, “For what reason?”
And he says, “How?”
And you say, “What does this mean?”
And he screams back, “You’re a cow
Give me some milk
Or else go home”

Once in the Tunnel of Obscenities, any combination with one-eyed can only refer to the penis (the pee-hole at the tip of the head, hence “one-eyed”), and it is hard to imagine that Dylan should be unaware thereof. The euphemism has existed at least since Big Joe Turner’s “Shake, Rattle And Roll” (1954): “I’m like a one-eyed cat peepin’ in a seafood store”. Dylan himself played the song in ’92, together with Keith Richards, but before that it is performed and recorded by Elvis, Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, The Beatles and actually everyone else at Olympus; the Dylan of ’65 is familiar with the song and with the sexual connotation of “one-eyed”.

“One-eyed midget” is still a not entirely unwitty variant of the usual one-eyed (Willie, anaconda, Jack, monster, trouser snake), which could be intended as an insulting allusion to the size of a man’s genitals – after pencil a second stab below the belt.  

In any case, this tempts some exegetes to see ambiguities in verse fragments such as they’ve all liked your looks, give me some milk, a bone and even in lumberjacks… after all, a lumberjack attacks your “wood”. It even leads to renamings like “Ballad Of A Closet Homosexual”.

Yeah, well. A dirty mind is a joy forever, as they say.

Anyway, pretty far-fetched, and worse, it does stain the song’s brilliance. Even Dylan, who usually doesn’t care what people see in his lyrics, won’t be too enthusiastic about this kind of banalities. After all, the song is mainly virulent on an intellectual level, and that is how Dylan seems to understand it too, as witnessed by Al Kooper’s memory of the noisy premiere of the song, Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, New York, 28 August 1965. That is the first concert after the recording of Highway 61 Revisited, the concert with also the premieres of “Desolation Row”, “From A Buick 6” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”, the first concert with that division into an acoustic set and an electric set and with the electric premieres of “I Don’t Believe You” and “It Ain’t Me Babe”.

It does not go down too well, the electricity. “Ballad Of A Thin Man” is seventh on the list after the pause, the last song before the final “Like A Rolling Stone”, and the commotion reaches a top. Scolding, raging, whistling… but Dylan does not falter, while police forcefully keeps pushy fans away from the stage.

“Three-quarters of the way through, Dylan stood at the piano to play “Ballad Of A Thin Man,” a song from the as-yet-unreleased Highway 61 album. It had a quiet intro, and the kids persisted in yelling and booing all the way through it. Dylan shouted out to us to “keep playing the intro over and over again until they shut up!” We played it for a good five minutes – doo do da da, do da de da – over and over until they did, in fact, chill. A great piece of theatre. When they were finally quiet, Dylan sang the lyrics to them: “Something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you?” It was almost as if he’d written the song knowing full well that the moment would come when he’d sing it to a crowd like this one.”

The recordings of the concert do not fully support Kooper’s memory, but the story is too good to ruin with historical accuracy.

Nowadays, the public is very receptive to the opening chords, by the way. The perverts.

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

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

12 years of Untold Dylan

Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc.  We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan.  We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers.  Although no one gets paid, 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 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

• Part 1: Bob Dylan: Fearful Symmetry
• Bob Dylan And Fearful Symmetry (Part II)
• Bob Dylan And Fearful Symmetry (Part III)

By Larry Fyffe

Saith Fredrich Nietzsche, God is dead and it’s you and I who killed Him. What the disgruntled Romantic writer contends is that the human ‘Imagination’ has been trampled asunder by the orthodox social and religious authorities of modern times who have made worshipping the ‘Golden Calf’ the Holy One to follow. Nietzsche draws from the  Ancient Greeks, and their Apollonian/Dionysian dualistic mythology. Akin he be to the poet William Blake who condemns ‘Deists’, like Isaac Newton, for casting God outside a supposedly independently-running Universe.

Blake be no fan of the ‘noble savage’ supposedly idealized by the Enlightenment Man ~Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Blake’s imaginative vision, Jesus is God, but the Tiger-like God is not Jesus. Instead, the poet portrays Christ as a human being from the country who now lives in the city.

It’s rather dark and ‘Satanic’:

But most through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new born infant's tear
And blights with plagues the marriage hearse
((William Blake: London)

Jesus, according to Blake, is an imaginative artist who dosen’t turn back. He envisions a better city on earth for his fellow human beings to live in. And for imagining such a city with bright ligthts, the Lamb-like God is crucified.

Northrop Frye, linguist and literary critic, focuses on biblical mythology too – out of which, he says, the poet Blake creates a personal mythology. You see, words sometimes have two meanings. According to Frye, poet Blake contends that artists ought to be Tiger-like in spirit.

As expressed in the following song lyrics about artist John Lennon (which as everyone, of course, now realizes) Frye would say are drawn from the Biblical well of words that contains both the New and Old Testaments):

You burned so bright
Roll on John
Tiger, Tiger,  burning bright
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
In the forests of the night
(Bob Dylan: Roll On John)

The killer of the Beatle claims he’s a ‘Christian’.

Despite what other analysts might say, Bob Dylan chooses his words carefully – the narrator’s physical body in the song above is in the city, but his spiritual ‘soul’ is in the mimetic forest:

A little confused I remember well
And stopped into a strange hotel
With a neon sign burning bright
He felt the heat of the night
(Bob Dylan: Simple Twist Of Fate)

The sexual urge strikes deep. Like Blake, Dylan is caught between Heaven and Hell which indeed can be a bit confusing:

Wish I was back in the city
Instead of this old bank of sand
With the sun beating down over the chimney tops
And the one I love so close at hand
(Bob Dylan: Watching The River Flow)

It all depends on on one’s point of view – one should not be where s/he does not belong:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And Heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour
A robin red breast in a cage
Puts all Heaven in a rage
(William Blake: Auguries Of Innocence)

No bird be they trapped in a cage; nor a grain of sand – it’s all metaphor:

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there's someone there
Other times, it's only me
I'm hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand
(Bob Dylan: Every Grain Of Sand)

As it saith in the Bible:

And I John saw the holy city, new Jerusalem
Coming down from Heaven
Prepared as a bride adorned for her husband
(Revelation 21:2)

12 years of Untold Dylan

Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc.  We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan.  We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers.  Although no one gets paid, 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 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

By Tony Attwood

This is episode 19 of “All directions at once”.  The index to previous episodes can be found here.

From 1968 to 1970 Bob Dylan wrote 22 songs.  For most songwriters that would be a pretty decent output over a three year period.   But with Dylan at the time, we looked back to see that in 1962 alone he wrote 36 songs, and this wasn’t a one-off.  In the following year he wrote another 31 songs.

And they weren’t just any old songs, in 1963 for example we were offered ten songs that would be the masterpiece-highlights of any other songwriter’s output, but for Bob they were just another selection from his endless production line of works of genius.    In case you are interested my ten selections for genius status from that year are…

• Masters of War
• Girl from the North Country
• Boots of Spanish Leather
• Bob Dylan’s Dream
• With God on our Side
• When the ship comes in
• The Times they are a-Changing
• The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
• One too many mornings
• Restless Farewell

Even if you don’t rate half of these as highly as I do, even if you only find five absolute masterpieces in a year is still pretty good going.  Irving Berlin could do it.  But anyone else?  I don’t think so.

But after just one song composed in 1968 (and that delivered late) Bob’s heart didn’t really seem to be in the old songwriting malarkey.  Yes of course there were still some superb pieces, but there was also the suggestion that Bob didn’t really want to write that much any more.  “JWH was done because his contract said “do it”, “Self Portrait” was decidedly different if not wacky at times, and by “New Morning” he was pretty overt in telling us that getting away from it all (presumably including us fans) was his main interest.  No touring, and as for the writing stuff, that was a strictly contractual matter.  If some great songs popped out, that was good, but it was pure chance.  Win some, lose some.

But the trouble was that although Dylan has through most of his career produced some songs that really don’t stay in the memory too long, they have mostly been overshadowed by the works of genius.  Now that he was just writing enough songs to fill up the LP he was contractually obliged to create, we got pretty much all of it.  The days of finding a missing masterpiece in the studio dustbin were long over.  I’m sure you remember; songs like I’m not there.  Unfinished, unreleased, utterly unbelievable.

Yet for us poor fans, looking back to the masterpieces of the past while endlessly casting our eyes across the street to make sure Johanna was still having her visions, surely after such an extended break, we, the people who put up the money, had the right to expect a rejuvenated Bob to come along, offering us some works that were pretty astounding.  Works to compare with “It’s alright Ma” and “Rolling Stone”…  I mean, we deserved it surely, after these years of dedicated fandom.

But no, Bob didn’t want to know.  He took more time out, and once he had got to the stage of not needing to do another album because of a contract, he just let matters go their own way.  And in a way that was fair.  He’d delivered around 200 songs (and that’s not including all the jokey bits from the Basement or those poems in the notebook.)   That’s more than a lifetime’s work for most song-smiths of note.  What was the matter with us fans?  What did we want?  Blood?

Well, yes, actually if that is what it took.  I mean, we’d been loyal.  We’d kept the memory alive hadn’t we?    We were just waiting for Bob to catch up, to come out of hiding and say, “hey guys, thanks – yeah that version of Johanna that Tony and his band did, that was pretty cool – what were those chords you put in?…”   But the call never came.  Not to me at least, and as far as I know not to any of the fans.

So we had to wait as matters did indeed take their own course.  We had to sit through Peggy Day (“love to spend the day with Peggy Night?”  Really?) and Country Pie (“oh me oh my” oh Bob please), and even Living the blues; I mean Bob Dylan as Guy Mitchell?

My own take on 1971 is that Bob recognised what was going on – or at least if he didn’t then his management did and told him in no uncertain words.  We were still out there, still playing and singing “Baby Blue,” still hoping – and he knew that.   And I say that with some certainty because otherwise how do we explain “When I paint my masterpiece”?

Apart from the fact that it is a great song with super lyrics, take the title.  Clearly a reflection on the point that we hadn’t had a masterpiece for a while.  But not “write my masterpiece” – that would be too obvious.  Besides it would have had to be “write my next masterpiece” and that really would make it too introverted.

And then the opening.  “Oh the streets of Rome…” taking us back to Italy, scene of some of those magical early moments.  (According to Rich Will, Bob has always maintained a love of Italy – and incidentally his article on the subject really is worth reading – once you’ve finished this one.  There’s a link at the end, but please don’t flip there now – I’ve got lots more to say…)

But even without any connection with “Bel Paese” it is just one of those openings that does something for the mind.  It creates in five words an image in the way that “Oh how I love you” doesn’t.  It’s unexpected, it is image making, it is exciting, it demands attention.

And it doesn’t make sense – which is what makes it even more tantalising.  No, actually the streets are not filled with rubble, but yes they are filled with the spirit of Romulus, Brutus, Cato, Pompey, Crassus, Cicero, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula…

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
Ancient footprints are everywhere
You can almost think that you’re seein’ double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs

But “seeing double”???  Because there are so many of them I guess.  And if not, does it matter?  And we know he’s actually been there because he got the wild geese story which is always a nice touch (more on that anon).

I am not sure if we really saw “When I paint my masterpiece” as a complete return to form, but I am pretty sure that when we first heard it, quite a few of us stopped commenting on how it was just like the night to play tricks upon one, and instead sat up and listened afresh…  Which was just what Bob intended, and exactly why it also turned up on the 1971 Greatest Hits album.   Hello Bob.  You’re back!  Where you been?  Oh Italy!  Good place to choose.  Have a good time?  Great?  Write any songs?  Yes?  OK, let’s hear it.

Rather like the masterpiece painting where x ray examination can reveal the changes that the genius painter made as he went along – the changes were perhaps not always (from our viewpoint) for the better, but through the recordings made of the song performed on stage, we can see a songwriter who, even if he wasn’t sure yet where he was going, certainly knew it might go somewhere.  And “somewhere” was exactly where we wanted Bob to go.  Not quite anywhere, because that variant upon “Singing the blues” wasn’t really what we wanted, but anyway, good to have you back.

“Filled with rubble” and “Filled with trouble” – whatever you say Bob.   Anything you like.  And for those of us with a spot of classical education it was wonderful because we could pontificate.   The rubble of the fallen monuments of the Republic and the Empire, the trouble from the uprisings of greedy and self-centred men who would put themselves before the extraordinary achievements of the Republic, and destroyed a vibrant democracy allowing an Empire to arise with a god-emperor at its heart, until the Goths came a-knocking on the door.  Oh and the geese.  Nice touch.

So to reiterate, we have in the first verse a masterpiece of reference and change…

Oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble
Ancient footprints are everywhere
You can almost think that you’re seein’ double
On a cold, dark night on the Spanish Stairs
Got to hurry on back to my hotel room
Where I’ve got me a date with Botticelli’s niece
She promised that she’d be right there with me
When I paint my masterpiece

The Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti (Spanish Steps, Dylan calls the “stairs”) take you (if you have the energy) up the steep hill from the Paizza di Spagna to Trinità dei Monti.  135 steps, not really a climb to do on a cold dark night unless you are chasing shadows and ghosts – which of course can be fun (and dangerous) in itself.  But for much of the year there are no cold dark nights in Rome.  Well, not that cold.

But that’s only the start of the fun, because then we had originally a pretty little girl from Greece who became Botticelli’s niece.  Just a phrase that popped into his head?  Maybe, maybe. But (and you are going to have to stay with me for a moment if you want to get to grips with this idea) here is another explanation.

I doubt that Dylan just looked at the Coliseum, and the Spanish Stairs and said, “hey that’s nice” and walked on.  I don’t mean I think he stayed with a guide book, but this is a guy who knows and enjoys his history and his literature, and (given he is a visual artist too) who knows a lot about art too.

The website Castle Fine Art says of Bob’s artistic work, “His brushstrokes are like his voice: straightforward, rough, occasionally fragile. He’s not after artistic perfection but something larger, a moment, a feeling. The effect is enthralling.”

And that really does relate to this song too – Bob is not after perfection or exactness.  Thus  Botticelli’s niece is not quite right but it gives us a link to the painting The Birth of Venus, which was commissioned by the Medici family.   As the somewhat more exact guidebooks and histories point out Pliny the Elder (the great writer, scientist and philosopher who died while recording his scientific observations on the eruption of Vesuvius) suggested Alexander the Great offered his mistress as the model for the nude Venus to be painted by Apelles.  But then noting that Apelles had fallen in love with the girl, gave her to the artist.  (That’s not very 21st century, but is very Roman).

So the actual model for Botticelli’s Birth of Venus was not his niece but Simonetta Cattaneo Vespucci, who it seems had a “relationship” with two of the Medicis.  Linking  Birth of Venus with the great days of the Republic makes the model in the picture a symbol of the continuity of the Republic, the Empire and the Eternal City.

It’s a famous tale for anyone interested in the art of the Republic and the Empire and I think turning Botticelli’s Venus into Botticelli’s niece is a nice piece of fun for Dylan, which gives him a handy rhyme.  And why not?  That’s what he does.  Anyway, it made me smile when I first heard it.

So now we know where we are: we are very much in the world of Dylan the Tourist.  He won’t have seen Birth of Venus in a trip to Rome, but Dylan had Italian connections all the way back from his time with Suze Rotolo and his trip to Italy looking for her.  Indeed the stories around Freewheelin are full of Italy.  And besides “Masterpiece” does have the line Train wheels runnin’ through the back of my memory.  It’s worth hearing just for that.

But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Oh, the hours I’ve spent inside the Coliseum
Dodging lions and wastin’ time
Oh, those mighty kings of the jungle, 
                      I could hardly stand to see ’em
Yes, it sure has been a long, hard climb

I’ve always wondered with that line of the long hard climb, if we are not back to the Spanish Steps!  Or is it the climb back to creativity?  Or both?

But then so much of this song is looking back

Train wheels runnin’ through the back of my memory
When I ran on the hilltop following a pack of wild geese
Someday, everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody
When I paint my masterpiece

Oh yes, the geese.  A reference, I think, not quite understood by some reviewers of this song.  The story is that when the Republic of Rome was under attack from the Gauls (which is to say in the fabled origins of the Republic, long before the days of the Empire) Rome seemed about to fall and the Romans were besieged.  Despite low food supplies during the siege the Romans kept their sacred geese fed, and this turned out to be a shrewd idea, because as the Gauls attacked, the geese honked as they do, woke up the guards, who then resolutely defeated the attackers. 1-0 to Rome.

The Gauls gave up their attack and withdrew, Rome was rebuilt, and the sacred geese were remembered forever with an annual parade in which a golden goose is the heart of the celebration.   You can’t read a guide book without finding a load of geese in there somewhere.

But then strangely he seems to dismiss it all…

Sailin’ round the world in a dirty gondola
Oh, to be back in the land of Coca-Cola!

Suddenly we are out of Rome – and there are (just to be clear about this) no gondolas on the Tiber, it’s Venice where they are to be found.  Indeed going for a sail along the Tiber is just plain dull and really not worth the effort.  And besides, certainly for me, each time I’ve been to Venice there are not dirty gondolas; the competition to get the tourists into gondolas is very strong, and brightness and colour is part of the deal.  (The water buses are cheaper though, and just as much fun; I recommend getting an all-day ticket and going round the islands).

So what is this about?  Leaving the history, the romance, the beauty, the Republic and Empire, for sugar, colour, flavouring and water plus an issue about where the canals are…  What is going on…

In part Dylan was talking about writing the next masterwork that he wanted to write, rather than writing songs he was contractually obliged to write.  In part he was having a laugh, but I wonder, I just wonder, did he even at this moment, have an inkling that there was another masterpiece just around the temporal corner?   And not just one, but masterpiece after masterpiece.  All the Botticelli business was in 1971 and we would still have to wait until 1974 to see the final explosion of utter, gorgeous, total genius-brilliance with “Tangled up in blue” et al, but my goodness wasn’t it worth the wait!

But Bob was, here, showing us once more all that might be.  I mean, what did you think when you realised you were listening to a piece of music that included the couplet,

Newspapermen eating candy
Had to be held down by big police

Dylan is having fun, but also saying he knows it won’t always be like this.  We are getting towards the time to move on.  He is telling us this that is the interregnum.  (From the Latin).  (As spoken in Rome).   “Time passes slowly” he told us, and there is no more wonderful place in the world to appreciate the passing of time in relation to human activities than in Rome.  But now we knew…

Someday, everything is gonna be diff’rent
When I paint my masterpiece

There was however a line that appears to have been cut en route which was sad… With a picture of a tall oak tree by my side – the reference to the Zen tradition of using one aspect of nature alone to understand everything.  Cutting the pretty little girl from Greece was, to my mind (and of course all this ruminating is just my reaction to the song) was OK (not that in any seriousness could I tell Dylan what was better or worse in his writing) but losing the oak tree was not so good, at least in my world.  It is an image of a way of contemplating the world – the only thing that is wrong with it is that it is from a totally different culture.

And there is another cross reference that I had completely failed to see, until reminded of it through an excellent review  on Expecting Rain, which if you are seriously interested in this song you really ought to read.

In ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’  written in 1818 by Lord Byron, the poet (and here I quote from the Expecting Rain review)  contemplates the ruins of ancient Rome and finds nothing but chaos – broken dreams and relics of ancient cruelty….

Byron perceives the city as a whole as a space strewn with fragments and debris, visible signs of decayed power testifying to the vanity of human aspirations

The review, written by Christopher Rollason (whose blog is always worth a read) sees the song as coming from a narrator who “has come to Europe and Rome in search of artistic fulfilment, hoping that with ancient scenes around him he will achieve the vision that will enable him finally to ‘paint his masterpiece’.”

That’s a very interesting vision.  I have approached the song seeing this as Dylan himself contemplating Rome and Italy, and the “paint my masterpiece” not being literally “paint” but a metaphor for his return to artistic fulfilment, which he has moved away from in creating albums because of contractual requirements rather than because he had something to say.   And here we see Dylan contemplating his ultimate song or ultimate album as conveyed in the lines “Some day everything is gonna be smooth like a rhapsody When I paint my masterpiece”.

You can see it either way, just as you can see She promised that she’d be right there with me When I paint my masterpiece as a sexual phrase or as a phrase relating to the person who most artists or all genres have by their sides who support, put up with, and are a sounding board for their ideas.

So, a complex piece, with its own fun and some historical references too.  Difficult to transcribe into music.

But Dylan does it, although in so doing uses a technique that I think is unique within the Dylan repertoire.  He totally changes key between the second and third verse to reflect the change from Rome to Brussels.

We are clearly in A with A and E being the chords that the song for the first two verses, and then we slip up into the completely unrelated B flat.  It’s a different world.

It is not a very subtle technique, but it makes the point of the change of emphasis.  And the plane trip to Brussels wasn’t subtle.

So a turning point.  The wilderness years coming to an end.  Just a while to go before we got one of the most sublime moments in Dylan’s songwriting career.   The point when everything from “Idiot Wind” to “Tangled up in Blue” began to ferment inside.

Bob didn’t return to touring until a 40 gig tour in the early months of 1974.  He then played Masterpiece on stage 182 times from 30 October 1975 through to 2 November 2019.  But he wrote it before the grand second explosion of his talent started.

Did you know that Bob Dylan composed a new Italian national anthem?

By Aaron Galbraith and Tony Attwood

This article continues from “The unexpected re-workings”  article published earlier, and you may remember that we had some serious problems there with recordings being available in one region but not another.

It is possible the same problem will appear here so once again we are giving two links – and if both fail for you, just type in the artist and song title and see what you find – with luck the recordings will be there, and they most certainly are listening to.

Kesha: Dont think twice

This takes minimalism to a new level – and rather nicely in the first version below is followed by an excellent early Dylan version of the songs.

But if that link comes up as not available try this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMFV6qEk1S0

Moving on we have “I’d Have You Anytime” by Westworld actress Evan Rachel Wood.

And an alternative source…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LJjIpXZlZQ

And can I (Tony) say that I really do hope you are able to hear these renditions, and those highlighted in part one of this article, because they really are so unusual and indeed in several cases so stunningly beautiful.  Please do go searching further afield for these if neither link works.  It really will be worth the effort.

To finish off I (Aaron) wanted to include Patti Smith’s version of Drifter’s Escape.

and the alternative

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

Tony: If you are a regular reader you will know that I’ve elevated this song to a singularly high level of importance in terms of Dylan’s song writing across the decades, and if you have a little while to spend contemplating this song, its relationship with Bo Diddley, Don Gardner and Dee Dee Ford, and what it actually means, might I be rather egocentric for a moment and recommend my commentary on this work in the “All directions at once” series.   And indeed may I recommend this version – which if you are a regular reader you’ll know I have mentioned over and over and over again, until I am sure you are bored stiff with it.  Hopefully the exposition in the All Directions article might explain my fixation a little.

12 years of Untold Dylan

Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc.  We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan.  We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers.  Although no one gets paid, 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.

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by mr tambourine (videos selected by Tony)

Bob was first supposed to have an American Summer Tour announced from June 4 to July 12. Like the Japanese tour before it, it was cancelled.

But…

What if the pandemic had actually started after July 12, for example in late July/early August, just so Bob could do his tours?

In the first article considering this, we looked at the Japan tour.

Here we go with the American tour.

May 8, 2020

False Prophet gets released as a single and a new album finally gets announced, titled “Rough And Rowdy Ways”, the full tracklist still not known. It includes two singles “Murder Most Foul” and “I Contain Multitudes”. Release date set for June 19.

June 4, 2020: Bend, Oregon: Les Schwab Amphitheatre

https://youtu.be/LTa9ZDMiwXk

1. Gotta Serve Somebody
2. I Contain Multitudes
3. False Prophet (live debut)
4. Tears Of Rage (first performance since 2008)
5. Lonesome Day Blues
6. With God On Our Side
7. Tryin’ To Get To Heaven
8. Man Of Peace
9. Early Roman Kings
10. Pay In Blood
11. Not Dark Yet
12. Just Like A Woman
13. Long And Wasted Years
14. Tombstone Blues (first performance since 2006)

Encore

15. Murder Most Foul

June 6, 2020: Ridgefield, Washington.  Sunlight Supply Amphitheatre

1. Gotta Serve Somebody
2. I Contain Multitudes
3. False Prophet
4. Tears Of Rage
5. Lonesome Day Blues
6. With God On Our Side
7. Tryin’ To Get To Heaven
8. Man Of Peace
9. Early Roman Kings
10. Pay In Blood
11. Not Dark Yet
12. Just Like A Woman
13. Long And Wasted Years
14. Tombstone Blues

Encore

15. Murder Most Foul

June 7, 2020: Auburn, Washington: White River Amphitheatre

1. Gotta Serve Somebody
2. I Contain Multitudes
3. Lonesome Day Blues
4. Tears Of Rage
5. False Prophet
6. Girl From The North Country
7. Tryin’ To Get To Heaven
8. Man Of Peace
9. Early Roman Kings
10. Pay In Blood
11. Not Dark Yet
12. Just Like A Woman
13. Long And Wasted Years
14. Tombstone Blues

Encore

15. Murder Most Foul

June 9, 2020: Eugene, Oregon: Matthew Knight Arena

1. Gotta Serve Somebody
2. I Contain Multitudes
3. Lonesome Day Blues
4. Tears Of Rage
5. Tombstone Blues
6. Girl From The North Country
7. Tryin’ To Get To Heaven
8. Man Of Peace
9. Early Roman Kings
10. Pay In Blood
11. Not Dark Yet
12. Just Like A Woman
13. Long And Wasted Years

Encore

14. False Prophet
15. Like A Rolling Stone

June 12, 2020

Tracklist finally gets revealed!

Stateline, Nevada: Harveys Outdoor Amphitheatre

https://youtu.be/TRoiwSR32Jo

1. Gotta Serve Somebody
2. I Contain Multitudes
3. Lonesome Day Blues
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. Tombstone Blues
6. Girl From The North Country
7. Tryin’ To Get To Heaven
8. Man Of Peace
9. Early Roman Kings
10. Pay In Blood
11. Not Dark Yet
12. Just Like A Woman
13. Long And Wasted Years

Encore

14. False Prophet
15. Like A Rolling Stone

June 13, 2020: Berkeley, California: Greek Theatre

1. Gotta Serve Somebody
2. I Contain Multitudes
3. Honest With Me
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. Can’t Wait
6. Girl From The North Country
7. Make You Feel My Love
8. Man Of Peace
9. Early Roman Kings
10. Pay In Blood
11. Not Dark Yet
12. Just Like A Woman
13. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere (first performance since 2012)

Encore

14. False Prophet
15. Like A Rolling Stone

June 14, 2020: Berkeley, California: Greek Theatre

1. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere (Bob on guitar)
2. I Contain Multitudes
3. Honest With Me
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. Can’t Wait
6. Girl From The North Country
7. Make You Feel My Love
8. Man Of Peace
9. Early Roman Kings
10. Not Dark Yet
11. Pay In Blood
12. Just Like A Woman
13. Gotta Serve Somebody

Encore

14. False Prophet
15. Like A Rolling Stone

June 17, 2020: San Diego, California: Pechanga Arena

1. Gotta Serve Somebody
2. I Contain Multitudes
3. Can’t Wait
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. Honest With Me
6. Girl From The North Country
7. Make You Feel My Love
8. Tryin’ To Get To Heaven
9. Pay In Blood
10. Early Roman Kings
11. Not Dark Yet
12. Just Like A Woman
13. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere

Encore

14. False Prophet
15. Like A Rolling Stone

June 18, 2020: Los Angeles, California: Hollywood Bowl

1. Gotta Serve Somebody
2. I Contain Multitudes
3. Can’t Wait
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. Lonesome Day Blues
6. Girl From The North Country
7. Make You Feel My Love
8. Man Of Peace
9. Pay In Blood
10. Early Roman Kings
11. Not Dark Yet
12. Just Like A Woman
13. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere
14. Long And Wasted Years

Encore

15. False Prophet
16. Like A Rolling Stone

June 19, 2020:

Rough And Rowdy Ways gets released!

June 20, 2020: Las Vegas, Nevada: Mandalay Bay Events Center

https://youtu.be/bklWKe_skGU

1. Gotta Serve Somebody (might be in Las Vegas, having lots of fun lyrics, crowd goes crazy)
2. I Contain Multitudes
3. Can’t Wait
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. Lonesome Day Blues
6. Girl From The North Country
7. Honest With Me
8. Make You Feel My Love
9. Man Of Peace
10. Pay In Blood
11. Early Roman Kings
12. Not Dark Yet
13. Just Like A Woman
14. Long And Wasted Years
15. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere (Bob on guitar)

Encore

16. False Prophet (Bob on guitar, first time live for this song)
17. Like A Rolling Stone

June 21, 2020: Glendale, Arizona: Gila River Arena

1. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere (Bob on guitar)
2. I Contain Multitudes
3. Can’t Wait
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. Lonesome Day Blues
6. Mother Of Muses (live debut)
7. Honest With Me
8. Make You Feel My Love
9. Man Of Peace
10. Pay In Blood
11. Early Roman Kings
12. Black Rider (live debut)
13. Just Like A Woman
14. Gotta Serve Somebody
15. Long And Wasted Years

Encore

16. False Prophet (Bob on guitar)
17. Like A Rolling Stone

June 23, 2020: Albuquerque, New Mexico: Tingley Coliseum

1. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere (Bob on guitar)
2. I Contain Multitudes
3. Lonesome Day Blues
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. Can’t Wait
6. Black Rider
7. Honest With Me
8. Make You Feel My Love
9. Man Of Peace
10. Pay In Blood
11. Mother Of Muses
12. Early Roman Kings
13. Just Like A Woman
14. Gotta Serve Somebody
15. Long And Wasted Years

Encore

16. False Prophet (Bob on guitar)
17. Like A Rolling Stone

June 24, 2020: Amarillo, Texas: Amarillo Civic Center

1. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere (Bob on guitar)
2. I Contain Multitudes
3. Lonesome Day Blues
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. Can’t Wait
6. Black Rider
7. Honest With Me
8. Make You Feel My Love
9. Man Of Peace
10. Pay In Blood
11. Mother Of Muses
12. Early Roman Kings
13. Just Like A Woman
14. Gotta Serve Somebody
15. Long And Wasted Years

Encore

16. False Prophet
17. Like A Rolling Stone

https://youtu.be/yUFMcpakRc0

June 26, 2020: Irving, Texas: The Pavilion @ Toyota Music Factory

1. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere (Bob on guitar)
2. It Ain’t Me, Babe (new arrangement)
3. My Own Version Of You (live debut)
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. Can’t Wait
6. Black Rider
7. Honest With Me
8. Make You Feel My Love
9. Man Of Peace
10. Pay In Blood
11. Lenny Bruce
12. Early Roman Kings
13. Mother Of Muses
14. Just Like A Woman
15. Gotta Serve Somebody
16. Long And Wasted Years

Encore

17. False Prophet
18. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry

June 27, 2020: Little Rock, Arkansas: Simmons Bank Arena

1. Things Have Changed (new arrangement)
2. It Ain’t Me Babe
3. My Own Version Of You
4. When I Paint My Masterpiece
5. Can’t Wait
6. Black Rider
7. Honest With Me
8. Make You Feel My Love
9. Man Of Peace
10. Pay In Blood
11. Lenny Bruce
12. Early Roman Kings
13. You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere
14. Mother Of Muses
15. Not Dark Yet
16. Just Like A Woman
17. Gotta Serve Somebody

Encore

18. I’ve Made Up My Mind To Give Myself To You (live debut)
19. It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry

The tour continues.

12 years of Untold Dylan

Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc.  We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan.  We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers.  Although no one gets paid, 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 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

by Jochen Markhorst

Ballad Of A Thin Man (Part 1): Along came Jones

II          Freaks and geeks and simples

Madame de Rambouillet quite spontaneously organises a rather intellectual gathering somewhere at the beginning of the seventeenth century in the Chambre Bleue of her Paris town house Hôtel de Rambouillet (where today the Louvre’s Richelieu wing is), and she sets a trend; more literary salons soon emerge. Until the nineteenth century, the salon remains the place to be, the place where decisions are made and the place where is decided what is “in” and what is “out”. The phenomenon eventually evaporates, but at least the German language has since then been enriched with a wonderful concept: salonfähig, “being possible in the salon”, which now means socially acceptable as well as artistically valuable.

The term describes the quality John Lennon refers to in his analysis of the use of the word “clown”:

“I’m A Loser is me in my Dylan period, because the word ‘clown’ is in it. I objected to the word ‘clown’, because that was always artsy-fartsy, but Dylan had used it so I thought it was all right, and it rhymed with whatever I was doing.”

Dylan, Lennon means, made the word “clown” salonfähig.

Dylan’s authority extends – of course – beyond making artsy-fartsy words acceptable, but still: it is a forte. After “Mr. Tambourine Man” follows a tsunami of pied piper-like figures and other musical magicians in pop songs (Status Quo, Chrispian St. Peters, Donovan, Led Zeppelin), as Dylan’s style characteristic for giving archetypes supporting roles is gratefully copied. Fairy-tale figures, for example. Cinderella was once sung by Paul Anka and she drops by in the musical Funny Girl (“Don’t Rain On My Parade”), but she really has no place in pop culture – until “Desolation Row”, that is. After that she can perform with The Hollies (“Isn’t It Nice?”), The Who (“Success Story”), Buck Owens and The Pixies, to name but a few.

A bloody nose is far too childish for a tough rock song, and even in the cornier pop songs never sung, but after Georgia Sam is allowed to walk around with a bloody nose in “Highway 61 Revisited”, the floodgates open, and noses bleed from The Who to Elton John (“Made In England”, 1995), from John Mellencamp to Billy Eilish (“Bad Guy”)… Dylan had used it so it was all right.

The same thing is happening now, after “Ballad Of A Thin Man”. Geeks and freaks are absolutely uncommon actors in songs, but Dylan’s song makes them salonfähig. Procol Harum, Jimi Hendrix, The Who (“Cousin Kevin”), Donovan, The Velvet Underground (“White Light/White Heat”)… before the end of the decade freak has definitively penetrated the rock jargon. Geek follows a little later. Alice Cooper, Don McLean (“Roosevelt was a cripple, Lincoln was a geek” – “Fashion Victim”), George Thorogood, Joe Jackson, CSNY… which the rock poets, incidentally, almost always rhyme with freak.

Most Dylan-worthy in the beautiful song “Martha’s Madman” by The Jerry Hahn Brotherhood, written by the far too unknown poet and folk musician Lane Tietgen, who only writes beautiful, quirky songs with wonderful, colourful lyrics for the underrated debut album from 1970;

He's tellin' her the world is full of freaks and geeks and simples and he's
Hiding like a leprechaun under stones and in the ripples
In the pool of time she thought she knew it, but someone threw a stone into it
Which breaks up the surface and it's makin' her nervous and it's true
What can she do
Martha yes I guess you'll have to wait around, another thousand years

Manfred Mann is a fan. On the first, untitled record of his Earth Band (1972) is his first Lane Tietgen cover, “Captain Bobby Stout”, and on his million seller Watch Manfred definitively lifts the Brotherhood out of obscurity through his brilliant interpretation of this “Martha’s Madman”. On his most Dylanesque album side, by the way; Side Two opens with Robbie Robertson’s “Davy’s On The Road Again”, number two is “Martha’s Madman” and the album side closes with a long, spun-out version of Manfred Mann’s signature song, Dylan’s “The Mighty Quinn”.   

Freak and geek are words well-chosen by the poet Dylan in 1965. Freak now evolves from a reactionary swear word to a badge of pride, the setting of the song suggests a club-like lair where the in-crowd can be found, the disruptive dialogues and wild metaphors are ambiguous enough to allow the most diverse interpretations. Which is exactly what happens.

Perhaps most striking is Huey P. Newton’s open, loud declaration of love. The leader and co-founder of the Black Panthers, the militant Afro-American political organisation from California, already stands out with the photo on the front of Listen, Whitey! The Sounds Of Black Power 1967-1974 (including Dylan’s “George Jackson” on it). Newton demonstratively holds his copy of Highway 61 Revisited, and that is no coincidence. The Black Panther adores Brother Dylan, and his admiration for “Ballad Of A Thin Man” borders on worship. Co-founder and bosom friend Bobby Seale publishes his book Seize The Time in 1970, while Newton is in prison, largely based on tape recordings Seale made during visiting hours in prison. One of the chapters is called “Huey Digs Bob Dylan” and deals extensively with Huey’s fascination with the song.

Seale remembers the early days of the Party Paper of the Black Panther movement, how Newton and he spent days working on that paper in San Francisco. And always Highway 61 Revisited plays in the background.    

“This record played after we stayed up laying out the paper. And it played the next night after we stayed up laying out the paper. I think it was around the third afternoon that the record was playing. We played that record over and over and over.”

Thin Man’s lyrics actually go right over Seale’s head, but fortunately Huey can explain. “Huey says that whites looked at blacks as geeks, as freaks,” and Huey can explain what the midget symbolises and what Bobby Dylan means by the geek giving Mr. Jones a naked bone. Seale is stuck on that geek, so Huey explains that part in more detail:

“He’s been in the circus all his life and he knows nothing else but circus work. But he can’t be a trapeze artist anymore because he’s been injured very badly, but he still needs to live, he needs to exist, he needs pay. So the circus feels very sorry for him and they give him a job. They give him the cruddiest kind of job because he’s not really good for anything else. They put him into a cage, then people pay a quarter to come in to see him. They put live chickens into the cage and the geek eats the chickens up while they’re still alive . . . the bones, the feathers, all. And of course he has a salary, because the audience pays a quarter to see him.

He does this because he has to. He doesn’t like eating raw meat, or feathers, but he does it to survive. But these people who are coming in to see him are coming in for entertainment, so they are the real freaks. And the geek knows this, so during his performance, he eats the raw chicken and he hands one of the members of the audience a bone, because he realizes that they are the real freaks because they get enjoyment by watching what he’s doing because he has to. So that’s what a geek and a freak is. Is that clear?”

Almost literally the same words that Brother Bobby uses a few times in 1978 to announce “Ballad Of A Thin Man”… making pretty clear what book the thief of thoughts has on his bedside table during this tour.

So then Dylan also read how Huey P. Newton continues to spread the gospel of the Thin Man. More brothers get infected. “Many times we would play that record. Brother Stokely Carmichael also liked that record.” And especially if you’re stoned or drunk, preferably under the headphones, Seare knows, it was something else!

“These brothers would get halfway high, loaded on something, and they would sit down and play this record over and over and over, especially after they began to hear Huey P. Newton interpret that record. […] Old Bobby did society a big favor when he made that particular sound.”

And should one of the brothers have any questions, he knows what to do:

“If there’s any more he made that I don’t understand, I’ll just ask Huey P. Newton to interpret them for us and maybe we can get a hell of a lot more out of brother Bobby Dylan, because old Bobby, he did a good job on that set.”

To be continued. Next up: Ballad Of Thin Man part III: A one-eyed midget down on his knees

12 years of Untold Dylan

Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc.  We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan.  We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers.  Although no one gets paid, 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 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down

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

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

Part 1: Bob Dylan: Fearful Symmetry

Bob Dylan And Fearful Symmetry (Part II)

By Larry Fyffe

Because Heaven is defined in relation to Hell, and Hell in terms of Heaven, to the linguists who  live down on Deconstruction Row, the two imaginary visions be an equally valid way for any artist to examine the human condition. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels may claim their version has a material base, and that the biblical version has a spiritual one, but the language used by one and all contains within it a ‘kerygmatic” mythology, a resolution of the struggle for the ‘god’ of gold when everybody eventually lives in peace and harmony with one another.

Northrop Frye, being a human creation of his position and time, dismisses Marxism out of hand because the linguist claims it has the characteristics of an ‘ideology’ as though Judeo-Christianity were not ‘dogmatic’.

Notwithstanding that Structuralist linguists contend that the spoken and written language of human beings has no relation to the the natural world around them, who among us can deny that there are both Marxist as well as biblical ‘demonic’ elements in the poem quoted below – still lingering  there, however, is an imagined harmonious ‘mimetic’ existence even if it’s after physical death:

A wind blew out of a cloud by night
Chilling my Annabel Lee
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea
(Edgar Allan Poe: Annabel Lee)

In the (anti)Romantic ‘Gothic’ poem above, the author metaphorically compares a storm-cloud to the ‘devil’, a representative of supernatural evil in biblical mythology. But note that in the poem, the demon is not depicted as though from a transcendental world.

In the song lyrics below, the author metonymically substitutes a hat to represent the materialistic inclinations of most people in modern western society: a hat that’s made to look like animal skin – it’s not a halo. As well, the physical head represents the whole person; no spiritual aspect has she.

It’s a Realist song, a portrayal of mundane modern existence down here on earth:

Yes, I see you got your 
Brand new leopard-skin pillbox hat
Well, you must tell me baby, how your
Head feels under something like that
(Bob Dylan: Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat)

The following song goes even further down the irony road of Realism, a particular situation on earth is black-humoredly presented as sordid and ugly rather than idealistically harmonious and beautiful as it’s said to be in heaven for those considered worthy enough to be there:

Well, I took me a woman late last night
I's three-fourth drunk, she looked all right
'Till she started peeling off her onion gook
Took off her wig, said, "How do I look?"
I's high flying, bare naked, out the window
(Bob Dylan: I Shall Be Free)

In the following song, a pair of boots represents a complete person – the abandoned guy in the story is made to feel unworthy, but he’ll settle for something material that reminds him of the imagined paradise, angel included, that might have been (could it be that he wants her to send him a pair of her sexy-looking boots?):

So take heed, take heed of the western wind
Take head of the stormy weather
And, yes, there is something you can send back to me
Spanish boots of Spanish leather
(Bob Dylan: Spanish Boots Of Spanish Leather)

There are ‘Dylanologists’ who are critical of any singer/songwriter/musician who creates a song or a record album that does not have a united theme whether it be of a blissful Heaven or of a

Kafka-like Hell. But to have a theme that hangs suspended between these two concepts is not to be tolerated. No, the two are not allowed to exist side by side; either there’s order or there’s chaos –

the sun or moon shining all the time, or else dark clouds forever raining.

12 years of Untold Dylan

Although no one gets paid for writing, publishing or editing Untold Dylan, it does cost us money to keep the site afloat, safe from hackers, n’er-do-wells etc.  We never ask for donations, and we try to survive on the income from our advertisers, so if you enjoy Untold Dylan, and you’ve got an ad blocker, could I beg you to turn it off while here. I’m not asking you to click on ads for the sake of it, but at least allow us to add one more to the number of people who see the full page including the adverts.   Thanks.

As for the writing, Untold Dylan is written by people who want to write for Untold Dylan.  We welcome articles, contributions and ideas from all our readers.  Although no one gets paid, 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 8500 active members. Just type the phrase “Untold Dylan” in, on your Facebook page or follow this link    And because we don’t do political debates on our Facebook group there is a separate group for debating Bob Dylan’s politics – Icicles Hanging Down